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PARTISAN REVIEW
people can be, or become, to one another.
Beloved,
the closest among
these to a historical novel, though
Cigarettes
might well qualify in
another few decades, deals with the most chronologically distant
material: the time is during and after the Civil War, the central
place Cincinnati, with numerous flashbacks to a Kentucky planta–
tion and cameos of a Georgia prison camp, Trenton, and other
places.
Beloved
is not, as might at first appear, the only one of these
novels to claim more territory than a single time and place, or for
that matter a single plot. Just as Morrison's novel is about much
more than the life of a black woman after the Civil War, so
Cigarettes
resists being pigeonholed as a story about particular lovers (though
we are shown lovers) or a particular family (though we're shown
several). Moravia and Tournier, working on a somewhat smaller
scale than the American writers, nevertheless manage not only to
pack numerous flashbacks (Moravia) and digressions (Tour–
nier) into their tales, but to achieve thereby a far more complex ver–
sion of "reality."
All these stories are about the inextricable complexities both of
life and of stories about life.
If
there's no simple plot, there's no one
narrator either, no one voice with full authority for the Word. The
closest we come to straight first-person narration is in Moravia's
Dodo; but (as the novel's title hints) so much of Dodo's attention is
devoted to peering into other people's rooms and lives, speculating
about the past, and planning various elaborate strategies (does it
need saying how much of a presence Proust is here?) that we come to
feel Dodo is as passive a narrator as he is a person. Tournier's third–
person narration is suave but intrusive; the novel veers toward
travelogue which then transforms itself into literary-philosophical
discourse. Such generic waverings become more compelling than the
relatively straightforward story of Idris's travels. Mathews' third–
person omniscient narrator is omniscient about different things, ac–
cording to which section we're reading; and in an almost invisibly
narrow frame, which occurs in the first and last of the sections, a first
person narrator turns up , unobtrusive but crucial.
It
took me a cou–
ple of readings to understand who this "I" was. Morrison uses a lot of
third-person narrative, but at the very heart of
Beloved
we suddenly
hear the voices of all the central characters, sometimes to stunningly
poetic effect.
All these novels make knowing use of a mixture of techniques,
yet none mounts the kind of pyrotechnical display that obscures the
i
