Quarrel & Quandary (23 page)

But when we say that poetry is strange, we mean not that it is less than intelligible, but exactly the opposite: poetry is intelligibility heightened, strengthened, distilled to the point of astounding us; and also made manifold. Metaphor is intelligibility’s great imperative, its engine of radical amazement.

What is strange about poetry is what is most manifest: not so much the unpredictable surge of its music as the words of which it is made. Everyone uses words; from minute to minute, from a million million larynxes, a deluge of words falls on the air. And every word, spoken or written, has its own history, and is a magnet for cultural accretion. A poet has the same access to the language-pool as a tailor, an archaeologist, or a felon. How strange that, scooping up words from the selfsame pool that everyone else draws from, a poet will reconfigure, startle, and restart those words! How strange that what we call the norms of life—the findings of sociology, of anthropology, the common
sense of common observations of nature: call it whatever you like—how strange that all these habits and pursuits poetry is said to be irrelevant to are precisely what poetry has the magisterial will and the intimate attentiveness to decode!

Let us come back to pots. I read, the other day, an essay on translation of the
Analects
of Confucius. One of these is recorded as follows: “A gentleman is not a pot.” Other renderings are: “A gentleman is not a utensil,” “A gentleman is not an implement.” This is taken to be a declaration on behalf of a generalized cultivation of insight as opposed to the specialist’s performance of a narrow concrete task. To those who insist that poetry is irrelevant to our common preoccupations, or that it contributes nothing “real” to society, one can only reply: Poetry is not a pot.

And poetry, because it is timeless, takes time. Let W. H. Auden have the last word on the things both infinite and infinitesimal that poetry is about:

A confession of omission:
The Christmas Oratorio
, by Sweden’s celebrated Göran Tunström, is only the second Swedish novel I have ever read—the first was Pår Lagerkvist’s
The Sibyl
—and this alone is an anomaly, or possibly an indictment. Where, on my American bookshelves, are the Swedish novels? On the other hand, is it at all proper (I mean proper in a purely literary sense) to think of any novel as a work of national expression? A novel, after all, is one of the two blessèd forms (poetry is the other) that stand in opposition to generalization or co-optation. In a novel we encounter
this
woman,
this
child,
this
man. We are also led to
this place:
but place, though it may shape a human being, is almost always—for a novel—less than a human being. If I am enthralled by Moscow and Dublin, it is because that is where I have met Anna Karenina and Molly Bloom.

And so the question is inescapable: is there really such a thing as a “Swedish” novel, a “Russian” novel, an “American” novel? Is Göran Tunström a sort of summary or repository of the Swedish sensibility? Does national temperament inevitably inform a writer, or is every writer sui generis, an unduplicatable fingerprint, a unique force never to be replicated? In short: when I read
The Christmas Oratorio
, am I reading representative Swedish fiction, or—the difference counts—am I simply reading Göran Tunström?

The Christmas Oratorio
(translated by Paul Hoover) is a lyrical novel; it instantly put me in mind of D. H. Lawrence’s
Sons and Lovers
, another work of unashamedly high romantic song.

That is Lawrence. Now here is a passage from Tunström.

The difference between these scenes (read in or out of context) is self-evident. The first describes nature’s beauty made still more beautiful by the sensations of the two young lovers observing it. The second presents the natural world, lovely and innocently steadfast in itself, made strange and unreliable by the grief of a husband whose young wife has died in an accident.

But there is a difference far more crucial than any superficial disparity of narrative circumstance: what do we mean when we speak of a “poetic novel”? Lawrence’s poetry is a novelist’s
poetry—it may be ripe, it may be voluptuous, but it is never phantasmagorical, it never flies off into an independent reverie, it is grounded at every moment in the reality and need of the scene in hand. (Seamus Heaney: “A grounded strength as well as a perfect tact.”) Tunström’s poetry, in contrast, almost instantly departs from the narrative center to sail upward to the meta-metaphorical: a “white moment” perforates reality, and through that hole in the curtain of our five senses “the properties glide out of the object.”

In
The Christmas Oratorio
Platonism rules, and the properties glide out of their objects again and again. The narrative is strong, the visionary flights have their gauzy beauty; but it is a beauty stripped of strength, furred by mist. A free-floating lyricism fogs over the palpable bodies and burning minds of the human actors in the tale, so that we can see them only dimly, as through a blemished window, and are shut off from their mental cues. Now and then the poetry settles, like crystal deposits, and the fog clears; and then we know what is there.

And what is there is a series of country tragedies that spread to the other side of the planet, entangling three idiosyncratic generations. Sidner, an inward and precocious farm boy, gives his mother’s bicycle a push as she heads downhill to the church to rehearse Bach; the bicycle crashes into a cow and Solveig is killed. Aron, Sidner’s father, is inconsolable, and moves his orphaned family into town to take a job in a hotel. The town seethes with strangeness: a child named Splendid, a genial type of Huck Finn; the hotel’s Sauce Queen; and even an imaginary and forlorn Selma Lagerlöf, riding a raft. Sidner, who loves books and music, is seduced in his teens by an eccentric older woman; she gives birth to his son. And meanwhile Aron, in a hallucinatory overseas correspondence, comes to believe that Solveig has been returned to him in the form of an odd young woman in far-off New Zealand. On the ship carrying him there,
Aron throws himself overboard and drowns. Sidner, yearning to know his little son and kept away, falls into temporary madness; ultimately he follows his father’s track across the sea. The novel ends in the voice of Sidner’s grown son. Ordinary life is extraordinary, and hard.

All this is the spine, so to speak, of
The Christmas Oratorio—
and by “spine” nothing remotely like plot is intended. There is no plot, but there is something eerier: call it destiny. Or call it teleology: a sense of universal purpose to which mortals are blind. Events fall out as naturally and arbitrarily, and yet as astonishingly, as leaves from a tree in autumn. Göran Tunström is a master of earthly truths.

But he is a writer powerfully tempted by the unearthly: “And unseen I went by, inside a huge scream.… Someone had lost a mirror in the moss by the shore. My eye was caught by it, deep down I saw how my tears fell upward toward me.” And: “What flickering flames we are. How easily darkness washes over us, extinguishing our lives. It is a wonder that we exist at all.” And: “As soon as I turn my dwarfish eyes to God, trying to define him, he disappears, becoming manifest everywhere he is not. His absence is the prerequisite for his existence.” And, to cap the rest: “You wanted to know what it’s like to write a book. It’s exhausting! It’s like forcing yourself over a desert.… But then you come to an oasis: words pour out, every leaf opens, everything wants to become poetry.”

And just here is the difficulty: in a novel
not
everything wants to become poetry. Nor does a novel’s everything want to be coated with the silvery blur of the unearthly, the magical, the legendary, the wistful, the dreamlike. A novel—
any
novel, Swedish, English, French, Russian, Italian, American, Japanese—cries out for structure: the structure, one might venture, of society itself. The novel, after all, was born out of societal experience. Modernism turned it subjective, introspective. But introspection
let loose into the purely visionary is in danger of losing so much perspective that it will become indistinguishable from sentimentality. What I miss in
The Christmas Oratorio
is social bite, something more stringent than the merely bizarre; irony, one of the deep gifts of the Western mind; and finally the sense that, often enough, a stone is really a stone and a hand no more than a hand. Too much metaphor overloads us with softness. And Göran Tunström, in all the wisdom of his hard lives, knows profoundly that the human condition is anything but soft.

An essay is a thing of the imagination. If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion in it, you need not trust it for the long run. A genuine essay has no educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the movement of a free mind at play. Though it is written in prose, it is closer in kind to poetry than to any other form. Like a poem, a genuine essay is made out of language and character and mood and temperament and pluck and chance.

And if I speak of a genuine essay, it is because fakes abound. Here the old-fashioned term poetaster may apply, if only obliquely. As the poetaster is to the poet—a lesser aspirant—so the article is to the essay: a look-alike knockoff guaranteed not to wear well. An article is gossip. An essay is reflection and insight. An article has the temporary advantage of social heat—what’s hot out there right now. An essay’s heat is interior. An article is timely, topical, engaged in the issues and personalities of the moment; it is likely to be stale within the month. In five years it will have acquired the quaint aura of a rotary phone. An article is Siamese-twinned to its date of birth. An essay defies its date of birth, and ours too. (A necessary caveat: some genuine essays are popularly called “articles”—but this is no more than an idle, though persistent, habit of speech. What’s in a
name? The ephemeral is the ephemeral. The enduring is the enduring.)

A small historical experiment. Who are the classical essayists that come at once to mind? Montaigne, obviously. Among the nineteenth-century English masters, the long row of Hazlitt, Lamb, De Quincey, Stevenson, Carlyle, Ruskin, Newman, Arnold, Harriet Martineau. Of the Americans, Emerson. It may be argued that nowadays these are read only by specialists and literature majors, and by the latter only when they are compelled to. However accurate the claim, it is irrelevant to the experiment, which has to do with beginnings and their disclosures. Here, then, are some introductory passages: