"--But it's no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life.
--What? says Alf.
--Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred..."
-James Joyce, Ulysses
As a January snow softly falls upon all the living and the dead outside my window, I'm sitting here thinking about James Joyce and the future of the past. The future, that is, of Modernism (and its late phase, soi-disant postmodernism), and the need for a Modernist-style revolution in literature today. Not a national or a nationalist revolution, but an international, cosmopolitan movement or tendency. The last example of such a phenomenon was probably magic realism, a literary tendency that spread across the world like avian flu (although it was a considerably more beneficent epidemic). With Kafka and Cervantes as its cosmopolitan precursors, magic realism spanned the globe like Jim McKay, eventually entering English literature courtesy of a short kid from Bombay whom I will call Sal the Man. But this is all old literary news. We need a new revolution now, a new movement to energize the six addled souls who still give a shit. (Pessimism keeps me grounded.)... Yes, pessimism is realism, but let's not overdo it. Let's not talk/think ourselves into Morris Berman's infuriatingly attractive black hole of cultural despair. For me, that would be little more than artistic suicide--or, more appropriately, artistic abortion. It's necessary to remind oneself that the collapse of America--now well underway as the economy crashes through its worst slow-motion train wreck since 1929--is not the end of the world. It's the end of an idea of America, but so-called 'American ideals' (more properly, the ideals of the European Enlightenment) are actually being achieved more effectively in countries that will probably weather the current crisis better than the United States (France, Germany, Sweden). I'm not saying that Europe is a mixed-economy Promised Land while Reaganized and Bushified America is an insufferable hellhole; I'm merely pointing out that in Western Europe, although racism is rampant and the far rights are rising, decent health care is considered a right rather than a privilege of wealth, the political left (the real left, not the centrist liberals called 'leftists' by American 'conservatives') has a voice and a role in government, the social safety net is strong, and unions have real power. In short, the end of America is not the end of the world, and to be cosmopolitan today is to be ahead of the curve, ready for a decentered, pluralistic future, an age with multiple centers of power rather than a single superpower. It's going to be a dangerous next few decades, though, because America in decline will inevitably lash out like a wounded tiger. We will undoubtedly kill many thousands more before our death. How to counter this sickness, this psychopathology of national decline? Deploy cosmopolitanism, intellect, eros, the difficult pleasures of the greatest art. Work against the day by thinking against it and creating opportunities for thinking otherwise. That's probably the best and most that art can do.
"In a world of lies the lie is not removed from the world by means of its opposite, but only by means of a world of truth"--Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks
To provide opportunities for thinking otherwise. That may be the end, means and purpose of art, insofar as its sociopolitical efficacy is concerned. Books that are worth our time, books that strive toward the state of Kafka ice-axes, give their readers occasion to think differently, to ride thought-trains and make connections undreamt of in the hegemonic ideologies; such books increase the circumference and volume and depth of our imaginations; they show us the impossible--which can be defined as that which our dominant ideologies render unthinkable. This is the ultimately subversive chord struck by the slogan of our great-grandfathers' avant-garde: "Make it new." The authentically new, as opposed to the advertisers' 'new and improved,' is always the unthinkable, the unseeable, the unsayable, the unheimlich. An art worth more than a few minutes of our time must embody this, body it forth (to use a lovely archaism).
American writers today are in a dubiously privileged position for writing about hegemony because we're in the midst of it. We live at ground zero, we're citizens of Rome during the reign of Constantine (now hoping that Obama might be a successful Julian); the artifacts of corporatist ideology--its products, forms and structures--are all around us. It may be impossible to write about America today without writing in some way (even implicitly) about corporatism. This is the ideology that shapes the information we receive and pollutes the air we breathe; it's everywhere, riding each new wave of technology like a virus (this time hardly beneficent), infecting and infesting our minds until we mistake it for reality and can imagine no alternatives. Art can counter this exactly by imagining those alternatives, seeing the unseeable, speaking the silences, pushing back the claustrophobic horizons that threaten to crush us and inviting the world inside. That's what cosmopolitanism means to me: pushing back those horizons, expanding the imaginable world. We must counter the world of corporatist lies with a Kafkaesque "world of truth."
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
A FAN'S NOTES by Frederick Exley
"To talk about oneself a great deal can also be a means of concealing oneself." --Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Exley's A Fan's Notes isn't bad, but it certainly isn't great either. It doesn't live up to its most hyperbolic back cover blurb: "The best novel written in the English language since The Great Gatsby." Thus spake Newsday. Well... I know it's unfair to hold a book responsible for what a publisher's marketing department decides to slap on the back cover, but this kind of egregious hyperbole demands to be smacked down. The Sound and the Fury and Absalom! Absalom! are perhaps slightly better than A Fan's Notes and were both published between Gatsby's 1926 and Exley's 1968. But enough blurb criticism. The book itself is an interesting autobiographical fiction, a good literary drunkalogue with some excellent moments. The description of undergoing insulin and electroshock 'therapy' was especially well executed--no mean feat in dealing with subject matter that can easily slip into Snake Pit melodrama--and Exley actually managed to make interesting reading out of his months spent on a davenport staring at his feet. But I often found myself wondering what Exley wasn't telling us. What is he leaving out? I finished the book with the feeling that there was another novel (or 'fictional memoir,' to use Exley's term) concealed in the lacunae of A Fan's Notes. I also left the book thinking that for all Exley's eloquently expressed self-loathing, he probably didn't loathe himself as much as many readers will. And for all of his tough-writer, warts-and-all self-examination, there are major elements of Exley's character that remain tellingly unexamined (most strikingly, his homophobia), suggesting that at book's end, after all the apparent confessions, Exley's still living a life Socrates would consider hardly worth the effort.
Exley's A Fan's Notes isn't bad, but it certainly isn't great either. It doesn't live up to its most hyperbolic back cover blurb: "The best novel written in the English language since The Great Gatsby." Thus spake Newsday. Well... I know it's unfair to hold a book responsible for what a publisher's marketing department decides to slap on the back cover, but this kind of egregious hyperbole demands to be smacked down. The Sound and the Fury and Absalom! Absalom! are perhaps slightly better than A Fan's Notes and were both published between Gatsby's 1926 and Exley's 1968. But enough blurb criticism. The book itself is an interesting autobiographical fiction, a good literary drunkalogue with some excellent moments. The description of undergoing insulin and electroshock 'therapy' was especially well executed--no mean feat in dealing with subject matter that can easily slip into Snake Pit melodrama--and Exley actually managed to make interesting reading out of his months spent on a davenport staring at his feet. But I often found myself wondering what Exley wasn't telling us. What is he leaving out? I finished the book with the feeling that there was another novel (or 'fictional memoir,' to use Exley's term) concealed in the lacunae of A Fan's Notes. I also left the book thinking that for all Exley's eloquently expressed self-loathing, he probably didn't loathe himself as much as many readers will. And for all of his tough-writer, warts-and-all self-examination, there are major elements of Exley's character that remain tellingly unexamined (most strikingly, his homophobia), suggesting that at book's end, after all the apparent confessions, Exley's still living a life Socrates would consider hardly worth the effort.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
THE RECOGNITIONS by William Gaddis
I have just done something that few readers of literary fiction will ever do: I have finished The Recognitions. The book that I have referred to for years as my Penguin Classics Bad Conscience will trouble me no more. (Excuse me while I reset my shoulder; I just dislocated it patting myself on the back.) At the end of this first reading, I conclude that it's a book worth reading once, but probably not twice. And even as I type this, I remind myself that I sometimes don't recognize (pun intended) the greatness of a book until my second reading. My first reading of Ulysses left me bewildered and nonplussed; I've now read it 7 or 8 times and it's at the top of my 'favorite novels' list. On the other hand, the overwhelming greatness of some books (Tristram Shandy, The Master and Margarita, Jacques the Fatalist) was readily apparent to me during my first reading. I don't think The Recognitions belongs in that exalted company, and the reasons are several.
While the book begins very strongly, with a brilliant and beautifully written (and long, but it's so good the length doesn't bother me) first chapter describing Wyatt Gwyon's childhood in a narrative voice that surprisingly echoes the bitter ironies of Mark Twain's late style, the novel then very quickly goes off the rails. To mix metaphors, it's as though Gaddis puts his novel in a centrifuge and forces us to watch as the parts fly off in various directions. I also (and perhaps more appropriately given the book's repeated references to the atomic bomb) thought of those diagrams of the results of atom smashing experiments, with subatomic particles flying off on various trajectories. (This analogy probably fits Gravity's Rainbow better than The Recognitions.) While all of these analogies might be used to justify Gaddis's structure, none of them can explain away the book's biggest structural and conceptual flaw: with only a few surprising exceptions (Stanley, Mr. Pivner) the other characters Gaddis introduces are less interesting and original than Wyatt. The Wyatt Gwyon narrative is the book's strongest and strangest. The novel's big Dickensian world of other people and stories ultimately broadens Gaddis's themes without substantially deepening them.
I also think that about 300 pages could be cut from this novel without harming it a bit. There are too many cocktail parties, too many scenes at the bohemian cafe where Return to Sorrento is always playing on the jukebox, too many pages devoted to annoying minor characters who add little or nothing to the book, too much...well, just too much--of everything.
A perhaps subconscious motive for this overabundance may lie at the heart of the novel's strength, in the Wyatt Gwyon story itself. The Wyatt narrative is so original that it threatens to undermine the novel's major theme: the impossibility of authenticity and originality in the modern world. Here at the center of his own novel, Gaddis has constructed a solid (albeit highly ironized) answer to his novel's argument, a brilliant example of original, authentic artistic creation in the age of Dale Carnegie and Geritol. On some level Gaddis must have sensed the danger that the Wyatt narrative posed to his larger project, and this realization might have led to the desire to 'conceal' Wyatt behind a screen of cardboard cut-out characters, to bury his story under a flood of fakes and fakery. (Gaddis, were he still alive, might object that this was all exactly his point and that I've missed a level of irony. This is entirely possible. Even the Wyatt narrative, after all, is finally just like all the others: a bit of Gaddisean fakery built from the abracadabra of the author's words--and not entirely his words, come to think of it, for some of them were taken from J.G. Frazer and T.S. Eliot and...)
That said, there is some truly gorgeous and remarkable stuff in this book, even outside the Wyatt story. The Mephistophelean Recktall Brown is a wonderful creation with a perfectly crappy name. ("Recktall Brown is reality" says a character at one point.) The Stanley narrative at times comes close to the Wyatt storyline in terms of sheer religious weirdness, and Stanley's death is a near-perfect closing note, the church collapsing on top of him because he's an American and doesn't bother to learn Italian before traveling to Italy. (A nice little cautionary tale for Ugly Americans abroad.) Gaddis's characterization of Mr. Pivner, a man who takes Dale Carnegie as his textbook and ends up lobotomized in a prison for a crime he didn't commit, contains a few brief passages that are as close as the novel ever comes to moments of truly earned pathos. There are also a few passages that read like pitch-perfect predictions of the prose of Thomas Pynchon.
And therein lies a possible problem for Gaddis in literary historical terms. If nothing else, reading this book shows me a novel that Thomas Pynchon almost certainly read in college or shortly thereafter. (I detect a Recognitions influence as early as V.: Pynchon's New York characters seem to be twisted descendents of Gaddis's pseudo-intellectual pseudo-bohemians. And Gaddis's joke names [Agnes Deigh, the aforementioned Mr. Brown] must have licensed Pynchon's own occasionally awful puns.) The problem for Gaddis here is that the pupil (Pynchon) has so far outpaced his one-time master that the older writer might be relegated by literary history to the Marlovian shadows cast by Pynchon's "Shakespeherian" sunlight. Time is rarely kind to writers who show others the way to greater things. Have you read anything by Edouard Dujardin lately?
I began this post by saying that my Penguin Classics Bad Conscience would trouble me no more. That was perhaps a bit overly optimistic. It would be more correct to say that The Recognitions will henceforth bother me in a different way. Instead of mocking me with the fact of its unreadness, it will now nag me to read it again, to pick up on the things I inevitably missed the first time through. I probably will read this novel again, but not soon. I'll probably return to it sometime during the next decade. But before I do, I intend to read J.R., a book that I suspect might be better than this one.
While the book begins very strongly, with a brilliant and beautifully written (and long, but it's so good the length doesn't bother me) first chapter describing Wyatt Gwyon's childhood in a narrative voice that surprisingly echoes the bitter ironies of Mark Twain's late style, the novel then very quickly goes off the rails. To mix metaphors, it's as though Gaddis puts his novel in a centrifuge and forces us to watch as the parts fly off in various directions. I also (and perhaps more appropriately given the book's repeated references to the atomic bomb) thought of those diagrams of the results of atom smashing experiments, with subatomic particles flying off on various trajectories. (This analogy probably fits Gravity's Rainbow better than The Recognitions.) While all of these analogies might be used to justify Gaddis's structure, none of them can explain away the book's biggest structural and conceptual flaw: with only a few surprising exceptions (Stanley, Mr. Pivner) the other characters Gaddis introduces are less interesting and original than Wyatt. The Wyatt Gwyon narrative is the book's strongest and strangest. The novel's big Dickensian world of other people and stories ultimately broadens Gaddis's themes without substantially deepening them.
I also think that about 300 pages could be cut from this novel without harming it a bit. There are too many cocktail parties, too many scenes at the bohemian cafe where Return to Sorrento is always playing on the jukebox, too many pages devoted to annoying minor characters who add little or nothing to the book, too much...well, just too much--of everything.
A perhaps subconscious motive for this overabundance may lie at the heart of the novel's strength, in the Wyatt Gwyon story itself. The Wyatt narrative is so original that it threatens to undermine the novel's major theme: the impossibility of authenticity and originality in the modern world. Here at the center of his own novel, Gaddis has constructed a solid (albeit highly ironized) answer to his novel's argument, a brilliant example of original, authentic artistic creation in the age of Dale Carnegie and Geritol. On some level Gaddis must have sensed the danger that the Wyatt narrative posed to his larger project, and this realization might have led to the desire to 'conceal' Wyatt behind a screen of cardboard cut-out characters, to bury his story under a flood of fakes and fakery. (Gaddis, were he still alive, might object that this was all exactly his point and that I've missed a level of irony. This is entirely possible. Even the Wyatt narrative, after all, is finally just like all the others: a bit of Gaddisean fakery built from the abracadabra of the author's words--and not entirely his words, come to think of it, for some of them were taken from J.G. Frazer and T.S. Eliot and...)
That said, there is some truly gorgeous and remarkable stuff in this book, even outside the Wyatt story. The Mephistophelean Recktall Brown is a wonderful creation with a perfectly crappy name. ("Recktall Brown is reality" says a character at one point.) The Stanley narrative at times comes close to the Wyatt storyline in terms of sheer religious weirdness, and Stanley's death is a near-perfect closing note, the church collapsing on top of him because he's an American and doesn't bother to learn Italian before traveling to Italy. (A nice little cautionary tale for Ugly Americans abroad.) Gaddis's characterization of Mr. Pivner, a man who takes Dale Carnegie as his textbook and ends up lobotomized in a prison for a crime he didn't commit, contains a few brief passages that are as close as the novel ever comes to moments of truly earned pathos. There are also a few passages that read like pitch-perfect predictions of the prose of Thomas Pynchon.
And therein lies a possible problem for Gaddis in literary historical terms. If nothing else, reading this book shows me a novel that Thomas Pynchon almost certainly read in college or shortly thereafter. (I detect a Recognitions influence as early as V.: Pynchon's New York characters seem to be twisted descendents of Gaddis's pseudo-intellectual pseudo-bohemians. And Gaddis's joke names [Agnes Deigh, the aforementioned Mr. Brown] must have licensed Pynchon's own occasionally awful puns.) The problem for Gaddis here is that the pupil (Pynchon) has so far outpaced his one-time master that the older writer might be relegated by literary history to the Marlovian shadows cast by Pynchon's "Shakespeherian" sunlight. Time is rarely kind to writers who show others the way to greater things. Have you read anything by Edouard Dujardin lately?
I began this post by saying that my Penguin Classics Bad Conscience would trouble me no more. That was perhaps a bit overly optimistic. It would be more correct to say that The Recognitions will henceforth bother me in a different way. Instead of mocking me with the fact of its unreadness, it will now nag me to read it again, to pick up on the things I inevitably missed the first time through. I probably will read this novel again, but not soon. I'll probably return to it sometime during the next decade. But before I do, I intend to read J.R., a book that I suspect might be better than this one.
Monday, January 12, 2009
THE LAST CATHOLIC by Walter A. Davis
I have an unofficial rule here at Mindful Pleasures of only commenting on books that readers can (at least theoretically) read for themselves, but I'm breaking that rule today to write about an important book that has not yet been published and that I have had the privilege of reading in manuscript, Walter A. Davis's The Last Catholic.
Attentive readers of this blog might recognize Davis's name, but it deserves to be much better-known. A Professor Emeritus of English, now retired from Ohio State University, Davis is the author of the interdisciplinary nonfiction books Inwardness and Existence: Subjectivity in/and Hegel, Heidegger, Marx and Freud; Deracination: Historicity, Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative; Death's Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche Since 9/11; Get the Guests: Psychoanalysis, Modern American Drama and the Audience; and several other books (all of which can be purchased at Amazon.com).
His massive fictional work-in-progress, The Last Catholic (of which I have just read the finished first volume), is a novel unlike any other in American literature. To call it the story of a Catholic childhood, youth and young adulthood in 1950's Chicago is like calling Moby Dick a fishing story; to call it an American bildungsroman is like calling The Great Gatsby the story of a rich guy who gets capped. The Last Catholic is indeed a modern American version of an intellectual bildungsroman (or 'antibildungsroman,' as Davis has it); it's "the story of the growth of a mind," but it's also so much more: an intense psychological study of family relations and sexuality; a reinvention of the Naturalism/Realism of Dreiser and Sinclair (especially in a chapter in which Davis's narrator works one summer on a construction crew building a Chicago high-rise); an exploration of the dialectical relationship between reading and experience that effectively deconstructs the duality, showing that reading is experience (when done deeply); a phenomenology of reading containing multiple descriptions of the experience that are unlike anything in American literature; an unsparing account of teenage and young adult sexuality in the 1950s-60s and the regulation and deployment of this desire by social authorities (the family and the Catholic Church); an exploration of 'consciousness' as a fundamental reality that we cannot think past (although we can 'feel' our way into it by following our emotions)... And even this list doesn't exhaust the riches of Davis's novel. It's a book studded with original, stand-out scenes: a Rorschach test that culminates in the narrator's memory of viewing Willem de Kooning's Excavation; a bizarre, heartbreaking letter written to the narrator by a friend in a mental hospital; several scenes that are like anthropological descriptions of pre-Sixties American sexuality; one scene in a cloakroom at a Catholic school that absolutely nails the crazy fetishism of teenage male desire; in that same chapter, a description of Catholic education that takes the theme of martyrdom to places that will shock most readers; a near-journalistic account of the response of students at Marquette University to the Cuban Missile Crisis (a good portion of this novel is set at Marquette in the early Sixties, so it is, among other things, the Great Marquette Novel). In short, The Last Catholic is that rare thing in our country's literature, a philosophical novel that stands comparison to the great philosophical novels of Europe (some of which are discussed in detail in the book; the 'climax' of the novel comes when the narrator locks himself in a room for a week and reads The Brothers Karamazov, an experience that changes his life). Davis is writing an answer to all those who have wondered why American literature no longer deals with the 'Big Issues': Life, Death, the Meaning (or meaninglessness) of Existence. This is the kind of book that many Americans have been waiting and reading for. Any publisher who cares about the future of American literature as art and exploration should rush to acquire this book and publish it, making it available to a reading public that's famished for truly serious, complex and challenging fiction. Davis's novel promises to be an event in our literature. It deserves to be read.
Attentive readers of this blog might recognize Davis's name, but it deserves to be much better-known. A Professor Emeritus of English, now retired from Ohio State University, Davis is the author of the interdisciplinary nonfiction books Inwardness and Existence: Subjectivity in/and Hegel, Heidegger, Marx and Freud; Deracination: Historicity, Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative; Death's Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche Since 9/11; Get the Guests: Psychoanalysis, Modern American Drama and the Audience; and several other books (all of which can be purchased at Amazon.com).
His massive fictional work-in-progress, The Last Catholic (of which I have just read the finished first volume), is a novel unlike any other in American literature. To call it the story of a Catholic childhood, youth and young adulthood in 1950's Chicago is like calling Moby Dick a fishing story; to call it an American bildungsroman is like calling The Great Gatsby the story of a rich guy who gets capped. The Last Catholic is indeed a modern American version of an intellectual bildungsroman (or 'antibildungsroman,' as Davis has it); it's "the story of the growth of a mind," but it's also so much more: an intense psychological study of family relations and sexuality; a reinvention of the Naturalism/Realism of Dreiser and Sinclair (especially in a chapter in which Davis's narrator works one summer on a construction crew building a Chicago high-rise); an exploration of the dialectical relationship between reading and experience that effectively deconstructs the duality, showing that reading is experience (when done deeply); a phenomenology of reading containing multiple descriptions of the experience that are unlike anything in American literature; an unsparing account of teenage and young adult sexuality in the 1950s-60s and the regulation and deployment of this desire by social authorities (the family and the Catholic Church); an exploration of 'consciousness' as a fundamental reality that we cannot think past (although we can 'feel' our way into it by following our emotions)... And even this list doesn't exhaust the riches of Davis's novel. It's a book studded with original, stand-out scenes: a Rorschach test that culminates in the narrator's memory of viewing Willem de Kooning's Excavation; a bizarre, heartbreaking letter written to the narrator by a friend in a mental hospital; several scenes that are like anthropological descriptions of pre-Sixties American sexuality; one scene in a cloakroom at a Catholic school that absolutely nails the crazy fetishism of teenage male desire; in that same chapter, a description of Catholic education that takes the theme of martyrdom to places that will shock most readers; a near-journalistic account of the response of students at Marquette University to the Cuban Missile Crisis (a good portion of this novel is set at Marquette in the early Sixties, so it is, among other things, the Great Marquette Novel). In short, The Last Catholic is that rare thing in our country's literature, a philosophical novel that stands comparison to the great philosophical novels of Europe (some of which are discussed in detail in the book; the 'climax' of the novel comes when the narrator locks himself in a room for a week and reads The Brothers Karamazov, an experience that changes his life). Davis is writing an answer to all those who have wondered why American literature no longer deals with the 'Big Issues': Life, Death, the Meaning (or meaninglessness) of Existence. This is the kind of book that many Americans have been waiting and reading for. Any publisher who cares about the future of American literature as art and exploration should rush to acquire this book and publish it, making it available to a reading public that's famished for truly serious, complex and challenging fiction. Davis's novel promises to be an event in our literature. It deserves to be read.
Thursday, January 1, 2009
NEW YEAR, NEW FONT; REMEMBERING ROSA, OPPEN AND BUNUEL
A new year deserves a new font; Mindful Pleasures needs a typeface slightly more readable than last year's, with more distinct commas, periods and semicolons. Since the comma is my god and the semicolon my demigod, this matter is crucial. Here's hoping everyone prefers Verdana to the old Times.
Among my resolutions for 2009, I pledge to do everything within my admittedly slight powers to make the following three old dead artists better known:
SALVATOR ROSA (1615-73) was an Italian painter of the Baroque era. If you've been to any of the world's great art museums, you've undoubtedly walked past his paintings. Next time, stop and look. Rosa's marvelous, moody, proto-Romantic landscapes influenced 18th-century notions of the Sublime, and the London National Gallery's unforgettable Self-Portrait is a great portrait of the artist as judge, weighing his fellow men and women in the balance and finding them wanting. Rosa paints himself half-length against a grey sky; one hand rests on a tablet upon which is inscribed the Latin phrase Aut tace, aut loquere meliora silentio, "Either be silent, or speak things better than silence." I've never seen a painting by Rosa that was less than interesting (although he was a prolific and diverse artist, so I'm sure there are some duds out there). It's high time for one of the major museums (London National, Met, Louvre, Uffizi) to host a Rosa retrospective. Let's give this unknown-except-to-specialists master the respect he deserves.
GEORGE OPPEN (1908-1984) was an American poet who seems to have slipped back into obscurity in the years since his death. This fate probably wouldn't have surprised or much bothered Oppen, a lifelong left-wing activist who spent much of his life not writing but doing what philistines call ''real work": union organizing, working at an auto plant, fighting in WWII (he was a highly decorated soldier in the European theater), building houses, partnering in a small furniture business. But the other, more literary side of Oppen's life deserves to be remembered and read. For me, the stand-outs among his works are two long poems, "Route" (his great sui generis masterpiece) and "Of Being Numerous." The former begins:
"Tell the beads of the chromosomes like a rosary,
Love in the genes, if it fails
We will produce no sane man again..."
It also contains a couple of typically concise statements of Oppen's poetics: "I have not and never did have any motive of poetry / But to achieve clarity" and the brilliant "Words cannot be wholly transparent. And that is the / 'heartlessness' of words." The high point of "Route," though--and possibly the best thing Oppen ever wrote--is the prose section describing the horrors of life in Alsace under the Nazi occupation. This section was my introduction to Oppen. I heard Paul Auster (who knew Oppen during the 1970s; hell, Auster knew everybody during the 1970s) read this section at a PEN event a couple years ago, and when he was finished I thought, "Whoa! What the hell was that?! And why haven't I ever read it?" I encourage anyone who has never read Oppen to check him out. I'll end this discussion with another quote from the man himself:
"Obsessed, bewildered
By the shipwreck
Of the singular
We have chosen the meaning
Of being numerous."
LUIS BUNUEL (1900-1983) was the greatest of all Surrealist filmmakers. I'm always surprised when I mention Bunuel to Americans and discover that their knowledge of him begins and ends with the eye-slicing scene in Un Chien Andalou. Outside the subtitle-loving subculture of foreign film buffs (I'm a charter member), Bunuel's career is pretty much unknown here in freedom's home and bravery's land (as Gore Vidal called it). It's time for a Great American Bunuel Revival (or Introduction, as the case may be). It should become common knowledge that Bunuel had a career as long as Hitchcock's, beginning in silents and ending in the Seventies, and directed films as brilliant (and in their own way more shocking) as any created by the master of suspense. The great works of his last two decades deserve to become at least as well-known on these shores as the films of Fellini, Bergman and Truffaut. I especially recommend Viridiana, The Phantom of Liberty, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Belle de Jour, The Milky Way and That Obscure Object of Desire. Seek them out. Check them out. You won't be disappointed.
Among my resolutions for 2009, I pledge to do everything within my admittedly slight powers to make the following three old dead artists better known:
SALVATOR ROSA (1615-73) was an Italian painter of the Baroque era. If you've been to any of the world's great art museums, you've undoubtedly walked past his paintings. Next time, stop and look. Rosa's marvelous, moody, proto-Romantic landscapes influenced 18th-century notions of the Sublime, and the London National Gallery's unforgettable Self-Portrait is a great portrait of the artist as judge, weighing his fellow men and women in the balance and finding them wanting. Rosa paints himself half-length against a grey sky; one hand rests on a tablet upon which is inscribed the Latin phrase Aut tace, aut loquere meliora silentio, "Either be silent, or speak things better than silence." I've never seen a painting by Rosa that was less than interesting (although he was a prolific and diverse artist, so I'm sure there are some duds out there). It's high time for one of the major museums (London National, Met, Louvre, Uffizi) to host a Rosa retrospective. Let's give this unknown-except-to-specialists master the respect he deserves.
GEORGE OPPEN (1908-1984) was an American poet who seems to have slipped back into obscurity in the years since his death. This fate probably wouldn't have surprised or much bothered Oppen, a lifelong left-wing activist who spent much of his life not writing but doing what philistines call ''real work": union organizing, working at an auto plant, fighting in WWII (he was a highly decorated soldier in the European theater), building houses, partnering in a small furniture business. But the other, more literary side of Oppen's life deserves to be remembered and read. For me, the stand-outs among his works are two long poems, "Route" (his great sui generis masterpiece) and "Of Being Numerous." The former begins:
"Tell the beads of the chromosomes like a rosary,
Love in the genes, if it fails
We will produce no sane man again..."
It also contains a couple of typically concise statements of Oppen's poetics: "I have not and never did have any motive of poetry / But to achieve clarity" and the brilliant "Words cannot be wholly transparent. And that is the / 'heartlessness' of words." The high point of "Route," though--and possibly the best thing Oppen ever wrote--is the prose section describing the horrors of life in Alsace under the Nazi occupation. This section was my introduction to Oppen. I heard Paul Auster (who knew Oppen during the 1970s; hell, Auster knew everybody during the 1970s) read this section at a PEN event a couple years ago, and when he was finished I thought, "Whoa! What the hell was that?! And why haven't I ever read it?" I encourage anyone who has never read Oppen to check him out. I'll end this discussion with another quote from the man himself:
"Obsessed, bewildered
By the shipwreck
Of the singular
We have chosen the meaning
Of being numerous."
LUIS BUNUEL (1900-1983) was the greatest of all Surrealist filmmakers. I'm always surprised when I mention Bunuel to Americans and discover that their knowledge of him begins and ends with the eye-slicing scene in Un Chien Andalou. Outside the subtitle-loving subculture of foreign film buffs (I'm a charter member), Bunuel's career is pretty much unknown here in freedom's home and bravery's land (as Gore Vidal called it). It's time for a Great American Bunuel Revival (or Introduction, as the case may be). It should become common knowledge that Bunuel had a career as long as Hitchcock's, beginning in silents and ending in the Seventies, and directed films as brilliant (and in their own way more shocking) as any created by the master of suspense. The great works of his last two decades deserve to become at least as well-known on these shores as the films of Fellini, Bergman and Truffaut. I especially recommend Viridiana, The Phantom of Liberty, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Belle de Jour, The Milky Way and That Obscure Object of Desire. Seek them out. Check them out. You won't be disappointed.
Sunday, December 14, 2008
SPEAK, MEMORY by Vladimir Nabokov
Having commanded Mnemosyne to speak, Nabokov seems unable or unwilling to make her shut up. This work, the least impressive of Vlad the Inscriber's longer prose compositions, is distinguished by a desultory, rambling quality which none of the novels possess. Whenever Nabokov's fictional narrators wander tangentially away from the main line of a narrative, there's always a good reason for--and much of interest in--the digression, but when Nabokov-as-narrator wanders into genealogy, the joys of boys' western novels or the finer points of chess problems, this reader nods. There is too much that is boring and underexamined in this mis-subtitled work. (It's no kind of 'autobiography' at all; it is in fact the last example in the Western tradition of that quintessentially 18th-century literary form, the aristocratic memoir.) And it's surprising that Nabokov, who can ironize anything in his fiction, seems unable to cast a colder eye upon his childhood world. Instead, he gives us, for the most part, beautifully-written sentimentality, an almost ahistorical idyll, a record of a childhood paradise lost to the forces of ideology. Of course, the Nabokovian idyll rested on the backs of those barely seen servants, but Our Memoirist prefers not to notice the politics of his idyll--a repressive strategy as doomed as Zhivago's pastoral retreat... This is an odd, obsolete work, redeemed only by the beauty of its prose; even Nabokov's worst book is better written than the best book of just about any of his contemporaries... The biggest problem with Speak, Memory is the lack of any narrative arc. Rather than being a kind of postmodernism avant la lettre, this lack is better understood as a result of the book's piecemeal production. Each chapter, written at a specific time for a specific magazine, still bears the stamp of its occasion and resists integration into an autobiographical narrative. This is a recipe for boredom and redundancy. Also, Nabokov is simply too sentimental to subject those he loves (and those places he loved) to the burning ironic acid he deploys in Pale Fire and Lolita. This is as 'nice' as Vladimir Vladimirovich gets, and the work suffers for it.
There is, of course, another side to this book. There are sparkles in the Nabokovian mist: a few brilliant descriptive passages; an almost anthropological (or phenomenological) description of the life of the pre-Revolutionary Russian upper class; some passages that appear to have influenced W.G. Sebald who, in a rare critical lapse, pronounced this book (or at least parts of it) 'sublime'. (Maybe not so much of a lapse, if thus qualified.)
There is, of course, another side to this book. There are sparkles in the Nabokovian mist: a few brilliant descriptive passages; an almost anthropological (or phenomenological) description of the life of the pre-Revolutionary Russian upper class; some passages that appear to have influenced W.G. Sebald who, in a rare critical lapse, pronounced this book (or at least parts of it) 'sublime'. (Maybe not so much of a lapse, if thus qualified.)
HIS DARK MATERIALS trilogy by Philip Pullman
I like Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy so far (I'm about halfway through vol.2). The Subtle Knife, thus far, lacks the inventiveness and originality of The Golden Compass, but I'm still reading...The anti-theological satire seems more pronounced in book two, a trend which I hope continues, because Pullman has hit upon a fascinating idea for an alternate Earth: What would Europe look like if the Reformation had failed? No schism in Christendom, no Enlightenment, science referred to as 'experimental theology' and priestly spies posted to all science laboratories. This is all marvelous stuff, and Pullman handles it so subtly that only adults or attentive teens will pick up on it all.
[LATER]
Having just finished The Subtle Knife, I'm beginning to appreciate the Romantic audacity of Pullman's project. He is rewriting Paradise Lost in Nietzschean terms, imagining a story in which 'Adam' and 'Eve' bring about the death of God, destroy 'the Authority.' Magnificent. If he can pull this off, I will remove my hat and humbly eat it. This is a Romantic act worthy of his own daimonic Lord Asriel. Upon book three, The Amber Spyglass, rests the question of the success or failure of Pullman's Miltonic rebellion.
[EVEN LATER]
Well, Pullman didn't quite pull it off. The trilogy runs very well for most of its length, with few missteps, but then in the last third of The Amber Spyglass Pullman prematurely climaxes his most adventurous storyline, leaving the book to limp toward an anticlimactic, unsurprising denouement. A truly disappointing ending--and damn bad narrative construction. Until the last 100 pages, though, His Dark Materials is superior fantasy, illuminated by flashes of strong, strange greatness that lift it out of the genre bin and onto the literature shelf. Specifically, I'm thinking of the alethiometer and its interpretation, which can be interpreted as an allegory of reading; of the mulefa world, an invention worthy of Calvino; of the 'subtle knife' itself, a Borgesian space-time instrument that cuts like a moviola between different narrative worlds; of the very Borgesian concept of the possibly infinite number of parallel worlds; of Iofur Raknison's grand, gaudy, filth-strewn bear palace; of the dismal 'refugee camp' of the dead. This is all marvelous stuff--intelligent, literary fantasy at its best--and it's wonderful to think that kids and teenagers will read it and perhaps move on to investigate the works alluded to (Milton, Blake, Keats, etc.). Just as Jim Morrison led me to Blake many years ago, Philip Pullman might pull contemporary young people toward the canon. Harold Bloom's fulminations over Harry Potter's success seem overly curmudgeonly in light of the fact that some Harryheads will inevitably become Pullmaniacs and have their appetites whetted for the old books that inform Pullman's new ones. As a bonus, there's some biting anti-Christian satire in these books that simply delighted me.
[LATER]
Having just finished The Subtle Knife, I'm beginning to appreciate the Romantic audacity of Pullman's project. He is rewriting Paradise Lost in Nietzschean terms, imagining a story in which 'Adam' and 'Eve' bring about the death of God, destroy 'the Authority.' Magnificent. If he can pull this off, I will remove my hat and humbly eat it. This is a Romantic act worthy of his own daimonic Lord Asriel. Upon book three, The Amber Spyglass, rests the question of the success or failure of Pullman's Miltonic rebellion.
[EVEN LATER]
Well, Pullman didn't quite pull it off. The trilogy runs very well for most of its length, with few missteps, but then in the last third of The Amber Spyglass Pullman prematurely climaxes his most adventurous storyline, leaving the book to limp toward an anticlimactic, unsurprising denouement. A truly disappointing ending--and damn bad narrative construction. Until the last 100 pages, though, His Dark Materials is superior fantasy, illuminated by flashes of strong, strange greatness that lift it out of the genre bin and onto the literature shelf. Specifically, I'm thinking of the alethiometer and its interpretation, which can be interpreted as an allegory of reading; of the mulefa world, an invention worthy of Calvino; of the 'subtle knife' itself, a Borgesian space-time instrument that cuts like a moviola between different narrative worlds; of the very Borgesian concept of the possibly infinite number of parallel worlds; of Iofur Raknison's grand, gaudy, filth-strewn bear palace; of the dismal 'refugee camp' of the dead. This is all marvelous stuff--intelligent, literary fantasy at its best--and it's wonderful to think that kids and teenagers will read it and perhaps move on to investigate the works alluded to (Milton, Blake, Keats, etc.). Just as Jim Morrison led me to Blake many years ago, Philip Pullman might pull contemporary young people toward the canon. Harold Bloom's fulminations over Harry Potter's success seem overly curmudgeonly in light of the fact that some Harryheads will inevitably become Pullmaniacs and have their appetites whetted for the old books that inform Pullman's new ones. As a bonus, there's some biting anti-Christian satire in these books that simply delighted me.
HUMANITY: A MORAL HISTORY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY by Jonathan Glover
In this fine, terrible, chilling book, Glover points out an important and compelling distinction between Nazism and the other major totalitarian ideology of the 20th century, Stalinism. The communist genocides (Stalinist and Maoist terrors and famines, the Gulag, the Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot's 'Year Zero') can be tenuously traced to Enlightenment utopianism, albeit in nationalistically twisted forms. Part of their horror lies in the fact that these governments created hells in the name of building paradises. The Nazi terror was of a different philosophical order. It was a pre-Enlightenment movement fueled by a vision of ultimate German dominance, the 'thousand-year reich.' For the Nazis, the creation of hell on Earth was the end, not the means. Obviously this is a quibble from the point of view of the millions of victims of these regimes, but I think it does suggest a reason for the special horror the Nazi atrocities evoke in us. The Nazis, in the middle of modern Europe in the middle of the Modernist century, prided themselves on their anti-Utopianism. To adapt Martin Amis, they built an autobahn to the animal brain, and millions of people eagerly speeded to the end of that road.
LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov
Upon re-reading Lolita yet again, I'm impressed by Nabokov's modernization of Flaubert in his characterizations of Charlotte Haze (especially) and Lolita. Nabokov (or Nabokov's novel, by no means the same thing) appreciates the extent to which our selves, as we perform them, are imitations of mass media prototypes. Recall the scene in which Charlotte and Humbert can communicate 'deeply' only because his expressions and her consciousness have been cribbed from the same sources: sentimental movies, cheap novels, popular magazines--the massmedia of midcentury America.
There's really nothing new or 'post-modern' about this. It's a concept as old as long-form fiction, and a history of the novel might be written with this theme as its through-line: the novel as a critique of 'the culture of the novel,' the culture in which novels and other media products aid in the production of the self, the process that we over-optimistically call 'socialization.' This is a concern--although not, of course, expressed in these terms--of Western fiction from Don Quixote (driven mad by books) to Madame Bovary (destroyed by sentimental fiction) to Huckleberry Finn (a Cervantine critique of Walter Scottish novels) to Lolita, and then there's The Great Gatsby, that little primer on the construction of the self under capitalism. Nutshelled, the idea is that while only a few human beings make books (or movies or TV shows), books make millions upon millions of human beings. Again, this is hardly a new idea; Oscar Wilde had it more than a century ago. But the persistence of the theme from the birth of the novel in Renaissance Spain to its death(?) in the hypertextual 2000s (Is it death or transfiguration? Calling Richard Strauss... If it's anything, this carping on the death of the novel or the death of reading is a symptom of Western provincialism and intellectual exhaustion; the novel is very much alive and constantly metamorphosing around the world today; the reports of its death emanating from American academic ghettos are all greatly exaggerated.) suggests that there's something in the basic structure and/or ideology of the novel (all novels) that is self-conscious, reflective, self-referential, that the novel is an inherently critical medium, perhaps the only essentially critical narrative form. One aspect of the novel's work is to produce a mirror of that work, reflecting the dangers of its reading back upon the reader. Is this a result of novelists' barely conscious Platonic/puritanical 'bad consciences', their anxieties about the negative results of the representations they struggle so mightily to produce? Or is some other mechanism at work? Is the structure of the novel something like the structure of the mind? The mind, thinking, reflects upon its own thought processes, inventing fictional characters such as Mr. Mind, Ms. Thought, the whole vague Memory Family, in order to better dramatize and comprehend a process that is--according to the best science we have--a business of webby tissues and chemical baths. The structure of the novel mimics the structure of the mind--not to be confused with the brain, creator of both.
Well, as I was saying before my brain fired off that cognitive digression, this 3rd or 4th reading of Lolita revealed a few things I hadn't noticed before, such as the central lag in the book's structure. Part One is very good, but the first half of Part Two disappoints (as I believe it did on my previous readings, but the book's better parts relegated it to oblivion in my memory). The long, Whitmanesque catalogs of motels and roadside attractions that begin the section, while often funny, quickly blur into a gray haze of American white noise, information overload. The section is a Nabokovian travesty of Flaubert's famous "He travelled" passage near the end of Sentimental Education, but the beauty of the source lies in its unrealistic brevity. Humbert's travels, by contrast, are more exhausting than enjoyable. And yet...and yet, even as I write this I wonder if that might not be exactly the point...It may be impossible to definitively criticize a work so endlessly ironic; any critique feels like a foot placed squarely into a beartrap laid by the shadowy V. Siren (or is it the umbral Vivian Darkbloom?)
There's really nothing new or 'post-modern' about this. It's a concept as old as long-form fiction, and a history of the novel might be written with this theme as its through-line: the novel as a critique of 'the culture of the novel,' the culture in which novels and other media products aid in the production of the self, the process that we over-optimistically call 'socialization.' This is a concern--although not, of course, expressed in these terms--of Western fiction from Don Quixote (driven mad by books) to Madame Bovary (destroyed by sentimental fiction) to Huckleberry Finn (a Cervantine critique of Walter Scottish novels) to Lolita, and then there's The Great Gatsby, that little primer on the construction of the self under capitalism. Nutshelled, the idea is that while only a few human beings make books (or movies or TV shows), books make millions upon millions of human beings. Again, this is hardly a new idea; Oscar Wilde had it more than a century ago. But the persistence of the theme from the birth of the novel in Renaissance Spain to its death(?) in the hypertextual 2000s (Is it death or transfiguration? Calling Richard Strauss... If it's anything, this carping on the death of the novel or the death of reading is a symptom of Western provincialism and intellectual exhaustion; the novel is very much alive and constantly metamorphosing around the world today; the reports of its death emanating from American academic ghettos are all greatly exaggerated.) suggests that there's something in the basic structure and/or ideology of the novel (all novels) that is self-conscious, reflective, self-referential, that the novel is an inherently critical medium, perhaps the only essentially critical narrative form. One aspect of the novel's work is to produce a mirror of that work, reflecting the dangers of its reading back upon the reader. Is this a result of novelists' barely conscious Platonic/puritanical 'bad consciences', their anxieties about the negative results of the representations they struggle so mightily to produce? Or is some other mechanism at work? Is the structure of the novel something like the structure of the mind? The mind, thinking, reflects upon its own thought processes, inventing fictional characters such as Mr. Mind, Ms. Thought, the whole vague Memory Family, in order to better dramatize and comprehend a process that is--according to the best science we have--a business of webby tissues and chemical baths. The structure of the novel mimics the structure of the mind--not to be confused with the brain, creator of both.
Well, as I was saying before my brain fired off that cognitive digression, this 3rd or 4th reading of Lolita revealed a few things I hadn't noticed before, such as the central lag in the book's structure. Part One is very good, but the first half of Part Two disappoints (as I believe it did on my previous readings, but the book's better parts relegated it to oblivion in my memory). The long, Whitmanesque catalogs of motels and roadside attractions that begin the section, while often funny, quickly blur into a gray haze of American white noise, information overload. The section is a Nabokovian travesty of Flaubert's famous "He travelled" passage near the end of Sentimental Education, but the beauty of the source lies in its unrealistic brevity. Humbert's travels, by contrast, are more exhausting than enjoyable. And yet...and yet, even as I write this I wonder if that might not be exactly the point...It may be impossible to definitively criticize a work so endlessly ironic; any critique feels like a foot placed squarely into a beartrap laid by the shadowy V. Siren (or is it the umbral Vivian Darkbloom?)
Saturday, December 13, 2008
THE BLANK SLATE by Steven Pinker
The deafening silence that accompanied the 2002 publication of Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate (If there was an outcry, I didn't hear it.) was the unmistakable sound of a paradigm shifting. If this book had been published 20 or 25 years earlier, it would have ignited furious scholarly denunciations, critical conferences, even public demonstrations, but it seems that sometime around the millennium a new paradigm slid into place, and the ideas that ignited the 'sociobiology wars' of the 1970s-80s in academe have achieved broad acceptance. This book does seem to be the final and decisive nail in the coffin of a kind of radical social constructionism that creeped from sociology and literary theory into biology in the 1970's-90's. It replaces the concept of mind as a tabula rasa written upon by patriarchal capitalist society with a more nuanced approach to mind informed by recent research in neuroscience, genetics, cognitive science, evolutionary theory, etc. In short, Pinker compellingly argues that genes and heredity and evolutionary history ('biology' in the broadest sense) are more important in determining the construction of the self than any of the current 'star' thinkers in the American humanities have been willing to admit. If the self is likened to a computer, all of the hardware and a significant percentage of the software is assembled and loaded at the genetic factory; culture and society load the rest of the software and tinker with the hardware, but who we are is profoundly genetic. This is a chastening notion for anyone who has come into self-consciousness in an intellectual world dominated by Foucault, Derrida, Lacan and their American disciples--even for someone like me who reads them with a large bag of rock salt--but it's good and healthy (it is meet, as Shakespeare might have said) to be intellectually chastened every once in a while. The nature-nurture debate is by no means over (and I suspect Pinker underestimates the importance of environment), but the massive amount of evidence he marshals from anthropology, biology, medicine, etc. should make it virtually impossible for anyone to argue that the biological component of personality and behavior is negligible or that there is no fundamental 'human nature' shared by all homo sapiens regardless of culture. The book is already forcing me to re-examine my existentialism. Yes, Virginia, there is an 'essence' and it precedes our individual existences by tens of thousands of years. There is, in other words, a human nature, and its existence is powerfully demonstrated by the many columns of cultural universals in the back of Pinker's book (some of which are, admittedly, highly abstract and arguable). So the fundamental principle of Sartrean existentialism is incorrect. Can I 'save' Sartre, save what's valuable for me in existentialism (its godless ethics, its insistence on free will, 'thrownness' and the absurdity of existence)? I think I can, even in the face of the idea that not only what makes us similar but what makes us individual (tendencies toward aggression, melancholy, happiness, etc.) may well be genetically programmed. The key to saving an existentialist outlook lies in the realization that we are hardly the slaves of our genetic inheritance. First, we must appreciate that the genetic inheritance is complex and contradictory. We have evolved frontal lobes, for example, that control and repress the violent impulses in the brain's limbic system. (Incidentally, this is a good example of contemporary neuroscience independently confirming Freud's theories of repression and showing their material basis.). Second, we have developed self-consciousness and the abilities to reason, to empathize, to feel compassion, to love irrationally. All of these may be genetic inheritances, but we have the freedom to put them into play against other, darker inheritances. That's where the crucial existential choices come in.
What are the downsides of Pinker's book? His theories can be easily misused by the far right (and even left) to justify differential social and legal measures, but one hopes this is a characteristic only of the wacko political fringe. There are a few passages in which I think Pinker comes very close to racism, and overall the book does seem to be concealing a neoconservative bias. From a methodological standpoint, Pinker is seemingly oblivious to the dangers of his own 'paradigm creep', even as he decries the creeping paradigms of the 'blank slate' and the 'noble savage'. This is especially evident in the chapter on art, which reads like an afterthought that should have been excised. Pinker is far outside his area of competence here, and it shows.
What are the downsides of Pinker's book? His theories can be easily misused by the far right (and even left) to justify differential social and legal measures, but one hopes this is a characteristic only of the wacko political fringe. There are a few passages in which I think Pinker comes very close to racism, and overall the book does seem to be concealing a neoconservative bias. From a methodological standpoint, Pinker is seemingly oblivious to the dangers of his own 'paradigm creep', even as he decries the creeping paradigms of the 'blank slate' and the 'noble savage'. This is especially evident in the chapter on art, which reads like an afterthought that should have been excised. Pinker is far outside his area of competence here, and it shows.
THE GOD DELUSION by Richard Dawkins
One of the things that has long attracted me to Richard Dawkins--and which is on frequent display throughout The God Delusion--is his intellectual pugnacity. His seemingly fearless straightforwardness comes like a refreshing breeze into a public sphere where too many academics fear offending their colleagues, superiors, the public, the mullahs (Muslim and Christian), etc. Dawkins is not 'nice'; that is, he doesn't tiptoe across the linguistic eggshells of politically correct discourse, trying above all not to offend. The P.C. disease, rampant in the American academy a decade ago, happily never made it to Dawkins's Oxford office. This undoubtedly reflects a cultural difference between the fervid fundamentalist-tending U.S. and the more laid-back relative secularism of contemporary Britain. (These are of course gross generalizations, but I'm thinking out loud here...no one should expect rigor.) This thought leads me to wonder about the hypocrisies of P.C.: wasn't this (isn't this) really conservatism in radical leftist drag? Whatever leftist intentions may have been behind P.C., by the time this doctrine of inoffensive blandness became institutionalized it was already a reactionary conversation-stifler, an attempt to embrace everyone and everything while discouraging incisive criticism in the names of pluralism, multiculturalism and 'respect'. Pluralism is my philosophy; multiculturalism is the reality in which we live; but respect need not be accorded to horrendous ideas and practices (female genital mutilation, circumcision, the suicidal fantasies of David Koresh) in the names of pluralism and multiculturalism. And perhaps we can best show our respect for other human beings (who are more worthy of it than any religion) by giving them a candle and a key, showing them a possible way out, an alternative worldview, another way of living.
Friday, December 12, 2008
ON THE NATURAL HISTORY OF DESTRUCTION by W.G. Sebald
Sebald's On The Natural History of Destruction is almost as astonishing and moving as his prose fictions. Beautifully controlled by Sebald's magisterial prose, it's a guided tour of hell that never lapses into hysteria--and is all the more horrible for that. I note a connection between what Sebald works toward in the title piece (a 'natural history' built out of the powerfully evocative images into which history has crystallized) and American philosopher Walter A. Davis's emphasis in Deracination on the power of images to communicate history's horrors. Thinking about this similarity sets me wondering if Sebald might have read Davis's 1989 magnum opus, Inwardness and Existence, a book that seems to be slightly better known in the British academy than the American (the current Archbishop of Canterbury has referenced it). It's possible, but I suspect the similarity is born of the fact that two writers of the same era and age (I think Davis is 2 or 3 years older than Sebald) who read many of the same books may arrive at similar ideas, even if they live a hemisphere apart. Anyway, the Natural History sits as both complement to and commentary upon Sebald's fictions, and as such it evokes a particularly Sebaldian melancholy in this reader when he considers how much was lost in those few seconds on an English highway in late 2001.
THE CONFUSIONS OF YOUNG TORLESS by Robert Musil
This is a very well-written but rather minor novel. It's also tiresomely overwritten in places, with characters commanding rhetorics far beyond their years. While reading it I frequently asked myself, How can a novel this short be this boring? The answer: Musil 'tells' us too much instead of 'showing' us the characters' psyches via observed actions. There's also a certain desultory quality in the narrative structure that drains away intensity. Musil takes about 40 pages, for example, to reach the point at which the book should have begun. But there are consolations in the book: some passages of prose-poetry are quite impressive; and the final interview scene, in which each of the instructors attempts to enlist Torless's thoughts into his own weltanschauung while Torless resists and insists upon the individuality of his experiences (and is consequently drummed out of the institution), is a nice bit of Musilean irony.
A personal note: Upon beginning this book I remembered reading it once before but could recall absolutely nothing about it. I now believe that this must be because I hadn't actually read it. I must have abandoned it after a few pages back in the autumn of 2001, a time when national hysteria rendered the goings-on at an Austro-Hungarian boys' school rather beside the point...(Or maybe the novel's juvenile martial setting cut a little too close to the post-9/11 bone.)
A personal note: Upon beginning this book I remembered reading it once before but could recall absolutely nothing about it. I now believe that this must be because I hadn't actually read it. I must have abandoned it after a few pages back in the autumn of 2001, a time when national hysteria rendered the goings-on at an Austro-Hungarian boys' school rather beside the point...(Or maybe the novel's juvenile martial setting cut a little too close to the post-9/11 bone.)
WILL IN THE WORLD by Stephen Greenblatt
Unlike most of his contemporaries in the academy, Stephen Greenblatt writes a clear, attractive prose. His style is illuminated with glimmers of mild wit and carries surprisingly uncluttered arguments. In short, the man writes well, and this makes his book worth reading. As for his arguments, he's too eager to place the young Shakespeare in a world of Catholic conspiracy (probably because it's an entertaining subject that Greenblatt wants to write about), but his identification of Robert Greene as an original of Falstaff is as clever as it is compelling. The biggest problem with Greenblatt's book is its generic classification. This isn't 'nonfiction' at all. It is as much a tapestry woven from authorial supposition and educated guesswork as Burgess's Nothing Like The Sun and deserves to be placed alongside that novel as an imaginative improvisation (albeit by a narrator more sober than Burgess's) upon Shakespearean themes. All Shakespeare biographies are finally historical novels; given the paucity of significant information about the subject's life, they can be nothing else. Greenblatt's book might have benefitted from more self-consciousness in this area.
BELOVED by Toni Morrison
And now it's time for a little heresy:
Toni Morrison's Beloved is not a great novel. In fact, it's not even a very good one. It's too slow, too long, contains scenes of such overripe melodrama that any other literary writer would be chastised for including them, and--now I commit the heresy of heresies--it's not even especially well-written. That's right. Morrison's much-lauded prose doesn't impress me much. Even in her celebrated lyrical passages she seems to be forcing intensity into her lines through obvious rhetorical devices such as repetition (writing "slowly, slowly" when a simple "slowly" would do). There's also one glaring logical problem with the narrative, unresolved at the halfway point: surely one of Paul D's acquaintances or coworkers would have informed him of Sethe's past very soon after his arrival in Cincinnati. Paul's ignorance is simply not credible and exists solely so Morrison can manipulate her readers by slowly lifting the curtain on her murder scene.
Toni Morrison's Beloved is not a great novel. In fact, it's not even a very good one. It's too slow, too long, contains scenes of such overripe melodrama that any other literary writer would be chastised for including them, and--now I commit the heresy of heresies--it's not even especially well-written. That's right. Morrison's much-lauded prose doesn't impress me much. Even in her celebrated lyrical passages she seems to be forcing intensity into her lines through obvious rhetorical devices such as repetition (writing "slowly, slowly" when a simple "slowly" would do). There's also one glaring logical problem with the narrative, unresolved at the halfway point: surely one of Paul D's acquaintances or coworkers would have informed him of Sethe's past very soon after his arrival in Cincinnati. Paul's ignorance is simply not credible and exists solely so Morrison can manipulate her readers by slowly lifting the curtain on her murder scene.
INVISIBLE MAN by Ralph Ellison
Rereading Invisible Man, I find it even more intriguing and impressive than on my first reading, even though I'm now better equipped to spot its flaws, such as the Faulkner pastiche at the beginning of chapter five (Ellison sounding more like Oxford Bill than KC Ralph, exactly what one would expect of an American working on his first novel ca.1950) and the way Ellison explicitly states the subject of the next chapter at the end of each. Both are rookie errors and should be covered under the slack that readers must always grant a promising first novel, regardless of the reams of praise and commentary it has accrued.
But even with all its flaws--the intriguing minor characters who breeze past us and are lost to the narrative like missed exits on a freeway, the passages that sound too Faulknerian or Hemingwayesque, the rookie mistakes--Invisible Man remains a great novel that contains moments of awesome, astonishing power. Its greatness is on a level with The Tin Drum but not with Ulysses. Upon finishing it, I wonder if the ideology of liberal individualism expressed in the final pages is sufficiently exemplified by the preceding narrative, or if Ellison's flights of imagination lay the book open to deconstructive readings that might push the novel's ostensible liberalism into something more radical and militant (a kind of anarchism, perhaps) or more conservative (considering the novel's condescension toward its female characters). I suspect that the final fiction is less ideologically stable than Ellison intended, hence the explicit statement of ideology in the epilogue.
That said, Ellison's improvisations, his imaginative flights, his surrealism, all of this is marvelous. The novel is a better blend of naturalism and symbolism than Edmund Wilson achieved in Hecate County, and it approaches Kafka in its nightmarish intensity and inventiveness. This is the way to write an American novel.
But even with all its flaws--the intriguing minor characters who breeze past us and are lost to the narrative like missed exits on a freeway, the passages that sound too Faulknerian or Hemingwayesque, the rookie mistakes--Invisible Man remains a great novel that contains moments of awesome, astonishing power. Its greatness is on a level with The Tin Drum but not with Ulysses. Upon finishing it, I wonder if the ideology of liberal individualism expressed in the final pages is sufficiently exemplified by the preceding narrative, or if Ellison's flights of imagination lay the book open to deconstructive readings that might push the novel's ostensible liberalism into something more radical and militant (a kind of anarchism, perhaps) or more conservative (considering the novel's condescension toward its female characters). I suspect that the final fiction is less ideologically stable than Ellison intended, hence the explicit statement of ideology in the epilogue.
That said, Ellison's improvisations, his imaginative flights, his surrealism, all of this is marvelous. The novel is a better blend of naturalism and symbolism than Edmund Wilson achieved in Hecate County, and it approaches Kafka in its nightmarish intensity and inventiveness. This is the way to write an American novel.
MY LIFE AS A FAKE by Peter Carey
Carey's My Life As A Fake is surprisingly good, considering the lukewarm-at-best reviews it received upon publication. It's a very enjoyable, original, quite clever literary novel--perhaps too clever for its own good, since it apparently flew over the heads of most reviewers. They failed to appreciate Carey's deliberate, often subtle, sometimes intertextual, provocations of disbelief, his many signals that the text we're reading is, like all the other narratives and texts it contains, a 'fake,' a fiction the validity of which must be questioned and the motives of its teller examined. It's a delicious book, delightful, maybe the most purely enjoyable thing Carey has yet written.
There are so many levels in this deceptively simple narrative that I can only acknowledge Carey's preeminence as the most audacious faker of them all. Carey leads us into his fictional Barnum house, his fabric of potential falsehoods, his narrative of blind alleys, hidden sanctuaries, dubious texts, just as (in one possible interpretation) John Slater leads Sarah Wade-Douglas into the labyrinth of Kuala Lampur in order to use her as the bait in his plot to avenge himself on Christopher Chubb for the Noussette affair, when Chubb successfully 'played' him. This interpretation only came to me in an 'aha' moment a couple of hours after finishing the novel, and I think it's a valid solution--and Carey's failure to reveal it in the text is also justified, since his narrator is unable to see herself as a mere pawn in Slater's malicious plot. She doesn't ask herself the right questions, she fails to appreciate the fictitious nature of her reality--a glaring failure, to the attentive reader. What a wonderful novel!
There are so many levels in this deceptively simple narrative that I can only acknowledge Carey's preeminence as the most audacious faker of them all. Carey leads us into his fictional Barnum house, his fabric of potential falsehoods, his narrative of blind alleys, hidden sanctuaries, dubious texts, just as (in one possible interpretation) John Slater leads Sarah Wade-Douglas into the labyrinth of Kuala Lampur in order to use her as the bait in his plot to avenge himself on Christopher Chubb for the Noussette affair, when Chubb successfully 'played' him. This interpretation only came to me in an 'aha' moment a couple of hours after finishing the novel, and I think it's a valid solution--and Carey's failure to reveal it in the text is also justified, since his narrator is unable to see herself as a mere pawn in Slater's malicious plot. She doesn't ask herself the right questions, she fails to appreciate the fictitious nature of her reality--a glaring failure, to the attentive reader. What a wonderful novel!
THE TWILIGHT OF AMERICAN CULTURE and DARK AGES AMERICA by Morris Berman
Reading Morris Berman's almost unrelievedly pessimistic--and, tragically, almost completely convincing--volumes of social criticism, The Twilight of American Culture (2000) and Dark Ages America (2006), I feel as though I'm being infected by Berman's hopelessness, his too-compelling vision of an America already too far gone to avoid cultural death. Surely he's being too pessimistic, focusing too much on the very dark 'dark side' of contemporary America while not recognizing that he can only make his case with information gleaned from the works of those who represent another side, one he slights, the embattled and marginalized but still active left-liberal side of the American sociopolitical spectrum. (Berman would doubtless counter that he doesn't ignore this side at all, that in fact he's a charter member of it.) Also, for all of Berman's pessimism, he still seems to hold onto one last metaphysical guarantee: a dialectical theory of history which ensures that a New Enlightenment will eventually come, a guarantee that ultimately justifies the work of his "new monastic individuals". But what if his structural analysis is wrong and we are in fact just whistling into an endless dark, our best works destined to become exhibits in the Deng Xiaopeng Memorial Museum of Western Decadence (est. 2143)?... The best we can do, I guess, is work authentically for our own sakes and for the work's sake--which is exactly what all artists worthy of the name have always done. Anyway, although I fear Berman is right, I hope he's wrong and that the current darkness will end sooner than he thinks... At least there's this modicum of hope: even when we can't see the light, we can still be the light. (I know, it sounds like Jesse Jackson, but I think W.H. Auden would probably agree with it.)
THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT by Norman Mailer
Mailer's Armies of the Night stands up to a second reading, although it does not demand one. There's a lot of good stuff in the book, all of it dominated by Mailer's greatest creation: his colossally insecure, obsessively self-regarding Self. Mailer (or should I say "Mailer"?) comes across like a pugilistic Woody Allen, a nebbish who has read too much Hemingway. He's willing to laugh at himself, but not too boisterously. His reveries about technology, totalitarianism and American life are often insightful, sometimes original and (unfortunately) still relevant. But the book's greatest value for me on this reading lies in Mailer's voice: that reckless, intelligent, prodigal, American voice, that voice that frequently tiptoes to the farthest border of authorial control and occasionally slips over. This voice is the book's greatest contribution, and when it goes away, replaced at page 240 by Mailer's intentionally dry 'Historian' voice, my interest dwindles. This late change of tone and persona is the book's biggest flaw; it's boring and unnecessary because Mailer has already 'shown' us the kind of history/journalism he is writing against--he has shown it to us by writing its diametrical opposite. There's no need for him now to become what he has just demolished. So pages 240-275 are the book's most skim-worthy...But Norman redeems himself at the end. His analysis of the official violence that ended the final phase of the demonstration is some of the best and most disturbing work of his career.
Monday, September 29, 2008
IN SEARCH OF J.D. SALINGER by Ian Hamilton
Ian Hamilton's controversial and legally hampered attempt at a Salinger biography is valuable for illuminating its subject's life and motivations and for tantalizingly suggesting that Salinger has multiple completed manuscripts stashed in his rural New Hampshire home. (If he doesn't burn them, we might be surprised by a Henry Roth-like flash flood of late, late and/or posthumous works.) The most eye-opening part of the book is Hamilton's discussion of Salinger's WWII service. The guy walked through hell (Utah Beach on D-Day, Runtgen Forest, the Battle of the Bulge) and by the end of the war he may have been driven insane. All of this casts a long shadow over his canonical works (all written after the war; he has tried to suppress his pre-war short stories), which must now be read as emphatically postwar fiction even when, as in the case of Catcher in the Rye, they don't explicitly mention the war. Salinger, it appears, is more Hemingwayish than I have ever imagined.
UNDER THE VOLCANO by Malcolm Lowry
Lowry's Under the Volcano impresses me no more on this reading than it has on my previous readings. It still seems overwritten. It's as if during the course of his multiple revisions Lowry wrote the life out of the story. He's also guilty, like his literary godfather Herman Melville, of sledgehammer symbolism (i.e. symbols as subtle as sledgehammer blows), such as the pariah dog that follows the Consul around (and perhaps follows him down the ravine in the novel's last line). All in all, the novel doesn't live up to its reputation, and I don't consider it a great book. It might be the ruin of a great novel, as Lunar Caustic is the ruin of a great novella, but a writer of ruins doesn't equal a great writer. In Volcano's own terms, the book is a Maximilian's palace of a novel, a ruined refuge for its doomed, dreaming lovers.
It almost pained me to write the above, because I want to like Under the Volcano. Like Melville's Confidence Man, it's a work I'm predisposed to admire. But I can't admire it, and the fault, I'm convinced, lies not in myself but in the book. Interestingly, the two novels, otherwise so disparate, seem to have one major fault in common: both read like notebook dumps--padded, overwritten novels filled out with stories from the authors' notebooks. Many knowledgeable readers consider them great novels; this knowledgeable reader regretfully does not.
It almost pained me to write the above, because I want to like Under the Volcano. Like Melville's Confidence Man, it's a work I'm predisposed to admire. But I can't admire it, and the fault, I'm convinced, lies not in myself but in the book. Interestingly, the two novels, otherwise so disparate, seem to have one major fault in common: both read like notebook dumps--padded, overwritten novels filled out with stories from the authors' notebooks. Many knowledgeable readers consider them great novels; this knowledgeable reader regretfully does not.
A THOUGHT ON JAMES JOYCE AND THE ART OF MICROSCOPIC READING
As an example of how closely Joyce's Ulysses can be read, consider this brief passage from the 'Lotus Eaters' episode in which Leopold Bloom, pausing in a church during mass, misreads the sign on the back of a priest's vestments:
The IHS on priestly garments--as Joyce certainly knew and the secular Bloom appropriately does not--is a Christogram, writing that alphabetically signifies Christ, in this case via the first three letters of His name in Greek: iota-eta-sigma. This Christogram is also commonly (mis)interpreted as signifying 'Iesus Hominum Salvator' ('Jesus, Savior of Man') or 'in hoc signo (vinces)' ('by this sign, conquer', from the legend of the vision of Constantine). Read in the light of this last misinterpretation, the only one that explicitly refers to the acts of reading and interpretation that are the concerns of the Joycean passage, these few lines that on the surface seem a mere scene of comic and sentimental misinterpretation become something much more complex. It is both an allegory of misreading (paging Dr. de Man...) and an allegory of the act of reading the Joycean text itself. It opens a series of mirrors, in some of which the reader might see reflected his/her own studious and/or baffled face. Bloom as reader, mirroring and parodying the actions of all nonfictional readers of Ulysses (you, me, Harold Bloom), misinterprets a written sign. But it's not just any sign. It's a sign that is commonly misinterpreted as referring to a scene of crucially correct interpretation. Joyce thus casts a shadow of doubt on the validity even of Constantine's interpretation and places a critical question mark over all acts of reading and interpreting, even of the holy Word. In short, the passage is a deconstructionist's delight, hurling the acts of reading and interpretation into a deManian abyss of mirrors and meaninglessness... This is all too complex for a blog post (it's really academic journal fodder), so let me end it now, delivering a Tristram Shandy-ish coup de grace in the delightfully understated form of a single, terminal period: .
...Letters on his back: I.N.R.I? No: I.H.S. Molly told me one time I asked her. I have sinned: or no: I have suffered, it is. And the other one? Iron nails ran in.
The IHS on priestly garments--as Joyce certainly knew and the secular Bloom appropriately does not--is a Christogram, writing that alphabetically signifies Christ, in this case via the first three letters of His name in Greek: iota-eta-sigma. This Christogram is also commonly (mis)interpreted as signifying 'Iesus Hominum Salvator' ('Jesus, Savior of Man') or 'in hoc signo (vinces)' ('by this sign, conquer', from the legend of the vision of Constantine). Read in the light of this last misinterpretation, the only one that explicitly refers to the acts of reading and interpretation that are the concerns of the Joycean passage, these few lines that on the surface seem a mere scene of comic and sentimental misinterpretation become something much more complex. It is both an allegory of misreading (paging Dr. de Man...) and an allegory of the act of reading the Joycean text itself. It opens a series of mirrors, in some of which the reader might see reflected his/her own studious and/or baffled face. Bloom as reader, mirroring and parodying the actions of all nonfictional readers of Ulysses (you, me, Harold Bloom), misinterprets a written sign. But it's not just any sign. It's a sign that is commonly misinterpreted as referring to a scene of crucially correct interpretation. Joyce thus casts a shadow of doubt on the validity even of Constantine's interpretation and places a critical question mark over all acts of reading and interpreting, even of the holy Word. In short, the passage is a deconstructionist's delight, hurling the acts of reading and interpretation into a deManian abyss of mirrors and meaninglessness... This is all too complex for a blog post (it's really academic journal fodder), so let me end it now, delivering a Tristram Shandy-ish coup de grace in the delightfully understated form of a single, terminal period: .
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK by Doris Lessing
The Nobel committee has finally encouraged me to try The Golden Notebook again, and I find it much better than I did on my abortive first reading ten years ago. Lessing is surely the most Lawrentian writer alive--an idea that greatly delights and surprises me. That's probably what Harold Bloom sees in the book: Lessing as a female re-writer of Lawrence, revising Women in Love in an age of self-consciousness.
My verdict upon finally finishing the book? A very good novel. It's too long, of course (a typical Lessing weakness), and there are some boring parts (especially in the first and last 100 pages), but the novel's highs are very high and original and almost unutterably strange. Lessing strikes off some wonderfully poetic images: intense, unforgettable stuff, such as the image of madness as a crack in the self through which the future of humanity might burst like water through a failing dam. Her exploration of human complexity, including but not limited to sexuality, at times surpasses that of her great precursor, Lawrence. Really, I'm stunned at how much good stuff is hidden in the inner sections of this book. There are even some hilarious comic scenes that show us Lessing revising and correcting her precursor's dire humourlessness... And to top it all off, at novel's end Lessing leaves us in a position of deconstructive uncertainty as to the relation of any of the book's narratives to 'reality'. Is Free Women a literary act of controlled hysteria in which Anna tames and suppresses the wild chaos of the later blue and golden notebooks, or are the notebooks artful exaggerations of Free Women's milder 'reality'? Lessing leaves this question and all related ones open, so that we readers ultimately find ourselves in the position of Free Women's 'Anna' during her brush with madness: in a space papered obsessively with texts that have an insolubly problematic relationship to reality. That way Derridean madness lies. The 'solution' found by the narrator of Free Women (whom Lessing in her 1971 intro identifies with Anna) is an ironic stoicism, a very British stiff-upper-lip soldiering on in the face of meaninglessness. It's a position akin to Rortian irony. But this ending is heavily, almost sarcastically, ironic; and the entire final section is seriously undermined by the unforgettably surreal imagery of madness that has gone before... Yes, it's one hell of an interesting book.
My verdict upon finally finishing the book? A very good novel. It's too long, of course (a typical Lessing weakness), and there are some boring parts (especially in the first and last 100 pages), but the novel's highs are very high and original and almost unutterably strange. Lessing strikes off some wonderfully poetic images: intense, unforgettable stuff, such as the image of madness as a crack in the self through which the future of humanity might burst like water through a failing dam. Her exploration of human complexity, including but not limited to sexuality, at times surpasses that of her great precursor, Lawrence. Really, I'm stunned at how much good stuff is hidden in the inner sections of this book. There are even some hilarious comic scenes that show us Lessing revising and correcting her precursor's dire humourlessness... And to top it all off, at novel's end Lessing leaves us in a position of deconstructive uncertainty as to the relation of any of the book's narratives to 'reality'. Is Free Women a literary act of controlled hysteria in which Anna tames and suppresses the wild chaos of the later blue and golden notebooks, or are the notebooks artful exaggerations of Free Women's milder 'reality'? Lessing leaves this question and all related ones open, so that we readers ultimately find ourselves in the position of Free Women's 'Anna' during her brush with madness: in a space papered obsessively with texts that have an insolubly problematic relationship to reality. That way Derridean madness lies. The 'solution' found by the narrator of Free Women (whom Lessing in her 1971 intro identifies with Anna) is an ironic stoicism, a very British stiff-upper-lip soldiering on in the face of meaninglessness. It's a position akin to Rortian irony. But this ending is heavily, almost sarcastically, ironic; and the entire final section is seriously undermined by the unforgettably surreal imagery of madness that has gone before... Yes, it's one hell of an interesting book.
THE CONFIDENCE MAN by Herman Melville
Melville's Confidence Man is the literary equivalent of the Big Con. (If you don't know what that is, go to a video store and rent The Sting.) Anyone who reads past page 50 eventually sees that the joke's on him, that the book is tiresomely repetitive and peppered (or should I say 'papered'?) with passages of dry, failed pastiche that are too imitative to be funny. As on my previous embarkations aboard the Fidele, I find myself wanting to like this book but being repelled by its transparently conning nature. Melville makes a serious mistake early in the game when he shows his hand to all careful readers; his narrative voice is so rarely poker-faced that we can't really give him our readerly confidence. The book, in other words, is a failed confidence game at the reader's expense and its narrator an incompetent con man. We don't--and shouldn't--believe him for a minute. The first sentence, with its outlandish 'Manco Capac' simile, is fair warning. The major artistic problem with all of this is that an incompetent con man isn't interesting, just irritating. (By contrast, the expert conmen in David Mamet's House of Games and Glengary Glen Ross interest us because they successfully con us into identifying with them--which is, not incidentally, a pretty good description of the actor's job.) If the narrator were a better con man, we would let him entertain us; as it is, after 60 or 70 pages (or sooner) the only thing we want to do is put the book back on the shelf and re-read Moby Dick or Bartleby the Scrivener or Billy Budd.
THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS by Albert Camus
"Seeking what is true is not necessarily seeking what is desirable." -- Camus
On this reading of The Myth of Sisyphus I'm thinking about the relative strengths and weaknesses of Camus' absurdist arguments against suicide. In addition to arguing that suicide is 'unethical' in an absurdist understanding of ethics because it 'settles' the problem of the absurd (a rather dogmatic argument that depends on Camus' assertion that living in the absurd is an unquestionable good), Camus argues that an appreciation of life's transience, meaningless and absurdity, far from making life valueless, makes it more worth living. Such a consciousness of absurdity infuses every moment of existence with the aura of ultimate transience: this kiss may be the last kiss, this rose the last rose, etc... It's a compelling argument, but I doubt if it would matter to someone suicidally depressed, someone who has already been living for some time in that curious state of hypersensitive lethargy that is the pre-suicidal consciousness.
On this reading of The Myth of Sisyphus I'm thinking about the relative strengths and weaknesses of Camus' absurdist arguments against suicide. In addition to arguing that suicide is 'unethical' in an absurdist understanding of ethics because it 'settles' the problem of the absurd (a rather dogmatic argument that depends on Camus' assertion that living in the absurd is an unquestionable good), Camus argues that an appreciation of life's transience, meaningless and absurdity, far from making life valueless, makes it more worth living. Such a consciousness of absurdity infuses every moment of existence with the aura of ultimate transience: this kiss may be the last kiss, this rose the last rose, etc... It's a compelling argument, but I doubt if it would matter to someone suicidally depressed, someone who has already been living for some time in that curious state of hypersensitive lethargy that is the pre-suicidal consciousness.
A MOVEABLE FEAST by Ernest Hemingway
What a surprisingly strange and disjointed book this is! A collection of obviously carefully worked fragments that never quite cohere into an overall narrative, A Moveable Feast is both an occasion for its author to settle old scores (against the dead-by-publication Ford Madox Ford and Gertrude Stein, as well as other lesser names) and a sometimes highly illuminating look at writerly process. The book frequently falls into bathos; indeed, some sections seem to take bathos as a formal principle: beginning with incomparable lyrical description, moving on to an encounter written in strict Hemingwayan dialogue rhythms, then ending in anticlimactic triteness with Ernie and Hadley sharing a typically saccharine exchange.
Two sections especially intrigued me on this reading: the long Fitzgerald section, in which Hemingway devotes a quarter of the book to the project of taking back everything he says in the section's opening elegiac paragraph, and the odd, contradictory, conflicted "Birth of a New School," in which the author puts his own homophobic hysteria on display and then retreats into an image of himself mothering his baby. In other words, he takes a traditionally female role in a domestic space immediately after publically putting down a local queer. Very suggestive and self-deconstructing, the section reveals a bit more, it seems, than the author might have intended.
Two sections especially intrigued me on this reading: the long Fitzgerald section, in which Hemingway devotes a quarter of the book to the project of taking back everything he says in the section's opening elegiac paragraph, and the odd, contradictory, conflicted "Birth of a New School," in which the author puts his own homophobic hysteria on display and then retreats into an image of himself mothering his baby. In other words, he takes a traditionally female role in a domestic space immediately after publically putting down a local queer. Very suggestive and self-deconstructing, the section reveals a bit more, it seems, than the author might have intended.
DISGRACE by J.M. Coetzee
This is a truly great novel, a highly-intelligent, complex work that constantly surprises the reader. Coetzee's lovely, allusive, Modernist prose (justified by his protagonist's literary profession) binds the work into the European tradition, from Goethe and Wordsworth to Kafka, but as I read I also found myself comparing its 'deep structure' to that of a novel Coetzee never references, The Charterhouse of Parma. Like Stendhal's work, Disgrace begins as one kind of book (a 1990s academic PC scandal narrative a la Oleanna, The Human Stain, one of the storylines in The Corrections, etc.) but then unexpectedly shifts gears to become quite another kind of story (an exploration of power, race and sex in post-Apartheid rural South Africa). This conjoined disjunction sets up a powerful series of ironic echoes as each narrative reflects upon the other. It's a profound, very disturbing and unsettling reading experience, a thoughtful book that (like all great novels) demands re-reading.
INFINITE JEST by David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest is no better in the $10 tenth anniversary edition than it was in the hardcover I bought remaindered a decade ago for $6.95. To correct a couple of the critical hyperboles of the mid-90's: the book is no Ulysses; nor is it a Gravity's Rainbow, however much it tries to be. No, it's just a big, bloated, unsurprising hodgepodge of elements very much like things we've read before in Pynchon, DeLillo, Nabokov, etc. The biggest problem is Wallace's lazy prose, a language typed rather than written, a prose so weak and, like, hiply inarticulate and, like, condescending to the point of, like, insult, you know... A little of this faux-demotic goes a long, long way. Listening to DFW 'talk cool' is like watching John Kerry drink beer--vaguely painful. After reading 100 pages (a tenth of its length) I've returned IJ to the shelf convinced that I'm not missing much, that the book hasn't aged well (its technology has already been superseded by the internet and DVDs), and that a week spent reading it would be a wasted week... And yet, all other things being equal, if DFW could write like Nabokov I'd read his damned book, no problem, even if it were longer than Proust. And if he were as talented as Vlad the Inscriber and as outrageously funny as Jonathan Swift or Philip Roth, then IJ would be a great book, but DFW sets his sights lower, aiming toward the second-rate academic comedians (sic) of the Seventies: Profs. Barth, Barthelme, Coover--writers no one off-campus ever reads...
THE CORRECTIONS by Jonathan Franzen
Upon finishing The Corrections I hereby retract my earlier characterization of it (in conversation and online) as a 'truly awful, overrated book,' an opinion based on an aborted first reading several years ago. While certainly flawed and too worshipful of the fictions of Don DeLillo, it's a good novel overall. It's good, not great, and certainly not the landmark work of American literature that it was proclaimed by many reviewers. No, what we really have here is a Joyce Carol Oates-type social realist novel (the least adventurous kind of 'serious' American literature) dosed with DeLillo-esque paranoia and spiced with a few scenes that pastiche the 'edgy' pantheon (Pynchon in the 'talking turd' scene; Heller in the 'ship's doctor' scene). This combination creates a few jarring tonal disparities (as though scenes from an earlier, more satirical draft have been spliced into the more somber final narrative) and lessens the novel's impact, making it read at times more like a first novel than a third one. So, while The Corrections is not a masterwork--and is not, I suspect, as adventurous a novel as Franzen is capable of writing--it is still well worth reading.
BUDDENBROOKS by Thomas Mann
Mann's Buddenbrooks, which I've finally gotten around to reading many years after buying a copy, is quite good--indeed, it is at times absolutely masterful, completely assured and amazingly good, for a first novel (important condition)--but it's far from beyond reproach. Without further ado, then, my reproaches: the Dickensian grotesques Mann uses to fill minor roles are all equally irritating; after a great beginning and an extraordinary first third, the narrative drags during the book's second half (and second third); the long epilogue-like chapter depicting Hanno's schoolday greatly disturbs the book's overall formal unity and reads like a late addition, an almost-independent fiction employed to pad out the volume. Still, it is a good book, an exceptional family saga with some indelible scenes and characters and a very good business novel that dramatizes the Christianity-Capitalism conflict (thus problematizing Max Weber).
I also noticed that Mann's characterizations become more psychological as the book goes on, as though he taught himself psychological characterization during the act of composition. Further proof of the only real rule of writing: Inspiration and discovery occur during the act of composition, not before. That's one of the things that makes the act so addictive...
I also noticed that Mann's characterizations become more psychological as the book goes on, as though he taught himself psychological characterization during the act of composition. Further proof of the only real rule of writing: Inspiration and discovery occur during the act of composition, not before. That's one of the things that makes the act so addictive...
THE WAVES by Virginia Woolf
I've finally gotten around to Woolf's The Waves only to discover that it wasn't worth the wait. Yes, it's a beautiful book...but unfortunately it's not a very good one. It's a beautiful failure. The whole thing is simply too overwrought--the prose tries always to overflow, burst its banks, while the author forces it into a stylistic and structural straightjacket. The Waves is a marked artistic falling off from the heights of Dalloway and Lighthouse, a regression to symbolism that negates the symbolism/naturalism Wilsonian Modernist melange of the earlier novels. (That's Edmund Wilson, by the way, not Woodrow. Edmund adumbrates his theory of Modernist literature as the synthesis of symbolism and naturalism in Axel's Castle.) Woolf rejects her earlier Modernism and drowns it in a symbolist tidal wave. (I could be all too playfully clever and call it a 'title wave,' but I do have a small amount of taste.) The novel reads like a transcript of a seance with the author as medium: all the voices are a single voice, all the consciousnesses are Woolf's, and because of this lack of differentiation--worse, this lack of emotion or personality-- the novel fails to solicit our sympathy and even transforms its moments of pathos into laughable Woolfian self-parody. As an unintentional comic novel, it's almost as good as D.H. Lawrence's best/worst efforts.
Friday, June 20, 2008
THE BROKEN ESTATE by James Wood
Although I disagree (sometimes fundamentally) with many of the opinions and interpretations in this collection of James Wood's reviews, I found myself reaching the book's end with the wish that it were longer. High praise indeed for a collection of critical essays. Even when Wood is wrong (as he often is!) he's worth arguing with, worth thinking about, and that's the sign of a very good critic, a Kael or a Vidal or an Edmund Wilson (to use the George Steiner tic that Wood so deliciously mocks). James Wood is not an easy man to ignore.
The fundamental problem with Wood's criticism is his overestimation of Jane Austen. Austen is his touchstone for literary greatness (he even compares Gogol to Austen, for pete's sake!), and this greatly limits his ability to appreciate Modern and Postmodern literature. Analyzing Pynchon or Morrison or DeLillo according to criteria abstracted from close readings of Mansfield Park and Emma is rather like judging sportscars in terms of the design specs for horse-drawn carriages. Wood's carriage of choice may be the finest ever made, but its excellence is beside the point when the subject is Ferraris.
The fundamental problem with Wood's criticism is his overestimation of Jane Austen. Austen is his touchstone for literary greatness (he even compares Gogol to Austen, for pete's sake!), and this greatly limits his ability to appreciate Modern and Postmodern literature. Analyzing Pynchon or Morrison or DeLillo according to criteria abstracted from close readings of Mansfield Park and Emma is rather like judging sportscars in terms of the design specs for horse-drawn carriages. Wood's carriage of choice may be the finest ever made, but its excellence is beside the point when the subject is Ferraris.
THE NIGHT WATCH by Sarah Waters
Sarah Waters is not--or at least, not yet--a writer of the first rank. She's with Iris Murdoch in the second drawer from the top. The Night Watch is merely good; it isn't a great novel, and in fact it seems a bit less than the sum of its parts. The novel's reverse chronology isn't really justified by the story and appears to be a rather obvious and artificial gimmick, a means of creating mysteries which the narrative wouldn't otherwise contain, a blatant reader-manipulation device. And in addition to all that, the device doesn't really work: the novel's eventual revelations all struck me as rather disappointing and anticlimactic. I also found myself wondering, as I read this relatively tame and P.C. Waters performance, about the niche Waters fills in the BritLit cathedral. Is she British fiction's 'acceptable' literary lesbian, less disturbing and transgressive than writers sold exclusively at Gay's The Word, more palatable to mainstream (read 'straight') readers who find even Jeannette Winterson a little too dykey? Is Sarah Waters Brit Lit's answer to The L Word, gentrifying lesbian fiction for a bourgeois audience? As the bisexual and very transgressive car crash afficionado Vaughan remarks in David Cronenberg's film Crash, "A case could be made..."
TOO LOUD A SOLITUDE by Bohumil Hrabal
Yet another very good book that few Americans (even literary types) have read, this novella is a wonderful Central European melange resounding with echoes of Kafka, Gogol and Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground. It's a marvelous book full of great ideas and images; it overflows with hope and hopelessness, dark humor and sly satire. (I'm starting to sound like a blurb writer, so I guess it's time to exit. Suffice it to say that Too Loud a Solitude is one of those books that, upon first reading, makes me want to gush.)
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
POSTWAR: A HISTORY OF EUROPE SINCE 1945 by Tony Judt
While I quarrel with some of Tony Judt's historical interpretations and find him too eager to see in the contemporary world a 'post-ideological age' (contra Judt, I see one ideology--corporatism--achieving hegemony), I still found Postwar a wonderfully informative, engaging, educational book. In short (please!), it taught me some things: the consummate cynicism of Mitterrand, the dual-culture tension inside Belgium between now-prosperous Dutch-speaking Flanders and now-poorer francophone Wallonia, the left-wing officers' coup that overthrew the fascist Portuguese dictatorship in the 1970's, the ease with which former Communist strongmen repositioned themselves after 1989 as nationalist leaders (Milosevic was the best-known example, but the trend was international), and much more. I even experienced a permissible amount of Judt's proscibed nostalgia as I read about the fall of the Eastern European dictatorships in 1989, a moment that seems ever more magical as it recedes in time and that great moment of optimism is drowned in the rhetoric of the demogogues, Western toadies and corporate tools who quickly rushed in to fill the Soviet void. What happened to the spirit of 89? It was shot by a sniper in the Sarajevo market.
One major problem with the book (which Judt only addresses in passing) is his frequent--one might almost say 'kneejerk'--conflation of the Western left (a heterogeneous enough group) with Stalinism or Soviet-style Communism. With some hardline exceptions (so powerless that they only hurt themselves), Western, non-Soviet leftism was an altogether different, more libertarian thing, tending toward anarchism. As these tendencies would have been anathema to any Soviet leader (and given that the hardline PCF turned its back on the Left Bank during Mai 68), greater distinctions must be drawn between Western democratic and Soviet totalitarian leftism. Philosophically, it may be the difference between humanistic Marxism and its authoritarian Leninist perversion. (Marxism is a philosophy of revolution from below misinterpreted by Lenin as a justification for terror from above.) In any event, Judt's frequent hamfisted lumping of the 'Western left' into a single group plays along with a very contemporary right-wing tune: the attempt by rightist ideologues around the world to tar the entire 20th-century left with the black brush of Stalinism. This is a cynical distortion of the history of Western political idealism, and it cannot stand. (Because most people know nothing of the nuances of history, however, this particular 'big lie' appears to be headed for the collective mental trashheap labelled 'received ideas', the mental dunghill of cultural decline...Okay, I'll go easy on the metaphors.)
Despite these reservations (or because of them, for history lives by informed argument), I enthusiastically recommend Postwar--especially to American readers, most of whose acquaintance with European history ends where this book begins.
One major problem with the book (which Judt only addresses in passing) is his frequent--one might almost say 'kneejerk'--conflation of the Western left (a heterogeneous enough group) with Stalinism or Soviet-style Communism. With some hardline exceptions (so powerless that they only hurt themselves), Western, non-Soviet leftism was an altogether different, more libertarian thing, tending toward anarchism. As these tendencies would have been anathema to any Soviet leader (and given that the hardline PCF turned its back on the Left Bank during Mai 68), greater distinctions must be drawn between Western democratic and Soviet totalitarian leftism. Philosophically, it may be the difference between humanistic Marxism and its authoritarian Leninist perversion. (Marxism is a philosophy of revolution from below misinterpreted by Lenin as a justification for terror from above.) In any event, Judt's frequent hamfisted lumping of the 'Western left' into a single group plays along with a very contemporary right-wing tune: the attempt by rightist ideologues around the world to tar the entire 20th-century left with the black brush of Stalinism. This is a cynical distortion of the history of Western political idealism, and it cannot stand. (Because most people know nothing of the nuances of history, however, this particular 'big lie' appears to be headed for the collective mental trashheap labelled 'received ideas', the mental dunghill of cultural decline...Okay, I'll go easy on the metaphors.)
Despite these reservations (or because of them, for history lives by informed argument), I enthusiastically recommend Postwar--especially to American readers, most of whose acquaintance with European history ends where this book begins.
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
PEELING THE ONION by Gunter Grass
Gunter Grass's too controversial, much-heralded memoir, Peeling the Onion, is disappointing overall. It's not a great Grass book in the way that Palimpsest is a great Vidal book. It's too long, contains too many unsatisfying digressions and shameless plugs for Grass's other books, is too redundant (an age-old Grassian vice: what in Thomas Mann was a musical repetition of motifs becomes in Grass an exercise in mechanical redundancy), and finally doesn't tell us enough about some of the most interesting questions it raises. (e.g., What did Grass and Paul Celan talk about in Paris all those years ago while The Tin Drum was struggling to be born?) One interesting/provocative/troubling aspect of this self-described 'memoir,' this explicit confession, this story presumed to be true, is that Grass repeatedly--indeed, obsessively--provokes our disbelief and even explicitly demands our skepticism. It's as though he wants us to read the story of his life with a greater disbelief than even his most experimental novels provoke. As I read I found myself wondering if this was merely a self-protective device, a way of distancing himself from his own memories (especially those of his time in the Waffen SS), or if it was, rather, Herr Professor Grass's final lesson to us: all propositions should be initially treated as doubtful, especially those presented as self-evidently true. Is Grass constructing for himself in this 'memoir' a new role, that of author-without-authority?
EASY RIDERS, RAGING BULLS by Peter Biskind
Peter Biskind's fast, juicy, gossipy, readable blockbuster of an inside Hollywood book, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, forces me to consider the reactionary nature of many of the great films of the 70's. It seems that the only genuine maverick among the 'generation of '71' is Altman. With all of his complexities and contradictions, Altman is the guy who made the most deeply radical films (and paid a price for it--not in personal wealth but in creative freedom). By turning a deconstructive eye to genres, by making an Altman detective film (The Long Goodbye), an Altman war movie (MASH), an Altman gangster movie (Thieves Like Us), an Altman western (McCabe and Mrs. Miller), etc., etc., he also incidentally (and perhaps malgre lui) criticized the ideologies that constructed and informed the conventions of those genres (capitalism, patriarchy, authoritarianism, militarism). This is the way in which Bob Altman, by no means an intellectual, becomes the Derridean anarchist of American cinema, while Billy Friedkin, old friend of Studs Terkel, becomes a creator of reactionary corporate product disguised as transgression--French Connection, Exorcist, etc. ad nauseum.
Biskind's book convinces me that great movies are like laws and sausages (and novels): you don't want to see them being made. By pulling back the curtain on The Godfather, Chinatown, Apocalypse Now, and showing us what contingent, jerry-built, cut-and-paste jobs these (and all) movies are, and by showing us the necessary collaboration involved in moviemaking, with its inherent tensions and confusion of creditation, Biskind is really telling me much more than I needed to know. Fortunately (or unfortunately), it's a compulsively interesting book. I only wish he'd concentrated as much on the aesthetic as on the economic side of things. But, as this book constantly reminds me, they don't call it the movie business for nothing.
Biskind's book convinces me that great movies are like laws and sausages (and novels): you don't want to see them being made. By pulling back the curtain on The Godfather, Chinatown, Apocalypse Now, and showing us what contingent, jerry-built, cut-and-paste jobs these (and all) movies are, and by showing us the necessary collaboration involved in moviemaking, with its inherent tensions and confusion of creditation, Biskind is really telling me much more than I needed to know. Fortunately (or unfortunately), it's a compulsively interesting book. I only wish he'd concentrated as much on the aesthetic as on the economic side of things. But, as this book constantly reminds me, they don't call it the movie business for nothing.
HOW TO READ LACAN by Slavoj Zizek
I've read enough of How to Read Lacan to be unimpressed by the hyperactive Zizek style, that cool, fast, glib skimming across the surfaces of texts (mixing high and low culture, from St. Augustine's Confessions to Ridley Scott's Alien) that scoops out only what one needs to exemplify one's (Lacanian) theory before moving on to the next text. Zizek writes philosophy for the age of channel surfing. He doesn't linger long enough to let his examples drag him down. If he did, some of them might drag him into a critique of Lacan, as great art always exceeds interpretations. The Slovenian Supernova is an enthusiastic follower, not a leader.
After finishing Zizek's book on Lacan, I think I've learned more about Zizek's style than Lacan's thought. Zizek quotes someone else as saying that Lacan's writings show us how he thinks more than what he thinks. In this sense, SZ (oh, those Barthesque initials are perfect for a poststructuralist!) may be the truest Lacanian of them all (meaning, of course, the phoniest).
After finishing Zizek's book on Lacan, I think I've learned more about Zizek's style than Lacan's thought. Zizek quotes someone else as saying that Lacan's writings show us how he thinks more than what he thinks. In this sense, SZ (oh, those Barthesque initials are perfect for a poststructuralist!) may be the truest Lacanian of them all (meaning, of course, the phoniest).
STONER by John Williams
John Williams's Stoner is a good minor novel. Not great, but an excellent example of the best aspects of American regionalism: psychological and sociological insight married to an almost poetic lyricism. It's the kind of novel Thomas Hardy might have written had he been a midcentury American academic. (Bizarre thought.) It is a quite well-written novel, but not an extremely well-constructed one. The narrative is too episodic and lacks sufficient integration of the various themes. Also, Williams's physical 'marking' of the antagonist Lomax (and his protege Walker) with a physical deformity seems a bit overdone, the sort of thing we might find in the medieval texts Stoner studies but which strains credulity in the naturalistic 20th-century context in which Stoner appears. There's also a nasty little puritanical implication of homosexuality between the cripples--something Williams fails to explore beyond ambiguous innuendo. Indeed, the Walker character is left hanging as a narrative loose end, isn't he? So, despite a recent NYT rave, Stoner is not a 'perfect' book. It's not one that compels re-reading, either.
Monday, February 4, 2008
ON THE YARD by Malcolm Braly
Thanks to the New York Review's book publishing wing, NYRB Classics, I've discovered another great, unfortunately neglected novel, Malcolm Braly's On The Yard. A prison novel originally published in 1967 and long out of print until rescued by NYRB, this book may be the last great monument of American Modernism. As decentered as an Altman film, with a cast of dozens and no real central character, the novel treats the prison as a Joycean city and takes its structural cues from "Wandering Rocks" and Mrs. Dalloway, allowing the point-of-view to 'float' among the characters without seeming to privilege any one consciousness. This allows Braly to wander at will all over the prison universe, from the warden and the guards to the saddest and the most nihilistic inmates, creating a novel that seems almost too rich for its 300-odd pages. Surely the best and most surprising book ever written on the American prison system, this is a truly great novel, an unfairly overlooked masterpiece of American literature.
IT ALL ADDS UP by Saul Bellow
Bellow's nonfiction collection It All Adds Up leaves me even more mystified by the knee-jerk awe with which St. Saul of Chicago's name is invoked by reviewers and critics. Apparently, in the world according to Bellow, 'it' all adds up to Neoconservatism, accompanied by the hoary claim of all ideologues (usually left implicit by Bellow) that one's own idelogy is not an ideology at all but a description of self-evident, unmediated reality. Why, oh why, do so many people think Bellow is so good? Am I missing something? Okay, I'll admit to liking Seize the Day and being slightly more than indifferent to Augie March, but Herzog? Henderson the Rain King?? Humboldt's Gift??? The Dean's December????? Ravelstein???????????????? You gotta be kidding... And as for Saul's nonfiction (the point of this post), anyone who considers the late neocon disinformation artist Allen Bloom a great political thinker has truly abandoned all critical discrimination and need no longer detain us (to use a favorite formulation of Harold Bloom). To end, I note in passing that after the obligatory funereal encomia a blanket of silence descended over Bellow's work. His posthumous reputation seems headed for a probably deserved oblivion. He's a period piece. The general consensus is, as so often, dead wrong.
Cormac McCarthy's BLOOD MERIDIAN and the Kabbalah
I'm attracted to the dialectical and heretical implications of the Lurianic kabbalist concept of tsimtsum. The idea that the proto-creative act is one of deific withdrawal suggests a universe that can be defined as 'the place where God is not.' (This is, I immediately remind myself, an overly dualistic caricature of tsimtsum, an act which, according to Scholem's reading of the mystics, leaves a residue of God in space, a divine Derridean trace.) Strategically ignoring the later stages of the Lurianic creation myth, in which the fallen world is infused with sparks of divinity, I want to linger on this first act, this originary withdrawal in which God creates the void. Dialecticizing, there is 'God' and 'not-God'; both imply and depend upon the other, but the space of creation is 'not-God.' This also seems to be the setting of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. The novel describes a world from which god has withdrawn, leaving only traces and ruins. (Doesn't the novel begin with falling stars, a meteor shower, sparks of light falling out of heaven? "God how the stars did fall," indeed--a kabbalistic image on the first page, which seems intended to be misread as Miltonic.) McCarthy's world is a place in which God exists, but not for us, not here. This is McCarthy's true theology, however Christian he may think he is.
POETICS by Aristotle
One surviving manuscript of Aristotle's Poetics breaks off just as the author turns to comedy. This suggests deliberate censorship, perhaps performed by a puritanical monk during the Middle Ages or later. The lost treatise on comedy would have told us much, of course, but even more importantly, its existence would have granted to comedy the seal of Aristotelian authority that tragedy has always enjoyed--an authority that survives even today in the privileging of 'serious' novels over 'funny' ones. (Count the number of comic novels that have won the Pulitzer prize; you can probably do it on one hand, maybe one finger.)
It's also interesting that even in the most famous passage of the discussion of tragedy, the stuff of comedy creeps in. Aristotle's word katharsis, signifying the supreme benefit of tragedy, also carries the signification of purgation, the action of a laxative. So scatology, the lowest of comedy, invades the heights of tragedy; the generic line is crossed even as it is being constructed.
It's also interesting that even in the most famous passage of the discussion of tragedy, the stuff of comedy creeps in. Aristotle's word katharsis, signifying the supreme benefit of tragedy, also carries the signification of purgation, the action of a laxative. So scatology, the lowest of comedy, invades the heights of tragedy; the generic line is crossed even as it is being constructed.
THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK by John Updike
Updike's Witches of Eastwick disappoints. It's a very well-written and very poorly constructed book, a fact that suggests Updike spent so much time polishing his prose (to an admittedly lovely shine) that he had none left to devote to story construction, narrative arc, sufficient character development, and all the other things that good narrative fiction requires. And Updike can't weasel out of responsibility with a "postmodernist's pass." This is no work of Kunderan or Calvinoesque avant-gardisme; it's a traditional American Romance (infused with a particularly nasty strain of traditional misogyny and Reagan-era anti-liberalism), and it's not built well enough to pass muster. I suspect that the book was well-reviewed and remains highly regarded (this was the one Updike novel included in Harold Bloom's notorious 'canon,' for example) because readers are blinded by Updike's stylistic pyrotechnics--i.e. his highly figurative prose--and cannot see that he has no real story to tell.
MERCIER AND CAMIER by Samuel Beckett
Beckett's little-known novel Mercier and Camier, written in 1946 but not published until the 1970's, is in its own way an even stranger and darker work than Waiting for Godot. Similar themes, images, and even lines of dialogue appear in both works (perhaps the reason for Beckett's sitting so long on the novel), but the novel is more unforgiving, more violent, more brutal and fatalistic, ending with a kind of death that's indistinguishable from life, just as the previous chapters' life was flatly, drily nightmarish. A very impressive book on this 2nd reading.
A quote: "What can be said of life not already said? Many things. That its arse is a rotten shot, for example." A nice Beckettian twist on 'shit happens.' Life shits aimlessly, pointlessly...
On finishing Mercier and Camier my desire is to flip the book over and read it again. High praise.
A quote: "What can be said of life not already said? Many things. That its arse is a rotten shot, for example." A nice Beckettian twist on 'shit happens.' Life shits aimlessly, pointlessly...
On finishing Mercier and Camier my desire is to flip the book over and read it again. High praise.
THE DALKEY ARCHIVE by Flann O'Brien
Flann O'Brien's The Dalkey Archive is far from literary greatness. To use one of the author's favorite words, it's a 'desultory' performance, formless, rambling, seemingly unplanned. It's a poorly edited, ill-conceived book that contains the suggestion of a truly great work only in the Joyce subplot. If the de Selby stuff had been jettisoned as so much melodramatic dead weight and O'Brien had expanded the 'resurrection of Joyce' idea into a full-length novel, then he might have had a genuine comic masterpiece on his hands. But as it is, the book is a fitfully funny mess.
THE FINAL SOLUTION by Michael Chabon
Chabon's Final Solution, though a slight, minor work, ultimately impresses me with its imagined confrontation between Sherlock Holmes, epitome of 19th-century rationality, and the genocidal 20th-century irrationality of the Holocaust. Chabon keeps the Holocaust theme subtle in his text (if not in his title, which terribly gives the game away), treating it more subtly than I would have (and I would've been wrong, overemphatic), touching the terror, in fact, in an oblique, Sebaldian way that preserves its irrationality, that doesn't try to contain the horror within a framework of 19th-century realism--the subtle but serious flaw of most ficitional treatments of the Holocaust. At the end, Holmes, limited in this new and terrible world by his antiquated hyper-rationality, cannot achieve this final solution, cannot quite grasp the horror. It is good, surprisingly so, and I find myself wishing it were longer, more complicated (Chabon can complicate a narrative with more facility than just about any writer alive, as evidenced by the first 80 pages of Wonder Boys), the characters better developed.
PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT by Philip Roth
Portnoy's Complaint, on what I guess is my 3rd reading, still holds up, still surprises. It's as outrageous, inventive and infuriating as ever, a comedy that crosses all the lines, the first appearance of the Dionysian Roth who will repeatedly rear his phallic head at intervals during the writer's subsequent career--most notably in My Life as a Man, The Professor of Desire, Sabbath's Theater and The Dying Animal. It's a cry of literary liberation that begins as a whine and ends with a scream, and it's all wonderfully (or morbidly, depending on your literary politics) self-conscious. The structure (a psychoanalytic monologue exaggerated into a stream of consciousness novel) is original and free while still following a generally chronological progression, a narrative that begins in the speaker's childhood and ends in his adult present as he begins analysis.
What 'saves' the character of Portnoy for us readers, finally--even after Roth alienates us from the character by showing us his attempted rape of the Israeli girl--is Portnoy's humor, his appreciation of the absurdity, the impossibility, of his situation and his ability to joke about it. Even when language fails and he screams out at the end, he's able to deflate the pathos with a punch line--which is more than that: a statement of beginning at the end, it forces a Joycean curcularity upon the text, a cycling back to the origin of neuroses in childhood, the movement that neatly defines Portnoy's prison. Serious stuff, for a farce.
What 'saves' the character of Portnoy for us readers, finally--even after Roth alienates us from the character by showing us his attempted rape of the Israeli girl--is Portnoy's humor, his appreciation of the absurdity, the impossibility, of his situation and his ability to joke about it. Even when language fails and he screams out at the end, he's able to deflate the pathos with a punch line--which is more than that: a statement of beginning at the end, it forces a Joycean curcularity upon the text, a cycling back to the origin of neuroses in childhood, the movement that neatly defines Portnoy's prison. Serious stuff, for a farce.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
