Occasional Prose (25 page)

Meet Silas Flannery, author of innumerable best sellers that girdle the globe; a Zeus of the realm of book-production; legitimate successor to the old titan, creator of James Bond; at present residing on a mountain-top in Switzerland while in the grip of a majestic writing block, on a scale suitable to his fame and his royalties as well as the Alpine scenery. This sun-like figure’s momentary (it is hoped) eclipse is spreading grief and terror among publishers, agents, banks, advertising firms, sponsors of the brands of liquor to be drunk by his characters, the fashions they are to wear, the tourist spots they are to visit, all stipulated by contract and now in jeopardy. Not solely the powerful corporate giants of the West but the infant economies of small developing countries expecting to be “put on the map” by a brief stopover of the old Irish author’s imaginative progeny on their beaches or coral reefs. As in the case of Demeter grieving for Persephone, a whole world or, rather, industry is in mourning for the stricken creator who does nothing but write in a diary and observe through a spyglass a young woman in a deck chair on a terrace at the bottom of the valley who is reading a book.

Our first acquaintance with Silas Flannery (other than the gossip relayed by Ermes) is made through a text,
In a network of lines that enlace
. The “I” of the narrative is an elderly jogger, a visiting professor at an unnamed university who, if I am not mistaken, has some of the lineaments of Nabokov’s Kinbote. It is only a shadow, though, as one might say “Shades of Charles Kinbote,” or, as the words “Belgian,” “Bernadette,” “Jojo,” in conjunction with the previous narrative, make one wonder whether a cloud called Simenon has not passed overhead. There is no question, I repeat, of parodies here. There are faint resemblances, delicate reminders, some so evanescent that they cannot be pinned down to any one author or even school (Why do I sense that Ukko Ahti has something to do with Hungarian literature or just with the way Hungarians
talk
about Hungarian literature?), while others, for instance the Japanese novel,
On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon
, do seem to represent a whole distinct class of book. That “magic” effect, however, as Calvino (the real one) modestly lets us see, is produced by the manipulation of certain key words such as ginkgo tree, moon, waterlily, leaves, and certain stage properties such as suki-yaki and the kimono.

In general, though, what we are offered is ten volatile distillations of the novelistic essence bottled in ten diverse scent-containers. The little narratives are evocative in the same way as the white butterfly that flies across the valley from the book page the young woman is reading to alight on the page Silas Flannery is writing. What makes the white butterfly so poignant? What does it evoke? Literature, I suppose, because it is softly telling us that it is an author’s device, a symbol; we are given an almost stolen glimpse of the author putting in a symbol. But, beyond symbolizing a symbol, it also evokes the errant, fluttery nature of communication, the perishability of message and messenger (it is an ephemerid), and conceivably the old lepidopterist, Nabokov, still haunting the Swiss peaks and valleys where he spent his last years. Yet if there
is
such an allusion it is less an
omaggio dell’autore
than a smiling acknowledgment of a presence.

A presence that in my opinion is wrongly evoked in connection with Italo Calvino, even though I have just been guilty of doing so, led on by the white butterfly. In the first place, I cannot escape the feeling that Calvino is no admirer of Nabokov, who likes to treat the reader as an adversary in a one-way hide-and-seek game. In the second place, I can see no influences at all at work on “the new Calvino,” even of writers he has quoted admiringly in his critical prose, no literary genetic imprint, no trace of Borges, for example; if there is a hereditary line to be found, it winds back, surely, to the Orient, where all tales come from. There is an over-all congeniality with Queneau, but that is a matter of a shared playfulness, on the one hand, and a shared interest, on the other, in the possibility of literature as a semi-mathematical science, with laws to be detected.

In any case, we get to know Silas Flannery through the narrative of the old jogger, and, when we get to know him in person in Chapter 8, which is composed of extracts from his diary, we can distinguish autobiographical elements, quite recent ones, in
In a network of lines that enlace
having to do with “forgetting himself” in the presence of young women. And this in turn allows us to distinguish the real Silas Flannery from the false one; there are
two
sets of pages signed with his name, the second,
In a network of lines that intersect
, being the handiwork of his devilish counterfeiter, Ermes Marana.

When we examine the counterfeit, a curious literary phenomenon comes to light. If embarrassing autobiographical elements, creeping into the first fragment, seem to vouch for its authenticity, the counterfeit reveals itself as such in a not dissimilar fashion: the personality of its true author has “bled” into the work, which is volubly preoccupied with kaleidoscopes, with the “polydyptic theatre” (in which numerous small mirrors lining a large box turn a bough into a forest, a lead soldier into an army, and so on), and finally with a financial empire based on catoptrics, i.e., done with mirrors. In these involuntary revelations we are encountering the phenomenon known to medicine as ecchymosis (to use a Calvino-like word): an oozing of blood into the tissues as the result of a bruise. In other words, the wound and the bow. Ermes Marana’s obsession with the dark arts of imitation, seeping into
In a network of lines that intersect
, betrays it as a forgery, just as in the old jogger’s fragment a misfired pass made at a girl student proves (unless we have to do with a very clever and knowledgeable copyist) that it is a genuine Flannery. Thus a work can be “read” as an Identikit portrait of the author lurking inside it, unaware of giving himself away.

Of course there is nothing really new here. This kind of literary detection was initiated many years ago by Miss Caroline Spurgeon, who was the first to count the images in Shakespeare’s plays, paving the way for a deconstruction of Shakespeare’s own image (“Others abide our question, Thou smilest and art still”) as a deep, fathomless person. And it was early in the century when Freud induced Leonardo to betray his secret. These are all modes of “reading” that many of our contemporaries vastly prefer to the older, “passive” kind. Lotaria, as a matter of fact, is still working the Spurgeon territory, drawing up lists of words used in a given novel or group of novels in the order of the frequency of their occurrence; her computer has proved invaluable to her in her labors, whose purpose is to catalogue novels in terms of atmosphere, mood, social background, and so on, thereby eliminating the wastefulness inherent in traditional reading habits. She is writing her thesis on Flannery, who finds himself unnerved by the prospect, unable to write a word in case it be “counted” against him by the electronic brain.

Meanwhile, in the seventh chapter, we have come upon a fresh kind of reading. The Reader, invited by Ludmilla to wait for her at her apartment, is seen “reading” the apartment in order to read Ludmilla. Nothing of course is more common. Who has not “read” a house, a set of bookshelves, a medicine cabinet, in the owner’s absence? It is true that the objects in Ludmilla’s house—or anyone else’s—are “elements of a discourse.” But with this reading of Ludmilla’s house something different is starting to happen. This is at once felt by the pronouns, which suddenly shift places. Here at Ludmilla’s, the “You” familiarly addressed is no longer the Reader; it is Ludmilla. “Calvino” is now speaking to her directly, over the head of the Reader, who has become a “he,” that is, almost an intruder. And this reversal of the pronouns presages another, sweeter event. Before you can say Jack Robinson, they are in bed together, having metamorphosed into a “You,” second-person plural, a single two-headed “
Voi
,” two young heads on a pillow. And now half this plural is “reading” Ludmilla’s body, her fleshly envelope, as, before she came home, for want of better, he was reading every crevice of the container that is her apartment. And Ludmilla is reviewing
his
body but more cursorily “as if skimming the index.” The plot has thickened.

Separation, naturally, follows. He travels to Switzerland to find Silas Flannery. We learn of his visit from entries in Flannery’s diary—another mold in which the traditional novel may be cast; we have already had the epistolary form in Marana’s letters to the publisher. From the diary too, we learn of another of Marana’s diabolical machinations—his arrangement with a Japanese combine to pirate Silas Flannery’s complete works. Not exactly pirate, though—copy the model, using native workmanship. As Marana has explained to the old writer, “the great skill of the Japanese in manufacturing perfect facsimiles of Western products has spread to literature.” Without revealing his own part in the fraud, he shows Flannery a book signed “Flannery” that Flannery has never written; a firm in Osaka has managed to get hold of the formula. Now the flood of imitations re-translated—or, rather, translated—into English will be indistinguishable from his personal output.

It is a nice touch that the Japanese novel that takes up the next pages should be, if not a perfect facsimile, at least a fair imitation of one, plausible enough to pass inspection in a drugstore paperback rack. Only two more samples remain to be exhibited. The Reader and the Other Reader after a number of vicissitudes are about to be reunited. We readers have seen pass in review, like a series of floats, to our cries of delight and recognition, a parade of the types and varieties of narrative experience, many of them in native costume with flags borne by persons having names like Ponko and Arkadian Porphyrich.

It is better than a parade. It is a
Summa fictionis
of scholastic rigor and, like all glorious codifications of divine mysteries, it has to do with love. The act of reading, when finally consummated, is seen to be parallel to the act of love. And at the same time, lest the foregoing seem too awesome for a book so sweet-natured and shyly merry, there is something here suggestive of an old-fashioned small-town garage (maybe an old Fiat place) with a car inside that has the hood up and a jack or so underneath. An inventor in a white coat, the top mechanic, is lovingly tinkering with it, tuning the engine and listening like a doctor. Just about every part of it is worn out and begging for replacement. It is a lovely piece of junk. And yet when the inventor shuts down the hood and takes his place at the wheel of the contraption, removing his white coat (or maybe he is wearing a white short-sleeved jump suit), it actually moves, responding to the slightest touch of the accelerator pedal. And what does it run
on
? I think it must run on suspense, an organic natural product that nobody, not even (so far) our inventor, can tell us much about. If I can try to read his mind, I will say that, in the formula for suspense tentatively set out there, one should find at least three parts sex.

June 25, 1981

Politics and the Novel

S
OMEONE SAID THE OTHER
day that the American novel was, of course, not political: By comparison with the European novel—say Zola and the Russians—our home product was primarily domestic, unconcerned with public affairs. It was a surprise to me to learn that this strange notion was taken for granted—a truism—by common opinion; to me it was a new idea. At once a contrary list sprang into my mind,
The Bostonians
and
The Princess Casamassima
lining up with Henry Adams’s
Democracy
; behind them marched
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, (“did much to hasten the American Civil War”—
Oxford Companion to English Literature
) and
The Blithedale Romance
, Hawthorne’s satire on the Brook Farm experiment in communal living; ahead were Dos Passos’
U.S.A.
,
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, right up to Norman Mailer’s
Why Are We in Vietnam?

Indeed, Americans, I think, tend to get their political education through fiction—occasionally through poetry, though this is becoming rarer. Today a novel such as E. L. Doctorow’s
The Book of Daniel
, currently a film, seems to have no other design than to excite a belief in the innocence of the Rosenberg couple or to reinforce a disbelief already held as to the charges against them. I do not know whether the Doctorow book changed anybody’s mind on this subject—how could it, seriously, being fiction, deal with a concrete instance of fact?—but fictions do sway us to the right or left, and Americans, I suspect, more than most.

I can cite a case—my own—of a young person’s being altered politically by a novel, but I cannot explicate the process, let alone explain it in terms of the author’s intention or literary strategies. I believe there is often something accidental in these things, as with love, which gives them a feeling of fatality.

When it happened to me, at the age of twenty, it was the first time. I was probably not very susceptible politically; the year I was fifteen I had read an entire set of Tolstoy with no effect that I recall on my belief system. I was an atheist, a romantic, and an arch-conservative (except at elections, when I was a Democrat); none of this could have come to me from Tolstoy. The first real dent on my Cavalier-period armor was made in my senior year at Vassar in Miss Peebles’s course in Contemporary Prose Fiction, where we studied “multiplicity” and “stream of consciousness” and were assigned
The 42nd Parallel
by Dos Passos as an example of those trends. I fell madly in love with that book—the first volume of the trilogy that was going to be
U.S.A.
No doubt the fervor of emotion—an incommunicable bookish delight—had been preparing in me for some time through other “social” books, just as two mild bee-stings may prepare you for a third that is fatal. I had been telling my friends, and believing, that in politics I was a royalist—an impractical position, I knew, for an American, since we did not even have a kingly line to restore. At the suggestion of one of those anxious friends, I had read Shaw’s
The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism
, but it rolled right off me, water off a duck’s back. Then came
The 42nd Parallel
.