The Farewell Symphony (The Edmund Trilogy, #3) in Queereaders

Jan 28, 2016 Jesse rated it really liked it

Shelves: read-in-2016, american-lit, queer-lit, american-expats, 1990-s, memoir-and-autobiography

Every year or so I dutifully find myself undertaking yet another Edmund White novel, even though I’m well aware it will likely prove to be a frustrating experience for me. What exactly compels this constant return? Mostly because I’m compelled by the manner in which White’s distinctive form of “autofiction” revels in the minute observations that capture the particularities of lived life. His writing is structured by a principle of accumulation as he amasses vast catalogs of the little things—hab Every year or so I dutifully find myself undertaking yet another Edmund White novel, even though I’m well aware it will likely prove to be a frustrating experience for me. What exactly compels this constant return? Mostly because I’m compelled by the manner in which White’s distinctive form of “autofiction” revels in the minute observations that capture the particularities of lived life. His writing is structured by a principle of accumulation as he amasses vast catalogs of the little things—habits and objects and sounds and garments and slang words and bodies— that are individually experienced but in retrospect seem to become so many synecdoches standing in for entire eras. Thus when White writes that “no single song was long enough to sustain our drug-induced frenzy so the disc-jockey often went from one record to an identical cut in another copy of the same record, thereby doubling our pleasure,” he records the kind of vivid offhand details that are usually forgotten yet capture the unique texture of a particular moment in time.

White explicitly makes this an integral aspect of his autofiction. In a passage toward the end of The Farewell Symphony that deeply resonated with me, the novel’s unnamed narrator admits that “official history—elections, battles, legal reforms—didn’t interest” him, and that he “didn’t want to be a historian but rather an archaeologist of gossip.” Major historical and cultural events commence at the peripheries of the narrative, but always seem to remain just out of sight, shifting emphasis instead upon interactions between intimates and friend groups and larger social communities, carefully enumerating all the private little stories and jokes we tell and retell to each other.

And yet such sumptuousness of details can become too decadent, even overindulgent—I always reach a point, usually around the ¾ mark, when it feels like everything really should have been wrapped up already (it makes me empathize with the enervated partygoers in Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, compelled to linger long after the fête has reached its end). Endless aggregation of detail, even when meticulously managed, inevitably comes at the cost of narrative momentum, and a sense of inertia and stasis sets in. Which is strange effect, considering how The Farewell Symphony is crammed with so much activity.

At the same time I appreciate how the unnamed narrator allows space for other individuals and personalities to temporarily “take over” the narrative for stretches, brandishing it for their own purposes. Like so many specters summoned via memory’s ability of conjuration, the novel often evokes something closer to a memoir of a community than an individual, and each lovingly-crafted portrait becomes a kind of (futile) attempt at keeping their eventual loss at abeyance.

The novel, in the end, fashions itself into a lamentation for an entire generation of gay men that was quickly and brutally decimated by the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 90s. In the novel’s closing pages White alludes to Haydn’s Symphony No. 45—more commonly known as “The Farewell Symphony”—a piece famous for its unorthodox conclusion that entails musicians to “get up [and] leave the stage” one by one “blowing out their candles as they go.” “In the end,” he explains, “just one violinist is playing.” It turns out to be a remarkably poignant metaphor for the final third of the novel, when most of the vivid presences who had been wandering in and out of the narrative unexpectedly fall sick and pass away with a shocking, almost surreal celerity. But like Haydn, White opts for quiet exits, with the deaths of even the most significant characters announced in passing statements. Such a tactic might be accused of sidestepping the devastating gravity of the situation, but the effect ultimately effectively conveys the heavy weight of absence. And in the end it is White himself who is left alone on the stage, playing wistfully until, finally, all lapses into silence.

[This review is cross-posted on my blog, Queer Modernisms.] ...more

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Nov 01, 2013 Sean rated it it was amazing

Before moving to Paris I bought myself a few packages of oversized black t-shirts, to match my new pair of black Nike running shoes. I thought I could plug into the latest iteration of the art-world uniform, spread around the internet as “Ghetto Gothic,” collaging morose adolescence with an efficient interest in over-designed sportswear. Apparently I had completely forgotten that, given my gainly physique, clothes work their hardest to fit me wrong. These draped layers of black should appear eff Before moving to Paris I bought myself a few packages of oversized black t-shirts, to match my new pair of black Nike running shoes. I thought I could plug into the latest iteration of the art-world uniform, spread around the internet as “Ghetto Gothic,” collaging morose adolescence with an efficient interest in over-designed sportswear. Apparently I had completely forgotten that, given my gainly physique, clothes work their hardest to fit me wrong. These draped layers of black should appear effortlessly streamlined. But on me, the silhouette struggles to build into one solid shape. A friend once told me I’m an impossible subject for a photograph. I won’t allow myself a single unselfconscious second to stand or sit still. I move my hands, lift my chin, shift my eyes, and repeat. But I’m convinced that, even more than these motions, the two long sticks that manage to pass for my legs, and this chest that somehow looks concaved -- this thing I sometimes name my body, it refuses to let itself be outlined. My attachment to my adolescence is as much psychological as it is physical. At 22 I’m still growing. When I was sixteen, change meant development, a means to an end. In my twenties, as change continues, I now brace myself for a life with no end, no form. Even death strikes me as just this same shapelessness inverted.

White’s “baggy” book, The Farewell Symphony, which maybe some would call “awkwardly draped” (?), fights to invent ways to tell a story about life. We find keystones, like sex and friendship, to guide us. But the novel’s doubled backbone flags its own failure. The narrator recalls, throughout the story, two irretrievable breakdowns: his unrequited love for Sean, and his latest lover Brice’s loss of life. In the end he refuses to narrate his relationship with Brice. Here the reader manages to receive a point, not a line. Maybe other novelists might build a story made up of so many moving parts in order to drown out any hope for meaning with the cranking and whirring of industry. But the novel never becomes mechanical. Meaning abounds, but it can only be touched and scraped through the labors of interpretation, which in White’s writing more closely resembles a game, not toil. Self-reflections, judgements of character, critiques of politics and nationalities -- all these registers White dishes out as gossip. Despite the extreme breadth of the novel, White succeeds in scrubbing the depths of a life, and it is precisely because he digs his tunnels to the center of this earth haphazardly, leaving them flimsy and even fragile. The reader must stay alert, fearing the tunnel might soon collapse behind him. But with this strange attentiveness he becomes committed. He invests in life.

If I typically lack the self-courage to look myself in the eyes, I manage to find my way to a mirror whenever I read novels, like White’s, that chronicle a year, a decade, or a life of a gay character. Invoking the nearly ritualistic ways gays build up their identities by assimilating things ineffably “like” them, or things they ineffably “like,” I read The Farewell Symphony as an opportunity to consider a comparison. My past, present, and future expanded with each passage, growing to incorporate the narrator’s actions and thoughts. It was then my choice to decide which of the points fit, and which points didn’t. But either way I was invested in this other life in front of me, because it was also my life, or could be my life if I wanted it to be. I hadn’t expected such an outcome, but I have discovered entirely new territories of myself just from gossiping on and on about White’s protagonist, which I whisper when I’m alone. ...more

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Jun 26, 2012 Stubby Girdle rated it liked it

Left judging White (and White's all-consuming whiteness) as, in some ways, emblematic of so much of what is corrupt about being a homo in the here-and-now (and I'm not talking about the promiscuity, FYI), yet still want to read A Boy's Own Story and still want to read his biography of Genet, and maybe being uncomfortable with those two facts. I guess the self-indulgent, constant self-belittling (which really served to further mythologize himself) White's narrator engages in worked. Totally unfoc ...more

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