conquest of disbelief in after the war: First world, first person, and the gift of friendship, The

Southern Quarterly, Summer 2003 by Norman, Ralph

AS A NOVELIST, our friend Richard Marius departed only once, in After the War, from his habit of old-fashioned narrative omniscience. The entire burden of telling the story is placed in the fragile care of a displaced person, a man so marginal and vulnerable that he is given to reading dictionaries in order to keep some slender hold upon his sanity.

Paul Alexander Kephalopoulos is the man, and in all external respects his career closely follows that of Henri Marius Panayotis Kephalopoulos, the author's father, "foundryman, farmer, Tennessean," to whom, with Anne Close, Richard's friend and editor, the book is dedicated. Paul Alexander (he drops, as did Henri Marius, the surname which troubled the officials at Ellis Island) is a young engineer who has found his way from home and family in Greece to a new life in Bourbon County, Tennessee, by way of Belgium, where he had been sent for schooling and where, early in the Great War, he had been severely wounded. He is beset by headaches and bad dreams and by two very convincing ghosts, hold-overs from "Arcadia," his student days at the Institut St. Valery in Ghent. Not least, he is also visited and empowered, on almost every page of this memoir, by the muse of comedy. So extravagantly empowered, so impressive is his capacity for recollection and fabulation, the reader has trouble seeing where or in what respect this memoirist can possibly have been wounded.

On first reading, right on up to the very end, the dazzling improbability of this departure from ordinary omniscience, or from ordinary debilitation, goes unchallenged. The muse has had her way with Marius/Alexander and so with us; we cannot say no to this telling.

On second reading, the effect is more puzzling. Is there some sleight-of-hand, some slippery magic at work to compound our gullibility? We are reminded that when it came to telling another young engineer's story, that of Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain, not even Thomas Mann, the old Zauberer himself, ever quite trusted his man with any portion of the narrative. Castorp is in fact dismissed before the story is quite over. He's sent back down to the low country to play his appointed role in the Great War, while Mann, in full authorial command, lingers with us for a few final transcendental remarks atop the mountain, pondering the young man's fate and that of Western civilization.

No such hesitation from Marius about Paul Alexander Kephalopoulos; he allows his engineer to begin the story in steady, deliberative self-confidence, and more than a bit pre-emptively:

I am not mad; I never was. Wounded in body and soul, yes. Melancholy, yes. Suicidal, perhaps. Selfish? Deceitful? Disloyal? A liar, even to myself? Yes, all those things. But I never went crazy, no matter how it may seem in the story I sit here to tell. (After the War 3)

By novel's end the self-assurance has not gone away. It's been confirmed and underscored at every turn, and the engineer has become a consummate poet. He's been allowed to fix and report his world with stunning clarity.

The sunlight shone on the roof of the car and shone on every blade of grass and on every tree, and on the child's hair, a thousand radiances, an infinity of lights shining from the one great light, and I looked toward the upper field, where Guy and Bernal had gone, toward the mountains rising beyond, blue against the blue sky, and I saw light everywhere, and I thought I saw Apollo dancing. (622)

These are not the evasive or indirect words of an ironist, or of one believing himself incapable of or unready for what has been vouchsafed in final vision. Blue against blue, and light everywhere: the fulsome tone and intention of the entire novel, and not only as it reaches this summary beatitude, give it away as a comedic performance from start to finish. Is there any fiction of our time that aims more directly and self-consciously to conclude in such lucid proximity with Canto XXXIII of the Paradiso? Here's Dante in the same mood:

Oh abbondante grazia ond'io presunsi

ficcar lo viso per la luce etterna,

tanto che la veduta vi consunsi!

Nel suo profundo vidi che s'interna

legato com amore in un volume,

cio' che per l'universo si squaderna:

sustanze e accidentti e lor costume

quasi conflati insieme, per tal modo

che cio' ch'i' dico e un semplice lume.'

("Oh, the abundance of the grace that let me dare to fix my gaze, by Light Eternal, so far that my sight was consumed in the seeing! In its depth I could spy all that there is, as if gathered in, brought together lovingly, within the pages of a single book, its leaves spread out across the universe-substances and accidents and their relations, all, fused in such manner that what I can say about it here is-simple light indeed." [Divine Comedy XXXIII.82-90])

We can't sense that there is much left unsaid in After the War that the author considers unsayable. We may not be in the presence of omniscience, not quite, but we're not sure what possible intelligence that matters could be missing from this account, or for what reason. Paul Alexander is seeing it all and seeing it whole, substances and accidents and their relations, the one simple light made radiant by the one great light. A theologian might say that everything required for salvation is here on the page, plain for all to see; a philosopher, that the writer has "saved the phenomena." The theologian, recalling the familiar imagery of Paul's letter to the Philippians, might want to add that this is entirely a work of self-emptying. The Greek term kenosis denotes, as readers of that short work will recall, the fabulous resourcefulness by which the Author and finisher of a world can somehow empty himself without let or jealousy into the mind and conscience of a single fragile member of that world. ("Have this mind in you," Paul writes, "that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality of God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, and being found in human form, humbled himself and became obedient...." [Phil. 2:5-7])