Adventures in Postmortemism
A posthumous novel by Malcolm Bradbury employs no less a
figure than Diderot to examine the idea of writerly
legacy.
Unlike the torrent of stories, plays, critical
studies, parodies, television scripts, anthologies and book reviews that poured
from the pen of the late Malcolm Bradbury, his full-length novels came
grudgingly, but once a decade: ''Eating People Is Wrong'' (1959), ''Stepping
Westward'' (1965), ''The History Man'' (1975), “Rates of Exchange” (1983) and
''Doctor Criminale'' (1992).
Though each of these neatly captures the cultural
preoccupations of its day and each experiments with style, they are more or
less cut from the same cloth: most offer some version of a liberal British
academic (who closely resembles Bradbury himself) confronting the farcical yet
inevitably corrosive forces of postmodernity. There's
the usual stuff of the academic comic novel -- the exposure of pretentious
theorists, a splash of adultery, the bewilderment of the well-intentioned
humanist and a bit of fun with the English language. Character and plot matter
less than ideas. And what starts out in a comic vein invariably takes a darker
turn.
Bradbury was often confused with David Lodge -- they were
colleagues early on in their careers, wrote collaboratively and even make cameo
appearances in each other's books -- but Bradbury's novels tend to be more grim
and more technically ambitious, less funny and, as a result, a lot less
successful commercially. Bradbury was aware of the price he paid for his
experimental approach. As he put it in an interview in The Paris Review, there
''remain many writers for whom writing is not an economic activity but a
vocation, the book not a commodity but a site of exploration.''
Nonetheless, Bradbury's previous novels were all published on
this side of the Atlantic by big-name houses. But not this
one. It is easy to imagine harried acquisition editors skimming through
the hefty manuscript of ''To the Hermitage,'' failing to see what Bradbury was
up to and deciding that there was no money to be made here. It is no small
irony that the Overlook Press acquired the American rights to the one Bradbury
novel that transcends its cultural moment and may well attract a coterie of
admirers and have a long and happy shelf life.
In ''To the Hermitage,'' Bradbury breaks new
ground. While the usual Bradbury stand-in appears, his role is now secondary to
that of the novel's real hero, the great Enlightenment writer Denis Diderot
(best remembered these days, as Bradbury ruefully notes in his preface, ''as a
Parisian district or a Metro stop''). Those who still read Diderot today tend
to dip into his Encyclopedia rather than his daring fiction -- This Is Not a
Story,'' ''Jacques the Fatalist'' and ''Rameau's Nephew'' -- to which Bradbury
is powerfully drawn.
Along with a literary hero comes yet another innovation: a
surprising final turn toward the elegiac. Yes, a lot of the old ingredients are
still included -- the satiric riffs, the knocks at deconstruction, the sleeping
around -- but these often seem stale and do little more than enable Bradbury to
address what's really on his mind: what does posterity have in store for
writers? It's as if Bradbury started out to write one kind of novel in the
early 1990's, when the old academic battles still seemed to matter, and then
took his book in an entirely new direction when thoughts of mortality --
Diderot's and his own -- loomed larger.
''To the Hermitage'' is woven together out of two baggy plots,
both based on actual journeys, which unfold in alternating and interwoven
chapters labeled ''Now'' and ''Then.'' ''Then'' takes us back to 1773, when the
aging Diderot arrives at the court of the world's most powerful woman,
Catherine the Great. While Diderot spends his mornings filling up notebooks
with dazzling plans for how to improve Russia, ''the Cleopatra of the age''
busies herself with the nasty business of running an unruly country. As she
likes to remind him, he writes on paper, she on skin.
For a few hours on most afternoons, though, they meet at the
Hermitage to argue and flirt -- and Bradbury does his best to reconstruct the
sparring between these intellectual and despotic heavyweights. (It's sometimes
unclear which one is which.) After several months of this, Diderot returns to
Paris, Catherine's attention having turned to Potemkin. Upon Diderot's death,
his extraordinary library, which Catherine had purchased and left in his
possession, is carefully packed up and shipped off to its final resting place
at the Hermitage.
Rather than romanticizing the Enlightenment and using it as a
stick to beat our postmodern age -- as one might have expected from Bradbury --
the novel emphasizes just how much the two periods have in common. ''Now''
takes place in 1993, when an unnamed English novelist (the Bradbury stand-in)
joins an academic junket called the Diderot Project, bound for St. Petersburg.
The members of the Diderot Project include an unusual cast of academic
hangers-on, each thinly drawn and each exemplifying a different part of
Diderot's range of intellectual interests: a diplomat from Sweden, a
philosopher from America, a writer from England and so on. Their ferry ride
from Stockholm to St. Petersburg provides an excuse for some first-rate
philosophical and literary set pieces.
The best of these is an off-the-cuff lecture by the English
writer -- ''A Paper That Is Not a Paper'' -- and its message is at the heart of
the book. Rebutting Roland Barthes's famous essay ''The Death of the Author,''
it proposes a countertheory called postmortemism, a hilarious and gruesome argument that
authors are never really dead and buried. To illustrate this point, we are
taken through a ''burlesque necrology'' in which the physical remains of great
writers -- including Laurence Sterne, Voltaire and Descartes -- are variously
buried, exhumed, dismembered and misplaced.
Postmortemism, the argument runs, holds just as true for
an author's literary remains. Sterne's ''Tristram Shandy'' -- that great postmodern novel of the Age of
Reason -- is supposed to end with the actual death of the author, but of course
it never does. Diderot, who loved the book, was inspired to pick up where
Sterne left off. The lecture concludes that ''we can say Sterne turns into Diderot;
who turns into Beaumarchais; who turns into Mozart; who turns into Rossini. He
also turns into Proust and Joyce, Beckett and Nabokov'' -- and, somewhere down
the road, by implication, the Shandyesque Bradbury.
It's a wonderful conceit, and much of the rest of the novel is
spent defending it. When the members of the Diderot Project arrive in St.
Petersburg, Russia is in turmoil: Boris Yeltsin is fighting off a coup, the
economy is in shambles and everything is for sale, including pilfered volumes from
Diderot's library at the Hermitage. The English writer will leave Russia with a
gift of a couple of stolen books safely stashed away: Volumes 5 and 6 of
Diderot's own copy of ''Tristram Shandy,''
in which he discovers Diderot's continuation of Sterne's novel along with
furious scribblings in Diderot's hand that turn out
to be an unknown draft of ''Jacques the Fatalist.'' Inspired, the English
novelist rushes home to write his own book. ''To the
Hermitage'' neatly confirms and celebrates the triumph of postmortemism:
''Books breed books, writing breeds writing.''
The other lesson of postmortemism is
serendipity. Writers never know where their remains will end up. Diderot filled
66 notebooks in St. Petersburg with ideas about how to run an enlightened nation,
but Catherine showed little interest in them. By playing around a bit with
history, Bradbury rewards Diderot with a surprise visit in Paris from Thomas
Jefferson. While Diderot's writings would be burned in France and ignored in
Russia, they would inspire Jeffersonian America -- and Bradbury's Diderot dies
believing that his work is ''not wasted after all.'' The novel comes to a close
in 1784 with Diderot's death and burial in the church of St.-Roch in Paris -- from which, only a short time later, both the
coffin and the body will disappear.
Malcolm Bradbury died unexpectedly last November at the age of
68. For living proof of postmortemism, we need look
no further than the novelists he taught at the University of East Anglia --
including Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro and Rose Tremain.
Those in search of Bradbury's literary remains -- correspondence, early drafts,
a travel diary -- might try the Lilly Library at Indiana University.
Published by James Shapiro
In April 1, 2001
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
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