Heir to the Glimmering World, by Cynthia Ozick

A Review of Cynthia Ozick’s

Heir to the Glimmering World

Originally published in the Rain Taxi Review of Books, Winter 2004/2005

Heir to the Glimmering World

By Cynthia Ozick

Houghton Mifflin ($20)

When writing a novel in the first person, an author with such fierce intelligence and power as Cynthia Ozick is forced to funnel her enormous lexicon into the limited tones of some necessarily smaller voice. Ozick has always been fascinated with impersonation and imposture, though, and in her latest novel, Heir to the Glimmering World, her ventriloquism act finds itself bound within a tiny doll-house theater that the author’s near-omniscience constructs from far-ranging material but that, from within he narrator’s small glimmer of life and reading, makes for tricky circumscription.

On its surface, this novel of the American 1930s is a tribute to the great English authors of the 19th century, but as Ozick speaks through the voice of her Brontëan orphan-protagonist Rose Meadows, it soon seems to be more like a reflection of the 20th century’s own reflections of 19th century style—particularly of John Updike’s and Saul Bellow’s conservative return to the big-old-fashioned-novel aesthetic. There are rule-breaking twists, however, as Rose’s narrative of her life-education with the German refugee clan the Mitwissers drifts out of the box of her own mental arena (the same way that Jane Austen sometimes breaks the strict logic of who’s saying or thinking what) and then diverges into the separate chapters that follow the perversely parallel non-education of the Mitwissers’ dissolute benefactor James A’Bair. These forays are the novel’s most inspired moments, but at the same time, I can’t help but think of Thomas Pynchon’s similar and more successful detours in his parodic Mason & Dixon.

Perhaps there are too many novels at play in this novel to allow it to cohere on its own, or perhaps Ozick’s muted voice is unable to rise in a way that lifts her vast learning into one living and all-encompassing entity. In the end, Heir to the Glimmering World is like a brilliant Frankenstein’s monster that can’t help but be an impersonation.

—David Wiley

The 9/11 Commission Report

A Review of The 9/11 Commission Report

Originally published in the Rain Taxi Review of Books, Fall 2004

The 9/11 Commission Report

Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States

By Thomas A. Kean, et al.

W.W. Norton & Company ($10)

Formed against the wishes of the current president, who stalled for more than a year before allowing any kind of formal investigation into the atrocities that on September 11, 2001, ended approximately 3,000 lives on American soil, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States is a bipartisan group of ten Congresspersons who, after more than a year of public and private hearings (including an informal meeting with the President and Vice-President, who stipulated that they wouldn’t have to testify in public or under oath), has now published its findings—or at least an “Authorized Edition” of its findings.

As a self-contained text, this Report is an almost endlessly fascinating document. Broken down into several sections and subsections, it reads in some parts like a spy novel, in some like a dry government manual, and in others like a disaster movie, its severally fragmenting facets adding up to something like a broken cross between Citizen Kane and Infinite Jest. With its copious notes and its prismatic search through so many shifting narrative frames, it keeps the reader constantly uneasy and on edge and in relentless struggle to unravel and interpret its deliberately sophisticated manipulations and obfuscations. And as with those two prodigious works, perhaps its puzzle parts don’t add up at the end, either.

The Report begins with a detailed account of what happened on that terrible morning, as seen through the perspectives of the air traffic controllers, the government, the military, and several passenger-callers aboard the planes. As many commentators have already pointed out, the Report is soft on assigning responsibility, and in no place is this as apparent as in the minute-by-minute description of what the President was doing in Florida while the rest of the government and military was running amok: absolutely nothing. In an astounding gift of slack, the Commission doesn’t press our Commander-in-Chief on his nearly ten minutes of inactivity after learning of the second World Trade Center hit, and when reconstructing the Vice President’s decision an hour later to shoot down any further planes, the President fabricates an earlier phone call in which he okays the decision—a phone call that doesn’t exist in the White House switchboard log, isn’t corroborated by staff notes on either end of the call, and which was clearly invented and agreed upon to make it seem as if he’d made any of the decisions that his staff made for him that day.

It’s patently unfair to assign blame for such a monumental system breakdown on one man’s inability to act when faced with an on-the-ground crisis, though, and it’s this viewpoint that then leads the text of the Report into a retrospective examination of the rising threat of Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network and of the failures of the intelligence community to address that threat. But in this approach, too, the Commission once again employs soft-focus—or perhaps simply diverts us by focusing our attention on a barrage of surface issues rather than on what lies beneath. As seen from the Commission’s point of view, the root of the problem is simply that our country’s reactive powers are too weak and disorganized to respond to the relentless and irrational threats of fundamentalist terror. In several sections they lament the nonexistence of an agency in charge of both external and internal counterespionage, a division of power that was made in 1947 in response to the just fear of creating a “U.S. Gestapo,” and they never once address the problem of the U.S.’s own campaigns of terror and assassination, which they routinely treat as a legitimate response and privilege of power. There’s no sincere inquiry into “why they hate us,” and when the Commission addresses the question of “what can we do to stop [al Qaeda’s] attacks,” all they offer is a cynically derisive non-answer: “Abandon the Middle East, convert to Islam, and end the immorality and godlessness of [our] society and culture.” Apparently they never thought to look into our policy of propping up and encouraging terrorist states such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt, or of supporting Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine—issues that are cited almost unanimously in the Islamic world as the reason why bin Laden has so much sympathy and support, not some nonsense about “hating freedom.”

Rather than simply strengthening our defenses and offenses, perhaps we should more deeply reflect on how we see our place in the world. The failure of our current aggressiveness finds a potent illustration in our own 1998 terrorist missile strike on the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical facility in the Sudan (a strike that the Commission actually defends, and which Noam Chomsky discusses in great detail in his book 9-11). Just before the strike, the Sudan had detained two al Qaeda members in connection with the embassy bombings in east Africa and had contritely offered them to the U.S., along with a vast database of al Qaeda information, only to be rebuffed by our State Department with contempt. Then after we bombed the Al-Shifa plant, which had supplied virtually all of the impoverished nation’s medicine, the Sudanese simply let the men go, effectively cutting off our best inroad into the world of al Qaeda. In the eyes of the Commission (which never once mentions the existence of the two al Qaeda suspects in its Report), the bombing is seen as a justified preemption, but to bin Laden and his network of accomplices and sympathizers (as well as to many ordinary Muslims throughout the world, whose donations to al Qaeda incrementally trickled into a sizeable stream), it was a call to action.

Rather than address any kind of sincere policy shift, the Commission (which is only bipartisan within the right-wing sphere of Washington politics) largely focuses its recommendations on a systematic reshuffling and consolidation of forces—a response that anyone who understands the situation at all can only liken to holding back the ocean with a precision rifle. As we all know, decapitations—even of bin Laden himself—can only lead to more Hydra heads. What the 9/11 Commission has done with this “Authorized Edition” is merely divert our attention from the true face of terrorism, which is in fact our own face (perhaps we should call it the 9/11 Omission), and produced a bona fide infinite jest.

—David Wiley

Dante in Love, by Harriet Rubin

A Review of Harriet Rubin’s

Dante in Love

Originally published in the Rain Taxi Review of Books, Summer 2004

Dante in Love:
The World’s Greatest Poem and How it Made History
By Harriet Rubin
Simon & Schuster ($25)

In Dante in Love, the latest addition to the growing genre of popular works that hold up one artistic masterpiece as the culminating mirror of an entire era, Harriet Rubin argues that the central theme of the Divine Comedy is love and that the poem’s three stratifications—Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—are each reflections of how well or how poorly any one individual’s love is directed.

Rubin clearly loves the Divine Comedy, but as her book’s hyperbolic title suggests, the overwhelming nature of her subject matter often leads her astray. In dealing with such an encyclopedic work, a writer must be able to encompass a multifaceted sphere of sometimes obscure information, and indeed Rubin often succeeds in reining in large amounts of material. She rounds up all the usual medieval subjects well: Her mini-biographies of Abelard, St. Bernard, Abbot Suger, St. Francis, St. Thomas, Guido Cavalcanti, and Brunetto Latini are both engaging and well balanced, two qualities necessary for any Dantista wishing to mirror her master’s technique. Yet she often falls prey to the sins of rearrangement, exaggeration, and oversimplification—all of which also mirror Dante’s technique but considerably distort the picture that she’s trying to paint.

In an attempt to make her book accessible to contemporary tastes, Rubin greatly plays up the aspects of conspiracy and intrigue, with which Dante’s life and times were rife and which are absolutely essential to any understanding of his artistic pilgrimage, but by using such bold and riveting strokes to draw her readers in, Rubin often wildly misrepresents both the nature of Dante’s reality and the complex mysteries of that reality’s scattered evidence. In her discussion of the split in Florentine politics between the Guelfs and the Ghibelline parties, for example, she makes the astonishing distinction that the Guelfs were brute lackeys and the Ghibellines reflective intellectuals. She also waxes overly poetic about how the Gothic cathedral-schools that Dante encountered on his trip to Paris influenced the theology and structure of the Comedy, even going so far as to map out a nearly Homerically implausible itinerary for her pilgrim-poet—never once mentioning that the only records of this trip are in Villani’s and Boccaccio’s later accounts and that almost all modern scholars have disregarded the trip as a wishful fiction.

Rubin seems to have a fair grasp of Dante’s written works—especially gratifying is her appreciation of his little-read treatise on church and state, De Monarchia—but when she dismisses La Vita Nuova as little more than a sentimental allegory and claims that until writing the Comedy he was a second-rate poet who lived in the shadow of his friend and mentor Guido Cavalcanti, the Dantean balance of her judgments come profoundly into question. Her over-emphasis on certain sections of the Comedy (especially the justifiably absorbing Ulysses section of the Inferno) to the detriment of others is also suspect; she glosses over much of the Paradiso, which she deals with in little more than a string of quotations from Dante lecturer John Freccero; and she often rearranges the order of the text to fit the shape of her discussion. Perhaps the most deeply telling imbalance, however, is her insistence upon Dante’s primacy over Shakespeare, an over-simplification made by only the most fantastical shapers of perfect order.

Still, Rubin’s love for Dante and his work comes shining through even the most distorted passages. She clearly hopes for her book to be an embarkation-point rather than an end-point in the Dantean journey, and if the worst she’s done is to get people to misread the Divine Comedy, that’s a whole lot better than nothing at all. Dante in Love may not have the clear vision of some other recent works dealing with artistic history (see Ross King’s excellent Brunelleschi’s Dome, Anton Gill’s intriguing Il Gigante, and R.W.B Lewis’ succinct Dante, all of which telescope large portraits into simplified but well-wrought frames), but if all Rubin is guilty of is misdirected love, perhaps the worst that Dante would do would be to assign her to Purgatory for a while, where all souls are destined one day to ascend to Paradise, to become one with “the love that moves the sun and the other stars.”

—David Wiley

The Manuscript Found in Barcelona

The Manuscript Found in Barcelona:

An Essay on Jan Potocki’s

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa

Originally published in the Rain Taxi Review of Books, Summer 2002

“If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke—Ay!—and what then?”

—Coleridge

Imagine if you discovered a crack in reality. If you woke up one morning with Coleridge’s flower in your hand, or if you’d been transformed into a gigantic beetle, or if a very old man with enormous wings had shown up in your town. Then you’d know that the world of appearances was just that—a world of appearances. Our author isn’t as obvious at that, however. A more likely scenario would be that you’d discover some implausible over-perfection. A symmetry or repetition or coincidence that was too impeccable not to be the work of an artist. Nabokov saw these symmetries in the butterflies he chloroformed, and he in turn put them into the books he brought to life. But what happens when our author makes the patterns too apparent, like a novelist showing the characters the artifices of the world they live in? What happens when the labyrinth of reality becomes too artistic?

This kind of textual/existential confusion lies at the heart of Jan Potocki’s vast novel, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa—and at the heart of my relationship with that novel. Like an infinite series of circumstances laid out by an infinitely patient novelist with the sole object of delivering Potocki’s book into my hands—or me into the hands of Potocki’s book—the events of the last few years strangely echo the fictions illustrated in that book’s all-encompassing labyrinth. As in The Trial, or Gravity’s Rainbow, or any number of Borges stories, the paranoia factor is high, and since the book describes a manuscript that takes into account its own discovery, I’m not so sure that I’m not just a player in Potocki’s constantly unfolding game.

It all began when I went to see Wojciech Has’ film The Saragossa Manuscript. A Polish friend had been raving to me about it for years, calling it the Polish equivalent of The Wizard of Oz, and when I walked out of the theater after seeing it I felt that not only was it The Wizard of Oz, but Citizen Kane, The Seventh Seal, Lawrence of Arabia, Blazing Saddles, The Purple Rose of Cairo, and Pulp Fiction as well. It had almost everything you could ever want in a film: swordfights, dreams, lost manuscripts, conspiracies, inquisitions, stories-within-stories, lusty men and women (in fantastic combinations), ghosts, absolutely amazing scenery, and nearly infinite—and infinitely looping—digressions. It was the true neverending story. The only things missing were the Technicolor and the singing and dancing, but even without them, I walked out of the theater stunned.

I was sure that the film was in some way derived from Borges, though, with so much of the conspiracy/manuscript/story-within-story material reminding me of “The Garden of Forking Paths” and “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” As in any good Borges story, the theater program gave no information other than that the film was made in 1965, which coincides with the height of Borges’ international fame, so I just shrugged, classified it in my brain as a great Borgesian film, and proceeded to rave about it to anyone who would listen. But a few months later, I heard from another friend that the movie had been made from a Polish novel—which intrigued me because I wondered how Borges could have infiltrated the Polish literary landscape so quickly and produced such a thoroughly Borgesian novel before 1965. I didn’t feel in any hurry to pursue the matter further, though—wanting, I guess, to keep the film as unsullied as possible by what I thought might have been a derivative novel.

The next turn in the labyrinth came when I was in Spain. I’d recently set out on a long trip across Europe and had begun to see what I later learned were Potockian patterns cropping up everywhere: amazing coincidences, wildly convoluted sequences of circumstance, weird repetitions and variations, people coming in and out of my life with dreamlike rapidity—and all of it depending on whether a churchbell woke me up fifteen minutes early or the bakery was closed or the bus schedule made me too late to get into the hostel where I would have met such-and-such a person and gone on such-and-such an adventure. It was as if every step I took and every decision I made were weighted with the infinity of all of my possible futures—or else that it was just all preordained and that my feeling of autonomy was simply an illusion. Since I kept being reminded of the cross-country labyrinth in The Saragossa Manuscript—and since I was nearing the point where I was going to have to decide if I was going to visit Saragossa or not—I just couldn’t get the film out of my mind. I never made it to Saragossa—it was way out of the way from where chance had landed me, and I needed to head north before it got too cold—and so after six weeks in Spain, I decided that Barcelona and Figueres would be my last cities before entering France.

In Barcelona I was having that eschatological feeling you get when you’re about to leave a country (I also had that scatological feeling you get after eating bad food), and one morning, as I made my way to Parc Güell, feeling as if I were somehow on the edge of something, I decided to take an early-morning side-trip before seeing Gaudi’s gaudy fantasy land. I needed to trade in my copy of Cormac McCarthy’s Cities of the Plain before I read it a third time, and there was supposedly a second-hand English bookstore somewhere near the Lesseps Metro stop, so I made my way down the streets, sad to be leaving Spain after seeing such a small fraction of what there was to see, and then sat myself on the stoop and waited for the bookstore to open. The owner arrived seconds later, and after I helped her open the store and turn on the lights and feed the cat, I went straight to the fiction section. Scanning the spines at random, the first title I saw, right next to The Chosen and Swann’s Way, was The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. I didn’t quite believe it at first, thinking it was just a mis-shelved travel book about Aragón, but when I picked it up, there it was in my very own hands: the novel I didn’t know I was looking for.

I bought it, not quite convinced it was real, but I didn’t read it right away. I was reading the Bible (a great book for traveling), and I decided to read the Deuteronomic Histories (Joshua through Kings) before starting something new. So I passed through Figueres (where I saw Salvador Dali’s Rainy Taxi, the namesake of this very magazine) and then slowly made my way to Paris, where I finally fell into The Manuscript.

In addition to the amazing contents of the book (which I’ll get to soon, I swear), the history of Potocki and his novel is perhaps a novel in itself. Count Jan Potocki (pronounced “Pototski”) was born in 1761—almost 150 years before Borges—and like his English equivalent Sir Richard Burton, he was a legendary figure and swashbuckling renaissance man: a writer, publisher, traveler, political activist, aristocrat, soldier, Knight of Malta, freemason, occultist, historian, linguist, and daredevil. Outside of Poland he’s probably best known for his work in ethnology, which he more or less pioneered, and inside Poland he’s best known for his one novel, which he wrote in French and which was only translated into Polish after he died.

What we know of Potocki’s personal life is shrouded in myth. He was married twice, divorced once (a very big deal), and both his marriages were rife with scandal—possibly including incest. He traveled widely, wrote and studied incessantly, accepted a perplexingly varied array of political appointments, and espoused sometimes irreconcilably divergent philosophies. And in 1815, depending on what source you believe, he took his life on either December 2nd (my ex-wife’s birthday) or December 11th (my birthday), after fashioning a silver bullet from the knob of a teapot (or perhaps a sugar-bowl) and having it blessed by his castle’s chaplain.

The history of his novel is just as bewildering. He wrote it in French and published it in bits over the last few years of his life, and he appears to have finished it in 1814 and published it in its complete form in Paris. But when he died the novel somehow fell out of circulation in France. At least three plagiarisms and one lawsuit ensued, and there are some scholars who even maintain that Potocki isn’t the author of the book we have today. What’s known for certain is that somehow all the complete copies of the French original have been lost. There’s about a fifth of the book missing, so what scholars have had to do is retranslate the Polish translation of those sections back into French. Thus the current English translation has parts that have been translated three different times—from French to Polish to French to English, the whole process spanning more than 175 years.

After all this prelude, I was almost ready to be disappointed by the novel, but within just a page or two, all the world outside its pages suddenly seemed like a feeble appetizer—a “Chopsticks” warmup for The Goldberg Variations, or a Vanity Fair blurb on the cover of Lolita. Suddenly the book eclipsed not just the film, but my own weird journey toward the book, the book’s publication history, and even Potocki’s own story. Or rather it simply encompassed it all.

Initially narrated by an unnamed French officer, the book begins with the story of how he found the novel that we’re about to read. During the Napoleonic Wars, he was looting in the captured town of Saragossa when he discovered a manuscript in an abandoned house. He doesn’t know much Spanish, but he knows enough to see that the book tells the story of “brigands, ghosts, and cabbalists” and that it might prove entertaining in the future. Soon afterward, the officer gets captured by the enemy, and when a Spanish captain sees the book and realizes that it tells the story of one of his ancestors, he takes the narrator into his house, treats him as his guest, and translates the book into French to keep him entertained.

The novel then moves directly into the manuscript—and into another first-person account, which it does whenever it enters any new story or frame—and tells the story of Alphonse van Worden, a young Walloon officer on his way to join his regiment in Madrid. It’s 1739, and to get to Madrid he has to pass through the as yet unsettled Sierra Morena mountain range, which is supposedly rife with bandits and lost spirits and against which everyone warns him. Undaunted, he goes anyway. He spends his first night in what seems to be a deserted venta, and at midnight, startled by the entrance of a servant, he’s led deep into the bowels of the building and introduced to two beautiful Moorish women who claim to be his long-lost cousins. And when they begin telling him their story, the book begins a dreamlike descent into its labyrinth of stories-within-stories-within-stories-within-dreams-about-dreams-within-stories.

Clearly influenced by The Decameron (it was often billed as “The New Decameron”) and by the Arabian Nights (which as an Egyptologist, Potocki may have read in the original) as well as by Apuleius’ proto-Picaresque The Golden Ass (which is the earliest extant example in Western literature of a prose narrative built around storytelling), The Manuscript Found in Saragossa is one of the most complexly structured novels I’ve ever read. A hypertext in almost every sense, its every page is linked to every other, and even the most attentive reader will have to leaf back through the book constantly to remember who’s telling what story about whom. Even the characters themselves get exasperated at how complex the whole thing is. But by some miracle, it’s also one of the most readable novels I’ve ever read. Like the film it inspired, it’s an overwhelmingly entertaining work, and its breathlessly unaffected narration keeps the pages turning constantly. Even when it deals with the most mind-bogglingly arcane topics, it manages to sweep the reader along with it, dazzled but eager for more.

Part of Potocki’s appeal is his incredible ability to unsettle. Like Kafka or Pynchon—or Shakespeare—he has an uncanny knack for creeping the reader out, as if he’s manipulating your dreams and fascinations into the most horrible (and horribly enticing) combinations. Descending into its underground labyrinth, the reader is treated to all manner of sexual and religious and familial weirdness. As in Angela Carter’s Wise Children, doubles abound and ambiguities flourish, and as in Kafka, the protagonist is constantly waking up from his nightmare and finding himself in another. After van Worden’s first night with his cousins, who try to convert him to Islam so they can marry him, he wakes up under a gallows next to a dead man—the brother of one of the story’s innumerable brigands—and as he eventually falls into the stories of Pacheco the demoniac and Ahasuerus the Wandering Jew and Pandesowna the gypsy chief, he almost invariably ends up under the same gallows, not sure if it’s all over or if it’s just beginning again.

The novel takes place over sixty-six days of storytelling (a nice mathematical compromise between The Decameron’s ten and The Arabian Nights’ 1001), and as the stories cross and descend and recross and form parallels and ascend to link up with any number of the other spiraling narratives, van Worden slowly discovers himself to be at the center of a vast, labyrinthine conspiracy—a conspiracy that’s as surreal and paranoiac and symmetrically stagy as anything in Ficciones or The Crying of Lot 49 or The Truman Show. Van Worden is the novel’s main character and narrator, but as the book sets itself up around him, he also seems to be its main audience. All the bizarre repetitions—the stories about stories, the dreams about dreams, the absolutely stunning sexual variations—start to seem like a kind of game staged for van Worden’s sake (or perhaps like a novel written with him as the main character). Vast conspiracies may come a dime a dozen in the age of Pynchon, but in the early nineteenth century, the influence of Kafka and Borges had yet to inform (and warp) the novelist’s palette of themes. And since so much of the novel’s emphasis is on the gamey artifices of the realities and fictions that surround van Worden, the book prefigures even the metafictional innovation of novels like If on a winter’s night a traveler and films like The Player.

A truly all-encompassing novel, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa seems to absorb every frame and level and era of readership that enters into it, not only planning for its “discovery” by the French soldier and his Spanish captor, but also seeming to plan for my discovery and reading of it 200 years later in Spain and France. Indeed, as I found myself caught up in the book’s labyrinths, I felt that my reading experience in Paris—the city that the novel had disappeared from—had somehow been taken into account. And so when I read the news that the film’s director, Wojciech Has, died on October 3, 2000—midway through my reading of the novel—I knew that The Manuscript Found in Saragossa was Coleridge’s flower and that I was one of its characters.

—David Wiley

Notes of a Former Rabelaisian

Notes of a Former Rabelaisian:

An Essay on François Rabelais’

Gargantua and Pantagruel

Originally published in the Rain Taxi Review of Books, Fall 2001

In the introduction to his translation of Gargantua and Pantagruel, J.M. Cohen writes that “Rabelais stands prejudged.” That is, whether we’ve read him or not, we all know that he’s, above all, Rabelaisian, the way that Kafka is Kafkaesque, Borges is Borgesian, and Proust is Proustian. But is Rabelais Rabelaisian? And does the word Rabelaisian really mean what we think it means?

A longtime fan of writers who have often been described as Rabelaisian, I’ve always assumed that the word meant something like what all the blurbs said: vast, erudite, boozy, hilariously satirical, ingeniously inventive, sick, potty-mouthed, and horny. Writers like William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, Angela Carter, and Rikki Ducornet were Rabelaisian. They were writers capable of writing anything that their minds could imagine, no matter how absurd or obscene, and of respecting no limitations other than the parameters of the alphabet.

Through the criticism of Mikhail Bakhtin, the word Rabelaisian has also come to mean subversive, grotesque, and more or less left wing—a kind of mixture of the Marxist, the Kafkaesque, and the Tod Browningesque: Rabelais the critic, Rabelais the arch-clown, Rabelais the father of “carnivalesque” dissent, Rabelais the solace of Pynchon’s preterite souls.

But is Rabelais any of these things? Can a sixteenth-century monk possibly fulfill these twentieth-century expectations? For many readers (and just as many critics) it doesn’t seem to matter. Rabelais is out there the way that Proust is out there: as the root word of an extremely useful adjective. I may have even used the word Rabelaisian myself once or twice—in describing the shit-storm in Gravity’s Rainbow, maybe, or perhaps the miter-fucking fantasy in Ducornet’s Phosphor in Dreamland. But recently, after reading Jan Potocki’s ostensibly Rabelaisian novel, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, and living in what I thought was an extremely Rabelaisian situation—two months of literary squalor at the Shakespeare & Company bookstore in Paris—I decided to see for myself what this Rabelais business was all about. I decided to actually read Rabelais.

After getting my hands on a copy of Gargantua and Pantagruel—a serendipitous process too long to go into here but which I now know to be “Potockian”—I was first surprised to learn that Rabelais didn’t invent Gargantua. Gargantua was the subject of a popular anonymous book of the time called the Great Chronicles of Gargantua, and what Rabelais did was write a sequel: Pantagruel. With the success of Pantagruel, Rabelais then decided to go back and write his own version of Gargantua, which included many episodes lifted straight from the earlier Gargantua. Then he wrote three (or maybe only two) continuations of Pantagruel’s story. So when we read Gargantua and Pantagruel now, we read the second book first, then the first, and then the remaining three, which is maybe a little like watching The Phantom Menace before watching the other three Star Wars films—and then maybe reading a couple of those Star Wars continuation novels. And it’s just as inconsistent.

Gargantua, the “first” book in the series, recounts “The Most Fearsome Life of the Great Gargantua, Father of Pantagruel,” following the giant-king and his group of cronies around as they get drunk, perform feats of derring-do, and generally whip a bunch of ass. For the first fifty pages it all seems very impromptu, with no real sense that Rabelais has any idea where the book is going. But then, about halfway in, he comes up with an inspiration: Friar John, the ass-kicking boozer who defends his abbey only because his supply of wine is in danger. When he joins the ranks of the roving gang, however, he quickly highlights Gargantua’s run-of-the-millness as a hero, throwing the book into even further imbalance. We’re clearly supposed to be impressed by Gargantua’s hyperbolic feats—this isn’t a story about how the sidekick is more interesting than the main character—but it’s just as clear that Rabelais is incapable of making Gargantua all that exciting.

Then in the “second” book, which recounts the “Terrible Deeds and Acts of Prowess” of Gargantua’s son, Pantagruel, there’s an entirely different cast of characters, most notably the even more fire-stealing Panurge, Pantagruel’s proto-Falstaffian sidekick. But as in Gargantua, not much really happens. It’s all just a series of disconnected anecdotes and unremarkable fight scenes, with a few comical asides from Panurge.

Then when the third book rolls around, somehow Friar John has become part of the second generation’s crew, with no explanation of why he’s Pantagruel’s pal now instead of Gargantua’s. My guess is that since he’d just invented Friar John for his flashback first volume, Rabelais must have liked him so much that he decided to let him step a generation into the future, skipping over the now unrevisable Pantagruel. Granted, this isn’t Ulysses we’re talking about (although Joyce was a great admirer of Rabelais) and the text was written the old-fashioned way—dictated like a scroll instead of scrutinized like a modernist hypertext—but such a big inconsistency does seem a little strange. But then again, since everybody’s so eager to claim Rabelais for our century—and since the lapse of character and frame is so much like the episode in Mason & Dixon where a character from The Ghastly Fop (a book within the book) enters the story of Mason and Dixon—let’s just call it postmodern.

With Panurge and Friar John now in the picture together—the foil playing the foil to the foil—the book’s focus shifts a bit. Panurge is a notorious rake, and when he gets the idea to put aside his codpiece and look for a wife of his own—Friar John all the while egging him on and scaring him with insinuations of cuckoldry—the book finally finds a direction. Going to philosophers and theologians and lawyers and physicians for advice—all of whom assure him that he’ll be a cuckold if he marries—Panurge decides to seek the Oracle of the Holy Bottle to find the answer.

Books four and five follow the crew through an interminable series of sea adventures, bringing them into contact with the Chitterlings, the Papimaniacs, the Siticines, and the utterly unbearable Furrycats. When they reach the Oracle at the end of the “Fifth and Last Book,” Panurge finally gets his answer, bringing the whole saga to its conclusion, but by then it’s impossible to care anymore. Part of the problem is that it’s unlikely that Rabelais wrote the final volume: The format seems wildly altered; the narrator’s voice (and placement) has changed; and the things that before had seemed dull and formless are now unbearably dull and formless. But whether Rabelais is responsible for this final volume or not, the text that’s been passed down to us that attributes itself to Rabelais is almost impossible to finish.

So the question is, What’s the big deal? Why is this series of not-very-inspired adventures so important? Why is Rabelais such a touchstone—or at least such a catchphrase—to so many writers and critics? Why is Rabelais Rabelais?

The answer lies in who he was and when he wrote—and especially in the precedents he set. As a monk in the early sixteenth century, he was a part of the rising tide of Humanism, which meant that he took in a vast amount of learning that was considered to be outside the limits of clerical bounds. Against the wishes of his superiors—and often having his books confiscated—he taught himself Greek, first to read the New Testament in the original, and then so he could read the Classics without the mediation of Averroës and the other (mostly Muslim) commentators. Even Dante got his Homer from secondary sources, and so with such a wide variety of thought—and weird inspiration—at his fingertips, Rabelais was free to do just about anything.

But the next question is, does he put this inspiration to good use? Is the fruit of all this learning ultimately any good? And the answer is, not really. There are very few things that Rabelais does really well, and since so many of the subsequent Rabelaisians did them all so much better than he did, reading Rabelais ends up mostly being tiresome. His greatest talent seems to be his gift for hilarious exclamations (“God’s balls!” and “By the foreskin of Christ!” are my favorites), but compared to writers like Angela Carter or Jeanette Winterson, his blasphemies seem pretty feeble. He also loves to make extended lists of disparate things, stringing them all together in an attempt to amaze you with his vastly absurd imagination. But his juxtapositions seem uninspired and poorly planned when compared to those of master list-makers like Joyce or Borges. There’s no sense of things being plucked from the far reaches of the cosmos and lined up in all their glorious Library-of-Babel incongruity, despite all the references he makes to Scipio Africanus or how many types of fish he can name. Then there’s the variety of the formats he uses—the frequent shifts in the narrative from narrative proper to songs to drama to verse to Q&A to long lists and then back to narrative again. It’s pretty entertaining at times, if only for variety’s sake, but compared to the meaningful uses to which writers like Sterne and Joyce put their format changes, it mostly ends up seeming off-the-cuff and empty. Which is also the main problem with how he uses his vast storehouse of knowledge. A writer like Borges uses his infinity of reading judiciously, picking out exactly what he needs and putting it to work as effectively and dramatically as possible. Rabelais just goes off on his erudite digressions for no apparent reason, rarely illustrating any meaningful point or following any of the text’s internal logic. And then there’s the most important question: Pantagruel’s shit-balls that sprout into little women, or Pynchon’s awesome shit-storm? No contest. But I have to admit that I was impressed by Gargantua’s trial-and-error discovery of the best thing with which to wipe his ass. After experimenting with, among other things, a lady’s velvet mask, a page’s bonnet, roses, beets, his own codpiece, a basket, a penitent’s hood, and an otter, he finally strikes upon the perfect ass-wiper: a well-downed goose.

To compare Rabelais to writers more suitably contemporaneous, he again comes up quite pale. With luminaries like Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer before him and Shakespeare and Cervantes soon afterwards, he’s barely worth mentioning. Dante’s incredible precision and systematically pointed erudition—not to mention his ingenious grossness—make Rabelais look like a joke, his long-winded digressions positively first-draft compared to the amazing symmetry of the Commedia. And although Cervantes can be clumsy at times, his comic depth and the breadth of his understanding reveal Rabelais to be quite shallow. Comparing two similar scenes, the episode in Don Quixote when Sancho Panza finally gets to rule over his “isle,” and the scene in book three of Gargantua and Pantagruel when Panurge is made “Warden of Salmagundia in Dipsodia,” the difference is polar. When confronted with his own authority, Sancho comes across as a nearly Solomonic figure, rising so far above the occasion that the episode’s amazing comedy (mostly at Sancho’s expense) only serves to illustrate the squire’s profound humanity. In Panurge’s big scene, there’s little more than a (relatively funny) disputation on the merits of Lending and Borrowing, with a cynical spin on the four cardinal virtues. So even the ostensibly show-stealing Panurge doesn’t put on much of a show. It’s hardly Salmagundian.

Which in a roundabout way brings things back to the question of sidekicks—and to the larger question of Rabelais’ depiction of power relationships, which seems to be in some dispute. For someone looking for the proto-Marxist critic in Rabelais, his inability to make his main characters interesting and his reliance on his trickster-figure sidekicks is tempting fare. But looking at the book more broadly, there’s little question of Rabelais being any kind of dissenter. Even though he’s quite liberal in his judgment of what’s blasphemous and what’s not—his characters’ actions and sayings often pushing the boundaries and provoking his critics to condemn him—he always makes it clear that he and all his characters are good Christians. Reactionary Christians, even, if we’re to judge by his attitude toward the Reformation, or to Jews, or by the great fuss Panurge makes about a character not getting to make his final confession. Granted, Rabelais’ depiction of the Papimaniacs and their idolatrous devotion to the Holy Decretals is hilariously scathing, but then again, didn’t Dante—the ultimate Catholic line-toer—have a special place in Hell reserved for the popes he didn’t like? It could also be argued that, like Chaucer may have been doing, Rabelais was simply using his Christian mouthings as a shield so he could be as blasphemous and bawdy as he wanted to be. Or that he was expanding the parameters of Christianity to include bawdiness and fun—a sort of boozing version of Blake’s “Garden of Love.” But whether this is the case or not, Rabelais still holds his Christian shield high, and he in no way stands for people outside or beneath the structure that protects him. Rabelais’ enemies are all at the Sorbonne, not in Rome, and his attacks on them are all petty and local—hardly the stuff of meaningful satire. This is no Swift we’re talking about—no bitterly satirical social critic. He’s more like the Oscar Wilde of The Importance of Being Earnest: His critiques are self-serving, viciously trite, and empty, leaving little for the reader to really digest.

To compound Rabelais’ demerits for the modern reader, he also shows himself to be a monarchist (don’t forget that Gargantua and Pantagruel are kings), an unquestioningly despotic imperialist, and a shocking gynophobe. Tod Browning’s freaks would hardly consider him “one of us.” Which is all as it should be, I guess. Rabelais was a monk in sixteenth-century Catholic France; he wasn’t Angela Carter. It’s pretty disappointing, but I don’t think we should pretend that he was anything but what he was. Because anyone who thinks Rabelais was putting his “carnivalesque” grotesqueries to work for the consolation of the underdog is only fooling himself. Such a view would be like thinking of Milton as a feminist, or of Dostoyevsky as a nice-guy socialist, or of Flannery O’Connor as a freethinker.

So after all the air’s been let out, what does that leave in Rabelais for the deflated Rabelaisian? Is there anything left in him worth reading at all? Or is he to be tossed in the bin with Stendhal and Dostoyevsky and Mann and all the rest of so-called “important” writers who aren’t worth your shelf space, let alone your precious time. If you’re a completist—or a masochist—the way I am, you have to read him. And now that it’s over, I have to admit that I’m glad I have. Rabelais isn’t much fun to read, but he’s kind of fun to remember, and the good bits will probably stay with me for a while. But other than filling in a blank space in my spotty connect-the-dots understanding of literature—and giving me some good ideas about ass-wiping materials—Rabelais’ cacata carta kind of seemed like a waste of time. I recommend reading Jan Potocki instead.

—David Wiley

Borges and His Fiction, by Gene H. Bell-Villada

A Review of Gene H. Bell-Villada’s

Borges and His Fiction

Originally published in the Rain Taxi Review of Books, Summer, 2000

Borges and His Fiction:

A Guide to His Mind and Art

Revised Edition

By Gene H. Bell-Villada

University of Texas Press ($30)

In Jorge Luis Borges’ story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” a vast, all-encompassing, and completely imaginary world infiltrates and then takes over our own, insinuating its way into our history, geography, literature, sciences, and metaphysics via bogus encyclopedia entries, conjectural treatises, and pseudo-scholarly games. In a startling parallel, Borges’ own invented world—with its infinite libraries, invented authors, and alternate universes—has infiltrated our own and spawned an almost equally vast array of secondary material.

Adding to the ever-growing list of entries, Borges scholar Gene H. Bell-Villada has updated and expanded his 1981 study, Borges and His Fiction. Incorporating biographical material that has surfaced since Borges’ death in 1986 and revising the critical evaluation of the Fictions, Bell-Villada’s book offers a more comprehensive look at Borges—the man, the Argentine, the world-class writer—than probably any other single volume.

Unfortunately, Bell-Villada writes about Borges much better than about Borges’ work, and as the book descends into the Fictions, the reader learns more about the critic’s interests and biases than about Borges’ stories. Somehow bending each narrative to fit (or subvert) some preordained conceit, Bell-Villada reads all manner of spurious Tlön-like theories into Borges’ ever-mutable world. While the sections on Borges himself are enlightening, we somehow find that “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is a comment on the situation in WWII-Europe, that “Emma Zunz” is a feminist-proletarian parable, and that “The Zahir”—in an astonishing stretch—closely conforms to Freudian paradigms.

While this volume may be useful to Borges experts, a less scholarly reader might not have the critical know-how to separate the useful from the nonsensical. This book, which the author addresses to the general reader, is unfortunately better left to the ever-expanding and ever-infighting cabal of critical theorists.

— David Wiley

Time for Robo, by Peter Plagens

A Review of Peter Plagens’ Time for Robo

Originally published in the Rain Taxi Review of Books, Spring 2000

Time for Robo
By Peter Plagens
Black Heron Press ($24.95)

Since in addition to being a fiction writer Peter Plagens is also a painter and an art critic, it’s tempting to judge his debut novel, Time for Robo, by its cover. Featuring just the title printed in simple block letters, the book’s surface doesn’t go very far to recommend the dense swirl of storytelling that lies just a few millimeters beneath. Which is strange for an writer so obsessed with surfaces. But as Plagens illustrates, an image, like a human life, is malleable and fleeting, and it’s the dimensions that lie beyond the surface that give it its true character.

That’s not to say that Time for Robo comes alive as soon as you open its cover. There are some interesting epigraphs at the beginning (one by the Bee Gees) and a quite amusing Contents page, which features section and chapter titles such as “Alas, Through the Looking Glass,” “Every Picture Stores a Telly,” and “Time the End of Till.” But with the opening chapter, things look as flat as the cover suggests.

Narrated by God, who’s somehow also a computer, the chapter functions both as a kind of Semiotics for Dummies and as an apology for (and defense of) the novel’s weaknesses. In order for us readers to understand him, sez God, He has to narrow Himself down; He has to be imperfect—like a statue chipped from a formless but all-encompassing piece of marble. I don’t know if Plagens thinks people will actually fall for these kinds of tactics—if we’re supposed to think that Time for Robo is as imperfect as, say, the Statue of David—but maybe we should give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he’s not just trying to put one over on us non-art-critic types.

And then, somehow, things get interesting. First there’s a writer named Billy Lockjaw, who’s working on a novel (not quite the one we’re reading); and then there’s his novel (his second novel, whose chapters are printed as if they’re the chapters of Time for Robo); and then there are interjections from God, who reminds us intermittently (and only somewhat annoyingly) that what we’re reading is Billy’s work (and presumably not Plagens’). Who writes the chapters about Billy is anybody’s guess, I guess, but soon it doesn’t really matter, because with each new chapter, the layers of storytelling pile upon themselves until they form a fairly intricate Möbius strip of narrative.

Part of the pleasure is that Plagens’ themes—time, art, religion, the nature of reality, oral sex—build and revolve around each other as intricately as the narratives do, and that with so much to work with, the possible variations seem almost infinite, despite the computer’s caveat. But then once the stories get moving, Plagens loses momentum again as, instead of coming up with original variations, he begins to round up all the usual suspects: There’s a Flemish painter whose painting alters itself while he sleeps and then makes its way across several continents and centuries (see Gaddis and Borges); a shadowy, unnamed agency that has its fingers in all kinds of creepy technologies (see Pynchon); a cabal of Jesus freaks who become coke-dealing computer programmers (see Pynchon again); and a man who’s nicknamed Robo and whose father more or less lets the aforementioned agency experiment on him (see Pynchon yet again) and who somehow has (or had) the power to punch holes in time and disappear for split-seconds while he plays basketball (see Vonnegut and—gasp—Tom Robbins?). Surrounding all this is the narrative tension between Billy and God, which for all its cleverness is just a pale version of the struggle in William Vollmann’s You Bright and Risen Angels between the Author (a computer programmer) and Big George (an ostensibly omniscient electrical force).

In the end, Time for Robo is a brilliant and extremely provocative failure. The diverging ends, which spin from such auspicious possibilities, are way too loose to be reconciled; the Pynchonisms are way too transparent (and incomplete) to be credible; and the out-and-out hands-in-the-air, shoulder-shrugging I-give-up ending is hardly enough reward for finishing the thing. But there are other rewards, and not just a few of them, embedded in this mess of a novel. Most important is the simple fact that Plagens is such a compelling storyteller that, despite everything, it’s hard to stop reading. Even as he charts well-explored territory, he somehow comes up with fresh ways of seeing—and telling—his stories. Which may not be enough reason to pick this book up and make your way into its uninviting outer layers—but once you have, you’ll find yourself constantly compelled to keep reading. Which I guess may be recommendation enough.

—David Wiley

Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov): Portrait of a Marriage, by Stacy Schiff

A Review of Stacy Schiff’s

Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov):

Portrait of a Marriage

Originally published in the Rain Taxi Review of Books, Winter 1999/2000

Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov):

Portrait of a Marriage

By Stacy Schiff

Random House ($27.95)

When asked about his wife’s relation to his fiction, Vladimir Nabokov once declared that “most of my works have been dedicated to my wife, and her picture has often been reproduced by some mysterious means of reflected color in the inner mirror of my books.” Always coy, Nabokov failed to mention that his wife, Véra, was also the work’s typist, editor, translator, researcher, and first (and only intended) reader—as well as the author’s secretary, teaching assistant, chauffeur, accountant, ghost-correspondent, cook, and, for many years, financial supporter. But because she retreated so insistently to the background, biographers and critics have always had difficulty putting her in context to the man and to the work. Even Nabokov leaves her nameless in his memoir, Speak, Memory, so what biographer Stacy Schiff has set out for herself is the dauntingly Nabokovian challenge of separating ghostly fact from ghostly fiction.

As with her life, however, Nabokov also dominates her biography. Perhaps there isn’t enough information on Véra herself for Schiff to write anything more than just another Nabokov biography. But since Schiff only spends about twenty pages on the pre-Nabokov Véra, who met her husband when she was twenty-one, and about fifteen pages on the post-Nabokov Véra, who outlived him by thirteen years, the book’s slapped-on subtitle, “Portrait of a Marriage,” seems more accurate than its chosen title, Véra.

Still, looking at Véra and Vladimir as “the Nabokovs”—or as their collaborative moniker, VN—yields interesting surprises. It was after meeting Véra that Nabokov, who was known as a poet, began writing novels. And the meeting itself—Véra sent him a note instructing him to meet her on a bridge, where she arrived wearing a mask—surely informed the nature of his future work. But as the biography progresses, Schiff seems little interested in separating Véra from the masked variations of her that appear in her husband’s novels. And she’s so obsessed with Nabokov’s dopplegängers and mirror images that she projects them onto Véra, often citing the work to make sense of the life.

When the book succeeds at getting near its ostensible subject, however, it shocks the reader with Véra’s oddly amazing presence. By any account a genius, she had almost perfect recall—far better than her famously mnemonic husband—read much more widely than is conceivable, spoke four languages fluently (later learning enough Italian and Swedish to help translate her husband’s novels), and more or less did everything for Vladimir but compose his books. While he wrote, she worked, helped to prepare his lectures, delivered them when he was sick or away, kept up his correspondence, made hard-nosed deals with publishers, and performed almost superhuman amanuensic feats.

All this excellence, however, made the real world a little hazy for Véra Nabokov. In Germany in the 1930s, she was almost blindly oblivious to the Nazis (Véra was Jewish). And as the literary life wore on, dirt-poor or not, she never let go of her old-world prejudices. For all her genius, Véra Nabokov was deeply homophobic, seemingly unaware of feminism, rabidly right-wing (she supported McCarthy and befriended William F. Buckley), was a complacent war-profiteer (she invested Lolita money in McDonnell Aircraft during the Vietnam war), and, to top it all off, she carried a gun.

Not least important, though, she was a woman who for better or worse subjugated her genius to that of her husband—a subject that Schiff handles poorly, not once addressing the relationship in feminist terms. But for all her apologies—and despite her horribly clunky, faux-Nabokovian prose—Schiff somehow succeeds in transmitting her awesome affection for Véra Nabokov to the reader. Which is probably as close as we’ll ever get to the elusive Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov.

—David Wiley

Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies, by Ken Kalfus

A Review of Ken Kalfus’

Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies

Originally published in the Rain Taxi Review of Books, Fall 1999

Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies

By Ken Kalfus
Milkweed ($22)

Arriving on the heels of his first collection, Thirst, Ken Kalfus’ new story collection, Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies, marks a radical leap forward for its author. Wildly overrated by just about everyone, Thirst was long on plot and short on tone, texture, character, and just about everything else a story collection needs. With the exception of a few isolated flights of fantasy, the collection read like Ron Carlson on an off day. But Pu-239 reads like nobody but Ken Kalfus.

Not without its flaws, however, Pu-239 starts off only a little past where Thirst left off. The title story, although terrifying plot-wise, sacrifices real characterization as it recounts the rapid succession of events that follow when a doomed power plant worker tries to sell a canister of plutonium on the Russian black market. Not only is the premise straight out of a Sean Connery/Alec Baldwin vehicle, it moves so quickly that any attempt at giving it texture ends up sounding awkward and forced. The overall effect is chilling, though, and when the story reaches its astonishing conclusion, it becomes clear that Kalfus has done an expert job of planting the seeds of post-story fallout in the reader’s mind.

While the breakneck opening story may grab the reader’s attention, it’s Kalfus’ longer stories that allow him to do what he does best. In “Birobizhdan” Kalfus tells the story of Jewish patriots who lay the groundwork for an autonomous Jewish state in the eastern part of the Soviet Union. Not only is the story absolutely compelling, but Kalfus employs ingeniously effective storytelling strategies that open up profound narrative explorations without slowing the story down at all. Perhaps the most brilliant section is when a group of Jews, led by the politically gung-ho Israel, sets out on their trainride east. The stops and starts, the interminable delays and setbacks, the increasing hostility at each stop, and the relentless determination to keep moving all mirror the story itself as it chugs toward its destiny. And of course there’s the unspoken implications of Jews heading east on a train, with the imminent Soviet betrayal foreshadowing Europe’s betrayal in World War II. Ominous, indeed.

The novella “Peredelkino” is a bit less successful than “Birobizhdan,” but it covers almost as much ground as it traces the vertiginous ups and downs of a Soviet writer’s career. As in Thirst, Kalfus is most successful when he tests the limits of his storytelling powers, but postmodernism is unfortunately still a little beyond his reach, as the garbled “Bodyonnovsk” attests. But the hilarious fairy tale “Salt” achieves a near-perfect tone as it explores the disparity between money and value.

The only real bummer about Pu-239 is that it draws a fairly sharp line between reality and fantasy. The realities that Kalfus evokes can be so darkly surreal, however, that even at their most direct and devastating, they mimic the mind’s hazy mediation. And even though he keeps the surface level fairly straight, Kalfus makes the reader keenly aware of the nuclear dimensions packed within the boundaries of Newtonian fiction.

—David Wiley