As for my own disappointment in encountering Enemies of Promise after so long a hiatus: it was never Connolly’s fault that I made up a book that wasn’t there. I wanted to brood over failure. Connolly presides over the groans of success. He knows no real enemies—unless you count the threat to revolution ambushed in Mayfair moustaches.
Published in The New Criterion, March 1984
William Gaddis and the Scion of Darkness
Carpenter’s Gothic is William Gaddis’s third work of fiction in thirty years. That sounds like a sparse stream, and misrepresents absolutely. Gaddis is a deluge. The Recognitions, his first novel, published in 1955, matches in plain bulk four or five ordinary contemporary novels. His second,//?, a burlesquing supplementary footnote appearing two decades later, is easily equivalent to another three or four. Gaddis has not been “prolific” (that spendthrift coin); instead he has been prodigious, gargantuan, exhaustive, subsuming fates and conditions under a hungry logic. His two huge early novels are great vaults or storehouses of crafty encyclopedic scandal—omniscience thrown into the hottest furnaces of metaphor. Gaddis knows almost everything: not only how the world works—the pragmatic cynical business-machine that we call worldliness—but also how myth flies into being out of the primeval clouds of art and death and money.
To call this mammoth reach “ambition” is again to misrepresent. When The Recognitions arrived on the scene, it was already too late for those large acts of literary power ambition used to be good for.
Joyce had come and gone, leaving footprints both shallow and deep everywhere in Gaddis’s ground—the opening dash, for instance, as a substitute for quotation marks: a brilliantly significant smudge that allows no closure and dissolves voices into narrative, turning the clearest verisimilitude into something spectral. Gaddis, imperially equipped for masterliness in range, language, and ironic penetration, born to wrest out a Modernist masterpiece but born untimely, nonetheless took a long draught of Joyce’s advice and responded with surge after surge of virtuoso cunning. The Recognitions is a mocking recognition of the implausibility of originality: a vast fiction about fabrication and forgery, about the thousand faces of the counterfeit, and therefore, ineluctably, about art and religion. In the desert years of long ago, when I was a deluded young would-be writer tangled up in my own crapulous ambition, The Recognitions landed on my grim table (and on the grim tables of how many other aspirants to the holy cloak of Art?) and stayed there, month after month, as a last burnished talisman of—well, of Greatness, of a refusal to relinquish the latter-day possibilities of Joyce, Mann, James, Woolf, Proust, the whole sacral crew of those old solar boats. That, I think now, was a misreading of Gaddis’s chosen ground. He knew what monuments had gathered behind him, but—seizing Joyce’s dialogue-dash as staff—he willingly moved on. He was not imitating a received literature; he was not a facsimile Joyce.
Gaddis was, in fact—and is—new coinage: an American original. To claim this is to fall into Gaddis’s own comedy of “enamored parodies weighed down with testimonial ruins.” Originality is exactly what Gaddis has made absurd; unrecognizable. Yet if it is obligatory to recapitulate Gaddis’s mockery through the impact—the dazzling irruption—of his three-decadesold first novel, it is because The Recognitions is always spoken of as the most overlooked important work of the last several literary generations. Tony Tanner: “The critical neglect of this book is really extraordinary.” David Madden: “An underground reputation has kept it on the brink of oblivion.” Through the famous obscurity of The Recognitions, Gaddis has become famous for not being famous enough. Carpenter’s Gothic—a short novel, but as mazily and mercilessly adroit as the others—should mark a turning: it should disclose Gaddis’s terrifying artfulness, once and for all, to those whom tonnage has kept away. Carpenter’s Gothic may be Gaddis-in-little, but it is Gaddis to the brim.
The title itself, the name of an architectural vogue, is a dangerous joke. It alludes to a style of charm that dissembles—that resplendent carved-wood fakery seductively laid out along the Hudson a century ago, “built to be seen from the outside,” its unplanned insides crammed to fit in any which way—“a patchwork of conceits, borrowings, deceptions,” according to McCandless, the owner of one of these “grandiose visions. . . . foolish inventions. . . . towering heights and cupolas.” McCandless is a geologist, a novelist, a heavy smoker with a confusing past. He has locked up one room containing his papers, reserving the right to visit it, and rented the house to a young married couple, Paul and Elizabeth Booth. Paul, like the house, has grandiose visions. He works as a public relations man for the Reverend Ude’s evangelical operations, which reach as far as Africa; when Ude drowns a boy while baptizing him, Paul in his inventive fecundity—he is a desperately hollow promoter—twists this into a usable miracle. Liz, Paul’s wife—wistful, abused, hopeful, humble, herself quietly deceitful—is, along with her ne’er-do-well brother Billy, heir to a mining combine intent on scheming itself back into a business empire’s version of African colonialism. Paul, a combat veteran, was formerly bagman for the company under the chairmanship of Liz’s father, a suicide; the company is now in the hands of Adolph, the trustee. Adolph keeps Liz, Billy, and Paul on short rations. Obedient to Paul’s several scams, Liz goes from doctor to doctor, patiently pursuing an insurance fraud. McCandless reveals himself as the discoverer of the African gold the company is after, and seduces Liz. But there is no gold; McCandless is a lunatic impostor. In the end, brother and sister die of too much imposture.
All this crammed-in conspiring, told bare, is pointless soap-opera recounting. We have run into these fictional scalawags before, rotted-out families, rotted-out corporations, seedy greedy preachers and poachers, either in cahoots with or victims of one another, and sometimes both. They are American staples; but “plot” is Gaddis’s prey, and also his play. Triteness is his trap and toy. He has light-fingered all the detritus that pours through the news machines and the storytelling machines—the fake claims, fake Bible schools, fake holy water out of the Pee Dee River spreading typhus, a bought-and-paid-for senator, an armed “Christian survival camp,” fake identities (Paul, pretending to be a WASP Southerner, is probably a Jew), the mugger Paul kills. Plot is what Gaddis travesties and teases and two-times and swindles.
Yet these stereotypical illusions, these familiar dumping grounds of chicanery, turn to stony truths under Gaddis’s eye—or, rather, his ear. Gaddis is a possessed receiver of voices, a maniacal eavesdropper, a secret prophet and moralizer. His method is pure voice, relentless dialogue, preceded by the serenely poised Joycean dash and melting off into the panning of a camera in the speaker’s head. Speech is fragmented, piecemeal, halting and stunted, finally headlong—into telephones continually, out of radio and television. Through all these throats and machines the foul world spills. The radio is a perpetual chorus of mishap and mayhem, pumping out its impassive dooms while the human voice lamenting in the kitchen moans on:
—Problem Liz you just don’t grasp how serious the whole God damn thing is. . . . the bottle trembled against the rim of the glass,—after him they’re after me they’re after all of us. . . . He’d slumped back against word of two tractor trailer trucks overturned and on fire at an entrance to the George Washington bridge,—fit the pieces together you see how all the God damn pieces fit together, SEC comes in claims some little irregularity on a Bible school bond issue next thing you’ve got the IRS in there right behind with misappropriation of church funds for openers, problem’s their new computer down there’s just geared to their mailing list if they don’t build their mailing list there won’t be any funds what the whole God damn thing is all about, you get these Bible students they’re smart enough digging up Ephusians but they count on their fingers nobody knows where in hell the last nickel went,
and on and on: fire, death, fraud, money, voice voice voice. The voices are humanity seeping out, drop by drop, a gradual bloodletting. It isn’t “theme” Gaddis deals in (his themes are plain) so much as a
theory of organism and disease. In Carpenter’s Gothic the world is a poisonous organism, humankind dying of itself.
The process is gargoylish: a vaudeville turn. Paul’s scribbled diagram of a promotion scheme, with all its arrows pointing cause-and-consequence, is mistaken for a map of the fourteenth-century Battle of Crecy. The “big ore find on the mission tract,” a lie, is designed to lure American military imperialism into Africa. Liz, roused against McCandless, cries out (quoting Paul muddying it up: Ephusians for Ephesians, now Clausnitz for Clausewitz), “Clausnitz was wrong, it’s not that war is politics carried on by other means it’s the family carried on by other means,” and McCandless, sneering at tribe against tribe, nation against nation, replies: “Well good God! They’ve been doing that for two thousand years haven’t they?”
McCandless is Gaddis’s strong seer, a philosophical trader in scourging tirades: “. . . talk about a dark continent I’ll tell you something, revelation’s the last refuge ignorance finds from reason. Revealed truth is the one weapon stupidity’s got against intelligence and that’s what the whole damned thing is about. . . . you’ve got enough sects slaughtering each other from Londonderry to Chandigarh to wipe out the whole damned thing. . . . just try the Children’s Crusade for a sideshow, thousands of kids led into slavery and death by a twelve year old with a letter from Jesus. . . .—all four horsemen riding across the hills of Africa with every damned kind of war you could ask for. . . . seven hundred languages they’ve all been at each other’s throats since the creation war, famine, pestilence, death, they ask for food and water somebody hands them an AK47. . . .” Paul, meanwhile, is Gaddis’s weak seer, discloser of the shoddy morning news: “Draw the line, run a carrier group off Mombasa and a couple of destroyers down the Mozambique channel, bring in the RDF and put the SAC on red alert. They’ve got what they want.”
Is Carpenter’s Gothic a “political” novel? An “apocalyptic” novel? A novel of original sin without the illusion of salvation? It is tempting to judge Gaddis as Liz finally judges McCandless: “Because you’re the one who wants it,” she accuses him, “to see them all go up like that smoke in the furnace all the stupid, ignorant, blown up in the clouds and there’s nobody there, there’s no rapture or anything just to see them wiped away for good it’s really you, isn’t it. That you’re the one who wants Apocalypse, Armageddon all the sun going out and the sea turned to blood you can’t wait no, you’re the one who can’t wait! . . . because you despise their, not their stupidity no, their hopes because you haven’t any, because you haven’t any left.” But not long after this outburst Liz learns from McCandless’s wife—who appears out of nowhere like a clarifying messenger—that McCandless was once in a mental hospital. Another clue hints at a frontal lobotomy. A world saturated in wild despair, and only in despair, turns out to be a madman’s image.
Even while he is handing over this straw of hope—that the evangelist of darkest calamity is deranged—Gaddis the trickster may be leading us more deeply into hopelessness. If McCandless, the god of the novel and its intellectual sovereign, the owner of that false-front house of disaster, whose pitiless portrait of our soiled planet we can recognize as exactly congruent with truth-telling—if McCandless is not to be trusted, then where are we? Does Gaddis mean us to conclude that whoever sees things-as-they-are in their fullest tragic illumination will never be credible except under the badge of lunacy? Or does he mean McCandless—whose name, after all, suggests he is the scion of darkness—to speak for the devil? And if so, is Gaddis on the devil’s side, if only because the devil is the most eloquent moralist of all? And a novelist to boot, whose papers are irredeemably scrambled in that secret messy room he is forever cleaning up, that room “like Dachau,” choked with smoke, where the Bible is stored upside down?
The true god of the novel—god of invention, commerce, and cunning—is of course mercurial Gaddis himself. He is a preternatural technician and engineer: whatever turns, turns out to turn again; things recur, allusions multiply, pretexts accrete, duplicities merge, greed proliferates, nuances breed and repeat. The center holds horribly: “you see how all the God damn pieces fit together.” No one in Carpenter’s Gothic is innocent or uninjured or unheard. It is an unholy landmark of a novel; an extra turret, so to speak, added on to the ample, ingenious, audacious Gothic mansion William Gaddis has slowly been building in American letters.
Published as “Fakery and Stony Truths,” The New York Times Book Review, July 7, 1985
Italo Calvino: Bringing Stories to Their Senses
Not long before his death in 1985, Italo Calvino undertook to write five stories on the five senses. He completed three—on the powers of tongue, ear, nostrils—gathered now in a nervous, narrow, dazing volume; a cerebral accident swept him away before he could arrive at the fingertips and the eye.
The trio of tales in Under the Jaguar Sun are not “experimental.” Calvino, an authentic postmodernist (despite the clamor, there are not so many of these), does not experiment: the self-conscious postmodernist is also a devil-may-care post-experimenter. No one has understood the gleeful and raucous fix—or tragedy—of the latter-day artist more penetratingly than Italo Calvino. The writer’s quest has traditionally been to figure out the right human questions to ask, and if we still love the novels of, say, George Eliot, it is because we are nostalgic for the sobriety of a time when the right questions could be divined. In the disorderly aftermath of Joyce, Kafka, Agnon, Borges, all the questions appear to be used up, repetitive, irrelevant; and their answers—which only recently did take on experimental form— have been marred by struggle, stoicism, and a studied “playfulness” more plucky than antic. After Kafka, after Borges, what is there to do but mope?
Calvino sets aside both questions and answers for the sake of brilliant clues and riddling intuitions. He gives up narrative destination for destiny, clarification for clairvoyance. He invents a new laughter suitable to the contemporary disbelief in story. In short, Calvino re-addresses—and magisterially re-enters—the idea of myth, of “the tale.” In earlier works, he imagined Marco Polo as Scheherazade, mesmerizing Kublai Khan with jewellike accounts of walls, images, weather, names, humors, fates; or he noted that “the objects of reading and writing are placed among rocks, grass, lizards, having become products of the mineral-vegetable-animal continuum.” He even invoked—in the exhilarating pages of If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler—a Father of Stories, “the universal source of narrative material, the primordial magma.” A learned, daring, ingeniously gifted magus, Calvino has in our own time turned himself into the Italian Grimm: his Italian Folktales, a masterwork of culling and retelling, is devoted precisely to the lure of the primordial magma—myth spawned by the body of the organic and inorganic world.
The three tales of Under the Jaguar Sun are, accordingly, engendered by the human nervous system—the body as a cornucopia of sensation, or as an echoing palace with manifold windows, each a shifting kaleidoscope. The Modernists have already hinted at how the fundamental story-clay, the myth-magma, can spring out of taste—remember Proust’s madeleine; or smell—Mann’s diseased Venice; or sound—Forster’s ou-boum in the Marabar Caves. Yet these merely metaphorical resonances will not content Calvino. He slides back behind them to the primary ground of perception: ganglia and synapse. He fuses fable with neuron. By driving story right down to its biological root, to cell and stimulus, he nearly annihilates metaphor. Calvino’s postmodernism is a literalism so absolute that it transports myth to its organic source, confining story to the limits of the mouth, the ear, the nose.
But what seems to be confinement and limitation—the mouth, after all, is only a little chamber—widens to rite and mystery. The title story opens with a scrupulous recounting of Mexican cuisine (the reader is likely to salivate), and winds up in a dazzlement of wit and horror. The narrator and Olivia, a tourist couple who are vaguely estranged, are in Mexico on a holiday. They are diligent about seeing the sights and obsessive about trying every exotic dish. The h
usband is somewhat apathetic (“insipid,” Olivia calls him, as if he needed seasoning) while Olivia is intense, inquisitive, perilously inspired. Her passion for food is sacerdotal, almost creedal. Studying her “voluptuous mastication,” the narrator is overcome by a revelation of his own: “I realized my gaze was resting not on her eyes but on her teeth. . . . which I happened to be seeing for the first time not as the radiant glow of a smile but as the instruments most suited to their purpose: to be dug into flesh, to sever it, tear it.”
Husband and wife investigate the “gastronomical lexicon” of various localities, including chiles en nogada, “wrinkled little peppers, swimming in a walnut sauce whose harshness and bitter aftertaste were drowned in a creamy, sweetish surrender,” and gorditaspellizcadas con manteca, “plump girls pinched with butter.” The very name of the latter returns them to their hotel room in a rare state of sexual arousal. And meanwhile their days are given over to exploring the ruins of ancient Aztec and Olmec civilizations— temples where human sacrifice was practiced, with the complicity of willing victims, by priests who afterward consumed a certain “ritual meal.” Olivia presses their guide to speculate on the possible flavors of that unspecified dish—following which, during a supper of shrimp soup and goat kid, the husband fantasizes that “I could feel my tongue lift me against the roof of her mouth, enfold me in saliva, then thrust me under the tips of the canines. . . . The situation was not entirely passive,” he reflects, “since while I was being chewed by her I felt also that I was acting on her, transmitting sensations that spread from the taste buds through her whole body.” Without such reciprocity, “human sacrifice would be unthinkable.”
Metaphor and Memory Page 3