Is Donald Barthelme a Pleasure to Feel Guilty About?

Now reading: Guilty Pleasures, by Donald Barthelme.

Reading next: Dombey and Son, by Charles Dickens.

Don B gets my vote for coolest writer of the century: he’s like the Miles Davis of literature, unassailable in his hipness and his knack for finding the joy in (and audience for) experimentation.  But coolness is not an unalloyed good.  Some prefer warmth, after all.  Or sincerity.  Or finely drawn character.

I love Barthelme, have ever since I first read him in college.  I can’t even hold it against him that he was the New Yorker’s darling for so long; that’s how much I love him.  I can remember reading “The Joker’s Greatest Triumph” and thinking it was the greatest thing ever.  In this collection, we get “And Now Let’s Hear It for the Ed Sullivan Show!”, which is simply a recitation of the events of an episode.  Proto-TV fiction, in other words.  These TV-episode stories are still delightful examinations of how TV was fun and how it was banal (it’s both fun and banal differently now, 40 years down the road, of course).  I love the staccato incantation in “Ed Sullivan,” the flat judgments of the everymannish narrator, and the weirdnesses of people being on camera that it exposes.  (These, of course, are still weird, for all their seeming less weird to us: we are so used to the mannerisms and rhetoric that TV inflicts on us, now.)

But somehow these are less impressive to me, now, though I certainly see them as crucial for American experimental lit’s development.  I love Don B when he’s in pure play mode, especially: when he’s messing around, creating narratives around his collages of old engravings and illustrations, or compiling lists of real and/or imaginary things (“Games Are the Enemies of Beauty, Truth, and Sleep, Amanda Said” is an absolute classic of this type), or when he’s throwing his narrative and/or argument off the rails (or at least onto a sidetrack) just because it pleases him to do so (like the old-style s confusion in “An Hesitation on the Bank of the Delaware”). Is it weird that this is when he seems most important to me — not when he’s being “topical,” or “satirical”?

Mostly I love his mimicry: his perfect synthesis of tone, form, and vocabulary.  His story “That Cosmopolitan Girl,” an extended parody of an ad for Cosmopolitan magazine, is quite funny at first just for its silly exaggeration of the ad’s own rhythms and mannerisms and utter emptiness.  But it stays funny due to phrases like “pure unshirted hell” and its gonzo plot: when it moves beyond satire into surrealism.  He was a perfect sounding board for his time, was Don B.

There’s guilt to be had in the inconsequentiality of so much of his subject matter, I suppose, but Barthelme always seemed to get in at least one sentence that actually made you consider why he was writing what he was writing, or see why he loved what he was doing.  Sometimes he can seem a little too smooth for his own good — all of those seemingly tossed-off New Yorker pieces must have grated on his less fortunate contemporaries.  But hey, people love Kind of Blue for a reason, too.

Mothers and Other Monsters

Just finished: The Woman in White.

Reading next: Guilty Pleasures, by Donald Barthelme.

This book really does have more than its fair share of monsters, doesn’t it?  People monstrous — grotesque might be another way of putting it (but then I couldn’t use that killer title, lifted from this Maureen McHugh collection) — in their self-interest, their willful disavowal of wrongdoing or even wrongful impulse, their superficial gentility.

Fosco is an obvious example — like Milton’s Satan, he seems something of a heroic villain until you remember the bodies he’s buried under rhetoric, charm, and rationalization (it’s more complicated with the rather defensible Satan, of course, but that’s a whole other topic) — and I’ve already talked a little about Frederick Fairlie, who is so indifferent to everything in the world but his own comfort as to be rather delightful.  But I’m thinking here of other monsters.

The monstrous mother is Mrs. Catherick.  In her discussion with Walter, and especially in the letter she sends him, Mrs. Catherick displays her absolute lack of interest in her daughter’s well being; the coldness with which she dismisses news of Anne is matched only by the warmth with which she justifies her abandonment of Anne.  It’s a magnificent portrait, this little sketch of Mrs. Catherick.  There’s her pride at being bowed to by the minister, this tiny measure of civility and her rehabilitated status in her community to be clung to at all costs.  And, especially, there’s her magnificent sign-off to Walter, which, in context, seems like the epitome of that hoary old chestnut, the banality of evil: “My hour for tea is half-past five, and my buttered toast waits for nobody.”

Is it wrong to argue that Walter Hartright himself is something of a monster, too?  What brought this to mind for me was his insistence that he bore no blame for Glyde’s death.  Of course, Glyde never would have been where he was if Walter were not digging into Glyde’s past — it’s not like he bears no responsibility.  And one of the main conflicts throughout the Third Epoch is Walter’s internal struggle between the need for vengeance and the need to protect Marian and Laura.  Collins kind of bails Walter out of this conflict, in the end.  But the conflict hews awfully close to that classic noir trope of the detective as the other side of the criminal coin: capable of impulses as dark as any murderer’s.  Interesting, that this proto-detective novel already contains the DNA of hardboiled novels and The French Connection.

The Manipulative Novel

Now reading: The Woman in White.

Wilkie Collins is manipulative.  All novelists are manipulative at some level; with the best of them, you don’t even think about resenting it.  (Others can make you feel creepy and weird.)  Collins seems to me to be a genius of manipulation: he twists the knife in the most delightful ways.

The best example of this is probably the “postscript” Fosco leaves in Marian’s diary.  What I love about this is how the manipulation works on multiple levels: at the level of Collins’ interaction with the reader, the postscript provides a shocking twist at the end of Marian’s narrative, injecting suspense — about Marian’s safety, the secret of Anne Catherick, and Fosco’s plans — into an already suspenseful situation.  As this thesis by Leanne Page suggests, the postscript also puts us in the position of recognizing that we, as well as Fosco, have been reading a private document: his glee at having stolen Marian’s secrets makes our glee at the twists in the story a bit unseemly.

But the real mystery here is why Fosco, a master manipulator himself, leaves his note behind, showing that he’s read the diary.  The reasons for this are unclear to me: is Fosco gloating?  Is he just not as bright as he seems?  Throughout the book, Collins is extremely concerned with maintaining the authenticity of the documents he presents, with the status of the text itself: evidence is presented in a variety of forms — letters, the diary, the statements of those who would have direct knowledge on the case.  Indeed, Marian herself is constantly referring in the diary to the diary, and to the time she’s had to write in it, and to her need to record events accurately.  (As an aside: as someone who works with real diaries all the time, I can tell you that a diary like Marian’s would make my head explode.  Every diary is interesting in its own way, but all diaries are, by and large, records of life being boring, or at least uneventful.)

All of this attention that Collins pays to his diverse texts further complicates Fosco’s postscript for the reader.  It could be that Collins simply fudged here: wanting to show the reader that Fosco had read the diary but having no way to do so inside Marian’s text, he introduces the implausible scenario that Fosco finds it irresistible to prove to Marian that he’s read the diary.  Perhaps we’re to believe that Fosco simply believes his ingenious plot cannot possibly be unraveled, and so it does not matter whether anyone knows that he was scoundrel enough to read the diary.  Or is it a matter of the status of the diary at the time: was the diary stolen by Fosco, and only recovered later, or did he lock it away where he thought no one could retrieve it until the plot could not possibly be unraveled?  (A fascinating possibility, Collins using the placement of his narratives to create tension at a metafictional level!)  Did Fosco believe Marian would not survive her illness — did he intend to use his “vast knowledge of chemistry” to poison her?  Did he leave the message for some other reason that the reader does not yet know, but will later, as more is revealed?

At any rate, I hope this shows what a complicated and delightful thing it can be to manipulate.  Collins is quite good, I think, at moving his characters in consistent, intelligent ways, which is what makes me question the status of Fosco’s postscript — Dickens, frankly, is often worse at this, especially in his early books, making his characters do dumb or inconsistent things and dropping little gods into the narrative just because he needs to make something happen.  If this were an early Dickens novel, I’d probably not bat an eye at Fosco’s postscript as a simple marker of irrepressible, monomaniacal evil; it may be such here too, but Collins at least makes me question it.  He’s also fantastic at concluding his episodes, one of the key spaces for manipulating the reader: the last page of the Second Epoch seems to me one of the masterpieces of suspense writing, in its pacing (the masterful use of paragraphs of a single word or sentence, and the staccato fragments set off with dashes), its scene-setting, and its “surprise” ending that seems, as you read it, both astonishing and inevitable.  If this is manipulation, who needs free will?

Fosco’s Theory of Relativity

Now reading: The Woman in White.

My wife, Jaime, has been telling me to read this book for years and years.  Every time it comes up, she exclaims, “Count Fosco!” with this very particular mix of awe, terror, and delight.  She always says Fosco’s one of her all-time favorite villains.  So I knew something of what I was getting myself into.

But really, how do you prepare yourself for a morbidly obese Italian who looks like Napoleon and lets his pet white mice crawl all over his body, and seems to have his wife hypnotized and/or terrorized into being his mind-slave?  Not knowing yet where Collins is taking all of this (well, maybe having some inkling, but not knowing), I can say that already Fosco seems like a brilliant creation, the sort of extravagantly anti-realistic grotesque that is strange enough (and, in this case, fat enough) to somehow become real, to the reader: to impose his big, fat, weird reality on the world.  Like Napoleon, I suppose, or Hitler.

I’m sure there will be more opportunities to explore Fosco’s abundant oddity, but for now, let me just mention three things I’ve found most interesting, in the hundred or so pages since first meeting him.

1) Fosco seems to me to be a perfectly Victorian villain, in that his main tactics are an unfailing courtesy and an obsession with keeping up appearances of friendly society and warm familial bonds.  At every turn, when Percival Glyde threatens to ruin their plot by flying off the handle (again), Fosco smooths things over by apologizing for his hotheaded friend, by sympathizing with Laura’s and Marian’s sense of decency and decorum, and by insinuating that he values discretion and leisure above all else; that he’s a gentleman, in other words, and how could anyone dispute a Count’s claim to that?  You get the feeling that Fosco and Glyde will succeed (or come damned close) simply by Fosco’s smooth insistence on the impropriety of discussing the technicalities of life with ladies, and his being interesting enough to distract them from the matters at hand.  He’s a jujitsu master, in other words: absorbing and redistributing moral violence.  (Best Shakespearean comparison I can think of so far: part Lady Macbeth, part Iago.)  I wonder whether Collins intended him as a gross exaggeration of the sorts of wretchedly artificial relationships the Victorian English seemed to maintain with each other.  Part of me wonders whether he’s not Frederick Fairlie’s id unleashed and given agency.

2)  Speaking of morality, one of the more fascinating set pieces so far takes place in the “boat-house” on Glyde’s estate, when the entire party takes a break from a long morning stroll and finds itself embroiled in a discussion of whether “crimes cause their own detection.”  In this context, it is perhaps not surprising that Fosco takes the “interesting” side of the argument against Marian and Laura, arguing for a kind of moral relativism: “Here, in England, there is one virtue.  And there, in China, there is another virtue.”  Of course this would not fly, with either the ladies or with Collins’s readers: England’s virtue was the virtue, surely, in the Victorian Empire, on which the sun never set!

You get the sense that Fosco knows the stakes are very low, and therefore reveals some of his true feelings about the pointlessness of virtue — managing to make himself more fascinating to the ladies in the process, with this fine little piece of braggadocio (familiar now as the mating call of the Transgressive Academic): “I am a bad man, Lady Glyde, am I not?  I say what other people only think, and when all the rest of the world is in a conspiracy to accept the mask for the true face, mine is the rash hand that tears off the plump pasteboard, and shows the bare bones beneath.”

3)  Finally: am I crazy, or is there a fairly blatant homosexual subtext between Glyde and Fosco?  Laura’s confession to Marian seems to make clear that Glyde has never given her the slightest indication of his love or even lust for her; and in his “Man of Sentiment” episode, as Marian puts it, Fosco wears his dandiest clothes and indulges his aesthetic sense to the hilt, rhapsodizing on music, on the sunset, etc.  His status as a decadent Italian, his weird relationships with exotic pets, his unusual relationship with his wife, and his avowed sympathy for the feminine; Glyde’s seemingly complete lack of interest in sex with his (much younger, beautiful, apparently willing, at least at first) wife, his invitation to Count and Madame Fosco to join him on his honeymoon, and his constant submission to Fosco’s wishes; are these markers intended by Collins to send a message of homosexuality, or am I projecting 21st-century reading on a 19th-century work?  I always wonder, with Victorian novelists, how much of this sexual marking is conscious and how much is just submerged, or unconscious.  Either way: there seem to be some rather intricate things going on in this book with sex and gender, and I’ll probably need to address them in the next post.

A Fop and an Androgyne

Now reading: The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins.

This is the first of Wilkie Collins that I’ve read, and I must say I’m pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoy the writing itself; I expected something more sensationally and less imaginatively written, whereas it has been (at least so far) quite strong.  In the early going, I’m most intrigued by a couple of characters whose parts I’m unsure of in the overall narrative:

-Frederick Fairlie, who seems a great type of villain: the foppish, indifferent hypochondriac.  Constantly using his supposedly fragile nerves and health as an excuse to get rid of people, and to have nothing to do with things he cares nothing about, he is revealed as a monster of solipsism.  He refuses to leave his room for any reason, and takes no considerations into account other than what will mostly quickly get him rid of whoever is bothering him.  He sets guidelines for when and how his niece Laura will be allowed to visit him before and after her wedding, imploring that she visit him “without tears!” to avoid upsetting his disposition.  Fairlie reminds me very much of Des Esseintes from Against Nature, here presented from the normal societal perspective on the worthlessness of such a self-centered aesthete.  I’ll be interested to see what’s done with him.  He’s a caricature as so many characters in Victorian novels are, but he’s one that’s particularly well done and interesting, I think, and one that can also strike close to home: that consideration for one’s own comfort whatever the consequence for others is a source of constant struggle, isn’t it?

-Marian Holcombe, who seems as though she may actually be our protagonist, or at least should be.  While Fairlie is presented as effeminate and delicate, Holcombe is given a statuesque body, a homely face, and any number of masculine sympathies and markers as something of an intermediary between the sexes.  Collins seems to set her up as a kind of sexless combination of what he sees as the best of each sex: the compassion, familial concern, and lively wit of the female, and the level-headedness and responsibility of the male.  And yet she is a strong defender of her sister Laura’s right to choose her husband, and to back out of a marriage that certainly promises to be loveless; she certainly sees the woman’s point of view.  Marian seems kind of fascinating, and I’m interested to see what Collins does with her, as well: does she become the authorial surrogate, interjecting Collins’s own views into the plot?  Or is she allowed to take a more active role, perhaps in solving the mystery of Anne Catherick?

I note that we get to know Marian much better than we get to know Laura, the object of so much attention but so little substantive description.  In combination with the ominous marriage agreement allowing (the wonderfully named) Percival Glyde to take her money in the event of her death before her 21st birthday, the lack of depth to Laura’s character makes me wonder if she’s not long for the narrative.  Not that it’s all that uncommon for a Victorian novelist to keep a young woman pure by sketching her as good and pure and beautiful without an ounce of actual character.  Marian’s too interesting to be loved, it would seem.

Love-Words Written in Blood

Finished: Nights at the Circus.

As I mentioned in my last post, exuberance, digression, and deliberate inefficience (sometimes to a fault) are major keys to Angela Carter’s style, and ways in which her style reflects her message.  The third chapter of the “Siberia” section is a more or less perfect example of how Angela Carter works.

In terms of simple plot development, this chapter is almost completely extraneous: its only purpose in connection to the main narrative is to introduce the characters who will rescue Walser from the train wreck.  Instead of simply having some Siberian hunters or peasants find him, or the rescue crew take him to the next town, Carter introduces the tale of the Countess P.’s asylum/penitentiary for husband-murderers.

This and other self-contained backstory chapters are the best parts of Nights; they make me think that, from my limited experience, Carter is a better short-story writer than novelist.  The story here, of the inmate Olga Alexandrovna discovering ways to subvert and, ultimately, bring down the Countess’s cruel panopticon from the inside, is moving and almost perfectly constructed for Carter’s feminist, humanist, and (perhaps) magical realist purposes (what it is not is at all necessary in this novel).

The paragraphs in which we learn the method by which Olga begins to communicate with the guard who delivers her food are another classic Carter passage — one that, while I still quibble with its word-by-word execution, I admire very much for its brilliant embodiment of Carter’s ideas:

That evening, after a free if surreptitious exchange of looks as supper was served, Olga Alexandrovna found a note tucked into the hollowed-out centre of her bread roll.  She devoured the love-words more eagerly than she would have done the bread they replaced and obtained more nourishment therefrom.  There was not a pencil nor pen in the cell, of course, but, as it happened, her courses were upon her and — ingenious stratagem only a woman could execute — she dipped her finger in the flow, wrote a brief answer on the back of the note she had received and delivered it up to those brown eyes that now she could have identified amongst a thousand, thousand pairs of brown eyes, in the immutable privacy of her toilet pail.

In her womb’s blood, on the secret place inside her cell, she drew a heart.

I mean… wow!  That’s just a brilliant example of imaginative, utterly unrealistic, even antirealistic, fiction’s power to connect readers to difficult ideas in a way polemics or criticism cannot, as is this whole chapter.  (Do I even need to read Foucault after this?)  The opposition to institutional schemes of surveillance and enforced penitence; the discovery of lesbian love (female companionships, sexual and/or friendly, recur throughout the work); the brilliant, earthy, purely human, believably and powerfully symbolic method by which Olga replies, with its echoes of “Satanic” pacts written in blood, its message of totalitarian inability to overcome the physically and basically human and female, its touching example of the human need for connection and love; and the surprising romance of the last sentences — these are the essence of Angela Carter.

On Angela Carter’s Style

Just finished: Nights at the Circus.

Reading next: The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins.

Everyone has a different idea of what makes a “well written” book.  I try to avoid describing books as “well written” for precisely that reason, though when I find myself using the phrase it’s generally in reference to a book in which I admired the author’s use of language, inventive sentence structures, and control over plot, without necessarily making much of a connection to characters or themes.  Calling a book “well written” is a backhanded compliment, at least from me. It can be a matter of editing as much as writing, to some extent.

Nights at the Circus did not strike me as well written.  I was surprised by this, as I very much admired the writing in Carter’s The Bloody Chamber. This is a matter of some sloppiness — things that surely should have been pointed out in editing — but also of style.  Now, it is impossible to talk about Angela Carter for very long without talking about style.  Hers was showy, verbose, lyrical, passionate.  Flowery, even.  In this book, it struck me as excessively so.  Perhaps it is a matter of length.  I’m not sure. At any rate, for my taste, this book includes a few too many sentences like this:

The toil-misshapen back of the baboushka humbly bowed before the bubbling urn in the impotently submissive obeisance of one who pleads for a respite or a mercy she knows in advance will not be forthcoming, and her hands, those worn, veiny hands that had involuntarily burnished the handles of the bellows over decades of use, those immemorial hands of hers slowly parted and came together again just as slowly, in a hypnotically reiterated gesture that was as if she were about to join her hands in prayer.

Carter will often coin hyphenates like that “toil-misshapen,” and will also wedge parts of speech in where she pleases (she’s especially loose about adjectives and adverbs).  The writing consistently draws attention to itself, which is enough for some people to write it off as poorly written (and for others to praise it as well written).  I have no problem with intentionally heightened (or lowered, or otherwise self-evident) language; but it better be damned well done.  Sometimes it is here; sometimes it’s not, as in that turgid sentence about the baboushka.

Another matter of style is dealing with person and tense; Carter can also be loose with this, and I am appreciative of it to an extent.  There’s something to be said for taking on the voice and perspective the story demands without worrying overmuch about the internal logic of your text; and I think Carter comes down on the side of liberty in these matters as in all others, consistently.  I enjoyed the transition from the shifting third-person perspective of the second section to the introduction of the first person, in the mind of Sophie Fevvers, for the first time in the book, as we enter the third section, “Siberia.”  But suddenly, within the first chapter, we again shift out of Sophie’s mind.  It seemed capricious and unnecessary, in a book that has been rather free about letting us delve into minds and perspectives, nearly omnisciently, and has also been telling us back-stories and legends with some regularity.

All of which is not to say I didn’t enjoy the book — I did.  And all of which is not to say it’s not full of more interesting ideas and characters and plot twists than nine-tenths of the fiction I’m ever likely to read.  But it struck me that this is one of the few books I’ve read recently that I found myself fighting against on the basic level of language: of annoyance with the words chosen, and their order.  I do think Carter wanted her readers to tussle at that level, to some extent, to fight against the threadbare mundane language in which most of us communicate (and even think).  Certainly the overabundance of her words and sentences was a central part of why the stories in The Bloody Chamber worked so well for me: nothing efficient, brutal, or straightforwardly masculine about them.  “There’s nothing like confidence,” as Sophie says.  In the tightrope act of fitting style to message, I thought the “confidence” of The Bloody Chamber was self-assurance, and the “confidence” of Nights at the Circus had more than a little of the grifter in it.

The Ludic Game

Now reading: Nights at the Circus.

Now I am faced with a horribly difficult question, a question that has bothered me to distraction (no shortage of distractions on the good ol’ Web), a question I’m still not quite sure how I’m going to answer: just what do I think of these chimps and these clowns?

There are both, in spades, in the second section of this book, set in St. Petersburg.  There are also a communicative pig, two tiger attacks, and a very strange finale that I’ll also have to discuss.  But I keep coming back to the chimps and the clowns.  What the hell’s going on here?

This section reminded me of a favorite book, in need of rereading: Stephen Dobyns’ The Wrestler’s Cruel Study, which should be a cult classic, though I’ve never met anyone else who’s heard of it, much less read it.  (Maybe I just don’t get out enough.)  That book also involves some intelligent primates, and has a similar kind of madcap energy and balance of philosophical heft and absurdist incident to Carter’s book, and especially this second section.

But about the monkeys.  Chimps, actually, to be specific.  They are Lamarck’s Educated Apes, twelve of them.  When we meet them, they’re rehearsing their act, a classroom scene.  But they seem to be actually learning, and discussing; and, we find out later in the chapter, they can, indeed, write (or at least their leader, the Professor, can).  Lamarck is an abusive drunk; the chimps end up striking out on their own, after Colonel Kearney, the circus’s owner, cheats them.

And then there’s the clowns.  And there are twelve of them, too, actually — or is it thirteen, with Judas-Walser?  The comparison to the apostles is made explicit; Buffo the Great, the clown’s leader, as Christ.  After some earlier fun with a travesty of the resurrection, they have a travesty of the Last Supper, which leads to a very drunk Buffo losing his mind, trying to kill Walser and getting committed.

They’re a gloomy lot, these clowns, given to philosophy and quotations from somewhat unlikely sources.  King Lear, for instance.  The “twin” musical clowns, Grik and Grok, engage Buffo in an exploration of uselessness and nothingness:

“…turned into more than the sum of our parts according to the dialectics of uselessness, which is: nothing plus nothing equals something, once—”

“—you know the nature of plus.”

….But Buffo wasn’t having any.

“Bollocks,” he said, heavily, belching.  “Beg pardon, but balls, me old fruit.  Nothing will come of nothing.  That’s the glory of it.”

And the entire company repeated after him soft as dead leaves rustling: “That’s the glory of it!  Nothing will come of nothing!”

So what are we to make of these two groups of twelve?  The Professor and the chimps carry themselves with a dignity and sense of decorum all out of line with the behavior of the rest of the circus, and most especially with the obscene, scatological, debased clowns.  I am not sure what the import of all of this is supposed to be, quite honestly.  The messiness of humanity does seem to be part of “the glory of it,” in Carter’s eyes, and also part of the tragedy of it (see Mignon’s story, about as messy as it gets: the messiness of murder, and abuse, and abject poverty).

Colonel Kearney calls his circus “the Ludic Game,” and one wonders if that’s how Carter saw this book — or at least the Petersburg section of it: her mind at play, over matters serious and frivolous alike, amusing itself and hopefully others.  The section ends with what sure seems to be a flight into surrealism or plain and simple magic, as Sophie escapes an evil Grand Duke’s clutches by dropping a toy train onto his gorgeous carpet; we then find ourselves suddenly on the real Trans-Siberian Express.  It’s a disorienting section break, one I’m not exactly sure I’ve interpreted correctly, and one no author who wanted her readers to remain straight-faced would have undertaken.  But it also seems to fit with a St. Petersburg episode so superabundant with ideas, stories, and language.

Witching Hours

Now reading: Nights at the Circus, by Angela Carter.

A couple of things early on here remind me of The Manuscript Found in Saragossa.  We again have a story of a story being told.  And there are, again, questions of motivation and intention: why is the story being told at all, and why to the person it’s being told to?  There are, also, some hints of artifice, of Carter behind the curtain, relishing her fiction, and of characters with secret identities (most humorously, Lizzie, who seems to be the rare fin-de-siecle Cockney capable of explaining mid-20th-century feminist theory, if Sophie would just let her).  One fascinating flourish is the repetition of the phrase “green hinge,” in reference to Midsummer Night and May 1, respectively.  The first time this is spoken by Sophie herself; then it is repeated in her story by her crazed, phallus-worshiping abductor.  Is this a hint that Sophie is making it all up — a slip revealing her own mannerisms in others’ mouths?  Or did the phrase stick with her when her abductor used it, and work its way into her vocabulary?

However, the most interesting (coincidental) echo of TMFiS is the play with time and the idea of the “witching hour,” when witches, ghosts, and such are most active — typically, 12-1am.  In TMFiS, the witching hour was evoked by the recurrence of a bell tolling midnight right before weird things started happening at the Venta Quemada.  In Nights at the Circus, it’s a little more complicated.  Throughout the first section, there’s also a bell repeatedly striking twelve times for midnight.   But here, the bell strikes twelve over and over again, in one night.  And the bell is that of Big Ben, ringing through London.

Furthermore, the clock in the dressing room of Sophie Fevvers is also stuck on midnight.  Sophie’s telling her story, and she introduces this clock and explains the positions of its hands during her discussion of her childhood in the brothel of one Ma Nelson:

It was a figure of Father Time with a scythe in one hand and a skull in the other above a face on which the hands stood always at either midnight or noon, the minute hand and the hour hand folded perpetually together as if in prayer, for Ma Nelson said the clock in her reception room must show the dead centre of the day or night, the shadowless hour, the hour of vision and revelation, the still hour in the centre of the storm of time.

So throughout the night, time stands still at the witching hour — or, in Sophie’s words, “the shadowless hour.”  And there’s the puzzle of Sophie: is she telling the shadowless truth of how she came to have wings and travel the world as the star of a circus, or is she bewitching her young interviewer?  Is this magic, or truth, or just another aspect of a beautiful, self-inventing con?  Witch itself is surely a quite complicated word for Carter, and it will be fascinating to see what kind of witch she’s created here.

Enlightening Infotainment!

Just finished: The Manuscript Found in Saragossa.

The cover of my Penguin Classics copy is this famous Goya etching:

“The Dream of Reason Produces Monsters,” the typical translation of the writing on the desk goes.  I’ve loved it ever since I first learned about it (and about Goya) researching a paper during my freshman year of college.

It’s a fine choice for the cover, since the tug between reason and faith, science and the supernatural, is a major part of Potocki’s book.  While the theme is perhaps standard for the Gothic genre, here it also acts like something of a brilliant thematic complement to the historical fiction, since the manuscript narrates events in 1739, in the thick of the Enlightenment.

Central to the theme is the core mystery of whether or not van Worden’s encounter at the Venta Quemada was supernatural, and how it could be explained otherwise.  This does all get resolved, if somewhat unsatisfyingly, by the end of the book.  But three subplots also directly address, and complicate, the reason vs. faith struggle: the computations of Velasquez the geometer, and the stories of Uzeda the cabbalist and his summoning of the Wandering Jew.

Velasquez is in the habit of turning any narrative into an equation, plotting its coordinates on a graph or applying his newfangled calculus to discover its underlying logic.  (Velasquez often seems more like a behavioral economist than a geometer.)  We are often given Velasquez’s process in solving these “problems” in full.  He is, essentially, the stereotypical absent-minded professor, wandering off to complete his equations whenever they occur to him.  But these sections are, essentially, word problems, and their place in the narrative seems to be to serve as — dare I say it again? — infotainment!  (I’m a big fan of the use of the exclamation point in The Informant! — best ever use of punctuation in a film title?)  There really seems to be no other reason for Potocki to give them to us in full, rather than summarizing them.

Which is not to say that they don’t serve a narrative function, as well; Uzeda’s daughter, whom we first know as Rebecca and then as Laura, serves at first as a sarcastic foil to Velasquez’s nerdy twisting of every life story into an equation, but gradually comes to respect his “system” and love him for his mind and his heart.  Velasquez delves into his system on the 37th to 39th days, and his thoughts on religion do seem formed by — and in reaction to — the Enlightenment.  It seems that these thoughts, reconciling reason and religion, shift Rebecca away from sarcastic dismissal of Velasquez’s over-rational approach to life and toward an appreciation of his finer qualities:

Thus, rather like the lines we call asymptotes, the opinions of philosophers and theologians can converge, without ever meeting, to within a distance which is smaller than any given distance….  Now does a difference which I cannot perceive give me the right to set my convictions up in opposition to my brothers and to my Church?  Does it give me the right to sow my doubts in the faith that they possess and which they have made the basis of their ethics?  Certainly not…. So I submit heart and soul.

The other most blatant example of infotainment in the book is the Wandering Jew’s story.  The Wandering Jew here functions as a kind of historical Forrest Gump: giving us a crash course in history as well as telling us about his brief encounters with historical figures (Cleopatra!  Herod!)  For much of the middle third of the book, Velasquez and the Wandering Jew monopolize great chunks of text with their edifying infotainment: Velasquez’s supreme reason and Ahasuerus’s implausible march through millennia taking turns educating us.

You can certainly argue that the book’s ending closes the argument decisively in favor of reason.  However, I believe that Potocki thinks there’s something to Velasquez’s apologia for religion; and while he may have exposed superstition, he has certainly been careful to leave the door open on faith.  More than that, a perfectly rational explanation for everything in the novel is, at some level, rather beside the point: the cabbalists, ghosts, demons, and underground kingdoms are the fuel that keeps the narrative moving, that keeps the reader interested, in ways that Velasquez’s equations never do.  The experience of the book is such that one does not know whether to believe or disbelieve and, like Velasquez, must “submit heart and soul” to find out how Potocki wraps it all up.  Suspension of disbelief is a much more spiritual undertaking than we typically acknowledge; and frankly, it’s a little disappointing when a writer tries to explain that while I thought I was taking a leap of faith, there was really a nice mattress waiting for me all along.