Tuesday, June 2, 2015

Is this book true? - John Crowley tells stories - he couldn't quite get at those secrets

The last line of Little, Big suggests that the John Crowley’s fairy novel may not be about fairies as such:

Even the weather isn’t as we remember it clearly once being; never lately does there come a summer day such as we remember, never clouds as white as that, never grass as odorous or shade as deep and full of promise as we remember they can be, as once upon a time they were.

Not fairies, but fairy tales, stories.  The novel is a pastiche of old stories, forms of stories, and stories about stories.  The method is to create something original by assembling and rearranging things created by others.  Thus a garden is lifted directly from Through the Looking Glass, and a fish from Rudyard Kipling or Richard Jefferies or both, and a photograph from the Cottingley Fairies hoax.  Characters take the place of birds and reenact the medieval Persian Conference of the Birds.  Folktale motifs are everywhere.  Santa Claus is a character for a single paragraph.  Every chapter begins with a quotation.  In Book 5: Augustine, Ben Jonson, Shakespeare (Coriolanus), and one from Thomas Love Peacock that just about knocks the wind out of the novel. The entire section is titled “The Art of Memory,” from the 1966 Frances Yates book on the history of memory systems.  The interaction between the novel and outside texts is dense and constant.

But the story itself is full of story-telling.  I know, now, from book blogs, that many readers actively loathe art about art and postmodern screwing around with stories.  Crowley’s novel is one of those.

Some of the story-telling metaphors that are built into the plot:

One character becomes a soap opera writer, transmuting the story I have been reading into another I only read about:

He save for the last a letter from Edgewood, some weeks in transit, a good long one from his mother, and settled to it like a squirrel to a large nut, hoping to find something within he could use for next month’s episodes.  (Book 6, Ch. I, “Carrying a Torch”)

His grandfather wrote children’s books about adorable animals.  Those also get looted for the soap opera.  Part of one of the children’s books, Brother North-wind’s Secret, is read aloud to me by a series of schoolchildren, so I get a good look at that kind of story.  This secret of this North Wind is different than the one in George MacDonald’s The Back of the North Wind.  The source of the children’s book are – well, one of my favorite jokes in the book.

Three characters, in succession, become devotees of an unusual pack of tarot cards, one that does not have the usual Major Arcana (no Death, Devil, or Hanged Man) but has a series of Least Trumps that include The Bundle, The Banquet, and Multiplicity, the latter being the governing principle of a tarot deck.  The seventy-three cards are constantly rearranged into many different stories that may or may not somehow imply a single larger story.  The latter idea is stolen directly from Italo Calvino.

There are, of course, books:

Books!  Opening with a crackle of old glue, releasing perfume; closing with a solid thump.  he liked them big; he liked them old; he liked them best in many volumes, like the thirteen on a low shelf, golden-brown, obscure, of Gregorovius’s Medieval Rome.  Those – the big ones, the old ones – held secrets by their very nature; because of his years, though the paragraphs and chapters passed each other under his scrutiny (he was no skimmer), he couldn’t quite get at those secrets, prove the book to be (as most books after all are) dull, dated, stupid.  They kept their magic, mostly.  (Book 3, Ch. III [Marlowe epigraph], “Books and a Battle”)

These old books lead the character to the book that is like another running joke, Architecture of Country Houses, the one book that could explain everything that goes on in the novel to its characters if they could only understand it or perhaps believe it.

“Dad,” Auberon said, “is this book true?”

“What book is that?”

Auberon held it up, waggling it to show the covers…  “Well, ‘true’,” he said, “’true’. I don’t know exactly what you mean by ‘true’.” Each time he said it the invisible doubt-quotes around the word became clearer.  (ellipses mine)

I have included a number of examples of Little, Big describing itself.  The final major self-description is the use of the Art of Memory, which I will save for tomorrow.  I also want to return to Calvino. And to that fish.

24 comments:

  1. I love how you pick apart the whole into innumerable pieces with their own background and source. There were references to many children's books in Little, Big which thrilled me, (Alice in Wonderland is not one of them) and the scene of the children in the classroom was fabulous. Thanks for reading with me; I'll be back when not on my iPhone in the vet's office.

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  2. So many references. I would love to see a catalogue. Like near the end, when the little kids are slightly freaked out by meeting, in person, the woman with the alligator purse from their jump rope song. Pretty funny.

    Do you remember your problems with Alice, by the way? I think that book is one of the great artistic achievements of the 19th century, and of the novel. Crowley is curiously careful to avoid Alice in Wonderland - too strong a book. Sylvie and Bruno is easier to absorb.

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    1. My problems with Alice in Wonderland probably lie primarily in reading it too young. I should read it again, with much more literature behind me now that I'm not a teenager anymore. I was just annoyed with the silliness of it, unable to jump into the fantasy at all. Perhaps I'll try it again one day, for I do love the beginning of Jabberwocky.

      I would also like to reread Little, Big and take note (make a catalogue as you say) of each reference I can find. There are so many of which to take note.

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    2. Teenage opinions don't count and should be discarded. Childhood opinions, by contrast, count for a lot and should be treasured.

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  3. Well, you have opened a can of worms with the notion that a book (writing) is "true." I wonder what that means. Is it too simple-minded to say that the only writing worth reading must be "true" -- and that must be defined (not in a subject way but) in a universal, Platonic way? But that might just be dim-witted babbling from your neighborhood curmudgeon.

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  4. Yes, very tricky, especially in fiction, which in some sense is entirely false but in another can be full of truth. How can false things - stories about fairies - be true? Yet they can.

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    1. Just like I find Biblical stories Truth. Perhaps the Truth comes from what the story represents.

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  5. I also felt like Little, Big was trying to "create something original by assembling and rearranging things created by others"; that feeling, plus the presence of fairies, reminded me of another book in the same vein: So long, Luise by Celine Minard, with its mixture of Arno Schmidt's Faun, Nabokov's Lolita and Ada (even stealing the touch of a three-petaled orchid), Alice in Wonderland, Le grand Meaulnes, Kipling's Them, Oberon and Titania, Queen Mab, pixies, himantopodes with their long strap-like feet, living Sheela Na Gigs, Sade, etc.

    If some reviews of So long, Luise are to be believed, Minard's readers, just like Little, Big's readers, still share with Desire Nisard his distaste for "l'art pour l'art".

    Off topic. I'd like to ask you to please join Eric Chevillard's Benevolent Association for the Demolishing of Nisard. Its motto: "Nisard is the slime at the bottom of every fountain. Irretrievably, there has been Nisard. How can we love benches, knowing that Nisard often pressed them into service? [...] Strawberries are the less delectable for Nisard’s love of them. [...] Sharing his filthy bathwater would inspire no greater disgust". That last sentence, of course, was copied from Victor Hugo's "We feel great disgust when swimming in the same ocean he once bathed in".

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  6. Hey, I have read that Chevillard book! I fear that if I attempt to demolish Nisard I might become him.

    I love hearing about the Minard book. Perhaps someday I will have the chance to read it.

    The Little, Big readalong had a surprisingly high casualty rate.

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    1. I know! What happened?! I thought we had at least eight...I suspect we need a better hostess next time. :)

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    2. I am pretty sure not a single one of the other participants reads Wuthering Expectations, so it would be rude for me to speculate.

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    3. I think it was a big book for a busy time; you can either devote a lot of time to it or you'll feel a bit lost. At least that's the case for me. I read it straight through in the first two weeks of May, or I knew I would lose momentum and become buried. That's the only problem with a read-along for me; I can't take weeks and weeks with it.

      So glad, Tom, for the opportunity to discuss this with you, Helen (a gaullimfrey) and Lory. Also, I know that Frances of Nonsuch Book has been reading it.

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    4. I tried to make time for it, but even with advance notice, May was not the month. I keep skimming through it to read posts like this one, though.

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    5. Skimming, that would be interesting. You will have read a kind of dream-version of this dream-novel.

      Simply not having the time, that I understand. The complaints about rhythm and "time tolerance" were more puzzling.

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  7. Characters take the place of birds and reenact the medieval Persian Conference of the Birds.

    How remarkable that scene must be! I'm getting a big Master and Margarita vibe from this novel, perhaps unreasonably.

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  8. Crowley had been working on the book for several years with no idea where it was going. He says reading The Conference of the Birds gave him both a structure and an ending.

    I have not read Bulgakov, but I think there are some similar pastiche elements. It does not matter if every piece jammed into the novel fits smoothly together.

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    1. I have read Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, but I don't see obvious connections between the two other than some magical realism. I found Bulgakov's book much darker with a real sensation of evil.

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    2. Isn't Master and Margarita a kind of pastiche novel? Gogol + Dostoevsky + Goethe and other versions of the Faust story? That's the postmodern element, I thought, the use of the old stories and texts.

      There's no satire in Little, Big. That's a big difference.

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    3. We might as well throw in Balzac (Le peau de chagrin) and Leonid Andreyev (Satan's Diary) into the mix.

      Master and Margarita is my favorite 20th. Century novel because it's extremely successful in its technical implementation. To pick one from many possible examples: there are two main plot-lines: 1)The Jesus and Pilate story, which is told hyper-realistically with all the original supernatural elements removed; and 2)Woland the demon's visit to Moscow, which is told a la Gogol, filled with supernatural elements discordantly for a contemporary setting.

      At the conclusion, the Jesus and Pilate story switches to a muted supernatural mode and Woland's plot-line becomes the Master and Margarita's muted supernatural ending; both finish in a kind of limbo or bardo, half-way between Tolstoy's religious tales and Andreyev's ones.

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    4. Crazy. Sounds impossible. Now that is a skilled use of the tools of fiction.

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  9. Somebody gave me a copy of this years ago, but I never read it and I think I got rid of it. Now I think maybe I should read it...

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  10. I love this about all the sources and I like how they are all 'jammed together' as you say, rather like the house itself. I am reading my way slowly through your posts, they are all fascinating.

    RT above mentioned Plato and I feel a there's a bit of Plato's cave in here somewhere, but that might be misremembering. I really should get back to reading this (once I've finished devising fresh tortures for my students in their English exams).

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  11. Jean - yes. I will just mention - not that I have not made this clear enough - that Crowley writes with the arsenal of Modernist techniques. Helen wrote about this a bit. Some readers have had real problems with the pace or "rhythm" of the novel, but how it is so different than Faulkner of One Hundred Years of Solitude or Pale Fire escapes me.

    Plato - oh yes, the cave, exactly. The real fantasy of the novel is the idea that there are some characters who can turn around and see, however dimly, the objects casting the shadows. Or, to use Schopenhauer's terms, they can look behind the veil, beyond Representation, to get a glimpse of the Will, the Real. It turns out that behind the veil, there is another veil, and the move out of Plato's cave is not into the sun but into a somewhat better lit cave.

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