Found at a library sale
At Marc Fitten’s invitation, I’ve finally succumbed to the world of blogging, from which I tried to stay away so far. So, I decided to use this immediate medium in order to promote works of literature I discover and find worthy of a larger audience.
Two weeks ago I found at our local public library three marvelous (in all the senses of the word) works of fiction, each for $2 apiece: Gao Xingjian’s Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather, A. S. Byatt’s The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye and Steven Millhauser’s The Knife Thrower. What attracted me at first was the books’ design and cover (yes, I judge a book by its cover and most of the time I’m right), the first two (published by Flamingo and Random House, respectively) in hardcover, but in a small, pleasant size, not the huge bricks in glossy, gaudy colors one usually finds at one’s local Borders or Barnes & Noble, and the third one in paperback (Phoenix House, a British publisher), less dramatic looking than the other two, but still nice to hold and feel.
It is likely that you’ve never heard of Gao Xingjian—a Chinese writer who now lives in France—though he happens to be a Nobel laureate. His collection of short stories Buying a Fishing Rod… is written in a deceptively simple style, but the more you read the more you realize that he is in fact a very complex writer. With the exception of the last story, all the stories are vignettes populated with “simple” people, consisting mostly of dialogues in which all the dramatic tension is concentrated. The last story suddenly shifts from this straightforward style to a twisted structure reminiscent of Last Year at Marienbad, though its structure is even more complicated, like a cross between a Beckett play and an Alain Robbe-Grillet story (but less annoying than the latter). This may not sound very appealing, but it is worth reading.
A.S. Byatt’s collection of short stories is rightly subtitled “Five Fairy Stories,” as it is written in the genre of fairy tales. Byatt uses motives and themes that are specific to the genre, but rather than focusing on the light, moralistic aspect of it, she delves into the dark, uncanny side of the popular imagination as it is preserved in European folklore. It is a refreshingly anti-Disney vision of the fairy tale, which reminds me a little of Tim Burton—though much less bloody than his films.
And, finally, Steven Millhauser’s collection of short stories The Knife Thrower is a true discovery, probably the biggest discovery I’ve made since I read W. S. Merwin’s The Miner’s Pale Children. Milhauser’s technique is very particular in that it uses a realist-psychological approach only to better thwart it by infusing it with elements of fantastic fiction. For example, in “A Visit,” the narrator is introduced to his friend’s wife, who happens to be a gigantic, ugly frog. A different writer would have described the scene in a surrealist style, but Millhauser’s character ponders with a straight face the implications of his friend’s marriage to a frog. This encounter between the means of psychological realism and fantastic literature creates a disruptive tension and provokes in the reader a feeling that transcends the literal description.
Millhauser has the very rare genius of giving us the pleasure of reading that captivating stories usually arouse in us, while reflecting and engaging the reader in a reflection not only on the story itself and on the act of storytelling, but also on some serious topics, such as the relationship between technology and morality, the American obsession with technological progress and the extremes to which this obsession is carried. Yet he does this in such an oblique way that the reader may not even notice that the stories “The Dream of the Consortium” and “Paradise Park” are essentially two critical essays on American lifestyle done in the guise of storytelling. I believe that he manages to weave his ideas so smoothly into the fabric of the story—indeed the ideas are the story—for two reasons: 1) the narrator doesn’t judge from the outside, but is himself one of the crowd and, like the crowd, goes through a series of conflicting feelings, from nostalgia for the charm of the old department stores to being seduced by the new world of mega-malls, in which the old stores and pretty much everything on the planet is copied and transformed into a replica that can be purchased and sold. 2) the child in Millhauser is fascinated by all the incarnations of amusement parks, which, in turn, are incarnations of old fairs and freak shows—a magic world reminiscent of an Oriental bazaar, which is best represented in the story “Flying Carpets.”
It is no accident that the dream store in “The Dream Consortium” and the dream amusement park in “Paradise Park” are extremely similar. Both utopias are built on the desire to replicate life, that is, to transform everything into a copy that ends up taking the place of the original. For the business people in the dream store there is no distinction between a wristwatch and a Roman villa. In the dream store one can order and buy an entire European city, which is, of course, more convenient than traveling all the way to Europe. Sounds familiar? A cross between Las Vegas and Disneyland, Millhauser’s dream store and paradise park remind us of Baudrillard’s reflections on technology and simulacra. In “The Dream of the Consortium,” the entire world, or rather its replica, can be bought, sold and possessed by consumers. In “Paradise Park,” the consumers of increasingly titillating forms of entertainment descend into labyrinthine structures that imitate the real world from which they are trying to escape. But the search for ever more titillating amusements eventually turns onto itself like a snake biting its tail, and Paradise Park becomes a sort of Devil’s Park in which the ultimate pleasure is pain.
If one wants to find out more about Millhauser’s understanding of art one should read the story “The New Automaton Theater,” an ars poetica that should be compulsive reading in all “writing” classes. The narrator distinguishes between a “Children’s Theater,” built on a naïve realism that wants to keep the illusion of fiction at any price, and a theater for adults—the “new automaton theater”—in which the artifice of fiction is exposed for what it is, and the realist characters become “automatons.” The new automatons lack the grace of the realist ones from the Children’s Theater, but they are “profoundly expressive in their own disturbing way.”
Millhauser walks the very tight rope between the Children’s Theater and the New Automatons Theater, and he walks it brilliantly.
