Hiding: Looking for Henry Green
In 1959, Terry Southern conducted (for the Paris Review) the most substantial extant interview with the British novelist Henry Green. Southern actually did most of the talking (almost as if he was a Henry Green character), with Green rather diffidently agreeing with most of Southern’s2 remarks, offering some fairly circumspect reflections on his work that are nevertheless revealing enough to make the interview worthwhile. What is most interesting about this interview, however, is that Southern is participating in it. He is not a writer one immediately thinks of as influenced by or likely to be particularly sympathetic to a novelist of manners of the sort Henry Green is frequently thought to represent. That quite clearly he did greatly admire Green’s work should persuade us to reconsider the perceived practice of both writers, but perhaps especially Green, since the terms and categories that have most typically been used to describe and assess his fiction have not really done justice to the sustained, if subtle subversions of the form, style, and subjects it ostensibly seems to adopt.
It is understandable that Green’s novels might be regarded as comedies of manners of the kind also written by such writers of Green’s generation as Evelyn Waugh or Elizabeth Bowen. They are by and large novels about groups of people as they interact in a specific social setting, frequently, but not always, an upper middle or upper-class setting, whose habitual behaviors are scrupulously depicted. Formally, they proceed almost entirely through what Henry James called the “scenic method,” narrative progression through scenes, with exposition and description usually subordinated to dialogue. The underlying tone of the novels could be called comic or satirical, although it is a comedy of suggestion and implication, not outright mockery or ridicule. At the same time, the satirical purpose does not impede the overall goal of presenting a comprehensively realistic portrayal of the particular social milieu serving as the subject of the particular work at hand.
Contemplating Green’s body of work more closely, however, reveals that even to the extent that Green was willing to work loosely within the confines of this important mode of English fiction, his novels simultaneously seek to escape those confines, enlarging the scope of the “manners” portrayed, expanding the formal range of the scenic method, disturbing assumptions about the role of “voice” in fiction. If Green’s fiction finally doesn’t entirely leave the formal ambit of the novel of manners, it does stretch and reshape its conventions. This use of the form to alter its own usual habits, to determine possibilities not yet realized, is what most warrants considering Green an “experimental” writer. Literally Green’s novels explore new ways to test the limits of the presumed norms the novels must also partially observe for them to be fully intelligible.
Among Green’s novels, the one most accurately classified as a novel of manners of the familiar kind would probably be Loving (1945), one of the novels now being reprinted by Nyrb, along with Caught, published immediately prior to Loving (1943), and Back, published immediately after (1946). Loving is a satirical narrative of class that might have served as inspiration for such tv shows as Upstairs/Downstairs and Downton Abbey in its twin focus on the lives of an aristocratic family and its staff of servants, both residing on an Irish estate (although both the family and the servants are English) during World War II. The Tennant family (primarily the matron, Mrs. Tennant, and her married daughter) come off as predictably clueless and hypocritical, defined by their possessions and elevated sense of dignity. We actually get much closer to the servants, especially through the experiences of Charley Raunce, the head footman who assumes the duties of butler when the old and venerable current butler dies. Charley could be called the novel’s protagonist, although the focus and perspective fluctuate among numerous characters over the course of the few weeks on which it concentrates.
Loving may also be the prototypical example of Green’s application of the scenic, or dramatic, method in the formal construction of his novels. Green’s fiction over the course of his career (Green stopped writing in 1952, at the age of 47) became increasingly radical in its reliance on this method—his final two novels, Nothing and Doting are among the most radical in their use of it in modern fiction—but Loving is no doubt marked enough in its blending of dialogue with narrative exposition that readers find it familiar enough as a strategy, even if Green is nevertheless unmistakably a writer who tells his stories primarily through his characters’ talk, which also serves as the main source of characterization. Ultimately what makes Green’s writing compelling is that his dialogue may be both the most evocative of real human speech and the most responsive to the needs of the imagined narrative of which it is a part in all of English fiction. Green’s novels are fashioned from dialogue not because this is an expected feature of the genre but because above all he is interested in the spoken word as a phenomenon of language and in the potential for the creative rendition of speech—of the particulars of human interaction more broadly—to be the center of narrative and artistic interest in a work of fiction.
Certainly most American readers are likely to find the talk in a novel like Loving, with its close attention to the diction, cadences, and inflections of the characters from each of the social classes it portrays, to be authentically “English.” Some of the effects Green creates may be discernible mostly to British readers, as in the phenomenon described by critic Lorin Stein, by which “Raunce will talk posh one minute, cockney another, then borrow jazz slang. . . Most conventional writers (or writers who had spent less time having actual conversations with servants) claimed to find Green’s dialogue unrealistic, even deplorable.” Further, the expository passages in the novels themselves often integrate elements of speech:
He was kicking this flower into his pantry not more than thirty inches at a time when Miss Burch with no warning opened and came out of Mr. Eldon’s death chamber. She was snuffling. He picked it up off the floor quick. He said friendly,
“The stink of flowers always makes my eyes run.”
“And when may daffodils have had a perfume,” she asked, tart through tears. . . .
At the same time, as Tim Parks has put it, the narrative voice “is not a strict imitation of dialect, since many other dialect elements are missing.” In other words, neither in dialogue nor straight expository prose is Green merely copying or imitating the speaking habits of people “like” the characters he has created. Idiom and accent are suggested but not methodically reproduced. The goal is a realism of sorts, but one in which we can find the characters “real” as fictional characters rather than reflections in the mirror the writer has held up to life. What is “missing” in Green’s emphasis on speech is an effort to make talk itself the focus of interest apart from the way their talk works to develop and distinguish his characters. Several of Green’s novels, including Loving, involve a rather large cast of characters, and it is surely a mark of his artistry that almost all of the characters who speak more than a few lines are consistently recognizable and entirely “rounded,” even if their actions are limited or repetitive. This is especially impressive in Loving, where the temptation to have characters seem uniformly representative of their respective class might be particularly strong.
Such a temptation surely existed as well when Green was writing his earlier novels Living (1927) and Party Going (1938). Like Loving, Living is a parallel portrayal of social classes, although in this case the divergence is between the owners of a foundry and its working-class employees. This novel led some to praise Green as a “proletarian” writer because of the empathy he extends to the working-class characters, but really this is something Green is able to do with all of his characters, even the upper-class characters, whose behavior may otherwise seem the object of satire. If these characters, even in Party Going, which is the most directly a satirical take on the leisured class of all of Green’s novels, inevitably come off as pompous and absurd, it is not because Green has so firmly applied his thumb to the satirical scale that their sins are weighed more heavily but because he allows the characters to be and speak as themselves without violating plausibility. Green can so convincingly ventriloquize all of his characters because he is able to so fully inhabit each of them, flaws and all (and all of them are indeed flawed).
Throughout his work Green exhibits a facility for this sort of “negative capability,” although perhaps an even more apt description of Green’s approach is to view it as what T.S. Eliot called an “escape from personality” that the genuine artist seeks to accomplish. Few novelists have achieved the escape from authorial presence, the removal of all traces of direct intervention by the narrative voice, as if the author is hiding, as convincingly as does Henry Green. This quality is arguably what most strongly identifies Green’s early novels as modernist, or at least the effort at such narrative removal is what gives Living and Party Going a someway disassociated tone, that, in combination with the abrupt shifts of perspective, the unorthodox dilation or foreshortening of time, and the generally drifting plots, warrants regarding them as contributions to modernist experiment in fiction. It could be said that Green’s work is an extended attempt to determine how thoroughly the outward signs of the author’s control of his fictional creation can be erased, how little can be revealed about the author’s attitude toward his characters and their actions. In Green’s fiction, the impression is conveyed that these actions in effect relate themselves, the narrator simply a verbal necessity of sorts.
This strategy is still evident in Caught, although the narrative center of gravity is more readily discernible, less dispersed among a large cast of characters and a digressive story. Caught is a multi-character novel, but it does feature a character who could be called its protagonist, a character who, because he so undeniably resembles his creator, at least helps to focus the events related as parts of a unified experience recognizable to the reader as more or less coherent narrative. The narrative follows Richard Roe, an upper-class Englishman who has joined the Auxiliary Fire Service to do his part in the war effort as the London blitz is about to commence. For most of the novel, Roe is engaged in training for the duties of a fireman—react quickly during a bombing raid to put out ensuing fires—and we are concurrently introduced to a range of other characters, including Roe’s superior, Pye, who in a bizarre coincidence is the brother of a woman, clearly not of an entirely sound mind, who had briefly kidnapped Roe’s son and has been committed to a mental hospital (a matter of considerable frustration to Pye, who is made to bear the cost).
As with Living and Loving, Green in Caught proves extraordinarily adept at creating working-class characters whose habits and states of mind he renders without condescension or reduction to caricature. This is especially true of Pye, whose confusion and resentment, both toward his sister’s predicament and his own as the leader of a fire brigade in wartime clearly unsure how to carry out the duty, are unmistakable but genuine, the qualities of a character that finally affirm his essential dignity. They are the qualities that, along with the perhaps inevitable sense of solidarity that would arise among a group of people engaged in an important if terrifying task, lead Richard to express strong feelings when contemplating Pye’s ultimate suicide when the weight of circumstances become too heavy to bear: “. . .when I was posted to his station it was much worse for him that it was for me. Then what finally ruined him was the authority he got. He didn’t do anything to get it. It came with the war, because he was an experienced fireman. He wasn’t in the least ready to have men under him.”
Perhaps because it engages an inherently dramatic subject—if not immediately action-oriented, the narrative proceeds through the underlying tension provided by the increasing likelihood the characters will soon be swept up by dangerous and dramatic events indeed—Caught, although still mostly related through dialogue as characters interact with each other, blends speech with expository prose more fully than most of Green’s other novels. Most of the time this prose is muted, revealing little further of the author apart from the impassive narrative voice employed, but at times it offers a kind of deadpan lyricism:
Coming back after his second spell of leave, Richard found he could not remember what his home life had been only a day or two before. All he had done lay ready to hand, but as dried fruit is to fresh off the tree, tasteless, unlike. Now that he was kept all hours in the station he had no privacy with which to ferment those feelings, shriveled after so short a journey.
At other times, Green’s prose becomes less muted, its lyricism more insistent:
The firemen saw each other’s faces. They saw the water below, a dirty yellow toward the fire; the wharves on that far side low and black, those on the bank they were leaving a pretty rose. They saw the whole fury of that conflagration in which they had to play a part. And they cowered where they sat beneath the immensity. For, against it, warehouses, small towers, puny steeples seemed alive with sparks from the mile high pandemonium of flame reflected in the edge, the perimeter round which the heavens, set with stars before fading into utter blackness, were for a space a trembling green.
Such passages do not aspire to “fine writing” nor to help advance the plot (the actual bombing raids and their aftermath are finally alluded to rather than depicted directly) so much as provide the color (in this case literally) that fills in and around the characters’ verbal exchanges, as much a kind of structural device as a narrative mode.
Caught was written subsequent to Green’s own enlistment in the Auxiliary Fire Service, and Richard Roe seem transparently to reflect his creator’s response to the experience. Although Green’s status as a son of the upper class informs all of his work, Caught surely comes closest to being a direct autobiographical transformation of Green’s personal sense of class consciousness into literary art of all of his novels (although the character of Dick Dupret, heir to the foundry in Living also seems an overt enough representation of Green’s experience working in his father’s business). The most explicit autobiographical account Green ever offered, of course, was his memoir, Pack My Back, written immediately before Caught (1940). If Caught, Loving, and Back could be considered a kind of World War II trilogy, we would probably need to make it a quartet by adding Pack Your Bag, which according to Green’s own testimony at the beginning of the book was written in anticipation of the war: “I was born a mouthbreather with a silver spoon in 1905, three years after one war and nine years before another, too late for both. But not too late for the war which seems to be coming down upon us now and that is a reason to put down what comes to mind before one is killed, and surely it would be asking much to pretend one had a chance to live.”
Green of course was not killed, but the war prompted not just the memoir-like reckoning with personal trauma in Caught or the wartime social anatomy of Loving, but also a novel that is the most removed from Henry Green’s accustomed purview and the least concerned with social behavior as such, Back, published in 1946. The novel focuses on the plight of an injured returning war veteran, the difficulties he has adjusting to his injuries, to his government-provided job, and to the death (while he was away) of the woman he loved. He meets another woman who looks so much like his lost love (who had been married to another man) he decides that in fact she is her. Most of the novel, in what turns out to be a surprisingly linear plot, follows Charley Summers as he gradually comes to terms with the reality that this woman is actually his lover’s half-sister, of whom he had previously been unaware. Eventually, after first provoking from her nothing but scorn, he begins to fall in love with her and the novel concludes as they plan to marry—she, in fact, has proposed to him.
Thus Back could be described as a love story, and a sympathetic and optimistic one at that. Although Charley’s war-inflicted damage is portrayed without sentimentality, Green allows him a measure of healing. His wife-to-be, Nancy, is no benevolent maiden, as she possesses her fair share of bitterness and resentment at the treatment, she, an illegitimate daughter, has received from her father. But this only makes the mutually satisfying relationship the two manage to forge between them all the more affecting and all the more convincing. Nancy is no doubt the most alive and interesting character in the novel, and in her complexity and self-presence she shares much with other women characters in Green’s fiction. If no Green novel features a female protagonist (of those that can be said to have protagonists), women are featured as prominently as men in his large-scale casts, and most of them, like Nancy, come to life as individuals to whom Green seems to listen as attentively as any of the men as they speak themselves into existence and assume their place in the world their talk allows Green to create.
If, following on Loving, Back doesn’t entirely seem the sort of book Henry Green might have been expected to write, considering the two along with Caught ultimately should confirm that, despite their shared discursive features, Green’s novels are generally quite dissimilar, sometimes radically so. In this way Loving, as probably Green’s most famous book, acts to somewhat distort his actual achievement, an accurate characterization of which must at least note that Green never really wrote the same sort of book twice. Perhaps his oddest book is the immediate successor to Back, Concluding, which at first seems a fairly recognizable kind of story set in a girl’s school but eventually seems to resolve itself into a quasi-futuristic political allegory a la 1984. The girls, it appears, are being educated to assume a role in a hyper-bureaucratized England (mostly just referred to as “the State”), and the story poses the school’s two dictatorial headmistresses against a retired scientist who, to the chagrin of the two ladies, who want the land, has been granted by the State a plot of land on the school’s grounds. The novel is tightly structured, unfolding over the course of a single 24-hour period, giving it a superficial resemblance to the compressed timespan used in Party Going, but where the earlier novel brings resolution of a sorts to its ostensible plot, Concluding concludes having settled few of the questions it has raised.
After Concluding, Green wrote two additional novels, probably his least well known, Nothing (1950) and Doting (1952). Here at the end of Green’s writing career, he emphatically returned to something like conventional comedies of manner, although these two novels taken together also most rigorously employ the dramatic method, effacing the narrator’s presence from the scenes about as thoroughly as is possible short of literally staging them as plays instead. They are also witheringly satirical, focusing entirely on upper-class characters whose speech is rendered with great care and piquancy, revealing them to be utterly vacuous, self-parodic and hilariously so. James Wood has described Green’s humor as fundamentally “gentle,” but Nothing and Doting unambiguously illustrate the extent to which this is a seriously mistaken judgment.
At this point it seems appropriate to circle back to Terry Southern, whose esteem for Henry Green is obvious enough in his Paris Review interview, but whose own work, often classified as absurdist, “sick,” or “black” humor, probably would not be immediately associated with Green’s by most readers. But it is in novels like Nothing and Doting that the kind of satirical humor characteristic of the comedy of manners is transformed by Green’s apparently absolute detachment into a comedy much more extreme in its effect. Perhaps it goes too far to say that Henry Green was kind of premature black humorist, but his last novels prior to his final 20-year silence prompt us to remember the essentially comic vision animating all of Green’s fiction, while also to regret that Green elected afterwards not to pursue it even farther.
Unrelenting Burlesque: Terry Southern
It is tempting to conclude that Terry Southern has faded from the cultural memory because his work feels unavoidably "dated" due to its contemporaneous references, its time-bound subjects, the decidedly démodé familiarity of its postwar disaffection. From this perspective, Southern was essentially a topical satirist, and, as eventually happens with almost all such satire, what on its appearance seemed keenly alert to the pervading cultural winds seems to languish in stale allusions once the winds have shifted. Even an accomplishment as unequivocal as Dr. Strangelove can be harder to appreciate when the political circumstances within which it acquired its comic edge no longer apply.
However, while Southern's screenplays (not just Strangelove or Easy Rider but also the British film version of The Magic Christian) inescapably reflect the convulsive sociohistorical currents of the 1960s, his novels, with the possible exception of Blue Movie, really do not as much depend on their topical details. Indeed, one could say that Candy and The Magic Christian did much to rouse the insurgent spirit of the 60s, but acknowledgment of their literary virtues is not necessarily contingent on their status as documents of their time. Although of course like any literary work in which later readers not part of its initial audience might still take an interest, both of these novels include details and references such readers may not immediately recognize, but neither of them require familiarity with historical and cultural context for their themes and formal strategies to achieve their effects. Candy in particular has somewhat lost its ability to shock, as the sexual and literary taboos it was notorious for breaking are no longer much in force, but this might actually allow us to perceive its less sensationalist, more purely literary qualities even more clearly.
Whether or not we consider Southern to be a satirist, certainly a primary feature--perhaps the essential feature--of his work is its humor, if not satirical humor per se then a mode of humor that goes beyond traditional forms of amusement. Southern surely intends the comedy in his scenes, stories, and extended jokes to be both funny and disturbing, in some ways disturbing because it is funny (or vice versa). During the postwar period this sort of humor was referred to variously as "absurdist," as "sick" humor, or as "black humor." While there is some justification for placing Southern's fiction into each of these categories, "black humor" seems more useful (and less morally freighted), especially as it ties Southern's work to that of other writers of his generation who not merely depicted a world that seemed "absurd" in its loss of coherence following on two shatteringly destructive world wars and the rise of a new order of ideological conflict and the threat of nuclear annihilation, but did so by employing forms of humor, often drawn from popular culture, that were not traditionally "literary" and often had the effect of provoking laughter perceived as unsuitable to the subjects and situations portrayed.
Southern's fiction makes extensive use of this sort of humor, from the prolonged seduction scenes of Flash and Filigree to the crude sex jokes of Candy to the elaborate put-ons staged by Guy Grand in The Magic Christian. Indeed, Southern suffered throughout his career from a perception among readers and critics of a more refined literary sensibility (those playing the "quality lit game," in Southern's words) that his work went too far in its iconoclasm, sacrificing subtlety and craft for often coarse humor. Similar objections could be made, of course, to the work of numerous other modern writers, from Beckett to Genet to Joseph Heller, although the argument that any of these writers, in the process of evoking what Bakhtin called a "carnivalesque" kind of humor, also abandoned "craft" cannot ultimately be sustained. The question, then, is not whether Terry Southern uses this kind of humor appropriately (by definition it involves a certain degree of "excess"), but whether the comedy he does employ is in any discernible way different or distinctive in the effects it creates and the purposes to which it is directed.
In his book on Southern, Terry Southern and the American Grotesque, David Tully attempts to place Southern's work in the tradition of American fiction associated with the "grotesque" invoked in the book's title, a tradition most immediately identified with the fiction of Poe and Hawthorne. Tully's attempt to locate Southern in the American nonrealist tradition represented by these two writers is compelling and entirely justified, and his claim that Southern's fiction "neither evades nor embraces morality but simply perceives morality as part and parcel of a cultural artifice that seeks to evade or conquer nature," an effort that is doomed to failure, provides a useful interpretive tool for discerning an underlying theme uniting all of Southern's work, especially the fiction. But if Tully's view of Southern as a "decadent" Romantic adapting the worldview of Poe and Hawthorne to the conditions of mid-20th century America does give coherence to Southern's body of work, illuminating what indeed seems to be a theme to which Southern consistently returns, in his discussions of individual works he still leaves a distorted impression of the way Southern's novels and screenplays treat this prevailing theme.
"It is often difficult for people to take comedy seriously," Tully writes in his introduction, "but Southern, for all his grotesque comedy, is a deadly serious writer." That a predominantly comic vision and formal strategy can also be taken seriously is certainly an important point. Much modern and postmodern literature (not to mention 18th and 19th century writers such as Sterne, Dickens, and Twain) would have to be rejected as insufficiently serious if we were to disregard this truth. However, the "deadly" in "deadly serious" leads Tully not to point out the ways in which comedy, in Southern's work or others', is itself a representational mode well worth taking seriously for its inherent aesthetic qualities and implications, but to focus narrowly on the "serious" themes Southern explores. In this analysis, Southern is a writer determined to "say something" about modern American life--about human existence in general. Consideration of the specific ways those themes are realized by rendering them through often extreme episodes of burlesque, parody, and comic exaggeration is almost nonexistent in Tully's book, however much, as the only extant critical consideration of the work of Terry Southern, it remains a worthwhile reading of that work.
Of course, Tully is not alone in implicitly devaluing comedy except to the extent it is clearly satirical, in which case readers can in effect overlook the silliness and exaggeration in favor of the larger satirical intent—the "message" the satire wants to convey. What was called black humor disrupts the normal expectations of this kind of satirical comedy, presenting instead an apparently non-instrumental humor that does not simply subject perceived folly or corruption to the kind of ridicule that seeks correction of objectionable behavior, but treats all human activity as essentially comic, equally deserving of unqualified laughter. Such an approach certainly implies a worldview of sorts, if only that the appropriate response to the world we inhabit is to laugh at it. (That it is fundamentally absurd is indeed a perspective adopted by a number of midcentury writers, but this is not a necessary inference to be drawn from the expression of a radically comic vision--and can equally well be suggested through non-comedic means.) However, what is most provocative about this mode of black humor is not the philosophy of modern life it might advance but its challenge to our notions about the justified objects of humor, the phenomena of modern life at which it is acceptable to laugh.
Terry Southern's fiction undoubtedly belongs generally to the informal movement of writers converging around what Bakhtin called "absolute" comedy, but whether his form of such humor is similar enough to that of prototypical black humorists like Joseph Heller or Bruce Jay Friedman to comfortably link it to their work could be questioned. Since David Tully's description of Southern as offering a variant of the "grotesque" is otherwise accurate in capturing one of the qualities that defines Southern's fiction, perhaps to more fully account for its total effect we should regard the novels as examples of a kind of grotesque comedy in which "comedy" is not merely an accompaniment, an efficacious embellishment of the primary object of interest, Southern's representation of the grotesque in modern American culture. Instead, comedy doesn't reflect or duplicate the grotesque as encountered in reality but works to produce it. (Poe and Hawthorne do as well, of course, albeit through different means.) Through characters, scenes, and situations marked by his typically unrestrained brand of humor, Southern invokes a grotesque comic world resembling our own ordinary world just enough for us to laugh at it in recognition.
Southern was most successful in realizing this project in The Magic Christian, probably the least successful in Blue Movie. However, both Flash and Filigree and Candy may in fact offer a more purely grotesque depiction of its characters and their milieu, in the sense of the term Tully has in mind when he describes the American version of the grotesque as "the freakish aspect of the carnival that is American culture." Flash and Filigree, Southern's first novel, still retains its "freakish" quality (no doubt even more striking to readers in the late 1950s), which arises from the deadpan manner adopted by the novel's narrator, beginning with the extended dialogue between a doctor, Dr. Eigner, and his patient that occupies the first chapter.
Dr. Eigner sat quietly, his white drawn hands clasped, resting on the desk, his lips parted in an almost weary smile, perhaps only tolerant of his own opening cliché, inevitable, as he asked:
"And what, Mr. Treevly, seems to be the trouble?”
"Yes, replied the young man, sitting forward in the chair at first, then back easily, crossing his legs.
"Well, I don't think it's much really. I have, or rather did have, . .a certain lesion. A lesion which wouldn't or at least didn't. . .close. A rather persistent. . . ."
"I see, said Dr. Eigner, unclasping his hands and placing them flat on the desk before him. "And where is the--this lesion?"
Mr. Treevly shifted in his chair, as though about to stand. "Well," he replied instead, with a certain smugness," at first it was only a pustule. . . ."
"May I," interrupted the Doctor again, now with the faintest pained smile, ". . .may I see it?"
"Of course," said the other, speaking pleasantly, but he followed the remark with a look of extreme care. "I should like to give you some particulars. . .which may facilitate, or rather, have some-bearing-on. . .the diagnosis.
"Yes," said Dr. Eigner after a pause. "Yes, of course," and leaned back, a little heavily, perhaps even in resignation . . . .
Of course, that a doctor would be having such a conversation during an office visit is not itself at all unusual, but most readers no doubt were not accustomed to finding lesions and pustules the immediate subject under discussion in the opening pages of a novel. Southern's placement of the scene as the novel's first, as well as the poker-faced narration, help make the scene seem altogether grotesque indeed, certainly to the extent the term can be taken as synonymous with "weird." The same effect is produced two chapters later as Dr. Eigner is preparing to leave the Clinic in his imported luxury car. As he departs we are told he is given to driving "extremely fast," which he demonstrates forthwith:
These canyon roads toward noon blazed with heat, and now the sun lay afire on the mountain land, striking every light surface with wild refraction. Dr. Eigner turned down the green glass visor and floored the throttle, racing up along a slow rise in the highway road. The Delahaye touched the crest of the hill with a whirlwind drone and plunged into the descent as for an instant the black sedan was lost behind. . . .
Dr. Eigner is involved in an accident at the bottom of the hill toward which he is racing (literally, it turns out), the repercussions of which provide the novel the series of events that could be called its plot (although a parallel sequence of events follows a callow young man's efforts--ultimately successful--to seduce Babs Mintner, a nurse who works at the Clinic.) While Flash and Filigree is no lost classic, Southern's initial foray into the comically grotesque is still effectively creepy, and both its episodic structure and uncluttered style establish the approach Southern will take in his subsequent novels as well, giving them a consistency of tone that probably should not be surprising, since all three of the novels were written almost concurrently, their publication history jumbled.
Flash and Filigree was initially published only in England, while Candy appeared in the U.S. several years after the publication of The Magic Christian, even though Candy was written first. The circumstances surrounding Candy are further clouded by the fact that it is to an extent a collaboration, co-written with poet and friend Mason Hoffenberg, However, evidence suggests that the novel was written mostly by Southern, whose idea it was and who had already written a substantial part of it when Hoffenberg joined him (Tully). Moreover, the novel is so much of a piece with the rest of his fiction it seems entirely justified to regard it as just as representative of Southern's work as his other novels and screenplays (many of the latter also written in collaboration). Written for a somewhat disreputable French publisher specializing in "erotic" fiction, the situation if anything allowed Southern to more freely indulge his inclinations as a writer drawn to outrageous situations.
The most immediate connection between Candy and Flash and Filigree is the way in which the former takes the latter's episodic structure and amplifies it into a fully picaresque story that has a plot only in the sense that one thing happens after another (often the same thing in a slightly different iteration). Indeed, this use of picaresque narrative to depict the journey of an innocent confronting the iniquities of the world is the primary parallel between Candy and its presumed namesake, Voltaire's Candide. Southern's revision of Voltaire perversely twists the conventions of the picaresque narrative when he portrays Candy Christian as essentially still an innocent even after she has experienced degradation at every stage of her journey. Although Candy manages to retain her virginity for early two-thirds of the narrative, all of the men she meets, before and after, treat her as a purely sexual object, but she never really manages to perceive herself as a victim nor to understand the inherently dehumanizing attitude the men take toward her. Candy herself possesses an inherent goodness that prevents her from recognizing their predatory behavior as anything other than a momentary lack of control (a weakness she thinks she may be guilty of provoking).
Although Southern uses Candy Christian and her travails to exemplify the clash between naïve presumption and the hard truth of reality (the metaphysical theme running throughout Southerns's work), the novel also depicts egregious exploitation of Candy's good nature for male sexual gratification, with little regard for her sexual agency. Whether Southern's concern for Candy's plight extends to her status as a woman in a sexist, patriarchal society is debatable; while Southern's prominent women characters are depicted as victims, their stereotypically "feminine" identities are generally reinforced, their exploitation not so much a potential opportunity to escape their confinement in prescribed gender roles through resistance but the inevitable consequence of their status as the weaker, more vulnerable sex. Candy Christian is perhaps allowed more room for development as a character beyond this reductive role, as she actively struggles to maintain her human dignity, but it would be a stretch to say she is presented as a sort of proto-feminist heroine.
This problematic depiction of hyper-sexualized, mostly passive women is no doubt most pronounced in Blue Movie, Southern's pastiche of the Marquis de Sade updated to 1960s Hollywood. The novel chronicles the production of a pornographic "art" film concocted by a well-regarded director for whom the film is a vanity project that prompts him to take advantage of his reputation as a serious filmmaker to attract big-name stars to his production, although he doesn't quite reveal to them what kind of film they're signing up for. While ultimately the director and his collaborators (primarily a screenwriter with more than a little resemblance to Terry Southern, and an unctuous producer) are the objects of the novel's satire (and it is largely a satirical novel), revealing themselves to be utterly indifferent to the suffering they cause in their blindness to any interests other than their own, the sex scenes they stage are especially demeaning to the women actors, whose bodies are relentlessly treated as object of potential violation. Southern himself, of course, doesn't necessarily share his characters' casual contempt, but the episodes are narrated with sufficient relish that the effect now is at least as obnoxious as it is disturbing or darkly satirical.
Because it is emphatically focused on the escapades of its male protagonist, with women playing really only subsidiary roles (principally in the novel's frame-tale), The Magic Christian mostly escapes the period-specific cultural assumptions that, to one degree or another burden the other three novels. While it would, strictly speaking, be misleading to call the novel autobiographical (no one has ever quite managed to carry out the kinds of actions performed by Guy Grand), as reflected in its main character's bearing toward the world, his insouciant abandon in realizing ever more outrageous acts of impish sabotage, surely Guy Grand does implicitly represent Southern's own comic method as a writer. Like Guy Grand, Southern attempts to undermine the established order through an artful mockery, to expose the hubris and folly that have created and maintained the social order, even as it deadens the lives of those who must subsist in it, and who themselves contribute to their own degradation by willingly submitting to it. Both Guy Grand and Terry Southern subject not just authority or particular kinds of social behavior to incessant ridicule, but the whole of social existence as manifested in postwar America.
In The Magic Christian Southern takes the picaresque strategy and makes it serve most persuasively to provide aesthetic and thematic unity. The picaresque structure doesn't just accommodate Terry Southern's penchant for episodic development but is inseparable from the comic vision that inspires the main character and his exploits. Guy Grand exemplifies Southern's anarchic spirit in his iconoclasm and ingenuity, and is Southern’s greatest fictional creation. If any work of fiction from the 1960s could be said to epitomize or presage the raucous spirit of the period itself--which in many ways owes much to Terry Southern's influence--it would be The Magic Christian, even if Guy Grand achieves his dissident goals through subterfuge rather than confrontation.
It is tempting to think of Southern's kind of humor as centering around the joke (as does the humor of Heller and Friedman), but it would be more accurate to say that Southern writes, even in his fiction, extended sketches the humor of which is not proclaimed loudly but arises from the implicit incongruity of the situations portrayed and from the characters' often impassive responses to the situation. These situations are not so much absurd (as in the logically skewed episodes of Catch-22, for example) as progressively more outlandish, sustained send-ups of our belief in an underlying normality of "civilized" behavior. This belief is exposed as an illusion by Southern's unrelenting burlesque, the effect of which is in some ways only intensified by the cool narrative manner Southern's 3rd-person narration typically assumes.
This manner is first of all a product of Southern's mostly utilitarian, mostly expository style. Seldom does Southern pause from the immediate storytelling task to indulge in flights of sensory description--certainly there are few of the kinds of figurative embellishments and finely wrought imagery that leads to a writer being praised as an admirably "literary" writer. And, on the one hand, it is true that, since most of Southern's kind of comedy is essentially plot-based--the product of what happens, however loosely structured--an especially fussy, ostentatiously lyrical style would likely interfere with his preferred comic effects, taking attention away from the outrageous situations depicted and in effect placing it on the writer and his skills as a prose stylist. On the other hand, while he is by no means deficient as a writer of prose, clearly Southern himself must have concluded that his talents were finally more suitable for film writing, since for the most part after writing the script for perhaps the most important black humor movie of the 1960s, Dr. Strangelove, he devoted his time to writing screenplays (most of them not produced). Aside from Easy Rider, none of these came close to equaling what he had accomplished in Strangelove or in his early fiction.
It is true that movies have been especially adept at a certain kind of broad comedy abiding somewhere between silliness and satire. It is also true that precisely this sort of comedy was used by many of the black humorists (indeed, by such precursors to the black humorists as Nathanael West and Samuel Beckett), which at the time provoked skepticism among some critics and readers but in retrospect seems perhaps the most important legacy of black humor fiction. Terry Southern made an important contribution to this legacy, but in turning directly to movies (an ironic move to some degree, since Southern in a prominent book review, "When Film Gets Good," complained that too many writers were writing fiction that wanted to be movies) as the vehicle for his comic imagination, he seemed to reject the further possibilities of fiction as the form that might expand his comic vision. Given the genuine achievement of The Magic Christian and the dubious success of his later efforts at film writing, he probably made the wrong choice.
Deforming Form: Percival Everett
Percival Everett’s novels participate in the form "novel" primarily as extensions of the much older mode of satire, which requires no particular form or genre for its more general task of comic deflation. Satire targets behaviors and attitudes that are implicitly marked as so unacceptable or pompous they are deserving of the deflating mockery satire provides. The essentially corrective message of satire—this behavior needs to be eradicated or changed—thus always takes precedence over the purely formal and aesthetic niceties over which some other practitioners of the form at hand often dwell, even when the satirist him/herself might be taking extreme liberties with form and style.
Everett certainly does take liberties with form in his novels, and they are liberties frequently accomplished to hilarious effect. However, these efforts seem mostly directed toward simply dismantling the novel as "form", without much interest in aesthetically reconstituting the text, Everett's text, as at least a temporary alternative to established forms, as a new iteration of form in fiction. The first target of Everett's satire is the writing of fiction itself, which is portrayed implicitly as an enterprise saturated in pretension and moribund assumptions. Although intellectual and academic fraud and pretension in general, as well as the cultural frauds historically perpetuated by white American institutions, are the ultimate objects of satire in most of Everett's fiction, the force of this satire is so intense and thoroughgoing it seems irresistibly to extend to the literary/philosophical underpinnings of fiction as an "institution" of intellectual practice.
Glyph (1999) well illustrates both the pleasures and the limitations of Everett's approach. It has a typically outrageous premise: a baby is born with the ability to read and to think (although not to speak) at a near-genius level. When this is discovered, the baby is abducted from his parents (an artist mother whom the baby rather likes and a clueless literary academic he decidedly doesn't) by a series of academics, scientists, and government goons, all of whom want to harness the infant prodigy to their own personal and professional agendas. Along the way, all of these character types are thoroughly mocked, shown to be concerned only with their own personal and professional aggrandizement. But at the same time the baby, Ralph, is also inclined toward his own kind of self-absorption and intellectual pretension:
. . .My dreams became so transparent that they became devoid of meaning. Jung would have been proud of me. Freud would have gone to sleep during our sessions. My dreams became an exercise in boredom, though I was actually impressed with my imagination and its ability to create so many characters, even if they were stock and repetitive. I thought I knew how it felt to be Louis L'Amour or James Michener or even Dickens.
Ironically, the actuality of my having subverted my dreaming practice made the fact of my dreaming of great interest. I wondered what indeed it meant about me that I was so set against the notion of convention that I should attack it. So, I replaced the dream with the novel, stripping the stories of my dreams of any real meaning, but causing the form of them to mean everything.
Later in the novel, we are presented with "Ralph's Theory of Fictive Space," a long list of propositions that as they accumulate become more and more nonsensical:
B._E) Story is self-determining and therefore conceptually finite, but fictive space has no boundaries and only boundaries.
B._F) The world, story and, by extension, fictive space make up reality.
B._FA) Realities are dependent on fictive space.
B._FB) Fictive space contains, controls, and contributes truth in reality.
B.A) A story cannot be seen at once.
Such passages are very funny, but not only do they make it difficult to muster up much sympathy for Ralph as the novel's protagonist, they work to extend Glyph's mockery to itself as a text, as one struggles to discern how Ralph's various assertions and pronouncements relate to the text we are reading, only to decide that this very struggle is one of the novel's satirical targets.
To some extent, Everett's practice in a work like Glyph is an illustration of M.M. Bakhtin's concept of the "carnivalesque," in which an attitude of "radical skepticism" makes it impossible for anything to be taken seriously. But Bakhtin makes a distinction between carnivalesque comedy and satire—the latter takes nothing seriously except its own, its author's, authority, which is invoked to ridicule that which needs to be corrected. My sense of Everett's fiction is that finally it does not fully relinquish that authority, that its attack on literary processes and pretensions seeks to evade comedic reduction where the work of Percival Everett is concerned. That Everett, or the text at hand, at least, depicts the assumptions behind literary representation to be risible does not mean that Everett's text is also risible. The alternative to "causing the form of [novels] to mean everything" is causing Everett's satire of it to "mean" at least something.
The essentially satiric character of Everett's fiction is even more pronounced in I Am Not Sidney Poitier. This novel is much less metafictional than Glyph or Erasure, its most outrageous gesture in this direction being the introduction of a character named "Percival Everett," although this Percival Everett is an Atlanta-based professor teaching a course in the "Philosophy of Nonsense." As such, he is in the line of academic frauds to be found in his namesake's fiction, but he doesn't really act as a focus of satiric attention on literary creation per se. His role instead is as a kind of advisor—whose advice is mostly nonsensical, of course—to the novel's protagonist, Not Sidney Poitier. The novel chronicles Not Sidney's travails as he attempts to find his place in the world after inheriting a fortune from his mother, who made a lucky investment in the Turner Broadcasting System just before it rose to prominence, along with its founder, Ted Turner.
The novel gets most of its laughs, such as they are, from Not Sidney's rather loopy conversations with Ted Turner, as well a series of episodes in which Not Sidney finds himself, sometimes in dreams, sometimes in reality, acting out the scenarios of Sidney Poitier movies such as The Defiant Ones, Buck and the Preacher, and, ultimately, In the Heat of the Night. Unfortunately, as a character Ted Turner falls flat, the satirical intent motivating his portrayal being rather fuzzy at best. The parodies of the Poitier movies come off rather better, although ultimately they seem rather obvious in their satirical ambition to illustrate that the obstacles to civil respect and equality encountered by Sidney Poitier's characters in these "social problem" films are still with us these many years later. And this ambition seems to be the novel's primary motivating force, even if it is leavened with the sort of "nonsense" one expects from both Percival Everett and "Percival Everett."
If I Am Not Sidney Poitier Sidney Poitier is satire of a more or less conventional kind, in which mocking, often corrosive humor is used for a traditionally corrective purpose, in Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, as in Glyph or Erasure, the authority of the very narrative we are reading (to the extent we can unravel the narrative) is itself questioned, quite deliberately, as Everett takes storytelling, and fiction as a mode of storytelling, for targets of mockery. This quality in Everett’s work, but I believe the impulse behind it is still best regarded as satirical rather than postmodern per se. While Everett does blatantly and persistently call attention to the artifice of fiction-making, the object seems less to simply complicate the reader’s response to the act of narration and to disrupt the maintenance of illusion than to expose both notions to travesty. Fiction as a literary form is itself not spared the hard edge of Everett’s satire. Among postwar American writers whose work consistently incorporates self-reflexive strategies, perhaps only Gilbert Sorrentino so relentlessly dismantles the existing support structures of fiction — the novel in particular — as does Everett, although Sorrentino seems more interested than Everett in supplying new such structures, even if they are only temporary, made to fit the specific work at hand.
In Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, Everett does not seem engaged in an effort to replace the blasted remnants of the conventional novel with a fresh form of his own invention. It would be more accurate to say this novel settles for deforming form as a self-sufficient aesthetic principle. It courts confusion on almost every level: Is “Percival Everett” the narrator who begins the novel by narrating the dream of his “father,” or is it the father? Is the son thus “Virgil Russell”? Is “Percival Everett” Percival Everett? Is it the latter whose voice appears periodically to remind us he’s in the midst of creating the work we are reading? If the premise of the novel is that is that the two men, “Percival Everett” and “Virgil Russell,” are relating stories to each other, how do we know whose story is which, since the “dialogue” is never clearly demarcated as such? If the stories are emerging as part of a “novel” the father is writing (or is the son writing a novel about the father writing a novel?), why do the characters, their situations, and their actions keep transmogrifying and blending together? Is the story ultimately related of the father’s attempt to escape confinement in his “hospital” the novel’s real story, or is this just more make-believe? What in the world do the photographs in the novel’s concluding section have to do either with the accompanying text or the novel as a whole?
This concluding section finally suggests to us that the father may be in a coma, or perhaps has just died, so that we could choose to interpret the novel we have just read as the spontaneous projections of a dying brain. No doubt some readers who expect formal continuity to be more firmly established, and sooner, will not have the patience to acquiesce to the novel’s apparent disorder until this conclusion provides a kind of retrospective justification (maybe). One suspects, however, that Everett not only anticipates such a response but to a degree expects and welcomes it. The extreme skepticism of fiction’s ability (the ability of all human discourse) to adequately render the truth about human reality that sustains Everett’s satire is surely accompanied by a skepticism of our ordinary ways of reading, which necessarily is expressed by confounding the reader’s expectations, deliberately alienating the reader from these ingrained habits. That Everett’s fidelity to such skepticism would so completely alienate readers who stubbornly cling to their expectation that they reject a novel like this one in frustration is perhaps an acceptable price to pay.
Everett is a prolific writer (by my count Percival Everett by Virgil Russell is his 21st book), so one also must presume he does after all believe fiction has value. Indeed, in Everett’s case that value may very well consist of the opportunity each book gives him to exercise his satirical imagination and to challenge readers to a more active and self-aware reading experience. The very ferocity of Everett’s satire, as well as the relatively rapid rate at which he chooses to offer it, suggests further that he finds no lack of appropriate targets in current American culture (although his interests extend to American history as well) and that their satirical deflation is a worthy object, perhaps one most appropriately undertaken by fiction of a sufficiently adventurous kind.
Those who do grant Percival Everett by Virgil Russell its ultimate formal integrity and follow it through to the end will actually find that the story it tells, however obliquely, and the subject it addresses, however indistinctly, are among the most emotionally engaging, even moving, in Everett’s fiction. In whatever way we choose to identify “Percival Everett,” the character’s plight is treated with considerable sensitivity, at least to the point we find Everett’s depiction of old age and its indignities convincing and compelling. The relationship between father and son, although no more free of regret and misunderstanding than any other, also emerges from the novel’s formal uncertainties as nevertheless genuinely felt, captured almost poignantly in the novel’s final scene:
. . .Twitch a finger here. Twitch a finger there. Fuck with them any way you can. I’m dead, but they don’t know it. Forget the adage let sleeping dogs lie. How about we let dead men die?
You hold my hand
I hold your hand.
I write this for you.
If I wrote, this would be it.
If you wrote.
Yes.
I will always be here.
And I.
I’m dead, son.
I know that, Dad. But I didn’t know you knew it.
If this conclusion suggests that genuine human connection is possible, even (especially) in facing imminent death and inevitable suffering, it also thus paradoxically reinforces the judgment that Percival Everett is fundamentally a satirical writer, albeit one of a particularly radical sort. A satirical writer must ultimately believe that the satirical gesture has some conceivable efficacy, that it is not simply an expression of nihilism or despair. One certainly wouldn’t go to Percival Everett’s novels for good cheer and false comfort, but in being often savagely funny they are also balanced by a concern that we behave better, and make such mocking laughter less necessary.
A Sensation of Hollowness: Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods
In a review of the novel in Review 31, Helen McClory makes a curious criticism of Helen DeWitt's 2011 novel, Lightning Rods:
What it lacks is interiority. The narration, because it is so slick and over-worked, has the feel of a voice-over; it's all surface, even when we are ostensibly presented with access to the minds of the characters. This creates a sensation of hollowness. . .
The total misperception of DeWitt's purpose in Lightning Rods is extraordinary. As almost all other reviewers of this novel observed, it is most certainly a novel of "interiority," although it is a special kind of interiority that deliberately uses the contents of consciousness--more importantly, the forms of expression those contents assume--to create a pervasively "surface" effect. If it seems "slick and overworked," that's because the modes of thinking the novel travesties are themselves so formulaic and riven with cliche. "A sensation of hollowness" is precisely the effect Lightning Rods is designed to create.
The plot of Lightning Rods is no doubt by now well-known, as the novel received numerous reviews that prominently emphasized its outrageous premise. A failed vacuum cleaner salesman, Joe, is inspired by his own sexual fantasies to begin marketing a new service designed to help alleviate sexual harassment in the workplace: a contraption installed in an office bathroom that allows testosterone-addled men to have anonymous sex with women (the lightning rods) whose bottom halves are exposed rearward and then withdrawn back through the bathroom wall. The service proves to be quite successful, for the companies whose workplaces become less litigious, for the men whose needs are fulfilled and thus become more efficient and cooperative workers, and for the women. who are handsomely rewarded financially and in some cases use the job to work themselves up the "corporate ladder." (One of the lightning rods eventually becomes a Supreme Court lawyer.)
Joe's diligence and sincerity are reflected in the manner of the book's narration, nominally in the form of "free indirect" discourse, the stylistic/narrative mode developed precisely to plumb a character's "interiority." But while the language with which the story is told surely does capture the way Joe both perceives the world and explains it to himself, it is indeed shallow and hackneyed, permeated by the external languages of self-help and commerce:
Now if you're selling encyclopedias it's obvious you're selling people the idea that they can be what they want to be. But even if you're selling vacuum cleaners you're selling people the way they could be--they could be people who will clean their stairs and the furniture and curtains using appropriate attachments, instead of borrowing a vacuum cleaner for Thanksgiving and Christmas from their next-door neighbors. You're selling the chance to fix something that's wrong. What you're selling, basically, is the idea that there's nothing wrong with the customer; maybe they don't know as much as they should, or maybe they happen to live in a dirty house, but that's because they don't have the one thing lacking to put it right.
The reader could turn to practically any page in Lightning Rods and find a passage like this. Clearly DeWitt wants not just to emphasize Joe's subjectivity, but to suggest that this very subjectivity has been thoroughly determined by the all-pervasive discourses, and the underlying assumptions, of American-style capitalism and its accompanying modes of therapeutic encouragement. No matter how "deep" we plumb into Joe's "interiority," we're only going to find more such platitudinous language and bromidic concepts, since in effect they have replaced any genuine interiority, substituted for any genuine thinking, beyond the need to apply the concepts most effectively. As Edmond Caldwell observes in his review of the novel, "It is less like Joe 'uses' this language. . .and more like this language thinks him"--although it might be even more accurate to say there is no thinking at all going on, only the pre-formulated thinking represented by the recycling of familiar expressions.
Caldwell also maintains that the novel is a satire of its own ostensible genre, the novel of "psychological realism," which "stands revealed as a patchwork of readymade materials--cliches and slogans, the hoariest sententia and newly-minted banalities." If all such novels are "no less a howling absurdity than Lightning Rods, the difference is that one of them knows itself as such." While I would not deny the accuracy of this reading, I don't think the self-satirical impulse fully accounts for the effects DeWitt manages to achieve in nevertheless exploiting the assumptions of psychological realism. She employs its "cliches and slogans" in a way that, at the same they are revealed to be such, transcends the "banalities" of this mode of narration to tell a story that is far from banal, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of John Barth's notion of a "literature of exhaustion" that takes the very "used-upness" of a literary practice and creates something new. As much as it shows psychological realism to be "a patchwork of readymade materials," the novel also shows that human consciousness itself (at least of the "ordinary" variety) might be a hodgepodge of such materials. There's no going "deep," only going sideways into more culturally determined fragments of predigested language.
"Surface" and "interiority" are interchangeable, versions of each other. The characters' motives are not hidden (to themselves or to us) but quite transparent, although those motives are encapsulated in the shallowest, most insipid kind of interior discourse. The most powerful human motive, sex, is, of course, thoroughly externalized, subjected to the same trivialization and commodification by which American culture reduces all human activity to commerce. (It isn't prostitution if it makes good business sense.) Much of the humor in Lightning Rods comes from the way in which the characters readily adapt to circumstances that might otherwise provoke feelings of shame and degradation, how easily the sexual drive comes to be regarded as something that merely requires the right kind of management.
What makes this novel more than simply satirical (whether of the American commercial imperative or the novel of psychological realism) is that the ostensible target, our protagonist Joe, in whose "interiority" we have been placed and whose idea it is to channel the sexual drive in his commercialized service, is finally not a character deserving only of our laughter. Above all, Joe is utterly sincere in his belief that his service will have beneficial effects, that in offering it he is doing good. He shows concern for his employees, and as a sideline to the main business of providing lightning rods, he also devises an adjustable toilet to make public restrooms easier on short and/or obese people. His sincerity and good intentions make it difficult to regard Joe as a purely risible figure; he winds up being a rather sympathetic character who at worst has succumbed to the irresistible influence of cultural forces outside his control.
Readers of DeWitt's first novel, The Last Samurai, might at first find Lightning Rods a radically different kind of work, almost to the point it doesn't seem by the same writer. Samurai is a sprawling novel that at times courts formlessness, while Lightning Rods is a compact, sharply focused work exhibiting a unified narrative perspective that contrasts with the bifurcated perspective of The Last Samurai. Ultimately The Last Samurai could be called a novel about a search for identity, while the characters in Lightning Rods seem quite confident in their identities, even if those identities are ultimately culturally constructed. To a degree, however, both books are about the use and abuse of language.The Last Samurai highlights the possibilities of language in its story of the budding genius Ludo and his facility in many languages and ability to relate them to each other, something that DeWitt also does in the novel as a whole. Lightning Rods illustrates our more common relationship with language, whereby we allow our thinking to be determined by language in its most ossified, restrictive forms. If The Last Samurai implies the yet untapped potential of language when viewed cross-culturally, Lightning Rods reveals how any language can become so burdened with the conceptual debris scattered by one's culture as to become hazardous to all thought.
Mutated Reality: George Saunders
The fiction of George Saunders is usually received enthusiastically by readers and critics who admire it for its “quirky” departures from what are still even now the predominantly realistic norms of literary fiction. And it is not so hard to understand why these readers and reviewers would find Saunders’s fiction appealing. To first-time readers especially, his stories are no doubt a little puzzling, requiring some accommodation to their surrealistic settings and premises, but ultimately they are puzzling in an entertaining way, the settings and events just off-kilter enough to provoke the reader’s curiosity, the premises just outrageous enough that we find their surrealism both disconcerting and surprisingly tangent to existing conditions of American reality. Above all, the stories are often very funny, so that even if we remain uncertain how to interpret the narratives’ mutated reality, we can still enjoy their oddities as conveyed through Saunders’s deadpan, understated style, which can assimilate the most stilted, bureaucratic jargon with the most colloquial, slang-ridden expressions, often in the same paragraph or even the same sentence. Reinforced by Saunders’s ability to mimic the inanities of American speech in his dialogue, this adept orchestration of voices and languages is frequently a source of pleasure in itself.
Tenth of December (2012) manifests all of these appealing qualities. It may be, in fact, his most consistently engaging book since his first, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996). The title story of that book introduced a narrative trope that by now has become a signature Saunders device, a trope encompassing both plot and setting, through which the story’s protagonist, also the narrator, relates his experiences as an employee of an outlandish theme park in which American life and history have been reduced in scale and repackaged as entertainment— although there is never much indication that anyone is actually entertained by it (certainly not the employees). Parks such as this signify both the way American history has been reduced to its value as the subject of such simplistic entertainments, designed to fulfill the needs of commerce rather than citizens and their shared culture, as well as the way in which American life in the present has organized itself around the commercial imperative, emptied itself of interest in anything except mindless spectacle. “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” may be the prototypical such story, its title an accurate forecast of the story’s portrayal of a Civil War-era theme park in crisis and the unfortunate consequences for its employees, especially the narrator (who winds up dead). The story isn’t in fact entirely surreal, since one can indeed imagine an American culture so debased that something like the phenomenon it depicts could arise, but its imaginative amplification of these nascent cultural tendencies is darkly comical and disturbing.
Most of the stories in CivilWarLand (including the concluding novella, “Bounty”) are of this kind, giving the book itself a structural and thematic coherence. Stories of this type recur in Saunders’s later work as well (“Pastoralia”), suggesting that this narrative is especially expressive of Saunders’s concerns as a writer, that his return to it allows a continued development of those concerns. There is but one such story in Tenth of December, “My Chivalric Fiasco,” which is actually one of the least substantial pieces in the book, a diverting enough turn using the theme park setting that gives Saunders an opportunity to indulge in some quasi-Elizabethan verbal tricks but is otherwise rather slight. Most of the other stories in the book nevertheless still seem recognizably to originate in the same sensibility that offers the dystopic theme park narrative as a touchstone of sorts for the aesthetic and thematic assumptions of Saunders’s fiction.
Stories such as “Escape from Spiderhead” and “The Semplica Girls Diary” share a setting in what must taken as a near future in which currently ominous practices and trends have proliferated even farther, to the point they have simply become an accepted feature of the cultural landscape. In the first, prisoners have been assigned to a facility where they serve as test subjects for drugs with names like “Darkenfloxx” (administered through a “MobiPak”), which work to alter mood or increase sexual proficiency. (Saunders readers will not be surprised when the tests go horribly wrong.) In the second, a suburban family in distress wins a lottery jackpot and uses the money to keep up appearances by buying “Semplica Girls” (“SGs”), poor young immigrant girls who have essentially agreed to act as lawn ornaments through some sort of new technology that allows them to hang suspended in the air. Both stories could be called satirical, but again they less provoke laughter than sober recognition such things might not be so farfetched. In each story as well, at least one character resists the general moral drift that accepts the ongoing situation as normal and instead experiences an awakening of sorts. In “Escape from Spiderhead,” the narrator protagonist decides he will not contribute to the possible death of another test subject, at the cost of his own life. In “Semplica Girl Diaries,” the family’s youngest daughter is so deeply upset by the treatment of the SGs that she sets them free, causing the family even greater hardship.
Thus, while stories such as these clearly enough have some satirical intent, they are in most cases just as clearly explicit moral fables, tales of overcoming the degrading and dehumanizing attitudes that appear to underlie the social order depicted in the stories. It seems likely that this quality in Saunders’s fiction also contributes to its appeal: the imaginative projections into the future come marked with palpable disapproval of the sorry state of affairs it has produced, but offer some hope that the human capacity to overcome cultural conditioning and make morally courageous decisions might still survive. This sort of provisional optimism does not color every story, but finally one can’t call Saunders a gloomy writer, however much his fiction does illuminate the march of folly on which the human species, especially in America, seems to be proceeding. He has been compared to Kurt Vonnegut, who certainly did have a gloomy outlook, and whose fiction contains the same sort of SFish elements and the same straight-faced humor, but where in Vonnegut the humor is about all that comes between us and nihilistic despair, in Saunders it, as well as the movement of narratives like “Escape from Spiderhead” toward an ultimate moment of moral recognition, acts to reinforce, as in most conventional satire, the critique of social dysfunction. Saunders’s fiction leaves the discernible impression its representation of human folly is at least partly meant to suggest we should (and could) stop doing and believing the things that make it possible.
The stories particularly register the depredations of “late capitalism” and the class divisions it perpetuates and intensifies. In addition to the dehumanizing practices depicted in “Spiderhead” and “Semplica Girl Diaries,” the demeaning necessities of current economic arrangements are featured in “Exhortation” (composed in that most debased form of capitalist communication, the memorandum) and “Al Roosten,” in which a man voluntarily debases himself in the name of good business. Class conflict is portrayed very directly in “Puppy” and “Home” and emerges as the dominant theme in the book’s first story, “Victory Lap,” which compels attention first of all as the story of a young woman abducted by a madman but rescued by a neighbor boy before she is killed. Finally, however, the thriller-tinged plot (which seems taken from a television crime drama) serves as a device to dramatize the distance that has grown between the young woman and her rescuer, once childhood friends, a distance exacerbated by the pretensions of class. These stories, less fantastic than “Semplica Girl Diaries,” Pastoralia,” or “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” (or certainly than Saunders’s novella, “The Brief Frightening Reign of Phil”), nevertheless only reinforce the conclusion that Saunders is a writer with the ambition of “saying something” about the state of American life and culture.
However much these particular stories depict characters facing extreme situations, they ultimately might still be characterized as works of narrative realism. Even Saunders’s more radically surrealist stories do not really depart from the requisites of conventional storytelling, and in this his fiction is consistent with (probably one of the inspirations for) most of the neosurrealist fiction that has become quite a noticeable development in recent American writing (for example in the work of Aimee Bender and Stacey Levine). If anything, this fiction observes the dictums of plot development even more scrupulously than traditional realism, as the freakish or oddball characters and absurdist events are chronicled in a strictly linear way, encompassing appropriately rising actions and clear resolutions and generally satisfying any reader’s need for narrative. At the same time, claims are often made that this mode of fiction is nevertheless audacious and unconventional, claims based entirely on its defiance of the surface logic of ordinary reality. Thus the alternative posed to “realism” is a diametrical anti-realism that informs a story’s content but not its form. Saunders is probably the most accomplished of these new surrealists, but his stories only illustrate most prominently that such fiction derives its appeal from conjuring fanciful flights from reality related through familiar narrative strategies. That Saunders employs his vision of an altered reality at the satirical level to achieve the traditional goals of realism—to depict the way things are—could lead us to the conclusion that Saunders’s ambitions aren’t that far removed from those associated with the realist tradition. They might be seen as two sides of the same literary coin.
The relatively large proportion of stories in Tenth of December that are more or less straight realism only reinforces this conclusion. It would seem that sometimes Saunders’s effort to capture the degeneration of American life requires the surreal satire of “Semplica Girl” or “CivilWarLand,” while in other cases the realism of “Puppy” or “Home” works as well. Their shared use of conventional storytelling is allied with another in-common feature that finally helps to account for the appeal of Sanders’s work: All of Saunders’s stories ultimately create an emotional atmosphere that solicits considerable empathy for his characters and their plight. This is accomplished to a great extent through Saunders’s prose style, which can be ingenuous in an almost merciless way but through that very quality also provokes sympathy for a character such as the title character of “Al Roosten,” a struggling merchant who has entered into a “luncheon auction of Local Celebrities, a Local being any sucker dopey enough to answer yes when the Chamber of Commerce asked.”
Roosten stepped warily out from behind the paper screen. No one whooped. He started down the runway. No cheering. The room made the sound a room makes when attempting not to laugh. He tried to smile sexily but his mouth was too dry. Probably his yellow teeth were showing and the place where his gums dipped down.
Frozen in the harsh spotlight, he looked so crazy and old and forlorn and yet residually arrogant that an intense discomfort settled on the room, a discomfort that, in a non-charity situation, might have led to shouted insults or thrown objects but in this case drew a kind of pity whoop from near the salad bar.
The most transparently emotion-laden story in the book is perhaps the title story. In it, a boy and a middle-aged man are making their way through a patch of woods. The boy is simply enjoying himself, lost in fantasy, but we discover that the man is ill with cancer and has come to the woods to commit suicide. The man winds up rescuing the boy when he falls through the ice on a pond, and the man decides he wants to live, after all. The plot itself tugs pretty strongly at the heartstrings, but the language used to convey the suicidal man’s despair (Saunders hews pretty closely to the character’s stream of thought) bears an especially direct emotional weight as well:
Ouch, ouch. This was too much. He hadn’t cried after the surgeries or during the chemo, but he feels like crying now. It wasn’t fair. It happened to everyone supposedly but now it was happening specifically to him. He’d kept waiting for special dispensation. But no. Something/someone bigger than him kept refusing. You were told the big something/someone loved you especially but in the end you saw it was otherwise. The big something/someone was neutral. Unconcerned. When it innocently moved, it crushed people.
A passage such as this does not hide the underlying pathos through irony or “wacky” humor. The emotion it is clearly soliciting from the reader even verges on being sentimental. (I would maintain it actually crosses that line.) The story’s placement at the conclusion of this book would seem to further indicate that Saunders regards it as bringing together the book’s common concerns or revealing its important assumptions. For me, the story works to clarify that, despite the fact many of his stories court the bizarre and chronicle extreme states of being, finally George Saunders’s fiction fits comfortably enough within the established protocols of the American short story as recognized and accepted by most readers. That this is true does help explain the widespread enthusiasm for Saunders’s work—the surface content of his stories is pleasingly weird, but they are also told in familiar ways and engage the reader’s emotions rather straightforwardly. At the same time, it does little to help justify claims that Saunders’s fiction, in addition to being entertaining, also occupies a place on the cutting edge of American fiction.
Facile Caricatures: Rebecca Goldstein
Readers familiar with Rebecca Goldstein's previous fiction would no doubt find that 36 Arguments for the Existence of God has much in common with the earlier work. It concerns itself with the intellectual nexus formed by science-mathematics-philosophy, is set in the campus world of academics, and supplements its focus on the life of the mind by introducing questions about Jewish identity and Judaism as a side interest. It is the sort of thing most readily identified as a "novel of ideas," although this novel may be the most insistent on foregrounding the "ideas" themselves as its central interest.
In novels such as The Mind-Body Problem (1989), Mazel (1995), and Properties of Light (2000), Goldstein takes as her subject characters working in the "hard" disciplines who struggle to reconcile their commitment to the intellectual rigor of these disciplines with their physical and emotional impulses that tempt them away from that commitment, in some cases toward the suspension of reason and rigor represented by religion and religious tradition. 36 Arguments continues the preoccupation with this subject but does so in the form of a conventional academic satire, a mode the earlier novels, for all their focus on academics and their eccentricities, did not really approach. These novels (as well as the short story collection, Strange Attractors) seemed to manifest an effort to satisfy both the demands of philosophy and of literary form (perhaps analogous to their protagonists' efforts to reconcile head and heart). Properties of Light, for example, finds a provocative way to use science to create a ghost story of sorts, as one of its characters comes back to quantumly "haunt" the woman responsible for his death.
36 Arguments for the Existence of God, however, doesn't really exhibit the same concern for transforming philosophy and science into literary devices. Granted, the "36 arguments" construct is used as a structural element, incorporated literally in the form of a series of propositions and their refutations as the novel's concluding section and metaphorically by providing the novel's chapter titles, but otherwise this novel presents few surprises either formally or thematically, proceeding as a garden-variety academic satire complete with bursting egos, pretentious-sounding projects, and fierce political in-fighting. It provides Goldstein with the opportunity to portray the current phenomenon of "new atheism," but its appeal is largely restricted to the examination of this phenomenon as a "current issue." While some marginal interest might be added by dramatizing this phenomenon through attributing positions to fictionally depicted characters, finally not much about the controversy over new atheism is really illuminated by dressing it up as fiction rather than addressing it more straightforwardly through analysis and explication.
The most serious limitation of 36 Arguments, however, is that as satire it isn't very funny. None of the characters rise above facile caricature--the female characters are all in one way or another too much woman for the diffident protagonist--and emphasizing the decidedly Jewish names of campus buildings (at "Frankfurter University") and a college president named "Shimmy" only goes so far. The most egregious failure is the portrayal of Jonas Elijah Klapper, "Extreme Distinguished Professor of Faith, Literature, and Values" and embodiment of pomposity, clearly enough modeled on Harold Bloom. Once one "gets" that this character is based on Bloom, the endless reiterations of his girth, his affected speech and mannerisms, and his encyclopedic references to Jewish mysticism become almost unbearable. It's never clear whether Klapper is meant to represent the foolishness of literary study in general, or of a particular kind of anti-scientific literary discourse, or whether he just signifies that it's inappropriate to be Harold Bloom. Whatever the case, we can only conclude that, as Gordon Haber puts it in his review of the novel, Klapper "is supposed to be a comic figure because his interest in Judaism leads to messianic delusions, and because he’s fat" (The Forward).
Because so much space is devoted to Jonas Elijah Klapper, and because presumably something is to be made of the contrast between Klapper's approach to "faith and values" and the approach the protagonist, originally a disciple of Klapper, eventually favors, or between Klapper's take on Judaism and that of "true" Hasidic Jews, or something or other, the insipidness of the novel's portrayal of him subverts any purely literary claims it might have to make on us. The flashbacks to this period in the protagonist's life prove almost completely superfluous and little in his interactions with other characters is of much interest. We are left with a subplot concerning the "Valdener Hasidim," a community of Hasidic Jews for whom both Klapper and the protagonist develop an increasing fondness. Interest focuses in particular on the current Valdener Rebbe and his heir apparent son, a mathematical genius in the making who is ultimately forced to choose between the potential of his genius and his responsibility to the community he is apparently destined to lead.
The protagonist, Cass Seltzer, a Frankfurter psychologist who has written a surprise best seller called The Varieties of Religious Illusion, is himself not a very compelling character. He exists mostly as an opportunity for Goldstein to evoke the milieu he inhabits and to raise the issues of faith and belief with which the novel is principally concerned. He has the consummately "moderate" personality that allows him to empathize with believers even as he is chosen to make the case for nonbelief in a setpiece debate near the novel's conclusion. He is clearly enough regarded as the "winner" of the debate, yet his admiration of the community spirit that maintains the Valdeners in their traditions and of the decision by the son to continue those traditions after his father's death is also palpable. The narrative never deviates from Cass's perspective, and we are inevitably led to appreciate both his intellectual toughness and his soft spot for tradition and solidarity.
The novel's concluding episode, a joyous celebration of a Valdener wedding, veers away from satire and rests ultimate sympathy with the community practices of the Hasidic Jews. This is the sort of thing some readers find "moving" or "transcendent," but I find it muddled and maudlin. It doesn't seem to me to rescue a sense of "mystery" about human life but indicates a willingness to disregard the truth. It doesn't invest Cass Seltzer with additional "humanity" but confirms his ability to equivocate. Cass may not be a believer, but he'd really, really like to be one, the irrationality of belief notwithstanding. The right kind of religious belief--not too intense, but with a lot of dancing-- would be so nice and agreeable.
Uncorrected: Alta Ifland
Although we are perhaps invited to regard as the novel's protagonist the first character introduced to us in Alta Ifland's The Wife Who Wasn't--Sammy, a Santa Barbara widower whose decision to import a mail-order bride from Moldova does indirectly set off the chain of events the novel chronicles--the character soon enough blends into a much larger cast of characters who in effect vie for our attention in a series of short chapters focusing on one or, in many cases, a group of them. Indeed, Sammy turns out to be one of the less significant characters in the novel, beyond his initial decision to obtain a foreign wife, although the wife herself certainly does assume a central part in the narrative burlesque that ensues when she attempts to adjust to her new surroundings among her upscale California-style bohemian neighbors--and they unsuccessfully try to accommodate to her unexpected presence.
Yet it would not be accurate, either, to say that the wife, Tania, instead takes on the role of protagonist, the novel's title notwithstanding. Not only does she essentially disappear in the novel's final section--her ultimate fate revealed rather anticlimactically--but she really acts more as a catalyst of the increasingly absurd events that transpire than a a lead character in her own right. The introduction of both Sammy and Tania, however, does work to establish the novel's twinned satirical focus: on the pretensions of the prosperous Santa Barbara set and on the still essentially peasant ways of the Moldovans (represented by additional members of Tania's family), during the time depicted in the novel (early 1990s) only recently released from their country's postwar occupation by the Soviet Union. The first section of the novel takes place in Santa Barbara after Tania's arrival, while the second moves to Moldova for a fuller portrait of Tania's family--her mother, brother, and daughter Irina (about whose existence Sammy is initially unaware). Eventually both Irina and the brother, Serioja, manage to obtain visas and travel to America as well, causing even more turmoil in Sammy's neighborhood than did Tania by herself (although she causes quite enough on her own).
The absence of a stable center of reader identification ultimately reflects the fluidity of Ifland's treatment of the two groups and their social and cultural assumptions. Because much of the first part of the novel consists of letters Tania writes home to her mother, we are probably inclined at first to think the force of the novel's satire is directed primarily at Sammy and his cohort, with Tania's more clear-eyed perspective revealing their affectations and artificially induced attitudes. ("I've been asking around about where and how to meet other women here, and everybody advised me to go to "yoga." If you want to meet women in California, they say you have to go to yoga.") But while these characters are certainly insufferable enough, Tania and her plebeian family come to seem mercenary and acquisitive in their own boorish way, when they are not, in the case of Serioja, entirely dissolute. If the Americans are made to seem a self-important, joyless lot when set against the earthier ways of the Moldovans, their sojourn in America suggests that the latter have essentially been stripped of their dignity by the existence they were forced to endure under the Soviet occupation.
Thus, while the escalating sense of calamity this clash of cultures produces makes the story consistently compelling, we are left with a cast of characters who are also consistently unlikable, providing the reader not even the sort of fixed perspective from which to appraise the narrative situation afforded by a more conventional approach. In this decentered narrative space, we are left to drift among its various characters, all of whom can seem equally obnoxious. In its way, however, such an effect is invigorating: We are not presented with the usual of sort of corrective satire with its implicit moral instruction critiquing bad behavior; instead, The Wife Who Wasn't highlights a covetous human nature in general, depending for the sustaining of the reader's engagement not an attachment (however tenuous) to a protagonist character through whom we might get our bearings, but the maintenance of the reader's curiosity about how this culture clash will ultimately sort itself out.
Here Ifland's narrative disappoints somewhat. At the novel's conclusion some time has passed, and the Santa Barbara neighborhood is consumed in a conflagration, leaving only Sammy's house standing. Meanwhile, we have lost track of Tania and her daughter, whose reckless behavior finally goes too far and they are in effect forced to flee. We discover, but only through photos now carried around by Serioja, that the two women are in Reno, Irina a stripper and Tania a hostess in a casino. (Serioja himself has returned to Moldova and moved back in with his mother, splitting his time between drinking and mopping the floors in their apartment building.) Although it is perhaps appropriate that most of these characters are treated to something less than a flourishing future, their fates seem rather arbitrarily determined, the story simply halted and the ramifications of the encounter between the unsophisticated and the "advanced," the poor and the prosperous, muted if not obscured.
One of the novel's characters, however, does seem at the narrative's end to be thriving. Maria is a Moldovan icon artist who is first introduced to us as Irina's teacher. (Irina has artistic talent and hopes to profit from it when she reaches America.) After Irina has left to join her mother, Maria takes up with Serioja, ultimately marrying him so she can accompany him when he too embarks for America. Maria, of course, has no intention of returning home with Serioja when he quickly enough wears out his welcome with Sammy and his neighbors, and so she remains in America, almost immediately finding success both in her personal relations with other men and in her art ("her paintings sold so well that, reluctantly, she had to make some changes to her wardrobe in order to appear somewhat presentable at the numerous receptions held in her honor.") Maria resolutely pursues her own interests, but those are dedicated above all to the practice of her art. To the extent this makes her selfish, heedless of others' feelings, it is a selfishness cultivated on behalf of artistic integrity, not personal gain or social standing. Maria prizes her independence, but this is ultimately to ensure the independence of her art.
Perhaps we are to identify with Maria. It seems likely that Alta Ifland does (although no doubt there is also some satirical commentary on the American commercial art world and its eagerness to embrace "exotic" art without really understanding it). Like Maria, Ifland is an eastern European immigrant (from Romania) attempting to take advantage of the wider exposure America seems to offer the artist. In Ifland's case this also involves writing in what is essentially a third language--after Romanian and French--a challenge she meets quite impressively. Her efforts presumably resist both the temptation to unbridled opportunism exhibited by the likes of Tania and Irina and the self-satisfied, etherealized hedonism in which the faux Bohemians of Santa Barbara indulge themselves. We might regard Maria as someone capable of redeeming the offer of freedom America is supposed to extend without succumbing to the "sacred commerce" (the official philosophy of a cafe at which Tania tries to find a job) such freedom has too commonly become.
In her previous volumes of short fiction, Elegy for a Fabulous World (2009) and Death-in-a-Box (2011), seems to be a writer of lyrical tales or fables (again set both in Europe and in America). The Wife Who Wasn't certainly seems like departure from the earlier mode, not just in its satirical approach but in its greater emphasis on creating realistic characters and stronger reliance on narrative. This does not exactly make it a conventional novel, however. If the characters are realistic, it is in the sense that the their attitudes and behavior, even though they mostly provoke an unfavorable impression of them as social beings, are believable, not that they are the product of an effort to create characters that are "well-rounded" as an end in itself. The narrative is greatly refracted through the episodic alternation of perspective, putting at least as much stress on the actions related in the individual episodes as on the larger narrative progression of which they are a part. Ifland is not telling a story but several stories that also form a narrative whole.
Most of all, Ifland manages to write a satirical novel that is able to elude the usual limitations of satire. It doesn't reduce the conduct it surveys to an exercise in moral theater, and it offers a depiction of its characters' inveterate egocentrism that does not seem exaggerated but is a constitutive part of their orientation toward the world. These characters aren't so much violating social norms as demonstrating in their own way that their lack of empathy and self-restraint is all too normal.
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