The Washington Post January 15, 1995, Sunday, Final Edition Readings BYLINE: Michael Dirda SECTION: BOOK WORLD; PAGE X15 LENGTH: 2110 words After Strange Books AVID READERS, along with certain connoisseurs of wine, women or song, sometimes grow so refined in their tastes that these become eccentric, even bizarre. The typical novel, like vin ordinaire, the missionary position and the so-so soprano, no longer offers enough kick: Hollow-eyed, we hunger after more exotic and piquant sensations. For readers this cry for "madder music and for stronger wine" may lead to antiquarianism -- a passion for the odd, marginal books of the past -- or to the cult of the new, the cutting-edge and the underground. Sometimes these two extremes even meet in certain strange books. Consider, for example, the 20th-century's recurrent attempts to break away from the novel's confining linearity, the dominion of row after row of type. By cutting up steel engravings from melodramatic pulp fiction Max Ernst created nightmarish collage novels, La Femme 100 Tetes (The Hundred Headed Woman, 1929) and Une Semaine de Bontei (A Week of Kindness, 1934). Lion-headed gentlemen stare at languorous demi-mondaines in dishabille; bedsheets become swirls and eddies of water; "in the heart of Paris, Loplop, Bird Superior, brings nightly food to the streetlamps"; and throughout there shudders an air of menace, sexual transgression and torture. As Andre Breton once said, these albums suggest "the meticulous reconstruction of a crime witnessed in a dream." A similar technique, juxtaposing a cliche'd text with engravings cut from the British equivalent of an old Sears catalogue, resulted in a comic masterpiece, What a Life! (1911) by E.V. Lucas and George Morrow. Depicting the life of Baron Dropmore, of Corfe, this annotated photo album gently pokes fun at the conventions of Edwardian biography: unhappy school days, raffish upper-class friends, a dastardly crime in a country house, heartbreak, travel, wartime service and eventual family happiness. The humor depends, of course, on perfect pitch, as when a young woman wearing a ludicrous paper crown, advertising a product called Grapholine, earns the following comment: "The Duke's only daughter, who became Lady Grapholine Meadows, was never seen without her coronet, which was a masterpiece of the jeweler's art." Much this same playful sensibility, but now deliciously warped, reappears in Edward Gorey's macabre keepsake albums. The Hapless Child (1961), with elegant periphrasis and Edwardian-style pictures, relates the non-stop misfortunes of a little girl who loses her parents, suffers abuse by her schoolmates and is eventually sold to a drunken brute. When she finally runs away from her cruel tormentor, the now blind girl is struck down and killed by a car driven by her own father who, having been wrongly reported dead, has been desperately searching the city for her. In a final twist of the knife, the father never recognizes the thin and wasted creature as his own child. All this, of course, would be horrifying were it not for the sheer bathetic excess of misery; the result sends up Victorian melodrama and any number of Shirley Temple movies. Gorey's prose, dry, precise and formal, complements his pictures perfectly. In The Unstrung Harp (1953) he guys professional authorship and its ways: "The night before returning home to Mortshire Mr. Earbrass allows himself to be taken to a literary dinner in a private dining room of Le Trottoir Imbecile ... The talk deals with disappointing sales, inadequate publicity, worse than inadequate reviews, others' declining talent, and the unspeakable horror of the literary life." Gorey is well known; so is Art Spiegelman whose heavily illustrated version of a Jazz-Age poem, The Wild Party, has recently been published; but Milt Gross remains underappreciated. Gross's He Done Her Wrong (1930) is the book version of a silent movie melodrama. Using only black and white pictures (and not a single word), Gross's saga ranges from the polar gold fields to the big city, depicting the adventures of a prospector who is betrayed by his partner, a Snidely Whiplash who absconds with both the young man's money and his girl. The album is replete with haunting images: At one point the square-jawed hero and the now unhappily married heroine just barely fail to meet when a movie marquee sign is suddenly lowered onto the sidewalk, blocking their view of each other. It bears the words "Now Playing 'Fate' -- Bryan Theater." A lovely, unique piece of Americana. In these books one picture is worth at least a thousand words. But there are other means of breaking up traditional narrative. Borges transmuted the personal essay into metaphysical fiction (e.g., "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," "The Aleph"). In "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis, Tertius" the Argentine fabulist and his friend Bioy-Casares discover a single volume from a mysterious encyclopedia that appears to describe a world utterly different from our own. Employing his trademark smoke and mirrors, Nabokov turned the seemingly scholarly commentary on a 999-line poem, Pale Fire (1962), into a dizzying game of unreliable narration, madness and murder. Georges Perec's Life A User's Manual (1978) unfolds the secrets of the inhabitants of a Paris apartment house; all the chapters are pegged to the various rooms in the building. Beckett's How It Is (1960) reduces action to the almost nonexistent: In short bursts of prose, without punctuation, the text follows the movement and memory of a character named Bom who does next to nothing but crawl through a kind of cosmic mud for 200 pages. For many, myself included, these improbable stories and novels are among the greatest masterpieces of our time. BUT THERE are still other, less well known attempts to break away from the constrictive bonds of plot and narration, what E.M. Forster once summarized as "The king died, and then the queen died of grief." Michel Butor's Niagara (1965) bears the subtitle "a stereophonic novel," which means that it presents several different narrative tracks simultaneously, all of them focusing on Niagara Falls. On any page one might find a half dozen different voices: An announcer who details, in the language of tourism, the beauties of the Falls; newlyweds on their honeymoon; an old married couple revisiting the site on their 50th anniversary; the black gardeners who work at the surrounding park; a gigolo and his rich inamorata; and high-flown passages from Chateaubriand glorifying the Niagara of the early 19th century. Each of these is clearly distinguished, so that the reader may "listen" to a single voice, or several, or even attempt to follow all of them at once. The flight from authorial control reaches one apogee in Marc Saporta's Composition No. 1 (1962), which was published as a set of loose sheets in a box. "The reader is requested to shuffle these pages like a deck of cards; to cut, if he likes, with his left hand, as at a fortuneteller's. The order the pages then assume will orient X's fate." Each page here must necessarily stand on its own; yet having read through one combination I found the story of X's marriage, graphically described love affairs, and wartime memories consistently gripping. Stanley Crawford's Some Instructions, or to give its full title "Some Instructions to My Wife concerning the Upkeep of the House and Marriage, and to my Son and Daughter, concerning the Conduct of Their Childhood," does away with ordinary narrative by presenting a kind of marriage almanac -- a succession of schedules, calendars, memos and notes of husbandly advice. "The house is the Marriage, and thus to maintain and keep in good repair the house, tidy and well cleaned, is to keep the Marriage too in good repair, tidy, well cleaned." J.G. Ballard has a story that consists solely of an index. The brilliant Steven Millhauser reveals a high romantic tragedy in "Catalogue of the Exhibition: The Art of Edmund Moorash 1810-1846" (in Little Kingdoms, 1993); the text consists of museum notes on a suite of paintings. Jerome Charyn's The Tar Baby (1975) reproduces an entire issue of an imaginary literary magazine. Tar Baby's memorial number for Anatole Waxman-Weissmann (1931-1972) includes letters to the editor, advertisements, course offerings, an interview, and essays like "Auguries of Futility: The Misinventions of Anatole Waxman-Weissmann," by Seth Birdwistell, and editorials by W.W. Korn, Bret Harte Professor of Rhetorical Arts and Sciences at Galapagos Junior College. By reading through the issue one learns about the improbable history, rivalries and friendships of an intellectual security guard whose "lifework consisted of a trunkful of notes, an aborted biography [of Wittgenstein] and one elliptical essay endlessly revised." Such fun with academics also characterizes Gilbert Sorrentino's mammoth Mulligan Stew, which parodies virtually every form of contemporary writing. The novel even reprints an entire chapbook of wonderfully bad, confessional poetry, Lorna Flambeaux's "The Sweat of Love," and a short play, actually a masque, about baseball (and other matters) called "Flawless Play Restored." Sorrentino dedicates this book to Brian O'Nolan, better known as Flann O'Brien, whose At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) is itself a well-spring of literary playfulness and Irish humor. O'Brien's second masterpiece, The Third Policeman (1967), takes the idea of the unreliable narrator to one logical end: The hero turns out to have been dead throughout most of the book. Peace, by science fiction novelist Gene Wolfe, is another example of such post-mortem fiction. Wolfe enjoys narrative trickiness: In The Shadow of the Torturer (1980, first part of a series) the protagonist can forget nothing; in Soldier of the Mist (1987, with a sequel) the hero loses his memory each time he goes to sleep. Henry Green's classic proletarian novel, Living (1929), avoids using the definite article (the) throughout; Georges Perec's novel La Disparition (1969) never uses the letter E; William Gaddis tells JR (1975) and A Frolic of His Own (1994), both recipients of National Book Awards, almost entirely in speech and without identifying the speakers. Of course, as all you "gentes and laitymen, full stoppers and semi-colonials, hybreds and lubberds" know, the masterpiece of word magic remains James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1939), that epic tale about "the farce of dustiny." No doubt its artificial language, built around the "abnilisation of the etym," encouraged Anthony Burgess to create his own Russified English for A Clockwork Orange (1962) and Russell Hoban to remake current speech and slang for Riddley Walker (1980): Both novels, set in grim futures, are serious moral fables made exhilarating through their poetic languages. TO CONCLUDE this mini-survey of the wilder shores of fiction -- and I have failed to mention William Burroughs's cutouts, William Gass's typographical experiments (Willie Master's Lonesome Wife, 1968) and many others -- let me praise one of the most original and appealing artistic projects of our time: Tom Phillips's A Humument (1987). This "treated Victorian novel" relates "the sad story of Bill Toge" and his progress in love and heartbreak. What Phillips did was this: He took a late Victorian novel entitled A Human Document, by W.H. Mallock, and transformed its pages by blotting out unwanted text and overlaying various pictorial patterns to help link the words he wanted to retain. Phillips decorates each page with his own artwork but never adds any words; still he manages to create out of the template of Mallock's novel a strange and haunting poetry, based on "realities broken by quivering peculiarities." Several pages are playfully erotic, many comment on the vagaries of the artistic life, others approach prose poetry: "turn to serious syllables soft as your body in the blue film of the hush and whisper of your mind." Phillips, naturally enough, belongs to "a generation in love with chancy art." Don't some of these experiments with narrative form resemble today's creative cutting edge, hypertext and CD-ROM? As is so often the case, the utterly new turns out to be very much like the unjustly forgotten. Though the next 50 years should see some startling developments in the art of electronic storytelling, I doubt whether any of them will come as a complete surprise. "The splendid illustrations of novels and children's books ... intended for persons who can scarcely read are among the few things capable of moving to tears those who can say they have read everything." -- Andre Breton Readings welcomes comments, book lists, etc. Write to Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World, Washington DC 20071. COUNTRY: EUROPE (69%); UNITED KINGDOM (69%); SUBJECT: BC-01/15/95-X15REA BOOKS ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY (90%); RECORDING INDUSTRY (90%); WOMEN (78%); PERSON: EDWARD GOREY (70%); MILT GROSS (68%); MAX ERNST (53%); LOAD-DATE: Jan 16, 1995 LANGUAGE: ENGLISH SERIES: Occasional GRAPHIC: ILLUSTRATION, SUSAN DAVIS FOR TWP TYPE: REVIEW Copyright 1995 The Washington Post Search Terms [(peace "gene wolfe")](28) View search details Search Details You searched for: (peace "gene wolfe") Source [The Washington Post] Show Full with Indexing Sort Relevance Date/Time February 20 2010 10:10:53 View first documentView previous document 15 of 28 View next documentView last document Back to Top LexisNexis® About LexisNexis | Terms & Conditions | My ID Copyright ©2010LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.All rights reserved.