"Rhyming Life & Death," by Amos Oz, is available at Buffalo Street Books. Image provided.
THE LITERATURE OF INTERRUPTION has carved out a distinct, and often controversial, tradition in Western novels. Laurence Sterne’s Tristam Shandy (1759) is frequently cited as an inaugural work in this vein, with Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried as popular contemporary examples of authors who bury, then highlight, the omniscient scope of their own voice alongside of, and sometimes overshadowed by, that of the primary narrator or other characters. Another more ambiguous “interrupted” text is Mark Twain’s Roughing It, a work of breach literature that functions as a semi-autobiographical work of travel writing. In this fictionalized explorer’s journal that follows a “Mark Twain” character in his journeys through the Wild West, Twain the author repeatedly disrupts Twain the character in order to segue into long reflections and observations about his own process as a writer.
But none of these works are truly comparable to Amos Oz’s newest novel, Rhyming Life and Death, which presents us with a stark expose of a post-literary mainstream culture from the perspective of an established author who is skeptical not only of the written word, but of the entire literary business surrounding publication and the presentation of literature to an enraptured and puerile public. In Oz’s newest novel, reader, writer, critic, scholar, and audience member alike are cast in grotesque detached absurdity: in an opening scene, the cow-like, doe-eyed spectators at a literary conference hang on every syllable of the visiting author, who has learned from his father how to behave like a diplomat, with carefully rehearsed facial expressions and the periodic caressing of his own brow. Meanwhile, he turns each body in his line of vision into a character of his choosing, most of whom he imaginatively eviscerates in one way or another during the narrative. Oz doesn’t conflate his own persona with that of his narrator (referred to only as the Author throughout the book). In that respect, Life and Death is more closely aligned with Vladmir Nabokov’s Pale Fire or Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch than with more popularized “postmodern” works of “metafiction.”
The book’s opening passage primes the reader for the scorn the narrator takes to his fans as he considers a sample of the mundane questions he is prepared to face from them. They ask about what time of the day he writes, how he finds his inspiration, and why he divorced his first wife. They are far more intrigued by the precious details of his personal life than by the content of his written works. Oz said in an interview with Haarertz, an Israeli newspaper, that he is terrified of how the public will receive this book, which is, above all else, a book about the process of writing a book, a dark, detailed, gritty interior mock-up of how a fiction writer works to piece together something original out of the scraps thrown at him by a chaotic world.
The structure of the book is concrete and easily grasped: the plot traverses one evening, which begins with a presentation and a reading for the Author, and is followed by a long courtship and seduction between the Author and Rochele Reznik, who reads the words of famous writers out loud at literary events. This coupling culminates with a hasty exit, exemplary of the way spontaneous unions between strangers often end. Throughout the novella, little more than 100 pages, the Author reflects on the social and personal uses of literature and interrogates his own process as a writer, as well as the meaning of his work.
Within that fixed structure, which grounds and orients the reader, we span generations of Israeli characters of both genders, who are compulsively created in the Author’s mind. A waitress who pours him some coffee near the opening of the book becomes Ricky, who was once in love with Charlie, a character who never takes a physical form in the text. Charlie is a football player, who used to call Ricky “Gogog,” which is the pet name he also used for his next girlfriend, Lucy, who is also an imaginary character, and who the Author imagines Ricky might someday want to contact so that they might compare field notes about their shared lover. (Got that?)
Reviewers have griped about the lack of concrete characters and recognizable plots. Guardian reviewer Adam Mars-Jones brands the novel a work of postmodernism and complains that the reader is rendered a cold spectator looking in on a world the Author, or Oz, has closed tight to him: “Intellectual engagement seems pointless when the book has already had the last word,” Mars-Jones writes. “Emotional engagement is ruled out by the shifting status of the ‘characters’ – why step over the threshold and enter the interior spaces of the fiction, when the carpet is only there to be pulled out from under you?”
In his defense of Lacanian theory, How to Read Lacan, Slavoj Žižek asserts that the postmodern trick of a writer interrupting the narrative to tell you how the narrative was constructed, or to make ironic comments about the meaninglessness or falseness of the narrative, is actually a dodge, a means of avoiding the harder task of actually creating an insulated world of the Real. “Instead of conferring on these gestures a kind of Brechtian dignity,” Žižek writes, “perceiving them as versions of alienation, one should rather denounce them for what they are: the exact opposite of what they claim to be – escapes from the Real, desperate attempts to avoid the real of the illusion itself, the Real that emerges in the guise of an illusory spectacle.”
In other words, it does us little good to see the puppet-master, the sweaty guy with his hand up the puppet’s skirt. We just want to see the puppets and their interplay, because, during the act of peering into a masterfully crafted world, we’re able to build interior vocabularies and communicate with ourselves in languages that span beyond the breadth of speech and transcend the mundane knee-jerk use of informal language. These interactions with so-called fantasy are closer to an internalized authentic experience than the highly coordinated actions of our day-to-day social interactions. The postmodern device of the storyteller interrupting the story to bring awareness to the means or vehicle of communication cheats the readers out of the chance to come into contact with the Real.
Here’s a good example now: Damn it, there’s my phone. It’s Luke, Post editor and publisher. I’ll let it go to voicemail. But if I let it go, I might not get him on the phone for another three hours, or more. And then people will be asking me questions I won’t have answers for. And then the content flow will get all backed up. Or I’ll make a decision and he won’t be happy with it. So I kind of have to answer it. Yes, Luke, I’ll headline the story. I’m working on the review now. What’s up on the site now was dated hours ago, is there something else we can get up there quickly? No, I don’t think it’s a good idea to stream other people’s blogs onto the site. Why? Think of me as an information monogamist. I don’t want my content sleeping around with everyone else’s content, swapping fluids with junk publications. It might catch some sort of literary disease. Yes, I’m joking. Sort of. I have to go though. Yes, later. OK. Bye.
I’m in the Gimme Cayuga, down the road from my home, across from the creek that I love to ride my bike along to clear my thoughts. The tulips in the park just bloomed out, and the lilacs too are finishing up. Irises now split open the flesh of their bulbous heads and splay their tissue-paper tongues and layers toward the sky. Ithaca Post artist Mason Speed is drawing at a nearby table. Movie reviewer Katie Andryshak is in another corner typing out her latest piece. I tried to look over her shoulder, but she shooed me away. This place is like an advertisement for Apple, one Mac after another. Look at us, all plugged in, enjoying ourselves, getting high off the tap-tap-tap of the keys, the neon white of the screen, the power of the mouse. Not Mason. He’s drawing. He still knows the pleasure of ink on his fingers.
And so on. While such digressions interrupt a carefully constructed work, there’s a fundamental difference between a writer making comment on construction of the work and what Oz has done, which is to create a character who is a writer and then follow his stream of consciousness. Mars-Jones seem to have misunderstood this in his assumption that we can fairly compare the Author to Oz; in fact, Oz, in his interview with Haarertz, points out that he is different from the Author in several crucial ways. Must we relentlessly drive every work of art into the realm of the literal, and ruthlessly interrogate its factuality based on correspondence with the material world of facts and dates? Is there any more boring or irrelevant way to read an imaginative text?
Further, it could be argued that the Author’s urgent need to categorize strangers bears at least a little resemblance to how we file ourselves and each other into neat types we can understand. The Author knows that each character must have some distinctive characteristic that sets him apart and sears him into the reader’s mind. In relation to our peers, we know this too. As Post columnist Amelia pointed out, for example, Luke has more than 35,000 messages in his inbin . Mason wears a newsboy hat, works in a record store, has ink on his fingers. Amelia recently bought pounds of local rhubarb for rhubarb martinis. Post recipe writer Katie Church is crazy about local eggs. Culture Editor David Nelson Pollock has worn the same button-down black cardigan and worn-down black shoes since I met him almost a decade ago.
We all use language and stories wittingly or unwittingly to create meaning, and Oz’s vignettes are anything but cold and detached; each portraiture contains more than random details, but proffers full, developed studies of its subject, each of which is actually a “short” in itself, making it possible to read the text like a film reel or as a series of “stills.” Though the storyline gyrates within the confines of its structure, the expected narrative arc is intact with set up, tension, and climax. And speaking of that climax, it’s fairly long for a sex scene, with the heightened awareness of the Author and Rochelle so poignantly described (both characters trapped within their own nearly crippling insecurities, yet still the erotic exercise provokes a flood of genuine emotion for both characters) that labeling the book “cynical” is ultimately erroneous. The Author is moved during this scene; although he is pulled out of it, the barrier between him and the world is, for a few moments, finally broken.
What pulls him out? The consideration of Arnold Bartok, one of his imagined characters, described as “a sick monkey that has lost most of its fur,” who was fired from his job sorting packages for a carrier company, who takes care of his invalid mother and changes her chamber pot every few hours. Bartok is more than a little obsessed with the idea of eternal life and attempts to find some plausible possibility for infinite prolonged existence. It isn’t true that life and death are two sides of the same coin, he reasons: “For millions of years, trillions of organisms flourished on Earth without any of them ever experiencing death.” Single-celled organisms did not die, Bartok asserts, they only multiplied, so death actually did not exist. Aging and death only appeared later when sexual procreation replaced multiplication as a means of reproduction: It follows that it is not life and death that came into the world as a pair, but sex and death. Since death appeared later than life, Bartok continues, perhaps it will also disappear, along with suffering, if we can only eliminate sex.
An ongoing discussion of Tsefania Beit-Halachmi, the writer of the (fictional) poem Rhyming Life and Death for which the book is named, serves as a unifying thread throughout the book. Over and over the poet’s name is tossed amongst the pages like a beach ball, again and again characters muse on lines from the poem and wonder if the poet is still alive. One recurring couplet is particularly cited; the curator mentions it in his opening lines to introduce the Author early on in the book: “You’ll always find them side by side: / never a groom without a bride.”
On the last page of the book, the Author wryly notes that the poet was wrong about this, yet to me it isn’t this couplet that contains the “kernel of insight,” the bright internal flame of the text; rather, that can be found in the Author’s response to the curator with different lines from the same poem: Many a wise man lacks for sense / Many a fool has a heart of gold / Happiness often ends in tears /But what’s inside can never be told.
As the Author piles on “lie after lie,” and experiences shame and confusion for the life he lives “at a distance,” “from the wings,” wondering why he bothers to write about things that will exist whether or not he writes about them, admitting himself that he has no real answers on life’s central questions (the ones his readers expect him to answer), the opposite view is offered by Dr. Pessach Yikhat, who says at the end of the cultural evening that “one of the roles of literature is to distill from misery and suffering at least a drop of comfort or human kindness.” While Beit-Halachmi was wrong, the Author muses, Yikhat, though dim, is, in the end, “quite right.”
In the same interview with Haarertz mentioned above, Oz maintains that compassion is a recurring theme in the novel, and that the Author does receive a few doses of it. Oz also claims that the Author trying to make a connection with Rochelle is like a turtle trying to come out of its shell. Fair enough, yet the Author does make considerable internal progress toward a “real” touching with another human when he begins to see that Rochelle is not the passive, unattractive woman he imagined her to be. Though this relationship will never be the fodder for the social ejaculations of marriage and family, and though the Author is ultimately thwarted en route to orgasm, his trajectory toward intimacy is presented alongside a narrative preoccupation with the opaque nature of an individual’s (especially a writer’s) rich interior life (what’s inside can never be told). This lends the reader an opportunity for corresponding inner reflection; in the era of social networking, where public image is a professional essential and everyone can self-produce to look like a rock stair or celebrity, private contemplation is a more valuable response, perhaps, than fits of alienation or public expressions of vexation.
Danielle Winterton is Content Editor of The Ithaca Post and co-founding editor of Essays & Fictions.
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