MFA vs. NYC vs. Reality

When I heard about the new book on contemporary American literature titled MFA vs. NYC, I thought, "Are those my only choices?" Surely our collective literary imagination has not so atrophied that we can straightfacedly envision the literature of this vast and heterogeneous nation as existing solely within a few blocks of Brooklyn and on the scattered islands of the Academic Archipelago (a wintry prison that still awaits its satirical Solzhenitsyn, Richard Russo's Straight Man being not nearly good enough). The tunnel vision encapsulated in the title is a parodic publishing company executive's Manhattan-centric view of America, that New York provincialism that thinks the country ends a few miles west of the Hudson and that LA and San Francisco are two islands sprouting Hawaii-like from the far Pacific. New York centrism and academic careerism may be realities of corporate publishing and literary writing, respectively--most major publishers are, after all, based in New York, and even the rock stars of literary fiction rarely sell enough books to support themselves without an academic dayjob (one of the most shocking details in D. T. Max's too-summary biography of David Foster Wallace is the statistic that in its first ten years of publication Infinite Jest sold a mere 150,000 copies; respectable numbers for experimental fiction, but Stephen King (a writer Wallace read and apparently liked) has probably had days on which he has sold that many books between breakfast and lunch). But these two phenomena--traditional publishing and literary careerism--are an infinitesimal part of the contemporary American story. If one reads only novels written by Iowa City graduates now resident in Brooklyn, one might acquire a vision of America much like the one adumbrated in the HBO series Girls, and one would have little notion that for much of the United States, Game of Thrones, The Wire and Breaking Bad are considerably closer to the 'pointy end' of things--closer, that is, to the America most of its citizens know, a place of money woes, death fear, sudden violence, delusional paranoia, and the everyday surrealism of living peacefully in a time of horrendous war. The limited literature of MFA and NYC (maybe we should call it the academic-corporate complex) has definitively captured none of these realities; indeed, many of its most highly regarded products seem strangely stuck in the last century.


To take a more or less random example, Nicole Krauss's Great House should have been a brilliantly cosmopolitan, mindblowing masterpiece, an American cousin of Roberto Bolano's extraordinary 2666 and W. G. Sebald's even more impressive Austerlitz. At least that's what the cover blurbs would lead one to expect. The reviewer from Elle tells us that this novel "reminds us what it means to be alive." And lest we dismiss that as typical reviewer's hyperbole, the book opens with seven pages of blurbs. That's right. Seven almost-solid pages of praise. Now, I know blurbing has gotten completely out of hand in recent years, but this is ridiculous. A law of diminishing returns kicks in when before I even reach a title page I've already turned through seven pages of effusions from everyone from Sam Tanenhaus to Jewcy.com(?!). Methinks, I think, the publisher doth protest too much. Krauss's Great House is not, alas, a great novel, but it's not exactly a bad one either. Rather, it's a typically competent, highly readable, quickly forgettable product of the academic-corporate publishing complex. While I found some things to admire in the book and thought it interesting enough to finish, it left me with the sense that I'd just consumed a sort of Duncan Hines literary confection: one cup DeLillo, one cup Sebald, two tablespoons David Grossman, a pinch of Bolano, add high seriousness and stir. It's an A-student's novel, designed to satisfy her relatively small circle of readers the same way successful students' papers are tailored to the tastes of their professors. (I too was an A-student, so I know the signs.) Seven pages of blurbs suggest that this limited goal was achieved admirably, but will the author ever leave the MFA program in her mind?


The main ingredient in Krauss's stew of 1990s influences is the writer who seems to have replaced Raymond Carver as the paradigmatic literary hero of the MFA-NYC school, Don DeLillo. He seems the perfect hero for a young writer: prolific, uncompromising, artistically successful, caustically critical, admirably intelligent, and to put the cherry atop the sundae, he was David Foster Wallace's penpal and father-confessor. But unfortunately there is another, less positive side to his influence. (Full disclosure: I've loved some of DeLillo's works (Running Dog, Libra), liked others (parts of Underworld, Mao II), disliked some (Americana, other parts of Underworld) and absolutely hated the one that most people seem to love (White Noise), so my attitude toward DeLillo, while mixed, is not necessarily negative.) The most serious problem with DeLillo's MFA apotheosis is that he is, relatively speaking, a rather limited writer. It's not that he repeats themes and ideas from novel to novel--of course he does; all writers do that--nor even that most of his characters, from Americana through Underworld and beyond, seem to speak with the same voice (I will never understand critics who praise DeLillo's ear for American speech; the dude's ear is stamped out of tin). The biggest problem is that of the major living older American novelists--DeLillo, Roth, Morrison, McCarthy, Pynchon, Gass, Matthiessen--DeLillo seems to have been chosen for canonization precisely because he presents the least challenge to academic assimilation. The academy can swallow him because his works bear the fewest thorns. He has neither Roth's political incorrectness nor Morrison's fiercely dark vision of America, neither McCarthy's repulsive violence nor Pynchon's prurient pornography, neither Gass's juvenile limericks nor Matthiessen's CIA past. We might almost say DeLillo won the nomination because he's the Mitt Romney of American literature, the debater with the fewest demerits. Oh, he's a fierce critic of capitalism and all that, but his critiques are sugared with a heavy enough dose of irony to make the medicine taste sweet. Having elevated such a writer to paradigmatic status, we should not be surprised when novelists influenced by him create a limited and relatively safe literature, a literature more Franzen and Lethem than Morrison and Wallace.


But wait, there's more bad news from the aesthetic asphyxiation front. In addition to setting up Don DeLillo like a cardboard calf for younger writers to worship, our universities also encourage artists to strangle themselves upon the knotty cords of fallacious 'theories.' The academically generated idea that seems to have hogtied David Foster Wallace and certainly ruined the ending of Ian McEwan's Atonement is the ludicrous notion that because something called 'Modernism' has been superseded by something called 'Postmodernism,' works that could be described as 'modernist' are no longer possible. The ideologues of pomo would be as gods (or popes, rather) and make all artists the prisoners of their hypostases. The idea is multiply fallacious. First, as stated, it asserts that there was something called Modernism which existed the way an oak tree exists, in the space between its 19th-century roots and 20th-century branches. This idea becomes exceedingly problematic when one notes the range of works that shelter under the Modernist canopy, from Howard's End to Finnegans Wake, from "The Jolly Corner" to "Hills Like White Elephants," from Proust's Recherche to Woolf's Orlando, from Yeats to Dada... If Modernism be a single tree, where is its blossom, where its bole? Second, it asserts that something called Postmodernism can be distinguished from Modernism in the way cardinals are distinguished from sparrows. In fact, each and every characteristic of Postmodernism can be found in the canonical works of Modernism. (Try to think of one that isn't; if you know the Modernists well enough, you won't be able to. Even post-Shoah consciousness is arguably prefigured in Kafka.) Mo is always already Pomo. Third, the notion of Postmodernism succeeding Modernism is based upon an organic metaphor that silently likens literary history to a growing plant or animal that passes through various stages of life, leaving earlier stages behind like fallen flowers or shed skin. This is probably the fundamental fallacy of literary (and art) history. Artistic processes simply do not adhere to the implacable chronologies of organic time. Literature 'lives' differently. The literature of the past obviously determines that of the present (even writers like Sebald who seem sui generis usually only seem so), but the present is the inevitably distorting lens through which we view the literature of the past and take from it the works that continue to serve (as Sebald took Stifter and Keller and set them in the literary pasts of readers who might never have otherwise known them). The literary present determines the past as much as the past determines the present. To assert that we must all write postmodern novels because we live in postmodern times is to misunderstand the porous nature of literary time and to make oneself the monk of a new religion, to subject oneself (like all early adherents) to the overwhelming power of one's own projections. But writers, and artists generally, need feel no imperative to adhere to any rule except the Polonian: to thine own self be true. If so-called Modernism is the literature that most answers the call of your consciousness, then write Moddy novels and let the theoretical Gradgrinds go grind themselves.


Modernism is not some superseded doctrine like the phlogiston theory of fire. The concerns of Modernist literature are at least as valid today as they were a century ago: alienation, anxiety, the technologization of life, the mediation of knowledge, consciousness of the absurdity and meaninglessness of life, the precariousness of existence, the absence of transcendence and the insufficiency of utopianism, the death of gods and the birth of the material world, the redemption of this falling world in the act of crazy love that turns it into art. None of these ideas is in any way outdated. Add the triumph of corporatism, the pauperization of the working class and the proletarianization of the bourgeoisie, and you have a set of themes for an ideal 21st-century fiction. Indeed, the idea that Modernist fiction is outdated might be a defense mechanism--just as "Postmodernism" is a defense--against the terrible relevance of the Modern. It's an idea that protects writers from the overwhelming power of Modernist art, from the anxiety-inducing achievements of a period that produced Picasso, Proust, Pound, Paterson, Eliot, Joyce, Yeats, Woolf, Conrad, James, Colette, Gide, Bulgakov, Kafka, Miller, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Welles, Dali, Man Ray, Mandelshtam, Duchamp, Matisse, Artaud, Schulz, Mann, Rhys, Nin, Faulkner, Anderson, Stein, etc., etc., etc. ... As I type this list, I sadly laugh at the thought that today's MFA programs have set up Don DeLillo as their paradigmatic novelist. Such a polestar assures at least a generation of superhip prose technicians, bloodless tellers of bloodless tales where the only thing that really flows is irony.


Art is the only form of redemption I trust. So let me close by dilating upon two of those Modernist themes implied above: the ideas that art is the only redemption we can trust and that sex is as much of transcendence as we can know. It is perhaps not overly Romantic to consider these ideas at least potentially revolutionary in our increasingly banal and frightened world. Ignoring religion as unnecessary (at best), these ideas ground transcendence in material reality. This is to suggest that the proper path of art is not that of unlimited ironic play but the messier, muddier, dirtier road where writers must blacken their hands with the inkdark realities of our world. Postmodernism, from Derrida to DeLillo (and especially in the work of their followers), seems increasingly an ironic Game of Thrones where artists and thinkers putter and plot in King's Landing while cowering from the assaults of the real (Derrida as King Joffrey, Stanley Fish as Lord Baelish, Fredric Jameson as Varys the court eunuch). The truly subversive act, today, is to leap those pasteboard walls and investigate the realities of material existence. The needful act is to hurl one's imagination against the terror of nothingness, the wonder of being, the redemptions of art, the transcendence through eros. Enough of theory, let us live.

Here's the good word: Blogrant

Blogrant \blog-rant\ n [blog personal internet journal + rant to ramble on at ridiculous length] (ca.2008) : an extended and highly polemical essay posted on an internet blog site - usu. considered pejorative.


I've been responsible for a few of these, and another is coming in a few minutes.

"The Pedersen Kid" by William H. Gass

Like anyone else who constantly reads and has read hundreds or thousands of books (I never began to count them, but surely I've read thousands by now: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, plays, art...), I sometimes find myself in a reverse 'Buridan's ass' dilemma resulting from my disposition toward hypercriticism. I begin reading, say, a novel by William Gass, but the author's pathological hatred of narrative turns my reading into an arduous drive up a rocky mountain, so I jerk on the parking break and turn to a genre novel--Ursula Le Guin or Stephen King, let's say--only to be repulsed by the stylistic anemia of generic prose. I usually end by reading neither book and scrawling a few lines in my notebook about the null place where constant criticism has stalled me, all the while still intensely desiring that mindblowing experience of fiction, that nearly ideal novel that marries prose of Gass-level beauty and intelligence to the ineluctable structural logic of the best genre fiction.


Why has this become an either/or in our literary world? Why can't the plot/prose duality be a both-and? Why can't we have both witty, beautiful, lyrical prose and a cracking good story? Why can't a literary novel also be a page-turner, and vice-versa? The combination of artful prose and tight plotting (even melodrama) is certainly not a new idea. Dickens did it, and Nabokov, Faulkner too, and Fitzgerald. The 'new' and bad idea is the notion that these two things mustn't go together, that a tightly-plotted, swiftly-paced work must be written in stripped-down sentences (or Ellroyan fragments) while lyricism is expected and permitted only in 'serious' novels written by people who live in Brooklyn and/or teach 'creative writing' (a phrase that should be redundant, like 'leggy pants' or 'well-hung pornstar'). Writers today need to break down the imaginary wall between plotting and lyricism and rediscover the old synthesis, not as nostalgia but as rejuvenation. This seems urgently necessary today, as genre fiction hardens into pared-down repetitions of structural formulae and 'literary' fiction, that ostensible game reserve for stylists, is often blandly written, with little or no attention to the music of words. Too much of our 'art prose' is being written silently, whereas prose should always sing.


That last sentence brings me by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to William Gass and environs. Call him Bulbous Bill, Big Billy Boy, the Alliterative BHG (his rap name), just don't call him a plotter of plots. He loves sentences, hates plots. Plots make him plotz. But this wasn't always so. Witness his first published fiction, 1958's "The Pedersen Kid" (collected ten years later in his essential book of short fiction, In The Heart of the Heart of the Country). This 80-page story is one frozen hell of a debut, an instant American classic. It's a brilliant, gorgeously written exploration of the homicidal hatred that festers inside families, and it boasts an ending even more "zero at the bone" than its wintry setting. And it is also a 'story' in the traditional sense of the word, a deliberately (even elegantly) plotted work of narrative fiction. This story and parts of Omensetter's Luck mark the young Gass as a direct descendant of William Faulkner and suggest that he might have become a more Cormac McCarthyesque kind of novelist had he not fallen under the baleful influence of the stony Stein sisters, Gertrude and Wittgen, and metamorphosed into the postmodern wordplayer who's still playing even now (and beautifully) as ninety nears. If Gass hadn't made a 'linguistic turn' down the tunnel to Academic Ghettoland--and if he hadn't grown to despise narrative with the same superflux of spite with which Ruskin roared against the Renaissance or divines denounce the devil--he might have become, well, John Hawkes... But we already had one of him, and he did the job well enough for two, so Gass went digging elsewhere and turned up what is surely the strangest and most unexpected oeuvre of his literary generation.


But in this post I'm supposed to be opposing Gass, not burying him with blurbs. It's time to go contra on Gass's ass. Contra Gass (sounds like a 1980s CIA-owned Central American petroleum company, n'est-ce pas?), yes, contra Gass (who, I suspect, was attempting to elevate a personal weakness (the inability to plot at novelistic length) into a prescriptive law), yes, yes, contra Gass, narrative, that old inextricable intertangling of story and plot, and character, those bugbears of psychological complexity and realistically multiple motivation, should be valued at least as highly as the linguistic fabric of a work. When either side of this supposed duality is overly privileged, the novel will either freeze in a frost of 'white writing' or fizzle out in wordy displays of narcissistic fireworks. Instead of seesawing overcompensations, we require Hegelian synthesis and Aristotelian balance. The errant Clement Greenbergism that prescribes a medium's material as its only valid message (an aesthetic ideology for which Finnegans Wake and The Tunnel might stand as the defining Pollocks and De Koonings) is already the dustbreath of ghosts and deserves to be blown away by books that are elegant in both prose and plot. The works of Annie Proulx, Cormac McCarthy and Michael Chabon are fine examples of such syntheses in the American grain. We need more books and writers (and readers) like them.

A Length of Links

If you're feeling like Don DeLillo's Nicholas Branch and would like to lose yourself in the vast compendium that DeLillo, in Libra, called "the Joycean Book of America," the entire 26 volumes of the Warren Commission hearings and exhibits on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy can be found online here. But beware: these volumes are a paranoid's paradise.


Voices and Visions, the very good 1980's PBS documentary series on American poetry, can be viewed online here. Click on the poet's name and then the 'VoD' link on the next page to watch the entire episode.


That unfortunate 16th-century traveler Cabeza de Vaca might, at a stretch, be understood as the true and unacknowledged father of America's 'Southern literature' (which, as Garcia Marquez has admirably observed, is really 'northern' literature, the literature of the northern Caribbean basin). The Journey of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, one of the earliest extant accounts of travel in the area now known as the American South can be read online here.


Another of American literature's disavowed founding texts, The New English Canaan, by that long-notorious anti-Puritan Thomas Morton of Merrymount--he of the Hawthorney May-pole and many merry mountings--can be read online here.


Arthur Golding's classic 16th-century English translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, the translation Shakespeare would've known, can be read online here. I have long contended that Titus Andronicus can be best understood as a Bloomian revision of Ovid's great tale of Tereus, Procne and Philomela.


Herman Melville's letters to Nathaniel Hawthorne can be read online here.


Finally, here's a fascinating video of British SF/Fantasy writer China Mieville in leftist public intellectual mode. He's discussing the nexus of Halloween and Marxist theory, and the whole thing is more interesting than that dread word 'theory' makes it sound:

The Golden Rule of Storytelling (as exemplified by Breaking Bad)

Here is the only necessary law of successful narrative fiction, the Golden Rule of Storytelling: The only law is the law of unintended consequences. This is how good stories proceed: from the unexpected through the unforeseen to the utterly unpredictable. Good narratives move through a series of major actions and the ramifying unintended consequences of those actions. It's the unexpectedness of the consequences that sustains a reader's interest, keeps readers reading and wondering what the hell will happen next. A story in which actions have only their expected consequences is a dull, unimaginative thing.

I could exemplify this rule with any good narrative from Sophocles' Oedipus Rex to Chabon's Wonder Boys, but because I'm of the opinion that the most cogent criticism of contemporary American literary fiction is the inarguable fact that no American novel of the past 13 years has captured the insanity of contemporary life in this country as effectively as two cable series, Breaking Bad and The Wire, I'm going to make my argument with reference to the tale of Walter Hartwell White. The overall five-season arc of Breaking Bad can perhaps best be described as a study in increasingly severe unintended consequences. White's initial decision to cook meth has the almost immediate consequence of forcing him to turn his RV into an improvised mobile gas chamber for the defensive killing of two drug dealers. (This detail from the pilot dovetails perfectly with Walter's final incarnation, five seasons later, as an inadvertent fundraiser for neo-Nazis. His first Nazified killing foreshadows the man he will become.) This act has the unintended consequence of failing to kill Krazy 8, which leads to him being treated like an Abu Ghraib prisoner in Jesse's basement and plotting to kill Walter with a pottery shard. His theft of the shard has the consequence of convincing Walter, who had decided to free Krazy 8, to instead murder him, slowly and brutally. And so the series continues, through unintended consequences large and small, the most apocalyptic of these being the Wayfarer 515 disaster at the end of season two. This was the ultimate unintended consequence of Walter's attempt to rouse Jesse, which accidentally knocked Jane onto her back, a position in which she choked to death, a death which impaired her air traffic controller father (memorably played by John de Lancie, a character actor almost as ubiquitous as Bryan Cranston) and caused the disastrous midair collision that was the Breaking Bad world's September 11. Only in the series' very last episode, dedicated to fan-pleasing and loose-end tying, do the characters' actions have always and only the predictable consequences. This was of course a structural exigency--unintended consequences would have kept in motion a narrative machine the finale was required to shut down--but it produced a final hour that (for me, anyway) swerved away from the unpredictable spirit of the series and left me feeling rather unsatisfied.

A Thought on Sade, after reading Justine and Philosophy in the Bedroom

Like many thinkers who mistakenly think themselves 'radical,' the Marquis de Sade possesses a worldview stalled in the first moment of a deconstructive dialectic. He is stuck in the rut of moral inversion, revaluing evil as good and then moving on to revalue evil as good in another anecdote. This is his only trick, and like a mentally-challenged magician he performs it again and again and again... Sade simply inverts the traditional good/evil moral binary and then prematurely arrests the dialectic at this point, failing to appreciate the instability of the inversion and further failing to conclude that both the binary and its inversion depend upon and perpetuate an ideology that they serve to conceal, patriarchy. (In this way, Sade is very much like a fatuous academic feminist trapped in an intellectually moronic "women good, men bad" worldview. Lest you think this is a caricature, I can assure you that I have known more than one academic feminist who actually thinks this way.) Sade's texts can be easily deconstructed, but they fail to deconstruct themselves (in the way, for a contrasting example, that Paul de Man argued Rousseau's texts deconstruct themselves, obviating the need for Derrida). The Undivine Marquis's thought, in short, is facile and immature, his prose is mediocre, his artistry deficient. Finally, I can read him only as a silly satirist with a nastily misogynistic streak.

On Foreign Fiction and Ours

American literary journalism (to the extent that such a beast still exists in our decidedly post-Edmund-Wilsonian America) continues to follow its bizarre ungraven commandment about non-English language fiction: Thou Shalt Admire Only One Foreign Writer at a Time. In recent years this single slot in our national literary consciousness has been filled by W. G. Sebald, then Roberto Bolano, then Javier Marias, then a quartet of Hungarians who slid past faster than bad goulash through a colon (Marai, Esterhazy, Nadas, Krasznahorkai--I ask admirers of these four apocalyptic horsemen (estimable writers all) to pardon my excremental simile), and now the overrated critic James Wood is easing Norway's Karl Ove Knausgaard into the slot. (I haven't read him yet, but his stuff looks potentially interesting, and I've already mis-Englished his funny name to "Charlie Oily Noseguard.") So despite the fact that our intubated, respirator-attached, heart monitor-beeping literary establishment only notices one etranger at a time, this phenomenon still evinces a hunger for foreign fiction. The outlanders give us something that our domestic product fails to provide.

In the case of Sebald, the powerful attraction many American readers and writers feel toward his fiction may be directly comparable to the attraction British writers of a century ago felt for the nineteenth-century Russian novel. Against the comforting, overstuffed palisade of our safe, middle-class literature, these foreign works hurl existential cannonballs. As Tolstoy and Dostoevsky did when read by the Bloomsburyites against the background of Trollope and Bennett, Sebald and Bolano insist upon the importance of the "big questions" in an age when our fiction has become narrow and domesticated. Foreign writers somehow haven't learned to fear the huge themes that invigorated the best American literature of the 19th and 20th centuries: the fundamental matters of existence and its opposite, meaning and meaninglessness, good and/as evil, the absence of the supernatural, the presence of death--themes that can perhaps be encompassed in a single, packed phrase: the terror of nothingness and the wonder of being. In a word (or two), existential anxiety is the quantity missing from our academicized fiction. While American literary fiction focuses on issues and identities (the family, feminism, the environment, minority rights, racism, identity politics), foreign writers such as Sebald, David Grossman, Peter Nadas, Laszlo Krasznahorkai insist upon that Melvillean "little lower layer" that obstinately refuses to be dissolved in the ironic acids of so-called postmodernism. (That last word fires off an extended parenthetical digression: Postmodernism is less 'post' than 'posthaste;' at its most dogmatic, it's a frenzied, hysterical flight from the concerns of Modernism that becomes, in our ivy-covered halls of mirrors, a monstrous parody of Modernist narcissism. Who among writers, after all, was or is more tormentedly self-imprisoned than David Foster Wallace? In an amusing but too-influential essay, he nicknamed Updike, Roth and Mailer--three phallic pillars of American late Modernism--"the Great Male Narcissists." One might reply that Wallace, the So-So Suicidal Solipsist, wasn't much of an improvement upon his elders. My current view of Wallace is that while he wrote some very good stuff (most of it hidden deep inside Infinite Jest), as a writer--that is, as an artist in prose--he rarely approaches the level at which William Vollmann and Annie Proulx comfortably cruise. Nor, it must be said, does his prose compare well with that of Updike, Styron, Roth, Gass, or most of the other Old White Narcs. And now I slam down the closing parenthesis:) After half a century of postmodern American novels, of prurient parody and paranoid pastiche, of mutating metafictions and mutilated meditations, we find ourselves gazing abroad for signs of writers still concerned with those archetypal "modern themes" that the coiner of the word 'metafiction,' Big Bad Billy Gass, carefully listed in his early essay on E. M. Cioran, a set of bullet points sharp enough to make any corporate Powerpointer proud:

• alienation
• absurdity
• boredom
• futility
• decay
• the tyranny of history
• the vulgarities of change
• awareness as agony
• reason as disease

We could doubtless find all of these themes in Infinite Jest (and certainly in Gravity's Rainbow) if we looked hard enough, and finding them there would support my old contention that postmodernism is neither more nor less than late Modernism, the Modernist movement's later phase rather than its dialectical antithesis. Nonetheless, this list reads like the beginning of a litany of the 'missing pieces' we seek in Sebald and his international contemporaries.

Don DeLillo and those he has influenced (about two generations of MFA writers, by now) try to sound these themes, but their playing is too deliberate, too academic, too terribly technical and not nearly musical enough. The reader (this reader, anyway) suspects that these mostly middle-class American writers are concerned with these themes not because they've felt the claws of these realities digging into their flesh, but because they read a list of these themes in an essay by Gass and learned that this was the proper stuff of serious fiction. (In a very similar way, young Dave Wallace learned his MFA lessons well and became a postmodernist in the postmodern era, a highly conventional act of unconventionality.) What the Americans mostly lack is what some foreign writers still possess, the authenticity of lived experience. Over the past 50 years, Europeans have experienced everything from totalitarian terror to revolutionary ecstasy (the political experience, not the club drug--although that can be an experience too) while Americans sat on their couches and watched these events on TV ("Ooooh, the Berlin Wall's coming down!... Pass the picante sauce.") An old argument states that U. S. 'serious' fiction tends toward suburban realism as a function of America's economic and geopolitical position as an isolated, affluent, secure, imperial superpower in which every citizen from Bill Gates to the housekeeper who mops the pee stains off Bill Gates's bathroom floors considers himself 'middle class.' We Americans have been terribly overdetermined to produce bourgeois fiction in the manner of Anne Tyler and Joyce Carol Oates.

But that situation is, tragically, changing before our eyes. Now that the United States is in undeniable economic decline, now that we have become a site of terrorism both domestic and foreign, now that the existential fear of violent death and the paranoid psychosis of the far right have become central elements in our nation's political discourse, now that grinding poverty exists a street away from spectacular wealth and the formerly comfortable middle class feels itself sinking faster than the Titanic, the former social determinants no longer apply. By all rights, 21st-century Americans should produce a 19th-century Russian literature. The America of our time is finally, terribly, a Dostoevskyan place. We are all foreigners now.

The Proustian Simile

Proust provides the best introduction to any Proustian topic, so let's begin this brief note on the Proustian simile with three increasingly complex examples from A la recherche du temps perdu:

As the spectrum makes visible to us the composition of light, so the harmony of a Wagner, the colour of an Elstir, enable us to know that essential quality of another person's sensations into which love for another person does not allow us to penetrate. -- The Captive

Faced with the thoughts, the actions of a woman whom we love, we are as completely at a loss as the world's first natural philosophers must have been, face to face with the phenomena of nature, before their science had been elaborated and had cast a ray of light over the unknown. Or, worse still, we are like a person in whose mind the law of causality barely exists, a person who would be incapable, therefore, of establishing a connexion between one phenomenon and another and to whose eyes the spectacle of the world would appear as unstable as a dream. -- Within A Budding Grove

As, from a long way off, the sight of the jutting crag from which it dives into the pool thrills with joy the children who know that they are going to see the seal, so, long before I reached the acacias, their fragrance which, radiating all around, made one aware of the approach and the singularity of a vegetable personality at once powerful and soft, then, as I drew near, the glimpsed summit of their lightly tossing foliage, in its easy grace, its coquettish outline, its delicate fabric, on which hundreds of flowers had swooped, like winged and throbbing colonies of precious insects, and finally their name itself, feminine, indolent, dulcet, made my heart beat, but with a social longing, like those waltzes which remind us only of the names of the fair dancers, called aloud as they enter the ballroom. -- Swann's Way

The Proustian simile is a perfect example of how Modernism "makes it new" by taking its methods from the oldest archaeological layers of the Western tradition. For Proust's trademark similes are merely modernizations of the epic simile, a stylistic hallmark that descends from Homer through Virgil to Dante and onward to the Renaissance epicists and their Romantic descendants. As 19th-century archaeologists dug through the Turkish dirt to bring before modern eyes the ruins of a city Andromache knew and Agamemnon burned, so Proust descended to the birthing place of Western literature and from that hillside still stinking of putrefying python pulled forth such similes as this classic comparison of young girls to flowers from Within A Budding Grove:

...these young flowers that at this moment were breaking the line of the sea with their slender hedge, like a bower of Pennsylvania roses adorning a cliffside garden, between whose blooms is contained the whole tract of ocean crossed by some steamer, so slow in gliding along the blue, horizontal line that stretches from one stem to the next that an idle butterfly, dawdling in the cup of a flower which the ship's hull has long since passed, can wait, before flying off in time to arrive before it, until nothing but the tiniest chink of blue still separates the prow from the first petal of the flower towards which it is steering.

This is an especially complex example, beginning with a metaphor that likens the band of girls strolling along the shore to "young flowers" before modulating, at "like," into the epic simile that consumes the rest of the passage. Proust (or should we say Moncrieff?) departs here from the classic "as...so" form he uses elsewhere, but conceptually there is little difference between Proust's comparison of Albertine's "little band" to a bouquet and Homer's comparison of doomed warriors to falling leaves. The major, specifically Modernist difference lies in the way the vehicle subsumes the tenor. The roses all but erase our readerly vision of the group of seaside girls. Albertine and her friends are lost behind an image of flowers that reads very much like a close description of a canvas by Monet or Cezanne. (Proust's painter Elstir, whom the narrator meets in this volume, seems a composite of Monet, Whistler and Cezanne.) The radical flattening of space in Proust's image--the vastness of the sea contained in a flower garden and a tiny insect placed in parallel with an ocean-going steamship--is as much a stylistic signature of Cezanne as the epic simile is of Proust. It fairly screams Modernism. But the writer is not content to relax into the echoes of this exclamation. He pushes things further and animates the image, showing us the moving tanker, the flying Nabokovian blue (for what else could it be?), and in so doing he trades the brush of Monet for the camera of Lumiere. Perhaps unintentionally, the way genius often follows its muse, Proust brings his text of memory (both personal and literary) forward into the cinematic century of its composition.

More could be said about this passage. Most obviously, one might comment upon the butterfly as an image of the narrator's erotic desire, floating promiscuously over the group as a whole before coming to rest on Albertine--a desire that might feel subjectively like the 'buzzing blooming confusion' of an insect but look to an outside observer more like the lumbering progress of an oil tanker... And even more could be said. More can always be said about great art. That's why any acceptable commentary on the entire Recherche would surely run to at least 14 volumes. Better to just read Proust and puzzle it out for ourselves.

List No More : Ten Reasons Why I Will Post No More Lists On This Blog

1. Every lame-ass blog in the imaginary electronic universe is cluttered with nonsensical lists.
2. The decontextualized data imparted by lists exemplifies the valorization of information and the parallel devaluation of knowledge that are two of the most salient intellectual consequences of our current technological revolution. (The ongoing transformation of formal education into vocational training is a much more important manifestation of this phenomenon.) 
3. Justin Bieber.
4. I asked myself, "What would Faulkner do?" (and a Snopes replied, "No more a yer goldarn lists, ya carpetbaggin' varmint!")
5. I need more time to work on my arrangement of Tristan und Isolde for single banjo.
6. If Norman Mailer were here, he'd be head-butting me right now.
7. Emily Deschanel's eyes.
8. I've spent far too much time at the downward-spiraling Huffington Post paging through all those useless "literary" lists that exist solely to amplify HuffPo's hit count and thus increase corporate ad revenue.
9. Will Shakespeare told me to stop.
10. Vita brevis.

Prolegomena to Any Future Discussion of the Nobel Prize; or, The Only Nobel List You'll Ever Need

Now that the annual suspense is a month behind us and the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to the impressive and deserving Canadian short story writer Alice Munro rather than (to name a few equally deserving North Americans) Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Joyce Carol Oates, Cormac McCarthy, William Kennedy, Don DeLillo, John Ashbery, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Peter Matthiessen, Edward Albee, William Gass..., this is perhaps a good time to cast a colder-than-Canadian eye on the Nobel by composing a list of non-Nobel laureates that is even more distinguished than the well-known list of winners. Granted, Beckett and Mann and Faulkner and Hemingway and Sartre and Camus and Grass and Coetzee and many other major, deserving writers have all won the Nobel, but check out the undeniably major writers to whom the Swedish Academy awarded a Hemingwayish nada:

Leo Tolstoy.

Joseph Conrad.

Henry James.

Emile Zola.

Mark Twain.

August Strindberg.

Henrik Ibsen.

Anton Chekhov.

James Joyce.

Marcel Proust.

Virginia Woolf.

Franz Kafka.

Robert Musil.

D. H. Lawrence.

E. M. Forster.

Carlos Fuentes.

Chinua Achebe.

Arthur Miller.

Henry Miller.

Tennessee Williams.

William Carlos Williams.

Jean Genet.

William Gaddis.

Allen Ginsberg.

Jorge Luis Borges.

Andre Breton.

Paul Eluard.

Louis Aragon.

Antonin Artaud.

Federico Garcia Lorca.

Julio Cortazar.

Italo Calvino.

James Baldwin.

Danilo Kis.

Bertolt Brecht.

Mikhail Bulgakov.

Vladimir Nabokov.

W. H. Auden.

W. G. Sebald.

Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Louis Ferdinand Celine.

Ezra Pound.

Simone de Beauvoir.

John Dos Passos.

Paul Celan.

C. P. Cavafy.

It appears as though Tom, Don, Philip and Ol' Cormac are going to be in excellent company either way.

The Rest of My Sixty-odd Literary Pillars

(I'm bringing this series to a close now with some shorter takes on the rest of my Gassean 'pillars'.)

Vertigo by W. G. Sebald. I can't choose just one of Sebald's four major fictions. Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz are four books I hold more closely than any I have read in the past decade. I've flown across the Atlantic many times and spent many hours, days, weeks in the galleries of Europe standing in front of paintings and sculptures and looking and thinking until I began to understand them. I discovered Sebald on one of these trips, bought a copy of Vertigo at Waterstone's Piccadilly (Europe's Largest Bookstore, the sign outside boasted most unBritishly), read it, then read it again, then read Emigrants, Saturn and Austerlitz in quick succession (all three in a single week, as I recall), and soon found myself identifying deeply with the narrator of Sebald's books. Rarely have I so closely identified with a fictional character. His bookishness, his aestheticism, his intellectuality, his wanderlust, his haunting by the horrors of history: these were all aspects of my personality before I knew Sebald existed, so finally reading him was like gazing deeply into a mirror that reflected through my face and showed me the shapes of my mind. Reading him was and is an unsettling and troubling experience. That's why I value it.

The Anxiety of Influence by Harold Bloom. Very few books possess the power to change the way you read everything else. For me, The Anxiety of Influence was one of them. Reading this slim but Borgesianly enormous volume altered my understanding of the shape of literary history. No longer was it trapped in chronology and historically delimited isms. Now an Elizabethan writer could be seen to reach across the centuries and decisively influence a Modern; and even more startlingly, the Elizabethan could now be re-read as a writer impossibly influenced by the Moderns, the way Blake sometimes reads like a disciple of Yeats, and Cervantes like a brilliantly wayward student of Barth. My understanding of Melville and Sterne as postmodernists, my notion that the novel since Cervantes (hell, since Petronius, if we want to press the issue) has always been a 'postmodern' form, these ideas were licensed by the freedom Harold Bloom granted to my reading mind. And another thing (there's always another thing when you're writing about great books): Somewhere in Anxiety, Bloom states that the meaning of a poem is always another poem. He's speaking of literary influence, but I creatively misread the line to license a truly aesthetic form of criticism, an as-yet purely hypothetical school in which criticism will be as beautiful as the objects it attempts to apprehend. In our publish-or-perish, jargon-or-die world, that would be a refreshing change.

Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia. Paglia suicided her credibility a few years back when she slipped off the rightwing deep end and started making birther noises, but back in the first half of the 1990s, she was the most dynamic, most media savvy, and most intelligently provocative scholar in America. Sexual Personae is another book that transformed me as a reader--and also, to some extent, as a human being. I read it at just the right time, as a college student during the P.C. early 90s, a time when many ideas that had formerly been genuinely revolutionary--feminism, the subversion of gender and sexual roles, the liberation of desire--were becoming institutionalized and hardening into Foucault-influenced academic dogma and kneejerk puritanism. (In a graduate seminar ca.1995, I remember a professor mentioning Paglia as a 'pro-pornography feminist'--a description Paglia herself would've endorsed--and this phrase brought one Women's Studies student to a state that could only be described as 'flabbergasted.' She shook her head in disbelief as she said, "Wait, wait, wait a minute... There are pro-pornography feminists?!") I was looking for a way to understand art that neither reduced it to ideological exemplarism nor treated it as a sacrosanct, quasi-religious object. Reading Paglia during the summer of '93 validated my nascent intellectual aestheticism by giving it a name. Her book introduced me to Walter Pater, showed me the connection between Michelangelo and sadomasochism, and taught me the true and wondrous meaning of decadence. Sexual Personae could only have been written in the late 20th century, but in many ways it's a nineteenth-century book, a throwback to an age when scholarly ambition was still encyclopedic, before the shades of the prison house of overspecialization closed upon our culture. 

The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot. The Waste Land is the only poem that has ever made me cry. That's not literally true; there were a few others, but this poem by a man whose public persona was reserved to the point of mummification brought me to a place so nakedly emotional that I wept--no, not the 'copious tears' of schlock fiction, but at least one or two authentic ones. The part I found so emotional was Part One, lines 35-42, the 'hyacinth girl' passage. By a strange alchemy, this sketched scene of emotional strangulation set my emotions free in a way that mere words have rarely done, before or since. No reader of this blog will be surprised to learn that today I'm fascinated by the homosexual erotics of The Waste Land. I find something very cruise-y and Whitmanesque (and Cavafyesque, too) in the Thames-side workingmen's pub where the poem pauses (lines 259-265) for a few lines before escaping to the aestheticized interior of a church--a poor escape strategy, for the aestheticism of the image invokes Pater and Ruskin, two men of decidedly non-normative sexuality, the former gay and the latter a pedophile. The crux of any gay interpretation of The Waste Land, however, must be a passage near the end of the poem (lines 402-405) in which the speaker addresses a 'friend' (a possible allusion to the 'master-mistress' male friend addressed by the speaker of Shakespeare's sonnets, the greatest gay poem in the language), speaks of the blood shaking his heart, and invokes the memory / fantasy of "the awful daring of a moment's surrender," saying, "By this, and this only, we have existed..." And what is "this"? This, quite simply, is what this always seems to be: the main thing, the Edwardianly unspeakable thing: white-hot homosexual amour, gay sex hotter than poured steel. That'll set a seal on your bowler-hatted life, Mr. Eliot. These lines are as close as the proper and prudent T. S. E., OM, will ever come to what jacket copy writers like to call "sulphurous gay confession."

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. I spent the second week of June, 1990, reading War and Peace cover to cover. That's right: I read the whole thing in one week. I'm still not entirely sure how I pulled that off, but it was probably a combination of youthful energy, 21 year-old eyes, and the absolute lack of a life. (About this same time I read McMurtry's Lonesome Dove in five days--not quite so impressive, but still...) This marathon immersion in early 19th century Russian life reminded me (at a time when I needed a reminder) that great novels have the power to bring us into contact with vanished lives, gone worlds, and to make those worlds, for the duration of a reading, more vital than the world we inhabit. We return from such an experience with an unexpected boon, a revitalized vision of the wonder of living. (This all sounds very Romantic and naïve to me now, but that's because I've become jaded in my middle-age.) The fat Signet Classic that inked-up my thumbs 23 years ago still sits on my bookshelf next to the Signet Anna Karenina I read a few months later. It's time to read them again; I've been away from Tolstoy for far too long.

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I read it in the spring of my depressive, neurotic, Raskolnikovian twenty-first year. I remember sitting in a metal chair amidst the warped and creaky floorboards of my parents' front porch and losing myself in Dostoyevsky's fever dream of a warped and spooky St. Petersburg. While I read it, the novel held me like a nightmare from which I couldn't awake. I often find myself re-reading books that impress me this deeply, but in the case of Crime and Punishment, I stayed away for more than twenty years--my punishment for the crime of enjoying it, I suppose. When I re-read it a few months ago, it seemed written in the jagged lines and glaring colors of Expressionist painting. It is surely the greatest crime novel of its century.

The Social History of Art by Arnold Hauser. In any good secondhand bookstore (shouldn't it be 'secondbrain'?) you should be able to find the four Vintage paperback volumes of Hauser's Social History of Art. Don't pass them by. Hauser is where any modern understanding of history's effect on artistic expression should begin. Shortly after reading them, I traveled to the Art Institute of Chicago and spent a day walking around the European painting galleries and spotting example after example of sociopolitical change affecting the forms and contents of art. Some of these examples were obvious: the effect of Protestant iconoclasm on the subject matter of 17th-century Dutch painting: the triumph of still life, landscape and portraiture over "papist" religious scenes. Others less so: the flattened, wind-up toy-like figures in Seurat's Grand Jatte as a response to an industrialization and mechanization that escaped the factory floor to inf(l)ect all of life with its inhuman rationality.

Fiction and the Figures of Life by William Gass. Gass's essays are a recently discovered love. I started reading them (and re-reading them, compulsively) within the last ten years. Even when I disagree with Willie-the-G(and I do, profoundly, on the importance of story and plot in novels (negligible, he thinks; I say, essential)), I read his incomparable sentences with, to coin a phrase, mindful pleasure.

Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. I remember reading Henry Miller's obituary in the newspaper when I was twelve years old and thinking that these scandalous Tropic books sounded like hot stuff. A decade later, I devoured Cancer in two days and discovered one of the most deeply European and philosophically pessimistic of all American novels. (Perhaps only Djuna Barnes' Nightwood exhibits a more cosmopolitan sensibility.) It's also the most iconoclastic of them all, a surrealist-influenced tearing down of aesthetic idols, a Dadaist gob of spit in the face of artistic pretension and Jamesian elegance. (Stylistic warning: the next sentence begins with an ironic pastiche of Henry James's stuttering qualifications. Unlike Mr. James, I can't control myself.) Additionally, and not least, Tropic of Cancer is, at times, quite beautifully written, an aspect of Miller's work that finds an echo in the eloquent ranting of Philip Roth's iconoclastic characters. (Which reminds me of a little example of the decline of American culture. A few years ago, one of the cable 'arts' channels produced a series titled Iconoclasts. In each episode, two wealthy celebrities interviewed each other. All of the interviewees had one thing in common: not a single one was any kind of iconoclast.)

Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson was one hell of an iconoclast. It's too bad that he's misread in schools as an official philosopher of Americanism, because he's much greater and much, much more dangerous than that. To read "Experience," "Self-Reliance" and "Circles" is to put yourself inside the mind of a man who writes, "The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is." and "People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them."

The Atlas by William T. Vollmann. This is the book in which Vollmann invites us to wander the world alongside him. It's a breathtaking journey, written in some of the finest prose of his generation. The Atlas is one of the best recent books I've read since the turn of the millennium, a real "you gotta read this" book.

The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche. To my mind, Nietzsche is the first Western philosopher to get the God stuff absolutely right. Not only is the Transcendental One dead, He only ever existed as a symptom of human weakness. "...[A] poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want anymore: this created all gods and afterworlds" (Thus Spake Zarathustra). If I must choose a single essential book by Nietzsche--and there isn't one; great stuff is scattered all over his oeuvre--my candidate would be The Gay Science.

Collected Poems by Philip Larkin. Larkin's poems pull off the neat trick of being both exquisitely crafted and bracingly direct. "Church Going," "An Arundel Tomb," "The Old Fools," "The Trees," "Aubade," "Deceptions," "Mr. Bleaney," "Dockery and Son," "Ambulances,"... there are so many good ones. He's such a fine poet that one easily forgets he was a reactionary doofus. That's the way it should be.

Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, edited by Walter Kaufmann. I am an existentialist, and Sartre is my philosopher. It's been fashionable for a while to dismiss him as a chicly radical commie stooge, but like the parallel dismissal of Heidegger as a Nazi (and, for the record, Heidegger's Nazism was much more egregious than Sartre's communism; anyone who fails to distinguish between being a communist in De Gaulle's France and being a fascist in Hitler's Germany lacks the ability to distinguish anything; it's the difference between opposing the power structure in one's country and licking its jackboots), but, as I was saying before that parenthesis, the contemporary western elite's ideological dismissal of Sartre is a convenient way to avoid the hard work of reading and thinking about his writings. The best introduction to Sartrean existentialism is the lecture "Existentialism is a Humanism," included in this exceptional volume. The other selections from Sartre here are also very good. Being and Nothingness, which I've been reading in a piecemeal way for many years, is a quite difficult book that contains scattered passages of beautiful lucidity. It was written for a professional philosophical audience, and no one should confuse it with an introductory text. The several volumes of his translated essays and interviews (in English under many titles from many different publishers; New York Review Books has just published a good selection in one volume) and the novella Nausea are other good places from which to leap into the Sartrean world. I also enjoyed Ronald Hayman's biography of Sartre, a good enough and highly readable popular bio.

Novels and Other Writings (A Cool Million, Miss Lonelyhearts, The Day of the Locust, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, etc.) by Nathanael West. This Library of America book brings together the complete works of the almost-forgotten father of the American dark comic novel. I discovered West when Harold Bloom mentioned him in passing in one of his books as an important precursor of Pynchon, an opinion I found amply confirmed when I read West's four novellas. He's not a Faulkner or Hemingway, but he's easily the equal of Flannery O'Connor and deserves to be as widely known and read. A Cool Million, published in 1934, is the Great American Political Satire. The demagogic rhetoric of West's American fascist leader, ex-President Nathan "Shagpoke" Whipple, will ring eerie bells in the minds of readers who've been paying attention to the Tea Party 'movement.' (In this context, that last word must carry its full complement of scatological overtones.)

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. Beckett or Genet? Well, Beckett was more important to me in my formative years. (I recall once telling the Russian  playwright and translator Sergei Task that my three favorite writers were Joyce, Beckett and Nabokov. Now, two decades later, I wouldn't be able to choose just three.) But today I'm leaning more toward Genet. A Parisian lowlife who can write like Proust trumps a terminally exhausted Irishman any day. It's too glib, but perhaps true nonetheless, to understand the dour Irishman as the end of something (Modernism) and the queer Frenchman as the beginning of something else (Postmodernism). When I was 20, though, and I first read Godot, it was like opening a door onto a world as bizarre and funny and bloody awful as the one I lived in. My reaction to that first reading of Godot bore a family resemblance to the effect of the films David Lynch was making during these same years: Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Wild at Heart. There's a similar irrational strangeness in the two men's works, a Kafka-like quality that makes it difficult to draw any hard distinctions between Modernism and Postmodernism. The latter is perhaps best seen as the late, late stage of the former, an analysis that can be analogized to contemporaneous developments in capitalism--but that's the stuff of Fredric Jameson's and David Harvey's works, not Beckett's, Genet's or Lynch's.

Collected Plays and Prose by Oscar Wilde. I will now attempt something completely original: I will write about Oscar Wilde without quoting him. The Wilde One is the most quotable writer of the past 200 years. He's even more quotable than Nietzsche (and that's saying a lot). He also wrote the funniest English play of the 19th century (The Importance of Being Earnest) and the most exquisite horror novel of a century that also gave us Frankenstein, Dracula and the bifurcating Dr. Jekyll. But he has been remembered as a wit, and that would likely have been his preference. For the Wildean paradox is not merely a game of words; it is a carefully crafted act of social satire, a verbal timebomb  elegantly tossed into the gaudy drawing rooms of late Victorian England. No wonder they destroyed him.

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie. Relax, Ayatollah. It's only a dream. Several of them, actually, all amazing. Rushdie brought magic realism into British literature in a huge way with Midnight's Children, but Satanic Verses was the first of his novels to cross my stateside reader's radar. (A dubious thanx to the extreme hatchet-jobbers in Tehran for alerting me to this great novel by giving it the ultimate bad review.) Verses was the first magic realist novel I ever read, so of course it impressed me enormously. As a college student at the time, I even became something of a minor evangelist for the book, trying to convince professors to add it to their syllabi. Like all evangelists, I was ineffectual.

Close Range by Annie Proulx. Annie Proulx kicks ass. She kicked mine when I picked up this book and read "Brokeback Mountain." She kicked it again with "The Half-Skinned Steer." And several other tales herein left my posterior battered and bruised. She is one of the major American prose artists of our time.

Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert. For some reason, I put off reading Flaubert until my 30s, and the first book I read was Steegmuller's edition of his travel journals and letters, Flaubert in Egypt. Then came the beautiful Bovary, the brilliant Trois Contes, and finally the magnum opus, Sentimental Education. It's probably the greatest of all 19th-century French novels. It's no Sharknado, but it's good enough.

Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne. Like Walt Whitman and Michael Herr and (arguably) David Foster Wallace, Sterne was a one-book writer (Sentimental Journey is a comparatively slight and forgettable performance), but his one book was a mind-blower. Kundera writes somewhere that all novels descend from either Fielding or Richardson. I want to trifurcate that paradigm and propose a third line descending from Sterne and running straight on through Joyce and Pynchon to the infinitely jesting Mr. Wallace.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. Speaking of Kundera, I think I'll let Kundera's novel speak for itself: "The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own "I" ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become."

Moby Dick by Herman Melville. He died so obscure that one obituary writer misspelled his name and another titled the obit "Death of a Once-Popular Author." Too bad he was dust before the opportunity for a last laugh arose. I think we should take a cue from Spanish writers who refer to Cervantes' masterpiece as 'the Quixote' and start referring to Melville's as 'the Dick.' For me, the Dick is one of the two greatest novels ever written by an American. Absalom, Absalom! is the other.

Great Short Works of Herman Melville. None of Melville's other novels have impressed me as much as the Dick, but much of his short fiction is brilliant--and often deeply weird, another quality I value in fiction (and life). Bartleby, Billy Budd, "Benito Cereno," and "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" especially impress me.

Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath. I haven't read Plath for years, but there was a time when she was the only poet for me, and Dostoyevsky was the only novelist. A bad time. Now I compare her to Van Gogh, another artist who achieved true originality, whose work became most vital, lucid and crystalline, while his life rushed toward self-destruction. This is the most dangerous aesthetic game. No one should play around with it.

Complete Poems by Anne Sexton. After Plath, I discovered Sexton, the second of the suicide sisters who presided over the 1960s American poetry scene. I preferred Sexton because her work was crueler and funnier; her deathwork was full of life.

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. Yes, she stole the novel's basic idea from Ulysses, a book she snobbishly derided. (Usually a fine and discerning critic, she allowed personal prejudices to get the better of her here.) And yes, To The Lighthouse is probably more beautiful and formally adventurous. But I find myself repeatedly drawn back into Clarissa Dalloway's day, maybe by Woolf's rather outrageous decision to counterpoint her prim and proper title lady with the shellshocked and impoverished suicide Septimus Warren Smith. The book has become so canonical by now that we've lost the sense of just how radical a choice this was.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. I seem to be on a suicidal roll here, so let's not leave out the most recent inductee to this most dubious of literary societies. Infinite Jest is DFW's one great book (relatively few writers have written even one truly great book); there are very good things in the others (Bombardini, the Great Ohio Desert, the 'Brief Interviews,' "The Depressed Person," "Octet," "Good Old Neon," much of the journalism in Supposedly Fun Things... and Consider the Lobster), but much of Wallace's writing now reads like either preparation for or reaction to that one great book.

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. It took me several tries to finally read Blood Meridian. My first attempts were waylaid early by the violence and stupidity of the characters and the general ugliness of the tale. I repeatedly returned it barely read to my bookshelf, but the beauty of McCarthy's prose lingered in my mind, and I repeatedly picked it up again. When I finally read the whole thing, it was like a bomb going off in my brain. For two or three days after finishing Blood Meridian, I wandered aimlessly around the crater it had blown.

Gulliver's Travels and Other Writings by Jonathan Swift. Swift is the secret English father of Voltaire. Swift is a Rabelais who knows when to stop. Swift is a satirist whose irony indicts us all. Swift is seriously funny, and major-league filthy. Decades ago, a scatology-free Gulliver was cartooned for the kiddies. That's too bad. Swift without shit is like Joyce without Guinness, Shakespeare without sack, Nabokov without little girls. "I like obsessions," Luis Bunuel has written, "my own as well as other people's, because they make it easier to deal with life; I feel sorry for people who don't have any." Don Luis was a foot man; Swift's obsession aimed higher.

Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Stephen Mitchell). Solely in terms of his facility with images, Rilke was a poet of Shakespearean power. There are precious few of those; they are rarer than Vladimir Putin's smiles; they happen about as often as Kim Jong-Un says something sane. Rilke, at his best, is an inexpressibly beautiful poet. Death-obsessed, he imagines metaphors that leap into life. Rodin and Cezanne taught him to see, and he is their equal in words.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. How's this for a slick segue: One of Rilke's mistresses, Baladine Klossowska, was the mother of the painter Balthus, one of whose trademark nymphets adorned the cover of an early paperback of Lolita. I first read the novel in Alfred Appel's annotated edition, which was a great initiation into the parallel universe of Vlad the Inscriber. It might be interesting to read Lolita in terms of Nabokov's conflicted relationship to homosexuality. His brother and (if I recall correctly) one or two of his uncles were gay, and it seems clear that one of the targets of Lolita's satire is the rhetoric of homosexual apologetics, as refracted through the prism of Humbert's self-serving rationalizations of pedophilia.

Seven Plays by Sam Shepard. In our overspecialized society, where a person is permitted one function and one function only, most people know Sam Shepard only as a character actor who often turns up in westerns, the thinking man's Sam Elliott. Alternatively, those who know him as a playwright tend not to rate his acting too highly. Like most people outside theater circles (and those are very small circles indeed when set against the vastness of America), I knew him first as Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff. Five years later, when I read Buried Child and True West, I learned that he was one of American theatre's few true geniuses. These two plays don't deserve comparison with O'Neill or Miller or Mamet; they deserve comparison with Faulkner and Melville, the two titans at the top of the American mountain.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. This short novel is one of my Bunuelian obsessions. I reread it every two or three years. Everything that needs to be said about Gatsby has already been said by Lois Tyson in her highly readable textbook Critical Theory Today, which submits Fitzgerald's novel to readings based on all the major schools of criticism. So I'm going to take this opportunity to write about the Robert Redford / Mia Farrow film, a fine adaptation that everyone seems to hate. I've found very little to dislike in the movie: Redford, Farrow and Waterston are as good as can be expected, and Dern is great; it's a faithful adaptation; the cinematography is memorable if a bit too gauzily sentimental (but that was a 70s stylistic tic; it's in all the period films of the era). I suspect that so many people claim to hate the film because the negative opinion gained currency early and makes the criticizer feel culturally superior. It's a lazy opinion that has fossilized into general wisdom.

How to Save Your Own Life by Erica Jong. Erica Jong was one of the first writers to take me inside a woman's life, so she's tremendously important to the development of my literary mind. I had read Alice Walker earlier, and later I read Austen, Bronte(s), Eliot, Porter, Cather, O'Connor, Oates, H.D., Dickinson, Bishop, Sexton, Plath, Woolf, Rich, Morrison, Nin, Proulx, Murdoch, Sontag, Barnes, Hobhouse, Colette, Jelinek, Paglia, Lessing, Dove, Forche, Carter, Dworkin, O'Brien, Cixous, Atwood, Le Guin, Beauvoir, Gaitskill, Minot, Carson, Sappho, Kempe, Holmes, Welty, Roiphe, Irigaray, Olds, Wharton, and on and on... I'm surprised by how many women writers I've read, because I don't think of them as 'women writers;' I stopped making that distinction a long time ago. At the beginning of my adulthood, I read Jong's Isadora Wing trilogy (Fear of Flying, How to Save Your Own Life, Parachutes and Kisses), and the second one seemed the best: the smartest, funniest, and sexiest of the three. For a long time now, Jong has been paying the penalty that our literary establishment enforces upon writers who achieve phenomenal success: academic ignorance of her work, which is officially considered as weak and ephemeral as most other bestsellers. This is simple snobbery. And in the case of a writer as bookish, as unabashedly literary as Jong, it is also simple stupidity.

l'Assommoir by Emile Zola. Zola's greatest novel is insufficiently known to English-language readers, perhaps because its title obstinately resists easy translation. Penguin Classics avoided this problem by publishing it under the French title. An assommoir is a lower-class drinking establishment, a low dive, a boozer, a beer joint, and English lacks a single word to clearly signify both the establishment and the nature of its clientele. One English publisher called it The Dram Shop, which just sounds odd. Under any title, it's the defining novel of 19th-century naturalism. It will show you many things, and it will break your heart.

United States by Gore Vidal. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, before he became a television creature, Larry King was the best thing on American radio. He was the Mutual network's late-night man, hosting a talk show that broadcast live (live!) from midnight to 5:30 every weeknight. The guests ranged from politicians and pundits to writers and musicians to comedians and conspiracy theorists, and King kept every guest on the show for three full hours, usually an hour of interview followed by two hours of listener questions and Kingly follow-ups. Then, after the guest made his drowsy exit, the host threw open the phone lines and spent two more hours fielding unscreened calls on any topic anyone awake at 4am wanted to talk about. If this sounds insane, well, it was insane--and it was also great entertainment. (I still remember King 'conversing' with an anonymous numerology fanatic from Winnemucca, Nevada, who thought he could prove using numerical equivalents of the letters in Gary Hart's name that Hart was the Antichrist. When the caller finished his crazy spiel, King asked calmly, "Okay, now can you tell me who's gonna win the second race at Aqueduct next Saturday. 'Cause that's some information I can really use, ya know?") The King show was popular liberal radio (something virtually unknown today), and it attracted Washington insiders and Tonight Show-level celebrities. During the early Reagan years, it was the little bit of late night sanity in my young life. It introduced me to Erica Jong and the concept of zipless fucking; it was where Dr. Ruth informed me that masturbation was perfectly natural (a big load off my tweenage wanker's mind); and it was the place where I first encountered Gore Vidal. The Greatest Gore circa 1982 was Mr. Savoir Faire. I delighted in his haughty voice, polished periods, withering wit and suave sparring with the krazy callers. His appearances on the King show led me to his novels, which led me to his essays, which will Horaceanly instruct and delight me until the end of (my) time.

The Mad Man by Samuel R. Delany. Who will be the Melville of our time? What great writer presently living will the future use to indict us with blindness, the way we look back on the late 19th century and want to scream, "Open your eyes, you dolts! There's this great book called Moby Dick by a great writer named Melville, and he's still living among you and you don't realize any of this because you're too busy memorizing 'Thanatopsis.'"? What rough and incomparable literary genius exists among us all-but-unacknowledged outside a small coterie? My candidate is Samuel R. Delany. Science fiction fans have known him for a very long time, but most of them know him the way aficionados of sea stories knew Melville--as a writer who did important work in the genre many years ago. Delany continues to write big, important books, but he now writes in the genre called 'literary fiction.' The Mad Man may be the most amazing of these.

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. I've said it before, and it's worth saying again: Upon finishing The Master and Margarita I thought, "This is it. This book is the reason writing was invented." Surely the Sumerians didn't go to all that trouble just so we could read Danielle Steele. The Master is the greatest Russian novel of the Soviet era written inside the U.S.S.R.. Given that Bulgakov worked during the Stalin terror, it's amazing that he died of natural causes. If he were writing today, Putin would imprison him.

Selected Essays by John Berger. One of John Berger's books is titled Just Looking, and that's how some of his best essays begin, with Berger standing before a work of art and just looking at it, letting it trip him into thought. Berger is that rare and necessary thing, a politically engaged aesthete. His work should be paradigmatic for all leftist criticism of art and literature. Like Arnold Hauser, Robert Hughes and Robert Herbert (and unlike the equally perceptive but less talented T. J. Clark), Berger combines a perceptive mind with an admirably agile pen. His criticism is literature.

(There are of course many other books that have rewired my intellectual circuitry, but they're not specifically literary pillars: Noam Chomsky's works; Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States; the complete works of the art critic Robert Hughes; Voltaire's Bastards by John Ralston Saul; Inwardness and Existence by Walter A. Davis; Joseph Campbell's Jungian flights; The Parallax View by Slavoj Zizek; John Richardson's multi-volume biography of Picasso; David Cook's History of Narrative Film; Schopenhauer's
The World as Will and Representation; many others...Lewis Carroll's Alice books should've been included on the list of 'pillars;' they're two of the most subversive works to emerge from Victorian England, and I hold them closer than anything by Dickens.)

A Few of my Literary Pillars, Part Six

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. We all know what happens to Gregor Samsa, but what's it all about? There are as many answers as schools of interpretation. Psychologists will tell you that Gregor is externalizing and literalizing the self-image thrust upon him by his family; psychoanalysts might see an eruption of the Freudian id or a horrifying outburst of the Lacanian 'Thing'; Marxists will argue that he has been dehumanized by the ideological structures of hegemonic capitalism; Christians will speak of him as a blameless saintly figure suffering martyrdom in a godless modern world; Foucaultians might position him as a victim of the ubiquitous and inescapable power relations that define family and society; Derrideans could read him as a deconstructive subversion of the human/bug polarity that puts the very nature of definition into question. (I'm caricaturing, of course, but only slightly.) And not one of these interpretations will be satisfactory; all of them will leave questions unanswered and aspects of the text ignored. All of them will reduce Kafka's work to an allegory of the critic's paradigm of choice. (Susan Sontag made this same general point half a century ago in "Against Interpretation." Too bad no one was listening.) Easy to allegorize, difficult to understand: that's the problem with Kafka. More emphatically, understanding is the problem with Kafka, and the first sentence of The Metamorphosis shows us why. “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” The matter-of-fact irruption of the irrational at the end of the sentence confounds its calmly reasonable tone and rationally grammatical form. This confounding of reason, this problematizing of understanding, is one of the things The Metamorphosis, and much of Kafka's best work, is about. Kafka turns understanding into a problem, a dilemma. The very notion of understanding, of interpretation, is contrary to the spirit of Kafka. His work repeatedly brings the irrational into troubling contact with modern reason and forces the rational into retreat; the task of interpretation, by contrast, is to argue unreason away, to tame it, to dissolve it into rational allegory. Interpreters have done their damnedest with this story, but in the end Gregor Samsa remains a gigantic dung beetle and no rational interpretation can satisfactorily tell us why.

The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud. And speaking of interpreting the irrational... Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeere's Sigi!  Freud spent decades in Vienna doing the exact thing that Kafka, scribbling away in Bohemian obscurity, repeatedly showed to be impossible. The original German title of his best book is much better: Die Traumdeutung, with the traum reaching toward trauma and inflecting the English dreams into drama. For every Freudian dream is the drama of a trauma, the imaginative expression of unconscious conflicts. For me, the best parts of this book are not Freud's interpretations, which sometimes seem a little too clever, too slick, but the dreams themselves. Nearly every dream Freud records is a surrealist masterpiece in miniature, a strange, troubling, mysterious, and medievally anonymous work of art. The mind is a craftsman as amazing as any who carved Chartres, and we are all members of its guild. I've read quite a bit of Freud in the quarter-century since my first interpretation of the Interpretation: many of his papers in the great Collier paperback editions with a triple-faced Freud on the covers (Sexuality and the Psychology of Love is an essential volume), papers and case histories in Peter Gay's Freud Reader, The Ego and the Id, Civilization and its Discontents, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Totem and Taboo. But the Traumdeutung is still the most important to me. What other book has the power to wrench open a door to the unknown third of our lives?

The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso by Dante Alighieri. After arguments about money, disputes about translation tend to be the nastiest and most personal conflicts in which writers engage. This is especially true of the translation of poetry, in the criticism of which it's quite common to see a translator attacked with the kind of ad hominem 'arguments' that form the lingua franca of American right-wing radio. Not only did the translator in question, the critics assure us, misinterpret this word and this line and this poem, but she's also naïve, foolish and incompetent, a child sent to do a man's job, and she probably has smelly armpits too. That last part was an exaggeration, but only a slight one. And sometimes this kind of hatchet job reduces itself to Pythonesque comedy when the hatchet-wielder, halfway through his chopping, remarks in passing that he cannot read the original language... I suspect that most of this misdirected passion is born of love. When we fall in love with a translated poem, the words of that translation become the object of our affection. And when a new translation appears, and the new translator alters our beloved words, how can we not feel enraged, how can we fail to lash out at this interloping translator, this foul rapist of our beloved? I understand these emotions because I've been falling in love with translations for years. I fell in love with the three books of Dante's Divine Comedy in the wonderful 1980s translation by Allen Mandelbaum published in paperback by Bantam with illustrations by Barry Moser. (The Mandelbaum translation is also available in a single hardcover volume from Everyman's Library.) These are three of the greatest books I have ever read. They soar for pages through that exalted realm of beauty and sublimity that Shakespeare reaches only at his greatest moments (Hamlet, the latter acts of Lear, some of the sonnets). If you care to know the most terrifyingly beautiful thing I've ever read, I'll tell you: it's the description of the river of light in canto 30 of the Paradiso. It's the aesthetic equal of Rilke's sublime "garden where flowers eternally open" in the Duino Elegies. It may well be the most unspeakably, unenvisionably beautiful thing ever imagined by the human mind.

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. We misread Walt Whitman in my high school English class. That was typical. We misread most everything under the direction of a Christian fundamentalist teacher who confused pedagogy with preaching. She wasn't the only incompetent among the faculty at my high school, but she was surely the most annoying. Our misprision of "the good Walt," however, was not entirely her fault. Our textbook, doubtless designed for the delight of reactionary Texans (the kind of people who tie guys like Walt Whitman to fenceposts and torture them to death), presented a deballed and bowdlerized Walt, a Whitman without a body, a singer who sang of himself, but only from the waist up. This Texan dehorning turned Whitman's greatest work into pages and pages of seemingly pointless catalogs with some ideas borrowed from Emerson to make them look meaningful. I didn't buy it for a minute. What I did buy was a Signet Classic paperback of Leaves of Grass, and therein I discovered the real Walt. I still have the book, and it has held up admirably over the years: a little wear on the edges of the cover, a spine crease near the middle, the pages foxed but not badly. It's still the book in which I first encountered the 'Calamus' poems, correctly understood by some of their early readers as the most significant group of gay love poems in the English language since Shakespeare's sonnets. Whitman became my poet, the singer of (some of) my secret desires. Displaying a kind of courage that I can now hardly credit to my teenage self, I carried the book around my homophobic high school (that was in fact its name, Homophobic High) like an identification badge, a public proclamation of booknerdy queerness. Nothing happened. Fortunately, homophobes tend to be too semiotically challenged to interpret the sexual implications of literary signs.

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. The Italian title is best, l'Arcobaleno della Gravita. Not only is it better music, but the baleno suggests balena, the Italian word for whale, thus linking, in an appropriately roundabout way, the greatest of all American postmodern novels to its ultimate source in the work of that postmodernist a century and more ahead of his time, Herman Melville. (I won't bother punning on Roberto Bolano.) Beginning in a dream and ending in apocalyptic fragments, Pynchon's arcing whale of a novel did to my mind what the Luftwaffe did to much of central London. Whole mental neighborhoods were laid waste; neuronal Underground lines were torn open and their blind denizens forced into squinting sunlight; my internal power grid was knocked out and total rewiring necessitated. Gravity's Rainbow is that kind of book. I've always been most powerfully attracted to novels in which 'anything can happen,' (Kafka, Nabokov, Borges, Garcia Marquez) and GR takes that phrase to its surrealistic limits and beyond. I have but to mention Slothrop's toilet trip, Brigadier Pudding's fecal meal, or the voyage of the foolship Anubis to establish how far this novel goes, how much the Pynchonian 'anything' entails. Pynchon's probably the only American writer--the only one, living or dead--with enough crazily imaginative artistic intelligence to conceive and accomplish the kinds of things Garcia Marquez could pull out of his hat. It's easy to imitate that side of Gabo, to turn oneself into a magic realist epigone, but how many writers can be that brilliant and still be themselves?