Let the American quality, the dream
Of a land where men shall work their destiny
Deeply as they will, give you the power
To realize with proud and reverent heart
The strange identity of man as man
And fling it up against the dark of time
Where it may loom forever as the bright
Image of godhead in the simple man
That now has risen from this American earth
And shall but with the bitter end of things
Go back again into the humble earth . . .
— Paul Engle, America Remembers
Via a comment on Ann Althouse’s blog, I skipped over today to this review in the London Times of an essay titled Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus (How to discuss books that one hasn’t read), which was written by one Pierre Bayard, who is a professor of French literature at the University of Paris VIII. And also (writes the reviewer, Adrian Tahourdin) a “practising psychoanalyst.” How beautifully French.
Bayard’s droll conceit includes a description of the four categories into which he places books:
“LI” is livres inconnus (books he is unfamiliar with); “LP” livres parcourus (books glanced at); “LE” livres dont jai entendu parler (books he has heard discussed) and LO les livres que jai oubli (books he has read but forgotten).
Tahourdin next recounts that James Joyce’s Ulysses falls into the category LE.
[Bayard] claims not to have read the novel, but he can place it within its literary context, knows that it is in a sense a reprise of the Odyssey, that it follows the ebb and flow of consciousness, and that it takes place in Dublin over the course of a single day. When teaching he makes frequent and unflinching references to Joyce.
I suppose we should delight in his honesty.
I also wonder . . . hmmmm . . . what do his students think?
I’m afraid I can’t relate. Having attended a modest state college, I’m reasonable certain that my lit professors had actually taken the trouble to read the books to which they had the habit of making “frequent and unflinching references.” An alarming lack of pretension, I agree. But I forgive them.
Another thought also occurs to me. What does it say about a literary novel when People Who Read Serious Books can sum it up in a single sentence — sum it up as an idea — without even having to read it — and then discuss it, as that idea, amongst themselves?
Where are its roots?
Michael Blowhard wrote this, a couple of days ago, in a post about mystery writer Elizabeth George:
When you pull an artform out of the earth it grows from, even if you do so with the best or the loftiest of intentions, it’s likely to whither and then die.
I’m not sure we can accuse Joyce of yanking literature out of the earth — I think he was just marchin’ to the beat of his own drunken Irish drummer — but in the end he didn’t need to even if he’d wanted — he has the Bayards of the world to do it for him . . .
What I’ve been doing instead of blogging :-)
(besides working of course! my day job has been pumping writing assignments to me like an out-of-control gadget in an I Love Lucy bit)
is reading.
One book I’ve just about finished now is Shakespeare: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd, and a couple nights ago got to the chapter covering the period where Shakespeare was writing Coriolanus. One of the themes Ackroyd explores is Shakespeare’s use of contemporary political events in his drama; in Coriolanus, there are parallels between the events of the play and the 1607 Midland uprising by English peasants against the landed gentry. Shakespeare displays an empathy with his characters; for instance, he portrays his rioting Roman citizens as motivated by imminent starvation. Nonetheless, notes Ackroyd, Shakespeare didn’t take a political position in the play. Instead, he “displaced and reordered” the events of his own day “in an immense act of creative endeavor.”
Everything is changed. It is not a question of impartiality, or of refusing to take sides. It is a natural and instinctive process of the imagination. It is not a matter of determining where Shakespeare’s sympathies lie, weighing up the relative merits of the people and the senatorial aristocracy. It is a question of recognising that Shakespeare had no sympathies at all. There is no need to ‘take sides’ when the characters are doing it for you.
To take this a step further, consider Norman Holmes Pearson and W.H. Auden’s introduction to Viking’s The Portable Romantic Poets, in which they write:
Consciousness cannot divide its donnes into the true and the false, the good and the evil; it can only measure them along a scale of intensity.
Exactly. And so we have in Shakespeare that he seeks the intensity of consciousness rather than, say, ethical illumination; this explains also why “art” in the service of some sort of Message is invariably off-putting, like a note struck not quite in tune; even though we may nod in approval our jaw has tightened slightly; we are burdened by such “art” rather than released.
As it happens, I’ve also just finished another book, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, by Ken Kalfus, which the book jacket promised to be “rollicking” and “a brilliant new comedy of manners.” The book, if you haven’t heard, is set against the backdrop of 9/11 and its aftermath; the plot is the bitter interplay between a man and wife who are divorcing. It was a 2006 National Book Award Finalist and got press when it was published for having incorporated 9/11, and for the opening hook: both protags believe for a short time that the other had perished that morning, and hate each other so much they both hope it to be true. And so you have the frisson of public horror mixed with private triumph, raising the possibility that the book will somehow conflate or even alchemize public and private worlds, public and private reactions. It’s a book, IOW, that suggests we will find some sort of Meaning, if only of the sardonic sort.
And so I read, hunting. Here’s a bit of what I found: a reference so passing as to almost seem inserted (as if the actual event occurred as Kalfus was drafting the book; it didn’t, it actually happened before 9/11, although in the book, whether by error or literary license, it’s said to have happened in 2002) to a suicide bombing of a pizzeria in Tel Aviv. Marshall is reminded of the bombing when he’s walking in Manhattan and is startled, post-stress-syndrome-traumatically, by the sound of a “heavy steel grille being slammed shut on the back of a truck parked in a loading zone;” he goes on to reflect:
This was a world of heedless materialism, impiety, baseness, and divorce. Sense was not made, this was jihad: the unconnected parts of the world had been brought together and made just.
So Marshall’s personal world is allegorically connected to international events. Nod, nod.
Earlier in the book Joyce, the wife, again in a scene that felt to me patched-in, is said to be “intently” following the invasion of Afghanistan — so much so that she memorizes the country’s geography, the better to follow the military campaign’s every move. She’s also “drawn to the Afghan people, for their beauty and primitive dignity, even if that dignity seemed contradicted by their brutality, untrustworthiness, and venality” and asks
Would American wealth and the expediencies of its foreign policy corrupt the Afghan people? Or were we being corrupted by their demands for cash, their infidelities, and their contempt for democratic ideals?
Meanwhile her life hadn’t changed. She was still not divorced and she had lost hope of ever being divorced; or, more precisely, her marriage was a contest governed by one of Zeno’s paradoxes, in which divorce was approached in half steps and never reached. After the long post-9/11 interregnum, Joyce and Marshall had resumed meeting with the lawyers, who themselves seemed wearied by their disputes despite the cornucopia of billable hours.
You can almost hear the study questions forming in the background. How does the Afghan invasion shed light on Joyce’s behavior toward her husband? Her attitude toward her divorce? How she views herself within her marriage?
And of course there’s also the possibility that we’re intended, as well, to find Kalfus himself peeking through, a kind of parallel world outside the book where he is wink wink nudge nudge “taking sides.” More study questions.
What we don’t find, however, is intensity. There’s the Jerry Springeresque viciousness of Marshall and Joyce’s mutual hatred, but that’s not intensity, that’s spectacle. Certainly neither Marshall nor Joyce “take sides” in contemporaneous political questions, unless moral ambivalence itself counts today as side-taking.
We’re left with mere Meaning.
It’s enough to make one wonder if that’s the most to which a literary writer, writing in America today, can dare aspire.
Related: I also blogged about The Portable Romantic Poets here.
At some point in fifth grade, I noticed the blackboard in Mrs. Marshman’s math class was blurry. I mentioned it to my parents, and within a few weeks had been fitted with my first pair of glasses.
I didn’t submit to the experience wholeheartedly, by any means. Most troubling was the sense that I was now damaged in some way. Poor eyesight is a mild disability for sure, generally more a nuisance than a crippler. Still, the finality of it weighed on me. It also complicated things. My eyeglass lenses were constantly in need of cleaning, the frames would get knocked about and no longer fit, and then, of course, came puberty, and to my other insecurities came the added burden of a reputation for braini-slash-nerdiness — of which my glasses were an obvious sign.
The body is always in a state of flux, of course, and once pointed in the direction of poor vision dutifully explores that trajectory; the silver lining was that as my eyesight worsened I swapped the hornrims for gold wire rims, and later contact lenses. Not quite so homely.
But I still hated them.
Then I learned about William Bates, an early 20th Century physician who had made the astonishing claim that poor eyesight is learned — and can be unlearned.
I read his book, Better Eyesight Without Glasses, tossed my contacts aside, and began muddling about the world without my visual crutch.
I was encouraged at first. With my eyes freed to function more naturally, my vision improved quite a bit right away; my right eye (the “weaker” of the two) went from 20/180 to 20/80 or so.
But 20/20 vision eluded me. I could induce it for short periods — I’ve passed vision tests, twice, for my driver’s license — but much of the time my world was still blurry. I didn’t put my glasses back on. But sometimes I wondered if the received wisdom wasn’t correct, after all. It seemed that perhaps poor eyesight is inescapable, a curse bestowed by our genes or the modern necessity of being tethered to close-up work, reading, computers.
Now I know differently.
The clues I needed were in another book, Relearning to See, by Thomas Quackenbush. I won’t bore you with the minutiae of my discovery, but the upshot is that I needed to relax and stop trying to see. By trying to see, I was distorting either the shape or the alignment of my eyeballs. When I relax, breath, and stop trying to see, the world around clears.
This isn’t a purely physical change. On the contrary, Candace Pert is right on when she says the body is the subconscious mind. Granted, straining to see has a measurable effect on the physical body (this image
is one Quackenbush reprinted from Bates’ Perfect Sight Without Glasses; the woman had perfect vision at the time the leftmost photo was taken. In the middle photo she has myopia — see how her eyes look different? And on the right, she’s furrowing her brow as she tries to see) — but it is first and foremost a condition of being. Put another way: my vision began to blur when I was a child not because my eyes were failing but because as I transitioned from early childhood into social awareness — when I began valuing how others viewed me — a kind of habitual anxiety that defined my relationship to myself hardened into fact. Little wonder the world around me went dim.
When I relax, breath, and stop trying to see, I feel something that affects more than my eyes. It’s like sinking back into a comfortable chair, a state of being in which I am letting go instead of struggling. The clarity of my vision is ancillary: a function of a different vantage point rather than a different way to hold the muscles of my eyes.
Quackenbush touches on this as well in his book, writing:
The individual with blurred vision is interfering with the normal, relaxed way of using the mind and body.
Plenty has been said about the way we modern folk are so stressed; how we react to non-physical stimuli with the same fight/flight response our forebears depended upon to escape saber toothed tigers. But how many of us realize that this response literally distorts our experience? It’s a perversion of our ability to think abstractly: we wrap ourselves in a kind of continual low-grade nightmare, little realizing that our anxiety defines what we can touch and know.
“Cultivate a habit of relaxation.” It’s the first New Year’s resolution on my list, because I’ve begun to understand that everything else flows from it . . .
When someone wrote an Amazon review that she’d bought Outwitting Dogs because her dog was on the cover, I assumed she meant she owned a Jack Russell terrier and bought the book because there’s a Jack Russell on the front.
Doh!!!
It really IS her dog on the cover!!!
Susan has sent me some more pics of Camilla to post here. Look at that sweetie! She doesn’t look at all like a dog who would chew a slipper now, does she!
And isn’t this cool? Turns out the book’s cover model is a hard-working industry professional with a massive portfolio — who hobnobs with some of the most famous dogs in the biz!!! Lassie!!! Beethoven! The Taco Bell chihuahua!!! Air Bud! And that’s Bullseye, the Target Bull Terrier, in the sunglasses, right?
And look at this one — you can see why this dog works a lot. Doesn’t that make your heart just melt?
Catching up on some things, here: I finished The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant several weeks ago and before I mess with the code to remove its image from my sidebar I may as well blog about it, eh?
I liked the book; I liked the way it pulled me into the 15th century and into the inner life of the narrator. The fact that it raises issues around suspension of disbelief is not any flaw in the novel per se, but in the genre.
One can’t help but wonder whether a 15th century teenager would view the world in a way that could even be communicated to a 21st century observer.
How did women living at that time view themselves? How could they?
In some respects, I think Dunant has probably hit on a few answers. The narrator’s habit of filtering her interpretation of the world in religious terms comes across as plausible, for instance. And certainly her conflict with her parents and siblings rings true, given her personality and intelligence. There is internal consistence, which helps a great deal to make the novel’s pretenses work.
But what about the primary themes of the novel? They are essentially feminist: the narrator is precociously bright and desires desperately to be a painter; because she’s a woman, both her intelligence and her artistic ambitions are a liability. This conflict, incidentally, isn’t handled in a way that’s stilted or cloying. Nonetheless, one can’t help but wonder whether any woman at that time could have articulated herself in those terms.
Put another way: could such conflicts have become even close to conscious 500 years ago?
It’s an impossible question to answer; we can’t place ourselves inside the skins & minds of long-dead people.
Historical novels are, instead, rather like dreams: they insert a contemporary self into a vastly peculiar landscape and say, “now. React.”
Quite possibly, that’s enough.
some will a strut and some will fret
see this an hour on this stage
others will not but they’ll sweat
in their hopelessness in their rage
we’re all the same
the men of anger
and the women of the pagethey published your diary
and that’s how i got to know you
key to the room of your own and a mind without end
and here’s a young girl
on a kind of a telephone line through time
the voice at the other end comes like a long lost friendso i know i’m alright
my life will come my life will go
still i feel it’s alright
i just got a letter to my soul
when my whole life is on the tip of my tongue
empty pages for the no longer young
the apathy of time laughs in my face
you say
each life has its place
From Virginia Woolf, by the Indigo Girls (Rites of Passage album).
This version of the lyrics is from the rites of passage CD liner notes, only with line breaks.
the place where you hold me
is dark in a pocket of truth
the moon has swallowed the sun and the light of the earth
and so it was for you
when the river eclipsed your life
but sent your soul like a message in a bottle to me
and it was my rebirthso we know we’re alright
life will come and life will go
still we know it’s alright
someone’ll get a message to your soul
The song stunned me when I first heard it because it so perfectly captured how I felt when I discovered Woolf’s diaries. (Her novels otoh — I should probably reread them now. I read them in college because one was supposed to, and didn’t really warm to them. Perhaps I was too young.)
I wonder if she came to realize, at the end, that her gifts could not substitute for a belief in deservedness . . . nor earn it.
Isn’t this nice? Outwitting Dogs cracked Amazon’s Top Ten List of dog training books!
This was last night. Since the list is updated hourly, the ranking fluctuates–the book had dropped two placed by this morning. Still, it’s cool, isn’t it? Up there with Karen Pryor! :-o And the Monks of New Skete! LOL
It’s a thrill when the dog training book I co-wrote gets a mention in the press, of course, but I also love when someone says something like this, which I just found in a dog training forum (Terry Ryan is the trainer I teamed up with to write Outwitting Dogs):
I second Sandra on the Terry Ryan book, i just bought it and im hooked.
It’s hard to assign a value to writing quality, and it happens that Terry (her website is here) is a gifted and experienced dog trainer; there’s no question that the enthusiasm shown by people who read it are in large part due to the quality of the content. The lady knows what she’s doing when it comes to dogs!
But I like to think that my contribution — in terms of the organization, clarity of the writing, and tone of the book — are playing a part in the book’s success as well ;-)
/end shameless self-promotion
Newly awakened, I recognized
the day — it was yesterday,
it was yesterday with another name,
it was friend I knew to be lost
who came back to surprise me.Thursday, I said to it, wait for me,
I am going to dress. We’ll go out together
until you disappear into night.
You shall die, I shall go on
awake and accustomed
to the satisfactions of dark.Things came about quite differently
as I shall tell in intimate detail.
I don’t really care for Neruda — much of his poetry strikes me as forced — but this one’s pretty nice, and after a day spent hunched at my computer, looking up only long enough, once in awhile, to chafe at my responsibilities, at the dullness of being responsible when it’s naughtiness I need — I can relate to the Thursday of the poem that turns finally into a tomb.
The translation is by Alistair Reid, from a 1972 bilingual edition, in paperback, Pablo Neruda Selected Poems. [UPDATE: is it no longer in print? Not sure. Here’s another option.]
