|
For some reason, I can't seem to get away from Ulysses. I find a little bit of James Joyce in so many of the books I read, and A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood is no exception. This is the story of George, a middle-aged gay professor whose partner, Jim, has just recently died. Like Ulysses, A Single Man takes place over the course of a single day. Like Ulysses, A Single Man has very little plot, and like Joyce, Isherwood does not shy away from the less common plot developments, such as bowel movements. While A Single Man may not be as huge a literary milestone as Ulysses, Isherwood's novel does become more than a simple itinerary of a day in the life of a grief-stricken man.
George wakes up, he has breakfast, he goes to work. He goes to the gym, he visits a friend, he goes to a bar. That is virtually the entire plot, but while George is doing all this, George thinks, and it is in those thoughts that Isherwood's novel transcends from a book with a banal plot to a book with something to say. This transformation is thanks in no small part to Isherwood's third person narrator, who has both omniscience and prophecy. At times, the narrator fetishizes parts of George's body (his stomach, his heart, his brain), simplifying George to nothing more than a body on the dissection table. George wakes up, for instance, "mildly nauseated by the pylorus in a state of spasm." This narrator feels like a lot like a voice-over actor from a Discovery Channel documentary, straight down to his sometimes unexpected humor: George's body shambles into the bathroom, urinates, and weighs itself, and after this excessively scientific description, the narrator says, "still a bit over 150 pounds, despite all that toiling at the gym!"
While the narrator may play the part of Discovery Channel host rarely, he never loses that unabashed interest, slightly amused, slightly skeptical—the kind a child has for a firefly or a caterpillar he has just captured and put in a jar. This enthusiasm of the narrator transfers to the reader, and we remain interested in George—whose day is just as boring and uneventful as yours or mine—because the narrator remains interested in him.
Because the narrator is omniscient, he shares with us most of George’s thoughts, and George’s day-to-day actions somehow transcend into something more thanks to these internal monologues. George does not simply wake up: The narrator, as he tells us about George’s slow ascent into consciousness, also philosophizes on self-awareness and the construction of the “I.” While George has a seemingly innocuous conversation with a married neighbor, his thoughts rage against the status quo treatments of alternative sexualities that try to erase or blur being gay. As George works out, the reader receives a lecture on the benefits of daily exercise. As he drives to work, George meanders through parallel universes, the darker sides of himself, and the disparity between the way others see us and the way we see ourselves.
This is a lot to fit into a single book of less than 200 pages, yet Isherwood manages to fold all these ideas and discussions into A Single Man. Again, the narrator plays a major role here, because his fluidity and charisma allow Isherwood to transition smoothly and quickly from one topic to the next. His sentences are short and simple. He speaks matter-of-factly and in the present tense: George does this, and George does that. George feels this, and George thinks that. The prose feels, for lack of a better term, very audible, very narrated, very spoken, and so the philosophical diatribes feel less like written lectures and more like spoken conversations.
I've been referring to the narrator as a 'he,' which is misleading because this narrator is not a person. This is not The Great Gatsby’s Nick Carraway. This narrator has no diegetic role. He never interacts directly with George, and he has no name, no body, no explanation for his existence. He does have, however, a personality, a sense of humor, and a vested interest in George that borders on scientific. As Edmund White mentions in his cover blurb, this is one of the first books of the gay liberation movement, and the narrator’s treatment of George illuminates him, so to speak, as the male of a new species in his own natural habitat—the liberated gay just as nature made him.
(March, 2010)
|
