The Situation of Writing Itself

Unbeaten Paths 13

Avner Landes, The Delegation (Operation Dodecahedron)

One might look forward to a new novel by Avner Landes because his previous, debut novel, Meiselman: The Lean Years, promised to reinvigorate, or at least to sustain, the legacy of American Jewish fiction of the sort represented by Roth, Bellow, and Malamud (with a dash of Bruce Jay Friedman and Stanley Elkin for extra spiciness). Landes’s portrayal of his Jewish characters and milieu is as close in its scrutiny as Malamud and as frank in that scrutiny as Roth (the huffily offended tone of some of the reviews of the novel and its matter-of-fact depiction of its protagonist’s flaws suggested that the reflexive indignation with which Roth’s frankness was sometimes greeted has not entirely dissipated). Meiselman serves to remind us that the quintessential Jewish novel has arguably been broadly comic in outlook and method—broad enough that it both captures the absurd conditions attending modern Jewish existence and the further absurdities that inform efforts to cope with these conditions in ordinary Jewish lives.

The Delegation certainly maintains Landes’s focus on the situation of Jews (if anything even more acutely), but readers will first of all need to reckon with the novel’s most conspicuous feature, its formal arrangement. It ostensibly relates an historical narrative about the World War II-era visit of two emissaries from Stalin’s Soviet Union, the poet Itzik Feffer and the theatrical personage Solomon Mikhoels. Stalin has sent them on a world tour to drum up support for the Soviet war effort, specifically to appeal to their fellow Jews for assistance in the Soviet Union’s heroic struggle against Hitler’s fascism. But this historical narrative—actually a novel written by Izzy Shenkenberg (a character introduced in Meiselman)—is only one layer of the novel’s discourse. A stream of footnotes appended by Shenkenberg runs below the main narrative, and a further stream of notes to the notes runs below that. The reader can choose his/her way through the text—following each layer separately, interrupting the narrative to read the notes (leading to further notes), reading discrete chunks of each sequentially, etc. . By necessity, then, this is a novel that requires the reader first of all to be aware of the way its formal device governs our experience of the work rather than the narrative it appears to supplement.

While the “story” embedded in the novel’s three-tiered structure is drawn from historical fact, the way the novel brackets the story in this intricate formal configuration transforms it into an element of the novel’s artifice, artifice that makes The Delegation an adventure in the act of reading before it is “about” anything else. Given the choices the reader can make in approaching the text, it is almost literally the case that each reader will have a different experience of the book, will in effect read different books, although in retrospect the three layers work together distinctly enough and form an appreciably coherent whole. In this way, The Delegation is closer to a precursor work such as Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch, which similarly offers the reader multiple pathways though the text provided, than it is to other novels incorporating footnotes, such as Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, or the several such works by David Foster Wallace. All of these works interrupt the customary linear progression assumed by most narratives (and most readers), conveying the impression that we are moving backwards or sideways (in The Delegation flash-forwarding to another time and place). Such a move prompts the recognition—at least momentarily—that narrative itself proceeds through artifice, invoking an illusion that depends on our willing consent to its credibility. The labyrinthine scheme through which The Delegation presents its core narrative, along with various elaborations and the exposition of its authors’ efforts to create it, renders the conventional suspension of disbelief only a secondary consideration in the reading experience.

It might seem this sort of complexity is an obstacle to an appreciation of the very real seriousness of the underlying story and its equally sobering implications. The actions and the subsequent experiences of Itzik Feffer and Solomon Mikhoels, both authentic historical figures, illustrate the perilous circumstances of Jews in Stalin’s Soviet Union. (Both were killed in the early 1950s, Feffer executed for treason and Mikhoels murdered by Stalin’s thugs.) Feffer’s fate seems especially poignant, since he is portrayed as a true believer in the ideals of communism, but the story of the Feffer-Mikhoels tour also illustrates most immediately the vulnerability of diaspora Jews to the exploitation of such idealism (to socialism and progressive progress if not to communism per se), although not only Jews are shown to be susceptible to appeals to social justice and equality, as the novel’s depiction of the figure of famed actor and singer Paul Robeson, both in relation to the Feffer-Mikhoels mission and to Stalin’s regime in general, further makes clear. The tour is ultimately motivated by Stalin’s assumption that the the Jews, especially American Jews, have the financial resources and the influence needed to bolster the Soviet Union’s cause in fighting Hitler. That Stalin has this caricatured vision of “the Jews” does not seem to occur either to the two delegates or to those with whom they interact while in America, and the tour, which ends with a rousing speech given by Feffer, is to all appearances, a success.

If the novel’s structure diverts some attention from the serious themes it does also explore, it cannot be said that the narrative voice and tone announce that this is an earnest examination of the Jewish situation, as Feffer and Mikhoels themselves refer to it. The center of consciousness in Izzy Shenkenberg’s novel is Feffer, and he is portrayed as an unequivocally comic character, beset with anxiety caused primarily by his bad case of hemorrhoids, so that he spends much of his time worrying that he won’t reach a bathroom in time to prevent a horrendous accident, or that he has soiled his clothes and is emitting foul odors. Perhaps the most outrageous moment in the novel occurs when Feffer and MIkhoels are visiting Albert Einstein (himself portrayed comedically as a dirty old man) and does indeed soil his underpants, so severely that he must steal a pair of Einstein’s underwear. The depiction of Feffer’s affliction turns him to the sort of of hapless figure made familiar in much American Jewish fiction (and adopted by other, non-Jewish writers such as Thomas Pynchon) and, as with most such figures, this very haplessness almost inevitably persuades us to be on his side, feeling empathy for his plight even as we are laughing at him. In this case, we might begin to question whether our laughter is altogether seemly, once we consider the ultimate fate awaiting both Itzik Feffer and Solomon Mikhoels not too long following this journey through America. In this way, Landes takes a relatively obscure figure whose story might at best seem like a cautionary warning against a too credulous idealism and renders him a rather tragicomic character, although finally we must judge him to be deluded in his faith in the Soviet system.

Feffer doesn’t realize he is a victim of this system until it is too late, but it turns out he is the victim of an agent contributing more conspicuously to his suffering. It appears that the narrator of the novel Izzy Shenkenberg has written is not a third-person stand-in for the author but something like a first-person narrator, if indeed this narrator was a person: a hemorrhoid, apparently a roving hemorrhoid who has chosen Itzik Feffer as current host. Again, this conceit might seem to belittle the importance of the story of Feffer’s experience as a representative figure in modern Jewish history, but it seems in keeping with the complaint registered in the Author’s Note by Izzy Shenkenberg—who is, after all, the source of the conceit—about what he calls “Jews-Like-Dead Jews” books, of the sort unfortunately favored by Jewish readers. Izzy tells us that in The Delegation he has conceded to this predilection, after the failure of a previous book that defied the genre, and written a dead-Jew book, although not one that works by resorting to “hacky jokes” that reinforce stereotypes that don’t even provoke real laughter. In Shenkenberg’s novel (and Landes’s), laughter doesn’t trivialize disturbing subjects but heightens the disturbance by mixing the ridiculous and the horrific. Why isn’t it possible for a character such as Feffer both to serve as a martyr to a kind of deadly naivete and as someone who also suffers terribly if ignominiously from hemorrhoids?

Perhaps it is a mistake to think of Landes’s novel as primarily the framing of Izzy Shenkenberg’s The Delegation. The Author’s Notes don’t merely add a metafictional flourish to the central historical narrative but transform that narrative into an element within a larger narrative, the narrative of its own framing, or at least the circumstances motivating the framing. In this case, we might more appropriately take Izzy to be the protagonist of Avner Landes’s The Delegation. His questionable state of mind (some combination of resentment and insecurity) and his struggle to understand his audience, his status in the literary world, and really his purpose as a writer are the wellsprings from which the chronicle of Feffer/Mikhoels mission has emerged, and ultimately it is this, the whole context of literary creation, that The Delegation explicates. You could call this metafiction—writing that depicts the situation of writing itself—but that very situation encompasses much larger questions about Jewish identity and experience.

Alvin Lu, Daydreamers (FC2)

Alvin Lu’s novel, Daydreamers, immediately declares itself to be writing about writing. It begins with a “Translator’s Preface” that identifies its main text to be a manuscript written by the translator’s father (the translator acknowledges this might not be certain), ambiguous in its genre: it “bears novelistic traces, even as it is preoccupied with the truth.” Furthermore, the protagonist of this quasi-novel is the author’s son—the translator. Is the translator a further extension of this character in the father’s novel, or is he indeed the actual son who has been fictionalized in that novel? Ultimately, Daydreamers leaves this question unanswered, so that the further question of what is “real,” what a figment of characters’ imaginations is rendered superfluous. All is fiction, and all of its elements point only within the compass of that fiction.

Of course, this is true of all fiction, but our habits of reading continue to tempt us to maintain the opposition “real/fiction” even when faced with what literally has been presented to us as a work of fiction. Daydreamers concerns itself directly with the problem of determining what is real in the story offered by the father’s book in the figure of “Lena Wu,” a character whose motives, and finally her very identity, are a subject of investigation for all of the other characters, uncertainties also left unresolved (although with many hints that she is indeed a phantom). The character thus serves as an effective device in giving the novel a plot of sorts, although how seriously we are to take the device as a means of exploring the porous border between illusion and reality is not so clear.

But perhaps this would be an expectation that the main figures in this novel—all of whom are Chinese-American—would not would not hold of works of fiction, in which such a distinction does not actually apply. In addition to the translator’s father, another writer character is Yvonne Fung, who has some reputation in the Chinese community in the Bay Area but does not otherwise appear to be widely known (her main occupation is as a real estate agent). In the father’s novel, Yvonne is enlisted to find Lena Wu and tell her story, but excerpts from her other writing are interpolated throughout the text. In one such excerpt, she writes of the Chinese view that “writing was action, decisive and irrevocable”; further, traditional Chinese culture “does not harbor the illusion that fiction is somehow not the truth.”

In this way of thinking, writing is itself a reality, and fiction, despite ostensibly being “made up,” is still an effort at revealing the truth (perhaps with more freedom to invent along the way). If we assume that Alvin Lu is attempting not merely to dramatize such ideas but to embody them in his own novel, then the seemingly self-enclosed form of Daydreamers is really a way of affirming the self-sufficiency of even such a highly wrought novel to assert its own authority to get at the truth that lies beyond mere stolid fact. While the novel does not resolve the mysteries that serve as the twin engines of its plot—What really led to the death of “Uncle Rafael.” the event that leads the son-narrator to both Yvonne Fung and Lena Wu, and who is Lena Wu?—this seems itself an expression of the deeper truth that emerges from Daydreamers: factual truth is often elusive, difficult to determine, but fiction is the medium to which we can turn for the most compelling representation of this more profound insight.

It is also certainly the case that Lu’s novel provides us with insights into the ethos characterizing the Chinese-American community in the California Bay Area, of course one of the oldest and most established of such districts in the United States, although in this case the dominant lineage is Taiwanese. Among the central concerns for the characters in the novel is the preservation of writing in Chinese—the father’s novel, as well as the interpolated fragments from the writing of Yvonne Fung are written in Chinese script, and the father belongs to a literary society (presided over by one Mrs. HU) dedicated to sustaining literary writing in Chinese. The son, of course, has made himself proficient in Chinese writing (although his sister, the subject of the father’s previous book, is not), although his efforts are mostly applied to keeping visible the work of the older writers whose audience has largely been confined to those who read Chinese-language publications. But for these writers the rewards of writing appear to be in the writing itself, not in external recognition, an attitude that their professional success in other fields of endeavor makes possible and their persistence in the Chinese language perhaps makes necessary.

Despite the metafictional intricacies and the novel’s atmosphere of noir-like mystery, one could say also that Daydreamers is an immigration success story. The endeavor to continue cultivating a Chinese literary tradition is a kind of luxury attendant on apparent prosperity resulting from achievements in business and technology, and the attempt to solve the puzzle of Uncle Raphael’s death also serves as a means to reveal the habits of mind and conduct prevalent in this particular enclave of the Asian-American community, in particular those very attributes that have contributed to the success (in Uncle Raphael’s case, perhaps also the failures) these characters have achieved. The narrator is tasked with assisting his father as he tries to review the status of Uncle Raphael’s business (a publishing company), and as he meets with the employees we are able to survey Raphael’s somewhat familial business practices. Similarly, both Yvonne Fung and Lena Wu display their own kind of unorthodox business methods, although certainly Yvonne is more conventionally successful at it than Lena Wu, whose life seems closer to a hard-luck story than what we are able to gather about the other characters.

At the end of his preface, the son/translator comes as close as we get to an explanation of what “really happened,” what real-life circumstances inspired the father’s manuscript. He tells us that, from his perspective, his father “got most of it right.” If we take this preface at face value, he is affirming that the projection of the son’s point of view is essentially accurate, and implicitly that the events related did happen. Yet even here, we are given reason to doubt that the story involving Lena Wu is indeed to be trusted. We are told further that “in the scene where I finally meet up with Lena Wu, I think he was not merely wrong, but embellishing.” Indeed, “in real life that meeting never occurred.” While this at the least implies that the whole narrative is more fiction than “real life,” if we still wonder whether the son as translator of the narrative” might also be the father’s creation, we are truly left in a funhouse of fictive illusion doubling back on itself. Whether we really should go so far in interpreting the novel’s devices in this way, stranding ourselves in the absolutely indeterminate, is arguable, but even if we don’t, Daydreamers is no less compelling as a work exploring the possibilities inherent in the situation of writing itself as an animating artistic conceit.