The Reading Experience

Perhaps the most formidable obstacle to an unequivocal appreciation of Mark de Silva's The Logos is exasperation with the novel's narrator/protagonist. Actually more than exasperation: the narrator is an unlikeable, often unpleasant fellow. Of course, literature is replete with unlikeable or morally suspect protagonists, and in itself this does not invalidate the aesthetic merits of a work of fiction. But The Logos is a prodigiously lengthy work (over 1,000 pages in the U.K. version published by Splice, 728 pages in the edition now published by Clash Books), and abiding with a character and voice that are often enough obnoxious but also at times simply dull is a fraught exercise for any reader.

That de Silva is deliberately presenting us with an obnoxious narrator would certainly be a plausible enough assumption, although presuming the reader's continuing patience with such a narrator over the course of a narrative of such mammoth size seems an overly sanguine expectation unless the novel offers interest of other kinds that reinforce a more compelling aesthetic vision. But while the narrator of The Logos–a prominent artist whose girlfriend has left him–provides plenty of talk about art, the novel itself is formally and stylistically more or less conventional. de Silva has skillfully created a fully rounded, consistently believable character, and in his role as narrator this character relates a sometimes odd but abundantly detailed narrative, but there really isn't much about either the character or the story that is sufficiently innovative or compelling they would overcome a reader's antipathy to a narrator as insistent on his presence–other characters play their parts in the novel, but always subsidiary to the protagonist and his concerns–as our not-so-humble narrator in this novel. Thus, even if we decide to stay with the narrative despite our discontent with his presence, doubt about its ultimate purpose remains.

The narrator (unnamed throughout the novel) certainly takes his own art very seriously, and is very opinionated about artistic practice and art history, concerning both of which he admittedly seems very well-informed, even learned. Yet his expressions of these opinions, while never less than intelligent, are highly discursive and expository:

     Painting, I came to realize, was almost an apology for the nakedness of drawing, a way of glossing over its conceptual blading of the world. It was a way of seeing blindly, so to speak, or passively, without the critical powers of the mind. Photography only heightened this tendency; that's why so many painters have been entranced by the lens, optics, the camera obscura, and the photograph. In contrast, drawing was without doubt an analytical art: the mind's contribution was obvious, and there was no attempt at representing a sensory given–as if such a thing were possible. . .

      Drawing, then. began to feel like the intellectual height of the two-dimensional arts, its essence, its philosophy, not some rough-and-ready starting point toward rendering surfaces, as the pervasive notion of the sketch would suggest, but the ultimate product, fully distilled. This is why, for me, photography poses at least a prima facie problem for painting, in its competition for surfaces, whereas it offers no difficulty at all to drawing, properly understood.

These passages are interspersed throughout the narrative, slowing  down the already rather slowly developing plot with what is essentially critical commentary–although the narrator's prose style when relating the story he has to tell does not differ drastically from that which he employs when dilating upon art. Perhaps the commentary gives the narrator some credibility in our consideration of his artistic habits, but often they seem like set-pieces that eventually contribute to an increasing weariness with both the narrator's actions and the digressive way he recounts those actions.

These set-pieces seem even more peculiar when considering the novel's narrative perspective. It is a first-person narrative, but the rhetorical situation seems free-floating, detached from any plausible point of origin: never are we told the narrator is actually writing down his account of himself after Claire, his now ex-girlfriend and fellow artist, has departed, or even that he is speaking aloud (on a tape recorder, for example).Thus we encounter this voice from nowhere whose exposition is nevertheless carefully and strategically composed, which accentuates the character's status as the verbal artifact of the author's literary ventriloquism and ultimately makes it harder to dismiss the narrator's more unpleasant qualities as just the flaws of an otherwise "well-rounded" character. The narrator's verbal manner flattens out the fictive discourse to an obsessive, self-involved monologue that almost inevitably comes to seem an exercise in narcissism.

But does the author want us to judge this character a narcissist, or are we to find that the portrait of an artist that emerges from his narration to some degree mandates that we overlook his more prosaic character flaws? After all, artists are infamously opinionated and self-absorbed, known to exploit other people to their own benefit. Indeed, for an artist who specializes in portraiture, as does the narrator of this novel, such exploitation may be unavoidable. But in The Logos, what the protagonist seems most eager to exploit is his own talent, not on projects commensurate with the artistic principles he articulates throughout the novel but on an opaque publicity campaign sponsored by a wealthy capitalist who professes an interest in the narrator's art. For this campaign the narrator is tasked with making a series of drawings of two people selected by the capitalist, a troubled but talented young football player and an actress known so far for her roles in obscure independent films and theater. These drawings are reproduced in a variety of forms and displayed around town, apparently at random but actually according to a strategy devised by the capitalist and his advertising adviser. The project is ultimately judged a success (by the capitalist, but others aren't so sure), and our narrator is well-compensated for his work, but for the reader this whole endeavor remains murky in its purpose and sporadic in its interest.

In his interactions with the football player and the actress (Duke and Daphne), we do learn a great deal about the narrator's attitude toward black people and women–much of it not very laudable. He is not directly racist or sexist, but he clearly harbors views reinforcing the usual kinds of stereotypes (about the dangers posed by black people or the sexual availability of women, for example). Perhaps these views are themselves just a function of the narrator's egoism and his complacency about the world beyond its relevance to his work, but those qualities over the course of a novel so extended become manifestly apparent as well, so that finally the chronicle of the narrator's encounters with Duke and Daphne, his participation in the hybrid art/public relations project more generally, doesn't really reveal the narrator's character defects so much as confirm the alienating effect that his presentation of himself induces from the very beginning.

I remained as uncertain about whether provoking such alienation from his protagonist is one of de Silva's objectives for the novel as when I felt the first stirrings of hostility toward the narrator. If a profound ambivalence about this character is part of de Silva's design, it seems to me aesthetically questionable to prolong the reader's discomfort over the entire course of such a protracted narrative. If instead we are meant to some degree to experience some empathy for the narrator in his attempt to rebound from romantic disappointment, all I can say is that I had a very difficult time mustering it. Perhaps de Silva's intentions don't fully encompass either of these options: the protagonist embodies the artist's quest to be faithful to his vision despite his own limitations and the triviality of the culture he confronts. I am unable to interpret the novel this way myself, but I don't want to discount the possibility I may be misreading it.