The essays in this blog not infrequently deal with books that I have found interesting, and not a few of them are novels. This one was stimulated by one that I have not read, but clearly need to read soon. I refer to the novel James, by Percival Everett. James is of that genre of novels that belong at once to the categories of fiction and of literary criticism or literary history, for they are fictional works that in some imaginative manner interact with earlier works of fiction. The “background” book in this instance is Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), a picaresque romp of high moral seriousness largely about the friendship of a young white lad (Huck) and an older black man (Jim). A friend of Joan’s, who is reading James in a book club, asked me a couple of linguistic questions arising from her reading of it. And as you have probably observed during the current political campaign, what you do when you don’t know the answer to a question is to obfuscate by answering a different one.
So I was set to thinking about a certain kind of book that messes with literary history while contributing to it. I do not have in mind here that kind of novel in which the animation of the fictional plot depends upon an obvious contradiction of generally accepted historical fact. These are sometimes called “alternative historical”, though I prefer the simpler “counter factual”. Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Tower (1962), an imaginative orgy of the counter factual, depicts a world in which Japan and Germany, having won World War II, now administer a partitioned and occupied United States. The underground opposition to the Fascists is led by a single heroic figure in Wyoming! Who knew? The genre of novel I have in mind—and to which (I take it) Percival Everett’s James belongs—I would regard not as counter-factional, but as counter-fictional.
A fairly well-known work from my own field of special interest in our earlier literature is John Gardner’s Grendel (1971). The oldest great poem in English that most people have ever heard of is the Anglo-Saxon heroic epic poem Beowulf, dating in its sole surviving manuscript probably from about the year 1000, though likely to be of earlier composition. Beowulf is the name of its Scandinavian hero, who battles against ferocious monsters. In the earlier part of the poem, Beowulf as a young man takes on a terrible pair of monsters—Grendel and Grendel’s otherwise unnamed mother—who are attacking Heorot, a fabled mead-hall of the aging Danish King Hrothgar. (In case you are wondering what a mead-hall is, it’s a place where heroic Scandinavian warriors sit around drinking mead, duh…Of course the precise recipe for ancient mead itself, a potent potion based in the fermentation of honey, is not known). In similar fashion, the exact nature of the monstrosity incarnate in Grendel and his mother is not precisely clear, but it is formidable, terrifying, lethal, and anthropophagic (in more common parlance, cannibal).
Sometimes novelistic interplay can become complicated, or perhaps even puzzlingly complex. The more widely known the base or target novel, the richer the complexity is likely to be. One of the early Victorian novels that anyone who reads novels at all is likely to know is Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). There is a reason for Jane Eyre’s perennial popularity. It is a really great novel, and its title character an enduring model of feminine pluck. Jane has it all—meaning, in this instance, everything required of a stock heroine of Victorian fiction. As a governess, Jane finds herself in the creepy moorland mansion of a dark, brooding, handsome, and super-sexy guy called Mr. Rochester, a man of mysterious sorrows. Strange noises—of the “Did I really hear something?” type—occasionally float down from the off-limits attic. Spoiler alert! There is indeed, unbeknownst to Jane, someone in the attic-- a madwoman! The madwoman in the attic is Mrs. Rochester, née Bertha Mason. She had to be put in the attic by Mr. Rochester on account of her violent mental aberrations, which are both literally and figuratively incendiary and apparently render her unsuited to what might be called normal social interactions. And as her continuing existence might seem an insuperable impediment to the much-to-be desired hooking up of Mr. Rochester and Jane Eyre, you can be pretty certain that her potential longevity will have to be dealt with. Read the book to learn how it all turned out.
The novel Jane Eyre is of course told from Jane’s point of view. But feminist literary critics have encouraged a broader perspective, such as that which might be imagined to have animated the incarcerated Mrs. Rochester herself. One of the more important books of literary criticism dealing with the Victorian novel remains The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979), by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. Though outside my own special field of expertise, I became very familiar with this book. By a stroke of fate, and my good luck, I was the chairman of the Princeton English Department at the time we were trying (successfully, I am glad to say) to poach Sandra Gilbert from the University of California. So I naturally had to read her most famous book. She was a splendid scholar, colleague, and friend during the five or so years we overlapped.
The device of telling a well-known story from a new perspective or oblique angle forces you (the reader) to reconsider what is usually a widely shared, nearly default moral perspective, often in a surprising fashion. I first came to appreciate this literary phenomenon in unusual and certainly unsalubrious circumstances on account of something scrawled on the wall of a dirty public toilet stall. I am of a generation so antique as to have learned their filthy language and sexual misinformation from furtive lavatory graffiti rather than from widely viewed family TV shows. Scrawled on the wall of one particularly well inscribed public convenience, I found one day, among many other things, the following strange graffito, the product of dyslexia rather than of depravity, a benediction actually. God bless little grils! Beneath this, in bold majuscules, was the query DONT YOU MEAN GIRLS [?] without the punctuation mark the syntax required. But it was the third and final sentence in what would today be called this thread that was truly brilliant. It plaintively asked, What about us grils? The ingenious conceit of John Gardner’s Grendel is to ask the question “What about us monsters?” in a way that makes a reader sympathetic to monsters. The genius of Jean Rhys’s 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea is to give a compelling explanation of how a mulatta beauty queen from the Lesser Antilles came to be locked up in the attic of a creepy castle in the British boondocks. It sort of makes you think twice about what it might mean to be a Victorian heroine. Remembering the grils almost always enriches the tale told and the reader’s appreciation of the manner of its telling.
