Metacommentary of the Damned

In impossible, maddening, and ultimately brilliant The Political Unconscious, Fredric Jameson argues that a Marxist approach to literary criticism provides the most discerning analysis of a text by “always historicizing” and considering the political, social, and cultural contexts that other approaches, in his view, either minimize or ignore entirely. As Jameson presents this argument, he introduces a concept that, for me, epitomizes the complex task that confronts any serious reader. When approaching a text, the reader discovers the contexts multiplying so that no text exists as a discrete entity, entirely self-contained and readily digested. Instead, we read through a series of always-already existing readings of that text, from the initial reviews in newspapers to the latest literary critical analysis of the text. There is no way, for example, for any reader to understand Shakespeare without confronting, either implicitly or explicitly, the four hundred years of commentary that merge to create “Shakespeare.”

I have been thinking of this metacommentary lately as I read Kent Haruf’s novel Plainsong. The cover of the novel itself is so freighted with meaning that one becomes overwhelmed just looking at it. The back cover features carefully wrought blurbs, all vying to construct the ultimate critical apparatus for us; all a reader needs to do is plug in the Michiko Kakutani analysis machine, and you’re ready to read.

Take the title: Plainsong. When I was in an undergraduate creative writing course, one of the students (who happened to be the lone graduate student there) wrote a short story called “Fugue in C Minor,” or something like that. The professor groaned and said, “Any short story with ‘fugue’ in the title…” and then he trailed off in hopeless frustration. And here is Kent Haruf with Plainsong. It reeks of preciousness. It screams seriousness. It is eager, intense, and driven, like a precocious undergraduate creative writer with more enthusiasm than talent.

Then there is the silver National Book Award Finalist badge embossed on the cover. The words “National Bestseller” hover above. The cover illustration shows distant hills in moody, smudged black and white with a dark and stormy sky dominating. “So foursquare, so delicate and lovely…It has the power to exalt the reader,” the New York Times Book Review proclaims. Foursquare? Exalt? Is this a novel or a sermon?

Once I open the book, I am again assaulted by messages urging me to remember that I am in the presence (or Presence) of Literature. “Here was this man Tom Guthrie in Holt standing at the back window in the kitchen of his house smoking cigarettes and looking out over the back lot where the sun was just coming up,” the story begins. As beautiful and evocative as this line is, it clearly arrived here after following dusty roads through the Exodus-reeking desert, along washed out rocky creekbeds and apocalyptic gorges, jerking awake as the other passengers on the Cormac McCarthy bus shout dire imprecations against the marauding hounds of hell chasing their tails in their fevered imaginations.

And then when he speaks, he does so without the benefit of typographical convention. No quotation marks, the true sign of Quality Writing(tm).

But why am I savaging this book? The truth is, I liked it. I liked it a lot. The story unfolds at the calm, quiet pace of a cowboy (in this case one of the McPheron brothers) methodically and carefully using a calf-puller on a pregnant heifer. Like McCarthy, Haruf loves work, and spends pages in the minutiae of real work, the kind that leaves your hands covered in mud, blood, and deep scratches. His characters are tough western types, and even the main character, history teacher Tom Guthrie, can throw a punch harder than any history teacher I ever knew. The rest of the characters, from poor, pregnant Victoria Roubideaux to sensually steaming Maggie Jones to taciturn Raymond and Harold McPheron, are believable, friendly folks with the interesting but subtle stories that hide under the surface of small towns across the country. The language is spare but as starkly beautiful as the high western plains locked in the deep freeze of January. The plot moves along at its own unhurried pace, with each character’s crisis crashing in excruciating slow motion into each other character’s crisis.

The problem for me is the metacommentary. The book told me too obviously what it was and how I should read it. Take away the slobbering praise on the covers and throw in a bushel or two of quotation marks, and you have a straightforward, honest, and deeply affecting book. With all of the cultural apparatus stitched to the book, it becomes a threatening monster, the Book That Must Be Read Seriously.