Yearly Archives: 2010

mcelroy on moral fiction

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“Great Expectations and Middlemarch can’t be done now. They don’t feel to me like the atmosphere I’m living in now. I’m with William Carlos Williams and Joyce and others; whatever I’m ‘saying’ I have to give the feeling of time now, the multiple disastrous world now, the world that came awfully and finally out of World War II. But Great Expectations and Middlemarch – they show people losing their true centers, going after money or status or displaced ideals, letting errors multiply, self-deception, self-punishment even. Great novels. I reread them. They move me. They add to me. I see how the whole thing works out (more maybe than any book can pretend to today) – but it is that whole process that adds to me, not an abstractable credo or assent. A novel isn’t a sermon or a moral program – excuse the truism. My step-grandfather, who came from Maine, thought the old copybook maxims were the way to teach you how to live. I thought about this, this conviction of his; but the fact that it was a conviction of his told me more than any of the actual maxims ever could.”

(Joseph McElroy, interview with Tom LeClair in Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists (1983), p. 246.)

alan burns, “the angry brigade”

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Alan Burns
The Angry Brigade: A Documentary Novel
(Quartet, 1974)

It’s hard to tell exactly what this is bereft of critical apparatus. The front cover gives this book the subtitle “A Documentary Novel”; the back cover explains that the author has used “a deft combination of serious in-depth research and imaginative reconstruction”. The seriousness of Burns’s credentials are played up: inhe is a “novelist, playwright and lawyer . . . . a barrister, [who] did research in politics at the London School of Economics, and since 1965 has been a full-time writer.” An unsourced epigraph facing page 1 declares that “The true story of the Angry Brigade will never be told until they publish their memoirs . . . if they ever do.” A short section entitled “Focus on the Angry Brigade” starts the book; signed “A.B.,” the ostensible author explains that he interviewed six people involved in the actual Angry Brigades, but on the condition of concealing their identities:

I therefore adopted the method of the ‘collective autobiography’, telling the story in the words of the participants, but without ‘naming names’. The collective nature of the book is appropriate to a movement whose members remain anonymous for ideological as well as legal reasons. . . . This book brings together the experiences of members of two activist communes. It tells how as individuals they became radicalized, how as groups they were organized, how they related to the world outside . . . . This book relates past events in the past tense, but similar groups and activities continue in various forms. The story is told naturally in different tones of voice and different accents. The reader will distinguish the various motives and attitudes of the speakers, and judge the quality of the men and women who took part in these events. (pp. 2–3)

The book that follows seems to be an oral history of the Angry Brigades in Britain in the early 1970s, told in first-person sections by “Barry,” “Dave,” “Jean,” “Ivor,” “Susanne,” and “Mehta.” Certainly in this country, the history of the Angry Brigades is almost entirely forgotten, if it was ever known in the first place; a tiny article in Wikipedia might provide background; more can be learned from the article on Anna Mendelssohn and a 2004 piece by David Edgar in the LRB. The Angry Brigade seem to have been overshadowed even in their own time by the more violent IRA. I wouldn’t claim to have any particular interest in or knowledge of the history of the Angry Brigades; I came across a mention of this book in Jonathan Coe’s biography of B. S. Johnson, which also notes that the Angry Brigades inspired Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry, one of Johnson’s more successful books. This particular book isn’t particularly easy to find, at least in this country; it doesn’t seem to have been reprinted after this paperback edition.

What remains is an odd document. I certainly can’t pin any historical figures to the names of the characters; this is a long way from being a roman à clef. The personal characteristics seem to have been studiously scrambled. I don’t think the voices are quite as indistinguishable as Burns’s contemporary Zulfikar Ghose found them – Dave’s voice, for example, can always be distinguished because he swears more than anyone else – but there is something very strange about this. Perhaps this is intentional on Burns’s part, an attempt to suggest that individual identities have been subsumed to the greater movement; or perhaps this is how the speakers wished to present themselves to Burns, if the interviews took place as suggested by the introduction. But there’s something interesting about this anonymity: it seems appropriate for a narrative of anarchism, and it’s very different from what we’re used to in histories of terrorism. 

The book takes a turn for the strange towards the end: one of the characters bombs the Post Office Tower (which actually happened in 1971; Wikipedia attributes this to the Provisional IRA) and a woman is killed. People have been injured by the Angry Brigade’s violence over the course of the book; but this death didn’t actually happen. The narrative is now firmly in the realm of fiction; this is enforced by the penultimate section of the book. Dave has been sent to jail; in this section, he counts off the 52 months and 25 days that he spends in jail:

I ticked off the days:
1ST YEAR
1st month
12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 (p. 169)

There’s a similar entry for every month (all but the first and the last listing every day; the 17th of July is circled every year, his birthday); at the end, he’s released and takes the bus back to rejoin the Angry Brigade. It’s an odd list, taking up 7 pages: there’s not much that can be learned from it save that the 35th month has 29 days, and is thus a leap year, presumably either 1972 or 1976. If it’s 1972, he enters jail in 1969 and leaves in later 1973; if it’s 1976, he enters jail in 1973 and leaves in 1978. The book was originally published in 1973; historically, it would make most sense for him to enter jail in 1973, but something is clearly off. Jail passes in a blur; he is released into a militarized Britain, where the Angry Brigade’s struggle continues. Ivor has taken charge of things; the Angry Brigade seems to be leading a full-on rebellion against the British government. There’s a paragraph-long final section, narrated by Suzanne: she curtly tells how three bombs exploded in the basement of their headquarters while she and Ivor were sweeping it: in the final sentence of the book, she feels the shock wave of the bomb.

What’s going on here? The oddity of the end of the book doesn’t seem to be noticed either by Ghose’s piece on it nor by the other short review that I can find online, which treats it as a historical document. While the book may have started from interviews, as “A.B.” insists at the start of the book, there’s also an author of fiction at work here. Returning to the note at the beginning of the book:

Who then was responsible for the Post Office Tower bombing and those at Carr’s home, Bryant’s home in Birmingham, the army barracks in Albany Street, Chelsea Bridge early in September, and the Royal Tank Regiment HQ in Westminister? At least three have been claimed by the Angry Brigade. But it seems as if the bombings are the work of more than one group. In the words of the Special Branch’s ‘experts on the left’: ‘In calling it the Angry Brigade we’re chasing a myth because there is no one organization called the Angry Brigade. There is a theory that the Angry Brigade is a many-headed hydra.’ In other words the example set by the bombings of last year has been followed by independent political groups. In London alone there are thought to be three such groups. (p. 1)

A space has carefully been opened: “A.B.” (initials that Ghose notes also stand for “Angry Brigade”) is careful to not explicitly blame the Post Office Tower bombing on the Angry Brigade, an organization that he then denies exists as such. The Angry Brigade is as much an idea as it is a historical actor: as an idea, it can serve as part of fiction, a piece of fiction that ultimately becomes purely speculative. 

harry mathews, “the journalist”

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Harry Mathews
The Journalist
(David R. Godine, 1994)

One initial reason that Harry Mathews’s The Journalist is interesting is the simple problem that he takes as his subject: that of narration in the novel. The narrator who records what’s happening is a convention of the novel, going back to the letters that compose Samuel Richardson’s books, letters that are so thorough, it has been noted, would take more time to write than actually passes in the narrative itself. The reader might recognize this; but there’s a suspension of disbelief. We understand how a novel is told. The novel as ostensible diary has a similarly long history: as with reading letters, there’s the frisson that comes from reading someone else’s diary. Most first-person narratives, of course, aren’t actually in the form of the diary itself, but there’s something of an implied diary: we assume that the narrator is writing down what happened, and we’re content to call this entirely artificial form “realism”. There’s the problem, of course, that writing is not commensurate with life: it takes more time to have something happen and write it down than it does for something to happen, to say nothing of turning its description into something that anyone else would want to read. And plot, of course, only appears after the fact.

The narrator of The Journalist seeks to keep a journal of everything that happens to him; the book is that record. It’s not coincidental that it’s also a record of insanity: as the narrator seeks to keep track of more and more things, more and more of his life slips away. It’s impossible to live and to actively record your life at the same time, life recorders to the contrary: the sticking point might be the active consideration of the recording of one’s life:

How can I expect to include all I want from a day or part of a day I’ve just lived through if I meekly follow the line that leads from a beginning to an end? That line can only oversimplify. It sticks to the obvious and reasonable, avoiding all that lies outside its “inevitable” progress, avoiding what I most hope to record, the then and then that might not have led here at all and that, even if they did, had anyway their own momentary savor and deserve better than to be flattened into stepping stones on the path to another night’s sleep. To follow chronology means fitting things into place, making sure that nothing has happened. How to see things out of place? Analysis will subvert the illusory naturalness of memory left to its slippered self. (pp. 19–20.)

Such consideration requires recording of its own; one thinks of fractal coastlines. Of a piece with his recording is his division of his journal-writing into ever more complex categories: starting with dividing the what is fact (“A”) from the subjective (“B”), then dividing the two categories more and more: towards the end, something might be “B I/b.2a” if it’s something that the narrator is told by his mistress Colette, for example. A quarter of the way into the book, the text column narrows: marginal notes beside the text note the category that part of the narration might fall into. Not every sentence is classified; I suspect most readers can’t help but ignore the marginal categorizations as deciphering them would retard reading. 

It is, however, a convincing narrative of craziness. What seems to start as a harmless pursuit (albeit a pursuit recommended to the protagonist with the idea that it will help him) is ratcheted up more and more and his depictions and classifications become more and more detailed. It’s a harrowing book as well because of the metafictional aspect of it, which might be said to implicate the reader. The narrator loses control of his own life by writing about it; the reader can’t help but consider that a necessary condition of reading is to ignore the world in favor of the book. The Journalist isn’t necessarily a pleasant book to read, and it probably shouldn’t be, given its subject. 

It’s hard to pinpoint when and where this narrative takes place: Mathews seems to be purposefully evasive. The setting seems to be a smaller city in a European country: where exactly that might be is left vague, and the list of places that it’s not seems to be larger than the list of those that it might be. Everyone eats well; they have pleasant love affairs which cause no pain. The time seems to be the late 1980s, although again there are no specific indicators; the computer exists, but is non-invasive in this world, which does bear a decided resemblance to that of the pastoral. The vagueness is intentional, as is noted when the narrator’s journal is scrutinized by another:

He also suggests that I add references to contemporary events to my account to expand its admirable specificity and make clear to my readers where and when each entry take place. I object: I know where and when they all take place, and following his advice would mean wasting scarce time. (p. 206)

This drama is interior: something like it could be happening anywhere, to anyone; it happens every time a novel is written with a journal-writing narrator. There’s a shock in the last book of Proust when the reader realizes that World War I is happening: the narrator has been writing away, to the exclusion of society, and time has been passing. 

Another book of metafiction, Tom McCarthy’s Remainder approaches the same subject as The Journalist from a different direction, less concerned with character and more concerned with form; there’s a similar progression in that book, and it’s a bit surprising that I’ve never seen the two books compared. To my mind, Mathews’s book is superior because it’s more human, pointing out the unreconcilable contradiction between art and life. Mathews’s book is more concerned with text and its ineluctable linearity which forces narratives upon lives. McCarthy’s characters purposefully feel more like puppets, at service to a greater artistic program: this is purposeful, but the human cost of art is left as an exercise for the reader to figure out. 

august 16-august 22

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Books

Films

  • Dekalog (The Decalogue), directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski
  • Sherlock, Jr., dir. Buster Keaton
  • The Paleface, dir. Buster Keaton
  • Our Hospitality, dir. Buster Keaton & John G. Blystone
  • The Navigator, dir. Buster Keaton & Donald Crisp
  • Steamboat Bill, Jr., dir. Charles Reisner & Buster Keaton
  • One Week, dir. Buster Keaton & Edward F. Cline
  • The Balloonatic, dir. Buster Keaton & Edward F. Cline
  • The Boat, dir. Buster Keaton & Edward F. Cline
  • The Scarecrow, dir. Buster Keaton & Edward F. Cline
  • The Haunted House, dir. Buster Keaton & Edward F. Cline
  • The Frozen North, dir. Buster Keaton & Edward F. Cline
  • The Playhouse, dir. Buster Keaton & Edward F. Cline
  • The Love Nest, dir. Buster Keaton & Edward F. Cline
  • Neighbors, dir. Buster Keaton & Edward F. Cline
  • Cops, dir. Buster Keaton & Edward F. Cline
  • Convict 13, dir. Buster Keaton & Edward F. Cline
  • Daydreams, dir. Buster Keaton & Edward F. Cline
  • Hard Luck, dir. Buster Keaton & Edward F. Cline
  • My Wife’s Relations, dir. Buster Keaton & Edward F. Cline
  • The High Sign, dir. Buster Keaton & Edward F. Cline
  • The Goat, dir. Buster Keaton & Malcolm St. Clair
  • The Blacksmith, dir. Buster Keaton & Malcolm St. Clair
  • Out West, dir. Roscoe Arbuckle
  • The Cook, dir. Roscoe Arbuckle
  • His Wedding Night, dir. Roscoe Arbuckle
  • The Butcher Boy, dir. Roscoe Arbuckle
  • The Rough House, dir. Roscoe Arbuckle & Buster Keaton
  • Good Night Nurse, dir. Roscoe Arbuckle
  • Backstage, dir. Roscoe Arbuckle
  • Coney Island, dir. Roscoe Arbuckle
  • Fatty’s Magic Pants, dir. Roscoe Arbuckle
  • Mabel, Fatty and the Law, dir. Roscoe Arbuckle
  • Fatty Joins the Force, dir. George Nichols
  • Mabel’s Dramatic Career, dir. Mack Sennett

jane bowles/denton welch, “a stick of green candy”

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Jane Bowles & Denton Welch 
A Stick of Green Candy
(illustrated by Colter Jacobsen) 
(Four Corners Books, 2010)

This book is not, of course, a long-lost collaboration between Jane Bowles and Denton Welch; rather, it consists of two stories by Bowles (“A Stick Of Green Candy” and “Camp Cataract”) and two by Welch (“The Trout Stream” and “Narcissus Bay”) will illustrations by Colter Jacobsen as part of Four Corners’s Familiars series, where artists are invited to illustrate texts. Four Corners make beautiful books: this is hard-cover, beautifully bound, with attention paid to details: the white case has a shiny green spine, candy-like enough. The title page is hand-lettered; the illustration is generous, not only black and white but also full color. Matthew Carter gets thanked on the colophon for his work on the type; the book was printed in Italy. Four Corners makes books for people who appreciate beautiful books, and this is a large part of the attraction of this edition. There’s something to be said for this assemblage of stories, though. The Jane Bowles stories are in print, as part of My Sister’s Hand in Mine. The Denton Welch stories are a bit harder to get ahold of, at least in this country: Tartarus Press put out a complete edition in the U.K., but it’s pricey and I don’t have a copy of it. I probably should.

The illustrator, Colter Jacobsen, seems to be the person who selected these stories to appear together. What ties them together, besides his judgment? Though the writers were roughly contemporaneous, they’re very different; while Welch’s works tend to be strongly centered around a single consciousness, it’s pointedly difficult for the reader to find anyone to identify with in the work of Jane Bowles. Three of the four stories here involve strange children; the fourth, “Camp Cataract” is about two sisters whose relationship never quite becomes adult. In “The Trout Stream,” Welch’s protagonist young protagonist observes his elders, who try and fail to make themselves happy; in “A Stick of Green Candy,” a young girl, ignored by her parents, grows up by herself. “Narcissus Bay” relates the story of a young boy in China who sees a procession of a beaten woman, two chained men, and a police officer, the aftermath of some crime; more importantly, he learns how his knowledge of this can affect those around him. Like “The Trout Stream,” “Camp Cataract” seems to end with a drowning. If Bowles and Welch’s voices aren’t particularly similar, there’s a consistency to these stories in their focus on outsiders. Welch’s narrators seem to be outsiders by choice; those of Bowles seem dragged along by the world around them. 

I like this presentation: with only four stories, these narratives have room to breath, and the reader is encouraged to slow down. The Bowles stories can be found in the FSG collection of her works; to my mind, though, they suffer in that context from being presented after Two Serious Ladies, a more powerful work. Welch’s stories appear with 74 of their fellows in his collected stories; I know that I find it hard to focus on details in the midst of so much. Here details stand out: at the country house of “The Trout Stream,” they eat Bombay duck; later, a woman has a “voice like an electric guitar”. I don’t know when the story was written, but Denton Welch died in 1948; one wonders what that sound would have meant to him. There’s something to be said for having the leisure to appreciate this; certainly its possible in a collected work, but it’s more difficult. 

Colter Jacobsen’s illustrations appear to be pencil versions of found photographs: snapshots of children playing at dusk, people in front of old buildings, some men behind an enormous shark. Most of them are repeated: one image on the left page, one on the right, though there’s not a precise repetition: small differences can usually be discerned between the two images. The images in the endpapers (a waterfall with a slight rainbow, done with colored pencil as are a handful of other images in the book) appear to be mirrored across the gutter, but looking more closely reveals that the left and right images, though similar in outline, are entirely different in detail: the rock face and trees are entirely different. Some of the drawings of photographs give the impression of having been manipulated or treated: in the pictures of the men with the shark, the shark seems to have been whited out or erased. 

One spread shows two snapshots, dated “4-1941”; they are again imperfectly mirrored, and in one of the photos, depicting two women, the faces are blurred on the right: there’s something almost creepy to this. There isn’t generally anything that directly ties the illustrations to the text; there’s a similarity in feeling, however, and the reader comes away with the idea that like the depicted photographs, the stories have also been rescued from the past. With this spread, the last set of paired photographs in the text, it’s possible to draw a correspondence between what’s pictured and the story that’s being illustrated (“Camp Cataract”): there are two women who might be the sisters of the story, a date which might match the story, a label (“COLD SPRING – N.Y.”) which might fit the story, and two images of waterfalls, one of which appears prominently in the story. This set of images most directly matches the text; flipping back through the text of this particular story, one can find other illustrations which also fit, as well as some that don’t (a reproduction of a color photograph of a small girl holding up a piece of clothing; a teenager in a B.U.M. t-shirt inhaling from a bong): these weren’t drawn from Bowles’s text, but they feel of a piece with the text. 

There’s no artist’s statement with this book: I would have liked to see one, as the choices made here are interesting and not obvious. John Morgan is the designer of the series; I feel like I should go back and get the older books in this series.

the beach in august

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The day the fat woman
In the bright blue bathing suit
Walked into the water and died,
I thought about the human
Condition. Pieces of old fruit
Came in and were left by the tide.

What I thought about the human
Condition was this: old fruit
Comes in and is left, and dries
In the sun. Another fat woman
In a dull green bathing suit
Dives into the water and dies.
The pulmotors glisten. It is noon.

We dry and die in the sun
While the seascape arranges old fruit,
Coming in with the tide, glistening
At noon. A woman, moderately stout,
In a nondescript bathing suit,
Swims to a pier. A tall woman
Steps toward the sea. One thinks about the human
Condition. The tide goes in and goes out.

(Weldon Kees, from Poems 1947–1954.)

august 11–august 15

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Books

Films

  • Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, dir. Howard Hawks

Exhibits

  • “Charlotte Posenenske,” Artists Space
  • “The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today,” MoMA
  • “Item,” Mitchell-Innes & Nash
  • “Ragnar Kjartansson,” Luhring Augustine
  • “Le Tableau: Curated by Joe Fyfe,” Cheim & Read

julian jason haladyn, “marcel duchamp: étant donnés”

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Julian Jason Haladyn 
Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés
(Afterall Books, 2010)

I sporadically follow Afterall’s One Work series, probably not as well as I should; most look interesting, but only a few look immediately interesting enough to put down money for. They’re small books, and the concept is good: a close reading of a single piece of visual art presented for a general audience. This one follows on the heels of the big show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art last year focused on Étant donnés; it reminds me that the catalogue is still sitting on my shelf, waiting for a closer reading. This book is conveniently sized for subway reading; thus I’m getting to it more quickly.

What’s most immediately interesting to me about Haladyn’s reading of Étant donnés is that he bases it around a reading of Raymond Roussel. (For what it’s worth, I found my way to Duchamp through Roussel; encountered after Roussel, the way Duchamp works makes perfect sense.) Roussel’s influence on Duchamp has long been known; but there haven’t, to my knowledge, been many readings of exactly how that influence worked, perhaps because it was difficult for a long time to get a handle on Roussel’s work. Julio Cortázar, for example, was interested in the connection between the two. This is easier now for an English audience now that there are two biographies of Roussel in English as well as Exact Change’s compilation How I Wrote Certain of My Books; Foucault’s book on Roussel, odd as it is, is newly back in print as well. Haladyn refers to most of these in his text. Crucially, Haladyn connects Roussel’s posthumous publication of How I Wrote Certain of My Books to the posthumous unveiling of Étant donnés. I don’t know whether a direct connection can be made – during his life, Duchamp indicated that seeing Roussel’s theatrical works was pivotal for his early works, but it’s unclear whether Duchamp knew about what Roussel was up to after his death. Duchamp would certainly have known people who would have known about Roussel – Michel Leiris, for one, as well as the members of the Oulipo – but my sense is that the historical record is somewhat dark on the subject. Foucault’s book, for example, came out in 1963, when Duchamp was almost finished with his work; and Duchamp doesn’t seem to have said anything in print about Roussel and seemed surprised by Michel Carrouges’s earlier argument about his influences. But as he admits in that letter, there are clear affinities. Haladyn declares that there was an “extreme unlikelihood” that Duchamp saw Courbet’s L’Origine du monde before constructing his nude (a statement undercut by his footnote, where he admits the possibility that Duchamp could have seen a reproduction); but not considering the possibility that Duchamp didn’t actually know about Roussel’s procédé undermines an otherwise extremely interesting argument about the similarity of Roussel’s procedure and Duchamp’s inframince. The lack of discussion of Duchamp’s own use of homophones is also an odd omission. 

Haladyn structures his book around finally visiting the Philadelphia Museum to see the work in the flesh – Haladyn is Canadian, based in Ontario – his narration of his approach to the work is odd in part because he doesn’t mention that he’s visiting the exhibit not in its normal state, when it quietly waits behind its non-descript vestibule, but in the midst of an exhibition based around the work, in which there are lines of people waiting to look through the peep holes. This isn’t how the work is normally seen; if one observes casual visitors in the Duchamp room at the PMA, most are unprepared and don’t discover Étant donnés at all. Once in a while, someone does by accident: there’s a burst of excitement, everyone goes to see what the matter is, and sometimes people are shocked. (There’s no warning label on the room yet; one wonders how often mortified parents complain to the staff.) But it’s strange that Haladyn should describe the act of waiting to look as a normal part of viewing the work: it seems integral to the experience that it should take place in a room that seems like it might have been left open by accident. 

The titles of Duchamp’s best-known works (Nude Descending a Staircase, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even) promise prurience that the objects themselves comically fail to deliver; Étant donnés does the opposite and is consequently even more shocking. Haladyn stresses that this work is very much about the role of the viewer, following Duchamp’s argument in “The Creative Act”: it is the viewer’s experience of the piece, with the shock entailed in it, that gives it meaning:

If, therefore, it is in and through the eyes of the viewer that the creative act reaches its climax, it seems appropriate that Given addresses the eye in such an overdetermined manner. Too look into this installation is to be (made) aware of the fact that one is looking. . . . Significantly, the immanent moment of being caught peeping through the door of Given by another viewer’s gaze is intimately part of the process of viewing this installation whether or not the moment actually occurs. (p. 82)

Released posthumously, there is no way to ask Duchamp what his work meant. Roussel’s How I Wrote Certain of My Books offers a posthumous explanation of his work, as well as providing an instruction manual to those who would create work like it; Duchamp also release an instruction manual after his death that also allows one to recreate it. This is an extremely tempting correspondence; but there are also extreme divergences between the two creator’s posthumous performance. Roussel was baffled when his public wasn’t astonished by his genius during his life; he assumed that his explanation would make it clear to the public, in didactic fashion, how they’d be wrong. Duchamp offers no such guidance; as he’d explained earlier, there was no solution because there was no problem. Haladyn’s book, though promising, isn’t entirely convincing; but it’s an interesting start, and he could profitably expand his argument.

wallace shawn, “essays”

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Wallace Shawn
Essays
(Haymarket Books, 2009)

This book has been hanging around the bedroom forever; I don’t remember whether how it turned up in the house. I found myself interested in it when listening to an interview with Wallace Shawn in which he talked, rather perceptively, about Harvard class books. Class books are sent to those graduates for whom the alumni office has the address every five years; they’re very strange documents, as class members are allowed to write a statement describing themselves, presumably for members of their class that haven’t seen them for a while and might be wondering what they might be up to. (See, for example, filmmaker Irene Lusztig’s Class Notes project, where she recruits volunteers to read some of the entries from her ten-year book aloud on video.) These are very strange statements: there’s an awful lot of self-justification and soul-baring, and some brave soul could probably connect them to the Puritan tradition if Sacvan Bercovitch hasn’t already done that. Wallace Shawn, coming from privilege, is interested in the way privilege functions in America and is willing to talk about it; most people from his position avoid the subject entirely as being gauche. Shawn rightly finds the subject interesting: the majority of the members in his class seem to think that “life is good,” though the outside world is going down the tubes: a weird contrast, and one that might bear more scrutiny, in the style of Henry Adams. As someone who found myself in that realm largely by accident, as a cultural foreigner, I was interested in this book.

As it turns out, Shawn doesn’t discuss Harvard class books in the essays here, though there is a similar focus in a few of the essays. This isn’t an especially consistent collection: there are a number of short pieces written for The Nation and similar places which, while funny, feel rather slight when read in the context of a book. Coherence is also lost because these pieces cover a long span of time, from 1985 to last year; most are from the last decade, and the earlier pieces fit don’t stand out too far. About half are political; a quarter are concerned with the theater; and the rest of the space is taken up with two interviews, one with Noam Chomsky and the other with Mark Strand. But the overall effect of this hodgepodge is to create a single viewpoint’s perspective on a dark decade, a decade in which the left was dissatisfied and ineffective. Perhaps over time this will seem more interesting, as this will be a decade that historians will scrutinize; right now, looking back feels vaguely dispiriting in the same way being there did. But it’s a little book; most of the pieces don’t overstay their welcome and it’s a quick read.

It’s an interesting book because Shawn’s position is the same as most of the people I know: over-educated, interested in the arts, and deeply dissatisfied with the state of the country, and his attempt to make sense of the world is coming from a similar place to theirs. When seen in print, though, it’s strange how unfamiliar this perspective seems: maybe this is my fault, as I know that I increasingly found myself skimming things like The Nation or Harper’s because things were so bad issue after issue: what The Onion called “outrage fatigue.” But it also seems entirely possible that there haven’t been enough people complaining about what became normal in the past decade: the militarism, the flag-waving, the bizarre way in which “¿quién es más macho?” seemed to have become the deciding factor of American politics and elections. Shawn rightly wonders about this: he feels out of touch and hopeless in this world, a position that I think many of us find ourselves in. It’s important that this dissatisfaction isn’t coming from an explicit ideology: rather, as read here, Shawn presents himself as someone trying to live in a world gone mad. I don’t know how well some of these pieces would have come off in their original presentation in The Nation: at this point in time, one reads The Nation because you’re part of the American left, not because you’re part of the general reading public. 

I wish that I would care more about the theater than I do: in theory, of course, it’s fantastic, but paying proper attention to it (like many other possible pursuits) requires more time and effort than I’m willing to give it based on the expectation on what I’d get out of it given my occasional casual experiences with it. That said, I like reading Shawn’s attempts to justify writing for the stage here, in no small part because it’s an attempt to justify art production of any sort in a world that doesn’t recognize that as productive work. I don’t think, of course, that there’s any need for him to justify what he does to the world; but most in his position wouldn’t bother or would take their worth for granted. Shawn notes that there isn’t a diverse playgoing culture in New York (to say nothing of the rest of the country); it’s hard to make an argument for theater as a popular art when it’s predominantly restricted to the upper class. This isn’t a new argument, of course, though one that can increasingly be applied to a wide range of artistic forms – the literary novel, for example; but it’s interesting to see this taken into account by someone who’s involved in this sort of production. 

The best essays in this book (“The Quest for Superiority,” “‘Morality'”) are those that try to break us out of our cultural assumptions, as Americans and as, presumably, cultural elites. The upper classes have odd ideas, which aren’t often interrogated; and it’s to Shawn’s credit that, as the consummate insider, he can notice how strange the familiar can sometimes be. Privilege often goes unquestioned in American life. I don’t know that this is exactly the book that I would have liked it to be; but there is still something interesting here, as incoherent as it might be.