Invisible Cages

Hmm, it's been a while. Frustrating, that.

In the meantime, I've finished Anna Kavan's A Charmed Circle. Lovely title, thanks, I think, to the unexpected way in which "charmed" ends up conveying anything but a lovely reality: this little family group is most definitely trapped in some sort of bubble of low-grade malevolence. Some power seems to be holding them all there, unable to make their respective and definitive breaks for existences less bleak—and also limits them to a pale unlikeability that represses any interesting or empathetic tendencies they may have just below the surface.

Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Elles (Alone), Wikimedia

It's a nice change from those quietly victorious mannered romances, where 1) persistent adherence to "true morality" will save our steely heroine, along with the gentle facade that keeps her human; where 2) the tale’s evil or even merely shallow contingent will earn appropriate kicks in the pants from Justice; and where 3) characters are either sympathetic or not—as opposed to generally annoying, with brief periods that make you want to like a given individual, but know it’ll be an attempt doomed sooner or later to failure or willful ignorance of the facts. So although you probably wouldn’t want to hang out with any of this book’s characters (Christofferson may be an exception here), their failure to live up to some ideal standard or to commit themselves fully to the task of saving themselves is more true to life than any governess-makes-good adventure.

Part of this faithful reflection of humanity giving itself only half a shot is the skillful way in which Kavan portrays people’s absolute misapprehension of the impressions they're making on others, or of the thoughts and feelings going through the mind of whoever’s right in front of them. Beryl’s and Olive’s inability to talk to each other; the latter’s and Will’s completely different ideas of what’s going on between them; Will’s and Beryl’s mutual frustrations with each other’s misunderstood reactions; the young men’s apparent cluelessness about their own feelings—and all of the confusion remaining hidden beneath each individual’s ineptly constructed surface: generations have passed since this thing was published in 1929, but stake out a group of “young people” today, and it might seem that only the clothing and the presence of electronic gadgets have changed.

And the “old folks” are just as culpable, fallible, and insufferable as the young souls they’re supposed to be guiding. A mother whom the author gives free reign to wish her kids would go away, and openly to express her disappointment in them; a father who tries to barricade himself into book-bound isolation? You might be hard-pressed even today to find a writer willing to be so honest (as opposed to merely dramatic or hip to the latest requisite display of angst) about the fact that those bonds that are supposed to come so naturally and unconditionally are often out-and-out—and maybe even dangerous—myths.

But here’s the interesting twist: a tenuous, possibly unrealistic note of hope at the end, at least for Olive and Beryl. But it’s just that: a glimmer, and one we’re not sure is deceptive, naïve, hallucinated, or truly justified. The only way that final adjective can be applied is if – and that’s a big if—both girls get off their upper middle class butts and assert the truths they’ve discovered about themselves: their degree, at least, of power over their living conditions, their attitudes, their emotions. 

Oprah probably wouldn’t approve of this story—what amounts to Kavan’s extended reminder that the will often prefers inertia and the unpleasantness of the known to self-fulfillment. I’m guessing that’s one reason I’m so appreciative of its quietly unflinching confrontation with the realities of a species that’s anything but perfect.

Trying to Pinpoint the Dissatisfaction

Are you familiar with the frustration of attempting to describe something that doesn't quite sit right, or achieve its goal, but which does(n't) so without including any glaring beacons of wrongness that help point out specific areas of failure?

Source: Lilian Wagdy via Wikimedia Commons.

Such is the result of trying to analyze Alaa Al-Aswany's Chicago, which portrays a number of Egyptian immigrants, new and old, to the Windy City. It's an easy read, and the characters do get into situations and experience emotional and practical dilemmas that are interesting in themselves-- but there's just something missing here. I'm guessing there's more to it than things getting lost in translation into English; sure, the fact that the dialogue placed in American characters' mouths is just too stilted/formal and old-fashioned to sound believably native could have something to do with translation. But the additional fact that the story sometimes moves in a manner that makes you think the author equates good storytelling and style to simply getting the characters from one plot point to the next is probably as obvious in Arabic as it is in English.

It's a noble attempt at portraying the complexities of immigrant life; the knotty realities of corruption, power, religion, and culture; and the heterogeneity of one nation's strivers and seekers. In the end, though, it just doesn't hold up as solid fiction, maybe because the author ventured outside of what he knew well enough to create a really robust tale, and may have been overconfident about his grasp of Chicagoan/American culture.

Putting the Pieces Together

Well, it's about time I made my pronouncements on Georges Perec's Life: A User's Manual. When I got started on it, I really didn't know what to expect; after all, my only exposure to his writing had come through material on that mad group of mathy wordplayers, Oulipo, and via Species of Spaces and Other Pieces.

Basically, the whole large tome involves a look at one moment in the various, not-overtly-connected lives of the dwellers of a Parisian apartment building. I wasn't aware, of course, that all of these little pictures were taking place simultaneously, but upon reaching the end of the tale, that "time frame" (if time frame it is), became clearer-- and after checking out a brief précis of the piece, it didn't surprise me. All the detailed description-- which honestly got old after a while; describing surroundings in minute detail does tell a story through objects, but begins to amount to one long list after a few hundred pages-- didn't allow for much action. You're essentially left, then, at a very brief point in time, but-- and here's the genius-- fully loaded with everything each participant is bringing to that blip, with everything a normal, quick glimpse at a person wouldn't be able to discern. Perec here is giving us the normally-impossible fullness of an individual's being within one moment, alongside his or her neighbor's equally full presentation within that same moment. The problem the author makes explicit, of course, is the fact that we can't see all of this simultaneously; in telling a situation, we're limited to separate, linear recountings of one individual at a time as a means of presenting this being who, although s/he physically ages "linearly," if that's accurate, lives as an existential something within many times and places simultaneously.

I'm aware of the fact that Perec set certain rules and limitations upon himself while writing this book; if you're interested in these challenges, Wikipedia has a list of them. At this point, the only thing about this writing arrangement that's of interest to me is the confirmation that yes, quite often, constraints cause creativity to blossom, not die. (Look at Greek tragedy, or Twin Peaks-- the latter of which I consider David Lynch's best work, perhaps because he had to confine himself to the strictures of FCC broadcast rules, and couldn't fall back [too much] on over-the-top violence.)

What really blew me away, though, was the chronology that follows the book's index-- an appendix that makes clear just how involved and deeply knowledgeable Perec was about the details of his character's lives, and about how they all fit together. My amazement was of the same genre (but I'll admit, never got anywhere close to) the level of wonder felt at reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: namely, the giddiness that ensued at the realization that someone had this all inside his brain, kept it straight, and presented it clearly and engagingly. Evidence of rare genius? I'd like to harbor the delusional fancy that the same ability resides in all-- or at least a surprising portion-- of us as well.

A Difficult Story, with Difficult Questions

Courtesy WikimediaCommons.

What to say about Phoolan Devi? Or rather, about her autobiography, I, Phoolan Devi? My reaction is more to her history, her story, and the situation than it is to a thing crafted according to a particular style-- than it is, in other words, to the book itself.

To say this is a tale of overcoming hardships would be a ridiculously insulting understatement; this is no grand quest for truth that ends with a beam of sunshine and chords of victorious soundtrack schmalz crashing over our heroine atop Maslow's pyramid. This is, in large part, an act of setting the record straight on the part of a woman who makes plain in several places that, although she doesn't consider herself or her acts (which included a lot of killing and violence, both in self-defense and in service of vengeance) "good," also refuses to apologize for acting out against much of the horror that took place over a lifetime-- years of suffering all too familiar to the victims of long-standing assumptions about certain classes and genders in some (many?) parts of the world.

Above all, the book brings to the fore the question of violence. Is there such a thing as a legitimized use of it? I'd like to call myself a pacifist-- but have a hard time arguing with a voice who, acting both for herself and others like her, really does have no other way-- not even the ability to read, write, or count up to double digits-- to right an entire system of wrongs other than by physically striking back at those who maintain that system. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. had solid educations, had connections, had the knowledge that a global press and inter/national allies could be powerful forces in their missions of change. And if nothing else, both had voices within their own communities. So, I'm not excusing Phoolan Devi's use of violence-as-remedy-- but I also can't condemn it merely by pointing to others who've led highly risky, hard-fought, but largely peace-based campaigns for justice.

If nothing else, this one's going to stay with me for a good, long while. The book might help me think through some larger questions-- but then again, the more likely prospect is that it'll do a good deal to muddy already murky waters.

The Review that Quickly Becomes a Personal Rant

To say the reading's been going slowly over the past month or so would be a laughable understatement. But behold: one tome has emerged from the stack, its contents ingested from front cover to back. The book? Occupy Religion: Theology of the Multitude, by Joerg Rieger and Kwok Pui-lan.

Before I go into a fuller discussion of the thing, let me first make clear that we really do need to hear-- and think deeply about-- the assertions the authors are making about how religious belief and practice really need to change-- to undergo an almost complete reorientation, in fact. I'm down with that opinion 100%, especially with its main component, the need to address class as a primary element of lived faith. Without recognizing how class structure is an essential aspect of an increasingly universal status quo, both maintaining and being maintained by an essentially global oligarchy-- and without doing our utmost to change that situation-- all of our well-meaning efforts at charity, love, justice, inclusion, etc., etc., really won't amount to much. It's the establishment-shattering possibilities within religion that are at the heart of many of our spiritual traditions, and if we're to honor those traditions, we need to accept and act according to those possibilities.

Superb. Right on. Hallelujah. First problem, though: the book really should have been titled Occupy Christianity. Although the authors do acknowledge that they're only going to concentrate on their particular faith tradition, and give a nod here and there to some practices in Judaism and Islam, the title isn't quite honest in terms of the broader issue it purports to address-- namely, the need to change religious-- and not just Christian religious-- practice in general in a more justice-oriented way. This disappointed expectation (at least for me) is profoundly significant. Because as long as we continue to identify "religion" with one religion, it's a pretty short step from there to one true religion.

But anyway.

Here's another thing: for readers unaccustomed to contemporary Christian theology, the authors' assertions about the need to keep the tradition true to its justice-oriented roots might just be mind-blowing, in an admittedly fantastic fashion. Their pointing to the many ways in which mainstream Christianity/Christendom has become complicit with the (oppressive) powers-that-be might be the key to shocking some awareness into earnest Christians as-yet-incognizant of what exactly life lived comfortably within a neoliberal kingdom means. And it might also offer those newly conscious ones vehicles not only of dealing with their ensuing disorientation, and of comforting them that all is not lost, but also of providing new ways to move ahead within their tradition.

Source: Tanya Little

To those even remotely familiar with liberation theologies or the progressive Christianity of, oh, at least the social gospel and especially early feminism and post-colonialism on, these same reminders and assertions are pretty much the same thing we've been hearing all along from progressive Christians: rituals focused on active participation and personal story-telling, images of the church body (such as the starfish, prominent here) that better work to value all members and not just elevate the clergy at the expense of everyone else, "leaderfull" engagement as opposed to (apparently) any form of hierarchy whatsoever. The only difference here is that the ideas have assumed new packaging: namely, an association with the latest social justice movement and some (welcome) inspiration from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.

Maybe what feels to me like a collection of stale reminders and suggestions, though, is really just a personal frustration at progressive Christians' need to hold onto/rehabilitate symbols and figures without which their faith would apparently disintegrate. For instance, the Trinity. (Sure, it could provide the image of an interdependence of equals-- but so could an ideal commune, without having to resort to divinely ontological guessing games.) For another instance, Paul.(1) There's admittedly no way to prove my suspicions that his "service as one equal among many" (not a quote from the book or anywhere else, as far as I know), at least as presented in his letters, looks all too much like false humility and pedantry. Were we contemporaries, I could imagine my trying to escape his unctuous presence any chance I got; being around a guy who always seems to have an unsolicited lesson or admonishment ready to hand seems suspect, and produces the same creepy reaction caused by a character such as Uriah Heep or the oily preacher in There Will Be Blood. For a third instance, Timothy, and the apparent need to make excuses for his (and Paul's; why not backtrack a little) misogyny.

Why hold onto these things, these guys? Out of sentimentality? Out of a fear that peeling off one layer, then another, might lead to a void inside? There are admittedly huge problems with picking and choosing which aspects of your tradition you'll follow (any number of reactionaries' selective interpretation of who's eligible to be loved could provide a good cautionary tale about doing so). And no one's perfect; good ideas can come from execrable people, and if an individual had to be a pure paragon before s/he were allowed to contribute to society, nothing, good or bad, would ever get done. Perhaps my frustration, then, is simply with a perceived need to adorn a solid message with gilded figures-- an inability to act on an imperative (essentially, Micah 6:8: "do justice,... love kindness,... walk humbly with your God") without imagining some figurative justification for that action. An assumed belief that without some constructed image of divine exemplarity, even the thought of treating each other well could never possibly present itself, much less be acted upon.

Obviously, we've got problems. And I'm almost willing to say that whatever knocks us upside the collective head and makes us start solving them is a welcome thing. But my discomfort prevails. If the peaceful side of the ramparts involves sappy rituals and holding onto idols of our own making, well-- I'll probably choose to find a nice cozy cave once we've gained a decisive victory over the 1%.


(1) Note the difference between the early Jesus movement and the later construction known as Pauline Christianity.

Immobility-- Maybe

So, what did I glean from Daniela Crăsnaru's The Grand Prize and Other Stories? It's taken me a while to finish the collection, so even with notes, some of the earlier tales are a little hazy. Nevertheless, there's a semi-frequent theme here of missed opportunities, whether past or present, left unresolved and/or unaddressed thanks to personal inertia. Said lack of movement isn't always something for which we can hand out easy condemnation; in "The Grand Prize," for example, the protagonist's allowing a mistake to go uncorrected probably had a lot to do with legitimate fear, and permitted him to save himself in the end-- in terms of practical living conditions and lack of hassle from the authorities. The faded husband's inability to extricate himself from an unpleasant marriage in "Mr. Eugene" in part reflects his acknowledgment that he's the one responsible for getting into this situation in the first place-- and for bringing someone else along for the ride. And then there's the good husband of "About Happiness," undergoing the unsolicited realization that he has and will continue to accept a state of not-joy.

George Romney, Sketches for Languid and Prostrate Figures

We can all probably relate to being stuck, and to not knowing how-- and/or being too fearful-- to escape the situation. But is the inertia Crăsnaru describes merely individual? Are we supposed to see some larger national/cultural characterization here? I'm not familiar enough with Romanian history, especially of the post-1989 variety, to know whether I'm justified in posing this question. But when large numbers of people have a difficult, more or less common past (or even present) to face, it would be surprising if a good percentage didn't just feel like submitting to the way things are or have turned out, instead of, midway through life, making a brave foray into something completely different and assuredly uncertain.

Definitive leaps or breaks, such as the one in "The Fallen Cork Tree," may result in brief outbursts of new, even if frustratingly confusing, life-- outbursts which might also be followed up by inexplicable catastrophe. Asserting yourself to achieve just one individual thing beyond the average, as in "The European Mechanism," could culminate in the earth--or your own invention--rising up and swallowing you.(1) And so maybe it really is safer to stick to the uninspiring and predictable, to cheat yourself out of something grander in favor of a degree of security and the bits of enjoyment you can pull out of the smooth flow of foreseeable events.

The responsible thing to do would be to undertake a bit of investigation on this author: find some interviews, find some other commentary, see what her intent was. For now, though, I'm satisfied with what I've got, and feel more compelled to move on to other things. Maybe I'll cheat myself out of a variety of insights due to my own literary inertia-- but the possibly great thing about being phlegmatic in this instance is that I'm unlikely, years hence, to fall into bitter reverie and regret about the Googling I didn't do. We can hope, at least.

(1) With this particular story, though, I have to wonder what sort of commentary on striving to be part of "Europe" might be present. Especially with the semi-mysterious figure who encourages our man to go ahead with his project and his desire to claim himself as a stand-out individual, this tale has echoes of an industrialized, un-bloodthirsty Macbeth.

As Usual, the Book is Better

Jack Kerouac. Courtesy Tom Palumbo.

I'm sort of straying from the reading path here and offering my two cents on the recent film adaptation of On the Road. As one of my favorite books (and given the fact that I was a Kerouac junkie in my twenties), it was with an odd, eager trepidation that I looked forward to viewing the thing. That low-grade sense of dread came from the conviction that this book simply should not be filmed-- not necessarily because it's some sacrosanct piece of mid-century Americana, but because I can't think of a way to do cinematic justice to that weird mix of poetics, action, and camaraderie.

As expected, the celluloid (OK, I guess it'd be more accurate to say "digital") version was a pale reproduction of the pen-n-paper original. Much of the casting was weird (except for Viggo Mortensen as Bull Lee/William Burroughs) and the dialogue stilted (again, you have another problem there with the transition to film: actually making moving, visible characters talk like a book is a risky venture). What I will say the project added to all the written encapsulations of the Beats and those who tried to follow in their footsteps is some evidence of the toll all these men and their kicks took on the women involved with them-- and the ways in which a solid portion of these partiers didn't really take women as much more than vessels to attend to their sexual and sometimes financial needs. The film did do a good job of bringing some of these ambiguities to the fore, so I'll at least applaud it for that.

Still, I'd advise anyone to stick with the book.

Other works that fall into the hands-off category, where movie directors are concerned? Hopscotch (Julio Cortázar), Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace), The Corrections (Jonathan Franzen-- although I think this one's already under contract, or has had the rights bought, something). Anyone have any other thoughts on books that should stay books?

A Brother in Style?

Courtesy David Shankbone.

There's a shout-out on one of the preliminary, "rave reviews for the author" pages in George Saunders' Tenth of December from David Foster Wallace, which expresses the late great writer's admiration for Saunders' work. After having devoured this volume, I find the inclusion of DFW's quote entirely apt, not only because the book is just plain solid and deserves to be praised, but also due to the fact that I see a certain kinship in the two guys' writing: the way they deliver a story, the way in which an everyday conversational style acts as the vehicle for mind-blowing outcomes.

Take "The Semplica Girl Diaries," for example. The first time I read it, in The New Yorker, I was astounded at the way the narrative moved from casual chuckles at the protagonist's slightly goofy, if well-intentioned, passage through life, to an alarming end in which said protagonist has become aware of just what such an earnest, if blinkered, approach to existence might lead to. I was left with the same feeling-- of not having seen any of the dread coming, and of awe at how the hell the author pulled that off-- that I experienced upon finishing DF Wallace's "Oblivion."

Too, there's a shared ability to understand the logical conclusions of contemporary absurdities, from medicalizing humanity to marketing (someday, I'll look more closely into the contrasts and similarities between, say, "Escape from Spiderhead" and "My Chivalric Fiasco" and DFW's "Mister Squishy" and Infinite Jest).

But I don't want to allege that one author is or was imitating the other, or that each could be the other. Nope; the pieces each man writes/wrote is definitely his and not the other's. I would have liked to have witnessed a conversation between the two, though, to see if any personal affinity, rivalry, or anything else were present. For now, though, I relish the prospect of diving into all the other Saunders tales I've been missing out on-- and seeing whether, after I've imbibed all that reading, my initial vision of authorial kinship still holds.

Disappointment, Impotent Rage, an Uncertain Future

So, Alain Robbe-Grillet's Snapshots, more or less a collection of scenarios and/or hints of stories shut down before they've begun to unfold, was a mixed bag. Up until this point, I'd been a big fan of the few curious worlds of Robbe-Grillet I'd delved into: endless loops of possibly-hallucinated sameness, jealousies and suspicions broiling just under calm and stylish surfaces, muted intrigues. But this little volume wedged a nagging seed of doubt in my head-- or maybe more my heart, really, but more on that later.

The "snapshot" nature of these separate scene-descriptions wasn't what disappointed me; I knew I was in for brief flashes of settings that sometimes made me feel as if the guy had published a bunch of old writing exercises. With an author of this nature, though, even those snippets succeeded in having something haunting and/or vaguely menacing about them-- a real feat, when you're limiting yourself to short bursts. I did often think that poetry would have taken his (sometimes) excessively detailed material and disposed of it much more effectively and efficiently-- but enjoyed the sensation that these vignettes were prototypes for something like Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine, that triumph of nitpicky description for description's sake.

So, overall, fine. Until the last snapshot ("The Secret Room"), a lingering gaze upon a post-sacrificial scene, all predictably fascinated with the subdued "milkwhite" embodiment of female sensuality, a few pages of misogynist soft porn justified by-- and probably accepted due to-- its preemptively defensive label as "art." I just couldn't stomach what the back cover so blithely described as Robbe-Grillet's "interest in the sado-erotic," as if some guy's hobby of imagining and publicly aestheticizing gender-based cruelty was just as legitimate as bowling or woodworking. And if this interest is just peachy keen, why not tout one's fascination with snuff films, which really amount to a less beautified, less ritualized celluloid enactment of words put down on paper?

Emmanuel Benner, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

I'll engage the argument that such literature-- or maybe just this piece-- has nothing to do with some sort of malign desire to dominate one gender or the other, with the plea to compare reception of just these sorts of works, along with any number of staged rape scenes, or B-spectacles of scantily-clad babes being chased by psycho-killers, with that of 2005's Hard Candy. Soon after it came out, I wrote an account of what it was like to watch the film, which includes what we believe to be a teen girl castrating a pedophile, with men who, after recovering from the pained sympathy-pretzels they'd twisted themselves into during certain scenes, were outraged at the movie's gall-- and even more so at my observation that now they knew what it felt like to be subjected to cinematic and literary rape scenes and have your objections dismissed as an insensitivity to artistic license. Centuries-long artistic portrayal of women's victimization as women (from any number of forays into Leda and the Swan to A Clockwork Orange)? Acceptable. One film that depicts punishment-as-attack-on-manhood? Blasphemous. Maybe Deliverance served as a gateway here-- but since the sexualized violence there wasn't being committed by a woman, we could all go away feeling disturbed and then get on with our lives.

There's not much more I can say about my reaction to "The Secret Room;" if I haven't conveyed my injured outrage by now, I won't be able to do it by drawing out my justifications. And so the question that's accompanied my disgust is: How does (or does not) this particular snapshot change my feelings about this author? I've gotten to know more about his work, yes, and so I'm suffering from a lessened delusion about what his overall oeuvre contains-- one of those nice "growing experiences" we're all supposed to be so happy to have. And how much does or will it matter, especially since what were acceptable assumptions at the time Robbe-Grillet was writing have changed since his pieces were published? Knowing Henry Miller was a dirty old man whose stories were heavily populated by a lot of slime didn't change my appreciation for his mind-blowing word craft and ability to set a scene; Mason & Dixon made me forgive (and then some) Thomas Pynchon for The Crying of Lot 49's hovering paternalism.

At least in the immediate aftermath of "The Secret Room," my love of The Erasers is unchanged; I wouldn't mind a repeated round of disorientation thanks to The Labyrinth. But it might take a while before I'm willing to return to any of those mysterious worlds-- and as They say, you can't go back home (or in this case, to a familiar story and the feelings it evoked) again.

An All-Clear in the End-- But Not the One You Were Expecting

I will probably never understand why it takes me so long to get my head back on straight post-vacation. If nothing else, it's at least a sign that I had an excellent time, and was thus able to forget everything real-world related. At any rate...

Out Stealing Horses: wow. While it didn't take the turn towards disturbing teen relationships I suspected it might, it did offer plenty of unexpected occurrences and things for both narrator and reader to ponder. Had an American author taken on this story, there probably would have been a great deal more pained self-examination and a years'-long process of recovering from the self-torture an abandoned kid might have imposed upon himself, at least until some therapist-figure convinced him he wasn't to blame for anything.

It's precisely that lack of striving for a state of psychiatry-approved equilibrium that I value about this book. There's almost a stoicism to it; a confrontation of restless ghosts, but one that just lets them come up and show themselves, receive the requisite amount of attention they demand, and then recede back into the far corners of memory, probably only until they start feeling neglected again. And the narrator's awareness of what some might call faults-- his ambiguous feelings towards various family members, for example-- is present not in the activist mode of envisioning steps on the ladder of "well-being" to be climbed and conquered, but simply as self-awareness, and that's that. Even the question that rose up in my mind-- whether it's preferable to live through a solitary existence without any outside connections, or to get through that same state of being knowing that there's a slew of people out there who love and care about you, but whom you keep at a safe distance-- really didn't matter in the end-- because the narrator probably wouldn't have seen it as a relevant question. He's ended up at the place he's ended up, he can't do anything about the past but acknowledge it, and now he'll get by as simply as he can, period.

Other than being a solidly good book, Petterson's work is also a reminder (especially to a standard American public convinced of the universal desirability of its brand of individual "happiness" at all costs) of what travel, face-to-face interaction with non-locals/-co-nationals, or just written exposure to someone else's thoughts should do: remind you that there are multiple ways of looking at things-- and maybe, following on that recognition, that you can at least investigate some of those paths before stressing out about adhering to the one you've been assigned.

Unease of Different Sorts and Probabilities

Two chapters into Out Stealing Horses (Per Petterson), and I'm already wondering if this thing's going to take a turn I didn't expect. Admittedly, I stopped reading last night at one of those perfect points that, after having neatly brought to an end a sudden onslaught of weirdness, lets you sit with it, not introducing anything else until you feel like embarking on the next chapter.

I'll refrain from spoilers, but at this point, I'm not sure whether the protagonist's childhood memories will stick to recounting a more-or-less standard golden age, or whether something his friend's just done will take this thing into one of those formative extended situations that makes a clean break with a kid's childhood and pushes him into a more complex, less rosy-cheeked world. My sister and I did grow up with lots of boys as playmates, and although we all engaged in a wide variety of stupid dares, everyday cruelties, and general injustices, I've never been able to recognize in all that the occasionally sadistic joy some literature and films allege young boys take in death, destruction, and intimidation-- something portrayed in a particular episode of this book as well.

Photo by nottsexminer.

Again, it's too early to make any pronouncements-- but in its low-key look back at past events, it's gripping so far.

What I'm afraid is going to be all too gripping, and not in any sort of good way, is Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. I saw Alexander speak a little over a year ago on the multiple, often race-based horrors meted out by the US justice and penal systems, and so I know what I'm in for-- not only in terms of content, but (and the following is positive) a really clear, concise presentation of something no one wants to think about. What I'm hoping is that giving myself fuller exposure to and information about a situation I'm already aware and beyond ashamed of will push me into actually doing something more than reading-- and just telling others to read the book. I've barely begun with this one, though, and so I suppose I can take comfort for a short while in the fact that I'm arming myself with information that will allow me to proceed more efficiently and effectively.

And as for the periodic sadisms represented by our cultural products, mentioned above? I'm guessing Alexander's book will be exposing a lot of those-- just more than periodic, perhaps more subtle and definitely more severe, and probably being dispensed by the very people we're expected to believe work against such goings-on.

Inching Along, but with Results

Back from a superb mini-vacation, during which I did only enough reading to finish the Musil collection. The final section consists of some short essays and stories, a few of which reveal the sparkle of a fantastic smartass. In "Oedipus Endangered," for example, the author uses the etymological link between "womb" and "lap" (the word is the same for both in German) to speculate that Freud formed his theories on the Oedipus complex around the very historically determined mode of dress that constituted a woman's lap: "In this sense the basic experiences of psychoanalysis definitely derive from the clothes of the 1870's and 1880's and not from ski togs. And if you look at people in bathing suits, where is the womb or lap today?" (325)

Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Similarly, his thoughts on the either creepy or invisible nature of most monuments ("Monuments"), and what appears to be a sort of I've-had-it approach to talk of sports' uplifting nature ("Art and the Morality of the Crawl") won't fail to elicit a sarcastic snigger of agreement here and there. Probably the best piece from this section, though, is "The Blackbird," which I wouldn't say is exactly Kafkaesque, but it does provide enough of that enjoyable and thought-inducing "Hnh?" reaction that it could probably be read alongside "A Report to an Academy" or "A Hunger Artist," just to see what sorts of stylistic and narrative turns pan out.

And now, heading back to the daily grind-- and all the reading that helps me face it-- I'll probably have much more of a literary nature to ponder over the coming days. Next up? Either some Anna Kavan or Per Petterson, maybe George Saunders' latest. In the immediate future, though, dinner.

Panopticism, Still

After what seems like a stupidly long time to get there, I finally reached the end of Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish. I'm talking not only about the duration of this particular go-round of reading, but also about the fact that I got through 1.3 masters degrees and a Ph.D., all of which reveled in philosophy, ethics, cultural studies, anthropology, and religion, without having been publicly shamed for carrying that big fat knowledge-lacuna around with me.

Photo: Hans Weingartz, Wikimedia Commons

Feeling less now like a fraud, and also generally happy to have imbibed the primary source about which so much discussion has circled ever since its publication, what I can't get out of my head right now is the author's account of Mettray, a sort of 19th-century juvie near Tours. Devoid of walls, the reformatory, according to Foucault's account, was the epitome of discipline's* ability to rule without recourse to traditional forms of overt violence or to the typical prison. My favorite of its facets? The phrase written out on the wall of each boy's cell: "God sees you." These days, its presence might seem like something out of Jack Handey's excellent "Deep Thoughts," or the product of a bumbling bureaucrat, the protagonist of an outsized satire. And I'm sure your average 19th-century kid not prone to buy into the system would probably have had a nice chuckle at the transformative intent of the message as well.

What I'm finding less funny is how we can see contemporary use of big data and tracking as part of discipline's creation and use of new knowledges in shaping and maintaining the Normal. Some might also be prone at the moment to substitute "the NSA" for "God" in that phrase of yore-- and it might be even more interesting to speculate about how said agency and those that depend upon and interact with it might have more, and more insidious, ways of corralling so-called (potential) delinquents into the Normal than does any assertion about divine displeasure. What may be a more interesting thought experiment would be to imagine employing Mettray's warning message as the basis for a new interior design pattern for the NSA and for those in league with it. I'm guessing none of the targets, though, would see the humor or the irony in that move-- and, as proven by Google's own legendary appeal to its employees to refrain from evil, you eventually stop seeing what's right in front of your face, much less thinking or caring about the demands it makes or the action it requires.

Was Foucault happy to have revealed the ways in which society often controls its own? I can't offer any thoughts on that question. But my guess is, he knew it would be relevant long after his rock star status was transferred to the next aspirant on the historical-philosophical scene.


*Foucault, of course, has something particular in mind when he talks about discipline/the disciplines-- very generally, a mechanism for achieving docility (adherence to the norm) and maximum productivity, which has at its disposal and continues to produce new forms of measurement, documentation, observation, and so forth. Examples? Medicine, education, criminology,...

Coincidentally...

Just hours after this morning's post, I received my copy of The New Yorker in the mail. Lo and behold, The Daily Show's John Hodgman has a fantastic one-pager in there, in which he imagines Ayn Rand as a columnist for Parade-- where, among other things, the rigid mistress declares, "I am joking, because I am not joyless. What is your favorite joke, readers?" Not to be missed.

(Semi-)continual Threads and Obsessions

Just a few more stories left to read in the Musil collection. Since finishing Young Törless, I've gone through "The Perfecting of a Love" and "Grigia"-- both of whose characters seem to accept their own conclusion that true love of a person is realized, strengthened, and/or purified through being unfaithful to that very person. The conviction takes on a different place of prominence in the two stories; in "Perfecting," the entire narrative is centered around exploration of that idea, whereas the essentially same conjecture only forms a momentary realization in the protagonist's mind, and is connected with seemingly larger thoughts on eternity (where the guy will be "linked" with the wife he's left behind) and death, and the interplay between those two. I'm mostly convinced that "Perfecting"'s Claudine wouldn't want to make any generalizations beyond her own case; with "Grigia"'s Homo, on the other hand, I get the sense that the man would be comfortable with turning his own feelings into a loose theory of the value of unattachment which, among other things, paradoxically links one person to another.

I'm not out to argue one way or the other about this thought or about the "morality" of the characters pondering it. Rather, I'm wondering more about when an idea takes hold of a writer to such a degree that, ceasing to be just one more question to explore, s/he can't shake it, and it becomes a (near-)constant theme or feature of that person's work, maybe even the idea to which that wordsmith feels called to devote his/her life. The author who comes immediately to mind is Ayn Rand-- and although I'm not talking expressly about her over-insistence on individual autonomy and (to me) general lack of compassion and skewed approach to living with other human beings, what often hits me most about her work probably can't be disconnected from those aspects of her narratives and/or "philosophy." What I find odd about Rand is that, in spite of a mindset that would seem to lend itself to characters' full assumption of independence, there's an awful lot of glorification of women sacrificing themselves for the sake of an abusive or borderline horrible man. Howard Roark rapes you, and you're supposed to find the experience glorious and revelatory? We the Living's Kira is supposed to put up with a frequent brute like Leo, just because he has an indomitable spirit? Admittedly, living through the Russian Revolution would probably mess anybody up to some degree (hence, probably, Rand's domineering selfishness), but the seeming celebration-- and narrative persistence-- of these dysfunctional relationships surely had earlier roots.

"Repetition," by ThinkDraw

You can only engage in so much psychological speculation on authors through their work-- and if you go too far down that road, you've completely abandoned the story as a story, and you might as well just try to set up a reality-TV series featuring the writer in a shrink's chair. That is, are we more interested in what motivates a story, how a theme got into it, or what that story does, how it moves and what it says? None of these questions is or should be totally inseparable from any of the others, of course-- and maybe one of the things critics have pondered or are interested in is what the right balance between all of those factors is, whether for reader or writer. I've got a few more stories to go in my Musil collection; we'll see, if his love/(un)faithfulness question pops up again, if he can offer any more insight into the matter.

Concise Doses of Which to Take Heed

Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Ludvík Vaculík, people. If you haven't read The Guinea Pigs, go grab it and prepare for an amazing and low-key analysis of quiet horror. It's no surprise that its author was involved in the Czech dissidence movement, along with Václav Havel and so many others. And so we shouldn't ignore his non-fiction, whether it's the 2000 Words manifesto, his current journalistic work, or the fantastic (so far, at least) little collection of his samizdat feuilletons that I picked up in the bargain bin the other day, A Cup of Coffee with My Interrogator.

Some understanding of late-20th-century Czech history is helpful, but not necessary, to appreciating Vaculík's insights into the sad and dangerous absurdities going on around him-- as well as the sense of humor he often has when addressing them. His observations about his country's accepted forms of discourse, for example, might as well be applied to the contemporary US political and social spheres. Remarking on France's then-recent (1976) efforts to guard against the corruption of French by English, he notes that Czech requires no such wariness about other languages coming in and mucking it up:

"The difference in our case lies in that our language is being rotted from within, it is all due to rotten Czechs, if you like. They have a very limited vocabulary and almost unlimited scope for using it in public, a puny theme and a vast amount of patience in sticking to it, lean ideas and fat powers. These people have established something like a Basic Czech containing 850 words." (1)

Analyzing in a later essay a tourist's comment that he liked Czechoslovakia better than Greece because it was "freer," Vaculík partially overcomes his amazement at the assertion by speculating that human freedom is something "wider" and other than political freedom. (2) Not that he isn't all for the latter-- but I'm guessing he would agree with his friend Havel's conviction that no (broadly defined) technical measures will save anyone, if their spiritual states are empty and useless.

Ancient history to be committed to the dust (or bargain) bin, then? Not in the least. If you're able to read these short essays and so many others that came out of this movement without seeing warning signs all over the place, please go back for a second round. Once I'm finished with this collection, I might do just that-- both for a kick in the pants, and out of sheer admiration at what a person can pull together in three pages.


(1) Ludvík Vaculík, "Free to Use a Typewriter," in A Cup of Coffee with My Interrogator (Columbia, LA: Readers International, 1987), 1.

(2) Vaculík, "The Genie," in A Cup of Coffee, 16.

An Exception for Edith

Since I steeled myself last night and made it through to the end of the Robert Frost collection, this will probably be the last post I write on the man's work, at least for a while. Fortunately or un-, I received no definitive revelation regarding why I just can't relate to much of the poetry. I got the feeling, though, that said alienation has more than a bit to do with the fact that Frost often relies heavily on aspects of nature for his subject matter. Try as I may (OK, not very hard) to remember the names of plants and birds, I suffer some sort of lethargy-induced mental block on the rare occasions that such a task presents itself. Don't get me wrong; watching birds-- or ants, or squirrels, or even leaves being pelted by raindrops-- is often mesmerizing, and if a thunderstorm comes through, you can forget about my doing anything but staring and listening gleefully to the fury. My best form of admiration for all of this, though, comes in silence; trying to add words to the scene seems to take the edge out of it. I certainly won't condemn others' assertions that verbal descriptions only enliven the view of a nice apple tree-- but I think in this instance, the best I can offer is "to each his/her own."

Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

What did grow stronger, though, was my conviction that Louis Untermeyer's commentary (1971) detracted from reading the actual poems-- and may have been at least partially to blame for the old-fashioned tint the collection took on. And for whatever reason, what encapsulated that feeling for me was his use of "delightful" in assigning a value to Frost's poems on insects. (p. 186; it's also used on the back cover to assert that the book makes "a delightful addition to any library.") "Delightful"? Who uses the word nowadays without a tinge of bemusement, or as a way of indicating that the object/person/activity described is nice and maybe fun, but essentially harmless and not really worthy of serious scrutiny? I would need to undertake an etymological study to find out if the term ever constituted a truly robust compliment-- but the only person I can think of who could use "delightful" and signal thereby sincere enthusiasm for whatever's being described is Edith from Downton Abbey-- and then only in her post-World-War, more-mature version. Given, Edith herself sometimes doesn't realize the full implications of her suggestions, but to the character's credit, she does seem open to thinking things through once they're pointed out to her. That subject, though, is an entirely different can of worms, further discussion of which would only make me remember how guiltily addicted I am to a highbrow soap opera.

So, then: maybe the moral of my Frost adventures is to approach an unknown work sans the assistance of well-intentioned commentary. Historical context and biographical information, yes-- but next time, I might just take the initial plunge solo.

The Problem with Greatness

You'd think you'd feel exhausted after shutting a nearly 500-page book of short stories by the same author. Not so, though, if that book is Sherman Alexie's latest, Blasphemy, which features both old and new pieces. This guy has mastered the form; he's one of those rare authors who makes it look oh-so-easy to whip out a concise, yet multi-layered tale that plops you right down into a living world, without using one word too many or too few. In other words, he's one of those frustrating individuals who makes you feel even more like an idiot for trying to write your own pathetic yarns, and instead of being relatable enough on a talent level to the reader, gets pretty close to convincing you to just set aside the pen and be satisfied with enjoying the work of others endowed with more skill.

Seattle Municipal Archives via Wikimedia Commons

There are also few people in general I can think of who can identify and openly admit to the use of and immersion in humor in order to cover a multitude of pains, discomforts, and insecurities-- and who know at exactly what point a joke or witty comment can leave a relationship in shards. Alexie's also well-versed in the potential for self-betrayal in humor-as-protective-measure. When is it legitimate to laugh something off, in what circumstances can a well-crafted joke offer true comfort, when does a chuckle essentially concede victory to evil, when does everything stop being funny?

There's probably a truckload more to say about this book; the place of Native Americans in the U.S., and of white culture's ambiguous and often guilt-laden-but-inept-and-non-understanding response to the situation/s, holds an unsettled and unsettling place of prominence in most of the stories, as does the way in which men think about and approach women. And if you're a basketball player and/or fan, you'll feel the connection of a kindred spirit running in and out of many of the characters' lives. But to sum it up, if you're looking for someone who'll give you a straightforward, yet loving, presentation of imperfect humanity, check out Blasphemy. You won't be disappointed.

The Possibly Perilous Second Journey

Although I'll tend toward the former, the following is proof of either the value or the danger of rereading. Before starting in again on the world of Young Törless, I remembered its brilliant presentation of schoolboy cruelty, and its tendency to draw in even gentler souls. But that memory comes from a time prior to viewing Michael Haneke's absolutely terrifying (and what I'll allege is his best) film, The White Ribbon. Set at approximately the same time and in an at least similar culture (Germany, as opposed to then-Austria-Hungary) as Musil's tale, the story is not only a brutal account in itself, but takes on added weight when you realize that the everyday horrors being perpetrated in an unobtrusive village may have been part of longstanding assumptions and unspoken conventions that enabled the release of planned extinction programs and systematized sadism just a few years down the road. And I couldn't help but compare the novella's beautifully written presentation to the film's incredible cinematography, which was like watching a moving, black-and-white exhibit by an ideal photographer. The way in which the story itself was acted out in visual perfection at first contributed to an uncanny temptation to fall into nostalgia-- but then, as you figure out what's happening, the realization that you've been tricked by false appearances makes the understanding of the plot even more unbearable. How often, you can't help asking yourself, have you been conned into accepting an evil theory, a person, a situation as legitimate, even praiseworthy, because it just looked so damn good?

With these new images in my head, and with residual memory of what's going to happen for my second engagement with Törless, I'm starting to feel more hideous, and to get that sensation sooner, than happened the first time around. So in this case, rereading has made the book's impact much more intense. Strangely enough, I'm doubly eager to get through it now.

This zeal at the thought of repetition-- minus the dread-- has only happened two other times that I can recall. After reading Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch (my second favorite book, just barely falling behind Infinite Jest for the top spot) straight through, I immediately went back and began devouring it in the "hopscotch" order the author suggested. I guess it wasn't a technical rereading then-- but the way in which that second round unearthed countless secret doors verged on the spiritually revelatory-- meaning, for me, that the only way I could explain how a book that good had been conceived and successfully executed was via divine intervention.

Unfortunately, my second reading of Ulysses didn't result in even half that level of ecstasy. My first go-round ended in absolute love-- a legally blind sort of love, as I really couldn't tell you what had happened in those pages, only that there were points where the language really did beam you right into the middle of an early-20th-century pub. And then, a decade later, it was suggested to me that that book should be reread every ten years-- advice I promptly followed. Although the amazement hung on for a while, and although I do remember writing early on in my notes, "I LOVE THIS BOOK!", I soon couldn't handle hanging out in the inside of an oversexed character's head, and finally gave it up-- without condemnation, only tiredness. Maybe I'll try again in another decade-- but only after revisiting Cortázar and David Foster Wallace.

Until then, I've got Young Törless, and a few more of Musil's stories, to finish. I'm guessing it'll be a good idea to insert plenty of new-to-mes in between this re-match and those others.

Three Cheers for Modernism

Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Boy, do I love those Modernists! Try to top Kafka, Walser, Benjamin, or Babel (yes, I'm counting him), and most authors from that crowd, and you've got a huge challenge on your hands. The latest evidence of my enthusiasm comes from the fact that, in tackling a collection of Robert Musil's stories, I'm rereading* Young Törless, the first selection to feature in said volume.

I have a hard time describing just what it is that makes the greats from the early 20th century stand out so much; the best I can offer is the sense that these writers are just plain solid. They pull off an intellectual sophistication that engages unashamedly in disciplined soul-searching and social criticism without turning florid, sappy, dogmatic, or cynical. And even though the worlds they describe are in reality even further removed from my own existence than is the poetic universe created by Frost (as discussed here yesterday), something about them never feels alien. That last observation could have something to do with the fact that I was much more immersed early on with European literature than with American, but that personal-historical item doesn't quite serve to explain things.

Might it all come down to a sort of nostalgic yearning for an intellectual golden era that never really existed? Doubtful. As much as I love the literature and the thought of regularly writing and receiving handwritten correspondence (with a fountain pen, no less!), you couldn't pay me enough to live according to pre-World-War mores, no matter what sort of great conversations and inspiration could be found within that world, and that's assuming I'd be lucky enough to befriend even one of those luminaries.

What I'd like to say, at the risk of sounding like a New Age romantic, is that there's some intellectual-emotional connection, or some shared genetic sensibility between at least this reader and those authors of old that's survived more or less unbroken. That may be what good literature is supposed to keep alive: the ability to go and live beyond an informational transaction, and institute an impossible conjuction within and throughout time. But before I turn flowery, I'll just leave you with a link to what for me is the hands-down best example of that shared wavelength: Walter Benjamin's "Unpacking My Library." Dig in.

* I very rarely reread a book.

Countering Blog Glitches

So, in spite of my best experiments, investigations into useless help topics, and an unanswered plea for assistance sent out into the void, my reply to the last visible comment on the post titled "The Struggle That Wasn't" refuses to show up in any nook and cranny of this particular forum. Hence, Sean, I offer my reply to you via a separate post. Behold:

I copied down that same passage about writing and the "there"!

I'll grant your point about the bleakness, and admit that I'm not quite objective when it comes to making judgements about more darkly toned endeavors; though not prone to dismal moods myself, I'm a sucker for artistic gloom, and need a regular fix of Bergman films, cloudy days, and sad jazz to keep a level head. I'm guessing this is at least partly a reaction to ubiquitous and saccharine pop culture, but I'll wager that pre-adolescent revelry among the German Romantics also has something to do with it.

At any rate, if I do continue with the series, I'll most assuredly post my thoughts. In the meantime, drop by anytime and share yours with me!

Now that I've taken matters into my own hands, I'm sure the damn comment will now show up right where it was originally supposed to have been, looking innocent as the proverbial lamb. I've got my eye on you, Blogger. An impotent eye, but an eye nonetheless.

(Re)discovering an American Icon

I've been loitering somewhere in the middle of The Road Not Taken: A Selection of Robert Frost's Poems for a solid chunk of time now. Part of that creeping pace rests upon the fact that I want to give every poem its due, instead of just devouring page after page in an effort to be finished with the thing-- but I'll also admit that I'm often not in the mood for interaction with scenes and attitudes that might only still exist in a few living memories. That second explanation, on its own, really shouldn't make any sense, especially given the fact that so much of what I love reading encapsulates times, places, and assumptions that are out of fashion, out of reach, and often, the product of an age so far gone that its practices almost seem inhuman.

But in this case, the foreignness is probably also combined with the feeling that I'm reading this volume more out of a duty to lessen my ignorance than anything else. Oh sure, I grew up hearing my mom randomly break into recitations of "The Pasture" and "The Road Not Taken," and by now, the line from "Mending Wall," "Good fences make good neighbors," has found its way into at least a portion of the aphorism-quoting public. But I never really went any deeper than that, and any time I'd hear some MFA student blow off Frost with an eye-roll and a dismissive wave of the hand, I didn't even know enough about his work to take up any sort of position vis-à-vis this posturing.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

And so, here I am, gradually reading vignettes of New England life from the last century, and finding that, yes, this is a world I can't recognize-- but also that the description of this world is sometimes striking in its insight, sometimes even deliciously eerie. And although the stereotyped gentle wife makes her appearance every now and then, there are also times when Frost gets couples' hesitant discomfort with each other, that willingness to tiptoe around our own emotional needs to keep someone else happy, or a situation balanced-- a ceremony the poet also knows eventually will be transformed or come crashing down when one person or the other lets out some sort of truth.

I'm finding that in general, then, it's not the poems so much that are sentimental, but a habitual willingness to see them as such-- in this instance, evidenced in Louis Untermeyer's commentary, which, in spite of its apparent protestations to the contrary, seems all too ready to give three cheers for a mythologized New England stolidity and its good old characters we love to talk about but really treat, from the height of our literary sophistication, in a bemused and slightly patronizing fashion. (This particular commentary also seems to be a product of its time.) It may or may not make any sense for me to speculate that Untermeyer probabaly loved Sarah Orne Jewett's stuff, but that's a question for another time, and for someone who knows much more about the man and his work than I do.

At any rate, I'm involved enough to see this book through to the end, but don't expect me to reach that point any time soon. And in case you're wondering, the next time someone gives a quick dismissal of this poet, I'll be willing to step in and offer a few rounds of "Yes, but..."

A Curious Possible Parallel

Well, I finished the collection of Wilde essays. Not only was it increasingly easier to get through as it went along; an almost-constant question also began to lodge itself in my brain. Namely, what would a conversation between Wilde and Nietzsche have looked like? The query really took on urgency when I came across this sentence: "... the contemplative life, the life that has for its aim not doing but being, and not being merely, but becoming-- that is what the critical spirit can give us."* It was the "becoming" there that struck me-- because so much of what Nietzsche wrote about was "becoming who one is." The two men died in the same year, but my pure speculation is that neither probably read the other's work, especially given the fact that poor old Friedrich spent his last eleven years in madness-induced silence.

I was relieved to know that more than a few others are interested in at least a variation on that question; a quick search yielded plenty of published offerings. Until I can check them out, I'll set down a few preliminary thoughts, admittedly limited by my relatively narrow exposure to Wilde.

First: the matter of style. For both men, it's essential, and requires claiming one's own individuality and rejecting conformity with a variety of concerns. But I'm not sure we can easily say each author meant the same thing by it. For Nietzsche, having the strength to stand on one's own meant, among other things, blasting through expectations of written style. Sure, his aphorisms had predecessors in masters of the genre such as LaRochefoucauld-- but when you're running in a scholarly milieu (at least until you ditch that, too, as he did), deviating from standard form is a bold and risky move. Wilde's celebration of and involvement in aestheticism seems too "social" for someone like Nietzsche, who unlike his contemporary, did not run in fashionable circles. Even while Oscar was pleasantly scandalizing people with the unique self he presented through plays, wit, and dress; and even as he called for changes in attitude and thought; I don't get the sense that he would have gone in for Nietzsche's demand for a revaluation of all values. Still, Wilde's doubt that "we have ever seen the full expression of a personality, except on the imaginative plane of art," would most likely have gotten a nod from his German contemporary.**

Not that Nietzsche wasn't witty; pick up anything starting around Human, All Too Human, and any doubt about that will immediately be erased. (Most of his chapter headings in Ecce Homo, including "Why I Am So Clever," seem to be poking some seriously dark and critical fun at a world that's closing in on him.) But even at his most apparently angriest, he seems to hold an earnestly committed faith even in the decadent whiners he takes such pains to condemn. Things for him were always at such a state of emergency that even the lightness and dancing he wanted everyone to be doing had something intense about them. Wilde, on the other hand, even when he's being deadly serious, still seems to present his thoughts in the arch manner of a Louis XIV courtier.

Then: the question of democracy. Wilde doesn't say much directly about it in this collection, but in "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," he states that "democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people."*** So many of his essays are also criticizing public taste and behavior, and it seems that democracy is implicated in those criticisms. I'm guessing Nietzsche would have agreed with Wilde's sentiment, but, strangely enough, would have done so with a little less cynicism. The German's disgust with democracy and socialism (the latter of which Wilde was for) lay not in equal treatment for all, but in the resentment that springs up between free individuals when one person gets more of something than someone else. Starting out from the same conditions isn't the problem here; it's the sense of resentment and jealousy certain people feel when, opposed to those certain people, one individual has a greater amount of skill at some activity, or another individual works especially hard and reaps a big reward for it. The resentful bunch will demand that no one receive more-- of anything, whether talent or anything else-- than the next person, and will use democracy to level the entire population to the same state of stagnant mediocrity. Nietzsche envisions a democracy of the future, freed of this resentment, and so also freed for achievement and self-actualization (although he wouldn't use that term) for everyone.

There is, of course, the third question of art, but I'm running out of steam and time, so I'll just say that I'm pretty sure Wilde, with his assertion that art is non-rational and immoral (and of course, he'll mean something very particular here), would have been down with Nietzsche's ruminations in The Birth of Tragedy, with his celebration of the right balance of the Dionysian and Apollonian that makes for great art.

Maybe more to come on these topics. Whether or not that happens, though, I'm beyond pleased that Intentions picked up speed and interest-- and that I found another possible connection to my beloved curmudgeon, Nietzsche.

* "The Critic as Artist," in Intentions and Other Writings (Garden City, NY: Dolphin/Doubleday, no publication year), 107.

** "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," in Intentions, 199-200.

*** "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," in Intentions, 204.

When Wit Falls Flat

I'm not sure what's happened. I, a huge fan of Oscar Wilde's plays, have hit some sort of wall while trying to get through Intentions and Other Writings, which contains a few essays originally published in various places, now gathered in one convenient, and, I'm finding, highly frustrating spot. I picked up the thing mostly for its inclusion of "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," but said essay falls toward the end, and I'm starting to suspect it was placed there in the same purposeful way that a one-hit wonder is featured late on an otherwise mediocre album.

Forget the disorientation largely due to differences in writer's and reader's respective positions in time; stumbling over dropped names of now-forgotten figures and realizing the character dubbed "Vivian" is a guy really isn't that big an issue. But I never thought I'd get just as bogged down by a Wilde character's lengthy flights of flowery fancy as I would by some third-rate Romantic's goopy paeans to Love or nature goddesses or whatever else came from the pen of a pale dork in a billowing blouse. Example: it took all my energy and a good bit of encouragement à la "The Little Engine That Could" (I think I can, I think I can) to get through the section of "The Critic as Artist" that features Gilbert's high-flown recapitulation of Dante's Divine Comedy. Among other things, I'm pretty sure the old poet would've given young Gilbert a solid fist to the gut had he heard his work turned into melodrama, as it is when shaped by Mr. Prolix.

But Gilbert, I'm sure, would've pretended to be charmed by the entire assault and laughed it off with a witty remark and a drink. And it's just that feeling that's made Intentions drag from almost the very beginning of the collection.* Namely, the wit grows old pretty quickly, and you get the sense that there's more in this writing that's being hidden or repressed than is being revealed. That we're dealing with a bunch of characters-- and maybe a creator-- who are terrified of revealing any chinks in their armor, almost panicked at the thought that some member of the literati might discover they laugh uncontrollably at the Victorian equivalent of Wipeout and still hang out at home in a beloved and unfashionably threadbare sweater, without a hint of irony. I'll venture to say it's akin to the disheartened way I feel when faced with a gathering of stereotypical hipsters, too cool to view genuine concern, passion, and interest as anything but idiotic, and making sure to look ultra-hip while sneering.

Given, Wilde did have a lot that the establishment of his day thought he should hide-- among other things, resulting in his sentence to two years' hard labor. You have to wonder, then, what was going on with so much flippancy, but retroactive pop psychoanalysis is just as tired as extreme aestheticism. I'll keep slogging, through, then, and hope to have been convinced of this collection's worthiness by the time I reach the end.


*(Caveat: The first essay, "The Decay of Lying," is great-- hence, the "almost.")

Oscar Wilde photograph by Napoleon Sarony. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The Struggle That Wasn't

So, I just finished Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle (Book One). I heard about it out of the blue about a month ago, when a stranger directed me to a review-- which one, I can't remember, but it made more than a few allusions to Proust, and focused on both Knausgaard's and his French predecessor's exhaustive attention to detail.

I suppose I need to read up some more on the project, which consists of a total of six volumes of autobiography. What immediately struck me, though, was its name: in Norwegian, Min Kamp, which obviously jars the reader with thoughts of a predecessor far less appetizing than Proust: Hitler, and his Mein Kampf. Until I find some reliable sources regarding this choice in title, however, I'll just pass over that subject, since any speculation I make about it would be idle, and most likely unoriginal.

To the meat of it, then. I cannot possibly explain what makes this book so engaging. It really is just the story of growing up with a difficult father and getting on with an adult life marked with all the ambiguities and frustrations courtesy of such a parent. Reflections on nostalgia, the (meaning of the) everyday, cohabitation, and ordinary human imperfection. I'm tempted to say it's more of a chronicle than a story, but stopping there would constitute a false move, or a betrayal. It's as if Knausgaard's created some sort of magical, contemporary expansion of one of those detailed 19th-century diaries that turn up and are used in history seminars as accompaniments to scholarly texts-- only shorn of all the naivete and preciousness and over-eager avowals of trust in divine guidance.

A study in critical self-scrutiny, yes, but nothing akin to navel-gazing. And done in a style that doesn't even come close to ostentation, but maintains an iron literary grip the whole way through-- a feat that still has me wondering exactly what happened, how this guy did it, and how I can 1) get over my envy at the author's skill and perseverance and 2) at least display equivalent amounts of sustained writerly diligence. Until my brain can sort through this phenomenon further, that's about all I have to offer now-- other than the charge to check it out for yourself. You won't be disappointed.