By Josh Abbey
The Ways of Paradise
Peter Cornell, Fitzcarraldo, 2024
This a Fitzcarraldo book. Its cover is white with blue lettering. This means The Ways of Paradise is non-fiction. Alternate colour schemes include blue with white lettering (fiction), blue with yellow lettering (Swedish), or red with black lettering (Reviewers Beware!). This is the kind of genre defying book that can easily make the reviewer look like an idiot. On the other hand, the book doesn’t really have a plot, so no one can damn your review with the backhanded compliment: ‘first-class plot summary’.
Ostensibly, The Ways of Paradise is all that remains of the magnum opus of a reclusive scholar: 122 pieces of paper, labelled ‘The Ways of Paradise: Notes’, and seeming to comprise the critical apparatus of that great work. If a book review is meant to say things like ‘a delightfully pleasant beach read’ and have opinions about the likeability of the characters, this book asks for an exception. It partakes in the found manuscript tradition, and this will no doubt see the word ‘Borgesian’ appear on its blurb alongside other words like ‘labyrinthine’, ‘enigma,’ and ‘profoundly existential’. It is, however, a work of genius, whatever that means. It covers many themes—the fantastical, the centre and the periphery, flaneurs, paradise, the arcades, taboos, conspiracy, memory, reverie, dreaming, hermeneutics, symbology, numerology, mythology, and mythologising—via a cast of familiar names: Proust, Mallarme, Benjamin, Freud, Ruskin, and Derrida. The point, if it has a point, if it has to have a point, is our desire for there to be a point—And really, we should give up on points, and think only of doing. Any old idiot can make a point; the task is to do something. Mr Peter Cornell, writer, historian, art critic, has done something. This isn’t a found-manuscript novel: it’s a not-quite-the-manuscript-I-wanted-to-find novel.
The dual nature of the found-manuscript novel means it can be reviewed once, twice, or not at all. It could be read as a work of metafiction. Or as though it really was written by a reclusive scholar. What we have then is an unreliable editor.But an editor unlike previous unreliable editors. The editor of Thomas Carlyle’s metafictional extravaganza Sartor Resartus occupies more than half of the volume with his own issues—(man’s got problems)—and thus obscures the work he was meant to bring to light. In Nabokov’s Pale Fire, the editor Charles Kinbote makes the work of John Shade all about himself. He is an unwitting alchemist: every sentence is simultaneously that of an arsehole and a genius: Kinbote the former, Nabokov the latter. Whereas in The Ways of Paradise, Peter Cornell is a peculiarly absent editor. According to Cornell, our reclusive scholar was ‘a familiar figure at the National Library of Sweden’ who made an impression on a chair in the reading room ‘almost every day for more than thirty years.’ As the ‘author’s sole remaining friend and student,’ Cornell was an understandable choice as literary executor. He offers real insight:
‘It was said that he was occupied with an uncommonly comprehensive project, a work that – as he once disclosed in confidence – would reveal a chain of connections until then overlooked.’
‘It was said’—by whom? The recluse or someone else altogether? The man with the dark glasses, the talking watch, and the passive voice? Come on, Peter, you knew the man. Roland Barthes might have killed the author, but we’d still like to know his name. It is unclear whether Cornell is reluctant to tell us more of this scholar or has nothing more to tell. Did he decide to conceal the author’s name, or does he conceal it as a condition of his executorship? Perhaps, Cornell has forgotten the name of our recluse; perhaps, he never knew it for sure. I shall call him Bryan. Otherwise, he is simply ‘the man who wrote the notes in the sheaf labelled “The Ways of Paradise: Notes”.’ (But someone else could have written those notes, so he might not even be that).
As Cornell points out in his preface, we cannot be sure the manuscript contains the entire critical apparatus nor that the notes are in the correct order: even the notion that these notes are a critical apparatus is an editorial imposition. As per the title of the manuscript ‘The Ways of Paradise: Notes’, some of them could be notes of their own accord. Some of the leaves may be in there by accident. As much as we ascribe them coherence because they were bundled in the same sheaf, we do so out of a desire for coherence. This bundle of notes is all we have—all we can know of the author. Who would wish for Bryan an eternity, scrappy and unknown?
Many of the surviving notes focus on the archaeology, the fragment, and its reconstruction, and this will no doubt induce in some readers a desire to reconstruct as much of the lost work as they can. In II.19, Bryan himself outlines a method of reconstruction; from the ‘insignificant fragment’ one might ‘reconstruct an absent whole (like the archaeologist reconstructs the shape of a jug from a small shard thereof).’ In that ‘an’ there is doubt:
‘They move as if in circles, in ever-widening rounds: in the light of the hypothesis, they find and interpret individual fragments that together provide a corrected and expanded hypothesis of the whole, which helps them to find new fragments and so on.’
With the task of reconstruction in mind, some of the notes become pungent with suggestion: ‘a centre may just as well be located at the periphery, like a humble fragment.’ Whether at the bottom of the page or the back of the book, notes are at the periphery of the text. Without the main text, they become the centre. Which fragment is the centre, most important for the construction of the whole, is a cause for consternation. The diverse nature of the fragments hinders any reconstruction of the whole.
While some of the notes are references, (’II.24. Milton, Paradise Lost, III.’), they are not all references, and we cannot be sure that Bryan does not reference within the text itself. We cannot infer what discussion has passed in the interim, nor the extent of that interim. Some notes are mere palaeography (‘II.73. Handwritten word illegible,’) some seem like aide memoires to further composition (‘III.6. Not how it happened.’), and some like correspondence answering a question (II.28.). A great many of them seem more like paragraphs intended for the main text. If these are actually tangential remarks, what is going on in the text? It is frustrating that the editor makes no attempt to categorise the various types. Some of the notes could have done with editorial explication, for example, ‘II.75. Was said to be in possession of a yellow book on the subject of Swedish Tantrums.’ The editor neither traces the book in question nor explains the peculiar qualities that make a tantrum a ‘Swedish Tantrum’. Under-salted herring? Nor would it have been a great stretch to add page numbers to the references. Should the editor have supplied them via Bryan’s own books he might have found some illuminating marginalia. Maybe there was nothing amongst Bryan’s effects which could supplement our understanding of the text — but there is no evidence the editor tried. Next time he dies, Bryan would be wise to employ a different editor. This one has been curiously lax. We can understand his apathy; this isn’t the book he wanted to edit. But he has been treacherously absent… almost as if on purpose. I say that Cornell has the lost magnum opus and is keeping it from us until he can find the treasure first!
***
A central portion of the notes considers conspiracy in its various guises: the Knight Templars, the Soviet show-trials, the Rosenbergs, medieval pogroms. The book itself invites the reader into a conspiracy of meaning: to see connections where they may not be and form a comprehension on this spurious basis. And it is not difficult to see the reclusive scholar as the subject of a conspiracy himself. Below the ostensible scholarship, he leaves hints and clues, sentences that are more about themselves than they are notes to a magnum opus. Just as the recurrence of Mont Saint-Victoire in the work of Cezanne suggests ‘that this motif harbours a dark and mysterious meaning’, so the motifs of Cornell’s book themselves have something to reveal. And yet, in the very next sentence, our reclusive scholar tells us that the old notion about ‘the centre of the world’ is a ‘fantastical tale’ that ‘reproduces itself in ever-widening circles around its origin’. Like the ‘ever-widening rounds’ of the detective, always further from the centre: we are going around in circles.
The first note concerns itself with fantastical tales, and those that follow establish a connection between paradise, the centre, and meaning. As paradise is found at the centre of the world, meaning is found at the centre of the text. Yet when we learn that ‘The city takes the shape of a spiral or labyrinth – the very function of which is to protect its centre’, it is easy to think the function of this labyrinthine text is to keep us from the meaning. The reader who knows Cornell is both editor and reclusive scholar knows that there is no magnum opus, no centre for the labyrinth to keep us from in the first place. It is our temptation to infer and reconstruct the absent centre, to find the meaning that turns these notes into a labyrinth. This is part of Cornell’s mischievous game: ‘II.65. One could say that these labyrinthine arcades were zones for various forms of illusion making’.
To paraphrase a quote lifted from Freud, Cornell creates a world of phantasy which we take very seriously. For Cornell has actually written two books: the first is a series of notes to the magnum opus of a reclusive scholar, the second a commentary on our attempts to understand the first. His genius is to do this with the same words in the same order. To leave us uncertain as to whether there is a point to be discovered: ‘III.21. Whether he meant this seriously, or if it was just a mind game, remains unclear.’
JOSH ABBEY is a writer and high school graduate.
Art by Ginger Vidal
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