Right now I'm in the midst of Rex by Jose Manuel Prieto as I read my way though the finalists for the Best Translated Book Award. As it happens, this book has quite a bit to recommend, but right here I want to focus on a certain dichotomy of Prieto's that I find very intriguing.
The narrator of Rex simply idolizes Proust. He loves him so much that he won't even say Proust's name: he just calls him the Writer. And he thinks that everything knowable in the world can be found within In Search of Lost Time. It's hard to explain exactly what the narrator means by these things without having you read Rex, but suffice to say that per Rex's narrator, Proust is the consummate form of the artist as creator.
Now, in contrast to the Writer is the Commentator, who kind of resembles the omega to Proust's alpha. The narrator eventually drops enough hints that we understand that the Commentator is none other than Borges. Essentially, where the Writer holds the power of creation, the Commentator can only create by commenting on what has come before. While it's clear that Rex's narrator sees the Writer as clearly superior to the Commentator, he does admit that the latter has a little something to his credit (though not nearly as much as the Writer does). Again, it's hard to say just what is meant by calling Borges the Commentator, but my brief explanation gives the basic idea.
Though I have some issues with this schema, these are nonetheless wonderfully fascinating archetypes to try and fit writers into, not in the least because their exact boundaries remain unclear. As I was mulling this over through the weekend, I came to the conclusion that they roughly correspond to modernist/postmodernist (at least as understood by someone like Enrique Vila-Matas), as well as to Harold Bloom's concept of the strong and the weak poet (but this does get a little complicated, since Bloom would probably say that everyone, strong or weak, a commentator to a certain degree, with Shakespeare, and perhaps some of the ancients, being the Writer).
In light of what I'm about to say, I want to be clear that I'm not using Writer or Commentator in a pejorative way. They're simply descriptive terms that I find interesting, and possibly useful. And so, with that disclaimer in mind, I now ask you: which of our contemporary (or near-contemporary) authors fit into the category Writer, and which fit into the category Commentator?
Here are my own highly debatable guesses.
Writer
Proust
Philip Roth
Cormac McCarthy
Steve Erickson
Kazuo Ishiguro
William T. Vollmann
Norman Rush
Haruki Murakami
Richard Powers |
In Between
Don DeLillo
W.G. Sebald
J.M. Coetzee
George Saunders
|
Commentator
Borges
Nicholson Baker
Enrique Vila-Matas
Aleksandr Hemon
David Foster Wallace
Salman Rushdie |
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