Occasional Prose (24 page)

For me,
Anna Karenina
is terribly true, almost truer than any novel ought to be. No illusions are permitted to survive in its rigorous climate;
War and Peace
is softer, more clement. Levin ends
Anna
with the admission of his own incorrigibility; he has not changed, as he always dreamed he would, and now he knows that he never will be different. Still that is not quite the end; he tells himself at once that there
is
a difference, even though it is imperceptible—an
inner
difference that he owes to the rediscovery of the Christian truths he has known as a child. True, nothing outwardly will change, but he has lost the inner feeling of meaninglessness. Now every minute of his life has a “positive meaning of goodness with which I have the power to invest it.” These are the last words of the novel and a kind of consolation. But since, precisely, by Tolstoyan standards the proof should be visible and palpable, there is no reason to believe that this too is not an illusion, of a very common kind, created by need.

Everyone needs the good, hankers for it, as Plato says, because of the lack of it in the self. This greatly craved goodness is meaning, which is absent from the world, outside the chain of cause and effect and incommensurable with reason. Yet Levin’s intimations of it owe a great deal, surely, to Kitty, to the unaccustomed delights of fatherhood and new-married life, i.e., to material factors, so that the conviction we are left with as we close the novel may be just as time-determined as Vronsky’s feeling of pureness on leaving the Shcherbatskys’, which is partly due to his not having smoked for several hours. The hero of
Anna
is Anna, after all, not Levin. She is the tragic sacrifice, and if the novel is a tragedy, of temple-like Greek logic (the only novel in history to achieve this stature), it is because the power of suffering in Anna imposes meaning by the drastic act of auto-destruction. The excruciating ache of Vronsky’s strong, even teeth, the twitching of his jaw are a restatement of the theme in his limited corporeal language.

[March 22, 1981]

Acts of Love

C
ALVINO IS A WIZARD. HIS
last work of fiction,
The Castle of Crossed Destinies
, was inspired by two packs of tarot cards. The hero of the latest,
If on a winter’s night a traveler
, is “the new Calvino”—in other words, itself. The novel the reader has opened is the same novel a Reader inside the cover has gone to a bookstore to procure, having seen an item in a newspaper announcing that a book by this author, the first in several years, has appeared. Everything fairly normal so far. Calvino’s Reader—the one inside the story—is a reasonable updating of the “dear reader” of the old fictioneers. As we might expect, relations with him have become more informal, positively familiar: right away the author is calling him “you” (“
tu
,” “
ti
,” “
te
,” in the original), which is like getting on a first-name basis at the first handshake. “Calvino,” a hospitable figure, is concerned that the new owner of his book should have optimum conditions for the enjoyment of it: good light, a comfortable position, no distractions (“No, I don’t want to watch TV!”), cigarettes and an ash-tray if he smokes.

What may strike the reader (small
r
, you or me, not Him) as possibly a bit odd is the insistence on the Reader’s anticipation, as though this were an
ars amoris
and the whole first chapter, in which we meet author and reader but not yet the book, were the foreplay, stimulation of erectile tissue prior to the act of reading as recommended by a rather permissive sex manual. The Reader is instructed to “Relax,” “Concentrate”; we watch him, alone at last with the desired object, sensuously postpone his pleasure, turning the volume over in his hands, glancing through the jacket copy, while the author, also watching, approves,
up to a point
: “Of course, this circling of the book ... this reading around it before reading inside it, is a part of the pleasure ... but like all preliminary pleasures, it has its optimum duration if you want it to serve as a thrust toward the more substantial pleasure of the consummation of the act, namely the reading of the book.” This should be a hint of what is to follow: consummation withheld—a series of beginnings, ten to be exact, ten novels that break off just as they are getting interesting, ten cunningly regulated instances of coitus interruptus in the art and practice of fiction.

From the start, from the very first lines, like a barely heard alarm-bell, “the new Calvino” induces slight anxiety in the Reader preparing himself to recognize the “unmistakable tone” of the author—one of the small initial sensations, highly pleasurable, of opening a volume by an author one already knows. But now the awaited sensation fails to materialize: this new one does not read like a Calvino. There seems to be no connection with any of his others. Nonetheless the Reader persists, swallowing his first disappointment. In one who is hooked on the potent old drug, the urge to read is greater than the urge to read a Calvino.

In fact, as our marvelous story-teller fully demonstrates, the addict can no longer be choosy; we behold him at the mercy of his habit, suffering withdrawal symptoms when the supply is abruptly cut off, unable to break himself of the solitary practice, so easily fallen into, of letting his eyes run from left to right, then right to left on a swift diagonal, dropping down a line, and again left to right, back and forth across any bound sheets of printed white paper so long as order and serial pagination have been respected. And how little it takes, for example, to compel reader-identification with the pronoun “I” in a first-person narrative, no matter where it is supposed to be happening and amid what company—more and more, these days, no introductions are necessary. In the course of this short book “You” will identify yourself with a series of complete strangers, some of whom, like the fellow with the suitcase in the first novel, never even let you know their name and occupation.

As my reader has surely heard if he is tuned in to literary events,
If on a winters night a traveler
keeps turning into other novels, into, finally, nine successive polymorphs that break off at the point where the reader starts to feel real suspense as to what will happen next, the point where in an old movie serial the heroine is tied to the railroad tracks and the engine is coming steadily toward the viewer, who has to wait patiently for next week’s installment not to be sure of the worst. Ten short cliff-hangers (though in some cases the drop is modest), ten contemporary authors (counting the false Calvino), ten titles, ten manners somehow familiar to the ear but by no means parodistic. The confusion begins with a rather common binder’s error, always maddening to the innocent purchaser. By a duplication of “signatures”—as printer’s folded sheets of multiples of four are called—after page 32 the bound copy of
If on a winter’s night
, instead of going on to page 33, jumps back to page 17, repeating the sequence 17–32, and then, as really can happen, does it
again
, with the awful effect of eternity or of a stuck phonograph needle.

With the second chapter it is the next morning and we are back in the bookstore; the Reader cannot wait to return his defective copy and have it replaced so that he can get on with the story. There, between two rows of bookshelves, among the Penguin Modern Classics, he meets the Other Reader, by name Ludmilla, who has come on the same errand. The bookseller has been telling her, and now he tells the Reader, that unfortunately the signatures of the Calvino book got mixed up at the binder’s with those of a Polish book,
Outside the town of Malbork
, by Tazio Bazakbal, so that the Calvino is being withdrawn temporarily from circulation with the publisher’s apologies. By luck, though, the bookseller, having checked his stock, finds he has a few sound copies of
If on a winters night
, which he can offer the two disappointed readers. But on the joint realization that it was the
Polish
book they had started on the previous night, they decline the Calvino. It is the Bazakbal they are now eager to finish.

The Reader goes home with the fresh volume, exhilarated by the thought that he will have a companion in his reading, with whom he can compare notes: he has taken her telephone number. The pages this time are uncut, and he arms himself with a paper knife to hack his way through the new obstacle to his impatience. But he has not advanced a page before it is evident that this is not the book he began yesterday. That one took place in a railroad station, and this one is on a farm, seemingly in central Europe. The style is quite different too: the other was foggy; this is clear-cut and precise, each character being promptly defined by an attribute, such as gnawed nails, or an implement, like a butter curler, that he is handling.

It is the wrong book but it is a book. The Reader reads on. Soon the story begins to absorb him, even though the names of places and people do not sound particularly Polish, which is odd. And then, as his knife goes ahead mechanically cutting, far more swiftly than he is able to read, his eyes suddenly come upon two blank sheets. Then two printed pages. That is how the book continues: an alternation of blank pages and printed pages. Those binders again. And that is not all. The more he considers the bit he has read of
Outside the town of Malbork
, the more he is persuaded that it has nothing to do with Poland. The names of a river and a town and the consultation of an atlas suggest that it is set in a locality called Cimmeria, identified by Homer (
Odyssey
XI, 12-19) as a region of perpetual mist and darkness. And, as if this were not enough, when he telephones the Other Reader to hear whether her copy is the same, the voice that answers is different from hers. It is her sister speaking, a left-winger and feminist, named Lotaria.

There is no halting these metamorphoses; the book has taken on the extensible form of a telescope, with one part sliding into the next. Cimmerian, a modern language which has the distinction of being a dead language at the same time, is guarded by a mild dragon, Professor Uzzi-Tuzii, from infiltration by Cimbrian, spoken by a neighboring people who after the Second World War annexed Cimmeria and became the Cimbric People’s Republic.
Outside the town of Malbork
proves to really be
Leaning from the steep slope
, the masterpiece of Ukko Ahti, a Cimmerian author of the first quarter of the century. The fragment Professor Uzzi-Tuzii is reading aloud to the two Readers, translating from the original as he goes, is unfortunately all we possess of Ahti’s fictional work, so highly representative of Cimmerian literature. Upon finishing the first pages, the writer went into a deep depression and succeeded in taking his own life.

Now Professor Uzzi-Tuzii’s little sanctum, already overcrowded with books, is invaded by Lotaria, insisting that the writing is not Cimmerian but Cimbrian. Moreover it is not unfinished. The title was later changed, and it was signed with a different pseudonym, that of Vorts Viljandi, a “complex personality” who wrote in both tongues. At this very moment the entire work is scheduled for analysis and debate by Lotaria’s seminar on the feminist revolution, led by Uzzi-Tuzii’s rival, Professor Galligani. As Ludmilla and the Reader take their places at a classroom table, Lotaria is holding a bundle of manuscript,
Without fear of wind or vertigo
(the true, post-revolutionary title), from which she will read aloud to the study group in a German translation.

Like each earlier attempt, the session with Lotaria’s study group ends unsatisfactorily; as she cuts the reading short, to open the floor for discussion, she dismisses the Reader’s plea to look at the rest. “The rest? ... Oh, there’s enough material here to discuss for a month. Aren’t you satisfied?” Giving up on the University, the Reader decides to resort to the publisher of the initial defective volumes. There he is turned over to a Mr. Cavedagna, the house’s pacifier and problem-solver, a little man shrunken and bent, familiar with the complaints of the trade, who leaps to the natural conclusion that the Reader is a writer, whose problem he knows: “You’ve come about your manuscript?”

In his relief at finding a Reader, so rare nowadays, where he had feared a writer, more and more a drug on the market, the small Dickensian being, himself an escapee from a library shelf, becomes genuinely expansive; for once he can be an open book. Behind the unhappy mix-up of the signatures, he explains, lay a villain of a translator, a certain Ermes Marana, doubling as a literary agent, who has been selling the firm a succession of specious foreign novels which he purports to have translated, covering his tracks when suspicion arises by a bewildering series of substitutions.

Thus the Cimbrian or possibly Cimmerian novel by Ukko Ahti was really the so-called Polish novel or can it be vice versa? This impudent sleight of hand, these brazen impostures might have gone on till infinity had it not finally appeared that the swindler did not know a word of those languages; he had merely inserted some appropriate proper names in a trashy text entitled
Looks down in the gathering shadow
that he had plagiarized from a little-known Belgian author, Bertrand Vandervelde. As a proof of confidence, Mr. Cavedagna offers the Reader photocopies of the opening pages of the real French text to look through in the office. It is a gangland story, a novel of the
milieu
; the “I” or reader-surrogate is a retired mobster who has gone into the tropical-fish business in the Parisian
banlieue
and is at present having a hard time disposing of the dead body of “Jojo,” a former associate.

We are now at the sixth chapter, almost halfway through. These numbered chapters, which at first seemed to be mere bridges leading to the narratives proper, are growing longer and more substantial, generating a suspense of their own, spinning their own plot. Around the Reader and the Other Reader, an independent cast of characters has been assembling: the two professors, Lotaria and her Amazons, Mr. Cavedagna, and now, just when he was needed, a villain, the
traduttore-traditore
of ancient ill repute, Ermes Marana, whose first name seems to link him with the god of thieves. And in the wake of the villain, coolly introduced by him in a series of letters to the publishing house, appears the mythic hero, a Celt of superhuman stature.