Being and Cappuccino
Ever since Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim spent a
morning putting out the conflagration his cigarette had started in the home of
his academic host, British fiction has kept a generically sure place for the
endearing cloddishness of aspiring young dons and the sardonic eye they are
wont to cast over the groves of academe. Formerly one of these professorial
youths himself, Malcolm Bradbury is the author of not only many works of
literary criticism but six satiric academic novels (which he calls, in ''Unsent
Letters,'' ''university'' or ''campus'' novels).
Mr. Bradbury is well aware that, just as people no longer
smoke the way they used to, so plot inspired by (even cloddish) subjects is no
longer the focus of modern (even academic) fiction. According to current
Marxist criticism, for instance, there are no more subjects whatsoever, since
there are no more bourgeois individuals available for creating characters, or
for being them. Thus, in 1977 Roland Barthes announced the death of the author.
Mr. Bradbury's two new books keep pace with the times. ''Unsent Letters'' is an
uneven collection of memoirs masquerading as a collection of disconnected,
satiric essays. ''My Strange Quest for Mensonge'' is
an extended fulmination against deconstruction disguised as a parody of that
mode of criticism.
In both, Mr. Bradbury's often hilarious wittiness remains. But
gone are the realistic settings and characterizations of his first books (such
as ''The History Man''). In their stead we get a heavily ironical self-mockery
that is sometimes clever but no less labored for being self-conscious. In a
typical piece from ''Unsent Letters,'' a reminiscence called ''Remembering the
Fifties'' attempts a fix on Mr. Bradbury's generation, so different from today's: ''where nowadays everyone wants to be an insider
trader, in those days they all wanted to be outsiders.'' In the 50's, Sartrean existentialism was the thing, along with espresso
bars, those ''two continental innovations that were often confused, so that
there were many discussions as to whether the word for Nothingness was neant or capuccino.'' ''Unsent
Letters'' also includes extended apologias for having written for television;
one defense takes the form of a teleplay about the monotony of a novel-writer's
life: ''Writing long narratives is a strange, solitary vice, of the kind that
can make you blind, as Homer discovered to his cost.''
The best piece in ''Unsent Letters'' is not in fact a memoir,
but a totally fictional thank-you note from a visiting lecturer to his
erstwhile academic host, the exquisitely sustained politesse of which satirizes
with Amislike deftness the horror of provincial
academic life. ''I hope the elderly lady in Anglo-Saxon is now fully recovered
from her fit, and realizes that the reasons we all lay on top of her towards
the end of the evening were entirely therapeutic.'' Genre, as Mr. Bradbury
realizes, is a powerful literary force; once associated with a particular kind
of fiction (such as ''campus novel''), authors find it difficult to escape
their labels. It is thus with a sense of disappointing Mr. Bradbury's own hopes
that one finds, predictably, his academic spoofs far funnier than his memoirs.
Some letters are better left unsent.
Generically tighter and more satisfying is the parody of ''My
Strange Quest for Mensonge.'' From the French pun in
its title, (mensonge means a lie, as in fib) to its
re-creation of Henri Mensonge's classic of
deconstruction, ''La Fornication Comme Acte Culturel'' (''Fornication as
a Cultural Act''), the style, tone and timbre is so close to Derrida and
Foucault as to be a kind of homage to the real achievements of post-structuralist criticism. Mensonge
is presented as the ultimate deconstructive philosopher because he has taken
this modern critical project to its logical conclusion. If the author has been
pronounced dead and if language is a hopelessly self-enclosed system that can
never indicate any thing outside itself, a dance about an absent presence, then
''Mensonge has gone further, insisting that he was
never even there in the first place, has never been known to anyone, even his
closest friends, that he is no one, has achieved nothing, and does not exist.
In short he has claimed to be a totally absent absence.''
The Bradburyan narrator's attempt to
write a biography of such an elusive author is in itself condemned to failure,
but then ''biographies are said to be fictions revealing more about the
biographer than they do about their subjects, who of course do not exist
anyway.'' Accordingly, we get confessions by the author, who has here suffered
a sea change into someone whose obsessions recall the delightfully mad narrator
of Swift's ''Tale of a Tub,'' and John Kinbote, the
insane commentator of Nabokov's ''Pale Fire'' (both of whom Bradbury mentions
en passant). A coda listing the details of possibly apocryphal sightings of the
absent Mensonge Mr. Bradbury owes to the
disappearance of Slothrop in Thomas Pynchon's
''Gravity's Rainbow''; in these imitations, Mr. Bradbury shows himself an
excellent magpie, and the music of postmodern intertextuality
is pleasant to hear. Veering close to sense, shearing off some edge of
absurdity, looping with great elegant swaths through deconstructive styles and
arguments, a 50's existentialism finds itself baffled,
intrigued, amused and, at last, savagely disgusted by post-structuralist
critical practice. (Mr. Bradbury's fundamental objections appear to be sexual
and sexist, but in this particular resistance to theory he has the company of
many illustrious satirists before him.)
The final spoof of ''My Strange Quest,'' its afterword by
Professor Tardieu, a Parisian intellectual who never met Mensonge,
is supposedly translated by Mr. Bradbury's friend and fellow British academic,
David Lodge, who happens to be himself a well-known
academic novelist. In it Mr. Bradbury brings up a question with which he has
opened ''Unsent Letters'': ''Is Malcolm Bradbury really David Lodge?'' Less a
joke on French critical theory than, one suspects, irritation at often being
confused with Mr. Lodge, Mr. Bradbury emphatically sets the record straight. He
is not Lodge, but ''Bradbury the campus novelist, Bradbury the professor of
American Studies, Bradbury the Booker Prize judge, Bradbury the TV adapter of
postmodernist novelists such as John Fowles and Tom
Sharpe, Bradbury the tireless international conference-goer
and British Council Lecturer.'' Bradbury, we might also conclude bathetically,
the wonderfully witty parodist and tediously tireless self-promoter. In the last
postmodern analysis, Mr. Bradbury bores less the more he is absent, and when
present least is most amusing indeed.
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Universitat de Valčncia Press
Creada: 06/110/2008
Última Actualización: 06/11/2008