Communicating Vessels

Dear Friend,

In order for us to discuss this final procedure, involving “communicating vessels” (later I’ll explain what I mean by the term), I’d like us to revisit together one of the most memorable episodes of Madame Bovary. I refer to the agricultural fair of chapter 8 in the second part of the novel, a scene that is in fact composed of two (or even three) different story lines braided together, each shadowing and in a certain fashion modifying the others. Because of the way the scene is structured, the different events, joined in a system of communicating vessels, exchange material, and an interaction is established among them, causing the episodes to merge into a whole that makes them something more than mere juxtaposed story fragments. A system of communicating vessels operates when the sum of an episode is something more than its parts—and that is true of Flaubert’s fair.

Here we have, in scenes interwoven by the narrator, a description of the day the farmers exhibit produce and animals from their farms and celebrate the harvest; the authorities make speeches and award medals; and at the same time, in the council chamber on an upper floor of the town hall, which overlooks the festivities, Emma Bovary listens as Rodolphe woos her with fiery declarations of love. The seduction of Madame Bovary by her noble suitor is perfectly able to stand alone as a scene, but, interwoven as it is with the speech of the councillor Lieuvain, a complicity is established between it and the minor goings-on of the fair. The episode acquires another dimension, another texture, until it might just as well be said that the villagers’ celebration takes place below the window where the soon-to-be lovers exchange vows of love: presented alongside their encounter, the fair seems less grotesque and pathetic than it would without the softening effect of such a delicate filter. We are pondering here a very nuanced subject, one that has nothing to do with simple action but rather with finely calibrated ambiance and the emotional and psychological essences that emanate from a story. It is in this context that the system of communicating vessels is most effective, so long as it is handled well.

The whole description of the agricultural fair in Madame Bovary is witheringly sarcastic, underscoring to the point of cruelty the human stupidity (la bêtise) that fascinated Flaubert, his scorn reaching its height with the appearance of Catherine Leroux, a little old woman who receives an award for her fifty-four years of work in the fields and announces that she will give the prize money to the priest so he will say masses for her soul. If all the poor farmers seem, in Flaubert’s description, to be mired in a dehumanizing routine that strips them of sensitivity and imagination and makes them dull figures, thoroughly common and conventional, the authorities are shown in an even worse light as garrulous, blatantly ridiculous nonentities in whom hypocrisy and spiritual duplicity seem primordial character traits, as expressed in the empty and trite utterances of the councillor Lieuvain. But this picture, painted so dark and remorseless that it is hardly credible (and suggests a possible failure of the episode’s power of persuasion), only emerges when we analyze the agricultural fair on its own, disassociated from the seduction to which it is viscerally linked. In reality, tangled up as it is with an episode that serves as an escape valve for its vitriolic irony, the sarcastic ferocity of the fair scene is considerably tempered. The sentimental, light, romantic air that is introduced by the seduction establishes a subtle counterpoint, which fosters verisimilitude. And the sunny element of the country fair, presented with exaggerated and humorous irony, also has, reciprocally, a moderating effect, correcting the excesses of sentimentalism—especially the rhetorical excesses—that characterize the episode of Emma’s seduction. Without the presence of a very powerful “realist” factor—the presence of the farmers and their cows and pigs in the square down below—the lovers’ dialogue, brimming with the clichés and commonplaces of the romantic lexicon, would perhaps dissolve into fantasy. Thanks to the system of communicating vessels that merges the two scenes, the rough edges that might have interfered with each episode’s power of persuasion are smoothed and the narrative unity is actually enriched by the resulting amalgam, which gives the chapter a rich and original character.

At the heart of the whole created by the communicating vessels linking the country fair and the seduction, it is possible to establish still another subtle counterpoint—this one on a rhetorical level—that contrasts the mayor’s remarks in the square with the romantic words that Emma’s seducer whispers in her ear. The narrator weaves the speeches together intending (entirely successfully) that the two—which unspool in a double strand of political and romantic stereotypes—should alternately drown each other out, introducing an ironic perspective without which the tale’s power of persuasion would be reduced to a minimum or vanish completely. We may therefore conclude that a second set of specific communicating vessels is enclosed within the general set, reproducing in miniature the overarching structure of the episode.

Now we may attempt a definition of communicating vessels. Two or more episodes that occur at different times, in different places, or on different levels of reality but are linked by the narrator so that their proximity or mingling causes them to modify each other, lending each, among other qualities, a different meaning, tone, or symbolic value than they might have possessed if they were narrated separately: these are communicating vessels. Their mere juxtaposition is not enough, of course, for the procedure to work. The decisive factor is a “communication” between two episodes set side by side or merged in the text by the narrator. The communication may be minimal, but if it doesn’t exist at all it is impossible to speak of communicating vessels, since, as we have noted, the unity that this narrative technique establishes makes an episode composed this way always more than the sum of its parts.

The most subtle and daring case of communicating vessels may be that of Faulkner’s The Wild Palms, a novel that tells, in alternating chapters, two separate stories: one a tragic tale of passionate (and ill-fated adulterous) love and the other that of a convict who in the wake of a devastating natural disaster, a flood that lays waste a vast region, struggles mightily to return to prison, where the authorities, since they don’t know what to do with him, sentence him to even more years in prison—for trying to escape! The plots of these two stories never mix, though at a certain point in the story of the lovers there is a reference to the flood and the convict; nevertheless, because of the physical proximity of the protagonists, the language of the narrator, and a certain climate of excess—passionate love in one case, and in the other the fury of the elements and the suicidal integrity that drives the convict to keep his word and return to prison—a kind of resemblance is established. Borges, with the intelligence and precision that never failed him in his literary criticism, put it best: “Two stories that never intersect but somehow complement each other.”

Julio Cortázar experiments with an interesting variation on the system of communicating vessels in Hopscotch, a novel that takes place, as you may recall, in two settings, Paris (“From the Other Side”) and Buenos Aires (“From This Side”), between which it is possible to establish a certain chronology (the Parisian episodes precede the Buenos Aires episodes). At the beginning of the book, there is an author’s note suggesting two different possible readings: one (let’s call it the traditional one) begins with the first chapter and proceeds in the usual order; the other skips from chapter to chapter, following the directions given at the end of each episode. Only if the reader chooses this second option does he or she read the whole text of the novel; if the first is chosen, a full third of Hopscotch is excluded. This third—“From Diverse Sides (Expendable Chapters)”—is not made up of episodes created by Cortázar or narrated by his narrators; it consists of texts and quotations from other sources or, when the material is by Cortázar, of freestanding texts without a direct plot relationship to the story of Oliveira, La Maga, Rocamadour, and the other characters of the “realist” story (if it is not incongruous to use that term to describe Hopscotch). They are pieces of a collage that, in its communicating vessel relationship with the novelistic episodes, is intended to add a new dimension—a dimension we might call mythical or literary, an extra rhetorical level—to the story of Hopscotch. This, very clearly, is what the counterpointing of “realist” episodes and collage is meant to achieve. Cortázar had already used this system in his first published novel, The Winners. In it, he interweaves the adventures of the passengers of the ship on which the story is set with some odd monologues by Persio, a principal character—abstract, metaphysical, sometimes abstruse reflections meant to add a mythical dimension to the “realist” story (though in this case too, as always with Cortázar, it is inadequate to speak of realism).

But it is above all in some of his stories that Cortázar uses the communicating vessel scheme with true mastery. Allow me to remind you of the small marvel of technical craftsmanship that is “The Night Face Up.” Remember it? The protagonist, who has been in a motorcycle accident on the streets of a big modern city—almost certainly Buenos Aires—undergoes an operation and, in what at first seems merely a nightmare, is transferred in a temporal shift from the hospital bed where he is convalescing to a precolonial Mexico in the throes of a guerra florida, when Aztec warriors hunted for human victims to sacrifice to their gods. From this point on, the story is built on a system of communicating vessels, alternating between the hospital ward where the protagonist is recovering and the remote precolonial night in which in the guise of a Moteca he first flees and then falls into the hands of his Aztec pursuers, who bring him to the pyramid where he is sacrificed with many other victims. The counterpoint is achieved by subtle temporal shifts that, in what we might call a subliminal way, cause the two realities—the present-day hospital and the precolonial jungle—to approach and somehow contaminate each other. Until, at the final crux—which involves another shift, this time not just temporal but in level of reality—the two times merge and the character is in fact not the motorcyclist being operated on in a modern city but a primitive Moteca who, seconds before the priest rips his heart out to appease the bloodthirsty gods, has a visionary glimpse of a future of cities, motorcycles, and hospitals.

Another narrative gem by Cortázar, “The Idol of the Cyclades,” is a very similar story, though it is structurally more complex. In it Cortázar uses communicating vessels in an even more original way. Here, too, the story takes place in two different temporal realities, one contemporary and European (a Greek island in the Cyclades and a sculpture workshop on the outskirts of Paris) and one ancient, at least five thousand years old (the primitive civilization of the Aegean, a society of magic, religion, music, sacrifices, and rites that archaeologists have long been trying to reconstruct from the fragments—utensils, statues—that have come down to us). But in this story, past reality filters into the present in a more insidious and unobtrusive way, first through an Aegean statuette that two friends, the sculptor Somoza and the archaeologist Morand, find in the valley of Skoros. Two years later, the statuette sits in Somoza’s workshop, and Somoza has made many copies of it, not for aesthetic purposes but because he believes that by doing so he’ll be able to transport himself to the time and culture that produced it. In the story’s present, in which Morand and Somoza confront each other in the latter’s workshop, the narrator seems to insinuate that Somoza has gone mad and that Morand is the sane one. But all of a sudden, at the story’s amazing conclusion, when Morand winds up killing Somoza, performing ancient magic rituals on his cadaver, and preparing to sacrifice his own wife, Thérèse, we discover that in fact the little statue has possessed both protagonists, turning them into men of the age and culture that made it, an age that has burst violently into a modern-day present that believed it had buried it forever. In this case, the communicating vessels aren’t symmetric as they are in “The Night Face Up,” with its balanced counterpoint. Here, the incursions of the remote past are more spasmodic, fleeting, until the splendid final crux—when we see the cadaver of Somoza naked with the ax sunk in his forehead, the little statue smeared with his blood, and Morand, naked too, listening to wild flute music and waiting for Thérèse with his ax raised—makes us realize that the past has entirely subsumed the present, subjecting it to its barbaric and ceremonial magic. By linking two different times and cultures in a narrative unity, the communicating vessels of both stories cause a new reality to be born, one qualitatively different from the mere composite of the two that are merged in it.

And although it seems impossible, I believe that with this explanation of communicating vessels we may conclude our discussion of the tools and principal techniques that novelists use to construct their fictions. There may be others, but I, at least, haven’t come across them. The ones that leap out at me from the page (and the truth is, of course, that I don’t go searching for them with a magnifying glass, since I’d rather read novels than autopsy them) seem to me likely to be related to one or another of the methods of composition of the stories that have been the subject of these letters.

Fondly,