THE SONNETS by William Shakespeare

I began this re-reading of Shakespeare's sonnets with the idea that contemporary readings of Shakespeare tend to overcompensate for centuries of puritanical commentary by overemphasizing the same-sex elements. Every generation creates its own Shakespeare, and our Shakespeare is perhaps too gay... Well, having just finished a sustained, single-sitting reading of all 154 sonnets, I am now of the opposite opinion. The 'Shakespeare' imagined/implied by contemporary criticism is not nearly gay or bisexual enough. When read the only way they should be read, in sequence and in totality, the sonnets reveal themselves as a brilliant, complex, sublime narrative of the agonies and exaltations of bisexual love. And while the poem's eroticism is clearly bisexual, it is also just as obviously overwhelmingly homosexual. Roughly two-thirds of the work narrates a relationship between men; the historically overemphasized "dark lady" narrative doesn't begin until sonnet 127, and the element in this relationship that most puts the poet-speaker on the erotic rack is the fact that it's a triangular relationship in which the lady is also the poet's rival for the "man right fair." So even the 'straight' sonnets are also crucially gay. (I'm leaving aside for the length of this post the problematic question of projecting modern sexual categories into the past. For the nonce I'm more Boswellian than Foucaultian. Pun intended.) It's probably not possible to overemphasize the gayness of this particular Shakespearean work, and that's a fact too important to remain hidden in the hortus conclusus of academe. The word needs to get out that these very famous poems are very famous gay poems. Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day"), for example, is read by every American teenager in junior high or high school, but how often is it taught as a love poem 'spoken' by a man to a man? In my own public school encounters with the poem (during the 1980s), it was carefully decontextualized, ripped out of the sequence and presented as an ostensibly independent work, the better to mask its object's gender. Decontextualization and selective emphasis were the usual strategies for 'straightening the canon' at My Horrible High School (and probably at yours too). The unwritten rules went something like this: Read Chaucer, but pay no attention to that gay Pardoner behind the curtain; read a few of Shakespeare's sonnets, but don't mention the gender of the beloved; read some Marlowe, but certainly not Edward II; read Paradise Lost but not Lycidas; read Idylls of the King but not In Memoriam; spend far too much time reading Jonathan Edwards; ignore Swinburne; for god's sake, don't even mention Oscar Wilde; pretend Hemingway's Garden of Eden doesn't exist; and the most important rule of all: end the class ca.1940 so as to avoid any openly gay contemporary writers. Thus was the canon sanitized for the protection of Reagan's America, and in most of the country the situation is probably the same today.

Returning to the text, corrupt and typo-ridden though it is in my edition of the Complete Works, I note on this reading that while the narrative through-line is stronger than I've noticed before, the amount of connection between contiguous sonnets can vary greatly. This variance can mask the larger narrative unity. Sonnets 15, 16 and 17, for example, lock into a tight rhetorical sequence of statement, counter-statement and synthesis, which then issues in Sonnet 18, an example of the speaker's deathless, death-haunted verse. Sonnet 19 beautifully varies and restates some of 18, but then comes the appropriately jarring Sonnet 20, which has little rhetorical relationship to the immediately preceding verses. This disjunction works because in narrative terms Sonnet 20 constitutes a reversal; it tosses a phallic spanner into the erotic works. The editor of my edition cites Sonnet 20 as evidence that the speaker's homosexual love is unconsummated. I beg to differ. Sonnet 20 describes a moment of frustration in the narrative, but it is a moment definitively overcome in Sonnet 33, which I read as a homosexual aubade describing a hasty and troubled consummation ("...he was but one hour mine").

Another point of contention comes at the very end of the sequence. The last two sonnets are generally considered bathetically insipid, a disappointing whimper of an ending after so many big bangs. But I would argue that this may be exactly Shakespeare's intention. The two mythological sonnets exemplify exactly what they narrate: a failed retreat into pastoral. They thus constitute a final turn of the sequence's screw. By the end of the sequence, the erotically tormented poet is stretched out on the rack of his desires, and Shakespeare leaves him there. There can be no arcadian relief, no magical mythological cure. Even the thought of his beloved young man, which once (in the sublime Sonnet 29) brought him spiritual ecstasy in a world of pain, can now only redouble his torment. And the last two sonnets close off his final escape route. There is no exit.

CHILD OF GOD by Cormac McCarthy

Forget Bret Easton Ellis. Forget him completely. The real 'American Psycho' is this 1973 novel by Cormac McCarthy. Lester Ballard, McCarthy's "child of God much like yourself perhaps," is the frontier hero as psychopath, Natty Bumpo as necrophile, Huck Finn as transvestite serial killer. He's the classic American mountain man and pathfinder as refracted through the same blackened glass that will later show us that most nightmarish of all American Westerns, Blood Meridian. Lester Ballard's story is also the closest McCarthy has ever come to a psychological novel. Although Ol' Cormac has always been more mythographer than psychologist, and while characterization is not his strongest suit--and this book is no exception to either rule--Child of God does contain a compelling case study in the sexual psychopathology of serial killing. McCarthy cuts to the paradoxical core of Ballard's murderous desire: his need to have sex with a woman who is both dead and alive, who both exhibits a literal kadavergehorsamkeit before his god-like power and presents him with the warmth of living flesh. This is the paradox that makes him a serial killer: he murders repeatedly in a quest for the heat of the freshly killed. This desire, with its ideal, continued fulfilment always just out of reach, is also artfully underscored by the Echo and Narcissus motifs that McCarthy threads through the fabric of the novel. (And that I did not entirely catch on my first reading.)

One structural anomaly bothered me as I read. The novel begins with two alternating narrative voices: the lyrical authorial voice familiar from McCarthy's other novels, and a plainer, chattier, more rambling, cracker barrel storyteller's voice. This second voice, which contains the book's best humor, drops out at the end of Part One, presumably because McCarthy (or his editor) thought a comic counterpoint would detract from his progressively grimmer central narrative. I felt the loss of this voice in the book's second half. Perhaps Cormac wants us to feel its absence as his story goes completely insane.

I suppose it's now possible to divide McCarthy's work into three distinct periods. First comes the Southern Novelist who wrote The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of God and Suttree. Next is the Western Novelist of Blood Meridian and The Border Trilogy. And now in our current dispensation we have the Popular Novelist, the Pulitzered and Oprahfied and proxy-Oscared author of No Country for Old Men and The Road. I never thought I would see the author of Child of God in the audience at an Oscar ceremony, but there he was back in February 2008, sitting with his young son in the fifth or sixth row and pumping his fist when Javier Bardem's victory was announced. But surely the evening's most surreal conjunction came earlier, when McCarthy walked along the red carpet and passed just behind Regis Philbin. If those men had met, it would've been like matter and anti-matter colliding. 2012 would've come early.

EROS THE BITTERSWEET by Anne Carson

Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet is a philosophical prose poem disguised as a work of literary criticism--and vice versa. Fortunately, both disguises are highly accomplished. Of the four books by Carson I've read (Glass, Irony and God; Plainwater and The Beauty of the Husband are the others, all poetry collections), this is the one I would most enthusiastically recommend. A fittingly elusive and allusive text about the paradoxes of desire, the book moves like its author's mind--poetically--as it presents readings (often impressively close) of texts from Sappho to
Plato and in the process throws off sparks that reach as far as 20th century literature and philosophy. The entire book might be fruitfully read in conjunction with Shakespeare's sonnets (unmentioned by Carson), Wuthering Heights (ditto), Proust (a startlingly unspoken presence in Carson's text), Lacan (mentioned only once in passing), and Derrida (unnamed). In the case of the last two, Carson's text appears to be (in her book's own terms) erotically 'wooing' Lacan and Derrida, coyly and indirectly invoking and implicitly critiquing their ideas. In her reading of a Sappho fragment, for example, Carson briefly (too much is too brief in this book) outlines a theory of the erotic genesis of self-consciousness--desire in grasping for an object knows itself as lack--that resonates with Lacan. More subtly, her repeated invocations of 'edge,' 'fold,' and (less subtly) 'difference' signal toward Derrida's texts (specifically, the essays in Dissemination) without mentioning his name. Likewise, the pointed absence of any direct reference to Jacques le Mort in her extended discussion of the Phaedrus (which no contemporary academic can mention without bowing to "Plato's Pharmacy") appropriately inscribes Derrida into her text as an absent presence. We might even argue that Carson's text constructs a highly paradoxical 'desire' for Derrida that can only be sustained by keeping him unnamed and thus 'outside the text.' The Great Deconstructor floats like Sappho's apple just out of reach, in the 'nothingness' of the very hors-texte which he famously claimed did not exist. This is a damn clever book.

REMAINDER by Tom McCarthy

Jonathan Lethem’s front cover blurb on the US edition of Tom McCarthy’s Remainder is exceptionally misleading. It reads: "A stunningly strange book about the rarest of fictional subjects: happiness." The Kirkus Reviewer on the back cover appears to have read a different book: "An assured work of existential horror....Perfectly disturbing." Which is it, happiness or horror? The Kirkus reviewer is more to the point, but Lethem is not entirely wrong. For Remainder is ultimately a novel about the happiness that comes from committing acts of horror.

When I finished reading Remainder I wanted to say "Wow!" This is that rare thing, a truly great ‘postmodern’ novel. It’s also the best first novel I’ve read in years, and the fact that it was first published in Paris in 2005, had to wait a year for British publication and didn’t appear in the US (as a paperback original, the publishing industry’s version of direct-to-video movies) until 2007 is a situation that should force the British and American publishing industry to hang its collective head in shame. (This will never happen, of course. Bertelsmann AG bought shame and liquidated it a long time ago.) Remainder’s greatest interest lies in the fact that while it touches most of the usual ‘postmodern’ bases (self-consciousness, radical uncertainty, metafiction, simulation, the construction of the self and reality, personality as performance, De Lillo-ish paranoia, Will Selfish satire), it more importantly inscribes the postmodern condition as an affliction that must be overcome to achieve authenticity. The overall form of the narrator’s search for an escape from extreme self-consciousness might be understood as a classic Hegelian triad. The first 100 pages state the thesis: a will to authenticity in a postmodern world. The next hundred pages describe an antithetical drive to dominate other human beings (the narrator becomes a totalitarian child playing with living dolls) that soon turns thanatotic, becoming a desire to annihilate self-consciousness by "re-enacting" his own death. The final third of the novel executes a terrible synthesis, combining the drives to authenticity, domination and death in acts of violence, murder and terrorism, all exquisitely aestheticized in a way that Walter Benjamin identified as typically fascistic. (The novel’s most chilling moment comes when the narrator imagines the beautiful spectacle of passenger planes exploding in midair. September 11 is very close here, and we are reminded that Osama bin Laden, like our narrator, was a man with enough money to turn his fantasies into reality.) In his ultimate, terroristic incarnation, the narrator can finally accept the material world from which he has previously fled, because that world has now become the ‘simulation’ in which he acts. His flight from postmodernism ends in the only way it can, as a full-armed embrace of the always already inauthentic postmodern world.

This is just one possible interpretation--and not an entirely satisfying one. (Like Stephen Dedalus, I don't believe my own theory...) To use the book’s own terms, it leaves a large textual remainder, a troubling residue of matters unaccounted for. (Any interpretation of anything leaves such a remainder, that hermeneutic surplus for which this novel provides an encyclopedia of images.) What are we to make, for example, of the ending of chapter three, where the narrator’s admission of fictionalization places the remainder of Remainder under a cloud of radical uncertainty. Do the subsequent events happen in the novel’s ‘real’ world, or are they too an elaborate narrative fantasy in the narrator’s mind a la the long fantasy sequences in Rushdie's Satanic Verses? The best answer is surely "Both," but with a narrator this utterly unreliable we can be sure of nothing. My own reading tends to demote this moment in importance, since these metafictional leaps are such a hoary postmodern convention by this point that perceptive readers can’t possibly take them seriously. Overuse has fatally ironized metafictional irony. That may be the anti-postmodern point of the episode.

I was also struck by the monkish sexlessness of the narrator (and, for the most part, the novel). This asexuality is a blind spot as gaping as the one in which the exact nature of the narrator’s absurd trauma lies buried. Perhaps his eros has passed entirely into thanatos, revealing itself as an apparently asexual drive to dominate and kill. This would be yet another characteristic of the inescapable postmodernity the narrator exemplifies. And it also suggests a more psychological interpretation of the novel, focusing on that unspeakable trauma and the narrator’s overpowering repetition compulsion...

And there’s also the matter of this novel’s similarity to Charlie Kaufman’s film Synecdoche, New York. This seems to be a case of two artists independently and simultaneously arriving at the same central conceit. Kaufman was asked about the similarity in an interview and said this:

"This script, for the record, [was] written before that novel came out. I saw a review of that thing [Remainder]; I was freaked out. I intentionally did not read it. I have not read it. I hadn’t made the movie yet, and I didn’t want to have any kind of influence [from] it. But like I said, this script was written before that came out. I saw it online and I thought, A) oh fuck, and B) this is a book that I would read, normally. This sounds like a cool book. But I won’t. And I haven’t. And I probably at some point I will, but I don’t know…now it might be awful to read it. It might be like, Oh, he had this great idea that I didn’t have and I cant do anything about it." (From Anthem interview with Charlie Kaufman)

EUROPE CENTRAL by William T. Vollmann

Europe Central should have been titled Big Bill Vollmann's Bag O' War Stories. It is exceptionally well-written (like all of Vollmann's books), but the points Vollmann makes, the ideas he explores and even the tales he chooses to tell are often less interesting and original than the prose that constitutes them. Less a novel than a collection of loosely related stories and novellas, Europe Central suffers from the lack of any overall, unifying structural architecture. Vollmann attempts to make it all cohere into a kind of contrapuntal form, as outlined in the Table of Contents, but he seems to have lost the thread of this structure at some point during the writing process. The result is a bloated book about Nazism, Stalinism, art and ethics that contains many interesting parts (a novella about Shostakovich; the story of Walter Benjamin's sister-in-law, an East German judge known as 'the red guillotine') and far too many pages that deserve to be skimmed or skipped. In other words, it's a typical Vollmann book: beautifully written, very smart, and baggier than a strip club patron's pants.

It's also telling that the book's longest sustained narrative of the Holocaust is the tale of Kurt Gerstein, an ineffectual 'renegade' SS officer who is one of Vollmann's personal heroes. Gerstein, as Vollmann imagines him, is a complex and conflicted character, but the choice of his story as a lens through which to view the extermination camps serves to place Vollmann's narrative in the long line of Holocaust stories that use the Nazi genocide to reaffirm the humanistic ideals that the camps so casually slaughtered. Spielberg's Schindler's List, in many respects an extraordinary film, is the best-known example of this kind of narrative. By way of contrast, I want to mention a darker, more intense film that finds absolutely no affirmation in the ice-cold reality of genocide. I'm speaking of Tim Blake Nelson's The Grey Zone, a movie that came and went in 2001 with little fanfare and that may be the grimmest and most impressive representation of the Holocaust yet achieved by an American filmmaker. Focusing on the prisoners of the Auschwitz sonderkommando, it depicts characters who are both more deeply conflicted that Schindler and more impossibly heroic than Gerstein. It deserves to be much better known.

UNACKNOWLEDGED LEGISLATION: WRITERS IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE by Christopher Hitchens

The ambivalence that I and many on the left feel toward Christopher Hitchens is perhaps best summed up in this post by a reader of the Guardian (UK)'s books blog:


"Hitch is a pretty amazing character. His output is immense, his commitment unwavering and he should be applauded for this and held in high regard. I really like the guy.

He's also clearly a massive, massive twat. Anyone who genuinely thinks he is a good person needs to have his head examined.

If Hitch was given the slightest whiff of power, we'd all be his underslaves while a host of elected 'worthies' including Dawko, McEwen, Rushdie and Stephen Fry fed each other grapes, composed atonal music and played with each others balls.

Does anyone else think he should change the record too? He's delivering the same lines over and over again. I've heard the North Korea gag a thousand times over. And the Hubble telescope nonsense. Yeah, I've seen the pictures too. They're kinda shit. Not a patch on the wonder of Jurassic Park.

PS His literary criticism is cracking by the way. Stick to that."


My own view is that Hitchens is a knowledgeable political analyst, a talented writer and a wonderful polemicist who has been unfortunately mistaken for a public intellectual. (It's an easy mistake to make in America, a country without an intelligentsia. We have a professoriat, which is a different and much tamer animal.) I admire the passionate energy of Hitchens's polemics against religion, Kissinger, etc. while deploring his support of the Iraq War and his recent cosiness with the neocon right. (I essentially agree with him on Afghanistan, though...) Anyone with an interest in the man or his work should read this cover story from the May 2008 issue of the British magazine Prospect, which elucidates Hitchens's thought processes better than anything else I've read.

And I suppose I should eventually get around to the stated subject of this post. Unacknowledged Legislation is the unwieldy Shelleyan title for a grab bag of Hitchens's literary criticism from the 1990s. There are some good pieces here on Wilde, Raymond Williams, Anthony Powell, Kipling, Martin Amis, Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin books, etc., but the collection's greatest joys come (as one would expect) when Hitchens unloads mercilessly on a more or less deserving target of his wrath. The Reagan-worshipping Tom Clancy and the self-worshipping Tom Wolfe receive devastating bombardments, but the most furious polemical barrage is reserved for the egregious Norman Podhoretz. A high-point is Hitchens's casually parenthetical reference to "the engulfing, mandible-destroying blowjob that [Podhoretz] would...bestow on Ronald Reagan." And yet, even as I enjoyed this evisceration of Old Poddy I reflected that Hitchens's imagery had been rendered fatally ironic by his own later performance of the same service upon the corpus of George W. Bush. (Anyone who doubts the abjectness of Hitchens's period as an apologist for the Bush administration need only view a tape of Hitch's New York debate with George Galloway, during which he defended even the administration's response to Hurricane Katrina.) Near the beginning of his piece on Isaiah Berlin, as he considers Berlin's support of the Vietnam War, Hitchens writes of hawkishness as "the most lethal temptation to which the contemplative can fall victim." I'm surely not alone in wishing that Hitch had been more contemplative on the issue of Iraq.

ONE LAST NOBEL PRIZE POST (and then no more about it until next October, I promise)

What can we conclude about the Nobel Prize from a list of the last 25 winners? (Click on each name to see the writer's official page at the Nobel foundation's website.)

2009 - Herta Müller
2008 - Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio
2007 - Doris Lessing
2006 - Orhan Pamuk
2005 - Harold Pinter
2004 - Elfriede Jelinek
2003 - J. M. Coetzee
2002 - Imre Kertész
2001 - V. S. Naipaul
2000 - Gao Xingjian
1999 - Günter Grass
1998 - José Saramago
1997 - Dario Fo
1996 - Wislawa Szymborska
1995 - Seamus Heaney
1994 - Kenzaburo Oe
1993 - Toni Morrison
1992 - Derek Walcott
1991 - Nadine Gordimer
1990 - Octavio Paz
1989 - Camilo José Cela
1988 - Naguib Mahfouz
1987 - Joseph Brodsky
1986 - Wole Soyinka
1985 - Claude Simon

It's an eclectic list that at first appears to defy generalizations. True, more than half are Europeans, so the prize is certainly Eurocentric, but does anyone really expect a prize awarded by Europeans to be non-Eurocentric? More troubling to me is the fact that the prize seems to have 'contracted' into a strictly European award during the last few years. Looking at the 1980s through 2000, we see laureates from Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, China, Japan--and even one lonely American. But since 2001 Europeans have dominated. Not a single writer from the Western hemisphere has won the prize since V.S. Naipaul (who although born in Trinidad is, by general agreement, more English than the English); no American has won since Toni Morrison; no one from Central or South America since Derek Walcott; only two East Asian writers have won in 25 years. And even the non-Europeans who have won recently (Pamuk and Coetzee) are writers deeply indebted to European literature. The Swedish Academy needs to look outward or risk closing itself into a European box.

Herta Muller Wins Nobel

Proving once again that nobody, absolutely nobody, can predict the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Swedish Academy has just awarded it to Romanian-born German novelist Herta Muller, a writer who wasn't on anyone's list of Nobel possibilities. Having never read Muller, I can say nothing about her work, but I predict that there will be a lot of blather spoken today by people who are only slightly better informed than I am. This is a selection that's going to have readers scratching their heads and saying 'Who?' and going to Wikipedia for a quick info fix. So I guess the Swedish Academy has done the best thing they can really do. They've introduced me and the world to a writer who might be very good. I just hope she's better than Elfriede Jelinek...

NOBEL THOUGHTS

The winner of this year's Nobel Prize for literature will be announced on Thursday October 8. Israeli writer Amos Oz is the predictors' favorite this year, which means he probably doesn't have a chance in hell of winning. Whatever one may think of the Nobel committee's choices, they are almost always surprising. Last year's win by J.M.G. Le Clezio (a writer I still haven't read) sent me and millions of other non-French readers to Wikipedia to find out exactly who the hell this dude with three initials was and what he had written that was so nobelisable. Likewise the recent wins by Elfriede Jelinek and Imre Kertesz, writers little-known outside Europe. Doris Lessing's and Harold Pinter's wins were surprising for their extreme tardiness; Orhan Pamuk's Nobel, by contrast, seemed to come surprisingly early.

So if Amos Oz can be safely counted out, who might the other contenders be? British bookmaker Ladbrokes is giving odds on Oz, Assia Djebar, Syrian poet Adonis, and perpetual American mentions Thomas Pynchon and Joyce Carol Oates. Philip Roth, a favorite in years past, hasn't been mentioned recently, so this may be his year. But the pool of nobelisable writers is broad, and I wouldn't be surprised if one of the following walked away with this year's award: Carlos Fuentes, Chinua Achebe, Milan Kundera, David Grossman, Korean poet Ko Un, Juan Goytisolo, Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie (but that would take real courage, so it's unlikely), Adrienne Rich, Milorad Pavic, Peter Carey, Edna O'Brien, Wilson Harris (Guyana), Ernesto Sabato (who at 98 would be the prize's oldest recipient)... But I suspect the winner's name has not yet been mentioned in this blog.

And all this speculation raises another question: What does the Nobel mean? It's an amazingly good payday for the winner, and it's undeniably prestigious, but is the prize's prestige really deserved? The negative case is easily made: simply list a few of the great writers who went to their graves un-Nobeled. The list is a veritable Who's Who of twentieth-century literature: James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Jean Genet, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Alain Robbe-Grillet, James Baldwin, D.H, Lawrence, Ralph Ellison, Andre Breton, Paul Celan, Antonin Artaud, W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Simone de Beauvoir, Mikhail Bulgakov, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, George Orwell, W.G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, Witold Gombrowicz, and the list goes on... To put the case as succinctly as possible: Why should we grant so much prestige to a literary award that preferred Pearl Buck to James Joyce? Now, some readers will surely consider that question 'elitist.' They will be correct. The question is elitist, and in matters of art, so is the questioner.

THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES by Roberto Bolano

After starting and quickly abandoning The Savage Detectives a few months ago, I had an intimation that I would be returning to the book in the near future... Well, the near future is now. I gave it another chance, and I'm very glad I did. This is one of those rare novels that after a rather unpromising beginning progressively improves until it eventually touches greatness. And even the opening section impressed me more on this reading. The first 140 pages didn't impress me enormously (my mind remained unblown), but they were good enough to keep me reading--as good as they needed to be. This time I can see beyond the lazy diary form of the first section and enjoy Juan Garcia Madero's naive and unreliable narration (an unreliability signaled by his literally incredible sexual athletics) and the mysterious, apparition-like entrances of Arturo Belano (obvious authorial stand-in) and Ulises Lima, the leaders of the obscure (but not entirely fictional) 'visceral realist' poetry movement in 1970s Mexico City. Their enigmatic appearances in Garcia Madero's narrative prepare us for the roles they will play throughout the book: never speaking directly but always spoken about, always seen obliquely through the distorting lenses of others' eyes and minds and often enveloped in a weedy haze. Bolano's sex scenes in this first section are also good, and their range--from comic to horrific--is impressive. But the novel doesn't really take off until its four central characters climb into a Chevy Impala and flee Mexico City for the dubious haven of the Sonoran desert. At that point, the first section abruptly ends, the narrative breaks, and the novelistic form radically explodes into a long, 450-page collection of monologue fragments in which multiple narrators, most of whom are extremely minor characters, recount various stories of the lives and wanderings of Belano, Lima and the other visceral realists. The form is successfully entropic--a rare achievement--as it negotiates an original pathway between the Scylla and Charybdis of traditional coherence and postmodern fragmentation. This section is the novel's heart and Bolano's triumph, as impressive as his nearly perfect novella By Night in Chile. The various voices--sentimental, bitter, bitchy, pompous, angry, enigmatic, uncomprehending--sound out against each other in cacophonous chorus, recounting the litany of failures and temporary stays against failure that constitute the characters' lives after the collapse of their movement. As I read, I was reminded repeatedly of Flaubert's Sentimental Education and began to see The Savage Detectives as a contemporary Mexican Sentimental Education and the long second section as a gigantic expansion upon the famous "He travelled..." passage in which Flaubert glosses over the years of Frederic Moreau's aimless and disappointed wanderings. This is a Sentimental Education focusing on what happens after the dreams collapse: the life of flight and poverty on the margins of our globalized world.

"Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragedy," says Bolano's fictional critic (and Arturo Belano's dueling opponent) Inaki Echeverne, and the novel bears out this pronouncement even as it attempts to dilute it with self-protective irony. The chapter that contains this line, one of the book's very best sections, ends with a tale told by the Chilean Arturo Belano, a tale of two writers, one Peruvian and the other Cuban (unnamed but clearly Reinaldo Arenas), both of whom suffer equal but opposite forms of ideological attack. At the story's end, Bolano's Chilean listener tells him "You and I are Chilean...and none of this is our fault," thus completely missing the point of Belano's tale and reaffirming his own sense of ideological purity, a sentimental leftist illusion of purity born (irony of ironies) in the destruction of the Chilean left at the hands of Pinochet. Scenes like this, and especially the brilliantly hellish Liberian episode near the section's end, ultimately lift the book beyond the level of comic literary roman a clef to an examination of the tragedy that life has become in the modern world. This is post-magic realist, anti-utopian dissident fiction, and it's marvelous.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY: SELECTED LETTERS 1917-1961 edited by Carlos Baker

One of the rare highpoints in Hemingway's published correspondence is his 28 May 1934 letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald:

"Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to hurt like hell before you can write seriously, But when you get the damned hurt use it--don't cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist--but don't think anything is of any importance because it happens to you or anyone belonging to you."

That's the most often quoted passage, but there's equally good stuff in the rest of the letter (written on the occasion of Hemingway's reading of Tender is the Night, about which he says, with typical helpfulness, "I liked it and I didn't like it").

"...good writers always come back. Always." Thus spake Hemingthustra. This is demonstrably untrue, but it's interesting that Hemingway needs to believe this. It tells us more about Hem than Scott.

"You see, Bo [Hem's nickname for Scott], you're not a tragic character. Neither am I. All we are is writers and what we should do is write." The good common sense of that last sentence is cruelly negated by the abysmal character judgments in the other two. Within ten years of the letter, Fitzgerald would drink himself to death; Hemingway, on the other hand, would commit suicide the way a character in The Sun Also Rises went bankrupt: gradually at first, and then suddenly. But again, it's telling that Hemingway needs to believe this about himself.

"Invention is the finest thing but you cannot invent anything that would not actually happen. That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best--make it all up--but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way." I especially like this one. It reminds me of a story Hemingway surely knew: when someone remarked to Picasso that Gertrude Stein looked nothing like his portrait of her, Picasso replied, "She will."

"Scott for gods sake write and write truly no matter who or what it hurts but do not make these silly compromises."

"You can study Clausewitz in the field and economics and psychology and nothing else will do you any bloody good once you are writing. We are like lousy damned acrobats but we make some mighty fine jumps, Bo, and they have all these other acrobats who won't jump."

And then Hem's attempt at friendship-saving irony: "Jesus its marvelous to tell other people how to write, live, die etc."

I also like the way Hemingway's pen/mind slips twice and he writes 'right' for 'write.' The same thing happens to me whenever I right about righting.

WONDER BOYS by Michael Chabon

The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay won the Pulitzer, The Yiddish Policemen's Union earned reams of good reviews, but in my opinion Wonder Boys remains Michael Chabon's best book. It's one of the most purely enjoyable American novels of the past 20 years, and in terms of craft it's a novelistic masterpiece: the first 80 pages are a textbook example of how to complicate a narrative, and the remainder is a master class in the inventive extension and ultimate resolution of those complications. That said, this is no groundbreaking, mind-blowing work of literature, no Gravity's Rainbow or Ulysses, nor is it meant to be. Rather, and no less impressively, it's a masterful work of 'traditional' narrative craftsmanship, as well-written and expertly constructed as any of the novels in Philip Roth's 'American trilogy.' It's a book that engages not only on the macro level of novelistic structure, the pleasure of watching a writer successfully juggling a host of characters and situations, keeping them all in the air, and bringing them to a fitting denouement, but also at the micro level of sentence and image. Chabon's comic metaphors rarely misfire and are sometimes painfully apt (e.g. Tripp comparing his bearlike self and a young student to Picasso's blind minotaur being led by an angelic girl). And at a level somewhere between the macro and micro, Wonder Boys offers a plenitude of surprising local pleasures. The brief tale of the washed-up writer Joe Fahey, who waves a loaded gun at his writing students to instruct them in fear, is an example that comes immediately to mind. But enough praise. We don't really do a novel justice until we can see where it fails, where its ostensible intentions break apart and other, perhaps unintended, meanings peek through. Where does Wonder Boys fail? What are its weaknesses? One is immediately apparent: This novel narrated by that pseudo-Faulknerian novelist Grady Tripp is, like all of Tripp's other works, excessively 'male.' Chabon/Tripp's women--even the most complex of them, Sara Gaskell--don't rise far above the role of detachable male appendage and object of desire. Also, I doubt that Chabon fully considered all the implications of the novel's consistent depictions of adult male happiness as a regression to adolescence and a flight from the feminine: Irving Warshaw's spring house, James Leer's basement, Tripp's endless and apparently rather juvenile Wonder Boys manuscript, Terry Crabtree's life. By novel's end Tripp seems to have broken out of this regressive trap, but such a reading is undermined by indications that his new life is even more deeply regressive: he has returned to his childhood home, accompanied by the only maternal figure among the major characters. The ending is sentimental, matrimonial, classically comedic, but it remains haunted by the old unrest and self-loathing that eat at Tripp's matricidal heart.

It might also be interesting to consider this theme of male regression with respect to the shape of Chabon's career to date. Beginning with an impressive Fitzgeraldian debut, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, he fulfilled most of its promises with Wonder Boys. But then something strange happened. Instead of continuing along this path and sharpening and polishing his literary chops, Chabon flew off on a series of tangents, writing the kinds of books and stories that minor characters in Wonder Boys might have written. It has been a disappointingly unoriginal, regressive course, from the MGM 1940s comic book world of Kavalier to the alternative history / detective noir pastiche of Yiddish Policemen's Union and so forth. It is as though Chabon has entered his own novel and become several of his characters--a fate that Wonder Boys recognizes as an occupational hazard. But Chabon is still relatively young, he still has talent to burn, and there's still a chance that he'll return to comic realism and write the great novel that's still inside him.

A couple more random thoughts:

Grady Tripp is not a standard unreliable narrator; he's an accurate, lucid narrator stoned into unreliability--Chabon's clever method of showing us the effects of the various drugs Tripp ingests.

Another thing that impresses me about this book is the wisdom of its reflections on writers and writing, on writerly self-loathing and self-destruction, alcoholism, the "midnight disease," and on the most perverse thing in the world: the unaccountable attraction of it all.

MEMORY OF FIRE by Eduardo Galeano

"Each day of life is an unrepeatable chord of a music that laughs at death." --Eduardo Galeano, Century of the Wind (Memory of Fire, volume three).

Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire trilogy ( a history of the Western hemisphere with a corrective emphasis on its southern half, comprising Genesis, Faces and Masks and Century of the Wind) is very good, at moments sublime, and extremely important, showing us a new way to write and understand history: in vivid fragments, vignettes, poetic images. The act of authorial selection is foregrounded by the form, so there’s no traditional historical legerdemain suggesting that this is the history of the Western hemisphere and no others need apply. It’s a beautiful, nuanced book that shows us just how poetically powerful history writing can be. Galeano takes history out of the hands of the professoriat and makes it sing. He’s a bluesman, and his composition, in three long movements, is a vast blues for the Western hemisphere. On first reading, the work seems sui generis, like what might have happened if Borges and Garcia Marquez had collaborated on a history book–an impossible possibility, given their strongly opposed political views.

The third volume, Century of the Wind, covering the 20th century, is the most impressive of the trilogy. Its vignettes range from beauty to horror, from the exhilaration of successful revolution to the unspeakable sadism of the torture chambers, from summary executions and casual slaughters to a little town in South America called Yoro where, from time to time, it rains fish. "[In] America," Galeano writes (and by ‘America’ he always means the entire hemisphere), "surrealism is as natural as rain or madness." He has written an appropriately surreal, sublimely beautiful and terribly true book that is as artful as it is educative. I wish there was more history like this.

AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Autumn of the Patriarch, while not as surrealistically inventive as One Hundred Years of Solitude, is a great novel in its own right and deserves to displace the overrated Love in the Time of Cholera as the ‘other’ Garcia Marquez novel. If Solitude synthesizes Faulkner and Kafka, Patriarch leans more toward the Faulknerian side of things, its prose heavily influenced by Absalom, Absalom! (In Gabo’s geography, Faulkner is not a ‘Southern writer’ but a writer of the northern Caribbean basin. In terms of the location and duration of his influence, this is probably the best way to think of Faulkner. He's the northern grandfather of the late twentieth-century Latin American novel.) The long, run-on, convoluted, marvelously lyrical sentences in this novel give a Baroque flavor to a nightmarish, Gothic story, a combination reminiscent of Old Bill at his darkest. Gabo’s prose makes this a more difficult read than Solitude, but it’s a familiar, Modernist kind of difficulty, the difficulty of complexity, of multiple narrators and a (somewhat) non-chronological narrative, a difficulty that finally enriches rather than obscures.

I admire the way Gabo’s incredibly long-winded sentences–the last 50-page chapter is a single sentence–are like a sea on which the reader floats and in which he is occasionally submerged. We drift into the prose and let it flow over us, let it dominate our consciousness. There’s something genuinely overpowering in this lyricism, as powerful as Faulkner at his best; it’s an insinuating power, that of a melody that moves from the background to become the center of the song...But I prefer the oceanic metaphor. Gabo’s sentence rhythms are tidal, like the rhythm of the sea the general is forced to sell (to Americans who set it up in Arizona, a marvelous bit of satire that Gabo prodigally throws off in a subordinate clause), and the loss of the sea near the end of the book foregrounds this rhythm with an image that tropes the last chapter’s single-sentence structure: a terminal tide that streams out never to return. And this is also, obviously, an image of life, which occurs once and once only, no repetition (unlike my last phrase), no resurrection–a point stated, perhaps too explicitly, at book’s close.

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I’m reading One Hundred Years of Solitude for the 2nd or 3rd time. It’s the Great Columbian Novel, a fact often obscured or missed by North American and European critics who designate it a “Latin American” novel. While Gabo deliberately generalizes his tales, never explicitly naming the country in which the novel is set, many of the background events (Liberal-Conservative wars, banana massacre, etc.) are recognizable incidents from Columbian history. I wonder how many North American readers appreciate this, understand that they’re reading a kind of ‘national epic’ of 19th and 20th century Columbian history rather than a generalized, mythologized, ‘South American’ fable.

The most serious flaw I find in this reading is that Gabo forces too big a cast upon himself. There are simply too many Buendias, and the author doesn’t sufficiently individualize them all. (He’s great, but he’s not Tolstoy.) So as we reach the halfway point, the Aurelianos and Arcadios of various generations tend to blur together, and I find myself repeatedly turning back to the genealogy chart in the front of the book. If Gabo had cut out a generation, this flaw might have been less noticeable, but which scenes would we want to lose, which beautiful images would we eliminate?

Reading the book after the 2000-2001 Bushite takeover of the U.S., I feel an eerie shock of recognition in some scenes, particularly the stolen election that leads Col. Buendia into rebellion (so much like the events of late 2000 in that most Caribbean, that most Latin American, that most magic realist of our United States). A new, deep-freeze chill also accrues to the banana massacre and its Kafkaesque aftermath of delusional official denials. Here is where magic realism becomes realism proper, reflecting hallucinatory reality.

Again and again the book surprises me, even upon re-reading. It is a triumph of the engaged imagination, a great left-wing novel that is also (rare thing) a great novel, fully deserving its prestige. Its strengths greatly outweigh its weaknesses, rendering them negligible, barely worth mentioning beside the great plagues of insomnia and amnesia, the suicide attempt of Col. Aureliano, the ascension of Remedios the Beauty, the train of corpses, and so much more.

This is a novel as lush and fertile as a Columbian rain forest (and filled with as many intoxicating substances), a book of Dantean inventiveness and richness. Yes, I’m gushing now, but this novel deserves it. Gabo’s inventiveness does not flag (as Grass’s does in Tin Drum); even the last two or three chapters contain marvels: the “brothel of lies”; Aureliano and Amaranta’s amour fou in the house that succumbs to nature exactly as they do and is destroyed along with them; the old Catalonian bookseller with his shopful of treasures that the citizens of Macondo see as so many piles of printed junk; the tour de force ending in which the last Buendia reads of his own death at the moment it occurs–a very tidy clearing of the stage.

The book is a supreme example of writing that is both politically engaged and wildly imaginative. There is enough melancholy and wistfulness in Gabo’s tone to keep his fantasy from becoming mere whimsy. And it’s a melancholy born of the nightmares of Columbian history, a history like a freight train packed with corpses (a central image of the novel’s second half), a wistfulness born of what that history might have been. It’s not a perfect book (I’ve mentioned a few flaws above), but it is one of the very greatest.

GARGANTUA AND PANTAGRUEL by Francois Rabelais

Having read the first two books of Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, I find the work tedious, monotonous, redundant, tiresome, boring, soporific, uninteresting...you get the picture.

There are brief passages of genius, truly inventive and outrageous comic scenes (the journey into Pantagruel’s mouth stands out), but these joyous moments are, to coin a phrase, few and far between. Even if we consider ‘Master Alcofribas’ (a name that makes me think of alcohol and freebase and Richard Pryor aflame) the most unreliable narrator of all time and the book a massive deconstruction of itself, the text does not become a bit more interesting. This is a book made to be skimmed, scanned, skipped-through, sampled, sipped, tasted, tested, tippled, tinkled-upon, etc, etc, etc,...

One non-comic aspect of the book that does interest me is the way that some elements of Rabelais' style analogize with contemporary trends in the visual arts. Rabelais’ sartorially detailed descriptions of clothing and nauseatingly clinical depictions of wounds (this last surely a comic device meant to satirize the goreless slaughters of medieval romance) can be seen as analogous to the trompe l’oeil, photographically exquisite details of Mannerist painting (the draperies in Bronzino’s portraits, for example). Like all books, G&P is of its moment, an artifact of the first half of the 1500's in France, the Mannerist Fontainebleau era.

A brief thought about MOBY DICK

A brief thought about a book that cannot be thought of briefly:

Moby Dick is the American Bible, the only canonical New American Testament. It’s a highly critical secular scripture that puts opposing philosophical positions in play and questions them all even as it questions the very ground of human knowledge and the validity of interpretation. More than an adventure story (although it is, of course, a great, tragic one of those, too), it’s an epistemological adventure, a hermeneutical quest--hence the multitudinous images of unreadable writing and uninterpretable signs that barnacle the skin of this whale of a text. The reason no one could understand the book when it was published is simple: a century and more had to pass before our intellectual culture could catch up with Melville’s mind (and we surely haven’t definitively caught it yet...). We needed to assimilate the ‘linguistic turn’ of philosophy, the structuralism of Levi-Strauss, and the poststructuralism of Derrida before we could begin to see all that Melville accomplished here–not because Derrida and Levi-Strauss explain Melville but because Melville contains them (and probably a critique of them besides). This is, moreover, the relationship the greatest art often has to philosophy, and we should begin to read fiction and philosophy accordingly. Reading Moby Dick in this light, we might see that while the white whale is the novel’s master-image of mystery, it is only the novel’s penultimate point of hermeneutic and epistemological failure. The ultimate mystery, the vast unknown, the gap for which that between the signifier and signified is merely one more trope, is that mystery of which the white whale is agent: death.

On Kenneth Branagh's HAMLET (1996)

When I first saw Kenneth Branagh's 4-hour "full text" version of Hamlet during its initial theatrical release in 1996, I was not overly impressed. I thought it was OK but too long, had too many cameos and was too much of a Kenneth Branagh Experience. Now, having just finished watching the pristine DVD release, I wonder what kind of bad weed I was smoking back in '96. Branagh's Hamlet is a great film. And more than that, it is the best Hamlet I have ever seen on film: better than Olivier's reductive "man who could not make up his mind" interpretation; better than Tony Richardson's 1969 film with Anthony Hopkins miscast as Claudius to Nicol Williamson's Hamlet (although Hopkins is actually a year older than Williamson, he looked about 10 years younger in 1969, and Claudius should really look noticeably older than Hamlet); better than Zefferelli's version with crazy Mel Gibson pretending to be sane; better than the tame 1980s PBS film with Kevin Kline; better than the Ethan Hawke 'Wall Street Hamlet' with Sam Shepard as the Ghost (providing the best scene in the movie, by far). Brilliant and thrilling and as mad as its protagonist, Branagh's film deserves to be seen again and again. Yes, Jack Lemmon's wooden line readings weigh down the front end a bit, but that's ultimately a minor flaw, and what works in the film massively outweighs it--to wit: the "too, too solid flesh" soliloquy in the suddenly emptied great hall; the mirrored "To be or not to be" soliloquy during which the camera moves in so that the edges of the mirror become invisible and we have an image of two Hamlets with daggers drawn preparing to duel, an absolutely perfect visual analogue for the soliloquy; the thrilling "let my thoughts be bloody" speech reimagined as a German Romantic aria performed atop a snowy mountain out of Caspar David Friedrich; Derek Jacobi's Claudius, who comes off in this production as almost a Macbethian tragic figure (it could be argued that this is Jacobi's movie); Brian Blessed's performance as the Ghost, especially the wonderfully understated side-glance of tenderness he directs at Gertrude in the bedchamber scene; the amazingly fluid camera work (looks like steadicam, but it's actually all dolly shots); the marvelous Wellesian low-angle shot that shows Hamlet and Gertrude reflected in a pool of Polonius's blood; the perfect casting of Charlton Heston as the Player King (which made me think: if Chuck had been offered more roles like this during the 90s, maybe he wouldn't have gone looking for love at Wayne LaPierre's house); the mad genius of Branagh's set with its rooms behind mirrors, secret passages and myriad hiding places, a set on which no one can say with certainty "Now I am alone..."; the fact that one of those mirrors conceals the padded cell in which Ophelia will rave... I could go on ("I'll rant as well as thou") because this is a great film, probably the only Shakespeare film that's worth watching twice solely for its excellence as a film. The DVD commentary track by Branagh and the film's textual advisor is also quite good. It was only when watching the the movie with the commentary track on (and Shakespeare's words muted) that I was able to fully appreciate the filmic beauty of this work (the mise en scene, shot compositions, etc.). This is a Shakespeare movie that still looks amazing even without Shakespeare's words. Check it out.

THE RENAISSANCE by Walter Pater

Pater's Renaissance is one of my Bibles. Specifically, it's my Pentateuch. Joyce's Ulysses is my New Testament, Gravity's Rainbow my Apocalypse, Tristram Shandy my Apocrypha, Kafka my Koran, and A la recherche du temps perdu my endless Mahabarata. One of the most beautifully-written books in the English language, The Renaissance has an undeserved reputation for purple prose and an all-too-deserved one as the holy book of decadent aestheticism. "I wish they would not call me a hedonist," Pater once complained, "it gives such a wrong impression to those who do not know Greek." As we all know, however, the real reason we are discomforted by any description of ourselves is the possibility that it might give people the right idea. Pater was an aesthete, and his book is the first and best English-language manifesto of aesthetic life. Here's a taste (and just a taste) of what Pater is capable of:

On Pico Della Mirandola: "And yet to read a page of one of Pico's forgotten books is like a glance into one of those ancient sepulchres, upon which the wanderer in classical lands has sometimes stumbled, with the old disused ornaments and furniture of a world wholly unlike ours still fresh in them."

On Michelangelo: "A certain strangeness, something of the blossoming of the aloe, is indeed an element in all true works of art: that they shall excite or surprise us is indispensable. But that they shall give pleasure and exert a charm over us is indispensable too; and this strangeness must be sweet also--a lovely strangeness."

On Michelangelo's pietas: "He has left it in many forms, sketches, half-finished designs, finished and unfinished groups of sculpture; but always as a hopeless, rayless, almost heathen sorrow--no divine sorrow, but mere pity and awe at the stiff limbs and colourless lips."

On the Uffizi Medusa (also the subject of a poem by Shelley): "What may be called the fascination of corruption penetrates in every touch its exquisitely finished beauty."

On the proper use of philosophy: "Philosophy serves culture, not by the fancied gift of absolute or transcendental knowledge, but by suggesting questions which help one to detect the passion, and strangeness, and dramatic contrasts of life."

On aesthetic experience: "Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch."

I could continue quoting Pater until my hands curl up like lobster claws, but that would only wrench more quotes out of the contexts in which they really must be read. In the long last chapter, Pater quotes Goethe on Winckelmann: "One learns nothing from him, but one becomes something." The same is true of Pater. If one reads him deeply and well, one might become an aesthete. The Renaissance is one of my 'essential' books. Every literate human being should own a copy.

OUT OF SHEER RAGE: WRESTLING WITH D.H. LAWRENCE by Geoff Dyer

Geoff Dyer is a wanker. Anyone who has read his dire book of travel pieces, Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It, knows just how much of a wanker he can be. Out of Sheer Rage, on the other hand, is a much better and more original book, a first-person account of Dyer's failure to write a book about D.H. Lawrence that becomes, in its way, a rather beautiful book about Lawrence. Reading it, I was reminded of Henry Miller's early attempt to write a Lawrence book; as I recall, Miller amassed reams of research material and became so engrossed in the research that the book itself was never written. Something of that sort happens to Dyer, but fortunately he turns his inability to sit down and re-read Women in Love into the motive for a globe-spanning tour of Lawrentian locales that rarely fails to entertain and sometimes does much more. There are memorable visits to Lawrence's childhood home and his house in Italy, but the book really comes alive when a Lawrentian consciousness seems to leak out of Dyer's reading and invade his world. After a moped crash in Greece, for example, Dyer and his girlfriend have post-traumatic, injured sex. Lawrence would've understood their need for sex at this moment, but he couldn't have written a scene with the gentle humor of Dyer's. (Humor was not D.H.'s strong point; it's hard to laugh while coughing blood.) Even better--the high point of the book, in fact--is a druggy scene on a Mexican beach in which Dyer takes himself in hand (the arch-wanker wanks) while staring at his girlfriend's pussy and imagining himself licking her clit while she pisses on his chin. Dyer can hold this vision for only a few seconds, though, until self-consciousness kicks in and he realizes he's sitting naked on a public beach preparing to wank. There are quite a lot of good scenes, interesting thoughts and questionable assertions in this book, and they are all worth reading.

SHAKESPEARE, TRAGICAL AND COMICAL

Hamlet and Twelfth Night were made for each other. Probably written around the same time (yes, my 'probably' covers a multitude of scholarly sins, but let's leave the fraught matter of Shakespearean chronology aside for the length of this post), the two plays strangely and surprisingly complement each other, and could be fruitfully performed on alternating nights. If Hamlet is Shakespeare's greatest theatrically self-conscious work (the play within the play; Hamlet as an actor who performs madness so well that his own disbelief is at times suspended, etc.), Twelfth Night may be his greatest textually self-conscious work, frequently reflecting on problems of reading, writing, language, representation and (mis)interpretation. ("Malvolio: By my life, this is my lady's hand. These be her very c's, her u's, and her t's; and thus she makes her great P's." [insert groundlings' raucous laughter here]). And at the beginning of Act Three, Feste is a most Derridean clown (or should we think of Derrida as Feste translated into labyrinthine French?):

Viola: Thy reason, man?

Feste: Troth, sir, I can yield you none without words, and words are grown so false I am loath to prove reason with them.


I am suggesting that each of these plays mirrors the other--or that we should make them mirrors in our minds. We should read Viola's performance through Hamlet's, and vice versa; read Malvolio's 'scene of reading' through Polonius's, and so on. This might be the best way to break down the thoroughly artificial historical barrier separating Shakespeare's raucous tragedies from his serious comedies. And this barrier must be laid low if we are to understand Shakespeare at all. "Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world" is the plea Shakespeare makes through Falstaff (playing Hal pleading for Falstaff in a typically mind-boggling bit of meta-theater), and too many critics and readers have been too quick to reply like Hal, "I do. I will." An important lesson of ALL of Shakespeare, though, is that any idea of tragedy that slights comedy cuts out its own heart before it has had a chance to start beating. Maybe we can't really understand Shakespeare unless and until we can see fat Jack Falstaff and melancholy Hamlet and tranvestite Viola as brothers.

THE MAD MAN by Samuel Delany

Oh boy... This is the book in which Samuel Delany, never one to fly his freak flag at half-staff, runs that sucker all the way up the pole, over the top and into the stratosphere. The Mad Man is the story of John Marr, a young, gay, African-American grad student in philosophy, and his decade-long quest to understand the life, work, thought and death of Timothy Hasler, a young, gay, Korean-American philosopher murdered in a New York City hustlers' bar in the early 1970s. That's the standard Publisher's Weekly-type description of this novel, and it's pretty much bullshit. The Mad Man is nothing like A.S. Byatt's Possession (which Delany reviewed and which probably inspired the novel's conception), and Gwyneth Paltrow will definitely not be appearing in the movie. The Mad Man isn't an academic novel, either--at least not after the first 20 pages. And the 'mystery' of Hasler's death is solved with a pathetically minimal amount of investigation and no real thought at all. No, while The Mad Man flirts with these genres, uses them, cruises them, it never really hooks up for a meaningful relationship. So what, finally, is this book? The Mad Man is one of the filthiest and raunchiest pornographic novels of the twentieth (or any other) century. It's a novel that concerns itself, in explicit, extensive, sometimes comic and occasionally tiresome detail, with men whose sexuality takes the form of drinking other men's urine and eating their feces. This is Delany's long (almost 500 pages in the definitive revised edition of 2002) song of urolagnia and coprophagia, a novel in which the narrator repeatedly falls to his knees to drink the warm piss of filthy homeless men. Now, the last part of that sentence might make the novel sound rather stupid, an academic exercise in transgression, slumming for tenure. But The Mad Man isn't that, either. It is one of the most highly intelligent--indeed, intellectual--porn novels ever written, a book that belongs on the shelf with Bataille's Story of the Eye and Sade's Philosophy in the Bedroom. Delany's novel might be subtitled 'Philosophy at the Mine Shaft,' for it is during an early-80s 'wet night' in that bar that the narrator begins to understand Heidegger's concept of 'meditative thinking'--surely the raunchiest context in which that thinker has ever been invoked. Delany shows us two 'wet nights' over the course of his novel, and both are among the most eye-opening scenes in the book. But if The Mad Man were only an intellectual / philosophical porn novel, it probably still wouldn't be worth 500 pages of my time. What kept me reading was the book's strange alienation effect: since Delany describes desires so far away from mine, I'm alienated from his sex scenes (the novel thus functions for most readers, straight and gay, as the very opposite of traditional pornography--another, and especially triumphant, example of Delany's deconstructive genre-cruising). I am alienated from the novel's raunchiest scenes in a way that opens up space for reflection on the nature of desire. At what may be its deepest level (understanding that the very notions of 'depths' and 'levels' would be exceedingly problematic to a postmodernist like Delany, and also that they would be, in the book's own terms, 'Hasler Structures'), the novel is an examination of the farthest shores of human desire in all its messiness and of the structures we build to contain that chaos. One critic has likened this book to "an unbelievably raunchy Magic Mountain," and while that comparison is at least a bit hyperbolic, I think it would be fair to call the novel an extended dramatic meditation on Hegel's discussion of the master-slave relationship. The narrator is impressed enough by The Phenomenology of Spirit/Mind (different translators translate geist differently; the German word denotes both meanings) to plan at one point a vast Hegelian summa to be titled The Systems of the World. The Mad Man might be read as a chapter in that abandoned effort.

THE STRONGER by August Strindberg

Strindberg's 6-page play The Stronger, a work that exerted an obvious influence on Ingmar Bergman's film Persona, is a smaller and considerably less complex work than that film, but it remains of interest because of the extreme psychological movement at its climax. When Mrs. X, the speaker, evokes her colonization by the silent Miss Y, she does so in imagery that is luridly sado-masochistic. This poetic vision of ultimate inauthenticity, probably the first and only few lucid seconds of the character's life, is immediately 'flipped' into a self-aggrandizing embrace of inauthenticity as ultimate superiority. The change comes fast enough to give readers and viewers a severe case of whiplash, and that's probably why it feels so compelling, so accurate. Defense mechanisms do tend to slip into place this quickly and efficiently, a fact that renders The Stronger a most chilling little play.

And what of Miss Y? She remains an unknown quantity, a silence upon which we can project our prejudices and call them interpretations. She may well be every bit as inauthentic as her Chatty Cathy companion. To be seduced by her silence into an overestimation of her character is to hear the sound of a Strindbergian trap closing around us.

CULTURAL AMNESIA by Clive James

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DOUBLE LIVES, SECOND CHANCES: THE CINEMA OF KRZYSZTOF KIESLOWSKI by Annette Insdorf

Anyone who comes to Annette Insdorf's book in search of incisive, challenging criticism of Kieslowski's works should look elsewhere. Insdorf knew and loved Kieslowski (she tells us that she called him 'Wujek' [Polish for 'uncle'] and he called her 'Mala' ['little one']), and she comes solely to praise him, an attitude that tends toward the tiresome. Overall, though, her book is valuable and worthy of measured praise rather than dismissive burial. The book is very good on a strictly informational level, providing an excellent overview of Kieslowski's many early documentaries and obscure pre-Decalogue feature films, and it succeeds well in communicating the complete shape of Kieslowski's career. Indeed, it's really more an annotated filmography than a work of criticism. Insdorf is anything but critical. Her commentaries are, however, often illuminating, especially her discussion of the Three Colors trilogy--a discussion that informs and enriches our understanding of the films despite the fact that Insdorf, like the director himself, works overtime to make the trilogy (especially White) seem more humanistic and hopeful (and consistent) than it actually is. One example of the low level of critical intelligence Insdorf brings to bear on these movies: Even though she writes that the events of White take place over a period longer than one year, she's perfectly prepared to play along with Kieslowski's too-neat ending to Red and write that "the trilogy comes full circle within one year." In fact, as careful viewing makes clear, White, Blue and Red are chronologically inconsistent; Karol and Dominique could not possibly have been on a boat crossing the English Channel one year after the death of Julie's husband.

Insdorf also tells us that Kieslowski had a difficult time deciding on the proper endings for some of his films (The Double Life of Veronique and White, in particular), so perhaps the ambiguity of these endings is less a result of artistic mastery than of directorial uncertainty. Hardly a 'killing' criticism, this may just be another way of saying that Kieslowski's films are courageously authentic, true to the director's and screenwriter's visions even when those visions are uncertain or conflicted.

Since my opinion of this book is making me sound like something of a Kieslowski killjoy, I should probably state that I consider the Decalogue, the Three Colors trilogy and The Double Life of Veronique to be among the best films of the past fifty years. I wish Insdorf had written a book equal to them.

WILLIAM GASS, AMERICAN WRITER

On this July 3, as America tunes up for its annual day of self-congratulatory symphonies, allow me to pre-emptively piss on the parades by presenting a few select passages from the always aphoristic and absurdly alliterative essays of William H. Gass:

"Our culture...desires men who will be willing to be mowed down in anonymous rows if need be, used up in families, in farms and factories, thrown away on the streets of sprawling towns, who want to pass through existence so cleanly no trace of them will ever be found."--Habitations of the Word

"Consciousness is all the holiness we have."--Habitations of the Word

"Theology, it appears, is one-half fiction, one-half literary criticism."--Fiction and the Figures of Life

"...the chief point in life is to die of something and never for something if it can be helped."--Tests of Time

"Francis Bacon prosecuted his patron, Essex, for treason, and was found guilty himself of bribery and consequently expelled from court. Vianini was burned at the stake...At the hands of the Inquisition Giordano Bruno suffered the same painful fate. Nothing was ever done to Louisa May Alcott."--Tests of Time

"In every country, in every clime, regarding any rank or race, at any time and with little excuse, orthodoxy will act evilly toward its enemies. Survival is its single aim--that is, to rigidify thought, sterilize doubt, cauterize criticism, and mobilize the many to brutalize the few who dare to dream beyond the borders of their village, the walls of their room, the conventions of their community, the givens of some god, the mother-smother of custom, or the regimen of an outmoded morality--and even the Greatest Good itself could not fail to be bruised by such handling, and rapidly rot where the bruise had been."--Tests of Time

"One sign of a sound idea is its fearlessness."--Tests of Time

"Writers must reveal and accuse. It will happen naturally. No need to aim at some selected target. Writing well will put the writing in the bulls-eye."--Tests of Time

"When all is well, everyone is ill but will not know it."--Tests of Time

"Early on I learned that life was meaningless, since life was not a sign; that novels were meaningful because signs were the very materials of their composition. I learned that suffering served no purpose; that the good guys didn't win; that most explanations offered me to make the mess I was in less a mess were self-serving lies. Life wasn't clear, it was ambiguous; motives were many and mixed; values were complex, opposed, poisoned by hypocrisy, without any reasonable ground; most of passion's pageants were frauds, and human feelings had been faked for so long, no one knew what the genuine was; furthermore, many of the things I found most satisfactory were everywhere libelously characterized or their very existence was suppressed; and much of adult society, its institutions and its advertised dreams, were simply superstitions that served a small set of people well while keeping the remainder in miserable ignorance."--Finding A Form

"When I looked at man, I did not see a noble piece of work, a species whose every member was automatically of infinite worth and the pinnacle of Nature's efforts. Nor did history, as I read it, support such grandiose claims. Throughout human time, men had been murdering men with an ease that suggested they took a profound pleasure in it, and like the most voracious insect, the entire tribe was, even as I watched, even as I participated, eating its host like a parasite whose foresight did not exceed its greed. Hate, fear and hunger were the tribal heroes."--Finding A Form

"If life is hard, art is harder."--The World Within the Word

"If you enjoy the opinions you possess, if they give you a glow, be suspicious. They may be possessing you. An opinion should be treated like a guest who is likely to stay too late and drink all the whiskey."--A Temple of Texts

"Yeats grew old disgracefully. It is the only way to go."--A Temple of Texts

"It seems incredible, the ease with which we sink through books quite out of sight, pass clamorous pages into soundless dreams. That novels should be made of words, and merely words, is shocking, really. It's as though you had discovered that your wife were made of rubber..."--Fiction and the Figures of Life

"It is the principal function of popular culture--though hardly its avowed purpose--to keep men from understanding what is happening to them, for social unrest would surely follow, and who knows what outbursts of revenge and rage. War, work, poverty, disease, religion: these, in the past, have kept men's minds full, small, and careful. Religion gave men hope who otherwise could have none. Even a mechanical rabbit can make the greyhounds run."--Fiction and the Figures of Life

"Even Arnold Bennett noticed that we do not measure classics; they, rather, measure us. For most people it is precisely this that's painful; they do not wish to know their own nothingness--or their own potentialities either..."--Fiction and the Figures of Life

"Works of art confront us the way few people dare to: completely, openly, at once."--Fiction and the Figures of Life

"The artist is a lover, and he must woo his medium till she opens to him; until the richness in her rises to the surface like a blush."--Fiction and the Figures of Life

And to bring this Gassean litany to an end, one of my favorite quotes from Gass's great essayistic precursor, Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them."--from the essay "Circles"

Have an unsettled Fourth of July.