Universality in a Regional Novel | The Life and Opinions of Marcus Aurelius Wherefore

book: The Life and Opinions of Marcus Aurelius Wherefore | L. D. Clark

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	• The Life and Opinions of Marcus Aurelius Wherefore L. D. Clark 1st Books Library, 2000 - 652 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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If the Shandean Shoe Fits ...

Texas author L. D. Clark has written a tour de force in his latest novel. It is an academic satire that ranks with the work of David Lodge. As its allusion to TRISTRAM SHANDY in its title indicates, it is also a novel about the life and opinions of a consciousness perplexed by his times. Marcus Aurelius Wherefore has retired from Confusion University and is attempting to write the great American novel that eludes us all. He courts his muse, Thalia, something of an elusive electron presence in his computer's cursor, but can't seem to get his ducks (in the form of random notes) in a row. To while the time, Wherefore weaves a saga about an African slave who chases his captured wife into the land of the Comanche-like Torvos. Clark tells this story-within-a-story, which he calls the "Moran saga" after its main character, in his best Western narrative style. Unbelievable as it is, the story sweeps us along like a Texas flash flood through its miraculous events. But Wherefore must keep returning to the "real" novel, which turns out to tell itself despite his halting attempts. And it is a scathing satire on just about every ISM to infect academia in the last half of the twentieth century, from "Marxianity" to French feminism to post-structuralism. Parts toward the end are very strong: the death of Wherefore's friend Andrew (which brings us momentarily into the world of Ivan Illych); Wherefore's final solution to his novel in a proposal for hyperfiction, perfectly suited to a readerly approach and created by the thumbing of the space bar! the wonderful letter of rejection of the Moran saga; the angry Swiftian satire on the impeachment of President Clinton; Wherefore's trip to the underworld to solve the Shandean problem of how to end an autobiographical novel.

I don't think this is Clark's best novel; that honor belongs to A BRIGHT TRAGIC THING, his novel of the Great Hanging of Unionists during the Civil War in Geinesville, Texas. But this is a fine, sometimes outrageous satire. It may offend some sensibilities, even as the offended laugh up their sleeves, even as they realize that, like Cinderella's, the shoe fits all too well.

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Universality in a Regional Novel

L.D.Clark has written in Marcus Aurelius Wherefore a modern masterpiece in which a retired professor with a writer's block forces himself to pursue the writing of "the great American novel" on a computer with a cursor that becomes his muse, notes collected over a lifetime of teaching in a large Western University--all in disarray but containing a story of the quarrels and struggles of an English Department faculty beset by change and growth and a foolish if not stupid administration. The story of these problems becomes a universal experience of all academic departments in all universities in the world. The faculty meetings contrast subtely with the tribal meetings of native Indians who have captured Moran, a Negro who along with his wife was bought by a White Man after the Civil War and brought West to become a virtual partner and friend of his owner. In an Indian raid, Moran's wife is taken by the Indians and he goes in her pursuit. The parts of this story that appear intermittently throughout the larger volume becomes a point-counterpoint to the academic departmental struggles and meetings--and these portions appear in italics in the text. This novel deals with the hero/anti-hero problem in literary criticism, with a critique of modern literature and its protagonists by a man steeped in Victorian literature and who brings to modern criticism those Victorian moral values and virtues found in Victorian literature--in itself an important accomplishment. Words and their meanings and use are fundamental to all people in all times and places.The author's use of vulgarity by Marcus Aurelius Wherefore in selected places and situations becomes a commentary on its very inapplicability in literature though it is there to be looked at squarely. There are so many thought-provoking passages in the novel, that it has that classic feel of knowing that one must reread and reread, and in each reading find something entirely new. Finally, while the "truth" of our biblical myths may be gone, the beauty of their telling remains for this Marcus Aurelius Wherefore, and that realization suggests the very definition of "literature."

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A satirical novel of university politics, Washington government and the decayof American society over the past 40 years.

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