Impromptu Holiday!

Surprise! Classes were cancelled today. Granted, I only had one, but it's still a good feeling. Earlier I meant to post a quote from Denise Levertov's "Relearning the Alphabet." Now seems like a good time. Here's the beginning:

A

Joy--a beginning. Anguish, ador.
To relearn in the ah! of knowing in unthinking
joy: the beloved stranger lives.
Sweep up anguish with a wing-tip,
brushing the ashes back to the fire's core.

B

To be. To love another only for being.

C

Clear, cool? Not those evasions. The seeing
that burns through, comes through to
the fire's core.

D

In the beginning was delight. A depth
stirred as one stirs fire unthinking.
Dark dark dark . And the blaze illumines
dream.

Vater

This afternoon I read Kafka's story "The Judgment," the one he wrote "at one sitting during the night of the 22nd-23rd, from ten o'clock at night to six o'clock in the morning." In his diary, he wrote, "Only in this way can writing be done, only with such coherence, with such a complete opening out of the body and the soul."

"The Judgment" follows Georg Bendemann as he abrubtly goes from seeming a successful businessman to being unveiled as a liar, "a devilish human being." He has been deceiving himself.

The revelation comes from Georg's aging father, so there are questions of power at issue. I write that and it sounds pedantic; in the story, it's pervasive and palpable. The father is a tyrant, his word absolute, his actions arbitrary. Like Kafka describes his own father in his unsent letter.

The father's pronouncements are shocking, an indictment of the son, but I hesitate in completely trusting them. In the "Letter to Father" Kafka writes that his father's view of his son is distorted, his words and actions manipulative. In the story, just as the son deceives himself, so the father could be deceiving the son, manipulating him to maintain control. And Georg's guilt is overwhelming. "The Judgment" left me sad and troubled: where does the one end and the other begin?

Another troubling aspect: the father yells at his son, "Do you think I didn't love you, I, from whom you are sprung?" And Georg's dying words: "Dear parents, I have always loved you, all the same." Love is a weapon in the first, a call of absolution and a cry of anguish in the second. In a general kind of way it reminds me of Proust: love is permeated with something other than itself.

Incidentally, today is my birthday. I am no longer legally beholden to my parents.

"He had burned his opus"

The short pieces in The Voice Imitator are disquieting. None is longer than a page. They could be called short stories, depending on how flexible one's definition of the short story is. The back copy gives a more precise definition: "parable-like anecdotes." Many feel more like mock-parables. A few have stuck in the back of my mind. One in particular, "Genius," is about the death of an Austrian thinker:

For decades, he wrote, he had pursued an idea and as actually able to realize and bring this idea -- in the nature of things a philosophical one -- to a conclusion in a moderately long work, but his powers had been completely devoured by the idea.

(Most of the pieces are not this dense; and this one reminds me strongly of Correction.)

This man is denied the appreciation, and finally decides to commit suicide. But before he does so, he does something that I find disturbing:

However, as he did not wish to betray his own character, he had burned his opus before he died, he had burned his life's work and actually reduced it to nothing within the space of a few minutes after taking decades to bring it to fruition, but he had not wanted to leave it to a posterity that was not worthy of it. The terrible idea that he, like so many of his fellows, would be appreciated only after his death and would thus be exploited and become famous was what had caused him to destroy what he had achieved [....] The city of Vienna [...] has lived since its founding on the works of its geniuses who have committed suicide; he was not minded to become another link in this chain of geniuses.

Granted, much of The Voice Imitator is disturbing in some way or another (and funny, too). But for me, the most disturbing pieces are ones like this, that don't deal directly with murder or madness (I guess that says something about me). Many are about more 'normal' people -- middle-class intellectuals, polite society, and so on -- and it is because they are so average that their thoughts and actions are so disturbing. But I digress.

In this one, it's the idea of burning your life's work that gets to me.

Kafka did burn some of his work, and Proust didn't publish his first novel. We have most of Kafka's writings because Max Brod did not burn them as Kafka instructed, and Proust's novel because a family member (his brother?) had it published in the 1950s. I don't want to get into the whole issue of whether those actions were right or wrong, but what if Kafka's wishes had been respected? What if his diaries, his novels, his short pieces had all been burned? The majority of me thinks it's better that they weren't, but another part wonders. I think literature would be the worse for it, for sure. But all the same, publishing his work was a violation....

(I wish I knew more about Kafka.)

Maybe it's because I am a part of that posterity that the idea of burning your work bothers me. Even with the writers who did publish, it's scary to speculate -- What if Proust had died before beginning In Search of Lost Time? If Virginia Woolf had succeeded in killing herself earlier? -- and so on. It also begs the question: how many great works will never be known, burned or not? What has been lost?

"Genius" is unsettling because it points to a precariousness in art. We call books "timeless," "classics," "for all ages," etc, but their existences aren't really as sturdy as all that. And their creations much less so.

I am still alive.

My reading hasn't been very coherent this week -- a lot of starting and stopping. I've been preoccupied by a short paper that was due this morning. It's been a while since I've written anything for a class, so the first paper I'd turned in wasn't quite up to par. When I got it back I realized it was too much like a blog entry -- very informal, and a zillion and one contractions. So the past few days were spent obsessing over the second paper. Once it was done: crash!

Actually, the experience with the paper made me realize that I need to edit more. Too often I hit the "Publish Post" button without thinking. Then I review what I've written and am embarassed. I'll do that from now on....after this post, that is.

I tried to begin another novel, but gave up after a few pages. It was excellent, but I'm unable to stick with it right now. I began Blanchot's The Space of Literature and am taking that very slowly.

When I finished Extinction I was in a sense relieved; I thought, Now I can try something new. I brought plenty of books with me, and I've acquired a few since moving in. So many possibilities.... and I still find myself returning to passages I'd marked in the familiar books. Swann's Way, The Great Fire of London, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Denise Levertov's Selected Poems. And a little while ago I started a collection of short pieces called The Voice Imitator by.... Thomas Bernhard.

Maybe tomorrow I'll be ready for a new author. I apologize for being so boring.

[Excerpts from The Voice Imitator can be found here. I really like "The Tables Turned."]

Thinking about Anna Karenina

When I’m between books I tend to find myself returning to those that I’ve already read. Today I’ve been thinking about Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and wondering why it was so significant for me.

It was not the first “serious” book I’d read, and I already considered myself an avid reader at that point. It didn’t radically change the way I lived (that would have been nice, given the health issues I had at the time).

A big part of it probably has to do with the fact that I had no concrete expectations of the book. I had – and still have, sometimes – a tendency to approach a book with a goal in mind. Usually the goal would be education, entertainment, or both. Tolstoy wasn’t the first author to thwart those goals. I had read The Plague and some of Simone de Beauvoir’s novels with the intention of learning about existentialism; I enjoyed them, but I don’t think I learned much. I’m sure I came to Anna Karenina expecting something, but I still can’t exactly say what. I think it was the mood I associated with what little of the novel I’d read before.

Tolstoy is known for a lot of things that I was vaguely aware of – for his social ideas, for his misogyny, for his characterization. Instead of trying to be the “active reader” that my English teachers tried to foster, I didn’t really think about those things. They faded into the background. The novel became an experience, and because of its length I was able to return to it repeatedly. I am sure that my chaotic health played a role in this -- Anna Karenina was something familiar I could return to when I needed it. If I had read it at another time, would it have been so significant for me? If it had been another book at that time, would the effect have been the same? Maybe. But since then, I’ve returned to the book and read parts of it, and the effect remains what it was. Maybe it had something to do with my letting the novel take control, rather than trying to pin it down and analyze and distill the “main ideas.”

I’ve read a few of Tolstoy’s shorter works since, but I am not really interested in tackling War and Peace. I think it would be a mistake to think that I could duplicate my love of Anna Karenina by reading the same author.

Thinking about Extinction was what really brought about this line of thought. There’s a need on the author’s part to write, but it’s not one sided; readers bring their own needs into the equation. And those sets of needs seem very similar to me.

Destruction/Creation

Last night I finished Thomas Bernhard’s Extinction. Of the three works of his that I’ve read, I found this one the most powerful.

The introduction to one Bernhard site describes the author’s “ur-story” as “the tale of a protagonist who, experiencing himself as a target of persecutory violence, seeks to displace this violence upon a surrogate.” The ur-story makes up the bones of Extinction, and surrogates include the German language, the country of Austria, and Murau’s (this particular protagonist) family (especially his mother).

Murau’s relationship to everyone else is more than ample fodder for psychoanalysis. And that has probably been done, and probably more than once. But what really strikes me about Extinction is that we get a glimpse of the reason for such violence, the necessity of it:

Time and again I have observed that when I am possessed by one of these dire moods, I seize upon all available persons one after another, and tear them apart, denigrate them, demolish everything about them, and denude them of more or less all their virtues so that I can rescue myself and breathe freely again. (Trans. David McLintock).

And it’s also the reason for writing in the first place. Destruction and creation – they melt into one another.

Murau tells us, “On occasion I transform this fanatical faith in exaggeration into an art, when it offers the only way out of my mental misery, my spiritual malaise.” (If only temporarily). Maybe that is why this book spoke to me the most – it exposes the rawness that went into the creative/destructive impulses. It exposes the creative and the destructive impulses themselves, and that those impulses are fundamental to existence. This is a book that was written from a fundamental necessity, however clichéd or trite that may sound. But reading Extinction left me with the feeling that it could not have been otherwise.

If you’re interested, you can read page 310 at The Gaping Void.

Art-Objects. Or Not.

This passage from one of my AOA readings struck me. (AOA stands for "Africa, Oceania, and the Americas" -- aka "The art of everyone else." It's an outdated term and approach.) It's from Cecelia Klein's "Objects Are Nice, But...", which deals with the ways in which traditional approaches to (Western) art are inapplicable to other cultures. She writes about how some art is not accepted as such because it comes directly from nature or from the body:

What keeps us from recognizing these sometimes heavily adorned and greatly revered dead bodies and body parts as "sculpture" is not their form or usuage, but the unacceptable nature of their substance. For in cases like these, as in so many instances of "significant" form throughout the "non-Western" world, the object literally partakes of the subject matter. [....] The boundaries between "art" and nature, object and subject, in other words, were perceived by these peoples as far more fluid and permeable than by Euro-Americans, and "significant" form was form that referenced the natural world in terms of that world's very substance. [....]

It is because we still endorse the old adage that "seeing is believing" that the object has attained such a prestigious place in our lives, and that art history has been charged with fetishizing it.

That's quite an indictment of art history at the end, but I think that the essential idea there deserves consideration. Is the art object overemphasized? I don't know that that's necessarily the case in contemporary times, but it seems to be when comparing Western and non-Western cultures. (Elsewhere Klein talk about how many of the latter's most 'significant' artworks were not imagistic; colonisers took objects that were actually less important and assigned them a new value.) The Conceptual art movement of the late 20th century was partly a response to the booming art market -- it tried to take the focus away from the commodifiable aspect. (In that sense it was a bit self-defeating, as the works were often purchased by museums and collectors....)

But "fetishizing"? I think it draws us back to that unresolvable question: What is art? Is it conceptual, is it aesthetic, is it experience, is it something else? I find myself agreeing with Klein in some sense, that "art objects" are overly emphasized. After all, if the history of art were to be truly inclusive, wouldn't it have to include the performing arts --music, theater -- as well? Music is certainly more of an aesthetic experience than anything else. You can record it and sell a CD or an MP3, but you can't truly objectify it.

So do we have these blinders on when we look at literature? What might we be missing. (Incidentally, I think this is also interesting to think about in terms of the whole e-text/hypertext/print wars. Periodically you see articles hailing the death or at least mortal illness of the printed book as object, which is bound up with anxiety as to what will replace it. Personally, I'm not threatened by the prospect of the e-book -- TV didn't kill print books, and photography didn't kill painting. In fact, the newer technology led the older into new directions.)

Towards the end of the article, Klein makes this very provocative statement:

The object of art history becomes a kind of blinder that permits only a narrow, necessarily distorted view that in turn can be -- and too often is -- used to characterize those [non-Western] peoples in terms of lack. [....] Since one of the original functions, if not object(ive)s, of art history was precisely to justify such denigration of conquered and colonized populations in order to facilitate their exploitation, I think that it is art history's moral as well as intellectual obligation to redefine its object. Art history needs to recognize, above all, that although objects are surely nice, they are not everything; they should never be the primary subject matter, the main objective of the discipline.

I know that's a lot to throw into one post. But it raises another question (or series of them, I guess) in the same vein as those I've been asking recently. Klein claims that art history has a moral obligation. I do not believe that art in general has such an obligation, but can the same be said of a discipline like history? The problem is, answering yes could go very well or very badly. In the best case scenario, it could mean a radical new understanding of the past and of ourselves; in the worst, it could mean that a privileged few get to choose what is important, what we remember, and what we forget -- all under the guise of 'moral obligation.' But I'm not entirely comfortable with saying no, either, even though I am uncomfortable with the 'moral' tag. For me, 'moral' implies 'subjective' -- but is it even possible to be objective?

Troublesome Things

My thinking's been a bit muddy lately, but hopefully it will be on track again soon. So I apologize in advance if this post is a little scatter-brained.

Yesterday, when I wrote about the selection from Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others, I wanted to include this aside:

(There is much humbug to be found, and ignored, in declarations made by some of the most admirable photographers of conscience.)

It's short and simple, but I couldn't make up my mind about how I felt about it. On the one hand, I wanted to say that a work of art should stand for itself, humbugs be damned. But I didn't feel right about leaving that as an unqualified absolute. So I tried to write more, and I wound up with well-meaning, though moralizing, comments that I don't really subscribe to.

Should a writer's personal or political ideas influence how we read his or her book? It would if we were looking at it in a biographical or critical way, then yes, but what about when assessing a novel or poem on its own value? I'm inclined to say no. And ideally it would make no difference, but how much does knowing distasteful facts influence one's reading?

I would that think I'd have a hard time picking up a book written by an anti-Semite or a Nazi. But if I look over at my shelf, I can see Celine's Death on the Installment Plan. Celine was a rabid anti-Semite. And really, there's a lot of negativity towards Jews in European and Russian literature (to put it mildly), and yet that's primarily what I read. And knowing that Andre Gide advocated pederasty in the later years of his life didn't stop me from acquiring The Immortalist.

What about a work by a murderer? Well, I like the paintings of Caravaggio, a man who is believed to have killed at least one person. But maybe the distance in time and the biographical uncertainty play a larger role there.

Some writers went crazy later in life; that gives me no pause.

And what about nonbiographical issues -- issues at work within a text? I have yet to find a strong female character in Philip Roth, yet this doesn't bother me all that much during a reading. On the other hand, I knew I really wasn't liking Slaughterhouse-Five when I found myself actively noticing how awful the women characters were. Speaking of Vonnegut, the anti-war ideas at work in that novel are not incompatible with my own, and yet that didn't sway the book in my favor.

It's strange -- I find myself thinking that I should judge works based on those 'humbugs.' I worry that I'm not critical enough. But, at least so far, I really haven't been able to in a significant way. I hope I can continue to keep those things separate from the works themselves.

Selections

I've been doing more reading for art history class than anything else this weekend. I dropped my (boring) literature class, and the difficulty of beginning a new language is bleeding into my reading of Bernhard. (I made the mistake of trying to read Extinction right after doing German audio exercises; I was too busy trying to sound out the proper nouns to notice what was actually going on. I do think, though, that English would be much better if it had a few umlauts...)

I had two readings for Tuesday's class: selections from James Elkins' The Object Stares Back and Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others. (This art class deals with representations of sacrifice). I had high hopes for Elkins given the title of his book, and he does have some excellent observations, but at times he can be syrupy. And it's distracting. Regardless, he makes many good points about seeing (rather than "just looking"). For one, he points out that seeing is not disinterested or objective. It is intimately bound up with desire and with possession. (Elkins compares shopping and art. Both involve the desire to possess, but the difference is that with art, one "can't complete the urge that the seeing starts.") For Elkins, there is really no such thing as objectivity -- it is all bound up in desire.

Furthermore, seeing can be violent, aggressive. It "is also controlling and objectifying and denigrating. In short, it is an act of violence and it creates pain." While this quality can be diluted, "it can never be eradicated." When I read this part of the passage, I had to wonder, does possessiveness imply violence and pain?

One also can't "just look" at an object, because the object is always in flux depending on its context or one's life; furthermore, there is no one viewer. The viewer is also in flux, "and what really takes place is a 'betweenness'" (he takes an idea from Heidegger) in which there is neither pure object nor pure self. Seeing dissolves what one is.

In the other excerpt, Sontag writes about how terrible images can also be beautiful (although photos are criticized for being too "aesthetic"). Some photographers would "correct morally" their photographs by making the subjectmatter "not spectacular. But," she goes on, "the spectacular is very much part of the religious narratives by which suffering, throughout most of Western history, has been understood." In that terribilita, she finds a kind of "challenging beauty."

Buyer Beware

After yesterday's disheartened post, I read a little more of Swan's Way and then skimmed the rest. The last 150 pages or so were largely devoted to Charles Haas and his life. And that's interesting in its own right -- I'll save it for another time -- but that isn't why I picked up the book in the first place. I was hoping for something about Swann, Proust's Swann, and Proust's novel.

At the very end, Raczymow reveals his motives for writing the book:

If Haas, so celebrated, so courted, so famous, could fall into anonymity, could fall into such terrifying oblivion, what about me, what about my name? I had wanted to bring him back from anonymity. For it was really this sense of anonymity that I refused to accept. [....] I had to write a book so that my name would endure, so that it was not attached only to this contingent being one might pass on the street or call on the phone, but to an object tht was clearly outside him, one that could be seen and touched without knowing who I was, something separate, and that would perhaps ensure, when I am no longer around, that I continue to live.

It's well meaning, and a nice sentiment, but I wish this paragraph had been the first one. I knew this wouldn't be an academic work, but all the same I was hoping that In Search of Lost Time would remain, if not the primary focus, then an important part of the book. As it is, I feel a little mislead.

Frustrations

I was enjoying Swan's Way, but suddenly it began to really, really irritate me. Raczymow is too quick to jump on Proust's 'inconsistencies.' He sees mistakes that do not exist. For instance:

The names of C and D miraculously came back to life so that others could help you understand you were mistaken, that there was really nothing so remarkable about the family.

(I've edited this so that it does not contain any spoilers).

Raczymow does two things with this that I don't like. First, he takes the 'you' literally, rather than as an informal way of saying 'one.' Proust uses 'you' many times throughout the novel, but I think he means it in a very general way, not in a Hey! YOU, reader! kind of way. But Raczymow's assumption sends him off on digressions about how illogical Proust is, about how he "occasionally treated his characters as if they were real people."

Second, he interprets the sentence to mean that the names C and D are evoked because the appear in In Search of Lost Time. I have no idea where that comes from. In the context of the novel, it makes perfect sense. F is the decendant of an old aristocratic family. She marries an obscure intellectual snob. Now one has to be reminded that she came from wealth and status. But then C and D, her petit bourgeois grandparents, are cited to show that there is "nothing so remarakble about the family" after all. Social snobbery (gee, was that important in In Search of Lost Time).

Raczymow is great at examining details, but when they are decontextualized like this, it all goes wrong.

And although he insists otherwise, there is an increasing amount of this conflation of fiction and life. Raczymow implies that although Proust said that Haas was just the starting point for Swann, he was dissimulating. At other times, he suggests that Swann is Proust himself in the frame of Haas; He "stuffs [Haas] with another substance that he borrows from someone close by, so to speak, someone he knows well and who appears as plausibly novelesque as the creature he has just killed--Proust himself." I do think that this is a very interesting point, and has truth to it. But then, the whole novel is "filled" with "Proust himself." But Swann -- for me, at least -- is a character, a fictional character in a work of literature, in his own right, not just an agglomeration of Haas and Proust. Swann and Haas are more tangled up together than they really should be.

Faults

FromRaczymow's Swan's Way:

(The work of art is not a sphere but only an approximation of one, just as the earth is, with its cracks, its crevices, and its "faults." Bataille says that desire arises when we catch sight of some secret and infintesimal disfigurement on the supposedly "perfect" body of a woman. The cracks, crevices, and faults in the work of art are what enable us to grasp it, appropriate it, penetrate it, realize that it is possible to do so and that the work of art will not resist, and will even ask to be penetrated.)

A Dante Question

I was looking over my schedule and I think that there's a chance I might drop my literature class rather than one of the art ones (assuming I get into the one I'm wait-listed for). Well, I'll have to wait until classes start to figure it all out, but in the event that I do, I'm wondering whether or not I should keep my copy of The Divine Comedy. The translator is Mandelbaum, and my question is this: does anyone know if this is a good translation, or if I should hold out for a better one?

'What we are made of'

From Extinction:

The tragedy of the would-be writer is that he continually resorts to anything that will prevent him from writing. A tragedy, no doubt, but at the same time a comedy--a perfect, perfidious comedy. [....]

We must produce a substantial account, not to say a long account, of what we emerged from, what we are made of, and what has determined our being for as long as we've lived. We may recoil from it for years, we may shrink from such an almost superhuman enterprise, but ultimately we have to settle about it and bring it to a conclusion.

Fall Preview

I just registered for my fall courses; I made it into all of the ones I wanted, except one (art history, for which I'm wait-listed). I will be taking:

Art History -- Either a colloquium on 'Scenes of Sacrifice' or, if I don't get into that, a survey of African, Oceanic, and South American art

Logic 100 -- It counts as math and philosophy!

German 100 -- Because all of the German literature courses are taught in German! I'm hoping to add another language next year.

Western Classics in Translation (English/CompLit): From Homer to Dante -- Or, how to justify more reading.

My advisor sent me to the bookstore right away to snatch up the used books (it didn't make much of a difference), so I already have the lineup for Western Classics class. The haul consists of The Illiad, plays by Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles, The Aeneid, and The Divine Comedy. Honestly, I am taking the class because I want to read that last one.

Hopefully, though, I'll still be able to make time for my own reading. What am I saying? Of course I will.

Swan and Hare

Yes, Swann and Haas have many unusual traits in common, which they share, moreover, with a handful of other people. But it would be unwise to confuse them. Not only would we be factually mistaken, we would misconstrue those very aesthetic principles we were trying so hard to promote.

This is how Swan's Way begins. (I am not far into it). The book is not an academic study; it is a very personal, idiosyncratic response to the character of Swann. Raczymow picks up on small details and tics, aspects that one might forget or dismiss as pure description. He looks at the real-life Haas (whose name means "hare" in German), and although he draws parallels between him and the character, he keeps them distinct from one another. (Interestingly, he points out that rather than using Haas to illuminate Swann, most people ascribe traits of Swann's to Haas, using fiction to inform life rather than vice versa). The Jockey Club also plays an important role (as it does in In Search of Lost Time); Raczymow is particularly interested in the tensions between Parisian society and Haas's Jewishness.

He draws a lot of observations that are not very flattering. For instance, he proclaims that for Proust, "everything that is Jewish is debased." That's too strong to my taste (or maybe I'm just defensive), but I think he's on to something when he writes that Swann's self-depricating humor is "the kind of self-reflexive anti-Semitic humor typical of the Belle Epoque, when Jews 'lightheartedly' internalized everything that was said about them." It's easy to imagine Proust absorbing this, as he had a mother of German-Jewish descent. And later, too, during the Dreyfus Affair.

But Raczymow believes that Proust was jealous of Haas's social successes, and that the emergence of Swann's "Jewishness" (during the Dreyfus Affair) is Proust's way of reducing Haas/Swann "to square one -- nonexistence." Swann signifies what Proust might have been, had he not written his novel: the socialite, the "spoiled, snobbish son of a Jewish mother with a German name." And thus, the decline of Swann is really a "relentless" attack "on himself." Proust was almost nothing more than a Swann or a Haas. Selbsthasse, self-hatred.

Raczymow (I'm uncomfortable typing that, as I have no idea how it sounds) also draws out the connection between being Jewish and being foreign:

Like an abscess it was the inevitable sign of some disorder: the tabooed German name. But why was a German name considered a pejorative? We know that the Guermantes had considerable German blood in them. But in the case of Swann, it was clear that German meant Jewish. As in Balzac.

He considers it a stroke of genius on Proust's part to have given Swann a British name to separate him from this (for a time).

The book is enjoyable so far; it is made up of short meditations, but I had to keep returning to them when writing this to better understand them. I also want to warn that the book contains plot spoilers. I am trying to skirt around them (hence the vagueness), but I want any prospective readers to be aware of that.

Dogged Themes

I keep thinking of a previous post of Richard's at The Existence Machine, where he mentions how some writers "return to common themes over their entire writing lives, themes that they explore and worry continuously" rather than telling new stories from book to book. It's sticking with me because I am reading Thomas Bernhard again, and the description fits him exactly. (In fact, when I went back to look at that post, I saw that Bernhard was the first example listed!)

Extinction, Bernhard's last novel, is true to the themes of Concrete and Correction. Again, we have an Austrian intellectual, the son of a land-owning family in decline, who (so far) is examining his love-hate relationship with his family and the way that his rejection of them shaped his life. There is much that resonates with the previous two, but it is in no way stale or old or boring. It still feels like a different book. It's lighter than Correction and there's more attention to craft and detail than in Concrete.

I don't think it's just a matter of style, though. You could take the same scenario and write it over and over in different ways (and this has been done at least once before) but the effect wouldn't be the same, because it's not just about the form. The content is not incidental -- it evolves from book to book. Rudolf, Roithamer, the narrator of Extinction -- they begin from roughly the same place (like Bernhard himself?) but they diverge in their responses and in the way they choose to live their lives.

I admire that dogged, lifelong pursuit of those 'common themes.'

Haas's Way

I had more or less written off my college's bookstore due to their pitiful fiction section -- and by 'section' I mean 'two bookcases with four shelves each' -- but I'm going to have to give it another shot. I was wandering down an aisle, looking for postcards and maybe room-snacks, when my eye caught the 'Literary Criticism' tag on the case facing the junk food (admittedly, it was only 2/3 of a shelf). Almost immediately I saw a slender book called Swan's Way by one Henri Raczymow. Me being me, I had to pick it up. I thought it might be another translation, but apparantly it's a meditation on the character Swann and the man he was more or less based on, Charles Haas. The book "evolves into an examination of the question of personal identity and posthumous survival. [....] Blurring the boundaries between life and fiction, Swan's Way leads the reader even deeper into the unresolved question of literary and personal character."

I think the book could go either way, and I'm a tad skeptical about the approach of conflating the real-life model with the literary character. But then, as I've been reading a lot of books that do that lately, I'm going to put that aside and keep an open mind.

A Few Notes on Bernhard

I managed to read Thomas Bernhard's Concrete this week despite all of the chaos. (It was very short, and it doesn't have the long, long sentences of Correction). Basically, the novel is made up of a man named Rudolf's notes on his family, his life, Austria, and his desire to begin his great work, a study of the composer Mendelssohn Bartholdy. That summary seems kind of dull, but the book is excellent. Maybe it's because it's less about the Rudolf's story than it is about his telling and retelling of it. A few thoughts:

--There is a striking difference between narration and Bernhard's method (nonnarration? does it have a name?). I didn't really think about it until I reached a section at the very end about a woman named Anna Hardtl. Rudolf met her years earlier, and he remembers her story. Although that story and its implications were interesting, I enjoyed that part much less, and at first I couldn't figure out why. At first I thought I was just tired, but when Bernhard switched back into the book's predominant style, I realized that that was it. That style -- Rudolf's notes (and their status as notes) -- are part of what so engaged me. I wonder if I would have been that conscious of it had Bernhard not made me question the narrative, or ask, "What's different?'

--Many books I've read delay the revelation of their 'truths' until the end, most likely for that cathartic impact. Not Bernhard. Each sentence is a reworking (clarification? correction? rewriting?) of one that preceeded it. The novel is this demolishing of that which came before.

--Unlike Correction, in which Roithamer commits suicide after the completion of his great work, Concrete's basis is in Rudolf's inability to even begin his life's work. But the possibility of that masterwork is what sustains Rudolf, the reason he continues to exist. As with Correction,
completion implies annihilation.

Miscellany from Room 326

My pre-orientation ended yesterday evening (actual orientation begins tomorrow), and although it was difficult at first, in the end I'm grateful that I did it. It helped the transition along in a significant way. Yesterday was also the day of the Big Move -- into the permanent housing. My room is....actually quite similar to the one I was in before, except it has bookshelves, a huge window, a larger closet, and maybe an additional foot or two of space. I've unpacked everything (which is a strange thought), so the room is much more habitable, although it still needs work. (Stark white, flaking walls, with some writing on them. A few posters or prints will work wonders).

Unpacking the books was fun. The final count: 32, including recent purchases. I consider that reasonable. And while I was unpacking, the books sat piled up on my desk, some upperclassmen wandered into my room and asked if they could be 'nosy' and look at them. They asked my favorite book, and I couldn't pick one. They were delighted that my answer was "Which one?" and not, "I don't have one, but my favorite TV show is...." And the woman next door to me covered her door in quotes from Pride and Prejudice. So I'm in good, bookish company.

And finally, I wanted to post the following. It's a sign near the main campus building, and it prettymuch speaks for itself: