There is nothing stranger, yet more familiar, than fiction.
Stranger Than Fiction, Edwin Frank’s magisterial book about the 20th-century novel as a cultural phenomenon, is a must-buy for anyone who takes more than a passing interest in fiction writing and the cultural zeitgeist expressed by the ground-breaking novels cited. We meet some 30 novels and their authors and how they redefined the novel and culture itself at key points in the 20th century. Each novel has a “life” of its own, as the subtitle suggests. Readers will wish to acquire the books they have not read. We thank the stars for public libraries.
The book actually starts with Dostoyevsky’s almost mid-19th-century “Underground Man” – Notes from Underground – and correctly states that the parody of an angst-ridden or soul-searching misfit at play here was a harbinger of the fiction that was to come. We feel the excitement at the dawn of the century. But then comes the dark pall thrown over everything by the first World War. This is indeed “The story of an exploding form in an exploding world”.
How fitting, then, that Frank launches the century with that doyen of mass consumption and sensationalist paranoia, the prophetic HG Wells. Indeed a fascinating, not to say occasionally moving, narrative arc can be drawn from Wells’s The Invisible Man (1897) to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). The latter book signalling not just the history of blacks in the US but US history itself, a point not just made by Frank, but also Barack Obama right at the end of the century.
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The book is persuasive on Gertrude Stein who, via a hypnotic repeat overload within the paragraph, changed the very nature of a novel’s sentence, certainly a North American one. The rise of “Americanitis” as a condition. (There was even an over-the-counter elixir for it.) Restless, provisional, polyphonic, to quote Frank on Ellison but fitting Stein and the nation as a whole. A bit like improvised jazz.
James Joyce is, of course, a major figure here. One of the best points Frank makes about Virginia Woolf, out of many, is that some of her work is a response to Joyce. If The Dead could only have happened in Dublin, Mrs Dalloway could only have ever happened in and around Mayfair. Yet they have a shared lineage. We are so different and yet so close.
Joyce revolutionised language itself, not so much because, as an exile, he had nowhere left to go, or was saying a plague on both your British and Irish houses, as Frank suggests, but because he proposed a new way of speaking and being Irish. Luke Gibbons, building on Seamus Deane, has argued this point superbly in recent times. Frank is of course correct to posit Jewish Leopold Bloom’s humanity with the savagery of the anti-love, reactionary Cyclops of Ulysses.
If Frank’s scintillating defence of DH Lawrence is the beating heart of the book, its existential soul is its salute to Ralph Ellison and his game-changing Invisible Man
If Joyce had engagement, Franz Kafka had estrangement, and Frank provides some highly revealing insights, not only regarding Kafka’s grá for Yiddish theatre and parable but in his comparison of Kafka with Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. Both are hilarious, both are tragic, to paraphrase Frank. One gets the image of a man hanging grimly, but daringly, to the descending finger of a skyscraper clock. Amerika looms large. Kafka is as fluid and relentless in his sentences – the pun is deliberate – as Chaplin or Harold Lloyd as they slide down the rubbish chute of 20th-century history. All have “the poise of a surfer on a breaker” – Frank’s remarkable description of Kafka’s writing. There is a devil-may-care “ecstasy” there. Then comes the knock at the door.
If Frank’s scintillating defence of DH Lawrence is the beating heart of the book, its existential soul is its salute to Ralph Ellison and his game-changing Invisible Man. For it is here Frank does not just define the modern American novel, he defines “The Whole Story of America”. We see very clearly how Ellison struggled to free himself, not just from the shackles of slavery, but also the hypocrisies and control mechanisms to the political left and right of him. For Frank, the 20th-century novel is a constant assertion of the dignity of self.
Whilst Joyce, Proust and Thomas Mann dominate the century and this book, the right of authors to write exactly what they are inspired to write is a central issue for its author, and this of course was James Joyce’s cri de cœur. It is in this spirit we see how Joyce anticipates the postcolonial visions of Chinua Achebe, García Márquez and VS Naipaul revealed in these pages; that is – how to write the past and future “warts and all”, as the best guarantee of true liberation. Artistic freedom then becomes a guard against forced conformity. If the centre cannot hold, said Joyce in his decades-long response to Yeats, each one of us must become the centre and then reach out. We must say “Yes” to each other.
A final word on the grace and power of Frank’s writing. Here, for example, in describing Russian author and important war correspondent Vasily Grossman’s gruesome report from the Treblinka death camp and the story of a middle-aged, childless surgeon who forgoes her chance to escape due to her profession after adopting a child, David, who dreams of his imaginary frogs to the last.
“We see, in her final glimpse of herself as a mother, someone still yearning, as well as a not-yet-extinguished sense of irony that we in turn experience as bitter irony and deep pathos. We see David, his mind mixed up to the last moment with the stuff of life, including – those dancing frogs – the casual cruelty that exists on a continuum with the deliberate cruelty of the men who have brought him here to kill him. We see all that, and perhaps also in the background the fairytale figures of Hansel and Gretel and Brother and Sister, and it is probably not necessary to point out the allusion to the Madonna and Child. We see that all points of view end here.”
Paul Larkin’s translation of A Fortunate Man by Henrik Pontoppidan is published by NYRB Classics
