Literature

I’ve just finished reading Paul Park’s “A Princess of Roumania”:http://www.powells.com/search/DTSearch/search?partner_id=29956&cgi=search/search/&searchtype=kw&searchfor=Paul%20Park%20Princess%20Roumania (warning: mild spoilers ahead). The book deserves to become a modern classic; it’s as good and as serious as the first two books of Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials.” I’ve been an admirer of Park’s novels for a long time. His previous books are wonderful, but there’s a clear progression from the gorgeous, baroque, but slightly undisciplined prose of his first book, _Soldiers of Paradise_ and its somewhat inferior sequels, through _Celestis_ to _Three Marys_ which is written in language as plain and lovely as a stone. “A Princess of Roumania” is better again – strange images rendered more striking by the very matter-of-factness with which they are described. His first novel for young adults, it takes a standard plot – a girl and her companions catapulted into a strange new world of magic and enchantment – and does unexpected things with it. John Holbo has just written a “post”:http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/if_we_must_have_fish/ on the Valve about novels in which the characters come to realize that they are inhabiting a fictional world, in which “the laws of the universe are the laws of genre.” Much of the power of _A Princess_ comes from its _refusal_ of the cosiness that this all too often implies.

bq. “We’re not going home,” she said. The flatness, the sureness in her own voice surprised her. And it wasn’t true – she’d read a lot of books like this, where the girl wakes up and she’s a beautiful princess in another world. But she always goes back again. She always goes home. “We’re not going home,” she heard herself repeat.

I’ve a theory, which I suspect is hardly original to me, that the magic in really good children’s fantasy draws its resonance from a child’s perception of what it must be like to be grown up. When you’re a child or a pre-adolescent, the adult world seems an attractive and terrifying place. Adults have power, but are driven by forces and desires that a child can only dimly understand; wild magic. Thus, for example, when Susan rides with the daughters of the moon and the Wild Hunt in Alan Garner’s _The Moon of Gomrath_, she’s glimpsing for a moment what it will be like to be a woman. In contrast, the magic in mediocre children’s fantasy is all too often domesticated, rationalized, and stripped of its real force. _A Princess of Roumania_ seems to me to be an oblique rejoinder to the kind of children’s fantasy in which magic is under control, in which the child goes home. There’s no returning for Miranda Popescu; her entire world (our world) turns out to be an elaborate fiction, a shelter from reality that quite literally disappears in a puff of smoke. She and her friends are propelled, only half grown-up into the world of adulthood, of complex responsibilities and obligations. A world where magic exists, but isn’t really understood, where adults lay complicated plans, but don’t know what they’re doing most of the time. In most fantasy, the hero or heroine is fulfilling a plot, a prophecy, a pre-ordained destiny – at the pivotal moment in _A Princess_, Miranda refuses the path that has been laid out for her, and the power of adults to decide what to do with her life, instead deciding herself. All this, and the Baroness Nicola Ceausescu, perhaps the most wonderfully described, and _sympathetic_ villainess that I’ve ever seen in a YA book. I can’t say more than to reiterate that the book is a delight.

London and many other places will “observe two minutes of silence”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4679681.stm at noon GMT today for the victims of last week’s bombings. The debate has already begun (“see below”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/07/14/battle-lines/) about the right political and legal response to the attacks. Besides policy and law, though, Britain and Ireland have suffered long enough from terrorism to have produced literature about it. Below the fold I reproduce a powerful poem from the late “James Simmons”:http://www.wwnorton.com/nael/20century/topic_4/simmons.htm. It commemorates one of the earliest, and worst, atrocities of the Northern Ireland conflict, the IRA bombing of Claudy town in July of 1972. The circumstances of that event were different from last week’s attacks, but some things were the same. I don’t know of anything else that conveys them nearly as well.

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Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s attempted to write a poem so bad that International Library of Poetry would neither declare semifinalist in one of their bogus contests, nor offer to publish it in an anthologies. She “finally succeeded”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006498.html by the device of taking a Miriam Abacha 419-scam letter and introducing line-breaks. The comments thread has now exploded, with the Abacha scam being rendered in many different poetic forms and styles: Shakespearean sonnet, haiku, limerick, Gilbert & Sullivan lyric, Allen Ginsberg ….. Check it out!

A few weeks ago, “Michael Bérubé”:http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/balls_to_the_wall/ wrote a snarky post responding to a Joseph Epstein “review”:http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=5546&R=C4FE2FB13 of Elaine Showalter’s “Faculty Towers”:http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=62-0812238508-0, a brief history of the academic novel. As Michael says, the essay “honestly isn’t very good,” but I can understand why a little better after reading Showalter’s book. _Faculty Towers_ isn’t very good either, and it isn’t very good in the same ways as Epstein’s essay.
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China Miéville has just won the “Arthur C. Clarke award”:http://www.appomattox.demon.co.uk/acca/News/Winner%2005.htm for _Iron Council_, which we ran a “seminar”:https://crookedtimber.org/category/mieville-seminar on in January. He seems to be on a bit of a roll the last month or two; he’s also interviewed in the “current issue”:http://www.believermag.com/issues/200504/interview_mieville.php of _The Believer_. Look out next month for some more Miéville-related goodness.

Two blogospheric manifestations of Beckett. First, Maud Newton links to an old piece in the Guardian, defending the critically panned novel, _Mercier and Camier_ as a good starting-point if you want to start reading Beckett. While I agree, I think that his early novel, _Watt_ is even better; it’s a sort of evolutionary missing link between Flann O’Brian and Beckett’s own later work. Some very fine jokes; I especially like the railway porter who is both “stout” and “bitter.” If you start by reading Beckett’s earlier novels, you’re more likely to get and enjoy the less obvious (but still real) comedy of his later work. _Waiting for Godot_ is a very funny play if you’ve got a particular sense of humour.

But if you really want to find out about the brighter side of Beckett, you need to ask Janice Brown. Mark Kleiman gives her grief for perverse reading and misattribution in this widely cited (and rather scary) speech, but by far the best bit is her stirring closing paragraph, in which she puts Beckett to work ladling out some Chicken Soup for the Conservative Soul.

Freedom requires us to have courage; to live with our own convictions; to question and struggle and strive. And to fail. To Fail. Recently, I saw a quote attributed to Samuel Beckett. He asks: “Ever tried? Ever failed?” Well, no matter. He says, “Try again. Fail better.” Trying to live as free people is always going to be a struggle. But we should commit ourselves to trying and failing, and trying again. To failing better until we really do become like that city on the hill, which offered the world salvation.

This passes beyond misprision into an appalling sort of creativity. What _would_ that city on the hill look like if Beckett were the architect? Inquiring minds would like to know.

Update: small changes following comment from Jacob Levy.

Update 2: title changed following realization that a Bad Pun was trapped in the post’s main body, waiting to be liberated.

One for Daniel Davies from a book I’m reviewing.

“Monitoring, Rules, and the Control Paradox: Can the Good Soldier Svejk Be Trusted,” in Roderick M. Kramer and Karen S. Cook eds., Trust and Distrust in Organizations, New York: Russell Sage 2004.

One of the most fascinating and revealing forms of organizational sabotage is “working to rule” – precisely following rules while providing no voluntary effort beyond that required by the rules. An especially destructive form of “working to rule” involves applying the rules most carefully where they are least appropriate to the situation. This technique was perfected by Private Josef Svejk, a leading Czech cultural hero, and the eponym of Jaroslav Hasek’s satirical novel, The Good Soldier Svejk. … Svejk was taking advantage of a basic fact … it is simply impossible to specify in advance all the behaviors that the organization will require from its employees if it is to survive and thrive. This is the organizational manifestation of the phenomenon known as “contractual incompleteness” in economics (Coase 1937). … many organizational tasks simply do not lend themselves to outcome-based incentives. The rest of this paper discusses the alternative: close specification of desired behaviors by means of rules and commands, and sanctions to enforce those behaviors. In particular, I will argue that built-in inefficiencies may plague management by monitoring. The inefficiencies may be understood by picturing the monitoring relationship as a one-shot game with a Pareto-suboptimal equilibrium. … The paper will examine the nature of the “tit-for-tat” exchange that is capable of Pareto improvements in organizations in which labor contracts are based on monitoring of individual actions rather than measurement of individual outcomes. Furthermore, cooperation requires trust in that hierarchical superiors must yield some of their capacity for discovering and punishing shirking by subordinates.

This is one of the most exciting things to have happened in a long time. Scientists using a new photographic technique have made amazing strides in deciphering the famed Oxyrhynchus papyrii (the contents of an Egyptian trash-heap). Apparently, just in the last few days, they have discovered previously unknown writings by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod, and Lucian, as well as a long epic passage from Archilochos. It’s not particularly likely that you’ve ever had a look at how much Archilochos there is in the world, but let me tell you: ain’t a whole lot. Not even one complete poem, if memory serves. (Oxford’s Delectus ex Iambis et Elegis Graecis has all the details.) From the Independent:

The previously unknown texts, read for the first time last week, include parts of a long-lost tragedy – the Epigonoi (“Progeny”) by the 5th-century BC Greek playwright Sophocles; part of a lost novel by the 2nd-century Greek writer Lucian; unknown material by Euripides; mythological poetry by the 1st-century BC Greek poet Parthenios; work by the 7th-century BC poet Hesiod; and an epic poem by Archilochos, a 7th-century successor of Homer, describing events leading up to the Trojan War. Additional material from Hesiod, Euripides and Sophocles almost certainly await discovery.

Oxford academics have been working alongside infra-red specialists from Brigham Young University, Utah. Their operation is likely to increase the number of great literary works fully or partially surviving from the ancient Greek world by up to a fifth. It could easily double the surviving body of lesser work – the pulp fiction and sitcoms of the day.

Go Mormons! (Now if only you could find those darn gold plates and diamond spectacles!) I know every Classics scholar and enthusiast in the whole world is waiting with bated breath…
On the other hand, this Scotsman headline is enthusiastic but misleading: “‘Lost’ classical manuscripts give up their secrets after 9,000 years.” What’s 7,000-odd years among friends, after all?

‘But pray, sir, why must I not teach the young gentlemen?’

‘Because, sir, teaching young gentlemen has a dismal effect upon the soul. It exemplifies the badness of established, artificial authority. The pedagogue has almost absolute authority over his pupils: he often beats them and insensibly loses the sense of respect due to them as fellow human beings. He does them harm, but the harm they do him is far greater. He may easily become the all-knowing tyrant, always right, always virtuous; in any event he perpetually associates with his inferiors, the king of his company; and in a surprisingly short time alas this brands him with the mark of Cain. Have you ever known a schoolmaster fit to associate with grown men? The Dear knows I never have. They are most horribly warped indeed.

— Patrick O’Brian, “The Ionian Mission”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393308219/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/, p84.

On the other hand, I wish I had the absolute authority to make my students do the reading. At least some of it.

The nominations for science fiction’s Hugo awards were announced yesterday. In alphabetical order, the nominees for Best Novel are:

Iain M. Banks – The Algebraist.

Susanna Clarke – Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.

Ian McDonald – River of Gods.

China Mieville – Iron Council.

Charles Stross – Iron Sunrise.

I’ve read four of the five of them, which is a personal record (the exception is the Banks book – while I love Banks’ stuff, the reviews of The Algebraist were mixed enough that I didn’t feel inspired to buy it in hardback). Indeed I and other Crooked Timber people have blogged extensively on both Iron Council and Strange and Norrell. I haven’t blogged on either the Stross book (which has gotten a fair amount of well-deserved blogospheric love recently), or on Ian McDonald’s book, although I’ve been meaning to write about the latter for a long time. It’s both smart and fun, a collision between booster-stage cyberpunk (the underlying story of the book riffs on William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Count Zero) and a reinvented India. McDonald has been engaged in a very interesting effort over the last ten years to re-imagine science fiction from the perspective of the developing rather than the developed world, and in this novel he’s made a crucial leap forward in imagining what an India transformed by information technology might look like and mean, on its own terms. Only two of the many viewpoint characters are Westerners, and they serve more to provide contrast than to translate and domesticate the exotic. McDonald’s West retains economic and political dominance, but is quietly losing out over time, because it’s trying to shut out the disruptive impact of new technologies. It’s an aging monopolist which is about to have its lunch eaten. India is where it’s at – new sexes (neuts), AI-driven soap operas, towed icebergs, and finally, the gateway to a new universe. I’m not sure whether the book is (or even tries to be) authentic in any strong sense of the word (I’d be fascinated to hear the opinion of anyone who’s from India and has read it), but it’s exciting, thought-provoking, and (once you come to grips with the many viewpoints that McDonald uses), very entertaining. Not a book that I’d pass on to anyone who isn’t already an SF reader – the future-shock might be a little much – but something that I would recommend without hesitation to anyone who loves the genre, and wants to read something that feels fresh and new. As far as I know, it hasn’t found a US publisher yet – perhaps the nomination (and the British Science Fiction Association award that it’s also picked up) will prompt somebody over here to pick it up.

(nb – as always with my posts, all commission from the Amazon links above will go to charity).

“n+1” magazine, which sent out its second issue a few days ago, is really very good indeed. It’s a nice mixture of politics and literature – a deliberate antidote in 248 pages to both the self-congratulatory coyness of McSweeneys and the ghastly sincerity of the Believer. The stand-out article in the current issue is Elif Batuman’s piece on Isaac Babel, which is shot through with small fragments of genius. It combines a finely judged assessment of Babel’s work, which makes you want to run out and read him (if, like me, you haven’t done so yet), with an exquisite and devastatingly funny deconstruction of the Babel industry in academia. I suspect that I’d get even more from it if I’d already read Babel’s stories. I especially liked this short passage on cultural identity and alienation (n.b. that Batuman’s point goes far beyond Jewish identity politics – the Irish have a more highly developed, if less historically justified, version of the same trope).

Tolstoy observed, “Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” and he was right: surely everyone on this earth, vale of tears that it is, is entitled to the specificity of his or her suffering. But in the end, I am too deeply invested in the idea that literature can render comprehensible another family’s unhappiness. For this reason, I once became impatient with a colleague I met at a conference in New York, who was insisting that the Red Cavalry cycle would never be totally accessible to me because of Lyutov’s “specifically Jewish alienation.”

“Indeed,” I finally said, “as a six-foot-tall first-generation Turkish woman growing up in New Jersey, I cannot possibly know as much about alienation as you, a short American Jew.”

He nodded. “So you see the problem.”

Unfortunately, this isn’t available on the WWW; you’ll have to go to your bookstore and buy yourself a copy of the magazine (or become a subscriber) if you want to read it – I’d recommend the latter if possible (it’s really a great little magazine).

Over at _Inside Higher Ed_, “Scott McLemee”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/intellectual_affairs__8 has some interesting reflections on Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins, a late nineteenth century writer who got a lot of attention from literary scholars, including Henry Louis Gates, because she was identified as African-American, but now turns out to have been white. While there are some academic politics here that are worth exploring, Scott focuses on the more interesting aesthetic question: how it is that an author of very considerable mediocrity may become interesting because of her racial background. When Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins was black, the relentless whiteness of her fictional characters was significant and important, but when she became white again, it turns out to be hundrum and uninformative, a rather banal product of the racial prejudices of its time.[1] Scott has some fun with the earnest efforts of literary theorists to read racial complexities into a text which simply doesn’t support them, contrasting Kelley-Hawkins with another, far more interesting-sounding African-American writer from the same period who does actually engage with the ironies and paradoxes of fluid racial identity. But even though the alchemy of race may not be able to produce gold from dross, the body of Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins scholarship may still have some worth. We can consider it as an imaginative exercise, along the lines of the literary critics of Borges’ “Tlön”:http://aegis.ateneo.net/fted/tlontext.htm, who

bq. often invent authors: they select two dissimilar works – the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights, say – attribute them to the same writer and then determine most scrupulously the psychology of this interesting homme de lettres…

Re-imagining a dull white religious novelist of the late nineteenth century as a conflicted black woman is less ambitious, certainly, but still not entirely without merit.

fn1. Which, as Scott points out in his conclusion, are themselves worth studying, but surely not the same thing.

I’ve just finished Günter Grass’s “Crabwalk”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0156029707/junius-20 , which which I read partly because it dovetails with some other stuff I’ve been reading (such as Sebald’s “Natural History of Destruction”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375504842/junius-20 ) and partly because I have to give a presentation to my German class about a recent book I’ve read. I figured that if I chose a German book there’s be plenty of on-line material to help me work out the relevant vocabulary.

There’s been “much blogospheric concern”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2005/02/14/thousands_of_neonazis_march_in_dresden.php recently about the resurgence of the German far-right, and that’s very much Grass’s concern. One of the favourite themes of the neo-Nazis is Germans-as-victims and Grass’s underlying thought is that the embarassed silence of the German mainstream about the fate of the refugees from Germany’s lost eastern provinces has gifted the extremists a monopoly of that issue. The novel is centred around the sinking of the “Wilhelm Gustloff”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KdF_Ship_Wilhelm_Gustloff on 30 January 1945. The ship, a former pleasure cruiser, was carrying as many as 10,000 people when it was sunk by a Soviet submarine. Nearly everyone on board perished and it therefore ranks as one of the worst maritime disasters even. The narrator protagonist Paul Pokriefke is a cynical journalist whose mother, a survivor, gave birth to him on one of the lifeboats. His estranged son, Konrad, is a neo-Nazi obsessive who runs a website devoted both to the ship and to the assasinated Nazi functionary after whom it was named. Paul tells us of the sinking itself, of his difficult relationship with mother (a DDR loyalist who cried when Stalin died) and son, and of the assassination of “Gustloff”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Gustloff himself in Zurich in 1936 by a Jew, “David Frankfurter”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Frankfurter .

One thing that Grass gets absolutely right is the atmosphere of internet chatrooms. The son, Konrad, is forever engaged in hostile-but-matey banter with a “Jewish” interlocutor “David”. Not only are their identities not quite what they seem but he gets the adolescent faux-enemy-I-hang-out-with thing. I won’t say more about this, because I don’t want to spoil the denoument for anyone.

I’m not sure that Grass ends up telling us all that much about the neo-Nazi phenomenon. What he does get across though is a sense that the commitment of all of his protagonists to anything like a liberal democracy is fragile and contingent. Certainly a book worth reading for both its literary and historical interest, though the translation is occasionally clunky.

Imagine my delight last night when I opened my copy of Wired to find a “From the Blogs” column featuring a charming excerpt from Crooked Timber’s own Kieran Healy. (No, seriously- imagine it.)

As a Freeper hates a Camembert slice
And an OxBlogger hates a dove
As CalPundit hates a rainy day
That’s how much you I love.

Whole poem here, and many congratulations to Kieran. Now, there are some who would wonder how it happened that Wired would come to publish a short blog excerpt that’s two years old. Not me, though; I’m still waiting for my close-up…