The Reading Experience

The Many Faces of Odysseus

Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey (Starcherone Books) would seemingly qualify as a "novel" only if we define the form in the barest possible terms: a lengthy composition in prose. Puporting to be a decoded translation of a series of "extra" episodes of The Odyssey (decoded because, according to the translator, who provides an introduction to the book that has now been made of them, they have existed as an encrypted manuscript the means of decrypting which has only recently been discovered), it bears no resemblance to the sort of unified narrative most readers expect to find in a novel. There is no plot other than the preexisting plot of the Odyssey, on which the "lost books" perform multiple variations. Similarly, while Odysseus is presumably the protagonist (if it isn't the "translator"), many different versions of Odysseus, assuming many different roles, are presented in the 46 episodes comprising The Lost Books. The stories are told from many different points of view, both first-person and third-person (one of the most affecting of the tales is told by the Cyclops, lamenting his blindness at the hands of Odysseus (and for whom he expresses great hatred)), and while one might read the tales simply as a collection of stories, this would rob them of the coherence they ultimately attain as a set of imaginative supplements to the Odyssey narrative--taken together, they form a kind of anti-Odyssey, an implicit commentary on the Homeric version of the story achieved by highlighting its elisions and sounding out its interstices.

Such a strategy does require some familiarity on the reader's part with the Odyssey itself, since the effects created by this sort of rewriting and rearranging to an extent do depend on our recognition that an episode from Homer's text has been recast--Odysseus returns to Ithaca to find his people "all astonishment and delight" and Penelope dead, Achilles abandons the Green encampment to do good works in the world, perhaps to spend "a year in contemplation in the shadow of a tree"--or a character or episode has been enhanced or freshly emphasized. While it is certainly possible that the reader only minimally acquainted with both The Iliad and The Odyssey would still find Mason's alternative versions diverting enough, the humor and the wit embodied in Mason's counter-narratives, as well as the cleverness of their construction, will surely strike the Odyssey-literate with more force and efficacy than those who know Homer's epic only in its barest outlines, if at all. By no means is The Lost Books of the Odyssey a book to be enjoyed only by classicists, but it helps to be a reader with an interest in literature, and The Odyssey's role in its history, that overshadows whatever interest most readers of novels profess to have in encountering "real life" in fiction.

Despite these potential obstacles to a broad audience for a book like The Lost Books of the Odyssey, it is, in my opinion, nevertheless a work of "experimental" fiction that many readers would find enjoyable if they were to give it a chance. Not only are many of the invented episodes entertaining in their own right, but gradually one comes to anticipate what new twist on the Odysseus story Mason will offer, in a way that is almost analogous to the pleasurable anticipation readers feel when looking forward to the next turn of plot in a conventional narrative. Equally rewarding is the opportunity to reflect further on the Homeric themes of war, honor, leadership, and sacrifice, which, if anything, are accentuated even more intensely (if at times ironically) through the liberties taken with the story of the Trojan War (e.g., the chapter narrated by Odysseus that begins, "I have often wondered whether all men are cowards like I am") and through the parallels that might be drawn between this re-told Odyssey and our own ongoing, ill-conceived war. The Borgesian frame provided by the translator's introduction and an appendix relating the history of the lost books contributes an additional tongue-in-cheek element that completes the novel's masquerade as a feat of "scholarship."

For me, the most successful works of experimental fiction always "entertain," even when they reject or subvert the usual devices conventionally considered the source of fiction's ability to entertain--the devices that create "compelling characters," dramatic narratives, "vivid" settings, etc. (Gilbert Sorrentino's novels provide a good example of this ability to entertain while dispensing with the standard accoutrements of entertainment.) In experimental fiction of the postmodern kind, this is frequently accomplished through comedy and satire. In the case of The Lost Books of the Odyssey it is achieved through what might simply be called ingenuity, along with a certain amount of chutzpah. This may or may not be an approach all readers can appreciate, but I found this novel a pleasure to read nevertheless, and I highly recommend it.

Incorporating the Old

It is sometimes mistakenly assumed that "experimental" writers (and the critics who champion them) have little regard for the kind of fiction that preceded them, that they simply deny the continued aesthetic value of what has come before. But I think most experimental or unconventional writers have a relationship to the past that is captured by these words from John Dewey in Art as Experience:

When the old has not been incorporated, the outcome is merely eccentricity. But great original artists take a tradition into themselves. They have not shunned it but digested it. Then the very conflict set up between it and what is new in themselves and in their environment creates the tension that demands a new mode of expression.

Writers like William Gass or John Barth or Robert Coover have always been at pains to make clear they consider their own work to be extensions of past practice, part of the very tradition their fiction otherwise seems to be challenging. Barth especially found inspiration for his "postmodern" work in such 18th century forms as the picaresque and epistolary novel, as well as in Greek and Arabic literature, while Gass's essays frequently pay tribute to writers of the past. By "digesting" literary history, these writers both nourish their own talents by heightening the "conflict set up between [tradition] and what is new in themselves," thereby discovering "a new mode of expression," and help to bring a usable literary past into the present. This is not so much Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence" as it is a necessary sounding of literary tradition in order to find one's own proper place within it.

Certainly there are "eccentric" writers whose work seems merely strange, even incomprehensible, because an enabling context--to what convention is this device responding, to meet what known goal has that strategy been used--is missing. Such works lack the "tension" Dewey speaks of, and the effort to read them is mostly frustrating rather than creatively challenging. But I would guess that most writers of innovative fiction set out to create fiction as good as that which they've admired as readers. To do so requires more than imitation. It requires finding the means adequate to "a new mode of expression" that perhaps will measure up to those already to be found in the great works of the past. Ultimately it requires an effort equal to that Dewey ascribes to the "great innovators in modern painting," who "were more assiduous students of the pictures of the past than were the imitators who set the contemporary fashion."

Dead Systems

In his essay "On Several Obsolete Notions," Alain Robbe-Grillet describes the novel in its "classic" phase:

All the technical elements of the narrative--systematic use of the past tense and the third person, unconditional adoption of chronological development, linear plots, regular trajectory of the passions, impulse of each episode toward a conclusion, etc.--everything tended to impose the image of a stable, coherent, continuous, unequivocal universe. Since the intelligibility of the world was not even questioned, to tell a story did not raise a problem. The style of the novel could be innocent.

He continues:

But then, with Flaubert, everything begins to vacillate. A hundred years later the whole system is no more than a memory, and it is to that memory, to that dead memory, that some seek with all their might to keep the novel fettered. . . .

It is tempting to say that Robbe-Grillet's account of the 19th century novel and the shadow it cast on subsequent novelists still seems relevant, fifty years later, and that many readers still think of the "innocent" narrative as the novel's natural form, from which any variation or experiment in form is merely a temporary departure. However, an honest consideration of Robbe-Grillet's bill of particulars would have to conclude that fiction over the course of the 20th century did in fact move beyond the model Robbe-Grillet associates with Balzac and other early novelists.

While much current fiction does continue to employ third-person narration--usually the "free indirect" variant through which a character's thoughts, recollections, and emotions provide a perceptual matrix but are not directly stated by the character--first-person narratives are probably more prevalent than ever before, as are experiments in shifting, alternate, and multiple points of view. Similarly, stories related in the present tense have become so common that what was once a notable divergence from the norm is probably no longer noticed by most readers. And while most novels still rely on "plot," their plots are by no means always "linear," such chronological development as they possess often enough supplied by the reader after piecing together the fragments of narrative presented without much immediate regard for chronological continuity. It could perhaps be argued that too many novels do still imply a "decipherable universe"--decipherable insofar as it can be adequately rendered through the protocols of realism--but most literary fiction is not so tied to a 19th century worldview as to portray human experience as "stable, coherent, continuous, unequivocal."

Indeed, to the extent that contemporary life seems to many of us discontinuous and indefinite, the modernist-derived strategies emphasizing subjectivity and fragmentation seem justified in the name of realism itself. And to this extent, Robbe-Grillet has been proven correct when in the same essay he predicts that this sort of modernist experimentation (with which he more or less associated his own fiction) will become "assimilated," viewed by critics still attuned only to the past as the most recent golden age of storytelling. Thus, esteemed critics such as James Wood point us back to Henry James or Virginia Woolf as writers who set a standard of inner-directed realism, a realism of the mind and its subjective perceptions rather than a realism of the material world presented as a collection of facts. Wood is certainly not alone in holding up the psychological novel as the apogee of the novel as a literary form. The notion that in fiction, and only in fiction, we can "get inside" a character, can "feel" what it's like to negotiate the world from a perspective other than our own, is very widespread. But, I would argue, this is because one part of the modernist project, the extension of realism into "psychological realism," has been successful, while that part setting a prececent for aesthetic innovation ("make it new") as a measure of artistic achievement has not been embraced as firmly by either writers or critics. The set of accepted conventions for the writing of fiction has been advanced from about 1825 to about 1925, but those voices that "seek with all their might to keep the novel fettered" to a "dead system" can still be heard, even if that "system" has incorporated some of the strategies for which Robbe-Grillet himself was an advocate.

Although "innocent" novels are still being written (particularly within some forms of genre fiction), very few serious writers have failed to notice fiction's loss of innocence. But the expansion of techniques available to the modern writer has developed into its own kind of "systematic" practice that can be just as stubborn an obstacle to the development of a "new novel" as the traditonal story form Robbe-Grillet wanted to clear away. It is probably inevitable that strategies and approaches once regarded as mold-breaking will eventually become conventional, established techniques for the novelist to adopt when they suit his/her need. But this only makes it more important that writers like Robbe-Grillet or Donald Barthelme or Gilbert Sorrentino emerge to point out that such techniques have become hidebound and to offer fresh alternatives.