by Michel Houellebecq
translation of HP Lovecraft: Contre le monde, contre la vie into English by Dorna Khazeni (2005)
with an introduction by Stephen King
and two stories by H.P. Lovecraft:
“The Call of Cthulhu” (1926)
“The Whisperer in Darkness” (1930)

Michel Houellbecq is a contemporary French author of some note, but I have not read any of his (other) works. Most articles about this (non-fiction) book, his first published work, discuss the ways in which it connects to his more famous, more recent novels. But I can’t comment on that because I don’t know.

My first encounter with Lovecraft’s astonishing name came when I played the old Infocom text adventure game The Lurking Horror, which stages Lovecraftian stuff at an essentially undisguised M.I.T. to create what must therefore be the nerdiest game of all time. It’s not bad. The unholy-summoning storyline is of course a big Lovecraft “homage,” but I didn’t know it at the time. I was only able to gather from context that his name (which makes a cameo as the name of a computer) was somehow a genre-appropriate “reference,” and I remember thinking that there was something etymologically unsavory about the idea that the words “love” and “craft” should in combination connote monsters and evil.

It was not until several years later that I finally saw evidence that “love-craft” had been a real person and a writer of horror stories: passing through the hallway of some other high school (on a “science team” trip, I believe!), I came across a copy of one of his story collections, abandoned on a table. Something still seemed unsavory. The book was from some godawful sci-fi publisher, had a terrible over-the-top illustration on it, and all around looked like something both obscure and shoddy. Infocom had expected me to know about this guy? It seemed to me like maybe he wasn’t a real writer, he was just some creepy underground thing for creepy underground people, best ignored – like, say, the Church of the SubGenius.

As the years went on, I continued to come across references to Lovecraft, many of them seeming to take for granted that his literary importance was widely acknowledged. Well, not by anyone I knew, it wasn’t! This was not an author that anyone ever seemed to read, nor one whose works were apparent at the bookstore. I knew where “important” authors’ names came up, and his didn’t. Nonetheless I seemed frequently to come across winking references to ridiculous garbage words like Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth, as though the significance of this gobbledygook was common knowledge to normal cultured people.

You might well point out that I was, among other things, playing computer adventure games, so what did I expect? But the form and structure of the interlocking worlds of nerddom are not readily apparent to one who has only ventured into one or two of them.

Anyway, finally one day in college, while on duty at a very quiet library desk job, I decided to educate myself. So I and my roommate, who had come to hang out, read library copies of “The Dunwich Horror,” which had been recommended somewhere or other as Lovecraft’s greatest story. The horrendously overripe, relentlessly inelegant writing – humorless, monotonous, and altogether amateurish* – was a surprise. So was the particular combination of horror tropes (which I have since learned is exactly characteristic of Lovecraft): zoological mix-and-match half-human monsters with color-changing fins and such, IN COMBINATION with decrepit farmhouses and drawling, hostile New England country folk. These two varieties of horror didn’t seem like a natural match, to me, and yet here they were, unapologetically wedded, in this purportedly important story. My roommate thought the only redeeming aspect of the story was the opening passage, a description of the discomfort one feels driving deeper and deeper into the wild rural countryside. I thought the ultimate monster (an enormous egg-shaped mess of “squirming ropes” with a “half face”) was odd enough to deserve some respect. We also appreciated the historical significance of horror that was based on cosmic abominations rather than on mere hauntings and curses. Both of us agreed that as a whole it was really, really junky.

Now, armed with first-hand knowledge of just what the hell “H.P. Lovecraft” was, I was better able to be baffled by the breadth of his reputation. Who were these crazies calling him one of the major writers of the twentieth century? How had they convinced Penguin, and then this year – Good Lord! – The Library of America!? to buy into this? Who dared invent the notion of a “Lovecraft scholar?”

I am fascinated by the fact that Lovecraft, a phenomenally bad writer of phenomenally pulpy PULP – I mean really, the very pulpiest imaginable – is held in such high esteem by what seems to be an ever-widening circle of nerdified critics. Here, for example, is Joyce Carol Oates going off unreservedly about Howard Phillips. It make me feel a little lightheaded to think that when they’ve been coaxed into the right mood, critics are willing to overlook (or even embrace) the most glaring, painful, high-school-literary-magazine-grade stylistic offenses. How am I supposed to learn taste from these people when nobody seems to object to this most obvious tastelessness? And yet, for all that, I am simultaneously attracted to Lovecraft’s aesthetic goals, and pleased by the idea that all this eager critical disregard for his screaming faults is apparently motivated by a general enthusiasm for those goals.

The man wanted to recreate the unnerving sensations akin to fear that arise during dreams and fevers. I think that’s cool. Like Lovecraft, I think that there is, at least, the impression of profundity in these feelings, a subconscious suggestion that perhaps our basic assumptions about perception, experience, life on Earth, consciousness, reality at its basic level – perhaps these are flawed and subject to revision based on new information. A bit like the Timothy Leary types who insisted that LSD showed them new truths, there is a potent and upsetting impression, in certain dreams, that one’s understanding of THE NATURE OF ALL THINGS has been broadened. It’s not just any old being-weirded-out, it’s ominous and important being-weirded-out. The principle, I suppose, is that a broad enough sense of uncertainty and unease can call one’s whole life into perspective, which can be a gratifying experience. This sort of impression is hard to recreate while awake and sober, but when you get it, it’s really something. Pondering death is a natural way to get there, as is any real consideration of the depth of time and the size of the universe. But the impressions caused by these real-world thoughts are not nearly as potent as those in dreams, because at some level, we ARE always aware that we will eventually die, or that the universe is vast beyond our capacity to imagine. Whereas until we have it, we are completely unaware of the impression, in a dream, that the whole world is purple and dark and is slowly tilting and creaking. The unnameable, everything-revising implications of that experience will be felt to the fullest. My post about Scriabin’s Prometheus talked a bit about this, and how I respect it as an artistic goal, and enjoy it as an experience.** Lovecraft was going for something like that.

He was, in fact, going for a very particular subcategory of this experience. He had given the subject a lot of thought, and most of his stories are fixedly dedicated to a certain upsetting notion; namely, that the unsettling dream world of horrible not-rightness is in fact part of our world, a reality that existed before historical time and continues to exist outside normal space. Poe put it at the south pole and in tombs; Lovecraft does those, but he also adds that it is in outer space, and, most importantly, somewhere magically parallel to us, the ether from which demons and such can be summoned. He takes old quasi-religious notions of ghosts and netherworlds from from the long tradition of alchemy- and magic-based ghost stories, and blends them with the surreal discomforts of dream-horror. Or he works dream-horror into the old mythological constructions about gods meddling among humans. Basically, his inspiration was that the powerful horror of the surreal can be worked into ghost stories, monster stories, god stories. That’s it. It’s a good idea, and yes, in one way or another it’s the foundational idea behind pretty much all horror today. I like it. Is it brilliant? I don’t know; it’s not as though Lovecraft really invented it himself. But he clarified it and pursued it with a certain consistency of concept, which is no small thing.

So to sum up: I think Lovecraft was a bad writer, but the idea(s) for which he’s known are good, and interesting to me.

I saw this book (this is about that book, remember) on display on the new non-fiction table when the translation came out earlier this year, and was immediately attracted by the title: Against the World, Against Life. It seemed to be talking about the crux of the Lovecraftian concept: that fascinating, horrifying dream-rejection of reality. The first pages were compelling; the author was talking about H.P. Lovecraft’s actual problems coping with the real world and suggesting that the peculiar anti-reality stance of his horror was actually a sort of philosophical position, and that it appeals to readers who at some level also hate reality. The psychological functions of horror interest me, and the idea of a book taking this tone toward Lovecraft seemed very appealing. I also think, for personal reasons, that Lovecraft’s biography of utter pathetic grinding hopeless failure is an interesting backdrop to his bad but beloved art, and seeing it worked into this thesis was satisfying. So (a little later) I bought the book and read it.

Unfortunately, it’s much more fannish and obnoxious than I expected. Houellebecq loves Lovecraft, and loves his own intensity in loving Lovecraft, and seems ultimately like another example of the fixation on Lovecraft himself that for some reason characterizes his readers. His emphasis on world-hating flaunts a sort of perverse enthusiasm that, I have read, is typical of Houellebecq, whose novels are apparently misanthropic in the extreme. With this sort of attitude, he’s not the right person to be discussing the work; he just barely feels that it needs defending, and most of his arguments seem like calmly self-satisfied perversion rather than a good faith offering of thought. The mission statement on the first page, “We need a supreme antidote to all forms of realism,” which struck me as charmingly bold at first, turns out to be a deadpan that is never dropped. Does he really believe it? Hard to say what that question means. One might well ask whether he really likes Lovecraft after all, or is just putting on a show. Though I am inclined to think that he really does like Lovecraft, since he talks about discovering him as a child. I think a kid’s enthusiasm for monsters is never a put-on. And I’m willing to believe that Houellebecq really thinks that life is beastly and horror is the proper response to it. But that, as they say, is his problem. He certainly didn’t convince me otherwise.

See this entry for a little bit about the book’s attitude toward Lovecraft’s prose style. Then check out this satisfying letter in which the excellent ghost story writer M.R. James (much admired by H.P.) mentions “one H.P. Lovecraft, whose style is of the most offensive.”

The one really valuable insight provided by the book (though still with a hint of tasteless, nihilistic pride) is that Lovecraft’s reccurent sub-human horrors are in fact directly derived from his own deeply felt racism. There is a really remarkable passage quoted from one of Lovecraft’s letters, sounding just like one of his overblown (“overblown” is much too mild a word) fictional passages of revulsion, but describing his experience walking down the ethnically mixed horror streets of New York City, where he briefly attempted to have a life and utterly failed. I felt like it really made everything about Lovecraft click into place – the fear we are being made to feel is racial fear, with all its various strata of disgust – pseudo-rational social and biological disgust, but always, fundamentally, a simple bigot’s displeasure with the unfamiliar. More generally, a man who lived his life alone in his room is a man whose basic discomfort with the unknown, even the benign unknown, must have been incredibly acute. It is as though his stories are furiously grotesque projections of, say, my mild anxieties about talking to strangers.

This psychological clue to Lovecraft’s horror, and horror in general, was interesting to me, and Houellebecq initiated it, but Houellebecq himself seems to dismiss it in favor of actually endorsing the conclusions Lovecraft drew about how awful life was, even as he illustrates their ridiculous extremity. What does Houellebecq think of Lovecraft’s phenomenal racism? He doesn’t lower himself to say; he’d rather keep up the show of being an apostle of nihilism.

Meanwhile, the introduction by Stephen King is really lazy and smarmy – this coming from someone who in general has no problem with Stephen King – and is an all-around bizarro pairing for the book. King offers us some downright stupid bitter put-downs for literary criticism in general, and then tells us that the present book isn’t really one of those books, even though it is. Then he rambles about himself at some length. My impression was that he had breezed through the book inattentively and is glad to write an introduction to just about anything. At one point he says something like, “I agree with everything that Houellebecq says…except for his idea that Lovecraft hated life and that you have to hate life to enjoy Lovecraft. In fact, that’s not true.” Seriously, he says that. It also made me cringe when he copies out Houellebecq’s flamboyantly niihilistic chapter-headings (“Attack the story like a radiant suicide,” “Utter the great NO to life without weakness,” etc.) and then says something dense like, “yeah, I agree with that.”

Which, finally, brings me to the Lovecraft stories that pad out the back of the book. I had read neither of them. The first was the famous “The Call of Cthulhu.” Cthulhu, for those of you who have never set foot in a comic book store, is a horrible octopusish god thing that lives in a sunken nightmare city and calls out psychically to sensitive types, who have bad dreams about him. The city rises up for a day in the Pacific somewhere, and some people in a boat come across it, and open a big portal, and Cthulhu rises out, but one guy gets away to tell the tale. There were elements of the story that were nice ideas – the idea that people all over the world are vaguely aware of this thing, that images of it show up in all different cultures, including ongoing secret cults, and that it has been sleeping since ancient times but will return…it’s all nice, though the awful prose slows it down. Most of the pleasure I took in these ideas came after reading the klutzy prose, digesting it, and then thinking about it all afterward. But the worst, I think, is that this dreamed thing actually shows up at the end of the story, and is basically a Godzilla – a big old slimy monster trudging out of the depths. I’ll grant that maintaining a sense of unreality is a tough challenge when the narrative approaches its object, but I would say this ultimately failed.

The second story was better, probably the best I’d ever read by H.P.: “The Whisperer in Darkness.” It was long but the prose was significantly cleaner than his other writing, I thought, so I didn’t much mind the length. This one was about evil aliens who live in New Hampshire. A not-so-clever but still effective conceit for keeping things at a satisfying distance is used – the horrors are mostly described to us by a skeptical narrator who hears about stuff through a written correspondence with a believer. The believer sends him bits of evidence that give him doubts. Etc. Then, in the last section of the story, the narrator travels up into the woods to meet the believer, whose letters have suddenly changed in tone and who now seems to love the aliens. You can see where this is going, but it goes there with a little bit of flair. The whisperer of the title is the believer character (maybe) sitting almost completely muffled up in the corner of the farmhouse, moving stiffly, and hoarsely telling the narrator about how wonderful it will be to have his mind removed from his body and taken to faraway worlds by the aliens. To the just-discovered Pluto, in fact, where the aliens are from. They call it Yuggoth.

It was actually kind of a fun story, though the final punchline is pretty clearly telegraphed by what comes before, so the ending is a little anti-climactic. But the horror, I would say, was not dreamlike, not really. This was your typical story of lobster aliens deceiving people in New Hampshire, and as such set itself an easier task.

Okay, I’m done with this, finally, though I just had another thought about Lovecraft, so I guess I’ll end with this. He writes in that style we know so well from old newspapers: the stilted, wordy, overpadded propriety of the mustachioed old men of the turn of the century. Despite the fact that it’s 1925, Lovecraft thinks that he’s one of those old men and he thinks that style is super keen, a really dignified, solid weight in his pen, which he, like those old men, will nourish with selected power words from his own particular storehouse, and bring to poetic heights with romantic outpourings. To him, his Oh god! The thing had no face! Such eldritch abominations cannot be! is just a new spin on the old O! My love, death has taken thee! And now his fans buy into it as well: Lovecraft was a great old man of literature; he wrote important texts with dignity.

Can’t we all be a little more embarrassed about all this? That’s all I ask.

* It’s really satisfying, coming up with ways to describe what’s so bad about Lovecraft’s writing. I have more adjectives if anyone wants to hear them.

**This is of course also something that the surrealist painters explicitly attempted, with, I would say, only occasional success. My quickie reviews: Magritte was too clumsy a painter and too conceptually “clever” to get these sensations across very often; his images have a satisfying waking mystery to them but aren’t actually very dreamlike. The sexual ones in particular don’t really work, I think. Dali was closer to the mark, but he was too caught up in the idea of populating his canvases with symbolic doodads and goo on stilts. That goes double for Yves Tanguy. Most of it feels pretty contrived and silly, not to mention ugly. Max Ernst had a particular couple of things he could convey, though a lot of his work doesn’t signify much to me and even some of the dream-ish stuff seems like icky overkill. De Chirico had that nice thing that he did over and over, which works for me. My dreams are often like that, though a little less flat. And where would UPA have been without him? Remedios Varo seems to be more and more popular these days, and I can see the appeal. A few too many tissue-paper vaginas and alchemists and wispy people for my taste, but the overall atmosphere is certainly effective, even if you think it’s schlocky.

by Jonathan Safran Foer

[extended as of 8/26/05]

In the New York Times Magazine profile of the author, a few months back, Mr. Foer was quoted as saying something like “I don’t write to make people think I’m smart, or that I’m a good writer. I write so that I can feel less alone.” (=rough paraphrase from memory). Then it is mentioned that when he was very young, he wanted a flamboyant suit to wear, and then his mother is quoted saying something about how he has always been able to come up with the most moving things, things that touched her deeply.

I hadn’t read the book at the time, but I found all this off-putting. It didn’t bode well for his writing, in my mind. I finally read the book, and all my fears came true.

When I was a freshman in high school, I was still very uncomfortable with how I might or might not fit into the social life of the classroom, even during academic time. I didn’t trust that my contributions would be appropriate and wouldn’t annoy teachers and/or students; I had the sense that at most times, other people generally “knew what was going on” and that I fundamentally didn’t, even if I intellectually felt like I understood the material or the social situation or whatever. So I had various strategies for coping and not losing too much face. One strategy was to say only one or two things per class, but have them be “intriguingly outside the box.” “Intriguingly outside the box” is pretty easy to pull off if it’s your only criterion – you just have to sit tight for a while and notice which way the conversation is headed, and then imagine some other direction it could have gone and then mention that in a way that suggests that it’s an intellectual mistake to ignore it. As long as what you say is both surprising (because it fights the natural flow of conversation) but blatantly on-topic, you get credit from teachers for contributing something “valuable” and at the same time, little risk of having to defend yourself or get corrected, because nobody was thinking about it. So this little gambit was a safe way of regularly scoring enough points to stay afloat without really entering into a game that I didn’t think I could play properly.

My story is that during that freshman year, my English teacher used to sit among the students while we discussed our reading, and one day while I was making one of my “but what about THIS?” comments, she apparently leaned over to one of my fellow students and whispered “isn’t he funny? – he thinks he’s so wise.” Apparently, she thought I was so clearly absurd a character that nobody would think to report this to me. I don’t know what she was thinking, really. But it’s beside the point.

The point is that I was doing this calculated thing, yes, exactly, to get points for seeming wise, because I desperately needed some kind of points and I had hit on this thing I could pull off. And the moral of this anecdote is that it didn’t fool anyone: my teacher (and everyone else) thought it was comical; my “wisdom” was contrived and formulaic; my self-serving motivations were irritatingly apparent. I had taught myself a method for creating the impression of thoughtfulness and was relentlessly enacting it to meet my own psychological needs.

Ahem. Before I go on, let me point out that I have the utmost sympathy for my past self, as well as for anyone else who behaves similarly. Social interaction is tough, and I think it’s not just forgivable but in fact necessary for people to rely on these sorts of preset “systems” for creating pseudo-spontaneous effects. Happens all the time. It even, in fact, happens in literature all the time. My anecdote here is simply meant to show that when it’s too transparent, it’s annoying (even to teachers), and that it is possible for “wisdom” to actually be nothing more than a formulaic bid for approval.

So: Jonathan Safran Foer thinks he’s so wise. But since he’s a widely-praised author and his books are enormously successful, I, unlike my 9th-grade English teacher, cannot find the generosity of condescension in my heart to say that I think it’s “funny.” It just frustrates and annoys me.

His wisdom-generating-machine is of a different variety than mine ever was, and based on the Times profile (which is really quite a piece of work – I just now found it online again, via the link on this page), it sounds as though he turns its crank near-constantly.* He certainly does in this book.

He plays not for the “he sees things that other people miss” crown, as I did, but rather for the laurel of “he is so sensitive: he says the most moving things, and he can find beauty and magic in anything!” And he does so expertly. His pretentions are finely honed and virtuosic; his bids for our admiration have more grace and sophistication to them than those of even the most extravagantly self-indulgent personalities I met in college. He is, I have no qualms about saying, a true artist of the form.

Everything Is Illuminated intends to be a swirling whirling wonderworld of emotional truth, it wants to first dazzle us with a thousand tricks and treats, and then reveal that they are all tied to the painful, joyous throbbing heart that is all human experience. Right, so far so good. But have I, by writing that sentence, actually found the material to write such a book? Not hardly. I would need to first of all have something to say about human experience.

This book does not have anything real to say. And it says it in many many ways. Does it have things in it that might make people cry? Oh sure, sure – like, slowing down time to a stop during the naively ordinary instant during World War II just before an innocent peasant village is bombed to oblivion and everyone is killed, prolonging it to typographically flamboyant extremes through two pages of “. . . . . . .,” and shouting stuff like “(run while you still can!)” in parentheses because we know that they did not and will not no matter HOW MUCH WE WANT THEM TO!, and saying so explicitly, etc. etc.

That example is actually the climax of the book, in some ways. Sorry I just gave it away. But this exact same stunt actually happens at several other points, where time slows down cartoonishly to the point where the meager, unconvincing poignancy Foer has built up can be strenuously, blatantly mined out from under the toenails of the moment. So to speak.

I can tell you how that passage might make Jonathan Safran Foer’s mom cry. First of all, it’s built around the idea that the inevitability of that which has already happened (the destruction of this shtetl) still has the potential to be upsetting. Next, it refers to the fact that people will mentally dwell on such moments with the active desire to change them, even though that is of course impossible. Elsewhere in the book, he has talked about the fact that some people may desire to “rectify” history fictionally when writing it down, in attempt to psychologically address the pain of some irreversible past event. Foer is not discovering these truths for us, or even presenting them for our analysis; he is simply using them. And what is he using them to say, or do? He is trying to make mom cry. What does this book offer us? That experience of being made to cry in this way, and that is all.

Perhaps knowing that he needed more, Foer made the book structurally complicated. The structure, in fact, has a lot of potential. “Jonathan Safran Foer” and his Ukrainian translator (you’ve read excerpts, you don’t need me to tell you about that) alternate chapters, one writing about the present and one writing fantastically about the past. Interspersed are the Ukrainian’s responses to JSF’s work, which sometimes mention unseen responses sent from JSF to the Ukrainian. Guess what! JSF finds the Ukrainian’s chapters VERY MOVING, ALMOST HEARTBREAKING, and the Ukrainian finds JSF’s to be ALSO VERY MOVING! They also frequently find time to mention that they found the events that are being described to be VERY MOVING. Only we the readers get the pleasure of knowing that this all amounts to self-congratulation by exactly one real live dude.

The subject matter is JSF’s family history, but as he imagines it, which means a torrential helping of soggy faux-folk “Jewish heritage!!!” whimsy, which incorporates a good deal of “earthy” sex that is almost entirely off-putting. The present-day stuff, ostensibly “realistic” by comparison, is about JSF seeking out said family history in Ukraine and not finding it, plus some stuff about the Ukrainian that takes center stage by the end even though it remains only very loosely sketched.

The emphasis on family, on Jewish lore and tradition, on loss and memory – this stuff would seem to indicate literary substance, and he increases that impression by running many, many parallels and ambiguities up and down through the already overwrought folksy parts of the text. But the impression of substance is circumstancial, superficial. You may untangle as much as you like, but you will not find a coordinating wisdom. Writerly resourcefulness, certainly, but none of the precious WISDOM that is implicitly advertised on every page.

In fact, the more untangling you do, the less well-crafted the structure starts to seem. If you finish the book and learn all there is to learn, and then begin again, you’ll see that much of what comes at the beginning isn’t quite exactly in keeping with what comes at the end. “Moving” effects from early on make little sense in the context of the whole. I tried to work out a generous theory that made this all out to be intentional, and just another layer of the book’s interest in the artifice of writing, but I couldn’t find a way to make it work out. There’s just no getting around it: the book’s more complicated than it can handle.

I am also put off by the attitude toward dealing with Jewish heritage that is in evidence here. The real Jonathan Safran Foer seems to think that by portraying “Jonathan Safran Foer” as a spoiled American with no real cultural clue, he is demonstrating that his interest in his own Jewishness is somehow better founded than his alter ego’s. What it ultimately is is a conflation of sentimental memories of his grandmother with secondhand Yiddish folklore/Isaac Bashevis Singer. Plus some New York-y “You’ll know we’re the chosen people when you taste this delicious bagel, nu?” crap. Then he acts as though being able to channel this bunch of charoseth (in combination with a penchant for making mom cry) puts him in good standing to take a whack at recreating the emotional truth of the Holocaust. Maybe it’s wrong of me, but I found this aspect distasteful. I felt like the book was establishing Jewish “cred,” which ought not to be a prerequisite for writing about the Holocaust or about one’s grandmother. I was offended that he seemed to think it was necessary/appropriate to put this Jewish-ish stuff in, and I was also uncomfortable with the fact that this is the specific blend of stuff he picked.

Yesterday I stood and flipped through Harry G. Frankfurt’s tiny hardbound essay On Bullshit, which you’ve probably seen in large quantities at the bookstore. From my breeze-through, it seemed like a well-considered blend between very dry cuteness and legitimate light philosophy, and I’m pleased to think that it’s selling well, even if it’s for the most superficial reasons. I’m sure Princeton University Press is pleased too. Anyway. Frankfurt’s point (which he makes far more precisely than I’m about to) seems to be that bullshit, which is so prevalent in contemporary life, is distinct from lying, in that it represents not an attempt to disseminate falsehood but rather a complete disengagement from the concept of truth. It fundamentally disregards the obligations that follow when one takes seriously the possibility of being accurate, being correct. It does not actively defy those obligations but lives outside them.**

Anyway, Everything Is Illuminated does the artistic version of just that. It is artistic bullshit. It does not tell us anything about life (even though it seems to), but it is not because Foer is trying to deceive us; it’s because he has opted for a project that, for all its tears of pain and joy and love and death and war and family, does not believe that it is necessary to be concerned with those things. They are just used as the playing field for another game entirely.

Here is the score of the game: Yes, Jonathan Safran Foer, some of those things you wrote about are sad and whimsical things. Yes, I do not know anyone else who has thought of quite so many of these particular sort of sad and whimsical things. You manufacture many premium notions. You also write much better than, say, me. I. Your book was interesting to read. But it wasn’t about anything, and it acted like it was about important things, and so I didn’t like it. I know that you might not actually think you’re so wise. I know this book probably wasn’t who you are. It’s just something you’re trying to do. Despite your protestation, I think you did write this to convince people that you’re smart, and a good writer. And you know what? You convinced me. But I do not think this book will help you to be less lonely, as you claimed to want. Were you really trying to connect? It’s much simpler than all that, but very different.

I hope to god you never actually read this, and this second person thing is pure affectation on my part. Good god, Jonathan, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry. Lots of people I know loved this book. That’s in fact why I read it. I just wasn’t the target audience.

Oh, but just this one last thing – among the reviews of this book at amazon.com can be found the following nugget of white-hot condescension:

You people who “loved this book!!!!” are slaves. This book doesn’t even qualify as a shadow on the wall of the cave.

It made me laugh.

[THREE DAYS LATER, 8/26]

I think I have a little bit more to say. Two things.

First: the humor in the book is grating, in that it is both smugly deadpan and yet hopelessly secondhand. I tried to read the opening chapter when it was published in the New Yorker before the book came out, and couldn’t manage to finish it, because it was so obnoxiously proud of itself over an incredibly tired gimmick. It, and a good deal of this book, was essentially the old “Wild and Crazy Guys!” routine. Yes, Foer puts his own spin on it by keeping this character around for a whole book – and the idea of taking old joke stereotypes seriously is in fact kind of interesting. But he doesn’t acknowledge it as an old joke. He thinks it’s clever.

I’m not going to go into it here at too much length, but I think you’ll know what I’m talking about when I say that there is humor and there is “humor,” and that the latter is not actually a form of creativity, but merely a sort of social quirk that rarely contains any real invention. Pre-fabricated sarcasm (“welcome to my world!”), deadpan conceits (“you my pimp daddy, Doug”), put-on mock-pretend lying (“I hate you, honey.” “I hate you too.”) all qualify as this lesser thing. There are also more elaborate quasi-comedic constructions that nonetheless are this thing, or at least are equally kin to this thing as they are to real humor. Much of the humor in this book is like that. I grant that I may be indefensibly oversensitive to this distinction. But in the context of all that affectation, it seemed baldly, irritatingly insufficient. Not unlike a teenager who is infuriatingly confident that because he can casually and dryly drop “you my pimp daddy, Doug,” he is too cool for, among other things, school.

Second: Above, I describe the “protracted moment of doomed innocence” passage and complain that its only purpose is to make us cry, as though that’s a problem. In fact, I say throughout that what the book lacks is a “point,” and imply that mere emotional manipulation is artistically inadequate. But that was a mistake: I don’t actually think that at all. I don’t look to art for philosophical news (though I appreciate it when it’s there) – I look to it for aesthetic experience, and, yes, emotional experience. Art doesn’t have to have a “point” to be good and satisfying; not a “point” beyond its inherent aesthetic effect, at least. It’s not even at all damning, I don’t think, for a writer or a reader to be uncertain what the “meaning” of some emotional effect is, so long as they derive some kind of aesthetic satisfaction from it. I confused myself into complaining that substance and purpose were lacking, but that’s the wrong complaint.

I got confused because it’s a very hard line to draw. I’m reminded of the discussion I had with a friend after leaving Steven Spielberg’s Amistad (1997). My friend said that the movie had been terrible because it was so manipulative. I said that I liked that movies can be manipulative, I like being manipulated, so I didn’t think that was the problem. She said that she was insulted and offended by the form of manipulation in this particular movie, which I agreed with. But it was hard for either of us to quantify what it was the movie had done to become offensive, what line it had crossed.

I have theories about how to formulate the distinction between pleasurable and infuriating manipulation, but I’m not really fond of any of them. My other complaints about this book, above, are good indicators of the direction of my thinking – I suspect it has something to do with feeling “used” by the artist himself, not just the work. Maybe.

I’m going to think about the question some more and if I come up with anything good I’ll write about it here. Anyone else wanna take a whack at this?

*I’m sorry this is going to be so mean. I’m sorry, Jonathan Safran Foer. I was very attentive and open, while I read your whole book. And the whole time, I felt like you didn’t actually care about saying anything to me, I felt like all you really cared about was getting me to be impressed with you, and it offended me that you did it by pretending to want to tell me about life and love and feeling and important things. I know you didn’t really mean to exploit those subjects, or exploit the Holocaust, or anything like that – and I know, you were drawing your material from real feelings that you’ve really had – but I still couldn’t help but feel that it was fundamentally self-serving of you. So I feel entitled to say what I thought. I know, it’s rude to say these things, and I feel bad about that. But I’m going to continue.

**Something like that. That’s what I came away with, anyway. Maybe I should read it for real.

by Laurence Sterne

Apparently, John Updike never made it through Tristram Shandy, but I did. That feels pretty good. To quote Updike’s passage directly, “Like many an autodidact I have taken simple-minded pride in finishing a book once I began to read it.”

Updike’s miniature assessment of Tristram seems accurate to me, except for his central assertion that it is boring. “Facetious,” even “chirping,” certainly. But delightfully so. I mean, come on.

Of course, it did take me a very long time to finish it, on a schedule that incorporated several long hiatuses. But that makes sense; Tristram Shandy was published in five separate installments over the course of eight years, and I therefore opted to read it more as five amusing short books than as one long master-book. One hopes that nobody in 250 years is suckered into reading all ten million pages of Harry Potter as though it is a horrifically bloated single work, though arguably it is a horrifically bloated single work. I remember feeling similarly that Bleak House suffered from being reduced to a mere continuity rather than remaining a truly serial experience. Laurence Sterne seems to have believed for a while that he would live off of Tristram indefinitely, publishing new volumes every few years for the rest of his life. Accordingly, the individual volumes are modest in length and charming, while the work taken as a whole is a fair bit overweight. But avoiding boredom is easy; take time off in between installments, just like Sterne did. Don’t know why Updike didn’t see that.

I don’t have any real knowledge of the general nature of 18th-century humor, so maybe this is just ignorant of me, but I was astonished at how well the wit had aged. And the book is indeed mostly wit. Several of the contemporaneous reviews I’ve read refer to the book as a “performance,” and though for all I know that may simply be a standard 18th-century usage, I think it’s telling. The work felt very much like a kind of one-man show, an intricate song-and-dance delivered by a storyteller who blatantly intends to be fascinatingly eccentric. But unlike other “look at me!” writers I’ve read (Vonnegut comes to mind), Sterne completely embraces the standup-act quality of his undertaking and truly takes advantage of his chosen performance medium. Some of it’s sort of like prop comedy of the printed page.

Is it funny when a chapter and 10 pages are missing from the book, and then Sterne/Shandy tells us he tore them out because they were so well-written that they overwhelmed the rest of the work? I think so. Is it funny when the first sentence of a chapter gets tangled in subordinate clauses, drifts off to some other topic, and finally Sterne/Shandy says he needs to start again, and gives it another go in the next chapter? I think it is, yes. It’s a bit Monty Python, that sort of thing. And Monty Python was indeed very clever, back when it was new. The freshness and boldness of Tristram Shandy rang through for me, 250 years later. It’s genuinely clever.

It’s also very funny in a non-gimmicky, situational, frequently bawdy way. I laughed out loud several times; usually at penis-related humor, of which there is plenty. By contrast, the most dated elements are the rather abrupt injections of “sentiment,” generally in the form of lumps in the throats of men feeling deep affection for their loyal friends. The interrelation of these two poles – the sentimental and the vulgar – is in some ways the theme of the book, and one that Sterne, the clergyman and preacher, clearly takes seriously in a spiritual sense. The welling-ups of brotherly love may have seemed a little lame, to me, but the overall message I took away was extremely sympathetic. Roughly, I understood the book to be saying, “God’s Earth is full of all kinds of stuff; tons and tons of stuff. Every imaginable thing can sustain our attention, and everything, from the sacred heights of love to the dirty depths of sex, is part of the picture of what makes up creation and what makes up life. And love isn’t actually all that far from sex, is it. Life is a holy overabundance of tiny things, buttonholes and long noses included. The idea that some things are important and others aren’t is an absurdity; some of the greatest human joy is found in worthless projects and lazy conversations. The title is a red herring in this book about nothing in particular, just as any purported ‘meaning of life’ is a red herring in a creation full of silly, vulgar details. And that’s how a joyous, witty God wanted it.”

The book as a whole may be a bit of an uneven hodgepodge, but the overarching sense of a warm philosophy behind it all came across clearly throughout. At the same time I occasionally got the sense that I wouldn’t want to spend any social time with Sterne, whose self-amusement is tangible. But since I, too, was amused, that impression didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the book. Prior to reading this, I had read A Sentimental Journey, the work he began immediately after the final volume of Tristram and left incomplete at his death. I think it may actually be more successful in conveying a similar philosophical message, and a finer literary product as well. But Tristram is the more memorable, for sheer volume of comic invention if nothing else.

Reading Dickens, one frequently feels the thrill of being in the presence of bold, durable, archetype-creating characters. Sterne draws his characters much less efficiently and with some false steps, but by the end, Walter Shandy, Uncle Toby, and Corporal Trim are similarly vivid, charming little people. By the late scenes of Toby and Trim (such as the one in which Trim attempts to tell Toby the story of the King of Bohemia and his Seven Castles but never really gets past the title), I felt that thrill, the joy of watching characters who were so strong as to seem “famous,” for want of a better word. A bit like the pleasure of actually reading the conversations of Don Quixote and Sancho, or Holmes and Watson, or even watching Casablanca: that’s really them, you think, and they’re really doing that thing they do, in all its glory. That’s about the strongest praise I can think of for this kind of characterization.

The various famous “goodies” – the black page, the marble page, the blank page, the line diagrams of the narrative, etc. etc. – all these things are actually fun, when they arise. Knowing about them in advance, out of context, as I did, just detracts from their proper value within the text. Sure, maybe this is an early “modernist” novel, in that it’s full of gimmicks and talks about itself and doesn’t do what it says it’s going do. But, you know, so’s Don Quixote (a direct, acknowledged influence on Sterne), and if I was a real scholar I bet I could find a bunch of other examples. In the final analysis, “whimsically self-referential” (or “whimsically unconventional”) is just one of a thousand things a book can be. It’s a tool, a device that doesn’t carry with it any particular aesthetic value. Tristram is a charming book, a funny book, and a humane book. It happens to use the device of “whimsically self-referential” to excellent effect. Let’s be impressed by the effect rather than the device. I don’t think I have the stomach to read this (report on its predecessor to come), but I’m led to understand that it’s the most recent tick on the prison wall of books that are full of gimmicks because they believe that GIMMICKS ARE MAGIC. Gimmicks are not magic. Don’t be dissuaded from reading Tristram Shandy by overemphasis on the gimmickry. Sterne knew what he was doing.

Tristram Shandy is an early “modernist” novel in a more important sense of the word “modernist” – its catholic embrace of all things high and low as equally significant. It’s the forward-looking philosophy of the book that has kept it alive. People often ask how Thomas Jefferson (or some such person) would manage if transported into the present day. I think Laurence Sterne, for one, would manage quite well. He saw and commented on all the particulars of his time, but from a perspective well above and beyond that culture. I understand why Joyce took him as a model for Finnegans Wake.

No “original edition cover” for this one – you had to get your own binding, back then. Here’s the attractively bound set of first editions that’s been going at abebooks.com for just under $30,000.

And here’s the title page and frontispiece from volume one (7th edition, as you can see).

Several online editions are available. For some reason, internet folk seem to love Tristram Shandy. A lot of them talk about how it’s a sort of proto-hypertext (get over yourselves, people!). I personally think it’s because of the gimmicks. Anyway, I can’t imagine really reading this whole book off a screen. For what it’s worth, this one makes a point of maintaining all the original formatting quite strictly, as does this one (albeit with all kinds of annoying HTML navigation and “annotations”). This is of course just plain text. I read the Oxford edition and found the footnotes (and layout) extremely satisfying. Far superior to the Norton Critical edition, which I also glanced through.