Literary Parallels: Chance or Choice?
Here’s a rather challenging meme I started, or attempted to start, five years ago. It is truly wonderful to reflect how stupid we were back then compared to how smart we are now. In only five years!
Anyhow, I just discovered a new example today, which I place last in the list below:
The narrator’s rich friend Ravelston in Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying AND the narrator’s rich friend Ravelstein in Bellow’s book.
The Annamite mistress appearing in Pynchon’s V. AND the Annamite mistress found in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American.
The defective trousers that figure in both A Confederacy of Dunces AND Robert Walser’s story “The Walk.”
The oddly fascinating plaster crack found in the bathroom in Tom McCarthy’s Remainder and the same item found in the same room in Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s La salle de bain.
Incidentally, in the intervening half-decade I’ve been informed by an unimpeachable source that Toole could not have known Walser’s story. So put that one down as “chance.”
December 30th, 2008 16:35
The final one is probably choice as McCarthy refers to Toussaint in a discussion on BBC Radio 4 only this week:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7802000/7802586.stm (do a page search to find the item)
I read “Bathroom” nearly 20 years ago and don’t remember anything of it except the name of a character.
December 31st, 2008 10:13
Thanks much, Steve – very entertaining! In the interview, McCarthy gives Toussaint as his only example of an avant-garde novelist.
After I wrote this blog entry I also saw that McCarthy mentions Toussaint’s Camera in RSB’s Books of the Year Symposium.
Now that I think of it, McCarthy also reviewed Camera in the New York Times Book Review, which perhaps subconsciously is why I thought of McCarthy while rereading “The Bathroom” for a thing I’m writing about Toussaint.
The NYTBR was interesting — in less than 700 words McCarthy evokes Keaton, Tati, Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, Harold Lloyd, Bergson, Ponge, Wallace Stevens, and Kafka. In the RSB Symposium he calls Camera “A major and important novel, for all sorts of reasons,” but doesn’t share any of the reasons. It’s a fascinating sort of indirection happening here, maybe not entirely conscious.
Or perhaps it’s simply proper deference to something that serves for him as — to use your phrase — an “obscure marker on an invisible path.”
Re the Bathroom, is that character you remember Edmondsson, perhaps?
December 31st, 2008 14:39
Yep, Edmondsson it is.
I read Camera before Tom and Lee (Rourke) spoke so highly of it. As with The Bathroom, I wasn’t so taken; don’t know why.
January 2nd, 2009 10:50
I wasn’t so taken with The Bathroom the first time I read it either. I had read Monsieur, and I didn’t think it was up to the same standard. Readers in France read them in the opposite order and had the opposite reaction. John Taylor has neatly summarized the difference – “Monsieur resembles the traditional novel more closely, which means that its quirky departures from classical form are more intriguing and artful.”
I’ve been a Toussaint admirer since I first read him in ‘91. Moreso than I think I knew. In fact, I was recently reading some things that I wrote back in the 1990s when I wrote prose fiction. At the time, I thought I was exploring the register of Flann O’Brien’s The Poor Mouth, but I can see now that instead it is completely Toussaintian.
And here’s something completely uncanny – one of my stories included characters whose surnames were derived from ornithology, just like Camera’s Puffin and Fulmar. And in fact, it included a character called Fulmar. Seventeen years before I read Camera. Boo!