Ur-Story: Dash Dot Dash Dot, Pt. 3

(cont'd from previous posts)

We Americans like our heroes Romantic—with a capital 'R'. First of all, they must be heroic. They must be sympathetic. Their emotional lives must be readily accessible. Through the sheer dint of their will, they must rise above their circumstances and confront obstacles we readers can comprehend from our own experience. And, ultimately, they must prevail against the odds stacked against them.

This helps me make some sense of Michiko Kakutani's review of Tom McCarthy's C in a recent The New York Times. She says: "The hero of this novel, one Serge Carrefax, is another flat character, who sees the world in emotionally uninflected, purely materialist terms…"; and he is "a bizarrely detached character with a forensic attitude toward life: someone who can’t feel any grief over his teenage sister’s sudden death and who sees soldiers getting tangled in their parachutes and thinks of wriggling 'flies caught in spiders’ webs.'”

The reaction was pretty much the same among amazon.com readers (I paraphrase): "I just couldn't bring myself to like the main character"; "He was not sympathetic"; "He seemed aloof and cold"; "I didn't care deeply for the character or form a strong enough connection with him"; "The protagonist and his plight didn't engage me sufficiently". 'What does that even mean?' I wondered as I read these reviews from people who actually, supposedly, read the same book I did.

It was shocking to me to read these reactions to C, a book I found to be utterly brilliant. I was mesmerized by it. I felt so strongly about it I wanted to write it up for my blog. I simply couldn't understand how we could have read the same book.

Poor Serge Carrefax, he seems to be none of those Romantic things we Americans demand from our novel heroes. Kakutani and her readerly ilk will never forgive McCarthy for allowing a taint of determinism into his work, nay, into his character's story. And she reminds us of this by running down the remarkable Remainder, McCarthy's ground-breaking first novel.

Interestingly, Kakutani correctly locates one source of inspiration for C—let's call it the tradition C inherits, though she misses the Nabokovian Ada extension—in Gravity's Rainbow, but she misses the precise import of the Pynchon. Tyrone Slothrop's entire struggle was to escape the psychological, behavioral, conditioning (i.e., the determinism) that motivated his descent into the Zone; to do so, he must disappear, essentially, de-individualize, dis-integrate, if you will. As Jonathan Dee points out in his review of C in Harper's Magazine, another, deeper, more personal and insidious form of determinism is at work in the character of Serge Carrefax: he finds himself bound up in a self-styled cocoon of Freudian dimensions.

How a serious protagonist spending an entire lifetime struggling to come to terms with a grief so stultifyingly powerful it defies his comprehension and motivates practically everything he does from that point on (including making him physically ill) makes for a 'flat' character, or makes a good [advisedly] reader feel the characterization is 'flat', baffles me. Maybe Serge just doesn't gush enough about how he's feeling (or what his attitude is toward Prada, or what he thinks about his boss). This 'bizarre detachment' condemns McCarthy's novel in the eyes of much of the American reading public, particularly those in the thrall of the conventional (dare I say shallow) emotional preconceptions that animate Kakutani's disgust.

This struggle, to the contrary, elevates C to the realm of something I've taken to calling the Ur-story. Look to the Gilgamesh, THE Ur-story, and how its hero reacts to Enkidu's, his boon companion's, death. Yes, he wails and moans his grief—and Kakutani gets that part, the emotional outpouring of the protagonist. But what she fails to comprehend is the significance of the resulting quest for Utnapishtim and immortality—the quest, in other words, to join the mourned love one in death—the epic quest that truly defines character.

(to be continued)