Paul West is an extremely stubborn writer. He has not deviated from his desired subject matter, rather attaining critical success through the mastery of his unique form. Unfortunately, West’s writing is better known for the awards it has won than for outstanding sales. His oeuvre is notable for its breadth, encompassing novels, short stories, personal essays, criticism, poetry, and autobiography. Each work uses form as a means of experimentation.
The critic Diane Johnson lauded West for “his faith in the novel as an art form, as a dignified production of the human mind, capable of rendering, in its infinite variety, social comment, philosophic statement, comedy, [and] pain.”
The depth of subject matter West has explored bespeaks his theme of choice, namely, his belief in the rich abundance of human experience. West’s sole short story collection, “The Universe, and other Fictions,” serves as an entrance into his understanding of fiction.
The inordinate amount of wonder West finds in the universe pairs him with Vladimir Nabokov, Julio Cortazar, Italo Calvino, and T.S. Eliot. Like Nabokov, West views reality as comprised of random, ever-changing forces. His narratives are often surrealistic but vivid abstractions of concrete fact. His short stories also reflect Cortazar’s desire to push language to new ends. The use of irregular syntax, linear and non-linear narrative structures, modernistic stream of consciousness, and general ambiguity stems from Cortazar. Undercurrents reminiscent of Calvino’s wavering between precious description of the fantastic and grounded realism also appear in West’s writing.
Beginning in grammar school, West read and reread T.S. Eliot. Although he discusses Eliot extensively in his criticism, he also employs the objective correlative in most of his fiction, viewing it as the “the essential template or jig of the working intellect.”
Moreover, West’s criticism demands that the critic as well as the author should be scrutinized, to enhance the reader’s experience and understanding of critical and non-critical works. The number of influences on West’s fiction indicates the thoughtfulness with which he writes, founded on a critical approach.
In the 1970s and 1980s, West studied astronomy. This pursuit deeply influenced his prose. In a 1988 interview, West explained its effects: “I wonder when I first recognized the everywhereness of everything: perhaps after I started taking astronomy seriously and rid my thinking of dichotomies. The universe wasn’t out there, or up there, it was all over. This was ’heaven,’ and I was in it….I never had that much sense of being my own thing, my own person; I was always the universe’s possession, on loan to myself at a high rate of interest, but at any moment combinable back into a form I wouldn’t have recognized myself in.”
The multitudinous forms of experience he saw beyond earth translated to his belief in the magical nature of the earthly realm.The second story from “The Universe,” “Tan Salaam,” is about an eponymous African tusk-smuggler turned mystic who finds himself in the desert. It demonstrates West’s knack for defying the expectations of the reader. Salaam’s journey reflects both archetypal religious imagery and issues plaguing modern society. Much like Dante, West describes Salaam as first descending and then ascending. The conclusion reemphasizes this point by placing Tan Salaam on a raised fortress. Nietzsche employs the desert in the third essay of “The Genealogy of Morals” as the mental space one inhabits to distance oneself from the chaos of human society. Salaam acts as somewhat of an ascetic priest himself, strangers traveling to hear his story of enlightenment in order to cultivate their own sense of levity. The physical juxtaposed with the spiritual indicates the superfluity of earthly existence. The story also engages issues of cosmopolitanism. Tan Salaam has turned a remote, exotic location into a desirable one through the use of spiritual ideals. This subject matter ties West’s literature to yet another genre, the post-colonial.
West does not write convincingly about these other cultural contexts in “The Universe,” however. His dialogue and narrative expositions read so similarly that a lack of quotation marks caused them to be confused. Furthermore, the conclusion leaves the reader wondering why West establishes so many paradoxical conditions without answering a single one. The relationship between the spoken and unspoken is a powerful one, which West fails to actualize in the text. He descends into the literary canon without developing a coherent response and integration of the material he studies. Consequently, his prose reads like a coarser version of the modernist aesthetic, deftly allusive without providing necessary explanation for its allusions.
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