Tatlin! by Guy Davenport
**Tatlin! by Guy Davenport Overview**
"Tatlin!" is a notable collection of short stories by Guy Davenport, which has garnered attention for its sophisticated narrative techniques and diverse subject matter. The stories range from explorations of historical figures, such as the title story about Vladimir Tatlin, a pivotal figure in Constructivism, to imaginative tales like "Robot," which recounts the discovery of the Lascaux cave paintings by young boys in France. Davenport's unique storytelling often involves intertextual elements, where he creatively incorporates sentences from other authors, such as Franz Kafka and Max Brod, into his own narratives, blending different perspectives into cohesive stories.
The collection showcases Davenport's deep engagement with history and art, as seen in his incorporation of his drawings of notable figures like Stalin and Lenin alongside the text. One of the longer stories, "The Dawn in Erewhon," reflects on social ideals, contrasting intellectual pursuits with the joys of simple, physical existence in a fictional setting inspired by Samuel Butler's Utopian vision. Overall, "Tatlin!" is characterized by its rich tapestry of themes ranging from the archaic to the philosophical, inviting readers to reflect on the interplay between civilization and deeper historical truths.
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Tatlin! by Guy Davenport
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1974
Type of work: Short stories
The Work
Tatlin! is the collection of short stories that made Davenport one of the most admired and studied fiction writers in modern American literature. Most of the reviewers who commented on the volume when it appeared admitted that they had seen nothing like these highly sophisticated and polished stories, either in subject matter or technique. The stories range from the title piece, about the founder of Constructivism and Russian Formalism, to a story about young boys who stumble on the Paleolithic cave paintings of Lascaux, France, in “Robot,” and move through the deep Greek past in “Herakleitos” to an imaginary past of the writer Edgar Allan Poe in “1830.” The volume ends in an imaginative descent into Holland as a sensual “netherland” or underworld, where a Dutch philosopher attempts to regenerate an earthly Eden by means of the body.
The second story in the collection, “The Aeroplanes at Brescia,” was actually the first story that Davenport published and concerns a famous air show at Brescia, Italy, in 1909 in which most of the world’s renowned pilots took part. The construction of the story has become as famous as the story itself; Davenport initially began it as an essay on writer Franz Kafka, but in the midst of his research, he discovered that Kafka’s first published newspaper story was titled “The Aeroplanes at Brescia.” Though Kafka’s story was a piece of journalism, Davenport views it as a typical Kafka short story and uses, in his own story, every sentence that Kafka wrote. However, Davenport makes important changes to suit his own style. Accompanying Kafka was Max Brod, a character in Davenport’s story as well as Kafka’s first biographer. Davenport also used every sentence of Brod’s report of the air show at Brescia in his story. Again, he rearranges both Kafka’s and Brod’s sentences in highly imaginative ways to produce a composite narrative that fuses all of their perspectives into a typical Davenport story.
Davenport employs similar methods in many of the other stories in Tatlin!. In the title narrative, he tells the story of the difficult life of Vladimir Tatlin, founder of Constructivism, an engineer, designer, painter, sailor, teacher, and folk musician—a veritable modern Renaissance man whose genius was crushed by the life-denying strategies of communism. Davenport, also a highly respected artist, interweaves his own drawings of Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Ilich Lenin, and Tatlin throughout the story, creating an intertextual collage of visual images and written passages.
The charming story “Robot” records the accidental discovery of the caves of Lascaux by six French peasant boys in 1941. The story is titled “Robot” because that was the name of the dog of one of the boys who actually discovered the caves while chasing a rabbit. This story dramatically illustrates Davenport’s persistent concern for the submerged archaic wisdom that lies hidden beneath modern civilization, waiting for discovery. Because of this important discovery, it became clear that Western humanity had attempted to express itself through imaginative forms at a much earlier date than anyone had ever suspected.
The longest story in Tatlin! is “The Dawn in Erewhon.” The story’s title connects it to the famous English Utopian novelist Samuel Butler and his book Erewhon, an anagram of “nowhere.” The fictional Dutch philosopher Adriaan van Hovendaal attempts to escape his overly intellectual propensities by creating an Edenic community of three, with a teenage boy and girl, Bruno and Kaatje. They travel to idyllic forests, carefully dividing up duties and enjoying themselves in clean but sensual activities. “The Dawn in Erewhon” is Davenport’s first attempt to present the social ideals of Fourier in a fictional form. Feelings and the claims of the body take precedence over all intellectual duties or exercises in the longest story in the collection.
Bibliography
Bawer, Bruce. “Guy Davenport: Fiction á la Fourier.” In Diminishing Fictions. St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 1988.
Furlani, Andre. “Postmodern and After: Guy Davenport.” Contemporary Literature 43 (Winter, 2002): 709-735.
Kenner, Hugh. “A Geographer of the Imagination.” Harper’s 263 (August, 1981): 66-68.
Meanor, Patrick. “The Fourierist Parables of Guy Davenport.” In Postmodern Approaches to the Short Story, edited by Farhat Iftekharrudin and Joseph Boyden. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003.
Olsen, Lance. “A Guidebook to the Last Modernist: Davenport on Davenport and ’Da Vinci’s Bicycle.’” Journal of Narrative Technique 16 (Spring, 1986): 148-161.
Sullivan, John Jeremiah. “Guy Davenport: The Art of Fiction CLXXIV.” Paris Review 163 (Fall, 2002): 43-87.
Vandiver, Elizabeth. “Fireflies in a Jar.” Parnassus: Poetry in Review 21 (Winter, 1995): 59-76.