As Alex noted last week, the Hotel St. George Press is soon to release a new fabulism anthology, and it promises to leave a trail of gaping jaws across this fair nation—nay, across this fair planet. We’ve defined fabulist stories, for our purposes, as “ingeniously inventive works of fiction concerned with transcending, appropriating, merging, or otherwise promiscuously vacillating between various styles and traditions.” And in that spirit, here’s a reading recommendation.
Posted in full on the Conjunctions website, and reprinted in the March 2010 edition of Harper’s, Paul LaFarge’s “The History of the History of Death” is among the finer works of fabulist fiction I’ve recently encountered. Framed as a symposium presentation, the story takes the form of an anonymous exegesis on Hermodorus’s History of Death and its attendant curse.
The gist is this: throughout history, scholars of the History of Death have been known to perish in grisly circumstances soon after publishing their research. In less adroit hands, such a conceit might come off as twee, but LaFarge merges aloof scholarship and gallows humor to tremendous effect, and what emerges is a carefully faceted reflection on books, their readers, and death. Sure, many a febrile headline has employed the phrase “death of reading,” but none so literally as this story, a meditation on a culture in which the only people who read books are those who write them, or, more insidiously still, write about them. The text is replete with a believably daunting number of proper nouns and dry, academic witticisms. The following passage, from the third paragraph, is as representative as any:
Godfrey Sizer couldn’t avoid mentioning Hermodorus in his article on Neanthes for the Biographical Dictionary of Classical Historians, but he tried to protect himself with the remark “It has become an article of faith among classicists that even to mention the History of Death is to court misfortune; a risk that cannot be avoided here, although perhaps frank acknowledgment of the superstition will serve to dispel it.” Unfortunately for Sizer, this attempt at countermagic was in vain: A year after Volume 7 (Marcellinus–Pictor) of the Dictionary appeared, he was eaten by his own dog.
LaFarge pawns off some thought-provokingly tacky theses by framing them in the overblown rhetoric of the Ivory Tower. One scholar, for instance, floats the idea that the accursed History of Death “partakes of a fatality that is diffusely present in all books and documents, a will to eliminate the reader, by violent means if necessary. Books, Peach wrote, before his appalling death in an Algiers hotel room, want a world without people, just as people yearn for a world without books.” Ridiculous, yes. But it’s exactly this sort of baseless contention, I’ve found, that grabs me as a reader. Most sane thinkers will reject out of hand the notion that our books want us dead. But in ridiculing that hypothesis, it’s hard not to ask what it is that we want our books to do to us. Many of my favorite moments in literature use absurdity to foreground profundity—just as the ironic can whet my appetite for the earnest, prescience is best digested through the mouths of fools. I’m reminded of the novelty coffee-mug manufacturer who appears early, and briefly, in Roberto Bolano’s 2666, to exclaim that his mug-making job is killing him “like samurais armed with those fucking samurai swords.” “What do you think of that?” the mug-maker asks his conversation partner, who responds just as I would: “I don’t know.”
I won’t spoil LaFarge’s abrupt ending, except to say that it’s a punchline with a strong undercurrent of poignance, and that it casts the story in a compelling new light. As with much of the exemplary work in the fabulist tradition, the charm of “The History of the History of Death” lies in its blurring of the lines between fact and fiction, creator and created. It turns out, for instance, that Hermodorus was a bona fide Greek philosopher, putatively a disciple of Plato; the History of Death, on the other hand, is LaFarge’s invention, but his gloss was convincing enough to have me double-check. (Then again, maybe my ignorance of all things ancient makes me an especially gullible reader.) Of course, much of LaFarge’s fiction defies us to place it, and him, on some continuum of authority. His second novel, Hausmann, or the Distinction (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), takes as its subject Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann, who was a nineteenth-century French urban planner. LaFarge claimed it was not he who wrote the book but Paul Poissel, an elaborately constructed alter ego. As an unusually erudite Wikipedia entry tells it, LaFarge contends that he’s
merely the translator of an obscure French-language text by a forgotten minimalist metaphysician named Paul Poissel, extended to the “reproduction”, in the opening pages of the book, of the title page of the “posthumously” published in 1922, “first (and only) French edition of Haussmann, or the Distinction“, and the inclusion, in the afterword, of daguerreotypes, the first of which depicts a female whom the caption identifies as “Yvonne Dutronc, ca. 1872″, a character which does not even appear in the main narrative, but is mentioned only in the afterword, in LaFarge’s own (fictional) footnote and (apparently) on the dedication page—”for Y.” The second image purports to be that of “Paul Poissel in 1880″ and both are described as having been “found” by the afterword’s veritable author, Paul LaFarge, himself, in the archives of the French national library, Bibliothèque nationale. An elaborate website, The long sad life of Paul Poissel, which expands the conceit, assigns June 4, 1848–November 17, 1921 as Poissel’s dates, along with myriad details about his life and times. The entire website functions as satire, including, at one point, the accusation that the American author “masquerading” under the French name “LaFarge” had the audacity to put his own name on front cover, as if he was the actual author. Other parts of the website include quotations, such as an excerpt from a 1934 letter Walter Benjamin “wrote” to Gershom Scholem, in which he makes a deeply complicated observation about Poissel, and also MP3 files featuring early archival “recordings” of Poissel’s voice, reciting (in French) portions from his own “works”. Haussmann, as a whole, also serves to display the depth of LaFarge’s scholarship into the period of the Second Empire as well as his playfulness with language (the putative front page of the 1922 work indicates that it was issued “à Paris, chez les Éditions de cire perdu”, or by “the Paris Publishing House of Lost-Wax Casting”).
LaFarge’s follow-up to Hausmann, The Facts of Winter (McSweeney’s, 2005), furthers this illusion by claiming Paul Poissel as its author and LaFarge as its translator. It’s a good, old-fashioned Borgesian shenanigan. But in the age of databases and deep digital footprints, there’s something even more unsettling about tampering with a work’s metadata, as LaFarge does here. After all, it’s one thing for a text to be unstable and quite another for the information about that text to be unstable. Though no such person exists, Amazon.com lists Paul Poissel as the author of The Facts of Winter. If your bookseller carries the novel under “Poissel” and not “LaFarge,” then congratulations: fiction has encroached upon your reality. Before “metafiction” ground itself into the fallow soil of solipsism and became a dirty word, it reminded readers that abstruse concepts like mise en abyme had real life to them, that to be a playful writer was not at all to be a frivolous one. That lesson, among many others, informs the work of Paul LaFarge, and Paul Poissel, and the best of their fabulist contemporaries.
