Avanti!

Monsieur Sartre Discovers the World

2010-05-14T04:26:00.000-07:00

Les Mots, by Jean-Paul Sartre
1963, 210 pp.

The Age of Reason, by Jean-Paul Sartre
1945, 300 pp.

The Reprieve, by Jean-Paul Sartre
1945, 377 pp.

Iron in the Soul, by Jean-Paul Sartre
1949, 349 pp.

Existentialism is a Humanism, by Jean-Paul Sartre
1946, 141 pp.

Jean-Paul Sartre—Philosophy in the World, by Ronald Aronson
1980, 359 pp.

Letters to Sartre, by Simone de Beauvoir
1990, 531 pp.

Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, by Iris Murdoch
1953, 158 pp.

Some time ago I decided that I had been too shallow about Jean-Paul Sartre. After the predictable enthusiasm of the snobbish teenage intellectual wore off, I had long dismissed Sartre on political grounds. I found him always too dogmatic, too cozy with Moscow, too detached during the Occupation, too much the towering archetype of the Reactionary Leftist. I knew a few sordid details about his and De Beauvoir's relations with young women, and sided with Camus when I learned of their famous break. I judge all twentieth-century intellectuals by their stance on the three great forces of our age: imperialism, fascism, and Stalinism. Sartre was Right on Imperialism, yes, and even courageously so, but Wrong on Stalinism, and seems to have abstained on fascism in practice, which counts to me as being Wrong on It.

His philosophical work is too putridly written anyway. Perfectly good words exist without having to go around making so many up.

But eventually I'd come round to grudgingly admitting that this was too shallow an approach to one of the last century's most prominent intellectuals. His work was too wide, too deep, and too prolific to be so easily written off tout court, and while I may be able to dismiss Sartre the Man, Sartre the Thinker and Sartre the Phenomenon still remained to be grasped. So I set out to learn some things.

The first thing I learned is that the literature is vast and unruly. I have now read about 2500 pages by or about Sartre, and even that selection was necessarily spotty. I have, for instance, left out most of the shibboleths of Sartre’s thought: Being and Nothingness, the two doorstopper volumes of the Critique of Dialectical Reason, the 4,000 pages on Flaubert. This is partially deliberate and partially out of necessity: in a genuine effort to approach Sartre in good faith, I have selected those books which I think I will be most positively disposed to, and which will therefore leave open a desire to return to Sartre’s more difficult work in the future. I am also facing six MSc exams and a dissertation on Bengali agrarian structure, and simply don’t have time to totalize any historico-political realizations of the practico-inert totalization. I have things to do.

The enormity of Sartre’s output is further complicated by the diabolical productivity of Simone de Beauvoir. In addition to her four volumes of autobiography (largely about her relationship with Sartre) there are several autobiographical novels, many volumes of diaries, Adieu to Sartre (which is mostly transcripts of conversations), and several volumes of letters between the two of them. Add to this the many thousands of critical and academic monographs, and you have a truly horrifying selection of material indeed. I have tried to choose the books I think are both best and most important to the historiography of “Sartre studies.” Thus, under review here are Ronald Aronson’s book (thirty years in the writing, he had first access to the unpublished second volume of the Critique), as well as Iris Murdoch’s brief introduction (the first English-language study of Sartre’s thought). Of the many volumes of letters, I chose the most scandalous. De Beauvoir published many of Sartre’s letters before her death, with the sex bits kept in and the names edited out. After her death, her executor (formerly a teenage lover of both Sartre and De Beauvoir) published Letters to Sartre in a complete and unedited edition, stirring up all manner of controversy and recriminations, to be discussed more fully below.

This selection of books constitutes an approach to Sartre as the politically-engaged writer of fiction. The memoir and the letters are meant to get a sense of him as a person; the scholarly books are meant to get a sense of how his fiction work integrated with the general course of his thought. The philosopher is overlooked here, and the playwright and journalist marginalized. This is unfortunate, but will hopefully allow a deeper and more coherent appreciation for the aspects of Sartre’s work I am addressing.

The Roads to Freedom trilogy (Les Chemins de la liberté) therefore forms the core of this analysis. Written during the Occupation and published in 1945 and 1949, these three novels depict a few months in the life of Mathieu Delarue and his friends and lovers as they and their world of Montparnasse cafés live through the summer and fall of 1938 and then the defeat of France in June 1940. Mathieu is of course Sartre himself in fictional form: born in the same year, also a teacher of philosophy, filled with thoughts about ontological freedom. He is something of a waffling, ineffectual petit-bourgeois intellectual, but deliberately so, all the better to illustrate and embody the realization of meaninglessness and the dilemmas which emerge with an understanding of Sartre’s idea of freedom.

The first volume, The Age of Reason, is the least interesting of the three. It is something of a conventional melodrama which revolves around two days in Mathieu’s life as he searches frantically for money to pay for his mistress Marcelle to have an abortion. The use of characters who clearly represent philosophical types and the frequent blunt employment of hyper-conscious inner monologues gives the otherwise unremarkable novel a veneer of existentialist thought. This also annoyed Iris Murdoch, who writes that “[t]oo much of the story is predigested for us in the consciousness of the main characters.” The two most important figures who flank Mathieu are Daniel, who embodies negation and destructive egotism, and Brunet, the committed, unquestioning Communist. This sets up a pattern which intensifies in the later volumes: as Iris Murdoch writes, “Mathieu stands between the deliberately fallen and perverted nature of Daniel and the naively but innocently engaged nature of Brunet.” But in the first volume, Brunet is a marginalized figure; instead, Daniel is the source of action. But he (and his activity) is action without content. He cannot manage to forge an identity for himself, to insert himself into conditions which will determine his behavior. He is a self-conscious expression of Sartre’s idea of “bad faith,” in which, despite being aware of our basic freedom, we act as though we have no control. Daniel is a figure of tension and contradiction, and Sartre’s presentation of him as a sort of pathological quasi-Freudian case history is one of the few points which separates The Age of Reason from simply being a standard melodrama. By the third volume, when Daniel plays only a very minor role, Sartre drops all pretence and has him actually tell us that he is trapped in a mentality of "in-itself," rather than "for-itself," hence his anguish and destructive activity. This is unfortunate: Daniel is probably the only character who is more interesting at the start of the trilogy than at the beginning. As a tortured, psychologically damaged, unpredictable figure trying and failing to define himself and his place in reference to the world, he is interesting. As a sock-puppet for one of Sartre’s philosophical concepts, and as a very poorly-dramatised homosexual, he is dull.

The second volume, The Reprieve, is a far more ambitious and intelligent piece of work. Here the overall structure of the trilogy becomes clear: The Age of Reason takes place in the summer of 1938, when private lives and personal concerns still dominated the nature of experience. Sartre’s decision to present them in long, unbroken scenes of third-person subjective narration is therefore logical, but faint murmurs of history are still present, mostly in the form of Communist political engagement and the war in Spain. Minor characters from the first novel get more screen time in the second. Most important is Gomez, the bohemian painter who went to fight in Spain and has been made a General, but a whole host of new characters are also added, many of them well-drawn and placed in sympathetic plights. The Reprieve takes place during the 8 days of September 1938 which culminated in the Munich agreement, and thus created a brief illusion of peace. The formal departure is clear on the first page: Sartre has been reading John Dos Passos, and illustrates his theme by constant cutting between narrators, sometimes within the same sentence. Fictional characters and historical personas mingle, third-person and first-person narration blend into each other, and past tense gives way to present. He is a great proponent of what in cinema is called the match-cut, when, for instance, a person says “No” in one scene and we cut immediately to someone in another scene reacting to someone else saying “No.” A person in one scene orders a cup of coffee, a person in another scene recieves one. The general effect is to give the impression of a wide social fabric in which the decisions of the powerful affect people of all different backgrounds and social situations in similar ways. Much of the novel consists of private lives being interrupted as men find that they have been mobilized and will soon be fighting a war. By cutting constantly between scenes, Sartre is able to dramatize the social solidarity which is too often lost in subjectivity and egoism. This was a direct decision in light of the claustrophobia of La Nausée, which is an abstract, ahistorical demonstration of the human project. Les Chemins de la liberté is a historically specific, socially embedded demonstration of the particular ways different people try to realize the human project under conditions outside of their control.

Sartre’s canvass is broader, and his insight keener than in the first volume. Brunet emerges as a meaningful character in his own right, and the different impact of historical events on apparently powerless individuals is convincingly demonstrated. But if anything, Sartre overcompensates. He is so enamored with his cross-cutting technique that he commits a now-standard cinematic error: he cuts so swiftly that not only is the narrative sometimes difficult to follow, but the audience is also rarely allowed to see dramatic situations or thoughtful conversations develop. That he sustains this technique for almost 400 pages instead of using it judiciously for dramatic and intellectual emphasis is also a bit tiresome, but encourages the reader to proceed slowly and carefully. It’s rather like watching a two-hour montage: interesting in the abstract, but exhausting in practice.

Iron in the Soul seems at first to be a happy medium. It takes place during the collapse of the Third Republic in June 1940, and in the first third gives us several characters in longish scenes, to develop specific ideas. So we see Gomez, who had in The Reprieve left his wife and child to return to fight in Spain, but who is now living in New York, being offered pointless work as an art critic. Boris, the young idealist, and his narcissist sister Ivich reappear. There is a wrenching scene of Gomez’s wife and child, trying to make their way on foot with an endless refugee caravan to unoccupied France. All of these scenes are well executed, but none resolve their respective stories, so in each case the reader is left thinking that the stories will be resolved at the end of the book.

The second third follows Mathieu, now in the army, as he and his squad wait around to be captured by Germans. Their officers have run away and they have no ammunition, so they wait and bicker about who lost the war. Another squad comes along, still disciplined and still willing to fight. In the pivotal moment of the trilogy, Mathieu takes up a rifle to join them. The result is about what you expect.

Then you approach the final third of the book, which you expect to resolve all of the existing stories, and perhaps return to many of the characters from the second book whose stories also did not get resolve. But none of this happens. Instead, Sartre offers the story of Brunet the Communist, having been caught up in the retreat and captured, as he tries in vain to organize a cell in the German prison camp. This is presented in two fifty-page paragraphs. The first works: the unbroken prose feels rather like a director with a Steadicam, winding through the confusion and chaos of an army in disarray, returning constantly to the solid, confident figure of Brunet. Sartre has a point here. As Murdoch puts it, “Brunet unreflectively identifies himself with a single concrete project…The universe solidly and reassuringly is as the Marxist analysis says it is. He himself is an instrument of the Party whose function has been determined by History. Brunet reflects no more about these things; he acts.” No confusion of the in-itself here, no despair at the terrible realization of human freedom. Thus a clear contrast is drawn between Brunet and Mathieu, and the characters from the beginning, and Sartre’s argument is well depicted. But the second long paragraph adds little to the experience of the first, and ends the book, so we never learn the fates of a dozen or so interesting characters. This is especially disappointing since the first half of Iron in the Soul is quite good, and the book seems to be shaping up in such a way as to cast the whole trilogy in a coherent, satisfying, well-crafted light. To end it with what feels like (rather boring) redundancy on the one hand, and dissatisfying lack of resolution on the other is quite annoying. Whether this was a deliberate decision by Sartre, taken to illustrate the meaninglessness of existence, I don’t know. If so, then all it signals is the writer’s greater interest in himself than in his characters or his readers.

The ending aside, the trilogy is good, if not marvelous. The second volume in particular is an excellent formal and philosophical exercise, and makes it impossible to come away without respect for Sartre as a novelist. I was bothered by the end, and some decisions along the way, but Les Chemins de la liberté did indeed leave me wanting to read La Nausée.

Sartre's memoir Les Mots is a strange entry in the genre of literary autobiography—strange and suspicious enough that it may be better considered as a novel than a memoir. It depicts the young Jean-Paul, raised by a domineering old bourgeois and two women, and who withdraws into a world of books, then discovers the pleasure of writing them. As a story, this is delicately, even sometimes beautifully told, but as the memoir of Jean-Paul Sartre, it perhaps protests too much. We are not given the actual subjective experience of Sartre’s young life, nor shown clearly how his experiences shaped his intellectual development. Instead the mind at work is that of the mature Sartre, with all of his analytical habits on full display, telling us what to think about what he is ostensibly showing us. What he presents as actual experience, is an organized, analyzed composite of events presented as symbolic. He is also rather unfair and dismissive to the adults who seem to have provided him with a rather comfortable and indulgent life: his grandfather gets to be the subject of the mature Sartre’s assault on the bourgeois experience of art, and the women are reduced to irrelevance.

Granted, perhaps it is unreasonable to expect anyone to write a memoir which consists solely of honest, enlightened self-insight, depicted with a control of lucid, lively prose. In some respects, Sartre suffers in my judgment by being Sartre: I credit him with a sharp eye and a subtle mind, and therefore expected something a bit more probing. It also presents itself as a search for self-knowledge, but to this reader, having also read a vast swathe of Sartreism, it came across as an act of self-mythologizing. It reads like the work of an intelligent man who has read Freud and gone back through his life to find those events which can be presented in a Freudian context to produce at the end the proper impression of the adult man. It is a perfect demonstration of the fallacy of confirmation bias.

Yet for all those complaints, many key aspects of Sartre’s life are present in Les Mots. The committed engagement with literature, obviously. But also the unworldliness. Sartre’s family never seemed to have to earn money, and it was never expected that Sartre himself would have to earn money. Instead he passed his entire life secure in the notion that he could and would do nothing but read and write on things which interested him, and had no awkward contact with grubby material necessities. This perhaps reached its apotheosis (or, from the point of view of Sartre’s readers, its nadir) when Gallimard gave him a monthly stipend for life, so that even sales and royalties ceased to matter. As Aronson ruefully puts it, “he could work when he wished on whatever he wished, without colleagues, without supervision, without criticism.” This was the life of the young Jean-Paul as well, and it is clearly a situation he never quite left. Les Mots is also a tightly, rigorously written document of the experience of alienation, and contains a small polemic on Sartre’s idea of what art is and how it should be experienced. It is not a bad book; I am simply suggesting that to take it at face value is to be misled by the wiles of the mature Sartre.

It is an unfortunate truth that Ronald Aronson’s book on Sartre is the best book under review. It will hold strong appeal not only to any reader interested in Sartre, post-war philosophy, or leftist thought, but to any reader with any appreciable interest in literature. It is intensely readable, and though judicious in its praise and criticism, it is suffused with a great sympathy and affection for its subject. Sartre is presented in quite an understanding light, which is perhaps necessary considering the despicable portrait painted by Letters to Sartre; all I can say is that after reading this book, I would rather have been Ronald Aronson than Jean-Paul Sartre.

There must be some high pantheon in the Olympus of literature for those select few academics who have managed, through Herculean effort of intellect, to distill mountains of turgid philosophy into slender, lively, intelligent, fascinating books. What Walter Kaufmann has done for Nietzsche and Shlomo Avineri for Hegel, Aronson does here for Sartre. Aronson covers all of the major phases of Sartre’s thought, and all of his most important works, often in quite close detail, but free from scholarly throat-clearing and annoying digressions. There is not a whiff of nonsense about the book, to the extent that Aronson refuses even to draw general conclusions and ends his study two pages after ending his discussion of Sartre’s huge book on Flaubert. This is an intelligent, critical intellectual biography, nothing more and nothing less.

It will be profitable at this juncture to follow Aronson in a brief discussion of the development of Sartre’s thought. Throughout the book, Aronson anchors his analysis on two poles: Sartre’s fixation with the nature and extent of human freedom on the one hand, and his abiding pessimism on the other.

According to Aronson, Sartre began his philosophical career by posing critical questions about the ontology of freedom. His first two books, The Imaginary and Imagination, roughly translated, both pose a similar argument: that man is always free because in any situation, man can retreat into the imagination. This idea of mental escape was later enlarged to include emotions: “Emotion and imagination alike are spontaneous, self-determined free acts in which we escape from a world ‘ruled by deterministic processes.’” But immediately Sartre’s pessimism turns up: escapist imagination hardly constitutes real freedom in the real world, and even according to Sartre himself, too much reliance on this sort of freedom leads only to pathology. But already a familiar tension emerges: the world is unpleasant, and there must be some way of mitigating it, so Sartre proceeds from what he wants to be true (that humans are basically free) and constructs a clever answer, but one which even he ultimately does not find persuasive. His tendency to chase solutions he has already decided on, and his willingness to mangle the theorists whose shoulders he stands upon (Husserl and Heidegger, mostly) are quite frankly reminiscent of another mad genius, one who used to haunt the British Museum Reading Room.

Well, if imagination and emotions are one means of escape, but not anchored enough in the world, perhaps art, since it is imaginary, is the site of human freedom. This led to several essays on aesthetics in which Sartre argues that since art is imaginary, it cannot have anything to do with morality, since morality requires being-in-the-world, but at the same time that reality cannot be beautiful, since beauty is a virtue which can only be applied to the imaginary. This interest in art as a means of escape animates Sartre’s first and most famous novel, La Nausée. In that book, Sartre’s narrator Roquentin realizes that all things are contingent and meaningless, that there is no order to the world, whether human, divine, or causal. The horror of this (the nausea, obviously) suggests that our only way to continue living in such a world is to hide the meaninglessness through organization, wishful thinking, self-deception, escape, “bad faith,” and so on.

Roquentin’s dilemma is of course expanded upon and developed at length in Sartre’s first great philosophical masterpiece Being and Nothingness. This is rather a difficult book to summarize, though Aronson is masterful at making it intelligible. I will be briefer than he is, at the risk of doing some violence to a key work. Here Sartre’s concept of freedom has broadened yet further: there is no difference between the being of man, and his being free. With his consciousness, man creates himself, gives meaning to things in the world, and can detach himself from any situation. But again, the pessimism returns: we build illusions to hide this freedom from ourselves, and our consciousness exists “only as it sees the world as lacking,” because we cannot be the thing that created itself. Sartre sees man as being engaged in a constant, doomed project to become what he calls “the for-itself-in-itself,” the thing which is not contingent on something else, “consciousness become substance, substance become the cause of itself, the Man-God.” Understandably, this is rather difficult. In fact, Sartre says that we cannot realize that goal because simply existing and having that goal are one and the same, so we are chasing something which is itself created by our running. Thus, his famous conclusion: “man is a useless passion.” From this doomed project emerges the self-deception of “bad faith,” attempts to make things dependent on us and thereby to dominate them, creations of various illusions. These can be analyzed (as Sartre later did at horrific length in his books on Baudelaire, Genet, and Flaubert) using the machinery of “existential psychoanalysis.”

Now, Sartre wrote those things during the late 1930s, and few books could be less politically engaged. With the declaration of the war, though, he was called up and sent to the front, and later taken prisoner. Suddenly Sartre found that he was in the grip of forces completely outside his control, and worse, that these forces did not consider him exceptional at all. Suddenly he was but one powerless man among many thousands of powerless men. His letters to Simone de Beauvoir show the trauma of this realization, though De Beauvoir seems utterly oblivious to it. But the damage was done: Sartre discovered the world. The three novels discussed above signal his first attempts at engagement with reality, but the decisive turning point was his seminal essay What is Literature?

Aronson rightly places What is Literature? at the center of the book and of Sartre’s intellectual development. In it, Sartre takes up the model of Being and Nothingness, but resolves its dilemma: art, he argues, especially reading, allows me to unify the subject (myself) and the object (the work of art) through the imaginative, creative process of experiencing it. The novel I create in my imagination when I read is the “for-itself-in-itself,” and I accomplish my ontological goal and cease to be a useless passion. He doesn’t quite come out and say that reading makes me the Man-God, but the implication is there. He goes on at some length about the role of the artist and the relation of the artist to the audience and the place of art in class (and classless) society, all of which is fascinating, and possibly his best work. The point, though, is that he effectively concludes that the only moral, philosophically tenable position is to be a politically-engaged writer. Aronson therefore treats us to a chapter-long analysis of Sartre’s plays, and another chapter on Sartre’s political essays, both of which are splendid for their brevity and analytical rigor.

Aronson then discusses Sartre’s relations with the Communists: his early, rebuffed attempts at cooperation during the war, then his whole-hearted adoption of the Party line, followed by distance and internal criticism after the invasion of Hungary, and finally his turn towards the Third World after the Cuban Revolution. Sartre comes out of this discussion in a far better light than I’d ever given him credit for. The engagement with Communism led of course to the Critique of Dialectical Reason, in which Sartre sets himself up as an independent Marxist philosopher. Aronson had access to the unpublished drafts of the Critique and does the best he can under the circumstances, but not even his enthusiasm can get past the misery of actually reading the thing. “It is an undisciplined, almost incoherent style of writing in which everything must be said, more or less at once, and never otherwise than by a kind of fiat,” he writes, after giving us a 70-line paragraph as a excerpt. He does engage in meaningful analysis of Sartre’s argument, but ultimately finds it unconvincing, and finally dubs the Critique “undisciplined, self-indulgent, confused, and confusing.” Aronson elsewhere devoted an entire book to the Critique, and was obviously suffering some fatigue from that decision. Far better for Aronson are Sartre’s political essays, especially those in his book about Cuba and his analysis of Stalinism.

Finally Aronson turns to the 4,000-page monolith of the book on Flaubert. It represents about one quarter of Sartre’s collected writings, and is in fact longer than the collected writings of Flaubert himself. Sartre worked on it for about twenty years, dedicated to a single methodological question: “What can we know about a man?” Indeed, the Flaubert book is only incidentally about Flaubert: it is designed to demonstrate the method of existential psychoanalysis, to prove that everything can be communicated and that with the necessary information, we can arrive at a perfect understanding of another person. As Aronson sees it, “the Flaubert was, after all, a product of defeat. L’Idiot de la famille was erected over the ruin of the Critique, the collapse of his political hope, his role as political intellectual and the project of a committed theatre. It was a work of withdrawal, in which Sartre’s thought left the world and became absorbed in the life and work of another intellectual recluse.” After slogging through Sartre’s approach and outlining the content of the book, Aronson eventually dispenses with pleasantries altogether. The book “violates the elementary rules of human communication,” he complains. It “lacks all respect for its readers,” and, like any monologuing crank, it makes no distinction between “the activity of research and its socially communicable results.” Aronson washes his hands of the matter, despite his obvious enthusiasm for Sartre’s early and middle periods, and his great respect for Sartre’s intellect. Aronson refuses to draw any general conclusions or engage in any evaluation. He ends his book two pages after concluding his discussion of the Flaubert.

Compared to Aronson’s formidable performance, Iris Murdoch’s Sartre: Romantic Rationalist is rather underwhelming. Murdoch was a good novelist who won the Booker and was made CBE for her services to English literature. I find her quite skilled at time, place, mood, and atmosphere, though I think her use of male narrators in the first person is more brave than it is successful. She was a student of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s at Cambridge, and married John Bayly, the splendid literary critic. Her very sad death from Alzheimer’s is the subject of the film Iris with Judi Dench and Kate Winslet. Her book on Sartre was the first serious monograph on the subject to appear in English. It is very short, and made even more so since her introduction fills pp. 9-39, and pp. 148-159 are various bibliographical lists. Furthermore, since it appeared in 1953, it covers only Sartre’s earliest writings, whereas Aronson’s study came out in the year of Sartre’s death.

Murdoch’s thesis is quite literally embodied in her title: she considers Sartre to be a rationalist intellectual by disposition, but to have come to intellectual maturity under the romanticist shadow of Surrealism (to which she devotes a surprising amount of time and space) and was unable to escape what she calls a “romantic Trotskyist longing for permanent revolution.” Her discussion of Sartre’s trilogy is quite good, and her insights into Being and Nothingness are fascinating in the sense that they are original and organic and have not yet been shaped by any scholarly consensus or sterile debate, such as currently exists. She deals with Sartre’s solipsism without making excuses, and discusses it in such a way that throws light on many of the works discussed above: “He isolates the self so that it treats others, not as objects of knowledge certainly, but as objects to be feared, manipulated and imagined about.” This is confirmed by much of the action of the wartime trilogy, and of Sartre’s approach to his family in Les Mots and the literary figures he devoted books to. She also sums up Sartre’s enduring appeal with great efficiency: Sartre suggests that your personal despair is in fact a universal characteristic of humanity, and has nothing to do with social situations, historical specificity, your own defects. We see ourselves in his portraits of the lonely individual, (not to mention himself as a lonely individual), which produces enduring sympathy. Her take on Sartre’s Marxism (still quite protean at the time of her writing) is quite interesting. She must have been surprised by later events, since she writes that “The Marxist can be a confident utilitarian because he has both a clear idea of human good and an understanding of the mechanism of social cause and effect. Sartre lacks both.” Yet it is hard to disagree with her assessment. Sartre did lack both. He just didn’t let that stop him.

Yet Murdoch is often rather digressive, which is surprising for such a short work. The reader gets the impression that she knew a lot about the history of modern philosophy and about novels, but did not perhaps have much to say about the work of Jean-Paul Sartre. Certainly it is important to situate the object of study in a specific milieu, but it is unwise to devote equal time, attention, and enthusiasm to the surroundings as to the man himself.

Curiously, one important strand of thought which both Aronson and Murdoch leave out is an actual concrete analysis of what exactly Sartre meant by “existentialism” in the real world. The discussions of Being and Nothingness are important to this, of course, but that work is also notorious for its lack of application to the real world. Aronson discusses Sartre’s engagement through literature, which I agree is of central importance, but we do Sartre a disservice if we assume that he somehow thought that literature was the only meaningful way to act in the world. He gave a more general presentation of his views in his lecture (and later the short book) titled Existentialism is a Humanism.

It is a fascinating work. It is short and accessible, which enables the reader to consider it as a totality, and it rewards careful thought as such. In Existentialism is a Humanism, Sartre presents his now-famous argument that with human beings, existence precedes essence. We are not created based on some pre-existing template of what constitutes human nature. We simply exist, and our essence (what human nature is) is determined by each of us in our actions. And further, layering on a bit of Kantian thinking, our actions should be such that we would want them to be common to general human nature. Sartre argues that Dostoevsky’s Trap is but the starting point for an existentialist: if everything is permitted, then there is no excuse, no recourse for our actions but ourselves. If we are free, then we are responsible for what we do, and the world is what we make of it. “There is no love,” he says, “apart from the deeds of love.” This unyielding primacy of actual human action and ultimate personal responsibility leads Sartre to conclude that existentialists are not reproached for their pessimism, but for “the sterness of our optimism.”

As an explanation and a defense of a position, Existentialism is a Humanism is first-rate. It is a fine piece of rhetoric, and a brilliant popularization of very complex ideas. It is also fascinating because it shows that Sartre can be intelligible and persuasive when he chooses to be, and that his philosophy really was a coherent system which he really did illustrate in the works discussed above.

Of the books here reviewed, Letters to Sartre is the only one I wish I hadn’t read. It is a big, beastly book: over 500 pages of De Beauvoir’s letters to Sartre, mostly (and by mostly, I mean pp. 35-375) dated September 1939-March 1941. As part of the research for this review, I read a number of other reviews of De Beauvoir’s copious writings, searching for the best volume to consult. Time and again I came across a similar phrase: “if De Beauvoir had deep thoughts on X event or Y book, she must have left them for her letters to Sartre.” Since this phrase cropped up in reviews of her personal diaries, I considered myself safe in seeking out those very letters. Here, I thought, I shall get a sense of Sartre from the outside, through the eyes of a highly intelligent woman who knew him best.

I was wrong.

If these letters are any indication, Simone de Beauvoir was one of the most catty, petty, self-absorbed, pseudo-intellectual solipsists ever to rise to unfortunate public prominence. Her letters mainly convey her daily routine: she drinks a lot of coffee in cafés, reads books, writes in her diary, and sleeps with lots of young girls, mainly ex-students. Since the bulk of the letters start on the date which initiated that minor historical quibble known as World War Two, I naively thought that De Beauvoir would have some thoughts or reflections on this. She does not. In late November of 1939, she writes to Sartre and asks him to explain the origins of the war—not because she wants to know, but for the novel she’s working on. By mid-December, when Poland had been partitioned and occupied and Warsaw’s 400,000 Jews forced into a ghetto, De Beauvoir gets her several girlfriends to find out if their respective boyfriends think she’s pretty. Hitler invades France; Beauvoir writes that she has a terrible pimple on her cheek and is losing sleep over it. Does she have thoughts about the defeat and collapse of the Third Republic, the establishment of the Vichy collaborationist regime, the evacuation of the British from Dunkirk? No, but she does go to see The Gorilla, starring The Ritz Brothers and Bela Lugosi. She doesn’t even have thoughts about the books she’s reading: her first thought occurs on p. 238, while on a ski trip during Christmas 1939, when she has something to say about Heinrich Heine. She first mentions the war on p. 317, several letters after Sartre was in fact taken prisoner by the Third Reich. She never demonstrates the slightest concern for the conduct or progress of the war, or the loss of life there entailed. Instead, she is very interested in the color of her turbans, and the emotional state of her various girlfriends.

This is the point that’s caused a degree of controversy. As a review in The New Yorker put it, following the publication of this unedited volume:

“The revelation was not the promiscuity; it was the hypocrisy. In interviews, Beauvoir had flatly denied having had sexual relations with women; in the letters, she regularly described, for Sartre, her nights in bed with women. The most appalling discovery, for many readers, was what ‘telling each other everything’ really meant. The correspondence was filled with catty and disparaging remarks about the people Beauvoir and Sartre were either sleeping with or trying to sleep with, even though, when they were with those people, they radiated interest and affection. Sartre, in particular, was always speaking to women of his love and devotion, his inability to live without them—every banality of popular romance. Words constituted his principal means of seduction: his physical approaches were on the order of groping in restaurants and grabbing kisses in taxis. With the publication of Letters to Sartre, it was clear that, privately, he and Beauvoir held most of the people in their lives in varying degrees of contempt. They enjoyed, especially, recounting to each other the lies they were telling.”

It gets a bit worse:

“Sartre and Beauvoir liked to refer to their entourage as ‘the Family,’ and the recurring feature of their affairs is a kind of play incest. Their customary method was to adopt a very young woman as a protégée—to take her to movies and cafés, travel with her, help her with her education and career, support her financially. (Sartre wrote most of his plays in part to give women he was sleeping with something to do: they could be actresses.) For Sartre and Beauvoir, the feeling that they were, in effect, sleeping with their own children must, as with most taboos, have juiced up the erotic fun.”

So where does this leave us, at the end of 7000 words? I must first and foremost admit that I was wrong about Sartre in many ways, most egregiously in the realm of politics.

I had always thought Sartre a rather good playwright, and had no trouble accepting him as the model of the politically-engaged man of theatre. Having read his short stories, several of which I can still recall clearly despite the ten years and thousand books which have passed since then, I thought of him as a decent fiction writer. His three novels have led me to revise this judgment upwards. They are an impressive project, and though the realization is a bit hit-and-miss, it was certainly inevitable that any attempt to illustrate the concepts of Being and Nothingness in real world events would be a difficult task. Les Chemins de la liberté are an important piece of post-war writing, and central works of existentialist literature; The Reprieve is without doubt an excellent novel, and Iron in the Soul is half of an excellent novel. Sartre as a novelist has amply proven himself. What of the rest of his work?

It is possible to construct a sort of timeline of Sartre’s life and work, and my approach thereof. As illustrated in Les Mots, Sartre’s pre-war life was an intensely cloistered, self-referential, unworldly one. He seems never to have grasped the existence of a world outside of the rather fascinating and misshapen skull of Jean-Paul Sartre. This gave rise to some interesting theories often presented in miserable prose, and an existentialist outlook that coloured the rest of his intellectual development, but which rested on an uneasy tension between solipsism and action. Upon discovering the world (in the unfortunate guise of World War Two), Sartre’s life and work fell into four phases: political neutrality but engagement with general reality; then the shift to ardent Communism; the High Communist phase in which Sartre became a Marxist thinker in his own right; and finally the phase of Sartre-as-champion of the Third World. Or, following Edmund Wilson’s phraseology: Sartre Discovers the World Exists; Sartre Discovers Communism Exists; Sartre Discovers He Is a Communist; Sartre Discovers the Third World Exists. Taking into consideration the work produced in each period, it is difficult not to conclude that Later Sartre became a character in a book by Early Sartre: intelligent, but self-indulgent, once again unworldly.

One generality is clear: Sartre, for all his intellectual pyrotechnics and the increasingly absurd length of his ruminations, seems to have been a rather lazy thinker. I first had an inkling of this while reading his famously terrible preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. There Sartre not only fails to supply any critical or intellectual appraisal, or even to situate the book in a historical, social, or biographical context, but indeed commits a very basic high school-student error: he summarizes. Worse, he summarizes incorrectly. He spends almost fifty pages telling you what he thinks Fanon is about to tell you, but as you begin to actually read Fanon himself, it becomes painfully obvious that Sartre only read the first chapter, and that he read shallowly. I began to wonder what could explain this, and then began to notice a pattern in Sartre’s work. We can draw a straight line from the simplistic preface to the unwritten fourth volume of Les Chemins de la liberté, to the uncompleted second volume of the Critique, to the unfinished fourth volume of the Flaubert, to the abandoned notebooks on ethics, to the manuscript on Mallarmé which was apparently misplaced somewhere. This straight line is labeled “Lazy Thinker.” Why else dispense so consistently with scholarly rigor and the conventions of research and presentation? How else do we explain the increasingly self-indulgent rambling of the later works? Sartre’s enormous output may suggest a man of enormous energy and passions, but his apparent refusal to revise, to clarify, to think before he writes suggests a man allergic to the heavy lifting required by critical thinking. I should not want to have to write a book as long and complex as the Critique of Dialectical Reason, but I should greatly prefer having to write that book to having to write the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

But when Sartre is brief, controlled, and rigorous, he is very good indeed. Hence his lively political essays, and the superb Existentialism is a Humanism. This probably also explains his memorable short stories, and his quite effective plays. His writing when it was for an actual audience (indeed, his engaged writing) is brilliant, and always worth reading. It is the writing he apparently did for himself, by himself, with himself in mind, with himself as audience that is turgid, confused, and largely unreadable.

Sartre was certainly a genius of some kind. Few intellectuals have written so many critical works in so many fields of endeavor, or have grappled so seriously both with eternal problems of human experience and with the specific political and social problems of the twentieth century. He cannot reasonably be overlooked by any serious student of twentieth-century thought, and a brief sampling of his work is too confined to dismiss a thinker who contained worlds. I look forward to returning to perhaps a half-dozen of his books, though I finish this project pleased that I never met him, and certain that his longer and larger projects will always remain unread by me.

Guest Post: Re: The Moral "das Ding"

2010-03-31T02:23:00.000-07:00

Here it is in the rough;

The dichotomy seems to be between, in my estimation a false one, a priori notions or levels of productivity. A priori notions; which relate to concepts like the categorical imperative. Then questions of productivity (Social, economic, otherwise) relating to utilitarian or consequentialism, which still exist with abstractions filled in with a priori assumptions.

If we are to assume that the axiomatical understandings of moral structures exist under the pretext of economic productivity, for example, it is unhealthy for the economy of a civil society to create a general distrust amongst all the people by allowing murder to go unrecognized, this would undoubtedly cause a massive rupture in the fluidity of productive forces; no one is going to go to work and produce things if there exists a very real fear of getting killed the second they leave their home. But what if we turn this on its head? What if the threat of violence serves as the productive element of society? PRC serves as an example of this, if we are to assume a functioning and, for the most part, legitimate government structure is necessary to mediate the material relations between people; that a working economy cannot exist without a working government, can it not be stated that if we are to have at the foundation of any moral structure the issue of its productive and economic impacts, we then cannot condemn exploitation, state violence, corporate violence, corruption, etc. on moral grounds. The condemnation only exists within its speculative productive impacts, so were we to see that, in certain places, under certain regimes, where heavy exploitation brings in massive amounts of foreign capitol, we then are stripped of a moral argument against this practice because morality serves productivity.

It seems impossible to avoid filling in the spaces of abstraction without resorting to simplistic a priori estimations. A little something inside you that just tells you this is wrong or this is right. It is also seems impossible to avoid, without a God, to avoid postmodern speculations about how you define "good" and "bad". Hitchens I've noticed tends to fall into this trap, the only time when he debates theologians and his argument crumbles, when he makes a very categorical statement, "this behavior is evil!" to which the theologian then replies "Where do you draw your conclusion of what is evil and good without a God to lay out the very definitions for both?" Other than simply stating the source of it comes from a priori subjectivity, where do we have grounds to make such assumptions about the validity of moral statements (or indignations)? The Kantian notion of "duty" and the categorical imperative become the obvious and all too easy reply. Which, in my opinion, crumbles the instant someone recognizes that their categorical "duty" will undeniably lead to something destructive, that occasionally a space opens up where to lie seems completely morally justifiable. Thus, confusing the importance of which to attach ones moral compass to, "duty" or consequence, does morality lie in ones behavior and acts in accordance to duty or is it contingent on the outcome of amoral actions directed towards a moral outcome?

But similarly, consequentialism seems to require a level of immediacy. If the ends justify the means, and since there is no specific "duty" or categorical imperative which insures one is going to make the most utilitarian judgment, then it seems to me that the individual would then need a certain closeness to the outcome of the particularly morally driven behavior. A visible consequent of the action. Though, as the space expands; with the action driven by utilitarian speculation as the epicenter of this space, and the effects of this action go beyond the visible, unseen consequences of otherwise immoral behavior go unnoticed. Purchasing clothes that were made in sweatshops because you not purchasing it is not going to close the sweatshops anyways and it is economically smart on your part. The lack of a categorical imperative here rings loudly. If morality existed in action and not outcome, then duty dictates the behavior.

The trouble with the above is not the lack of understanding of morality, drawing from good ol' Witty here, but paradox in the human "understanding" or morality. It is a metaphysic, its understanding seems to be nothing more than a dialectic without a rational synthesis, its validity seems to lie in the capricious behavior of human beings. Part of it seems to me that Zizek's "materialist theology", while not satisfactory by any means, provides us enough space to say "genocide is wrong" "rape is wrong". We must engage with each other as if such a thing like morality actually did exist, while recognizing the subjectivity of it.

Beyond that, as unsatisfying and open-ended as all that was, my ideas of "morality" get stuck there, and I can't seem to push past it.

--Kyo

Guest Post: Hermit in Paris

2010-03-24T03:15:00.000-07:00

Hermit In Paris, by Italo Calvino

2003, 255 pp.

One need read only a few books by the great man to realize that while he may have been a hermit in Paris, Calvino is a giant in literature. Born on the 15 October 1923 in Santiago de Las Vegas, Cuba, two months after which his family moved back to their native Italy, we find our protagonist spending his first 25 years in San Remo, Italy, fighting along side the partisans against fascism, and finally moving to Turin to join the ranks of returning combatants seeking a university degree. His rushed thesis was on ‘the Opera Omnia of Joseph Conrad’. In twenty days in December of 1946 Calvino wrote his first novel The Path to the Spider’s Nest. A novel which his mentor and fellow author Cesar Pavese passed along to a publisher, and went on to sell 6,000 copies in post-war Italy, no small feat. If one was active in Politics in Italy in the 40’s and 50’s one had few options, on the one hand was fascism on the other was communism. Calvino gravitated toward communism, and broke with it in 1957 in light of the failure of Khrushchev to de-Stalinize the Soviet Union, the exit of one of the leading communists in the Italian party, and in the Soviet’s response to Hungary and Budapest (as well as the support for these actions by the PCI leadership).

The book itself is a collection of interviews, essays, and critical reflections upon the travels of the human through the mediums of life, literature, and politics. We follow Calvino as he fought the Nazi’s in one of the most important regions for the Germans the Maritime Alps, ‘a back route to the font lines’ where “Even in the final days of the war the Germans had reappeared by surprise and we had suffered mortalities.” He writes tellingly of war, “As long as our lives hung by a thread, it was pointless conjuring up even the notion that a new life was about to dawn, one without machine-gun fire, reprisal raids, the fear of being caught and tortured. And even afterwards when peace had come, rediscovering the habit of functioning in a different way would take time.”

In “American Diary 1959-1960” he describes his time in America in perhaps one of the greatest series of letters, here collected and presented with subtitled journal entries, and insightful accounts of the US. Calvino’s trip across country led him to conclude, rightly I might add as testified by my own car trip across country, “A few outings on the motorway are enough… you realize that 95 per cent of America is a country of ugliness, oppressiveness, and sameness, in short of relentless monotony.” He actually met Martin Luther King during his sojourn in Alabama. He was there on the 6th of March, 1960 and witnessed, “what racism is, mass racism, accepted as one of society’s fundamental rules.” This passage of a Calvino merits an extended quotation, Calvino writes of the day’s proceedings when racial tensions flared their ugly ways as black people simply were exiting a meeting at a Baptist church,

‘The most admirable ones are the black girls: they come down the road in twos or threes, and those thugs spit on the ground before their feet standing in the middle of the pavement and forcing the girls to zigzag past them, shouting abuse at them and making as though to trip them up, and the black girls continue to chat among themselves, never do they move in such a way as to suggest they want to avoid them, never do they alter their route when they see them blocking their path, as though they were used to these scenes right from birth.’

He speaks about Texas and the Texan mentality in incisive terms as well reminding us that they in fact went into WW2 a year before the rest of the country following along with a Canadian bomber squadron. He was present during Mardi Gras in Louisiana, and found a home in New York, the city that of all the cities he lived in Calvino immediately felt in possession of and at home in.

In one interview we find out that Calvino knew people who were particularly close to Gramsci, he met the Hungarian literary critic and Marxist Gyogry Lukác’s in the Summer of’56, and that he was a diligent communist who actually fought as one, worked as one in a publishing house, and believed in it with a youthful zeal. He faced the continuing failure of communism in praxis, and gradually grew less interested in Politics as an active participant. However, Calvino points out two things that are immediately relevant to our understanding of what this means. “One is the passion for a global culture, and the rejection of the lack of content caused through excessive specialization: I want to keep alive an image of culture as a unified whole, which is composed of every aspect of what we know and do, and in which the various discourses of every area of research and production become part of that general discourse which is the history of humanity, which we must manage to seize and develop ultimately in a human direction. (And literature should of course be in the middle of these different languages and keep alive the communication between them.” And “My other passion is for a political struggle and a culture (and literature) which will be the education of a new ruling class … if class means only that which has class consciousness, as in Marx. I have always worked and continue to work with this in mind: seeing the new ruling class taking shape, and contributing to give it a shape and profile.” Thankfully, as a result of this combination of factors he did not leave us with a scant amount of literature. If I quote in length it is because the erudition of Calvino is such that I do not want to cheapen it by paraphrasing his lifetime of deep thinking and articulations.

I could go on quoting and write about what to me is largely the pivot point of the book, his Hermitude in Paris, how his living in different cities as a writer contributed to the concept of Invisible Cities, but I’d prefer to simply say read the damn book. One is never cheapened by reading Italo Calvino, he wrote each book in a different way and he can only enhance one’s understanding of the world by showing us the multitudinous forms of his narrators, his imagination, his fantasy, and his exploration of what literature can and should be. He writes this advice, “First of all live, and then philosophize and write. Writers above all should live with an attitude towards the world which effects a greater acquisition of truth.” And he reminds us, “What counts is what we are, and the way we deepen our relationship with the world and with others, a relationship that can be one of both love for all that exists and of desire for its transformation.”

To the Finland Station

2010-03-17T05:53:00.000-07:00

To the Finland Station, by Edmund Wilson
1940, 509 pp.

When life has become particularly difficult, when you flounder amid indecision and uncertainty, when you feel you have lost your way, you can do no better than to read a good book about communists. We, all of us, move through life assailed by information, much of it contradictory or irrelevant or fraudulent, with no governing principle for its assimilation and evaluation, and marooned in our solitude as the communicability of experience diminishes. How, then, are we to organize our experience of the world, especially in a manner effective enough to allow us to take meaningful action in it? A long and healthy dose of Marx, with his unparalleled ability to marshal and organize vast amounts of information into an argument which is both cogent and forceful, will immediately set you aright, and make whatever difficult tasks lie ahead appear to be small, simple things. All that had appeared solid will melt into air, and the way ahead will be revealed. Only ask yourself: What Would Marx Do?

I have therefore arrived at To the Finland Station after a long Marxist bath which began with the hundred-page introduction to Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, then proceeded through a volume of Hobsbawm and a short piece by Tony Cliff. My appraisal might be affected by this prolonged exposure, but I found this book to be extremely enjoyable. Wilson, a gifted literary critic and close friend of Vladimir Nabokov, is a splendid writer. His Axel’s Castle is an intelligent, accessible approach to most of the important artists of the Modernist period, and is a good place to start for an accurate, logical description of what exactly happens in Ulysses. Here he is a sort of curious sidekick to Leszek Kolakowski. To the Finland Station mirrors much of Kolakowski’s monumental Main Currents of Marxism quite closely: there are the various pre-Marx socialists, then Marx himself as the centerpiece, then Lenin and Trotsky emerge in the third act. But in many ways Wilson is the exact opposite, and perhaps perfect companion piece. Kolakowski is an intellectual and scholarly juggernaut, an immense whirling combine of knowledge and analysis, with sentences like mechanical threshers, shredding all that stands before him. He knows everything that has ever happened or ever will happen, and has compressed it all into his work. He is the Alpha and the Omega, and he can flatten the life’s work of a poseur like Althusser in one withering sentence. His work is less a book and more like an entymologist’s catalogue, with innumerable obscure Marxists preserved, impaled, in careful boxes. Wilson, on the other hand, has no scholarly apparatus. There are no footnotes, no bibliography. Naturally, I found this a bit annoying. Much of his material is biographical and conversational, to the point where he seems often to be writing a novel. The book is easy and quick to read because of this: I may read Kolakowski before bed, but I bet you don’t. This is much more manageable.
In fact, if I am ever absurd enough to have a child, it is highly likely that this will indeed be her bedtime reading: “Now, next door to the Marxes in Trier there lived a family named von Westphalen…”

Like Kolakowski, though, the stuff before Marx turns up is often desperate. The book opens well, with an enthralling account of Michelet, the great (and often utterly forgotten) French historian, who was the first (and in many senses the only) writer to use the actual documents and archives to write a multi-volume history of the French Revolution. Within two chapters Wilson had me on Amazon, pricing full sets. The chapter on Gracchus Babeuf is excellent, and a more efficient introduction to that essential character than Robert Rose’s full-length biography.

The chapter headings are a good summary of Wilson's approach: Karl Marx Decides to Change the World, Marx and Engels Take a Hand at Making History, Marx and Engels Go Back to Writing History, Trotsky Identifies History With Himself, Lenin Identifies Himself With History.

Wilson’s avuncular conversationalism does have its drawbacks. Particularly when describing the misery of Marx’s life in London, Wilson’s sense of humor works against him. He seems to be laughing at Marx and his three dead children, adopting a position of superiority which is hardly warranted. That said, the chapters on Marx are mostly very good, and though they are lighter on detail than David McClellan’s excellent biography, they are quicker, smoother, and probably better written. Anyone interested in the great man’s life, but pressed for time and without access to a university library could do no better than to seek out To the Finland Station and read pp. 112-345. Wilson has clearly read Marx widely and deeply, even to the extent of translating some of Marx and Engels’ odd polyglot correspondence and sending copies of Marx’s mathematical manuscripts to a distinguished professor for commentary. He is great fun and displays contagious enthusiasm when he talks about the good bits of Marx’s work, and has a sharp eye for the problems which are now so familiar.

In particular, he has an entire chapter called “The Myth of the Dialectic,” which, while he annoyingly fails to trace the origin of the thesis-antithesis-synthesis vulgarism to Fichte rather than Hegel, does make an important point. Hegel was an idealist and a mystic, and the concepts of the dialectic and the Absolute Idea are holdovers from the great age of German mysticism. Marx never was able to get away from metaphysics, and they are often his undoing. His love for abstraction and grounding in classical German philosophy led him down dark alleys which he plunged into so heedlessly that he never found his way back out. Hence we have the inescapable problem of the Labour Theory of Value, which in Volume III of Das Kapital turns out to be separate from actual prices and demand functions and turns out to have been mysticism all along. This may explain why the best of Marx’s work are the most materialist, the most immediate responses to actual political events rather than the products of long years of abstract rumination.

Wilson is also sharp on Marx’s other weaknesses: his enormous hatreds, his domineering nature, the misery he inflicted on his family, his tendency to factionalism. All manner of contradictions are revealed: Marx’s ambivalence towards science while espousing scientific socialism, his inability to reconcile his great hatred of capitalism with his sober economic analysis of its necessity. And so on. Wilson’s Marx is a fascinating character memorably presented, but an altogether smaller figure than you expect. His Engels, however, emerges as quite a sympathetic character. There is none of the rage of some Marxists who accuse Engels of simplifying and distorting the subtle gradations of Marx’s thought into the sort of vulgarity which has been used to justify violence and repression. Wilson’s picture of Engels is of a loyal, amiable guy who likes to have a good time and when he is away from Marx’s drive and cynicism, likes to go horseback riding and eat grapes. Weighed against this sympathetic portrayal of Engels, Wilson’s Marx seems all the more limited. There is a touching passage about their only real falling-out, occasioned by the sudden death of Engels’ lover Mary Burns. Marx started out to write a sympathetic letter, but didn’t quite know how, so he ended up complaining for several pages about his own life. Engels, understandably, replied coldly. Marx tried to apologize, and apparently cast about for something to cheer Engels up. He seems to have concluded that the best thing would be to get Engels talking about something he knows well but that Marx doesn’t, apparently on the grounds that what Marx himself enjoys is expounding at length on topics that others are ignorant of. So Marx writes to Engels about factory machinery, and only succeeds in alienating Engels more. Two more of Marx’s letters go unanswered, and we begin to see just how much Marx needs his friend and how limited he was in the world of personal relations. Marx’s daughter later wrote of how her father would get immensely excited when Engels was coming to visit London, but be all to business when Engels actually arrived. These letters are an angle on Marx we don’t often see: the lonely exile, the great intellectual whose passionate hatred and pedantic insistence on subtle distinctions drove away all his comrades, the old man afraid that he has driven away his only friend. Here, and later during his account of the death of Marx’s wife, Wilson is quite moving.

Instead it is Lenin who is the hero of To the Finland Station. Wilson has quite a glowing assessment of Lenin, who he sees as above petty politics, as a charming, charismatic statesman of the future. Most of the violence of the Revolution and the Red Terror Wilson ascribes to Trotsky, who he sees as a bit of an egotist, a dilettante, and a man prone to violence and cruelty. Wilson later recanted a bit and published as Appendix E to a later edition of To the Finland Station a correction in which he acknowledged that virtually all of the institutions of Stalin’s repression were set up by Lenin himself. But for the main narrative, Lenin seems almost a messiah, and Wilson faithfully reports all of the best stories from Trotsky’s biography of Lenin, but leaves out the carping, contemptuous tone of Lenin’s polemics and the gleeful cruelty of Lenin’s telegrams.

Wilson, of course, has his problems. While he is an effective and engaging popularizer of history and ideas, he is less convincing when he expresses his own ideas. He is given to some unconvincing psychologizing, and he has some peculiar ideas about Jews. The book suffers from the absence of the 1844 manuscripts, but it is not Wilson’s fault he could not have access to them during his writing. We probably could have done with less of Fourier and Owen and a bit more of Kautsky, Luxemburg, and Plekhanov. If read as an interesting, thoughtful, and enthusiastic account of a great and fascinating drama, the book is a rousing success, it just must not be taken as a critical, scholarly opus, or as the last word on any point of controversy.

Black & Blue

2010-01-30T13:29:00.000-08:00

Black & Blue, by Ian Rankin
1996, 498 pp.

Although “tartan noir” is a genuine, codified genre in its own right, this book may perhaps be best categorized along with The Wire in a sort of “post-industrial sociological realist” vein of crime fiction. Since I still consider The Wire to be the finest work of fiction so far this century in any medium, this is high praise by association, and well warranted. Both David Simon’s work and Ian Rankin’s novels explore the violent intersection of individuals and institutions in the wake of rapid capitalist transformation of older societies. This interaction is mediated by various forces: the geography of a modern city, the effects of immigration and racial stratification in an urban setting, the role of controlled substances in mediated experience. It is something wholly apart from the existential themes of the classical noir, and something more prescient and clear-eyed than standard social criticism. I love this kind of stuff.

Ian Rankin boasts an enormous ouevre, startlingly varied an expansive for a relatively young man. I selected Black & Blue at random, but it appears to have been a serendipitous choice. My copy comes with a 10-year retrospective introduction by the author which helpfully explained that this, the 8th of currently 17 novels featuring Detective Inspector John Rebus, of the Edinburgh police, is a transitional and transformative book in the series. Evidently it was with this book that Rankin decided to branch out from pure police procedural into a wider interrogation of post-industrial society. Black & Blue won a number of awards and inspired a book-long critique of its themes.

The story is enormous convoluted. There are three general strands: the first has to do with the real-life “Bible John” murders, which took place in Scotland in the late 1960s. Rankin posits a follow-up copycat called “Johnny Bible” and introduces Bible John as a character, hunting the killer who has usurped his notoriety. So there’s a serial killer and a real-life serial killer hunting him. Very good. The second strand involves the mysterious death of an oil platform worker and expands out to include a crime family from Glasgow, a drug operation in Aberdeen, corruption of oil interests in the North Sea, and crooked cops. The third strand has to do with a former partner of Rebus’ who recently committed suicide, and who may or may not have framed a suspect named Spaven many years ago as part of the original Bible John case. Spaven became famous in jail and eventually killed himself, protesting his innocence all along. The young Rebus was involved in the cover-up to the possible framing and is now the target of an internal affairs probe and a television crime show. Needless to say, about 500 pages later all of these things turn out to be connected, and it is to Rankin’s credit that once all the pieces are in place, the whole plot does indeed make sense.

Rebus is a solid protagonist. He’s as maverick-y and tenacious as all fictional detectives are required to be, and is frequently persecuted by the police, which happily allows the reader to identify with him as an individual being persecuted by a giant, soulless, powerful institution. This is absolutely necessary in detective fiction. If the protagonist is going to be a cop instead of a private eye, he must be distanced from the police department, lest the reader realize that as a police detective, our hero is an appendage of a giant, powerful, soulless institution which exists to persecute individuals just like the reader. Anyway, Rebus has solid loner, maverick cop credentials. He also has an impressive drinking problem (at one point he has three Laphroaigs at a pub at 6 AM before going to work) and a dark past and a divorce and an estranged daughter. He carries the book well, with lots of stubbornness and wry quips.

As much as I enjoyed the novel and would recommend it and am looking forward to reading the other 16 Rebus books, it is not without problems. There are two major ones: the way Rebus quits drinking about halfway through, and the way the plot is resolved.

The first suffers from comparisons. One of my favorite detective series is by Lawrence Block, about an alcoholic New York detective named Matt Scudder. In that series as well, the middle book is pivotal and signals and expansion of scope into wider societal themes. It is also the point where Scudder quits drinking, but that process accounts for possibly half the book. Scudder manages to string together one or two sober days, sometimes almost a week, but is constantly aware of the struggle and constantly rationalizing himself into having another drink. The torment of the addiction is executed brilliantly, and indeed sticks in the reader’s mind long after the plot has dissipated. Further, I’ve now read several hundred pages of Infinite Jest, which is greatly concerned with addiction and features many very long monologues about AA meetings and the sensations of addiction. This is serious business, but Rebus quits almost casually. I found it simply impossible to believe that a bitter, lonely 55-year-old detective who has three single malts before work could give it up so quickly, particularly concerning the central role that pubs and whiskey play in the lives of people who are unfortunate enough to live on this stupid, rainy island. I just didn’t buy it, and it undermined the emotional gravitas of the Rebus character.

The second problem might have something to do with an American/Scottish cross-cultural difference. American detective novels end with cathartic gun battles. The last one I read featured an entire subplot which existed solely to provide a reason for a cathartic gun battle at the end. But while it is easy to believe that heavily armed, trigger-happy American cops do indeed have extensive gunfights with double-digit body counts, police officers in the UK don’t carry guns. There is one gun in all 500 pages of Black & Blue, and it’s used to hit somebody. The Bible John/Johnny Bible plot gets resolved offstage, the really sinister sadist gangster villain gets arrested by somebody else, and people who you want to go to jail do so. But the book ends less with a bang than a whisper, and frankly, despite enjoying the book very much, it left me a bit unfulfilled. It also left me curious to read other installments in the series, to see if either the drinking becomes more of an emotional arc, or if all the books end on a quiet minor key.

Little Dorrit

2010-01-29T11:22:00.000-08:00

Little Dorrit, by Charles Dickens
1857, 820 pp.

I have avoided Charles Dickens for almost a quarter-century. I have never experienced any of his works, with the exception of A Christmas Carol, which I consider to be a tragedy in the genre of Czesław Miłosz’s The Captive Mind: the stages by which an independent will gives way to external compulsion and coercion. I have never seen any of the various films or stage plays based on his books, nor have I ever read any of his many novels, whether in school or otherwise. Until now.

And, startlingly, I really enjoyed it. An 800-page book carries quite a burden of proof, to justify the investment of the reader’s time and attention, and to pay for the opportunity cost of not reading perhaps five other, shorter, books. Dickens manages this here, with dexterity and aplomb. It really is quite a good novel, and the prospect of reading more Dickens no longer fills me with howling dread. I am still leery of his plucky-young-boy novels, but look forward with pleasure to the day I have time to settle down to Our Mutual Friend, Hard Times, Edwin Drood, and Bleak House.

George Bernard Shaw once wrote that Little Dorrit is a more subversive book than Das Kapital. I would argue that he drew a needless distinction: Little Dorrit effectively IS Das Kapital, but with more jokes and better characters. The plot concerns William Dorrit, a goodhearted if overly dignified man who winds up in the Marshalsea debtors prison for so long that he becomes known as “the Father of the Marshalsea.” His youngest daughter, the upright, long-suffering, completely pure Little Dorrit was born in the Marshalsea, and has lived her whole life there, taking care of her father and her wayward siblings. Then there is Arthur Clennam, our hero, recently returned from China, attempting to make his way and start a business in seedy, rainy London. Lurking constantly in the background is the sinister Blandois, a blackguard and murderer with a suspicious moustache and diabolical plans. The plot is hugely elaborate, and studded with subplots and counter-plots too numerous to delve into here. Suffice it to say that the Dorrit family is raised high and then brought low again, as in a similar way is Arthur Clennam. There’s long voyages and illnesses, and in the end everything turns out fairly happily.

The characters are what drive this whole clattering, ramshackle, Rube-Goldberg-device of a plot, and quite memorable characters they are indeed. But really the book hinges on two utterly sublime creations: Mr. Merdle and the Circumlocution Office. Merdle is a captain of industry, a powerful player, a legend of capitalism and financial ingenuity. He has lavish parties at his exquisite mansion, attended by adoring luminaries referred to only by their professions: Law, Bishop, Physician, etc. Also in attendance are members of the omnipresent Barnacle family, who run the vast, impenetrable bureaucracy of the Circumlocution Office. The chapter which introduces the Office and the Barnacles is an exhilarating, hilarious bit of writing which justifies the purchase and time investment of the book all by itself. The purpose of the Office is to ensure that nothing at all gets done, and to that end it employs enormous numbers of people filling out innumerable forms, all of which contradict one another, all of them obstructing any progress anyone anywhere attempts to make in anything. There are whole bodies of self-proclaimed "socialist" thought which display less class consciousness and a weaker grasp of actually-existing political economy.

You can also have my word that the Circumlocution Office is alive and well in London today.

Eventually, after many hundreds of pages of the plot thickening, it finally curdles when it turns out that Mr. Merdle is in fact an 1857 rendition of Bernard Madoff, down virtually to the last detail. I almost howled with delight on the Tube. The passages illustrating the collapse of London finance when his Ponzi scheme comes to light are wonderful, as Dickens spins out an extended metaphor which is equal part Lehman Brothers and Battle of the Nile:

“The Inquest was over, the letter was public, the Bank was broken, the other model structures of straw had taken fire and turned to smoke. The admired piratical ship had blown up, in the midst of a vast fleet of ships of all rates, and boats of all sizes; and on the deep was nothing but ruin; nothing but burning hulls, bursting magazines, great guns self-exploded tearing friends and neighbors to pieces, drowning men clinging to unseaworthy spars and going down every minute, spent swimmers floating dead, and sharks.”

The withering, all-encompassing contempt Dickens pours upon the wealthy and the powerful is truly one of the most entertaining, gratifying, and inspiring spectacles in all of literature. I wish I had read this book as a small boy so that, when called upon in class to say what I wanted to be when I grew up, I could reply: “One day I want to ridicule someone as well as Charles Dickens ridiculed the bourgeoisie.” His scorn takes in Parliament, the bureaucracy, Big Business, finance, the establishment of various professions, and self-aggrandizing philanthropists. His invective is never less than elegant and convoluted, and there were large passages I was tempted to memorize so that I could spit them at the drones of Finance I see on the Underground every morning. The so-called "populist rage" which greeted the events of 2007 was the petulant fist-waving of a child compared to Dickens' hilarious outpouring of ridicule. Granted, one is never far from the knowledge that Dickens was paid by the word, but he is such a virtuoso at spinning out metaphors and sentences longer than any reasonable human could be expected to sustain such verbal ingenuity that he is a delight to read. Yes, a suspicious number of his characters have wordy verbal mannerisms, and yes, he does present conversations which circle and circle longer than necessary. But this gives us both a sense of the characters and of actual-existing life. It adds to the sense of the novel being a world which you wrap yourself up in and get pleasantly lost. And it prefigures some important literary developments, since the run-on ramblings of Flora Finchley effectively prefigure Molly Bloom's monologue. It also speaks less to Dickens’ financial needs and more to his great energy, and as far as I’m concerned, its his energy and his verbal dexterity which pull the whole enterprise off. He really is the sort of writer who could make the back of a cereal box entertaining, and I must report that I thoroughly enjoyed all 820 pages.

Avanti II: Night of the Living Avanti

2010-01-29T11:13:00.000-08:00

I began the Avanti Book Review a year ago with the stated intention of reviewing every book I read. This I did without fail for 10 months, with the one exception of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, for which I wrote a compelling 2500-word review which was promptly lost in a power outage. I reviewed 74 books, totalling 23,737 pages. Then in late October I stopped. I stopped not because the workload of getting a master’s degree was too much, but because undertaking a degree at the London School of Economics is the opposite of thinking. My mind had grown fat and disgusting, and I was ceasing to have interesting things to say about the books I was reading. I was also finding that I read too many books which elicited too little response: I neither loved them nor hated them, and while reading them may have enhanced my cultural and intellectual capital, they left my life no richer. The first book I read and did not review was G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday. When I finished it, I took a long walk to mentally compose the review, as is my habit. Despite walking for some time, I found I could only generate a paragraph, and that bland at best. Following that was The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford, sometimes considered a fine bit of modernism. I discovered I lacked the energy to sift through its levels of irony and unreliable narration. I found most of my reactions to the books I was reading could be expressed with a shrug. What did I think of John Banville’s Booker Prize-winning novel The Sea? I thought it was predictable. What about Witold Gombrowicz’s long-suppressed modernist fable Ferdydurke? I didn’t get it. If you want greater detail, you are welcome to ask me sometime, over a dram of single malt. The point is that I sort of lost interest.

Since then I have read 38 books: 23 fiction and 15 nonfiction. I have also read approximately 85 scholarly journal articles, which average 25 pages each, which is an additional 2500-odd pages of dense nonfiction that should be taken into consideration. For my dissertation I have read large pieces, running into many hundreds of pages, of a further 19 books, but since I did not read them cover-to-cover, I leave them off my official tally. At the time of this writing, I am 900 pages into Ulysses, about 500 into Infinite Jest, and am reading a handful of other books besides. So there’s been a lot of reading going on à chez moi. I estimate I’ve processed well over 12,000 pages since the last review. Since the previous year’s reviewing covered 74 books, to catch you guys up would entail about half a year’s work, and let’s face it, that time would be better spent reading.

But! I have nevertheless revived the moribund corpse of the Avanti Book Review. I do this mainly for the pleasure of reading, and I do it not with the purpose of reviewing every book I read, but instead the ones I want to review. Mainly these will be positive reviews, of books I am enthusiastic about but which I think for some reason you are unlikely to read. Perhaps they are too long. Perhaps the genre is too obscure. Perhaps they are unfairly neglected or utterly unknown. Therefore these reviews should probably be taken less in the sense of a reasoned critical opinion, but instead in the sense of a friend urging you to check out this good book.

Those aficionados of my invective-studded evisceration of some books should not lose heart. I will continue to angrily review books which either a) I expect to like and then don’t, or b) are so pungent with scrofulous moral decrepitude that I feel it an intellectual duty to demolish them. Instead of two or three reviews a week, there will probably be more like three or four a month. I shall write not as a theorist but as a connoisseur. I hope that these new reviews may cause in some reader a few moments of happy contemplation.

The Crying of Lot 49

2009-10-15T15:37:00.000-07:00

The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon
1965, 152 pp.

When most people speak of “postmodernism” in literature, they are really speaking of Thomas Pynchon, and when most people speak of Thomas Pynchon, they are speaking of two books: Gravity’s Rainbow and The Crying of Lot 49. Intrepid readers seeking an entry point into that arch and disreputable genre can select no better exordium. Gravity’s Rainbow is considered a titan of the genre, while The Crying of Lot 49 contains all of its essential preoccupations, in a much more manageable package.

Therefore we have funny names (the heroine is called Oedipa Maas), a preoccupation with psychoanalysis (her therapist is named Dr. Hilarius), an irreverent combination of absurdist humor and real pathos, and acute paranoia. The story begins when Oedipa finds that she is the executor of the estate of her recently deceased ex-boyfriend Pierce Inverarity. Inverarity was an eccentric tycoon who seems to own a piece of everything. Oedipa begins to find traces of a shadowy organization called “Trystero,” which turns out to have been a nefarious shadow postal service in Renaissance Europe, then migrated to the United States, where it serves as an underground through which all other undergrounds communicate. Its emblem is a postal horn with a plug in it, and she begins to see this sign everywhere. Every lead she follows brings her back to another entity owned by Pierce Inverarity. Everywhere she goes she sees the muted horn. Has she stumbled onto a giant conspiracy, or is this an elaborate game set up by Inverarity?

The book starts with comedy and farce. There is a long sequence in which Oedipa is being seduced by her co-executor, so she puts on lots of extra clothes, but knocks over a hairspray bottle which flies around the room smashing things. One of the first members of an underground who she encounters is a parody of a right-wing fringe outfit, based around the cult of the captain of the Confederate ironclad “Disgruntled,” led by somebody called "Mike Fallopian." The opening is the weakest part of the book, since the comedy leaves enough room for the reader to begin wondering what the point is. Why call your protagonist “Oedipa”? Clearly it’s to conjure an association with a certain ill-fated Theban, but since her parents are never mentioned, is it the riddle-solving aspect rather than the more known parricide that we should focus on? What about the other silly names, like “Genghis Cohen”? Why am I reading these long, silly digressions about a movie one of the characters starred in as a child?

Then about two-thirds of the way in, Pynchon changes gears. In a riveting, tour-de-force passage of some twenty pages, he sends Oedipa on a Dantean nighttime journey through San Francisco, encountering desperate people and the Trystero symbol everywhere she turns. The prose here is lush and heavy, with a long, bitter nose and earthy undertones. It’s relentless, clever, brilliantly realized. It’s like a particularly paranoid Tom Waits song. It also marks the point when the novel turns serious.

The final third consists of nothing but loss. Oedipa loses everyone in her life, and indeed perhaps even her sense of self, since she is left with nothing of her original life to hold onto: “That night’s profusion of post horns, this malignant, deliberate replication, was their way of being up. They knew her pressure points, and the ganglia of her optimism, and one by one, pinch by precision pinch, they were immobilizing her.” The book is worth the read simply for the central bridge section, which is a relief, because the book does not resolve itself, it only ends. To some extent this is a manifestation of the wise old rule about how it is always more effective not to actually show the monster, but to leave it to the reader (or viewer) to imagine. Not resolving the reality or fabrication of the Trystero network is probably wise, and works to make the book unsettling instead of just entertaining. With such a short book, the reader invests fairly little time and effort, so the burden of proof is fairly low, but still it was a gamble which Pynchon only pulls off thanks to his virtuoso middle section and the intriguing possibilities it raises.

The impact of this book is quite easy to trace. I was constantly struck by just how similar David Foster Wallace’s book The Broom of the System is to The Crying of Lot 49. Both share numerous aesthetic and structural points, and though Wallace is articulating a rather less paranoid and hostile worldview, it is still a worldview preoccupied with anxiety and persecution. Wallace was a great talent and an original voice, but it is striking to see just how Pynchonian he was.

At any rate, The Crying of Lot 49 is accessible, which much postmodern fiction is not, and holds the reader’s attention, which most modern fiction in general does not. It is at times brilliant, though not consistently, but shows enough skill and virtuosity that it makes the prospect of tackling the beast of Gravity’s Rainbow a bit less daunting.

The Universal Baseball Association

2009-10-09T13:52:00.000-07:00

The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., by Robert Coover
1968, 174 pp.

This strange and rather endearing little book is rather like a musty capsule sent up from those disreputable realms once referred to disparagingly by Gore Vidal as the “research and development” division of fiction writing. It comes from a different time, when meta-fiction was still a new world to be explored, before the arch irony of the self-appointed post-modernists drowned all sense of wonder and empathy in exploratory fiction. Coover was one of the first great meta-fictionists during the high 1960’s when it was still possible to speak of a serious American literary avant-garde. His most famous book is probably The Public Burning, which approaches the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg from a perspective somewhat akin to magical realism. (Incidentally, this seems to be an oddly resonant confluence of interests: E.L. Doctorow’s acclaimed 1971 novel The Book of Daniel deals with the same case in a metafictional sort of way.) The Universal Baseball Association is brief, elliptical, and allegorical. It is full of baseball, full of middle aged failure and loneliness, and is also about God and creation, good and evil.

The story is about a sad, lonely, 56-year old accountant named J. Henry Waugh, who loves games. He has designed himself a baseball game he plays with dice, which has been so elaborately thought out that it simulates all of the possibilities and probabilities of real baseball. He has created teams, players, histories, relationships, sexual tendencies, bars, songs, politics, commentary. He has charts governing all manner of possible outcomes, and in his mind the characters live and breathe and play baseball. This reveals itself gradually: the book seems to open with Henry watching a game. Or perhaps he is at one. Only slowly do we realize that it and everything he sees and hears at it is in his imagination.

Like Henry, the Association is past its prime. The Golden Age is over, and since Henry can play through a year in about six weeks, whole dynasties have risen and fallen and new generations of players emerged. But he is losing interest, until a brilliant young pitcher appears on the scene, throwing the exhilarating perfect game which opens the book. Henry pours all of his hopes into the boy and counts on him to revive the Association and the sole source of interest in Henry’s life. But then the dice turn against him: triple ones twice in a row send him to the “Chart of Extraordinary Occurrences,” and another set of triple ones kills the young hope, struck in the head by a wild pitch. The dice are relentless, and the game turns into a miserable defeat on top of the tragic death. There seems to be no justice in the Association, no sense of good triumphing over evil. Henry is devastated and his life starts to come apart. For long stretches of the book Henry disappears entirely and his imaginary characters take center stage, themselves coming apart under strain. Finally Henry stacks the dice and kills the player who threw the fatal ball, trying to regain balance in the Association.

The reader’s ability to parse what is going on is directly proportional to the amount of time it takes to realize that the name “J. Henry Waugh” is very easily condensed to read “JHWH.” Henry is none other than the Creator himself, and his pure Son dies a premature death at the hands of cruel fate and its evil avatars, who are unfortunately also of Henry’s own creation. The story of The Universal Baseball Association is the progression from a deistic to a theistic God: in case the reader is unclear, the final chapter takes place a hundred “years” in the future, when the Association has resolved into religious sects with rituals and blood feuds.

Quite a lot of the book consists of baseball games and baseball jargon. To some extent, it is probably possible to enjoy without some underlying enjoyment of baseball. Henry is a compelling enough character: sad and pointless in a stultified Middle-American way. His imaginary players are colorful and often entertaining. The writing is good without being flashy. When Coover writes, for instance, that Henry “cried for a long bad time,” the reader must reflect that “long bad time” has no linguistic finesse, but is a perfect phrase nonetheless. The hallucinogenic shifts between Henry’s reality and imagination are not slippery and deceptive in the manner of some more manipulative meta-fictions. One can easily picture them using different aspect ratios, different film stocks. After the initial uncertainty, it is always clear what is going on, which allows the reader more space to think and feel about it. It is a frequently sad book, but a clever one, and Coover’s idea of telling life through baseball is a satisfying conceit. Recommended, but only so long as the reader does not mind a great deal of baseball.

Growth Triumphant

2009-10-03T05:51:00.000-07:00

Growth Triumphant, by Richard A. Easterlin
1998, 200 pp.

This compact, efficient little book is a surprisingly satisfying foray into the melee of economic growth literature. It takes as its task the explanation of what it argues are the two major developments in the modern world: rapid and sustained economic growth and enormous population growth. Both of those topics have provoked an enormous and tedious amount of literature, and arguments as to their causes are so numerous that a small army of scholars is fed simply to generate new ones. Easterlin does something audacious, though: he argues that both have the same cause, progress in roughly the same way, and are leading towards the same result. The cause is technological change, and in his view it determines mostly everything else.

Considering the simplicity of that explanation, he makes a remarkably persuasive case. He argues that since the technological changes of the Industrial Revolution created large, expensive, complicated methods of production, they were not feasible to buy and use in a home, farm or workshop. This necessitated institutions like corporations to raise capital to invest in these new technologies, centralization of production to take advantage of the economies of scale generated by large production facilities, which in turn created more administration (leading to white-collar jobs) and urbanization. Urbanization promoted agglomeration industries (services catering to large populations) and a demand for municipal government services. Better technology reduced transport costs, which promoted trade. It increased income, which increase demand for products, which generates more growth. Better technology requires better education, which is why education is necessary to development. In his argument, virtually all the usual explanations for growth are just consequences of technological change and scientific methodology.

He takes the argument further, to state that the population explosion is the result of technologies and scientific developments which reduced mortality. This created an over-supply of children relative to demand, which eventually falls off as incomes rise and the cost of regulating fertility falls. So after an initial, transitory increase in population, fertility drops off and populations stabilize. Easterlin argues that both this demographic transition and the process of growth are happening faster now than they did in the past, so he predicts a future of permanent, general growth, constantly rising aspirations, and disappearing cultural differences in a “constant race to achieve the good life of material plenty.” His analysis of technological change in industrialization and public health is interesting, upbeat, and engaging. He mentions a lot of intriguing, logical conclusions which follow from discarding the ideas he finds quantitatively inadequate, and consequently the book is an enjoyable and fairly quick read. It is also much less depressing than most books on economic development, which revolve around either European exploitation, hopeless poverty traps, or Malthusian catastrophe. Easterlin makes the whole process sound quite hopeful and encouraging.

To reach this conclusion, he deals with each issue separately, in a very careful, measured, precise, unemotional way. He presents both sides of a given argument, then some quantitative evidence, and sees what the evidence suggests. Quite often this is persuasive, as when he proves fairly conclusively that neither population growth nor population decline is correlated with economic growth. Other times he is less persuasive, as when he has to set up elaborate proxy variables for some difficult-to-quantify variable he wants to test. He also dispenses with whole arguments based on one or two quantitative studies, without discussing just how difficult it is to get reliable data, or the statistical significance of his correlations. Fairly large swathes of the first half of the book seem to be extended arguments with Paul Krugman, who largely invented the modern theories of economic geography, economies of scale, and North-North trade, but Krugman gets only one mention in the whole book, and that’s a rather disparaging remark on a minor article in Foreign Affairs. He also doesn’t spend much time explaining how and why that mighty technological change took place in northern England in the 1750’s, as opposed to earlier or later or in a different place. Obviously there had to be institutions in place to create and spread such technological change, which he acknowledges, but doesn’t spend much time analyzing. Growth Triumphant is also a fairly short book: only 154 pages of actual text, and that is frequently broken up by large charts and graphs. That being the case, Easterlin really could have been more thorough. He is persuasive when he uses quantitative data to dispense with faulty arguments, but less so at proving his own. The burden of proof for such a monocausal explanation is quite high.

Interestingly, the book seems to wind up on a very upbeat note: growth and rising aspirations for everyone forever! But then Easterlin pulls the rug out from under the reader with a genuinely chilling final sentence, like the last shot a film with a twist ending that makes you rethink everything that’s gone before: “In the end, the triumph of economic growth is not a triumph of humanity over material wants; rather, it is the triumph of material wants over humanity.” Yes, he suggests, the future is constant growth, but there is no choice, no room for human agency. Growth Triumphant indeed!

Babel-17

2009-10-03T05:47:00.000-07:00

Babel-17, by Samuel R. Delany
1966, 219 pp.

Samuel R. Delany might accurately be thought of as the James Joyce of science fiction. His work is intellectual, difficult, conceptual, avant-garde. It begins with acclaimed, cerebral renditions of existing literary forms and progresses to Dhalgren, an immense, impenetrable work of high modernism. Babel-17 won Delany prominence and a Nebula award and is now justly a classic of the genre.

The book is a sort of science-fiction-according-to-Ludwig-Wittgenstein. In the midst of a 20-year interstellar war, strange sabotages and disasters are accompanied by mysterious transmissions in an unknown language code-named Babel-17. The plot follows Rydra Wong, an acclaimed poet who has neurological gifts which allow her to understand any language and grasp the thought patterns which accompany a language to an extent which borders on telepathy, as she tries to unearth the mystery of Babel-17 and stop the attacks. She forms a crew, which allows Delany to really let his imagination run with the possibilities of space travel. Her pilot is an immense surgically-created tiger-beast who steers by literally wrestling through “hyperstasis transit,” her navigators are a “Triple” of three mentally, emotionally, and sexually symbiotic people, and her sensors are resurrected ghosts called Ear, Eye, and Nose. They perceive space and objects through one intense sensory input. She encounters space pirates and aliens and all manner of wildly imaginative science-fiction stuff.

The aesthetic is quite similar to M. John Harrison’s great novel The Centauri Device: it’s a future set mainly in decaying post-industrial port cities full of smoke stacks and rusted metal and concrete towers. There’s an impoverished, anarchic underclass, a seemingly permanent and pointless interstellar war, and a lot of imagery centering around smoggy sunsets and industrial fires. “Ships rose with a white flare, blued through distance, became bloody stars in the rusted air,” for instance. It might be plausible to think of Babel-17 as an entry in a very select sub-genre: the post-industrial anarcho-poetic sci-fi novel. I love this kind of stuff, and Delany pulls it off with flair and style. He keeps the forward momentum going with a decent amount of sabotage, space fights, assassinations, and so forth, without losing track of the great linguistic puzzle his protagonist is attempting to solve. Delany is good at expressing her intellectual excitement: “She wondered what would happen if she translated her perceptions of people’s movement and muscle tics into Babel-17. It was not only a language, she understood now, but a flexible matrix of analytical possibilities where the same ‘word’ defined the stresses in a webbing of medical bandage, or a defensive grid of spaceships. What would it do with the tensions and yearnings in a human face? Perhaps the flicker of eyelids and fingers would become mathematics, without meaning…”

Speaking of that linguistic puzzle, there’s some very interesting parallels in Babel-17 to David Foster Wallace’s Broom of the System. Both feature female protagonists trying to solve language puzzles, and seem born out of each author’s interest in the degree to which reality is a linguistic construction. Both involve antinomies (in fact, the exact same ones) as a major plot point, though Babel-17 is structured in a much more conventional novel form, with none of the post-modern playfulness of Broom of the System. I just wonder if Wallace happened to read Babel-17 at some point, or if the attraction of speculative fiction authors to Wittgenstein, language, and logic is so widespread as to create such coincidences.

All of that said, the book is not perfect. Delany is here better at vivid prose and imagination than he is at dialogue and interpersonal relations, the former of which is often strained and the latter sometimes unmotivated and arbitrary. There is an odd slackening to the pace about twenty pages before the end, and what seems like a minor plot twist midway through turns out to be a major development which determines much of the second half of the book. And my copy (the original 1966 Ace paperback edition) had some serious quotation-mark typos which were a particular impediment during a long and lovely dialogue towards the end in which two characters switch around “I” and “you” in their conversation. Those minor complaints aside, Babel-17 is an excellent read, at once a satisfying sci-fi adventure and a cerebral exploration of the possibilities of language. It isn’t every sci-fi author who knows what an “allophone” or a “plosive” is or who is daring enough to suggest that an interstellar war might be ended using antinomies.

Zeno's Conscience

2009-09-29T11:26:00.000-07:00

Zeno’s Conscience, by Italo Svevo
1923, 437 pp. Translation by William Weaver, 2001.

The legend of Italo Svevo is one of the great Cinderella stories of modern literature. Svevo’s real name was Ettore Schmitz, and he was principally a successful businessman in Trieste. He also had an interest in fiction and wrote two novels, published at his own expense in 1892 and 1898, to absolutely no acclaim whatsoever. They received decent reviews, but nobody read them. Discouraged by being totally ignored by the reading public, Svevo gave up on literature for decades and devoted himself to business instead. Some years later he enrolled in English classes taught by an eccentric, down-on-his-luck Irishman named James Joyce. Joyce showed Svevo some of the stories that would later go into Dubliners, and Svevo mentioned, in an embarrassed and self-deprecating way, that he also used to write stories. He gave Joyce his two novels, and Joyce loved them. He encouraged Svevo to resume writing, and by the time Svevo finished Zeno’s Conscience in 1923, Joyce had published Ulysses, was living in Paris, and was well on his way to being the most notorious author in the world. He used his formidable skills of literary promotion to get Svevo an audience and some notoriety, and soon Svevo was proclaimed, somewhat inaccurately, the Italian Proust. Svevo’s last years were happy and successful; he died in a car accident in 1928, but his novel was quickly translated into English and immediately joined the pantheon of the great Modernists.

So much for the reputation and the preliminary throat-clearing, on to the book. Zeno’s Conscience purports to be the manuscript written by one Zeno Cosini, aging and neurotic Triestine businessman, as part of his psychoanalysis. The first section details his absurd, futile, lifelong attempts to quit smoking; the second his relationship with his father; the third his courtship of the beautiful but distant Ada and eventual marriage to her less beautiful sister Augusta as well as his infidelity with a silly, annoying singer named Carla; the fourth section deals with his business relationship with Guido, his former rival for Ada’s hand; and the last is a sort of summing-up and attack on psychoanalysis in general. Zeno is endlessly self-deceiving, and in general the book consists of one situation after another which calls to mind that old line from Hamlet: “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.”

So when Zeno has wild, psychosomatic pains which he assures us are not due to guilt over his infidelity, we understand that he is protesting too much. Every time he declares that he does not hate Guido, who succeeded in marrying Ada where he failed, we understand that he is protesting too much. When he is at pains to tell us how much he loved his father, respects his doctor, or loves his mistress’s singing, we understand that he is protesting too much. But Zeno knows that there is something wrong with him, and he is attempting to analyze it—the trouble is that he is analyzing it from an entirely incorrect position. He is excellent at finding scapegoats for his problems, always returning to the poison which his chain-smoking puts in his veins. But we very quickly understand that the problem is not Zeno’s smoking, or his mystery pains, or his brother-in-law. The problem is Zeno.

A second theme is the farcical way in which Zeno’s best efforts always turn out in the opposite result from what he intended. He begins by courting Ada, who he only succeeds in annoying, then moves to Alberta, who isn’t interested, and eventually ends up with Augusta, who initially found least attractive. He tries to succeed in business and makes ridiculous blunders. He is amused and a bit pleased to find that his psychiatrist thinks he has an Oedpius complex: “Spellbound, I lay there and listened. It was a sickness that elevated me to the highest noble company. An illustrious sickness, whose ancestors dated back to the mythological era!” And so forth. But at the same time, usually his efforts are directed towards ends which we know would be bad for him, so when things turn out exactly the opposite, it is to his benefit. Guido functions as a foil: he too is unfaithful to his wife and inept in business, but Zeno manages, through no genius of his own, to appear faithful and competent, while Guido ends in disgrace and failure.

All of this is very good, and Zeno, despite all his flaws, is a likable figure. The first two sections, which are the most openly absurd and farcical, are quite good, as is the last one, which brings all the threads of the book together and adds a satisfying sense of perspective. These sections are also rather short: the middle two sections are about 150 pages each, and do tend to sag in the middle. Once the reader gets used to the two themes listed above, we still get to watch Zeno enact them over and over at quite some length. I enjoyed the book and Zeno’s company, but I must admit I felt it went on a bit too long.

Svevo’s Italian was roundly criticized when the book came out for being bland “bookkeeper’s Italian.” I cannot speak to that, except to mention that both Svevo and Zeno actually were bookkeepers, so that’s a perfectly sound stylistic choice. As with all translations by William Weaver, the prose is first-rate, and a new edition of this book is clearly worth the praise lavished on it during its appearance.

Having declared myself an implacable opponent of shallow narcissism in literature, I find myself constantly obliged during my reading of Modernist literature, to revise my opinion. It is true that Zeno Cosini and Italo Svevo have a great deal in common: a time, place, vocation, and smoking problem. But I would argue that this book is not at all narcissist, for the very obvious reason that Zeno Cosini is a ridiculous figure, endlessly self-absorbed and self-deluded. No one who is actually a narcissist would be able to present a character who is such a narcissist. Svevo knows what a narcissist Zeno is, and he finds it hilarious. But he does not make Zeno a noxious figure: Zeno is lovable and forgivable, but weak and flawed, just like the rest of us. As a portrait of a character and a self-deceiving mind, Zeno’s Conscience is absolutely in the first rank. As a novel, though, it sags structurally in the middle between a very strong opening, ending, and the thematic bridges which connect them.

The Eternal Husband and Other Stories

2009-09-26T09:03:00.000-07:00

The Eternal Husband and Other Stories, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
1862-1876, 349 pp. Translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

I am about to write one of the world’s few truly unique sentences: Dostoevsky is at his best when he is being funny. When he gives himself over to his earnest, mystical, moralizing Christianity, he produces tedious, pedantic, nearly unreadable dreck in great volume: The Idiot is certainly the poster-child of this tendency. But when he stays away from the fever dreams, the hysterics, the raptures and mystical babbling, when he quits stalling with subplots and social drama and instead focuses on active satire and ridicule, he is quite good. It is for this reason that Demons is excellent, while The Idiot is interminable, and the opening of Crime and Punishment is far better than the end. The volume under review is a combination of these tendencies, but works more often than it doesn’t.

The volume is dominated by the 180-odd page novella “The Eternal Husband.” This story proceeds from a very good idea: Velchaninov, a wealthy, worldly, vital Petersburg man is visited by a man he hasn’t seen for nine years. The man, Pavel Pavlovich, appears several times before actually approaching Velchaninov, drunk and behaving strangely in the middle of the night. He tells Velchaninov that his wife has just died. Velchaninov had had an affair with the man’s wife nine years before. Whether Pavel Pavlovich knows this is the core of the story, which plays out through the destructive obsession of the one man for the other, with Velchaninov’s need to find out how much Pavel Pavlovich knows, and with their mutual inability to separate themselves from each other. The sense of menace and unease is well done, and the characterization is very good, but Dostoevsky too often indulges in two of his favorite themes: the two men spend a lot of time behaving in ways they don’t understand and can’t control, under all sorts of mystical influences, and people are driven to physical illness (or even death) due to emotional or spiritual problems. The first theme too often makes his characters seem ridiculous, rather than weak humans in the grip of mighty mystical forces, and too often undermines the characterization he’s put several pages of work into. This often is irritating, since it seems like he isn’t playing fair—instead of behaving counter to their personalities, it reads more like his characters are cardboard slaves to the requirements of Dostoevsky’s preconceived manipulations.

Furthermore, the language is too often simply clunky. I had this same problem with The Idiot, though I didn’t notice it in Demons or Crime and Punishment. I am unclear on whether it is a problem with Dostoevsky or with Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Probably it is both. I haven’t read Pevear and Volokhonsky’s Tolstoy or Gogol, but I have read their Bulgakov and it was quite different from their Dostoevsky. Furthermore, Nabokov in his Lectures on Russian Literature complains of exactly what annoys me: Dostoevsky loves to have his characters speak in stuttering, inarticulate, mystical monologues which probably don’t work in any language. Worse, he likes to gather all his characters together into a drawing room (or, very frequently, a sort of “scandalous feast”) so characters monologue feverishly while other ones stand around apparently doing nothing. His characters tend to preface their statements with meaningless throat-clearing phrases like “But incidentally” or “By the way” or “And anyhow,” which I have come to assume are various translations of some common Russian verbal mannerism. The trouble is that in many contexts they don’t work at all, like when Velchaninov thinks to himself “By the way, I must give him the bracelet!” or “was not entirely sure, incidentally, that he had kissed him.” Has anyone ever thought to themselves “By the way”? And in “The Meek One,” a later story in the volume, a character sits “quietly and silently.” Both at once! I have to assume that Dostoevsky wrote two different Russian words meaning two different sorts of being quiet, which is a point against him, but I wonder why Pevear and Volokhonsky decided to include both. Why do they choose to include all of the little prevaricating meaningless phrases? All characters use them, so it isn’t a telling character trait. It just makes the writing seem stilted, annoying, and occasionally ridiculous.

Those complaints aside, the volume features two very good stories: “A Nasty Anecdote” and “The Meek One.” The first is a cutting satire in which a powerful government official turns up drunk and unannounced at his subordinate’s wedding, in order to prove his liberal humanist convictions. If the reader can set aside Dostoevsky’s loathing for progress and recognize that indeed, some aspects of wealthy liberal hypocrisy are timeless, it’s quite an amusing story. It reads like an 1862 episode of “The Office.”

“The Meek One” is a stream-of-consciousness narration of a self-absorbed pawnbroker who, through his well-meaning but totally misguided attempts to make his young wife happy instead drives her to suicide. In its theme of the narrator’s total inability to consider the world outside himself, it’s almost Bergman-esque in nature, and is a much more focused, tightly-constructed story than Dostoevsky usually produces. The last line particularly sums up the character, and the character of many people, spoken over the body of his dead teenage wife: “No seriously, when she’s taken away tomorrow, what about me then?”

There are two other less impressive stories. “Bobok” is fairly good, a story about a hack writer who attends a funeral and mistakenly finds that the dead carry on for a month or so in their graves, having bickering conversations. This is another excuse for Dostoevsky to ridicule progressive ideas and their consequences for society, since all but one of the dead people have cast off religion and tradition and consequently have stupid, venal conversations from their graves. Nevertheless, it’s fairly amusing for the 20 pages it lasts. The last story, “Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” begins in the vein of Notes from Underground, but then lapses into a lengthy dream sequence which ends with its feverish narrator seeing the light of mystical Christianity and setting out happy into the world. This story unifies several of my least favorite of Dostoevsky’s preoccupations, and does nothing which he does not do elsewhere.

In sum, then, the volume contains two very good stories, two fairly decent ones, and one bad one. It is also a convenient collection of most of Dostoevsky’s shorter work, and it is interesting to see him working in a more precise, restricted form than his usual immense, bloated novels. Worth a look, even if just for “The Meek One” and “A Nasty Anecdote.”

The Double

2009-09-18T12:09:00.000-07:00

The Double, by José Saramago
2002, 324 pp.

Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, a mild-mannered, lonely, divorced high school history teacher rents a film at the suggestion of a colleague, in an effort to pass a pleasant evening. He is astonished to see in the film a supporting actor who looks precisely like him (or at least, precisely as he looked at the time the film was made) and he becomes obsessed with finding this double. As hooks go, this is an excellent one, though as literary themes go, Saramago begins on dangerous ground. The theme of the double has been dealt with innumerable times in literature, seldom with much interesting variation (John Banville's review of The Double in the Times helpfully singles out an early instance in Plautus' Amphitryon) and seemed to have been conclusively laid to rest with Dostoevsky's 1846 novella which shares the same name as the book here under review. It is rare for Saramago to proceed down such a well-trodden path, but he pulls it off, barely.

To some degree, my reading of The Double suffers from the mass consumption of Saramago's works that I've indulged in these past six months. Tertuliano is another in a string of Saramagian protagonists: lonely, middle-aged men with unassuming and unimportant but mildly intellectual jobs. His only working class protagonists have been Baltasar and Jesus Christ, and he seems to be aware that this is another work in a similar vein. The familiar Saramago narrative voice is alive and well here, though for the first time aware that it is a narrator in a novel rather than simply a rustic, garrulous, folksy, Portuguese storyteller. The narration frequently refers to redundancies six lines back, or a sentence on a previous page, or to its own knowledge as the narrator. On the very second page it even makes an allusion to the mild-mannered protagonists of several of Saramago's earlier novels.

All of this is fine. The trouble is that there really only seems to be about fifty to one hundred pages of actual material here, and the narrator, who (granted) is always a bit digressive and self-referential, often seems to be stalling. The procedural details of Tertuliano's search for his double are compelling, but they are interspersed with scenes from his teaching job which are frankly irrelevant. It takes Tertuliano 106 pages to find his double's name, then another 108 pages before they meet. That middle section sags quite a bit, brightened up only by Saramago's always delightful facility with romantic dialogue, here between Tertuliano and his girlfriend Maria da Paz.

The last third, though, creates steadily building menace and malevolence, spinning out the existential violence of having a double (or being a double) into realized physical and emotional violence. Saramago then utterly blindsides you around page 300, and the book ends with so many twists and adjustments that the reader is left a bit startled and unsettled. I have not yet decided whether the very final twist actually works or not: Saramago's endings are always ambiguous, often dark, and tend less to resolve the existing story as much as to set up another story which Saramago isn't going to bother telling. Here the final twist raises such a host of new questions and suggests such a change in character that rather than forcing the reader to reevaluate what has come before instead borders on overthrowing the book entirely.

The Double also suffers from a certain deficiency of characterization. Tertuliano is less fully realized than Ricardo Reis or Senhor José or Raimundo Silva, and as the story progresses we realize his double is not much of a character either. Both are given quite a lot to do, especially in that saggy middle section, but little of it adds to our understanding of them as characters. To some extent this helps Saramago in a critical point when he wants to create ambiguity as to which is which and whether even they have gotten themselves mixed up, which must be the only example on record of a novelist using his formidable skill to turn flat characters into an asset rather than a defect. As a first Saramago read for the uninitiated, The Double has enough of a hook and enough of a familiar setting and theme to be easily accessible, but for the long-standing acolyte it is only a minor work in the Saramago canon.

Guest Post: Night Train

2009-09-17T16:08:00.000-07:00

Night Train, by Martin Amis
1997, 175 pp.

Night Train a police procedural by Martin Amis is a novel you struggle to put down; filled as it is with a prose style reflective of an educated police officer who’s seen much of everything. The story begins with Mike Hoolihan, the detective and narrator, and as she herself points out a woman, telling us that what will follow is the worst case she’s ever had to deal with. What unfolds is a complex foray into a case that comes to consume all of her waking hours, the subject of her investigation is the apparent suicide of Colonel Tom’s (a man she loves and respects for drying her out – she was a devout alcoholic, and not incidentally a man who is in charge of 3,000 police) daughter. At first, Amis skillfully weaves us through her day and her current job, as an asset seizing police, meaning the mob owns some shit, we want that shit, so we as police, take that shit. Then in the second section Mike delves deeply into the psychological profile of the said victim, Jennifer, who as we begin this section realize was on lithium – the drug of the manic depressive. In the final section “The Seeing” we solve the suicide, figure it out as the saying goes, and we are not satisfied, and neither is Mike, but its how it is. And we find out that Jennifer has left the clues, has done so deliberately because she is the daughter of a police.

Interesting to note is the recurring theme of the night train throughout the novel taking a new and clever interpretation at each twist and turn. We get the actual physical night train which keeps the rent way down and keeps her up “around quarter to four. I lay there for a time with my eyes open. No chance of reentry.” We soon find out that her man Tobe is also a night train warbling up the steps in all his massive girth, a man so large he is once ascribed furniture proportion with the “I sat on the couch of his lap.” Then the philosophical musings of a detective “Suicide is the night train, speeding your way to darkness…The ticket costs everything you have. But it’s just a one-way. This train takes you into the night, and leaves you there.” But it’s the description that really takes this novel and the night train to the smoothness of Johnny Black, how the actual night train interweaves with the suicide, “And here comes the night train. First, the sound of knives being sharpened. Then its cry, harsh but symphonic, like a chord of car horns.”

The prose of Mike Hoolihan is that of an educated police, who knows a thing or two about history, about as much as one can glean from college and the occasional stray fact that permeates our everyday interactions with media and film. At the beginning we even get this caveat, “Allow me to apologize in advance for the bad language, the diseased sarcasm, and bigotry. All police are racist. It’s part of our job…Anyone can become a police – Jews, blacks, Asians, women – and once you’re there you’re a member of a race called police, which is obliged to hate every other race.” Followed immediately by another, “These papers and transcripts were put together piecemeal over a period of four weeks. I apologize also for any inconsistencies in the tenses (hard to avoid, when writing about the recently dead) and for the informalities in the dialogue presentation.”

Amis missteps only once in the entire novel into complete and utter failure with this travesty of colloquial speech imitation, “I was quit when you came in here. I’m twice as quit now.” This a response to Col. Tom Rockwell’s insistence that she pick up the case even though she was currently working out of asset forfeiture, after eight years of grueling homicide. The dialogue is superb, with each character getting her or his own inflections and vernacular particular to what that person would have in real life. For example in an interview with Jennifer’s boss, who is “big in his discipline” and “famous: TV-famous” we get this majestic air of authority and condescension in one priceless exchange,

…As of last fall she was working on the Milky Way’s Virgo-infall velocity.
I asked him: could you be more specific?
I am being specific. Perhaps I should be more general.

The same scientist who by the walk out to Mike's car we see again in this light,

“Denziger looked as though mathematics were happening to him right then and
there. As though math were happening to him: He looked subtracted, with much of
his force of life, and his IQ, suddenly taken away.”

The structure of the novel is characteristic of Amis’ attention to detail. He begins the first section “Blowback” utilizing the days themselves as the subheadings, to orient us to the crime and the time span we are, in fact, as readers working with. Then in the second section “Felo De Se” which is an archaic legal term meaning “felon of himself” (as relates to English common law) or shorthand, suicide, we see a shift to longer headings which briefly summarize the actions undertaken in this section which is to put together the psychological profile or the why of whodunit. While finally, in the third section “The Seeing” we end up seeing the why without interruption of headings and in eighteen pages, and as in all good police procedurals we get the closure we’ve been so desperately seeking at each twist and turn of the whole sordid affair.

The novel was skillfully written. The pages kept turning themselves as if they too were examining the case. The ending was handed to us on a silver platter, right next to the dialogue, and the suicide of a beautiful woman with everything to live for. Put into the context of his work Night Train was a much easier read than was Money (for all its slow moving minutia and painful alcoholism of the main character), Amis in this case gave us a reformed drunk who is seen at the end sipping on her second seltzer before walking out the bar. In his book the War Against Cliché Amis yelps with the indignation of a prose stylist whose only content concern is to avoid unwarranted cliché, in this book he meets the criteria and delves deeply in and through the mind of a police, a woman police no less, and with the skill of authorial confidence takes us through one case that we will likely never forget.

A Tomb for Boris Davidovich

2009-09-16T11:03:00.000-07:00

A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, by Danilo Kiš
1978, 135 pp.

Though his work is increasingly difficult to find in the United States, no conversation about postwar European literature, especially the dissident literature of Eastern Europe, is complete without Danilo Kiš. He gained a great deal of notoriety with his strange, difficult 1973 novel Hourglass, and a great deal of controversy with this brief collection of linked short stories. A Tomb for Boris Davidovich is directly in the tradition (or perhaps, sub-genre) of Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, and Victor Serge's The Case of Comrade Tulayev. It is a worthy second-generation entry in that great project of literary conscience, but it does not equal or surpass its predecessors, nor does it seem as significant a piece of work as the controversy around it once suggested.

The book consists of seven short stories, usually linked from one to the next by the mention or brief appearance of a character from the previous story. They are presented as factual biographies of fictional people, mostly loyal Communists who are arbitrarily arrested during the purges and subject to torture. Some are executed, some are exiled, some sign false confessions. The first four are told in titled paragraphs, giving the book a slightly avant-garde feel, but that convention is dropped with the longest and best story, which shares the title of the book. All of the stories to that point detail the contributions of someone to the Bolshevik revolution: the first character commits sordid murders at the false direction of an informant, the second is volunteer during the Spanish Civil War who is betrayed by his superior who is a Soviet agent, the third is an apparatchik who stages a fake religious service for a visiting Western diplomat in Kiev. The titular Boris Davidovich Novsky is a brave, committed, noted revolutionary who is arrested and tortured in order to extract a false confession for a show trial. His story is the only one which adds significantly to the existing Koestler/Serge examination of the same subject: Novsky wants to die honorably, to preserve a suitable ending for the biography he has been writing with his actions his entire life, and his interrogator is determined to deny him that satisfaction. Their confrontation is a grueling, bleak story, and by far the strongest point of the book.

The story which follows deals with a 13th-century Jew who is forced to convert to Christianity during a pogrom. The similarities between it and the story of Novsky are obvious, but Kiš apparently feared they would not be, so he appends a note explaining them. I found this a bit annoying, and despite his well-intentioned point about the timeless, cyclical nature of history and human cruelty, I dispute the parallels between the Jewish victims of Christian pogroms and the betrayed Communist agents of the other stories. A better analogue would have been a story about a devout and famous Christian who is tortured and murdered by other Christians for the crime of not being Christian enough.

This leads me to my general complaint about the book. While Kiš is certainly a great writer, I cannot conclude that this is his greatest book. It lacks the formal ingenuity of Hourglass, and the Borgesian precision of Encyclopedia of the Dead. It is quite short and at least three of the seven stories (one about a card game between prisoners which determines a murder, the one about the 13th-century Jew, and the last about an artist who dies of elephantiasis) seem to distract from the general point of the book. The biographical format preserves the nearly obsessive theme of memory which pervades Kiš's other work, and anti-Stalinist dissident literature in general, and the essay-like tone fits in with the sort of work being done by Milan Kundera and Czesław Miłosz. But it is a very brief and slightly disorganized book, and considering the furor it produced in Yugoslavia when it was published, I was surprised that none of its characters was from Yugoslavia, nor did any of its action take place there. With all of that in mind, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich stands mainly as an indication of what sort of dissent was possible under Yugoslav Communism: even this small book criticizing forty years later a brutal system which itself had been repudiated twenty years earlier provoked outrage. Such was the nature of the Stalinist and post-Stalinist world, and if the book seems to do less than we expect from the vantage point of the 21st century West, it is because the first (and perhaps only) duty of the man of conscience at the time was to plainly state what now seems obvious.

Germinal

2009-09-16T10:20:00.000-07:00

Germinal, by Émile Zola
1885, 428 pp.

Even among the towering pantheon of nineteenth century French social novelists, Émile Zola enjoys his own particular and peculiar distinctions. Unlike Balzac, who only formed his existing work into a related series with the publication of Le Père Goriot, Zola conceived of his entire twenty-volume Rougon-Macquart series before writing the first world, and meticulously plotted and researched his works to fully examine the impact of environmental forces on human beings in all sectors of French society during the Second Empire. Like Hugo, he was furiously engaged in politics, and his great J'accuse still stands as probably the most famous single piece of journalism in all of world history, and perhaps also the greatest polemic. Zola may not have invented literary naturalism, but certainly was its most famous and thorough practitioner, and as a result his novels stand as fascinating and detailed historical documents. Germinal is the most famous of these, especially after the production of the big-budget, award-winning 1993 film. It well deserves its notoriety.

Germinal is the story of a coal miners' strike in a rugged, impoverished town in northern France. It is based on a true story: Zola spent a week in the mines at Anzin and Denain, and emerged with a thousand pages of notes. Consequently, the book is astonishingly detailed. It creates through meticulous, lush, relentless accumulation of specificity the sights, smells, and sensations of the living hell that was the life of a nineteenth-century coal miner. The story is animated by the arrival of a young man named Étienne Lantier (a member of the Rougon-Macquart family whose rich, poor, and middle-class members Zola follows through his twenty volumes) at the bleak mining town of Montsou, looking for work. This allows Zola to pull the reader through a solid hundred pages of meticulous description of the layout and functioning of the mine, of the suffering of the workers for generation after generation, of the crushing burdens of debt and poverty and children, and of the cruelty of the bosses. Zola is very clear which side he is on and does not pull punches: very quickly the reader is introduced to a good-hearted fifth-generation miner who has spent fifty years working and suffering for a capitalist whose name he doesn't even know. The mine, Le Voreaux, is given terrific personifying characteristics to the extent that it is an important figure in the story: a sort of menacing presence, a constantly hungry beast that eats thousands of workers.

Soon the bosses institute a new policy which cuts the already meager pay of the miners, and the tensions in the town stretch to the breaking point. Lantier, who has begun to read widely but shallowly in the socialist literature of the time, organizes a strike and Germinal really takes off running. Lantier and the miners organize a local chapter of the First International, give rousing speeches, and eventually, as time begins to take its toll and the weight of hunger begins to break their spirits, they form an angry mob. What follows is an exhilarating, disturbing, violent, passionate, fifty-page set-piece as the mob rampages across the mining towns, burning and looting and smashing the mines. At its best it captures all the blood-and-thunder of the high passages of the Manifesto, and it is impossible not to feel a thrill as the hated machines are beaten apart to cries of "Long live the International!" Yet Zola provides a surprising amount of nuance. Yes, in the book as a whole the workers are generally strong, hearty, worthy people and the capitalists are vain, stupid, selfish, and utterly indifferent. But Zola is acquainted with the mindless savagery of crowds and is unflinching in his depiction of the crowd getting out of hand and turning ugly. Soon all sense of class struggle is gone and it is simply an outpouring of inarticulate hatred. We watch mild-mannered characters, mostly women, turning into plundering barbarians, and we see the crowd get away from Lantier and become its own character. Zola really winds himself up here, practically pounding the drums: "It was an apocalyptic vision of the revolution that would inevitably sweep them all away on some bloody evening of this dying century. Yes, one day the people would slip its harness and, unleashed, race along the roads just like this; it would make the blood of the bourgeois flow, it would parade their severed heads on pikes, it would scatter the gold of disembowled cashboxes. The women would shriek and the men would have those wolflike jaws open to bite. Yes, there would be the same rags, the same thunder of heavy sabots, the same terrifying mob, with its dirty flesh and stinking breath, sweeping aside the old world in a wild, barbaric onslaught. Fires would blaze, not so much as a stone would be left standing in the cities, and after the enormous rut, the enormous orgy during which the poor, in a single night, would ravage the women and empty the cellars of the rich, there would be a return to the savage life of the forest."

It goes on in this vein for some time.

Zola never lets up after that. We see a dozen major characters gunned down by the gendarmes, the strike broken, the miners even worse off than before, split by recrimination and betrayal, and finally are treated to another exhausting tour-de-force section as the sabotaged mine collapses. The (slightly obligatory) love triangle subplot between Lantier, his rival Chaval, and the daughter of the most prominent mining family gets resolved with murder and starvation, and the book ends with every character either dead or utterly broken. I almost wish that I could call Zola a cruel and bitter novelist, but I can only call him a scrupulously honest one. In his understanding and depiction of the course of class struggle, from the intolerable exploitation which engenders it to the ultimate use of organized violence to stop it, Zola is never less than spot-on.

The book is surprisingly earthy, with a great deal of sex and nudity and execretion. At times Zola seems even a bit overzealous, as when there is some hideous mutilation of dead capitalists, or when he creates a Tiny Tim analogue character, apparently for the sole purpose of having her starve to death in her parents' arms. Zola has some distressing and surprising views about women, who despite being shown as laboring under the double burden of mine work and domestic work, are also shown as the most savage members of the mob, and as either duplicitous or submissive animals who seem to exist to give birth constantly. But taken as a whole Germinal is an excellent book, fascinating in its details, horrifying and devastating in its relentless honesty, exhilarating in its action, powerful and moving in its writing.

James Joyce

2009-08-31T19:15:00.000-07:00

James Joyce, by Richard Ellmann
1959, revised 1982, 887 pp.

While reading Peter Gay’s mammoth biography of Sigmund Freud last month, I frequently remarked to colleagues and comrades that the author seemed to know more about Freud’s life and works than anyone could possibly know about anything. It appears I must retract that statement, having grossly underestimated. Richard Ellmann’s biography of James Joyce is inclusive and comprehensive in a way no book I have ever read could possibly equal, displaying a mastery of knowledge so complete that it borders on the infuriating. The back cover of the book features a blurb from Anthony Burgess, himself a formidable Joyce scholar, calling it “The greatest literary biography of the century.” I am forced to wonder what literary biographies from other centuries could meet, let alone surpass Professor Ellmann’s harrowingly perfect performance here. I suspect there are none, and until I hear of one, I am willing to truncate Mr. Burgess’ pronouncement, and simply call James Joyce the greatest literary biography. Full stop.

Part of what sets Professor Ellmann’s book well ahead of even Professor Gay’s work on Freud is that Ellmann wrote the original work in the late 1950’s, and therefore was able to personally interview many people who knew James Joyce, including his brother Stanislaus. Professor Ellmann seems to have tracked down everyone who ever spoke to or about Joyce: the first page includes a footnote to a personal conversation Ellmann had at dinner with T.S. Eliot, and a chapter later a footnote informed me that Joyce’s childhood next-door neighbor Eileen now teaches on an Indian reservation in Saskatoon. The dauntless Professor Ellmann seems to have trekked through the wilds of Saskatchewan to speak with her, and returned with the knowledge that blackberry was Joyce’s favorite flavor of jam. That is the kind of biography we are discussing. It is not just that Professor Ellmann has read and understood everything Joyce ever wrote, from the most incidental limerick (of which Joyce produced an astonishing number) to Finnegans Wake, the most complicated, difficult book ever written. It is not just that Professor Ellmann has read all his letters (and edited volumes of them for publication), spoken to all of Joyce’s friends, acquaintances, enemies, and family members, nor is it that Ellmann has taken the trouble to track down the factual origin of every minor character who appears in all 250,000 words of Ulysses: no, the really remarkable thing is that he includes every last iota of that information in this book, in a clear, clever, and organized fashion. It is an achievement which leaves the reader with a vague desire to dig up Professor Ellmann and throw stones at him.

Amid this fearsome wealth of factual information (Joyce liked Bellini better than Wagner, and Green Calville was his favorite kind of apple), Ellmann addresses at length the two points which are essential to anyone curious about tackling the daunting oeuvre of the world’s most complex writer: first, does Joyce tell us anything of importance, and second, if all he wrote about was Dublin and people he knew, is he anything more than a very clever male narcissist?

Ellmann’s answer to the first comes early on, and he spares no praise in making it. Joyce, he says, began writing with the briefest, simplest verse, proceeded through short stories into novels, invented a new way of portraying consciousness, and ended with an immense polyglot encyclopedia, surveying all of human life and experience on the way. In Ellmann’s forceful and infinitely detailed argument, Joyce accomplished nothing less than the most honest and accurate depiction of the human condition ever created, first from a naturalist, external perspective, then from a subjective internal one, then using an entirely new language expressing cognitive leaps and connections never before imagined to more accurately perceive the universal and democratizing experience of dreams. In Ellmann’s view, Joyce not only tells us important things about ourselves, but invented a new way of doing so such that he tells us things no one else ever had before, and that no one else ever can again without simply echoing his words.

Furthermore, Ellmann argues, using copious quotations from Joyce’s work, and entire chapters dedicated to the making of Ulysses and Joyce’s great short story “The Dead,” that the thematic premise of Joyce’s work is a sort of secular humanism, a “justification of the commonplace.” Joyce was “the first to endow an urban man of no importance with heroic consequence,” and by ennobling that which is common he also made common that which is noble. Joyce was something of a socialist, and a lower-middle class man of cities, and his work can (almost) be understood as relating to socialist realism the way that Bach’s Violin Concerto in E Major relates to someone whistling. Given the social, political, and literary context of Joyce’s time, this was something downright revolutionary: asserting the presence of the sublime and universal in every profane and pointless action of an unimportant individual.

This is not a book in which punches are pulled.

The answer to the second question is the animating force behind most of Ellmann’s structure of the book. The very first sentences of the introduction read as follows: “We are still learning to be James Joyce’s contemporaries, to understand our interpreter. This book enters Joyce’s life to reflect his complex, incessant joining of event and composition.” While it is certainly true that all of Joyce’s work is firmly anchored in Dublin and in Irish culture and in his own life experiences, and while it cannot be denied that Stephen Dedalus is Joyce surrogate seen with the keen, dissecting eye of a more mature artist, it must also be acknowledged that Joyce’s art ended with universality. Ulysses elevated all that which is common and average to the position of being sacred and beautiful, and proved that in each individual human being lies something noble and heroic. Finnegans Wake took the principle a step farther: in it, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker is not just an everyman, but all possible everymen, and also all possible father figures, just as Anna Livia Plurabelle is all mother figures and all rivers and the origin of all life, and Shem and Shaun are all brothers and all allies and all rivals from all of human history. Every word of Finnegans Wake is a multilingual pun (for instance, the title: fin as in the French word for "end," plus the sound of "again," meaning "recurrence," plus "wake" both as in "to stop sleeping" and as in "funeral" and the lack of apostrophe indicates both the awakening of all possible Finnegans as well as the funeral of one in particular) and therefore draws cognitive connections which transcend political boundaries, the burgeoning nationalisms of Joyce's time, and any degree of cultural exceptionalism. Joyce invented a language which proved the universal equality of all people.

Those questions settled, the only matter of interest that remains is what the book is like to read. I trust I have made clear its density of information (Joyce was afraid of dogs and thunderstorms, and a fellow named Sinigaglia delivered his first child) but I assure the terrified reader that it is also frequently amusing and pleasant to read. Admitteldy, at times Professor Ellmann's mania for drawing connections grows a bit thin, as when he suggests a link between Joyce's 1902 desire to rent a cottage and Leopold Bloom's one-line mention of the same idea. For the first three hundred pages, Joyce is occasionally annoying, since he lived his entire life with the utmost financial responsibility and demanded exorbitant sacrifices from the people around him, in service to his yet-unproved genius. This is more than made up for by his hilarious antics of the latter half, when he achieves some measure of fame and notoriety. At times Ellmann's knowledge and rarefied vocabulary gets the better of him, as in this gem of a sentence from the very first page: “Joyce’s father, John Stanislaus Joyce, owned a framed engraving of the coat of arms of the Galway Joyces, and he used to carry it along, grandly and quixotically, on his frequent enforced déménagements, atoning for squandering his family’s fortune by parading its putative escutcheon.”

I assure the reader that I intend to parade my putative escutcheon as soon as I've finished this review.

In sum, the book is a flat-out masterpiece. At the very least, the chapter on the making of Ulysses is required for anyone attempting to tackle that mountain of literature, but the book as a whole is a rewarding, absorbing, utterly unique achievement. It must be the best and most detailed biography ever written, and considering the vast difficulty of its subject, its creation is an unparalleled feat. It cannot be too strongly recommended.

The Savage Detectives

2009-08-30T13:54:00.000-07:00

The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolaño
1998, 648 pp.

Since his untimely death at the age of 50 in 2003, Roberto Bolaño’s literary star has been in constant ascent. Six of his books have been translated into English already; a new one is just out, and there are four more scheduled for 2010, with two following in 2011. A review of the latest book informs me that two more completed novels have been found among his papers in Barcelona, as well as a sixth part to his sprawling opus 2666. It is a very good time to be discovering Roberto Bolaño.

Bolaño, who seems to have had an excellent instinct for literary fun, tends to appear in one guise or another in most of his work. His books also tend to be interconnected, with characters appearing in several books, or perhaps reading poems by a character who appears elsewhere. As more of his books get translated, it is increasingly possible to speak of an entire world he created, a world where the political and personal implications of the state of Latin American literature is of primary concern. For all that, The Savage Detectives must be his most autobiographical novel. It is also fiercely inventive, both in form and in content, to such an extent that (in my opinion) it is evidence of something truly remarkable: that Roberto Bolaño might best be ranked as the last of the great, high Modernists, one of the only contemporary authors who can go toe-to-toe with Musil or Woolf and emerge the better for it. He is not simply stylistically playful, like the postmodernists: he is furiously, vehemently emotional and overflowing with rage and pity at the political and literary figures of his time (to the very limited extent that he recognizes any separation between those two groups). He is deeply sensitive, but at the same time deeply aware of the possible permutations and interpretations of that sensitivity. He does not write a manipulative, purely subjective emotional story, but paints emotion in big, bold colors then stands back to examine it from all possible sides and angles. He gets away with things which shouldn’t be possible, and the result is a splendid read.

The Savage Detectives is a novel in three very unequal parts. The first section (about 150 pages) is the youthful, euphoric diary of Juan García Madero, a 17-year old poet who joins a moment called “visceral realism.” The visceral realists are based on Bolaño’s own “infrarealist” movement of the 1970’s. The infrarealists were guerrilla poets who would stand up in the audience at poetry readings to shout their strange, avant-garde poems over the poor, beleaguered poet on stage. They made wild plans to kidnap Octavio Paz, they stole books from bookshops and libraries, and they were mixed up with Trotskyists. They were the terror of the Mexico City literary world for a while, before they dispersed and fell apart amid drugs and recriminations. During their time they rejected with the utmost vituperation both the state-sponsored, establishment-sanctioned poets like Paz, who received government support, and the so-called “peasant poets,” who they saw as trafficking in poorly-examined, knee-jerk, reactionary “otherness,” who “mask their ignorance with arrogance,” and who, for all of their complaints of persecution, lived comfortably on university salaries. The infrarealists were a maligned third force, and Bolaño kept with that literary position his entire life. He had nothing to do with the famous Latin American Boom and had no time for the fairy tales of magical realism, but neither was he associated with the bitterness of the anti-Boom writers. Instead, if one is to speak of Latin American literature separate from the dialectic of the Boom, one must speak of Bolaño. He fills the same position on the literary spectrum as did Victor Serge, George Orwell, and Albert Camus in politics: radical left with a conscience.

Anyhow, García Madero joins the visceral realists, who are led by Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano. Immediately Bolaño’s autobiographical jokes start to crop up: Ulises Lima is based on Bolaño’s friend Mario Santiago, who published one collection of poetry in his life, now long out of print. Arturo Belano is based on Bolaño himself, but so too is the young García Madero. Leave it to Bolaño to give us a book with not one fictional alter-ego, but two. García Madero’s diary describes the social scene around the founders of visceral realism: their friends, their lovers, their families. He has a lot of sex and writes a lot of poetry. It is an intoxicating 150 pages, and Bolaño knows it. He is well aware that after that euphoric induction into the world of the visceral realists, neither you nor García Madero will ever be able to leave. The diary ends on a cliffhanger: García Madero and Lima and Belano in a car with a sweet prostitute friend named Lupe, going a hundred miles an hour out of Mexico City. On the one hand, they are fleeing Lupe’s outraged, dangerous pimp. On the other hand, they are headed for the Sonora Desert, in search of the lost works of Cesarea Tinajero, the mysterious 1920’s poet who the visceral realists consider their founder.

The second section is 445 pages, twice as long as the other two sections combined. It is made up of several hundred brief fragments given in the first person narration of about four dozen narrators, over 25 chapters. It reads like unedited documentary footage, like interviews that take place over twenty years. Some of these dialogues refer to others, as though the speakers were in the same room or watched the previous interviews. Some tell stories, some recite poems, and almost all speak around or about their encounters with Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano during their wanderings in the twenty years after their return from the desert. Some narrators recur, some appear only once, some talk for many pages, some for only one paragraph. Each is different and memorable, which is the truly remarkable achievement. In his sublime By Night in Chile, Bolaño proved that he could sound like a dying man, a conservative priest, and like José Saramago. Here he is like one of those voice actors showing off that he can run through fifty characters. He can sound not just like women, but young women, old women, happy women, sad women, and dying women. He can sound like gay people, mentally disabled people, old people, successful people, failed people, and married people both before and after a divorce. He can sound like anyone. One is Auxilio Lacouture, the narrator of Bolaño’s book Amulet. Many of the narrators are characters we met in the opening diary, and many appear in each other’s interviews. They mostly flesh out the lives of the two founders of visceral realism, but also flesh out each other’s lives, and the world they live in: brilliantly, accurately, each speaker is more concerned and more interested with themselves and their own lives and perceptions than with everyone else's. Through this anarchic oral history, we follow Lima and Belano all over the world: Mexico City, Barcelona, Paris, Provence, Tel Aviv, Vienna, San Diego, Malagua, Luanda, Kigali, Monrovia. They meet, they part, they meet again, they fall in and out of love, they begin to grow old. They are not universally beloved—one ex-girlfriend says of visceral realism, “The whole thing was a love letter, the demented strutting of a dumb bird in the moonlight, something essentially cheap and meaningless…Visceral realism was his exhausting dance of love for me.”

Through all this, Belano and Lima emerge as fascinating characters. Belano seems to be every young poet’s dream: he’s tough and rugged and loves poetry so much he reads it in the shower. Every woman he meets wants to have sex with him, and towards the end of the book, he has a knife fight with a critic. But the interviews paint a worse picture of him than they do of Ulises Lima, who is presented as a sort of beautiful, mysterious aesthete, the one whose genius seduces everyone into joining visceral realism. There is a heartbreaking moment towards the end, when Lima meets the once-detested Octavio Paz in a park. They speak briefly, and Paz is very kind, but obviously has no idea who Lima is. But both Belano and Lima have their foibles: Belano eventually is impotent, Lima mugs people in a park in Vienna, both live in constant poverty and irresponsibility, and both (it turns out) finance their short-lived poetry magazines and their Mexico City lifestyles by selling a kind of marijuana called “Acapulco Gold.”

The brief third section returns to García Madero’s diary, detailing their search through the Sonora Desert. In these closing pages, the book’s theme becomes readily apparent: The Savage Detectives is a book about the failure of young, romantic dreams, and a group of people who never outlive the loss and disappointment. It is a book about how sometimes finding what you want is worse than not finding it, and how few things ever live up to our imagined ideals. It is a sad book, and all the sadder because it was written by Bolaño, prematurely dead, as a lament for his dreams and his friends from his youth. It is also beautiful and relentlessly talented in a way few books ever are, and it has more honest things to say about the confluence of life and literature than anything written in the last fifty years. And it is intimately concerned with the implications of a life devoted to art, and to the honest expression of life through art. We spend 648 pages reading about Lima and Belano, two poets whose poems we never read, as they try to find Cesarea Tinajero, whose poems they never read, in an effort to develop a true and genuine poetic movement. As we read the oral history section, we realize that the diarist of the first and last parts is never mentioned: nobody remembers him, or has heard of him. Cesarea Tinajero is all but forgotten, and by the end of the book, despite all their adventures, all their effort, Ulises Lima is totally unknown to Octavio Paz and his assistant, and Arturo Belano walks off into Liberia in search of an anonymous death. Bolaño seems to be making a point: devotion to art is necessary, regardless of the content of that art. He is also unequivocal on his point about the necessity of art being genuine: one of the most wrenching moments in By Night in Chile is when he persists in demonstrating that the cultured upper-class has no problem discussing refined over-stylized "art" while genuine people are being tortured in basements; he likewise suggests that clichéd art is but the first step on the road to tyranny; further, his Distant Star seems to suggest that fascism is but the revenge of failed artists. Bolaño gives us these insights in straight, nuanced, colloquial language, combining the ridiculous and the sublime, the dangerous and the erotic, the tragic and the mundane. In its disorderly but relentless march toward failure, death, oblivion, and forgetfulness, The Savage Detectives is the best mirror of life that is possible in literature.

The Unconsoled

2009-08-27T15:53:00.000-07:00

The Unconsoled, by Kazuo Ishiguro
1995, 535 pp.

When researching which book to read from a well-regarded, well-established author whose work I am unfamiliar with, I tend to canvass all the available reviews and select not the most famous or most decorated book, but the book which sounds like the one I will enjoy the most. I try to give an author the benefit of the doubt, to begin on the best possible foot, then to proceed to the more difficult, more obscure, or more clichéd works. In retrospect, I have no idea what led me to decide to read Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled. It's true that the front cover carries a quote from the New York Times Book Review calling it "a work of art," but I am certain I didn't read that review. I read the one which says it "tries the reader's patience." And indeed it does. It tries and it fails.

In the interest of full disclosure, I must immediately report that I did not finish The Unconsoled, and I never will. I made it to page 314, where I found myself in a surprisingly detailed and explicit monologue about extremely elderly people having sex. The preceding 313 pages had given me no reason to continue, and when I skipped to the end to see if the whole thing was a dream or a death-hallucination, I found no explanation there either. I put the book aside and watched the airport carpet instead.

The Unconsoled deals with an apparently brilliant pianist named Ryder, who comes to an unnamed Central European city to give a concert. He is immediatley diverted and sent on a series of little errands. His schedule is apparently very busy, but he has no idea what is on it, and he seems to know (or thinks he knows) everyone he meets. He knows what the hotel porter is thinking and worrying about, in great detail, and when he meets the porter's daughter, he seems to have been married to her, or thinks he had been, or possibly remembers he was. He often has a whole conversation, then suddenly notices that someone else was standing there, or that the person he's talking to is carrying a large package, or that he's in a movie theater. He takes long, circuitous routes on his mysterious errands, then goes through a door and finds himself back where he started. Half the people he meets are old childhood friends. Some of his experiences are textbook nightmares: the person he tries to catch up with but can't, the place he has to get to but can't find, the party where he shows up in his bathrobe and has to give a speech, and so forth.

So I caught on pretty quickly that Ishiguro was playing games. I can handle the tired old auspices of the Unreliable Narrator, and I am well versed in the little games the surrealists play. I don't even need a plot, let alone one that makes sense. I read Thomas Bernhard and liked it. I got Ishiguro's general points (assuming, kindly, that he had any): every character seems to have problems relating to close family members, there is a sort of satire of the middle-class cult of art and artists, and the tension between personal duties and the duties of a public identity. That's all well and good, but the novel is terrible.

Part of the problem is the writing. The prose is flat, stilted, and formal, devoid of a single interesting phrase or memorable line. The first page contains six adverbs. Every line of dialogue is indentically stilted, and every character speaks in the same flat, horribly dull English, even Central Europeans and children. Look at this dreck:

"'As a matter of fact,' I said to her quietly, 'there was something I wished to talk to you about. But, er...'"

Say that out loud. I dare you. Obviously the "to her" can go, since she's the only person he's talking to. The "quietly" can probably go too, as any first-year writing teacher will remind you. "Wished" and "talk" belong to two different levels of formality: either you can "wish to speak to someone" or you can "want to talk to someone." "Wished to talk" sounds stupid. And "But, er"? Seriously? No one has ever said that, for the very good reason that someone might offer him toast.

And people blather this sort of stuff in monologues that can drag on for five, six, eight, or ten uninterrupted pages. It's utterly unreadable, and the slow pace, meaningless little quests, and total absence of logic make any given ten pages of The Unconsoled an identically boring, pointless, and frustrating read as any other given ten pages. Perhaps Ishiguro was trying to do a Kafka thing here, and make a few points about self-centered demands. But Kafka wrote about Everymen, who were always sympathetic and easy for the reader to identify with, caught up in the teeth of a cruelly indifferent, soulless bureaucracy. Ryder, the protagonist and narrator of The Unconsoled, is a bore and an ass, a totally self-centered, self-righteous, self-regarding imbecile whose personality consists entirely of his sense of entitlement and complete lack of curiosity about the world and everyone in it. He is a miserable presence to spend any number of pages with, let alone 538 of them. Nowhere is it suggested that Ryder is dreaming, hallucinating, dead, an alternate personality, or for that matter, a realistic character, an interesting figure, or in any way a worthwhile creation. The book ends with no explanation, no justification, no resolution. I do not mind a book with no point, but I object to a terrible book with no point.

I wonder why I read this instead of The Remains of the Day, which won Ishiguro the Booker, or Never Let Me Go, which the great M. John Harrison loved. Those may be perfectly good books, but I will probably never read them now, since Ishiguro will always taste for me like the grinding, stupid drudgery of this appalling mockery of a book. I paid a penny for it on Amazon and intend to leave an irate note complaining that I was cheated.

The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum

2009-08-27T15:10:00.000-07:00

The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, or: How Violence Develops and Where It Can Lead, by Heinrich Böll
1974, 140 pp.

Heinrich Böll seems to have led a rather difficult life. A Catholic pacifist who managed to get out of joining the Hitler Youth in the 1930's, he was conscripted into the Wehrmacht and fought in France, Romania, Hungary, and the Soviet Union, being wounded four times, then was captured by Americans and interred in a prisoner-of-war camp. His home city of Cologne was heavily damaged by Allied bombing, and he wrote in a style called "Trümmerliteratur"--the literature of the rubble. His books are short, sharp, and dark written in a simple, straightforward style, constantly attacking authority. During the attacks of the Baader-Meinhof Gang in the early 1970's, Böll (who by then had won the Nobel Prize) was appalled at the sensationalist, unethical, virulent posturing of the West German tabloid Bild-Zeitung, saying "[what Bild does] isn’t cryptofascist anymore, not fascistoid, but naked fascism, agitation, lies and dirt." The Bild immediately attacked him, labelling him a secret Communist and a terrorist sympathizer, suggesting he was in support if not in aid of the Red Army Faction. Böll wrote this short book based on those experiences.

The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum is about an honest, hardworking maid who meets a man at a party and falls in love. He spends the night at her house, but turns out to be a wanted bank robber. He escapes, possibly with her help, and she is brought in by the police for questioning. She had nothing to do with the bank robberies, and seemed to be unaware that the man was a criminal, but the tabloid press paints her as a cold-blooded terrorist and ruins her life. After her cancer-ridden mother dies (due to the verbal badgering of a tabloid reporter who sneaks into her hotel room), Katharina Blum shoots the reporter and turns herself in. This story is presented in 58 short chapters, some less than a page, written in a detached, ironic tone. At times it is surprisingly funny: "she rings the front doorbell at the home of Walter Moeding, Crime Commissioner, who is at the moment engaged, for professional rather than private reasons, in disguising himself as a sheikh..." Mostly it is sarcastic and bitter, dripping with barely-restrained fury. By the second page (or even by the end of the back-cover blurb) the reader knows everything that is going to happen. This removes any subjective emotional experience, which is necessarily based on surprise, and leaves only Böll's skill and vast contempt to animate the book.

This it does well. Böll's narrator is quite self-aware, and plays around a bit with the time scheme, constantly apologizing and making asides to the reader: "Before embarking on our final diversion and rerouting maneuvers we must be permitted to make the following 'technical' interjection. Too much is happening in this story. To an embarassing, almost ungovernable degree, it is pregnant with action: to its disadvantage." This narration depends entirely on the outrage provoked by the contrast between what we are dryly informed is the case and how the tabloid news articles present the story. I was curious why the narrator is allowed to speak frankly and ridicule the tabloids, instead of slathering on another layer of bitter sarcasm and pretending that the News! is an upstanding pillar of democracy. Nevertheless, the presentation is excellently crafted, and when Katharina Blum is allowed to speak at the end, the effect is suitably tragic and infuriating. I felt nothing through most of the book except for admiration at Böll's skill, but I finished it angry, which is exactly what he intended.

Katharina Blum is a good piece of work, and carries particular resonance in light of the utterly deplorable behavior of the American media during the years of the Bush junta, but I would not call it an essential read. I look forward to investigating Böll's pre-Nobel work, especially his Billiards at Half-Past Nine, but Katharina Blum is necessary only for habitual completists and people who haven't yet heard that the media is full of liars, sharks, and scoundrels.

Phantom Prey

2009-08-27T14:38:00.000-07:00

Phantom Prey, by John Sandford
2009, 438 pp.

Though it may be difficult to believe, and though it may provoke outrage and offense among the general readership, it must be stated without equivocation that the present author has at times been accused of elitism. It is all lies and slander, I know, but I daresay it startled me entirely out of Sordello's 1237 lament in the Occitan sirventes-planh style over the death of his patron Blacatz (so effectively parodied, of course, in Canto VII of the Purgatorio) and left me with no recourse but a response. I offer it here.

I love detective novels. I admit it freely, without reservation or embarassment. Donald E. Westlake remains one of my favorite writers, especially in his Richard Stark pseudonym (he had something like thirteen pseudonymns and wrote about a hundred books) and I judge all dialogue by the formidable standard of Elmore Leonard. John Sandford (which is a pseudonym for the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Camp...you see how deep the rabbit-hole goes) has always been a favorite. I've read approximately twelve of his "Prey" novels, which feature a Minneapolis detective named Lucas Davenport. Unhelpfully, all are titled "(Adjective) Prey," and the adjective never gives any indication what exactly the book is about, so I have a devil of a time remembering if Winter Prey was the one about the Native American terrorists or the guy who hides in the water tower, or if Secret Prey was about the female assassin or the one with the Russians. Maybe the one with the female assassin had Russians in it? I have no idea.

At any rate, I love these books. Davenport starts out as an obligatory maverick detective in the first few, with a lot of money from a computer software company he founded and a Porsche and good fashion sense and a hot reporter girlfriend and depression and a good ability to kill bad guys. Over time he ends up as the deputy police chief and then the governor's troubleshooter cop, and now works for the stupidly-named (but apparently real) Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. He's caught like a dozen serial killers by now and probably shot like a hundred people and been shot about seven times and now is married to a hot surgeon who is inexplicably named "Weather." His friends and colleagues are all well-drawn and well developed by now (this is the 18th book in the series) and I've read so many that they fit like a comfortable pair of socks. Sandford rarely fails to deliver what you want: the plots are suspenseful, the villians evil and devious, the murders satisfyingly grisly, the sex happily explicit and frequent, and there's an action scene at the end. I made a note early on: "Pg. 15--two murders, lots of nipples." I bought Phantom Prey at the airport in Singapore before a flight to Tokyo and finished it in one sitting before we passed Taiwan.

Unfortunately, this is not a particularly good entry in the series. The plot concerns the disappearance of a rich girl who seems to have been a Goth and whose Goth acquaintances soon start dying. There is a rocky start as Sanford tries to build suspense by giving the reader a lot of sentences without verbs ("Something wrong here") instead of using the perfectly effective free-indirect style. Things pick up when Sanford gets into the nuts-and-bolts of police procedural, at which he is exceptionally skilled. The dialogue is solid, and there are some good lines: "the smell of the old cigarette butts closed in around them," or "the coffee had never seen Seattle, or even heard of it." Here's a good example of the kind of thing he does:

"Back out into the skyways, getting-out-of-the-office time, crowds jostling though to the parking ramps, a few of the younger women showing some pre-spring skin, the teen guys flashing tattoos over health-club muscles, their elders often with the competitive, fixed, dead-eyed, and querulous stare of people who were not getting far enough, fast enough, making enough, hustling all the time, working all the time, no time for an evening's paseo, no time even for half-fast food. Scuttling people."

The trouble is that about halfway through it becomes clear that he hasn't been playing fair. He nearly almost uses My Least Favorite Plot Twist Ever, in which it turns out that several people, including the killer, are in fact one person's alternate personalities. This is particularly infuriating because I like Sanford exactly due to his avoidance of these sorts of games. His suspense is always genuine, never authorial tricks, and his villains are never Hollywood stereotypes. His policework is always spot-on and believable, and he usually seems to respect the reader enough to be honest and put in some effort to plotting and research. Not so much here. Whether he is running out of steam this late in the series or was under a contractual obligation or domestic pressure I do not know, but Phantom Prey is ultimately a disappointment, even as an airplane read. Even the ending action sequence comes as the resolution of an entirely unnecessary subplot: a subplot which seemed to exist solely to provide some occasional nudity and the climactic action. The writing is skillful enough, and Sanford knows his characters and his subject well enough to be in complete control, but he demonstrates his skill far better elsewhere. I suspect I will remember which Prey this one is, but not for good reasons.

By Night in Chile

2009-08-27T13:41:00.000-07:00

By Night in Chile, by Roberto Bolaño
2000, 130 pp.

While reading reviews of Roberto Bolaño's novel The Savage Detectives, I could not help but notice that everyone who writes anything about Bolaño mentions By Night in Chile at some point. It is frequently the reviewer's introduction to Bolaño (James Wood seems to have stolen his copy from a friend) and is referred to in hushed tones, like a powerful talisman or a frightening bouncer, often using phrases like "glittering perfection." It is a short book, and I was greatly enjoying The Savage Detectives, so I obtained it immediately to see what Bolaño can do with the notoriously difficult novella form.

The answer is, he can do anything he wants. Novellas are tricky creatures: too long to be a short story which has only one sustained theme and few scenes, but too short to develop subplots and major complications as in a novel. Bolaño solves the problem by structuring the novella as a rambling deathbed monologue, delivered in a single 130-page paragraph. The dying man was a conservative Jesuit priest named Father Urrita, who was something of a toady and a hanger-on to the conservatives who supported and constituted the Pinochet regime. He fawns on a famous literary critic, meets Pablo Neruda, goes on absurd missions for Opus Dei, and gives Pinochet and his generals lessons in Marxism. He seems a bit unhinged, alternately boastful and defensive, and all the while plagued by visions of a "wizened youth," who follows him through his life, judging him.

Bolaño presents this in long, coiled, lovely sentences, almost precisely in the style of the great José Saramago. This seems like an almost gratuitous demonstration of skill. In The Savage Detectives, Bolaño proves that he can mimic anyone's voice with precision: here he proves he can adopt the voice of one of the century's finest writers. Bolaño lived in Barcelona for some time and was immensely well-read, so I cannot assume he was unfamiliar with Saramago's work, but instead recognized the beauty and grace of the long, eventful sentence demonstrated in Saramago's work, and in the work of Thomas Bernhard and W.G. Sebald. He apparently was not content simply to show off his control of the novella as a form, he also is demonstrating his mastery of style and the sublime improvements that choice of style lends to his solutions to the difficulties of the form. Have a look at this, a small fragment broken off from a giant, powerful sentence:

"and in its own way the painting was an altar for human sacrifice, and in its own way the painting was an acknowledgement of defeat, not the defeat of Paris or the defeat of European culture bravely determined to burn itself down, not the political defeat of certain ideals that the painter tepidly espoused, but his personal defeat, the defeat of an obscure, poor Guatemalan, who had come to the City of Light determined to make his name in its artistic circles, and the way in which the Guatemalan accepted his defeat, with a clear-sightedness reaching far beyond the realm of the particular and anecdotal..."

That sentence goes on for about three pages, telling the story of an artist dying alone in an attic. There are lots of lengthy stories in the book, all of them ending in failure and loss. When another story ends, we are treated to a startling simile: "And when I finished telling this story, Farewell was still staring at me, his half-closed eyes like empty bear traps ruined by time and rain and freezing cold."

Bolaño is also, as ever, scathingly political. Bolaño was an outspoken leftist, once jailed by the Pinochet regime, and lived a long time in exile. His work shows enormous, monolithic contempt for writers he considers to be government stooges or "neo-Stalinists," like Neruda, as well as for the so-called "peasant poets" or (or to Bolaño, merchants of "otherness" or "neo-PRI-ists") like Octavio Paz. His guerrilla "infrarealist" movement, parodied lovingly and sadly in The Savage Detectives was something of a literary Left Opposition, an anti-authoritarian left movement whose enemies were everyone in power, everyone with institutional backing, regardless of their position on the political spectrum. Here, in a slightly unfair but fiercely polemical bit of moral equivalence, he seems to suggest that an affection for Neruda is but the first step on the road to Pinochet.

Ultimately, By Night in Chile is a scathing condemnation of the sort of anxious intellectuals who, desperate for reassurance and self-preservation, ally themselves to power and proceed to utilize their intellects to rationalize and explain away their self-serving perfidy. There can be little doubt that the "wizened youth" is anyone other than Bolaño himself, sitting in judgment on a whole generation of moral cowardice and received opinions. By Night in Chile is a beautiful, savage, angry book, and it proves its author a writer of the very first rank, and a formidable man of conscience.

Freud: A Life for Our Time

2009-08-03T11:47:00.000-07:00

Freud: A Life for Our Time, by Peter Gay
1988, 810 pp.

Biography is a difficult and disreputable art, much beloved by lay readers and despised by experts. Certainly everyone can agree on the need for biographies in general, but it is rare indeed to find anyone who agrees on the need for one specific biography in particular. Sigmund Freud was no different: he went to some length to frustrate his future biographers, often destroying years of correspondence and notes, and writing (after his own regrettable flirtation with biographical writing) that "Whoever turns biographer commits himself to lies, to concealment, to hypocrisy, to embellishments, and even to dissembling his own lack of understanding, for biographical truth is not to be had, and, even if one had it, one could not use it." Peter Gay, the German-born cultural historian, is so thoroughly steeped in all of Freud’s ideas that he has the wit to cite this sentence on the very first page of his introduction to this enormous and enormously comprehensive volume. Perhaps only Gay could have written this book: his curriculum vitae boasts six books on Freud, a four-volume history of bourgeois culture, some serious work on the Second International, a history of Weimar culture, work on Voltaire’s politics, and four books on the Enlightenment. He is a formidably meticulous scholar, which makes the book fascinating without being flashy. “I have tried to be accurate rather than startling,” he says, and with a subject matter as contentious as the life and work of Sigmund Freud, that he accomplishes this is an impressive feat.

I will save the reader of this review from a lengthy play-by-play of Freud’s life. In events it was rather dull: his family moved from Frieberg to Vienna when he was quite young, and he lived in Vienna his entire life, mostly in the same apartment at Berggasse 19. He took several trips to Italy, which he loved, and one to America, which he hated, studied briefly in Paris as a young man, and eventually was forced to emigrate to London after the Anschluss. He was married to the same woman for 53 years and had six children. And he wrote a lot of books.

Gay argues immediately that it is impossible to separate Freud from Freudian thought. Something of a committed Freudian himself, his chapter on Freud’s early life reads like a summary of The Interpretation of Dreams, as Gay points to the where the seeds of Freud’s thought were hidden in Freud’s youthful experiences. Gay is also keen to explain away any of Freud’s professional, personal, or theoretical mistakes through psychoanalytical reasoning. Poor reasoning or petty personal conflicts are fairly consistently chalked up to unresolved conflicts within Freud’s (or Jung’s, or Adler’s, or Ferenczi’s) ego. This is not always persuasive, and reveals Gay as a more incisive historian of ideas than personal biographer, and sometimes seems to indicate that the author is avoiding asking really tough questions of his subject. Gay tends to side with Freud on all of the major conflicts in his life, from the early break with Breuer over the importance of sexuality in psychological development (which Freud later discarded), through the break with Jung over the character of the libido, all the way up until the later fights with Ferenczi’s idea of “intense empathy” and “mutual analysis.” But Gay is always factually accurate: where Freud makes mistakes or produces terrible books, Gay says so, but does not take the further step of considering what impact those mistakes have on the body of Freud’s thought as a whole. I took careful notes of Gay’s analysis of each of Freud’s books, and when compiled they paint a much less rosy picture of Freudian thought than one is left with upon reading the book. Consider this list:

The famous “talking cure” developed in the therapy with “Anna O.” was far from the instant cure Freud presented it as in his 1895 Studies on Hysteria. Anna O. was in treatment at three other clinics until well into the 1880’s, the talking cure having played no part (as Jung himself discovered and pointed out later) in her recovery

The famous “Irma’s Injection” dream from Freud’s 1900 The Interpretation of Dreams was about a patient named Irma who was nearly killed by the malpractice of Freud’s friend Wilhelm Fleiss. Freud had referred “Irma” (whose real name was Emma Eckstein) to Fleiss, who left a piece of gauze in her nose after an operation. When it was finally removed, after she spent weeks almost bleeding to death, she was left permanently disfigured. Freud later covered for Fleiss, and convinced him to continue practicing medicine.

Freud consistently invented stories about childhood sexual trauma which he attributed to his patients, most notably “Dora” from his 1905 case study. Dora was being molested by a family friend, but Freud interpreted this as a repressed sexual attraction to her father. Dora denied this (on the fairly rational grounds that it’s absolutely stupid) but Freud “took her ‘most emphatic contradiction’ as proof that he was right in his conjecture.” Much later he recognized this “heads-I-win-tails-you-lose” policy was hardly scientific and was criticized for it, but never recanted his analysis, and still proceeded to build an intellectual edifice on what was essentially fiction. He frequently found himself later in life forced to blame his patients for making up stories and deceiving him, when in fact it was he who forced them to admit the truth of scenarios he had invented. Gay follows him in this, explaining away Freud’s duplicity as a “lack of empathy” towards his patients and particularly “Freud’s general difficulty in visualizing erotic encounters from a woman’s perspective.”

In his early work on hysteria (circa 1895), Freud presented a paper in which he claimed that all 18 hysterical cases he had examined had their roots in childhood sexual trauma. Unfortunately, the rest of his speech refers to a half-dozen of them which are exceptions. By the time he revisited the topic in 1897, he admitted to a friend that he dropped his work on hysteria because not one case confirmed to his hypothesis.

Freud’s 1901 Psychopathology of Everyday Life, which is the origin of the famous “Freudian slip,” was based deeply in the now-discredited work of Wilhelm Fleiss, and argued for no less than psychological determinism. This book sustained the least criticism from Gay, but was among the most disliked by Freud himself, and added nothing in terms of theoretical structure, only an entertaining popularization.

Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality is probably the cornerstone of Freudian theory, and receives the highest praise from Gay, who paints an image of Freud the scientific pioneer battling both the societal repression of the Victorian bourgeois and his own conservative, straight-laced sense of decency. But, in Gay's own estimation, it fails to address the nature of the sex drive, the nature of sexual excitation, a defensible definition of pleasure, or provide any concrete evidence of its claims.

There are exactly six extended case studies in Freud, including Daniel Paul Schreber, who Freud knew from an autobiography but never met, and a child called Little Hans, who Freud met once briefly but analyzed with the father as “intermediary.” The Wolf Man was initially considered a big success, but soon relapsed and later said that what helped was Freud’s kindness, not his analysis. One case study was just a lesbian with nothing wrong, though Freud thought homosexuality to be a version of narcissism and stunted sexual development. Dora has already been discussed. The Rat Man, I must admit, was a success, but one accidental success does not make for a general theory.

By the time he gets to Freud’s later, more speculative work, even the resolute Professor Gay seems to throw up his hands. Yes, all of Freud’s speculation in his biography of Leonardo da Vinci was based on a single sentence which itself was a mistranslation. Yes, his theory of the origin of civilization in Totem and Taboo was based on an incorrect speculation by an anthropologist named Robertson Smith, and on Freud’s long-held Lamarckian views, which, as everyone now knows, were incorrect. “This was sheer extravagance,” Gay says, “piled upon the earlier extravagance of the claim that the primal murder [which founded civilization] had been a historical event.” But “Freud firmly stood by his improbable reconstruction.”

By the 1920’s when Freud was writing Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, and The Ego and the Id, poor Professor Gay finds himself having to deal with his contradictions and inconsistencies. “Freud rarely spelled out the precise import of his self-correction,” Gay writes, perhaps in frustration. “He would not specify just what he had discarded, what modified, and what kept intact from his earlier formulations, but instead left the adjustment of apparently irreconcilable statements to his readers.” After all, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud says that even he doesn’t believe what he’s saying, just that he is following an idea to what he felt was its logical conclusion. Naturally, he defended that idea as though it were a doctrinal proof, but without acknowledging that he did indeed take it seriously.

Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety “strings together ideas instead of demonstrating their necessary connection,” and shows a Freud who is “anxious to be done once and for all with the work of rebuilding.” The Question of Lay Analysis is written as a dialogue for a popular audience, defending the idea that psychoanalysis requires no medical training or licensing, and was written after one of his acolytes was sued for quackery. Freud’s analytic study of Woodrow Wilson, on which he collaborated with a dubious character named William Bullitt is so embarrassing, so full of “snide antagonism and mechanical psychologizing,” that Gay tries desperately to suggest that perhaps Freud only wrote the introduction and only claimed to write more of it in an effort to sound more important. He is left wondering why Freud would lend himself to such a “caricature of psychoanalysis.” At this point in the book I repeatedly wondered over coffee with friends how anyone took Freud seriously. Imagine my gratification to find that the great A.J.P. Taylor reviewed Freud's book and concluded by asking: "How did anyone ever manage to take Freud seriously?"

Freud’s final book, Moses and Monotheism is “more conjectural than Totem and Taboo, more untidy than Inhibitions, more offensive than The Future of an Illusion.” It consists of three linked essays, the last and longest of which has two initial prefaces which effectively cancel each other out, and a third preface in the middle, which repeats earlier information. Here Professor Gay is reduced to assuring the reader that this was out of design rather than senility. The book postulates Moses as a real historical person, an Egyptian non-Jew and something of an anti-Semite who was murdered by the ancient Hebrews in an re-enactment of the foundational father-murder from Totem and Taboo. This would make the historical Jesus the leader of the primal father-murderers, and Christianity a big lie, contrasted to the older father-religion of Judaism. That there is no evidence whatsoever of the actual life of either Moses or Jesus seems not to have given Freud pause.

Then there is the infamous Cocaine Incident. The notoriety of Freud’s 1884 paper “On Coca” is so great that it is nearly a chore to revisit this subject, but it is necessary for any sustained critique of Freud’s life and work. “On Coca” purports to be the successful treatment of morphine withdrawal using cocaine. The patient was Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow, who was using morphine to combat excruciatingly painful neuromas due to the amputation of several fingers. The treatment was not only a failure, since Fleischl did not break his morphine addiction and had no reduction in pain, but Fleischl became addicted to cocaine, began injecting himself with enormous quantities, and died six years later addicted to both substances, apparently from what we now call a “speedball.” It gets worse for Freud: he was aware that the treatment was unsuccessful, since he wrote about it in a letter a month before publishing his article. So he knew when he wrote the article that he was lying, but published it anyway, and though he claimed to be wracked by guilt, he never took responsibility for his failed treatment which contributed to a man’s death. Even worse, Freud’s letters mention at least two other occasions in which he mis-diagnosed physical ailments as psychological ones, leading to the deaths of patients. Freud it seems was not only a non-scientific speculative theorist basing his theories in now-discredited pseudo-science, but further was an accomplice to and a committer of repeated fatal malpractice.

There is a pattern here: Freud would consistently boast of scientific breakthroughs he had not yet achieved, then would falsify either the process or the results to conform to his preconceived ideas, and would later revise his theories based on new evidence (or blame the old mistakes on other people’s errors) in order to avoid admitted that he had serially committed scientific fraud. Gay is never this explicit. He deals with the cocaine episode, though he never returns to Freud’s life-long cocaine habit, and follows Freud in attributing his errors to other people and to Freud’s well-meaning personality mistakes. The evidence he presents is all factually accurate, but he does not draw the reader's attention to its implications, either out of a misguided sense of impartiality or a less-defensible allegiance to Freud's reputation.

What survives unscathed? The Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, and Freud’s late attacks on civilization and religion, all of which are interesting, but by their very nature speculative and impossible to prove scientifically, and indeed are based in Freud's earlier fraudulent work. But then, Professor Gay, the consummate historian of culture and ideas, follows Stefan Zweig’s argument that Freud is best understood as a philosopher and moral theorist, and argues that his real importance is his impact on culture and ideas. To come to grips with Freud necessitates coming to grips with this question. At times Gay refers to some of Freud’s work as quasi-historical novels, often draws parallels to Freud’s love of art, and argues that Freud possessed a frustrated longing to engage in artistic creation. This seems hardly fair play. Freud maintained his entire life that he was a serious, rigorous scientist who was revolutionizing the world in the same mold as Copernicus and Darwin. He saw himself as doing for the human mind what calculus had done for the natural world, and tersely noted in his diary every year that he was “again passed over for the Nobel Prize.” A thinker must be judged based on the goals he sets for himself, and if Freud (and his acolytes) maintained that he was a serious scientist, then it is as a serious scientist that he must be judged, and found wanting. Moreover, bad science, particularly bad science which, as we have seen, has been falsified by the scientist, cannot later be explained away as deliberate works of fiction. I, for instance, intend to pursue a career as an academic economist. If I were to falsify a paper (let alone my entire life’s work) and be caught out in it, I could hardly explain that it wasn’t actually economics at all, but that on the contrary, I was writing very clever poetry.

And while Freud’s impact on the artistic world cannot be questioned, it was that application of his theories which annoyed him the most. Gay never tires of referring to him as a quintessential bourgeois, and his stolid, conservative artistic tastes reflect that characterization: he had no interest in the Modernists or the avant-garde artists who were actually influenced by him. He wrote several polemics against “wild analysis,” and despised the watering-down of his specific clinical vocabulary to take in general, ill-defined cultural trends. Of course, he and his followers almost constantly engaged in “wild analysis,” using psychoanalytic language as a weapon in their petty personal disputes, and Freud argued in favor of “lay analysis,” which is quite difficult to separate from the “wild” variety. The inextricable cultural utility of Freud’s terms and the prevalence of their use in artistic discussion would have infuriated him, so we can hardly judge him a success because he succeeded in doing exactly what he tried not to do.

But it cannot be denied that Freud’s language has a powerful resonance. A recent study by the American Psychoanalytic Association found that Freud is widely taught in American universities, but only in arts, culture, and social science departments. If Freud is mentioned at all in psychology and psychiatry courses, it is as a dead tributary of psychological thought, important only for historical context. Instead, versions of his ideas live on in cultural studies, not because of their scientific accuracy or clinical application, but because in their widest interpretation they can accurately reflect patterns which emerge from a sustained study of human expression. These patterns existed well before Freud, and rather than diagnosing them as he claimed, he was so steeped in them that he gave them their most precise expression. There is quite a lot of validity to Harold Bloom’s joke about how a Freudian reading of Shakespeare is less useful than a Shakespearean reading of Freud, that Hamlet did not have an Oedipus complex so much as Freud had a Hamlet complex. Recognizing the practical utility of the modern rendition of Freud’s vocabulary, we must conclude that we can keep Freudian ideas only if we strip out Freud himself and end up with terms so divorced from what he originally meant that they preserve only the sound and spelling of the word, but none of its original content. Since the tragic flaw of Freudian theory seems to have been Freud himself, it is only by removing him and his actual ideas that we can salvage some meaning, albeit transformed, from his work.

That I could even conduct the above discussion is due to Professor Gay’s scrupulous, unimpeachable scholarship and splendid writing. I consumed this daunting book at a startling rate and emerged with a grasp not only of Freud’s theories but with a wealth of factual minutiae which is slightly alarming. I know who gave Freud his famous couch, I know what his favorite opera was, and I know how many operations he endured due to his mouth cancer. I know his dog’s name, his address, and where he bought his hats. I am conversant in all of Freud’s various friendship-ending disputes, with Fleiss, with Jung, with Adler and Rank, and with Ferenczi. I took something like thirty pages of notes, which I have endeavored (and failed) to spare the reader in this review, and even read the lengthy, meticulous bibliographical essay which ended the volume. Though I dispute many of the author’s analyses and conclusions and feel he is too kind to his subject, I will state without equivocation that this book is one of the finest works of scholarship, intellectual history, and biography I have ever read, and it is with great pleasure that I look forward to experiencing Professor Gay’s numerous other works.

The River of Lost Footsteps

2009-07-31T15:04:00.000-07:00

The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma, by Thant Myint-U
2007, 388 pp.

Burma has the dubious distinction of being home to both the world’s longest-ruling military dictatorship and the world’s longest-running civil war, yet receives among the least Western attention of any country outside of sub-Saharan Africa. It is the sort of place about which it is fashionable to have an ill-informed political opinion, and which lends itself well to the sort of simplistic morality play so favored by the facile American analysis of foreign affairs. That the brutal military junta is guilty of innumerable crimes and the immiseration of its people is without question; that Aung San Suu Kyi won the free and fair elections in 1990 is also beyond doubt; that the Burmese people have suffered and continue to suffer grievously at the hands of their overlords is self-evident. Yet there is a need for an informed, expert account of modern Burmese history written especially for a Western audience. It is that gap which Thant Myint-U, a trained historian and social scientist, an experienced UN employee, and the grandson of Secretary General U Thant, set out to fill with The River of Lost Footsteps. It would therefore be a backhanded compliment indeed to call it the best history of modern Burma, but I fear that backhanded is as kind as I can be. Despite an impressive breadth of knowledge on display and despite the author’s manifest familiarity with his subject, The River of Lost Footsteps is not a particularly good read. I am glad that it exists, and glad that I read it, but I hope that the field of modern Burmese history will not end with this book.

I began in high spirits: the epigram to the first chapter is footnoted, and on following the footnote, I was delighted to see that I would be treated to endnotes in Chicago-style formatting, which is the Johnny Walker of citation styles. The first chapter begins with the fall of the Burmese monarchy to the British in 1885. This seemed like a logical place to begin a history of modern Burma, but the trouble reared its ugly head immediately. Chapter Two is about who the author is and why he wrote the book, and therefore ought to have gone first. It simply serves as an interruption as the second chapter, and while the epigram to Chapter One is from a nineteenth century memoir, the epigram to Chapter Two is a Seinfeld quote, fairly accurately reflecting the decline in scholarly quality. Chapter Three begins well before the birth of Siddhartha Gautama, which cannot be considered "modern" by any stretch of the imagination, and there the scale of the problem became clear. Thant Myint-U is terribly, horribly, unspeakably fond of beginning in the middle, doubling back to the beginning to explain how the middle got to be the middle, then proceeding to the end. The technique of beginning in the middle is legitimately useful in film, where it is called “in medias res,” but is confusing and unpleasant in historical narrative. The book as a whole is in medias res; individual chapters are in medias res, and sometimes the brief sections which make up the chapters are in medias res. This makes the book damned difficult to follow, annoyingly repetitive, and a trifle amateurish. It is not helped by Thant’s habit of sketching the critical middle scene in a sort of fictionalized, novelish way, often devoid of footnotes. The book opens, for instance, with the last king of Burma deciding to flee the palace. But we have no idea what that actual scene was like, and neither does Thant, since he never cites any sources for it. How does he know what these people looked like and what they were feeling? As a trained historian, I know he has no real idea: he’s assumed, and he’s taking some poetic license. That is not the business of history.

Furthermore, he tends to rely very heavily on a few books which he effectively summarizes to provide some sense of narrative structure. Chapter One is mostly a summary of his own previous book and A.T.Q. Stewart’s The Pagoda War. The chapter on the Second World War is a summary of General Slim’s excellent Defeat into Victory, and Louis Allen’s Burma, The Longest War. The three chapters on Burma’s ancient and medieval history are interminable and irrelevant. They distract from the point of the book, seem to bear little importance to modern events (except for the point that the Burmese have a successful military history) and squat like a forbidding wall in the center of the book. This is unfortunate, since it will probably deter many readers who don’t care about fifteenth century imperial Burma and will discourage them from pressing on and reaching the very good later chapters. When Thant actually gets around to the British occupation, the Second World War, and the struggle for independence, he is at his best and is often quite good indeed. He has a terrific eye for the strange detail and peculiar character, which never moves the book along, but does at least make it interesting. Sometimes this misfires and he seems to be spouting non sequiturs, and frequently they require that you already know what Whitehall is, and who the Taiping rebels were in order to make any sense at all.

The famous 1988 uprising is discussed in Chapter Two, and then is mainly skipped over in the latter chronological chapter where it would seem to belong. I forgot entire about Chapter Two until I went back and consulted my notes, so for many pages I thought he’d overlooked it. The section on Aung San Suu Kyi is quite brief and perfunctory, possibly due to his conviction that his audience already knows a bit about her. He tends to insert his own and his family’s experience when his fractured narrative is otherwise unable to make a point, and this habit, combined with his choice to devote time and attention in greater proportion to subjects which most interest him undermines any sense that the book is communicating authoritative history. Thant should have cut the “Personal” out of the subtitle and gone with a regular history instead. There is no kind way of saying it, but the tragic flaw in this book is its author.

Nevertheless, I learned a lot about Burma, and can now draw from its colonial experience and modern dictatorship a number of interesting observations which are relevant to general discussions of empire, decolonization, state building, and so forth. It is valuable to know that the Burmese government was set up as a puppet fascist regime by Imperial Japan, that it is comprised of Buddhist Burmese-speakers who are but one of over three hundred ethnic groups, that it has been fighting and killing the Christian Karen people in the Shan states for decades, and that the military is also the only institution likely to survive future years of isolation. Thant even includes fairly logical and persuasive policy recommendations at the end, which is certainly welcome. Interested readers would do well to read Chapters Seven and Nine through Twelve, but skip the medieval sections and the utterly incoherent middle chapter on social history. There is much knowledge to be gained from this book, but you must pry it with some effort from the author’s rather confused clutches.

Dubliners

2009-07-28T15:22:00.000-07:00

Dubliners, by James Joyce
1914, 190 pp.

In my review of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I was at pains to make clear that the book can be read and enjoyed simply as a novel by any general reader, without the crossword-puzzle burden of deciphering and scholarly puzzling which is so inextricably linked with the Joyce mystique. Certainly there are all manner of images and motifs which can be unpacked from that book, and to some extent they deepen the reader’s appreciation for Joyce’s work, but it is perfectly good to just pick up and read, and the professoriat have already done enough to scare readers away from actually reading Joyce, which is an intellectual and cultural travesty to which I have no interest in contributing. Dubliners, however, requires some careful exegesis: its fifteen stories are structured with such delicacy and enigmatic precision that some are nearly incomprehensible without thorough examination. Joyce doesn’t so much show or tell many of these stories as suggest them, in the way a skilled filmmaker will create an empty place in the frame and let the audience anticipate the image which will fill it. Dubliners is an intricate puzzle which is at once a concrete depiction of lower-middle class life in turn-of-the-century Dublin, and a meditative fugue on the various flavors of failure.

Joyce said that each story centers on his idea of an epiphany: a moment in which a character has a sudden rush of self-understanding or illumination. I think that is too broad a statement. Each story deals with a sudden realization of the scope of a character’s failure, their recognition of their insignificance and irrelevance in the world. Joyce presents here fifteen different and distinct flavors of failure and disappointment, each fully realized and precisely evoked. He tastes the subtle gradations of failure the way other people taste fine wine.

The first few stories are narrated by child characters, and as the stories continue they deal with the lives and concerns of gradually older people, shifting from children to siblings to parents and spouses. There are some stylistic developments: part of “A Painful Case” is written as a newspaper story, and part of “Grace” is written as a sermon. Hynes's poem in “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” parodies (though sympathetically) Joyce's own first poem, written at age 9 in the style of Byron, on the death of Parnell, the famous Irish nationalist politician. There are two adolescent, first-experience stories, then two sporting stories, two stories about love, two stories about politics, two about religion, two about bachelor life, and four on petty clerks (two single and two married). The collection ends with festive life, with a story called “The Dead,” set in the winter, probably on the Feast of Epiphany. The first and last stories, “The Sisters,” and “The Dead,” form bookends to the collection as a whole, and are therefore worth considering at some length.

For such a brief story, “The Sisters” must be among the most widely-dissected pieces of writing in the English language. A cursory search returned no less than 57 peer-reviewed scholarly articles, some running to a length many times that of the story itself. My favorite title of the bunch was “Between Resistance and Complicity: Metro-Colonial Tactics in Joyce’s ‘Dubliners.’” The story was first published independently in 1904, under the rather significant pseudonym “Stephen Daedalus.” It is a brief account of the death of an old, crippled priest, seen through the eyes of a young boy who was his friend. The boy’s uncle drops repeated hints about an inappropriate relationship between the two, though the boy does not understand what he means, and at the end, as the boy first discovers death, his mother and he talk with the dead priest’s sisters, who seem to deal with the death superficially and meaninglessly, and mention that the priest had suffered a breakdown after accidentally breaking a chalice. The story rather trails off, leaving the reader wondering why a story about a young boy and a dead priest is called “The Sisters.”

Joyce wrote in a letter that the old priest in “The Sisters” was intended as a symbol of Irish life: priest-ridden and semi-paralyzed. The priest has an important effect on the younger generation, but dies and leaves the young to fend for themselves. "The Sisters" contains suggestions of improper sex, but we end the story blind to the reality, chained as we are to the narrow perceptions of the young boy. We never know the truth. The story opens with a male world, proceeds through ellipses and vagueness, ends in a female world, registering the contrast between the different social roles for the two genders. The men speak in half-sentences, the women in clichés, though the women are the dominant figures in the story. The dead priest’s sisters seem too wrapped up in themselves and the necessities of their self-centered adulthood to feel much of anything about their brother’s death, whereas the young boy who was only his friend, and that briefly, experiences the priest’s death as a pivotal moment. The story seems therefore to be slightly about the authenticity of youth contrasted with the falseness of adult society, and about the boy’s realization of that dichotomy. The failure here is not his, but that of the sisters, and the story is the boy’s realization of their failure. There is also the failure of the priest to succeed as a priest and uphold his assigned duties. “The duties of the priesthood was too much for him,” one of the sisters says. “And then his life was, you might say, crossed.”

It is difficult but worthwhile to follow Joyce’s thought process in the very first paragraph of “The Sisters,” which we know he substantially revised once he had conceived of Dubliners as a whole:

“Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being.”

A “gnomon” in Euclid is a parallelogram with one side missing, much like how paralysis restricts movement and sensation to one side. A gnomon is something like the geometric expression of a partial existence. It is interesting that Joyce limits the meaning to the Euclidian one, since a gnomon in general is the part of a sundial that casts a shadow, and comes from the Greek for “that which reveals.” “Gnomon” and “simon” rhyme, (and “gnomon” sounds a bit like “no man,” but that be reading too deeply, if such a thing is possible with Joyce) and simony is the sin of selling religious offices, or making profit from sacred things. The story suggests that the priest in question was guilty of this. Simony was pivotal in the 1075-1122 Investiture Controversy, (until, of course, it was settled by the Concordat of Worms) and its practitioners were condemned by Dante to the eighth circle of hell, which Joyce, having a powerful affinity for Dante, would certainly have known. Finally, the word “simon” both does literally sound like the word “demon,” which is a “maleficent and sinful being,” and also comes from the name of Simon Magus, who turns up in the Acts of the Apostles and who was considered by Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Epiphanius as the origin of all heresy. Joyce, with his religious upbringing and Jesuit education certainly knew this as well. So we can follow the cognitive chain which proceeds thus: paralysis-parallelogram-gnomon-simon-demon. Taken tout court, it reads as an opening thesis: Ireland is paralyzed by and leads a half-existence due to its moral, physical, and spiritual heresies.

But heresies in what sense? In the sense that they are restrictive, repressive, self-generating, and are not a natural expression of humanity. They constrain humanity, producing self-centered adults like the two titular sisters, instead of authentic, feeling human beings. The moment of sudden, cruel realization at the end of "The Dead" seems to suggest we need greater awareness of them and how they hide reality from us, and perhaps further serves as a caution about their capacity to harm. All throughout Dubliners, Joyce’s unit of moral analysis is less individual characters, and more the city of Dublin as a whole, and therefore Ireland and Irish society as he knew it. Many of his characters live off the British presence, and many of the lives he depicts are structured by the necessities of British rule. These are not people who are free to live for themselves, but whose lives are curtailed by outside institutions: social mores, the state, the church, and the British.

Stanislaus Joyce wrote the following of “The Dead”: “Joyce works minutely for many pages, to create an ambiance of little bourgeois souls in all their noisiness, vulgarity, and innocuousness. When the festivity is almost at an end and the laughter at its height, a far away, barely audible voice of someone singing an old Irish air irresistibly calls back to a woman’s memory a truly romantic passion which had been extinguished by death; and the memory annihilates at one stroke her present happiness and that of the leading character in the story.” In its combination of naturalism and emotional insight, “The Dead” is certainly the best realization of Joyce’s technique here. It is often cited as the finest short story in the English language. I may dispute that claim, on the grounds that the story consists of forty pages of build-up as Joyce describes the party and the various insecurities of the central character, which seems on first reading to be going nowhere in particular. The cruel emotional reversal comes only in the last five pages, and while they are indeed magical pages, I am at a loss as to how Joyce determined that those preceding forty pages were necessary, rather than only thirty-nine of them, or indeed forty-one. The party rather goes on, is my point, and lest I be accused of Philistinism, I cannot help but notice that it is generally ignored in most scholarly analyses. Every other story in Dubliners seems chiseled out of ice, without a single superfluous word or a single scene whose purpose is open to question. It is certainly necessary for Joyce to establish that the central character in “The Dead” is insecure, bourgeois, and has trouble with social relationships, it just may not have been necessary to establish it four or five times.

So much for the structure of Dubliners. Joyce’s actual prose is gorgeous in these stories. He has a particular knack for the swift, memorable description, often of a character’s head. Take this example from “Two Gallants,” which features a pair of dubious characters who reappear in Ulysses:

"His head was large, globular and oily; it sweated in all weathers; and his large round hat, set upon it sideways, looked like a bulb which had grown out of another."

Or, this from “A Painful Case”:

"His face, which carried the entire tale of his years, was of the brown tint of Dublin streets."

Or, lastly, from “A Mother”:

“His conversation, which was serious, took place at intervals in his great brown beard.”

His insight into his characters is so sharp as to be almost painful. The pathetic, jealous would-be writer of “A Little Cloud” considers his hopeful future: "He could not sway the crowd but he might appeal to a little circle of kindred minds. The English critics, perhaps, would recognise him as one of the Celtic school by reason of the melancholy tone of his poems; besides that, he would put in allusions. He began to invent sentences and phrases from the notice which his book would get." He, of course, fails utterly, and is dismissed by a far more successful friend from his youth. The titular mother in “A Mother” is a composite of an empty marriage and failed ambitions: “She sat amid the chilly circle of her accomplishments, waiting for some suitor to brave it and offer her a brilliant life. But the young men whom she met were ordinary and she gave them no encouragement, trying to console her romantic desires by eating a great deal of Turkish Delight in secret." Or finally, the husband and wife in “Counterparts” who seem to me to be living out the misery of alienation caused by the capitalist relations of production: "His wife was a little sharp-faced woman who bullied her husband when he was sober and was bullied by him when he was drunk." Do you know these people? I believe I have met them in various places in the world, perhaps utterly unaware that they are living out lives James Joyce had already written for them.

Two central stories are particularly noteworthy, while I am running on at great length. “Clay” takes a bit of unpacking. It is the story of an old woman who goes to spend Halloween with the man who she fostered as a child. She works a menial job at a rescue mission for homeless women, and is teased several times about never marrying. She forgets the expensive plum cake she’d bought, and finally plays a game with the man’s children. Modern readers will have no idea what this game is, or what significance it entails until they learn that a traditional Irish Halloween game consists of a blindfolded person choosing one of several objects, each of which is meant to represent that person’s fate. One is a ring, signifying marriage, one is a prayer-book, signifying a spiritual life, and one is a lump of clay, signifying death. Since the game plays out from the old woman’s perspective, we do not see what she chooses, only her perception of the sad reaction of the other people. Only then does the title and the point of the story become clear. The story ends with the old woman singing a traditional song, but with mistakes: she forgets the verses which deal with suitors, marriage, and a happy life.

The second important story is “A Painful Case,” in which an intellectual, meticulous, and ambitious bank cashier befriends a lonely housewife, but ends their friendship when she impulsively touches his hand. Many years later he learns of her suicide and realizes he deprived her of her only human connection. This is the most straightforward story of the collection and requires little forensic work, so therefore is the clearest demonstration of Joyce’s flawless execution. This sort of realization has been enacted before (and since) in art, but never with this precision. (It also, interesting, features an early version of that old canard about inter-gender friendships: "Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse.") “A Painful Case” seems to me to be Joyce demonstrating what he can do when he decides to color inside the lines.

Dubliners requires a lot of attention; more, I think, than Portrait did. It rewards that attention with a spot-on evocation of life in a specific time and place, with the deepest possible understanding of the universal sensations of failure, with the pleasure of watching a consummate artist perfecting his craft, and with the humanist empathy it provokes for its sad, flawed, miserable characters. It is a remarkable book, and had Joyce died immediately after completing it, he should still have been regarded one of the finest writers in the language.

The Broom of the System

2009-07-23T19:09:00.000-07:00

The Broom of the System, by David Foster Wallace
1987, 467 pp.

I came very accidentally to David Foster Wallace. If you go to the search page on the London Review of Books website, the example illustrating how to search for terms in quotes is "david foster wallace." I remember seeing his short story collection Brief Interviews With Hideous Men at a used bookstore, sandwiched peculiarly in the Marxism section, on the very bottom shelf, towards the left. I remember reading Amazon reviews of Infinite Jest at work in 2005, when browsing through the longest books in the English language. I decided not to read it on the grounds that it did not appear to have much sex or violence in it. I am a regular reader of the infrequently updated blog of the web developer for the Penny Arcade webcomic (it's a long story) and it was there that I saw he'd killed himself. "Time to rerereread Infinite Jest," the blog said. Now that I've read his fiction, I notice that virtually every word on that blog is written in a voice desperately trying to sound like his. For a moment he seemed to be everywhere. A giant had fallen and I had only just discovered him.

Then I read D.T. Max's long, painful article in The New Yorker. It is a deeply emotional piece of reporting, and produced a few images of Wallace which I am still unable to shake off. The article covers his life and literary career, but was the first outlet after his death which reported on his long struggle with depression, so the theme of his struggles against his own mind ran through the piece. He’d hid it from the public for years, never mentioning his heavy medication, his past substance addictions, or his trips to mental health facilities, including more than one round of electric shock therapy. I’ve now read all of his interviews and essays and one of his novels, and I cannot conceive of how the public could have missed this. It's everywhere in his work. His depression is written on every page. But amid the process of tracing the impact of depression on his life and work, Max takes the time to let Wallace’s friends and family remember what kind of person he was:

“Longtime agent Bonnie Nadell recalls how he stood on line at FedEx the week before Christmas to mail an autographed book to a fan. "He would just do things like that because he was a really sweet person," she says. His students at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., remember the committed, engaged teacher: Amanda Shapiro had taken writing classes with him the past three years, and recalls the copious comments she got back from him about her assignments. "He would write five pages of notes on a six-page story," she says, "and put so much care and thought into helping us as writers. He would type out the letters, and then annotate them, in pen, with little smiley faces and notes and corrections."”

Interviewers always found him mystifying. He was a big, athletic guy, who had been something of a tennis prodigy in his youth, but he dressed in sloppy, poorly-fitting clothes and wore glasses invariably described as “granny” style. After his first round of shock therapy, his sister remembered him sitting in a corner, writing in a notebook with a Care Bears cover. I’ve seen his interview with Charlie Rose, one of the very few he ever gave, in which he speaks in an incongruously gentle voice, giving long, recondite answers to facile questions, using precise diction devoid of vocalized pauses, but constantly upset with himself for not articulating better. The Salon obituary saw the same thing:

“On "Charlie Rose," Wallace was like a giant combine moving through a field of wheat when he was supposed to be posing with a cute donkey and an old leather plow in front of the family barn. In the midst of long answers that continually posed an impossible series of new questions, moving over the humps of the host's simplistic assumptions with a clatter and bang, he stopped and asked Charlie, 'I assume all this will be edited out, right?'”

After the New Yorker article, I got kind of fixated. I've now read all of his essays, his book reviews, his interviews, and his articles. Everything available online. I have found that he had a gift for saying, in perfect, fluent, erudite prose, things that I had hoped to think of in ten years. Not that he would write things I'd been thinking but hadn't figured out how to say, but that I'd be on step two of a thought process, trying to figure out step three, and there he'd be, elegantly describing the view from the last step. His piece on the politics of the English language is a perfect example of his humanism, his empathy, and his considered opinion on a difficult matter. I highly recommend it to you. His voice is very firmly rooted in a 1990’s sense of Generation X anxiety, riddled with acronyms and born of a recognition that his was a generation deprived of its own voice by the rapacious, ongoing hunger of Baby Boomer self-indulgence and of what the New York Review of Books called “the panic of influence.” Wallace was an old-fashioned late 19th-century social and psychological novelist and observer of human behavior, but was steeped in the flashy literary tricks of post-modernism. The post-modernists argued that our cultural mechanisms are such that it is now impossible to say anything meaningful about the human experience, but ignore that there plainly is a void in human relations which only fiction can fill, harnessing as it does the provocation of empathy and understanding. I could carry on this topic for a long time, but you would do better to read his own thoughts on the matter. The point is that with his work Wallace was advancing a moral argument as much as an aesthetic one: that fiction does still have purpose, that meaningful things can be said even among the cultural logic of late capitalism, that human beings can connect with one another, and that therefore fiction can help us through the immense loneliness of living in this world. His argument in general seems to be that only the artifices of fiction are able to produce the illusion that it is possible to genuinely empathize with and understand another person, which is a depth of true feeling necessary to continuing to live. Fiction therefore, in its duplicity, is true in a way that reality is not. But recognizing its inherent falseness, how it is it to be honestly employed? This is a question he grappled with his entire life, and the utter failure of his contemporaries to take it seriously is to their eternal shame.

He employs in his numerous essays a largely moral vocabulary to cut apart topics ranging from the uses and abuses of the English language, to the Maine Lobster Festival, to the self-absorption of the John Updike school of Baby Boomer narcissism in fiction. These essays give us a sense of his formidable intellectual pugilism: the Updike review in particular is downright daring. Few other young authors would ever dare to take on such a revered elder statesman, but Wallace not only shreds his book to pieces but, like Karl Marx, recognizes that Updike's entire ontological predicate is flawed. He not only wrote a bad book, but wrote it for bad reasons, and indeed seems to be existing incorrectly. In these essays, Wallace seems everywhere to be making a doomed stand in favor of meaning in human existence, despite all of the hideous cultural constructs we have invented to implement our alienation from one another.

Which brings us to The Broom of the System. The novel was originally Wallace’s senior English thesis at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His other major was philosophy, in which he specialized in semantics, formal logic, and analytical philosophy with a very heavy background in higher mathematics. His philosophy thesis on modal logic was entitled Richard Taylor's 'Fatalism' and the Semantics of Physical Modality and was awarded the Gail Kennedy Memorial Prize. In it he developed a new formal apparatus called “intensional-physical-modality” to wholly dismantle Taylor’s 1962 argument about fatalism. Here is a typical sentence: “Let Φ (a physical possibility structure) be a set of distinct but intersecting paths ji–jn, each of which is a set of functions, L’s, on ordered pairs {t, w} ({time, world situation}), such that for any Ln, Lm in some ji, Ln R Lm, where R is a primitive accessibility relation corresponding to physical possibility understood in terms of diachronic physical compatibility.” This, I think, is at the heart for my affinity for Wallace: not only do I almost universally agree with his opinions and analyses, not only do I have great admiration for his intellect and accomplishments, and not only am I in awe of his capacity for articulation, but further I find something fascinating in the juxtaposition of ruthless intellect and emotional vulnerability. The author of that sentence was the same sad, fragile young man writing in the Care Bears notebook.

The Broom of the System is both very good and very frustrating. The story involves Lenore Beadsman, daughter of baby-food magnate Stonecipher Beadsman III, and her sort-of boyfriend Rick Vigorous, who is half of Frequent and Vigorous Publishing Company. Lenore’s great-grandmother (also named Lenore) was a student of Wittgenstein at Cambridge and lives in a nursing home which must be kept at 98.6 degrees, since her body cannot regulate its temperature. She’s literally cold-blooded, you see. The elder Lenore vanishes without a trace, along with about twenty other employees and inmates of the nursing home, thereby kicking off the ostensible plot. The Stonecipher company seems to be producing some sort of new baby food which makes babies super-smart, which sort of involves Rick Vigorous and someone else named Andrew Sealander Lang in a way which I guess could also be called a plot. There are a lot of coincidences: in the unpromising opening chapter, a young Lenore is visiting her sister at Amherst when two frat guys burst into their room and demand that Lenore’s sister and roommates sign their posteriors, for the purposes of fraternity initiation. One of them grows up to be Andrew S. Lang, one of Lenore’s sister’s roommates turns out to be Lang’s future wife and former neighbor of Rick Vigorous. And so on. There are sort of magical-realist peculiarities: Rick Vigorous’ son has a mystical connection to Richard Nixon, and a town is built in the shape of Jayne Mansfield. The Governor of Ohio commissions a desert to be built (the Great Ohio Desert, no points for considering the acronym) in order to restore a sense of the sinister to suburban Cleveland. Instead of watching television, a family turns on a video feed of themselves wearing masks, acting out each others lives. There are three sort-of plots: where did the elder Lenore go and why? Will the younger Lenore stay with the neurotic and jealous Rick Vigorous, or with Lang? What will happen with the super baby food?

Well, I'll tell you: I don't know.

All of this is given with some playful post-modernist digressions. Many scenes are presented only in dialogue, studded with an immensely annoying habit of having one character say: “....” I kept wondering why it was four dots instead of three, and began to theorize that maybe it was an ellipsis with a period at the end. Some chapters are given in transcript form. Rick Vigorous is mainly impotent, so instead of having sex, he tells Lenore stories, all of which are tragic and convoluted and have sort of metaphysical application to the action of the story. One chapter is a story he wrote himself, starring a surrogate character who appears occasionally in italics, reaping great victories Rick Vigorous himself does not enjoy. There are some first-person excerpts from what is apparently Rick Vigorous’ diary. Eventually we get the point: we never see anything through Lenore’s eyes, only words other characters use to describe her. As her Wittgensteinian grandmother would say, he does not exist and has no life beyond the words the characters (and through them, Wallace) uses to create and refer to her. How does she differ from a character in a story Rick Vigorous tells? Is a character in a story within a story more or less real than the character telling the story? Or more real than the character reading it? Wallace is playing for keeps here: he ends the book in mid-sentence, when he stops using language to create the characters.

Now, all of this is very clever, frequently amusing, and when Wallace really lets himself get going on the possibilities of philosophy, it’s downright fascinating. But he has two very serious problems. The first, and in my opinion most fatal, is a problem of voice registers. All the characters sound the same. They speak a sort of arch, reflexive, adverb-studded hipster jargon regardless of age, education, or socioeconomic standing. The segments from Rick Vigorous’ diary are the only exceptions, and they’re lovely pieces of writing. Consider this: "A kiss with Lenore is a scenario in which I skate with buttered soles over the moist rink of lower lip, sheltered from weathers by the wet warm overhang of upper, finally to crawl between lip and gum and pull the lip to me like a child's blanket and stare over it with beady, unfriendly eyes out at the world external to Lenore, of which I no longer wish to be part."

I must wonder why Wallace chose to give him such an expressive inner life and such a bland outer one. The dialogue passages particularly accentuate this problem, since it quickly sounds like one voice talking to itself. Sometimes he just lays on too much grad student jargon. Look at this: "The fat lady's not really real, and to the extent that she's real she's just used, and if she thinks she's real and not being used, it's only because the system that educes her and uses her makes her by definition feel real and non-educed and non-used." Some tightness of diction and the removal of recursive sentence structures (everyone always refers to “X vis-à-vis Y” or “X, as regards the whole Y situation,” or something similar) would probably cut a hundred pages off the novel. He also forgot the very first rule of good writing: kill all the adverbs. Every subject of everyone’s speech in this book is improbably, unbelievably, surprisingly, startlingly, incredibly, achingly adverbial. Furthermore, there seems to be a confusion about formality. Characters are never consistent in levels of vulgarity, and often the narrator seems to be a bit more prudish than the characters are. It strikes an entirely wrong note to have a narrator refer to “bottoms” and “going to the bathroom,” when characters say they have asses and are shitting. Choose one or the other, preferably consistent with the subjective formality of the occasion in which the characters are speaking.

The voice problem is pretty clearly a problem of an inexperienced novelist who has learned to write the way he speaks but not yet the way other people speak. Tackling something of this scope and complexity, especially while inventing a system of modal logic, was always going to have a few beginner mistakes. The other problem is a structural one, which is endogenous to Wallace’s decision to not resolve any of the plot strands. The New Yorker article tells us that he was aware of this: “The problem for Wallace, as he reflected after its publication, was that “Broom” offered an analysis but derided even the idea of a solution. In a 1989 letter to the novelist Jonathan Franzen, a friend, Wallace said that “Broom” felt as if it had been written by “a very smart
fourteen-year-old.”

I'd say he was too harsh on himself. It felt as if had been written by a very, very smart twenty-four-year-old. He also described “Broom” as covert autobiography, “the sensitive tale of a sensitive young WASP who’s just had this midlife crisis that’s moved him from coldly cerebral analytic math to a coldly cerebral take on fiction . . . which also shifted his existential dread from a fear that he was just a 98.6°F calculating machine to a fear that he was nothing but a linguistic construct.” The existential dread is certainly there, but there is also an awful lot of jokes and playfulness going on, as Wallace clearly spends some time playing with his art form. And it seems especially towards the end, when Lenore’s pet bird has become a televangelist celebrity, that the sense of dread has been lost and the novel has gone entirely off the rails. Apparently he was smart enough to know that, but felt that it was an accurate portrayal of life: “Yet when he tried to write a proper conclusion,” the New Yorker says, “in which geriatrics emerge, revelations revelationize, things are cleared up,” the words felt wrong to him. “I am young and confused and obsessed with certain problems that I think right now distill the experience of being human,” he wrote to Howard. Reality was fragmented, and so his book must be, too.”

All of that is theoretically sound, but does not make for a satisfying reading experience. I finished the book wondering why I had read so many strange transcripts of Lenore and Rick’s sessions with their psychiatrist, and long passages of nonsense dialogue from Lenore’s bird. What was the point of introducing Bombardini, the man who decides to eat until he reaches infinite size and fills the universe with Self, only to never appear again? What was the point of establishing an emotional connection between Lenore and Rick, Lenore and Lang, and Rick and Lang’s wife, never to resolve it? Really, what was the point of writing the novel?

The point was to exorcise Wallace’s fears, and to experiment with the boundaries of language. The point was for him to grow, develop, and learn as a writer. I'm glad he did it and I'm glad he published it. Name another novelist whose work at the age of 24 is available for public consumption. At that age, even Karl Marx was making silly arguments about Democritus, and Shakespeare was probably busy hoarding grain. The Broom of the System is fascinating as an artifact, and as a process. Here we are able to see an intellect grappling with itself and with the strictures of its chosen art form, and emerging bloodied but stronger. There are traces of the voice of the mature Wallace here: in the words of the New Yorker, "written in language that shows that it's possible to be serious without being sanctimonious, funny without being sophomoric, erudite without being pretentious, and these chapters unfold, beguilingly, from the particular to the philosophical, from small case studies to larger, zeitgeisty ruminations." Here he is simply too inexperienced to pull off the lofty deconstructions he'd intended. The Broom of the System may not be brilliant, but it is both essential and necessary. I probably would not recommend it to you, unless you are, like me, enraptured with Wallace's thought, but I am very glad I read it, and since we are to suffer the cruel fate of no more words from the late, great David Foster Wallace, I am glad I was able to enjoy this last bit of time with him.

The Inimitable Jeeves

2009-07-17T12:49:00.001-07:00

The Inimitable Jeeves, by P.G. Wodehouse
1923, 224 pp.

P.G. Wodehouse was, as near as I can tell, the funniest man who has ever lived. Even the great Douglas Adams quailed at the 100-odd books in the Wodehouse’s oeuvre, all of them packed to bursting with jokes that absolutely leave you for dead. The “mentally negligible” Bertie Wooster and his all-knowing, indefatigable butler Jeeves are certainly Wodehouse’s most famous creations, thanks in no small part to the highly effective televised prostylizing of Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, and here they are at their prime, delivering exactly what you want from P.G. Wodehouse.

Bertie Wooster is, like nearly all of Wodehouse’s protagonists, a member of the idle rich, lounging vaguely through life in a static world which strongly resembles inter-war London. Nothing ever changes in this world, no one ever suffers, and time never passes. Bertie is the first-person narrator of the Jeeves stories, which makes for an interesting verbal contrast. Most of the stories hinge on his absolute stupidity: he blunders into some mortifying social situation (generally he winds up engaged to someone, or several someones, or commits to going to a school play or something) and eventually Jeeves swoops in (generally demanding the destruction of some particularly atrocious article of Bertie's wardrobe) and solves everything with a single brilliant stroke. Bertie’s spoken dialogue consists mainly of imbecilic blurts like this: “What, ho? I say, I’m dashed, old cove!” or: “‘Hallo, hallo, hallo!’ I said, ‘What?’”

But for all that, his narration is ripe with the most startlingly hilarious similes in all of literature. Wodehouse chooses to write through Bertie’s eyes, so really the reader knows that it is Wodehouse who notices that someone “had a long face, like a sheep with a secret sorrow,” or that “aunt is calling to aunt like mastodons bellowing across a primeval swamps,” or that someone’s laugh sounds like “a cavalry charge across a metal bridge,” but since these words are given to Bertie’s narration, the reader gets a delightful sense that Bertie has a rich and beautiful inner life which he simply cannot express verbally. For all that, he has a terrific command of the definitive article. Everything is prefaced by “the,” so that his head is “the old bean,” or “the old cerebellum,” and when he has tea, it “lubricates the good old interior.” When he dances, he “shakes the old shoe,” and so forth. It’s funny as hell.

He has also conversations like this:

“This club,” I said, “is the limit.”
“It is the eel’s eyebrows,” agreed young Bingo. “I believe that old boy over by the window has been dead three days, but I don’t like to mention it to anyone.”
“I say, have you lunched yet?”

At any rate, The Inimitable Jeeves is something called a “semi-novel” collecting several Jeeves and Wooster stories into a vaguely chronological narrative. Generally, one chapter sets up a problem and ends on a cliffhanger, then the next chapter solves the problem and everything ends as it once was. The stories revolve around Bertie’s friend Bingo Little, who constantly and repeatedly falls in love with every woman he meets, each of them worse than the last. This of course gets him into awkward social situations, so he calls in his friend Bertie and the great polymath Jeeves to get him out. These are the sort of things which present major obstacles in Wodehouse’s universe: bets are taken on which local vicar will give the longest sermon, there are underhanded dealings regarding a three-legged race at the faire, a controversy over yellow shoes, a scandal involving pouring soda water on an Oxford tutor, and a scheme in which Bertie has to pose as a romantic novelist. To be pointlessly critical, the format is somewhat awkward, and does get repetative by about the eleventh story. Genuinely full-fleshed novels like The Code of the Woosters work better as a solid reading experience, but the semi-novel form lends more coherence than a simple collection of short stories. It also makes it easy to read a couple stories, then set the book down and wade through a history of modern Burma, then return without having to worry about what you'd forgotten.

If you insist, it is possible to drag some interesting observations out of Wodehouse’s stories. Despite being very much set in the world of the upper-class, imperial British age, his wealthy characters are by and large total idiots. Their servants are universally more interesting, more educated, and more competent, not to mention capable of interacting and forming friendships which are more genuine and less narcissistic and empty than those of their employers. Women tend to be stronger, more confident, and more ambitious than their indolent, waffling menfolk, and Wodehouse reserves a special scorn for fascists, who he ridicules at some length in The Code of the Woosters. But there is no reason to go dragging the mud of literary criticism through such a pristine construction. Wodehouse never fails to deliver. He is always entertaining, always funny, always good-natured, and is a reliable refreshment to energize the old brain and revitalize the old spirit to help the fatigued autodidact prepare for another round of stuffy lucubration. Wodehouse is always a more pleasant reading experience than anything else you could possibly be reading.

Guest Post: The Apartment

2009-07-15T03:28:00.000-07:00

The Apartment; Directed by Billy Wilder
1960; Starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine

Only recently have I come to the realization that I love movies made by Billy Wilder. Prior to this enlightenment, I had only digested his films piecemeal, walking away from each thinking “well, that was a pretty damn good movie” and not recognizing my appreciation of his films in a totality. Searching through the films of Wilder in my Netflix account, and from the films that I have seen, most have been rated 5 or 4 stars, with a few exceptions (apparently I absolutely hated the film “One, Two, Three”, most likely on the account of its lampooning of Reds). The generally appreciated canon of Wilder needs no explanation as to why they are great and recognized films (Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Sabrina, Seven Year Itch, those being only a few selected from a prodigious and celebrated catalog). Recently, I just had myself a second viewing of what I consider to be one of his finest and yet most ignored films, The Apartment starring Jack Lemmon and a very coquettish Shirley MacLaine who sports a most adorable 60’s bob.

Having at least two viewings of a film is the only way one can truly appreciate a film in its totality. The first viewing has the audience more interested in following the subject of the film, the story, what is being said, etc. The second viewing, with the audience already being savvy to the subject, allows the viewer to meditate further upon the substance of the film, its form and style. Hence why, great films hold up strong against the test of time, while mediocrity is precipitated beyond the continental slopes and onto the abyssal plains only to be picked apart by bioluminescent fish and/or on dollar racks at discount grocery stores.

As I mentioned in the first paragraph, it is to much wonderment on my part as to why this film is not instinctively recognized as one of Wilder’s best (or, to be more accurate, when in discussion of great films, particularly by Wilder, why this one is not as readily referenced as say “Some Like it Hot” or “Sunset Boulevard”). While, in my opinion, the overall aesthetic of his films might be common and antiseptic, the temperament of Wilder’s films is what seduces the audience. This is especially true for The Apartment. There are two very distinct classes in this film; (1)those who have an ‘excess’ of company and love, and as result of this, are numb to the humanity that surrounds them, solipsists, (2)and those who are deprived of company and love, and are acutely aware of their solitude. Appropriately set during the holidays, this allows Wilder to honestly and genuinely articulate the infinite distance between the “haves and have-nots”. It is with much solemnity that one who is alone approaches the merriment of holidays, not unlike travelling alone through Venice or being caught in the snack bar alone on a Saturday night at a movie theater by an acquaintance who then proceeds to mercifully invite you to join their company but you are too proud to accept and tell them that you have friends waiting for you anyways, even though you don’t. Off topic.

Not to simply present a synopsis (those I am certain can be found all over the internets), but for a quick glance at the film I will briefly summarize it. The loner is played by Jack Lemmon, whose character C.C. Baxter uses his bachelor’s apartment to maneuver his way up the corporate ladder, that is, he allows his superiors to use his place after office hours to bring their extramarital intrigues for a quick tryst. This eventually results in a promotion for Baxter, but under a specific condition, his boss, Sheldrake, gets to use his apartment to bring over his “other woman” (every Monday and Thursday). This other woman, no less, happens to be Shirley MacLaine’s character, the woman who Lemmon proceeds to masochistically romanticize over.

There is something to be said about the masochism of both Lemmon’s and MacLaine’s character. That in their inherent masochism lies their raison d'être and it can also be observed that it keeps them sensitized towards their fellow man, particularly Lemmon’s character. In their isolation, paradoxically, is where they find their solidarity with their fellow human beings. It is in their isolation that the viewer can sympathize, empathize, or even relate with the character. While the end film ended just as how people would expect it to end, a generic and stereotypical romantic Hollywood ending, the actual the purpose of the film is not about the bliss of being with that special someone. The film actually recognizes and demonstrates the romanticism of solitude, and the selfless humanity that can be born from such a condition. That there is nothing more humanist than the altruism that is born from unrequited love.

The Master and Margarita

2009-07-14T13:40:00.000-07:00

The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov
Written 1928-1940, published 1966, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 1997, 412 pp.

I recently read a roundtable discussion in which prominent book critics and literary personalities confessed to which great works of literature they'd never read. Ulysses featured prominently, of course, to the extent that I rather thought the discussion should have been titled "Excuses For Why I Never Read Ulysses," or maybe "How to Become a Prominent Literary Personality Without Reading Joyce." War and Peace was naturally the close runner-up. Delectably, the last respondent was Garry Wills, who lamented that he's never read the Psalms, Job, and Isaiah in the original Hebrew. In a fit of originality, Cynthia Ozick said "A book I've been told, again and again, it's imperative to read is Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. I hope to remedy this omission."

I too have been told, again and again, that it is imperative to read The Master and Margarita. Bulgakov is probably surpassed only by Solzhenitsyn in the chilly field of prominent twentieth-century Russian writers, and the story of the writing and publishing of The Master and Margarita is about as compelling as Solzhenitsyn's own long struggle. Bulgakov was a well-known writer during that brief flare of creative genius which emerged in the wake of the October Revolution. He wrote a novel about the Civil War and several plays, all of which were frequently denounced for being reactionary, counter-revolutionary, and entirely too sympathetic to the White forces. He wrote the first draft of Master and Margarita in 1928, but burned it in 1930, in despair of the future of art in the Soviet Union. He rewrote it by 1936, and continued polishing (it came to four drafts) until his death in 1940. A censored version was finally published in a Moscow-based literary magazine in 1966, and the full draft began to circulate in samizdat until a Frankfurt publisher began to put out the full version in 1967. A Russian edition came out in 1973, and the book is by now something of a classic. A Russian television channel put out a ten-hour miniseries of the novel in 2005, to enormous acclaim, and the book has been cited as an inspiration by everyone from China Miéville to Mick Jagger. Apparently there's even a level in Grand Theft Auto 4 based on it.

All of that said, I will not tell you, even once let alone again and again, that it is an imperative read. It is a good book and an interesting one, but it is a very different reading experience from what the stories of persecution and proud artistic independence would suggest.

The novel opens with Berlioz, the stuffy bureaucratic director of the official Moscow literary group, talking to a radical and untalented young poet named Homeless about the non-existence of Jesus. They meet an alarming, dark stranger who assures them he was an eyewitness to Pontius Pilate's meeting with Jesus, and tells them the story in great, naturalistic detail. The stranger is, of course, Satan, and the book follows the lunatic effects of his intrusion into the regulated, stultified world of Soviet Moscow. Berlioz is soon run over by a tram car and Homeless ends up in a lunatic asylum. Satan and his retinue (a talking, chess-playing, gun-toting cat named Behemoth, a naked, red-headed vampiress, the angel of death, and a minor devil) take over a Moscow theater and stage a black-magic show, leaving a swathe of destruction and mayhem in their wake. They trap everyone they encounter into being arrested, leading to quite an influx of people to the lunatic asylum, all protesting that they'd been framed by Satan.

About the time of the magic show, I was wondering who exactly was the protagonist. Then I turned page 133 and saw: "Chapter 13: The Hero Enters." The hero is "the master," a brilliant writer who had authored a novel about Pontius Pilate before being denounced by his neighbor (who wanted his apartment) and imprisoned in the asylum. To prove that he is indeed the master, he wears a little hat with an "M" embroidered on it. Bulgakov is very oblique about his circumstances: only the footnotes make it clear that he was arrested by the secret police. There are none of the dramatic midnight knocks on the door that are so common in dissident literature. Instead Stalinist repression is presented as a sort of phantasmagorical circus. This reaches its apotheosis in a chapter called "Nikanor Ivanovich's Dream," which is a clear satire on show trials and the Stalinist habit of declaring political opponents to be mentally ill.

At any rate, Satan and his colleagues meet up with Margarita, the master's long-lost lover, who they decide is the ordained Queen of the ball they apparently must have on Walpurgis Night. Margarita uses some magic cream, becomes a witch, spends a lot of time flying around naked, and attends Satan's ball. I will not give away the ending except to mention that the conventional plot structure which would have demanded the titular master and Margarita as heroes fighting against Satan and his minions is entirely missing here. In fact, there's little if any actual conflict in the book, since Satan and Company are effectively all-powerful, and mostly toy with the unnamed representatives of the Soviet government who try and stop them from carrying out their nefarious, surreal, and largely inexplicable plans. I never quite understood why Satan decided to manifest himself on earth, why he put on the magic show, why he threw the ball, why he had to live in that specific apartment, or why anything at all happened in the book, aside from the obvious logic that it was necessary in order for there to be a book. Satan and his retinue seem to be on a powerful mission for most of the book, eliminating anyone in their way, but by the end I still had no idea why.

The book is strange, inventive, and often entertaining. During his initial chase of Satan, the poet Homeless mystically self-baptizes by stripping naked and jumping in a river. He leaves his clothes with an old man and when he returns he finds both of them have been stolen. At Satan's ball, there is a parade of dead poisoners who emerge from coffins in the fireplace, a jazz band made up of gorillas and orangutans, people who jump naked in a swimming pool full of champagne, and the talking cat with a bow tie and opera glasses. Polar bears dance the Kamarinsky, and Margarita's maid, who is also a witch, rides a giant pig. These things are often amusing, and are certainly never dull. Bulgakov has a keen eye for a surreal detail and a good metaphor. My favorite: "Love leaped out in front of us like a murderer in an alley leaping out of nowhere, and struck us both at once."

The lunacy of Satan's activities is interspersed with a few chapters which are clearly taken from the master's book on Pontius Pilate. They are an intensely realistic retelling of the gospel story, and layer into the Moscow part of the narrative as characters read bits of the book or talk about the book to one another. This allows for an interesting parallel suggesting that Jesus may have been an early victim of a show trial, and that there is a timeless conflict between authority and authenticity which is even now playing itself out in Moscow. Bulgakov never makes the master into a Christ figure, though he seems to clearly be a representative of artistic integrity, suffering petty persecution in the time of officially-dictated socialist realism.

However, I am simply at a loss as to why the book is considered a satire. I assimilated three central themes. There is the theme of romance, which Bulgakov seems to see as a function or expression of personal courage, personified in Margarita’s devotion to the master. The second is the theme of art, which has great power over people (as evidenced by Satan’s power over everyone he meets, of the danger posed by the master, and so forth) and which is authentic and free, and therefore is in conflict with the inauthentic authority of Stalinist orthodoxy. The third theme is that of religion. Bulgakov shows us the power of religious figures being taken seriously, and holds up Stalinist repression as being no match for the eternal power of religion, which has control over death and the spirit—something no tyrant has yet managed, in Bulgakov’s view. Through these themes wander other symbols: Homeless seems to stand for rational intellect, a detached witness, the pig was once a person more interested in propriety than humanity, there are long lines for food and problems with currency, and there is an episode in which an empty suit sits at a desk, mindlessly processing papers: a perfect image of bureaucratic alienation. But satire? Stalin is absent, and indeed never actually named. Instead the targets seem to be state-sponsored artists, the Philistine public, and low-level bureaucrats. Worthy choices for demolition all, but hardly the stuff of grand satire. And the themes are heavily overshadowed by the riotous imagery and bizarre goings-on, making the book read more like a crazy dream which contains a few elements that might have greater meaning.

The Master and Margarita is therefore certainly a good book, a good entertainment, and fascinating as a period piece, but it lacks the withering satirical fire of Swift or Twain. It reads better as the sort of strange modern urban fairy tale which seems to delight Russian audiences: see for example the films Nightwatch and Daywatch, or the modern works of Victor Pelevin. Its creativity is superb, and its subject matter clearly audacious, so if taken on its own merits it is rewarding. Just ignore all those people who keep telling you that it is imperative to read.

The City and the City

2009-07-09T17:28:00.000-07:00

The City and the City, by China Miéville
2009, 312 pp.

If I were to declare that China Miéville is the most creative author alive, I would expect that statement to meet with only blasé concurrence. That hypothesis has by now survived the rigorous testing which characterizes the gulf between theory and fact and has emerged unscathed into the realm of epistemological truth. I am prepared to go farther: China Miéville is the best living writer in English. Full stop.

The City and the City is not his best book. That distinction is still reserved for The Scar. But The City and the City is a demonstration of the range of his capability, which as near as I can tell is more congruent with than asymptotic to the infinite. He's not a "cult of the sentence" writer, so this review will not bristle with excerpts of his particularly clever descriptions. He does not produce the sort of prose the New York Times likes to call "poignant" or "evocative." He produces the sort of prose readers call "excellent." More to the point in this book, he has a masterful control of voice. In The Scar he is a frightened, lonely, highly-educated woman; in Iron Council a jilted, gay, male revolutionary; here he is a tired, professional Eastern European police officer in first-person narration. John Updike would have made Inspector Tyador Borlú sound like a dewy-eyed poet. Miéville makes him sound like a tired, professional, post-Soviet Eastern European police officer. The voice and tone never strike a wrong note. It's a virtuoso performance, all the more so for the absence of rhetorical and prose pyrotechnics.

Additionally fascinating is the grasp of genre conventions Miéville displays here. In his Bas-Lag trilogy, Miéville spent considerable time merrily running around, dynamiting every genre convention in sight. Here he has created a book which is two parts police procedural in the gritty realist style of Ed McBain or Richard Stark, one part metaphysics, one part Cold War thriller, two parts sharp-eyed social criticism, with a splash of Philip K. Dick, and maybe a little Borges thrown in. In The City and the City, almost all of the conventions of the detective genre are on display, but Miéville allows them to evolve organically and plausibly from the logic of the narrative, so they are unobtrusive structural conventions rather than lazy clichés. There are the usual meddling politicians, a Mysterious Caller, a Dead Girl, a Buddy Cop, and jurisdictional conflicts aplenty, but they are not labored constructions in Miéville's deft hands: they read instead like a demonstration of his mastery of the genre. The City and the City is like a trigonometry exam on which the student completes every question perfectly, then on the back provides an elegant new solution to Hilbert's Entscheidungsproblem. Based solely on his grasp of the genre and the mechanics of a forceful narrative, The City and the City is a very good detective novel. But Miéville is only getting warmed up.

As good as his use of plot and voice are, Miéville's genius is for world-building. The City and the City takes place in a fictitious Eastern European city called Besźel, rather gray and decaying, which occupies the same physical space as another city called Ul Quoma, which is its long-standing political and cultural rival. Citizens of the two cities are forbidden to interact with each other, even to see, smell, or hear each other, and are trained from childhood to "unsee" each other. This ban is enforced by a shadowy entity called "Breach," which seems to be a sort of hyper-efficient secret police. They know everything and see everything and maintain the separation between the two cities. Citizens who "breach" and violate the separation disappear. It is never particularly clear just how literal the separation is: at first you get the sense that there is a sort of mystical separation between the two, that maybe people in one city seem vague and ghostly in another. As the book goes on, though, it seems increasingly like the two cities are literally occupying the same space, and people recognize what to unsee based on colors, designs, and cultural stereotypes. This is a brilliant conceit. Miéville gives Ul Quoma a vaguely Muslim flavor, allowing him to build an utterly plausible replica of the European social tensions over Muslim immigration in all its various political and personal permutations, but literally manifested in the enforced separation. There is of course a storied history of cities with mythical, mysterious, magical, or otherwise hidden cities underneath. Making the other city just as real but hidden due to politics was a masterstroke of invention, and he gets quite a lot of mileage out of it. There is nothing absurdist or fantastic about the events of The City and the City: every event, every action is either explained or open to be explained, and this allows for Miéville to take his ideas seriously. There is no deus ex machina here, no authorial trickery. He has serious things to say about the social strata of modern Europe, and has thought of an innovative, serious way to say them.

The story begins with a murder. I will attempt not to give away too many of the narrative's plot convolutions, but will say only that the murdered girl turns out to have been an archaeology student working in Ul Quoma. Her body turns up in a housing project in Besźel, so Inspector Borlú is assigned to the case. She seems to have shadowy connections to unificationist radicals, to discredited academic ideologies, and to vague legends about something called Orciny, which may or may not be a hidden third city in places the Besź think are in Ul Quoma and the Ul Quomans think are in Besźel. From there the story opens up, hopping between the cities, delving deeply into their history and intellectual culture, and into their conflicted political spectrums. The two cities are perfectly realized. Miéville has thought of what their currency is called, what their Internet domain names are, what their American investment policies are, and how the elaborate diplomacy between their governments works. He's thought of their folklore, neologisms (the delicious topolganger, for instance), a fictitious Chuck Pahlaniuk novel, and what UNESCO thinks about the whole affair. He wisely makes both cities plausible, neither more attractive, more realistic, or more sympathetic than the other.

If I have criticisms, it is with the characters. We see a little of Borlú's home life, and a scene at hoome with his Ul Quoman partner, but the only sense we get of them as people are in their professional roles. This is standard to the genre, but I felt that Miéville usually layers in more depth of motivation for his characters, so their actions are a function of their personalities and the internal logic of their relations. The police procedural format does not lend itself well to this, but the reader will only notice if he happens to be looking for it. Borlú is dogged, meticulous, intelligent, sympathetic, and sensitive, and if nothing else, there are a whole stable of stock character traits less talented writers affix to their detectives which Miéville rightly ignored. As criticisms go, this is rather like complaining that your delectable steak dinner was not also covered in chocolate, so it should not be taken too seriously. The City and the City is a superb book, and a resounding confirmation that yes, China Miéville really can do anything.

Baltasar and Blimunda

2009-07-06T21:00:00.000-07:00

Baltasar and Blimunda, by José Saramago
English translation, 1987, 343 pp.

Certainly by now even the most casual reader of this platform is thoroughly acquainted with my delirious affinity for the works of José Saramago, so consequently I shall attempt to keep the fawning praise to a minimum in this review. Baltasar and Blimunda was Saramago's first novel, written four years before The Stone Raft and The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. It is surprisingly mature, showing no sign of literary apprenticeship or inexperience, no faltering of an unsure authorial hand, and can stand comfortably in the pantheon of his other great novels, though for all of its excellence I must admit it is my least favorite of the five of his books I've read. It is a less focused novel, less intimate, and hobbled by an arbitrarily cruel ending which left me distinctly unsatisfied.

The book is set in early eighteenth-century Portugal and follows three strands, setting them up against one another to illuminate a series of contrasts. One story concerns the construction of a giant convent in Mafra, which the enormously stupid and ineffectual King João V promises to build for the Franciscans if the queen bears him a child. She does, he lives up to his promise, and fifty thousand Portuguese peasants are conscripted into hard labor for decades. The second story is the construction of a slightly magical flying machine by Padre Bartolomeu Lourenço, a heretical priest and real-life aviation pioneer. Helping him in his efforts are Baltasar and Blimunda, whose quiet, loving dedication makes up the third strand. Baltasar is a former soldier who lost his left hand in battle, and Blimunda is gifted with a magical ability to see inside of people when she fasts. The great Domenico Scarlatti makes a few sensitive and erudite appearances as their friend and collaborator:

"Domenico Scarlatti called at the estate just in time to see the machine rising into the sky with a great shuddering of wings, and just think what would happen if those wings could flap, and once inside the coach-house, the musician found the debris of their departure, broken tiles scattered all over the floor, battens and joists sawn off or broken away, there is nothing sadder than an empty space, the machine is already on its way and gaining altitude, only to leave behind the most acute melancholy, and this sends Domenico Scarlatti to the harpsichord where he starts to play a bagatelle, barely skimming his fingers over the keys, as if stroking someone on the face when all words have been spoken or when words fail..."

These plot strands allow Saramago to set up a series of contradictory scenes, contrasting the rulers and the ruled, the haves and have-nots, those who relax and those who work, all the better to express his vast contempt for the powerful. He takes a number of barbed shots at God in general and organized religion in particular, several of them quite amusing. At one point, the latest in a line of sequences in which he shows an innocent being harmed and wonders where God is, he asks if perhaps God was busy attempting to master his multiplication tables. In particular there is a tour-de-force sequence two-thirds of the way through in which Saramago first describes the agony and brutal hardship experienced by a team of laborers trying to move a gigantic block of marble down a winding road to the convent. It is excruciating, back-breaking work, and several people die. This is followed by an extended sequence describing the regal comfort and enormous indifference of the king's traveling procession making it slow way to that same convent. The point is delivered with Saramago's characteristic panache: whether laboring under an unfeeling, uncaring piece of rock or under the royal person, the suffering of the common people is identical.

Saramago's prose is as full-bodied and robust as ever, with his characteristic authorial presence and folksy asides. He delves suddenly into first-person to give the perspective of someone he is describing, which can be jarring (at first I took it for one of his authorial intrusions before I realized it was a different voice, meant to emanate from the character he was just mentioning) and which he drops in his later novels. He is also more earthy here, more descriptive of sex and dirt and violence than in many of his later novels, probably due mostly to the subject matter and the time period. The book is brilliantly written and well-crafted, of course, and his characters are as keenly sculpted as ever. He presents Baltasar and Blimunda's devotion to one another without cheap sentimentality or manipulative pathos, and the exhilaration of their work on the flying machine, the details of their lives as powerless plebeians is perfectly played. The book is not without flaws, though. Most of Saramago's later books would restrict themselves to only one of the three stories, delving deeper but into less subject matter. Here he sometimes almost seems to be losing track of his point, reserving little interest for Baltasar and Blimunda, who he made me care so much about, and the book is pieced together more by the set-piece scenes than the emotional trajectory of the characters. Despite being the organizing thread, the story of Baltasar and Blimunda too often takes a back seat. Sometimes they disappear for entire chapters, and we miss years of their lives.

The ending, as I have already mentioned, seems unfair, startling, unnecessary, and unkind both to the reader and to the characters. It does slightly make sense given a careful reading of the book's symbolic content: if you view the flying machine as a realization of freedom before its time, which must necessarily be destroyed in a world still dominated by the tyranny of absolute monarchy and organized religion, and if you are willing to accept that one of the novel's central themes is the powerlessness of regular people in the face of that tyranny, then I suppose the cruelty of the ending makes sense. It is still conducted with the sort of brevity and tacked-on vindictiveness and lack of closure which reminded me of the closing pages of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. It seems unfair, and ends the book on an entirely different note from the preceding pages. Saramago is always worth reading, and always a delight to spend time with, but Baltasar and Blimunda (and Baltasar and Blimunda) deserved a different ending.

The Selfish Gene

2009-07-02T19:24:00.000-07:00

The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins
1976, 352 pp. Revised edition 1989.

Richard Dawkins has recently resigned from the Simyoni Chair for Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, so it is safe to say now, without fear of future contradiction, that he has been exceptionally good at his job. His name has become ubiquitous, well beyond notorious, reviled by some and admired by many; certainly he is the best popularly known academic in his field. I was prepared to call The Selfish Gene his magnum opus, but he assures the reader that it is not: that honor is reserved for The Extended Phenotype. Instead The Selfish Gene is his manifesto, his opening broadside into the world. It details the theory he has spent his career elaborating and explaining, and is certainly one of the most exciting popular science books I've ever read.

The Selfish Gene was first published in 1978, to rave reviews. My copy is the revised edition from 1989, which sports 65 pages of closely-typed endnotes. You must read them. Some are refutations of claims in the original text, some are elaborations, some detail interesting new experiments and theories, some conduct long-running arguments, and some are responses to critics. They are an example of a scrupulously honest scientist in critical engagement with his own work, and they offer quick, incisive intellectual pleasures in ways the text, with its burdens of exposition and clarity, sometimes does not.

The first several chapters consist of Dawkins laying out his theory and the analytical machinery with which it can be applied and analyzed. I will try to explain it in brief, but Dawkins' words really are the best way of expressing the theory. Genes are the unit of natural selection, because they can replicate themselves. Individuals are essentially "survival machines built [and programmed] by a short-lived confederation of long lived genes." Genes interact with one another, so what matters is how well genes are able to survive in the context of all the other genes in an individual, and get themselves passed on to another generation. Dawkins is at pains to be clear that he is not a genetic determinist, especially when it comes to human beings: "it is perfectly possible to hold that genes exert a statistical influence on human behavior while at the same time believing that this influence can be modified, overridden or reversed by other influences. Genes must exert a statistical influence on any behavior that evolves by natural selection." In humans, the most prominent influence is culture, in animals there is obvious variation in individual behavior. But quite a lot of behavior is statistically influenced by genes, which get passed along to future generations depending on the success of the behaviors they promote. Behaviors which can sustain themselves in a population over time are "evolutionary stable strategies" (ESS) which Dawkins proves, using game theory pioneered by Maynard Smith, is at the heart of most animal (and possibly human) behaviors.

The next several chapters consist of Dawkins applying the theory to sets of observed behavior: aggression, family planning, generational conflict, gender conflict. The first of these is fascinating, since it is the first time we get to see the theory in action and get walked through the game theory process to analyze behavior. The next three wear on quite a bit, and left me restless enough to start getting critical. Essentially, it seems to me that there is a falsifiability problem here. These middle chapters consist of the same pattern: Dawkins considers a puzzling or contradictory behavior in some species of animal. He then demonstrates using some simple game theory (only ever the Prisoner's Dilemma, by the way, never extensive-form games, or imperfect information games, or anything more advanced, probably due to the non-specialist audience) how exactly that puzzling behavior is really the dominant or stable strategy from the perspective of selfish genes, and explains that genes for that behavior must therefore have become prevalent in the gene pool. This struck me as the biological equivalent of Hegel's old chestnut about the real being rational and the rational being real. So how can his theory be falsified? Any behavior can be explained away on the grounds that "well, it exists, so it must be an ESS, and therefore caused by a selfish gene."

Now to some extent, this is unfair. Dawkins is writing for a popular audience, and therefore doesn't lay down any actual math, any formal modeling, or any of the other specialist machinery I know perfectly well he has at his disposal. It may also be the case that the selfish gene theory is just that good. I do not have the biological expertise to evaluate the problem, but in the interest of reviewing The Selfish Gene in particular rather than the selfish gene in general, I must admit that I finished the book unconvinced that there was any behavior Dawkins couldn't explain away, and I found this disquieting.

I also have a substantive complaint. Chapter 7, on family planning is interesting when dealing with animals, but an unmitigated disaster when dealing with human beings. As I so presciently noted recently, it is a sad example of an intellectual who begins to wind himself up on the issue of "overpopulation" and immediately deploys a series of unexamined, exploded old Malthusian fallacies. "Individuals who have more children than they are capable of rearing are probably too ignorant in most cases to be accused of conscious malevolent exploitation," he writes, after detailing what he sees as an endless and stupid population explosion. This comes perilously close to Huxley's idiot, paranoid phrase about the "teeming illiterates." But then Huxley seemed to be a reprehensible bigot derived from a long line of reprehensible bigots. Dawkins is neither reprehensible nor a bigot; indeed, he is a very good scientist--too good to make such blunders. Population and demography and their relations to poverty and development is a deeply researched field of development economics, and Dawkins ought to have at least acquainted himself with some of their findings. The poor, especially the rural poor, do not--I repeat, DO NOT--have lots of children because they are stupid, lazy, carnal, illiterate, greedy, gluttonous, lustful animals. This is apparently impossible for comfortable, otherwise educated and sensitive intellectuals to grasp. The poor have lots of children because a) children start work very young and therefore are a productive asset in poor, rural places instead of a drain on food and finances as they are in the First World, b) children will grow up to provide for their elderly parents, who will not have the benefit of a social safety net, c) high infant mortality lends itself to having more children, to make up for the unknown number which will die, d) women who do not work either through cultural stupidity or a simple lack of jobs face fewer opportunity costs for having children and less power to make family planning decisions, and e) poor families in general face a lower opportunity cost for having children. For a rich couple the choice is between a yacht and another child; for the poor it is a gamble that enough of your children will survive that you will be able to live off of them in your old age. Dawkins thankfully does not trot out that great shibboleth of First World neo-Malthusianism: that it is bad to save people, help them get medicine and healthcare, or provide food aid because people who survive will just have vast broods of progeny and you will end up back at square one. It was a relief that he had the sense not to be that stupid, but it was still discouraging to see such fallacies and ignorance from such a methodical scientist and keen intellect.

I stalled on that chapter, but persevered, and in the end was very glad that I did so. My complaints aside, Dawkins is a delightful writer. He has a gentle, urbane sort of tone which barely restrains the obvious excitement and passion he has for the subject. He seems very happy to be writing the book, and very happy to have us read it. He has an endearing habit of adding a decorous, dainty exclamation point at the end of a sentence to indicate that he is indulging in a little joke. He speaks both of himself in the first person, to explain his thinking, of the reader in the second, to establish a rapport and keep attention, and of both of you together to bring you along by the hand through the world of evolutionary biology. There is no sense of Dawkins the bloody-knuckled rhetorical pugilist who turns up lacerating pseudo-science books in the Times or reducing Bill O'Reilly to stunned silence. He takes a few cheerful potshots at religion, mainly in the endnotes, and is not shy about making his opinions clear on theories he finds unconvincing. But The Selfish Gene is not a polemic. It is a book by someone who is very good at what he does talking about his absolute favorite thing, and therefore it is a terrific read. He has a terrific command of biological and zoological information, and I learned quite a bit from his examples and analysis. He is also a great popularizer and communicator of the abstruse, complex ideas of W.D. Hamilton and John Maynard Smith, among others. For people (like me) who are utterly unfamiliar with the discipline, this is an excellent place to start. He also clearly knows that he is presenting a scientific theory which is subject to test and revision. At one point, he challenges the reader outright: "If anybody does not want to admit that parental care is an example of kin selection in action, then the onus is on him to formulate a general theory of natural selection that predicts parental altruism, but that does not predict altruism between collateral kin. I think he will fail."

Even more intriguingly, he ends with two chapters which provide a sort of link between the gene, a tiny molecule, and the necessity of the welfare state. No, you did not mis-read that sentence. He argues throughout the book that his selfish gene theory, with all of its implications against altruist behavior, and against group-selection theory, predicts behavior but does not advocate or condone it. His conclusion is this: "If there is a human moral to be drawn, it is that we must teach our children altruism, for we cannot expect it to be part of their biological nature." He devotes an entire chapter to explaining how reciprocal atruism is an evolutionarily stable strategy and how rebellion against our selfish genes is an inherently and beautifully human act. I was very glad he did this, since many times earlier in the book he made the point that altruist behavior is not stable, since it is open to exploitation by selfish individuals. I spent a lot of time wondering why he was dodging the social science implications of that conclusion, and was glad he returned to it from the beginning.

Now, I have not done an elaborate job of summarizing his points. Perhaps you have thought of an exception to his theory. Social insects, for instance, or parental sacrifice, or the dangeorus warning calls birds give when predators appear. Dawkins deals with most of these, in greater detail than I am willing to summarize here. Read the book. It goes quickly and is extremely interesting, especially for people preoccupied by the social sciences, since it functions as a sort of exhilarating (and exhilarated) introduction to a whole world of knowledge and controversy we otherwise ignore, at our own peril.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

2009-06-30T16:50:00.000-07:00

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce
1914, 253 pp.

James Joyce is certainly the most notorious writer in English, if not the most notorious writer in any language anywhere. Probably Shakespeare is better known and more discussed, but most people have some actual exposure to Shakespeare, albeit only in school or in heavily padded adaptations. As The Guardian never tires of reminding us, Joyce is among the most-purchased but indisputably least-read authors in the world. Almost everyone has heard of him. It is practically a right of passage for all intelligent, solipsistic, arrogant, artistic-minded young men to take a crack at Ulysses and fail to get out of the Martello tower. It is a pity that the great legends of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake have so thoroughly overshadowed A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It is an excellent and rewarding book.

Portrait consists of five chapters, moving forward through the early life of Stephen Dedalus, the sensitive poet and aesthete who also figures prominently in Ulysses. As Stephen matures and develops, so too does the book’s prose: the writing in each chapter reflects Stephen’s apprehension of the world at that time. Chapter One is therefore quite simple, with a bit of babytalk and little intellect or plot, only mood and sensation. This discouraged me the first time I picked up Portrait, many years ago. Do not let it discourage you!

Chapter Two is more complex, suffused with kindness and innocence. Here I think Joyce the Author is most clearly visible through the impeccably maintained persona of Stephen the Free-Indirect Style Narrator. Joyce shows great tenderness for the quiet, imaginative little boy who is sent off to school and who begins to experience the tensions which cut into his family. We learn about his father, witness an argument over politics at the dinner table, see what life is like at school. Chapters Three and Four are where Portrait really hits its stride. There Stephen is an adolescent, discovering Romantic poetry (indeed, when in Chapter Three Stephen gets beaten up by boys for liking Byron better than Tennyson, the reader realizes how many Byronic flourishes Joyce has layered into the chapter) and begins discovering women. Finally he discovers actual sex, and prostitutes, and the oppressive Catholicism of his upbringing seizes center stage.

Joyce treats us to two furious, frothing sermons on hellfire and eternity, easily rivaling Dante for the most persuasive depiction of the guilt and fear engendered by Christianity. The whole chapter is written in the blood-and-thunder cadences of ornate, Old Testament prose. This is prose that could beat up Cormac McCarthy's prose and take its lunch money. Stephen is racked with guilt, terrified by God and the enormity of his sins, in a pool of self hatred which would have drowned Raskolnikov. He sums it up:

“What did it avail to pray when he knew that his soul lusted after its own destruction? A certain pride, a certain awe, withheld him from offering to God even one prayer at night though he knew it was in God's power to take away his life while he slept and hurl his soul hellward ere he could beg for mercy. His pride in his own sin, his loveless awe of God, told him that his offence was too grievous to be atoned for in whole or in part by a false homage to the Allseeing and Allknowing.”

Stephen confesses and repents and tries to become the most godly and pious person he can be. Like Saramago’s Gospel According to Jesus Christ, Joyce demonstrates here that taking Christianity seriously is the swiftest way out of religion. Stephen’s teachers expect that he will join the clergy, but his intellect rebels, tormented by the cruelty of a God which would create such a horrible place as hell, or such a horrible thing as eternity, and after a brilliant depiction of existential revolt, Stephen finally casts off the last remaining chains which kept him from apprehending his own abilities: in the final chapter, his voice is not that of a child, or of his family background, or of his favorite poets, or of the religion in which he was raised. It is finally his own voice. If this chapter had failed, the book would have failed. Luckily, it is by far the finest passage in the book. Stephen emerges as a wickedly intelligent, deeply read, endlessly sensitive and observant person. There is a splendid passage of reflection on all the things that he has learned in college: "but yet it wounded him to think that he would never be but a shy guest at the feast of the world's culture and that the monkish learning, in terms of which he was striving to forge out an aesthetic philosophy, was held no higher by the age he lived in than the subtle and curious jargons of heraldry and falconry.” He won me over right there: I wanted to be friends with him, and I look forward to seeing him again in Ulysses.

In a review for the New Republic, H.G. Wells called Portrait “by far the most living and convincing picture that exists of an Irish Catholic upbringing.” I would go further: it is the most convincing picture of an intellectual and artistic development, of the stages by which a mind frees itself from tradition and superstition, and of the process of a keen and sensitive intellect finding its own particular voice. Here the unity of content and form is complete: by the final chapter, when Stephen comes into his own, Joyce is writing at the top of his form, in the voice that would later animate the entire world in Ulysses. Portrait is therefore a useful door into that giant masterpiece: it gets the reader over his preliminary terrors, provides some acquaintance with Joyce’s quirks and methods, and introduces the reader to a splendid character and Joyce as the author. And best of all, Portrait is simply a good book. It requires no interpretive machinery or “expert” commentariat. It can be picked up and read with profit and enjoyment by anyone. Afterwards, Ulysses begins to seem a vaguely possible undertaking.

Some writers are highly visual, particularly since the advent of film brought on an artistic grammar dictated by the necessities of visual storytelling and embedded it in our cultural unconscious. Others are auditory, with a great ear for dialogue and dialects, for the peculiar rhythm of actual speech. Joyce is an omni-sensual writer. He does not mention a sensation as a visual cue, but as an actual tactile experience, bounded by his character’s consciousness and perception. Portrait is packed with sounds and textures and smells and tastes, the memories they bring on, the emotions they provoke, and the digressions of thought which follow from their experience. This makes for slightly curious reading to a literary sensibility which is trained to picture a character and his environment in the mind’s eye. We are almost always conscious of what Stephen is experiencing, though not always where and when he is experiencing it, or what he looks like while doing so.

There is a lengthy section in which Stephen explains to a friend his elaborate Aquinas-inspired theory of aesthetics. He reaches, after many closely-argued pages, this conclusion: “To speak of these things and to try to understand their nature and, having understood it, to try slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out again, from the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound and shape and colour which are the prison gates of our soul, an image of the beauty we have come to understand--that is art.” His full conception of art and beauty finally allows him a way to understand and appreciate the world, and the book ends with him self-confident, adult, and able to face the world. Joyce writes towards the end: “A soft liquid joy like the noise of many waters flowed over his memory and he felt in his heart the soft peace of silent spaces of fading tenuous sky above the waters, of oceanic silence, of swallows flying through the seadusk over the flowing waters.”

Knowing that Ulysses begins with Stephen some years later and deals (along with everything else it deals with, which may be the sum of human experience) with his relationship with Leopold Bloom, I was very tempted upon finishing Portrait to scrap my elaborate plan to prepare for reading Ulysses and simply jump straight in. It was difficult not to read the last page of Portrait, and with the closing of one cover open another and read the first page of Ulysses. Take this as a testament to how much I liked the book, how much I liked Joyce as an author and Stephen as a character. The idea of a further thousand very difficult pages spent in his company seemed to me a pleasure rather than a burden, and I eagerly look forward to beginning the endeavor.

Le Père Goriot

2009-06-28T13:05:00.000-07:00

Le Père Goriot, by Honoré de Balzac
1835, 238 pp.

At first glance, Honoré de Balzac is a daunting world to explore. His novel sequence La Comédie humaine comprises some 95 finished works, including novels, novellas, short stories, and essays, as well as about 48 unfinished pieces, ranging from nearly-finished stories to disjointed notes to works that exist only as titles. La Comédie humaine details the lives and experiences of a whole multitude of characters spanning the entire breadth of French society during the Restoration and the July Monarchy (about 1815-1848) as they prosper (or don't), fall in love (or out of it), have children, grow old, and often die. Where does one begin reading something like that? Is it best to read through them chronologically as they are written, or to attempt to follow the chronology of the stories themselves? Do you include the unfinished pieces? Should you simply buy the eighteen-volume Collected Works and plow through them in order? Or should you just skip him entirely and go with Zola instead? I quailed in front of this dilemma for months (Arthur Conan Doyle was apparently utterly defeated by it), but have finally found the solution. Begin with Le Père Goriot.

Goriot was the first novel in which Balzac hit on the idea of bringing back characters from previous stories and having them interact in the same coherent world. It is often called the keystone of La Comédie humaine, and it has been translated into English so many times that Balzac's biographer Graham Robb assures us that it can be safely read in translation without missing much of Balzac's writing. It begins the saga of the career of Eugène de Rastignac, the ambitious social climber who turns up in nineteen of the stories in La Comédie humaine, including as an old man in La Peau de Chagrin, which Freud obsessively read and re-read while dying of oral cancer. It also introduces the devious and dastardly Vautrin, a Moriarty-like criminal mastermind on the run from the police whose nefarious schemes will animate much of the La Comédie humaine. There are apparently 48 characters in the book who recur in other Balzac stories, where they emerge not from a void but from their own busy private lives which the reader only briefly glimpses. Goriot is therefore an excellent place to start, since these major characters will reappear like old friends in most of the other novels, and since it has the benefit of being chronologically early both in terms of the writing and the story. And, perhaps most importantly, it really is quite a good book.

The story concerns Goriot, a wealthy old merchant who sells everything he owns and sinks into abject poverty in order to provide for the expensive whims of his two feckless daughters, each of whom has married a rich man and who operate in very high society. Goriot lives in Maison Vauquer, a poor boarding house in the Latin Quarter, which is famously described in minute detail for about ten solid pages at the opening of the novel. Balzac sums it up like so: “There is no illusory grace left to the poverty that reigns here; it is dire, parsimonious, concentrated, threadbare poverty; as yet is has not sunk into the mire, it is only splashed by it, and though not in rags yet, its clothing is ready to drop to pieces." Also in residence is Rastignac, a law student who sets out to make a name for himself in high society, an assortment of mediocrities that allow Balzac to ridicule middle-class Paris, an ingenue who has been unfairly disinherited by her rich father, and Vautrin. The way Balzac handles Vautrin is rather brilliant: at first he is part of the scenery, like the other lodgers, then slowly begins to turn up in surprising places, behaving suspiciously. He reveals himself to Rastignac to be a ruthless social climber, and proposes a scheme of murder and manipulation to get Rastignac his fortune. Rastignac is ambitious and a trifle ruthless himself, but has a conscience (though he grapples with it) and rejects Vautrin's plan. It is not until about two thirds of the way into the book that we learn who Vautrin really is, and the revelation nearly prompted me to start the book all over in search of clues Balzac may have layered into his earlier appearances. At any rate, having rejected Vautrin, Rastignac meets and ingratiates himself with Goriot's two selfish, capricious daughters and begins his social climb.

Ridiculing high society seems to have been a requirement to be a novelist in the nineteenth century, and with good reason. Flaubert drew quite a few influences from Balzac (indeed, Rastignac is mentioned by name in The Sentimental Education) and I think there is profit to be gained by a comparison between their two styles. In my review of The Sentimental Education, I argued that Flaubert writes in the prose equivalent of the deep-focus lens. If the reader will humor me the extension of the cinema metaphor, Balzac writes in a tight, focused closeup which he slides in long, unbroken takes over people and places. Consider the opening shot in Hitchcock's Rear Window. The camera, in a reasonably tight closeup, pans across the walls of James Stewart's apartment, across his desk, and finally takes in the entire room. In doing so, we draw information from the pictures on the wall, the objects on the desk, the newspaper clippings. By the end of the shot we can construct quite a lot of information about his character and his character's recent past. Balzac uses the same technique with his conscientious descriptions, particularly of the Maison Vauquer. Flaubert seized on telling details from several simultaneous actions to draw them all into the same sharp focus; Balzac holds only one thing in his camera at a time, though in great detail and in context with what has come before and what will come after. He also has a sharp and cutting way with a crushing observation. Of the proprietress of the Maison Vauquer, he writes: "It is one of the most detestable habits of a Lilliputian mind to credit other people with its own malignant pettiness." I imagined Gore Vidal deploying this line over a cocktail.

Goriot is a relatively short book, with no wasted scenes, characters, or developments. It is therefore quite effective, and although Balzac is not shy with the melodrama, the closing scenes are emotionally gripping: old Goriot lies dying in poverty without even a penny to buy firewood while his daughters attend a fancy party wearing dresses he spent his retirement savings on, and Rastignac realizes the depth of self-centered cruelty on which high society as a whole is predicated. “Eugene did not wish to see too clearly," Balzac writes. "He was ready to sacrifice his conscience for his mistress…This woman was his, and Eugene recognized that till then he had only desired her, he did not love her till he had gained his happiness; perhaps love is only gratitude for pleasure.” But the price is too high, and Rastignac ends the book (and begins his career in La Comédie humaine) scarred by his introduction to the heartless ways of the bourgeoisie, but determined to succeed in Paris on his own terms, in his own way. It was a solid conclusion to a well-structured, efficient and effective book, populated by memorable characters in a fully realized simulacra of the real world, and it left me strongly considering that eighteen-volume purchase.

The Idiot

2009-06-25T17:46:00.000-07:00

The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
1868, 633 pp. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

It is difficult to find something clever to say about Dostoevsky that hasn't already been said by Vladimir Nabokov. Somewhere around the The Idiot's ninety-seventh engagement scandal (page eighteen, in other words) I took a break and picked up The Inimitable Jeeves, by P.G. Wodehouse, the delightful experience of which may have led me to the first original insight anyone has had regarding Dostoevsky since the publication of Lectures on Russian Literature. You see, Dostoevsky's books are always a certain proportion of time-filling social scandals (mostly revolving around engagements, marriages, affairs, and the like) weighted against a certain proportion of philosophical dialogue and melodramatic actions determined by the necessities of philosophical attitudes. In Crime and Punishment, the ratio is something like 40/60, in Demons, it is probably closer to 50/50. The Idiot is about 90/10, and consequently, it reads like a P.G. Wodehouse novel from hell, bloated to six times its normal length, perhaps written in a long, dark winter of the soul, under the influence of mystical Christianity and ineffective doses of Zoloft. Both books involve domineering matriarchs, preposterous and ineffectual noblemen, social scandals, manipulative friends, and protagonists who are idiots. I consequently spent four hundred pages wishing fervently that Jeeves would shimmer into the room and solve all of Myshkin’s ridiculous problems with the clever application of some purple socks and a rather noisy cummerbund.

The Idiot is the story of Prince Myshkin, who (as everyone who ever discusses the book is required to quote) is meant to be a "positively good man." He is epileptic and simple-minded, totally trusting and naive, and at the beginning of the book returns to Russia from a sanitarium in Switzerland. He promptly meets and has scandals with a variety of characters representing a cross-section of Russian society and opposing philosophical types. Most important of them is the dastardly Rogozhin (in typical Dostoevsky fashion, he has dark hair, dark clothes, dark features, dark eyes, and lives in a dark house) and the beautiful but difficult Nastasya Filippovna. These three form the love triangle of sorts which is at the ostensible center of the novel. The love triangle becomes sort of a love dodecahedron with the inclusion of the wealthy Epanchin family, whose youngest daughter Aglaya is sometimes apparently in love with Prince Myshkin. General Epanchin's clerk Ganya is of the poor Ivolgin family, and at the beginning wants to marry Nastasya Filippovna, who herself is the mistress of the vile Totsky, friend of General Epanchin. Will Myshkin marry Aglaya or Nastasya Filippovna? Will Nastasya Filippovna marry Myshkin or Rogozhin? Inquiring minds want to know.

Part One moves along at a decent pace. It establishes the characters and their relations to one another, and sets up a good bit of melodrama. Things looked promising, and I began to look forward to the murder: this is Dostoevsky, after all, so there must be a murder. In fact, as I read along, I began to formulate the theory that a given Dostoevsky book is only as good as its murder. I will venture to disclose to you that the murder is not committed until the gap between pages 606 and 607, some three hundred pages after my interest died a sad, lonely death. Nabokov wrote in his lectures on Dostoevsky that "[he] was more of a playwright than a novelist. What his novels represent is a succession of scenes, of dialogues, of scenes where all the people are brought together--and with all the tricks of the theatre, as with the scène à faire, the unexpected visitor, the comedy relief, etc." This is exactly true in The Idiot, at times in a sense that strains credibility well past the breaking point. At several points characters launch into monologues that last for ten or twelve unbroken pages, while about a dozen people apparently sit around watching. At parties people vanish into the background until Dostoevsky needs them again, and anyone can arrive from any distance away if it is convenient for Dostoevsky's purposes. If this was an occasional habit, it would be tolerable, but as the bulk of the book it is desperate stuff. It is also clear that once he'd completed Part One, Dostoevsky had no idea what to do. Parts Two and Three are a grasping, underplotted mess which not only fail to build tension and propel the plot, but instead provide a host of distractions and opportunities for the characters to behave in ways quite contrary to Dostoevsky's descriptions of them.

This last point is a fatal one. Like a playwright, Dostoevsky is in the habit of describing people and places once, at their introduction, then never again. There is no texture of sensation in his books, nor hardly any visual sense. His characters are defined by the ideas and social positions Dostoevsky wants them to represent, so when they behave in a contradictory manner, the reader has no sense of the human being to fall back upon (which would create a sense of complex and unpredictable characterization) but instead simply gets the sense that Dostoevsky is confusing himself. If his characters seemed to be evolving in some direction, a few strange actions would be understandable, but his characters rarely, if ever, evolve. At the end of the book Myshkin is still an innocent, well-meaning idiot, Rogozhin is still dark and treacherous, and so forth. We are told that both Nastasya Filippovna and Aglaya are beautiful and enchanting, and goodness knows Myshkin spends a lot of time falling in love with them, but they never behave other than as selfish, spiteful, cruel, damaged harpies. There is nothing lovable (or interesting) about either of them. Moreover, Nastasya Filippovna and Rogozhin spend the majority of the book offstage. Parts Two and Three and most of Four are dedicated to Myshkin's interactions with the Epanchin and Ivolgin families at various dachas outside of Petersburg. He spends much more time telling Aglaya he loves her (for unclear reasons, since she seems to enjoy humiliating and ridiculing him in public) than doing anything else, all of which is totally extraneous to the actual story. I am aware that the overall point is to demonstrate the corruption and cynicism of Russian society by holding it up to comparision with Myshkin's saintly behavior. Balzac did this quite effectively in Le Père Goriot thirty-three years earlier, and recognized that the best technique to employ was a loss of innocence. Myshkin does not evolve enough to warrant this theme, nor do we get a sense that the Epanchins and the nihilists are representative types instead of individuals who just happen to be a bit bitchy. And if this is the theme, the love triangle is a distraction. If the love triangle is the theme, the social criticism occupies too much of the book, is too fitful and unfocused, and does not seem to advocate anything save for a vague mystical Christian idealism.

The only really notable figure of the book's interminable middle stretch is Ippolit, a consumptive nihilist who has resolved to kill himself. His attempt ends in failure and public ridicule, but apparently Dostoevsky was interested enough in his character to revive him under a different name four years later in Demons, where as Kirilov he is one of the novel's most interesting characters. Dostoevsky seems to have reversed the Marxist dictum: for him, it is farce first, then tragedy. Here the point seems to be to ridicule nihilism, in Demons it seemed to be to warn of its dangers and perversions.

These structural flaws aside, it must be said (at the risk of being accused an inveterate Philistine) that Dostoevsky's prose is abysmal. It is possible that accurate translation is simply impossible, though I trust the Pevear/Volokhonsky team, having read their Crime and Punishment and Demons last year and enjoyed them both. I'm currently reading their translation of Bulgakov, and see no problems. Really, the failure is with dialogue, and since Dostoevsky is such a theatrical author, this is deadly. The example given below is a trifle unfair, since it deals with an absurd subject; however, it is at a serious moment of the book, and is meant to be taken seriously, so I consider it fair game. Imagine the voices of actors trying to deal with this material, or read it out loud and see if it sounds at all passable:

“Did you receive my hedgehog?” she asked firmly and almost crossly.
“I did,” the prince replied, blushing and with a sinking heart.
“Then explain immediately what you think about it. It is necessary for my mother’s peace and that of the whole family.”
“Listen, Aglaya…” the general suddenly began to worry.
“This, this is beyond all limits!” Lizaveta Prokofyevna suddenly became frightened of something.
“There aren’t any limits here, maman,” the daughter replied sternly and at once. “Today I sent the prince a hedgehog, and I wish to know his opinion. What is it, Prince?”
“You mean my opinion, Aglaya Ivanovna?”
“Of the hedgehog.”
“That is…I think, Aglaya Ivanovna, that you want to know how I took…the hedgehog…or, better to say, how I looked at…this sending…of the hedgehog, that is…in which case, I suppose that…in a word…”
He ran out of breath and fell silent.

If only Fyodor Dostoevsky had been given a hedgehog.

Would we put up with this from anybody else? It may be that this is Officially Classic Literature, and that it is a relic from a different place, time, and literary tradition, but somebody somewhere once defined a classic as a work which can stand up to criticism indefinitely. This is not such a book. And, to add insult to 633 pages of injury, at the end it turns out that the entire book was pointless. The perfectly good, Christ-like prince accomplishes nothing except making a lot of lives worse, and returns to his sanitarium, having witnessed a murder of a character we have not seen enough of to care about and who has behaved so badly that it is impossible to imagine him caring either.

Pevear and Volokhonsky seem to have translated all of nineteenth century Russian literature into English. The Double was Nabokov's favorite of Dostoevsky's work, and James Wood thinks that The Eternal Husband is excellent. Pevear and Volokhonsky have translated both. There's a whole world of Turgenev, Gogol, and Pushkin they've brought into English, not to mention vast swathes of Tolstoy, Bulgakov, and Chekhov. There is so much in the world to read, life is so short, and The Idiot is so very, very long.

Brave New World

2009-06-24T17:45:00.000-07:00

Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
1932, 384 pp.

There have been times in which I felt I was the only person on earth never to have read Brave New World. I have long considered Orwell's 1984 to be among my favorite books, and I have an affinity for dystopia in general, but cannot prosecute a conversation on the subject without somebody bringing up Brave New World. It seems everyone read it in high school, while I was swimming through the collected works of John Keats and some very trashy novels involving super-vampires and a person who could talk to all dead people. Indeed, Brave New World tends to be held up alongside Orwell's book as the staunchest pillar of the genre, standing proud on the foundation of Evgeny Zamyatin's We, slightly above and to the right of Ira Levin's This Perfect Day, and perhaps (depending on your political and aesthetic sensibilities) in the company of Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (decent) Jack London's The Iron Heel (less decent) and Ayn Rand's Anthem (nonsense on stilts). Finally I could bear my ignorance no longer and read the damn thing.

The very first sentence of the book lacks a subject, and I nearly stopped reading right then and there. But (regrettably!) my mother raised no quitter, save where matters of exercise are concerned, so I forged ahead. Three sentences later I was confronted with this malodorous beast:

"Cold for all the summer beyond the panes, for all the tropical heat of the room itself, a harsh thin light glared through the windows, hungrily seeking some draped lay figure, some pallid shape of academic goose-flesh, but finding only the glass and nickel and bleakly shining porcelain of a laboratory."

I honestly assumed there was some mistake. I consulted another copy of the book, and felt my brain begin to cry when my fears were confirmed. There was no mistake, no disaster of translation. A human being, a natural English speaker, actually wrote that sentence. How can a shape be pallid, when pallid refers to color? How can something shine "bleakly"? What exactly is a "draped lay figure"? Does that distinguish it from a draped clergy figure? Was that clause some sort of horrific accident involving what was meant to be a transitive verb? What does the first clause refer to? I put down the book and poured myself a drink, for courage.

Have you heard of the Bulwer-Lytton Award? Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, the First Baron Lytton, who I am delighted to report that I am not making up, wrote novels that actually began with sentences like "It was a dark and stormy night" or "A shot rang out". San Jose State University gives out an annual prize for "the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels." Here's a good example: "Gerald began—but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them "permanently" meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash—to pee." As I folded myself around my reinforcing whisky, I began to wonder if there was an honorable mention for Worst First Page Ever.

I went out for a walk, and looked at the clouds, pondering the immense incomprehensibility of the universe. Perhaps, I reasoned, by the time I got back, the book would have done the decent thing and read itself. But when I returned, there it was, glittering malevolently, and perhaps shining bleakly. I took a running start and tackled page two.

I'm sure you are familiar with the story of Brave New World, since you probably read it in high school. In brief, it depicts a future in which genetic engineering, systematic use of pharmaceuticals, and subliminal messaging during sleep has created an endlessly stable, endlessly boring hierarchical society. Nobody is born, but instead everyone is grown through clever scientific techniques and bred for specific tasks: from the smartish, beautiful, tall, and competent Alphas, to the hideous dwarf Gammas. Probably less well known is that it was written as a satire on H.G. Wells' hopeful Men Like Gods. The tongue and cheek satire of H.G. Wells shows up pretty quick, and the book contains a surprising amount of jokes and sly humor for something ostensibly considered a dystopia. Lumping it together with 1984 strikes me as rather like classifying The Producers with Schindler's List, on the grounds that both involve Nazis. There's quite a bit of sex stuff, though a lot of it seemed rather prurient, with the sort of juvenile sensibility that assumes that women spend a lot of time getting naked together in showers and hitting each other with pillows when men aren't around. I'll give Huxley some credit here: he is fairly encyclopedic in his satire, and seems to have come up with a clever and slightly amusing take on virtually every recognizable aspect of everyday life. The satire never breaks character, which would have been immediately fatal.

However, he has some serious structural problems. The plot is animated by the discovery and return of John Savage, which is the ancient fish-out-of-water scenario, with all the obligatory misunderstandings. Huxley's habit of setting up four simultaneous scenes and then cutting back and forth between them in a sort of montage gets annoying quickly. It builds momentum and at times even tension, but it also repels coherent thought and reflection. That he uses it at critical points for exposition and character development is instructive, and is worth comparison to Orwell, who sustained his scenes almost past the point of tolerance. Consider the moment when Winston Smith finally begins reading Goldstein's book: that excerpt goes on and on and on and has been the defeat of many an ambitious young contrarian. Orwell wants you to think and reflect and have a sustained thought process; Huxley's montage technique prevents this, and prevents taking him seriously.

Huxley's dystopia also does not stand up to much consideration. It is a very precarious sort of tyranny, based on the suppression of human nature, and one gets the sense that one day without narcotics would end the whole affair. I was also a bit murky on why the strict hierarchy was exactly necessary. Apparently Alphas would be unhappy if forced to do menial Gamma work (though that leaves open the question of why Beta through Delta is necessary instead of just two classes) which does not seem to add up with how heavily medicated and conditioned everyone is. There seem to be captains of industry and pillars of civil society, though their organizations are unclear, their relations are unclear, and the extent of their status is unclear. There is apparently a Deputy-Governor of the Bank of Europe, for instance. How does one get to be in that position? Did he have a better education? Is he richer than everyone else? What are his views on monetary policy? The one member of the elite we do get to see is quite underwhelming, and rather than the pitiless evil of the functionary in 1984, he's sort of a sympathetic, affable chap. There is no organized violence (the police use narcotic gas and water pistols filled with anesthetic) no paranoia, no poverty, no real persecution. And if (as the Controller concedes) Shakespeare is better than their empty synthetic rhetoric, why not steal it and say they invented it? Then Savage would not be a danger, and their prose would improve.

Nor do the personal relations carry much credibility. If Savage is meant to be a sensitive Shakespeare-reader with a real concept of human relations and genuine, why does he love Lenina? She's an idiot and he knows it, and he dislikes everything about her. Is it just because she's beautiful? If so, that's a pretty shallow motivation for an ostensibly thinking and feeling person, and apparently incorrect because he turns her down when she propositions him. Why does he like Bernard Marx, and why does Marx begin the book a brilliant individualist contrarian and end it a mindless apologist? While we're on the subject, why does Huxley set up the Bokanovsky process at the beginning, allowing for genetically identical clones of people, but not exploit it as a plot device? If Bernard Marx and, say, the Controller had been genetic twins, there could have been some interesting exploration of the concepts of self and identity, nature vs. nurture, and so forth. An opportunity entirely missed, in favor of a pseudo-philosophical climactic conversation which reads like an over-bright but under-experienced college freshman who annoys you by raising his hand and blathering out his opinion on Kierkegaard in your 8 AM microeconomics class. That the conclusion seems to be in favor of an eternal and loving God with a dash of Catholicism only makes the conclusion all the more intellectually bankrupt. There is also a twinge of "savage is savage, civilization is civilization, and ne'er the twain shall meet" philosophy which turns up in the closing scenes, and the way Huxley just refers to "civilization" rather than the one particular dystopia seems to suggest a neo-Luddite, slightly pastoral anarchist vision, instead of functioning social and economic democracy, the very concept of which Huxley apparently finds abhorrent.

So I didn't like the book. Then I made a terrible, terrible mistake. I turned the page, and saw Brave New World Revisited. An inveterate completest, I forged ahead, to my eternal regret. This review is already too long. The rest of it is going to consist entirely of furious spittle-flecked vitriol. Stop reading here, go outside, and read a book.

"The prophecies made in 1931 are coming true much sooner than I thought they would," Huxley begins. Revisited was written in 1958, which is a notable year for its total absence of genetically engineered castes, cloning, mass-hypnosis, subliminal messaging during sleep, or systematic, government-mandated drug use. Fortunately, Huxley was kind enough to organize his essay to inform me about how thoroughly correct he was about everything. He begins with "Overpopulation."

Any time an intellectual other than Amartya Sen begins holding forth on the issue of "overpopulation," you can be entirely certain that you are about to receive unadulterated Mathusian fallacies which have not been updated or amended by any knowledge produced since 1830. There will be no discussion whatsoever of the enormous body of knowledge which has arisen in the field of population growth, demographics, family planning, food production and distribution, and the role of population in development. You will not hear about the Harris-Todaro Model, I assure you. Huxley does not disappoint: "[Birth control] must be practiced by countless individuals, from whom it demands more intelligence and will power than most of the world's teeming illiterates possess," he writes. "In parts of Asia and in most of Central and South America populations are increasing so fast that they will double themselves in little more than twenty years. If the production of food and manufactured articles, of houses, schools and teachers, could be increased at a greater rate than human numbers, it would be possible to improve the wretched lot of those who live in these underdeveloped and over-populated countries. But unfortunately these countries lack not merely agricultural machinery and an industrial plant capable of turning out this machinery, but also the capital required to create such a plant. Capital is what is left over after the primary needs of a population have been satisfied."

Oh dear. Those silly, stupid, lazy brown people! They’re much too stupid to understand how condoms work, which is obviously why they choose to be too poor to have access to them, and choose to live in tradition-bound patriarchic societies in which women have no say over their reproductive health and family planning decisions, promote the high infant mortality rates that engender high birth rates, and continue to select repressive demagogues as their leaders to tell them that condoms cause AIDS. That certainly is what prevents us (whoever that may be) from creating more houses than people (because everyone needs their own house, plus some extras) and creating teachers faster than people (because everyone needs their own teacher, plus some extras, and teachers are not part of the population, but instead are grown in orchards near Atascadero). If only Huxley could properly define what capital is, then perhaps he would see that everything he thinks is goddamn stupid. It gets worse. Why, pray tell, is it dangerous for there to be so many poor brown people? Well, I'll tell you:

"Communism has been invented. Given this fact, the probability of over-population leading through unrest to dictatorship becomes a virtual certainty. It is a pretty safe bet that, twenty years from now, all the world's over-populated and underdeveloped countries will be under some form of totalitarian rule -- probably by the Communist party." Twenty years from 1958 makes 1978. In 1978, Ethiopia had just gone communist, Vietnam and Laos were communist, and Yemen had gone communist in 1970. Mozambique and Angola were nominally communist, but engaged in terrible, long-running civil wars. That makes six out of a hundred and twenty-odd “underdeveloped countries,” though none of them is or was particularly overpopulated. And their Communist parties were of a variety of stripes, instead of one ever-present monolith of over-populated rabble-rousing. Of course, any thinking person knows that over-population does not "lead" to dictatorship, nor are all dictators communists, so perhaps these details skewed Huxley’s highly scientific prediction. And since communism, for all its faults and permutations, at least is correlated with a very low birth rate, if over-population really is his worry, Huxley should have breathed a sigh of relief had he been correct. He does not. Instead he delivers this little gem:

"In this second half of the twentieth century we do nothing systematic about our breeding; but in our random and unregulated way we are not only over-populating our planet, we are also, it would seem, mak¬ing sure that these greater numbers shall be of biologically poorer quality." Up until this point I had been struggling manfully to take Huxley as a serious, if misguided and uninformed thinker. In retrospect, I was reading the reputation, not the writer, and biting into a mouthful of eugenicist gristle was enough to bring me back to reality. At this juncture I threw the book across the room. I was in the cafeteria at work, so this provoked some controversy, principally from the large woman I hit when I threw it. I took the book outside and threw it again across the courtyard, and was marching over to kick it a few times when somebody stopped me.

How anyone could sustain this argument with a straight face after the Second World War is utterly beyond me. I am aware that Huxley comes from a long line of wealthy white eugenicists, so perhaps bigotry and dribbling pseudo-scientific stupidity ran in his family. I am aware that he is considered by many to have been brilliant, and that lots of people think Brave New World is one of the best books in the English language. I want very much to find where Aldous Huxley is buried, to dig him up, and to throw stones at him. Had he simply been a lone bigot, a sad crank in a corner somewhere obsessively filling notebooks with this sort of unexamined detritus of an exploded ideology, that would be one thing. But no, he is considered a genius and read by everyone in high school. He is worse than a garden-variety bigot filled with juvenile self-righteousness and narcissistic hatred for the unwashed masses who clutter up his planet and breathe his air: through some terrible mistake, he has been taught to generations of blank-minded youngsters. The only thing worse than a bigoted idiot is one who is the cause of bigotry and idiocy in others. Slogging through his self-congratulatory remarks as to the superiority of intellectuals and their imperviousness to lies and government propaganda, I began to think of all the other asinine eugenicists the world has endured, trumpeting their vulgarized Nietzsche and perverted pseudo-science. It made me consider the old refrain of the Allied Expeditionary Force: the only good person with a world-view like this is a dead one. Now if only Mr. Huxley’s influence would die.

Regeneration

2009-06-20T16:08:00.000-07:00

Regeneration, by Pat Barker
1991, 250 pp.

I would suggest that someone write a survey of modern female British writers who have an obsession with the First World War, had Terry Castle not already beat me to it in the London Review of Books. Of them Lyn Macdonald’s documentary histories are indispensable, but Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy is certainly the best known. This is the first volume, released in 1991 to great acclaim; the third volume won the Booker. With these three books Barker vaulted herself into the tiny ranks of universally admired contemporary female novelists.

Regeneration is about equal parts fact and fiction. The catalyst is a declaration written by Siegfried Sassoon protesting the continuation of the war, and his time spent at Craiglockhart mental facility as a result. Sassoon was one of Britain’s great anti-war poets, and he really did write that declaration and spend time at Craiglockhart. He really was treated by the brilliant psychiatrist named Rivers, really was friends with Robert Graves (who wrote the famous anti-war memoir Farewell to All That and several antique military historical novels of which I, Claudius is the most famous but Count Belisarius is probably the best) and really did meet Wilfred Owen while in the hospital. All of this is true, and Barker took quite a risk in adopting these famous and famously articulate men as her characters. This gambit succeeds brilliantly: indeed, for my money the book’s greatest strength is Barker’s command of her characters’ voices. Each has his own distinctive diction and tone, with never a wrong note. They sound exactly how educated, refined, sensitive people under tremendous social pressure who have been through horrible experiences and are now in psychological torment ought to sound. As you can imagine, this is quite a feat. This skill extends even to minor characters, who are drawn with speed and efficiency. Look how quickly she defines the limits of one character's world:

"In her world, men loved women as the fox loves the hare. And women loved men as the tapeworm loves the gut."

There is also a character named Prior, who is fictional, and therefore allows Barker to escape the confines of the mental facility. Prior adds a dash of romance and a female character when he meets a winsome factory worker in Edinburgh; regrettably, this affair ends with a passage which ought to have won Barker the coveted “Bad Sex in Fiction” award.

Aside from Barker’s control of voice, the sections (all too brief!) in which Sassoon and Owen collaborate on their poems are excellent, if for no other reason than that it is inherently fascinating to watch people be good at something.

Despite being a good book overall, I confess I often felt that it was one which lacked motivation. There is no conflict between Sassoon and Rivers, nor even is Sassoon particularly the main character, since Prior gets at least as much attention, and his conflict is of a very genial sort. We do get a sense of the nightmares and flashbacks these soldiers experience, but since they are well-mannered, well-spoken, and well-educated, there’s never any moments of real emotional torment. Nor is there any doubt that Sassoon is quite sane and will ultimately be sent back to the front, all of which adds up to very skillfully drawn characters having very skillful conversations but to no real emotional purpose. Even the final pages in which Sassoon is discharged lack gravitas: he wants to go back, and he does. It is not a defeat, or a death sentence. I assimilated the themes of mental anguish and slow recovery, of undercurrents of social stratification and masculinity, but themes cannot drive a narrative alone. Perhaps I expected a darker and more wrenching book. Barker certainly has a disparaging view of English society during the war, and of the platitudes that demographic produced and consumed in volume. After a prayer, for instance, she writes: "The congregation, having renounced reason, looked rather the happier for it and sat down to await the sermon." Good stuff, that, but hardly a driving fury. Regeneration is certainly good, it just didn’t particularly tell me anything about the experience of war and post-traumatic stress that hasn’t already been dealt with extensively in fiction. I wondered why Pat Barker decided to write such a calm and restrained book. Surely the only reason to write about the First World War, especially about the mental damage of the soldiers who fought in it, is due to some overwhelming passion. I felt no such passion, only considerable skill. Skill is in rather short supply these days, so it is welcome when it is found, so I therefore consider Regeneration well worth reading (indeed, I will happily read the other two books in the trilogy) but nothing more.

In Patagonia

2009-06-16T20:14:00.000-07:00

In Patagonia, by Bruce Chatwin
1977, 204 pp.

To this day, the more remote and exotic parts of the world are crawling with unshaven backpackers clutching Moleskine notebooks, desperately trying to be Bruce Chatwin. This is understandable. After reading In Patagonia in about two sittings, I too wanted to be Bruce Chatwin. You should go read it right now, and then you can join me in wanting to be Bruce Chatwin. You won't regret it.

In 1974, Chatwin was the art and architecture writer for the Sunday Times. He flew to Buenos Aires, ostensibly to do research, and promptly quit his job with the following telegram: "Have gone to Patagonia." This book is the product of his months spent walking, riding, hitchhiking, and generally browsing around Patagonia, the vast and desolate southern triangle of Chile and Argentina. He claims to have been driven there by a childhood curiosity brought on by a small patch of skin ("brontosaurus skin," his mother tells him) sent home by his great-uncle, who was briefly consul in Punta Arenas. More broadly, he appears to have been fascinated his entire life by the most distant parts of the earth and by the nomadic lifestyles of the people who inhabit them. To this end, he wrote a couple of volumes of essays, a couple novels, and In Patagonia, which secured him immortality and which stands as the antithesis to Theroux's Great Railway Bazaar in the founding pantheon on modern travel writing.

Theroux's book was a linear, almost claustrophobic narrative of an endless, virtuoso train journey. Its skin and bones were details of cabin comforts, meals, stations, tickets, and the other banal details of travel. Theroux's account of the London to Paris stretch differed only slightly from the Madras to Sri Lanka passage, and his glacial indifference to local people, history, culture, and specific stories made any given piece of the book as closely centered on Paul Theroux's personal comfort as any other given piece. When In Patagonia came out two years later, Theroux gave it a bad review, complaining that Chatwin never explains how he gets from one place to another, what he eats there, or how he pays for it all. And quite rightly. Chatwin recognized that those things are only interesting to the people who actually experienced them. To everyone else, they just sound like monotonous whining. It may be that the central experience of your vacation was the bus breaking down and you getting ameobic dystentery, but nobody else wants to hear about that. It was probably subjectively important, but it is objectively tedious. Instead Chatwin alternates his short, punchy chapters between travelogue and encounters and full stories explaining the background of the subjects he's investigating. So (for example) there are a couple chapters about his progress finding one specific cabin high up in the mountains and trying to determine who built it and when. Eventually it becomes clear that it was built by none other than Butch Cassidy, so we get a chapter about the Cassidy gang staging heists and running from the law. Chatwin tells a hell of a good story, and treats us variously to rousing sea adventures, an anarchist uprising, the origins of the Welsh exile community, meditations on Darwin, a connection between a book about Magellan and the origin of Caliban in The Tempest, and a 19th century European lawyer who convinces the local Araucanian Indians to elect him King of Patagonia. It is true that Chatwin never dwells for very long on these things and presents travel as too neat, too comfortable, and too romantic an experience. He also never wastes your time, talks down to you, or tells you something boring or obvious. He works his way down the coast, cutting back and forth from the sea to the mountains, from Argentina to Chile, all the way down to Tierra del Fuego, to the most southern city in the world. Along the way he investigates every story and legend of interest, always on the trail of his great uncle, the sailor and diplomat, and the origin of that "brontosaurus skin."

It helps that Chatwin is a splendid writer, with a confident, clipped, laconic voice and a keen eye not just for startling visual descriptions, but for emotions and relationships. Theroux is good at exotic absurdity; Chatwin is just as good, but recognizes pathos as well. Consider this description of a dying exiled poet in an empty, run-down cabin:

"She was waiting for me, a white face behind a dusty window. She smiled, her painted mouth unfurling as a red flag caught in a sudden breeze. Her hair was dyed dark-auburn. Her legs were a mesopotamia of varicose veins. She still had the tatters of an extraordinary beauty."

A mesopotamia!

Or consider this description of a little crossroads town:

"The city kept reminding me of Russia--the cars of the secret police bristling with aerials; women with splayed haunches licking ice-cream in dusty parks; the same bullying statues, the pie-crust architecture, the same avenues that were not quite straight, giving the illusion of endless space and leading out into nowhere."

And this:

"The cliffs were a lighter grey than the grey of the sea and the sky. The beach was grey and littered with dead penguins."

Jesus.

I trust by now that I've made my point. I've never read a book quite like In Patagonia, despite being a great aficionado of travel writing. Chatwin comes across like the most grizzled, fascinating, taciturn fellow in a dark expat bar, and it is a pleasure to have spent 204 pages with him. That his life ended so prematurely is a tragedy, and I lament that he left us so few books. Had he written only In Patagonia, though, his immortality would probably still be assured. It really is a splendid read for anyone with an interest in anything: at once exotic, romantic, erudite, lapidary, fascinating, and totally unique, it cannot be too highly recommended.

The Great Railway Bazaar

2009-06-10T22:44:00.000-07:00

The Great Railway Bazaar, by Paul Theroux
1975, 379 pp.

Paul Theroux has probably seen more of the world at ground level than any other person alive. He has gone by train from Cairo to Cape Town, from Boston to Argentina, and twice from London to Southeast Asia, to Japan, then across Russia back to London. He has spent a year on trains in China, and kayaked in the South Pacific. He has walked the coast of England, been a Peace Corps volunteer in Uganda and taught in Singapore. He's written something like 20 novels and ten travel books, and he apparently knows everybody. The Great Railway Bazaar, about his first circuit of the Asian continent by train, is the book that made him famous. It's something of a classic of the travel genre, though it is unlike most travel books I've ever read.

Theroux seems to embark on his four-month odyssey not exactly out of a love for travel or curiosity about new places or due to the sort of slightly mystical wanderlust that possessed Bruce Chatwin. Instead, as he makes clear in the opening sentence, he just really likes trains. Indeed, the book is less of a travelogue and more of a description of sitting on trains. Theroux gets out periodically to sniff the air and complain, but most of his time is spent ensconced in his cabin. He gives a few defenses for this mode of travel, ranging from the highly persuasive (trains are comfortable and never spill your drink) to the dubious (train travel lets you see a country "with its pants down") to the rather self-righteous (a lengthy passage about how an experienced traveler can accurately tell everything about a given country just by looking at it out of the windows for a few minutes). He meets eccentric characters on the train, of course, though most of them are fellow travelers rather than locals, and even the locals tend to be wealthy, odd, and English-speaking. He is not particularly interested in the history or culture of the places he visits, though he is perfectly willing to dispense sweeping generalizations from his sleeping car. "Afghanistan is a nuisance," for instance. "The food smells of cholera, travel there is always uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous, and the Afghans are lazy, idle, and violent." In Burma he gets into an argument when he "questions one of the cardinal precepts of Buddhism, the principle of neglect." Burma, he explains, "is a socialist country with a notorious bureaucracy," but a Buddhist bureaucracy which demands the patience and piety of a monk who is used to a life of suffering. "Nothing happens in Burma, but then nothing is expected to happen." Sometimes these seem fairly accurate, like his impression that modernization in Turkey stopped "with the death of Ataturk, at 5 minutes past 9 on 10 November, 1938." Other times, like when he blames all of the problems in Sri Lanka on the natural laziness of the people, he just seems like a fat, obnoxious, wealthy, white man who cannot understand how the poor have failed to read Weber on the Protestant work ethic and the spirit of capitalism and why they have therefore chosen to remain in abject poverty.

But now I have given the wrong impression. It is certainly an interesting book, but it is interesting in direct proportion to the reader's interest in two things: Paul Theroux and the world of 1975. I think I have already dealt with the first; the second is more interesting. Theroux crosses Iran before the Revolution, Afghanistan before the Soviet invasion, Burma before the democracy crackdown, and Vietnam during Kissinger's "decent interval." He crosses the Sea of Japan in a rusty trawler, has a run-in with the Burmese police, and seems to start losing his mind in Japan. This is all good stuff, and he is frequently a good writer. Consider these examples:

"The brown drapery hangs in thick folds, keeping out the breeze and preserving the heat, which is paddled around the room by ten slow fans. All the tables are set, and the waiter, who might be dead, is propped against the wall at the far end of the room. It is fairly certain there is a suicide upstairs waiting to be discovered, and the flies that soar through the high-ceilinged bar are making for the corpse of this ruined planter or disgraced towkay. It is the sort of hotel that has a skeleton in every closet and a register thick with the pseudonyms of adulterers."

Though some of the misanthropy which characterizes his later work is certainly present, on the whole he seems urbane, well-read, well-traveled, and well-spoken, just certain he knows everything he needs to know and immensely disinterested in everything else. He has few experiences which would qualify as "adventures" in the normal sense of travel-book adventures, nor does he travel in the sort of low-to-the-ground semi-poverty which is the current vogue in travel literature. Theroux seems to be more of a quantity over quality traveler, and though he is gifted with a keen eye for sharp descriptions of places and people, his overwhelming interests are trains and Paul Theroux. Still, it is a fascinating account of the sort of journey only a handful of people have ever made, one which is largely impossible today, and as a book it is an important pivot point in the genre of travel writing.

The Road

2009-06-09T12:50:00.000-07:00

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
2006, 287 pp.

Ten years after some undescribed global calamity, a man and his son follow the road south and try to survive. The world is dark and cold, covered with billowing ash. The cities are destroyed, all the animals are dead, and the human survivors have long since become roving bands of murderers and cannibals. Together the man (called only "the man") and his son ("the boy") walk south to the ocean. The Road is a stark, desolate book, a minimalist modern take on the old post-apocalypse genre, and a surprisingly intimate story of paternal love.

The book consists of short paragraphs and episodes lasting a page or two. The man and the boy walk along the road. They hide from roving bands of cannibals. They search ruins for food. They get hungry, they get cold, they get wet. They camp under a tarp and make a small fire. This is the book. Much of it is given in barren passages of dialogue, full of repetitions, okays, yeses, and nos, devoid of quotation marks or commas. This is a representative:

"Did you have any friends?
Yes. I did.
Lots of them?
Yes.
Do you remember them?
Yes. I remember them.
What happened to them?
They died.
All of them?
Yes. All of them.
Do you miss them?
Yes. I do.
Where are we going?
We're going south.
Okay."

McCarthy is known for his thick, gnarled prose with its Biblical cadence and peculiar antique diction. Here he is mostly quite restrained, grudgingly giving up very few sparse words on big empty pages. He gets a lot done with very few words, almost entirely nouns and verbs which do a lot of heavy thematic lifting. His descriptions are terse and efficient:

"The grainy air. The taste of it never left your mouth. They stood in the rain like farm animals. Then they went on, holding the tarp over them in the dull drizzle. Their feet were wet and cold and their shoes were being ruined. On the hillsides old crops dead and flattened. The barren ridgeline trees raw and black in the rain."

He delivers several simple, but apt descriptions, mostly of the endless dark and cold, sometimes both. "That cold autistic dark" for instance, or "the ancient dark," or one of McCarthy's favorite images conflating the shoulder blades of someone starving with razors. One readily forgives the Ptolemaic error in the lovely description of how "the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp." This is a case study in the unity of content and form: McCarthy sketches a barren, empty world, with barren, emaciated prose. It is true that his usual tropes are not far away: as James Wood pointed out in the New Republic, he still has “a reliance on gnomic utterances by cameo prophets” and his habitual bursts of sudden horrible violence punctuate the narrative. At times he does wind himself up into a passage of rhapsodic, frothing prose, like this one:

"By then all stores of food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond."

Indeed.

But aside from the craftsman’s impressive fashioning of the mechanics of his art to suit his purposes, The Road has a few interesting structural nuances. It could most obviously be classified as an entry into the post-apocalyptic genre, but it resolutely defies most of the conventions of that dubious category. Most post-apocalyptic books have the actual calamity as a centerpiece, since that allows an easy before/after dichotomy, some noisy set-pieces to get through the middle stretch, and a bit of moralizing about the cause of the disaster. The Road takes place ten years later, with the apocalypse itself barely explained. The man has memories of the world “in that long ago,” but the boy does not, and the man is unable to communicate his memories, because the world is so different: “He could not construct for the child’s pleasure the world’ he’d lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he.” Most post-apocalyptica is created for the purposes of social commentary. It is designed as an allegory for contemporary problems, a reductio ad absurdum argument against the author’s pet fears. The Road is nothing of the sort. Like the great prison literature, The Road is purely material, concerned only with how one would live in a world without people, commerce, production, infrastructure, organization, social groups, safety, or a future. This is the really affecting core of the book: the man is totally devoted every moment of every day to survival, and we are carried along with him through the hard details of that struggle, but he has no answer for the struggle against the last problem. Survival may be the only thing that matters, but why bother surviving in such a world? Why bother keeping your child alive, if you know that his only future is to continue living in such suffering? We learn in flashback that the boy’s mother killed herself rather than live only to be killed and quite probably raped and eaten.

With the conventions of the post-apocalyptic genre stripped away, what remains is that quintessential American motif: the road or river novel. Transit down a road or a river has been a stirring metaphor since at least Mark Twain, and seems to be deeply ingrained in the American psyche. I’m certain Joseph Campbell had all sorts of theories about it. It remains here, when all the rest of civilization and culture is gone, and it works as an animating force to push the novel along.

All of that said, the end is a problem. Throughout we get a deep emotional sense of the man’s commitment and devotion to his son. “If he is not the world of God God never spoke,” the man thinks early on, and as the book continues, he gets increasingly theological. The man kills several people and refuses to help several more out of the necessity of survival, but the boy always objects, wanting to help anyone he can. The boy increasingly takes on a sort of child-saint aspect, including a passage in which the man tells one of McCarthy’s “cameo prophets” that the boy is a god, the last god on earth. The prophet takes this a bit humorously, but the point remains whether the boy is meant literally to be seen as a redemptive godly figure, or if the man’s monomania has proceeded to such an extent that he really believes it and is effective at persuading the reader. The final pages strike an incongruous note of religious consolation, with solemn talk about the fire of God being passed from person to person and even a bit of downright deus ex machina which casts much of the rest of the novel into an entirely different light, opening up interpretations in which the man was far more paranoid and violent than previously considered and the world not quite so badly off. Many reviewers found the last pages uplifting and hopeful. I found them false and disingenuous, and had McCarthy not been quite so fortunately terse with them, they could have ruined the novel entirely. Instead it is a good book with a false ending, but still well worth reading, particularly for aficionados of Cormac McCarthy or of post-apocalyptic fiction.

Frederick the Great

2009-06-04T21:37:00.000-07:00

Frederick the Great, by Gerhard Ritter
1968, 201 pp. From a series of lectures given at the University of Freiburg in 1933-1934.

Much is popularly known about the Third Reich; amongst people familiar with European history at least a little is known about the Second, but the First is by now entirely ignored. This is particularly true in the United States, where the global conflict known elsewhere as the Seven Years War is known as the "French and Indian War" and where all history is framed as the teleological production of American exceptionalism rather than the Great Power struggle for dominance in Europe. This is unfortunate. There is quite a lot to be learned from the age of so-called "enlightened" absolutism, from the practitioners of calculated diplomacy and limited wars, and specifically from Frederick the Great. For the interested non-specialist, Gerhard Ritter's brief biography is an excellent introduction.

Professor Ritter is probably best known, to the extent that he is still known at all, for his participation in the postwar debate over the sonderweg interpretation of German history. Ritter was a German nationalist, a conservative, and a devout Lutheran, who fought as an infantryman in the First World War and was a strong supporter of the old monarchy. He was not, however, a Nazi, and he argued his entire life for a form of conservative German nationalism separate from the perversions of National Socialism. (This is, incidentally, why arguments that Hitler was purely conservative and not in his own sick way a revolutionary are nonsense: there were genuine German conservatives who ardently wanted a return to the limited aims and stability of the monarchy. Ritter was one of them, Hitler was not.) He was against the Nazi regime and its brutality towards the Jews, and participated in the July 20 Plot and survived, though he did argue that Jews should be stripped of civil rights. Ritter's professional career was limited to works on German political, military, and cultural history: he wrote on Bismarck, Luther, the Schlieffen Plan, and Carl Goerdeler. He was effectively the dean of conservative German historians, and this is probably his best-regarded book.

Ritter packs quite a lot of information into these 200 pages. As a biographer of Frederick, he hits all the major points with admirable concision and illumination. Frederick's father Frederick William was a domineering tyrant and a big, blustering, violent man. We get a good sense of how his antagonism towards Frederick shaped Frederick's personality and style of governance: Frederick William once had his son imprisoned and forced to watch his best friend being executed. When Ritter says that Frederick set out to be a new, tolerant, cultured sort of monarch, we believe him. The two Silesian Wars and the Seven Years War get their due, as does Frederick's administrative, military, and economic reforms, but really this book is less a biography and more of Ritter's consideration of what he knows of Frederick's life. As Peter Paret, the translator, notes in his introduction, the book is "less the product of its author's archival research than of his reflections on the history of political ideas." Therefore we get only a brief discussion of what Frederick did but a strong, considered examination of why he did it and why it mattered. Ritter seems to have absorbed everything there is to read about Frederick, including Frederick's own writings, and considers it all in light of the documented historical facts. This gives him leverage to evaluate Frederick as a leader: "Almost simultaneously with the anonymous appearance of his Anti-Machiavel in 1740, its author outraged Europe by his particularly ruthless use of force," Ritter writes. Was Frederick then really the humanitarian monarch he considered himself to be, or were his writings purely cynical? Ritter considers the matter and concludes that Frederick was concerned with the well-being of his people, but only because it served certain ends.

And here Ritter's book is the strongest, when it focuses less on historical narrative and more on its central thesis. Ritter argues that Frederick recognized that "the unselfconscious kingship of earlier times was a thing of the past...No longer was the state dynastic property, nor was the royal dignity any longer granted by the grace of God" and therefore set out to update and perfect the absolutist system pioneered by Louis XIV. His deep historical studies and voluminous correspondence with leading thinkers led him to some interesting conclusions. "Frederick found it possible to demonstrate dispassionately the theoretical advantages that republican or parliamentary forms of government enjoyed over the system of royal absolutism. If the monarchy was to retain political authority in this completely altered intellectual climate, it must constantly prove itself by supreme achievements in politics and war." To that end, Frederick established total legal security for all, restricted the power of the monarchy, protected against arbitrary governmental power, and reformed the military. He instigated and won three wars against superior forces allied against him, attacking from all sides, and took territory integral to the maintenance of a viable, contiguous Prussian state. "We have suggested," Ritter writes towards the end, "that Frederick's military policy relied on the methods of the absolutist state, which it perfected until they attained their highest possible effectiveness."

Ritter is clear about how this project developed, and how Frederick learned along the way. His youthful impetuosity during the First Silesian War and his total misreading of the diplomatic situation after the death of Charles VI taught him important lessons about Great Power diplomacy, and his early attempt at reforms taught him about the need for unitary power in the monarchy. He learned quickly on the battlefield and pioneered a new tactic of rapid flanking maneuvers. He never emerges as much of a diplomat, though, especially in the run-up to the Seven Years War in which he was constantly and hopelessly outmaneuvered by Kaunitz. But considering that, as Ritter rightly notes, "personal rule driven to such extremes was made possible only by constant, intense activity, and an almost unlimited versatility," the fact that the same man could win the Battle of Leuthen and also write a theme for a composition by Bach is extraordinary.

It is clear from this book that Ritter is interested in Frederick as a military leader first, as a diplomat second, and as a domestic reformer a distant third. The portions of the book dedicated to each subject can equally be ranked by quality. There are a few annoying formatting issues, unfortunately. Since this book is derived from a series of lectures Ritter gave in the mid-1930's, there are no footnotes and no bibliography, so it is impossible to track down the origin of an interesting story (say, Frederick's stirring personal bravery during the great defeat at Kunersdorf) or to verify a quotation from his letters or diary (say, when he writes about his depression to his sister). It also makes the book useless as a tool for further research. A map would have been most welcome, since nobody remembers where Wolfenbuttel was. Since it requires passing familiarity with the 1730 English marriage plot, and with the subtle diplomacy of Kaunitz, it is not particularly accessible to the general reader, so it is difficult to determine who the book is for, exactly. Me specifically, perhaps. Whatever the case, there is probably no other volume which so precisely conveys the essential details of Frederick's life along with such informed consideration on their importance and historical context.

Herzog

2009-06-02T21:01:00.000-07:00

Herzog, by Saul Bellow
1961, 416 pp.

I tend to take notes when reading non-fiction or large trade paperbacks which can comfortably accommodate a sheet of notepaper as a bookmark, but with smaller mass-market paperbacks I have an annoying half-system: I dogear the bottom corner of a page which has something I want to remember or quote, then at the end of the book I go back through to all the dogeared pages with a notepad. I tend not to mark the specific passage, out of a visceral and terminal distaste for marking up books, so I spend a lot of time re-reading these pages wondering what the hell I wanted to remember. It doesn't help that I mark pages that have both good passages and bad, so when returning to any given page, I have no idea what I'm looking for. By the time I finished Herzog, the book was thick with folded corners, sometimes three or four pages in a row. I was tempted to tally the good passages against the bad. I think it would have come out about equal.

There is little story to speak of in Herzog. The title character is a middle-aged ex-professor undergoing his second acrimonious divorce. The action of the book takes place over a few days or perhaps a week, but is laced with flashbacks and memories, and most notably, Herzog's little letters he writes to people he knows or has read about. Bellow sums it up on the third page: "Late in the spring Herzog had been overcome by the need to explain, to have it out, to justify, to put in perspective, to clarify, to make amends."

These letters are given in italics, sometimes interspersed with un-italicized passages which seem to be Herzog's own thoughts, although they continue rather than interrupt the flow of the italicized letters. Some of them are fairly amusing: "Dear Doktor Professor Heidegger, I should like to know what you mean by the expression 'the fall of the quotidian.' When did this fall occur? Where were we standing when it happened?"

The narration veers between third-person omniscient and free-indirect style, with no clear distinction between what Herzog is thinking, remembering, or experiencing and the narration. Perhaps this is meant to reflect the fragmented and disoriented state of Herzog's mind. If so, I notice little improvement over the course of the book: indeed, as far as I could tell, Herzog's mood improves, but he does not grow or change as a character, so we are left with 416 pages of whining which goes nowhere and does nothing. It's like reading the script for a four-hour Woody Allen movie without any jokes.

Herzog is a damnably uneven book. There are several sections of about fifty to seventy pages which are magical, inevitably followed by thirty or so pages of unmitigated dreck. A few patterns emerge. Yes, as everyone on earth knows, Bellow is terrific with the precise, unique, lapidary descriptive phrase. Thus we have the "thick brick document" of Queens, and the interesting reversal of the usual order of listed adjectives: "soft big nose" instead of "big soft nose," and so forth. Bellow is excellent at applying bizarre but somehow perfectly applicable adjectives to otherwise banal things, and these phrases stick happily in the memory long after the book has ended. But as near as I can tell, that is his only strength. His dialogue is stilted and false. Try reading this out loud and see if it sounds like actual human beings having a conversation:

"'Phoebe,' he said. 'Admitting you're weak--but how weak are you? Excuse me...I find this pretty funny. You have to deny everything, and keep up a perfect appearance. Can't you admit even a tiny bit?'
'What good would that do you?' she asked sharply. 'And also, what are you prepared to do for me?'
'I? I'd help...' he began."

And sometimes his peculiar phrases go disastrously wrong and it becomes clear that instead of tossing off bits of gleaming, beautiful prose as though it were child's play, it is in fact quite a lot of work which sometimes doesn't succeed. When Herzog notes his lawyer's "long fingers, like a hunchback," the reader is left wondering what the hell kind of hunchbacks Saul Bellow knows. Dexterous ones, apparently.

Careful readers of this platform will recall that some months ago I reviewed Bellow's final novel Ravelstein. I did not like it, though in retrospect the review is harsher than I'd intended. Perhaps I was unfair to an 85-year old man who had just undergone food poisoning of such severity that his entire nervous system had to be effectively rebuilt from scratch. I was at pains to review the book rather than the reputation, though I admit I expected nothing short of excellence from a Nobel laureate and favorite author of everyone from Martin Amis to Roger Ebert. In my review I noted what I took to be a few glaring errors, and I considered them fatal to a book which revolves around the vast intellect of its subject. A music writer for the New York Times caught a couple other mistakes that I missed, but he had a different interpretation. The most egregious error is a reference to a recording of Palestrina "on the original instruments." But Palestrina wrote only vocal music, making "original instruments" a trifle difficult to record on. But the writer suggests a different interpretation: perhaps the error was not Bellow's, but his narrator's, who was meant to be constantly in awe of the far more intellectual title character. "If so," the writer concludes, "the 'error' represents the highest level of literary virtuosity." Of course, it seems like the narrator heard the recording and must have been able to tell five human voices from 16th century musical instruments, and if he was astute enough to learn that it was Palestrina specifically, not just some old recording, surely he would know that Palestrina wrote only a capella music. But how else to explain such a mistake? The other howler is the narrator's placing of General McAuliffe at Remagen, which is well inside Germany and was captured by the 9th Armored Division in 1945 instead of at Bastogne, which is Belgium, and where McAuliffe was in command of the 101st Airborne and famously said "Nuts" to the German demand for surrender in December of 1944. This is the most well-known story about the Battle of the Bulge, and it is impossible that a copy-editor could have missed it. Could it be that Bellow, with his fame and reputation, gets leniency from his copy-editors, or could it be that the mistakes are meant to illustrate the failings of his narrator character and were therefore left in? I don't know, but the other bits of repetition and occasionally awful prose did not inspire me to err on the side of Bellow. It is true that there were occasionally excellent descriptive phrases, but not enough to outweigh the mistakes, just to make it an uneven rather than a bad book.

And I must conclude that Herzog is similar. Take this example. On page 85, in a mental letter concerning a distasteful politician, Herzog writes, "The general won because he expressed low-grade universal potato love." This is a good phrase, and particularly resonant in ways Bellow could not have anticipated: "potato love" has notes of both Dan Quayle (who will forever be associated with tubers) and Bill Clinton's "feel-your-pain-literally-touchy-feely-empathy" and provokes the reflection that yes, all of our politicians exactly peddle low-grade universal potato love. Perfect.

But then the phrase reappears thirty pages later in the midst of a dreadful, interminable stretch of flashback about Herzog's brief stay with his utterly unbelievable, ostentatiously Jewish, frequently incoherent lawyer. Here it is in some context:

"Forming his lips so that the almost invisible mustache thinly appeared, Sandor began to sing, 'Mi pnei chatoenu golino m'artzenu.' And for our sins we were exiled from our land. 'You and me, a pair of old-time Jews.' He held Moses with his dew-green eyes. 'You're my boy. My innocent kind-hearted boy.'
He gave Moses a kiss. Moses felt the potato love. Amorphous, swelling, hungry, indiscriminate, cowardly potato love.
'Oh, you sucker,' Moses cried to himself in the train. 'Sucker!'"

Herzog is staying with this guy at a real low point, just after his wife has left him for his best friend, and we're meant to be feeling (as far as I can tell) some sense of his wrenching, disoriented, betrayed loss. It's given to us in flashback, though, so we have the added counterpoint of his disgust and bitterness at how this lawyer treated him at the time. But I defy anyone to read "He gave Moses a kiss. Moses felt the potato love" and not burst out laughing. In its first incarnation, it was the perfect phrase. When it is dragged out again, it hits exactly the wrong note. The phrase appears four other times that I counted, though never quite so badly. It works as a shorthand, though it increasingly becomes a condescension as the butt of its fatuous posturing shifts from those who peddle it to those who receive it. Clearly in the first mention, and even in the second, it is used to express Herzog's disgust at fraudulent empathy; in the last four uses, he looks down on unnamed passersby for accepting it. The emphasis shifts from one of commiseration to one of superiority.

Bellow is also given to quasi-philosophical rambling, which tends to go on for a page or two, coming from nowhere and leading to nowhere. This happens a lot in Herzog, since the title character is a professor who wrote a book about Romanticism and Christianity, and who (as either a theme or a running joke) hopelessly intellectualizes all of his life's problems. These passages almost never work. Here's an example, using our old friend, Mr. Potato Love:

"Trust her, she'd find comfort while he was away, not be despondent in 'desertion' as he would have been--his childish disorder, that infantile terror of death that had bent and buckled his life into these curious shapes. Having discovered that everyone must be indulgent with bungling child-men, pure hearts in the burlap of innocence, and willingly accepting the necessary quota of consequent lies, he had set himself up with his emotional goodies--truth, friendship, devotion to children (the regular American worship of kids), and potato love."

That just might mean something profound, but it sounds goddamn ridiculous. When he manages to reign himself in, it sounds much better, like this lovely sentence from earlier in the book: "Truth is true only as it brings down more disgrace and dreariness upon human beings, so that if it shows anything except evil it is illusion, and not truth." Better, and it's given in free-indirect style, so we know where to place it amid the other sentences on the page. It is not a pearl of sui generis philosophizing which has dripped at random from Bellow's mind into the midst of Herzog's life and my reading experience.

That's how the book is. There'll be seventy very good pages covering two or three flashbacks and about six philosophical arias which are good, then thirty pages that are nigh unreadable. One of these latter was an extremely distasteful courtroom scene which seemed to exist in order to establish that gay people are absurd sex maniacs and black people have big lips, drive badly, talk funny, and commit crimes. Considering that I noted early on that Moses Herzog seems to be a dear reflection of his creator, and that Herzog's world is populated entirely by upper-middle-class Jewish men, his few encounters with different segments of the population are universally repellent. Perhaps this was more acceptable in 1961. Perhaps it is just a trait of the character, not the author, although Martin Amis teaches us that the difference between the two can be measured by how much contempt the latter has for the former. But Bellow seems to have infinite sympathy for Moses Herzog, and he did not succeed in making me share it. Herzog seems to have a lovely, caring girlfriend (we hear quite a lot about how nice her breasts are, and her shrimp remoulade) and seemed to ignore his children while still married to their respective mothers, so I didn't particularly buy his obsession with his manipulative ex-wife or obtaining custody of their daughter. It seemed to me, much like the entire book, to just be an indulgent exercise in male narcissism. One of Bellow's overarching themes is that all of Moses Herzog's learning and erudition is useless to him when he needs it most, when his life is coming apart. It's a curiously anti-intellectual argument, but it only works insofar as Herzog's learning is useless because he can only relate to the world through the carapace of his narcissicm. Had he actually learned from all the accumulated knowledge and experience of the world, I am quite certain he'd find something useful.

Do the frequent beautiful phrases make up for this? I say that they do not: Bellow's prose is a blunderbuss of hit-and-miss verbiage instead of the precise crafting of les mots justes. A badly organized book with little plot, little character development, terrible dialogue, offensive racial caricatures, a narcissist for a protagonist, and an anti-intellectual argument is not redeemed by an occasional and statistically unreliable ability to produce good descriptive phrases. His gift with words can take him far, but not this far.

Marx in the Mid-Twentieth Century

2009-05-28T12:34:00.000-07:00

Marx in the Mid-Twentieth Century: A Yugoslav Philosopher Reconsiders Marx's Writings, by Gajo Petrović
1965, 230 pp. Translated by the author from the Croatian Philosophy and Marxism

Gajo Petrović was a stalwart of the old and now mainly deceased Praxis School of Yugoslav Marxist humanism. He lacked the economic expertise of Branko Horvat, the innovative drive of Mihailo Marković, the ethical focus of Milan Kangrga, or the comprehensive analytical gifts of Erich Fromm of the Frankfurt School, but he was nonetheless a solid if unostentatious thinker, and this is a solid if unostentatious book. It was written after Petrović's close study of Plekhanov, but before his more critical and polemical works during his conflict with the dogmatists of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. It is probably best considered as a preliminary statement of position and an introduction to the basic tenets of Marxist humanism. As such, it is a rather unremarkable read for the initiated and I enjoyed it on the grounds that it is always pleasant to be told things one already knows and agrees with. Though critical of Stalinist (and French-Stalinist) Marxist philosophy, it is not a polemic; since it is a collection of essays, it also lacks a unifying theoretical structure.

The first few essays are a critique of what passed for orthodox Marxist philosophy. Petrović rightly points out that most of its catechisms--economic determinism, the dogma of "dialectical materialism," the capitalism/dictatorship of the proletariat/imperfect socialism/perfect communism development, etc-- have little to no basis in Marx, but are instead Stalinist distortions of Leninist distortions of Marx. Petrović is kinder to Lenin than I think is necessary. He correctly notes that Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks (see Volume 38 of his Collected Works) effectively repudiates the dogmatism and denial of humanism in Materialism and Empiriocriticism. I still have no time for Lenin or what passes for his thought, and I think Petrović's case would be stronger if he placed the point of departure from Marx squarely on Lenin's shoulders, against the better efforts of Rosa Luxemburg, but it ought to be noted that Petrović was writing in Titoist Yugoslavia when criticism of Lenin was still zabranjen. Anyhow, he begins with some obligatory criticisms of Stalinist distortions, and the reader thinks immediately of Orwell's line about a book by Bertrand Russell: it is surprising to remember that there was a time when it was the first duty and obligation of serious people and people of conscience to loudly repudiate Stalinism, that the matter was ever in doubt. Petrović never mentions his French opponents by name, but it is necessary to remember that the Praxis School and the other disparate, lonely Marxist humanists were engaged in constant intellectual warfare with the French school of Stalin's apologists who hated the works of "Young Marx," the philosopher and humanist, asserting instead the primacy of "Old Marx," the bitter, cold-eyed, "scientific" economist. These two camps might more accurately be divided into those who have lived under tyranny and those who have not; those who recognize the thread of passionate humanism which animates all of Marx's thought and those who select only those aspects which can be interpreted to support their own preconceived allegiance to repression. Understandably, Petrović and the other Praxis thinkers knew that Moscow was a greater threat than the self-indulgent dilettantes in Paris, so it is to Moscow that the criticism is directed, but the purpose of the critique was not to win over Soviet apparatchiks but to serve as a humanist (and accurate) counterweight to the prevailing philosophical trends in Europe.

The centerpiece of the book is three or four essays on Marx's conception of man. Curiously, Petrović appears not to have had access to Marx's actual Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, but instead relies heavily on quotes cribbed from Fromm's Marx's Concept of Man, which is indeed a good book. An outright review or discussion of it may have been more profitable, rather than a second-hand approach to Marx, but again, we must give allowances for a Yugoslav thinker who probably couldn't get ahold of banned books, and who was writing for an audience probably unfamiliar with Fromm. Substantively, Petrović spends a lot of time discussing the ideas of alienation and praxis, and traces their importance through the corpus of Marx's work. He disputes the Stalinist (again, Leninist, I say!) subjection of philosophy to politics and the view of man as a mechanical, economical animal rather than a free and constructive being. He insists that man is free to the extent that he is able to act as a creative, self-determining personality and contributes to the development of humanity, all of which is solid Marxist-humanism.

Somewhat disappointingly, Petrović dodges the end-point problem of materialist philosophy: if the material world is bounded by causality, then everything has a cause, and if everything has a cause, how can man be free in a determined world? Is not the praxis which makes man a unique being itself a product of material causes? If so, how is it an essentially creative act? Neither Marx nor Petrović ever answers this question to my satisfaction.

There are a couple interesting essays on ontological and epistemological problems, including two at the conclusion which deal with language and Wittgenstein, Being and Heidegger. I would not be the tedious pedant I am if I did not point out that neither of these have much to do with Marx, in the mid-twentieth century or otherwise, but they are interesting, especially as a historical document expressing the perspective of a forgotten school of thought on the most important philosophical issues of the day. No stubborn, dogmatic obsolescence for the Praxis School: these fellows were cutting-edge. My only complaint is that the final two essays seem to represent an abandonment of any pretense to a central organizing theme.

In sum, Marx in the Mid-Twentieth Century hits most of the important themes of Marxist humanism: individuality; the importance of freedom and creativity; the process of de-alienation of man from himself, his society, and his labor; the unity of Young Marx with Old. It hits a few other points besides which are at once interesting and distracting, and would have benefited either from rhetorical fire, a central thesis, or more access to Marx's actual writings. As it stands, it is a solid contribution to the field, though it frequently leaves the reader wondering where he has mislaid his copy of Erich Fromm.

Flaubert's Parrot

2009-05-26T21:06:00.000-07:00

Flaubert's Parrot, by Julian Barnes
1984, 190 pp.

I closed Julian Barnes' slender, elegant novel with an audible sigh of despair. I have a teetering pile of some twenty books I intend to read before the end of the summer, including two weighty Russian doorstoppers, and now I have no choice but to obtain and read everything Barnes has written. I had intended to start in on Richard Ellmann's massive biography of Joyce in preparation to taking a running-start at Ulysses, and now I've got to drop everything, all of my meticulous plans, and read a dozen more slender, elegant books by a talented, intelligent, gifted writer.

That bastard.

Flaubert’s Parrot is a novel and a collection of essays centered around the trivia and minutia of Gustave Flaubert’s life, as written by an elderly, lonely, melancholy, retired British doctor named Geoffrey Braithwaite. He does not appear in the first couple of essays except as an unobtrusive authorial voice, and I found myself scribbling down an objection: “Why present as novel, why not just book of essays by J. Barnes?” But details begin to accumulate about Dr. Braithwaite, as the reader begins to notice what sort of things interest him, what other people think about his Flaubert obsession, and how, alone and at the end of his life, his fixation with the dead French novelist is what keeps him going. As we get to know Geoffrey Braithwaite, he emerges from the margins of the essays on Flaubert as a kind, sad, terminally nice man, and through him so too does Julian Barnes appear as a genial master of ceremonies. I wanted to be friends with him, to sit in his quiet, dark study with a cup of tea and talk about L’Éducation Sentimentale. It’s an interesting gambit: Barnes could have presented us with just a collection of essays and reflections, which would have been interesting enough. But he decided not to. He decided to make the reader feel something, in addition to just thinking things, and I found myself wondering why he decided on that feeling specifically. Why Geoffrey Braithwaite as a narrator, instead of somebody else? Does Braithwaite’s story communicate a feeling Barnes associates particularly with Flaubert? Is he based on somebody Barnes knew? When he decided on an emotional experience for the reader in addition to an intellectual one, he could have settled on anything. I wonder why he wanted me to empathize with Geoffrey Braithwaite, in addition to Flaubert.

Whatever the case, Barnes effectively strips away much of the machinery of a conventional novel and replaces it with his endearing personality and wealth of knowledge. This is risky: if either the personality or the knowledge had proven insufficient it would have ended in disaster. Barnes pulls it off like a virtuoso running through the Toccata and Fugue in D minor just to warm up and check that all the pipes are clear. His knowledge of Flaubert is encyclopedic, and he presents it in a variety of forms. There are straightforward essays, reflections on Flaubert and trains, and Flaubert and animals. There are three chronologies of Flaubert’s life: one wholly positive, the other entirely negative, and one in Flaubert’s own words. Critically, he lets Flaubert talk in lengthy quotations from letters and novels, and doesn’t try to imitate his voice or produce a pastiche. Braithwaite has his own entirely separate voice, and beyond it is a layer of slightly postmodern subjectivism, as Braithwaite learns how difficult it is to find actual reliable knowledge about Flaubert, but persists in telling you anyway, because he cannot bring himself (yet) to tell you about himself. There is a highly amusing section in which he utterly eviscerates some poor literature professor (who, I was delighted to learn, actually existed), and a rendition of Braithwaite’s own version of Flaubert’s famous Dictionary of Received Ideas. There’s also an essay from the perspective of Louise Colet, Flaubert’s mysterious and much-maligned mistress, and a series of mock-term paper questions. Braithwaite has some pretty shrewd literary observations: “Flaubert’s planned invisibility in a century of babbling personalities and shrieking styles might be characterized in one of two ways: as classical, or modern…a century before [modern critics] he was preparing texts and denying the significance of his own personality.” Or, apropos of Sartre’s miserable book on Flaubert: “How submerged does a reference have to be before it drowns?” And based on the hilarious sequence on pages 98-100, I was ready to vote for him as Dictator of Literature. In the end, he produces a phrase which perfectly sums up Flaubert’s work, Flaubert’s life, and his study of both: “straight-faced, yet misleading.” He has a sharp insight into the state of modern literary criticism: "[Critics] act as if Flaubert, or Milton, or Wordsworth were some tedious old aunt in a rocking chair, who smelt of stale powder, was only interested in the past, and hadn't said anything new for years...Whereas the common but passionate reader is allowed to forget; he can go away, be unfaithful with other writers, come back and be entranced again...I never find myself, fatigue in the voice, reminding Flaubert to hang up the bathmat or use the lavatory brush." Braithwaite has an immensely respectful approach of pursuing the writer as a reader which seems to be lacking in a world full of tendentious academics who half-learned from Freud how to tell artists what they really meant, using literature like a drunk uses lampposts: for support, not illumination.

In sum, it is a splendid literary entertainment, by someone who clearly loves books, about someone who loves books, writing about an author who revolutionized books, intended for readers who love books. It is funny and moving, and instructive. It takes its subject seriously and its audience as well: it assumes its readers capable of mature intellectual consideration and emotional empathy. An excellent book.