tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-44274637279353790362024-03-05T17:11:24.302-08:00Avanti!DE OMNIBUS DUBITANDUMAvanti!http://www.blogger.com/profile/14778606749543607723noreply@blogger.comBlogger90125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4427463727935379036.post-31292392615710722292010-05-14T04:26:00.000-07:002010-05-14T05:02:06.314-07:00Monsieur Sartre Discovers the WorldLes Mots, by Jean-Paul Sartre<br />1963, 210 pp.<br /><br />The Age of Reason, by Jean-Paul Sartre<br />1945, 300 pp.<br /><br />The Reprieve, by Jean-Paul Sartre<br />1945, 377 pp.<br /><br />Iron in the Soul, by Jean-Paul Sartre<br />1949, 349 pp.<br /><br />Existentialism is a Humanism, by Jean-Paul Sartre<br />1946, 141 pp.<br /><br />Jean-Paul Sartre—Philosophy in the World, by Ronald Aronson<br />1980, 359 pp.<br /><br />Letters to Sartre, by Simone de Beauvoir<br />1990, 531 pp.<br /><br />Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, by Iris Murdoch<br />1953, 158 pp.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />His philosophical work is too putridly written anyway. Perfectly good words exist without having to go around making so many up.<br /><br />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 <em>tout court</em>, 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.<br /><br />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: <em>Being and Nothingness</em>, the two doorstopper volumes of the <em>Critique of Dialectical Reason</em>, 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.<br /><br />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, <em>Adieu to Sartre</em> (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 <em>Critique</em>), 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.<br /><br />This selection of books constitutes an approach to Sartre as <em>the</em> 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.<br /><br /><em>The Roads to Freedom</em> trilogy (<em>Les Chemins de la liberté</em>) 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 <em>petit-bourgeois</em> 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.<br /><br />The first volume, <em>The Age of Reason</em>, 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 <em>The Age of Reason</em> 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.<br /><br />The second volume, <em>The Reprieve</em>, is a far more ambitious and intelligent piece of work. Here the overall structure of the trilogy becomes clear: <em>The Age of Reason</em> 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. <em>The Reprieve</em> 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 <em>La Nausée</em>, which is an abstract, ahistorical demonstration of the human project. <em>Les Chemins de la liberté</em> 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><em>Iron in the Soul</em> 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 <em>The Reprieve</em> 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 <em>Iron in the Soul</em> 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.<br /><br />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 <em>Les Chemins de la liberté</em> did indeed leave me wanting to read <em>La Nausée</em>.<br /><br />Sartre's memoir <em>Les Mots</em> 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Yet for all those complaints, many key aspects of Sartre’s life are present in <em>Les Mots</em>. 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. <em>Les Mots</em> 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.<br /><br />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 <em>Letters to Sartre</em>; all I can say is that after reading this book, I would rather have been Ronald Aronson than Jean-Paul Sartre.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Nietzsche-Philosopher-Psychologist-Walter-Kaufmann/dp/0691019835/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1273837558&sr=8-1">Nietzsche</a> and Shlomo Avineri for <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Hegels-Cambridge-Studies-History-Politics/dp/0521098327/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1273837578&sr=1-1">Hegel</a>, 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />According to Aronson, Sartre began his philosophical career by posing critical questions about the ontology of freedom. His first two books, <em>The Imaginary</em> and <em>Imagination</em>, 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.<br /><br />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, <em>La Nausée</em>. 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.<br /><br />Roquentin’s dilemma is of course expanded upon and developed at length in Sartre’s first great philosophical masterpiece <em>Being and Nothingness</em>. 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.”<br /><br />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 <em>What is Literature?</em><br /><br />Aronson rightly places <em>What is Literature?</em> at the center of the book and of Sartre’s intellectual development. In it, Sartre takes up the model of <em>Being and Nothingness</em>, 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.<br /><br />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 <em>Critique of Dialectical Reason</em>, in which Sartre sets himself up as an independent Marxist philosopher. Aronson had access to the unpublished drafts of the <em>Critique</em> 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 <em>Critique</em> “undisciplined, self-indulgent, confused, and confusing.” Aronson elsewhere devoted an entire book to the <em>Critique</em>, 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.<br /><br />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 <em>method</em> 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. <em>L’Idiot de la famille</em> was erected over the ruin of the <em>Critique</em>, 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.<br /><br />Compared to Aronson’s formidable performance, Iris Murdoch’s <em>Sartre: Romantic Rationalist</em> 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 <em>Iris</em> 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.<br /><br />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 <em>Being and Nothingness</em> 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 <em>Les Mots</em> 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 <em>did</em> lack both. He just didn’t let that stop him.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 <em>Being and Nothingness</em> 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 <em>Existentialism is a Humanism</em>.<br /><br />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 <em>Existentialism is a Humanism</em>, 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.”<br /><br />As an explanation and a defense of a position, <em>Existentialism is a Humanism</em> 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.<br /><br />Of the books here reviewed, <em>Letters to Sartre</em> 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.<br /><br />I was wrong.<br /><br />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 <em>The Gorilla</em>, 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 <em>taken prisoner</em> 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.<br /><br />This is the point that’s caused a degree of controversy. As <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/09/26/050926crbo_books">a review </a>in <em>The New Yorker</em> put it, following the publication of this unedited volume:<br /><br />“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 <em>Letters to Sartre</em>, 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.”<br /><br />It gets a bit worse:<br /><br />“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.”<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 <em>Being and Nothingness</em> in real world events would be a difficult task. <em>Les Chemins de la liberté</em> are an important piece of post-war writing, and central works of existentialist literature; <em>The Reprieve</em> is without doubt an excellent novel, and <em>Iron in the Soul</em> is half of an excellent novel. Sartre as a novelist has amply proven himself. What of the rest of his work?<br /><br />It is possible to construct a sort of timeline of Sartre’s life and work, and my approach thereof. As illustrated in <em>Les Mots</em>, 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.<br /><br />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 <em>The Wretched of the Earth</em>. 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 <em>Les Chemins de la liberté</em>, to the uncompleted second volume of the <em>Critique</em>, 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 <em>Critique of Dialectical Reason</em>, but I should greatly prefer having to write that book to having to write the <em>Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus</em>.<br /><br />But when Sartre is brief, controlled, and rigorous, he is very good indeed. Hence his lively political essays, and the superb <em>Existentialism is a Humanism</em>. 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.<br /><br />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.Avanti!http://www.blogger.com/profile/14778606749543607723noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4427463727935379036.post-56350331401855233132010-03-31T02:23:00.000-07:002011-07-18T10:04:01.459-07:00Guest Post: Re: The Moral "das Ding"Here it is in the rough;<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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?<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />--KyoAvanti!http://www.blogger.com/profile/14778606749543607723noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4427463727935379036.post-91749771318779240622010-03-24T03:15:00.000-07:002011-07-18T10:04:16.898-07:00Guest Post: Hermit in Paris<div>Hermit In Paris, by Italo Calvino </div><div>2003, 255 pp. </div><div><br /></div><div>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). </div><div><br /></div><div>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.” </div><div><br /></div><div>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,</div><div><blockquote>‘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.’</blockquote></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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.” </div><div><br /></div>Avanti!http://www.blogger.com/profile/14778606749543607723noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4427463727935379036.post-45603712027225898372010-03-17T05:53:00.000-07:002010-03-17T05:58:46.495-07:00To the Finland StationTo the Finland Station, by Edmund Wilson<br />1940, 509 pp.<br /><br />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?<br /><br />I have therefore arrived at <em>To the Finland Station</em> after a long Marxist bath which began with the hundred-page introduction to Gramsci’s <em>Prison Notebooks</em>, 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 <em>Axel’s Castle</em> 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 <em>Ulysses</em>. Here he is a sort of curious sidekick to Leszek Kolakowski. <em>To the Finland Station</em> mirrors much of Kolakowski’s monumental <em>Main Currents of Marxism</em> 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.<br />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…”<br /><br />Like Kolakowski, though, the stuff before Marx turns up is often desperate. The book opens well, with an enthralling account of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelet">Michelet</a>, 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 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois-No%C3%ABl_Babeuf">Gracchus Babeuf </a>is excellent, and a more efficient introduction to that essential character than Robert Rose’s full-length biography.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 <em>To the Finland Station</em> 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.<br /><br />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 <em>Das Kapital</em> 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Instead it is Lenin who is the hero of <em>To the Finland Station</em>. 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 <em>To the Finland Station</em> 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.<br /><br />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.Avanti!http://www.blogger.com/profile/14778606749543607723noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4427463727935379036.post-74783675556696005752010-01-30T13:29:00.000-08:002010-01-30T13:57:11.422-08:00Black & BlueBlack & Blue, by Ian Rankin<br />1996, 498 pp.<br /><br />Although “tartan noir” is a genuine, codified genre in its own right, this book may perhaps be best categorized along with <span style="font-style: italic;">The Wire</span> in a sort of “post-industrial sociological realist” vein of crime fiction. Since I still consider <span style="font-style: italic;">The Wire</span> to be the finest work of fiction so far this century in any medium, this is high praise by association, and well warranted. Both <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Simon">David Simon</a>’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.<br /><br />Ian Rankin boasts an enormous <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Rankin">ouevre</a>, startlingly varied an expansive for a relatively young man. I selected <span style="font-style: italic;">Black & Blue</span> 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. <span style="font-style: italic;">Black & Blue</span> won a number of awards and inspired a book-long critique of its themes. <br /><br />The story is enormous convoluted. There are three general strands: the first has to do with the real-life “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_John">Bible John</a>” 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />The first suffers from comparisons. One of my favorite detective series is by Lawrence Block, about an alcoholic New York detective named <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Scudder">Matt Scudder</a>. 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Infinite Jest</span>, 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">casually</span>. 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.<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Black & Blue</span>, 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.Avanti!http://www.blogger.com/profile/14778606749543607723noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4427463727935379036.post-62970379325614993652010-01-29T11:22:00.000-08:002010-01-29T11:32:51.119-08:00Little DorritLittle Dorrit, by Charles Dickens<br />1857, 820 pp.<br /><br />I have avoided Charles Dickens for almost a quarter-century. I have never experienced any of his works, with the exception of <span style="font-style: italic;">A Christmas Carol</span>, which I consider to be a tragedy in the genre of Czesław Miłosz’s <span style="font-style: italic;">The Captive Mind</span>: 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. <br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Our Mutual Friend</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Hard Times</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Edwin Drood</span>, and <span style="font-style: italic;">Bleak House</span>. <br /><br />George Bernard Shaw once wrote that <span style="font-style: italic;">Little Dorrit</span> is a more subversive book than <span style="font-style: italic;">Das Kapital</span>. I would argue that he drew a needless distinction: <span style="font-style: italic;">Little Dorrit</span> effectively IS <span style="font-style: italic;">Das Kapital</span>, but with more jokes and better characters. The plot concerns William Dorrit, a goodhearted if overly dignified man who winds up in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshalsea">Marshalsea debtors prison</a> 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. <br /><br />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. <br /> <br />You can also have my word that the Circumlocution Office is alive and well in London today.<br /> <br />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:<br /><br />“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.”<br /><br />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!http://www.blogger.com/profile/14778606749543607723noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4427463727935379036.post-87279624253406043982010-01-29T11:13:00.000-08:002010-01-29T11:22:20.623-08:00Avanti II: Night of the Living AvantiI 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Eichmann in Jerusalem</span>, 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<span style="font-style: italic;"> opposite</span> 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">The Man Who Was Thursday</span>. 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">The Good Soldier</span>, 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">The Sea</span>? I thought it was predictable. What about Witold Gombrowicz’s long-suppressed modernist fable <span style="font-style: italic;">Ferdydurke</span>? 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.<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Ulysses</span>, about 500 into <span style="font-style: italic;">Infinite Jest</span>, and am reading a handful of other books besides. So there’s been a lot of reading going on <em>à</em> <span style="font-style: italic;">chez moi</span>. 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.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Infinite-Jest-David-Foster-Wallace/dp/0316066524/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1264792823&sr=8-1">too long</a>. Perhaps the genre is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartan_Noir">too obscure</a>. Perhaps they are <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Calasso">unfairly neglected</a> 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. <br /><br />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 <a href="http://avanti08.blogspot.com/2009/06/brave-new-world.html">scrofulous moral decrepitude</a> 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.Avanti!http://www.blogger.com/profile/14778606749543607723noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4427463727935379036.post-60496538157212930042009-10-15T15:37:00.000-07:002009-10-15T15:43:01.034-07:00The Crying of Lot 49The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon<br />1965, 152 pp.<br /><br />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: <span style="font-style: italic;">Gravity’s Rainbow</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">The Crying of Lot 49</span>. Intrepid readers seeking an entry point into that arch and disreputable genre can select no better exordium. <span style="font-style: italic;">Gravity’s Rainbow</span> is considered a titan of the genre, while <span style="font-style: italic;">The Crying of Lot 49</span> contains all of its essential preoccupations, in a much more manageable package.<br /><br />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?<br /><br />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?<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />The impact of this book is quite easy to trace. I was constantly struck by just how similar David Foster Wallace’s book <span style="font-style: italic;">The Broom of the System</span> is to <span style="font-style: italic;">The Crying of Lot 49</span>. 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. <br /><br />At any rate, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Crying of Lot 49</span> 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Gravity’s Rainbow</span> a bit less daunting.Avanti!http://www.blogger.com/profile/14778606749543607723noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4427463727935379036.post-71860456423121823232009-10-09T13:52:00.000-07:002009-10-09T13:58:50.245-07:00The Universal Baseball AssociationThe Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., by Robert Coover<br />1968, 174 pp.<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">avant-garde</span>. His most famous book is probably <span style="font-style: italic;">The Public Burning</span>, which approaches the case of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_and_Ethel_Rosenberg">Julius and Ethel Rosenberg</a> 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">The Book of Daniel</span> deals with the same case in a metafictional sort of way.) <span style="font-style: italic;">The Universal Baseball Association</span> 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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">The</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">Universal Baseball Association</span> 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. <br /><br />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.Avanti!http://www.blogger.com/profile/14778606749543607723noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4427463727935379036.post-48045316435594326022009-10-03T05:51:00.000-07:002009-10-03T05:52:55.701-07:00Growth TriumphantGrowth Triumphant, by Richard A. Easterlin<br />1998, 200 pp.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Foreign Affairs</span>. 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. <span style="font-style: italic;">Growth Triumphant</span> 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.<br /><br />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. <span style="font-style: italic;">Growth Triumphant</span> indeed!Avanti!http://www.blogger.com/profile/14778606749543607723noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4427463727935379036.post-33909973675752203342009-10-03T05:47:00.000-07:002009-10-03T05:51:14.285-07:00Babel-17Babel-17, by Samuel R. Delany<br />1966, 219 pp.<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Dhalgren</span>, an immense, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhalgren">impenetrable work</a> of high modernism. <span style="font-style: italic;">Babel-17</span> won Delany prominence and a Nebula award and is now justly a classic of the genre.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />The aesthetic is quite similar to M. John Harrison’s great novel <span style="font-style: italic;">The Centauri Device</span>: 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Babel-17</span> 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…”<br /><br />Speaking of that linguistic puzzle, there’s some very interesting parallels in <span style="font-style: italic;">Babel-17</span> to David Foster Wallace’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Broom of the System</span>. 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 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinomy">antinomies</a> (in fact, the exact same ones) as a major plot point, though <span style="font-style: italic;">Babel-17</span> is structured in a much more conventional novel form, with none of the post-modern playfulness of <span style="font-style: italic;">Broom of the System</span>. I just wonder if Wallace happened to read <span style="font-style: italic;">Babel-17</span> at some point, or if the attraction of speculative fiction authors to Wittgenstein, language, and logic is so widespread as to create such coincidences. <br /><br />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, <span style="font-style: italic;">Babel-17</span> 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.Avanti!http://www.blogger.com/profile/14778606749543607723noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4427463727935379036.post-11878578213432070402009-09-29T11:26:00.000-07:002009-09-29T11:31:14.125-07:00Zeno's ConscienceZeno’s Conscience, by Italo Svevo<br />1923, 437 pp. Translation by William Weaver, 2001.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Life-Italo-Svevo/dp/1901285626/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254248897&sr=8-3">1892</a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Emilios-Carnival-Italo-Svevo/dp/0300090471/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254248897&sr=8-6">1898</a>, 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Dubliners</span>, 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Zeno’s Conscience</span> in 1923, Joyce had published <span style="font-style: italic;">Ulysses</span>, 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.<br /><br /> So much for the reputation and the preliminary throat-clearing, on to the book. <span style="font-style: italic;">Zeno’s Conscience</span> 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Hamlet</span>: “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.” <br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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. <br /><br /> 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, <span style="font-style: italic;">Zeno’s Conscience</span> 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.Avanti!http://www.blogger.com/profile/14778606749543607723noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4427463727935379036.post-35023105385817917072009-09-26T09:03:00.000-07:002009-09-26T09:07:02.414-07:00The Eternal Husband and Other StoriesThe Eternal Husband and Other Stories, by Fyodor Dostoevsky<br />1862-1876, 349 pp. Translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky<br /><br />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: <span style="font-style: italic;">The Idiot</span> 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Demons</span> is excellent, while <span style="font-style: italic;">The Idiot</span> is interminable, and the opening of <span style="font-style: italic;">Crime and Punishment</span> is far better than the end. The volume under review is a combination of these tendencies, but works more often than it doesn’t.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Furthermore, the language is too often simply clunky. I had this same problem with <span style="font-style: italic;">The Idiot</span>, though I didn’t notice it in <span style="font-style: italic;">Demons</span> or <span style="font-style: italic;">Crime and Punishment.</span> 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Lectures on Russian Literature</span> 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.<br /><br />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.” <br /><br />“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?”<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Notes from Underground</span>, 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. <br /><br />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.”Avanti!http://www.blogger.com/profile/14778606749543607723noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4427463727935379036.post-11369955083406268582009-09-18T12:09:00.000-07:002009-09-18T12:42:58.986-07:00The DoubleThe Double, by José Saramago<br />2002, 324 pp.<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">The Double </span>in the <span style="font-style: italic;">Times</span> helpfully singles out an early instance in Plautus' <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphitryon_%28play%29"><span style="font-style: italic;">Amphitryon</span></a>) and seemed to have been conclusively laid to rest with Dostoevsky's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Double-Gambler-Fyodor-Dostoevsky/dp/0375719016/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253301862&sr=8-3">1846 novella</a> 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.<br /><br />To some degree, my reading of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Double</span> 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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">The Double </span>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, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Double </span>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.Avanti!http://www.blogger.com/profile/14778606749543607723noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4427463727935379036.post-52517989810212162622009-09-17T16:08:00.000-07:002011-07-18T10:04:35.434-07:00Guest Post: Night TrainNight Train, by Martin Amis<br />1997, 175 pp.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.”<br /><br />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.”<br /><br />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,<br /><br />…As of last fall she was working on the Milky Way’s Virgo-infall velocity.<br />I asked him: could you be more specific?<br />I am being specific. Perhaps I should be more general.<br /><br />The same scientist who by the walk out to Mike's car we see again in this light,<br /><br />“Denziger looked as though mathematics were happening to him right then and<br />there. As though math were happening to him: He looked subtracted, with much of<br />his force of life, and his IQ, suddenly taken away.”<br /><br />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 “<a href="http://www.lectlaw.com/def/f106.htm">Felo De Se</a>” 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.<br /><br />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 <em>Night Train</em> was a much easier read than was <em>Money</em> (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 <em>War Against Cliché</em> 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.Avanti!http://www.blogger.com/profile/14778606749543607723noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4427463727935379036.post-37676120938058637072009-09-16T11:03:00.000-07:002009-09-16T11:43:09.175-07:00A Tomb for Boris DavidovichA Tomb for Boris Davidovich, by Danilo Kiš<br />1978, 135 pp.<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Hourglass</span>, and a great deal of controversy with this brief collection of linked short stories. <span style="font-style: italic;">A Tomb for Boris Davidovich</span> is directly in the tradition (or perhaps, sub-genre) of Arthur Koestler's <span style="font-style: italic;">Darkness at Noon</span>, and Victor Serge's <span style="font-style: italic;">The Case of Comrade Tulayev</span>. 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.<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">avant-garde</span> 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Hourglass</span>, and the Borgesian precision of <span style="font-style: italic;">Encyclopedia of the Dead. </span>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, <span style="font-style: italic;">A Tomb for Boris Davidovich</span> 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.Avanti!http://www.blogger.com/profile/14778606749543607723noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4427463727935379036.post-21092781135632888762009-09-16T10:20:00.000-07:002009-09-16T11:03:18.231-07:00GerminalGerminal, by Émile Zola<br />1885, 428 pp.<br /><br />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 <i>Le Père Goriot, </i>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 <span style="font-style: italic;">J'accuse</span> 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. <span style="font-style: italic;">Germinal </span>is the most famous of these, especially after the production of the big-budget, award-winning 1993 film. It well deserves its notoriety.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Germinal </span>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.<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Germinal </span>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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Manifesto</span>, 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."<br /><br />It goes on in this vein for some time.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Germinal </span>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.Avanti!http://www.blogger.com/profile/14778606749543607723noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4427463727935379036.post-65318573357311646792009-08-31T19:15:00.000-07:002009-08-31T19:30:25.078-07:00James JoyceJames Joyce, by Richard Ellmann<br />1959, revised 1982, 887 pp.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Joysprick-Introduction-Language-James-Library/dp/0233962646/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251771409&sr=8-1">formidable</a> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Re-Joyce-Anthony-Burgess/dp/0393004457/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251771383&sr=8-1">Joyce scholar</a>, 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">James Joyce</span> the greatest literary biography. Full stop.<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Finnegans Wake</span>, the most complicated, difficult book ever written. It is not just that Professor Ellmann has read all his letters (and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Selected-Letters-James-Joyce/dp/0571107346/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251771515&sr=1-1">edited volumes</a> 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Ulysses</span>: 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.<br /><br />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? <br /><br />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. <br /><br />Furthermore, Ellmann argues, using copious quotations from Joyce’s work, and entire chapters dedicated to the making of <span style="font-style: italic;">Ulysses</span> 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. <br /><br />This is not a book in which punches are pulled.<br /><br />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. <span style="font-style: italic;">Ulysses</span> 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. <span style="font-style: italic;">Finnegans Wake</span> 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: <span style="font-style: italic;">fin </span>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.<br /><br />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.” <br /><br />I assure the reader that I intend to parade my putative escutcheon as soon as I've finished this review.<br /><br />In sum, the book is a flat-out masterpiece. At the very least, the chapter on the making of <span style="font-style: italic;">Ulysses </span>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.Avanti!http://www.blogger.com/profile/14778606749543607723noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4427463727935379036.post-3482798494287749082009-08-30T13:54:00.000-07:002009-08-30T14:23:32.817-07:00The Savage DetectivesThe Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolaño<br />1998, 648 pp.<br /><br />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 href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/books/review/Mason-t.html?_r=1&ref=books">a new one is just out</a>, 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">2666</span>. It is a very good time to be discovering Roberto Bolaño.<br /><br />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, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Savage Detectives</span> 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.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">The Savage Detectives</span> 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">By Night in Chile</span>, 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">anyone</span>. One is Auxilio Lacouture, the narrator of Bolaño’s book <span style="font-style: italic;">Amulet</span>. 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.”<br /><br />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.”<br /><br />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: <span style="font-style: italic;">The Savage Detectives</span> 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">they</span> 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">By Night in Chile </span>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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Distant Star </span>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, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Savage Detectives</span> is the best mirror of life that is possible in literature.Avanti!http://www.blogger.com/profile/14778606749543607723noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4427463727935379036.post-2935016502746154242009-08-27T15:53:00.000-07:002009-08-27T16:28:41.138-07:00The UnconsoledThe Unconsoled, by Kazuo Ishiguro<br />1995, 535 pp.<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">The Unconsoled</span>. 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.<br /><br />In the interest of full disclosure, I must immediately report that I did not finish <span style="font-style: italic;">The Unconsoled</span>, 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.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">The Unconsoled</span> 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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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:<br /><br />"'As a matter of fact,' I said to her quietly, 'there was something I wished to talk to you about. But, er...'"<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">The Unconsoled </span>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 <span style="font-style: italic;">The Unconsoled</span>, 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">terrible</span> book with no point. <br /><br />I wonder why I read this instead of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Remains of the Day</span>, which won Ishiguro the Booker, or <span style="font-style: italic;">Never Let Me Go</span>, which the great M. John Harrison <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/feb/26/bookerprize2005.bookerprize">loved</a>. 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.Avanti!http://www.blogger.com/profile/14778606749543607723noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4427463727935379036.post-56422903848015548202009-08-27T15:10:00.000-07:002009-08-27T15:53:32.871-07:00The Lost Honour of Katharina BlumThe Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, or: How Violence Develops and Where It Can Lead, by Heinrich Böll<br />1974, 140 pp.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baader-Meinhof_Gang">Baader-Meinhof Gang</a> 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Bild-Zeitung, </span>saying "[what Bild does] isn’t cryptofascist anymore, not fascistoid, but naked fascism, agitation, lies and dirt." The <span style="font-style: italic;">Bild</span> 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.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum</span> 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. <br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">News!</span> 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. <br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Katharina Blum</span> 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">junta</span>, but I would not call it an essential read. I look forward to investigating Böll's pre-Nobel work, especially his <span style="font-style: italic;">Billiards at Half-Past Nine</span>, but <span style="font-style: italic;">Katharina Blum</span> is necessary only for habitual completists and people who haven't yet heard that the media is full of liars, sharks, and scoundrels.Avanti!http://www.blogger.com/profile/14778606749543607723noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4427463727935379036.post-81991478791365806042009-08-27T14:38:00.000-07:002009-08-30T13:58:49.381-07:00Phantom PreyPhantom Prey, by John Sandford<br />2009, 438 pp.<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">sirventes-planh</span> style over the death of his patron Blacatz (so effectively parodied, of course, in Canto VII of the <span style="font-style: italic;">Purgatorio</span>) and left me with no recourse but a response. I offer it here.<br /><br />I love detective novels. I admit it freely, without reservation or embarassment. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_westlake#Pseudonyms">Donald E. Westlake</a> remains one of my favorite writers, especially in his <a href="http://www.amazon.com/RICHARD-STARK-PARKER-BOOKS/lm/R1JLGR42OK5NXA/ref=cm_lmt_srch_f_1_rsrsrs0">Richard Stark</a> 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Winter Prey </span>was the one about the Native American terrorists or the guy who hides in the water tower, or if <span style="font-style: italic;">Secret Prey </span>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.<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Phantom Prey</span> at the airport in Singapore before a flight to Tokyo and finished it in one sitting before we passed Taiwan.<br /><br />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:<br /><br />"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 <span style="font-style: italic;">paseo</span>, no time even for half-fast food. Scuttling people."<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Phantom Prey </span>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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Prey </span>this one is, but not for good reasons.Avanti!http://www.blogger.com/profile/14778606749543607723noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4427463727935379036.post-40590777856864269202009-08-27T13:41:00.000-07:002009-08-27T14:38:09.406-07:00By Night in ChileBy Night in Chile, by Roberto Bolaño<br />2000, 130 pp.<br /><br />While reading reviews of Roberto Bolaño's novel <span style="font-style: italic;">The Savage Detectives</span>, I could not help but notice that everyone who writes anything about Bolaño mentions <span style="font-style: italic;">By Night in Chile </span>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 <span style="font-style: italic;">The Savage Detectives</span>, so I obtained it immediately to see what Bolaño can do with the notoriously difficult novella form.<br /><br />The answer is, <span style="font-style: italic;">he can do anything he wants.</span> 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. <br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">The Savage Detectives</span>, 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:<br /><br />"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..."<br /><br />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."<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">The Savage Detectives</span> 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. <br /><br />Ultimately, <span style="font-style: italic;">By Night in Chile</span> 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. <span style="font-style: italic;">By Night in Chile </span>is a beautiful, savage, angry book, and it proves its author a writer of the very first rank, and a formidable man of conscience.Avanti!http://www.blogger.com/profile/14778606749543607723noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4427463727935379036.post-19488436438314692022009-08-03T11:47:00.000-07:002009-08-03T12:10:32.964-07:00Freud: A Life for Our TimeFreud: A Life for Our Time, by Peter Gay<br />1988, 810 pp.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Leonardo-Childhood-Standard-Complete-Psychological/dp/0393001490/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1249325320&sr=8-1">regrettable flirtation</a> 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 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Gay">curriculum vitae</a> 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.<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Anschluss</span>. He was married to the same woman for 53 years and had six children. And he wrote a lot of books.<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">The Interpretation of Dreams</span>, 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:<br /><br />The famous “talking cure” developed in the therapy with “Anna O.” was far from the instant cure Freud presented it as in his 1895 <span style="font-style: italic;">Studies on Hysteria</span>. 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<br /><br />The famous “Irma’s Injection” dream from Freud’s 1900 <span style="font-style: italic;">The Interpretation of Dreams</span> 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. <br /><br />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.”<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Freud’s 1901 <span style="font-style: italic;">Psychopathology of Everyday Life</span>, 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.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality</span> 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Totem and Taboo</span> 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.”<br /><br />By the 1920’s when Freud was writing <span style="font-style: italic;">Beyond the Pleasure Principle</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego</span>, and <span style="font-style: italic;">The Ego and the Id</span>, 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Beyond the Pleasure Principle</span> Freud says that <span style="font-style: italic;">even he</span> 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.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety</span> “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.” <span style="font-style: italic;">The Question of Lay Analysis</span> 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 <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Thomas-Woodrow-Wilson-twenty-eighth-President/dp/B0006D681G/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1249325810&sr=1-6">analytic study</a> of Woodrow Wilson, on which he collaborated with a dubious character named <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Christian_Bullitt,_Jr.#Bullitt_and_Freud">William Bullitt</a> 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?"<br /><br />Freud’s final book, <span style="font-style: italic;">Moses and Monotheism</span> is “more conjectural than <span style="font-style: italic;">Totem and Taboo</span>, more untidy than <span style="font-style: italic;">Inhibitions</span>, more offensive than <span style="font-style: italic;">The Future of an Illusion</span>.” 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Totem and Taboo</span>. 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.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_von_Fleischl-Marxow">Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow</a>, 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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />What survives unscathed? The <span style="font-style: italic;">Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality</span>, and Freud’s late attacks on <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Civilization-Its-Discontents-Sigmund-Freud/dp/0393059952/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1249326284&sr=1-1">civilization</a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Future-Illusion-Sigmund-Freud/dp/1442133457/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1249326312&sr=1-1">religion</a>, 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">very clever poetry. </span><br /><br />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.<br /><br />But it cannot be denied that Freud’s language has a powerful resonance. A <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/weekinreview/25cohen.html">recent study</a> 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.<br /><br />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.Avanti!http://www.blogger.com/profile/14778606749543607723noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4427463727935379036.post-4048495132734436142009-07-31T15:04:00.000-07:002009-07-31T15:23:43.899-07:00The River of Lost FootstepsThe River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma, by Thant Myint-U<br />2007, 388 pp.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_Thant">U Thant</a>, set out to fill with <span style="font-style: italic;">The River of Lost Footsteps</span>. 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, <span style="font-style: italic;">The River of Lost Footsteps</span> 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.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddha">Siddhartha Gautama</a>, 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 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res">legitimately useful</a> in film, where it is called “<span style="font-style: italic;">in medias res</span>,” but is confusing and unpleasant in historical narrative. The book as a whole is<span style="font-style: italic;"> in medias res</span>; individual chapters are <span style="font-style: italic;">in medias res</span>, and sometimes the brief sections which make up the chapters are <span style="font-style: italic;">in medias res</span>. 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.<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">The Pagoda War</span>. The chapter on the Second World War is a summary of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Slim">General Slim’s</a> excellent <span style="font-style: italic;">Defeat into Victory</span>, and Louis Allen’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Burma, The Longest War</span>. 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">non sequiturs</span>, 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.Avanti!http://www.blogger.com/profile/14778606749543607723noreply@blogger.com0