About Firmin

My mother, a most literary woman, would say in high praise of someone, that he or she was A Reader. (She said it in a way that one just knew it was in caps). Over the past few weeks I have visited the sites of all the LBC members; I have read your comments and opinions on all manner of things. I feel deeply honored that this group of Readers has chosen Firmin for discussion.

Jessica is right. To call Firmin a “rodent that speaks” is about as far from the truth as one can get. The incapacity to speak, even more than his rat body, is the defining feature of his condition. In placing him outside the world of language, it makes him the ultimate outsider. (It is interesting, in this connection, that Aristotle defines a “man” as a “speaking animal.” He also defines a “man” as a social animal, a member of a community or polis, and says that anyone living outside a community must be either “a beast or a god.”)

Levi questions whether Firmin really understands the books he rhapsodizes about. This is a good point. It is part of the larger question of whether we are to take at face value Firmin’s claims to genius. The examples of “great first lines” he presents at the beginning suggest that he is more of a hack, more like Jerry Magoon than the writers of the great books he admires. In so far as Firmin is human, he is a human failure, someone who has failed to attain in reality the place in the world that his imagination had carved for him.

A central “theme” of the novel, one that Jessica and Ed both talk about, is the imagination in its dual role as a means of escape from “reality” and as a means of creating “realities.” But an escape from the world that is simultaneously a creation of a world – isn’t that what we call literature, and art in general? What is the difference between imagination and delusion? Is there a hard and fast difference? Toward the end of the novel Firmin confesses that he is not able to distinguish what he remembers from what he has imagined remembering, that he is not really sure of his mother’s name or whether she was fat or skinny. Then what was he talking about all that time? And what is the end result of all that talk, An illusion? Or a book?

Now for the question Ed raises. This is, as Firmin might say, a Big One. Is Firmin “really” a rat or a man. I had hoped to plant just that question in the reader’s mind at the outset by prefacing the novel with the quotation from Chuang Tzu. Is Firmin a rat imagining he is a man? Or is he a man imagining he is a rat? Ed is right, there are clues, not to the answer, but to the presence of the question, at several places in the story. This question, man or rat, does not have an answer in the book, and I certainly don’t know the answer. In lieu of an answer, I would like to pose a few more questions. If I speak to you in the misery, meanness, and solitude of your rat heart and assure you that, after all, you are human, will you be comforted? When Firmin tells Ginger Rogers that he doesn’t believe anything, she replies: “You believe you are a rat.” Do you believe that you are human? Are there times when you stop believing this?

Ed, finally, brings up the question of whether, if Firmin is a human, the rat is not as much a fictive construct as the books are. As I said, I really don’t have any answer to these questions. Indeed, I very much hope they are not answerable in any definitive way, and that Ed and Jessica are both right, the way certain clever figures can morph back and forth between being, say, a picture of a rabbit or a picture of a duck. And though the picture is both things equally, it cannot be both at once. (Anne's post on shifting perspectives hits the mark here.) On the one hand, on the level of narrative, Jessica has to be correct, or we don’t have a story at all. It is, after all, about the adventures of a rat, tail, tunnels, and all. On the other hand, we have to wonder what sort of existence this story has. After all, there really aren’t any literary rats. What happened to the story about a rat that Jerry Magoon was writing and that, after Jerry’s death, Firmin cannot find in his notebooks, where the word rat does not appear even once?

I want to emphasize that I did not write the book with these sorts of questions in mind. With a few notable exceptions (I think of The Unbearable Lightness of Being), I don’t much care for “philosophical” novels. When I go to a desert island, if I don’t have to stay too long, I think I’ll pack The Thirteen Clocks. When I wrote Firmin I had in mind a voice, a character, and a condition (he was a rat). I worked paragraph by paragraph, forcing myself not to look ahead for fear that I might close off possibilities I was not yet aware of. It felt as if the story was telling itself. I would not allow myself to imagine how it might end, or what it might mean. I never thought for an instant about the questions we are discussing. They became evident to me only afterwards, when the novel was finished, and I could approach it with the knowledge and ignorance of any other Reader.

 

Comments

[asheresque]

Sam, it is wonderful to have you drop by for a visit here, and especially so because I found the note you posted here as pleasing to read as your novel, and in fact these paragraphs are a nice taste (a little joke there) of that so-enjoyable meal.

Mr. Savage, I hope you don't mind if I throw some questions about you, because Firmin left me buzzing with several. Here are a few:

1. I gather from your author photo that you may be more mature in years than the average first novelist. Assuming this is correct, what on earth have you been doing with your awesome writing talent all these decades? Why is Firmin your first novel instead of, say, your tenth?

2. You mention above that you don't particularly care for philosophical novels, but I also note that you have studied and, if I remember correctly, taught philosophy. I'd love to hear which classic or contemporary philosophers most excite you and which schools of thought, if any, you tend to favor. I'm guessing you to be a Wittgenstenian, but then I suppose that's generally a safe guess and also I suppose I could be way off. Would love to hear your response on this.

3. This is probably an unfair and tasteless question. But it happens that this is an eventful week in American electoral history, and I was wondering if you felt like presenting a rat's-eye view (or a Sam Savage's-eye view) of current events. I felt there was a political undertone to Firmin's scenes of urban dislocation (oh, I also want to praise Anne's wonderful previous posting on Scollay Square) and so maybe I can be excused for asking this non-literary question. If you don't want to answer, though, I understand.

I could go on but I'd better stop.

[Sam Savage]

Thanks for the questions, and the praise.

What was I doing all those years? I would like to say, with Firmin, that I was writing novels in my head. That would be true to a degree, as I started a number of them. I think I failed to finish them because I was blinded by an idea of a novel that was not the kind of novel I was ever meant to write. I think it was fundamentally a failure of courage. I wrote of lot of poetry, most of it thankfully lost. I did things, such as fish commercially, print letterpress books, build houses. But I have always thought of myself as a writer. I suppose that Firmin was born in those years. I did, finally, finish a sort of novel prior to Firmin: The Criminal Life of Effie O. This is an illustrated comic novel written in a kind of ragged rhyming verse. It is nothing at all like Firmin.

I studied mostly nineteenth and twentieth century continental philosophy. I wrote a thesis on Nietzsche. I suppose Heidegger and Wittgenstein are the two philosophers who were most important to me. I don’t read philosophy anymore. I like to think that Wittgenstein showed this fly, at any rate, the way out of the bottle.

I am delighted that we have, yesterday, taken a step towards recovering some of our democracy, such as it was. I thought, at the time of the old antiwar movement, that I could not dislike anyone as much as Nixon. I was wrong. That said, I don’t place huge hopes in the Democratic party. I dislike violence and those who practice it. I think there are, as Camus liked to say, victims and executioners, and one should strive to be on the side of the former. By the way, I graduated from Yale in 1968, at the age of 28 (I dropped out for a few years). One of my classmates was George W. Bush. I either never met him, or I forgot him.

[Levi Asher]

Thank you for the answers, Sam. I really hope I'll get a chance to read "The Criminal Life of Effie O" or anything else you may choose to publish next.

[Anne]

Thanks, Sam, for your gracious and generous drop in here at the LBC--it's always really thrilling to have authors stop by.

I love the appellations of Reader and Big One.

And I love the book.

If you're still around, I have a completely indulgent question to ask. As a Yalie (PhD, 94), I'd love to hear more about the benefits and scars from your time in New Haven...

[Sam Savage]

I was at Yale for a long time, eight years from the time I entered as a freshman to the time I graduated, several more years as a graduate student and, briefly, as an instructor. I have never been back. Although I received what people call a first-class education there, I feel that most of what I know today, and value, I learned somewhere else. It was an epoch to leave scars, and it did. I wish I could talk about it more fully, but if I ever began I would not know how to stop. Your choice of the word “scars” makes me think that you will understand. Thank you so much this discussion. The comments from all of you are terrifically heartening.

[Bill Ectric]

I especially like Sam Savage's comment regarding "the way certain clever figures can morph back and forth between being, say, a picture of a rabbit or a picture of a duck. And though the picture is both things equally, it cannot be both at once".
This "back & forth" concept has pervaded my mind and my work for years. It springs from sub-atomic particles, matter/energy, etc. and culminates in higher thought processes like natural/spiritual.

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