the novel against itself
by Douglas Messerli
Gilbert Sorrentino Aberration of Starlight
(New York: Random House, 1980)
In relation to his earlier fictions—Imaginative Qualities, Splendide-Hôtel, and Mulligan Stew—Gilbert Sorrentino’s Aberration of Starlight is perplexing, not in terms of linguistic style or content, but in its unabashed use of modernist structures and other narrative techniques. His three previous works—representing such genres as the mock-essay, the fantasy, and the anatomy—were explicit declarations against the novel and its domination of prose literature in the twentieth century. Yet Aberration of Starlight not only announces itself as a novel on its dust-jacket (although, one must admit, that the generic differences of which I am speaking have little to do with what the publisher chooses to call a work), but within its pages it generally behaves as one. Except for one section in each of its four perfectly balanced “acts,” this is a story which presents, primarily in objective narration, the viewpoints of four different characters, mimetically grounded in a specific time and place, whose interactions precipitate thematic dichotomies—“love and separation,” “youth and age,” “innocence and knowledge”—similar to those of the majority of works of twentieth-century fiction. The book, in fact, is imbued with a sense of ironic nostalgia that Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren—those doyens of modern narrative theory—might applaud.
It
is not that this fiction is “modern” as opposed to “postmodern,” or even
“retrogressive” as opposed to “advanced,” that troubles one; it is just these
kinds of categorizations and their mindless devotees which Sorrentino so
brilliantly satirizes in Mulligan Stew. Rather, the problem is that in
the context of the modern novel, Aberration of Starlight seemingly is
not a very original work. In such a genre, Sorrentino’s literary fortes—his
stunning leaps of logic, lists, litanies, and mimicries—for the most part are
missing, and by the reader are missed. This is not to say that the book is
without its obvious pleasures. The white-starched, sunlit world which Marie
Recco, her son, father, and would-be suitor inhabit, superficially is as loving
and longing a portrait of America as are Edward Hopper’s canvases. Like Hopper,
Sorrentino captures the spirit of a people so splendidly naïve that, poised on
the edge of World War II, they fail to comprehend their own potential to
isolate and hate. The very similarities between Sorrentino and Hopper, however,
point to what appears to be the novel’s failure. The reader has been here
before, and, on the surface at least, Sorrentino has nothing new to say of it.
Describing its characters as boorish and banal, Paul West correctly observes
that the novel presents literary figures who,
“Instead of discovering or inventing
compensations that would free them as characters, from the anonymous pattern of
libido and denial, …back off into the twaddle that surrounds them. Their heads,
and what little is in them, dominate the narrative, and keep on coming through
direct, without much of the narrational intervention that could render shades
of feeling they feel but can’t express. Indeed, the narrator, who shows up
rarely, seems even more buried in the stuff of their lives than they are. (The
Washington Post Book World, Sunday, August 31, 1980).”
With regard to objective narration and its
inherently closed structures, it is as if in Aberration of Starlight
Sorrentino has attempted to outdo the moderns. It is not that one necessarily
demands a more “contemporary” fiction; it is simply that one is less satisfied
by an anachronistic one.
If
such comments sound contentious, it is the result of Sorrentino having set up
certain expectations in his previous fictions, which appear thwarted in this
new book. But that very fact encourages one to speculate that this “novel” is
not all it seems. There is, after all, that one section in each of the four
portraits that does not conform to the prevailing structure of the book, that,
in fact, in the prose romance as practiced by the majority of moderns, is clearly
out of place. In each of these passages, the narrator intrudes upon his
fiction, not only asking direct questions about his characters, but answering
them with authorial knowledge not implied in the book’s other parts. For
example, the plot of Sorrentino’s fiction gives the reader little indication
whether Tom Thebus, the salesman to whom Marie is attracted, is a rakish Romeo
“out to get a lay”—as Marie’s father describes him—or whether his interest in
Marie is sincere. In most objectively narrative novels such information is
conveyed through denouement or is left purposely ambiguous for the reader to
piece together from what he or she has gleaned of the characters through their
words and acts. But in Aberration of Starlight such impersonal methods
are circumvented. “Was Tom indeed a maker of cuckolds?” the narrator asks.
“If rumor is to be given credence, the answer
is “yes.” Three men putatively so served were: Lewis D. Fielding, a junkman of
Ossining, N.Y., through his wife, Barbara; Alfred Bennett Martinez, a plumber
of Ozone Park, N.Y., through his wife, Danielle; William V. Bell, a shop
teacher of Paterson, N.J., through his wife, Joanne.”
Similarly, the reader is told outright that
Marie is sexually afraid of men (p. 67), that her father “had energetically
conspired in his own defeat” (p. 175), and numerous other pieces of trivial and
useful information that radically work against the objective point of view
which dominates the rest of the book.
More important, in these four sections, Sorrentino occasionally permits
himself the lists and litanies he scrupulously avoids elsewhere in the text.
Concerning Marie, for example, the narrator asks:
“The names of some of her favorite poets?
Ella Wheeler Wilcox; Blanche Shoemaker
Wagstaff; Captain Cyril Morton Thorne; Burelson St. Charles MacVoute; Dinah
Maria Mulock Craik; Edgar A. Guest; Josiah Gilbert Holland, Lorna Blakey
Flambeaux; H. Antoine D’Arcy; Emma Simpere Furze; Alaric Alexander Watts; Mary
Artemisia Lathbury; Blanche Bane Kuder; Jean Ingelow; Carruthers Sofa-Jeudi;
Maltbie Davenport Babcock; Nixon Waterman.”
This is the stuff of Mulligan Stew and
other earlier fictions. Not only are some of the names the same (an entire
sheaf of poems by Lorna Flambeaux appears in Mulligan Stew), but the
structure of such a listing is of the same kind of pattern that controls Mulligan
Stew and Imaginative Qualities.
One
understandably is surprised in encountering such structures in the midst of a
novel; and, accordingly, one is brought to question whether such passages are
simply lapses in what otherwise is a carefully composed novel, or whether they
are purposeful intrusions, and, if so, to what effect? I do not pretend to have
answers to such questions of authorial intent; but it may be helpful to explore
some of the implications of such structures, which, in turn, may suggest why
Sorrentino uses them.
The
following is a typical listing from Mulligan Stew:
“What cannot Gold do?
A number of things, the more prominent among
which are: make the pivot, shoot the rapids, differential calculus, speak
Spanish, hit in the clutch, carry a tune, get a job, say not, walk a crooked
mile, swim, hold his liquor, support his children, write a poem, play tennis,
pay his bills, trim his beard, shine his shoes, take a shower, use capital
letters, keep his sex life private, be proud, speak to an angel, take a little
walk, boil lobsters, open clams, like women, cut it out, grow up, move to
Yonkers, cease and desist, jump over the candlestick, act his age, fly a kite,
go two rounds, catch a fish, make a salad, write a check, wash the windows, eat
crow, crack corn, fly the coop, take a powder, go anywhere alone, bunt, write a
play, stop the shit, cut the comedy, know Brooklyn, mind his business, sharpen
his ax, make an apple pie, honor his father and mother, be a Jew, shoot crap,
make a list, see himself as others see him, play pool, be joyful and
triumphant, take off his hat, wash a glass, deck the halls, mix a Sazerac, be a
clown, sing in the rain, jump with Symphony side, make ‘em laugh, stand a ghost of a chance, button up
his overcoat, love a mystery, get started, and shudder….”
The immediate purpose and effects of such a
list are quite obvious. In this case, the narrator, punning on a cliché,
transforms the thing, gold, into a person incapable of actions, triggering a
series of new clichés, common expressions, song titles and idioms signifying
acts. A listing such as this—this one is from a character’s scrapbook—has
little to do with plot, character, place, or theme as readers of
twentieth-century fiction have come to think of them. Attempts to relate these
actions to characterization, to understand these things of which the character
Gold is incapable, would miss the point: Gold has no substance as a character,
he/it is merely a thing of language, a pun. There is an “idea” behind this
combination of words: that of inaction, which Sorrentino expresses quite
concretely; but one recognizes that this “idea” is far less important than the
structure it takes. One might suspect, knowing Sorrentino’s writing, that there
is a kind of Oulipean logic to this list. But, although one might contrive to
find a thematic link in the passage, the very order of these verbal
constructions work against any such attempt. For these do not represent a
particular kind or even context of acts. “Sing in the rain” may relate to “deck
the halls,” “be joyful and triumphant,” “be a clown,” “button up his overcoat,”
and even “carry a tune,” but such musical references have little in common with
“mind his business,” “sharpen his ax,” or “make an apple pie.” It quickly
becomes clear that the focus here is on verbs and little else, on their
everyday and idiomatic usages (“shine his shoes” and “stand a ghost of a
chance”), on their rhythms and other patterns of sound (“wash the windows, eat
crow, crack corn, fly the coop…”) and their syntax. And while there is a beginning
and ending to this list of verbals (it opens with the clause, “A number of
things,” and closes with the conjunction), one understands it as something akin
to a catalogue, as something that, while complete in itself, retains the
potential for continuance. The reader, therefore, does not experience the
passages as something whole, as organic, even as developmental, but recognizes
it as a linguistic sequence capable of being repeated indefinitely, as a
pattern of language which—although operating within certain organizing
principles—inflects no subordinations upon its constituent parts.
The
controlling mechanism of such a passage is not repetition, therefore, but
progression. And one need only compare Sorrentino’s list with a passage from
the work of another contemporary, William Gass, to understand the significance
of this. In In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, Gass writes,
“The sides of the buildings, the roofs, the
limbs of the trees are gray. Streets, sidewalks, faces, feelings—they are gray.
Speech is gray, and the grass where it shows. Every flank and front, each top
is gray. Everything is gray: hairs, eyes, window glass, the hawkers’ bills and
touters’ posters, lips, teeth, poles and metal signs—they’re gray, quite gray.
Horses, sheep, and cows, cats killed in the road, squirrels in the same way,
sparrows, doves, and pigeons, all are gray, everything is gray….”
Superficially, Gass’s writing here seems to
have much in common with Sorrentino’s; it is a list of things that share a
syntactical relationship, that of noun to adjective, with the color gray. But a
closer look reveals that Gass’s list functions in a very different structural
context. Although they may seem potentially infinite in number, Gass’s nouns
are made finite because they are secondary to repetition, are subordinate to
the word “gray.” These nouns all point to the word “winter” (mentioned one sentence
earlier in the passage) and refer the reader back and forward in each sentence
to their adjective. The listing, accordingly, reveals itself as developmental,
organic, and whole. Because the list is self-referential within Gass’s work, it
is finite and complete. One experiences it less as a catalogue than as an
inventory or compendious description. In other words, while progressive
structures such as Sorrentino’s may contain repetition, structures of
repetition such as Gass’s are not necessarily progressive.
The
structure of Gass’s listing, in its organicism and self-referentiality, is
perfectly at home in the novel. In its potential of continuance, the structure
of Sorrentino’s catalogue points away from its type; it is a sequence of a kind
of construction; and, in that fact, it directs the reader’s attention from the
temporal context of narrative towards space, towards the world of things he
himself inhabits. Mimesis, the heart of modern prose, is undermined as the
imitation is transformed into a thing itself: a catalogue of actions, a
syntactical grouping of language.
When such catalogues appear in profusion in a fiction, as they do in Mulligan
Stew, the effect is devastating. Mimesis and its attendant hand-maidens,
character and place, seldom survive. And that is just what Anthony Lamont, the
character-novelist central to Mulligan Stew, encounters. Like many moderns,
Lamont, an avowed “experimentalist,” manipulates style and content, while tying
his fiction to organic structures of character and place. Unlike the great
moderns, however, Lamont is what Pound calls a “diluter,” a follower of the
inventors and the masters of a tradition, who produces “something of lower
intensity, a flabbier variant” (“How to Read”). So inane is Lamont’s writing,
so constraining his setting (a mountain cabin wherein the narrator, musing over
the body of his murdered friend, awaits the police) that his characters rebel and
attempt to escape their fictional confines. Unable to “master” his creations,
and faced with what he sees as an increasingly valueless and hostile
environment outside his fictional one, Lamont declines into paranoia.
In
a 1980 review of Mulligan Stew I suggested that Lamont’s insanity was a
negative thing that left the reader with a vision of the world in which
language is so denigrated that it brought into question his or her own
existence. In a response to that review, Sorrentino wrote me that his intention
had been to show that “as Lamont gets crazier he gets better.” My mistake had
been to look at the fiction more in terms of content than of structure; I had
made presumptions which had less to do with the fiction than with lived
experiences. But it is in the structure, not in plot that Sorrentino reveals
his concerns. As Lamont moves towards insanity, he gradually embraces the very
catalogues, lists, indexes, technical manuals, and other enumerations
that—while obsessing both his society and him—are seen as signs of the
culture’s decay, and thus separates him from his fiction, from his idealized
representation of life. As he embraces these, bit by bit, his fiction is
invaded by the progressive structures inherent in his scrapbook. The following
appears in the fourth to the last chapter of his novel Lamont’s novel,
Crocodile Tears:
“In the meantime, our sinisterly slick
magicians were extracting gouts of applause by a series of tricks that, so I
assumed, were designed to “warm up” the audience, a large moiety of whom, I
assure you, were drunkenly blasé, and replete with doubts and cynicalities of
varying potency. These tricks were, according to Madame Corriendo, “wand
inspired,” and, surely enough, in her long fingers she held a curious wooden
rod of maybe a foot and a half long, atip at both ends with pointed caps of a
metallic substance, perhaps metal itself! In some shape or other, I mean alloy,
if you are with me. At the sight of this innocent-appearing chunk of wood, Ned
Beaumont, his eyes watering in loathsome pusillanimousity, and his fingers, how
do you say it? “plucking” on the tablecloth, breathed heavily and began to
sweat onto the rather tasteful silverware that had been placed— and with
inherent correctness, too—before him.”
Although this passage may at first seem to be
descriptive, it actually has very little in common with conventional
descriptive narration. What the narrator describes as a “series of tricks,”
functions as a sequence that resists a coherent presentation of reality, that
works against mimetic relationships. Although it is at first connected with the
character Madame Corriendo, the phrase “wand inspired,” for example, directs
one’s attention away from character or even action to a list of things in
space: her long fingers, a “curious wooden rod,” and its metallic tips. The
tips, in turn, permit the narrator to pun on “alloy” (a mixture of metallic
substances and “to debase, to impair”); the object of the second meaning, is
accordingly the subject of the next sentence, Ned Beaumont, whose actions, once
again, point the reader away from the character and his actions to other
objects: to the table, the tablecloth, and the “rather tasteful silverware.”
Whereas the Gass passage continually refers the reader back to its subject, the
writing here moves ceaselessly forward in what Gertrude Stein describes as the
sequence of counting “one and one and one and one” rather than “one, two,
three, four” (“Poetry and Grammar”). By the time Lamont reaches his last
chapter—significantly titled “Making It Up as We Goes Along”—the progressive
structure has taken over entirely. There is little difference between its
sequence of dialogue and the list of “what Gold cannot do.” Both point to the
world outside the fiction, and, in that sense, both create something “new,”
something that follows its own language into being rather than merely using
language to express the known or preconceived. And Lamont, in this regard, does
become a better writer, an inventor of sorts. Yet he too, obviously, is a thing
of words; and Mulligan Stew thus ends not with his writing, but with a
three and a half page “will,” one final grand listing of the disposition of
things. As in the works of Samuel Beckett, both characters and characters’
characters all are subsumed into the flow of words, are sacrificed to the
endeavor of naming the imagined as things of sound and space into reality.
In
light of these concerns in Mulligan Stew it is almost unthinkable that
such structures in Aberration of Starlight are unintentional “lapses” or even
mere intrusions upon what is otherwise a conventional prose romance. The
effects of such interruptive and progressively structured passages are too
deleterious to the mimeticism inherent in the 20th-century novel to be
disregarded in a fiction that appears to be imitating it. Let us imagine that
in The Sound and the Fury—a novel organized as is Sorrentino’s around
the viewpoints of four characters—Faulkner suddenly asked of Caddy, as
Sorrentino does of Billy, “How did [s]he feel when [her] grandmother died?” and
answered, “[s]he was frightened that she was not really dead because of how she
looked in the funeral parlor.” Upon climbing the tree in her muddy drawers (the
image Faulkner described as central to his novel), Caddy, in fact, is
frightened by what she sees: her dead Damuddy laid out on the bed. But the
reader is never told that. Faulkner’s reader must come to his or her
conclusions based on Caddy’s later actions, her amoral commitment to things of
the world. One is forced to evaluate her, in other words, as one would a living
being, and the character is made to seem more real by that fact.
Faulkner represents an extreme of objective narration. An omniscient
narrator might simply tell the reader in passing how Caddy or Bill felt. But
even so, by first asking the question, Sorrentino draws attention to himself,
to the author, or, at the very least, to some imagined narrator of the work;
and, in so doing he reiterates the fact that his character is merely a
creation, a thing of words. When this is done several times, as it is in Aberration
of Starlight, the whole begins to function as its own progressive sequence,
as a series of authorial intrusions which, like the list of Gold’s inactions,
point the reader away from any reality that the fiction is attempting to
imitate, towards the world which reader and author cohabit outside the book.
The fact that some of these particular questions and commands also are
progressive in structure further helps to undercut the organicism and mimesis
of the prose romance.
Yet one must recall it is the extreme objectivism of Faulkner to which
the rest of Sorrentino’s book seems to aspire. Such extremes are too radical
merely to be sloughed off by calling Sorrentino, as Guy Davenport has, a “Late
Eclectic Modern.” For these are reconcilable systems; as the fiction itself
demonstrates, one cannot serve God and mammon both. Made conscious of his or
her own world through the progressive structures, faced with knowledge that
lies “outside the book,” so to speak, the reader gradually is placed in the
role of voyeur in relation to Marie Recco and the other characters in the book.
Sorrentino accentuates this feeling by framing several of his scenes as if in a
photograph. The fiction begins, indeed, with the photographic image:
“There is a photograph of the boy that shows
him at age ten. He is looking directly into the camera, holding up a kitten as
if for our inspection, his right hand at her neck, his left hand underneath her
body, supporting the animal’s weight. The sun is intensely bright, and he
squints at us, smiling, his white even teeth too large for his small face.”
When, moreover, the author alternates such
framing techniques with personal letters, interior monologues, and descriptions
of intimate sexual encounters (“He pulled his fly open and yanked his hard-on
out of his pants, then grabbed her hand and told her to look at him…”), the
result is almost pornographic. Peering down from Gulliverian heights, the
reader begins to comprehend how completely such techniques—all perfectly at
home in the modern novel—close the fiction’s characters within a claustrophobic
structure to which there is no direct access, only resemblance to real life.
Such an impenetrable world is Lilliputian, a world inhabited by the
near-sighted and small-minded. Each of the fiction’s characters, as Paul West
notes, is unable break out of his or her behavioral patterns. But that is just
Sorrentino’s point. As do his narrative techniques, his characters represent
the extreme of the Romantic dichotomy of self and world; and, as such, they
have fallen into solipsism. Those outside the self are transformed from
individuals into cliché and epithet. A single paragraph must serve as example
in a fiction pervaded by racial epithets, euphemisms, and exaggerated similes
and metaphors.
“Dare I call you, Marie darling? Or should I
address you, you swell thing, as Mrs. Recco, prostrating myself before your
tiny feet in formality. Like a monkey in a tuxedo on a chain held by an old
dago? And of course I beg you to forgive that terrible word knowing you, dear
princess and Queen of sweetness were once married to a dago and so got your
name. But I don’t hold that against you, not on your life, darling!”
Such writing may be funny, but its
implications are horrifying. There is little possibility that anyone might
escape from such a “prison-house of language.” In so solipsistic a vision, love
and communication cannot exist; at book’s end, Marie, her father, son, and
would-be lover are as frozen in time and place as the photograph with which the
work began.
It
becomes apparent that what was first perceived as a bittersweet presentation of
post-World War II America, is, in the end, an indictment of the modern novel
and the vision inherent in its structures. By exaggerating those structures and
juxtaposing them with the progressive structures of contemporary fiction,
Sorrentino clearly demonstrates the dangers of any closure. In short, in Aberration
of Starlight Sorrentino uses the novel against itself; the organicism of
the modern novel turns in to swallow its own tale. Like its predecessors, this
fiction explores, through its own telling, the nature of art, which,
ultimately, Sorrentino seems to argue, is all any fiction can hope to
accomplish. Imitation and ideas, he makes clear, have little to do with art.
Writing in The Washington Post Book World, Sorrentino recently argued,
“For some reason, incomprehensible to me,
[the] mimetic concept has all but defined the “important” novels of this
country. We love our novelists to be seers, to have Important Ideas…”.
(February 13, 1980)
The structures of Sorrentino’s fiction seldom
stand for the world, but pointing outward, define and become one with the
world; like the last chapter of Lamont’s Crocodile Tears, Sorrentino’s
works make up the world as they go along. In his fiction it is as with
starlight, what appears to be traveling at an angle to the direction of the
observer—what appears as an aberration—actually travels in a straight line
between the observer and its source.
Philadelphia and College Park, Maryland, 1980
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