But to think of Metcalf only in a poetical context, which he himself certainly did later in his career, understates the novelistic pleasures of Genoa, and makes it seem more like a slightly acrid literary syrup that is “good for you,” rather than a narrative of two brothers and the way the literature of this continent shapes their lives. The question of what this book is—whether it’s even a book or something more intimate, like an act of whispering, or one of those late nights when a friend tells you everything until the early hours of the morning — is an open question. But let us not forbear to report that the act of reading these pages is exceedingly pleasurable and full of event, full of the kinds of insights into the real of consciousness, if in fact there is a real that is not an effect of literature itself. This book is not work, but it is a work of joy.
How do you read it then? Like all the books that have changed me as a reader and made me think otherwise about the book as a vessel for language, Genoa can be read in ways that are like unto the novel, in which you start at the beginning and move page by page to the end. But you can also read Genoa as a particularly rich act of Melvillean scholarship by a person with abundant feeling for the work of his great-grandfather. You can read it, too, as a work of scholarship about American exploration narratives, a kind of Anatomy of Melancholy in which all is the lesson of the classics. And you can read it as a work of repetition compulsion about what lineage is. Each of these readings is coincident with the others, and each is available at any time. In a way, Genoa requires that you don’t start at the beginning on one of your perusals of its chapters, but rather that you start in the middle and let the languorous semiosis of compulsive quotation be your guide. And it also requires that you read only for Columbus, and that you skip the quotations entirely. It permits you license as a reader and judges you not at all.
And so Genoa is also a work about the act of reading. As the beginning, the transition, into Metcalf’s subsequent vanishing into quotation and poetry, this makes sense, that the work should be about reading, that it should locate the old debunked theory that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny in the stratum of citation, in which all novels consist of a history of literature, each with its influence.
So much happening in such an abbreviated space, a mere couple hundred pages! More the length of a poem than the length of a novel. And happening well before the period in which fiction this innovative (I’m thinking of the period between, for instance, Snow White, by Donald Barthelme, and The Age of Wire and String, by Ben Marcus) would have found a success d’estime simply for being new and unpredictable. But that is exactly why this reissue gives us a chance for an overdue reevaluation, and gives you the opportunity to have the experience with this book that I was so happy to have, the experience in which the history of literature, again, seems populated by eruptions of a kind you never knew to expect, eruptions of the unpredictable and new.
HEADWATERS
ONE
CITY OF INDIANAPOLIS, a cold spring day, late. Blackberry winter, my father called it — after some warm days, some affluence of sunshine, a sudden crackling blast of cold, rain edged with sleet, low, almost formless clouds scudding across the level land.
“When ocean clouds over inland hills Sweep storming. .”
Thus Herman Melville put it, thinking, perhaps of Pittsfield. Here there are no hills — only the squared-out city. Further south, toward the Ohio, Crawford County, where Mother’s family, the Stoneciphers, came from, there are hills — hills and valleys, woods and caves.
But here I turn a square corner, and the old house comes into view, the house that used to be country and now is city, that has not moved, but in remaining still has allowed our fellow Americans to sweep around it, to put up suburban dwellings in what used to be the cornfield, so that it now stands, as it ever was, but with the largeness of land lopped off; the house in which I was born and raised, on the land that we farmed; house and land that we lost, or that I thought we had lost, but that unknown to the rest of us remained, during the years of depression, in the arthritic grip of my mother, so that when I married and gave evidence of settling down, it fell into my lap, a gift — the land gone, but the rough old house, of timbers pegged and nailed before the Civil War, the house my father was born in, and his father before him, standing strong.
My father’s name was Paul B. Mills — he would never tell us what the B. stood for — we would guess and joke about it, Carl and I, but he remained passive and humorless — nor did my mother offer help, either condone or criticize our curiosity, and to this day I don’t know if she ever discovered what it was — but there was the strange look from him one day when out of a clear blue, I had been thinking of other matters, I suddenly said “Bunyan — my father is Paul Bunyan,” and again he neither affirmed nor denied, just for a moment the queer look — but there it was, on the birth certificate that showed up after his death, and the shock, perhaps greater than the accident of his death and those who died with him, the funeral, the relatives, the shock when I read it, the spelling of it: “Paul Bunion Mills.”
Making the right angle turn I am now “running up into the wind’s eye,” as Melville said it — the only approach to a storm. Elbows digging into ribs hold an overcoat tight around me, and I lean forward, letting the rain and sleet beat against my face, so that forehead, cheeks, nose and chin, and the lines incised into my face, become a mask, at once me and not me, alive. .
“During the Cambrian, Ordovician, and most of the Silurian periods, Indiana was submerged beneath the seas. In the later Silurian, a mighty upheaval began; eventually most of the continent was uplifted and the great interior seas slowly receded. This was not a violent or sudden process; the earth rose only an inch, perhaps, in a century or more.”
“In the Mississippian and Pennsylvanian epochs of the Carboniferous period, Indiana was steadily elevated; at the close of the Mississippian the whole region was above sea level. During the Pennsylvanian, a period of millions of years, Indiana was probably a rank, lush swamp — populated by amphibious creatures, and covered with fern-like plants growing in vast luxuriance.”
“In the Pleistocene about five-sixths of the whole region — all except what is now south central Indiana — was at one time or another under a massive layer of ice, sometimes 2,000 feet thick.”
and
The Miami, original Indian inhabitants of Indiana, lived on wild game and fowl, corn, tubers, roots and dogs. As late as 1812, the Miami burned their war captives, but the practice of cooking and eating them, which had once been very popular, ceased around 1789.
Passing the suburban houses, homogenized so that one might be another, I approach the old farm house down the road, anachronistic and stubborn; but for this, the regularity would be complete.