What a dreary way to begin a story he said to himself upon reviewing his long introduction. Not only is there no “ground-situation,” but the prose style is heavy and somewhat old-fashioned, like an English translation of Thomas Mann, and the so-called “vehicle” itself is at least questionable: self-conscious, vertiginously arch, fashionably solipsistic, unoriginal — in fact a convention of twentieth-century literature. Another story about a writer writing a story! Another regressus in infinitum! Who doesn’t prefer art that at least overtly imitates something other than its own processes? That doesn’t continually proclaim “Don’t forget I’m an artifice!”? That takes for granted its mimetic nature instead of asserting it in order (not so slyly after all) to deny it, or vice-versa? Though his critics sympathetic and otherwise described his own work as avant-garde, in his heart of hearts he disliked literature of an experimental, self-despising, or overtly metaphysical character, like Samuel Beckett’s, Marian Cutler’s, Jorge Borges’s. The logical fantasies of Lewis Carroll pleased him less than straight-forward tales of adventure, subtly sentimental romances, even densely circumstantial realisms like Tolstoy’s. His favorite contemporary authors were John Updike, Georges Simenon, Nicole Riboud. He had no use for the theater of absurdity, for “black humor,” for allegory in any form, for apocalyptic preachments meretriciously tricked out in dramatic garb.
Neither had his wife and adolescent daughters, who for that matter preferred life to literature and read fiction when at all for entertainment. Their kind of story (his too, finally) would begin if not once upon a time at least with arresting circumstance, bold character, trenchant action. C flung away the whining manuscript and pushed impatiently through the french doors leading to the terrace from his oak-wainscoted study. Pausing at the stone balustrade to light his briar he remarked through a lavender cascade of wisteria that lithe-limbed Gloria, Gloria of timorous eye and militant breast, had once again chosen his boat-wharf as her basking-place.
By Jove he exclaimed to himself. It’s particularly disquieting to suspect not only that one is a fictional character but that the fiction one’s in — the fiction one is — is quite the sort one least prefers. His wife entered the study with coffee and an apple-pastry, set them at his elbow on his work table, returned to the living room. Ed’ pelut’ kondo nedode; nyoing nyang. One manifestation of schizophrenia as everyone knows is the movement from reality toward fantasy, a progress which not infrequently takes the form of distorted and fragmented representation, abstract formalism, an increasing preoccupation, even obsession, with pattern and design for their own sakes — especially patterns of a baroque, enormously detailed character — to the (virtual) exclusion of representative “content.” There are other manifestations. Ironically, in the case of graphic and plastic artists for example the work produced in the advanced stages of their affliction may be more powerful and interesting than the realistic productions of their earlier “sanity.” Whether the artists themselves are gratified by this possibility is not reported.
B called upon a literary acquaintance, B_____, summering with Mrs. B and children on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. “You say you lack a ground-situation. Has it occurred to you that that circumstance may be your ground-situation? What occurs to me is that if it is it isn’t. And conversely. The case being thus, what’s really wanting after all is a well-articulated vehicle, a foreground or upstage situation to dramatize the narrator’s or author’s grundlage. His what. To write merely C comes to suspect that the world is a novel, himself a fictional personage is but to introduce the vehicle; the next step must be to initiate its uphill motion by establishing and complicating some conflict. I would advise in addition the eschewal of overt and self-conscious discussion of the narrative process. I would advise in addition the eschewal of overt and self-conscious discussion of the narrative process. The via negativa and its positive counterpart are it is to be remembered poles after all of the same cell. Returning to his study.
If I’m going to be a fictional character G declared to himself I want to be in a rousing good yarn as they say, not some piece of avant-garde preciousness. I want passion and bravura action in my plot, heroes I can admire, heroines I can love, memorable speeches, colorful accessory characters, poetical language. It doesn’t matter to me how naively linear the anecdote is; never mind modernity! How reactionary J appears to be. How will such nonsense sound thirty-six years from now?‡ As if. If he can only get K through his story I reflected grimly; if he can only retain his self-possession to the end of this sentence; not go mad; not destroy himself and/or others. Then what I wondered grimly. Another sentence fast, another story. Scheherazade my only love! All those nights you kept your secret from the King my rival, that after your defloration he was unnecessary, you’d have killed yourself in any case when your invention failed.
Why could he not begin his story afresh X wondered, for example with the words why could he not begin his story afresh et cetera? Y’s wife came into the study as he was about to throw out the baby with the bathwater. “Not for an instant to throw out the baby while every instant discarding the bathwater is perhaps a chief task of civilized people at this hour of the world.† I used to tell B_____ that without success. What makes you so sure it’s not a film he’s in or a theater-piece?
Because U responded while he certainly felt rather often that he was merely acting his own role or roles he had no idea who the actor was, whereas even the most Stanislavsky-methodist would presumably if questioned closely recollect his offstage identity even onstage in mid-act. Moreover a great part of T’s “drama,” most of his life in fact, was non-visual, consisting entirely in introspection, which the visual dramatic media couldn’t manage easily. He had for example mentioned to no one his growing conviction that he was a fictional character, and since he was not given to audible soliloquizing a “spectator” would take him for a cheerful, conventional fellow, little suspecting that et cetera. It was of course imaginable that much goes on in the mind of King Oedipus in addition to his spoken sentiments; any number of interior dramas might be being played out in the actors’ or characters’ minds, dramas of which the audience is as unaware as are V’s wife and friends of his growing conviction that he’s a fictional character. But everything suggested that the medium of his life was prose fiction — moreover a fiction narrated from either the first-person or the third-person-omniscient point of view.
Why is it L wondered with mild disgust that both K and M for example choose to write such stuff when life is so sweet and painful and full of such a variety of people, places, situations, and activities other than self-conscious and after all rather blank introspection? Why is it N wondered et cetera that both M and O et cetera when the world is in such parlous explosive case? Why et cetera et cetera et cetera when the word, which was in the beginning, is now evidently nearing the end of its road? Am I being strung out in this ad libitum fashion I wondered merely to keep my author from the pistol? What sort of story is it whose drama lies always in the next frame out? If Sinbad sinks it’s Scheherazade who drowns; whose neck one wonders is on her line?
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