Literary critics have nightmares too. ’Tis not uncommon that I may wake up some time in the middle of a balmy night sweating like an inebriate Italian, fear written across my face in metaphorical permanent marker, my hands trembling like a cheap food processor; freshly released from the grips of some ominous ordeal. In recent times, I have suffered from a reoccurring nightmare: I am seated behind an old wooden desk surrounded by middle-aged men in faded suits pointing fountain pens at my head – the type that are really guns in disguise – whilst in an academic alternative to synchronised swimming they crease their wrinkled foreheads and form a supreme collective frown. My own pen hovers above the habitually blank paper, as if awaiting orders, which arrive, finally, from between the thick glistening lips of the man who stands directly in front of the desk.
‘Write me a synopsis’ he spits, threateningly.
I shrug my slight shoulders foolishly, as if to say ‘Is that all?’, supposing (quite literally) that I can write a synopsis in my sleep.
‘I’m not finished’ he splutters.
‘Go on’ I intimate.
‘Write me a synopsis of The Empty Tree’
Panic seeps into my body, as if applied slowly with a syringe.
‘You mean the The Empty Tree by Vladimir Dorwindovitch?’ I ask.
He nods. The other men grin in that nauseating way that only literary editors can.
‘But that book doesn’t have a plot’ I protest.
The men say nothing, but their meaning oozes through the silence. ‘Don’t be stupid girl’ they are thinking -‘There is no such thing as no plot’. To which I’m thinking – maybe so, but all the same, it can’t really be possible to write a synopsis of The Empty Tree – can it?
However, in this dream it seems I have no choice. Either I write my synopsis, or a dozen gimmicky firearms launch teeny bullets into my sweet little head. I can’t help but be tempted to go for the latter option. Instead, I wake up.
Upon waking, I stand tall the before the flood of relief, letting its gently buffeting waters cleanse me of all dream debris. Having done this, I get up and walk over to my desk, where I discover a small scrap of paper, which reads as follows: ‘Please write a review of The Empty Tree for Monday. Analysis and synopsis essential’.
I can only blame myself. After all, it was I who nominated The Empty Tree for inclusion on this list of great European novels, unaware at that time that I would be expected to pen a review of it. Which is not to say that I regret my decision – far from it, the novel is still one of the greatest – but that I can’t help viewing the task of providing readers with some sense of what the book is about as being almost beyond my critical powers. Almost (I have some pride).
Incidentally, there will be no synopsis in this review. Which leads us directly on to the analysis. Why can there be no synopsis? Because nothing happens. Define nothing. All right – nothing of any particular merit happens. Really? I take that back – the fact is that lots and lots of things happen, but there are too many things to deal with in a single paragraph. Not even loosely?
That’s it, I’ve had enough. Here’s your blessed synopsis:
‘A man who has just discovered he has no relations takes a long meandering walk around an anonymous city, meeting and befriending a series of strange people and objects, with whom he indulges in aimless conversations. The novel mostly consists of dialogue, with the odd description here and there and, at the end, a twenty-page poem about the relative values of different washing up liquids.’
Now, that wasn’t as bad as you made out, was it? Maybe not, but I still have my doubts. I feel as though I’ve degraded the novel. It sounds rather dull. It sounds quirky to me. Even worse. Beware a quirky synopsis – that’s one of the first rules a publisher comes across. Maybe so, but the stuff about the washing-up liquid sounds genuinely good. Thanks. You can dispense with the sarcasm any time you want. Okay. But that kind of information can be useful. I fear not in this case. These washing-up liquids are entirely fictional.[1]
The Empty Tree by Vladimir Dorwindovitch. What can I say? The fact is – it’s nonsense. Pure, triple-malt, super-refined, heavily brewed nonsense. The literary equivalent of a three-wheeled car driving round and round a roundabout. The kind of stuff that Surrealists can only dream of (and god knows they do a lot of that). It isn’t even symbolic nonsense. Goodness no, Vladimir Dorwindovitch has no time for symbols – for ‘meanings’. Such ideas merely dilute or infect the nonsense, which, in this pure form, can only be truly and utterly meaningless.
So why read it? What is there to learn? What is the point?
If there is no such thing as a plot-less book, then no doubt there is no such thing as book empty of didacticism. There are varying levels, maybe, but even the most self-conscious writers cannot avoid imbuing their work with the unconscious strains of their ideology. Writers are teachers, whether they like it or not. Possibly, we are all teachers, whether we like it or not. Even our most basic actions communicate ideas that others may unconsciously learn from.
But enough of this. If this review is to be true to the spirit of its subject, a prolix discussion of ideology and didacticism would be quite inappropriate. In the real world, these things can never be entirely ignored. But in the world of Vladimir Dorwindovitch? What the hell. Ultimately, I believe that it all comes down to a single word. A dirty word, as they say. One of the filthiest, foulest, smuttiest words that exists in the world today. The prince of dross, the king of muck, the commander in chief of dangerously dirty words.
This word, of course, is ‘pleasure’. See how it rolls off my tongue like a snake slipping off a wet rock into a cool stream? Close the door of your room and try it yourself. It feels good, doesn’t it?
Ay, but there’s the rub. What good ever came out of feeling good? Who can deny that the increasing growth of pleasure-filled writing has seriously contributed to the downfall of the European novel? People are seeking thrills from literature, and sister, it ain’t good. What ever next? It’s as if they think novels are some form of pure entertainment; a medium that gives, and expects nothing in return. It is a saddening state of affairs, that’s for sure. And yet, sitting at the heart of this crowd of sickeningly pleasurably books – like a black bear at a conference of blackbirds – is a work I feel inclined to excuse. A work that seems to be almost purely pleasurable, and yet also commendable. Pleasurable and – dare I say it – a great work of literature.
Now, of course, The Empty Tree is hardly a book for the masses. Yet on the other hand, it doesn’t ask for the reader to know their Alcibiades from their Mario Alcibiade Praz. It offers entertainment regardless of knowledge, but dependant on an intellectually informed frame of mind. The lack of a strong narrative drive is the principle explanation for this, otherwise the common throngs might flock to Dorwindovitch’s door in reckless haste, for there is nothing the least bit off-putting in his use of words. When one is a child, one supposes that adult books are liberally seasoned with numerous examples of excessively lengthy and multifarious language, blind to the fact that some of the best adult books betray their maturity not through the boringly balletic bellicosity of their verbal dexterity, but through the parsimonious utilization of more prosaically frugal methods (i.e. with subtlety).
But let us not get ahead of ourselves. It would be somehow insulting to sprinkle the confetti of needless praise on Dorwindovitch’s bald Lithuanian head. I would rather sprinkle the remains of crushed penguin bone marrow. A writer of such unrelentingly absurd prose deserves nothing less than absurd praise. The only thing that threatens to stop me is the realisation that any nonsense I could create would look as meagre in comparison to his as a scrap of seaweed does to the Great Barrier Reef. For – contrary to popular opinion – true nonsense is a difficult thing both to create and maintain. Indeed, you could say that it takes a particular sensibility to do nonsense justice – a sensibility which Vladimir Dorwindovitch evidently possesses. Though The Empty Tree seems at times to be the literary equivalent of a dim-witted dog chasing its own tail, it simultaneously manages to engage a reader’s attention in a manner that one can only call hypnotic.[2] According to all sense, this novel should be considered merely a waste of time. Nonetheless, I am drawn to it, in the same way that a man with forty fillings in his mouth is drawn to sucking boiled sweets – though I hasten to add that The Empty Tree presents no discernible risk to its reader’s health.[3] The simple actuality is that Dorwindovitch is a master of aimless prose.
Here I am tempted to coax a meaning from the work, one that is not reliant on conscious authorial assemblage, but which takes its cue from the aimlessness of which I speak. It is no so much a meaning as a feeling that this novel inculcates, incites and instils in its readers: a reminder, quite simply, of the rich creative potential of the human mind. The foundation of fiction is the ability to whip up words to form alternative worlds, as one whips eggs to form superlative meringues. Beyond this, authors exercise their ability to create structures within this world which make up for the lack of structure in our own. Dorwindovitch somehow manages to play it the other way, creating a world which has less structure and meaning than our own (is that even possible? Just about, it seems).
Let us take a few steps into that nonsensical world and meet a few of its characters. Characters you say? In a sense, yes – but in a greater sense, no. The truth is, none of Dorwindovitch’s characters have a specific character. They have names and they say and do things which might be said to contribute to a character, but were you to add all of these things together, the result would be an inconsistent mess. Every character that you studied would seem to have a profile exactly the same as its companion: no one has a personality of their own; they simply pick up elements of personalities, wear them for a while, then cast them aside. Dorwindovitch gives dialogue to one person/animal/thing or another regardless of whether it makes any sense for that person/animal/thing to be saying something of that sort. A better way of saying it would be to say that Dorwindovitch shares dialogue amongst his characters; he gives them voices as he might give bottles of water to a thirsty crowd, making no allowances for personality. He applies the same method to action and to description, ignoring with refreshing brio all the basic principles of character development. Thus a woman who has two arms at one point in the novel, has three at another. A wasp who defends Communist principles in chapter one, celebrates Capitalist governments in chapter three, despite having died in chapter two (though he was called ‘Dead Wasp’ even before his demise). The same blinkered logic applies to all of the characters who, as the previous classification has suggested – ‘person/animal/thing’ – are somewhat of an eccentric bunch. Other than Four-Armed Woman (for that is her name) and Dead Wasp, other ‘characters’ include The Fork, Great-Big-Metal-Thing, Oats (some sort of human being, I think), Scruffy Dog and Sir Frog of Toad, who either changes his name or is replaced later on in the novel by Lord Toad of Frog. There is also the anonymous man on whom the book is centred, until the penultimate chapter, when he disappears, leaving Scruffy Dog and The Fork to present the washing-up-liquid dialogue, which in fact shakes off all of its quotation marks half way through, though continuing to take on the appearance of a conversation. Needless to say, the whole thing ends on an uncertain note, half-way through a sentence.
Nonsense. And yet, curiously pleasurable nonsense. Is it any wonder that several critics have suspected that the author is a drug-user? The tendency to use alcohol and narcotics as an explanation for the more curious outpourings of the human imagination is certainly common amongst modern critics – but is it ever correct? In this case, I think that we can safely assume that it is not. For all his tendencies to avant-garde eccentricity Dorwindovitch is known to be quiet, deeply religious and obsessively healthy man. He is also credited with having a bad memory, which might explain his effortless inability to stick to any one plotline.
Nonetheless, a single atmosphere pervades the work, that which is suggested, I fancy, by its title. The novel begins with our anonymous pseudo-hero having a conversation in a bar with a green-haired woman. She asks him a question about his family, at which point he remembers (for the first time, it seems) that he has none. This, it appears, has never occurred to him before and the shock of this realisation drives him out to the street, where he rests for a moment at the foot of an empty tree. Dorwindovitch, as I have previously stressed, is an author who mostly denies a symbolic reading of his prose. In this case, however, critics seem to be agreed that there is a definite link between the loneliness of the man and the leaflessness of the tree, a connection cemented by the traditional usage of the term ‘family tree’.[4] However, critics are divided over whether the lack of family has anything to do with the rest of the novel. Some have suggested that the novel simply follows the man as he tries to make himself a fictional family from various characters and objects he meets, a view with which I am inclined to agree with in part, wishing nonetheless to stress that there is nothing quite so ‘simple’ about the man’s journey or that, in the end, it really is a journey, for there is clearly no destination (after page three hundred and four, the man is seen no more). All the same, the ambience of emptiness created by the opening event is an ever-present, a mixture of loneliness that is paradoxically mingled with a tone of joyous camaraderie, which springs from a single imagination – that of the author and, arguably, that of the man in the story, who may well be but a version of the author himself. I cannot help but be reminded of a quote by the late philosopher Gerard Monteblass: ‘I love to be alone together with myself’.
But let us not twist The Empty Tree into a thesis on the self and loneliness. Let us not drive to a triumphant climax in which we bless the novel with a string of conclusions concerning its meaning. Is it about loneliness? About the eternally creative potential of the human mind? Or is it, as the blurb suggests, ‘the travelogue of a schizophrenic orphan, with a digression on washing up-liquid’?
I care not. Meaning-wise, The Empty Tree is a mess. If Dorwindovitch was aiming at a meaning, he missed the target by the mile. If he was trying merely to write pleasurable prose, he succeeded gloriously, in a way that no other writer ever has. Entertaining literature usually brings with it a sense of guilt within the concerned reader. I have enjoyed myself, one thinks to oneself, but what have I learnt? Dorwindovitch’s talent is such that, at the end of The Empty Tree one cares not a jot what one has learnt. And one couldn’t give a damn whether or not one’s review of such a pleasurable experience is in any way lacking in the sustained appreciation interpretation of minutiae and sophistic thematic diversions, neatly wrapped up with a neat ribbon of conclusive summation in the final sentence. Just enjoy the nonsense.
Review by Heidi Kohlenberg
[1] It is worth noting that several critics have attempted to burst the bubble of the fictional washing-up liquids in order to reveal a hidden truth, but that all of them have failed to make any kind of links with either real life brands or with any other objects to which the fictional liquids might symbolically refer. The failure to squeeze meaning out of Dorwindovitch’s work is a constant theme in correlated criticism.
[2] It is worth bearing in mind on this point that there are many people who have been hypnotised by the sight of a dim-witted dog chasing its own tail, though personally I don’t see the appeal.
[3] This information is correct at the time of going to press, though doctors in a hospital in Lithuania are still waiting for the results of a test carried out on a certain Kaunus Riddulski, whose family have argued that the series of heart attacks he suffered early this year can be convincingly linked to the patients chronic obsession with ‘The Empty Tree’
[4] I have had some trouble tracking down whether or not the Lithuanian language accommodates this same connection between the words ‘family’ and ‘tree’, but on the wisdom of a friend (who knows a word or two of the language) I am confident that it does
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