Forgetting to Forget

ONE OF THE shorter quotes that is hard to forget comes from Henry Miller: "Remember to remember." A simple thought, yet it resonates in the mind and seems to telescope into one's life. Of course it's not a very catchy phrase, no doubt it's slipped somebody's mind one time or another. Probably "Forget to forget" would have better endured the trials of time and competitive advertising. But either way the message is the same and Guy Davenport's Tatlin!, a collection of six stories, succeeds in exploring its resonance.

Davenport brings a curious new genre to literature: short historical fiction. In dispensing with the burdens of longer historical novels, Tatlin! presents an exciting array of portraits including Franz Kafka, Herakleitos, an ancient Greek philosopher, Vladimir Tatlin, a Russian artist, Henry Breuil, a French anthropologist, and minor sketches of Picasso, Chagall, Lenin and Stalin.

Tatlin! is an intellectualized version of the New Journalism, and appropriately enough its subjects are safely distanced in the past. Davenport presents the necessary facts and then expands them into a believable story--a story including the "less objective data" that really make up most of our lives, a story allowing for his own interpretation of historical figures and events. Fortunately the book's relative isolation from contemporary events saves it from the dilemmas of New Journalism: the grey area between fantasy and fact is not so controversial when dealing with history.

Despite the fact that Tatlin! offers an intriguing introduction to particular historical figures and events it also suffers at times from an insufferable degree of learning. Sometimes reading parts of it is like entering into the middle of a high-powered philosophical discussion of Hegel. In fact, Tatlin! could be called the first collection of a new genre: the short story of ideas. Like the novel of ideas each story does not simply attempt to mirror reality but to create a new world of the imagination that is a separate and additional part of reality. In a way Davenport's stories are to literature what Frank Lloyd Wright's structuralist buildings are to architecture. They are both functional and graceful; their structure explains their function of preserving and discussing ideas.

Probably the most successful story of the lot is "The Aeroplanes at Brescia," an account of a visit by Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Kafka's posthumous literary agent, and Brod's brother Otto to an air show in Italy. Most of Kafka's work was not published until after he died; he spent a good deal of his life as a lawyer specializing in insurance. Davenport is able to penetrate this shy, reflective character quite sensitively. As Kafka is traveling in a boat to Italy he thinks of Odysseus and then of his more successful relatives.

There were odysseys in which the Sirens are silent. Without paper, he conceived stories the intricacy and strangeness of which might have earned him a nod of approval from Dickens, the Pentateuch and Tolstoy of England. Before paper his imagination withdrew like a snail whose horns had been touched.

Later, Kafka compares the Italians flocking to the 1909 air show to tartar tribes invading an English garden party. What is most interesting about the story is that it was taken in part from original accounts by Kafka and Brod. One wonders whether it was Kafka, Brod, or Davenport who wrote this sentence:

Max said that they must agree to remember the hole in the floor, through which they could now see a great red pizza being quartered with a knife that, as Kafka observed, was surely a gift of the Khan to Marco Polo, as each of them over the years would tend to doubt his sanity remembering it.

In "Robot" (pronounced ru-bow) Davenport tells the story of the discovery of the Lascaux cave in southern France, the site of some of the earliest prehistoric paintings. According to this version a dog named Robot chasing a rabbit actually discovered the cave. Henri Breuil, a French Jesuit anthropologist provides Davenport with a voice to describe the caves as brains for the earth. Breuil talks about his discoveries in China, Africa, the Altamira caves in Spain where Picasso studied the ancient bull drawings for the bull he painted in "Geurnica." Everything becomes interconnected in Davenport's stories; history isn't simply a series of layers, one ignorant of the other. Rather it's a finely woven mesh all intricately related. To neglect a sense of history is comparable to death.

In the longest story, "The Dawn in Erewhon," the hero, a Dutch philosopher, Adriaan van Hovendaal, who apparently actually exists, says, "Man has a history rather than a nature." And this story is Davenport's most comprehensive attempt to present that idea. But here the author fails, partially because he gets too pedantic, in both his language and his ideas, and partially because he shifts from the present action to an excerpted translation of van Hovendaal's works on Samuel Butler's utopic Erewhon and his own concepts of Utopia which are rightly described as "some of the strangest in modern thought."

Both "Herakleitos" and the title story, "Tatlin!" are interesting presentations, although again, somewhat pedagogic. Vladimir Tatlin was the leader of the Russian movement in art called Constructivizm, a Marxist form of structuralism, where form compliments structure for the good of the masses. And Herakleitos is something of a crazy Greek philosopher who thinks "without opposition all things would cease to exist."

"1830" is the most perplexing of Davenport's collection. It is a lot like The Turn of the Screw because you're never sure if you can trust the narrator who could be one of three different people, Davenport may be fooling everybody with this one.

DESPITE THEIR underlying theme of "remembering," these stories don't come together into a unified reading experience; they don't make up a book. And that may be the most frustrating part about the whole endeavor. Davenport's sense of history is limited--sometimes so specialized as to be useless. Who, after all, would know what a young man described as a "redstone kouros from Sounion...translated into the slenderer grace of a modern gramivore" is unless he knew that the kouros was an idealized version of the male in ancient Greek sculpture practiced in Sounion and that a gramivore ate grain? The frustration is good in a way, too, because it makes one realize how immense our history actually is and how much of it we've come to neglect or take for granted.

Guy Davenport believes that man has to be taught that history. "Otherwise," he says through van Hovendaal, "his nature is the same as an animal's."

Reading Tatlin! is like sitting down with a friendly old genius. At times his knowledge may annoy you, and at times you will simply have to ignore what he's saying, but don't forget to remember to listen.