recognizing the thing itself in harry mathews's cigarettes

Recognizing the Thing Itself in Harry Mathews’s Cigarettes

Roy Scranton

Contemporary Literature, Volume 54, Number 3, Fall 2013, pp. 520-549(Article)

Published by University of Wisconsin PressDOI: 10.1353/cli.2013.0025

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R O Y S C R A N T O N

Recognizing the Thing Itself in HarryMathews’s Cigarettes

Something I’ve said again and again, which I try to make sure is evidentin all my books, is that the experience of reading is the experience of read-ing. In America there’s a tradition that says that what literature should dois give you the real thing. But for me, the only real thing is the writing.

Harry Mathews, in an interview conducted by Susannah Hunnewell

I n 1956, having escaped Princeton, Harvard, the U.S. Navy,and the Upper East Side of Manhattan for an artists’ colonyon Mallorca, Harry Mathews and his wife, the sculptor Nikide Saint Phalle, were introduced one night to a young poet

named John Ashbery.1 The two men hit it off, and soon Ashberywas recommending to Mathews the writing of an obscure late-nineteenth-century French aristocrat named Raymond Roussel,which he himself had recently been introduced to by KennethKoch and which he was soon to come to France to study. Withina few years, Mathews would be using part of his inheritance tofund Locus Solus (named after one of Roussel’s novels), the fleet-ing transatlantic literary journal that helped crystallize what hascome to be known as the New York school of poets. Ashbery,Mathews, Koch, and James Schuyler collectively edited the jour-nal (with Ashbery, Koch, and Schuyler each helming specific

Special thanks to David Bellos, Ella Brians, Rachel Galvin, and Harry Mathews for theirhelpful and provocative conversations, and to Nancy Shawcross at the Van Pelt Libraryfor her assistance in the archive.

1. See “John Ashbery Interviewing Harry Mathews” for the two writers’ mutual rec-ollection of this event.

S C R A N T O N ⋅ 521

issues) and all contributed work, alongside poems and storiesfrom Edwin Denby, Barbara Guest, Frank O’Hara, Fairfield Por-ter, and others.

While critical work on the New York school has been accu-mulating, most attention remains focused on the poets, espe-cially O’Hara and Ashbery, and on New York in the early sixties.The role of prose fiction and the group’s connections to Paris,both contemporaneously and in terms of influence, have beenless well attended to than they might be. Koch’s The Red Robins,Mathews’s novels, Schuyler’s novels, and Schuyler and Ash-bery’s A Nest of Ninnies, along with such outliers as Joe Brain-ard’s I Remember and Richard Foreman’s No-Body, suggest anunderexamined strain of American prose writing, deeply influ-enced by French literature generally and surrealism more spe-cifically, that reaches from the novels of Djuna Barnes, JaneBowles, Gertrude Stein, and other modernists to the work of suchauthors as Kathy Acker, Paul Auster, Lydia Davis, HarryetteMullen, and Lynne Tillman.

A key figure in this underground tradition is undoubtedlyHarry Mathews, whose accomplished and sui generis workremains difficult to categorize, not least because it appears toshift from the deeply Rousselian early novels The Conversions andTlooth to the much more naturalistic but no less playfully chal-lenging later novels The Journalist and My Life in CIA.2 Yet how-ever difficult he may be to pin down, Mathews should be seenas operating in a vital tradition of American experimental liter-ature that crosses easy generic and national boundaries and chal-lenges narratives of simple periodization. He has been involvedwith the New York school since the mid 1950s, carrying on themodernist mission into the twenty-first century, and his workwith the French Oulipo connects him to international currentsand to authors such as Italo Calvino, Raymond Queneau, andGeorges Perec. Harry Mathews’s work deserves more attention,

2. On the question of the reception of Mathews’s work, Michael Boyden makes a laud-able effort to explain the neglect it has suffered by appealing, on the one hand, to anideological tendency toward “realism” in American literature and, on the other hand, tothe difficulty of the work itself.

522 ⋅ C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R E

both in terms of the literary history of the twentieth century andfor its own sake, as an oeuvre of great aesthetic sophisticationand literary merit. I intend to make my argument by example,in considering Harry Mathews’s masterwork, Cigarettes, pub-lished in 1987.

Cigarettes is a difficult novel. Linearity is eschewed in favor ofwhat appears to be a looping, leap-frogging perspectivalism;characters appear and reappear, sometimes unnamed, some-times under aliases; and major events are referred to obliquely,sometimes obscurely. It takes spadework not only to establishchronology and relations but sometimes even to figure outwhat’s going on, who’s talking, or what the point is. At the sametime, Cigarettes is as easy as Austen: written in prose so cleanthat it’s almost seamless, the novel presents the social drama ofmid-century New York elites in all their glittering superficiality.3

We get betrayals, betrothals, scams, affairs, horse races, art mak-ing, art business, jazz, beautiful young women, lecherous oldermen, kink, gay lovers, poetry, fallings-out over inheritances, andtearful reconciliations.

On one level a soap opera cut into puzzle pieces, Cigarettes onanother level presents a meditation on recognition and misrecog-nition—from recognizing ourselves in our children, to misrec-ognizing the people around us and their motivations, to seeinghow we ourselves are not just shaped but wholly made by ourrelationships with others. The novel’s key signifier is a portraitthat defies description, of a compellingly enigmatic woman whoseems to embody the real itself yet remains the opaque object ofothers’ cathexes and projections. Meanwhile, even astute readersmay find themselves caught off-guard by the recognition thatthe entire novel has been narrated by one of its characters. Fromits title to its final pages, we are consistently challenged to attendto what is right in front of us. Misrecognition, it turns out, is thenovel’s central concern. Cigarettes deserves, repays, and teachescareful reading.

3. For two early essays on Cigarettes that elucidate the themes and texture of superfi-ciality in the novel, specifically through the metaphor of the mask, see McElroy andWhite.

S C R A N T O N ⋅ 523

Structure and Story: Elizabeth

Cigarettes presents the interlocking relationships of fourteenmain characters in fifteen named chapters and an untitled coda.4

The story is told predominately in an “omniscient” third-personnarration, which turns out to mask the first-person perspectiveof narrator Lewis Lewison.5 Most of the novel’s action takesplace in 1936 and 1963, though it extends noticeably forward into1938 and back into 1962. While certain chapters take up longerdevelopments between these two bracketing terms, particularlythe biographical narratives about Lewis, Morris, and Priscilla,the years between generally remain distant.

Cigarettes’s milieu comprises the Saratoga Springs “horse-and-dog set” and New York’s downtown art scene (250). At thenovel’s heart, two families, the Ludlams and the Lewisons, thesiblings Romsen, and the painter Walter Trale circle and intersectin a careful and sometimes disastrous waltz of money, love, man-ners, and passion, passing back and forth from the city to thecountry. Rather than reprise the chronologically and narrativelydisjointed text of Cigarettes, I want to turn to the two main storiesworking through the novel, that of the novelist, Lewis Lewison,and that of the artwork, Trale’s oil portrait of Elizabeth H. Track-ing these two main threads will illuminate the novel’s immanentform and bring to light its concern with recognition.

The story of Elizabeth’s portrait begins in 1936, with the loveaffair between Oliver Pruell and Elizabeth H. These two meet ata summer party and begin seeing each other. She is impressedless with his money, class, and education than with the literarytalent he evinces in a series of erotic poems he writes to her.

4. In the typescript of Cigarettes, the coda follows the end of “Maud and Elizabeth”without a break.

5. Establishing Lewis’s authorship and exploring what it means will follow. Criticalcommentary has noted Lewis’s role as narrator but left undeveloped or unexamined theimplications for reading and likewise has inadequately addressed the question of com-position (see, for example, Leamon [87–88] and Viers [180–90]) or, conversely (see Daviesand Harris), has addressed the reader’s role in narrative construction but seeminglymissed the fact that Lewis is the narrator. A. D. Jameson, while lucidly sketching the“narrative artistry” of Cigarettes, mistakes character for author when he claims, “[t]henarrator is ultimately revealed to be Mathews himself.”


Elizabeth gently prods Oliver to come into his own, both in hiswriting and in his relationship with his father, Barrington Pruell,toward whom Oliver feels only fear and resentment. Oliverchafes at her efforts, and his resistance, especially to her attemptto get him to buy a race horse, pushes Elizabeth into an alliancewith Barrington. It is in Barrington’s genial company that she isintroduced to the painter Walter Trale.

Trale can’t keep his eyes off her: in Elizabeth, he sees some-thing he’s never seen before, a captivating melange of mysteryand authenticity. Walter says, “It wasn’t so much that she wasbeautiful, it was the way she moved. Her fingers and kneesmoved the same way her face did, or maybe it’s the other wayaround” (27). Others see it, too. Oliver had found in her his ownself-creation: “Oliver told himself something like: She thinks,therefore I am” (23). Allan Ludlam, whose brief affair with Eliz-abeth effects the book’s gossipy opening, sees her as “More thangood: the thing itself” (11). Maud Ludlam, Allan’s wife, remem-bers her as being “someone beautiful and a little ‘wild’” and afterpurchasing her portrait becomes obsessed (250). After Elizabethmoves in with her, Maud finds her even more irresistibly enig-matic: “How’d you get the way you are?” she asks; “Was therea revelation that struck the scales from your eyes?” (275). At onepoint, Barrington Pruell tries to explain to Priscilla Ludlam(Allan and Maud’s daughter) what Walter saw in Elizabeth:

She was . . . very sharp. Attractive, too—big and handsome and gracefulas a cat. She loved horses. Walter met her at the track one day, and I thinkhe thought she was part horse. By the second race they were thick asthieves. Just good friends, though, they never went—they never fell inlove. She had exactly what he needed—she was a human animal. Sheposed for him every day for the next week or two. He must have donedozens of sketches, and finally he painted her portrait in oils.

(200–1)

This anecdote forms the seed of Priscilla’s undergraduate thesison Walter, “The Female Figure in Recent American Art,” whereshe argues that “Elizabeth had revealed to him the ‘animal graceand transcendent sexuality’ of a woman’s beauty” (156).

S C R A N T O N ⋅ 525

Whatever it was that Elizabeth had, Walter’s painting of herseems to reveal something else entirely. All we are told of it isthat the face is gold and ivory, the lips mauve and horizontal,the eyes ochre. Walter’s style is hard to pin down: “Walter worehis originality strangely. . . . He could not be classed as anabstractionist, even when he most resembled one. His figurationhad a disturbing offhand look, with none of the starkness ofHopper and Sheeler or the stylization of Lichtenstein” (187).The painting is described as possessing a “masklike abstract-ness” (71); Elizabeth’s identity is “veiled” in “mystery” (251).Mathews’s apophatic representations of the portrait are explic-itly foregrounded in an exemplary moment of seeing, a key sceneaddressing the theme of surfaces and illustrating Mathews’spoint that language itself does not function representationally.6

The scene features Lewis Lewison and young art critic MorrisRomsen discussing Morris’s review of Trale’s work in the mag-azine New Worlds:

They were standing under Elizabeth’s portrait. Lewis said, “From whatyou wrote I’d imagined it different. Maybe that’s what you wanted?”

“Ah, so?”“No? I got something like: one can’t really describe anything. So you

pretend to describe—you use words to make a false replica. Then we’reabsorbed by the words, not by the illusion of a description. You alsodefuse reactions that might get in our way. So when we look at the paint-ing there’s nothing we expected—none of your false words, none of ourfalse reactions—we have to see it on its own terms?”

“Not bad. So what’s the point?”“The point, the point . . . is, what’s actually there? You leave the thing

intact by giving us what isn’t there—?”“Promise not to tell? They won’t get it.”“I don’t either—I’m only guessing. I mean, some of the things you say

are wild. What about: ‘Our original heaven is the tempestuous sky of thevagina’?”

“Just more of the same.” Morris pointed to the portrait. “Imagine writ-ing about that mouth. Even if you keep it abstract—like ‘a mauve hori-

6. Mathews elaborates helpfully on the nonrepresentative functions of literary lan-guage in his interview with Lytle Shaw.


zontal’—people will look and tell themselves, incredible mouth, somauve, so horizontal. And horizontality means this, and mauve meanssomething else. Goodbye, Miss Mouth. ‘Tempestuous sky’ gets rid of thevagina, and vice versa, even if the words are still there, doing whateverit is words do.”

(137)

The point here is that the painting is only itself, a painting, yetworks as an empty signifier, which viewers would rather projecttheir own preformed opinions onto than confront as a thingitself, a surface. Morris Romsen’s essay responds in like fashion,seeming to refer to the painting but in fact using incomprehen-sibility to bend language back away from its referent.

After painting Elizabeth’s mauve, horizontal mouth, Walterkeeps the portrait in his own collection until he gives it to Maudat the novel’s end. Walter, after reading Morris’s article andPriscilla’s dissertation, comes to see the portrait as “his primor-dial, self-made totem . . . not only his but him” (215). It is shown,but not sold.

It is, however, copied. Phoebe Lewison, Lewis’s sister and Wal-ter’s apprentice, is made to duplicate the portrait as part of hertraining, in exactly the way Walter originally painted it. He forcesher to scrape her canvas over and over, until finally she executesa “brilliantly faithful copy” (215). It is Phoebe’s copy that Walterlater gives to Priscilla (who has by then moved in with him) totake to Morris to sell. After Morris dies, his sister Irene conniveswith Lewis to recover the copy from Morris’s apartment. ThenIrene sells it to Maud, who takes it back to Saratoga Springs.Before she can hang the painting, though, Allan steals it in hisretreat from what he thinks is the exposure of his affair withElizabeth. He hides the painting in his apartment in the city buttells Irene it was stolen, which fact Irene then asks Owen Lewi-son (Phoebe and Lewis’s father, and a friend of Irene’s) to inquireinto. Suspicion combined with a desire for distraction leadsOwen to uncover Allan’s old insurance scams, then use them toblackmail Allan for the painting. Unbeknownst to Owen, it isPhoebe’s own copy of Walter’s painting that he takes back to herin Saratoga Springs, as a gift, then destroys in dumb rage whilePhoebe dies from the complications of a disease that she might

S C R A N T O N ⋅ 527

have survived had not his meddling resulted in early misdiag-nosis—or so we’re led to believe.7

Elizabeth’s portrait at last hangs in Maud’s house, broughtthere by Walter himself just before Elizabeth dies.8

Structure and Story: Lewis

Lewis’s story begins two years after the portrait’s, in 1938, withhis birth to Owen and Louisa Lewison. We are told that he isspurned early by his father, who prefers Phoebe, and developsa complex relationship with his mother grounded in an ambiv-alent identification with her that can be understood in classicallypsychoanalytic terms. In order to try to gain his father’s love, heunconsciously sets about both to become his mother and todestroy her. That is, he identifies with his mother because hewants to displace her in his father’s affection. At the same time,he repeatedly provokes her to discipline him, no doubt in thehopes of attracting his father’s gaze. Instead, he works againsthis own desires by establishing an intimate confidentiality withhis mother that only confirms his masculine inadequacy, leavinghim disappointed and unhappy. His identification with Louisaworks at cross-purposes to its deeper motivation, which is hisdesire for bonding and identification with his unavailable father.Within this dynamic, his only emotional engagement with hisfather then takes the form of internalized self-rejection.

As a youth, this confused hostility comes out most dramati-cally in his impotent attempt to rape Priscilla, a transgressionthat permanently ruins his intimacy with his mother. In this, hisfirst “sexual” encounter, Lewis unleashes on the little girl who’ddared challenge his nascent defenses of isolation and disdain all

7. We cannot in good faith trust the Owen-Phoebe narrative. Lewis’s complex resent-ments toward Owen and his love of Phoebe undermine any possible objectivity in thetwo “Owen and Phoebe” chapters. The possibility that Lewis would blame Owen forPhoebe’s death, which given Lewis’s feelings toward Owen seems all too likely, opens agap between the reader and the text on the point of Owen and Phoebe’s relationship thatresists any attempt at closure. We only know what Lewis tells us. We cannot say withany confidence what really happened or how.

8. Elizabeth dies in 1963.


his rage against femininity, all his fury at his mother and Phoebefor standing between him and his father, and all his self-loathing.Priscilla fends Lewis off, and he flees in shame. Later, his mas-ochistic tendencies turn to their proper object, the discipliningfather: he makes his own feminized body the object of punishingviolence at underground BDSM parties.

After Lewis reads Priscilla’s thesis (“The Female Figure inRecent American Art”), he develops a crush on Walter, then triesto replicate his parental relationship through him. Walter won’thave it: he’s even less interested in Lewis than Owen was. Lewistakes Walter’s rejection hard and remains rudderless and trou-bled until he reads Morris’s article on Walter in New Worlds,which inspires him to begin writing—and to meet Morris. In hisfriendship with Morris, he finds a relationship that’s not onlyfulfilling but reciprocal. Their mutual recognition occurs afterLewis is arrested in a police raid on a BDSM party and exposedin the news as “a pervert.” Morris and Lewis’s friendshipevolves into a sadomasochistic love affair that, for all its kink, ishealthy and enriching for them both (143). Tragically, it ends withLewis watching Morris die of a premature heart attack, unableto do anything because Morris has encased him in concrete.Lewis (mis)interprets Morris’s dying words as “I loathe you,”thus confirming the pain, inadequacy, and self-hatred he soneeded Morris to act out on him (154).

Lost without Morris, Lewis turns back to Walter, only to findhimself in the same unsatisfying situation as before. Walter,unsure how to deal with the scandal around Morris’s death, hasgrown distant, and that distance is compounded by (what Lewissees as) Priscilla’s gatekeeping. Lewis reacts with rage. Drivento vengeance, he exposes to Irene Priscilla’s underhanded ma-neuvering to sell Walter’s paintings through Morris, which expo-sure results in Priscilla’s and Walter’s estrangement, and then,after Phoebe’s and Elizabeth’s funerals, he vindictively tells Wal-ter that Owen had destroyed his totemic portrait of Elizabeth.9

9. How exactly this happens we are left to imagine. The moment is suggested in oneof Mathews’s typically baroque prolepses: “[A]fter the portrait of Elizabeth was broughthome from the hospital, Lewis immediately noticed its disappearance and discovered his

S C R A N T O N ⋅ 529

The thematization of Lewis’s pre-oedipal drama comes outdistinctly in his fixation on Priscilla’s essay on Walter and thefemale in American art, which allows him to elaborate his viewson the mystery and power of women, the endless confusion andmiscommunication between the sexes, and the impossibledilemma he sees men facing in having to choose between sub-mission and antagonism.10 Elizabeth embodies the powerful,mysterious feminine, toward which Lewis feels both sympa-thetic identification and confused revulsion. This dynamic neatlyreprises Lewis’s childhood triangle, with Elizabeth as Louisa andWalter as Owen, but with a difference. Since Elizabeth is bothdistant from Lewis and dead (which death no doubt connectsher in Lewis’s mind to Phoebe), she can be positively recuperatedin a way that would have been impossible if she’d actually beeninvolved in Lewis’s life. As well, while the stories of Walter’sattempts to woo Irene and the stories of his other affairs portrayan active worshipper of feminine power, in contrast to Lewis’sfearful disengagement (and identification as “Louisa”), ourviews of Walter and Lewis are Lewis’s. That is, Walter looks likethat, because Lewis thinks like that:

Lewis once again ventured to cite Priscilla’s theory of Walter and Woman.“Louisa!” Morris exclaimed to Lewis, who shrank, “that’s infantile caca!Even if Miss Priss is right, it’s still only Big Momma Rides Again. Mostboys feel that way sometime—like you, n’est-ce-pas, am I not insightful?Walter probably didn’t notice—Wonder Woman’s name for him was Cad-mium Rose. Doesn’t mean anything, only words. My words for it were‘tempestuous sky of the vagina,’ remember, and they don’t mean anythingeither.”

(163)11

father had destroyed it. He spoke to no one of what he had learned. Walter must be thefirst to know; Lewis must tell him. He waited until they met at another funeral to enactthis small revenge” (170).

10. The analysis of Priscilla’s thesis is one of the prime examples in the text of Lewis’sauthorial voice betraying the supposed objectivity of the narrative: the description isdismissive, catty, and shot through with Lewis’s resentment toward Priscilla. Priscillacomes up again and again in the novel as Lewis’s nemesis, his feminine double, a proxyfor both his mother and his self-lacerating narcissism. She is the bad writer, the connivingmanipulator, the untrustworthy feminine at the root of Lewis’s pre-oedipal desires. Noth-ing Lewis writes about Priscilla can be trusted.

11. A question arises here: who is “Wonder Woman”?


While Cigarettes as a whole and especially the central chaptersare symbolically structured around Lewis’s pre-oedipaldynamic, when we come to understand that Lewis wrote thebook, we are right to ask how much he knows what he is doing.Walter may reign over the center and Elizabeth rule the extremes,but it is Lewis who finds himself crucified between the artist andthe artwork, between submitting to his muse and trying to con-trol it. The sharpness, insight, and irony that make the “objec-tive” narration seem so compelling are, on the novel’s terms,Lewis’s sharpness, insight, and irony. As readers, we have toreckon with the fact that Lewis has taken up these events,arranged them in sequence, and written of them so brilliantlythat we forgot anyone was telling the tale.

All of these issues come resoundingly together near the endof “Lewis and Walter.” After Morris’s death and Phoebe’s hos-pitalization, Lewis, bereft, seeks sympathy from Walter. What hethinks he needs from Walter and what he might actually wantturn out to be different things, however. Either way, Lewis isfurious that, as he sees it, Priscilla is keeping him at arm’s length.In a flash, he turns his anger from her to Walter:

[Lewis] met Walter and Priscilla by chance the next morning . . . Priscillastill cheery, Walter silent, standing behind her, contemplating Lewis withthe appalled eyes that identified him as doom made flesh. As he wasreplying to something Priscilla had said, Lewis recognized that familiarexpression: it was the way Owen always looked at him. Lewis’s under-standing of the couple he faced began to change. He lost track of whathe was saying to Priscilla. His scalp prickled with sweat.

“What’s wrong?” Priscilla asked.Lewis lied, “I just remembered talking to Morris once on this corner.”

He kept staring at Walter. “You know how his being dead—you forget itfor five seconds, and something brings it back—don’t you, Priss? Youknow what an incredible man he was.”

Thirty-seven years before, Walter had sat down conclusively on his littlesister’s best celluloid doll. Since that time, no one had ever looked at himas she had then, as Lewis was looking at him now. The aversion drainedout of him; he reverted to his considerate, vulnerable self. Lewis did notnotice this because of the tears of rage in his eyes.

(168)

S C R A N T O N ⋅ 531

Yet of course he does notice: he wrote it down, twenty years later,in Cigarettes, perhaps his greatest act of revenge (or at least res-sentiment), or maybe a grab at something more like grace. Let usnow turn to the question of how Lewis might have writtenMathews’s novel and what this might imply.

Lewis’s Cigarettes

Lewis is a classic unreliable narrator. That he is so is not obvious.Coming to the end of the novel, even astute readers will becaught off-guard by the reintroduction of Lewis’s narrating “I.”We forget that Lewis opens the novel with an explicit statementof intent: “I wanted to understand. I planned someday to writea book about these people. I wanted the whole story” (3). Whileseeming to be a portrait of the woman at its center, Elizabeth H.,and of her portrait, the nexus of the novel’s plots, Cigarettes turnsout instead to be a study in the authorial hand of Lewis Lewison,supermasochist, observer, art critic, psychologist, Hegelian,lover, and—in an unsettling and finally unfixable way—authorof Cigarettes.

Lewis’s authorship is so carefully woven into the text that evenafter the book is familiar, it remains challenging to keep in mindthat the descriptions, insights, explanations, and stories are allwritten from Lewis’s point of view, twenty years after the novel’sclosing events. The first time through, reading the novel in itsactual narrative voice is all but impossible, so deft is Mathews’sobfuscation. The sentence immediately following Lewis’sannouncement of purpose—“After an absence of many yearsElizabeth that day had come back to town”—shifts us out of thefirst-person and into a slightly formal, seemingly objective psy-chological realism, out of Lewis’s story and into Elizabeth’s (3–4). We get one more explicit comment identifying the narrator,then nothing overt for 285 pages. On page 4, Lewis writes ofAllan, “Recently he had shown kindness to me when few othershad. My best friend had died, and gossips had cruelly blamedme for it.” This obliquity refers, of course, to Morris Romsen’sheart attack, and this paragraph is the last mention of Lewis for


almost eighty pages, until he shows up as a character, Phoebe’sbrother, “arrested in scandalous circumstances” while she suffersfrom hyperthyroidism (80).

Lewis’s authorship is most definitively evinced in an earliertypescript draft’s ending, which was edited out of the final pub-lished version.12 The last sentences of this earlier typescript ver-sion read, in italics: “Lewis lights another cigarette. ‘Here endeth thelast fiction,’ he says aloud as he yanks the sheet from the roller” (268).With this, Mathews yanks us out of the novel with an unabashedreveal and refocuses our attention on the novel’s title. The pub-lished version is doubtlessly improved by the removal of thispassage, for several reasons, but its presence in the earlier draftprovides strong evidence for the centrality of both Lewis’s nar-ration and the looming absence of cigarettes.

What exactly it means for readers that the ostensibly objectivethird-person psychological realism of the narration is in fact adeeply subjective first-person account is in some ways the centralquestion of the novel. It is through this question that we see howCigarettes fits smoothly into the rest of Mathews’s oeuvre andevinces his recurring concerns with language and the misappre-hension of its representationality, the fragmentariness of narra-tive, the creative role of the reader, the limitations of psycholog-ical realism, and manifestations of “the self” in text. Beforetreating the question of what Lewis’s authorship might mean,however, which will open other issues, such as the novel’s pro-cedural structures, I want to first play detective and ask howLewis could have written Cigarettes.13

12. The typescript copy of Cigarettes to which I here refer is, frustratingly, the onlydraft of the novel I’ve been able to find in Mathews’s papers. There are, further, no notesor plans referring to the novel’s creation. Mathews has, quite deliberately it seems, erasedhis tracks.

13. I take the term “procedural” from Joseph Conte, who uses it to distinguish writingconcerned with production through created forms from “formalist” writing, which hesees as working primarily within traditional structures (including genre), and “structur-alist” writing, which because of the word’s association with certain strains of criticalthought remains unwieldy and unhelpful in its application (75–111, esp. 76–77). Conte,in turn, doubtlessly picked up the term “procedural” from Brian McHale’s now-canonicalConstructing Postmodernism, which defines it much along the lines of an Oulipian con-straint: “In procedural writing, . . . textual production is entrusted to a fixed procedure

S C R A N T O N ⋅ 533

The key problem here is that, as readers, all we have is thetext. Whatever “reality” might exist “behind” the narration mustbe imagined from Lewis’s untrustworthy account.14 In effect,Mathews has succeeded in his stated goal of writing a novel insuch a way that the reader must make up the story, not simplybecause within the diegetic discourse of the novel the narrationis presented in disjunctive fragments, which force us to loop backand string together the story they imply, but because the entirediscourse of the novel is grounded in a narration for which thereis no ground outside the text.15 In this way, Cigarettes resemblesVladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Georges Perec’s La Vie moded’emploi; all three can be seen as highly successful examples ofwhat might be called Escher fictions.16

The interpretive void into which Cigarettes throws the readeris exhilarating. We could justifiably argue that the entire novelis pure fiction, that there is no Lewis Lewison, and that the ques-tion of what is “real” is at best misguided. This is all true. Yetwithin the narrative frame of the novel, we are told that Lewiswanted “to write a book about these people,” and hence we areequally justified in assuming that Cigarettes is that book and inasking the questions that subsequently arise, most centrally, howhe could have known what he writes (3). Clearly much of the

. . . [such as in an acrostic or a sestina] . . . which generates, automatically as it were,strings of language, which in turn become the raw materials for building narrativeworlds” (McHale 184).

14. As Paul Harris puts it in his discussion of the novel: “The reader . . . ends up in aposition not unlike the characters, left to ‘read’ the unfolding scenarios as best they can,given the available evidence. The novel’s emphasis on what lies in its interstices fore-grounds the reader’s role; somewhat in the vein of Wolfgang Iser’s idea that texts leavegaps and indeterminacies to be filled by the reader who thereafter realizes the work.”

15. As Mathews puts it in an essay that seems something of an ars poetica: “The writermust take care to do no more than supply the reader with the materials and (as we oftensay nowadays) the space to create an experience. That is all the creating that takes place:of writer and reader, the reader is the only creator. This is how reading can be defined:an act of creation for which the writer provides the means” (“For Prizewinners” 7).

16. The ontological status of fictional worlds and their relation to “reality” is a funconundrum that has puzzled critics since Plato. I offer the term “Escher fictions” merelyto float a neutrally descriptive characterization that might be applied equally to any textthat writes itself into its reality, such as Don Quixote. Mathews dramatizes the problemagain, even more explicitly, in The Journalist, profitably discussed by Joseph Tabbi inCognitive Fictions (131–37).


novel is “imagined,” but some of it must be “real” (within thenarrative frame of the novel, that is). How can we possibly knowwhich is which, and how would we decide? We remain ulti-mately stymied by the fact that we have no other reference pointby which to triangulate and verify; yet if we want to keep fromfalling into hermeneutic impotence, we must play the game withthe pieces we’re given.

There are three sources for Lewis’s knowledge. The first is, ofcourse, his own experience. He is a central character in the noveland would know much of what happened firsthand. The secondis the archival text. Cigarettes is full of other people’s texts andeven begins with one—Allan’s letter to Elizabeth. We have Mor-ris’s article in New Worlds; Priscilla’s gossipy thesis; Oliver’spoems in The Presidio Papers; newspaper articles, wills, and policereports; and Phoebe’s journal, quoted at length in the chaptersdescribing her illness. The third kind of source is secondhandtestimony, most notably the lengthy intimacies shared withLewis by Morris in their long evenings together. Allan, who weare told has befriended Lewis, would be a source of informationfor both his affair with Elizabeth and his tangle with Owen.Owen and Louisa might both have been willing to share infor-mation. Irene too may have spoken to Lewis: she is both Lewis’sdead lover’s sister and his mother’s friend, and after Lewisinforms her of Priscilla’s underhanded maneuvering, they maywell have established an intimate confidentiality that wouldunlock portions of the story. The only real lacunae are Maud’sand Oliver’s stories. Oliver’s story may well have been filled inby his father, Barrington, who seems to enjoy telling anybodyeverything, and the likeliest source for Maud’s story (and Pau-line’s along with it) would be Maud herself. We must imaginethat Lewis went to Maud, proposing to write a book about Eliz-abeth and her portrait. His interest in returning to the subjectthat had united him with Morris would no doubt have appealedto Maud, and when combined with her own love for Elizabethmust have proved irresistible. It is not difficult to imagine Lewissitting with Maud out on her “shady west porch” (245), plyingher with green Chartreuse while she reminisced.

S C R A N T O N ⋅ 535

However much these sources of information might accountfor, the narrative is filled out with Lewis’s imaginings, interpre-tations, and prejudices. The more we come to realize how biasedand subjective is Lewis’s narrative, the less we can trust its con-clusions. Is Owen really somehow responsible for Phoebe’sdeath? Did Louisa really spend her life in fear of Lewis? Is Pris-cilla really such a careerist bitch? Is Walter that daft? We haveno way of knowing but ought to be deeply suspicious of howLewis presents things. Our perspective on all of these charactersis ultimately one-sided, as even other characters’ insights windup being filtered through Lewis’s singular view. Our suspicionought to extend to the mode of narration as well, the “psycho-logical realism” that presents these characters as so reliably read-able in terms of unconscious motivations and drives. Lewis seesthe world through Freudian psychology, but that doesn’t meanwe have to. In fact, the dispositions of Lewis’s lens suggest thatit would behoove us to question the limits of such an obviousand conventional narrative approach. Cigarettes might not be aparody of psychological realism, but it is definitely ironic in itsplayful use of conventionally psychoanalytic frames.

Misrecognition and Form

The “content” of Cigarettes is filtered through and structured byLewis’s Freudian lens (however ironically); its “form,” on theother hand, is Hegelian.17 While neither Mathews nor Lewisasserts Hegelian leanings, “Hegel’s Aesthetics” plays a key rolein Morris’s intellectual development (220), and the philosophergets name-dropped into Oliver’s Rousseauian reverie out boat-ing with Elizabeth:

17. My argument is that the immanent form of the novel is Hegelian, in that it functionsthrough a dialectical process of intersubjective recognition. Richard Deming makes astrong case elsewhere that Oulipian constraint is per se Hegelian: “Constraint’s delimitingof language and shaping of form (giving form form, we might say) facilitates theunthought and brings it into the realm of manifest consciousness by producing limitsituations that force creative resolutions, forcing us out of our usual habits of languageand conventional approaches to rules of grammar, syntax, or narrative form” (660).


He let the boat drift. He had no place to go. He did not think, except aspart of the dreaming. . . . The boat rocked sleepily, turning this way andthat, providing his feelings, his thoughts, their objects. For one momentquickly gone he tried to say what was happening to him (maybe Hegel,maybe Heine; they didn’t matter either). He had nothing to grasp.

(24)

This reverie compares nicely with Elizabeth’s explanation toMaud of her childhood revelation (275–76). These insights, of theimmanent self, are taken up again in the last pages as Lewiscontemplates a mysterious actor on a train platform:

The man had dressed, as for an afternoon lawn party, in a costume ofconventional perfection. A blazer of not-quite-navy blue followed theslope of his shoulder and the fall of his slack right arm with unclutteredsmoothness. Above the flattened collar of his jacket appeared a neat ringof off-white crepe de chine shirting, its points drawn together with a glintof gold beneath a rep tie of plum and pewter stripes, whose mild bulgewas nipped by a more visible clasp of gold above the open middle buttonof the blazer. From a gently cinched waist fell pleated trousers of dove-gray flannel—my mental fingertips fondled their imagined softness, con-firmed by the delicacy with which they broke, an inch above their cuffs,against the insteps of brown-and-amber saddle shoes. To complete thearray, the man in his left hand held a high-crowned, pale-yellow Panamahat, using it to fan—so solemnly I wondered any air was displaced—hissweatless head.

Tipped forward, turned a little to one side, the head looked strong andsleek, although, in its details, less than handsome: the aquiline nose wastoo thick at its tip, the space between the eyes too narrow, the lips toothin. These flaws hardly mattered. It has been said that being perfectlydressed provides a satisfaction no religion can give; and from this man,even in our nondescript surroundings, such satisfaction emanated likelight from a filament. The way he assumed his elegance implied an impe-riously debonair attitude to the world around him. He seemed to beinventing his very presence here, imagining himself in some sublime farcestaged for the amusement of knowing friends, and for his own.

This impression, as it turned out, contained an element of truth. A fewdays later, returning for the funerals, I learned that the man I had seen inthe station was a professional actor, not particularly well known or suc-cessful except in his secondary career: he appeared as a paid extra manat fashionable parties. He could supply a stylish presence, he spoke well(and not too well), he charged a reasonable fee. I had seen him at work,

S C R A N T O N ⋅ 537

perhaps waiting for a lady due on the northbound train whom he hadbeen hired to escort for the evening.

I was relieved to have this apparition explained. He had disturbed memore than I cared to admit.

(290–91)

The man is disturbing to Lewis, even uncanny, for the same rea-son that Elizabeth is appealing: his blithe superficiality chal-lenges Lewis’s dependence on notions of depth to constructmeaning, and the apparent transcendence of being that he offersin mere being (in acting himself) upsets the young man’s fiercedefensive elaborations between inner and outer, public and pri-vate. The redemption offered in the actor’s pure style, his imma-nent surface, terrifies Lewis for its exposure of what he thinksshould remain hidden: the self.

The moments when the private self becomes public are themoments of greatest anxiety in Cigarettes, as shown in the scan-dalous humiliations to which Lewis is subject in the crucifixionand “King Koncrete” episodes (169); the misrecognition of selvesin such moments are the novel’s central propulsion. The momentof alterity in the social encounter, that is to say, is most typicallya moment of traumatic misrecognition. The few flickers of self-recognition, such as those of Oliver and Elizabeth, and the fewreal mutual recognitions, such as those between Owen andAllan, Lewis and Morris, Elizabeth and Maud, and Phoebe andWalter, offer moments of fulfillment that contrast powerfullyagainst the painful, muddled misunderstandings that dominatethe book, with lovers misrecognizing lovers, parents misrecog-nizing children, viewers misrecognizing artworks, people mis-recognizing their own desires, and we readers misrecognizingthe text.

Each chapter is built around at least two misrecognitions, onebeing primary (see figure). This structure of misrecognitions nodoubt arises out of Mathews’s generative constraints. Cigarettesis, notably, his only avowedly Oulipian novel.18 What this means

18. The Oulipo, or Ouvroir de litterature potentielle, refers to a Paris-based group ofwriters, mathematicians, logicians, and philosophers who have undertaken to “raise theproblem of the efficacy and the viability of artificial (and, more generally, artistic) literary


ChapterPrimaryMisrecognition

SecondaryMisrecognition Recognition?

“Allan andElizabeth”

Allan thinks Elizabethis making a fool of him.

Allan misunderstandsElizabeth and Maud’sconversation.

No.

“Oliver andElizabeth”

Oliver thinks Elizabethis trying to change him.

Oliver thinks his fatherwants him to be afinancial success.

Maybe Walterand Elizabeth.

“Oliver andPauline”

Pauline thinks Oliverloves her.

Oliver thinks Pauline isrich.

No.

“Owen andPhoebe: I”

Owen thinks Phoebe ismaking a fool of him.

Phoebe thinks Owenwants to control her.

Maybe Walterand Phoebe.

“Owen andPhoebe: II”

Phoebe doesn’trecognize her voice(“the squawk box”) ashers.

The doctorsmisdiagnose her illness.

PhoeberecognizesOwen.

“Allan andOwen”

Allan misrecognizesPauline’s intentions.

Owen misrecognizeshis own intentions.

Yes, Allanand Owen.

“Lewis andMorris”

Lewis misinterpretsMorris’s last words.

Morris (initially) fails tonotice Lewis’smasochism.

Yes, Lewisand Morris.

“Lewis andWalter”

Lewis thinks Waltercan stand in for Owen.

Walter mistrusts Lewis. No.

“Louisaand Lewis”

Lewis thinks Louisaundependable.

Lewis’s bid forcompanionship is seenas freakish.

No.

“Irene andWalter”

Walter thinks Irene, hisdealer, and Morris arecheating him.

Walter thinks Irene willsleep with him.

Yes, IrenerecognizesWalter.

“PriscillaandWalter”

Priscilla thinks the“magic” of art is inWalter, not thepainting.

Walter doesn’trecognize Priscilla inthe bar.

No.

“Irene andMorris”

Irene doesn’t see thatMorris resents her.

Irene comes to think ofLewis as the enemy.

Morrisrecognizeshimself.

“Paulineand Maud”

Pauline thinks Maud istrying to control her.

Maud thinks Pauline isright to resent her.

No.

(continued)

S C R A N T O N ⋅ 539

ChapterPrimaryMisrecognition

SecondaryMisrecognition Recognition?

“Maud andPriscilla”

Maud thinks Priscilladoesn’t need her.

Priscilla thinks Maud isdrinking because ofAllan’s adultery.

No.

“Maud andElizabeth”

Maud thinks she can’tenjoy life.

Maud’s missingElizabeth leads her tobe angry with her.

Yes, Maudand Elizabeth.

This chart is simplistic and schematic and is meant as a sketch of structure, notan exhaustive explication. There are often multiple misrecognitions in a chapter.

for our concerns is that it was written with rules and developedaccording to certain invented procedures. Mathews discusses hisprocess vaguely in various interviews: “I decided to write anOulipian novel,” he told The Paris Review. “And I created thisabstract scheme of permutations of situations in which A meetsB, B meets C, and so forth. There’s no point in looking for it nowbecause no one will ever figure it out, including me. Anyway, Istared at this for a year, and in time people started appearing,then situations, then stories” (“Harry Mathews”). In anotherinterview, with John Ash, he emphasizes the importance of rela-tionships, saying, “I started off with the question of how to tella story about a group of people belonging to the New York artand business world in a way that would allow the reader to makeit up. That’s not completely honest, but I don’t think I can behonest about it because I don’t really remember what happened”(31). Most recently, in an interview with Barbara Henning,Mathews elaborates slightly, claiming to have begun from “aseries of five-item lines of events, moronically simple events like

structures” through deliberate and empirically minded experiments in language (LeLionnais 30). They are noted mainly for their use of constraint, the “strict and clearlydefinable rule, method, procedure, or structure that generates every work that can beproperly called Oulipian” (Mathews and Brotchie 131). Examples of constraints includesonnets, acrostics, anagrams, lipograms, and N + 7. Well-known Oulipian works includeItalo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Georges Perec’s La Disparition, and Ray-mond Queneau’s Cent mille Milliards de poemes. Daniel Levin Becker’s Many Subtle Chan-nels offers an engaging and elegantly written history of the group.


A meets B, B dislikes A, A falls in love with B, B flees” (13). Hedescribes his series of five-item lines as a generative combina-torial matrix akin to a sestina: “Well, let’s say there are five linesand then you transpose the things. You take the first item fromthe first line and put it into the second line, and the third iteminto the third line, and so forth. You get a completely differentstory.”

Once we know what to look for, this simple schema becomesglaringly obvious. In chapter 1, for example, Allan meets Eliza-beth, Elizabeth dislikes Allan (“Her docility suggested, illogi-cally and inescapably, that he no longer mattered to her” [10]),Allan falls in love with Elizabeth, Elizabeth flees Allan. This com-bination of plot points can be seen permutated throughout thenovel, so long as we remain capacious in our interpretation ofwhat the terms signify. In chapter 6, for example, we can readAllan’s obsession with Owen as a form of “falling in love,” andin chapter 11 we can read Walter’s substitution of Pauline’s copyfor his original painting of Elizabeth as his way of “fleeing” fromPriscilla’s domination. Repeatedly and consistently we seemoments of “meeting,” “falling in love,” “dislike,” and“flight.”19

There are, it appears, a few variations at play in how thisschema is presented. Primarily, it is difficult to tell at timeswhether we can trust the ordering presented in the table of con-tents. That is to say, in chapters 2 (“Oliver and Elizabeth”) and7 (“Lewis and Morris”), either character could be the “A” or the“B,” and in chapters 3 (“Oliver and Pauline”) and 15 (“Maudand Elizabeth”), it appears that the second listed character fillsthe “A” role and the first the “B.” In chapter 15, only an ungen-erous interpretation would read Elizabeth’s death in Maud’shouse as fleeing, though the “flight” of her (possibly hallucina-tory) larks is explicit. The main exception to the schema is chap-ter 5 (“Owen and Phoebe: II”), which could only be read in con-

19. I would suggest that the unnamed fifth item in the matrix is “A tells B about abusiness deal,” which can be seen to repeat with as much consistency as the other fouritems.

S C R A N T O N ⋅ 541

sonance with this scheme if Phoebe fulfills both roles, falling inlove with herself, disliking herself, and fleeing herself.20

While Mathews’s “series of five-item lines” may give readerspurchase on the novel, it is doubtful that this series exhauststhe procedures in play. Other possible constraints, arrived at byconsidering repetitions and tropes within the text, mightinvolve the names of horses, varieties of wines, different usesof the word “capital,” variations on the word “crucifixion,”numbers, different styles of writing (from “camp,” to “bohe-mian,” to “detective”), the names of trees and other plants, art-ists and artworks, and other texts (from the works of SirThomas Browne, to Henry Festing Jones’s memoir of SamuelButler’s life, to Madame Bovary). Whatever schemata are at workin Cigarettes, the questions of what went into them and howthey transformed those inputs into what we have on the pageare—barring further revelations from Mathews—unlikely toever receive conclusive answers.21

Misrecognition is, of course, an ancient trope. To grasp theimport of the misrecognitions in Cigarettes, we need to turn toHegel. Hegelian dialectic, often misunderstood as a process bywhich an idea, or thesis, is contradicted by its antithesis, whichcontradiction is then resolved and transcended in their synthesis,is better understood as a structural function of cognition: it is themediation of difference in unity. This happens at the level of

20. Chapter 5’s exceptional status in the book suggests that it is perhaps the clinamento Mathews’s constraint. Some suspect that the constraint at work in this chapter is a“Canada Dry.” “Canada Dry” and clinamen are both technical terms for the Oulipo. ACanada Dry is a text which, according to Paul Fournel, “has the taste and color of arestriction but does not follow a restriction” (Mathews and Brotchie 119). The clinamen,adopted from Lucretius, “is a deviation from the strict consequences of a restriction”(Mathews and Brotchie 126).

21. Malcolm Sutton offers a sensitive reading of Cigarettes that emphasizes the (pos-sibly) aleatory character of the novel’s procedural poiesis, which he suggestively arguesis expressive of Mathews’s thematization of the role of chance in community forma-tion. An analysis relating aleatory procedure to hermeneutic reading—explicating the(mis)recognition of tuche for automaton (as discussed by Jacques Lacan) and connectingthis back to intersubjective social relations—would allow us to frame Sutton’s insightwithin the novel’s central questions of authorship, recognition, and subject formation.The question of whether or not Mathews’s proceduralism is best characterized as aleatoryremains open.


metaphysics, when we create gods, systems, and mythemes thatgive our own order to the world; it happens at the level of per-ception, in the mutual constitution of figure and ground; and ithappens most centrally at the level of social existence, whereindividual identity and social identity mutually shape each otherat the moment when private becomes public and public, private.That we are socially formed even as we form society is a dialec-tical understanding of the self.22

Two moments are key in dialectical sociality, that of recogni-tion and that of concretization. Recognition begins with the real-ization of another’s self-consciousness. Mostly, in life perhapsbut definitely in Cigarettes, people see each other not as self-conscious beings but as reflections, projections, and cathexes oftheir own consciousnesses. Even the beginning stages of recog-nition, when another person is seen in his or her singular fearand desire, are rarely achieved. More often than not, we don’teven recognize ourselves. Rather than seeing our own desiresand fears clearly and self-consciously, we act on them and theninvent stories after the fact to keep us hidden from ourselves, asmost of the characters do throughout the novel.

These recognitions and misrecognitions would be merelyglancing monadic vectors were it not for the fact that we createeach other, shape each other, and give form to each other’s livesin social expectations and performances, cultural artifacts, ritu-als, practices, deeds, and language. These concrete mediating“third terms” take up difference in moments unifying disparate

22. The motor of the dialectic, sublation or Aufhebung, the complex triple action ofraising, negating, and preserving, occurs along multiple axes—temporally, socially, psy-chologically, culturally, logically. For Hegel, we are perpetually negotiating alterity, atincreasingly complex and sophisticated levels of self-identification.

I am deliberately leaving out the most Hegelian aspect of Hegel’s dialectic, which isits historical movement—the very movement that suggests the thesis-antithesis-synthesiscaricature. The recuperative narrative theodicy of Hegel’s dialectic, and the individual’srole in it (for the Hegelian self, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny) are too complex toaddress here, and a philosophy of history is far from our needs: although Cigarettes doesshow a changed society, how it changes is precisely what gets left out by the twenty-two-year gap between 1938 and 1960. The question at issue is strictly a question of thedialectical relationship between identity and alterity in social recognition and concretemediation.

S C R A N T O N ⋅ 543

consciousnesses through what Hegel calls “spirit,” or what wemight call “the social.” Morris Romsen, for example, becomes anart critic when he’s recognized for his art criticism in New Worlds.His article, like Walter’s painting of Elizabeth, is both by himand of him. For Hegel, Christ’s crucifixion is the key symbolicmediation in the history of human thought: Christ on the crossis the third term bringing together the human and the divine,the material and the spiritual. It is no wonder, then, that cruci-fixion figures so centrally in Cigarettes, both as the primarymoment when Lewis enters the public sphere and as a key termin Lewis’s understanding of himself. Concrete mediation takesother forms in the novel, too, often in complex ways, not leastthrough Elizabeth’s portrait.

The dialectical interplay between recognition, misrecognition,and concrete mediation achieves its dramatic climax in Morris’sdeath. In this scene, Lewis’s passive entrapment is recognizedby Morris and made literally concrete. The absurdity of this“concretization” only heightens its dramatic intensity: the sym-bolic becomes manifestly real, as our nightmarish impotence inthe face of death. Lewis’s self-willed breaking out of his concreteshell ritualizes his own first active steps out of the purely privateinto the public realm, steps which achieve their final form in thenovel Cigarettes, where he exposes himself as he sees others see-ing him. Lewis’s moves into public are shaped by profound andtraumatic misrecognitions, as in the bat episode, his crucifixion,and most seriously the scandal over Morris’s death, and in thislight we can read Cigarettes as an effort toward rectification, abid for authentic recognition. Ostensibly a book about “these peo-ple” (3), it is in fact Lewis’s concrete self-representation pre-sented to these people. While his discomfort at seeing the mys-terious actor on the train platform suggests that Lewis has yetto achieve the full liberatory potential of self-recognition, thefinal paragraphs gesture toward an acceptance of our social con-stitution that promises the hope of his finally learning to be athome in the world:

I was only beginning to learn that the dead stay everlastingly presentamong us, taking the form of palpable vacancies that only disappearwhen, as we must, we take them into ourselves. We take the dead inside


us; we fill their voids with our own substance; we become them. Theliving dead do not belong to a race of fantasy, they constitute the inhab-itants of our earth. The longer we live, the more numerous the invitingholes death opens in our lives and the more we add to the death insideus, until at last we embody nothing else. And when we in turn die, thosewho survive embody us, the whole of us, our individual selves and thecrowd of dead men and women we have carried within us.

Your father dies: you hear his laugh resounding in your lungs. Yourmother dies: in a store window you catch yourself walking with her hud-dled gait. A friend dies: you strike his pose in front of an expectant cam-era. Beyond these outward signs, we take up the foibles, the gifts, theunrealized failures and successes of those we have watched and watcheddie.

Of course we do everything in our power to deny this. I shall deny itto you and to myself as long as I speak, still pretending that you are onlyyou, and I I. In this way I can become altogether blind and go on gropingmy way through sunlight and darkness, with only my uncomprehendingcomplaints to furnish names for the things I trip over and for the othersightless bodies I stumble against. In such circumstances, I sometimesthink that only the residual strength of the dead beings inside me givesme power to survive at all. By that I mean both the accumulated weightof the generations succeeding one another and, as well, from the first oftimes, when names held their objects fast and light shone among us inmiracles of discovery, the immortal presence of that original and heroicactor who saw that the world had been given him to play in withoutremorse or fear.

(291–92)

In these final thoughts, Lewis rediscovers, in a measured,mature register, the ecstatic insight experienced by Phoebe in herstruggle with hyperthyroidism and known by Elizabeth in herchildhood epiphany: we are all one, we create each other andare part of each other, and only in the work of recognition do webecome free.

Why Cigarettes?In the end, we return to the concrete mediation before us: somelanguage, a novel, this book titled Cigarettes. Lewis is a fiction,but one who becomes substantial through the play of language.Why, finally, is “his” novel titled Cigarettes?

S C R A N T O N ⋅ 545

On the train home to her parents in Saratoga Springs, Phoebehas a revelation. Weak, sick, and delusional, she has begun tohallucinate voices, notably “the squawk box” that starts“repeat[ing] an inexplicable succession of letters inside her docileears: b.s.t.q.l.d.s.t., b.s.t.q.l.d.s.t. . . .” (95). Once home, she willrest, take medication, undergo and recover from a thyroidec-tomy, torture and make peace with her father, and die. In themeantime, “Phoebe learned something about the series of letters.B.s.t.q.l.d.s.t. signified an old train careening down an old track.At slower speeds the train said, Cigarettes, tch tch / Cigarettes,tch tch” (96).

This is one of only three uses of the word “cigarette” in thenovel, and one of only six mentions of smoking. In addition tothe one above, these are (2) When Oliver Pruell ups the stakesin his manipulation of Pauline Dunlap: “Oliver did not budge;did not light his next cigarette” (39). (3) When Oliver imagineshis future life with Pauline as one including dining rooms filledwith “tuxedoed cronies smoking cigars and drinking port” (41).(4) When Phoebe Lewison tells her father Owen, in 1961, thatshe’s running off to the forests of the southwest: “Owen, whohadn’t smoked in a decade, compulsively clutched an emptybreast pocket” (44). (5) When Morris comes to visit Lewis in thepsychiatric ward at Bellevue Hospital after Lewis’s crucifixionand arrest, Morris brings him a shopping bag with some toilet-ries and says, “I couldn’t remember if you smoked—not here, Iguess” (143). (6) When Elizabeth reads aloud to Maud a line froma section of The Big Sleep: “I finished my cigarette and lit another.The minutes dragged by” (258).

In an interview with Lynne Tillman, Mathews declared, “Thequestion, ‘Why is the book called Cigarettes?’ is a question thatshould be asked.”23 In some of Mathews’s other novels, mostnotably Tlooth and The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium, the titlefunctions as a paratextual signifier, both extending and destabi-lizing the diegetic realm of the novel. In the first case, the word“tlooth” comes in at a moment of oracular utterance, deep into

23. He said as much again in his interview with Henning: “There’s no explanation.The explanation is that it’s a good question” (18).


the work, upsetting an already frayed narrative. Before the ora-cle’s cry, the title, punningly mixing “truth” and “tooth,” wasmeaningless; with its invocation, the book changes. With TheSinking of the Odradek Stadium, on the other hand, the title pointsbeyond the novel’s plot to the sinking of a ship named OdradekStadion.

It may be that the emphatic absence of cigarettes is intendedmerely to highlight the work’s fictionality. Lewis is, we mightimagine from the end of the typescript draft, furiously smokingaway while he writes. Perhaps the missing cigarettes are sup-posed to suggest what else is missing, such as World War II. Orperhaps it is relevant that Harry Mathews’s good friend GeorgesPerec died of lung cancer a few years before Mathews wrote thenovel.

“I remember Georges Perec giving up cigarettes for less harm-ful cigarillos,” writes Mathews in “The Orchard,” his remem-brance of Perec (91). “I remember being irritated when, afterGeorges Perec died, people asked if he smoked a lot. His deathwas plainly too enormous to be attributed to anything so com-monplace. Later, his doctors told Catherine B. that the tumor inhis lungs had nothing to do with tobacco; later still, I learnedthat his cancer was typical of heavy smokers” (85). Cigarettes isdedicated to Perec’s memory. “I remember Georges Perec at ourlast lunch asking me not to smoke. He had given up smoking afew days before, and he was anxious to avoid temptation”(“Orchard” 88). Cigarettes is marked by death: Elizabeth’s, Mor-ris’s, Phoebe’s. Mathews mentions in his interview with Tillmanthat between 1980 and 1986 he’d lost both his parents, Perec, andseveral other friends as well, including Italo Calvino (“HarryMathews”). Perec, it might be noted, was born in 1936, the ear-liest date in the novel, and died in 1982—the year before LewisLewison pens the epilogue.

To push biographical interpretation further, Mathews’s firstwife, the sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle, suffered from the samehyperthyroidism that kills Phoebe. Mathews himself was bornin 1930, which makes him a close contemporary of Irene andMorris (born in 1927 and 1933). The age ranges in the novel fallmainly into two generations, that of Mathews’s parents (Walter,

S C R A N T O N ⋅ 547

Maud, Elizabeth, Allen, Owen) and one slightly younger thanMathews’s own, that came of age in the early sixties (Phoebe,Priscilla, Lewis)—that is, Perec’s generation.24 Finally, Mathewshas admitted that the book is about the world he’d grown up in,his WASPy Upper East Side milieu, with Saratoga Springs stand-ing in for the Hamptons (“Interview” [Shaw] 42–43). Variousepisodes echo and resonate with Mathews’s brief “Autobiogra-phy,” most notably Arnold Loewenberg’s academic mentorshipof Morris Romsen and Lewis’s childhood thievery.25

Still, why Cigarettes? Perhaps the characters are the cigarettes;perhaps our lives are like cigarettes, flaring in the dark andburned to smoke, becoming a part of the ones who take us in,all becoming part of one another. Perhaps there’s the suggestionof a metaphor in the ephemerality of smoke. Perhaps this, per-haps that, perhaps whatever we want to think: “Cigarettes” is aspotently empty a signifier as “B.s.t.q.l.d.s.t.,” Morris’s “tempes-tuous sky of the vagina,” or Walter’s portrait of Elizabeth. In theend, I’d like to think that the title reminds us of an old traingoing slowly down an old track, and that Lewis has used it tomake his novel a memorial to Phoebe even while Mathews usesit to draw our attention back to “the thing itself.”

Princeton University

W O R K S C I T E D

Boyden, Michael. “The Riddling Effect: Rules and Unruliness in the Work ofHarry Mathews.” Electronic Book Review 29 Sept. 2006. Web. 16 Sept. 2011.

Conte, Joseph. “American Oulipo: Proceduralism in the Novels of Gilbert Sor-rentino, Harry Mathews, and John Barth.” Design and Debris: A Chaotics ofPostmodern American Fiction. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2002. 75–111.

Davies, Jeremy M. “Tch, Tch: Notes on Cigarettes.” Quarterly Conversation 3Sept. 2012. Web. 21 Jan. 2013.

24. Morris Romsen and Irene Romsen Kramer stand outside this set—ethnically, asJews; temporally, being slightly older than the children and rather younger than theadults; and socially, having almost no connection with Saratoga Springs.

25. See especially 120–21 for Mathews’s penchant for stealing and 127–29 for his mod-els for Arnold Loewenberg.


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recognizing the thing itself in harry mathews's cigarettes

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