Somebody's best book yet
Laurence Lerner
MENSONGE by Malcolm Bradbury Deutsch, £5.95 The death of the author poses a tricky problem for those authors who are still alive. If it is language that speaks and writing that writes; if the individual writer has lost his autonomy and become a dispersed subject through which linguistic and social codes transmit themselves; and if the function of thought is now to deconstruct the concepts necessary for thinking, so that (in the words, if they are his words, of Henri Mensonge) there is not only no philosophical object of attention, but also no agent capable of doing the philosophising; and if the classical distinc- tions between literature and philosophy, between narrative and theory, between thinking and joking, are all called into question . . . I keep saying `if , but we are surrounded by people who do believe these things — or rather, if they really believe them, they are not people who believe them, but vehicles through which the ideas are transmitted in texts that tirelessly undermine their own status. So perhaps we should say since the author is dead and the individual has become a dispersed subject, etc, there are problems for the person who sits down at his/her desk to put words onto a hitherto blank page. What will the book be 'about' if there is no extra-textual reality? Will it be a novel or a work of theory?
Enfin Malherbe vint. The situation was waiting for Malcolm Bradbury. In his latest book, Bradbury has invented the figure of Henri Mensonge, who changed the face of modern philosophy by writing a book on fornication as a cultural act, published by the Imprimerie Kouskous in Luxembourg, in a minute edition of which no two copies are alike and all are now unobtainable. Since then Mensonge has preserved an absence more magnificently total than any deconstructor has yet managed.
No press interviews exist in any of the conventional journals. There is, of course, no autobiography. However, a book called Non-Mensonge par Non-Mensonge is rumoured to exist, though in manuscript only, whoever has or has not written it refusing apparently to permit its publication.
It would be nice to think that Bradbury in his turn was invented by Mensonge, as a persona to speak through while remaining silent, so indulging in the deconstructive act of having one's chocolate cake and eating it — well, not 'it', but a text, fictitious like all texts, in which 'cake' is a lexeme brought into being by the existence of culinary discourse.
I would love to think this, and so (in some moods) would Bradbury, but it won't work. Bradbury is no Mensonge, he lives (extra-textually) in Norwich, and wrote not only this book but lots of others, some of them novels (stories, that is, about people who never existed) and others literary criticism (discussions, that is, of books which exist and tell stories about people who never existed). This means that he belongs to that interesting modern species, the academic novelist, with his two selves, one sober, scholarly and salaried, the other inventive, irresponsible and either very rich or very poor. One problem for the members of this species is whether to keep the two selves as separate as they can, or to blend them constantly, to write fiction that sounds like criticism, criticism that sounds like narrative, and parody that differs only by the lifting of an eyebrow from what it parodies.
The latter has always been Bradbury's method. His novels are about academics, his comic writing glides in and out of his own critical style. It is obviously a danger- ous method: self-parody can be a means of saving others the trouble. Here for inst- ance is a sentence from Bradbury's wholly serious book on the novel published by none other than the Oxford University Press: One of the most important assumptions in modern thinking about the novel is the notion, prevalent among novelists and critics alike, that some time in the concluding years of the last century or the early years of this one, at a point which is not exactly sensitive but is nonetheless there to be felt, there occurred a change, a redirection, a re- emphasis or a 'turn' of the novel.
And here is Mensonge:
We have burnt our boats, cut ourselves adrift, dispensed with the old reality, and are now on a voyage of discovery sailing to the terra nova of the changed dispensation.
As we move from the complex syntax, the qualifications, the abstract nouns of Professor Bradbury to the purple clichés of the satirist, we may feel the difference is not as great as it might be, or (worse still) that we prefer the latter.
But as well as dangers the method has great opportunities — or rather one great opportunity, when it comes to making fun of post-structuralism. For deconstruction has discovered what satire has always known, that the most devastating subver- sion comes not from those who merely fear and dislike what they attack, but from those who fear what they love, who under- stand and admire what they also believe to be impossible. Swift is far more deadly on the Houyhnhnms than he is on the pedants of Laputa. Bradbury himself has claimed that he is far closer to his own Howard Kirk than are those readers who find Kirk merely despicable. And out of Bradbury's own ambivalence towards modern criticism comes the most effective satire that it has yet received. I have heard old-fashioned academics raise easy laughs from like- minded audiences by quoting bits of decon- structivist jargon. I have heard earnest deconstructors use the jargon to admiring, gullible audiences. But I have had to wait for Malcolm Bradbury to find the under- mining from within, the tiny displacement that makes the whole thing plausible and absurd. This is not only the best satire of deconstruction, it is the best thing Brad- bury has written.
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