Feature
Literary 2003: AUTHOR PROFILE
by Pauline Uchmanowicz

The last frontiers on earth lie in the geography of the imagination. Fiction writer Emily Barton plumbs her own prodigious caverns in her debut novel The Testament of Yves Gundron (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000). This expedition into the history of ideas earned Barton the second annual Bard Fiction Prize, established to encourage and support promising young writers. She received a $30,000 award and one-semester appointment as writer-in-residence at Bard College for spring 2003.

The Testament of Yves Gundron, which chronicles a close-knit, communal way of life as yet untouched by centuries of progress, unfolds in mountain-ringed Mandragora, an “uncharted” farming village on an island in the Outer Hebrides off the northwest coast of Scotland. Rooted in speech patterns and idioms of Middle English and presented as the written testament of yeoman farmer and inventor Yves Gundron, “On the Nature of Change and on the Coming of the New World,” it is edited and annotated by Harvard academic Ruth Blum. Fluctuating between the mythological and oddly familiar, the treatise sounds like Barbara Tuchman’s historical account A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, echoing off of Thomas Hardy’s 19th-century novel Far from the Madding Crowd.

Kernels of authenticity permeate the imaginary landscape. “Mandragora” is Latin for mandrake, assigned supernatural properties in the medieval cosmology of plants known as the “doctrine of signatures.” The author also drew from J.B. Jackson’s study The Necessity of Ruins and Other Topics in determining inventor Yves’ domain. Barton says, “It’s a documented fact that the harness led to carts and straighter roads,” precursors to urbanity that serve as motifs in the novel. Consequently, a reader at first glance might surmise that editor Blum has uncovered a historical manuscript, a literary conceit made famous in our region by Washington Irving’s tale of “Rip Van Winkle,” a posthumous writing found among the papers of one Diedrich Knickerbocker (whose name survives in the New York Knicks). But when Ruth shows up on the scene after 30 pages as a 20th-century visitor to Mandragora, answering a greeting of “Hail” with “Wow. Hello,” the effect is disorienting, as if Barton’s fable suddenly bumped into the satire Hocus Pocus, in which Kurt Vonnegut poses as an “editor” who has compiled a book from scraps of paper written by a certain Eugene Debs Hartke.

A task that in actuality fell to Barton’s real-life editor, Ethan Nosowsky, was getting the reclusive Thomas Pynchon to “blurb the book.” She prompted, “Tell him he’s the living author I most revere. Tell him that I played in a college band called Imipolex G, the name of the super plastic in Gravity’s Rainbow, and that we covered all the Paranoids’ songs” (a reference to the rock group in The Crying of Lot 49). Barton in fact thinks that one should read Gravity’s Rainbow “not as a book but as an oracle.” The same advice could apply to her own creation, a meditation on the twin pillars of civilization—language and technology—and their effects on the evolution of natural landscapes and human consciousness.

Pynchon ultimately connected to The Testament of Yves Gundron, supplying the cover blurb “blessedly post-ironic, engaging, and heartfelt—a story that moves with ease and certainty, deeply respecting the given world even as it shines with the integrity of a dream.” Other reviewers have credited Barton for escaping “the veiled confessions of your average first novel” (The New York Observer) and eschewing “postmodern gamesmanship” (Los Angeles Times). But Barton’s background and understanding of literary theory do inform her rumination on progress in part.

Dedicated to her father and in memory of her mother, “The book is about loss and change,” Barton says. “My mother died while I was writing it.” In the story, Ruth sets out in search of Mandragora to fulfill the wishes of her own recently deceased mother, Esther, who once spun tales of its simple-living inhabitants. Yves’ consciousness is similarly based on loss. As recounted in an “intermezzo” to the principal narrative, both his parents, two brothers, and a sister succumb to a Great Scourge; not long after, his first wife dies in childbirth along with the baby. Linked to his editor through mutual tragedy, the diarist ponders aloud before her, “What if this were the last time, in all of history?”

Barton understands such a position, reflecting, “I think people have always thought they’re living in the end time; it’s what we’re wired for.” On the other hand, she is quick to add, “Ruth’s sensibility as an academic is not my own. She edits irresponsibly, I think; the story is not the ‘truth.’” As disclosed in a footnote, Blum turns out to be an anthropologist facing an unfinished master’s degree; her voyage to the Outer Hebrides happens to coincide with embarking on “the impossible task of finding a thesis topic.” The Bard Prize recipient’s own achievements suggest a decidedly different scholarly path.

Emily Barton graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard University, where she wrote her senior honors project, a novel, with a grant from the Ford Foundation. After next earning an mfa from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she published short stories in Story and American Short Fiction and began to regularly contribute reviews to tNew York Times Book Review and Bookforum. With grants from the Michener-Copernicus Society and the Vogelstein Foundation, she completed The Testament of Yves Gundron, named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and nominated for the Guardian Fiction Prize in the UK.

Barton describes her undergraduate years, the late 1980s and early ‘90s, as “the heyday of semiotics and deconstruction in college English departments.” Though able to pursue the subjects she most loves, late-medieval English and 15th- and 16th-century lyric poetry, she reports, “Women’s literature wasn’t covered in the depth I wanted at Harvard, so I studied it independently. But in those heady days of literary theory, Barthes, Baudrillard, Derrida, and Saussure were inescapable.” The influence of these philosophers melded with her sojourns in Middle English shows up in The Testament of Yves Gundron on several counts: in the discursive footnotes of editor Blum, where she abbreviates her life in a “parallel” narrative; in the bricolage of rock’n’roll and the blues that infiltrate Mandrik Gundron’s (brother of Yves and the only resident to have traveled beyond their village) psaltery-accompanied ballads (e.g., “Just wait until we reach the castle / And everything’s gonna be out of sight”); and in the roll call of Barton’s characters, including Matthias Gansevöort and Ydlbert von Iggislau. “The names of the people ‘sprang up’ from where their ancestors had been,” Barton says. “I wanted a sense that they had moved a lot and dragged their names all over, whether Persia or Scotland.”

As essayist Guy Davenport writes, “Language itself is a continuously imaginative act. Rational discourse outside our familiar territory of Greek logic sounds to our ears like the wildest imagination.” Barton addresses the particular terrain of the English tongue most directly when Mandrik, one of the few literate Mandragorans, presents a “reflection upon language,” attempting to ferret out differences between Ruth’s speech and his own. Mandrik concludes that the repetition of “um” (not to be confused, he says, with the divine “om”) uttered by the visitor and absent from the utterances of his kinfolks “indicates a deep aversion to speaking Truth.”

The pursuit of Truth, including its religious corollaries, likewise plagues the novel’s central characters. Barton herself claims to be against organized religion, as it currently exists, but nonetheless values the moral grounding it may afford. “But when religion is used to turn people against each other, to me that’s turning against God.” Though raised a Jew, she has studied Hinduism and Buddhism, part of her training as a yoga instructor. While the doctrine of reincarnation makes a cameo appearance in The Testament of Yves Gundron, its author ascribes chiefly to the Taoist precept: “The way that is the way is not the true way.” As if speaking for her characters’ unwitting stumble into the present age, she translates this to mean, “Like life, religion has to grow, change, and embrace differences.”

Using her residence at Bard to research and draft Prudence Winship, the eponymous title of her novel-in-progress, set in Brooklyn right after the Revolutionary War, Barton continues her journey into the history of ideas and the evolution of language, the 18th-century milieu offering rich possibilities. Expect her pending time capsule to announce a world as yet unseen.

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But we could not risk giving a horse a name. They were subject to all manner of plagues, maladies of the tooth, hoof, and digestion, sometimes a dread illness that turned a healthy horse to a deranged beast, choking on its own frothy spittle, spewing blood from every orifice. Because God is merciful, such a horse rarely lived longer than a day. Horses died young, as all creatures die young - like hatchlings in the nest or children yet unable to speak, foals were delicate, without sense, and held always in a balance that desired to tip against them. Sometimes God spared a foal its childhood torments, and it grew to be a strong adult, suitable for work. The seasons could not turn round upon a workhorse, however; they often died in their first few months of service. Even the smallest human error could bring a horse to its knees. I hitched my third horse, a beautiful chestnut mare whose white socks I brushed down of mud each night, to a full cart of grain one August morning - a cart only slightly more full than that she had pulled the week before - and she strained too hard under the load. Before I could loose the choking strap from her neck, she stood quite dead at the edge of my farthest field, her eyes popping and her tongue aloll. Her pained and frozen visage struck terror into my heart, and I let much of the shocked wheat go to rot in the field because I dreaded to approach the dead horse. After a few days I enlisted the help of my closest companions - my brother, Mandrik le Chouchou, and my neighbor Ydlbert von Iggislau - to drag the stinking, stiffened carcass away. “Fear not,” Mandrik told me, bowing his head of fine brown curls before the sight. “The multitudes depart our presence thus, but the few escape intact.” Ydlbert set his hat on the ground, revealing his balding pate to the hot sun, spat in his two strong hands, and set to hacking off the edible sections and the horse’s skin. I could neither think long on the commentary nor bear to watch the flaying, so I returned to our house, where we wintered in poverty and want, except for copious lots of salted horse meat.
—Excerpt from The Testament of Yves Gundron