Beginning of the Game

Reading Cortázar on the plane, I begin to understand that the problem with much of the fiction published today in America is not actually what I had until now called the fetishization of voice. I’ve complained about too much first-person that seeks to inhabit a perspective either identified fervently with the author (confession) or ventriloquized in a way that becomes more condescending as it approaches what it takes to be authenticity (experiment). At these two extremes we find two styles and two philosophies of authorship, one entirely subjective, assuming that, after a few identifying details have been changed, the writer’s feelings are foremost (no, Leslie Jamison, I don’t want to hear anymore about how you were dumped by that poet); the other entirely masochistic, assuming that the writer is a passive medium through whom the characters’ voices are channelled because they urgently have to express themselves (Gilead). All of the recent scandals surrounding the authenticity of memoirs reify experience into a credential. At issue is the accreditation of The School of Hard Knocks, which awards a Ph.D. in Life.

Cortázar’s stories show that the real problem is the way both confessional and experimental modes are narrated by an experiential “I” rather than an observational “I.” Naturally, this is an artificial distinction. You will say, how can experience and observation be disconnected? You will say that you enjoy reading observations of experience (Alice Sebold’s Susie Salmon is told by her murderer that she’s not observant enough, and Susie spends the rest of the novel compensating for that deficiency) and you lose yourself reading about those who lose themselves in experiences of observation (The Virgin Suicides). But reading to lose oneself is not the only, or even the most interesting, reason to read.

Cortázar writes dramatically, about the shift from observation into experience, and vice versa. Motorcyclists share dreams with Aztecs; Argentine insomniacs change places with the Hungarian beggars they see when no dreams are forthcoming. Photographers morph into cameras, trapped inside their instruments of perception. And with “no transition and no surprise,” a flaneur slips through the plate glass of an aquarium tank to become the creature that has fascinated him: an axolotl, a young salamander with unseeing eyes of molten gold (no sight) and an extraordinarily sensitive tail (but plenty of nerves). The observer becomes the experiencer, “incapable of expression,” who consoles himself by thinking of the story his former self will write. This drama of observation and experience—one mode shifting into the other, as a domestic servant excluded from a party comes to act the part of a grieving mother, and really feels her role—in the end offers little in the way of consolation. Experience is often confining, boring, disappointing; that is, when it’s not deadly. The amateur archaeologist would do better not to identify with the idol he’s dug up, and the reader would do better not to identify with the character in the story he reads, lest the knife be plunged into his skull.

It’s no coincidence that the same filmmaker who adapted The Virgin Suicides also made a film about the solace to be found within the alienation of travel. But travel need be about psychic comfort no more than reading is. Working through Wordsworth and other poets, Jeffrey Robinson has written about the need to read and teach literature as other than consolatory. Leave consolation to Lady Philosophy. Travel, like writing, can be not a means to losing or finding oneself, but an activity that refreshes and redramatizes the ever-shifting balance between observing and experiencing.