|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
The Bard in the Bago
| Article
# : |
19043 |
|
|
Section : |
BOOK WORLD
|
| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1991 |
2,544 Words |
| Author
: |
Chilton Williamson, Jr.
Chilton Williamson, Jr., is senior editor for books at
Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. His latest book is
The Homestead, a novel published last year by Grove Weidenfeld. |
In 1852, Gustave Flaubert, in a letter to a friend, expressed a desire to create "a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the strength of its style." Nearly a century and a half later, Alvin Kernan, professor emeritus of humanities at Princeton, argues (The Death of Literature, Yale University Press, 1990) that the concept of high--meaning romantic and modernist--literature that Flaubert's ambition represented is now stone dead; so it is as well for Ivan Doig and his publishers that his latest novel may be described in exactly opposite terms as a book about a good deal, a book entirely dependent on what is external, which does not employ style to hold it together.
Ivan Doig, who was born in Montana in 1939 and worked there as a ranch hand before emigrating in his middle twenties to Seattle, Washington, has in a dozen years established his authorial reputation with two nonfiction books and four novels, the last three of these making a trilogy of which Ride With Me, Mariah Montana is the concluding volume. Although as last as 1989 the critic A. Carl Bredahl [see following commentary] noted that while "among westerners, the appearance of This House of Sky in 1978 led to interest in and respect for a new writer ... among easterners ... Doig continues to be largely unknown," anonymity, even in the East, seems to be becoming something more like pale celebrity. It may be something of a puzzlement that a writer--more particularly, a novelist--who does not hesitate to devote thousands of words to a detailed description of a fire crew fighting a forest fire or several hundred words to the unpleasant process of skinning out dead and bloated sheep, should find his work read and enjoyed by people who have never seen a great western forest--let alone one in conflagration--and for whom provisioning sheep camps ought to be as foreign-sounding a chore as irrigating date trees in Arabia. The answer is perhaps that, in this age of "the death of literature," what readers of fiction find appealing is not some weaker approximation of the art novel as it was developed by writers like James Joyce, William Faulkner, or even Allen Tate, but the novel which, in Bredahl's phrase, "values surface"--meaning landscape, physicality, family, community, and the objective facts of history--by treating human experience in a nonsymbolic way.
Doig, a former newspaperman and magazine writer, is also the holder of a doctorate in history; and at the conclusion of each volume of his Montana trilogy (English Creek, 1984; Dancing at the Rascal Fair, 1987; and Mariah Montana, 1990) the several pages of acknowledgements testify candidly to the kind of research that helped inform the book and that another
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
