THE GRAMMAR ARCHITECT
By Chris Eaton
We don't usually think of art as being a form of mass media, but the
influence of the mass media on it is obvious. Poems and paintings don't give us
the news or provide us with facts and information, but they have to communicate
using the same basic grammar the modern mind has grown accustomed to receiving
its sports scores, headlines, celebrity gossip and advertising (especially
advertising) in. In the early twentieth century, for example, poetry and painting imitated the page layout of newspapers, with their
discontinuity of impression and perspective, fragmentation, and collage. And
we've all seen the studies showing sentences getting shorter to match our
minimal attention spans.
And so, as the historian Eric Hobsbawm has observed, "it impossible to
deny that the real revolution in the twentieth-century arts was achieved not by
the avant-gardes of modernism, but outside the range of the area formally
recognized as 'art.' It was achieved by the combined logic of technology and the
mass market, that is to say by the democratization of aesthetic consumption. . .
. Advertisements and movies, developed by hucksters, hacks and technicians, not
only drenched everyday life in aesthetic experience, but converted the masses to
daring innovations in visual perception, which left the revolutionaries of the
easel far behind, isolated and largely irrelevant."
That last is going a bit too far, but Hobsbawm's general point holds.
Technology and the mass market are the forces in the last century that have
shaped the arts. Our stories haven't changed, but the ways we go about telling
them have been warped, at times almost beyond recognition. This has even lead
some people to prophesy the death of the novel. But that might be jumping the
gun.
The Grammar Architect is Toronto writer Chris Eaton's second novel,
and its subtitle tells us it's a "cover" of Thomas Hardy's A Pair
of Blue Eyes. Like a musical cover, Eaton's imitation "begins with
Hardy's basics and transforms it into something entirely his own."
In the ups and downs of literary fashion Hardy's novels have recently been about as
"out" as Jane Austen's have been "in." But his
power as a storyteller means that he's always had his followers, and not just
among those looking for a good old-fashioned read. The Miramichi of David Adams Richards,
for example, often seems like Hardy's Wessex transplanted. And for a young, experimental
writer like Eaton, Hardy's "basics" help to provide a small nugget of
narrative solidity for an otherwise totally amorphous postmodern novel.
A very, very small nugget, but at least it gives him a start.
A Pair of Blue Eyes tells the melodramatic story of a love triangle
involving a young man working on a church tower, and the daughter of the vicar. This doesn't have much to do with Eaton's cover version.
There is a fellow working on a church tower named Neil, and he does fall in love
with a girl named Judith, whose mythological father (going by the name of
"Tragedy" here) doesn't approve. But most of the time Eaton is on his
own.
And he's changing a lot more than the names. Most of all what he's changing
is the way the story is told. Even if he'd kept Hardy's novel intact it
still would have been completely transformed. The Grammar Architect comes
at you like a rambling, relentless rush of pure verbal energy. It seems as if
it's all done on a single breath. The story, like a typical Eaton sentence, is a
soup of circularity, free association, and playing endless mental catch-up.
Nothing about the narrative is linear (as you should expect in a novel that
includes a sub-plot involving time machines). Instead of a love triangle there is a love polyhedron (or
something like that), and
Eaton wants to give us a full scorecard of who's scoring. The same is true of the sentences, which can run on but
more often shatter into numerous parenthetic asides and by-the-way subordinate
clauses that hang like shirt sleeves sticking out of an overstuffed suitcase.
Everything might be connected and god forbid anything gets overlooked. The book
Neil, the Grammar Architect, is writing is in fact just an inventory, a
collection of facts and items, "a second Babel disguised as a novel,"
a great work of "List-erature."
In other words it's a book you seem to surf as much as you read, mimicking
the experience of channel surfing or clicking through pages on the Internet. And
what's on? Just the kind of magic realism television and the Internet specialize
in. Technology and the mass media are spinning the potter's wheel again.
But if this is all there was to The Grammar Architect it would only be
a particularly hyper kind of literary curiosity. Magic realism is, at least in
one reader's opinion, getting quite played out (especially when you cue the
freaks). But in addition to being so full of life and raw energy, Eaton is a
very good writer with something to say. His timing is perfect, which is
necessary for a comic writer, and his use of language witty, lyrical, and fresh.
You have to sit back and admire someone who can end a chapter with "the
clanging bells among leaps the live thunder." That's something that pulls
you up short - it's difficult without
being at all vague, clichéd or indirect. Which is to say, it's what good
"poetic" prose should be.
Of course a book like this is going to frustrate anyone just looking for a
good story. If that's your thing, try Hardy. But The
Grammar Architect may well be the best Canadian novel of the year. This is
the new. It does suffer a bit from a lack of weight, those traditional literary
ballast bags of psychological realism and moral depth, but it also goes places
those heavier novels can't reach. The novel isn't dead, but continues to evolve.
Notes:
Review first published October 15, 2005.
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