Firmin Roundtable #1

I'll start off -- I've been looking forward to talking about Firmin for a while, so let me spill my unorganized thoughts out here and hopefully get the conversation going.

It's been a while since I read FIRMIN -- as a bookseller I received an early galley copy, and I devoured it (ha!) right away. But my memory was jogged recently by reading Andrew Friedman's article "The Rodent Is Myself" in the August 2006 issue of The Believer. Friedman admirably traces the history of the rat/mouse in literature, from Dostoyevky's "mousehole" in NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND, to Haruki Murakami's character Rat and Easy Rawlins' fierce sidekick Mouse, through Art Spiegelman's MAUS and even Robert Sullivan's nonfiction RATS. His contention is that these novels and stories posit that either rats-are-like-humans (implying sympathy and even brotherhood with our fellow mammals) or humans-are-like-rats (hiding, furtive, urban survivalists), and that they all play with our fascination and disgust with our likeness to rodents.

But when he gets to FIRMIN, the most recent and the most literal of the literature of rodenthood, I feel Friedman stumbles. He writes "By collapsing the provocative ambiguity that shades MAUS into having a narrator who's simply a precocious rodent that speaks, the novel at times has a congenial, aw-shucks cuteness Firmin himself would loathe." I can't argue with the cuteness (which some of my coworkers found annoying, but which I think is part of Firmin's appeal, and his self-hatred and absurdity.) But the important mistake is:

Firmin doesn't talk.

Nor does he walk on his hind legs. Other than his ability to read, he's a realistic, garden-variety rat. I think the book's otherwise charming illustrations lead to this misapprehension (and the disconnect between image and text seems of a piece with Firmin's fantasies about himself), but the way I read it, nowhere in the text of the novel is it stated or implied that Firmin is a Mickey-style humanoid rat. He's the same kind we see scuttling in subways and basements.

And that's the tragedy that makes him all the more human -- makes him, in fact, an Everyman (or a Fur Man). His mind is full of thoughts, ideas, images, stories, fantasies, desires, but he is utterly unable to communicate them to his fellow rats (who don't care) or humans (to whom he cannot speak). His inability to communicate makes him utterly isolated, alone with his thoughts; no matter how much affection his human friend, Jerry Magoon, has for him, there's no way they can really understand each other. (He attempts desperately to break out of this isolation by communicating, leading to the funniest scene in the novel, when he jumps out of the bushes and frantically signs "goodbye zipper" to passersby, before realizing the futility and ridiculousness of the gesture). Firmin is us, not necessarily in his surreptitious garbage-feeding ways, but in his aching desire to communicate, and in his isolation when he is unable to do so.

But that's just my opinion. Agree, disagree?

Comments

[asheresque]

Before I read Firmin, my favorite literary rat had been Templeton from E. B. White's "Charlotte's Web". Templeton, if you remember, was a slob and a complainer, but he came charmingly to life once a year when the State Fair came to town. He waited until dark, when all the people left, then threw himself into a nightly orgy of food scraps. Humans meant nothing to Templeton, except that they brought food.

Like Templeton, Firmin is all rat. The two creatures have little in common and would not have been friends, but both are distinctly non-human, even though Firmin yearns to be human while Templeton just yearns to eat like one. I agree with Jessica that the "goodbye zipper" scene was one of the best moments in "Firmin", and this scene shows how lost Firmin is in the world of humans, because he hilariously fails to understand that the phrase "goodbye zipper" (which he chose because it is easy for a rat to sign-speak) does not mean anything and will not help him make friends with strangers in the park.

Likewise, despite the fact that he is in love with books, his understanding of these books seems limited (despite the fact that he rhapsodizes -- sometimes unconvincingly -- about them). He reminds me of Helen, the intelligent computer network in Richard Powers' "Galatea 2.2" -- both Helen and Firmin are voracious readers, but they both seem to miss a lot of the meaning of what they read.

All in all, I agree with Jessica that while Sam Savage's rat is a fascinating metaphor for a human, it does not help the book to understand the character as some type of actual human. Maybe the whole equation should be reversed -- in several scenes, such as the tragic incident with the rat poison or the final vision of a destroyed neighborhood in downtown Boston, the question may be whether or not humans are rats.

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