Meta-fiction, script writing, travel writing and the novel

Copyright 2010 - A. Barake

I have been reading Redmond O'Hanlon, Michael Palin, and Bill Bryson recently, in parallel for no particular reason. So for the same reason, I will comment about them together.

After having enjoyed Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything", which I think is his masterpiece, I picked up his book of columns on returning to live in North America, New Hampshire specifically. Like his other travel chronicles, it is an amusing collection of his peculiar collisions with everyday reality, filtered and edited extremely cunningly, but apparently effortlessly. He is an artist of the everyday, a likable author, although I have become suspicious about amiable literary personae since I read Witold Rybczynski's gentle books on history and architecture. You see, he taught classes at McGill while I was there, and he certainly was not amiable. Maybe he did not like teaching.. who knows, but I was very surprised as how radically his literary voice differed from his aural one.

So Bryson is well edited, slick, fun. Low on big content, even less than Witold, but big on small stuff, except in his science book, which I have acknowledged above and cannot recommend enough.

Let us move on, towards the synthesis that I am trying to circle, using the next guy in the list. Palin. Specifically his novels, and more specifically his latest, "The Truth". I think it is a ripping yarn, perfectly suited for a TV short series, but I also think that it is a failure as a novel. It tries hard, with many details taken from life, that may resonate with some readers, that surely resonate with the author, clear descriptions, characterizations and lots of touching interactions with minor characters, yet the voice of a novel is missing. The writing is friendly but fluffy, verbose almost, requiring editing. I wanted to edit it while I was reading it. Michael, I offer my services officially if you wish. It just needs tightening up to become a good novel. It needs excising of noise as well as the addition of texture for coherence, it needs a drive, a plot that gels, not just a good story. And by the way, I think Palin is truly amiable, not someone with a dual persona. What you read is what you get. A huge success and role model due to innate talent and goodness, not editing. Just sayin'.

Then there is O'Hanlon, who had been sitting on my shelf unread for years, I mean the Borneo book that made his name. What a hoot. Apparently the man was coming out of years of slogging at his thesis, a bit down, when he decided to hit the jungle with a friend who happens to be a great poet, but who comes off as a calm, wry and stabilizing partner but ultimately a side-kick in the book, not the way he sees himself I would think.

O'Hanlon can write. The stuff is direct, intelligent, and gets into your head like a conversation over drinks late at night. It was written by Redmond for Redmond, but it makes one want to be Redmond, or at least to be around him. Of course it is a sort of advertisement for himself, but it is brilliantly self-deprecating, and smart as well as genuine, a masterpiece. I will read his other stuff to see if my opinions about his truth can be sustained.

I have written about Paul Theroux and Coetzee here before, particularly about how I think they shape their voice, how they manage to write freshly when so much of the plain style has already been done before them, on the same subjects. Their trick is individualism, filtering common experience and internalizing the world in a deeply reflective way. The other guys I mention in this essay go there too now and then, O'Hanlon being my favorite, but Palin being the most honest about it I think. Bryson is a journalist, so it is difficult to tell if and
when he will turn on you, or how deep the stuff goes with him. It may be just copy.

Where does fiction and meta-fiction intersect with the travel story? Palin's book is an attempt, but as I said, I think it fails. O'Hanlon is pure travel, no fiction. Bryson is column journalism, short narrative, with some
exagerration for fun. Theroux does walk across the border into the country of the novel, he is aware of how lying well is an art. Coetzee too, but by avoiding the lie, by mixing characters with self, by doing the meta fiction thing very well.

I wish some of the lesser meta-fiction types writing today (who would use any mention of their name as advertising) would put in the effort to reach the borders of that territory rather than re-treading the plain biographical noise with outrageous urban experience that is so common. Bukowski, Cohen, Kerouac all did it very well, but they were also poets, and that is their legacy, their context. Meta navel gazing only works if you prove yourself through poetry too. Coetzee does it with prose alone.

Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello device

I am working my way through Coetzee's novels in no particular order, and I have just finished Slow Man. Elizabeth Costello's role becomes clear there. Coetzee, no doubt all too aware of his self-centredness; in fact he keeps alluding to it through his secondary characters, who keep asking if they really can be considered secondary, if anyone can; so as I was saying, to deal with that dilemma, he creates this other author's voice, to take him outside J.M. In a sense it works. He manages to see things differently, and I am sure the choice of gender helps him. Empathy is strong in his writing, but it is a clinical empathy, one rooted in observation, like a photographer that sees misery, captures it and then moves on. It is not care, it is halfway to care. So The Elizabeth Costello device pushes the plot towards action, towards mistakes, she forces him to do and to confront.
Again, why the fuss? Why not just write from the perspective of other voices than his own? Probably because he is so honest and is not wired that way.
The method succeeds in making his work interesting, but as John Crace in his pastiche of Coetzze in the Guardian  notes, he keeps writing the same book. Why not?

In fact I have argued the other way for songwriters. Is the medium a factor? Can songs be egocentric, since they are an accepted form of wooing? Are novels different? No answers here.

Comments on Coetzee and the books Elizabeth Costello, Diary of a Bad Year and Summertime

J.M. Coetzee’s work is more often about himself than not, in subtle reflections that achieve the necessary universality. Yet I feel a great unease about it. The undertone of self-criticism and mockery is subverted by the very fact that he is writing about himself. In effect saying that that is what is important. I know that it is deeper than that, that he uses himself consciously as a device, one that is central to his approach to fiction, but I also know that sadness and depression come from loneliness.

However, Coetzee has succeeded in reaching others, he has two Bookers, a Nobel and is loved by readers and writers, including me. He says things that need to be said, with courage and balance.

But, and this is what gnaws at me, there is the self-centredness, the one he is aware of, that he digs into all the time, the fatal flaw.

Maybe I can talk about the novels I mention in the title, to give examples. Elizabeth Costello reads like a crotchety set of essays by someone who does not care how they are perceived, because they are gone, above criticism. Costello is dead at the end, in a sort of purgatory, and this gives closure to all the ranting. It is good ranting though, holds your attention, and despite the characterization, shows balance. This is the tour de force. The hard foundations of Coetzee’s writing are a) humanism, probably more accurate to say animalism, avoiding pain, b) guilt about colonialism, and anger about the guilt, since he is not directly guilty, he is constantly trying to extricate himself from it c) self and others, connection, sex as a mystery.

Elizabeth Costello contains a casual sexual encounter in a hotel, between business travellers that is masterful in showing how a we inhabit our bodies when close to one another, how strange, beautiful and limiting awareness of sexual contact is. Sex and loneliness in Coetzee’s work are bound tightly. He does not really understand the other, despite all the voices.

This brings me to Summertime, where he reflects on his middle years through women that have known him. This is masterfully written, but the uneasiness I feel about it relates to the above, he cannot get out of himself. He realizes it, since his characters allude to his “autism”. Realizing it and trying to exorcise it and ultimately failing in my view is what makes the work so strong, but also so flawed. He can go on telling us he knows this, and there are two possible conclusions: i) he is truly failing - case closed ii) he is using this mechanism to drive his creativity, it is a shtick. I refuse to believe the second.

In Diary of a Bad Year, he tries again to bring out Coetzee from his shell. Two and a half points of view. Himself, as always, a young woman who becomes his typist, and the views of her boyfriend, an foil to the humanist/animalism/anarchist Coetzee character. Archetype does not mean one-dimensional here. He is fully fleshed, but a bit distant, a bit vague, a bit too consistent. Coetzee is getting revenge it seems on that type. I know these types well, I dislike them too, but again, I almost want to not believe that Coetzee is exercising a form of petty literary revenge. Not petty I guess, the themes are broad enough, but in all three books there is a sort of accounts settling smell, things that his “autism” may have prevented him from doing in real time may be coming out.

So in conclusion, I must admire the man and admit that I enjoy the work, but some of it seems to evade complete control, which to me is a criterion of classic art. This is the mystery of Coetzee’s work.