by Albert Camus (1913-1960)
translation into English (1948) of La Peste by Stuart Gilbert (1883-1969).

Next roll: 1304. That’s The Plague by Camus. The first listed work by Camus, at position 1303, to which I would normally fall back, is The Stranger, but ha HA! I’ve actually already read The Stranger! Even by my most self-critical standard, I’ve read The Stranger – I read it only last year (since this site started!) and remember it well. In general, anything I read prior to graduating from college is going to be considered suspect, which means there are only a very few great books I’ll be able to check off this list. But this is one of them, and I got to it on only the 7th try.

Furthermore, a copy of The Plague, seen above, had already been sitting on my bookshelf, having been given to me for my birthday last year by my grandmother, after hearing that I had read and enjoyed The Stranger, which she had given me previously. And my roommate, helping himself to my books, had very recently read my copy of The Plague and strongly recommended it to me. And then the magic-number machine spat it out for me. Think of that. Which is lucky, since apparently I’m more likely to listen to random.org than to my grandmother or my roommate.

The Plague was excellent, a masterpiece. Very powerful.

This sincere praise is pretty bland compared to my elaborate whining about books I liked less, but that’s the way it goes.

The Stranger impressed me as an intelligent, memorable, well-conceived, well-controlled piece of work. But this was monumental in a way that the earlier work wasn’t – it felt important, which is a word I generally don’t feel comfortable applying to a piece of art. In this case I feel comfortable. The sense of moral purpose behind this work was intense, and the depth of thought justified that intensity.

It’s a commonplace to say that the function of art is to show us things about life, about the real world, but often this seems to be a bland justification after-the-fact for art that, in practice, feels like it has some other kind of aspirations. This was art that felt like it wanted to show me something about the real world, like the author was aware of the full scope of what he as a writer might try to accomplish morally – and was attempting it. I felt, in reading it, that the book wanted to convey a moral content more than it wanted to be, say, “intelligent” or “fine,” and that it only was those things – which it very much was – because they contribute to the power of the work as a whole. The ultimate purpose of which is moral.

It’s been hard for me to write anything here about the book in part because I felt obliged to summarize that moral content, and found that I wasn’t quite sure how to articulate what had nonetheless struck me as vital and coherent in the reading. But – it is also a commonplace (common, anyway) to say that one writes a poem rather than prose because the specific intended “meaning” can only be expressed as a poem. And I think the same could apply here. The philosophical content of this book has been expressed as a novel because the novel conveys a whole that would have to be fractured to be expressed more prosaically. Inherently philosophical though that whole may be. The book is a vision rather than a message.

That said, there is at least one facet of the moral content that I can articulate (and I see that it again relates to the general philosophical line I’ve found myself on recently). That being: Life is meaningless and all our values, emotions, institutions, customs, etc. are illusions, flimsy constructions. And the clarity of this knowledge is of course a kind of horrible, inescapable, deadening sobriety for those who attain it. But, NONETHELESS, despite life’s being meaningless, we must continue to do good for one another. That it is possible to know that only we ourselves imbue all things with meaning, and still, in all clarity, believe that these meanings deserve to be honored.

I think this is about as vital a philosophical message as could be conveyed to modern times. The elephant in the room of our contemporary culture is that everybody already knows that ultimately everything is meaningless. Camus describes a society that resists and resists this knowledge as it is gradually worn down by indifferent nature (only his most intellectually inclined protagonists already know it). The society I live in, far safer and more affluent, nonetheless is much closer to the philosophical precipice at all times. It’s just sort of in the air, and we’re all pretty much braced to wince at – or shrug at – or in some cases, try to drown out by protesting – the sad but unsurprising news that we’re evolutionarily programmed to believe everything that we believe and feel everything that we feel, and that the indifferent universe discovered by science is the real bottom line. We would love to turn back from this knowledge to a time of real beliefs, but we can’t in good faith, because the arguments that got us here can never be erased and will always be rational. So we’re stuck here, and I think this new philosophical reality is, at some level, responsible for most of what ails the world today – because nobody can quite figure out what we’re supposed to do when we know that nothing is important important, “in the scheme of things.” But Camus, 60 years ago, was already showing us characters who are at that precipice, or over it, and who are driven to do good anyway. They believe that the meanings that we share, even though we invent them and know that we do, can still be worthy. This is a next step for all of us, a step that the human race as a whole must gradually take. It’s something that we can all nod at, but to feel it in the gut of the culture will take a long time.

I assume this is what is meant by the quote on the back cover, from the New York Times: “Of such importance to our time that to dismiss it would be to blaspheme against the human spirit.” That’s strong stuff but by the end I recognized the sentiment. I didn’t, by the way, think that this book about death and meaninglessness was “depressing.” Like I said, these days we’ve all kind of got that in our veins, between the lines of everything.* What was far more striking to me about The Plague was the fact that it knew this and was still hopeful, human-affirming. A grim and sober kind of hope – a mournful kind of hope – but extremely clear-eyed and thus more affecting than anything sentimental might have been.

I don’t always want all this in a book, and there are many sorts of things I often want out of a book that this did not provide, or provided only feebly. But what it was, it was with great force. Definitely one of the two or three best books I’ve ever read.

* Notice how I shrugged off The Floating Opera even as it said this seemingly shocking stuff, simply because it wasn’t well-written enough – nihilism itself gets a yawn, and trumping nihilism with more nihilism is just doodling.

2420: The Floating Opera by John Barth.

John Barth (1930- ), The Floating Opera, written 1955, published with the ending changed at the publisher’s request in 1956. Revised edition with the original ending restored published in 1967.

The following block of text comes to you from the past:

I’ve had the good sense, in this case, to write my thoughts as I’m having them rather than some months after forgetting them.

This book reminds me of my writing, not in the usual sense that it reminds me of my aspirations or thought processes, but that it reads like the actual things I write, or at least like the things I was trying to write when I was twenty-four, which is how old John Barth was when he wrote this. That is, more than a little annoying. My own attempts at fiction, as of a few years ago, usually disappointed me – they would spool out in a stream of clever improvisation, and then upon being read would reveal themselves as irritating and limp. Far more busy than they were purposeful. I guess that’s no surprise since I usually had no purpose in mind.

The Floating Opera began by inspiring not just a “yeah, I could write this,” but an “oh, man, this is exactly the sort of annoying thing I might write.” But then after a few chapters it had developed to “I could definitely see slightly-younger-me writing any given annoying piece of this, and even coming up with the plan for the whole, but if I had actually managed to write the whole, which is seeming to me slightly but significantly greater than the parts, I’d be pretty impressed with myself.” It’s an interesting experience; usually in matching wits with a writer as I read, I am either eventually left shamefully far behind (“Once again, I have absolutely no idea what should come next on any level, and thank god I don’t have to write it”) or I win by a landslide (“Gimme a break!”). This time I find myself keeping pace but finding the sensation of distance unfamiliar. You mean if he just keeps up this college-kid gimmicky crap all the way to the end, he’s going to end up in the Western Canon? Really?

So on the one hand, hooray, maybe I could write this, but on the other hand, boo, I don’t think it’s very good. It’s better than what it threatens at first to be, which is a charmless and nerdified imitation of the Tristram Shandy meta-narrative gimmicks, which depend exclusively upon charm to succeed. But it is that, despite what else it manages to be, and the choice to give a wide berth to cute disorder is the hallmark of the young, unpracticed jerk. Someone was complaining about this in Slate, I think, recently, in re: Advanced Topics In Calamity Physics* but also applicable to the whole post-McSweeney’s phenomenon of the “wildly ambitious” “post-modern” potpourri novel with self-referential footnotes and one page that you need to read in the mirror, by some young, unpracticed jerk. I think it’s particularly damning of Jonathan Safran Foer et ilk (and of those reviewers who have gone coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs) that The Floating Opera was written in 1955 and already plays the same game of willful novelty loosely stitched into sentimental shapes. In the 50s it feels slightly ahead of its time; by 1973 when Kurt Vonnegut was writing Breakfast of Champions he had to go overboard to get it to register because the basic gag was old news. Why then are we still so charmed out of our pants by the present day that we think that it, not to mention Dave Eggers or whoever, deserves credit for confronting modern society and coming up with this stuff?

Okay, I probably didn’t deserve “coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs,” but right now I’m trying to train myself to leave in the color rather than assess it out of existence.

If there’s anything we can learn from watching old TV clips on Youtube, it’s that by the end of the 70s (i.e. by the time I was born) both cynicism and post-cynicism had been well established and explored. Better would be “insincerity and post-insincerity.” I feel like post-insincerity has been getting pats on the back for several years now, but, and here’s what I’m saying, that’s the game of young unpracticed jerks, a fact which has been known for at least 50 years if not thousands.

* I tried to parody that title but it resists by pre-emptive snark, which is part of the point here.

By the end, Barth had outpaced me, so I grumblingly credited his book for being better than just a bunch of college-kid stuff. But now, in deeper retrospect, I see it as a bunch of college-kid stuff after all. It just covers its tracks as it goes with more skill than the start leads you to expect. The book manages to tuck in its chin as it dives, making it seem like all the clumsiness at the beginning was just a piece in a well-oiled puzzle. But that itself is just another sort of gimmick.

The book was more or less on the topic of “to be or not to be?” and more generally, “what’s it all about?” That might be “deep” but it doesn’t take much to get there; and, also, anything at all can potentially relate to that topic. It doesn’t really excuse sloppiness for it later to be revealed as part of a well-oiled tapestry of sloppiness, which is meant to evoke that oiliest tapestry of all, life. You can throw anything against that wall and it’ll stick.

But there is talent and ambition here beyond just showing off. The higher aspirations, when they rise to the surface, are similar (in my mind) to what Camus was doing in The Stranger, which I read last year. Barth wants us to notice how things are not in themselves inherently meaningful; that if we do not have a moral relationship to things, their natural state is to have no meaning, no moral value in themselves, and that life itself is potentially just as meaningless. Stated like that it’s old hat. Camus makes the idea haunting through his art; Barth’s art, by contrast, wanders around sniffing at stuff and then, in the end, reaches out and pushes the idea directly on the nose. Honks it, in fact.

The ending that his original publisher made him change – uh, spoiler alert, as they say – is that the protagonist attempts to kill himself and a lot of other people because there’s no reason to go on living, and it doesn’t work, and that doesn’t bother him because there’s no reason not to go on living. Apparently in the version that Barth changed to finally get the thing published, the guy actively decides not to kill everyone, because he sees his baby daughter and realizes that he loves her, or something similar. Hard to find a copy of that version these days.

It was hard to find this one too. I could have bought a new paperback copy but I had a feeling I wouldn’t want to keep this one – unless it was aesthetically satisfying to own. And the current paperback edition isn’t. It isn’t cheap, either. The copy I read as pictured here – first edition of the revised version – was brought out to me from the closed stacks at the Brooklyn Public Library. To which it has since returned.

We could sit here and speculate about why this was on Harold Bloom’s list, but I’ve got better things to do. I didn’t mind reading it; I just don’t recommend it. When the time comes I’ll be perfectly glad to read Giles Goat-Boy or whatever the next Barth on the list is. Interested even. I’ll bet he got better.

by Sean O’Casey (1880-1964)

Roll 4: 1418. That’s The Shadow of a Gunman by Sean O’Casey, but of course I’ve never read anything by Sean O’Casey so I have to go back to the first work under his name: Juno and the Paycock.

Went to the local used bookstore and had several options; I went for a quaintly dirty pocket edition with a weirdly endearing picture of O’Casey on the cover.

When I’m looking for a play, it seems always to be readily available at the first bookstore I try – and this feels reasonable, because: who ever buys plays? Nobody. So of course they’re all still there for me. The same is not true of poetry, however, despite its no doubt being an even slower seller than drama. In that case the problem is, I assume, that bookstores must buy their poetry stock more or less at random. You’re gonna tell me there’s a poetry buff on staff in every bookstore in the country? Not possible.

Am I joking? I think I’m joking.

Anyway, Irish playwright, Dublin tenement, tragicomedy. I’ve been reluctant to write about this play because it went about that fast, and it was months ago. I read it at just under the speed of performance, which is very very fast by reading standards, despite being essentially the “intended” speed of the work. Intended or not, it didn’t make a strong impression. This is a problem with plays, which weigh so much less than novels, and I’m not sure what the solution is for a reader. Seeing the play, obviously, would be better than reading it – though again there are problems with that as well; usually even when I see a play, I still feel underexposed. After the performance I generally wish I could go back and run over certain scenes again (or, if I wasn’t impressed, am happy to let loose a memory hell-bent on fading).

I get that a poem of 8 lines can be “as good” as a novel of 500 pages because of the apples and the oranges, but somehow with plays, the fruit-rating metaphor doesn’t satisfy me. With a play, something about artistic scale always seems actually to be out of whack. How can a play be as serious as a book? A movie, which lasts about as long as a play and is at least superficially similar in presentation, is not a problem for me; I see what movies have that let them “rate” as artistic objects of worth. Why do plays still feel thin?

In a recent conversation it was put to me that plays do not have the same peculiar power to engage that movies have because in a play the people are small and manifestly far away, whereas in a movie, the people occupy enough of our field of vision to call on our social instincts. Faces in a movie appear in our brains more or less at the scale of people who are only a few feet away, and whose actions therefore require not just comprehension but actual emotional response. Speculative though it may be, I find this quasi-biological explanation extremely convincing.

But there’s another reason that plays seem thin, I think, which is that plays are, compared to movies, thin. On content. A movie screenplay might only be as long as a stage script, but the movie itself is enriched ten thousand times over by that other pictureworth of words in every frame. A play is not made of pictures; it’s made of people, clothes, curtains, and stuff, and nobody ever said people, clothes, curtains, and stuff are worth ten thousand words. Understandably. A photograph of a play in some ways offers me more room for the imagination than the play itself; in the moment that the event actually happens, if I’m there, I am unavoidably aware of the actuality of people on a stage, which actually leaves less of my consciousness free for entering into the created world. The live presence of live people is supposed to be the essence of the magic of theater, but if the magic involves a world other than the theater in which those people exist with you, can’t their presence actually dampen the magic?

Theater, unlike film and literature, is openly false. The falseness can be put in the service of “truth,” but the falseness is essential. Yes, I know, fiction is lies, and film is essentially illusion, but lies and illusion are different from falseness. Lies and illusion can be taken for the truth. For the most part theater embraces this falseness, and why not? It’s a pretty steep uphill battle to convince anyone that a stage is anything other than a stage. Better just to offer the audience that it “represents” something else, in the realm of the imagination.

Plays, despite being presented to our faces, take place in the imagination. Movies do not. Books do, but, a-ha my point, books are much longer.

A play bears the same relationship to its script that a musical performance does to its score; a movie, by contrast, is the fungal organic mess that grows all over the rigid planter of the screenplay. Id est, much more complex. The additional complexity in a play is supposed to be in the performances, and in some spark of danger that comes from the live phenomenon – and maybe, like I said that time, in the weird communal temple of doom aspect. To me, though, these things generally don’t balance out the tens of thousands of other words that I might have gotten from pictures, or from a book that includes, literally, tens of thousands of other words.

Which is to say that this play didn’t make a serious impression… and that I’m not sure how to make the next play I read make a serious impression, either.

Some comments about the play itself, to prove that I read it: the tragic and comic elements alternate and mingle and jostle for attention in an interesting way. There’s something potent about having outright vaudeville routines thrown at you in a very grim context, particularly because in this case the intention of the playwright was not obvious. He wasn’t up to any normal showmanly thing: trying to shock or draw a contrast or to offer relief or anything like that. I’m not even sure he intended the juxtaposition to be unusual. I think he was both aiming higher than all of that, and also thinking less about it. The comedy face/tragedy face thing seems like it’s been part of the Irish self-image since well before Sean O’Casey. Melodrama alternating with slapstick was the bread and butter of the popular theater for years and years, too, so in that sense the material was just of its time. But the play also had “realist” aspirations – what with all the social ills! – and that put a weird spin on the broader stuff. In part I think he was doing it intentionally; in part I think it’s just aged a little funny.

If you didn’t notice from its title: this play is one of those “dialect texts” where the author has taken pains to capture the couple of local peculiarities of speech that strike him as significant, every time they occur. Exempli gratia: “I wasn’t in ayther wan snug or dh’other.” This makes for rough reading, though I guess it would also make for rough listening. Anyway, dialect transcription like this can be a sign of either earnest realism or broad comedy. In this case it was both. As with Huckleberry Finn.

I think that the aesthetic impact of these tensions in the material could probably be increased to the point of being very satisfying by a good performance. All in all, this is a performer’s play. Lots of opportunities to make business and life out of it. Like reading a promising sitcom script – I’m not laughing at these words, but someone might use them to make me laugh. Someone might use this play to make me feel something. Then again they might fail to.

In telling someone about my reading scheme, I mentioned that I had read this play, and she said she’d actually seen the play performed. I, curious about what kind of life it might take on in the flesh, asked how it was. She said, “amazing.” That was that.

There’s a whole essay to be written about my problem with people saying that things are “amazing,” but since I don’t plan to write it, I’ll tell you what the problem is right here. It’s this: When I was young, old fogies would sometimes complain that the words “fantastic” and “unbelievable” were being widely abused by airheads, but at that time, at least, you could still take these to be exaggerated versions of “good!” Nowadays, these words, and especially “amazing,” no longer necessarily mean even “good.” “Amazing” frequently means nothing, because people seem to use it when called upon to voice opinions about things they have no clear opinions about. When someone, especially someone I don’t know very well (as was the case in this example) tells me that something is “amazing,” I usually get the impression only that the person wants to align him/herself with other proponents of that thing, not that the person himself has any positive assessment of the thing itself.

On the other hand, I know quite a few people who say “amazing” when they have any strong genuine reaction to a thing. In one sense they are saying that they are amazed that anything in this vale of ennui has the capacity to actually impress. Beth has pointed out with amusement how these people I know – actors, they are – seem to say “it’s kind of amazing” several times per conversation. I’ll admit that in the heat of it all I sometimes fail to notice things like this.

Back to Juno (and the paycock):

Is there a faithful Hitchcock film of this play featuring several of the original cast members? Yes, there is. Why haven’t I watched that yet? I don’t know.

Is there a failed Marc Blitzstein musical called Juno based on this play? Yes, there is. Why haven’t I watched that? You can’t. Not even at the New York Public Library. All right, actually, they have video of this revival but I don’t really want to make an appointment just to watch THAT. Well, okay, maybe I will sometime. Eh.

Juno and the Peacock, by the way, is a tale from Aesop. I didn’t know this previously.

I want to note that this, my fifth Western Canon selection, was the first that I didn’t have to read in translation. It was actually written in English, for a change. Well, sort of English.

by Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828-1910)

translation of Kazaki into English by Peter Constantine (Modern Library, 2006)

Third roll: 989 – lands me on “Tolstoy: Short Novels,” from whence I bounce back to the first unread Tolstoy on the list, which turns out to be the first Tolstoy on the list, I not having read anything by Tolstoy other than, I think, a short story or two long ago. The first Tolstoy on the list is The Cossacks. A new translation had just come out last year so I was immediately able to pick up a copy of it, again at the Strand Annex, for $6 or something like that. See above for visual aid.

This Modern Library edition dates it to 1862 but the internet consensus seems to be 1863. In any case it was in the works for 10 years or so, presumably started around the time in Tolstoy’s life that it surely represents. It’s a young man’s work about being a young man. A certain type of young man’s work about being a certain type of young man, in fact. To jump directly to my opinion: the book is clearly an effort to have a broader perspective on the foibles of this certain type of young man – the author wants to write as though he is able to look in from the outside and observe truths that just happen to be about who he is, or was. But I don’t think the author was as much more mature than his past-self protagonist as he must have thought. The perspective is lacking.

The book started with a brisk portrait of this kid, Olenin – philosophically curious and reasonably self-aware about how privileged and pampered his life is, but all the same, blindingly self-centered – and I was immediately excited at the prospect that it would have something to say to my generation. Possibly something chastening. Presumably something sturdier than whatever Indecision was saying (with its mouth full). But in the end – skipping to the end – it’s not clear that it was saying anything much. It’s not clear to me what Olenin should have or could have learned. It definitely comes across that Tolstoy, in living among the Cossacks as described in the book, felt that their spiritually and psychologically uncomplicated existences were a humiliating counter-example to his own personality, and that that felt like a significant life experience to him. But isn’t that itself a pretty self-centered way of seeing the world? Yes, and Tolstoy tries to acknowledge that by making the romantic significance that Olenin imparts to the Cossacks seem slightly ridiculous. Yet the book itself clearly believes that their straightforward rurality is indeed a thing of great and significant beauty – he saves his most attentive writing for descriptions of the dirt and the cows and the smells and sounds. In any case, making Olenin’s various philosophical passions out to be “naive” seemed to be the full extent of the higher authorial wisdom. The real intention here was, I believe, to record a setting and a frame of mind that were memorable and intense in the living. It was all right as a fictionalized memoir, limited but still interesting as a character study (and a cultural study), and frustrating as a novel (or novella, really – it’s quite short).

It could be argued that this is a book about a life-changing experience that intentionally leaves the life-changing for after the curtain has fallen. That wouldn’t be a bad idea for a book, and I could be convinced that this was that book. Whatever the intention, though, it doesn’t change the fact that I finished it feeling that it hadn’t given me enough thoughts to chew on about the action. Olenin’s plentiful thoughts don’t count – they are the action. And don’t try telling me that the book was an impartial rendering of events, offered up to us to interpret or not as we like. Please. If it was that, it was only that by default.

Despite its being, as stated, quite short, it still took me a long time to get through this because I was reading it aloud, which always slows things down drastically. We ended up doing this a chapter at a time, and it’s made up of many short little chapters. Peter Constantine did a perfectly fine job making the English readable, but I wouldn’t recommend giving this one that kind of slow and careful attention – the form is something less than taut and it would probably best be read quickly in one or two long gulps. The old Louise and Aylmer Maude translation, which I think was the only English version available prior to last year, seems, on skimming, perfectly acceptable. Yes, it’s a little 19th-century-cated, but so is Tolstoy.

I did come away with a more specific interest than previously in reading Tolstoy’s more mature, more famous works. There were a few ambitious scenes of philosophical revelation in The Cossacks that were intriguing and admirable when taken in isolation, and I got excited about the prospect of seeing the same sort of thing done with greater control. Next Tolstoy will be War and Peace. Whenever that comes up.

Oops, finished, but then I thought of this to say – one section of the book portrays Olenin going, nervously, in the throes of a wicked crush, to a party with a bunch of giggling girls, and then, after the evening plays out, returning home to muse on the fantastic, near-universal significance of everything that has happened. This scene, and others, I thought, were very successful at evoking high school. My dismay, then, was that nowhere in the book did we get to hear from the Daniel Stern voice, so to speak. Without that guy putting it in perspective, high school is just a big mess; we need that guide to help us differentiate our attitude toward high school gossip from the attitude of high school kids. If we don’t think Olenin’s love is as real as Olenin does, what do we think? It depends what happens to him when he grows up. I guess he grows up to be Tolstoy. That would have been an interesting book.

That is, in fact, what all of Proust’s big-ass book is – high school nonsense dissected endlessly from stratospherically high above it all. I loved that. This, by contrast, either had nothing to say yet or didn’t want to let us in on it, and what fun is that?