Since last summer, I’ve been not only rereading but translating a lot of Neruda’s landmark work; the task has been dizzying, intoxicating. In the early fall, I read and reviewed the collected poems of Alfredo de Palchi, and I’m always reading and re-reading shorter books of poetry and prose. Some recent ones have included Natasia Saje’s Vivarium, Derek Burleson’s Melt, and Thomas Gardner’s Poverty Creek Journal. This past semester, I also taught Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and an array of authors from Lao-Tzu (there may have been no such individual) to Sartre to Paul Tillich to Michael Pollan.
This winter, I reread James’s Washington Square, and I’m now immersed in Faulkner’s Light in August. Though this sequence of books was relatively random, I thought I’d say a few words about the meanings this juxtaposition has taken on. Both authors play off brilliantly against older conventions of the novel. For all their dark revelations of life’s disappointments, both books are also very funny. Faulkner’s use of Biblical allusion is bitingly ironic, and the complex expression of his entire twisted sensibility is a constant pleasure. His characters Lena Grove, Gail Hightower, Joe Joanna Burden, and Joe Christmas are all alienated souls. The pregnant and abandoned Lena is so naïve that, whenever she speaks, others readily interpret her circumstances much better than she can. And we backtrack into the troubled past of the tortured Joe Christmas, whom nobody knows quite what to make of; he doesn’t understand who or what he is and never will. Faulkner makes self-conscious use of Victorian and Southern gothic tropes in a way that only highlights the characters’ warped relationship to the past and their sense of estrangement. His handling of questions of race, gender, and class is also fascinating because his protagonists can defy categorization and accordingly tend to be perceived as subversive. Since events are not narrated chronologically, it takes time for us to grasp how Joe’s isolation and hostility escalate into homicidal rage. Oddly, however, Lena manages to achieve a bit more acceptance in the immediate community than other major characters precisely because she unwittingly plays into certain sexist conventions. From the perspective of the socially conscious reader, that observation is another double-edged sword. A colleague of mine recommended the book as a eulogy to the outsider, but can we simply read it that way, given Joe’s doom and Lena’s unquestioning pursuit of her simple destiny?
It’s coincidental that I had just re-read James’s Washington Square prior to undertaking the Faulkner novel. After all, it is here that James inverts the precedents set by Austen in Pride and Prejudice and Elliott in Middlemarch by giving center stage to a young woman who—like Faulkner’s later heroine, Lena Grove— is decidedly not regarded as “clever.” (Then again, Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility arguably sets the precedent for this uncompromising refusal to present us with idealized characters or a fairytale plot.) In response to Dr. Sloper’s expressed wish that his daughter Catherine be taught to be more than plain, innocent, and honest, his sister Lavinia inquires “Do you think it is better to be clever than to be good”? The Doctor retorts, “Good for what? You are good for nothing unless you are clever.” At times, Catherine’s greatest virtue seems to be that she lacks the virtue of cleverness (she isn’t manipulative and doesn’t make scenes); but making such a determination would only flatten James’ portrait. In a sense, the point is just the opposite, since Catherine grows to understand that her father was right to object to her courtship with her suitor, Morris Townsend, who turns out to be quite self-serving. Catherine’s eventual realization comes at the cost of her youthful idealism, and she never remarries. What’s more, Dr. Sloper’s dedication to cleverness can read as foolishness. He even chooses his patients on the basis of how much “originality” he recognizes in their symptoms, and he contracts the illness that kills him while on the way to visit a patient in a mental asylum. On the whole, the novel is too ‘careful’ to be among James’s best, but it is interesting that it was followed by A Portrait of a Lady, which famously opens with the courtship of Isabel Archer, who is arguably too “clever” for her own good, insofar as that quality fosters overconfidence. Unlike Catherine, who imprudently believes that she is in love with a particular person, Isabel is ingenuously enamored of her own bold and brilliant sense of possibility. (The suitors that Isabel turns down early in life even remind us of those that the heroine of Washington Square turned down later in her career.)
In his still later work, James goes on to explode the very distinctions between the foolish and the clever, the ordinary and extraordinary, the real and the ideal, knowledge and interpretation, and even content and form, making him a true father of Modernism. That said, just as Washington Square still bears the hallmarks of the pre-modern novel on which James proceeds to innovate, the whole enterprise of Light in August is less radically “experimental” than that of his earlier masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury. It is as if Faulkner had reached his version of the limits of what James, Conrad, Ford, Joyce and he himself had shown could be attained and then trimmed the sails a bit. Though they both combine great novelistic precision with vivid poetic imagination, James and Faulkner also write quite differently. I’ve been continually marveling at how, in contrast to James’s maddening rhetoric of qualification, Faulkner offers us an equally hypertrophic rhetoric of speculation: Lena pauses “as if she’d just thought of something that she hadn’t even been aware she didn’t know.” This kind of subtlety was made to outlast the Millennium.
Matsuo Bashō, Backroads to Far Towns, translated by Cid Corman (White Pine Press, 2004)
I recently read Backroads to Far Towns, Bashō’s travel journal. . . a summer’s journey he undertook with his friend and disciple Sora in 1689. From the introduction by Cid Corman:
The journey was one both had looked forward to and realized would be difficult and even dangerous. And, indeed, one might not return. It was to be more a pilgrimage—and in the garb of pilgrims they went—than a case of wandering scholarship: a sight not uncommon even in modern Japan, visiting from temple to temple, seeing old acquaintances, places famed in history or poetry or legend, touchstones for the life lived, the dying to come and what life continues.
I’ve been reading a lot the last month. Most recently finished Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Sayings and Giorgio Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi Continis. These are books having to do with Jews in Italy in the 1930s, a period I’m writing about. Also strongly recommend The Aguero Sisters by Cristina Garcia, Learning to Drive by Katha Pollitt, and Please by Jericho Brown.
I recently had so much fun rereading this novel by Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940). The Master and Margarita was completed in 1937 but wasn’t published in any form until 1967. The full, unexpurgated version appeared in 1989, the year of the Tiananmen Square protest and the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the novel, the Devil and his retinue (including a black cat that walks on two legs) arrive in Moscow literally to decapitate the unbelieving head of a writer’s association and to wreak havoc on the literary elite. The so-called Master is the aspiring poet who starts out as a willing tool of the government-controlled literary organization but undergoes a transformation after being admitted to an insane asylum. The book is full of quasi-realistic caricatures of self-important bureaucrats and greedy opportunists. It is wickedly funny, replete with brilliant details, and totally uncategorizable. It can be read on so many levels: as Bildungsroman, as love story, as historical fiction, slapstick comedy, moral parable, social satire, a foray into Magic Realism, a philosophical allegory partially inspired by Gogol and Dostoevsky—you name it.
In French, in her original handwriting, opposite English translation by Susan Sellers, and a wonderful interview in which Cixous discusses her process. I feel simpatico with her temperament and methods—capturing bits of memory, dream, dialogue—and I like the way she talks about the creation of a text from these fragments: “It’s a kind of building, which is very mobile, supple, where I try to bring into interaction those different notes. Then sometimes I develop them. Sometimes they have been just the first germs of something which is going to develop into a large chapter; but sometimes they remain exactly in the way they happened, like drops, and in a very lapidary way…..”
I am enjoying this Cold War political thriller set in Eastern Europe in the 1960s. Perfect escape reading, terrifically conceived, except that Steinhauer’s protagonist’s country is never named or identified, and his city is always called simply “the capital”—very annoying not to be grounded in a real nation with historically specific places, language, details (which Steinhauer can certainly handle, since he lives in Budapest).
A book I reread every year and which I teach is David Markson’s Reader’s Block. First of a tetralogy, this book takes on mortality, anti-Semitism, and the form of the novel, disabusing us of the notion of the artist as “hero” by revealing the flaws and the failures of both the artists and the world they live in. Written in tiny paragraphs, made almost entirely from quoted or paraphrased texts (kind of like a cento), the book has a subtext that pulls the reader along. I can’t resist. My students can’t resist. And in that way my own reading and my teaching life join again and again.
I will put in a plug for a book I worked on as an editor. Malena focuses on the state murder of Argentina’s desaparecidos—the 30,000 civilians kidnapped, tortured, killed, and “disappeared” by the military junta in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The novel, which features an American of Argentine descent who must make a profound moral choice when he discovers the horror of the junta’s killing prisons, shows how we are implicated in the horrors of our larger world and must be brave enough to turn guilt into action.
When I first started writing poetry, it was an accident. I’d always thought I was a fiction writer, but my lines on the page kept shrinking, compressing, and then one day….oooops a poem. So I figured I’d better read some poetry. I picked up A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now, edited by Aliki Barnstone and Willis Barnstone. Under the name of the last poet in the book, Leslie Scalapino, there was a poem titled “EPILOGUE: [anemone].” When I read the poem, a light bulb went off: I realized there must be infinite things language can do. I often go back to this book, and this particular semi-prose poem, as to a conversation with an old friend. Here is an excerpt:
I was able to describe my feelings:
by saying it was like being an insect who puts its feelers
out into the flowers of a plant, and sucks from them, as we were
(sucking) from the restaurants and bars of the city. . .
I realized later there was an odd foreshadowing in the poem of how—as if by a long seduction—I would grow into the city and the city into me, but all the time still with a sense of being outside myself.
