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.

I even took pleasure in inciting him to begin his philosophical instruction - a little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down the pants in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard

If nothing else I have learned to take Kierkegaard ironically, and once I do that I can enjoy his grim humor:

There was a man whose chatter certain circumstances made it necessary for me to listen to.  At every opportunity he was ready with a little philosophical lecture, a very tiresome harangue.  Almost in despair, I suddenly discovered that he perspired copiously when talking.  I saw the pearls of sweat gather on his brow, unite to form a stream, glide down his nose, and hang at the extreme point of his nose in a drop-shaped body.  From the moment of making this discovery, all was changed.  I even took pleasure in inciting him to begin his philosophical instruction, merely to observe the perspiration on his brow and at the end of his nose.  (56)*

Kierkegaard’s humor often comes from his inventiveness, as he pursues an idea, for example describing a true “knight of the faith” as an accountant who walks “as sturdily as a postman” and “thinks about the special hot dish which his wife has been preparing for him, a grilled lamb’s head garnished with herbs perhaps” – given the chance, “he will discuss it with a passion” (107), the grilled lamb’s head, a classic Danish dish which you should not Google if you do not want to see a photo of a grilled lamb’s head.  I am still not exactly sure what a “knight of the faith” is meant to be.

In a discussion of “demoniac despair,” Kierkegaard invents a sentient clerical error:

perhaps it was no error but in a far higher sense was an essential constituent in the whole exposition – it is then as if this clerical error would revolt against the author, out of hatred for him were to forbid to correct it, and were to say, “No, I will not be erased, I will stand as a witness against thee, that thou art a very poor writer.”  (158)

I suppose I should be pulling out some sharp aphorisms, too, but Kierkegaard is no G. C. Lichtenberg, and I find his inventions, these little characters than emerge, more amusing than his sayings, although those are not bad either.

The characters are part of the one part of Kierkegaard that I feel I misunderstand most fruitfully, the “Exordium” to Fear and Trembling in which he retells the story of Abraham and Isaac in four different ways, each with a variation not in action but in the psychological outcome.  Abraham, for example, is intentionally cruel to his Isaac in order to protect his son’s faith, to direct Isaac’s doubt or despair onto himself (so Abraham sacrifices not his son but himself).  Or in another version, the reverse:

But Abraham prepared everything for the sacrifice, gently and quietly, but when he turned aside and drew the knife, then Isaac saw that his left hand was clenched in despair and that a shudder passed through his body – but Abraham drew the knife.

Then they returned home and Sara hastened to  meet them; but Isaac had lost his faith.  No word of this has ever been mentioned in the world, and Isaac never spoke to anyone of what he had seen and Abraham never suspected that anyone had seen it.  (100)

So Abraham’s entirely human and understandable – almost necessary (that’s another one of the variations) – moment of doubt is destructive.

Kierkegaard immediately turns these scenarios to a complex argument about faith, dread, and despair that I did not understand at all.  Whatever fragments Auden used went unrecognized, except for the four stories themselves; whatever idea I was supposed to be following was replaced by an idea about narrativity, about how stories imply other stories, with especially rich stories implying many other stories.  Once each new story is recognized – told, written, imagined – it becomes a permanent part of the original story.  Maybe it was invented, maybe it was there all along.

Meanings accumulate, too, complementary or contradictory, but unresolvably so, because as stories they may well all be true.  Or many of them may be true. Or none. Who knows.

In other words, I recognized in Fear and Trembling the Kierkegaard of Borges and Derrida, or a simple outline of such a creature.  I read Kierkegaard, and all philosophy, as if it were literature, and perhaps too much as if it were about literature, but in this narrow case it really was.

*  Page numbers from The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard, so I have no idea which book this is from.

The really exciting part - or, too many machinery metaphors

There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: he may be considered as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these three – storyteller, teacher, and enchanter – but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer. (Vladimir Nabokov, “Good Readers and Good Writers,” Lectures on Literature, 1980, p. 5)

When I suggest, or directly state, that I do not care about plot, I am lying.*  I love good plots; I love good stories.  Who doesn’t?  Story is central to fiction, and in an important sense to all writing.  An argument is a story – “John Galt is worth reading, and here’s why.”  Maybe that's not a good story.  Readers, creative devils, fill in or make up stories when the one in front of them is insufficient.

Why so little attention, then, to story, or to plot, the mechanism that drags the story along?  My metaphor reveals my prejudices – even in many of the greatest novels, I can hear the clanking cogs and perhaps even see the novelist turning the crank.  Now, of course, novels run on electricity, and are quieter, but the internal contraption is similar.

In a review of Henning Mankell’s first Wallander mystery, Rohan Maitzen is able to compress her description of the mechanism of the novel into a single word, “procedural.”  The functioning of the procedural machine is so well understood that nothing else is necessary.  Maitzen can then concern herself with the interesting parts of the novel – atmosphere, the lead character, the light dusting of politics.

When I spent some concentrated time on mysteries a couple of years ago, I ended a week of posts by noting that six recent mysteries by six different writers, whatever their surface dissimilarities, all followed identical plot paths – the same dang thing over and over again, I called it.  One of the authors, Steve Hockensmith, actually read the posts and wrote an entirely reasonable piece about the ways he creates variety – tone, setting, theme.  But not form!  I concede that the mystery writer who makes too many custom modifications to the well-functioning machinery is probably no longer writing mysteries, but that hardly makes the standard plot interesting, by which I mean, worth writing much about.

I’ve picked on standard mysteries only because the genre is so well-understood, but the fact is that most fiction is not so different.  The stories told are old ones, the machinery built from standard blueprints, which hardly means I do not want to hear the stories again, any more than I dismiss a piece of music written in sonata form – oh, that old thing!  No, the old forms are capacious.  They seem capable of containing anything.  But then I want to spend my time playing with the unusual contents, not the container.

[A] great writer is always a great enchanter, and it is here that we come to the really exciting part when we try to grasp the individual magic of his genius and to study the style, the imagery, the pattern of his novels and poems.

The three facets of the great writer – magic, story, lesson – are prone to blend in one impression of unified and unique radiance, since the magic of art may be present in the very bones of the story, in the very marrow of thought. (5-6)

Nabokov concludes the talk, a sentence or two later, with his insistence that we read “the book of genius not with his heart [story], not so much with his brain [meaning], but with his spine.”  “[T]he book of genius” is a necessary qualifier.  The spine, one might note, is directly connected to the brain, and not so distant from the heart.  I fear I am too dismissive of story, and I know I’m too cavalier about meaning, but this is why – I’m excited by the really exciting part.

* I always laugh when I see a negative review praised as “honest” – e.g., “Thanks for the honest review, you brave truth-teller.”  All of my reviews and posts are dishonest, whether negative, positive, or wishy washy.

The same dang thing over and over again

I just started reading Alessandro Manzoni's On the Historical Novel (1850), which includes many of the arguments I and others have made this week, couched in a subtle, ironic rhetoric. I think it's ironic - maybe he means exactly what he says. So far, Manzoni has used his essay to completely demolish the historical novel: "it is the historical novel itself that is completely at fault."* Manzoni is himself the author of one of the best historical novels ever written, The Betrothed (1827), so perhaps I am misreading.

Regardless, it's full of useful ideas. I may return to it soon. A Professional Reader might have thought to look into the subject before writing so much. Ah well.

Anyway, my final complaint or concern or prejudice is more about books that come in series than about historical novels as such. The mystery series is the mode of our age, what people read. On trips to Germany, I have marvelled at the richness of the literary culture, about the attention received by serious books. But what do Germans really read, really, more than anything else? Mysteries that come in series. I'm using "mystery" generically, including thrillers and such - the Owen Parry novel I read claimed to be a "novel of historical suspense."

I know that people still write and read romances and sea stories and knights-in-armor stories. But I do not believe that those genres have the equivalent of the amazing rack of books I recently found in a library, a collection of knitting mysteries, and candle making mysteries, and gardening mysteries. Used book store mysteries. Antiquing mysteries. Pie mysteries. I am for some reason currently using a bookmark that advertises a series of handbag mysteries.**

Everything gets shoveled into mysteries now, including stories about the birth of Italian Futurism and stories about New York City midwives. When I described my pile of six mysteries, I didn't say anything about the plots, not because of concern about spoiling the surprise, but because the plots don't matter, not in any of them. The settings matter, a lot, and the choice of detail, and the voice. But the plot, the actual mystery in the mystery, is always just something pulled off the shelf of time-tested devices.

Because the clever author (and every author I tried was clever enough) knows that we cannot just march from the beginning of the mystery to the end, the story has to be well-larded with incidental material that slows us down, with each episode of the novel giving us 1) one piece of genuine information, 2) several interesting but in the end deceptive pieces of information, and 3) directions to the next episode. There must be writers who can break free of this formula. But if they do so, are they still writing mysteries?

So if I find myself wearied with the repetition found among six different authors, I can guess how I'd feel reading more books by the same author. Steve Hockensmith's cowboy Watson and Holmes are in four novels now. Besides the train, one's on a ranch in Montana, one's in San Francisco, one's in Texas. That's something. But they're really just the same dang thing over and over again, aren't they?

I suspect that's true of more authors than Hockensmith. It's not what I'm looking for in fiction. With some time - a year, years - I'm likely to try one of these authors again, probably Parry or Hockensmith. The memory of the original pleasure will have dimmed, and I will be ready to enjoy the same dang thing. That formula works in one way - I turned every page of every book, faster and faster until I got to the end.

* P. 72 of Alessandro Manzoni, On the Historical Novel, tr. by Sandra Bermann. University of Nebraska Press, 1984.

** Now if someone were to write or has written a pie sea story, I might just read it. 'Cause the idea is so stupid.

The taste for story - "Too - much - goin' - on!"

Back to that James Wood interview for a minute, and "the essential juvenility of plot." He said it, not me! Wood immediately admits that he doesn't really mean it anyway, he's exaggerating for effect.

Wood is not really making an argument here. He's just stating a preference, a preference for "fiction in which not a lot happens in obvious ways." It's a preference I share - give me Richardson over Fielding, Austen over Scott. Chekhov, Proust, Beckett. Give me Malone Dies (plot summary: Malone dies).

There's a distinction I should make between story and incident. Everyone wants a strong story. It's the taste for incident that really matters. Clarissa has only three or four major incidents, that, over the course of 200 pages, might make for a taut thriller. Over the actual 2,000 or so pages, they become secondary. Or look at Proust - a fair part of "Combray" is devoted to details about how the narrator falls asleep, and the climax is when our young hero runs off to say farewell to his favorite hawthorn bush.* Dumas (or Hugo, or Dickens), fills his long books with much more incident. A lot more just happens, even if the basic story is not much more complex.

The quote in the title is something meine Frau heard at a showing of the remake of Shaft. The dashes should be read as pauses, the inflection should be increasing - land hard on the last word. It's a brilliant piece of literary criticism. Incident is often mistaken for story, even by professional writers. A good action movie has a simple, possibly even mindless plot, but complicated episodes. Writers, like the Shafters, often get this wrong. We want fewer plot twists, but more cool incidents.

The taste for incident is sometimes described as immature (action movies, video games). We're supposed to outgrow it, just as we're supposed to cultivate or somehow acquire a taste for sophistication in music. Honestly, is this anything but snobbery? The use of incident can be extremely subtle. Orlando Furioso is almost nothing but incidents, piled up to the moon, ingeniously woven together. Ovid's Metamorphoses works similarly - the fragments and stories are individually brilliant, but the transitions are marvels.

My preferences are ceteris paribus. I prefer less to more, all else equal, but with the great writers, all else is never equal. Rabelais, Cervantes, Byron, Waugh - their wonderful books are bursting with activity. Now I don't know what to think. Maybe I like it all. Save that thought for tomorrow.

Anyway, this has to influence how I write about stories. If I don't put a high value on story, then I won't be as thoughtful about revealing surprises as I perhaps should. Maybe writing this out will remind me to be more careful. Probably not. De gustibus non disputandum est. Nonsense, we dispute other people's tastes all the time. But how often do we argue with our own?

* The most pathetic scene in all of literature? Marcel gives the hawthorn a big hug, tearing up his little suit and hat. What a great book.

The Watched Plot, Continued - Reader, I m****ed h*m

Although I have not read Jane Eyre, I know, through cultural osmosis, I guess, the entire story, including the last line* and the genuine “the ghost is actually a man in drag”-style plot twist. I know more about it than about any other major novel I haven’t read, except, possibly, David Copperfield (from a stage version at the Steppenwolf in Chicago) and Les Miserables (from the Jean-Paul Belmondo movie, the one set during World War II).

Has Jane Eyre’s pleasure been spoiled for me – no, I reject spoiled, I know that - say, blemished, or even appreciably diminished? Does it matter? I have strong, strong doubts. Surely Charlotte Brontë is a good enough writer to direct my response to where she wants it. I want to note that Jane Eyre’s plot twist is the actual title** of one of the most read and assigned books of feminist criticism, so I cannot be entirely alone here.

Dorothy W left a comment yesterday pointing out that there's an entire class of novels that have been so fully absorbed into the culture that a clean first reading is almost impossible: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula, The War of the Worlds, A Christmas Carol. Almost any famous fairy tale. Frankenstein has to be just about the worst, or best, case. How many first-time readers miss the actual story on the page in front of them while looking around for Igor and the pitchfork-wielding peasants and "Puttin' on the Ritz"?

Another example. The Hudson Review published, last fall, two first-rate excerpts from the Pevear and Volokhonsky War and Peace. One scene, one of the novel's half dozen greatest, involved the death of a major character. The assumption is that the magnificent details of Tolstoy's art override any objections. Still, they could have chosen a different scene.

I didn’t mind revealing that Little Nell dies at the end of The Old Curiosity Shop. For one thing, Oscar Wilde’s comment on her death may at this point be more famous than the novel itself. (A typical response to Wilde is probably "Wait, which novel has Little Nell?" Or "Who is Little Nell?").

Second, Nell’s death is not really what one would call a plot twist. Any attentive reader can see it coming from at least the halfway point of the book. Dickens in fact received a steady flow of letters begging him to let Nell live. These were not necessarily the most sophisticated readers, and they understood the foreshadowing easily enough.

Third, I don’t expect many of my readers to actually read the thing themselves, and those who do either aren’t reading for the story, which is not in and of itself worth the trouble. More on that tomorrow, maybe.

And here’s the thing – I was affected by Nell’s death anyway, in spite of everything. Almost physically affected, with a little emotional jolt. The final scene is a materpiece of pace and tension. Our taste for the sentimental may not be what it once was, but Dickens knew what he was doing. I know I won't have the same response on a second reading - I'll be poking around to see how he did it - but it was not the "what" that was important. It was the "how".

Who killed Roger Ackroyd? Who cares? That's another one I haven't read yet somehow know the twist. Still, I promise, I won't tell you. Unless I have a really good reason.

* Update: first line of last chapter, not last line. My excuse: "Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance." Thanks to Imani.

** No, the title isn't Jane Eyre's Plot Twist. It's the plot twist of Jane Eyre. No, not The Plot Twist of Jane Eyre. Look, I'm trying not to give it away.

A Watched Plot Never Spoils*

I hate the word “spoilers”. It will never be used here without quotation marks. Stories – novels, movies, whatever – whose primary value is suspense exist, certainly. But is a story that is actually spoiled, ruined, by having heard it before really worth hearing in the first place? Maybe, but any book like that is unlikely to show up at Wuthering Expectations. So forget spoiled – let's try a more substantive point.

I'll use James Wood to stake out an extreme case. In this interview, he claims to "make a point in my reviews of describing the entire book". He’s exaggerating – see his New Yorker review of the latest Richard Price novel, in which he covers a wide range of plot details, including what must be some key plot points, but actually leaves a lot back. Also, by the time most of us actually read the novel, we’ll (I'll) have forgotten almost everything Wood said. Our (my!) cognitive limitations are a separate issue, I guess.

Prof. N. Reading made some comments on the Wood interview that got me thinking. Prof. Reading makes some serious arguments against Wood, using The Mill on the Floss, which has a plot twist, as an example. She mentions the value of rereading for depth, but I assume everyone agrees about that. More interesting are her ideas, some very classroom centered, about the value or experience of the first reading. This is not primarily about the value of shock or surprise, but the development of a certain freedom of expectation. If we know the end, or the turning points, our reading is directed towards them. This is a source of depth - we notice the details of how the author gets us where she's going - but at the price of a sense of contingency, a constriction of our imaginative freedom. Once we know what happened, we risk forgetting what might have happened.

This is a serious point, worth thinking about by anyone who writes about books for a non-specialized audience (specialists reasonably write as if everyone has either already read the book, or never will). Please, Professor, let me know if I've mischaracterized your argument.**

Let me return to the extreme case for a moment. Homer, Ovid, the authors of The Poem of the Cid and the Niebelungenlied, all assumed that their readers (listeners, viewers) knew a version of whatever story they were telling. The emotional power of Aristotle's classic catharsis was supposed to occur when the audience already knew the story well. Writers like Euripides, our first postmodernist, played off of this knowledge in plays like Helen and Orestes, creating outrageous, expectation-shattering twists, possibly at the expense of catharsis.

But no matter how fundamental the story, there's always a first time, isn't there? At some point, likely, for most of us, long ago and completely forgotten, we had at least a brief moment when we feared that Abraham might really sacrifice his son. And if he did, that would mean ---. Then we got to the end of the story, and Isaac was alive, and the story meant this instead of that. But the possibility of that other meaning shadows the story.

It is obviously impossible to write seriously about books without describing what's in them, in detail - it's the details that matter. Otherwise, we could just read encyclopedia entries. I have to draw the line somewhere. Orestes kills his mother, and is tormented by the Furies. Moses dies without ever seeing the Promised Land. Robinson Crusoe gets off the island, eventually. And Jane Eyre - well, that would be telling. Tomorrow, I'll see how, if, when, I can tell.


* Not on Google – I can’t be the first, can I? Anyway, I am, for the moment, so proud of this bon mot that I want to copyright it. Must credit Amateur Reader. Anything else I write, who cares, copy away. Unless you’re a student working on a paper in which case, a) your teacher can tell when it's not your own writing and has Google, and b) show some dignity, man.

** I'm taking the argument seriously enough that I have skipped Blogging the Canon's posts about The Mill on the Floss, in order to preserve the surprise.