“… there is a very special transformation that takes place when we read fiction that is not experienced in nonfiction. This transformation, or catalyzing action, can be seen to play a vital part in what we might call, grandly, existential self-formation.â€
-Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies
What does it mean for individuals to be completely free to determine who they are as human beings? To live authentically, eschewing the notion that our natures are predetermined? To recognize that we are rational beings frequently faced with life-altering decisions that cannot be decided on the basis of rationality alone? A sense of one’s existential freedom–and the responsibility to the self and to others that this freedom entails–can be anxiety-inducing, but it can also be exhilarating.
Existentialism has often found its most compelling expression in the arts, from the films of Bergman and the plays of Sartre and Beckett, to the novels of Dostoevsky and de Beauvoir. Though marginalized as a philosophical movement by the dominance of the Analytic tradition in the English-speaking world, Existentialism remains relevant in both the popular and literary cultures of the West.
Over the next four months I will read and write about works of fiction that deal with the existential themes of anxiety, absurdity and authenticity. My intention is not to critique, but rather to appreciate and explore. My focus will be predominantly Canadian, though I reserve room for the occasional continental classic. I will begin by considering my chance encounter with an obscure Canadian contribution to this literary tradition.
I first came across No Such Mirrors through a friend. I was a studying in Montreal at the time and overwhelmed with other books I was obliged to read. J. asked If I would be willing to use my university library card to borrow the novel for him, as he couldn’t find a copy anywhere else. Petty details such as due dates, I was well-aware, escaped J. from time to time, but he assured me should I do him this favour, he would read the book at once and return it well in-advance of the deadline. I decided to trust in the existential idea that J., as an individual, is a free and responsible agent whose essential qualities need not be predetermined by his actions in the past.
I looked up the book in the catalogue and found it in the fifth floor stacks, an old paperback, rebound in bright yellow library boards. The title intrigued me, but the covers provided few clues as to the novel’s contents. The front cover featured the monochromatic image of two human eyes, disconcertingly reproduced at slightly larger than human scale. The eyes were not side by side, but one above the other, creating the impression of two separate monocular gazes, rather than a set of eyes belonging to a single individual. Above the first eye, the author’s name (ALVIN SCHWARTZ), between the eyes, the title (no such mirrors). Below the second eye, in bold lower case, the name of the publisher (writer’s cooperative, montreal). The back cover was entirely blank: no plot synopsis, no blurbs, no author bio.The inside cover of the book offered little more by way of disclosure. There was the year of copyright (1972), the reservation of rights, and an epigraph from Act I, scene 2 of Julius Caesar:
. . . it is very much lamented, Brutus,
That you have no such mirrors as will turn
Your hidden worthiness into your eye,
That you might see your shadow.
This set the tone, established certain expectations: the author has literary aspirations; there will be some amount of intrigue in this novel, perhaps treachery. I turned the page. I found a second epigraph, this one excerpted from a MÄori creation myth, creating a peculiar juxtaposition with the first. I began Part One. The narrator, newly released from prison, returns to Chicago to withdraw the contents of his bank account before setting out for New York, in an attempt to leave his previous life behind for good. He abandons not only his hometown, but his name as well. He adopts, arbitrarily, the moniker “James Smith†as he makes his way through Kennedy Airport.
The tone is formal, a tad stiff, the author suspending enough disclosure to create a sense of mystery. Smith takes a room on the third floor of a run-down Brownstone on West Ninetieth. The room, he tells us, approximates the dimensions of his former cell. There is a standoff with his new landlady over the provision of a heating plate for making tea. Smith is surprised by his forcefulness in the exchange, and by the way the landlady acquiesces. This is an early indication that he is as much of a mystery to himself as he is to the reader. Before the end of the chapter, there is an alarming, one-sided encounter with the only other tenant on the floor, Smith’s eye pressed to the keyhole of his door, his ear carefully attuned to the sounds in the next room. Only after he hears his neighbour’s footsteps descend the stairs does he begin to make his tea. Smith, it seems, is a creep, a curious one, in both senses of the word.
I had to stop reading at that point. There were too many other books to be read, books on which I was required to write term papers. I passed the book on to J., leaving Smith in his room, the water in the pan on his heating plate boiling indefinitely. Several weeks later I contacted J. to remind him of the due date and he informed me that he read and returned the book, as promised, several weeks before. ‘What did you think?’ I asked him. ‘It was very good,’ he told me. ‘Fell off a bit towards the end.’
Two years passed. I graduated and moved away from Montreal. I forgot about Smith almost entirely, his boiling water gradually becoming little more in my memory than a puff of steam. Then I was sitting at my desk one evening, no shortage of books to read or tasks to occupy my mind, when Smith showed up again. He made his intentions known, and, just like his landlady, I found myself in no position to refuse. I didn’t remember the name of his book, but J. reminded me when I asked. I checked local libraries, the catalogues of used booksellers, and fared little better than J. did two years before. I found mention of a single copy for sale, listed in the inventory of the very Montreal used bookseller where I was previously employed as a cataloguer. I placed my order. Two days later I was informed that the book was not, in fact, in stock. I considered my options, placed an order through interlibrary loan and ten days later, Smith and I were reunited at long last. At first I wondered how he would have held up over time, but he was more or or less as I remembered him. We spent the next sixty pages getting to know one another, and James Smith, or “Paul Wolchek” as I came to know him, turns out not to be quite the creep he seems in chapter one, though there is no doubt he is odd.
Suddenly, Part Two begins and Wolchek/Smith retreats again into to the shadows. An acquaintance of his, Giordano, an expressionist painter met by chance outside the monkey cage at the Central Park Zoo, takes over narratorial duties. Giordano adds a new dimension to the tale, relating several, increasingly troubling encounters with Wolchek/Smith as he dabbles pigments on his palette. Then the third and final section begins and Giordano is supplanted by a third-person narrator. By the time novel’s clever and unexpected triptych narrative structure unfolds, it seems inevitable, as if the only way to really get a sense of Wolchek/Smith (the seemingly delusional, prototypical, unreliable narrator) is to gradually gain distance from the limitation of his point of view. It is in the novel’s supposedly most objective third section where the surreal and the paranormal overtake what has been to that point a realist, if unrealistic, novel.
Alvin Schwartz’s No Such Mirrors, is deeply odd and intricately structured, philosophically dense and deliberately eerie. Though there is nary a P.I. in Wolchek’s Manhattan, No Such Mirrors bears more than a passing resemblance, in style and in subject, to Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, the first installment of which was adapted as an acclaimed graphic novel by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli. Schwartz, coincidentally, wrote for Batman and Superman comics for a 17 year period, during which he was, according to Marvel Comics editor Roy Thomas, “living his life as a graphic novel before the term ever existed.†More recently, Schwartz published two “spiritual memoires†chronicling the intersection of his popular writing and private pursuits.
His metaphysical interests are frequently evidenced in No Such Mirrors. When Wolchek’s neighbour eventually gets wise to his voyeuristic tendencies, she accuses him of being, understandably, a “strange man,†who is “angry without knowing quite what to be angry about.†Wolchek is inclined to agree with her and suggests that anger comes of “discovering one’s helplessness.†“The business of transmuting those feelings into self-creation,†Wolchek explains, “is a long and difficult process.â€
The goal of this process is not, for Wolchek, to find one’s self, but quite literally, to “become someone else.†Here Schwartz’s narrator defines his own end in terms similar to those in which essayist Sven Birkerts defines the fiction reader’s undertaking. In my series of posts over the next four months, I will focus on works of fiction whose protagonists do
deliberately what Birkerts suggests all readers of fiction do, that is, “slip free from our most burdensome layer of contingent identity†in order to create new selves. I am interested protagonists who do this in a specifically existential context, who confront both anxiety and absurdity in an attempt to embrace their freedom, as well as their finitude.
