Our Napoleon in Rags: Tone, Style, and Narration

To contribute to this discussion, and maybe open up more avenues for ideas, I'll start with some things Carrie said. She struggled a bit with some of the stylistic elements of the book, and wondered if there is such a thing as an "unflawed" novel.

The question of "flawed" and "unflawed" novels depends on your aesthetics, and assumes a certain idea of a novelistic ideal. One of the things I like about the novel form is that it can encompass and include just about anything, from minute character study to complex plotting to parody and picaresque. A few of our nominees this quarter aspire to put various novelistic techniques into play, and that's something I particularly like in Our Napoleon in Rags.

I think there are a few justifications for varieties and oddities of tone and style in the book. There's a certain archness to the opening section, but then the other sections each have their own slightly different rhythms and dictions. The most obviously different comes toward the end, with "The Sutherland View", where the point of view switches to first person, and the voice is more conversational, more ordinary in its poetry, than anything the previous sections have offered. It can be perplexing and jarring, but then the revelation(s) of the ending put it into a different perspective, and the entire book gets recast as a study in ventriloquism as an attempt at compassion and knowledge. Two sentences on the second to last page are essential: "As Haycraft always said -- and Glenda, too -- we suffer from a lack of willingness to imagine the experience of others. It is in their honor that I have reimagined this story and written down all of what I could access." If you keep those sentences in mind on a second reading of the book, it becomes quite a different, richer, and more complex experience than it is on the first read. Our Napoleon reveals itself to be about the limitations of understanding, the difficulties of compassion, and the pitfalls of imagining, because the last pages show that these attempts have not entirely succeeded.

I've just finished reading Charles Johnson's Middle Passage, and the complexity of narrative there made me think of Our Napoleon -- the various layers of imagined reality, the ways of imagining it. Writing inscribes memory into time, becoming itself both an act of history and an evocation of imagined pasts. What I like about both Middle Passage and Our Napoleon in Rags is that they don't ignore the power the storyteller has over the story, and they both quietly, but clearly, remove any pretense of objectivity from their imagined realities.

The ending is unsettling not just because it rearranges our relationship to all the pages that come before it, but because it recasts the narrative as being narrated by someone who is, in many ways, despicable. This complexity makes the moral/political pronouncements of the last paragraph simultaneously seductive, hollow, and horrifying, and leaves an admirable amount of room for readers to draw their own conclusions.

Comments

[CAAF]

I agree with you, Matt, in the main (though worry that in your encapsulation it sounds like I'm bringing up "flawed novels" pointedly in regards to Napoleon, which I thought was an amazing novel in large part because of its technical style).

But you know, while I share your liking for the breadth of what novels can do and of the variety in their intentions and aesthetics, when I say "flawed writing" I'm talking about something beyond that. Something that sounds to the ear like a wrong note. Or a flat passage. Or a stretch that feels too overwritten. It happens in most novels - b/c it's almost impossible to pull of a long form piece of writing where every word has that kind of divine click of being in the right place.

I read a great quote by Zadie Smith recently that I need to look up again, but it was something about loving certain books especially for these warts.

[CAAF]

p.s. Matt, have you read Look Homeward, Angel? I was thinking about it this morning too; in it, Wolfe plays with all these different dictions and tones (including an oddly good, overtly Joyce-ean section). Wolfe's project was to try to recreate the entire cosmos of a town (Asheville, another Southern town), which is what reminded me of it in relation to the Gann.

[gwenda]

I love many flawed books. The classic example of the great but flawed book is Huckleberry Finn and its ending. (A more recent book which came in for harsh criticism of the ending would be The Lovely Bones.) Most of Jonathan Carroll's best novels are flawed to me, and I love them both in spite of and because of those flaws.

I can only think of a very few novels that I consider perfect: Karen Joy Fowler's Sister Noon, Sean Stewart's Mockingbird, Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle. There are others; and for each of these, for other readers, the flaws are dreadfully apparent, I'm sure.

All of which by way of saying I'm too tired to be much coherent. But I love talking about the flaws of books (in an affectionate way).

(And CAAF, I know exactly what you mean. The false note in the prose.)

[Matt Cheney]

I haven't read any Wolfe, I'm sorry to say. I've got a copy of Look Homeward Angel somewhere, though. I adore Faulkner, and he had great things to say about Wolfe that are relevant to this -- he maintained that Wolfe was greater than Hemingway because he aspired for more, and so his failure was greater. To Faulkner, it was the aspiration that was most interesting and made Wolfe a better writer than Hemingway, whose work was more flawless.

Of course, the flaw is in the eye of the beholder. I've recently been on a quixotic campaign defending Ishiguro's ending for Never Let Me Go, which many people who are smarter than I am think is nearly ruined by what they perceive as a preachy ending. And I've read attempts by people to redeem such, I think, obviously flawed items as Faulkner's late novels, and Dostoyevsky's endings. (I revere no novelists as highly as Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, but I dislike few endings as much as those of The Brothers Karamazov and War and Peace.)

I certainly do think, though, that "flawless" works are often less interesting than others, because if a writer is capable of writing something so apparently perfect, why didn't they strive for more? But there are a couple books I adore simply because they seem like such perfect constructions -- The Hours works that way for me, in fact.

[CAAF]

Yes, all so true! I'd almost always read a brave, botched experiment, than safe and smooth. (That's a great quote from Faulkner about Wolfe, by the way, who I do love for always have gone for the whole hog.) There's also this line from Mr. Ben Folds: "i thought about ... all the great ideas i had/ and how we made fun/ of thoses who had the guts to try and fail."

The nice thing about flaws is that sometimes they can give you insight into how the writer constructed the book. A perfect book can seem impenetrable, or like it climbed fully grown from the writer's head. A flaw or a bad book by an otherwise great writer can let you in, show you how the writer worked it. There's a book by Edith Wharton (who I adore), Roman Honeymoon or something, and it's a total lump, and it's so interesting to read it in tandem with her best work. You can see how when she exaggerated certain tendencies in her writing, it all just toppled over. Or got vapid.

And yes, it seems like for every book one loves with all its warts, there is another smoother production that one can only bring oneself to admire.

[Health News]

I can't believe how much of this I just wasn't aware of. Thank you for bringing more information to this topic for me. I'm truly grateful and really impressed.