2. "We refer, naturally, to our own W": the Strangeness of History in 'Napoleon Symphony'

:1:

I came close to titling this blogpost 'Burgess in the shadow of Tolstoy'; for Napoleon Symphony ends with an epilogue in heroic couplets ('An Epistle to the Reader') in which the author confesses a near-crippling anxiety of influence. How can any novel about Napoleon, especially one that spends so large a portion of its length on the 1812 invasion of Russia, tackle the inevitable comparison with War and Peace?

Post-Tolstoy novelists are reckoned mad,
Presumptious, temerarious or all three,
To write about the Corsican, since he
Is brilliantly portrayed in Voina i Mir:
After that vodka, who wants British beer. [347]

Vodka? Really? Nearly 600,000 words of vodka, that would be: 1440-pages of the stuff in my Oxford Classics paperback. A fatal dose surely, and one that makes Burgess's modest 350-pages of beer look positively thimble-sized. AB presumably intended the comparison in terms of comparative strength rather than quantity; but nonetheless. There's something ill-judged I think, almost passive-aggressively so, about this epilogular self-effacement: 'Take then or leave this lump of minor art,' he instructs us at the start of his PS-epistle. Protest too much much? And then we look again. Lump, like beer, implies a heft to Burgess's production; where vodka, though distinctively Russian and the tipple of many a refined drinker, is essentially flavourless. And flavour, we suspect, is the get-out-of-jail-free card Burgess is holding on to. He knows his energetic stylistic mishmash is closer to Hardy's Dynasts than to the remarkable solidity and steadiness of Tolstoy's aesthetic momentum; and he's swingeingly honest in this verse ps that 'The Dynasts is, indeed,/A monstrous shocking failure'. Still, Burgess believes the Muses prefer 'failed boldness' to 'orthodox success'. Maybe they do.

The 'Epistle to the Reader' is six pages of pure poetasting Explainderby, and far from the novel's finest moment. That the novel has greatest moments, and indeed achieves something so remarkable and marvellous that I'm tempted to bracket it one of Burgess's two or three most impressive achievements, remains my conviction, however.

Still, since Burgess actually incorporates the disadvantageous comparison with Tolstoy into the text, I suppose we can't ignore it. It's pointless to index the differences between these two novels in terms of relative greatness: this is Tolstoy we're talking about after all, and Burgess's awkward self-laceration ('I was brought up on music, and compose/Bad music still ...') doesn't take us anywhere interesting. The anxiety of influence here has produced not so much a swerve as a U-Turn: everything Tolstoy does, Burgess does differently. Tolstoy writes in plain discursive style, and builds his story according to the logic of a linear narrative; Burgess works style indirect libre, streaming consciousness, poetry and other textual playfulnesses in a non-linear way, with flashbacks and flashforwards, repetitions and contortions. Tolstoy includes scores of characters, including at least half a dozen that could be called 'central' to the story; Burgess has only two 'characters': Napoleon himself and to a much lesser extent Josephine, and arranges around them a variety of supporting marionettes characterised by modes of appearance and varieties of idiolect.

But beneath the more obvious differences is one strange locus of similarity that, paradoxically perhaps, indicates a core difference between the two books. I'm jumping off, here, from something John Bayley argues in his book on Tolstoy that strikes me as relevant to Napoleon Symphony. Bayley thinks that Tolstoy creates a variety of compelling and realistic characters in War and Peace (and I think that's right); but Bayley also insists that the central figure, Pierre, isn't real in the way that figures like Rostov and Kuragin are 'real'. Pierre is more by way of being a focalising instrument, a way of bringing the huge multiplicity of the novel into what Bayley calls a 'dramatic and metaphoric unity of purpose.'

Pierre's carefully constructed physical self—his corpulence, spectacles, good-natured hang-dog look, etc—become as it were the physical equivalent of Tolstoy's powerful abstract singlemindedness—they are there not to give Pierre a true self, but to persuade us that the truths we are being told are as solid as the flesh and are identified with it. [John Bayley, Tolstoy and the Novel (Chatto 1966), 73]

This is a rather brilliant observation, I think. Bayley adds, again I think rightly, that we accept Pierre (and also Andrei) as characters despite their depthlessness: 'we feel that Pierre and Andrew are bound to be seekers and questioners because the one has no past and the other no roots in life, forgetting that Tolstoy has deprived them of these things precisely in order that they should conform to the fictional Bildungsroman type of the seeker' [Bayley, 75]

The interesting thing is that Burgess's Napoleon is also not a character in any meaningful or 'real' sense. Yet this gorgeous Napoleon-shaped kaleidoscope of textuality functions in Napoleon Symphony in a completely different manner to the way Pierre, say, functions in Tolstoy. Burgess in this novel effectively repudiates Bildungsroman: the denial of any character development or arc is part of the point of Napoleon Symphony. (I wonder, thinking about it, if AB writes any Bildungsromane at all. I'm not sure he believes people do grow and change. Isn't one point of Clockwork Orange to suggest that 'changing' a person's personality is necessarily an act of intrusive violence? Do any Burgess characters evolve and grow and alter?)

There's a particular point to the anti-Bildungsroman aspect of this novel, though. It has to do with Burgess's way of articulating a sense of the dangerously pure externalisation of the 'seeker' motif of that mode of art. Napoleon seeks for many things in this novel, but none of them are connected to his inner being. All his goals are military, political, external. Napoleon emerges from Burgess’s portrait as energetic and ambitious, skilled a motivating his troops (by turns swearily hectoring and eloquently inspiring), good on orchestrating large scale operations—all the things you’d expect. Burgess’s N. is also hot-tempered, hot-blooded and given to mood swings of a Corsican or Mediterranean type: passionate and urgent.

More to the point, Burgess portrays Napoleon as urgently chameleonic, a kind of echt-politician, happy to adapt himself absolutely to the requirements of power, or the appetites of the ruled. When he’s in Egypt he informs the gathered ‘imams and muftis and kathis’ that he is himself a Muslim: ‘we believe in Allah, we take the Koran as a holy book. In our land we broke the power of infidel Rum’ [46]. In part 2 a young German nationalist called Stapps tries to assassinate Napoleon, and Burgess devotes many pages to the emperor’s attempts to convert the lad to a genuine Napoleonism rather than just have him shot. ‘I am your father,’ he tells the lad. ‘I am everybody’s father.’ When Stapps demurs (‘my father is a Lutheran minister of Saxony. He is a German and a patriot’) Napoleon insists:

‘Well, give me a month to learn German and then I’ll be a German patriot too. And a Lutheran, if that’s what you want. It’s not difficult to be anything once you’ve been a Muslim. Well a sort of Muslim and the Egyptians more or less accepted us as such. But first first first, mark this, first I’ll be a European.’ [140]

This all-things-to-all-men thing is amongst other things a way of characterising the emperor as an elaborate nothing: we get no sense of him as a person, no sense of his childhood. As Bayley points out, War and Peace is intensely concerned with childhood and its relationship to adulthood; Burgess doesn't 'do' kids. I'd say the first Burgess title to include anything like a convincing child character is Little Wilson and Big God. With Napoleon, here, there nothing underneath all the textual specificity to generate a sense of a living human being.

This, though, is not a failing of the novel so much as it is an attempt to erect upon the quasi-musical form of ‘Napoleon’ a textual edifice with a rather different shape. The novel calls to mind Emerson’s 1850 essay ‘Napoleon; or, The Man of the World’, one of his odder pieces that establishes its thesis via a queer nod to Swedenborg:

It is Swedenborg’s theory that every organ is made up of homogeneous particles, or as it is sometimes expressed, every whole is made of similar; that is, the lungs are composed of infinitely small lungs; the liver, or infinitely small livers; the kidneys of little kidneys, etc. Following this analogy, if any man is found to contain within him the power and affections of vast numbers, if Napoleon is France, if Napoleon is Europe, it is because the people whom he sways are little Napoleons.

Emerson sees that this has its bad side, of course; ‘a man of Napoleon’s truth of adaptation to the mind of the masses around him, becomes not merely representative but actually a monopolizer and usurper of other minds’. There's enough of a critique of tyranny in Burgess's novel to give force to this latter notion, although I get the sense that AB is a little too in love with the sheer energy and ebullience of his central character. But it speaks to the novel's relationship to history. Napoleon Symphony is (I hate to state the bleeding obvious, but there you go) an historical novel, and does many of the things readers go to historical novels for. Indeed, it manages to wear its evidently detailed historical research lightly give how densely it is worked—I for one spotted no unintentional errors although Burgess plays the anachronism game more than once. Nevertheless, if we try to decide what version or theory of capital-H 'History' Burgess is advancing in this novel I'd say we have a hard time pinning it down. Tolstoy added a vast appendix to War and Peace laying out his anti-Great-Man theory of history. Anthony 'Explainderby' Burgess's appendix is only a confession of overshadowing by Tolstoy. What is 'history' in this novel? Might it be that Burgess sees human life and variety as synchronically composed of myriad Emersonian Little Napoleons?

:2:

Reviewing the novel for The Spectator in 1974 a young Peter Ackroyd reached for a de-haut-en-bas bitchiness rather beyond his years. Burgess, he said, ‘contrives a rhetorical garishness by shifting the surfaces of his writing around like toy-bricks’; ‘the writing has an artificial pace reminiscent of some of the more troppo passages of opéra bouffe’; the ‘Elizabethan’ analogy between language and music ‘seems a singularly pointless one at this late date’; ‘Mr Burgess’s writing has a squelchy quality which one does not associate with anything in particular’ and so on. It all strikes a rather ironic note in the light of the toy-brick artificiality of Mr Ackroyd’s own, later-written, novels. But he does make one good point:

In Napoleon Symphony the hero is the quintessentially romantic figure whose tears can kill little children in the street, and the one who goes amongst his people in disguise. He is the hero who strives for vainglory of nations before the growing power of the Volk:’I had not yet got down to calling it anything,’ Talleyrand smiled, ‘but since you press me, I will launch the term master race.’ There are a great many of these nudges and winks to posterity, and a strain of what one might call contretemps runs through the novel. [the review is reprinted in Ackroyd’s The Collection (Viking 2002), 16-17]

Contretemps is meant dismissively, in the sense of inopportune or embarrassing textual strategies; but in a more at-root sense of the word it's weirdly well chosen. Burgess's view of History is indeed contre-temporal. I can think of novels that have styled history in terms of myth, and novels that have scrupulously explicated myth in terms of plausible historical verisimilitude, but I can't think of another example save this that shows us an historical agent, caught in and trying to shape history into precisely myth. Burgess's Napoleon is, in effect, a failed author; attempting to write himself into grander roles and greater destinies. His eventual failure is to find himself not as the Apollo his name seems to imply but rather as Prometheus 'chained to a rock, his liver eagled out' [351]. The fourth section ludically inserts not only Prometheus (because the fourth movement of Beethoven's Eroica reused the theme from his Creatures of Prometheus ballet). but the Christ-Crucified rebus INRI, over and over again, in a plethora of ingenious embeddings, not least the next-to-last sentence of the book: 'And I say aga INRI ng bells bells bells bells and rejoice. Rejoice' [343]. Wait: didn't AB publish a book on the author of Ulysses entitled Re Joyce? Who's the real Christ-figure, the Word spurned and rejected: warrior and tyrant Napoleon, or an altogether humbler individual?

Word begins with a W. The entire fourth section is a Joycean pastiche of styles, from Jane Austen through Henry James (whom, on his deathbed, believed himself to be Napoleon, implausibly enough) to Joyce himself. Style marches from 1821 up to the novelist's present day. The Jamesian passage, in fact, makes great play with the mystic significance of the letter W, now presiding in the very Northern skies from which Napoleon has been banished as the constellation Cassiopeia, and standing for everything that defeated Napoleon:



But we know who is encoded by W, don't we? Who else but Wilson? ('We refer naturally,' the narrator confides, 'to our own W, to W as a right English letter' [286]. Is that writer of English? Man of English letters? Word-wright?). This self-reflexivity is rather refreshing in its frankness and clean self-regard, I think. Amour-propre is a clean sort of love, after all. Time runs from Burgess to Napoleon and back into the mists of myth, and then runs in a contraflow back to the present; and the net result of that is to break the conventions of historical fiction into glittering shards. Even INRI, snapped apart into IN and RI in many places, brings a Christic code back to the source. For what is I.N. but a Latin abbreviation of J--n? And who is this to come from the East, the place where the sun rises, where Apollo himself reigns, out of whose beds Burgess himself arose to become a novelist, to mispronounce the name Wilson as RI/LSON? It's fanciful, I know; but the whole novel is fanciful to the nth degree. Do you see what elaborations it drives the humble critic and interpreter?

In his recent book The Antimonies of Realism (I blogged a read-through of this work here), Fredric Jameson has interesting things to say about the way the realist novel is caught between the logic of (pseudo-Providential) emplotment and the logic of (verisimilitudinous) openness and freedom. This diremptive tension results, he argues, is the kind of formal fragmentation we associate with Modernist texts in particular. It might also (though Jameson apparently has no interest in Burgess) stand as a summary of Napoleon Symphony's whole-text strategy: a work that is centripetal stylistically and constituted of a blizzard of multifarious individual elements that repeatedly emphasizes the arbitrariness of events, whilst at the same time being almost monstrously overdetermined not only by the historically fixed career of its subject but by the formal constraints of Beethoven's symphony. To this schema Burgess then gushingly adds extra formal constraints: a hammered-home contrast between the Earth (and Fire) as Napoleon's element, and Water (and Air) as the element of his Britannic enemy. In its very extravagance is its critique of the very idea of the historical novel as such. Burgess's hefty disrespect for the traditions in which he is working is bracingly brilliant. He bursts apart the dull and worthy narrative-and-costume historical novel as forcefully as if he had aimed a fully loaded Gribeauval twelve-pounder directly into their ranks.

I've no idea whether Burgess read Lukács' masterful study The Historical Novel (1947; 1962 in English). Maybe he did. Perry Anderson rightly calls it 'still probably the best-known of all works of Marxist literary theory' and summarises its influential theses about there form created (Lukács argues) by Scott:

Built around the work of Walter Scott, Lukács’s theory makes five principal claims. The classical form of the historical novel is an epic depicting a transformation of popular life through a set of representative human types whose lives are reshaped by sweeping social forces. Famous historical figures will feature among the dramatis personae, but their roles in the tale will be oblique or marginal. Narratives will centre instead on middling characters, of no great distinction, whose function is to offer an individual focus for the dramatic collision of opposing extremes between whom they stand, or more often waver. What Scott’s novels then stage is a tragic contest between declining and ascending forms of social life, in a vision of the past that honours the losers but upholds the historical necessity of the winners. The classic historical novel, inaugurated by Waverley, is an affirmation of human progress, in and through the conflicts that divide societies and the individuals within them.

It follows from Lukács’s conception that the historical novel is not a specific or delimited genre or subgenre of the novel tout court. Rather, it is simply a path-breaker or precursor of the great realistic novel of the 19th century. A generation later, Balzac – for example – essentially adapted Scott’s techniques and vision of the world to the present instead of the past, treating the France of the Restoration or the July Monarchy in much the same way that Scott had represented mid-18th-century Scotland or 12th-century England. Balzac’s great successor, for Lukács, was the towering figure of Tolstoy, whose War and Peace represents a peak simultaneously of the historical and of the realist novel in the 19th century.

I quote this really only to note how gloriously perverse Burgess's own intervention into the mode is. Napoleon Symphony is a non-epic quasi-una-fantasia chunk of beery experimental prose that depicts transformations not of popular life but of its own language and form; it deals with no representative human types, and is very sketchy on the sweeping social forces of its chosen period. One famous historical figure dominates the dramatis personae, his roles anything but oblique or marginal. Burgess's narrative has no interest on middling characters, or characters of no great distinction. What Burgess’s novel absolutely refuses to do, then, is stage a tragic contest between declining and ascending forms of social life, in a vision of the past that honours the losers but upholds the historical necessity of the winners, or give voice to any bromides concerning human progress, dialecticism or History at all. Instead of what we might call 'deep' dialecticism Burgess develops a surface or formal contrapuntal balance, the external career of a famous historical figure who lacks inwardness rendered into a fiction that lacks the outward connection to theory, history or generic codes and that is instead a gloriously involuted knot of self-referential textuality. It refers to itself, and to its musician-writer author. It refers, naturally, to its own W.

God, I love this novel.