Atchley by David Green. Station Hill Press, 1998. 120pp. Pb. $12.95.
But what is this book about? We ask the old banal question. It is about itself, as the young Beckett said of Joyce's early Work in Progress which was to become FW. But a work of art is never entirely about itself despite our modernist/post- modernist forebears.
It is about its perceivers, its readers. As in Rezeptionsesthetik. About its writerly readers, ideally, in the Barthesean (S/Z) sense. But this opens a can of worms, questions about the inviolable integrity of the work of art, and by extension the whole problem of the decline of our culture due to making "art" cater to the banalities of non-artist perceivers. And a work of art is about—of course—other art. This book in particular triggers this reader to images, associations, to see/hear paraphrases, ideas or even some quoshed quotatoes from other characters, other authors, other texts. Atchley the book and Atchley the character are about...well, let Atchley speak:
"My work has grown stale to me. The greatest gift is to be able to re-create the world through one's words, to appreciate its colors, dark and bright. And yet I take the colors and make them dull, digging into the ground beneath the gardens...to find what soil and rock supports the color, ...as if the cold dark earth could explain the iridescence of the iris. Why do I make this effort to explore another's world and not my own, to establish my presence as the elaboration of another's?" (36)Yes, we murder to dissect. This, after he has written a letter to say that he has met "this fellow Green at Birkbeck" and "didn't quite know what to make of him." (Suddenly one thinks of At Swim-Two-Birds, whose fictional characters comment on and annoy their author, himself a fictional character created by the book's pseudonymous author, Flann O'Brien)
At times, Atchley seems to be about challenging futility—the Futility described to me once as Wonder by a psychiatrist—that we can never analyze or dissect to find the causes of beauty; the integrity of essential reality is not divisible. Nor explainable. Nor should we wish it so, he believed, this sensitive psychiatrist.
But Atchley can't leave well enough alone. The book (for want of a better name) wants to question assumptions down to the bone: "...author and character are nothing more than events in the mind of the reader; in fact how they exist in the mind of the reader is more important to who they are than who they really are....It is always possible that some unscrupulous scholar has created a writer by the name of Atchley to question the assumptions and strategies of critical theory." (11-12)
Perhaps the author is a phenomenon of the text [but then who created the text?]. Green observes: "Atchley is really saying two things...that the person who does the writing is not a single unified entity, but is rather the provisional amalgam of a changing environment, literary influences, impulses, skills, and so on; and second, that this person only becomes an author by virtue of the text...as understood by those who engage in [it]." (14-15)
Do such questions and concerns hold up over time, or are they merely fashionable, trendy concerns of our post- modern times?
To return to the quote from page 36: One thinks of Sartre's Roquentin's final resolution in Nausea. To give up devoting his life to writing about the life of another (a DWM, actually) and to write a new kind of book, one that would make its readers ashamed of their Existence. Is Atchley ashamed of his existence? Or is he annoyed that he hasn't got more of it? The presence of absence or the absence of presence...?
"He doubts whether it is possible to eliminate the authorial influence from a work altogether." Well, who cares? After the death of God, must we kill off authors now? Pride and self immolation—if the author can eliminate his Traces from his own work, then...? The autonomous text, devoid of Voice? And what about James Joyce's authorial intrusions in Dubliners, how his Narrative Voice mimics the voice and language of a character so that we are taken in, as by Maria in "Clay," and then subtly given distance by a single word, such as "ferreted"? Is this not akin to Romantic Irony? Is there not a tradition from which contemporary authors such as Green or Atchley still draw, one that at least debunks the most artificial device of all, the omniscient narrator?
When we look more closely at that Magritte painting we notice a blue book on the mantel, part of its cover reflected in the mirror; but while the back of the man appears in the reflection rather than his front, the reflection of the book is as normal, with the lines of letters on its surface mirrored as in life. So, are we to infer something that at least the book designer, Susan Quasha, saw—that while the man/author/mind is hiding the self, the text is to be read as "normal"?
Not only has the author, Green, doubled himself in Atchley (his mother's maiden name, incidentally)—sometimes the narrative is in the first person, sometimes in the third person. The book itself falls into two: a meditation on writing, "The Art of Absence, a pickayune questioning process" and, Landfall, a picaresque questing tale filled with glorious sensory description, flora and fauna of Gallicia, and the teller's physical creaturehood in the existential, historical, phenomenal world. Something for the mind, something for the body. A tour de force of collaboration or symbiosis between the left brain and the right brain of one skull collaborating, or at least contained in, one text.
But then, I recall an old e-mail from Green who protests, "Since I was trying to avoid writing about anything in particular, I used description to fill the void, to create wonder rather than thought." At the quest's inevitable and ideal end, we are treated to a self reflexive pun, the "deep green" surface of the sea. And other words give us other companions: "buoyant stern" and "lilac flakes of light" and "small sargasso"—do we not think of Eliot, of Pound, of the pre-Raphaelites, of Saint Brendan?
He does not say so, but Green's Atchley's boat "responded gaily." For me. Like FW, this book wants a return to the sea. A Vichian ricorso.
Well, Green is deep, or at least "his" Atchley is striving for both depth and simplicity. The mind's attempts at self perception are valiant and perhaps ever inconclusive. The nature of an artistic text is never reducible to a definitive explanation or theory, nor is the beautiful, nor is the sublime. It has taken me nine months to read this book (with maps.) I don't mind. I suggest you do the same.
—Alison Armstrong