John Barth's X Factor

As I’ve noted in previous posts, I have a job that has expected and unexpected downtime on a regular basis, so I bring whatever book I am currently reading with me nearly everywhere I go.  As way of small conversation, I get asked almost daily what I’m reading, what it’s about, how I like it.  The responses to my answers concerning John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor have been quite amusing.  When I read the title and hold up the book to reveal its cover, which has a colored wood-carving-style illustration of a man in colonial dress and a tri-cornered hat reclining under a tree with a sack of tobacco, an opened book, and a long-stemmed pipe, the most common reaction is a confused, panic look that tells me they don’t know if they should respond with sympathy, horror, or excitement.  Then as I explain that it’s a novel from 1960 set in England and Colonial America at the end of the 17^th century about a 30-year-old virgin trying to find his claim to fame as the Poet Laureate of Maryland and all the misadventures he has, the confused look only gets more desperate.  Then I add that it is written in the style of 18^th century novels like the ones Henry Fielding wrote.   Oh.  Wow.  How quickly can we change topics, their eyes plead. 

No matter how much I effused about how fantastic the book is, I could not make anyone interested in reading the book much less eager to find out what makes the book so brilliant.

The Sot-Weed Factor is nothing short of amazing.  From the construction of the sentences to the tangling and untangling of the grand arc of the plot, John Barth does everything right.  It is a book that is intelligent, fun, bawdy, insightful, wandering, focused, and a joy to get lost in.  The choice to use the language and structure of the 18^th century novel may seem like a gimmick at first, but the style is in fact critical to the feel and thrust of the novel.  The narrator, though not actually a character in the novel, becomes essentially that, and it is impossible to separate the tone and presentation from the substance of the novel.  I could not imagine this story being told in any other way.  To use 20^th century language and sensibility to render the tale would be to make the world created at odds with our relationship to it as readers.  Barth employs instead an immersion technique.  When I think of the breadth of the story and Barth’s commitment to understanding the language, the sentence structures, the idioms, and the style of writing he is imitating, I am awestruck, even more so when I realize that he has managed to make the style his own.  If the plot and substance were nothing more than hollow playthings, I would be in love with this book.

But the plot and substance are as dazzling as the prose.  Not only does Barth twist and turn the plot, mercilessly torture and tickle his characters, but he does so with a sense of thematic purpose.  In his introduction to the novel, written 26 years after the novel was published, Barth notes that the theme of his grand opus is innocence: 

I came to understand that innocence, not nihilism, was my real theme, and had been all along, though I’d been too innocent myself to realize that fact.  More particularly, I came to appreciate what I have called the ‘tragic view’ of innocence: that it is, or can become, dangerous, even culpable; that where it is prolonged or artificially sustained, it becomes arrested development, potentially disastrous to the innocent himself and to bystanders innocent or otherwise; that what is to be valued, in nations as well as in individuals, is not innocence but wise experience.

But I add to Barth’s evaluation my own: that this book is about identity, who we are, and how we know ourselves.

I could point out dozens of recurring themes and tropes in the novel, but like tributaries feeding a raging river, they all trickle back to the question of identity. 

For example, there is the theme of storytelling throughout the novel.  Everyone Ebenezer (our protagonist) encounters has a story to relate to him.  In fact, at times the plot feels like a string of short stories.  Through these stories, Ebenezer comes to understand how the world works, as he travels down the road from innocence to wise experience, and who he is in relation to all these others.  The stories are filled with truths and lies as everyone attempts to define themselves and their place in the world, even if only to advantage themselves or manipulate poor Ebenezer.  There is an hilarious scene in the first quarter of the novel, in which Eben, stuck in a stable with no pants and covered in his own shit, tries to figure out how to clean himself.  A man of learning, he decides to lean on the brilliant minds that came before him, searching the annals of literature for a solution to his problem.  It is a ridiculous and beautiful pursuit that ends with him finding no real-life application of his literary predecessors.  But it is precisely this sort of real-life knowledge that comes from the stories he gets from his fellow travelers.  In the end, Ebenezer is right to search through previous human experience, but he goes to the wrong source.  And every story he encounters and tucks away helps him to understand himself and his relationship to the world.  Experience is self-knowledge.

There are aphorisms; discussion of cosmophilism; a backdrop of political intrigue, revolutions and opium trafficking; a look into twins; the power and ramifications of signing your name; disguises and stolen identities; slavery and indentured servitude; laws and manipulative power—dozens of thematic variations that play like individual instruments in the creation of a grand concerto.  For the analytical reader, there is so much to feast upon, so many connections to make, and as much as I would like to lay out everything I discovered here, I will let you do the discovering for yourself.  But that can only happen if you pick up the book and take the journey yourself.  If you do, you won’t regret it.

The Music Falters - Another Installment in the Dance to the Music of Time

First off, let me welcome you to the 1960’s!  This journey began back in 1923, and we are finally cutting into the 5th decade.  Ironically, our first step forward is a step backward as we return to number 39 on our list, the twelve-volume work by Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time. 

My editions of A Dance to the Music of Time comes in four volumes, each volume titled as a “movement,” as in a symphonic work.  This format naturally gathers the books into four sets of three.  As I was well into Book V, however, it seemed to me that the books might want to be three sets of four, for it feels like Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant is the beginning of something new.  The first of the two factors that give it that feeling is the opening scene of a bombed-out pub.  The war, looming in the background of At Lady Molly’s, has struck London at last.  Of course, the entire story is told as memories spurred on by that opening scene, so the war is held at bay for at least one more novel, but the faded scene of destruction colors the whole of the activity that follows it.  The second factor is the postponing of most of the familiar story lines that we have followed thus far in favor of introducing us to new characters.  Widmerpool makes only the briefest of appearances; Templer is absent entirely, as are his sister Jean and his ex-wife Mona; Quiggin is nowhere to be seen and Members pops in for one short scene.  We spend more time with the Tollands, but mostly with characters we missed out on in previous novels.  All of this gives the impression that Powell is setting the stage for some new events to unfold in the upcoming novels.

Unfortunately, I found Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant, in spite of its fantastic title, to be one of the least interesting entries in the series.  It felt like it had a lot of potential to make great connections, but finally failed to do so.  The big political event, for example, that places us in time is the abdication of Edward VII in 1936.  This idea of abdication was hinted at in other relationships too, as in Maclintick and his wife, and Moreland’s potential abdication of his responsibilities toward Matilda.  As I looked about for more thematic connections, I was left holding a handful of ideas without any real textual evidence to bind them together.  More than abdication, Powell is looking at the institution of marriage and the pressures it places on the people at its center—which is a topic that Powell has already plumbed in previous novels.

Another theme seemed to be the collision of the old with the new, as emblematized by the titular restaurant: 

The name Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant offered one of those unequivocal blendings of disparate elements of the imagination which suggest a whole new state of mind or way of life.  The idea of Casanova giving his name to a Chinese restaurant linked not only the East with the West, the present with the past, but also, more parochially, suggested by its own incongruity an immensely suitable place for all of us to have dinner that night.

I saw traces of this theme in the weakening of Jeavons and the passing of St. John Clare, as well as the way that local deaths and events were overshadowed by the looming crisis in Europe.  But like the idea of abdication, these connections seem to be more in my mind than textually grounded in any thorough way.  And like his handling of marriage, Powell has been dealing with these clashes from the beginning of the series, so again there is not much new here.  I am perhaps asking too much of the novel to draw out these connections and to play with these themes.  Presumably the novel does precisely what Powell wants it to do.  I was just left a little flat when it was all said and done.

The novel is of course excellently written and the characters are as compelling as always, but the trend of each novel being better than the last in the series has faltered here.  I expect that it has done so to introduce new characters and complications to be mined in the novels still to come.  Only time will tell.  I’ll pick up with the sixth book in the series, The Kindly Ones, after another seven novels, when I reach 1962.

A Lunch of Naked Side Dishes

I was very nervous going into Naked Lunch.  I’ve never found Ginsberg’s poetry particularly thrilling, and my latest experience with Kerouac’s On the Road left me wanting much more than it was able to give.  I saw Cronenberg’s adaptation of Burroughs’s book when it came out in 1991, but I remember very little about that experience except the William Tell scene and my being generally confused and disturbed. 

I am happy to report that Naked Lunch is nowhere near as bad as I feared, even if it is not nearly as good as I would have hoped.  At its most brilliant moments it is a dystopic novel about a place called the Interzone.  In the final quarter of the novel (when it is at its best), Burroughs lays out the major characters and political parties of the Zone.  Connections that had been alluded to are made clear, and a clever, if bizarre, world comes into focus.  Personally, I wanted to spend a lot more time rooting around in the politics of power and control that are at the heart of the Interzone and that are clearly of great interest to Burroughs himself.  At its worst moments it is a collection of narratives about emotionless and cruel sexual encounters in which Burroughs seems to challenge himself to create the most disturbing images he can while including as many bodily fluids and orifices as possible.   In these section characters come and go (pun intended) with names but without presence, making no emotional claim on the reader and requiring no additional thought.

In the section titled “Atrophied Preface,” which of course comes near the end of the novel, Burroughs offers us insight into what he is stabbing at in this novel.  Burroughs himself complained that critics need to judge a book by how well it succeeds at doing what it sets out to do rather than judge it by what they want the book to do.  While I think that is a problematic approach to criticism since it demands that we know the author’s intentions and it assumes that art does what the artist intends and nothing more, I am happy to work within his parameters here.

Obviously central to Naked Lunch is junk and the physical effects junk has on the junkie.  Within the novel itself and in the “Atrophied Preface,” Burroughs emphasizes that junk affects the brain in such a way that the user cares only about the junk and nothing else, that it switches off the part of the brain that lets us respond emotionally to the world around us:

Morphine having depressed my hypothalamus, seat of libido and emotion, and since the front brain acts only at second hand with back-brain titillation, being a vicarious type citizen can only get his kicks from behind, I must report virtual absence of cerebral event.  I am aware of your presence, but since it has for me no affective connotation, my affect having been disconnect by the junk man for the nonpayment, I am not innarested in your doings . . . Go or come, shit or fuck yourself with a rasp or an asp—‘tis well done and fitting for a queen—but The Dead and the Junky don’t care . . .

That lack of “affective connotation” is the defining tone of the novel.  Within the covers of the book, no one cares about anyone else.  People interact with each other; talk; buy drugs; invade every orifice; work nooses around necks; cover each other with shit, piss, and semen; but through it all, there are no “affective connotations.”  The result is a heartless and compassionless world full of human-like shells.  Burroughs succeeds perfectly in communicating this aspect of the junky life.  The difficulty is that such an approach gives the reader nothing to hold on to, nothing to emotionally engage with, so that all we are left with is disgust or intellectual curiosity. 

Personally, I prefer to have something to feel, but I can’t fault Burroughs for not wanting to give me that.  It does seem odd though that Burroughs wants to claim that the murder scenes are anti-capital-punishment.  To move us to be against capital punishment he first has to . . . move us.

Also in his “Atrophied Preface,” he notes:

There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing . . . I am a recording instrument . . . I do not presume to impose ‘story’ ‘plot’ ‘continuity’ . . . Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function . . . I am not an entertainer . . .

Yeah, that’s a weird thing to say.  I don’t know anyone who writes about “what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing.”  Aside from that bizarre notion, it is here that Burroughs succeeds by failing.  Those moments when story, plot, and continuity are forced into the novel during the Interzone passage—those are the moments that the book is most entertaining and most gripping.  The book achieves in spite of itself.

Many readers have observed that they quit reading in the middle of the novel.  I suspect that they all quit during the plotless portion of hangings and degradation and meaningless orgies.  My advice is to push through those middle doldrums, for  Dr. Benway and the Interzone are waiting on the other side with some food for the intellect even as it starves the emotions.

Achebe Brings It All Together When Things Fall Apart

As always, there are spoilers ahead:

It is readily accepted that an ending can make or break a story.  No matter how fantastic the characters or how moving their struggles, if the ending doesn’t satisfy us, we will leave the tale with a bad taste in our mouths.  Conversely, a mediocre telling of a banal set of events can suddenly become great art if it all amounts to something magnificent at the end.

Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is a fantastic example of an ending being able to lift a story well above its station.  At no point is the novel mediocre or banal, but I did not feel the magic of the story until the last two pages.  Up to that moment, I thought Achebe had pulled together a collection of well-told and interesting stories about Okonkwo’s tribe and eventually their encounter with the white missionaries.  But the vines of his narrative, which seemed to weave in and out of each other in beautiful but barren patterns, suddenly bore fruit in the final 30 pages, building up to an unexpected climax that brought color to the vines themselves.

 I was interested in Okonkwo and why Achebe would choose to make his character the heart of his narrative.  What was Achebe saying about Okonkwo’s overwrought masculinity?  Why is it important to follow a character with such disdain for others who have failed?  Why is it important that Okonkwo is a warrior?  Why must he treat his wives and kids so rottenly?  All these questions and more ran through my head as I read, but I found no good answers.  I understood Okonkwo’s motivations and his history, his ambitions and his fear—I just didn’t know why Achebe wanted to tell his story.  It wasn’t until I hit that ending and saw Okonkwo’s body hanging from the tree that I found myself catapulted back through the novel to re-evaluate and examine what I had already read.

Things Fall Apart is a huge success because it never idealizes the past or Okonkwo’s people.  It is important that Okonkwo be an ugly person and that his people engage in appalling behavior, like the murder of twins and the seemingly unmotivated murder of Ikemefuna.  These are not a herd of starry-eyed and loving wildlings who are beset upon by the greedy and vicious white man.  These are people with a complex social order and a full set of recognizably human beings.  They have fears and jealousies and ambitions and cruelties.  Anyone can make us feel for the pains of an innocent, but only an artist can make us suffer for those whose hands are bloody.  For all Okonkwo’s shortcomings, he was a man who faced a ton of adversity and came out on top.  He is a warrior aching to prove his manliness.  This is a man who will not lie down and die when the going gets rough.  So to see him pushed to suicide—my God!  I knew that I was feeling hopeless about the inevitable clash between the colonialists and the natives, but to know that he saw it too is heartbreaking.  He knew his people would not fight.  He knew that he could not fight them all.  He knew there was nothing to be gained by going down swinging.  His son was lost to him.  His clansmen were lost to him.   His world would soon be lost to him.  And there was nothing he could do to change the tides that would batter his people.  All that future is contained in the body hanging in the tree.  That is powerful plotting, and it turns the ho-hum of the tales of Umuofia that open the novel into something purposeful and important

Those first two sections serve as a kind of immersion into the world of Umuofia.  Achebe knew his readers would be most likely aligned with the colonist, for he wrote in English.  This is a tale for people who did not grow up in Umuofia.  The story takes place before the turn of the century, so even Nigerians reading the story would be reading it in a post-colonial world.  It is important then, that we understand the culture, politics, and religious practices of Umuofia thoroughly, that we respect the logic and reasoning of the people.  The true conflicts with the white colonists happen when the outsiders force their own practices on the Ibo without ever understanding even so much as their language, let alone their lives.

Mr. Brown cares to spread the word of the gospel as much as Mr. Smith, but Brown takes the time to talk to the people and understand their beliefs.  He tries to alter those beliefs by cloaking religious education in the guise of scholarly education.  It is Smith and the militaristic whites who care nothing for the people they walk among, and by the time they start wielding their might and government, we as readers do not share their ignorance.  We reject their ignorance.  I for one was hoping the Ibo would stand up against the whites in battle at least, hoping against my own knowledge that they would not go quietly into that not-so-good night.  Both Brown and Smith are distressing to the reader, but Brown is distressing because he represents the inevitability of time and change.  Smith represents something brutal and uncaring.

There is obviously a lot to say in discussing this novel about the relationship between the individual  and his society, and between one society and another, but I will leave all that in the hands of someone who cares more about those things than I do.  Instead, I will end with a few quotes in the novel that I love:

How wonderful is the phrase “fight of blame” to describe an unjust war?

How wonderfully ominous is  the moment Achebe says that “the white man had not only brought religion but also a government”?

Again: “The white man is very clever.  He came quietly and peaceably with his religion.  We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay.  Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one.  He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.”

And as a final stray thought, I keep thinking how much more I would have liked Avatar had Cameron drawn his story from Things Fall Apart.  Well, I would have loved it.  Certainly the movie would have been a flop instead of a box-office hit, no matter how glorious the special effects and 3-D craziness.  It’s much more palatable to have the Na’vi be starry-eyed wildlings who can repel their invaders, to have the Na’vi win the brothers of the white man so that the white man can no longer act as one.  Palatable and easy with no messy aftertaste.   That’s just not what I’m looking for in my narratives.