Argentina bans unhealthy books

Here’s something you won’t read everyday: The Argentine government has severely restricted the importation of books due to human health concerns*:

That’s right. According to the government, it can be dangerous to “page through” a book that has high lead quantities in its ink. “If you put you finger in your mouth after paging through a book, that can be dangerous,” said Juan Carlos Sacco, the vice-president of an industrialist organization that supports the measure.

The government claims that this is not a ban. However, since each buyer has to demonstrate at the airport’s customs office that the ink in the purchased book has lead quantities no higher than 0.006% in its chemical composition, the result is that all book imports into the country are stalled.

*(following that link will lead you to an unpleasantly partisan right wing site, so be warned.) (Via)

Where I Write (I need new shelves badly)

Oh Mann Ammann

Eine traurige Nachricht, ein echter Verlust. Der Ammann Verlag schließt seine Pforten. Hier ist ein Interview mit dem Besitzer und Leiter des Verlages, Egon Ammann und hier ist die Pressemitteilung.

Zum 30. Juni 2010 wird der Ammann Verlag seine publizistische Verlagsarbeit beenden. 1981 von Egon Ammann und Marie-Luise Flammersfeld gegründet, erreichte der Verlag sogleich mit seiner ersten Publikation, dem Erzählungsband »Die Tessinerin« von Thomas Hürlimann, internationale Aufmerksamkeit. Für das Frühjahr 2010 bereiten wir unser letztes Programm vor. (…) Die Gründe für diesen Entschluss liegen im fortgeschrittenen Alter der Verleger und in einer Marktsituation, die für Literatur zunehmend schwieriger wird. Ein Verlag mit dem Profil des Ammann Verlags ist eng an die verantwortlichen Personen gebunden und kann ohne sie nicht fortbestehen. Marie-Luise Flammersfeld und ich haben gegeben, was wir zu geben hatten. – »Alles hat seine Zeit.«

(via)

Paolo tells all!

Paolo Giordano, rising star of the Italian literary scene, who has recently published his debut novel, La Solitudine dei Numeri Primi, to thunderous acclaim, winning the 2008 Premio Strega, answers a few readers’ questions on the World Literature Forum (where I can also be found). Here is the link to the thread where questions, even of a frivolous and private nature (“Paolo, why are you so pretty?”) can be asked and where they will be answered by Giordano during the next few weeks. You need to register first, but it’s worth it, anyway. The reason why Transworld Publishers staged this event is because they will publish the English translation of the book (The Solitude of Prime Numbers) during the coming month. I’m currently reading the book and will post a review next week when I’m finished. It isn’t the first event of its kind at the WLF. Upon the publication of Niccolo Ammaniti’s The Crossroads, its publisher, Cannongate Press, already had its author answer a few questions here.

What China Miéville finds exciting

China Miéville, one of the best writers of our age, on his new book, The City and the City:

Uncancan

A list of Some Good Fantasy on the M John Harrison blog. Worth looking at. Good: Tom Waits’s on it. Bad: Glavinic again. Worth looking into, at any rate. There’s some intriguing books (and movies, and records) on it, some I’ve haven’t even read.

Cut up and Tabulate!

David Nygren twittered an idea, “about writing a novel in an Excel spreadsheet.”, experimented a bit and invented, with help from Nick Name, the Novexcel. Here’s how that looks:

Instead of writing a complete novel in excel form, he wrote a story first:

The first worksheet of the Excel file has the “raw data,” the story itself (8 columns x 30 rows). The easiest way to read it is to click on the first cell and then use the arrow keys to move to the next cell you want to read. The second sheet has a line graph that gives graphical representation to the “Character Intensity of Thought Units” (CIT Units) for each “Action Segment” in the story.

The raw data is formatted to print nicely, if that’s your thing. However, I encourage everyone to read the story in its electronic format. I’ve turned on “Track Changes,” thereby cordially inviting you to collaborate with me on this short storyspreadsheet. Make any changes you feel are appropriate, and then send your version of the short storyspreadsheet back to me at david [at] theurbanelitist [dot] com. I’ll be able to highlight any changes you made.

I keep reading texts and essays by people advocating cutups, but this is a first (for me). The possibilities of this are endless. via

Wordslaughter

This year’s Tournament of Books is under way. Don’t miss the carnage, and 2666′s inevitable win. Here is the first round:

2666 v. Steer Toward Rock
judged by Brockman

Netherland v. A Partisan’s Daughter
judged by Kate Schlegel

The White Tiger vs. Harry, Revised
judged by Jonah Lehrer

Unaccustomed Earth v. City of Refuge
judged by Mary Roach

Shadow Country v. The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
judged by Anthony Doerr

The Lazarus Project v. The Northern Clemency
judged by Monica Ali

A Mercy v. The Dart League King
judged by Jonathan Eig

Home v. My Revolutions
judged by Witold Riedel

The Lizard of Oz: Rachel Ingalls’ “Mrs. Caliban”

Ingalls, Rachel (1983), Mrs. Caliban, Harvard Common

ISBN 0-87645-112-1

There is a risk to this: burdening a book or poem with the weight of a classic work of literature, especially if the work is as iconic as Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The shorter the book, the more frivolous, usually, the reference, in my experience. None of this is applicable to this novel, which wears the reference lightly and plays with it, with ease and joy. Rachel Ingalls is a writer unjustly neglected by the reading public, her work is largely out of print, including this novel, probably her most famous book. Mrs. Caliban was published in 1983, but not a single phrase or scene in it feels dated. Having just finished it, I find it hard to contain my enthusiasm, to put my pure and utter delight at reading this novel into words. Everything about this book fits, every word, every image seems perfectly calibrated. It’s intellectually rich, it’s use of intertextuality is fascinating and challenging, but above all else, it is a great read that races through a fantastic spiral of events, dragging the engrossed reader along. The book is frequently very funny, often rather sensual, but, au fond, as when we hear the protagonist say to her 6-foot lover, “Larry, you’re all I have”, it is a profoundly sad novel, a sadness that, lucky for us, never turns to bitterness.

As is to be expected, no one in the novel is actually called Mrs. Caliban. The protagonist is called Dorothy, which naturally recalls the Wizard of Oz. She is a housewife, whose life feels empty to her. Her husband, Fred, is frequently claiming to be working late, but Dorothy suspects him of actually having an affair; Fred has had affairs before and currently he is distancing himself again from his wife, not touching her more than necessary, moving the beds apart. This last distancing happened after, after an accident and a miscarriage, the pair suddenly found themselves childless. The accident had brought them together for a short period, but the miscarriage had driven them apart. As in so many cases, the husband, irrationally blamed the wife for what happened. Marriage is portrayed as an imbalanced relationship, where the wife is more of a servant than a sensual human being. It’s not just Fred. Estelle, Dorothy’s best friend, finds out that two men are proposing to her in order to acquire a housemaid, already seeking sexual satisfaction on the side with other, younger women. This strange piece of dialog illustrates Dorothy’s need well:

“Oh, Jesus Christ, Dot. You would go get some useless toy dog like that. Fat lot of good that would be if you turn the corner and bump into a gang of roughs who’d beat you up and rape you.”
“With my luck,” she had screamed, “they’d tie me to the railings and rape the dog instead.”

Up to now, Mrs. Caliban has intermittently shown signs of curiousness: the radio seems, for instance, at times to interact with Dorothy, when the radio program is interrupted by a speaker who imparts, sotto voce, soothing messages for her. One day, however, a strange (even stranger?) message, in a loud voice announces breaking news. A giant green sea monster, called “Aquarius the Monsterman”, has escaped from the “Jefferson Institute for Oceanographic Research”. Since her special messages so far had all been delivered in the same tone of voice, Dorothy decides that this has really happened. This broadcast starts off a novel which is preoccupied with a constant flickering of fantasy and reality, and Ingalls displays no interest in telling us what’s real and what isn’t. The fantastic events become more pronounced when “Aquarius the Monsterman” suddenly arrives on her doorstep, turns out to be called Larry and to speak English. Both name and language have been forced on him by the researchers at the Institute, who performed gruesome experiments on him, torturing the poor guy and even abusing him sexually. For the rest of the novel, however, we’ll only know him as Larry.

Larry is something of an antithesis to the world around Dorothy. In contrast to our pop-cultural expectations he does not have an unpronounceable foreign name, which the savvy researchers have shortened to Larry. He was given his name because in his home culture:

“We don’t give names… Everyone knows. We recognize each other.”

The whole culture seems far more intuitive, people do “the same things” and look the same., it seems less like a humanoid society and more like a tender, well-oiled machine, such as nature may appear to be at times. Larry is very tender, careful. Apart from webbed toes and frog eyes he appears to look like any (good looking) man. The fact that he is stark naked quickly awakens Dorothy’s desires, which lay dormant for a long time:

He sat down beside her. He said, looking at her, “I’ve never seen. Men, but not someone like you.”
“A woman,” she whispered, her throat beginning to close up.
He asked, “Are you frightened?”
“Of course.”
“I’m not. I feel good. But it’s very strange.”
A lot more than strange, she thought. And then: no, it’s just the same. They rolled backwards together on the bed.
“Wait. Not like that,” she said.
“Show me.”
“I’m a bit embarrassed.”
“What does that mean?”

She proceeds to have sex with him quite often, everywhere in the house. The novel never describes the sexual act, but shows its reflection in the changes in Dorothy, who becomes happy, relaxed, who suddenly starts to take an interest in life again. She learns what Larry is prepared to eat and what not, she learns about the way he was treated in the Institute. Automatically she assumes multiple roles. She is protective, as of a child, she caters to him as she caters to her husband and, most importantly, of course, she has taken him as her lover. At night he hides in the guest room or drives around town (she teaches him), and whenever her husband is gone, Larry comes out. Events spiral out of control when he kills five louts in self-defense, who attacked him with knives and broken bottles. The media immediately points to the dreaded monster; clearly, he’s no longer safe in her house, people will notice and tell on her. She must get him back to sea, which attempt leads to the cataclysmic finale.

Many of the references to “The Tempest” are obvious, I’d think, but there is a twist to it all. Larry is both Prospero, the man who comes over the sea and leaves again at the end, and Caliban, the native ‘alien’, who is taught the ‘civilized’ culture, who is perceived to be in need of teaching (incidentally, he does not only learn language. He watches a lot of TV and starts, suddenly, to imitate a dancer in a commercial. After learning the performance he asks Dorothy what it means. She replies that it’s just a dance performance and considers telling him about the cultural moorings of dance, but thinks better of it. After a while, twoscore pages later, Larry proclaims to have understood what it means. We are never told what Larry’s groundbreaking insight is, but clearly, using his limbs in the semiotically fraught way of dance is a language, as well, and Larry recognizes this immediately, and learns). Since Larry is, as I mentioned, a representative of the forces of nature (He seems, at times, as naïve and helpless as Prince Myshkin, but their naivety is rooted in completely different circumstances; indeed, it’s rather Dorothy who is a weathered, numbed descendant to the Prince, I think), one may see the world where humans built their cities as the island where Prospero’s rule has wrought many changes. Dorothy, the best candidate for ‘Mrs. Caliban’, supports such a reading. The very name “Mrs. Caliban” is ambiguous. Fred, her husband, is clearly in no shape to be the noble savage, but at the end, Larry and Fred, somehow, have merged in her racked mind: asked about her husband’s name, she produces the name “Larry”. This suggests that it is only at the end of the novel that she has become Mrs. Caliban.

This issue of naming and reference is fickle. Ingalls interrogates two large constructs, both concerned with power and disenfranchisement. There is gender and its intricacies, the relationships between men and women, the roles both automatically assume and the difficulties of breaking out of such a role. Both Dorothy and her best friend Estelle try, and both, in a way, fail at it and both are tragic failures, because we can see it coming. The depressing, claustrophobic domestic situation of Dorothy is emblematic for the world and society she lives in and it takes Larry for us to see that. I say: “for us”, because all the characters are restricted to their world, they are never afforded the opportunity to actually reflect upon their roles and relations. The second large construct is only hinted at, and it concerns the idea of enlightenment and progress. Larry and the Institute are two factors in this discourse, but the criticism does not only strike at blind belief in scientific progress: when a news report about the five dead teenagers moves Fred to rant about the ugly, giant monster, we get more than a whiff of the amount of prejudice and racism that is part of this society’s structure. The fact that the community appears to be completely ‘white’ only adds to the claustrophobia. In order to to this in the brevity she has chosen, however, Ingalls is forced to project very conventional, strangely unproblematic sense of corporeality. It questions many conventions, but bodies just exist and are all functional human bodies. I said ‘strangely unproblematic’ because, after all, we encounter a 6 foot sea monster which has never lived with humans, which doesn’t speak normally, which is irritated by the movements of dance, but this is all taken in stride. The strangest part about this is sexuality.

While emphasizing the needs of sexuality for Dorothy, the novel is less explicit about the effect this has on Larry, who has never had sexual intercourse before. In a way, Dorothy makes him into a man, but we never learn whether this effects any change in Larry. After all, we aren’t even sure Larry exists at all. The uncanny messages that we learn about on the very first page, introduce a sense of surreality. In the sense of Brian McHale’s excellent explication of postmodernism, this is a highly postmodern novel which at no point expresses an interest in finding out what’s real and what’s not. There are parts of the story that conform more to what we conventionally perceive to constitute ‘reality’ and parts that conform less to that, but Ingalls is constantly mixing up her elements. Certainty is not for us, and it’s neither for Dorothy who, in the final chapter, scrambles to hold everything together even as life and fantasy fall apart. In a way, Dorothy is caught up in a Cyclone but she can neither return to Kansas nor land in Oz, so she’s in a state of limbo. Thinking about this I was reminded of Salman Rushdie’s famous essay on the Wizard of Oz where he points out the difference between the Kansas of the book and the Kansas of the movie version. If I do not misremember him, he emphasizes the fact that the Kansas of the Wizard of Oz movie is not a realistic Kansas, as the one in L. Frank Baum’s book is. It is a curiously warped version. In Mrs. Caliban, Dorothy may be living in a country which is the dark twin of that Kansas.

Short Circuit: Ilija Trojanow’s “Autopol”

Trojanow, Ilija (1997), Autopol, dtv
ISBN 3-423-24114-4

While not conceiving or constructing it first, the Autobahnen, the German highway system, is still considered to be one of Adolf Hitler’s lasting achievements by many Germans, not just revisionists. In his second novel, “Autopol”, Ilija Trojanow digs deeply into the tar to excavate a horrific dystopia, published in 1997, on the heels of his widely praised debut novel “Die Welt ist groß und Rettung lauert überall” (1996), as part of an Internet project, as a “novel in progress”, published in small, hyper-linked installments. Since then he has been traveling the world and went on to published multiple travel accounts of India, Bulgaria, Kenya, Zimbabwe and Mecca, he has also been writing essays, managing his own small publishing house (all of his books, incidentally, were published elsewhere). With all that, it took him 9 years to finish his third novel, “Der Weltensammler”, which I’ve reviewed here. “Der Weltensammler” is, as I said then, a masterpiece, frightfully aware and complex, a mature work in every way, a warm, full-bodied read. “Autopol”, in contrast, is short and very lean, almost angular; it’s also considerably less complex, serving its ideas up hot from Trojanow’s excellent mind.

When it was finished and, finally, published in book form, for a while readers had the choice to read the paper copy of it or the hypertext online version. All I had was the book itself, and while I can see how the novel would have worked as a hypertext, I do not have the option of reading it as such any more, since the online version has disappeared. Contrary to my expectations, ordering all the bits and pieces and binding them into a single book may have rendered the whole enterprise less interesting, rather than more, but that’s purely speculative, of course. The actual book on my desk is certainly worth reading and recommended. It’s a science fiction thriller, told in very small chapters. There are dialogs, conventional narratives, photographs, copies of press clippings, and an official memorandum. The plot is rather conventional, but cutting up the narrative and offering several voices the opportunity to tell the story makes for a quick and varied read. The novel consists of three sections; while the basic mixture of formal genres within each section stays roughly the same, the headings change. This may appear to be an inconsequential change, something that could be seen as simple trickery, but “Autopol” not only relies heavily on such changes but it also draws much strength and insight from them. It’s power is not, after all, derived from the writing itself, but from other elements: scenario, ideas, and formal tricks. The writing, I’m sorry to say, is weak, though it is never actually bad: somehow Trojanow always manages to be at least functional. He conveys what he has to in a decent style without the stylistic embarrassments that plague so much of current German fiction.

The basic idea is simple: a political dissident, Sten Rasin, is imprisoned in a huge prison colony, the eponymous Autopol, where criminals are dropped into to disappear; Rasin subsequently stages a large-scale prison escape attempt, in the course of which hostages are taken and people are killed. In Autopol, there is no rehabilitation, it’s a place where those end up whom the society wishes gone. Thus far, nothing new. The structure of the prison, however, is novel. It’s not a region or a place or, God forbid, one of those prison planets so ubiquitous in SF movies. It is a system of highways, a closed circuit that is cut up into four sectors, each of which has four rest stops. In between the rest stops, cars ceaselessly circulate. These cars are the prisons, and their drivers are called pilots, since the cars are apparently meant to be a mix of high tech buses and modern trains. The rest stops are solely meant for the drivers. Prisoners only get off the buses when they are sick or dead. They eat, sleep and live on the road. This system, closed off the the world bustling on outside, has developed a dynamic of its own. It is not run by the government, it is run by a company; the judiciary has almost unchecked powers to drop people into the abyss that is the Autopol and neither the company nor the people outside care. As it turns out, by now, even if they did care, the system cannot be effectively supervised by the people. Criminals are not just abandoned in the prison; by dropping them into the closed system of the Autopol, they are dropped out of the “open” system of the society outside.

This scenario will evoke several unpleasant historical and cultural associations in most readers. There are roughly three layers of significance. The first, and most unpleasant, is the most obvious one. In my first sentence I mentioned the Führer, and the Third Reich is a central reference here. One of the most salient associations, I think, are the cattle wagons used to move Jews through Europe to their fatal destination. As with the Autopol, the railways were a kind of closed system, with most onlookers pursuing a don’t ask, don’t tell policy in regard to the prisoners. The context here is different, of course, but Trojanow is concerned with the frightening ability of a society to cast out its members without looking twice and asks how this ties into our notions of narrative. “Autopol” dwells quite extensively upon the intricacies of speech and discourse, partly by using different genres, as mentioned, partly by the inclusion of an undercover journalist, who is determined to ‘get the truth’. This is the second major reference, equal parts Natural Born Killers and Katharina Blum. Journalistic ethos and narrative truth are both important parameters here, and questions arise as to how the media shapes our understanding of the world etc. If this sounds unspectacular, it is.

This part of “Autopol” is tedious and repetitive. Much of the resulting boredom is due to Trojanow’s decision to set the novel in a world very similar to the one he lived in then (1997 Germany). He restricts the SF elements to the Autopol. This, of course, makes some of the novel’s predecessors such as Böll all the more obvious, and severely restricts the scope of its criticism. That’s something that we often find in fiction writers who turn to the tools of SF for inspiration, but shy away from going all the way. So ’tis with “Autopol” as well: by restricting the amount of SF elements, Trojanow loses many advantages the genre offers. This restriction is clearly intended to generate immediacy, to make the criticism more directly relevant to today’s readers, and, in this, the novel definitely succeeds. Trojanow is a very good writer, too good not to make this book work at least at one level. His decisions, i.e. opting for sound bites rather than longer prose sequences, and for immediacy rather than complexity, mar the novel, I think. As it is, it is highly readable, well executed, but never rises beyond “good”. Good, but, I fear, forgettable, like a good, strong drink.

A drink, that only speaker/readers of German are able to enjoy, so far. As of today, only three of Trojanow’s books have been translated into English. Adding “Autopol” (or his debut novel!) would not be the worst of ideas. Get to it.

Wild at Art: Gottfried Keller’s “Der Grüne Heinrich”

Keller, Gottfried (2007), Der Grüne Heinrich (Erste Fassung), Deutscher Klassiker Verlag

ISBN 978-3-618-68023-9

This extraordinary novel, translated into English as “Green Henry”, is generally acknowledged to be one of the great novels of World Literature (we’re not getting into Canonization etc. here, a’ight?), and while I find ranking literature difficult, especially over a large period of time, after finishing “Green Henry” I could not but concede the justness of such a categorization. Please take heed: there are two editions of “Green Henry”, one published in 1854/55, with Gottfried Keller, at 33, still a young, energetic man. The second edition was published 25 years later, its author a settled, paunchy old man, almost as old as me. I read both editions a dozen years ago, this time I only reread the first edition. There are significant changes between the two editions and much of what distinguishes the first edition has been changed in the second, especially the dark ending, “dark as a cypress”, as Keller himself put it. I advise anyone who considers reading this book against reading the second edition first. Alas, I have not been able to find out which edition the English translation is based on.

“Green Henry” is not a perfect novel, far from it. Compared to perfect novels such as “The Good Solder”, this one is almost a formless, youthful, overcooked piece of prose. Keller was writing and drafting the novel while the presses were running, his publisher taking the drafts straight off his hands. Immediately after publication Keller expressed his distaste with the outcome of his work. He planned and drafted this novel for over ten years, assembling odds and ends, shifting parts to and fro. The only thing that stayed constant over all these years was the basic idea and the ending. When explaining why he did not discard the novel instead of trying to revise it into a bearable edition, Keller said that there are parts of the novel which he cannot explain, which he cannot reproduce. There are parts of the novel that “one can only have once, and only give once”, as he wrote. After finishing the novel, the reader will feel himself able to point to phrases, chapters, scenes the writer may have meant. I think this says a lot about the book and the impression it makes on its readers.

The plot is not particularly noteworthy, per se. As a classic Bildungsroman it follows the general rules of the genre. It follows Heinrich Lee, a young man from Zürich, through the first stages of his education, academical and sentimental, up to the dark last pages. One of many remarkable aspects is the structure. After twoscore pages Keller inserts an autobiographical récit. It is referred to as a “Youth history” (Jugendgeschichte) in the novel and makes up roughly half of the length of the complete novel. This section is written in the first person singular; the narrator is Heinrich himself and throughout the rest of the novel he carries the manuscript of the Jugendgeschichte everywhere with him. When he, in the later stages of the book, travels back to Zürich, poor and disgraced, he owns nought but the clothes on his back and the manuscript that contains his Jugendgeschichte. The beginning and the rest of the novel is narrated by an omniscient third person narrator, who is, true to the time, quite judgmental, but he is just judgmental enough to balance the cocky voice of Heinrich which has accompanied us for such a long time. The novel as a whole sometimes feels like one of the long, elaborate dreams related during its course, but it feels eerily balanced. Characters move in and out of it; the Jugendgeschichte starts at the beginning of one volume and ends in the middle of another; the third person narrator is sometimes annoyingly interested in Heinrich’s thoughts and feelings and sometimes he barely registers the existence of these things in Heinrich, but it all, miraculously, seems to cohere. And it’s Keller’s voice and thinking that makes it cohere, not the plot, not the writing and certainly not Heinrich the self-important twat.

Heinrich is driven by an ardent wish to become an artist; he has considerable talent and finds at home in Zürich several teachers to help him on his way. When the Jugendgeschichte sets in he is without a father. His father used to be a famous and brilliant man, and his fame is both a help and a hindrance for Heinrich in his days in Zürich. Heinrich’s mother is a dear, caring, thrifty woman, one of the most endearing characters I have ever encountered in literature. She manages their household money, pays for Heinrich’s lectures and, when he’s of age, endows him with enough money to enable him to move to Munich where he intends to pursue a career as a professional artist. The Jugendgeschichte suffers from having a first person narrator, because Heinrich (the protagonist) is a typical teenager, a know-it-all, who pities himself almost as often as he envisions a golden future; the fact that Heinrich (the narrator) wrote the Jugendgeschichte shortly before leaving for Munich, casting judgment upon his younger self, is making it worse.

There are two basic concerns in the Jugendgeschichte: art and love. Heinrich is a typical teenage boy who vacillates between pining for girls, which includes writing poems and drawing pictures of and for the loved one, and acting cool, in order not appear vulnerable towards the girl who obviously cannot feel anything for him. Granted, my own youth may have been a particularly pathetic specimen (which I still hesitate to turn to for in my writing, no matter how much I’d like to tap that source) but not much appears to have changed, once you subtract obvious (positive) changes in a society’s mores, such as teenage sexuality and the influence of Christian thought on your average thinking teenager. In this, we never see Heinrich grow up. In his infatuations and affairs with girls in Munich, he never stops being his teenage self. If a Bildungsroman charts a maturing of the main character, not just an education, “Green Henry”, I think, violates that rule. His behavior towards the first girl in his life and his behavior towards the last girl are strangely similar. Heinrich, called nicknamed ‘green’ because of the green clothes his mother sews for him, remains green for all his emotional life. He’d rather evade confrontations than talk or sit through them. If he has the opportunity to not open himself up to hurt, he will take it. As someone who can understand the logic of that, I could have told him that hurt is not easily put off one’s tracks; someday, it will catch up with you. Heinrich has this lesson driven home to him again and again yet he doesn’t learn, he remains green Henry.

It is completely different with art. Art, for Heinrich, is a continuous learning process. First he learns from teachers, then, upon visiting relatives in the country, he starts to learn from nature. The Jugendgeschichte is crammed with Heinrich’s ruminations about what real art should and should not do, it discusses the relation between art and nature, between copying a picture and creating one oneself. Time and again we see Heinrich torn between the easy solution of drawing an idea, a cliché ridden image, with no connection to the natural world, and what he sees as the ethos of art, trying to provide as truthful a picture of nature as possible. We find that his relatives in the country, even his peasant uncle who has not seen much art in his life, can easily spot the artifice, the ‘wrong’, the dishonest kind of art. All this is spread heavily throughout the Jugendgeschichte, and it’s tedious. As mentioned, we have two Heinrich’s in the Jugendgeschichte, Heinrich the protagonist and Heinrich the narrator, one more self-important than the other, and their combined odds and ends of education add up to this huge amount of vapid lecturing. The tediousness, however, has a function in the novel. We’re supposed to feel the stupendous amount of youth that lords over all of Heinrich’s actions so as to feel him growing in the second half of the book.

And, in contrast to Heinrich’s emotional life, his understanding of his own creativity and his art really matures and grows. His career as an artist never takes off because Heinrich isn’t willing to make it work, but at the same time, cut off from his home, cut off from nature, he digs deep into his creative urge and instincts. He understands, what works for him and what doesn’t. In a clear contrast to the Jugendgeschichte we barely see him drawing, painting, reflecting. What we get are dreams, where the cultural history of his country and the angsty swamps of his unconscious play out, we see him try to wake up after a year of doing nothing, try to tap into his creativity again, breathe into himself. In a pivotal scene he sits down to draw but he produces an abstract painting. His friends ridicule him, but neither they nor Heinrich himself can help being affected, if only for a moment, by the power of the painting, which is subsequently discarded. It does not fit the idea of good art, and good art, then and now, is equal parts accomplishment and market value. Heinrich admires crassly commercial artists, who are able to make any idea or sujet work with little effort: they just put their usual spin on it and it sells and sells and sells. Heinrich, on the contrary, is still searching for the perfect means to express himself.

Much of this novel seems run-of-the-mill, after all, it’s 1854, some of the most important and well known Bildungsromane have been written and provide a subtext for the novel: Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, Wieland’s Agathon or Jean Paul’s Siebenkäs. Keller clearly has no ambition to better them or to innovate. This novel turns, to look not at the world or literature or things like that, it turns inward. The way that the Jugendgeschichte is strewn over the 4 volumes in which the novel was published originally is significant: Heinrich’s quest is clearly also a formal imperative for this novel, which doesn’t present one long, convoluted plot as a series of skirmishes or battles with Heinrich’s art or himself, and he loses all of them. How ironic that, midway through the novel, he is to win the only actual fight he is in. Heinrich’s character makes us doubt his accounts in the Jugendgeschichte, too often Heinrich appears to exonerate himself from tougher charges; so while we read about his youth, we are constantly doubting the veracity of the Heinrich’s reports of the events relayed to us through his voice and when we watch him bumble through Munich, we are armed with the discussion of nature and artifice, shaken by the long dream sections which sometimes appear to be seamlessly blending into reality, and we start to doubt the evidence of our own ears, which makes for fascinating reading, although you don’t HAVE to read the novel that way. It doesn’t force any reading on you; you are perfectly free to read it as an example of the Bürgerlicher Realismus (bourgeois realism, a genre that dominated especially German 19th century novels in the second half of that century (Same time next week this blog will feature a review of another famous specimen of that genre, Wilhelm Raabe’s popular novel “Der Hungerpastor”)). Fact is, it drew me right in and especially the first and last third just flew by. Highly recommended (but only the first edition, remember!).

Colson Whitehead: The Intuitionist

Whitehead, Colson (2000), The Intuitionist, Anchor
ISBN 0-385-49300-2

I may be experiencing a streak of luck lately with books I read for fun, but this right here is another excellent novel. It’s Colson Whitehead’s debut, published in 1999.Whitehead has since published two other novels to general praise and won a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called genius grant, and reading “The Intuitionist” it’s easy to see why. It is a very well-written, completely original novel about racism and elevators. It’s not perfect but it need not be. “The Intuitionist” is very good and I cannot recommend it highly enough. It makes use of a fascinating kind of allegory: the protagonist is an Elevator Inspector, and the story is set in the Elevator inspector milieu, in a society which roughly corresponds to 1950s America, I think, featuring scenes at Elevator college seminars, in Elevator libraries, at Elevator inspector conventions, not to forget that Elevator inspecting gets done now and then and quite a bit of Elevator theory is relayed to us,including something that is most certainly a kind of Elevator deconstruction. The Derrida of Elevators is called Fuller, and although he’s been dead a while, he has an important part to play. I wager there isn’t a Derrida in actual Elevator inspecting practice. Although Elevator inspectors certainly do exist, it is not an academic profession, and I certainly doubt the existence of Elevator inspecting theory. Elevators provide an extraordinarily original allegory for a whole category of class concerns, but there is a danger. Racism and topics like that can be perceived as ‘dirty’, unpleasant, but clothing them in a clean allegory may help your rhetoric but it often reduces the inherent urgency of a topic like this. Colson Whitehead is smart enough to recognize that.

On top of this ingenious construction, he has crafted a suspenseful thriller. The plot is wonderfully complex and, true to its genre, only unravels slowly, as the protagonist finds out about intrigues and secrets hidden in every nook of the Elevator inspecting milieu. The protagonist, Lila Mae Watson, is the first black woman to become Elevator inspector. Inspector Watson. As someone who, in the center of power, is relegated to the peripheries, she is made to be the fall guy in what at first appears to be a union dispute. Two factions fight for the leadership of the Department of Elevator Inspectors, and as elections approach, they will use any means necessary to secure an advantage. A pair of elevators recently inspected by Watson suddenly free-fall and crash. Although nobody has been harmed, this is a terrible accident that makes headlines and puts Watson’s faction at a disadvantage. In an effort to clear her name, Watson follows up on different shady leads, has a run-in with the mob, reveals a few secrets and falls in with a bad guy. The book, as far as genre is concerned, is a cross between the bookish thrillers of Dan Brown or Elizabeth Kostova and the detective novels of Chandler, but it is, of course, far more than that.

To understand the way the allegory is weaved into the novel, I think this passage, early in thew book, is significant:

For the first time it occurs to Lila Mae that someone might have been hurt. “That’s impossible. Total freefall is a physical impossibility.” She shakes her head.
“That’s what happened,” Chuck reaffirms. He’s still looking up at the ceiling. They can hear some of their colleagues whooping outside the door. “Forty floors.”
“Which one?”
“Number Eleven, I think.”
She remembers Number Eleven distinctly. A little shy, but that’s normal in a new cab. “The entire stack is outfitted with the new Arbo antilocks,” Lila Mae argues. “Plus the standard reg gear. I inspected them myself.”
“Did you check them,” Chuck asks tentatively, “or did you intuit them?”
Lila Mae ignores the slur. “I did my job,” she says.

In this innocuous passage several important references are hidden. Arbo is an elevator manufacturer, one of the two giants of the trade. The other is called United. The important reference, however, can be found in the dichotomy between “check” and “intuit”: the two aforementioned factions fundamentally differ in their approach to elevators. One of the factions prefers a hands-on approach, to look at the wiring and the mechanical parts of the elevator to check it. They are called the Empiricists and the current Chairman of the Department of Elevators is an Empiricist. The others intuit, they feel the Elevator, they try to sunder elevators and elevator-ness. They are called Intuitionists, and Fuller, the Derrida of elevator theory, is the founding father of that discipline. Lila Mae Watson is an Intuitionist, of course. Interestingly, one of the premises of the novel is that this approach, mad as it may sound, actually works. In fact, the Intuitionists can boast better results and Lila Mae Watson is the best of them all.

The fact that the narrator calls Chuck’s reference to Intuitionism a slur, when it could also be read as a factual question, since, after all, it’s what Watson actually did, points to the fact that it is actually the precarious balance between these two ways of reading Chuck’s words that defines many conflicts in the book. It is not surprising that Lila Mae Watson, the woman on the margins, chooses this discipline. And a secret, not revealed until late in the novel, about the founder of Intuitionism, further expounds upon that intricacy. Empiricism is more than the received and dominant doctrine. It is also the ideology of the dominant power paradigm, reflecting the society’s axiomatic values. So, in a black-and-white reading, Empiricism (as defined in the novel) is white, male, commonsensical, anti-intellectual bullshit. This is reinforced by passages like the following:

See, the Empiricists stoop to check for tell-tale striations on the lift winch and seize upon oxidation scars on the compensating rope sheave, all that muscle work, and think the Intuitionists get off easy. Lazy slobs.
Some nicknames Empiricists habe for their renegade collegues: swamis, voodoo men, juju heads, witch doctors, Harry Houdinis.

One of many strengths of this novel, however, is that such a reading, tethered solely to those in power, does an injustice to the actual intricacies. Watson is the only black Intuitionist, and her guild turns out not to have clean hands, either. For one thing, the novel reflects upon the intricacies of center and periphery, not opting for the easy way out. Pompey, the first black inspector, attacks Watson two thirds into the book:

This is a white man’s world. They make the rules. You come along, strutting like you own the place. Like they don’t own you. But they do. […] I was the first one in the Department. I was the first colored elevator inspector in history. In history! And you will never, ever know what the hell they put me through. You think you have it bad? You have no idea. […] You had it easy, snot-nose kid that you are, because of me. Because of what I did for you.

Problems of identity play a central role in the novel, questions of blackness (Whitehead has clearly read Aimé Cesaire) for example and questions of class, inasmuch as income, erudition and related issues are concerned. The extent to which corporate America was inimical to the young black men and women, to which it has pitted one isolated African American against another, to which it has silenced black voices to better hear the white screech.

Now here’s where the academic dispute becomes salient. It’s clearly intended as a satire on the academic world. In chapters that sketch Watson’s professional career, we are availed of large batches of elevator theory and we are clearly not supposed to take any of that seriously. In fact, as we will find out later, some central textbooks were expressly written as a joke. Personally, however, I think this is not just satire. Communication is a central issue in the novel: I think an especially important reference here is Henry Louis Gates jr.’s theory of the Signifying Monkey. Gates’ theory rests upon the assumption that African Americans have a way of communicating which is all their own, which creates a nonviolent way of coping with oppression and the oppressor, of opening a channel of communication among the silenced. In “The Intuitionist”, all the black characters ‘signify’, in Gates’ understanding of the term; in fact, Intuitionism is, partly at least, most certainly the practice of reading and concentrating upon a subtext in order to order one’s understanding of the whole. All this is wrapped in a light package.

This book is very easy to read and it is enjoyable on a very basic aesthetic level. The language is certainly rich and assured, although, as is expected of a debut novel, it hits a few shrill notes now and then. As I said before, Whitehead manages the genres he’s using very well: it is a suspenseful thriller, until the ending, which is a disappointment but not necessarily because of Whitehead’s ineptitude. On the contrary, I think Whitehead is slowing the book down deliberately at the end, to let his points sink in. He is clearly not interested in letting the reader breeze, untouched by his thinking, through a thriller set in a strange elevator world. He wants, no, he makes us understand what we have been served. And one of the last points we are made to understand is that it is no surreal fantasy world, after all: “The Intuitionist” presents a world that is almost a mirror to ours, a city that is like ours, just with elevator theory. It’s Gotham City, with elevators.

We are never told which city the City actually is, but like Gotham, we are pretty sure the city in question is supposed to be a distorted version of New York. And so, last but not least, “The Intuitionist” can be read as an ode to New York, since, among other things, the City is described as the one which the whole world looks to where elevators are concerned. It is a precarious city, and New York is a precarious city, the city of integration, but also a city of race riots, a city of chances and death traps. When Watson, after the underwhelming finale, decides to start anew, she stays in New York and we accept this: where else would she go, but to Gotham City? Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses. “The Intuitionist” shows us a society that is under a heavy strain by racial and class conflicts, that is on the brink of eruption, with the tired, poor, huddled masses leading this revolt; and it shows us a way out, not the way of assimilation, but the way of intuition, of communication, of finding a voice, and hearing the muffled voice behind the thick metal doors.

Mouthfuls

Recently I discovered not just the fabulous blog A Literary Cocktail (anything that encourages drinking in style and on a regular basis is lovely) but the affiliated blog Bookbabble, I found it necessary and remarkable to point out the book talks posted there (among others, Irene of the Literary Cocktail partakes from time to time). Here’s the latest:

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Flotsam: Stephen Marche’s “Shining at the Bottom of the Sea”

Marche, Stephen (2007), Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, Riverhead Books
ISBN 978-1-59448-941-9

Mark my words. Stephen Marche will be enormous, one of the greats of English language literature, if his second book, Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, is any indication. This is is an excellent book. Well conceived and well executed, this is a book the kind of which is rarely encountered. It is a book of fictions that is itself a larger fiction that touches upon many interesting and necessary issues. Before I lose myself in the alleys of my mind, let me tell you: I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It is doubtless among the best books I’ve read during the past months, and Stephen Marche may well be becoming one of my favorite living writers, if he can sustain this quality in his future work as well. This book has many ancestors but perhaps none so obvious as Borges and the divine Nabokov, author of a book that is quite similar to Marche’s masterpiece, in several regards: Ada, or Ardor. It is also heavily informed by theory, especially poststructural and postcolonial philosophy. Marche quotes luminaries of the fields in question such as Homi K. Bhabha or Jacques Derrida, but the work is never bogged down by these references and I will try to steer clear of Derrida and Bhabha in this review as well.

“Shining at the Bottom of the Sea” has a lot to say but it does it in a light and enjoyable manner. The fat sweaty man of theory that so often rolls upon the unsuspecting reader in books concerned with postcolonial issues, is luckily completely absent here, although the basic premise and structure suggests elsewhere. The book claims to be an anthology of writers from a former British colony: Sanjania, a Caribbean island. It is completely fictional, as is everyone of the 21 (unless I miscounted) Sanjanian writers included in the Anthology. Stephen Marche pretends to be merely the editor of the volume, who provides an informative preface and a glossary of the writers included in the anthology. The anthology contains Marche’s preface, an introduction by Leonard King, the most famous living Sanjanian writer, three sections of stories and one section of literary criticism by Sanjanian critics and others (including a letter by Ernest Hemingway to John Dos Passos). The scholarly parts of the anthology are (formally speaking) perfectly annotated and bibliographed, most references, of course, being completely bogus.

There is a caveat here: this is a careful book that does not sweep up the reader in a ravishing feat of storytelling, although Marche certainly would have the chops to pull this off. No, many stories here not terribly engaging nor are they supposed to be: most stories take less up less than ten pages, and the reader is not allowed to settle into them before he is thrown out again by the scruff of his neck. Some stories we are sad to leave, sad stories about love and death, pride and humiliationsome, I’m sorry to say, just pass us by. It’s a credit to Marche’s powers as a writer that we don’t feel this as a loss, it all adds up the big picture. Because this is, after all, what the pattern of stories is about. The stories manage to convincingly recreate a whole culture, the culture of a fictitious country, no less. With the very first story, the very moment Marche steps up to the plate, a swashbuckling history called “The Destruction of Marlyebone, the Private King” by a “F.R. Fisher”, we are captured by Sanjania. This story is three pages long but it packs the punch of a dozen more pages at least.

This story demonstrates many of the strengths of the whole collection. It never descends into low trickery, it does not fiddle with orthography or funny accents. There is a fine line between representing a voice and slipping into racism, and funny orthography is frequently amusing, but not necessarily evocative, certainly not in and of itself. Marche avails himself of an English that is predominantly modern, even in these early stories, supposedly written at the beginning of the 20th century (we’ll return to this in a moment), but he puts a peculiar spin on it, creating a tone that is all his own and that, after a few stories, we will recognize as “Sanjanian”. There are small tweaks on the syntax, but the larger part of the tone is carried by composites such as “oceanshrouded”. Marche fits these words snugly into the fabric of the stories, they never feel odd or like curios, instead we as readers accept that this choice of words is part of the rhythm of Sanjania. Marche’s success works on two levels, this one, the immediately pleasuring power of his writing is one of it.

The other level is cerebral. There is, as would be expected of a project like this, a double bottom to it all. This book is so carefully, intelligently, yes, slyly, constructed it provides hours of cerebral entertainment, even before we come to the “criticism” section. After all, in the first third of the stories, we have yarns that read like 17th century stories, or 19th century Romantic recreations. From the biographical notes, however, provided for each writer, we learn that they, as previously mentioned, are contemporaries of modernism. The style is clearly anachronistic, even within the fictional framework, Mr. “F.R. Fisher” undoubtedly intended it as a stylistic throwback. It’s propaganda, reaching back to one’s cultural roots to strengthen one’s cultural identity against the colonizer, in this case, the “Britishers” as they are often referred to in this book. A second detail that most will immediately remark upon is the very name of the island, since it refers both to the largest and most well known British colony (India) and to the odyssey of the Zoroastrians who fled what is know today as Iran and trekked all over Asia until they settled in India, where they are known today as Parsi.

This kind of cultural fluidity with a strong inner core that travels well (see Clifford and others) works as well for Sanjania. Both culture, that is, cultural travel and identity, as well as geography, literal and metaphorical, play an important role. In a central story, “Flotsam and Jetsam”, a bookseller expounds upon his theory that Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest” was written by a Sanjanian and is set in Sanjania. Travelers, i.e. people, ideas and books, are just so much flotsam and jetsam, thrown into the river of time in distress, with all the stories expressing a yearning for the time when the shipwrecks of old Sanjanian culture sailed under full sails (yes, with all the problematic issues associated with that). Again, not to be too repetitive, but the very fact that I can write this attests to Marche’s evocative capabilities, evoking a culture that does not even exist, and doing it in a light and readable manner to boot.

All of this raises numerous questions about culture and colonialism, not least because Marche’s method works from an English core, a colonial norm, everything here reaffirms the strength of the culture of the colonialist, and displays the maze one is sent to when one seeks out one’s own cultures central ideas with the tools provided by the colonialist. It also shows to what extent we’ve all become cultural colonialists, to what extent we’ve become readers who have, theory be damned, accepted certain framings of the story. Marche’s book does a merry jig in our frames, toys with them, by constructing a world without representing an actual world, solely with the constructs we use. He is a jester, laughing at us: this book does not evoke a world in the sense of representing it, it just taps our convention of how a world is to be evoked, read, (re)presented. Marche does not hit us over the head with these ideas, he lets us realize them, as we glide through a sea of stories, flotsam, all of us. This is a very good book. Read it.

Rationality: Beryl Bainbridge’s “Harriet Said…”

Bainbridge, Beryl (1977), Harriet Said…, Fontana

ISBN 978-0-00-614650-6

“Harriet Said…”, was written in 1958, in fact it was the very first novel Beryl Bainbridge wrote but, as it happened, when a publisher in 1972 finally agreed to publish it, it was the third of hers that was published. Bainbridge has since gone on to become one of the most renowned British novelists of her generation, but these days, several of her novels are out of print, including “Harriet Said…”, which is a big shame. This is an excellent novel, almost flawless; it is also a short novel that contains several other novels’ worth in its pages. It’s a sweet recollection about childhood, a complex evocation of interpersonal dynamics and a dark meditation on the emptiness in the souls of three families, that continues to build momentum until it ends in a climax that provides no resolution nor relief to the helpless reader. Since the book is extraordinarily well written, I almost could not resist reading the whole book in one sitting.

Part of that is the writing, and the eerie way that Bainbridge conveys the irreality of childhood experiences. Thinking back, haven’t we all got memories that appear to be, somehow, less than ‘real’? Language has always been an able medium to convey things like these; to my sensibility it seems that language, as our mediator between our synapses and the world outside, is uniquely qualified to express different ways of worldmaking, of perceiving what we are up against. Writers like Beckett manage to convey this without having to resort to manhandling language the way Rushdie does. Rushdie’s a writer on the adult side of the spectrum who tries to duplicate the other side. In contrast to him, Beckett seems to operate from within language. Apart from a few peers, the only batch of writers who also achieve this effect regularly are writers of children’s literature. They have to appeal to a child’s way of making the world, and they realize, like so few ‘adult’ writers do, to what extent children -and we- are, to use that old phrase: at the mercy of language.

Beryl Bainbridge’s book, however, balances on that divide between these two writings. One, which is conscious of our part in making the world, and the other, larger, adult one, which just accepts the world as a given (see, Rushdie molds the given into shape. He derives his effect from the contrast with the conventionally perceived way of worldmaking). In a way it is a novel on the adult side of the divide, looking over the fence at the Beckett side, if that makes any sense. Details are hard to provide. Odd phrases,words, transitions that sound exciting, and then on the other hand, imagery that is quite explicitly surreal, like this passage that could be the intro to a scene in a musical:

An old man on a bench further along began to whistle between his teeth, tapping his stick on the ground. When the red red robin goes bob bob bobbing a-long…A row of thin knees jerked up and down, a row of polished boots clumped in time to the tune. Any moment now, I thought, Harriet would fling her arms wide and sing at the top of her voice. She was probably only waiting for a tired chorus of old women in shawls and tattered skirts to dance over the stones, massive bosoms a-bobbing, before she began.

The writing is a source of joy. It seduces the reader from the very first page. Novels where the very language keeps surprising the reader are rare. This is one of them. Despite all this, I had to stop to catch my breath and continue reading it the day after. The plot that thus affected me revolves around three families, or rather: two girls (best friends), an old man, and their respective families. The two girls’ relationship is what powers this novel. One of the two is the first person narrator; the other’s the eponymous Harriet. The title is an apt description of the dynamics between the two thirteen-year-olds: the protagonist listens and acts, while Harriet speaks. Harriet appears to know her way around the world: she explains how best to treat their environment and, more significantly, she explains how to read it. The narrator keeps a diary but Harriet dictates her the entries.

Harriet knelt upright, drew out a box from under the dresser, opened it and handed me the diary. “We’ve neglected it,” she said as I took it. “I’ve lots to write about.” (…) Harriet gave me the pencil and lay on the floor again. “Put; ‘She has been away in Wales.” I began to write and kept my face averted, trying to be neat and quick at the same time. “ She has been away in Wales. What next?” “Put, ‘I have been here alone’.” Harriet’s voice was muffled against the carpet. “And that you have become more intimate with the Tsar.” It was always Harriet who dictated the diary, but it was in my writing in case her mother ever discovered it.

More significantly, it’s also from her perspective, not Harriet’s. The idea behind this is the fact that, in case of failing memories, a diary is the best evidence as to what events transpired, and Harriet, as the smarter, more mature friend, is better qualified to be in control of such an important task. She does not, however, stoop to picking up the pen herself (w/ one exception). She’d rather dominate the narrator, getting her to write, as she is also getting her to do fuck and murder. As events unravel, the narrator appears to be coming into her own, mostly through contact with the old man, Mr. Biggs, who is referred to as “the Tsar” by the pre-teen couple.

Early on, she thinks that she has fallen in love with the Tsar, despite the fact that she clearly does not know what it is to be in love. Harriet advises her on how to woo him, which explains why the narrator’s attempts at seducing the old pedophile quickly evolve into cruel games of domination. The narrator is an apt pupil, and is slowly developing a sense of self esteem, as she nudges the old man about. However, this self-esteem is highly unstable since she proves to be completely helpless where direct manifestations of love are concerned. She is unable to deal with situations where Harriet’s instructions are not helpful; there is a reason for the inadequacy of Harriet’s instructions in that area: when it comes to love, Harriet herself meets her limits. Thus, the two of them stumble through a sequence of events, fumbling for the right moves both in the literal as well as the figurative dark. Their helplessness and the lonely despair of Mr. Biggs make for a dense spiral of events.

There is a terrible tension in the book, which is getting worse and worse the further the novel progresses, until it approaches horror, of the kind we know from novels like Doris Lessing’s “The Fifth Child”. The kind of horror that arises from what dwells within us, not in our souls or dross like that but what hides within our communities, what dire things our social structures can beget. In other words, the horror is not in what the characters do. Like in many novels on, for instance, the Third Reich, terror is, partly in the readers’ recognition of the irrational rationale at work, the fact that we are never in the dark about their irrational rationale and can recognize it and fit it all too well into our world. Partly, we also find terror in the fact that these two girls can use their hometown as a place for cruel experiments without anyone noticing, anyone caring, any repercussions. These two girls are daughters of the enlightenment, and the events that unfold are not at odds with that tradition. This is our good ol’ friend, the instrumentelle Vernunft, dontcha know. And here we have two girls, defenselessly exposed to rationality.

This is an extraordinary novel, suspenseful but poetic. It is well written and conveys to us both the joy of childhood and the terror of the evil in our midst. It is highly intelligent and complex, but it remains accessible and readable at all times, if one can stand the darkness. It’s easier than in the aforementioned “Fifth Child”, but that’s because the light writing mitigates it. A most remarkable book, highly recommended to anyone.

Enemy Action: Ian Fleming’s “Goldfinger”

Fleming, Ian (2002), Goldfinger, Penguin

ISBN 978-0-14-200204-9

This is one of dozens of new editions of the James Bond novels. It’s safe to say that everyone will have seen at least one of the movies made on the basis of the novels and stories penned by Ian Fleming, former Navy commander. Most of the movies have clearly ascended to the rank of classics by now, and so have the novels. Since I suspected that their classic status was conferred upon them not by virtue of literary quality but on account of the influence that these novels exerted over not just British but world literature (and influence, as we well know, does not per se make for good reading) I have not read any of these books yet. So, on a whim in December, I went and bought Goldfinger, since that always used to be one of my favorite movies. This book took me ages to finish and bored my socks off. It’s not a complete disaster, though. There are a few interesting issues in the novel.

The first issue is racism. Ian Fleming’s novels are infamous for being both racist and misogynist, to such an extent that these things had to be toned down in the movies, and we’re talking about a series of movies here that are both racist and misogynist, so that’s quite something to say. The novel appears to disappoint these expectations right at the beginning: when the character of Goldfinger is introduced, a decadent, rich, greedy man with a name that is close to stereotypical Jewish names, Fleming directly addresses his readers. He points out explicitly that Goldfinger is not Jewish, but Latvian. Clearly Fleming knows what his antisemitic readers would expect or assume. He does not interrogate these attitudes or assumptions, he does not criticize them in any way, he merely acknowledges their existence. That is enough, however, to issue this book with a peculiar context. It tells us, or suggests to us how to read certain other passages, such as this one:

Bond intended to stay alive on his own terms. Those terms included putting Oddjob and any other Korean firmly in his place, which, in Bond’s estimation, was rather lower than apes in the mammalian hierarchy.

Since Fleming knows that he can rely on the less savory instincts on the part of his readers, the explicit way this is formulated points to the fact that the important part of this passage is not the racism but “in Bond’s estimation”. This is especially relevant, since some other prejudice, concerning both women and homosexuality, is brought up in a casual manner and not reflected at all by the narrator.

Thus, this racism is part of Fleming’s characterization of Bond. The agent with the license to kill is shown to be a rather simple, old-fashioned conservative, with a distaste for the modern world, with its streaks of decadence and the tendency towards cosmopolitanism. Indeed, Bond, the tireless traveler, who speaks multiple languages and can handle several countries’ cultural customs, is a well-garbed nationalist, a leftover imperialist, who mourns his country’s demise and is slowly but surely turning into a cultural pessimist. The less than favorable depictions of Americans attest to that. He is linked to his enemy, Goldfinger, by their mutual distaste for modern paper money, if they need to have it at all. Bond hands away huge amounts of money without blinking an eye and Goldfinger doesn’t actually care about the monetary value of his gold, he craves gold both as an object and as a means to achieve something. Build a house, train servants, win. There is but one major difference between the two, as constructed in the novel’s black-and-white world: Goldfinger’s a commie.

Goldfinger, published in 1959, at the end of that era of American politics known as McCarthyism. The basic methodological idea of McCarthyism corresponds to the basic methodological idea of the Inquisition: the accusation is the best proof the prosecution needs. The accusation is enough as it is. The epistemological method of the novel at hand works in the same way. Once the idea that Goldfinger works for the Soviets is lodged in Bond’s brain, it immediately turns to fact. He came up with the idea by pure conjecture, there was nothing pointing in that direction that would have justified coming up with that connection, yet as the novel progresses we find out that, yes, indeed, Goldfinger is a commie. Clearly the novel shares certain ideas about communism with luminous contemporaries (well, almost) such as McCarthy; it turns these common ideas, that even today are shared by center and right wing politicians, into personal faults of Goldfinger.

The novel is not well written, by any measure. It is, however, interestingly constructed. Its concept of truth and proof is not the only aspect worth mentioning. Another one is its use of suspense and action. The novel is plainly not interested in block buster action. There is plenty of that, but it’s crammed into surprisingly few pages, especially when we consider the amount of space that is devoted to a simple game of cards or golf or a meeting of thugs and gangsters. All of these scenes, and many more, are not about action but upon the suspense that is culled from a so-called battle of wills. I forget which famous writer (Clausewitz? Bah who cares.) said it, but it has been said that a battle is decided the moment it starts. This is the case in Goldfinger as well. In the game of golf or in a demonstration in Goldfinger’s mansion we see battle lines drawn, we see troops marshalled, we see two generals facing off. The actual fighting is decided the very moment the troops embark. When Goldfinger tells his foe:

Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.”

he is saying that even the first two events, a game of cards and the aforementioned game of golf, have been enemy action already. My tolerance for boredom is rather low, so I won’t be doing it, but it’s certainly worthwhile to read through Fleming’s oeuvre in order to monitor it for these battle lines, for the net of suspicion and subterfuge before the first shot is fired. If you have limited time for reading, I cannot recommend this book, but if you can spare the time, it is certainly worth a peek.

And then there were none: Robert Coover’s “Gerald’s Party”

Coover, Robert (1985), Gerald’s Party, Grove Press
ISBN 0-8021-3528-5

Ros was famous for her breasts

When Robert Coover published his great and grandiloquent novel Gerald’s Party in 1985, he was a well-established voice in experimental American prose fiction. The two books he is still best known for, The Public Burning and Pricksongs and Descants, had already been published and praised. In a way, this explains the boldness with which “Gerald’s Party” strides onto the literary stage. It wears its theoretical commitments on its sleeve. The narrator and various characters frequently give voice to various theoretical concerns that shape and inform this novel. And, in contrast to novels like Ana Historic, it is a resounding success. We walk away from this novel with the feeling that we cannot say anything about it that the novel does not say better, in a more subtle or brilliant way. The novel dissects theatricality, performativity, sexuality, fairy tales, gender roles, genres and other things, and by making its points in a very obvious manner, it dissects the very act of dissection as well. A cerebral novel like this can be a rather joyless affair, a trudge, a mind-numbing effort. Gerald’s Party isn’t. The reason for this is the writing. There are few writers like Coover: every word in Gerald’s Party feels necessary, no word appears to be substitutable with another.

Saying that the book is excellently written is not saying that the novel is written consistently, it slips –or rather: hops- from register to register. Also, despite the appearance of dozens of characters and the prominence of dialogue, there’s no real trace of what is often referred to as ventriloquism. The characters’ voices in the novel, as they start to crowd the narrow confines of 313 pages, become more and more interchangeable. The author’s nimble fingers are always present, most obviously in the many poetological passages commenting upon the structure of the novel. There is for instance, the following, from a monologue by a painter who tells us why her project has failed (“Gerald’s Party” can well be regarded as a successful attempt to scale the artistic heights the painter abandoned):

“I meant to have a lot of doors in my painting, doors of all sizes, some closed, some partly open, some just empty doorframes, no walls, but the various angles of the doors implying a complicated cross-hatching of different planes, and opening onto a great profusion of inconsistent scenes, inconsistent not only in content but also in perspective, dimension, style- in some cases even opening into other doors, mazes of doors like funhouse mirrors – and the one consistent image was to be Ros. […] But I could not handle it. Too many doors at once, you might say.”

This passage could have been voiced by most characters (except the drunk ones whose speech is slurred. Interestingly, the level of intoxication is the only possibility to tell people apart until this, too, near the end of the novel becomes less of a helpful, too). Apart from the basic artistic principle, there are a few details from this monologue that also fit a poetological reading, most notably: “the one consistent image was … Ros.”

Ros, you see, is the victim of a murder that sets this novel’s cogs in motion: “None of us noticed the body at first” is the first sentence of a novel that, partly, follows – or rather imitates – the conventions of a genre that can be called the “salon mystery”. It involves a party with several characters, a murder and the appearance of an inspector, who solves the mystery by listening to all party guests still alive and finding out ‘whodunit’ (it wasn’t the butler). The inspector is mostly fiendishly smart, like Christie’s elegantly mustached Belgian Hercule Poirot. This genre is so well known that it has been made fun of several times, two of the most hilarious film versions surely being Neil Simon’s “Murder by Death” (1976) and Blake Edwards’ “Pink Panther” (1963). One is, indeed, wondering, what drove Robert Coover, a writer clearly well acquainted with pop culture, to do another send-off in 1985. The answer’s easy: Coover is not actually writing a parody.

Coover is using the form of the salon mystery to comment upon issues that, incidentally, can form a part of genre specimen, and this includes parodies (most parodies, you’ll find, adhere quite strictly to the conventional rules of a genre, since they derive much of their humor from these rules), he is not commenting upon the form. “Gerald’s Party” is a multi-faceted wonder of a book. For one thing, it is a novel concerned with decadence and depravation. We find that numerous people engage in sexual acts, some of them aborted, some not, some of them consensual, some not. This is a veritable moral pigsty, which, at times, may leave a distinct smell of Rome, burning, in some readers’ nostrils. After the first murder, several other people die, yet in this cesspool of a cocktail party, few people care about dead friends or lovers, unless the act of killing provides a spectacle that rivals sex. In contrast to that, we have a few scarce traces of honest, vulnerable love. There are, for example, two people trying to gauge the love they have for each other. This strain of true feeling is clearly at odds with the party at large.

As is rationality, the backbone of the mystery genre. This genre which is concerned with finding the correct (read: one) way of reading the world is subverted here by introducing a multiplicity of attempts of reading or making sense of the world. The most basic element of the genre and the one which all parodies I personally know focus on, including the two named, the Inspector, is almost completely isolated. His trajectories hardly intersect with party proceedings, something that becomes apparent early on:

Inspector Pardew, absorbed in his examination, noticed little of it. Under the glass slides as a makeshift magnifying glass, he peered closely at the wound, poking and probing, muttering enigmatically from time to time. He picked Ros’ breast up once by the nipple to peer under and around it, but he seemed disinterested in the breast itself – if anything, it was an obstacle to him.

The detective, Inspector Pardew, does not mingle with the crowd, he slips in and out of the novel and when he, true to genre conventions, steps in at the end, to present us Ros’ murderer, his solution is not tied to any plot strand. I said it subverts the genre and Pardew is the clearest evidence for this. Where mystery novels usually attempt to parse the world and its inhabitants for evidence, gathering knowledge to find out “whodunit”, “Gerald’s Party” is completely disinterested in the “real world” within the book. The events related by the book point outside the book; this book has two layers: something that is supposed to be a ‘real world’, where inspectors, murders and these things occur. This is hidden, however, under a thick carpet of words and intertextuality, the second world within the book.

There is logic within the first of the book’s worlds which is buried by the party and its events. This is made plain by the fact that Inspector Pardew, who insists upon the interconnectedness of all events, who appears to have no clue as to the actual events at that party, arrives at a successful conclusion at the end, finding out, after all, ‘whodunit’. His conclusion is puzzling to us readers: we have nothing apart from the events related by Coover, the cheeky bastard, to go on, all we have is the carpet. And like a luscious oriental weave, Coover’s book is an artificial construct that hides the world where Pardew’s perspicacity works its magic. This paradox of, to borrow that famous phrase, blindness and insight, i.e. the impossibility of reading the world from any one point of view with any degree of objectivity, is woven through the whole book. Since Pardew is the only one who is honestly attempting to understand the world, at least the one he has access to, the other instances of that paradox resemble tropes more than earnest attempts.

The first trope is introduced through a cameraman, who appears on the scene early on, and whose readings of the party are scrutinized by partygoers at the very same party on a small TV. We learn that the moving pictures he produces, and, by extension, moving pictures in general are unreliable; they are, indeed, readings and not objective depictions. The pictures are affected by the interest of the camera man, by the interaction with the observed and by the way the image arrives at the viewer. An image can be recorded, looped, repeated, stored and manipulated and the viewer is none the wiser for it. The trope of the camera is a representative of the reader, it is Coover’s tool to show up the reader’s arrogance who scans the page thinking he/she understands what’s written on it in a thoroughly objective way, when all he/she does is create an image of the text his mind the exact form of which is dependent on much more than mere sight.

Coover, however, offers other tropes as well. The strongest of these is theatre: the party guests are all part of an art crowd, who converse about the plays and movies they have acted in or directed. Ros has starred in pornographic art, she is the one who connects everything within the book. Lovers and fellow actors occupy the same slot in the memory of things past, and the more the novel progresses, the more art and life merge, to the point where the living room is transformed into an impromptu stage. Although the stage is volatile and vulnerable to intrusions from real life, the lack of an audience transforms all of the party guests into spectators and points to the roles all of the characters are acting out, that we all, in effect, are performing. These roles, Coover suggests, can take different shapes and draw from different sources. There are the obvious things, such as the fact that Gerald’s wife or Alison’s husband are never named, they –and others- are only referred to by the roles they are allotted in society.

The real fun, however, is to be had once we find that texts can be structuring principles as well, fairy tales, for example. The novel plays an elaborate game of hide-and-seek with fairy tales such as Snow White, drawing you deeply into the novel, as you play along. And yes, we are playing along. This is a novel that constantly reflects upon the way it is made, about the effect it has on readers and about the situatedness of its readers. This means that it is highly dependent upon its readers coming from the same cultural context as the author. For all the explaining it does, a surprisingly large part of it is subtext that is understood intuitively. Beni, one of the actors at the party, exclaims: “But she’s not one of us […] she wouldn’t understand”.

This is true for most of this novel as well. If it does not fit your sensibility, you will not like it. The prose is great, no matter what your aesthetic allegiance, but this is a novel of ideas and they need to work for you. This is a warning: this novel is not for everybody. That said: I think this book is stunning, a full success, and the writer clearly among the best writers currently at work. The way he controls tiny nuances and wields the heavy hammer of theory at the same time is inimitable. Books like Marlatt’s disaster of a novel show how hard it is to make an endeavor like this work. Even for Coover: although my read started off with enthusiasm, delight and sheer pleasure in Coover’s craft, after closing the book the prevailing feeling was of exhaustion. A good exhaustion, but tiring nonetheless. It’s tiring, as well, to the novels characters. Those who aren’t killed, leave the party by and by, returning the house to its previous, conventional state. As we turn the final page, however, we are informed of an emptiness at the heart of that structure. All the party guests, all these voices that sound so alike, disappear and we find that what is left is less than we expected. Isn’t it always? When the lights go out and the guests leave, who is left?

Kapitalismuskritik

She showed me a photograph: it was Ros on her hands and knees, looking over her shoulder at her raised bum – or rather, not a bum at all, but a rich banker, a snowman capitalist with greedy black-button eyes on each pale cheek, a carrot-nose stuck in her anus, top hat perched on top, and a wet bearded mouth about to ingest a shining gold rod.

from Robert Coover’s novel Gerald’s Party

Shadows: Yasushi Inoue’s “Der Tod des Teemeisters” and “Das Jagdgewehr”

Inoue, Yasushi (2008), Der Tod des Teemeisters, Suhrkamp
ISBN 978-3-518-46025-2
[honkaku bō ibun, translated by Ursula Gräfe, not yet translated into English]

Inoue, Yasushi (2006), Das Jagdgewehr, Suhrkamp
ISBN 978-3-518-45845-0
[ryōjū, translated by Oskar Benl, translated into English as The Hunting Rifle]

Tanizaki, Jun’ichiro (1977), In Praise of Shadows, Leete’s Island Books
ISBN 978-0-918172-02-0
[Translated by T.J. Harper and E.G. Seidensticker]

These are two novellas by one of the most highly regarded Japanese prose writers in the second half of the 20th century. I am completely unread as far as critical writings on Japanese prose are concerned, which is not an understatement, so excuse all and any foolish comments that may be obvious and/or superfluous. The Hunting Rifle is Inoue’s first publication, published in 1949, the Death of a Tea Master’s one of his last publications, published in 1981.

Reading the first one puzzled me inordinately. The Hunting Rifle is a strangely seductive work of art. It is reduced to a few significant pieces of dialogue, a few episodes. I started to read it as a love story, but my expectations, schooled by reading countless works of genre literature, were soon disappointed by the way it was executed: it is not an actual love story, it’s a retelling of a love story at a distance, or rather: it is a story about love, if that makes any sense. The story which forms the framework is about a writer who turns an observation about a middle-aged man with a hunting rifle into a poem, published into a hunter’s magazine; the poem, which is extraordinarily beautiful, closes by saying that the rifle presses all its weight into the back and soul of the lonely man wearing it, and that it’s radiating a blood-specked beauty that never appears when the rifle’s targeting something living. Clearly, the poem is critical of hunting, and consequently the poet is astonished that a hunter’s magazine would print it. Shortly afterwards, a man writes him, sure of being the middle-aged man described in the poem, and sends him three letters, asking the narrator to read and then burn them.

The three letters, which the narrator then ‘presents’ to the reader, tell of a forbidden affair between Saiko and her cousin Joskuke, both of whom are married, an affair, which, as we learn soon, ends with Saiko’s suicide 13 years later. The letters are from Saiko’s daughter, who was handed a journal by her mother just before the mother kills herself, and writes a long letter to “Uncle Josuke”, which becomes more and more condemning. She condemns the affair as amoral and thus demonstrates the constraints of the society which led to the affair being covert and doomed; additionally, her righteous – and partly justified- indignation creates an atmosphere that helps the reader to better place the events which are more fully related by the two other letters. The second letter is from Josuke’s wife, Midori, who tells him, among other things, that she has long known about the affair and asks for a divorce. The third and final letter is written by Saiko, who thanks him for having loved her so much for 13 years, and expresses, at the same time, a deep and devastating loneliness; it is a passionate letter yet very composed and cold.

Between these three letters we find events described that have led to four people being lonely, cold, even when passionately in love. There is a deep yearning for love, for company, in each of these letters, although Saiko’s daughter’s in a different way. They are hunting, for love, for composure, for dignity. In an episode related in Midori’s letter, Josuke aims at her back while both sit on a porch. She says she noticed even though Josuke put the gun away quickly. The chaos and violence of life does not reach these characters, the things they do follow careful, pre-established lines. And Saiko’s suicide is an old, known way to end such an affair before it is troubled by violence; and yes, suicide is not violence, as in The Death of a Tea Master, suicide is shown to be an adult, well-considered decision to endow one’s life with a shape even to the end of it; or rather: especially at the end of it. That illicit affair brought disorder into their lives, even if it was just a little, and Saiko’s final action is shown as an attempt to-re-order it. Inoue finds beauty in the spare and in the darkness in people’s minds.

I was reminded of Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s short but breathtakingly beautiful essay “In Praise of Shadows”, which praises traditional Japanese architecture, where simplicity rules. As he makes abundantly clear early on, this simplicity is a superficial one, it may and often does hide complexities, but the surface, inside and outside the houses, is clean and spare. It is not the cleanliness of modern glass-and-steel architecture, it’s an aesthetic that involves changing surfaces like wood, which glitter with age the older a house is. The shadows, which are praised, are those left in a room by the angle of the light falling in. Shadow and darkness are not the absence of light for Tanizaki, they are the most important element. It is in shadows that we can contemplate ourselves best, it is light that disturbs our inner order. Thinking and aesthetic meditation are described as almost incompatible with modern fixtures. This passage may illustrate what I mean:

On the far side of the screen, at the edge of the little circle of light, the darkness seemed to fall from the ceiling, lofty, intense, monolithic, the fragile light of the candle unable to pierce its thickness, turned back as from a black wall. I wonder if my readers know the color of that “darkness seen by candlelight.” It was different in quality from darkness on the road at night. It was a repletion, a pregnancy of tiny particles like fine ashes, each particle luminous as a rainbow. I blinked in spite of myself, as though to keep it out of my eyes.

Tanizaki mourns a style long gone, a style that cannot compete with the comfort central heating, electric lights and enamel toilets can provide. He feels an alienation of sorts towards that new world, he considers it a part of Western culture. If we Japanese, he says at one point, had invented these things, they would not be as corrosive to our culture as these Western objects are.

Maybe having read both of these books prepared me well for my second Inoue novella, “Death of a Tea Master”, maybe that’s why it did not irritate nor puzzle me at all. It is a beguiling, melancholy historical story retracing the mystery behind the self-inflicted death of a famous tea master, Sen no Rikyū, which soon turns out to be a meditation on the tea ceremony and those who take part in it. Maybe, however, it was different in the latter novella, since it wears its aesthetic heart on its sleeve, by following up both on the story as well as on the aesthetic background. When I closed its covers I found myself moved, entranced, and saddened. I felt the impulse to prepare a careful cup of tea, which is the strangest effect a book has ever had on me.

The Tea Master is a book that extends over a period of 32 years, from 1590 to 1622. It is a period of turmoil that sees the death of a generation of tea masters who appear to be the guardians of a certain culture, and their passing clearly signifies a change within that culture. The span of time encompasses the last throes of the Sengoku period, a time of upheavals and violent conflicts, which was ended by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, a powerful daimyo, as regional warlords were then called. Hideyoshi unified Japan by subjugating the other major clans or by entering into alliances with them. It was Hideyoshi who asked for Rikyū’s suicide by seppuku, the ritual suicide mostly undertaken by the retainers of defeated warlords, either voluntarily or not. This novel, which is supposed to be a modern edition of old, unedited journals of a 17th century monk by the name of Honkakubo, charts this monk’s attempts to find out why Rikyū killed himself. And surprisingly, ‘because Hideyoshi told him to’ is not the answer.

As the Hunting Rifle seemed to be a love story, the Death of the Tea Master appears to be a mystery yet applying our genre expectation to this novel would make for as disappointing a reading experience as did reading the Hunting Rifle as a love story for me. As the plot, which covers 32 years, extends over as little as 167 pages in my edition, there are huge gaps and jumps. Honkakubo does not search for the answer to the mystery, at least not in the world around him. His search does not necessarily involve an interrogation of people and evidence, what McHale, if I remember correctly, refers to as the epistemological quest, which distinguishes the modern from the postmodern. Honkakubo makes use of information if and when it comes and the use he makes of it is singular: as he is handed a document that belonged to the late tea master, asked for his expertise, he finds that the document contains thoughts on the tea ceremony and spends weeks, carefully copying it down, meditating. During the 32 years he is invited by a few other monks and tea masters because he used to be a student of the late Rikyū, and has a few elliptical talks with them about Rikyū and the tea ceremony in general. They are elliptical because Honkakubo is reticent, quiet, polite. Even when among people who may cast light upon the mystery, he does not pursue a line of questioning that may enlight him. These people he meets are far more inquisitive yet they must consider him a dissatisfying conversationalist, because he is reluctant to share his interpretations of events during the last years and months of Rikyū’s life.

Even as more and more facets of the great tea master’s life enter the picture, his death remains a mystery, because outside events cannot shed light on it. Only as Honkakubo immerses himself in meditation, praying at Rikyū’s shrine and contemplating the tea ceremony, he gains an idea of what happened. Generally, asking for someone’s suicide meant killing them as surely as would thrusting the tanto into their bowls with their own bare hands. There is, however, a major difference. It is, after all, a self-inflicted death; in this case, Honkakubo and others are additionally wondering why Rikyū did nothing to alter Hideyoshi’s opinion. As our rulers today, the daimyos of Rikyū’s time were prone to bouts of anger now and then. Asking for a retainer’s suicide apparently was often a rash act, and the retainer was expected to ask for forgiveness and mercy afterwards. Rikyū would, it transpires, almost certainly have been granted mercy. Instead, he went to his death without complaint.

The tea ceremony is offered as a possibility for understanding the reasons for this. Rikyū was one of the first important tea masters to practice the art of wabi-sabi, a philosophy of simplicity, intimacy and modesty. I briefly discussed Tanizaki’s essay on architectural aesthetics earlier and the culture the loss of which he laments, is basically one dominated by wabi-sabi. In one of the most intense scenes in the novella, the tea ceremony is described as an encounter with death, with the tea drinker submitting to the tea master’s power. Although the tea master, who grinds the tea leaves, boils the water, cooks and serves the tea, may seem like a servant, he is actually the one person who is in charge of a ceremony which is apparently of high spiritual importance, because drinking the tea is not important; one has to drink it in the right way. People bow their heads under the yoke of ceremony, of convention and their tea master’s actions. Seppuku, the ritual suicide, is, in a way, quite a similar procedure, only here the warlord or emperor calls the shots. It may be that by refusing to ask for mercy, Rykiyu is refusing his lord the power which seppuku usually grants him.

This, however is but a personal interpretation. The novella itself does not decide upon any single reading. Instead it tries to make the cultural and personal context, in which the novella’s characters move, as clear as possible. It is not asking the reader to follow up on its clues to find out who did it; on the contrary, it invites the reader to meditate upon death and power and may, in some perceptive readers, awake a sense of self which we may be alienated from by modern times. This corresponds to the Hunting Rifle in a curious way. Behind the sad and cold story that is offered to us, love, not necessarily reciprocal love, is presented as a way to awaken your self as well. The Death and the Tea Master never allows for us to construct dichotomies, oppositions, it asks for our thoughts on death and autonomy; similarly, The Hunting Rifle asks us to consider our attitude towards love. Saiko relates an episode from school, where girls in class distribute a sheet of paper with two questions on it: “do you want to be loved” and “do you want to love”. In a way, the book is about the characters’ own hypothetical answers to this question and about the effect this has on their lives. Both of the novellas seem very distant from us, culturally, yet that distance beckons us to step closer. Tanizaki writes, near the end of the essay, and he could well have been describing Inoue’s method:

I would call back at least for literature this world of shadows we are losing. In the mansion called literature I would have the eaves deep and the walls dark, I would push back into the shadows the things that come forward too clearly, I would strip away the useless decoration.

New it ain’t: Lydia Davis’ “Varieties of Disturbance”

Davis, Lydia (2007), Varieties of Disturbance, FSG
ISBN-13 978-0-374-28173-1
ISBN-10 0-374-28173-4

This is my first review of a story collection; what’s more Lydia Davis is a certified genius and I am a wooden-brained blatherer and arrogant to boot, so you’ll have to indulge me in this or stop reading. If you expect praise, you’re not going to find a whole lot of that here, I know that much, although I am not particularly sure where I’m headed.

“Varieties of Disturbance” is Davis’ sixth collection of short prose. Davis is one of the most honored and praised writers of her generation. She is also known as an accomplished translator, having translated Michel Leiris, Maurice Blanchot, and Marcel Proust, among others. Praise for her work seems to be ubiquitous, something I’ve only found out, strangely enough, once I started my reading of the “Varieties”. This book is advertised and praised as innovative, “rule-breaking” (back cover), with some, like Charles Baxter, claiming that Davis “is reinventing the short story in our time”. Ahem. Baxter is, I believe, mistaken (but it’s not his fault, we’ll come to that), since this book is nothing of the sort.

I have to admit that I have never before read a book like this. “The Varieties of Disturbance” is a good book, although the qualities of its stories is not consistent. Sometimes Davis heads for short time effect instead of letting her prose work out the ideas she has set them on, for example in the story called “Tropical Storm”:

Like a tropical storm
I, too, may one day become “better organized”

Or in a story called “The Busy Road”

I am so used to it by now
that when the traffic falls silent,
I think a storm is coming.

I will say this: The book is highly enjoyable and I don’t regret having read it. This is one of its two main strengths: the writing. Davis is an assured writer. She changes seamlessly from register to register, is in full control of her phrases’ cadences. This book is mostly extraordinarily well made; what’s more, Lydia Davis is an extraordinarily well read writer. She has dipped her quill deep into the inkwell of literary history, evoking writers and imitating different texts and styles. There are a few explicit references, chief among them a cutup/reworking of Kafka’s letters and a lame but, again, well-executed story that follows a traveler’s reading of Beckett on a road trip, but most of them aren’t. Davis is an ironist, however, and a true ‘postmodernist’, she rarely uses these styles, most of these stories are about the style they are written in. Thus, even when she writes in iambs or adopts the impish yet sharp tone of Lewis Carroll or Dr.Seuss, she never ‘stoops’ to their level of play, she keeps her distance, basically retelling a style as one would a story. A good example for this is the story “Jane and the Cane”.

The aforementioned story involving Beckett is, in part, symptomatic of a certain weakness of that collection: its strength rests on the power of Beckett’s words, not on Davis’ words and the best result of reading it is being sent back to yr own shelves to explore the grand Irishman’s words again . It consists of a complex interweaving of, for example, the trajectory of travel on the one hand and the trajectory of reading on the other. The story tells us how words and events are processed, how reading a text and reading a trip can be similar and what the givens in these two instances are. Contrary to what many critics seem to believe, however, ‘complex’ does not equal ‘good’. Just because a reader may feel he’s in over his head, the book isn’t suddenly a success. This effect is well known from critical reactions to so-called obscure writers. I have read more than one defense of Derrida that showed how little the defender understood of his subject (and I believe Derrida’s actually right); also, there are other writers in the postmodern section that I have not yet read that are praised by people who clearly have trouble understanding basic arguments, among them, most recently Ward Churchill.

Don’t get me wrong, the book is often intellectually tingling, quite like a crossword puzzle or a philosopher’s digest, There are short pieces that sound extremely deep and intellectually charged, I’ll quote two of them to illustrate the point made in the previous paragraph. The first one’s called “Index Entry” and touches upon all sorts of things, among them language in general and naming in special:

Christian, I am not a

The other one’s called “Suddenly Afraid”:

Because she couldn’t write the name of what she was: a wa wam owm owamn womn

Again, it’s almost a waste of breath to sum up its concerns, it’s all so plainly there. On the other hand, the simplicity and clarity is a merit of Davis’ work, I am just not sure how highly I would weigh that merit.

To sum up, Davis achieves sounding complex not by being a good thinker or good reader but by having read a large amount of good thinkers and writers. Her work draws from a huge bulk of sources and never shies away from flaunting this. Critics may erroneously declare her innovative, but the writer in these texts never pretends to make it new. Davis is postmodern in the best sense of the word. A similar effect is aimed at in a consummate story about a walk which a male critic and a female translator of Proust undertake. The critic is, we learn, dismissive of her work, preferring an older, less faithful but more poetic version. An episode on the walk these two take reminds the translator of an episode in Proust. She proceeds to quote the passage in both translations. Again, a similar set of questions and problems is raised as in the Beckett story, again pretty unsubtle, in a way that does not allow the reader to read it in a different manner. That happens because these stories are very spare, Davis unerringly going straight for the philosophical jugular of her pieces. She is rather disinterested in what is usually referred to as plot, if each story is taken on its own. However, over the course of the collection, things happen, people are described, interiors and exteriors are evoked, the works. “The Varieties of Disturbance” covers a large terrain, yet still keeps within the enamel confines of domestic life, roughly speaking. We find epigrams on the small humdrum tragedies of everyday life, as well as longer faux-academic studies of, for example, the letters a class of schoolchildren send a sick, hospitalized classmate. Davis’ writing which, while always competent, sometimes even dazzling, actually works best in sober contexts, like said study, or, in one of my favorite pieces, an account of the procession of maids passing through the household of a writer by the name of “Mrs. D.”. This is one of my favorite pieces because so much that is characteristic about the book is gathered here. Sobriety, pastiche, and subject. What subject? The domestic space. The titular disturbance is the disturbance of the private order, of our daily patterns. The title story dwells a little on the issue, I’ll quote the last third:

When I describe this conversation to my husband, I cause in him feelings of disturbance also, stronger than mine and different in kind from those in my mother, in my father, and respectively claimed and anticipated by them. My husband is disturbed by my mother’s refusing my brother’s help and thus causing disturbance in me greater, he says, than I realize, but also more generally by the disturbance caused more generically not only in my brother by her but also in me by her greater than I realize, and more often than I realize, and when he points this out, it causes in me yet another disturbance, different in kind and in degree from that caused in me by what my mother has told me, for this disturbance is not only for myself and my brother, and not only for my father in his anticipated and his present disturbance, but also and most of all for my mother herself, who has now, and has generally, caused so much disturbance, as my husband rightly says, but is herself disturbed by only a small part of it.

Make of that what you want. I think this part illustrates the merits and demerits of Davis’ work very well, although the writing is not typical, and from your reaction to it you may gauge the possible reaction you may have to the whole book.

I did say earlier that this book does not break new ground yet I also said that I have not read a book quite like this before. Where similar books concentrate on one or two sorts of adaptions, this one crawls with influence, we mentioned this earlier. At every single point the reader hears other writers. The most significant reference are probably works like Lichtenberg’s enormous Sudelbücher, his collection of aphorisms, essays and other texts. I know that the word aphorism is these days connected to all sorts of weak writing. Lichtenberg’s work, on the other hand, contains narrative episodes, thoughts and finished essays on literature and science. Lichtenberg was a true polymath, another word that has been applied to too much less worthy books these days, much as I love David Foster Wallace, he is often like a fish out of water when tackling science in non-fiction. Other writers and texts that come to mind reading Davis include Thomas Bernhard and books of his like “Der Stimmenimitator”, or short prose like Kafka’s, Beckett’s, Barthelme’s or Barth’s, it’s really a long list, and this is off the top of my head. “The Varieties of Disturbance” is unlike any of these books, because it resembles all of them, in part, without the original fire or brilliance. It’s a weaker collage of others’ styles, a weaker collage of others’ ideas, written by a very good writer. So how does the mistaken idea of innovation enter the picture? The publisher or the author printed the word “stories” on the cover of this book of short prose. As short prose, this is nothing new, as stories, this book does indeed break new ground. If I change the title of my inane master’s thesis and add the words “a novel” to it, I promise a novel the kind of which you have never before read. Distinguishing modes of reading from kinds of texts is not the worst idea, sometimes.

“The Varieties of Disturbance” is written in one voice, even when being punny, alliterative, iambic, this is the voice of one person. The book explores what I have called the enamel confines of domestic life. How children, maids and mothers shape our lives’ rhythms. This is the interesting part, the affecting part, the part that sets this book apart from similar texts. This it what makes it re-readable, watching the prose explore the nooks of this voice’s life, watching how babies, dogs, brothers cause little and big disturbances in her life. All the ideas about language and theory, none of them are new, nor particularly riveting. Yes, it’s fun, but that part of the book is like “Kill Bill”. New it ain’t. Read the book if you’re up for a bit of intellectual fun, do not read it if you want something special or new. Although your time is better spent with any writer named in this review, it’s not badly spent with Lydia Davis. Did I make sense?

Fittings: William Gaddis’ “Carpenter’s Gothic”

Gaddis, William (1999), Carpenter’s Gothic, Penguin
ISBN 0-14-118222-9

William Gaddis was probably one of the most celebrated writers in the English language in the latter half of the twentieth century. At his death in 1998 he was considered a major American writer despite having only four (a fifth, Agape, Agape, was posthumously published in 2002, as well as a collection of essays, The Rush for Second Place) novels to his credit. Two, JR, which is concerned with the world of finance, and A Frolic of his Own, which pokes fun at the law profession, have won the National Book Award. His chef d’oeuvre, the towering, enormous The Recognitions is the only one I have personally read, so far. Difficulty and, as trite an observation though it may seem, length, is one characteristic all three of these novels share. Carpenter’s Gothic, published in 1985, the third of his novels, is not very difficult and slim to boot. Thus, it’s no small wonder it has been given short shrift by many readers and is considered B-grade Gaddis.

For B-grade material, however, this is an amazing prose masterpiece. Even if every other novel by Gaddis were better than Carpenter’s Gothic, that’s no skin off CG’s back. This is a wonderful, extraordinarily written book. The plot is the least of it, yet it’s an grand plot with colorful characters that is generic yet consistently engaging. I have pointed out elsewhere on this blog how hard it is to make good genre books while trying to be ‘literary’. Dozens of boring books attest to that fact, for examples a few of Chabon’s genre forays, such as “The Final Solution”. Gaddis, however, has his generics down pat. The characters alone attest to that: the female protagonist, Liz, is a young beautiful heiress to a huge, evil conglomerate. She and her brother are not paid their full share though, they are paid from a trust fund. The conglomerate’s chief executive is also the one who controls the trust fund. His daughter is Liz’s best friend and richer than her, thanks to her father’s shady dealings.

Liz’s husband Paul, who may or may not have married Liz for her money, is an irascible media consultant for Reverent Ude, an evangelical priest, who is himself engaged in some shady affairs. Paul is a Vietnam veteran, who has come out of the war without decorations but with a lot of psychological damage. He is no Travis Bickle, though, Paul’s a functioning part of society. In fact, I personally thought that his psychological limitations are quite some help in his job. And he is very good in what he does, although he may not be the brightest bulb in the box. With everyone around him engaged in subterfuge and intrigue, Paul appears to grasp only a fraction of what is happening. Speaking of which, we should not forget the third major character, Mr. McCandless, a former teacher, who owns the house Liz and Paul are currently living in. His own background is a mystery. When asked by Billy, Liz’ brother:

“I mean what are you, some kind of geologist?”

He answers vaguely

“Yes. Yes you could put it that way, now…”

He may be involved in shady dealings, secret maps, clandestine knowledge about ore mines in Africa, or he may not. From these three characters a story is spun that gains speed as you turn the pages and comes to a violent and turbulent climax.

There are all sorts of tricks and games Gaddis plays with us. In a novel with an evangelist and his media consultant, the only fundamentalist ravings we get to read are McCandless’, who is a fervent atheist. They are amusing to read, and the only actual monologue we get served. Any bit from these rants is quotable, so I just use an early one:

Think I made it up? Like the name on that book there? You think ignorance isn’t dead serious? Red dirt, rolling hills, a rail line, trickle of a stream and a town grows up there, great trees meeting overhead down the main street and some civilized person names the place Chemin-couvert. A generation or two of ignorance settles in and you’ve got Smackover, a hundred years of it and you’ve got a trial like that one, defending the Bible against the powers of darkness they are doing more to degrade it taking every damned in it literally than any militant atheist could ever hope to. Foolishness bound in the heart of a child but the rod of correction shall drive it out so they whale the daylights out of their kids with sticks.

Another great topic is ownership, how things and people are owned, held and used, Paul, who barely owns anything, makes a point of holding and using as many things as possible, trying to pay/invest as little as possible in/for them so they appear to be his, largely a self-deception which starts with not paying the rent for the house and ends with trying to hold (on to) his wife, as he holds her breasts. Sexuality, per se, is repressed, there’s not much sex or open eroticism in the house, which also extends to the aesthetics. We only learn at the close of the novel that Liz is staggeringly beautiful, only after the events have started into their fateful gallop we even learn she’s a redhead. Once desire is freed, however, it starts to ooze and burn and takes ahold of every major character. As in The Recognition, authenticity and repetition is a major topic again. The very title refers to this. Late in the book, McCandless talks about the house which is built in a style called “Carpenter’s Gothic”:

Oh the house yes, the house. It was built that way yes, it was built to be seen from the outside it was, that was the style, he came on, abruptly rescued from uncertainty, raised to the surface -yes, they had style books, these country architects and the carpenters it was all derivative wasn’t it, those grand Victorian mansions with their rooms and rooms and towering heights and cupolas and the marvelous intricate ironwork. That whole inspiration of medieval Gothic but these poor fellows didn’t have it, the stonework and the wrought iron. All they had were the simple dependable old materials, and the wood and their hammers and saws and their own clumsy ingenuity bringing those grandiose visions the masters had left behind down to a human scale with their own little inventions.

He continues and later refers to the house as a “patchwork of conceits”. This could be said about the novel as well, in two ways. One is the plot. As typical of the genre, the plot is virtually “a patchwork of deceits”, i.e. a plot stitched together by all its characters’ trickery and subterfuge. The way this is realized, however, brings us to the second way. Gaddis isn’t content by merely writing a great Gothic novel, he undercuts expectations time and again, sometimes by playing with themes. Sometimes, though, he uses his most powerful tool: language. The book, to return to metaphor is well referred to as a patchwork of conceits, because sure as hell it is not a melting pot of conceits or something like that. All the intrigue is relayed to us in dialogue that almost never meshes. People talk and talk yet they don’t communicate. Liz is the medium of this sort of antisocial behavior, she endures other people’s plots and talks. Plots intersect yet they don’t meet and even after the explosive finale the major strands appear to be ‘pure’.

This novel continues Gaddis’ work with dialogue that he started in “The Recognitions” and brought, as as I have read it so far, to full bloom in “JR”. The novel is largely dominated by the things people say, the things they do are often relayed to us via dialogue, and this dialogue is so well written that it doesn’t need the tired formula many prose writers rely on, the “he said sadly” structure of introducting/framing speech. Gaddis’ dialogue doesn’t need this, he uses punctuation in order to convey pauses and speed, not in order to adhere to any dull rules of punctuation. His characters’ words double up, speed up, are pitched higher, lower, so we almost hear how they say it. His is an extraordinary control of other people’s voices. Many things have been written, especially in the 1990s, on this or that writer’s ‘ventriloquism’, writers like DFW or David Mitchell. The effortlessness of Gaddis’ casting voices, compared to the heavier-handed works of his younger acolytes, is humbling. The whole book seems to be written effortlessly. It’s a quick, fun read, written with a master’s hand who took on a genre and made it his. The boards and structures of the genre are there, but the fittings are Gaddis’ and the heart of the house, it’s soul, is his as well. And no one could have done a better job on either of them.

Intentionally Dull: Daphne Marlatt’s “Ana Historic”

Marlatt, Daphne (1997), Ana Historic, House of Anansi Press
ISBN 0-88784-590-8

I am not sure how to approach this rather short review so excuse me if I digress. It appears that in the last two decades a certain kind of philosophy has turned into “theory”, and many of its adherents seem to believe that within “theory”, philosophy’s rules no longer apply. Mentioning “gender”, “class” or “race” is quite enough, or dropping the name of enough canonized theorists. Thus, essays that do “theory”, often resemble lists of books and writers, containing barely a shred of actual argument. This is not restricted to any kind of theory, it can happen in a deconstructive reading of Dickinson as well as in that unbearable book on Merrill by Gwiazda. When non sequiturs become the main structural principle of an academic work you know you’re in trouble. The only thing that matters in such books or essays is the amount of texts mentioned and the degree to which they fit that book’s idea of “theory”. I have read a review of a biographical study of Elizabeth Bishop where the reviewer’s main complaint is that a passage in the book in question is plausible but “undertheorized”. Huh. I bet it’s also badly argued since the point is tough to argue (the necessity of biographical readings for understanding Bishop’s work) but that’s beside the point.

To return to the novel at hand. It has been praised quite a lot but if you look at the blurbs on the back, you can just imagine the reviews. “Theory” reviews of a “theory” novel. For this is what “Ana Historic” is. The writer is clearly well versed in theory of all stripes. Narrative, gender, power. It never drops the requisite names, but otherwise it’s like a big checklist and most readers will have all the right bells ringing in their heads (Foucault! Butler! Etc.). Often complex novels will make readers think of theory, some writers seem to be eerily conscious of the philosophical implications of what they write. The complexity of Beckett’s or Melville’s prose, Merrill’s poetry etc. will make reader’s minds reach for the thinkstuff. Then there are the less subtle writers, the most brilliant of whom is probably Heiner Müller, who write after or during the advent of theory and whose every scene or line betrays that knowledge. But it’s still exciting, interesting, which is more than I can say about Marlatt. Marlatt will, from time to time, stop and insert blunt pieces of theory, explicitly pointing out some presuppositions in the narrative as the gender roles or power structures. At times this reader had the impression of reading an analysis of a text that never appears on its own. This would have been interesting as well.

However, Marlatt is devoted to be a spoilsport. After doing some analysis she lapses into ‘regular’ writing again, interspersed with some tedious poetry (Marlatt must be an awful poet, if this text is any indication) and, less and less often, “theory”. She is not a good stylist, her prose is flat and uninteresting, sometimes I even had the impression of it’s being intentionally dull. Her being a spoilsport can be demonstrated by opening the book at random but this passage is among the most telling. IT starts out well enough:

not, not…all these elements knotted into the text.

The reader may sigh with slight annoyance, but more often he will chuckle with goodwill. Everybody likes puns. But how does she continue?

not, not…all these elements knotted into the text. silent k. for what? kiss. xoxoxo in code. kisses and hugs. omitted.

See what I mean? Sometimes this book appears to be committed to make this book as straightforward and uninteresting as possible, sussing out every ambiguity or pun and uncurling it. And from beginning to end it’s always the same dull style. And this despite a really good plot.

It’s a book about a woman in our time reimagining the life of a woman in 1873 who is mentioned in brief in some official records. Her notes and imaginings reflect on the way that those who write determine who is remembered and whose story is told and that the circumstances and the society around you determine who writes and who doesn’t. It’s about the power of naming things and people and about the lack of personal choice one has in a society. The book turns out to be a meditation on the limits of writing and thinking as a woman in this culture and language that is still dominated by men and their structures. It is about repression and about discipline, today and then. About questions of power and how they’re interlaced with questions of sexuality. And it does all these things, it bears repeating, in the dullest way imaginable, although, near the end, ten or twenty pages really moved me (the end, again, is awful, awful.).

There is a basic difficulty in judging a book like this. It is based on the difficulty of being a woman in a patriarchal society and a female writer writing in a patriarchal language, and I, a white male, am bound to misread it. The axiomatic canon I use in judging this book may be wrong and not applicable to “Ana Historic”. But then, the question is, what sort of system is it that Marlatt is submitting her book to. If it’s theory/philosophy, it’s not well argued and not original at all, there is not a shred of originality in the whole book, apart from the research plot and the plot is not part of the system. Or is it literature, then the flat writing and the terrible boredom is an important and damaging issue. I have, however, intimated that Marlatt may be an intentional bore. Make people think not like the book, maybe Brecht all over? I get the feeling Marlatt is trying to somehow straddle both systems and is relying on her poetical muscle to make it all work, since she was, when the novel was first published, a noted and acclaimed poet. Also, Marlatt, as many current practitioners of so-called “theory”, seems to believe that you only have to say enough of the ‘right’ things and say them often enough, to make her text work.Sadly, it doesn’t work, none of this. This plot deserves a better writer or a better thinker. It is not well served with Daphne Marlatt.

Patrick Hamilton: The Slaves of Solitude

Hamilton, Patrick (2007), The Slaves of Solitude, New York Review Books
ISBN 978-1-59017-220-9

This is another one of the ‘lost’, i.e. out-of-print classics which have been republished in the nifty NYRB editions and thus made available to the reading public. “The Slaves of Solitude” was originally published in 1947 and its plot is set in 1940s London. The novel is, at 240 pages, a quick and enjoyable read, a novel as funny as it is moving. The protagonist, “this slave of her task-master, solitude”, a middle-aged former schoolmistress with “a healthy complexion –too healthy for beauty-“, by the name of Enid Roach, who is once, to her chagrin, referred to by her Christian name, but is usually known as “Miss Roach”. As she concedes herself, her former occupation has endowed her with certain character traits and being called “Miss Roach” seems to fit her character best. The novel charts a few weeks of her life in a boarding house by the river Thames, “some miles beyond Maidenhead on the Maidenhead line”, from her point of view (mostly, I’ll return to that) and containing her sarcastic, enraged, bitter and tentatively enthusiastic attitude towards her fellow boarders and her environment as a whole. It is so funny, you’ll laugh out loud often enough not to read this book in public and moving enough that you genuinely care about Miss Roach’s feud with two fellow boarders and quietly cheer her on.

However, despite all the hardships Miss Roach seems to be suffering, she does not appear to be in need of being cheered on. She is a stubborn person, trudging on and on through a blizzard of slights and insults, both real and (possibly) imagined. She reads her environment like a wayward book, looking for battle lines. Who is against her? Her arch enemy at the beginning is Mr. Thwaites (who reminds me of certain characters one meets on chat boards from time to time). He is a Daily Mail reader, which is saying quite enough about him. He adores, in a way, Hitler, nurses a diffuse hatred against communism or Russians; he disparages women unless he wants to get in their pants and he loves to hear himself talk. He considers himself to be supremely witty and at dinner he lets loose a barrage of phrases and words he considers witty and smart. He also considers himself to be quite suave and cosmopolitan (although he is a patriot of the most disgusting stripe) and toys with French phrases (that he barely understands) as well as with dialects, producing nuggets like this “”Yes…I Hay ma Doots, as the Scotchman said – of Yore”.

There are other colorful characters, a historian named Miss. Steele, who sits at a separate table and from time to time throws in some partisan comments which Miss Roach usually takes to be supportive of her. There is also a former actor who sits at another separate table and barely says anything. Some lodgers, among them two American lieutenants, leave the establishment which used to be a tea-house. It is with one of them that Miss Roach tries to lighten her loneliness, but it is an attempt that is doomed from the start. His kisses merely confuse the former schoolmistress, as we the readers are apprised of her changing perception of the city around her which changes from blackness to darkness and back again. Incidentally, the use of colors and the naming of them is a fascinating part of this novel’s complex language. Confusion is Miss Roach’s main trouble, as she is constantly trying to sort other people’s comments into a black-and-white scheme, i.e. trying to find out who is against her and who is supportive of- of what? Of her opinions surely not, since she rarely vents her exuberantly worded rants. Her low mumbles at the dinner table are but the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Her rants and her confusion reach a high when her friend, a German called Vicky Kugelmann, called “Koogel” by Miss Roach’s landlady, whom Miss Roach had always considered to be somewhat ‘under her wing’, turns, so to say, against her by being suddenly, surprisingly, upbeat and popular. With men, mostly, including her lieutenant and the evil Mr. Thwaites. Suddenly, Vicky appears to be less of an Anglophile to Miss Roach and more of a covert Nazi. Her endearing use of outdated 1920’s English starts to be unnerving and almost unbearably obnoxious. There are whole pages of rants about vocabulary in the latter half of the novel which are among the most hysterically funny passages of the book. Although these suspicions and rants are indicative of a not very endearing character trait, a smallness of character, every line of the book proclaims Miss Roach’s generosity. This smallness is a way to defend herself, another way to cope with loneliness. Being a slave of solitude, she does not appear to have a choice. Her choices are made, larger and smaller ones. When a bomb destroyed her home and she left her school she ended up in her present lodgings in as unplanned a manner as her relationship with the lieutenant sours when Vicky intrudes upon it. It is only in the grand, cataclysmic finale that she starts to get ahold of herself and her choices and it makes quite a difference.

Mr. Thwaites’ game is domination, plain and simple. He attacks people by asking loaded questions, such as the very first question he poses our heroine when he inquires about “your friends”, the Russians. Miss Roach never said nor implied anything to justify that but every time that question is asked she is pushed into the defensive. As the novel proceeds he finds more and more ways to play his game. Questions of power are asked a few times in the “Slaves of Solitude”, the very title of which implies, well, servitude. This one may seem to be a servitude to one’s self, one’s loneliness, but the book demonstrates how often lonely people slip on the yokes of other people’s whims and opinions to escape solitude. Letting yourself kiss by some greasy American soldier, who may or may not take you to his home after the war, letting yourself be insulted and attacked by an odious Englishman rather than skipping dinner or tea time or spending it alone. She drinks quite a lot, although she knows when to stop and doesn’t usually enjoy drinking, but she drinks because she sometimes enjoys it. If you have once lifted the veil of solitude or if you have seen a way to go about lifting it, you will try again, and you will endure quite a lot. As London and the world fall apart, so does her former life and she becomes, by and by, conscious of her detrimental bonds with her ‘friends’.

As many other novels over which the dire shadow of alcoholism hangs, it is dominated both by humor and tragedy. Other outstanding novels in this vein are Jean Rhys’ electrifying masterpieces or the books of A.L. Kennedy, most notably Paradise. I wonder about Hamilton’s other novels. This one, enjoyable though it is, feels blunted. It’s rather nice, actually, which, subtly, changes the brand of humor we’re dealing with in this book. It is not the type of gallows humor we would expect with the ingredients we readers are served here and the good thing is, we notice this early on and relax. This novel relaxes its grip around the reader but it doesn’t do this for lack of focus or brawn. It allows us to laugh, laugh hard, to then, finally, freeze when we realize that this comedy, with tragic undertones, is set against the backdrop of last century’s huge tragedies.

Teacher Man: John Williams’ “Stoner”

Williams, John (2003), Stoner, New York Review Books
ISBN 1-59017-199-3

Published in 1965, this is a classical novel about academic life that has been out of print for a while now and, like many other worthy yet recently neglected books, has been reprinted by the New York Review of Books. And so it made its way onto my shelves and yesterday in a train to East Germany I read it and it’s one of the best books I read this year. John Williams’ slim body of work contains 4 novels, among them a Western (Butcher’s Crossing), a historical novel (Augustus) and this one, the life story of a man from the Midwest who comes from hardscrabble circumstances, enters university in 1910 and finally becomes teacher at the University of Missouri, specializing in Latin, Greek and Middle English. It starts in his youth and ends with his death and between these it describes a remarkable life in a way that never fails to move.

Williams’ language is not dazzling, he is not a great stylist, but he’s a good one and that’s quite enough. His , style is never just perfunctory, it leads us straight into the heart of the story and into Stoner’s, by being always clear yet not cold. Williams is always warm, so much so, indeed, that at times he toes the line between warmth and cliché, indeed, between warmth and schlock, without ever descending into the latter. Williams never bores the reader and, at times, moves him to tears. Stoner is a beautiful novel, sad yet not depressing. A light melancholy, a constant sense of defeat drifts through the novel, but it’s not devastating defeat, it’s more like the usual brand cultural pessimism, particularly common in the academe. We have all heard this before, often connected to the advent of the different kinds of structuralism and postmodernism. Why can’t we just analyze or read the text. Soon we’ll be at a point where the pessimists will co-opt the hilarious and well-known line of criticism Empson had to confront upon the publication of the “7 Types of Ambiguity”.

I digress. Back to the novel. “Stoner”’s plot is simple enough. It concerns a young boy from a poor family which cannot afford even farm hands so he is used to hard farm work and is reluctant to leave the farm when his father offers him the prospect of attending the new agricultural college at the University of Missouri. Finally, he leaves, but university is a surprise and propels his life in a direction he could not have expected. Attending an introductory course on English literature he falls in love with books. Soon he drops all his scientific and agricultural courses and reads literature and philosophy. He becomes a bookish person in the best sense of the word: someone with a passion for books and a brain to make that passion work. He learns Greek and Latin and writes his M.A. thesis on prosody in a story in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. While learning and writing he is offered the opportunity to teach undergraduates as acting instructor.

While it’s true that Stoner is a born scholar and a passionate reader, his true vocation, we soon learn, is teaching. In a scene at the end of the book, when he’s honored at a banquet and is asked to give a speech he is speechless and overwhelmed and the only thing he manages to say, from the depth of his heart, is

“I have taught at this university for nearly 40 years. I do not know what I would have done if I had not been a teacher. If I had not taught I might have-“ He paused, as if distracted. Then he said, with a finality, “I want to thank you all for letting me teach.”

Stoner is a dedicated and gifted teacher. As the opening of the novel makes clear, this is no reason for him to be respected by his peers. His colleagues held him “in no great esteem while he was alive” and they “speak of him rarely now”. Stoner did not bend to the fashions of his time, he tried to teach what he thought right which, for a brief period, makes him a very popular professor yet puts him at odds with the heads of the university and the department and cripples his academic career.

Sad though this might be, Stoner is among the least vain characters in fiction I have ever encountered. He does not particularly care about these things, preventing them in effect from becoming personal defeats or tragedies. His personal tragedies concern his life as a man. Soon after obtaining his M.A., while studying towards a doctoral degree, he falls in love with a peculiar and beautiful girl, well-off, from St. Louis. After a brief period of courting her, she consents to marry him, and from then on his private life is ruined, because the woman is profoundly disturbed. Incapable of love, neither emotional nor sexual, she is passionate only for a few months when she decides to become pregnant. In the first half of the novel she appears for me to be the vastly more interesting character. Stoner is bland, the novel lets his love for books, language and knowledge characterize him, he *is* his teaching. His wife, though, is fascinating. From the first time we meet her she is aloof, detached, yet she manages to hold on to Stoner almost as if in an afterthought. She is such an introverted character that we can safely assume her extroverted behavior in the latter half of the novel as a show put on as part of her piecemeal war with Stoner.

Their daughter, Grace, is severely damaged by her mother’s attempts to hurt her father. She punishes the girl, forces her to stop spending time with her father, dress “girly” in order to become “popular” which then meant the same it means today. Until her daughter manages to break free with a truly desperate act, she appears to be the spit image of her mother, damaged in the exact same way. The women are a never ending source of fascination, they are the most ‘three-dimensional’, the most vivid, most mysterious characters in the novel, although they are rather treated in an offhand fashion. There is a young instructor who’s madly in love with Stoner and begins a short but doomed affair with him, who at times seems to be a Randian heroine and at others glitters with something more. It’s a testament to William’s enormous gifts as a writer that his female characters, hidden in the shadows as they often are, are such a success. The few blacks stand out, although in a different way, they are marked: it’s the “Negro farm hand” and the “Negro servant” and the like.

Again, Williams’ novel is too brilliant not to make a few good points on these matters as well. When Stoner at the beginning arrives at the university, he does so practically in blackface, with dirt caked onto his face (remember Bergson?) and when he visits his parents in the summer he finds they have had to hire a “Negro farm hand” to replace him. There are innumerable complexities to this novel, such as his concept of how bodies work. Again, ideologically, the novel’s on the shadowy, mens sana in corpore sana, side of things, with all of Stoner’s male adversaries being either fat or “cripples” or limping. As with the women and the blacks, this simple account hides complexities, too intricate to discuss here. Suffice it to say it’s never as easy as all that with Williams: he’s too good a writer for that. The novel is accessible and appears simple (not simplistic), yet on closer reading it unfolds and turns out to contain deposits of deliciousness, none of which weighs this enjoyable read down. It was moving, thoughtful, and Stoner’s love for books was the best description of an amorous relationship I have had the honor of reading in months. I will most certainly read his other novels. If they are as good as Stoner, I am in for a treat.

I’ll have to add, as a tiny postscript, that the novel appeared less sad to me than it may to others. The life of Stoner, who spends all his life teaching at university, had a utopian ring to my ears. As I contemplate my academic future gliding slowly away, this novel’s proceedings had a melancholy air to me, like reading of a dying civilization. Ah, well.

Posh Spice: Martin Amis’s “The Rachel Papers”

Amis, Martin (1984), The Rachel Papers, Penguin Books
ISBN 0-14-007001-X

This is a quick review. Published in 1974, this is Amis’ first novel and the third of his I’ve finished. The other two, Time’s Arrow and Information, were stupendous achievements where Amis proved himself among the best stylists of his age, at least judging by the narrow diet of books I am on. I was fascinated that two so different yet excellent novels could have been authored by the same cranky Brit. Then, some five years ago, I stopped reading Amis, for fear of being disappointed or for lack of motivation, I really can’t say. Now, the Rachel Papers. In a way, picking a good writer’s first novel is an excellent means of warding off disappointments since the very fact of it being the first means you have to make allowances, for youth, inexperience. So, no, I was not disappointed. On the other hand, the Rachel Papers never achieve the power of the other Amis novels I read. This novel is not consistently interesting, funny or well written. It is, at times, all three of these, but not for longer than two thirds of this rather short book.

The novel certainly is worth reading, if only for the first half which is riotously funny. I spent much time walking around my workplace and reading sentences and paragraphs aloud to virtual strangers. The humor is not for everybody, the main character, Charles Highway is a posh, snotty, selectively well read (I’ll return to this) fuck, who is the younger version of a certain type well described as ‘geezer’, who is part of every single norm in society (white male heterosexual etc.) and who regards any deviations as slightly suspicious. Hence his brand of humor.

I spent the night in a state of mild, run-of-the-mill delirium, sweating quietly as my mind wobbled and raced and swerved: and with morning, came the unshakeable, indeed serene, conviction that I was a homosexual. It all added up: I had had, it was true, one queer experience (a smegmatic handful of queer experience in my primary-school cricket pavillon); I was a soprano, a first soprano, often taking descants, in the choir; I was as yet a virgin, and I had to lie my unpimpled head off to my friends about how I wanked as often, and with as much piston-wristed savagery, as they said they did. Clearly, the minute I was off my arse, I’d be getting it on the bus to Oxford and hawking it there to the friendly undergraduates at Magdalen. In puzzled preparation I read the collected works of Oscar Wilde, Gerard Manley Hopkins, A.E. Housman, and (for what little it was worth) E.M. Forster.

Did you laugh? Grin? Raise a disapproving eyebrow? These are some of the reactions this novel tries to elicit from its readers, smugly, I may add. The main reason why it drags at times and why many readers will leave it less than satisfied is its smugness yet this is also part of the fun of reading it.

To the plot. Charles Highway, a young man from a thoroughly bourgeois household, relates his life and his efforts to get into Rachel’s pants. Rachel is 20, which qualifies her for that desirable category: an Older Woman, since Charles is only 19, a few hours away from becoming 20. The book is largely composed of reminiscences and reflections. It’s a pretty straightforward coming of age tale and as many of them are, it is somewhat dated. The main difference to the generic treatment is Charles’ character. Charles is smug. Yes, many of the main characters are smug. Not like Charles, though. He is a frail boy, often sick, who has few friends, but is decently well looking, frightfully smart. His frailty leads to neurotic obsessive behavior. Before he meets people, even if it’s just the few minutes it takes to walk someone home from the train station, he plans every word. Before people come into his room, he carefully arranges every detail. The amount of dirt, the records and books on display and other things are carefully calibrated to achieve an effect. He worries and circumspectly tends to his pimples.

Many men (i.e. former boys) will nod and say: yeah well what’s so particularly neurotic about that? I did the same thing then. Well, in all likelihood, not quite the same thing. Charles plans his words not by thinking hard: he assembles a dossier. He tends to his pimples and draws up tables and charts and he has journals for all aspects of his life. The titular “Rachel Papers” are literally all papers and journals and ‘documents’ that chart his endeavors to bed Rachel including plans and the like. Charles does not like to think for himself, he surfs on a crest of received rules and traditions. He judges people according to his society’s prejudices and it works embarrassingly well. And when he sits for his O levels, his essays are a collection of others’ ideas and judgments, although, judging by the book, it’s a very well written collection.

Despite all this, the novel is highly generic. Yes, Charles Highway is an extraordinarily enjoyable character but that’s about it. Everything else is pretty run-of-the mill. The way the story is narrated is unusual enough, but the writer clearly does not have the chops to do a great job of this yet, so what could be innovative falls flat and is merely amusing. That is quite enough for a book, however. The Rachel Papers is no masterpiece, but I enjoyed it every bit of the way. Funnily, what you are left with is not a feeling of exhilaration, and Charles Highway is too flat a character to not vanish into thin air the moment you turn the last page, but you feel the author’s smugness. Behind the last page you can see Martin Amis grinning arrogantly. The book exposes Charles Highway’s arrogance as youthful and premature, it casts judgment on his casting judgment on everybody in his papers yet it supports the basic drift of it.

Thus, the book seems very cold, aloof and so does his author. Having an unbearable author is never the book’s problem or else we would be bereft of many great works of literature and philosophy. Here, however, the reader is constantly being talked down to and the more the book proceeds, the clearer this stance becomes and the more it gets on one’s nerves. The fact that the book contains two Charles Highways, one’s the protagonist and the other’s the author is not its main flaw, but that the writer’s unable to make the book succeed in spite of this is. The constant self-congratulation is like a solid brick wall between The Rachel Papers and a really good book. Still. A recommendation. It’s a barrelful of laughs and it’s extraordinarily well (if intrusively) written. And while the smugness of the author may be a hindrance, the smugness of the protagonist is an attraction, it adds spice to the dreary olla podrida that the genre has become.

Field Work: Ilija Trojanow’s “Der Weltensammler”

Trojanow, Ilija (2007), Der Weltensammler, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag

ISBN 978-3-423-13581-8
[Translated into English by William Hobson as The Collector of Worlds (Faber and Faber, 2008)]

As an introductory remark of sorts: when Trojanow’s novel was translated into English, his name was strangely transliterated into “Ilya Troyanov”. Strange, since he, although he is of Bulgarian descent and has lived both in India and South Africa, is German. Thus, they needed, in a way, to transliterate his name back into Bulgarian and then transliterate it into English. Funny thing, when his travel books on the hadj and the Ganges were translated in the “Armchair Traveler” edition, his name was stated correctly (here’s a longish discussion of this) So, this is just me being a pedant, but if any of you wants to go out and buy the book I thought you should know this. Speaking of which: you should read this book. It is among the best German novels I read in 5 years and certainly the best German novel I finished this year.

For me as a reviewer there are two ways to approach this book, because on the one hand it’s highly readable and evocative, a novel of adventures and exotic places, and on the other hand it’s a very smart book about narratives, orientalism, colonialism etc. It makes many of its theoretical points in a quiet manner, sneaking theory onto the reader’s mind, so to say. However, just in case, if I forget to mention this again: this is a gorgeous, fragrant, compelling novel that I can’t imagine anyone not liking. It is a very well written book. With so much of contemporary German literature in a stylistic slump, Trojanow’s clean, complex prose, which is elevated yet highly readable at the same time. It is functional prose, in the very best sense. The language needs to shoulder a huge story, a brilliant narrative structure and evoke three different locales without detracting from either of the three, which is just what it does, providing, additionally, chunks of gorgeous prose scattered all over the 523 pages of my edition.

The novel, consisting of three sections and a coda, follows the life of famous explorer, translator, poet, soldier, sufi Richard Burton. The novel is no biography, it does not claim accuracy. As the author himself says, it is “inspired” by the life and work of Burton and at times strays far from the path of biographical fidelity. The most intriguing experience for me was the fact that I was left not with a desire to read a ‘proper’ biography of Burton but to delve deep into Burton’s own writing. Der Weltensammler is at least as much about the cultures it writes about and the difficulty of writing about culture and biographies as it is about Burton the person. The novel may seem conventional, but any closer reading will reveal it’s anything but. In dealing with three periods of Burton’s life, as a soldier in the British army in India from 1842–1849, as an incognito ethnographer/pilgrim in Medina and Mecca in 1953 and as an explorer, hunting for the sources of the Nile in central Africa with Speke from 1856–1860, it examines the very acquiring knowledge and the product is an eminently readable book that appeals to a vast readership. Reading the novel you can see not Burton’s but Trojanow’s mind work. Each of the three parts is constructed in a different way although they share certain basic properties. They all consist of two strands of narrative: one’s the Burton narrative, written by a third person narrator, sometimes Burton, sometimes omniscient. The second is, let’s say, the informant. The detective. The storyteller. All of these. As the novel proceeds Burton’s voice is more and more muted. Instead of leading us, step by step, into Burton’s mind, we withdraw more and more and see knowledge, doubt and the world as perceived by multiple points of view take center stage. From the very first chapter the voice of the native dominates Burton’s. Der Weltensammler has been criticized repeatedly for failing to render Burton the person in a satisfying way, which is puzzling since the novel clearly has no intention of ever doing so. Reproaching it for failing in an endeavor it never undertook is, to say the least, boneheaded.

The first section treats Burton’s time in British-India where Burton is portrayed as insatiable as far as knowledge and languages are concerned. He takes a teacher and learns several Indian languages, among them Gujarati and Hindustani, as well as studying in-depth Indian culture and religion. He takes a lover (a temple prostitute) and when he is moved to a largely Muslim part of the country he learns their religion and both Persian as well as Arabian. He starts to practice the Muslim faith as a means of mingling with the common (enough) people in disguise. He develops an opinion of how to deal with civil unrest and uprisings and although the reader may have the notion of meeting a tolerant and open man, Burton recommends draconian measures. In the end a scandal and bereavement lead to his leaving the country precipitously, “on sick leave”. This is the whole story. Trojanow, luckily, completely abstains from trying to sound the depths of Burton’s soul, from attempting to find out Burton’s motivations.

The only helping hand he lends the reader is the voice of Ramij Naukaram, who becomes his servant, his mediator between the foreign country and Burton. Naukaram’s voice is recorded because, at the outset of the novel, he seeks out a lahiya, a writer, to write down his story in order to compose a letter of application. Thus, the story is narrated by the third person narrator and Naukaram, who is frequently asked by the lahiya to clear up confusions. The lahiya, it turns out, is as much of an author as he is a human recording device and by and by he fills in narrative gaps in the story. As Naukaram’s audience, he clearly represents the readership of the novel and as an inventive writer he is just as clearly a stand-in for the author. He helps us make sense of the story we are watching unfold. How much of Naukaram’s story is self-serving? How much is, later on, anti-Muslim prejudice? What is the truth? When does it turn to fiction?

Thankfully, there is remarkably little of that popular literary parlor game: letting the native puzzle about white/Christian rituals and customs. This usually contains two elements: making fun of the native’s naiveté and criticizing our own culture. Barely anything of that here. By using Burton’s voice to explicate the British and Christian elements and leaving Naukaram to explain the parts of the story that involve his own culture. Thus far, he seems to be the common figure of informant, something, however, which is both subverted by the fact that his strand contains an Indian recording an Indian, and by the fact that we get a lot of grumbling about the low morals and despicable religion and behavior of Muslims. Naukaram cannot understand why Burton would choose to become Muslim, even for a disguise. We get an outside view from the inside, so to say.

The second part is even more complicated. There is again the Burton strand, yet the second strand contains more elements. Instead of having one man relate a story to a second man, it mostly consists of three man debating Burton’s identity. The three men are the Turkish governor, the Sharif of Mecca and the Kadi. The occasion is Burton’s publication of the “Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al Madinah and Meccah”, wherein he details his pilgrimage in disguise, something which is, if undertaken in bad faith, heretical and blasphemous. The Turkish governor, who appears to have called the meeting, is worrying about something else, however: whether Burton may have been a spy for the British army, paid both to reconnoiter Mecca, Medina and its environs and to sow unrest among the people under Turkish rule. The three of them proceed forthwith to debate this back and forth. In order to arrive at a satisfying conclusion they call witnesses and engage in theological discussions. Here the Burton strand often appears to be a commentary upon the discussion of the three, by depicting situations described by the witnesses from Burton’s angle. There are many details hidden beneath the folds of this construction, some revealed, as in an afterthought, late in the sections, such as Burton’s subterfuges to measure and draw Mecca without anyone noticing. Burton slips on and off the page like the Dervish that he claims to be while traveling. The extent to which identity is subject to interpretation is demonstrated brilliantly, as we see Burton’s honesty being debated.

The third part is the least exciting yet not less enjoyable. This is the part where Burton’s voice finally takes a back seat to the commentary. Here the commentary is, in a way, an insider-outsider-insider, a black slave who ‘returns’, so to say, with the Slave holder culture clearly imprinted upon his mind. The fact that Burton is so subdued here may be due to the fact that Burton is here as ‘himself’, he is not trying to pass himself off as someone he’s not. As the novel clearly demonstrates, however, it is no longer his choice, he has become his masks. This does not lead to a harmonic melting-pot kind of character, however. In his conflicts with the different kinds of ethnicities and religions (and Speke as Brit is but one of them) the difficulties and the possibilities of intercultural communication become clear. Nonetheless, we should never forget that Burton was a soldier and a fighter and although the novel accords little weight to these aspects of his personality, he is, as the title says: a collector of worlds. He had a voracious hunger for other cultures, and although his seniors doubt his loyalty, the Burton represented in the book has his loyalties straight. Everything, from his way in assessing political situations to his attitude to gathering knowledge is clearly routed in his own culture (there are a few telling differences between him and Speke that sent me to look up something in Foucault but I shouldn’t go into these details). The book demonstrates the bonds that knowledge as we see it, are for us and how little, at the same time, we can afford to forgo it.

All this is contained by the Burton described in the book, who is so well contained by the strands of narrative that he never towers over the events and places. Fittingly, the coda is reduced to the one aspect of his person that is never before properly focused on: his beliefs as a Christian. A small investigation is launched to determine whether Burton merits the Catholic burial his wife insists upon. The smallness of the grave serves as a perfect metaphor for the provincialism that Burton tried to escape by trying to become a Weltbürger, a citizen of the world. That he didn’t become one and merely became a Weltensammler is his tragedy and, to an extent, ours. Putting on the news tonight, I sighed quietly.

Nope. Not even funny. Paul Auster’s “The Brooklyn Follies”

Auster, Paul (2006), The Brooklyn Follies, Faber and Faber
ISBN 0-571-22499-7

Since this review is going to end with a strong recommendation to never touch the book, do not get this advice wrong. Preferably, do not read the book. If you have to, here’s what you do: after finishing it, pick up immediately any other Auster book on your shelf. Since The Brooklyn Follies is quite an atypical book to start your Auster reading I’m guessing you have one. So, pick one of them, preferably a current one, Oracle Night, Timbuktu, Book of Illusions, any of these. Read a page or two, somewhere from the middle. If you’re perceptive, you’ll notice a funny thing. The whole of the Brooklyn Follies is based upon a single conceit. This is a book purportedly written by Nathan, who is clearly supposed to be an idiot. It hinges upon the idea of a good writer using the voice of a bad writer. It is full of Nathan’s grandiose phrases, his self delusions, his sense of ‘humor’. As a writer, Auster is not prone to subtleties. He might as well have highlighted the important phrases with magic marker. And yet the book is terribly written from the first line to the last, which is where my advice comes in. Well, we’ll return to this in a few moments. Let’s first look at the book from a different angle.

Nathan, an oafish retired insurance salesman, is writing a book recording his life’s follies. He moves to Brooklyn, expecting to die in the near future. He has recently fought cancer, successfully, in all likelihood. He has been born and raised in Brooklyn, so, in anticipation of his physical demise, that’s where he returns. In Brooklyn he meets his cousin Tom, whose promising career has ended up behind the greasy wheel of a New York cab. We, the deplorable readers, are apprised of his downfall from wunderkind to cabbie in a chapter called “Purgatorio”, which on the one hand continues the sad tradition of using Dante’s wonderful poem for hundreds of bad or worse similes (most recently encountered in the blurbs of my German edition of Wassili Grossman, but I digress). This is of course Nathan the self important oaf speaking, but this sort of thing isn’t exactly rare and after a few dozen of these, it begins to grate. But I digress again. On the other hand, the chapter, like most chapters in the book, is stocked with descriptions like these: “It wasn’t that he had ever wanted a great deal from life, but the little he had wanted turned out to have been beyond his grasp”. My little pet philosopher here stole a few peeks now and then and retreated groaning after a few seconds.

Back to plot. Both these men come with baggage. Nathan has a daughter from a marriage that ended when the wife presumably had to listen to him once too often. He had a falling-out with that daughter and his worries about righting his relationship with her at what he (still) thinks is his life’s sundown provide a constant talking point throughout the book. Eventually he buys her an expensive necklace and writes an abject letter of apology since, you know, there’s nothing better to charm a woman than generous and groveling men. And wouldn’t you know, it works, the daughter returns to his fold crying, asking (at his knee, one presumes) for his wise words. Speaking of wisdom, the book contains a few excellent descriptions of itself. The best comes early, just exchange “she” for “he”:

It’s a rare day when she speaks in anything but platitudes – all those exhausted phrases and hand-me-down ideas that cramp the dump sites of contemporary wisdom

I digress. Back to the two unhappy campers. Well, Nathan, as mentioned, starts recording his life’s idiocies in what he labels the “Book of Follies” (at a particularly inane moment, a discussion between him and Tom, who majored in literature, is recorded, where Nathan complains of digressing so much and Tom tells him (do I hear swelling strings?) that he’s now becoming a real writer. Bah). Into that book also go whatever idiocies he commits in the course of the events of The Brooklyn Follies (yes yes I know). That’s that.

Now Tom. The mere fact that Tom is unmarried is apparently no reason for the author (which? Yes, I’ll come to that) not to issue him with a woman to care for. In Tom’s case, it’s his wayward sister, who cavorts from bed to bed and man to man and gets into trouble at every corner. Funny thing. The only promiscuous person in the book is a woman, she gets punished for it (by life) by ending up in the most evilly pure environment Auster (Nathan?) could think of, a Christian fundamentalist sect. In the end, having returned to the fold, she is chaste and happy. These are, spoilers, I guess I should have issued a warning, but really, it will not actually spoil the book for you, because there are many other plot lines in the course of the book. And here we encounter the one strength of Auster and this book in particular: he creates great characters. Not in a realist novel kind of way but in a Tim Burton movie kind of way. I may be influenced by watching the first season finale of Pushing daisies in the background right now, but plots and characters would have made, at the hands of the right director, a wonderful movie. There are so many scenes I could point to. It would be a warm movie, uplifting, something to watch again and again, in full, warm colors. A really, really great movie. Conceivably. The trouble with writing is, well, writing.

Thus, instead of reveling in the plot and characters, we get stuck with dour old Nathan and his dour, mostly younger friends. The whole point of the book is humor. His spiel with Nathan’s voice, Nathan’s preposterous grandiosity and his constant jocular joking is supposed to be funny. And funny books are sometimes not overwhelmingly well written, so there’s a loophole, right? Nope. This book is not even funny. I suppose it could be another one of the book’s follies that the narrator manages to fumble every single joke. Even if he starts off well, he does not know where to stop and follows every phrase or sentence with humorous potential with a dull paragraph of dour earnestness. As I say, I have an idea why his wife wanted to leave him. And then there is Tom, who enables Nathan to include pages and pages of dull and idiotic patter about literature. It’s not that he’s factually wrong most of the time, because he isn’t. The tone is that of an overeager underachiever with a book by the typewriterslashcomputer, typing up the details on Kafka nice and tidy. He makes a few tiny mistakes but the bulk of it is correct, factually. The whole of this is often used for a kind of adult, pseudo-academic humor. And, dull as this is as statements on literature, this, too, is not even funny. There is a doubly intended funniness here, one by Nathan and the other by Auster and none of the two works.

This two-faced dullness is what I will discuss now that this review is coming to a close. Clearly, Auster is trying to use Nathan’s qualities as a hack for humorous purposes. There is a complicated system of reference connecting The Brooklyn Follies to the “Book of Follies”, since the author never steps out from behind his curtain. From first to last sentence it’s Nathan’s book. So what do we do with the clearly marked badness? Who do we send the check for bungled storytelling to? Who do we sue for wasting our time? Is Nathan playing with his readers, a bad writer trying to seem a worse writer, by the ham-fisted way of doing it exposing himself as the former? Is the whole story a machination of Nathan? I have hinted at this before. Is Nathan a sad old man trying to concoct a life more interesting than the one he actually leads? Well, as they say, we only have the book, and it says nought. There are no hints that I found that would point in such a direction. So why do I call Auster a bad writer? Is there evidence in the book that it is not all Nathan’s voice? No. But here we return to the beginning of this piece. Take any of his recent books and you will find a huge amount of the same sentences, the same *coughs* humor, the same sameness. It’s Auster’s voice all right, with very cheap bits of “Nathan” tacked on a few times. This novel is a huge failure. As a movie it would have succeeded, and as a novel written by a different writer, it would also have succeeded. Auster has his strengths, and I still remember the novel’s characters vividly, if somewhat uneasy at the heavy stench of sexism (Nathan’s?) pervading the book, writing prose just is not one of them.

So, I’d like to say I tried Auster’s method and created the voice of a believably self-important hack, but if you look at my other writing here, that’s just me. Same with Auster.

Cheese and Squeeze

Annalee Newitz at i09 presents Ten of the Kinkiest Science Fiction Books You’ll Ever Read. This one’s my favorite

Set on a planet of psychically-gifted people who embrace sexual diversity and peace, the series is focused mainly on sexual slavery and war. Our heroine is a prostitute (a noble calling on her world) who holds the “high couch” of her town – basically, she’s the sex duchess. Unfortunately she’s always being kidnapped or taken to other worlds where she’s tied up, forced to have degrading sex, and (of course) has lots of tearful, shame-faced orgasms. Silly and pulpy, the first novel in the series is basically a swashbuckler with kinky bondage thrown in between sword fights. Also, there is a giant flying cat.

Hidden: Brian Evenson’s “The Open Curtain”

Evenson, Brian (2006), The Open Curtain, Coffee House Press
ISBN-10 1-56689-188-4
ISBN 13 978-1-56689-188-2

In fact it is impossible to comprehend the actions of the murderous Lafferty brothers, or any other Mormon Fundamentalist, without first making a serious effort to plumb their theological beliefs, and that requires some understanding of LDS history, along with an understanding of the complex and highly fluid teachings of the religion’s remarkable founder, Joseph Smith. The life of Smith and the history of his church may be considered from myriad perspectives, of course . And therein lies the basis for the Mormon leadership’s profound unhappiness with my book.

(A Response from Jon Kracauer to his critics)

This book is hard to describe without spoiling it for the reader. It’s a tightly wound tale of horror, although not in the sense of the recent wave of splatter movies. Its brand of horror is akin to the brand of horror in Doris Lessing’s terrifying The Fifth Child. There are murders in the book, dismemberments, stabs, cuts, and strangulations, yet the novel is far from grisly. The blood is decorative, ritual. There are numerous rituals in the novel, rituals, however, which are an integral part of the horror. There is, in the middle of the novel, at the point where events really take a steep downward turn for the protagonists, a strange marriage ceremony. Strange to me, but apparently a faithful depiction of a Mormon wedding ceremony. It bears remarkable similarities to Salman Rushdie’s masterfully dense novel of partitions, marriages and Pakistan, Shame. In Rushdie’s novel, it was a delightful, tender, erotic episode where two people find each other not only despite rituals, but find ways to use them for their own ends. In a way, in The Open Curtain, a similar episode is described, and this time, too, the ritual is put to individual use, or as one of the characters puts it “we pulled a fast one on God”. Evenson, a former Mormon, presents us these rituals with painstaking –and ultimately frightening- accuracy. It is important since Mormonism provides the backbone of the story.

The story is basically based on two historical events. One is the murders by the Lafferty brothers, Ron and Dan, who killed their brother Allen’s wife and child in order to purify them. The victim, Brenda Lafferty, was thought to support Ron’s wife in her decision to leave him when he insisted upon marrying multiple women. Mormonism’s ties to violence are notorious, mostly connected to the so-called blood doctrine. Here’s wiki’s neat summary:

In Mormonism, blood atonement is the controversial concept that there are certain sins to which the atonement of Jesus does not apply, and that before a Mormon who has committed these sins can achieve the highest degree of salvation, he or she must personally atone for the sin by “hav[ing] their blood spilt upon the ground, that the smoke thereof might ascend to heaven as an offering for their sins”. Blood atonement was to be voluntary by the sinner, but was contemplated as being mandatory in a theoretical theocracy (see Theodemocracy) planned for the Utah Territory; it was to be carried out with love and compassion for the sinner, not out of vengeance.

In 2003, Jon Kracauer published a non-fictional account of the Lafferty story, Under the Banners of Heaven, which included a fascinating account of the aforementioned violent history and spawned indignation and changes in certain rituals. The book is also one of the pre-texts of Evenson’s tense coil of a horror novel. The actual incident that spawned the novel, according to the author, is William Hooper Young’s murder of Anna Pulitzer. The great thing is that the New York Times has digitalized a huge part of their archives. As the protagonist digs through the articles, we have the opportunity to do the same. This is from the September 20, 1902 article:

Capt. Titus, Chief of the Detective Bureau, announced at 10:30 o’clock last night that Mrs. Anna Pulitzer was murdered by William Hooper Young, a grandson of Brigham Young, the famous Mormon leader. The murder, said the chief detective, was committed in the apartment of Young’s father, at 103 West Fifty-eighth Street.

The Open Curtain takes a troubled teenager, Rudd Theurer, from a Mormon community, who digs up the case of William Hooper Young for a school project and at the same time discovers he has a half brother, Lael. From this situation Evenson spins a tale of violence, religion, deceit and madness. Rudd comes from a troubled family although we are never filled in as to what constitutes that trouble. His dead father towers over the first half of the book, as he is the one who connects all the strands of the story. The plot ingredients here would make for a fat, long, complicated novel, psychological in a convoluted way. And this is just the beginning. The novel becomes more and more complex as it progresses at a prodigious speed. It starts with memory of a murder and progresses to actual murder, as the events unravel. Murder, he wrote? Make no mistake, this is not a mystery: there are no surprises for the reader, who soon gathers how the novel is going to end. The Open Curtain is a terrifying novel, precisely because we know what is going to happen.

One of the central tropes of this novel is doubt. Doubting the evidence of yr own eyes, doubting God, yourself. Names become pratfalls: Lael, a male name often assigned to girls, meaning “belonging to God”, is often mispronounced as Lyle, the main difference being the first syllable that changes from being pronounced lay to being pronounced lie. Things like thus abound, most significantly the main character, Rudd, whose name derives from the Old English meaning “ruddy-skinned”, in other words: red-skinned. This provides a link to one of the most frequently cited instances of Blood Atonement, the 1887 Mountain Meadows Massacre, undertaken by a group of Mormons disguised as “redskins”, i.e. Native Americans. Instrumental in that slaughter was John D. Lee, whose manifesto is frequently cited by Rudd, who finds that his father had added copious annotations to it. This is just a mild hint of the complexities in The Open Curtain.

Mainly, however, it is about spiritual awakening, religious experience, a concern throughout the book. “God”, as one of the characters pronounces, “has drawn a curtain between myself and heaven and there is no parting it.” This is straight in the middle, ironically, since this novel is about breaking open boundaries, ripping open curtains, having madness fuck your old tired separations. In a way this novel is about strong religious experience, but the further open the curtains are, the darker the room becomes, until the concluding third of the novel, a masterpiece of describing a darkness within a soul or a mind. This novel is about the power of religion, even in those who do not think themselves religious. Religious upbringing or knowledge of intimate religious ideology can be enough to propel your forward on a path into the night. There are no farmhouses near that path and no possibility to rest once one embarks upon it. The dread the reader feels upon watching the characters hurtle down that path stems from Evenson’s mastery in drawing characters and setting situations and moods. Except for the teacher a character I felt slipped from his control, everybody is fleshed out and real to the extent necessary. So are the moods. There is humor, banter, as well as dread, irritation and fear, in the necessary doses. Because, above all, it is an accomplishment in that it does not waste a word. It is first and foremost a thriller and it succeeds within its own genre, a rare feat for literary forays into genre.

It is a superbly well crafted thriller, which is not weighed down by pretension. It has a serious side to it as well, showing what can happen if the violent elements in our culture suddenly surface and create a huge swirling vortex of madness. I will close with a remark from Evenson’s afterword:

A few years after the Lafferty murders, the Mormon temple endowment ceremony was changed in significant ways. The most significant changes to my mind involved the deletion of the “penalties,” a portion of the ceremony in which each temple participant mimed out stylized ways of being killed if they were to reveal temple secrets. Many temple-going Mormons saw this as a positive step: I tend rather to see it as a further repression of Mormonism’s relation to violence. Changing the ceremony hasn’t changed Mormonism’s underlying violence; it has only hidden it.

Katharina Hacker: The Have-Nots

Hacker, Katharina (2006), Die Habenichtse, Suhrkamp
ISBN 978-3-518-45910-2
[Translated into English as The Have-Nots by Helen Atkins, Europe Editions]

It was with trepidation that I picked up this novel, an gift by a dear old friend. It won the 2006 German book prize, besting as good a novel as Ilija Trojanow’s Der Weltensammler. Whence the trepidation, you ask? Whatever books may be published off the radar, the body of books that constituted critically acclaimed German contemporary literature is a sad affair. Look at the 2006 short list. Both the Schulze and the Walser are so bad that I’d rate that year’s jury worse than this year’s Booker Jury. Dito other fêted writers. Judith Hermann? Pascal Mercier? If you listen closely you can hear me shudder right now. Oh, maybe I’m just picky. Anyway, to cut a long story short, Die Habenichtse is an excellent novel. Hacker may be somewhat sloppy with her prose at times, but more than makes up for it.

Oh, but what is it about? This basic question is hard to answer satisfactorily. Not that the plot is that convoluted or hidden, but this novel is necessarily about plot. A rough sketch of the plot could read like this: after 9/11 a Yuppie couple, he working as a lawyer, she working as a designer, move to London because the husband, Jakob, has been offered a job there. Dull alienation ensues, like straight from a mid-80s suburban novel. There are all the routine trappings. Man works too much, gets caught up in his work and his colleagues, wife (Isabelle) is lonely, consoles herself with a lover. The lover in question is a drug dealer. The dullness of this plot does not reflect badly on the novel though.

Katharina Hacker is an excellent writer, always in control of her matter. The plot, as we see quickly is one more tool in her nimble fingers. The novel is stuffed with these devices which directly evoke distinct references and feelings to the literate reader. There is the fact that it commences with 9/11, or that the law firm hiring Jakob is mainly concerned with the restitution of property stripped from Jewish fugitives by the Nazis.

Wir müssen hineingehen, sagte Jakob. Er bückte sich und hielt die Blumen, die gerade von seinem Rollkoffer rutschen wollten, fest. Isabelle? sagte er, wir können hier nicht stehenbleiben.

There are alcoholic parents, a brutally killed cat, a mistreated child and some highly erotic passages. And all of this in about 300 pages. The novel moves at an incredibly speed, hitting the reader with its images, characters, ideas, never letting up. This effect is all the more pronounced by the intricate construction: Jakob, Isabelle, the neighbor’s child Sara, Jim the dealer, their stories are told in interweaving chapters. What for? There is no conclusion where the different threads come together to produce surprise or shock. The structure does, however, emphasize the complexities of the novel, by emphasizing the general applicability of what may seem like particular problems. These problems are not hard to guess, they are not alluded to, the reader is bludgeoned over the head by them.

Thus, we turn again to the question of what the novel is about. A hint is found in Jakob’s ruminations upon researching details of the Shoah, buried in heaps of books, Bajohr, Friedländer and a shelf full of others. In a telephone conversation Jakob vents his shock

Ich habe mich noch nie so sehr mit Deutschland beschäftigt, sagte Jakob am Telefon zu Hans, – ich frage mich, ob ich all diese Bücher in Berlin hätte lesen können. –Warum nicht? sagte Hans empfindlich, und Jakob las ihm eine Passage aus Friedländers Buch […] vor, wie Kinder einen Juwelierladen stürmten im Juni 1938, wie sie ihn plünderten und ein kleiner Junge dem jüdischen Besitzer ins Gesicht spuckte.

There we have, in a nutshell, the reason why the novel is set in London. The distance to Germany allows the novel to treat Germany and its past without having to resort to the olde dance, the guilt game: y’know. Germans were victims, too, you can’t collectively blame Germans, and are we not nowadays grown out of the whole thing? It’s sickening, and Hacker brilliantly sidesteps the issue by having Jakob realize the extent of the disaster and also, time and again, the fact that it was man-made. We did this, and freed from Germany, Jakob awakens to that fact. Not just past Germans, he is also made aware of the hidden stashes of anti-Semitism in present Germany, and of the ways Germans hide behind alibi actions like, for instance, restituting property without truly coming to terms with what exactly caused Germans to persecute and industrially murder European Jewry.

Alexander Mitscherlich’s classic study of collective German repression, Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern, as well Zvi Rex’s (possibly an invention by Broder)’s bonmot that “The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz” become relevant in this context. The question “Und gibt es ein deutsch-jüdisches Zusammenleben? Ich bin gar nicht sicher” („Is there a German-Jewish cohabitation? I am not sure at all.”) is well asked given that in a city like Cologne right here, there is strong resistance against a Jewish museums while a couple of old geezers are allowed to host a major anti-Semitic installation on one of the most prominent and central places of Cologne. There is a strong and pronounced bitterness to many of these issues. The 9/11 reference at the beginning merely quietly contextualizes them. The Twin Towers make virtually no appearance once the book leaves the introductory passages and it’s a better book for it. Hacker knows which cards to play and which not to play. Thus, the novels feels heavy, but never heavy-handed (unlike this review).

In the meantime, in the present private disaster strikes the protagonists, especially, Isabelle and Jim. Here we return to what I called a dull plot. It is only dull if we expect a standard plot, if we expect to be moved or engaged by what shapes up to be, among other things, an unhappy love story. Victims, guilt etc are transposed to the private realm and then projected back again. The novel reduces everything to power structures, never more so than when it treats in-depth Isabelle’s affair with Jim. Hierarchies become painfully obvious. Gender hierarchies, economic hierarchies, even questions of anti-Semitism are transferred into the private realm. As I said, the writing, although mostly powerful, evocative and precise, is somewhat sloppy in places. Nothing about the rest, though, is the least sloppy. The novel is perfectly constructed, thoughtful, it works equally well on multiple levels, and, above all, and to counter the dry way I have been approaching it, it is endlessly entertaining. The speed, the writing and the pathos combine to form a truly great read, in my eyes.

Outbound

Why stop at capitalism when you can regress to feudalism?

(From a NYT review of Ingo Schulze’s terrible novel “New Lives”)

A Horrifying World

“It was a horrifying world, but it was a real one. How many of us can say we’ve made a new world out of the things that terrify and move us?” At least a few of the women writing horror today can say just that. And there’s no way to mistake the new worlds they’re making for the work of men.

That was from an overview of recent Horror fiction written by women and although I’m generally wary of the olde ‘women write differently than men’ claim, and have yet to find an instance of a decently argued statement of that claim, the quoted point is interesting.

His stories: On Javier Cercas’ “Soldiers of Salamis”

Cercas, Javier (2002), Soldiers of Salamis, Bloomsbury
ISBN-13 978-1582343846
[Translation: Anne McLean]

There you go. It’s that time of drunk again, another review. This is the first half of what I wanted to be two joint reviews, one of Cercas’ novel and the other of Kertész’s novel Fiasko, because they are thematically related, just that one is great and the other’s decent. However, I mislaid my copy of Fiasko so I decided to shelve that miserable review and get on with this crapulicious piece.

So. I’ll start with the decent one, Javier Cercas’ novel Soldiers of Salamis, originally published in 2001. It is a nice novel, but not necessary reading. It’s short, light, entertaining and contains enough seriousness and originality to make up for the flaccid narration. This sounds harsher than intended, probably. It consists of three parts, chronicling the efforts of the protagonist to write an account of an incident in the Spanish Civil War. That protagonist is called Javier Cercas, and yes, this is a bad sign. It is an awkwardly postmodern construction, trying very hard to put a complex spin on the war, trying to exploit the complexities of memory and narration. I call it awkward, but it’s not bad. The parts are all there, lies, dead ends, conflicts between oral storytelling and written storytelling, distrust towards the written word, falsified evidence and a examination of what exactly authority in the telling of history constitutes. Plus, there are some nice touches. One endearing detail are the funny cameos, most prominently that of Roberto Bolano, recently deceased Chilean giant, who, in interviews in 2003 expressed his delight at being known more as a character in Cercas’ novel than as an actual writer. Bolano is similarly engaged in mixing fact and fiction yet his subtlety, so evident in The Savage Detectives, is nowhere near in evidence in Cercas novel.

The second thing is that the book can actually be forceful at times. It’s like a longer version of a passage from a far more mesmerizing Javier Marias novel in that it is powered by a strong interest in tracking down the historical truth about an incident that may seem isolated but is soon proving to be emblematic for the mire that the civil war and the ensuing dictatorship have created for Spain and its citizens, which, as the novel proves, has consequences for his country till today. And yet, Cercas manages never to overburden his novel with darkness and faux-serious historical signifying. Cercas manages his material well, he is confident in what he does, and the novel slowly unfolds like a well-laid plan. After finishing it, everything drops into place and whatever boredom may have forced you to spread the lecture of the novel over clearly too long a period, vanishes and is replaced with pleasure. Yes, pleasure.

And another positive aspect is that Cercas seems to be perfectly aware of his limitations as a writer, so much that the cameo of Roberto Bolano must be said to perfectly make up for a certain lack in his writing: humor. I said the tone is light but it’s not humorous, at least not in translation. The fact that it chronicles a dogged search for truth so so thoroughly done and expressed, and seems to require such an effort on the writer’s part that Cercas, needs to have recourse to someone else’s voice to make up for his lack. On the other hand, the fact that he is able to call on this voice and do it in such a satisfying way is indicative of his talents as a writer. The Bolano character steps up to the plate and boy does he smack the ball hard. The character is infinitely likeable, he’s nice, respectful, erudite, humorous and deeply serious at the same time. In fact he is the best drawn character in the whole book, the only one who jumps straight off the page. As a reader this is a strange experience, because it reminds you of all the flat characters, and that includes “Javier Cercas”.

The unevenness, however, is part of the novel’s technique, each section and each character serves a certain purpose (oh the banalities I write. Please do excuse me.), and after the first section, dealing with the hunt for truth, and the second section, consisting of an account of the events, the third section is what makes Soldiers of Salamis a novel, and a good one at that. On the surface, Bolano serves as a sauce thickener of sorts, by virtue of dispensing advice to “Cercas” who has trouble finishing the novel. On a different level, the character of Bolano itself does the same job, the warmth of the description and the elements that the voice of Bolano allows Cercas to add, cause the whole construct, which hitherto never felt more than just that: a construct, to finally gel.

Notice, I barely mentioned the whole postmodern novel-within-the-novel conceit, it’s because Cercas isn’t very good at that game and the less said, the better. It does demonstrate one important thing, though. As a historian you may end up with a straight tale, after years of research and digging for truth. This tale represented by the middle section of Soldiers of Salamis. The novel enveloping that section stresses, however, that history is hard to pin down, that it is always elusive, forming both all the straight tales to come, as well as influencing the interpretation of adjacent events and figures. This novel is not so much about history as it is about historiography. It provides insights into how historical accounts are written and it does that in a remarkably readable way.

If you are interested in the Spanish Civil War and want a good and moving read which is better than its component parts, get the book. I was glad to have read it, yet I am not the least curious about any of his other books. That may convey you this reader’s impression best, I think. In sum, a cautious recommendation. Maybe it’s the contrast with Kertész’s novel I finished a few days before starting the Cercas. Kertész (review forthcoming) wrote a necessary novel, moving, brutal, vivacious. Cercas didn’t. He wrote a good one, which is rare enough these days. More power to him.

Paris Confidential: On Ariel Dorfman’s “Konfidenz”

Dorfman, Ariel (2003), Konfidenz, Dalkey Archive
ISBN 1-56478-293-X
[Original Publication: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995]

Konfidenz. The title sounds German, the author’s name vaguely German as well, yet neither novel nor writer are. Ariel Dorfman is a Chilean writer living and teaching in the US. He is most famous for the play “Death and the Maiden” which was turned into a movie by no less a genius than Roman Polanski. Konfidenz is his 4th novel, published in 1995, written in English. And it’s strange, strange. I have read it once all the way through (well, it’s a short novel) and reread several portions of it, and I still fell unable to decide whether it’s a great or horrible novel. The writing is usually a good sign, but not here. I’ll return to why this is the case.

At the center of the novel is a telephone conversation between a woman in a Paris hotel room and an unknown man who watches her from across the street, unbeknownst to her. It starts off as a thriller, along the lines of a ‘cat-and-mouse’ game. The reader is never apprised of the solution to what appears to be a riddle. During the conversation details are revealed, by and by. We learn who the woman is and get told who the man is and whence he knows her. Apparently he is a forger, lending his services to a clandestine organization, writing fake letters, constructing alibies, like these new agencies constructing an alibis for cheaters. The last person’s alibi he constructed and buttressed by forged letters was the unknown woman’s husband’s. This means he knows all sorts of details, enough to warrant saying that he knows her.

This may sound pretty straightforward with a plot we’re used to from many other genre texts. It’s written in a plain language, unadorned to the point of becoming repetitive. These are not rhythmical repetitions or anything, they rather read like repetitions borne from a severely limited vocabulary. The language is functional, not the least musical and, as I said, very repetitive. The novel is ‘saved’ by several intriguing inserts, reminiscent of Paul Auster (who is a similarly ungifted stylist), with two men watching each other, One of them is the one having the telephone conversation, the other one is just spying on him. Clearly he knows his subject well. Is he from the resistance movement, too? Has he been at this long? He never undertakes action, and later, when his actions are required, he recuses himself from that responsibility.

Still, even with these inserts, the first half of the novel appears to be pretty simple, promising genre appropriate surprises or something along these lines. The reader is kept guessing. Who watches whom, what’s up with the woman and is something wrong with her husband? And then the novel just implodes. The french police breaks up the conversation, and grueling police questionings ensue. In a way this accelerates the process of revelation as explanations follow upon explanations. Now, however, the crux: they are contradicting each other. The conversation itself was already replete with non-sequiturs, and odd ideas and coincidents. Now we are up against completely different versions of the truth and we, the reader come to agree with a character who says:

You know – I couldn’t care less if you’re telling the truth or of this is all just a gigantic tall tale.

Or several tall tales. And the further the story progresses the more the reader seconds another character’s thought:

It’s useless … there’s nothing you can do. Nothing you can do, that is, but ask why.

Why all these stories? Why the confusion? The why is not to be found in the stories themselves. This is not a detective novel – remember McHale’s explication of the modern/postmodern divide? – the genre elements are a red herring. The key is found in the settings, 1930s France and a concentration camp. The Shoah is not an easy tale to tell, as we have known for quite a while. It’s not just Felman’s “crises of witnessing”, I’d say Dorfman’s novel takes its consequences from Levi’s “here there is no why” and what McHale correctly analyzed as a shift in literary sensibilities.

The detective caper and traditional narrative logic is at odds with what needs to be told. A synonym of the title is ‘trust’ and Konfidenz‘s suggestion is that maybe we should not put our trust in the usual, conventional stories. The forger protagonist, after all, constructed fake stories intended to fool close relatives, people who are hard to fool. The success of his forgery depended, yes, on his skill as an imitator of a person’s handwriting and writing style, but at least to an equal extent on the fact that people do not mistrust letters written by their husbands and wives. Letters as genres are allotted a certain amount of suspension of disbelief. There are things you do not expect from letters from people you know. Same goes for detective stories. The title just emphasizes the distrust towards conventional stories Dorfman says is needed.

Needed not just because of a general linguistic fraudulence we are beset by as a culture and as members of a society, but because the Shoah clearly showed us the limits of our old ways to tell a story. Writers like Semprun demonstrated how fragile ‘truth’ in this context can be, and that you may be well advised to approach this truth from several ‘untruths’ first. Truth may turn out to be the dark hole in the middle of the web of storytelling. Telling the truth in a straightforward manner may distort it, hide it behind the intricate folds of convention or fancy language (hence, maybe, the bare-bones language in the novel). Konfidenz is another novel that shows how to circumvent this, how to repair storytelling, how to restore its power. A power that’s needed in order to learn from the past so that what happened once will never, never happen again.

Fresh off the Presses

As soon as I will be able to afford it, I am going to order this hefty new publication. I am so happy happy happy about this.

Harmonious

But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don’t think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful.

from Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray

Literary Criticism

Another great strip @xkcd:

The mouseover says: “I’m looking at you, Anathem”

Boy am I looking forward to reading that brick of a book. It’s sitting on the shelf watching me, to pounce on any bit of unguarded spare time.

Fairness

“How dreadful!” cried Lord Henry. “I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. Its hitting below the intellect.”

from Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray

Ghosts of our Youth: On Hwang Song-yong’s "The Guest"

Hwang, Sok-yong (2001), Der Gast, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag
ISBN 978-3-423-24563-0
[translated from the Korean by Katrin Mensing, Young Lie and Matthias Augustin]

The well read among us are well acquainted with the presence of ghosts in literature, in good and bad books both. One of the best post 1945 novels employing that technique is Pedro Paramo. It’s this novel that Hwang Sok-yong’s novel reminded me most of, despite the numerous significant differences. I may be returning to this.

“The Guest” is about the time that Communism became the prevailing political ideology of North Korea, and about civil war like fights between fanatical Catholics and fanatical communists, both committing countless atrocities. The focus here is not, as usual and common in reports of atrocities committed by communists, on the evil reds. This tendency is so common in literature, especially with all the Gulag literature and the GDR literature, showing, iterating and reiterating ad nauseam just how unbearable life under socialism was, that I was irritated at the fact that it’s not the focus here, but ultimately positively surprised. Catholic fanatics. Well. What do you know.

The protagonist is an expat catholic priest, living in the US, who travels to Korea in his brother’s stead. His brother’s a catholic priest as well, apparently long tormented by guilt. He committed countless atrocities in his home country, murdering many communists in an attempt to seize control of their county before Communist backup arrived. The urgency of his youthful follies is apparent. The atheistic Communists, driven by an ideology that seemed imported from abroad, going against all traditions, political as well as religious, must have seemed an imminent danger to the priest-to-be.

The fact that they had large backers all across the country and abroad provided the urgency to do away with those in their home country once and for all. The same applies to the Communists, of course. After the brutal colonial rule of the Japanese, they looked to the north and east and saw new beginnings.They decided to make it new in their own country as well. And then the old retaliated, the old, politically as well as religious. Catholicism is so strict, so much of a ritual, that it’s the perfect fit for a religion that one sees as an obstacle, just like the Russian Orthodox Church was.

Both parties were in the wrong, so wrong it’s tough to find the right words for it, and yet one is tempted to refer to the atrociousness as “youthful folly”. Hwang Sok-yong found the perfect literary expression for this. There are so many problems with depicting the brutality en détail, not the least of which is the question whether a description will do justice to what happened, for the mind of the reader who is too young or too unkorean (yes, neologism) to remember. It’s like A.O. Scott’s musings on the American remake of Haneke’s classic “Funny Games”. The ghosts are the personified atrocities, they are the a Derridean trace (not really, I’m just joking), the personified lack. It shows to the reader who’s missing. Fathers, brothers, daughters, mothers. They are right there, looking him in the eye. And here’s where the author’s second brilliant move kicks in. He did not use the criminal brother as protagonists, even though he’s the one who originally saw the ghosts. He hands the reader a reader-like mirror, the brother who had nothing to do with it all.

For him, the ghosts help unravel the convoluted story, family tragedies, the tragedy of a country stumbling from one dark place to the next and then the following one. And they help us understand as well without trying to shock us with gratuitous violence. It’s not that I am not always up for copious amounts of violence, my deep adoration of Sarah Kane’s slim but brilliant oeuvre speaks for itself. But here this may be the wrong road to go down. Making the reader guess, look, see the lack and the aftermath has proven to be as effective a literary move as I’ve known, see for instance a work such as Semprun’s magisterial (ministerial) Le Grand Voyage. And it’s effective here. Read this book. While not as good as the abovementioned Pedro Paramo, which is absolutely mesmerizing, depicting a village tragedy as well, it’s something else. It’s necessary. Read it.

Ondjaki: Good Morning Comrades

Ondjaki (2008), Good Morning Comrades, Biblioasis
ISBN 978-1-897231-40-1
translated from the Portuguese by Stephen Henighan

What a novel. Ten pages in I hated it. There are some common literary mechanisms that I am getting tired of and this is one of the worst: a faux-naïve narrator, usually children or adolescents, describing his or her life in terrible circumstances, be it war or dictatorship or other regimes. Here it’s communist Angola, in the last year of a war that had lasted for several decades. A naïve boy is telling his tale. Simple style. I couldn’t decide whether it was the writer’s fault or the translator’s, but what I did know was that I regretted buying the book.

Ten pages later I was hooked. The style turned out to be more of a pose, it created a voice, a believable voice for the narrator and protagonist, the novel immediately started to cohere, and it stayed that way until the end of the book. When I had finished it, I felt I knew Ndalu, as the narrator/protagonist is called, on a personal level, even though he shared few personal details with us, the readers. This evocative power in so young a writer is impressive. This novel will not be the last of Ondjaki’s novels I’ll read.

The main power of the novel, however is found in its background. It’s set in Angola, a former Portuguese colony, which was torn apart by decades of war afterwards. One was the civil war, described @wiki like this:

The Angolan Civil War (1975 – 2002), one of the largest and deadliest Cold War conflicts, erupted shortly after and lasted 27 years, ravaging the economy, disturbing social order and disrupting social stability in the newly independent country. Over 500,000 people lost their lives,[7][8] as the three main factions and several smaller ones struggled for supremacy. Millions of Angolan refugees suffered with the conflict and left the country or simply fled to other regions of Angola.

The other major war was between the Angolan forces, augmented by Cuban military and apartheid South Africa. The latter conflict ended when the Angolan/Cuban army defeated South Africa’s forces at the battle of Cuito Cuanavale. Good Morning Comrades‘ translator writes of this:

The battle of Cuito Cuanavale has been erased from history as it is taught in Western nations; yet this battle forced the Western world to accept Angola’s present boundaries, caused the fall from power of South African president P.W. Botha, and led to the independence of Namibia and the end of apartheid in South Africa. In many parts of the world, Cuban soldiers, rather than tepid sanctions by the Western nations, are credited with having dealt the apartheid system its death blow.

This ambivalence, between oppression and liberation, of communist dictatorship, which in the novel is presented as yet another kind of colonialism, with beaches just for the Soviets and Cuban teachers and inspectors, while not actively governing the country, are apparently in firm control of central infrastructural points, is important. So are others: now we get to the really tasty bits. The Cuban/Soviet colonialism is never reflected, but the former Portuguese is, in two different ways. One is an old man, Comrade Antonio, who is old enough to remember Portuguese rule and constantly insists on the fact that it hasn’t been that bad, in a way that reminded me of old GDR citizens, who remember the 40 yrs fondly.

The second way Portuguese colonialism reflected is trickier. A relative from Portugal visits. How is this important? Let me digress first: all of Ndalu’s description of Angola are refreshingly devoid of whining, describing his circumstances good-humoredly, without hidden judgment. Some things might seem strange or possibly oppressive to us, but not to Ndalu. It does raise the question whether judgment is valid at all, since it’s not part of the book, maybe it’s just our/my uptight anti-communism (not that I thought I harbored this sort of prejudice). However, and here’s where we return to the visit, we do get an outside view on this, which reveals the absurdity of many daily rituals Ndalu takes for granted.

But even within these absurd rituals, there are again contrarian elements. Take this piece of dialogue. The aunt brings three different chocolate bars and Ndalu automatically assumes that she must have borrowed her neighbor’s ration cards. She denies that:

“I don’t have any sort of ration card. In Portugal we make our purchases without a card.”
“Without a card? But how do they keep track of people? How do they keep track, for example, of the fish you take home?” I didn’t even let her respond. “How do they know you didn’t take too much fish?”
“But I make the purchases I wish to make, provided that I have the money. Nobody tells me that I took too much fish or too little…”
“Nobody?” I was startled, but not overly so, because I was certain she was lying or jiking. “Isn’t there even a comrade in the fish market who stamps the cards when you buy fish on Wednesday?”

There you go. We all know that the phrase introduced by “provided…” isn’t as unimportant as it seems. And we all know that we here have excellent means of keeping track of our customers. These things crawl throughout the book including through an action- and suspense-packed episode at the center of the novel. I called the book simple but it’s deceptively simple. There is so much hidden in between the sparse details, that it results in the picture evoked in this short novel being incredibly rich. Additionally, the history it’s based on is intriguing, and I really like Ndalu.

The novel isn’t perfect, I am too much of a stickler for style to claim that, since Ondjaki or his translator isn’t interested in style at all. Yes, I said it works, but its accumulative. Pick any page, read it, it’s not a particular pleasure. read a whole chapter and the pleasure returns. It’s not my kind of book, but unquestionably good. On many levels. And he has four more novels already published in Portuguese, one of ‘em translated. Lots of great literature to look forward to.

In Praise of Fiction

A. Nomani in an older piece on the Jewel of Medina that was pulled by Random House. She concludes her musings w/ this:

All this saddens me. Literature moves civilizations forward, and Islam is no exception. There is in fact a tradition of historical fiction in Islam, including such works as “The Adventures of Amir Hamza,” an epic on the life of Muhammad’s uncle. Last year a 948-page English translation was published, ironically, by Random House. And, for all those who believe the life of the prophet Muhammad can’t include stories of lust, anger and doubt, we need only read the Quran (18:110) where, it’s said, God instructed Muhammad to tell others: “I am only a mortal like you.”

Here is a different piece of hers on hopes for future debates.

Good Question

Joshua Henkin’s right on the money (emphasis in the following quote’s mine)

The [Blue Flower] won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1997 [...]. There were a few grumblings at the time (Underworld had been the favorite in some circles), revived more recently when someone (one of the judges? I can’t remember exactly) suggested that The Blue Flower had been a compromise choice and that a smaller, less ambitious novel had won out over a book that swung for the fences. No disrespect meant to Delillo or any of the others, but The Blue Flower, though it comes in at just over 200 pages, is neither small nor unambitious. Would people have said the same thing if the writer had been a man?

Um, no (1)

Fêted writer Paul Verhaeghen writes

It’s just that the literature I care about sings in many tongues: It can be Brits with deep new roots in Japanese society, recovering Muslims investigating the human core at the heart of religion, women examining the true awfulness of masculinity, white Americans having a long hard look at our racism past and present, Jews writing about “passing”, Americans writing in French, Russians writing in English, or dying men turning back to stare unblinkingly into the void of life’s true evil.

Um, no. Since the books in question are David Mitchell Cloud Atlas, Salman Rushdie Satanic Verses, Donna Tartt The Secret History, Richard Powers The Time of our Singing, Philip Roth The Human Stain, Jonathan Littell Les Bienveillantes, Nabokov Pale Fire, Roberto Bolano 2666, the correct answer’s no, the “literature” you “care about” doesn’t really sing in many tongues, at least not in a nontrivial sense.
As far as that Rushdie phrase is concerned, that’s wrong on so many levels, I get bored just thinking about it. Dude, it’s almost like reading your novel.

Joan Didion: Play it as it lays

There are many variations of street craps. The simplest way is to either agree on or roll a number as the point, then roll the point again before you roll a seven. Unlike more complex proposition bets offered by casinos, street craps has more simplified betting options. The shooter is required to make either a Pass or a Don’t Pass bet if they want to roll the dice. Another player must choose to cover the shooter to create a stake for the game to continue. If there are several players, the rotation of the player who must cover the shooter may change with the shooter (comparable to a blind in poker). The person covering the shooter will always bet against the shooter. For example, if the shooter made a “Pass” bet, the person covering the shooter would make a “Don’t Pass” bet to win. Once the shooter is covered, other players may make Pass/Don’t Pass bets, or any other proposition bets, as long as there is another player willing to cover. (wikipedia)

The title of Play it as it lays, Joan Didion’s arguably most famous novel refers to the game of craps, a game of dice where the players bet on the outcome of a roll of dice. There are two possible outcomes, at the end of the line: “Pass” or “Don’t pass”, i.e. “Win” or “don’t win”. If anyone were asked to bet on Marie, the protagonist of Didion’s novel, now where would they put their money?

Marie, an actress in the grasps of an amoral, drug-addled, cruel Hollywood machinery, is doomed. I have, in conversation, compared Play it as it lays to Hemingway’s masterful The Sun Also Rises. Both feature broken characters who interact in faux-upbeat ways. It is, in both cases, a kind of schedule, something to observe, to keep up with. There is a beat to which the participants march, and it is a quick beat, not allowing for any pauses, or reflections. It’s with us or against us. Tune in OR drop out. Hemingway’s characters are all quick on the uptake and march to whatever beat presents itself. Hemingway’s tenderness, so outspoken in the stories, is nudged into the background here, soft music overshadowed by the beating of the drums and the marching, always the marching.

Marie, however, giving a child up for adoption, having an abortion, is, at one point, missing a step and, from that point on, is never in step again, always a tad late, always just missing the safe midstream current. An astonishing amount of people is prepared to help her, but it never works out.Her lethargy, depressions and simple mishaps, all of these things contribute to the disaster that her life quickly becomes. It was never much fun to begin with but the rapid rate at which it decomposes is frightening.

And that it is frightening, despite a protagonist who is perilously close to being a caricature of the typical Hollywood diva wreck, like the magnificent Monroe late in her (way too short) life, or today’s prime publicity victim, Britney Spears, that is over comes this character, is due to Didion’s language and structure. It is a very reduced language, almost, one is tempted to say: Hemingwayish in its harshness and brevity. And it’s short sentences, and meaningful line breaks. And short chapters. It slips from one point in time to another, bringing together the story of her demise by picking up those threads in her late life which brought it on. By the jumps back and forth between the various points in time the novel highlights connections and shows the rope tightening around Marie’s neck.

Marie is a victim and those who would accuse her of being lazy and lethargic and bringing the disaster upon herself, have not understood the extent to which her abortion and her failed marriage have broken her already embattled spirit. At one point even her ex-husband, who appeared to at least understand her predicament, accuses her of overreacting. In her sexual relations she is never in control, she is merely submitting. She doesn’t enjoy the act, she submits because this is how it’s done. It’s the beat again, and she’s marching, from bed to bed, from one man to the next. Until she misses a step.

It had seemed this past month as of they were all one, that her life had been a single sexual encounter, one dreamed fuck, no beginnings or endings, no point beyond itself. [...] She had a sense the dream had ended and she had slept on.

Play it as it lays is a remarkable novel, dark, brutal and fundamentally sad. It is highly recommended. It is the story of a woman who shoots a roll of dice and doesn’t pass and a whole society who bets against her and is happy to take her money. Alea jacta est, indeed. What’s done is done. ISBN

Yep

This @ the bookblog today

I cannot imagine a world where carrying around an advance copy of Roberto Bolano’s next book will get you laid.

I can. No, really.

Blood

Although the heat had not yet broken she began that week to sleep inside, between white sheets, hoping dimly that the white sheets would effect some charm, that she would wake in the morning and find them stained with blood. She did this in the same spirit that she had, a month before, thrown a full box of Tampax into the garbage: to be without Tampax was to insure bleeding, to sleep naked between white sheets was to guarantee staining. To give the charm every opportunity she changed the immaculate sheets every morning. She wore white crêpe pajamas and no underwear to a party.

from Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays

On Revolution

Why don’t they know that this is impossible to do without, that this really must be accomplished, that it certainly will be – so that no one will ever be poor or unhappy again? Isn’t this what they’re all saying? No, they feel sorry, but they really think things will always stay just the way they are – maybe a little better, but still much the same. [...] Yes, it’ll be wonderful when there are no more poor people, when no one can coerce anyone else.

– Nikolai Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done? (trans. Michael R. Katz)

Simple Mistake

So if you’re a young and ambitious literary scholar, you could do worse than to learn something about modern psychology and linguistics, especially those concepts and techniques that can easily be applied to texts.

sayeth Liberman, who, as we already know, has the literary sensibility of that mug of coffee right there. And yes, it can be done. Doesn’t mean it should be. I can take a dump on my computer right now. Doesn’t mean I should. Simple Mistake.

Bookerrrrrr

Longlist has been announced

Aravind Adiga The White Tiger
Gaynor Arnold Girl in a Blue Dress
Sebastian Barry The Secret Scripture
John Berger From A to X
Michelle de Kretser The Lost Dog
Amitav Ghosh Sea of Poppies
Linda Grant The Clothes on Their Backs
Mohammed Hanif A Case of Exploding Mangoes
Philip Hensher The Northern Clemency
Joseph O’Neill Netherland
Salman Rushdie The Enchantress of Florence
Tom Rob Smith Child 44
Steve Toltz A Fraction of the Whole

Color me thingie. I’m happy. Some heavyweights, some more unknown novels and even a thriller. I will now read my way down that list. Have read one already and ordered Netherland which is supposed to be superb. And no Carey!!!

Juan Goytisolo: The Blind Rider

Blind Rider is a book that punishes too hasty readers. Not in the way that actually ‘understanding’ the book becomes a problem, or, Finnegan’s Wake-like, an impossibility. You can plow hastily through the book and feel you understood everything. Blind Rider is a strange novel, very well written (as far as you can see this through the usual haze of translation), but strangely not quotable.

At the center of it is a man who has lost his wife and is struggling with the way he perceives life, and more specifically, reality, religion and love. It is composed of small chapters, that often move from wonderfully observed particular to general observation, within generally three pages. There are differently structured chapters, of course, it’s not a strictly composed novel, as far as I see it.

Many passages are shockingly vapid, empty, cliché, they are good imitations of bad ‘philosophical’ literature, reminiscent of what Bernhard attacked so brilliantly as ‘writers of aphorisms’ in Der Untergeher. There is obviously a shallowness even in the passages that detail his loss. Taken chapter by chapter, not reading the whole novel, I’d say these are bad chapters, probably part of a bad book. Again, much of this is language, phrasing, things that could be due to whatever bee crept under this translator’s (Thomas Brovot) bonnet.

So, what do I mean by saying it punishes the hasty reader? Maybe I am, as usual, talking about my fat and bearded self. I came to this book with high expectations. One could call me a connoisseur of bleakness and by all accounts this book promised to be a trove of bleakness. And it started off so well, too. And I dug in, swallowing the book in big hungry gulps. I was, however, soon disappointed, because there is an abyss of abysmal writing to bleakness. Because of the surplus of strong emotion that seems, to the mediocre bleak writer, perfectly communicable by words and phrases treading well known paths, this sort of word, phrase or image (in pietry more often than not heavily indebted to Trakl) recurs time and again and becomes wearisome. All this may well be ‘heart-felt’ or ‘authentic’, but these are hardly literary terms and thus have no place in a defense of this book.

So I started to move along at a more and more sluggish pace, disappointment being the trouser around my ankles keeping me from running faster through the pages of this thin book. As the discourses with God cropped up, in line with a certain popular kind of cheap pseudo-theodicy, I wasn’t even more disappointed, I couldn’t be, as it appeared to be, to me, just more of the same uninspired dirge. Yes I noticed many literary references, mostly to Tolstoy’s prose, the Kreuzer Sonata, Hadschi Murat, War&Peace, Anna Karenina (how could I not have noticed) but it appeared to be, for me, just an undemanding way of putting meat on the bones of this skeleton of a narrative.

How could I have been so mistaken! This occurred to me within an hour of finishing the book. Something wasn’t right about my impressions but, off the cuff, I wasn’t able to tell what the problem was, exactly. So I reread the novel, and, as I said: boy was I wrong about it!

A hint of how this novel works surfaces in the dense web of explicit and implicit literary references. The careful structure (not strict but still careful) assures that nothing in it feels haphazard, incidental. Reading more than five mini-chapters in a row you immediately lose whatever thought of mediocrity one may have, the mind at work is obviously a brilliant one. The question of one’s ontological status (“do I exist?”), the web of literary reference, and the aforementioned insipidness of some of the remarks, which border on caricatures of so-called philosophical discourse.

The point to this, I guess, is, what does it matter? Theoretical discourse is exposed as disposable here. What does it matter, the narrator thinks, I feel, and grimly, blackly, sometimes blackly humorous, presents these cliché puppets of such discourses. A fellow student told me last week that he considered theory to be a nice exercise for idle brains but not much use in day-to-day life. And what happened to the narrator before the novel sets in has shown this to be true, to him.

There is a loss at the heart of this novel, which borders on being a poem, so well is it composed, so few words are incidental, a loss that has caused the narrator to lose faith. Not faith in God, faith in everything, language, reality, God. This book is an effort to resurrect his faith by trying to cope with the disability this loss of faith can be to a writer. If you don’t believe in the power of words to create anew, why not use the truism that, to you, everything has become? He uses art to spin off it the feelings he isn’t able to describe adequately, my knowledge of Tolstoy has allowed for strong insights into the protagonist which were, I believe, hidden within these references, as other insights are hidden within the formulaic formulations.

In the final chapters the writing gets better as the protagonists reality merges more and more with discourse and art, and is all subsumed by it, his loss has been taken up by art and language and transformed into Nothing. Bleakness? Yep, it’s about bleakness all right, and it’s a deeper, more fundamental bleakness than most writers manage to express, because it’s not expressible. This tiny novel is like a vampire, feeding off all sorts of sources, and it’s a brilliant spectacle watching it do it’s work. ISBN

Reader’s Dilemma

Stretch @ the Guardian blog on a familiar ‘problem’:

Whenever I discover a new author, it always starts so well. An enticing cover image, a seductive first line, some flirtatious opening pages. Before I know where I am, he’s found his way into my bed and is keeping me awake late into the night. But as with any relationship, it isn’t long before questions of commitment crop up. As someone with a frankly promiscuous attitude towards writers (I’ll try anyone once), I always find myself asking the same question: am I really expected to read everything they’ve written? [...]

One fundamental problem remains – and not just laziness (although to be honest, that’s part of it). The truth is that bad novels sometimes happen to good novelists. Absolute consistency is the hallmark of very few writers, particularly the more prolific ones. Must we, as readers, suffer bad prose for the sake of loyalty?

(via)

On hopes, disappointments and surprises: recent books by Günter Grass and Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie and Günter Grass, two of my favorite living writers, have both published new books recently. Both writers have a mixed track record of late. Rushdie took a downward turn with The Ground Beneath Her Feet and hit literary rock bottom with the astonishingly bad Fury. He regained some ground since, with the mixed but good Shalimar the Clown. It wasn’t all good, in retrospect there were many problems with it but I for one heaved a big sigh of relief upon reading it. Especially the Kashmir passages were among his very best work, and in the WWII passages I felt he was slowly getting the hang of writing about the west without descending into self-parody.

Grass has started his bad years with Mein Jahrhundert (My Century), which showcased why he shouldn’t write more short prose, but wasn’t as excruciatingly bad as the poetry he published in the following years. Novemberland and Letzte Tänze were bad. Very bad. Embarrassingly bad. Lord knows, Grass was one of the best German post-WWII poets when he started his career, I’d still recommend his debut volume of poetry, Die Vorzüge der Windhühner to anyone who cares for poetry and my opinion. I can’t really explain what happened. He also published a novel that read like a bad parody of himself, Im Krebsgang (Crabwalk).

So I awaited both writers’ new books with hopes and fears. With Grass, admittedly, the hope was solely based on my love for his older work and wasn’t strong enough to make me pay for the hardcover. When I finally bought the paperback of Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion) I was pleasantly surprised. Yes, some irritating ticks, too much talk of Grass’ penis and too much of a hurry marred the book, but it cohered wonderfully, was a great read and contained much of what I loved and love in Grass’ work. A shifty memoirist, he slips in and out of truth, offers interpretations for his own work by claiming real life counterparts to some of his most famous creatures, including the precocious son of an acquaintance of his, who walks into the living room with his tin drum. Grass relates of his talks with a friend in the army, who was to become Pope Benedikt XVI, he does a good job of discussing Germany’s dark past without providing excuses (but also without being really open about it, more on this soon) and his writing often shines as it did in the old days. It’s the old baroque Grass again, who lays it on too thickly but it feels rarely forced. An inspired book.

Not so The Enchantress of Florence. Well. There are two ways of looking at the book. They are not compatible, but they are both true. According to one it’s easily his best work since The Moor’s last Sigh. No matter how you look at it, it’s not as good as Moor or the Verses, or Shame, or Children, or indeed Haroun, but it bests the rest of his novels. There is some glorious writing and there are few writers out there who can do as much justice to the sumptuousness of the setting of the novel as Rushdie can. Without even having to indulge in long descriptions, it’s there, in his prose. He needs few words to paint a whole, finely detailed, rich world. Days after finishing the Enchantress I had vivid visions of Florence. It made me pull Mandragola and The Prince off shelves and reread them.

There are many strange and great characters, often pained with broad brushstrokes that left an intricate pattern in the novel. The story is straightforward enough told with an enormous pace, actually, but without ever seeming hurried. He seems to have regained his talent for telling a rich story in few words, something which has amazed me ever since Shame (which, at the time, I picked up reluctantly, as any thin book, but which, in retrospect, seems like that house in Danielewski’s House of Leaves, it’s bigger inside than outside.)

However, there are, once we invoke the masterpieces of this great writer, some respects in which The Enchantress somewhat short. It’s never as moving, as warm, as his earlier work. People move past you and even though their characterization is superb, the book is still cold. With a writer of Rushdie’s abilities, I wouldn’t be surprised if he had recognized his strengths and crafted a better novel, to the best of his abilities. Unlike Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion) this is most certainly not an inspired book, no sir. It’s a supremely well crafted book, but there’s something missing at the heart of it all, although I admit that Rushdie’s language does carry a certain warmth, the warmth of a room hung with thick, rich carpets, in the midst of summer, in a household lonely with cruelty. The child alone in his room basks in the heat, but still shivers, from a different kind of cold.

And this is where we turn to the second point I alluded to before. Rushdie was never a good thinker. Take a peek into one of his volumes of essays and you’ll see what I mean. The best parts of them are inspiring, even thought provoking, but less like real philosophy and more like (at times) good aphorisms. Not that they are aphorisms. If that is confusing, it’s all you’re going to get. Well. Back to Rushdie being a second- or third-rate thinker.

It shows in the new novel which cites and sometimes paraphrases contemporary discussions of that infamous idea of the “Clash of Cultures” and of religion and fundamentalism. Tired, all too well known witticisms, bad arguments that pose in the novel as novel (excuse the pun) ideas, and brilliant and/or daring ones at that. How could Rushdie have read period pieces (it is to be assumed he has read all or most of Macchiavelli’s work, including the luminous work that is the Discourses on Livy) and assumed that his cut&paste method of transplanting weak contemporary arguments into that setting could work at all?

Hence my comparison to Fury. Both are, in their own ways, failed novels of ideas, in both cases because Rushdie hasn’t many good ideas, in the philosophical sense, of his own. It’s not just because Rushdie is channeling the Football Hooligans of Rational Thought, although he is, and it’s not a nice thing to behold. No, this novel immediately takes a nosedive anytime he engages in anything philosophical. It recovers quickly, but I have been known to shout angrily from time to time while reading it. I’m not sure I want to reread it. I’ll try to just remember the great parts and look forward to the new novel, which is, hopefully, emptier of philosophy and fuller of awesome (yes, I use awesome as a noun). ISBN

"A hard, dark gem": Some short remarks on Thomas Bernhard’s "Frost"

I am a great admirer of Mr. Bernhard’s work, all of it. It’s almost devoid of women, yet judging from his treatment of them when they appear, this may be a good thing. His work is still amazing, possibly because of all that bile stored in his pen.

My two favorite novels of his are his first and his last one. Bernhard is a bleak writer and his last novel, called Extinction (Auslöschung) is maybe his funniest novel, his most playful, and yet ful with all his marvellous bleakness.

His first novel though is hard as a rock. You can see the humor briefly before the frost grabs it, breaks its neck and laughs bitterly. It’s very well written, incredibly so for a debut novel. As in Bernhards other work there are many repetitions, many musings upon the rotten nature of the world, yet it is his bleakest novel and that is saying a lot. There are several critics who confessed to have capitulated on their first attempt to tackle this relentless lecture in pain. The plot isn’t important, the setting is rural Austria, and the characters are a painter who went there to die and a young student who is sent there to spy on the painter and compile reports on him. The novel, which is, on top of all that, one of his longer ones with the German pb clocking in at just under 400 pages, basically consists of walks taken by the writer accompagnied by the student who strikes up a friendship with the bitter old man.

The old man lectures him on the desolate state the world is in. There’s a solution shining through (art!) but its like seeing the sun miles away while you’re standing in the rain, pummeled by a cold wind and always in danger of being hit by lightning.

Bernhard is one of the best prose stylists in the German language post 1945, and as early as Frost, he’s almost at the top of his game. Whether its the descriptions of the hideous whore that is the landlady of the inn where both protagonists are staying or of the peasants who are all sick, inside and out, and of the Frost, who dominates the landscape and eats into the hearts of the citizens of the area.

This novel reads like a development of his poetry (he started as a poet, then turned to prose and drama), sharpening it, hardening it into the dark gem that it is. Much of what is developed here returns time and again in his work, but most noticeably in what is, beyond any doubt, his masterpiece: Extinction (Auslöschung). ISBN

Harry Crews: A Feast of Snakes

A Feast of Snakes is suprising. Not in the way it all comes together at the end, because the reader expects that, somehow. It’s surprising how complex a 177 page novel can turn out to be that starts off as ferociously and genre-attuned as this one.

The book is steeped in poison, blood, sweat and brutality, laced with a big dose of humor. Love doesn’t have a place in Mystic, Georgia, the place where the novel’s events take place, a place that’s more about power than anything else. The power, at first glance, appears to be favoring white males, they call the shots and theirs is an authority no one cares to question publicly.

However, as is said of the main character: “His job was to be the nigger” and “as soon as he was not around a white man, he quit being a nigger.” Whiteness, as we have known for a while, is indicative more of power relations than of anything else, and the power wielded by the white ‘niggers’ such as the main character, Jon Lon, is a very restricted sort of power. People can be bullied by money and by complex arrangements of words and both of these things aren’t to be found in Mystic, Georgia.

This leads Mystic’s white men to use brutality extensively to legitimize the power structure in place in town. It is not necessary to enforce it, the brutality is more of a show of strength, like a Soviet arms parade.

The novel’s language is reduced and rich at the same time. Descriptions are written in a simple yet never simplistic style that is careful and elegant. The dialogue is almost completely in dialect. The difference between that dialect and the standard English of the descriptions and of the out of town visitors is very pronounced and, again, sheds light on the power relations in and around Mystic. Whereas the white men feel superior enough in their control of language to admonish blacks thusly: “Lottie Mae, try not to talk nigger talk to me.”, the difference to out-of-towners shows that their own language is ‘nigger talk’ as well.

It’s always easy to bully those in a position that those apparently in power perceive as weaker than their own, but it, and the accompagnying false feelings of superiority, blinds the seemingly powerful to his own role in other power structures. As easy as you bully someone, you are bullied, and a generous spirit can help you see this. Many people, though, don’t. Some of which live in Mystic, Georgia.

In the bigger picture, all these whites are ‘niggers’ and their refuge, Mystic, Georgia, is about to be swallowed by the modern world, the richer, smarter and more literate world around them. Theirs is a doomed archaic civilization, where everyone turns a blind eye on rapes, having your dick sucked after cornholing someone is the height of true love and murder is almost an accepted way of meting out justice. And Harry Crews is capable of finding the right words and images for all this, in 177 paltry pages. Diving deep into myth and other granaries of language and culture, he says only what needs to be said. He never overpowers the reader with his language, which he uses only to say something, every word, every image is put to work in the service of the story.

It seems that Mystic, Georgia is beyond the grasp of either government or modern society. It’s governed by its own laws and, at the moment that it faces destruction, its laws turn out to be more of a trap than a help against a foe that doesn’t attack the way the people of Mystic expect it to. They cannot deal with a foe who does not use corporeal violence to conquer them but that is all they have left to deal with the unknown.

Harry Crews’ novel Feast of Snakes is highly recommended to anyone who enjoys novels about the American south or good novels in general. It may seem slight, but it packs a wallop. Very much worth reading.

[if you made it to the end of this erratic, self-important crap I applaud you and apologize] ISBN

Communist Bookworms

Excellent idea over @ paperpools:

The odd thing about the people who specialise in decluttering people’s lives is that no one ever talks about the possibility of (shock horror) communal ownership. The alternatives offered are a) private ownership and b) divestment. So you have to choose between having a Greek-English Lexicon in the home, which you consult a few times a year, or not having access to one at all. The idea that you might be better off as a member of a group, so that you all paid once for a book you all might occasionally have use for, and all clubbed together to pay for a place to keep the collection… well, it’s not that it smacks of Communism. It’s not that it’s unAmerican. It’s so absolutely alien it’s not even considered as a possibility.

Democrats campaigning like Republicans

Reading HST’s 1972 campaign notes, I have to think of remarks as in this Dowd column. Here’s Thompson on covering Ed Muskie:

That scene was pure Nixon – so much like a pep rally set at a Young Republican Club that I was reminded of a conversation I’d had earlier with a reporter from Atlanta. “You know,” he said. “It’s taken me half the goddamn day to figure out what it is that bothers me about these people.” He nodded toward a group of clean-cut young Muskie staffers at the other end of the car. “I’ve covered a lot of Democratic campaigns,” he continued. “But I’d never felt out of place before [...].”
“I know what you mean,” I said.
“Sure,” he said. “It’s obvious – and I’ve finally figured out why.” He chuckled and looked at the Muskie people again. “You know what it is?” he said. “It’s because these people act like goddamned Republicans! That’s the problem. It took me a while but I finally figured it out.”

from Hunter S. Thompson’s incredible Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72

Michael Hulse

Met him. Embarrassed. I talk too much. Too much stupid stuff. Doro is right. I should shut my trap. Hm. He autographed my copy of his poems tho.

Common Sense (Blathery Rant)

I have talked to people recently who extolled the virtues of disagreeing with academic opinion, regardless of the soundness of yr arguments against the old position. They appeared to be entirely unfazed by the fact that the argument in these books seems to rely entirely on common sense, not on thinking or careful reasoning (for example this book).

Last night it occurred to me that the funny thing about most of these ‘rebellious’ attacks against the academic establishment is that they only work for a reader who is rather roughly or not at all acquainted with the ‘facts’. While it is true that many of these ‘facts’ are created by academia (and I would be the very last person to defend something like ‘objective historical facts’, indeed I think that to posit the existence of knowable objective historical facts means almost always a shoddy methodological framework) and that there is a strong intolerance against alternative theories, the carefully reasoned book that would actually have an impact on the generally accepted theory is rare. The only thing it actually does is stir up the uneducated masses without educating them first. It’s pure demagoguery, and not in a nice way.

This is anti-intellectualism at its worst. It may not look like this sometimes but take a closer look at the premises and you’ll see it. And Common Sense, as the instrument of such arguments, appears to me sometimes to be downright evil. I am not very firm on English etymology, but the German equivalent, “gesunder Menschenverstand”, which, roughly, awkwardly, translates as “healthy human reasoning”, shows how Common Sense works. It attacks things which are outside of a given societal norm, which, of course, reflects strongly the dominant anti-emancipatory ideas of a given society. Small wonder then that, say, in the realm of philosophy, books, nay, pamphlets abound which are bashing Feminism and any strain of postmodern/poststructuralist thought that is not in agreement with the dominant norm. The sick elements of society, if you will, channeling Agamben and Foucault here.

Thus, Common Sense often surfaces in the most evil of contexts. Antisemitic, racist literature is built on a foundation of ‘common sense’. The whole insidious concept of political correctness is built on ‘common sense’ as well, the idea being that, if we were really honest, we would admit that what is perceived as ‘pc speech’ is really only pc mumbo-jumbo. There is, as to modern antisemitism, an aspect of down-to-earth, almost agrarian, simplicity to the whole thing. Small wonder that both concepts can often be found in nationalistic ‘Blut und Boden’-contexts and in anti-cosmopolitanist arguments. It does not, though, usually make an appearance in islamophobic contexts, as the stereotypes directed at that particular minority are others. Debauchery, decadence, yes, but Islam is so strongly identified with a particular ethnic group that the particular nexus described above is never really activated. Islamophobia is, currently, a rather obvious affair, and so widely and fundamentally accepted, that it has had no need to hide behind a rhetorical veil yet.

The strangest aspect of this, though, is that even intellectuals, and those who are very much in favor of emancipatory movements, tend to view ‘common sense’ and the gesture of rebellion as an acceptable ally in the battle against orthodoxy and then proceed to attack nilly-willy those who work within orthodoxy, who urge others to try to read and understand what you are criticizing before you go off on a 200page commonsensical rant (or at least to be open to arguments from orthodox academia). Happened to me once here and several times in person. And no, this is not about left-wing antisemitism (think anticapitalism, think usury). And no, I have no answer to this, really. It baffles me, honestly. Did I mention that they are all really, really smart, some of them way, way smarter than this blog’s dim-witted excuse for an author? They are. You see me throwing my hands up. I have no answer. Do you have one? I’d love to hear it. A book you can direct me to?

Have a great week, btw., folks.

Gettin’ yr morals on

Conversational Reading on William T. Vollmann’s new book, Riding Toward Everywhere

The problem is that he has a tendency to overdo it, as in, for instance, writing an entire book about hopping trains that has no real point to it and tries to play up the hobo life into some kind of American myth.

That’s not to say that someone out there couldn’t write a good book about hobos or whatever, but Vollmann isn’t the guy to do it. He has some kind of soft spot when it comes to whores/bums/etc and his sense of morals becomes way too facile

History of Islam (paradoxe du bouquiniste)

On Helen de Witt’s wonderful blog I found this

Urvoy points out an oddity which he calls the paradoxe du bouquiniste. Anyone who spends a lot of time at secondhand bookstalls finds an image of the history of French thought in the 18th century quite different from what he was taught. In his studies they would have talked only of thinkers who were opposed to established religion, above all to religious orthodoxy; but in the bookstalls one finds a vast army of defenders of the faith, names one has never heard of, or heard of only as someone who criticised Rousseau… Since the Renaissance, he suggests, we have placed emphasis on originality, on individualism, so our intellectual history devalues whatever was typical of its time, rates highly whatever was at least self-proclaimed as original. Books offer us chapters on great individuals, with perhaps a dutiful chapter on background which the reader feels free to ignore.

In the history of Arab thought, on the other hand, the opposite is true. It has been written not by philosophers but by historians, and they privilege “representative” authors. The Arab philosophers who drew on the Greek philosophical tradition have just about managed to get taken seriously because of their immense influence on Scholasticism – but many Islamic scholars regard them askance as marginal thinkers. Attention was concentrated on the religious apologists, who were seen as expressing the essence of Arabic-Islamic thought. [I am writing this awkward English because paraphrasing DU, something I do very badly.]

Urvoy comments: the enterprise of setting out a collective structure of thought, with occasional detailed studies of individuals, is entirely legitimate. But isn’t there something odd about this radical antithesis between the study of Western and of Arab thought? Can it really be right for the Arabist to concentrate solely on writers whose equivalents he would despise if he were a specialist of the 18th-century in France?

Sanctuary

This resonates with me, those who know me may know how deeply. William Styron on his love of books

“I read everything I could lay my hands on,” he remembers, some 50 years later. “Even today I can recall the slightly blind and bloodshot perception I had of the vaulted Gothic reading room, overheated, the smell of glue and sweat and stale documents, winter coughs, whispers, the clock ticking toward midnight as I raised my eyes over the edge of ‘Crime and Punishment.’ The library became my hangout, my private club, my sanctuary, the place of my salvation; during the many months I was at Duke, I felt that when I was reading in the library I was sheltered from the world and from the evil winds of the future; no harm could come to me there.”

Dealing with World War II

As a German I keep reading discussions (or taking part in them myself) on how my country is/was dealing with WW II. One of the complaints I hear most is the call to forget, to not resume talking about painful issues. People specifically complain about the fact that the issue of guilt is too often pressed. The fact that the following, from Japan (well, from the Guardian, actually), is not likely to happen here is why I kind of like painful issues and guilt. Seeing how some Germans talk about WWII I am happy that some sort of collective feeling of guilt is preventing hot water like this from boiling here.

Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe has won a major court battle over a book he wrote more than 30 years ago detailing how Japanese soldiers persuaded and sometimes forced Okinawan civilians to commit suicide rather than give themselves up in the closing days of the second world war.

[...]

The ruling was also a high-profile setback for a vocal lobby among Japanese conservatives who have long sought to discredit or censure material documenting Japanese excesses during the war, including government-supported prostitution, the rape of the Chinese city of Nanking and other incidents.

[...]

The plaintiffs, who were expected to appeal, filed the suit after discovering school texts portrayed the military as responsible for the Okinawa suicides, their lawyer Shinichi Tokunaga said. They made their claim amid a conservative-led movement backed by hawkish Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and his successor, Shinzo Abe, to “soften” textbook accounts of wartime atrocities, or to deny any involvement in them by Japanese troops.

A government decision two years ago to delete textbook references to the Japanese military role in the forced suicides brought the issue to a boil on Okinawa, culminating in a protest by more than 100,000 people in September last year.

(via)

On Borges

Conversational Reading on Borges’ oddities

It’s hard not to find Borges amusing . . . he was just so odd. Manguel recounts that he once promised a young boy that if he was good, Borges would then let him imagine a bear. Who else could you so easily picture saying that in complete sincerity? Another time, he attempted to console the Argentine writer Silvina Ocampo, who was devastated by the death of her dog, with some metaphysical posterings about how her dog was really just a reflection of the Platonic idea of the dog, which encompassed all the infinite possible dogs, etc, etc. . . . As Manguel tells it, Borges really thought this was going to be helpful.

American Indecencies (2)

Motoko Rich article in NYT online:

Mr. Horsley, whose memoir, “Dandy in the Underworld,” was published last week in paperback by Harper Perennial, a unit of HarperCollins, said he was detained by United States customs authorities for eight hours and questioned about his former drug addiction, use of prostitutes and activity as a male escort.

[...]

Lucille Cirillo, a spokeswoman for the New York office of United States Customs and Border Protection, said she could not comment on specific cases. But in an e-mail message, she said that under a waiver program that allows British citizens to enter the United States without a visa, “travelers who have been convicted of a crime involving moral turpitude (which includes controlled-substance violations) or admit to previously having a drug addiction are not admissible.”

In “Dandy of the Underworld” Mr. Horsley, who is notorious in Britain, writes of being raised by alcoholic, sexually promiscuous parents and bouncing through several schools. He details a debauched life of cocaine, heroin, opium and amphetamine use, writing that he spent more than £100,000 (nearly $200,000) on crack cocaine and £100,000 to consort with more than 1,000 prostitutes. He also chronicles his trip to the Philippines to be hung from a cross, an event that was recorded by a photographer and videographer and formed part of an art exhibition that was extensively covered by the news media in his home country.

[...]

Mr. Horsley said he was surprised he was deported, since he had previously traveled to the United States six times, twice to visit relatives in Boston and four times to New York.

“God bless America, land of the free, but sadly not the land of the depraved,” he said. He referred to the recent resignation of Eliot Spitzer, the former governor of New York, in the wake of revelations that he had frequented prostitutes. “I’m not a politician, I’m an artist,” Mr. Horsley said. “Depravity is part of the job description.”

He added that he regarded his memoir as “a very moral book in the same way that Bret Easton Ellis’s ‘American Psycho’ was a moral book.” He added, “I’m not a bad person.”

Orange Prize sexist?

Times online

The all-women Orange literature prize is still needed, despite women winning prizes in fair competition with men, the organisers have said.

The Orange prize longlist, published yesterday, includes Anne Enright’s The Gathering, which won the unisex Booker a few weeks ago. In the past two years, women have won both the Booker and Costa literary awards.

The novelist A. S. Byatt told The Times that the Orange was a sexist prize, saying that she was so critical of what it stands for that she forbids her publishers to submit her novels for consideration. “Such a prize was never needed,” she said, noting that many works of literature were by women.

John Sutherland, the academic, said that ghettoising women writers did them more harm them good. Anita Brookner, a Booker winner, has dismissed positive discrimination and is also believed to have declined having her novels entered for the Orange.

Harriet Hastings, project director of the Orange prize, shrugged off the criticisms, maintaining that it was international and had no need to justify its existence: “Although major prizes have been won by women, the value of the Orange is as a celebration of women’s fiction.”

[...]

Kirsty Lang, chairman of this year’s panel, denied yesterday that the Orange was positive discrimination, saying that most readers are women, and prizes are to attract readers. (via)

If you know me I have strong opinions about the policies of the Nobel committee and have been known to scream at people who decry political aspects of that award (both attacking Jelinek’s and Lessings’s awards as being politically correct awards that should belong to MEN such as John Updike (*retch*) or Philip Roth.). But an award just for women? I dunno.

Pilgrimages: James Merrill and the Poetics of Travel

[This is a summary of my M.A. Thesis which is not finished, but I had to hand in a summary, so I wrote this. If anyone has any ideas or criticism or wants to point me in a direction he or she might think I didn't think about, he or she is more than welcome. I have forgotten to include Jaynes in the voices part at the end and chronotope in the middle somewhere but that's not important]

James Merrill’s is, quite explicitly, a poetry concerned with places. An early volume is called The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace, which refers to Switzerland, and his last volumes include as transparently named poems as “Overdue Pilgrimage to Nova Scotia” and “Walks in Rome”. The speaker(s) of Merrill’s poetry travel(s) to Greece, Italy, Turkey and other countries, coming from the United States. Additionally, he meets fellow travelers. Hans Lodeizen, the Netherlands poet, “The Summer People” and, finally, souls of the dead who travel from the afterworld to spend leisurely nights at the Ouija board with JM and his partner DJ.

At first we will be looking at actual travel and its reflection in the poetry, starting off with a look at the different places the speaker(s) in Merrill’s poetry end up in. The first of these places and arguably one of the most important, is Greece, where hellenism’s historic sites provide a colorful background to tales of loss (Tony: Ending the Life) and love (Days of 1964). Greece is mostly a place to visit: the speaker and his friends are guests, and are never shown to be anything other than that, which makes for a curious inbetween state in poems that seem to be about fixed places and which even develop their own sort of family imagery. Not so with the second group, which is New England, especially Boston and Stonington, Connecticut. Merrill’s childhood poems (The Broken Home) are for the most part set against a refined Bostonian backdrop and it’s chiefly in Stonington where he will receive the visiting souls in his Ouija board sessions. New England is both: a place where others visit Merrill and his friends and the place where Merrill’s at home, born and raised.

Both Greece and New England are such an essential part of his poetry that they are rarely introduced. Names and references are enough to put the reader on the right track. Other places such as Rome and Istanbul/Byzantium have to be introduced by name: “Istanbul. 21 march. I woke today / With an absurd complaint.” (The Thousand and Second Night). However, poems such as “Days of 1964″ also contain a considerable amount of description that might well enable a local to situate the poem into a specific time and place. Places have left their traces all over James Merrill’s poetry. That said, it should be added that descriptions and explicit reference is not the only or even the most important way in which these places have left their traces. The most important -and most relevant for the purpose of this paper- way is via their cultural context.

Places such as Athens or Boston imply clear-cut cultural contexts. Thus, it should come as no surprise that Merrill’s poetry is filled with references to specific cultural contexts. However, they are almost always blended with other contexts, other travels past and present which have left their mark on his poetry. Greece especially is a treasure trove, informing both Merrill’s ecphrastic poems like “Bronze” and leaving traces of philosophy (“We love the good, said Plato? He was wrong. / We love as well the wicked and the weak.” (Matinées)), myth (“I call up / Graces, Furies, Fates,” (An Urban Convalescence)) and language (“Goods, bads, kaló-kakó, cockatoo-raucous” (To my Greek)) everywhere. Greek cultural references are special in that they mostly appear in poems which are set in places outside of Greece. In this, naturally, Merrill reflects the enormous influence Hellenism has had on western culture and literature. Interestingly, Greece as a culture reverses the guest/visitor relation that we saw when looking at (fixed) places. One could see Hellenism as a visitor, appearing in all kinds of settings, in different guises, clad in Rilke, for example.

The opposite, of course, is true for the New England context, which is evoked almost only in the New England poems. These poems refer to a well documented cultural context which has probably found its best decription in Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, depicting New England as a place of meetings, where ships and trade arrive and leave, where a certain jet set levity cannot hide a darker, menacing undercurrent (especially in “Skunk Hour”). A consideration of the New England context is helpful in figuring out deceptively simple poems like the sonnet sequence “A Broken Home” and goes a long way towards explaining the dark note in poems such as “18 West 11th Street”, where genealogy is decribed as ‘hatching’ “another generation / Of strong-jawed, light-besotted saboteurs”. Echoes of the skunk mother who “will not scare” reverberate in poems such as “18 West 11th Street”, promting the speaker, for example, to remark upon “The girl’s / Appearance now among us [...] / Naked, frail but fox-eyed.” The religiousness of New England culture has also left its traces in Merrill’s poetry, especially in The Changing Light at Sandover, where he evinces a strong spirituality, if in a mocking spirit and definitely not in a Christian vein.

The third group of places, with cities as Istanbul (The Thousand and Second Night), Rome (Walks in Rome), Venice (Investiture at Cecconi’s) or Alexandria (Tony: Ending the Life), is, interestingly, often portrayed in the past and the present within the same poem. It is obvious that these places are as important for their cultural context, which is inscribed into their very names, as for their reality in a narrative that may take place in modern times. The way that, for instance, Istanbul is sometimes referred to as Istanbul and sometimes as Byzantium, is a giveaway. These places, similar to the New England poems, contain ample reference to Hellenism, for instance, but keep their own cultural contexts to themselves. An exception of sorts is Italy. Neither Rome nor Venice, taken by themselves, do that, but Italy as a whole does provide an important cultural context that the travelling speaker carries with him back to the United States or to Greece. To be more precise, when I write ‘Italy’ I should probably write ‘Tuscany’ because between Dante and Macciavelli and others, these references do not stray outside of that enchanting swathe of Italy. However, as Tuscany is not named, to my knowledge, I have to assume that it is not a category of the poem and the italian refernces refer to the cultural context of ‘Italy’ as a whole.

Now that we have examined places and the other aspect of places, that is to say, cultural contexts, or, as we will refer to them from now on: cultures, we can turn to the, by now, famous theory of “Traveling Cultures” of the eminent anthropologist James Clifford. He claims that for the anthropologist of recent decades, a different sort of travel has arisen as an issue to be dealt with: cultural travel. There are two kinds of cultural travel to be considered. The first one is actual, bodily travel, in the common sense of the word. In this way Merrill’s speaker(s) travel to Rome, Greece, Boston etc. This received idea of travel has informed the commonly used concept of culture quite a lot, the idea being that cultures can be relatively stable concepts, even if they are no longer anchored to a well-defined place or to the local as the person who lives there. Exceeding the scope of a phenomenon such as Hellenism, in the modern age travel has been radically facilitated, so that adherents of a certain culture can travel the world, without, ultimately, being connected by ethnicity nor by nationality to the traditional place associated with that culture. Diaspora and connected concepts are important here. The cultures travel piggyback on a traveler’s figurative shoulders, he or she brings his own cultural contexts. In the case of Merrill it will be a point of interest whether claims made in previous sections (New England culture only in New England poems) can be upheld: doesn’t he carry his contexts with him as well?

The second sort of cultural travel could be called figurative travel. Cultures can travel without the members of the culture moving corporally, for instance through receiving visitors or through being subjected to medial influences, such as television or literature. This time there is a double travelling. Culture travels to the readers/watchers and those on the receiving end are travelling in a sense, too. Reading a book about Greece and visiting Greece might have roughly the same impact in ternms of cultural influence. This is especially relevant for James Merrill’s poetry, as it is swamped in book lore: Byzantium, Dante’s Tuscany, these have, of course, never been visited by Merrill in a literal sense. Yet, as we will see, the impact on his poetry is similar to the impact left by his ‘real’ travels. To not regard these two as two specifictations of the same basic phenomenon is to not understand the importance of travel in the broader sense, as Clifford uses it, to Merrill’s poetry.

These two kinds of cultural influence, which can be viewed as a complex system of visiting and hosting cultures, especially in a writer who travels as extensively and often as Merrill did. The first group of exchanges are the most obvious, between New England and Greece. The wealth of Hellenistic references that populate the New England poems are indisputable and have been remarked upon. A point of interest would be to what extent the New England culture informs the Greece poems. This formulation is crucial. Of course, the New England culture doesn’t influence the Greek culture, as it would in Clifford’s model (Well, it might but we are not interested in anthropology.). The impact of travel will, ultimately, be shown to be something that is part of the poetry, not necessarily of ‘the real world’. As we will see, travel and poetry are intimately connected in Merrill’s oeuvre. A final remark: we will dispense with other cross-references, such as New England/Tuscany, New England/Rome etc., as the most interesting question, whether Merrill could be said to form a sort of tiny New England diaspora would have been answered already and neither Rome nor Tuscany or Istanbul could provide illuminating angles.

The second group of exchanges are between childhood and adulthood poems. Almost all of the childhood poems are situated in New England, whereas, even though a large portion of the adulthood poems are provided with a Greek backdrop, there are many locations in them. Thus it is not possible to juxtapose two distinct locations in comparing these two kinds of poems. I maintain, however, that it still makes sense to talk about child- and adulthood as locations in a figurative sense and to talk about a variant of cultural/fugurative travel taking place between the two. Merrill’s adulthood poetry is so replete with echoes from his past as chronicled in the childhood poems that it’s no wonder so many critics felt justified in scooping with both hands material from the psychoanalytic slop pail. I maintain that to discuss the traces of childhood in the adulthood poems in terms of travel (or, as we will see later: intertextuality) is a cleaner method, and on top of that I will attempt to show that it’s a method that does more justice to the specific requirements of poetry as poetry. To return to the adulthood/childhood travels, we will find that, of course, the travel concept works both ways. The childhood is consistently seen through the lens of the adult speaker, which might seem trivial, but actually contributes to the overall picture in which adulthood emerges as the figurative ‘home’ and childhood as the foreign country visited by the grown-up speaker.

The concept of travel and the importance of this concept for Merrill’s poetry and poetics becomes even clearer once another kind of travel is added. This is the traveling undertaken by the souls of the dead in the Ouija board poems, most notably in The Changing Light at Sandover. This doesn’t fit in the narrow literal/figurative dichotomy established heretofore. Of course, it takes a giant leap of faith to assume the ‘reality’ of the spirits. I would argue that it is a strange idea to take that leap in the context of a poetry where, for instance, the speaker of “The Broken Home” needs assurance of as ‘simple’ a fact as the one “[t]hat you and I are as real / At least as the people upstairs” but this is not an important point anyway. Looking at the poetry the question whether these are real voices or whether these are passages invented by David Jackson or whether this is all just a conceit, is not of interest because the fact of the matter is, within the poem, the visitors from the afterworld are clearly just that: visitors. And this time, too, there is a reciprocal element in all this. As will be shown, contact with JM/DJ does not leave the afterworld unchanged.

After the term ‘travel’ and its connection to Merrill’s poetry has been examined, it is now time to look at the implications of all this for Merrill’s poetics. Clifford’s theory of Traveling Cultures is, at the root, a theory about communication and that term fits Merrill’s poetry like a glove. I’ll show is how that which we leaned about travel can be translated to common literary terms such as intertextuality. First, however, I will expound on the centrality of dialogue to the previous discussions of travel. Encounters with other countries in Merrill’s poetry almost always involves dialogue, foreign languages, etc. This culminates in The Changing Light at Sandover, where dialogue is not only central but basically the only means of travel, as the spirits never appear, their presence is solely signalled by the letters DJ dictates to JM.

The voices speaking, whispering, beseeching, commanding, in The Changing Light at Sandover, are not the only voices. In fact, I will suggest that dialogicity, that well-worn concept of Mikhail Bakhtin’s, is an excellent tool to decribe the poetical implications of travel as we have come to understand that term. There are several elements to this, the first and most obviously being plain intertextuality, which roughly corresponds to what we have called figurative travel early on. The influence of cultures transmitted via books or other media. Another element is translation, which develops from intertextuality, because on the one hand it is a form of intertextuality but it’s a special enough variant of it. Merrill translated poems, used translated phrases (literally translated Greek idioms for instance) and at the same time, translation was always part of the poetics of travel. It is shown to be a facilitator of ‘real’, that is, literal travel, as it is the precondition for communication. Similarly, intertextuality would, without translations, not work as well: Merrill’s poems would teem with German, Greek, Tuscan, French phrases and as such be understandable only to a choice coterie of readers. The best explication of the workings of translation can be found in Lost in Translation. The third element, again, is basically a sort of intertextuality, but, again, it’s special enough to be discussed as a special issue. This is Merrill’s attitude to form and to tradition in general. This wraps up tzhe dialogicity chapter because, of course, using a certain form or genre evokes old and buried voices, Petrarca, Dante, Rilke and many many others. Thus, maybe, The Changing Light at Sandover is a brilliant concretion of this concept, with all these poets, first and foremost of course our dear Wystan, literally speaking to Merrill through David Jackson. I am naturally brief in this part of the summary as this part of the paper relies a lot, and will reference a lot, conclusions drawn in the previous parts.

Travel mediates between contexts: the merging of places -figurative and literal- creates a sort of shared cultural space. Merrill’s poetry can be seen as pursuing just this. I will show that this works on almost every level of his poetry, including form and formulation. His use of metre, pun and metaphor, his descriptions of places and travels, the way he handles autobiographical material, all of this is part of the project of mediation.

On Auden

Archbishop Rowan Williams on Auden

If I had to find one word for Auden’s poetry, it might be “satisfying” – not remotely in the sense of comfortable, but full of that sense of creative necessity that poetry conveys when it is most itself: this is how it must be said, this is (borrowing Geoffrey Hill’s language) a poetry of “atonement” where something is at the same time finished and set free in the fabric of the words.

Faking Memory

This, well, something similar, anyway, has been a topic on this blog before (here and here) Today the NYTimes Online writes this

A best-selling Holocaust memoir has been revealed to be a fake. The author was never trapped in the Warsaw ghetto. Neither was she adopted by wolves who protected her from the Nazis, nor did she trek 1,900 miles across Europe in search of her deported parents or kill a German soldier in self-defense. She wasn’t even Jewish, The Associated Press reported. Misha Defonseca, 71, right, a Belgian writer living in Dudley, Mass., about 60 miles southwest of Boston, admitted through her lawyers last week that her book, “Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years,” translated into 18 language and adapted for the French feature film “Surviving With Wolves,” was a fantasy. In a statement to The Associated Press, Ms. Defonseca said: “The story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving. I ask forgiveness to all who felt betrayed. I beg you to put yourself in my place, of a 4-year-old girl who was very lost.” Ms. Defonseca, who gave her real name as Monique De Wael, said her parents were arrested and killed by Nazis for Belgian resistance activities when she was 4; she was cared for by her grandfather and uncle. She came under pressure to defend her book after Sharon Sergeant, a genealogical researcher in Waltham, Mass., said she had found clues in the unpublished United States version of the book.

Today’s Quote (4)

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it — “I refute it thus.”

Boswell/Life Of Johnson

Richard Flanagan: The Unknown Terrorist

Persons and actions of this story are invented. If the description of certain journalistic practices shows ressemblances to the practices of the Bild newspaper, that’s because these ressemblances are not intended nor accidental, they are inescapable

The Unknown Terrorist, Richard Flanagan’s novel, is, as he himself says at the back of his forgettable new book, a modern take on Böll’s Verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum. And it is basically the same story. Woman fucks stranger, stranger is suspected of terrible crime, woman is suspected of being an accomplice. And I really like the Böll novel. Must be my favorite novel of his. So why was The Unknown Terrorist such a mess of a novel?

Can’t be the writing. Heinrich Böll is not a great stylist. What success his novels and stories have, style has nothing to do with that. Flanagan is, if anything, a better stylist. Much of the novel drags and much is functional at best, but there are outstanding passages as well. Can’t be the writing? Characters, maybe. That, actually, is the first problem. Although Böll’s characters are cliché characters, they need to be for the story to work in the little space that is allotted to them and Böll is a master in making even cliché come alive. Not so Flanagan. For one thing, he overdoes the cliché, adds many more layers of schlocky details. And then he just lets his characters get away with this. He doesn’t even try to make the characters believable. No Sir. When he slips his characters into the pockets of the story, he adds just the most necessary characterization. He sticks to the dolls (ironic, eh?) he constructed. Interaction between characters is unbelievable, as a rule.

But that is not his main error. The main problem with the novel is the old show-don’t-tell idea. He lets us know what people are thinking. Not just the protagonist, but also the journalist, the cops, and others. Every aspect of the story is examined and explained. It’s as if he was expecting his readers to be less smart than fourth graders. No guesswork for us. And this is where the novel goes terribly wrong. Yes, that’s tedious to read. But the political aspect of it is softened to an extent that is almost criminal. The hard criticism of mass media of Böll’s novel is softened to bad individuals who do know better but decide, greedily, to go ahead with the “story”. Whereas the only dedication of Flanagan is to David Hicks, a victim of misguided governmental policy, Böll’s reads like this:

Personen und Handlung dieser Erzählung sind frei erfunden. Sollten sich bei der Schilderung gewisser journalistischer Praktiken Ähnlichkeiten mit den Praktiken der Bild-Zeitung ergeben haben, so sind diese Ähnlichkeiten weder beabsichtigt noch zufällig, sondern unvermeidlich.

(Persons and actions of this story are invented. If the description of certain journalistic practices shows ressemblances to the practices of the Bild newspaper, that’s because these ressemblances are not intended nor accidental, they are inescapable). Lots of misguided governmental policies in his time, too. However, that’s plainly not his point. It’s about how the mass media distorts something if it conforms with certain bourgeois stereotypes.

This would have worked fine with The Unknown Terrorist, too. Slutty woman? Check. Arab terrorist? Check. Etc. And these stereotypes are seen to be at the basis of the journalist’s doing the story the way he does. However, it stops at this point. Richard Cody. And he does know better, but his greed for money and fame blinds him. Böll exposed the stereotypes that govern the press. Maybe a ‘real’ Richard Cody would not need the incentive of greed. The stereotypes alone are more than enough. This would have made an incisive commentary on the state of our nations. Look at the inane and inherently racist coverage of the remarks of Archbishop Williams, or check out the coverage in Danish newspapers of the alleged plot to kill the damn cartoonist. Or German newspapers covering that. Hell, mainstream coverage of muslims by privately owned media. Daily Express, anyone? Henryk M. Broder? Broder writes the stories Cody would write had he Broder’s erudition or style. Or check out how much of a deal it is that a photograph was published with Barack Hussein Obama wearing a turban.

No, The Unknown Terrorist is not tidy nor subtle. It doesn’t have to. It’s an angry book, wearing its moral indignation on its sleeve. But it is on this account, the political sphere, that it fails first and foremost. It attacks a government who uses a Patriot Act-like legislation to exert pressure on people. But the main protagonist’s life is not destroyed by that. It’s destroyed the hateful discourse taken up and whipped up by the press. Böll’s novel got him into a pickle with the press which launched a spite-and hateful campaign against the little indignant writer, a campaign that lasted years. No such chance with Flanagan, I presume. The boring little antepodean shit.
ISBN

Redeeming McCarthy or Look out! Communists!

Fine, if short, essay in the NY Times on a ridiculous new publication (it’s a good season for this, apparently, seeing as Jonah Goldhagen has published his book, too), “Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies” by M. Stanton Evans. Here’s an excerpt but read the whole essay, it’s worth it.

Part of Evans’s appeal is his boast to have unmasked the biases and distortions of previous McCarthy critics, this author included. He begins by describing a massive Russian spy operation in the United States, drawing his evidence from K.G.B. files as well as portions of the Venona project, a top-secret operation that traced Soviet intelligence traffic during World War II. Evans leaves the impression that he has uncovered fresh material, suspiciously overlooked until now. In fact, numerous scholars have used these documents to craft a thorough portrait of Communist espionage in Washington, though most believe that the worst of it was over by the late 1940s, when the F.B.I. began a crackdown on spying and a federal security program was put in place. If anything, they say, this evidence serves to reinforce the standard portrait of McCarthy as a bit player in the battle against Communist subversion, a latecomer who turned a vital crusade into a political mud bath.

Evans disagrees, claiming that the Communist problem was very much alive in 1950, when the senator first made his charges of treason in high places. [...] Most important, Evans buys into the heart of the McCarthy conspiracy — the belief that leftist elements in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations created a foreign policy to advance the spread of world Communism.

How else could one explain the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe or the fall of Chiang Kai-shek to the army of Mao Zedong? “[...] McCarthy blamed the fall of China on “a conspiracy so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.” Evans not only endorses this conspiracy but actually expands it to include “the Eastern, internationalist faction” of the Republican Party, “with ties to Wall Street, large corporations, big Eastern media outlets and Ivy League establishment.” To Evans, the conspiracy passed from president to president — from Roosevelt and Truman to Eisenhower and even Nixon, a former McCarthyite, who “would fall off the teeter-totter, landing with Henry Kissinger in Red China, thereafter pushing on into the mists of détente with Moscow.”

Lynn Peril

New discovery. Lynn Peril, author of two very interesting-sounding books: Pink Think and, most recently, College Girls. These days she joined the ranks of us bloggers. Check out her blog. Why don’t you start with her fascinating post on the pink/blue ‘divide’.
(am I patronizing you? a little bit maybe. Ah but you still like me, don’t you?)

"Of what use are the humanities"

Stanley Fish reviewed a new book on the subject and concluded his essay with the following wonderful paragraph.

To the question “of what use are the humanities?”, the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject. Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good. There is nothing more to say, and anything that is said – even when it takes the form of Kronman’s inspiring cadences – diminishes the object of its supposed praise.

Terry Pratchett has Alzheimer’s

Oh God not him. One of the best writers alive, the great Terry Pratchett, has Alzheimer’s.

Author Terry Pratchett is suffering from a rare form of early Alzheimer’s disease, it has been revealed.

In a letter published on the website of artist Paul Kidby, the writer said the condition was behind a “phantom stroke” he had earlier this year.

Pratchett said his statement should be interpreted as “I am not dead” and that he had taken the news “philosophically” and “possibly with a mild optimism”.

He himself assures us that more books are probable (whew!) and further:

I would just like to draw attention to everyone reading the above that this should
be interpreted as ‘I am not dead’. I will, of course, be dead at some future point, as
will everybody else. For me, this maybe further off than you think – it’s too soon to tell.
I know it’s a very human thing to say “Is there anything I can do”, but in this case I
would only entertain offers from very high-end experts in brain chemistry.

McEwan doesn’t get it (not quite)

In such a short interview with the NYTimes that one is tempted to invent a different term for it, McEwan says the following

Your fellow novelist Martin Amis is being shredded in the British press after criticizing various aspects of Islam. He was attacked in The Guardian, in a shrill manner. All religions make very big claims about the world, and it should be possible in an open society to dispute them. It should be possible to say, “I find some ideas in Islam questionable” without being called a racist.

Which ideas do you mean? Well, the idea that any apostate should be punished is revolting. This is completely hostile to the notion of free thought and everything we hope to stand for. I think Martin has suffered terribly at the hands of The Guardian.

Yes Ian. Veeery smart. One is tempted to describe this with a sentence of his own, from just before, in the same interview:

You were probably already a nonbeliever. No, I was just beginning to see through it all, but not quite.

Not quite. Well, if that isn’t a nice way to put it.

"Philosophy in the Flesh"

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have written a very readable and really good book about an intriguing linguistic concept, Metaphors we live by. Take care, it’s not a work of philosophy, it’s full of holes and bad reasoning, like much of so-called “science”. There are better technical books on Cognitive Linguistics, such as Langacker’s books, Fauconnier’s amazing classic or Talmy’s opus magnum, but they aren’t really that readable, and all of them indulge in the same disregard for, well, thinking. Bah, science. Oh, were was I? Yes, well, many years later, Lakoff and Johnson decided that, after all, not only did they write philosophy, but GOOD philosophy, really, better than ALL the other philosophers, which, from the start, smacked of the typical myopic condescension to philosophy usually practiced by scientists. So they published Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its challenge to western thought in 1999, which is a very pretty book (I like the cover). That is all the nice things that can be said about it. The authors totally disregard the actual writings of the writers they criticise. The only ones who get their due, mostly, are Chomsky and Descartes. With all the others it’s as if they never thoroughly read a book of theirs. I have a specialist (well) for Analytic Philosophy at hand and she was astonished, looking at the bibliography, that, having read these books, the authors could still claim what they did. It’s no use going into details here, they are wrong in most respects. In the parts where I have in-depth knowledge, the idiocy was equally palpable.
The funniest thing was that they call it “A radical change in our understanding of reason” and talk about the ‘fact’ that “human rationality isn’t at all what the Western philosophical tradition has held it to be” and “we are different from what our philosophical tradition has told us we are”. They say that their thesis was ORIGINAL. NEW. Which, frankly, it’s not. These ideas have been around. Hampshire (much as I dislike him), Husserl, Quine, even in the work of writers as old as Kant (I’m told) and Stirner traces of such a sentiment can be found. And we are not even talking about the parts of it that aren’t boring old materialist philosophy.
One should be thankful to Lakoff and Johnson for their work in the 1980s, because they found a precise and good expression for a problem and its answers (here is an explanation but I just saw that it’s now, miraculously, also called “embodied philosophy”. Don’t let that confuse you, it’s not philosophy) that have been around for a while now, but this…is just…embarrassing. I know I have recommended their books to some of you, and after reading vast parts of this one, I felt acutely embarrassed to have done so. Stay away from this one. And don’t think that they are philosophers. They are not. They are linguists, with all the positive and negative things that follow from that description. I still recommend Lakoff’s Women Fire and Dangerous Things.

Hitchens at work

This is from a NY Times review of John Updike’s most recent collection of nonfiction by Christopher Hitchens. It’s nicely written, informative and all that. We also learn that Hitchens writes “Yuck” and ticks in the margins of his books, but, as I said in a German text on this blog, certain minds seem to be unable to refrain from mentioning Islam in a stupid and self-revealing way. I wonder if a get-together of Hitchens and his editor looks like Fawlty Towers all over again, just this time nobody cries: DON’T MENTION THE WAR but DON’T MENTION ISLAM, however, given the frequency of Hitchens’s Islambashing this is improbable. Though I must admit, he does kinda remind me of John Cleese’s character. Here’s the fun part of his so-so review

Discussing Grass’s rather recent discovery that Germans had also been the victims of atrocities, Updike asks:

“Can a nation war against a regime without warring against the people the regime rules? Is the very concept ‘war crime’ tautological, given the context of determined violence? As Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, said a few weeks ago, ‘War is always a catastrophe.’ Are discriminations possible between appropriate and excessive bombing, between legitimate and atrocious ship-sinkings, between proper combat of armed soldiers and such tactics as using civilians, including children, as human shields or disguising an ambush as a surrender? An American soldier recently wounded in such an ambush, when interviewed on television, shrugged and, with striking dispassion, conceded that, given the great imbalance of firepower between the Coalition and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, he could hardly blame his attackers for their murderous ruse.”

This is evenhandedness taken almost to the point of masochism. (What of the “imbalance” between the jihadists and the girls’ schools they blow up?) And Updike doesn’t choose to answer any of the questions — familiar enough at a sophomore level, as is Annan’s affectless remark — that he poses. I have the suspicion that he is overcompensating for the rather lame defense of the war in Vietnam that he mounted in his memoir “Self-Consciousness.”

For balance (?) here’s Kakutani’s good review of Mr. Updike’s most recent novel, Terrorist.
And now, in comes Basil Fawlty (yes, any review of a book an Islamism will mention Islam, several times, but read on, you’ll see what I mean)in his own review of that book

Indeed, Updike continues to offer us, as we have come to expect of him, his grueling homework. The sinuous imam of the local mosque (Shaikh Rashid) does not try to impress the half-educated and credulous Ahmad with the duty to fight the enemies of the Prophet. Far from it. He prepares him for stone-faced single-mindedness with some intricate Koranic hermeneutics, designed to shake his faith. And guess which example is adduced? The theory of the German Orientalist Christoph Luxenberg, who has argued that the “virgins” promised to martyrs in Paradise are actually a mistranslation for “white raisins.” Bet you never heard that! My feeling — call it a guess or an intuition — is that this is not how madrassas train their suicide bombers. My other feeling is that Updike could have placed this rather secondhand show of his recent learning in some other part of the novel.

It sorta makes me wonder whether he’s drunk when he’s writing his essays. Or high on some very damaging drugs.

Open Letter by the Eternally Stressed Semanticist

From Lance Nathan’s blog

An Open Letter

Dear [□ Sir / □ Madam / □ Representative / □ Journalist / □ Idiot],

I know you believe you know a great deal about
[□ linguistics / □ children's literature / □ law / □ psychology / □ other (please specify)]

simply because you
[□ use language / □ read Harry Potter and Goodnight Moon / □ watch Law & Order / □ have a mind],

or because you’ve read a newspaper article about
[□ the lack of numbers in Pirahã / □ Dumbledore being gay / □ some Supreme Court decision / □ Prozac].

But please understand that the issues in this field are far more complicated than you realize. For instance, the field isn’t all about
[□ proper grammar / □ writing children's books / □ litigation / □ schizophrenia];

those of us practicing in the field spend much of our time reading articles, synthesizing facts, and seeking a deeper understanding of [□ language / □ literature / □ law / □ the mind]. I’m not saying that you can’t have an opinion until you’ve
[□ understood an article by Chomsky / □ read every Caldecott and Newbery Medal winner / □ argued a case before the Supreme Court / □ spent three years running rodents through mazes]

—in fact, most of the people in our field have never done that. But we’d appreciate it if you either consult an expert, or educate yourself a little more by
[□ taking a course or two / □ taking a course or two / □ taking a course or two / □ taking a course or two]
[...]

via Language Log

Writing, Monday afternoon

Islamofascism (bits and pieces)

Prompted by a new piece by Eboo Patel who tends to make mostly correct statements in ridiculously short postings in his portion of the great Washington Post On Faith blog (a treasure trove)on Islamofascism awareness week, this. First the quick definition of the wiki entry

Islamofascism is a controversial neologism suggesting an association of the ideological or operational characteristics of certain modern Islamist movements with European fascist movements of the early 20th century, neofascist movements, or totalitarianism.
The word is included in the New Oxford American Dictionary, defining it as “a controversial term equating some modern Islamic movements with the European fascist movements of the early twentieth century”. Critics of the term argue that associating the religion of Islam with fascism is offensive and inaccurate.

Second the relevant portion of Patels text

What would you think if I told you every high school kid in baggy pants was a drug dealer?
Or every woman wearing lipstick was a prostitute?
How about that every black man on the street was getting ready to rob you?
Or every Italian guy was a mobster?

Then you should be equally offended by IslamoFascism Awareness Week because it employs the same twisted logic as the revolting statements above and its objective is equally ugly: every time you see a Muslim, the organizers of IslamoFascism Awareness Week want you to think “terrorist”.

One of the founding fathers of my country, Thomas Jefferson, had enough respect for Islam and Muslims that he owned a copy of the Qur’an. Another one of my founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, declared that the pulpit of a hall he helped build in Philadelphia would be open to a Muslim preacher.
The America that I love faces real threats from terrorists. Too many of those terrorists call themselves Muslims. Victory requires that we focus like a laser beam on these enemies.

Third, here’s a link to a good article against Islamofascism Awareness Week.

Finally, as the warped idea of Islamofascism seems to take hold mostly in the poor minds of those who think that nowadays it’s valid to equate Islam with Islamism I recommend READING. Books would help but they are often difficult to come by in dumbland, so the Internet can be of help as well. Daniel Pipes in particular, who has defended highly questionable ideas such as racial profiling, offers nice bits of counterargument against embracing the benighted idea of islam=islamism.
For instance here

“Moderate Unicorns,” huffed a reader, responding to my recent plea that Western states bolster moderate Muslims. Dismissing their existence as a myth, he notes that non-Muslims “are still waiting for moderates to stand and deliver, identifying and removing extremist thugs from their mosques and their communities.”

It’s a valid skepticism and a reasonable demand. Recent events in Pakistan and Turkey, however, prove that moderate Muslims are no myth.

In Pakistan, an estimated 100,000 people demonstrated on April 15 in Karachi, the country’s largest city, to protest the plans of a powerful mosque in Islamabad, the Lal Masjid, to establish a parallel court system based on Islamic law, the Shari‘a. “No to extremism,” roared the crowd. “We will strongly resist religious terrorism and religious extremism,” exhorted Altaf Hussain, leader of the Mutahida Qaumi Movement, at the rally.

Also, for those who can read french, it’s an option to consider Mohamed Sifaoui, writer, journalist, muslim and declared secularist who writes books against forms of radical Islam, who fought for Charlie Hebdo’s right to print the damn caricatures (I still think printing them in Germany was unconstitutional but well, trust German courts to uphold the flag of whiteness, er, free speech), but who’s a rather stupid man, well that doesn’t change much, does it.

Today, in a lucid review of The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism by Norman Podhoretz, Kakutani (whom I tend to criticise from time to time) wrote something which, as does Mr. Podhoretz’ book, relates to this posting’s topic

For that matter, Mr. Podhoretz lumps together Muslims opposed to the United States, a “two-headed beast” of “Islamofascism,” whose objective he says is “to murder as many of us as possible” and destroy “the freedoms we cherish and for which America stands.” Such characterizations not only try to draw parallels between radical Muslims and the Nazis, but also gloss over the many schisms and conflicts within Islam that have pitted Shiites against Sunnis, Iranians against Iraqis, religious fundamentalists against more secular Baathists.

Ghostwriting

This is from a review of Robert Harris’ new novel.

Citing a real handbook on ghostwriting by Andrew Crofts, it demonstrates some entertaining tricks of the trade. A good ghost, for instance, supplies his or her own memories, because the famous person may have been too busy being successful to recall anything. When concocting Lang’s childhood appearance in a Christmas pageant, the ghost researches which real pageants were put on in the place where Lang lived as a boy. Then he gives the ex-prime minister a choice of roles. Wise man? Too much. Sheep? Wrong message. “A guiding star?” “Perfect!”

I need to get my hands (hum) on that handbook. Not the Harris book, though, which sounds perfectly awful. I got better books here.

9/11 and Feminism

In a recent book review of Susan Faludi’s new book The Terror Dream (I like her book Backlash a lot, polemical and wrong as it may be in parts)Michiko Kakutani points out its many many logical flaws, starting with

To begin with, the reader wants to ask: What disappearance of female voices? What “bugle call” to “return to Betty Crocker domesticity?” Since 9/11, Hillary Rodham Clinton has become the leading Democratic contender in the race for the White House, with a good chance of becoming the first female president in history; Katie Couric was named anchor of the CBS Evening News; and women like Lara Logan of CBS and Martha Raddatz of ABC have been reporting from the frontlines of the war in Iraq. Ms. Faludi asserts that the 9/11 widows “the media liked best” were the fragile, dependent ones, “who accepted that their ‘job’ now was to devote themselves to their families and the memory of their dead husbands.” But even she has to acknowledge that the so-called “Jersey Girls” (Kristen Breitweiser, Mindy Kleinberg, Patty Casazza, and Lorie van Auken) played “an essential role in forcing the creation of the independent 9/11 Commission,” and helped strong-arm “top White House officials into testifying before the commission.”

Kakutani does say that Faludi explains that these women were the exception to the rule but it doesn’t seem to bother her. Nor the fact that Faludi points out that in places central to the frontier myth, women have been underrepresented or excluded, as the stewardesses who boiled water on Flight 93 to throw it on the terrorists (nice nugget, there, as a fighting action it’s in conflict with the myth but broken down in its component parts, it’s actually pretty similar to women who in frintier times prepared the means with which men fought. Curious conflict there)

She writes that post-9/11 marketing efforts “had succeeded in darkening the image of the sexually liberated single woman,” even though “Sex and the City” remained a hit TV show in the years before and after the attacks.

It would have been nice of Ms. Kakutani to have recalled Backlash a little bit better and the part of it, which was itself at the time not new, but it was for the first time presented in a nationwide nonfiction bestseller (we all would love for Irgigaray and Butler to sell big but that’s not going to happen, is it), which discusses the so-called ‘emptiness’ of the career woman. Much of what Ms. Faludi has written about that is admirably compatible with Sex and the City (I’ve written some remarks about that show in this short essay of mine as well)however, that show, for whatever reasons, did run out in the years when the infamous War on Terror began (does Kakutani presume that this process is exact? The second the myth begins everything is being adjusted? Those things take time), which could provide material for a neat discussion of the closeness of the show to the myth and the reason for its incopmpatibility with the similar problematic surrounding the stewardesses on Flight 93.
The most striking part of Kakutani’s criticism of Faludi’s book, as well as the most telling, is this one:

And she writes that television and other pop culture manufacturers dispensed “the consolations of a domestic idyll where men wore all the badges, and women wielded all the roasting pans,” even though high-profile shows like “Scrubs,” “CSI: Miami” and “The Osbournes,” which had their debuts in the year or so after 9/11, hardly illustrate this theory, and television has more recently seen the emergence of shows (like “Damages,” “Saving Grace” and “The Closer”) featuring feisty middle-aged heroines as tough-talking lawyers and cops.

Granted, I don’t remember enough of Backlash [and I don't find my copy. Anybody who's willing to buy me a new one is welcome! ] to retrieve from memory to what extent Faludi has understood the gender/sex divide, but what’s interesting about these new shows, as well as about Scrubs is that these shows work with a strong sense of what “masculine”/”feminine” is and of how masculine/feminine a man/woman should be to be normal, which makes shows like these hasten to show that, looking at The Closer, for instance, despite being a “tough cop”, Chief Brenda Johnson is still very feminine, she may fulfill the gender role of a man, down to her behaviour at home, but ‘deep down’ she’s still a woman, an insidious argument if I ever saw one. If that show wasn’t so enjoyable… Point is that although Faludi’s arguments abour rebuilt attitudes should not be taken too literally, these arguments are indeed forceful and they describe a troubling development.
However, Kakutani may be right about one thing.

Ms. Faludi’s overarching thesis in this book rings false too. In fact, her suggestion that the 9/11 attacks catalyzed the same fears and narrative impulses as those unleashed by our frontier ancestors’ “original war on terror,” leading to a muffling of feminist voices and a veneration of “the virtues of nesting,” runs smack up against her own “Backlash,” which suggested that similar assaults on women’s independence were being unleashed in the 1980s — a time not of war or threat but a decade that witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the coming end of the cold war.

It might, after all, not be due to the horrible specter of 9/11. How people behaved in the face of 9/11 might have been due to what they were thinking all the time. Maybe it’s just that with faminism it’s as with civil rights, people no longer look too closely at what’s happening if they are so afraid some muslim Terrorists might destroy their homes and their ‘freedom’ that they don’t notice the infringement of said freedom by their own elected government and nonelected media.

On Delmore Schwartz

Schwartz, “the genius of the old partisan group” (Atlas 378) left his mark on a whole generation of poets and it is sad that this aspect of his is even less recognized than his poetic prowess (He has at least a Bollingen Prize to show for that, which makes it somehow hard to deny altogether). Lowell, whom we pegged earlier as one of the pioneers of Postmodernism, observed in interviews that he had “never met anyone who has somehow as much seeped into me”, Berryman revealed in similar interviews that he thought Schwartz was “the most underrated poet of the twentieth century” (both quotations: Atlas 378). Also, “[m]any of the new writers looked back to Delmore Schwartz [who] was known [...] as a writer’s writer” (Ruland and Bradbury 336). Kenneth Koch went to Princeton in order to become a student of Schwartz’s (cf. Atlas 268) and John Ashbery notes that

of all the [...] poets who have influenced me [...] Schwartz is the one whose work is least known today and therefore the one most in need of elucidating for the benefit of anyone [...] who might be interested in my work. (Ashbery 3)

Indeed, many elements of Ashbery’s poetry can surely be found in Schwartz’s work, but the most influential aspect of Schwartz’s poetry might well be his unconcern with dogma, without being downright rebellious in the way that Ginsberg was. Early Ashbery poems such as “Glazunoviana” or “The Grapevine” sound so Schwartzian in their structure and (postmodern) form that its easy to see the correspondence.

The poet who was most influenced by Schwartz was John Berryman, whose Dream Songs are a landmark of postmodern literature. “[T]he gullible Berryman” (Atlas 209) so admired Schwartz that he “became inarticulated in his presence and [...] relied on Delmore’s advice in literary matters” (209); Schwartz was probably the first one who saw in Berryman’s early derivative poetry the promise of considerable talent, as he “did everything he could to promote [Berryman's] reputation” (210). Additionally, the influence of Schwartz on individual poems “crucial to [Berryman's] development” (Matterson 1) has been demonstrated satisfactorily (cf. Matterson 1ff.).

This takes us to the point where we have to consider the reasons for Delmore Schwartz’s bad standing today. If he was as influential and innovative as I claim, why is he not more famous today? Why do critics claim that “his best poetry was behind him after 1939″ (Bauer, “The Figure of the Film Critic as Virile Poet”, 118), when Genesis was unwritten, as was most of the brilliant later poetry? There are several reasons for this. A particularly simple explanation might be that the rejection of Schwartz’s later poetry might be due to a reactionary strain in post-war criticism which had also tried to muffle or outright silence the poetry of the Beat poets (cf. Thurley 210f.); this reactionary strain represents a continuity of New Criticism. But Schwartz was also rejected by his friends and even by his admirers. Even as perceptive a critic as Jarrell denied the worth of Schwartz’s post-1939 poetry (cf. Travisano 20). This cannot be explained away with snobbishness.

The real problem was twofold. At first, Schwartz’s postmodernism was not a case of slight or subtle variation, it was a full shift. For this shift, however, “the taste and critical vocabulary [...] had not yet been invented” (Kirsch 223) when Schwartz initiated the demise of his reputation with Genesis in 1943. The literary system had not changed with him, and the function of his post-modern aestetic was not able to unfold properly (cf. Tynjanov 439ff.), as it would’ve had twenty years later. Elizabeth Bishop could not help but call the late poetry of Schwartz “really bad” (Travisano 19). New Critical ideals even noticeably influenced the negative attitude towards the late poetry by Schwartz’s own biographer, James Atlas (cf. Bawer 147). Certainly, there are poets who made their way despite being marginalized by the literay world. These are those poets who establish alternative canons, such as Olson and the Black Mountain poets or the budding New York School of poets, which stared to form in the 1940′s, whereas Schwartz was not able to detach himself from mainstream criticism.

After the Middle Generation poets on the one hand, and experimental postmodernists on the other hand, had established themselves during the 1970′s in academic discourse, the way for a reevaluation of Schwartz was clear, but it never happened. When his new style finally fitted the literary system, it was too late. The trias of Berryman, Bellow and Atlas had already destroyed the basis for an unbiased evaluation of Schwartz’s poetry. The emerging canon of postmodern literature was partly dominated by confessional poetry (Which was and is easier palatable than Schwartz’s pioneering efforts in the 1940′s, as his poetry of that time is burdened by a grave, complicated language, whereas the easy, flowing lines of the late Lowell or Sexton can be understood easier and faster), and partly by experimental poetry, as we saw earlier. Schwartz’s poetry fits neither category. When, finally, in the 1980′s (cf. Huyssen 17f.) political aspects were becoming important factors for inclusion into the canon, Schwartz’s way into the canon was closed once and for all, on account of his blatant ignorance of all things political.
All of this meant that he had never a chance to be recognized as a poet of Postmodernism.

The themes of Schwartz’s poetry “are chiefly [...] awe and abyss” (Ozick 12; italics hers). He writes with an intensity which became rare in modern poetry since Swinburne had lost his spark. ‘Awe’ and ‘abyss’ are fine descriptions of his work, they show why he was exceptional. He was filled with ‘awe’ of his literary forebears. Ford in particular has meticulously shown how indebted Schwartz was to the French modernist poets and Schwartz’s correspondence with the great modernist poets such as Pound, Stevens, Eliot and Auden showcases his deep admiration of their faculties (cf. Atlas 178 and elsewhere). Yet he evinced the abyss, too, in his work, the pessimism, the doubt that what he believed to be true was really right. He was one of the first to explore the possibilities of a poetry that breaks with modernist ideals. His courage to write the kind of revolutionary poetry he wrote, should be admired. But he failed, and the body of verse he left us is contradictory and uneven. It is hard to come to terms with this poet.

There are more problems than simply prevailing critical opinion. There is also the confusion about a definition of Postmodernism, which seems to change every time someone writes a book about it. In postmodernist poetry, the case is even more complicated, as even McHale, the author of one of the clearest and finest definitions of postmodern novels, surrendered to the difficulties of such a definition,. He conceded that he had not “been able to identify any ‘umbrella’-model capable of accomodating the full range of postmodernist features” (McHale, The Obligation Toward the Difficult Whole, 251). The best accounts of postmodern poetry similarly shy away of ‘umbrella’-models, such as Lynn Kellers brilliant study. But this retreat into particulars just postpones the problem, in my understanding. However, the seeds of a theory of postmodern poetry have been planted in McHale’s approach to postmodern novels, where he uses a term of Jakobson, the change of dominant (cf. McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 6ff.). It seems to me that this is a direction worth pursuing. A fellow Russian Formalist, Jurij Tynjanov, has proposed a theory of literary evolution, where the text, its elements and the literary system surrounding it form a cohesive unit. The question of how to evaluate literary evolution becomes a question of relation between the elements of the literary system.

To explain the changes from one set of relations in the literary system to another, you have to take into account not only stylistic changes, McHale’s échec demonstrated this sufficiently. You have to also take literary evaluations into account, not only criticism, but also the different types of canons and their functions within the system. You will have to be prepared to suspend the kind of schematic chronology inherent in the term ‘tradition’, so you can find changes and influences (See for instance Wilson’s account of the difficult relation between the work of Yeats and Delmore Schwartz, which defies critical wisdom on how tradition worked within Modernism) where you might not have expected them, for instance the autobiographically tinged poem of Schwartz’s in his first collection of poems. In such an approach one might demonstrate how the poetry of Wilbur, Olson or Creeley is, for all intents and porposes, modernist and the poetry of Schwartz postmodernist.

Thus, the gift of Delmore Schwartz to literature is threefold. One aspect are the texts themselves. The second aspect is the influence on many poets of Postmodernism, whereby he might have shaped the literary style we call postmodern. The third and last aspect is the potential gift of clarity: we might arrive at a better understanding of postmodernism and modernism if we try to understand Delmore Schwartz.

Do you hear, do you see? Do you understand me now, and how
The words for what is my heart do not exist? (Schwartz, Summer Knowledge, 228)

Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and their ilk

It has been online for awhile, but it’s so perfect a phrase that I can’t resist pointing it out to anyone who hasn’t read it yet. Associate Professor Berlinerblau from the University of Georgetown, in a rare stroke of genius, called the writers spearheading the recent wave of dumb atheistic writers “the football hooligans of rational discourse”. Such a perfect phrase, isn’t it?

Alcoholic (1)

Understanding Language in Babel-17

[once again, miserably bad paper, but maybe informative?]

Kingsley Amis wrote in his treatise on Science Fiction that the motto „‘Idea as Hero‘ is the basis“ (137) for SF. In Babel-17, Samuel R. Delany’s sixth novel, the importance of language and linguistics is emphasized. It does both to an extent that is very unusual in a SF novel (cf. Aldiss and Wingrove 292) and its interest in language runs deeper than in the ordinary SF novel, where strange words abound or some new language or dialect is invented, as in Burgess‘ A Clockwork Orange. Evidently, language is this novel’s hero.

Babel-17’s interest in language and how it portrays the mechanisms behind language is the subject of this paper. It has the goal of mapping out the political and the epistemological consequences of the text’s treatment of language, which, as will be made clear, works in several ways. Some of the examiniation is done out in the open by Rydra Wong, a famous poet who is commissioned to decipher Babel-17, a code allegedly used by terrorists to coordinate their acts of sabotage, which soon turns out to be a language. In other parts, the examinition is provided by the character’s actions and emotions and by the events. Finally it will be pointed out, that the interest in language even informs the structure of the novel down to the generic markers it employs. It will be seen that SF is a kind of language itself which has to be understood by the reader of SF, because „knowing a genre is also knowing how to take it up“ (Broderick 39).

This is also the way most criticism has been reading the novel, but none of that criticism has noted, that it’s not just ‘about’ language, it is about understanding language as one of the basic givens of humanity. Its influence reaches deeply, into communication and thought. That is what the first two parts are trying to show. The last part amply demonstrates, that even when something in not language, is may be language-like, such as the genre SF.

SF is „What If Literature“ (Landon 6) and, as remains to be shown, Babel-17 poses some of the more powerful what if questions, trying to help people to recognize science’s „potentialities for social change“ (Asimov 162). This paper’s thesis is, that at the end of the trail that this reading of Babel-17 provides, one can see some possibilities of a brighter, more humane future, or a darker future. Babel-17 indicates the potentialities of communication and language that humanity has squandered for thousands of years and it poses some potent questions about free will and about the truth we take for granted. What questions these are, this paper will attempt to demonstrate.

Babel-17 is written in English and the characters that shape events, or are shaped by them, are speakers of English. One might be tempted to think that this impression only derives from the fact that the novel is written in English, just as an English novel about France would feature no, or not very much, French dialogue, even if all the characters were French. It becomes clear, though, that the first impression is correct once we note that comparisons to other languages always are comparisons of English to other languages (cf. Delany, Babel-17, 111). Also, the English-speaking characters never have to translate anything, everybody who takes part in this novel’s events speaks English and should be able to communicate perfectly with anybody else.

Although English is the predominant language, it is not the only one. The political background to the story is a war between the Alliance, part of which forms the earth , and the Invaders. Both probably consist of several nations, having several languages each (cf. 24). Of the Invader’s languages we encounter none. Eight earth languages are mentioned, other than English: Finnish, Sioux (as an example for North American Indian languages in general), French, Hungarian, Spanish (all five: cf. 111), Basque (cf. 77), Old Moorish (cf. 115) and an unnamed african language that is spoken in the „N’gonda province in Pan Africa“ (54, cf. 51f.). Sample words are not provided from Basque, Finnish, Hungarian or Sioux, only one word from Spanish and Old Moorish each, about five French words and generous eight sentences of the African language. These languages are not important to the story, they only demonstrate certain linguistic points, such as the grammatical differences between Sioux and and Finnish noun cases.

Thus, the main focus, of course, is on the mysterious language, Babel-17. Babel-17 is described as „the most analytically exact language imaginable“ (210). It does not know the words ‚you‘, ‚I‘ nor the words derived from them, such as ‚your‘ and ‚mine‘ (cf. 139) so speakers of it cannot even conceive of the principle of the subject. Also, Babel-17 „contains a preset program [...] to become a criminal and saboteur“ (215). This means it curtails the range of options the speaker of Babel-17 has so severely, it even imposes a „schizoid personality into the mind of whoever learns it“ (215), which means that a second personality is programmed into the person that can even grab hold of all the willpower of this person. The speaker of Babel-17, who thinks only analytically and cannot talk or think in categories of subjectivity, is massively hindered in the choices his mind allows him to make, for example „thinking in Babel-17 [you might] try and destroy your own ship and then blot out the fact with self-hypnosis“ (215).

In trying to crack the structure, the grammar and vocabulary of Babel-17, Rydra Wong, the poet that turned linguist by virtue of her „total verbal recall“ (9), finds that it „scares“ (22) her. For a language that one does not understand, this, introduced at an early point in the narrative, is a novel idea. Everybody would agree that it is possible to be afraid from something said and understood or even by a menacing way of delivery that a language can have, but being afraid of the language itself must seem strange to the reader.

As we have seen, there are passages in Babel-17 that compare different languages to each other. This process, however, is never focused on. The comparisons are drawn to make points about the nature and the properties of language itself. The vocabulary that is often used to make these points is scientific vocabulary, stemming from linguistics, but the person doing the scientific work is not a scientist. Rydra Wong, as mentioned above, is an artist, a poet, whose linguistic explorations are more of a hobby or a vocation. There are many weighty passages treating issues of linguistics but they are counterbalanced by the epigraphs introducing the five chapters, taken from Marilyn Hacker‘s poetry.

The differences sketched here between science and art run deeper. The first thing that is learned about language is that it is not a code and that the two should not be confused. A code can simply be deciphered, but a language has to be understood in a more organic way (cf. 6ff.). Suddenly voices, circumstances, contexts become important. An artist‘s intuition becomes useful, her „knack“ (10). This intuitive approach is contrasted with the government scientists, who, „although they know a hell of a lot about codes, [...] know nothing of the nature of language“ (8). This kind of disparagement has lead some to claim that, in this novel, language is part of the arts and not of science (cf. Weedman 136). This approach mistakens the pervasiveness of science. If in this text art is valued more highly, it is only because „today a person who learns the rules of art well is a little rarer than the person who learns the rules of science“ (48).

So, even if Rydra’s advantage might be her intuition, her art still has to confer to rules. More often than not, she uses linguistic terms to talk about these rules, in a word, she uses science. As Walter E. Meyers points out though, she misuses these terms often enough: „The uninformed reader of Babel-17 receives misinformation“, and the novel „is inaccurate at almost every turn“ (both: Aliens and Linguists 180). It seems as if all the linguistic terms that are heaped up (cf. Delany, Babel-17, 111) are nothing but words, or names. Outside the text the rules spread out in the pages with linguistic rambling might be scientific nonsense or inaccurate, but in this text, her rules lead Rydra Wong to an understanding of Babel-17.

The critic who tries to establish a rift between science and art in Babel-17‘s treatment of languages is mistaken because he does not understand that the novel’s discourse is concerned with language itself. Language is its own „ordering principle“ (Fox 97), not art or science. The two ways to approach the nature of language, art and science, do not preclude one another. It is important to note, that each takes part in solving the mystery of Babel-17. So cannot be about linguistics or poetry, it is about their object, language.

The most important fact is the all-pervasiveness of language. Early in the novel, a customs officer has some kind of sexual encounter and, trying to cope with the ensuing depression, he turns to the means of language. He tries to describe his loneliness in a way that perfectly describes one of the limits language imposes on its speakers, the emptiness of language (cf. 47). In the dense phrasing of structuralism: you „cannot ‚mean‘ and ‚be‘ simultaneously.“ (Eagleton 170), the thing you talk about is absent in the language, language is empty. Later Rydra, awakening from sleep, is caught between English and Babel-17 and thereby experiencing a kind of double consciousness (cf. Littlefield 223). She is not able to gather her thoughts, reflecting on the nature of language: „If there’s no word for it, how do you think about it?“ (Delany, Babel-17, 111). The nature of language, one learns from Babel-17, evidently is defined by the limits it imposes on us.

During a voyage through space we learn of ghost-like beings, called ‚Eye‘, ‚Ear‘ and ‚Nose‘, who are part of a space ship‘s crew, and who are responsible for sensual reconnaissance. They report how an approaching space port looks like to the captain of the ship who has no windows or anything to „see“ for herself (72f.). Through a helmet she can partake of the three sensory impartations, each of which can explain the whole situation as is witnessed by the simultaneous answers to the captain’s question of where to dock in the space port and for the verbal description of each the words seem deficient.

„In the sound of the E-minor triad.“
„In the hot oil you can smell bubbling to your left.“
„Home in on that white circle.“ (73)

This passage amply illustrates the point, that language is not enough, but everything recurs to language, in the end, you have to listen and make the best of it. Aristotle said man is a social being and society consequently depends on communication, or, to phrase it differently, on language.

Limited as we might be because of language, we might think, that we might possibly cope completely without language. The one area, though, where everybody might agree that language is essential, is communication. And it is communication that turns out to be one of the three most important aspects of language in Babel-17, the other two being the diversity of languages and language itself.

This novel is shock full of characters who try to communicate with others and fail or who don’t even try. The latter case is evident in the interplanetary war between the Invaders and the Alliance. In the whole novel there is not a single instance where the two parties communicate in any way. Until the last chapter, the Invaders are only twice encountered in person and then from a considerable distance, only as a red light on a radar screen (cf.124ff.). The unspoken question lingers in the text whether the war could have been evaded or, once under way, stopped by both parties communicating their differences. There are indications of both possibilities in the text. For one thing, both parties refer to the other party as the „one-who-has-invaded“ (215), which implies a misunderstanding . For another, as Rydra Wong sets out to put an stop to the war at the end, one of the first measures she takes, is to talk to the Invader’s Commander (cf. 218).

More interesting than the political misapprehensions are the numerous implications that aberrations in communication might be part of the conditio humana. The thought of the General: “Sequestered, how could this city exist?” (3) might well be applied to humans in general, as this same General, becoming infatuated with Rydra, mentally despairs of not being able to tell her his feelings, thinking: “My god [...] all that inside of me and she doesn’t know! I didn’t communicate a thing!” (14), even though Rydra understands him perfectly through his non-verbal language, the “[b]reathing pattern, curls of hands in lap, carriage of shoulders” (197), also called “[m]eaningful motion [or] kinesics” (Meyers, Aliens and Linguistics, 59) in linguistics. This communication comes so naturally to humans that its total absence can cause “horrifying” (Delany, Babel-17, 197) shocks. The Butcher, as a speaker of Babel-17 loses the concept of ‚I‘, he is badly handicapped when it comes to communicating with others, but as he does not have the verbal means to efficiently communicate subjectivity the Butcher subconsciously resorts to non-verbal language (cf. 151), such as thumping his breast to express something that would be filled by speakers of English with the word ‚I‘ or ‚me‘ . Obviously, even if we do not talk we always use language or language-supplements such as a gesture to communicate.

Sometimes in Babel-17, communication takes place neither through speech nor through non-verbal language. Sometimes it takes place through telepathy, which is interesting, considering the interpretation of the General’s statement stated above: sequestered from other people, how can man exist? Telepathy is often seen as a way out of the solitariness of modern man (cf. Milner 298) and a way to cut the distance to others and to short-circuit communication if problems arise (cf. Bogdanoff 247). It is consequently of high importance that the person who solves the communication problems surrounding Babel-17, Rydra Wong , is telepathic (cf. Delany, Babel-17, 198).
Reading the thoughts of animals she comes up with pictures (cf. 205), but with humans the mind-reading always results in grammatically correct sentences. The difference between man and animal must clearly be language . Humans being „creatures whose choices are limited to killing or talking“ (Meyers, The Language and Languages of Science Fiction, 211), the emphasis on good communication in Babel-17 indicates a strong inclination to the latter, moreover it demonstrates a way to circumvent the former, if we bear in mind the political misapprehensions we talked about.

As we have seen, language has many uses in Babel-17, reaching from a comparison of different languages to an examination of the nature of language and, further still, to the necessity of communication. Communication has been the bottom line of all these implications of language. There is one other use of language, though, which concerns the practice of ‚naming‘ things.

The first kind of naming, using names as intertextual devices in a way that Bakhtin labeled „discourse“ (Eagleton 146), enables communication, not between the characters but between the reader and the text, as well as between this text and others. It is obvious at first glance that names are eminent for the construction of the text, as the five parts of Babel-17 are each named for one character, thereby signifying his or her importance for that particular part. Names, apparently, carry meaning in this text.

Most names in the text are invented, they seem like anagrams but there is no way to determine from the text itself where they point to, they might as well be part of the strange names of SF . The first of the three which are indeed decipherable is the name of the battleship on which Rydra encounters the Butcher, the only person really speaking Babel-17, though not uttering a single word of it in the text, and learns that language: Jebel Tarik. We are informed, that this means ‚Tarik’s mountain‘ in Old Moorish (cf. Delany, Babel-17, 115). It also is the Old Moorish name for the small peninsula called Gibraltar, one of the pillars of Herakles. What exactly this reference means we can only speculate upon. One way this can be construed is that it is indeed Herakles, the hero of greek myth, who is meant. This is indicated by the only openly mythical reference in the text (cf. 126), which also refers to greek myth and Herakles‘ quest , two parts of which took place on Gibraltar. As Babel-17‘s events ressemble a series of quests (cf. Barbour 26), calling the battle ship ‚Jebel Tarik‘ might be a move of the text placing the novel’s events square in ancient quest traditions.

The second name is the name of the novel as well as of the mysterious language: Babel-17, which is obviously a biblical reference to Babel, also known as Babylon. There are two significant biblical passages pertaining to Babel-17. The first is situated in and is concerned with God punishing Babylon for its arrogance. The punishment consists of „confound[ing] their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.“ (Pinker 231) This passage may well be read as a mythical explanation for the diversity of languages, the origin of many misunderstandings that arise in human communication. The second one is found in , where the downfall of the Great Whore Babylon is described in detail. At first glance, this passage might seem a little weird, having nothing to do with language or communication at all. Maybe, on second glance, it describes the consequences of mis-using language, of failed communication, of using words for war-mongering. In this reading of Babel-17, could the accusation that „die auf Erden wohnen, sind betrunken geworden von dem Wein ihrer Hurerei“ () not be talking about humanity whose mind was clogged by misleading words? In short, clogged by the limitations of language, just as, in a more obvious way, the Butcher’s mind is clogged by Babel-17.

The last name is less complicated than the first two. It is the protagonist’s name: Rydra Wong, which, spoken aloud, sounds like „right or wrong“ and may be a play both on critical processes within a language and on sublime messages in otherwise inconspicuous speech. The first reference might have something to do with the fact that within Babel-17‘s structure everything that can be said seems logically correct and intrinsically right, including the criminal actions programmed into it. It takes Rydra Wong to detect the manipulation inherent in the language. SF-editor Hartwell claims that „the dream of SF is to control reality by creating it“ (95) and Babel-17 tries to do just that. It creates a world where all possible propositions are true, it pretends that that each and every possibility is exhausted. As Wittgenstein said: „Man kann [einen Satz] verstehen, ohne zu wissen, ob er wahr ist.“ (33). Babel-17 pretends that every proposition that can be understood is true. This pretension is questioned by Rydra, introducing external criterias for evaluating truth into the language.

Names are of a great value to the structure of Babel-17. This holds true, as we have seen, for some particular names. Also, as we have seen, the process of naming things, for instance naming chapters or naming the novel, is an important part of the process of developing Babel-17‘s themes. We get an idea of exactly how important the process of naming actually is if we read that „[w]ords are names for things.[...] But were words names for things, or was that just a bit of semantic confusion? Words were symbols for whole categories of things“ (Delany, Babel-17, 112; italics his).

What I mean by „process of naming“ is the process whereby someone or something gets assigned a name and, through the name, the person or thing suddenly can be categorized, be used as a thing one can finally be sure of. Naming is trying to rid yourself of issues of undecidabilities, trying to rid yourself from ambiguities inherent in the person, thing or idea. Naming is a continuous series of „attempts at ‚image control‘“ (Tucker 13). That process is nicely illustrated early in the text, when a customs officer sees something he has never seen before, he is intimidated accordingly, so he tries to name the thing. He starts by calling it „the Silver Dragon“ (35), a name, that is more like a title than a name. Its gender or sex is not specified yet, that happens in the next sentence, starting off with „[s]he“ (35). The naming is complete, relieved that he could assess the creature, the customs officer can now allow himself to be astounded and exclaims: „It‘s a woman!“ (35). The same reasoning leads him shortly afterwards to tag someone a „Pervert[]!“ (43). This quick tagging seems to be the easy way of handling complicated situations.

There are two more ways that naming is employed in the text. One is the use of euphemisms and codes. A euphemism occurs, for example, when the General talks about the terroristic sabotage as „accidents“ (12). Codes are used far more often and in these codes names are used as simple placeholders for the encoded words, for example in radio contact in a space fight (cf. 129) or, more simply in assigning a code name to the language which the terrorists use to communicate with each other, Babel-17.

The last crucial act of naming concerns the naming of one’s self. According to Jacques Lacan, we are least ourselves while we talk about ourselves (cf. Eagleton 170), yet the attempts to define one‘s self by talking or thinking about it crowd the text. Be it the elusive desire that one wants to seize by naming it (cf. Delany, Babel-17, 14) or one’s vague feelings that seem less vague once they are named: „I am amazed, surprised, bewildered.“ (5). This process is reflected in the text itself in a most interesting way: when Rydra is trying to teach the Butcher the concept of ‚I‘ and ‚you‘, he turns that same concept nearly on its head by turning ‚I‘ and ‚you‘ respectively into proper names.

The main concern of naming is finding the „real name“ (69) of things, and thereby their irrefutable meaning. Later Rydra asks herself „[i]f there‘s no word for it, how do you think about it?“ (111), how do you assess it? This question echoes the questions that arise from the posthumously published works of American linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf, his central claim being the following:

We are thus introduced to a new principle of relativity, which holds, that all observers are not
lead by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic
backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated. (Whorf 214)

The so-called principle of linguistic relativity states that fundamental differences in grammatical categories or in categories of words correspond to fundamental differences in thought. We cannot think independently of the language system we are part of, because „we cannot but ‚see and hear and otherwise experience‘ in terms of the categories and distinctions encoded in language“ (Lyons 304). This is the strong formulation of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which is highly controversial.

The weak formulation ‚merely‘ states that „the structure of one’s language influences perception and recall“ (307), meaning that memory is selective and depending on the language systems it will recall different things in different language systems. Some hold, that, although Whorf might have been wrong in his strong hypothesis, the weak version ist too weak and they formulated their theory between these two versions, taking into account the culture as a whole of the society in question (cf. Gipper 225).

In respect to two different language systems, the last issue to be discussed is the difference between translation and understanding. Even if it were true that translation is impossible, because metaphors and connotations are seldom translatable and never without losing some of the connotation, this would not mean that understanding is impossible (cf. Lakoff 311). It is crucial to differentiate between two languages having a different „conceptual system“ (311), which is what makes translation difficult (cf. 311f.), and the „conceptualizing capacity“ (310), of which Lakoff assumes that it is shared in general by people. This capacity allows for understanding even in cases when the conceptual systems are radically different (cf. 311f.).

One need not go very far in looking for an example of the difficulties implied by the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis in Babel-17. The two most significant languages in the text, English and Babel-17, are not very similar to each other, their conceptual systems are fundamentally different. Babel-17 is “an exact analytical language” (Delany, Babel-17, 215), while English is claimed to be “analytically clumsy” (210). Speakers of Babel-17 seem to have an “angular brutality” as well as an “animal grace” (both: 131). The English language, by contrast, lends itself well to poetry, it is beautiful when it is polished, it is a very subjective language, expressing peoples thought and opinions (cf. 17f.), whereas in Babel-17’s conceptual system the grammatical category of subjectivity and self-reflexiveness is missing (cf. 139).

These conceptual differences make translation difficult, certainly. That is why the Butcher, the original speaker of Babel-17, who does not speak a single word of it within the text, has trouble communicating properly in English, he sounds harsh and brutal (cf. 146ff.). These difficulties do not, however, prevent him from learning in English the concepts of ‘I’ and ‘you’ that are missing in the conceptual system he operates with. His being able to understand Rydra’s teaching is the proof that the text offers for the validity of Lakoff’s distinction between understanding and translation.

The closest the text gets to simply restating Whorfian theory is when Rydra claims that “language is thought” (23, italics his) and the closest it gets to refuting the same theory is by saying that although “the original words were lost, the translation remained” (77). What may seem simply like a contradictory statement turns out to be, another one of the textual tactics of Babel-17, namely intrducing a contardiction to shake the readers grip on the meaning of the text and to leave him with questions. Similarly, the explanation of Babel-17’s function as programming its speaker “to become a criminal and a saboteur” (215) is so blatantly unscientific and implausible that it should quickly be realized that the text is not concerned with simple endeavors such as fictionally exploring Whorfian theory. On the contrary, it uses Whorf’s theory to make its own points.

Sometimes the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is also called Sapir-Whorf-Korzybski Hypothesis, named after the founder of General Semantics, whose Motto is ‘The Map is not the Territory’ (cf. Eco 124f.), something we already encountered in Lacan’s thesis. Interestingly, this corresponds nicely with Broderick’s assertion that SF “maps utopia” (107). This connection should encourage us not to look for literalizations of utopias in works of SF, but to look instead for hints, absences, the “naturwissenschaftliche Wunderbare” (Todorov 54). Also, we should remember Moylan, who claimed, that we should not expect utopias in modern literature but only expressions of utopia (cf. Moylan 36). A cursory glance at Babel-17 reveals that there is no utopia in the narrow sense of the word. Still, there is a map of a certain, utopian change, as closer scrutiny will show. Babel-17 traces the contours of that change in the murky waters of language.

Naming things and using manipulated speech have been part of everyday language for several years now. The text shows just how manipulative everyday language can be by using the extreme example of the schizophrenia-inducing Babel-17 in several subtle ways. For instance it is pointed out that Babel-17 manipulates its speakers by using manipulative vocabulary: “the word for Alliance in Babel-17 translates literally into English as: one who has invaded.[...] It has all sorts of little diabolisms programmed into it.” (Delany, Babel-17, 215). This particular diabolism it shares with English, as we never get to know the word for the Invader’s home planets, they are just that: Invaders, meaning, those-who-have-invaded.

It is not easy to blame Babel-17 on the Invaders, as they used Babel-17 as a tool which only worked because it turned a weapon which was the Alliance’s all along, against the Alliance (see footnote 6). Babel-17 encourages us to look at language as an object, not as a given. “[T]he tool is not the weapon; rather the knowledge of how to use it” (213). This is where linguistic relativism comes into play. Some, among them Robert Anton Wilson, have claimed, that English is a highly manipulative language, with lots of possibilities to shroud the speaker’s intentions. That’s why they invented E-Prime, which appears to be sort of a new and improved English, wherin one is not allowed to use the verb ‘(to) be’ or any of its compound varieties (cf. Wilson 97-107). Changing the conceptual system changes minds, they claim. Exactly the same claim is made by Rydra Wong. After having uncovered every secret of Babel-17 and having stopped the sabotage she corrected Babel-17 “to build it towards truth” (Delany, Babel-17, 218).

Turning around what I said in the previous paragraph, I may also claim that its easy to blame Babel-17 on the Invaders, because the names suggest that. It is an „alien language“ (7) and the nameless Invaders wrought havoc with it (cf. 214f.). Sure, the Butcher was the Alliance’s tool, but it took the Invader’s cunning , the „knowledge how to use it“ (213) to make him a weapon. If it is that easy to change truths, how can Rydra believe herself to be able to make Babel-17 truthful?

Wittgenstein famously wrote: „Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen“ (Wittgenstein 111). Not to talk about something equals in this case not being able to say anything about that something that can have any claim to truth. Babel-17‘s status as a work of fiction and the loads of contradictions of which we have encountered several already, almost represent that Wittgensteinian silence. At the end of the day, what, really, has been said? What has been named? If „[a]ny given fiction reveals what it excludes“ (Broderick 133) the possibilities of what is revealed in Babel-17 are great, as it nearly never mentions the government, society, anything that borders on the issues of language is excluded from the text but not from the text’s discourse. Some kind of utopia is discernible in the text, but it’s precise shape is never named, which makes it all the more pervasive.

In Babel-17, we have earned, language is present in many ways, as language, linguistics, poetry and in the process of naming. There is one last aspect left, the one about the language-like qualities of SF. Samuel R. Delany encourages the reader of SF to think of it „as a language that must be learned or as a mode of writing as distinctive as poetry.“ (Landon 7). Each SF text is embedded in a „generic [SF] megatext“ (Broderick 59), which consists of all the other SF works that have been written and all the works that will be written. This means that every SF text has numerous references to numerous other SF texts which must be „not so much understood as simply recognized as proper names.“ (Broderick 57). Most importantly among those references figure certain stock terms that keep cropping up and the individual SF text is characterised by the way he takes up these stock terms and uses them in his own narrative.

This, of course, is nothing else but the notion of intertextuality that we already discussed. It is only now, however, that all the necessary elements for a sensible discussion of the dialogical functions of the SF megatext have been gathered. Babel-17 „showcas[es] the possibilities of SF’s invented languages“ (Malmgren 9) and a comparison with the SF megatext shows that Sfspeak is just another language in the bulk of the many already presented, but it is the process of naming that will become most important for the discussion of SF vocabulary.

Many SF texts play on the so-called „quest formula“ (Aldiss and Wingrove 393). These texts constitute a whole subgenre of SF: the space opera, which first appeared in the 1920s in pulp magazines such as Amazing and Astounding. (cf. Landon 72 ff.). Kingsley Amis remarks that what space operas resemble most are „horse operas“ (44) and Susan Sontag noticed, apropos of SF films, that their predictability remind her of Westerns (cf. 209). Space opera’s plots involve all the magic ingredients, space ships, black holes, hideous aliens, big guns and in a focal position: the heroic men who conquer the unknown universe (cf. Bogdanoff 82 f.). Space operas not only reinforce certain stereotypes, they also have social relevance in their advocacy of capitalism and colonialism (cf. Bogdanoff 85f.) They are propelled by a „missionary fervor and a sense of purpose“ (Landon 81). This crusade leads to frequent encounters with aliens. These encounters can be subsumed under the so-called first contact theme.

First Contacts are not restrained in their appearance nor are they more likely to appear in a space opera than in any other SF subgenre. They are first contacts with that which is alien, that which is the other. This theme is so pervasive that it has lead Broderick to say that SF both „writes the narrative of the other“ and „the narrative of the same, as other“ (51, italics his), which is a major insight, as C.G. Jung points out: „the alien is that which exists within humanity but which civilized humanity believes to have conquered“ (Golden 73). Also, according to C.G. Jung, the quest of the hero is a new myth (cf. 31) and corresponds with „the perennial human quest for meaning and wholeness“ (29). Fighting a war against an alien perceived as hideous would mean what the hero really fights is that within himself which he perceives as hideous. He finds himself a substitute enemy.
Turning to SF it soon is noticeable that the main problem in first contact scenarios is a failing of all kinds of communication, verbal as well as non-verbal (cf. Bogdanoff 244). In SF films the appearance of the alien usually is accompanied by silence (cf. Seeßlen 435), which in written SF texts is impossible to realize. As in the movies, however, the appearance of the alien has its importance. According to Bogdanoff communication works better the more human the alien appears. (cf. 230). This raises the question of what is really human: the humans, their shadow counterparts or both? What makes someone human ? It might well be language.

When talking about mythical references in the novel we already noticed the quest motive in Babel-17. Indeed, the novel has been derisively called a space opera often both by members of the academia (cf. Schulz 151) as well as by members of the SF ‚scene‘ (cf. Keim 503). It has been claimed that space opera’s underlying world view prevents any criticism of society or language (cf. Keim 514). In contrast, I would claim that the text „shows the need to understand codes and conventions“ (Samuelson 168) in order to work with them.

The stereotypes of space opera are conspicuously absent. The hero is a woman, who has weak moments (Delany, Babel-17, 15f.). She is a poet, not a warrior and although fights take place they have nothing to do with what turns out to be the hero’s victory. There’s none of the stereotypical male cocksureness in the events. It is poetry, science and Rydra and the Butcher‘s love that wins the day, not the big guns. The crew on Rydra‘s ship which is all the society the text permits us to see works in ways together that seem more like kibbutzim, working together as equals, work and love closely related. There is no trace of capitalism; colonialism, however, is hinted at, the headquarters of the Invaders are in a city called „Nueva-nueva York“ (218), a clear reference to New York and American colonial history. The missionary fervor, too, has its place in Babel-17, but it is a different fervor, a different purpose. In the end, Babel-17 is accorded no cultural value that could result in a cultural colonisation, it is assigned to other tools, it works as a go-between.

Speaking ‘SF’ means understanding the stereotypes and using them. Moylan wrote that he believed the productive powers of phantasy were situated in art (cf. Moylan 33). Using one’s phantasy to speak to the reader with the intent of swaying him to the cause, that aspect of Moylan’s belief are well taken care of by SF.

The key to the space opera motive in Babel-17 is found in Jung‘s observation as stated above: „the alien is that which exists within humanity but which civilized humanity believes to have conquered“ (Golden 73), a dark force within humanity. And language is exactly that, a manipulative force that we believe to have conquered through writings, through codes, through the disambiguation that we believe to occur in the process of naming. By transposing the palpable figure of the alien with something as vague as language, Babel-17 demonstrates what we should be afraid of: ourselves. „Who is this animal man“ is asked early on (Delany, Babel-17, 3). If we as human beings dump our fears of our shadowy side on the character of the Alien, this process assures that in the figure of that Alien can we ourselves be traced (cf. Golden 161). In language we can also be traced with all our arrogance in full display, all our weaknesses.

Language in space operas, we have found, mirrors the capitalist society from when they originated. Language mirrors our selves, but, as we learned, those same selves are absent in the language. Compared to other utopias, the traces of utopia visible in Babel-17 are not to do with enshrining a particular language or culture, as utopias generally have the tendency to do (Gordon 205). Languages, we learn, are deficient. English as well as the mysterious Babel-17. Communication also is deficient, personal as well as global, we have learned that, too. Maybe society, and we, too, who are mirrored in it are also deficient.

Language is mended as the events turn to a close (218f.). Another thing that is on the way to being mended is the political situation, meaning the interplanetary war, as Rydra and the Butcher are resolved to stop it. About earth society we receive nearly no information, we only encounter two earth people from the government, the General and a customs officer. Both are unhappy. The General, because he thinks that he cannot communicate with others. The customs officer seems to be unhappy with his whole life situation. He changes because he communicates with others, he changes his language system in parts: the process of naming is recognized as bad. This, actually is not portrayed in the novel, but when Rydra returns to earth the customs officer’s lifestyle resembles a lifestyle he claimed was perverted (cf. 191f.). Rydra’s quest, one might assume, mirrors the officer’s journey through his language in an allegorical way.

In his foreword to Delany’s seventh novel The Einstein Intersection, Neil Gaiman reviews some of the ways that particular novel has been read by all kinds of readers and interpreters. He closes that section of the foreword without passing judgement on the validity of these readings but instead he comments: „if that were all the book was, it would be a poor type of tale, with little resonance for now. Instead, it continues to resonate.“ (Gaiman ix). That holds equally true for Babel-17, which has been read as a black novel (cf. Weedman), as a gay novel and as an arrogant and trashy novel (cf. Keim)

SF, Delany says, is „a tool to help you think about the present [...] in a way that allows you to question them as you read along in an interesting, moving and exciting story“ (Landon 35). This statement perfectly captures the effect of Babel-17, an exiting story about language and its mechanisms, questioning our sense of ourselves. Notions of free will and truth are under fire in this novel. That its narrative is open-ended is fitting. It leaves us with questions, not with answers. Questions that are about language, not about codes.

Languages have to be understood. When Rydra sits down with her tapes and transcriptions and works out all the grammar and vocabulary before passing judgment on Babel-17, maybe that is the text’s way of telling us to sit down likewise and consider the implications.Rydra’s understanding of herself and her understanding of the language happen at the same time. Babel-17 suggests, that it is always that way as understanding ourselves means understanding language first.

SF „shows human kind groaning in chains of its own construction, but nearly always with the qualification that those chains can be broken if people try hard enough“ (Amis 77) In Babel-17 these chains are language. Changing your life means changing your language. This is where mainstream criticism errs, which assumes that Babel-17 is about language and problems of language. They cannot see that it is about change. Trying hard enough not to succumb to the manipulations of language or to reflect the manipulation. These consequences are political as well as epistemological. Changing society also means changing yourself and your language, which is the lesson Wilson implemented when he started to advocate E-Prime.

6. Bibliography

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Robert Jordan dies at age 58. Why do I care?

It’s truly astonishing the amount of sexism one is prepared to stomach sometimes when you want to be entertained. There’s Ally McBeal of course, which isn’t all that clear cut a case but I suspect she will come up again on this blog. And there’s the pain in the ass of High Fantasy. The lesser the writer the ranker his sexism. The Peakes, Miévilles, Delanys or LeGuins are few and far between. Most of the High Fantasy novelists write fiction like boys who don’t talk to girls or rarely. This includes (and why shouldn’t it) women writers. The best of this group of writers rise above the mediocre rest by mastering the art of crafting powerfully escapist novels. For example, in Robin Hobb’s oeuvre you won’t find complex structures, great ideas or multi-layered characters. But inevitably, by the second volume of her small cycles, you will be hooked. This Sunday, Robert Jordan died. Why do I care? Robert Jordan is the best bad writer of his genre. Stylistically, he’s clearly worse than many of his collegues, he only narrowly escapes being worse than Raymond Feist, stylistically. His storytelling has become increasingly tedious and increasingly sexist. However, the world he created was large, populated by an innumerable host of characters. It was, I’ll grant him that, addictive. Addictive enough for me to have read every single novel of the twelve (including that damn prequel) that he’s written. He was only one novel away from finishing. And then he died, that cheeky bastard. Looking at the long and colorful row of Jordan novels behind my shelves (no place for him ON them) I marvel at my boyish anger. And even more, I marvel at the fact that I have been reading his novels for over ten years now, and they have become more and more sexist at a steady rate and I have not destroyed them or given them away, I haven’t even stopped buying them, reading them, for Christ’s sake. Maybe this was an accomplishment of his, to make his novels -if not entertaining- addictive enough to keep me, hell, US, reading, for so many years, through so many bad books, up to the end, which -poof- suddenly disappeared. It feels as if he’d done it on purpose, inspired by the Sopranos maybe. Twelve books of teaser and then – blackout.
Maybe that’s genius.

On Paul Gilroy’s "The Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of Modernity"

(Fußnoten sind in eckigen Klammern in den Text integriert)

Paul Gilroy’s text, “The Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of Modernity”, the first chapter of his book on the Black Atlantic, struggles to arrive at a clean notion of ‘blackness’. His problems, however are due to the same problems he shows ‘Cultural Studies’ to have, moreover, problems, that most academical writing informed by modernity struggles with. So his own difficulties are symptomatic for the topic he discusses and they might resurface in my own discussion of his text.

There have been many definitions of what would constitute the ‘modern’ or ‘modernity’, but modernity’s roots in the Enlightenment [ Of course, Gilroy oversimplifies how influences worked at that crucial time. How the Romantics resurrected the racialized idea of the nation and used it against 'scientific' tendencies, in short, how the Enlightenment as the Age of Reason and the Romantics as the resurrectors of 'culture' have worked together to produce Modernity has not been considered by Gilroy, yet these are minor disagreements; they would not have an impact on his thesis.] have always been stressed. The so-called Age of Reason is usually evoked whenever politicians or academics attack ‘intolerance’ and ‘racism’. Yet that same age has not only been instrumental in inventing the modern nation-state, it also helped racializing culture via the “fatal junction of the concept of nationality with the concept of culture” (2). The crucial aspect was the notion of a racial community of members of the same nation. Germans were Germans because they were linked by blood [2 Blood, as a juridical marker of Germanness was kept until 1996, which explains many racialized arguments in this country, but not similar arguments in others. Gilroy's argument, however, holds true for all of the 'West'.] and culture. The same applied to Britishness. Thus, Britishness or Germanness took on a transcendent meaning. And British persons and Germans were, racially speaking, considered white [3 And Christians, of course. In the same period of time, modern Antisemitism was born from a cluster of notions similar to the cluster considered by Gilroy].

The racialization of culture is most obvious when the major role of ‘blackness’ (not darkness) as a trope in early 19th century lectures and discussions on aesthetics, which could be said to provide a foundation for most of modern aesthetics [4 This is of course a bold claim, but I think its true, considering the extent to which major claims of Hegel's lectures in Jena and A.W. Schlegel's lectures in Berlin keep resurfacing in modern aesthetics.], is considered. Thus, blackness, as the other, has been ingrained in the very basis of modern thought and writing. The idea of the black man as the adversary has long since become part of cultural thought and the identity of ‘Germans’ and ‘the British’ has for a long time been white. To black Europeans or Americans this has been a major problem, as they could not partake of the identity of their nation. As a result the idea of an African ‘homeland’ and of a black history arose that is -examined closely- basically identical to the history of Africa and the history of the Middle Passage. Thus, black empowerment, instead of changing anything about racist attitues, was intrumental in creating a nation for blacks.

However, blacks were not only in so far part of the creation of Modernity as they served as a trope. Gilroy stresses the extent to which blacks have been actively participating in crucial movements in ‘white’ history, from “Columbus’ pilot, Pedro Nino” (16) to the likes of Olaudah Equiano, who was involved “in the beginnings of organized working-class politics” (12). In the realm of whites, blacks were only seen as a victimized people, never as agents. Purportedly emancipated branches of cultural studies which are concerned with the study of blacks, reinforce that impression by reiterating the nation/culture juncture, the nation being, in this case, Africa. The consequence of these studies is the identity, for instance, of the Black American as the exception to the (white) rule. Gilroy’s focus on the Enlightenment makes clear to what extent the racialized notions of nation and culture have informed the tacit racism on Campuses around the world, and how much of it went unnoticed by scholars.

The difference in method in Gilroy’s text is the emphasis on traveling. Instead of focusing on nations as creators of culture, he creates the Black Atlantic as the epitome of travel. The Atlantic, upon which black slaves were carried from Africa to America, but upon which black captains, too, navigated on many routes. From the ships going back and forth several were built by blacks, and books and ideas crossing the Atlantic were -in part- written by blacks. The trope of the Black Atlantic, in other words, serves to destabilize the notion of stable cultural identities.

Gilroy proposes a “theorization of [...] hybridity”, which would still (of course) be based on black and white identities, which is where Gilroy’s problems with the notion of ‘blackness’ enter, but focusing on travel and not on the awkward construction of a ‘homeland’ might very well be the way out of the trap set by Enlightenment, which ensured that you cannot dispense of talking about black and white if you do not want to drag these concepts along implicitly. However, using the Black Atlantic as a trope for the inbetween, these identities do not fuse (as this would create only new ‘stable’ identities), but instead, they are disregarded, losing their power in a theory concentrating on the fluidity of identities instead of their stableness.