Squarely in the Realm of the Transgressive, Where True Desire Abides

First published in France in 1938 and introduced to me by the wonderful Rikki Ducornet, the stories in Marguerite Yourcenar’s Oriental Tales do more than just confront the power of desire, they promote it to immense and terrifying dimensions.

In Kali Beheaded, the gorgeous virgin goddess Kali is massacred by jealous fellow gods, who re-attach her head to the body of a whore, and she roams the world in furious confusion, seducing and destroying everyone she encounters with vengeful innocence — a unity Yourcenar may have invented — the slave of her own craving to connect with other beings. Yourcenar writes, “. . . the liquefied fortunes of men clung to her hands like strands of honey.” For Kali, now goddess of sex and death, desire and destruction are the same, and she is just as much a prisoner of this binary as everyone else.

In Our-Lady-of-the-Swallows, a priest becomes convinced that nymphs are living in a cave and seducing his parishioners, so he blocks the cave’s small mouth and tries to starve them. But as he celebrates their death-song, the reader learns the nymphs are really swallows, who, indeed, are really starving.

In Aphrodissia, the Widow, the widow of a minister in what probably is Greece — a Greece abandoned by the gods, but not the passion that made them necessary—mourns the death of her illicit lover Kostis, a thief who terrorized a village full of hypocrites and cowards. Aphrodissia’s love for Kostis is both skeptical of love as social custom, and deeply, almost violently tender, and places love itself outside convention and squarely in the realm of the transgressive, where true desire abides in Yourcenar’s work.

Yourcenar sees the social realm as stifling and criminally banal; her characters are desperate for a vehement divorce from their communities and a union with the rage of their emotion. Aphrodissia rescues her lover’s head from the top of a spear and tries to run away with it, but she is chased, and, in a scene that is unbelievably moving, she slips into a canyon, where she dies.

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If Oriental Tales has a flaw — beyond the way it uses an exoticized and mythical Far East as an environment for stories that transcend the banal, in an “everyone is crazy over there” kind of way — it’s the way her stories veer too easily into the fabulous. Wealthy servants give away their fortunes to benefit their masters, murder victims come back from the dead, imprisoned artists paint a flood and then a lifeboat to escape with, and all that from just one story: How Wang-Fo Was Saved, which Yourcenar adapted from an ancient Taoist fable.

Literary fairy tales have to find a way to navigate the pitfalls of facile magic. Italo Calvino does it by writing prose that slyly critiques the reader; Angela Carter does it by violently exploring latent assumptions about gender. When Yourcenar fails, her stories seem too formulaic or have no sense of the hassle of reality. Their endings read like punch lines.

In a way, Yourcenar is one of her own characters: a zealot on a fool’s quest to embody, in a story, that which cannot be contained. At her best, she’s like a physicist who briefly but revealingly controls the ineffable unseen before the operation blows up her collider. She writes as if she knows the edict from Blanchot that says that to toil with the elements in the only true realism.

Most of us grow out of the idea that life is either death by boredom or immolation in desire, but every now and then, as we look drearily out the window, we remember all our deepest loves and hates, all of the desires we’ve left unacted. Oriental Tales is for these moments, when the loss we keep repressed comes rupturing unbearably through our lives.

Aren't Revolutions Built Upon Manifestos?

Years ago, I sat in Day One of my first fiction workshop, a newbie writer worried about appearing too newbie. The workshop leader wanted to know about us. What writers we liked. Some of our favorite books. My workshop mates tossed out the expected names like Garcia Marquez, Borges, Saunders, Bender, Barthelme and Bukowski and Carver, Hemingway and Nabokov and Kafka. My underarms ran with sweat. When my turn came, I wanted to express my individuality, and maybe my mental stamina too, so I said that I liked Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Cue the crickets and the blank stares. The workshop leader said “Okay” in a way that sounded disappointed. Like: Okaaaaaaaaay, thanks. Next person please. Since then, I’ve continued to get the same reaction when I mention it. So what is with all the literary hating on this novel? Some writers are quite forceful in their dislike. Others will temper their negative reaction by admitting that they liked Rand’s The Fountainhead, however, and liked it even better in its movie form (the 1949 classic starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal).

After all, who doesn’t inwardly cheer when Howard Roark blows up the building he designed rather than see it bastardized by feeble minds?

Don’t get me wrong, I understand the two obvious turn-offs with Atlas Shrugged, starting with its size. Sure, it’s bloated. Wikipedia has it as number eight on their longest-novel list, punching in at about 565,000 words, topping both David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (#11, at 484,000) and Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, but edged out by Leo Tolstoy at #7 with his poster-child of heft, War and Peace (587,000). Novels this big simply don’t play well these days. We’re an attention-deficit, multi-tasking society of over-caffeinated busybodies. Give us the Cliff’s Notes, please, downloadable to Kindle, teen vampires and boy wizards helpful but not required. I’ll agree that a good editor could have trimmed this beast down without harming its essence, but that didn’t happen, and so a few more trees were sacrificed to Rand’s verbose tendencies. New ones have grown up in their places; time to move on. To me, the size of this novel is much more a function of a vast plot scale than verbosity. Who would dare tackle a colossal topic like the disintegration of society, across industries, from coast to coast?

While there is no shortage of apocalyptic novels, most narrow their scope to a story that can be comfortably told in 60,000 words or so. In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, for example, we never find out what destroyed society — we just follow a man and his son on a bleak, frightening journey of survival. Rand, on the other hand, chronicles how something too big to fail can indeed fail. That’s going to take more than a few chapters, people. Talk about a big canvas to paint!

And second: what about the pages and pages of Rand’s individual-centric philosophical diatribes sprinkled throughout the novel? For example, mystery man John Galt’s big radio-broadcast soliloquy near the end of the book covers fifty-six pages of small typeface in the 1999 edition. While admittedly being too swollen (see above), I’d argue that it’s necessary to the story. The entrepreneurial characters that go AWOL in the book were successful enough that they could have survived, in some lesser way, the grievous actions of bumbling government bureaucrats, if all they were interested in were survival. But they were idealists, damn it, and mustn’t all idealists spout their ideals? Aren’t revolutions built upon manifestos?

In my opinion, it aids the credibility of the story to understand the deep-rooted motivations and passions of Henry Reardon, Dagny Taggart and the rest of the shruggers. It helps make their outrage palpable and their extreme actions believable. Does it come in chunks too big to swallow? Yes. I believe it unnecessarily taxes the reader when the top story disappears for dozens of pages, so maybe Rand loses a few craft points here, but for God’s sake, let her keep her ideals. They’re the nuclear fuel of this whole sloppy brilliant mess of a novel.

I’ve come to accept the fact that I’m one of the few that will ever read and enjoy this book, as a fan of her literary accomplishment, not of her philosophy (the other supporters of Atlas Shrugged seem to be the right-wing followers of her Objectivist beliefs). I’m still satisfied with my response given back in that workshop years ago, defending this unruly novel, and equally dissatisfied with my recent non-response to a friend who asked me why I hadn’t read Infinite Jest yet. Within a span of milliseconds, I considered answering “too long.” I thought of saying “too many big lumps of momentum-killing thoughtwandering,” but I was not about to become a hypocrite. Instead, I just shrugged.

An Author Who Was Trying To Transcend Plot: On Henry James's The Wings of the Dove

A number of years ago, I became very interested in what I thought of as Henry James’s best book, The Turn of the Screw­­. In particular, I believed that one hundred years of critical study had missed the point of it completely, and I had a better idea (which I still believe to be true).  It’s only recently, however — in the wake of completing the manuscript for a short book about the correspondence of Henry James and his philosopher brother William — that I’ve come to realize that I thought of The Turn of the Screw as Henry James’s best book only because it was the one I could understand.

James had a lot of problems with people understanding him — most notably, William — and to this day he has a kind of writer’s-writer grudgingly granted Master-status. Tooling around on Facebook, I’m surprised to see him so infrequently listed (as in never, so far) among folks’ favorite books or authors. If he is discussed these days, it’s for his famous ghost story, which mostly gets used to justify the recent glut of crossover literary/genre books.

But there’s a problem with that: James didn’t think a whole lot of The Turn of the Screw. No, scratch that. He did like the book, he thought he’d executed it perfectly — he just didn’t prefer it. It was too obviously commercial. James wrote a lot of things for money in his life, and occasionally he was craven in doing so, but he always recognized it for what it was. He didn’t like unambitious writers, or writers who wrote only one kind of thing, and he criticized “vulgar,” tasteless audiences, too — ones that wanted to be told only stories that were exactly like stories they had already been told.

So what were James’s new stories? Well, they were the big novels that I didn’t think were his best work. I had told myself that my problem with them was that I just couldn’t get all that worked up about whether some young girl was going to marry. Without really knowing it, I was signing on to a familiar take on James — his fascination with the lives of young women spoke probably to some latent facet of his psychology or personality. AKA, he was gay. But the truth is, that’s stupid. I don’t know whether James was gay, and neither do you, and neither of us should care. And more important, these books are much better than The Turn of the Screw, and I had to write a book of my own to figure out why. (It’ll appear, by the way, from the University of Iowa Press in Fall 2012!)

And that brings me to my real recommendation here — The Wings of the Dove. I’m not going to bother telling you the plot of the book at all, because that’s kind of the point I’m trying to make. Most book reviews these days are ninety percent plot summary — so is it any surprise that we have trouble understanding an author who was trying to transcend plot? The plot of The Wings of the Dove doesn’t matter; it’s how the story’s told that makes the difference. Which means that if you’ve seen the movie, then you don’t understand anything at all about the book.

How’s it told?  It’s almost entirely without events. That is, it’s almost all character interiority — you’re in the mind of a character, riding sidecar to their consciousness, as they mull away on some upcoming event, and then suddenly, whoosh, the event has come and gone, and now the character is recalling the event, characterizing it in retrospect. Through almost the whole book — and it’s a big book — almost nothing just outright happens.

To understand why he would do this, we have to go back in time a little bit. For James, just about everything returns to Balzac (e.g. the plot of Eugenie Grandet sounds so much like a Jamesian plot it’s not even funny). Late in his life, in an essay called “The Lesson of Balzac,” James described Balzac as a “painterly” writer, and a monk. It’s the painter part I want to focus on (though if we were to all think of James as a monk, too, we’d probably have much more intelligent discussions about him).

Henry and William James were both more or less reared in the nursery of museums, and you’ll have to take my word for it that Henry said on a number of occasions that what he wanted to do, as a writer, was what he thought he saw happening in the history of art. What was that? Well, after the invention of perspective — depth — paintings were divided into foregrounds and backgrounds. Often you had a portrait in the foreground — Virgins and Jesuses — and in the background you’d have some kind of landscape, maybe some ruins. As time passed (art historians, please sheath your sabers — this is not an art history lecture), artists started to get more and more interested in that background. The background, in other words, climbed into the foreground: thus, the shift from portrait painting to landscape painting. In the avant garde — though Henry didn’t know this — something else was happening: even though the background became the foreground, it didn’t come into any kind of focus. Hello, impressionism!

Now that’s a terribly, terribly, terribly simplified version of things — but it does seem to jibe with how Henry James basically thought of it, and he articulated as much in a story that described the illustrations of a particular edition of Sleeping Beauty. In short, he noted how the blurry background of an image seemed to tug on the imagination, how it triggered something like a stream of thought, a reverie of images. That’s what he wanted his fiction to do — inspire readerly reverie.

So how does The Wings of the Dove do that? Well, in a story, the plot is the foreground — the events, the dialogue, the action. What’s in the background, often unstated (think Hemingway, Carver, etc.), is the meandering minds of the characters who have mulled these events in advance, and who will reflect on them in retrospect. The Wings of the Dove, like the art that Henry wanted to emulate, inverts the background and the foreground so that all we get are blurry impressions of events — blurry impressions that are truer to a reality the confusion and ambiguity of which we fool ourselves by denying.

When I reread The Wings of the Dove for my book, I started to see it like this, as James wanted me to see it — I started to make out the shapes in the fog. My old anxieties faded away. I found that I cared a whole lot less about who was going to wind up marrying whom than I did about recognizing the mind wheeling there on the page, streaming and reverieing away — didn’t it seem a little similar to mine? That, I realized with a jolt, was the whole point.