Chris Scott — Bartleby [1971]

In the wrong hands, Tristram Shandy can prove fatal. As a callow undergraduate whelped on the navalgazing torments of Dostoevsky, Sartre, and Camus, I was not ready for the onslaught of Sterne’s masterpiece, and over a frenzied year or two, I wrote an imitative novel parodying the literature of exhaustion. I had napalmed all hopes of penning a middlebrow bestseller, and locked myself into the experimental cage forever. Then there are those staid souls who, like Dr. Johnson, dismiss the book as an amusing oddity, and are content to write pastel-covered tales of Courage in the Face of Evil. Brit-born Canadian Chris Scott belongs in the former camp, having written this staggering act of impish homage to Tristram Shandy as his debut novel, thereafter purging himself with novels that riff on genre fiction, finding the need to cleave to familiar forms after such formless madness. A précis of the plot will prove impossible, since there is no plot to précis. The novel’s hero, openly cribbed from Melville, is a precocious five-year-old with an unparalleled amorous capacity, and the novel chronicles his attempts to locate his missing ward. Making use of imitative Sternean English, the various interruptions and insertions and digressions, the novel plays around with the picaresque form, Dickensian grotesques, and the notion of authorship in the wake of Barthes. A full-on assault on good taste, the novel is not for the squeamish. De’Ath is a necrophiliac open about his sexual assault on corpses, and the bawdy humour (from the masculine perspective) passes into the sexist (the virgin maiden is ravished by the five-year-old hero, there is a ten-page paean to the naked female form), which explains this novel’s out-of-print status for 45 years. Like the finest self-indulgent metafiction, the novel mingles characters from other books, pinching from Beckett, Vidal, and Melville, and demonstrates some A-grade wordplay and devilish twists of tongue. The principal pleasure of Bartleby (aside from all those listed things), lies in Scott’s fantastic language, and despite the absence of plot and manic sense of unhinged improvisation, the novel keeps the reader in love with each euphonious turn of phrase. His grotesques, especially De’Ath, are also rendered with panache, and his obsessive riffs on authorship, narratorship, and whatnot, make this something of an ur-text for the self-eating prospect of self-referential postmodernism. Bartleby plays with this, revelling in the comedic properties of this notion, but never endeavours to explode the form. Scott’s next novel is called To Catch a Spy, which is perhaps one of the most vanilla of titles possible, suggesting a complete repentance from this mode. Unlike B.S. Johnson’s Travelling People, a far milder Sterne homage, Scott was not hellbent on reinventing the wheel. This novel is proof indeed that Barth et al were not the only ones exhausting literature: our Canadian friends were part of the revelry too, and sadly omitted from the history books.

Editions:

Hardback, 1971, Anansi.

Bibliography:

Novels:

Bartleby, 1971, Anansi.

To Catch a Spy, 1978, Viking.

Antichthon, 1982, Quadrant Editions.

Hitler’s Bomb, 1983, McClelland & Stewart.

Jack, 1988, Macmillan.