Far Beyond the Personal

A Belated Review of Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch

Edward Moore, PhD (patristics@gmail.com)

This may seem an untimely time to be preoccupied with questions of literature, the novel, and the art of writing in general. The year 2015 has barely begun, and thoughtful persons -- and persons of action (usually, but not always distinct) -- are concerned with police brutality (at the local and national level), the machinations of the so-called Islamic State, freedom of speech (and other Western values) versus fanatical and oppressive ideology, among other important problems. As it should be. Yet for those of us who remain enclosed in a cocoon of self-referentiality or, to use a more accessible term, seasonal depression, the pursuit of beauty -- and the simultaneous escape and self-revelation it provides -- is perhaps the most timely occupation. This is not to say that practicioners of the discursive arts (which includes cinema along with novels, short stories, and plays) have not been busy trying to be timely. Indeed, recognition official and unofficial has been given to works that deal with such perennially timely topics as Nazi-occupied Europe, the American civil rights movement, and the usual coterie of race and gender-themed productions. But, as usual, a foray into the complex psychology of a single human being -- reasonably well-educated, perhaps neurotically sensitive, and prone to highly personal philosophical reflections, oh, and wracked by tragic personal loss (not loss of a nation or a culture -- all abstractions -- but of something endemic to the 'I') -- is a rare find in our post-Romantic, post-post-modern era. 'Tis better to remain with the dead white European (not necessarily) males, in order to retain consciousness of ... well, what makes those of us unfortunate enough to have been born inside the borders of the current waning Empire tick.

With that mindset, I have read, at last, Donna Tartt's much-discussed book (note I have not labeled it a novel -- more on that later) The Goldfinch (2013, New York: Little, Brown and Company). Since I permit myself only a handful of new works of fiction per year, being far more concerned with older, neglected writings, I tend to be a bit behind the times, as it were. I also tend to be very selective. Unless I am contracted to write a professional review, and receive the book directly from the publisher or author's agent, I have no qualms about putting down a work that bores me. I took Donna Tartt's book off the shelf, voluntarily, after having seen it mentioned several times during my casual perusal of literary reviews and magazines. Resting and bored over the Christmas holiday week, I began Tartt's book on a Friday evening -- and completed it the following afternoon. As is my wont, my reading was careful, analytical, but by the time I reached the middle, roughly, of the rather hefty tome (771 pages), I realized I had become emotionally involved. This does not often happen when I read a work of fiction, and only less rarely when I read poetry (I watch movies only when forced by friends). And so it is the highest praise I can give to any work of literary art.

That being said, I nearly put the book down before reaching the definitive crisis of the narrative, the terrorist bombing of the museum and the resultant death of the narrator's beloved mother (p. 31). Excessive first-person reflections about minor details, combined with overwhelming descriptions of persons and things, runs counter to my aesthetic of economy in narrative. Perhaps it is my background as an academic philosopher that causes me to recoil from the no-stone-unturned approach to fictional writing; in philosophy such an approach is the norm, and when I turn to fiction I expect writing that is, well, breezier than typically verbose philosophical essays. But for some reason, I stayed my hand, and continued to read. As with a ponderous Romantic symphony, if one is to appreciate the work, one must allow ones response(s) to unfold at the pace set by the composer. If the composer is astute, and atuned to his themes, the patience will be rewarded. Such is the case with The Goldfinch. One of my first unbidden thoughts, as I followed the course of events, was of Dostoevsky. I immediately checked myself. How dare I compare any work, or writer, to the mad Russian, one of the greatest novelists of all time? Perhaps my emotional response to Tartt's work was clouding my judgment, for there is really nothing about her style, and little more about here theme(s), that justifies a comparison with Dostoevsky. Yet there it was. I vowed at this point to be more critical in my reading; I was clearly losing my objectivity (What?! Isn't the whole point of reading a work of literature to become immersed in the world set up by the author?) Upon reflection, however, I asked myself: Why not? Is Dostoevsky some jealous god? Will I be struck down if I dare to find a contemporary work that is more satisfying for me than The Brothers Karamazov? Yes, The Goldfinch is (sorry) a very different animal; but comparing my first reading of the former with the latter, the personal fact is that my response to Tartt's work was immediate, variegated, and inviting -- after the initial emotional overflow -- of continued reflection (and forget about the false objective / subjective dichotomy. As a philosopher I should know better!). My response to Dostoevsky's masterpiece, as I recall after a space of over twenty years, was rather ... laborious.

During my lifetime my taste in literature has undergone various minor changes, ranging from a youthful love of fantasy and horror (Poe, Dunsany, Lovecraft, and the old Gothic novelists were my mainstays, and Tolkien followed me everywhere), to a fascination with psychopathy and altered states (French Surrealism, the novels of Bataille, the effusions of Artaud) to a current interest in questions of purpose and meaning, as well as personal legacy (recent works by Linda Holeman, Michael Gruber, Sarah Dunant and, of course, Donna Tartt). The one aesthetic constant has been atmosphere. By that I mean the elusive, because indefinable, quality of a piece of writing that provides an anchor for memory, a point of reference that is non-discursive and unmediated in its mnemonic force, like a scent or a landscape. My favorite writings are those that conjure an inescapable atmposphere, the way a person will produce, if you will, an aura. When the mere mention of a title is sufficient to transport my imagination back to vivid, pervasive scenery and voices, attitudes ... then it can be said that the writer has succeeded in creating a multifloriate atmosphere that may or may not be comparable to my life. It need not be, for a work of art is, of course, a world in itself. And whether the atmosphere is that of early nineteenth-century Liverpool, twenty-first century Manhattan, or Middle Earth in the Third Age, it matters not -- the resultant sense of the place as existing beyond myself, there to be discovered, is the artistic success that raises writing to the level of literature, art.

The most realized atmosphere in The Goldfinch is, oddly enough, the alcohol and drug-addled period spent by the narrator and lead character, Theo Decker, in the Nevada desert, with his unlikely and, as it turns out, fateful friend, Boris. The rather plodding introspection of the preceding section gives way to an almost frenetic, fragmentary manner of recounting a hazy, dreamlike episode -- or series of episodes -- which, as we find out much later, was largely an alcoholic blackout (the chapter sections grow correspondingly shorter here, mimetic of the fragmentary consciousness of the professional abuser of substances). If the startling contrast between the cement canyons of Manhattan and the agoraphobic expanse of the sun-baked Nevada desert is not sufficient to disorient both narrator and reader, the mind-warping intake of alcohol and drugs does the trick. Any description of the desert that did not involve some level of perceptual and noetic distortion would read as woodenly naturalistic. In this section there is almost a metonymic correspondence between Theo's roiling consciousness and the hazy reality of the environment in which he has landed. Tartt's prose in this section effortlessly maintains this sensation at a fever pitch.

It is only as we reach the end of the book that we call into question -- not perhaps for the first time but certainly with greatest force -- the narrator's reliability. The only real constant in the 'story' is Theo's post-traumatic stress disorder, the result of losing his mother in a terrorist bombing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (during the immediate aftermath of which he filches, for a noble purpose, the eponymous 1654 painting by Fabritius). To say that this painting is some sort of symbolic or emotional anchor is not quite correct, as we discover that Theo has idealized the work in a very personal -- and idolatrous -- manner -- so much so that he is unaware, for a very long time, that the package that he thinks contains the painting actually holds an old civics textbook, switched by his rather amoral friend Boris, who cannot help but covet and steal, even from his only true friend. The switcheroo by Boris takes place during the Nevada episode, which is appropriate. This episode is one of many mini genre-pieces, so to speak, in Tartt's lengthy but remarkably coherent text. I would not hesitate to label the Nevada episode a bildungsroman, for we sense (since we are not explicitly shown) Theo coming of age, or entering into self-awareness, if you prefer. There is striking verisimilitude in this section, for Theo is very selective in his focus -- as we all are, to a greater or lesser extent -- pushing or drinking away anything or anyone that does not aid him in his personal quest for stability, if not contentment or, imagine, happiness. For example, an underlying homoerotic element in his friendship with Boris is subtly suggested in this section, and later verified nonchalantly by Boris. Theo, apparently, was so blacked out he didn't recall his brief foray to the other side, just as he was too tanked to notice that his beloved painting had been switched by his best friend.

It would be simplistic to say that events happen to Theo and he responds. While this is the surface of the narrative at this point, there is a depth. Theo's remarkable adaptability, when wrenched from familiar surroundings and placed in an alien environment with his father -- a wreckless gambler and addict who had abandoned his mother and him, only to return after the former's death for selfish reasons -- and the father's drug-dealing girlfriend, cannot be said to be due to his immersion in alcohol and drugs, although this likely helps. Rather, Theo is seen doing what strong persons who experience tragedy often accomplish: drawing upon that experience for protection against the continually hostile forces of life, and for the power to endure. In less capable hands this would be trite, if not maudlin. Not so here. We do not witness Theo merely rising above the pain of losing his mother; rather, we see him delving deep into his anger and disgust at the mindlessness of existence (and existents), and transforming those dark emotions into a sort of intellectual and emotional fuel. As Theo's introspective habit develops, he becomes acutely aware of his pendulum-like emotional life, swaying from ecstatic love for Pippa (the girl he first saw in the museum the day of the bombing) and a depression so deep he cannot find a single word for it. This "black curtain of horror" is more than just a symptom of opiate withdrawal. He reflects:

But depression wasn't the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn't he cute? Awww. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hell awaited them ... (p. 476)

If The Goldfinch is a dialectical work, in the Hegelian sense, the above quote would represent the antithesis, as Theo passes from love of a person (his mother -- the thesis) to a harsh despising of most -- not all! -- of humanity (antithesis), to a final, fully self-conscious love of beauty as an ideal or, more precisely, love of the beauty that exceeds the person and makes him feel a deep yearning to participate in that beauty -- in other words, love of the sublime (synthesis).

And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky -- so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime. (pp. 770-771)

Indeed, when I finished reading this work, a passage from Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit came to my mind. To paraphrase: The life of the Spirit is not the life that shrinks from feebleness and decay but, in utter dissolution, finds itself. This could easily have served as an epigraph for the entire work.

There are various novelistic techniques for building suspense. Every third-rate hack writer knows how to do this. Just read James Patterson, if you have the stomach. Tartt manages to evoke an oppressive sense of impending danger, if not doom, not by any analyzable technique, but 'simply' by telling the tale. "A story is, finally, what it tells and no more," wrote Gore Vidal in an essay on Calvino. It is the sense of the inevitable, on all levels, that makes a story convincing, that produces tension and suspense without recourse to any writer's workshop stylistics. The result is a propulsive force that, yes, keeps the reader turning pages. And, in The Goldfinch, this atmosperic charge is not to be found in any external events, but rather within the consciousness or subconsciousness of Theo himself, as rendered through Tartt's versatile, poetic prose. The subtly threatening visit from his father's loan shark produces tension in the manner of a typical thriller or crime drama, but one never gets the sense that Theo is in any physical danger. The real danger is yet another upheaval of persons and place; at this point, we are not sure if Theo's fragile eggshell mind can handle another displacement. After the death of his father, in a not very suspicious automobile accident, given the dad's constant use of pills washed down with booze, we know that Theo will soon be leaving Nevada, and Boris. Yet we are told that he will be meeting Boris again (over 150 pages later) ... and are left to imagine under what (likely unsavory) circumstances.

It is impossible to synopsize this book, in whole or in part. Suffice to say that Tartt wields her prose with such virtuosity that one gets the sense that one is not reading writing so much as experiencing ever-shifting mental states that sometimes correspond with, sometimes jar against, the environments and atmospheres in which Theo finds himself. Take, for example, the second paragraph of Chapter 6, still in Nevada:

Winter or summer, the days were dazzling; the desert air burned our nostrils and scraped our throats dry. Everything was funny; everything made us laugh. Sometimes, just before sundown, just as the blue of the sky began darkening to violet, we had these wild, electric-lined, Maxfield Parrish clouds rolling out gold and white into the desert like Divine Revelation leading the Mormons west.

In two substantial sentences the visceral response to the desert is recorded, as well as the less tangible interplay of mind and place that is so much like poetry. I thought of Ginsberg when I read these lines, and perhaps Tartt did too, for she reigns herself in (rightly so) and returns us to the reality of Theo's (and Boris's) situation rather quickly. "Our diet had made us malnourished, with soft brown bruises on our arms and legs -- vitamin deficiency, said the nurse at school, who gave us each a painful shot in the ass and a colorful jar of children's chewables." This would be humorous, if we were not aware that both of these young men's fathers are highly unstable. There is the very real danger of Boris's father beating him to death in a drunken rage. While Theo's father is not physically abusive -- except for one uncharacteristic outburst -- the danger of repercussions from his (the father's) unpaid gambling debts hover over everything Theo does. The physical decay is not symbolic of a deeper emotional decay; it is very real. Theo and his buddy eat junk food, drink vodka like water, and live a see-saw life of artifical highs and all-too-natural lows. While their friendhip is genuine, it is of a self-destructive nature typical of substance abusers: big plans for a glorious future while high, followed by vomit-drenched, blinding reality after the come-down. I let out a temporary sigh of relief when Theo finally boarded the Greyhound for New York. Of course, as those of us who have battled addiction know all-too-well, one can change location as often as one likes or is able, but the demon always follows ...

If there is a moral anchor in this tale (for want of a better term) it is Hobie, restorer of fine furniture and friend (more like grandfather-figure) of Theo's beloved Pippa. The conversations between Theo and Hobie are sometimes deeply philosophical, dealing with the morality of beauty and the purpose of maintaining beautiful things, whether furniture or other artworks, or meaningful relationships. Again, nothing cloyingly sentimental, just realistic dialogue between two introspective, highly sensitive persons. Here is Hobie:

Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only -- if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn't it? And isn't the whole point of things -- beautiful things -- that they connect you to some larger beauty? Those first images that crack your heart wide open and you spend the rest of your life chasing, or trying to recapture, in one way or another? (p. 757)

One can easily replace "objects" and "things" and impersonal pronouns, here, with "persons," etc., and get at the 'truth-saying' of this, and similar passages. I daresay that most people who read literature have had the experience of an elusive beauty that they are trying, with every new experience, to recapture. Attachment to art of any kind is often a surrogate for a human attachment that once was, but is no more. If every writer writes for a particular person -- or with the hope that a lost beloved will someday read his words -- many readers, I think, read for insight into their own partially-formulated desires to regain a lost emotional Elysium. That this Elysium all-too-often involves one irreplaceable person is one of the great -- if not the greatest -- tragedies of life. To spend a lifetime seeking an absent presence is to forego other meaningful relationships, and to only partially see, or even to ignore, other manifestations of beauty. To make the transition from the love of a single person to the love of persons, and finally to the love of beauty as a universal, an ideal, is to gain a sort of redemption -- a redemption from the self-centeredness of the personal quest, as concern is transferred from the 'I' and its attendant 'other' to the ethical and moral grounding of the 'We'.

I will not attempt to discuss the symbolism of the Fabritius painting, as it is inscribed in ever-shifting ways throughout the tale until the synthesis, if you accept my Hegelian schema. For one of the great pleasures of this book is flipping to the frontispiece to contemplate the painting as one encounters it in various contexts throughout the tale. Suffice to say that meaning is bestowed, not produced. This goes for meaning found in works of art, as well as in human relationships. If I choose to call a certain failed relationship a mistake ... well, then it is just that. The meaning I derive, then, will be that of a lesson or -- worst-case scenario -- a sickening waste of time, which is no meaning at all. If I choose to consider my failed relationship as a temporary sojourn in a transcendent realm where, for a brief time, I experienced the love that surpasses all understanding, I will have the melancholy comfort of knowing there is a space beyond the self, the 'I' -- a space that is perhaps obtainable again, by way of some heretofore inconceivable person, place, or thing.

[I]t is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch. For if disaster and oblivion have followed this painting down through time -- so too has love. Insofar as it is immortal (and it is) I have a small, bright, immutable part in that immortality. It exists; and it keeps on existing. And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next. (p. 771, finis)

It would be pedantic of me to remind the reader that it is not only the painting that Theo is reflecting upon here, but I'll do it anyway. He is reflecting upon every person for whom we bear memories of deep love, and maintain those memories for the sake of giving immortality to our ephemeral moments of transcendence. We bestow meaning upon a person's memory in the same manner we bestow meaning upon a work of art: by preserving its immediacy, the initial shock that pulled us -- if only for a moment -- out of our cocoon of self-referentiality.

Now to the question of the novel. Why did I not label The Goldfinch a novel? Every label is shorthand for a definition. And, as every philosopher knows, any definition that is not rigorous and precise is no definition at all. Since we live in a post-Platonic era, in which categories of understanding have given ways to searchable categories of convenience, I feel that hanging a label on this work would be, at best, an unhelpful reduction -- at worst, a silencing or imprisonment of the polyphonic logoi that raise their voices in a single consciousness throughout this text. Of course, it is inevitable that The Goldfinch will go down in literary history as an example of a particularly unconventional novel, such is the academic desire to codify and catalogue for the sake of curriculum (alliteration intentional). This is not without some justification, I will add, for Tartt, while avoiding the sort of meta-commentary on writing that one finds in Michael Gruber's work, for example, does include at the book's end a brief note in which Theo explains how he has not written these pages from memory, but rather from a series of letters to his mother that he began writing at the age of thirteen, and continued throughout his life. He admits that the text we are reading was compiled from these voluminous letters "with the idea that Pippa will see it someday -- which of course she won't" (p. 763). One gets the sense that Theo has intended this work for a posthumous posterity (a pleonasm, but you get my point, I'm sure), not for the eyes of anyone who has participated, wittingly or not, in his life. This is not a mechanical device to add verisimilitude; rather, it lends an extra layer of pathos to an already saturated chronicle of heart and mind. This is not a negative criticism. In an age of dialogue-soaked novels that read like movie scripts, with wooden characters and meager boilerplated prose, reading Donna Tartt's prose is like hearing Joshua Bell perform the Sibelius violin concerto after having suffered Dantesque torment at a Taylor Swift concert.

Of the modern novel, Nathalie Sarraute once wrote that it must "dispossess the reader and entice him, at all costs, into the author's territory. To achieve this the device that consists in referring to the leading characters as 'I' constitutes a means." Anyone who has attempted to write a novel knows how difficult it is to maintain a consistent focus, and sustained interest for the reader, when writing in the third person. And most readers, I daresay, prefer the intimacy of a first person account to the often journalistic third person narration. Obviously, the third person method permits the omniscient narrator to take control and lead us to places a single consciousness could not possibly go. This works especially well in the genres of horror or crime drama / thrillers where true suspense cannot be achieved if the character in danger is the one doing the telling. He or she obviously escaped if he or she is alive to tell the tale. But when the concern is not with mere physical survival, but with intellectual and emotional survival, if not endurance or triumph, then the first person is not only preferable, but necessary. In matters of the heart and mind, I want to hear it from the horse's mouth. It is impossible to imagine The Goldfinch as a third person narrative. It is equally impossible to imagine it as a movie (and I hope Donna Tartt refuses to sell the rights when and if the offer comes). So while this work resembles, superficially, many a modern novel, it is not for the reason (or perhaps purpose) that Sarraute had in mind when she wrote that the cinema "garners and perfects what is left of it by the novel." It is perhaps a tired cliché to state that all great, and some good, novels, old and modern, are successful because they contain a memorable character. But it is useful to remember that characters are memorable because they communicate some truth about life, or the human condition; and that this is accomplished by representation through language that is itself a representation of actions and states. Words are not signs of signs, operating in an ever-expanding network of inter-referentiality, inter-textuality. Words are signifiers referring to very real conditions in the life-world. A text -- a writer! -- is only successful to the extent that this truth (yes, truth!) is kept firmly in mind. Communication is an art. It cannot be accomplished by the clashing voices of a committee, a political party, a group of university creative writing students, or professors at a cocktail party. Only the individual, the person, can communicate truths that ring down the halls of the ages.

I am not aware of the manner in which Donna Tartt composed her work, except that it took several years to complete. I have the image of her sitting alone, in quiet contemplation, like a Romantic poet of old, seeking just the right word, the right image, to make the communication successful. Of course, it is possible that she 'workshopped' some of the chapters, or that she painstakingly reviewed current trends in literature, revising and re-revising in an effort to be unique. I do not want to know. The Romantic image is much more ... human. Either way, The Goldfinch is a success in a way a movie simply cannot be. Technology is no substitute for the creation of worlds with words. Great acting is no substitute for the demiurgic relationship of reader with writer. Dialogue is saying; prose, properly achieved, is showing, telling, effecting. An unforgettable atmosphere is one that has been produced in the same manner as meaning: through the unique, unrepeatable, creative response of the 'I' to the unique, unrepeatable creation of / by the 'other'. 'We' leave the cocoon of self-referentiality and enter the world of art. In this we are, indeed, far beyond the -- merely -- personal.