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Booze, Smokes & American Cultural Identity
The stereotypical image of “the writer” is familiar to anyone familiar with Hollywood. The camera pans up to the fifth floor of a run-down building, into a room overlooking the street, then comes to rest on a desk in the corner. On the desk are the artiste’s essentials: a typewriter, a half-empty bottle of whiskey, and an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts. The writer need not even be present: we have been taught to recognize his traces as surely as we read the proverbial writing on the wall.
Not that alcohol and cigarettes are somehow private property of an American cultural elite. In France, for example, this literary combination took root early as well and has remained alive—thanks to Hollywood and its imitators and the star power of locals like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus—down to the present day. Nevertheless, I propose that booze and smokes as necessary tools for the writer’s craft represent a particularly American myth—and also one of America’s most successful and enduring cultural exports.
It is curious indeed to move from American literature of the Nineteenth Century into that of the Twentieth. From the rare figures of an Edgar Allan Poe supposedly writing himself into a drunken stupor, or a Herman Melville hard at work with brandy and a good pipe, we suddenly find ourselves in a world of smoky jazz bars and hard liquor flowing out of speakeasy pipes—in short, the celluloid world of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.
Where did this made-for-the-big-screen universe suddenly come from? This is a complex question with complex answers, of which I can but suggest a few here. An in-depth analysis of this question would have to consider issues as diverse as the persistence of drugs such as opium in literature through the mid-Nineteenth Century, their relative eclipse, and the rebirth of literary drug culture after World War II; the increasing focus on poetic madness among artists of the generations who came of age after the Twenties; the role of music, be it jazz or rock & roll, as code for sex, which was often another way of saying freedom; etc.
Disclaimers aside, let us briefly trace the parallel careers of alcohol and cigarettes in literature separately, before more closely examining their abrupt crystallization in American cultural production early in the Twentieth Century.
One need look no further than the figure of Dionysus to locate the origin, in Western thought at least, of the association of artistic creation with alcohol consumption. Initially the god of wine and sexual fertility, Dionysus was later promoted to patron of the arts who could endow his worshippers with divine creativity.
The thus “inspired” artist became a commonplace in the Romantic era, as writers and revolutionaries alike (often one and the same) looked back to Greek and especially Roman models for their own inspiration. The image of the writer that emerged out of this retrospective was a contradiction. At once clearsighted and intoxicated, prophet and fool, poet and rebel, he would come to be known by many names—Lord Byron, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, Lenny Bruce, Jim Morrison.
The literary career of cigarettes is a comparatively more modern—and arguably, more American—affair. Cigarette smoking actually originated in the West Indies and parts of Central and South America, before being exported to Europe by Spanish explorers in the late 1500s. Until the Twentieth Century, however, the cigarette remained largely foreign to literary appropriation, appearing famously in the biography of Walter Raleigh, but elsewhere toiling in obscurity.
The failure of cigarettes to enter the world of belles lettres was undoubtedly related to the difficulty of producing them en masse, which was only to be resolved around 1875 with the introduction of cigarette manufactories in England and America. There was also the problem of image competition—particularly in England—from pipe smokers such as Charles Dickens and Conan Doyle, whose genteel descendants in the past century boasted the likes of J.R.R. Tolkien and naturalized Englishman T.S. Eliot.
An early indication of the new American aesthetic which would combine alcohol and cigarettes may be found in Henry James’s anthologized novel, THE AMBASSADORS. Conceived in 1895 and published in serial form in 1903, THE AMBASSADORS participates vigorously in the Jamesian project of defining America against the backdrop of a wiser, more civilized Europe. The novel’s protagonist, Lambert Strether, travels to France on an “American” mission to recall his patroness’s wayward son Chad from a supposedly corrupt life in Paris, but what Strether learns over the course of his mission profoundly alters his perceptions not only of himself but of the America he purports to represent.
In effect, James pits two very different Americas against each other: the traditional America of puritanical and mercantile values (symbolized by Mrs. Newsome, Mrs. Pocock and Waymarsh) against an emerging America infused with a new, freer spirit through its contact with Europe (symbolized by Chad, Little Bilham, and Strether himself). This positing of two antipathetic countries within a single one suggests a number of oppositions which the novel sketches in varying degrees of completeness, including: a rigid moral code versus a purely aesthetic one, and an outmoded literature versus a developing one which will incorporate this new “moral” aesthetic.
James thereby serves as American prophet and role model for what Malcolm Cowley will condemn as the “religion of art” in EXILE’S RETURN. Gertrude Stein, among others, credited James with thus ushering in the aesthetic formalism of the Twentieth Century, remarking of herself from the perspective of Alice Toklas, “It is rather strange that she was not then [in her days at Radcliffe] interested in the work of Henry James for whom she now has a very great admiration and whom she considers quite definitely as her forerunner, he being the only nineteenth century writer who being an american felt the method of the twentieth century.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson once remarked of himself and his fellow countrymen, “We go to Europe to be Americanized.” It is perhaps no accident that in THE AMBASSADORS the straight-laced Strether, while delving into what it means to be an American, takes up cigarette smoking. At the same time he gives himself over increasingly to what might be called recreational drinking, particularly during his lunches with Madame de Vionnet.
In one sense, of course, Strether is merely “letting his hair down.” But on a deeper level he would appear to be constructing a new identity for himself, a new American identity, a hybrid of the Old World and the New, one modeled on the seemingly unconscious grace of the poet Little Bilham. Indeed, Strether appears consciously to imitate Little Bilham, both in the latter’s attitude of expatriate flâneur and in his habit of smoking cigarettes (which characteristics, for that matter, seem inseparable). Insofar as the older Strether stands in for his author—James himself admitted as much—, this flattering imitation might be read as an approval of the lifestyle and symbols chosen by the up-and-coming generation of artists.
At the beginning of the Twentieth Century, the combination of alcohol and cigarettes was something new, something truly “American,” full of both pioneer spirit and a kind of carelessness, and young writers seized upon it with all the fervor of youth, and all the excitement occasioned by the dawning of a new century. These symbols constituted at once a rejection of the old America and the making of a new one, a move from provincial puritanism to urbane aestheticism.
In a country thus internally divided between two moralities, what more fitting vices than a depressant and a stimulant combined? And for the once culturally advanced Europe, now suddenly following America’s lead after “America created the twentieth century,” to use Stein’s phrase, what less surprising than that these symbols should become the norm worldwide? Years before the Marlboro Man graced the billboards of foreign cities, our ambassadors were already hard at work writing their novels in Europe, and more would soon join them. Hollywood took care of the rest.
Copyright (c) 2011 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.
[Sol Luckman is a prolific visual artist and critically acclaimed author of fiction and nonfiction. His numerous books include the international bestselling CONSCIOUS HEALING: BOOK ONE ON THE REGENETICS METHOD and the newly released POTENTIATE YOUR DNA: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO HEALING AND TRANSFORMATION WITH THE REGENETICS METHOD. For information on the “revolutionary healing science” (NEXUS) of the Regenetics Method, check out http://www.PhoenixRegenetics.org. Sol is also author of the BEGINNER’S LUKE Series of seriocomic novels that hilariously explore the role of imagination in creating reality. A respected New York publisher, whose authors feature a National Book Award finalist and dozens of prestigious award winners, made an offer (declined in favor of self-publishing) for the six-volume BEGINNER’S LUKE Series, which was selected out of a “slush pile” of 8,000 manuscripts—a rare and wonderful feat. Luke’s signature obsessions with self, sex, satire and slapdash highlight a serious, and life-changing, point: CONSCIOUSNESS CREATES. The point is there is a point to living in the imagination—for only through it can we reinvent our ourselves and our world. Share the Adventure of an imaginary lifetime by visiting http://www.BeginnersLuke.com. View Sol’s paintings and learn more about his work at http://www.CrowRising.com.]
Writing the Monument: Sylvia Plath's Answer to Death in THE BELL JAR
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme ...
Faced with the inevitability of death, writers throughout history have sought to capture their identity (or another's) in their work as a way of transcending time. Perhaps the greatest example of such literary immortalization may be found in Shakespeare's sonnets, which often revolve around this posterity motif, but countless other writers have responded in their own fashion to the specter of death. The Romantic poets, for instance, obsessed with the fear of loss of self, often viewed their poetry as the only possible container for an otherwise transitory identity. And in the Twentieth Century, William Faulkner spoke of the artist as one who "[tries] to ... [carve] on the wall of oblivion, beyond which he will have to pass, in the tongue of the human spirit, 'Kilroy was here.'" It is thus not surprising that, in her autobiographical novel THE BELL JAR, Sylvia Plath should likewise desire to eternalize herself in the face of annihilation. Plath goes beyond mere rhetoric, however: THE BELL JAR may be read as a series of attempts, not unlike Shakespeare's sonnet sequence, to find a lasting container for a complex inner reality, culminating in the creation of the novel itself, which becomes the ultimate vessel for that reality. In the words of A. Alvarez, "It is as though [Plath] had decided that, for her [writing] to be valid, it must tackle head-on nothing less serious than her own death." From the very first sentence of the novel, death looms frighteningly close for Esther Greenwood, Plath's fictional persona: "It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York." As is here intimated, and as we will see clearly later in the novel, Esther is headed for a profound confrontation with her mortality when she undergoes electrotherapy. Following Esther's treatment, in the words of Gordon Lameyer, Esther "[enters] deeper and deeper into this world of death" until she attempts suicide in Chapter Thirteen. Here the parallels between Esther and the author's own life are neatly drawn. Even on an extremely sophisticated level, Plath never lets us forget that "all flesh is grass": "with each flash a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant " (italics mine). What Esther fears in death is homogeneity. For her, mortality is the great equalizer, and her fear of death is closely linked to her fear of the void, of permanent identity loss. Referring to THE BELL JAR, Edward Butsher speaks of Plath's "central obsession with Kierkegaard's 'fear of nothingness.'" It is evident throughout the novel that Esther harbors a similar dread: "I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of the person I'd never seen before in my life." Or later, in Chapter Four: "I looked round me at all the rows of rapt little heads with the same silver glow on them and the same black shadow on them at back, and they looked like nothing more or less than a lot of stupid moonbrains" (italics mine). Even Esther's "panic-struck" reaction to physics may be interpreted as an outgrowth of her fear and indignation at what she considers a denial of individuality on the part of this "equalizing" science, which breaks everything down into faceless components and formulae. Esther feels that she must act or be swallowed by time. But what to do with such a fragile identity? How to fight back against death? In light of these questions, Esther's answer to Jay Cee's "inquisition" concerning her future takes on profoundest significance: "'I don't really know,' I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true." Thus begins the narrator's quest, both for a unified self, as pointed out by such critics as Lameyer and Marjorie Perloff, and for a nonperishable vessel to carry that self into the future. Perloff asserts that "the central action of THE BELL JAR may be described as the attempt to heal the fracture between inner self and false-self system so that a real and viable identity can come into existence." While true, we must add that such a critical approach is limited in that it fails to account for Esther's simultaneous struggle to immortalize her emerging identity. The "monumental" nature of Esther's struggle is emphasized by the recurrence of various types of symbolic containers. Concerning the primary function of the oft-used image of the mirror, we could remark of Esther what she says of Hilda: "She [stares] at her reflection ... as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she [continues] to exist." The image of the bathtub, which occurs twice in the novel, also recalls Esther's search for a receptacle. Whether "coffin-shaped" and "marble," or simply a good place to lie after slitting one's wrists as Esther imagines it in Chapter Twelve, the bathtub is an unmistakable symbol of containment after death. The telephone is yet another recurring image in THE BELL JAR. And though, unlike the mirror and the bathtub, it is not a symbolic container, the telephone nevertheless plays an important role, thematically, in Esther's struggle to immortalize her identity. Described as both a "death's head" and as having a "bone-colored cradle," the telephone becomes an image of insistent death, of imminent identity loss, a problem that must be "answered." (Plath appreciates a good pun.) Foreshadowing her ultimate response (i.e., narrating the novel), Esther does give an answer: she "[lifts] the receiver and [speaks] in a husky, receptive voice" (italics mine).
In his essay "The Double in Sylvia Plath's THE BELL JAR," Lameyer, like Perloff, explains the novel in terms of the narrator's search for a distinct identity. According to Lameyer, Esther systematically identifies with another person—Betsy, Doreen, Hilda, then Joan—in an attempt to define herself, before rejecting this "double" as insufficient or bogus. Thus THE BELL JAR becomes a progression toward self-actualization, leading Esther from New York, to and through her would-be suicide, and ultimately beyond her "madness" to the sense of identity and rebirth with which the novel ends. Yet, here again, we must realize that Lameyer's approach, while revealing, is inadequate to describe the full complexity of Esther's struggle: the pure "psychological approach" fails to establish convincing reasons for Esther's rejection of all doubles. If we keep in mind that Esther's search is not only a quest for self, but also an effort to immortalize that self, then it becomes apparent that her doubles are themselves symbolic containers of identity, each being rejected in turn as she (the double) shows herself to be, in Perloff's words, "essentially a flawed human being." In other words, as Esther struggles to establish her identity, and at the same time a lasting vessel for that identity, she discovers doubles to be insufficient because any double will necessarily share her own human frailty. She cannot locate her identity in a medium as ephemeral as herself. Plath wrote in her college honors thesis: "Often the double becomes an ape or shadow which presages death and destruction." The most striking examples of the "inadequate" double are Joan, who is likened throughout to a horse, with obvious connotations of strength and vitality; and Doreen, who is described as having "eyes ... hard and polished and just about indestructible" and "blonde hair ... like a halo of gold." Yet both of these seemingly indefatigable doubles are rejected. Esther "[dissociates] [herself] from Joan completely," and Joan later commits suicide. Doreen, similarly rejected, becomes at the very moment of rejection a powerful symbol of Esther's mortality in contrast to the "eternally verdant" carpet on which Doreen lies: "I think I still expected to see Doreen's body lying there in the pool of vomit like an ugly, concrete testimony to my own dirty nature." The psychological approach is also inadequate in that it virtually ignores the literary implications of the text itself. Plath herself once said: "Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing ... I still want to see it finally ritualized in print" (italics mine). This attitude on Plath's part is related to the desire for literary eternalization we discussed in the introduction. As we will see, more than a result of psychosis or neurosis or divided self, THE BELL JAR is in fact the product of the author's need to find an enduring container.
Esther's fear of death, intimately tied to her "fear of nothingness," is also inextricably bound up in her dread of not becoming a great writer, whose work, like Shakespeare's, will transcend death and thereby eternalize the creative identity. This is a key concept to grasp in order to understand the novel. While renouncing doubles; religion ("Of course, I didn't believe in life after death"); and—as we will later demonstrate—sexuality as means of "beating death," Esther turns increasingly to literature for salvation. Thus her "panic" when "darkness [wipes] [her] out like chalk on a blackboard" (italics mine). And thus her crisis and breakdown when, having found no other suitable container for her identity, she discovers that she has not been accepted into the writing course she has looked forward to, as if the course, or rather her writing, were a "safe bridge over the dull gulf of the summer," a summer which is "like death." Clearly, what terrifies Esther here is the wordless "gap" into which, her writing having failed, she ("a body in a white blouse and green skirt") will inevitably "plummet" (italics mine). What to do? At this point, Esther feels that nothing can be done, no container can be found. She believes she has been defeated by oblivion. Her writing, as judged by her creative writing professor, is "factitious, artificial, sham." According to Lameyer, she "recalls all the criticism of her life and writing that anyone ever made and accepts [this] judgment." She has been unsuccessful in finding or creating a container for her emerging identity, and in the ultimate act of despair, she attempts suicide by crawling into a nook in the cellar and swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills. The irony of this attempted suicide is twofold. First, the act itself—climbing into a tight damp space evocative of a womb and suggestive of Esther's desire to rebecome "the white sweet baby cradled in its mother's belly"—is a symbolic search for a container. The fact that her would-be suicide fails contributes to this irony and produces a second paradox: Esther's attempted suicide is what sparks her recovery; in trying to end herself, she is actually beginning anew her search for identity and immortalization, a search ending in the creation of the novel itself, the fruit of her recovery. Viewed in this manner, even the title takes on great significance. "Bell," pronounced aloud, sounds exactly like the French belle, such as in the phrase "southern belle"; jar comes from the Arabic jarrah, which designates a type of earthen vessel. If there was any doubt before, there can be none now: Plath is looking for a jar in which to put the belle. Esther's recovery is only a matter of time: THE BELL JAR, like winter, invevitably moves toward a season of rebirth. What has been generally overlooked by critics, however, is that her recovery is tied not only to her emerging sense of identity, as pointed out by the psychological approach, but also to Esther's knowledge that she can and will write again, that she will find a way to immortalize herself in writing. It is no coincidence that in the closing chapter of the novel, Esther experiences in nature something similar to the dissolution of writer's block: "I could hear a musical trickle and drip as the sun thawed icicles and snow crusts." And the mention of "a pure, blank sheet" is rather blunt in its evocation of literary birth. In the end, Esther's writing, no longer a form of escape from reality as it was when she wrote "villanelles and sonnets" in Mr. Manzi's chemistry class, becomes a way of confronting reality. Her belief, expressed early in the novel, in the power of words to endure beyond other mortal endeavors, triumphs: "People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn't see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick or couldn't sleep." Esther's solution to the problem of death remains strictly verbal. Plath provides us with certain valuable indications that, though her narrator overcomes her fear of sexuality, marries and has children, her answer to death and loss of self does not lie in progeny. One reason for this, as expressed by Lameyer, is that "birth was inextricably bound up in [Plath's] mind with death." Throughout the text, Esther makes us aware that immortalizing herself through genesis, by creating a type of genetic continuum, is not an option: "Children made me sick." Or her bitter cynicism when Buddy Willard says that "after [Esther] [has] children ... [she] [won't] want to write poems any more." Or, after recounting the story of the nun and the Jew under the fig tree—an obvious symbol of sexuality—Esther's "literary" (and "anti-progeny") impulse to "crawl in between those black lines of print the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big fig tree" (italics mine). Here again, we find the narrator's desire to contain her individuality in writing, as opposed to seeking refuge in childbearing as a means of continuum. The final irony in THE BELL JAR, and in our discussion of the novel, is the novel itself: our taking time and energy to examine Plath's attempt to eternalize herself in Esther Greenwood is testimony that she has done so. As long as there is a reader, the author's identity can never be lost; THE BELL JAR becomes Plath's monument to withstand time. Her "I am, I am, I am," an allusion to Samuel Coleridge's concept of the "infinite I am" (itself an allusion to biblical divinity and an assertion that words create the monument), can never fade. To but slightly rephrase Shakespeare's Sonnet #65: THE BELL JAR is Plath's way of saying, "in black ink my [life] may still shine bright."
Copyright (c) 2010 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.
[Sol Luckman is a prolific visual artist and critically acclaimed author of fiction and nonfiction. His numerous books include the international bestselling CONSCIOUS HEALING: BOOK ONE ON THE REGENETICS METHOD and the newly released POTENTIATE YOUR DNA: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO HEALING AND TRANSFORMATION WITH THE REGENETICS METHOD. For information on the “revolutionary healing science” (NEXUS) of the Regenetics Method, check out http://www.PhoenixRegenetics.org. Sol is also author of the BEGINNER’S LUKE Series of seriocomic novels that hilariously explore the role of imagination in creating reality. A respected New York publisher, whose authors feature a National Book Award finalist and dozens of prestigious award winners, made an offer (declined in favor of self-publishing) for the six-volume BEGINNER’S LUKE Series, which was selected out of a “slush pile” of 8,000 manuscripts—a rare and wonderful feat. Luke’s signature obsessions with self, sex, satire and slapdash highlight a serious, and life-changing, point: CONSCIOUSNESS CREATES. The point is there is a point to living in the imagination—for only through it can we reinvent our ourselves and our world. Share the Adventure of an imaginary lifetime by visiting http://www.BeginnersLuke.com. View Sol’s paintings and learn more about his work at http://www.CrowRising.com.]
A Brief Survey of Transgression in the Theory of the Novel
Transgression is a term for which, it would seem, every theorist of the novel has a different definition. For Georg Lukács, transgression obtains specifically in those modern novels possessed of a nihilistic outlook which, by hook or crook, deny history. Formalists such as Viktor Shklovsky like to talk about stylistic transgression in the novel, which, according to them, evolves independently of history through a constant, transgressive rewriting of former texts. In Roland Barthes’s model (in which there are two competing types of transgression), sexual identity and transgression are dialectically entwined.We can thus easily identify at least three categories of transgression in the theory of the novel, which I will call, somewhat reductively, the political, the stylistic, and the sexual (which subsumes gender). As we will see, these categories are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but combining them can be a tricky business. In addition to the three theorists mentioned above, I will limit my discussion to the influential models of Ian Watt, Mikhail Bakhtin, and D.A. Miller. It goes without saying that such a sampling of theorists merely scratches the surface of an extremely complicated field, and I must here apologize for my own transgression against academic thoroughness.For Lukács—on this issue perhaps alone among leading theorists of the novel—transgression is defined negatively. Lukács’s Gustave Flaubert and Emile Zola, as described in THE HISTORICAL NOVEL, are precursors and abettors of modern(ist) decadence, guilty, like so many Twentieth Century historians, of transgressing against history itself. This historical transgression takes the form of “modernization,” based in the “belief that the fundamental structure of the past is economically and ideologically the same as that of the present.”Modern writers are not just blind to historicity (their own included), however; according to Lukács, they also needlessly vilify the present. Specifically, in the novels of Flaubert “those brutal and animal features are emphasized and placed at the centre, which occur later in Zola as characteristics of the life of modern workers and peasants. Thus Flaubert’s portrayal is ‘prophetic’. Not however, in the sense in which Balzac’s works were prophetic, anticipating the actual, future development of social types, but merely in a literary-historical sense, anticipating the later distortion of modern life in the works of the Naturalists.”Lukács places great emphasis on the uniqueness of the individual in history (individualized collectivity) as well as on the uniqueness of the historical moment (historical materialism). To transgress against this uniqueness is the highest literary crime and merits Lukács’s reactionary wrath, as witnessed above. Transgression is further bluntly defined in Lukács’s model as inhuman: “Flaubert has against his will become the initiator of the inhuman in modern literature.” (Note that transgression is not necessarily a matter of will, but can inhere in a text despite the intentions of the writer, a line of thinking which runs, curiously, through Barthes.) Transgression operates equally at the level of style: “The Flaubertian attitude towards history inevitably leads to a disintegration of epic language” by inducing writers to approximate historicity through a misleading “pseudo-historical language form.”Finally, given that the (true) novel is defined as an accurate portrayal of the individual (once again, collectively defined) within a specific historical moment, Lukács views the tendency to psychologize—so prevalent in modernism—merely as a transgressive aberration. The “tendency to make history private is a general characteristic of the nascent decline of great realism,” he proclaims. To summarize, we might say that, in Lukács’s theory of the novel, transgression is everything that is not realism.
In Shklovskean formalism, as in his THEORY OF PROSE, art is defined as that which transgresses against (disrupts) the unconscious: “The purpose of art ... is to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition. By ‘enstranging’ objects and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and ‘laborious.’ The perceptual process in art has a purpose all its own and ought to be extended to the fullest. Art is a means of experiencing the process of creativity.”Here transgression is (positively) defined as an essential characteristic of the novel, as that which allows its always already old story to be made new. The novel, then, is like the phoenix forever being reborn out of its ashes, forever essentially the same, only plumed with new feathers: “a work of art is perceived against a background of and by association with other works of art. The form of a work of art is determined by its relationship with other preexisting forms ... All works of art, and not only parodies, are created either as a parallel or an antithesis to some model. The new form makes its appearance not in order to express a new content, but rather, to replace an old form that has already outlived its artistic usefulness.”Clearly, Shklovsky’s theory opposes the Romantic (and for that matter, Lukácsean) view of the “natural” (or “realistic”) novel. Stated another way, the natural in Shklovsky’s model—if it exists at all—is purely a question of form, which is said to be in constant (transgressive) flux, rendering the “natural” paradoxically transgressive. Thus artistic formalism is intimately tied to the notion of the avant-garde: the novel is inherently generationally transgressive owing to its ongoing need to make itself new.Unlike Pierre Bourdieu’s focus on the avant-garde, however, Shklovsky’s theory does not concern itself with economic or other “outside” determining factors of cultural production; rather, the latter’s model operates entirely on the “inside,” offering a view of literature as a closed history of texts in reaction/response to other texts. “If I were to use the analogy of an inventor and his tradition,” writes Shklovsky (using said analogy), “I would say that ... literary tradition consists of the sum total of the technical possibilities of [the given] age.”Strangely, the ostensibly antagonistic theories of Shklovsky and Lukács, after traveling for so long in opposite directions, ultimately approach each other in their mutual disdain for psychologizing and emphasis on the collective nature of art. “There is no point in becoming enamored of the biography of an artist,” writes Shklovsky. “He writes first and looks for motivations later. And least of all should one be enamored of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis studies the psychological traumas of one person, while in truth, an author never writes alone. A school of writers writes through him. A whole age.”The notion that transgression is constitutive of the novel itself is most evident in the example of Laurence Sterne, author of TRISTRAM SHANDY and arguably Shklovsky’s prototype of the novelist: “Sterne lays bare the device by which he stitches the novel out of individual stories. He does so, in general, by manipulating the structure of his novel, and it is the consciousness of form through its violation that constitutes the content of the novel.”Sterne’s transgressiveness thus lies in his turning of novelistic tradition mercilessly on its head, in his subversion, or inversion, of the accepted forms of novelistic genre and style. In Shklovsky’s model, the novel as object, however, as “pure form,” merely a “relationship of materials,” is finally not transgressive in the least. Art is ultimately “inoffensive,” “shut up within itself.” Once rendered material, in other words, the novel ceases to be transgressive—the (formal) rendering is itself the transgressive act.
In THE RISE OF THE NOVEL Ian Watt defines the novel, as a “novel” form, as that which breaks definitively with the traditional, rigid hierarchy of genres: “literary traditionalism was first and most fully challenged by the novel, whose primary criterion was truth to individual experience—individual experience which is always unique and therefore new.” At the same time, Watt maintains that this break with the past has its roots in Cartesian thinking, which sets the new individual tone for the post-Renaissance. In an attempt to account for mediation, to locate the origins of the novel both on the “outside” and the “inside” (to fuse Lukács and Shklovsky, so to speak), Watt defines the novel as doubly (ideologically and formally) transgressive against the old (collective, rigidly hierarchical) social and artistic order.For Watt, novelistic formalism translates into “formlessness,” which (whether by dint of “genius” or “accident” it remains unclear) translates into “the lowest common denominator of the novel genre as a whole, its formal realism”: “What is often felt as the formlessness of the novel, as compared, say, with tragedy or the ode, probably follows from this: the poverty of the novel’s formal conventions would seem to be the price it must pay for realism.” And this realism, in the novels of Daniel Defoe, for example, “is as defiant an assertion of the primacy of individual experience ... as Descarte’s cogito ergo sum was in philosophy.” For Watt, then, like Shklovsky and unlike Lukács, the art of the novel is first and foremost an art of transgression.According to Watt, there is a very important temporal transgression at work in the novel, which “[breaks] with the earlier literary tradition of using timeless stories to mirror the unchanging moral verities. The novel’s plot is also distinguished from most previous fiction by its use of past experience as the cause of present action: a causal connection operating through time replaces a reliance of earlier narratives on disguises and coincidences, and this tends to give the novel a much more cohesive structure.” With the new conception of time comes a new conception of space: “Defoe would seem to be the first of our writers who visualised the whole of his narrative as though it occurred in an actual physical environment.”Behind these (transgressive) changes in philosophy and literature lies something all-determining for Watt—the emergence of a large (relatively speaking) middle class reading public during the Eighteenth Century: “both the philosophical and the literary innovations must be seen as parallel manifestations of larger change—that vast transformation of Western civilisation since the Renaissance which has replaced the unified world picture of the Middle Ages with another very different one—one which presents us, essentially, with a developing but unplanned aggregate of particular individuals having particular experiences at particular times and at particular places.” Here Watt’s model insists on a kind of precise historical materialism not unlike that found in Lukács’s theory, and yet Watt, by emphasizing a cultural rift as decisive in the formation of the novel, cannot escape the language of transgression: the transgression effected in and constituted by the novel reflects a vast cultural transgression that undergirds and surrounds it.Watt’s theory of mediation has its share of inconsistencies. “Formal realism is only one mode of presentation,” he writes, “and it is therefore ethically neutral: all Defoe’s novels are also ethically neutral because they make formal realism an end rather than a means, subordinating any coherent ulterior significance to the illusion that the text represents the authentic lucubrations of an historical person.” Watt’s previous language of cultural transgression has without warning become a language of the social status quo smelling of Shklovskean formalism, a tendency which is even more pronounced when he focuses on the novels of Samuel Richardson: “The importance of Richardson’s position in the tradition of the novel was largely due to his success in dealing with several of the major formal problems which Defoe had left unsolved” (italics mine).The next step on Watt’s form/ideology roller coaster, however, brings us back to Lukács: the novel typically “makes us feel that we are in contact not with literature but with the raw materials of life itself as they are momentarily reflected in the minds of the protagonists.” Watt goes on to attempt a synthesis of form and ideology which appears naïve at best, condescending at worst: the “combination of romance and formal realism applied both to external actions and inward feelings is the formula which explains the power of the popular novel: it satisfies the romantic aspirations of its readers in a literary guide which gives so full a background and so complete an account of the minute-by-minute details of thought and sentiment that what is fundamentally an unreal flattery of the reader’s dreams appears to be the literal truth.” Thus the reader, that defining figure in Watt’s model, remains little more than a shadow made to dance by the still more abstract concept of “literary greatness.”The cracks in Watt’s theory are perhaps most pronounced in his treatment of Henry Fielding’s novels, whose “distinguishing elements have their roots not so much in social change as in the neo-classical literary tradition ... Fielding’s celebrated formula of ‘the comic epic in prose’ undoubtedly lends some authority to the view that, far from being the unique literary expression of modern society, the novel is essentially a continuation of a very old and honoured narrative tradition.” The possibility of a venerable novelistic tradition, however, Watt firmly denies by locating the source of Sterne and James Joyce (as well as that of Jane Austen and Marcel Proust) not in Fielding’s playful picaresque (in the tradition of Miguel de Cervantes), as one might reasonably expect, but in the formal realism of Defoe and Richardson—a shaky argument at best. So ends in a muddle a model with high hopes for reconciling the formal and ideological poles in the theory of the novel.In Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogical theory espoused in THE DIALOGIC IMAGINATION, the novel looms forth out of history as the ultimate transgressor, Gargantua consuming (appropriating wholesale) all other genres into its heteroclite body from the dawn of culture onward: “The novel parodies other genres (precisely in their role as genres); it exposes the conventionality of their forms and their language; it squeezes out some genres and incorporates others into its own peculiar structure, reformulating and re-accentuating them.”Unlike Watt, Bakhtin makes no effort to identify a precise period for the rise of the novel (though he does cite the Renaissance, and particularly François Rabelais, as an important moment in the novel’s history), choosing instead to trace the evolution of the novelistic as a quality that ceaselessly forms and informs the novel genre. Yet, like Watt, Bakhtin stresses both the formal and ideological influences in the novel’s development: “It is of course impossible to explain the phenomenon of novelization purely by reference to the direct and unmediated influence of the novel itself. Even where such influence can be precisely established and demonstrated, it is intimately interwoven with those direct changes in reality itself that also determine the novel and that condition its dominance in a given era.”Bakhtin defines the novelistic as against the epic. The novelistic (once again, the novel is appropriately “novel”) is that which breaks down (transgresses against) epic’s “absolute past” by admitting the reality of the present. Specifically, this transgression obtains through humor: “It is precisely laughter that destroys the epic, and in general destroys any hierarchical (distancing and valorized) distance.”In other words, the reading subject, by actively decoding and approving a transgressive message (a message which travels through a semantic static of words in time and space) plays an essential role in the creation of the novel: “the reality reflected in the text, the authors creating the text, the performers of the text (if they exist) and finally the listeners or readers who re-create and in so doing renew the text—participate equally in the creation of the represented world in the text.”Bakhtin thus adds a critical third element to the formalist/historicist equation—the reader as (actively transgressive) participant in the formation of the novel—thereby calling attention to the complex interplay of textual production. At the same time, his focus on the living word, the word made incarnate in a great transgressive body, is suggestive of the body politic, and from there it is but a small leap to arrive at the concept of a revolution of bodies effected through the word.Following Bakhtin’s lead, Roland Barthes in S/Z wastes no time locating narrative transgression (for classic texts) in the figure of the narrator. The narrator, as a “joining of two antithetical terms,” positive and negative, inside and outside, “induces or supports a transgression.” Moreover, it is precisely the narrative body which is viewed as the transgressive element: “As supplement, the body is the site of the transgression effected by the narrative ... It is by way of this excess which enters the discourse after rhetoric has properly saturated it that something can be told and the narrative begin.”For the classic, or readerly text, transgression is closely associated with the (bodily) presence of the author, with his/her intrusion into the world of the text which simultaneously effects the narrative and yet limits its free semantic play, thereby restricting our freedom as (re)readers (re)writing the text. Unlike Bakhtin, who stops just short of (approvingly) defining the novel as parody, a genre composed entirely of ironic appropriations by the author, Barthes maintains that irony destroys textual multivalence: “A multivalent text can carry out its basic duplicity only if it subverts the opposition between true and false ... if it flouts all respect for origin, paternity, propriety.”Barthes argues that the readerly text must therefore by replaced by the writerly text, a move with definite implications for the politics of the body. Accordingly, the transgressive bodily intrusion of the readerly text (exemplified by Honoré de Balzac’s SARRASINE) must give way to another type of transgression: the infinitely plural, authorless, writerly text (anticipated, if not exemplified, by Gustave Flaubert’s BOUVARD ET PECUCHET): “multivalence (contradicted by irony) is a transgression of ownership. The wall of voices must be passed through to reach the writing: this latter eschews any designation of ownership and thus can never be ironic ... parody, or irony at work, is always classic language ... This is the problem facing modern writing: how breach the wall of utterance, the wall of origin, the wall of ownership?”Thus, to the opposition between readerly and writerly corresponds an opposition between two types of transgression, the former negative, the latter positive, which, Barthes suggests, are currently locked in a struggle for hegemony not unlike the figure of antithesis, defined as a “battle between two plenitudes set ritually face to face.” To read this as simply a conflict between capitalist individualism and collectivist modes of thinking is, I offer, an oversimplification. The political stakes, however, would appear to be high and undoubtedly center on questions of sexual (bodily) freedom. Indeed, Barthes’s model could be thought of as a call to arms of the sexually transgressive which would undermine (or redefine) accepted, “canonical” notions of reading gender and sexuality, paving the way for the later transgressive model of D.A. Miller.In THE NOVEL AND THE POLICE Miller structures his theory of the novel around Michel Foucault’s theory of discipline. Whereas Foucault focuses on increasing objectification and classification of individuals during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, Miller examines discipline at work in the Nineteenth Century (realistic) novel, which he maintains institutes a panoptic (as in Jeremy Bentham’s infamous panopticon prison) transgression against individual privacy concomitant with the increasingly panoptic social ground.In the typical case of Balzac, for instance, Miller writes that his “omniscient narration assumes a fully panoptic view of the world it places under surveillance.” Unlike Barthes, however, Miller is careful not to identify such narrative transgression with a single body, a move which shifts the focus from transgressor to transgressed against, from writer to reader: “this panoptic vision constitutes its own immunity from being seen in turn. For it instrinsically deprives us of the outside position from which it might be ‘placed.’ There is no other perspective on the world than its own, because the world entirely coincides with that perspective. We are always situated inside the narrator’s viewpoint, and even to speak of a ‘narrator’ at all is to misunderstand a technique that, never identified with a person, institutes a faceless and multilateral regard.”It is hardly coincidental that, while Barthes chooses a first person narrative to make his point, Miller generally selects texts in the third person. In both cases, however, the narrative is conceived as a limited and limiting perspective which seeks to give itself the illusion of totality. The realistic novel thus effects a kind of underhanded power play which corresponds not only to Barthes’s “reality effect” but also to Bakhtin’s notion of “monologism.” “The panopticism of the novel,” writes Miller, “… coincides with what Mikhail Bakhtin has called its ‘monologism’: the working of an implied master-voice whose accents have already unified the world in a single interpretative center.” The realistic novel, in other words, constituting itself as the always already, the definitive one and only perspective, attempts to answer all questions before they have been asked.Miller deftly avoids the good guy/bad guy binary he sees at work in realism’s taxonomy by not simply problematizing the panoptic text. In an important move, he points out the reader’s own complicity in the exercise of transgression against himself, writing, “power can scarcely be exercised except on what resists it ... one might claim that the novel rather than fearing desire solicits it ... desire brings the desiring subject into a maximally close ‘fit’ with the power he or she means to resist ... Insistently, the novel shows disciplinary power to inhere in the very resistance to it.” The “pleasure of the text,” according to Miller, is intimately tied to a desire on the part of the reading subject to be exposed (as an individual).Anticipating Eve Sedgwick, Miller builds his closet out of glass: “Even when a character’s subjectivity may be successfully concealed from other characters, for us, readers of the novel, the secret is always out.” And yet: “the fact the secret is always known—and, in some obscure sense, known to be known—never interferes with the incessant activity of keeping it. The contradiction does not merely affect characters. We too inevitably surrender our privileged position as readers to whom all secrets are open by ‘forgetting’ our knowledge for the pleasures of suspense and surprise ... In this light, it becomes clear that the social function of secrecy ... is not to conceal knowledge, so much as to conceal the knowledge of the knowledge.”In the final analysis, secrecy, rather than constituting the subject’s private identity, affords a term of resistance which allows the panopticon to cast its transgressive gaze while at the same time paradoxically affirming its blindness: “In a world where the explicit exposure of the subject would manifest how thoroughly he has been inscribed within a socially given totality, secrecy would be the spiritual exercise by which the subject is allowed to conceive of himself as a resistance ... The paradox of the open secret registers the subject’s accommodation to a totalizing system that has obliterated the difference he would make.”The pleasure of the text is not finally different from a kind of condescending pity which, through a process of self-reflection, renders us, to a greater or lesser extent, “free”: “The charm we allow to Dickens’s characters ... is ultimately no more than the debt of gratitude we pay to their fixity for giving us, in contrast, our freedom.” Such freedom, however, as Miller suggests, is purely relative. In the world of the panopticon violation is the rule rather than the exception.My search for the meaning of transgression in six theories of the novel has, I am afraid, produced far more questions than answers. Following, then, is my conclusion in which nothing is concluded:• Why does it seem obligatory to define the novel, either negatively or positively, vis-à-vis transgression? Is transgression in fact the art of the novel? If we could answer these questions, we would be much closer to explaining both what a novel is (form) and what a novel does (ideology).• The novel, as a transgressive genre, is almost always associated with movement, change. Yet it is often difficult to pinpoint exactly where and when this change occurs, not to mention how and why. Is the novel a transgressive act or does it induce one? In other words, what is the relationship between transgression and culture? Is transgression truly transgressive, or is it, as Jonathan Dollimore maintains, “intrinsic to social process”?• On a similar note, what is the relationship between transgression and subversion in the novel? To what degree is novelistic transgression subversive and vice versa? In Miller’s theory, for instance, transgression serves to maintain, rather than subvert, the social status quo. But Bakhtin suggests that the novel, as a transgressive genre, is somehow revolutionary. Are these views entirely incompatible, or might the novel be both? Barthes implies that it is indeed both, but his model for mediation is practically nonexistent. What might a theory look like that could mediate successfully between the transgressive and the (non)transgressive in the novel?
Copyright (c) 2010 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.
[Sol Luckman is a prolific visual artist and critically acclaimed author of fiction and nonfiction. His numerous books include the international bestselling CONSCIOUS HEALING: BOOK ONE ON THE REGENETICS METHOD and the newly released POTENTIATE YOUR DNA: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO HEALING AND TRANSFORMATION WITH THE REGENETICS METHOD. For information on the “revolutionary healing science” (NEXUS) of the Regenetics Method, check out http://www.PhoenixRegenetics.org. Sol is also author of the BEGINNER’S LUKE Series of seriocomic novels that hilariously explore the role of imagination in creating reality. A respected New York publisher, whose authors feature a National Book Award finalist and dozens of prestigious award winners, made an offer (declined in favor of self-publishing) for the six-volume BEGINNER’S LUKE Series, which was selected out of a “slush pile” of 8,000 manuscripts—a rare and wonderful feat. Luke’s signature obsessions with self, sex, satire and slapdash highlight a serious, and life-changing, point: CONSCIOUSNESS CREATES. The point is there is a point to living in the imagination—for only through it can we reinvent our ourselves and our world. Share the Adventure of an imaginary lifetime by visiting http://www.BeginnersLuke.com. View Sol’s paintings and learn more about his work at http://www.CrowRising.com.]
Hemingway's Experimental Math: THE GARDEN OF EDEN
Readers familiar with Ernest Hemingway’s fiction tend to be surprised and vaguely ill-at-ease when entering the lush textual vegetation of his posthumously published novel THE GARDEN OF EDEN. Begun in 1946 and left unfinished at the time of the author’s death in 1961, THE GARDEN OF EDEN has generated a healthy amount of scholarly debate since its sensational appearance in 1986. Bristling with a new challenge, critics have been drawn primarily to two topics that the text itself foregrounds: the gender-bending theme linking the young writer-protagonist David Bourne to his new wife Catherine in an incestuous love-hate relationship; and the formal characteristics of this oddly “postmodernist” novel which combines Hemingway’s signature realism with intense metafictional experimentation worthy of Italo Calvino or John Barth. This is not to suggest, as some critics have done, that THE GARDEN OF EDEN represents a radically unprecedented departure from the standard Hemingway novel we all know and love. Gender-bending, particularly under its outward sign of the “crossing” haircut, threads conspicuously through THE SUN ALSO RISES (1926), A FAREWELL TO ARMS (1929) and FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS (1940), before reaching a kind of apotheosis in THE GARDEN OF EDEN. As for metafiction, one need look no further than to the most anthologized of Hemingway’s stories, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), to trouble our accepted notions of Hemingway as the past century’s arch-realist. In fact, the principal metafictional technique employed in THE GARDEN OF EDEN with such bewildering effect was already fully integrated into “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” In both texts we find framed within the basetext a summarized meta-narrative which takes place inside the creative subject’s consciousness: just as we experience David writing his African stories, and at the same time somehow “read” the stories themselves, we follow Harry, who is dying of gangrene in Tanzania, through a series of “unwritten” narratives that he imagines in his delusion. And in both novel and story the dialogue between basetext and metatext is productive of meanings that a purely “linear” narrative would be hard-pressed to convey. Reception of THE GARDEN OF EDEN has been spotty at best, with most reviewers agreeing that the novel as published by Scribners (following a controversial editing out of approximately a thousand pages of manuscript) ultimately fails to deliver the goods as a complete work of art. I disagree with this rather cavalier assessment, but as Kant warned us long ago, we have no business arguing tastes to begin with. What interests me in this novel, editorially sanitized though it may be, is the leap Hemingway takes into a sustained (if not altogether new) dialogized universe in which a wide range of binarisms are collapsed and then all mixed up together like the bouillabaisse his characters so decadently consume. THE GARDEN OF EDEN, as its name implies, is a world apart, a textual universe where traditional distinctions—as between masculine and feminine, self and other, life and art—hold no sway, where straight lines become circular and end where they began, where the comfortable logic of either/or is replaced by the disconcerting possibility of both/and. Nowhere is this perplexing illogic more evident than in David and Catherine’s bizarre sex life, whose lack of description in the novel has, according to Comley and Scholes, led “one befuddled critic to suggest that ‘somehow, she sodomizes him.’” Thankfully, reviewers agree that Hemingway, whether or not his tackle was sufficient to the task at hand, was after bigger fish than many have given him credit for. “Nowhere else in Hemingway’s work is the intricate relationship between reality and imagination, between self and art, so originally explored,” writes Allen Josephs, adding, “If William Faulkner had read [this] book, I doubt he would have remarked on Hemingway’s lack of ‘courage to get out on a limb of experimentation.’” Hemingway himself was clearly aware of the tangled, nonlinear implications of his novel, as well as of the problems of interpretation it might pose, for he was fond of pointing out to critics during the period he was composing THE GARDEN OF EDEN, “Gentlemen, you are criticizing my arithmetic when I am long ago into calculus.” As this quip suggests, and as criticism has abundantly borne out, the tendency to read THE GARDEN OF EDEN as a symbolic algorithm—whether step-by-step back into the author’s biography, or more problematic still, as a self-evident example of the author’s famous “hero code”—has been strong. Nowhere has this tendency to pigeonhole the novel been more patent than in the readings given to David and Catherine Bourne. It has generally been acknowledged that both characters are, despite Hemingway’s cited distaste for “composite characters,” among the most synthetic creations in recent literature. As a rather scantily disguised rewriting of F. Scott Fitzgerald’ TENDER IS THE NIGHT, a subject to which I will return, THE GARDEN OF EDEN positions David and Catherine as surrogates for, respectively, Scott/Dick Diver/Gerald Murphy and Zelda/Nicole Diver/Sara Murphy. At the same time David is clearly a projection of Hemingway, similar in a myriad of respects to the narrator of A MOVEABLE FEAST, just as Catherine represents, variously, at least three of the author’s wives. To complicate matters further, Marita, the “dark girl” brought in by Catherine to be her “Heiress” when she leaves, suggestively recalls two of these same wives, Pauline Pfeiffer and Mary Welsh, both of whom were bisexual and entered Hemingway’s life as the third term in adulterous love triangles which prefigure THE GARDEN OF EDEN. Where critics have typically struggled has been in the interpretation of David and Catherine, a process which has often resulted in an elaborate form of choosing sides between the two. According to this either/or logic—which the text itself resolutely seeks to deconstruct—the novel must have a protagonist and an antagonist, a good guy and a bad guy (or a good guy and a bad gal, or vice versa). The traditional approach, followed by Josephs, for example, is to read David as the hero and Catherine as the transgressive she-devil who, to culminate her long list of sins against the artist-hero, burns David’s African stories, an act which Josephs calls “one of the most shattering acts of cruelty anywhere in Hemingway’s fiction.” At the opposite end of the critical spectrum, Steven C. Roe, basing his study (“Opening Bluebeard’s Closet”) on the manuscript, has taken it upon himself to thoroughly demonize David as a monstrously egomaniacal Bluebeard figure who sacrifices his wives to his art and represents what Hemingway “feared most about himself.” Hemingway does at times make David out to be a Bluebeardesque “monster,” even in the expurgated published version, as Catherine at one points makes explicit. Nevertheless, although Roe admits that “Catherine, to a lesser degree, becomes ‘monstrous’ herself,” his reading of the novel—in addition to ignoring the evidence that David represents to some extent a critical parody of Fitzgerald—tends to polarize David and Catherine in a way I’m arguing against in this essay. Attempting to establish a middle ground between these extreme interpretations, Kathy Willingham, in “Hemingway’s THE GARDEN OF EDEN: Writing with the Body,” has argued for a feminist reading of Catherine which would place her alongside David as the text’s “other” artist. “GARDEN unequivocally constitutes a unique and moreover, dual, Künstlerroman,” she writes. That it traces the development of David’s artistic life is an idea which most critics enthusiastically embrace. However, GARDEN also portrays Catherine’s artistic odyssey, and this becomes evident by analyzing the components of the novel which Hemingway suppresses. By submerging Catherine’s artistic quest beneath aspects of the narrative foregrounding David’s development, Hemingway mirrors a central thematic concern, namely the suppression of female creativity. To focus only on David’s narrative and point of view not only neglects Catherine’s artistic evolution, but constitutes a failure to acknowledge the text’s “Other” where free play and creativity exist. Willingham persuasively demonstrates how Catherine subverts David’s “patriarchal” moratorium on her creativity by not only scripting the novel which David in effect transcribes, but also by creating her own text using her body as prima materia. Recognition of Catherine’s status as (oppressed) writer is vital to a healthy understanding of THE GARDEN OF EDEN. Nancy Comley and Robert Scholes, whose rereading of Hemingway’s novel focuses precisely on those moments of ambiguity where “normative” notions of gender and identity are elided, unfortunately tend to overpsycholanalyze the author, interpreting Catherine less as an artist-figure than as “the puritanical castrating mother who destroys her boy-man’s connection to the primitive.” Similarly, Willingham’s strict essentializing of the feminine and the masculine, her insistence on reading Catherine solely in terms of David’s “Other,” runs the risk of once again forcing a choice between the two as creative (or for that matter, destructive) models. But the text repeatedly stresses the paradox that David and Catherine not only represent opposing versions of the artist, locked in war-like struggle, but that they also are the same artist. “Why do we have to go by everyone else’s rules?” Catherine asks David early in the novel. “We’re us.” “Maybe I’d better go back into our world,” she tells him a bit later, “your and my world that I made up; we made up I mean.” Finally, toward the end of the novel, we read from David’s perspective: “Catherine was not his enemy except as she was himself in the unfinding unrealizable quest that is love and so was her own enemy ... She turns my flank so skillfully then finds it is her own and the last fighting is always in a swirl and the dust that rises is our own dust” (emphasis mine; Faulkneresque verbiage Hemingway’s). Sporting identical haircuts and suntans, sharing the same lover, swapping sexual roles back and forth, both ravenously hungry and fearful of time, David and Catherine’s individual boundaries are blurred over and over again in THE GARDEN OF EDEN. Mark Spilka makes a strong case for reading these characters in virtually Jungian terms, as simultaneously animus and anima of the author’s androgynous creative psyche. Although such psychological readings usually give me goosebumps, there’s a lot to chew on in Spilka’s model—not because it provides a vision of some kind of transcendental “truth,” but because Hemingway himself obviously thought in these “mirroring” terms. Viewed from this perspective, Catherine’s mention of “the world we made up” shouldn’t be taken lightly: THE GARDEN OF EDEN is very much a dual creation, a product of the literal and figurative marriage between David, who transcribes the travel narrative that makes up the novel, and Catherine, who directs the narrative’s plot and stars in its pages. The novel which ends with David and Catherine’s impending divorce paradoxically represents their most complete union—if not the child they were unable to have—thus concluding on a thematic level a logic-defying loop which in every way parallels the type of illogic inherent in the self-begetting text. I will return to the relationship between form and content in THE GARDEN OF EDEN, but first I would like briefly to address the notion of the Garden evoked in the title. In 1948, after finishing the greater part of a first draft, Hemingway remarked to a friend that the novel was about “the happiness of the Garden that a man must lose.” This statement has tempted more than one critic into the problematic assumption that there’s a garden in this text to begin with, one which is lost over the course of the narrative to be replaced by the bitter fruit of wisdom. “Rather than a coincidentia oppositorum or the homo totus of Jungian psychology, which are metaphors for fulfillment and integration,” writes Josephs, “David and Catherine’s experiments expose the disintegration that comes with the loss of the garden and the curse of human sexuality. It is no coincidence that David comes to call her Devil.” While admitting this to be one possible interpretation of the Garden as a symbol, with such a contradictory, polyvalent narrative we should always be wary of oversimplifying. Another way of reading the Garden, and one I think is suggested by the very possibility of a reading like the one sketched above in this novel structured on the mirror image, is its exact opposite: that there is no foundational Garden in this text. The hunger pangs that lead David and Catherine into the moral wilderness of androgyny, instead of suddenly disrupting paradise, are, as the first chapter makes abundantly clear, present as evil seeds from the beginning. In this interpretation David, who shares Catherine’s hunger, is as much a Satan/Eve figure as Catherine herself—yet again inviting us to consider the two as a single character. Speaking to himself in the mirror following his first haircut and bleaching with Catherine, David says, “All right. You like it ... Now go through with the rest of it whatever it is and don’t ever say anyone tempted you or that anyone bitched you.” Perhaps we hear an echo in this passage of Hemingway’s letter to Fitzgerald in which he criticized TENDER IS THE NIGHT: “We’re all bitched from the start.” In any case it doesn’t require much imagination to see how David and Catherine are indeed bitched from the start. Consistent with the project of rewriting Fitzgerald’s novel, Hemingway subtly implies that Catherine, like Nicole/Zelda, has spent time in a Swiss psychiatric hospital; David’s past is similarly traumatic, as his African stories leave little room to doubt. I’m suggesting that David and Catherine enter the world of THE GARDEN OF EDEN already in a state of fragmentation, and that the only integration or fulfillment in this text—belated though it may be—results from the fulfillment of the narrative premise itself: the only garden in this novel, in other words, is THE GARDEN OF EDEN. From this perspective it might be helpful to interpret Marita not simply as a submissive nurse figure, as most critics have done, but also as the textual embodiment of the dark, shadowy (because unseen) Reader au sens large of the David/Catherine text. After all, Marita spends the majority of her spare time (if we can use the phrase for the idle rich) reading what David has written and Catherine scripted. If this sounds like an example of overzealous criticism, perhaps it is. One thing is certain: THE GARDEN OF EDEN, by consciously and conspicuously foregrounding its formal characteristics, seems almost to require us to interpret its thematic content in formal or artistic terms. The opposite is equally true: the novel’s formal structuration lends itself easily to a reflexive meditation on its own content. We see this reciprocal process at work most plainly in the relationship between gender economies and genre. Just as the plot dynamics hinge on the interplay between the masculine and the feminine, on a generic level the novel assumes the form of a complex dialogue between mimetic and metafictional modes. Moreover, in strikingly similar fashion to the blurring of gender and identity boundaries discussed above, the contours between the mimetic and the metafictional gradually run together until there’s no longer any distinguishing between the travel narrative and the African stories which enter that narrative in meta-form. The ultimate result of this mind- (and gender-) bending process is, of course, the self-begotten novel, in which basetext and metatext(s) are revealed as one and the same; but long before the final page mimesis and metafiction have ceased to exist as discrete categories. In Chapter Sixteen, for example, we find David at work on the second of his African stories: But the half past ten was on the watch on his wrist as he looked at it in the room where he sat at a table feeling the breeze from the sea now and the real time was evening and he was sitting against the yellow gray base of a tree with a glass of whiskey and water in his hand and the rolled figs swept away watching the porters butchering out the Kongoni he had shot in the first grassy swale they passed before they came to the river. This passage adds reality and fiction to the long list of binaries Hemingway throws out the window. Later, in conversation with Catherine, David is described as “[listening] in the unreality that reality had become.” To return to the relationship between gender and genre, let us once again consider David and Catherine—this time, however, from a more strictly “literary” perspective. The point has been made that both characters, in their own manner, are writer-figures. In David’s case this is more self-evident than in Catherine’s, but the question remains: what kind of writers are they? Depending on whether we ask this question of the characters as they appear in the novel, or with respect to the novel as it is “written” by the character we’ve called David/Catherine, we get two very different answers. In the first instance, David and Catherine represent contrasting conceptions of the artist. Despite the metafictional function which David’s African stories perform in the novel, it should be noted that the stories themselves, as related by Hemingway’s narrator, are essentially straightforward and mimetic, following a linear progression through a series of described events. Corresponding to David’s “realism” is its generic antithesis in the narcissistic body-text produced by Catherine: her masculine haircuts foreground for the viewer the fact that her “maleness” is merely the product of artifice, much as metafiction serves as a reminder that what we’re reading isn’t really “real.” Catherine’s connection with metafiction comes tantalizingly close to being made explicit at least twice in the text. In Chapter Six she imagines herself in mise en abîme: “I was thinking so much about myself that I was getting impossible again, like a painter and I was my own picture.” Later, describing to David how she plans to have their hair cut, her terminology is suggestive of other meanings: “It’s sort of bevelled back from the natural line” (italics mine). We might even go so far as to read David’s African stories—which probe his past and culminate in “the beginning of the knowledge of loneliness”—as embodying the epistemological approach typically associated with a kind of modernism, whereas Catherine’s self-creating, cosmetic “fictions” would appear to have more in common with the ontological focus of postmodernist aesthetics. Without couching his argument precisely in these terms, Robert Jones hits upon the notion that THE GARDEN OF EDEN “constitutes an important link between Modernism and Post-Modernism.” As co-creators of THE GARDEN OF EDEN, David/Catherine represents a third kind of writer, neither realist nor metafictionalist, but an androgynous synthesis of the two combining an awareness of epistemology with a fascination for ontology. By making the figure of androgyny thus resonate on both thematic and formal levels, Hemingway not only blurs the boundaries between masculine and feminine, self and other, art and life—he virtually collapses distinctions between content and form. Even stylistics enters into play at this point: Hemingway’s trademark dialogue, which at first seems to be chiefly an aesthetic device, begins to take on added significance when we consider how dialogue functions as a trope for the interplay between the various binarisms we’ve been discussing. The role that mirrors play should be more closely examined as well. Throughout the novel mirroring serves as an appropriate metaphor for the paradoxical coexistence of sameness and difference, the virtual equivalence of reality and fiction, self and other, male and female, meta and mimetic, that make up the very quicksandy substance of THE GARDEN OF EDEN The conflation of racial characteristics, as in the combination of dark skin and light hair, should also be considered in this context. According to Comley and Scholes, the Scribners text of the novel “does its author a serious disservice” by all but eliminating an important African subplot: “The obsession with tanning is connected with the desire to reach a primal level of experience, some heart of darkness, from which Euro-Americans have been cut off by their heritage of enlightenment.” This quest for “something powerfully irrational” is quite in keeping with the novel’s project of going beyond the limits imposed by Cartesian thinking. There’s a case to be made that this “new” kind of novel—which Hemingway actually thought of at one point as forming a monumental tetralogy—should be read as the author’s treatise on the art of the novelist, especially when we compare David’s thoughts on writing with Hemingway’s own artistic theories. The most obvious similarity between character and author on the subject of aesthetics (there are many) is their shared “iceberg theory,” which gets translated by David into an image better suited to the equatorial climate he grew up in: “He wrote [the story] exactly and the sinister part only showed as the light feathering of a smooth swell on a calm day marking the reef beneath.” On the other hand, there’s also a case to be made—and here we’re back to the absurd logic of both/and—that THE GARDEN OF EDEN betrays elements of self-parody in addition to its parody/critique of TENDER IS THE NIGHT. Concerning overt self-parody, we run into the problem of the manuscript versus the published novel. Josephs puts it euphemistically when he writes that “at times the book almost seems an anthology of Hemingway’s favorite topics and places.” It would be more to the point if he had asked, “Just how many martinis and Perrier whiskeys do the characters drink?” Is the novel intentionally self-parodic, or did Scribners and its editor intentionally find the “Hemingway novel” they went looking for in the manuscript? That THE GARDEN OF EDEN represents a rewriting of Fitzgerald’s novel has been generally acknowledged by critics. Spilka, following Arthur Mizener’s insightful biography of Fitzgerald (THE FAR SIDE OF PARADISE), refers to TENDER IS THE NIGHT, along with Kipling’s JUNGLE BOOK, as among the novel’s “immediate sources,” on a par with its direct biographical inspiration: Ernest and Pauline’s honeymoon at Le Grau-du-Roi in 1927. Spilka traces Hemingway’s anxiety of influence to two specific scenes in Fitzgerald’s novel: the “barbershop showdown” where Tommy Barban confronts a half-shaven Dick Diver for Nicole’s hand, and the “lesbian lark” in which a vaguely repulsed Dick rescues his friend Mary North and Lady Caroline Sibley-Biers from jail after they have disguised themselves as sailors and picked up two unsuspecting girls. This seems as good a place as any to look for the original impetus for THE GARDEN OF EDEN, although as Spilka also points out, there’s more than enough documentation of transsexual haircuts, hair bleaching and lesbianism in Hemingway’s biography to account for his fascination with these subjects. Obviously, many pieces of evidence support the claim that Hemingway was writing in response to TENDER IS THE NIGHT, not least of which is the fact that Hemingway was clearly obsessed by Fitzgerald’s novel, as he was by Fitzgerald himself. Their entangled relationship—based on admiration for each other’s work, a sense of competition out of proportion to the circumstances, and quite possibly repressed homosexual desire for one other—is reminiscent of the similar connection between Melville and Hawthorne a century earlier. If anything, Ernest and Scott’s “friendship” (I use the term loosely) has generated more myths, wholly or in part, than that of their nineteenth-century precursors, including such literary “myths” as Tennessee Williams’ CLOTHES FOR A SUMMER HOTEL, Kaye McDonough’s ZELDA and Hemingway’s own A MOVEABLE FEAST. The barely submerged rewriting of the psychodrama between Scott and Zelda in THE GARDEN OF EDEN is one of the novel’s most salient features: a young writer’s career is threatened by his insane wife, whose jealousy of his writing, combined with his suppression of her creativity, pushes her to a series of vindictive acts against her husband, including tempting him to drink so that his writing will suffer. Bruccoli quotes Hemingway as telling Max Perkins shortly after the publication of TENDER IS THE NIGHT: Scott can’t invent true characters because he doesn’t know anything about people ... he has so lousy much talent and he has suffered so without knowing why, has destroyed himself and destroyed Zelda, though never as much as she has tried to destroy him, that out of this little children’s, immature, misunderstood, whining for lost youth death-dance that they have been dragging into and out of insanity to the tune of, the guy all but makes a fine book, all but makes a splendid book. Hemingway follows a similar narrative line in his depiction of Scott and Zelda’s relationship in A MOVEABLE FEAST. Specific references to Dick and Nicole of TENDER IS THE NIGHT abound in THE GARDEN OF EDEN, the most blatant of which being Diver David’s repeated plunges into the Mediterranean which resonate simultaneously on two very different levels. Depending on how we interpret David’s diving, it’s possible to read the novel in contradictory ways. Is diving here a metaphor for the artistic enterprise as it should be undertaken, a heroic probing of the depths of reality? or does it symbolize a narcissistic submersion in one’s own particular fantasy? In other words, is David the courageous artist-hero that some have claimed him to be, or is he an unsympathetic victim of Hemingway’s irony? It should be clear by now that the answer to both these questions is yes. On the one hand, Spilka is surely accurate when he writes that Hemingway correctly identified Fitzgerald’s “dangerous self-indulgence,” his importation of “feelings about his own decline” into the character of Dick Diver, as a problem Hemingway would himself have to face in his own version of the writer’s struggle with “tragic” circumstances. Thus, David Bourne, his chief persona in THE GARDEN OF EDEN, would make of the act of writing a stoic buffer against such circumstances and would stubbornly resist their debilitating power. He would confront the hazards of androgyny that Fitzgerald had only dimly understood ... and would overcome them through courageous masculine artistry. According to this account, David/Ernest manages to triumph over “corrupting” feminine influence where Dick/Scott succumbs to an emotional and artistic “crack-up.” But we also know that Hemingway doesn’t exactly pull his punches when it comes to David, who under the continual ironic blows of his author emerges with a black eye or two himself. Parody isn’t a word one encounters much in Hemingway criticism, but it seems oddly appropriate in this novel. David’s complicity in his own “tragedy”—his blindness not only to Catherine’s personal and artistic needs, but to his own desires and needs as well, as paralleled by the story of his betrayal of the elephant—is a trenchant replaying of chapters out of both Fitzgerald’s and Hemingway’s lives. Thus by taking aim at Dick Diver—whose overestimation of his ability to “heal” Nicole is matched only by his underestimation of his emotional dependence on her—Hemingway writes a novel that defies attempts at categorization. Faced with an internally condradicted text which represents at once ars poetica, critique and self-aggrandizement, parody and self-parody, it’s hardly surprising that readers expecting a more or less “straightforward” story feel perplexed and giddy-headed when they turn the last page and replace the book on the shelf. Fitzgerald once wrote that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” In composing his most ambitious novel, Hemingway clearly took Fitzgerald at his word.
By collapsing a host of distinctions, from masculine and feminine to form and content to parody and self-parody, THE GARDEN OF EDEN moves beyond the limits of Cartesian logic into a complex, non-Euclidean universe where opposites attract and fuse together. The painful “change” that takes place with and between David and Catherine leaves them paradoxically more united in the aftermath of their separation—out of which THE GARDEN OF EDEN is “born”—than they ever were in the precarious balance of their “Edenic” honeymoon. Nevertheless, the novel is far from ending on a happy note. We last hear from Catherine in a letter to David that sums up, poetically and lucidly, the madness that has driven her away and which threatens to recur at any moment. As for David, who finishes the novel by rewriting the African stories that Catherine has burned, it’s difficult not to see in his heroic “recovery” a relapse into the kind of self-obsessed, masturbatory blindness that led to Catherine’s exile from the garden in the first place. “Are we the Bournes?” Marita asks him shortly after Catherine has taken the train to Paris. The dialogue which follows her question speaks worlds to the attentive ear: “Sure. We’re the Bournes. It may take a while to have the papers. But that’s what we are. Do you want me to write it out? I think I could write that.” “You don’t need to write it.” “I’ll write it in the sand,” David said. Consistent with its internal illogic, THE GARDEN OF EDEN ends in a sense exactly where it began, with David and Marita’s marriage—exactly like David and Catherine’s—ready to be washed away like writing in the sand. In the final analysis we are left to contemplate the dangerous isolation and selfishness inherent in the writerly enterprise. For David, who “[cares] about the writing more than about anything else,” remains sadly the same little Davey whom his father described as the “iron-hearted little bastard. He meant to say cold-hearted but he turned it kindly with his gently lying mouth. Or maybe he meant it.”
Copyright (c) 2010 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.
[Sol Luckman is a prolific visual artist and critically acclaimed author of fiction and nonfiction. His numerous books include the international bestselling CONSCIOUS HEALING: BOOK ONE ON THE REGENETICS METHOD and the newly released POTENTIATE YOUR DNA: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO HEALING AND TRANSFORMATION WITH THE REGENETICS METHOD. For information on the “revolutionary healing science” (NEXUS) of the Regenetics Method, check out http://www.PhoenixRegenetics.org. Sol is also author of the BEGINNER’S LUKE Series of seriocomic novels that hilariously explore the role of imagination in creating reality. A respected New York publisher, whose authors feature a National Book Award finalist and dozens of prestigious award winners, made an offer (declined in favor of self-publishing) for the six-volume BEGINNER’S LUKE Series, which was selected out of a “slush pile” of 8,000 manuscripts—a rare and wonderful feat. Luke’s signature obsessions with self, sex, satire and slapdash highlight a serious, and life-changing, point: CONSCIOUSNESS CREATES. The point is there is a point to living in the imagination—for only through it can we reinvent our ourselves and our world. Share the Adventure of an imaginary lifetime by visiting http://www.BeginnersLuke.com. View Sol’s paintings and learn more about his work at http://www.CrowRising.com.]
