Waiting for the Barbarians (28 page)

Yet playful as the
Odyssey
is, it is always serious. At the heart of its narrative Russian dolls and suggestive punning is a profound, ongoing exploration of identity: What does it mean, after all, if your cleverness, the trick that at once defines you and that you need to stay alive, reduces you to being “no one”? At the end of the
Odyssey
, you get the answers to questions that start forming in the first line, the first word of which is
andra
, “man”: to be a man, a human being, wildly inventive and creative but inevitably subject to dreadful forces beyond our control—which is to say, death—is to be something wonderful and, at the same time, nothing. The clever games that the
Odyssey
plays are, in the end, games worth playing. Mason’s book is merely jokey—too clever by half.

Both the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
wrestle with paradoxes of life and death, mortality and immortality. Achilles is willing to die young if
it means winning undying renown; Odysseus will do almost anything to survive his journey, but when he’s offered immortality by the amorous nymph Calypso, he rejects her in favor of returning home to the aging Penelope—surely the greatest and most moving tribute that any marriage has ever received in literature. The allure of immortality and the competing rewards of a humble human life are the themes that animate John Banville’s
The Infinities
, which, like the novels by Malouf and Mason, has things to tell us about the act of adaptation.

The myth that Banville adapts is that of the Theban king Amphitryon (a story that the author already engaged with a decade ago, when he produced an adaptation of Heinrich von Kleist’s
Amphitryon
). In the story, Amphitryon goes off to war and, while he’s away, Zeus assumes his form and seduces his unsuspecting wife, Alcmena. The confusion of identities leads to often hilarious theatrical and philosophical complications and, ultimately, to the birth of twin children, one of whom is Hercules. The novel, like its model, not only toys with genres—it starts out as a deathbed drama and ends with a surprising deus ex machina—but also wrestles with deeper questions. Chief among these is the paradox that human creativity (and procreativity) seeks to attain a kind of immortality—“infinity”; and yet mortality, the knowledge that we are finite, is what gives beauty and meaning to life. The existence of the Greek gods, “immortal and ageless,” might, you suspect, be pretty boring, in the end.

The title
The Infinities
refers to a revolutionary theory promulgated by the novel’s main character, an eminent mathematician with the heavily symbolic name Adam Godley, whose work has somehow unlocked the key to infinity and made it possible “to write equations across the many worlds, incorporating their infinities … and therefore all those other dimensions.” Not the least of these dimensions is, it seems, death itself: when the book begins, Godley has suffered a colossal stroke, and the plot follows his family during what seems
likely to be his last day on earth. There’s his much younger, hard-drinking wife, Ursula; his son, also called Adam; his daughter-in-law, Helen, an actress, who, like the mythical Alcmena, is unwittingly carrying on an affair with Zeus; and Godley’s tormented daughter, Petra, whose boyfriend is the pretentious know-it-all who doesn’t recognize the plot of
Amphitryon
even when he’s in it.

The infinities that Banville unleashes have startling and provocative implications. Among other things, you come to realize that the world of the novel is not our own world but one of the parallel possible worlds to which Godley’s discovery has provided the key. Here Mary, Queen of Scots triumphed against Elizabeth I, Scandinavia is a Middle East–like political mess plagued by endless wars, and energy is derived from saltwater. And, of course, the Greek gods are real—a nice thought since, as the narrator, who happens to be Hermes, reminds us, “we offer you no salvation of the soul, but no damnation, either.” These gods envy humans and yearn for mortality, which they attempt to taste by means of “intercourse” both literal and figurative. Such premises give Banville a useful vehicle for his themes of mortality, creativity, and the possibility of making something truly new in a world that seems increasingly exhausted morally, politically, and spiritually.

And yet the book lacks a certain urgency. As often with this author—not least in his highly overwrought
The Sea
, which won the Man Booker Prize—the conceits, the symbolic names, and the ostentatiously “lyrical” diction are striking, but too often you feel that the author is simply amusing himself, swatting, like a cat at tinsel, at notions that have caught his eye. Somehow, it doesn’t add up. (The shocking dramatic climax of
The Sea
—a book in which Banville, or at least the excessively gloomy narrator who has “a fair knowledge of the Greek myths,” is already thinking of “the possibility of the gods”—is almost totally inorganic, constructed.) By the end, it’s hard
not to think that Banville himself has fallen into an error that his fictional Hermes observes in Adam Godley: “the peril of confusing the expression of something with the something itself.”

About one thing
The Infinities
is not in the least confused: lurking within it is the sly acknowledgment of a fact that has been clear to authors, if not to mathematicians, since that day, three millennia ago, when a blind itinerant singer tampered with some old heroic lays and turned them into the
Iliad
. Literature, like the universe that Godley reveals, has always been a series of endless tamperings, “an infinity of infinities … all crossing and breaking into each other, all here and invisible, a complex of worlds.” However flawed or successful Banville’s novel and its fellows may be, the mere existence of these proliferating adaptations points, once again, to the inexhaustible, indeed seemingly infinite potential of the classics themselves.

—
The New Yorker
, April 4, 2010

WHAT NOVEL COULD
be so essential that even the dead feel compelled to know what it’s about? At the beginning of Jean Giraudoux’s
Bella
(1926), the narrator, attending a memorial service for schoolmates who fell in the trenches of World War I, begins to hear the voices of his dead comrades. For the most part, they talk about mundane, soldierly things: the discomforts of war, annoying commanding officers. But the last voice the narrator hears is different—it’s the voice of a young man tormented by the thought that he’d never had a chance to read a certain seventy-five-year-old novel. What the dead youth wants is for the narrator to summarize the book “in a word.” In a word, because “with the dead, there are no sentences.”

The book in question is Stendhal’s
Charterhouse of Parma
, an epic and yet intimate tale of political intrigue and erotic frustration, set in the (largely fictionalized) princely court of Parma during the author’s own time. Almost since the moment it appeared, in 1839, Stendhal’s last completed work of fiction has been considered a masterpiece. Barely a year after the book was published, Balzac praised
it in a lengthy review that immediately established the novel’s reputation. “One sees perfection in everything” was just one of the laurels Balzac heaped on
Charterhouse
, in what was surely one of the world’s great acts of literary generosity. Sixty years after Balzac, André Gide ranked
Charterhouse
among the greatest of all French novels, and one of only two French works that could be counted among the top ten of world literature. (The other was
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
.) The encomia weren’t restricted to France—or, for that matter, to Europe. In an 1874 article for
The Nation
, Henry James found
Charterhouse
to be “among the dozen finest novels we possess.”

At first glance, the bare bones of Stendhal’s story suggest not so much a literary masterpiece as a historical soap opera. The novel recounts the headstrong young Italian aristocrat Fabrice del Dongo’s attempt to make a coherent life for himself, first as a soldier in Napoleon’s army and then, more cynically, as a prelate in the Roman Catholic Church; the attempts of his beautiful aunt Gina, Duchess of Sanseverina, and her lover, the wily (and married) prime minister, Count Mosca, to help establish Fabrice at court, even as Gina tries to fend off the advances of the repellent (and repellently named) Prince Ranuce-Erneste IV; Fabrice’s imprisonment in the dreaded Farnese Tower for the murder of a girlfriend’s protector, and his subsequent escape with the help of a very long rope; and his star-crossed but ultimately redemptive love affair with his jailer’s beautiful (and, it must be said, rather dull) daughter, Clelia.

So what, exactly, makes all this so indispensible to Giraudoux’s soldier? Why, in the words of one contemporary Stendhal scholar, does
Charterhouse
exhale “some incomparable air of which every human being needs absolutely to have taken at least one breath before they die”?

As it happens, we’re now almost exactly as far from Giraudoux’s novel as Giraudoux’s characters were from the publication of Stendhal’s;
a good time, perhaps, to consider the question raised by that strange scene in
Bella
. More important, the superior new translation of
Charterhouse
by the distinguished American poet and translator Richard Howard makes it possible not only to breathe once again that incomparable air but, as good translations always do, to grasp fully its peculiar qualities, to understand why the experience of reading this work is so famously “rapturous,” and why the novel itself continues to be so fresh and sustaining.

“Fresh” is the key word here. On November 4, 1838, Stendhal (the most famous of more than two hundred pseudonyms used by Marie-Henri Beyle, a Grenoble-born career diplomat and lover of all things Italian) sat down at his desk at 8, rue Caumartin in Paris, gave orders that he was not to be disturbed under any circumstances, and began dictating a novel. The manuscript of
Charterhouse
was finished seven weeks later, on the day after Christmas—an impressive feat, when you think that a typical French edition runs to five hundred pages. The swiftness of its composition is reflected in the narrative briskness for which it is so well known—the “gusto, brio, elan, verve, panache” of which Howard is rightly conscious in his translation—and, as even die-hard partisans of the novel would have to admit, in passages where compositional speed clearly took a toll in narrative coherence. (“We have forgotten to mention in its proper place the fact that the duchess had taken a house at Belgirate.”)

The idea for the book had actually been rattling around in Stendhal’s head for some time. His Roman diaries of the late 1820s are crammed with lengthy references to the convoluted histories of the Italian Renaissance nobility, a favorite subject and the basis for a series of short tales he published in the mid-1830s as
Chroniques italiennes
. The lineaments of
Charterhouse
owe a great deal to a seventeenth-century chronicle of the life of Alessandro Farnese, later Pope Paul
III, that Stendhal came across during the course of his Italian travels. (Farnese, who became pope in 1534, had a beautiful aunt, Vandozza Farnese, the mistress of the cunning Rodrigo Borgia; murdered a young woman’s servant; was imprisoned in the Castel Sant’Angelo; escaped by means of a very long rope; and maintained as his mistress a well-born woman called Cleria.) So while the extraordinary speed of the novel’s composition can be attributed to an almost supernatural flash of inspiration, it can also be seen as the more natural outcome of a long and deliberate process that had finally achieved fruition.

Like the circumstances of its creation, the finished novel seems at once spontaneous and premeditated. The quick pace of the narrative and the vividness of the characters are balanced throughout by a coolly sardonic assessment of human nature and, in particular, of politics. Stendhal, a lifelong liberal who as an idealistic young man had followed Napoleon into Italy, Austria, and Russia, found himself living at a time of almost unprecedented political cynicism in post-Restoration France. Disgust with the bourgeois complacency of his countrymen played no little part in his admiration for the Italians, whom he considered to be more authentic—“more profound and more susceptible to violent emotions,” as he wrote in his diary. To Howard’s credit, both the Italian passion and the French worldliness are evident here; but it is the novel’s distinctive impetuousness and forward momentum, the qualities that so famously make it such a good read, that are fully captured here, perhaps for the first time, in English. (Howard himself finished the translation in twenty-eight weeks—one week per chapter—a feat only slightly less miraculous than Stendhal’s.)

But the appeal of
Charterhouse
is more than just a matter of its urgent, even impatient style (“Here we shall ask permission to pass,
without saying a single word about them, over an interval of three years”). It lies, too, in the vibrant characters, who are prey to unruly emotions that will be familiar to contemporary readers. There is, to begin with, the novel’s ostensible hero, the impetuous young Fabrice, who as a teenager, when the action begins, disobeys his right-wing father and sneaks off to fight for Napoleon. What is most resonant for contemporary readers isn’t Fabrice’s starry-eyed idealism—which is, after all, endemic among protagonists of Romantic novels, and which, in any case, is constantly belied by the hard and occasionally farcical realities of lived life (an exhausted and slightly hungover Fabrice sleeps through much of Waterloo)—but the decidedly more modern, and even postmodern, way in which a sense of authenticity keeps eluding him.

This more than anything, you suspect, is what keeps
Charterhouse
alive for each generation. Like so many of us, Fabrice is always measuring his life against the poems and novels he has read. (At Waterloo, he thinks of the “fine dreams of sublime and knightly comradeship” he learned from studying Tasso.) With a self-consciousness more typical of the late twentieth than the early nineteenth century, he keeps checking up on himself, as if trying to conform to some hidden master plan for being, or for loving—a plan that, as the novel tragically demonstrates, he is never quite able to follow. No wonder he so often expresses himself in the interrogative: “Had what he’d seen been a battle?… Had this battle been Waterloo?” “Am I such a hypocrite?” “What about a minor affair here in Parma?” One ironic measure of Fabrice’s inability to master the art of living as a free man is that he finds true happiness only in the womblike security of his prison cell in the Farnese Tower (as many critics have noted, he’s jailed for exactly nine months), from which he is loath to escape after he falls in love with Clelia—an affair, appropriately enough for a
character obsessed with astrological signs and prophecies and hidden symbols, that is conducted at first exclusively through hand signals.