Forget About It : My Very Short List of Annoying Novelistic Cliches

I usually oppose prescriptive approaches to art, but even I have limits. Here are a few literary cliches that contemporary fiction writers should probably avoid:

1. A shot rang out. No it didn't. Gunshots don't ring; landline telephones and Salvation Army bells do. Shots snap, crackle, and pop (like a cereal commercial); they also explode, echo, ricochet, erupt, burble, and whistle (past the ears of those lucky enough not to be on the receiving end--which is what Hemingway meant when he said you never hear the one that gets you), but they never really rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiinnng.
2. Any sentence beginning with the word 'suddenly.' Especially overused by thriller writers, as in "Suddenly a shot rang out. Thompson dove for cover. "Let's get outta here," he grunted to the blonde, already hot-footing it for the door."
3. "Let's get outta here." Don't say it; make like Nike and just do it. This and all closely related lines of dialogue are the novelist's easiest and cheapest way to signal a shifting of scenes. If you can't accomplish this simple task more artfully, you shouldn't write.
4. Stage directions, such as 'he rose,' 'he walked across the room,' 'he staggered,' 'he sat,' 'he stood,' 'he opened the door,' 'he closed the door.' These bland but necessary directions cast a pall of boredom over any page on which they appear. Why can't we write 'he sank into his naugahyde Barcalounger and relaxed to a Pat Boone LP,' or 'he took a sip of fine Kentucky bourbon and neighed like a Derby horse,' or, less whimsically, 'he dragged his left foot to the front of the room'?
5. Paragraphs composed entirely of short simple sentences. Or, in James Ellroy's case, fragments. Of short. Simple sentences. During the 1980s heyday of minimalism, whole novels were written in this facile 'see Dick run' prose. Critics straightfacedly hailed their strength. And vigor. Now it's over. Thank Dog.
6. Authorial moral earnestness. The most serious novels are, in Kundera's great phrase, "an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become." A novel should not exist primarily as a platform for authorial posturing (though we all do strut a bit; we're only human). The author's morality (and his/her politics, philosophy, etc.) informs every sentence of a good novel. It need not be billboarded. If you write well enough--and authentically enough--the ideological/intellectual stuff will take care of itself.
7. Postmodern Self-Consciousness. After almost half a century of novels in which writer-characters write the novel we are reading and/or make fictional appearances to comment upon their own fictions, etc., etc., this sort of thing has hardened into a blood clot in the aorta of contemporary literary fiction. Still something of a subversive strategy when Salman Rushdie used it in Midnight's Children, its status as cliche was clearly signalled by its deployment in Neil Simon's Jake's Women (which was, to be fair, superior Simon). Whenever a technique appears in a Neil Simon play, it has ceased to be subversive.
8. Academic novels. These days, most well-reviewed, 'serious' writers of 'literary fiction' are either graduates of MFA programs and/or pay their bills by 'teaching' at colleges and universities (living off LitFic is incredibly difficult; even David Foster Wallace had a professorial day job). This sorry situation has led to a glut of campus novels (even Denis Johnson wrote one[!]). Like every other genre, this one boasts a few very good books (David Lodge's Small World and Chabon's Wonder Boys come to mind), but most fail to rise above mediocrity.
9. Suburban social realism (or as Parisians might call it, le roman de Franzen). I think everyone has had enough of the bland banlieues americaines, n'est-ce pas? The only original suburban novel still possible is an utterly tasteless Pynchonian allegory in which all the boring, bourgeois characters, ashamed of being trapped in such an imaginatively impoverished genre, commit mass suicide at the end of chapter one. In the second chapter, fire destroys the suburbs. The rest of the novel tells the story of a family of neurotic rabbits who hop around madly and shag each other silly amidst the ruins of the human world. The book ends with the triumph of lapine fascism and a song-and-dance number titled, "When Rabbits Rule the World (It'll be Auschwitz Time for Kitty Cats)."
10. Insert Your Least Favorite Literary Cliche Here.

THE SUNSET LIMITED by Cormac McCarthy

The Sunset Limited is that rare Cormac McCarthy work that doesn't go far enough. Ol' Cormac is usually dependably excessive, to say the least. Blood Meridian is the most surrealistically excessive Western in our literature, just as Moby Dick is our most surrealistically excessive sea story. The unlimited pneumatic mayhem of No Country For Old Men (or for any other men--or women--except Anton Chigurh) served to indict our entire culture, but even that wasn't enough for McCarthy. Not content with laying waste to a part of a part of the country, he let the entire world have it in The Road. And sometime in between these works, he crafted this odd, unplatonic dialogue that he calls 'a novel in dramatic form.' Well...Sorry, Charlie, but it's nothing of the kind. Judged as a novel, The Sunset Limited is a thin, weak concoction. It comes off much better when we read it as what it really and obviously is, a play. It's a promising script for a potentially great dramatic production, provided the actors and directors play it with minimal solemnity and maximum irony (there is much dark comedy here, even a Beckettian note in White's frequent attempts to leave the room). The biggest problem is that McCarthy fails to take these two men far enough into themselves. Neither recounts the worst thing he has ever done, and neither presses the other to do so. This final reticence may reflect well upon the two men's humanity, their mutual respect and capacity for empathy, but it robs the play of a potentially shattering dramatic crescendo, a pair of glorious, Sam Shepard-style titanic monologues in which Black and White recount their worst moments. As it is, the text is haunted by these lacunae, the monologues that never were. Leaving them out is an entirely defensible artistic choice, but I don't think it was the correct one in this case.

THE DA VINCI CODE by Dan Brown

The Da Vinci Code is garbage, utter tripe, a book so poorly written that it can be read as an unintentional parody of pop thriller writing. I read it several years ago, and I have yet to receive a reply regarding the bill I subsequently sent to Dan Brown, charging him a (fairly reasonable) dollar value for my wasted reading time and demanding payment in full. A blurb on the cover of my copy quotes Nelson De Mille's hysterically effusive description of the novel: "This is pure genius." To which I can only reply: If this is pure genius, I'd hate to smell crap. I have retitled the book Thriller Written with a Mixmaster, because it reads as though Dan Brown tossed an average thriller, a tourist's guidebook and a volume of dotty art history into a Mixmaster and pressed 'Puree.' This is not to say, surprisingly, that the book is entirely without merit. (Nothing that riles the religious right can be entirely without merit.) But its few noticeable merits--superfast pacing, clever puzzles--shrink to subatomic size in proportion to its most glaring demerit: the absence of any perceptible authorial talent. To call The Da Vinci Code 'junk food for the brain' is an insult to junk food. This is a cheap, disposable thriller so poorly written that it doesn't even qualify as a guilty pleasure. If I rated books with stars, I would give it a black hole.

STUDIES IN CLASSIC AMERICAN LITERATURE by D. H. Lawrence

"The furthest frenzies of French modernism or futurism have not yet reached the pitch of extreme consciousness that Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman reached. The European moderns are all trying to be extreme. The great Americans I mention just were it." -- D. H. Lawrence

The biggest problem facing readers of D. H. Lawrence's nonfiction is the separation of the author's invaluable insights from his errant crackpottery. Studies in Classic American Literature contains a surprising number of the former and far too much of the latter. As a testy, polemical, provocative examination of several essential 18th and 19th century American books, this 88 year-old text remains highly valuable. As a basic primer on how to read these books--trust the tale, not the teller; great advice for reading anything--it is probably unbeatable. As an exercise in American cultural criticism, it is a fundamental and prescient volume. "Can you make a land virgin by killing off its aborigines?" Lawrence asks at one point, posing the question of American genocide at a time when Wounded Knee remained a living memory. In his essays on James Fenimore Cooper, Lawrence anticipates (and perhaps exceeds) Leslie Fiedler's signature insights into race and myth in American literature. He uses the Leatherstocking novels to define an endlessly suggestive 'myth of America': "[the novels] go backwards, from old age to golden youth. That is the true myth of America. She starts old, old, wrinkled and writhing in an old skin. And there is a gradual sloughing of the old skin, towards a new youth." Near the end of the same essay, Lawrence gives us his darkest reflection upon the obsidian mirror of American fiction: "The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted." These two sentences can teach us much about the contemporary American right and its psychotic, suicidal, anti-American cruelty--a psychosis that often manifests itself in a drive to smear all liberal aspects of government and society with rhetorical excrement and then complain that they stink. Sarah Palin brandishes all the firearms, but the telegenically cruel Paul Ryan (who eerily reminds me of Bret Easton Ellis's Patrick Bateman) is the real Natty Bumpo of contemporary American fascism. That old fascist cyborg Dick Cheney is so enamored of Ryan's hard, isolate stoicism that he has stated, "I worship the ground Paul Ryan walks on." (Which I guess clears up all the confusion about the true religion of the American right, n'est-ce pas?) As this brief digression suggests, the best parts of Lawrence's book remain more relevant than anything in any other octogenarian work of criticism. But these best passages are embedded in far too much of the aforementioned crackpottery: long anti-feminist tirades, a bit of anti-semitism, pages and pages of blather about the Lawrencian "Holy Ghost," a bunch of bizarre, bitchy non sequiturs... Amazingly, the book is still worth reading. It is worth our time to separate the true Lawrencian gold from the resentful, forgettable dross.

My Proust Questionnaire (Happy 140th, Marcel)

In honor of Marcel Proust's 140th birthday, I've decided to submit to a version of the infamous Pivotian, Liptonian, Vanity Fairian 'Proust Questionnaire.'

1. Your most marked characteristic? None of your business
2. The quality you most like in a man? Wit and sensitivity
3. The quality you most like in a woman? Friendliness and wit
4. What do you most value in your friends? The fact that they are my friends
5. What is your principle defect? Perfection
6. What is your favorite occupation? Turning sentences around, making worlds of words, liking that other world.
7. What is your dream of happiness? I have more interesting things to dream about
8. What to your mind would be the greatest of misfortunes? Total paralysis or the disintegration of the mind
9. What would you like to be? An enigma
10. In what country would you like to live? England, specifically London, even more specifically Bloomsbury, most specifically of all Bedford Square
11. What is your favorite color? The deep blue of shadows cast by evergreen trees upon freshly fallen snow
12. What is your favorite flower? Queen of the Night Tulip, the most decadent flower in the world
13. What is your favorite bird? The one between my index and ring fingers
14. Who are your favorite prose writers? Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Walter Pater, Vladimir Nabokov, William Faulkner, many others
15. Who are your favorite poets? Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, Donne, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, Rilke, Celan, Hart Crane, Allen Ginsberg, T.S. Eliot, many, many others
16. Who is your favorite hero of fiction? Tyrone Slothrop
17. Who is your favorite heroine of fiction? Fanny Hill
18. Who are your favorite composers? Bach, Beethoven, Berg, Wagner, Mahler, Morton Feldman
19. What is your favorite symphony? Beethoven's Ninth
20. What is your favorite opera? Wagner's Tristan und Isolde 
21. Who are your favorite painters? Picasso, Titian, Rembrandt, Cezanne, Fragonard, Goya, Manet, Van Gogh, Beckmann, many others
22. Who are your heroes in real life? A 'real life' hero is a dangerous thing to have.
23. Who are your favorite heroines of history? Ditto
24. What are your favorite first names? Alexandra, Marina, Natasha, Miranda
25. What is it you most dislike? Today's Republican Party, a surreal collection of Burroughsian Talking Assholes
26. What historical figures do you most despise? Hitler, Stalin, and many other religious figures
27. What event in military history do you most admire? It's difficult to find anything admirable in human slaughter
28. Who are your intellectual heroes? Jean-Paul Sartre, Noam Chomsky, Mahatma Gandhi, Thomas Jefferson, Emma Goldman, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Kinsey, Albert Einstein, Richard Dawkins
29. What natural gift would you most like to possess? Perfect vision
30. How would you like to die? As Bartleby said, I would prefer not to...
31. What is your present state of mind? Weird to surreal, a Gaudi palace of spiralling dreamstone
32. To what faults do you feel most indulgent? Excessive love, and any other 'fault' born of authentic passion
33. What is your favorite word? Superflux
34. What is your least favorite word? No
35. What is your motto? Doubt Everything

Celebrating Marcel Proust's 140th Birthday

No one outside the hardcore Proustian community seems to have noticed yet that this Sunday, July 10, 2011, is the 140th birthday of Marcel Proust. I suggest celebrating the occasion by taking a long swig from the Modern Library 'Proust Six-Pack':

This is a box set of the complete In Search of Lost Time (A la recherche du temps perdu) in six sturdy paperback volumes, as translated into English by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and subsequently revised (twice) to bring it into line with the most recent French edition. (Ideally, of course, one should read Proust in French; I'll be working on that for the rest of my life...) I have my quibbles with some of Moncrieff's choices, but his translation remains the best Proust in English. I've sampled the other recent translations and found them flat, bland and unsatisfying, a weak stew. Moncrieff's work, on the other hand, is sinuously, Art Nouveau-ishly impressive enough to be a monument of English prose.

A single sentence in Robert Hughes's The Shock of the New convinced me that it's impossible to really know Proust until you've experienced Art Nouveau  architecture at its excessive best. So one might also celebrate Marcel's cent-quarantieme by watching Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara's great and beautiful 1984 documentary Antonio Gaudi. (It's available from the Criterion Collection and can be rented from Netflix.) This is an almost entirely wordless 72-minute visual essay that plays like a poem or a modernist symphony (or a Proustian novel), piling image upon image upon image, allowing breathtakingly photographed examples of Gaudi's works to speak for themselves. When a narrator's voice enters near the end, it seems to come only to demonstrate the superfluity of words. The images are the thing.

This would also be a good time to study some of the Old Masters that Proust especially loved: Chardin, Rembrandt, Vermeer. Look at Vermeer's View of Delft and try to find Bergotte's little patch of yellow wall (but don't kill yourself doing it):

That's how I'll be marking a date that should be as important as Bloomsday on the literary calendar.

HAPPY PROUST'S BIRTHDAY!

A thought on Terrence Malick's DAYS OF HEAVEN and Henry James's THE WINGS OF THE DOVE

"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal..." -- T. S. Eliot, "Philip Massinger," The Sacred Wood

By the Eliotic standard, filmmaker Terrence Malick must be considered a 'mature poet,' even in his early work. Malick's second film, the beyond-beautiful Days of Heaven, boldly steals its central love triangle from Henry James's The Wings of the Dove (a novel written, appropriately, in the same general period in which the film is set [within a decade or so]). Genders are switched, and the action is shifted from London drawing rooms and Venetian palazzi to the harsh world of the early 1900s Texas Panhandle (portrayed credibly by Alberta, Canada), but the attentive and literate viewer will have little difficulty seeing the wealthy, doomed Sam Shepard as wealthy, doomed Milly Theale, the conspiratorial Richard Gere as conspiratorial Kate Croy, and the lover-turned-conspirator-turned-lover Brooke Adams as lover-turned-conspirator-turned-lover Merton Densher. Critics have often pointed out the thin, elliptical nature of Days of Heaven's narrative, a story so slight as to be dwarfed by the stunning visuals, but it seems less elliptical and more intertextual (not to mention more interesting) once one identifies the Jamesian intertext.

The Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory of English Literature : A Satyrickall Diversion

Ben Jonson spilled the beans four centuries ago in an unwritten letter recently discovered bound between the endpapers of a nonexistent book in the London Library: The Looney Hypothesis is all true, every bit of it. The Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare's plays and Shakespeare wrote Marlowe's plays and Marlowe wrote Middleton's plays and Tommy the Kyd wrote John Webster's plays between rackings in the tower; Ben Jonson wrote everyone else's poetry and John Donne wrote Ben Jonson's; Donne also wrote most of George Herbert's poems (the ones not written by Marvell), Marston wrote all of Tourneur's works, the Countess of Pembroke wrote Sidney's Arcadia, Spenser wrote Francis Bacon's essays, and Bacon wrote Queen Elizabeth I, who wrote nothing save death warrants; Addison wrote Steele's essays and Steele wrote Addison's; Marvell wrote Milton's epics while Milton wrote poems, pamphlets and precious little else, being blind (surely no one still believes that Bennettian wives' tale about the blind bugger's dreary dictation to his dutiful daughters?); Alexander Pope wrote Homer's epics and Samuel Johnson wrote Swift's satires and Henry Fielding wrote Tristram Shandy and Sterne wrote Richardson's Clarissa over a single sleepless weekend; Wordsworth and Coleridge were inventions of William Blake, while Hazlitt and De Quincey were prosey aliases for Byron and Shelley; Keats wrote every Romantic poem but found criticism Byronically 'killing'; Mary Shelley wrote all of Percy Bysshe's poems and Percy wrote the tale of Frankenstein; Jane Austen's books were written by George Eliot, Eliot's by Anthony Trollope, Trollope's by Thackeray, Thackeray's by Dickens, Dickens's by Lewis Carroll, Carroll's by Michael Jackson, Jackson's by Walter Pater, Pater's by John Ruskin, Ruskin's by Marcel Proust, Proust's by James Joyce, Joyce's by Virginia Woolf, and Woolf's by a dustman from Sydenham named Willie Stoat; Flann O'Brien wrote the half of Finnegans Wake that was not written by Myles na gCopaleen, Brian O'Nolan wrote all of Flann O'Brien's works, James Joyce wrote Brideshead Revisited as a piece of high satire, and Graham Greene wrote the rest of Evelyn Waugh while vacationing in Jamaica; in the beach bungalow nextdoor, Ian Fleming invented John Le Carre as a pseudonym for a former spook from Cornwall, while James Bond begat Kingsley Amis who begat Another Amis, who wrote all his father's books; and Salman Rushdie wrote everything, including the Koran.

I hope this clears things up.

Pour Joyce: Eighteen Joycean Thoughts for Bloomsday

Paul Cadmus, Jerry, 1931. (Toledo Museum of Art; Toledo, Ohio). The sitter is Cadmus's lover, the artist Jared French. This nakedly intimate, surprisingly complex and deeply erotic painting is my favorite artistic image of the novel that has given a name to today.

In honor of Bloomsday 2011 here are eighteen thoughts inspired by Ulysses, one for each chapter. Pour them into the porches of your rears.

1. TELEMACHUS. Who is Stephen Dedalus's third 'master,' the one who wants him "for odd jobs"? He pedantically identifies the first two masters (Pope and King) for the benefit of Haines, but his cryptic reference to the third flies far over the Englishman's low-altitude head. It's one of the many teasing riddles Stephen leaves unsatisfactorily answered, and thus several answers suggest themselves. (This shows that Joyce has learned well the secret of Shakespearean motivation: the less an author explicitly tells, the more labyrinthine the reader's guesses.) Stephen might mean Ireland, the unchosen country of his post-collegiate funk (Yes, Stephen Dedalus is 20th-century literature's archetype-defining 'slacker'), or he might be referring to his literal boss, the decidedly odd Mr. Deasy; or, at a stretch, Buck Mulligan, who depends on Stephen's job to finance his Thursday night carousing. The best answer, though, is literature, the artistic master to whom he has yet to offer a sacrifice, save his grandiose 'epiphanies' and the odd little scraps of poetry composed on library slips (and torn typing paper) during stolen moments on Sandymount Strand.

2. NESTOR. Every good reader of Joyce is, like Stephen, a learner rather than a teacher. Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, while great and re-readable, are less than infinite works. They don't demand a lifetime of re-reading. Ulysses, by contrast, is a book one can re-read even beyond the Biblical threescore and ten. (Fortunately, it's better than the Bible, and funnier.) And Finnegans Wake surely requires several lifetimes (as well as proficiency in many languages), many cycles of recirculation before we begin waking to the Wake. We are all learners of Joyce, attempting with each reading to understand his books in toto and always moderately succeeding before always colossally failing. For however well we may read, Joyce reads better; however cleverly we may interpret, Joyce interprets more cleverly. He knows all of our tricks and is always several steps ahead of us, occasionally turning to mock us, always scribbling determinedly on...

3. PROTEUS. An excellent example of the vast network of cross-references that ties Ulysses together appears in this passage from 'Proteus': "Pico della Mirandola like. Ay, very like a whale. When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once..." Taking the middle sentence first, this Hamlet line seemingly thrown up by random association refers back to the first chapter, where a peninsula is described as lying "on the water like the snout of a sleeping whale." More obviously, it sounds the novel's Hamlet motif and joins the Hamletisms of chapter one to the motif's gargantuan thematic expansion in 'Scylla and Charybdis.' The mention of Mirandola in the first fragment signposts the third sentence, which is a pitch-perfect parody of Walter Pater's essay on Pico della Mirandola in The Renaissance. This parody of Paterian prose precurses the parodic style/structure of 'Oxen of the Sun' (where Pater is among those specifically parodied) and might also remind us of Pater's oft-quoted line (from the essay on Giorgione in The Renaissance) about all art aspiring to the condition of music, a possible conceptual inspiration for the 'Sirens' chapter. And wherever there is Paterian aestheticism in Ulysses, one gets a whiff of the novel's Wilde motif and the closely related motif/theme of homoeroticism, two aspects of Ulysses that have been insufficiently explored.

4. CALYPSO. The tolling churchbells that end this chapter resound Westminstered through the pages of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. Woolf disliked Ulysses (her well-known statements about it are shallow and class-prejudiced, not Woolf at her critical best), but she was deeply influenced by it, writing in Dalloway an anglicized, bourgeois-centric, feminacentric, more formally traditional, more sharply focused, and much more concise 'revision' of Joyce's novel. Joyce's exact contemporary (Woolf was also born in 1882 and died in 1941) was hardly alone in being decisively influenced by the the book of Mr. Bloom's day. Ulysses was influencing writers even before Sylvia Beach booked it. Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot read it as a work-in-progress in manuscript and magazines, so the Joycean juxtaposition of myth and modernity stands behind two of the great poetic monuments of Modernism, The Waste Land and The Cantos. Is there any other novel that has had a comparable influence on the history of poetry?

5. LOTUS EATERS. When Bloom, walking near Trinity College, sees an unimaginative poster for a sporting event, he thinks, "Damn bad ad. Now if they had made it round like a wheel. Then the spokes: sports, sports, sports: and the hub big: college. Something to catch the eye." The poster he sees is too obvious and representational: a "cyclist doubled up like a cod in a pot." The one he imagines is more abstract, even avant-garde, the sort of thing the Italian Futurists or Russian Constructivists might have conceived. In other words, it's au courant for the time of the novel's composition, but too early for that of its setting. If Joyce learned from Shakespeare, he also learned from Dante: a writer can easily make his characters seem ahead of their time (or in the Florentine's case, make them peerless prophets) by setting his tale a few years in the past. This tiny scene is also a demonstrative commentary on how quickly the most radical artistic ideas can be turned to the stuff of advertising. Capitalism can digest anything.

6. HADES. Consider a single paragraph from Mr. Bloom's ride to the cemetery:

"The stonecutter's yard on the right. Last lap. Crowded on the spit of land silent shapes appeared, white, sorrowful, holding out calm hands, knelt in grief, pointing. Fragments of shapes, hewn. In white silence: appealing. The best obtainable. Thos. H. Dennany, monumental builder and sculptor."

Note the sudden whiplash turns of tone and register, the unexpected collisions of discourse--all perfectly appropriate for a description of something seen from a speeding carriage. We begin with neutral, tourguide-like description, then jarringly lapse into the discourse of auto racing (a motif of the funeral procession). After a mere two words, our temporary sports fan of a paragraph spills into lyrical description ("Crowded on the spit of land...") that crosses over into a parody of elegiac sentimentality ("sorrowful, holding out calm hands...In white silence: appealing"). This register is hewn by the more descriptive fragment "Fragments of shapes, hewn," and after a brief return to the elegiac, we immediately lapse into the language of self-promotion, advertising, Leopold Bloom's professional discourse: "The best obtainable." And we end with a passing glimpse of Mr. Dennany's business sign, a capitalist banality that bathetically undermines the lyrical beauty of the preceding lines.

7. AEOLUS. Here's a truism I'm tired of repeating: Modernism at its best was always already post-Modern. Joyce becomes postmodernly self-conscious in this chapter about newspaper production, printing, writing and (above all) rhetoric. Wandering among the newsmen of Dublin, Ulysses achieves self-consciousness and reflects upon the means of its own production. At the most explicit moment of formal involution, editor Myles Crawford pulls Stephen Dedalus aside and asks him to write "something with a bite in it" and proceeds to prophesy the novel in which he appears: "Put us all into it, damn its soul. Father, Son and Holy Ghost and Jakes M'Carthy." Mr. McCarthy's compatriots are of course well represented in Ulysses, fathers and sons constitute one of the novel's major themes, and the ghosts of Homer and Shakespeare are holy enough for Joycean work. Among the other spirits present at the seance, one should mention Stephen's mother, Bloom's father and son (that theme again), Oscar Wilde, Parnell, Paddy Dignam, and an unholy host of others.

8. LESTRYGONIANS. When Bloom pauses to watch a typesetter in the 'Aeolus' episode, his mind returns to a memory of his father reading Hebrew, and he reflects upon Old Testament morality: "Justice it means but it's everybody eating everyone else. That's what life is after all." Sweeney Todd couldn't have said it better. This Hebraic Hobbesianism is explored further in 'Lestrygonians,' when Bloom enters the Burton and witnesses a panoramic Darwinian spectacle of the eaters and the eaten: the munching men are compared to animals at their feed. This may be what life is, after all, but Bloom decides to have none of it and retreats to Davy Byrnes's "moral pub" for a gorgonzola sandwich (not recommended for the lactose intolerant). It might be possible--but not terribly interesting, perhaps--to interpret this chapter as an allegory of the birth of ethics as a dialectical response to the Hobbesian state of nature. But like all of Ulysses, it's much, much more than that.

9. SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS. Joyce has already Brechtianly revealed the stage machinery of his novel (most explicitly in 'Aeolus'), so it should come as no surprise when Stephen begins his discourse on Shakespeare by mentally invoking that unlikeliest of muses, the most secret father of Joycean naturalism, Saint Ignatius Loyola. Buck Mulligan is absolutely right about Stephen (and his creator): he has the cursed Jesuit strain in him, but it's injected the wrong way. It's ferociously secular. And just as Stephen Loyolanly meditates upon Shakespeare's London, Joyce the novelist Loyolanly 'composes' his own earlier Dublin. Ulysses is, among much else, a demonstrative secularization of the Loyola meditation technique known as 'composition of place' (which Stephen explicitly cites in the same line). This, I am convinced, is the compositional key to Joyce's realism. This is how he 'achieves' Dublin on the page. Joyce the apostate sat in Trieste-Zurich-Paris from 1914 to 1921 and performed Loyolan compositions of place on the Dublin of 1904.

10. WANDERING ROCKS. Before he ends this most peripatetic of episodes with a tour de force tour de Dublin, Joyce takes us inside the consciousness of Master Patrick A. Dignam, son of the encoffined and engraved stiff from 'Hades' ("First the stiff; then the friends of the stiff."), in a 'juvenile' prose style reminiscent of the early pages of the Portrait. It also, to my ear, sounds like a typically pitch-perfect Joycean parody of Gertrude Stein's prose. Judge for yourself. Here's the son recalling the father's death and encoffinment: "His face got all grey instead of being red like it was and there was a fly walking over it up to his eye. The scrunch that was when they were screwing the screws into the coffin and the bumps when they were bringing it downstairs." This also sounds a bit like mid-period Samuel Beckett, the Beckett of Molloy. But the art of the sentences is pure Joyce: notice that "screwing the screws" sonically and visually analogizes the repetitive screwdriver turns of the action it describes, and that the b's in the second half of the sentence 'bump' against its smooth sonic flow like the coffin against the stair walls.

11. SIRENS. One obvious question arises from this section: Where is "Ulysses: The Opera"? Answer: it's right here, waiting for a composer Wagnerianly ambitious enough to music the 700-page Joycean libretto. Seriously, a novel this musical cries out for operatic adaptation. We have had two attempts at film adaptations (by Joseph Strick and Sean Walsh); both are watchable and interesting but neither comes close to the book's level of artistry. A less 'realistic' adaptation for the operatic stage might work much better. It might, in fact, given a sufficiently Brechtian director, come much closer to the novel's artistic heart. Imagine an operatic Ulysses conceived like Berg's Wozzeck, with eighteen scenes that play like self-contained mini-operas, each in a different style. I will ask my question again: Why doesn't such an opera exist? Why isn't it already part of the Met repertoire?

12. CYCLOPS. A few years ago, in a basement gallery at the Art Institute of Chicago, I encountered a photograph that absolutely destroyed me, tore at me until I felt fragmented, ripped me apart like an angry child's least favorite toy. The photograph was taken after World War II by David Seymour (known professionally as 'Chim'), and it showed a young girl named Terezka standing before a chalkboard on which was scrawled an indecipherable jumble of tangled, spiralling lines that superficially resembled some of the abstract expressionist paintings in the galleries upstairs. The wallcard informed me that Terezka had been photographed in a home for disturbed children after spending most of her young life in a concentration camp. She had been asked to draw a picture of 'home' on the chalkboard. These words helped me understand the image, but the image itself blew all that understanding away as soon as I looked into Terezka's eyes. Her haunting and haunted stare, directed straight into the camera, is one of the most deeply horrifying things I have ever seen. These are eyes that have seen far too much, that have been forced to drink so deeply of human horror that they can only project that horror outward. These are eyes blighted and blinded by experiences most human beings can hardly imagine. Looking into them was like staring into the sun. I couldn't bear it for more than a few seconds at a time. I left the gallery, left the Art Institute, and walked aimlessly north on Michigan Avenue. By the time I reached the Water Tower I heard another voice, a counter-tone, rising up inside me to meet the unspeakable horror of Terezka's eyes. It offered itself as a kind of answer to the image. It was the voice of Leopold Bloom from the 'Cyclops' episode, answering the anti-semitic arseholes at Barney Kiernan's by defining love as the opposite of historical hatred. Love. It's a kind of answer.

13. NAUSICAA. After his Gerty-enabled ejaculation on Sandymount Strand, Bloom tries and fails to write her a message in the sand with a phallic wooden 'pen.' He throws the wood away, accepts that they will never meet again, and slips into a doze. (The parallels between his encounter with Gerty and his later and longer one with Stephen Dedalus are instructive.) His sleep-slipping mind immediately fires off a machine gun barrage of motifs (beginning "O sweety all your little girlwhite up I saw dirty bracegirdle made me do love sticky...") to create one of the novel's most extraordinarily avant-garde passages. This brief paragraph is beyond the rest of Ulysses, beyond surrealism, beyond even Finnegans Wake; the nearest analogy that comes to mind is William Burroughs' 'cut-up' method. As Bloom sleeps, Joyce leaps.

14. OXEN OF THE SUN. This chapter is Joyce's gift to English majors. A good part of its lit-geek fun comes from trying to identify all the styles parodied. Even the best-read of readers probably won't correctly identify them all. Fortunately, Gifford and Seidman's Ulysses Annotated (an essential reference) does a wonderful job of separating the pseudo-Lamb from the cod De Quincey, the faux-Ruskin from the false Carlyle. Joyce's takeoff of Carlyle is particularly hilarious: "By heaven, Theodore Purefoy, thou hast done a doughty deed and no botch! Thou art, I vow, the remarkablest progenitor barring none in this chaffering allincluding most farraginous chronicle. Astounding!" Astounding indeed. This is parody so perfect that it passes into criticism and forces the reader to wonder why anyone ever took Carlyle's maniacal fustian seriously.

15. CIRCE. If 'Sirens' sings out a demand for operatic adaptation, 'Circe' demands an imagistic alchemization at the animating hands of Terry Gilliam. It's a script for the greatest cartoon Gilliam will never draw. Much, much more than this, "Circe" is Joyce's farcical response to Goethe's already rather ridiculous Faust, Part Two, as well as a parodic take on Flaubert's weirdest work, The Temptation of Saint Anthony. More immanently, this longest section of Ulysses--taking up more than a fifth of the book's total length--is the novel's outrageously Freudian dream of itself. Or as a Reagan-era public service spot might have said: this is Joyce's brain on drugs, really good drugs, premo shit, hardcore hallucinogens cooked up especially for Ol' Jimmy Boy by Albert Hofmann's predecessor at Sandoz Labs. But this isn't really Ulysses unhinged. Joyce never loses control. This is Ulysses uncensored, a dreamtime bursting of the imaginative strictures, the rational rules of fiction, under which much of the novel is written (especially the more 'realistic' sections; Joyce here shows us that adherence to the rules, not to reality, is what defines 'realism.') For me, 'Circe,' 'Penelope' and 'Proteus' are the novel's three most liberating chapters...

16. EUMAEUS. ...and this chapter is surely its most boring. Intentionally so. If 'Cyclops' and 'Circe' are the inspirational takeoff points for Thomas Pynchon's wildly imaginative flights, then 'Eumaeus' and the first half of 'Nausicaa' might be considered the birthplaces of David Foster Wallace's accomplished and irritating experiments in imitative form. This chapter is a resting place in the night, a cabman's shelter where the novel pauses to catch its breath after the metamorphic frenzy of 'Circe.' It is also--and this may be the most interesting thing about it--the last piece of traditional narrative fiction Joyce ever wrote. After this comes the catechism of 'Ithaca' and the deluge of 'Penelope,' and then the labyrinthianly idiolectal Finnegans Wake. 'Eumaeus,' then, might be read as a demonstration of the exhaustion not merely of Bloom and Stephen but of the naturalistic narrative tradition as a whole. Joyce comes not to praise the tradition but to bury it. This is Joyce turning the final screw in the Paddy Dignam coffin of traditional fiction.

17. ITHACA.

What is the significance of the four full-page initials, U, S, M, and P, that decorate respectively the title page and the first page of each section of the standard 1961 edition of Ulysses?

Anagramming most obviously as 'sump,' the letters codedly signify a pit to which liquid wastes are drained, a cesspool, and might therefore constitute a puritanical designer's critical commentary on the book's content. Another view reads the letters in order to form an acronym describing the central character: Unreconstructed Sado-Masochistic Paddy.

Why does the 1961 edition of Ulysses end this chapter with a greatly enlarged period?

That's not a period, my daffy darling. It's a wormhole that bypasses the 'Penelope' episode and takes the daring reader directly into the loonyverse where sleepers never wake, Finnegan's, there to meet sinbad the sailor and jinbad the jailer and tinbad the tailor and--you get the picture.

18. PENELOPE. Here's a highly arguable assertion about the overall structure of Ulysses and its relationship to twentieth-century literature: Ulysses begins in Modernism (the first six chapters), passes through the Postmodern dissolution of the autonomous self (chapters 7-17), and ends, in 'Penelope,' with a compelling Post-Postmodern recovery of the subjectivity dissolved in the previous chapters. Discuss. ("Oh, rocks! Tell us in plain words.")

And while you're discussing it, I'll take this opportunity to lament the fact that the 1975 edition of Joyce's Selected Letters, edited by Richard Ellmann, is currently out of print. By virtue of its inclusion of the uncensored texts of Joyce's wonderful erotic letters to Nora, this is quite possibly the only volume of author letters in existence that might conceivably sell a commercially respectable number of copies, so I find its absence from the market puzzling, to say the least. Surely this book would be a natural for the New York Review Books Classics imprint. I wonder why they haven't picked it up. Until this book is brought back into print, the Joycean literary landscape will be like a home without Plumtree's Potted Meat.

American Writers and American (Sur)Reality : A Premature Ejaculation for the Fourth of July

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"the gelatinous, contractible threat of the shapeless octopus of dreams" : On the Prose Style of FADO ALEXANDRINO by Antonio Lobo Antunes

Fado Alexandrino is an amazing novel, brilliantly written and masterfully conceived and executed. Even if it had been less well-written, the novel's impressive formal originality (Lobo Antunes' montage-like narrative style in which temporally and spatially disparate scenes are conjoined in a single page, a single paragraph, sometimes a single sentence) would have been sufficient to earn it 'must read' status. The author takes a hint from one or two chapters of Joyce's Ulysses and, exhibiting a Kirk Varnedoe-esque 'fine disregard' for the rules of novelistic fiction, transforms that hint into the hallmark of his style. Fado Alexandrino is the Sentimental Education of the Portuguese revolution, the Ulysses of 1970s Lisbon. It's one of the most important European novels of the past 40 years. And it is also a singularly exhausting reading experience.

I am not saying that the book is especially difficult. (It is a difficult novel--relative to, say, the works of Martin Amis or Ian McEwan--but it's not extraordinarily difficult. After 15 or 20 pages, readers attuned to post-Joycean fiction will become accustomed to the Antunesque style and have little difficulty navigating the cubistically shifting planes of his narrative.) My readerly exhaustion might have something to do with the work required to follow the novel's four distinct but simultaneously narrated storylines, but I suspect a more likely culprit in the very aspect of Fado that makes it so exhilarating and impressive, the author's maniacally metaphorical prose. The metaphor I quote in the title of this post is an admittedly extreme example, but pretty much every page of the novel exists under the gelatinous, contractible threat of Lobo Antunes' octopoid metaphors. (I know it's problematic to comment on the prose of a work read in translation, but Gregory Rabassa, who beautifully translated Fado, is one of the world's most highly regarded literary translators, so I assume that his English version is very faithful to the author's Portuguese.) Antonio Lobo Antunes doesn't write like someone who consciously invents metaphors, who deliberately pauses during the writing process to construct a clever image or a startling simile; he writes like someone who naturally thinks in metaphors; he writes like a man possessed by a metaphorizing demon. Lobo Antunes writes like a demiurge who hovers above every blank page and commands his images to be fruitful and multiply. He is the writer as orgymaster, a Sade of the simile, letting linguistic copulation thrive while his metaphors metastasize into figurative octopi that threaten to strangle the meaning of his serpent sentences beneath an insufficiently diaphanous linguistic veil that sometimes becomes as impenetrably dark as the mouth of the River Tagus on a gloomy winter night... Yes, reading Lobo Antunes at his most manic feels something like that. Reading him, in other words, is both exhausting and exhilarating. It's like good sex. But not the safe, bodiless, postmodern wordsex that academics call 'transgressive.' That's hardly Antonio's style. His prose is strictly bareback, down and dirty linguistic fucking from the wrong side of the tracks. If Jose Saramago is the only contemporary Portuguese literary writer you've read, you definitely need to give Antonio Lobo Antunes a try.

IN PRAISE OF OLDER WOMEN by Stephen Vizinczey

According to a legend recounted on the front endpapers of my edition of this book, an early reviewer disgustedly tossed his advance copy into a wastebasket and wrote to the American publisher, "...I hope that Mr. Vizinczey will be murdered before he has time to write another book." When the book that caused this Khomeini-esque reaction in 1966 is read today, one wonders what aspect of this urbane, restrained and rather tame novel (tame not only for our time but for its own, the time of Naked Lunch, Last Exit to Brooklyn and the lifting of the Chatterley ban) was so upsetting. A highly literary erotic bildungsroman set against a background of historical tragedy (World War II, Nazism, Auschwitz, Stalinism, the 1956 Hungarian uprising), In Praise of Older Women reads like a lighter, more comic, much less ironically detached, Budapest version of the The Unbearable Lightness of Being. This comparison is intentionally anachronistic; Vizinczey's work preceded Kundera's by about two decades and might have influenced it, in a very general way. In contrast to Kundera's great work, Vizinczey's novel is good, interesting and minor. I want to call it a 'major minor novel.' (Unbearable Lightness is a major novel; Catch-22 is a Major Major one.) It's smart about sex and cognizant of the complexities of love. The chapters on 1956 and the narrator's experiences in Italian exile are wonderful, as are the passages in which Vizinczey's narrator indicts intellectuality and political action as flights from the self--"No argument can fill the void of a dead feeling," he writes--even as he flees from himself into erotic entanglements. Vizinczey should perhaps have given this irony greater emphasis, given us a more Nabokovianly unreliable narrator. As it is, Andras Vajda is an insufficiently unreliable narrator, more Henry Miller than Humbert Humbert. A more mysterious, elusive central character would've made the book more deeply interesting.

THE HUMBLING by Philip Roth

Philip Roth's 'Nemeses' quartet is really a quintet if you count The Dying Animal (which Roth categorizes as a 'Kepesh book'), a sextet if you include the 'Zuckerman book' Exit Ghost, or even a septet if you stretch the concept to include The Plot Against America. All seven books are thematically similar enough to belong together in the Library of America volume in which they will (surely) eventually be bound. The Humbling is probably destined to be considered a lesser member of this group. If Everyman (which I seem to be alone in finding exceptionally weak and unimpressive) was Roth in elegiac mode, The Humbling is his essay in tragedy. And a blatantly theatrical tragedy it is: a three-act structure; an actor-protagonist who has become psychologically unable to act (shades of Bergman's deeply theatrical film Persona); explicit references to O'Neill, Chekhov, etc.;  a makeover scene drawn from the deeply disturbing, self-abnegating makeover of Kim Novak in the last act of Vertigo; and even a gun mentioned in the first act, brandished in the second, and predictably discharged in the third. It is rather remarkable to see how many bases Roth can touch in such a brief book, but this is more the pleasure of watching a master at work than the much greater delight of reading a masterful book. For The Humbling is a minor Rothian performance, evidence that the tragic isn't really this major writer's mode. His greatest and most original mode, the one in which he writes his most powerful fiction, is the comical-tragical-absurdical-outragical of Sabbath's Theater, Portnoy's Complaint, The Human Stain, Operation Shylock, Zuckerman Unbound, The Anatomy Lesson, and (a lesser example) Our Gang. But tragic Roth is better than no Roth at all, and The Humbling is a good enough book, not a bad one. I predictably enjoyed most of its predictable pages.

ULYSSES by James Joyce: Chapter Three, 'Proteus'

Joycean modality of the ineluctably visible. Signs of all things we are here to read. Words, words, words... The 'Proteus' episode of Ulysses, Stephen Hamlet's soliloquy on Sandymount Strand, is a hermeneutic minefield strewn with interpretive traps for wary readers. (Joyce doesn't bother trapping the unwary; that's too easy.) Stephen's thoughts look 'deep,' and Joyce works overtime to achieve this appearance, taking us on an eccentric allusionary tour through his mental library of philosophy, theology, aesthetics, etc. As a consequence, most readers miss the most crucial point of the section: its shallowness. I began to understand this only after traveling to Dublin and spending a sunny Sunday morning on Sandymount Strand. The strand is a huge sandflat. At low tide the soppy sand stretches far out to the barely visible edge of the sea, and it's possible to walk out over the flat, if you don't mind trudging through shoe-sucking muck. When the sea stops holding its watery breath and exhales back toward the land, the tide comes in very quickly over the flats. I know from experience how easy it is to find yourself stranded on a slight rise as the water rills in around you. (I still have an old pair of shoes stained darker brown by Irish Seawater.) When reading 'Proteus' we must realize that although Stephen is indeed at the edge of the sea, it is a pathetically shallow sea. Even at high tide, you can probably wade out a considerable distance before the water hits your waist. Likewise, while Stephen Dedalus appears to be a Hamlet plumbing his depths, those depths are in fact almost all shallows. Whenever his broody musing threatens to touch a deep place in himself, a place of guilt or shame or anxiety about sex or death, Stephen flies off on yet another tangent, soaring away into his mental library, into the rhetoric of theology, philosophy, history, into memories and fantasies, into self-mockery. (The passage in which the cocklepicker man orders his dog away from the dead dog's body reproduces the structure of the entire episode in miniature: the Claudius-voice of Authority orders Stephen Hamlet to put off these thoughts of death ["Tatters! Out of that, you mongrel!"]) This self-mockery may be the most important because it's the beginning of self-criticism, but it's only a beginning. And most of it is, importantly, aimed at his former self, an "other me" who can be more safely dismantled. Stephen went to Paris with grandiose dreams of forging great art in the soul's smithy; now he's back in Dublin and still in the process of realizing that he must first forge his soul.

Another point about this shallowness: late in the section we see Stephen's naked emotions, his loneliness and neediness and self-pity; we glimpse a kind of depth, and it's not a pretty picture. This depth is, in fact, embarrassingly shallow: adolescent, maudlin. Stephen's emotional life is not an acceptably complex, avant-garde construction; it mocks his "Latin Quarter hat," and so it must be fled. I suspect that this, rather than the book's proletarian roughness, is the aspect of Ulysses that Virginia Woolf found so repellent. Posh Virginia wanted to believe that all human beings (or at least that tiny minority that finds its way into serious fiction) are unfathomably complex. Joyce knew that most of the time we are insufferably shallow creatures, ankle-deep and mucky like Sandymount Strand.

There are some endlessly interesting juxtapositions of writing, sex and death near the section's end. Stephen, so horny he's kissing the air, has a thought and writes it down on a torn scrap of paper, a wordy ejaculation that we cannot read. Soon after, while the tide comes erotically in ("long lassoes from Cock Lake"; Cock Lake is a long phallic inlet of the sea into the Strand at low tide), Stephen lies back against the sharp rocks and masturbates, jesuitically mortifying his flesh even as he pleasures it. This is the 'job' he thinks of in the line "Better get this job over quick." He's giving himself a quick handjob as the tide rolls orgasmically in. (The eroticized description of the tide might thus be understood as a construction of Stephen's masturbating consciousness.) And after this, after he comes, he punishes himself with a guilty vision of sexual putrefaction (the drowned man as a "bag of corpsegas" with a "quiver of minnows" in its trousers). And from this vision he predictably flees into pseudo-Hamlet, The Tempest and typically Dedalean intellectual parody. (My masturbation interpretation, which runs counter to the general critical consensus on these passages [most critics think Stephen is urinating here, despite the fact that he's reclining (a good way to wet one's trouser legs) in full view of any passing pedestrians; a pocketed reclining handjob makes more sense], resonates perfectly with Bloom's later masturbation on a different part of Sandymount Strand [in "Nausicaa"]. Sandymount, it seems, was where Dubliners went to wank in 1904. Today they have internet porn.)

The deep power of "Proteus," the part that hurts, is Joyce's bulls-eye portrayal of young male literary consciousness. This is how English majors think--a fact that I can only acknowledge now that I'm older than Bloom. We think we're out far and in deep, but we're really just wading in the shallows, wanking on the strand.

ULYSSES by James Joyce: Chapter Two, 'Nestor'

Chapters one and two of Ulysses are sutured together by a beautiful sonic 'match cut.' The last word of 'Telemachus,' usurper, shares an initial vowel sound and rhythm with the first two words of 'Nestor,' You, Cochrane. The matching music of the words (an early hint of the technique of 'Sirens') transports us smoothly from the seaside path of the first chapter's conclusion to the classroom at Mr. Deasy's school.

'Nestor' is one of the novel's slighter chapters, but it contains some of Stephen Dedalus's greatest moments. His definition of a pier as a "disappointed bridge" is simply gorgeous, an example of a 'pathetic fallacy' that generates genuine pathos. Every human being wandering alienated through the modern city is a pier who thinks he's a bridge. In his dialogue with Mr. Deasy (a name that Dickensianly rhymes with 'queasy,' appropriate for a character who becomes increasingly nauseating as the scene progresses), Stephen effectively rephrases Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire on the nightmare of history and succinctly deconstructs Deasy's ill-informed Shakespearean allusion by contextualizing it as a line spoken by Iago. He also rather wonderfully describes himself as a 'learner' rather than a 'teacher.' My favorite moment of the discussion, though, is the Joycean coup de theatre that occurs when Deasy's Protestant Hegelian argument reaches its "one great goal, the manifestation of God" at the very moment a goal is scored in the hockey game out the window. Deasy is too blinded by dogmatism to note the deflationary irony, but nothing is lost on Stephen, who "jerk[s] his thumb towards the window" and defines God as "a shout in the street." A shrug of the shoulders slightly defuses this populist blasphemy (which unsurprisingly is also a classical allusion: vox populi, vox dei).

This most literally pedagogical of Ulysses's chapters is the perfect place to say a few words about the vast academic secondary literature that has grown up around this novel. There is an intimidatingly massive library of Joycean books, essays, journal articles, webpages, blogs, etc., but only three books are absolutely necessary for an informed reading of Ulysses: Richard Ellmann's still-standard biography, James Joyce (in its 1982 revised edition); Stuart Gilbert's James Joyce's Ulysses; and Don Gifford and Robert Seidman's Ulysses Annotated. These books, especially the last, will tell you more than you need to know. This may sound like an enormous diss directed at the Joyce Industry, but it's not. I've found many other Joyce books informative and even enjoyable, but none of them are as absolutely necessary as the three mentioned above. As to the fraught question of which edition of Ulysses to read, I've read both the Gabler edition and the long-standard 1961 edition and found that while there are a few interesting differences in some specific lines, most of Gabler's many corrections are very minor. I'm tempted to call the scholarly tempest over the Gabler edition "Much Ado About Nothung"--but surely someone has already used that as an alternate title for Wagner's Ring.

...and another thing about the opening of ULYSSES

Because the setting of the first chapter of Joyce's Ulysses has become so familiar over the nine decades since its publication, we may have lost sight of just how incredibly disorienting the novel's opening pages are. Think back to your first reading of the book. If, like me, you attempted to read it 'cold,' without first dipping your toes into the tepid teawater of Joyce criticism, the first few pages must have left you entirely at sea (specifically, at the Irish Sea). This is because Joyce takes the principle of in medias res to heart and thrusts us into the midst of things we cannot possibly understand. Only late in the chapter will the attentive cold reader understand, by piecing together various clues, that the chapter takes place in and around the Martello Tower at Sandycove. To appreciate the extremity of Joyce's Modernist difference, the shock of his new, just consider how a 19th-century novelist might have begun Ulysses: "On the morning of June 16, 1904, a stately but rather plump young man known to all as 'Buck' Mulligan paused atop the stairs of the Martello Tower at Sandycove, a sleepy coastal village south of Dublin." That's a perfectly respectable Victorian frock coat of a first sentence that does everything a perfectly respectable silk-hatted first sentence should. It's also a fine substitute for Sominex. Joyce's 'cold open' is, by contrast, considerably more disreputable, disorienting, defamiliarizing. It doesn't make me drowsy.

ULYSSES by James Joyce: Chapter One, 'Telemachus'

I'm beginning this Bloomsday month with a quick re-reading of the Joycean Telemachiad, the first three chapters of Ulysses, a book I've read cover to cover seven or eight times. (Yes, I've lost count.) The point of these posts isn't to offer any 'universal' interpretation of the novel or its episodes (Ulysses dissolves all interpretations like a universal solvent, anyway). Rather, I want to shine some light on a few passages and ideas that may not have received sufficient attention in the voluminous critical literature... 

The first words of Ulysses are too familiar, so let's look closely at them until they become strange again. "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead..." The elevated, formal connotations of 'stately' are rammed immediately, with only a comma's mini-pause, into the low-comic, ironically deflationary connotations of 'plump.' (The deflation is ironic because the word's literal meaning is an opposite of 'deflated.') Read the words aloud and you can hear the deflation: 'stately' slides smoothly off the tongue through slightly parted lips; 'plump' pops and snaps and rumbles flabbily as it climbs laboriously out of the mouth. Here, in the book's initiating moment of differential meaning, its first two words, Joyce simultaneously demonstrates the deflationary irony that will be the keystone of the novel's comic rhetoric and gives us a crucial lesson in how to read Ulysses. We must take nothing, not a single word, at face value; we must always look for the deflating irony that inevitably lurks somewhere nearby.

Every time I re-read Ulysses I'm amazed anew at the number of major themes Joyce is able to introduce, with seeming effortlessness, in the brief space of the first chapter. Most of the novel's themes and motifs and many of its techniques are either stated or foreshadowed here:  a haunting familial death (Stephen's mother here 'containing' the theme that Bloom splits between his father and son), anti-semitism (in Haines's late anti-Jewish aside), cultural imperialism (Haines's plundering of Irish folk culture), imperialism and/as the nightmare of history (Haines again: "history is to blame"), Oscar Wilde as/and the specter of homosexuality (Wilde, dead only a few years before the first Bloomsday, stands alongside Parnell as one of the novel's most important ghosts; note also Buck Mulligan campily calling Stephen "my love"), Catholicism (in Buck's comic blasphemies and Stephen's melancholy pronouncements), fathers and sons (in the teasing preview of Stephen's discourse on Hamlet and in Mulligan's "Ballad of Joking Jesus": "my father's a bird," an image that unites the dove of the Holy Spirit and the winged phallus of classical art while also saying, less exaltedly, "my dad's a dick."), the classical and Mediterranean worlds (Buck's Wilde-ish Hellenism), and much more. The whole novel is contained in embryo in this first chapter. Subsequent chapters will perform acts of cellular division and gargantuan multiplication upon the various parts of the fetal body here formed.

Homer's Odyssey and Shakespeare's plays are the most important intertexts in Joyce's radically intertextual novel. The relationship to Homer is well-known after 90 years of exhaustive exegesis, and I've long considered it less important than the novel's profound and multifaceted intertextual relationship to the plays of Shakespeare. If Homer is the skeleton of Ulysses, Shakespeare is its central nervous system. I'll have more to say about this (someday) in an eventual post on "Scylla and Charybdis," so for now I'll limit myself to a general thought on the allusions of Ulysses. The densely woven allusionary texture of this novel (exemplified in "Telemachus" by allusions to Shakespeare, Xenephon, the writings of the Church Fathers, Yeats, Wilde, Swinburne, and many, many others) is the literary culmination of that distinctively Modernist rhetoric developed decades earlier in the studio of Edouard Manet. My favorite place and time for the birth of Modernism is Paris in the spring of 1863. While Salon-goers crowded in to mock Manet's Dejeuner sur l'Herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) at the Salon des Refuses, the artist was across town working on Olympia. These two seminal paintings were built around a texture of knowing allusions to the history of art, allusions that both deflated the authority of tradition by positioning it amidst mundane modernity and deflated the modern by juxtaposing it with older, more 'heroic' forms. Manet should thus be recognized as the inventor of the technique of mutually deflationary allusion that lies at the heart of the rhetoric of literary modernism: Ulysses, The Waste Land, Mrs. Dalloway, Pound's Cantos, and all the libraries of works that have flowed from them. Manet is the father of Modernism; his model Victorine Meurent might be considered its mother. (Some readers might say that this form of allusion elevates rather than deflates, granting the tradition the immediacy of modernity and raising modernity into the heroic realm. There is a name for such readers: optimists.)

A HISTORY OF GAY LITERATURE: THE MALE TRADITION by Gregory Woods

Don't let the Yale University Press logo and the author's academic Gay Studies credentials fool you. This is not yet another entry in the More Foucaultian Than Thou sweepstakes. A History of Gay Literature is an extraordinarily intelligent, well-argued, clearly written and enjoyably readable book. Indeed, this is about as close as literary history comes to a page-turner. A possible reason for this pleasant divergence from the run of the Queer Theory mill may lie in the author's nationality. He's a British Professor of Gay and Lesbian Studies, and unlike too many of his American confreres he still values linguistic clarity and apparently still believes in that Phantom of the English Department, the 'common reader.' With a global reach and a range that runs from ancient Greece to contemporary New York, this ridiculously learned and near-encyclopedic book is a single-volume education in gay literature. The obvious writers and works are covered-- Shakespeare, Marlowe, Wilde, Genet, Ritsos, Arenas--as well as many less familiar names. However well-read you think you are, I guarantee that you will find discussed herein a great writer or book you have probably not read. (In my case, I discovered Hubert Fichte, Herve Guibert and Virgilio Pinera.) Even more impressive than the book's range is the author's critical acumen. Woods's reading of Eliot's The Waste Land as a gay pastoral elegy is worth the price of the book. Likewise his discussions of Marlowe's Edward II and Shakespeare's sonnets, of which he writes, "Reading the sonnets will always flush out the reader's attitudes to homosexuality. To that extent if no further, this sequence of poems is the key gay text in English literature." When I finished this book, I wanted more. I wished Woods had gone deeper into Samuel Delany (especially his key queer text, The Mad Man), explored the gay themes in Clive Barker's SF/fantasy novels, etc., etc. At nearly 400 pages, this book is still too short. It could have been almost twice as long. (Yes, I'm perfectly aware of the gay phallic rhetoric barely concealed by the loincloth of this complaint.) This is a marvelous book that might just change the way you read. It will certainly add at least a few more books to your to-read list. And isn't that, finally, the most important function of criticism at the present time?

A SPORT AND A PASTIME by James Salter

James Salter has long been described as a 'writer's writer,' which sounds too much like the opposite of a 'reader's writer.' In fact, he's a very good and highly readable writer who has developed a prose style that's both more staccato and often more beautiful than Hemingway's. A Sport and a Pastime is a derivative novel, descending very obviously from the European-set fictions of Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Miller (not a bad trio to emulate, by any means), but the familiarity of setting and subject is overcome by the sheer force of Salter's art. His prose, which at first looks almost as stripped-down as James Ellroy's, soon reveals an unexpected poetic lushness, a painterly sensuality that reminds me of Bonnard (a painter explicitly referenced in the text). Almost every page contains a quotable example of Salter's eye. Here are a few selected at random:

Certain things I remember exactly as they were. They are merely discolored a bit by time, like coins in the pocket of a forgotten suit. (Did I mention that this book was derivative? Yes, this sounds too much like Proust when taken out of context, but within the flow of Salter's short sentences the line of descent is obscured.)

Her body, portions of it, seem to become luminous in his mind. Everything he touches or looks at, the fork, the tablecloth, somehow, by their homeliness, their silence, seem to celebrate that flesh which only a single layer of cloth conceals, does not even conceal, proclaims. (a very long sentence, for Salter)

Mornings with clouds. Windy mornings. Mornings with black wind rushing like water. (This is Salter-style at its most distinctive, like lines from a plein air painter's notebook. The sentence that immediately follows these teeters on the brink of cliche, a brink Salter's prose knows a bit too well.)

Beneath his trunks is a white like fresh bandages. His buttocks are like the inside of an apple. (This lilywhite ass is some of Salter's best work, poetically strong enough even to overcome the silly word 'buttocks.')

What's Wrong With Faulkner's LIGHT IN AUGUST

"...a novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it..." -- Randall Jarrell

You don't touch the Torah.
That's why I rarely write about William Faulkner.

If there is a grand secular American scripture, it must surely contain Faulkner's works of the 1930s, Melville's Moby Dick and The Confidence Man and his shorter fictions, the essays of Emerson, Thoreau's Walden and "Walking" and "Civil Disobedience," the poems of Whitman and Dickinson, the best novels of Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison, Miss Lonelyhearts and Gravity's Rainbow. That would be enough to found a real religion upon--more than enough--if we needed a religion.

In that nearly unbelievable run of great books Faulkner wrote between the late 1920s and the early 1940s--a period that reached its artistic peak at Absalom, Absalom!, my candidate for the greatest American novel of the 20th century--Light in August is not among the (here comes the annoying pun) most august lights. The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying shine more brightly. They are crisper, tighter books. Absalom is better written. In Light in August Faulkner seems to have given himself permission to stretch out and write at Dickensian length, and while he achieves much that is great and beautiful and intelligent and terrible and sublime in these pages--enough to make any criticisms seem almost nitpicky--the book suffers from this authorial freedom in three important ways. First, it's simply too damn long. The second half of the novel could have been shortened by at least 100 pages without losing anything essential. There are entire scenes that could and should have been reduced to a few sentences of exposition. (This is heresy, I know, but sometimes we must risk the stake.) Second, in a surprisingly clumsy piece of novelistic construction, Faulkner brings his novel to its bloody climax more than 40 pages before the end. The final two (two!) chapters are less catharsis and loose-end tying than an authorial inability to shut up. It's as though Faulkner put himself in a writing trance and couldn't break out until he brought us full circle to Lena Grove on the road again. I admire the symmetry, but I yawned at its execution. Third, and most importantly, Faulkner gives us too little Joanna Burden, one of his most interesting, complex and mysterious characters, and far too much Rev. Hightower, a relatively uninteresting Andersonian grotesque. (Many of Light in August's characters are, in fact, grotesques that might have flowed from the mind of Faulkner's early mentor Sherwood Anderson (Hightower, Mr. and Mrs. Hines; Byron Bunch, Lucas Burch, Percy Grimm); Faulkner might almost have titled this book Winesburg, Mississippi.)

These faults would probably have sunk a lesser novel, but this is not a lesser novel. This is Thirties Faulkner, our greatest writer in his greatest decade. Light in August, with all its faults, is still better than many other writers' best works. It's an essential part of the modern canon, a must-read. Indeed, it's good enough to be read more than once.

A New (well, pretty old, actually) Pynchon Pic...but don't get excited, it's just his arm...

The above photograph, which was published on the LA Times website last week, was taken somewhere in southern California, ca.1965. The porcine pinata is named Claude. The foxy lady in the Oedipa Maas dress and flaccid-armed sweater is one Phyllis Gebauer. The right arm crooked around the open door in the shadowy background (look closely) is allegedly attached to the unseen body of noted non-recluse Thomas Pynchon. While this photograph might initially appear to be merely a jokey demonstration of the author's near-Yahwistic aversion to representations of himself, a close semiotic analysis reveals encoded in its seemingly banal, snapshot-like exterior a carefully constructed series of references both to Pynchon's past and future works and the history of Western art. Just as the Pynchonian arm is both an exercise in synecdoche--using a part of the body to represent the whole--and a delightfully skewed reference to the first line of the Aeneid, the two fingers raised to signify 'peace' and/or Churchillian 'Victory' simultaneously represent the entirety of Pynchon's oeuvre through a synecdochic display of the title of his first novel, V. The aforementioned foxy lady on the landing is likewise simultaneously a reference to the caryatids on the Porch of the Maidens at the Erechtheum (Athens) and, as suggested above, a possible original for the protagonist of Pynchon's second novel, The Crying of Lot 49. The pudgy pink porker pinata, its presence as puzzling as a pope in a peignoir, presumably precurses the Pynchonian protagonist's piggy performance in the insufficiently alliterative Gravity's Rainbow. Unsurprisingly, the pinata also obviously signifies that ubiquitous Pynchonian dramatis persona, Pig Bodine. The lumpy V formed by the pig's erect ears (which like the earlier Erechtheum allusion sounds the erection motif of Gravity's Rainbow) leads the viewer's eye by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to the V of Pynchon's fingers. And so the end of our ocular voyaging is to arrive at the place where we started and know that place anew as a sign signifying Pynchon's 1990 novel Vineland. We might also notice the angle of Pynchon's signifying gesture: the rigid middle finger can be read as an 'I' as well as one half of a 'V'; the two together thus monogram Pynchon's most recent novel, Inherent Vice. The woman's expressionistically tilted shadow on the sunny California wall at lower right surely references the German Expressionist motif in Gravity's Rainbow, and this disturbing combination of southwestern sunlight and fascistic shadow should bring to mind the closing section of Against the Day. (Note the way her shadow-head is violently penetrated by the knife-like sawtoothed metal banister that seems to levitate magically above the unseen steps.) In perfect opposition to this, the photograph offers at upper left the shadowy secular cross cast by the window's crossbar on a blind that rather heavy-handedly signifies a world blind to the joyous, magical, transforming grace, the goofball good luck, that is the most positive force in Pynchon's novels. And what are we to make of that other, even more mysterious shadow, the oblique black line running across the wall at right, above and roughly parallel to the banister? Is this merely the shadow of an awning support, or could it be the Hiroshima-flash imprint left by the vapor trail of a screaming that has just come across this peaceful California sky?

Now everybody--

(I also like the way the Sixties flower decal on the door seems affixed to the woman's forehead like one of those large metal reflectors worn by doctors in Marx Brothers movies.)

LITERARY CINEMA : A List of Great Film Adaptations

Mediocre books make great films and great books make mediocre films. That's the general rule, the first half best exemplified by The Godfather (which even Mario Puzo admitted could've been a better book) and the last half by the career of Joseph Strick. Most film adaptations of great books succeed only as illustrated versions of the source novel. Here are a few exceptions to this rule, some truly great films from great books.

1. Time Regained (Raul Ruiz). A beautifully photographed adaptation of Proust's endless novel that succeeds in finding a visual stylistic analogue for Proust's prose style.
2. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Philip Kaufman). A great, smart, sexy adaptation of Kundera's great, intelligent, sexy novel.
3. The Sheltering Sky (Bernardo Bertolucci). Bertolucci's beautiful film captures the beauty and menace of Paul Bowles.
4. William Shakespeare's Hamlet (Kenneth Branagh). Branagh, not Olivier, made the only truly great Hamlet in cinema history.
5. The English Patient (Anthony Minghella). Now that the Miramaxed hype has been forgotten, we can enjoy this great film without Harvey Weinstein's shadow hulking over us.
6. Doctor Zhivago (David Lean). "How did you come to be lost?" A great exploration of the many ways people can be 'lost' in the whirlwind of revolution.
7. The Age of Innocence (Martin Scorsese). Scorsese's truly impressive range has yet to be generally acknowledged. This guy went from Rupert Pupkin to Jesus Christ to Henry Hill to Edith Wharton to the Dalai Lama, and all five films were marvelous.
8. Short Cuts (Robert Altman). Altman's masterful adaptation of several Raymond Carver stories was the best American film of the 1990s.
9. The Wings of the Dove (Iain Softley). James would certainly not have approved, but it's still a great film.
10. The Portrait of a Lady (Jane Campion). James would probably not have approved, but...
11. Vanya on 42nd Street (Louis Malle). The My Dinner With Andre team reunites for this 'workshop' version of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya that will move you to tears.
12. A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick). A fairly faithful and endlessly ironic adaptation of Anthony Burgess's Finnegans Wake-influenced futuristic novel.
13. The Tin Drum (Volker Schlondorff). Not a complete adaptation, but still a  great, one-of-a-kind film.
14. Howards End (James Ivory). James Ivory's masterpiece.
15. Wonder Boys (Curtis Hanson). Brilliant adaptation of Chabon's excellent novel. How many other mainstream American films can you name that include a knowing reference to Jean Genet?
16. The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese). This is the only Jesus movie worth watching. Even better than Pasolini's. All others drown in kitsch.
17. The Decameron (Pier Paolo Pasolini). Beautifully filmed version of some tales from Boccaccio.
18. Les Enfants Terribles (Jean-Pierre Melville). Silly beginning, brilliant ending. Melville's film has the strengths and weaknesses of Cocteau's story.
19. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (Martin Ritt). Classic spy film from a classic spy novel. Richard Burton, Claire Bloom, and the first cinematic representation of George Smiley make this one especially worth watching.