Thursday, January 24, 2013

call it a state of things, an economy of conditions



The narrator of George MacDonald's Lilith chases through a mirror after a man who is a raven, and once he is through the mirror he tells the reader that he has trouble explaining to them what he can see because it is an economy of conditions.

He says, "I beg my reader to aid me in the endeavour of making myself intelligible -- if here understanding be indeed possible between us. I was in a world, or call it a state of things, an economy of conditions, an idea of existence, so little correspondent with the ways and means of this world ... that the best choice I can make of word or phrase is but an adumbration of what I would convey."

So there's a trick he can't do, this narrator, and he feels aware that he can't do it, the naming of experience in words on paper, and it might have been possible to solve his problem as Georg Trakl does, by juxtaposing words poetically and strongly and thereby meeting one economy of conditions with this other economy of conditions known as poetry (afterwards he might have felt satisfied that he has risen to the challenge even if he has not won), but the narrator's serious temperament leaves him disabled in this particular area, him, instead, wanting to write prosaically and be the dutiful person that Mikhail Zoschchenko was pretending to be in his Nightingale novella, that decent reporter who lets you know with jokeless fidelity what the character looks like and how he ate.

Now he will ask the reader to aid him in "the endeavour of making myself intelligible," begging this as if it is a special request, as if it is not the exact thing all readers are called upon to do the moment they put their eyes on the pages and agree to read; he encourages them to clasp him extra-tightly, and come very close to the story, and merge with it, because it is set in a strange place and the reader's role needs to be reaffirmed he thinks; they need their spines stiffened and they are being alerted to the existence of a fact they will discover fully much later in the book: that Lilith is a religious allegory.

To disarm the reader MacDonald pretends that the narrator is failing them, and writes as if they should think that the characters are real, and that these real characters should see a thing that is actually there, but the magical landscape on the other side of the mirror thwarts him (though not really: it is playing into his hands, into the plans of the author), this landscape being inhabited by things that correspond only vaguely and irregularly to princesses, leopards, giants, white leeches, loaves of bread, and the other words that the narrator comes up with, yet the reader probably forgets after a short while that the narrator did not really see a leopard, a princess, a white leech, but according to himself ("the best choice I can make of word or phrase is but an adumbration of what I would convey") he saw only some phenomena that had to be suggestively expressed in those terms or else never be talked about or mentioned, and then the book would be unwritable and it would not be in front of you in your hand or anywhere else.

White leeches possibly exist somewhere but not in the place the narrator has visited, not in the mirror-land for whose sake he has written the words "white leech."


8 comments:

  1. Good, as they say, good catch. This reader certainly forgot. That is a rich sentence.

    I'm reading Hofmannsthal, a writer who actively fights with language and its limited ability to represent - well, represent what, I am still not sure about that. But he is open about his frustration.

    I wonder what he would have done in the face of MacDonald's placidity or resignation (or laughter) in the face of the inadequacy of language?

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    1. I wonder. The absence of fight in MacDonald's narrator interests me. This inability to describe whatever he's seeing doesn't oppress him. He mentions it and keeps going without digging or fretting or getting angry because he can't explain himself. Language, I think, doesn't bother him. What bothers him is the fear that the reader might mistake his allegory for an ordinary adventure novel. So he writes this paragraph, which, in a different kind of writer, would have been the gateway to worries about language, but in him it's an instruction to the rest of the world. "Think behind the leech."

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  2. This reminds me of an observation I made about Dostoyevsky's narrator in Brothers Karamazov a couple of months ago: he hedges his bets with the reader early on, claiming gaps in his knowledge and begging the reader's forgiveness, allowing him to introduce into the narrative all manner of events he could not have observed. This is different from what MacDonald's narrator is doing, I know, but even if Dostoyevsky wasn't thinking about the limitations of language, he was thinking about the endless problems of verisimilitude.

    I've never heard of either George MacDonald or his novel, but now I must read Lilith.

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    1. Give him a shot. Lilith's got the good qualities of allegories as well as the bad ones; the narrator is humourless and more or less characterless (he's a vehicle to carry the reader around in, not so much a person in his own right; the author shunts him around the scenery like a prize bicycle), but this drive to come up with a scenario that will approximate an important spiritual realisation takes the book into some charismatically strange places.

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    2. I always enjoy it when an author pushes hard against form, trying to get somewhere he's never been. It's true that this often reduces other narrative elements (like narrators or plot) into obvious tools, but that's okay.

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    3. I worded that the wrong way. It's the imagination that's strange, not so much the form. The form is fairly standard, a man goes through a magic portal and has adventures on the other side, the reader learns some sort of moral or absorbs some sort of commentary, Piers Plowman, The Water-Babies, things like that.

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  3. Thank you - Lilith sounds brilliantly weird and I'd never have known of its existence without your blog. I'd only ever heard of the opera.

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    1. I hadn't heard of the opera -- I go and look it up -- oh there you go. Same Lilith, different scenario. Allegory is a huge help here when it comes to weirdness; the author needs the narrator to do weird things for the sake of the allegorical story, he needs him to stay in a cave for weeks pouring water over a corpse so that we can witness the difference between a shabby parody resurrection and a good one, or he needs tiny magical children to crawl up to his chin and push fruit in his mouth (and you realise that no author today would write something this suggestive between an adult and a child without expecting the reader to understand some sort of perversity behind it, but MacDonald's prose is innocent as lambkins).

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