Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

by Wendy Lesser

  That there is indeed a hidden connection between despair and exhilaration is made explicit by a character in another novel, the female narrator of Amulet: “And when I heard the news it left me shrunken and shivering, but also amazed, because although it was bad news, without a doubt, the worst, it was also, in a way, exhilarating, as if reality were whispering in your ear: I can still do great things; I can still take you by surprise, silly girl, you and everyone else…” Amulet, which was written immediately before By Night in Chile, was like a dry run leading up to the greater work. Bolaño made two advances in the later novel: he put the narrative into the mouth of a dislikable character, and he eliminated himself entirely from the book. There is no Arturo Belano in By Night in Chile. There is no Bolaño figure of any kind, unless we count the “wizened young man” of whom the priest seems so afraid, but he could be anybody, including Death. In By Night in Chile, the author has finally done exactly what he feared so greatly in Distant Star: that is, merged bodily with his most despicable character. Without even the separateness of “vile Siamese twins,” they have become a single person, a frightened and dying man living off the memories of his Chilean past, dreading the annihilation of himself and all his writings. There could be no character less like the real Roberto Bolaño than Father Urrutia—a member of Opus Dei, a smarmy literary careerist, a right-wing snob, a religious hypocrite, a worm in the service of Pinochet. And yet for the duration of By Night in Chile we are horribly and, yes, exhilaratingly inside him.

  It is rightly said of W. G. Sebald, a writer with whom Bolaño is sometimes compared, that all his characters are essentially versions of their author. This, I think, is a flaw in his novels, particularly Austerlitz, which purports to be about someone else. A similar flaw afflicts an even greater writer, Franz Kafka, whose strongest works are almost unbearable because of the airlessness of their self-enclosure. Roberto Bolaño is an author who risks exactly this charge and then triumphs over it. Finally, it is not that all his creations are projections of himself, but the opposite: in his novels, he becomes a mere figment of his characters’ reality, a shadow in their dreams. Like the French surrealist poets he so admires, he carefully sets up the trick mirrors, constructs all the cunning aesthetic parallels, assures us that he is playing with us—and then smashes the whole construction to bits. When the dust clears, all that’s left (but it is more than enough) is a moment of true feeling.

  * * *

  The desire to innovate is not what lies at the heart of books like these. If it were, they would feel much flimsier, morally and aesthetically, than they do. In each case, the author’s primary aim is to reveal the truth, and the novelty of form is just a by-product of that aim. This is the paradox that lies behind formal inventiveness: you can only achieve an exemplary kind of novelty if it is not, primarily, what you are trying to achieve. As an end in itself, stylistic innovation is merely a way of showing off, a useless if mildly entertaining trapeze act; only when harnessed to the author’s fervent truth-telling does it become significant.

  To tell the truth in literature, each era, perhaps even each new writer, requires a new set of authorial skills with which to rivet the reader’s attention. We are so good at lying to ourselves, at lapsing into passive acceptance, that mere transparency of meaning is insufficient. To absorb new and difficult truths, we need the jolt offered by a fresh style. Yet what is startling at first eventually hardens into either a mannerism or a tradition. Even Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” if read too early and too often (in a classroom setting, say), can come to seem a mere example of Satire. So every writer—every good writer, every writer who really has something to say—must figure out for herself a new form in which to say it. The figuring need not be conscious, and the innovation need not be dramatic or obvious; we can be affected by style without necessarily perceiving the sources of the effects. But if we do perceive them, they cannot detract from our sense of the writer’s seriousness (a seriousness that, in the case of an innovator like Mark Twain, may partake of a great deal of humor). The structural and stylistic eccentricities must seem—and be—essential, not merely ornamental.

  Take Moby-Dick, for instance. Reading that novel (if it is indeed a novel, and at times I have my doubts), we do not say to ourselves, “Oh, that Melville is such a show-off.” The informational chapters that interrupt the tale, the ones with titles like “Cetology” and “Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales” and “Jonah Historically Regarded,” do not strike us as expert research fetched up by the super-smart Melville from his vast library of whale knowledge. There is no Melville here. He has faded completely into his story, becoming “a nonentity, like Shakespeare,” as William Carlos Williams astutely put it. The grandeur of Moby-Dick stems partly from the fact that it seems larger than any individual author—larger than the self-described Ishmael who is supposedly telling us the story, but also larger than the real author we know must lie behind him. (But we know it only with the purely rational side of our brains: we do not feel it, just as we do not feel Shakespeare pulling strings behind the stage, nor Milton directing Adam and Eve toward their predestined fates.) It may seem tedious at times to plow through the masses of information that punctuate Captain Ahab’s quest for the great white whale, but eventually we come to realize that they are the story, just as much as the quest is. No clever game is being played with us, no puzzle is being presented for our ingenious and self-satisfying solution. We are simply being dropped into a new kind of reality, in which we will either sink or swim; by the end, perhaps, we may have learned to do both.

  For a very different approach to literary innovation, consider James Joyce’s Ulysses. This is a novel that has always gotten on my nerves. I admit that part of what is annoying is how much other people love it and praise it, when it leaves me completely cold. I vastly prefer the youthful author of Dubliners, and even the slightly pushier fellow behind Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, to the highly self-conscious innovator who wrote Ulysses. By the time he reached that point, Joyce had begun to congeal into the artist who would eventually produce the nearly unreadable Finnegans Wake, and the obvious source of the rot was his overweening desire for a great literary reputation. This trumped all other literary desires on his part, so that things which had mattered to him earlier—the creation of believable human figures, the portrayal of a particular moment in Dublin’s and Ireland’s history, the use of language as an element in our common experience, the reliance on real as opposed to fabricated emotions—all gave way to this one enormous wish: to be the greatest, most impressive writer of his generation. This is not a literary impulse but a self-promotional one, and you can sense it in every chapter, almost every line, of Ulysses. We are meant to admire each tour de force for its cleverness and its brilliance. We are meant to recognize and applaud the skillful scene-by-scene parallels between the heroic Homeric tale and its reduced Dublin version, the chortlingly amusing imitations of other literary forms, the archetypal renderings of Jew and Catholic and man and woman. Woman! Don’t get me started. If I hate anything more than the rest of the book, it’s that ridiculously orgasmic Molly Bloom soliloquy with which Joyce concludes—a ventriloquist’s dummy masquerading as a character. Reading her breathy Yeses, I can hear her all-too-evident author congratulating himself on his literary genius.

  Finnegans Wake may be less hateful in part because it is more of a noble failure. Here the effort to charm the reader through a flamboyantly displayed intelligence has tipped over into something weirder, more willful, more insistent on having its own way to the exclusion of all else. This myopic intensity presents us with a more interesting project than the slyly clever Ulysses, but it is still too self-regarding to be convincing as literature. Authorial performance, rather than being simply the novel’s primary method, has become its raison d’être: there are no characters to be violated, no readerly sympathies to be toyed with, no fake emotions to be evoked, because all these old-fashioned novelistic elements have been jettisoned in favor of the desire to s
peak in a new kind of language. As poetry, Finnegans Wake may have value. As a novel, it does not really work, and only the most sympathetic Joyceans (myself certainly not included) have managed to make it all the way through.

  At least one of those sympathetic readers was a great writer himself, and his reading of Finnegans Wake influenced him so heavily that his own innovative work grew out of it. I could be speaking about Samuel Beckett (who worked for a time as Joyce’s secretary and absorbed the influence at first hand), but in this case I’m actually referring to Thornton Wilder. His 1942 play The Skin of Our Teeth was a direct response to Joyce’s late work—almost a borrowing from it, or a translation of it into understandable dramatic form. The play is indeed more coherent than Joyce’s novel, but it too is gigantic in its aspirations, attempting to encompass the whole history of mankind, not to mention all the various functions of the theater, in its brief evening-length range. And it too now seems a bit of a noble failure, though it did win the Pulitzer Prize for its year.

  The ironic fact is that Wilder had already created his most formally ingenious and original work a few years earlier, in a play that appears to have nothing whatsoever to do with Joyce, or indeed with any other piece of writing I’ve ever encountered. Our Town, like Moby-Dick and all other truly innovative works of literature, seems to have no direct ancestor but itself. Often disguised as a somewhat sentimental piece of Americana (particularly when it is performed at the grade-school and middle-school level, as it so often is), Wilder’s play about Emily Webb, George Gibbs, and the other small-town inhabitants of Grover’s Corners is actually a quietly radical piece of theater. I might never have realized this, had I not seen the revelatory production that was directed by David Cromer at the Barrow Street Theater in 2010. Assembled with the other onlookers who were seated on bleachers surrounding and even among the performers, I understood for the first time that we too are the ghostly presences to whom and of whom Emily is speaking in her final, after-death soliloquy; we too belong with the temporarily living characters who will someday be numbered among the dead. And Cromer, by taking on the role of the Stage Manager (the role that, in both its novelty and its down-to-earth practicality, most clearly pinpoints Wilder’s revolutionary technique), actively helped me toward this realization. Delivering those perspective-shaping lines in his own flat, Midwestern, non-actorly voice, occasionally standing among and even touching the audience members as he spoke, David Cromer personally cemented the connection between the play’s reality and our reality, for we knew that as the director he really was the play’s stage manager.

  A play is a form of literature that only completely exists onstage. That is merely its shadow, or its embryo, that we read in script form, and if one’s theatrical expertise is insufficient, as mine certainly is, a script alone may fail to yield up some of the work’s most important effects. It took Cromer’s fully embodied version of Our Town to remind me of something I’ve had to rediscover repeatedly: that deep feelings are by no means incompatible with artistic self-consciousness. Both the human heart and the theatrical fourth wall were pierced by that singular performance, and the familiar paradox lay in the fact that my awareness of being in a theater space with other silently weeping audience members contributed to, rather than shattered, the illusion. And what was the illusion, exactly? That these characters were alive? (But they told us themselves they were long dead.) That human lives could be viewed from a distance, as if historically or even geologically? (But the play itself was allowing us to see things in that way.) Or perhaps that these quotidian tragedies—hope disappointed, early death, longing, regret—had some kind of bearing on our own lives? If that is an illusion, I wonder what reality might be.

  * * *

  The kind of magic Thornton Wilder accomplished through his Stage Manager—that intermediary between the characters and ourselves, that broker of their experience to us—has long been performed in a less explicit way by nondramatic writers. In a novel or a poem, the stage manager is language, and the challenge for the author is to use it in the way Wilder used his: as a screen between us and the characters that somehow intensifies rather than diminishes our sense of felt connection with these fictional people. The language needs to point to itself as a tangible medium and at the same time afford us the transparency of a window onto another life. It must get in the way and get out of the way, all at once. I can think of many remarkable works that accomplish this, starting with Don Quixote if not with Homer, but for now let me focus on two writers of my own era.

  Louise Glück is a poet whose works have always depended primarily on the powerful presence of a speaking voice. Whether she is writing discrete lyric poems, as in The Wild Iris, or linked narrative poems, as in Averno, we feel addressed—almost buttonholed, in a Coleridgian sense—by that emphatic speaker who is conveying his or her feelings to us. This is not exactly dramatic monologue in Browning’s terms: the voice is less personal than that, the character less specific. It is a voice that exists on the page alone and comes fully to life only when we are reading its words. The voice may have a backstory—often a complicated and rather disturbing backstory, in Glück’s seriously intelligent and sometimes uncomfortable work—but it does not generally cohere into anything as specific as a biography. The episode, the encounter between us listeners and that Orphic speaker, seems to be complete in itself.

  But in her recent volume A Village Life, the balance appears to have shifted slightly. The emphatic voice is still there, but it takes up residence in one person after another—one character after another, we would say if this were a novel. Yet A Village Life is not a novel, or even a collection of linked stories; it is very clearly a collection of separate but somehow related poems. What links the poems is not just geography, that undefined but apparently Mediterranean village in which all this speaking is taking place. It is also language, the European language (again undefined, but of a particular place and time) from which Glück seems to have translated all these speeches into English. It is an excellent, pure, almost transparent translation: there are no grammatical errors, nothing that is not perfectly idiomatic, perfectly in keeping with our everyday speech. And yet there is a sense of foreignness that hangs over the whole transaction. These voices, and the stories they tell us of their lives, are coming to us from elsewhere. The language is, in that sense, a barrier between us and the speakers, but it is also what conveys them so fully to us that we almost feel we are meeting them in person. And, as in Our Town, we sense that in meeting them we are also, in some obscure and indirect way, meeting ourselves. It is the distance, I suspect, that enables us to open ourselves to this feeling—we would be more guarded if the seemingly foreign language did not assure us that we had no self-scrutiny to fear.

  A similar mechanism, though not the same one (for each author invents her own revolution, however quietly), governs the language of Penelope Fitzgerald’s best novels. Fitzgerald was a writer who came to writing late: she published her first book, a biography of an English poet, at the age of fifty-eight, and she published her first novel two years later. Over the next twenty years or so—practically up to her death in 2000, at the age of eighty-three—she continued to develop as a novelist until she became an undisputed if rather strange master of the form. I’m thinking particularly of her last three published novels, each of which is set in a different place and time: Innocence, which occupies two Italys (the sixteenth-century incarnation that appears briefly at the beginning of the novel, and then the mid-twentieth-century version); The Beginning of Spring, which takes place in Russia in 1913; and The Blue Flower, which reproduces, or imagines, the atmosphere of Novalis’s late-eighteenth-century Germany.

  In all three books, the language Fitzgerald employs, while partaking of her usual qualities—authorial wit, refusal of closure, suppressed but tangible emotion—also contains something that is specific to its location. In Innocence, this has largely to do with rhythm, a kind of run-on, comma-separated pileup of clauses that somehow evokes the rapi
dity and vivacity of Italian speech. In The Beginning of Spring, it has more to do with tone: the conversations among the Anglo-Russian characters have both the philosophical intensity and the melancholy humor of late-nineteenth-century Russian prose, even as they also contain a note of British asperity. And in The Blue Flower, which is probably Fitzgerald’s most extreme effort in this direction, the English is so heavily flavored as to seem, at times, a direct translation from the German. No, that’s not quite right: not a translation, but an imagined German, the way German would sound in our minds if we knew it as fluently as we know English. It is English functioning as German while still retaining the flexibility of English.

  This is especially clear in a phrase like “the Bernhard,” which is how the family at the center of The Blue Flower (and, at times, the author) refer to the youngest son, a sprightly, original boy named Bernhard. Its sense in English is clear enough—a kind of family joke, a singling-out of the smallest, oddest child—and there are even English examples of a similar usage in children’s nicknames: The Piggle, for instance, is a D. W. Winnicott case study about a little girl. But the phrase also evokes the German der Bernhard, which is a colloquial, sometimes regional way of expressing familiarity, as if to say, “Oh, that Bernhard! That is so typical of him.” This is one of those authorial gifts we needn’t fully receive to enjoy. That is, you can still get a kick out of the name “the Bernhard” even if you don’t know the German habit of speech, but if you do know it, the phrase is made even richer.

  The effect of such linguistic strategies (which go by much more quickly, and therefore with much more subtlety, than I have been able to suggest) is to create a sort of magically thin and nearly transparent scrim between us and the characters. We are looking directly at these people—inhabiting them, in some cases—but we are also looking at the medium through which they are brought to life. Fitzgerald’s novels point to themselves as written objects and at the same time continue to insist on the psychological reality of their characters. They do not let us off the emotional hook in any way. On the contrary, they appear to strengthen our connection with the characters by making us feel that all of us, readers and characters alike, somehow recognize the existence of the transmitting paper and print. In The Beginning of Spring, this sense is reinforced by the fact that the main character, Frank Albertovich Reid, runs a Moscow-based printing business called Reidka’s. There is always a special interest, I find, that attaches to novels focusing on the printing or paper business (Arnold Bennett’s Clayhanger is one, and Balzac’s Lost Illusions is another). In such novels, the object in your hands points, however indirectly, to the process of its own making, as if to level the difference between your reality and its own.