It is hard to say whether Samuel Emmer, the protagonist of James Elkins's Weak in Comparison to Dreams, should be regarded as a "reliable" narrator of his story. On the one hand, there is no reason to believe he is telling us a false story about his experiences as a municipal employee in Guelph, Ontario, assigned to make a series of visits to various zoos to ensure the new Guelph Zoo avoids their problems with neurotic animals, or even that these experiences are being distorted (especially where the narrator's behavior is concerned). Yet we also can't finally be certain that we have perceived this character's true nature, because he may not possess a true nature--the enigma that persists even after we have come to the end of the narrative presented in this novel may just be an artifact of the protagonist's mutable personality.
The novel begins normally enough, the first chapter an apparently conventional first-person narrative, as Samuel recounts one of his zoo visits, although the setting does seem a bit unusual: the city zoo in Tallinn, Estonia. After a brief flashback to the circumstances surrounding his assignment to the Zoo Feasibility Committee and to his first such visit, to the Bronx Zoo, Samuel goes on to relate his encounters in Tallinn with the zookeeper and her assistants, as well as his observations of the conditions in which the animals are kept. As he continues to make these visits (Finland, Germany, Salt Lake City and Knoxville in the United States), his obsession with the animals and their inhumane imprisonment intensifies. This is not conveyed to us directly through internal deliberation but in the narrator's depicted behavior in the narratives of his visit. The narrator not only becomes more strident in his insistence to his hosts that their animals are expressing deep-seated distress, but in doing so he increasingly affects a knowledge and expertise he does not possess. It is not so much that he is trying to be more forceful in his disapproval of the treatment of zoo animals but that in each of his zoo experiences he is becoming a different person.
His metamorphoses in these scenes are aided and abetted by a series of "reports" provided to him by his Guelph laboratory assistants (although one of them is actually a former assistant), papers and case studies ostensibly meant to add to Samuel's knowledge of animal behavior but that are also intended, we discover, to provoke Samuel into noticing that his own behavior, as observed by the assistants, shows some of the same disturbances exhibited by captive zoo animals (repetition -compulsion). The graphical elements included in these reports--charts, tables, drawings--are paralleled by many photographs that appear throughout the text, especially photographs that accompany Samuel's reports of a series of dreams that alternate with his accounts of the zoo visits. At first, the dreams, invoking his childhood in Watkins Glen, New York, seem harmless enough, but eventually they begin to obsessively revolve around fires in woods and mountains. The dreams seem to reinforce Samuel's erratic conduct during his interactions with the zoo personnel to suggest a psychological breakdown, toward which the novel seems to be heading.
But after losing his job in Guelph due to his erratic behavior, Samuel essentially runs away, driving north ("toward the Arctic"), where apparently we leave him. He reappears to us as a much older man, living in northern Ontario but shortly to move to live with daughter. Here Samuel's narration is more lucid and controlled, but still obsessive, except that in this case his obsession is with the music he plays on the piano, most of it written by obscure modern composers whose methods of composition are likewise at times repetitive and compulsive, like both Samuel and the animals he observed many years previous. It it is unclear whether Samuel is himself aware of the correspondence between this music and his own personality traits, but it seems likely that he is, and his incessant playing of the music both continues to manifest the protagonist's obsessive-compulsive behavior and also allows him to express it in a way that brings a degree of satisfaction not evident in the earlier scenes. If compulsive behavior is in part a full immersion in the present, in the here and now (or a way of coping with that immersion), Samuel Emmer seems poised in the present, quietly situated between the turbulent events depicted in his previous narrative and the change that awaits (at the end of the novel, Samuel is preparing to move out of his home).
He has been living in the home for 40 years, but this novel passes over those 40 years in silence. Samuel occasionally alludes to these years, but we never get a fully articulated account of how he spent this large portion of his life (or, for that matter, why this elision is significant.) Such a discontinuity in Samuel's story has the effect of suggesting a discontinuity in the personality of Samuel Emmer, a suggestion that is not fully realized in the depiction of the character in Weak in Comparison to Dreams but becomes more visible as both character trait and formal device in the many documents relating to other volumes in the Samuel Emmer saga that Elkins has made available on his website. This novel is merely one in a series of five that, as we are also told on the website, Elkins has mostly completed but remain unpublished. Our current lack of access to the further context and elaboration these other books would provide ultimately presents the biggest obstacle to a full appreciation of Weak in Comparison to Dreams: the portrayal of Samuel Emmer and his life presumably requires all of the volumes in the series to be complete so that interpretation based solely on this novel is itself incomplete--not just a question of creative ambiguity but a constraining uncertainty. If it is finally a part of a larger whole, surely we do need to comprehend the whole in order to properly comprehend this portion.
Nevertheless, Weak in Comparison to Dreams still provides a rewarding reading experience. Although it is no longer such a novelty to encounter a work of fiction that incorporates photographs or other visual imagery, Elkins integrates them with his verbal text very dexterously, and ultimately text and visuals seem fully complementary, both of them necessary to the story the writer wants to tell, not an exercise in ornamentation. That story is certainly not a conventional one, but its mysteries and surprises are revealed in a skillfully calibrated way that keeps the narrative lively enough that the novel's length does not seem excessive and maintains the oddity in the protagonist's character that justifies its formal indirection. (In addition to the photos, drawings, and diagrams, the novel also includes numerous interpolated documents, as well as several extended fantasias in which Samuel imagines the interplay between his two assistants.) Overall, the novel exhibits laudable ingenuity and manifest intelligence. I hope to hear the other four novels have found their publishers.
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