This episode’s music is “When I Was Done Dying” by Dan Deacon.

You can subscribe to the Mining the Dalkey Archive podcast at Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and watch us on YouTube.

And be sure to follow our sister podcasts: Two Month Review (Apple, Spotify) and Three Percent (Apple, Spotify) for more book talk!

Stephen Schenkenberg is the former editor of St. Louis Magazine (which is how I believe I met him) and is now the Vice President of Communications & Marketing for the Missouri Botanical Garden. He knew Gass quite well, as evidenced in this incredible interview from 2009, and he’s written about his work on several occasions, including this piece about his passing for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

For more information about Gass and The Tunnel, be sure to check out the recent season of the Two Month Review podcast that went through the book philippic by philippic over twelve episodes.

[Note: This essay refers to the original audiobook packaging, which, aside from the table of contents, is pictured in full below. It’s unknown at this time what, if any, packaging accompanies the “recently re-released” version of the audiobook from Dalkey Archive, although given our digital world, it’s most likely just an MP3 and not a cardboard box with three CDs inside.]

Basking in Hell: Returning to William H. Gass’s The Tunnel

“I began The Tunnel in 1966. I imagine it is several years away yet. Who knows, perhaps it will be such a good book no one will want to publish it. I live on that hope.”

—William H. Gass, interviewed in 1971

When William H. Gass’s 650-page novel The Tunnel was finally published in 1995, following nearly three decades of labor by the critically esteemed author and essayist, it was called a lot of things. Two critics used the word “monster,” and they weren’t simply referring to the abhorrent narrator, history professor and Nazi specialist William Frederick Kohler, who most certainly fits the bill; those critics were describing the book itself. While Bookworm host Michael Silverblatt deemed The Tunnel “the most beautiful, most complex, most disturbing novel to be published in my lifetime”—a claim he renewed last year—James Wolcott scored the novel’s long-awaited landing a “bellyflop.” For Steven Moore, writing in the Review of Contemporary Fiction, the work was “a stupendous achievement and obviously one of the greatest novels of the century.” For James Bowman: “a load of crap.” In the New York Times Book Review, Robert Kelly called The Tunnel an “infuriating and offensive masterpiece,” ending his 2,600-word review by essentially—and perhaps bravely—throwing up his hands: “It will be years before we know what to make of it.”

For anyone who still cares about this book—essentially, Kohler letting loose a plotless stream of notes from underground on his crappy childhood, fat wife, dim colleagues, much missed mentor, and lonely existence—it’s been a great year. Dalkey Archive Press, which has published The Tunnel since 1999, has given us two valuable offerings: last spring, Dalkey’s low-profile journal CONTEXT published a two-page document called “Designing The Tunnel,” excerpts from Gass’s 12-point instructions to the book’s designer about layout, type, and the overall visual goals as they related to the book’s themes; and a month later, the publisher released an unabridged audiobook of the novel, recorded by the 82-year-old author last year near his home in St. Louis. One is two pages; the other, 45 hours. Both provide compelling ways to re-experience this disagreeable and stunning novel.

How to Design a Lump of Darkness

William H. Gass has long been interested in design, particularly in the marriage of language and art. In his experimental 1968 novella Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, Gass used images and an array of fonts, colors, and symbols to suggest a text as female body below its male reader, the language the love being made. The author has admitted that some of these visual efforts were more conceptually interesting than successful, and at least one of his reasons why—“I was trying to find a spatial coordinate to go with the music”—is tellingly unhelpful. Gass’s interest in the visual arts would continue for decades, through his own photography, the Dual Muse exhibition and conference his International Writers Center put on in 1997 (painters writing; writers painting), and projects relating to what he calls “the architecture of the sentence.”

Thus it’s clear, reading this previously unpublished “Designing The Tunnel” document, that we’re hearing from a writer who cares deeply about the look of a book. “I regard these instructions and the general layout of the text only as indications of my intentions,” Gass began, welcoming the suggestions of a “sympathetic designer” who might take him closer to his goal. That said, he doesn’t sound like an author uncertain of what he wants. Having requested that the book be bound in rough black cloth, with a spine like Viking Press’s edition of Finnegans Wake, Gass stated that the reader “should be holding a heavy[,] really richly textured lump of darkness.” The cover should not have the author’s name. “Why not put the author’s name on the book? Because it is Kohler’s book. Because, in a sense, it is not a book.” Gass sounds like an art-class enthusiast describing his hopes for typography—“I would love it if every line looked like a length of barbed wire”—as well as the treatment of Kohler’s doodles, which might, if successful, bring to mind Hitler’s architectural sketches of camps. “I want something at once naive,” Gass instructed, “a little charming, and a lot unsettling.”

Continuing on illustrative matters, Gass addressed what he called the “PDP Particle,” a structure of four Os connected by an X that is supposed to signify Kohler’s “Party of the Disappointed People.” “The meaning is deliberately left ambiguous,” Gass wrote about the emblem. “But the reader is invited to wonder ‘what the fuck?’” (Various versions of this emblem, and many other doodles, are scattered on pages throughout the book, in order to give a sense of randomness and disorder to what has been compiled and bound.) Perhaps the most revealing aspect of these instructions is the inclusion of a black-and-gray drawing Gass made—it’s credited, though, to W.F. Kohler—that shows The Tunnel the narrator claims to be digging from his basement study to—well—nowhere. Knopf’s first edition included this drawing in its front matter, but only in the recent CONTEXT issue do we see the key Gass made, showing how 12 points on the drawing mark what he considers the book’s 12 sections. The first point, for instance, marks an old coal furnace in Kohler’s basement office, from where he narrates most of the novel; Gass explained that for this section, named “Life in a Chair,” the furnace provides The Tunnel’s “disguise.” Moving across the drawing from left to right, we get to point three, which is placed just above a creaky ladder. “The book begins,” Gass announced. “The drop or initial descent of The Tunnel is excavated.”

It is through this storyboard-like document that we first understand that the plotless stream in fact has segmented plots. Further, we get a better sense of Gass’s intent to have the book take the form of a tunnel itself, with the reader, as he says he wants in one section, “crawling through an unpleasant and narrow darkness.” Reading a document like “Designing The Tunnel” retrospectively, of course, it’s difficult to determine how much intent equals success. Had I found the book unsettling? Check. Unpleasant? Check. Did I wonder, at least once, “What the fuck?” Mission, in this case, accomplished.

Unabridged & Unrelenting

The handsomely packaged audiobook is the much greater boon. In addition to MP3s on three CDs and Michael Eastman’s photographs of the recording session, the audiobook package includes “The Tunnel in Twelve Philippics,” the most illuminating document I’ve seen about this novel’s structure and aims. Interviewed at a bookstore in New York earlier this year, Gass spoke about the origins of the “Twelve Philippics,” which, like the earlier design document, was previously unpublished. (The word Philippic, meaning bitter tirade, comes from the orations of Demosthenes against Philip, king of Macedon, in the fourth century BCE.) Gass reported that an early editor of The Tunnel manuscript was having difficulty understanding the big novel, and the gentleman kept wanting to make it smaller. Gass wrote the “Twelve Philippics” in response, in an effort to articulate the importance of the overall structure. “I was trying,” he told the New York crowd, “to show him that the building would fall down.”

Gass has stated elsewhere that the “Twelve” of the title comes from composer Arnold Schoenberg’s 12-tone system, which the author adopted for The Tunnel’s construction. In a 1998 Lannan Foundation interview with Michael Silverblatt, Gass, responding to a question about “the music” of his work, spoke about how such structures aid his fiction writing, which is concerned more often with themes than a single narrative. Using Schoenberg, he devised a work consisting of 12 chapters of about the same length (marked by the 12 points mentioned above); in each chapter one of the book’s main themes would dominate, with the other themes rising and falling behind it, less loud, but always present.

The classical music critic Alex Ross has written that “Schoenberg’s strict method, ordering the 12 pitches of the scale in nonrepeating atonal rows, was exhilarating therapy for composers beset by a multiplicity of stylistic choices,” a statement that aligns with Gass’s use of it as an aid to writing. (What Ross wrote next—“The plague was on audiences, who detested the jumbled, athematic textures common to the idiom”—well describes the reactions of some of The Tunnel’s critics.) A literary blogger’s report on the New York reading, and specifically Gass’s comments about the 12-tone system, attracted a bit of sniffling. One writer commented that while he admires the bravery of Gass’s work, the “essential silliness” of the Schoenberg matter is bothersome. “I only make a big deal about it because I think this is a (subconscious?) left-over from the extra-literary effects once used to sell literary art to the masses (nowadays we just use sex or personal tragedy) . . . the writer as Wizard; the reader as Rube.” Though Gass himself has been quick to deflate the significance of this structure-adoption (in one interview, lightly mocking his “grandiose scheme of things”), it seems odd to fault him for what seems more like a private organizational system than something on which the book’s public reception rests. As Greg Carlisle recently pointed out in his study of David Foster Wallace’s masterpiece Infinite Jest, that novel’s structure was based on a fractal object called a Sierpinski Gasket. Like Gass’s Philippics, Wallace’s method is foremost about devising a framework for the author in his writing chair, and less so the reader in his.

In the audiobook’s liner booklet, after the initial listing of Philippics one through twelve, there is a structural description of The Tunnel, which includes brief remarks about point of view, text divisions, thematics, and, as explained here, the novel’s “Initiating Situation”: “Kohler teaches at a major Midwestern university. He has studied German during the thirties, returned with the first army during the invasion as a debriefer, then as a consultant during the Nuremberg Trials. Writes a book called Nuremberg Notes. Its softness earns him some suspicion.” As always with William Gass, there is an inherent benefit of just taking in his words. Its softness earns him some suspicion. The alliteration is Gassian, and the scene-setting economic, informative, and satisfying.

Turning the booklet’s page, we are in deeper, and Gass’s remarks about the novel are direct but don’t drain the life out of the book itself. (I have in mind the DVD-commenting actors who over-explain a scene until it’s lost what made it interesting.) Of the novel, Gass stated, “It is the opposite of history,” in that it “denies and defies all the ordinary methods of narration, plot, character, and so on.” The Tunnel’s subject: “Many elements go into this novel, but its fundamental subject is the fascism of the heart, the character of the household tyrant and imaginary genocide.” The book’s action: “There is scarcely any at all.” The narrator: “wholly unreliable.”

There is still more in the booklet—about characters, about philosophy and forms, and a list of the novel’s seven key issues. The list begins with “The nature of history. Status of narrative” and ends with “Belief, illusion, fiction, and the purity of the mind.” For me as a reader, the articulation of the second key issue—“The nature of bigotry. Tribalism, Resentment.”—is most valuable, in that it is a reminder of why the book is, and must be, soaked in sourness. If it’s possible to love this book, and I think it is, it can be done only through an embrace of its honest bitterness, an understanding and acceptance of Kohler’s hatred (“Hate has given force and purpose to my life”) in the manner that he himself has accepted it (“Can I forgive the plague I am?”). But as repugnant as this novel often feels, Gass sweetens the sourness with exceptionally controlled, poetic, and seductive prose. “Sing of disappointments more repeated than the batter of the sea,” Kohler soliloquizes,

of lives embittered by resentments so ubiquitous the ocean’s salt seems thinly shaken, of letdowns local as the sofa where I copped my freshman’s feel, of failures as frequent as first love, first nights, last stands; do not warble of arms or adventurous deeds or shepherds playing on their private fifes, or of civil war or monarchies at swords; consider rather the slightly squinkered clerk, the soul which has become as shabby and soiled in its seat as worn-out underwear, a life lit like a lonely room and run like a laddered stocking.

You may well ask, at this point, what it’s like to spend 45 hours with such a man. What it’s like to jog to Kohler (hatred through the headphones), to cook to him, to ride a foul bus with a fouler voice inside. And to that word, voice: Gass’s is suited to the task of making such a trip endurable. It’s rich and pleasant and clear, capable of a sinister growl and a barely abiding, stretched-out sigh. And there are many of these sighs, right up to the novel’s last lines. (“Or shall I, like the rivers, rise? Ah. Well. Is rising wise?”) Indeed, one of the achievements of this audiobook is its pacing; Gass’s unhurried delivery of his anti-hero’s often beautifully formed scorn is what allows us to understand what it’s like to live inside his skin. For several pages in the book’s second half, Kohler shaves and shits, feeds the birds, makes some toast. The morning ritual. Slowed down. Ah. Well. Let’s head downstairs. Nice. And slow. On the page, we can move quickly through such sticky stuff; not when it’s spoken. We have no choice but to experience this character as he experiences himself—his wipes and gripes are in real-time—and this is partly what makes the audiobook an invaluable tool for understanding the novel.

The audiobook’s other principal benefit is a simple one: it allows us to revisit, and experience aurally, this author’s exquisite prose. While much of the book is concerned with the ugly, Gass gives glimpses of Kohler’s other sides, before his heart burned over with futile rage. Not incidentally, these instances all occur in the past, and they offer a chance to enjoy the prose without feeling uncomfortable about its context. (Is it right, I wondered when I first read the novel, for a writer to use such poetic metaphors to describe a Holocaust’s heap of bodies?) Though Kohler detests his parents even more than he does his wife, there is the occasional memory still shiny, unburned. “I remember, as a boy, being taken fishing by my father,” he tells us. “Brown trout lay hidden in little stone holes like the complete expression of a wish.” In a long passage about the family’s ritualistic Sunday drive, Kohler recalls vividly the stops for ice cream, with his young self standing along the long counter looking at the flavors through the glass. Strawberry “looked like wounded vanilla,” and Neapolitan “was like eating a flag.” But there, to the right, was Rainbow, his favorite. “I loved its accidental and chaotic benevolence. It was like having a noise melt in your mouth. Grape eased into pineapple, then bent itself about banana. A nut would turn up.”

The adult Kohler loved as well, and we’re witness throughout the book to actual tenderness and vulnerability as he relives his doomed affair with a young part-time student named Lou. It is upon her back that Kohler was commanded to “do rivers.” “With my right forefinger slanted slightly to bring the nail into play,” he recalls, “I would inscribe the course of a river—so gently, so slowly, it might have been a tear’s trail—running its convoluted way the length of Lou’s back, semicircling a buttock, and concluding in her crack, at a fulfillment one might call a delta.” The novel’s real season is winter, though. Rivers freeze. And Lou—as Gass’s hero Rilke would say—was ahead of all parting.

The window of the car would not roll up and Lou’s face looked warm from the cold wind as if freshly slapped or shamed or elsewhere loved. My hand fell to hers, too, somewhat like a discarded glove, and she took it with a squeeze, so that the chilled soon lay within the chilled, I thought, like a bottle of champagne. Cold hand, moist part, I said. Hers slipped away.

There is one character Kohler feels more for—Magus “Mad Meg” Tabor, the volatile and brilliant mentor Kohler had during his years studying in Germany—and this man gains the most from the audiobook treatment. Because Tabor’s presence in the novel is often through lectures (“His hot hall held us like a thermos,” Kohler recalls), the listener to the audiobook is put in range. Though Kohler’s still the one describing the lectures—about history and language, the impossibility of having a single true text—we now feel like we’re there, listening.

You shall listen a little longer. My unravelings reach their end. What I’ve said to you today, and every day so often through the year, is very obvious, very plain, very easy, very simple and straightforward, very clear. Gentlemen: now I close. If the study of history is the study of language in one form or another, and if we really fabricate our past, not merely—weakly—live it; then we can begin to see how the world was Greek once, or Roman, since every page of consciousness was written in these tongues then. All the central documents—laws, plays, poems, reports, abiding wisdoms, letters, scientific learning, news—were couched in Greek or Latin phrases, and the chief historians consulted them, composed their chronicles from the same speech, in the same words. Don’t you see that when a man writes the history of your country in another mother-language, he is bent on conquest? If he succeeds, he will have replaced your past, and all your methods of communication, your habits of thinking, feeling, and perceiving, your very way of being, with his own. His history will be yours, perforce. Per-force!

As Gass takes Mad Meg toward his final point of climax—”Conquest via history is the only kind with any permanence”—there is shouting and swearing and a room full of chanting—“GERMAN . . . GERMAN! . . . GERMAN . . . GERMAN!”—and students are in tears and breaking their chairs, and Tabor is soon gone, and the novel’s section ends abruptly, with a silence. But it is not a book’s silence, but the kind that follows a speech, a performance we hear. It is riveting, and it is finally clear, only through listening—to Gass as Kohler as Tabor—that Mad Meg stands at the center of the book. His command—Conquer via history, gentlemen—is not just the force behind Kohler’s career; it is the reason the pages of The Tunnel exist at all.

William Gass may be personally drawn to the visual, both as a narrative tool and as a subject itself. (He’s at work on a novel about a museum, in this case, a man’s personal museum of inhumanity.) But what has become clear over several months of living with The Tunnel—of thinking about its design and structure as well as its themes—is that, at last, it is really the prose that matters. The novel’s little logos, Kohler’s doodles, the drawing of The Tunnel itself—these are instructive and they have their cumulative effect for the reader. But none of it feels significant after you have had the chance to listen to it whole.

Gass has acknowledged that as a novelist he’s drawn to “fulminators,” from preachers like Reverend Jethro Furber in his novel Omensetter’s Luck to Kohler and Tabor in The Tunnel. It is this aspect of his work that so lends itself to the audio experience. You’ll recall that Gass, in those first notes to the book’s designer, remarked that, in a sense, The Tunnel “is not a book.” But try as he might—with comic-strip balloons scattered in the text, a page made to look like a wrinkled grocery sack—it is impossible to convince us that what we’re holding is not a book. What Dalkey Archive Press has done with this indispensable recording, then, is not simply give us another way to experience this landmark novel; they have enabled Gass to realize one of his principal hopes for The Tunnel itself. First they made the book; then they made it disappear.

Next month Vince and Chad will be discussing The Dregs of the Day by Máirtín Ó Cadhain, transalted from the Irish by Alan Titley.

You can subscribe to the Mining the Dalkey Archive podcast at Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and watch us on YouTube.

And be sure to follow our sister podcasts: Two Month Review (Apple, Spotify) and Three Percent (Apple, Spotify) for more book talk!

This episode’s music is “Electricity” by Spiritualized.

You can subscribe to the Mining the Dalkey Archive podcast at Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and watch us on YouTube.

And be sure to follow our sister podcasts: Two Month Review (Apple, Spotify) and Three Percent (Apple, Spotify) for more book talk!

This issue also contained a “Letter from Russia” by Vsevolod Brodsky; three “Cultural Memories” (aka, excerpts) from Robert Louis Stevenson, Roman Jakobson, and Marguerite Young; and two “Reading Culture” pieces: “Brain Drain” by Mark Crispin Miller and the essay that appears below, “The Middle Mind” by Curtis White.

There are also “Reading Guides” of favorite twentieth-century novels—translated into English—by writers from Latin America, Russia, Italy, and France. Some day soon I’ll run a bunch of these guides, both because it’s interesting to see how many of these same titles would appear on similar lists today, and because these are legitimately good reading guides! As always, CONTEXT created an excellent pathway to becoming a very well-read literary citizen—thanks in large part to Curtis White!

Curtis was the editor of CONTEXT for much of its printed existence, acquiring essays, writing for it, helping shape what the tabloid looked like and which sort of authors it boosted. (Something I’m hoping he’ll help do again as we expand this Substack into a “New Context” . . . ) At the same time, he wrote a number of incredible works of fiction, including America’s Magic Mountain and Requiem, both of which I would’ve included in the Dalkey Essentials Series.1

Curtis’s full list of publications—with Bookshop.org links to everything that’s available—can be found below, but the book of his that’s most relevant to this particular post is his only title to come out from HarperOne: The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves. If I can get Curtis on a future podcast to talk about his works, his friendship with John O’Brien, his time on Dalkey’s board of directors, his interest in the counterculture, FC2, and more, he can tell this story with many more details, but, basically, after writing the piece below, he was contacted to further develop it into a full manuscript. Which he did, and which resulted in a brilliant book—one that’s definitely worth reading today because, sad to say, not a lot has changed . . .

I’m going to get out of the way here, but I do want to point out that Curtis’s takedown of Terry Gross continues in Requiem, so if you like what you read below, get The Middle Mind and get Requiem. And, and, and! Preorder his new book, On Resistance: A Manifesto, forthcoming from Melville House this August.

“The Middle Mind” by Curtis White

I have suspected for some time that there is something missing in the way we usually construct the Culture Wars. Bennett, Cheney, D’Souza, Kimball, etc., on one side. Fish, Graff, Bérubé, Mapplethorpe, etc., on the other. I’ve been as involved and absorbed in this faux drama as anyone, but at the same time, dimly, I have wondered: do these characters really stand for things people care about? I mean, in places other than the Chronicle for Higher Education and the National Review?

And then at last it occurred to me that this titanic agon (as dear Harold Bloom might put it) was just a diversion from the real action. There is another cultural politics in our midst, perhaps even more organic then the academic Left or ideological Right. It is moving, making its way, accumulating its forces, winning while putative conservatives and tenured radicals beat the bloody hell out of each other to no end at all. This third force I call our Middle Mind. It is a vast mind, my friends, and I fear it is already something towering and permanent on our national horizon.

The Middle Mind attempts to find a middle way between the ideological hacks of the Right and the theorized Left. Unlike Middlebrow, the Middle Mind does not locate itself between high and low culture. Rather, it asserts its right to speak for high culture indifferent to both the traditionalist Right and the academic Left.

The Middle Mind is pragmatic, plain-spoken, populist, contemptuous of the Right’s narrowness, and incredulous before the Left’s convolutions. It is adventuresome, eclectic, spiritual, and in general agreement with liberal political assumptions about race, gender and class. The Middle Mind really rather liked Bill Clinton, thoroughly supported his policies, but wished that the children didn’t have to know so much about his personal life. The Middle Mind is liberal. It wants to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and has even bought an SUV with the intent of visiting it. It even understands in some indistinct way that that very SUV spells the Arctic’s doom. Most importantly, the Middle Mind imagines that it honors the highest culture, and that it lives through the arts. From the perspective of the theorized Left academy (of which I confess myself an ineluctable member—with reservations), the Middle Mind’s take on culture is both well intended and deeply deluded.

One way or the other, what I’m here to tell you is that the Middle Mind is winning. That is, it has the most plausible claim to being the true representative of the public’s opinion. This is good news insofar as it means William Bennett is not winning, but oh boy are there qualifications on this triumph.

I’d like to review a few of the most recent excursions of the Middle Mind that have drifted by me. It’s not always easy to know when one is in the presence of the Middle Mind. It generally flies below critique’s radar because it has the advantage of not being associated with a particular political camp. It feels “natural,” which is how we can be pretty sure it’s winning. It has its effect without being noticed. A neat trick in Kulturkampf.

The Middle Mind is very well connected. It doesn’t need bags of money from conservative foundations and think tanks to create its presence. The Middle Mind is present effortlessly. It comes to us with the convincing and implicit claim, “You’ve been curious about this, you’ve been waiting for it, and wondering about it, and here it is.” The Middle Mind is frequently on public TV (Charlie Rose), in city weeklies, and in book review sections of slick magazines (Spin and GQ). It is everywhere on National Public Radio, even shows like Whad’Ya Know?, but our collective nose is rubbed in it on Terry Gross’s Fresh Air. Fresh Air is not merely a promotional vehicle for the Middle Mind, it is itself a prime example of the Middle Mind in all its charm and banality.

Let’s think about Terry Gross and Fresh Air for just a moment. Here is an interview program that claims quite earnestly to be for intelligence, for the fresh and new, for something other than regular stale network culture, for the arts and for artists. But anyone who much listens to the show knows (I certainly hope that I’m not the only one who has noticed) that: 1) Terry rarely interviews an artist or intellectual that real-deal artists and intellectuals would recognize. 2) She has no capacity for even the grossest distinctions between artists and utter poseurs. Many of the “writers” she has interviewed recently have been writers for TV series and movies. People who can with a straight face say, “Seinfeld is a great show because of the brilliant script writing” love Fresh Air. Now, Seinfeld may be a cut above the average sit-com, but it’s a sit-com! 3) The show is a pornographic farce.

Let me develop this last idea about the pornographic a bit. Terry Gross’s interest in books and writers is too often morbid, perverse, and voyeuristic. Two quick examples: she recently interviewed the main writer of the new HBO series Six Feet Under. The critical moment in the interview came when she asked him (I’m paraphrasing from memory), “What was it like when you were in that car accident and your sister was driving and she died but you didn’t?” Was she leading up to a telling psychological reading of the work in question? No. She wanted to know and I suspect her audience wanted to know what it was like to be in an auto accident in which his sister died! That’s it. Do we learn something about writing, or the arts, or culture? Do we learn anything? No, we learn that he was traumatized by the event.

As to what the folks who go on this show are thinking, knowing they’ll face this kind of personal inquisition, I won’t speculate. They’re probably thinking either, “Fresh Air! The big time!” Or “Good grief, that woman is an idiot. But my publicist will shoot me if I don’t do it.”

A week or so later there was a program in which Terry interviewed an author who had written a novel in which a woman says, “Drop dead,” to her husband and the next day he does drop dead. Before the novel was published, the author’s own real-life husband dropped dead on a tennis court. This was the point at which the book became interesting for Terry. If her poor husband hadn’t dropped dead, Terry would never have been interested in her or her book for this Show of Shows. “What did it feel like to suspect you’d killed your own husband with your art?” Fresh Air? How about Lurid Speculations? It’s like Dr. Laura for people with bachelor degrees. Car Talk has more intellectual content.

From the perspective of a person really interested in art and culture, one can only say, “Well, I think she’s on my side, but, God, she’s so stupidly on my side that I hardly recognize my side as my side.” Thus the Middle Mind.

As l’ve considered various avatars of the Middle Mind, I’ve occasionally felt that my criticisms were a bit unseemly or even unkind. Terry Gross. Isn’t she probably a very nice person? Good companion? Probably picks up the tab for lunch more than her share of the time and doesn’t complain if you had a couple of drinks. Of my next instance, however, one need have no such reservations because Joe Queenan’s Balsamic Dreams is one of the nastiest books I’ve read in some time. The Right Wing character assassin has nothing on this guy.

Queenan’s thesis is not deceptively simple. It’s just simple. And familiar. Simple and familiar used to equal trite, but the Middle Mind has infused the trite with a new vigor. Queenan argues that Baby Boomers are a failed generation, largely because of their overwhelming obsession with “me.” Queenan has little to add to the usual conservative critique of the Me Generation except the novel observation that what’s most wrong about the obsession with “me” is that it is “annoying.” “Decent folk,” he explains, are “annoyed” by Boomer cars, jobs, money, music, self-referential conversation, hypocritical moralizing, and lack of self-awareness. Leave it to a Boomer, as Queenan confesses he is, to base a moral judgment on the never defined term “annoying.” Annoying to whom? Queenan and “decent folk”?

But exactly who, one might ask, ever manages to be “decent” in Queenan’s worldview? Queenan makes it clear that it is not Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation” of World War Two, which he finds to be a sad embarrassment, and Generation X is no better at all than its Boomer parents. So, were the decent people all born before 1920? Should we imagine a lot of annoyed octogenarians tottering around? Seriously, given Queenan’s methods, it’s a miracle that he ever found a single decent person.

Of course, this ethos constructed of that-which-annoys is itself very annoying. The greatest annoyance proper to Balsamic Dreams itself is its persistent willingness to contend that it means anything at all to generalize about generations. Perhaps one should say, “what goes around comes around” (to use one of the Boomerisms that Queenan hates so much). Balsamic Dreams is Ginsberg’s Howl in full retreat. But Ginsberg at least had the wisdom to see that the mammon he howled against was not the responsibility of any one generation. I’d happily join Queenan in a good old-fashioned rant against humanity as such, as Philip Wylie does in A Generation of Vipers, Twain did before him and Swift did before Twain. But that wouldn’t have the buzz and commercial hook that bashing Boomers has. And it won’t get him on Fresh Air.

Terry: “Do you really dislike your own generation because it likes balsamic vinegar?”

Quel scandale! How interesting, fresh and utterly Middle Mind.

Why can’t he admit that balsamic vinaigrette tastes better than that thousand-island crap made out of mayonnaise and pickle relish that we had to eat on iceberg lettuce in the fifties?

Two last comments on Queenan: since when do we have to put up with ethical diatribes from columnists for GQ? Is that where all the decent folk have gone? They’re all at GQ? Why isn’t GQ an expression of Boomer culture? Do they all eschew the balsamic vinaigrette at GQ?

Ironically, the ultimate retort to my critique of Balsamic Dreams could very well be that my thesis about the Middle Mind simply confirms Queenan’s propositions about Boomers because the Middle Mind is what you get when Boomers take over high culture. Okay, Joe, I get it. Good job.

The Middle Mind is also interested in the spiritual, but it is not the Christian fundamentalist spirituality-with-teeth of the Right Wing. By and large, the Middle Mind is in pursuit of the Buddha. Books that seek to explain Buddhism or introduce it to North Americans are a large and growing publishing phenomenon making certain spiritual leaders, like Thich Nhat Hahn, the Vietnamese Buddhist teacher of “Mindfulness,” into something approaching international celebrities. One of the hottest such books recently was Dinty W. Moore’s The Accidental Buddhist. The book is a mostly chronological description of the author’s experiences and reflections on what he calls “my American Buddhism project.”

Then I had this bright idea—the best way to learn about Buddhism would be to see it in action, the best way to imagine how it might fit into my hectic life would be to see how other Americans are fitting it into their busy American lives. I was always a big fan of quests of adventures, and here was a chance to have my own.

What makes this book an example of the Middle Mind is:

1) The author’s conviction that his audience wouldn’t know anything about Buddhism, and couldn’t distinguish it from Hare Krishna pan-handlers at an airport (by the way, what happened to those guys? A national consequence of the Giuliani clean-up?); the Middle Mind assumes the people it takes as its audience don’t know anything; it assumes most people are benevolently stupid: “Oh Buddhism. Tell me about that.”

2) It is written in the kind of prose that works in novels written with Hollywood in mind: “About this time, an auburn-haired, distinctly beautiful young woman walks by in the sort of exceedingly tight red dress that can make a man’s heart do the hokey-pokey.”

3) No one, least of all the author, is required to think. Any genuine intellectual content attaching to Buddhism is apologized for both directly (“Understand? I’m not sure I do, frankly. . . .”) and through a down-dumbing trivialization (“Why do Tibetans have Such Trouble with Their Vacuum Cleaners”). Frederick Streng’s book on Mahayana philosophy, Emptiness: A Study in Religious Meaning, is a great work of intellect about a subject which has an intellectual aspect. The Accidental Buddhist is not such a book, nor could it be since its aspirations are closely limited by the managers of the Middle Mind (in this case the editorial staff at Main Street Books, a division of Doubleday). By the way, and this is a large part of my point, Streng’s book is long out of print. Of course.

But once we recognize what kind of mind it is that we are dealing with (a middling mind, as I have said), we can acknowledge that in fact this mind is making a good faith effort to report on something that is in fact very important. This is the frustrating thing about the Middle Mind. Joe Queenan is not wrong to condemn yuppies (whoever they are) who walk their dogs while talking on cell phones from their slowly rolling SUVs. (With the reservation that this sounds an awful lot like the sort of apocryphal myth Reagan used to spin about “welfare cheats”; it’s Reagan’s technique turned the other way; have you ever seen someone walk their dog, cell phone in hand from a rolling SUV?) And Dinty Moore is not wrong to pass along to us the words of Bhante Gunaratana:

You suffer from the same malady that infects every human being. It is a monster inside all of us, and it has many arms; chronic tension, lack of genuine compassion for others, including the people closest to you, feelings being blocked up, and emotional deadness. . . . We build a whole culture around hiding from it, pretending it is not there, and distracting ourselves from it with goals and projects and status. But it never goes away. It is a constant undercurrent in every thought and every perception; a little wordless voice at the back of the head that keeps saying, “Not good enough yet. Got to have more. Got to make it better. Got to be better.”

The Accidental Buddhist is not a horrible book and it is certainly not a good book. It cannot hurt Buddhism although it’s hard to see how it might help it (except insofar as it might lead someone to seek a truly good book about Buddhism). My contention is simply that a mediocre book—facilitated by a culture of mediocrity that forbids real intelligence—hurts us all.

One of the most common gambits of the Middle Mind is to claim to provide high culture while really providing something a good deal less. Thus, one of the operating assumptions of Fresh Air is “some of our best writers work for TV.” Queenan and Moore provide a sociology and theology perfectly appropriate to the expectations and conceptual capacities of the readers of Time magazine. The Middle Mind’s motto could be “Promise him culture but give him TV.” And so the Middle Mind novelist provides narrative art of the highest aspirations that, minus a few poetical profusions and recondite bits of diction, could pass for pulp fiction. Hence:

He arranged her against the wall, held her chin in one cupped hand and drew his other hand slowly up beneath her skirt until she gasped, pretended to open herself to him.

Pulp fiction or high art of the novel? Only her hairdresser knows?

Let me give you more clues. In the first thirty-five pages of this novel its heroine is in a convent, falls in love with Chopin while playing his music at the piano, moves in with a rugged but tender farmer, has torrid (and tormented) sex with same, is kidnapped by a bank robber, is shot in the hip (by the Sheriff!) and witnesses the death of her-lover-the-farmer, shot by the bank robber, but not before he gouges out the robber’s eyes with his thumbs and buries him with the sheer force of his own dying body weight in soggy prairie loam.

Well?

I regret to inform you that this concoction is the work of National Book Critics Circle Award winner Louise Erdrich in her newest novel, and National Book Award nomination, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. That I know of, there are few critics in these United States who would question her right to be taken seriously as a novelist. The Last Report is the sort of novel that will get made into a sensuous and serious independent art movie starring Harvey Keitel as the farmer and Kate Winslet as the heroine. Terry Gross will interview the director, Jane Campion, let’s say, and ask questions like, “There are feminist themes here, aren’t there? The binding of breasts is a feminist theme, isn’t it? Have you ever bound your breasts?” Our interest piqued, we will congratulate ourselves for seeing this movie at the local cinema society screening, rather than seeing the latest from Hollywood at the cineplex, and imagine in all seriousness that we are on the side of art and the angels.

To be fair, The Last Report is not a pulp romance, although it cozens its readers with the content of pulp romance. But neither is it a work of art in the tradition of the best novels. Yet no amount of whining on my part will change the fact that Erdrich, her novels and the movies to be made of them, reign triumphant and beyond question in the mundus mentis mediae. As you can perhaps tell, there is no lack of subjects for an essay on the Middle Mind. Perhaps you, readers of CONTEXT, have favorite examples of your own. Perhaps, for example, you’ve noticed that the Antique Road Show has turned arts and antiquities into crude commodity fetishism.

Expert antiquarian: “This spittoon embossed with the crest of the House of Summersoft is worth $4,000, top dollar at auction.”

Pallid owner: “Ooh! I had no idea!”

Pallid owner thinks: “I could sell this now and have that money, but then I wouldn’t have the spittoon, and I’d probably just spend the money on some sort of crap, and after a while the thing I bought will be indistinguishable from all the other things I’ve bought, things I didn’t buy with this special free money from the implausibly valuable spittoon, and then I won’t remember it was special at all, because I bought it with this money, this spittoon money, and so I’ll have nothing, really, not even the spittoon, but what’s the point of keeping the spittoon? Is it the pleasure of knowing I could turn it into cash any time I liked, if I wanted? Or maybe I should actually spit in it once in a while. This smart man says that Queen Victoria probably once spat in it. Or is it spit? Spitted? No. Ooh, I’m so confused.”

Books by Curtis White

Heretical Songs

Metaphysics in the Midwest

The Idea of Home

Anarcho-Hindu

Monstrous Possibility: An Invitation to Literary Politics

Memories of My Father Watching TV

Requiem

The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves

America’s Magic Mountain

The Spirit of Disobedience: Resisting the Charms of Fake Politics, Mindless Consumption, and the Culture of Total Work

The Barbaric Heart: Faith, Money, and the Crisis of Nature

The Science Delusion: Asking the Big Questions in a Culture of Easy Answers

We Robots: Staying Human in the Age of Big Data

Lacking Character: A Novel

Living in a World that Can’t Be Fixed: Reimagining Counterculture Today

Transcendent: Art and Dharma in a Time of Collapse

On Resistance: A Manifesto

Next month Vince and Chad will be discussing Cadenza by Ralph Cusack.

This episode’s music is “Fairytale of New York” by The Pogues.

You can subscribe to the Mining the Dalkey Archive podcast at Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and watch us on YouTube.

And be sure to follow our sister podcasts: Two Month Review (Apple, Spotify) and Three Percent (Apple, Spotify) for more book talk!

From Zenosbooks, which has the most comprehensive information online about this series:

When [Peter] Mayer acquired the paperback rights to One Hundred Years Of Solitude (published in hardcover by Harper & Row in a translation by Gregory Rabassa in 1970), the Avon Bard Latin American list was essentially born and Bard was on its way to becoming a major American publisher of Latin American fiction, even though the García Márquez book was first published in paperback as an Avon book and only later as an Avon Bard title. According to Robert Wyatt, the plan to publish Latin American fiction did not follow any particular plan, but evolved over time: “We sort of tacked the Latin American titles on as they came along.”

The 1970s were a good time for Latin American authors in the United States, in that “magical realism,” that blending of the elements of magic with the real world, was in the air. Writers of the “Boom” generation—that shorthand designation for a disparate group of authors that allowed publishers to effectively package a collection of talented writers into an aesthetic “school” or unified movement where there may not have been one—like Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez. José Lezama Lima, and Julio Cortázar were building reputations in the English-speaking world helped by a flood of translations from the Spanish and Portuguese by notable translators like Gregory Rabassa, Suzanne Jill Levine, Harriet de Onis, and others. Driven by the Venezuelan sculptor José Guillermo Castillo, the New York-based Center for Inter-American Relations proved instrumental in the development of this interest in Latin American poetry and prose, not only by publishing a journal three times a year focused on the art and literature of Latin America, but by arranging financing for the translations of nearly 70 books by Latin writers.

You can find the complete list of Avon Bard Latin American titles here, including The Celebration by Ivan Ângelo, translated from Brazilian Portuguese by Thomas Colchie, which is the focus of today’s CONTEXT post.

Thanks in large part to Julio Cortázar, I’ve always been in love with Latin American writers. I used to collect as many Latin American Literary Review Press titles as I could find—by authors like Luisa Valenzuela, Ricardo Piglia, Ana María Matute, Giannina Braschi, Rosario Castellanos, all the anthologies, etc.—and when I encountered John O’Brien’s library (R.I.P., I believe this library was sold off, and has since been destroyed by a burst pipe), I not only got a real education in literature, but discovered the Avon Bard series and read as many as I could find on the shelves.

There were maybe one or two of these titles I wasn’t keen on, but left to my own devices (and unlimited funds), we probably would’ve reprinted every one of the out-of-print titles from this series.

And Dalkey did do a few! Macho Camacho’s Beat by Luis Rafael Sanchéz came out before my time there (Martin Riker was a big fan, and now I want to reread this book, but it’s probably out-of-print again), and Lygia Fagundes Telles’s The Girl in the Photograph (translated by Margaret A. Neves) came out after I was gone, but while I was there, we did Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Manuel Puig, Camilo José Cela, Ignácio de Loyola Brandão, and the aforementioned Ivan Ângelo.

When I first read it, Ângelo’s The Celebration completely blew me away. It reminded by of Cortázar’s Hopscotch, superficially at least, in the way it had sections “Before the Celebration” and “After the Celebration,” which could be read in a couple different ways, but it was also a great representation of the non-Magical Realist Latin American literature of the time, with a heavy focus on dictatorships. (Ironically, Augusto Roa Bastos’s I The Supreme—the subject of the new Two Month Review season starting March 6, 2026—is also dictator-related, and came out from Vintage’s Aventura line, another noteworthy series of excellent works of world literature.) This was also true of the Brandão books, especially Zero and And Still the Earth, which are absolutely wild, and also deserve another life, now, in 2026.

We reprinted both of Ângelo’s two Avon Bard titles: The Celebration and The Tower of Glass, but then everything stopped. He has other untranslated works, and we had, at the time, a very bright intern from Brazil who may have looked into these, but ended up focused instead on António Lobo Antunes, who I was even more obsessed with at the time. (See all the Antunes titles Dalkey brought out over the years after Grove abandoned him.) Nevertheless, at least English readers have these two books available to them . . .

I’ll let Theodore L. McDermott explain more about the book itself below, but to introduce him, Ted was my marketing assistant for a number of years, including during the Lost extravaganza. He’s a brilliant reader, a great writer, and a big fan of Flann O’Brien—exactly the sort of person you’d want working at Dalkey Archive. (Those were the days!) Anyway, he wrote a number of pieces for CONTEXT during his time there, is the author of The Minor Outsider, and is now a freelance journalist focusing on the Montana-Idaho-Washington region.

And here’s the piece he wrote about Ivan Ângelo’s masterpiece!

Reading Ivan Ângelo’s The Celebration by Theodore L. McDermott

You can see something of Borges in The Celebration: in the way that the central event of the book—the event that gives it its title—is absent from its pages. You can see something of Cortázar in the way the chronology coils around and crosses over itself. You can see something of Nabokov in the fictional annotations that retell the story from an entirely new vantage, implying an endless number of other versions as yet untold. You can see something of Barth in the stylistic variations. You can see something of Machado de Assis, Osman Lins, and Ignacio Loyola Brandão in the peculiarly Brazilian integration of remarkable formal innovation and social and political engagement.

You can see all of this, but what’s most apparent, and most important, is that Ângelo has written a book unlike any other.

*

When he sat down to do it, Ângelo took the entire world and dissembled it so that he could cram everything in the space of 203 pages. The entire world in one book, except he has forgotten to include one thing: the celebration.

Reading Ivan Ângelo’s The Celebration is to reassemble. This is not passive fiction that tries to tell, start to finish, the chronology of a life, of an event, of a particular epiphany. Instead, in chapters that skip through a bewildering array of styles, techniques, times, and places, Ângelo, who has written a number of other books both for children and adults, including the story collection Tower of Glass, creates a kind of fiction that is as precise as it is broad.

He writes with a ferocious energy and purpose about both the inscrutable forces of history and the maddening insignificance of all our individual lives.

Ângelo began The Celebration in 1964, twelve years before it was published, and the same year a revolution put a military government in control of Brazil.

Near the end of the novel, he writes:

(Author’s note: What am I supposed to write about in this shithole of a country? Anything I write seems like a joke, as if I were totally avoiding the subject. What subject? Shit, that’s all. And anyway, whoever said it was my responsibility? Why not write detective stories, or one-act plays for children?)

The answer to all of these questions is the book itself. He doesn’t choose a subject: he includes everything. He doesn’t avoid politics, but neither does he announce any specific political commitment.

Flannery O’Connor wrote, “I suppose half of writing is overcoming the revulsion you feel when you sit down to it.”

Ângelo’s revulsion is palpable; he overcomes nothing, but writes anyway. And the world that Ângelo creates is as vivid, as grim, and as crowded as a Hieronymus Bosch hellscape.

The novel begins with “A Short Documentary (the city and the interior, 1970).” The city is Belo Horizonte. The interior is the Brazilian Northeast. The documentary is comprised of excerpts from newspapers, leaflets, police testimony, a letter to the editor, books, a birth certificate, “a popular Northeastern ballad of 1952,” speeches, and a report from the “Sugar Refineries Association.”

Some of these are actual historical documents, while others are invented; it’s impossible to distinguish between the two. Together, they describe the riot that exploded on the night of March 30, 1970, and continued into the next morning. There is a “flashback” to documents from earlier moments in Brazilian history, showing us the events that made the riot unavoidable.

Severe drought, government corruption, prolonged disenfranchisement, and poverty have combined with a host of unstated, alluded to, and unparaphrasable events and prejudices to bring Macrionílio de Mattos, a fifty-year-old former outlaw from the Northeast, and Samuel Aparecido Fereszin, a reporter in Belo Horizonte, to the fore of a “highly organized group” of peasants marching toward riot police.

That’s the first chapter. In fourteen pages, we’ve covered 120 years. We’ve been dropped into the midst not only of Brazilian history, but also into a miniature war.

Then we turn the page and read the title of the next chapter: “Thirtieth Anniversary . . . Pearls.” The next page is only occupied by a single word, “Husband,” down in the lower right corner. We turn again and read:

—I have so much to do tomorrow.

It was some time ago that she began this business of making plans for tomorrow. But tomorrow she’s going to die.

We go, in a matter of three sentences, from an unremarkable bit of dialogue to an insinuation of murder. We find ourselves trying to figure out who’s speaking, who “she” is and why “she” will die. But this is answered quickly: a wealthy husband is trying to kill his beautiful wife, and she is his willing victim: “So Juliana nodded yes, finished the rest of her slice, and braced herself for the onslaught of its poison.”

In the transition from the first to the second chapter, the book moves from the public to the private without blinking. It moves from the historical to the domestic without comment.

The book is filled with these kinds of shifts, sudden turns, and unresolved mysteries. It moves from the ’30s to the ’50s, back to the ’40s, on to the ’70s, and even into the future. We move through a cast of characters as large and disparate, and yet surprisingly interconnected, as those in Robert Altman’s Nashville.

Chapter-by-chapter, we unpack the contents of this book: a brief biography of a beautiful girl who seeks a career in journalism and ends up left only with “days of drunkenness and solitude”; the story of a woman who is driven to abandon her family by the exclusionary intimacy that her husband enjoys with her son; a chapter about a once-promising writer who gave up his career to become a successful lawyer and a “strong contender for a top slot among the ten best-dressed bachelors of the city of Belo Horizonte in 1970”; a brusque story that tells, in alternating sentences, of two characters who meet and confront each other in the last line; a story—told from the points of view of his mother and a police commissioner—of the consequences of a college student’s political activism. And this only brings us halfway through.

*

Should you get a copy of The Celebration, you will notice that the pages that comprise the last third of the book have black edges, so that, when seen from the side, it’s explicitly divided, like a phone book.

These black-edged pages demarcate the final chapter of the novel, which is entitled:

“AFTER THE CELEBRATION: A cross-index of the characters, in order of appearance or reference, with additional* information regarding the fate of those who were alive during the events of the night of March 30.”

*necessary?

surprising?

useful?

corroborative?

unnecessary?

useless?

Between the bookends of a “Short Documentary” and an “index,” then, we have been given seemingly disconnected stories of a range of characters who (before the index) may or may not be going to—or else (in the index itself) have already gone—to the celebration of the title.

This is where, if it hasn’t already, summary begins to break down. Any statement about plot, character, action, setting, theme, or anything else would require a paragraph of qualifiers, caveats, and extrapolations. For example, I could reiterate, we never actually see the celebration itself.

But I would have to explain that the index contains annotations that, like those in Pale Fire, are never indicated in the main body of the text, and that refer to events that may or may not ever have happened—even in fictional terms. Unlike Kinbote’s interpretations, however, this indeterminacy is not an outcome of the alleged narrator’s probable insanity, but because the events described in the index happen in the future.

Sometimes “future” means “after the celebration.” Other times it means “after the date of the book’s publication.” The Celebration was first published in 1976, but we are still informed that Commisioner Humberto Levita “died of laughter, literally, in 1982.” Now, this index also includes an annotation to the word “Author”: an Author who is similar to, but isn’t, Ângelo. Here, in the index, the Author is having a conversation with a friend about the book you’ve been reading. Parenthetical asides written by a third-person narrator describe the action in what otherwise would be a passage comprised exclusively of dialogue. Referring to the matter of the celebration not being included in a book that’s named for it, the Author says, “I have some sketches, I’ll show you (opening the drawer, taking out a folder, selecting three pages, sitting back down again). Take a look (handing the pages to his friend).” Only then is part of the missing scene included. In the end, the celebration is neither present nor absent. Despite the novel’s infinite fracturing, everything is carefully connected.

The term “experimental writing” implies that formal innovation is an “experiment.” An experiment implies a question, implies that the book is an argument whose success or failure proves or disproves something. As a result, one often feels that they’re reading a lab report. I think it would be better to disassociate “experimental” and “innovative” in order to make room for books like The Celebration.

Ângelo’s novel is not an experiment, but a fully realized, nearly perfect work of art. The use of so many styles, the colored pages, the fragmentation, the “cross-index of the characters,” the primary documents, the false ones—all of these are simply the elements that best describe, well, reality. And because reality is subjective, mutable, indeterminate, and indescribable, formal innovation is the one great way to get at it.

In the suffering of the drought-starved and government-exploited poor, in the petty conflicts of upper-class intellectuals, in the wide-angled scope of Brazilian history, in the microcosm of a celebration, in everything the novel includes, and in everything it pointedly leaves out, the entire, tired world is captured.

And since the world hums along, thus far, without end, so does The Celebration. You can start reading it, but you can never finish. I open this book and close it. I swear it off, telling myself I’m through, that I get it. I started reading The Celebration about eight months ago, and though I have read it start to finish several times, I’m not finished with it. I carry it around my apartment. I prop it open with the weight of the salt and pepper shakers when I’m eating dinner, or hold it open with the soles of my shoes on the front steps when it is warm enough, or bend it back when I am lying in bed.

Oftentimes, I’m not even reading the words, only looking at the type on the page and wondering, How the fuck does he do it? But then, I come back to it again.

(Author’s note: What a waste to let this moment go by without trying to capture the sense of it, if only in outline, to be able to show someone: this is how it was, back then.)

This is how it was, this is how it is, and this his how it will be.

It’s hard to know what to say about The Celebration, a book that is so clearly a masterpiece, a book that you read with wide, uncritical eyes, a book that strikes you initially as perfect, and only improves after that. An essay in praise of The Celebration is like the hook that hangs a painting: it might help to get it noticed, but won’t add anything to the beauty of the work itself. If you will only notice it, the book will do the rest.

“Reading Ivan Ângelo’s The Celebration” by Theodore McDermott first appeared in CONTEXT No. 19.

Selected Works by Ivan Ângelo in Translation:

The Celebration Trans. Thomas Colchie.

The Tower of Glass Trans. Ellen Watson.

Selected Untranslated Works:

Duas Faces [Two Faces], 1961.

O ladrão de sonhos [The Thief of Dreams], 1995.

A face horrível [The Horrible Face], 1996.

Amor? [Love?], 1996.

Pode me beijar se quiser [You May Kiss Me if You Please], 1997.

O Vestido Luminoso da princesa [The Luminous Dress of the Princess], 1997.

História em ão e inha [History in Big and Small], 1998.

Next month’s book is Dead As Doornails by Anthony Cronin. A Dalkey Archive edition is coming soon, but in the meantime, this is available from Lilliput Press who is reissuing it on occasion of the book’s 50th anniversary.

This episode’s music is “Blood Wedding” by Black 47.

You can subscribe to the Mining the Dalkey Archive podcast at Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and watch us on YouTube.

And be sure to follow our sister podcasts: Two Month Review (Apple, Spotify) and Three Percent (Apple, Spotify) for more book talk!

This episode’s music is “GPT” by Dan Deacon.

You can subscribe to the Mining the Dalkey Archive podcast at Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and watch us on YouTube.

And be sure to follow our sister podcasts: Two Month Review (Apple, Spotify) and Three Percent (Apple, Spotify) for more book talk!

Here’s the complete list of titles mentioned:

Dead As Doornails, Anthony Cronin

Borstal Boy, Brendan Behan

The Great Hunger, Patrick Kavanagh

The Keeper, Tana French

Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way, Elaine Feeney

Carn, Patrick McCabe

Mouthing, Orla Mackey

The Key and The Dregs of the Day, Máirtín Ó Cadhain

After Party, Dean Browne

The Steps, Juliano Zaffino (not Irish!)

Topographia Hibernica, Blindboy Boatclub

Killoyle, Roger Boylan

Library of Brothel, Anakana Schofield

The Benefactors, Wendy Erskine

First Book of Frags, Dave Lordan

Bogmail, Patrick McGinley

Next month Vince and Chad will be discussing The Collected Plays of Dermot Healy. (For real this time.)

This episode’s music is “Angoon” by Portugal. The Man.

You can subscribe to the Mining the Dalkey Archive podcast at Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and watch us on YouTube.

And be sure to follow our sister podcasts: Two Month Review (Apple, Spotify) and Three Percent (Apple, Spotify) for more book talk!

Later this week, a post will go up on the Three Percent Substack about French literature in the Translation Database, so I thought it would be nice to bring a bit of attention to one of the authors who, when I first got into serious publishing, was a writer it seemed like everyone was familiar with: Raymond Roussel.

I could be wrong, but I don’t think Roussel has the reputation he did back in the early 2000s—perhaps for the reasons that Trevor Winkfield alludes to in his opening paragraphs—which is a shame. For readers interested in Harry Mathews (especially The Conversions), Eric Chevillard, Raymond Queneau, and the Nouveau Roman writ large, Roussel is definitely worth checking out.

Trevor Winkfield is a Leeds-born writer and artist who edited Roussel’s How I Wrote Certain of My Books and Other Writings, as well as creating the artwork for the cover—which he also did for the original Dalkey Archive Press covers for The Case of the Persevering Maltese and The Human Country. If you’d like to know more about him, I highly recommend this interview that appeared in The Brooklyn Rail back in 2014.

“Reading Raymond Roussel” by Trevor Winkfield

For some readers, Raymond Roussel resembles nobody so much as the admired party guest towards whom one is propelled by overly enthusiastic hosts who breathlessly assure one, “You’ll have so much in common.” But confronted with the said guest, one finds that though one might have everything in common with him, one has nothing to say.

This confrontation can be all the more unsettling if one’s smitten hosts include Marcel Proust, Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, Alberto Giacometti, Michel Leiris, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Harry Mathews, Georges Perec, and John Ashbery, to a man great admirers of the influential French scribe. Though citing a writer’s prestigious fans is a cheap way of drawing attention to him (“He’s nothing but a writer’s writer’s writer’s acquired taste,” as one partygoer sneered at me), it’s due to these important admirers that Roussel’s status has changed subtly but dramatically over the past decades from marginal curiosity to central figure, one of those writers we have to go through rather than walk around. We’re now on the crest of another Roussel revival, an event occurring every generation or so. The apparent failure of these revivals to establish Roussel as an academic Major Writer is not the point of the venture. For as Roussel himself noted in another context, each revival finds “more and more people gathering to my cause.” Think Mallarmé as opposed to Balzac.

Roussel was born into an immensely wealthy Parisian family in 1877 (he died by suicide in 1933), the money surrounding him acting as a cocoon between himself and reality. The quotidian is notable by its absence from his work: this is not a literature with much appeal for anyone in search of a social conscience. But if one is magnetized by works of the imagination derived almost solely from linguistics, Roussel represents some kind of summation. How I Wrote Certain of My Books, the posthumously published testament in which Roussel delineates many—but by no means all—of his writing techniques is, as they say, essential reading. As a vade mecum it doesn’t necessarily make the books easier to penetrate, but it does provide some clue as to what lies beneath them (though no matter how knowledgeable these clues make us, as readers, feel, no amount of shouting “Open Sesame!” at the threshold of the books entices them to reveal all their secrets). The most obvious examples of his expository secrets can be found early in his career, before he learnt to cover his tracks. The story “Among the Blacks,” written during Roussel’s years of “prospecting” (as he termed his youth) begins and ends with two almost identical phrases: Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard (The white letters on the cushions of the old billiard table) and Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pillard (The white man’s letters on the hordes of the old plunderer). Acting as a delicious sandwich between these apparently irreconcilable rhyming bookends comes a parlor game set in a country home. A question in writing is posed to someone who is then shut up in the adjoining room; after ten minutes one is released to give a response to the question in the form of a riddle whose flavor is perfectly captured by Ron Padgett’s hilariously deadpan translation:

First, there was a man’s face, split in half, the right side of which was utterly fiendish and ugly. This was followed by an eyeball, from which hung an L. Then came a skeleton key that was inserting itself into a 2. After this there was a stack of currency bills; the Greek letter for alpha; the words “The Chrononhotonthologos Man”; a cat, the incomplete group of words “—— — your rocker!”; a table setting that included a prominent frankfurter and a jar; and last, four zebras singing in unison, “We don’t want to zzzz!” After a moment of reflection, I had the complete sentence and I related it in detail while having the others follow on the drawing: HYDE L EYE KE TWO DOugh A CAREY CAT YOU’RE OFF MUSTARD ZEBRAS. And I repeated fluently, I’d like to do a caricature of Mister Debarras.

One finds this mixture of the “simple as ABC with the quintessential” (to quote Michel Leiris’s memorable definition) as either childish or brilliantly inventive. A Rousselian finds both attitudes acceptable.

Such raiding of the nursery to conjure up adult myths produced Roussel’s first indisputable masterpiece, the novel Impressions of Africa, published in 1910 at the author’s expense (as were all his books) under the prestigious Lemerre imprint. It begins like a boy’s adventure story: a group of shipwrecked passengers are captured and held for ransom by an African king, Talou VII. To while away their time and keep their captors entertained, each captive is allotted a theatrical task or test of mechanical ingenuity based on his inherent skills, to be performed at a gala before their release. But in a reversal of the plot of Among the Blacks and in defiance of all the rules of detective fiction, Roussel first explains and then describes his mysteries, somewhat like the playwright who, in the opening scene, tells us who the murderer is and then spends the rest of the play explaining why he did it. Suspense is thus dispensed with at the opening of the adventure. But it remains one of his greatest triumphs as a storyteller that after all the mysteries have been unravelled and explained away, they become even more mysterious—hence his appeal to modernists and ourselves. A further aspect of his appeal resides in his manipulation of people. Not exactly as a puppet master, but one who shuffles his characters around to serve the same purpose as words, strictly to unfold the story. No one could be less interested in psychology than Roussel. The surface of things is paramount, characters being defined by their rituals and attributes, not their sonalities. Their belongings as a result can be more animistic than their owners.

And yet his characters—some of the most inventive in all twentieth-century literature—are elevated above the robot level with a few deft strokes of characterization. Take the unforgettable episode concerning the painting adventures of sexy Louise Montalescot (one of whose many singularities derives from a phonetic distortion of (slices) á canard (duck) into aiguillettes (shoulder braid of a uniform) á canard (false notes in music), thus supplying Roussel with her musical shoulder braid). Over the span of several pages we discover that she is a botanical explorer traveling with a younger brother, “the object of her warmest affection”; she has charm and allure, is both beautiful and captivating; she possesses “splendid fair hair, which she allowed to fall in natural curls below the small forage cap worn jauntily over one ear.” She’s adopted male attire for the tropics, specifically an officer’s uniform. Blessed with a serious demeanor, yet she preaches free love. None of these details is dwelt upon (in many ways they’re as cursory as stage directions), but bit by bit throughout the narrative they’re offered as clues to our protagonist’s persona: they leave us with an impression rather than a portrait, but it’s enough to make us care about the characters and about what they’re going to do next. And what Louise Montalescot does next is create a painting machine, a photo-mechanical contraption whose functioning is facilitated by the use of a rare tropical oil. Set in motion, it produces an unbelievably accurate and artistically satisfying facsimile of the garden arranged before it. No wonder Duchamp and Picabia, among numerous visual artists, extol this particular episode as one of the seminal turning points in their own lives. The whole book has a similar visual impact, like an illuminated manuscript patiently unscrolled by a professorial hand.

This notion of lives episodically unfolding “before our very eyes” is carried even further in Roussel’s second and final novel, Locus Solus, first published on the eve of World War I (his sole comment on that conflagration—“I’ve never seen so many men!”—being a mordant example of his blinkered humor) and for many of us his greatest, most perfect narrative construction. Set in the spacious grounds of Locus Solus, the “solitary place” inhabited by Martial Canterel, a wealthy scientific genius living on the outskirts of Paris, the novel’s form, even more so than that of Impressions, relies for its model on the travelogue. Here our guide actually is a professor, one who escorts his guests through his landscape of marvels. A partial tabulation of what his guests are asked to admire would include a curious, antique sculpture molded from dry earth of a naked child holding forth a wizened flower; an aerial paving beetle-cum-weather forecaster which builds a mosaic made from rotten teeth, guided thither and yon by the wind (whose movements Canterel has predicted days in advance). Further on, we come across a gigantic faceted aquarium containing a curious medley of objects and creatures, including a depilated cat who, aided by a pointed metal horn, galvanizes the floating remains of Danton’s head into speech; a dancer with musical tresses; and a troupe of bottle-imps performing scenes from folklore and history as they rise and fall through the oxygenated water. The central marvel, however, involves what amounts to a glass-enclosed graveyard where eight corpses are reanimated (thanks to Canterel’s preparations of vitalium and resurrectine) in order to relive the capital moments of their lives, attended by their ecstatically grieving (but still living) relatives.

This précis barely skims the surface of the novel’s layout, which, like that of Impressions, is delineated by descriptions, which in turn expand and engender other descriptions, followed by explanations of those descriptions. And such is the concision of Roussel’s language that itemizing all the episodes and their ramifications would entail a tabulation almost as detailed as the books themselves, ending up with something very much like Lewis Carroll’s lugubrious map, the one that’s so detailed it’s on a scale of one mile to one mile, thus completely covering the landscape it is intended to elucidate.

Roussel’s world, as portrayed in the two novels, is almost soundproof and virtually devoid of dialogue, with only the whirr of an aerostat or the presumed clatter from the blades of a hydraulic wheel to interrupt the mime. One suspects that almost as an act of revenge Roussel felt compelled to follow his two novels with two plays, The Star on the Forehead in 1925, followed two years later by Dust of Suns. These are plays in which people can’t stop talking . . . or is that babbling? Whatever it is, it’s more than mere verbiage they spout. Their speeches act as the plot’s propellant. Anecdotes are batted back and forth between characters like shuttlecocks, cleverly disguising the fact that a single narrator could conceivably deliver them as a monologue. Hilarious and deeply involving though both may be, these remain plays better read on the page than endured on the stage.

Roussel’s penultimate opus, New Impressions of Africa, is not, as its name seems to imply, a continuation of the earlier novel. Rather it is one of the most complex poems in the French language, four cantos based loosely on four Egyptian tourist sites. Not only is the text complex, it looks impenetrable. The layout proclaims “No Trespassing” to the casual reader, with its thicket of brackets within brackets within brackets and attendant footnotes as austere and foreboding as any Rosetta Stone. But once inside it reveals itself as even more impenetrable! For instance, the opening of the third canto (ostensibly extolling the virtues of a column on the outskirts of Damietta which, when licked, cures jaundice) is brought to a halt after only five lines by the mention of hope, leading to a parenthesis dealing with an American uncle whose nephews have hopes of inheritance. But that touching scene is not completed for five or six pages, the word “American” having provoked a double-parenthesis dealing with “that land still young, still unexhausted” whose dog’s cold nose triggers a trio of brackets and a brief revery on an ailing pup. Which in turn triggers a bracketed aside within four parentheses, then another within five. After barely one hundred lines, even the most astute and intrepid explorer is all at sea and gasping for air. This avalanche of interruptions is akin to that produced by a group of partygoers, with one conversationalist being interrupted barely after he’s begun talking; meantime his interrupter is in turn cut short by the person across the table whose memory has just been jolted, so she in turn relates an anecdote, which reminds her neighbor of a funny story . . . and so on and so forth. This simplistic exegesis of the technique is, I hope, sufficient to show that it’s not for readers cursed with a one-track mind. But to those who persevere, this Everest of High Modernism donates rich comfort: like all truly great works of art, it is inexhaustible in its rewards. The density of the language—its pared-down compression—is such that each line could be ascribed a physical weight as well as length. As Roussel himself said of an earlier version of this poem, abandoned after countless revisions, an entire lifetime would have been insufficient to complete the polishing. Likewise (and I know whereof I speak) an entire lifetime is insufficient to fully disentangle (and understand—my italics) its myriad branches. The same, of course, may be said of Roussel’s entire oeuvre.

This piece first appeared in issue No. 10 of CONTEXT. Copyright © Trevor Winkfield.

Selected Works by Raymond Roussel in Translation

Among the Blacks: Two Works

How I Wrote Certain of My Books and Other Writings (ed. Trevor Winkfield)

Impressions of Africa (tr. Mark Polizzotti)

Locus Solus (tr. Rupert Copeland Cunningham)

New Impressions of Africa (tr. Mark Ford)

Last January, Matt Martinson started an approximately ten-year project of reading every single Dalkey Archive title (based on this spreadsheet) and writing a short poem about each one. On this episode, he talks about the project and how far along he is, trends he’s picked up on, and how he guides his reading, before a discussion Juan Goytisolo’s Exiled from Almost Everywhere (translated by Peter Bush) and Julián Ríos’s Procession of Shadows (translated by Nick Caistor), two books from two Spanish masters that pair together quite well.

This episode’s music is “Bomb” by J Church.

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The next book to be featured in this series is The Collected Plays of Dermot Healy.

This episode’s music is “The Diamond Sea” by Sonic Youth.

You can subscribe to the Mining the Dalkey Archive podcast at Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and watch us on YouTube.

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This episode’s music is “Works and Days” by Tortoise.

You can subscribe to the Mining the Dalkey Archive podcast at Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and watch us on YouTube.

And be sure to follow our sister podcasts: Two Month Review (Apple, Spotify) and Three Percent (Apple, Spotify) for more book talk!

But it’s Coleman Dowell’s novels that I really want to focus on today.

I do have interesting Dalkey lore related to Coleman Dowell, mostly related to his long-term partner, Bert Slaff, but I’m going to save this for a future post on Eugene Hayworth’s Fever Vision: The Life and Works of Coleman Dowell (which contains an introduction from Edmund White). For now, I’ll just mention that Bert was on Dalkey’s board until the end of his life, is responsible for the “Coleman Dowell Series,” which was one of Dalkey’s only named & funded series, and hosted many a Dalkey employee who visited NYC. (Bert’s apartment on 5th Ave. with a balcony overlooking the Guggenheim was both spectacular and awash in stories in a way that felt almost haunted, positively, by Coleman’s spirit.)

Rather than distract from Dowell’s work with gossip and namedropping, I would rather you read Sorrentino’s piece, and then check out Island People and/or Too Much Flesh and Jabez. (Spoiler: By contrast with the more “plotless” Island People, Too Much Flesh and Jabez is much easier to summarize.)

According to the “About the Author” page in Island People:

Coleman Dowell was born in 1925 in Adairville, Kentucky. After serving in the army, he left Kentucky for New York and a career on Broadway and in television. He began writing fiction in the early sixties; Random House published his first novel, One of the Children Is Crying, in 1968. As he continued writing, Dowell’s books became more daring and experimental, and appropriately were published by New Directions: Mrs. October Was Here appeared in 1974, Island People in 1976, and Too Much Flesh and Jabez in 1977. Dowell’s final novel, White on Black on White, was published by Countryman Press in 1983. Despondent over his career, he committed suicide in 1985. A Star-Bright Lie, a memoir recounting Dowell’s Broadway years, won the Editor’s Choice Lambda Literary Award when it was posthumously published by Dalkey Archive in 1993.

Sorrentino’s essay was my introduction to Dowell’s work, and I suspect it will be for a number of you as well. At the time when CONTEXT No. 3 came out, I was applying for a Dalkey apprenticeship around this time, so I was on a complete Dalkey bender, and was enthralled to find out about an ND+DAP author I’d never heard of, someone whose work called to mind If on a winter’s night a traveler, and which sounded almost fractal in construction (“you are reading a book that’s largely been generated from smaller pieces of itself”).

[It’s funny. A lot of these same techniques and references have come up recently with regard to books being published today, in 2025, with editors and publicists and book critics acting as if these ideas about the craft of literature are totally new and “crazy.” Just goes to show that not as many people in books have an awareness of the past as you’d expect—especially when it comes to Dalkey’s complete catalog—and that everything has already been done.]

All of Dowell’s work is fascinating and complex, pushing back against the existing stereotypes of what constituted “gay literature.” Personally, I think he’s ripe for rediscovery, especially among fans of more “challenging” contemporary world literature.

So read this, then read Dowell. I think you’ll find a lot to admire and puzzle over and learn from.

“Reading Coleman Dowell’s Island People” by Christopher Sorrentino

Interviewed in 1978 by John O’Brien, Coleman Dowell 1925–1985) said, “In Island People I had to invent everything—my techniques and everything because I wanted to do things I wasn’t sure words could do.” What “words could do,” of course, turned out to be the focus of Island People, with its hair-raising presentation of what Dowell refers to in the book as “the underlying.” The connotations of this term are rehearsed endlessly in the text, but what we read is the “underlying” itself: within the preternatural boundaries of this astounding book, its repeated instances act individually and together to point away from the possibility of “solving” the work. Though Dowell, in his interview, offers many authorized (so to speak) interpretations, Island People manages to slip out from under anything as slight as its own author’s claims about its nature.

A plot summary doesn’t help much here as a starting point for analysis: as the saying goes, you’d have about as much luck bisecting a sneeze. An unnamed man leaves the city to live in a house he has bought on a small island, a lone outsider among the “island people” who inhabit the place year-round. Though he lives alone with his dachshund, it appears that he has an engaged (if isolated) existence, enjoying frequent contact with and occasional visitors from the city. Abruptly, it’s revealed that the acridly disturbing comedy of manners we have read, involving the man and his guests Beatrix and Jeremiah, is a story, “The Keepsake,” written by another unnamed man living under circumstances identical to those of the first man, though somewhat more removed from the outside world.

Island People seems to have unveiled its framework here, and even the reader habituated (whether by contemporary fiction or by facile Scream-style reflexivity) to metafictional techniques expectantly awaits the commencement of the “real” Island People. As with Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, the wait is unending. But while Calvino’s comedy draws inevitably toward the shaggy-dog joke that crowns its penultimate chapter, Island People is all “underlying.” It’s a book that doesn’t seem to have been written as much as it seems to crawl out of itself, and is made up of a handful of chronic images, a few stark and metaphoric figures, and an endless succession of contrasts, correlations, and mutations that are effected through a continuous stream of distorted information, to which the periodic addition of what seems to be fresh intelligence only adds to the overall indeterminacy.

Island People can perhaps most usefully be read as a collection of documents—journal entries, fragments, poems, short stories, and mysterious shifts in time and voice denoted by switches to what I take to be a more “archaic” typeface (it’s the fact that the typeface is changed that textualizes these phantom utterances for me and allows me to feel comfortable categorizing them as documents)—whose authorship is unclear and whose veridicality, within the confines of the book’s peculiar space, is likewise undetermined. Island People is set in motion by the Narrator’s decision to embrace his invention Beatrix as an alter-ego (”helpmeet” is the curious word Dowell chooses in the interview) and to allow her, as a sort of repentance for his maligning of her in “The Keepsake,” to write his life. In the process, the wholly invented Beatrix herself invents, in a series of episodes, several versions of the Narrator, most of them named variations on “Chris,” all of whom move ever to the danger and the “assault of desire” that the Narrator has decamped to the island to avoid. These episodes are surrounded by journal entries, presumably the Narrator’s (though their provenience is open to question), and by the strange articulations from the past, announced by the change of typeface, which obliquely tell the story of the family, touched by sickness, murder, and accusations of witchcraft, which had lived in the house in the nineteenth century.

Even as Beatrix’s Chris-avatars echo one another across the chasm of the novel, on still another level each “Chris” has his own doppelganger/opponent to grapple with inside the limits of each episode, while the other characters engage and complement one another in their respective episodes and with their counterparts throughout the novel, so that—just for the sake of example—the infinitely supercilious “Christopher” who stages patronizing “interviews” with his perceived social inferior Victor (both to discern the similarities between them and to indulge in the homoerotic undertone of the meetings) echoes not only the “Chris” of the next segment, a youthful playwright who is overwhelmed by the otherworldly depravity of the salon maintained by Claudo Darius, and not only Claudo, who takes “others into his body” to arrest decay, a sort of vampire who prolongs his own life “by ceasing during those periods to be . . . ,” but Victor as well, with whose condition Christopher is forcibly made to identify. Island People gradually fills with these doubled and reflected inhabitants—with writers and interlocutors whose pitilessly cold probing reveals their own barrenness more than that of their subjects, with precise observers who are so concerned with concretizing the abstruse social code their antennae pick up they remain unaware that they have entered the very slipstream of unuttered information that they monitor, with gigolos and hustlers and con men, with runaway boys, with the scarred and the birthmarked, with people who snap, or sag, when confronted with desire or revelation of truth—all in various at different stages of life, crossing of gender and sexuality and race and time and space to form a webbed whole.

The web is spun entirely from language. I find that each new reading reveals deeper levels of—perhaps not meaning, but significance. Opening the novel for the purpose of confirming a quote for this essay newly exposes another of the interlacings that connect episode to episode and character to character. The effect of recognizing that you are reading a book that’s largely been generated from smaller pieces of itself is claustral (to use a component of the carefully chosen, nearly ritualistic vocabulary employed by Dowell) but it’s also liberating in a profound way. This kind of work, where words and phrases become suffused through systematic repetition with a private, diacritical import, opens itself to the infinite even as it closes itself and becomes defined by its textual limitations, because the “action” of the text does not center on the novelist’s technique of executing imagined alternatives to what “is,” a technique that usually manages to escape scrutiny because as a convention it’s inseparable from our concept of the novel form (in fact, it—the “idea” of the book, the unique set of alternatives each offers—is probably the very essence of the novel to most readers), but on the combinatorial possibilities inherent in the very words of the text in their juxtaposition to one another.

Consequently, countless parts of Island People set off sympathetic vibrations with countless other parts. Again, to provide just a few examples: in addition to numerous occurrences of the text’s central figure of an isolated man attempting to connect “like an island managing to throw out from itself . . . to touch, however tenuously, a main body and thus become a peninsula,” there are evocations in at least ten other places in the book of people with “island-like” traits or of conditions akin to living on a metaphorical “island,” plus numerous instances in which the “island people” reference is intended literally. The image of someone staring through, or at, the panes of a mullioned window or door is likewise revisited. Memory or what “could be another world” is evoked repeatedly through the related metaphors of a “vertical door,” a “line of yellow light,” a “dilated chink,” and “a thread of gold from a barely cracked door.” The similitudes are opposed in equal number by contrasts. Broad antitheses like writer and written, victim and victimizer, attraction and repulsion, male and female, homosexuality and heterosexuality, and youth and age, to name just a handful, appear throughout, and more specific motifs are held up for detailed comparison—e.g., on page 31, Grace is portrayed as a condition to attain, the essence of benevolence; while on page 66 Grace is described as a kind of a priori bestowal and a “malignancy.” Juxtaposed to the similarities, which have a tendency to ground the text, and contrasts, which help to deny the text “realism,” are correlative echoes and occasionally drastic transmutations of previously “received” information, which repeat the characters’ own mutability and underscores Island People’s refusal to reappear from out of the language into which it vanishes. For example, “Chris’s” frenzied moonlit fight with a rosebush on page 38 is echoed by the tree surgeon, Sajic’s, healing ministrations 250 pages later. When “Christine” makes her willfully mute son witness her stoning of a rabbit that has become trapped in the garden, it is recalled later when Sajic and his teenage lover, Moselle, are (nonfatally) stoned when discovered in flagrante delicto. The Narrator’s idle comment early in the book regarding the hunters who have overrun the nearby woods, “I could pick them off from my window,” is chillingly evoked in the novel’s final pages, as the danger dwelling at the edge of the fiction threatens to inundate it.

Though we are continually being confided in and directly addressed by the book’s various narrators, shown privileged information, and generally having the book’s textiness held under out noses, Dowell is silent as a sphinx: there is no point in the book at which there is any intrusion that might attest to the presence of the author: he remains hidden: in other words, while the stylistic differences proffered by the authors of the miscellaneous documents in Island People are perhaps subtly real,1 each is unimpeachably “literary,” so to speak—that is, not only is there an absence of the parody that would lend a Just Kidding aspect to the proceedings (as is the case with another book made up entirely of documents, Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew), there is also, to borrow from structuralist thinking, no “metalanguage” to allow a dominant and “authentic” voice to emerge, comment on, and claim authority over the book.

Dowell said that the book’s concept began with the theme he read in the Dickinson lines that serve as one of Island People’s epigraphs, “One need not be a Chamber / to be Haunted / One need not be a House / The Brain has Corridors surpassing / Material Place,” and the book pays overt homage to the lines several times. Dickinson’s verse is a particularly good choice to express the sense of ardent yearning Island People’s miscellaneous techniques, its haunting recurrences and hand-picked lexicon, collaborate to sustain, a longing that drives each of the characters who inhabit its “corridors” to their increasingly desperate and reckless acts—either material or imagined. When the extravagantly birthmarked Low criticizes the affectless and clinical “Chris” for writing a story of their relationship, “The Birthmark,” in the episode of the same name, he complains, “You didn’t want the real thing to get in the way of your story.” The increasingly foregrounded impetus of Island People is its unsuccessful effort to write that “real thing” and set it to rest. Island People’s conundrum and implicit tragedy is that it is composed of a series of truths and accurate intuitions that are nonetheless defective, that in the end avoid or elide the “real thing” that has sent its characters into their solitary orbits. The mysteriousness at Island People’s core is the reason for its uncanny and disturbing ambience: there is no more succor for the reader than for the characters. Speaking of the book’s lesson, Dowell said, “that kind of loneliness will not lead to a knowledge of reality or how to separate art from life.” What Dowell did not mention—perhaps he felt it unnecessary or self-evident—is that the lesson comes from outside the text. The book itself is singularly unedifying in this respect, and ends on a note of unendurable desolation: emptied of its inhabitants, the book leaves the reader to turn out the lights when (s)he leaves, as it were. The “real thing” is connection, a confrontation with desire. Aloneness yields an impoverished existence; it yields, to paraphrase a passage from early in the book, the reality we create in those secret places of ours that others do not know about—“But what about the eyes that took some of him in passing on a windy corner one dark night and enshrined that fragment of him like a holy relic and yearned over it and prayed to it for days and years . . .”—insulated from the risky evanescence that always holds the possibility of love as well as danger.

Books by Coleman Dowell

Black on White on Black

Houses of Children: Collected Stories

Island People

Mrs. October Was Here

One of the Children Is Crying

A Star-Bright Lie

Too Much Flesh and Jabez

“Reading Coleman Dowell’s Island People” by Christopher Sorrentino first appeared in Context No. 3, which was published in spring 2000.

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The next book to be featured in this series is Threshold by Rob Doyle. (Who also wrote about the reissues of both The Ikon Maker and A Farewell to Prague.)

This episode’s music is “McLeyvier” by Rich Aucoin.

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Although we had been in touch about her book—I recommended reordering one of the stories in Coming. Apart., so that “The Last Short Story” actually opens the collection—and then on a podcast we did with May-Brit Akerholt (I also wrote about Anatomy. Monotony. in a piece about marriage alongside Nina Lykke’s Natural Causes), but we had never met in real life.

Edy’s an incredibly funny person—her account of a Kafka-esque experience with Border Control had everyone cracking up—with an eye for detail and ability to write about emotions and situations others might shy away from. Her work is sharp, uncomfortable (in the best way), provocative, and quite layered. Definitely worth checking out.

Anyway, hanging out with her—and seeing the first snowflakes of the season—has put me in the mood to read some cold-climate books, especially books from Estonia.

I’ll write more about John’s history with Estonian literature, our first trip there (which may have saved my life), some of the highlights from the backlist, etc., in a separate post about Rein Raud, but for now, I wanted to bring some attention to, arguably, Estonia’s greatest contemporary writer: Mati Unt.

Unt was a giant in Estonian letters, which might sound like the start of a bad joke, but only until you open up Things in the Night, his absolute masterpiece—and the first Estonian book Dalkey ever published.

This was one of my finds, which arrived from Eric Dickens, a translator from several languages (I forget them all, but I know Dutch was one), who had great literary taste and a lot of wit. He was also an independent scholar, and his piece on “Literary Translation in Britain and Selective Xenophobia” is an excellent look at the situation of literary translation in the early-2000s:

British publishers, usually themselves incapable of reading books in foreign languages, get around this serious cultural handicap by employing what are termed “publisher’s readers.” In theory, this means that the publisher consults a well-informed adviser to tell him or her what is being published in the world at large. But there are drawbacks. Firstly, there seems to be no clear process whereby a publisher’s reader is chosen. This could be anyone from a family friend who did his year abroad in France to someone the publisher met at a cocktail party and swore blind she was an “expert” on, say, Ruritanian literature. The publisher has no way of checking their credentials and language knowledge and their choice of authors could be one-sided or even quirky. The publisher, having few insights into how Ruritania works, and into who is respected there as an author, relies totally on the publisher’s reader. The publisher’s only check is the occasional chat with one or two European publishers over drinks in the evenings at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Since these foreign publishers do speak English and are on occasions Anglophiles, the conversation, and ultimate trading, tends to swing in the other direction, with the foreigner buying British or United States literature—but almost never vice-versa.

Eric turned me on to Unt, and ended up translating two of his books: Things in the Night and Brecht at Night. (The third Unt book published by Dalkey, Diary of a Blood Donor, was translated by Ants Eert.) He also wrote about Unt on a couple of occasions, including the obituary of sorts that follows.

Sadly, Dickens himself passed away in 2017, but his impact on the promotion of Estonian literature—through his work for Dalkey Archive, and as the translator of Jaan Kross for Harvill—lives on.

I’d like to reread these three Unt titles along with Autumn Ball (which I really, really would love to bring out in a new translation) and connect them to larger trends in the Dalkey backlist, but for now, this piece will have to serve as a general introduction to his complex, fascinating, polyvocal work.

Enjoy!

Mati Unt (1944–2005)

Mati Unt was born in Estonia and lived there all his life. He spent his early years in the village of Linnamäe near the university town of Tartu. His life, like that of so many Estonians, was rooted in the countryside and nature, something evident in all of his works. Unt doubled as one of the most influential modernist, and latterly post-modernist, authors in Estonia, as well as being a playwright, director, and producer, staging plays at several theaters in the Estonian capital, Tallinn.

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Unt made his breakthrough as an author early in life, publishing his first prose in the early 1960s while still at school, and later while studying literature and journalism at Tartu University, near the village where he was born. He belonged to the Sixties Generation, which denotes a number of Estonian writers born in the 1940s and who emerged as writers and intellectuals some twenty years later. During the years leading up to the Prague Spring of 1968, Estonian intellectuals had high hopes of a Duběck-style “socialism with a human face.” Their hopes were soon dashed. Nevertheless, Estonia had always managed to evade the full brunt of Soviet repression and censorship.

In the 1960s and ’70s, when Stalinism had waned, key works of international literature were made available in translation to the citizens of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic by such authors as Whitman, Faulkner, Salinger, Scott Fitzgerald, Wilder, Malamud, Baldwin, Capote, Updike, Oates, Bellow, Golding, Bergman (film scripts), Kafka, Borges, Butor, and Camus. This was thanks to an unusual initiative, a weekly addition to one of the cultural monthlies where many shorter works of international literature managed to appear. In 1964, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simon de Beauvoir made a brief visit to Estonia, and even works that were frowned upon by the central Soviet authorities—such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita—were published in the Estonian language. Presumably the Soviet authorities thought that the translation of controversial works into a language used by no more than one million people could do little or no harm to the predominantly Russian-speaking USSR.

For much of his working life, Mati Unt was involved with the theater, staging plays regularly from 1981, when he became the director and scriptwriter for the Youth Theater in Tallinn. It is often thought that the Soviet Union was entirely cut off from Western theatrical trends, but this is not entirely true. During the 1960s thaw, new ideas in the theater seeped in through the Iron Curtain and from the more liberal satellite states to the Soviet Union itself. In time, names such as Artaud, Grotowski, and Peter Brook became familiar to Estonians.

Over the past decades, Unt staged many plays of international renown by dramatists such as Sophocles, Corneille, Shakespeare, Goethe, Schiller, Strindberg, Ibsen, Chekhov, Gombrowicz, Genet, Weiss, Havel, and Beckett, plus adaptations of Euripides and Bulgakov, many of these at the Vanemuine Theater in Tartu. One of the last plays he staged was Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker, in the provincial town of Rakvere, and before his death Unt was working on a stage adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.

Mati Unt also wrote several plays of his own. As early as 1967, Unt was experimenting with the introduction of Brechtian techniques to Ancient Greek material in his play Phaethon, Son of the Sun. Perhaps Unt’s most complex stage play was Dress Rehearsal (1977) where in Pirandellian fashion he examined the life of a Soviet revolutionary through actors on a film set performing in and discussing what is in fact a rather hackneyed adaptation. The real revolutionary, now an old man, stands around the set giving monosyllabic advice, and seems rather indifferent to the myth his life is being turned into.

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Still, it is as a renewer of Estonian prose that Unt will be best remembered, at home and especially abroad. The leitmotifs and style of Mati Unt’s fiction changed little from when he first began publishing in the 1960s and was regarded as something of a Wunderkind. Unt’s prose is rooted in the mythology of everyday life, personal relationships, sexuality, and especially that of modern urban living—although the national trauma of the Soviet occupation always lurks under the surface. To this he added the deadpan humor of the eternal observer, someone who never quite succeeds in getting fully involved with other people, and yet is always present amongst them.

Unt was always interested in popular science; the most unexpected associations and references appear in his works. He was also keen on examining paranormal, esoteric, and pathological phenomena, like vampires, werewolves, cannibals, sex criminals, and those driven by obsessions and idées fixes. One critic says: “Unt’s interest in everything . . . was phenomenal. He read rapidly and much, his memory was first class and concrete, and he synthesized what he read. You could always ask him about things in many fields.”

Unt’s early novels clearly show the direction he was moving in. His first novel, Farewell, Yellow Cat!, appeared in his school annual in 1963. Here the protagonist is in an ideological battle with his aunt, a homeowner—something that was rather politically incorrect in the Soviet days. Anything harking back to bourgeois times (i.e., the 1930s of independence and the authoritarian rule of President Päts) had to be painted in a negative light. But by mentioning them at all, Unt was taking a stand.

Then came the novella The Debt (1964), which caused a literary storm. Under the edicts of Socialist Realism, Soviet literature was in those days supposed to provide models for how people should conduct their lives. Instead, Unt chose a protagonist who was having sex while still at school, and who gets a girl pregnant, something which was shocking to the hypocritically puritan Soviet society. Critic Tiit Hennoste regards this novella as Unt’s key work: “It was the first work of Estonian literature in Soviet times that caused a real scandal, and endless disputes about the behavior of the young.”

In 1970, Unt produced a Kafkaesque murder-mystery parody called Murder at the Hotel, and two years later wrote a love-triangle novella called An Empty Beach, where a young married writer has to contend with the advances made to his wife by a violinist—and which, he claimed, contains elements of self-mockery. A film version of this novella was scheduled to start shooting in late August 2005, and will continue despite the author’s death.

Under the same cover was Mattias and Kristina, which is again about a young couple struggling against society, and who end up in a kind of Tristan-and-Isolde tragedy.

This was followed in 1975 by the novella And If We Are Not Dead, Then We Are Alive Right Now. This deals with werewolves and contains numerous references to literature on the same subject, a stylistic trait that remained constant in the rest of Unt’s œuvre.

Unt’s most famous novel, Autumn Ball (1979), was translated into English—as well as Russian, Finnish, Swedish, and other languages—back in the Soviet era, and tells the story of six people living in apartments in the Tallinn high-rise suburb of Mustamäe, and who are destined to meet at the end of the novel: a poet, an architect who is a technocrat and futurist, a misanthropic barber, and a TV-addicted woman and her young son. Here, Unt’s coolly objective yet tongue-in-cheek style and interest in popular science came into their own. Apart from Things in the Night, this is the only novel by Unt made available in English. [Ed. Note: This is no longer true. See below.]

Unt’s novels and stories, as well as a few plays, were collected in two volumes in 1985, totaling some 650 pages. But Unt was not finished as an author. Some of his most significant work was still to come.

The following year, Unt published a volume of novellas and other short texts entitled They Speak and Keep Silent. Critics talk here of polyphony in the Bakhtinian sense, claiming that while there was the germ of this already in Autumn Ball, by now Unt had abandoned the traditional role of a narrator. These texts include the semi-theatrical dialogue of a woman and a taxi-driver; a short play about the nineteenth-century poet Lydia Koidula (see below) and the twentieth-century author of folk tales Aino Kallas; diary entries by a woman whose husband disappears without trace; and a postmodern text that comments on the translation of a poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Things in the Night, Unt’s second-longest novel, and second to be translated into English, appeared as Oös on asju in 1990, and deals with electricity in all its forms: a source of urban heating and lighting, but also a dangerous and untamed force. Unt also incorporates other devices from his stock of trivia: pigs, cacti, holography, urban cannibalism, and the ever-present blocks of high-rise apartments found throughout the former Soviet Union. Things in the Night continues in the postmodern vein of They Speak and Keep Silent, being full of game-playing, anarchic behavior, absence, schizophrenia, and irony. Nevertheless, there is, as in similar works from the former Soviet Bloc, a touch of light moralism in the novel.

The Estonian critic Kalev Kesküla sums the work up as follows:

The novel consists of the author’s confessions, novel fragments, snatches of plays, comments on how to write a novel, poems, minutes of interrogations, letters, and quite a few quotes from popular classics. There are amusing adventures and pointless ratiocinations. From time to time, the writer-protagonist personifies the compulsive scribbler who is unable to curb his urge to write when attempting to describe electricity, who tells yarns about accidents and shops. The characters in the novel have strayed into a world where other people’s words, clichéd behavior, and serious scientific literature are jumbled up together. In its artistic radicalism, the novel is very modernist, while very postmodern in its zest for irony. The ideas that bear the novel along appear to be a fear of people and an underlying misanthropy, themes familiar from Unt’s earlier works. Here again we have the criminals, farmers who set their dogs on those wandering through the night, arctic hysteria, and cannibalism.

In 1990, the same year as Things in the Night, Unt published a second novel, Diary of a Blood Donor. This is the usual Untian mixture of fact and fiction, and takes one of the most sacred names in Estonian literature in vain. Lydia Koidula (1843–1886) is regarded as the first Estonian woman poet of significance, and also the first poet to express an Estonian longing for independence and freedom. But Unt rather blasphe-mously weaves this national icon and her Latvian doctor and husband into a postmodern tale of vampires and a mysterious trip to Leningrad. While the leitmotif of Things in the Night is electricity, that of Diary of a Blood Donor is, predictably, blood.

After 1990, Unt published only one major work of fiction, but one with special international resonance. This was a documentary novel about Bertolt Brecht’s meeting with the Estonian-born Hella Wuolijoki, who later became a Communist and broadcaster in neighboring Finland, and is entitled Brecht at Night. (The night was clearly something with which Unt had affinities.) In true Untian style, the author mixes episodes from the history of Estonia and Finland in a tale centered around World War II, including historical documents and a rather playful description of the very bourgeois and somewhat fastidious Brecht, who would like to feel at home with the workers, but is too busy with his “alienation effect” and mistresses.

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In one of a series of articles written to mark Unt’s sixtieth birthday—January 1, 2004 —Ms. Marju Lauristin, who remembered him from his early days as a writer, wrote an appreciation entitled “Mati Unt’s Blogosphere.” In it she examines Unt’s last literary guise—that of a columnist in the cultural press, where he wrote short pieces that almost resembled “blog” entries, recording his comments on life on a weekly basis. Lauristin, now a professor of media studies, remembers Unt as someone for whom the world was “very text-centered, sound-centered, centered on the life of the mind.”

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Mati Unt lies buried in the writer’s corner of the Metsakalmistu cemetery in Tallinn, where he rubs shoulders in death with many of the key figures of nineteenth- and especially twentieth-century Estonian literature, their graves all grouped together rather like those in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey —but in a more modest, truly Estonian manner. The vaults of the abbey are here replaced by the branches of trees.

This piece originally appeared in Context Magazine No. 18. (And on the Three Percent blog back in the day . . .)

Books by Mati Unt in English Translation

Autumn Ball

Brecht at Night

Diary of a Blood Donor

Things in the Night

This episode’s music is “Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano” by John Cage (who sites Stein as an influence), performed by Orlando Bass in Vienna at the Konzertsaal @ Das MuTh, during the Impulstanz festival. 02/08/2022.

You can subscribe to the Mining the Dalkey Archive podcast at Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and watch us on YouTube.

And be sure to follow our sister podcasts: Two Month Review (Apple, Spotify) and Three Percent (Apple, Spotify) for more book talk!

The next book to be featured in this series is The Ikon Maker by Desmond Hogan.

This episode’s music is “In the Margins” by The Lemonheads.

You can subscribe to the Mining the Dalkey Archive podcast at Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and watch us on YouTube.

And be sure to follow our sister podcasts: Two Month Review (Apple, Spotify) and Three Percent (Apple, Spotify) for more book talk!

That said, I was reading a lot of authors at the time that Giles Gordon was connected to, especially B. S. Johnson, Ann Quin, and, the subject of our next Mining the Dalkey Archive podcast, Brigid Brophy.2 Gordon, an innovative novelist in his own right, also ran the Scottish branch of the Curtis Brown Agency, and represented a number of the members of this branch of boundary-pushing British writers from the latter half of the twentieth century.3 And since this was around the time that we were doing Quin and Brophy, Gordon’s presence—as an agent and a writer—was in the air.

The piece below is, for a lot of Dalkey aficionados, pretty basic, yet a nice starting point to discuss ways to approach and converse about literature, and what sets certain books apart. This is a thread that runs throughout the “Commentaries” in Context, so expect more of them in the coming months. For now, enjoy!

“Fiction As Itself” by Giles Gordon

The difficulty with writing, as with reading, is words. Only the painter uses paint—not the spectator, not even the art critic; he uses words. Only the composer uses notes—not the listener, nor the music critic; he too uses words. The writer uses words, but so does everybody else. Therefore everyone believes he or she is a potential writer.

Most people, in daily currency, use words in what they think of as a fairly literal way. Consequently they are made uneasy if a writer does not use them similarly. They expect a novelist to know more words than they do, and to employ them with greater expertise than they can. Basically though, they expect a “story” to begin at the beginning (wherever that may be). If the first four words aren’t literally “Once upon a time,” the reader should be able to assume they’re taken for granted. The story should continue through exposition, climax, denouement, until on the last page the author can write “The End,” and the reader may be confident there’s no more to come, that nothing that should have been said remains unsaid.

The reader, then, expects to understand a work of fiction in the way he understands a conversation with his butcher, his bank manager, his wife, his colleagues at work, or even—in times of energy crisis—his candlestick maker or vendor. Or, pitching it a degree higher, he expects the fiction he reads to illuminate his own conversations with his hairdresser, his solicitor, his wife, his friends, even his Member of Parliament, because he knows that the author possesses “imagination” while he probably does not.

We are conditioned to read thousands of words every day. There are probably more of them in a single issue of the Times or the Guardian or the Daily Telegraph than there are in the average new novel; and we’re conditioned, because we lead such “busy” lives, to read these words—whether in newspaper or book—as fast as we’re able to assimilate them. In practice, this means a general understanding of the surface meaning, the “factual” content, rather than being persuaded, beguiled, influenced, stimulated, and altered by the words. But the craft of even our best journalist is one thing, the art of our better novelists quite another. Or should be.

In his introduction to The Secret Life of Our Times, a collection of fiction first published in the magazine Esquire (edited by Gordon Lish; Doubleday, 1973), Tom Wolfe points out that in the 1960s in America:

Journalists began mastering the same techniques of social realism that American short-story writers had depended on for so long. They began using them in quite sophisticated ways, in fact—and without ducking behind the screen of fiction. This was the movement or, better said, the development known as the New Journalism. These two forces—film and the New Journalism—would have probably been enough by themselves to deflect serious fiction writers onto a new course, much the same way that the rise of photography held painters and sculptors against representationalism after the turn of the century.

Mr. Wolfe goes on to suggest that the contemporary American short story is now evolving a system of poetics, or formal conventions, after the manner of the classical conventions that English poets—and English readers—observed in the eighteenth century: “. . . the characters are not tied to history, geography, nationality, or political subdivisions. . . . They speak, if they speak at all, in a language that tells you nothing about class, regional, or ethnic status.” The journalist, the “factual” writer, reports a world which his reader not only recognizes but identifies with, even if it is Chile, China, or Afghanistan. This he can do uniquely well. The talented writer of fiction is much more subversive. As David Gallagher wrote recently in the Observer, reviewing a novel by the Chilean José Donoso: “The only reality it posits is that of its own pages. There is no ‘real world,’ no specific context to which it refers, and it is subversive precisely because it denies the validity, or stability, of any context.” In other words, it is itself. A novel is a novel is a novel.

Traditionally, the British have been suspicious of theories of fiction, but at a time when many of the most intelligent and imaginative novels are coming from Latin America, North America, and France, and when translation is making available to us more new books than ever before, we could do a lot worse than to pay closer attention to what critics are writing about non-British fiction. Though Tom Wolfe and David Gallagher in their remarks quoted here are writing about American fiction, we surely cannot afford to be so insular as to disregard what they are saying. Sooner or later, we must—as a fiction writing and reading nation—accept that unambitious but competent slice-of-life mediocrity (Joe Lampton, Jim Dixon, Lewis Eliot) isn’t all our novelists need be capable of.

In what seems to me a passage of the utmost importance to contemporary fiction criticism, Tom Wolfe in the introduction already quoted from suggests that the perpetrators of what he calls the new poetic in fiction are producing—legends, fables, parables, myths—neo-fables:

. . . realism has been done; it’s finished. But how can I abandon realism and all of its extraordinary power and yet transcend it? Why, by returning to a form that goes back to the very roots of literature itself, a pure and crystalline form, a form that does not depend on the soon outdated details of everyday life for its effects, a form that communicates directly with the consciousness of man, a form that is as timeless as language itself.

In spite of the universality of myth, for the writer of fiction—by authors, reviewers and readers, I’d like the reviewer or reader to say to himself: “Mr. X appears to be doing such and such. He knows his European literature, he’s read his Cervantes and Sterne and Peacock as well as his Joyce and Proust and Beckett, and his Americans, not forgetting Borges. He uses words in his latest artifact in a way that, if not peculiar to him, is not how they are used in this sentence. He’s intrigued and fascinated by them, by sentences, paragraphs, pages as sounds, shapes, rhythms as well as senses. His meanings aren’t necessarily mine, but that’s no reason to dismiss them.”

Let us be grateful to our all too few writers prepared to reveal in fictional terms their visions of the air-conditioned nightmare, and their parallel dreams, even day-dreams.

I am not asking for fiction that isn’t immediately accessible in all its glories either to be praised lavishly or to be patronized with contempt of parody. If in terms of its own originality—whatever uniqueness it possesses—the reader of a book has difficulty immediately in interpreting its territory, why shouldn’t this be regarded as a challenge? Henry Moore said recently: “Cézanne, at one time, was completely unacceptable, and now he’s part of the tradition. It’s time that makes the difference.” But I would not want to suggest that there is, in itself, any virtue in the writing of fiction in being “experimental,” assuming that were possible, which I don’t believe to be the case if the author is serious about his art. If a novel is labelled experimental or avant-garde by a reader, then it seems to me that the book has failed in its primary function, at least in terms of that one reader: to be a novel.

If content and form in fiction are inseparable, both essential aspects of a single artifact, a novel that with skill portrays its author’s individual contemporary vision cannot be experimental or avant-garde. It can only be itself, a work of fiction.

This passage first appeared as part of the introduction to Beyond the Words, edited by Giles Gordon and published by Hutchinson in 1975. It was then reprinted in CONTEXT no. 11.