Ugh
Some days you just feel like sitting in bed and listening to Wagner/Mahler at insensitive levels.
Ah well.
Starting moving again on my thesis--I've been working on my annotated bibliography for the past two days and I wrote a draft of my thesis proposal. Maybe I'll post that.
Money and Genre
I believe that it is in Audre Lorde's essay "Poetry Is Not a Luxury" that she talks about the connection between class, or more basically money, and the type of literary medium or genre one can work in. Poetry (and to a lesser extent, essays), which can be worked at in odd hours and with limited means much more easily than can a novel, tend to be the chosen forms of expression of economically disadvantaged people.
What's interesting (to me at least) is how this division is inverted for the mass consumption of literature—mass in the sense of one person amassing a relatively decent-sized library, not in the sense of many people doing something simultaneously.
If one is a serious poetry reader, it is, I think, absolutely necessary to have one's poetry in hand for frequent reference. The serious reader of novels, however, can largely proceed in her pursuit borrowing most things from the library. One does not need to be continually refreshed by reviewing novels as one really must to be a proper reader of poetry.
I am finding this out as I am trying to educate myself in 20th C. Am. Poetry through a devoted ransacking of my local (home) library and now Baker. I cannot possibly remember very many of these poems without having direct and personal access to them, whereas I find it very easy to pursue some sort of independent education in the 20th C. British novel merely by getting them from the library and returning them at the end of the book.
To make a long entry short, I need to start buying more poetry.
Arendt
I'm taking a fantastic class this term, titled "European Jewish Intellectuals." We're reading Arendt, Derrida, Benjamin, Adorno, and Levinas over the course of the term—mostly Arendt, Derrida and Benjamin. Actually, it's a
ton of Derrida, though mostly his later, very Levinasian, religio-political stuff.
Anyway, our first reading assignment is Arendt's dissertation on Rahel Varnhagen, the "salon Jew" who was instrumental in publicizing Goethe or something, and two essays—What Remains? and What is Freedom? The latter essay is stunning, quietly revolutionary, almost.
Rejecting the long-established tradition of situating freedom and its opposite in the self, in the will, Arendt posits freedom as simply an attribute of action. Through a complex arithmetic that I cannot entirely parse, Arendt manages to isolate the potential of virtuosity in action from the will and from judgment and locates freedom as, I think, the capacity to be a virtuoso in action, particularly in political action. The capacity to begin something, to overturn what is always an infinite improbability by beginning something, is what it means to be free. Locating freedom in the sovereignty of the personal will is politically sterile, as freedom of action and sovereignty are not in any way compatible. I need to make sure I'm understanding this aright when we discuss it in class, but I believe this is essentially her point.
This view of freedom and its uncoupling from the will could be of enormous use in looking at Bellow's characters and their problems with women. Many, if not all, seem to feel trapped—unfree to pursue their academic/philosophical path—because of the weakness (or strength) of their will toward women. How much of that feeling may be dissolved or ignored if one applies Arendt's ideas of freedom and sovereignty, I do not know, but it would certainly be quite interesting to explore that further.
Dammit
My horse in the Man Booker Prize race—Black Swan Green—
is out of the running. It didn't make it to the shortlist.
Edward St. Aubyn's
Mother's Milk did, however. I've been told—personally—by Zadie Smith that I should read it. (She spoke at Butler College in Indianapolis, and I went to see her. We had a nice chat about Forster as she signed my dog-eared copy of
White Teeth.)
This just about ruined my day
Slate tells me "
Tall people earn more because they're smarter."
Bollocks.
Bellow is quite conscious of height in all his novels. It plays a significant role in Sammler, and Augie looks up to a few people (I forget which) because of their height. Herzog, I think, has a brother who is taller than he, or something. And I think he depicts Bloom/Ravelstein as being tall, which I guess he was.Anyway, height=grandeur=virility for Bellow. Blech.
Black Swan Green -- *not a Saul Bellow Post*
David Mitchell's Black Swan Green is, according to some British bookie, the odds-on favorite to win this year's Man-Booker Prize (longlist and article
here), a fact which requires me to read it.
I read Mitchell's previous novel, Cloud Atlas, and really enjoyed it (with some minor stylistic and philosophical quibbles), so I figured reading BSG wouldn't be too onerous a task. Once again, I felt Mitchell suffers from a few rather annoying flaws (the strings are all too visible throughout most of the novel, and many passages seem like ideas for dream sequences that Mitchell said, well why the hell not, and then kept in as actual plot), but somehow it repeatedly manages to get me to forgive him entirely and appreciate his dubiously purposeful devices and hokey minor touches.
This eager forgiveness is due in part, no doubt, to the sense of surprise I felt throughout much of the novel—surprise that Mitchell, whose arch artificiality made Cloud Atlas such a delight, could develop, in the space of one novel, a deeply sensitive understanding of a thing so complex and bewildering as a child witnessing the decay of his parents' marriage. Mitchell displays a heartbreakingly gentle touch in sketching the effects on a child of parents quarreling and deceiving one another. I suppose every couple does their quarreling and deceiving differently, but to my mind, Mitchell gets all of it alarmingly right--the smugly Pyrrhic nature of every resolution to every fight, the strategizing and counter-strategizing, the mixed and helpless reactions of the children, the vague feeling of slow attrition that lingers over dinners and conversations. Philip Larkin wrote memorably, "They fuck you up, your mom and dad," but Mitchell is able, in many very different instances, to bring that flippant truth to life.
Without giving much of the end away (troubled marriages always end in divorce in books or movies, unless one of the parents dies first), one of the things that struck me was the pervasive sense of nebulous failure that occluded all communications within the family. Kids are stuck in a very odd place during a divorce: there is a sense that, because they are the main product of a failed marriage, they must share in the failure, a feeling which normally is accompanied by guilt for being unable to escape from that failure, or, in its more extreme (though by no means uncommon) form, for being unable to prevent that failure, and at the very most, for being actually responsible for the failure. However, the really terrifying part of the whole process is the stammering ineptitude of everyone involved—no one seems to have any control except the gossips and the lawyers. Not only that, but events and parents seem to conspire to make all children, it seems, feel both displaced and over-claimed, cast off and fought over, rejected and demanded.
The Squid and the Whale did a fine job of portraying the inner workings of a divorce, but Black Swan Green may be even more effective at doing so, principally because it leaves so much out. The Squid and the Whale is almost a documentary of a divorce; it takes care to allow the viewer to construct a coherent and unified narrative of the action. But divorces don't seem coherent or unified in the slightest, at least not while they're happening or in the next few (many?) years after them. Loads of things pass right by you without registering while it's going on, and while you could go back and reconstruct the order and typology of those things, it certainly doesn't occur to you to do so. Parents and siblings become ciphers; their personalities become less definite, and not more so, as I feel was the case with Squid & the Whale. In BSG, Mitchell traces this fuzziness perfectly—even the first-person narrator, Jason, dissolves a little bit as a personality when the shit hits the fan and his father moves out.
This is a very hard book, but a very good one. It's not challenging, but it does ask for some emotional involvement. I suppose that was rather easy for me; identifying with Jason was not difficult, and was, moreover, rather poignant. I read most of the novel sitting in my car in vacant parking lots; the fallout of my parents' own divorce still occasionally blows up and around me and I feel I can be in neither house. Richmond doesn't have many coffehouses, and even those are closed on Labor Day. Limited options, always.
Thanatopsis
Just finished Mr. Sammler's Planet this morning. It occurs to me, in reading it, that Bellow is one of a string of authors, most of them influenced by some amalgam of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, and Spengler, whose main obsession seems to me to be
thanatos, the death-drive, particularly in regards to Western culture/Civilization.
I'm trying to draw up a list of other authors who are also in this vein. For future reference (mine, mostly), here's the list I've compiled thus far:
Celine
Houellebecq
Henry Miller
David Mitchell
Ortega y Gasset
HG Wells
Mann (present as an obsession, but normally {?} resisted)
Dos Passos
DeLillo
Pynchon
Cormac McCarthy
Anthony Burgess
Walker Percy
Martin Amis
Christopher Isherwood(?)
WS Burroughs
Kubrick
An interesting position occurs within the science fiction genre, where classical thanatos is often transferred into a desire for a simple switch from corporeal to digital or mechanical existence. I would venture to suggest that nearly all science fiction subsists on this premise and the attendant fear of its successful completion.
Moving a little further, it is not difficult to tie in all the writing about gender and these impulses in science fiction literature. Haraway will, of course, be important here, as well as the gender-based critiques of cyberpunk.
Advancing one more (large) step, the gendered aspects of any eschatology—personal, cultural, universal—will probably be of immense importance to my thesis. Sammler is of an eschatological mind, even post-eschatological, if that is possible. Herzog also is, in a qualified way.
It is becoming more clear to me that Augie March will not be useful to my thesis as a main text. I think it will come in handy as a counterpoint, but the introduction of it as a main text will require me to focus my thesis as a developmental account of Bellow's protagonists and their attitudes toward women. I'd rather skip the dynamics and try to capture Bellow statically, in the mostly homogenous group of protagonists that appear in his later novels —Herzog, Sammler, Citrine, Corde, even Chick from Ravelstein. Henderson likewise is probably out as a main text, though it also will provide some interesting points for support.
The dynamics for the paper will come from the fact that women, for Bellow as for everyone else on the above list (I think), act as the motivating force both for eros and thanatos in men. These drives are not inherent (?) but exist as a function of relations with women. Or perhaps, through women--that women mediate between men and the vast ocean of undifferentiated Will, that women act as brokers of the Will to Power for men.
My personal feelings about this is that it's heteronormative, androcentric bullshit. But I think Bellow began to see that in Ravelstein, when Allan Bloom's homosexuality caused him to narratively re-evaluate or at least qualify this Schopenhauer/Nietzsche/Spengler line of thought.
However, speaking of Spengler, Bellow seems rather obsessed with the orientalism of the Jews that derives from Spengler's classification of Jews as Magians and Europeans as Faustians or whatever. Magians, and the Orient in general, are of course feminized by the West, and I think this probably upset Bellow, as Jews would therefore stand beside women as intermediaries of the Faustian Will to Power that Europeans (in Spengler's system) have an unqualified right to claim and hold. Bellow's position is therefore enormously unstable and, therefore, enormously interesting.
just for future reference
While at home, I've been reading a great deal of poetry—Rilke, Roethke, Lowell, Collins, Ted Hughes, Mallarme, Strand, and some others. I figure it would be good to keep some kind of record of which poems I particularly liked. I made lists of all of the above, but now can only find my lists for Roethke and Hughes. Ah well.
Hughes (Birthday Letters):
The Tender Place
The Shot
18 Rugby Street (I really liked this one)
Fidelity
Fate Playing
Your Paris
You Hated Spain
Moonwalk
The Blue Flannel Suit
9 Willow Street
59th Bear
Black Coat
The Lodger
Apprehensions
The Bee God
The Hands
Roethke (Collected Poems):
The Waking (of course)
His Foreboding
The Abyss
The Moment
In a Dark Time
The Motion
Infirmity
The Decision
The Far Field
Meditation at Oyster River
Maybe I'll find my list for Lowell at least.
Ah--here it is:
The Flaw
Waking in the Blue
Memories of West Street and Lepke
Man and Wife
Odysseus & Circe
Realities
The Withdrawal
Wellesley Free
To Frank Parker
Home
Shadow
Notice
Shifting Colors
Unwanted
The Downlook
Epilogue
Arethusa to Lycotas
George III
