A Substitute for Imagination

...I needed the coming Revolution to cleanse my spirit I needed to confess " Similarly, the massacre of a million and a half Armenians by the Turks beginning in 1915 comes up in several contexts, yet always in kindred terms Ararat is such a short book that a reader attracted to its characters and themes might conceivably overlook the author's failure to develop them No one, however, can miss the monotony of his language Thomas hopes to pass off the mechanical march of his short, flat sentences as improvisational flow Pushkin's tale, with its urbanity, its various rhythms and its telling details is an oasis in a desert of banality Although Egyptian Nights and Ararat ostensibly share a theme-the enigma of creativity-the questions Surkov starts to ask himself as soon as Pushkin breaks off focus on the availability of the women who play minor roles in the story, not the problem of origination For Thomas' poets, women come in three basic forms-past, present and future Prospective conquests are infinitely desirable because infinitely malleable ("I'll lie flat out in bed naked dictating to her And when the last word is taken down we'll make love") In retrospect, lovers inspire contempt, and in practice they induce a mild nausea that only a rapist's fury can help these men overcome The most striking of the book's three rape scenes involves Surkov and a Marxist woman who "gave out an acrid, penetrating odor" that he finds "both revolting and exciting" "A stab for my father A stab for every victim of Stalin, I thought This bitch wasn't going to get away with a gentle screw " The semianonymous act is Thomas' emblem for both erotic and political life Hemakes his major female characters members of oppressed races-the Poles, the Armenians, the Jews-to emphasize that his concern is the relation between victim and oppressor Mariam Toumaruan and an Armenian man perk up a listless sexual encounter by pretending he is a Turk, for example, and immediately afterward she has the redemptive vision of the Armenian sacred mountain of Ararat that Thomas intends as the epiphany The twin peaks of the mountain represent for him a resolved or innocent dualism, the transcendence of the dualisms of man and woman, history and the individual, East and West Unfortunately, the brief passage about Ararat is hackneyed ("two snowy peaks, looking insubstantial already turning golden in the morning light") and vague ("a friendly Armenian had told her 'When you see it you will know it'") Thomas' conception of dualism is too muddled to emerge in a clear image or formulation The individual who embodies history in Ararat is a shipboard acquaintance of Surkov's named Firm, a man with vivid memories of participating in the massacres at Babi Yar and in several major episodes in the slaughter of the Armenians He selects the more appalling statistics and pornographic instances of violence for the delectation of his listener Surkov sees him as a kind of Ancient Mariner?I guess he felt a compulsion to go over his story " The difference is that the Ancient Manner's story turns on crises and concerns a loss and partial recovery of humanity, while Finn's anecdotes are excerpts from the documents of a history that has been purged of all traces of human intention and intuition Finn and history simply converge, like The White Hotel's heroine and the Wolf-Man, so that Thomas can juxtapose factual documents with his fictions about fictions But documented facts are not necessarily adequate representatives of reality, any more than fictions (even those raised to the nth power) are necessarily adequate representatives of the imagination...

...Three thousand...

...Three hundred...

...He does find time, though, to note that Anna and the "Wolf-Man,' whose histories exhibit "a surprising number of similarities,' probably passed one another on his stairs once This piece of trivia has no place in Freud and should luxe none in his literary mutator Its function is the same as that of the trash novelist's assurance that his U S President's widow now wed to a Greek tycoon is not Jacqueline Onassis, which absolves the author of libel while allowing him to exploit the glamour of the real Except for Thomas the danger lies in accusations of plagiarism-hence the noting of "similarities"-and reality consists of powerful texts In his new novel, Ararat, when the narrator mentions that someone's amour is "distantly related" to Roman Polanski, or when Mikhail Sholokhov is defended against charges of plagiarism with a reminder that "all art is a collaboration, a translation if you like," the reader is supposed to be enchanted into granting Thomas a place among his idols He is indeed a sincere and ardent idol worshipper-the irritable, self-absorbed Russian literary types who serve as his alter egos mA rarat turn reverent when they think of Aleksandr Blok, Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, or Aleksandr Pushkin And like Freud in The White Hotel, Pushkin is subjected to hommage by appropriation and impersonation His prose-and-poetry fragment Egyptian Nights is included in Ararat, then "completed " The novel's tricky narrative structure serves as a magician's smokescreen meant to prevent spectators from determining whether miracles (on the order of rabbit "translated" into dove, or Pushkin into Thomas) are being wrought before their eyes A Russian poet named Sergei Rozanov recounts a storv about three poets, Russian, Armenian and American, who tell each other interlocking tales concerning a Russian known as Surkov He metamorphoses into Pushkin while on an ocean cruise to the United States The ship never lands Instead, a few pages after the end of Surkov-Pushkin's Egyptian Sights, we find Surkov preparing to board a plane to the U S There he is to meet Donna Zanfian Preston, an Armenian-American sculptress who is replaced by one Mariam Toumanian Fairfax in the last installment of Rozano's account Thomas very skillfully conceals his machinery shifting the scene and characters in midparagraph or between chapters with so little fuss that it seems only tactful to suspend disbelief Still, finding one's bearings becomes a chore A lot of flipping back and forth is necessary to verify the names of wives and mistresses, cities of origin and destinations, and pauses to register one's sudden movement from here to there further lengthen the trip through Ararat's fewer than 200 pages When Vladimir Nabokov makes us do this kind of work, we deem it a superior kind of play, rewarded as we are at every turn by glittering showers of words, the language in Ada and Pale Fire generates a vital warmth despite the heartlessness of the books In Ararat, once you manage to ascertain that you are there, you begin to notice that the exotic landscape bears a dispiriting resemblance to Gertrude Stein's Oakland no there there Thomas, fascinated by Freudian repetitions, lacks any of Freud's quixotic devotion to the pondering of essences or his naturalist's love of observing differences As a result, repetition is here reduced to redundancy Rozanov,Sur-kov, "Pushkin," and Thomas' version of Charsky (the poet-hero of Egyptian Nights) behave, think and speak in exactly the same ways, as do the two Armenian-American women (not to mention the poets' many lovers, who are as interchangeable as the girls in a James Bond movie) Redundancies proliferate not only at the level of the inconsequential-Thomas informs us every time a character lights a cigarette, opens a can of beer, or shifts in bed-but in the scraps of historical theater and esthetic philosophizing, as well as in the yards of erotic rhetoric that clothe the narrative "And it is true that I burn up women as a marathon runner burns up flesh How many had I had...

...A Substitute for Imagination Ararat By D M Thomas Viking 184 pp $13 50 Reviewed by Ellen Levy In his writings, Sigmund Freud often apologizes for digressing He also expresses the fear that he might be leading the reader down a blind alley and worries that his daunting reductions may not be radical enough By contrast, the Freud of D M Thomas' The White Hotel is a shameless gossip so absorbed in the lurid case of "Anna G " that he can pause for only three paragraphs to formulate the theory of Eros and Thanatos ("Why else, I thought, should there be death...