The Book I'm Looking For

Like most serious readers, I experience periods when I'm unable to read anything. Nothing seems satisfactory. I'll pick up a book I've loved for years and the words will lie lifeless on the page. Not Beckett, not Chekhov, not even Nabokov's greatest invention, the intoxicating voice of Humbert Humbert, can trick me deviously into enjoyment. I seem to have lost all my readerly mirth, and even the fire-fangled fronds of Stevens's summer palms refuse to dangle down. Days like these, my swirling thoughts settle on the idea that I'm simply asking too much of fiction, of mere words arranged by the merest mortals. Why should a perfectly tuned sentence be expected to come as powerfully as a climaxing lover? Why should an enveloping image not satisfy unless its light is so brilliant it overpowers the sun by which we read? The doubts come unbidden and circle like melancholy birds that in evening's dying light glide downward to the realization that asking too much is exactly and entirely the point.

We should always ask too much of art. Unless we ask too much, we are not asking enough. Unless we hold art to the highest possible standards, we will eventually find ourselves eating shit and calling it caviar.

All I ask of a novel is that it blow my mind and alter my perception of the world. That's all. And I do not consider that too much to ask of a novel by a living American writer. Franzen and Chabon and Jennifer Egan and Junot Diaz don't do it for me (although I like Chabon a lot, and respect Franzen), but Gravity's Rainbow and Blood Meridian and William Vollmann's The Atlas and Annie Proulx's Close Range and even Infinite Jest do exactly that. Yes, even Infinite Jest, about which I have major reservations and which coincidentally concerns itself with exactly these topics of enjoyment and anhedonia.

There's something else, too, that I'm looking for when I read: a creative originality that doesn't limit itself to content and form but reaches down to the level of the sentence and the word. Bullet my brain with a metaphor; sing me a sentence that sounds like a song. More than anything else, show me something I haven't read before. Not necessarily some surreal invention or outlandish transgression or excremental abjection--which have all been done to death, actually, and have been old hat since Bataille, older than Bataille's poop-smeared hat. All a writer really has to do is show me a shower head in a way that makes me feel I've never looked at a shower head before. Describe a human eye in a way that makes me see eyes differently for the rest of my life. That's what I want to read, a book that impresses me the way Ulysses impressed me on my second and third readings two decades ago, that impresses me like Proust, like Beethoven, like Picasso and Cezanne, like the ceiling of St. Ignazio di Loyola on a rainy day in Rome or the infinite inventions of Borges the Unblind, like the slow dying of the light at sunset over the Great Plains, like making love. That's the book I'm looking for, jonesing for. That's what I need to read.

The Riot of Spring

One hundred years ago this evening, on May 29, 1913, the premiere of Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) caused a now-legendary uproar in Paris. Although the extent to which it was a 'riot' has probably been at least a bit oversold, it's a centenary worth marking, preferably by listening to a good recording of the ballet.

An issue I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy--and I mean that from the bottom of my heart

Cliches are islands of excrement clogging the stream of consciousness. They are symptoms of lazy thought, thoughtless thought. Here are three of my least favorite contemporary American examples.

Issue. I have an issue with this usage. Sometime around the millennium, Americans ceased to have problems. No, we didn't stumble into some trouble-free post-scarcity paradise where everything and everybody's free, weed's legal, and the word 'bush' is used only to describe landscapes and pubes. No, not even close. Instead, the usage of the word 'issue' to mean 'problem' apparently migrated from the 'helping professions' (a euphemism that will cheesegrate the eardrums of anyone who's read Robert Stone's great short story "Helping") into the everyday discourse of the corporate world. This sort of thing is far from uncommon; discourse-to-discourse migration is one way languages grow and change, and it's not something that ordinarily annoys me. With this particular usage, however, something a bit more cynical and devious than typical linguistic mutation is going on. A problem demands a solution; an issue, though, is something to be 'worked through' (during many long years of therapy, for example), dissolving the very concept of 'solution' in a cloudy solution of  indefinite deferral. The usage is thus of great utility to the corporate world. In the latter part of the last decade, the big banks encountered serious 'issues' with credit default swaps, but since the collapse of the international economy did not constitute a 'problem,' no one really expected them to provide a solution. Having an 'issue' is a great way to avoid accountability and responsibility. It's a big problem.

I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. Of course you would. That's what worst enemies are for.

I really wish people would stop saying this. It's never true. (And if you think it is, then the person you consider your 'worst enemy' probably isn't.)


All nonmedical phrases containing the word 'heart.' The late Christopher Hitchens, in one of his finer drink-sodden moments, performed the thought experiment of replacing the word 'heart' with 'dick' in all the sentimental cliches that cluster like so many bloodclots around the circulatory organ. Consider: It's wonderful to be here in the dickland of America. Let's put our hands over our dicks and recite the pledge of allegiance. (Oddly enough, this probably was how oaths were taken in uber-patriarchal Old Testament times, a custom that leaves a trace in modern English in the similarity between the words 'testify' and 'testicle.') He wasn't the greatest boxer, but the kid had a lotta dick. I'm speaking straight from the dick. His speech was stirring and clearly dickfelt. We need to have a dick-to-dick conversation about that.


Let's declare a moratorium on all three of these cliches. And I mean that from the bottom of my dick.

George Carlin's "Join The Book Club"

This classic George Carlin routine is the funniest two minutes of comedy I've ever heard. Listening to it again just a few minutes ago, I almost laughed myself unconscious.

Literary Criticism and Theory: A Lightly Annotated List

Ranging from journalistic reviews to the turbocharged abstrusiosities of poststructuralism, here's a list of the critical works to which my mind returns again and again.

Walter Pater. Selected Writings of Walter Pater. (Edited by Harold Bloom.) Pater's The Renaissance is one of my secular scriptures, and this selection of the literary Pater (with a good intro by Bloom) is also worth re-reading.

D. H. Lawrence. Studies in Classic American Literature. Despite its occasional crankiness and flashes of stupidity, this deceptively thin, wildly suggestive, iconoclastic, iconogenic volume remains the single most essential book ever written about eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature. There is much to be found in these pages; Leslie Fiedler found his entire career here.

Edmund Wilson. Literary Essays and Reviews... (Library of America, 2 vols.) Collecting four decades of Wilson's critical books and reviews, including Axel's Castle, The Wound and the Bow and The Triple Thinkers, these two volumes are an amazing artifact of that long-ago, nearly mythical time when America actually had 'men of letters' (and women too).

Peter Brooks. Reading For The Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. One of the best works of literary criticism of the past 40 years, this is a compelling and surprisingly readable melange of Freud and narratology, with interesting and enlightening examinations of works as diverse as Eugene Sue's Les Mysteres de Paris and Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!

Walter A. Davis. Get The Guests: Psychoanalysis, Modern American Drama and the Audience. Anyone interested in modern theater should own this book. Contains extraordinary close readings of The Iceman Cometh, Death of a Salesman, A Streetcar Named Desire, Long Day's Journey Into Night, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Edward W. Said. Culture and Imperialism. Orientalism is probably still the Said book most often mentioned and cited, but Culture and Imperialism is the man's masterpiece. Contrapuntal readings of Mansfield Park, Kim and Aida are highpoints. No matter how much you think you know, this book will teach you something.

Harold Bloom. The Anxiety of Influence. Bloom's endlessly suggestive prose-poetic meditation on influence deserves its position as an instant classic. Bloom's theory of influence is one of the rare litcrit constructs that can be usefully applied to fields outside literature.

Harold Bloom. The Western Canon. Ignore Bloom's too-predictable diatribes against academic fashion and enjoy his incomparable essays on Shakespeare, Whitman, Dickinson, Freud, Proust, Kafka, et al. The appended book lists (which Bloom subsequently regretted) are filled with great suggestions for several lifetimes' reading.

Ross Posnock. Philip Roth's Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity. A great, essential work of American literary criticism that should be on the bookshelf of everyone who reads Roth. Indeed, it deserves a place on the shelves of anyone who reads.

George Steiner. Language and Silence. Contains some of the most ethically challenging and emotionally moving literary criticism I have ever read. "A Kind of Survivor" and "Postscript" are absolutely essential statements of post-Shoah consciousness.

William H. Gass. Fiction and the Figures of Life. All of Gass's essay collections are worth reading, worth pondering, worth arguing with. I prefer his essays to his fictions and find the best passages in his novel The Tunnel to be the most Gasseously essayistic. Every word of this first collection is meant to be thought about, every sentence written to be read aloud. This is literary criticism as avant-garde music.

Erich Auerbach. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. A stunningly intelligent, beautifully lucid, single-volume literary education, this is one of the greatest nonfiction books of the 20th century. Brilliant considerations of Homer, the New Testament, Rabelais, Flaubert, Woolf, etc., etc.

Cleanth Brooks. The Well-Wrought Urn. The paradigmatic New Critical text is still impressive after all these paradigm shifts. Brooks's criticism cuts to the capillaries of texts while employing a critical language that doesn't try to alienate the uninitiated. If only that last aspect were still paradigmatic...

Gore Vidal. United States: Essays, 1952-1992. Vidal's most barbed work of literary criticism was surely Myra Breckinridge, a killing parody of the French 'new novel' and nascent American postmodernism (l'ecole de Barthes-Barth), but the Greatest Gore is much wittier (and often funnier) in the literary essays collected here.

Rene Girard. Deceit, Desire and the Novel. Girard is a monomaniac, an Archilochean hedgehog (see Isaiah Berlin's essay "The Hedgehog and the Fox" if you don't get the reference), a monk of one idea. That's all true, and I might add that his work has a maddeningly monotonous quality reminiscent of the voices of people at pre-9/11 airports who used to approach you and ask if you've accepted Jesus as your personal savior. But none of this nullifies the value of his single idea. The "one big thing" Girard knows (mimetic desire, not God--God is something St. Girard only thinks he knows) is still a powerful critical concept, as this book repeatedly demonstrates. Once you understand mimetic desire, you'll read it everywhere. Which is exactly Rene Girard's problem...

Salman Rushdie. Imaginary Homelands. Rushdie is a very engaging critic, and this collection of pre-fatwa nonfiction will send you to Amazon looking for copies of some of the more obscure books he mentions. The essay on Terry Gilliam's film Brazil is simply brilliant.

Martin Amis. The War Against Cliche. We all know Martin Amis has an ego the size of the Eurasian landmass and that he thinks he's the son of Bellow, the reincarnation of Flaubert, and the Tolstoy of our time. If only his work lived up to his self-esteem...but that's an impossible standard. It says nothing good about the state of his fiction that his best works since Time's Arrow have been the memoir Experience and this highly readable, often perceptive collection of nonfiction. Given Amis's heady estimation of himself, it's probably necessary to remark that the 'war' of the title is the one fought by Joyce in Ulysses, subject of one of this book's better essays. Also hidden in this book is a remark about violence that just might save your life:

In the moments leading up to violence, the nonviolent enter a world drenched with unfamiliar revulsions. The violent know this. Essentially they are taking you to where they feel at home. You are leaving your place and going over to their place.

Something to keep in mind the next time you encounter a belligerent asshole.


Alberto Manguel. Into The Looking-Glass Wood. Like the Amis collection, this is a good bedside book, one to keep on the nightstand and dip into from time to time. Manguel's memoir of Borges and his consideration of Vargas Llosa are highpoints, but everything here is worth reading.

Italo Calvino. Why Read The Classics? A collection of Calvino's review essays that will send you back to the texts under discussion--the best thing criticism can do. Another good nightstand book.

Camille Paglia. Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. The kind of ambitiously synthetic work that most critics consider impossible today, Sexual Personae is perhaps most valuable for shining a spotlight on decadence, a concept Paglia absolutely owns. The chapters on Spenser, Sade, Coleridge, Balzac, Decadent Art and Emily Dickinson are especially impressive.

William H. Gass. A Temple of Texts. More flashes of brilliance from the fiery Gass. The title piece is a collection of micro-essays that will send you to Plato's Timaeus and the novellas of Katherine Anne Porter, among many other places. Reading Gass is the best way I know to tune your mind to the music of prose.

James Wood. The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief. I fundamentally disagree with James Wood and find his valorizations of Jane Austen and free indirect style unhelpfully ahistorical, but he's often a thoughtful and thought-provoking critic. His slim How Fiction Works is also (big surprise) a re-readable little book--even if it is mis-titled.

Milan Kundera. Testaments Betrayed. Kundera (whom Carlos Fuentes complimented with the title 'the other K') has written several short and quite similar nonfiction books in recent years. The Curtain is also quite good, but this is the best of them.

W. G. Sebald. On The Natural History of Destruction. Sebald lifts literary criticism to the level of art in this book that stands alongside his great fictions and shares many of their themes and techniques.

M. H. Abrams. Natural Supernaturalism. An Auerbachian embarrassment of riches, this is one of the monuments of the criticism of Romanticism. Perhaps the biggest surprise is how readable it all is--and how fresh it still seems. It's a book so good the gods rewarded its author with immortality: he turns 101 this year.

Jacques Derrida. Writing and Difference. I know, I know... Derrida is abstract, abstruse, impenetrable, obscurantist--and that's his good side. If there is, however, a single essential essay by Derrida that functions as a painless portal into the labyrinth of his thought, it's the piece that begins this collection, "Force and Signification." Read it, and you might be encouraged to read further. I'm rather surprised that anthologists and professors haven't yet caught onto this fact and persist in inflicting the impenetrable essay "Differance" upon their students as an introductory text.
 
Jacques Derrida. Sovereignties In Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan. A near-perfect match of critic and poet. Some of the pieces collected here might even be considered 'accessible'--a rarity in the Derridean oeuvre.

Carlos Fuentes. Myself With Others: Selected Essays. The star attraction here is Fuentes' essential essay on Don Quixote, "Cervantes, or The Critique of Reading."

Paul de Man. Blindness and Insight. The author was a Nazi collaborator and his whole life was a lie (for the extremely low lowdown, see David Lehman's Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man), but that doesn't change the fact that he was a microscopically close reader whose work encourages us to read more closely than we've ever read before.

Paul de Man. Allegories of Reading. In exemplary deconstructive readings of Rilke, Nietszche, Proust and Rousseau, de Man shows (repeatedly) how the rhetoric of a text (specifically, its figural language) can be at odds with its ostensible meaning. De Man himself is so diabolically effective a rhetorician that I can only disagree with him a few days after reading him.

J. Hillis Miller. Ariadne's Thread. Miller, the 'Yale critic' who wrote the best introduction to 'classic' deconstruction ("The Critic As Host" in Deconstruction and Criticism), here pretty much invents Deconstructive Narratology. Miller is by far the most readable deconstructionist ever to paper a pen.

Gregory Woods. A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition. An essential, exemplary work of critical literary history. Even extremely well-read readers will probably discover new writers in these pages.

Susan Sontag. Against Interpretation. Sontag's first and most important book (Under The Sign of Saturn is a close second). The title essay issues a challenge still worth taking up. Peter Brooks' Reading For The Plot explicitly positions itself in response to Sontag's call for an erotics of art.

Malcolm Bowie. Proust Among The Stars. Marvelous. A superlatively intelligent, well-written, highly readable, critical examination of the major themes of Proust's insanely sane Seine of a novel, with chapters on Self, Time, Art, Politics, Morality, Sex, and Death. What more could a Proustian desire?

O Bloody Shite...Ireland Does It Again

Official Ireland's flailing attempts to honor its writers always tend to ring hollow or fall flat. The bust of Joyce on Stephen's Green is a remarkable likeness of Mahatma Gandhi; the lameness and tameness of the Joyce statue off O'Connell Street quickly caused Dubliners to dub it "The Prick With the Stick"; the nearby and silly Anna Livia Plurabelle fountain is likewise called "The Floozie in the Jacuzzi"; the James Joyce Center is a place in search of a purpose, a shell without a snail; Joyce's tower at Sandycove is Dublin's stubbiest tourist trap; the Irish Writers Museum is a great argument for the irrelevance of writers' museums generally (a writer's true and only museum is his work; if no one wishes to visit his books, he deserves the oblivion that has already come); and the less said about the rather creepy statue of Oscar Wilde lounging lizard-like on a boulder in Merrion Square, the better.

The latest of these lead balloons, trundled out today, is a ten-euro commemorative coin from the Central Bank of Ireland showing on its commemorating face a poor likeness of Joyce in coiny silver ("Not a bloody bit like the man...") with the upper third of his head inexplicably sawed off and replaced with the opening lines of the "Proteus" episode:



We need not mention the kitschy Celtic harp on the reverse (a standard symbol on Irish coinage which Joyce would've mocked mercilessly), because the face of the coin alone is an embarrassing and multiple failure. It was immediately noticed that the quotation floating from the opened skull of this unfortunate victim of neurosurgical malpractice (who looks more the prim Irish schoolmaster than the rowdy, randy, Rabelaisian writer) contains in its fourth line a 'that' that's not to be found in either of the standard editions of Joyce's text. "...Signatures of all things that I am here to read..." reads the sicly coin, while both the Random House and Gabler versions agree that that 'that' should not be there. Oops.

Publisher's description of BLEEDING EDGE by Thomas Pynchon

A publisher's description of the new Thomas Pynchon novel, Bleeding Edge (to be released Sept. 17, 2013), has been published on Amazon.com. The page also informs us that the book is 496 pages long, so this will be a V.-sized Pynchon, something to look forward to.

Here's the publisher's description:

Thomas Pynchon brings us to New York in the early days of the internet

It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11th. Silicon Alley is a ghost town, Web 1.0 is having adolescent angst, Google has yet to IPO, Microsoft is still considered the Evil Empire. There may not be quite as much money around as there was at the height of the tech bubble, but there’s no shortage of swindlers looking to grab a piece of what’s left.

Maxine Tarnow is running a nice little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side, chasing down different kinds of small-scale con artists. She used to be legally certified but her license got pulled a while back, which has actually turned out to be a blessing because now she can follow her own code of ethics—carry a Beretta, do business with sleazebags, hack into people’s bank accounts—without having too much guilt about any of it. Otherwise, just your average working mom—two boys in elementary school, an off-and-on situation with her sort of semi-ex-husband Horst, life as normal as it ever gets in the neighborhood—till Maxine starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO, whereupon things begin rapidly to jam onto the subway and head downtown. She soon finds herself mixed up with a drug runner in an art deco motorboat, a professional nose obsessed with Hitler’s aftershave, a neoliberal enforcer with footwear issues, plus elements of the Russian mob and various bloggers, hackers, code monkeys, and entrepreneurs, some of whom begin to show up mysteriously dead. Foul play, of course.

With occasional excursions into the DeepWeb and out to Long Island, Thomas Pynchon, channeling his inner Jewish mother, brings us a historical romance of New York in the early days of the internet, not that distant in calendar time but galactically remote from where we’ve journeyed to since.

Will perpetrators be revealed, forget about brought to justice? Will Maxine have to take the handgun out of her purse? Will she and Horst get back together? Will Jerry Seinfeld make an unscheduled guest appearance? Will accounts secular and karmic be brought into balance?

Hey. Who wants to know?


UPDATE, 4/13/13: Penguin has just released the first page and cover art for Pynchon's Bleeding Edge. Read and see them at Gothamist.

Watch PHILIP ROTH: UNMASKED online

The PBS American Masters documentary Philip Roth: Unmasked can now be viewed online at the show's website. There are also some interesting outtakes available on the page. The documentary will probably be online for a limited time, so view it soon.

"Spring and Fall" by Gerard Manley Hopkins

I've always read Hopkins's "Spring and Fall" as a sneakily sadistic little poem, its beautiful music pulsating against the psychological cruelty it dramatizes.

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?

An adult and presumably male speaker addresses his question to a "young child," importantly female. To begin with a question is to signal the speaker's ignorance, the gulf of unknowing that separates him from the mind of Margaret. He does not know the cause of her grief, but even as he states the question that reveals his ignorance, he projects a childish sentimentality upon the consciousness that remains a blank to him.

Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Although still questioning, still uncertain, the speaker is now bold enough to force his own simile and metaphor upon the child he addresses. It is in his mind, not hers, that leaves are "like the things of man," a hackneyed Romantic cliche that should put readers immediately on guard. Our speaker is an impressive lyrical musician, but as a poet he is here considerably less impressive than his author.

Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

In the eighth line, our speaker becomes a poet worthy of his worldly creator: those wanwood worlds lying leafmeal rank among Hopkins's most impressive creations. But we should not allow their imagistic music to deafen us to the drama playing out in these lines. The depressive speaker here confesses the condition of his melancholic soul. His once fresh thoughts have been dried by life to wrinkly raisins, and his sole defense against the unadulterated mind of a child is to imaginatively adulterate that mind, projecting his own present melancholy into the child's future.

And yet you will weep and know why.

The italicized word punningly displays (in an admirably Shakespearean way) the violent force of the speaker's sadistic will. He insists, with all the force of Victorian patriarchy, that his imaginings will be the child's future. To say it in Jargonspeak: he will interpellate the child into his discourse of depression. Father-figure knows best. No alternative futures need apply.

Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.

The melancholic consciousness (that of the speaker and of his projected adult-child) is trapped in a mind of perpetual autumn where the names of seasons are so many Hamletian "words, words, words." The speaker's work of projection is now so complete (in his own mind) that he can adopt a tone of commiseration, of fellow-suffering. This may have been his motive all along. Misery does indeed love company, and it's more infectious than the plague.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

The deepest and most pathetic/bathetic truth of depression can be neither verbalized nor consciously known. It can only be expressed by the emotions and hypothesized to exist in the unconscious--'guessed' at in the ghostly self. Hopkins in these lines is a jaw-droppingly exact precursor of psychoanalysis.

It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Something as common (in all senses of the word) as self-pity lies at the core of a blighted consciousness that compulsively projects its blight even upon the greenest of worlds. In this final and mutedly triumphant psychological imposition, the speaker projects his blasted, self-pitying cinder-self upon the child. Her mind is still Romantically fresh, capable of being moved by nature; it is the adult speaker's mind, expressed in his projections, that has sealed itself into a self-perpetuating, self-pitying mantrap of grief in which nature, like his self, is a constant dying until cessation of breath brings its terminal literalization. His life can be described in a blasphemously liturgical formula: Death without end, amen. His only relief is the power-rush accompanying compulsive acts of cruelty such as the one dramatized here: the powerful projection of his living death into the mind of a child. The poem dramatizes a kind of mental molestation.

Shameless Self-Promotion: THE DEGAS MANUSCRIPT and BEAUTY AND TERROR by Brian A. Oard

My art historical mystery novel The Degas Manuscript and my book of art criticism Beauty and Terror: Essays on the Power of Painting are now both available as Kindle e-books at Amazon.com. Readers interested in good writing about great art should check them out.

As a little tease, here's the prologue and the beginning of chapter one of The Degas Manuscript:

PROLOGUE: THE CURRENT

     They threw her body into the river at the Quai Saint Bernard. The black water swallowed her with barely a splash, and she spun toward its depths like a stick of driftwood, trailing a veil of bubbles downward into darkness. When buoyancy bounced her to the surface again, ten feet from the quai, the only sound was the crackle of carriage wheels on gravel as the men drove away.

She floated face-up, sightless eyes open to the sky. Tiny waves slapped her body as she drifted toward the bridges at the end of the Ile St. Louis. Her blonde hair fanned out on the water like the tentacles of an exotic sea creature, some squid or octopus caught in the nets off Tahiti and shipped to Paris for display in the markets at Les Halles. One fair tentacle reached out and entangled a floating cigar end, a brown stub that still bore the toothmarks of the solitary stroller who had absent-mindedly flicked it off the Pont D’Austerlitz half an hour earlier during his journey from somewhere to somewhere in the city at night.

The river branched into channels and the current quickened. She was drawn under the bridges, past the island of silent mansions and toward the Ile de la Cité, where the low walls of the Morgue stood sentinel before the soaring buttresses of Notre Dame. Pulled by contending currents, her body was tossed for a time against the embankment below the Morgue, her arm and forehead striking the cold stone again and again as if obstinately demanding entry. Ultimately, the swifter current prevailed and she floated spinning like a pinwheel along the southern edge of the Cité. She spun past Notre Dame, its towers rising into blackness; past the large barracks that faced the cathedral and seemed equally silent and uninhabited; under the Pont St. Michel, stamped with the wreathed N’s of the ruling Bonapartes; past the Palais de Justice, the Préfecture de Police and the blood-stained prison of the Conciergerie; under the Pont Neuf, where an empty bottle tossed from the bridge splashed and bobbed near her head; past Henri IV sitting obliviously astride his bronze horse, and into the wider, calmer waters at the end of the island.

For a long time, her body bounced against the sides of barges and bathing platforms moored along the quais. And then she floated onward, under the bare metal frame of the Pont des Arts and along the endless, gaslight-splashed walls of the Louvre. The shattered, shimmering reflection of the palace walls in the river bathed her in the sparkle of a thousand yellow diamonds.

The current drew her body down, pulled her into the darkness, into an alien world. But the flitting fish seemed accustomed to her species, not frightened as they darted above and below her body and passed through the flowing folds of her gown. She floated with the fish past a massive bridge pier that stood like a lone, ruined tower in a land of inky blackness. She was dragged down until her shoulder hit the bottom, stirring an invisible cloud of gravel and mud. She bounced upward, began to rise, but her motion was checked by a jagged pile of refuse, a mound of old wood and fragments of stone thrown off the bridge two years before when a wagon overturned during Baron Haussmann’s rebuilding of the Louvre. Her arm caught on a board jutting out from the pile, and her body curled around this piece of wood, enclosing it in a lifeless embrace. Its sharp nails snagged her dress and held her motionless amidst the rushing water.

She hung suspended there for hours. The current eventually pulled her body horizontal and drew her arms out, but the dress remained caught on the nails. She seemed to ride the passing river as a falcon sails on waves of wind across the sky.

Slowly the river’s surface brightened into wavering day, and weak sunlight filtered down to find her lying there, unmoving in the ever-flowing water. The commotion of a passing boat pushed her body down and loosened the dress. But only when two paddlewheel steamboats splashed closely overhead, stirring the water to a froth, was she jarred completely free. She floated up to break the surface on a sunny Paris morning.

The current carried her past the Tuileries Palace and its adjoining garden, where top hatted promenaders trod on their shadows in the morning light. Near the Pont de la Concorde, she was caught in the wake of a boat ferrying tourists from the Louvre to the Universal Exposition. Her body was set spinning by its force, turning clockwise with arms and legs outspread. On the bridge, a well-dressed man leaned over the rail and rubbed a wind-blown cinder from his eye. The girl’s legs floated into the reflection of his top hat as if attempting to kick it off.

She drifted under the bridge and past the lush green trees of the Champs-Elysées. She proceeded slowly, rising and falling in the water. When she passed the garden of the Invalides and reached the Pont de l’Alma, she looked like a sleeper floating face-up on a watery bed, but a sleeper with eyes open and far past awakening. She would not be jarred into consciousness by the piercing screams of the Englishwoman who paused on her way to the Exposition, looked down into the smoky mirror of the Seine, and saw the eyes of a young girl staring back at her.

---

CHAPTER ONE

My Dear Manet,

Yes, I am telling this story to you, my dear fellow and sometime-friend. Now that you have been dead for three decades, my secrets should be safe with you. Listen closely. Did you enjoy that introductory lyrical effusion? I wrote it entirely for your benefit. You were always a great admirer of poetic morbidity, especially when it flowed from your friend Baudelaire. (I remember the day you took me to see Baudelaire in the nursing home; that sad afternoon will be part of this story.) But I can confess to you now that I never shared your poetic enthusiasms, and the process of writing those preceding three pages has caused my estimation of poets to sink even lower. It is easy, Edouard–too easy–to rhapsodize about the beautiful and the dead.

For mine is a story of beauty and death, of art and murder, and of you and me. It is the answer (long delayed; forgive me) to the question you asked outside the old Opera at the end of that summer masked ball back in 1867. Do you remember? Of course you don’t. Your memories are dust now, like the skull that contained them. You asked me who the killer was, and I lied to you. Now I have finally decided to tell you the truth, to answer your question honestly and in detail. My answer (and the reason I lied) can only be understood when the story has been told in its entirety, so I must write the whole thing, from the day I held her body in my arms to the day we both traveled out to Asnières and saw our futures floating in the river.

It’s a mystery story, then, like those of your beloved Edgar Poe. I still have the volume of Poe you gave me many years ago. It’s lying on my desk right now in the same condition as those unfortunate victims in the author’s ‘Rue Morgue’: spine broken, skin torn, insides spilling out. But I guess none of us is what we used to be. Berthe, Caillebotte, and even The Immortal Pissarro are all dead; Renoir is a cripple; Monet, your dark doppelganger, is almost as blind as I am; and as for Mary, the rich American–well, noon is like midnight for her, too. Why does age so often attack painters in the eyes? Are we all like Oedipus, cruelly punished for some unknown transgression? (You have made the Odyssean journey to the Underworld, Edouard, so answer me, answer me.) Simply to see these words as I write them, I’m forced to bend down until my eyes are almost resting on the surface of the paper (this hurts my back, but that’s another volume of stories), and if I could see well enough to catch my reflection in the studio mirror I would probably be mildly amused at the sad irony of the spectacle: the famous artist, the highly respected draftsman, rendered incapable of drawing anything, reduced to wasting good paper by covering it with words.

I try to resist the tar pit of self-pity, but sometimes it’s insufferably boring to be a blind and bitter old man. It’s a hellish kind of life when half the world hates you and the other half are damned fools.

To the story, then, the mystery. I’m sure you remember the day it begins, the day I visited your exhibition on the Place de l’Alma. It was the last week of May in 1867. Across the river from you on the Champ de Mars, Napoleon III’s Universal Exposition was drawing hordes (or should I say ‘herds’?) of tourists from around the world, but very few of those cattle wandered into your little building to see the show you mounted in protest when the officials refused to hang your paintings in the Exposition Palace. It was a pleasant, sunny day, but was it a Tuesday or Wednesday? Or Thursday? I can’t recall. I do know that before leaving my studio I would have paused to play Narcissus for a moment, checking my image in the mirror. What did I see? A young bourgeois in a black frock coat and top hat, a painter who dressed like the wealthy banker’s son he was. Yes, I’m beginning to see myself now. I was 33 that year and looked even younger, although in some undefinable way I already felt like an old man. Because my deep-set eyes gave me an expression people considered ‘melancholy’ and ‘Romantic,’ I was in the midst of a multi-year campaign to erase this Italian inheritance from my face. For fifteen or twenty minutes every morning I would stand before the mirror and direct at my reflection gazes that were ‘piercing,’ ‘ironic,’ even ‘furious,’ and which no soft-hearted soul would dare call ‘Romantic.’ My efforts were at best an incomplete success, and as I stood there that morning I surveyed through ‘sleepy’ eyes the fashionably loose cut of my coat, the immaculate white of my shirt collar, the carefully careless appearance of my cravat. I admired the way my face-framing fringe of black beard looked like a chin strap attached to my hat. And I was satisfied that the image in the mirror agreed substantially with the recent self-portrait hanging beside it on the wall....

To continue reading, purchase the Kindle e-book at Amazon.

A NEW LITERARY HISTORY OF AMERICA, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors

Neither a narrative history nor, strictly speaking, a reference book, this cinderblock-tall, dictionary-thick collection of essays (each averaging 4-5 pages) vies with The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry as the ultimate lit-geek occasional book. (An 'occasional book' is exactly what it looks like: a book to be dipped into occasionally, read randomly and desultorily, a few pages at a time.) Readers seeking a traditional narrative history of American literature should try Richard Ruland and Malcolm Bradbury's From Puritanism to Postmodernism, which ably covers most of the bases, outlining the overall shape of our country's literature and how that shape has changed over time. Marcus and Sollors take all of that as read and give us a massive, chronologically arranged compendium of essays by various writers and scholars on topics ranging from the poetry of Walt Whitman to Bell's telephone, from Lolita to Miles Davis, from Cortes' conquest of Mexico to hardboiled prose to hiphop to Hurricane Katrina. This format creates an unavoidable unevenness--some of the essays are merely competent--but the highpoints of this collection are very high indeed: novelist Richard Powers on Saint-Gaudens' Shaw monument; Mary Gaitskill on Norman Mailer; Ilan Stavans on the amazing journey of Cabeza de Vaca; a standout essay on the naming of America; Ishmael Reed's contentious take on Huckleberry Finn; T. J. Clark on Jackson Pollock; Sollors on The Sound and the Fury; an analysis of Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address; the art of Bob Dylan; the decline of Ernest Hemingway. Of course there are blind spots, especially in the final 200 pages (no examination of 1990s 'gargantuan postmodernism' (Infinite Jest, The Tunnel, Mason & Dixon, Underworld); not even an index listing for 1980s minimalism (not my favorite ism, by any means, but still fairly important); no discussion of the impact of academicization and MFA programs), but the plenitude of what's here successfully distracts us (most of the time) from what's missing. All in all, Marcus and Sollors have compiled an exceptionally good book, a wunderkammer of America and its literatures. Keep it on your desk, your nightstand, beside your toilet if you're into Joyce. This heavy book is never less than enlightening.

The Situation of Criticism at the Present Time

Jess Row's 2011 Boston Review article, "The Novel Is Not Dead," is an absolute must-read for readers and writers of contemporary fiction and anyone interested in the situation of literary criticism at the present time. In addition to arguing for the continuing vibrancy of novelistic fiction, Row compellingly criticizes the criticism of Virginia Woolf, indicts David Shields along similar lines, and begins and ends the article with a quote from Bakhtin that made my day.

The last lines of CONTINENTAL DRIFT by Russell Banks

After the end of his good, harsh 1985 novel Continental Drift, after all his narrative's downward spirals have wound themselves to nooses, after his protagonists have funnelled down their various American nightmares to the septic pits of death and living death, after all of this brutality and hopelessness and rage, a narrator we can only identify as the author steps to the page in full Melvillean voice to deliver an "Envoi" that ends in a bruised and bruising statement of the subversive potential of literary art:

Good cheer and mournfulness over lives other than our own, even wholly invented lives--no, especially wholly invented lives--deprive the world as it is of some of the greed it needs to continue to be itself. Sabotage and subversion, then, are this book's objectives. Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is.

Those words were written in the mid-1980s, a time almost as dishonest as our own, but they express an ambition--and more than that, a motivation for and justification of art--that seems virtually nonexistent in the literary fiction of our decade. The novel of today is no longer an anarchist's bomb; it's a career move, the next step up the ladder after that collection of short stories from your MFA days. Literary fiction has hardened into a rule-ridden genre as its authors have become academic promulgators of rules and professionalized players of the tenure game. Today we write not to change the world, but to change our addresses. The extent to which the mad, Ahabish ambition that flashes from Russell Banks's closing lines strikes us as foolhardy, naive or utopian is a good measure of how much we have lost along the twisting road from Yoknapatawpha County to Iowa City. But what we have lost is still out there, somewhere along the road, maybe floating like Finn down the middle of the Mississippi, that sopping cunt of the continent. Yes, the thing that will make our literature worthy of the heights of its past--those forbidding peaks named Faulkner and Melville, James and Wharton, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Dickinson and Frost--is still out there, waiting like Whitman at Robert Johnson's crossroads, crouching in the vastness of America... It's time for us to pick it up and run with it.

Skeuomorphism

A 'skeuomorph'--the most useful word I've learned this year--is a design element in a new product imitating an older, more familiar product that the new product makes obsolete. Skeuomorphism gives new technology an aura of familiarity. A few exemplary skeuomorphs: e-book readers digitally imitating the paper page and copying the size and shape of printed books; computer keyboards imitating the quickly obsolete typewriter; early automobiles resembling and called 'horseless carriages.' Whether intentional marketing devices or side effects of technological innovation, skeuomorphs are all around us. We live in a skeuomorphic world.

Nabokov on LOLITA; an Attempted Pynchon Documentary; and other scrapings from the tube of you

Here are two excerpts from an old Canadian TV program featuring Vladimir Nabokov and Lionel Trilling discussing Vlad the Inscriber's best-known work. Too bad the first clip begins in medias res, but it's interesting to see and hear this pair chatting up Lolita.

 

 

 

 

On a tangentially related note (Pynchon's parabolic trajectory probably intersected the hermetic Nabokovian circle during their mutual Cornell days), the entire documentary Thomas Pynchon: A Journey into the Mind of P can also be viewed on the Tube.

The doc is not quite as terrible as its title, which suggests a urinary rewriting of Wallace Stevens' "The Snow Man" ("One must have a mind of pee..."), but it didn't show me anything new.

 

 

 

And now for something completely different, here's an 18-second film of James Joyce, apparently photographed on two different days in 1920s Paris. Look for the child dressed as an Indian who runs behind him near the end of the second shot--a touch of Bunuelian irrationality.

 

 

 

 

And finally, here's a very short silent film of the elderly Claude Monet painting, talking, and chain-smoking in his garden at Giverny.

 



Philip Roth is Coming... to PBS

A life of low expectations makes the rare pleasant surprises that much more enjoyable, so I'm not expecting much from the upcoming PBS American Masters documentary on Philip Roth. (Premiering March 29, 2013; check local listings.) But even if it doesn't do more than scratch the Rothian surface, the prospect of any American TV network giving prime airtime to a writer of literary fiction is cause for celebration, fireworks, block parties, samba in the streets. (One bad sign: the PBS webpage describes Roth as "reclusive." He's not, he never has been, and he probably never will be. The fact that this documentary exists attests to that. Likewise the fact that he has been interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air. Recluses don't talk to Terry.)

NATIVE SON by Richard Wright

Native Son is that rare three-act novel in which the middle act is markedly superior to the other two. Richard Wright's attempt to synthesize Dreiser and Dostoyevsky in this tale of the crime and punishment of Bigger Thomas--1930s Chicago's very worst HVAC technician--errs in leaning too heavily toward Dreiserian naturalism at the expense of Dostoyevskian expressionism. Part one, "Fear," contains some good scenes (the death of Mary; the movie house masturbation, the 'playing white' scene), but too much of the section veers toward the ridiculous: the prose is uninspired and the storytelling heavy-handed; two important characters are cardboard caricatures of naive leftists; contrived coincidences (such as Bigger seeing Mary in a newsreel hours before meeting her) strain the reader's credulity; and the gruesome disposal of the body (surely intended as horrific) reads as a darkly comic parody of melodrama, a reading encouraged by Wright's portrayal of Mary as an endlessly annoying fashionably radical rich girl (most readers will want to mentally assist Bigger in his crematorial labors). The final part, "Fate," sacrifices drama on the altar of naturalism, devoting far too many pages to the static transcription of courtroom speeches; Max's extended address to the court is important and interesting, but its length stops the narrative cold. Only the central section, "Flight," saves the novel. Here an expertly handled Hitchcockian irony (the girl for whom they search is inside the furnace that warms them) produces a constant suspense equal to that of the later flight and pursuit; Bigger's murder of Bessie is as chilling as it needs to be (probably because Wright allows her more humanity than he gave Mary and thus solicits a greater sympathy from the reader); and even the prose in this section achieves a heretofore unprecedented lyricism, at one point launching into a single-paragraph unpunctuated expressionistic dream sequence that indicates what this novel might have been had Wright allowed himself to jettison the rhetoric of social realism and cut loose. Native Son could have been as good as Faulkner. Instead, it seems uncomfortably suspended between aestheticism and didacticism, as though Wright can't decide whether to be a poet or a preacher and is uncomfortable with both roles.

THE EMPEROR'S CHILDREN by Claire Messud

There is much to dislike in The Emperor's Children. Begin with the misguided concept: a realistic New York society novel, a highly conventional updating of Edith Wharton, that attempts to encompass the surreal, world-historical horror of the September 11 attacks. Only the greatest of novelists would have been able to pull this off, and Claire Messud is far from greatness. It is almost unnecessary to note that she fails. A tragic historical event that should have slammed into her text with enough deforming force to wrench it out of realism--at least temporarily--and make it something terribly new (literally, novel) is, despite the novelist's best efforts, almost trivialized into the climactic event of a book that too often reads like an extended episode of Sex and the City. (And to be clear, that last comparison is not a compliment.) Messud even goes so far as to exploit the September 11 attacks to create cheap dramatic irony and tawdry suspense, a pair of grave aesthetic offenses against taste and ethics. Granted, I'm not exactly Mr. Moral Fiction (he died on his donorcycle about 30 years ago, after a delightful little plagiarism scandal tarnished his rep), but I was disturbed by Messud's attempt to subsume the horror of the attacks into the form and techniques of traditional realistic fiction, as though the deaths of 3000 people can be considered simply more grist for the fictional mill. I'm not saying that the attacks should be considered off-limits to fiction. There are ways to write about unspeakable horror that do not tend to degrade or trivialize it: W. G. Sebald, Jorge Semprun, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, David Grossman and Primo Levi are a few writers who have found very different ways to do this. But these writers are Major League, and Messud doesn't even rate a try-out for the Toledo Mud Hens. Her prose is merely competent, her novel's form and tone are typical of its genre (the now highly conventionalized genre known as 'literary fiction') and some scenes descend perilously close to 'chick lit' cliche. The Emperor's Children is basically a middlebrow novel that wants desperately to be considered highbrow; it is a fiction written from and for what Curtis White called 'the middle mind.'

So why am I bothering to write about it?

Surprisingly (not least to me), despite my enormous reservations, I found the novel's characters complex enough and Messud's narrative skills engaging enough to keep me reading for all of her nearly 500 pages. In particular, the characterization of Frederick 'Bootie' Tubb is a marvelous portrait of a young man driven, for reasons that remain mysterious both to the reader and to his deluded self, to repeatedly sabotage his life. Whenever Bootie is on the cusp of any kind of success (as society defines the term), be it acceptance to Harvard, formal education, or his position as Murray Thwaite's secretary, he contrives to forge a mental monkey wrench and tosses it into his own works. At the novel's end, his self-destruction seems on the road to completion: he has taken advantage of the September 11 attacks to fake his death, escaped to Miami, and renamed himself after the central character of Musil's The Man Without Qualities. When last seen he is taking off into the American continent, chasing an unknown but likely dismal fate. He is easily Messud's most original and interesting creation; and he's also an archetypal American figure (and sees himself as such): the self-reliant, autodidactic loner grasping regeneration out of the bone-grinding violence of September 11. Messud's characterization of him constitutes her novel's most disturbing reflection on the psychopathology of American culture, a reflection her novel seems at pains to bury (like Frederick's symbolic body in the last section) beneath the predictable vapidity of the Thwaites' lives. Less Sarah Jessica Parker and more Robert Musil would have served this novel well.

The Triskaidekaphobic Flu

This week I'm suffering through a relatively 'mild' bout with the influenza of this Year 13. This bastard of a flu, this bitch of a grippe, is such a body-hammering Tyson of an illness that a 'mild' case can be summarized thus:

DAY ONE: Your bowels become a bowling alley in which liquid waste rolls up and down and up and down and up and down and...until the flu rams its fist down your throat and pulls your guts out through your mouth and your esophagus becomes a howitzer and you learn why it's called 'projectile' vomiting. An hour or two later, you find yourself on your knees before the toilet doing a passable imitation of the Ralph Steadman illustration on page 180 of the Vintage trade paperback edition (1989) of Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

DAY TWO: Whatever you ingest becomes another bowling ball rolling mercilessly down your large intestine to score a strike that sends diarrhea spraying out your anus like so many violently downed pins. You are dehydrated; your lips are chapped, the skin on your fingers begins to flake. You have so little energy that you can barely keep your head above the level of your shoulders while sitting in a chair. Walking is an exercise in zombie-imitation. Your tastebuds cease to function, and whatever you eat seems to consist of pressed paper and clay. Unsurprisingly, you have no appetite.

DAY THREE: Feeling much better, you wake to find that your energy and palate have been mostly restored overnight, but your bowling bowels still rumble with the distant artillery of internal farting. (And your muddled mind mixes metaphors (and apologizes alliteratively).) Diarrhea remains a problem, but seems to improve by evening. Dark brown poop soup no longer pours from your pucker whenever you sit on the face of the porcelain god.

One-liner: This disease is like Rabelais without the jokes. Get a fucking flu shot.

Bad Advice For Writers

In art there is one rule and one rule only: Whatever works, works. They could engrave those words on a wall somewhere in Iowa City and close down the Writers Workshop forever. Sometimes I suspect that creative writing programs, seminars, guidebooks, etc. all exist solely to promulgate rules that must be broken. Here are a couple of my least favorite "how to write" rules, a pair of hoary old cliches that are still frequently retailed to aspiring writers:

1. Write what you know. First of all, it's as unnecessary as instructing someone to "fart through your butthole." How can anyone possibly write what she doesn't know? (This is not to say that her knowledge might not be partial (like all knowledge) or incorrect (like the 'knowledge' of the Tea Party); in reality, what we know is always and only what we think we know--I think I know that.) Second, the rule implicitly (and, one hopes, fallaciously) assumes that student writers are unimaginative, ineducable and incapable of research, that their knowledge is a static quantity, an experiential dungheap from which they will fertilize the garden of prose. In fact, as everyone knows, "what you know" changes every day of your life (or should) and includes anything you might learn while researching a book about something you "don't know." Third, as MFA program dogma, this rule has produced a glut of books by writers intent upon parading what little they know, often limited to their own lives as middle-class American former English majors with MFAs in Creative Writing, the "here's a book about me and how I got from Podunk to Iowa City to Brooklyn" crowd. Fourth, to quote The Greatest of All Gores, "write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all." Vidal contrarily counsels writers to "[w]rite what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect..." This is fabulous advice. (Literally: it frees you to write fables, if that's the form that amuses your muse.) Vidal's is a relatively liberating injunction that resounds with the breaking of MFA-forged manacles. (The quotes are from the last paragraph of "Thomas Love Peacock: The Novel of Ideas," in Gore Vidal, United States: Essays 1952-1992.) Fifth, the rule privileges a kind of social realism that was already a battered Dreiserian fedora in the Thirties and has its roots in pre-Modernist naturalism, so it arguably constitutes a reactionary swerve away from the Modernist formal revolution (which includes postmodernism, magic realism, postcolonialism, Philip Roth's jism, and just about every other literary -ism since 1900). The writer of what he knows and only what he knows is an instantly forgettable Bartleby who would prefer not to engage with modernity.

2. Show, don't tell. The old distinction between showing and telling is multiply bogus. Historically, an argument from authority has invoked Flaubert and Henry James in favor of this rule, but Wayne Booth ably showed us (fifty years ago!) in The Rhetoric of Fiction that both masters violated the 'rule' whenever they felt a violation necessary. Both of them, that is, secretly subscribed to the 'whatever works, works' school. The show/tell distinction also collapses under its own feathery weight, because everything in a story is 'told' by a narrative voice; 'showing' is merely and obviously an illusion produced by competent telling. Another level of bogusity 'shows' itself when we remind ourselves that language neither shows nor tells; language signifies, a much more ambiguous and problematic process that may never escape from a purely linguistic pseudo-reality where the ghosts of Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty dance an eternal homoerotic tango. Showing and telling are both metaphors used to describe rhetorical strategies that, as I have 'shown,' tend to collapse into one another. Both concepts might further be considered manifestations of that very 'metaphysics of presence' that was the bete noir of Derrida and the white-collar deconstruction crew. Both concepts, that is, create an illusion of immediacy that conceals the Derridean differance, the indefinite deferral of meaning that defines language. In short, go ahead and tell, if you want to; telling is fine; telling is all we ever do--or think we do, within the illusion of metaphysical 'presence,' that oblivion of differance where bogusities unite, their lips locked and tongues intertwined in a final, fatal French kiss... And showing is OK too, as long as it works.

A New National Anthem

I hereby nominate James McMurtry's 2005 song "We Can't Make It Here" to be the unofficial American national anthem for the 21st century. It's time for some truth:

The Modernist Journals Project

Anyone interested in Modernism should head over to Brown University library's Modernist Journals Project homepage. They have scanned and made easily viewable the complete contents of a large number of artistic and cultural "little magazines" of the Modernist era, some of which are synonymous with English-language Modernism (Blast, The Little Review, Poetry, The Egoist, The Seven Arts, etc.). Also included are the complete contents of every issue of Scribners Magazine from 1910-1922, the W. E. B. Du Bois-edited NAACP magazine The Crisis from 1910-1922, the legendary radical leftist magazine The Masses from 1911, and much more. I've only scratched the surface of this collection, and it looks like an amazing time capsule of the era of High Modernism.

The 'Last End' of Gabriel Conroy: Some Thoughts on James Joyce, Romanticism, and the Ending of "The Dead"

In honor of today's Feast of the Epiphany, I've excavated a paper I wrote many years ago at university (or as Americans who haven't spent much time in Britain say, 'in college') on James Joyce's "The Dead", and I'm presenting here the one section of the paper that still interests me, a reading of the story's final scene. Students should feel free to plagiarize this post. Just don't get caught, because student plagiarism is taken much more seriously than the professorial kind, as the careers of Doris Kearns Goodwin, Moral John Gardner, et al. have shown.


In "The Dead"'s final section--which takes place almost entirely inside the protagonist's mind--Gabriel Conroy is forced to see himself as a typically paralyzed Dubliner, and his heart is opened to a kind of compassion--"a strange friendly pity"--for his wife, for his relatives, and perhaps for the entire world. There is however, as Peter Garrett has noted, a "balanced ambiguity"  (Twentieth Century Interpretations of Dubliners, 15) to the ending of the story. Having read it, one is tempted to ask the simplest and, perhaps, the most important question: "So what?" Yes, Gabriel is granted a beautiful and sublime vision of the unity of "all the living and the dead," and he is forced to see himself as a "ludicrous figure," but what can he, an established, middle-aged, bourgeois Dubliner, do with such a realization? Will he begin immediately on a journey to a figurative or literal 'west,' or will he wake the next morning having entirely forgotten his tremendous late-night revelation? There are several subversive elements in the story's final section--'subversive' in the sense that they undermine the surface meaning of the text and provide opportunities to deconstruct it--which suggest that Gabriel Conroy's life will not be significantly altered as a result of his vision--and that he may in fact even forget the epiphany. There is, in the story's final lines, a sense that Gabriel is accepting neither life nor Ireland; instead, he is surrendering to the living death of his Dublin existence.

The first textual clue that should cause us to suspect the impact of Gabriel's final vision is the fact that he has forgotten all of the other, smaller epiphanies of the evening. When he reflects upon the possible causes of his "riot of emotions" in the preceding scene with Gretta, Gabriel thinks, "From what had it proceeded? From his aunt's supper, from his own foolish speech, from the wine and dancing, the merrymaking when saying good-night in the hall, the pleasure of the walk along the river in the snow..." Gabriel remembers everything, it seems, except the most important events of the evening, the series of epiphanies triggered by Lily, Miss Ivors, and Gretta. These were the events which lead, like the steps in a geometric proof, to Gabriel's "riot of emotions," but he has already successfully forced them out of his consciousness. Joyce shows us here that Gabriel's modus operandi is simply to forget any situations which have the potential to puncture his inflated and (thus) fragile ego. Perhaps, Joyce implicitly suggests, he will forget this final one too.

Another textual detail undermining Gabriel's vision is the fact that it occurs while he is staring through a window. As we have seen earlier in the story, the windows of "The Dead" are places of escape from domestic obligations, not of the re-evaluating of those obligations. The fact that Gabriel turns to a window before embarking on his thought-journey across Ireland suggests that he is not facing Michael Furey's ghost but escaping from it. Gabriel's mind-trip takes him both away from the hotel room where Furey is very much 'alive' and psychologically threatening and to the imagined cemetery where Furey lies as cold and dead as Chuck Heston's hand. Gabriel's final revery is, despite the wonderfully lyrical language, as shallow and escapist as his earlier vision of walking alone through the snowy park.

Another, more general, deconstructive element is Gabriel's now-familiar unoriginality. Conroy, the professional critic, is granted this vision of unity, but--as in his earlier "distant music" vision of Gretta on the stairs--he is not creative enough to express it in his own words. Again, as in his earlier "souls" and "stars" revery about Gretta, Gabriel relies upon a host of borrowed words and images--borrowed, that is, from true artists--for the enunciation of his vision. Joyce scholars have detected traces of Homer, the New Testament, and even Yeats's Stories of Red Hanrahan in Joyce's closing paragraph. Indeed, the imagery itself is so cliched and kitschy--"the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried" with its "crooked crosses and headstones" sounds like a setting from a Gothic story by Poe or Lovecraft, Anne Rice or even Stephen King--that there are probably a nearly infinite number of possible sources. My addition to this list is Keats's late sonnet "Bright Star," which contains prominent images of "moving waters" and snowfall ("Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask / Of snow upon the mountains and the moors") and, very interestingly, ends with the couplet, "Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, / And so live ever--or else swoon to death." That last line should set off an associational alarm in the mind of anyone familiar with the final sentence of "The Dead." Gabriel's free use of stock Romantic and Gothic imagery suggests that at the end of the story he is still essentially unchanged. He remains a pretentious faux-Romantic with what L. J. Morrissey calls a limited artistic "vocabulary" ("Inner and Outer Perceptions in Joyce's "The Dead"," Studies in Short Fiction 25.1 (1988)).

Yet another interesting--and possibly even more subtly subversive--textual element is Joyce's sandwiching of Gabriel's final epiphany between two unattributed quotes from Gabriel's cousin, Mary Jane. Gabriel's phrase "snow was general all over Ireland," which he attributes to "the newspapers," is actually an almost exact quote of Mary Jane's statement earlier in the story, " '...I read this morning in the newspapers that the snow is general all over Ireland.' " (It is multiply telling that Gabriel's memory attributes the line directly to the newspaper and elides the female messenger who brought him the news.) At the end of Gabriel's vision, he again quotes Mary Jane with the jarringly repetitive phrase "...of their last end..." (During the earlier dinner table discussion of the monks at Mount Melleray, Mr. Browne asks why the monks sleep in their coffins, and Mary Jane replies that the coffin "is to remind them of their last end.") The importance of these quotes becomes clear when it is recalled that Mary Jane's only significant act in the story is the playing of what Gabriel calls "her academy piece," a long, virtuosic piano composition "full of runs and difficult passages" to which Gabriel and the other listeners only pretend to pay attention. Gabriel's eyes and mind wander during Mary Jane's tedious virtuoso performance, and four unidentified young men slip quietly out of the room to return only when the piece nears its end. Perhaps, by enclosing Gabriel's revery inside quotes from Mary Jane, Joyce is suggesting that Gabriel's final thoughts, with their flashy borrowed imagery and unprecedented lyricism, are the trills and runs of his own literary "academy piece," a pretentious self-indulgence which the reader should probably not take at face value. It seems true for "The Dead"--but not for all of Joyce's work--that, as Hugh Kenner says, the " 'poetic' passages mean that something is being evaded" (A Colder Eye 231).

The question of what exactly Gabriel is 'evading' in these last lines can perhaps be answered by a consideration of his final action in the story. Most commentators interpret the swooning soul and soft, whisper-like eloquence of the story's last sentence as a representation of Conroy joining his wife in sleep. While this final image anticipates Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, in both of which the same concluding image (but can we really call anything in the Wake 'conclusive'?) symbolizes a tenuous kind of domestic order amidst the chaos of modern life, here in "The Dead" it may represent (with apologies to John Cleese) something completely different. When Gabriel drifts off to sleep while experiencing a vision of the unity of living and dead, he is symbolically taking his place among those dead--the passionless, powerless, living, walking dead of dear dirty Dublin. One is reminded of Peter Garrett's remark that the people of Dubliners "appear as joined both in a kind of community and a kind of living death"(15). Gabriel's final act is his final and ultimate evasion. By accepting his position as a Dubliner, he successfully evades Miss Ivors' Romantic challenge to change his own life, to embark on a "journey westward." In fact Gabriel evades all the evening's Romantic challenges--even Michael Furey's--by accepting the "living death" of Dublin. He sees, and momentarily accepts, himself as a "ludicrous figure," merely another passionless, impotent Dubliner who can only surrender to what Joyce calls the "paralysis" of the city. In response to Michael Furey's passionate Romantic challenge, Gabriel falls safely asleep.

In "The Sisters," the first of the Dubliners stories, Joyce introduces a theme that unites the collection: the physical, psychological and institutional paralysis of Dublin. If Gabriel accepts anything in swooning to sleep, he seems to accept this inescapable paralysis. Why is escape an impossibility for Conroy while for another Dubliner, James Joyce, it was not only possible but necessary? To answer, let us consider the relationship between creator and creation, dancer and dance. We must remember Harry Levin's comment that Gabriel is the kind of person Joyce "might have become, had he remained in Ireland..." (The Portable James Joyce 18). Such a future would have been completely unacceptable to the young, quasi-Byronic Joyce. In this sense, Joyce's embrace of the echt-Romantic principle of flight enabled--indeed, compelled--him to escape Dublin, to flee to the continent, to embark upon a very Byronic-Shelleyan-Keatsian type of self-imposed artistic exile. Joyce's true Romanticism (a phrase that jars upon ears too accustomed to a polemical opposition between Romantics and Moderns) enabled him to escape; Gabriel Conroy's shallow, false Romanticism--a flight from reality rather than a response to it--is probably one reason why he will never escape that "center of paralysis" (Letters of James Joyce 2:134) that is Joyce's Dublin. Where Joyce/Dedalus flies, Conroy is grounded. At the end of Dubliners, as at the beginning, paralysis is as general as the snow.

THE BLEEDING EDGE by Thomas Pynchon

The first rumors of a new Thomas Pynchon novel, perhaps to be published later this year, have leaked out of Penguin Press. (I've heard that Fix-a-Flat is good for leaky penguins...) The only seemingly credible information we have at this point is the title, The Bleeding Edge. C'est tout, for now.

If this news pans out, 2013 is shaping into a good year for TP fans, as Paul Thomas Anderson also appears to be ready to film his adaptation of Inherent Vice this year.

UPDATE, 2/26: ...Here's the latest: An article in The Guardian reports that "Bleeding Edge, which will be published in America on 17 September this year, will be set in 2001 "in the lull between the collapse of the dotcom boom and the terrible events of September 11", said Pynchon's American publisher Penguin in its 2012 results announcement yesterday."

UPDATE 4/9: A publisher's description of the novel is now available.

Junot Diaz interviewed by Bill Moyers

Last weekend on PBS, Bill Moyers spent a very interesting hour in conversation with writer Junot Diaz. The entire interview can now be viewed online here. (There's also a transcript link on the same page below the video.) Diaz's take on contemporary America is fascinating and seems spot-on, as does his description of Moby Dick:

[It's] kind of a crazy, postmodern book. It's not like an 1800 novel. You know? You put another novel from the time period next to it. And those two books don't even seem alike. I mean, the dude interrupts the flow of his novel to have a play, to have characters talking like a play. He interrupts his novel to suddenly have a disquisition on whales, as told through the size and shapes of books...

This is the first time I've ever heard an academic (Diaz teaches at MIT) refer to Herman Melville as "the dude." It's refreshing.

Charles Durning on Acting and Trauma

There's some fascinating information about actor Charles Durning's pre-theatrical life in his New York Times obituary. I've always known he was an actor of admirable range and talent, but only from the Times obit did I learn that he was also a  traumatized survivor of some of the worst of WWII:

His combat experiences were harrowing. He was in the first wave of troops to land on Omaha Beach on D-Day and his unit’s lone survivor of a machine-gun ambush. In Belgium he was stabbed in hand-to-hand combat with a German soldier, whom he bludgeoned to death with a rock. Fighting in the Battle of the Bulge, he and the rest of his company were captured and forced to march through a pine forest at Malmedy, the scene of an infamous massacre in which the Germans opened fire on almost 90 prisoners. Mr. Durning was among the few to escape.

By the war’s end he had been awarded a Silver Star for valor and three Purple Hearts, having suffered gunshot and shrapnel wounds as well. He spent months in hospitals and was treated for psychological trauma.

Late in life, Durning spoke of one crucial wartime experience in an interview with Parade magazine. Quoting the Times obit again:

In the Parade interview, he recalled the hand-to-hand combat. “I was crossing a field somewhere in Belgium,” he said. “A German soldier ran toward me carrying a bayonet. He couldn’t have been more than 14 or 15. I didn’t see a soldier. I saw a boy. Even though he was coming at me, I couldn’t shoot.”

They grappled, he recounted later — he was stabbed seven or eight times — until finally he grasped a rock and made it a weapon. After killing the youth, he said, he held him in his arms and wept.

Mr. Durning said the memories never left him, even when performing, even when he became, however briefly, someone else.

“There are many secrets in us, in the depths of our souls, that we don’t want anyone to know about,” he told Parade. “There’s terror and repulsion in us, the terrible spot that we don’t talk about. That place that no one knows about — horrifying things we keep secret. A lot of that is released through acting.”