A special section of my library contains twelve books from twelve authors. I refer to these works as my Zodiac of Literature. Three of these books are dealt with below. Part of my Zodiac project is to find meaningful links among the novels. For each book, I have chosen a rudimentary sentence from which I derive meaning that pertains to the entire work. The three sentences are:
It wasn't the driver's fault he was only going thirty. -- Monsieur Levert, Robert Pinget
'It seems a very difficult sort of easiness,' I answered.
-- The Third Policeman, Flann O'Brien
I had been ready for anything, but not for a teapot.-- Cosmos, Witold Gombrowicz
i.
I had been
reading Monsieur Levert when I
arrived in Paris. One evening I returned
to my hotel on the Boulevarde St. Germaine carrying my Grove Press copy. Previously, I had vainly sought in a Larousse
dictionary a translation for the novel's actual title, Le Fiston. The clerk spoke
English and had been friendly, and I took this occasion to show him the
book. He had never heard of Robert
Pinget, one of the nouveau roman contingent.
It didn't matter. Could he tell
me what fiston meant?
No, he replied, but perhaps the
hotel's owner would know. Before I could
stop him, he took the book to an adjacent parlor and returned a few minutes
later. He was smiling as he handed back
the book. Fiston, he was told, was an affectionate name a father would call
his son. The word derived from fils.
This
made perfect sense, I told the clerk. He did not ask how.
Monsieur Levert has been writing a
letter to his missing son everyday for ten years. He never posts the letter. He
can't be satisfied with what he has written but is compelled to write (the
novel's last line: "Except for what is written there is death"
solidifies the book's Beckettian lineage). The narrative is divided into two
parts -- each part or letter may have been written years apart -- describing
life in Levert 's village. Part II
contains similar information but with many additions, contradictions, and
distortions. Indeed, the novel literally seems to start over.
The quoted sentence above embodies
the equivocal relationship between Monsieur Levert's two parts. Initially, there's the claim for the driver's
innocence and an apparently acceptable reason (he wasn't speeding), that is,
within the flow of the narrative the explanation appears logical.
I don't know why I returned to the
sentence. Perhaps I was pulled back to
it before I could turn the page. I
wondered how the fact that he was going thirty miles an hour absolved him of
responsibility. Was speed a negligible
factor for the accident? Could we trust
Levert's judgment? The sentence's
meaning, my initial understanding of its implications, detonated before my
eyes. The two parts of the sentence
separated and drifted apart. Looked at
another way, their being together grew more absurd. Especially so with the absence of a
comma. That's why I had to go back to
it. Read it again. Two complete thoughts together
uninterrupted. Only I have discovered
that they've little to do with the other.
Levert's word isn't good enough.
At this juncture of the novel, Levert's narrative is breaking down. The breach of meaning in the sentence
parallels the discontinuity between the novel's two parts. The sentence has effected the novel's
detonation! Which is Levert's. It will mean death.
The way the sentence works, likening
it to a patch of skin taken from the toe and placed under the microscope, as a
cellular sentence, we see Monsieur Levert's DNA. It resembles patches from other Pinget books. In fact, the tremulous feeling one gets
reading his novels is best exhibited in the first sentence of his first work, Mahu or The Material: "This is the
story I can't make head nor tail of it, somebody said: 'You ought to write it
down,' I can't remember who, perhaps it was me, I get everything mixed up, it's
true sometimes when I'm being introduced to someone I concentrate so much I
take on the same face as the person and the friend who is introducing us
doesn't know if it's me or the other one, he just leaves me to sort it out for
myself." We have entered a
detonated fictional zone and must try to put together a few of the pieces. The
notion of reliable narrator doesn't enter our head. In a more radical stroke than in Levert,
Pinget abandons Mahu's narrative halfway through. If we can make head or tail of the book, then
we're slightly better off than Mahu. As
for Levert, we feel melancholic toward his paralyzed relationship with
son. The act of writing his son might
not be worth the effort, but it's all he has. Like Beckett's narrators, he
can't help going on.
ii.
The rudimentary sentence from The Third Policeman might seem less
consequential, being spoken by the narrator as opposed to something from his
narration. It responds directly to
something said by Sergeant Pluck at a police station where the narrator is
being detained. However, the nature of the response lessens the immediate
importance of Pluck's remark. In these few words, we get a tiny (abstract)
picture of the whole novel.
The oxymoron as a turn of phrase has
been in the foreground of literary criticism very seldom. Used familiarly as the pun but garnering
fewer groans and appearing less often (especially in news broadcasts), the
oxymoron embodies contradiction and paradox, two things most people want to
avoid. Perhaps this partly accounted for
the wholesale rejection of the novel by publishers for twenty-seven years. Few could make head or tail of it. The sentence, the narrator's remark about a
difficult sort of easiness, refracts the entire novel through an oxymoronic
prism. By definition, also, we view the
oxymoronic statement as being fundamentally incorrect. Just as we know in The Third Policeman's narrative,
from the first sentence, and especially after the narrator puts his hands under
the floor looking for the black box of money, something is very wrong. More, when the Sergeant interrogates him
about bicycles and then expostulates a strange atomic theory. Not to mention the narrator's devotion to the
philosophy of DeSelby. When all is said
and done, we apprehend the narrator's fate just as we realize that a
crustacean, called a shrimp, could come in a variety of sizes, the largest
being the Jumbo size and, hence, only seeming to be a contradiction.
Seeming contradictions proliferate
in O'Brien's book, none more germane to the action than DeSelby's belief that
death is the greatest hallucination within the hallucination of life. In a sense, its truth is undeniable. While we know death's inevitability, we would
be paralyzed should we concentrate on it and nothing else. Our ability to act and respond loses force
when thoughts of death cloud our minds.
The narrator's application of this philosophy seems a model for all
philosophies to aspire. Marxists could
only wish the workers of the world united as well as this man seemingly avoided
death.
Only, the elusive third policeman is
finally met and the narrator must find out he himself has in fact died and gone
to a quite improbable hell. While we
might not fully understand the rationale behind the fascination with bicycles,
it seems an easy sort of hell. Reading
the novel again and again, we are disabused of this notion.
The odd feeling we carry through
this novel may just be another form, an absurd form, of the melancholy and
helplessness we suffer along with Monsieur Levert. The fictional world comes apart the more we
think about them. How does the speed of
the car relate to the driver's responsibility?
And what's really going on in O'Brien's nether world?
iii.
In
any case, these mid-twentieth century novels suggest the chaos near us, whereas
Witold Gombrowicz, in his last novel, Cosmos,
doesn't disguise or hide from the world's cornucopia of meaninglessness. His narrator wants to create order and
understanding within his absurd universe.
Yet, as the sentence culled from the narrative suggests, he can never
prepare himself for the unexpected, for the next object, for it will change the
pattern of meaning he had derived from previous objects, a pattern meant to
anticipate the odd, unexpected object.
Some things, apparently, are too odd, too great to handle, even simple
teapots.
Levert barely exists; O'Brien's
narrator fools himself to believe he exists. Cosmos's narrator, beset by people and objects, can only live by
finding meaning for those people and objects.
In fact, he discovers that he must fully participate in the mysteries
surrounding him and others even if that means perpetuating the mystery. Just as he had not counted upon a teapot
having any significance, so we didn't count on him killing a cat and hanging
the body from a hook on a door in order to finalize a symmetry started earlier
in the novel when he had found a sparrow hung from a piece of wire on a
branch. We resist believing that our
relationships to people and things are determined by randomness and
coincidence. Put another way, and
seemingly more oppressively, everything connects. Later in the novel, the narrator sees a bird
hovering in the sky: "Was it a vulture, an eagle, a hawk? At any rate it was not a sparrow, but it's
not being a sparrow made it a non-sparrow, and it was connected with the
sparrow by virtue of this." (99) On
the same page, an incongruous development, seeing a priest sitting on a rock on
a roadside in the mountain, reminds him of the teapot because the priest was a
superfluity.
The
novel's title refers to the order and meaning the Greeks applied to existence.
At any moment, the order can breakdown, either when meaning can't be found or
when too much meaning, too many relationships occur. Cosmos is about excess, the "here comes
everything" aspect of existence.
Or, better, about a narrator lured to the mysteries of objects and
determined to craft associations. Monsieur Levert initiates an opposite process
whereby the more we attempt to associate the two parts of the book (or the
cellular sentence), the less meaning or greater the dissociation will strike
us. But by being the opposite of Cosmos,
Monsieur Levert becomes connected to it.
Something DeSelby might agree with.
For The Third Policeman's oxymoronic stance grants us the
illusion of certain associations. We endure the uneasiness, possibly because we
sense O'Brien's narrator deserves everything he gets, including a repeat of the
experience (just as we gladly read the novel). Perhaps we even sense that these
three novels connect at a fundamental level and, somehow, this unity was
discovered by the happenstance of putting these three sentences together.
