Bringing a Contraband Treasure

...But for all its pedantry and preposterous machinery A Smuggler's Bible melts, projects, smuggles itself into a new kind of unity, takes responsibility for life-what else can fiction do...

...This modern discovery of the mind's dialectic has become a structural principle of contemporary fiction...

...From each principal part of this long, agonizing novel, to the next one, traversing each bridge-section with its further case of mysterious noumenal figures, the reader will follow David Brooke's remembrance of things amassed with-I am sure -delight, for McElroy has every gift that can blandish us into being entertained: dialogue, characterization, topography, wit...

...Everything changes...

...Muffled, mingled voices swirling about an impregnable egg of self...

...His victory is to have subdued these crowding talents and his own overwhelming, pathological ingenuity to an ultimate set of connections which afford, as he says, "precariously a design...

...then to the seventh manuscript, another virtuoso explosion, consisting entirely of a packet of letters sent by all the characters from all the other sections to David who has pretended (?) to have lost his memory...

...Everything counts...

...Once I thought of killing myself-to get out...

...6.95 Reviewed by RICHARD HOWARD Contributor, "Poetry," "Partisan Review" We have learned, in this century, two great things about the memory: It contains more than we are at first conscious of having received-it functions, that is, involuntarily (Proust...

...Yet if he could in some way hypnotize himself ostrich-style apparently out of his own existence, then he could hypnotize himself into another person, into 'another'-thus to love, thus to escape the wild divisions inside him, subliminal, supraliminal" "The highest life demands the most ruthless and even amorous memory...

...But instead I chose another way of leaving myself-projecting into the lives, the consciousness of others.' David Brooke's project-and these are just a few glosses on it, out of dozens strewn throughout the book-is to project into a novel, into something that will stand for a life, not merely lived or eluded, but understood, expressed, valued, the eight hysterically discrepant narratives he has written and is now conveying, inside a Smuggler's Bible (a fake book hollowed out to contain precious contraband) to a very symbolic Old Man in London...

...imagine having to identify each of the "principal parts" with a myth of Midas, Orpheus, the Golden Ass, etc., or having to trace a stolen green-covered French novel as it passes from hand to hand, part to part...

...to scatter makes it possible to recollect...

...Charles Newman's New Axis, which in ten stereopticon "takes" finds in the affluent paraphernalia of our middle-class madness the emblems of sufficient community...

...in an integral, original way...

...When Forster called for something more than the famous "the king died and then the queen died," in Aspects of the Novel, he welcomed a great many kinds of connection-what he insisted on (as the exergue to Howard's End makes explicit) was only connect...

...to the final elegaic section in which David's father, back in Brooklyn Heights but remembering Norway, thinks his dying thoughts waiting for his angina and rectal cancer to kill him...

...Indeed, so extreme are the dismemberments of his hero's "principal parts," as McElroy calls David Brooke's eight narratives, that for them to be contained significantly by a single memory requires a lot of explicit theorizing, bridgework and, in almost every section of the book, commentary: "Everything derives from everything...

...In consequence, forgetting is equally significant: the process of dismembering, we should say, is what gives point to remembering...

...Gilbert Sorrentino's The Sky Changes, which discovers the meaning of identity-its disintegration and release-in the metaphorical possibilities of the American landscape, the American road culture...

...with their games, conundrums and little tests that will exasperate the merely cursive reader-these eight links will be welded into a single catena, David expects (he has read The Counterfeiters and guesses a smuggler isn't so different), by the brief and informal transitions composed, mostly in the ship's cabin on the way across the Atlantic, by David's own creator ("for Form's sake I'll grant that he and I've been put here by a Creator whose distance from us and whose flair for style are consonant with my own independence and outrageous intelligence"), McElroy himself, or David's alter or superego...

...Do we not use each other to slip across the frontiers of selfscrutiny as something other than lonely people...

...From the first manuscript, recounting the urbane anomie of a second-hand bookseller in Brooklyn Heights where David grew up, the book shifts (or jerks) to the dissection of a sociologically interstitial ??oominghouse on Morningside Heights, the Kodak Hotel (lights...

...There are real simple things in this music that you don't hear for a long time...

...with their erotic indeterminacy that affords the book its strange tone of expectation...

...Smuggling, finally, is a metaphor for metaphor...

...Patterns...

...Disguising his treasure gives him-or at least saves him temporarily from losing-his freedom...

...camera...

...These eight sections, with all their labyrinthine ingenuity that reaches back to Nabokov and Butor...

...to the saga of David's honeymoon on Ischia or somewhere near it, told alternately from the viewpoint of his young English wife and himself and in which the purpose of sexual intercourse is seen as a further range of projection into the Other...

...And David is right...

...Sanford Friedman's Totempole, which articulates the growth of a man's eros by a set of discrete animal identifications, reading up the totempole to Man, the crucial figure at the top...

...then to David's mother, long after David has salted himself away in the confines of some university in Julia Brooke, a woman fond of attending surgical amphitheaters where she can study "the one red animal ditch in the loneliness of the sheeted patient...

...This David Brooke is indeed, as he calls himself, a kind of epistemological reuniac...

...half a dozen of whose extraordinary inhabitants David invades, projects himself into, while he is studying at Columbia...

...Our novelists, with their new apprehension of the way memory works and idles, have had occasion to transform the old, handed-down notions of the novel as a history, a chronicle of events...

...There is no waste...

...action...

...The smuggler, McElroy suggests somewhere in a "memo" to his restive David Brooke, hides or disguises his treasure in order to get it across a frontier, past customs, duties...

...and it functions voluntarily-we remember what we want to remember, in the way we want to remember (Freud...

...then to the narrative of a spiky, spurious romance between David's roommate in New Hampshire, a young historian from Oxford, and a lovely, neurotic American girl who makes -identifiable-sculptures: "I judge that she does monumental, macabre witticisms," says David, "for example, a Ruth made out of a barrel topped by a head with five faces painted on it and standing powerfully but without direction on several sets of good slim legs...

...and fourth among these radical books, Joseph McElroy's just-published A Smuggler's Bible, which didactically sets forth the physis of recognition, the process whereby we make sense out of what is remembered and what is forgotten...

...then to the book's showpiece, the near-breakdown account, by his 18-year-old son, of a kind of Marshall McLuhan professor of "American Civilization" whose dazzling charlatanry is practiced at the very New Hampshire school David has fled to...

...Solitude was audible only as one part of the game of offerings and acceptances, advents and farewells, sudden louder agreements, dominants and final weaves...

...In the last year, I can think of four first-rate first novels published in this country which have found new connections in "the emotion of experience," as Chesterton called memory, connections that transcend and even explode the notion of sequence and require of the reader a new effort to put reality together, to "compose," beyond the mere consecutive thrust of life itself...

...David soon saw that the way in -in to the center-was via the 'I' -the first person, i.e., his own 'I...

...Textures...

...A pattern of disconnection that holds all the currents in the same pool...

...Everything helps...

...For the novelist can no longer merely come into his form as if it were his bequeathed fortune: He must earn his inheritance, that deathbed legacy...

...The condensations, displacements and distortions Freud anatomized in the dream-work are mild functions of consciousness compared to some of McElroy's structural devices...

...A reverse evangelism to bring the word of others to one's own hard-up self...

...In this steeplechase of a novel, taking all the jumps with a style none of his contemporaries has equalled, McElroy has brought his treasure, his revolutionary sense of life's connections, the links that make it life, across the frontier of "storytelling," past the customs and duties of diversion, and by submitting (so strenuously) to the obsessive explosion of his consciousness, has made himself one more heir of that moribund old party, the modern novel...