Convention, In Life and In Words

Gaughin's Manao Tupapau (The Spirit Watches Over Her)

I adore Somerset Maugham’s novels.  While reading ‘The Moon and Sixpence’ recently I started to think about narrative flow.  It’s a fairly short novel of 240 pages, but it’s divided into 58 chapters of approximately equal length.  That’s an average of 4.13 pages per chapter, and all those chapter endings followed by a chapter beginning on the next page make for quite a bit of white space.  So the chapters are quite short.  A few of the early chapters are almost set pieces of a sort, but most of the chapters just take the story from one point to the next.  The chapters do fall into groups which deal with a certain time or place, but those groups are not explicitly shown on the page.  We’re simply presented with 58 short chapters.  What effect does this structure have on the reading experience?  How is the experience different from reading a Philip Roth novel, where there are fewer chapters and some of them are very very long indeed?

There are no cliffhangers or teasing links to pull the reader from one chapter to the next in the Maugham work.  If anything the style is quite formal and old-fashioned.  The action is carefully laid out, and the author (through the narrator) provides a good deal of commentary and speculation along the way.  My experience is of casual storytelling that is more-or-less evenly paced.  No Roth-like riffs or virtuoso passages that take your breath away.  The narrative proceeds without obvious effort from one topic to the next.  Each is dealt with in turn in a way that seems natural and appropriate.  The book has a certain propriety to it.  It bows to convention in a way that makes the reading experience comfortable and easy.  Nothing unusual gets in the way of the overall flow.

Would the reading experience be much different if Maugham had left the text the same, but combined several chapters into one?  There might be only a third or a quarter as many chapters, but would the experience be the same?  Dunno.  There is something comforting about digesting consistently short chapters.  And Maugham’s style of narration is nothing if not comforting.  It has echoes of the 18^th-century British novels that were written as a collection of letters, also of the serialized novels of 19^th-century writers like Dickens.  Maybe it’s just our familiarity with this structure that makes it easy and comforting.  Or is there just something pleasing about reading a book one short chunk at a time?

The plot is very loosely based on the life of Paul Gaugin, but Maugham’s protagonist is British.  Maugham seems caught up in the contrast between a truly artistic temperament and the accepted strict norms of British respectability.  I don’t think the main character’s transformation from workaday London stock broker to remarkably dedicated Parisian artist is well explained, but I don’t know that it’s important that the story be believable.  Maugham is highlighting the differences between two approaches to life.  Packing them both into the same character may not be entirely credible, but it does make the contrast more striking.

Maugham (through the narrator) seems to come down ultimately on the side of respectability, but with some looks of longing over the fence to the other side where a truly artistic temperament rules the day.  The conflict is fascinating.  And depicting this cruel, relentless, brilliant and somewhat unstructured artistic life in thoroughly conventional language in a reassuringly familiar structure gives the reader another clue to Maugham’s own choices.

A Tangled Web

‘The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life’ is the subtitle of Robert Trivers’s new book ‘The Folly of Fools’.  Trivers is Rutgers scientist who studies behavior from the point of view of evolutionary biology.  It’s a field that has interested me in a casual way since reading Robert Wright’s ‘The Moral Animal’ almost twenty years ago followed by some E.O. Wilson here and there.  Back then we were fascinated by altruism, and we tried to see the Darwinian advantage it might give to the survival and replication of an individual’s genetic code.  Trivers’s interest is in self-deception, how it helps us and how it can harm us.

First of all Trivers is quite a character.  Yes, he’s a serious scientist, but he’s also out there … sometimes pretty far out there.  He doesn’t mind speculating, and his range is huge.  He reveals something of his personal life.  His politics are close to Noam Chomsky’s.  If that bothers you don’t read this book.  He has a seriously negative (and I think prejudicial) view of psychotherapy.  I’ll bet he’s a fascinating teacher.

There are so many intriguing ideas in this book.  His accounts of many studies are incredibly revealing.  He discusses deception on both individual and collective levels.  Topics include molecular and chemical deception, family life, sex, language analysis, politics, airplane and spacecraft disasters, immunology, and false historical narratives.  Sure does give the reader lots to think about.  There is much work yet to be done in the field, and Trivers is quick to point out that he has few of the answers himself.  Nonetheless the questions themselves are so so provocative.

I think the book suffers from the lack of a clearly targeted readership.  It’s not hard science, though much supporting documentation is offered at the end of the volume.  But it’s not really popular science either.  The writing is not entertaining or engaging.  If anything I found it off-putting.  It sometimes combines the worst of scientific jargon, dry logic, and unimaginative presentation.  It’s popular science that never got properly dressed up for the general public.  Unfortunately the lab coat still prevails, and often with a good dose of dust from the research shelves of the library.  I guess that’s what can happen when a scientist tries to write for the public.  He can’t quite shed his scientific skin.  And that doesn’t serve the general reader very well.

There were times when I thought I might not make it through the book, but I did hold out.  And I’m glad I did.  Just think about your own image of yourself.  Think about the ways you distort reality to create an image for yourself that serves your interests.  Now imagine that everyone else is doing something similar.  And you react to their deception, they react to yours, and the endless contest of distortions goes on and on.  It never ends.  ‘Reality’ is only a starting point.  We manufacture our own reality to suit us.  And we change it when we feel we need to. 

The human brain is an incredible filter and interpreter that needs to make sense of huge amounts of data.  We pay a high price in terms of energy for that processing.  We need to get something useful out of it.  We construct whatever narrative works for us, even if that narrative is at least in part obviously false.  Doesn’t matter.  If it serves us, we’ll use it.  Of course sometimes the deception catches up with us.  But then we just create another narrative to explain that one as well.  It’s what we do.  And we’re damned good at it.

An Ivy League of Their Own

 Walter Kirn's book "Lost in the Meritocracy" is both revealing personal memoir and biting social commentary.  It's a short book that focuses mostly on Kirn's time as an undergraduate at Princeton in the 70's. Clearly a gifted student Kirn attended high school in rural Minnesota where his considerable academic talent mixed with a strong need to please authority figures. While that combination served him well in the relatively (but not completely) safe environment of secondary school, it was nearly his undoing on the all too worldly campus of Princeton.

Kirn had the intelligence needed to succeed in the Ivy League.  But the 70's were an odd time in much of the elite educational establishment (especially in the arts) when experimentation and drugs were rampant, and new academic theories were sprouting everywhere.  Anything was possible, and just about anything could pass as profound. The academy was little help in differentiating worthless chaff from lasting contributions.  And if the establishment couldn't tell the difference, what chance did a naive boy from the sticks have whose strongest desire was to please those in authority?

Kirn was ill-equipped to deal with the varied scene at Princeton. He just wanted to get along.  Little did he know that just about everyone else was faking it as well.  He was looking for security and truth but found tentative exploration and fraudulence. I'm sure there was plenty of valuable work and teaching going on there at that time. But Kirn got little to no help in finding it.

I take the time to write this because I had a similar Ivy League experience in the early 70's.  Similar background, similar experience, different campus, different field. Like Kirn I felt that my real education began after I left. I didn't have the strength and discernment to know what I wanted and figure out how to get it. Doing what was expected of me is what got me there, and that was pretty much my only strategy. It didn't work very well for me either.

First of all i was totally lacking in social skills and sophistication. My musical abilities got me into elite circles that I could handle musically but not socially.  At Harvard I played first continuo in a superb performance of the complete Bach St Matthew Passion, a great experience at any age, particularly so for a college freshman.  But as a consequence I attended a small dinner party for a world famous Boston Symphony guest conductor who happened to be gay.  I was by far the youngest there, and I barely knew what might be in a gin and tonic. The sexual politics were way more than I could understand.  At another occasion I was left backstage after a BSO performance to babysit an important elderly Symphony patron for a spell. No clue what to do. Again more than my limited social skills could manage. I was an oddity there. There was no well established path for young musical talent. My musical experiences were at a high level but they were extracurricular. There was no hand holding or guidance in the social arena.  It was sink or swim.  I pretty much sank.

Remember how things changed there during the 60's.  Early in the decade students were required to wear a jacket and tie to get a meal at the dining hall.  When I arrived in 1970 nobody told anyone what to wear.  The students in the room across the hall were stoned 24/7 and rarely even showered.  In the late 60's the tear gas was flying in Harvard Square.  Students and faculty both called into question the moral authority of the institution.  Traditional and aesthetic standards also suffered.  Suddenly almost anything was acceptable, and the lack of standards was paradoxically exacerbated by Ivy League arrogance.  Students were told from Day One that they had been chosen to lead the world.  So if the institution itself didn't have the courage to be appropriately critical, then how could these future leaders produce anything that was less than brilliant?

I remember a performance of a new avant-garde piece involving prepared piano and several other performers. Far out stuff with no explanations.  At some point something apparently went wrong with the piano and the performance seemed to stop, A man came onstage and futzed with the piano. Was this part of the piece?  Was it not?  We had no idea, and it was clearly not cool to ask.  And to voice annoyance about the interruption or the ambiguity was tantamount to admitting you had voted for Nixon (which I had not). Still seems like mob rule to me, but at the time I was intimidated. (I suspect that that intimidation continues today in the form of political correctness, which still makes me uncomfortable.)

These days education is much more practical. Students are preparing for careers early on. Everyone is worried about getting a job after school. No time for obscure theories and mumbo jumbo. Students just want to know how to get a leg up, how to get a competitive edge.

Well, that approach has its limitations as well. Less time to explore new directions. Nose constantly to the grindstone. Very competitive. But it does weed out much of the bullshit from the academy, and that is welcome.

I do think a traditional liberal arts education is not for everyone. This country invests far too little in high quality trade schools. And we should go to school when we're ready to learn, not when the guidance counselor tells us to go.  That being said I think I'll just be grateful that it's not 1970. Sometimes things do get better.

Fuckraking

Never read anything by Russell Banks.  His latest, “Memories of Lost Skin” was well reviewed, so I decided to give it a try.  Mixed reaction.

In this book Banks seems intent on combining traditional storytelling with difficult social issues.  From my point of view, his take on the social issues is interesting but not fascinating.  The storytelling is adequate though certainly not innovative or stunning.

The story deals with the life of a relatively young convicted sex offender.  We learn about his crime.  We learn something about his background.  We learn about his current living situation.

Most would consider me pretty far out on the bleeding-heart liberal scale, but even I was a little skeptical.  Not about the main character’s story.  I concede that it is indeed plausible.  But I can’t help but suspect that the vast majority of convicted sex offenders are not young innocents caught in traps made possible by internet technology and savvy police work.  I’m the first to admit that this country is unreasonably hung up on a wide variety of sexual issues, and I’m all for approaches that consider the psychological state of the ‘offender’.  But really.  Can we really assume that a certain large group of homeless men are really just slightly confused individuals who were led astray by some minor life circumstances?  Really?  I think it’s probably more serious than that.  I am stronger in my condemnation of the offender’s actions and of society’s hypocrisy in dealing with the offense.

There are some insights about porn and masturbation addiction that I found enlightening.  And it’s always wise to try as hard as we can to view the situation from the other’s point of view.  Also intersting thoughts on the nature of belief and abolute truth.  Once we learn that absolutes exist only in the word of abstractions and never visit the real world, we're left with belief as the only way to make sense of the vast array of options before us.  It may be an artificial self-defined sense, but it's what we have.

I didn’t find the storytelling to be particularly compelling.  Nor was it  sub-par.  But surely no awards here from the vantage point of the words themselves.

I have to admit to being somewhat disappointed.  But kudos to Banks for tackling a difficult subject.  I suspect that the average reader of traditional novels will not be sufficiently liberal to appreciate Banks’s point of view; and I also suspect that the literary elite (you know who you are), though they may be more sympathetic to his message, may not be enthralled with the writing itself.  But that’s just me.

Maybe I’ll give Banks another try.  Any thoughts on another Banks book?

Why Not?

Nicholas Baker’s latest novel ‘House of Holes’ is like nothing I’ve ever read.  Baker is known for his scrupulous (at times painful) attention to detail and the emotional detachment of his main characters.  HoH is an explicitly pornographic novel which takes that emotional detachment to an entirely new place.  The book focuses on a fictional ‘place’ called ‘House of Holes’, where all kinds of sexual fantasies and scenarios are played out.  In a series of loosely related chapters, various characters (there are no main characters here, just a large cast of supporting roles) accidently enter the HoH, where they take part in rich and varied panorama of sexual activity.

But this is not at all your typical porn book, not that we would expect that from Nicholson Baker.  This is sex completely cut off from roles (no priests, nuns, fathers, mothers, construction workers, pole dancers, no punishment, no pain ….) and society’s prejudices.  It’s just sex, pure and simple.  Nothing else.  Nothing.

First of all it’s remarkable that Baker can fill the pages of a full novel with enough variety to keep the reader interested.  The language is rich and playful.  He doesn’t hold back the humor either.  You’ll laugh at the obvious and not-so-obvious word play.  Puns abound.  It really is fun.  I confess that the last quarter of the book got a little tiresome for me, but that may have more to do with my mood at the time than the book itself.

Most open-minded men will, I think, be OK with Baker’s approach.  My guess is that most women will not.  Certainly not your typical book club selection, that’s for sure.  There’s no romance, no emotion or feeling other than purely physical sensation.  That’s pretty difficult to sustain over a few hundred pages.  And it’s an entirely new use for Baker’s typical emotional detachment.  Not at all what I expected.

As porn goes, it’s probably a lot healthier than almost all of the smut that’s out there.  It’s just plain fun.  What’s the harm?  It is an interesting exercise to consider sex devoid of all emotion and psychological significance.  Not what most of us would want in real life, but there is clearly no attempt to be realistic here.  It’s an ‘essay’ in the original sense of the word.  An attempt at something new.

What strikes me as a reader is the way each character reacts when offered an opportunity for a sexual encounter of some kind.  The proposal might be straightforward or bizarre.  There is never any emotion or attachment connected with the proposal.  Each character seems to consider very briefly, and then simply says something like “Well, OK!”

Of course this has nothing to do with reality, but I can’t help but notice how each character seems to bring no prejudice, fear, or trepidation to the decision.  The proposal is considered on its own terms.  No potential harm, some potential enjoyment … so why not?  In reality how often can any of us pull that off?  How often are we in such a neutral and calm place that we can make a decision devoid of all the crap that we carry from our past?  How often are we in that place of perfect peace and balance?

Isn’t that at least part the goal of the practice of meditation?  I might argue that in those few moments when we are truly open we make wise decisions.  Those moments don’t require courage.  It doesn’t pay to force ourselves to do anything.  But to be truly open means to listen well and without judgment, to accept generosity without fear, and to fully experience.  It’s like bringing the innocence of an infant to the adult world.

The real world requires caution, discernment, and discrimination (in the best sense of the world).  But it’s interesting to remember what it’s like to be completely open to what comes our way.  In those rare moments we may be at our best.

Murakami Magic

I’ve always been a big Murakami fan.  I’ve read most of his novels.  My daughter introduced me to his work with ‘The Windup Bird Chronicles’, which until now I’ve considered his best work.  But 1Q84 is more ambitious yet.  It pulls together many strands that have been prominent in his works over the years.  It is quite simply the best book I’ve read in quite a while.

Yes, it’s long.  Over 900 pages.  In the original Japanese edition it was published as three separate books.  And the first two were published before the last was completed.  Echoes of Dickens serialization here. 

1Q84 is part straightforward modern novel, part love story, part science fiction, part thriller, and part modern myth.  The nearest equivalent I can think of is Mozart’s ‘Magic Flute’.  The writing is very straightforward.  Typical for Murakami, an easy read.  Simple yet very engaging.  The structure is reassuringly formal and strict.  That helps in a book that is intentionally ambiguous in several ways.  The typography is innovative without feeling gimmicky.

All the usual Murakami elements are present:  lots and lots of Western cultural references, main characters that live outside of societal norms, supernatural aspects, a tight plot structure that has ambiguity built in, plain unadorned language that is at the same time aptly expressive.  Readers of Murakami will notice one thing is missing:  wells.  The well is an image that Murakami uses in a number of his books, but it makes no appearance here.  No need.

There are stories within stories, commentary on the role of literature in society, a surprising amount of sex (unusual for Murakami), violence, and suspense.  But there’s a central theme that Murakami has hinted at in earlier works but never focused on as he does here:  the redemptive power of love.  He shows us that we are all intended to love, to love wastefully, and to love fully.  In order to do this, we have to go through a process in which we shed limits and fears from our past, and in which we are transformed into our true selves through a kind of alchemy that produces pure human gold, a genuinely loving individual that fulfills his individual destiny.

Perhaps my own peculiar circumstances make me especially ‘vulnerable’ to his message.  Divorced, I find myself rediscovering my own capacity for love, finding again the person that I am meant to be.  Yes, I cried during the last hour of reading the book.  I’ve read many reviews and I won't quibble with much of the carping and criticism.  Nonetheless, 1Q84 struck a chord in me that I would wish for everyone to experience.  We are all meant to love.  There are many obstacles in our way, but we can find our way around them.  I’m not a strictly religious person (nor is Murakami), but I have attended services at Unity Church in Palo Alto for the last year, and I find Murakami’s message to be oddly compatible with Unity’s central theme.  We are all meant to love and be loved.  The path to that place is a difficult one, but it is the path that we are destined to follow.  Look for the signals in your everyday life.  You only have to notice them.  They are there.  Be open.  Love generously and unconditionally. Be who you are meant to be.

I’m not certain how open modern readers will be to Murakami’s message about the redemptive power of love.  It is certainly at odds with much that our cynical snarky culture puts out in huge quantities every day.  Perhaps underneath that cynicism is the hope that someday we will fulfill our emotional destiny.  Strangely Dickensian.  Call me a sucker.  I love it.  Sign me up.

Language Addiction

‘River of Smoke’ is the second in a series of historical novels by Amitav Ghosh.  The book deals with the period leading up to the Opium Wars in China in the early nineteenth century.  That period of history is fascinating for today’s readers.  Drugs were hopelessly entwined in the fabric of life then, just as they are now.  The personal, political, and economic consequences of addiction were serious.  The complexities of addiction are fascinating, and the connections between the personal and political realms are manifold.  Our ‘War on Drugs’ has its antecedents in this earlier time, but at that time Westerners were playing the roles of merchants and drug lords.  Profits were huge and the moral justifications elaborate and stretched thin.  For these connections alone the book is a fascinating read.

But the real strength of the book is its obsession with language.  Ghosh manages to capture something of the spirit of the time by using bits and pieces of many dialects and languages.  Many cultures mix and clash, and the resulting linguistic hodge-podge is wonderful to behold.  Ghosh seems to be addicted to the pleasures of language just as some of his characters are addicted to opium.  His playful use of language is fascinating, fun, ribald, and ultimately revealing of the time he describes.  I know of no other author who manages to pull this off.  Go too far in this direction and the language becomes incomprehensible.  Not far enough and much of the richness of the reading experience would be lost.  More often than not Ghosh strikes the right balance.

Approach the book with an open mind.  Don’t be put off by the dialects.  Stick with it even if you’re a little confused.  Read it aloud.  Rejoice in the complexity.  Enjoy.