Category: Literature

The Third Reich: Part II — Roberto Bolaño

Edwin Turner1 Comment

Literature has a unique power to echo not just from the past into the future, but also backwards through time—later works can somehow cast shadows on earlier ones, and later details of a writer’s biography sometimes seep into fiction that the writer produced earlier. Take for example Edgar Allan Poe. He published his long poem “The Raven,” about a man mourning his lost love, two years before the death of his wife, yet the autobiographical detail nevertheless freights the work with deeper emotional weight. Poe was a hero to Roberto Bolaño (“The honest truth is that with Edgar Allan Poe we would all have more than enough good material to read”), whose own early death seems to haunt the writing that came before it. In turn, the late opus 2666 seems to cast a huge shadow over the rest of Bolaño’s fiction, which of course preceded it. I’ve argued before that 2666 is the labyrinthine culmination of the Bolañoverse, a mirror-world of dread and paranoia and violence and literary criticism and strange beauty. The Third Reich, one of Bolaño’s earliest novels, now in its second part of a four-part serialization from The Paris Review, continues to show Bolaño gesturing toward the beast that would become 2666.

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters -- Goya (1797)

If 2666 impossibly haunts The Third Reich from the future, then paranoid Poe haunts it from the past. Last time we checked in, Udo Berger and his beautiful girlfriend Ingeborg had made tentative friends with another German couple while spending the summer at a seaside resort in Spain. Through this pair, they meet up with two nefarious locals, the Wolf and the Lamb; Udo also begins obsessing over a man named El Quemado, a burn victim who rents paddle boats to tourists. For Udo, the holiday is meant to be a working vacation—he’s a wargame enthusiast, and he plans to write a defining strategy for a new game called “The Third Reich” (implicitly, he plays the Nazi’s side). In the meantime, he’s also taken with the hotel’s owner, Frau Else, a German transplant who mysteriously disappears to take care of an ill husband who no one seems to see.

The first part of The Third Reich (published in the Spring ’11 issue) set the stage for dread, mystery, and extreme paranoia—all while on a sunny seaside holiday. The set-up recalls the seemingly innocuous first section of 2666, “The Part About the Critics,” where four European literature professors spend a vacation of sorts in sunny Mexico while ostensibly searching for a mysterious author. The Third Reich showcases the same sinister tension, describing—but never explaining—the stress between differing cultures, the radical alterity of “being on holiday,” of “vacating,” of being in a different place for a different purpose than what is usual, normal.

The second part of The Third Reich (in the new Summer ’11 issue) increases the dread and paranoia, all with a strange, mordant humor. The novel’s conceit is that the writing is Udo’s holiday’s journal; as such, he controls not only perspective and tone, but what details we learn—or don’t learn. It’s what Udo leaves out that becomes increasingly distressing and fascinating. Indeed, at a crucial point in the novel, Udo fails to explain to us why he remains in Spain after his holiday should be over, even as Ingeborg returns to Germany. There is an ostensible explanation—Charly has disappeared and Udo perhaps wants an answer to the mystery (I will withhold further details for fear of spoiling the plot). It seems more likely that Udo remains to work out his strategy for “The Third Reich”; he finds an unlikely gaming partner in El Quemado. Indeed, the wargame begins to define Udo’s perspective at all times—

When I saw from the balcony that the bathers were beating a mass retreat toward the hotels and campgrounds, I went down to the beach. It’s a sad time of day, and the bathers are sad: tired, sated with sun, they turn their gazes toward the line of buildings like soldier s already sure of defeat; with tired steps they cross the beach and the Paseo Maritimo, prudent but with a hint of scorn, of arrogance in the face of remote danger, their peculiar way of turning down side streets where they immediately seek out the shade leading them directly—they’re a tributue—toward the void.

German nihilism on holiday! Still, Udo finds perverse joy in his gaming sessions with El Quemado; in these episodes, his tone escalates to a manic pitch, reminiscent of some of Poe’s crazies (the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” comes to mind in particular), as well as the mounting insanity of Oscar Amalfitano in 2666. And, just as in the early parts of 2666, The Third Reich begins to buzz with rumors of rape. Udo hints at these rumors, but is unwilling to explore them. Also mysterious is the identity of Frau Else’s husband, a pointedly Gothic conceit, of course, that nonetheless may be the beating heart of horror at the center of the story. He haunts Udo’s sleep—

I dreamed that someone was knocking at the door. It was nighttime and when I opened the door I saw someone slipping down the hall. I followed. Unexpectedly we came to a huge dark room filled with the outlines of heavy old furniture. The smell of mildew and dampness was strong. On a bed a shadowy figure was twisting and turning. At first I thought it was an animal. Then I recognized Frau Else’s husband. At last!

I’ve done my best to omit some of the sharp twists in this section of The Third Reich for fear of spoiling the book, but I will add that Part II ends with something of a subtle cliffhanger (as I write the term “subtle cliffhanger” I realize that it is pure oxymoron; mea culpa). In any case, I’m enjoying the serialization very much and look forward to reading Part III.

“There Is No Beauty Anywhere” — Edith Hamilton on William Faulkner’s Curse-ridden Men

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From Edith Hamilton’s essay “William Faulkner: Sorcerer or Slave,” collected in The Ever Present Past—

Mr. Faulkner’s novels are about ugly people in an ugly land. There is no beauty anywhere. Whether he deliberately excludes it or does not perceive it, no one can say; but at least he says himself that a blossoming pear tree in the moonlight looks like hair streaming up from the head of a drowned woman, each hair distinct in the water from the others. He describes the scent of a blooming shrub, still wet with dew, as sickening. To walk through the woodlands in summer in “a gloom dimmer than the gray desolation of November” is to feel “malicious little eyes” watching (birds? squirrels?) while under foot the oozing earth crawls with snakes.

But the land is worse, far worse, than all of these unpleasant features put together. It ruins the people it nourishes. A dark curse lies on it. It was “already tainted before any white man owned it . . . from that old world’s corrupt and worthless twilight as though in the sailfulls of the old world’s tainted wind which drove the ships.” Columbus’, presumably. The initial curse, connected with the dispossession of the Indians, appears to be—Mr. Faulkner is not quite clear about it—inherited by the North as well as the South, but its full effect is shown concentrated in the South. “Don’t you see?” young Ike McCaslin cries in “The Bear.” “Don’t you see? This whole land, the whole South, is cursed, and all of us who derive from it, whom it ever suckled, lie under the curse.”

The people, thus doomed, are like the land that dooms them. It is part of the fate that molds them. “Our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent, shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooking image.” At this point Poe comes irresistibly to mind. “The dank tarn of Auber—the misty mid region of Weir—the ghoul-haunted woodlands of Weir.” It is the point in the realm of romance where extremes meet, Poe’s lovely and lost Ulalume and Mr. Faulkner’s curse-ridden men

“Ode to the Only Girl” — John Edward Williams

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“Ode to the Only Girl,” a poem by John Edward Williams—

I’ve seen you many times in many places–
Theater, bus, train, or on the street;
Smiling in spring rain, in winter sleet,
Eyes of any hue in myriad faces;
Midnight black, all shades of brown your hair,
Long, short, bronze or honey-fair.
Instantly have I loved, have never spoken;
Slowly a truck passed, a light changed,
A door closed–all seemingly pre-arranged–
Then you were gone forever, the spell was broken.
Ubiquitios only one, we’ve met before
A hundred times, and we’ll meet again
As many more; in hills or forest glen,
On crowded street or lonely, peaceful shore;
Somewhere, someday–but how will we ever know
True love, how wil we ever know?

New in the Stack: Banana Republican, Ether, and The Oregon Experiment

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As always, the stack overfloweth. Here are a few of the more interesting titles that have landed at Biblioklept International Headquarters recently.

Banana Republican is the first novel by historian Eric Rauchway. The book is a send up of American Imperialism in the 1920s, satirizing the naked greed, corrupt capitalism, and ugly jingoism that infused the rise of the global economy. Fortunately, all of these ills have left American foreign policy forever, right? Satire! Seriously though, Banana Republican looks to the past to reveal that our current foreign debacles are merely an extension of policies that have been around for decades. The protagonist is Tom Buchanan (yes, that Tom Buchanan, the racist football-playing, mistress-slapping lout of The Great Gatsby). Rauchway sends Buchanan into the fiasco of American intervention in Nicaragua in the early 20th century. In an interview with The St. Petersburg Times, Rauchway points out how this scenario allows for an exploration of the American dream from a decidedly different viewpoint than the one we find in Fitzgerald—-

People always see Gatsby as the novel about the American dream. But the character who represents that dream of upward mobility ends up floating facedown in a swimming pool. Tom Buchanan represents the real American dream: having it all and not having to suffer the consequences. I wanted to get away from the somewhat suspect view of the narrator in Gatsby and let Tom speak for himself. . . .

I was interested in writing about the irresponsibility of American foreign policy, so if you take Tom Buchanan in the 1920s, where are we? We’re in Nicaragua. When you look at American foreign policy, in Europe we do pretty well. In South America, not so much. And there’s that tradition in places that are on the edges of empire: Dissolute people get to go there and act badly and no one calls them on it.

Evgenia Citkowitz’s Ether collects seven short stories and a novella, all united by psychological and emotional complexity. Citkowitz’s characters explore moral dilemmas as they quest for identity, and if that sounds like the stock of contemporary fiction (which it is), the prose, terse, often chilly, and darkly funny, is what set these apart. Here’s Ligaya Mishan, reviewing the hardback edition last year in The New York Times—

Citkowitz’s book is peopled by mothers and fathers who are fumblers at best, unrepentant alcoholics at worst. A few are simply absentees, like the father of Beatty, the British schoolgirl in “Leavers’ Events,” who is omitted from family suppers, “disqualified by his status as a heroin addict.” The girl’s mother, a high-level fashion editor, is hardly more present. The only grown-up in Beatty’s life who actually behaves like one is, oddly enough, the rakish novelist she invites to the opera. After initiating a lazy seduction, he wisely thinks better of it. Again, Citkowitz flouts expectations: her heroine may be momentarily crushed, but soon she has moved to New York, ascended the editorial ladder at a chic magazine, landed her own office and effectively supplanted her mother — a modern-day Electra.

Ether and Banana Republican are both new in trade paperback from Picador.

In his promo vid (below) for The Oregon Experiment, author Keith Scribner suggests that, “It’s a novel that explores the ways in which the political, the social, the personal, the domestic are inseparable.” Those are some pretty grand claims, so here are the details: The Oregon Experiment recounts the story of Scanlon and Naomi Pratt, a couple who move from the East Coast to Oregon, where Scanlon begins his first tenure-track job as a professor who studies radical action mass movements. Naomi was once a “genius nose” who worked for perfume companies, but she’s lost her sense of smell; she’s also pregnant with the couple’s first child. Scanlon quickly becomes enamored of Oregon, and becomes particularly intrigued by local separatists and anarchists; Naomi’s nose returns, but she isn’t quite as thrilled as Scanlon about the new scene (particularly Scanlon’s enchantment with Sequoia, leader of the secessionists), although she does connect with Scanlon’s young subject Clay, an anarchist. Scribner propels his novel with ideas rendered in crisp, realistic dialogue. The Oregon Experiment is new from Knopf.

“This Schedule In Effect July 5th, 1922” — The Great Gatsby’s House Guests

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In Chapter 4 of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, narrator Nick Carraway recounts the names of the rich, shallow, parasitic guests who attended Gatsby’s parties. Nick tells us the list comes from “an old time-table” of names he originally recorded in July 5th—significantly, the day after Independence Day: the day after the hopes and dreams of a new country. From the chapter—-

Once I wrote down on the empty spaces of a time-table the names of those who came to Gatsby’s house that summer. It is an old time-table now, disintegrating at its folds, and headed “This schedule in effect July 5th, 1922.” But I can still read the gray names, and they will give you a better impression than my generalities of those who accepted Gatsby’s hospitality and paid him the subtle tribute of knowing nothing whatever about him.

From East Egg, then, came the Chester Beckers and the Leeches, and a man named Bunsen, whom I knew at Yale, and Doctor Webster Civet, who was drowned last summer up in Maine. And the Hornbeams and the Willie Voltaires, and a whole clan named Blackbuck, who always gathered in a corner and flipped up their noses like goats at whosoever came near. And the Ismays and the Chrysties (or rather Hubert Auerbach and Mr. Chrystie’s wife), and Edgar Beaver, whose hair, they say, turned cotton-white one winter afternoon for no good reason at all.

Clarence Endive was from East Egg, as I remember. He came only once, in white knickerbockers, and had a fight with a bum named Etty in the garden. From farther out on the Island came the Cheadles and the O. R. P. Schraeders, and the Stonewall Jackson Abrams of Georgia, and the Fishguards and the Ripley Snells. Snell was there three days before he went to the penitentiary, so drunk out on the gravel drive that Mrs. Ulysses Swett’s automobile ran over his right hand. The Dancies came, too, and S. B. Whitebait, who was well over sixty, and Maurice A. Flink, and the Hammerheads, and Beluga the tobacco importer, and Beluga’s girls.

From West Egg came the Poles and the Mulreadys and Cecil Roebuck and Cecil Schoen and Gulick the state senator and Newton Orchid, who controlled Films Par Excellence, and Eckhaust and Clyde Cohen and Don S. Schwartze (the son) and Arthur McCarty, all connected with the movies in one way or another. And the Catlips and the Bembergs and G. Earl Muldoon, brother to that Muldoon who afterward strangled his wife. Da Fontano the promoter came there, and Ed Legros and James B. (“Rot-Gut.”) Ferret and the De Jongs and Ernest Lilly — they came to gamble, and when Ferret wandered into the garden it meant he was cleaned out and Associated Traction would have to fluctuate profitably next day.

A man named Klipspringer was there so often and so long that he became known as “the boarder.”— I doubt if he had any other home. Of theatrical people there were Gus Waize and Horace O’donavan and Lester Meyer and George Duckweed and Francis Bull. Also from New York were the Chromes and the Backhyssons and the Dennickers and Russel Betty and the Corrigans and the Kellehers and the Dewars and the Scullys and S. W. Belcher and the Smirkes and the young Quinns, divorced now, and Henry L. Palmetto, who killed himself by jumping in front of a subway train in Times Square.

Benny McClenahan arrived always with four girls. They were never quite the same ones in physical person, but they were so identical one with another that it inevitably seemed they had been there before. I have forgotten their names — Jaqueline, I think, or else Consuela, or Gloria or Judy or June, and their last names were either the melodious names of flowers and months or the sterner ones of the great American capitalists whose cousins, if pressed, they would confess themselves to be.

In addition to all these I can remember that Faustina O’brien came there at least once and the Baedeker girls and young Brewer, who had his nose shot off in the war, and Mr. Albrucksburger and Miss Haag, his fiancee, and Ardita Fitz-Peters and Mr. P. Jewett, once head of the American Legion, and Miss Claudia Hip, with a man reputed to be her chauffeur, and a prince of something, whom we called Duke, and whose name, if I ever knew it, I have forgotten.

All these people came to Gatsby’s house in the summer.

A Poem for July 4th — Walt Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing”

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Walt Whitman’s poem “I Hear America Singing”—

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

Ernest Hemingway’s Suicide Gun

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Garden & Gun ran a short piece on Ernest Hemingway’s guns last year, and linked to a slideshow of the famous author (who killed himself 50 years ago today) with his guns. From the article—

When Ernest Hemingway took his own life on July 2, 1961, it was reported in Life magazine that he had done so with a “double-barreled shotgun.” Further reports specified the gun was a Boss that he had purchased from Abercrombie & Fitch, and for years this has been widely accepted as fact. But a fascinating new book, Hemingway’s Guns, by Silvio Calabi, Steve Helsley, and Roger Sanger (Shooting Sportsman Books), makes the case that Hemingway never owned a Boss, and that the suicide gun was actually made by W. & C. Scott & Son. It was Hemingway’s pigeon gun, a long-barreled side-by-side that traveled with him from shooting competitions in Cuba to duck hunts in Italy to a safari in East Africa. By all accounts it was a favorite.

Not long after that tragic day in Ketchum, Idaho, the gun was given to a local welder to be destroyed. “The stock was smashed and the steel parts cut up with a torch,” the authors write. “The mangled remnants were then buried in a field.” Roger Sanger visited the welding shop, which is still in business and being run by the grandson of the original proprietor. Amazingly, the welder still had a few pieces of the gun in a matchbox, and Sanger’s immediate reaction to the evidence was, “This is no Boss.” After showing pictures to a number of experts and collectors, he confirmed that it was most likely Hemingway’s beloved W. & C. Scott that had been the suicide gun.

A W. & C. Scott & Son Monte Carlo B—Serial No. 60293, c. 1898

The Pale King — David Foster Wallace

Edwin Turner17 Comments

In one of the notes at the end of David Foster Wallace’s incomplete novel The Pale King, the author writes, “Plot a series of set-ups for stuff happening, but nothing actually happens.” This is a fairly precise summary of The Pale King—if you take “nothing actually happens” to mean an absence of recognizable character arcs defined through readily identifiable conflicts progressing along a linear narrative. The Pale King is not a traditional novel. Hell, it’s not even really a novel, unless you decide to really stretch your definition of what a novel is. Which is all fine and good and dandy. Infinite Jest is not a traditional novel either, but it is, I believe, clearly identifiable as a novel: it coheres; it completes; it concludes—which The Pale King does not.

You know the context of The Pale King, and if you don’t you can look it up—there’s a glut of hand-wringing and buzz and backlash out there (out there=internet) that I’ve spent the past three or four months doing my best to ignore. And while I haven’t read a review of The Pale King yet (I’ll read Tom McCarthy’ s write up in The New York Times as soon as I finish my piece), I would have to be deaf dumb blind not to have missed all the headlines, the links, the tweets, the weight people have sought to attach to this book. Anyway, I’m approaching hand-wringing here myself, which is not my aim. I want to try to review the book. But, like I said, there’s all that context. It’s unfinished. Incomplete. Posthumous.

We know the context. You know it’s incomplete, I know it’s incomplete, we know that going in. Which is why it’s a far more satisfying read, I believe, to treat The Pale King as a fragmentary piece, a novel-in-stories, a collection of themes, riffs, dialogues and monologues, vignettes, bits and pieces. It’s closer in many ways to Brief Interviews with Hideous Men or Oblivion than it is to Infinite Jest, although there are plenty of novelly-novel elements. There’s a setting: mostly a sweaty Peoria, Illinois in the mid 1980s, and although much of the novel centers around an IRS regional center there, there are also bits in Chicago, various college classrooms, suburban homes, sad motels, crowded highways, fringe communities, surveillance vans, bars, psych wards, etc. There are recurring characters, all of them IRS employees.

Perhaps a bit on those characters: Some of the best moments of the book center on the bizarre mind of Claude Sylvanshine, a fact psychic who can’t control the flow of data that surges into his mind. Sylvanshine works with his partner and sometime rival Reynolds to help lay the groundwork for the arrival of Merrill Errol Lehrl in Peoria, where Lehrl will continue to machinize the IRS or something like that. There’s Toni Ware, easily the coolest character in the book. There’s not enough Toni Ware in The Pale King. There’s Leonard Stecyk, a person so impossibly good that he drives everyone to despair. There’s Lane Dean, a Christian who may or may not be slowly losing faith. There’s Chris Fogle, who tells us basically his life story in a 100 page novella that may or may not be the center of the book (there is no center though). There’s David Wallace, who claims to be writing a memoir, who claims to be, like, the David Foster Wallace, the author, who claims that he worked for the IRS for a few years between other gigs. As if to prove he’s the real David Wallace, his sections are crammed with diverting, annoying footnotes that repeatedly interrupt any rhythm the reader (or this reader anyway) could get going. It’s difficult to summarize or even describe the relations between the characters, who are defined repeatedly not just through their own telling, but through each others’ eyes, which makes it even more difficult to unpack the plot of The Pale King.

The conflict of the book, or at least the surface conflict, the plot-level conflict, seems to be (or seems to have intended to have been) about a movement within the IRS to essentially change its mission from one of service, of doing a job that no one wants to do that nevertheless has to be done for the greater good of democracy, to a more nefarious and machine-like agency bent on generating revenue—like a corporation. Thus humanity vs. bureaucracy, religious-type calling vs. mercenary machinery, selfless duty vs. selfish will, etc. etc. etc. Chapter 19 (§19, in the book’s terms) lays out these themes beautifully in a civics lesson (the chapter is set in a stuck elevator, I think). The civics lesson has even more resonance in these times of rampant Teabaggery. Here’s a taste—-

Corporations aren’t citizens or neighbors or parents. They can’t vote or serve in combat. They don’t learn the Pledge of Allegiance. They don’t have souls. They’re revenue machines. I don’t have any problem with that. I think it’s absurd to lay moral or civic obligations on them. Their only obligations are strategic, and while they can get very complex, at root they’re not civic entities. With corporations, I have no problem with the government enforcement of statutes and regulatory policy serving a conscience function. What my problem is is the way it seems that we as individual citizens have adopted a corporate attitude. That our ultimate obligation is to ourselves. That unless it’s illegal or there are direct practical consequences for ourselves, any activity is okay.

The IRS gives Wallace a perfect backdrop to explore the tension between civic virtue and the American right to be a selfish asshole, but it’s the book’s themes of boredom and attention that have been remarked upon the most. Simply put, the theme is pervasive, perhaps overdetermined within the narrative, and at once both obvious and complex. Infinite Jest explored the consequences and existential fallout of a society conditioned to believe that it had to be entertained at all times; The Pale King seems to respond to the same existential problem in kind, only from a different angle. There’s so much of this theme of boredom and attention throughout the book that I’ll lazily go to Wallace’s end notes again, where he concisely lays it bare for us (or not for us really but probably for himself)—

It turns out that bliss—a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.

Wallace finds a kind of transcendental out in the ability to concentrate attention on tasks of despair-invoking boredom. This type of attention obviously recalls the intensity of fervent, even monastic prayer (indeed, the IRS agents are often implicitly compared to monks), yet the Midwest America of The Pale King is deeply desacralized. Although Lane Dean provides a figure of religion in crisis (underexplored for the perhaps obvious reason that the book is unfinished), for the most part The Pale King  presents a post-Nietzschean world without an authorizing center. Wallace’s work then is to find some kind of metaphysical solace in a world where God seems absent at best, and he finds it in paying close attention to the tedium of life. For me, it’s The Pale King’s strange metaphysical moments that are the most intriguing (and frustrating) then. We have the aforementioned Sylvanshine, a fact psychic who can parse data, but cannot glean real meaning from it—

The fact psychic lives part-time in the world of fractious, boiling minutiae that no one knows or could be bothered to know even if they had the chance to know. The population of Brunei. The difference between mucus and sputum. How long a piece of gum has resided on the underside of the third-row fourth-from-left-seat of the Virginia Theater, Cranston, RI, but not who put it there or why. Impossible to predict what facts will intrude. Constant headaches.

In a world of information-overload, attending deeply and meaningfully to data becomes prohibitively difficult, if not impossible. Sylvanshine’s blessing/curse dramatizes the paralyzing post-20th century crisis of too much information (and therefore too many choices). The Pale King’s metaphysical elements manifest again in the ghosts Garrity and Blumquist, who kinda-sorta haunt the IRS center in Peoria; one of them shows up to explain the etymology of the word “boring” to Lane Dean. There’s a boy whose devotion to kissing every square inch of his body (clearly an impossible feat) takes on a spiritual dimension. There’s Chris Fogle, who experiences a religious-type epiphany in an accounting class. There’s also a “fierce infant” who seems to have some metaphysical powers, although I don’t know why I’m lumping him in here. Like I said, (didn’t I say?) I don’t really know how to review this book (I’ve also had a few beers at this point). The infant is one of those threads that goes nowhere, that fails to cohere, that might have a missing piece somewhere else, somewhere unwritten. A more complete picture of the transcendental bliss that prolonged attention might hold comes late in the book, in a longish piece (§46) that details a tête-à-tête between Meredith Rand, who is too-pretty, a little crazy, and ultimately both boring and alienating to almost any guy she actually talks to, and Drinion, an asexual man I take to be autistic. Drinion pays absolute, intense, true, human attention to Meredith Rand’s story of being admitted to a psychiatric hospital in her teens for cutting herself; there she meets her future husband. During their conversation, Drinion begins to levitate—via his attention, he literally transcends gravity. And yet the catch of it all is that Drinion’s autism and aesexuality somehow make it easier for him to attend others, to truly connect to this beautiful woman who simultaneously bores and alienates most of the men she bothers to speak with.

Still, Wallace posits in Drinion—and elsewhere in the book, but hey, let’s face it, this is getting pretty long for a blog review—Wallace posits some kind of answer to existential despair and boredom, an answer that goes beyond a trite commonplace like “empathy,” in that empathy is ultimately about self-identification: the answer in The Pale King seems to be selfless identification, in the most literal sense. There’s no cheat here—the narrative bits with Toni Ware especially dramatize the brutal ugliness of life, its essential Darwinian unfairness, the random cruelty that might be there. This is a book about death and taxes, and Wallace works to sanctify these costs of life, to make them count in a in a world that has largely abandoned the sacred, in a society where many people are incapable or unwilling to think empathetically about their relation to (via taxes and social institutions) other humans whom they do not personally know.

The Pale King is not as rich or funny or sad as Infinite Jest; it has nothing to match Don Gately nor does it have a Prince Hal Incandenza. But why hold that against it? It is, after all, an unfinished thing, but as incomplete as it may be, its ends not just loose but frayed, it is still a marvel of heart and intellect. Highly recommended.

The Pale King’s Opening Lines Vs. Hadji Murad’s Opening Lines

Edwin Turner11 Comments

Putting together a review of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King right now, I realize I have no place to put , nor anything intelligent or even thoughtful to say, about an observation I made about its opening lines (you know, that sentence you halfway paid attention to on some dude’s tumblr), which seem to echo the opening of Leo Tolstoy’s Hadji Murad, which said observation I only observed because I read the books at the same time, and in fact read the opening chapters on the same day. Anyway.

First lines of The Pale King—

Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-​brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the a.m. heat: shattercane, lamb’s‑quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-​print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek.

First lines of Hadji Murad—-

I was returning home by the fields. It was midsummer, the hay harvest was over and they were just beginning to reap the rye. At that season of the year there is a delightful variety of flowers —red, white, and pink scented tufty clover; milk-white ox-eye daisies with their bright yellow centers and pleasant spicy smell; yellow honey-scented rape blossoms; tall campanulas with white and lilac bells, tulip-shaped; creeping vetch; yellow, red, and pink scabious; faintly scented, neatly arranged purple plaintains with blossoms slightly tinged with pink; cornflowers, the newly opened blossoms bright blue in the sunshine but growing paler and redder towards evening or when growing old; and delicate almond-scented dodder flowers that withered quickly.

I’m not suggesting that Wallace is consciously following Tolstoy here, although the structures of the openings are remarkably similar, and in each case, the flora imagery is ultimately ironized by the narrative that follows.

“The List Is the Origin of Culture” — Umberto Eco

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From a 2009 interview with Der Spiegel—

Umberto Eco: The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries. There is an allure to enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was 2,063, at least according to Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. We also have completely practical lists — the shopping list, the will, the menu — that are also cultural achievements in their own right.

SPIEGEL: Should the cultured person be understood as a custodian looking to impose order on places where chaos prevails?

Eco: The list doesn’t destroy culture; it creates it. Wherever you look in cultural history, you will find lists. In fact, there is a dizzying array: lists of saints, armies and medicinal plants, or of treasures and book titles. Think of the nature collections of the 16th century. My novels, by the way, are full of lists.

SPIEGEL: Accountants make lists, but you also find them in the works of Homer, James Joyce and Thomas Mann.

Eco: Yes. But they, of course, aren’t accountants. In “Ulysses,” James Joyce describes how his protagonist, Leopold Bloom, opens his drawers and all the things he finds in them. I see this as a literary list, and it says a lot about Bloom. Or take Homer, for example. In the “Iliad,” he tries to convey an impression of the size of the Greek army. At first he uses similes: “As when some great forest fire is raging upon a mountain top and its light is seen afar, even so, as they marched, the gleam of their armour flashed up into the firmament of heaven.” But he isn’t satisfied. He cannot find the right metaphor, and so he begs the muses to help him. Then he hits upon the idea of naming many, many generals and their ships.

SPIEGEL: But, in doing so, doesn’t he stray from poetry?

Eco: At first, we think that a list is primitive and typical of very early cultures, which had no exact concept of the universe and were therefore limited to listing the characteristics they could name. But, in cultural history, the list has prevailed over and over again. It is by no means merely an expression of primitive cultures. A very clear image of the universe existed in the Middle Ages, and there were lists. A new worldview based on astronomy predominated in the Renaissance and the Baroque era. And there were lists. And the list is certainly prevalent in the postmodern age. It has an irresistible magic.

“Style and Content Must Match” — William Gaddis on Voice and Risk in His Novels

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From a brief  1982 interview with William Gaddis—

Q: The pervasive and distinctive authorial voice of The Recognitions gives way in J R to a self-effacing voice that seems to serve only functional purposes. Also in J R there is an increased dependence on dialogue. For verisimilitude in Lolita, Nabokov “travelled in school buses to listen to the talk of schoolgirls.” Did you take any special measures to hear and note the speech patterns of any of the wide variety of people who speak in “J R”?

William Gaddis: Style and content must match, must be complementary, accounting in part for a difference between the two books, though the lack of a conventional narrative style had already jarred a good many readers of The Recognitions when it appeared, as its hapless reviews show. J R was started as a story which quickly proved unsatisfactory, inspired- here’s the legitimate gossip—-by the postwar desecration of the Long Island village of Massapequa where my family had had property since around 1910, take a look at it now and you’ll see all the book’s worst hopes realized. In approaching J R as a novel, I was at pains to remove the author’s presence from the start as must be obvious. This was partly by way of what I mentioned earlier, obliging the thing to stand on own, take its own chances. But it was also by way of setting up a problem, a risk, in order to sustain my own interest, especially since the largely uninterrupted dialogue raised the further risk of presenting a convincing sense of real time without the conventional chapter breaks, white spaces, such narrative intrusions as “A week later . . .” How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me. As for what you call speech patterns, one is always listening and has got an ear or hasn’t, and without one, unless perhaps in dealing with an unfamiliar language and culture, no amount of your special measures like riding around on school buses will get you out of the swamp.

“Finnegans Wake: What It’s All About” — Anthony Burgess

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Read Anthony Burgess’s essay on James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. From said essay—

In his dream HCE, as we shall now call him, tries to make the whole of history swallow up his guilt for him. His initials are made to stand for the generality of sinful man, and they are expanded into slogans like “Here Comes Everybody” and “Haveth Childers Everywhere”. After all, sexual guilt presupposes a certain creative, or procreative, vitality, and a fall only comes to those who are capable of an erection. The unquenchable vitality appears in “our Human Conger Eel” (despite the “down, wantons, down” of the eel-pie-maker in King Lear); the erector of great structures is seen in “Howth Castle and Environs”. From the point of view of the ultimate dreamer of the dream, though (the author himself), “HCE” has a structural task to perform. As a chemical formula (H2CE3) or as a genuine vocable (“hec” or “ech” or even “Hecech”) it holds the dream down to its hero, is sewn to it like a mono­gram-HCE: his dream. But HCE has, so deep is his sleep, sunk to a level of dreaming in which he has become a collective being rehearsing the collective guilt of man. Man falls, man rises so that he can fall again; the sequence of falling and rising goes on till doomsday. The record of this, expressed in the lives of great men, in the systems they make and unmake and remake, is what we call history.

Light in August — William Faulkner

Edwin Turner5 Comments

I can’t unpack William Faulkner’s novel Light in August here. There’s too much in it. It’s too thick. Faulkner piles on his sentences in a gelatinous mass, smearing words on top of words into a deep swamp of meaning, motif, and symbol. The novel is archaeological, a deep dig into the South’s abject wounds. It is the most Faulkneresque Faulkner novel I have read, a heady strange brew that tries to suss out racism, misogyny, fear of paternity, the scars of the plantation system, the fallout of the Civil War, the cold comfort of religion, and so much more. Like any good modern text, you could say it’s about a quest for identity, and how the quester must come into conflict with the codes and terms of the dominant social order to find that solid identity. But in Faulkner there is no stable identity, and Light in August dramatizes this problem, even as it points to a possible inherent payoff.

A book review should give some sense of what happens in the book, but as in much of Faulkner’s work, explaining “what happens” in a Light in August would spoil the puzzle, the synthesis, the game, the shock of it all. But some outlines should suffice. The novel is set in the Jim Crow South, mostly in Jefferson, seat of Yoknapatawpha County, the Faulknerverse. It opens with Lena Grove walking “all the way from Alabama” into Mississippi; she’s in her third trimester of pregnancy and still has no ring on her finger, a sign that every Southerner knows how to read. Lena is looking for the father’s child, Lucas Burch; she hears tell that a Burch might work at the planing mill. It’s not Burch though, but Byron Bunch, who falls for Lena right away, plays Joseph to her Mary. Meanwhile, Lucas Burch is around—only the rascal’s taken up the false name Joe Brown. He’s also taken up with the novel’s tragic anti-hero, Joe Christmas, helping that strange man bootleg whiskey out of old servant quarters adjoining a decaying plantation house. Joe Christmas, an abandoned orphan, may have black blood in him. In Jim Crow Mississippi this makes him black, even worse than black—an unknown, unknowable something. Christmas (is there a more overdetermined name in fiction?) is accused of killing the woman who lives the old plantation house, a woman the community of Jefferson shunned for her family’s abolitionist, carpetbaggin’ past, yet now the community must exact the only kind of justice suitable for a black man accused of killing a white woman in Mississippi in the 1920s. JC, always estranged, must now keep on the run to avoid being lynched.

In any other novel, the two protagonists would have to meet, but Faulkner never allows a scene between Christmas and Lena. Yet they are undeniably tied together: somehow he is both the metaphysical father of her child and the child itself, Faulkner’s answer to the inescapable violent fatalism that curses the South. There is no exit from the wounded past, but there might be new possibilities, and we might find them in Lena’s baby. Lena provides a feminine antidote to Christmas’s abject fear of women, his utterly Faulknerian despair of genitalia and menstruation; at the same time, Christmas becomes the sacrificial lamb for the South’s sins, the totem whose ritualistic dismemberment will at once reaffirm the dominant social patriarchal order of the plantation system at the very same time it reveals that system’s deep hypocrisy and radical instability.

In Light in August, Faulkner shows us a world where social codes are rigid, inflexible, immutable, unspoken, and bear absolutely no relation to the concrete reality of the phenomenal, external world they pretend to govern. It’s the primal sin of the plantation system, which paradoxically separated and joined blacks and whites; which said that miscegenation was abomination yet created the optimal circumstances for racial mixing; which proscribed the very concept of a multiracial family while enforcing the Darwinian circumstances that would necessitate such a collective. It is a world where nothing fits together, nothing connects, yet Faulkner finds a place for his misfits, although he must find it by mixing up the system.

Here’s Lena talking to Hightower, the defrocked minister and ersatz medicine man (I will not even begin to discuss Hightower). Lena’s concern is over Christmas’s grandmother, who through a bizarre series of events is present at the baby’s birth—-

“She keeps on talking about—–She is mixed up someway. And sometimes I get mixed up too, listening, having to . . . . . . .” Her eyes, her words, grope, fumble.

“Mixed up?”

“She keeps on talking about him like his pa was that—–that one in jail, that Mr Christmas. She keeps on, and the I get mixed up and it’s like sometimes I can’t——like I am mixed up too and I think that his pa is that Mr—–Mr Christmas too—–” She watches him; it is as though she makes a tremendous effort of some kind. “But I know that aint so. I know that’s foolish. It’s because she keeps on saying it and saying it, and maybe I ain’t strong good yet, and I get mixed up too. But I am afraid . . . . . . .”

“Of what?”

“I don’t like to get mixed up. And I am afraid she might get me mixed up, like they say how you might cross your eyes and then you can’t uncross . . . . . . .”

But the eyes and the I’s (both are ways of seeing, of course) do get crossed in Light. Faulkner mixes up the system, crosses the wires as a way out of the ugly circuit, even as he paradoxically reconfirms the circuit’s contours. This is not a writer who flinches from history and all its despair, even as he tries to find a metaphysical answer outside of religious doctrine and conventional morality.

I feel like I’ve made, at best, some very broad, superficial scratches into the surface of a very dense, thick book; even worse, I’ve barely provided even a hint of Faulkner’s astounding prose. Mea culpa. I’ll take a second, more specific shot at Light in August in an upcoming post. For now: Very highly recommended.

Bill Murray Reads Billy Collins’s Poem “Forgetfulness”

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(More).

Anthony Burgess Laments the Loss of History

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In 1972, Burgess could already see the loss of historical perspective that was happening in institutionalized education. I suppose he would consider 2011 a nightmare that no one is even attempting to wake up from. Also, is there anything like this on TV today? Seriously—is conservatism simply the opposite of intellectualism at this point? Could you imagine a leading conservative pundit having a literary author like Burgess on his or her show to actually, like, talk about history (or anything else for that matter)?
(See also).

Seven Fragmentary Novels That Aren’t The Pale King

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I finished David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King the other night (don’t worry—I know that there’s been a terrible shortage of coverage for this obscure book, so I’ll post a review pretty soon review here). The Pale King unfolds as a series of fragments, some short as one page, many the length of long short stories, and one novella length piece. Characters recur, but themes, images, and motifs hold these pieces together rather than any linear plot. The better pieces can stand on their own as short stories, yet are much richer when read with/against the rest of the novel. The Pale King remained unfinished at the time of Wallace’s death, but his notes on the manuscript (published at the end of the book) suggest that fragmentation was always his intentional method.

The fragmentary novel is nothing new, but its particular powers have gained resonance against the backdrop of a world where authority, information, and communication are increasingly decentralized, scattered, and, well, fragmented. Fragmentary novels might have roots in the picaresque (those one-damn-thing-after-the-next novels like Don Quixote, Candide, Huckleberry Finn, Invisible Man, Orlando, Blood Meridian . . .), but picaresque novels tend to have a shape, a trajectory, even if they seem to lack traditional plot arcs or characterization. What I’m talking about here are novels made of pieces, segments, or chapters that work fine on their own, and  may even seem self-contained, but when synthesized help reveal the novel’s greater project. So, seven fragmentary novels that aren’t The Pale King—

Steps, Jerzy Kosinski

There’s force and vitality and horror in Steps, all compressed into lucid, compact little scenes. In terms of plot, some scenes connect to others, while most don’t. The book is unified by its themes of repression and alienation, its economy of rhythm, and, most especially, the consistent tone of its narrator. In the end, it doesn’t matter if it’s the same man relating all of these strange experiences because the way he relates them links them and enlarges them. At a remove, Steps is probably about a Polish man’s difficulties under the harsh Soviet regime at home played against his experiences as a new immigrant to the United States and its bizarre codes of capitalism. But this summary is pale against the sinister light of Kosinski’s prose. Here’s David Foster Wallace: “Steps gets called a novel but it is really a collection of unbelievably creepy little allegorical tableaux done in a terse elegant voice that’s like nothing else anywhere ever. Only Kafka’s fragments get anywhere close to where Kosinski goes in this book, which is better than everything else he ever did combined.”

Speedboat, Renata Adler

Telegraphed in bristling, angular prose, Speedboat unwinds as a series of seemingly unrelated vignettes, japes, and jokes all filtered through the narrator’s ironic, faux-journalist sensibility. Adler’s novel eschews plot, conventional characters, and resolution—its contours are its center. Speedboat was published in the early 1970s, but it would seem ahead of its time even if it were published tomorrow.  Adler captures the deep existential alienation of modern life, converting dread into verve and despair into marvel.

2666, Roberto Bolaño

Bolaño’s opus bears considerable superficial comparison to Wallace’s The Pale King: both were published posthumously, both have endured a process of buzz and backlash, both are unfinished, and both are purposefully fragmented. 2666 comprises (at least five) parts, some connected explicitly, others tied loosely together, but all interwoven with themes of violence, darkness, art, and love. The book’s most notorious section, “The Part About the Crimes,” is itself a fragmented beast, a procession of murders and rapes, dead-end investigations, bizarre TV appearances, and other sinister doings. Prominent characters disappear into the violence of Santa Teresa never to return again; the great mystery of the book seems unsolved. But like Ariadne, Bolaño offers his readers a thread through the labyrinth, a layering of motifs, as words and images repeat throughout shifts in space and time.

Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs

Naked Lunch’s cut-up origins are well-known and probably greatly exaggerated: the book is far more coherent than its reputation insists. Still, Burroughs’s infamous novel is all over the place (quite literally), moving through time and space and even to Interzone. Comic, rambling, lusty, and perverse, Naked Lunch’s satire is often overshadowed by its seedier, more sensational side. Burroughs claimed his novels were part of an antique literary pedigree: “I myself am in a very old tradition, namely, that of the picaresque novel. People complain that my novels have no plot. Well, a picaresque novel has no plot. It is simply a series of incidents.”

Vertigo, W. G.  Sebald

Vertigo blurs the lines between fiction, history, autobiography, and biography. The book comprises four sections. The first section tells the story of the romantic novelist Stendhal (or, more to the point, a version of Stendhal); the second section details two trips Sebald made to Italy, one in 1980, and one in 1987; the third section describes a trip Kakfa took to Italy near the end of his life; the final section describes the narrator hiking from Austria to visit the village where he was born in Bavaria. Underwriting and uniting these separate episodes is the narrator’s attempt to find a common thread between past and present, to find a unity in a Europe fractured by time and war. There’s also a deep, throbbing melancholy mixed with beauty and wisdom here.

Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell

Mitchell constructs Cloud Atlas like a doubled matryoshka doll, nesting narratives inside narratives that work their way to an apocalyptic future; once Cloud Atlas hits its middle mark, it works outward to the past, back to its own edges. With the exception of the middle piece, a nod to Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, Mitchell fragments each piece of Cloud Atlas at a key turning point, an old literary trick really, but one that pays off. The tales likely hold up on their own, but their intertextual play is the real delight of the novel, as Mitchell showcases a variety of styles and genres and forms that reflect the content and era of each tale. At its core,  Cloud Atlas explores Nietzschean themes of eternal recurrence and the will to power; its clever fragmented structure emphasizes the loops of history humanity finds itself caught in again and again, even as brave souls seek a new way of seeing, living, doing.

Go Down, Moses, William Faulkner

Faulkner always insisted that Go Down, Moses was a novel, although in its initial publication it was presented as a collection of short stories.  And granted, any of the stories can be read on their own. “Was” is hilarious homosocial hijinks, but read against the sorrow and anger in “The Fire and the Hearth” and “Pantaloon in Black,” or the prolonged majesty of “The Bear,” Faulkner’s project becomes much clearer—he is taking on a century in the lives of the Mississippi McCaslins. Go Down, Moses is strange and sad and funny and truly an achievement, a book that works as a sort of time machine, an attempt to undo or recover the racial and familial (and in Faulkner, these are the same) divides of the past.

“Remember That What We Call The Novel Is a Highly Artificial Form” — William Burroughs on the Picaresque Novel

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In a fantastic 1974 interview with noted translator Philippe Mikriammos, William Burroughs discusses the picaresque novel (and much, much more)—-

PM: Have you been influenced by Celine?

WB: Yes, very much so.

PM: Did you ever meet him?

WB: Yes, I did. Allen [Ginsberg] and I went out to meet him in Meudon shortly before his death. Well, it was not shortly before, but two or three years before.

PM: Would you agree to say that he was one of the very rare French novelists who wrote in association blocks?

WB: Only in part. I think that he is in a very old tradition, and I myself am in a very old tradition, namely, that of the picaresque novel. People complain that my novels have no plot. Well, a picaresque novel has no plot. It is simply a series of incidents. And that tradition dates back to the Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter, and to one of the very early novels, The Unfortunate Traveler by Thomas Nashe. And I think Celine belongs to this same tradition. But remember that what we call the “novel” is a highly artificial form, which came in the nineteenth century. It’s quite as arbitrary as the sonnet. And that form had a beginning, a middle, and an end; it has a plot, and it has this chapter structure where you have one chapter, and then you try to leave the person in a state of suspense, and on to the next chapter, and people are wondering what happened to this person, and so forth. That nineteenth-century construction has become stylized as the novel, and anyone who writes anything different from that is accused of being unintelligible. That form has imposed itself to the present time.