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Thursday, January 29, 2004

CHRISTY ZEMPTER
ThisWeek Staff Writer

In his wonderful short story "See the Moon," Donald Barthelme wrote, "Fragments are the only forms I trust."

Since then, the phrase frequently has been misappropriated by critics of postmodernism to oversimplify its aims and effects.

But for David Markson, it seems to have served as a lodestar, guiding the deceptively casual construction of his most recent novels, including Vanishing Point, which is slated to be released in paperback next month.

Following the style of the two novels immediately prior to this one -- Reader's Block and This Is Not a Novel -- Markson attempts a "seminonfictional semifiction" from the perspective of an unnamed narrator, in this case "Author."

Brief glimpses of Author are interspersed with anecdotal items on artists, writers, philosophers, scientists, musicians, athletes and historical figures -- collected odds and ends from a life spent in study and thought.

What reads initially as random trivia develops a shape and sense as the novel progresses, moving the furtive narrative along and creating significant dramatic tension.

Ideas recur throughout the scattering of anecdotes, creating the themes upon which the novel rests. Among the most significant of these is the history of a sort of accepted plagiarism within the domains of art and philosophy:

Remembering that Bizet's Carmen is based on a novel by Prosper M?rim?e.

Not remembering that the M?rim?e is in turn based on a narrative poem by Pushkin.

And perhaps the only way to make something new of the images that have been with us for centuries is to experiment with the forms in which they are presented:

To write only according to the rules laid down by previous classics signifies that one is not a master but a pupil.

Said Prokofiev.

There is also a preoccupation with death and illness, paired with an ongoing internal argument over the value of a life spent creating. In fact, at one point Markson fills a page-and-a-half with a listing of dates and locations of notable deaths without naming the dead. This habit of invoking death was established in Reader's Block and This Is Not a Novel, but here it resonates even more powerfully as it parallels the aging Author's decline.

Vanishing Point might easily have belabored the point of the structure of the earlier books, but instead its profundity and pathos make it the crowning achievement in Markson's experiment. Which is no small feat given the measure of his contribution to postmodern fiction. Like Barthelme, he avoids the tendency of experimental fiction to become a clinical manipulation of language that eliminates the human soul of literature. His methods are unorthodox, but the responses he elicits from the reader are those to which all literature aspires.

Particularly touching is the image of Author -- even as he exists within this postmodern format -- as a traditionalist, a writer who is frustrated by the dearth of ribbons and repair shops for the manual typewriter he continues to use and the waning emphasis placed on scholarship in our culture.

Markson anticipates the failure of some readers to understand his work in the second paragraph of the book:

A seascape by Henri Matisse was once hung upside down in the Museum of Modern Art in New York -- and left that way for a month and a half.

He revisits the anecdote two pages later:

One hundred and sixteen thousand viewers had strolled past Le Bateau, the upside-down Matisse, without comment, before it was rehung correctly.

As this premonition indicates, Vanishing Point is not for everyone. The too-casual reader will miss a lot. But the rewards for the serious reader are enormous, from both the story that Markson makes of his fragments and the nostalgic beauty of the fragments themselves.

<b>czempter@thisweeknews.com