Tag Archives: literary ancestors

There are two books which I both enjoyed thoroughly the first time I read through them, but I recently (this summer) read through both of them again, and my conclusions are a little different.  Whereas I had previously not thought of them as being much alike, suddenly I realized that they have a number of points in common, for all that the authors wrote from very different standpoints and apparently with different purposes.  The first (in publication date) is John Barth’s uproarious satirical send-up of the historical poet Ebenezer Cooke’s poem “The Sotweed Factor:  Or, a Voyage to Maryland” called The Sotweed Factor (tobacco grower/merchant), first published in 1960.  The poem which the fictional Cooke writes is also known in Barth’s satire as “The Marylandiad.”  Pynchon’s 1997 satire is set in the Americas also, but on the section between Maryland and Pennsylvania which came to be known as the “Mason-Dixon line,” and is entitled (you guessed it) Mason and Dixon.  Pynchon creates a character occasionally mentioned named “Timothy Tox,” who supposedly wrote in the past a poem known as “The Pennsylvaniad,” and has various scenes in which another weed entirely (pot) is consumed by the characters.  In some ways, Pynchon is taking on Barth’s fiction as much as he is imposing changes on his own, because he changes the way in which the fictional world itself is handled.

In Barth’s satire, Ebenezer and his twin sister are polymaths, and their separation and gradual rejoining are a part of the overarching plot structure, though much of the novel is a sort of picaresque trip around the Colonies in the end of the 17th and the first part of the 18th centuries.  Pynchon’s satire is set about a generation later, just before the Revolutionary War, though it starts before that with a fictionalized history of how Mason and Dixon meet up and go about forming a working relationship.  Their story is told (and partially imagined) by the “Reverend Cherrycoke,” a fictional character who supposedly was with them on their expedition to America, and is relating (and sometimes bowdlerizing) the tale for a family group.  In contrast to Barth’s satire, in which the characters are extremely well-educated, Pynchon’s satire takes place in an late Enlightment atmosphere in which some people know some things, but about which it is in fact the reader who must be the polymath in order to follow all the different Pynchonesque threads of narrative.  Mason and Dixon is more of a satire for specialists than Barth’s book and than Gravity’s Rainbow, in that both Barth and the earlier Pynchon tell more universal “jokes” or spend more time explaining their frame of reference; slyly, of course, but the explanations are still there.  In Pynchon’s book on the two astronomers/surveyors, however, one gets the feeling that some of the best punchlines are reserved for mathematicians, scientists, historians, surveyors, and engineers of all kinds; Barth’s book is more purely satirical and literary in nature.  Pynchon’s later book is also told with rather less of the boyish glee that those followers of Pynchon since Gravity’s Rainbow might be expecting, while the boyish glee itself is to be found in the character of Jeremiah Dixon as painted by Pynchon.

In both novels, Barth’s and Pynchon’s, one of the major subjects is what has come to be known as “culture shock,” in which the visitors from England are astounded by the difference of culture in America, or what sometimes seems like a total lack of culture, even to the tolerant Dixon.  There is also more of outright material escaped from a fantasy novel in Pynchon’s work, which might at first seem to be at variance with his strong tendency to follow a daybook from Mason’s and Dixon’s expedition.  There is, for example, a Learned English Dog who speaks, and a mechanical Duck, an exaggerated version of the interest of the time in automatons and machines.  In Barth’s novel, though many, many incidents are far-fetched, they don’t invite comparison to a fantasy novel.

Both novelists feature additional poetry in their books, Barth keeping to the subject of Cooke’s grievances with America, where he has come to claim an inheritance of a “sotweed” plantation, though the poetry fragments he gives are widely at variance except in structure with the real poem Cooke wrote.  The poems Pynchon contributes to his book are manifested as plenty of anachronistic comic songs, but few with the satirical, orgiastic, and scatological wit of those in Gravity’s Rainbow.  Both writers make up fictional meetings between their fictionalized characters and other real historical figures, but Pynchon spends more time actually constructing dialogues that, though odd and unlikely, seem emblematic of what we know of the historical characters.  An example of this is an encounter between Mason and Dr. Johnson and Boswell which takes place in a tavern.  Barth takes another tack; for instance, he creates long sections of a lascivious journal supposedly kept by Captain John Smith about his own sexual exploits.  There is more rowdinesss of this sort in Barth’s book (and one must guess that he inspired Pynchon early), whereas Pynchon seems to rely in an allusive and elliptical way to what (he must have known) readers expect from reading his earlier books.  A hint of this is in the cue-like mention of something being colored “magenta and green,” a color combination which occurred with frequency in Gravity’s Rainbow, almost as if readers were some of the Pavlovian dogs from the earlier novel, taught to salivate with anticipation at the repetition of “magenta and green” and to expect something major to happen.

Both books end “not with a bang but a whimper,” though this is not to say that the endings are not significant.  They are very different, however.  Barth’s book ends with its satirical edge unhampered, however much the characters have declined in fortunes, whereas Pynchon’s book ends on an elegiac note for the end of Jeremiah Dixon, who died sometime before Charles Mason, and the later final illness of Mason, bringing to a halt the worldly close friendship of the two men.  So vivid has been the picture of otherworldly visitations and unearthly happenings, however, that there seems to be almost a certain hope suggested.  Certainly, though the two books cater to some extent to slightly different audiences, the characters live beyond the novels for us, the readers.  I hope you will have the time and patience to read one or both of them, as they well repay the trouble.

Part III–The later twentieth and twenty-first century American fictions in particular which I have considered (though others cannot be excluded) focus on ridding the characters of the “names” their relatives, their society, or they themselves have previously given them, or making the “names” they have significant of a new identity or idea.  To mention just a few, in The Shipping News, there’s Quoyle, “the newspaperman” (whose past life is indeed a “coil,” like the cultural knots in a rope from which he descends and which he wants to limit).  He transitions from a name alone to a fuller identity when he happens upon the “scoop” of his own life, the startling news that the aunt whom he loves is actually his mother, and that he is not excluded from receiving mature sexual love from a girl he meets.  In The Lacuna, a young man is named alternately by those around him as a tool against his father (by his mother), a servant (even by his enlightened employers in his later life), a suspicious character (by the paranoid, communist-fearing functionaries of the United States government of the time), and finally as a good friend, and these are the roles and identities he generally accepts.  Finally, with the aid of his good friend, a woman, he is able to escape into a never-quite-previously lived “lacuna” (lacuna can mean either “absence, gap,” or “lagoon”)–into an idyllic past, and his further identity thus becomes a lacuna itself, a mystery.

Even earlier in one of the precursive texts I looked at, Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, Ethan is by his wife treated or “named” a shiftless, no-good husband; is gradually accepted as a transgressive but gallant suitor of sorts by his cousin Mattie; and ends his days caught between the two “names,” his identity a cipher, that of a “dead man,” as one of the internal characters defines him at the end.  He is a condensation only of the name “Frome” and the evidence of “the hard compulsions of the poor.”

The transition largely achieved by the struggles of the main characters themselves from being “only a name” to fulfilling (or “filling full”) an identity, cultural or personal, is not restricted to the Americans, however.  Firmly and repeatedly undercutting his audience’s expectations, the author/narrator-as-author-as-narrator of London Fields at the end of the novel turns out to be the “murderer” he himself has been seeking (to “kill off” one of the characters).  He steps thus with great irony and satirical intent into the shoes he has sought to fill (as if forcing the reader to write the novel), and satirizes audience expectations of identity patterns for characters, authors, and readers.  This ending rejects and simultaneously glorifies the use the reader would make of him, and constructs by ironies that point in all directions a narrative “identity” of his own making, which is that of a whimsical dictator, a character nearly as sadistic as the woman who is to be murdered is toward her lovers.

To revisit the topic of the picturesque briefly, contemporary authors sometimes focus less overtly on figurative language from page to page, but choose summational titular and thematic structures (“the shipping news,” “prodigal summer,” “the lacuna,” “the joke,” “London fields,” “a thousand acres,” even “the girl with the dragon tattoo”) as partial naming concepts.  They then “fill in” the significance of such things by close attention to character study as plot, setting, etc.  The character becomes the plot, the character’s interior in some way evokes or resembles the setting, and so on.

Though my treatment in three parts has not been exhaustive, it has been as far as I can see at the present time.  All of the contemporary novels I’ve mentioned above are in my opinion well-written and show a consistent concern with quality of reading experience which signals aesthetic significance, and each has a moral value system firmly in place.  You may have to find your way through multiple ironies to it, and sometimes traditional moral values are revised or moral elements are shifted around to allow for a more contemporary viewpoint–but clearly these writers, who manipulate the demotic and traditional voices of literature and experiment with both romance and realistic elements in their fiction, and who show characters caught up in the process of finding their own identities–these writers just as obviously have no doubts or qualms of any force about their own voices or identites in these books.  I hope if you haven’t read some of them you will find some new “friends” among them, after my long demand on your patience.

Part II–The book London Fields by Martin Amis, which is discussed by Scott in his book, has a complicated sort of voyeurism as one subject (and as far as romance is concerned, an intricate satire of voyeurism is the key element in the examination of romance here).  This book is seen as a sort of “art-speech,” containing near examples of skaz and the demotic voice, while flouting a general disregard for any specific political agenda to promote them.  (But more about this book later.)

Another set of works which deserves mention because it has reached a world demotic community (in translation) is the trilogy of “the Girl” books by Stieg Larsson beginning with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.  The books are not only written in the popular form of a Swedish mystery-cum-suspense series, which is demotic in its own country, but by taking up the world community topics of computer hacking, cruelty to women, espionage political, industrial, and personal, and sexual mores in a contemporary society, they also are able to reach a popular world community of such breadth as is rare.  Moreover, the books are clearly addressed, through their picaresque travelling heroine, to a democratic world community beset with these issues.  Not only have they reached a world community, but also they depict such sexual frankness and open social violence that they overtly take up the topic of cruelty at large and discovery of it by those who can take matters into their own hands, whether legally or simply justifiably by popular “vote.”  The gritty realism cuts against a simple sense of romance in the Larsson novels.  Perhaps the most one can say of these novels as potential avatars of the romance genre is to point to the unlikely degree to which the multiply challenged heroine manages in spite of all vast hurdles to overcome the challenges in her way.  And we are with her all the way in an enthusiasm for her abilities and with sympathy for her struggle.

Other contemporary authors choose to follow earlier role models by writing various kinds of regional fiction, using the culture, language, and sense of belonging special to certain communities or professions.  For instance, there is Jane Smiley’s novel A Thousand Acres, in which the subject matter (farming), settings, and character descriptions are special to the Iowa farming community.  There is not a specific dialect or idiom operating to translate the experience, except for the rueful practicality of the characters’ outlooks, and the way in which the rape of the daughters by the father, and old and forgotten secret, is made to parallel the story of the simultaneous rape of the land.  The surfacing of this secret, along with its sensational nature, and the focus on the psychological twists and turns of the plot, are surely at least tangentially related to the romance mode (it should be understood that I am using “romance” in the technical sense here).  As well, there are encyclopedic listings of Iowan native plants, flowers, and wildlife at the scene at the farm dump between Ginny and Jess (a romance in the usual sense of the word–read the book!).  Pictures of the culture also occur perhaps  in something so fleeting and elusive as the inflections in conversations which aren’t quite dialect, but which have the sense of certain speakers’ rhythms.

A really notable writer who has rung changes on the fictional particularizing skills of earlier precursors (whether the ones I named or others) is E. Annie Proulx, especially in her books The Shipping News and Brokeback Mountain.  Like many contemporary novels, hers either celebrate or detail changes in contemporary life, and break forth with cataclysms directed against the past and revelations about it.  The suppression and subsequent revelation of a hidden truth or way of life is equally a sign of the romance mode and variations of the realistic mode, and is perhaps the point at which the two are branches of the same tree.  Each of these two books contains some demotic speech markers in speech rhythms and abruptions as well.  Also, there are cultural markers in the first book, such as occurs at the beginnings of many chapters, where detailed instructions for the tying of different shipping knots, or regional sayings, are in evidence.  The first book furnishes a qualified “happy ending”–“And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.”  Brokeback Mountain by contrast furnishes a bleak picture of the past and its limitations rising to choke off the present, another frequent topic of demotic literature.  In this book, a bisexual man is left alone to mourn his gay lover’s death by beating at the hands of some other men who found him out, and there is thus the frequent demotic topic of society’s punishments of transgressions made against its prejudices.

The book The Joke by Milan Kundera is one which in its native language is another book full of skaz.  The fifth edition “Author’s Note” describes the difficult course of getting an accurate English translation.  The book blurb claims that it has “fidelity…to the words and syntax” and to “the characteristic dictions and tonalities” of its multiple narrators.  This matter aside, there is an attempt at fidelity to cultural practices in the descriptions of a Bohemian wedding ceremony in Chapter Seven, complete with the ritual wedding dialogues and actions.  As well, there is in addition to the otherwise scholarly analysis of folk songs of Chapter Four a recounting of the musicians’ lives as they are seen to live with their music.  There is a doubling of the picture, with two cultures in one place:  the original Bohemian culture and the Soviet regime which is superimposed over it, as they are lived out by the main character, a member of the original culture caught up in the toils of government repression.  Conflicts between two reigns or cultures is far from unheard of in romance, and were it not for the fact that the stark realism of Kundera’s text plays against it, one could also point to the picturesque elements upon which romanticism is fed, such as the celebration of village life and tradition, here an ironic picturesque because it is threatened.

A cultural doubling similar to this one can be seen in the book The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver.  In this book, a young boy is brought up alternately by his mother in the Mexico of the 1930’s, and in close contact with the Trotskyite faction there, and then by his father in Washington, D. C. during the early years of the Communist scare.  Here, the two cultures, each of which has its own demotic voice and events, are not layered one over the other as in Kundera’s book, but are placed side by side for purposes of contrast.  The main character lives his life drawing elements first from one cultural milieu and then from the other.  There is in both cases a demotic fiction clearly in place.  In this book, the picturesque of modest living and the picturesque of artistic concerns are mingled in the (imagined) views  given of the household(s) of Diego Riviera and Frieda Kahlo; likewise, the main character’s final escape to an idyllic setting sounds a note of the romance tradition.

Another book by Barbara Kingsolver also deserves mention in any serious discussion of demotic voice.  This is the book Prodigal Summer.  There is in this book a deliberate focus on dialect and pronunciation from as early as page 4, when a mountain person recognizes an American Northerner by the sound of “y” at the end of a vowel; on page 25, a Northerner teases an American Southern speaker about the double locution “still yet,” made for emphasis.  There are examples of how skaz of the area sounds to a strange ear.  The book takes up the topics of farming, plants, animals, and insects as a world cultural knowledge practiced not only by specialists and scientists, but also by folk specialists born to the culture as a people.  The overarching topic is the stewardship of the earth, and in their conflicts over this issue, the characters make outright comparisons of their different regional dialects and customs.  They are thus sophisticated in their understandings of their own speech.  Of most interest in terms of the picturesque and/or romance tradition is the mingling of an overall appreciation of nature not only by the simpler folk who live in the midst of it, but by those of more sophisticated intellectual tradition who also enjoy it.  The “prodigal summer” to which the novel refers is in fact the main vehicle of romance and superfluity for all concerned, with its exaggerated and lush influence over the personal identities of the people involved.  Personal identity will be further explored briefly in Part III.

Part I–In writing a long and complicated post (which I’ll feature in three parts for easier reading) I’d like to discuss identity issues as they impact first upon some precursory texts of contemporary fiction, and then upon some contemporary fictions themselves.  The literary issue which is involved here is the question of identity in narrative voice, when talking especially about the more contemporary and lately widespread use of the “demotic” voice (or the literary voice “of the people” as opposed to the “mandarin” voice or “high art” voice).  The demotic voice includes not only the speech of characters in dialogue, but especially features “skaz,” or, following Mikhail Bakhtin’s definition, “homodiegetic…narration which takes its cue from oral rather than written discourse.”  For more on “skaz” and “homodiegetic” see note below in Part III*.  (An earlier example of skaz is the narrative voice in Huckleberry Finn.).  Yet another point to be considered when one is determining how fictional voice operates is the issue of romance (in the technical literary sense) versus realism.  I would like to credit the valuable discussion of mandarin and demotic voices in fiction in Jeremy Scott’s book The Demotic Voice in Contemporary British Fiction.  Though he discusses a number of authors whom I am not going to mention here, his entire thesis is useful for understanding the questions relating to voice in fiction.

Taking the precursors to contemporary fiction first in order to say how they are related, I need to remark that they were particularizers and in-depth analyzers of the life and culture of certain communities, and often chose demotic speakers or humbler dialogues in the construction of their pictures of societies.  There are no doubt many precursors:  I’m only going to discuss three.  These precursors left a legacy behind them, which contemporary practitioners of the demotic novel in general have followed, been inspired by, or perhaps coincidentally (and intertextually) come after, changing a mandarin (or high literary) ethos for a more demotic one, inspired by the voice of whomever they took “the people” to be.  Scott remarks in his book that probably the first novel to imitate a character’s dialect and style of locution in the narration is Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent:  An Hibernian Tale.  In this book, a supposedly native Irish speaker gives his views on the aristocracy for whom he works.  The effects of “hearing” Thady Quirk (the native speaker) are broadly burlesque; he is clearly a folk narrator made up by someone with a rather distant relationship with the real Irish.  He’s funny, but he’s also made fun of, in addition to being the source of comedy aimed at others.  The opinions he has of his employers, however, ring true enough, though they are exaggerated for comic effect.

Another precursor is the American Sarah Orne Jewett in some of her novels and stories.  While she says there is “a likeness to be traced” to some particular town in her work, she also says the “sketches” of characters are not usually drawn from that town.  She is different from Edgeworth because, having only colorful local humor in one of her books such as Deephaven, she does not burlesque her characters, but treats them with a very careful attitude of respect.  Her two main characters in Deephaven follow and illustrate the staid morality of New England, though there are a few remarks which seem to suggest the subject of a “Boston marriage.”  In one such remark, for example, the speaker compares the two young ladies, herself and her friend, to the “ladies of Llangollen” (a “Boston marriage” was at the time a term for close emotional, personal friendship between two women, who would probably identity themselves as gay today).  The two ladies operate as an audience for the characters of the town, who are “characters” in more than one sense.  There are a few occasions when Jewett is particularly broad, and she is at those times reminiscent of Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn, though again she is not as sly and satirical by half as Twain (who is give a nod by Scott as a writer of demotic fiction).  By way of contrast with Deephaven, in Jewett’s A Country Doctor, there is less of a demotic voice, mainly because there are fewer humble characters who speak a naturally simpler language.  There is also a strong plot line concerned more with a single character (a young woman who wants to become a doctor) rather than with a whole culture.  In The Country of the Pointed Firs as well, there is more “hybrid” characterization and subject matter than in Deephaven, which is a set piece of dialect examination without much of a plot or story to it.  (Scott also makes use of the term “hybrid” in several different ways, to indicate the duality or mixture of story line, voice, and characterization).

A final major precursor (though there are undoubtedly many more which could be discussed) is Edith Wharton, not at all in her society novels, but in her novel of the New England countryside, Ethan Frome.  In her “Introduction,” the characters are compared to “granite outcroppings.”  They are said to be seen through the limited understanding of two “chroniclers.”  It is in fact the most external narrator who purports to understand them and who details the rhythms of speech and occasional grammatical lapses or “picturesque” language.  The starkness of the surroundings is both natural and societal.  The narrator, who is said to be more complex and sophisticated in understanding in this “Introduction,” empathizes near the end with the “hard compulsions of the poor,” this hardness bodied forth in the unsympathetic landscape.  Had Scott commented on Wharton, he might have noticed the frequency with which she does as he says Thomas Hardy does, and “often seek[s] to dramatise the internal lives of [his] characters…by displacing character ‘sensibility’ onto the landscape.”  This tendency also relates to the picturesque and romance traditions, to be taken up in more detail later, in Part II.

Did I mention that I’m a sucker for picking up old books that still have great reading value, whether at free book give-aways, low cost second-hand stores, Amazon.com Marketplace sellers, and anywhere and everywhere that people will give me a good book on the cheap that I think I might want to read?  “Want to read” is the key element here; I’m not really a “first edition book” kind of person.  Well, a few weeks ago, I picked up at my local library (which has both a free book shelf  and books for sale) a great short story anthology which is really not that old.  It was published in 2007.  I would encourage anyone interested either in teaching a beginning literature class to others (or simply to themselves) to get it.  It’s called The Story and Its Writer:  An Introduction to Short Fiction, and is edited by Ann Charters from the University of Connecticut.  I have it in the 7th edition (sorry, I don’t know if it’s been re-issued yet).  In this wonderful book, there are not only the same old short stories from the standard literary canon (“canon” in this instance refers to a body of literature which is well-established in both popularity and critical quality);  the book also features stories by more recent authors who are quickly enlarging the canon by leaps and bounds with their fine fictions.  In many instances, the stories are matched with one or several related stories, commentary, or casebook entries by the same or another author.  At any rate, if you are unable to get this book due to where you live (outside the U.S.) or due to scarcity of copies, I would still like to recommend the two stories I will be discussing briefly today, both by Kate Chopin.  I’m sure they may also be found elsewhere, though getting her comments on Maupassant may take a bit of digging in a bookstore or library.

First of all, if you read Chopin’s somewhat lugubrious novella The Awakening, whether you liked it or hated it, I want to warn you that her short stories are very different in nature from her novella.  The two stories, “Désirée’s Baby” and “The Story of an Hour,” though both written with her fine, sure touch, are clearly influenced by the French male writer Guy de Maupassant, and a brief commentary on de Maupassant’s works, written by Chopin, is in the commentary section of the anthology.  What she shares most with de Maupassant is not only the ability to condense the average emotive incident into strikingly full “moments of truth,” but also a skill at delaying the key event until the end:  she is obviously an accomplished writer when it comes to the surprise ending.

The first story I’ve mentioned by her, “Désirée’s Baby,” only about 4 pages long, is set in the American South of the Antebellum period, when slavery was still in its heyday.  The story concerns the events taking place which are centered upon what people do and say in an atmosphere where the birth of a new baby or presence of an orphan on a plantation leads to speculations about bloodlines.  I won’t give the ending away, except to say that the ending is ironic (you may remember that I discussed what is and isn’t ironic in an earlier post this week).

The second story, “The Story of an Hour,” is also ironic, and is even shorter (about 2 pages, as if the author was signalling the intensity and brevity of time with the length of the story itself).  Here, the irony is guided by the fact that we are inside the main character’s mind and awareness by means of a partially omnniscient/partially indirectly discoursed narrative:  we understand her as the other characters do not, and the surprise ending centers upon their misunderstanding of her feelings.

As Chopin says of de Maupassant in her commentary, “It was at [a] period of my emerging from the vast solitude in which I had been making my own acquaintance, that I stumbled upon Maupassant.  I read his stories and marvelled at them.  Here was life, not fiction; for where were the plots, the old fashioned mechanism and stage trapping that in a vague, unthinking way I had fancied were essential to the art of story making?  Here was a man who had escaped from tradition and authority, who had entered into himself and looked out upon life through his own being and saw with his own eyes; and who, in a direct and simple way, told us what he saw….it [is] genuine and spontaneous.  He gives us his impressions.”  More than this of the two stories and the commentary I leave you to read for yourselves, and I hope you will.  The story of de Maupassant’s which I think of most immediately upon reading Chopin is (I believe) called “The Diamond Necklace,” or “The Necklace,” a very well-known story indeed.  I mention it in case you’ve read it, so you’ll have an inkling of what to expect from Chopin (and also, you may find yourself delighting in the stories of de Maupassant too once you have read her).

So, the next time you happen to visit a free or used or remaindered book shelf, keep your eyes pealed for one of those “lamps” (books, in this metaphor) which light us along our way like this one did me.  You may find a treasure like I found, which kept me from having to choose between “new lamps” and “old lamps” because it had both historically traditional and newly traditional stories.  No one should have to choose only one!