ironising

Guided Tours of Hell by Francine Prose consists of two novellas, one so short it’s merely a long story and another so long it’s basically a short novel.  While the market packaging of these works as the same form may be suspect, they are related in theme and tone enough to merit pairing.  Both deal with questions about sex and death, Jews and the Shoah, and fascism past and present, and both do so within a bathetic comic framework that makes the journey through these harrowing topics more fun than one would expect (or even think decent).

The perversity of the discussion of mass slaughter is most pronounced in the first of these stories, which details the story of a visit by a group of (mostly unknown) writers to a concentration camp.  The perversity, though, isn’t what bothers me.  Rather, it strikes me as overwritten and overwrought, too enamored with the effort to avoid cliché.  It reminded me of a story from one of my workshops in university in which one writer, who sort of prided himself on his experimental innovations, submitted a story that contained almost no string of five words that had ever appeared together before.  It was almost impossible to tell what was going on in the story, what was actually happening.  When the prohibition against cliché becomes hidebound, the peregrinations that one must go through can be laborious instead of exciting for readers.  This book has a bit of that in it, drawing too much attention to technique at the expense of the story.

The second story, the novel, struck me as better and more successful in terms of the interplay between the morbidity and the comedy.  In this story a woman is besotted with her lover who takes her around the death sites of Paris.  The comedy lies in the ridiculousness of her emotional turmoil, the interplay between her real circumstances and her impression of them.

I imagine James Wood would love these books because the irony of the pieces, what gives them their comedy, something Wood believes should always bear the mark of the human tragedy, is his most beloved literary technique, free indirect style.  Prose writes in the third person subjective point-of-view, which allows her to enter directly into the mind of the character while still retaining some distance, some perspective from outside the character.  The simultaneity of inside and outside perspectives is what characterizes the third person subjective POV and free indirect style.  Wood believes this complexity, this multilayering brings fiction closest to reality of our experience of being conscious beings.  Prose, at least in this book, is a great example of the virtues this technique and this perspective.  I don’t necessarily agree that this accomplishment is the pinnacle of human artistic or literary achievement (as Wood might), but when done well it can be a delight.