LXXXI (81): A 21st Century?

Okay, we’ve made a lot of outrageous claims here, so let’s just examine them a little more closely. Let’s take Daniel Burt’s book The Novel 100: A Ranking of the Greatest Novels of all Time. There are lots of lists, but this is as good as any, better than most, if not the best. So let’s compare Confessions with the best and the comparable – since many can’t be compared – e.g., Tolstoy, Austen, Dickens, etc., but can with Joyce, Proust, Faulkner, etc. So let’s start with James Joyce’s Ulysses (ranked number 3), Finnegans Wake (26), Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (37), and then Proust, Twain, Faulkner, etc.

The obvious is stream of consciousness, whether very self-conscious, barely conscious, or sub or unconscious, such as Finnegans Wake (however, a book that few readers will ever attempt, let alone get past page 1). They’re All subjective and internal, of course, the most extreme example being Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (4), but not so excessive to the point of being too challenging for most readers to at least get past page 1 (as in the case of Finnegans Wake). With Proust, you might get up to page 2 or 3, and if you’re really determined, you might finish the first volume – Swann’s Way – if you can put up with his interminable vacillation. Then you only have 6 more volumes to go (unless you want to read the whole thing in 3 volumes, each the size of a New York City telephone book with print the size you’d read on a pill bottle). Huckleberry Finn (14) is, of course, at the other extreme – having a typical American slang indigenous to his time and place and the journey theme (which most stories have anyway). Also, Faulkner’s narrators in many cases – e.g., The Sounds and the Fury (23) – Quentin’s overly sensitive intellectual perspective contrasted with Jason’s hardened but very neurotic cynicism (and at times quite funny). A few others I’ll mention are Catcher in the Rye (94) and, of course (the obvious), On the Road (91), at least at the beginning of Confessions; Herzog (65), the philosophical schlemiel (towards the end of Confessions); Tristan Shandy (32), perhaps the most capricious narrator in literary history; and of course the most obvious one of all – but not listed in the top 100 (although I think it should) is Portnoy’s Complaint (Burt puts it on his “Next 100 [A Second Hundred] Honorable Mentions” – but not ranked).

One big difference, of course, is the inclusion of art – none of which those or any of the others on the top 100 depend on – and only one of which is illustrated by the author: Thackery’s Vanity Fair (24). Of all of those that do have artwork, the best is Don Quixote (1): Gustav Dore, famous for illustrating many of the classics – Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Rabelais, Balzac, Hugo, etc..

And as stated before, of course, take out the artwork and large portions may not change in effectiveness, but the true tone would not be quite the same. When I see a “dark” movie – or what may appear to be Film Noir – and yet hear light music, I’m more likely not to take its intent that seriously. Chinatown is dark. Butch Cassidy is not. Why? – even though they’re doomed, and we know it – the banter, the perspective, AND the music (much like the visual in Confessions) – set the tone. One or two pictures? Here and there? You could be sidetracked. But pictures plastered all over the pages after a while become wallpaper. Muzak! Elevator music. At best the musical score in a movie. Some memorable, some not – but either help. Or hinder

Now, if the intent is to distract from taking almost anything he says as being more than capricious (Tristan Shandy) or the diatribes of an “angry young man” (Catcher in the Rye/Portnoy’s Complaint) or the ramblings of a philosophical schlemiel (Herzog) – that’s another story. But aside from being, at best, a picaresque hero, he is not a Prince Hamlet, nor “an attendant lord” either, but an everyman. From there, you fill in the blanks. “That is not it at all! That is not what I meant at all!” T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

So? Top 100? You decide. But try reading that list first. If not the whole list, at least try the ones I mentioned. And if not all of them, at least Catcher in the Rye and Portnoy’s Complaint. If you don’t like either one of them, chances are that’ll just end up, at best, sitting on your coffee table for everyone else to look at all the pretty pictures, too.