August Wilson (1945–2005)
“Fences” (1983)

Random number 2465, extremely high (the range is 1–2535), which means a very recent work (recent for Harold Bloom, anyway).

Oddly enough, the copy above had been gifted to Beth for her birthday just before this selection came up. Of all things. (Yeah, it happens to be a charmless rental-style printing and not the more normal-looking trade edition).

I read this a good many months ago, and as I’ve said before, plays are the lowest-impact of reading experiences, so my specific engagement has gotten pretty low by this point and I’m going to have to take a big-picture tack here. This may get ugly.

“Fences” is a black “Death of a Salesman.” You might ask: why did we need a black “Death of a Salesman”? Couldn’t “Death of a Salesman” be the black “Death of a Salesman”?

August Wilson answers you: “To mount an all-black production of a ‘Death of a Salesman’ or any other play conceived for white actors as an investigation of the human condition through the specifics of white culture is to deny us our own humanity, our own history, and the need to make our own investigations from the cultural ground on which we stand as black Americans. It is an assault on our presence, and our difficult but honorable history in America; and it is an insult to our intelligence, our playwrights, and our many and varied contributions to the society and the world at large.” (1996)

(I should point out that the original context for this quote makes no actual mention of “Fences” — Wilson was just denouncing race-blind casting and used “Death of a Salesman” as his example. But it seems fair to assume that after 13 years of being told that “Fences” is just like “Death of a Salesman,” his choice of example was not arbitrary.)

Though I take issue with the victimized rhetoric — how can a play “deny us our own humanity”? It’s just a play, and there will be other plays. (Does “Stomp” deny me my humanity? Does “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark”?) — his basic point makes some sense to me. A play dependent on “the specifics of white culture” (or any other culture) cannot be directly interpreted as applying to non-participants in that culture.

But he also says that such a play is essentially “an investigation of the human condition” through a specific culture, rather than an investigation of that culture. Which opens the door to the idea that perhaps a cultural translation can be achieved. Which is how “Fences” reads. This existentially frustrated patriarch might not be existentially frustrated in exactly the same way or for exactly the same reason as Willy Loman, but as far as the human condition goes (not to mention sheer dramaturgy), we’re on familiar ground.

In this interview with Believer Magazine, as elsewhere, Wilson begins by brushing aside any possibility of having been influenced by Arthur Miller: “I’m not sure what they say about Fences as it relates to Death of a Salesman. At the time I wrote Fences, I had not read Death of a Salesman, had not seen Death of a Salesman, did not know anything about Death of a Salesman.”

For various reasons, this claim of complete innocence is very hard to believe, and in its own way tends to trivialize his work. His protest-too-much fills me with empathetic discomfort; whatever the real story, it’s something touchy and defensive. Even if this is in fact the truth, it’s a touchy and defensive truth.

Later in the same interview, clearly feeling that he’s in some kind of guru groove, he comfortably says some questionable things:

BLVR: What’s your opinion, if any, of Eminem? Do you think he’s capable of mastering the black aesthetic of hiphop?

AW: Yeah. He’s imitatin, he ain’t creatin. There’s a very big distinction. He’s not an innovator. He can’t create in that style so everything he do is just imitatin. Anybody can imitate anybody.

BLVR: I’ve read someone say, “Sure, whites can box like Muhammad Ali, once they see him do it.”

AW: The same thing with jazz. Benny Goodman could play jazz, but they ain’t creatin no music, they not innovators. So the music, it’s gotta be there for you to step into it. I wanna see you create it; it would be something different. Different aesthetics at work. But you can be influenced by, you can imitate anything. Got some Japanese guys that play some great jazz. Man, they really good, too! It’s already been done, man.

I for my part find this kind of talk completely unsympathetic. But what’s important is that August Wilson really believes what he’s saying. This is the inalienably racialized perspective in Wilson’s own heart, the one he believes he must contend with in writing his plays. To compete with white playwrights on their own turf, he would seem to believe, is impossible, because it is their turf, and turf is racial. So his work can only be legitimately his own insofar as it is not actually a member of the same genus as a white play like “Death of a Salesman.” In his mind, the correct name of the art form to which that play belongs is “white theater.” Were he to write “white theater,” he would be merely imitatin, not creatin, something he clearly disdains. Hell, that’s like something some Japanese guys might do!

But this is an unliftable burden, since “white theater” unfortunately encompasses all aspects of theater; they got there first. The only thing he’s got that whites didn’t get to first is “black experience.” Definitionally. And so August Wilson needs to believe that “black experience,” both in content and in form, is not just a re-skin but an actual different species; that by writing “black theater” he has utterly broken away from “white theater,” which can never be his.

This seems to me quite obviously wrong-headed from an objective cultural standpoint. It’s the outgrowth of the psychology of second-class-dom, and it is self-destructive. In needing so desperately to keep Benny Goodman and his grubby mitts out of the club — because goddammit, jazz is ours, and you never shared anything with us so why should we? — he creates a notion of cultural property that effectively cedes ownership of everything else to the oppressor, and recognizes that ownership as legitimate. So someone like August Wilson, who wants to do something like playwrighting, which was part of the great cultural cession, now needs to demonstrate to himself (and his peers who think like him) that what he is doing is actually different territory, new territory, fundamentally BLACK territory.

The quote about “Death of a Salesman” really says: “That’s yours, NOT ours. It’s painfully humiliating for you to say that it’s ours too, because it’s not. Almost everything is yours. I insist on it.”

Much more constructive would be to say “Actually, racial ownership of ideas doesn’t exist. As it turns out, nothing is any more yours then ours, so excuse me while we do whatever we like.” But this idea isn’t psychologically available, because separating the impression of culture from the impression of an authoritative voice is nearly impossible. Just turning on the television I feel like I am contending with the will of some strange meta-being, who has particular ideas about me and my place in the world, none of them particularly kind or understanding. Certainly when I, a non-fan, see baseball or football broadcast on TV I have a strong sense that someone or something is telling me “this is ours, not yours.”

I gather that being black in America for many people means growing up with the sense that nearly everything is murmuring this. Realizing that there actually isn’t any meta-being whose voice the culture is, no actual unified will of the oppressor, is the ticket out, but it also feels like selling out one’s own authentic self, the one who felt it. Which isn’t really an option, especially when one is a professional artist or a thinker and has entered into a long-term contract with “the authentic self.”

Navigating the emotions of being a black intellectual in America is obviously very complicated and difficult. Understatement, I know. I can only imagine how incredibly tired and lonely someone like Cornel West is. I get that impression from August Wilson, too. The albatross of identity must be dragged through every action, through every day, without end; it cannot be distinguished from life itself. I can hardly stand to think about my “identity” for even a minute; to me real life only takes place when I’m freed from that kind of self-awareness. I really don’t know how they can bear it.

This is all a roundabout way of saying this play wasn’t really for me.

I have found it subtly unpleasant to write this, just as I found it subtly unpleasant to read the play, because I feel that I am up against an artistic impulse that is inextricably linked to a congealed bitterness, a kind of angst of deprivation. Is that racism on my part? Whenever a piece of work with an overt “identity agenda” bothers me, it’s usually for this reason; people don’t have identity agendas unless they feel misused by the world at large, and people who feel misused by the world at large are not the people I would hire to be my singers and storytellers. And as a consumer of culture is this not what I’m doing?

I don’t remember “Juno and the Paycock” so well at this point (good lord, five years!), but I think my feeling there, in what was ultimately a very similar work, was that the ethnography of it was more dispassionate if equally prominent. But maybe that’s just Sean O’Casey getting the benefit of the doubt that time (and my ignorance) brings. The grudges of generations past always eventually wilt away, no matter how bitter they may once have been. Perhaps in a hundred years the politics of today will have washed away from August Wilson and only the solid rock of the work itself will remain, a durable fossil.

But that’s where I came in. That really is how I read “Fences”: innocently. I’m just saying the rock is an old and familiar rock.

The better justification for such a work, I think, setting race etc. aside, is simply that there’s no reason for lots of people not to keep writing “Death of a Salesman” over and over, just like they make a zillion westerns, mysteries, etc. Why not Death of a Salesmans? It’s a resonant and rich scenario. We could stand to go back there. And we do, and lots of writers continue to retread this same ground over and over, and more power to them.

As Death of a Salesmans go this is, in fact, quite a fine one. What it says it says with vigor.

I will now call your attention to this depressing video. The first half is the play I read — “theatrical” in ways both good and bad, but confident and clear. The second half is something else. Does this hateful laughter need psychoanalysis? The burned-out hole where love should be is no longer recognizable in the character on stage because it now encompasses the entire audience. It is a pit into which we are all eagerly leaping.

————-

Now to quickly post something else so as to bury this one as fast as possible.

Inevitably in writing such a thing as this I feel wary of all the angry angry people out there who might appear at any moment, like avenging ghosts, to tell me I’ve done some kind of wrong here. Or more likely, that I AM some kind of wrong. I don’t know what good they think they’re doing. All I can say to appease those gods is that I am, as always, open to reason, persuasion, and education. Racism is a dogma, and I am not being dogmatic.

Facebook is depressing, among other reasons, because it reveals that many of one’s friends and acquaintances want to present themselves as avenging ghosts. This is our venue for social self-reinvention, and THIS is how people want to re-invent themselves, as self-righteous crusaders? Why would they want that? I truly don’t understand.

Jean Genet (1910–1986)
Notre Dame des Fleurs (1943, revised 1951)
translated into English as Our Lady of the Flowers (1963) by Bernard Frechtman

Rolled 1267, which is in the Jean Genet range. I fall back to his first listed work: 1265, Our Lady of the Flowers.

I’ll get right to it: What we have here is a fairly long dense experimental novel. It is 300 unchaptered pages of continuous prose, written while the author was imprisoned for theft, consisting mostly of fragmentary improvisations on the (homosexual) fantasy life that fed the author’s prison cell masturbation — fantasies in which the ego/protagonist is a pathetic transvestite prostitute called Divine, who couples with various muscular criminals. (Genet is particularly turned on by the idea of murderers as sex objects.) Let words be not minced: this is not infrequently a book elaborately and poetically about hard cocks, by an author who makes no secret of what he’s doing with his other hand.

This is the 24th selection in my glacial traversal of the Western Canon, and by now I’ve learned to disregard the gust of apprehensive dismay that often hits me when I google my newly arranged marriage and get a sense of what I’m in for. Other than Ezra Pound, who was as awful as I feared, they’ve all turned out to be paper tigers. (To spoil the ending, so too was this one.) But I must admit that despite knowing better, on first reading the Amazon and Wikipedia summaries of Our Lady, I couldn’t help but feel taken aback by how very aggressively The List seemed to be trying to screw me over.

The problem is that I have a bias, perhaps under-considered, against “literary erotica” and its adherents. I can’t help but feel that “serious” “eros” is usually just a needless (and thus embarrassing) attempt on the part of bohemian intellectuals to dignify porn — or even worse, sex itself — the only way they know how: by ensconcing it in the aesthetics of bohemian intellectualism! (From whence it’s just an easy roll across the bed to academic intellectualism, with a brief layover at Wikipedia.)

*
After letting it live here for the months that this entry has been simmering unposted, I have now summoned the discipline to remove from this spot a very long digression (10+ brilliant paragraphs!) on the preceding theme, much of it written in the early stages of reading the book. Why? Because none of it had anything at all to do with Our Lady of the Flowers, but it was written as though it did. At best it had to do with a misunderstanding of Our Lady of the Flowers that, by the time I finished, had been long dispelled.

While this book might well be filed under “erotica” or “gay/lesbian interest” by some misguided booksellers (and half-read as such by some alterna-teentellectuals), it really is neither sort of thing. So my cranky porn-scorn was out of place here. I will save it for a rainy day.

*

Genet’s actual subject is in fact the great mystery of subjectivity, the interiority and insubstantiality of all experience. The concept is the prisoner’s masturbation fantasy taken as a metaphor for all of art, for all of life. That the metaphor seems so lonely and sordid is part of the philosophical point.

The preceding is never quite stated in the book, really; it’s my analysis (and, more or less, Jean-Paul Sartre’s, whose introduction is completely adulatory and pretty much on point but at 50 over-written pages oozes with so much intellectual ego that it ends up feeling condescending anyway). The book has the virtue of being the sort of work of art that is inherently multi-dimensional and thus needn’t explain itself; the artist rationale is, ultimately, implicit. But this means that it spends all its time just being itself, and so on a first pass it can be very hard to decode what it is that you’re reading. It’s hard to be sure just how aware Genet is of the many layers of his project. (Hence my initial misgiving that he was trying to pass off his means of self-arousal as itself equivalent to literature.)

By the end I knew with certainty that he was aware of all of the layers. He fills his book freely with masturbation, farts, smells, discomforts, and then despair, fantasies, memories, etc., because what he is writing is an existential testament, a song of the life of the soul. Self-regard and self-mythologizing are the recourse not just of the literal prisoner but of the lonely ego in everyone, trapped with only the senses to keep it company. In the book, as in life, this alternates between seeming like the glorious triumph of the imagination and a depressing delusion.

This makes for relatively difficult reading, not just because it the conceit is so peculiarly raw, but also because the mode of expression is as freely and unabashedly subjective as the reality it conveys. The task is generally one of running along after the author, panting, while he makes poetic leap after leap as the whim strikes him. This is the sort of reading where one’s attention is liable to drift without one’s realizing it, as in the middle of a paragraph, the literal ground under one’s feet surreptitiously ramps away into metaphor or dream. Or one fantasy births another nested fantasy, without explicit notice. Many of the inspirations took a bit of puzzling to work out, but they almost always proved to be fine and beautiful things once I was able to see what he was getting at, and thus in retrospect were deemed well worth the effort.

This I suppose is the risk and reward of poetry: it’s the very fact that you might well not know what’s being talked about that makes it so moving when you do. Communication that goes beyond the prosaic is a consolation because it is rarely attempted, and it is rarely attempted because it is so unlikely to succeed.

The difficulty and poetry of so much of the writing intensifies the sense of rude clarity when we return from the interior fantasy to the prison cell and Genet himself, which happens periodically because even in the act of writing he is ruefully, inescapably self-aware, and he is intent on sparing himself nothing, not even the reality from which the creative act is ostensibly an escape. In granting himself the hope of escape he also must, in order to be honest, acknowledge the hopelessness of hope, the terminal circularity of the existential struggle that his book represents.

In fact, when I said above that Genet never really states his overarching intentions, that wasn’t quite true — very late in the game, his interior monologue briefly alights on a few business-like notes-to-self about what he ought to include in the book he is writing — but of course by that point the reader will have already come to understand the nature of the project. It’s still a striking moment, though; the impact is of a momentarily blinding “special effect” on the page.

Anyway, I see that so far I am begging the question of what sort of stuff it is that one is reading when one reads this book. The best I can answer that is to say that Genet’s writing, like Proust’s, is genuinely philosophical in construction, such that the action and the implications of the action are inextricably intertwined. (It is certainly unsummarizable, as per the Monty Python sketch.)

But generally, one is reading about the life, loves, and feelings of Divine (referred to as “she”), born Louis Culafroy (referred to as “he”), imagined fitfully and non-chronologically from boyhood to early death — all in light of the explicit acknowledgement that Divine is a mere puppet for the use of Genet’s imagination, libido, and projected autobiography. Her world is populated by a small stock of equally puppet-like characters who sometimes, as Genet’s whim strikes, star in their own episodes — Genet tells us at the outset that he is imagining them out of people he has met, criminals he has read about in the papers, and tiny newsprint photos of vacant, tough-looking guys that he has cut out and stuck to his wall. In the gaps one reads about Genet in his cell, his thoughts, fears, and dreams, and his own autobiography. Within this framework, digressions and distortions abound, zooming in and out of the fantasy in all directions, delving lyrically and mysteriously into experiential details. Overall the text is about nine-tenths Divine, one-tenth prison cell, but of course the two layers are one and the same thing, and increasingly one reads with a full awareness at all times, which is the greatest and most unique achievement of this work — I can’t think of anything else I have ever read that so thoroughly collapses the distinction between teller and tale. And this collapse is justified not as a superficial experiment in style, but as an utter and obvious psychological truth, which of course it is.

By being a sort of limbless abomination of a novel, melted into primal formlessness by the heat of its own gaze, this book profoundly exposes what is lurking in plain sight behind all novels — psychology.

Bernard Frechtman’s translation is a marvel — many a time I had to remind myself that the subtle values I was savoring in the language were either those of the translator or else those that the translator had miraculously conveyed intact from another language. In either case I was deeply impressed by his work. In looking him up I find that he worked exclusively for Genet — as English-language agent and secretary, as well as translator; that the two had a falling-out in 1966, and that in 1967 Frechtman committed suicide by hanging. This is quite an ugly shadow to have over the work and I’m sort of glad I didn’t know it until after I finished. You guys, unfortunately, have had that possibility stolen from you. Sorry.

Anyway, the writing is spectacular.

So now to the text excerpts: Sometimes I do this grudgingly or arbitrarily, but in this case there were many passages that I had the impulse to clip and offer; it’s that kind of writing. Not to say that any of the text would make a good Barnes & Noble bag; it’s all much too oblique and self-pitying and indulgent and libertine. But it was very often fascinating and impressive.

For the first time I’m going to include two different excerpts, because why not. This first one is actually the very first passage in the book to have struck as a candidate for excerption, right near the beginning – it’s touching and straightforward and gives a good impression of the how the Proustian, scatological, and existential aspects fit together. It’s long but I can’t bring myself to cut any of it.

Genet tells us that he woke in the morning “still entangled in my strange dream,” in which his victim had pardoned him for his crimes:

… Upon waking, I still had the feeling of baptism. But there is no question of resuming contact with the precise and tangible world of the cell. I lie down again until it’s time for bread. The atmosphere of the night, the smell rising from the blocked latrines, overflowing with shit and yellow water, stir childhood memories which rise up like a black soil mined by moles. One leads to another and makes it surge up; a whole life which I thought subterranean and forever buried rises to the surface, to the air, to the sad sun, which give it a smell of decay, in which I delight. The reminiscence that really tugs at my heart is that of the toilet of the slate house. It was my refuge. Life, which I saw far off and blurred through its darkness and smell — an odor that filled me with compassion, in which the scent of the elders and the loamy earth was dominant, for the outhouse was at the far end of the garden, near the hedge — life, as it reached me, was singularly sweet, caressing, light, or rather lightened, delivered from heaviness. I am speaking of the life which was things outside the toilet, whatever in the world was not my little retreat with its worm-eaten boards. It seemed to me as if it were somewhat in the manner of floating, painted dreams, whereas I in my hole, like a larva, went on with a restful nocturnal existence, and at times I had the feeling I was sinking slowly, as into sleep or a lake or a maternal breast or even a state of incest, to the spiritual center of the earth. My periods of happiness were never luminously happy, my peace never what men of letters and theologians call a “celestial peace.” That’s as it should be, for I would be horrified if I were pointed at by God, singled out by Him; I know very well that if I were sick, and were cured by a miracle, I would not survive it. Miracles are unclean; the peace I used to seek in the outhouse, the one I am going to seek in the memory of it, is a reassuring and soothing peace.

At times it would rain. I would hear the patter of the drops on the zinc roofing. Then my sad well-being, my morose delectation, would be aggravated by a further sorrow. I would open the door a crack, and the sight of the wet garden and the pelted vegetables would grieve me. I would remain for hours squatting in my cell, roosting on my wooden seat, my body and soul prey to the odor and darkness; I would feel mysteriously moved, because it was there that the most secret part of human beings came to reveal itself, as in a confessional. Empty confessionals had the same sweetness for me. Back issues of fashion magazines lay about there, illustrated with engravings in which the women of 1910 always had a muff, a parasol, and a dress with a bustle.

It took me a long time to learn to exploit the spell of these nether powers, who drew me to them by the feet, who flapped their black wings about me, fluttering them like the eyelashes of a vamp, and dug their branchlike fingers into my eyes.

Someone has flushed the toilet in the next cell. …

That is, to me, a beautiful passage; I know it will stay with me. If that makes you want to read the book, though, be warned: you will also find yourself reading a lot about HARD COCKS. Two sentences after the end of that excerpt, the words “stiff penis” appear. Contrariwise if that sounds pretty good to you (reader #2), be warned that “whilst in many places the effect on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.” (Or at least I think so — but this is so far from being my neck of those woods that I really can’t say for sure. I would imagine that the somewhat grim existential context would take the bloom off of the rose of the sex scenes even for readers with exactly Genet’s proclivities, but what do I know.)

Now a somewhat more difficult passage, so that you can see at least one dimension of the difficulty and try your hand at it.

The pimp “Darling” (Divine’s principal lover) has been compulsively shoplifting at a department store. He finally approaches the door:

In his pockets were two silver lighters and a cigarette case. He was being followed. When he was near the door, which was guarded by a uniformed colossus, a little old woman said to him quietly:

“What have you stolen, young man?”

It was the “young man” that charmed Darling. Otherwise he would have made a dash for it. The most innocent words are the most pernicious, they’re the ones you have to watch out for. Almost immediately, the colossus was upon him and grabbed his wrist. He charged like a tremendous wave upon the bather asleep on the beach. Through the old woman’s words and the man’s gesture, a new universe instantaneously presented itself to Darling: the universe of the irremediable. It is the same as the one we are in, with one peculiar difference: instead of acting and knowing we are acting, we know we are acted upon. A gaze — and it may be of your own eyes — has the sudden, precise keenness of the extra-lucid, and the order of this world — seen inside out — appears so perfect in its inevitability that this world has only to disappear. That’s what it does in the twinkling of an eye. The world is turned inside out like a glove. It happens that I am the glove, and that I finally realize that on Judgment Day it will be with my own voice that God will call me: “Jean, Jean!”

The swoop out of simple narrative directly into a fairly sophisticated poetry is accomplished without batting an eye. The effect, at least to me, is like in a dream when the blood seems to surge up and swarm strangeness over what had previously been a naturalistic scene. This technique of sidestepping into a philosophical free-for-all is something like in Proust, but where Proust’s analytic swoops are generally toward a clarifying poetry of quasi-classical beauty, Genet is always stepping back to let in something dizzy, overwhelming. And then, just as quickly, out of this swoon of poetry further blossoms a painful tableau of the real author in a state of morbid desperation.

It was very easy for me to find myself glassily coasting over passages like this, which plunge one into complexities without warning; holding to the sense requires great commitment. To get from the department store door to “on Judgment Day it will be with my own voice that God will call me” in one breakneck paragraph is both exhilarating and exhausting. Every page offers the same. It is the exhilaration of great poetry, and that’s what this book is.

Once again, fatalistically strapping myself to The List pays off. A deep and rewarding aesthetic experience for which I am grateful was hidden away inside a book that I would never in a million years ever have read under any other circumstances — and that certainly includes having it recommended or assigned to me by anyone else. This is the kind of trust I can afford to place only in a ouija board and the pagan god CANON. (K’NON?)

I have just now taken a quick personal census and can say with confidence that this is by far the gayest book I have ever read.

The edition read, pictured above, was from the Brooklyn library. I had it out and read the first quarter or so around a year ago, when I scanned the cover as seen here, but then couldn’t renew it because it had been reserved and had to be returned. I did not summon up the will to retrieve and finish it until many months later, at which point the same copy showed a good deal more damage to the binding and a much enlarged tear in the corner, no doubt due to the other reader attempting to insert his penis. Thus the image you see above represents a bygone innocence.

The cover is one of Roy Kuhlman’s less funky efforts, and probably the best cover this book’s ever had.

This particular copy contained some of the most incoherent underlining I have ever encountered, the disjunct phoniness of which suggested (to my prejudicial imagination) one of those enthusiasts of “literary erotica,” having a cuddle party for himself and his awesomely open mind. I picture him in a corduroy jacket.

Since you were wondering, I’ll have you know that according to Google I am the absolute first, ever, anywhere, coiner of “teentellectual.” You will note that I, not content with this level of originality (viz. world-class), in fact went directly for the secondary inflection “alterna-teentellectual.” I’m ready for my genius grant, Mr. DeMille!

Okay, not to brag, but the term as it actually spontaneously occurred to me was “alterna-tweentellectual,” a word so ahead of its time that, had I kept it in, it would probably have broken Google — but then I realized that the particular pretension under discussion was necessarily post-pubescent. But when everyone is saying “alterna-tweentellectual,” oh, let’s say fifty years down the line, just remember that you saw it here first. And then kick yourself for not going and buying “teentellectual.com” while you still could, long before it became the Facebook of Web 5.0.

Wilkie Collins (1824–1889)
The Moonstone (1868, serialized in All the Year Round and in book form the same year)

Roll 24 was… well, I don’t have it in front of me but it was apparently between 859 and 862, the Wilkie Collins range, any of which numbers would result in my reading his first listed, The Moonstone. Which I happened already to own, having bought it off a sidewalk bookseller’s table in 2002 on a whim and then never opened. I read it in a matter of a few weeks… last fall.

I have put off writing about this book for a long time – (insert 5 months later: make that a very very long time) – because from the beginning I wasn’t sure what was worth saying about it. It’s fairly self-apparent what this book is, to the point where it was hard for me to imagine writing more than a couple of sentences of explanation. I would then be obliged to pad that out with unmotivated riffing, which I didn’t want to do. So I did nothing. Now the time has come, I say, to swallow my standards and do something anyway, so I can get this off my to-do list.

As a service to the reader: what this book is. This book is a popular serial entertainment, a rambling soap opera. It is, specifically, the sort of devil-may-care nerded-up soap opera where the suitors and secrets are intermingled with exotic unlikelihoods such as hypnotism, Indian assassins, opium, cursed diamonds, quicksand, and in the interest of spoiler camouflage I will here drop the scrim of “et cetera.”

The book is frequently cited as “the first English detective novel.” I can’t speak to whether it’s really the “first” of anything, but I can say that it reads like only a proto-detective novel. The Moonstone is at a halfway point between the sort of detectiveless family-secret mysteries one finds in most 19th-century novels (say, Bleak House) and the mystery genre proper, as we’ve known it since Sherlock Holmes. (For your orientation: Bleak House, 1852-3; The Moonstone, 1868; Sherlock Holmes, 1887.)

Note also that the claim is about detective novels only; the detective story had been established since Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” 1841. So Collins already knew plenty about how mysteries worked; the only really new problem that he set himself in The Moonstone was how to make the unraveling of a single mystery be the backbone for a whole novel.

His solution is unremarkable: basically, he just throws in all the standard tricks of the Dickensian trade to beef it up. The plot gets prolonged and padded the way it does in any long novel: side characters, side plots, bits and small talk, sub-intrigues, etc. etc. But despite the utter familiarity of all this sort of thing, it still manages to feel like a strenuous display of puzzle-solving on the author’s part. He makes it look hard. We are privy to a great deal of the characters’ plan-making and intention-stating, as well as a great deal of situation-reviewing and stock-taking — in such scenes one feels that one can hear, as though through a too-thin wall, the writer huffing and puffing at his table. Not to denigrate Wilkie by the comparison, but I am reminded a bit of J.K. Rowling, who I guess has become the convenient archetype for me of a writer who reveals her inexpertise by leaving plot-sweat on the page.

Yes, the comparison is unfair because Collins was, in fact, an expert — certainly moreso than JKR — and in any case the standards for plotting are different for a serial novel, where a certain amount of sprawl and slack is to be expected and readily forgiven. Nonetheless if one attempts to read The Moonstone as a true detective novel it will seem strained, primitive, and inefficient. For one thing, the role of detective is divvied up among several characters over the course of the book – there’s no master-sleuth hero, which seems like a requisite. There is a proper detective playing the part for a while, but it’s as though Collins felt it would be absurd to extend his professional presence indefinitely; he reaches the end of the initial investigation and then disappears for most of the rest of the book, without having solved the mystery we actually care about.

I just started going into more detail about how it diverges from the “mystery” archetype but there’s no need. Delete. The point is this: we think of mysteries as having their own set of rules, their own particular fantasy, their own customary absurdities in service of their own implicit mimetic ideals. But The Moonstone draws on a much wider range of absurdities and has no very particular ideals. It is not nearly so singleminded a fantasy as a mystery — the singlemindedness being part of the pleasure, at least to me.

The Moonstone, rather, is generous and fanciful, and obviously designed only to be a thing that will sell, sell, sell. Occasionally dull, occasionally thrilling, often rather dumb but never actually insulting to the intelligence — all-around fine fare for an interminable bedtime read-aloud. The pleasure I took in it was never entirely unselfconscious, but I suppose neither is a child’s, and probably neither was a reader’s when it was first published. Half-camp isn’t an exclusively contemporary mode of enjoyment. I need to give those very modern men and women of 1868 some credit and assume that hearing about the theft of a cursed diamond was as frivolous and escapist for them as it is now, and that they knowingly submitted to it with a twinkle in their eyes.

What’s new nowadays is how the self-indulgence of escapism dovetails into the self-delusion of infantilism. I’m going to leave that sentence but not pursue it, lucky you.

Anyway, it’s plenty delightful, but not excellent. It’s not particularly nourishing either. It’s the sort of book that if you tried to write about it eight months after finishing it, you’d really have to stretch to remember the details. The main thing I remember is the climactic [spoiler], which is very very silly indeed.

No, I do remember, I do. Really. I remember quite a few of the secondary color character sketches, all of which compare unfavorably to Dickens, competing on exactly his turf.

Standards have been successfully swallowed. I think we’re well into the unmotivated riffing phase here. Will be done soon.

His device of multiple narrators — utilized only to gratingly superficial effect — is presented like it’s some kind of complex calculus, solved only by a stroke of authorial genius. (I was going to say “is presented Shyamalanically” but figured you wouldn’t be sure what I meant. I was right, wasn’t I.)

By the end you will have guessed all the right answers, but you will also have guessed all the wrong answers too.

The Oxford edition that I read, as seen above, has an introduction noisily attempting to dignify the proceedings with an oversold colonialist/anti-colonialist reading. Good try.

This is a good one for kids and/or the beach. In the context of the Harold Bloom merry-go-round-of-the-damned that I’m on, that’s a thumbs up.

Done now.

Oh dammit, I forgot, I’m supposed to give you an excerpt. Hm. Okay, here’s the final paragraph of the book. Half-camp ahoy; I left with a smile on my face.

So the years pass, and repeat each other; so the same events revolve in the cycles of time. What will be the next adventures of the Moonstone? Who can tell?

William Faulkner (1897–1962)
As I Lay Dying (1930)

[Boy, this has been sitting here forever! I read this book something like a year ago, and I wrote most of this six months ago. But it has very much needed editing so I have delayed posting it. And now you’re about to find out just how badly it’s needed editing, because I’m finally fed up and am posting it after all, more or less as it’s been.]

After hot-dog-eating-contest-ing my way through Chernyshevsky, reading Faulkner was like sipping tea. (That was an attempt to use “hot-dog-eating-contest” as a verb. Your cooperation is appreciated.) I know Faulkner isn’t supposed to be like sipping tea; he’s supposed to be a heavy duty guy, one of the classic “difficult” writers. But people tend to overemphasize the challenge posed by “difficult” writing, and underemphasize the challenge posed by old writing, or bad writing. Compared to the messy, many-dimensional problems posed by the passage of centuries and huge shifts in cultural standards, difficulties in figuring out which character is talking (or whatever) are just like slight clouds in your tea. As I Lay Dying was pie — pie, I say — compared to a trudge like What is to be Done, because it was a book by a more-or-less modern American writer for more-or-less modern American readers like myself. He’s at home and I’m at home; neither of us is squinting at a phrasebook.

Which is more difficult: doing the crossword puzzle in today’s paper, or understanding any part of a paper from 1780?

Okay, obviously I’m exaggerating; this book was harder than cloudy tea. In fact, halfway through, feeling quite confused, I thought perhaps I’d better delete the above, which was jotted down in my early post-Chernyshevsky enthusiasm. But having reached the end and reflected on my experience, I’m comfortable letting it stand. The book might have been a three-star crossword puzzle, but it was still just a crossword puzzle.

And, puzzle-lover though I may be, I’m not sure that’s to its credit.

This being my first Faulkner novel — a momentous occasion, after all these years of hype! — I felt it prudent to ask around and see what a few Faulkner-lovers of my acquaintance had to say about As I Lay Dying. The average response was, I daresay, rather cool. Some admiration was tentatively expressed, but no actual affection. Generally they wanted to tell me which other Faulkner novel they actually recommended (The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom, Light in August). The most enthusiastic comment about As I Lay Dying that I was able to get out of any of the approximately three people to whom I spoke was: “it’s astonishing, isn’t it?” Which under the circumstances sounds a tad evasive. A snake eating a mouse is astonishing.

When these Faulknerians asked me what I had thought of it, I said the same thing to each of them, and now I say it to you, the infinite readership: I know what experience it gave, but I don’t know why that experience was on offer.

Just now I was watching the original ballet of Appalachian Spring — another stylized, modernist crunch on the spiritual concept of “America.” The ballet’s image of twitchy, angular purity and grace has an obvious appeal and an obvious purpose. It delivers something that feels useful to the soul, something worth carrying around. Something for the heart to take into account when choosing the palette for its own, inward American landscape. As I Lay Dying seemed to want to deliver something similar but for me it did not. What sort of inward use could its particular vision possibly serve? Wherefore this gnarled, driftwood gargoyle?

It wasn’t false enough to relish like a haunted house — it was nobody’s nightmare — but neither was it true enough to appreciate as a slice of any real world. It was an “expressionist” skew on the rural south, but I was never sufficiently convinced that it had been skewed in a good faith effort to express anything felt, rather than just as a device to superficially art-ify. Where, in this world he was describing, were Mr. Faulkner’s sympathies?, I wanted to know. With his own skill, seemed rather obviously to be the answer. But that was an unproductive answer, so I made great effort to set it aside and wait for another one to present itself. And others did, eventually, but in retrospect none half as convincing as that first one.

Does passion for technique and dispassion for characters necessarily mean that an artist is a jerk, or that he has his priorities wrong? I say “definitely not” — it annoys me when people level this complaint against, say, the Coen Brothers. But that’s because in Coen Brothers movies I always have a clear sense that the dispassionate storytelling has an emotional objective. Being at a dispassionate distance is itself a real and rather melancholy human experience; generally I think they’re interested in that melancholy, rather than disinterested in their characters. It is with the camera’s own godlike externality that we are meant to identify.

The text of As I Lay Dying, on the other hand, is entirely in the mouths and brains of its characters — the device is that it jumps from character to character at each new chapter. Scattered thus among its various characters, the book averages to having an external point of view, but it’s a point of view we are never actually offered, an unvoiced perspective. So the melancholy of externality cannot be a part of the equation. But that underlying lack of sympathy is there nonetheless, and we smell it, and we know it’s Faulkner behind it. He’s a lurker in his own book, and as such he feels insufficiently committed. So when he veers toward the grotesque, it seems divorced from any emotional impulse — modernist stylings for their own sake.

While we’re on the subject: is American Gothic making fun of those two people, or what? I tend to think that one’s more Coen brothers style; our sympathies are meant to be with the frame. I think Grant Wood is probably asking his audience “you know how sometimes you see something that’s not supposed to be strange, but it’s actually very strange, both unsettling and comical?” Faulkner showed me similar stuff but he never winked and never asked me anything.

Let me make clear that I did understand what I was reading! The “point” of the book, to some degree, is that all life and all meaning is subjective. Thus the idiosyncratic form. And thus also Faulkner’s refusal to declare any boundary between deadpan and sincere, grotesque and noble. I can see that he probably wanted each first-person narrative to strike an untippable balance between foreign otherness and some kind of essential truth-for-that-person, the glowing inner reality that is the ultimate object of sympathy because we all share it: the mystery of being existent. I feel like the strangeness came off, but the glowing innerness didn’t, because it’s dependent on the poetry, and, ultimately — and this is really the bottom line of my response — I wasn’t convinced by the poetry. It all comes down to the text.

Faulkner’s prose style here is highly conspicuous, constructed, idiosyncratic, fanciful, thorny. To these one might add affected, ostentatious, pretentious, self-indulgent and so on. One might add these words. Then again one might rather add poetic, rich, evocative, spectacular, virtuoso and the like. While reading, I spent a lot of mental energy on steering toward the latter sort of thing. Fighting against rather strong currents, I’m afraid.

I see that the work was an effort to transcend, but my experience wasn’t of transcendence, so I was left with the solid part only, which made the book feel unkind, false. And I’m not so sure that what he was attempting is even possible. Ulysses achieves exactly this kind of “sympathy-beyond-mere-sympathy” for Bloom, but that’s because Joyce, for all his artificing, realizes that poetry is the least of it; the real thing is to show that Bloom is more than merely fodder for Joyce’s pen. It’s in his very ordinariness that Bloom is allowed to transcend Joyce. Faulkner’s people are too busy being American Gothic hieroglyphs to possibly transcend Faulkner himself, so there’s nothing there to believe in.

In fact, the more I talk about it, the more embarrassingly overreaching the whole project seems. And the effort to leaven it by actually putting philosophical windings into the brains of each character is also embarrassing, for its shamelessness. (Though those were the most interesting passages to read, because they were the most communicative of the author’s actual intentions. If only he’d been able to write a book about those things instead of just “about” them… )

The book, I think, is one of those “great works of art” that is admired for what it indicates its intention to be, rather than for what it is.

And yes, the difficulty. I suppose his formal technique is archetypically modernist, in that it intends to reduce the materials to a scientific array, scatter the particles of the narrative, stack and arrange the sentences like blocks, like some kind of Gertrude Stein objects. In such works the “point of view” is that of the God of science, which is to say no God (unlike the film camera, mentioned earlier, which is a real and omnipotent god). But when Joyce has that chapter at the end of Ulysses all in questions and answers, he uses it to revel in the infinite possibilities of raw information, the endless glories of truth. The truth goes into a desk drawer, under the table, out into distant space, down to a microscopic detail, back and forth through time, into the mind, the body — everything. That chapter is a joyous, whimsical celebration of the modern potential to explode a moment, a story, art. Faulkner’s book, on the other hand, is “exploded” and yet its worldview remains provincial; it seems to be explosion as obfuscation rather than illumination.

As-yet-unrevealed things were referred to obliquely in earlier chapters only to be retroactively explained in later chapters. In Ulysses this device also occurs, but there it’s in keeping with the concept of the city as four-dimensional microcosm; that the book contains more stories than just the one that reads from front to back is part of the aesthetic point. Here it just felt like puzzles and confusion thrown in the reader’s path for complexity’s sake.

I guess I’ve worked my way around to my problem with much of post-WWI art — the techniques of modernism are so easily misunderstood, and were, and were converted into mere fashions rather than ideas. This was like secondhand cubism.

I felt like his descriptive language was perpetually dense and rich simply because he had resolved to keep his descriptive language dense and rich, rather than because some greater vision necessitated it. He would give me a heavily-worked morsel of prose-poetry about the ripples on a river, and I would think, “I see that you obviously strove to pour the full force of your art into this phrase… but why are you telling me about these ripples at all? They really don’t have anything to do with the substance of the scene, so the phrase doesn’t belong here, no matter how original and chewy.”

(Ding ding, train of thought is about to switch tracks, ding ding. Keep arms and legs inside.)

During the time I was reading this book, I happened also to be thinking about how my baseline experience of perceiving the world has changed over the years; how the flavor of it fluctuates and transforms over time. Things seem to me sometimes to be duller or more distant than they once were; or rather the sense that things are dull or distant settles over me more frequently and with greater inertia. My sense of the present, in space and time, has become less acute, softened by habit — the habit of being. I don’t know whether this is the nature of aging or a kind of depression, but it is of course something I would like to resist and improve; perceiving the world is pretty much my raison d’etre as a conscious being, after all, so it seems like a pretty high priority.

Earlier today on the street in Manhattan, I saw a very little boy in a stroller and could see in his eyes that his attention to the sidewalk passing under him was full and intense. I felt shamed by it. What do I think I know about sidewalks already, that I needn’t look? Why is my attention so withered and weak? You must change your life.

Once last year when I was in the shower, I happened to look at the wall tiles from only inches away, and saw them in their voluminous detail, and felt suddenly aware of the acute reality of the present, and was overjoyed. Of course the sensation was unreproducible, and here I am talking about it a year later because it has become so rare. For that boy in the stroller — and for me too once, I think — it was the only way of being.

The point of this extremely personal digression is this: perhaps an abundance of detail needs no justification to a reader whose mind perceives the abundance of the world. Detail is a first principle, not a stylistic choice. Why describe the ripples on the water? The question would not even occur to someone for whom the ripples were already and necessarily present; they would ask, “what is art but to describe ripples?”

Perhaps the better I understand art — the more I see the layers of its createdness, its intentionality, its personness — the further I fall from being able to see reality, the unpeopled truth. Sometimes I have the distressing feeling that I am surrounded by art in the world, swallowed up by the wills and minds of men rather than things as they are.

Medieval monks believed that reality was correspondences and symbols, that there was mind and message burning in everything, a world aflame. We tend to think of them as being the victims of chronological misfortune, doomed to live before the era of real knowledge and real comfort, doomed to make everything up from scratch while rats gnawed them in their beds. We imply that they saw art in place of reality as a way to alleviate their suffering, like the end of Brazil.

But I think that’s presumptuous. We need no such excuse to be seduced into believing that meaning is the underlying principle in the world; the impulse to see meaning is inborn.

Perhaps my problem is that I see the poetry so much more clearly than I see the ripples. The ripples, I think numbly, can take care of themselves; I just need to concern myself with the book. It seems likely to me that I read the book in this worthless, sterile spirit. Perhaps it was full of life and heart that I missed.

Ah well. Maybe some day I’ll pass this way again, but not right now.

Honestly, I prefer to write them this way. What really was I going to say about William Faulkner when there are so many Faulkner scholars, Faulkner journals, Faulkner societies and Faulkner conferences, all hard at work at the expansive task of finally getting Faulkner’s work good and responded to? Even as I read, I felt distressingly aware that not only had millions trampled this ground before me, but that they might be quite nearby still — that if I dared do an internet search to read up on the book, I would be thrust into a world with its own traditions and expectations and protocol, where all the good picnic spots had been claimed bright and early by the locals.

(The very concept of the “newbie” is a rather hateful one, isn’t it?)

Anyway, with this thoroughly kvetchy, self-pitying posting I’ve certainly shown them, haven’t I! Take that, Faulkner establishment. And take that, literary establishment at large that fairly unanimously considers this one of the great works of the 20th century.

And take that, people who read my site. And take that, me.

Next time I promise I will try to post quickly, before they fester, as this one so obviously has.

[A recap of the above:

First I say that the book was easy. Then I say that it actually was hard. Then I say that I don’t know why he wrote it because it seemed pointless to me. Then I say that the author must have been full of himself to write such a fancy-boy type book. Then I swear that I totally understood it, but that it just was a failure. Then out of nowhere I start making a big stink about how ooh, I’ve read Ulysses, ooh, look at me. Then I randomly start saying that I’m sad and lost in life or some shit like that, and then say that maybe that’s why, okay fine, maybe I didn’t understand the book, but that I don’t care. Then basically I say that people who like this guy’s books are stuck-up snobs. Then I immediately kind of disclaim the whole essay. And then this, which goes and pisses all over the whole thing.

All in all, not a proud performance.]

But, you know, the show must go on.

Oh, oops! I’m supposed to include a passage for you to sample and consider. Here you go.

In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I dont know what I am. I dont know if I am or not. Jewel knows he is, because he does not know that he does not know whether he is or not. He cannot empty himself for sleep because he is not what he is and he is what he is not. Beyond the unlamped wall I can hear the rain shaping the wagon that is ours, the load that is no longer theirs that felled and sawed it nor yet theirs that bought it and which is not ours either, lie on our wagon though it does, since only the wind and the rain shape it only to Jewel and me, that are not asleep. And since sleep is is-not and rain and wind are was, it is not. Yet the wagon is, because when the wagon is was, Addie Bundren will not be. And Jewel is, so Addie Bundren must be. And then I must be, or I could not empty myself for sleep in a strange room. And so if I am not emptied yet, I am is.

How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.

Pretty in its way, and artful in its way, and somewhere near to the profound, in its way… and yet at the same time, irritatingly contrived, and transparent, and condescending, and pretentious, no? Well, that’s my take.

Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828-1889)
Что делать (1863)
translated into English as What Is to Be Done? by Michael R. Katz (1989)

Roll 22 was 165, which is a blank divider row. Roll again.

Roll 23 was 995, which is What Is to be Done? by Nikolai Chernyshevsky. There’s only one modern English translation, and there’s only one edition of it. My local libraries and bookstores couldn’t come through for me on this one so I had to purchase it online, used. The copy I got was completely pristine, except for a stamp across the closed page edges: “NON-RETURNABLE.” This tells me that in a former life, it had been a course-required purchase that the university bookshop knew was too hot a potato to allow back through its doors. Not promising!

And maybe you can’t tell from the image, but the layout and presentation of this edition breathe academia, too. I’m sure Cornell University Press can muster more appealing design when they think they have something with a wider audience. This book, to my eye, has “for only one lecture? there’s no way I’m reading that” written all over it. The interior body font is the dated and size-inappropriate Zapf Book, which made me feel like I was sitting in an itchy chair in an ugly 70s office. Waiting for professor Katz’s office hours, I guess.

I just spent like an hour working out what font it was. Thanks for nothing, identifont.com.

What Is to Be Done? was truly fascinating to read: idiosyncratic and intriguing in style, form, and content, of unique and undeniable historical interest and significance, and not without charm. Whenever I was reading it, I was full of thoughts. I would have had plenty to say in section for this class had I done the reading.

That all said and meant, I unequivocally discourage any of you from ever touching this awful book. It was a total drag. A highly rewarding total drag. Is it possible for a book to be terrible and also really interesting? The six months I spent lugging this thing around say: “Sure.” What the work was, why it was, what it was saying and how it went about saying it — essentially, everything that falls comfortably within the purview of academia — all these questions were worthwhile and the answers were interesting. And remained interesting page for page; the book was continuously revealing new facets of itself in those regards. But at a more fundamental level, as an immediate artistic experience, it was NON-RETURNABLE.

Or… well, I think that’s how it breaks down. But I must admit to being a bit stumped by this one, aesthetically. It was a puzzler.

Let me quote from early in the book itself, from one of its many passages of noodgy second-person address:

I possess not one bit of artistic talent. I even lack full command of the language. But that doesn’t mean a thing; read on, dearest public, it will be well worth your while. Truth is a good thing; it compensates for the inadequacies of any writer who serves its cause. … But then again, dear readers… When I say that I have not one bit of artistic talent and that my tale is a very weak piece of work, you should by no means conclude that I’m any worse than those authors whom you consider to be great, or that my novel is any poorer than theirs. …

You may thank me. You so love to cringe before those who abuse you; so now you can cringe before me, too.

So yes, that’s the author assuring us that his ideas are more important than his admittedly graceless writing. But that passage itself should give a nutshell impression of the reading experience: it’s interesting — to the point of being amusing — that such an absurd and obnoxious passage exists at all, right? And that sort of interest can count for a lot. I grinned when I first came to a page of the author hectoring me outright — I was having genuine fun, encountering this, contemplating it. And yet there’s no getting around the fact that you would never want to read a book by this guy. That’s how the entire book was: generous of interest, and peculiar, and unappealing.

And here’s why: The book is actually an elaborate piece of agitprop. Yes, it bears some resemblance to a novel, but it’s not a real novel — it’s a phony one, a hollowed-out book with a pistol in it. It’s a big honking “truth pill” meant to wake people from the Matrix, hidden under the dust jacket of a soapy women’s romance. Basically, it’s a call to revolution dressed up to play as a formulaic love triangle story. Chernyshevsky seems to have done this for three reasons: firstly so that it would appeal to the masses who didn’t know they needed it, secondly so that it would go down easier, and thirdly to sneak it past the censors… who nonetheless must have been complete idiots not to have sussed out that something was fishy in this flagrantly ill-formed romance novel full of radical chit-chat.

Maybe there was a fourth reason too: I think Chernyshevsky may have felt that to couch his ideas in the interpersonal affairs of a few individuals — that is, within the world of “the novel” — was intellectually and aesthetically necessary. Ideas about social justice and social reform are, at heart, ideas about the souls of people, their inner lives, their needs and struggles. That is, the same stuff art is about. From a certain perspective, casting an ideology into novelistic form is not only more marketable and more vivid than passing out dogmatic pamphlets, but also more human and well-rounded, more true.

This attitude seems to me to have been fairly widespread in the era of the great novel, especially in Russia, and I basically agree with it. Art can embody ideas in ways that transcend the limitations of “mere language,” and that includes ideas of great practical consequence. Perhaps this is the biological function of art, in fact. Yes, mere language obviously has many clear advantages over art in its capacity to convey information. Language is like Legos: complex structures of meaning can be broken down, carried anywhere, and re-built more or less exactly. But the resolution is unfortunately a little blocky; subtleties can get lost. Art, on the other hand, can embody meaning with a resolution so fine and complexity so great that “resolution” and “complexity” seem like insufficient words… but that meaning is much harder to transport, especially as it gets more elaborate, and near-impossible to reconstruct exactly after being broken down. It’s an infinitely flexible but not particularly reliable way of conveying information. My dad the communications professional would probably have some technically appropriate words for these parameters. Art has unlimited bandwidth but a very high error rate (and, sadly, rapidly decreasing standardization of codes); language has very narrow bandwidth but a low error rate and very well-documented codes. Maybe?

So, what was I…? oh right right right. I was saying the book is just propaganda, ideology disguised as “a novel,” but then I said that I think he might have written it that way in good faith, for more or less the same reason that real writers write real novels. And, hm, real novels certainly embody ideologies, too. The Grapes of Wrath has just as clear a social message as What Is to Be Done?, but I wouldn’t call it “propaganda.” So what’s the difference?

I’m not sure I know the answer. This is part of what stumped me, and likewise a big part of why this was an interesting read. I was constantly asking myself “What is this? Is it a ‘work of literature,’ or something else? Might it not be that every work of literature is really just a Trojan horse bearing an ideological payload, and the only difference is that this book is more obvious about it?” I know that “all art is politics” is a notion that appeals to a lot of critics, but I’ve always instinctively rejected it as foolish; it’s like saying saying that every animal is essentially a walking skeleton, dressed up. The problem being that first of all, that’s an idiotic observation, and second of all it’s completely untrue. I’m at least as interested in invertebrate art as I am in mammalia, if not moreso. Certainly far more than I am in a book like What Is to Be Done?.

An easy answer to why it seemed like mere propaganda rather than art would be “because it was badly written,” but that feels like a cop-out. A more interesting answer is that it didn’t feel like art because it wasn’t actually right about the world. I think that this is probably why The Grapes of Wrath and the like get a pass — because we read such things and think, “hm, yeah.” I think Chernyshevsky might actually have been on to something when he said that Truth could redeem his stylistic failings — his real problem was that he also missed the boat on Truth.

This might also be a good answer to the question “why is it sometimes pleasurable for a movie to be ‘manipulative’ and sometimes completely infuriating?”, which has been rattling in my brain since seeing Amistad (as I mentioned back here). Namely: because we really do care about Truth. Amistad and Everything Is Illuminated were opportunistically disingenuous about the nature of the human soul, which is a far more odious sin than anything committed by, say, Avatar.

I don’t have a clear enough sense of Chernyshevsky’s milieu to accuse him of being disingenuous — but I do know that he was wrong. A critic’s quote on the back cover calls the book “psychologically sharp,” but it’s actually just that it’s intricate in its wrongness. The book is all about psychology, to be sure, and the author is obviously convinced that his understanding goes very deep indeed, but it’s all distorted and willful. He saw what he wanted to see and no more. His depths are all impossible halls of mirrors, soap opera as game theory: A knows that B knows that A knows that B intends to make a noble sacrifice for A, and so A must pre-empt B from pre-empting A from making a noble sacrifice by preventing B from doing so. Etcetera! They’re all chess geniuses of being considerate of one another. All of which, he assures us, is in fact quite self-serving and in keeping with the overall theory that people pursue only that which benefits themselves — because being noble gratifies the ego. That’s all well and good, but really? Really?? This is what you see when you look at people?

Chernyshevsky seems to have been a reasonably smart guy, and there is something sort of acute in the way he tries to write about psychological nuance; the problem is just that the subjects of his investigation are ridiculous paper doll contrivances in his own didactic scheme. The behavior he is supposedly teasing apart and exploring is all poppycock to begin with, so the layers he’s uncovering just feel like a journey down some crackpot rabbit hole. It’s like being told what really motivates The Man in the Yellow Hat to keep bringing that damn monkey to inappropriate places, at great length. Twenty pages about his basic human need to become a fully-realized individual, and how bringing the monkey everywhere somehow serves that need. Would that deepen Curious George, or would it in fact make it shallower, by giving it more chances to be wrong? I think the latter.

Now, a parallel universe of elaborate bogus psychology would be perfectly excusable if it were in the service of an interesting plot, but it’s not: here, in fact, it’s in the service of half-baked proposals for total social reorganization, which makes it dangerous — or, since from my historical vantage point the danger has already come and gone, pitiful. A theory of society is only as good as its theory of the individual. And so it turns out that the very thing that makes the work artistically legitimate is also what makes it bad: yes, casting it in human terms is a good way to show the world whether your utopia makes any sense, and no, it clearly doesn’t, because you’re so utterly blinkered. Toward the end I would find myself involuntarily shaking my head “no” as I read.

I can now see Notes from the Underground as a very important rebuttal to Chernyshevsky’s cockeyed premises. No, people aren’t always rational! No, people don’t even always have their own best interests in mind! The world is full of muck, and so are human beings. You could say that Dostoevsky’s writing was about why communism would never ever be able to work the way it was supposed to. He was so right.

Toward the end of the book we get a long and detailed description/advertisement for a wonderful, wonderful seamstresses’ cooperative, from which the reader is free to extrapolate a fantastic new world built on the same principles. Here is just one of many reasons he gives why it makes fabulously good sense for co-workers to all live together and all work in the same place where they live:

… Many other expenses are either drastically reduced or completely unnecessary. Consider this, for example. To walk two or three versts a day to the store puts extra wear and tear on shoes and clothes. The following example is trivial, but it can be applied to other things of the same sort. If you don’t own an umbrella, your dress can suffer major damage as a result of rain. … Let’s say a simple cotton umbrella costs two rubles. There are twenty-five seamstresses in the workshop. Umbrellas for all would cost fifty rubles. Anyone who didn’t have one would face a loss much greater than two rubles. But since they live together and each one goes out only when it’s convenient, in bad weather it rarely happens that many of them have to leave the house at the same time. They found that five umbrellas would be quite enough. These five umbrellas are of fine silk and cost five rubles apiece. The total expenditure on umbrellas was twenty-five rubles, or one ruble per seamstress. You see, each one gets to use a fine umbrella instead of a worthless one for only half the price. So it is with a large number of things, which together result in major savings.

Hard to read that without shaking your head “no,” isn’t it? It was for me. Not for Lenin! Seriously: it was part of the communist utopia — way back before anyone had to make real plans! This was part of the utopian vision! —  that there would only be one umbrella for every five people. It boggles the mind.

The workings of the new society are a just mess of snake oil doodles like this, which clearly don’t actually interest our author, except for insofar as he is utterly convinced that they are oh so brilliant and oh so simple! The thing that really interests him is that once all this new stuff — whatever it is — gets put in place and gets working, everything will be much, much, better. Toward the end of the book I found myself strangely moved by our heroine’s dream where she has a vision of a futuristic post-revolutionary society, in which people are living communally in huge crystalline palaces built of aluminum in the middle of lush, spreading fields. The people sing and smile as they work the crop; a huge flowing canopy is moved over them so that they are always in the shade; the palaces have showerheads on the roofs so that they can create rain whenever they like, and the interiors are provided with electric light so that people may party late into the night — which they do every night after eating luxurious feasts. These fairy-tale wonders are presented with a quiet, loving simplicity, and in reading that passage I finally felt some (pitying) sympathy for our author’s cause. A revolution would be solely to bring this about — and of course no sacrifice is too great if heaven on earth is the reward. I think that was the first time that I was able to understand the emotional appeal of revolution. Only if we undo everything and start again might we ever be allowed finally to embrace our hopes; not just our tight, calculated hopes, but our expansive, unbounded hopes, the hope for magic and wonder and joy to be present in all things. When the ways of the world seem clearly to preclude our hearts’ fantasies, the only way to stay true to those fantasies is to tear down the world. To make room for aluminum palaces!

Chernyshevsky gets one thing very right and must be given his due: that the inner lives of women are exactly as real as the inner lives of men, despite the fact that almost nobody in 1863 believed it. He is very clear on this point, and, I think, very insightful as to just how deep the problem goes. I.e. he understands that worshiping women as sublime and ethereal goddesses is still a kind of oppression. One section in particular, a historical pageant of women’s long, long march toward personhood, is sympathetic and nicely done. It was painful to me that at the heart of this dreadful muddle was such a fundamentally admirable observation. If this had been a pure feminist novel — if someone had cut out all the cooperatives and “materialism” and revolutionary insinuations, I would have had a very different response to it. Well, okay, they would have had to do a lot more editing than that.

Chernyshevsky walks his heroine progressively from philosophical darkness to light, presumably at the same pace as an imaginary reader would need to become slowly acclimated to the truth. This progression governs the underlying structure and timeline of the book; the ostensible love triangle plot is actually subsidiary, which results in bizarre pacing for anyone trying to read the pedestrian story advertised in the prologue. The author’s attention swerves unpredictably around this “plot” like the screwy orbit of a planet in some pre-Galilean model of the universe with the wrong body at the center. And after Vera Pavlovna has finally reached her enlightened state, he has to make some more structurally wacky choices — he suddenly lurches into the story of a brand new female character so that he can resolve the triangle happily into two couples, and then drifts into a really peculiar epilogue that introduces yet another new female character known only as “the woman in mourning,” who is apparently meant to be his (Chernyshevsky’s) wife, grieving while he languishes in prison writing this very book. We get to see these lively young people having a grand, grand old time of things, partying and whatnot, and singing songs, and wink wink, talking about certain things, wink wink. I think he honestly thought that he and his friends were absolutely the bee’s knees, but it’s actually all rather ominous. He calls the book a “tale about New People,” and by “New People” he means him and his friends, the clique of awesomeness who were finally going to set the world right.

The last pages tell us that by 1865 (2 years after publication) the revolution will have already come and all will be well on its way to wonderful. In fact what happened is that the book created a tremendous scandal but no social change, and Chernyshevsky was eventually sent to Siberia and had the spirit crushed out of him.

Harold Bloom says of his list that of non-fiction it includes only that which is “of great aesthetic interest.” On those grounds I agree with this work’s inclusion: it’s a work of great aesthetic interest. (He didn’t say “great aesthetic beauty,” after all.) This is writing that very intentionally seizes on fiction itself as a tool, but only as a tool, and wields it self-consciously — sometimes sincerely, sometimes tongue-in-cheek — to aesthetic ends. There’s a modernistic attitude in that, a bit ahead of its time; Chernyshevsky apparently came to it through his own pure inventiveness and radical heart, and it is raw indeed. When he would smirk and snark directly at me, the reader, about this strange book that he was writing and I was reading — which happened often — I couldn’t help but feel that I had really been drawn into an actual philosophical-aesthetic engagement with this strange man from 150 years ago. And yes, I enjoyed that.

The title, by the way, is a leading question to which the unspeakable answer is obviously “a revolution.” That’s one for the FAQ.

If you google about this book, you will find quite a few people writing about how the most important character is named Rakhmetov. This provides an easy way of distinguishing the people who actually read the book from those who read it in college, wink wink. Rakhmetov is in fact a walk-on; the main characters are Vera Pavlovna, Lopukhov, and Kirsanov. Rakhmetov is described, in his brief appearance, as an astounding, near-superhuman figure, a hero of idealized revolutionary strength, intelligence, and zeal… and then the author says outright that this Rakhmetov has been placed in the work solely so that a bewildered (and lowly) reader who thinks the protagonists seem extraordinary in their oh-so-forward-thinking ways will have a truly extraordinary figure to place beside them, better to see that this is in fact a story about quite ordinary people doing achievable things. As it turns out, the passage about the “extraordinary man” ended up making a strong impact on Lenin and other revolutionaries, so naturally any course that covers the book is going to talk about Rakhmetov. But make no mistake! He only appears for a few pages in the middle of a long book about other people, and anyone who implies otherwise is probably faking it.

Okay, I finally reached my 4000 word quota! No, just kidding. Really sorry about the length.

For those of you who, having read this, are now considering an intervention to stop me from reading another randomly chosen book, rest assured that the next random number has directed me to be a short and well-liked book that people actually read and that I would have wanted to read anyway. A book that some of you have already read and enjoyed. So don’t worry!

Thanks for your concern, though.

William Morris (1834-1896)
The Hollow Land and Other Contributions to The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (1856, posthumously collected and published 1903)

I rolled 895, which drops me in the William Morris range. Since I haven’t read anything by him, my system has me then fall back to his first entry: 891: Early Romances.

The first question as always is: what does Harold Bloom mean by this? Well, “Early Romances in Prose and Verse” is the title of a 1907 Everyman’s Library volume. Seeing as Bloom lists “Poems” as a separate entry under Morris’s name, I felt justified in skipping the Verse; that’s for another time, somewhere far off in the mists of my infinite, random future. This leaves the Prose. A bit of research reveals that the prose items in the Everyman’s volume had been collected earlier as “The Hollow Land and Other Contributions to the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine,” and that this collection is itself to be found in Volume I of Morris’s Collected Works, which unlike the other sources linked above is available at my local library. See above for the requisite scan of its completely unlovely binding.

I note its unloveliness because loveliness was one of Morris’s principal concerns, and bookmaking one of his chosen crafts. Take a gander at any one of the obsessively lovely volumes from his Kelmscott Press, which I gather to have been the birthplace of the entire modern tradition of the small press, and thus of the whole wide world of print geekery. All the fussy fetishes that constitute our present-day idea of “beautiful books” would seem to stem from here.

While the posthumous collection that I read definitely wasn’t up to Morris’s own flowery standards, it was still laid out with a certain ostentatious typographical dignity. (See the linked title above for a look at the interior.) My personal response to preeningly aristocratic type layout is to be at once enthralled by it and distracted from the content. Poems laid out in all their beautiful limpid pellucid lambent limpidity (to quote Nabokov) often impress and charm my eye and then proceed to leave no impression as poetry. I’m open to the beauty, but it’s not literary beauty. Nor is it a particularly apt complement to literary beauty; it’s as though the swimsuit and talent portions have been misguidedly combined. And compared to actual thoughts, type design is pretty thin stuff. It’s important that your typography not be more put-together, more cared-for, than your words themselves. So say I, anyway; there are large swaths of the bookstore that seem to disagree with me.

William Morris, I suspect, would also have disagreed. His attitude seems to have been that type design is no more and no less important than textual content; that they are both mediums for conveying aesthetic experiences, impressions, vague Romantic what-you-may-call-its. (Mind you, I infer this almost entirely from reading these stories; I did hardly any further research.) The fantasy of his dreamy medievalist writing is not just complementary but actually equivalent to the fantasy of his dreamy medievalist designs.

When I first encountered Lord Dunsany, the phrase occurred to me that reading his super-saturated fantasy stories was “like eating sweet brains.” I never had the chance to share this image with anyone, so I’m pulling it into service now. It applies to Morris too, though where Dunsany’s writing feels unwholesome in its purity — like the refined precipitate of fantasy; freebased fantasy — Morris’s feels unwholesome in its abundance, its boundlessness. It stretches on and on, disinterested in narrative; it wants only to prolong itself. The writing revels neither in words nor events but in its own atmosphere, which it exists solely to continuously renew — like a fog machine. I got the sense that Morris wrote not with the ambition to create discrete works, but rather to open a window on a certain precious configuration of unreality, and that having once gotten it open, his aspiration was simply to keep it open.

Morris’s writings are manifestly the work of a great wallpaper designer. His art aspires to the condition of wallpaper.

What else is one to make of a passage like this?:

The Abbey where we built the Church was not girt by stone walls, but by a circle of poplar trees, and whenever a wind passed over them, were it ever so little a breath, it set them all a-ripple; and when the wind was high, they bowed and swayed very low, and the wind, as it lifted the leaves, and showed their silvery white sides, or as again in the lulls of it, it let them drop, kept on changing the trees from green to white, and white to green; moreover, through the boughs and trunks of the poplars we caught glimpses of the great golden corn sea, waving, waving, waving for leagues and leagues; and among the corn grew burning scarlet poppies, and blue corn-flowers; and the corn-flowers were so blue, that they gleamed, and seemed to burn with a steady light, as they grew beside the poppies among the gold of the wheat. Through the corn sea ran a blue river, & always green meadows and lines of tall poplars followed its windings.

The old Church had been burned, and that was the reason why the monks caused me to build the new one; the buildings of the Abbey were built at the same time as the burned-down Church, more than a hundred years before I was born, and they were on the north side of the Church, and joined to it by a cloister of round arches, and in the midst of the cloister was a lawn, and in the midst of that lawn, a fountain of marble, carved round about with flowers and strange beasts; and at the edge of the lawn, near the round arches, were a great many sun-flowers that were all in blossom on that autumn of the day; and up many of the pillars of the cloister crept passion-flowers and roses. Then farther from the Church, and past the cloister and its buildings, were many detached buildings, and a great garden round them, all within the circle of the poplar trees; in the garden were trellises covered over with roses, and convolvulus, and the great-leaved fiery nasturtium; and specially all along by the poplar trees were there trellises, but on these grew nothing but deep crimson roses; the hollyhocks too were all out in blossom at that time, great spires of pink, and orange, and red, and white, with their soft, downy leaves. I said that nothing grew on the trellises by the poplars but crimson roses, but I was not quite right, for in many places the wild flowers had crept into the garden from without; lush green briony, with green-white blossoms, that grows so fast, one could almost think that we see it grow, and deadly nightshade, La bella donna, oh! so beautiful; red berry, and purple, yellow-spiked flower, and deadly, cruel-looking, dark green leaf, all growing together in the glorious days of early autumn. And in the midst of the great garden was a conduit, with its sides carved with histories from the Bible, and there was on it too, as on the fountain in the cloister, much carving of flowers and strange beasts.

Clearly one should not read such things. Either one is not sympathetic to its ends and susceptible to its effect, in which case it is an inexcusable embarrassment — or else one is sympathetic and susceptible, in which case it is deeply unwholesome. This is where my image of the sweet brains comes from. As a reader of such stuff I do my best to play both the skeptic and the addict, which gives the work its essential profile of seduction/repulsion. A vampiric metaphor would do just as well: Whatever I’ve just been drinking, it’s delicious… wait a minute, is this someone’s neck?

Just as the pre-Raphaelite painters probably deserve credit for inventing the RenFaire worldview, it should be acknowledged that Morris here seems to lay the groundwork for Tolkien (and, beyond him, all manner of nonsense). He shows us how to grind myth and history into a nostalgia sausage, which, on second taste, may not have any actual myth or history in it. In a way, his priorities embody the essence of Romanticism: things are important only for how they make you feel, and once you have a grip on those feelings, pump them up as much as you possibly can. You know that feeling of yearning you have when circumstances separate you from someone you love? Well, what if every concept in that sentence (i.e. “you,” “feeling of yearning,” “circumstances,” “someone you love,” “love”) were holy, royal, illuminated in gold leaf, placed in a sacred vault on top of the highest mountain, haunted, eternal, etc. etc.? Now that’s what I call artistic!

If you are foolhardy enough to take the stories seriously, that hypnotizing Tristan und Isolde effect of nauseating emotional elephantiasis is ever-present. Many of the pieces follow knightly characters through long dream-like lives (and ghostly afterlives) full of moral murk and confused unfurled-banner bombast, against which a single fleeting instant of hyper-chaste love is agonizingly juxtaposed. It is an attempt to multiply romance by infinity. But all this is only what Morris does distractedly, reflexively, while in the front of his mind he’s really only concerned with describing the garland on the bower over the queen’s head. The result is both obscene and blurry. And honestly, that has its place in my aesthetic palate. It certainly had its place in Poe. I just wish Morris had had the formal restraint to make it effective. If you’re going to take this trip, you want the good shit. This supply comes from an old-timey apothecary with an unreliable druggist; ingest at your own risk.

These stories were the product of a period of youthful, bright-eyed self-publication by Morris and friends in their early twenties (in the form of the short-lived Oxford and Cambridge Magazine), and there’s always a charismatic impression of sincere self-delight running under the surface, even as that surface itself is generally a thicket of impenetrable affectation. Nonetheless, tedium set in rather quickly for me, since the medium was the message and one story was about as good as the next. If you relished the passage above (from “The Story of the Unknown Church”) then maybe you’d enjoy this. In which case I also recommend avoiding it.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca (Seneca the Younger) (c.4 BC—AD 65)
Tragedies

136 is the line in my spreadsheet for Seneca’s name. Here’s what Harold Bloom says to read by Seneca:

“Tragedies, particularly Medea; and Hercules furens, as translated by Thomas Heywood”

There are some problems here. First of all, the word “particularly,” in combination with that confusing semi-colon, makes unclear what’s mandatory and what’s optional — not a big deal to anyone else, but a huge issue for me! Second of all, Thomas Heywood never translated any of Seneca. Jasper Heywood did. Fine, simple mistake. Anyone could have made it. Sure. But wait a minute, is he serious? I have to read a translation done in 1561? Just because it’s the version Shakespeare read? Bloom can’t actually care that much about it, since he got the translator’s name wrong. Has he ever actually looked at it? Seriously, take a look at what he’s asking of me, here. That there is the edition I’d have to read, too, because this is not a translation that’s been kept in print; there is no modern edition of the Heywood translation. Okay, fine, there’s also this one. But all that does is remove the blackletter issue. There’s still this to deal with:

“I muste goe dwell beneathe on grounde,
for hoores doo holde the skye.”

Sorry, Harold, I’m drawing a line in the sand here. You can tell me that I have to read some obscure thing, and I’ll go dig it up, and you can tell me that I have to read something difficult, and I’ll suffer through it. But if you tell me that I need to read an entire body of work, Tragedies, and then that I should read one of them “particularly,” and then casually toss off that in your opinion, I ought to read it in an unmodernized 16th century translation… but you get the translator’s name wrong… then I reserve the right to tell you “no.” No, I say, I’m not reading that. I’m calling your bluff. I don’t think you mean it the way you owe it to me to mean it. I’m putting myself in your hands here, Harold, and you need to take that responsibility seriously.

Tell you what, HB, I’ll make you a deal: I’ll read whatever tragedies are in the Penguin edition, which is the only edition of Seneca currently in print from a major publisher… and then I’ll supplement that with Medea and Hercules furens from the Loeb Classical Library edition. That’s a generous offer, considering how you botched this one up. If I were you, I’d take it.

Well, he took it.

I read:

Thyestes (brother tricks him into eating his own children)
Phaedra (fails to seduce her stepson, saves face by claiming he raped her, his father has him killed by the gods)
The Trojan Women (are unable to prevent the Greeks from killing their children)
Oedipus (you know this one)
Hercules Furens [= “Hercules Goes Crazy” = “The Shining”] (kills wife and children in a fit of madness induced by jealous god)
Medea (you know this one too. You don’t? Okay, fine: she kills her own children to spite her husband for leaving her. You really should have known that one.)

The first four were translated by E.F. Watling, 1966. The latter two were translated by Frank Justus Miller, 1917. Both translators seemed very capable to me; the 1966 translations were, as you’d expect, easier going.

You may have noticed a running theme of children being killed, usually by their own parents. A-yup. Apart from Oedipus, that’s what they were all about; and Oedipus, of course, is also about horrific betrayals of the loving parent-child relationship, so it really fit in quite comfortably.

The style was tasteless comic book horror. The intensity was constantly pushed well over the top, shamelessly savoring exactly the most sordid aspects. Seneca wants us to wonder: what WOULD someone do after being tricked into eating his own children’s flesh and then being shown their severed faces and told what he’d done? If that really happened? No, seriously, just… what would he do? As the moment approaches, you can’t deny that you’re getting uncomfortable. And excited.

This is the artistic equivalent of my sister’s question to my mother, at some tender age: “If you pulled up your skin like this [pinching a fold on her forearm] and then cut it with scissors, would you scream?” “Yes.” “A lot?” “Yes.”

These plays set out to depict situations in which the answer to the question “would you scream?” is “yes,” and the answer to “a lot?” is “yes.”

Perhaps “sordid” is a silly, needlessly judgmental word to use here. It gives me a warm feeling to know that we share exactly this kind of curiosity with our friends from 2000 years ago. Would this make for good theater? I feel certain that it would. I was pretty riveted as I paced around reading/performing it aloud to myself. With real actors, lights, and sets, it could easily be a goosebumpy indulgence. Look, they did it in London just a couple months ago and it sounds like it was just that. They did Caryl Churchill’s translation, which looks not just less faithful, but also more affected and less clear than the one I read, albeit more colloquial. But probably good delivery can clean that up.

Also like comic books, the text was full of gnomic attempts to seem deep, wise, and oh-so-heavy. The combination of facile aphorisms and exploitative morbidness really felt exactly like Batman. And yet these not-particularly-profound one-liners (“Death’s terrors are for him who, too well known / Will die a stranger to himself alone” — Thyestes, 50; “With great power / Comes great responsibility” — Spider-Man, 1962) are also, oddly enough, the link to the Shakespeareans, who quoted Seneca right and left and took all sorts of inspiration from what they apparently felt were sublimely classical texts. Strange and somehow delightful to be able to take in Shakespeare and Batman in the same glance.

Not to mention ancient Rome — and, beyond it, ancient Greece, the authentic classicism that Seneca was striving affectedly to emulate. The subjects of these plays, just so you know, are all borrowed directly from (and in homage to) famous Greek plays of five hundred years earlier. Seneca’s Oedipus is to Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (the one you know about) as Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet is to William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Just to keep that in perspective.

The backdrop for these plays is that Seneca was actually intimately tied up in the disastrous reign of Nero, whose tutor and advisor he was. He was a politician who happened to write. Ultimately, Nero accused him of being involved in a conspiracy (which he probably wasn’t) and condemned him to die by suicide, which he did. So in these plays, whenever the Chorus steps aside to chide the power-hungry for tempting fate, and advocate for simple, humble living — which happened at least once in every play I read — I had to imagine that the dead ears on which those words were falling were Nero’s.

My image as I read these was of Nero (played in my mind more or less by Biff from Back to the Future) slouching in a throne, sulky and distracted, leering at nearby grape-bearing slave girls during the parts without blood and guts, while Seneca watches him sidelong, grimly. Whenever someone starts talking about torn and devoured flesh or whatever, Nero perks up a bit, and then when they bring on the actual staged gore at the end, he guffaws with approval.

You can overlay a little Dick Cheney and George Bush onto that image too, if you like; for what it’s worth, Seneca seems to have looked a bit like Cheney.

When these plays go for the goods, they really go for it. Instead of killing her two children offstage, chillingly unseen, this Medea slays the first one onstage (in the presence of the other) then takes the surviving one up on to a roof with her and waits for Jason to come out and plead desperately with her not to do it. “Enjoy a slow revenge, hasten not, my grief,” she says to herself, drawing out the scene unbearably through several pages. As though a mother killing her children for spite wasn’t awful enough, Seneca turns it into a sick hostage standoff. Doesn’t this sort of thing happen on 24? Anyway, she eventually kills the second child too.

Oedipus’s eye-gouging, which preoccupies teenagers but isn’t actually the point of the play, here becomes a hilariously over-detailed account by a messenger, including stuff like: “… and still the fingers probed the open holes, / The nails scratched in the empty cavities / Which now gaped hollow where the eyes had been. …”

But my favorite outlandish, indefensible grotesquerie is the final tableau of Phaedra, in which Theseus, having learned that oops! his son never actually deserved to be dragged across sharp rocks and torn completely to shreds, mourns for him by trying to puzzle the many fragments of the corpse back into a person-shape. Yes, really. On stage. This is your excerpt:

CHORUS: You sir, shall set in order these remains
Of your son’s broken body, and restore
The mingled fragments to their place. Put here
His strong right hand … and here the left,
Which used to hold the reins so skilfully….
I recognize the shape of this left side.
Alas, how much of him is lost, and lies
Far from our weeping!

THESEUS: Trembling hands, be firm
For this sad service; cheeks, dry up your tears!
Here is a father building, limb by limb,
A body for his son…. Here is a piece,
Misshapen, horrible, each side of it
Injured and torn. What part of you it is
I cannot tell, but it is part of you.
So … put it there … not where it ought to be,
But where there is a place for it. Was this
The face that shone as brightly as a star,
The face that turned all enemies’ eyes aside?
Has so much cruelty come to this? O cruelty
Of Fate! O kindness, ill-bestowed, of gods!

That kind of eyebrow-raising stuff, the stuff that made me grin at those crazy Romans and their creepy, decadent tastes — the real meat of these tragedies — was always good reading and I enjoyed it. The downside to this assignment was that to varying degrees, these plays were all padded out with incredibly dull and protracted displays of mythological learnedness, unconnected to the matter at hand. The first few scenes of every play, before the swords came out, were always pretty bad, though I think the lowest point came between acts two and three of Oedipus, when Tiresias, exiting, tells the Chorus, essentially, “during the scene change, why don’t you tell the nice people about Bacchus,” which incites a four-page long oral report about Bacchus, apparently cribbed from some encyclopedia of Greek mythology and of absolutely no relevance to the story. That was a drag. I think Thyestes was my favorite, in part because it was the least padded. And the thing about the guy eating his kids didn’t hurt.

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
Collected Essays (1959)

I don’t know which of the infinite monkeys over at random.org picked this one for me, but it was a pointed choice. Surely this is the most broomlet-like of all the titles on Harold Bloom’s list.

On the face of it, the only organizing theme here is “Aldous Huxley is a thoughtful chap,” but either by editorial design, or simply due to the shape of his mind, there is an undercurrent running through much of it: the challenge and the necessity of reconciling humanism with the cold new truths of the 20th century, scientific, political, and technological alike. That this was the sort of thing that preoccupied Mr. Huxley will come as no surprise to anyone who, like me, tried to read Brave New World as a kid, but found it boring and stopped, and then was assigned to read it in high school after already knowing what it was about, and then either did or didn’t read it, I can’t remember.

Many of these essays put me through the same changes:
1. I am wary, based on the title, that the topic will be too bland or obscure to hold my interest
2. I find that the angle he has chosen is in fact uniquely interesting and accessible; the topic is really just a springboard to something universal and philosophical
3. I am touched by a finely made point and think: “What an excellent essay — I’m going to recommend this to people.”
4. I grow weary as the philosophical discussion becomes flat and repetitive.
5. I become disillusioned: “He doesn’t really have so much to say after all, does he.”
6. I end with a feeling of displeasure: Overall that had a lonely, hollow feeling to it.

That outline was given in the present tense, even though these are now decidedly past-tense essays for me. I have a lot to read, in this Western Canon, and despite the fact that many of his topics merited further reflection, I’ve let them go back to the library and moved on to other things. These were magazine pieces, and that’s how I read them, and that’s the level on which they made themselves seem significant. Even as they took on Big Questions — pretty much as Big as he could manage, in every essay — and often with real quality of thought and feeling, they still felt a little forgotten and gray, as though I were reading them out of a 60-year-old National Geographic that I found in the nightstand at a beach house. And his points, even the fine ones that made me 3. above, have all begun to flee from my memory already.

What lingers is principally the sense that here was a man striving to see above and beyond the niche of history in which he happened to live, straining to get the long view of things. I admire and sympathize with the impulse, but it is a tragic one. Yes, at its best, it leads him to some prescient perspectives on technology and other large-scale issues relating to the impact of man’s collective behavior on the earth and on himself. But the sad truth of it is that the long view — past, present, and future — is not particularly edifying. It is in fact on the whole depressing. Or, rather, it has no room in it for thought and feeling because it is on the wrong scale; our emotions were meant to handle smaller things — the things that, in general, Huxley is trying to speak beyond. And yet he tries to bring feeling with him. The result is a sense of ascending cynicism over the course of his career. The later essays were better-written, more deeply thought, much less hopeful, and of no clear use to me.

I suppose this is a repeat of my skeptical attitude about “pained” art already expressed in the entry about Rilke and the one about The Seventh Seal. And elsewhere. It’s my recurring question for shell-shocked 20th century art: what good can this possibly do?

Anyway: after thoughtful, wide-ranging commentary on art, politics, travel, nature, music, etc. etc., I come to the two essays about Huxley’s thoughts on psychoactive drugs — and lo and behold, only these two essays are heavily marked up in the library copy, thoughtfully underlined in pencil by some studious reader with a wholesome thirst for knowledge. But seriously folks. I felt like the disingenuousness and pretension of the typical “philosophical” drug enthusiast was laid bare: drugs open the mind, man, they’re part of the sacred spiritual quest for philosophical insight… and yet in this book full of thoughts about life, the world, and human experience, the only thoughts that this particular philosopher found stimulating were, coincidentally, the ones about taking drugs! Think of that!

If you’re going to tell people you get Playboy for the articles, you should probably read the articles. It’s the least you can do. This guy just opted for Hi-Liting the centerfold — who is, you will notice, studying a book and biting a pencil in deep thought.

“Read Doors of Perception; this is just part 7 of the whole book” this reader advised me in a thoughtful marginal scribble. Thanks, dude, for that tip — from one aficionado of mid-century British essayists to another.

Having made this jibe, let me also say that the Doors of Perception essay was in fact one of the most intriguing, containing as it does a measured and reflective first-person account of Huxley’s first mescaline experience. Coming at the end of these decades of increasingly hopeless writings, his sober enthusiasm for the spiritual possibilities of mind-altering drugs feels somehow a fitting final act for the book; you get the sense that, after years of questing, his consciousness had grown pretty disenchanted with what reality had to offer.

Your excerpt follows.

From the books the investigator directed my attention to the furniture. A small typing table stood in the center of the room; beyond it, from my point of view, was a wicker chair and beyond that a desk. The three pieces formed an intricate pattern of horizontals, uprights and diagonals — a pattern all the more interesting for not being interpreted in terms of spatial relationships. Table, chair and desk came together in a composition that was like something by Braque or Juan Gris, a still life recognizably related to the objective world, but rendered without depth, without any attempt at photographic realism. I was looking at my furniture, not as the utilitarian who has to sit on chairs, to write at desks and tables, and not as the cameraman or scientific recorder, but as the pure aesthete whose concern is only with forms and their relationships within the field of vision or the picture space. But as I looked, this purely aesthetic, Cubist’s-eye view gave place to what I can only describe as the sacramental vision of reality. I was back where I had been when I was looking at the flowers — back in a world where everything shone with the Inner Light, and was infinite in its significance. The legs, for example, of that chair — how miraculous their tubularity, how supernatural their polished smoothness!

…

At this stage of the proceedings I was handed a large colored reproduction of the well-known self-portrait by Cézanne — the head and shoulders of a man in a large straw hat, red-cheeked, red-lipped, with rich black whiskers and a dark unfriendly eye. It is a magnificent painting; but it was not as a painting that I now saw it. For the head promptly took on a third dimension and came to life as a small goblin-like man looking out through a window in the page before me. I started to laugh. And when they asked me why, “What pretensions!” I kept repeating. “Who on earth does he think he is?” The question was not addressed to Cézanne in particular, but to the human species at large. Who did they all think they were?

For relief I turned back to the folds in my trousers. “This is how one ought to see,” I repeated yet again. And I might have added, “These are the sort of things one ought to look at.” Things without pretensions, satisfied to be merely themselves, sufficient in their Suchness, not acting a part, not trying, insanely, to go it alone, in isolation from the Dharma-Body, in Luciferian defiance of the grace of God.

See, that was pretty good, wasn’t it. I want to be clear: this was a book full of good reading, just as I’m sure that “The Best American Essays 2009” or some such thing is also full of good reading. When I began it, I was delighted and surprised at how much I was enjoying reading essays, which I tend to think of as a tweedy, joyless substitute for actual reading — the Bert to fiction’s Ernie. “Why don’t I just read essays all the time?” I thought, delightedly. But now, finding myself writing this lackluster entry and thinking of Huxley as a bit of a Bert after all, I think I know why not. An essay, no matter how artful, doesn’t get filed in one’s memory under “aesthetic experience”; it gets filed with information, with conversations and glances at the newspaper and, at the very best, with one’s own thoughts. If this book is to have been significant for me, it will not be because of the experience it offered, but because I will find myself returning to those thoughts. I guess I simply can’t know that yet.

But I think this book may not have made much of an impression on me because I identified with it so readily. What impression was there for it to make? Perhaps to sharpen and focus the thoughts that I enjoyed reading because they were already mine but more acute. But were they actually more acute? Maybe I really only enjoyed reading them because they were printed in a book, whereas most of my thoughts are not. And that’s a transient pleasure.

NOTE AT THE FOOT: Having said that these essays were broomlet-like, I just now* decided to take a trip down memory’s fabled lane, skimming through 4 years of broomlitude to find out whether my sense of what it meant to be “broomlet-like” was on or off the money. Conclusion: On, but my style has really shifted over these years, don’t you think? My earliest writing here comfortably chats out its thoughts, seemingly as it’s having them. The more recent stuff feels pre-considered, clotted and uptight, like constipation that has been forcibly and uncomfortably loosened. Maybe I only think that because I can still clearly remember writing the more recent stuff. Still, there’s definitely something a little colder and more “grown-up” going on these days, which, in light of my displeasure with Aldous’s slightly-irritating thoughtful seriousness, is a self-cautionary observation.

* Months ago, at time of posting.

Georg Büchner (1813–1837)
Dantons Tod (1835)
translated into English as Danton’s Death (1971) by Victor Price

#18:

930: Danton’s Death

This was a satisfying morsel of seriousness, like a dark piece of meat. This is exactly the sort of theater I would never buy tickets for: historical, political, grim, long. But on the page and in my mind, it impressed me with its consistent intelligence. Every moment brings a new idea, either in content or form. Büchner wrote it at the age of 21, never having written for the stage before (and possibly never having seen a play?), and it feels wonderfully free from the influence of theatrical standard practice.

It’s clear that he wrote because he was personally invested in the issues (being a cynical revolutionary himself), not because he considered himself “an artist.”

Many writers seem to write principally because they are writers. The occupation and habit of writing demands subject matter, rather than the subject matter demanding its being written. Their desire to communicate is merely a habit, not an imperative. This state of affairs isn’t inexcusable, but once I recognize it, I often lose interest. I want to be caring about the same thing the writer cared about, feeling the same way he felt. If he was thinking about writing more than about life, chances are so will I. The catch is that passionate, unwriterly writing is usually ineffective; writers, unfortunately, are generally the only people who write well.

Here we have a rare and invigorating case of an author motivated more by his subject than his craft, and yet still having an excellent and original talent for that craft. Or at least for literary art. It’s not clear how realistically Büchner was thinking about theatrical productions. This play calls for a really huge cast (30 named roles plus assorted others), many of the characters making only one appearance each. It contains several heavily populated scenes requiring a large stage, and also many extremely short scenes that demand quick changes. Obviously, these things are all possible, but in combination they create the impression of a play written to be produced in the imagination rather than by paid professionals. Considering how heady and depressing it is, it’s awfully expensive. Not a promising combination from a business perspective.

It can be produced, and has been — not during Büchner’s brief lifetime, of course; not for many decades afterward — but at heart it’s not really crying out to be performed, at least not to my mind. It’s really just literature that happens to be written down as drama, I think because Büchner felt that the form of drama closest approaches the artistic ideal of recreating life. This piece borrows the notation of drama to be something rather different, a different kind of literature — just like that chapter of Ulysses that is written like a play but is manifestly unperformable.

I just read someone’s blog saying that Büchner invented cinema aesthetics 70 years too early: his successions of very brief scenes read like edited film. One succession, in fact, is like a reverse cut, where the scene set outside the prison wall, with a character seen in the prison window, is followed by the scene inside the prison, with the same character looking out the window. This is a neat point, but of course what Büchner was writing was not cinema because it couldn’t be. It was his own fresh aesthetic, driven above all by his desire to be true to life and not to convention.

Here’s an excerpt, in which Büchner decries the mass audience that lacks the imaginative capacity to comprehend sincere and conscientious portrayals of life, such as… this play. How right he was! This speech would not get anywhere near that audience for years. If a writer describes a tree falling in the forest, but nobody ever reads it, is it still standing?

CAMILLE. I tell you, if they don’t get things in wooden copies, all neatly labelled, in theatres, concerts, or art shows, they’ve got neither eyes nor ears for them. But carve a puppet, show them the hole where the string goes in, give it a pull so that its joints creak in blank verse with every step it takes — and then, what character-drawing, what verisimilitude! Take a little scrap of sentiment, an aphorism, a concept, dress it up in coat and trousers, give it hands and feet, paint its face and let it attitudinize through three acts till at the finish it gets married or blows its brains out — and lo, idealism! Fiddle out an opera that bears as much relation to the ups and downs of life as a clay pipe blowing bubbles to a nightingale — high Art. Turn people out of the theatre and on to the street — and oh dear me, how pitiful reality is! They forget God Almighty for his bad imitators. Creation, red-hot creation thunders and lightens in and around them at every moment; they hear and see nothing. They go to the theatre, they read poems and novels, they grimace like the puppets they find in them and turn up their noses at God’s creatures. ‘My dear, how commonplace!’ The Greeks knew what they were talking about when they said that Pygmalion’s statue came to life but bore no children.

DANTON. And artists treat nature as David treated the murdered Septembrists when they were thrown out of La Force on to the streets. He sketched them in cold blood and said: ‘I’m catching the last spasm of life in these scoundrels.’

[He is called away.]

CAMILLE. What do you say, Lucile?

LUCILE. Nothing, I so love watching you when you speak.

CAMILLE. Do you listen as well?

LUCILE. Of course!

CAMILLE. Well, am I right? Do you really know what I said?

LUCILE. To tell you the truth, no.

That deflated after-beat demonstrates what makes the play so brilliant. Büchner’s essayistic speechifying, which is always fascinating in its own right, is never allowed to forget that it too is just part of a real, fallen world, in which the pretensions of essayistic speechifying pale next to the love and pain and confusion around them. This is, in fact, the philosophical point of the play; just causes and noble actions are important, revolutions cannot be ignored, but they reduce life and death to political currency, and anyone who can see that death is another sort of thing entirely is bound to become disenchanted. A revolutionary with his eyes open will always be a cynic about his own cause.

What’s exceptional here is that Büchner takes equally seriously both the politics and the undercurrent of anti-politics. There’s no writing off the political intrigues of the plot as just so much breast-beating; everything that happens is very important for both the characters and for their country; but neither is there any writing off the sense that it is all an ugly, deluded game. Danton’s ambivalence is genuinely Büchner’s and it becomes ours as we take it all in. That, I think, is a great achievement. It’s so easy for a work of art to purport to struggle with philosophical issues even as it sits comfortably within larger and more fundamental philosophical assumptions. This play refuses to get comfortable; it lives right within the issues that drive it.

Among the major speeches of the play, most of them by boasting, feuding, scheming revolutionaries, there is one very earthy, personal one given to a whore, which ends on this remarkable note:

MARION. … Other people have Sundays and week-days, they work six days and they pray on the seventh. Every year they look forward to their birthday, and to the New Year, and they feel sentimental. I don’t understand all that. I know nothing about divisions or changes. I’m all of a piece, just one big longing and clinging. I’m a fire, a river. My mother died of grief. People point their fingers at me. That’s stupid! The only thing that counts is what you enjoy — bodies, holy pictures, flowers, toys. The feelings are just the same. Enjoy yourself — that’s the best way to pray.

This is really Molly Bloom incarnate, 80-some years before her time. The whole play feels like an outburst of very modern philosophical clarity, from an isolated soul who came to it with no particular help from the culture around him. I’m not enamored of “genius” any more than any other artistic mode d’être, but in this case I found the aesthetic self-sufficiency of the work and its author very compelling.

What, I can say raison d’être and modus operandi but I can’t say mode d’être? Well, screw you. And anyway, it’s still not actually what I mean. I really want a word for the type of story that is told about a given person — a mode of being talked about or dramatized, a pre-packaged quasi-narrative identity that can be imposed by a historian. “Tortured genius,” or “renaissance man” or “free spirit,” or “ahead of his time” — each of these is a what? They’re all a little phony because they’re all blithely reductive. Word suggestions please.

I wanted to say something about how naturalism is relative and the speeches aren’t actually “realistic” at all to the way people talk. The atmosphere created by playwriting that is observant about life but is artificially dense with thought always reminds me of Shakespeare, but surely that’s because I haven’t read enough plays. Though the introduction does seem to think drawing connections to Shakespeare is specifically merited here. So… there, I said something. The shorter the better.

A lot of standout lines and moments — I want to mention that the deeply evil speech that Saint-Just makes to the assembly, in particular, is absolutely riveting — and a richly idiosyncratic overall conception makes for a very satisfying read. But even knowing that, I’m not sure I would want to see this performed. I’m not sure it makes enough deliberate enough use of time — real, tangible time, sitting-in-a-crowd-in-the-dark-being-quiet time — that it wouldn’t just feel like a cruel way of turning this intriguing text into a tedious ordeal. There are plenty of very good books that I wouldn’t want to hear performed aloud. I think this might be one of them. Stage directions be damned.

But of course I don’t know — a good director could easily surprise me. I have an open mind and would like to sample a production on video or radio, except there doesn’t seem to be any easy way of doing so. There is a fairly well-regarded opera of Dantons Tod, which seems to have been a career-maker for composer Gottfried von Einem. Oddly enough, you can listen to most of it right here (a few tracks are missing). I actually got the score out of the library and followed through about half of it. The adaptation seems respectable and thoughtful, certainly, and the music seems fine… but I think I just don’t speak opera. As with Richard Strauss a few months back, I don’t know how to listen to a succession of moments of little to no inherent drama each being given big-time musical emphasis. This may well have to do with my mongrel musical upbringing, as I was saying earlier this week. But to go there would be really and truly off topic. Halt.

I got out the ratty library copy above even though they also had two successively cleaner and newer reprints, because 1) more fun to get something that reminds me of the 70s than something that reminds me of the bookstore, right? and 2) the new editions, being offset from the old edition, had slightly thicker, weightier letters. I bet if they cared about it, the technology exists to reprint old editions without any detectable loss of fidelity. But they obviously don’t care, and so they print these ever-blurrier editions, even though the crisper, more delicate letterforms are always more satisfying. AM I RIGHT, PEOPLE?

I’m thinking of building this observation into my standup routine.

Actually I think Demetri Martin already has, right after his hilarious bit about n factorial, and his brilliant riff about how 3 looks like a backward E, and his sestina about how awesome a perfectly sharpened pencil is. That shit cracks me up.

But seriously folks, Demetri Martin is probably a cool guy. I’m gonna end this entry before anything else happens.

Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)
Доктор Живаго (1957)
translated into English as Doctor Zhivago by Max Hayward and Manya Harari (1958)

Roll #17:
1748: Boris Pasternak.
1749: Doctor Zhivago

I had been writing a tremendously long entry about this book over many days, but I started to feel nauseated looking at it so I just now wiped it clean. From the top again, boys, this time with feeling, and don’t drag!

I’ll start with the confession: I’m not as proud of this reading as I have been of my others in this series. The book took me by surprise by turning out to be hard. It’s sort of a stealth hard book. You don’t realize what it demands of you until you’re halfway through. I get the impression that some critics have had a similar experience and settled for sizing it up in a superficial way, emboldened to do so, I’ll bet, by the existence of the movie. But it’s not a superficial book. It is an ambitious work of art that asks to be taken seriously. It aims high. Or wide, anyway.

The difficulty is that there are several things going on here, braided together and alternating, and while it’s easy enough to track them separately, it’s not clear how to synthesize and unify them. The descriptive imagery, the historical panorama, the philosophical digressions, the love story, and the life story are all in complex negotiations with one another for airtime. Given 550 pages, they each get enough room to have their say, and they manage to coexist stylistically without too much jostling. But the things they’re saying don’t seem quite consistent with one another. The ungenerous way to resolve the resulting complexities is to conclude that Pasternak didn’t have enough control for so large a work, wasn’t a natural novelist and so ended up writing something philosophically and aesthetically diffuse. It’s also possible that he thought of internal tension and heterogeneity as aesthetically valuable; rich soil for the mind — this certainly seems to be an attitude shared by many poets. The other possibility that I have to consider is that the various elements do resolve into a coherent field of meaning, but that I just haven’t seen how.

On the one hand we have something a bit like The Plague: people’s lives are overturned and threatened by great tidal forces beyond their control, and our good doctor goes among them trying to do the right thing and live according to humble principles, a heroic figure of humanism in a vast landscape of cruel abstractions. But a revolution is not a plague from above; it is a congregate expression of human will. The panorama of struggle and suffering through which Zhivago wanders is the product of his society, not of indifferent nature. Of course it’s admirable that Zhivago loves life, but surely so too do the desperate people around him; the real question is, what is this mess and how did they end up in it? All Quiet on the Western Front, which I read recently but didn’t write about, was about the inhumanity of war but also about the nature of war. It took it upon itself to address “what is this mess and how did we end up in it?” But Zhivago, and Doctor Zhivago, with its poet’s-eye-view of the world, seems skeptical of any kind of analysis, anything that would have a whiff of sociology or history about it. The only “big picture” Pasternak is willing to show us is the alien force of fate, manifested as a dense web of meaningless coincidences that intertwine all these lives; the big picture is a realm of inscrutable mystery.

Zhivago is an intellectual but his beatific humanism is old-school Russian: a little lyricism, a little Christianity, a little mysticism, a little folk. Fairy-tale-ish. That sort of thing, warm and loving though it may be, is no match for a force like the revolution. And Pasternak acknowledges as much: Zhivago’s life taken as a whole is pretty depressing, and after his family and then his mistress are torn from him by circumstance, he declines and dies in a kind of emeritus irrelevance, having had no real impact on events. But it’s also clear that Zhivago’s writing of poetry is meant to be seen as a heroic act. His poems capture the spark of humanism on the page and are like a seed of the human spirit, waiting to be reborn in society, or something.

To me, at least, the realistic descriptions of people starving, freezing, murdering one another, etc. etc. make the idea of poet-as-hero seem awfully flimsy. Isn’t this sort of romanticization of art and intellectualism just as ideological and removed from real life in its way as the sloganistic politics the book laments? The final paragraph, suggesting vaguely that perhaps from these poems, a new day will dawn in the cold Soviet Union, just seems like pie in the sky.

Seeing as Zhivago pretty much is Pasternak, it’s a little self-aggrandizing, as is the fairly overt implication that Zhivago is a Christ-like figure, his pure spirit having died for Russia’s sins. Also distasteful is the fact that the whole book, from a certain point of view, is a justification — sanctification, really — of cheating on your loving wife with the pretty blonde you met at work. The universe conspires to make Zhivago do it, of course, but the romance-novel aspect of the book starts convincing us that it’s fated and desirable long before it is morally excusable. And it’s Pasternak’s universe doing the conspiring, after all. Supposedly his wife and his mistress knew each other and got along well in real life.

Just as Zhivago embodies the values of the old-school Russian thought, the book is a throwback to (or a holdover from) the old-school Russian novel. Not having read War and Peace (which I suspect is the major forebear to Zhivago in substance and form), I feel ill-equipped to guess at Pasternak’s intentions — whether he was writing the only way he knew how, or was making a point by resurrecting a dead style, or was explicitly writing a modern echo of the classics, or what. But I suspect that such distinctions are different in Russia, where Tolstoy and Pushkin still play a far more central, scriptural role in contemporary national pride than, say, Melville and Twain over here in the US. On the issue of style, taste and anachronism, I was reminded of Rachmaninoff, whose music is often dismissed as over-the-top kitschy sentimentalism, but who was actually quite a serious and tasteful composer doing subtle things; he just happened to be one of the last men standing, still working within a frame of reference that was all but extinct, that favored heightened emotion and the intensification of beauty. Likewise, Doctor Zhivago has more than a touch of the soapy melodrama in it, but it comes by it honestly, by way of the craft of an earlier time.

I think. Then again sometimes Rachmaninoff does sound a little cheap even to me. And sometimes I had my doubts about whether Doctor Zhivago was really any more dignified or deep than the movie version that overshadows it. The question remains open. An AMC classic Hollywood movie can be “real art” too, if it’s done well enough. Maybe this book was that kind of achievement?

That Pasternak was a poet shines through very clearly, both for better and for worse. The images are conveyed with force and distinction; the prose, even in translation, is strong and rewarding. Most of the individual scenes are quite fine, and even the soapy, melodramatic stuff was full and well-crafted enough that I got into it. But the relationship between part and whole is always oblique, unstated, as in a poem, and so the whole never quite gelled for me; the murk never quite cleared. And I’m not going to read it again to make better sense of it, though I almost certainly would. It’s just too damn long. Since that’s my choice, I will in good faith grant that it’s entirely possible that this book is not flawed, but rather very rich, and that I have fallen short in exploring it. Probably that’s true… to some degree.

It is a worthy and impressive book. But my gut tells me that my problems with it were its problems, and this is my site, so what I say goes.

I am moved by the formal idea of having the book end, but then to offer, as postlude, Zhivago’s poems. We’ve watched the man’s whole life and seen how these poems represent only the briefest few days of oasis in his existence, and yet here they are, still burning with the life of those few days on the page — apart from, but bound to, the book of his life. I was braced to be deeply moved by the poignancy. But, sadly, the poetry suffers in translation more than the prose and the experience is underwhelming.

I’m also interested in Pasternak’s attempt to write poetry “by Zhivago,” an issue discussed in the comments way back here. I think he does all right. But there’s still a sense of distance between the character in the novel and the author of this poetry, since the only thoughts we’ve heard in Zhivago’s head have been quite directly expressed, and yet here he is being oblique and allusive. Perhaps that’s simply what it is to be a poet? Or perhaps Pasternak hasn’t played the role of Zhivago quite well enough? Once again I’m not sure how to evaluate.

Introduction in this edition by John Bayley is very good, I thought, and makes a fine case for the book. But it should come with a spoiler warning!

Here’s a choice passage for you — the pivotal scene where Zhivago writes. But of course this is actually Pasternak the poet describing inspiration and the writing process, and it has a satisfying “Inside the Actor’s Studio” quality.

Last night he had tried to convey, by words so simple as to be almost childish and suggesting the directness of a lullaby, his feelings of mingled love and fear and longing and courage, in such a way that it should speak for itself, almost apart from the words.

Looking over these rough sketches now, he found that they needed a connecting theme to give unity to the lines, which for lack of it fell apart. He crossed out what he had written and began to write down the legend of St. George and the dragon in the same lyrical manner. At first he used a broad, spacious pentameter. The regularity of the rhythm, independent of the meaning and inherent of the meter itself, annoyed him by its doggerel artificiality. He gave up the pompous meter and the caesura and cut down the lines to four beats, as you cut out useless words in prose. The task was now more difficult but more engaging. The result was livelier but still too verbose. He forced himself to even shorter lines. Now the words were crammed in their trimeters, and Yurii Andreievich felt wide awake, roused, excited; the right words to fill the short lines came, prompted by the measure. Things scarcely named in the lines evoked concrete images. He heard the horse’s hoofs ringing on the surface of the poem, as you hear the ambling of a horse in one of Chopin’s ballades. St. George was galloping over the boundless expanse of the steppe. He could watch him, as he grew smaller in the distance. He wrote in a feverish hurry, scarcely able to keep up with the words as they poured out, always to the point and tumbling into place of themselves.

The resulting work is one of the poems that appears at the end of the book, but the same tight meter that made it exhilarating to write surely also made it very difficult to translate well, and the English version, at least, doesn’t make any very great impact. Sadly.

Oh, hey, look, someone made a movie out of this book I just read, even though it seems like nobody ever reads it! Hey, it’s got really high production values! I get to see all the scenes I just read come to life! Cool!

I had never seen it before — who ever wants to watch a sweeping epic, really? — and pairing it with this reading was ideal, since I was able to focus on the execution, which I think is the movie’s strong suit, rather than the content. I’m just not sure what this story is worth to anyone.

I was very impressed with the adaptation; respectful and thorough but also streamlining, clarifying. Of course, it clarifies the political question by falling decidedly against the revolution in a way the book never does; a few “bad guy” moments are added in that make all the difference. But it never goes outside the bounds of the book’s spirit; it just retouches it so that ambiguities are washed away. Having Evgraf narrating in flashback to the daughter, and having Zhivago’s poems be “the famous Lara poems,” both are, I thought, cleverly unobtrusive ways of giving a roundness to the form that the book never provides.

Music was a little silly. Good casting though — Rod Steiger was a more interesting Komarovsky than the one in the book. Alec Guinness gives a much-needed sense of wisdom to the whole endeavor. Klaus Kinski is in it!! Julie Christie is a lot less of a person than the Lara in the book but that’s how movies work — the prettiness is the message, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan. Likewise, Omar Sharif does exactly what he needs to do as our protagonist by smiling a little and having watery eyes, and that feels like it does justice to the book, which I think is exactly what’s wrong with this material.

Hey, who here wants me to stop talking about Doctor Zhivago? Show of hands? Okay then.