...and another thing for BLOOMSDAY 2012

...because once I get started on the nacheinander and nebeneinander of Joycean thoughts it's really impossible to stop cold turkey (cue the Lennon tune) until I've remarked that the Modernists (a category I'll expand to include everyone from Manet to Philip Roth) have become far too fucking respectable in recent decades, haven't they? They've been mastered and doctored, syllabied and conferenced, MLA'd and IJJF'd, deluxe editioned, multiply translated, banned and boned (I don't even know what I mean there), presidential medalled and national treasured, and now we have a holiday (in puritanical Ireland of all places) celebrating a novel in which the central character does "love sticky" on a public beach. Hell, even that despicable asshole (and sometime great writer) Celine (not Dion, the other one) has been duly canonized--a fate he would surely have bemoaned and blamed on a cabal of les juifs. (To give the sorry sonofabitch his due, the WWI scenes near the beginning of Journey to the End of the Night are among the best war writing of the 20th (or any other) century.)

The Good Celine. Her heart will go on...

The Bad Celine. His heart never did...

Modernism, which hoped to be Henry Miller's gob of spit in the face of bourgeois culture, has become altogether too authoritative, academicized, anaesthetized, too much of an official commodity. (Too Dion, we might say, and not enough Celine.) The culture it was meant to gag has consumed it as easily as a handful of M&Ms. It's time to recover the pornographic scandal of Modernism, to be jolted anew by the multiple electric chair shocks of its new, to understand Ulysses as a work as indigestible as Brigadier Pudding's late night snacks, to see a Miro painting through the lens of the shit banquet scene in Pasolini's Salo (which was re-released by the Criterion Collection to coincide with the 2008 Republican National Convention, because timing is everything), to make Modernism obscene again, to recognize James Joyce as a man who never met a dick joke he couldn't work into the Wake, to read Proust as a guy who wrote 3000 pages and seven volumes so he could conceal from censorial eyes an explicit sadistic brothel scene hidden deep inside the final volume (surely the only reason the Recherche didn't suffer the fate of Ulysses and Chatterley is that no prudes made it to volume seven), to understand the haughty mandarin Nabokov as a punning 13 year-old boy who names a nymphomaniacal character "Dr. Anita Johnson." We need to recover the grand 'immaturity' of Modernism, as 'immaturity' is understood in Ross Posnock's wonderful, essential critical study, Philip Roth's Rude Truth, the title of which reminds me that near the beginning of Posnock's book he quotes from Roth's The Counterlife a character's 'countereulogy' for the Rothian writer Nathan Zuckerman. The passage can be read as a rude, ranting, impassioned lament for the sanitizing of modern art, so I'll quote it in full:

The deballing of Zuckerman is now complete...A sanitized death, a travesty of a eulogy, and no ceremony at all--completely secular, having nothing to do with the way Jews bury people. At least a good cry around the hole, a little remorse as they lower the coffin, but no, no one even allowed to go off with the body. Burn it. There is no body. The satirist of the clamoring body--without a body. All backwards and sterile and stupid. The cancer deaths are horrifying. That’s what I would have figured him for. Wouldn’t you? Where was the rawness and the mess? Where was the embarrassment and the shame? Shame in this guy operated always.Here is a writer who broke taboos, fucked around, indiscreet, stepped outside that stuff deliberately, and they bury him like Neil Simon—Simonize our filthy, self-afflicted Zuck! Hegel’s unhappy consciousness out under the guise of sentiment and love! This unsatisfiable, suspect, quarrelsome novelist, this ego driven to its furthest extremes, ups and presents them with a palatable death—and the feeling police, the grammar police, they give him a palatable funeral with all the horseshit and the mythmaking! The only way to have a funeral is to invite everyone who ever knew the person and just wait fore the accident to happen--somebody who comes in out of the blue and tells the truth. Everything else is table manners. I can’t get over it. He’s not even going to rot in the ground, this guy who was made for it. This insidious, unregenerate defiler, this irritant in the Jewish bloodstream, making people uncomfortable and angry by looking with a mirror up his own asshole, really despised by a lot of smart people, offensive to every possible lobby, and they put him away, decontaminated, deloused—suddenly he’s Abe Lincoln and Chaim Weizmann in one! Could this be what he wanted, this kosherization, this stenchlessness? I really had him down for cancer, the works. The catastrophe-extravaganza, the seventy-eight pound death, with the stops all pulled out. A handful of hairless pain howling for the needle, even while begging the nurse's aide to have a heart and touch his prick--one last blow job for the innocent victim. Instead, the dripping hard-on gets out clean as a whistle. All dignity. A big person. These writers are great--real fakes. Want it all. Madly aggressive, shit on the page, shoot on the page, show off their every last fart on the page. And for that they expect medals. Shameless. You gotta love 'em.

Philip Roth receiving the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama, 2011.

Bloomsday 2012

Bloomsday comes around again tomorrow like the lastfirst sentence of Finnegans Wake, and instead of adding a bit more to the Everest of verbiage occasioned by the novel, instead of saying again things that Hugh Kenner or Richard Ellmann already said 50 years ago, instead of pointing out that the Homeric intertexts, that Odyssey and its prequel at the arbitrary origin of Western literature, are already rather Modernist (belated, ironic, influentially anxious) in their tapestry of allusions to even earlier stories, tales, myths, legends; instead of remarking upon the climactic imagery of the "Nausicaa" episode and its queer reimagining in Kenneth Anger's Fireworks; instead of writing a post titled "Joyscrap" that attempts to think about the role of excrement in Joyce's works without ever referencing Bakhtin, Kristeva or Pynchon's Brigadier Pudding (TP's ultimate comment on the British palate); instead of any of that, I've decided to take it easy this Bloomsday and just link to some photos from my trip to Dublin a few years ago.

And if that's not enough, here's the gallery of all my travel photos and miscellanea that I've scanned in recent years. If you enjoy them, you will have enjoyed them; if not, not.

Apropos of nothing except a trip to my 'pictures' folder, here are three great images of writers influenced by Joyce (a category that arguably includes just about everyone who has written literary fiction since 1920): Hemingway, Georges Perec, and between them the man known to his French Resistance comrades as l'Irlandais, 'the Irishman,' Samuel Beckett (whose photo reminds me of Harold Brodkey's observation that Beckett's nihilism ended at the barbershop door; he had the best hair of any canonical male writer).

Transparency, Translucency, Opacity: Some Thoughts on the Continuum of Novelistic Prose

If the medium of prose can be likened to window glass, then the major genera of novelistic prose (popular, literary, experimental) might be placed on a continuum stretching from transparency through translucency to opacity. The overwhelming majority of the prose that people purchase and read, the prose of popular fiction, is carefully crafted to create an illusion of transparency. It seems a clear, flawless, almost invisible window through which the stories and characters are viewed. Transparent prose is the quintessence of 'slick shit,' even slicker than the glossy paperback covers that usually bind it. (I hasten to add that my use of the phrase 'slick shit' is not as derogatory as it may seem; it was the phrase the Epstein brothers used to refer to their Casablanca screenplay, a work I hold in quite high esteem.) Transparent prose flows like an undammed river, presenting no obstacles to readerly navigation. It is written to be safely and enjoyably consumed, and while it is not exactly the literary equivalent of Muzak (because it must successfully create an alternative world and transport the reader there, a function no one would apply to a canned instrumental arrangement of "In My Life"), it is undeniably the kind of prose most closely associated with commodification. All those rows upon rows of genre novels as superficially different and profoundly similar as breakfast cereals in a supermarket are written in transparent prose. The transparent is a plain style, eschewing complex sentence structures and figurative language, but not all plain styles are transparent. Hemingway and Carver, for example, are masters of translucent plainness, and Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans stands as a perverse masterpiece of the plain opaque. The prose of Stephen King, Elmore Leonard, and Thomas Harris (a trio I choose solely because they are the three best contemporary popular novelists I have read in recent years) can stand as exemplary of a prose that tends toward transparency as a Platonic ideal. James Ellroy would also be a good example, although in recent years his telegraphic style has tended to interpose itself between reader and representation, becoming a reductio ad absurdum of the truism that plainness can be just as mannered as complexity. It's not necessary to quote examples of transparent prose, because it's all around us. Open any bestseller and you will see it.

The prose of literary fiction--which I suppose can be defined as fiction intended primarily as an aesthetic object and only secondarily as a commercial one--tends to cluster around the translucent middle of the continuum. If the transparent is a pane of clear glass, the translucent is a tinted or molded window that "diffuses the light so that objects beyond cannot be seen clearly" (as Webster defines 'translucent'). Translucent prose calls attention to itself, becoming a visible barrier between the reader and the object it represents, a lens that distorts the object in the very act of making it visible. If transparent prose is as smooth as a fiber optic cable, translucent prose twists itself into barbs that tear at the reader's brain. In so doing, translucent prose retards the reading process, forcing the reader to notice the medium as well as its representations, the designs and patterns and flaws in the glass as well as the objects still visible beyond. Thus, it raises the questions of reading and writing as processes, makes unavoidable a sense of the novel as a constructed object, and, ideally, forces into consciousness the ideologically inflected decisions made by writers while writing novels and readers while reading them. The slick prose of popular fiction seems designed to forestall these three moments, to keep the reading process easy, fast, naive, and anything but (horror!) dialectical. Translucent prose tends to be dialectically unsettling, with the power to destabilize our received opinions not only of reading and writing but of the world and ourselves. Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, Melville's Moby Dick, Joyce's Ulysses, the vast roman fleuve of Proust--these are the first works that come to my mind as masterpieces of translucent prose. We can always 'see' (in the Conradian sense) the objects that Faulkner or Joyce or Melville or Proust prose-poetically present to us, but we can also always 'see' (indeed, we can never help but see) the poetic prose that presents them. Thus are we teased into questioning the novelistic illusion that enraptures us. If you seek more examples of translucent prose, walk down the literature aisles of a Barnes & Noble (this may be your last chance; brick and mortar bookstores might soon be deader than Adorno). Hemingway, in his own minimal way, is as translucent as Faulkner (James M. Cain would be their transparent contemporary), but in general, translucent prose tends to lengthen sentences to the point of absurdity (Proust, Thomas Bernhard, Faulkner), to promiscuously compound subordinate clauses (Henry James, Proust), to revivify words you might never eye outside pagan papyri and obscure incunabulae inscribed for the perusal of callipygian queens (Joyce, David Foster Wallace, Alexander Theroux), to break up the reading process by means of footnotes, endnotes, parentheses (Nabokov, Wallace, Faulkner), to launch into seemingly endless catalogues of exemplary objects (Rabelais, Joyce, William Gass), to burst unexpectedly into metaphors as natural and abundant as white blossoms on an apple tree after an April rain (Proust, Antonio Lobo Antunes, Bruno Schulz).

If the outer limit of transparency is the purely instrumental prose of children's books (which seems translucently minimal to the mature eye), the endpoint of translucence would be an opacity through which not even the outlines of represented objects would be visible. Opaque prose approaches the condition of a window painted black. It seems to exist only as language on a page, without any recognizable referent. It enacts a disappearance of signified into signifier. I think of Finnegans Wake, Stein's The Making of Americans, Julian Rios's Larva, the later works of Arno Schmidt. None of these is perfectly opaque, of course (only Dadaist glossolalial poetry touches that ultimate Malevich black square), but in passages of each the signified seems to dissolve into 'pure' language. In a way, this is analogous to certain paintings by Picasso and Braque from the early 1910s in which the iconicity of the painted sign (the resemblance between an object and its painted representation) is stretched to the breaking point in a process more familiarly known as Cubism. Perhaps paradoxically, opaque prose tends not to Beckettian sterility but to platitudinous plenitude. It builds Great Chinese Walls of words, literary monuments that seem almost enormous enough to be visible from space. Beyond their walls we can barely see, and this very fact may lead us to suspect a Melvillean void on the other side of the pasteboard mask, an essential Derridean meaninglessness that all language conceals. And it's only a small step from there to the idea that all of this "free playing" of the signifier isn't free at all; it's a compulsive, hysterical defense mechanism. One might further remark that opaque prose silvers the back of the window, transforming it into a magnifying mirror reflecting the writer's already engorged ego back upon itself in an infinitely inflating, infinitely repeating series. It is a synthesis of the infinite and the infinitesimal, an enormous claustrophobia. (Which is not to say it can't be great fun to read. The Wake, for all its opacity, is laugh-out-lud* funny.)

* I'm letting the typo stand since it's perfectly Wakish, referring to the legendary King Lud of London, namesake of Ludgate. It is also, as Joyce the Joyous would surely have pointed out, related to the Latin ludere, to play (whence comes Huizinga's Homo Ludens and the various ludicrosities of postmodernism). And we musn't forget old Ned Ludd, apocryphal first luddite, who would be sledgehammering my Toshiba right about now--

Notes on Technology

Heidegger was an optimist. His adherence to dialectical form in the face of technology's challenge marks him, in fact, as a utopian idealist. The H-man is so enfolded in the forms of dialectical thought that technology (as he defines it) simply must contain, at the core of its essence, a dialectical reversal of the order of technology... But what if it doesn't? What if the core of technology's essence is a mass-anesthetizing black hole from which nothing emerges except profit?

The only question concerning technology asked by the present generation is, "What's next from Apple?" They seek not a mystical 'saving' force but a slimmer, faster iPad.

Wikipedia is positively medieval, a vast Gothic cathedral of information constructed by anonymous artisans. It departs from the medieval model only in this: the stonemasons of the Middle Ages did not permit village idiots to carve their capitals.

The real problem concerning technology is not that it alienates us from the transcendental good/god of Heideggerian Being, but that it alienates us from the mundane reality of ourselves and others.

"What the hell are you taking about?" the techno-utopian asks. "My computer doesn't alienate me; it connects me to the entire world." The fallacy here lies in the idea that communication and alienation are necessarily mutually exclusive. Your computer connects you to the entire wired and wireless world, but this 'connection' is, upon examination, a sentimental illusion generated to mask a purely electronic reality. Computers connect only to other computers, and the communication they enable is so radically disembodied that we can never be certain we are interacting with a human being at the connection's other end.

Maybe the other end of that chatroom heart-to-heart was a computer statistically programmed to give you the answers you desired, the digi-tech equivalent of the old Magic 8-Ball.

Time spent with a computer is time lost with an actually present human being.

If Derrida had not already existed to demonize the "metaphysics of presence," Mark Zuckerberg would've been forced to pay someone to invent him.

If you don't suspect that your computer is impoverishing your life, that life has probably never been rich enough for the difference to be noticeable.

The vast virtual world of online pornography throws the problem of technology into sharp relief. Every time we masturbate to online porn (and don't even try to pretend you don't), we give a corporation the keys to our psyches, we let the multinational that owns our internet service provider know exactly what gets us off, the exact image that produces the most intense pleasure of our physical lives. Now ask yourself: How much would an advertising firm pay for that database?

Online porn is the ultimate commercialization of jouissance.

Every improvement in communications technology is also a further refinement of totalitarianism. The Nazis burned books and distributed radios.

Just as the fatal weakness of student movements lies in the fundamental fact that they are student movements, drawing their membership from a temporary and transient population, the fatal weakness of online protest lies in its virtual quality. Real protest can only happen in the streets, where it will eventually be met with batons, pepper spray and bullets.

The problem with Occupy Wall Street was that they brought a computer to a gunfight. The next Occupation must prepare to defend its encampments the way those Egyptians in Tahrir Square defended theirs: militarily.

But there will probably be no "next Occupation." Occupy already appears destined for a small corkboard display in the Museum of Leftist Nostalgia.

The technological death of privacy is a disaster for the imagination. Those human mysteries that once teased us into imaginative thought are now posted on Facebook for the world to read. In our unmysterious interpersonal world, Tolstoy would be an engineer.

Where is the space for original sexual fantasy--the most imaginative exercise most human beings ever engage in--in a world where internet pornography is but a keystroke away, offering an encyclopedic array of fetishistic satisfactions?

Few things in our technowelt are more ridiculous than online arguments: impassioned, heated, but ludicrously slow-motion exchanges between strangers who exist for each other only as caricatures abstracted from their previous statements, as though the entire situation occurs only to confirm the postmodernist concept of the individual as a discourse construction. Safe behind fortress walls of mediation, the anonymous arguers hurl insults and frame bons mots they would never have had the courage or quickness to create in the heat of genuine human interaction (the face-to-face kind).

Online conversation is to real conversation what internet sex is to bareback fucking.

Rest assured, I fully appreciate the savage irony of writing these anti-technological notes on a blog.

The internet today is an ideal model of an absolutely corporatist world in which governments have withered away and corporations control everything (even access to the world) and dissenting voices are given relative freedom to rant and ramble only because this is still a model and not the real world... How long will this distinction hold?

The mass media discourse of American political culture, separating our political life into a manichean Liberal vs. Conservative opposition, serves the media corporations' ideological goal of concealing the truly dominant ideology of our time, corporate capitalism or, more concisely, corporatism. Corporations distract us with political circuses while they steal all of our bread.

The generation of Americans now coming to adulthood has never known a non-digital life. They are a generation so thoroughly technologized that they see technology not as a threat but as a basic fact of existence, an unproblematic condition. Like the ratio of oxygen to nitrogen in the air or the presence of salt in seawater, technology seems a natural thing that cannot be 'thought' as a problem. This is the true legacy of Jobs, Gates and Zuckerberg.

Does technology make us dumber? Socrates thought so (see the Phaedrus and beware its bottomless ironies) and the case can still be made. Information that can be immediately accessed online need not be learned, need not be internalized, need not become authentic knowledge, something deeply known. Just as the corporatization of the university is transforming it from a site of education to a place of vocational training, so the technologization of thought transforms knowledge into information, a distinction best understood thus: information is something we use; knowledge is something we are. Knowledge is the brick and mortar of our subjectivity; information always remains an object outside us, something used for a specific purpose and quickly discarded. The triumph of information is the death of human subjectivity.

What is to be done? I have yet to hear an answer to that question that does not strike me as hollow, sentimental, nostalgic, utopian. So here's my hollow, sentimental, nostalgic, utopian answer: I believe that in works of the imagination, works of art, we can find a privileged space for opposition to the hegemonic ideology of our time, a kind of Archimedes point from which that ideology might be shaken, moved, even--at a utopian vanishing point I dare not gaze at for fear of blindness--overthrown. I believe that art not only can but must be more than mood music for power (a phrase I steal from Robert Hughes's Shock of the New, betraying my Modernist bias). I believe that art can pierce us more deeply than intellectual argument because it directly attacks our senses. I believe that any artist who does not work toward this end is asleep at the wheel. I believe that both Nietzsche and Picasso, both Rilke and Freud, both Proust and Sartre, are great philosophers because they are first and foremost great artists. And I believe that any artist who works authentically will ineluctably create oppositional art, for authenticity is everything that corporatism comes to crush.

The liberation of the imagination. That old Romantic avantgardish song and dance. This, strangely enough, is what is to be done.

But for now, turn off your computer and love the one you're with.

P.S.: My opinions may be crankier than a Model T engine, but that doesn't make them wrong.

A Metaphor for our Time

"Reality is a cliche from which we escape by metaphor." -- Wallace Stevens, Adagia

And metaphor, as Stevens also knew, is the anti-cliche in which we capture reality. Metaphor brings together two disparate electrodes until meaning arcs between them with a light that burns and brightens.

A metaphor for the present crisis: Corporate capitalism has run off its rails, plowed across an open field and smashed into a suburban housing development, demolishing a swath of middle-class homes, but capitalism's ideologues stand idly by and insist, like good Brezhnev-era commissars, that the system is fundamentally sound. "What rails, comrade?" the CNBC apparatchik insists in his thick Boris Badinov accent, "Train is supposed to run on ground."

Some Supposedly Great Books I Haven't Read (yet)

To begin, allow me a brief orgy of lit-geek bragging: I've read Infinite Jest (every jot, tittle, and footnote), and liked it enough to title this post with a DFW allusion; I've read Ulysses (so many times I've lost count--8 or 9, I think, over the course of 20 years, and I've read individual chapters more often); I've read Finnegans Wake (once end oundly ounced; eat teaks aleavetime to ride its wheel [pardon my truly awful mock-Wakish]); I've read In Search of Lost Time (once complete in Moncreiff's English, and parts of Swann's Way in French while sardined into the coach cabin of a flight from Paris to Detroit); I've read The Magic Mountain, The Recognitions, War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Gravity's Rainbow (twice), Against the Day, Underworld, You Bright and Risen Angels, An American Tragedy, and many, many other books that ill-read philistines like to think no one really reads. (And chances are, if you're reading this, so have you.) If you've ever wandered into the literary fiction or criticism aisles of a Barnes and Noble and picked up a wristbreaking volume and asked, "Who reads this shit?" I'm probably the answer to your question.

But enough literary dick-measuring. This post is about the widely acknowledged great books that, for one reason or another, I haven't gotten around to reading (yet), the canonical books that remain closed to me. Since I can't say anything of interest about them, a bare list must suffice:

• The Aeneid by Virgil
• The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser
• Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
• The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil
• The Glastonbury Romance by John Cowper Powys
• The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle
• The Changing Light at Sandover by James Merrill
• Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
• Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
• The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
• Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes
• JR by William Gaddis
• A by Louis Zukofsky
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

I know, I know...that last one raises your eyebrows, doesn't it? "He hasn't read Jane Eyre?! What the fuck?!!?" People are always surprised when I tell them that. It's my sleeved ace in games of 'Humiliation.' I still don't understand how I was able to acquire a B.A. in English without being forced to read Jane Eyre at some point by a Victoriana-enthralled feminist prof. My only answer is: Without god, all things are possible. (To paraphrase a character in another of these books I haven't read.)

Francoise Gilot and John Richardson on "Charlie Rose"

Charlie Rose justified his existence last night with a marvelous (as Mitt Romney might describe it) conversation about Picasso with John Richardson and Francoise Gilot. The entire episode can be viewed online at the show's website.Television this excellent is so rare on our American air that its infrequent appearances deserve praise in overplus. Of the artworks shown and discussed (currently on display at the Gagosian Gallery in NYC), the most interesting to me was a little-known oil from the early 1950s of Francoise wringing water from her hair: a loose, wet, drippy, contorted, Picassoan transformation of a Degas bather. If I had a fraction of Mitt Romney's money, I'd buy it off the Gagosian wall and repeat "Marvelous, marvelous" all the way home. Here it is:

Edmund Wilson strikes again

You can always count on a dead New York Intellectual for a quote that bears repeating. Terry Teachout (in an appreciation of the nearly forgotten writer Edwin O'Connor) just excavated this truism from the pen of Edmund Wilson: "a literary intellectual objects to nothing so much as a best-selling book that also possesses real merit."

Read today, the line takes on a poignancy that Wilson couldn't have intended, for he lived in an era when works of genuine aesthetic value (Salinger, Bellow, Pynchon, Mailer, Faulkner, Baldwin) commonly appeared on the bestseller lists. In fact, Faulkner's later, lesser novels were 'popular' enough to be Book of the Month Club selections, as was Richard Wright's Native Son. Difficult contemporary literary fiction from Faulkner to Sartre to Celine was sold in cheap paperback editions with sensational pulpy covers intended to appeal to a mass audience. (Imagine that: publishers marketing 'literature' to the working class...Those Mad Men weren't all bad. They realized that in the days before Fox News and American Idol, it wasn't unusual for working people to actually read books. I wish that aspect of those bad old days would return, but chances are slimmer than Pickens.) A glance at today's bestseller list shows how far we've come--in the wrong direction. Further evidence is provided by the fate of John Sayles' A Moment in the Sun, a big, bulging, authentically populist historical novel that should have won the Pulitzer Prize last year (quick, name the novel that did). Instead, it was rejected by the big publishers, and Sayles (who's not exactly Mr. Unknown Writer) ended up publishing it at McSweeney's (kudos to them). When I read the book, I couldn't help thinking that if it had been completed ca.1983, Random House or Simon & Schuster would've jumped on it, marketed it as "even better than Michener," and it would've sold millions of copies. It could have been a fine example of that increasingly spectral "best-selling book that also possesses real merit." Instead, it seems destined for cult status, at best.

Anyone who electronically laments the passing of the book or the culturally significant novel tends to meet with the typical 'technological utopian' reply, which I paraphrase: It's the best imaginable time to be a writer. Digital technology allows writers to self-publish in minutes and bypass the now-obsolete publishing industry. Stop your whining and start collecting the profits from your e-books. To which I reply in advance: Some kind of gatekeeping apparatus is necessary in book publishing, since we still live in a society in which anyone who is literate imagines he can 'write.' The trouble with throwing publication open to everyone is that everyone publishes, and works of Wilsonian 'real merit' tend to be lost in a Deepwater Horizon-size slick of pseudo-literate sludge. I'm not saying that online publishing is like pissing in the ocean. I'm saying it's like pissing in the Amazon. (And old Bill Burroughs told us about the dangers of that, didn't he?)

"Pynchon From A to V" by Gerald Howard

A citation in Ross Posnock's excellent critical study Philip Roth's Rude Truth led me to this 2005 Bookforum article by editor Gerald Howard, both a personal memoir of one reader's ingestion of megadoses of Pynchon and, more interestingly, a fascinating glimpse behind the scenes at Pynchon's publishers. There's quite a bit of little-known or previously unknown Pynchoniana here, including lists of rejected titles for V. and Gravity's Rainbow. James Ellroy readers will note that one of Pynchon's early titles for the former was Blood's A Rover, a Housman phrase Big Bad JE has since made his own. This very well-written article is required reading for anyone deeply interested in Pynchon. (The page uses a small font-size, so you may be forced to magnify to readability.)

In unrelated news, new posts on Mindful Pleasures have been nonexistent for the past few months because I'm concentrating on novel-writing (and re-writing...). Sometimes this goes quite well...and sometimes I feel as though my head is trapped inside a metal box lined with mirrors and I'm screaming at my own reflection for four solid hours at a stretch. So much for the pleasures of the writing life. No wonder Hem felt like killing bulls....Anyway, the writing continues and the books (plural) are coming...novels...big stuff....Stay tuned.

THE UNNAMABLE by Samuel Beckett

Thirty days ago I began what promises to be a year of our discontent (to put it mildly) with a reading of Beckett's The Unnamable, a decidedly dreary way to start a year that began drearily enough, with overcast skies the color of woodsmoke and tree-tearing winds blowing down frozen air from Guy Maddin Land. l'Innommable, as the author called it en Francais, is a complex, disturbing, unsettling little interior monologue that demands multiple readings. Most of the difficulty arises from the fact that Beckett builds his monologue out of contradictions that radically undermine the interior monologue form and images that assault that form's humanistic underpinnings. None of this, however, has deterred humanists from trying to recruit the work for their team, citing its closing cadence, "I can't go on, I'll go on," as a statement of existential affirmation in the face of absurd nothingness. This attempt to strategically confuse Beckett with Camus quickly founders, though, with the realization that The Unnamable ends with this phrase, that "I" does in fact stop--forever--immediately upon uttering it. The text thus ends not in affirmation but in another of the explicit contradictions that rhetorically define it. Indeed, one might go further and state that all of the text's contradictions culminate in this most unsettlingly terminal one, the fatal period and blank silence after "I'll go on."

The Unnamable is also another of those works (like Moby Dick and Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy) that makes much of post-structuralist literary theory seem redundant, little more than a prosaic (or deliberately obscure) codification of ideas presented more ably and accessibly by the earlier artists. Sam and Herman and Alain got there firstest with the mostest, and their works are still much better reads than those of Jacques D. or Jacques L. or even Michel F. (who was a good and lucid writer much of the time, better than his brethren) and Roland B. (ditto). Of course, this raises the question of how readily the "poststructuralist" aspects of these works would have been recognized if we were not reading them through the unbreakable lens of our knowledge of Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Barthes, et al. So the criticism and theory does seem necessary after all, if only (to borrow a simile from Northrop Frye) as a kind of hermeneutical scaffolding to be knocked away once the hard work of authentic reading is underway.

While reading The Unnamable I became convinced that this book would profit remarkably from a sensitive dramatic reading of the kind Joyce performed with a fragment of the Wake. This is a text that cries out to be read aloud... slowly... deliberately... with measured pauses between each phrase. The thought of Joyce also brought up the notion of Beckett's monologue(s) as a radically deconstructed 'revision' of Molly Bloom's--an idea to provoke a future re-reading.

A Private Tumor of the Soul

From George Steiner's very interesting Paris Review interview, a great epigram that ends with an image worthy of the third writer in Steiner's little list:

"How can you, after Proust and Joyce and Kafka and Faulkner, sit down and write a novel? I've never quite understood. Answer: you have to. And the you have to is a private cancer, a private tumor of the soul."

GNADENHUTTEN: AN AMERICAN VOICE by Brian A. Oard

The following is a short fictional monologue based on historical fact, a side-product of my current novelistic project:

My dearest Margaret (speaks Private Thomas Ord of the Pennsylvania militia after the massacre at Gnadenhutten in the Ohio country, March 7-8, 1782, a forgotten footnote to the American Revolution) I cannot write my dearest Maggie hand still shaking with rage and shame trying to remember O Maggie trying to forget my love the things I see in this wild land when we crossed the river and rode toward the village an Indian my age came running across brown winter grass still patched with snow in the shadowed places and seeing our guns cried Don’t shoot and smiled as at a joke Don’t shoot...I am a Christian... My father is a white man like you...My name is Joseph and his smile widens I am Joseph your brother and Bilderbeck riding beside me lowered his musket spat out a plug of tobacco said That so? raised the barrel flashing in sudden sunlight between clouds and fired into the smiling savage’s face we rode on trampling the body that twitched in the grass to the village called Gnadenhutten by the Dutch Indian-lovers who converted these savages finding the village abandoned and all the savages men women children in the field gathering winter withered corn and themselves withered sapling thin hollow eyed gaunt skin stretched tight as bookbinding over rigid skulls These people are starving Christy said and the Irishman Welch replied Aye, for white man’s blood. And if not a man then a woman or child’ll do, eh Wallace? And Wallace nodded agreement seeing nought before him but his captive wife and sons and hearing nought but the blood crying vengeance in his veins

Colonel Williamson called the Indians together Gather in the church yonder all of you he ordered them breathlessly fat face flushed with the effort of speaking We will transport you to Fort Pitt for food and shelter Williamson ordered two detachments to round up the neighboring Indians and waiting we grumbled at the colonel’s words I didn’t ride here to take prisoners Welch said and everyone agreed until Christy the preacher began Please, gentlemen. These are Christian Indians, no more harmful than a mouse in the field. The crime be not theirs and vengeance not ours. Twould be a sin to harm them... If they’re Christian Hindeman said we’ll send ’em to heaven and their souls’ll smile down on us Welch said Never figgered ye fer an Indian-lover, Christy, you with your woman still warm in the ground at their hands Christy said These are not the responsible parties. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord and Bilderbeck grumbled An eye for an eye sayeth the Book, isn’t that right, preacher? the men gathered round Christy threatening belligerent until Colonel Williamson came forward and calmed them saying Men, we are here for reasons larger than ourselves, our petty prejudices, fears and opinions. We have come to this howling wilderness to strike the flint of civilization on the stony ground of savagery, in this unforgiving darkness to light the lamp democratic; so in this spirit of democracy to which we young, we new, we first Americans have pledged our lives, our blood, and our sacred honor, let us decide this matter in a spirit democratic, Line up, men! Line up for a vote! Now let each man decide the matter for himself without demagoguery or coercion. Let each man who believes these Indians should live step forward now. Williamson’s face clouded when only a few militiamen stepped out of line That be all of you who vote for mercy? He sighed audibly Very well, men. You have made a Pilate of me, and I wash my hands of this affair. At sunup you may do what you will with the prisoners

The Indians imprisoned in the church informed of impending execution kept us awake all night with their praying and hymning until first light dawned and the killing began with the men and the boys taken to one one building for slaughter and the women and the girls taken to another and the eighteen who voted against removed themselves with Colonel Williamson to a spot below the riverbank where only the sounds of the killing could reach them O Maggie I was not of their number I saw Hindeman in the church rip two babes from their mothers’ arms and holding them by the ankles in each hand draw his arms back like Our Lord on the Cross and slam the babes together once twice three times until he dropped them to the floor heads broken like eggs and leaking brains I escorted prisoners to the men’s slaughterhouse and it was a gory scene Leet and Bilderbeck bloodied like butchers the floor sticky and smeared with red bootprints and Solomon Urie throwing his bloody rope around the entering prisoners and forcing them down kneeling on their backs on the floor while Hindeman or Leet did for them with a hammer and I remember walking the path of my dark red bootprints back to the church and back to the building again and taking the women to their slaughter with Welch and his tomahawk and his pile of bloody scalps tossed carelessly in a corner he trades them for whiskey I’ve heard I saw a young man scalped skull bared to the bone but still alive and somehow escaped running for the river across the grass down the bank into the freezing water and up the other side howling like an animal skull shining silver in the sunlight until the preacher Christy I later heard rose from the group of demurrers aimed his musket and fired at the buck bringing him down saying God have mercy on his soul. I would shoot a brokenlegged horse just the same I took an old woman to Welch’s building and Urie roped her since the men were all dead by now and held her facedown on the floor and Welch handed me a rock hammer saying Ye’ll be as bloodied as the rest of us and we’ll all meet in the same Hell and the old Indian woman begins reciting in English I shall not want and Urie calls out bloodyfaced Do her, man! and the woman He restoreth my soul and I raise the heavy hammer in both hands and Welch That’s it. Batter the bloody bitch and the woman Though I walk through the valley of the shadow and thinking savage savage savage I bring the hammer down and the woman Thy rod and thy and her skull gives way and warm blood splashes my cheeks and spots my spectacles O Maggie

FINNEGANS WAKE film and Samuel Beckett's FILM online

Among the wealth of interesting stuff at UbuWeb (a site I've just discovered) is a complete online version of Mary Ellen Bute's obscure ca.1965 film Passages From James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Also viewable online at the site is Samuel Beckett's inventively titled Film, starring Buster Keaton. In my brief initial visit, I also discovered--and listened to the zippy-paced first page of--a complete reading of Finnegans Wake performed by Patrick Healy. The 'Joyce Sound' page also features the soundtrack from the Strick Ulysses film and the well-known recording of Joyce reading from the Wake. Elsewhere on the site, visitors can watch Jean Genet's short film Un Chant d'Amour and clips from the later films of Orson Welles in the One-Man Band documentary. Check this site out.

Three Reasons to Learn German

There's an old European joke that becomes less true with every passing year: A person who speaks three languages is trilingual, a person who speaks two languages is bilingual, and a person who speaks one language is American. I'm an American who speaks English, French and enough Italian to make myself understood by silk-suited mafiosi on the Amalfi Coast (long story), but recently I've been regretting that my knowledge of German is limited to what I've picked up from old movies and reruns of Hogan's Heroes. (And let's face it, "jawohl, mein kommandant!" is not exactly a useful phrase in the Germany of today.) I've read most of the canonical krauts--Goethe, Holderlin, Trakl, Kafka, Mann, Grass, Celan, Sebald, Jelinek, Handke, Bernhard, et al--in English translation but now I'm frustrated by the fact that the following three major works of twentieth-century German literature have yet to be completely translated:

The Aesthetics of Resistance by Peter Weiss. Weiss is best known in the English-reading world as the author of that wild and crazy Sixties play Marat/Sade (which is still outraging Brits after all these years in a 50th anniversary RSC revival), but The Aesthetics of Resistance (a novel which can count W.G. Sebald among its admirers) is surely his prose masterpiece. A three-volume fictionalized account of leftist resistance to the Nazis (but that description hardly does it justice; it's like saying Sebald's The Rings of Saturn is a travel book), Weiss's book digresses into topics much further afield and begins stunningly with a description of the Pergamon Altar at the Berlin antiquities museum that cinematically 'pulls back' to show us the central characters walking and talking in and around the altar. It's a brilliant opening to a fantastic book, but unfortunately only the first volume has been translated into English. (And it's only available in a seriously pricey edition from the University of Chicago Press.) I hope translator Joachim Neugroschel and U. of C. Press intend to English the rest of this brilliant novel.

The History of Sensitivity by Hubert Fichte. This monumental nineteen-volume work of fiction and nonfiction (That's right, 19 freakin' volumes!! I guess the dude was pretty sensitive) is described on the flap copy of the Serpent's Tail edition of Fichte's Detlev's Imitations as "a dialogue with Proust's Remembrance of Things Past" that has "established [Fichte] as one of the great European writers of the twentieth century." Sounds like it's worth at least a partial translation, n'est-ce pas? Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any of these books in English.

Zettels Traum (Bottom's Dream) by Arno Schmidt. The magnum opus of one of the 20th century's most original writers, this 1334-page Finnegans Wake-influenced novel might just be the single most important German literary work of the last century not yet translated into English. John E. Woods, whose recent English versions of Thomas Mann have won great acclaim, is reportedly at work on a translation to be published in the near future, presumably by Dalkey Archive Press. I eagerly await it.

THE KINDLY ONES by Jonathan Littell

Many critics were much too kind to The Kindly Ones. Not only is Jonathan Littell's trainwreck mash-up of Ernst Junger, Gert Ledig, Georges Bataille and Aeschylus not a great novel; it rarely even rises above mediocrity. Littell's prose is bland and boring, and the narrative this toneless instrument is forced to carry achieves the rare feat of being both unimaginative and unbelievable. The prose (which I assume is as flat in the original French as in English translation--probably a safe assumption these days) might be defended as a deliberately bland narrative voice, an appropriately banal reflection of the evil banality of an SS bureaucrat's mind, but there are two major roadblocks on the way to this artistic justification: first, Littell's narrator, Maximilien Aue, is not a typical Nazi bureaucrat but an aesthete among the fascist elite, so one would expect his voice to be more florid, baroque, even Proustian; second, the opening line of the novel ("Oh my human brothers, let me tell you how it happened.") suggests that what follows will be a novel 'spoken' in a recognizable, idiosyncratic voice, a la the voices of Humbert Humbert or Dostoyevsky's underground man. Instead, Littell quickly loses this tone, and the prose becomes a merely competent, workmanlike wordstream remarkable only in its Nilotic length. The fact that this is exactly the kind of unremarkable, transparent prose we find in popular fiction (and no, I'm not going to invoke Gide, Camus, Robbe-Grillet and 'degree zero' writing; Littell's effort isn't good enough to merit that defense) suggests the proper way to read The Kindly Ones. For this is not really a 'literary' novel at all; it's a work of genre fiction, a big, bloated, research-intensive historical novel of the kind James Michener and Leon Uris used to write. It's tricked out in literary drag--allusions, quotations, intertextuality, philosophical discussions--but barely hidden beneath these gaudy rags is a book that Slavoj Zizek might call the "obscene supplement" of Herman Wouk's War and Remembrance. And about the novel's oft-mentioned 'obscenity,' its sexuality and scatology, perhaps the best that can be said is that fascism as anal sadism is a familiar and questionable idea, and it hardly merits a thousand-page dramatization. (Reading this novel, one gets the impression that Littell believes the classic psychoanalytic interpretation of fascism is an original idea he thought up one morning while masturbating in the shower.) All of that said, when The Kindly Ones is read as a historical novel, it's not all that bad. The historical reconstructions are well done and utilize the latest scholarship, and the meetings and discussions among SS officers probably come close to the reality of Nazi evil in its banal, bureaucratic form. If readers can overlook all the poorly digested research that the characters disgorge like Aue's many vomited meals, it's a decent piece of historical fiction. But there's really no reason for it to be 975 pages long. It's not War and Peace; it's not even War and Remembrance.

W. G. Sebald at 17, a photograph of a photograph

From 8mobili's photostream on Flickr, here's a photograph of W. G. Sebald's 1961 blood donor card, containing a photo of the author as a 17 year-old young man. Since the only familiar images of Sebald show him in the last two decades of his life, there's a slight shock in realizing that he was once this moody-looking Bavarian youth.

INDIGNEZ-VOUS! by Stephane Hessel

This week of nationwide police repression of the U.S. Occupy movement, a reminder from Mayors Quan, Bloomberg et al that all repression is local, seems a perfect time to read Stephane Hessel's universal call to (nonviolent) arms. Hessel's tiny book--so small you can stuff it in your pocket where it will be safe when Billionaire Bloomberg's robothugs come to toss all your other books into a garbage truck--delivers a simple and important message that has already resonated around the world: Get angry...and then channel that anger into political engagement. As Hessel writes, "...there are unbearable things all around us...If you spend a little time searching, you will find your reasons to engage. The worst attitude is indifference. 'There's nothing I can do; I get by'--adopting this mindset will deprive you of one of the fundamental qualities of being human: outrage. Our capacity for protest is indispensable, as is our freedom to engage." If that passage sounds rather Sartrean, there's good reason for it: Hessel was influenced by Sartre (and Merleau-Ponty, and Hegel, and surely a host of others) during his long-ago Normalien years. Indeed, the nonagenarian Hessel has lived so long that he comes to us now like a revenant from a gone world, a time of authentic heroism (he fought with the French Resistance), unspeakable horror (he was tortured by the Gestapo and imprisoned at Buchenwald and Dora), and triumphant intellectual accomplishment (his father knew Walter Benjamin and was a translator of Proust). Hessel comes out of this past now fading from memory to myth with a warning that we not betray the spirit of the Resistance, not turn a blind eye to injustice at home and abroad, not follow the siren songs of consumerism and accumulation. There are no new ideas in his pamphlet--just good ones. The same might be said of many books that changed the world. It's not a manifesto but a call to authentic action, with the emphasis on authenticity. The Tea Party 'acts,' but its actions are transparently inauthentic, born of Murdochian misinformation, channeled by political demagoguery and funded by corporations. The current Republican presidential debates are little more than a Koch Brothers Muppet Show, a sorry parade of corporatist drones--let's see if any of them can talk while David Koch drinks a glass of water. Don't bother seeking authenticity there, especially not from the probable nominee, Mitt "Corporations are people, my friend" Romney, who if elected will be a worse president than George W. Bush. Domestically, a President Romney will act as corporate-raider-in-chief, and internationally he will resurrect Bush's foreign policy team to foment more international disasters. Anyone who liked Dubya will love Willard. Today, if you seek authenticity, look in the streets. It was there in the encampment at Zuccotti Park until Bloomberg turned the park into a police state: a utopian experiment in noncapitalist life, a reminder to the millions that there is another way of living. This is the message the millionaires find insufferable, and that's why the batons flew Monday night. In The Middle Mind, Curtis White writes, "We will know we have succeeded in saying something that matters when we are told that it won't be tolerated." On Monday night, Occupy Wall Street received the bluntest possible confirmation that what they are saying matters. It matters profoundly. It matters so much that in order to stop it Michael Bloomberg left his 'reasonable man' reputation in tatters and acted--as John Hodgman said on last night's Rachel Maddow Show--like a papier mache puppet in an anarchist parade. The Occupy movement, wherever it moves from here, is meeting Hessel's challenge.

A piece of Hessel trivia: Stephane Hessel's father Franz Hessel was involved in a very Parisian menage a trois ca.1910 with the painter Marie Laurencin and the writer Henri-Pierre Roche. Roche later fictionalized the relationship in a novel titled Jules et Jim, the basis for Truffaut's great film. Stephane, then, is the son of 'Jim.'

Progress of Work on Work in Progress (not an exagmination round my factification...)

After a month's work on the book announced in my previous post, I've written my way through two distinct conceptions before finally arriving at a third that's good enough to take all the way to completion. First, I began the book as the digressive travel narrative vaguely outlined in the post below, but after about 25 pages it became a creature of tangents without a center. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it is in this case. I was trying to put everything into the book and succeeded only in drowning the narrative in details and digressions, factual and fictional. So I started over, this time writing a more narrowly focused nonfiction travel book, less Sebald and more Paul Theroux. But it wasn't long before this book went completely, manically fictional in a gonzo Hunter Thompson kind of way. Again, not necessarily a bad thing, but not the book I want to write at this time. The swerve toward fiction in this (and the first) false starts, however, showed me what this book really wants to be: a novel. And that's what it is now. The third conception, of which I am now on page 40 of the rough draft (written in my nearly microscopic, often illegible hand on that quasi-Luddite cliche of cliches, the yellow legal pad), is the story of a man named Steiner, a chemical engineer working for an oil company in the Midwest, who, nine months after the deaths of his wife and twin daughters in a car crash, takes a trip into the west for reasons he does not completely understand. The novel is about what happens to Steiner after the Tragedy (as he thinks of it), after his personal and professional lives suddenly crash down around him. I'm giving him my route and many of my experiences--Steinerized, seen from the perspective of a smart, shy, geeky, middle-aged engineer who is suffering intensely and who is also that rare thing in literature, a genuinely and complexly good man.

That's where the thing stands today. And that's probably all I'll be saying about it until the rough draft is completed. My new working title: Steiner's Journey.

When Faulkner Met Gable

From Shelby Foote's Paris Review Interview, a classic collision of Hollywood and Literature:

FOOTE: ...You’ve heard that thing about Faulkner and Clark Gable haven’t you? Howard Hawks was taking Faulkner out on a quail shoot and came by to pick him up a little before dawn to get to where they were going by first light. Clark Gable was in the car, and Faulkner in the backseat. As they rode along, Gable and Hawks got to talking. Gable said, You know, you’re a well-read man, Howard. I’ve always been meaning to do some reading. I never have really done it. What do you think I ought to read? And Hawks said, Why don’t you ask Bill back there. He’s a writer, and he’ll be able to tell you. Gable said, Do you write, Mr. Faulkner? Faulkner said, Yes, Mr. Gable. What do you do? 

The Real Problem with HUCKLEBERRY FINN

The real problem with Huckleberry Finn has nothing to do with the novel's notorious and historically accurate 219 uses of the word 'nigger.' (About which, Twain's comedic descendant Stephen Colbert said it best: "Mark Twain isn't just a great writer; he's a great rapper.") No, the real problem, the problem that remained unspoken in the highly-circumscribed media 'debate' over the book, is the fact that this widely-acknowledged 'great American novel' does not deserve the first of those adjectives. While it contains some great moments (Huck and Jim on the island and the raft in the book's first third, Huck's famous "All right, then, I'll go to hell" turning point scene later), the novel as a whole is fatally flawed by a series of poor authorial decisions. Once the two con men climb aboard the raft, the novel goes south faster than the flooded Mississippi, and Twain must have seen it floating swiftly away, because at this point he began to pad furiously. The last two-thirds of the book contain more padding than a room full of Victorian furniture. The misadventures of the duke and dauphin are bad enough, but when Tom Sawyer arrives, the book's quality drops like a boulder down a well. Tom's annoying schemes and his good-naturedly sadistic tormenting of Jim are like a long, painfully unfunny joke drawn out to soporific length--and then drawn out even further. I'm surely not the only reader who ends the book hoping that Jim's first act as a free man will be to whup that little white boy's ass all the way back to Missouri. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is one-third great and two-thirds tiresome. While acknowledging that it's an essential and highly influential work of American literature, we should not overestimate its quality.

Pap Finn, Prophet of the Tea Party

One of the many things Huckleberry Finn can teach us is that the worldview of American reactionaries has undergone remarkably little change in the past 150 years. Huck Finn's father--one of Twain's supreme creations, a character equally comic and terrifying--at one point launches into a rant that could, mutatis mutandis, issue from the mouth of any of the millions of present-day Americans (about 20% of the voting population, it appears) who constitute the rank-and-file of that amalgamation of corporate tools, right-wing anarchists, nativists, gun rights hysterics and others who seek shelter under the Tea Party's umbrella:

"Oh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful. Why, looky here. There was a free nigger there from Ohio--a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain't a man in that town that's got as fine clothes as what he had; and he had a gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane--the awfulest old gray-headed nabob in the State. And what do you think? They said he was a p'fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain't the wust. They said he could VOTE when he was at home. Well, that let me out. Thinks I, what is the country a-coming to? It was 'lection day, and I was just about to go and vote myself if I warn't too drunk to get there; but when they told me there was a State in this country where they'd let that nigger vote, I drawed out. I says I'll never vote agin. Them's the very words I said; they all heard me; and the country may rot for all me --I'll never vote agin as long as I live. And to see the cool way of that nigger--why, he wouldn't a give me the road if I hadn't shoved him out o' the way. I says to the people, why ain't this nigger put up at auction and sold?--that's what I want to know. And what do you reckon they said? Why, they said he couldn't be sold till he'd been in the State six months, and he hadn't been there that long yet. There, now--that's a specimen. They call that a govment that can't sell a free nigger till he's been in the State six months. Here's a govment that calls itself a govment, and lets on to be a govment, and thinks it is a govment, and yet's got to set stock-still for six whole months before it can take a hold of a prowling, thieving, infernal, white-shirted free nigger, and--"

Imagine Pap Finn's reaction if someone told him that the president of the United States was a "mulatter p'fessor" and you will begin to understand the dark circuit of American memory from which the Tea Party draws its power.

My favorite scene in BLOOD MERIDIAN

My favorite scene in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian is one of the few that doesn't end with blood spurting from an opened artery or a handful of brains blowing out the back of someone's head. It's the marvelous scene in chapter 19 that McCarthy laconically titles "Brown at the farrier's." When the murderer Brown arrives at a San Diego farrier's workshop and orders him to saw off the barrels of a shotgun he has stolen, the craftsman is dumbfounded and appalled. For the gun is a thing of beauty, a masterpiece of the gunsmith's art. Sawing off its barrels would be tantamount to cutting off Michelangelo's David at the knees or wiping one's ass on a canvas by Monet. The farrier refuses and flees (the only sensible thing to do when one sees a Cormac McCarthy character coming one's way), and Brown is left to hack off the barrels himself. This is one of the few scenes in the novel in which McCarthy orchestrates a stark conflict of worldviews and value systems. (It's also one of the very few in which an unarmed person stands up to a member of the Glanton gang and lives.) It is a collision of cultures. Brown is a nihilistic killer from out of the American desert places. For him, the value of any object resides solely in its capacity to inflict terroristic violence. The farrier, by contrast, is an urban businessman and craftsman, a believer in the rule of law and the pure value of exquisite artisanry. Compared to Brown, the farrier is an aesthete; compared to the farrier, Brown is an imbecilic monster. I also suspect that the farrier is the only character in the book who comes close to being an authorial stand-in. He is the book's only authentic artist, standing both within its violent world and critically apart from it. Perhaps we can begin to read Blood Meridian properly only when we read it from the farrier's point of view.

BLOOD MERIDIAN : Cormac McCarthy's Critique of Capitalism

One of the themes of Blood Meridian is the fundamental nihilism inherent in all ideologies of power: Manifest Destiny (most obviously in Captain White's ill-fated filibustering expedition); imperialism; capitalism; Christian morality. When the Glanton gang commandeers a Colorado River ferry late in Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy gives us a little allegory of the nihilistic contradictions of capitalism. Here's the relevant passage:

...Glanton took charge of the operation of the ferry. People who had been waiting three days to cross at a dollar a head were now told that the fare was four dollars. And even this tariff was in effect for no more than a few days. Soon they were operating a sort of procrustean ferry where the fares were tailored to accommodate the purses of the travelers. Ultimately all pretense was dropped and the immigrants were robbed outright. Travelers were beaten and their arms and goods appropriated and they were sent destitute and beggared into the desert. The doctor came down to remonstrate with them and was paid his share of the revenues and sent back. Horses were taken and women violated and bodies began to drift past the Yuma camp downriver... (262)

If Glanton and the boys were alive today, they would be oil company executives. Come to think of it, ex-Exxon CEO Lee Raymond does look a bit like a slightly more hirsute Judge Holden:

Lee Raymond: former Exxon CEO, Jabba the Hut impersonator

Well, the Judge told us he would never die, didn't he?

BLOOD MERIDIAN by Cormac McCarthy

Don't look away. We are not speaking in mysteries. You of all men are no stranger to that feeling, the emptiness and the despair. It is that which we take arms against, is it not? Is not blood the tempering agent in the mortar which bonds?... What do you think death is, man? Of whom do we speak when we speak of a man who was and is not? Are these blind riddles or are they not some part of every man's jurisdiction? What is death if not an agency? And whom does he intend toward? Look at me.
--Judge Holden in Blood Meridian

Judge Holden 'makes' Blood Meridian. Without him it would be a beautifully written western with a violent, Peckinpah-ish lyricism; with him, it's a great and fascinating novel that deserves shelf-space among the best works of Melville and Hawthorne. Judge Holden ('Judge' is possibly his first name, significantly mistaken for his title by the novel's other characters [cf, bizarrely enough, Judge Reinhold]), this seven-foot, 332-pound, dancing, declaiming, murdering masterpiece of malevolence, this ice-blooded preacher of the gospel of war, this terrifying and terrifyingly familiar embodiment of American nihilism, is by far the most impressive character in Blood Meridian and probably the greatest in McCarthy's entire oeuvre. Don't trust Holden when he claims not to speak in mysteries, for how else can he speak when he is himself the greatest mystery, appearing first to the Glanton gang as their satanic deliverer sitting calmly on a rock in the wilderness and proceeding to instruct them in the improvised manufacture of gunpowder from its natural plutonic elements? This story in chapter 10, which Chaucer might have titled 'The Ex-Priest's Tale,' is in my opinion the point at which the book blasts out of its 'revisionist western' subgenre and achieves true greatness. And the judge provides the powder for that blast. He seems bigger than the book, in the same way that Shakespeare's greatest characters are so much larger than the borrowed plots that struggle to contain them. And like Hamlet and Lear he is constantly performing, irrepressibly theatrical--even at one point declaiming naked upon a battlement in a raging thunderstorm a poem that could only be the storm scene from Lear. (McCarthy is artist enough to describe this performance only vaguely and indirectly, letting the reader connect the literary dots. The Lear connection becomes more obvious later when we see the Judge wandering with his 'fool.') Also like those Shakespearean creations in their respective plays, Holden is the only character in Blood Meridian whose consciousness seems uncannily to contain the book in which he appears. When he tells his fellow killers that "Books lie," only he seems to appreciate the delicious irony, only he seems to realize that he is a character in a book. What else could be the meaning of his mysterious smile as he speaks these words? Even more interestingly, it might be argued that Judge Holden is the 'narrator' of Blood Meridian, that the book is 'spoken' in the voice of his polymathic, polylingual consciousness. He is, after all, the only man still alive at the end, still dancing, still talking, and still insisting that he will never be stilled.

(This hypothesis might clear up one of the book's concluding mysteries: Why does the scene-synopsis at the head of the last chapter describe the last scene in German? Obviously, this is another example of the multilingual Holden showing off. The fact that the line's 'Ich' refers to Judge Holden seems to confirm the hypothesis. This is McCarthy's way of identifying the narratorial consciousness at novel's end.)

IT'S YOUR MISFORTUNE AND NONE OF MY OWN: A NEW HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN WEST by Richard White

Richard White's King Ranch-size volume of  'New Western History' is an interesting, enlightening, sometimes exciting, sometimes boring book that badly needs two things: 1) a proofreader and 2) an author who can write like Patricia Nelson Limerick. I read White's book immediately after Limerick's seminal The Legacy of Conquest, and It's Your Misfortune... suffers from the inevitable  comparison. Most obviously, Limerick is a witty and engaging writer, while White's prose lopes along like an starving pony. (It may seem beside the point to criticize a historian's prose, but it's not. Historians are, by definition, writers, and the quality of their prose should enter into the evaluation of their works.) Passing from medium to content, White's work can be read as an often-ponderous elaboration of ideas presented more snappily--albeit much more summarily--in Limerick's book. In short, The Legacy of Conquest provides the thesis statement of New Western History, and White professorially marshals the facts and stats to support it. While that's probably not an unfair description, it does slight the undeniable strengths of White's book. This is an insanely wide-ranging work that finds interesting and unfamiliar things to say about events as disparate as the California Gold Rush and the Dust Bowl, Japanese-American internment and the fictional life of Billy the Kid, the founding of the National Park system and the slow death of Indian Territory (as what's now Oklahoma was once known). It's probably best not to read this book cover to cover (as I just did) but to treat it as a revisionist encyclopedia of Western history, dipping into the index to find White's take on the Mormon settlement of Utah, the transcontinental railroad, the rise of Reagan, etc. The passages that most interested and intrigued me were White's occasional exemplary asides: he has a wonderful eye for the telling historical anecdote. His account of the California 'Indian hunters' Hi Good and Robert Anderson and Good's richly deserved end reads like a tale taken from Blood Meridian, and his mention of Juan Cortina's War equally piqued my interest. Also, White's brief description of the strict gun control that existed uncontroversially in many Western towns is the best kind of history writing--the kind that complicates our present political uses and abuses of the past.

OUTER DARK by Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy suffered no sophomore jinx. Quite the opposite, in fact. Three years after his highly promising 1965 debut, The Orchard Keeper, McCarthy delivered Outer Dark, his first great book and the work in which he first struck the seam of surreal apocalyptic violence that he would continue to mine for the next 40 years. A double-picaresque that follows both a young woman's wanderings through Appalachia in search of her abandoned baby and her brother's wanderings in search of her, Outer Dark is a marvelously lyrical tale of American terror. It's the kind of book Paul Bowles might have written had he never gone abroad, the kind Stephen King might have written had he been a better and more Faulknerian writer. The panoply of horrors to which McCarthy, like a loathsome god, delivers his protagonists begins with the usual Southern Gothic incest and insanity, moves on to murder and lynching, and doesn't cease until we've been subjected to a scene of vampiristic cannibalism that anticipates both the sublime terrors of Blood Meridian and the horror movie excesses of his more recent works (e.g. The Road). On the final page of Outer Dark McCarthy shows us an image that might represent the entire novel: a road disappearing into a gray, deathly, impassable swamp. This is the Cormackian Rome to which all the author's roads lead, a miserable sink of death. This swamp is the true and only setting of Outer Dark. The reader has spent the preceding 241 pages wandering feverishly through it, smelling the sulphur reek of this miasmic "spectral waste." It should also be noted that the swamp, which is approached by the male protagonist but not the female, is described in explicitly female terms. The mud that sucks Culla Holme's shoe is described as rising in a "vulvate welt." The swamp, like the pond with the "singing willow rim" in Hart Crane's "Repose of Rivers," is an image of female genitalia as the site of an incestuous return to origins, of male penetration as a violation of the incest taboo. It's a fundamentally misogynistic and puritanical image of the vagina as a thing to be fled. And since the novel contains obvious allusions to the Oedipus myth (the baby abandoned in the wilderness, for one), it should surprise no reader that the thing these characters flee will be the thing to which they are inevitably returned. The forbidding vulval swamp is both the provocation and the only end of Culla's wandering. Like his sister Rinthy, it is the female object that equally attracts and repels him--consciously repels and unconsciously attracts. It is the motor that will keep him moving through the Dantean hills of McCarthy's Appalachia until he finds at last his final swamp.

"The Last Good Country" by Ernest Hemingway

While "The Last Good Country" is included in two collections of Hemingway's short stories (the Finca Vigia Edition Complete Short Stories and The Nick Adams Stories), it is in fact neither a story nor complete. It seems to be the beginning of a novel that Hemingway never came close to finishing. (I base this conclusion on the published text, with the knowledge that Hemingway's posthumous publications sometimes represent only a portion of the manuscripts from which they are edited, as was the case with The Garden of Eden--see the highly illuminating endnotes to Frederick Crews's essay on Hemingway in The Critics Bear it Away.) If he had finished it, "The Last Good Country" may well have been his Huckleberry Finn, a much less comic and much more erotic Finn in which the youthful central character lights out for the unspoiled wilderness in the company of his younger sister and in which the pastoral retreat features incestuous desire, gender-bending and a literalization of Huck's Fiedleresque homoeroticism. It's tempting to grasp at this eroticism and argue that Hemingway was unable to finish this piece because its sexual themes cut too close to the authorial bone (as it were). But I suspect that "The Last Good Country" might have been abandoned for more purely aesthetic reasons. The finished novel/novella would have alternated between the narrative of Nick and his sister in the woods and that of the game wardens' search for them (centering on the town), a classic American contrast between 'wildness' and 'domesticity,' 'country' and 'town,' 'civilization' and 'savagery.' The problem lies in the fact that the 'wilderness' scenes greatly overpower the rest of the story. Everything memorable in the published text, everything interesting, everything original, takes place between Nick and 'Littless' in the woods, and Hemingway surely realized this, surely saw that the form to which he was married required him to spend too much time with characters and situations that were insufficiently inspiring, too many pages with the game wardens and the townsfolk. And so he let this story go and moved on to something else, leaving us with this tantalizing fragment that shows occasional flashes of greatness and leaves me wishing he had lived to reconceive it. It could have been brilliant.

THE BLACK DAHLIA by James Ellroy

The first book in Ellroy's already-classic LA Quartet (The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential and White Jazz are the others), The Black Dahlia is a very pleasant surprise. It is easily the equal of any noir mystery ever written, even the genre-defining works of Hammett, Chandler and Cain. The pacing is swift, the prose taut and sharp, the narrative voice almost completely convincing. The seeming ease with which Ellroy slips into the 1940s, recreating its atmosphere of deep and blatant racism, anti-semitism, homophobia, casual brutality (happy days are most definitely not here again in Ellroy's LA--or ours, for that matter) should cause all period novelists to turn at least slightly green. There is much to praise in this book, and much to criticize, but the aspect that most puzzled and intrigued me is the novel's false ending. As anyone who has read it knows, The Black Dahlia seems to come to a satisfying conclusion 100 pages before its end, with the title murder unsolved (as it officially remains in un-Ellroyed reality) and the hero married. I suspect that I'm not the only reader who arrived at page 258 and wondered what the remaining third of the book could possibly contain. To read these pages and find that they contain a rather typical (if finally surprising) solution to the crime was disappointing at first--as though Ellroy, having written a novel that departed from genre conventions, was compelled to bring his story back into line. But there is another, more interesting way to read the double ending of The Black Dahlia. Maybe the story does in fact end with Bucky and Kay's wedding, and the remainder of the novel is pure fantasy. The last 100 pages might be interpreted as Bucky Bleichert's fevered, obsessive, psychotic, noirish fantasy of solving the Dahlia murder. The final denouement is thus not so much Ellroy's genre-fulfillment as Bucky's wish-fulfillment. Unable to solve the case in novelistic 'reality', he solves it in writing, creating a compensatory narrative that relates to his own life much as the novel The Black Dahlia relates to Ellroy's life--a narrative compensation for the unsolved murder of his mother.

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.