“A stranger arrives in an unknown city after a long voyage. He has been separated from his family for some time; somewhere there is a wife, perhaps a child. The journey has been a troubled one, and the stranger is tired. He stops before the building that is to be his home and then begins walking towards it: the final short leg of the improbable meandering way that has led him here.”
So begins Daniel Mendelsohn’s Three Rings. It’s a trope that will repeat itself in slightly altered form throughout the entire book, providing something like a rhythm or a pulse: After unimaginable violence and squalor, the exile finds a new makeshift home, itself destined to be destroyed so that the process may begin again. You can find it in Homer and James Joyce. Mendelsohn claims we can see it in our own lives as well.
On the surface, Three Rings is about literary form. Mendelsohn tells the history of the narrative digression, traipses through centuries of literary culture, and explains “ring composition,” or the technique of pivoting to the past in the middle of a story in order to elaborate on the significance of a detail before working back toward the story’s present tense. But what this book is really about is Mendelsohn’s attempt to make sense of generational trauma, exile, and survival. Joan Didion notoriously said that we tell stories in order to live. Mendelsohn wants to show us that the forms those stories take can also tell us something about life.
For Mendelsohn, things never move in a straight line. The arc of history always connects, always brings people and places full circle back to each other. As an anodyne example, Mendelsohn was once an undergrad at the University of Virginia and eventually returned decades later as an accomplished writer and professor to give the Page-Barbour lecture, which will be published as Three Rings. Mendelsohn’s alma mater was founded by Thomas Jefferson, a notorious polymath whose political beliefs were in no small part informed by a book that was once the bestselling novel in Europe, Les aventures de Telemaque, by Catholic Archbishop Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fenelon. The book, although on one hand a rather pedantic reproach of bad kings, was wonderfully inventive in terms of form, comprising nothing but digressions from the Odyssey. Fenelon borrowed this technique from the famous scene in the Odyssey in which Odysseus’s nursemaid recognizes him by the scar on his knee he got while boar-hunting as a child. In the time it takes her to drop her washrag into the basin, we’re given the entire backstory of the hunt. It’s one of the most famous scenes in all of world literature and the example with which the literary critic Erich Auerbach began Mimesis, his landmark study of how reality is depicted in Western literature. Auerbach wrote his book while living in Istanbul as a Jew on the run from Nazi Germany, just like the relatives Mendelsohn wrote about in some of his previous books. One of those books is about reading the Odyssey with his father, a text Mendelsohn first studied in depth at the University of Virginia.
In Three Rings, the lives people live and the books they read repeat or echo. Everything is connected in a vast web of correspondences. The slim book feels like a cross between a touching literary essay and a conspiracy theory. Mendelsohn expresses the spirit of his own book when he writes, distinguishing Homer’s digressions from mere distractions, “[The Odyssey’s] twists and turns are unified in their aim, which is to help us understand the one complete action that is the subject of the work to which they belong.”
But what is the “one complete action” of Three Rings? First, we need to ask what the three rings are. Or really, who they are. Although the book includes cameos from the likes of Doris Lessing, Marcel Proust, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Three Rings mostly orbits three figures: Auerbach, Fenelon, and W.G. Sebald. The lives of a persecuted Jewish literary critic, a 17th-cenutry archbishop who fell out of favor with the French king, and a self-exiled postwar German novelist might not seem to have much to do with one another, but in Mendelsohn’s hands, their lives and work create a kind of infinite refraction, like mirrors facing one another, evoking the almost terrifying sense that humans are fated to a pattern destined to repeat itself ad nauseam.
Mendelsohn begins Three Rings with an account of his near failures as a writer. After years of researching a book about his family’s experience during the Holocaust, for instance, he became almost too depressed to write the thing. “Every time I tried to begin a new project,” he writes, “it was as if I had become one of the elderly witnesses or survivors I’d written about: a vacant wanderer arrived at last at a blank new space, unable to go on.” His thoughts meander toward writing as a commemorative act and the writer as an “exhausted wanderer” who always finds himself in situations that rhyme with his own creations. Mendelsohn then wanders past Auerbach and his hopeful faith in the “common connectedness of all cultures” toward the adventurous digressions of Fenelon and the moral exhaustion explored by Sebald. The prose is clean and sophisticated:
This is where we shall leave Auerbach for now: at the once unimaginably distant point to which he fled and where he began to write, there just beyond the edge of Europe, the weary stranger arrived at the remote periphery where he will compose his masterpiece about the center, about the canonical texts of the West. Liberated, as Dante had been, by his exile, he is now able to surrender himself to memories of his intellectual and cultural home, memories which, because of what is happening there, are the only materials from which he will be able to build his model: a museum of civilization that has lost its identity.
Three Rings is beautiful, and its beauty justifies its wandering ambulations, but what it suggests is ultimately incohesive: We’re all exiles bound to each other through a shared cultural destruction and rebirth — victims, every last one of us. But without some sort of metaphysical heft to give it context, Mendelsohn’s sophistication is ultimately flat — well-written but sentimental and a little preening. Writing about Sebald, Mendelsohn says that his “circling merely exhausts us while never bringing us any closer to the subject.” Mendelsohn never exhausts, but he, too, seems to be orbiting some central moral or spiritual truth without ever actually expressing it.
On the other hand, Three Rings performs exactly what it describes. It’s an object of its own subject, a tiny model that maps out the horror and frustration of its author without giving in to the temptation of dry rhetoric. After reading Three Rings, you feel as if you yourself have wandered in and out of exile, searching the patterns of recurrences for some clue as to the source of your personal suffering. Mendelsohn writes at the end of his book that for the German Jew Auerbach, “Ring composition; a wandering technique that yet always finds its way home, a technique which, with its sunny Mediterranean assumption that there is indeed a connection between all things,” was “a little too good to be true.” Perhaps the reader of Three Rings will share Auerbach’s sentiment. But he won’t regret the journey.
Scott Beauchamp is the author of Did You Kill Anyone? and the novel Meatyard: 77 Photographs. He lives in Maine.
