In a couple weeks I’m going to England for an Anthony Powell conference. Powell wrote a vast novel – 12 volumes long – called Dance to the Music of Time. I have taught the series several times, even published a book of student essays on it, Dance Class. I’m reading a third of a paper at the conference.
The way to read a third of a paper is to have two other partners with a common task reading the other two-thirds. In the third volume of Dance, titled The Acceptance World, three characters gather around a table to operate an automatic writing device called Planchette. Planchette was popular in the 30’s (the setting for this volume); it was a small wooden palette on castors holding a pencil. People put their hands on the palette, and, if the Spirit World had something to say, the castors rolled around and the pencil wrote a message from The Other Side.
Planchette comes through in The Acceptance World, and the novel accepts the legitimacy of the writing it produces. However, my partners and I are going against literary convention and assuming that the narrator, Nick Jenkins (who is one of the three operators), is wrong and that one of the three Planchetteers is manipulating the device for his or her own purposes. Each of us is arguing that one particular character is duping the others; I for instance have drawn the practical jokester Jimmy Stripling. Of course, if the villain should turn out to be Jenkins himself, we are left with the uncomfortable conclusion that the narrator of this vast comic epic is unreliable, indeed altogether untruthful.
The unreliables, frankly, are the three of us. None of us believes that Nick Jenkins is insincere about Planchette and what it accomplishes. In fact, in his memoirs, Powell tells that he took part in a Planchette moment with the composer Constant Lambert, Lambert’s wife, and another friend, Gerald Reitlinger. On that occasion, Mozart came through and described his mistress as being as ugly as a she-monkey. (Incidentally, Lambert, the sole musicologist present, was hung over and thus not operating Planchette at the time.) From Powell’s recounting of this event, it’s clear that he had no reservations about the validity of Planchette’s remarks. I cannot argue seriously that the incident in the book should be taken as a ruse.
But the exercise has had some interesting results. I have been forced to look at my character – the odd Jimmy Stripling – much more closely than I had looked before. I had always seen him as Jenkins has, frankly as a dope; and now I’ve seen that there’s more to him than either Jenkins or I have been willing to admit. As just one example, Jimmy was a race-car driver, and although this was long before NASCAR came on the scene, most of us would admit that a successful racer even back then would have to come well equipped with reflexes, coordination, and nerve. I had never before thought much about Jimmy in these terms. He seemed (thanks to the narrator) too much of a, well, a dope.
And what does this say about how we read narrative? Do we readers, faithful dogs that we are, accept fully the words and views of the voice that tells us all that we will ever know about the people and events? Any reservations about Lady Brett and Robert Cohn when we hear about them from Jake Barnes? Is Estella as beautiful as Pip would have us believe? How about Daisy and Gatsby – does Nick Carraway get them right, and is Tom Buchanan really such an oaf? And when we read contemporary novels, do we fully believe Skeeter in The Help or Marion in Cutting for Stone, or do we equip ourselves with a grain or two of salt?
John Updike wrote a wonderful novel called Gertrude and Claudius, telling Hamlet’s story from the points of view of his mother and his uncle, and I became quite unstuck for a while. Maybe Hamlet – whom I have always greatly admired – is a selfish little prick, after all. And suddenly I remembered Sir Francis Bacon’s essay on Truth: “What is Truth, said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.”
August, 2011 ©
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