One Thing to Another

This is how Polish writer Magdalena Tulli's novel, Flaw (Archipelago Books), begins:

First will come the costumes. The tailor will supply them all wholesale. He'll select the designs off-handedly and, with a few snips of the shears, will summon to life a predictable repertoire of gestures. See--scraps of fabric and thread in a circle of light, while all around is darkness. Out of the turmoil will emerge a fold of cloth, the germ of a tuck fastened with a pin. The tuck will create everything else. If it's sufficiently deep, it will call into existence a glittering watch chain on a protruding belly, labored breathing, and a bald head bedewed with perspiration. One thing leads to another.

One thing leads to another, not just in the tailor's work but in the work of fiction before us, the creation of which is being laid out much as the tailor lays out the cloth to cut. The narrative begins with the tailor, who is needed for that "predictable repertoire of gestures" his actions call forth, the marks of "character" to be found in the costumes worn. Additional items--a maid's dress, a notary's collar, a student's jacket, a general's uniform--are made, all for the "characters" who will later wear them as they play their roles in the story just beginning.

Soon the setting for this story, a city square, is introduced:

The place may look like some quiet neighborhood of a large city, where squares of this sort are encountered at very step amid the dense network of streets. But the vast whole to which this fragment belongs is not accessible. On each of the several streets connecting to the square, the pavement comes to an end just beyond the corner. Anyone who unduly trusts the solid look of the basalt cobbles and wishes to go elsewhere will immediately be mired in sandy excavations, amid the blank walls of apartment buildings, under windows drawn in chalk directly onto the plaster. Distant steeples and indistinct towers rise over the roofs and suggest the dimensions of the entirety of which this square is supposedly a part. Yet the whole itself must remain conjecture, as imponderable as accomplished facts or as forecasts of the future. Maintaining its substance and its walls and rooftops multiplied in real space would be impossible for me, and also unnecessary. In the meantime, the streetcar is already moving on its track. This will be the zero-line streetcar, the only line there is, and more than sufficient for the needs of a single square. Let the shape of the zero, unhurriedly described, accentuate the extraordinary qualities of the circle, a figure perfectly enclosed, whose whole is encompassed by a continuous line without losing a thing.

On the one hand, it is relatively easy to evoke a sense of "realism." All that is needed is a flower bed fillled with "small yellow blooms," some "ornamental railings on the balconies and lace curtains in the windows," the "basalt cobbles." On the other, to extend this realism to the "vast whole" beyond the square and its provisional, self-enclosed existence is not worth the trouble, is impossible to maintain and of little value if the "world" as represented in a city square is as much world as the novelist needs to portray it in fiction. Like the zero-line streetcar, this aesthetic world can be "perfectly enclosed. . .encompassed by a continuous line without losing a thing."

Soon enough, the characters themselves start making their appearances, characters such as the local policeman:

The policeman moves on as the streetcar continues its route around the square. How would that rather faded uniform sit on me? Maybe it would pinch under the arms? If I am the policeman, there was a time when I risked my neck in the trenches for the emblem that appears on my cap.

"I" is the narrative voice whose invocation of place and character we are witnessing as he/she/it brings the novel we are reading to "life." It should not be associated directly with the author but is instead a kind of character the author has created, a "novelist" whose job it is to bring together all of the elements that are needed to set the narrative into motion and keep it functioning. Sometimes this narrative voice conveys the story--or what is ultimately the story of the story--as a third-person narrator, outside all of the other characters and focusing on them one by one, but at times reconsiders the point of view and offers fragments related in the first person: "If I am the policeman. . ."; "If I am the notary's maid, on the second floor of the apartment building at number seven I take the vegetables out the basket. . ."; "If I am the notary, I shave with caution, and my hand never trembles. Before my eyes I can still see the blood I just wiped off the mirror, a reminder that my body is tired and all set to lower its tone." At times it is as if the narrator is leaving it up to us to decide whether we prefer the "inside" or the "outside" perspective, or, perhaps, whether in the end such a distinction is very meaningful.

Flaw relates what happens on this square over the course of a single day. And it is an eventful day. Most dramatically, a large group of "refugees" emerges from the streetcar and crowds into the square, to the extreme consternation of the local residents. Eventually the refugess are confined en masse in a cellar, but at the end of the day it is discovered that they have disappeared An Army general is disconcerted by this turn of events, reflecting that "What he ordered to be locked up should have remained so, period. . .The absence of the crowd is nothing but a special form of presence, and what has changed is in essence of secondary importance. Since the refugees are no longer here, they must be somewhere else, that much is obvious" The refugees seem to be a consequence of a coup that has taken place somewhere amid the "sandy excavations" outside the square but that we know about only through the rumors circulating through the square and that may have been connected to a loud explosion heard earlier in the day.

The novel ends with a reverie about what may have happened to the refugees if they had managed to make it to "America." The narrator concludes:

Happy endings are never happier than is possible. It might seem that, like a springtime thaw, they bring the promise of a new beginning, but the truth is otherwise. They merely lay bare the rotting matter of dashed hopes. Fortunate turns of events bring no relief, consumed as they are by the mold of unintentionally ironic meanings, and shot through with the musty despair of past seasons. And it is from them, these endings which end nothing, that new stories will grow.

One senses that the next day on this (presumably) East European square would unfold much like the day the novel has related, if not in detail then certainly in essence. That the novel has managed to convey this essence is perhaps a mark of its "success," but Flaw also seems to suggest that representing a bare essence of human existence is the best that fiction can do. By dramatizing the seat-of-the-pants process by which fiction is composed, highlighting the conventional signals of "setting" or "character" that guide our reading of fiction, disclosing the extent to which fiction is the active struggle to incorporate reality within an aesthetic scheme, not a completed account of reality, Flaw exposes the "flaw" in thinking that fiction can be a seamless represention of the real. It is artifice all the way down, and it does no justice, either to fiction or to the reality it seeks to encompass, to deny that fact.

Ultimately the true success of Flaw is its dynamic--I would even say entertaining--performance of this internal drama about the act of fiction-making.

ADDENDUM Archipelago Books has without question become an indispensable source of translated fiction, but I wonder whether it would be possible to include with its volumes a preface or critical introduction, presumably by a scholar or critic familiar with the author's work and/or with that author's national literature. Such an introduction might be especially useful for readers curious about a writer like Tulli but who really have no context within which to place her work. In lieu of that, this interview with the translator of Flaw is available.

Comments

[Daniel]

Wow JDJ.

[Dan Green]

No, Jonathan David, I do not make an argument about various people in the publishing industries. This post is a review of Magdalena Tulli's Flaw. If you wish, I am making an interpretive argument that Flaw, or Tulli, is "saying" something about artifice in fiction or about the limitations of a certain kind of realism, but I am not making an argument separate from my interpretation of the novel. We can have a separate conversation about the publishing industry or about realism as a representation of the real, if you;d like, but not on this post.

[Jonathan David Jackson]

Dan:

No, not *at all*. I do not misread your critical review. It is an interpretation that contains an argument and I took pains to actually QUOTE your words.

Even here you keep saying "those who would call fiction not a 'construction'" without clarifying who exactly you are talking about.

- ***WHO*** are you talking about?

- Who claims that fiction is not a construction and when did/do they claim this?

- WHO are you talking about when you said "It is artifice all the way down, and it does no justice, either to fiction or to the reality it seeks to encompass, to deny that fact"?

- WHO denies this, Dan, and when did they deny it?

Looking at the thrust of your posts as a whole it is reasonable to assume that you might be talking about people in various publishing industries but it is unclear WHO you are talking about.

I'm not sure why you would be reluctant to answer such direct questions and continue such a conversation. Now, don't get me wrong: I can make mistakes of reading but in this case I asked pretty clear questions and read your interpretation quite carefully.

My first name is "Jonathan David" but feel free to call me Jon.

Best wishes to you!

JDJ

[Dan Green]

Jonathan:

I think you mistake my interpretive comments about the novel for an "argument" I'm making. My post is not about "corporate publishing" but about Magdalena Tulli's novel. I interpret the moves she makes in Flaw to be an implicit critique of "world-building" in fiction. Those who might deny that artifice goes "all the way down" are those who have much more confidence than I can see in Tulli that fiction can be socially useful or politically engaged. Or those who would call fiction not a "construction" but a "reflection" of "real life." Certainly those who think fiction should be "seamless," either as a depiction of reality or simply as entertainment, are not going to appreciate Tulli's exposure of the seams.

[Jonathan David Jackson]

Dear Dan,

This is a fine review of a novel that I thought few people besides myself had read.

I hope you will answer my questions about an element of your critical approach. I have the utmost respect for your interpretations and we share a love for James Purdy and Stephen Dixon's work and you are the only person heretofore to have recognized Dixon's particular construction of life and his particular form of free indirect style--radical (in his case) approximation of character's assumed diction within the narrative voice--in some of his stories and novels.

My questions:

You say of FLAW in your review "It is artifice all the way down, and it does no justice, either to fiction or to the reality it seeks to encompass, to deny that fact."

- Who denies(d) the fact that the novel is constructed, is artifice?

- Who denies that the novel in question is constructed as fiction, or that the construction of "reality" is a highly created, stylized formal experience?

- Who is it in general or in the past (or who are you referring to) that denies the artifice of more commercial fiction (the kind on the bestseller lists) or fiction like Purdy's, Dixon's or Tulli's.

I share your extremely marked and often very vehement frustration with the narrowness of some (though not all) of the editors, agents, booksellers, and reviewers' tastes of the fiction that gets green-lit with marketing budgets and supported, as it were, in a drive to gain high numbers of readers (and handsome paydays for authors).

I am genuinely interested in knowing where in corporate publishing industries people intimate that fiction is not artifice, or constructed experiences. Where in corporate publishing do people deny the fact that the fiction is a wholly constructed experience of human existence?

*** It seems to me that there is an attendant problem: after the 1980s, it was the artifice of NONFICTION that was and still is often denied. There is an often extremely unintelligent ruse performed when reviewers and sellers ignore the constructedness of NONfiction. This unintelligence leads to James Freyian fiascoes--and there have been many such fiascoes revolving around the artifice of nonfiction. ***

In the market and reviewing of FICTION I see narrow and even problematic approaches. I see the favoring of particular fictional techniques and styles over others in big-money deals. But, rarely, do I see ad copy or reviews that get into neo-Aristotelian, Auerbachian, or experimental questions of mimesis--or debates around whether or the degree to which the fiction represents "reality." James Woods says he hates a particular kind of "hysterical realism" but even he wouldn't claim that works of fiction in general aren't constructions or formal embodiments of lives ideally or presumedly led.

Even the smashingly great Eric Auerbach (who, as graduate students know, wrote MIMESIS) spoke about the *kinds* of representations of reality--the kinds of artifice--that major works of Western European literature employed. MIMESIS was about the styles of construction that were or still are canonical. That those styles *are* constructions was the point.

You say, "On the one hand, it is relatively easy to evoke a sense of 'realism'."

But Dan, it really is not easy to evoke a sense of realism, either with Tulli's approach or with the approach of aesthetically lesser novelists like James Patterson who by their own admission are writing commercial fiction that cater to particular audiences needs for certain kinds of fictional construction. Each approach carries its own difficulties and challenges, even if the result, in my view, is better in some and not others.

"Sense" is the operative word for me in the phrase "sense of 'realism'". Even the science fiction, horror, and magical tales that I sometimes adore keep referencing back to human beings lives as our interpretation of history and present existence conveys it to be. Even genre fiction--avowedly removed from "reality"--is about our relationship, our sense, of life as it might be led.

So who in publishing or elsewhere denies the artifice of any of the kinds of fiction that you address?

What is the prior evidence that provokes the arguments that you make in the passages from your review that I quote in my comment here?

As ever, enjoying reading your critical voice:

JDJ