When you publish a novel, there’s often a flurry of interviews over the ensuing months. The interviewers repeat questions independently of one another. It’s an interesting indicator of what people are thinking when they approach your work. In my case, the number one thing is that I’m also a radiologist, which is disheartening to me, because radiology is such a small part of my intellectual identity. The second most interesting thing about me, apparently, is that I am also a poet.
There are plenty of things I could say about the poet and novelist thing, many but not all of which I’ve said in “The Servant of Two Masters,” published here in Kenyon Review Online. The interesting thing about the fact that interviewers find that interesting (or at least discussion-worthy) is that I don’t find it all that interesting. Or even unique. There are so many writers, past and present, who are formal prose-verse switch-hitters that I don’t see why anyone would take note.
Much more fascinating to me are those rare writers who have written creatively in different modes.
I’m referring to “modes” in the sense of Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism. Essentially—to completely simplify Frye’s classification, if not to falsify it outright—writing falls along a spectrum with mythopoetic stuff at one end, irony and kitchen realism at the other, and magical realism and the various genres (romance, historical fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, Westerns, etc.) falling somewhere in between, closer to one end or the other. (Fantasy would be closer to the myth-end, historical fiction closer to the verismo-end. You get the idea.)
How many writers have written in the wild, fantastic, religious-mythological mode one moment, and the eyes-on-the-ground, realist mode the next? And maybe thrown in an historical novel for good measure? You don’t see it too often.
I myself have found this phenomenon in two 19th-century French writers, Victor Hugo and Gustave Flaubert. Flaubert is, in my opinion, literary history’s supreme exemplar of a writer capable of writing in multiple modes. The fact that he is most famous for Madame Bovary is because of the preference of his audience—us—for realist fiction over mythological or religious work. The first friends to whom he read out loud the first version of The Temptation of Saint Anthony told him to pitch it in the fire and focus on the quotidian. That sounds about what your would expect from 19th-century European literary types—La Tentation is a wild religious fantasy that was not to the taste of his contemporaries or to ours. (Yet Flaubert, hellbent on being the first true pan-modal writer, did not give up on that work, reworking it—after finishing realism’s supreme pre-Tolstoyan masterpiece, Madame Bovary—into the second version we possess today.) Flaubert also wrote Salammbo, an historical novel about Carthage. He died before finishing his masterpiece in the ironic mode, Bouvard et Pecuchet. This man was all over the place.
Hugo, likewise, wrote Les Miserables at roughly the same time he was working on crazy cross-eyed religious verse like Le Fin de Satan.
Let us note: This is not normal. We expect our writers to be one way, and they usually are. Jonathan Franzen isn’t going to come out with a wild Christian prose poem about an ascetic seeing visions in the desert. Jhumpa Lahiri isn’t off writing Hindu mythological epics in verse. Salman Rushdie isn’t about to switch into kitchen realism or create some sublime Sufi parable. They do what they do; they are what they are; they do not run the modal scale.
I believe that this “multimodal” split-personality-disorder peaked in the 19th century as a result of the decline of myth and religion among the literary readership. Writers like Hugo and Flaubert had a genuine mythopoetic streak; yet they found themselves in a literary environment dominated by the realist novel. Possibly the relatively undeveloped state of genre fiction then prevented them from finding a modal equilibrium or synthesis in some intermediate, hybridized form like sci-fi or fantasy, and accordingly they pursued each mode independently.
Sometimes a work in one mode will pick up interference from the far end of the spectrum. In Hugo’s realist Les Miserables, there is an extended scene in which Jean Valjean escapes a convent inside a coffin; is temporarily buried; loses consciousness; and returns to consciousness after being believed dead for a few minutes. This is the Substitute Victim Trope and the Death and Resurrection Myth common to several mythological religions (including but not limited to Christianity). It happens on the “micro” level of the sentence as well. Consider Hugo describing the barricade of the revolutionaries: “It was a garbage heap and it was Sinai.”
Contemporary novelists with a very strong poetic or mythic streak often write most successfully (“success” considered both artistically and commercially) in genre, which combines elements from both ends of the spectrum. Consider Cormac McCarthy’s successes in the western (The Border Trilogy), the historical novel (Blood Meridian), crime novel (No Country for Old Men), and post-apocalyptic sigh-fi (The Road). Margaret Atwood is a poet-novelist who writes excellent realist fiction—but really comes into her own in her “speculative” science fiction. The Blind Assassin shows the two strains in direct juxtaposition, slightly unintegrated, alternating passages of realist narration with excerpts from a science-fiction novel ostensibly written by one of the characters. Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake show her tendencies integrated perfectly, equilibrated, as they are in the best science fiction.