“The logical extreme of story-within-story must be the novel within a novel. The drawbacks are obvious, but the trick has been worked successfully more than once.”
Photograph: ©Sarah Lee
Change of Level
Adam Mars-Jones shares the appeal of inlaid jewels in literature.
As a writer I'm a bit Old Guard about point of view, preferring to explore the world through a single set of perceptions. It's not exactly a matter of principle, it's just that when I reach the point in a piece of writing where there might be benefits to slip into another point of view (variety, contrast, a further set of possibilities), I'd rather stay with what I've got and see where it leads me. Perhaps what it comes down to is that switching from one point of view to another would feel like a cheat, letting me off the hook of a limitation which over time might be made to bear fruit.
As a reader, though, I'm not so hard-line, and I particularly enjoy what I suppose you'd call change of level -- not just a lateral shift from one person's perspective to another but the introduction of a new element, like an inlaid jewel. Stories within stories, wheels within wheels. The great master of Chinese-box construction would have to be Isak Dinesen, a.k.a. I-once-had-a-farm- in-Africa Streep-voiced Karen Blixen, in her Gothic Tales and Winter's Tales. I remember being particularly impressed by a story of hers about a bishop and a flood -- it must be "The Deluge At Norderney" in Seven Gothic Tales. Even a great modern practitioner of the story form like Alice Munro can't quite bring off the Chinese-box trick, it seems to me, when she tries to tell stories within stories in some of her later work.
One extra refinement is when the inlaid jewel is a free-standing piece of writing. Probably the first time I came across such an experiment was when I read Nigel Dennis's Cards of Identity in my early twenties. This novel, first published in 1955, has always had admirers (Auden an early one) without ever quite breaking out of the micro-cult bracket. It's been republished a few times and never quite catches on, though it hasn't altogether died either. The case histories presented to the Identity Club are fantastically funny pieces of writing, and Dennis has the daring to insert into his book a full-length pastiche of a Shakespeare play. It recapitulates the novel's themes and contains lines I will probably remember as long as the real thing, like someone starting a fire on the beach after a shipwreck with the words, "This hotty beam exonerates my chills."
John Irving's The World According To Garp plays a specialised variation on the same technique, by including examples of the writer hero's work. I read it when it came out in 1978 and found it overpowering. I wasn't sure I liked the author's personality since he was equally lacking in humour and charm, but he had an implacable narrative gift. I hardly dare go back to the book, since so much of his subsequent work has been disastrous. Books like Until I Find You and Last Night At Twisted River are unbelievably flat and soggy, and don't contain anything remotely as interesting as the root idea of Garp: that the real danger to the hero's family is not the outside world but the man obsessed with keeping it safe. Perhaps the best way to preserve my memory of Garp's excellence is to stay well away from it.
When I was on the jury of the Booker Prize in 1995 we collectively passed over Penelope Fitzgerald's last novel The Blue Flower for the shortlist, though I argued for it as eloquently as I could. This failure was particularly frustrating because we could only agree on five choices, so there seemed to be a natural vacancy for it. The trouble was that I couldn't rally enough support to turn the tide for the book, though I remember Kate Kellaway being in agreement. If there had been two potential vacancies we could perhaps have played some politics (vote for my candidate and I'll vote for yours), but with just the one spot this wasn't possible. Eventually we gave up and submitted a five-book shortlist.
The minority verdict was vindicated when The Blue Flower received more Books of the Year nominations than any other. Since then I've read most of Fitzgerald's novels, and particularly enjoyed the M.R. James pastiche ghost story inlaid into The Gate Of Angels. I can't be the only one, either, since A.S. Byatt once described it on the radio as James's best piece of work, presumably forgetting for a moment where she'd read it.
The logical extreme of story-within-story must be the novel within a novel. The drawbacks are obvious, but the trick has been worked successfully more than once. Percival Everett's 2003 satire Erasure is the story of a black academic from a secure middle-class background outraged by the narrow range of cultural options on offer. Illiterate misery memoirs of inner-city brutalisation are fêted by Oprah, while his own experience and ambitions are perceived as not black enough -- the product of self-hatred, even. He retaliates by writing My Pafology, a grotesque exaggeration and parody of the degraded pap he hates so much. It's published anonymously and becomes horribly successful, to the point where it is entered for a prize of whose jury he is a member, and everyone else mistakes his denunciation of it for snobbery and sour grapes.
My Pafology is printed whole in the middle of Erasure, on paper with a yellow tinge. Satire fails when it holds together too coherently, but the discomfort of Erasure doesn't dissipate. My Pafology despite its rancour and ugliness has an undeniable vitality -- though it's not clear whether this is a subtle intended effect or a gloriously perverse own goal.
A few months ago in the Aldeburgh bookshop I picked up a new hardback with a red-hot recommendation by Saul Bellow. I was intrigued because, after all, dead men tell no tales and blurb no blurbs. Looking at the publication details I saw that Austin Wright's Tony and Susan had first been published in 1993. I was really struck by the fact that someone at Atlantic Books had cared deeply enough about the book to give it another chance in hardback. Normally it's writers who persist in their folly, in hopes of becoming wise, and it's wonderful when a publisher joins the party of fools.
I have to admit that I didn't buy the book -- sorry, Aldeburgh Bookshop staff, but that's how I make my London Library subscription justify the expense. While My Pafology takes up a solid wedge of Erasure, Nocturnal Animals is dispersed through Tony and Susan in separate chapters. It's a thriller written by the heroine's first husband. She reads it reluctantly at first, not wanting it to be bad but not particularly wanting to be reminded of him either. The obvious twist would be for the inlaid novel to be some sort of revenge on her, but the relationship between the two stories is more complex. Tony's story is all extremity, Susan's all ordinariness, yet they intercommunicate. It's even hard to say which story is outside the other -- Susan's (because she's reading the book) or Edward's novel (because it comes from a deeper level of Susan's past, pre-dating her second husband and her children). The two stories share the book as the two lobes of a brain share a skull, with separate thoughts but feelings in common, both having access to the nervous system but along different pathways. Or, to quote one of Isak Dinesen's best cod-Oriental epigrams, they're like "two locked caskets, each containing the key to the other."
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Cedilla by Adam Mars-Jones is published by Faber and Faber
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Thursday, 20 January, 2011
In Features
- Change of Level
- ON DONKEYS IN LITERATURE
- What Can We Learn From Literary Frauds?
- Lest We Forget...
- On the Pleasure of Reading Aloud
- A Point of View by Jonathan Dee
- On Fashionable Despair and the Narrative Novel
- Crossing Over by Naomi Alderman
- Panic! by Alex Preston
- Collage is Not a Refuge for the Compositionally Disabled by David Shields
- Cash, Comfort and the Genesis of Literary Monsters by Henry Sutton
- Review of the Year 2009
- Tales from the City
- Chicago!
- Democracy Kills
- Talking the Shifting Talk
- Philosophical Balm for Troubled Times
- Concealed Identites
- A Small Catalogue of the Uncurated
- Literary Islands
- Christmas on the Page
- Natural Pursuits
- A Few of My Favourite Things
- The End of the World as We Know It
- Troy Stories
- Inspiring a Great Scot
- Writing Abroad
- The Fog of War
Buy books
Cedilla
Pilcrow
Blind Bitter Happiness
The World According To Garp (Black Swan)
Seven Gothic Tales: The Roads Round Pisa; The Old Chevalier; the Monkey; The Deluge at Norderney; The Supper at Elsinore; The Dreamers; The Poet (Penguin Modern Classics)
Books are purchased through Amazon UK. Link opens in a new window.
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