Those of us who read have authors who have become a part of our lives. Jonathan Carroll is one of mine, alongside William Blake, Søren Kierkegaard, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Annie Dillard, J.R.R. Tolkein, C.S. Lewis, Louise Erdrich, John Updike, J.D. Salinger, James Joyce, the Bible, and several others. There’s no point trying to be exhaustive. For an author to be added to my list, they have to speak to me, personally, and do so imaginatively. These authors tend to operate on the mythopoetic level. While the surface contours of their works tend toward the fantastic, their real subject is the human emotional landscape. They turn us inside out, projecting our emotional lives onto the screen of their rich imaginations so that we can better understand ourselves.
My connection with Carroll’s work is a bit more personal as well. I was introduced to his work by my current wife long before either of us thought we could ever be married in any possible world or, for that matter, long before either of us thought that we would ever want to be married to one another. When someone picks your first Carroll book for you — and picks it for you, not for a project of some kind that you’re working on — they’re not just thinking about a book they’ve read. They’re thinking about how they’re reading you. Sheridan’s first Carroll, for me, was Outside the Dog Museum, which turned out to be a perfect choice, because after reading that book I wanted to read all of Carroll’s work.
I’ve also had the privilege of meeting and corresponding with the author on occasion. This is no credit to me: he is very generous with his readers. His first contact with me, I regret to say, was a result of me being a little bit of a jerk on a listserve (those who know me will find it hard to believe that I could be a jerk on a listserve, or have ever been). I had just received a signed copy of a special edition of Carroll’s novella The Heidelberg Cylinder and I pointed out that the signature, being in a perfect script that perfectly matched the book print in color, looked like it had been photocopied onto the page. The author emailed me directly to tell me that yes, he had indeed personally signed all 1,000 copies of that book and that was his real signature. If I had signed 1,000 books that carefully you can bet that I would not let anyone take that work away from me. I don’t blame him.
But despite that start we have enjoyed an off and on correspondence. I wrote a short, complimentary review of White Apples on amazon.com and he liked it enough to have it linked from his website — he felt that I understood what he was attempting to do. Later, I was fortunate enough to meet him in a Delaware book reading, with Sheridan, after we were married. We brought our books in a big duffle bag and he signed them all. Still later, he was generous enough to meet me for coffee in his longtime home town of Vienna in the summer of 2011. Sometime in the early 2000s I quite unexpectedly found out that I knew one of his editors of his early works — not closely, but rather indirectly, through a listserve, but I was fortunate enough to meet both her and her husband in New York before he died. She told me very little about him out of respect for his privacy, but it was nice to have met her. That being said, I am no authority on his fiction. I am a published scholar, but I’m not a Carroll scholar. I have not read any of the ever-growing body of scholarship about his work and have not attempted to research his life. He’s endorsed one thing I said about his work, but I don’t assume that he would endorse everything, or even anything else.
What I’ve said so far is merely to provide some context for my reading of Carroll’s works. I believe that he’s a mythopoetic author, one who turns our emotional landscapes into his fictional ones. If I were to align him with any genre, I suppose it would be either magical realism or, perhaps, supernatural realism. Either way, I believe that the key to understanding any one of his novels is understanding the emotional conflict embodied by the weirdness that inevitably takes place. All fiction involves an emotional conflict, of course, but some fictions are focused on character, some on plot, while sometimes setting becomes a character of sorts. Carroll’s fiction is focused on an emotional tension that is embodied by a central character but also reflected in a (usually) magical or supernatural environment or, I should say instead, a perfect natural environment upon which the supernatural or magical intrudes. What I seek to do when I read his novels is to identify that central anxiety and then understand how its contours are being explored by the characters in the novel and the magical elements that surface within them.
I’m describing a methodology because I’ve recently been given a pretext for rereading Carroll’s first novel, The Land of Laughs, and have decided to read them all again, in the order of publication, and blog about each one as I read. Again, I’m not producing scholarship here. I haven’t engaged with the critical literature on the subject. I’m not seeking to argue an original thesis. I am attempting, instead, to comment, observe, and perhaps introduce Carroll to the unfamiliar. Above all else, I am attempting to work out for myself what these books mean to me, and why.
So my next blog will be about Carroll’s first novel, The Land of Laughs. Keep checking.
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