Instead of a Blog - Beached Leviathan, by Wirkman Virkkala

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Posted September 19, 2002

Beached Leviathan

Sometime back in the Vance Integral Edition's Cosmopolis (number 14), Paul Rhoads tore into Paul Auster's Leviathan, a novel that seemed to him the absolute nadir of literary craftsmanship, a corruption aesthetic sense, a vile tangle of postmodernist philosophy, and, in fine, the very antipode to the work of Jack Vance, to whose oeuvre Mr. Rhoads has valiantly devoted so much energy.

Now, when that PDF issue of Cosmopolis hit the Webstream, I had not read one word of Auster. I had seen two of his movies (loved one, hated the other), but had read nothing. Then, a few weeks ago I found amongst the disorder of my library a perfectly good copy of Leviathan. I decided to give it a try. My reaction? Not only did I finish the book, I enjoyed it very much!

This, despite Mr. Rhoads's complaints, despite the fact that the only Auster fan I know couldn't finish this particular novel.

Since Paul Rhoads took so much space to inveigh against the book, I'll take nearly as much space to defend it. Here goes!

Leviathan is a mystery. The back cover of my copy quotes an unnamed Wall St. Journal reviewer, who states that Auster is "a literary original who is perfecting a genre of his own. This would have turned me off if I had not long ago pretty much abandoned my faith in the reviewer's art. The book is very much in the Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine school of mystery, where the motivations and the crime itself are what must be discovered, while the criminal is known from page one. Such whatdunnit/whydunnit works have a peculiar charm for me. They focus on human motivation more than adventure and misadventure. They get closer to the stuff of life than your run-of-the-publisher's-mill mystery.
The novel is told in the first person, with an artful artlessness. That is, the construction of the book rigorously builds on the central premise: a novelist realizes that his best friend, a former novelist, has blown himself up, no doubt accidentally, by the side of a road in northern Wisconsin. He tells the story from his own point of view, does not reconstruct the plot with knowledge later gained — that is, the narrator withholds some information that could have been told on page one. The narrator, for all his hurry, wanders off on long apparently unrelated diversions — and then the relations reveal themselves. There are no diversions. It is all relevant.
The apparent artlessness does not come without cost. The narrator is not a murderer , so we can't count on him for a fancy prose style. I remember Paul Rhoads pillorying the book's short sentences. But there are many longer sentences. There is a variety, as there should be. What strikes me most is the utter simplicity of the prose, whether told in short breaths or longer gasps. This is not my favorite style, but it is effective in this tale. Mr. Rhoads complained about the piling on of clichés, and they are in the book, oh, yes (read Rhoads's criticism for a fun list). I found these lapses funny, as I found the incredible pomposity of Iris Murdoch's narrator in The Black Prince. The narrator is supposed to be a novelist, a professional writer, and yet he commits gaucherie after gaucherie! In any case, it does not seem artless in the Harry Stephen Keeler sense; it is instead a key indicator that Auster is using the perhaps-too-fashionable Unreliable Narrator Technique. Rhoads derided the breathless character — the haste — in which the tale is told. And that is indeed supported by the clichés and the reliance on short-hand descriptions. Here, the tale itself is the thing.
But let me pause here. It is striking how few similes, metaphors, and other figures of speech in Quintilian's catalogue one can find in the writing. The book's style is not Literary. It is conversational. Or, perhaps, in Netspeak (without the emoticons, thankfully.) When a major novelist writes a novel with a narrator who is a novelist, one might expect a style more hifalutin', like the periphrastic Bradley Pearson in The Black Prince (Murdoch, cited above). Auster does not conform to this expectation.
There are several well-developed characters in the book. Maria Turner, for example, is an artist of a unique stamp; the narrator's initial descriptions of her were thoroughly delightful. The central character, Ben Sachs, is interesting enough in his own right, I suppose; but I confess to feeling that his individuality was somewhat clouded by the personality of the narrator. Does the unreliable narrator method provide an easy excuse for this? Yes, though this might be an understatement: the clouding is the subtext of the novel itself — how little we know each other, how little we know even our best friends. Ah, ignorance — and then the revelations!
At one point, the narrator excuses contradictory testimony by saying that there is no one truth, only many truths. Blah blah. This is misuse of language, but you get the idea. Behind this loose talk lies a crystal-clear idea: our visions of the truth can be radically different, but each has some purchase on reality. Our ability to know for sure which vision tracks reality closer is sometimes extremely limited. I won't carp over this sub-theme in the novel. That a bright guy like our narrator would fall for this is, well, an indication of something — but what I'm not sure. Truth is, I put brackets around most idiotic philosophy spouted by a character in a book. I don't have to accept the point. The narrator is not identical to the author (though the similarities are striking, and labored over a great deal in the book). Similarly, I bracket out the philosophy of, say, F. Marion Crawford when reading his romances. I don't feel compelled to accept every one of the pronouncements that garnish his tales. Similarly, even if Paul Auster actually believes that one must accept every contradiction because there was no universal truth... not for them, not for anyone else, that doesn't mean I'm obliged to follow his error to appreciate his story. And, in fact, it seems prudent to me, a lover of fiction, to accept such philosophizing not on its own merits, but as objective correlatives to the story being told. Just as the savvy phenomenologist brackets out the wider significance of the objects of consciousness, and pays attention only to the meaning of the objects for a conscious being, so too must the reader of a novel bracket out the putative wider significance explicitly stated in the novel under consideration. The philosophizing, like the events themselves, should be seen as artifacts (objects) correlated to the emotions the artist conjures up. The philosophy there is no universal truth is disputable; its truth (!) irrelevant to the success of the novel. In this case, the narrator is conflicted by two radically different views of reality offered by his friends. We see the narrator's conflict in his stated philosophy, which, in our sober moments, we no doubt look upon as a cop out. But the philosophy itself expresses the emotion very well. The narrator is in a double bind, and refuses to play critic to his friends' follies. This reader reads, and moves on, satisfied not with the philosophy, but with the story as it unfolds.
I confess that one reason I read Leviathan was to get at some Hobbesian element in the thematic jungle of Auster's mind. Didn't see it. The novel is titled second-hand, so to speak. One of the revelations, three-quarters of the way through the book, is that the book is named not after Hobbes's great work but... I won't give away the surprise. Let me just say that the surprise signals the book's fixation on the personal, not the political.
The final quarter of the book explains how and why a former novelist became, as a result of several bizarre and violent coincidences, a terrorist. The coincidences are interesting, the violence not unbelievable. And the final mission that Sachs performs is fascinating, politically — and somewhat related to America's Lockean (not Hobbesian) heritage. He becomes the Phantom of Liberty. Still, the idea of Liberty in the novel does not seem clear. It is but a phantom. Only upon a second reading (unlikely!) would I gain anything political from this. I gathered that the narrator is utterly unprepared to handle the larger significance the idea of Liberty. One more reason to say that the narrator is Unreliable! The reader, closing the book, understands that the narrator has not captured the whole of friend's strange late course in life. And this is surely the point of the novel (to be distinguished from the narrated tale). Not only do we not know our friends entire, but their major commitments, their manifold significance — these may be beyond our ken. But that doesn't mean our friends are complete mysteries, or that what purchase we have on their significance is worthless.
It is the only fiction I've read in some time (if ever) that calls up Alexander Berkman as an important source of inspiration for the characters!
Rhoads couldn't help himself, of course: he compared Auster to Vance. This is rather like contrasting Howells with Poe! What profit can there be in such comparisons? Still, I'll bite: I may not appreciate Leviathan as much as Emphyrio, but surely more than many another other Vance adventure.
Finally, it is a liberal book — in several senses. Because of this I am not shocked that a very conservative gentleman such as Mr. Paul Rhoads would find it vexing on many levels. But ignore the political element — after all, liberal is first and foremost a term to apply to human character, not government policy. The liberality of the book shows in its approach to friends and lovers and even terrorists. The narrator, and the book as constructed, focuses on the mystery of being human and on the haphazard revelations of character that come over time, as incident of life piles up on incident.

And sometimes that liberality is precisely what I'm looking for when I read a human story. The word humanity without liberality as a constituent part becomes something less than human. Leviathan succeeds to the extent that it reveals something important about humanity: the importance of love and friendship, of breadth of mind, and of treating others without prejudice or undue reliance on pat, stock judgments.

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