Byzantium Endures: The First Volume of the Colonel Pyat Quartet Read online

  Pyat’s attitude to history is like his attitude to everything else: voracious and omnivorous, but also outstandingly combative. Bolshevism, he tells us over and over again, is an expression of Jewishness; it is a manifestation of the rule of the antiChrist. It is set against the Russian soul, the true Russian soul whose identity it has distorted and camouflaged. Pyat is actually Greek Orthodox, because of his mother. He insists he has a Cossack father, but this identity is constantly besieged by racial insinuations. Over and over again, despite his insistence to the contrary, he is assumed to be a Jew. So what is his identity? We assert our identity by means of our name. A proper name is a linguistic terminus; this is my name, and that’s who I am. Full stop. Here, we assert, an immoveable identity is proclaimed, and it is not generic but specific: this one individual belongs here in this portion of history. But Pyat’s father, we are told, changed his name a dozen times. And so identity itself has become protean. Identity lives in a permanent dialectic with survival. We might remind ourselves that many of the Jews of Europe only acquired surnames, rather than patronymics, because they were ordered to adopt them by their ruler.

  Historical Fiction/Fictional History

  A précis of the Quartet might give the impression that this is historical fiction. After all, there is a huge amount of history to be observed here, and much of it is witnessed at the most crucial moments of the twentieth century, but this is not historical fiction. We might choose instead to call it fictional history. The difference is that in the second category, history is employed to facilitate the creation of fictional characters, however many historical ones make an appearance. What is foregrounded, in other words, is not the historical but the fictional possibilities it provides for the fictive to go about its anarchic business. Pyat insists on the gap between his own exuberant reality and any historicist representation. It is as though Mr Punch should suddenly pop up at the Nuremburg Trials and say: ‘That’s the way to do it.’

  Robinson Crusoe was published in 1719 and is often considered the first modern novel written in English. It is also, in many respects, picaresque. It is also soaked in history, and is a displaced account of the actual misadventures of Alexander Selkirk, but it is not historical fiction. Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy is historical fiction because it takes as its foregrounded arena recorded history and the lives of actual people; these lives cannot be distorted out of recorded detail, but they can be enhanced through fictional invention, and they can be introduced to fictional characters while still retaining their historic identities. Shakespeare did this in his historical and classical plays: real lives were portrayed with fictional characters joining in around the edges of the plot. A confusion sometimes obtains here whenever we forget something: fiction, whether historical or not, is in love with fact. What fed into Balzac’s omnivorous imagination was historical and social fact. This he promptly transmuted into fiction. Moorcock does the same here.

  James Joyce in Ulysses encapsulates human experience by a concertina movement which grafts the most famous epic of them all on to an exhaustive account of one day in the life of Europe. That day was in 1904, so Pyat would have been four years old at the time, and a long way from Dublin. Joyce like Dickens was aware of the filament connecting the past and future in the form of the present moment. For the writer this filament articulates itself in ink, and at one point in Joyce’s gargantuan novel we have a recapitulation of the history of English writing. Pyat could be said to recapitulate the moral history of twentieth-century Europe, and for him to do that effectively he must of necessity be a consummate liar. So the problem he presents us with is the same one any liar always does: when should we believe him, and when not? Even the truthful do lie sometimes; even the liar sometimes tells the truth. And lies are usually motivated, even if the motivation is the simple urge to demonstrate your power. This is a century, he seems to tell us constantly, that refuses to tell the truth. The Armenians say the Turks attempted to inflict genocide upon them; the Turks say they did not. Nearly a century has passed, and the argument continues. The character of Pyat, we might say, stands right in the middle of all such arguments.

  Joyce is baroque, all is to be included in the omnium gatherum of his mighty books. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are amongst the most ambitious works ever written. One day in the life of humanity; one night in the life of humanity. Such diurnal universalism is challenging, and in the Wake Joyce will not even accept the parochial boundaries that usually separate one language from another. Joyce’s devotee, disciple and amanuensis Samuel Beckett abandoned such baroque inclusivism, the magnificently crammed room of the imagination, for a strategy of ascesis: let us see what can be pared away and still leave the essential subject. It is surely fitting that Giacometti created the tree for the first Paris production of Waiting for Godot: he too was trying to find out what you had to dispense if you were to get at the truth of things.

  Now Pyat’s text is undoubtedly baroque, and yet we have already pointed out that Moorcock has no interest in Joyce’s formal inventiveness. He is obviously entirely comfortable inside the traditional narrative; so this is modern picaresque, an adventure story out there exploring the world’s seas and highways, in the century’s great cities and its great moments. Pyat, whatever other doubts we might have regarding his lineage, can certainly trace his ancestry back to Robinson Crusoe and Lemuel Gulliver. Let’s get out there and discover the way of the world, even though disaster is bound to ensue. Nothing could be further from Beckett’s solipsistic solitaries tied to rocking chairs or examining the vestiges of human identity in a ditch.

  And yet. Moorcock keeps disrupting his traditionalist narrative by another means. Narrative explores movement in time and place. For experience in narrative to find any meaning, there must then be some stability of identity, either the narrator’s or the protagonist’s. But such identity is undermined from the beginning by Pyat’s relationship to his own genealogy, and his racial origin. So as he moves through the complex horrors of twentieth-century history, he is askew to himself; to his own meaning in the narratives of history. He constantly tells us of his un-Jewish identity, and we increasingly disbelieve him. He is modern history’s own unreliable narrator. He is a mirror we see through only darkly, and yet we still see enough to recognise the passages of history we are walking down. The point of Pyat as a fictional device is that we make out the lineaments of history despite him. We soon know that he will not tell us the truth. We are constantly looking over his shoulder to see what is really going on beyond and behind his words. Every time he opens his mouth we register that fracture of surface meaning called irony.

  The Colonel’s Grand Tour

  What motivates the grand journey in fiction? What sets Odysseus off to battle with monsters and gods? Or for that matter what makes Alice delve into a land where the logic is unrelenting but unearthly? We have used the word picaresque to capture the sense of episodic adventures whose unifying feature is a single adventurer encountering strange lands and hostile forces, ultimately to survive them, being tested almost to destruction by his trials. He might well discover the limits of himself in the process; find out what he’s really made of. Now Pyat is perhaps a mix of both Odysseus and Alice. He certainly experiments like Alice with substances that reconfigure the relationship between body and mind, the soma and the psyche which together make up our identity. And his picaresque field of action is our recent history; he is the Don Quixote of modernity. And the windmill he often tilts at more than any other is the spectre of his Jewish identity. Marx wrote in 1848 that there was a spectre haunting Europe. Pyat is another haunted species altogether; but his spectral hatreds and identities shadow the terrors and depravities of the last hundred years. This is fiction shadow-boxing with history; the reason it is not historical fiction is because Pyat insists so unrelentingly on his own fictional zest and brio. He is as much Mr Punch as Mr Average. He exceeds the permissible text and margins of historical fiction by his shape-shifting and his unassuageable appetites.
It is as though one had begun a documentary only to find Rabelais’s Pantagruel roaring his way out of it. And escapology is one part of Pyat’s extraordinary quality. There is an aspect of Houdini to him—that’s how he survives where so many around him do not. From the beginning here, one of the things he is constantly escaping is his own genealogy. He’s a Cossack not a Jew, he tells us—and himself—over and over again.

  It was a shrewd move on Moorcock’s part to make Pyat an engineer. The world the Quartet presents us with is a world richly abundant in things. There is a constant electrical storm of objects: heirlooms, commodities, boats, cars, weapons and tramcars, and of course books. This is object-laden fiction; history is an inverted pyramid pressing heavily down on Pyat’s consciousness. If, as we argued, modern fiction divides into the baroque and the minimalist, the object-laden and the ascetic, then Moorcock is indisputably in the former category, and though his twin in this respect could be seen to be Dickens, it might equally well be Joyce. Though we have said that Moorcock shows no interest whatsoever in modernist technique, the deliberate disintegration of the seamless narrative, he certainly shares with Joyce an obsession with the vast miscellany of objects which the modern world offers for our perusal. It was Beckett, Joyce’s amanuensis and disciple, who turned away from the world of things to those bare rooms and ditches. Joyce himself is always in the centre of the city of his imagination. He is Baudelaire’s flaneur, even if it is sometimes only memories he can stroll through. And he is as fascinated by the minutiae of commodities as Walter Benjamin was in his encyclopaedic (and unfinishable) Arcades Project. Pyat functions often as a magnificent eye: he sees Odessa in 1914 and evokes it on the page as if it stood thus today. Each situation, each spatial and temporal location he finds himself engaged in, shapes him even as he observes it: he is stained by locality, in its time-locked thusness, the way wood is stained by the varnishes applied to it. We observe him observing these rendezvous with history, and momentarily the ruins appear to reconstruct themselves, as they did in the early films of the 1890s when a reel was played backwards. The demolished chimney undemolished itself.

  In the massive accumulation of objects detached from any suspicion of usefulness, Dickens created an allegorical life in The Old Curiosity Shop. Here things are allowed an identity in relation to one another, freed from the degradation of utility. Pyat is undoubtedly a collector, but of what? It seems to me that the answer to this question is a curious one: what Pyat collects, what he becomes a connoisseur of, are historical sensations, impressions and memories. He is a phenomenologist of his century. He collects his own experiences the way a lepidopterist collects butterflies. This is the real logic I find in the progression of the four narratives. Pyat has a nose for where the most intense history is taking place. Off he goes to get some, as though it were a stash of his beloved cocaine. Pyat is the moth; modern history the flame.

  Think of the vast act of collecting that was Darwin’s life. It was out of his collections of specimens, facts, descriptions, images, plants and fossils that his thought emerged. It was his ability to ponder the inter-relations between all these dead animals and their vestiges, their attributes and adaptations, that led to his discoveries. If there is one moment in history when the act of collecting, obsessively and monumentally, coincides with the elaboration of scientific thought, this is surely it. In Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop the vast accrual of objects gleaming at one another generated a kind of allegory; in Down House, Darwin’s home in Kent, the vast number of dead creatures eyeing one another glassily generated the concept of Natural Selection. Pyat is a collector too: he collects women, friends, places, but most of all he collects experiences. He is an aficionado of experience, and that means places, times and cities. The gargantuan ambition involved in this massive act of experiential accrual marks him out as a kind of hero. And all compelling heroes of modern fiction are also anti-heroes: that seems to be a requirement of the new curriculum vitae.

  Pyat and Alienation

  Modern fiction is often an exploration of alienation. We can see this taking form in the deliberated alienation of Dostoyevsky’s Notesfrom Underground. It is soon to be followed by the allegorical alienation of Kafka’s K or Gregor Samsa or the dreadful goings on, the punitive writing on the body, of ‘In the Penal Colony’. There seems at this point to have been a separation of the literary sensibility from any conceivable reconciliation with the Zeitgeist. D.H. Lawrence saw modern industrial civilization as wounding humankind in the most intimate region of all: in its sex. And modern history has been made in the city not the country.

  Now Pyat is undoubtedly bitter at the twentieth century. The Bolsheviks merely represent one of its malignant manifestations, one more epiphany of the poison that perennially threatens civilization. But is he actually alienated, in the sense in which Dostoyevsky’s hero or Kafka’s victims are? Before the war we see Maxim (Max the Hetman) in Odessa, enjoying the fruits of a decorous decadence which modernity will soon sweep away for ever. He is introduced to cocaine by his relative Shura. Sherlock Holmes had been mightily fond of the stuff too, of course. Holmes used it to alleviate the lassitude of spirits he endured without a serious criminal case to engage his intellect. Pyat uses it to enhance life and sex. So cocaine and sexual initiation take place in the old-world indulgence of Odessa. And between Kiev, Odessa and Petersburg we have an extraordinary evocation of the prewar world that is about to suffer an irreversible inundation. We are also treated to one of the finest evocations of drug-induced paranoia and monomania ever written. De Quincey would surely have applauded. We are also reminded that the word Odessa contains an allusion to that Odysseus who set sail on his great journey millennia before; he was an excellent liar too. The sea our new Odysseus thrashes about on the surface of is a different maelstrom: the history of the twentieth century.

  But alienated? It is surely history itself which becomes alien here. Pyat has too much appetite for everything: cocaine, sex, money, power, technology, experience itself. The mind of the child in Dickens is often the empty stage upon which adult conflicts are acted out, and there is something of the same quality in Pyat. He is a kind of innocent, certainly at the beginning. He is Icarus. He gets to fly, courtesy of his own invention rather than his father’s, and he too falls to earth, but unlike his mythical forebear, he survives. At least that’s what he tells us. As usual we are obliged to come to our own conclusions, and meanwhile the great panorama of modern history continues streaming through the window. Already in Odessa the hint of criminal activity edges in menacingly. Family crime. This is one of the great fictional themes. That modern masterpiece The Godfather is a study of how a family fascinates itself even as it assassinates itself.

  A Traditional Narrative of Modern Disintegration

  And so, what do we have here? This is a traditional narrative concerning remarkably untraditional events. We might well call it Balzacian, Moorcock’s voracious appetite for the data of history, to be absorbed and transmuted into fiction. His historic curiosity remains forever undimmed, even when the relevant information is darkened by catastrophe, persecution and extermination. The modernists came to believe that to confront the realities of modern life there had to be a stylistic shift. The choice was presented thus: is style a crystal wall of transparency immaculately constructed and polished so that content can shine transparently though it, or is it the problematic textual arena in which the device is foregrounded, where the text displays its own textuality? Is style the mode in which writing exists for its own sake, in which it advertises its lack of utility—its aesthetic, which is to say the splendour of its uselessness? Ulysses is a jamboree of styles, an encyclopedia (Joyce’s own word) of device-foregroundings. It declares from its opening pages: don’t expect a straightforward story here, because there aren’t any left to be told. In painting from Cézanne to Braque and Picasso the canvas stopped attempting to mimic a three-dimensional space; instead it acknowledged itself to be two-dimensional. Cubism was the result of that act of art
istic self-consciousness.

  So what does Byzantium Endures say in reply to these demands? That there is a story, if not exactly straightforward then at least lucidly recount-able, and it is the story of the century. History, says Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. History, says Maxim Pyat, is me. I embody it. It has engraved itself on my flesh and my consciousness. I have lived it, endured it, got high on it, made love to it. More than once it has very nearly killed me. Listen closely and I will tell you the story of modern times.

  In walking through Paris Baudelaire saw not only the ruins of the old, but the ruins of the new too. It was the law of modern capitalism enunciated by Marx: all that is solid melts into air. So in his poem ‘The Swan’ Baudelaire strolls through Paris at dawn and sees a perpetual building site, whole arrondissements being demolished and rebuilt. Cities change quicker than the human heart, he reflects. Now Pyat the collector of historical experiences, though a profoundly unreliable one, is inevitably a memorialist. He itemises the places and buildings and, for that matter, states and nations, which are vanishing even as he meets them. Baudelaire’s perception that to live in modernity is to live in a condition of unceasing demolition and reconstruction is also Pyat’s. And as the ghostly voice that is central to Eliot’s Waste Land has it: ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins.’