Tuesday, July 18, 2006
David Markson Slanders Jean Genet
David Markson is an American avant-garde novelist I’d heard of but never read. So when I came across a copy of This Is Not a Novel in a bookshop I eagerly snapped it up.
The title of This Is Not a Novel puns on Magritte’s painting entitled This is not a pipe, which was one of the 22 paintings included in the artist’s first one-man show in the USA, in New York in January 1936. It was a copy of an earlier, almost identical work Ceci n’est pas une pipe painted in 1929.
The joke in the Magritte title is to do with representation and reality. Magritte’s immaculate painting of a pipe is not a pipe because it is a painting. The joke subverts all titles claiming to offer a window on to a real object. This Is Not A Hay Wain. This Is Not The Mona Lisa.
Markson adapts the joke to the genre of the novel. His book is not a novel because it has no characters and no setting. It does not tell a story. Its form is fractured. It consists largely of facts and quotations, separated by spacing. For example:
Flaubert died of what was then called apoplexy, i.e., presumably a stroke.
If its length is not considered a merit it has no other, said Edmund Waller of Paradise Lost.
Thomas Hardy wrote a carefully sanitized third-person biography of himself and left it behind for his widow to pretend she was author of.
This Is Not A Novel is more or less an anthology of bits and pieces. And probably almost all readers would agree with the title and protest: this is not a novel. And yet it is. It has a protagonist, known as “Writer”. It is Writer’s presence and voice which shapes the material in the text. Writer explains he is “weary unto death of making up stories” and that “Writer is equally tired of inventing characters”. It is not hard to believe that “Writer” is a persona for Markson himself, an elderly novelist nearing the end of his career.
In place of a conventional narrative the reader is faced with a blizzard of information. It appears haphazard yet it has a clear interest and purpose. The focus is on the lives of novelists, poets and painters, and, less often, musicians and photographers and other figures. We are given interesting biographical snippets about their lives. Often the focus is on the cause of their death. Another common theme is misunderstanding. Major creative figures often have little to say to each other when they meet. Their critical judgements are wildly unreliable. The reader’s response to much of this information is likely to be I didn’t know that and How ironic! Ultimately it’s a kind of dazzling collage of fascinating fragments. And it's easy to imitate. Here’s my hommage:
Charlie J. Fatburger. The name Truman Capote gave to a bulldog puppy he bought in the pet department of Harrods.
I cannot see what the retailing of such sick fantazing can do but minister to the wholesale sickness – Christopher Ricks, reviewing Jerzy Kosinski’s Cockpit.
Unaware of the songwriter’s death a month earlier, Clarence M. Kelley, Director of the FBI, passed the file on Phil Ochs over to the Secret Service, advising that Ochs was still a very real and present threat to the life of the President of the United States.
This Is Not A Novel is pitched at a well-educated reader. It assumes you know who “Constanze” is. It assumes that you are interested that someone (who?) once jeeringly referred to “The precious, pinchbeck, ultimately often flat prose of Vladimir Nabokov.” The book’s central themes are death, creativity and reputation. And it is a compelling read, though perhaps, like its form, in snippets, rather than in one huge gulp.
On the last page of the book you discover why Writer is so interested in one of its central themes. So it is, in the end, a novel of sorts: its minimalist story ends with a climax: a revelation, and a pleasurable last sentence.
You can find an interesting take on Markson’s novel here.
But I have one problem with This Is Not A Novel. As a body of writing it relies on the authenticity of the biographical materials it recycles. It rests on the assumption that the narrator knows far more than the reader and that the reader will find this new information interesting and entertaining. Everything is factual. Except that it isn’t. Most of the material that Markson displays was new to me. I chuckled, I gasped, I thought: how ironic! But then I came up against a reference to an author whose biography I’ve recently read. And the alarm bells started ringing.
Jean Genet was a paid informer for the Nazis in World War II. (p. 58)
This Is Not A Novel was first published in 2001. And Edmund White’s very comprehensive, authoritative and critically acclaimed biography Genet was published eight years earlier. So there’s not really any excuse for Markson getting it wrong. But he does. To say that “Jean Genet was a paid informer for the Nazis in World War II” is simply not true.
It’s a bizarre slander because it assumes that Genet was in possession of information useful to the Nazis. The insinuation, presumably, is that he was passing on information about the Resistance. In reality Genet spent much of the period 1939-44 in prison. He was a low-life petty thief. When he emerged from prison he kept company with fellow homosexuals, thieves, book dealers and writers He was on the margins of society, not remotely politically engaged. He was not involved in any capacity with the Resistance. Jean Genet was never in possession of any information likely to be of the slightest interest to the German occupation.
In prison Genet read Proust for the first time and his life was transfigured. He began writing his first book, Our Lady of the Flowers. Genet was introduced to Cocteau, who was impressed by his writing. But by 1943, a compulsive thief, Genet was back in prison again. This time, as a repeat offender, he was in serious trouble. He ended up in a deportation centre for the concentration camps. He was only spared from this fate by the behind the scenes intervention of Cocteau. Cocteau’s friendship resulted in Genet becoming the object of scurrilous attacks in the collaborationist and Fascist press.
I’m baffled as to what it was from which Markson derived his false belief that Genet was a Nazi stool pigeon. A newspaper article? A magazine? It’s a troubling error because if Markson is wrong about Genet, how can the reader be certain he isn’t making other careless mistakes about many of the other figures he mentions?
The title of This Is Not a Novel puns on Magritte’s painting entitled This is not a pipe, which was one of the 22 paintings included in the artist’s first one-man show in the USA, in New York in January 1936. It was a copy of an earlier, almost identical work Ceci n’est pas une pipe painted in 1929.
The joke in the Magritte title is to do with representation and reality. Magritte’s immaculate painting of a pipe is not a pipe because it is a painting. The joke subverts all titles claiming to offer a window on to a real object. This Is Not A Hay Wain. This Is Not The Mona Lisa.
Markson adapts the joke to the genre of the novel. His book is not a novel because it has no characters and no setting. It does not tell a story. Its form is fractured. It consists largely of facts and quotations, separated by spacing. For example:
Flaubert died of what was then called apoplexy, i.e., presumably a stroke.
If its length is not considered a merit it has no other, said Edmund Waller of Paradise Lost.
Thomas Hardy wrote a carefully sanitized third-person biography of himself and left it behind for his widow to pretend she was author of.
This Is Not A Novel is more or less an anthology of bits and pieces. And probably almost all readers would agree with the title and protest: this is not a novel. And yet it is. It has a protagonist, known as “Writer”. It is Writer’s presence and voice which shapes the material in the text. Writer explains he is “weary unto death of making up stories” and that “Writer is equally tired of inventing characters”. It is not hard to believe that “Writer” is a persona for Markson himself, an elderly novelist nearing the end of his career.
In place of a conventional narrative the reader is faced with a blizzard of information. It appears haphazard yet it has a clear interest and purpose. The focus is on the lives of novelists, poets and painters, and, less often, musicians and photographers and other figures. We are given interesting biographical snippets about their lives. Often the focus is on the cause of their death. Another common theme is misunderstanding. Major creative figures often have little to say to each other when they meet. Their critical judgements are wildly unreliable. The reader’s response to much of this information is likely to be I didn’t know that and How ironic! Ultimately it’s a kind of dazzling collage of fascinating fragments. And it's easy to imitate. Here’s my hommage:
Charlie J. Fatburger. The name Truman Capote gave to a bulldog puppy he bought in the pet department of Harrods.
I cannot see what the retailing of such sick fantazing can do but minister to the wholesale sickness – Christopher Ricks, reviewing Jerzy Kosinski’s Cockpit.
Unaware of the songwriter’s death a month earlier, Clarence M. Kelley, Director of the FBI, passed the file on Phil Ochs over to the Secret Service, advising that Ochs was still a very real and present threat to the life of the President of the United States.
This Is Not A Novel is pitched at a well-educated reader. It assumes you know who “Constanze” is. It assumes that you are interested that someone (who?) once jeeringly referred to “The precious, pinchbeck, ultimately often flat prose of Vladimir Nabokov.” The book’s central themes are death, creativity and reputation. And it is a compelling read, though perhaps, like its form, in snippets, rather than in one huge gulp.
On the last page of the book you discover why Writer is so interested in one of its central themes. So it is, in the end, a novel of sorts: its minimalist story ends with a climax: a revelation, and a pleasurable last sentence.
You can find an interesting take on Markson’s novel here.
But I have one problem with This Is Not A Novel. As a body of writing it relies on the authenticity of the biographical materials it recycles. It rests on the assumption that the narrator knows far more than the reader and that the reader will find this new information interesting and entertaining. Everything is factual. Except that it isn’t. Most of the material that Markson displays was new to me. I chuckled, I gasped, I thought: how ironic! But then I came up against a reference to an author whose biography I’ve recently read. And the alarm bells started ringing.
Jean Genet was a paid informer for the Nazis in World War II. (p. 58)
This Is Not A Novel was first published in 2001. And Edmund White’s very comprehensive, authoritative and critically acclaimed biography Genet was published eight years earlier. So there’s not really any excuse for Markson getting it wrong. But he does. To say that “Jean Genet was a paid informer for the Nazis in World War II” is simply not true.
It’s a bizarre slander because it assumes that Genet was in possession of information useful to the Nazis. The insinuation, presumably, is that he was passing on information about the Resistance. In reality Genet spent much of the period 1939-44 in prison. He was a low-life petty thief. When he emerged from prison he kept company with fellow homosexuals, thieves, book dealers and writers He was on the margins of society, not remotely politically engaged. He was not involved in any capacity with the Resistance. Jean Genet was never in possession of any information likely to be of the slightest interest to the German occupation.
In prison Genet read Proust for the first time and his life was transfigured. He began writing his first book, Our Lady of the Flowers. Genet was introduced to Cocteau, who was impressed by his writing. But by 1943, a compulsive thief, Genet was back in prison again. This time, as a repeat offender, he was in serious trouble. He ended up in a deportation centre for the concentration camps. He was only spared from this fate by the behind the scenes intervention of Cocteau. Cocteau’s friendship resulted in Genet becoming the object of scurrilous attacks in the collaborationist and Fascist press.
I’m baffled as to what it was from which Markson derived his false belief that Genet was a Nazi stool pigeon. A newspaper article? A magazine? It’s a troubling error because if Markson is wrong about Genet, how can the reader be certain he isn’t making other careless mistakes about many of the other figures he mentions?
# posted by Ellis : 8:44 PM
