Ur-story: Desperate Housewife (Pt. 4)

[continued from last posts]

It takes a certain artistry to be able to enter the persona and perspective of a fictional character. I've called it 'method writing.' And, in this, I agree with James Wood in his How Fiction Works. Yet, there are other artistries. The history of the novel is not, as he suggests, simply the history of the development of the free indirect style. William Gaddis in Carpenter's Gothic (as well as his other novels) is a case in point.

CG, like all his novels, is a busy canvas. Yet, the principal character of Elizabeth Booth emerges through the clamor of what seems like the world crashing in around her.

To apply another analogy, the text is like a tightly woven fabric: textile, if you will. And if you unravel one thread, wondrous things emerge. Here, I want to worry one thread: Liz throughout the book is writing a novel.

One of the prurient reasons we read novels is to see what other people are like when they're by themselves. To eavesdrop on their privacy, their aloneness. In CG, every chance Liz gets a quiet, private moment she settles in to work on her unfinished novel; yet, just as she's starting to get into it, the world, in one of its multiform ways, interrupts. She becomes, as Eliot famously says, "distracted from distraction by distraction." Still, a few bits of her novel show up in the text of CG. Let's follow the thread of her novel through the book; here's our first hint:

"No I'm fine Edie honestly, I'm fine I just told you nothing's the matter, I've been...I haven't no, I mean it was going to be sort of a novel but I haven't worked on it since we got here I haven't written a word I haven't even looked at it I've, I've been so busy with, with people here a cancer charity..." (35)

This states the theme carried through CG by the motif of her novel. There is no rest for Liz. The matters of the world prevent her from being able to focus on her writing. There is no quietude. If, as Franzen believes, Gaddis is an angry writer, this seems to be his chief complaint.

No one listens to Liz. Except for one brief moment, Edie is the only sympathetic ear she finds in the whole story.

Writing, for Liz, seems to serve two purposes. One, it helps her to imagine that her life could be different than the way it is. And, two, it provides her an escape from the clamor that surrounds her. She dreams of escaping. At one point, she asks her husband:

"—Paul do you think I could, maybe I could go away for a few days?

His hand closed on her breast. —Where.

—Just, somewhere I...

—Too much going on here Liz, you know that...his hand laboured her breasts, —just get things off the ground we can take a week someplace.

—No I meant, I meant just me." (54)

She fantasizes about a late-night TV rerun of Orson Welles's Jane Eyre while her husband makes love to her and, later, her fantasy of escape through the movie is throttled by lashing rain and lightning striking a large tree (also on TV). (55-57) She cannot escape Paul, it seems. So she fantasizes a different existence:

"Digging under scarves, blouses, lingerie in the top drawer she brought out a manila folder riffling the score or so of hand written pages, crossings out, marginal exclamations, meticulous inserts, brave arrows shearing through whole paragraphs of soured inspiration on to the last of them abandoned at what it might all have been like if her father had married a schoolteacher, or a chorus girl, instead of the daughter of a stayed Grosse Pointe family, or if her mother, lying silent even now in the cold embrace of a distant nursing home, had met a young writer who...

She was up for the moment it took to find a pen and draw it firmly through young writer who, take up rapidly with man somewhat older, a man with another life already behind him, another woman, even a wife somewhere...his still, sinewed hands and his...hard, irregular features bearing the memory of distant suns, the cool grey calm of his eyes belying...belying? She found the dictionary under the telephone book, sought for bely and could not find it.

—Mrs Booth?

—Oh! She was up..." (63-64)

McCandless, her landlord, interupts. Soon, he leaves, and it's back to her novel:

"Up the stairs she paused to run the bath, down the hall undoing her blouse with the worn address book still tight in her hand she'd barely lit the bedroom and slipped off her shoes, barely come down among the papers on the bed bent over the last of them, the cool, grey calm of his eyes belying...her lips moving, when the downstairs toilet flushed." (68)

But Billy, her brother, has arrived. Another interruption. Still, he poses the right question:

"...why don't you pack up. Pack a bag and get out of here Bibbs, listen. I'm going to California I'll wait for you. Tonight, pack a bag and I'll wait for you.

—I, I can't.

—Why not why can't you. Leave him a note tell him you just have to clear some this bullshit out of your head, this broken down house the whole wet gloomy everything dying out there in the sun, get a look at it. Why can't you.

—Because I, it wouldn't be fair..." (89)

She's a good person. Perhaps the only scrupulous character in CG. Billy, a naif, soon leaves and it's back to the:

"folder spread open on the bed where she came down to the last page taking her pencil straight to a man somewhat older and drawing it through another life, writing in other lives; through another woman for other women; through somewhere, for a wife hidden now in Marrakech, biting the nub of the eraser over his still, sinewed hands when the phone brought her upright.

—Yes hello...? No, no he's not here who is it, if he calls I can... Well yes he was here briefly Mrs Fickert, but he had to turn right around and...pardon? Well he, well yes of course he's married. I mean I'm his wife. Do you...hello?

The train [on TV] sped toward her and she caught the towel together at her breast up fetching Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, and it roared right over her as though she'd gone down on her back there between the tracks. Opened to the Ds now, licking her fingertip past dogtrot, dive, her finger ran down dishevel, dishpan hands till it reached disinterested, where the precisely incorrect definition she sought was confirmed in a citation from a pundit for the Times, she drew a line through indifferent and wrote it in, worrying at calm with faint prods of the pencil point: the cool, disinterested calm of his eyes belying? She hatched calm in a cuneate enclosure, licking her finger paging back to the Cs for cunning, past cut-rate, curt, running down from cuneiform and held, abruptly, at cunnilingus. She was reading it slowly, finger back to her lips pp. of lingere, more at LICK, when the phone rang again.

... [some further brief interruptions]

Knees drawn up she pulled the towel round her bared shoulders and a shiver sent breath through her, staring at that page till she seized the pencil to draw it heavily through his still, sinewed hands, hard irregular features, the cool disinterested calm of his eyes and a bare moment's pause bearing down with the pencil on his hands, disjointed, rust spotted, his crumbled features dulled and worn as the bill collector he might have been mistaken for, the desolate loss in his eyes belying, belying..." (93-95)

Apparently, she works through the night. Paul, her abusive husband who practically holds her prisoner here and who she found out in the above excerpt is having an affair, recalls that she likes to writer and asks Liz to clean up a fraudulent letter he plans to use for PR, make it sound more feminine. She refuses and Paul gets irate, accusing her of being unsupportive:

"—Write a novel you make up these different characters? put them in these situations getting rich, getting divorced, getting laid where they're talking to each other you pretend you're these characters so they sound real? Same God damn thing Liz, sit down for ten minutes pretend you're this good loving Christian mother Sally Joe writing a nice letter to..." (112)

Paul leaves for a few days. Liz & McCandless make love—vividly. Billy leaves with McCandless to go into the city. She turns on the television—yet another big distraction. And it's back to the novel:

"Those hands disjointed, rust spotted, crumbled features dulled and worn on the page right where she'd left them, she spread the manila folder open on clean sheets, reached for a pencil and found none, and then came back slowly on the fresh pillowslip stilled in the ashen flush of those silenced lips contorting soundless syllables on the [TV] screen which gave way, as the light at the windows gave way, to a lady playing the piano, to a man playing golf as the room grew darker, to leafy vistas and soldier ants in grim procession, to shell bursts brightening the walls for an instant, dimming with stretcher bearers, men loading a howitzer, firing a mortar turned away stopping their ears against the pounding, pounding, she was up, her feet off to the floor, reaching for the light, calling out—I'm coming! to the pounding on the door below, hesitating and then sweeping the folder up from the bed and back into the drawer under blouses, scarves, before she made way down the dark stairs, got the light on under the sampler, got the door open." (198-99)

At the end, the house is broken into. Liz collapses in Paul's arms, and he promises to take her away from all this. She comes upstairs. The drawer where she keeps her novel—her secrets—has been ransacked;

"She came in slowly picking things, dropping them again with a sense of something missing but apparently none of what it might be, finally settling to gather up the pages as though, righting them in their folder, here in her own hand at least lay some hope of order restored, even that of a past itself in tatters, revised, amended, fabricated in fact from its very outset to reorder its unlikelihoods, what it all might have been if her father and mother had never met, if he'd married a chorus girl instead or if she'd met a man with other lives already behind him, crumbled features dulled and worn as a bill collector on through the crossings out, the meticulous inserts, the wavering lines where her finger had run over cut-rate, curt, in pursuit of cunning and on to collisions of only days before, seeking the spelling of those Jack Russell terriers running down jackleg, jack mackerel to trip on jack off (usu. considered vulgar); seeking, for some reason, loose for its meaning as slack here cited in the sex roles of shorebirds with the author's name misspelled; confusing rift for cleft, and there waylaid by the anal ~ of the human body or here was livid, bypassing ashen, pallid, for the perversion she sought and found licensed by a sensitive novelist as reddish (in a fan of gladiolas blushing ~ under electric letters) for this livid erection where her hand closed tight on its prey swelling the colour of rage when she looked up sharp, straight before her: the television was gone." (247-48)

Then, after Liz dies, Paul finds her novel:

"And he stood there filling the doorway until the undistinguished grey car turned down the hill, knocking over a broom leaning there against the staircase and picking it up, standing there looking up the stairs and finally dropping the broom back to the floor and climbing them, down the hall where scarves, sweaters, papers, the chest's drawers themselves still lay flung out on the bed, on the floor as he'd found them, and the manila folder where he'd found it spread open on the bed to pages in a hand he knew spelling little more than bread, onions, milk, chicken? here drawn out in whole paragraphs and crossings out, marginal exclamations, meticulous inserts, her tongue tracing the delicate vein engorged up the stiffening rise to the head squeezed livid in her hand, drawing the beading off in a fine thread before she brought him in, surging to meet him for as long as it lasted, standing there numbed and then replacing it carefully in the folder, and then he stooped to pick up his shoes and hurried from the room, down the hall where his same numbed look met him now in the mirror over the basin, the white wisps he'd found there dangling from his hand as though he didn't know what to do with them before he turned on the water full and held his head under the tap, finally coming out shaved, scarred and shirtless where a movement no more than the flutter of a wing caught his eye through the glass at the foot of the stairs, someone on tiptoe, peeing in, and he came down them." (257)

For the first time in the story, Paul is speechless. Spinless. He's devastated by what he's found. This passage mirrors precisely Gaddis's narration in Chapter 5, where Liz and McCandless make love, where, it seems, deep speaks to deep, and where he betrays her.

There are many such threads, and one of the great pleasures of this (and just about any other Gaddis novel) is unraveling them. The illusion of systematicity: this is Gaddis's greatness.

And, as if to emphasize the importance of this particular novel-within-a-novel thread, Gaddis mirrors it. McCandless, it seems, has published a pseudonymous novel. It is, at least according to one accusatory character, a veiled account of McCandless's own life and time in the CIA—that is, a roman a clef. At one point, between the time he first meets Liz and their tryst, Gaddis gives us a short, revelatory, because italicized, passage:

"I distrusted romance. See, though, how I yielded to it.

A man, I suppose, fights only when he hopes, when he has a vision of order, when he feels strongly there is some connexion between the earth on which he walks and himself. But there was my vision of a disorder which it was beyond any one man to put right. There was my sense of wrongness, beginning with the stillness of that morning of return... while from the kitchen, the chords of Bach's D major concerto heaved into the room around him and settled like furniture." (150)

Now, whatever connection we are meant to draw by virtue of the fact that McCandless spells 'connexion' in the British way and Gaddis consistently spells 'colour' and 'labour' in the British way throughout I'll leave to educated speculation. Some have suggested McCandless is a stand-in, a cut-out, an alter ego for Gaddis. He's a novelist (of sorts) and a prankster, the mysterious owner of the house. Possibly insane, he has an affection for Liz. And his desire for order, reflected in this passage, is what he finds in Liz

There are any number of similar interwoven threads for the reader of Carpenter's Gothic to worry. All of them insightful to this complex book, all of them profitable. And, to me as a writer, this is the most demoralizing aspect of Gaddis's supreme artistry: it seems an almost insurmountable task to accomplish such a feat. Yet, this seems to be the tragic message of Liz and her aborted novel: whenever she gets the chance she works on her novel, but is constantly being interrupted, disrupted, distracted; she tries to pick up wherever she left off, but it is difficult; still, she is constantly, ruthlessly revising, trying to get it just right; to this end, she incorporates and fictionalizes aspects of her own life; but she dies before she can finish.

And it is this last which brings us to the artist's ur-story. Gaddis recognizes that the artist's work is perpetual and perpetually at odds with the world. CG is an artist's book. There is his vision of order and disorder—though it is beyond him (and certainly beyond Liz, or any of the others whose interiors are a jumble of good intentions) to put it right. And there is his sense of wrongness, clearly on display in such figures as Paul, Rev. Ude, Sen. Teakell, Dr. Kissinger, Lester, Billy, even McCandless. This is the connection between the artist and the earth upon which he walks.

Then there is the inevitability of the artist's dying. What, then, is lost? Death robs the writer (righter) of wrongs of the ability to fully articulate his vision, because not only is the world constantly interrupting, it is constantly changing—as is his relationship to it. Truth disappears in the spin. Justice favors the powerful. And death, likewise, never gives him the opportunity to set things aright. CG is less a work of anger, than a statement of the writer's desperation. It is that desperation in the face of his pervasive consciousness of the sense of loss—that ur-story—which, to my mind, elevates Gaddis's work to the first rank. And CG, though short, is certainly no exception.

Ur-story: Second Story

Patrimony, inheritance, birthright, tradition, legacy, heritage, incest, filiopietism, Oedipus complex, anxiety of influence: these are all ways (and there are many others) to express one of the major recurring themes in literature and fiction. Once we move beyond the lone individual struggling to understand reality, gain identity, deal with knowledge of mortality and grief, and establish a place in the world—the theme I have been exploring in my Ur-story series of posts—it is the first relationship, more primal even than love and mating. And it is a theme as ancient as Abram & Isaac (& Ishmael), and Lot's daughters; as central to our mythic self-understanding as Cronus & Zeus and Jahweh & Jesus; as profound as the aforementioned Oedipus and King Lear and Darwin & the apes; and as current as the new work by J.M. Coetzee, Summertime.

I rarely find myself reading, or having read, much less being in a position to comment on a novel that is au courant, but having just finished reading Summertime and seeing this reference to it on one of my favorite websites (h/t), I decided to pen a comment. There are plenty of reads on this enigmatic book out there (e.g., here, here, here, here, here, and here), and I'll try not to repeat any of them here. But none of them, to my mind, captures what I take to be the central theme of Summertime: one man's struggle to decide whether it is his duty to take care of his aging, ailing father and whether, if he cannot escape that duty, he is capable of doing so.

It is by no means an obvious theme because it is embedded in a pastiche of let us call them post-modern or metafictional literary techniques—the focus of most of the reviews I've seen. To understand how to read this book, it might be instructive to re-read my post here about William Gillespie's short book The Story That Teaches You How To Write It. The key is to pay attention to all the elements on the pages before you.

Thus, the American first edition of Summertime, the version I have, calls itself "Fiction" on its title page. We can, I think, safely take that at face value. Many of the reviewers spend valuable column space speculating on how much of the work is actually fictional and how much reliably autobiographical. As for me, I don't think it matters to an understanding of the book and, ultimately, am uninterested.

The confusion comes because the book—I'm not sure whether it can rightly be called a novel—is ostensibly about one "John Coetzee" who is said to be dead. For purposes of this post's clarity, I shall refer to the (dead) character in this fictional work as "John Coetzee" and the writer of this book as "J.M. Coetzee".

In my earlier Ur-story series of critical readings, I proposed a theory for understanding works of literature in terms of the essence of the story they sought to dramatize, that is to say the ways in which they dealt with the theme of confronting the human predicament of mortality and the accompanying sense of loss. On this theory, the story is a model of coming-to-consciousness emotionally. Summertime takes this essential understanding as its jumping-off place and goes on from there. J.M. Coetzee is using his own namesake, John Coetzee, as a character (though absent) in this book. John, like J.M., was a South African writer with a major literary reputation. Yet, in this book John Coetzee is dead.

Now one of the more difficult exercises for the writer of fiction is to give the reader a sense of a character through the eyes of the point-of-view character, the latter of whom is self-centered. Nick Carraway, for instance, is not what you might call self-centered. He is curious about and observant of his cousin Daisy and, of course, Gatsby. It is difficult to do because, as I've pointed out, much contemporary writing takes its cue from the 'method acting' school of drama; the writer doesn't merely impersonate, s/he takes on the aspect of the point of view character. And everything is about the self-discovery of the self-centered POV character; other characters tend to come across as stage props or furniture in the main character's world. James Wood, among others, famously calls this the free indirect style. I've called it 'method writing' (others have as well, e.g., see here, here, and here).

That is what J.M. Coetzee is attempting to do here, i.e., to give readers a sense of the fictional John Coetzee (and, importantly, his father) through the eyes of not one (arguably) but several point-of-view characters. Summertime consists of some notebook/journal fragments from John Coetzee and some transcripts of interviews and a narrative summary of another interview by one "Vincent", who is researching a biography of the late John Coetzee. Vincent apparently has taken some liberties with his transcriptions and summaries, and his interviewees often call him out on this. Thus Vincent's editorial control and thus his reliability are put at issue from the get-go.

So, let's call Vincent the Nick Carraway of Summertime and John Coetzee the not-so-great Gatsby.

Summertime is a compilation of Vincent's raw materials: interviews with five characters who knew John Coetzee (as presumably revealed in his journals) during the 1970s in South Africa and several of John's own notebook entries. Like the aforementioned Gillespie book, Summertime is thus a pastiche.

At first read it feels like J.M. Coetzee (the real life writer and Nobel laureate who has a world-wide following) has tried to pawn off a book written on the cheap (perhaps to fulfill a contractual obligation) by simply drawing on a few fragments from his own notebooks and some writerly exercises—to wit trying to imagine what some people (presumably with fictionalized identities) from his past might have thought about him—and cast the whole as a sort of po-mo, meta-fictional game by using the persona John Coetzee, having him be dead, and interjecting the fictional biographer. And that may very well be what this book is. But if it is merely gamesmanship, it is a sophisticated game and keeps the reader guessing. It does not readily betray its secrets.

But let's not cast aspersions on the writer's motivations. Let's take the text at face value, and examine it critically in terms of the sorts of things we look for in works of fiction. That is to say, let's treat it as the new form which, in the spirit of the game, it cries out to be.

(to be continued)

No, Not that James Woods

Disambiguation. A good word I learned, frankly, from Wikipedia.

The other James Wood (no 's') gives a close analysis of the free indirect style in a passage from Henry James's What Maisie Knew. He focuses on one word in one passage that shows James's true mastery; that is to say, he shows us how James steps back and allows us to see the scene through the eyes of Maisie through the use of one perfectly-modulated word: embarrassingly. [Of course, you can hear the chorus of MFA students bellowing in the background about the use of -ly adverbs.] Wood then traces the use of this technique back, interestingly, to the mock-heroic poetry of Alexander Pope. All he is really saying is: the writer needs to stand back and let the language reflect the character's own POV. The writer's style interferes with our being able to see the world through the eyes of the characters. With any given word or phrase or literary device, as a writer, ask yourself: "Is this my character speaking or am I intruding?" Call it "method writing"—after so-called method acting. The greater artistry, Wood is telling us, comes in getting the characters just right.

Now, what's fun about Wood's first chapter, called "Narrating", is his delicious take on other writers. He takes Updike to task for grievous authorial interference (or, offsides in soccer jargon) in Terrorist. He takes a first run at Nabokov, in Pnin saying: " Nabokov is here using a kind of free indirect style, probably without even thinking about it." I guess VN got lucky, huh? Wood notes how Faulkner's, Joyce's, and Shakespeare's characters all manage to sound like Faulkner, Joyce, and Shakespeare respectively.

But then, then my friends, he breaks out the stiletto: "David Foster Wallace is very good at becoming the whole of boredom." Pow! Do you get the feeling he doesn't particularly care for DFW? Wood praises Chekhov's use of what he calls the unidentified free indirect style, or the "village chorus." Then, he shows how Wallace takes that style to extremes in imitating the jargon and mangled lingo of Madison Avenue. Wallace's predecessors, he notes, include Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Pynchon, and DeLillo who let the "debased" language of the contemporary American idiom debase their own language. His point is a good one. There really is a balancing act, let's call it 'artistry', involved. But, then, Wood really drives the point through the heart of DFW. And twists.

In concluding this section, Wood gets it just right, I think:

So the novelist is always working with at least three languages. There is the author's own language, style, perceptual equipment, and so on; there is the character's presumed language, style, perceptual equipment, and so on; and there is what we could call the language of the world—the language which fiction inherits before it gets to turn it into novelistic style, the language of daily speech, of newspapers, of offices, of advertising, of the blogosphere and text messaging.

In essence, the novelist is a bit of a juggler. The balancing act is to keep these three balls (if you will) of language in the air simultaneously. Writers often talk about getting the words just right. Wood provides the matrix, or context, in which we can locate this rightness.

Ur-Story: Burning Man, Part 3

(cont'd from previous post)

I continue today my look at Elias Canetti's Auto-da-Fé. It is a complex book which does not lend itself to easy analysis, and I often find myself at a loss how to proceed here. It is, as I noted in my first post in this series, a savage satire. And, generally, I find myself pretty much in agreement with Daniel Green:

"Although certainly the best satire is also the most artful, I would still maintain that satire aspires to be primarily a mode of moral or political discourse, or of cultural criticism, and not an object of aesthetic contemplation."

The problem with an older text such as Canetti's (1935) is that we latter-day readers (without the sort of massive, multi-disciplinary scholarship to which a blog like this one can hardly aspire) simply do not have authentic access to the object of the satire: namely, the moral, cultural, and political discourse against which the text levels its attack—to wit, Weimar-era Vienna. The question becomes, then, whether the novel is, therefore, simply out-of-date or whether we, today, can look at the only thing we have (the text itself) and try to draw out something interestingly meaningful? Stated differently, do the characteristics of our own society today somehow mirror those of interwar Austrian society such that Auto-da-Fé's satire may at least partially hit home? Is it still relevant today?

Assuming, then, that there is some sort of satiric brunt to the text to which we can have access, we must first look at the text itself—its aesthetic qualities—to see what it might be trying to say (or, at least how it might be trying to say whatever it is it is attempting to say), mindful all the while of our own complicity, as readers, in the very culture who's practices are potentially being satirized. [As I indicated in my first post, however, such an assumption of meaning is problematized by the text itself. Whether or not this assumption is an intended object of the book's satire is another question altogether going to the heart of my reading.]

That being said, it's really quite difficult to get a fix on this novel. For one thing, the narrative is problematic. The narrative voice remains aloof, yet it asserts its intimacy with all the book's characters. It bounces around from head to head, often in the same paragraph; fantasies, dreams, memories, thoughts, plans, intentions, judgments, and running internal commentary from different points of view commingle with the action and dialogue. This makes for difficult slogging when first reading the text, putting off many readers after about the second or third chapter. But, upon re-reading, it makes it even more difficult to get a sense of the novel's narrative unity.

Here's an example picked at random (p. 321 of the Wedgwood translation). It comes in one of the most farcical scenes in the book in the chapter called "Private Property". After a fracas at a pawn shop over some used books, Kien has been taken to the police station for questioning. Kien believes he has been hauled in because he killed Therese by locking her up in his library and abandoning her. In actuality, she ran him out and took over the apartment. He thinks she's dead and that he's hallucinating her presence before him. Pfaff, deluded by guilt, fears he's going to be interrogated for the incestuous, abusive death of his daughter. Each of the policemen has his own agenda, as well. Fischerle, the other major character, does not appear in this scene, but is present in his absence. His doppelgänger, the Fishwife, his female, Jewish, hunchback dwarf twin, is killed by the crowd at the pawn shop. They believe that because of her deformity she must have committed some vague crime. Fischerle, who was there, managed to escape after picking Kien's pocket. No one cares about the death of the poor, deformed Jewess; their inquiry is about a potential breach of the peace (breaking the glass door of the pawn shop) and a robbery of which, in point of fact, Kien is the victim [notes mine]:

"The policemen nudged each other. He [the inspector who'd been daydreaming about purchasing beautiful silk ties and worrying about his tiny nose] was in one of his moods. Therese's foot overstepped her circle [the starched, blue, hoop skirt she always wears]. The man with a memory [Policeman 1] saw his goal in sight. Not one word had he forgotten. He intended to repeat the whole story in place of the accused. 'He's tired already,' he said and shrugged a contemptuous shoulder at Kien, 'I'll tell you quicker!' Therese burst out: 'I ask you [her trademark phrase], he's murdering me.' In her fear, she spoke low. Kien heard her; he disallowed her. He would not turn round. Never! for what purpose? She was dead. Therese shouted: 'I ask you, I'm afraid!' The man with a memory [Policeman 1], annoyed at the interruption, challenged her: 'What's biting you?' The father [Policeman 2] spoke soothingly: 'Nature has created women the weaker sex,' a motto he had derived from his son's last German composition. The Inspector drew out his mirror, gaped at himself and sighed: 'I'm tired too.' His nose eluded him; nothing interested him any longer. Therese screamed: 'I ask you, he must be put away!' Once again Kien resisted her voice; he would not turn round. But he groaned loud. The caretaker [Pfaff] was sick of all the fuss. 'Professor!' he bellowed from behind, 'It's not so bad. We're all still alive. And no bones broken!' he couldn't relish death. That's how he was. With ponderous steps he strode forward. He intervened."

Whew! It's dizzying. The reader has to keep in mind and catalog each character's reasons for being in the scene, their history, their delusions, etc.

Contemporary novel readers are used to psychological realism. Though we know that there is a writer actually writing the words on the page the characters speak and think, we bracket this knowledge and pretend we are gaining some sort of privileged insight into the internal world of the characters. The writer achieves this aesthetic effect by using, mainly, either the first person POV or the free indirect style. And the reader accepts that the realist author tries to portray each character uniquely and multi-dimensionally. To give each character a different voice—something I've called elsewhere on this blog "method writing."

This simply does not happen here. The characters are stereotypes, flat. Certain characters have limited vocabularies and specific recurring identifying markers and motifs, but their thoughts and utterances do not vary in style. Because of this, it's often difficult to pin down the narrative point of view. It rings false to our aesthetic ear. What's more, because of this perspectival relativism, there doesn't appear to be a global narrative voice. And we feel disoriented.

(to be continued)

Flaneric Suggestions?

I'm leaving this week for a six-city European trip avec famille. I've purchased a small journal exclusively for keeping a log of my travels. Over lunch last week, I mentioned this to a friend and sometime commenter here, Sandi. I said I was thinking about keeping it as an exercise "in character"; that is to say, as if a potential novel character were keeping the journal. Method writing, if you will. Brilliantly, she suggested I think about using a female protagonist. It sounds like a great exercise, at a minimum, for fictioneering.

What motivation, oh brainstorming blog-friends, might such character have for visiting Amsterdam, Köln, Heidelberg, Paris, Edinburgh, & Londinium? [par example: BDR (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, & Done) blogged his recent vacay using his blog-voice. With pictures. Randal frequently lets his persona frolic about Clevelandia with a camera as well.]

My flâneur should be just that:

As a member of the crowd that populates the streets, the flâneur participates physically in the text that he observes while performing a transient and aloof autonomy with a "cool but curious eye" that studies the constantly changing spectacle that parades before him (Rignall 112). As an observer, the flâneur exists as both "active and intellectual" (Burton 1). As a literary device, one may understand him as a narrator who is fluent in the hieroglyphic vocabulary of visual culture. When he assumes the form of narrator, he plays both protagonist and audience--like a commentator who stands outside of the action, of whom only the reader is aware, "float[ing] freely in the present tense."

Walter Benjamin posits in his description of the flâneur that "Empathy is the nature of the intoxication to which the flâneur abandons himself in the crowd. He ... enjoys the incomparable privilege of being himself and someone else as he sees fit. Like a roving soul in search of a body, he enters another person whenever he wishes." (Baudelaire 55). (Mellencamp 60).

Let your imaginations roam and let the suggestions roll in.

Merci. Maybe I'll name her Flannery.

Le Flâneur (music by The XX) from Luke Shepard on Vimeo.

Ur-Story: A Shot in the Dark

Last month Dan Green challenged us [qua Stephen Marche] "to re-read Robbe Grillet's fiction, especially those novels written before the publication of For a New Novel, and try to make a case that any of these points [to wit: his novels "applied rules and regulations, opposed subjectivity and tried to dissolve plot and character into description"] can be sustained."

As one of my current projects involves aspects of the traditional (think Oedipus cycle, Hamlet) genre of detective fiction and even thriller, I felt compelled to (re-)read Alain Robbe-Grillet's The Erasers (1953, trans. 1964 by Richard Howard), ostensibly a detective novel for myself.

First, let's get our bearings straight.

There are five basic elements of crime fiction: atmosphere, victim, culprit, suspects, and detective. Fair enough.

Tzvetan Todorov, in The Poetics of Prose (1971), tells us that crime fiction is comprised of two stories: the story of the crime ("fable") and the story of the investigation ("plot") which, in a sense, resolves the crime morally. It begins with a real murder (victim) and ends with a symbolic, retributive murder (the identification of the culprit). The story of the crime, which has already happened and is thus absent (i.e, the "fable" in Todorov's terms, after Lessing), is told in reverse and is unraveled, or made whole, as the story of the investigation (the "plot") moves forward.

Todorov also points us to S.S. van Dine's 20 rules for writing detective fiction:

THE DETECTIVE story is a kind of intellectual game. It is more — it is a sporting event. And for the writing of detective stories there are very definite laws — unwritten, perhaps, but none the less binding; and every respectable and self-respecting concocter of literary mysteries lives up to them. Herewith, then, is a sort Credo, based partly on the practice of all the great writers of detective stories, and partly on the promptings of the honest author's inner conscience. To wit:

•    1. The reader must have equal opportunity with the detective for solving the mystery. All clues must be plainly stated and described.

•    2. No willful tricks or deceptions may be placed on the reader other than those played legitimately by the criminal on the detective himself.

•    3. There must be no love interest. The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar.

•    4. The detective himself, or one of the official investigators, should never turn out to be the culprit. This is bald trickery, on a par with offering some one a bright penny for a five-dollar gold piece. It's false pretenses.

•    5. The culprit must be determined by logical deductions — not by accident or coincidence or unmotivated confession. To solve a criminal problem in this latter fashion is like sending the reader on a deliberate wild-goose chase, and then telling him, after he has failed, that you had the object of his search up your sleeve all the time. Such an author is no better than a practical joker.

•    6. The detective novel must have a detective in it; and a detective is not a detective unless he detects. His function is to gather clues that will eventually lead to the person who did the dirty work in the first chapter; and if the detective does not reach his conclusions through an analysis of those clues, he has no more solved his problem than the schoolboy who gets his answer out of the back of the arithmetic.

•    7. There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better. No lesser crime than murder will suffice. Three hundred pages is far too much pother for a crime other than murder. After all, the reader's trouble and expenditure of energy must be rewarded.

•    8. The problem of the crime must he solved by strictly naturalistic means. Such methods for learning the truth as slate-writing, ouija-boards, mind-reading, spiritualistic se'ances, crystal-gazing, and the like, are taboo. A reader has a chance when matching his wits with a rationalistic detective, but if he must compete with the world of spirits and go chasing about the fourth dimension of metaphysics, he is defeated ab initio.

•    9. There must be but one detective — that is, but one protagonist of deduction — one deus ex machina. To bring the minds of three or four, or sometimes a gang of detectives to bear on a problem, is not only to disperse the interest and break the direct thread of logic, but to take an unfair advantage of the reader. If there is more than one detective the reader doesn't know who his codeductor is. It's like making the reader run a race with a relay team.

•    10. The culprit must turn out to be a person who has played a more or less prominent part in the story — that is, a person with whom the reader is familiar and in whom he takes an interest.

•    11. A servant must not be chosen by the author as the culprit. This is begging a noble question. It is a too easy solution. The culprit must be a decidedly worth-while person — one that wouldn't ordinarily come under suspicion.

•    12. There must be but one culprit, no matter how many murders are committed. The culprit may, of course, have a minor helper or co-plotter; but the entire onus must rest on one pair of shoulders: the entire indignation of the reader must be permitted to concentrate on a single black nature.

•    13. Secret societies, camorras, mafias, et al., have no place in a detective story. A fascinating and truly beautiful murder is irremediably spoiled by any such wholesale culpability. To be sure, the murderer in a detective novel should be given a sporting chance; but it is going too far to grant him a secret society to fall back on. No high-class, self-respecting murderer would want such odds.

•    14. The method of murder, and the means of detecting it, must be be rational and scientific. That is to say, pseudo-science and purely imaginative and speculative devices are not to be tolerated in the roman policier. Once an author soars into the realm of fantasy, in the Jules Verne manner, he is outside the bounds of detective fiction, cavorting in the uncharted reaches of adventure.

•    15. The truth of the problem must at all times be apparent — provided the reader is shrewd enough to see it. By this I mean that if the reader, after learning the explanation for the crime, should reread the book, he would see that the solution had, in a sense, been staring him in the face-that all the clues really pointed to the culprit — and that, if he had been as clever as the detective, he could have solved the mystery himself without going on to the final chapter. That the clever reader does often thus solve the problem goes without saying.

•    16. A detective novel should contain no long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, no "atmospheric" preoccupations. such matters have no vital place in a record of crime and deduction. They hold up the action and introduce issues irrelevant to the main purpose, which is to state a problem, analyze it, and bring it to a successful conclusion. To be sure, there must be a sufficient descriptiveness and character delineation to give the novel verisimilitude.

•    17. A professional criminal must never be shouldered with the guilt of a crime in a detective story. Crimes by housebreakers and bandits are the province of the police departments — not of authors and brilliant amateur detectives. A really fascinating crime is one committed by a pillar of a church, or a spinster noted for her charities.

•    18. A crime in a detective story must never turn out to be an accident or a suicide. To end an odyssey of sleuthing with such an anti-climax is to hoodwink the trusting and kind-hearted reader.

•    19. The motives for all crimes in detective stories should be personal. International plottings and war politics belong in a different category of fiction — in secret-service tales, for instance. But a murder story must be kept gemütlich, so to speak. It must reflect the reader's everyday experiences, and give him a certain outlet for his own repressed desires and emotions.

•    20. And (to give my Credo an even score of items) I herewith list a few of the devices which no self-respecting detective story writer will now avail himself of. They have been employed too often, and are familiar to all true lovers of literary crime. To use them is a confession of the author's ineptitude and lack of originality. (a) Determining the identity of the culprit by comparing the butt of a cigarette left at the scene of the crime with the brand smoked by a suspect. (b) The bogus spiritualistic seance to frighten the culprit into giving himself away. (c) Forged fingerprints. (d) The dummy-figure alibi. (e) The dog that does not bark and thereby reveals the fact that the intruder is familiar. (f)The final pinning of the crime on a twin, or a relative who looks exactly like the suspected, but innocent, person. (g) The hypodermic syringe and the knockout drops. (h) The commission of the murder in a locked room after the police have actually broken in. (i) The word association test for guilt. (j) The cipher, or code letter, which is eventually unraveled by the sleuth."

From my own point of view, the entire genre of detective fiction is a reasonable literary move within the scope of what I have termed the Ur-story. There is a death; it is impactful; and there is an attempt to deal with it albeit in a rational, superficial mode. Solving the murder does not resolve the crisis of our mortality, but it provides a temporary fix. And sometimes that is all we require of literature.

[Updated to correct spelling. Sorry, Dan. Thanks, Dog]

(to be continued)

Working Title: Toys in the Attic

For those of you still interested in peering under the hood of this putatively creative mind, we offer this latest installment of the series of posts about which of the novels-in-progress to complete.

In our review of Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang, we referred you to a series of brilliant novels we found intriguing and compelling for their depiction of evil protagonists in the tradition of Crime and Punishment: Vladimir Nabokov's classic and controversial Lolita (1955), John Fowles's The Collector (1963), Evan S. Connell's The Diary of a Rapist (1966), John Banville's Booker-nominated The Book of Evidence (1989), and James Lasdun's The Horned Man (2002). All are told in first person—though The Collector has a middle section told from a POV other than the protagonist. We've long wanted to write a novel along these lines. Sex, misogyny, torture, murder, rape, madness, sociopathy, depravity: all fine subjects for the fictional mind.

Needless to say, this promises to be a somewhat darker novel than the other three I've outlined. I haven't conceptualized it quite as thoroughly as the others—that is to say, I have considerably more work to do on it to bring it to fruition. The premise has the protagonist sitting in a quiet, hidden corner in the attic of his home. He has just learned he's dying and has only a very short time to live. He's going through a box of memorabilia. His immediate dilemma is whether and how to tell his wife of twenty or so years that he's dying or simply to disappear one day and not return. The memorabilia, it turns out, are from past 'relationships' or 'affairs' he's had through the years; thus, much of the book will be told from the POV of his memories. However, as each so-called affair is revealed through whatever token he pulls out of his box, it becomes clearer to the reader that these were no ordinary relationships. His evilness starts coming through as he reviews what he considers to be his life's work—really, the only thing he's ever been truly successful at.

Story questions, naturally, involve his motives for his actions (if there are any, or they prove merely to be outcroppings of his character) and his reasons for staying with his wife and not adding her to his list of victims—these must be thematically and causally connected. The plot, as noted, will follow his decision how to deal with his imminent dying: will he have an 'epiphany' and come to grips with who he really is and punish himself? will he kill his wife? will he slink off into obscurity? will he find a way to perpetuate himself and his deeds such that his evil lives on after him? what will he do with his tokens, i.e., the evidence of his deeds?

The protagonist will not be immediately likable, but he will be complex and intriguing. That has to be his hook. The sociopath, particularly the borderline personality, is inherently seductive. I don't conceive of him as being deformed physically—that seems too obvious, too done already. Yet, there has to be some interesting flaw that we keep coming back to. The wife, too, though a lesser character in terms of presence, will need to be filled out—even if she's mainly off-screen/stage, so to speak. She's got to play a prominent role in his thoughts, and her character must be, therefore, larger than life—I'm thinking Kohler's wife in Wm. Gass's The Tunnel, here. Each relationship will represent a deeper stage in his depravity, though the figures won't be so much symbolic as emblematic; one way I've been toying with is to have each 'victim' represent a missed opportunity for the protagonist along the course of his life, one which if he'd taken would have made his life less miserable (at least he believes).

Unlike the other three, I have yet to write a word on this novel. Nor have I outlined it. If I chose it, I would have a lot of work to do. The work would be fun, but hard; the psychic delving would be intense and isolating, calling perhaps for greater strength and stamina than the others. The other projects in this series have their elements of darkness, but this one would be a deeply dark canvas: entirely chiaroscuro, perhaps. There is less room for the sort of humor I was able to bring to EULOGY. One limitation: this novel demands to be written in first person POV and not free indirect style. EULOGY was an intense first person POV and took place over the space of one hundred hours of what amounted to solitude. I had hoped to try out my chops with the third person in writing this next book; and the other three books in this series certainly allow for that. First person POV is more like 'method acting' writing; free indirect style is somewhat less demanding, giving the writer some breathing space to be himself. If I choose this book, I will have to completely submerge myself in the character of this monster.

Other issues. Query: Could I make it a worthy contribution to the tradition of novels I mentioned above or would it be entirely derivative? Query: Could I make it more than a mediocre piece of psychological realism? Query: Is the subject matter simply too touchy for the current market—I mean, after all, doesn't the public want to see things from the POV of the good guy and to see the bad man get his comeuppance at the end?

As I mentioned, this is the type of novel I've long wanted to pursue. So, what's a boy to do?

Ur-story: Brian Boyd & Doing vs. Being

If you've been following WoW, you'll know we've been pursuing a theme-blog we've been calling Ur-story. As of this writing, we've put up twenty-six posts on this topic (not including this one). The point is to examine works of literature (mainly fiction) to see if we can discover something essential in/about/to them. We noted how James Wood in his How Fiction Works neglected to provide any coherent account of the notion of story in the working of fiction. He's not alone. Much of the 'theorizing' about literature we've seen ignores the centrality of 'story'. High-brow critics emphasize such elements as character, theme, voice, language, structure, etc. Social or cultural critics tend to focus on identity issues, social or historical context, ideological cues, power relations, etc. Popular criticism tends to highlight plot, pacing, familiarity, compliance with genre expectations, etc. None of this, It seemed to us, gets to the essence of why people go to movies and plays, watch sitcoms and police shows on television, read novels and short stories, are mesmerized by myths and legends. What gets people's attention and keeps them coming back for more is the stories. As William Gass says: "Stories are things that get told. They can exist outside of any particular medium or any particular method of narration."

We were struck by the lack of critical attention to this fundamental aspect of so many forms of literature. We were also struck by the lack of any clear, readily available discussion, definitions, parameters, outlines, etc. of what a story is. So, we decided to come up with one of our own, proceeding empirically through any number of texts.

One way of addressing the essence of story is to examine its origins (something we did with respect to the creation myth and the Gilgamesh epic). This is also the approach of Brian Boyd, Distinguished Professor of English at Auckland University, New Zealand, and Nabokov exegete, in his article "The Origin of Stories: Horton Hears a Who," in Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 197-214. The question is whether his analysis gets at the heart of things.

He locates the origin of story in evolutionary attention-seeking behaviors: "Not only do we like to command attention, we also enjoy simply sharing it with others, because this cements our place in a social group whose support we need." (198) These behaviors show up in crows, parrots, rats, chimps, cetaceans, and other species. But there is more to story-telling than there is to, say, birdsong or communal dances of chimpanzees. The jury is still out with respect to whale songs.

According to Boyd, the precursors to narrative, at a minimum, are an awareness of and an ability to comprehend things that happen to us, the mentality to replicate these things, the recognition of other minds and their intentions and actions, and language. But these proto-stories need be nothing other than gossip or a recounting of the day's events which carry with them certain attendant risks:

"it can be misleading and it can be boring. Fiction on the other hand removes the dangers of deceit or manipulation and offers the promise of interest. Since we develop the ability to detect and resist stories, like any other forms of communication, that we see as skewed toward tellers whose interests differ from ours, skilled storytellers secure our attention by appealing to our cognitive craving to comprehend the actions and intentions of others, while serving their own aims both through the attention they garner and through appealing to interests that we either share or can be made to think we share with them. Fiction therefore offers a win-win situation, a non-zero-sum game, an advantage for teller (benefit in attention and status, at a cost in imaginative effort), and for the listener (maximum cognitive interest at little cost except time).

An evolutionary model of fiction, therefore, should focus on ways storytellers, as active individual strategists, maximize the attention of their audience by appealing to features that have evolved to be of interest to all human minds, to our shared understandings of events, our shared predispositions to be interested in and engaged by what others do and our sheer readiness to share attention." (200)

Stories work, he says, because humans are essentially problem-solvers. We have goals we strive to attain. We encounter obstacles along the way. Sometimes those obstacles are other problem-solvers just like us whose goals conflict with our own or entail the stymieing of our own. Sometimes we mistake their intentions for hostility and sometimes we encounter genuine hostility. It is important to be able to tell the difference. Still, we are able recognize others in similar situations. We can identify individuals and link them with their projects. And we can, ultimately, sympathize with their plight.

"there are two essential forces behind the power of plot to command our continued attention to a story, and that these forces are best explained in evolutionary terms: first, our interest in whether or not agents achieve their goals, which arises from the natural sympathy creatures at a certain cognitive and social level can have for others of their kind; and, second, our unique human interest, because we have Theory of Mind, in knowing the full situation that will explain the whole story. For as soon as we appreciate false belief, we realise that mistakes can be made through not understanding the true situation" (208)

Boyd proceeds to analyze these aspects of storytelling in Horton Hears a Who, a story by that master storyteller Ted Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss.

He locates the origin of storytelling in the evolutionary psychology of attention-seeking. In our Ur-story series, we took a more empirical, or evidentiary approach—looking both at some of the earliest stories known (Gilgamesh, Job, Eden, Genesis) as well as at numerous examples. There are benefits to both approach. We wanted to know what lay at the heart of the stories themselves. Boyd was looking at their origins in the human mind: what human faculty produces stories and why. We are looking for essence (Go away, Emeril! BAM!). Origin and essence, one would think, should coincide or at least be reconcilable.

The inference we drew from our look at a number of texts was that the essence of story—and by this we mean great, profound, moving stories—lies in the ways in which the individual character attempts to come to grips with the inevitable sense of loss that accompanies his/her confronting his/her own mortality and ultimate death. This may, indeed, be explainable in Boyd's attention-seeking terms. There is a fundamental human truth at the heart of story (whether incorporated into myth, religion, fiction, drama, etc.) and those who have confronted that truth have found that the dramatic tension of a story is the best means of communicating this insight without seeming, for example, preachy or didactic. So, sure there is some crowing. We would be the last to deny we are evolutionarily conditioned in our thinking and artmaking, our storytelling.

(N.B. In fact, we would probably one of the last to deny that stories may have also, say, an imperialist or a paternalist bias, or be the product of unconscious Oedipal urges and instincts, or have hidden structural similarities. The more theories and analyses we bring to the text the merrier, as far as we are concerned, so long as the text will bear them.)

Boyd breaks his analysis down to agents and goals, on the one hand, and psychology, or what he calls Theory of Mind, on the other. Ego. These do not approach what we take to be the essence of story. Sure, it's great to have goals. And the story of how one goes about achieving them against all odds is important. But 'doing' is not the fundamental human truth—'being' is. How does the character react when she recognizes that "all flesh is grass" and her moral dilemmas, decisions, actions, triumphs, and ironies are truly inconsequential? How does the character cope with the hard, awesome reality that transcendence is a convenient fiction that we use to comfort ourselves in the face of indifferent reality? That is the hard task at the heart of stories that matter.