The Gift of Metamorphosis
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing THE GIFT OF METAMORPHOSIS BY PEARL K. BELL Dan Jacobson, a Jewish writer from South Africa who migrated to London 20 years ago, is a first-rate novelist and deserves much...
...The power of love...
...Still, one cannot be entirely certain, for Jacobson foxily keeps moving the ground beneath our feet...
...The ancient bloody melodrama acquired a mordantly modern cast as Yonadab spun out his malicious commentary on the nature of political power, the insidious subtleties of conflict between fathers and sons, and the often absurd banality of unrestrained sexual greed...
...While Jacobson arranges the shifting, amoebic pieces of his puzzle, we try to decipher his clues, but without any strong confidence in the meanings we devise...
...To confuse the metaphor with the deed is to violate man's indispensable reality...
...The Wonder-Worker (Atlantic, Little, Brown, 191 pp...
...If he has forged an intricate chain of meditation on the alchemy of literature, he has done so in deliberately ambiguous ways which the reader must resolve for himself, if only to the extent of deciding they are not resolvable...
...In rendering again the familiar faces and conflicts of South Africa and its Jews, this novel, with its rather obvious simplicities of generational growth and change, its uncharacteristic blotches of sentimentality, showed distinct signs of fatigue...
...Is Dan Jacobson in fact running with this obsessive tide, imposing yet another fictional form on the seductive lessons of R. D. Laing—that in a world come unstuck, insanity, as Lionel Trilling has described this mode of response, not with approval, "is a state of human existence which is to be esteemed for its commanding authenticity...
...Wuchs, despite his belief that it is futile and capricious...
...Yet by the time Jacobson published his long and sprawling Jewish-family chronicle, The Beginners, in 1966, one began to suspect that he had carried his commitment to naturalistic realism as far as it could go, that his private well of experience and memory was running dry...
...It is more accurate, I think, to read this haunting and mysterious novel quite differently—to see in it a metaphoric scrutiny not of madness but of the art of fiction itself...
...Although the book took its subject from the Old Testament, the Jewishness of its characters was of no importance to Jacobson's narrative and moral purpose...
...to hanker after vulgarly supernatural powers of transformation, when the powers we have can perform such marvels for us, if only we allow them to...
...And two years later, the stories collected in Through the Wilderness, though finely wrought (Jacobson couldn't write badly if he tried), betrayed an unmistakable sense that neither the disturbing dilemmas of South Africa nor Jacobson's ancestral world of unchangeably alien Jews could any longer provide the challenge that he needed...
...Is The Wonder-Worker yet another version of Norman O. Brown's longing to attain those "supernatural powers" granted only to lunatics...
...In another premonitory sign, Timothy's house caught fire on the day of his birth, and as a schoolboy, he stumbled on the power these omens anticipated: By putting his forehead against a brick wall, a wooden door, a piece of paper, and closing his eyes, he became that substance, and divested himself of time and consciousness and "every other principle or condition of his own individuality...
...FOR THE PAST I5 years, there has been an extraordinarily pervasive concern with madness in such British and American novelists as Thomas Pynchon, Joseph Heller and Doris Lessing...
...Thoughts occupying space...
...During the day the protagonist submits patiently to the regime of the sinister Dr...
...Flesh and blood held secure from decay...
...How idiotic it is...
...Is he a madman or only an innocent victim...
...Now Jacobson has published a new novel...
...The Rape of Tamar stunningly retold the story of King David's only daughter—ravished and cast out by her brother Amnon, and avenged by her brother Absalom—from the viewpoint of David's nephew, the corrupt and conniving Yonadab...
...In this beautiful novel, we learn that these are the gifts we have, and they are more than enough...
...The individual consciousness eternized...
...All the glittering facets of The Wonder-Worker—Timothy's gift of metamorphosis, the narrator's labor of recollection, the richly lyrical speculation on the secrets of time and memory—are highly charged images of the creative act, the obsession that drives a novelist to convert the raw matter of transient experience into the miraculous permanence, the autonomous reality, of art...
...Is the man a murderer, or is this only another hectic wrench of fantasy...
...With the appearance in 1970 of The Rape of Tamar, a novel that turned away from the comfortable, well-known lineaments of his previous work, Jacobson announced his decision...
...Across this dream-like landscape of equivocation, with its febrile interplay of shadow and substance, one thing alone is clear...
...At the end of his story Yonadab exclaims: "Readers . . . breathe on us and we tremble into life, we begin to move...
...Of memory...
...Writers & Writing THE GIFT OF METAMORPHOSIS BY PEARL K. BELL Dan Jacobson, a Jewish writer from South Africa who migrated to London 20 years ago, is a first-rate novelist and deserves much greater critical attention in this country than he has yet received...
...This, it seems to me, is the profound clarity at the heart of Jacobson's riddle of the human imagination...
...One can interpret this "gift" in various ways: as the fulfillment of supernatural hankerings, or the boy's psychotic delusion, or the hallucinatory phantasm of Timothy's deranged creator, "sitting endlessly at this desk, unable to get away from it, remembering what I must...
...The choice is always yours...
...Memory made tangible...
...At such a moment a serious writer must face up to a dangerous choice: Either he settles for the undemanding solace of repetition, or he strikes out boldly in a new direction, whatever the risks...
...In bestowing upon the wily Yonadab a magical immortality, unfettered by the poky restrictions of verisimilitude and the dust of history, Jacobson raised some intriguing questions about the nature of imaginary truth and the complex devices a writer uses to attain it within the pages of a book...
...Turn the page and we fall still...
...Throwing the inhibiting cautions of realism overboard with startling audacity, Jacobson gave his malevolent narrator free passage over the 3,000 years between his Biblical existence and our own time...
...And he hunts for the flickering answer in his cache of precious stones and crystals, with their taunting prismatic gleams of perfection...
...Even when he moved his scene to Israel or to London, it was still South Africa that obsessed his characters, absconded with their memories, inflamed their thoughts and feelings...
...The novelist, remembering what he must, transforms the shards of time—the disconnected accumulations of experience and memory—into the hard, coherent shapes of art...
...Unlike the psychosis-intoxicated novelists, Dan Jacobson is not celebrating the higher sanity of madness, or exalting the supernatural power of unreason...
...Like the deliberately created, imaginative reality of a work of fiction, each heavy gem, "so immaculately ordered," contains and becomes its own world, "complete, inviolable, different from every other, as full of change and drama as it was of an unalterable stillness...
...An intricate and elusive exploration of the no man's land between literal reality and literary illusion, the book is simultaneously a limpid and an opaque tale of a tormented, unnamed young man—perhaps insane, perhaps a murderer, perhaps neither—who is being treated for an undisclosed ailment at a posh sanatorium in Switzerland...
...In most of his 10 books, Jacobson, now 45, has devoted his warmly responsive and witty intelligence, his vigorous and evocative prose, and his unflinchingly lucid judgment to the stern realities of his intractable native land—in particular to the small enclave in and around Johannesburg settled by immigrant Jews from Eastern Europe...
...5.95), and once more produced a work totally unlike anything he has done before...
...He spends his evenings, however, bent over his desk, writing a memoir about Timothy Fogel, a strange boy whose dim-witted Irish mother yelled out so loudly the night he was conceived that the neighbors came running in alarm...
...In any case, Jacobson's method is fascinating because of its nervous fluctuations of actuality, its tensely controlled alternations of focus between the narrator and Timothy, who, since they are of course one and the same person, have merged into a single voice by the end of the book...
...Of imagination...
...As Timothy matures, he loses the knack of metamorphosis that enabled him, during his childhood, to endure malign gossip about his mother, her early death from cancer and his German-Jewish father's amiable vagueness and mediocrity...
...Has he been writing mere nonsense?just lines and scrawls and scribbles"—as his doctor and father believe...
...Instead, his entire being becomes possessed by the conundrum of time: "Why should it be supposed that time was necessarily abolished, annihilated, once it was left behind...
Vol. 57 • April 1974 • No. 7
