Brain Pain discussion

This discussion covers: In The Ice, page 341 – 350
Glossaries, Chronology, Sources, page 351 – 411
Conclusions / Book as a whole

And so concludes William the Blind’s account of the first encounters of Europeans and native “Americans” in Vinland.

In the opening paragraph of his essay Epic and Novel*, M.M. Bakhtin writes:

The study of the novel as a genre is distinguished by peculiar difficulties. This is due to the unique nature of the object itself: the novel is the sole genre that continues to develop, that is as yet uncompleted. The forces that define it as a genre are at work before our very eyes: the birth and development of the novel as a genre takes place in the full light of the historical day. The generic skeleton of the novel is still far from having hardened, and we cannot foresee all its plastic possibilities.

With this idea in mind, is The Ice-Shirt a continuation of the development of the novel? Or is it something else – possibly a hybrid form that includes aspects of the novel, plus other elements?


*Thanks to Nathan for recommending this essay.

Jim wrote: "With this idea in mind, is The Ice-Shirt a continuation of the development of the novel? Or is it something else – possibly a hybrid form that includes aspects of the novel, plus other elements?"

If my reading of Bakhtin is correct then the novel is that genre which is capable of incorporating any and every other literary genre, from poems to drama to essays to legal briefs to epistles, etc etc; the novel is already always hybrid. What fascinated me with The Ice-Shirt was Vollmann's incorporation of the saga/epic voice/style/genre into an historical novel. It is a sort of parodic (without ridicule, naturally) imitation of the saga genre in the form of a novel, similar to Barth's Sot-Weed Factor being a parodic return to the classic picaresque (cf Tom Jones) or his LETTERS returning to the Richardsonian epistolary novel. Rather than moving the genre of the novel forward by simply being more modern and more realist (in rendering consciousness directly), as the major modernist writers like Woolf and Joyce etc were doing, Vollmann like Barth returns to older and more ancient forms of literature to find a new form for the novel. This movement backward in order to move forward is one of the elements that distinguishes the postmodern from the modern.

I'm not one to read historical fiction, but even without having any knowledge of how historical fiction is usually written, I think Vollmann has done something quite novel in bringing back the style and significance of the saga in creating a brilliant novel. And since I've still not read the Icelandic Sagas, I'm relying for the moment on you all who have read some of them to endorse or reject my thesis about how well Vollmann has made use of the saga materials.

Nathan "I'm not one to read historical fiction, but even without having any knowledge of how historical fiction is usually written, I think Vollmann has done something quite novel in bringing back the style and significance of the saga in creating a brilliant novel. And since I've still not read the Icelandic Sagas, I'm relying for the moment on you all who have read some of them to endorse or reject my thesis about how well Vollmann has made use of the saga materials..."

Short answer - he follows the sagas fairly closely, but expands and enhances them by including more of what's going on in the characters' heads and making them even more magical(esque) than the source material.

Nathan "N.R." wrote: "Jim wrote: "With this idea in mind, is The Ice-Shirt a continuation of the development of the novel? Or is it something else – possibly a hybrid form that includes aspects of the novel, plus other ..."

Despite the book not working for me, this is the best explanation of the book, N.R., its difference with modernism's quest, and the differentiation of modernism to post-modernism. All said succinct and with clarity. Thanks.

(I should apologise in advance for what is a very long and very rambling post even by my standards; it is also very muddled and not likely to be helpful to anyone. My only excuse is that I'm still trying to figure out what Vollmann is about, hence the somewhat... groping nature of what follows.)


Nathan "N.R." wrote: "...Vollmann like Barth returns to older and more ancient forms of literature to find a new form for the novel."

I for one think Barth and Vollmann are doing quite different things, and that Vollmann's relationship to the historical novel is nt at all like Barth's.

The way I see it, what the traditional historical novel from Scott onwards did was to turn its attention towards a period from the past and depict it in a modern form with modern language - you had, to put it simply, historical content poured into a contemporary form. What Barth (and other postmodern historical novels in his wake) did was to turn that model from its head to its feet (or the other way round, I suppose, depending on your own perpective) - in Sot-Weed Factor the plot (even though ostensibly set in the seventeenth century) is a distinctly modern one while the language stays very close to 17th century English - in other words, you have contemporary content poured into a historical form (again, this is very simplified and hence to be taken with a large pinch of salt).

Now, I think that Vollmann's Ice-Shirt (and, I assume, his Seven Dreams in general) does neither of those things (or maybe both, again depending on your own perspective), but marks an entirely new approach to the historical novel. I won't claim that I have quite figured out what exactly it is he is doing, but from what I have pieced together so far, is that in The Ice-Shirt he starts out by taking the Icelandic Sagas relentlessly at face value, i.e. he basically does not read them as fiction but as historical documents: He takes them literally in a way that other writers basing their books on sagas usually do not. Where others try to improve on them by making them more realistic, more psychological, or going the other way and treat them entirely as fantasy, Vollmann takes them as they present themselves and takes them seriously.

So, if Vollmann respects both the form and the content of the sagas in his own novel, it would seem The Ice-Shirt is some kind of mock-saga, an imitation or maybe a parody. Which it quite obviously is not, Vollmann never lets his readers forget that they are reading work written from a contemporary perspective by a contemporary author. One - and the most obvious - way in which he achieves this is by interspersing passages describing his own travels in Iceland - those serving the double function by marking the distance to the past, but also to underline that Vollmann is essentially writing non-fiction here.

Or maybe it would be more correct to say that The Ice-Shirt is a novel written with a non-fictional attitude. All historical fictions faces the problem of presenting something that is basically unknowable, namely a past that can no longer be experienced. Traditional historical novels rely on the power of representation to evoke the past, but tend to forget that representation conjures only fictions. Postmodern historical novels on the other hand tend to over-emphasize fiction with the inherent danger of subsuming historical language into a general language-game.

Vollmann, I think, steers clear of both dangers by basing his novel on a documented historical discourse rather than a more or less imaginary version of events, the sagas themselves rather than what they might be referring to, but at the same time does not dismiss the claim of that discourse to veracity from an advanced 21st-century point of view but rather takes the sagas by their word. In this way, I think, he shows us the sagas and the world where they originate from, in an entirely new way and also gives us an entirely new form of historical novel, one that is aware of the all the problems and complexities of writing about history as any postmodern historical novel but at the same time manages to give us a sense of that history as vivid and intense as any tradionalist historical novel.

Larous--

I've gotta agree with everything. Very useful analysis of WTV's relation to the genre of historical fiction.

To clear up what you may have misunderstood me saying: I don't think Barth ever wrote anything like historical fiction, only that Maryland/us history was some of his material for the Sot-Weed. What I meant to indicate was that rather than progressing into new forms of the novel, as the moderns were intent on doing, both Barth and WTV returned to older forms of fictioning; WTV to the Sagas (at least in the Ice-Shirt; the other Dreams are based more on historical records of one sort or another rather than epic/saga/fiction) and Barth, not to the historical novel, which is a nineteenth century invention, but to the picaresque (Sot-Weed) and the epistolary (LETTERS) and that kind of thing.

But, nevermind. What you've got going here in regard to WTV and the historical novel ... a very interesting and pertinent question.