PRAHA--
What is truly phenomenal about Vokali Constent's new novel is its timing. The 90s have been a decade marked by collapsing borders and disintegrating frontiers. In Europe, countries are uniting; increasing numbers of people are traveling to increasing numbers of places; certain tongues have begun to emerge as truly international languages. The expansion of the Internet into the private sphere, the masking over of ancient, unspoken rivalries, even the homogenizing effect of the new mass media have all contributed to shrinking the world into a palm-sized planet or, at least, to lifting it off Atlas's shoulders and placing it by his side as a peer. In the midst of it all stands Red Umbrellas.
![[RED UMBRELLAS]](/pix/umbrellas.gif) |
The title of Constent's sixth novel is, in keeping with his most distinctive characteristic, purposefully deceptive. From To Meld Western and Eastern Perspectives, his first essay (published backwards), to his phantom opus, Novel 2 1/2, to his brief forays into the visual arts, Constent has always played with his enthusiasts' minds.
"Reading," he once said, "has returned to its mid-life reincarnation: a pastime for the bourgeoisie... that, and a few duty-free Grishamite thrills at the airport. We need to challenge ourselves, keep our brain cells from being sucked down yet another cathode ray tube into yet another insidious Dan Rather eyebrow." With Red Umbrellas, he has demonstrated just how universal this call to arms really is: the words "red" and "umbrella" are the only two to appear in English... or any other known language.
Of course, to say that the text is not written in any known tongue is not to say that it is written in no tongue at all. The tender nuances of Constent's prose belie any accusations of gibberish or farce. Think Lewis Carroll, think Anthony Burgess, think, even, of some new incarnation of the familiar, excusable guile of Huckleberry Finn. Then remember: the narrative of Red Umbrellas is no dialect, nor is it slang, nor even the Latinate invention of Tolkien's Elves. It is one of a kind, and it is real.
Turn the page. The novel's first phrase is breathtaking: "Jy rzed pjy azf qem rja dazf qyqatoyd nu pjy nvevj," or "He was the old man who sold memories by the beach" [my translation; the Vokali Constent Authoritative Scholar suggests, "She swept her old memories into the surf"]. It only grows lusher from there. In a phosphorescent wash of syllables and stops, we are whisked through the first chapter into the fourth.
An editor's error? Hardly. On separate occasions, Constent has admitted to the admiration he feels for such mix-and-match authors as Cortázar and Burroughs, not to mention his penchant for the adolescent Choose-Your-Own-Adventure series. Besides, reading the book requires the sudden, spontaneous and unconscious absorption of an undefined language, an über-sensitivity to the texture of sound and to the colors of consonants and vowels. Linear time is simply not an issue.
Constent himself has taken reactionary criticism in stride, with published comments such as, "I have never in my life tried to swindle anyone; I have never written a fraudulent word." Of course, one might be tempted to cry irony.
Throughout the late 80s and into the first years of this decade, the vast majority of his efforts were concentrated on promulgating the early Fraud Art movement. Indeed, the title 'Red Umbrellas' is most likely a blatant nod to the creativity and early development he experienced during that time spent in the company of other original group members. Only in 1993, when he found himself in sharp dissent with the others' suggestions for a formal name for the group, did he actually cut his ties with them, and, even then, it was with contradictory feelings.
"I can only grieve for the loss of the potential collaboration, criticism and advice that my parting will most likely cause me," he stated in an interview at the time. "It is only the name I cannot abide. There is so much in a name after all, and whether one thing actually becomes two upon a second christening is yet to be proven."
(Critics were quick to retort that this was nothing more than his little personal consultant speaking: the label "Fraud," they asserted, was not going to help a known iconoclast-- one who had already intentionally (and openly) failed to produce a similarly intentionally (and openly) over-hyped new novel-- market his future efforts.)
But Fraud, and fraud, are not the same, and for the countless time in countless years, Constent once more delivers, and he delivers big. In more than one interview, he has shyly corrected the pronunciation of a certain phrase, the stress of a multi-syllabic word or even the unique manner in which his punctuation is intended to be observed, interspersing such corrections with witty tributes to Nabokov and his colorful alphabet spectrum and references to Emily Dickinson's passion for dashes.
Yet after, he always maintains that the beauty of an invented language is that it exists for everyone, from the Eskimos, with their many words for snow, to the British, with their many words for drunk. There is no alienation, no target group. In fact, his is the anti-marketing statement of the year, an observation that leaves most of his more scathing retractors hard-pressed to defend their attacks.
And the truth is, he is right. Ingesting the final crisp rounds of Red Umbrellas is the literary equivalent of watching the last currents of water spiral from the tub. We stare transfixed as they leave us behind, a whirlwind of motion that transcends the physical limitations of our own flesh. We are tangibly aware that we could never move fast enough to stop them and that our only hope is to gaze upon their clear beauty and reflect, or-- delicious treat of all treats!-- to run ourselves another bath. Likewise, with each read, Constent's prose grows richer, his characters more vibrant, the surreal details of the vignettes that connect the dots of their lives, more symbolic. We are, in short, reminded that reading is a journey of all the senses, of the self, not a mere mechanization of the eyes.
Of course, the essence of the story line, for all of its ambiguity and disguise, is also, quite literally, a gem. In a recently published biographical essay about Constent (The Modern Iconoclast, by Agnes Till), we are told of what appeared, until the publication of Red Umbrellas that is, to be an insignificant event in the boyhood of the author.
"On the beach with his father that day," Miss Till explains, "he was suddenly pierced by the sharpest pain his sand-smoothed foot had ever known. Upon further investigation, its source was found to be a semi-smooth piece of blue bottle glass. As the boy's father extracted it, the slightly bloodied edge caught the light of the fading day, and the young author whispered to his father in amazement, 'This must be the memory stone; it didn't want me to forget where I was going.'"
In light of this incident, we can easily identify the essential human soul of the characters who populate Constent's book, and perhaps of the prose itself. We grow even more attached to Jyffu, our mariner's half-remembered daughter, to her somnambulant dog Dsetl, and to the René Magritte beach on which, and over which, the plot unfolds.
Or maybe we don't. Maybe we've never read of Jyffu or Dsetl in the history of our literate lives. Maybe we've fallen through the sieves of the dreams of a parrot-cum-bard named Zyvp instead, an avian inspiration that circles above the ships of many a famous poem and recounts the moments that were not deemed worthy of mention: the off-duty sailor scratching his foot, the cook and his struggles to keep his sole good kettle clean, the seemingly trivial creaks of a particular wooden plank or the slippery smell of a dank, discarded rope. That is the beauty, not the fault, of Red Umbrellas: what some have denounced as inanity is, in fact, the longest step yet taken toward bridging the cultural, linguistic and geographical gaps that have kept us apart since the dawn of mankind.
--Daphne Pzrk, Czech Correspondent
January 1, 1999
