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Portrait of an Artist
| Article
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17025 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1990 |
2,049 Words |
| Author
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George Garrett
George Garrett is the Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative
Writing at the University of Virginia. He has written numerous
short story and poetry collections and novels, his latest
being Entered From the Sun. In 1989 he received the T.S. Eliot
Award and more recently, the PEN/Faulkner Bernard Malamud
Award for Short Fiction. |
THE TONGUES OF ANGELS
Reynolds Price
New York: Atheneum, 1990
195 pp., $17.95
As Bridge Boatner of Winston Salem, North Carolina, tells it, this story is mainly an accounting of the summer when Boatner, now fifty four, was twenty-one. The Tongues of Angels, like Kate Vaiden, Reynolds Price's highly regarded novel that won the National Book Critics fiction award in 1986, is a consistent first-person narration.
First-person stories
Any first-person story, at whatever angle and distance from the events depicted, is, in fact, a tale of here and now and essentially amounts to the time of its telling. The primary dramatic action of a first-person story is not to be found in the events themselves but in the telling of the tale. In any first-person story, the telling is the main thing that happens. Past and present are always here and now and are equal for as long as the telling lasts. In such a context there is an almost absolute freedom in time and space, to be exercised or inhibited as the teller (and, behind the teller, the artist) wills. There is freedom to react to events, to comment on events even as they are presented, and, when it pleases, to digress from the mainstream of action. In fact, there can be no such thing as digression in a well-executed first-person story.
Creating a special tension within this form, The Tongues of Angels is, nevertheless, a novel of precisely split time, of a then and a now, of highly significant past events being reviewed by a man mature and experienced enough to be skeptical of his own earned wisdom, and more than a little surprised at his earlier state of innocence. In our time - as distinct from the old-fashioned first-person story where a "discovered" manuscript (The Turn of the Screw) or a spoken voice later recalled (Heart of Darkness) provides a frame work - first-person stories are usually assumed to be told somehow out of thin air, tilting between the extremes of the simply spoken and the purely written. In this slender book, we learn fairly late that the narrative of Bridge Boatner is, in fact, a written one (which we are reading over his shoulder, as it were), being addressed to a specific person, his younger son Rustum Boatner.
And, a little later, we learn that Bridge now intends to share it all with some of his friends. "Maybe these words will
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