Hybrid Object
On William Maxwell's "So Long, See You Tomorrow"
William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow follows a nameless narrator writing about himself and also the story of the murder of Lloyd Wilson and the suicide of Clarence Smith, adults from a brief period in his childhood when he was friendly (not necessarily friends with) the son of Clarence, Cletus Smith. The narrator’s attempts to write about himself descend into musings and wonderings about Cletus and his life shrouded by murder and suicide. The narrator turns and spins the events over in his head hoping to discover motivation or simply truths about it, but then diverts to something near fantasy.
At one point early on, the novel might be understood as a memoir of a fictional life, and then later as an attempt at fiction on behalf of the nameless memoirist. The hybridization of these forms creates a constellation which points to various routes of analysis varying in utility, but the fundamental question of what to make of this book remains. At one point, the narrator offers a simple Freudian reading by suggesting that the events take place during a “pre-Freudian era.” By invoking an historical pre and post era, the memoirist doubly creates a pre and post era of this novel, the outer layer being built by the writer Maxwell himself. Similarly, this development of pre and post eras permits the memoirist the ability to have a pre-murder and post-murder vision of the events, drawing the reader into their subtilty and nuance without displacing facts into speculations. Arbitrary bifurcation then prepares the reader for the eventual split into a “mixture of truth and fiction” where the memoirist proceeds to lean into imagination.
It might be better to argue then that So Long, See You Tomorrow is simply a novel rather than a hybrid object. What matters in the distinction isn’t form or marketing but the presence of feeling and thus truth that emerges from naming it as properly as possible. It is in fact a simple first-person exploration of the narrator’s consciousness—his whims, wants, curiosities—telegraphed through a push and pull against the more tantalizing parts of the plot (infidelity, murder, suicide). His fascination with Cletus might be desirous, for example, but he doesn’t interrogate it on those terms. Instead, he thinks of himself like a “Greek chorus” observing the boy, who doesn’t attempt to console him but speaks instead in “broad generalities, grieves over the fate of mankind, whose mistake was to have been born in the first place.”
One key might be the truth around that pre-Freudian remark given that we later learn the narrator himself is in psychoanalysis. Is that pre-Freudian era worldly or individual? At the time of its announcement early on, it sounds worldly, just as the murder of Lloyd Wilson seems to be more essential to the narrator’s future life path. However, the murder, we find, is an obsession not an inciting event of his life, so the discussion of the pre-psychoanalytic curls into a personal statement. The upshot of this is then the layering of truth between reader, writer, and narrator. The two sets of truth, the real of the reader and the abstract of the novel, come into competition permitting the narrator to break through the facts of reading by giving over authority to imagination. That sense lies between the meaning making of the reader and the abstractions of a novel’s text.
The narrator uses the five senses to introduce these oppositions and allow himself entry into the imaginative. He becomes aware of “richness that wasn’t visual” and falls into a lyrical mode to extrapolate that for the reader: “dried out wood, rusting farm machinery, the manure pile, the pigpen, yarrow, onion grass, quicklime from the outhouse.[1]” He concludes with the phrase “all things considered” which produces an ironic affect where that phrase has an almost formal legal usage amidst the lyrical, individual explosion.
The tensions produced in the reading experience multiply the meanings Maxwell’s narrator begins with, thus allowing the reproduction of said meaning making into further extrapolations from the simple feelings of adolescent failure to the broader, more abstract senses of failing as a man, an American, a human being. He produces this by layering in narrative distances and reproducing, aesthetically, the distance one might often feel from their own ability to identify with the abstract categories of identification.
[1] While reading this section, I couldn’t help but think of the James Wright poem “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota.” There are probably more resonances with this poem and the novel especially the concluding line “I have wasted my life.”