The Reading Experience

Just Plain Doomed

Since David Foster Wallace's death in 2008, much if not most of the voluminous commentary about him has focused, understandably enough, on the circumstances of his life, especially those that might help explain how he came to commit suicide when by almost all measures of literary success he had accomplished a great deal, even to the point of being considered by many the most important writer of his time. Most of his readers no doubt expected even greater accomplishments from him in the future, and because his death at such a relatively young age meant his already extant work would now be his complete work (although of course the partially written The Pale King would appear posthumously), even discussions centered on that work rather than Wallace's life often have attempted to reinterpret the work by reading our expanded biographical knowledge of Wallace's struggles, both medical and existential, back into his fiction and essays. This tendency will probably only be encouraged by D.T. Max's recent biography of Wallace.

To an extent, some such reinterpretation of Wallace's work is inevitable, and if the current preoccupation with his troubled life ultimately results in more attention being paid to the work (as opposed to a Wallace legend in which he becomes the latest in the line of suffering artists, the sacrificial figure of his generation), then it will have performed a useful service. A good place to start in considering Wallace and his work from a fresh perspective might be the latter's relation to postmodernism, with which his fiction is usually associated, although perhaps as much in its resistance to certain fundamental features of postmodernism as an unambiguous affinity with its goals. Wallace himself expressed his unease with what he believed was its defining characteristic in his 1992 essay, "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction."

This essay is presented as a reflection on the influence of television, but in the long run it is more important as Wallace's analysis of the state of fiction at this time and, perhaps most significantly, as an implicit statement of Wallace's own preferred practice as a writer of fiction.  Here Wallace identifies "postmodern irony" as the characteristic approach of the most advanced American writers, and further identifies Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo specifically as the older writers whose work provides the touchstone in deploying such irony. He believes that irony in their fiction, "started out the same way youthful rebellion did. It was difficult and painful, and productive--a grim diagnosis of a long-denied disease. The assumptions behind this early postmodern irony, on the other hand, were still frankly idealistic: that etiology and diagnosis pointed toward cure; that revelation of imprisonment yielded freedom."

One could quarrel with Wallace's characterization of 1960s postmodernism here. Although it is true that what we now call American postmodernism emerged from the same cultural mileu that produced the era's "youthful rebellion," it doesn't seem faithful to the dynamic and largely comic spirit of 60s fiction to describe its effect as "grim," however much it might be responding to grim social and cultural conditions. I think it is also inaccurate to describe the comedy of this fiction as being of the sort that involves "diagnosis" and "cure." The comedy in Pynchon and DeLillo (as well as Coover, Elkin, or Barthelme) is not conventionally satirical in that it proposes no solutions to the social dysfunctions and existential dilemmas it portrays other than sustained laughter, although one could say it is this laughter that does promise the liberation into freedom, the "revelation of imprisonment." Still, by calling the postmodern irony of such writers "idealistic," Wallace clearly wants to exempt them from the criticisms he makes of writers following in their wake, who no longer have the idealism he finds in Pynchon and DeLillo. At worst Wallace wants to call into question the way their influence has been assimilated, not the literary value of their books.

And this influence was not communicated directly to younger writers, or at least so Wallace wants to argue. The bulk of this essay is actually taken up with an extended--some might say overextended--critique of television focusing on the way it has taken up the ironic stance traceable to these early postmodern writers and robbed it of its "idealistic" intentions. Describing the relationship to tv of a fictional everyman, "Joe Briefcase," Wallace observes:

For to the extent that TV can flatter Joe about "seeing through" the pretentiousness and hypocrisy of outdated values, it can induce in him precisely the feeling of canny superiority it's taught him to crave, and can keep him dependent ot the cynical TV-watching that alone affords this feeling. And to the extent that it can train viewers to laugh at characters' unending put-downs of one another, to view ridicule as both the mode of social intercourse and the ultimate art form, television can reinforce its own queer ontology of appearance: the most frightening prospect, for the well-conditioned viewer, becomes leaving oneself open to others' ridicule by betraying passe expressions of value, emotion, or vulnerability. Other people become judges; the crime is naivete. . . .

Again there is much here that is debatable, however much the general account of television "cool" might be. Wallace's definition of "television" seems very broad, seems indeed to encompass the medium as a whole, but in his discussion he seems primarily concerned with sitcoms and commercials. Perhaps it is the case that those responsible for creating this kind of television are also most likely to have read and felt the influence of avant-garde and experimental fiction, but if so Wallace does little to show that this sort of direct influence was likely. Instead, he suggests that tv and postmodern fiction "share roots," but his assertions about these "roots" only create confusion about what he counts as "postmodern" after all:

In fact, by offering young, overeducated fiction writers a comprehensive view of how hypocritically the U.S.A. saw itself circa 1960, early television helped legitimize absurdism and irony as not just literary devices but sensible responses to an unrealistic world. For irony. . .is the time-honored way artists seek to illuminate and explode hypocrisy. And the television of lone-gunman Westerns, paternalistic sitcoms and jut-jawed law enforcement circa 1960 celebrated a deeply hypocritical American self-image.

Further:

It's not one bit accidental that postmodern fiction aimed its ironic cross hairs at the banal, the naive, the sentimental and simplistic and conservative, for these qualities were just what sixties TV seemed to celebrate as "American."

From this one would conclude that for Wallace, "postmodern" writers are those writing what he calls "Image-Fiction," writers such as William Vollmann, Jay Cantor, Stephen Dixon, A.M. Homes, and Michael Martone, most of whom could only be called second-or third-wave postmodernists if Pynchon, DeLillo, and Coover are the original postmodern writers (Dixon is of the same generation as Pynchon and DeLillo, although he came to fiction writing at a later age.) It is not really plausible to think that such first-wave postmodernists would have been inspired in their practice by television rather than the modernist writers of the previous generation (although ultimately some of them--Coover, for example--do take the pervasive presence of television as a subject, while Pynchon and DeLillo are certainly sensitive to the influence of television and mass media on American culture), and Wallace seems to be suggesting that tv was as important an influence in the development of "postmodernism" as any literary influences. Furthermore, he also seems to be suggesting that television writers may themselves been influenced in their own version of postmodern irony primarily by television and not by postmodern fiction, after all.

It seems to me overwhelmingly likely that the irony expressed and the attitude of "canny superiority" encouraged by certain kinds of television shows are mostly a function of the history of television rather than of postwar American fiction. Television becomes just another of the features of American culture that causes both kinds of writers to hold that culture at a distance, even if in doing so the tv writers are contributing to the trivialization of that culture, which Wallace correctly enough points out. The ubiquity of the television version of reality as well could perhaps be the main source of tv's influence on fiction writers, as they struggle to register that ubiquity and its distorting effects on actual reality. Wallace is describing what he calls a "cultural atmosphere" in which irony is a privileged aesthetic response to experience, but the irony of television is superficial and self-satisfied, while the irony of postmodern fiction just isn't.

It's pretty clear that when Wallace refers to the "U.S. fictionist" who shares this atmosphere but also "sees himself heir to whatever was neat and valuable in postmodern lit" he is writing primarily about himself. It was, in fact, clear enough when this essay was published, but now it seems even more apparent that "E Unibas Plurum" is ultimately a kind of manifesto for Wallace's own artistic practice, at least insofar as that practice is based on prolonged reflection on his own relationship both to the "cultural atmosphere" television has helped create and to postmodern lit. He is drawn to postmodern irony, but finds that the cheap irony of television (of contemporary culture generally) has to some extent usurped it. At the same time, he wants his writing to convey a kind of sincerity, which he does find in early postmodern fiction, but which is becoming increasingly impossible, as he tries to point out in his critique of Mark Leyner's My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist at the conclusion of his essay.

"Leyner's work," Wallace writes, "is both amazing and forgettable, wonderful and oddly hollow" and "in its masterful reabsorption of the very features TV had absorbed from postmodern lit, it seems as of now the ultimate union of U.S. television and fiction." But also it is "just plain doomed by its desire to ridicule a TV-culture whose ironic mockery of itself and all 'outdated' value absorbs all ridicule." Wallace attempted to avoid this "doom" in his own work by steering clear of "ironic mockery"--although there is plenty in his novels and stories that could at least be taken as satirical--even while he could not avoid other postmodern devices and strategies. One could say that rather than moving away from postmodernism, Wallace in attempting to recover its original sincerity was trying to reinforce its initial possibilities.

Still, "E Unibus Pluram" works better as illumination of what David Foster Wallace was hoping to accomplish as a writer than it does as an examination of postmodern fiction. It doesn't really make the case that "TV had absorbed from postmodern lit" any of its own unproductive irony. To conclude that the popularity of irony on television must be related to the prevalence of irony in postwar fiction is to underestimate the ability of tv writers (and audiences) to understand the appeal of in-jokes and generalized mockery all on their own and, sadly, to overestimate the reach of American writers in the 1960s and 70s, however much in retrospect they seem to have presaged a significant cultural shift. Moreover, Wallace conflates the postmodernism of "postmodern irony" with the specific postmodern practice of metafiction, which he discusses briefly on the way to a much longer discussion of self-reflexivity in television. "Postmodern" irony becomes "self-conscious" irony, which is "the nexus where television and fiction converge and consort."

But metafiction and postmodernism are not synonymous, although their appearance on the literary scene was more or less coterminous. Metafiction was not "deeply informed by the emergence of television" but has its roots in the fiction of Beckett and Borges, or, if we want to trace it to its earliest manifestation in fiction, Cervantes and Laurence Sterne. It was not "self-conscious" in the superficial and trivial way in which television celebrates its omnipresence, but called attention to its own artifice as part of an effort of self-renewal, shedding encrusted assumptions and expectations to make further invention possible, not settling for facile mockery.

Ultimately I have to think that Wallace himself knew that as literary criticism/history this essay wouldn't stand up to serious scrutiny. Or perhaps he was so wary, as someone otherwise receptive to what was "neat and valuable" about "idealistic" postmodernism but also bathed in the noxious "cultural atmosphere" exuded by television, of succumbing to the debilitating irony of television he was not able to make these distinctions. Nevertheless, however much "E Unibus Pluram" might provide us insights into Wallace's intentions as a fiction writer, it doesn't really provide many insights into the actual nature and history of postmodernism.

Allegorical Codes

Stacey Levine's The Girl With Brown Fur (Starcherone Books) is yet another example of the way in which a certain strain of current "experimental" fiction has become tied to surrealism as the apparent alternative to conventional practice--presumably understood as itself committed to "realism," to which the new surrealism is the appropriate challenge. The most notable (and popular) harbinger of this mode of literary antithesis is perhaps the fiction of Aimee Bender, but it is now arguably the dominant approach among younger writers and in the fiction published by "indie" journals and presses.

Which, of course, means it's now no longer even vaguely "experimental," even if it ever was. (It wasn't.) It seems to be the default strategy of a rising generation of writers who otherwise regard themselves as unconventional. It is becoming, in other words, the new, unexamined convention. Levine is older (her first book was published in 1993), so perhaps her work could be regarded as a precursor of sorts, less subject to the charge of trendiness, even as it does continue to participate in practices that are fast becoming dull and commonplace.

"Dull" is precisely the word I would use to describe The Girl With Brown Fur. Not only are the individual stories tedious to read, but the relentless sameness of the stories (with some alternation of shorter with longer ones) makes reading the collection as a whole an oppressive experience. If the stories were more boisterously absurdist, or even just more straightforwardly whimsical, the book might be at least passably entertaining, but instead they proceed through their mostly amorphous narratives in the same affectless tone, reciting their mostly desultory actions and events in the same robotic way. Although writers such as Kafka and Borges, to whose work Levine's is sometimes compared, relate strange, ultimately inexplicable occurrences in a deadpan manner, as if such occurrences were perfectly normal, Levine's stories convey no particular impression at all. Her characters--and these stories are character-centric--have no presence, as if just giving them a name and assigning them weird things to do and say is enough to make them interesting.

The very first story in the book, "Uppsala," exemplifies all of these problems. Although it is one of the briefer stories, its welcome begins to wear with the initial scene-setting:

We come from a bad family and we are disgraced.

"What time do we get there?" asks Brother.

"Stop cluttering your mind with those kinds of thoughts," answers Mother. It is Brother's nineteenth birthday, and we are driving off to the cabin.

We think she is terrible.

The true source of our family remains unknown, though it effectively has prevented speech and compassion for the speechless.

The remainder of the story advances very little beyond what we learn in this passage, to the extent what we are told is comprehensible in the first place. The family arrives at the cabin, where we learn that indeed her children fear her. It is a "bad family" that dares not speak around her due to her "terrible" unhappiness. Unfortunately, these basic facts are then repeated again and again, in different words: "Our nights are static and lonely as ice gathers around the perimeter of this family kitchen"; "Our family is sad and does not live in a verdant place"; "But we are bound in a community of tension and stupendous threat the name of which only Mother knows." The burden of the story's additional narrative movement is carried by similar narrational declarations: "Because of our wounds, we each have grown permeable and have for example consoled one another at twilight"; "That winter we leaned the snow incited our games and the desire to freeze away our mother's sickness and we grew angry."

The "poetic" flourishes--"Amidst the piercing whiteness. . .our wishes that combine to produce friction of desperate severity"-- that decorate this and other stories can't rescue them from monotony and affectation. Although in the longer stories more of the narrative action is conventionally dramatized, they still, as Kristy Eldredge approvingly puts it, proceed "allusively, in an allegorical code," one that in my opinion condenses sense too densely in the name of superficial oddity and "quirk." And while in a story such as "Uppsala" the characters aren't meant to be developed extensively enough that the allegorical names they are given--Brother, Father, Mother--don't yet descend fully into mannerism, the other characters in the book play similarly one-dimensional roles. The effect of most of the stories is the same as in "Uppsala": the surface oddity substitutes for both character development and plot, and neither the language nor the imagery nor the mostly muted humor can rescue them from tedium.

Eldredge further maintains that Levine's approach "always feels down-to-earth and revealing of very real pockets in the human psyche." Some such claim, that the characters are recognizable even as they fail to be distinctive, that Levine is probing the primordial psyche, seems to accompany many of the generally admiring reviews and discussions of Levine's work, but even if I thought these claims had merit, I would not consider them significant accomplishments. The last thing we need is a continuation of the privileging of "psychological realism" through other, more superficially disguised means, reinforcing the notion that the appropriate goal of fiction is to probe and reveal the "human psyche," as if fiction were just an adjunct of psychotherapy. Going after the "deep pockets" (what is "revealed" usually amounts to platitudes and commonplaces, as in the generic "unhappiness" of Uppsala") through reversing the methods of realism is no more enlightening than it is in realism proper, and equally specious.

There is nothing formally challenging about The Girl With Brown Fur. The conventions of exposition, scenic construction, and dialogue go undisturbed. Character and plot are not abandoned, merely flattened out into lifelessness. The stories' uniform style does nothing to redress this lifelessness, aside from the usual sort of figurative language. The only conceivably unorthodox strategy in these stories is the reversal of realism, and at some point this becomes merely a repetitive gesture and ultimately only reinforces the protocols of realism by constantly reminding us of their deliberate absence. If Stacey Levine cannot be accused of helping to reduce surrealism to cliche by jumping on its current bandwagon, her fiction does nothing to avoid that fate.

 

The Searchers

Justin Taylor's The Gospel of Anarchy has received mixed reviews at best, and the most common complaint against has been that it is flawed in what is usually called "character development." Steve Almond asserts that its characters "seem more like mouthpieces than genuine people. We learn little about them beyond their half-baked dogma, and the point of view shifts frequently." Brain Evenson criticizes Taylor for merely "creating character images that contrast from scene to scene, allowing these unexplained changes to do the work of character development." Carolyn Kellogg regards its mode of narration as "a distancing agent, seeding a ubiquitous narrative skepticism."

While I would agree that The Gospel of Anarchy is a disappointing first novel, I don't think its main problem lies in a failure to create vivid characters. Indeed, since the novel is largely about the way its characters are willing to subsume their identities to the tenets of a burgeoning sect (some might say cult), or at least to find their identities in the formation of a collective, it seems very strange to fault it because it lacks distinct characters beyond the "half-baked dogma" they embrace. Similarly, since these characters are precisely trying to "distance" themselves from society at large, it's a curious response to them that finds "a distancing agent" inappropriate.

Furthermore, the injunction to develop "round" characters seems quite a reactionary expectation of a young writer, who may or may not find this a desirable goal, as is Almond's further pronouncements that novels "depend on rising action" in which "conflicts. . .have to be dramatized" and finding The Gospel of Anarchy wanting in fulfilling these hoary requirements. There's nothing in The Gospel of Anarchy that suggests Justin Taylor wants it to be judged as an "experimental" novel, but it nevertheless seems pretty dogmatic in its own right to demand it provide "sympathetic" characters, a fixed point of view, and adherence to Freytag's triangle to be judged acceptable.

If The Gospel of Anarchy is not particularly audacious in form or style, Taylor is clearly a skilled enough writer, and the "shifts" in point of view help maintain interest in the story, however much the story is unfortunately all too predictable, the outcome of its depiction of a failed punk commune implicit in its origins in youthful naivete, rigidity of belief, and in the narratives of failed utopias that precede it (I often thought in particular of Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance while reading The Gospel of Anarchy.) Taylor's first book, the story collection Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever, was widely praised for its portrayal of disenchanted youth, but part of the trouble with The Gospel of Anarchy is that it ultimately leaves the impression it began as one of those highly compacted stories and has been stretched beyond its capacity to bear the burden of both invoking its characters' spiritual ennui and depicting their attempts to re-enchant the world they've inherited.

The biggest problem with The Gospel of Anarchy, however, is that it is stretched to bear that burden in such a relentlessly earnest way its author seems not to be aware he is telling on overly familiar tale whose outcome is foreordained.  In his review of the novel, Joe Coscarelli complains there is too much "ambiguity as to whether [Taylor] means to mock his characters or endorse their anti-capitalist paradise," but actually whatever ambiguity there might be on this point is really all there is to maintain any interest in the story. Ultimately it doesn't really matter: the narrative seems designed to establish that the beliefs motivating the characters in their attempt to create an "anti-capitalist paradise" are precisely the sort of beliefs such characters in such a place and at such a time would hold--or did hold. Whether we are to find them compelling or ridiculous isn't finally what's at stake, although most readers will probably find themselves considering that question.

The novel begins well, with a portrait of its ostensible protagonist (the focus soon shifts away from him and settles on "Fishgut," a haven for the disaffected and the dropouts of the college town of Gainesville, Florida) in a state of extreme apathetic discontent, listlessly sorting through online porn while trying to decide whether to finish his education at the University of Florida. This character, David, meets up with an old friend who has fallen even farther into discontent, and who at the moment is engaged in a systematic act of dumpster-diving on behalf of his fellow residents of Fishgut. These episodes are fairly bracing, offering a vivid depiction of generational alienation, but they are not so freshly conceived or rendered to really seem shocking.

As if recognizing that such sketches of dissatisfaction and implicit despair can go only so far, Taylor devotes the rest of the novel to sketches of his characters attempting to ameliorate their despair. This is not an unreasonable or illegitimate thing to do, but the vehicle for this attempt, a hybrid ideology combining elements of anarchism, existentialism, and Christianity the group's de facto leader, Kate, calls "Anarchristianity," is not nearly as interesting as she--and perhaps Taylor--thinks it is. Apart from some scenes depicting David's sexual escapades with Kate and Kate's girlfriend, Liz, escapades that are themselves meant to represent a living-out of important tenets of the creed, most of the novel is taken up with an exposition of "anarchristianity" as inspired, at least retroactively, by a Fishgut resident named Parker, long since departed. While this part of the novel has some interest as an account of how religious sects (ultimately religion itself) get started, on the whole The Gospel of Anarchy doesn't give enough emphasis to this subject, either formally or thematically, to rescue it from the tedium that sets in when Parker and his "wisdom" become the novel's center of attention.

By the time we get to several pages of excerpts from the "holy book" concocted by Kate and David from some unorganized journals left behind by Parker, we've already been so immersed in the awkward hybrid of politics and religion that is anarchristianity it is very difficult to read these pages with the degree of interest Taylor clearly enough intends them to have.  If the writings themselves were more lively, their ideas more provocative, we might still concede their importance to the novel, but instead we are given passages such as this:

Faith is the power by which we leap over the unbridgeable chasm, burst through the wall of the asymptote, realize Heaven on Earth. Grace is us granted that power, the fuel injected into faith's engine, the energy generated from its burning up. 

Even if we could determine what such a claim is really supposed to mean, it's likely it would turn out to be just as banal as it seems. In my opinion, these pages act to finally bring down the novel as an aesthetic achievement. However much notions like this might appeal to susceptible twentysomethings, they're neither so vitally expressed we want to carefully consider them, nor so obviously ludicrous we know that satire is intended. They're just boring, and the eyes glaze while reading this collection of jottings.

It seems to me that Justin Taylor is too concerned in The Gospel of Anarchy with "capturing" his generation, with "saying something" about that generation's search for solutions to what they perceive as the problems of modern existence. This search is certainly a universal enough phenomenon, but unfortunately the novel essentially offers the same account of it as previous generations of literary seekers. Is fitting this particular kind of quest narrative to the changing if superficial particulars of each succeeding generation's social circumstances a worthwhile goal for the novelist? I tend to think not.

Arthur, Arthur

Partisans of "experimental" fiction (I am one) frequently make unequivocal distinctions between a properly experimental and a "conventional" work: The experimental work is formally or stylistically unlike anything that has come before--satisfying Ezra Pound's injunction to "make it new"--while the conventional work merely recapitulates, perhaps with modest variation, an already existing form or style.

If the goal is to identify the truly original, this distinction makes sense, however much it seems to some readers an overly rigid standard or just unnecessary--if a work of literature provides some kind of aesthetic satisfaction (if it's merely "a good read"), what difference does it make if it can be called original or not? In my opinion formal and stylistic innovation is important in maintaining the aesthetic potential of fiction. Without it, fiction becomes just a routinized "entertainment" medium that at best appeals to readers willing to settle for routine entertainment but that at worst itself implicitly denies that fiction has any potential to be "art" except through the skill required to master the moves involved in joining together the familiar elements--plot, character, setting--associated with it as an inherited form. I would not deny that this can be done more or less skillfully (and that the result can be more or less entertaining), but surely it is artistic originality that at the very least introduces a fresh perspective on what might be possible in a particular aesthetic form, and surely this is as true of fiction as of any other of the arts.

Perhaps, however, those of us who would defend experimental fiction against its frequent enough detractors (who usually either do prefer the familiar over the fresh or conveniently judge all literary experiments to be failed experiments) do, wittingly or unwittingly, too quickly discount the value of a work's capacity to "entertain," at least if "entertaining" is defined as that quality of the work that sustains attention, makes the reader feel the reading experience is worth the time spent. I have always thought the greatest experimental fiction precisely manages to both find original means of expression and make that expression entertaining, even traditionally "enjoyable." The fiction of Gilbert Sorrentino, for example, has always seemed to me wildly entertaining, even if it is dedicated first of all to discarding all the conventional ways of providing entertainment through narrative fiction. The same is true of the fiction (and the plays) of Samuel Beckett, if the reader can reconcile the at times farcical premises and occurrences with the bleak view of human existence Beckett presents.

There is also perhaps a middle ground between "experimental" and "conventional" in fiction where writers are able to follow up on (in a sense further experiment with) strategies and techniques first introduced by previous innovative writers, in some cases precisely employing those techniques in a more obvious attempt to turn them to the purposes of familiar literary pleasures. Although some practices that were at one time more daring--fragmented narrative or the move toward "psychological realism" among modernist writers such as Joyce and Woolf, for example--have inevitably become so assimilated as to no longer seem exceptional, others can still be used to credible effect by skillful writers seeking to avoid the most conventionalized assumptions about writing novels or stories. While the results couldn't be called experimental other than in this second-order sense, such works are certainly more adventurous than the great majority of what gets called literary fiction, and might even help convince some readers that more adventurous approaches to both the writing and reading of fiction could have their merits.

One such work is Arthur Phillips's The Tragedy of Arthur. Describable as parody or pastiche, or a combination of the two, the novel actually avoids taking on a structure readers immediately recognize as that of a novel, instead assuming the form of an "introduction" to a putatively newly-discovered play by Shakespeare, along with the text of the play. The introduction hardly exhibits the characteristics of an ordinary scholarly introduction, itself proceeding more as the memoir of "Arthur Phillips," in whose possession the play resides, and as such often satirizes the now-ubiquitous memoir form. The structure is highly reminiscent of Nabokov's Pale Fire, which Phillips has himself acknowledged, although most of the "story" occurs in the memoir itself rather than in the footnotes to the play (which do, however, add another layer of commentary on both the text and its origins.) Whereas Pale Fire works by forcing the reader to read carefully both the poem Nabokov has written and attributed to "John Shade" and the scholarly apparatus that purports to explicate it in order to extract the "real" story its narrator/editor wants to tell (which turns out to be quite an entertaining if outlandish one), The Tragedy of Arthur puts fewer burdens on the reader (at least explicitly); the fictional memoir, humorously tangential as a critical preface to Shakespeare, offers a narrative complete in itself, while the fabricated play could ostensibly also be read separately.

However lightly Phillips executes the formal manipulation, The Tragedy of Arthur is not an ordinary reading experience. It holds in balance several sources of aesthetic tension the reader must still reckon with, tensions left deliberately unresolved. Besides the obvious unresolved question (unresolved within the fictional framework) of whether "The Tragedy of Arthur" is real or fraudulent Shakespeare, we are left to contemplate how much of the story of "Arthur Phillips" is autobiographical and how much invented, which Arthur's life story--pere, fils, or protagonist of the play--is characterized as "tragedy," and whether we are to consider "The Tragedy of Arthur" as "good" Shakespeare, even if it is forged.

It may finally be the aesthetic triumph of this novel that all of these questions remain unanswered, or that they must be answered by individual readers. Although it seems most likely that the con man Arthur Sr. did indeed forge the play, the possibility it is genuine (again, within the fictional framework of the novel) is not foreclosed, as it is not beyond possibility that a "lost" Shakespeare play could one day be found. (At least two plays attributed to Shakespeare are known to be lost.) Moreover, even if it is forged, what does it say about Phillips Sr., something close to a common criminal as portrayed in the novel, that he could nevertheless channel Shakespeare's spirit well enough to produce a plausible simulation? (What does it say about Shakespeare?) (What does it say about Shakespeare that the novelist Arthur Phillips could produce such a simulation? About Arthur Phillips?) That it probably is forged additionally allows us to appreciate Phillips's satire of the "expertise" we assume Shakespeareans possess: their "authentication" of the play is clearly enough part wishful thinking, part craven service to a publisher interested in the project only for the money that might be made.

Phillips invites us to consider his "memoir" authentic as well (much of the information provided seems verifiably true), but ultimately it has to be taken as at least as much a fabrication as "The Tragedy of Arthur," however much Phillips uses real names and seemingly draws on the particulars of his own life and upbringing. Like the play, the introductory memoir has a surface plausibility as "the real thing," but we would be ill-advised to accept it as more than that. It works to reinforce formally what Sam Sacks in his excellent review of the novel called its theme of "the ambiguity of fraud" and in the process reminds us that all memoir is subject to this ambiguity, when it isn't manifestly fraudulent. Fiction, of course, is by definition a "fraud," but it explicitly announces itself as such, and one could say that The Tragedy of Arthur is as much as anything else a playful challenge to our tendencies to read fiction as disguised memoir and to the recent turn to memoir as a more reliable narrative source of literal truth. Readers of fiction will have to be content with the "ambiguity" that accompanies the fraud of fiction.

Such ambiguity (and playfulness) is carried through in the juxtaposition of Arthurs: Arthur the narrator, Arthur his father, Arthur the protagonist of the putative Shakespeare play, and Arthur Phillips, the author of The Tragedy of Arthur. Arthur the younger suffers the tragedy of a broken relationship with his father, Arthur the elder a similar tragedy in his loss of family, but also in the foreshortening of his own life's possibilities through his own mistakes, while King Arthur undergoes the tragedy that often befalls the royal heroes of Shakespeare's tragedies. The "tragedy" of the title perhaps then belongs equally to each, although one might ask whether Arthur Sr.'s forgery might actually represent a final triumph, a successful effort to breathe the same air as his hero Shakespeare, an effort strong enough it has fooled some into regarding it as genuine. The Tragedy of Arthur must represent a triumph for Arthur Phillips as well, a triumph of literary creation that, if it doesn't equal that of Shakespeare, or of Nabokov, is impressive enough and in its ingenuity subtly mocks any sense of "tragedy" involved in the novel's ostensible subject.

Thus finally the question of whether "The Tragedy of Arthur" as forged by either "Arthur Phillips" or Arthur Phillips is credible as Shakespeare is mostly beside the point. Certainly it is credible enough to pass as a claimant to authorship by Shakespeare, and that it be good enough to provoke the controversy depicted is as good as it needs to be. Phillips has undeniably immersed himself in Elizabethan language and culture as rendered by Shakespeare, and part of the fun in reading the play is coming upon those kinds of constructions one always finds puzzling in Shakespeare skillfully approximated. ("When they would have your guts to stuff their pudding-bags.") In my view, what Phillips has done most adeptly with the play is to fully integrate it within the concerns and the structure of the novel as a whole, and critics who have emphasized the mere fact of its presence or who suggest it is in itself the focal point of the novel have conveyed a distorted impression of its actual achievement.

Because The Tragedy of Arthur so emphatically foregrounds form, readers are not as likely to appreciate through it what in Phillips's previous novels seemed to me his strongest talent as a novelist, his facility as a prose stylist. This is on display most conspicuously in Prague, his first novel, and The Song Is You, the novel immediately preceding The Tragedy of Arthur. Although both of these novels feature (for American fiction) somewhat unconventional situations--a group of American expatriates in central Europe, an aging director of television commercials becoming obsessed with a young pop singer--neither of them could be said to be plot-driven. Both appeal through fluency of style. This is especially true of The Song is You (although ultimately Prague is probably the better novel because it seems less hermetically caught in the consciousness of a single protagonist), which intrepidly if eloquently articulates the increasingly rejuvenated mental life of its protagonist as he both surveys his life and pursues his new interest in a beguiling singer and in music in general.

The Irish girl performed that night. The crowd was larger, challenging the bar's legal capacity, and Julian thought she had changed in the last weeks, maybe even developed. She was slightly more coherent as a performer, as a projector of an idea and an image. The previous gig, something had distracted and dislocated her, as when color newsprint is misaligned and an unholy yellow aura floats a fractioned inch above the bright red body of a funny-pages dog. It had been perhaps the bass player's mistakes, or, if the hipster snob was to be credited, the seductively whispering approach of success. No matter: she was clearer tonight, even if he could still see her strive, from one song to the next, for an array of effects: the casually ironic urban girl, the junkie on the make, the desperate Irish lass whose love was lost to the Troubles, the degenerate schoolgirl, the lover by the fire with skin as velvet succulent as rose-petal flesh. . . .

With The Tragedy of Arthur, Arthur Phillips shows that as a novelist he has formidable control of both form and language. This was to an extent evident as well in The Egyptologist and in the Jamesian manipulations of point of view in Angelica, but Arthur confirms he is not an ordinary novelist rehearsing the same workshop-imposed conventions. I do not necessarily expect a new Arthur Phillips novel to revitalize the avant-garde, but I have come to expect it will exist outside the mold to which too many novels reflexively conform, formally and stylistically. His novels may lag behind Nabokov or Beckett or Sorrentino in adventurousness, but they do perhaps make some readers aware that more adventurous approaches are possible, and can even bring pleasure.

Empathy Will Be Received

To an extent, it's a little surprising that Elisabeth Sheffield's Fort Da (FC2) has not received more attention. It is, after all, in part a fairly sensational story about what we now call a "sexual predator," in this case a reversal of Lolita in which the "offender" is a female scientist who becomes obsessed with an adolescent boy. Although to be sure the story is told (by the woman) in an unorthodox way, the narrative is explicit enough, and the representation of motive and psychology seems true enough, it would seem the novel might have caused a little bit of controversy, although the very fact the narrative is related through unorthodox means that to some extent distance us from the events portrayed and mute the potentially scandalous elements suggests that Sheffield certainly did not seek to court controversy.

What Sheffield seems to be after is a truthful account of the narrator's affliction (if that's what it is) and of her manner of coping with it. The narrator straightforwardly acknowledges her desire for Aslan, the adolescent boy, and painstakingly chronicles the events of their meeting, their eventually consummated relationship, and her final efforts to track him down when she is separated from him. But she is not quite able to tell us this story from a conventional first-person point of view, as if she can't finally bring herself to associate these events and her part in them with the "normal" self she still wants to preserve, as if she just can't acknowledge her own agency. Thus she adopts a cumbersomely "scientific" style emphasizing passive voice constructions. Addressing her "report" to her high school English teacher, Mrs, Wall, the narrator affirms 

A true story that will faithfully present yours truly, without distortion or bias. To this end, a detached style has been adopted, one that will hopefully facilitate accurate reportage. The intent of this style is to step outside Rosemarie Ramee in order to more accurately observe her (and not, Strunk and White forbid, to annoy you with passive verb forms, which it is well remembered were a source of contention in high school). Yes, and maybe if the observations are presented with great care, with the greatest possible degree of honesty and precision, in the end empathy will be received.

Readers will have to decide for themselves whether to send RR (as she frequently hereafter identifies herself) "empathy," but her tortured attempts to remain objective, attempts she maintains throughout the narrative with gradually diminishing success, are really both the aesthetic and the emotional focus of the novel.

Aesthetically the style seems an apt analogue of the narrator's state of mind--she can tell the story, but only if she is in a sense able to withdraw her own participation and attempt to view the events with a kind of clinical detachment. Paradoxically, this forced detachment only makes the reader more aware of RR's obsession in the effort to cloak it, and her emotional turmoil becomes only more visible. This does have a discomfiting effect on the reader: there is a fascination to witnessing the machinations to which RR is driven in order to tell the tale, while we also recognize her strategy is in effect an attempt to minimize her offense. At the same time, it is not at all clear that Aslan resists RRs advances, or that he has been harmed by them, although of course the long-term harm cannot be predicted and we cannot finally trust that RR's account is anything but self-serving. She indicates that she is addressing her "confession" to Mrs. Wall because of the latter's reputation for leading an unconventional lifestyle, suggesting she does hope her audience might extend her some sympathy.

If Fort Da could be said to be "experimental" (FC2 is one of the most prominent publishers of experimental fiction), it would have to be in this tonal discontinuity--how far can the reader extend his/her sympathy to such a character presenting herself in such a narrative voice relating a story about what today approaches being as taboo a subject as we have? While the "report" form is interesting enough, it is finally just another variation on the epistolary or diary forms first explored in novels like Pamela or Robinson Crusoe as the immediate context and justification for first-person narrative. The narrative itself is essentially linear, and though the narrator's language occasionally makes it necessary for the reader to check his/her bearings, it unfolds interrupted only by the by now rather familiar use of footnotes (although given the text's formal status as scientific "report," the footnotes don't seem out of place).

If RR, like Humbert Humbert, believes her desire for Aslan, like Humbert's for his "nymphet," is a genuine expression of love, she seems less comfortable than HH with this form of love. Although both Fort Da and Lolita could both be said to be comic novels, the comedy of Lolita is darker,arising from the audacity of HH's behavior. The humor of Fort Da arises from RR's own confusions and limited self-knowledge. This makes Fort Da a consistently compelling read--to call it entertaining would seem impertinent--but whether it has something to "say" about, for example, the nature of female desire vs male desire, or about the origins of sexual behavior in psychological trauma (RR herself appears to believe she may be reacting to the early death of her brother) is perhaps for the reader to determine, depending on whether one considers it important that a novel treading on sensitive ground should redeem itself by making a "serious" point about the subject. In my opinion, the greatness of Lolita consists, in part, in its refusal to countenance communicating such a point. By raising "issues" related to pedophilia, Fort Da suggests it wants to address those issues and thus doesn't really show quite the aesthetic courage we find in Nabokov's novel.

 

Very Different from Themselves

In the previous post I suggested that too often reviews written by novelists or poets are taken as "an opportunity to disparage an approach to fiction or poetry that isn't the reviewer's." A good example of this would be a recent New York Times review by Michael Cunningham of Rikki Ducornet's Netsuke. After faintly praising Ducornet's novel, Cunningham instructs us that

By delving into a character’s motives, a writer fulfills one of fiction’s most powerful potentials — the ability to draw the reader into a character, including the most repellent of them. Fiction can show readers what it’s like to be someone very different from themselves, even if that drawing-in is discomfiting.

Ducornet, unfortunately, "has erred too much on the side of discretion":

The pure malice of Ducornet’s  [protagonist] is not alleviated by her reluctance to show us much by way of the injuries he’s inflicting on his patients. Ducornet treats the analyst’s patients as offhandedly as does the analyst himself. The book’s atmosphere of arid heartlessness begins to produce a parched feeling in the reader.

Cunningham's review betrays a lack of sympathy with the aesthetic goals of Ducornet's novel, goals that clearly clash with his own--"to draw the reader into a character"--and this unwillingness to accept a kind of fiction different from that which he writes is reinforced in the review by an unwillingness to understand what Ducornet's goals may be. He engages in no reflection on what Ducornet might be up to rather than psychological realism, and he considers Netsuke in total isolation from the rest of Ducornet''s by now rather ample body of work. If Cunningham has read any of Ducornet's previous fiction, his review seems rather determined to avoid any reference to it.

Readers familiar with Rikki Ducornet's fiction know that it does not attempt "to draw the reader into a character" in the manner--adopted, no doubt, from Virginia Woolf--that Michael Cunningham himself favors. This is not because she has no interest in character, but because in her fiction character is just one element that works to help give it its distinctive signature. Ducornet is not a realist, psychological or otherwise, but a fabulator, and were she to focus on drawing the reader inside the characters in the mode of Woolf or Faulkner she would either be undermining the very mode in which she has long worked, or be turning herself into a different kind of writer. Still, to say that Ducornet to some extent subordinates character to plot, setting, symbol and imagery, or, especially, style, is not to say that her fiction shows no concern for the "motives" of its characters. Indeed, long-time readers of Ducornet's work must be taken aback by Cunningham's suggestion that Netsuke exhibits insufficient attention to motive, since Ducornet's fiction so relentlessly chronicles what it represents as the motive force behind all human behavior: the unavoidable power of "desire."

In Ducornet's story, "The Word, 'Desire'", the protagonist, who is still experiencing the intense, intoxicating effects of new love, comes to appreciate this power when she notices her lover looking with obvious desire at another woman. She imagines herself into the perspective of both the lover, gazing, and the other woman, being gazed at, and finds herself concluding: "How far the word 'desire' goes! How it tugs us along! How it worries us, daggers us. How it lights our path." Ducornet's fables are fables of the manifestation and the consequences of desire, how it "tugs us along" and both "daggers us" and "lights our path." Her characters are driven by desire, experiencing both ecstasy and pain, come to a healthy acknowledgment of it, disastrously deny it. Desire in such works as The Stain, The Jade Cabinet, and Gazelle leads the characters to both become more human, and, in some cases, descend into the monstrous. Ducornet isn't really interested in showing readers "someone very different from themselves" because this fundamental human motivation is one to which we are all equally subject.

Thus the claim that a novel like Netsuke fails to explore "motives" arises both from a weak reading of the book and sheer ignorance, either literal or willed, of Rikki Ducornet's work as a whole. Cunningham asserts that the psychiatrist protagonist acts out of "pure malice" in seducing his patients, that he "systematically and without guilt soul-­murders" them. While it is not necessarily surprising that a reader might cringe with horror at the actions of a character like this protagonist (readers have expressed similar distaste for some of the actions and events depicted in her other novels), one might expect Cunningham to examine his response, to more fully appraise the text and more carefully measure his response against what the novel actually conveys to us about the protagonist. Because this character as subject to the inescapable influence of desire as any of Ducornet's other characters. He is not motivated out of "pure malice"--he may be malicious, but the malice isn't pure, uninflected by deeper impulses that are themselves neither benevolent nor malevolent but simply are what they are.

"My clients are thwarted, famished, and lonely," the protagonist tells us. "Inevitably, sooner or later, I seize upon and penetrate the one who has wanted this from me from the first instant. Or has taken time but has come around to wanting it." The narrator both believes what he is doing is of benefit to his clients--it's what they want as an assuagement of their pain--and knows he is exploiting them. He knows also he is exploiting his wife, Akiko, an accomplished and compassionate woman he both loves and despises. In betraying his wife with his clients, the narrator is acting on desires his marriage can't fulfill--that he doesn't want it to fulfill. Cunningham is correct to say that Netsuke is "a story about a man trying to bring his own house down" (although this isn't all the story is about), but this very insight implies he isn't simply acing out of malice. His accomplishments as husband and professional are being overrun by elemental impulses for which those accomplishments are an inhibition and a nuisance. In Ducornet's fiction, carnal desires must and should be expressed, but that doesn't mean the consequences will aways be "healthy."

Ducornet admittedly makes it difficult for us to grant the psychotherapist his portion of a shared humanity by making him the narrator of his own story. Novels narrated in the first person by morally compromised characters, such as Lolita, Thomas Berger's Killing Time, John Hawkes's The Blood Oranges, or, more recently, Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones can charm us into a kind of moral complicity in which we come to regard our identification with the narrator with some horror, but can also lead us to recoil at too obvious violations of ethical norms and decorum. We can both lull ourselves into overemphasizing the narrator's "human" qualities, and allow our disgust to overlook them. Judging from Michael Cunningham's response, Netsuke can provoke the latter reaction. A first-person narrator is always unreliable to some degree, but some writers especially exploit the capacity for first-person narration to create ambiguity and instability. Rikki Ducornet is this kind of writer. Whenever she uses a first-person narrator, as readers we need to be prepared for, and willing to accept, the resulting ambiguities.

 Netsuke, like many of Ducornet's novels, is relatively brief, which also no doubt adds to the possibility it will be misread in the manner exemplified by Michael Cunningham. We don't "get to know" the character as we do in longer works, especially those devoted to the kind of psychological realism in which "getting to know" is largely the point. Ducornet's kind of fabulation, which can draw on the elements of the fable or fairy tale without incorporating the movement toward narrative closure ("the moral of the story"), works best both through brevity and a deliberate avoidance of psychological "depth," at least through explicit strategies of point of view or style. Anything longer could mar the delicacy of what she is after, and "delving into a character's motives" would only undermine its subtlety.

Perhaps writers who take a much different approach to their own work will be unsympathetic to Ducornet's methods, but they ought to consider that bias before agreeing to review her work.

(June 13, 2011)