Literature: Spirit and Mechanics

I’m not sure why I hated just about every literature class I ever took.  High school, college, whatever.  I still can’t read most of the authors we read in those classes because of the bad memories.  I got good grades.  I just hated it.  Didn’t see the point.  Not sure if I wasn’t ready, or if they were really that bad.

Since finishing school I’ve been a pretty active reader.  That’s probably not a coincidence. I’d love to take a good literature class now, but I’m afraid that I’d have the same bad reaction (probably because of me, not because of the class).  So the next best thing is to read books about literature.  Not as good, but better than nothing.

My latest foray into that genre is James Wood’s How Fiction Works.  Wood is a book critic for The New Yorker, and I often enjoy his pieces.  This is a small book that doesn’t pretend to be definitive on any of the many topics he touches on. There are chapters on voice, on detail, on character, on language, on dialogue, and on truth and convention.  Woods refers to many works from the standard canon, and he quotes quite a few at length. His discussions are almost always telling.  I particularly enjoy his ‘rewrites’ of some passages that he quotes, his attempt to show what it might be like if the author did it a different way, and why the author’s way is better for what he’s trying to accomplish.   As someone who doesn’t write fiction it’s hard for me to imagine alternative versions; I just can’t put myself in the author’s place making decisions about how it might go.

There are many references to books I haven’t read, and some of the discussion is over my head.  Nonetheless I found it a very useful book. It has already changed the way I read.

Was I just not open to this kind of thinking when I was in school?  I know I’m not especially good at being open in situations where I don’t feel competent.  That undoubtedly got in my way.  Reading about it privately feels safer to me. Or maybe I just ended up with the bad teachers?  Or some of both.

Edward at Esalen

As a big fan of St. Aubyn’s five Patrick Melrose novels, I wondered what else he’d written, so I picked up On The Edge (1998, in the middle of the Melrose books).  It’s a comic novel of a young disenchanted Brit who is trying to track to a German woman with whom he had a three-day love affair. His search lands him at a New Age institute at Esalen.  The satire of guru California from the point of view of a staid Brit is funny and often telling, but here St. Aubyn doesn’t achieve the same level of costly autobiographical insight that permeates the Melrose books.  Rather this is a more traditional comic satire.  In that I was a bit disappointed. 

This passage sums up the Brit’s take on New Age America:

Peter wanted to ask Crystal to sit with him, but in the communal dining room he felt the usual sense of personal and social meltdown known locally as ‘lodge psychosis’. Instead of the sense of community it was designed to promote, the lodge shipwrecked its occupants by presenting them with a series of treacherous whirlpools and rock dilemmas. Acquaintances imagined they were friends, friends turned into strangers, seminarians were looked down on by residents, and residents exploited by staff, teachers appeared to be available to students but were suddenly ringed by jealous lovers and competitive sidekicks. Anyone at any time could come and ‘process an issue’ with you, however turgid or trivial, whether you could remember meeting them before or not. The person to whom you told the secret of your mother’s mental illness the night before might not remember your name by lunchtime the next day. The permissiveness that made sex seem pleasingly inevitable made you realize more sharply the internal constraints that prevented you from approaching the object of desire, but the same permissiveness could not stop the bore you most dreaded from bearing down on you with greedy tactlessness when you were deeply engaged with someone else. Like the place as a whole, the lodge made a partial transcendence of the formalities and hypocrisies of ordinary social life, but at the same time generated a longing for the good manners and the privacy which those formalities, until they became corrupted, were designed to protect.

Or on a more positive note:

Esalen

These Buddhists were certainly on to something. The exhausting business of turning his colliding and scattered emotions into a story about who he was was matched by the exhausting business of editing it into a story he liked. The first thing he asked about a situations was whether he liked it or not, and the next question was how it would ‘turn out’, which meant whether he would like it or not later on.

The plot is thin and the characters shallow, but there’s fun to be had.  Peter does find the German woman he was looking for, but when he does no longer desires her.  He has been changed by his Esalen experience, and at the end we have some hope that he will achieve better balance in his life.  Or maybe he’ll just careen in a different direction next time.

I miss the bitterness and painful sincerity of the Melrose books.  I’ll have to reread them.

Knausgaard

The six-part autobiographical novel My Struggle by the Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard has made a huge splash in the literary world.  In Norway the books have sold in unheard of numbers, and since the English translations have started to appear, they have received immense critical acclaim here as well.

Book 1 is over 400 pages and focusses on the teenage and young adult years of the ‘fictional’ character Karl Ove Knausgaard. The autobiographical subject and the intense inward focus can't help but point to Proust, but it’s hard to think of Marcel’s life as a struggle exactly.  It’s a life full of emotion, color, close observation, some pain, and relentless self-examination, but it doesn’t come off as a struggle.  There’s too much pleasure and a surprising amount of comedy for that.  But for Knausgaard it is indeed a struggle.  There’s little self-pity here but true empathy for others is also in very short supply.  This is a character (are we talking about a character or about Knausgaard himself … or both?) with limited social skills, strong self-reliance, and a seemingly unlimited capacity to keep staring into the void no matter how uncomfortable he becomes.  He just keeps looking even if it makes connections with others difficult

. 

The books best moments are about silence and stillness.  Here Knausgaard offers real insight into the mind and its ability to project thoughts and feelings and read them back as observation.  It’s like meditation in a way.  Just keep the stillness.  Let the thoughts come, let them go.

There are also interesting passages about art and aesthetics that are truly provocative.  It’s a very personal vision and doesn’t attempt to explain anything other than what he himself is trying to accomplish.  In spite of the overwhelming amount of knowledge and virtual experience available to an educated person today, Knausgaard ‘struggles’ to stay in contact with the unknown, and especially the unknowable, because for him therein lies the inexplicable beauty, the truly aesthetic experience.  This is not an easy task for someone who is a bit of a know-it-all asshole, and the obsessiveness with which he sticks to the mission is both admirably self-effacing and egotistical at the same time.

It’s easy to see that he’s profoundly scarred by his awful father.  The scenes surrounding the death of his father are difficult to read, and we are left to wonder how Karl Ove manages any kind of quasi-normal life for himself.  Of course we don’t know how much is real.  We do know that some members of the author’s family were very upset by the books and felt that various family members were not accurately portrayed.  But I don’t think truth is exactly the point here.  He does have an uncanny ability to put the reader inside his head.

But I’m not sure I want to spend all that much time there.  We'll see.

Return

I took down my copy of The Library of America’s collection of later Updike stories from the shelf.  Nine hundred pages.  Eighty-five stores from the mid 70’s to 2008.  Most were first published in The New Yorker, where Updike’s editor for many years was Roger Angell.  Reading the first twenty or so of the stories was like going home for me.  Some of them I remembered from their original publication; a few others I had encountered in other collections.  Some were new to me.  The collection is presented in the order in which they were written, so the ones I read were from 1974 to 1982, a time when I was a young adult.  Most take place in the eastern USA, or at least the characters are from there.  So it seems familiar.

But familiar isn’t necessarily just positive. I’ve learned a lot since then. My geographic, cultural, and personal horizons are broader now.  We’ve all grown up a bit.  But Updike is so good at depicting particular times and places.  The attitudes, norms, and trends from those times might seem antiquated now, constrained by tradition, perhaps missing the point, perhaps making too much of ordinary difficulty, maybe all to complacently accepting the paternalistic and elitist heritage from the post-war generation. 

For the most part Updike doesn’t preach, he simply reports what he sees. And the reporting is often brilliant.  These stories avoid the showy overly complex and learned language of many of the novels.  (Updike has been described by a certain feminist as ‘a penis with a thesaurus’.)  They’re simpler and more straightforward, and in each one he has clear and for the most part narrow purpose.  Often the story points to a particular moment, a subtle tipping point that the characters will only understand in retrospect. My favorites include ‘The Fairy Godfathers’ (a telling commentary on psychiatry and relationships), ‘From the Journal of a Leper’ (maybe a bit obvious but a nicely executed O. Henry-like story), ‘Morocco’ (wistful thoughts about family). 

Updike as a wonderfully graceful and telling way of shifting the tone near the end of a story.  It’s the place where we sense he’s going to stop describing and meandering.  Here he’s getting to the point of it all.  It’s not pedantic or moralistic, but it is telling.  It’s where someone reading the story aloud would change tone, slow the pace a bit, and look us in the eye.

Even if his vision was somewhat constrained by circumstance (he was very much a creature of his time and social status), he was a supremely skilled writer that genuinely loved the craft. There is much to be learned and experienced from reading him. And a visit home can warm the heart, even if I know and am in part grateful that I no longer live there.