History and Fiction

 My mind ought to be on finding a job, which I have not had much luck doing so today, but "Chasing Ashes" seems to be more more on my mind.

I read the introduction to The Covering Cherub: An Interview with Joshua Cohen, which follows, and knew this was skirting along my own interests, so excuse its inclusion. It explains what I wrote after it.

At 248 pages, Joshua Cohen’s latest novel, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family, is slim by his standards. His 2010 comic novel Witz comes to 824 pages. Book of Numbers is just shy of 600. Beyond page count, there is an instantly recognizable intensity to Cohen’s writing, and in this respect, too, The Netanyahus is a bit of an outlier, for it unfolds with the ease of an anecdote, a comic—if cautionary—tale.  

Published in the U.S. this week by New York Review Books, the novel follows a series of events surrounding a job talk in 1960 by the conservative religious historian Benzion Netanyahu at a small college in upstate New York. The narrator is the liberal economic historian Ruben Blum, who is assigned to take charge of Netanyahu’s campus visit, despite not knowing his work, because he is the only Jewish member of the faculty. Netanyahu unexpectedly brings his family along, and their encounter with Blum’s family is about equal parts farcical and disturbing. There are a few other plot points and some significant digressions, including two inserted letters and a fully delivered speech. But all of it comes together in a kind of playful package that I found more congenial—or differently congenial—than Cohen’s previous work.

In the afterword, we learn that the novel is based on real-life events told to Cohen by the literary scholar Harold Bloom, toward the end of Bloom’s life. Ruben Blum is a stand-in for Harold, the Blooms really hosted the Netanyahus, and so on. How much of the rest is true is unclear, for out of Bloom’s anecdote Cohen has crafted a story about two Jewish families half a century ago that is also an inquiry into the religious and political tenets upon which Netanyahu’s son—the famous Benjamin—would later reshape modern Israel. The result is a surprising hybrid, a learned and investigative novel that retains some of the feeling of a story shared by friends. Over and over, Cohen reconfigures the space between artifice and autobiography, between irony and earnestness, between what’s made up and what’s real, and how each of those modes offers its own understanding.

Here is somewhere close to what I want to do with my "Chasing Ashes:" 

INTERVIEWER

Okay, but there’s a choice here. Putting aside the question of what’s commercially viable, you didn’t accidentally include large nonnarrative sections in this book. Something about the subject, or something about the project as it initially came to you, or as it developed as you went, led you to decide that these forms—the letter, the speech—were a part of this particular book you were writing. And of course it would have been a choice not to use these forms as well. Why this choice, in this book, is what I want to know.

COHEN

Because you’re pushing, I’ll try. The novel of ideas—which is a phrase I hate and I’m going to blame you for not forcing on me, so that I have to force it on myself—is a tricky beast. Why it’s tricky is because of people. Novels can’t have an idea without a person and vice versa, of course, and though novels can contain countless ideas, the persons they contain come in two basic flavors, the author and the characters. Sure, an author can be a character, and a character can be an author, but I’m speaking about fundamentals. Who is the person expressing this idea, to whom and how and why? Newer novels are pretty antisocial—the person with the ideas is the author, wandering around somewhere that’s usually a city, thinking first-world thoughts in first person, talking to the reader and so essentially talking to themselves. Call this autofiction if you want, call this essayistic fiction, whatever—it’s antisocial, with a narrator who’s also the protagonist who’s also their own doctor, lawyer, surgeon, judge; the resident expert, through which all knowledge passes: if they didn’t read it, see it, hear it, or if they weren’t told about it, then it doesn’t exist, not for the reader. Now, contrast that to older novels like, say, The Man Without Qualities or, even better, The Magic Mountain. These are social novels. There isn’t any one person with all the ideas. Instead, the ideas are given to, spoken by, incarnated through the characters, who meet up in salons and sanatoriums and go on strolls through the snow, or to dances, or to interminable parties and meals, wearing out their quotation marks as they talk and talk and talk. Sometimes these characters converse in groups that chain—in the Musil, Ulrich and Arnheim, Ulrich and Diotima, Arnheim and Diotima—and sometimes they go back and forth dialectically—in the Mann, Settembrini, the so-called humanist, versus Naphta, the so-called radical—but mostly they do both and more, and if they’re Russian, they also perform monologues without interruption, a guest delivering six pages on metaphysics as the tea cools, and the host has switched to vodka and is already drunk.

Don’t worry—I’m getting to my point. A lot of my writing, some stuff published, a lot of stuff I’ll never publish, has to do with navigating these categories. What I like about the antisocial novel of ideas is the immediacy of first person—I like to read a mind thinking. And what I like about the social novel of ideas is other people besides the first person—I like difference and challenge and arguments with stakes. In everything I do, I’m trying to find ways of combining these categories, of juxtaposing them, blending them, mixing them up—in Four New Messages and Book of Numbers by faking emails, chats, edited and re-edited interview transcripts and drafts, and in The Netanyahus by forging letters of recommendation and lectures. My interest in this comes from my sense that this is how we live, merged with technology, enmeshed in other people’s text, even in self-generated authorless text, and unable to distinguish fact from fiction.

I've got work to do.