After starting and quickly abandoning The Savage Detectives a few months ago, I had an intimation that I would be returning to the book in the near future... Well, the near future is now. I gave it another chance, and I'm very glad I did. This is one of those rare novels that after a rather unpromising beginning progressively improves until it eventually touches greatness. And even the opening section impressed me more on this reading. The first 140 pages didn't impress me enormously (my mind remained unblown), but they were good enough to keep me reading--as good as they needed to be. This time I can see beyond the lazy diary form of the first section and enjoy Juan Garcia Madero's naive and unreliable narration (an unreliability signaled by his literally incredible sexual athletics) and the mysterious, apparition-like entrances of Arturo Belano (obvious authorial stand-in) and Ulises Lima, the leaders of the obscure (but not entirely fictional) 'visceral realist' poetry movement in 1970s Mexico City. Their enigmatic appearances in Garcia Madero's narrative prepare us for the roles they will play throughout the book: never speaking directly but always spoken about, always seen obliquely through the distorting lenses of others' eyes and minds and often enveloped in a weedy haze. Bolano's sex scenes in this first section are also good, and their range--from comic to horrific--is impressive. But the novel doesn't really take off until its four central characters climb into a Chevy Impala and flee Mexico City for the dubious haven of the Sonoran desert. At that point, the first section abruptly ends, the narrative breaks, and the novelistic form radically explodes into a long, 450-page collection of monologue fragments in which multiple narrators, most of whom are extremely minor characters, recount various stories of the lives and wanderings of Belano, Lima and the other visceral realists. The form is successfully entropic--a rare achievement--as it negotiates an original pathway between the Scylla and Charybdis of traditional coherence and postmodern fragmentation. This section is the novel's heart and Bolano's triumph, as impressive as his nearly perfect novella By Night in Chile. The various voices--sentimental, bitter, bitchy, pompous, angry, enigmatic, uncomprehending--sound out against each other in cacophonous chorus, recounting the litany of failures and temporary stays against failure that constitute the characters' lives after the collapse of their movement. As I read, I was reminded repeatedly of Flaubert's Sentimental Education and began to see The Savage Detectives as a contemporary Mexican Sentimental Education and the long second section as a gigantic expansion upon the famous "He travelled..." passage in which Flaubert glosses over the years of Frederic Moreau's aimless and disappointed wanderings. This is a Sentimental Education focusing on what happens after the dreams collapse: the life of flight and poverty on the margins of our globalized world.
"Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragedy," says Bolano's fictional critic (and Arturo Belano's dueling opponent) Inaki Echeverne, and the novel bears out this pronouncement even as it attempts to dilute it with self-protective irony. The chapter that contains this line, one of the book's very best sections, ends with a tale told by the Chilean Arturo Belano, a tale of two writers, one Peruvian and the other Cuban (unnamed but clearly Reinaldo Arenas), both of whom suffer equal but opposite forms of ideological attack. At the story's end, Bolano's Chilean listener tells him "You and I are Chilean...and none of this is our fault," thus completely missing the point of Belano's tale and reaffirming his own sense of ideological purity, a sentimental leftist illusion of purity born (irony of ironies) in the destruction of the Chilean left at the hands of Pinochet. Scenes like this, and especially the brilliantly hellish Liberian episode near the section's end, ultimately lift the book beyond the level of comic literary roman a clef to an examination of the tragedy that life has become in the modern world. This is post-magic realist, anti-utopian dissident fiction, and it's marvelous.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
ERNEST HEMINGWAY: SELECTED LETTERS 1917-1961 edited by Carlos Baker
One of the rare highpoints in Hemingway's published correspondence is his 28 May 1934 letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald:
"Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to hurt like hell before you can write seriously, But when you get the damned hurt use it--don't cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist--but don't think anything is of any importance because it happens to you or anyone belonging to you."
That's the most often quoted passage, but there's equally good stuff in the rest of the letter (written on the occasion of Hemingway's reading of Tender is the Night, about which he says, with typical helpfulness, "I liked it and I didn't like it").
"...good writers always come back. Always." Thus spake Hemingthustra. This is demonstrably untrue, but it's interesting that Hemingway needs to believe this. It tells us more about Hem than Scott.
"You see, Bo [Hem's nickname for Scott], you're not a tragic character. Neither am I. All we are is writers and what we should do is write." The good common sense of that last sentence is cruelly negated by the abysmal character judgments in the other two. Within ten years of the letter, Fitzgerald would drink himself to death; Hemingway, on the other hand, would commit suicide the way a character in The Sun Also Rises went bankrupt: gradually at first, and then suddenly. But again, it's telling that Hemingway needs to believe this about himself.
"Invention is the finest thing but you cannot invent anything that would not actually happen. That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best--make it all up--but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way." I especially like this one. It reminds me of a story Hemingway surely knew: when someone remarked to Picasso that Gertrude Stein looked nothing like his portrait of her, Picasso replied, "She will."
"Scott for gods sake write and write truly no matter who or what it hurts but do not make these silly compromises."
"You can study Clausewitz in the field and economics and psychology and nothing else will do you any bloody good once you are writing. We are like lousy damned acrobats but we make some mighty fine jumps, Bo, and they have all these other acrobats who won't jump."
And then Hem's attempt at friendship-saving irony: "Jesus its marvelous to tell other people how to write, live, die etc."
I also like the way Hemingway's pen/mind slips twice and he writes 'right' for 'write.' The same thing happens to me whenever I right about righting.
"Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to hurt like hell before you can write seriously, But when you get the damned hurt use it--don't cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist--but don't think anything is of any importance because it happens to you or anyone belonging to you."
That's the most often quoted passage, but there's equally good stuff in the rest of the letter (written on the occasion of Hemingway's reading of Tender is the Night, about which he says, with typical helpfulness, "I liked it and I didn't like it").
"...good writers always come back. Always." Thus spake Hemingthustra. This is demonstrably untrue, but it's interesting that Hemingway needs to believe this. It tells us more about Hem than Scott.
"You see, Bo [Hem's nickname for Scott], you're not a tragic character. Neither am I. All we are is writers and what we should do is write." The good common sense of that last sentence is cruelly negated by the abysmal character judgments in the other two. Within ten years of the letter, Fitzgerald would drink himself to death; Hemingway, on the other hand, would commit suicide the way a character in The Sun Also Rises went bankrupt: gradually at first, and then suddenly. But again, it's telling that Hemingway needs to believe this about himself.
"Invention is the finest thing but you cannot invent anything that would not actually happen. That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best--make it all up--but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way." I especially like this one. It reminds me of a story Hemingway surely knew: when someone remarked to Picasso that Gertrude Stein looked nothing like his portrait of her, Picasso replied, "She will."
"Scott for gods sake write and write truly no matter who or what it hurts but do not make these silly compromises."
"You can study Clausewitz in the field and economics and psychology and nothing else will do you any bloody good once you are writing. We are like lousy damned acrobats but we make some mighty fine jumps, Bo, and they have all these other acrobats who won't jump."
And then Hem's attempt at friendship-saving irony: "Jesus its marvelous to tell other people how to write, live, die etc."
I also like the way Hemingway's pen/mind slips twice and he writes 'right' for 'write.' The same thing happens to me whenever I right about righting.
WONDER BOYS by Michael Chabon
The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay won the Pulitzer, The Yiddish Policemen's Union earned reams of good reviews, but in my opinion Wonder Boys remains Michael Chabon's best book. It's one of the most purely enjoyable American novels of the past 20 years, and in terms of craft it's a novelistic masterpiece: the first 80 pages are a textbook example of how to complicate a narrative, and the remainder is a master class in the inventive extension and ultimate resolution of those complications. That said, this is no groundbreaking, mind-blowing work of literature, no Gravity's Rainbow or Ulysses, nor is it meant to be. Rather, and no less impressively, it's a masterful work of 'traditional' narrative craftsmanship, as well-written and expertly constructed as any of the novels in Philip Roth's 'American trilogy.' It's a book that engages not only on the macro level of novelistic structure, the pleasure of watching a writer successfully juggling a host of characters and situations, keeping them all in the air, and bringing them to a fitting denouement, but also at the micro level of sentence and image. Chabon's comic metaphors rarely misfire and are sometimes painfully apt (e.g. Tripp comparing his bearlike self and a young student to Picasso's blind minotaur being led by an angelic girl). And at a level somewhere between the macro and micro, Wonder Boys offers a plenitude of surprising local pleasures. The brief tale of the washed-up writer Joe Fahey, who waves a loaded gun at his writing students to instruct them in fear, is an example that comes immediately to mind. But enough praise. We don't really do a novel justice until we can see where it fails, where its ostensible intentions break apart and other, perhaps unintended, meanings peek through. Where does Wonder Boys fail? What are its weaknesses? One is immediately apparent: This novel narrated by that pseudo-Faulknerian novelist Grady Tripp is, like all of Tripp's other works, excessively 'male.' Chabon/Tripp's women--even the most complex of them, Sara Gaskell--don't rise far above the role of detachable male appendage and object of desire. Also, I doubt that Chabon fully considered all the implications of the novel's consistent depictions of adult male happiness as a regression to adolescence and a flight from the feminine: Irving Warshaw's spring house, James Leer's basement, Tripp's endless and apparently rather juvenile Wonder Boys manuscript, Terry Crabtree's life. By novel's end Tripp seems to have broken out of this regressive trap, but such a reading is undermined by indications that his new life is even more deeply regressive: he has returned to his childhood home, accompanied by the only maternal figure among the major characters. The ending is sentimental, matrimonial, classically comedic, but it remains haunted by the old unrest and self-loathing that eat at Tripp's matricidal heart.
It might also be interesting to consider this theme of male regression with respect to the shape of Chabon's career to date. Beginning with an impressive Fitzgeraldian debut, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, he fulfilled most of its promises with Wonder Boys. But then something strange happened. Instead of continuing along this path and sharpening and polishing his literary chops, Chabon flew off on a series of tangents, writing the kinds of books and stories that minor characters in Wonder Boys might have written. It has been a disappointingly unoriginal, regressive course, from the MGM 1940s comic book world of Kavalier to the alternative history / detective noir pastiche of Yiddish Policemen's Union and so forth. It is as though Chabon has entered his own novel and become several of his characters--a fate that Wonder Boys recognizes as an occupational hazard. But Chabon is still relatively young, he still has talent to burn, and there's still a chance that he'll return to comic realism and write the great novel that's still inside him.
A couple more random thoughts:
Grady Tripp is not a standard unreliable narrator; he's an accurate, lucid narrator stoned into unreliability--Chabon's clever method of showing us the effects of the various drugs Tripp ingests.
Another thing that impresses me about this book is the wisdom of its reflections on writers and writing, on writerly self-loathing and self-destruction, alcoholism, the "midnight disease," and on the most perverse thing in the world: the unaccountable attraction of it all.
It might also be interesting to consider this theme of male regression with respect to the shape of Chabon's career to date. Beginning with an impressive Fitzgeraldian debut, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, he fulfilled most of its promises with Wonder Boys. But then something strange happened. Instead of continuing along this path and sharpening and polishing his literary chops, Chabon flew off on a series of tangents, writing the kinds of books and stories that minor characters in Wonder Boys might have written. It has been a disappointingly unoriginal, regressive course, from the MGM 1940s comic book world of Kavalier to the alternative history / detective noir pastiche of Yiddish Policemen's Union and so forth. It is as though Chabon has entered his own novel and become several of his characters--a fate that Wonder Boys recognizes as an occupational hazard. But Chabon is still relatively young, he still has talent to burn, and there's still a chance that he'll return to comic realism and write the great novel that's still inside him.
A couple more random thoughts:
Grady Tripp is not a standard unreliable narrator; he's an accurate, lucid narrator stoned into unreliability--Chabon's clever method of showing us the effects of the various drugs Tripp ingests.
Another thing that impresses me about this book is the wisdom of its reflections on writers and writing, on writerly self-loathing and self-destruction, alcoholism, the "midnight disease," and on the most perverse thing in the world: the unaccountable attraction of it all.
Monday, August 24, 2009
MEMORY OF FIRE by Eduardo Galeano
"Each day of life is an unrepeatable chord of a music that laughs at death." --Eduardo Galeano, Century of the Wind (Memory of Fire, volume three).
Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire trilogy ( a history of the Western hemisphere with a corrective emphasis on its southern half, comprising Genesis, Faces and Masks and Century of the Wind) is very good, at moments sublime, and extremely important, showing us a new way to write and understand history: in vivid fragments, vignettes, poetic images. The act of authorial selection is foregrounded by the form, so there’s no traditional historical legerdemain suggesting that this is the history of the Western hemisphere and no others need apply. It’s a beautiful, nuanced book that shows us just how poetically powerful history writing can be. Galeano takes history out of the hands of the professoriat and makes it sing. He’s a bluesman, and his composition, in three long movements, is a vast blues for the Western hemisphere. On first reading, the work seems sui generis, like what might have happened if Borges and Garcia Marquez had collaborated on a history book–an impossible possibility, given their strongly opposed political views.
The third volume, Century of the Wind, covering the 20th century, is the most impressive of the trilogy. Its vignettes range from beauty to horror, from the exhilaration of successful revolution to the unspeakable sadism of the torture chambers, from summary executions and casual slaughters to a little town in South America called Yoro where, from time to time, it rains fish. "[In] America," Galeano writes (and by ‘America’ he always means the entire hemisphere), "surrealism is as natural as rain or madness." He has written an appropriately surreal, sublimely beautiful and terribly true book that is as artful as it is educative. I wish there was more history like this.
Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire trilogy ( a history of the Western hemisphere with a corrective emphasis on its southern half, comprising Genesis, Faces and Masks and Century of the Wind) is very good, at moments sublime, and extremely important, showing us a new way to write and understand history: in vivid fragments, vignettes, poetic images. The act of authorial selection is foregrounded by the form, so there’s no traditional historical legerdemain suggesting that this is the history of the Western hemisphere and no others need apply. It’s a beautiful, nuanced book that shows us just how poetically powerful history writing can be. Galeano takes history out of the hands of the professoriat and makes it sing. He’s a bluesman, and his composition, in three long movements, is a vast blues for the Western hemisphere. On first reading, the work seems sui generis, like what might have happened if Borges and Garcia Marquez had collaborated on a history book–an impossible possibility, given their strongly opposed political views.
The third volume, Century of the Wind, covering the 20th century, is the most impressive of the trilogy. Its vignettes range from beauty to horror, from the exhilaration of successful revolution to the unspeakable sadism of the torture chambers, from summary executions and casual slaughters to a little town in South America called Yoro where, from time to time, it rains fish. "[In] America," Galeano writes (and by ‘America’ he always means the entire hemisphere), "surrealism is as natural as rain or madness." He has written an appropriately surreal, sublimely beautiful and terribly true book that is as artful as it is educative. I wish there was more history like this.
AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Autumn of the Patriarch, while not as surrealistically inventive as One Hundred Years of Solitude, is a great novel in its own right and deserves to displace the overrated Love in the Time of Cholera as the ‘other’ Garcia Marquez novel. If Solitude synthesizes Faulkner and Kafka, Patriarch leans more toward the Faulknerian side of things, its prose heavily influenced by Absalom, Absalom! (In Gabo’s geography, Faulkner is not a ‘Southern writer’ but a writer of the northern Caribbean basin. In terms of the location and duration of his influence, this is probably the best way to think of Faulkner. He's the northern grandfather of the late twentieth-century Latin American novel.) The long, run-on, convoluted, marvelously lyrical sentences in this novel give a Baroque flavor to a nightmarish, Gothic story, a combination reminiscent of Old Bill at his darkest. Gabo’s prose makes this a more difficult read than Solitude, but it’s a familiar, Modernist kind of difficulty, the difficulty of complexity, of multiple narrators and a (somewhat) non-chronological narrative, a difficulty that finally enriches rather than obscures.
I admire the way Gabo’s incredibly long-winded sentences–the last 50-page chapter is a single sentence–are like a sea on which the reader floats and in which he is occasionally submerged. We drift into the prose and let it flow over us, let it dominate our consciousness. There’s something genuinely overpowering in this lyricism, as powerful as Faulkner at his best; it’s an insinuating power, that of a melody that moves from the background to become the center of the song...But I prefer the oceanic metaphor. Gabo’s sentence rhythms are tidal, like the rhythm of the sea the general is forced to sell (to Americans who set it up in Arizona, a marvelous bit of satire that Gabo prodigally throws off in a subordinate clause), and the loss of the sea near the end of the book foregrounds this rhythm with an image that tropes the last chapter’s single-sentence structure: a terminal tide that streams out never to return. And this is also, obviously, an image of life, which occurs once and once only, no repetition (unlike my last phrase), no resurrection–a point stated, perhaps too explicitly, at book’s close.
I admire the way Gabo’s incredibly long-winded sentences–the last 50-page chapter is a single sentence–are like a sea on which the reader floats and in which he is occasionally submerged. We drift into the prose and let it flow over us, let it dominate our consciousness. There’s something genuinely overpowering in this lyricism, as powerful as Faulkner at his best; it’s an insinuating power, that of a melody that moves from the background to become the center of the song...But I prefer the oceanic metaphor. Gabo’s sentence rhythms are tidal, like the rhythm of the sea the general is forced to sell (to Americans who set it up in Arizona, a marvelous bit of satire that Gabo prodigally throws off in a subordinate clause), and the loss of the sea near the end of the book foregrounds this rhythm with an image that tropes the last chapter’s single-sentence structure: a terminal tide that streams out never to return. And this is also, obviously, an image of life, which occurs once and once only, no repetition (unlike my last phrase), no resurrection–a point stated, perhaps too explicitly, at book’s close.
ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
I’m reading One Hundred Years of Solitude for the 2nd or 3rd time. It’s the Great Columbian Novel, a fact often obscured or missed by North American and European critics who designate it a “Latin American” novel. While Gabo deliberately generalizes his tales, never explicitly naming the country in which the novel is set, many of the background events (Liberal-Conservative wars, banana massacre, etc.) are recognizable incidents from Columbian history. I wonder how many North American readers appreciate this, understand that they’re reading a kind of ‘national epic’ of 19th and 20th century Columbian history rather than a generalized, mythologized, ‘South American’ fable.
The most serious flaw I find in this reading is that Gabo forces too big a cast upon himself. There are simply too many Buendias, and the author doesn’t sufficiently individualize them all. (He’s great, but he’s not Tolstoy.) So as we reach the halfway point, the Aurelianos and Arcadios of various generations tend to blur together, and I find myself repeatedly turning back to the genealogy chart in the front of the book. If Gabo had cut out a generation, this flaw might have been less noticeable, but which scenes would we want to lose, which beautiful images would we eliminate?
Reading the book after the 2000-2001 Bushite takeover of the U.S., I feel an eerie shock of recognition in some scenes, particularly the stolen election that leads Col. Buendia into rebellion (so much like the events of late 2000 in that most Caribbean, that most Latin American, that most magic realist of our United States). A new, deep-freeze chill also accrues to the banana massacre and its Kafkaesque aftermath of delusional official denials. Here is where magic realism becomes realism proper, reflecting hallucinatory reality.
Again and again the book surprises me, even upon re-reading. It is a triumph of the engaged imagination, a great left-wing novel that is also (rare thing) a great novel, fully deserving its prestige. Its strengths greatly outweigh its weaknesses, rendering them negligible, barely worth mentioning beside the great plagues of insomnia and amnesia, the suicide attempt of Col. Aureliano, the ascension of Remedios the Beauty, the train of corpses, and so much more.
This is a novel as lush and fertile as a Columbian rain forest (and filled with as many intoxicating substances), a book of Dantean inventiveness and richness. Yes, I’m gushing now, but this novel deserves it. Gabo’s inventiveness does not flag (as Grass’s does in Tin Drum); even the last two or three chapters contain marvels: the “brothel of lies”; Aureliano and Amaranta’s amour fou in the house that succumbs to nature exactly as they do and is destroyed along with them; the old Catalonian bookseller with his shopful of treasures that the citizens of Macondo see as so many piles of printed junk; the tour de force ending in which the last Buendia reads of his own death at the moment it occurs–a very tidy clearing of the stage.
The book is a supreme example of writing that is both politically engaged and wildly imaginative. There is enough melancholy and wistfulness in Gabo’s tone to keep his fantasy from becoming mere whimsy. And it’s a melancholy born of the nightmares of Columbian history, a history like a freight train packed with corpses (a central image of the novel’s second half), a wistfulness born of what that history might have been. It’s not a perfect book (I’ve mentioned a few flaws above), but it is one of the very greatest.
The most serious flaw I find in this reading is that Gabo forces too big a cast upon himself. There are simply too many Buendias, and the author doesn’t sufficiently individualize them all. (He’s great, but he’s not Tolstoy.) So as we reach the halfway point, the Aurelianos and Arcadios of various generations tend to blur together, and I find myself repeatedly turning back to the genealogy chart in the front of the book. If Gabo had cut out a generation, this flaw might have been less noticeable, but which scenes would we want to lose, which beautiful images would we eliminate?
Reading the book after the 2000-2001 Bushite takeover of the U.S., I feel an eerie shock of recognition in some scenes, particularly the stolen election that leads Col. Buendia into rebellion (so much like the events of late 2000 in that most Caribbean, that most Latin American, that most magic realist of our United States). A new, deep-freeze chill also accrues to the banana massacre and its Kafkaesque aftermath of delusional official denials. Here is where magic realism becomes realism proper, reflecting hallucinatory reality.
Again and again the book surprises me, even upon re-reading. It is a triumph of the engaged imagination, a great left-wing novel that is also (rare thing) a great novel, fully deserving its prestige. Its strengths greatly outweigh its weaknesses, rendering them negligible, barely worth mentioning beside the great plagues of insomnia and amnesia, the suicide attempt of Col. Aureliano, the ascension of Remedios the Beauty, the train of corpses, and so much more.
This is a novel as lush and fertile as a Columbian rain forest (and filled with as many intoxicating substances), a book of Dantean inventiveness and richness. Yes, I’m gushing now, but this novel deserves it. Gabo’s inventiveness does not flag (as Grass’s does in Tin Drum); even the last two or three chapters contain marvels: the “brothel of lies”; Aureliano and Amaranta’s amour fou in the house that succumbs to nature exactly as they do and is destroyed along with them; the old Catalonian bookseller with his shopful of treasures that the citizens of Macondo see as so many piles of printed junk; the tour de force ending in which the last Buendia reads of his own death at the moment it occurs–a very tidy clearing of the stage.
The book is a supreme example of writing that is both politically engaged and wildly imaginative. There is enough melancholy and wistfulness in Gabo’s tone to keep his fantasy from becoming mere whimsy. And it’s a melancholy born of the nightmares of Columbian history, a history like a freight train packed with corpses (a central image of the novel’s second half), a wistfulness born of what that history might have been. It’s not a perfect book (I’ve mentioned a few flaws above), but it is one of the very greatest.
GARGANTUA AND PANTAGRUEL by Francois Rabelais
Having read the first two books of Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, I find the work tedious, monotonous, redundant, tiresome, boring, soporific, uninteresting...you get the picture.
There are brief passages of genius, truly inventive and outrageous comic scenes (the journey into Pantagruel’s mouth stands out), but these joyous moments are, to coin a phrase, few and far between. Even if we consider ‘Master Alcofribas’ (a name that makes me think of alcohol and freebase and Richard Pryor aflame) the most unreliable narrator of all time and the book a massive deconstruction of itself, the text does not become a bit more interesting. This is a book made to be skimmed, scanned, skipped-through, sampled, sipped, tasted, tested, tippled, tinkled-upon, etc, etc, etc,...
One non-comic aspect of the book that does interest me is the way that some elements of Rabelais' style analogize with contemporary trends in the visual arts. Rabelais’ sartorially detailed descriptions of clothing and nauseatingly clinical depictions of wounds (this last surely a comic device meant to satirize the goreless slaughters of medieval romance) can be seen as analogous to the trompe l’oeil, photographically exquisite details of Mannerist painting (the draperies in Bronzino’s portraits, for example). Like all books, G&P is of its moment, an artifact of the first half of the 1500's in France, the Mannerist Fontainebleau era.
There are brief passages of genius, truly inventive and outrageous comic scenes (the journey into Pantagruel’s mouth stands out), but these joyous moments are, to coin a phrase, few and far between. Even if we consider ‘Master Alcofribas’ (a name that makes me think of alcohol and freebase and Richard Pryor aflame) the most unreliable narrator of all time and the book a massive deconstruction of itself, the text does not become a bit more interesting. This is a book made to be skimmed, scanned, skipped-through, sampled, sipped, tasted, tested, tippled, tinkled-upon, etc, etc, etc,...
One non-comic aspect of the book that does interest me is the way that some elements of Rabelais' style analogize with contemporary trends in the visual arts. Rabelais’ sartorially detailed descriptions of clothing and nauseatingly clinical depictions of wounds (this last surely a comic device meant to satirize the goreless slaughters of medieval romance) can be seen as analogous to the trompe l’oeil, photographically exquisite details of Mannerist painting (the draperies in Bronzino’s portraits, for example). Like all books, G&P is of its moment, an artifact of the first half of the 1500's in France, the Mannerist Fontainebleau era.
A brief thought about MOBY DICK
A brief thought about a book that cannot be thought of briefly:
Moby Dick is the American Bible, the only canonical New American Testament. It’s a highly critical secular scripture that puts opposing philosophical positions in play and questions them all even as it questions the very ground of human knowledge and the validity of interpretation. More than an adventure story (although it is, of course, a great, tragic one of those, too), it’s an epistemological adventure, a hermeneutical quest--hence the multitudinous images of unreadable writing and uninterpretable signs that barnacle the skin of this whale of a text. The reason no one could understand the book when it was published is simple: a century and more had to pass before our intellectual culture could catch up with Melville’s mind (and we surely haven’t definitively caught it yet...). We needed to assimilate the ‘linguistic turn’ of philosophy, the structuralism of Levi-Strauss, and the poststructuralism of Derrida before we could begin to see all that Melville accomplished here–not because Derrida and Levi-Strauss explain Melville but because Melville contains them (and probably a critique of them besides). This is, moreover, the relationship the greatest art often has to philosophy, and we should begin to read fiction and philosophy accordingly. Reading Moby Dick in this light, we might see that while the white whale is the novel’s master-image of mystery, it is only the novel’s penultimate point of hermeneutic and epistemological failure. The ultimate mystery, the vast unknown, the gap for which that between the signifier and signified is merely one more trope, is that mystery of which the white whale is agent: death.
Moby Dick is the American Bible, the only canonical New American Testament. It’s a highly critical secular scripture that puts opposing philosophical positions in play and questions them all even as it questions the very ground of human knowledge and the validity of interpretation. More than an adventure story (although it is, of course, a great, tragic one of those, too), it’s an epistemological adventure, a hermeneutical quest--hence the multitudinous images of unreadable writing and uninterpretable signs that barnacle the skin of this whale of a text. The reason no one could understand the book when it was published is simple: a century and more had to pass before our intellectual culture could catch up with Melville’s mind (and we surely haven’t definitively caught it yet...). We needed to assimilate the ‘linguistic turn’ of philosophy, the structuralism of Levi-Strauss, and the poststructuralism of Derrida before we could begin to see all that Melville accomplished here–not because Derrida and Levi-Strauss explain Melville but because Melville contains them (and probably a critique of them besides). This is, moreover, the relationship the greatest art often has to philosophy, and we should begin to read fiction and philosophy accordingly. Reading Moby Dick in this light, we might see that while the white whale is the novel’s master-image of mystery, it is only the novel’s penultimate point of hermeneutic and epistemological failure. The ultimate mystery, the vast unknown, the gap for which that between the signifier and signified is merely one more trope, is that mystery of which the white whale is agent: death.
Monday, July 27, 2009
On Kenneth Branagh's HAMLET (1996)
When I first saw Kenneth Branagh's 4-hour "full text" version of Hamlet during its initial theatrical release in 1996, I was not overly impressed. I thought it was OK but too long, had too many cameos and was too much of a Kenneth Branagh Experience. Now, having just finished watching the pristine DVD release, I wonder what kind of bad weed I was smoking back in '96. Branagh's Hamlet is a great film. And more than that, it is the best Hamlet I have ever seen on film: better than Olivier's reductive "man who could not make up his mind" interpretation; better than Tony Richardson's 1969 film with Anthony Hopkins miscast as Claudius to Nicol Williamson's Hamlet (although Hopkins is actually a year older than Williamson, he looked about 10 years younger in 1969, and Claudius should really look noticeably older than Hamlet); better than Zefferelli's version with crazy Mel Gibson pretending to be sane; better than the tame 1980s PBS film with Kevin Kline; better than the Ethan Hawke 'Wall Street Hamlet' with Sam Shepard as the Ghost (providing the best scene in the movie, by far). Brilliant and thrilling and as mad as its protagonist, Branagh's film deserves to be seen again and again. Yes, Jack Lemmon's wooden line readings weigh down the front end a bit, but that's ultimately a minor flaw, and what works in the film massively outweighs it--to wit: the "too, too solid flesh" soliloquy in the suddenly emptied great hall; the mirrored "To be or not to be" soliloquy during which the camera moves in so that the edges of the mirror become invisible and we have an image of two Hamlets with daggers drawn preparing to duel, an absolutely perfect visual analogue for the soliloquy; the thrilling "let my thoughts be bloody" speech reimagined as a German Romantic aria performed atop a snowy mountain out of Caspar David Friedrich; Derek Jacobi's Claudius, who comes off in this production as almost a Macbethian tragic figure (it could be argued that this is Jacobi's movie); Brian Blessed's performance as the Ghost, especially the wonderfully understated side-glance of tenderness he directs at Gertrude in the bedchamber scene; the amazingly fluid camera work (looks like steadicam, but it's actually all dolly shots); the marvelous Wellesian low-angle shot that shows Hamlet and Gertrude reflected in a pool of Polonius's blood; the perfect casting of Charlton Heston as the Player King (which made me think: if Chuck had been offered more roles like this during the 90s, maybe he wouldn't have gone looking for love at Wayne LaPierre's house); the mad genius of Branagh's set with its rooms behind mirrors, secret passages and myriad hiding places, a set on which no one can say with certainty "Now I am alone..."; the fact that one of those mirrors conceals the padded cell in which Ophelia will rave... I could go on ("I'll rant as well as thou") because this is a great film, probably the only Shakespeare film that's worth watching twice solely for its excellence as a film. The DVD commentary track by Branagh and the film's textual advisor is also quite good. It was only when watching the the movie with the commentary track on (and Shakespeare's words muted) that I was able to fully appreciate the filmic beauty of this work (the mise en scene, shot compositions, etc.). This is a Shakespeare movie that still looks amazing even without Shakespeare's words. Check it out.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
THE RENAISSANCE by Walter Pater
Pater's Renaissance is one of my Bibles. Specifically, it's my Pentateuch. Joyce's Ulysses is my New Testament, Gravity's Rainbow my Apocalypse, Tristram Shandy my Apocrypha, Kafka my Koran, and A la recherche du temps perdu my endless Mahabarata. One of the most beautifully-written books in the English language, The Renaissance has an undeserved reputation for purple prose and an all-too-deserved one as the holy book of decadent aestheticism. "I wish they would not call me a hedonist," Pater once complained, "it gives such a wrong impression to those who do not know Greek." As we all know, however, the real reason we are discomforted by any description of ourselves is the possibility that it might give people the right idea. Pater was an aesthete, and his book is the first and best English-language manifesto of aesthetic life. Here's a taste (and just a taste) of what Pater is capable of:
On Pico Della Mirandola: "And yet to read a page of one of Pico's forgotten books is like a glance into one of those ancient sepulchres, upon which the wanderer in classical lands has sometimes stumbled, with the old disused ornaments and furniture of a world wholly unlike ours still fresh in them."
On Michelangelo: "A certain strangeness, something of the blossoming of the aloe, is indeed an element in all true works of art: that they shall excite or surprise us is indispensable. But that they shall give pleasure and exert a charm over us is indispensable too; and this strangeness must be sweet also--a lovely strangeness."
On Michelangelo's pietas: "He has left it in many forms, sketches, half-finished designs, finished and unfinished groups of sculpture; but always as a hopeless, rayless, almost heathen sorrow--no divine sorrow, but mere pity and awe at the stiff limbs and colourless lips."
On the Uffizi Medusa (also the subject of a poem by Shelley): "What may be called the fascination of corruption penetrates in every touch its exquisitely finished beauty."
On the proper use of philosophy: "Philosophy serves culture, not by the fancied gift of absolute or transcendental knowledge, but by suggesting questions which help one to detect the passion, and strangeness, and dramatic contrasts of life."
On aesthetic experience: "Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch."
I could continue quoting Pater until my hands curl up like lobster claws, but that would only wrench more quotes out of the contexts in which they really must be read. In the long last chapter, Pater quotes Goethe on Winckelmann: "One learns nothing from him, but one becomes something." The same is true of Pater. If one reads him deeply and well, one might become an aesthete. The Renaissance is one of my 'essential' books. Every literate human being should own a copy.
On Pico Della Mirandola: "And yet to read a page of one of Pico's forgotten books is like a glance into one of those ancient sepulchres, upon which the wanderer in classical lands has sometimes stumbled, with the old disused ornaments and furniture of a world wholly unlike ours still fresh in them."
On Michelangelo: "A certain strangeness, something of the blossoming of the aloe, is indeed an element in all true works of art: that they shall excite or surprise us is indispensable. But that they shall give pleasure and exert a charm over us is indispensable too; and this strangeness must be sweet also--a lovely strangeness."
On Michelangelo's pietas: "He has left it in many forms, sketches, half-finished designs, finished and unfinished groups of sculpture; but always as a hopeless, rayless, almost heathen sorrow--no divine sorrow, but mere pity and awe at the stiff limbs and colourless lips."
On the Uffizi Medusa (also the subject of a poem by Shelley): "What may be called the fascination of corruption penetrates in every touch its exquisitely finished beauty."
On the proper use of philosophy: "Philosophy serves culture, not by the fancied gift of absolute or transcendental knowledge, but by suggesting questions which help one to detect the passion, and strangeness, and dramatic contrasts of life."
On aesthetic experience: "Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch."
I could continue quoting Pater until my hands curl up like lobster claws, but that would only wrench more quotes out of the contexts in which they really must be read. In the long last chapter, Pater quotes Goethe on Winckelmann: "One learns nothing from him, but one becomes something." The same is true of Pater. If one reads him deeply and well, one might become an aesthete. The Renaissance is one of my 'essential' books. Every literate human being should own a copy.
OUT OF SHEER RAGE: WRESTLING WITH D.H. LAWRENCE by Geoff Dyer
Geoff Dyer is a wanker. Anyone who has read his dire book of travel pieces, Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It, knows just how much of a wanker he can be. Out of Sheer Rage, on the other hand, is a much better and more original book, a first-person account of Dyer's failure to write a book about D.H. Lawrence that becomes, in its way, a rather beautiful book about Lawrence. Reading it, I was reminded of Henry Miller's early attempt to write a Lawrence book; as I recall, Miller amassed reams of research material and became so engrossed in the research that the book itself was never written. Something of that sort happens to Dyer, but fortunately he turns his inability to sit down and re-read Women in Love into the motive for a globe-spanning tour of Lawrentian locales that rarely fails to entertain and sometimes does much more. There are memorable visits to Lawrence's childhood home and his house in Italy, but the book really comes alive when a Lawrentian consciousness seems to leak out of Dyer's reading and invade his world. After a moped crash in Greece, for example, Dyer and his girlfriend have post-traumatic, injured sex. Lawrence would've understood their need for sex at this moment, but he couldn't have written a scene with the gentle humor of Dyer's. (Humor was not D.H.'s strong point; it's hard to laugh while coughing blood.) Even better--the high point of the book, in fact--is a druggy scene on a Mexican beach in which Dyer takes himself in hand (the arch-wanker wanks) while staring at his girlfriend's pussy and imagining himself licking her clit while she pisses on his chin. Dyer can hold this vision for only a few seconds, though, until self-consciousness kicks in and he realizes he's sitting naked on a public beach preparing to wank. There are quite a lot of good scenes, interesting thoughts and questionable assertions in this book, and they are all worth reading.
SHAKESPEARE, TRAGICAL AND COMICAL
Hamlet and Twelfth Night were made for each other. Probably written around the same time (yes, my 'probably' covers a multitude of scholarly sins, but let's leave the fraught matter of Shakespearean chronology aside for the length of this post), the two plays strangely and surprisingly complement each other, and could be fruitfully performed on alternating nights. If Hamlet is Shakespeare's greatest theatrically self-conscious work (the play within the play; Hamlet as an actor who performs madness so well that his own disbelief is at times suspended, etc.), Twelfth Night may be his greatest textually self-conscious work, frequently reflecting on problems of reading, writing, language, representation and (mis)interpretation. ("Malvolio: By my life, this is my lady's hand. These be her very c's, her u's, and her t's; and thus she makes her great P's." [insert groundlings' raucous laughter here]). And at the beginning of Act Three, Feste is a most Derridean clown (or should we think of Derrida as Feste translated into labyrinthine French?):
Viola: Thy reason, man?
Feste: Troth, sir, I can yield you none without words, and words are grown so false I am loath to prove reason with them.
I am suggesting that each of these plays mirrors the other--or that we should make them mirrors in our minds. We should read Viola's performance through Hamlet's, and vice versa; read Malvolio's 'scene of reading' through Polonius's, and so on. This might be the best way to break down the thoroughly artificial historical barrier separating Shakespeare's raucous tragedies from his serious comedies. And this barrier must be laid low if we are to understand Shakespeare at all. "Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world" is the plea Shakespeare makes through Falstaff (playing Hal pleading for Falstaff in a typically mind-boggling bit of meta-theater), and too many critics and readers have been too quick to reply like Hal, "I do. I will." An important lesson of ALL of Shakespeare, though, is that any idea of tragedy that slights comedy cuts out its own heart before it has had a chance to start beating. Maybe we can't really understand Shakespeare unless and until we can see fat Jack Falstaff and melancholy Hamlet and tranvestite Viola as brothers.
Viola: Thy reason, man?
Feste: Troth, sir, I can yield you none without words, and words are grown so false I am loath to prove reason with them.
I am suggesting that each of these plays mirrors the other--or that we should make them mirrors in our minds. We should read Viola's performance through Hamlet's, and vice versa; read Malvolio's 'scene of reading' through Polonius's, and so on. This might be the best way to break down the thoroughly artificial historical barrier separating Shakespeare's raucous tragedies from his serious comedies. And this barrier must be laid low if we are to understand Shakespeare at all. "Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world" is the plea Shakespeare makes through Falstaff (playing Hal pleading for Falstaff in a typically mind-boggling bit of meta-theater), and too many critics and readers have been too quick to reply like Hal, "I do. I will." An important lesson of ALL of Shakespeare, though, is that any idea of tragedy that slights comedy cuts out its own heart before it has had a chance to start beating. Maybe we can't really understand Shakespeare unless and until we can see fat Jack Falstaff and melancholy Hamlet and tranvestite Viola as brothers.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
THE MAD MAN by Samuel Delany
Oh boy... This is the book in which Samuel Delany, never one to fly his freak flag at half-staff, runs that sucker all the way up the pole, over the top and into the stratosphere. The Mad Man is the story of John Marr, a young, gay, African-American grad student in philosophy, and his decade-long quest to understand the life, work, thought and death of Timothy Hasler, a young, gay, Korean-American philosopher murdered in a New York City hustlers' bar in the early 1970s. That's the standard Publisher's Weekly-type description of this novel, and it's pretty much bullshit. The Mad Man is nothing like A.S. Byatt's Possession (which Delany reviewed and which probably inspired the novel's conception), and Gwyneth Paltrow will definitely not be appearing in the movie. The Mad Man isn't an academic novel, either--at least not after the first 20 pages. And the 'mystery' of Hasler's death is solved with a pathetically minimal amount of investigation and no real thought at all. No, while The Mad Man flirts with these genres, uses them, cruises them, it never really hooks up for a meaningful relationship. So what, finally, is this book? The Mad Man is one of the filthiest and raunchiest pornographic novels of the twentieth (or any other) century. It's a novel that concerns itself, in explicit, extensive, sometimes comic and occasionally tiresome detail, with men whose sexuality takes the form of drinking other men's urine and eating their feces. This is Delany's long (almost 500 pages in the definitive revised edition of 2002) song of urolagnia and coprophagia, a novel in which the narrator repeatedly falls to his knees to drink the warm piss of filthy homeless men. Now, the last part of that sentence might make the novel sound rather stupid, an academic exercise in transgression, slumming for tenure. But The Mad Man isn't that, either. It is one of the most highly intelligent--indeed, intellectual--porn novels ever written, a book that belongs on the shelf with Bataille's Story of the Eye and Sade's Philosophy in the Bedroom. Delany's novel might be subtitled 'Philosophy at the Mine Shaft,' for it is during an early-80s 'wet night' in that bar that the narrator begins to understand Heidegger's concept of 'meditative thinking'--surely the raunchiest context in which that thinker has ever been invoked. Delany shows us two 'wet nights' over the course of his novel, and both are among the most eye-opening scenes in the book. But if The Mad Man were only an intellectual / philosophical porn novel, it probably still wouldn't be worth 500 pages of my time. What kept me reading was the book's strange alienation effect: since Delany describes desires so far away from mine, I'm alienated from his sex scenes (the novel thus functions for most readers, straight and gay, as the very opposite of traditional pornography--another, and especially triumphant, example of Delany's deconstructive genre-cruising). I am alienated from the novel's raunchiest scenes in a way that opens up space for reflection on the nature of desire. At what may be its deepest level (understanding that the very notions of 'depths' and 'levels' would be exceedingly problematic to a postmodernist like Delany, and also that they would be, in the book's own terms, 'Hasler Structures'), the novel is an examination of the farthest shores of human desire in all its messiness and of the structures we build to contain that chaos. One critic has likened this book to "an unbelievably raunchy Magic Mountain," and while that comparison is at least a bit hyperbolic, I think it would be fair to call the novel an extended dramatic meditation on Hegel's discussion of the master-slave relationship. The narrator is impressed enough by The Phenomenology of Spirit/Mind (different translators translate geist differently; the German word denotes both meanings) to plan at one point a vast Hegelian summa to be titled The Systems of the World. The Mad Man might be read as a chapter in that abandoned effort.
Monday, July 6, 2009
THE STRONGER by August Strindberg
Strindberg's 6-page play The Stronger, a work that exerted an obvious influence on Ingmar Bergman's film Persona, is a smaller and considerably less complex work than that film, but it remains of interest because of the extreme psychological movement at its climax. When Mrs. X, the speaker, evokes her colonization by the silent Miss Y, she does so in imagery that is luridly sado-masochistic. This poetic vision of ultimate inauthenticity, probably the first and only few lucid seconds of the character's life, is immediately 'flipped' into a self-aggrandizing embrace of inauthenticity as ultimate superiority. The change comes fast enough to give readers and viewers a severe case of whiplash, and that's probably why it feels so compelling, so accurate. Defense mechanisms do tend to slip into place this quickly and efficiently, a fact that renders The Stronger a most chilling little play.
And what of Miss Y? She remains an unknown quantity, a silence upon which we can project our prejudices and call them interpretations. She may well be every bit as inauthentic as her Chatty Cathy companion. To be seduced by her silence into an overestimation of her character is to hear the sound of a Strindbergian trap closing around us.
And what of Miss Y? She remains an unknown quantity, a silence upon which we can project our prejudices and call them interpretations. She may well be every bit as inauthentic as her Chatty Cathy companion. To be seduced by her silence into an overestimation of her character is to hear the sound of a Strindbergian trap closing around us.
DOUBLE LIVES, SECOND CHANCES: THE CINEMA OF KRZYSZTOF KIESLOWSKI by Annette Insdorf
Anyone who comes to Annette Insdorf's book in search of incisive, challenging criticism of Kieslowski's works should look elsewhere. Insdorf knew and loved Kieslowski (she tells us that she called him 'Wujek' [Polish for 'uncle'] and he called her 'Mala' ['little one']), and she comes solely to praise him, an attitude that tends toward the tiresome. Overall, though, her book is valuable and worthy of measured praise rather than dismissive burial. The book is very good on a strictly informational level, providing an excellent overview of Kieslowski's many early documentaries and obscure pre-Decalogue feature films, and it succeeds well in communicating the complete shape of Kieslowski's career. Indeed, it's really more an annotated filmography than a work of criticism. Insdorf is anything but critical. Her commentaries are, however, often illuminating, especially her discussion of the Three Colors trilogy--a discussion that informs and enriches our understanding of the films despite the fact that Insdorf, like the director himself, works overtime to make the trilogy (especially White) seem more humanistic and hopeful (and consistent) than it actually is. One example of the low level of critical intelligence Insdorf brings to bear on these movies: Even though she writes that the events of White take place over a period longer than one year, she's perfectly prepared to play along with Kieslowski's too-neat ending to Red and write that "the trilogy comes full circle within one year." In fact, as careful viewing makes clear, White, Blue and Red are chronologically inconsistent; Karol and Dominique could not possibly have been on a boat crossing the English Channel one year after the death of Julie's husband.
Insdorf also tells us that Kieslowski had a difficult time deciding on the proper endings for some of his films (The Double Life of Veronique and White, in particular), so perhaps the ambiguity of these endings is less a result of artistic mastery than of directorial uncertainty. Hardly a 'killing' criticism, this may just be another way of saying that Kieslowski's films are courageously authentic, true to the director's and screenwriter's visions even when those visions are uncertain or conflicted.
Since my opinion of this book is making me sound like something of a Kieslowski killjoy, I should probably state that I consider the Decalogue, the Three Colors trilogy and The Double Life of Veronique to be among the best films of the past fifty years. I wish Insdorf had written a book equal to them.
Insdorf also tells us that Kieslowski had a difficult time deciding on the proper endings for some of his films (The Double Life of Veronique and White, in particular), so perhaps the ambiguity of these endings is less a result of artistic mastery than of directorial uncertainty. Hardly a 'killing' criticism, this may just be another way of saying that Kieslowski's films are courageously authentic, true to the director's and screenwriter's visions even when those visions are uncertain or conflicted.
Since my opinion of this book is making me sound like something of a Kieslowski killjoy, I should probably state that I consider the Decalogue, the Three Colors trilogy and The Double Life of Veronique to be among the best films of the past fifty years. I wish Insdorf had written a book equal to them.
Friday, July 3, 2009
WILLIAM GASS, AMERICAN WRITER
On this July 3, as America tunes up for its annual day of self-congratulatory symphonies, allow me to pre-emptively piss on the parades by presenting a few select passages from the always aphoristic and absurdly alliterative essays of William H. Gass:
"Our culture...desires men who will be willing to be mowed down in anonymous rows if need be, used up in families, in farms and factories, thrown away on the streets of sprawling towns, who want to pass through existence so cleanly no trace of them will ever be found."--Habitations of the Word
"Consciousness is all the holiness we have."--Habitations of the Word
"Theology, it appears, is one-half fiction, one-half literary criticism."--Fiction and the Figures of Life
"...the chief point in life is to die of something and never for something if it can be helped."--Tests of Time
"Francis Bacon prosecuted his patron, Essex, for treason, and was found guilty himself of bribery and consequently expelled from court. Vianini was burned at the stake...At the hands of the Inquisition Giordano Bruno suffered the same painful fate. Nothing was ever done to Louisa May Alcott."--Tests of Time
"In every country, in every clime, regarding any rank or race, at any time and with little excuse, orthodoxy will act evilly toward its enemies. Survival is its single aim--that is, to rigidify thought, sterilize doubt, cauterize criticism, and mobilize the many to brutalize the few who dare to dream beyond the borders of their village, the walls of their room, the conventions of their community, the givens of some god, the mother-smother of custom, or the regimen of an outmoded morality--and even the Greatest Good itself could not fail to be bruised by such handling, and rapidly rot where the bruise had been."--Tests of Time
"One sign of a sound idea is its fearlessness."--Tests of Time
"Writers must reveal and accuse. It will happen naturally. No need to aim at some selected target. Writing well will put the writing in the bulls-eye."--Tests of Time
"When all is well, everyone is ill but will not know it."--Tests of Time
"Early on I learned that life was meaningless, since life was not a sign; that novels were meaningful because signs were the very materials of their composition. I learned that suffering served no purpose; that the good guys didn't win; that most explanations offered me to make the mess I was in less a mess were self-serving lies. Life wasn't clear, it was ambiguous; motives were many and mixed; values were complex, opposed, poisoned by hypocrisy, without any reasonable ground; most of passion's pageants were frauds, and human feelings had been faked for so long, no one knew what the genuine was; furthermore, many of the things I found most satisfactory were everywhere libelously characterized or their very existence was suppressed; and much of adult society, its institutions and its advertised dreams, were simply superstitions that served a small set of people well while keeping the remainder in miserable ignorance."--Finding A Form
"When I looked at man, I did not see a noble piece of work, a species whose every member was automatically of infinite worth and the pinnacle of Nature's efforts. Nor did history, as I read it, support such grandiose claims. Throughout human time, men had been murdering men with an ease that suggested they took a profound pleasure in it, and like the most voracious insect, the entire tribe was, even as I watched, even as I participated, eating its host like a parasite whose foresight did not exceed its greed. Hate, fear and hunger were the tribal heroes."--Finding A Form
"If life is hard, art is harder."--The World Within the Word
"If you enjoy the opinions you possess, if they give you a glow, be suspicious. They may be possessing you. An opinion should be treated like a guest who is likely to stay too late and drink all the whiskey."--A Temple of Texts
"Yeats grew old disgracefully. It is the only way to go."--A Temple of Texts
"It seems incredible, the ease with which we sink through books quite out of sight, pass clamorous pages into soundless dreams. That novels should be made of words, and merely words, is shocking, really. It's as though you had discovered that your wife were made of rubber..."--Fiction and the Figures of Life
"It is the principal function of popular culture--though hardly its avowed purpose--to keep men from understanding what is happening to them, for social unrest would surely follow, and who knows what outbursts of revenge and rage. War, work, poverty, disease, religion: these, in the past, have kept men's minds full, small, and careful. Religion gave men hope who otherwise could have none. Even a mechanical rabbit can make the greyhounds run."--Fiction and the Figures of Life
"Even Arnold Bennett noticed that we do not measure classics; they, rather, measure us. For most people it is precisely this that's painful; they do not wish to know their own nothingness--or their own potentialities either..."--Fiction and the Figures of Life
"Works of art confront us the way few people dare to: completely, openly, at once."--Fiction and the Figures of Life
"The artist is a lover, and he must woo his medium till she opens to him; until the richness in her rises to the surface like a blush."--Fiction and the Figures of Life
And to bring this Gassean litany to an end, one of my favorite quotes from Gass's great essayistic precursor, Ralph Waldo Emerson:
"People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them."--from the essay "Circles"
Have an unsettled Fourth of July.
"Our culture...desires men who will be willing to be mowed down in anonymous rows if need be, used up in families, in farms and factories, thrown away on the streets of sprawling towns, who want to pass through existence so cleanly no trace of them will ever be found."--Habitations of the Word
"Consciousness is all the holiness we have."--Habitations of the Word
"Theology, it appears, is one-half fiction, one-half literary criticism."--Fiction and the Figures of Life
"...the chief point in life is to die of something and never for something if it can be helped."--Tests of Time
"Francis Bacon prosecuted his patron, Essex, for treason, and was found guilty himself of bribery and consequently expelled from court. Vianini was burned at the stake...At the hands of the Inquisition Giordano Bruno suffered the same painful fate. Nothing was ever done to Louisa May Alcott."--Tests of Time
"In every country, in every clime, regarding any rank or race, at any time and with little excuse, orthodoxy will act evilly toward its enemies. Survival is its single aim--that is, to rigidify thought, sterilize doubt, cauterize criticism, and mobilize the many to brutalize the few who dare to dream beyond the borders of their village, the walls of their room, the conventions of their community, the givens of some god, the mother-smother of custom, or the regimen of an outmoded morality--and even the Greatest Good itself could not fail to be bruised by such handling, and rapidly rot where the bruise had been."--Tests of Time
"One sign of a sound idea is its fearlessness."--Tests of Time
"Writers must reveal and accuse. It will happen naturally. No need to aim at some selected target. Writing well will put the writing in the bulls-eye."--Tests of Time
"When all is well, everyone is ill but will not know it."--Tests of Time
"Early on I learned that life was meaningless, since life was not a sign; that novels were meaningful because signs were the very materials of their composition. I learned that suffering served no purpose; that the good guys didn't win; that most explanations offered me to make the mess I was in less a mess were self-serving lies. Life wasn't clear, it was ambiguous; motives were many and mixed; values were complex, opposed, poisoned by hypocrisy, without any reasonable ground; most of passion's pageants were frauds, and human feelings had been faked for so long, no one knew what the genuine was; furthermore, many of the things I found most satisfactory were everywhere libelously characterized or their very existence was suppressed; and much of adult society, its institutions and its advertised dreams, were simply superstitions that served a small set of people well while keeping the remainder in miserable ignorance."--Finding A Form
"When I looked at man, I did not see a noble piece of work, a species whose every member was automatically of infinite worth and the pinnacle of Nature's efforts. Nor did history, as I read it, support such grandiose claims. Throughout human time, men had been murdering men with an ease that suggested they took a profound pleasure in it, and like the most voracious insect, the entire tribe was, even as I watched, even as I participated, eating its host like a parasite whose foresight did not exceed its greed. Hate, fear and hunger were the tribal heroes."--Finding A Form
"If life is hard, art is harder."--The World Within the Word
"If you enjoy the opinions you possess, if they give you a glow, be suspicious. They may be possessing you. An opinion should be treated like a guest who is likely to stay too late and drink all the whiskey."--A Temple of Texts
"Yeats grew old disgracefully. It is the only way to go."--A Temple of Texts
"It seems incredible, the ease with which we sink through books quite out of sight, pass clamorous pages into soundless dreams. That novels should be made of words, and merely words, is shocking, really. It's as though you had discovered that your wife were made of rubber..."--Fiction and the Figures of Life
"It is the principal function of popular culture--though hardly its avowed purpose--to keep men from understanding what is happening to them, for social unrest would surely follow, and who knows what outbursts of revenge and rage. War, work, poverty, disease, religion: these, in the past, have kept men's minds full, small, and careful. Religion gave men hope who otherwise could have none. Even a mechanical rabbit can make the greyhounds run."--Fiction and the Figures of Life
"Even Arnold Bennett noticed that we do not measure classics; they, rather, measure us. For most people it is precisely this that's painful; they do not wish to know their own nothingness--or their own potentialities either..."--Fiction and the Figures of Life
"Works of art confront us the way few people dare to: completely, openly, at once."--Fiction and the Figures of Life
"The artist is a lover, and he must woo his medium till she opens to him; until the richness in her rises to the surface like a blush."--Fiction and the Figures of Life
And to bring this Gassean litany to an end, one of my favorite quotes from Gass's great essayistic precursor, Ralph Waldo Emerson:
"People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them."--from the essay "Circles"
Have an unsettled Fourth of July.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
CANETTI SAID IT (supposedly)
I'm attempting to source the following quote attributed to Elias Canetti:
"Happiness is that ridiculous life goal of illiterates."
More than one movie reviewer quoted it in reviews of Mike Leigh's recent Happy Go Lucky, but none of them bothered to note the source.
UPDATE 11/19/11: The line is from Canetti's novel Die Blendung (English title: Auto Da Fe). The complete sentence reads: “Almost Kien was tempted to believe in happiness, that contemptible life-goal of illiterates. If it came of itself, without being hunted for, if you did not hold it fast by force and treated it with a certain condescension, it was permissible to endure its presence for a few days.”
Thanks Natalie.
"Happiness is that ridiculous life goal of illiterates."
More than one movie reviewer quoted it in reviews of Mike Leigh's recent Happy Go Lucky, but none of them bothered to note the source.
UPDATE 11/19/11: The line is from Canetti's novel Die Blendung (English title: Auto Da Fe). The complete sentence reads: “Almost Kien was tempted to believe in happiness, that contemptible life-goal of illiterates. If it came of itself, without being hunted for, if you did not hold it fast by force and treated it with a certain condescension, it was permissible to endure its presence for a few days.”
Thanks Natalie.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
RAMBLING ROUND ULYSSES: A BLOOMING BLOG FOR BLOOMSDAY
Yes it is yes it's Bloomsday again, and if you don't like it, you can K.M.R.I.A....
Neither stately nor plump nor Buck Mulligan, I come to the stairhead of Joyce's tower at Sandycove and step out onto the roof. It's a cool, misty morning in the middle of May, and as I emerge into it from the cramped, curving stairway and walk to the round parapet that overlooks the sea, my overwhelming impression is of greyness, a grey so blanketing it must be spelled with the bland British 'e' instead of the more upbeat American 'a'. Grey sky, grey sea, long grey cargo ship inching across a grey horizon that might have been painted by Whistler, grey water splashing against dark grey rocks, on the coastal road a few yards below (the tower isn't tall at all) a gray-haired Garda officer leans against the grey stone retaining wall and works with intense concentration at a cigarette from which a pencil-thin line of grey smoke snakes upward. (Or at least that's the way I remember it now, a few years later, sitting at my desk in a far corner of a distant room in a house in rural Ohio a few days before the longest of the year, attempting to reconstruct the scene, flipping through old notebooks, fingering photographs like rosary beads, not so much recalling or reciting memories as creating them anew on the light-emitting screen of a technological device that probably wouldn't have surprised Joyce at all--as Beckett said, the man tended toward omniscience.) Even the tower itself is grey. I lean against the grey stone parapet and survey the roof, this empty space no more than 10 feet in diameter where the greatest novel of the 20th century, the Rosetta Stone of Modernism, begins. There's something missing here. It's a launch pad without a rocket. The old lapwing already flew. Whereto? Trieste-Zurich-Paris, as we all know. Yes... I turn around to face the land he fled. In Joyce's day the Martello tower was in a relatively desolate spot on a coastal headland, but today Sandycove is where suburbia meets the sea. It's a typical residential suburb of Dublin, distinguished only by the brightly colored houses that line the coastal road, part of a half-hearted attempt to 'brand' this stretch of coast as the Irish Riviera. The only bright spot, from my point of view, is that the coastal houses won't be here long. Year by year the sea encroaches upon encroaching suburbia. Landslips are moving within feet of the coastal road, and the retaining wall won't hold them back for long. Soon--sooner than the residents and realtors believe--suburbia will truly meet the sea... The mist turns to cool, grey rain, and I disappointedly trudge down the stairs while birds the color of melancholy soar overhead. The tower has run out of epiphanies... A few minutes later, walking along the winding coastal road to the train station, I glance back at the tower and appreciate its absurdity. Originally a lookout place, it now looks comically out of place, a stubby lingam of suburbia raising its unimpressive erection between a row of overpriced houses and a road that skirts the sea.
When I arrived at Dublin airport, a place so architecturally unprepossessing that it immediately reminded me of my old high school, an immigrations officer drowsily asked the purpose of my visit and I replied, "James Joyce pilgrimage."
He looked up. "James Joyce?" he asked, speaking the last name with a slightly suspicious emphasis. "You mean Ulysses? That fella?" (This moment gave me my first lesson in Irish pronunciation. The Irish pronounce the name of Joyce's novel with a strong emphasis on the first syllable: YOO-li-seez.)
"Yes," I replied, "that's the guy."
Still holding my passport, the officer gave me a penetrating stare and said, "That's a hard book... Have you read Ulysses?"
I paused for a few seconds to enjoy the moment. I was actually being asked--under penalty of perjury and deportation, no less--if I had read Ulysses. To hell with all the people behind me in line. This was a moment to savor. Glancing down at my passport still firmly held between his thumb and forefinger, I said, "Will you kick me out of the country if I say no?"
He paused before answering, perfectly deadpan: "That is a distinct possibility, sir."
"Well then, yes," I replied overenthusiastically, "Yes, I've read it several times. Yes, I have. Yes."
He handed me my passport and waved me into the country with a bored "Enjoy it anyway."
I did.
When I returned to central Dublin after my morning at Sandycove I walked up O'Connell street, passed the Rotunda, and continued north to another of the genesis sites of twentieth-century art, the studio of Francis Bacon. A few years after Bacon's death in 1991, his studio and all its contents (untouched since the painter's death) were transferred from Reece Mews in London to Dublin's Hugh Lane Gallery. The studio is installed in a separate room at the back of the gallery, past a small but impressive collection of 19th-century French paintings (some of the best of which are jointly owned with the London National Gallery, the result of a massive and seemingly endless Jarndyce & Jarndyce-style legal entanglement that began when Lane died in the sinking of the Lusitania before he could clear up some ambiguity regarding the disposition of his paintings). The gallery is free, but Bacon's studio is not, so one must buy a ticket in the bookshop before trekking back to the dimly lighted room where a short documentary on Bacon plays perpetually. The doc is worth viewing, but the real attraction here is the studio. The Hugh Lane employed a team of archaeologists to map the London studio like an archaeological site, carefully noting the disposition of every scrap of paper, every discarded brush, every empty, tossed-aside paint can. It was all catalogued, removed and shipped to Dublin, along with the studio's walls, door and floor, and here at the back of the Lane all of the pieces were put together again. It's not a large room, for an artist's studio. It's slightly larger than a suburban living room. But it is heroically cluttered. 'Messy' doesn't describe it. This may be the most cluttered room I have ever seen--and I've known some pretty messy people...Yes, this is where Francis did his dirty work... Bacon likened the mess in his studio to the contents of his mind, so this room deserves its place in an art gallery, because it is in fact a work of art, an environment created by an artist as a portrait of his own mind, an objective correlative for the place his art really 'comes from'. And it also deserves its place in Dublin (city of Bacon's birth), for this is a most Joycean work of art, a work that in another medium marries the autobiographical imperatives of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to the encyclopedic surrealism of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. A listing of the torn papers and illustration fragments lying at random around the floor would resemble one of the catalogs from the last two books and would constitute an index of the painter's interests. The studio is sculpture as surrealist autobiography... These thoughts came to me as I stood in the now permanently open doorway of Bacon's studio and stared through plexiglass at the interior. (Unfortunately, we can't go inside; we remain voyeurs peering in at the Baconian aquarium, trying to spot the sea monsters.) There are five orifices through which one can view the studio: the glassed-in doorway, two peepholes sunk into the opposite wall, and two windows in what was the exterior wall. Looking through one of these windows, I had the uncanny experience of seeing myself reflected in Bacon's oft-photographed round studio mirror. So I guess I did make it inside. The mirror captured my face, peering in like an intruder from the gallery's surrounding darkness.
The morning I arrived in Dublin, I passed Bono on the sidewalk. I didn't believe it, of course. After all, who really arrives in Dublin, takes a bus to the city center, drops his bag at his hotel, and steps out for a walk only to immediately cross paths with the world's most famous Irishman? Shit like that doesn't happen... Well, except when it does. Returning to my hotel later that day, I mentioned ironically to the desk clerk that I saw "some guy who looked like Bono." The clerk was unimpressed. "Yes, that probably was Bono," he replied flatly. "U2 owns the hotel around the corner from there, and they stay there whenever they're in the city." The next time I left the hotel, I fully expected to see Van Morrison ambling down Lower Baggot Street. Unfortunately, Van the Man was nowhere in sight.
One morning I sat in Stephen's Green and watched the Dubliners walking past. Every man and woman seemed to move inside his or her own story. How many interior monologues are criss-crossing here, I thought from my bench, what interweaving of minds. Who is this tall, gaunt man who wears his overcoat like a hanger, and why does he sidestep to avoid walking under the shadow of that grove of trees? Who is this young woman in a red coat walking with her head down and hair pulled back in a thick ponytail that bounces softly against her upper back as she strides along? Woman in red aside, Dublin is a city that wears black. Every man his own Dedalus, walking in perpetual mourning for that morning's fall in the stock market.
Every walk in central Dublin is a walk through Ulysses. The better you know the novel, the more names and places you'll recognize. Wandering in the cemetery from the 'Hades' episode, I seemed to see the last name of a Ulysses character on every other tombstone. Turning north just beyond O'Connell street, I passed Capel Street, home of the lending library used by one Leopold Bloom. Northeast of there, on Eccles Street, the home of the Blooms has been torn down, demolished to make way for a maternity hospital, but the other side of the street remains much as it was in Joycean times, allowing us to project its mirror image on the demolished side and see the street Joyce would've struggled to recall as he imagined it all in Trieste-Zurich-Paris 1914-1921.
Those dates still shock. Joyce started writing Ulysses the year Europe marched merrily off to hell in Flanders fields. Its writing spanned the whole of WWI, the Easter Rising, the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Flu, and the Irish Civil War. He finished the novel not merely in a different city but a different world. An obvious and enormous question arises: how do the events of its years of composition impinge upon the novel?... I'll let you think about that one.
Ulysses turns up in the most unexpected places. Click here to see a reproduction (much too small, unfortunately; a slightly larger and clearer reproduction is here, thanks to Towleroad.com) of artist Paul Cadmus's 1931 portrait of his lover Jared French. Their illegally acquired copy of Ulysses is featured prominently in this portrait, which was recently acquired by the Toledo Museum of Art in Toledo, Ohio. The illicit book, presented upside down with French's phallic fingertip disappearing into a crack in its up-turned bottom, is an almost too-obvious symbol of gay male anal sex. Cadmus uses the smuggled book to smuggle into his painting an image of the unrepresentable. This painting deserves a place beside Meret Oppenheim's fur teacup in that small gallery of 20th century gay and lesbian erotic art icons. (I fell in love with Jerry [the painting's title] when I saw it a few weeks ago, and I will eventually be writing about it at length.)
Finally, here's a Bloomsday to-do list (one item for each chapter):
Neither stately nor plump nor Buck Mulligan, I come to the stairhead of Joyce's tower at Sandycove and step out onto the roof. It's a cool, misty morning in the middle of May, and as I emerge into it from the cramped, curving stairway and walk to the round parapet that overlooks the sea, my overwhelming impression is of greyness, a grey so blanketing it must be spelled with the bland British 'e' instead of the more upbeat American 'a'. Grey sky, grey sea, long grey cargo ship inching across a grey horizon that might have been painted by Whistler, grey water splashing against dark grey rocks, on the coastal road a few yards below (the tower isn't tall at all) a gray-haired Garda officer leans against the grey stone retaining wall and works with intense concentration at a cigarette from which a pencil-thin line of grey smoke snakes upward. (Or at least that's the way I remember it now, a few years later, sitting at my desk in a far corner of a distant room in a house in rural Ohio a few days before the longest of the year, attempting to reconstruct the scene, flipping through old notebooks, fingering photographs like rosary beads, not so much recalling or reciting memories as creating them anew on the light-emitting screen of a technological device that probably wouldn't have surprised Joyce at all--as Beckett said, the man tended toward omniscience.) Even the tower itself is grey. I lean against the grey stone parapet and survey the roof, this empty space no more than 10 feet in diameter where the greatest novel of the 20th century, the Rosetta Stone of Modernism, begins. There's something missing here. It's a launch pad without a rocket. The old lapwing already flew. Whereto? Trieste-Zurich-Paris, as we all know. Yes... I turn around to face the land he fled. In Joyce's day the Martello tower was in a relatively desolate spot on a coastal headland, but today Sandycove is where suburbia meets the sea. It's a typical residential suburb of Dublin, distinguished only by the brightly colored houses that line the coastal road, part of a half-hearted attempt to 'brand' this stretch of coast as the Irish Riviera. The only bright spot, from my point of view, is that the coastal houses won't be here long. Year by year the sea encroaches upon encroaching suburbia. Landslips are moving within feet of the coastal road, and the retaining wall won't hold them back for long. Soon--sooner than the residents and realtors believe--suburbia will truly meet the sea... The mist turns to cool, grey rain, and I disappointedly trudge down the stairs while birds the color of melancholy soar overhead. The tower has run out of epiphanies... A few minutes later, walking along the winding coastal road to the train station, I glance back at the tower and appreciate its absurdity. Originally a lookout place, it now looks comically out of place, a stubby lingam of suburbia raising its unimpressive erection between a row of overpriced houses and a road that skirts the sea.
When I arrived at Dublin airport, a place so architecturally unprepossessing that it immediately reminded me of my old high school, an immigrations officer drowsily asked the purpose of my visit and I replied, "James Joyce pilgrimage."
He looked up. "James Joyce?" he asked, speaking the last name with a slightly suspicious emphasis. "You mean Ulysses? That fella?" (This moment gave me my first lesson in Irish pronunciation. The Irish pronounce the name of Joyce's novel with a strong emphasis on the first syllable: YOO-li-seez.)
"Yes," I replied, "that's the guy."
Still holding my passport, the officer gave me a penetrating stare and said, "That's a hard book... Have you read Ulysses?"
I paused for a few seconds to enjoy the moment. I was actually being asked--under penalty of perjury and deportation, no less--if I had read Ulysses. To hell with all the people behind me in line. This was a moment to savor. Glancing down at my passport still firmly held between his thumb and forefinger, I said, "Will you kick me out of the country if I say no?"
He paused before answering, perfectly deadpan: "That is a distinct possibility, sir."
"Well then, yes," I replied overenthusiastically, "Yes, I've read it several times. Yes, I have. Yes."
He handed me my passport and waved me into the country with a bored "Enjoy it anyway."
I did.
When I returned to central Dublin after my morning at Sandycove I walked up O'Connell street, passed the Rotunda, and continued north to another of the genesis sites of twentieth-century art, the studio of Francis Bacon. A few years after Bacon's death in 1991, his studio and all its contents (untouched since the painter's death) were transferred from Reece Mews in London to Dublin's Hugh Lane Gallery. The studio is installed in a separate room at the back of the gallery, past a small but impressive collection of 19th-century French paintings (some of the best of which are jointly owned with the London National Gallery, the result of a massive and seemingly endless Jarndyce & Jarndyce-style legal entanglement that began when Lane died in the sinking of the Lusitania before he could clear up some ambiguity regarding the disposition of his paintings). The gallery is free, but Bacon's studio is not, so one must buy a ticket in the bookshop before trekking back to the dimly lighted room where a short documentary on Bacon plays perpetually. The doc is worth viewing, but the real attraction here is the studio. The Hugh Lane employed a team of archaeologists to map the London studio like an archaeological site, carefully noting the disposition of every scrap of paper, every discarded brush, every empty, tossed-aside paint can. It was all catalogued, removed and shipped to Dublin, along with the studio's walls, door and floor, and here at the back of the Lane all of the pieces were put together again. It's not a large room, for an artist's studio. It's slightly larger than a suburban living room. But it is heroically cluttered. 'Messy' doesn't describe it. This may be the most cluttered room I have ever seen--and I've known some pretty messy people...Yes, this is where Francis did his dirty work... Bacon likened the mess in his studio to the contents of his mind, so this room deserves its place in an art gallery, because it is in fact a work of art, an environment created by an artist as a portrait of his own mind, an objective correlative for the place his art really 'comes from'. And it also deserves its place in Dublin (city of Bacon's birth), for this is a most Joycean work of art, a work that in another medium marries the autobiographical imperatives of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to the encyclopedic surrealism of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. A listing of the torn papers and illustration fragments lying at random around the floor would resemble one of the catalogs from the last two books and would constitute an index of the painter's interests. The studio is sculpture as surrealist autobiography... These thoughts came to me as I stood in the now permanently open doorway of Bacon's studio and stared through plexiglass at the interior. (Unfortunately, we can't go inside; we remain voyeurs peering in at the Baconian aquarium, trying to spot the sea monsters.) There are five orifices through which one can view the studio: the glassed-in doorway, two peepholes sunk into the opposite wall, and two windows in what was the exterior wall. Looking through one of these windows, I had the uncanny experience of seeing myself reflected in Bacon's oft-photographed round studio mirror. So I guess I did make it inside. The mirror captured my face, peering in like an intruder from the gallery's surrounding darkness.
The morning I arrived in Dublin, I passed Bono on the sidewalk. I didn't believe it, of course. After all, who really arrives in Dublin, takes a bus to the city center, drops his bag at his hotel, and steps out for a walk only to immediately cross paths with the world's most famous Irishman? Shit like that doesn't happen... Well, except when it does. Returning to my hotel later that day, I mentioned ironically to the desk clerk that I saw "some guy who looked like Bono." The clerk was unimpressed. "Yes, that probably was Bono," he replied flatly. "U2 owns the hotel around the corner from there, and they stay there whenever they're in the city." The next time I left the hotel, I fully expected to see Van Morrison ambling down Lower Baggot Street. Unfortunately, Van the Man was nowhere in sight.
One morning I sat in Stephen's Green and watched the Dubliners walking past. Every man and woman seemed to move inside his or her own story. How many interior monologues are criss-crossing here, I thought from my bench, what interweaving of minds. Who is this tall, gaunt man who wears his overcoat like a hanger, and why does he sidestep to avoid walking under the shadow of that grove of trees? Who is this young woman in a red coat walking with her head down and hair pulled back in a thick ponytail that bounces softly against her upper back as she strides along? Woman in red aside, Dublin is a city that wears black. Every man his own Dedalus, walking in perpetual mourning for that morning's fall in the stock market.
Every walk in central Dublin is a walk through Ulysses. The better you know the novel, the more names and places you'll recognize. Wandering in the cemetery from the 'Hades' episode, I seemed to see the last name of a Ulysses character on every other tombstone. Turning north just beyond O'Connell street, I passed Capel Street, home of the lending library used by one Leopold Bloom. Northeast of there, on Eccles Street, the home of the Blooms has been torn down, demolished to make way for a maternity hospital, but the other side of the street remains much as it was in Joycean times, allowing us to project its mirror image on the demolished side and see the street Joyce would've struggled to recall as he imagined it all in Trieste-Zurich-Paris 1914-1921.
Those dates still shock. Joyce started writing Ulysses the year Europe marched merrily off to hell in Flanders fields. Its writing spanned the whole of WWI, the Easter Rising, the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Flu, and the Irish Civil War. He finished the novel not merely in a different city but a different world. An obvious and enormous question arises: how do the events of its years of composition impinge upon the novel?... I'll let you think about that one.
Ulysses turns up in the most unexpected places. Click here to see a reproduction (much too small, unfortunately; a slightly larger and clearer reproduction is here, thanks to Towleroad.com) of artist Paul Cadmus's 1931 portrait of his lover Jared French. Their illegally acquired copy of Ulysses is featured prominently in this portrait, which was recently acquired by the Toledo Museum of Art in Toledo, Ohio. The illicit book, presented upside down with French's phallic fingertip disappearing into a crack in its up-turned bottom, is an almost too-obvious symbol of gay male anal sex. Cadmus uses the smuggled book to smuggle into his painting an image of the unrepresentable. This painting deserves a place beside Meret Oppenheim's fur teacup in that small gallery of 20th century gay and lesbian erotic art icons. (I fell in love with Jerry [the painting's title] when I saw it a few weeks ago, and I will eventually be writing about it at length.)
Finally, here's a Bloomsday to-do list (one item for each chapter):
- Start the day with rich white milk, not hers
- Try to awake from your historical nightmare
- Telephone Eden on your navelcord
- Discuss the works of Paul de Kock.
- Stupefy them with Latin
- Plant Paddy Dignam and watch him, Bloom
- Kiss Molly's Royal Irish Arse
- U.P.
- Prove by algebra that Hamlet's father was his mother's uncle's brother's cousin's mother
- Stalk Father John Conmee SJ from central Dublin to the hill of Howth
- Tunefully tup Mrs. Bloom
- Explain by science the hanged man's erection
- Come
- Read Saintsbury's History of English Prose Rhythm
- Visit a Surrealist brothel and be as bad as Parnell was
- Buck yourself up in orthodox Samaritan fashion
- Insert long round end
- ...and yes I said yes I will Yes.
MERRY BLOOMSDAY!
Saturday, June 6, 2009
INWARDNESS AND EXISTENCE: SUBJECTIVITY IN/AND HEGEL, HEIDEGGER, MARX AND FREUD by Walter A. Davis
How good is this book? Just follow this link over to Amazon.com and buy yourself a copy. Right now. It's that good. (Alternatively, go to your local library and politely request that they acquire a copy for their Philosophy section.)
If a great book is one that shows you something more and different every time you read it, that changes with every reading because every reading changes you, then Inwardness and Existence is a great book. It's also a good book, the best kind in fact, the kind you can periodically re-read for the rest of your life. What makes it so special, sets it above most other books written by American academics in the last 30 years? It's a philosophically rigorous and at times mind-bogglingly ambitious book about the structure and construction of the self. While most academic writing on this subject today begins and ends with Foucault or Lacan and their followers, Davis's book begins with Hegel and doesn't really end. The book is circular, like a philosophical Finnegans Wake. It would probably be greatly illuminating to read Inwardness and Existence straight through and then turn immediately back to the first page and begin again, with the foreknowledge constituted by the first reading still fresh in one's mind.
Davis's book is 20 years old this year, and it's time for it to become more widely known in America and the rest of the world. (It appears to be slightly better known in Britain, where it has influenced the thinking of Britain's leading theologian, Rowan Williams, the current Archbishop of Canterbury.) This book and Davis's work generally should be at least as well-known as the works of Derrida, a thinker Davis surpasses and contains. One of the many high points of I&E (for me, anyway) is the section in which Davis compellingly argues that Deconstruction is a prematurely arrested moment of a dialectical movement that issues in Hegelian unhappy (or tragic) consciousness. Furthermore, Davis presents this demonstration not with a view to defending the battered ruins of traditional humanism but with the intention of radically destabilizing both humanism and deconstruction by means of a vast and Romantically ambitious synthesis of central ideas from the works of the four thinkers listed in the subtitle. Even more impressively, Davis doesn't simply lift useful ideas from Hegel, Freud, Marx and Heidegger; he reads each of them against themselves (as traditionally interpreted) to offer interesting and exciting new understandings of Hegelian self-consciousness, Existentialist freedom, Marxist subjectivity and Freudian psychoanalysis. (I did call it mind-bogglingly ambitious, didn't I?) And Davis's extended examinations of these schools of thought are so rich in insight, so powerful and compelling in their discussions of lived experience and of the meanings we give to life, that the book might as well have been subtitled "Subjectivity in/and Consciousness, Death, Culture, and Sex." (The book would probably have sold more copies with this subtitle.)
Both nouns in the title are crucial to understanding this book and Davis's work as a whole, but I want to focus on the second and think about Inwardness and Existence as a major contribution to Existentialism, probably the most important contribution yet made by an American thinker. This book takes Existentialism beyond Sartre, as he is popularly understood, by arguing that Sartrean freedom is not an a priori but must be achieved by a rigorous and extremely difficult process of rooting out the enormous intrusions of the Other upon the Self, the networks of internalized conflicts and ideologies that constitute most of who and what we are. This process of rooting out--called anti-bildung here and elaborated upon in Davis's later works Deracination and Death's Dream Kingdom--is the necessary preliminary to any of the authentic acts by which the Sartrean subject constructs his self, and it is such difficult work that few human beings ever begin it.
I know what you're thinking: If this book is so great, why haven't I heard of it?
Easy answer: You have heard of it now.
If a great book is one that shows you something more and different every time you read it, that changes with every reading because every reading changes you, then Inwardness and Existence is a great book. It's also a good book, the best kind in fact, the kind you can periodically re-read for the rest of your life. What makes it so special, sets it above most other books written by American academics in the last 30 years? It's a philosophically rigorous and at times mind-bogglingly ambitious book about the structure and construction of the self. While most academic writing on this subject today begins and ends with Foucault or Lacan and their followers, Davis's book begins with Hegel and doesn't really end. The book is circular, like a philosophical Finnegans Wake. It would probably be greatly illuminating to read Inwardness and Existence straight through and then turn immediately back to the first page and begin again, with the foreknowledge constituted by the first reading still fresh in one's mind.
Davis's book is 20 years old this year, and it's time for it to become more widely known in America and the rest of the world. (It appears to be slightly better known in Britain, where it has influenced the thinking of Britain's leading theologian, Rowan Williams, the current Archbishop of Canterbury.) This book and Davis's work generally should be at least as well-known as the works of Derrida, a thinker Davis surpasses and contains. One of the many high points of I&E (for me, anyway) is the section in which Davis compellingly argues that Deconstruction is a prematurely arrested moment of a dialectical movement that issues in Hegelian unhappy (or tragic) consciousness. Furthermore, Davis presents this demonstration not with a view to defending the battered ruins of traditional humanism but with the intention of radically destabilizing both humanism and deconstruction by means of a vast and Romantically ambitious synthesis of central ideas from the works of the four thinkers listed in the subtitle. Even more impressively, Davis doesn't simply lift useful ideas from Hegel, Freud, Marx and Heidegger; he reads each of them against themselves (as traditionally interpreted) to offer interesting and exciting new understandings of Hegelian self-consciousness, Existentialist freedom, Marxist subjectivity and Freudian psychoanalysis. (I did call it mind-bogglingly ambitious, didn't I?) And Davis's extended examinations of these schools of thought are so rich in insight, so powerful and compelling in their discussions of lived experience and of the meanings we give to life, that the book might as well have been subtitled "Subjectivity in/and Consciousness, Death, Culture, and Sex." (The book would probably have sold more copies with this subtitle.)
Both nouns in the title are crucial to understanding this book and Davis's work as a whole, but I want to focus on the second and think about Inwardness and Existence as a major contribution to Existentialism, probably the most important contribution yet made by an American thinker. This book takes Existentialism beyond Sartre, as he is popularly understood, by arguing that Sartrean freedom is not an a priori but must be achieved by a rigorous and extremely difficult process of rooting out the enormous intrusions of the Other upon the Self, the networks of internalized conflicts and ideologies that constitute most of who and what we are. This process of rooting out--called anti-bildung here and elaborated upon in Davis's later works Deracination and Death's Dream Kingdom--is the necessary preliminary to any of the authentic acts by which the Sartrean subject constructs his self, and it is such difficult work that few human beings ever begin it.
I know what you're thinking: If this book is so great, why haven't I heard of it?
Easy answer: You have heard of it now.
THE STREET OF CROCODILES by Bruno Schulz
If no one has yet used the word 'decadent' to describe Bruno Schulz's prose, allow me to be the first. I have defined 'decadence' elsewhere as a mode of artistic production characterized by highly stylized excess, and even the briefest examination of a random page from The Street of Crocodiles is a more effective argument than any I could construct for the work's decadent nature. (I should probably add that to me the word 'decadence' is purely descriptive, connoting no positive or negative aesthetic or moral judgment.) Assuming the general faithfulness of Celina Wieniewska's translation (a controversial issue that I am not linguistically competent to pronounce upon), Schulz writes a lush, beautiful, gloriously decadent prose, the highly figurative lyricism of which overwhelms the narrative gestures in his fiction. Schulz's 'stories' are nothing of the sort. Nor are they Kafkaesque parables. The too-easy Schulz-Kafka connection (made easier by the seemingly obvious influence of Kafka on Schulz's conception of the Father character) obscures the fact that these two artists could hardly be more different. Where Kafka is dry and focused, Schulz is expansive and effusive. Where Kafka's descriptions exhibit scientific naturalism even at their most surreal, Schulz is a lush, poetic painter whose prose is as vividly colored as an Expressionist canvas. Where Kafka describes, Schulz mythologizes. (Gregor Samsa is very matter-of-factly described in his transformed state; Adela and her broom, by contrast, become a furious maenad with her thyrsus when she shoos the birds from Father's attic room.) In short, where Kafka is incomparably and outrageously deadpan, Schulz is gorgeously decadent. His prose is like a burst pomegranate; the over-ripeness is all. I love it.
Some of the pieces in Crocodiles are extraordinary (the title fiction, "Cinnamon Shops," "Tailor's Dummies," "Visitation," "Birds," "The Comet") while others are slight and forgettable ("Nimrod," "Pan"). At their best, these fictions demand re-reading, if only to catch the elements missed on a first reading. There is a Borgesian richness here, as well as--it must be said--a Borgesian sameness, a repetition of images and ideas that almost (but not quite) could be justified as musical form. There's also, at times, too much too-much-ness, a poetic concentration of idea and image that calls to mind Schulz's favorite poet, Rilke. The Rilke influence may, in fact, be more decisive than Kafka, given the resemblances between certain passages in this book and similar moments in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.
Some of the pieces in Crocodiles are extraordinary (the title fiction, "Cinnamon Shops," "Tailor's Dummies," "Visitation," "Birds," "The Comet") while others are slight and forgettable ("Nimrod," "Pan"). At their best, these fictions demand re-reading, if only to catch the elements missed on a first reading. There is a Borgesian richness here, as well as--it must be said--a Borgesian sameness, a repetition of images and ideas that almost (but not quite) could be justified as musical form. There's also, at times, too much too-much-ness, a poetic concentration of idea and image that calls to mind Schulz's favorite poet, Rilke. The Rilke influence may, in fact, be more decisive than Kafka, given the resemblances between certain passages in this book and similar moments in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.
ANSELM KIEFER by Mark Rosenthal
Mark Rosenthal's Anselm Kiefer, the catalogue to the Art Institute of Chicago's 1987 Kiefer retrospective, is an average exhibition catalogue--and in its unexceptionality it fails to rise to the challenge of the artist who may well be our greatest living painter. (As I've written elsewhere, I consider Kiefer the only living painter to whom the adjective 'great' can be unhesitatingly applied.) The reproductions in this book are very good. My only complaint is that they are not larger and there are not more of them. (Cost considerations doubtless limited the volume's size.) With Rosenthal's text, however, I have some major quarrels. Most of them stem from his overly archetypal understanding of Kiefer's work. Drawing upon the writings of historian of religion Mircea Eliade (the University of Chicago's favorite Romanian fascist), Rosenthal's interpretations construct a Kiefer who is far too otherworldly, an alchemical-spiritual seeker of transcendence who concerns are increasingly divorced from historical and political reality. The most obvious problem with this 'Kiefer' is that he is not the artist who created most of the works reproduced alongside the text. The real Kiefer is an emotionally--indeed, furiously--politically engaged artist whose images deliberately and provocatively call up the reality of the present and the recent past. A single example of authorial misreading can stand as a synecdoche for the entire catalogue: Kiefer's 1986 painting Iron Path shows railroad tracks moving through a blasted gray-white landscape. Upon first encountering the image, most viewers will immediately understand it as a reference to the Holocaust. Not so Rosenthal, whose transcendental orientation forces him to interpret the tracks as an image of otherworldly connection, a kind of Jacob's Ladder. Almost perversely, his brief discussion of the painting fails to mention the image's most immediate historical resonance. Fortunately, Kiefer's art is strong enough to blow away Rosenthal's hackneyed ahistorical interpretations. Just turn to page 149 and spend a while looking at and thinking about Kiefer's Osiris and Isis (1985-87), a huge painting of a vast pyramidal monument to which Kiefer has attached a TV circuit board from which emanates a network of wires connected to ceramic shards. Think about the implications of Kiefer's surrealist collision of the ancient sacred and the technological sublime, and you will come to know the artist's work more deeply than does the author of this catalogue.
Having read many recent exhibition catalogues, I almost want to congratulate Rosenthal for not interpreting Kiefer's work in terms of some trendy critical theory du jour (Foucaultian, Lacanian). But unfortunately he feels compelled to embrace a hermeneutic dustier than the collected works of Northrop Frye.
Having read many recent exhibition catalogues, I almost want to congratulate Rosenthal for not interpreting Kiefer's work in terms of some trendy critical theory du jour (Foucaultian, Lacanian). But unfortunately he feels compelled to embrace a hermeneutic dustier than the collected works of Northrop Frye.
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