Q: How does this change everything?
RA: I cannot speak for the whole of literature because by some trick there just happens to be a few books that I have left to read. However, in American letters, from Huck Finn to Ishmael to Caddy and Quentin in The Sound and the Fury, characters have been called upon to demonstrate their humanity through some act of heroism, usually an act of qualified heroism which is meant to affirm the uncompromising moral truth that is thought to underpin our society. Of course, in practice it is never as simple as all that, ambiguity being the life’s blood of literary fiction. But when we consider Ariel—and I regard Ariel to be not only a collection of poems but one of the most formidable examples of metafiction in the canon—we are confronted with a situation wherein the main character, i.e., the author Sylvia Plath, has such a series of acute and polarizing insights into the human condition that, quite justifiably, not only can’t she act in any way to demonstrate her humanity, she can no longer even sustain it. She is obliged by the tenets of this design of self-Darwinism that she keeps redefining throughout the book to remove herself entirely from being and existence (and as a sidebar I would hasten to add here that the dissemblance between the two concepts is enough in itself to persuade any credible thinker to commit suicide). Sylvia, then, is compelled to cancel her birth certificate without regard to the fact that she is a wife (albeit an estranged one), a mother, a daughter, and a poet who carries within her the seeds of genius, and moreover she succeeds in making the reader believe that hers is the appropriate course of action, for some readers in the fictional sense, and for many others in the actual sense.
Q: You know, you might have written a critical study that said as much.
RA: And, for that matter, she might have as well.
Q: I gather that you’re saying that you think that such a study would have been an act of compromise.
RA: Yes, but in the real world suicide also tends to be an act of compromise.
Q: Mr. Anderson, I have read your novel, and I am wondering just how often it is that you find yourself visiting the real world.
RA: Writing Little Fugue was what I did to avoid just what you are suggesting.
Q: Point taken. Now, the major characters, or the voices in the fugue of the novel, Sylvia Plath, her husband Ted Hughes, her husband’s mistress Assia Gutmann Wevill, and the character that you have chosen to call Robert Anderson, are all poets or writers.
RA: Yes, poets or writers with varying degrees of achievement to their credit, but all of these characters present engaging minds for the narrative to enter into. As for the psyches of Sylvia, Ted, and Assia, I would have to describe them as overpowering. A novelist has to carefully apportion the thought-to-action ratio of each of these individuals that he is creating day-to-day. And despite the precedence of actual living people named Sylvia, Ted, Assia, and Robert, the writing of this book was much more an act of creation than an exercise in interpretation.
If a major character should take action without his individuality and his motivation having been made clear, and without a satisfactory sense of intimacy having been established between the character and the reader, then his actions are rendered inconsequential. On the other hand, if a character thinks in one direction, and then does not act accordingly, the consequence is that his thoughts are to no end, and his root identity is therefore countermanded altogether. Writing is rather like a video game in that respect: The author does battle with encroaching oblivion from every side.
But here is where the choice of fictionalizing Sylvia Plath and her circle became interesting and expedient. Setting aside for one moment what I just said about Sylvia’s acute insight into the human condition precluding her from carrying on, the Ariel poems, some of the very last poems that she was to write, are sometimes painful, always rueful, but they succeed in avoiding morbidity. Through gritted teeth, they manage to celebrate, in pretty much equal degrees, life and its terminus. They portray a daily struggle, alternately a struggle with ordinary domesticity and with memory, so fiercely and with so much depth of perception that in the end Sylvia’s acquiescence via hara-kiri seems not only inevitable but unsettlingly triumphant. But if she had not written those poems, and we were not privy to her cerebral journey by day and her engaging reverie by evening, who among us would fail to judge her actions as cowardly? After all, she did away with herself while her daughter and son lay in their cribs in the next room. Notwithstanding, we read Ariel, and we find not a despairing suicide note, but a marvelous feat of metaphor, a lucid letter that disarms our response of censure and condemnation because the poet has already judged, censored, condemned, and just possibly forgiven and absolved herself. This is the quality that attracts us in her poems, this sense of fire being snatched, albeit all too briefly and harrowingly, from the jaws of the deep freeze.
I was convinced from the outset that her experience offered the proper context from which to survey the squandered promise and the lemming-like illogic of our times, specifically the later half of the twentieth century. And I was also able to persuade myself, with the help of my agent, Ian Kleinert, and my editor, Dan Smetanka, that it was possible to work the novel out structurally by allowing Sylvia to play the role of the pilot fish, not only to Ted, Assia, and Robert, but also to her readership— metaphorically to the masses, if you will. She is the smallest, swiftest, and the most harried one in the pack, the one who swims alongside the sharks, and her sudden absence sets her company wildly off course. In the end, she serves as a metaphor for a societal virus larger than herself or any of the rest of us.
Q: I am glad that you have at least owned up to the fact that yours is a kettle-of-fish story.
RA: What exactly do you have against me?
Q: All that you have said so far qualifies as a great deal to espouse without once pausing to deal with the question of the propriety of using real people as characters in your novel. After all, Sylvia, Ted, and Assia led lives that were in many ways divergent from the ones that you depict in your novel.
RA: That’s correct. To deal with that aspect of the book ethically, let me just say that all characters in fiction, if they are going to have any depth at all, have to come from somewhere. They are not dreamed up— they are appropriated. One concept that Freud kept coming back to is the way in which the human mind is largely incapable of envisioning and creating without having a suitable archetype in place to refer back to constantly. Likewise all novels are written over the bones of previous novels, and thereby all fiction is to some degree metafiction.
If a novelist wishes to steal fire—and there is little reason for anyone to attempt something as unwieldy and thwarting as the novel form if he does not—it is incumbent upon him to steal it from a hand that he deems to be aglow. The novel that I admire foremost for sheer creativity is Gabriel Garcia-Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. It seems to me that the book is in many ways a rewrite of Faulkner’s Snopes novels, heavily informed by the works of Borges. That does not mean that Garcia-Márquez’s individuality does not show forth. Quite the contrary, the novel raises the literary bar, and in the end Márquez does a great service to those writers who have influenced him by extending the trajectory of their own achievements, by carrying the sparks from their torches to a new and further extended finish line.
Besides that, I have read Ariel hundreds of times and, with each reading, the immediacy and the intimacy of the poems is such that I have always felt as if I were watching her through a glass wall all too frangible, each time too mesmerized to do anything to save Sylvia from her fate, but cognizant all the while of precisely what she was getting at and where she was going to go with it. The fact that some of her references to this day seem obscure does not lessen the terrible clarity of the poems. I can’t help feeling that it was her intention to make accomplices out of her readership—this being one of the things that metafiction can do that ordinary fiction is apt to fall short of—that is, breaking down the barrier between the author and the reader in terms of something
more than good faith and shared feeling. The Ariel poems seem consciously, although never self-consciously, magnetic, and magnetism of this sort can hardly be unintentional. So, it was my intention to use the novel to repent my ongoing collaboration with Sylvia Plath, and to serve the same function, by wild proxy, for the rest of her very wide and diverse following. Ariel, as we all know, is the name of the horse that she would ride at her local fairgrounds in London. In the saddle, she envisioned herself as outdistancing her tormentors. With Little Fugue, whether or not I have succeeded, I was looking just once to grapple the reins from her.
Q: And this would embody your personal theft of fire?
RA: My theft of fire, and my leap of faith. The ride was not without its flaming hoops. The last aspect I’d like to get across in regard to your question about the use of real people in fiction is that Achilles, Hector, Ulysses, King Arthur, the whole of the dramatis personae of The Divine Comedy, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Richard the Third, and Count Ladislaus de Almásy—Ondaatje’s English Patient—were people who lived actual lives or else were amalgams of several real people. There’s a distinct challenge in distilling a fictional character from an actual person. Real people bring with them their own particular resonance, which has to be respected and utilized, and they also bring with them the resonance of the times that they have lived in, the specific epochs that helped to shape them. Leaving aside etiquette, which certainly isn’t my strong suit, or that of any writer whom I hold in esteem, let it be said that all of the baggage that these people naturally bear with them must be made to harmonize with the theme and the dramatic sweep of the novel. This turns out to be no easy task. I would venture to say that characters with names like Marybeth Ruttenberg and Bong Kung Park tend to be much more fluid and malleable.
Q: What about the inclusion in the novel of the character known as Robert Anderson?
RA: What about it?
Q: Does the character have more in common with you than just your name, and what is his particular function in the book?
RA: I think that I can answer the first part of your question best by initially concentrating on the second. In the earliest versions of Little Fugue, there was no character named Robert Anderson. To serve as the fourth part of the fugue, I tried to create a composite voice of Ariel readers, something along the lines of what Faulkner did with the combined voice of the auditing townspeople in his story “A Rose for Emily,” which is the same technique that Garcia-Márquez took up in his novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold. This approach did not work out in the first drafts of my novel. The voice proved to be too opaque. It had too much of a Greek chorus quality, and it served to unbalance the thought-to-action ratio that I mentioned before. Dan Smetanka suggested that the fourth voice in the contrapuntal mix should be that of someone named Robert Anderson. The truth is that unlike certain critics who must go nameless— like Cervantes says, let the commission of their sordid sin be its own punishment—Dan and I had read Herodotus, we had read Henry Miller, we had read Borges, we had read Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, we had read Edmund Morris’s biography of Ronald Reagan, we had read Philip Roth, and a few other authors I might name who proved bold enough to assume that the blurring of the line between fact and fantasy, and between author and character, affords a work something of the resonance of myth.
The first-person voice going by my name was never meant to be strictly autobiographical any more than the depictions of Sylvia, Ted, and Assia were supposed to be biographical. The intimacy of a first-person perspective, interspersed with the other voices in the third person, was what we were looking for in creating what we had come to think of as a fugue, and we realized all too well at that point that if we were going to go ahead and distort the personal lives of Sylvia, Ted, Assia, et al., in the name of the psychological novel, it was only fair that we distort the life of the author Robert Anderson as well.
Q: Would you say that Robert Anderson was the most difficult character to develop?
RA: Not in the sense that it was like some uncomfortable act of self-portraiture. The process didn’t bring back any agonizing memories because I don’t happen to have any. The character and I share the experience of a residency on Times Square during the heroin and crack epidemics, but the difference is that, as the years go by, he remembers things that happened to him, and I simply do not. And I’m finding out more and more, by the way, that for a writer of fiction, a highly selective memory can be a saving grace.
The creation of the character was difficult stylistically in that Robert had to be made to track the pale stalking horse of Ariel, meaning that his life had to bear out a number of veiled prophecies encrypted in Sylvia’s poems, and I am going to have to leave it to the individual reader to sort out what I mean by that. It was also difficult in that, after having attempted this, the critic in the New York Times referred to me as a former drug addict, and this is distinctly not true—he mistook a conceit of the narrative for a confession. The thing that surprised me was that when I put Little Fugue away and began my second novel Loverpool, it was not at all easy for me to leave behind the first-person narration, and to cease to see an alternate world from the tinted portal of someone called Robert Anderson, a character who was not me, but might have been in a parallel universe. Both Robert Lowell and Ted Hughes wrote about Sylvia Plath, regarding her coming into her own as a poet with the composition of Ariel. Lowell and Hughes, each in his own way, describe Sylvia as long harboring an alter ego that, when allowed to come to the fore, would not consent to allow her to reclaim her former identity. By their estimation, her death certificate should have included the phrase “suicide/fratricide.”
Q: And how would you like yours to read?
RA: “By way of drowning.”
Q: Why is that?
RA: Because it is my contention that there are two mighty rivers running on parallel courses through the communal heart of the celestial spheres. One is Lethe, the river of oblivion. The other is Mnemosyne, the river of omniscience. And in the dry and airy riverbed between these two divergent streams, the sirens continue to sing.
Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion
Self-discovery and validation through destruction are common themes among the characters in Little Fugue. What other commonalities can be seen?
What is the biggest struggle for Ted Hughes in this novel? Is the struggle resolved by the end of the book?
According to the author, Sylvia was so acutely aware of the human condition that she had to remove herself from it. In this case, is her suicide a moral compromise?
Do you see Sylvia and Assia as heroic or cowardly? Why?
Define the title. What is its meaning and how does it give the reader insight into where the story will lead?
In your opinion, what is the theme of the book?
What is the main driving force between Sylvia and Ted? What about the driving force between Ted and Assia?
Examine the author’s use of italics in parts of the novel. Who is speaking in these sections, and what is the significance?
Robert Anderson, the character, lives through and describes events that greatly impact his life. How do his drug days of 42nd Street, the riots at Columbia University, and the events of September 11 tie together to express this character’s central theme of wading through moral dilemmas?
Discuss what role isolation and drug abuse plays in the lives of each character. Do you think it is essential to their development to have to go through these self-afflictions?
ROBERT ANDERSON was born in 1964 in Rapid City, South Dakota, and came to New York City in 1985. Winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for his collection of short stories, Ice Age, he lived for many years in Times Square residential hotels, working as a cook and writing. He is at work on his next novel for Ballantine Books.
Little Fugue is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception
of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the au
thor’s imagination
and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the
situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are
not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work.
In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
2006 Random House Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 2005 by Robert Anderson
Reading group guide copyright © 2006 by Random House, Inc.
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Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of
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Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint
previously published material:
Harcourt, Inc., and Faber and Faber Ltd.: Excerpt from “The Hollow Men” from The Collected
Poems 1909–1962 by T. S. Eliot, copyright © 1936 by Harcourt, Inc., copyright renewed 1963,
1964 by T. S. Eliot. Rights outside the United States administered by Faber and Faber Ltd.,
London. ., and Faber and Faber Ltd.
New Directions Publishing Corp. and David Higham Associates Limited: Excerpt from
“Should Lanterns Shine” from The Poems of Dylan Thomas, copyright © 1939 by New Directions
Publishing Corporation. Excerpt from “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in
London” from The Poems of Dylan Thomas, copyright © 1945 by The Trustees for the Copyrights
of Dylan Thomas. Rights in the United Kingdom administered by David Higham Associates
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