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.

Therapy

Philip Roth’s fiction shares many qualities with effective psychotherapy.  Both require a big leap of faith, both are self-absorbed, unconstrained by reality, seemingly unorganized, undirected, and ultimately very revealing.

I’ve read most of his fiction, and he remains one of my literary heroes. Somehow I missed The Ghost Writer (the first in the Zuckerman trilogy), and if you can place yourself on that couch, be open to his unconscious as well as your own, it’s a great read.  Who else would consider the quandary in which Anne Frank would find herself had she lived to see the publication of her diary?  Who else has so much to say on being Jewish in 20^th-century America?  Who else so effectively and simultaneously looks back to his narrow past and forward to a wholly different future?  Who else so carefully considers (obsesses about) the writer, his role, his obligations and responsibilities, his shortcomings and limitations? Who else can do this in such a short book and in such a creative way?

I’m the first to admit that Roth is not everyone’s cup of tea, but neither is Pamuk, or Yan, or Naipaul.  And Roth has serious academic credentials and literary street cred.  Can we get political correctness out of the way and just give him the Nobel already? Please.

Amateurs

I read the New York Times semi-regularly.  I find quite a few articles to be interesting and informative.  Then I come across an article about a subject I know well.  If I have a good amount of technical and factual knowledge about the subject, I’m often aghast at the inadequacies of the article, what it got wrong, what critical points were omitted, how clumsy and hodge-podge it all seems.

The same with legislation.  Yes, our lawmakers do the best they can given the limits of the system in which they work, but when I read legislation in the telecom industry (that I know fairly well) I just can’t believe how amateurish it all seems.  These people really don’t know what they’re doing.  The process of making legislation is scary, and the resulting sausage is just not very good. Where are the adults?

Paul Theroux makes a similar point about terrorism in his mid-70’s novel The Family Arsenal.  The book takes place in London and concerns the IRA terrorist bombings that plagued the city at that time.  I very much like Theroux’s travel writing, and many of his novels profit from his special ability to blend place/time with character/plot.  For him they are pleasingly inseparable.  The Family Arsenal is not so strong in this aspect, or maybe I just don’t find London in the 70’s all that interesting.

But Theroux is very effective at demonstrating that most terrorists are not professionals deeply motivated by a political cause.  Most are young people with serious unresolved issues looking for a convenient outlet for their violent tendencies.  They latch onto a cause because it’s there, for a time they lend their energy and get their thrills from the action, and then they move to other outlets, get distracted by mainstream life, or they actually find at least partial resolution for their personal issues.

The book is a little writerly for my taste. Theroux takes himself seriously, and sometimes he misses the mark. But there is much to appreciate here.  Especially these days when young people from Europe and America are travelling to the Middle East to fight for ISIS, we would do well to consider what their motivation might be.  Do they really believe in the cause, or are they just unhappy in their own personal way, frustrated, and looking for acceptance, excitement, and an outlet for their anger?

I guess we’re all amateurs at the game of life, though it is possible to gain real professional expertise in specific areas.  And when we do, we realize how much we’ve differentiated ourselves from others. I’d like to think that there really are no professional terrorists, but rather just amateurs dabbling at destruction.  That would at least give law enforcement a small leg up.  But that may just my own lack of expertise talking.

Downton Abbey in a More Revealing Light

I saw the movie of The Remains of the Day in the mid 90’s and was very impressed by the performances of Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.  Something about that film has haunted me ever since. Having read and much appreciated Ishiguro’s more recent NeverLet me Go, I thought I really should read The Remains of the Day.  Booker Prize in 1989.

Two damned good actors.

So glad I did.  Ishiguro is a master of tone and nuance.  Nothing much happens. Recollections of the past and small but telling moments in the present. The book is written in the first person from the point of view of an aging British butler, Mr. Stevens is struggling to keep together a postwar 'aristocratic' household whose past is being called into question, and whose future is at best uncertain. He's stuck in the past and ill-suited to the demands of the postwar present.  But he is also severely limited in the emotional realm, and much of the fascination of the book is that his limitations are revealed only gradually. We come to know him bit by bit through his account of the present and his recollections of the past.  Always it’s the tone that is paramount, and that is constricted by Stevens’s limitations.  There’s much talk of ‘dignity’, and lots of derision of ‘banter’, a modern form of repartee that Stevens finds foreign and repugnant.  But it turns out that 'dignity' can be a way to justify crippling emotional limitations, and 'banter' is a way of representing spontaneity and freedom of expression.

It’s been many years since I saw the film, but memory tells me that it is a faithful expression of the novel’s essential message.  That’s not so common in these days of film adaptations that veer off into Hollywood themes that have little to do with the original text. I’ll revisit the film soon.  Gladly.

For now, I’ll say that Ishiguro is a master prose poet. The writing emits an aura that perfectly describes Stevens’s state of mind.  It’s a chance to enter another’s world, a chance to feel what another feels (or doesn't feel).

Such is good fiction.