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"Rather than defending its borders against that which it excludes, this book offers itself as a snapshot of the novel, one story among others that one can tell about its history. The book is made up of entries from over 100 contributors – a cross section of the international reading community, including critics, academics, novelists, poets, literary journalists – and the list is generated to a large degree from what this diverse group of readers tells us about what the novel looks like today. As such, this book reflects a set of priorities that are shared by today’s readers, a certain understanding of where the novel comes from, a particular kind of passion for reading. But it does so in a spirit of love for the diversity and endlessness of the possibilities of fiction rather than in any desire to separate the quality from the rabble, the wheat from the chaff. It speaks of a thousand and one things, but with a breathless urgency that derives partly from the haunting knowledge of how many other things there are to be said, how many other novels there are to be read, how short even the longest story can feel when faced with the endlessness of storytelling. "

                                                              from General Editor Peter Boxall’s introduction to 1001 Books you Must Read Before you Die

If there is no desire to separate any wheat, why not then include the New York telephone directory among the 1001? Endless possibilities there.

***

And then there’s 501 Must Read Books with an unsigned introduction that, although less purple, shares 1001′s squeamishness on selection criteria. All we get is:

"The recommendations for inclusion in this comprehensive book were made bya bibliophile and writer with a peerless reputation…;" and, to be charitable, this ‘analogy for choosing a book’: a lonely heart’s ad: "Smart inquistive mnd, imaginative, restless, open to new experiences, good sense of humour, seeks similar, compassionate, knowledgeable, surprising, intellectually stimulating, emotionally uplifting, thought provoking, distracting, colourful, rich, unusual, eccentric, globally aware, historically smart, with the innocence of a child, thrill seeking, techie, partner or partners for lifetime commitment to fun, adventure and new experiences."

Some years ago a friend recommended I read Nicholson Baker’s The Mezannine. He loved it for its precision, its vertical drilling, its detail. I struggled in quick sand for about 50 pages and threw the book aside. It felt like I’d been stuck the entire time walking down the up escalator that Baker had been describing with patented anality. I later gave Baker another shot. Vox wasn’t quick sand, it was porn. Bad, boring adolescent porn. 

Several months ago Ed Champion held a highly praised roundtable at his site discussing Baker’s Human Smoke. I wasn’t about to read it. I’d had enough minutia. Enough irritation.

For those into masochism, here’s Baker being irritating on TV. A gadfly stirring conversation. At least I’ll give him that.

Here’s what the New York Times gives him:

Baker contends that if the West hadn’t used bombs, Hitler’s support at home would have evaporated. While Baker’s pacifist sentiments are admirable, based on what I’ve just heard, and the reviews I’ve read I think he’s wrong. My sense is that if Chamberlain had stayed in power millions more Jews would have died and today we’d all be goosestepping to the beat of a racist conductor.

In a long winded piece at the Chronicle of Higher Education, Mahzarin R. Banaji a Harvard psych professor criticizes New Yorker editor Remnick and his Obama cover comme ca:

"Remnick pleaded in his own defense that he had also, some weeks ago, considered a cover of Obama wearing a number 42 shirt sliding into home base (but withdrew it because somebody else beat his magazine to it). In his opinion, that Obama-as-Jackie-Robinson cover was similar in spirit to the one he ran, just positive instead of negative. Wrong again. In the Jackie Robinson comparison, A=B (Obama=Robinson) is portrayed as A=B. In the cover in question A≠B (Obama≠Islamist) is portrayed as A=B (Obama=Islamist).

If the argument is that The New Yorker cover was meant to depict the radical right’s ludicrous portrayal of Obama as an apologist for Islam and its fundamentalists, then the question we might pose is this: Would Blitt consider it good satirical strategy to condemn child sexual abuse by depicting a young adolescent boy and an older man, obviously just having had sex, fist-bumping with knowing pleasure? In what world would that constitute satire rather than a failed imagination? Ultimately, all the lame responses by Blitt and Remnick don’t persuade because of the sharp limits of their morning-after reasoning."

Remnick’s response, in the Huffington Post: "The fact is, it’s not a satire about Obama – it’s a satire about the distortions and misconceptions and prejudices about Obama."

If this is the case, then the cover should have shown an artist, say John McCain for example, drawing what the cover depicts, not the drawing itself. That might have been amusing. As it stands, it simply puts Obama in garb that his less savory opponents might hope American voters see him dressed. It simply isn’t funny.

As David Worcester says in his superb little book The Art of Satire (Norton, 1969), "The satirist must simultaneously appear amiable to his audience, hostile to his enemies." Remnick fails at both. This is an intelligent man. Either he made a mistake and should admit it, or, he should provide his readers with a better explanation for why, other than attracting attention (which he denies) he went with the cover in question. This just doesn’t cut it.

The following review appeared in the July 26, 2008 edition of the Globe and Mail:

Dr. Johnson defined the essay as "an irregular, indigested piece, not a regular and orderly performance."

By this count there is no doubt that what Stephen Henighan presents in A Report on the Afterlife of Culture are indeed essays; what is missing however, in both Johnson’s descriptive and Henighan’s book, is necessary, cogent argument.   Without it, you have nothing but ‘a loose sally of the mind, ‘one that leaves boredom and irritation in its wake. 

Specifically, starting with the big picture:  the first essay opens with the camera of a Japanese tourist being smashed by a group of male Mams, members of one of Guatemala’s ancient communities “trying to wrest their children from an alien grip, to claim their offspring as their own, not as creatures of the image.” “We are all Mam now,” says Henighan dramatically, “longing to free the captured souls from Satan’s box in order to resituate our owns lives, actions and experiences within a meaningful, coherent social order that will lend our existences a resonance capable of being transmitted to succeeding generations.”

 In the face of technology, superficial commercial imagery, consumerism, globalization, in short, modernity, Henighan, in proscribing a ‘buy local’ solution, asserts,  that “attention to local detail and literary innovation are inseparable from one another; that  [if Canadian writers would only return to]…observing Canadian reality in meticulous detail, circumstances would oblige at least some of them to generate inventive, avant-garde narrative because the contorted particularities of Canadian life, colliding with the leveling assumptions of an English-language literary tradition institutionalized by the two greatest empires in the history of the world, would leave them no alternative.”

Bemoaning the fact that critics didn’t get this in his previous essay collection blinded as they were by a false, but dominant art versus social commentary/multi-cultural cosmopolitan versus rural whiteness dichotomy, Henighan concludes this volume with the notion that Canada’s salvation lies in a cosmopolitanism nourished by national history and local detail – the localism of The Tin Drum, One Hundred Years of Solitude or Midnight’s Children.

What I think he fails to understand in this, the essential message of his work, is that because Canada is a nation of immigrants who are not asked to melt in a pot, who bring a multitude of histories with them, who view local details with distinctively varied eyes, such notions of salvation are neither feasible nor desirable.

Canada lives as much in the imagination as in reality, perhaps more so than with most other countries.  A place where the destructive forces of nationalism have, for the most part, been neutered; where citizens can be patriotic with or without fanfare.  Of course attention to detail is essential to literary greatness, but just because Canadian novels don’t mirror contemporary urban existence, doesn’t mean we are doomed to live meaningless lives filled with mediocre art.

Of course economics determines in large part what gets published. But though this may not be entirely desirable, there’s a compelling argument to be made for the marketplace determining quality. When William Shakespeare wrote his plays, he wasn’t anal about reflecting local experience, he went with whatever he could find that would appeal to audiences, push seats through turn styles; whatever would best stage the timeless, sublimely beautiful truths and observations he had to convey about the human condition. This, I’d say, is the best advice any young Canadian writer can take, rather than listening to some gadfly spouting imagination-limiting prescriptives. In response to Mr. Henighan’s condemnation of Canadian fiction as devoid of the local present,  one is tempted to say, with Yann Martel, “I don’t know and I don’t care.”

Most of Mr. Henighan’s essays are hybrids, countries forced together to form new unhappy continents.  The unhappiest is the first in which the people of Todos Santos Cuchumatan are jammed uncomfortably up against Polish cathedrals and rambling accusations that Ian McEwan manipulates history to align with the present day outlook of his ‘surreptitiously superior’ readers. Though his argument: that democratic attempts to reinstate the past are disconnected from those cultures that initially gave birth to the forms reproduced – resulting in a dumbed down simulacrum –  may have merit, its presentation is slap dash. A rushed amalgam of Daniel Boorstin’s The Image, Susan Sontag On Photography, Adbusters and whatever Naomi Klein is currently writing. 

The most lucid pieces, contained in a series of author profiles grouped together in the middle of the book, are those left closest to their original published form. The most ‘provocative,’ despite their rather tired and personal attacks on The Giller, big publishing, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje et al, are those on Canada’s literary woes.

It has oft been said that ideas are conceived, born and polished in the act of essay writing itself. While there are some well turned phrases: Vargas Llosa “combined avant-garde narrative techniques with a wide-screened 19^th-century realism,”  “attention to detail as meticulous as that with which the dictator rules his nation,” there are also many Ill conceived over generalizations: contrary to Henighan’s pronouncements:   U.S. literary intellectuals are scrutinizing Latin American literature today as closely as they ever have; it wasn’t Australians or Brits who were responsible for a surge of interest in Roberto Bolano, but an American, Barbara Epler. Pride in Englishness is not the equivalent of racism; Blackwell’s inventory is not ‘thin and ephemeral;’ good fiction is not produced with foreign rights sales in mind… I could go on for the length of Mr. Henighan’s book, but space, which is a whole other topic, does not here permit.

In the past few days alone at least three friends have told me about the dying or death of their elderly parents, which bucketed this up from the memory well: when my redoubtable grandmother Judy Court (drawing of her above by Laura Knight, Xmas, 1921) was in her late eighties, still trotting the globe, we set out from Lewes, near Brighton, where she lived, on a drive to Bodiam castle. She knew the way, so I just followed instructions. By the time we’d arrived in Three Oaks, past Hastings, I decided to stop to get another opinion on the where abouts of the castle. Informed that it was back in the direction from which we had just come, and then straight North of Hastings, nowhere near where my revered traveling companion had indicated, I carried this intelligence with me to the car, and drove, quietly retracing our tracks, accompanied by a chorus of objections. Sure enough, half an hour or so later we came upon the ramparts…only to be informed by Judy that ‘they must have moved the castle.’

I told this story at her funeral, positive that the reason she had lived in good health to 99 had something to do with a certain unshakable stubbornness. 

All this to say that as she drifted in and out of consciousness on her death bed, my brother at a point close to the end heard her say "Extraordinary. Absolutely extraordinary." This sort of awe-filled curiosity, wanderlust, characterized her whole life, and gives me pause to believe that there may well be another leg left to walk once this journey on earth has ended.

*** 

I alas was not there for it, but when my aunt Averil’s ashes were scattered in a field in the south of England on a still summer day some 15 years ago, my cousin Jenni, who composed a song based on the experience, and others who were there, received a message. A gust of wind blew up from nowhere, snatched a clutch of hay, whisked  it overhead, and hurried it circling above over a nearby hedge, away into an adjacent farmer’s field. But more than this. As Jenni puts it, "The hay didn’t just fly in to the adjacent field it was sucked up into the sky
and looked like it was dissolving into the sky itself as the wisps got smaller
and smaller as they blew ever upward…"

*** 

Finally, on the other side of the family, the Beale side, a great aunt or uncle, can’t remember which, had died. As my father told it, friends and relatives had settled back at home after the funeral in a living room which opened out onto a garden. Suddenly, with everyone sitting around the room, a huge butterfly fluttered through the window, took a large circle, and flew on out again into the pretty English countryside.

Publisher John Calder in Textualities (via readysteadybook, via Lee) on Beckett

He also felt that he shouldn’t enjoy anything too much because if you enjoy anything too much you want to go on living and he didn’t want to put himself in a position where he was enjoying life so much that he was afraid to die.

There may be many people who believe that while pain surrounds us all the time it is somehow constructive to try to ignore it. Beckett doesn’t. His thinking is very close to Schopenhauer’s in this, although I think by the time he discovered him he’d already come to the same conclusions. Schopenhauer thinks that everything is caused by a kind of Will: Nature has a Will that for him is evil, the cause of suffering. Standard religions – not so much Hinduism or Buddhism – of course, deny this. Beckett asks deeply searching questions about conventional beliefs. Why should a god want to be worshiped, admired, praised? All we’re doing is replacing a parental figure with a god: Please, daddy, give me this.

Friedrich ‘the anti-Christ’ Nietzsche wasn’t very keen on the church either, precisely because it aided folk in the avoidance of pain, the facing of which was important to the growth and strengthening of human resolve and spirit, ‘no pain, no gain’. Faith didn’t help his father avoid suffering however. He died when Nietzsche was five; this caused the boy to question, and eventually abandon Christianity; to champion the open minded search for objective truth; to rely on the self to find its own way, in a godless world. Trying to come up with a system of values for a world without divine sanction, drove him mad. 

Here’s Calder on Burroughs:

As far as editing Burroughs goes: I tried to sit down with him to discuss books but he hated looking at old work. He was only interested in what he was currently doing. I would say, ‘Now look, this man on page forty strikes me as very like the one on page sixty-six, except he has another name – could it be the same person?’ Burroughs would say ‘ Yes, you’re right. Change the name. Do what you like. This bores me.’ The English editions of the
Burroughs’ novels I published read very differently from the American ones.

(Quite unlike most novelists today who pay a great deal of attention to the sales and packaging of their backlists…then again Burroughs ended up sitting around in some shack in the mid West surrounded by cats and empty vodka bottles). 

I don’t see Burroughs as a good writer but he’s an important writer. What he did during his experimental period strikes me as not so different from what T.S. Eliot was doing in ‘The Waste Land’.

He was obsessed with mind control, that there were alien beings manipulating us. He became a cult figure to a generation much younger than himself. He really had nothing at all in common with these people but he accepted their admiration and got caught up in the drugs and music culture.

Another superb, verging on patently superb,  post from Wyatt Mason at Sentences. His has quickly become a favourite stop along the daily blogospheric milk run. Discharge from a Deeper Wound exhibits all I want to see in a blog post:

Establishment of anticipation/hints of potential contrition:

"Let’s not kid ourselves," I wrote a few years ago, "everyone hates translations. The evidence is everywhere in the history of literature:"

Outstanding quotation selection (added points because they’re metaphors): par example these bon mots from some of translation’s more illustrious, florid detractors

Cervantes wrote that reading a translation was "like looking at the Flanders tapestries from behind: although you can see the basic shapes, they are so filled with threads that you cannot fathom their original luster." Goethe took issue with translators themselves, whom he likened to "enthusiastic matchmakers singing the praises of some half-naked young beauty: they awaken in us an irresistible urge to see the real thing with our own eyes." Gide observed that the translator was "a horseman who tries to put his steed through paces for which it is not built." Madame de Lafayette equated the translator with "a lackey whose mistress sends him to pay someone a compliment; whatever she said politely, he renders rude."

Thought provocation:

"The trouble I have with this conventional wisdom is how patently it flies in the face of practical experience."

Thought

When I think about it, the most beautiful passages I’ve ever read have all been in translation: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Stendhal. I question whether or not they can be any more so in the original. Hard to imagine.

Recommended reading:

Adam Thirlwell. The Delighted States (FSG, 2008) "…it is the elusive nature of literary style-what it is, how it works, and why it survives translation-at the center of his perambulatory tour of the nature of the novel."

Useful link:

Walter Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator"

Critique.

"Though The Delighted States does not answer the question "What is Style?", it does pose the question with uncommon resourcefulness."

Motivation to post a response, and provide my own recommendation:

If you haven’t read Ben Yagoda’s book on style I commend it to you.

Promise of more of the same.  

What more can you ask for; this man gets the hang of it. He’s the real meal. A very impressive, quick study.

I knew we were in for a treat when Louis Bayard proposed in his review of How Fiction Works that its author James Wood "writes like an angel with all the austerity and voluptuousness that implies. "

What draws many people to stories in the first place, says our guide, is not "the tension between author and character" as Wood purportedly has it, "but the chance to go on a journey, to see one event follow another in a way that is surprising and moving and possibly transforming. Does this make us "worse" readers than Wood? Is story simply a vestigial organ that will be cast aside by evolution? Or is it evolution’s engine?"

First off, Wood doesn’t dictate how we must learn, he states with confidence and authority his opinion on how fiction works best, and if he does ‘act as if Bovary can be separated from its story,’ I must have missed the performance. Far from saying that a tree can be isolated from its soil, I read him as saying that without a tree all you have is a pile of dirt.

Think about it, and I’m certain, contrary to Bayard’s snide suggestion otherwise, that Wood has: where does action start: in the mind. Fine, Anna Karenina, as cited by Bayard, has an affair. What’s more important: a description of her cheating on her husband, or some understanding of why she does it; of how she feels about it, of the pain and guilt and ecstasy that war within her. And the same holds for the behavior of her husband, her lover, her sister-in-law, son and other characters.

There is no action without people. So the more we know about them, the more interesting the story becomes. Story means little until and unless the reader can connect and engage with the characters responsible for it. Without establishing empathy, making readers care about what happens to these characters, without in short, ‘the good parts’ all you have is a pile of dirt.

Since I’ve been reading killer storyteller Flannery O’Connor of late, here’s what she has to say about Bayard’s soil (from Mystery and Manners):

Of course the story isn’t vestigial. It’s a vital part of who characters are and what they do.

While Bayard may not have to worry about being a ‘worse’ reader than Wood, he quite clearly should about being a worse critic.

Thanks to Mark Thwaite I’ve just read Idris Parry’s translation of Heinrich von Kleist‘s Über das Marionettentheater, and discovered a basis for curiosity. Why I want to know…

This from Parry’s introduction:

The theme of Kleist’s essay could be a continuation of: I think, therefore I am aware of myself, and if I am aware of myself I must know that I am a separate entity, aware of and therefore apart from my surroundings; but true knowledge must be complete, connected, indivisible; so separation into subject and object, self and surroundings means distance from knowledge, consequently uncertainty and doubt.

Kleist’s essay pivots around a reference to the third chapter of the book of Genesis, the story of the Fall of Man, the discovery of that self-consciousness which establishes and perpetuates human isolation. But ‘discover’ implies a historical event. Kleist shares with Kafka (who once claimed he understood the Fall of Man better than anyone else) the insight that it is only our concept of time which makes us think of the Fall of Man as a historical event in the distant past. It is happening all the time. The biblical story is a mythical representation of constant human awareness of self and therefore of separation…

According to Kleist there is no way back. Humans are now thinking animals, and the material of thought is knowledge. But knowledge, although the source of uncertainty when fragmentary…is also the vital substance of harmony when complete. So Kleist asserts that our only hope is to go forward to total knowledge."

And this again from readysteadybook: In a fascinating short essay in James Knowlson and John Pilling’s Frescoes of the Skull: the later prose and drama of Samuel Beckett (1979), Pilling writes:

Beckett’s admiration for Heinrich von Kleist‘s Über das Marionettentheater, written in 1810 [Kleist shot himself a year later], emerged clearly in October 1976 during rehearsals of the first production on BBC television of his recent television play Ghost Trio…

It is not at all surprising, of course, that Beckett should have been so strongly attracted to Kleist’s essay. For trapped as he is by his own consciousness of self, Beckett’s man yearns to escape from the limitations of his mortal state … his sense of the disaster of self-consciousness in man (and the inadequacy of the human intellect to arrive at any form of salvation) finds an unusually faithful echo in Kleist’s remarkable essay.

Photo: Gerard Lovett

An ancient bridge, and a more ancient tower,
A farmhouse that is sheltered by its wall,
An acre of stony ground,
Where the symbolic rose can break in flower,
Old ragged elms, old thorns innumerable,
The sound of rain or sound
Of every wind that blows;
The stilted water-hen
Crossing stream again
Scared by the splashing of a dozen cow;

W.B. Yeats, ll My House, Meditations in Time of Civil War. 1923