To fully understand the symbolic character of ‘the Boulevard,’ one must understand a bit about the geography and history of River Isle, the fictious, middle-sized, Midwestern, manufacturing city in which much of the action of my novel, Sweetheart of the Lonesome Boulevard, takes place.
River Isle sprawls over two sides of the Elm River. On the left bank (East side) lays the central business district, most of the significant commercial establishments, and middle-class residences. Opposite, on the west side, are the factories—making processed meat, breakfast cereal, farm machinery, chemical sweeteners, steel castings, etc.—and ‘Hunkeytown’ where dwell the descendants of Slavic immigrants who provide the labor that keep the factories running. In the middle of the Elm is the mile-long, canoe-shaped Island, the site of the art-deco monstrosities of City Hall, the Elm County courthouse, the Federal Building, Allies Coliseum, the Jail, and the Potter’s field.
The Boulevard, in the parlance of my youth, is the ‘main drag’ of River Isle. The urban congruence of a triple-digit federal highway, it runs from the Aladdin ballroom (just outside the eastern limit of the town) through east side and downtown, across the island and two channels of the river, traversing the factory district and Hunkeytown, and on past Kottmann’s junkyard and Kitty’s Kat Klub at the extreme western limit of River Isle, at which point it becomes Highway 317 once again.
Pick any point in River Isle: call it point A. Pick any other point and call it point B. Most likely, you can’t get from point A to point B without traversing at least part of the Boulevard. If you could, you wouldn’t want to: it would be too boring, because all the life of the town is concentrated along the Boulevard.
It all goes back to Harvey Langsam, horse-thief, slave-thief, militia deserter, who, in the 1830’s blazed a trail through the virgin forest with a Sac and Fox wise man and Kickapoo lover and settled on the Island. Other settlers came later, found Harvey very much not to their taste, and ran him off further westward. By way of atonement, they named the path he had made ‘Langsam Boulevard.’ That’s the source of what Dorf, the very 20th century narrator of most of this involved tale, initially thinks is a weak pun: the lonesome Boulevard.
But it’s not a weak pun, is it? Because all day and way into the night they go up and down on the Boulevard, don’t they, the workers and idlers alike. Teenagers ‘shoot the B’, driving back and forth from the Aladdin to Kottmann’s and back, and all over again, and again, and again. Traffic on the Boulevard is aimless, without purpose, as lonesome people drive isolated in their self-enclosed vehicles from one end of this symbolic thoroughfare to another. This ten-mile strip of concrete holds the town, middle-class east side and working-class west side, together, even as it isolates each and every individual who must live within its clearly defined—yet universal—limits.
At the center of this novel, Sweetheart of the Lonesome Boulevard, is the quintessence of lonesomeness, symbolized by the Boulevard itself. Aimless driving, back and forth and back again. So what, in the way of redemption, does the Sweetheart offer? I shall discuss this in my next post.
Peace,
David P. van
Showing posts with label literary fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label literary fiction. Show all posts
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Friday, August 28, 2009
Why This Book? (Part 3)
Previously, I discussed the manner in which the multiple narrators of my novel, Sweetheart of the Lonesome Boulevard, tell two alternate, interpenetrating stories, neither of which is entirely known to any one narrator. Indeed, the narrators themselves experience their existence as disconnected and chaotic, while meaning, coherence, and significance is communicated by means of the reader’s synthesis of all their various tales. I suggested that the ultimate meaning of this novel is essentially a spiritual one, and thus can be communicated only by symbols. In this post I shall point out some of the central symbolic structures which I have constructed in this work.
The Four Elements Each of the four parts of the novel employs a different element to draw attention to the rôle of humanity within the natural world. In Part One, the 18-year-old Dorf is stranded by a flood that destroys much of his home town. As an undergraduate in Part Two, he desperately seeks to rescue priceless paintings from a fire that breaks out in an art gallery. In his late twenties by Part Three, Dorf is trapped overnight in an abandoned mine. Having turned forty in Part Four, he works for a political candidate whose opponent conducts his campaign largely by radio.
Yet water, fire, earth, and air do not simplistically represent the violent indifference of nature to the humanity Dorf represents, nor are they pathetically fallacious. The flood was caused by a haphazard dam formed by the dumping of plowed snow on the river. The gallery fire spread from a nearby bonfire built in the midst of gale-force winds. The mine into which Dorf falls was the scene not only of his bigoted grandfather’s recent death, but also of a long-concealed hate crime. Like the airwaves upon which lies and misrepresentations are broadcast in Part Four, the prominence of the four elements points to stupidity and brutality, not of Hardyesque Nature, but of humanity at its worst.
The Arts Humanity at its best is represented by allusions and references to works of artistic creation, both intertextually actual and intratextually imagined. Music, particularly Rock and Roll, runs through Part One. Dorf and his friends listen constantly to the radio; Shorty, a record-store owner, is Dorf’s mentor, and Shorty’s own tale is focused on his encounter with Buddy Holly. In Part Two, Dorf’s attention is very much on painting. His girlfriend Myra is an art historian; Mr Diggins, the art-collecting undertaker, donates his collection of 20th century American masterpieces to Dorf’s college; and the wounded painter Dennis Parker is introduced as a character. Dorf, in Part Three, is concerned with fiction, as he struggles to begin his career as a writer in the midst of distractions both economic and romantic, and the dead poet Peter Aram--originally introduced in Elaine's Tale in Part One--becomes the center of a mystery. Questions of political and religious rhetoric—as art, as communication, as anti-art and dis-communication—dominate Part Four. This emphasis on what human beings are able to create contrasts with the elemental symbols in a manner that hearkens back to one of the most enduring of dichotomous themes in Western literature, that of Nature and Culture.
In my next post, I shall further discuss the symbolic structure of Sweetheart of the Lonesome Boulevard, examining the three most important symbols in the novel: ‘the Web,’ the Boulevard, and the Sweetheart herself.
Peace,
David P. Van
The Four Elements Each of the four parts of the novel employs a different element to draw attention to the rôle of humanity within the natural world. In Part One, the 18-year-old Dorf is stranded by a flood that destroys much of his home town. As an undergraduate in Part Two, he desperately seeks to rescue priceless paintings from a fire that breaks out in an art gallery. In his late twenties by Part Three, Dorf is trapped overnight in an abandoned mine. Having turned forty in Part Four, he works for a political candidate whose opponent conducts his campaign largely by radio.
Yet water, fire, earth, and air do not simplistically represent the violent indifference of nature to the humanity Dorf represents, nor are they pathetically fallacious. The flood was caused by a haphazard dam formed by the dumping of plowed snow on the river. The gallery fire spread from a nearby bonfire built in the midst of gale-force winds. The mine into which Dorf falls was the scene not only of his bigoted grandfather’s recent death, but also of a long-concealed hate crime. Like the airwaves upon which lies and misrepresentations are broadcast in Part Four, the prominence of the four elements points to stupidity and brutality, not of Hardyesque Nature, but of humanity at its worst.
The Arts Humanity at its best is represented by allusions and references to works of artistic creation, both intertextually actual and intratextually imagined. Music, particularly Rock and Roll, runs through Part One. Dorf and his friends listen constantly to the radio; Shorty, a record-store owner, is Dorf’s mentor, and Shorty’s own tale is focused on his encounter with Buddy Holly. In Part Two, Dorf’s attention is very much on painting. His girlfriend Myra is an art historian; Mr Diggins, the art-collecting undertaker, donates his collection of 20th century American masterpieces to Dorf’s college; and the wounded painter Dennis Parker is introduced as a character. Dorf, in Part Three, is concerned with fiction, as he struggles to begin his career as a writer in the midst of distractions both economic and romantic, and the dead poet Peter Aram--originally introduced in Elaine's Tale in Part One--becomes the center of a mystery. Questions of political and religious rhetoric—as art, as communication, as anti-art and dis-communication—dominate Part Four. This emphasis on what human beings are able to create contrasts with the elemental symbols in a manner that hearkens back to one of the most enduring of dichotomous themes in Western literature, that of Nature and Culture.
In my next post, I shall further discuss the symbolic structure of Sweetheart of the Lonesome Boulevard, examining the three most important symbols in the novel: ‘the Web,’ the Boulevard, and the Sweetheart herself.
Peace,
David P. Van
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Why This Book? (Part 1)
Why this particular novel, Sweetheart of the Lonesome Boulevard, at this particular time?
Post-modern fiction has been with us for nearly sixty years. Despite its programmatic eschewal of the traditional, it has become both a tradition in itself and a part of the larger literary tradition. None but a few academic troglodytes would deny that such works as Pale Fire, Slaughterhouse Five, The Crying of Lot 49, The Golden Notebook, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Sot-Weed Factor, or Beloved belong to the canon, whether one defines it in Arnoldian terms as “the best of what has been thought and said” or more practically as that which is frequently taught. Hence it is perfectly valid to ask why the world needs one more novel characterized by a non-linear plot, multiple narrators, verbal jouée, epistemological irony, subversive historical allusions, imagery from popular culture, and elements of metafiction and magical realism.
Sweetheart of the Lonesome Boulevard employs all these devices and techniques. All novelists write within a tradition, and I am not ashamed to admit that post-modernism is the one in which I work. Yet every tradition limits as much as it liberates, and the true test of a novelist’s creativity is the extent to which his or her work is able to push, perhaps even transcend, the boundaries of the tradition in which that work is composed. Sweetheart is a post-modern novel, but in it I have sought to make something and do things that the typical post-modern novel is not and the typical post-modern novelist does not do.
Though Dorf and the subsidiary narrators of Sweetheart often experience life in as fragmented, random, and meaningless a manner as Burroughs’ narrator in Naked Lunch, the novel itself offers a vision of wholeness and pattern. While Dorf’s rarely sees beyond his lonesomeness, Sweetheart differs from, for example, Breakfast of Champions in that human interconnectedness is apparent to the reader despite the reality of individual alienation. Brand-names and pop-culture references abound in Sweetheart as much as in White Noise, but not in the presupposition that tawdriness is all there is, for Dorf and several other characters experience infrequent but genuine epiphanies of genuine beauty. Finally, while Dorf and the other narrators find the story as impossible to tell as the stories of Pale Fire or Gravity’s Rainbow, the story nevertheless gets told.
Wholeness despite fragmentation, connectedness despite alienation, beauty despite a culture of ugliness, and a story despite the impossibility of telling it: these things set this novel apart from other postmodern novels. In future posts I shall discuss each of these aspects in more detail. In the meantime, you may wish to consider that Sweetheart of the Lonesome Boulevard is an anxious, hopeful book for an anxious, hopeful age.
Peace,
David Van
Post-modern fiction has been with us for nearly sixty years. Despite its programmatic eschewal of the traditional, it has become both a tradition in itself and a part of the larger literary tradition. None but a few academic troglodytes would deny that such works as Pale Fire, Slaughterhouse Five, The Crying of Lot 49, The Golden Notebook, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Sot-Weed Factor, or Beloved belong to the canon, whether one defines it in Arnoldian terms as “the best of what has been thought and said” or more practically as that which is frequently taught. Hence it is perfectly valid to ask why the world needs one more novel characterized by a non-linear plot, multiple narrators, verbal jouée, epistemological irony, subversive historical allusions, imagery from popular culture, and elements of metafiction and magical realism.
Sweetheart of the Lonesome Boulevard employs all these devices and techniques. All novelists write within a tradition, and I am not ashamed to admit that post-modernism is the one in which I work. Yet every tradition limits as much as it liberates, and the true test of a novelist’s creativity is the extent to which his or her work is able to push, perhaps even transcend, the boundaries of the tradition in which that work is composed. Sweetheart is a post-modern novel, but in it I have sought to make something and do things that the typical post-modern novel is not and the typical post-modern novelist does not do.
Though Dorf and the subsidiary narrators of Sweetheart often experience life in as fragmented, random, and meaningless a manner as Burroughs’ narrator in Naked Lunch, the novel itself offers a vision of wholeness and pattern. While Dorf’s rarely sees beyond his lonesomeness, Sweetheart differs from, for example, Breakfast of Champions in that human interconnectedness is apparent to the reader despite the reality of individual alienation. Brand-names and pop-culture references abound in Sweetheart as much as in White Noise, but not in the presupposition that tawdriness is all there is, for Dorf and several other characters experience infrequent but genuine epiphanies of genuine beauty. Finally, while Dorf and the other narrators find the story as impossible to tell as the stories of Pale Fire or Gravity’s Rainbow, the story nevertheless gets told.
Wholeness despite fragmentation, connectedness despite alienation, beauty despite a culture of ugliness, and a story despite the impossibility of telling it: these things set this novel apart from other postmodern novels. In future posts I shall discuss each of these aspects in more detail. In the meantime, you may wish to consider that Sweetheart of the Lonesome Boulevard is an anxious, hopeful book for an anxious, hopeful age.
Peace,
David Van
Saturday, August 8, 2009
A New Novel
Your attention, please, all who love literary fiction, especially publishers and agents.
My first novel, Sweetheart of the Lonesome Boulevard, is nearing completion.
Sweetheart of the Lonesome Boulevard is the picaresque story of Michael “Dorf” Dorfmann, as he matures from callow adolescence, through grief-embittered middle age, to his discovery of redemption in his own ‘lonesomeness.’ In this journey from youth to full adulthood, Dorf, a sensitive man with a self-conscious sense of integrity, seeks to comprehend the mysteries in the lives of those around him, hoping thereby to find his own place in the complex web of human relationships. In each of the novel’s four sections, he encounters Brenda Magarsczyk, a young woman with mystifying dark eyes. Despite the years that pass between these encounters, despite the fact that Brenda proves amazingly adept at changing her appearance, name, and occupation, Dorf always recognizes her and, in her, his own yearning to belong to something greater than himself. Brenda sometimes affirms, more often challenges, Dorf’s understanding of his identity and of the meaning of his quest.
Subplots and enigmas abound among the other people who touch Dorf’s and one another’s lives: an alcoholic record dealer who spouts a peculiar mixture of wisdom and nonsense, a painfully self-enclosed schoolteacher who longs to revive ancient paganism, a sexually predatory Gospel singer, a mortician who collects paintings, a beautiful but emotionally crippled Vietnamese émigré, a Jew-baiting clergyman, a 19th century frontiersman, and the megalomaniacal owner of a Christian radio station, interrupt Dorf’s first-person narrative to reveal things that Dorf does not, indeed cannot, know. Despite his imperfect understanding, their impact on Dorf’s life shines through in his formative experiences: the flood that ravages his home town, the fire that destroys a precious art collection, a fall down a mine, and the intrigues of a political campaign that compromise his closely-guarded integrity. His journey takes him to a thriving city and a bleak mining community, but he always returns to the Boulevard that traverses his home town of River Isle, where he sees, in the seemingly aimless back-and-forth movement of vehicles, the symbol of his own lonesomeness.
Though its plot sprawls in complicated interweavings, Sweetheart is driven primarily by the development of characters and the complexity of relationships among them. This complexity itself forms the major theme. Paradoxically, it is only by owning the lonesomeness of the Boulevard within himself that Dorf discovers the redemptive power of the vast web of human connectedness. The counter-theme of social, cultural, or moral intolerance--manifested by several characters--represents a false and inadequate way of belonging to the human community, for it tears the fabric of life into disconnected fragments. With her magical transformations and unnerving amorality, Brenda patches the fragments back together. It is Dorf’s recognition of her almost divine role that enables him to accept his own place as one traveler, among countless others, on the lonesome Boulevard.
If you are interested in knowing more, please contact me here at blogspot.
Thank you.
David P. Van
My first novel, Sweetheart of the Lonesome Boulevard, is nearing completion.
Sweetheart of the Lonesome Boulevard is the picaresque story of Michael “Dorf” Dorfmann, as he matures from callow adolescence, through grief-embittered middle age, to his discovery of redemption in his own ‘lonesomeness.’ In this journey from youth to full adulthood, Dorf, a sensitive man with a self-conscious sense of integrity, seeks to comprehend the mysteries in the lives of those around him, hoping thereby to find his own place in the complex web of human relationships. In each of the novel’s four sections, he encounters Brenda Magarsczyk, a young woman with mystifying dark eyes. Despite the years that pass between these encounters, despite the fact that Brenda proves amazingly adept at changing her appearance, name, and occupation, Dorf always recognizes her and, in her, his own yearning to belong to something greater than himself. Brenda sometimes affirms, more often challenges, Dorf’s understanding of his identity and of the meaning of his quest.
Subplots and enigmas abound among the other people who touch Dorf’s and one another’s lives: an alcoholic record dealer who spouts a peculiar mixture of wisdom and nonsense, a painfully self-enclosed schoolteacher who longs to revive ancient paganism, a sexually predatory Gospel singer, a mortician who collects paintings, a beautiful but emotionally crippled Vietnamese émigré, a Jew-baiting clergyman, a 19th century frontiersman, and the megalomaniacal owner of a Christian radio station, interrupt Dorf’s first-person narrative to reveal things that Dorf does not, indeed cannot, know. Despite his imperfect understanding, their impact on Dorf’s life shines through in his formative experiences: the flood that ravages his home town, the fire that destroys a precious art collection, a fall down a mine, and the intrigues of a political campaign that compromise his closely-guarded integrity. His journey takes him to a thriving city and a bleak mining community, but he always returns to the Boulevard that traverses his home town of River Isle, where he sees, in the seemingly aimless back-and-forth movement of vehicles, the symbol of his own lonesomeness.
Though its plot sprawls in complicated interweavings, Sweetheart is driven primarily by the development of characters and the complexity of relationships among them. This complexity itself forms the major theme. Paradoxically, it is only by owning the lonesomeness of the Boulevard within himself that Dorf discovers the redemptive power of the vast web of human connectedness. The counter-theme of social, cultural, or moral intolerance--manifested by several characters--represents a false and inadequate way of belonging to the human community, for it tears the fabric of life into disconnected fragments. With her magical transformations and unnerving amorality, Brenda patches the fragments back together. It is Dorf’s recognition of her almost divine role that enables him to accept his own place as one traveler, among countless others, on the lonesome Boulevard.
If you are interested in knowing more, please contact me here at blogspot.
Thank you.
David P. Van
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