The Life and Opinions of Marcus Aurelius Wherefore

Just retired from Confusion University, Marcus Aurelius Wherefore is determined to embark on a novel he has long anticipated writing about the twisted politics of his former department. He nurses in vivid mental form the stuff out of which he must actualize his dream, but the power to translate it into the written word seems always to evade him. None of this proposed creation is lost, however, for the reader of The Life and Opinions of Marcus Aurelius Wherefore, in which the scenes Mark was to fabricate emerge directly from recollection to the page in all their brilliant hues, more vivid than they might have been if he had fashioned them into words of his own. As he gropes ahead, Mark soon realizes, too, that he cannot continue his search to create without looking into other past and present spheres of existence beyond the university, into his own and those of the world at large. What evolves, as set down in this novel through a dynamic interweaving of memory and the present moment, is a comic journey through the world that Mark has always called his own but never quite understood--leading even to a visitation by novelists dead and gone and a translation into the afterlife. With widening and deepening vision, Mark's quest for greater understanding and higher achievement lies through a web of stories in which he mentally recreates life as it passes and life gone by, a broad spectrum of tales ranging from realism to fantasy: glowing accounts of the lost past; complex episodes of married life; Biblical stories retold; a tale of friendship and tragic loss; a mythical sojourn of a black cowboy among a fierce tribe of Indians; a look at the remnants of Marxism, and at minority and gender excesses out to the lunatic fringe. Interspersed with all these come interludes of political shenanigans in the Confusion University English department, the whole narrative climaxing in the politics of the Great Impeachment Farce. The novel is bound together in a powerful and fascinating form by the versatility of the protagonist-taleteller, whose sweeping narrative vision extends from simple tales through gripping adventure into hard-ball satire raking politics and intellectual life and social extremes over the coals. At the same time, a biting satire develops on contemporary literary criticism, particularly on theories of narratology, closing with the protagonist's vision of his own future in narrative: living and creating with his muse off yonder in a pastoral cyberland.