By Thomas Larson
Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate by Daniel Mendelsohn
1 / One thing we learn from the later-in-life memoir, or the personal essay writ long, is that it allows us to see the many digressive routes we’ve followed only after a good deal of life has resulted in our “ending up” on any one of these routes, a place much different than where we thought we’d be. Soren Kierkegaard spoke of living life forward, understanding it in retrospect, and Carl Jung said, “One finds one’s destiny on the path one takes to avoid it.” Fate never fails us; it’s got our welfare in mind, but bugger that it is, won’t reveal the plot until, well, it’s time. Because of our unexpected “off ramps,” we need to wait a while and then we may recognize a plan—perhaps the plan—that provides us with some sense of meaning. At times, a pattern to our directionlessness emerges, and anyone, even fools, can say it’s been predesigned. Think of Donald Trump assessing his 78 years (I know it’s a stretch) as a kind of Destiny: the TV brand, elected President on a fluke, convinced that he’s America’s Lord and Fricking Savior.
Is there a book in Western literature that best embodies our meaning-hidden meanders? For Daniel Mendelsohn, a professor of humanities and classical literature at Bard College and Editor-at-Large for The New York Review of Books, it’s Homer’s The Odyssey. His study of this epic Greek narrative, unique as an oral and written document, produced Three Rings. In it, the author juxtaposes a scholar’s memoir beside analyses of Homer’s tale-telling force in the work of several classic authors. The book’s contents were given by Mendelsohn as three talks in 2019 as the Page-Barbour Lectures at his alma mater, the University of Virginia.
Two years prior, he published An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic. There, he tells the buddy story of his and his elderly father’s tour of the Mediterranean by ship, tracing Odysseus’s route home after the Trojan War. (His father died shortly after its publication.) Counterbalancing that and other personal losses, Three Rings is buffeted by a different wind. With complexity and grace, the author unfurls his sails to chart the narrative artistry of The Odyssey, a model for countless novels and nonfictions, written centuries apart and rooted in the Homeric vein.
In a short, 116-page book, he begins by distinguishing opposing literary structures, one, the Bible, the other, The Odyssey. The Bible framework is the brainchild of Erich Auerbach, a German Jew, whose Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature and the conditions in which he wrote the 1946 work comprise the first of the three rings or texts Mendelsohn dissects. In the spotlight is the story of Auerbach’s exile to Istanbul where, forbidden access to the local library, he wrote, perhaps, the seminal study of narrative art based solely on a few dozen canonic texts he’d stashed in his suitcase.
The Bible, Auerbach says, is written in the “Hebrew style.” Its form is chronological, events are reported as facts, unblemished anecdotes, devoid of drama; its procedural plots and faith-bred justifications are inscrutable, with nary an interpretive interruption and no sense of a controlling point-of-view. Abraham will do what God tells him—kill his son, Issac, without a reason from God and without His chosen slayer questioning the order. Once Abraham’s told to stand down, nothing of his relief or joy accompanies the scene. Readers ask, what does it mean? The answer for some goes beyond the obvious injunction of pure faith and, instead, codifies the insidious nature of religious evil.
The other primal narrative, in the “Greek style,” is the ring composition and, again, under Auerbach’s lens, Homer, the Greek culture’s collectivized author, is its herald. Here is free-form literary invention, all events hyper-dramatically “staged” with metaphoric additions, exaggerated and fantastic escapades, a participatory narrator whose survival skill is adaptation, a nitty-gritty concentration on lived experience, and, most important for Mendelsohn, the ring technique: “the insertion within one story of other stories, the flash backward or forward in time in order to give depth and complexity to the primary narrative.”
The form at work may follow the traditional path—rising action culminating in a climax, as in Freitag’s pyramid—but, more often, circles around that core event, obliquely, with devil-may-care disregard of the “rules.” In essence, the way many of us like to tell stories.
It’s not a wild claim to say that countering the Bible’s rigid obscurity launched literature on its winding course. Among its lasting methods is the ring, which Mendelsohn calls “a convoluted manner of composing.” While the Bible can stun with its knife-edged verse, elegant parallelism, metered music, and accentual stresses—the King James version, the seedbed of English poetry—its 66 books are invariant in style, a plodding tractor of flat chronicle, patriarchal tedium, moral commands, and coercive violence. Are we to trust that God is its reliable narrator?
Some of that can be said of The Odyssey. But it is, instead, composed. Its shape is like a river—gravity’s meandering whose current-swift variations are its path. That path delimits the idea (albeit, the male prerogative) of roving, postwar, over sea and land, heroes facing down villains. In fact, the Greek word for drift is polytropos—“of many turns”—one of the more finessable figures of speech. Such figures we know as schemes or tropes. To oppose or twist for literary effect, such devices “turn” a word or phrase from its normal syntax or its typical meaning. “How honorable is the man who never lies” shifts the usual syntax, a scheme, while “Brutus is an honorable man” shifts the phrase’s denotation, saying he is what he is not, a trope.
Writers’ tropes, used as commonly or greater than schemes, are what’s literary in oral and written narratives. An epic—from Homer to your mother’s memoir about her wild days in Greenwich Village in the 1960s—is, or is, potentially, polytropic—versatile, multi-themed, heterodox, wandering (purposefully mixing the written now with the lived then), and, if the writer can flair, laced with more than an occasional seam of guile, subtext, and surprise.
To underscore the Greek style, Mendelsohn’s trek cites the work of two authors (the other two rings) who “internalized” the Homeric scaffold of narration and renewed the ring idea for their eras. First is the French theologian Francois de Salignac de La Mother-Fénelon’s 1699 The Adventures of Telemachus, which dramatizes Odysseus’s son’s search for his father (as his father searched nine years for his home), including a trip to the Land of the Dead. Fénelon’s was the most famous novel of his time, eclipsed nearly a century later by Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther.
And third—though not before he excurses through Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and its “fantastically elaborated series of narrations and digressions . . . exhaustively treated in the course of the novel’s four thousand pages”—Mendelsohn unpacks one of the most lauded contemporary nonfiction novels or, I’m tempted to write, autofictions: W. G. Sebald’s 1995 The Rings of Saturn: history, novel, travelogue, memoir, take your pick.
On a walking tour of Suffolk County in England, Sebald meditates on a host of subjects, which, Mendelsohn notes, are “nothing but digressions,” organized around the German exile’s gloomy meditation on fairly recent, historic “traces of destruction”: the mass death of Congolese by Belgian capitalists; a Dutch elm disease that pockmarked the English countryside in the 1970s; a caretaker’s reminiscence about British airfields from which planes took off and dropped “seven hundred and thirty-two thousand tons” of bombs on Germany. For their effort, England lost 9,000 British aircraft and 50,000 men. Of all this wasting, of “the failure of narrative” to render it, and of “the irretrievability of the past,” Mendelsohn writes,
As you make your way through [Sebald’s] twisting narratives, it becomes ever more difficult to escape the impression that the circling merely exhausts us while never bringing us any closer to the subject.
2 / I noted that Three Rings is as erudite as it is memoiristic. Tributes to beloved authors observe Mendelsohn’s interests (and ours), but the emotional pitch is unmistakable. Such is his desire to quell or calm his own life’s rapture with the canon or, better, the canonical. He describes his several struggles while drafting the book about his and his father’s trip. One path out of that sinkhole was reading Auerbach’s Mimesis—a summons in which the art of narrative analysis is masterfully done—and there Mendelsohn discovered the ring form, in essence, saving him from endless indecision. He saw that if a writer gets lost in the writing, it’s not the subject’s fault but a bog of a different order. His muddle came from back-to-back, exhaustive books—the father-son adventure and his struggle, a decade earlier, to complete the 500-page grief memorial, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, in 2006.
As a summary, here’s the opening of my 2007 review of The Lost in Fourth Genre:
Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost is the story of his search for six relatives, his grandfather’s brother’s family, who were killed in the Holocaust. The search is ocean-going and slow to unfold, held back yet pushed on by its watery domain. The book presents a handful of memories from a handful of survivors and witnesses, many over eighty, from one Polish town. Yet even the mealiest of recollections carry a mystery—and it is this mystery about what might have happened to the six that has aggrieved others and consumes Mendelsohn. The book is a testament to, and an enactment of, the trappings of memory’s rituals: how we linger, defend, indulge, and exhaust what we hope to believe about the past and what we must relinquish as speculation.
In Three Rings, Mendelsohn returns to the emotional turmoil of writing The Lost. He dwells on years of research and interviews, the horror of imagining his family’s murder, which were not the product of a Nazi “labor camp, but a death camp.” Reconstructing likely scenarios took a toll on him, a pain he was slow to confront. In fact, he admits to a “kind of breakdown.” The only time he cried was in Tel Aviv at an exhibit of models of actual synagogues built around the world across centuries of the Jewish diaspora. Why did the tears flow there? As a child, he built models of Greek temples, which, beside (or like) literature, shaped his precocious interests in classical scholarship. Still, those synagogue models—and not the tales he heard from a few Polish and Ukrainian survivors of the camps—brought his heart to its knees and, at last, triggered a sorrow that he had not dealt with.
Each book seems to open up aspects of himself that Mendelsohn buried in order to finish each book. The buried child here is his lifelong fear: being trapped in a cave. He details his claustrophobia, his terror of enclosure as a child and an adult, then traces it to the Calypso chapter in The Odyssey where the hero and his men are kept, chained and enthralled, for seven years, Odysseus, Calypso’s “love-prisoner.” An act of self-liberation, writing a book about the literary efforts of others who in order to grow must battle their confinement may bring us to battle the same in ourselves.
The beauty of Three Rings is that Mendelsohn discovers his way by writing a polytropic book, one that demonstrates the form of its composition as the project develops and he follows. A practicing preacher, he offers new material and goes back to it, repeatedly, reassessing its quirks and questions in light of whatever fresh turns he’s compelled or game to take.
To apply “convolution” as a form for contemporary nonfiction (one bailiwick of River Teeth’s publishing mission) should not be missed. In the best critical essays and memoirs, nonfictionists mix our meandering uncertainties, our ghosts always on the guest list. These are spirits we include on the journey because they provoke our wisdom and our daring. It may be helpful to know that when we choose the Bible style—for its enigmatic detachment with reality—or the Greek—for its intimate dismemberment of reality—neither path alone will be free of tension because each path is shadowed by what its opposing path keeps for itself.
New York Review Books
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Final note: This review ends my nine-year stint as the book reviews editor. My successor, I trust, will continue to feature adventurous critics, the best available. I hope the new editor continues to review books from small and University presses where the practice of narrative nonfiction and memoiristic essays are still esteemed as literary forms worth publishing. Thanks be to the generosity and friendship of many seasoned vets in letting me pursue, entirely unhindered, a book page, with well over 100 reviews, at River Teeth: my ab ovo brothers, Joe Mackall and Dan Lehman, and the new able guides at Ball State University, Jill Christman and Mark Neely. I hope to be invited back to do the occasional review or essay. I have a few in mind. Fare forward, voyagers.
Thomas Larson‘s website, http://www.
