6
Clearly, the satirist is eager and willing to tamper with, loosen, and even overturn the fundamental conventions and foundation-stones of fiction-making. He will snicker at or debase the hero, mock or taunt the author, and parody or pillage language and style. He naturally, therefore, also plays with traditional plots. In his hands, narratives all too frequently turn into games. Now, as Geoffrey Hartman has observed, there is an “almost universal . . . acceptance of the element of playfulness in art.”1 Our awareness of such “playfulness” and “gaming” has particularly deepened and matured since the appearance of Johan Huizinga’s influential Homo Ludens in 1938, and, subsequently, numerous studies have explored gamesmanship in life and in art.2 I am particularly interested in calling attention to the increasing utilization, throughout the present century, of gaming as a central theme, metaphor, and preoccupation in modern literature, and especially in identifying some of the causes of this heightened usage.
In writing about Ring Lardner’s successful portrayal of the gaming American—in baseball, in boxing, at the card table, etc.—Virginia Woolf in 1925 commented, “It is no coincidence that the best of Mr. Lardner’s stories are about games, for one may guess that Mr. Lardner’s interest in games has solved one of the most difficult problems of the American writer; it has given him a clue, a centre, a meeting place for the divers activities of people whom a vast continent isolates, whom no tradition controls. Games give him what society gives his English brother.”3 I would go even further than Woolf and suggest that games lend poignancy to much in almost every nationality in the twentieth century, since artists in most nations have sensed a break with almost all in the past that we term literary tradition. Literature in our period has responded to this isolation, this breakdown in coherence, by cultivating themes of exhaustion, decadence, and ennui, and particularly by parodying past traditions—by generally playing games.
To borrow a tetrahedronic manipulation from Northrop Frye, primitive literature was generally perceived as being cosmic, magical, and religious; Renaissance literature was understood to be cultural and especially expressive of national destiny; and nineteenth-century literature was comprehended as performing public service while also providing “entertainment” and comic relief. To complete this narrowing of context, the twentieth century has slowly been reduced to comprehending its literary art as pretense, as pose and posturing, as melodramatic excess, as nearly demonic lunacy and nonsense.4
To the twentieth century mind, the torch of the Enlightenment has gone out; the utopian dreams of the nineteenth century have turned “sour,” yielding a fetor.5 Darwinian “natural selection” appears to be nature’s jesting evolutionary game of randomness; Freudian psychology exposes the incessantly overflowing stream of consciousness in a fundamentally irrational psyche; and the indeterminacy, relativity, and quantum mechanics of modern physics suggest to modern authors an end to normative conceptions of space, time, and progressive linear narrative.6 Game analysis and probability theory literally spill over from mathematics into art. For many critics, the so-called inventive zest and creative thrust of the early “modernist” artists—Proust, Mann, Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Picasso, Stravinsky—appears to have petered out.
Equally important, the fin de siècle mentality, as we enter the modern period, deals a death-blow to historical eras and chronological traditions in art. For the first time, mass communications, rapid transit, historical rigor, and archaeological vigor lay bare and render uniformly accessible hundreds of techniques, styles, and conventions from the past. The many “phases” of Picasso’s artistry and the innumerable personae of Pound’s poetry demonstrate the advent in our art of this universal traditionalism. Discussing painting, J.P. Hodin indicates that “Modern Art is cognition, the findings of which . . . are organized into a new visual order. Linking up with a tradition of its own choice, of universal significance and without limitations in time and thus breaking with the chronological tradition generally acknowledged in art history, it strives for a synthesis of the work of the individual artist.”7
Harold Rosenberg designates this twentieth-century development as “the famous ‘modern break with tradition’ ”:
Under the slogan, FOR A NEW ART, FOR A NEW REALITY, the most ancient superstitions have been exhumed, the most primitive rites re-enacted: the rummage for generative forces has set African demonmasks in the temple of the Muses and introduced the fables of Zen and Hasidism into the dialogue of philosophy. Through such dislocations of time and geography the first truly universal tradition has come to light, with world history as its past and requiring a world stage on which to flourish.8
This total awareness of all times, all styles, and all places in our century is rather grandly portrayed by the metadimensional intelligence and world view of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s Tralfamadoreans.
Yet this “universalizing” of tradition has been by no means purely advantageous, for the embracing of all traditions renders us rootless and relativistic, with no distinct or coherent traditions whatsoever. Blending ourselves into all of the past gives us no distinctive perception—or understanding—of that past.
The barriers of the past have been pushed back as never before; our knowledge of the history of man and the universe has been enlarged on a scale and to a degree not dreamed of by previous generations. At the same time, the sense of identity and continuity with the past, whether our own or history’s, has gradually and steadily declined. Previous generations knew much less about the past than we do, but perhaps felt a much greater sense of identity and continuity with it because of the fixity, stability, and relative permanence of their social structure.9
The uneasy sense of dislocation—infused with heady creativity—has been present and predominant throughout the twentieth century. One need merely recall the far-fetched mockeries of modernism inherent in Alfred Jarry’s Ubu plays and philosophy of pataphysics, in dada, in surrealism, in the Beat movement, in the black humor novelists, and in the theater of the absurd to perceive a perverse and spoofing continuity in modern art’s anxious laughter at itself. And such self-criticism is clearly in evidence when we consider this century’s enormous predilection for and addiction to parody.10
It is true, of course, that playfulness and self-mockery are hardly new in literature. The Aristophanic agons are in some sense children’s debates; Chaucer and Shakespeare are, upon occasion, masters of scrim, self-parody, and nonsense. From one perspective, as Ian Watt has reminded us, the early novel could be comprehended as a kind of civic and gamesome “trial,” with the amassing of evidence, the presentation of testimony and exhibits, and the concern for verdicts looming large.11 But the fact remains that what in the literatures of the past served as one of many possibilities has for the twentieth century become an overarching attachment and preoccupation. We are, as a result, increasingly beset by playfulness and nonsense games and by an expanding concern for far-fetched fantasy.12 One need merely think of the recent devotion to antistories, the increasing prankishness of self-consciousness among authors, and the growing tendency for writers to engage in what one critic terms “literary disruptions” of narratives.13
Furthermore, a growing number of fiction titles suggestively reveals this childish-seeming, rollicking, and sportive tendency: In the Labyrinth (Dans le labyrinthe, Robbe-Grillet, 1959); Labyrinths (Borges, 1964); “The Lottery” (Jackson, 1948); The Collector (Fowles, 1963); The Glass Bead Game (Das Glasperlenspiel, Hesse, 1943); The End of the Game and Other Stories (Cortazar, 1967); Endgame (Fin de partie, Beckett, 1957); War Games (James Park Sloan, 1971); War Games (Wright Morris, 1951); King, Queen, Knave (Nabokov, 1928); Winner Take Nothing (Hemingway, 1933); Cards of Identity (Nigel Dennis, 1955); Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers (Elkin, 1965); The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (Coover, 1968); End Zone (Don DeLillo, 1972); Cosmicomics (Calvino, 1965); Lost in the Funhouse (Barth, 1968); Cat and Mouse (Grass, 1961); Slapstick (Vonnegut, 1976); The Sandbox (Albee, 1959); Hopscotch (Cortazar, 1963); Catcher in the Rye (Salinger, 1951); The Ginger Man (Donleavy, 1958); Snow White (Barthelme, 1967); Wonderland (Joyce Carol Oates, 1971); Say Cheese! (Aksyonov, 1989); An Ice Cream War (William Boyd, 1982); The Chronicles of Doodah (George Lee Walker, 1985).
Probably the best means for assessing this sporting and prankish trend is to observe more carefully a number of novels whose entire world view is ultimately gamesome. I have deliberately avoided the more renowned and conventional works, and I particularly have sought to draw my examples from the broad range of the whole century.
The nameless narrator in Henry James’s too-often scanted novel The Sacred Fount (1901) spends a long and busy weekend at a country house party. He commences to evolve a “hypothesis” about a select number of the guests: an aging wife appears to have been “rejuvenated” by her marriage; she looks vastly younger, whereas her new, youthful husband has unaccountably aged. The narrator conjectures that a magical umbilical cord connects the two, an enchanted reverse-transfusion mechanism that fulfills the one while draining the other. Similarly, two presumed lovers appear to the narrator to be equally affected: the male becomes ebullient, articulate, and intelligent, while the female declines into silence and a mumpish stupidity.
Patiently the narrator assembles the particles of his evidence piece by piece to substantiate the miraculous alterations. At the close, in a confrontation with the rejuvenated wife, he is totally defeated and routed in argument: it is as if her “system” or “hypothesis” prevails over his own. Or is she merely fighting for her new life, laying down smoke screens, and attempting to conceal the wonderful transformations and metamorphoses from the prying outsider? More profoundly, might the narrator himself have fallen prey to the mystical transformations, himself being drained of energy as his artistic hypothesis flourishes and expands into life? James never provides an answer, but he tantalizingly suggests that the entire novel’s world is somehow mysteriously alive with the consecrated (and even lunatic) logic of permutation, an overflowing of sacral supply and demand.14
A Scotland Yard man infiltrates an anarchist cell and indeed manages to become one of the seven great leaders (each named after a day of the week) of G.K. Chesterton’s sweeping European conspiracy, The Man Who Was Thursday (1908). Slowly it is revealed that every single one of the criminal leaders is in fact a “plant,” another disguised policeman. Like God, Scotland Yard represents the whole of creation, both law and order as well as its opposite—revolt, chaos, and scam. But then the first police agent awakens as from sleep and a dream, yet he is a new and more confident man after his imagined adventure. Are the police, we ask, but another version of criminality (or vice versa)? Does organized crime truly represent the civic order it supposedly seeks to overwhelm? Every man, in such a detective drama, is the absurdist player of innumerable roles, and the answer to the play of the roles, as in religion, is a mystery.
In Robert M. Coates’s Work The Eater of Darkness (1926), Charles Dograr, newly arrived in New York from Paris, is plunged into a terrific murder story, made an accomplice to a malevolent fiend, sought and chased by all of New York’s police, and trapped in a tower. All of this breakneck tale is recounted with the combined strategies of Dickens, melodrama, humdrum detective story, silent cinema, and surrealism. Then Dograr is finally whisked out of his nightmarish entrapment and set, smoking a cigar, walking down Fifth Avenue. An old beloved of his in Paris, also a storyteller, had been daydreaming about him: Had she written his misadventure? Was it a novel she had been reading? Had she “wished” him in and out of danger? All the stops are out, and there is no satisfactory solution. But Charles is safe and sound, returning to his beloved in old Paree. Who told the tale, and what, exactly, happened? No one quite can tell; suffice it to say that it is a tumbling, raucous, cliché-ridden story, stuffed with detours, false starts, footnotes, vignettes, and extras. Ultimately, all the fictional games are played for the reader’s benefit—yet also at the reader’s expense. The novel is a hilariously misconstructed hurricane of happenstance, adventure, and parody.
In a trifling contest, the narrator of Harry Mathews’s novel The Conversions (1962) wins a golden adz from Mr. Wayl, the millionaire, and thereafter attempts to explain the mysterious carvings on its handle. Indeed, the millionaire’s will promises to bequeath all his wealth to the one who can answer three mysterious questions about the adz. Tempted by this enormous prize, the narrator travels all over the world, collecting evidence about a secret society of gypsies, yet he increasingly comes to see that great quantities of this evidence have been fabricated by the millionaire himself. His seeming benefactor has devised a vast conspiracy merely to frustrate a would-be heir and drive him into considerable debt. Mathews’s entire quirky, fictional world is doubly fictitious, since the dead millionaire is another creator. Appendixes expand the fiction by giving additional scholarly “data” concerning bogus documents.
In Thomas Pynchon’s tale The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), clue by clue, Oedipa Maas discovers a comprehensive sixteenth-century mail conspiracy that still persists and even thrives in California—and possibly throughout the United States. How could such a massive underground postal service exist out of sight? Is it a sign of America’s decay, the promise of the rise of a rival, life-giving system, the demonic invention of the dead businessman Inverarity, or a huge paranoid conception proliferating within Oedipa Maas’s own brain?15 Once again, a metaphysical detective is set to work, uncovering a “plot” that may or may not be real, one that is sinister and ambiguous, involving the novel’s entire fictive world.
Martin Amis’s story “Insight at Flame Lake,” in Einstein’s Monsters (1987) describes our present-day world: the proliferation of media communications, the acceleration of horrible news and its torments: “This morning at breakfast I was fanning myself and scratching my hair over some new baby-battering atrocity in the newspaper and I said—Is it just me, or the media, or is there a boom in child abuse? And Dan said, ‘It’s exponential, like everything else these days.’ Himself a hostage to heredity, Dan naturally, argued that if you abuse your children, well, then they will abuse theirs. It adds up. In fact it multiplies.”16 Dan’s response seems cool, scientific, learned. But his commentary is anything but consoling: we live in an era of child abuse, and therefore each generation will experience a multiplication of instances. Disconcerted, we reflect that such mathematical, incremental growth can only lead to infinity.
Dan himself, we learn, is a mere thirteen year old, but a fully developed schizophrenic, a madman on a summer vacation that ends with his total breakdown and demise. More disconcerting still is the suggestion that all the generations since 1945, the happy birthday of the atomic bomb, have been increasingly infected by fear, frustration, and mania about destruction. Both bombs and offspring are equally “Einstein’s children” in Amis’s five short stories. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, madness, violence, and destruction are calmly, steadily, statistically, mechanically, on the upswing. In these tales, the sphere of inclusiveness placidly broadens, and there is no escape.
All the works that I have singled out for review overtly detail the superimposing of an external “plot” or framing device that controls, alters, and manipulates the fictional world and entraps the central characters in its toils. Plot—the traditional construct by which an author shapes fiction—becomes synonymous with some sort of conspiracy within the novel, an arranging of affairs that the characters attempt to discover and from which they attempt to escape. The characters, in short, seek to avoid and to transcend the confines of fiction. And the author himself is sympathetic. From the point of view of nineteenth-century determinism, plot and author alike are equivalent to the rigorous “plan” and the person of a monstrous manipulator of events, a kind of “President of the Immortals,” whom we encounter in Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. From the point of view of twentieth-century ideals of randomness and experimentation, authors and characters alike may be seen as fascinated by entrapment and yet desirous of evasion and liberation. They seek to elude incarceration in chronology or in the narrow bounds of the recent European novelistic tradition.
Fantasy provides one means of escape into a worldwide and civilization-long perspective. For fantasy and myth can leave behind the conventions of rationalism, realism, fiction as distinct from history, and specific spatial and temporal order and constraints. Science fiction has permitted just such freedom and flight, and it is no accident that this genre has proved so popular and abundant in our century. A good example of such a flight can be observed in a novel by Stanislaw Lem, a recent master of science fiction.
The Cyberiad (1967) catapults the reader completely into a universe of robotics; human beings are absent altogether or so scarce (and weak and slippery and scummy) as not to be believed in. Trurl and Klapaucius are ingenious inventor-robots, “constructionists,” along the lines of Abbott and Costello. Trurl is the true near-hero of these pieces, and he is a genuine mixture of Daedalus, Panurge, and Woody Allen. Some of his inventions are perfections; some are perfect disasters. As if we were in the realm of medieval robot-romances, the separate and disjunct tales tell of individuals’ sallies from an automated round table out into the universe of galactic oceanic voyages to do battle with dragons, pirates, evil kings, scamps, and fools. Increasingly, as if literary time were moving backward, we find ourselves in a world of a thousand and one Pyrite Hoplites, with overtones of allegory, exemplum, parable, and Aesopic fable becoming more and more prominent. Increasingly, too, there are tales within tales, like nests of boxes, until it is suggested that perhaps Trurl himself is but another creature captive in another frame of stories.
The finale abandons Trurl altogether, and we commence a Cyphroeroticon, a kind of space operatic Decameron, that is incredibly truncated, consisting of but a single tale. Indeed, the reader is caught in some in-between species of time, encountering tales from the far-distant future that are nonetheless so fragmented and disorderly that they seem to be epical, ancient futurist documents that have come down to us in mythic, vaticinating, and incomplete form. Past, present, and future are thereby handsomely juxtaposed and intertwined, and the reader is left suffering from a kind of multipressured time warp and culture shock.
Like Lem, Italo Calvino ranges, in his brief cluster of tales (Cosmicomics, 1965), across the history of the universe. His nonhuman characters (formulae, light, cells, dinosaurs) swirl along through the creation’s seemingly endless displays of élan vital, motion, generation, and evolution. Similar voyages outside the bounds of the novel, outside the borders of particularized time and space, can be observed in John Barth’s retelling of myths in Giles Goat-Boy (1966) and Chimera (1972). Barth’s well-known ambivalence leads him to rob such plots of conventional and forthright conclusions and of certainty and definite signification. His characters and the tacit or implied meanings of his tales directly oppose clarity and certitude. Other fictions, like those of Borges, break down distinctions between story and essay, metaphor and fact, while authors like Robbe-Grillet (consult Le Voyeur, 1955, and his screenplay of “Last Year at Marienbad”), Robert Coover (Pricksongs and Descants, 1969), and Jonathan Baumbach (Babble, 1976) eliminate the linear story and, fusing event, libidinal imaginings, and probability, tell stories with multiple sequences and alternate finales.
Perhaps most noteworthy has been the tendency of a growing number of writers to dissolve the barrier betwixt authors and their creations, allowing authors to break into their own fictions and characters to break out. Such a practice is by no means altogether new, but it has been a practice alien to the bourgeois tradition developing since Defoe. Becoming the darling of the middle class, this mode called for aloofness of presentation and extreme verisimilitude; the result of such ideals slowly drove authors out of their fictions, while their stories increasingly reveled in “realism.” In modern fiction, the sanctity of such verism is called into question or openly taunted.
In our own century, Pirandello’s story “The Tragedy of a Character” (1911), subsequently transformed into his major drama Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), most memorably reverts to authorial intrusiveness. The author-narrator complains of characters who “break into” his fiction and move about at will, beyond the control of the “author.” One such character in his tale clamors to get “in.” André Gide, in Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1925), enriched this experimental procedure by having himself and his character Edouard simultaneously at work upon a novel called The Counterfeiters. Bits of “journal” for the novel naturally turn up in the novel itself, and Gide includes, in an appendix, his own “journal” for the novel.17 In this novel Gide frequently becomes an intrusive commentator, offering assessments, evaluations, asides. Technically, this work has been considered an innovative landmark, and it has influenced subsequent fictions in this country.
Other authors, like Ronald Sukenick in Up (1968) and Steve Katz in The Exagggerations of Peter Prince (1968), have regularly and obtrusively introduced themselves into their fictions—and have even introduced one another into them. But characters are also interested in getting out of their own constrictive tales, and one might recall in this respect Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s Breakfast of Champions (1973). There, the author enters the novel and visits the scene, only to be fearfully frightened by Kazak, one of his own maniacal creations. Nevertheless, in a more generous mood, the author magnanimously promises “freedom” to characters like Kilgore Trout, because they have rendered him years of faithful fictional service. Pathetically, the aging Trout can only think to cry out for a single benefaction: “Make me young, make me young, make me young!” With that, the novel comes to a close. It is a paradoxical and tense moment when a character meets his maker. For one thing, Vonnegut hears something of his own father’s voice from the past in that beleaguered cry. And aside from all the wizardry that this authorial deity might be able to supply, nothing can prevent Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (and his father of long ago) from implacably growing old, old, old themselves. For a moment, then, author and character are akin, identical in their helplessness inside somebody else’s creation. And the shock of their confrontation and even assimilation of identities is, of course, managed by art.
All the fictions that I have described may be zany, ambivalent, and incredibly experimental in their explorations of fantastic content and form, but they are nonetheless amazingly aesthetic receptacles, assimilating echoes from dozens of popular cultural forms and literary traditions. Such works help to facilitate the breakdown of normative spatial, temporal, and linear narrative conventions. Instead, in an atmosphere in which recent trends and movements in art have been replaced by a kind of achronological universal traditionalism, as J.P. Hodin and Harold Rosenberg have suggested, these literary works mix together elements from fable, quest romance, dream sequence, expository writing, detective story, spy thriller, “tales of ratiocination” (Poe’s phrase), science fiction, surrealism, melodrama, cinematography, and cartoon. Such fictions accordingly are gamesome and gamey indeed—open-ended and growing by an aggressive osmosis and fusion. As literary creations, they are far from being “exhausted” or benighted; rather, they are distinctly sportive, fertile, healthy, and irrecusable. For the once-narrow “fragments” of past civilizations that Eliot “shored against [his] ruins” have in more recent fictions recombined, mushroomed, become large and substantial—until they compose the whole shebang.