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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
We look to fiction for images of reality--real life rendered as vicarious experience, with a circumstantial intimacy that more factual, explanatory accounts cannot quite supply. Yet the freedom to invent tempts the fiction writer to fantasy. Already, his manipulation of time, speeding it up and slowing it down according to the needs of his story, and his scanting of the routine and banality that make up most of life's substance take unrealistic liberties. John Hawkes, a conspicuous avant-garde libertarian, once announced, to the astonishment of a writing class in which I was enrolled, "When I want a character to fly, I just write, 'He flew.' " In its dizzying freedom fiction holds an opportunity to dramatize certain existential questions that mark the beginnings of philosophy in a child. Why am I--my consciousness, my mind--in this body and not another? Why do I exist now instead of in the past or the future? Why does time only move forward? What would it be like to live life backward, from old age to infancy?
This last question, lent some weight by the remaining puzzles in the biology of aging and the actual, pathological instances of premature senility in the very young, has an American literary pedigree. F. Scott Fitzgerald published a story, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," on the theme in 1922. Including it in his collection "Tales of the Jazz Age," he noted in a foreword:
This story was inspired by a remark of Mark Twain's to the effect that it was a pity that the best part of life came at the beginning and the worst part at the end. By trying the experiment upon only one man in a perfectly normal world I have scarcely given his idea a fair trial. Several weeks after completing it, I discovered an almost identical plot in Samuel Butler's "Note-books."
It perhaps says something about Fitzgerald's psychology that the story's opening sections, with Button as an old man, come across as coarse and brittle farce, whereas the end, in which the hero regresses into infancy, feels seductively plausible:
Through the noons and nights he breathed and over him there were soft mumblings and murmurings that he scarcely heard, and faintly differentiated smells, and light and darkness. , Then it was all dark, and his white crib and the dim faces that moved above him, and the warm sweet aroma of the milk, faded out altogether from his mind.
Though not one of Fitzgerald's best, the story was reprised eighty years later by Gabriel Brownstein, in his story collection "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt. 3W" (2002). The title story, a fantastic riff upon a fantasy, almost duplicates Fitzgerald's for a few sentences but goes off weirdly in its own directions. Button, born ancient in 1912, masquerades in "shtetl drag" as a jazz pianist "known variously as the Hey-Hey Hebrew, the Jitterbug Jew, and the Kokomotion Kike" during the late twenties, and reappears in the seventies as a barefoot hippie living, with his aged mother, in the same West Side apartment building occupied by the adolescent narrator. Benjamin Button's parents are a Southern woman and a "merchant banker" who is trying to suppress his Jewish, East Side origins, as the grandson of a rabbi. A great deal...
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