ProtoPostModernist

The Eater of Darkness begins with an Apologue set in Paris. A woman, whose lover has left the country, is remembering their lovemaking. She goes looking for him, discovers he has left the country, and moves into his former studio. Chapter I shifts to New York, and the woman’s lover, Charles Dograr. Charles Dograr, new to the City, meets a neighbor at his boarding house, a tattooed inventor calling himself the Eater of Darkness. The Eater of Darkness demonstrates a forcefield called the Dead Plane and a device Charles dubs the X-Ray Bullet. The two use the X-Ray Bullet to look through walls, people, pets, objects. Charles unwittingly kills a man named Trulge by activating the Bullet’s electrocution switch. Dograr attacks Rupert C. Pragman in an attempt to exorcise his guilt. He meets Trulge’s niece Adelaide after being mistaken for a cousin, Herbert Trask. Dograr and Adelaide fall in love and have sex. Dograr seeks Pragman out and convinces him to quit his job and become a detective working on the Trulge murder case. Dograr and Picrolas, the mastermind criminal genius who calls himself the Eater of Darkness, kill more people for various reasons using the X-Ray Bullet.

The real Herbert Trask arrives, enlists Pragman’s help, and blows Dograr’s cover with Adelaide (who is pregnant with Dograr’s child). Meanwhile, sleazy police officer Fred Coolan has infiltrated the confidence of Dograr and Picrolas, never suspecting that his girlfriend (prostitute Helène Montmorency) has fallen in love with Dograr. Dograr and Picrolas plan the ultimate bank robbery. Picrolas reveals his identity to Charles Dograr, as well as his passionate love. Dograr, twice repulsed by the criminal’s past and his affections, earns Picrolas’s hatred. During the bank robbery, Pragman accidentally blows up himself, Picrolas, and the X-Ray Bullet machine. With everyone but Helène gunning for him, Dograr leads a wild chase through the city and awaits death with Helène in his arms. The cops burst in while Adelaide and Trask fire their guns at Charles, and the story ends. In the Epilogue, this story is revealed to be a fiction written by the woman from the Apologue. She receives news that Charles will be returning from America after a one year absence, and the readers realize that the rest of the book has been this woman fantasizing about her lover. The Eater of Darkness is a story framed within another story.

Coates’s novel “de-emphasizes the mimetic and defamiliarizes the traditional generic forms,” “calls attention to itself as artificially constructed and claims itself to be a work of art” in which “the structural seams of the work are left visible and even highlighted and commented upon,” while the whole work is “dealt with playfully” (Hayward). The quotes are from a definition of the word “postmodern.” The Eater of Darkness also fits John Rowe’s definition of postmodern, offered in Redrawing the Boundaries, by being “intensely self-conscious of style carried to the virtual limits of language” (182). The book has an “obsessive concern with its own possibility of production” (ibid). Charles Dograr is not portrayed in this book as an artist or writer himself, but he is “poetically sensitive” and the woman who loves him is a writer, the common postmodern choice of protagonist (ibid).

While the modernists crossed genre boundaries, such as Eliot's The Waste Land with its footnotes (Rowe 186) and the near poetry of Joyce’s fiction, The Eater of Darkness operates via extensive pastiche. Rowe calls pastiche the "primary mode of postmodern writing" (187). Pastiche was at one time the French term for parody, and came from an Italian culinary term. In current criticism, it may also refer to the imitation of another work’s style or content (Myers 226). The culinary term, referring to the use of various ingredients combined into one new dish or pie, is more revealing in assessing Coates’s work, which blends and juxtaposes a variety of genres and textual forms to create a startling but complete new whole.

Pastiche elements of The Eater of Darkness like the use of footnotes and mimicry of signs and newspaper articles offer both an attempt to legitimize and make academic the subject matter, but are also the mode of parody of literary criticism and academia. The paradox of Coates as postmodernist is most clearly revealed in this effort. Coates, like most precursors or forerunners, cannot be neatly parted from his modernist environs and identity. In some ways, he is a frustrated romantic, trying to navigate writing in the twentieth century. Constance Pierce explores this navigation of authorial identity by Coates in her article “Gertrude Stein and Her Thoroughly Modern Protégé.” But Coates, in his frame story, is a “modern” prose fiction stylist of the highest order. I often feel that Coates is a poet who never got around to the poetry, and got stuck on fiction. I don’t know if I really accept the fact that Coates is writing fiction, though. He works hard to undermine the fictional quality of his work, producing great satire and parody of scholarship since, like the Dada artists, he’s really just having fun. When Charles Dograr and the villain Picrolas first look through the X-Ray Bullet’s path together, among the “items seen through” are Reginald Marsh, H. L. Mencken, Theodore Dreiser, Kenneth Burke, Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary, and Malcolm Cowley. When Charles, piqued with Asa Huddlebury, kills nine literary critics using the invisible bullet, the fatalities include James Thurber, William Soskin, Waldo Frank, and George Jean Nathan. Coates demonstrates his knowledge of academic literary criticism, while poking fun at that establishment.

Rowe also identifies as “modernist” the desire and attempt to be individual through expressing consciousness in prose and by developing a literary style. The postmodernist writers “no longer had such confidence in the redemptive powers of individualism” (185). Charles Dograr is not a person, ultimately, in The Eater of Darkness, but a construct created by a woman pining for a lost love. Charles is created and destroyed, but never characterized or developed. In his second novel Yesterday’s Burdens, Coates goes even further with de-individualizing his protagonist, intentionally losing him in the crowded streets of New York. In that novel, Coates comments that the character is partially himself. He does the same thing in The Eater of Darkness: “I have remarked that sometimes I think it was I who sat one rose-scented evening on the Palisades [...] and indeed in many ways this Charles Dograr was very like myself” (Eater 140). Discerning the identity of this speaking narrator, though, is complicated by the structure of the book as an adventure story written by Dograr’s lover within the frame of a love story written by Coates.

This intrusive narrator and Coates's self-referential footnotes and interruptions are elements of his effort, through writing fiction, to define himself (Rowe 182). Coates critiques his own ability and power as author in the footnote on page 163: “Obviously, someone has been working on the Trulge case without the concurrence, perhaps even without the knowledge, of the author. The complete ignorance on the part of Mr. Coates of the most elementary principles of plot construction, apparent throughout the book, is here devastatingly revealed.” In other sections, Charles Dograr asserts “I shall not live more than 250 pages” (134), then later feels “the heat of plot and counterplot” drain “from out his struggling soul” (234). Chapter X begins with what appears to be a completely separate thriller narrative, but becomes a conversation about said narrative between Charles Dograr and a critic and author named Asa Huddlebury. Here Coates compares himself to Charles, but then deconstructs his own novel through Huddlebury.

While experimentation with form is a key feature of modernism displayed in the works of Joyce, Woolf, Stein, Faulkner, and Eliot, to name only a few, their experimentation is about interior monologue, individualism, social change, and identity. Coates is commenting on form itself, and purposely removing individuality from his characters. Yesterday’s Burdens is a more in-depth and blatant effort to achieve both metafiction and depersonalization of character, or as Constance Pierce puts it “a more controlled effort” (Divinest 44). Pierce refers to The Eater of Darkness as "an infant metafiction" (modern Protégé 611), a somewhat limiting assessment implying not only youth but also incompetence, or at the very least immaturity. While it is true that this was Coates's first novel and by nature a somewhat less mature work, the metafictional aspects of The Eater of Darkness are both its mode and content. This mode and content, identified first by Ford and Cowley as Dada, is more appropriately identified as postmodern, and preternaturally so given its early date of publication.

Jacques Derrida’s 1974 book Glas is an example of certain formal elements perhaps pioneered by Coates. This is not to suggest that Coates directly influenced Derrida, but to point out just how far ahead of his time Coates was. Glas is printed in two columns, with notes and commentary interspersed occasionally between the columns, for the purpose of simultaneously interrupting the linearity of conventional writing and critiquing that linearity through a process of deconstruction (Rowe 190). In 1926, Coates superimposed “GOLDBAUM & BIRNER/ SILKS” in the center of a paragraph describing traffic and buildings on Fifth Avenue (Eater 121). The Eater of Darkness also features footnotes, which continue the fictional narrative rather than comment upon it (107). Coates even uses the two column form and merges the columns to poetic effect (58-59).

Reading Coates is like slowly taking apart a sandwich to see what’s in it, then putting it back together again to enjoy the combination of flavors and textures. The most telling element linking his first two novels, though, is the use of metafiction, and the deconstruction of his fictions by inserting himself as both character and author into his novels.

A number of situations or conditions may have prevented Coates from achieving acclaim and financial success. He always seemed to jump the gun, so to speak, in both academic and literary circles. One of the main limitations facing Coates was the lack of a primary strength and support for postmodernist fiction in the last third of the twentieth century—deconstruction, the school of criticism based on the poststructuralist theories of Jacques Derrida. Derrida did not present his famous paper “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” until 1966. Not until the mid-1980s was the association between Derrida’s philosophical theories and the postmodern literary movement cemented (Rowe 188). These theorists did not distinguish between literature and propaganda (as the fiction writers did), approaching Dada sensibilities regarding art and performance.

Though Malcolm Cowley, paraphrasing Ford Maddox Ford, called The Eater of Darkness “the first, and for some time only, Dadaist novel in English” (273), Dada offered no vocabulary for appreciation of the novel other than for its deviance and humor. That vocabulary would not develop until forty years after the original publication of The Eater of Darkness.

Constance Pierce speculates on related factors limiting Coates’s success. She points out that Gertrude Stein, as the mentor who helped Coates first publish The Eater of Darkness, “herself dismissed the Dadaists” (modern Protégé 611). In light of Ford Maddox Ford’s labeling of the book as such, it was easy for critics and academics to dismiss this novel along with the entire Dada movement. The Saturday Review of Literature certainly used the term “Dada” against Coates, assessing that “Dadaism would appear, therefore, to be a wise-cracking, lunatic sophistication” and suggesting that “for ‘Dada’ we might just as well insert ‘blah-blah’ or even ‘flap-doodle’” (460).

Unlike many modernist writers who searched for social change in their works, and similar to postmodern authors such as Barth, Gass, and Donleavy, Coates usually avoids politics (Rowe183), only briefly mentioning things like “Communists from Moscow” for humorous and satirical purposes (Eater 166). This aversion to politics also helps distinguish The Eater of Darkness from Dada. Even though the early performances of the germinal Dada group Cabaret Voltaire had very little content that was “overtly political,” the movement grew quite political, especially in Berlin (Shipe). A significant mode in Dada was parody of propaganda, or the propaganda inherent in replacing one set of cultural values with the disruptive performance of another set of values. Another point of intersection between Dada and the philosophical and critical (rather than authorial) definitions of deconstruction as postmodernism is this equality of literature and propaganda. To the postmodernist writers, though, “[p]ropaganda [...] is bad literature” (Rowe 186). Similarly, Shipe points out that “the real spirit of Dada was in events,” while Rowe states that “deconstruction tended to reinforce the practice of criticism as a tour de force performance” (201).

Coates himself praises the Dada artists. In his introduction to the 1959 reprint of The Eater of Darkness, he writes “It was the Dada period, and for me Dada always meant gaiety: the one artistic movement I know of whose main purpose was having fun” (iv). Charles Dograr even echoes a key tenet of Dada in The Eater of Darkness: “Don’t you think [...] we often confuse permanancy with importance in a curiously illogical way? Isn’t it often the very impermanence of the thing which makes its importance?” (143). Coates also addresses his lack of success in that same introduction, almost glorifying a lack of success as a Dada philosophy. He portrays the Lost Generation as “so far out, as the saying goes now, that success distressed us” (iv). Coates recalls considering wide circulation and profit as “vulgar,” and critical acclaim from the establishment as “equally disturbing.” He even calls The Eater of Darkness’s lack of mainstream success “gratifying,” especially because he never even expected to publish it at all, and because of its success with the right subsection of readers (v-vi).

Malcolm Cowley seems convinced that Coates intentionally avoided success throughout his career. Coates had some small success in 1930 with his first nonfiction book, The Outlaw Years, but put his royalties and his time (which could have been spent writing books for a waiting audience) into building a house by hand in the Connecticut countryside (Cowley 274). Coates also avoided lecture tours, and was in Cowley’s estimation very unassuming (275). Ultimately, Cowley blames the gaps in his production for his lack of success, as Coates’s novel The Wisteria Cottage “almost became a bestseller and was almost bought by the movies [...b]ut he waited seven years to publish his next novel” (274). That novel, The Farther Shore, did poorly, and was his last.

Pierce also suggests that readers and critics alike had little interest during the late 1920s and early 1930s in “form, signification, realism, culture, [and] commodification” (Language, Silence, Laughter). She also asserts that the literary writer/critic mentality at the time of the moderns (and after) rebelled against “fiction about writers worried about writing,” though this metafictional urge drives much of Coates’s work (Protégé 622).

I think she gets it right, but doesn’t go far enough to point it out. The aspects she’s referring to are all Postmodern ideals and concerns.