Mulligan Stew

This article deals with the novel, for the eponymous meal see Mulligan Stew (dish)

Mulligan Stew is a 1979 postmodern novel by the American writer Gilbert Sorrentino . It depicts the production process of a novel, the author of which loses his critical relationship with himself and his work. The central motif in Sorrentino's metafictional and parodistically structured box novel is failure .

Content and structure

In Mulligan Stew there are four nested levels. The one listed as B is the main level of action. Apart from the novel-within-a-novel ( C ), the plot is largely linear. Mulligan Stew is made of novel designs, notebook entries and a plurality of archival material of characters (letters, novel and short story fragments and prefaces Reviews, published catalogs, advertising brochures, a pseudo scientific articles and a play, poetry, etc.) mounted .

Level a

Even before the title page , twelve letters of rejection from editors concerning the novel Mulligan Stew as well as an expert opinion and an exchange of letters between the publishing director of Grove Press and the legal advisor of the parent publisher Hasard House are printed on colored paper . The ' mimicry ' of the real author's level of reality achieved through the reference to the novel itself and to Sorrentino and its editor is undermined by the names of the publishers ' editors borrowed from fictional works.

Level B.

The talented and unsuccessful writer Antony Lamont writes an 'experimental detective novel '. Lamont's notebook entries and archive materials can also be found between the drafts for the individual chapters. Lamont's letters in particular provide insights into his own life - the inquiries / replicas can (with a few exceptions) only be guessed at from his subsequent replies. While Lamont tries to convince himself and his correspondents that he is an avant-garde and misunderstood author, he at the same time ruthlessly tears down the work and views of others - u. a. in:

• Letters to his sister Sheila and her husband, the writer Dermont Trellis. He accuses him of wasting his (minor) talent on commercially oriented literature. When his brother-in-law succeeds, Lamont's attacks intensify. He accuses his sister of betraying him and his work;
• Letters to the literature professor Pomeroy Roche, who wants to use an earlier novel by Lamont for a seminar on experimental American literature. Lamont sees this as an opportunity to at least gain recognition in the academic world. When Roche refuses and opts for the pornographic novel by Dermont Trellis, Lamont covers the professor with insults:
• Letters to his ex-wife Joanne, in which he mourns memories and begs for her approval and her bodice;
• Letters to the poet Lorna Flambeaux, who sends Lamont erotic poems for assessment, but fiercely defends himself against his clumsy advances at a personal meeting.

Lamont increasingly perceives his setbacks as part of an all-encompassing intrigue directed against him , which he soon believes will only be countered by his upcoming masterpiece. In addition, he (and not without good reason) is plagued by the feeling that his characters lead a life of their own behind his back. As Lamont loses control of his life and work, the chapters of his novel become progressively more incoherent and stylistically (even) worse. The label " experimental literature " serves as an excuse to himself that the text can remain as it is in the uncontrolled writing process: "It is time to stop worrying about motivation" (p. 451 ). In the end, Lamont tries to convince the fraudulent clairvoyant Joseph Beshary to invest money in a chain letter campaign to distribute his books.

Level c

The novel-within-a-novel is Antony Lamont's manuscript for Cheap Red (Guinea Red). All chapters except 1, 6, 1 '' and 13 are flashbacks :

• 1 - [untitled]: Martin Halpin is waiting for the police in a house by the lake, wondering whether he killed Ned Beaumont.
• 1 '- Angel Falls : Conversation between Halpin and Beaumont.
• 2 - Best intentions : Halpin ponders the color blue.
• 3 - Painful Bites : Halpin tries to talk to Beaumont about Miss Corrie Corriendo and Mme. Berthe Delamode while visiting a restaurant.
• 4 - The tragic fool : Halpin's vita from birth to founding the publishing house with Beaumont; Beaumont's love for Daisy Buchanan.
• 5 - Broken love letters : Beaumont's affair with Daisy. Beaumont comes into contact with Corriendo and Delamode through erotic books and becomes sexually submissive to them . After he gave him a club as a gift, they ditch Beaumont.
• 6 - Spilled ink : Halpin is still waiting for the police and comes up with scenarios why they won't come.
• 7 - The forest is so wild : Halpin goes to Corriendo and Delamode in the club to dissuade them from Beaumont, they are seduced themselves.
• 8 - She is the goddess, the pearl : Halpin is saved from the club by Daisy; Daisy's life confession; Halpin and Daisy have sex and then immediately go for an abortion .
• 9 - Got the Daisy Blues : Halpin ponders Daisy.
• 1 '' - Angel Falls : New version of the 1st chapter in which Halpin is aware that he killed Beaumont because of Daisy.
• 10 - Nameless Shameless : Halpin and Daisy want to dissuade Corriendo and Delamode from Beaumont together and are involved in an orgy by the two .
• 11 - Naked catastrophe : Halpin, Daisy and Beaumont go to a magic performance by Corriendo and Delamode to expose their tricks, whereupon the two fight back using real magic .
• 12 - Like a swaying flower bent : defeatistic and confused stream of consciousness .
• 13 - Disturbed sanity : Halpin is waiting in the house by the lake and has the feeling that Beaumont's body has disappeared.
• 14 - Just pretend : Conversation between Halpin and Beaumont (or with himself - he has to take on both roles, since Beaumont has already disappeared from the novel).

Level D.

As long as they are not employed in the novel, the characters lead a life of their own that is (partially) independent of the author or all authors. Halpin's notebook and the materials he collected report on this. Halpin and Beaumont feel deeply embarrassed by the embarrassing dialogues imposed on them, the "confused, unnatural" English "" (p. 226) and the contradicting and suggestive actions - which run counter to their professional ethos as characters in fiction. In their "free time" they explore the house on the lake and its surroundings, which turn out to be incomplete. Finally, she decides to flee Lamont's novel. Tempted by the erotic scenes in Lamont's latest chapter and in the (naive) belief in an impending love scene with Daisy, Halpin stays longer than Beaumont, but ultimately follows him, disaffected, to a "kind of" depot "where characters can wait to be hired" (Pp. 527-528).

background

title

Mulligan Stew is the name of a meal that American migrant workers and non-working homeless people cooked from borrowed ingredients around 1900 . Sorrentino used a comparable 'recipe' in his novel, in which he used a multitude of linguistic styles and collected clichés. Buck Mulligan is also a character in James Joyce's novel Ulysses , the Sorrentino in Mulligan Stew a tribute proved yet parodied him. Reviewer Jim Feast reports that Sorrentino found it so difficult to choose a title (from several of his ideas) that it was ultimately made by Barney Rosset (Grove Press).

Intertextual references

In Mulligan Stew, Sorrentino takes up the premise : 'Fictional characters want to escape their author' from Flann O'Brien's Two Birds On the Swim and, according to his own statement, added the element of “absolute artificiality”. He borrowed most of the characters in the novel from the works of other authors: the writer Antony Lamont and his sister Sheila come from On Swimming-Two-Birds (1939), as well as Dermot Trellis, who wrote Wild West novels here and there . Daisy and her husband Tom Buchanan are from The Great Gatsby ( F. Scott Fitzgerald , 1925). Lamont's fictional character Martin Halpin is a gardener from a footnote in Finnegans Wake (James Joyce, 1939) and Ned Beaumont in The Glass Key ( Dashiell Hammett , 1931). The names of the editors who are among the (possibly not entirely fictitious) letters of rejection to Sorrentino come from other novels - u. a. Frank (François) Bouvard from Bouvard and Pécuchet ( Gustave Flaubert , 1881), Chad Newsome from The Ambassadors ( Henry James , 1903), Yvonne Firmin from Under the Volcano ( Malcolm Lowry , 1947), John Cates from JR ( William Gaddis , 1975 ) and Harry White from The Demon ( Hubert Selby , 1976).

Fictional works in the novel

Described or reproduced in excerpts, in addition to Antony Lamont's work in progress novel Cheap Red (later Crocodile Tears ), its predecessor Baltimore Blues , Zweiendreier , Violet Radiance and Unzierat . Furthermore, Dermot Trelli's pornographic novel The Red Swan (also: Bizarre Personae ) and his western novel, Red Morning, Blauer Drillich, which is in progress . A few other works only mentioned are How to understand the deaf by James Joyce, William Carlos Williams and the Sioux by Fred Engels , Fifty-five Hard Nuts by Albert Einstein , Honeymoon in China by Mao Tse-Tung , Favorite Songs of the American Legion by Horst Wessel . With The Apparent Softening of the Distant Nothing by Gilberto Soterroni, Sorrentino alluded to his own subsequent novel The Apparent Distraction of Starlight (1980).

Meta-textual aspects

Many aspects of fiction are addressed in Halpin's diary:

• the incompleteness and inconsistency of the space devised by the author

“It's a strange house, to put it mildly. There is the living room and the master room, but we couldn't find any other rooms. It seems like there are other rooms, but when we get close to them - I hardly know how to put it - they are just not there . [...] Next to the living room, a staircase leads "nowhere". Oh, I don't mean that it disappears into empty space, it only leads into a kind of ... haziness ”(p. 45, emphasis in the original). All the trees by the road "were the same shape, height, color, etc. They were trees in a very general way -" typical "trees. To an astonishing degree they looked like drawings. The sun was above and behind me and didn't move during my entire hike. I didn't cast a shadow. All of this was somewhat disturbing ”(p. 211). The nearest town was also “unfinished in a very bizarre and confusing way,” here and there buildings consisted only of facades and doors, others (like our house) had unclear, unfinished floors, streets suddenly stopped and behind them there were vast areas of fog and heaven ”(ibid.).

• the cause of excessive descriptions and digressions

In town, Halpin meets Clive Sollis (one of Joyce's supporting characters from Finnegans Wake , who had also "worked" in an earlier Lamont novel). He explains that Lamont will not find it here because the city is in a forgotten fragment that is "on a roof bath in Poughkeepsie in a locked suitcase" (p. 213). "Of the people who were currently in town, his a few" on vacation "[...] and a few (like him) had no other place to go because they had been ruined by previous assignments" (ibid ). An absence of still active characters leads to "enormous changes" in the books in which they are employed. Sollis is “convinced that boring philosophical digressions, thoughtful insertions, endless descriptions of landscapes, buildings, interiors and the like all appear in novels because the author has returned to“ work ”and can no longer find his characters wherever he left her ”(p. 214).

• Figures of various literary forms

Sollis "pointed out that he had never met anyone dissatisfied from a" commercial "novel or magazine story. "They live in a world of sheer kissing, beautiful clothes and smooth divorces, with a lot of chaste sex" "(p. 214). The postman is “two-dimensional. His cheeks were an unnatural pink, his teeth were massive little blocks of radiant fashion, and the grin was frighteningly uniform, ”and he rhymes with“ bringing good news to everyone "up and down the street". Then there was some idiocy about mums and dads and good little boys and girls [...] I thought it might be a dangerous madman, but Ned said he was probably from a "children's book series" ". These shift workers are "apparently genderless and work as men and women" (pp. 460–461, emphasis in the original).

• the missing author

Already at the beginning Halpin expresses the suspicion that Lamont is dead (p. 39) - which also invokes the concept of the author's death . Assuming that Lamont is not writing the story, Halpin asks himself towards the end of the novel: “But if he doesn't, who will? What if it wasn't anyone? What then? ”(P. 548).

reception

Friedhelm Rathjen described the novel as “a real cabinet piece [...], one of the bravura achievements of the novel of our day at all [...] The qualitative high point of the total simulation that 'Mulligan Stew' represents is the simulated non-quality. [...] They are so terribly bad that they can only be endured as satire . [...] and we don't want to hide the fact that the procedure is sometimes overworked. "

Roger Boylan wrote in 2010 that although it was named one of the best books of 1979 by The New York Times Book Review , Mulligan Stew has sold fewer than 25,000 copies to date.

Ted Gioia came to the ambivalent assessment: “Only the most persistent readers will survive this obstacle course disguised as a 500-page book. […] But there are more than enough fireworks in Mulligan Stew to make up for this balloon filled with quirks and smug grins by our author. [...] The bottom line: This book claims a place on every shortlist for the required reading of postmodern novels. "

Others

The novel is dedicated to Brian O'Nolan aka Flann O'Brien . Joachim Kalka's translation into German is dedicated to Hans Wollschläger .

literature

• Gilbert Sorrentino: Mulligan Stew . MaroVerlag, Augsburg 1997.
• John O'Brien (Ed.): The Review of Contemporary Fiction: Summer 2011. Mulligan Stew and Gilbert Sorrentino , Vol. XXXI # 2.
• Brian McHale: Postmodern Fiction . Routledge, London and New York 1987.

Web links

Stefanie Sobelle: Mulligan Stew and Gilbert Sorrentino's Aesthetics of Failure: An Introduction , from: Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol.XXXI # 2. Retrieved January 26, 2012.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Stefanie Sobelle: Mulligan Stew and Gilbert Sorrentino's Aesthetics of Failure.
2. ↑ Jim Feast: Review of The Abyss of Human Illusion By Gilbert Sorrentino , in: Evergreen Review, Issue No. 125 (12/2010 - 01/2011). ( Memento of the original from May 18, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved January 26, 2012. 
3. ^ "This is a possibility out of At Swim-Two-Birds, taking that book a little further, adding another integer to its basic idea. Absolute artificiality ”from Gilbert Sorrention's notebook, quoted from Stefanie Sobelle: Mulligan Stew and Gilbert Sorrentino's Aesthetics of Failure.
4. ↑ The delights of artificiality (Die Zeit, 1997). Retrieved January 26, 2012.
5. ^ Gilbert Sorrentino's Last Novel (The New York Times, 2010). Retrieved January 26, 2012.
6. ^ Translated from Mulligan Stew by Gilbert Sorrentino reviewed by Ted Gioia . (Postmodern Mystery, 2010/2011) Retrieved January 26, 2012.