The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Sven Birkerts, "In the Middle of the Journey: On the Building Site of Bradford Morrow's Trilogy."

Untitled document

This is not really an essay about Brad Morrow or his projected trilogy so much as it is a reflection on the nature of linked works of fiction as inspired-and constrained-by a reading of Morrow’s Trinity Fields and a selection of about 150 manuscript pages comprising sections of Ariel, the author’s work-in-progress. If I had at one point hoped to be more evaluative-pondering Morrow’s inventiveness or ambitiousness, or commenting on particular resonances between projects-I have scrapped that notion. At best, and then only in passing, I might speculate on the nature of this writer’s fictional imagination; nearly everything else will have to be either provisional or elusively philosophical. I am grateful to Morrow for agreeing to my odd, and maybe invasive, proposal, and for showing me pages from an unfinished manuscript. Reading, I had moments when I felt exhilaratingly close to the more molten stages of an artist’s imaginative venture.

I would offer that there are as many kinds of novel sequences as there are kinds of novels. At least potentially. By which I mean to say that nothing appears to limit the novelist’s imagination, so long as there is some filament of connection, whether actual or merely implied. Usually, of course, we find some webbing of character or situation, or a temporal continuity, but there is, in theory, no reason why the resonances of mere adjacency might not suffice.

If I am right in supposing this, however, then how do I explain the rather limited range of options actually taken up by novelists? Of the trilogies and tetralogies I have read-not that many, finally-most fall into a fairly straightforward pattern, either carrying a story on (Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, Updike’s Rabbit books) or shifting character focus in such a way that foregrounds and backgrounds shift as minor figures become central and protagonists recede (as in Joyce Cary’s trilogy, or Robertson Davies’s Deptford Trilogy, or Pat Barker’s war series). I have recently worked through Peter Matthiessen’s sequence of novels about the murderous Florida planter Edgar Watson, the point of which, at least in part, was to study a single life from a number of different vantages, including those of friends and community members, strangers, relatives, and, finally, the first-person view of Watson himself. But this, too, is an obvious task for the multivolume series to perform. More open-ended arrangements, like what we find in Beckett’s trilogy, where voices speak to us out of three different solitudes, or Cormac McCarthy’s last three books, which seem linked more by geography than anything else, are still fairly rare.

It is, I think, the possibility of various kinds of large-scale shifts-between characters, or epochs-that makes the trilogy or tetralogy so appealing for certain writers. One can, of course, do many of the same kinds of things within the compass of the novel, but not to such effect. The space-the break-between actual books is especially charged, more so, I would venture, than the interval between movements in a symphony or the margin between canvases in a triptych. It can be contemplated as a compositional element in its own right. The effect of pulling a background character from one novel into the protagonist’s role in another, say, is profound, has for the author undeniable intimations of God-like omnipotence. The novel’s considerable dimensionality is heightened significantly, with all sorts of new sculptural possibilities opened up by the available shifts. To shift attention thus, varying focal intensity and, in effect, moving the vanishing point to a new place, is to bring the reader face to face, more intensely than a novel can manage, with the mystery of other lives; it is to underscore the reach and the boundedness of subjectivity in a thrilling way. Time and space, as I will shortly discuss, are susceptible of similar intensifications. Indeed, the whole business can seem at times like making the mind-opening transfer from three- to four-dimensional chess, with corresponding complication of the entire order of cause and effect.

There is a key question to ask at the outset about any extended work: whether it originated as such in the author’s mind, or whether it may not have more the nature of a house added onto as inspiration came or need arose. I am fairly sure, for instance, that Updike’s Rabbit series was first just a novel, Rabbit, Run; then a novel-cum-sequel; then, perhaps more decisively, a trilogy; and finally, almost as an afterthought, a challenge put to the self, a tetralogy. The difference? In this case it would be that the author did not set out from the threshold to make his material porous or extendable; that the work of subsequent volumes was, in important ways, retroactive, involving a going back to see which threads/elements might best lend themselves to subsequent elaboration-a process finally not organic, but inventive, improvisational within limits.

Morrow, as I understand it, has had his material formulated as a trilogy from the start. In a letter (18 February 1999), apropos the manuscript of Ariel, he writes:

This novel, which I have been working on for some five years, setting it aside now and again to finish another novel or complete other projects, has my sole artistic focus at this moment in my writing career. I have set aside another novel, The Prague Sonatas, which is itself underway, in order to complete Ariel. . . .

Each of the novels-Trinity Fields, Ariel, and the third book-shall stand as a separate narrative entity. When the entire project is completed, individual volumes may be read in any order. Among my thoughts behind such an overall concept is that this triptych achieve a kind of sculptural narrative verity and vitality.

I have also studied a remarkable poster-sized chart of character geneologies and connections long enough to see just how much Morrow is compelled by the idea of character networks unfolding in time-networks that ramify to bring together individuals from very different backgrounds. His ambition, I sense, is to use this notion of unlikely bonds and intersections to explore not only historical events and how they link people together (the true formation of history), but also the fission-action whereby consequences detonate new causes and release further effects.

This is seen in the design itself, so far as I can make it out from the chart and hints within the manuscript sections I’ve read. The sequences from Ariel not only make use of the obvious linking move-of taking as one of the central characters a young woman, the eponymous Ariel, who is the daughter of Kip, one of the two protagonists of Trinity Fields-but then expands reach by bringing in adjacent plots and new characters who assume equal importance. By doing this, Morrow widens the frame, making it clear that Ariel’s story, while very important, is nonetheless but one part of a larger set of developments, all of these growing at root out of the government’s long-ago decision to develop and test atomic weapons in this parti-cular locale, the Jornada del Muerto south of Los Alamos and Chimayó.

Morrow himself, in this same explanatory letter, offers what might well be the best analogy for his design and procedure, writing: "Just as atomic particles come into near-contact and generate energy in unexpected ways, so do these diverse characters, whose lives, reshaped by mistrust, anger, understanding, and love, impact one another in Ariel." I am struck here by the lovely congruences between the core initiating event (the atomic tests) and the structural procedure as well as aesthetic metaphysics invoked by Morrow. I am led to wonder-and will not know until I have read the trilogy entire-whether it happens that the logic of destruction (fission as undoing the fabric of life) ultimately feeds into a vision of unsettled and displaced characters coming to interact in ways that can ultimately be grasped as restorative.

In Trinity Fields, Morrow has quite clearly set out the chain of dire effects: the parting of ways of Kip and Brice, childhood friends who are polarized and estranged through their political disagreements during the Vietnam era; the damage inflicted on Kip’s soul in Southeast Asia; Ariel’s loss of her real father. In Ariel, it would seem, he has initiated a momentum of restoration, bringing together the grown-up Ariel (now in search of her father, Kip) and one Marcos Montoya, nephew of Delfino Montoya, a rancher who was stripped of family lands by government decree, and who now, decades later, battles to win their legal return.

Physically, concretely, this opposition of destructive and restorative forces is represented by, on the one hand, the Trinity test site itself—"ground zero"—and on the other by the village of Chimayó, location of the annual religious pilgrimage and the repository of the sacred dirt, which asks to be seen as the exact counterweight to the deadly concentration of atomic materials. Morrow treads lightly here, allowing his reader to make the connecting supposition, and that only gradually. Likewise, he does not make any great clamor about situating his Rancho Nambé, site of so many crucial scenes in the novel, essentially midway between Los Alamos and Chimayó. The effect is unobtrusive but powerful.

Were the opposition of locales featured in just one work-Trinity Fields, say-the effect would be persuasive enough. But it would function in a very traditional manner at the thematic level. In a strange and fascinating way, though, the recurrence of locales in a second work—locale now seen through other eyes and featured differently as context—gives it a spatial dimensionality, as if we were staring through some kind of verbal stereoscope. The places thus acquire a new potency, one directly related to their augmented reality status.

Here again I would emphasize the effects of the discontinuity, the fact that these are events in discrete books rather than in some single grand entity. The break invites the spatial heightening, creates it, in effect, through the mind’s back and forth shuttling between character perspectives. Thus, to encounter Chimayó in two different works is to experience the radiation of correspondence across a gap. It is as if the energy must momentarily leave the closed circuit of the one work and pass through an interval of actual space before entering the circuit of the other work. As if.

There are other discontinuities to make note of, most obviously, perhaps, the change in narrative voice from first—Trinity—to third person—Ariel. What is the effect of this? My sense is that it allows Morrow to alter unobtrusively the pitch of his concerns. First person is the voice of the private, the domestic; it draws the horizon line to the scale of the narrator and inhabits the country of the near and the known. The third person, by contrast, opens the scope completely; allowing narration as story, it opens the way to the historical perspective. Which is precisely what Morrow intends here.

To intensify this effect, the author likewise has decided to juxtapose two very different time-frames in these novels. Trinity Fields, shot at close-focus, unfolds over a period of twenty-five years. Ariel presents us with the time-scale of generations, covers a period of 150 years. Not only that, it uses that century and a half time span to figure a passage of sorts from a magical/mythical conception of human presence and powers (Trinidad Otero de Pena, the first settler in the 1820s, is seen to be from the time of ghosts, of, if you will, meta-physics) to a far more imaginatively limited (physics-defined) understanding of things in the present.

There is so much to surmise, both about Morrow’s enterprise in particular and about the trilogy form in general. I simply do not have enough information to hazard meaningful guesses about the outcome of the work-which is, to me, thrilling. I feel that I am walking about in a Julio Cortázar short story, walking in fog toward the outer limit of a bridge under construction, guessing as I stare into that opaque element that the other part of the structure is rearing up to meet this portion. No matter how many cues I might have about how things will turn out, everything is finally held in reserve, just as it is when I am reading a novel and approaching the final pages. No matter how close to the end I am, I always feel that the real weight, the real meaning, is woven into the lines I have not yet read; that every cumulative step of approach might find its meaning entirely altered by arrival. I suspend myself in what I think of as the promissory moment of this work in progress, uncertain, not irritable, fully trusting myself to the visionary discipline of the writer, my trust bought by the pages that led me here.

Morrow informs me that the third book of his trilogy will be set just a few years in the future, and that he plans to intercut into the text certain nonfictional passages, mainly the transcribed words of people he has met whose lives have bearing on his project. While I cannot begin to guess how this initiative will play out in concrete narrative or aesthetic terms, it intrigues me to see Morrow introducing a third category into what might be called the epistemology of the work. The whole will then comprise significant shifts between the imagined actual (the historical events that are the ground of the narrative), the imagined (the unfolding lives of the characters), and the actual (the words of real people). I did not ask the author his rationale for what can be seen as a double departure-both stepping out of the traditional realms of past and present, and bringing in a new sort of witness-mainly because I do not believe in an author himself theorizing about what he intends. That is manifestly the reader’s task-interpretation-and that ideally with close reference to the words on the page. In spite of this caveat, however, I will hazard the observation that Morrow seems to be opening the weave of the work at the edges (recall here the etymology of text, from the Latin texere, "to weave"), looking for ways to join the artifice more closely to its sources in the actual. My sense is that he wants to preempt in the reader the conventional literary response, which is to understand the work as fundamentally autochthonous, an imagining safely sealed from the world. Bringing in real voices, as well as setting the work in the reader’s near-future, are both obvious strategies against the old illusionism.

Possibly this ratifies in some way my concluding thought, that Morrow is on his way to achieving a narrative capture of the extraordinary way in which certain large-scale events are scored as history-or History-differentiating themselves from everything else which merely happens-thus and thus and thus-by bending other events decisively toward and away in ways that become permanent; events that transform themselves, in other words, from mere happenings, to something we understand, with a shudder, as part of some larger fatedness.


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Sven Birkerts, "In the Middle of the Journey: On the Building Site of Bradford Morrow's Trilogy." Untitled document This is not really an essay about Brad Morrow or his projected trilogy so much as it is a reflection on the nature of linked works of fiction as inspired-and constrained-by a reading of Morrow’s Trinity Fields and a selection of about 150 manuscript pages comprising sections of Ariel, the author’s work-in-progress. If I had at one point hoped to be more evaluative-pondering Morrow’s inventiveness or ambitiousness, or commenting on particular resonances between projects-I have scrapped that notion. At best, and then only in passing, I might speculate on the nature of this writer’s fictional imagination; nearly everything else will have to be either provisional or elusively philosophical. I am grateful to Morrow for agreeing to my odd, and maybe invasive, proposal, and for showing me pages from an unfinished manuscript. Reading, I had moments when I felt exhilaratingly close to the more molten stages of an artist’s imaginative venture. I would offer that there are as many kinds of novel sequences as there are kinds of novels. At least potentially. By which I mean to say that nothing appears to limit the novelist’s imagination, so long as there is some filament of connection, whether actual or merely implied. Usually, of course, we find some webbing of character or situation, or a temporal continuity, but there is, in theory, no reason why the resonances of mere adjacency might not suffice. If I am right in supposing this, however, then how do I explain the rather limited range of options actually taken up by novelists? Of the trilogies and tetralogies I have read-not that many, finally-most fall into a fairly straightforward pattern, either carrying a story on (Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, Updike’s Rabbit books) or shifting character focus in such a way that foregrounds and backgrounds shift as minor figures become central and protagonists recede (as in Joyce Cary’s trilogy, or Robertson Davies’s Deptford Trilogy, or Pat Barker’s war series). I have recently worked through Peter Matthiessen’s sequence of novels about the murderous Florida planter Edgar Watson, the point of which, at least in part, was to study a single life from a number of different vantages, including those of friends and community members, strangers, relatives, and, finally, the first-person view of Watson himself. But this, too, is an obvious task for the multivolume series to perform. More open-ended arrangements, like what we find in Beckett’s trilogy, where voices speak to us out of three different solitudes, or Cormac McCarthy’s last three books, which seem linked more by geography than anything else, are still fairly rare. It is, I think, the possibility of various kinds of large-scale shifts-between characters, or epochs-that makes the trilogy or tetralogy so appealing for certain writers. One can, of course, do many of the same kinds of things within the compass of the novel, but not to such effect. The space-the break-between actual books is especially charged, more so, I would venture, than the interval between movements in a symphony or the margin between canvases in a triptych. It can be contemplated as a compositional element in its own right. The effect of pulling a background character from one novel into the protagonist’s role in another, say, is profound, has for the author undeniable intimations of God-like omnipotence. The novel’s considerable dimensionality is heightened significantly, with all sorts of new sculptural possibilities opened up by the available shifts. To shift attention thus, varying focal intensity and, in effect, moving the vanishing point to a new place, is to bring the reader face to face, more intensely than a novel can manage, with the mystery of other lives; it is to underscore the reach and the boundedness of subjectivity in a thrilling way. Time and space, as I will shortly discuss, are susceptible of similar intensifications. Indeed, the whole business can seem at times like making the mind-opening transfer from three- to four-dimensional chess, with corresponding complication of the entire order of cause and effect. There is a key question to ask at the outset about any extended work: whether it originated as such in the author’s mind, or whether it may not have more the nature of a house added onto as inspiration came or need arose. I am fairly sure, for instance, that Updike’s Rabbit series was first just a novel, Rabbit, Run; then a novel-cum-sequel; then, perhaps more decisively, a trilogy; and finally, almost as an afterthought, a challenge put to the self, a tetralogy. The difference? In this case it would be that the author did not set out from the threshold to make his material porous or extendable; that the work of subsequent volumes was, in important ways, retroactive, involving a going back to see which threads/elements might best lend themselves to subsequent elaboration-a process finally not organic, but inventive, improvisational within limits. Morrow, as I understand it, has had his material formulated as a trilogy from the start. In a letter (18 February 1999), apropos the manuscript of Ariel, he writes: This novel, which I have been working on for some five years, setting it aside now and again to finish another novel or complete other projects, has my sole artistic focus at this moment in my writing career. I have set aside another novel, The Prague Sonatas, which is itself underway, in order to complete Ariel. . . . Each of the novels-Trinity Fields, Ariel, and the third book-shall stand as a separate narrative entity. When the entire project is completed, individual volumes may be read in any order. Among my thoughts behind such an overall concept is that this triptych achieve a kind of sculptural narrative verity and vitality. I have also studied a remarkable poster-sized chart of character geneologies and connections long enough to see just how much Morrow is compelled by the idea of character networks unfolding in time-networks that ramify to bring together individuals from very different backgrounds. His ambition, I sense, is to use this notion of unlikely bonds and intersections to explore not only historical events and how they link people together (the true formation of history), but also the fission-action whereby consequences detonate new causes and release further effects. This is seen in the design itself, so far as I can make it out from the chart and hints within the manuscript sections I’ve read. The sequences from Ariel not only make use of the obvious linking move-of taking as one of the central characters a young woman, the eponymous Ariel, who is the daughter of Kip, one of the two protagonists of Trinity Fields-but then expands reach by bringing in adjacent plots and new characters who assume equal importance. By doing this, Morrow widens the frame, making it clear that Ariel’s story, while very important, is nonetheless but one part of a larger set of developments, all of these growing at root out of the government’s long-ago decision to develop and test atomic weapons in this parti-cular locale, the Jornada del Muerto south of Los Alamos and Chimayó. Morrow himself, in this same explanatory letter, offers what might well be the best analogy for his design and procedure, writing: "Just as atomic particles come into near-contact and generate energy in unexpected ways, so do these diverse characters, whose lives, reshaped by mistrust, anger, understanding, and love, impact one another in Ariel." I am struck here by the lovely congruences between the core initiating event (the atomic tests) and the structural procedure as well as aesthetic metaphysics invoked by Morrow. I am led to wonder-and will not know until I have read the trilogy entire-whether it happens that the logic of destruction (fission as undoing the fabric of life) ultimately feeds into a vision of unsettled and displaced characters coming to interact in ways that can ultimately be grasped as restorative. In Trinity Fields, Morrow has quite clearly set out the chain of dire effects: the parting of ways of Kip and Brice, childhood friends who are polarized and estranged through their political disagreements during the Vietnam era; the damage inflicted on Kip’s soul in Southeast Asia; Ariel’s loss of her real father. In Ariel, it would seem, he has initiated a momentum of restoration, bringing together the grown-up Ariel (now in search of her father, Kip) and one Marcos Montoya, nephew of Delfino Montoya, a rancher who was stripped of family lands by government decree, and who now, decades later, battles to win their legal return. Physically, concretely, this opposition of destructive and restorative forces is represented by, on the one hand, the Trinity test site itself—"ground zero"—and on the other by the village of Chimayó, location of the annual religious pilgrimage and the repository of the sacred dirt, which asks to be seen as the exact counterweight to the deadly concentration of atomic materials. Morrow treads lightly here, allowing his reader to make the connecting supposition, and that only gradually. Likewise, he does not make any great clamor about situating his Rancho Nambé, site of so many crucial scenes in the novel, essentially midway between Los Alamos and Chimayó. The effect is unobtrusive but powerful. Were the opposition of locales featured in just one work-Trinity Fields, say-the effect would be persuasive enough. But it would function in a very traditional manner at the thematic level. In a strange and fascinating way, though, the recurrence of locales in a second work—locale now seen through other eyes and featured differently as context—gives it a spatial dimensionality, as if we were staring through some kind of verbal stereoscope. The places thus acquire a new potency, one directly related to their augmented reality status. Here again I would emphasize the effects of the discontinuity, the fact that these are events in discrete books rather than in some single grand entity. The break invites the spatial heightening, creates it, in effect, through the mind’s back and forth shuttling between character perspectives. Thus, to encounter Chimayó in two different works is to experience the radiation of correspondence across a gap. It is as if the energy must momentarily leave the closed circuit of the one work and pass through an interval of actual space before entering the circuit of the other work. As if. There are other discontinuities to make note of, most obviously, perhaps, the change in narrative voice from first—Trinity—to third person—Ariel. What is the effect of this? My sense is that it allows Morrow to alter unobtrusively the pitch of his concerns. First person is the voice of the private, the domestic; it draws the horizon line to the scale of the narrator and inhabits the country of the near and the known. The third person, by contrast, opens the scope completely; allowing narration as story, it opens the way to the historical perspective. Which is precisely what Morrow intends here. To intensify this effect, the author likewise has decided to juxtapose two very different time-frames in these novels. Trinity Fields, shot at close-focus, unfolds over a period of twenty-five years. Ariel presents us with the time-scale of generations, covers a period of 150 years. Not only that, it uses that century and a half time span to figure a passage of sorts from a magical/mythical conception of human presence and powers (Trinidad Otero de Pena, the first settler in the 1820s, is seen to be from the time of ghosts, of, if you will, meta-physics) to a far more imaginatively limited (physics-defined) understanding of things in the present. There is so much to surmise, both about Morrow’s enterprise in particular and about the trilogy form in general. I simply do not have enough information to hazard meaningful guesses about the outcome of the work-which is, to me, thrilling. I feel that I am walking about in a Julio Cortázar short story, walking in fog toward the outer limit of a bridge under construction, guessing as I stare into that opaque element that the other part of the structure is rearing up to meet this portion. No matter how many cues I might have about how things will turn out, everything is finally held in reserve, just as it is when I am reading a novel and approaching the final pages. No matter how close to the end I am, I always feel that the real weight, the real meaning, is woven into the lines I have not yet read; that every cumulative step of approach might find its meaning entirely altered by arrival. I suspend myself in what I think of as the promissory moment of this work in progress, uncertain, not irritable, fully trusting myself to the visionary discipline of the writer, my trust bought by the pages that led me here. Morrow informs me that the third book of his trilogy will be set just a few years in the future, and that he plans to intercut into the text certain nonfictional passages, mainly the transcribed words of people he has met whose lives have bearing on his project. While I cannot begin to guess how this initiative will play out in concrete narrative or aesthetic terms, it intrigues me to see Morrow introducing a third category into what might be called the epistemology of the work. The whole will then comprise significant shifts between the imagined actual (the historical events that are the ground of the narrative), the imagined (the unfolding lives of the characters), and the actual (the words of real people). I did not ask the author his rationale for what can be seen as a double departure-both stepping out of the traditional realms of past and present, and bringing in a new sort of witness-mainly because I do not believe in an author himself theorizing about what he intends. That is manifestly the reader’s task-interpretation-and that ideally with close reference to the words on the page. In spite of this caveat, however, I will hazard the observation that Morrow seems to be opening the weave of the work at the edges (recall here the etymology of text, from the Latin texere, "to weave"), looking for ways to join the artifice more closely to its sources in the actual. My sense is that he wants to preempt in the reader the conventional literary response, which is to understand the work as fundamentally autochthonous, an imagining safely sealed from the world. Bringing in real voices, as well as setting the work in the reader’s near-future, are both obvious strategies against the old illusionism. Possibly this ratifies in some way my concluding thought, that Morrow is on his way to achieving a narrative capture of the extraordinary way in which certain large-scale events are scored as history-or History-differentiating themselves from everything else which merely happens-thus and thus and thus-by bending other events decisively toward and away in ways that become permanent; events that transform themselves, in other words, from mere happenings, to something we understand, with a shudder, as part of some larger fatedness.

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