Doc (I)

Postmodern historical novels have a habit of questioning their own existence.  Whether "historiographic metafiction" or "romances of the archive," such novels frequently wind up calling the possibility of historical narrative into question, or emphasizing the narrator's subjectivity, or morphing into stories about the historian's process instead of the (irreclaimable) past.  Strictly speaking, the past's inconvenient habit of being inaccessible to a much later narrator has always been built into the historical novel, right back to Walter Scott (known to meditate on the problem in his prefaces) and realist company.  But postmodern historical fiction tends to be more pessimistic about the possibility of representing ages long ago in any sort of realist mode, and more optimistic about the possibilities of formal experimentation.

Which leads me to Bruce Olds' Bucking the Tiger: A Novel (2002), one of the two novels about Doc Holliday I have sitting on my bookshelves.  This is Olds' second voyage into the lives of iconic nineteenth-century American figures, the first being Raising Holy Hell, about John Brown.  (In Bucking the Tiger, Holliday mentions Brown in passing--not positively.)   Although John Brown and Doc Holliday are not, perhaps, the most obvious pair, they both passed into myth by violently working outside the parameters of law, whether in the service of abolition or the self-service of gambling.  (Rodger Jacobs, who is not an Olds enthusiast, observes in a review of Olds' most recent novel that he's clearly interested in this type of character.)  However, unlike John Brown, Doc Holliday slowly dissolves into mist once historians try to track him down in the archives; there's more legend than man remaining.   Bucking the Tiger thus discards linear narrative--indeed, much of anything resembling a plot--and turns instead to the crafting of Doc's legend, adopting multiple POVs and forms along the way.  The deliberately fragmentary chapters range in nature from dialogue (apparently posthumous) to newspaper reports to cod medical reference works to free verse to scattered quotations; indeed, the prefatory "author's note" consists of definitions of such words as "bricolage" and "catena."  Readers seeking a unified Doc Holliday will find only his shattered body, as it were, spread out across the novel's pages.

The novel's structural fragmentation turns out to be mimetic, simultaneously figuring both Doc's rather frustrating resistance to historical reconstruction (as Olds points out, we don't even know how many men he actually killed) and, within the novel, his bodily dissolution--"this life of decomposition" (14).  "[H]e is coughing himself fraught to fractions" (5), Doc reflects in the first chapter, and the unavoidable reality of tuberculosis (a.k.a. consumption) lurks behind every action even when it isn't explicitly on the table.  Bucking the Tiger theorizes that "Doc Holliday," the legend, the dentist-turned-gambler and sharpshooter, is born out of this ever-present consciousness of death.  Not so much the fear of death, but what Doc describes as a sense of "powerlessness" before it, and then, "the sense that now, I must do everything possible to render myself less so" (38).  Doc goes West to stave off death, but slowly accrues a new identity as a death-dealer instead, a reputation he likens to "walking around inside a suit of stone--in the main, kept the bugs off, but there was absolutely nowhere to run" (205).  The new self paradoxically warps into its own form of entombment, in large part because that very American fantasy of total self-renewal winds up smacking right into other people: Doc doesn't just remake himself, he gets remade.  But then again, without that suit of stone, what is there of Doc Holliday? The "suit of stone" stands in bleak contrast to the nature of Doc's literal body, which spends the novel evanescing, degrading, and otherwise self-destructing; in the mock-epitaph that concludes the novel, we're told that Doc "[d]ied chewed up, chawed on, drubbed and sore dragooned, both lungs run to whey" (365).  Doc's body is a roving self-torture unit, regularly exploding into agonizing, bloody bouts of coughing.  After all, the suit of stone, Doc's Western self, is hardly sufficient to keep the real Doc together, even as it slowly takes his place.  This is not a novel that holds out any hope of an afterlife other than that legend, the mobile prison.  "Doc" is born out of death, and once dead, what remains is..."Doc." 

Doc thus turns out to be both set on self-destruction (he cheerfully ignores doctor's orders for the fifteen-odd years after his diagnosis) and, as it were, self-deconstruction.  Olds enacts Doc's unraveling, in both physical and figurative terms, in the novel's language games.   To begin with, the novel refuses to play by the realist rules of anachronism: as Olds quite cheerfully catalogs in his afterword, many of the fragments illuminating Doc's plight have been garnered from twentieth-century sources, and characters do things like quote N. Scott Momaday while in their cups (368).  Doc becomes Intertextual Man, his "context" no longer the culture of the late-nineteenth century West, but instead all of modern literature; as Olds remakes the myth yet again, Doc seeps out from history into pure story.  And certainly, some of Olds' decisions--making Doc's longtime girlfriend Kate sit at his deathbed, for example--turn out to be imaginative choices, satisfactory from a literary perspective (lovers together again as death looms!) but not necessarily "accurate."  Then again, that would seem to be part of the point: the novel takes the myth apart, but then plays with it, up-ends it, even re-romanticizes it.  Hence the patchwork imagery, with the novel as one more patch. By the same token, Olds refuses to differentiate character according to dialogue, let alone differentiate them from the narrator, as one would expect of realist fiction; we are always reminded that there is a twenty-first century author right there.   In fact, it's rather hard to fathom anybody talking the way these characters talk, which is where the novel itself begins unraveling.

Olds loves alliteration, loves consonance, loves pleonasm, loves all forms of repetition in general.   Both the narrator and the characters rack up endless lists of things, events, verbs, seeking precision yet never quite settling for a single word. Here's a speech from Doc himself, picked totally at random:

For a place so enamored of its drink, the West is singularly sloppy with those possessed of no right aptitude for its right handling.  It remains, alas, a land of scant couth, coarse and common and low, a land, at last, of low-down, loutish, copper-common drunks.  In the meanwhile, as there be nothing in this world so detestable in my eyes as the sight of an empty bottle--lest it be an underfilled glass--I intend henceforth to preside over my own dissolution and disintegrate as it may please me, if always with such discrimination and discretion as my debauchery may deliberately allow.  (127)

 

On the one hand, the sonic effects do work well enough with the paragraph's movement: the sibilants and soft "l" sounds contrast sharply with the hard "c"s, then crash abruptly into the blunt "drunks."  The "d" of drunks then echoes through the next sentence, with "debauchery" and "deliberately" ironically calling back to "detestable" (non-detestable debauchery? deliberate debauchery?) and both bookending the play on the "dis" verbs and nouns (themselves playing on each other--who disintegrates with discrimination?).   At the same time, the pleonasms suggest their own kind of linguistic debauchery, a world of rhetorical excess in which language piles up, turns back on itself, keeps reduplicating.  (Good lord, it's catching.)  Given that pleonasm is too much of a muchness, this accumulation of language suggests its opposite: what would happen if the excess was stripped away? What, then, would become of "Doc"? On the other hand, Olds writes the entire novel this way, which, to put it mildly, frequently produces the wrong sort of hypnotic effect. (In fact, despite frequently reminding myself, like the pianist Charles Rosen, that boredom may be a personal failure, I was rather bored.)  The sad and sobbing reader soon seeks an editor's soothing interventions...or, at least, some stoppage of the sesquipedalianism.   

I would suggest, though, that there's a more serious problem: the novel's drive towards fragmentation is, by this point in the postmodern historical novel's development, too predictable.   Legend falls apart under close consideration; news at 11? Trawls through the archives reveal only more linguistic constructs? Subjectivity may intrude on the historian's point of view? Haven't we been told this already--and often? I often find that metafiction tends not to be very interesting or thought-provoking when it's a novel's primary focus, and Bucking the Tiger didn't change my mind.