Doris Lessing

I have a vague memory of hearing about a talk that Stravinsky once gave in which he drew some sketches on the blackboard.  This, he said, represents Wagner’s music.

This represents Schoenberg’s music.

Those are my hand drawn recollections of the sketches, but I trust you get the point.  Wagner had lots of irrational expressionist impulses brewing inside, but he framed them in a strictly tonal structure.  Schoenberg simply removed the frame.

Never read a single work by Doris Lessing.  My bad.  Not sure that Briefing for a Descent Into Hell was the right choice for my initiation.  It is maybe the strangest most complex book I’ve ever read.  It is very much like the Schoenberg sketch by Stravinsky:  stream of consciousness and lots of expressive language with no clear or helpful overarching framework.  It’s up to the reader to figure it all out … or not.  It’s a short book, but not easy to get through.  There were numerous places on the way where I almost gave up.  But it does reward the reader that hangs in.  There is meaning even without the framework.  It’s up to the reader to provide the framework.

Unlike, say, David Mitchell’s literary pyrotechnics, where the foreground might be messy but the overall structure is strict (and where the overall structure actually informs the local narrative), here there is no overall structure.  We float.  We have no idea where we are and what it might mean.  We have no clue where it’s going and what the images might signify.  The reader has to place himself in the same uncomfortable uncertainty (and perhaps insanity) that the narrator is experiencing.  We don’t know where we are, what’s real, what’s not. It's a kind of inner science fiction.

What results is an extraordinary view from a higher level, from an almost god-like point of view that is both enlightening and frightening.  To understand at that level is almost more than a mortal can bear, more than we can handle and at the same time cope with day-to-day life.  Hence the insanity. 

But I take comfort in Lessing’s strong assertion that there is something larger, some bigger purpose, some higher level of existence which really is out there.  In our daily lives we struggle to sense it, but every so often we get a signal that it’s out there.  The book is a kind of mythology about those signals.  If you’re often disappointed by your day-to-day life, take solace.  Read Lessing.

Thoroughly Unmodern

This isn't just a throwback.  This is what you get when you bring out the way-back machine.  My former colleague Jeannette Haien's second (and last) novel, Matters of Chance, is old-fashioned in many ways.  The prose is the product of a highly educated and intelligent mind, but dated indeed. Quotations from classic literature abound, and the stilted language hangs out there just waiting to be speared.  I wonder if it took a conscious effort from Jeannette to avoid all temptations and references to modernism ... and by modernism I mean anything on the forefront of English literature in the 20th century.  I got used to the style, and ended up not bothered by it, but the prose is very unusual indeed for a book written in the 1990's.

More to the point though are the characters and the story itself. This book is the very embodiment of that 1930's to 1950's approach to life:  Buck it up.  It won't help you to express those feelings, it will only lead you into a self-indulgent black hole, so be strong, be tough, and do what you have to do.  It's a view that I grew up with and know first hand, and it certainly didn't work for me.  But I'm willing to believe that it was appropriate for a large proportion of a few generations that experienced the Depression and WWII.  It got done what had to be done; it got them through. Is it an ideal approach to life?  Well, I guess there really isn't an ideal universal approach separate and apart from a specific cultural and temporal context.

I don't think this book is nearly as successful as Jeannette's first book.  The war scenes are telling, but the second half of the book drags on and on with superficial plot, a surfacy account of lives well led. I wish we had the opportunity to know these characters better, but that's pretty much the point.  They didn't know themselves better, and they didn't want to.  Repression is very useful at times.  But I'm not sure it makes for great fiction.

From a recent New Yorker

Oh, well.  I have great respect for Jeannette.  She was a great musician and teacher.  Her presence would fill a room (yes, often to the uncomfortable exclusion of all others).  There was only one Jeannette.  I witnessed the strength of her convictions on many occasions, and she was a formidable presence.  I urge anyone with an interest to watch her interview with Bill Moyers (you can find it easily).  It does provide a glimpse into her power, her insight, and her moral authority.

Rest in peace.

Abradacabra

It’s an illusion. When it works we temporarily believe with all our heart and soul, even though we know it's an illusion.  It happens to me when listening to a great piece of music.  The real world falls away; the music creates an alternate reality which my brain accepts as a complete, self-contained, and satisfying space.  All that I need and want is there; if I just surrender, truly believe, I will be enriched.

 

The creator (composer, author, actor, whatever) needs great technical skill to bring this off.  He must be on intimate terms with his medium; he must know every nook and cranny, every nuance and subtlety.  And he must use consummate skill in stitching together his work so that no seam shows, no evidence of his craft is left visible. We just believe.  And he also must have an underlying message, something important that gets communicated without ever being explicitly stated.

The wizardry displayed in David Mitchell’s prose continues to impress me.  Cloud Atlas is downright virtuosic.  The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is more constrained, but nonetheless impressive.  So in working my way back through Mitchell’s fiction the next step was Black Swan Green.  It’s a straightforward first-person narrative of one year in the life of a young British teen.  No sci-fi here, no narrative jumbles, nothing but a traditional narrative.

Yes, it’s an eventful year for Jason, the main character, but the primary strength of the book is not plot but rather the prose itself.  There’s dialect and dialogue, there’s a good bit of superficial detail, there are lots of words, but none of it seems the least bit contrived.  The main character is totally believable and lovable (I wonder how much is autobiographical.).  It’s a credible and realistic depiction of what that awkward age actually feels like. And there are lessons to be learned here.

Maybe I’m just a naïve reader.  Like the person watching the magician, I probably allow my attention to be diverted easily so I don’t notice what’s ‘really’ happening.  But I don’t actually want to know how he does the trick.  I like being entranced.  I want to believe in magic.