Recently in The role of the novelist Category
 In Roberto Bolaño's novel, 2666, an acclaimed, reclusive novelist, Benno von Archimboldi works as a gardener in Venice. Bolaño acknowledges the unlikeliness of Archimboldi's day job - it sounds like a joke, like being a trash collector in Antarctica. But, no, Bolaño maintains that Archimboldi really is a gardener in Venice, employed by the municipality to tend to its public parks, however few in number or small in square footage. Having just traipsed around Venice for the first time, I have a fresh appreciation for the disbelief that ought to greet any claim to be a gardener in Venice: the city really doesn't have any plants. Indeed, I believe I have identified what has to have been Archimboldi's workplace. Pictured above is the only public park space I saw: four or so trees, clustered with some shrubs, by the Ponte della Accademia. An enterprising Venetian municipal official might consider installing a plaque, "Here worked the mysterious and brilliant novelist, Benno von Archimboldi, according to that other mysterious and brilliant novelist, Roberto Bolaño" - or setting up a walking tour of Venice's public plants, similar to Stockholm's tours of points of interest from the Millennium trilogy. That said, having seen Venice (however briefly), I now feel that Archimboldi's job was not a joke: it was a metaphor. Venice is a has-been metropolis. Its dwindling population survives on the skimpiest of economies: short of seasonal tourism, the city has no industry, no offices, no business, no livelihood. Its buildings are constantly decaying; upkeep and restoration efforts cannot hope to outpace the destructiveness of the rising salt-water. A monument to a Renaissance pinnacle, the city is currently close to a tomb, a symbol of the absurdity and hopelessness of resistance to mortality. Nonetheless, Bolaño doesn't grieve Venice's fate. Everything has its span of existence, and Bolaño doesn't respect attempts at exceeding these limits. Throughout 2666, Bolaño mocks stabs at immortality, whether through his repeated references to burned books or his antipathy to fame: Until that moment Archimboldi had never thought about fame. Hitler was famous. Göring was famous. The people he loved or remembered fondly weren't famous, they just satisfied certain needs. Döblin was his consolation. Ansky was his strength. Ingeborg was his joy. The disappeared Hugo Halder was lightheartedness and fun. His sister about whom he had no news, was his own innocence. Of course, they were other things too. Sometimes they were even everything all together, but not fame, which was rooted in delusion and lies, if not ambition. Also, fame was reductive. Everything that ended in fame and everything that issued from fame was inevitably diminished. Fame's message was unadorned. Fame and literature were irreconcilable enemies.
(p. 802.) Like fame, immortality is "rooted in delusion and lies." Immortality is almost always twinned with ambition. And it is reductive; to be immortal is to be diminished, the color stripped from the Greek statues, the music lost from the Greek dramas, the social context irrevocably severed from the surviving fragment. For Bolaño, literature is not about authors who reverberate through the centuries. Rather, tthe point of literature is to help us to accept mortality, to benefit from its gifts, and to husband our energies so that we can avoid wasteful resistance to the inevitable. In 2666, Bolaño suggests that mortality doesn't diminish life, but resistance to it does. Thus, he sends Archimboldi into the world's most beautiful monument to such resistance, Venice, to nurture life and growth in the midst of this blindingly gorgeous hollowness. The task Bolaño gives Archimboldi is one either futility or nobility. In any event, it is the task of any brilliant novelist today.
 In his most recent novel, Generosity, Richard Powers expresses frustration at the role of the novelist: I'm caught like Buridan's ass, starving to death between allegory and realism, fact and fable, creative and nonfiction. I see now exactly who these people are and where they came from. But I can't quite make out what I'm to do with them.
Michael Dirda, writing in The New York Review of Books, quotes this passage, and then continues: He [Powers] confesses that he would really like to write the kind of story that "from one word to the next, breaks free. The kind that invents itself out of meaningless detail and thin air. The kind in which there's no choice like chance."
Dirda doesn't think much of Powers's aspiration - he calls it "more portentous than clear" - but I felt an immediate intuitive connection with Powers. Having just finished a novel, I am currently traveling around the world in a relaxed and unplanned way. Where am I going? Wherever my friends or family are - or wherever my curiosity takes me. When am I going? Whenever it's convenient for my friends or family to see me. How long will I be traveling? I don't know. What will I do afterwards? I don't know. Why am I undertaking such a journey? To this question, I have a solid answer: because I felt like it. I had a strong, un-ignorable sense that this trip was the right way to fill my time at this stage in my life. Up until now, I've passed my days in a highly self-directed manner. I decided what to do, and then I did it. I wasn't easily distractable (I'm not one of those people who goes online to look up the spelling of a word and ends up frittering away two hours on trivial explorations). For reasons that I can't explain, but which exerted powerful visceral force on me, I felt convinced that now I must change my approach. I must surrender self-direction and float, like a jellyfish, wherever the ocean currents take me. I must allow my life, from one day to the next, to break free; to invent itself out of meaningless detail and thin air. Rather than deciding what to do and then doing it, I must accept that there's no choice like chance. Powers' dilemma as a novelist is no different from anyone's challenge in crafting his or her life. Humans make sense of their lives in stories, and each of us is, in a sense, penning a lived novel with our life choices. Each of us is caught between allegory and realism, as we struggle to choose between actions that are symbolically meaningful and those that are practical. Each of us ping-pongs between fact and fable, as we select the bases for our decisions. Each of us struggles to keep creativity and non-fiction in balance in our lives. I have just written a novel that was more planned than anything I've previously written. I didn't allow myself the luxury of not "quite mak[ing] out what . . . to do" with my characters. Practical in the extreme, the novel was strategically constructed to sell. It's a fable that studiously ignores inconvenient facts; a creative act that required all the strength of a daily grind.  Like Powers, I felt some frustration with this process. But the character at loose ends by the end was me. And the story that I wanted to allow to break free was mine. For the sake of satisfaction in my life, and for the benefit of my writing, I needed to (re)invent myself out of everything in the world that I never allowed to distract me. Unscheduled time, chance, joblessness, disconnection from the rat race - these are the flotsam and jetsam of the modern world. I am discovering what stories they yield . . . while I swing from a tree. (Image of Richard Powers from Minnesota Public Radio website)
 "Utterly futile" is not a bad description of all (my) attempts to blog about Roberto Bolaño's 2666. A blog post is simply too flimsy a format for any proper address of Bolaño's monumental achievement. Bolaño's 2666 requires depth and thoughtfulness from the attendant critical commentary, and a blog post (virtually by design) scrupulously avoids either. The snarky quip is indigenous to the blog post; the piquant insight is almost always lost and alone in a blog post, having arrived in such foreign territory only after a wrong turn routed it from The New York Review of Books or like journal. By which preamble I mean to introduce a follow-on thought to my last post about Bolaño's 2666. In that post, I pondered - ineptly - Bolaño's choice to present a writer-character, Benno von Archimboldi, without providing any examples of Archimboldi's work. I speculated that the writer-without-an- oeuvre might be a symbol of mortality, a subversion of the writer's (Romantic) aspiration of immorality through his or her works. Because a blog post is not a format conducive to exhaustive consideration of alternatives, I did not mention in my prior post another hypothesis that, on reflection, strikes me as more probable than my initial conjecture. Instead, I am now devoting this blog post to my alternate theory: that Bolaño left the reader without examples of Archimboldi's writing because Archimboldi's importance lies in his existence, not in his novels. As Baroness Von Zumpe, Archimboldi's publisher, admits: she had never bothered to read any of [Archimboldi's novels], because she hardly ever read "difficult" or "dark" novels like the ones he wrote. . . . When Archimboldi wanted to know why she kept publishing him if she didn't read him, which was really a rhetorical question since he the answer, the baroness replied (a) because she knew he was good, (b) because Bubis [her deceased husband] told her to, (c) because few publishers actually read the books they published.
(p. 863.) In the world of 2666, the priority is to bring the good book into existence. What happens thereafter - whether the book becomes a bestseller or tops out at only 500 copies sold - is irrelevant. The novelist writing and publishing is good for the world, even if the novelist is unread. This perspective strikes me as quasi-religious, echoing traditions of contemplative nuns who withdraw from the world and pray for particular causes. As Mother Carmela of Child Jesus, a Thai convent, says, "Through prayer we are responsible for society and the world." Believers may never see or interact with these nuns, but may nonetheless find solace in the knowledge of the cloistered nuns' prayers. In the same way, Bolaño suggests that by writing and publishing, Archimboldi (and novelists generally) is (are) responsible for society and the world. The importance of Archimboldi is that he exists, writing and publishing and thereby taking responsibility for the good of humankind. Like contemplative nuns, Archimboldi has withdrawn from the world - he's a "vanished" writer - and his writing (again like the prayers of the nuns) is invisible to us. Yet Bolaño wants us, the readers, to find solace in the fact of Archimboldi's efforts, just as Catholics find succor in the fact of the contemplative nuns' prayers. The writing itself, like the text of the nuns' prayers, is besides the point. That's my stab at the wayward thoughtful insight. Now for the snarky quip: nuns take a vow of poverty; unless Bolaño advocates that novelists do the same (and Bolaño is an author who switched from poetry to novels in order to make money), the novelist can't afford to go unread. (Images from The Daily Mail and National Museums Liverpool)
 "Why do you think memoirs are so popular these days?" my friend Gabi asked me roughly ten weeks ago. I told her that I hadn't given the question much thought. She had, however, and her conclusion (I'm summarizing) was that people these days are too stupid for novels: society, to paraphrase her view, is dumbing down to the point where the only stories that grip are elevated gossip. I was dubious, as I am of all claims that society is getting dumber. From what I can see, society has always been composed of a healthy majority of idiots. In any event, I've never been convinced by comparisons between today's reading population and that of times past because literacy rates are so much higher now. You can't expect literate morons to gravitate to the same fare as literate non-morons, and incorporating so many of these morons into the literate population (a development which I fully endorse) was bound to change the overall mix of reading options. But I continued to mull Gabi's question, and I was still mulling when Daniel Mendelsohn published his review of Ben Yagoda's book, Memoir: A History, in The New Yorker. Mendelsohn, like Gabi, suggests that the recent glut of memoirs "may be filling a gap created by the gradual displacement of the novel from its once central position in literary culture." Although Yagoda apparently doesn't speculate about why such a displacement is occurring, Mendelsohn has a theory. Televised talk shows, reality TV and the confessional Internet culture, Mendelsohn conjectures, may be creating an audience that cannot identify with protagonists who don't claim to be "real": Indeed, shows like Winfrey's, with their insistence on "real" emotions, may themselves have created an audience for whom fictional emotions are bound, in the end, to seem like little more than "dramatization without illumination." If you can watch a real lonely woman yearning after young hunks on a reality dating show, why bother with Emma Bovary?
Although, as numerous recent memoir fakes have demonstrated, "real" protagonists often tread into fictional territory, modern audiences (according to Mendelsohn) may find such protagonists easier to sympathize with (and to forgive) than fictional characters. I am as intrigued by Mendelsohn's explanation, but ultimately as skeptical of it as I am of Gabi's. Certainly, "real" stories have an allure that the fictional will always lack, but the notion that an audience's ability to relate to characters depends on the claimed truthfulness or fictional nature of the story doesn't (intuitively) strike me as persuasive. More likely, in my opinion, is that people are becoming conditioned to expect certain narratives in certain media: quite possibly people are gravitating towards TV and Internet content that delivers some semblance of "the real" - 24 hour news stations, reality TV, infotainment, documentaries, nature programming and, of course, talk shows. Television and dynamic Internet leave less room for the imagination than a book; demanding that such media deliver narratives that, likewise, are composed of more facts and less fantasy is (to my mind, misguided, but nonetheless) an understandable expectation. But if people aren't becoming too stupid for novels, and if television and Internet narrative expectations aren't infecting books, then what explains the recent outpouring of published memoirs? The most credible supposition, to my mind, builds on a point Judith Shulevitz made in her review of Yagoda's Memoir in The New York Times Review of Books. She argues that memoirists, whether liars or oracles (or, more likely, something in between), appeal: (1) because [they] might become . . . friend[s]; (2) because we might learn something useful; and (3) because we can't help being curious about the ways other people go about reflecting on themselves and justifying their existence.
At this historical moment, those last two reasons are intensely salient. The modern world demands much of its denizens. People must be educated and informed. They must be physically fit and attractive. They must be healthy and engaged in the world. They must have families and jobs. They must be sexy and productive. They must be prosperous and environmentally-sound. They must be free of prejudices and self-aware. They must be mobile and simultaneously rooted in family and community. No other time in history has demanded as much of its people. Typically, in past ages, societies have been content to let their women occupy one limited realm, their soldiers another, and they restricted similarly their wise men, merchants, rulers, wealthy and poor. These groups all had roles that were, generally speaking, well-defined; and these roles required skill sets that were, generally speaking, within the capacities of their players to learn within a relatively short time. Not so today: "unbounded" is le mot just with respect to social roles. Everyone must be everything. And the necessary skills for such high-level functioning require more time, training and experience to acquire than most of us will ever have. The current popularity of memoirs, to my mind, relates to these social demands. Memoirs tantalize readers with the promise of answers to their stress-inducing question: how do you do it? How do you meet social expectations in this day and age? Can someone else - someone successful enough to merit a published book about their life - tell me what I'm supposed to do? Historically, of course, seekers of such information turned to (among others) the witch doctors, elders, gossips and teachers of their day. They might also seek second opinions in the works of their relevant epic poets, myth makers, and story tellers (playwrights, novelists, etc.). Usually, of course, the advice of the witch doctor contingent was oral and unrecorded, so quite possibly we undercount the extent to which it was relied on by past generations. Today, of course, the modern equivalents of the witch doctors (Jack Welch, Rick Warren, Sarah Palin, etc.) have many mass platforms and outlets on and by which to promote and record their answers to the pressing question: how do you do it? So perhaps we now overcount their importance. Regardless, if today we are seeing a supposedly ahistorical reliance on the witch doctors, et al., and a corresponding decline in reliance on the epic poets and their ilk, perhaps the reason is not the audience's intelligence, nor its capacity for identifying with fictional characters, but the content of the fiction on offer. Surely fiction that enfolds the breadth of this global moment and provides fodder for rumination about the modern predicament is not penned by MFA graduates enjoying suburban lives underwritten by their jobs teaching in MFA programs? (Image of title page of Benjamin Franklin's memoirs from the website of The Library Company of Philadelphia)
 In The Celebration Husband, my fourth novel, which I'm currently writing, the protagonist, Tanya, runs intelligence missions for the British irregular forces fighting the Germans in East Africa during World War I. Tanya's contribution to the war effort is based on something that Karen Blixen actually did: she led a caravan of four ox wagons to supply Lord Delamere's men (with whom her husband was volunteering).  Like Karen Blixen, Tanya begins her journey at Kijabe, a railway station on the escarpment overlooking the Rift Valley in Kenya. From Kijabe, Tanya travels down the escarpment and across the floor of the Rift Valley to the Ewaso Nyiro River in Masailand. Then she moves south along the river until she reaches the tributary called the Narosera River. She follows the Narosera River until she finds where Lord Delamere is camped. (As a matter  of historical fact, Lord Delamere was recruiting Masai scouts in the area of the Narosera River after WWI broke out in August 1914.) To write plausible descriptions of Tanya's journey, I made the trip myself, first to Kijabe (top picture) and the railway station currently there (second picture). (The existing station was established in 1947 and is higher on the escarpment than the original station where Karen Blixen worked; all that remains of that spot is a grassed over mound of cement.) Then I traveled (by car, not ox wagon) across the floor of the Rift Valley until I reached the Ewaso Nyiro River, whereupon I bumped down a dirt "road" for two hours before I reached  Narosera Town, on the banks of the Narosera River. Neither the "road" nor the Town were on the map, so without my Masai guide, Jonas Olsarara (bottom picture), I never would have found either. (Jonas' critical contribution to this research, including his local and linguistic knowledge, made me wonder how Karen Blixen crossed Masailand in 1914 without a Masai-speaking guide; she makes no mention of such a person on her supply mission and claims that her crew consisted of Somalis and Kikuyus.) Along the road, we passed a seasonal "rhino swimming pool" (third picture), filled with water from unseasonal rains. And, despite the inconvenience and stress of the drive (that the wheels remained unpunctured and the chassis uncracked was miraculous), the richness of the landscape (fourth picture) would have made the trip worthwhile, even if it hadn't been necessary reconnaissance for my book.  However much I was enriched by the sensory wealth along the road, the local Masai population knew that such riches are of limited exchange value in a modern market: they were walking, not driving. I ended up giving rides to a number of them and was shocked to learn that they'd never seen - much less been in the car with - a woman driver before. This gorgeous young girl (left) had never had her picture taken previously, either. (This shot was the fifth attempt; on the previous four, she'd squeezed her eyes shut when the camera shutter clicked.)
Curious, I asked Jonas if he'd ever been in a car with a woman driver before: "No," was his answer. Jonas works in a lodge and makes a good  enough income to pay the school fees of his four brothers and sisters; he has also been in many types of cars in many situations, including cross country trips and game drives. Nonetheless, women drivers (though common in Nairobi) were an anomaly to him. He graciously opined that, based on my example, he found women drivers to be excellent.
He also hazarded that I was the first mzungu (white) woman to visit Narosera and seemed tickled by the idea that he had contributed to the introduction of this rare species to the ecosystem. Knowing that, 95 years before me, Karen Blixen had succeeded in locating Lord Delamere in this vicinity, I assured him that I couldn't be. "Well," he compromised, "the first mzungu woman who came by herself just to see the river."
He graciously declined to express any opinion about the sanity of such a woman.
Opening Jeanette Winterson's Weight, the first of many prefatory pages was about the series, The Myths, of which Weight - a refashioning of the myth of Atlas - is a part: Myths are universal and timeless stories that reflect and shape our lives - they explore our desires, our fears, our longings, and provide narratives that remind us what it means to be human.
Who could argue? But as a description of a series of modern retellings ancient myths, the statement fails in its explanatory purpose: if the very power of myths is their enduring relevance, why commission their retelling, as opposed to returning to the originals? In Winterson's Introduction, the third prefatory passage in the book (by the Intro, I was antsy for her to get started already), Winterson attempts an answer: My work is full of Cover Versions. I like to take stories we think we know and record them differently. In the re-telling comes a new emphasis or bias, and the new arrangement of the key elements demands that fresh material be injected into the existing texts.
Weight, p. xviii. Retelling stories is a common impulse. Shakespeare (who used commonly available plots) did it; Tom Stoppard returned the favor in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to fantastic comic effect; and other examples across high and low fiction abound, from Mario Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl to Anita Diamant's The Red Tent. But a new emphasis or bias doesn't necessarily deepen the literary (as opposed to sociological, historical, anthropological or psychological) value of the work; and an injection of fresh material doesn't necessarily enhance the old story line. New for the sake of being new is as gratuitous as the "[r]eality TV or the kind of plodding fiction that only works as low-grade documentary" that Winterson condemns in her Intro (p. xix). In the case of Weight, Winterson ends up aping that of which she claims to disapprove. After calling herself a "writer . . . who believes in the power of story telling for its mythic and not its explanatory qualities" (p. xx), she litters her retold myth with explanations: Autobiography is not important. Authenticity is important. . . . I
believe there is always exposure, vulnerability, in the writing
process, which is not say it is either confessional or memoir. Simply,
it is real.
p xix. And: When I was born my mother gave me away to a stranger. I had no say in that. It was her decision my fate.
Later, my adopted mother rejected me too. And told me I was none of her, which was true.
Having no one to carry me, I learned to carry myself.
My girlfriend says I have an Atlas complex.
p. 97. And: I am good at walking away. Rejection teaches you how to reject. I left my hometown, left my parents, left my life. I made a home and a life elsewhere, more than once. I stayed on the run.
p. 98. And: That's why I write fiction - so that I can keep telling the story. I return to problems I can't solve, not because I'm an idiot, but because the real problems can't be solved. . . . The more we see, the more we discover there is to see.
p. 137. Save it for counseling, Jeanette! This irrelevant content is the same kind of "'true life' account[] that occup[ies] the space where imagination used to sit" that she criticizes, "explanatory" rather than "mythic" writing. Coming on the heels of all her protesting against such dross, her own "mythic" contribution seems pretentious. In Weight, Winterson's feather-light achievement is to illustrate, not the "universal" and "timeless" aspects of the myth, but the self-absorbed, victim-centric obsessions of the moment. For an "explor[ation of] our desires, our fears, our longings, and . . . narratives that remind us what it means to be human," read the Greeks.
 This week's New York Times online book review featured a video, in which Sam Tanenhaus interviewed E.L. Doctorow about his new book, Homer & Langley. Doctorow - whose gentle, mellifluous voice matches his deft touch with political agendas - admits in the interview that the political dimension to Homer & Langley is about "entropy." Now, in the aftermath of the reign of Bush and Cheney, Doctorow says, "I hope we're living a little better, trying to recover our identity or our illusions of our noble identity as a country. The last best hope for mankind and so on." (5:25-5:44) Whether "recover[ing] . . . our illusions of our noble identity . . . . [as t]he last best hope for mankind" is "living better" is an interesting question. While I'm inclined to think that Americans will probably be happier, living under the illusion that the United States is the last best hope for humanity, I don't believe that such deluded happiness is either advisable or sustainable. (Simply based on our carbon emissions, America is not only not the last best hope for mankind, but unquestionably the chief agent of its demise.) I am surprised to hear Doctorow advocating a return to illusions - however seemingly nurturing. My own expectation of a novelist of Doctorow's stature (and with Doctorow's penchant for political activism - literary or otherwise) is that he'd recommend embracing a national identity based on reality: we can't go back again. At a minimum, writing a novel about entropy seems wasted effort if retreat into illusion - an approach no less entropic than the Bush/Cheney administration - is the recommendation. I have no basis for speculating about the reasons for Doctorow's position, and - disappointingly - Tanenhaus didn't pursue that line of inquiry. Perhaps I'm simply misunderstanding him; of course, in a 5-minute video, complex ideas will inevitably be oversimplified. But, as a default, Doctorow dispelling my illusions is as unremarkable as is America undermining his. (Photo courtesy of Find Target Reference)
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