Medipal Fictions: MF (1971)

This novel is not, whatever Wikipedia and the recent Penguin re-release think, called 'M/F':

The title is a simple juxtaposition of male and female, Miles and Faber, mezzo-forte, mother and fucker: MF. See?

That lack-of-line (and to be fair, AB himself seemed happy for it to be called either title) seems to me important. It's not a book about structurally separating out constituent elements, or distinguishing S/Z-like between similar but differently operative terms. On the contrary, it's a book about glomming together the sorts of things convention would rather keep apart You've Had Your Time records Burgess reading about a particular Algonquin myth in Lévi-Strauss's The Scope of Anthropology:

A boy finds his sister being sexually assaulted by his own double. He kills the double, only to discover that he was the son of a very powerful witch who has taught owls to talk. She looks for her lost son, now buried, and the brother has to pretend to be that son. The witch has her suspicions, which can be allayed only by the boy's marrying his own sister: no one would be so mad as to fracture the incest taboo. But even after the marriage the witch is not quite convinced, so she sets her talking owls to ask the pseudo-son riddles: if he gives the right answers, as Oedipus did to the Sphinx, she will know that he has committed the unpardonable sin and hence is not her son. The brother and sister escape when he unwittingly answers the riddles correctly, and they fly into the heavens, there to become the sun and moon in eclipse. What I saw in the legend was the possibility of composing a contemporary realistic novel in which all the structural desiderata were fulfilled without the uninstructed reader's needing to know or care. [YHYT, 208]

It's hard to really believe that last sentence. Not that Burgess failed to generate a contemporary novel of great energy and richness, a novel that evokes many of the qualia of verisimilitude. It is rather that Burgess proved incapable of leaving the reader uninstructued about his complex of structural desiderata, here riddling and allusive. I talked about this itch to explain with respect to Burgess's previous novel, Enderby Outside. It is in MF, of all his novels, this is the one where Burgess most fully takes on the mantle of his alter-ego, Explainderby.

He does this in an essay called 'Oedipus Wrecks', originally published in This Man and Music (1982). The intricate story of Michael Faber (MF, se): a 20-year-old expelled from his New York college for having sex in public, who goes on a eventful and highly-coloured peregrination around the Caribbean in search of the shrine of Sib Legeru, a poet and painter from Castita. The whole story is set in motion by Faber's family lawyer, whose name ('Loewe') is both a near-homophone for lawyer and a leonine indication of the novel's habit of treating its human characters as Jupiter Ascending mythic animal types. The real object search folds together oedipal self-knowledge and incest, although in this case the incest is front-loaded. 'What's your view of incest?' a character called Pardaleos asked him, early on [45]. Faber replies:

Incest, incest, Keeping sex in the family. Most cultures have pretty rigid taboos on incest. My own ancestral one, for instance. Oedipus, Electra, all that. Some don't care much. England didn't. They didn't bring in their Incest Act til 1908. [46]

Faber strives to avoid fucking his own sister, yet every effort he makes only paradoxically brings that consummation closer. That's the larger structure of the whole; there are a great many cryptic-crossword clues, acrostics and allusions along the way ,and Burgess's 'Oedipus Wrecks' explains them all. The whole riddling web is unpicked, along with a series of quite interesting speculations on incest. The essay is available here. It's full of this sort of stuff:

Miles clearly has a mad Oedipal talent. He can answer riddles and solve crosswords with no trouble. He makes, with the total automatism he gives to smoking, a riddle on the name of the lawyer Loewe:

Behold the sheep form side by side A Teuton roarer of the pride.

Lo means behold, ewe is a sheep, and in German Loewe is a lion. Nearly all the people Miles will meet in the course of the narrative will either have animal names or resemble animals. This prefigures a sphingine danger to the young Oedipus.

And so on. Chapter two opens in a restaurant, where waitresses keep interrupting Miles's thought processes by shouting out various orders. Burgess explains his own riddle here, an acrostic: 'Indiana (or Illinois) nutbake. Chuffed eggs. Saffron toast. Whiting in tarragon, hot. Michigan (or Missouri) oyster-stew. Tenderloin. Hash, egg. Ribs.' On and on it goes, explaining, explaining, explaining to the bitter end. The poet is called 'Sib Legeru' because 'Anglo-Saxon bishop Wulfstan called incest siblegeru, or lying with one's sib.'

It's a gobsmacking performance, not least because it renders the initial riddling pointless, presenting the crossword-grid to the reader with the answers already written into it. We might want to read it a number of different ways. For example, one might chalk it up to that mode of clever Burgess's insecurity, his sense that nobody who reviewed MF on its appearance really 'got' it, his desire (I think this was how Gilbert Adair put it in his intro to the recent Penguin reissue) to write for himself the proper review of the novel that reviewers had been too negligent to provide.

Thinking about it, though, I wonder if Burgess's ambition wasn't more metatextual. We think of writing fiction as an outward looking, broadcast undertaking: as exogamy, in other words. The writers puts out his or her work, the reader (unrelated to the writer) receives it, and husbands it. Strange and new and sometimes exotic growths proceed from this expollination, very often far removed from authorial intention and life. But in MF Burgess having jetted out a novel, seeks also to explain and so control the interpretation of the novel. It's like watching an animated cartoon on the television that comes pre-supplied with a laugh-track; wholly imaginary characters act funny, and a wholly fictional audience responds with hilarity. It's hard, as the flesh-and-blood observer, to do anything other than turn the TV off at such a performance, leave the non-people to their non-pleasure.

The situation isn't quite that, I suppose. But my point is that Burgess's dyad of novel and solution provides a quasi-incestuous version of a process we're more used to thinking of as exogamous.
as Burgess puts it in the 'Oedipus Wrecks' essay:

The taboo placed on [incest] is one that not even a rational age cares to question too closely. Inbreeding, say the eugenicists, weakens the stock, but that is too recent a discovery to explain the ferocity with which the prohibition has been enforced in most societies from the earliest times. The rationale of the ban on endogamy, or marrying within one's own social group or family or tribe, can only be presented in terms of the territorial imperative – the need to protect land through alliances, expressed in a law of exogamy. In ancient Egypt, which was powerful and stable and had no enemies, incest was not merely permitted but was mandatory in the royal house. Monarchical Europe, on the other hand, protected territory through foreign alliances confirmed by royal marriages or high-class exogamy. From ancient Greece on, incest became the most terrible of crimes because it compromised the security of the state.

The state, here, is Literature; and in this inward-looking novel Burgess is tacitly proposing a kind of Egyptian stasis of post-Joycean Literary hegemony. I don't mean as an actual manifesto, in the real literary world (a world with which AB continued interacting on a thoroughly exogamous, and indeed lucrative, basis for decades). But as the premise for this strange, deliberately-convoluted and riddling novel.

The 'Oedipus Wrecks' essay deliberately sets out to render interpretive analysis of the novel by me superfluous. I'm happy to accept my superfluity. The riddle of the critic is easier to solve than the riddle of the author. Explanation is incestuous, and the asymptote of incest is autoeroticism, the love of self that turns altro to mono, truth to fiction. And the biting question with this particular piece of mono-fiction is: does Burgess really need readers, critics or interpreters? Where do we fit into the smoothly self-redirected automyth? We-dipus Rex has become Me-dipus Rex. Maybe that's an accomplishment all its own. I don't know.