Had I seen this "exciting work of art in the Amerikanischen"? Well yes, Herr Doktor, you cunt, I have seen this masterpiece in the "Amerikanischen," and in fact tried to torpedo it on sight in one of the less-influential trades, through assigning to the auctorial voice the opinions of the protagonist, a juvenile sociopath. A base trick, yet an effective one, and unusually useful in a literary culture where it is utterly unknown (especially, alas, at the moment of composition) that author and protagonist are, or can be, different people.
Claude La Badarian is much more than a shell of autobiographical elements taken from Mr. Monahan's life. It is Claude La Badarian's abusive opinions, regularly spouted in his letters, that make him the character that he is. As the fictional character Claude La Badarian explains in the above passage, it is through the employ of a "base trick" in "one of the less-influential trades" (read: The Aristocrat or New York Press) that he purports to have succeeded in creating a fictional character for his works that is entirely different from himself. Although this "base trick" is discussed as having been employed by Claude La Badarian, I believe that it is Mr. Monahan (as the creator of Claude La Badarian) who has applied this "base trick" while creating Dining Late with Claude La Badarian. Though Claude La Badarian talks about creating a new sort of fictional character in American fiction, I suggest that it is actually Mr. Monahan who believes he has created a new sort of fictional character in Claude La Badarian. Conflating the author William Monahan with the fictional character Claude La Badarian is easy to do for any reader familiar with Mr. Monahan's autobiography. While not particularly in my first reading of Dining Late with Claude La Badarian, but more so my subsequent readings, I often did conflate the two. Certain aspects of Claude La Badarian do echo Mr. Monahan. But upon closer inspection I realized that something more was going on.
When Claude La Badarian writes about having tried "to torpedo [Mr. Monahan's novel Light House: A Trifle] on sight in one of the less-influential trades, through assigning to the auctorial voice the opinions of the protagonist, a juvenile sociopath," Claude La Badarian is in a sense talking metafictionally about how Mr. Monahan went about creating his character Claude La Badarian. In reality, it is Mr. Monahan who has assigned the opinions of a juvenile sociopath to his auctorial voice, which happens to be Claude La Badarian in the fiction serial Dining Late with Claude La Badarian. Claude La Badarian's personal history bears a striking resemblance to Mr. Monahan's. The "less-influential trade" that Claude La Badarian refers to in his letter is, most probably, either the Aristocrat magazine or the New York Press, which can be considered essentially the same publication in the context of Dining Late with Claude La Badarian. William Monahan is often personally attacked in Dining Late with Claude La Badarian, though ultimately his fictional self has his revenge on Claude La Badarian.
Although it is very clear that Mr. Monahan purposely gave Claude La Badarian a personal history similar to his own, it is less clear what his reason for doing this was. In the passages below I show that identical autobiographical details appear in both Mr. Monahan's essays and in the letters written by the character Claude La Badarian. The comparisons are remarkable! Afterward, I will explain the reason for which I think William Monahan created the Claude La Badarian character in the way he did. As you will see below, it's almost as if Mr. Monahan went through his non-fiction work with the specific intention of lifting key autobiographical passages for the purposes of applying them to Dining Late with Claude La Badarian. Here are three examples in which Mr. Monahan's essays match up with his fiction serial (note: the Variety essay came nearly six years after the publication of Dining Late, meaning Mr. Monahan may continue to shed light on the autobiographical elements in Dining Late with future essays):
Example 1: Mr. Monahan's maternal grandfather
I have written in a previous blog entry about the similarities between Mr. Monahan's maternal grandfather and Claude La Badarian's grandfather. Please see "William Monahan put his maternal grandfather into fiction" for further details.
Example 2: Mr. Monahan's childhood
Claude La Badarian writes in letter 12:
[T]he term "American" is a fiction for simpletons, foreigners and federals: the USA is a lot of countries unnaturally related. Claude is a member of the New England civilization. Poor Claude, literate little boy, fond of drawing, diffidence, solitude, beans on toast, "r" unknown in the La Badarian household, never saw himself on tv–not on Gilligan, not in cowboy films–until he saw David Hemmings in the cheapo early-60s seaside musical comedy Be My Guest.
Mr. Monahan writes in a 2007 Variety essay:
Growing up in Boston and environs in the '60s and '70s was very strange, because we, perhaps the primary American civilization, had no representation in art, anywhere. When I was a kid I used to watch television and you'd see an "American" family living in an "American" house having "American" problems, and I'd think, right, but where do they put their books? Why are they talking openly rather than metaphorically? On top of that, why don't they realize that what bothers them doesn't matter? Why isn't it raining and why is no one actually funny? Why do they think that a doctor has social status? Why doesn't anyone die?
Television and most films, granted, are under no obligation to be a mirror to nature -- Sherwood Schwartz was not required to be Flaubert -- but I literally didn't see anyone like myself, or anything like my own environment or condition or family, until I started to read books such as "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" and see movies set in the north of England, which were usually about reassuringly paradoxical people who made terrible, negative decisions.
Both Claude La Badarian and William Monahan had problems "seeing themselves" in TV and film, until they came across a certain type of British film. They also both emphasize that the term "American" is a vague one. They both mention Sherwood Schwartz's work as an example of the kind of TV in which they didn't "see themselves" (Sherwood Schwartz was the creator of Gilligan's Island), and they both point to films set in the north of England as examples of films in which they did "see themselves" (the seaside musical comedy Be My Guest was filmed in the north of England). Both Claude La Badarian and William Monahan had the same experience with TV and film while growing up in New England.
Example 3: Mr. Monahan's philosophies
Claude La Badarian writes in letter 4:
La Badarian, pill-crazed late-night epistolarian—omnia transformans sese in miracula rerum—operating on the Rimbaudian principle that the "I" is someone else, enhanced by insomnia, financial peril, and extensive media connections, is definitely not something we need to resurrect
Mr. Monahan writes in a 2001 Bookforum essay:
When the present writer was a very horrible young man, transfixed by Duchamp and the Sex Pistols, unable to forget Rimbaud's "The 'I' is somebody else" and Iago's artistically metasignificant "I am not what I am," he typed the following on a piece of paper: Write like Hamlet mad: Risk everything.
So both Claude La Badarian and Mr. Monahan are adherents to the Rimbaudian principle. Mr. Monahan is obviously basing his character Claude La Badarian on his own autobiography.
Yet, despite the fact that Claude La Badarian has the grandfather of William Monahan, the childhood of William Monahan, and some of the same philosophies as William Monahan, he is really best defined by his crude opinions which seem to be crafted by Mr. Monahan to be those of a juvenile sociopath. Claude La Badarian slowly takes on the character of a scumbag as he shares his opinions about women, colleagues, and so on. Similar opinions have not been expressed by William Monahan.
Interestingly, in the final letter from Claude La Badarian, a fictional Mr. Monahan is reported to be "having the usual problems with people he hadn’t thought about in a million years confusing themselves hopefully with completely fictional creations." A slight digression, so let's get back to the main thrust of my argument:
Throughout the fiction serial, Claude La Badarian is always ranting about how predictable American literature is, emphasizing how a lot of American fiction seems to be memoirs converted into fiction. This particular excerpt from letter 4 is interesting because it shows that Mr. Monahan is keenly aware of how ordinary it is for an author to include autobiographical elements in his/her fiction:
After one realises that one’s Memoir is a stack of prevarications, it is possible to convert the mass of text into a perfectly serviceable coming-of-age novel, but alas, Henry, what you’re left with then is the ordinary First Novel (a pitfall Claude La Badarian tried to avoid by calling his first novel Second Novel), in which a person resembling yourself in every detail ends up doing roughly the same shit you did but doing it (precisely as in Memoir) better than in the original. At this point in literature this obscenity (which is to say all of American Literature) must be avoided at all costs.
Mr. Monahan confronts this tendency among writers of American literature to include autobiographical elements in their work by doing something new with Dining Late with Claude La Badarian. Although he seems to be doing the same as most authors do with their fiction -- using their autobiography to create fictional characters -- he goes a step further by throwing in a twist. Mr. Monahan gives Claude La Badarian the opinions of a juvenile sociopath. These opinions are what make Claude La Badarian who he is. As sprinkled with autobiographical prose from William Monahan's essays as Claude La Badarian's letters may be, Claude La Badarian is not really anything like William Monahan. He quickly comes into his own, as the fictional character Claude La Badarian.
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