Tag: Writers

RIP John Barth

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RIP John Barth, 1930-2024

John Barth died yesterday at the age of 93. Between 1956 and 2011, he published thirteen novels and four short story collections. He also published a quartet of nonfiction books—his “Friday” books—that collected the many essays, introductions, lectures, and other pieces he wrote in his life time. The title of the last collection of nonfiction, 2022’s Postscripts (or Just Desserts): Some Final Scribblings, consciously pointed to the end of his road.

Barth will most likely be remembered for the novels and stories he published in the 1960s and 1970s, when he began practicing the metaficitonal arts. Critics and reviewers have alternately accused Barth of being a fabulist, an anti-novelist, a black humorist, a goddamn nihilist (or at least a creator of nihilist fiction), but most predominately, as a postmodernist.

Barth’s run from 1960-1972 is particularly impressive: The Sot-Weed Factor, Giles Goat-Boy, Lost in the Funhouse, and Chimera. In these works, Barth helped to create a new postmodernist tradition in U.S. fiction. Like most postmodern practitioners of his era, he was ambivalent and perhaps suspicious of the term postmodern. But Barth’s 1967 essay “The Literature of Exhaustion”, oft-cited as a postmodernist manifesto, called for a new literature in the face of “the used-upness of certain forms or exhaustion of certain possibilities,” which he cheerfully noted was “by no means necessarily a cause for despair.” (It’s a fine read, but not really a manifesto so much as a love letter to his hero Jorge Luis Borges.)

Many readers have interpreted “The Literature of Exhaustion” as a rebuke to realist fiction; Barth’s first two novels, The Floating Opera (1956) and The End of the Road (1958) are thus surprisingly realistic, at least for the reader who finds himself coming to them after, say, the metafictional fireworks of Lost in the Funhouse or Chimera (that reader was me, reader). 1960’s The Sot-Weed Factor marked a massive shift for Barth–in tone, complexity, structure, themes, and, quite frankly, length.

Interestingly, Barth claimed in his introduction to the 1987 reprint of Giles Goat-Boy that he regarded his first three novels “as a loose trilogy,” noting that in producing The Sot-Weed Factor,

I had put something behind me and moved into new narrative country. Just what that movement was, I couldn’t quite have said; today it might be described as the passage made by a number of American writers from the Black Humor of the Fifties to the Fabulism of the Sixties. For four years, writing Sot-Weed, I’d been more or less immersed in the sometimes fantastical documents of U.S. colonial history: in the origins of “America,” including the origins of our literature. This immersion, together with the suggestion by some literary critics that that novel was a reorchestration of the ancient myth of the Wandering Hero, led me to reexamine that myth closely: the origins not of a particular culture but of culture itself; not of a particular literature, but of the very notion of narrative adventure, especially adventure of a transcendental, life-changing and culture-changing sort.

Barth above offers a concise description of the trajectory of the next few decades of his writing.

In my memory, I’m most fond of The Sot-Weed Factor, a sprawling satire of American colonialism and storytelling itself, simultaneously rich and bloated. In my memory, I think of it as a companion to and forerunner of Pynchon’s masterpiece Mason & Dixon. Revisiting my review earlier today—composed nearly thirteen years ago—I see that I was quite unkind to the novel at times, describing it at one point as “the literary equivalent of a very bright writer jacking off to his own research.” Ah well. I was no doubt exhausted by the assy-turvy thing’s 800 pages.

Giles Goat-Boy (1966) is also very long—Barth would go on to write many long novels—and I think it’s probably the consensus favorite of Barth acolytes. Barth described Giles Goat-Boy as “the adventures of a young man sired by a giant computer upon a hapless but compliant librarian and raised in the experimental goat-barns of a universal university, divided ideologically into East and West Campuses.” Like The Sot-Weed Factor, Giles Goat-Boy is a parodic picaresque of displaced identity. It’s in Giles Goat-Boy that Barth begins his life-long practice of metafiction.

Barth’s metafiction evinces in more bite-sized doses in the collection Lost in the Funhouse (1966). This was the first Barth I read, sometime in the 1990s, and I suspect many readers found their way to it the same way I did, via David Foster Wallace; specifically, through Wallace’s novella Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, an intertextual response to Funhouse. Lost in the Funhouse is the perfect starting place for anyone interested in Barth’s metafictional postmodernism (and it might also be the last stop for some readers).

I think the next one I read was Chimera (1972), a book that daunted me so much when I was younger that I broke into sweats reading it. Revisiting a few years ago I found it far funnier, sillier, and comprehensible than I would have thought. At the outset of Chimera, Barth inserts himself as a somewhat-feckless genie who appears before Scheherazade and Dunyazade and, in a wonderful time-loop conceit, gives Scheherazade the “1001 Nights” gambit of story-telling-as-a-method-to-stave-off-rape-and-murder. Barth inserts himself into a frame tale around a frame tale around a frame tale. A reread of Chimera’s initial frame tale reveals realistic autofictional tinges into Barth’s metafictional gambit. The Genie–Barth–laments that “At one time…people in his country had been fond of reading; currently, however, the only readers of artful fiction were critics, other writers, and unwilling students who, left to themselves, preferred music and pictures to words.” Barth’s Genie has writer’s block, but he’s unsure “if his difficulty might be owing to his own limitations, his age and stage and personal vicissitudes; how much to the general decline of letters in his time and place; and how much to the other crises with which his country (and, so he alleged, the very species) was beset.” Modernist existential despair was never really exhausted, right? It just found new forms.

I’ll admit that I didn’t read much of Barth’s post-1970’s work, aside from the occasional essay or short story. I didn’t make any kind of dent into the near-800 pages 1979’s LETTERS (in fairness, I find even short epistolary novels tedious), and the last one I took a crack at was 1987’s The Tidewater Tales, making it somewhere farther into its near-700 pages before turning my poor attention elsewhere.

Like many readers, Barth’s 1960s and 1970s was a gateway drug for me to postmodernist writers like William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, William Gass, and Robert Coover. Most of that generation of American postmodernists are gone, but I like to think that their stories will go on. I’ll leave it with the opening piece from Lost in the Funhouse, “Frame-Tale.” The story never ends.

Plagiarism

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Thomas Chatterton (1770), English poet and forger, arsenic poisoning

Heinrich von Kleist (1811), German author, poet and journalist, gunshot

Manuel Acuña (1873), Mexican poet, ingestion of potassium cyanide

Amy Levy (1889), British writer, inhaling charcoal gas

Per Sivle (1904), Norwegian poet and novelist, gunshot

Sergei Yesenin (1925), Russian and Soviet poet, hanging

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1927), Japanese writer, overdose of barbital

Kostas Karyotakis (1928), Greek poet, gunshot

Charlotte Mew (1928), English poet, Lysol poisoning

Vladimir Mayakovsky (1930), Russian and Soviet poet, gunshot

Vachel Lindsay (1931), American poet, poison

Hart Crane (1932), American poet, jumped off ship

Austra Skujiņa (1932) Latvian poet, jump from a bridge

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1935), American writer, chloroform overdose

Robert E. Howard (1936), American author, gunshot to the head

Horacio Quiroga (1937), Uruguayan playwright, poet, and short story writer, drank a glass of cyanide

Alfonsina Storni (1938), Argentine poet, drowning

Walter Benjamin (1940), German-Jewish literary critic and culture theorist, morphine overdose

Walter Hasenclever (1940), German poet and playwright, overdose of Veronal

Marina Tsvetaeva (1941), Russian poet, hanging

Virginia Woolf (1941), English author, essayist, and publisher, drowning

Stefan Zweig (1942), Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer, barbiturate overdose

Osamu Dazai (1948), Japanese author, drowning in the Tamagawa Aqueduct

Cesare Pavese (1950), Italian author, overdose of barbiturates

Sadegh Hedayat (1951), Iranian writer, carbon monoxide poisoning

Ernest Hemingway (1961), American writer and journalist, gunshot to head

Sylvia Plath (1963), American poet, novelist, children’s author, gas inhalation

Charles R. Jackson (1968), American writer, barbiturate overdose

José María Arguedas (1969), Peruvian novelist and poet, gunshot

John Kennedy Toole (1969), American novelist, carbon monoxide poisoning

Paul Celan (1970), Romanian poet, drowning in the Seine

Yukio Mishima (1970), Japanese author, poet, playwright, film director and activist, ritual seppuku disembowelment

John Berryman (1972), American poet, jumped off the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota

Yasunari Kawabata (1972), Japanese writer, gas inhalation

Alejandra Pizarnik (1972), Argentine poet, secobarbital overdose

William Inge (1973), American writer, carbon monoxide poisoning

B. S. Johnson (1973), English novelist, poet, literary critic, sports journalist, television producer and filmmaker, cut his wrists

Anne Sexton (1974), American poet, carbon monoxide poisoning

Jens Bjørneboe (1976), Norwegian novelist, hanging

Frank Stanford (1978), American poet, gunshot

Jean-Louis Bory (1979), French writer, gunshot to the chest

Breece D’J Pancake (1979), American short story writer, gunshot

Wally Wood (1981), American comic book writer and artist, gunshot

Arthur Koestler (1983), Hungarian-British author, novelist, barbiturates

Richard Brautigan (1984), American writer, gunshot

Alice Bradley Sheldon (James Tiptree, Jr.) (1987), American writer, gunshot

Hai Zi (1989), Chinese poet, lying down on railroad tracks

Jerzy Kosinski (1991), Polish-born American writer, suffocation with plastic bag

Charles Crumb (1992), American comics writer and artist, overdosed on pills

Gu Cheng (1993), Chinese poet, hanging

John O’Brien (1994), American novelist, gunshot to the head

Walter M. Miller Jr. (1996), American writer, gunshot

Hunter S. Thompson (2005), gonzo journalist, author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, gunshot

Thomas M. Disch (2008), American writer, gunshot

David Foster Wallace (2008), American author, hanging

Ned Vizzini (2013), American author of young adult fiction, leapt from a building

Mark Fisher (2017), English writer and political theorist, hanging

Anthony Bourdain (2018), American chef, author, and television personality, hanging

Victor Heringer (2018), Brazilian novelist and poet, winner of the 2013 Prêmio Jabuti, self-defenestration

David Berman (2019), American musician and poet, hanging

“It was a lone tree burning on the desert” | Blood Meridian’s Moral Core

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Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian begins as a strange, violent picaresque bildungsroman, detailing the adventures of a teenage runaway known only as “the kid.” When the Kid falls in with John Glanton’s marauders, the narrative lens expands and pulls back; Glanton’s gang essentially envelopes the Kid’s personality. The pronoun “they” dominates the Kid’s own agency, for the most part, and the massive figure of Judge Holden usurps the narrative’s voice. The effect is that the Glanton gang’s killing, raping, and scalping spree becomes essentially de-personalized, and, to a certain extent, amoralized.

The Kid, and perhaps the ex-priest Tobin and the Kid’s erstwhile partner Toadvine, are the only major characters who bear any semblance of conventional morality in the narrative. The Kid exhibits a willingness to help others early on when he agrees to stitch one of Tobin’s wounds; later, he removes an arrowhead from a wounded man when no other member of the company will (Tobin chides him for caring, declaring that the wounded man would have killed the Kid had the Kid’s efforts been unsuccessful). For most of the central narrative though, the Kid’s individual actions are consumed into the gang’s “they.” However, at the beginning of chapter 15 the narrative focuses again on the Kid, who is charged with killing a wounded man named Shelby to “spare” him from the approaching Mexican army (this is a bizarre version of mercy in Blood Meridian). Shelby pleads to live and the Kid allows it, even giving the man some water from his own canteen. After he leaves he catches up with a man named Tate whose horse is wounded. Tate remarks on the boy’s foolishness for helping him, but the Kid does so nonetheless, sharing Tate’s burden as they try to make their way back to the rest of their party. Tate is soon killed by Mexican scouts. In both cases, the outcome of the Kid’s moral actions–the will to help, to save, to preserve life–are negated by the book’s narrative outcomes, but I would argue that his intentions in the face of violence somehow secure his humanity.

His journey alone to rejoin the Glanton gang is figured as a kind of vision quest, a strange echo of Christ in the desert, perhaps. At its core–and perhaps the moral core of the book–is the following strange passage–

It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A herladic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog’s, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jedda, in Babylon. A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before the torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets.

The burning tree alludes to YHWH’s appearance to Moses as a burning bush, and also the tree of smoke that led the Israelites through the desert. Significantly, all the strange, terrible creatures of the desert come to meet around it in a “precarious truce.” The burning tree inverts the natural, inescapable violence that dominates the novel and turns it into a solitary, singular moment of peace. When the Kid awakes–alone–the tree is merely a “smoldering skeleton of a blackened scrog.” God is not in the permanence of the object but rather in the witnessing of the event–Blood Meridian locates (a version of a) god in the natural violence of burning and consumption. There is a strong contrast here, I believe, with the book’s other version of god, the Judge’s proclamation that “War is god.” The Judge, a cunning, devilish trickster, wants to reduce (or enlarge) war to all contest of wills, to pure violence–to divorce it from any ideological structure. Yet the burning tree episode reveals natural violence divorced from ideology. The animals (and the man, the Kid) suspend their Darwinian animosities in order to witness the sublime. The episode is silent, outside of language, order, ideology. This silence is echoed in the novel’s final confrontation between the Judge and the Kid, who retorts simply “You ain’t nothin'” to the Judge’s barrage of grandiose language. While the rejoinder may not save the Kid, its rejection perhaps saves his soul (if such a thing exists in the novel, which I believe it does). So, while larger-than-life Judge Holden may dominate the novel, Cormac McCarthy has nonetheless given us another moral road to follow, should we choose.

[Ed. note—Biblioklept first published a version of this post in October, 2010.]

“Books are made out of books” | Blood Meridian and Samuel Chamberlain

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In his 1992 interview with The New York Times, Cormac McCarthy said, “The ugly fact is books are made out of books. The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.” McCarthy’s masterpiece Blood Meridian, as many critics have noted, is made of some of the finest literature out there–the King James Bible, Moby-Dick, Dante’s Inferno, Paradise Lost, Faulkner, and Shakespeare. While Blood Meridian echoes and alludes to these authors and books thematically, structurally, and linguistically, it also owes much of its materiality to Samuel Chamberlain’s My Confession: The Recollections of a Rogue.

Chamberlain, much like the Kid, Blood Meridian’s erstwhile protagonist, ran away from home as a teenager. He joined the Illinois Second Volunteer Regiment and later fought in the Mexican-American War. Confession details Chamberlain’s involvement with John Glanton’s gang of scalp-hunters. The following summary comes from the University of Virginia’s American Studies webpage—

According to Chamberlain, John Glanton was born in South Carolina and migrated to Stephen Austin’s settlement in Texas. There he fell in love with an orphan girl and was prepared to marry her. One day while he was gone, Lipan warriors raided the area scalping the elderly and the children and kidnapping the women- including Glanton’s fiancee. Glanton and the other settlers pursued and slaughtered the natives, but during the battle the women were tomahawked and scalped. Legend has it, Glanton began a series of retaliatory raids which always yielded “fresh scalps.” When Texas fought for its independence from Mexico, Glanton fought with Col. Fannin, and was one of the few to escape the slaughter of that regiment at the hands of the Mexican Gen. Urrea- the man who would eventually employ Glanton as a scalp hunter. During the Range Wars, Glanton took no side but simply assassinated individuals who had crossed him. He was banished, to no avail, by Gen. Sam Houston and fought as a “free Ranger” in the war against Mexico. Following the war he took up the Urrea’s offer of $50 per Apache scalp (with a bonus of $1000 for the scalp of the Chief Santana). Local rumor had it that Glanton always “raised the hair” of the Indians he killed and that he had a “mule load of these barbarous trophies, smoke-dried” in his hut even before he turned professional.

Chamberlain’s Confession also describes a  figure named Judge Holden. Again, from U of V’s summary–

Glanton’s gang consisted of “Sonorans, Cherokee and Delaware Indians, French Canadians, Texans, Irishmen, a Negro and a full-blooded Comanche,” and when Chamberlain joined them they had gathered thirty-seven scalps and considerable losses from two recent raids (Chamberlain implies that they had just begun their careers as scalp hunters but other sources suggest that they had been engaged in the trade for sometime- regardless there is little specific documentation of their prior activities). Second in command to Glanton was a Texan- Judge Holden. In describing him, Chamberlain claimed, “a cooler blooded villain never went unhung;” Holden was well over six feet, “had a fleshy frame, [and] a dull tallow colored face destitute of hair and all expression” and was well educated in geology and mineralogy, fluent in native dialects, a good musician, and “plum centre” with a firearm. Chamberlain saw him also as a coward who would avoid equal combat if possible but would not hesitate to kill Indians or Mexicans if he had the advantage. Rumors also abounded about atrocities committed in Texas and the Cherokee nation by him under a different name. Before the gang left Frontreras, Chamberlain claims that a ten year old girl was found “foully violated and murdered” with “the mark of a large hand on her throat,” but no one ever directly accused Holden.

It’s fascinating to note how much of the Judge is already there–the pedophilia, the marksmanship, the scholarship, and, most interesting of all, the lack of hair. Confession goes on to detail the killing, scalping, raping, and raiding spree that comprises the center of Blood Meridian. Chamberlain even describes the final battle with the Yumas, an event that signals the dissolution of the Glanton gang in McCarthy’s novel.

Content aside, Chamberlain’s prose also seems to presage McCarthy’s prose. In his book Different Travelers, Different Eyes, James H. Maguire notes that, “Both venereal and martial, the gore of [Chamberlain’s] prose evokes Gothic revulsion, while his unschooled art, with its stark architectural angles and leaden, keen-edged shadows, can chill with the surreal horrors of the later Greco-Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico.” Yes, Chamberlain was an amateur painter (find his paintings throughout this post), and undoubtedly some of this imagery crept into Blood Meridian.

You can view many of Chamberlain’s paintings and read an edit of his Confession in three editions of Life magazine from 1956, digitally preserved thanks to Google Books–here’s Part I, Part II, and Part III. Many critics have pointed out that Chamberlain’s narrative, beyond its casual racism and sexism, is rife with factual and historical errors. He also apparently indulges in the habit of describing battles and other events in vivid detail, even when there was no way he could have been there. No matter. The ugly fact is that books are made out of books, after all, and if Chamberlain’s Confession traffics in re-appropriating the adventure stories of the day, at least we have Blood Meridian to show for his efforts.

[Ed. note–Biblioklept first ran this post in September of 2010.]

My liver, the pain of clear thought, $5.75 for an Absolut on the rocks at the Hotel Dorset, New York City, and other great prices paid by various writers in their careers

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From “Don’t Everybody Talk at Once! (The Esquire Literary Survey).” Published in Esquire, August 1986.

The “article” consists of a ten-question questionnaire Esquire fiction editor Rust Hills sent to around fifty American writers.

What’s the greatest price you’ve paid in your career?

MAX APPLE: Over a career it’s more like a mortgage. You pay it out day by day and keep hoping that the rate will go down and some day you’ll renegotiate from strength.

VANCE BOURJAILY: $722,250—which is the difference between what my first nine books earned and the million dollars I’d have had by then if I’d made movies (if I’d had the ability).

HAROLD BRODKEY: The pain of clear thought.

HARRY CREWS: My liver.

J. P. DONLEAVY: Leaving everyone convinced I was a ruthless bastard.

STANLEY ELKIN: You’re sitting on an airplane, say, or talking to someone at a party, and the guy in the next seat or the person at the party says “And what do you do for a living, sir?” and you gotta say ‘I’m a writer,” and he says “Have you written anything I might have heard of?” This is the price I have paid for my career.

RICHARD FORD: Writers don’t have “careers.” Advertising executives do. The highest price I’ve paid is twenty-five dollars for a pizza Carver and I bought once in Port Angeles, Washington, in 1983.

BRUCE JAY FRIEDMAN: Little, if any, time on the playing field.

WILLIAM H. GASS: Ordinary life. We can’t find competent help to do our living for us. Another way of putting it: being an ordinary person in an ordinary world doing an ordinary job. What a waste of life that is.

BARRY HANNAH: Lack of peace of mind, lack of money.

KEN KESEY: Fame—it has made me the observed instead of the observer. Bad for a writer.

JAMES ALAN McPHERSON: I have been known to give up family, friends, and money in order to maintain my sense of personal integrity. I think it is this trait of character, whether or not based on “right” and “wrong,” that is at the basis of my work as a writer and as a teacher.

LEONARD MICHAELS: Marriage.

TONI MORRISON: Good company: that of my children and of friends. Much too little of both.

JOYCE CAROL OATES: ? (Perhaps I haven’t paid it yet.)

TIM O’BRIEN: My health, my golf game, fun.

PADGETT POWELL: You mean all the agony and wheel-racked whimpering before one can utter the good words? Or the booze and fractured homelife and fly-off-the-handle meannesses to the gentle folk around you? Or the loss of self-confidence. All that? Naa. I’ve gone scot-free.

REYNOLDS PRICE: I’ve been paid—thirty years of steady reward.

RICHARD PRICE: Too Much + Too Soon = Arrested Development.

TOM ROBBINS: I ’ve never thought of it as a career. A “careen” is more like it. And it would have been cheap at any price.

JOHN SAYLES: Writing is so much easier than the other jobs I’ve had. I can’t imagine any of it as “paying a price.”

BOB SHACOCHIS: The sacrifice of the artist is a romantic illusion. The possibility of forfeiture and loss is, if anything, democratic. Any person who makes a commitment to the pursuit of something meaningful is at risk.

JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN: Circa $5.75 for an Absolut on the rocks at the Hotel Dorset, New York City.

A review of Hilary Mantel’s novel Beyond Black

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In Hilary Mantel’s 2005 novel Beyond Black, a fat psychic named Alison endures the harrowing torment of a collective of ghosts she calls the Fiends, the spirits of cruel men from her childhood. When a young, aimless woman named Colette comes into Alison’s life and assumes managerial duties for her career, Alison’s bilious past comes to a head. Colette engineers more and better gigs for Alison (the death of Princess Diana causes a huge spike in business), who, despite her genuine psychic talents, must nonetheless run the kind of scam the “punters” in her audience crave. Colette and Alison soon move in together, buying a new house in a quiet, boring suburb outside of London; their prefab homestead is drawn in sharp contrast to the slums of Aldershot where Alison grew up–the novel’s second setting. As Beyond Black progresses, contemporary suburban Britain increasingly crumbles into Alison’s grim, greasy past in Aldershot. Alison’s chief tormentor is, ironically, her “spirit guide,” a mean little man named Morris, a one-time frequent customer for Alison’s prostitute mother. Alison, like many victims, has suppressed much of her grotesque childhood, but it’s hard to black out everything with psychic baggage like Morris weighing her down. In time, more and more of the Fiends reemerge, forcing Alison to confront her mother and the abuse they both suffered at the hands of those awful men. As the book lurches to its chilling climax, Alison asserts independence, casting out her metaphysical and psychological demons.

At its core, Beyond Black asks what it means to be haunted and how one might survive an abusive past intact. A slim specter of a character named Gloria floats through the book. The Fiends, whose vile antics are sometimes compared to a gypsy circus, have dismembered Gloria with the old saw trick. In Alison’s memory, pieces of Gloria are scattered around her childhood home, parceled out, fed to dogs, transported in boxes at midnight, hidden. Alison’s awful mother frequently alludes to Alison herself being “sawed up,” a metaphor that dances on the literal as we come to realize that the old drunk has pimped out her daughter repeatedly. Mantel’s novel investigates the return of the repressed, and although she gives us something like a happy ending, the book’s central thesis seems to be that pain cannot be abandoned or hidden, but only mitigated through direct confrontation.

The book’s humor does nothing to lighten its grim subject–if anything it exacerbates and confounds the darkness at the heart of Beyond Black. Mantel’s gift for dialogue fleshes out her characters (even the spectral ones), and while the book aims for a satirical tone at times, its characters are too richly drawn to be mere cutouts in a stage production. Mantel’s satire of contemporary English life is sharp and bleak; you laugh a little and then feel bad for laughing and a page later you’re horrified. It’s a successful book in that respect. It’s one real weakness is in the character of Colette, whose voice gives way to Alison’s past by the book’s end. This is actually no problem, as Colette’s narrative life is not nearly as interesting as Alison’s psychic traumas; Colette is, however, catalyst for the changes in Alison’s life. It would’ve been nice to see more resolution here, but I suppose Beyond Black hews closer to real life here, with all its messy loose ends.

I chose to read Beyond Black because I enjoyed Mantel’s recent Booker Prize winner Wolf Hall so much. The books have little in common other than being well-written and tightly paced, and I think that anyone who wanted more Mantel after an introduction via Wolf Hall would do right to pick up Beyond Black. Recommended.

[Ed. note—Biblioklept first published this review in 2010. RIP to Hilary Mantel, who died “suddenly but peacefully” yesterday at 70.]

How to Read James Joyce’s Ulysses (and Why You Should Avoid “How-to” Guides Like This One)

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[Editorial note: What follows is an edit of a piece I first posted on June 16, 2010–Bloomsday. Today marks the 100th anniversary of the first publication of James Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses. I tried to come up with something original, but I found I had nothing to say that I hadn’t already said here, which essentially amounts to, Read Ulysses. It’s not nearly as difficult as its reputation might suggest. And it’s really funny.]

James Joyce’s Ulysses is a celebrated and praised novel. However, the book’s reputation for density, erudition, and inscrutability still daunts many readers–leading to a glut of guidebooks, summaries, and annotations. Ironically, rather than inviting first-time readers to the text, the sheer volume of these guides to Ulysses can paradoxically repel. Their very existence seems predicated on an intense need, and although some of the guides out there can be helpful, others can get in the way. This need not be. Ulysses deserves its reputation as one the best books in the English language. It generously overflows with insight into the human experience, and it’s very, very funny. And, most importantly, anyone can read it.

Here are a few thoughts on how to read Ulysses, enumerated–because people like lists:

1. Ignore all guides, lists, maps, annotations, summaries, and lectures. You don’t need them; in fact, they could easily weigh down what should be a fun reading experience. Jump right into the text. Don’t worry about getting all the allusions or unpacking all the motifs.

Pretty soon though, you’ll get to the third chapter, known as “Proteus.” It’s admittedly hard to follow. You might want a guide at this point. Or you might just want to give up. (Of course, you might be a genius and totally get what Stephen is thinking about as he wanders the beach. Good for you). If frustration sets in, I suggest skipping the chapter and getting into the rich, earthy consciousness of the book’s hero, Leopold Bloom in chapter four, “Calypso.” It’s great stuff. You can always go back to chapter three later, of course. The real key, at least in my opinion, to reading (and enjoying) Ulysses is getting into Bloom’s head, matching his rhythm and pacing. Do that and you’re golden.

I’ve already advised you, gentle reader, not to follow any guides, so please, ignore the rest of my advice. Quit reading this post and start reading Ulysses.

For those who wish to continue–

2. Choose a suitable copy of the book. The Gabler edition will keep things neat and tidy and it features wide margins for all those clever game-changing annotations you’ll be taking. Several guides, including Harry Blamire’s The New Bloomsday Book align their annotation to the Gabler edition’s pagination.

3. Make a reading schedule and stick to it. The Gabler edition of Ulysses is nearly 700 pages long. That’s a long, long book–but you can read it in just a few weeks. There are eighteen episodes in Ulysses, some longer and more challenging than others, but reading one episode every two days should be no problem. If you can, try to read one episode in one sitting each day. As the book progresses, you’ll find yourself going back to previous chapters to find the figures, motifs, and traces that dance through the book.

4. So you’ve decided you need a guide. First, try to figure out what you want from the guide. Basic plot summary? Analysis? Explication? There’s plenty out there–too much really–so take the time to try to figure out what you want from a guide and then do some browsing and skimming before committing.

The most famous might be Stuart Gilbert’s James Joyce’s Ulysses, a dour book that manages to suck all the fun out of Joyce’s work. In a lecture on Ulysses, Vladimir Nabokov warned “against seeing in Leopold Bloom’s humdrum wanderings and minor adventures on a summer day in Dublin a close parody of the Odyssey,” noting that “it would be a complete waste of time to look for close parallels in every character and every scene in the book.” Nabokov scathingly continued: “One bore, a man called Stuart Gilbert, misled by a tongue-in-cheek list compiled by Joyce himself, found in every chapter the domination of one particular organ . . . but we shall ignore that dull nonsense too.” It’s perhaps too mean to call Gilbert’s guide “nonsense,” but it’s certainly dull. Harry Blamire’s The New Bloomsday Book is a line-by-line annotation that can be quite helpful when Joyce’s stream of consciousness gets a bit muddy; Blamire’s explications maintain a certain analytical neutrality, working mostly to connect the motifs of the book but letting the reader manage meaning. Don Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated is an encyclopedia of minutiae that will get in the way of any first time reader’s enjoyment of the book. Gifford’s notes are interesting but they can distract the reader from the text, and ultimately seem aimed at scholars and fanatics.

Most of the guidebooks I’ve seen for Ulysses share a common problem: they are obtrusive. I think that many readers who want some guidance or insight to aid their reading of Ulysses, rather than moving between books (what a chore!), should listen to some of the fantastic lectures on Joyce that are available. James Heffernan’s lectures for The Teaching Company provide a great overview of the book with some analysis; they are designed to be listened to in tandem with a reading of the book. The best explication I’ve heard though is a series of lectures by Joseph Campbell called Wings of Art. Fantastic stuff, and probably the only guide you really need. It’s unfortunately out of print, but you can find it easily via extralegal means on the internet. Speaking of the internet–there’s obviously a ton of stuff out there. I’ll withhold comment–if you found this post, you can find others, and have undoubtedly already seen many of the maps, schematics, and charts out there.

5. Another strategy: read, but listen to an audiobook as well. This will give you a chance to “reread” the novel. I highly, highly, highly recommend RTÉ’s 1982 full cast production. I reviewed it here some years back.

6. Keep reading. Reread. Add time to that reading schedule you made if you need to. But most of all, have fun. Skip around. If you’re excited about Molly’s famous monologue at the end of the book, go ahead and read it. Again, the point is to enjoy the experience. If you can trick a friend into reading it with you, so much the better. Have at it.

“Books are made out of books” | Blood Meridian and Samuel Chamberlain

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In his 1992 interview with The New York Times, Cormac McCarthy said, “The ugly fact is books are made out of books. The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.” McCarthy’s masterpiece Blood Meridian, as many critics have noted, is made of some of the finest literature out there–the King James Bible, Moby-Dick, Dante’s Inferno, Paradise Lost, Faulkner, and Shakespeare. While Blood Meridian echoes and alludes to these authors and books thematically, structurally, and linguistically, it also owes much of its materiality to Samuel Chamberlain’s My Confession: The Recollections of a Rogue.

Chamberlain, much like the Kid, Blood Meridian’s erstwhile protagonist, ran away from home as a teenager. He joined the Illinois Second Volunteer Regiment and later fought in the Mexican-American War. Confession details Chamberlain’s involvement with John Glanton’s gang of scalp-hunters. The following summary comes from the University of Virginia’s American Studies webpage—

According to Chamberlain, John Glanton was born in South Carolina and migrated to Stephen Austin’s settlement in Texas. There he fell in love with an orphan girl and was prepared to marry her. One day while he was gone, Lipan warriors raided the area scalping the elderly and the children and kidnapping the women- including Glanton’s fiancee. Glanton and the other settlers pursued and slaughtered the natives, but during the battle the women were tomahawked and scalped. Legend has it, Glanton began a series of retaliatory raids which always yielded “fresh scalps.” When Texas fought for its independence from Mexico, Glanton fought with Col. Fannin, and was one of the few to escape the slaughter of that regiment at the hands of the Mexican Gen. Urrea- the man who would eventually employ Glanton as a scalp hunter. During the Range Wars, Glanton took no side but simply assassinated individuals who had crossed him. He was banished, to no avail, by Gen. Sam Houston and fought as a “free Ranger” in the war against Mexico. Following the war he took up the Urrea’s offer of $50 per Apache scalp (with a bonus of $1000 for the scalp of the Chief Santana). Local rumor had it that Glanton always “raised the hair” of the Indians he killed and that he had a “mule load of these barbarous trophies, smoke-dried” in his hut even before he turned professional.

 

Chamberlain’s Confession also describes a  figure named Judge Holden. Again, from U of V’s summary–

Glanton’s gang consisted of “Sonorans, Cherokee and Delaware Indians, French Canadians, Texans, Irishmen, a Negro and a full-blooded Comanche,” and when Chamberlain joined them they had gathered thirty-seven scalps and considerable losses from two recent raids (Chamberlain implies that they had just begun their careers as scalp hunters but other sources suggest that they had been engaged in the trade for sometime- regardless there is little specific documentation of their prior activities). Second in command to Glanton was a Texan- Judge Holden. In describing him, Chamberlain claimed, “a cooler blooded villain never went unhung;” Holden was well over six feet, “had a fleshy frame, [and] a dull tallow colored face destitute of hair and all expression” and was well educated in geology and mineralogy, fluent in native dialects, a good musician, and “plum centre” with a firearm. Chamberlain saw him also as a coward who would avoid equal combat if possible but would not hesitate to kill Indians or Mexicans if he had the advantage. Rumors also abounded about atrocities committed in Texas and the Cherokee nation by him under a different name. Before the gang left Frontreras, Chamberlain claims that a ten year old girl was found “foully violated and murdered” with “the mark of a large hand on her throat,” but no one ever directly accused Holden.

 

It’s fascinating to note how much of the Judge is already there–the pedophilia, the marksmanship, the scholarship, and, most interesting of all, the lack of hair. Confession goes on to detail the killing, scalping, raping, and raiding spree that comprises the center of Blood Meridian. Chamberlain even describes the final battle with the Yumas, an event that signals the dissolution of the Glanton gang in McCarthy’s novel.

Content aside, Chamberlain’s prose also seems to presage McCarthy’s prose. In his book Different Travelers, Different Eyes, James H. Maguire notes that, “Both venereal and martial, the gore of [Chamberlain’s] prose evokes Gothic revulsion, while his unschooled art, with its stark architectural angles and leaden, keen-edged shadows, can chill with the surreal horrors of the later Greco-Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico.” Yes, Chamberlain was an amateur painter (find his paintings throughout this post), and undoubtedly some of this imagery crept into Blood Meridian.

You can view many of Chamberlain’s paintings and read an edit of his Confession in three editions of Life magazine from 1956, digitally preserved thanks to Google Books–here’s Part I, Part II, and Part III. Many critics have pointed out that Chamberlain’s narrative, beyond its casual racism and sexism, is rife with factual and historical errors. He also apparently indulges in the habit of describing battles and other events in vivid detail, even when there was no way he could have been there. No matter. The ugly fact is that books are made out of books, after all, and if Chamberlain’s Confession traffics in re-appropriating the adventure stories of the day, at least we have Blood Meridian to show for his efforts.

[Ed. note–Biblioklept first ran this post in September of 2010.]

The Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard (Sixth Riff: 1963-1964)

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PREVIOUSLY:

Introductions + stories 1956-1959

Stories of 1960

Stories of 1961

Stories of 1962

“The Subliminal Man,” Black Friday, and Consumerism

IN THIS RIFF:

“The Reptile Enclosure” (1963)

“A Question of Re-Entry” (1963)

“The Time Tombs” (1963)

“Now Wakes the Sea” (1963)

“The Venus Hunters” (1963)

“End-Game” (1963)

“Minus One” (1963)

“The Sudden Afternoon” (1963)

“The Screen Game” (1963)

“Time of Passage” (1964)

“Prisoner of the Coral Deep” (1964)

“The Lost Leonardo” (1964)

“The Terminal Beach” (1964)

“The Illuminated Man” (1964)

“The Delta at Sunset” (1964)

“The Drowned Giant” (1964)

“The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon” (1964)

“The Volcano Dances” (1964)

“The Reptile Enclosure” (1963) / “A Question of Re-Entry” (1963) / “The Time Tombs” (1963) / “Now Wakes the Sea” (1963) / “The Venus Hunters” (1963) / “Minus One” (1963) / “Prisoner of the Coral Deep” (1964) / “The Illuminated Man” (1964) / “The Delta at Sunset” (1964) / “The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon” /”The Volcano Dances” (1964)

There are 98 stories in The Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard. That’s a lot of stories. Maybe too many. Too many for me to write about in full, anyway. I’ve lumped these stories together because they are somewhat unremarkable: Ballard does his Ballardian thing way better elsewhere. Several of these stories feel like sketches (or leftovers) from Ballard’s early novels like The Drowned World, The Burning World, and The Crystal World. Themes of time, memory, art, and nature abound here, usually glommed on to simple adventure narratives or sci-fi pulp treadthroughs. Jungles, watches, crystals, structures, beaches. Misanthropy, paranoia, nagging wives, misunderstood heroes. Man apart from nature, but beholden to nature. Etc. The worst moments of these stories—and we can find these moments all through early Ballard, to be fair—suffer from a bad case of White Man’s Burden doubled up with a shot of misogyny. I’ve written it before in these posts, but the most disappointing aspect of early Ballard is our would-be futurist’s inability to transcend the patriarchal ideology of the post-war era. So now let’s move to the good stuff.

“End-Game” (1963)

I first read “End-Game” when I was sixteen or seventeen, and it’s always stuck with me. It’s the story of a former “party member” who’s been imprisoned under nebulous circumstances—only his prison isn’t that bad—a nice little villa, comfortable, with books and a chess set. He even has a housekeeper. Unfortunately, the housekeeper is also his executioner, and the date and method of the execution is forever withheld from him:

This ironic inversion of the classical Kafkaesque situation, by which, instead of admitting his guilt to a non–existent crime, he was forced to connive in a farce maintaining his innocence of offences he knew full well he had committed, was preserved in his present situation at the execution villa.

The psychological basis was more obscure but in some way far more threatening, the executioner beckoning his victim towards him with a beguiling smile, reassuring him that all was forgiven. Here he played upon, not those unconscious feelings of anxiety and guilt, but that innate conviction of individual survival, that obsessive preoccupation with personal immortality which is merely a disguised form of the universal fear of the image of one’s own death. It was this assurance that all was well, and the absence of any charges of guilt or responsibility, which had made so orderly the queues into the gas chambers.

Ballard directly invokes Kafka, whose tale “Before the Law” comes to mind here (not to mention The Trial and The Castle); “End-Game” also feels like Ballard’s take on 1984. It’s a great little tale, and I think it helps to prove that Ballard is at his best when he sticks to a confined, limited cast and setting. Much of the force of “End-Game” comes from Ballard pitting his prisoner/protagonist against the protagonist’s mental conception of his guard/executioner. Part of my ideal collection, The Essential Short Stories of J.G. Ballard.

“The Sudden Afternoon” (1963) / “Time of Passage” (1964)

In “The Sudden Afternoon” and “Time of Passage,” Ballard explores how time and place—context, I suppose—constitute identity. The former story is a tale of metempsychosis with a troubling take on Indian spirituality, wherein a doctor—an Indian, of course—transplants his psyche and his wife’s psyche into the bodies of another couple (his wife is dying of a terminal disease). Ballard’s own wife died a year after the story was first published (I’m reminded of Poe here, whose wife Virginia died after the publication of “The Raven”). “The Sudden Afternoon” isn’t very good, but structurally we see Ballard beginning to employ something approaching the cut-ups/fragments he’ll move to in the next decade.

“Time of Passage” is essentially a rewrite of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” It’s also basically a rewrite of Ballard’s own 1961 tale “Mr. F Is Mr. F” — only this time, Ballard dispenses with abject-horror-for-maternal-body in lieu of a fable-like exploration of what a life in reverse might actually look like. A lovely story. Stick it in The Essentials.

“The Screen Game” (1963)

Another Vermilion Sands story. More insanity. Another femme fatale. An attempt at the story of Orpheus, perhaps. I would have lumped it in with the stories in point 1, but I wanted to clarify: The Vermilion Sands stories are the worst.

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“The Lost Leonardo” (1964)

This is an excellent little detective tale with mystical-magic undertones. I’m a sucker for any story of art theft, too. We all know Dan Brown ripped off Umberto Eco, but maybe Eco ripped off Ballard? Who cares. Lovely stuff. Ballard is excellent at the detective story; Poe is one of his clearest predecessors, but like Poe, he’s more famous for other stuff. Too bad. Let’s call it Essential.

“The Terminal Beach” (1964)

1964’s “The Terminal Beach” is such a big break through for Ballard in terms of formal elements and structuring that it probably deserves its own post, but I’ll jab at it here anyway. Up until now, Ballard’s stories have been notable almost entirely for their ideas—his prose has improved some, but ultimately, the pulp fiction he’s writing for magazine publication constrains him to a pedestrian rhetoric that simply can’t match how far out his concepts are. With “The Terminal Beach,” Ballard finally approaches a narrative structure—fractured, polyglossic, shifting through interiors to exteriors, breaking through different forms—that can match the themes of his tale. The story–clearly an Essential—points to the finest of Ballard’s future work. You can read it here in two parts, but here’s a taste that I think stands alone as a microfiction:

The Fly

(A small fly, which Traven presumes has followed him into the fissure, now buzzes about the corpse’s face. Guiltily, Traven leans forward to kill it, then reflects that perhaps this minuscule sentry has been the corpse’s faithful companion, in return fed on the rich liqueurs and distillations of its pores. Carefully, to avoid injuring the fly, he encourages it to alight on his wrist.)

DR YASUDA: Thank you, Traven. In my position, you understand

TRAVEN: Of course, Doctor. I’m sorry I tried to kill it – these ingrained habits, you know, they’re not easy to shrug off. Your sister’s children in Osaka in ’44, the exigencies of war, I hate to plead them. Most known motives are so despicable, one searches the unknown in the hope that YASUDA: Please, Traven, do not be embarrassed. The fly is lucky to retain its identity for so long. ‘That son you mourn, not to mention my own two nieces and nephew, did they not die each day? Every parent in the world grieves for the lost sons and daughters of their earlier childhoods.

TRAVEN: You’re very tolerant, Doctor. I wouldn’t dare – YASUDA: Not at all, Traven. I make no apologies for you. Each of us is little more than the meagre residue of the infinite unrealized possibilities of our lives. But your son, and my nephew, are fixed in our minds forever, their identities as certain as the stars.

TRAVEN: (not entirely convinced) That may be so, Doctor, but it leads to a dangerous conclusion in the case of this island. For instance, the blocks – YASUDA: They are precisely what I refer to, Traven. Here among the blocks you at last find an image of yourself free of the hazards of time and space. This islandis an ontological Garden of Eden, why seek to expel yourself into a world of quantal flux?

TRAVEN: Excuse me (The fly has flown back to the corpse’s face and sits in one of the dried-up orbits, giving the good doctor an expression of quizzical beadiness. Reaching forward, Traven entices it on to his palm. He examines it carefully) Well, yes, these bunkers may be ontological objects, but whether this is the ontological fly is doubtful. It’s true that on this island it’s the only fly, which is the next best thing

YASUDA: You can’t accept the plurality of the universe – ask yourself why, Traven. Why should this obsess you? It seems to me that you are hunting for the white leviathan, zero. The beach is a dangerous zone. Avoid it. Have a proper humility, pursue a philosophy of acceptance.

TRAVEN: Then may I ask why you came here, Doctor?

YASUDA: To feed this fly. ‘What greater love – ?’

TRAVEN: (Still puzzling) It doesn’t really solve my problem. The blocks, you see

YASUDA: Very well, if you must have it that way

TRAVEN: But, Doctor

YASUDA: (Peremptorily) Kill that fly!

TRAVEN: That’s not an end, or a beginning.

(Hopelessly, he kills the fly. Exhausted, he falls asleep beside the corpse.)

“The Drowned Giant” (1964)

Another Essential, this puzzling fable readily recalls Gabriel García Márquez’s story “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.” Ballard rarely handles archetypes so directly as he does here. Even if the story’s theme seems almost too-plain—we lose the miracle, we cast down the old gods, we deny the sublime, etc.—its construction and telling are wonderfully achieved.

The lower jaw, typically, found its way to the museum of natural history. The remainder of the skull has disappeared, but is probably still lurking in the waste grounds or private gardens of the city – quite recently, while sailing down the river, I noticed two ribs of the giant forming a decorative arch in a waterside garden, possibly confused with the jaw–bones of a whale. A large square of tanned and tattooed skin, the size of an indian blanket, forms a backcloth to the dolls and masks in a novelty shop near the amusement park, and I have no doubt that elsewhere in the city, in the hotels or golf clubs, the mummified nose or ears of the giant hang from the wall above a fireplace. As for the immense pizzle, this ends its days in the freak museum of a circus which travels up and down the north–west. This monumental apparatus, stunning in its proportions and sometime potency, occupies a complete booth to itself. The irony is that it is wrongly identified as that of a whale, and indeed most people, even those who first saw him cast up on the shore after the storm, now remember the giant, if at all, as a large sea beast.

On the horizon:

Ballard plays with fragmentation again in “The Beach Murders” and “The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race” — and we finally get to his stories of the late sixties.

[Ed. note: Biblioklept originally ran a series of posts on The Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard between October 2013 and March 2014.]

Photograph from “The Postmodernists Dinner” — Jill Krementz

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Photograph from “The Postmodernists Dinner,” 1983 by Jill Krementz (b. 1940)

From the University of Houston’s collection of Barthelme’s papers. The entry’s description:

Left to right: unidentified, unidentified, Donald Barthelme, John Barth, Robert Coover (turned), unidentified, Kurt Vonnegut, Walter Abish (with patch), William Gaddis (squatting), unidentified, William Gass, unidentified, unidentified. In 1983, Barthelme arranged a “Postmodernists Dinner” for the group of writers who were often lumped together under the “postmodernist” label. The reclusive Thomas Pynchon declined the invitation.

It would be swell if anyone could identify the women in the photograph. [Ed. note–the woman to Walter Abish’s left (behind Gass) is the artist Cecile Abish, Walter’s wife. Thanks to Terry in the comments.]

In his 2009 Barthelme biography  Hiding Man, Tracy Daugherty offers the following recollection of the “Postmodernist Dinner” from novelist Walter Abish:

Around this time — in the spring of 1983 — “Donald had this idea to make a dinner in SoHo,” says Water Abish. “A major dinner for a group of writers, and he planned it very, very carefully. It was a strange event. Amusing and intriguing. He invited…well, that was the thing of it. The list. I was astounded that he consulted me but he called and said, ‘Should we invite so-and-so?’ Naturally, I did the only decent thing and said ‘Absolutely’ to everyone he mentioned. I pushed for Gaddis. Gass was there, and Coover and Hawkes, Vonnegut and his wife, Jill Krementz, who took photographs, I think. Don’s agent, Lynn Nesbit, was there. She was always very friendly. Susan Sontag was the only woman writer invited.

Daugherty continues:

Pynchon couldn’t make it. He wrote Don to apologize. He said he was ‘between coasts, Arkansas or Lubbock or someplace like ‘at.”

Abish recollects that the meal was at a very expensive restaurant, prefix, and the writers had to pay their own way. There were about 21 attendees, and Barthelme was “Very, very dour.”

Here is Pynchon’s letter declining the invite (via Jessamyn West, both on Twitter and her wonderful Donald Barthelme appreciation page):

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I had never seen the photograph until today when Ethelmer shared it with me on Twitter. Thanks!

The authentic American apocalyptic novel | Harold Bloom and Blood Meridian

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The Triumph of Death, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, c. 1562

Harold Bloom’s esteem for Blood Meridian may have done much to advance the novel’s reputation since its publication, especially in pre-social media outlets, like Goodreads, Twitter, or Facebook. His essay on the book, first published in his 2000 collection How to Read and Why and later included as the preface to Random House’s Modern Library edition, makes a strong case for Blood Meridian’s canonical status. Bloom begins, in typical Bloomian fashion–the anxiety of influence is always at work–by situating McCarthy’s book against other heavies:

Blood Meridian (1985) seems to me the authentic American apocalyptic novel, more relevant even in 2000 than it was fifteen years ago. The fulfilled renown of Moby-Dick and of As I Lay Dying is augmented by Blood Meridian, since Cormac McCarthy is the worthy disciple both of Melville and of Faulkner. I venture that no other living American novelist, not even Pynchon, has given us a book as strong and memorable as Blood Meridian . . .

The Garden of Earthly Delights — Hell, Hieronymus Bosch, 1503-1504

Bloom goes  on to rate Blood Meridian over DeLillo’s Underworld, several books by Philip Roth, and even McCarthy’s own All the Pretty Horses. Indeed, Bloom proclaims Blood Meridian “the ultimate Western, not to be surpassed.” This doesn’t mean that Bloom is at home with the book’s violence; he confesses that it took him two attempts to read through its “overwhelming carnage.” Still, he makes a case for reading it in spite of its gore:

Nevertheless, I urge the reader to persevere, because Blood Meridian is a canonical imaginative achievement, both an American and a universal tragedy of blood. Judge Holden is a villain worthy of Shakespeare, Iago-like and demoniac, a theoretician of war everlasting. And the book’s magnificence–its language, landscape, persons, conceptions–at last transcends the violence, and converts goriness into terrifying art, an art comparable to Melville’s and to Faulkner’s.

Bloom repeatedly invokes Melville and Faulkner in his essay, arguing that Blood Meridian’s “high style” is one of its key strengths (unlike fellow aesthetic critic James Wood, who seems to think that McCarthy is a windbag). The trajectory of Bloom’s essay follows Melville and Shakespeare, finding in Judge Holden both a white whale (and not so much an Ahab) and an Iago. He writes:

Since Blood Meridian, like the much longer Moby-Dick, is more prose epic than novel, the Glanton foray can seem a post-Homeric quest, where the various heroes (or thugs) have a disguised god among them, which appears to be the Judge’s Herculean role. The Glanton gang passes into a sinister aesthetic glory at the close of chapter 13, when they progress from murdering and scalping Indians to butchering the Mexicans who have hired them.

I think that Bloom’s great insight here is to read the book as a prose epic as opposed to a linear novel. Bloom intuits that Blood Meridian foregrounds a deeply tragic and ironic reworking of the great American myth of Manifest Destiny. While hardly a pastiche, the book is somehow a collage—a massive, deafening collage that numbs, stuns, and overwhelms with its layers of thick, bloody prose. The effect is akin to the apocalyptic paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel. Dense and full of allusion, paintings like The Triumph of Death and The Garden of Earthly Delights surge over the senses, destabilizing narrative logic. Like Blood Meridian, these paintings employ a graphic grammar that disorients and then reorients. They are apocalyptic in all senses of the word: both revelatory and portentously conclusive. And like Blood Meridian, they showcase “a sinister aesthetic glory” (to use Bloom’s term), a terrible, awful, awesome ugliness that haunts us with repulsive beauty.

[Ed. note–Biblioklept originally published a version of this post in September of 2010].

RIP Gene Wolfe

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RIP Gene Wolfe, 1931-2019

Gene Wolfe died today. He was 87. Tor’s obit includes these details:

Gene Wolfe was born in New York on May 7, 1931. He studied at Texas A&M for a few years before dropping out and fighting in the Korean War. After his return to the US he finished his degree at the University of Houston. He was an engineer, and worked as the editor of the professional journal Plant Engineering. He was also instrumental in inventing the machine that cooks Pringles potato chips.

…Wolfe went on to write over 30 novels, with his best best-known work, The Book of The New Sun, spanning 1980-1983. The series is a tetralogy set in the Vancian Dying Earth subgenre, and follows the journey of Severian, a member of the Guild of Torturers, after he is exiled for the sin of mercy.

Last night, I fell asleep listening to Chapter 15 of the audiobook version of Gene Wolfe’s 1980 novel The Shadow of the Torturer, the first book in The Book of the New Sun.I have been falling asleep to Chapter 15 of this particular audiobook for about three nights now. Before that, I was falling asleep to Chapter 14. There is nothing particularly boring about the book. I put headphones in my ears take sleeping pills and fall asleep to an audiobook every night. There’s something about plugging into a narrative that’s not my own life that takes me out of all the anxieties that creep out at bedtime. I get through 15, maybe 20 minutes, and I’m out. I restart a few minutes before the last bit I remember. Anyway, I fell asleep to Chapter 15 — “Baldanders” — last night. I might’ve even made it a little bit into Chapter 16. I’ll find out tonight.

I first read The Shadow of the Torturer as a young teen. I was too young for the book—I don’t think I fully appreciated its scope. I read the next book in The Book of the New Sun series, but I don’t remember if I finished it out. In a year or two, I had abandoned fantasy, a mistake that I corrected years later. Youthful indiscretion. I reread a chunk of The Shadow of the Torturer again in my twenties and found it more complex than I remember. Then I mistakenly left the mass market paperback copy I was reading at a beach condo we had conned from someone’s friend’s grandmother for the weekend, and that was that—until this February, when a brief Twitter conversation prompted me to get the audiobook. I’ve been listening to it every night since, and at the rate I’m going through it I’ll probably be done by the end of the summer. I’m digging it.

Will Wolfe now gain a wider audience outside of the sci-fi/fantasy cult audience now that he has died? Maybe. I mean, that happens sometimes, right? His work is challenging though, employing strange diction and proffering only the smallest crumbs of exposition. Ultimately, it’s clear that Gene Wolfe was a writer’s writer, as evidenced by a 2015 profile of him in The New Yorker which proclaimed him “sci-fi’s difficult genius”—

Wolfe has published more than twenty-five novels and more than fifty stories, and has won some of science fiction and fantasy’s most prestigious awards. But he has rarely, if ever, been considered fully within the larger context of literature. His books contain all of the nasty genre tropes—space travel, robots, even dragons—and he hasn’t crossed into the mainstream on the strength of a TV or movie adaptation. Wolfe himself sees the trappings of science fiction and fantasy, the spaceships and so on, as simply “a sketchy outline of the things that can be done.” But even within fantasy fandom, Wolfe’s work presents difficulties. His science fiction is neither operatic nor scientifically accurate; his fantasy works are not full of clanging swords and wizardly knowledge. But ask science-fiction or fantasy authors about Gene Wolfe and they are likely to cite him as a giant in their field. Ursula K. Le Guin once called Wolfe “our Melville.”

Blog about a list of films included in Antoine Volodine’s short story “The Theory of Image According to Maria Three-Thirteen”

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Antoine Volodine’s short story “The Theory of Image According to Maria Three-Thirteen” is collected in Writers, a book available in English translation by Katina Rogers from Dalkey Archive Press.

Writers is one of the best books I’ve read in the past few years: unsettling, bizarre, satirical, and savage, its stories focus on writers who are more than writers: they are would-be revolutionaries and assassins, revolting humans revolting against the forces of late capitalism.

Writers (which I wrote about here) functions a bit like a discontinuous novel that spins its own web of self-references to produce a small large gray electric universe—the Volodineverse, I guess—which we can also see in post-exotic “novels” like Minor Angels and Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven. 

Volodine’s post-exotic project refers obliquely to the ways in which the late 20th century damns the emerging 21st century. And yet the trick of it all is that the stories and sketches and vignettes seem ultimately to refer only to themselves, or to each other—the world-building is from the interior. This native interiority is mirrored by the fact that many of his writer-heroes are prisoners communicating from their cells, often to interrogators, but just as often to an unresponsive void.

“The Theory of Image According to Maria Three-Thirteen” takes place in such a void, a kind of limbo into which the (anti-)hero Maria Three-Thirteen speaks herself into existence. It’s an utterly abject existence; Maria Three-Thirteen crouches naked like “a madwoman stopped before the unknown, before strangers and nothingness, and her mouth and her orifices unsealed after death…all that remains for her is to speak.” She speaks to a semi-human tribunal, a horrorshow, creatures “without self-knowledge.” After several paragraphs of floating abject abstraction, Maria eventually illustrates her thesis—an evocation of speech without language, speech in a deaf natural voice–to this audience.

Her illustration is a list of scenes from 20th-century films.

I found this moment of the story initially baffling—it seemed, upon first reading, an utter surrender to exterior referentiality on Volodine’s part, a move inconsistent with the general interiority of Writers. Even though the filmmakers alluded to made and make oblique, slow, often silent, often challenging (and always beautiful) films, films aesthetically similar to Volodine’s own project, I found Volodine’s gesture too on-the-nose: Of course he’s beholden to Bergman, Tarkovsky, Bela Tarr!

Rereading the story, and rereading it in the context of having read more of Volodine’s work, I take this gesture as the author’s recognition of his aesthetic progenitors. Volodine here signals that the late 20th-century narrative that most informs his work is cinema—a very specific kind of cinema—and not per se literature.

This reading might be a misreading on my part though. Maybe Volodine simply might have wanted to make a list of some of his favorite scenes from some of his favorite films, and maybe Volodine might have wanted to insert that list into a story. And it’s a great list. I mean, I like the list. I like it enough to include it below. I have embedded the scenes alluded to where possible, and in a few places made what I take to be worthy substitutions.

Here is Volodine; here is Volodine’s Maria Three-Thirteen, speaking the loud deaf voice—

And now, she begins again, to illustrate, I will cite a few images without words or almost without words, several images that make their deaf voice heard. You know them, you have certainly attended cinema showings during which they’ve been projected before you. These are not immobile images, but they are fundamentally silent, and they make their deaf voice heard very strongly.

The chess match with death in The Seventh Seal by Ingmar Bergman, with, in the background, a procession of silhouettes that undertake the arduous a scent of a hill.

The man on all fours who barks in the mud facing a dog in Damnation by Bela Tarr.

The baby that cries in a sordid and windowless apartment in Eraserhead by David Lynch.

The bare facade of an abandoned apartment building, with Nosferatu’s head in a window, in Nosferatu by Friedrich Murnau.

The boat that moves away from across an empty sea, overflowing with cadavers, at the end of Shame by Ingmar Bergman.

The desert landscape, half hidden by a curtain that the wind lifts in Ashes of Time by Wong Kar Wai.

The early morning travel by handcar, with the regular sound of wheels, in Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky.

The old man with cancer who sings on a swing in Ikiru by Akira Kurosawa.

The blind dwarfs with their enormous motorcycle glasses who hit each other with canes in Even Dwarfs Started Small by Werner Herzog.

The train station where three bandits wait at the beginning of Once Upon a Time in the West by Sergio Leone.

The flares above the river in Ivan’s Childhood by Andrei Tarkovsky.

The prairie traveled over by a gust of wind in The Mirror by Andrei Tarkovsky.

She is quiet for a moment.

There are many others she thinks. They all speak. They all speak without language, with a deaf voice, with a natural and deaf voice.

 

The nightmare has no escape (Antoine Volodine)

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Several creatures wake up, semi-human and semi-animal, seated on a tribunal dais. Their memory doesn’t give them any self-knowledge, they knew nothing about the affair that they must judge, or even about the world where they’ve landed. The only landmark they have at their disposal is the individual lamp that illuminates a bit of the table before them. The darkness all around is without hope. Silence reigns, crushing, and prolongs itself. Aware that the situation must be untangled in one way or another, they all imagine being observed by their neighbors with discontent and even hatred. In reality, all share, without knowing it, a vertiginous feeling of guilt and solitude. The strangeness of the situation reinforces itself every moment; immobility grow stronger. The minutes flow, more and more painful. The only way to put an end to the unbearable seems to be to take the floor. Their voice must be heard, they must seem to take on their judiciary function competently. After having cleared its throat, the massive animal who is in the middle, and therefore assumes the need to play the role of president, opens the dossier placed in front of it and begins to read it with thundering voice. Startled by the excessive vibration of its vocal chords, painfully embarrassed by the words it pronounces, it nonetheless continues its speech. What it has before it is a prose poem, surrealist, a completely incongruous text. The creatures sitting to its left and its right have collapsed at the idea that they must now prove their existence and therefore respond. In order not to underscore its own foreignness to the world, each one to the world, each one in turn pretends to know the procedure and intervenes, masking it’s fears under an aggressive excess of confidence. The readings follow one after the other. The poems are not always of a trivial nature and, on the contrary, abound in imprecations and personal attacks;  however, they are formulated in a sufficiently obscure manner that each magistrate feels deeply implicated. The tribunal session has no end. The nightmare has no escape.

From Antoine Volodine’s short story “The Theory of the Image According to Maria Three-Thirteen.” English translation by Katina Rodgers (Dalkey, 2014).

The microfiction, which points to the abject nature of writing/speaking (and witnessing), by the titular heroine, is also a macrofiction for both the story itself, and, perhaps, Volodine’s entire post-exotic project.

Blog about the first half of Antoine Volodine’s Writers

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Antoine Volodine’s collection of loosely-connected stories Writers (2010; English translation by Katina Rogers, Dalkey Archive, 2014) is 108 pages. I have read the first four of the seven stories here—the first 54 pages. This is the first book by Volodine that I have read. Antoine Volodine is in fact a pseudonym, I know, but I don’t know much else about the writer. I’ve been meaning to read him for a few years, after some good folks suggested I do so, but I’ve never come across any of his books in the wild until this weekend. After I finish Writers I will read more about Volodine, but for now I am enjoying (?) how and what this book teaches me about the bigger project Volodine seems to be working towards.

That bigger project evinces in the first story in the collection, “Mathias Olbane,” which centers on the titular character, a writer who tries to hypnotize himself into a suicide attempt. Poor Mathias goes to prison for twenty-six years — “He had assassinated assassins.” Like most of the figures in Writers (so far anyway—you see by the title of this post that I am reporting from half way through, yes?) — like most of the figures in Writers, Mathias is a revolutionary spirit, resisting capitalist power and conformist order through radical violence. Before prison, Mathias wrote two books. The first, An Autumn at the Boyols’ “consisted of eight short texts, inspired by fantasy or the bizarre, composed in a lusterless but impeccable style. Let’s say that it was a collection that maintained a certain kinship with post-exoticism…” The description of the book approximates a description of Writers itself; notably, Volodine identifies his own genre as post-exoticism. Autumn at the Boyols’ doesn’t sell at all, and its sequel, Splendor of the Skiff (which “recounted a police investigation, several episodes of a global revolution, and traumatizing incursions into dream worlds”) somehow fares even worse. Mathias begins a new kind of writing in prison:

…after twenty-six years in captivity, he had forged approximately a hundred thousand words, divided as follows:

  • sixty thousand first and last names of victims of unhappineess
  • twenty thousand names of imaginary plants, mushrooms, and herbs
  • ten thousand names of places, rivers, and localities
  • and ten thousand various words that do not belong to any language, but have a certain phonetic logic that makes them sound familiar

I love the mix of tones here: Mathias Olbane’s grand work is useless and strange and sad and ultimately unknowable, and Volodine conveys this with both sinister humor and dark pathos. Once released from prison, our hero immediately becomes afflicted with a rare and incurable and painful disease. Hence, the suicide urge. But let’s move on.

The second tale in Writers, “Speech to the Nomads and the Dead,” offers another iteration of post-exotic writing, both in form and content. The story plays out like a weird nightmare. Linda Woo, isolated and going mad in a prison cell, conjures up an audience of burn victims, an obese dead man, Mongolian nomads, and several crows. She delivers a “lesson” to her auditors (a “lesson,” we learn, is one of post-exoticism’s several genres). The lesson is about the post-exotic writers themselves. She names a few of these post-exotic writers (Volodine is addicted to names, especially strange names), and delivers an invective against the modern powers that the post-exotic writers write against:

Post-exoticism’s writers…have in their memory, without exception, the wars and the ethnic and social exterminations that were carried out from one end of the 20th century to the other, they forget none and pardon none, they also keep permanently in mind the savageries and the inequalities that are exacerbated among men…

The above excerpt is a small taste of Woo’s bitter rant, which goes on for long sentence after long sentence (Volodine is addicted to long sentences). Like Mathias Olbane, Linda Woo writes in the face of futility, creating the “post-exotic word,” a word that creates an “absurd magic” that allows the post-exotic writers to “speak the world.”

Linda Woo’s name appears in the next story in Writers, “Begin-ing,” if only in passing. This story belongs to an unnamed writer, yet another prisoner. Wheelchair-bound, he is interrogated and tortured by two insane inmates who have taken over their prison, having killed their captors. The pair, Greta and Bruno Khatchatourian, are thoroughly horrific, spouting abject insanities that evoke Hieronymus Boschs’s hell. They are terrifying, and I had a nightmare the night that I read “Begin-ing.” It’s never quite clear if Greta and Bruno Khatchatourian are themselves post-exotic writers gone mad or just violent lunatics on the brink of total breakdown. In any case, Volodine affords them dialogue that veers close to a kind of horror-poetry. “We can also spew out the apocalypse,” Greta defiantly sneers. They torture the poor writer. Why?

They would like it, in the end, if he came around to their side, whether by admitting that he’s been, for a thousand years, a clandestine leader of dark forces, or by tracing for them a strategy that could lead them to final victory. … They would like above all for him to help them to drive the dark forces out from the asylum, to prepare a list of spies, they want him to rid the world of the last nurses, of Martians, of colonialists, and of capitalists in general.

The poor writer these lunatics torture turns inward to his own formative memories of first writings, of begin-ing, when he created his own worlds/words in ungrammatical misspelled scrawlings, filling notebook after notebook. Volodine unspools these memories in sentences that carry on for pages, mostly centering on the writer’s strange childhood in an abject classroom where he engages in depravities that evoke Pasolini’s Salò. And yet these memories are the writer’s comfort—or at least resistance—to the lunatics’ violence. Volodine’s prose in “Begin-ing” conjures Goya’s various lunatics, witches, demons, and dogs. It’s all very upsetting stuff.

Courtyard with Lunatics, 1794 by Francisco Goya (1746-1828)

After the depravity of “Begin-ings,” the caustic comedy of the next story “Acknowledgements” is a welcome palate cleanser. In this story’s twelve pages (I wish there were more!) Volodine simultaneously ridicules and exults the “Acknowledgements” page that often appends a novel, elevating the commonplace gesture to its own mock-heroic genre. The story begins with the the hero-writer thanking “Marta and Boris Bielouguine, who plucked me from the swamp that I had unhappily fallen into along with the bag containing my manuscript.” The “swamp” here is not a metaphor, but a literal bog the writer nearly drowned in. And the manuscript? A Meeting at the Boyols’, a title that recalls poor Mathias Olbane’s first book  An Autumn at the Boyols’. Each paragraph of “Acknowledgments” is its own vignette, a miniature adventure in the form of a thank-you note to certain parties. Most of the vignettes end in sex or death, or an escape from one of the two. “Grad Litrif and his companion Lioudmila” as well as “the head of the Marbachvili archives” (oh the names in this story!) are thanked for allowing the writer

…to access the notebooks of Vulcain Marbachvili, from which I was able, for my story Long Ago to Bed Early, to copy several sentences before the earthquake struck that engulfed the archives. My thanks to these three people, and apologies to the archivist, as I was sadly unable to locate either her name or her body in the rubble.

“Acknowledgments” is littered with such bodies—sometimes victims of disasters and plagues, and elsewhere the bodies of the married or boyfriended women the writer copulates with before escaping into some new strange circumstances (he often thanks the husbands and the boyfriends, and in one inspired moment, thanks a gardener “who one day had the presence of mind to detain Bernardo Balsamian in the orchard while Grigoria and I showered and got dressed again”). He thanks a couple who shows him their collection of 88 stuffed guinea pigs; he thanks “the leader of the Muslim Bang cell” who, during his “incarceration in Yogyakarta…forbid the prisoners on the floor from sodomizing” him; he thanks the “Happy Days” theater troupe who “had the courage” to perform his play Djann’s Awakening three times “before a rigorously empty room.” Most of the acknowledgments connect the writer’s thank-you to a specific book he’s written. I’m tempted to list them all (oh the names!), but just a few—Tomorrow the Otters, Eve of Pandemic, Journal of Pandemonium, Goodbye Clouds, Goodbye Romeo, Mlatelpopec in Paradise, Macbeth in Paradise, Hell in Paradise…Without exaggeration: “Acknowledgements” is one of the funniest stories I’ve ever read.

With its evocations of mad and obscure writers, Volodine’s books strongly reminds me of Roberto Bolaño’s work. And yet reading it is not like reading an attempt to copy another writer—which Volodine is in no way doing—but rather like reading a writer who has filtered much of the same material of the 20th century through himself, and has come to some of the same tonal and thematic viewpoints—Volodine’s labyrinth is dark and weird and sinister and abject, but also slightly zany and terribly funny. More to come.

 

“White Rabbits,” a short tale by Leonora Carrington

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rabbit

“White Rabbits”

by

Leonora Carrington

THE TIME has come that I must tell the events which began in 40 Pest St. The houses which were reddish-black looked as if they had survived mysteriously from the fire of London. The house in front of my window, covered with an occasional wisp of creeper, was as blank and empty looking as any plague-ridden residence subsequently licked by flames and saliv’d with smoke. This is not the way that I had imagined New York.

It was so hot that I got palpitations when I ventured out into the streets—so I sat and considered the house opposite and occasionally bathed my sweating face.

The light was never very strong in Pest Street. There was always a reminiscence of smoke which made visibility troubled and hazy—still it was possible to study the house opposite carefully, even precisely; besides my eyes have always been excellent.

I spent several days watching for some sort of movement opposite but there was none and I finally took to undressing quite freely before my open window and doing breathing exercises optimistically in the thick Pest Street air. This must have blackened my lungs as dark as the houses. One afternoon I washed my hair and sat out on the diminuitive stone crescent which served as a balcony to dry it. I hung my head between my knees ¡and watched a blue-bottle suck the dry corpse of a spider between my feet. I looked up through my lank hair and saw something black in the sky, ominously quiet for an airplane. Parting my hair I was in time to see a large raven alight on the balcony of the house opposite. It sat on the balustrade and seemed to peer into the empty window, then poked its head under its wing apparently searching for lice. A few minutes later I was not unduly surprised to see the double windows open and and admit a woman onto the balcony—she carried a large dish full of bones which she emptied onto the floor. With a short appreciative squawk, the raven hopped down and picked about amongst its unpleasant repast.

The woman, who had hemp-long black hair, wiped out the dish, using her hair for this purpose.

Then she looked straight at me and smiled in a friendly fashion. I smiled back and waved a towel. This seemed to encourage her for she tossed her head coquettishly and gave me a very elegant salute after the fashion of a queen.

“Do you happen to have any bad meat over there that you don’t need?” she called.

“Any what?” I called back, wondering if my ears had deceived me.

“Any stinking meat? Decomposed flesh … meat?”

“Not at the moment,” I replied, wondering if she was trying to be funny.

“Won’t you have any towards the end of the week? If so, I would be very grateful if you would bring it over.”

Then she stepped back into the empty window and disappeared. The raven flew away. Continue reading ““White Rabbits,” a short tale by Leonora Carrington” →

Mental Places: A Conversation with Gerald Murnane

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