Wait!

One of the more disconcerting experiences you can have as a reader, I think, is discovering that the novel ardently insists that it is going in one direction, while you, struggling to keep up, point to this or that detail and cry, "Wait! Aren't you heading off somewhere else?"  Reading Emily Barton's The Testament of Yves Gundron (2000) proved to be a case in point. 

Barton sets the novel in Mandragora, a tiny "lost" village near Scotland--so lost that it is entirely unaware of airplanes, Boston, or the fishermen living a scant few miles away.  Life is nasty, brutish, and short: the inhabitants farm, go to market, doze through church services, and die young.  Yves, however, comes up with a magical new invention, called a harness, that enables horses to pull loads without being strangled to death.  This leads to better carts, which leads to more produce, which leads to wider gates at the entrance to the neighboring city.  And that leads to destruction: "The squalid row of tenements which had previously intervened between the gate and the church square had fallen into heaps, razed" (28).  Yves' inventions, which have already prompted him to new and untoward desires, destroy the lives of the citizens who happen to get in their way.   This instance of flashing neon symbolism prepares the reader for the arrival of Yves' "editor," Ruth Blum, a doctoral candidate in anthropology whose dead mother inspired her to seek out the legendary village.  Ruth, who soon winds up living with Yves, explains that "I study people, Yves.  I'm here to study you" (49), but her "study" rests on keeping the village untainted by the modernity she represents.  Needless to say, she fails terribly at remaining an objective observer (cf. Mischa Berlinski's more recent Fieldwork [2007]), and matters are not helped by an airplane crash, an encounter with the aforementioned fishermen, the reappearance of the flu, and the revelation that Yves' brother Mandrik has lied about his trip to Indo-China.  The novel ends where it begins, with Yves writing the book in front of us.  As Mandrik declares, the village is undergoing a brutal birth into "History": "We are the first men to have need of what came before; for without it, we cannot divine our destination, or what kind of progress we are making there toward" (302).  With change comes the loss of tradition, and with that loss comes the awareness that there was a tradition in the first place.  An awareness that comes much too late, it seems.

It was here that I found myself wondering where I had parted ways with the novel.  When the book first appeared, John Crowley remarked  (in a generally positive review) on the "absurd holes" pocking the novel's landscape, and there are times when the reader needs anti-gravity to sustain disbelief.  Think about it too long, and the narrative slides out of improbability into impossibility.  What I expected to find, but didn't, was that the novel was driving towards a revelation that Yves' testament was, in fact, Ruth Blum's invention.  The testament transforms Ruth's project from anthropology to history, with the "primitive" Other taking over the academic's voice; at the same time, Ruth mediates Yves to the "educated" reader through her footnotes.  Or she would, if the footnotes didn't also confess to her psychological crises and disruptive sexual desires.  More to the point, although the first footnote explains that Ruth has limited her interventions to dividing up the manuscript, "regulariz[ing]" the language and mechanical conventions, and fixing Yves' errors (5), it's hard not to notice that Yves' narrative reads like a clichéd fantasy about pre-industrial cultures.  Yes, life is rotten, but the people are God-fearing and content.  Everybody in the community looks after everybody else, although life remains rotten.   Mandrik, the mystic rebel, is supposedly an awe-inspiring creature, a being entirely unknown to Ruth, and yet he appears to be a cross between a sixties hippy and a nineties New Ager.  (He's also a flagrant liar, and arguably responsible for some of the aforementioned rottenness in Yves' life.)   Between Ruth, Yves, and Mandrik, the novel keeps telling us that there's something really good here, but the goodness rests on a lack of time to think about how rotten everything actually is.  That is, the village's most valuable points all derive from a negative.  Everything in the novel seems to point towards it being as much a meditation on the dangerous self-delusion involved in this kind of fantasy as on the dangers of technology: the "modern" characters fantasize about finding an enchanted space untouched by capitalism and science, only to arrive just a little too late to find it.  Ruth isn't the first outside visitor, after all; Yves' grandmother also comes from beyond, and introduces the island to blues rhythms.  The untouched village doesn't exist as such.  But, as Thomas Pynchon announces on the front cover, the novel is "[b]lessedly post-ironic."  Perhaps I'm just too skeptical about pre-industrial utopias?