Slightly Bluestocking

A New Start, Elsewhere

2008-02-07T00:37:00.000-05:00

I'm trying to get back into reading, writing, blogging. The new effort can be found here.

---AC

The Word

2006-11-30T12:19:00.000-05:00

Thanks to my lack of computer (read: limited internet time), I've been able to finish Goethe's Faust. I liked it a lot, and while I can't speak to the original, I felt that Walter Kaufmann did a fine job rendering the poetry into English. The lines have both rhythm and beauty without being full of archaisms. (Reading this made me think I should try Shakespeare, now that he isn't required).

Faust is an intellectual, a man who values action. And he is driven. In the prologue, the Devil (Mephistopheles) bets God that he can ensnare Faust's soul. The Lord replies that "A good man in his darkling aspiration / Remembers the right road throughout his quest." And while undoubtedly sometimes Faust recognizes his errors, he never really changes his course of action. To the end, he maintains his ambitions. [Skip this paragraph if you don't want a spoiler] So while I knew how the play ended, I was still very surprised that he was saved. The angels say, "Who ever strives with all his power, / We are allowed to save." Deus ex machina. But is it really because of Faust as a person, or because Mephisto can't be allowed to win? Please do comment if you can clarify the ending or point me towards some secondary sources.

[End spoiler]

There is a motif throughout Faust which I think will make for a nice segue into Mann's Doktor Faustus. Faust, as a man of action, often casts aspersions on 'the word.' At one point he opens a book and reads "In the beginning was the Word." He changes it in his 'translation' to "In the beginning was the Act." Faust is not really one to value art or aesthetics in and of themselves. Goethe sets up several exchanges to this effect. An excerpt:

Faust:
If you have anything to say,
why juggle words for a display?
Your glittering rhet'ric, subtly disciplined,
Which for mankind thin paper garlands weaves,
Is unwholesome as the foggy wind
That blows in autumn through the wilted leaves.

Wagner:
Oh God, art is forever,
And our life is brief.

In T.J. Reed's Thomas Mann: The Uses of Tradition, I read that Goethe, with Schiller, was a pioneer in aesthetics (drawing on Kant's influence). To paraphrase Reed (and this is from memory, sorry), they argued that art should be valued as an aesthetic creation, and not for its ability to deceive. Hardly a novel concept now, but at that time it was a challenge to the notion that art and literature had to be transparent 'windows' onto the world, that they were only worthwhile for their ability to depict life.

And interestingly, it is Faust himself who cannot see art's value. Wagner doesn't have a huge role, but Mephistopheles takes over, echoing the 'art is forever' dictum. He also says something that I found very surprising and very modern:

I lost much time on this accursed affliction,
Because a perfect contradiction
Intrigues not only fools but also sages.
[....]
Men usually believe, if only they hear words,
That there must also be some sort of meaning.

Faust never comes around, but as another spirit says, "The human being is, his life long, blind." Mann's Faust is himself an artist (a musician), so I am interested to see where he goes with this.

[And once again, I apologize for the lack of coherence. I'm just a bit stressed out.]

Decadence and Decline

2006-11-27T20:07:00.000-05:00

I've been meaning to post on Buddenbrooks since last week, but I've been experiencing difficulties with my laptop (it needs a new part). Now that I'm back from vacation, I have the school's computer lab at my disposal. Anyway....

I enjoyed the book very much. As I said before, it is very different from The Magic Mountain stylistically. Its scale is both grand and minute. The book spans four generations, so it covers a lot plot-wise. But Mann zooms in on certain characters and fleshes them out in such a way that Buddenbrooks does not feel like a history. The decline is more intimate, more immediate. I read in The Uses of Tradition that Mann began with the end -- the last Buddenbrook -- and worked backwards, but as he did, he began to get sidetracked by other characters and other ideas. So what began as an end, a decline into 'artistic decadence,' in fact generated the entire family. For instance, much of the book deals with Tony Buddenbrook's ill-fated marriages which, even though the book was conceived around two of the male characters -- her brother Thomas and his son Hanno (Johann).

I would have had no idea that Hanno was the starting point for the novel had I read only the novel because the other characters dominate. The mood definitely changes when he is born, though; things become much more melancholy and self-reflective. A part of that whole idea of the linking of artistic sensibility, decadence, and decline.

And despite Mann's reputation for density, Buddenbrooks was very funny. During the uprisings of 1848, the consul Buddenbrook goes outside and sees that the gas lamps have not been lit even though it is evening. That makes him more indignant than anything else. "Really," he says, "that's taking the revolution too far!"

Much as I liked Buddenbrooks, though, I am very interested to see what Mann did later in his career, in his less 'realistic' works. I brought Doctor Faustus back with me (as well as Goethe's play, which I want to read first), but I doubt I'll get to it before the end of the semester. I've begun Goethe's Faust, but lately Gathering Evidence has been calling my name, so I might return to Thomas Bernhard. Which is perfectly justifiable, since I don't get my computer back until Wednesday....

Buddenbrooks

2006-11-19T14:31:00.000-05:00

Since my last post, I've begun reading Buddenbrooks. It's strange, considering how scattered my reading has been over the past month or so, but I'm moving through it very quickly. I'm about 2/3 of the way done. (Some of my other work is languishing, I'll admit.)

Buddenbrooks is strikingly different from The Magic Mountain, and even from Death in Venice. This is his first novel (published at twenty-five!), and, as Bloglily commented below, it is much more in the tradition of the 19th-century novel. It does not have that same exquisite slowness as The Magic Mountain. It is made up sketches (sort of) of the Buddenbrook family at certain crucial moments in their history (understandable, given that this novel spans most of the 1800s), and this approach makes it a much faster read.

I've also checked out Thomas Mann: The Uses of Tradition (T.J. Reed) from the library; Reed has a whole chapter on Buddenbrooks and "The Making of a Novelist," which I plan to start over Thanksgiving. I think this will help compensate for my lack of knowledge of German literature. (Especially as I've read that some of Mann's later works draw very heavily on Goethe).

I'll have more to write about Buddenbrooks later. Right now I should get back to studying. "Should" being the operative word there.....

Returning

2006-11-07T19:03:00.000-05:00

My reading has been disjointed these past few weeks. I started novels, then stopped. Yesterday was really the first time I sat down and read as I usually do. It was a beautiful day, so I sat outside with Death in Venice for an hour. And then I finished it today.

I'd read it before, but it's one of those that only gets better with rereading. And while I
remembered the basic plot, most of it felt new. Details and characters took on new significance in light of the outcome.

This time around, I read Michael Henry Heim's more recent translation. It's been a few years since I read the other one, so I didn't see much difference. (Well, I didn't remember the language being quite so flowery the last time around. I looked up the other version online and this one is indeed a bit more overblown. Not sure how well that reflects the original.) In the introduction to this version, Michael Cunningham waxes rhapsodic: "Here we have an Aschenbach who is harder to dismiss, whose fate is larger and nobler, if not exactly more comforting." That's a lot to put on a translation. And I'm not inclined to find Aschenbach's fate "noble." His is passionate, infatuated with beauty (which may itself perhaps be "noble"), but his actions are not. Isn't that what makes him so "hard to dismiss" in the first place? Why do we need to turn him into a hero in order to enjoy the book?

As usual, Mann's short (well...) fiction left me wanting more. I went over to the library to read some essays on Mann, but it wasn't the same. Like Dorothy, I may need to get my hands on Buddenbrooks soon.....

More to follow....

2006-11-07T18:58:00.000-05:00

From Death in Venice:

It is surely as well that the world knows only a beautiful work itself and not its origins, the conditions under which it comes into being, for if people had knowledge of the sourcesfrom which the artist derives his inspiration they would oftentimes be confused and alarmed and thus vitiate the effects the artist had achieved. [....]

For how can a man be worthy as an educator if he has a natural, inborn, incorrigible penchant for the abyss? Much as we renounce it and seek dignity, we are drawn to it.

On Stevens

2006-10-22T10:29:00.000-05:00

Last night, in my disjointed way, I read a few poems of Wallace Stevens' (my first). I did not read many, but instead read those few through several times, trying to wrap my mind around them. Those that I've read remind me a bit of Rilke.

From "The Motive for Metaphor:"

The obscure moon lighting an obscure world
Of things that would never be quite expressed,
Where you yourself were never quite yourself
And did not want nor have to be,

Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being

I love those lines. The more I read them, the more they remind me of reading, of writing. Things never quite expressed -- and never quite grasped. The writer partially expressing, the reader partially understanding, and yet both finding something there. Finding something here.

Scary Movie

2006-10-22T09:15:00.000-05:00

Halloween is almost here -- how did that happen? The turning leaves should have been a clue, but it really didn't hit me until yesterday. I passed by a house with extensive decorations and commented that it was a bit early to be preparing for Halloween. Then I realized that that was a stupid thing to say. The weather is also shocking. It's in the 30s and 40s during the day -- I have to start adapting. And wearing gloves.

I love autumn. When I was younger, I loved Halloween because, in addition to dressing up, it was an excuse to watch scary movies. My dad didn't especially want me to because he worried that they'd give me nightmares (he was generally right, too). As a compromise, he let me rent the original versions of the classic horror movies -- Dracula, The Mummy, Frankenstein. I still haven't seen most of the famous ones -- Friday the 13th, Halloween, The Exorcist, Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But neither group strikes me as particularly frightening. The latter (in their modern incarnations, at least) are based on the grotesque, on shock value. Gore correctly synched with the appropriate soundtrack. You jump in your seat at the loud music. But is that the same thing as being scared? Surpirsed, sure. But scared?

I have a tendency to overanalyze scary movies. I think it stems from that early tendency for nightmares. I'd always ask myself, Is this scary? and try to figure out why a movie (or story) bothered me; it was a way of disarming the film, of removing its power. I still wonder -- what is it that terrifies? I still am not sure. But terror is not synonymous with the grotesque, or with shock.

The one film that I remember being genuinely terrified by is not a horror movie. It has a happy ending. It's a musical. What's this strange exception? The Wizard of Oz. That's right. Near the end, Dorothy has been captured by the Wicked Witch and is locked up in her castle. The Witch places an hourglass on the table and says, This is how long you have left to live. When this runs out, you die. I took that literarlly. It's not just that you're going to die -- it's that you know exactly how much time is left. And you have to watch as time runs out. All you can do is wait.

Of course, Dorothy gets her deus ex machina, the Witch her comeuppance. (My brother had to reassure me of this before I would come out of the bathroom and watch the rest). But that still remains one of the only truly horrific scenarios I can imagine: knowing that death is coming, and being powerless do anything but wait.

Which isn't a problem, unless you're human.

How's My Studying?

2006-10-15T23:33:00.000-05:00

Here is the time for the sayable, here is its homeland.
Speak and bear witness. More than ever
the Things that we might experience are vanishing, for
what crowds them out and replaces them is an imageless act.
---Rilke, Ninth Elegy

I've been reading the Duino Elegies most nights before going to sleep. I worked my way through them slowly. It might has well have been for the first time -- except for a few lines, I didn't remember much. My edition is bilingual, and every so often I'd flick my eyes to the left-hand side and scan for familiar words. Not many of them, but some.

I am in a strange place with my reading. I find myself reluctant to start anything new, particularly anything long. I've been reading through books I've read before, opening at random and just following a few lines. Or looking for marked passages. I've been meaning to start Independence Day for a week now, and I can never do it. Instead, I page through Rilke, Franzen, Kafka, Bernhard, Roubaud, Proust.

And I am in a strange place with my academic work. I feel I don't study enough, don't work hard enough. It's strange to have so many free hours. I probably shouldn't. According to my wall calendar, I am supposed to have a working thesis/hypothesis for one paper and a topic for another by tonight. I told myself that in order to compensate for the .... well, slowness of campus life that I'd throw myself into academics, but so far that hasn't happened. I'm not a hard worker.

I need a book with a tone to match my current state. Starting something new carries the prospect of failure, of wasted time, but really there's nothing to lose. And at the same time, I can't understand what's stopping me from finding solace in the books I already love

Anyway, that research topic....

Ae, well.

2006-10-11T12:19:00.000-05:00

At the start of Art Matters, Peter de Bolla acknowledges the trickiness of defining the word “aesthetic.” He tries to spell out his meaning of the word from the outset:

What distinguishes affective or aesthetic experiences from others is the fact that they are occasioned by encounters with artworks. This proposes a mutual definition, so that what elicits aesthetic experience is an artwork and an artwork is defined as an object that produces aesthetic experience.

I consented to this definition as necessary to the rest of the book and moved on. Later, though, I felt forced to withdraw that consent.

De Bolla discusses artworks—painting, music, poetry—in such a variety of terms and interpretations that I could no longer figure out what the word “aesthetic” meant. He talks about enlightenment and knowing with Wordsworth, interpretation and intellectualism with Gould, and a plethora of other things, which began to render the a-word meaningless.

In the conclusion de Bolla returns to the theoretical underpinnings of the Introduction:

An aesthetic experience is made out of its own singularity. [….] Once again the paradox of the aesthetic raises its head. The aesthetic is both grounded and not grounded in the conceptual, both singular and universal, evaluative and descriptive. But I do not regard these difficulties and paradoxes as anything other than attempts to delimit the distinctiveness of the category of the aesthetic. It is precisely these paradoxes and difficulties that need further exploration and elaboration.

This, six pages from the end of the book. (And yes, he italicizes every “aesthetic” throughout). Delimit something that has only the vaguest of premises to begin with? I guess I just don’t see how this followed from what he had been doing before. It’s probably more due to confusion and lack of education on my part, to be honest, but it made for slow, dense reading. De Bolla’s analyses of his chosen artworks were fascinating, but I am still in the dark when it comes to aesthetics and forging my own responses to my own aesthetic experiences.

Hand in Hand

2006-10-11T10:37:00.000-05:00

From Art Matters:

Thus to a greater degree than with the sister activities of listening and looking, reading is an interventionist activity: whether we like it or not, reading necessarily encompasses the making of meaning. Though it might seem logical to read a literary text before attending to an aesthetic response to it, in fact, this is impossible given that the reading and the response are interactive; that is, one develops in the shadow and in step with the other. An exploration of affective experiences of texts, therefore, must go hand in hand with the production or presentation of a "reading" or interpretation.

More Than Feeling: On Art Matters

2006-10-10T14:08:00.000-05:00

I’ve just finished the chapter of Art Matters dealing with Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis. (The book has been slow going, as I’ve been occupying myself with other things; I also went away for the weekend and didn’t bring it with me). De Bolla gives a very detailed account of how to approach that work. “Newman’s canvases,” he writes, “required us to learn how to become comfortable with the notion that we must move from an initial blindness in the face of this art toward insight. We must work with out ‘mutism,’ not against it.” (Although becoming “comfortable” with it seems to defeat the purpose). Usually we ask, What does the painting represent? What does it mean? Instead, he tells us, we should be asking, What does this painting know?

De Bolla discusses the qualities of the work, compares it with others, weaves in Newman’s own statements and writings. I was a little puzzled. I couldn’t figure out how this was a specifically aesthetic approach or how it was applicable to anything but Vir Heroicus Sublimis. The discourse seemed to spring not only from experience, but from detailed research and study; odd, given the fact that he writes that knowing such things “is not a prerequisite of an aesthetic encounter. Very often, in fact, knowledge of this kind may block or prevent an affective experience, stifle or stunt the emergence of the art’s low, whispering voice.” How, I kept asking, is this approach any different?

In the end, though, he reveals his motives: this “intellectual” approach is an exercised designed to get one away from putting too much emphasis on feeling. (So often we judge art so much on gut emotional reaction). Feeling is only a “side-effect” of the aesthetic response:

I want to stress that “feeling” is not the only material I encounter there. Indeed, my affective or aesthetic experience is held in a more rarefied atmosphere than feeling, between the emotive sensation and cognition. I ask myself the question of knowing because by doing so I turn attention away from the purely sensate. And that question of knowing appears to me as a quality of the work itself.

Being moved is an entirely valid aspect of an experience, but not the only one. There’s nothing wrong with feeling; we can consider an art on other terms and still be moved. But we have to be prepared to look for more.

Vocabulary Matters

2006-10-04T11:10:00.000-05:00

I've just begun a book by Peter de Bolla called Art Matters. It is essentially de Bolla's attempt to create a vocabulary for describing an aesthetic experience that would otherwise strike one dumb. By taking a closer look at three works by Barnett Newman, Glenn Gould, and Wordsworth, he sets out to describe what it is to be moved by a work of art. No small feat!

Hopefully, this will benefit my blogging so that I'm not always writing, "I don't know what to say about X" (a common response dubbed "mutism" in the book).

This is from the Introduction, where de Bolla summarizes various approaches to art:

In the philosopher Morris Weitz's term, art is an "open concept"--it must accomodate the permanent possibility of change, expansion, or novelty. Thus if one gives up the obsession with the need to answer the question "What is art?" -- that is, the insistence that the concept of "art" be a prerequisite for affective experience -- one is able to see that art is allowed extraordinary diversity in form, structure, and representational content. And this includes its own self-interrogation.

Whether or not de Bolla succeeds in what he's trying to do, I'm looking forward to the endeavor.

Eerie Proceedings

2006-10-03T17:15:00.000-05:00

I've spent the past week reading more Kafka. Rather than read more short fiction I opted for The Trial, which I'd so far only read partially.

The first third of the novel was littered with marginalia circa 2002. Very embarrassing marginalia. Or maybe it was from my second partial reading of the novel the following year (I only made it a little bit farther that time). Either way, I was clearly influenced by the back copy and other random things I'd heard about Kafka's "prescience" (ie, how The Trial anticipates totalitarianism, the existentialist movement, and so on). Luckily, though, those scribbles were written in pencil, so I read with an eraser at close at hand. I'm trying not to think about what my opinion of myself as a reader in 2006 will be when I'm looking back from, say, 2010.

The Trial has the same disorienting, unsettling feeling as "The Judgment." SLB was kind enough to point out that "The Judgment" is key to Kafka's other works. Many of the same themes are at work, including the same ambiguity regarding guilt and innocence, if those terms are even valid. As the prison chaplain tells Joseph K., "The verdict is not suddenly arrived at; the proceedings only gradually merge into the verdict."

To quote the same character, "The right perception of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other. [....] [I]t is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary." I don't mean to imply that "anything goes," but the book seems unusually open, in the sense that it can be read in several ways. And while many of those readings might be "true," that openness is a necessary component of the novel. There is no revelation, no explanation. We are free to read it as we choose—and as with Joseph K., there’s something disturbing in that freedom.

Impromptu Holiday!

2006-09-26T07:20:00.000-05:00

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

2006-09-25T21:46:00.000-05:00

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"

2006-09-22T15:25:00.000-05:00

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.

2006-09-21T17:20:00.000-05:00

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

2006-09-17T11:36:00.000-05:00

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

2006-09-16T12:02:00.000-05:00

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.

2006-09-12T20:50:00.000-05:00

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

2006-09-10T23:34:00.000-05:00

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

2006-09-10T22:23:00.000-05:00

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

2006-09-07T13:05:00.000-05:00

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

2006-09-06T11:50:00.000-05:00

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.