Cadenza: An Afterword

By Gilbert Sorrentino

Why should we attend to Cadenza? It is a book of memory, termination and death, written with an Anglo-Irish arrogance worthy of Beckett, an arrogance that leaches out of these things the sentimentality and hideous falsity that they usually encourage. The novel comprises a chain of loosely connected stories having to do with the hero, one Desmond; these stories exist in an arbitrary fictional time and are ordered and combined (or not combined) as instances of memory, fantasy, and what may as well be termed dream. The actuality of the novel is the present but as we read we discover that the past is also the present. We have then no firm grasp on time and nothing in the book allows us the comfort of an “and then’’ chronology. The train in which Desmond has hidden himself is one that moves through a space that has been converted into time at the author’s bidding so that we find ourselves in a kind of fictive fourth-dimension. This sleight of hand permits the author to concretize, so to speak, the temporal, so that what seems lost is not but is recovered in its entirety. 

Although the work is an utterance at the invisible edge between life and death it is written in a scintillant comic spirit. Cusack’s comedy is, however, of the classic Irish variety, that is, black and then blacker. In Watt, Beckett speaks of the “laugh that laughs at that which is unhappy.” Desmond and Celia caught in flagrante—what could be “funnier”? The drunken French priest, the singing of an Irish Republican song at an Orange Christmas party, the scene in which Uncle Melchizidek’s corpse falls overboard—all these things are material for burlesque, if not what is depressingly called “humor.” But in Cadenza these occurrences are inseparable from loss, unhappiness, misery and death. 

Yet nowhere in the novel are we allowed the specious deliciousness of the tragic. The Irish are not good at tragedy and when it appears in Irish literature it almost always rapidly disintegrates into the mawkish, the sentimental, and the maudlin. I have always suspected that this lack of tragedy stems from the Irish vision of the world as eminently fair, or, to be clearer, the Irish think of life as a stew of bewildering and impenetrable events, an inexplicable “cosmic joke.” Given such a vision, how can there be a tragic if one expects, at any minute, to be knocked flat? What can possibly be surprising about man’s propensity for evil, the tragic flaw, sickness, pain and death? This sense that life is what it is and is no great bargain at that is not a good one for tragedy. It is perhaps pertinent to note here that the Irish writers whom we have taken to our hearts in the United States, e.g., O’Connor, O’Faolain, O’Flaherty, Behan, have a great gift for what my mother called “snots and tears,” i.e., the tragic gone awry. But it is hard going here for a writer such as Flann O’Brien; his bitter and anarchic comedy, rooted in squalor, meanness, death, and torture both physical and mental, is not our dish. O’Connor writes of one of his stories, “The Martyr’s Crown,” which is about a virtuous woman who prostitutes herself to a British officer in order to save members of the IRA during “the troubles”: “It is probably as old as history, but Mr. O’Nolan [O’Brien] must be the first writer to have treated it as farce.” One feels the thin edge of disapproval in the remark. Cusack is in the O’Brien tradition but we prefer an O’Connor, whose very titles (“My Da,” “My Oedipus Complex”) often have the ring of our “civilized” humorists’ pallid feuilletons. Such titles could have come from the pen of E.B. White. 

So. The past informs this entire work but the past is the present, it is the same past that Maurice Blanchot speaks of when he says that in Proust events “can be brought back by the tide of time, not as memories but as real events . . . recurring in another moment of time.” It is a sophomoric truism that the present instantaneously and without surcease becomes the past: Cusack has exploited this fact and places his dead events on the same temporal plane as living events—which are, of course, also dead in a snap of the fingers. My last word, “fingers,” is as much a part of the past as are those things I did and said and wrote yesterday, a year ago, ten years ago. Yet as I write, the word “seems” to be more present than what I wrote ten years ago and I assume that the reader also thinks of it as being in the present. Yet we know that although it “just” happened it takes its place with everything that is gone. Cusack, in managing his work so that the past and the present are one, implies that if the past is dead and the present is the past, it too is dead: it simply does not exist. Given this proposition, the idea of fictional realism suffers an enormous blow. If presently occurring phenomena are not really here and now, and if they are as actually irretrievable as the phenomena of a decade past, what indeed measures or can measure present reality? And if memory and fantasy are interchangeable, why cannot the present instant be memory, or more pertinently for Cusack, fantasy? Cusack tells us once again (we cannot be told often enough) that all fiction is a lie and lies most egregiously when it pretends to remember the facts. 

The past and the endless dying present are of a piece: we call this “life.” As we live we die, and the present, in such a view, is negligible if not contemptible. When Desmond remembers the sweetheart of his youth and the blissful lovemaking they enjoyed before discovery, he remembers it as a brilliant fictional scene of excitement, fulfillment, and depression. He has polished it perfectly in his mind so that he makes love in a pattern of his own devising, he retrieves that afternoon in absolute totality. It is more than memory. It is the actuality of what has ended and will never end. And he will make love to her again, surely. Cadenza insists on the stupidity of reality, or, more exactly, insists that to remember our lives is an act of creation. Williams writes, in Paterson, “Anywhere is everywhere,” to which Cusack might reply, “anytime is every time.” Nothing disappears. 

Gilbert Sorrentino is the author of fourteen novels, including Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, The Sky Changes, and Mulligan Stew, as well as books of poetry and criticism. He has received numerous grants and awards throughout his career, including the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, two Guggenheim Fellowships, two NEA Fellowships and a Lannan Literary Award.