Preparing the syllabi for my courses. The hardest is the one for a “special topics” course called “Unclassifiables,” for which I am entirely to blame. I thought it might be fun to do a survey of books that bend and blur genres, that don’t fit neatly into any one category, that combine travel writing with autobiography, say, or novel and notebook, or biography and autobiography. Some gorgeous and successful works have been written recently that fit this bill. I’m thinking of books like Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, wherein he documents his failure to write a standard biography of D.H. Lawrence, resulting in a kind of accidental or postmodern biography, and a very good one. Julian Barnes does something similar in Flaubert’s Parrot, a novel in which the hero, a retired professor, takes the reader on a kind of scholarly tour of Flaubert’s life and work through the detritus of objects associated with him, including several stuffed parrots reputed to have served as Flaubert’s role model for the one in his novella, A Simple Heart. Barnes’ book is made like a sandwich, with (mostly) nonfiction chapter served up between slices of a novel to do with the professor’s attempt to come to term’s with his wife’s suicide. The conceit works very well, despite that compared to traditional novels Flaubert’s Parrot has practically no scenes and really only one character who himself is a bore and a cipher.
But these books work—meaning, first of all, that they are comprehensible and have solid, albeit unusual structures. I’m hard-pressed to say what works, for instance, in Ben Marcus’ The Age of Wire and String, which reads like a collection of prose poems written by Martians. If a book is a circuit, them Marcus’ book reminds me of the circuits I used to build in my inventor father’s laboratory by soldering together on a circuit board a random assortment of resistors, capacitors, diodes, and whatever else I could find in his spare-parts bins, and then, when I had what very much looked like a real circuit, plugging in the result. What I got for my efforts more often than not was a cloud of smoke and even, occasionally, flames. Apparently those flames are what Marcus’ orgasmically enthusiastic readers are responding to when they paste his creation with epithets like “brilliant” and “genius.” Call me a fuddy-duddy reactionary, but I’m of the old school that thinks a novel (or any work of literature for that matter) should do something other than befuddle its readers, or anyway let them do most if not all of the work, and for an uncertain reward. At least with Joyce and Finnegan’s Wake there are layers of puns and riddles and other allusions and associations to be excavated by those who bother. I have no such confidence in Ben Marcus’ work—nor can any of his otherwise demonstrative supporters provide a single shred of solid evidence to show that slogging through his swamp of opaque images and gibberish will do anything for readers that their own dreams or a Rorschach ink blot test can’t do for them.
Enthusiasts of such works not only admit to this willful obscurity as a substitute for content, but can’t seem to get enough of it. Speaking of Padgett Powel’s The Interrogative Mood, another recent postmodern “masterpiece”—a so-called novel consisting exclusively of a string of arbitrary and disconnected questions—one Amazon reviewer wrote, “Forces your brain to make up its own story.” To which I say, “So do blank sheets of paper. I prefer the blank sheets.” But maybe that’s because I’m a writer, and like to befuddle myself with my own words. But if, when, and before I subject those words to the public, I at least try to make some sense out of them. Marcus thinks this is a bad idea, and, worse, a form of condescension or pandering the result of which will ultimately be an infantilized audience incapable of digesting truly innovative literature. But what I suspect he’s really arguing for is a literary landscape less hostile to his circumscribed talents. He doesn’t want to level the playing field; he wants it to be graded downward in his favor. And people support this, I suspect because they are themselves writers who’ve grown weary of telling comprehensible stories, of having a subject and working it into a narrative, or maybe they never had it in them to begin with, or maybe they’d like a blurb from Ben for their own “postmodern” book. What goes around comes around, after all.
