Every once in a while we stream a movie featuring a writer of some sort, most recently the great French film about two writers married to one another, Anatomy of a Fall. Writers in such films usually face an obstacle involving their writing. Or in the case of “Misery,” based on a Stephen King novel I haven’t read, an obstacle involving a reader. Or in the case of “The Shining,” based on a Stephen King novel I haven’t read, an obstacle involving a haunted remote hotel and an insidious imbalance between work and play. More recently, “American Fiction,” a pretty good movie based on Percival Everett’s Erasure, which I haven’t read but my mother tried and failed to read, features a writer grappling with anti-intellectual market forces.
On TV, “Sex and the City” featured a writer, I suppose, or at least a journalist/proto-blogger? “Californification” featured a writer who was also a debauched sex addict, which was typical of course among writers of previous generations. Lena Dunham sent her “Girls” alter-ego to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop although Hannah seemed more like an essayist/blogger than a fiction writer? Thomas Pynchon appeared on “The Simpsons,” surely the greatest writer to cameo on a great TV show.
And of course writers have appeared in novels. The list is long. Ever since Orpheus, the bard of Greek mythology, writers have populated the writing of writers. You can google “novels featuring writers” and dredge up any number of listicles and Reddit threads mentioning dozens of books you’ve never heard of. Many of these are first-person autofictional-type novels, however, which isn’t really what I’m thinking of when, per the interrogative title of this post, I think of great novelists in great books by great writers (see the end of this for my definition of “great”). My Struggle is a great series of novels but there’s obvious overlap between the writer depicted in the books and the author. And I’m not thinking of Nathan Zuckerman or Henry Bech, obvious alter-egos for Philip Roth and Updike (and although Updike claims his famous writer is based on Mailer, Salinger, and others, few consider those Bech books “great”). And I’m not thinking of the unnamed appearance of Roth in Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry or Roberto Bolano in Soldiers of Salimas (a great novel by Javier Cercas) or anything like that.
I’m more interested in predominately fictional GREAT novelists in unambiguously GREAT novels by indubitably GREAT novelists. That list is super-short . . . The only two who really meet the criteria without qualification are Bergotte in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and Benno von Archimboldi/Hans Reiter in Bolano’s 2666. I picture the “uncouth” Bergotte (apparently a fictional blend of Anatole France and John Ruskin) disheveled, wearing gray worn torn clothes, and I picture Archimboldi of course wearing his full-length leather jacket.
Two others I can think of nearly make it: Chester Greylag Dent in Don DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star (CGD is undeniably a great writer/submarine dweller but, although I loved Ratner’s Star, many would question the book’s greatness), and Paul Arnheim in Robert Musil’s A Man Without Qualities (the first volume is undeniably great but Paul Arnheim is not really a novelist, is he? He’s more of an essayist/industrialist) . . .
And then there’s probably a tier below those four guys above:
Gustav von Aschenbach in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice is a well-regarded writer but I wouldn’t deem Mann’s novella up there with his four major novels, particularly Buddenbrooks and Joseph and His Brothers (one of the greatest novels I’ve read, in John E. Woods’s translation). Pierre Menard in Borges’s The Garden of Forking Paths almost meets the criteria? Pierre Menard is a famous writer created by a great writer (Borges), and the idea of his replication of Don Quixote, his atemporal influence on Cervantes, is certainly GREAT, but I’m hesitant to put Pierre Menard up there with Bergotte and Archimboldi . . . Kilgore Trout in Vonnegut is a not particularly successful sci-fi writer . . . John Shade in Nabokov’s Pale Fire is a poet and academic, not necessarily a great writer? Pale Fire is considered a classic but not something I considered “great” when I read it ~15 years ago . . . EI Lonoff in Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer nearly meets the description but among the many Roth novels I’ve read I wouldn’t include The Ghost Writer among his best? I like it, sure, but it’s not up there with The Search or 2666 . . .
I haven’t read Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, which seems like it may fit the criteria, although the writers in it are apparently fairly closely based on Delmore Schwartz and Bellow himself, so maybe like the Roth and Updike alter-egos mentioned above? I also haven’t yet read Woolf’s Orlando, not to mention a hundred other novels that probably qualify. (I feel like I know what I don’t know at this point but I reserve the right to have no fucking clue about anything of course and very much hope I’m continually proven ignorant about everything — ie, learn.) Also, some may say Bill Gray in Don DeLillo’s Mao II, which I read in late 2001 or early 2002 and don’t remember well. He seems to fit the bill but the book doesn’t seem in the same league as DeLillo’s best (End Zone, Ratner’s Star, Amazons, White Noise, Libra, Underworld), let alone AMWOQ, 2666, or The Search.
So ultimately, in the end and in short, when I think about great novelists in great novels by great novelists, I can really only unreservedly pronounce two unequivocal winners, Bergotte and Archimboldi/Hans Reiter. (Leave a comment if you can name some others, in books or movies.)
Otherwise, why did I bother posting about this?
At this point in my so-called writing career, no one would call me a great novelist but that doesn’t mean I can’t conceive a great novelist. I’ve done just that, in fact, in a forthcoming full-length publication entitled Like It Matters: An Unpublishable Novel. The fictional Great Novelist I’ve engendered is a composite of a half-dozen actual “great” writers I’ve witnessed in person. I won’t name names but I’ve had some access to rare and elusive writer types in my life. I’ve even witnessed these entities, who’ve made their names sitting alone in silence writing their great works, interact with admirers out in the wild, often seated at tables covered in food and drink.
One such great writer over the course of a meal featuring many bottles of wine demonstrated all the colors of the character spectrum. They seemed off-putting, charming, witty, snobby, down to earth, funny, boring, pompous, insightful, kind, just about everything you could think of, all of which made me think this is why this writer is a great writer. They’re everything, and can therefore access everything in themselves to create their characters. Their true identity, instead of being reduced by obvious superficial biographical categories, extends all over the place.
Extension in the direction of complexity seems related to the modifier “great,” which needs some definition: when attempting a literary fundamentalist geometric proof, one must remember the reflective property: God is great, therefore Great is god. Or, per Proust, the apparition of beauty equals the apparition of the divine. “Great” for me is essentially synonymous with “God.”
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