David Eisenman informs me in a comment to a previous post that he and his colleagues have just put together a “new edition”:http://www.guydavenport.com/ of Guy Davenport’s novel, “Wo es war, soll ich werden,” which is 35% longer than the original published version. It’s handbound, in a signed edition of 100 copies and looks quite beautiful.
From the category archives:
Literature
Jennifer Howard of the Washington Post has a longish article-cum-book-review in the most recent “Boston Review”:http://www.bostonreview.net/BR29.6/howard.html on “the uses of fantasy,” where she gets it very badly wrong, but in an interesting way. She takes a critical hatchet to Susanna Clarke’s “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1582344167/henryfarrell-20 (which “I”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002484.html and others on “this”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/12/a_tale_of_two_l.html “blog”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002570.html “and”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2004/12/books_of_the_ye.html “elsewhere”:http://www.longstoryshortpier.com/vaults/2004/11/28/magic_tricks liked quite a lot) and to modern fantasy in general, but rather than attacking it for being too ridden with the cliches of genre, she attacks it because it isn’t genre enough. For Howard,
bq. When the news strays so far from the familiar moral contours of the struggle between Good and Evil, it’s tempting to lose ourselves in stories in which this battle is fought in clear terms and on an epic scale.
bq. Good over here, Evil over there—call it the Lord of the Rings model, in which heroes may be flawed but are always recognizably heroes, and their enemies want nothing less than to stamp out (as one of the good guys puts it in Peter Jackson’s recent film adaptation) “all that’s green and good in this world.” Many other fantasy classics work this territory, too; think of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, for instance, with its underpinning of Christian allegory.
Thus, Howard finds that JSAMN is a failure; it’s “a possibly fatal degree of academic remove away from epic sweep and the big moral questions.” More precisely:
bq. aren’t the showier sorts of magic—magic that battles for the soul of the world—exactly what we need, now more than ever? … Clarke’s novel doesn’t parody the genre; it displays in a lifeless cabinet of wonders all its elements—every element, that is, but the epic sense of Good and Evil, of things larger than ourselves, that makes the best fantasy so powerful and so necessary.
I’m not disputing that escapist fantasy can’t be good stuff (when it’s well written, it’s wonderful), but I do think it’s rather unfair to pillory Clarke for not writing the kind of book that she clearly didn’t want to write in the first place. Clarke isn’t especially interested, as far as I can make out, in epic battles between good and evil; instead, she’s rather more concerned with the tensions between the magical and the mundane. She’s not copying Tolkien; if anything, she’s riffing on a very different tradition of fantasy that goes back to Hope Mirrlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist. For which purpose, the incongruence between the world of Faerie and the social niceties of Regency England works extremely well – it not only provides Clarke with the makings of good comedy, but allows her to get at the fundamental _thinness_ of the British social order. The key moments in the book are those where you realize that Jonathan Strange and Dr. Norrell’s dispute is at most a sort of shadow play, a prelude to something much stranger and wilder. From Clarke’s novel:
bq. He had meant to say that if what he had seen was true, then everything that Strange and Norrell had ever done was child’s-play and magic was a much stranger and more terrifying thing than any of them had thought of. Strange and Norrell had been merely throwing paper darts about a parlour, while real magic soared and swooped and twisted on great wings in a limitless sky far, far above them.
Magic, in Susanna Clarke’s novel, is profoundly unsettling, in a way that it isn’t in Howard’s preferred forms of fantasy; it threatens to disrupt the social order. There’s a sort of dynamic tension between it and reality, rather than a simple escape from our complex world. If the usages of Regency England are so fragile, so vulnerable to disruption from without, then what of our own settled ways of doing things? Howard clearly doesn’t like this mode of writing, which is her right, but it seems to me at the least peculiar that she should prosecute the book for not being what it doesn’t want to be in the first place, and then convict it on all counts. There’s more than one mode of fantasy out there, and if JSAMN doesn’t conform to her preferred type, then that’s really not Clarke’s fault, nor does it reflect on the book itself so much as on the lack of sympathy between the book and a particular kind of reader.
I’ve never known any more about Walt Kelly’s comic strip “Pogo,” than that it gave birth to the famous phrase “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Now, after reading John Crowley’s lovely “essay”:http://bostonreview.net/BR29.5/crowley.html on Pogo in the _Boston Review_, I want to read the lot.
I’d come across Stephen Schwartz as TCS’s resident ranter against “Islamofascism” and producer of _ex post facto_ rationalizations for such wise decisions as the Tariq Ramadan exclusion and the Cat Stevens deportation. Now I see that “he’s turned his hand to literary criticism”:http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/746mjtym.asp?pg=1 . Apparently, the Swedish Academy “have returned to their habit of awarding the Nobel Prize for Literature to an unknown, undistinguished, leftist fanatic.” At one point he interrupts himself, mid-rant, to write
bq. But the Nobel Prize is bestowed for writing, and one must therefore address Jelinek’s publications.
Before going on to make clear that his only knowledge is based on a film adaptation of one of Elfriede Jelinek’s books!
Anyway, that list of unknown, undistinguished leftist fanatics ….
bq. scolding lefty turned Nazi-nostalgic Gunter Grass, in 1999; Jose Saramago, a vulgar enemy of religion and former Communist censor in revolutionary Portugal, in 1998; and the repellent Dario Fo, an Italian playwright specializing in denunciations of capitalism, in 1997…. Other Nobel stars have included Claude Simon (1985), a Stalinist who defamed George Orwell; Castro-lover Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1982); Pablo Neruda, Stalinist secret police agent (1971); and Soviet plagiarist and propagandist Mikhail Sholokhov (1965).
Incidentally, is “Nazi-nostalgic” Schwartz’s take on _Crabwalk_ ?
It is National Poetry Day here in the UK, and though it is presumably _not_ National Poetry Day in many of the nations from which CT contributors and readers come, I’m not going to let that stop me. “Nick Barlow is assembling a list of participating blogs”:http://www.nickbarlow.com/blog/2004_10_03_archive.html#109714776137102153 and among them is “Backword” Dave Weeden “who opines that”:http://backword.me.uk/2004/October/nationalpoetry.html 130 is the greatest of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. He may be right, but my favourite — especially in Britten’s setting in his Nocturne — is 43. Here it is:
bq. When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see,
For all the day they view things unrespected;
But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee,
And darkly bright, are bright in dark directed.
Then thou, whose shadow shadows doth make bright,
How would thy shadow’s form, form happy show
To the clear day with thy much clearer light,
When to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so!
How would, I say, mine eyes be blessed made,
By looking on thee in the living day,
When in dead night thy fair imperfect shade
Through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay!
All days are nights to see till I see thee,
And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.
“Atrios”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2004/10/cancel-it.html linked to “this discussion”:http://www.xoverboard.com/blogarchive/week_2004_10_03.html#000967 of the rather odd claim that in 164 different TV shows, what we’re seeing is not what is really happening in the fiction, but what happens in the mind of a small character from _St. Elsewhere_ called Tommy Westphall.
The argument for this claim, what I’ll call the Westphall Hypothesis, is based around a rather impressive bit of research about “crossovers in TV-land”:http://home.vicnet.net.au/~kwgow/crossovers.html. (The site seems to be based in Victoria, so I have some natural fondness for it.) The reasoning is as follows. The last episode of _St. Elsewhere_ revealed that the entire storyline of that show hadn’t really (i.e. really in the fiction) happened but had all been a dream of Tommy Westphall. So by extension any story involving a character from St. Elsewhere is really (in the fiction) part of Tommy’s dream. And any story involving a character from one of those shows is also part of Tommy’s dream, etc. So all 164 shows that are connected to _St. Elsewhere_ in virtue of character sharing are part of Tommy’s dream.
It’s a nice little idea, but there are half a dozen things wrong with it.
I know there are some big literature enthusiasts around here[1] so I thought I’d post a pointer to this site I just came across called Opening Hooks, “a collection of literary beginnings”. The creator of the site explains:
Chip Kidd once said, “A good book cover makes you want to pick it up. End of story.” More often then not, however, a gripping first sentence or paragraph prevents you from putting it back down. The opening hook. It’s a simple concept, reading is linear, time is finite. What keeps a reader reading is the opening hook.
I don’t have any particular memories of special opening hooks, but browsing through the site’s data base I came across this one: “When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.” – Yup. I think this one qualifies as a good opening hook. Unfortunately, when I first read Kafka’s The Metamorphosis I attempted to do so in its original. Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt. Perhaps understandably, words such as “Ungeziefer” – or insect – are not part of one’s basic foreign language vocabulary lesson so I’m afraid I had a hard time fully appreciating some of the nuances – huh, some of the basics! – during my first attempt at the novel. Let’s just say I probably spent more time flipping through the dictionary than the book. But reading the sentence in English on that site brought it all back and I do think it qualifies as a good opening hook. I suspect others around here who are much bigger literature buffs than I am will think of candidates for their favorite opening lines without having to go to their book shelves (or browse an online data base).
Hat tip: Matt Read.
fn1. This post is dedicated to a fellow CT blogger. You know who you are.;-)
I’ve just finished Elizabeth Hand’s “Mortal Love”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0061051705/henryfarrell-20, which I recommend very highly; it’s the best novel she’s ever written. Her earlier work is sometimes extraordinary (if you can find a copy of _Winterlong_, buy it without hesitating) but it’s never quite under control – one has the impression of an artist struggling with her materials and every once in a while being overwhelmed by them. She’s overcome this in her recent shorter work – in particular “Cleopatra Brimstone,” and “The Least Trumps”:http://www.conjunctions.com/njarchive.htm. Both these stories have a technical mastery that was only sporadically present in her early work. They’re acute and sharp.
_Mortal Love_ repeats this success at novel length. It has a wealth of materials – Richard Dadd (lightly disguised), Pre-Raphaelites, “Henry Darger”:http://www.elizabethhand.com/darger.htm style outsider art – but handles them with style, grace and economy.
As I’ve remarked “before”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001332.html, the Washington Post’s Michael Dirda is a prince among fiction reviewers. Dirda has wide-ranging tastes and an altogether infectious delight in the books that he loves (see “here”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/style/columns/dirdamichael/ for a collection of his recent reviews). It’s a pity then that the NEA’s “Reading at Risk” report has “provoked”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10807-2004Jul24.html him into a fit of the “Birkerts”:http://archives.obs-us.com/obs/english/books/nn/bdbirk.htm.
I’m just back from a week in the Bay Area, with limited web access – “John H”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002258.html mentions a friendly argument that we had last year over China Mieville and the economics of fantasy. My two posts on the subject are on my old blog, which is a bit difficult to access these days – for those (if any) who are interested in the topic, I’ve posted them below the fold. I note that I’ve mellowed a bit on the topic in the meantime, partly in response to criticisms from PNH and others.
I’ve just finished another Andrew Crumey novel, his latest, “Mobius Dick”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0330419919/junius-21 . I thought I might be reporting that, whilst I’d enjoyed it, I enjoyed it less than his Mr Mee (which “I completed the other day”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002241.html ). But the last twenty pages where all the different threads come together with a rush (a bit like a Jonathan Coe novel), gave me such delight that I’d have to rank them equally. Crumey is that unusual thing, a novelist with a PhD in theoretical physics. And here his learning is fully deployed: the Copenhagen interpretation, multiverses, Schrodinger; Schopenhauer, Nietszche and Thomas Mann; mad Nazis, Marxism, and a British Democratic Republic; Robert and Clara Schumann; a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps and a Scottish nuclear power plant; weapons of mass destruction. All there, and he brings off the connections brilliantly (even lacerating literary postmodernists in the process). Fantastic. (Not yet published outside the UK as far as I can see, so my link is to Amazon.co.uk).
I finished Andrew Crumey’s “Mr Mee”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312268033/junius-20 last night, and, to adopt the “Chris Brooke evaluative vocabulary”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2004_04_01_archive.html#108221387921088431 , it is truly splendid and I’m going to read his other books as soon as I can. Crumey weaves together three interlocking stories: the unworldly octogenarian Mr Mee, and his discovery of the internet, porn and sex; the reflections of a terminally ill professor of French literature on his life, work on Rousseau, Proust, and (most pressingly) his plan to seduce his favourite student; and the adventures of Ferrand and Minard, two characters from Rousseau’s _Confessions_. I’ll avoid posting spoilers, but along with the “Monty Hall problem”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002227.html , we’re also treated to versions of Searle’s Chinese Room and Ned Block’s entire population of China, and one of the protagonists, seduced by an 18th century anticipation of the functionalist theory of mind, tries to construct a computer from string and paper. Anyone who has ever taught or been taught elementary logic will laugh aloud.
I’m in the middle of reading Andrew Crumey’s rather intruiging novel “Mr Mee”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312268033/junius-20 at the moment. One minor point of interest is that this may be the first work of fiction to contain a description of the Monty Hall problem (see “Brian’s post below”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002210.html ) in the form of a letter, supposedly written in 1759 from a Jean-Bernard Rosier to the Encyclopedist d’Alembert:
bq. Sir, you may know that many years ago one of our countrymen was taken prisoner in a remote and barren region of Asia noted only for the savagery of its inhabitants. The man’s captors, uncertain what to do with him, chose to settle the issue by means of a ring hidden beneath one of three wooden cups. If the prisoner could correctly guess which cup hid the gold band, he would be thrown out to face the dubious tenderness of the wolves; otherwise he was to be killed on the spot. By placing bets on the outcome, his cruel hosts could enjoy some brief diversion from the harsh austerity of their nomadic and brutal existence.
bq. The leader of the tribe, having hidden his own ring, commanded that the unfortunate prisoner be brought forward to make his awful choice. After considerable hesitation, and perhaps a silent prayer, the wretch placed his trembling hand upon the middle cup. Bets were placed; then the leader, still wishing to prolong the painful moment of uncertainty which so delighted his audience, lifted the rightmost cup, beneath which no ring was found. The captive gave a gasp of hope, and amidst rising laughter from the crowd, the leader now reached for the left, saying that before turning it over he would allow his prisoner a final opportunity to change his choice. Imagine yourself to be in that poor man’s position, Monsieur D’Alembert, and tell me, what would you now do?
“John Holbo”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/07/superbeing_and_.html has an interesting post in his ‘John and Belle’ incarnation on superhero comics and nostalgia. His argument, as I understand it is that the classical superhero story is dead – that the ‘straight’ efforts to resurrect it (Michael Chabon’s ‘Escapist’) and the revisionist (Daniel Clowe, Chris Ware) are more closely related than they seem at first sight. They’re exercises in nostalgia, driven by how the “pain of unachieved adulthood contend[s] with hope for redeemed childish innocence.” If we look through the images around which we construct our identities when we are growing up, they provide luminous refractions of our adult complexities.
In comments at John and Belle’s “other blog”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/06/pull_the_the_fi.html, Fafnir from Fafblog speaks to the perplexity caused by reading Gene Wolfe.
bq. Gene Wolfe is a punk. He also greedily ate my fudgcicle once while signin my copy of “The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories.” I said “hey gene wolfe that is my fudgcicle” an he said “maybe you only THINK it is your fudgcicle because you are plaaaaauged by the ghooosts of meeeeemory. wooooooo!” all the while makin wiggly fingers. And I went home thinkin that maybe I really was plagued by the ghosts of memory and maybe I wasn’t who I thought I was, was I Fafnir or was I Gene Wolfe, or was I a butterfly dreaming I was Gene Wolfe dreaming I was Fafnir? And the next day I woke up an realized that punk had just eaten my fudgcicle.