Category Archives: reviews

danielle dutton, “attempts at a life”

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Danielle Dutton
Attempts at a Life
(Tarpulin Sky, 2007)

The first story in this book, “Jane Eyre,” effectively rewrites that novel as if it had been written by Robert Walser, with the short sentences, friendly appeal to the reader, and self-abasement of his narrators. It’s an exercise in compression: 400 pages become five and a half. Brontë’s book is rendered strange and unfamiliar. One realizes that the opposite process could be applied, and Walser’s short stories could be stretched out to become novels: but a good deal of Walser’s charm comes from his compression: The Assistant and especially The Tanners suffer in comparison to the magic of his shorter works. From the first paragraph, covering the first few chapters of the novel:

I read a lot early in life, and seriously craved love, but was accused of being a liar by my own family and set away to learn to sell my soul to the Lord, and also to knit. Abandoned at school, I befriended an extraordinary girl who soon died like a martyr in a series of consumptive fits. Small but a natural watcher, I lived on through that season of death to learn to speak French and to draw. (p. 3)

This is very funny, of course (the dangling “and also to knit” threatening to tip over the sentence); but the Jane Eyre narrating this story is a very different person from the one who narrates the novel, who couldn’t be imagined telling her story in this way. This much compression implies distance – be it ironic or damaged – a comprehension of one’s life as a written thing. It’s not by accident that one of the few details of Jane Eyre’s early life given above is how much she read: these are bookish pieces, as one might expect from a story rewriting a novel in the voice of another writer. A section named “Some Sources” at the end suggests that Robert Duncan’s “An African Elegy” feeds into “Jane Eyre”; the lines quoted in the poem describe Virginia Woolf, who isn’t mentioned directly in the notes. This is a story, one senses, about the way in which a life can be told; this comes through in the content of the story (a canonical story about the subjection of a woman) but more strongly through the style of the story, in the way that it scrutinizes how women write and are written about.

An argument could be made that these pieces are prose poetry, but there’s an emphasis on narrative that isn’t usually stressed so much in prose poetry. But like prose poetry (I’m thinking of Mallarmé), this is a firmly written language: they couldn’t really exist in spoken form, because they have to exist on the page. This comes out most clearly in the centerpiece of the book, “Everybody’s Autobiography, or Nine Attempts at a Life.” The title, of course, is from Gertrude Stein’s second autobiography, the first that she wrote in her own voice: rather than assuming Alice Toklas’s voice, she became everybody. In this piece there are nine short sections (several only a paragraph long), each with a first-person narrator explaining, in a different way, their life. The notes in the back suggest that it uses material from Jerome Rothenberg anthology of Modernist artists and poets Revolution of the Word, and it seems like the text was collaged from their biographies and works: though nothing quite adds up, and there’s the feeling that the reader is listening to Modernist ghosts reciting their lives. The language is familiar, but strange: the ninth section starts “I was born circa 1877 in Pennsylvania, and died in 1949” (p. 32); the narrator of the fifth, born in Mexico City in 1946, travels to Europe in 1972 and meets a woman who kills herself in 1950. 

The language here is interesting: one can’t really say that one was born “circa 1877” (“circa” itself being the sort of word one finds in print more often than one hears it), or narrate stories with paradoxical holes in their plots with the assumption that a listener will believe. One can’t say “I died” because that’s a lie: if the speaker had died, he couldn’t be speaking. There has to be a suspension of disbelief. One could say it, maybe in the context of a play as there’s a suspension of disbelief inherent in the theater, but even there it doesn’t work: the audience would perceive the character as lying. There’s not quite the same convention of realism – we know that what’s happening before us is, in at least one sense, fake, being performed by actors who are not characters. Shakespeare, it’s worth noting, doesn’t show us sixteenth-century England directly. There’s a scene in de Chirico’s novel Hebdomeros where a play is being performed; a fight breaks out, and the viewers are confused as to whether it’s a real fight, the same conundrum that opens Joseph McElroy’s Actress in the House.

On the page, however, “I died” can be said: it’s a received convention of fiction that we can be spoken to by dead people. We accept the characters of a nineteenth-century novel behaving in a way that seems nonsensical because there is that suspension of disbelief: we’re willing to admit the possibility that the contemporaries of the novelist did behave that way. (A historical novel presents something very different, of course.) And in a sense, of course, books are the way dead people talk to us: a dead person can’t write, but someone who wrote can be dead. This is fantastically strange, but we tend to take it for granted. 

It’s to Dutton’s credit that she gets at this: not hitting the reader over the head with it, but suggesting. That’s how, in a way, the sources in the back of this little book function: none really gives away what’s going on in the story they ostensibly inform, but they send the reader off to other books. This is a book with a perfect epigraph, from Gertrude Stein’s Lectures in America:

And it is necessary if you are to be really and truly alive it is necessary to be at once talking and listening, doing both things, not as if there were one things, not as if they were two things, but doing them, well if you like, like the motor doing inside and the car moving, they are part of the same thing.

nicholson baker, “u and i”

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Nicholson Baker
U and I
(Vintage Books, 1991)

Somehow I’ve never read any books by Nicholson Baker, on account of, I think, coming across dismissive reviews of his work when I was in college; and I’ve read very little John Updike since bouncing around some of his shorter things in high school. My not reading Updike is a conscious choice, though an old one, from when I saw deciding which fiction to read in a more confrontational light. Updike, Roth, and Bellow were firmly the establishment at that point, the pricks to be kicked against. My resistance to Bellow has softened over time; I could see liking bits of Roth, though I suspect it will be a while before I get around to reading him; but Updike still seems decidedly uninteresting when considered against the other options. There’s a class association with him in my mind, fair or not: he was writing about other people for other people. Updike is someone I always identified with Harvard: he was, I think, the first novelist I ever recognized by sight in the wild, being marched into the Barker Center to be given some award. Gaddis went to Harvard too, of course, but he had the decency to get kicked out. Updike was the well-behaved novelist.

Baker, on the other hand, has become more interesting over time; I’ve liked the shorter pieces by him that I’ve come across, and I suspect I’d like some of his novels. () This book had the premise that I liked most; it’s not, however, as easily come across in used book stores, being consigned to the hell of belles lettres or essays. Obviously, Amazon obviates this problem; but Baker never seemed necessary enough, especially when there are stacks and stacks of unread books around here. Finding it by accident on a stroll from the Met to Bryant Park seemed right: and here I am, having finished his little book about Updike. I’m glad, perhaps, that I waited for this one: there are a huge number of books mentioned in this book, and I’ve read most of them, which helps, a bit, in understanding what Baker’s getting at. Here is is talking about reading, or not reading, Harold Bloom:

I know about “misprision” only from book reviews – book reviews, not books, being the principal engines of change in the history of thought, and contributing in that necessary role a certain class of distortions to the forward flow by allowing those works which contains plots and arguments that are easily summarized in their reviews to assume a level of cultural bulk and threat that the books themselves may or may not deserve. (p. 64)

This is a book about books and their authors; it is not, directly, a book about reading, partially pointedly so. Baker gives himself the constraint of not re-reading Updike while writing about Updike; so the Updike that appears on the pages of this book is the Updike who appeared in Baker’s mind, not the Updike who appears on the pages of his books. Updike stands for influence; behind him stand others, not least Nabokov. In the opening of the book, Baker draws a distinction between the way we think about dead authors and those who are alive: we can compare ourselves to living authors (as Updike was when Baker wrote), while the dead are preserved in amber (Nabokov then and now):

Readers of the living are always, whether they know it or not, to some degree seing the work through the living writer’s own eyes; feeling for him when he flubs, folding into their reactions to his early work constant subauditional speculations as to whether the writer himself would at this moment wince or nod with approval at some passage in it. But the dead can’t suffer embarrassment by some admission or mistake they have made. We sense this imperviousness and adjust our sympathies accordingly. (p. 10)

A comparison might be drawn to Out of Sheer Rage (1997), in which Geoff Dyer attempts to come to terms with D. H. Lawrence; though maybe Dyer’s difficult-to-find first book,Ways of Telling, about John Berger, might be the most apt comparison. (Does U & I come up in Out of Sheer Rage? It might, but I gave my copy of that book away so I can’t check.) I find Dyer’s account a bit more appealing: that book, ostensibly about Lawrence, is rather a book about not writing and coming to terms with the creative act. This one is about coming to terms with influence: in some ways, a trickier thing. 

A case could be made for this book as a work of fiction, starting with the subtitle, “A True Story.” Baker comes off not unlike one of Thomas Bernhard’s demented, ranting narrators, though that writer isn’t mentioned in the text. The book starts with the death of Donald Barthelme, one of Baker’s teachers; Barthelme’s presence hovers over the text, as does the idea, more associated with Barthelme than Updike, of metafiction. A distinct strand of the book follows Baker as he tries to get his book published, talking to his editors at The Atlantic and imagining what his book might look like; he is explicitly concerned, of course, about the progress of his own writing. 

You could say that this book hasn’t aged well: I could see how in 1991 this would have been strange and interesting, but a decade of memoirs and writing about writing on the Internet have made this seem overfamiliar. Now we know too much about too many writers. In an odd way, this is a book that would be impossible to write now: because of the Internet, there’s no longer the separation between the author and the reader that was enforced by the time when serious writing was done on typewriters and writers communicated largely through the mail or in person. Writing an email to someone who’s influenced you isn’t qualitatively a different thing than composing a letter; however, it’s much easier, and it only takes a moment’s lack of inhibitions. And in an age of rampant self-Googling, it’s almost become expected that if you write about someone, they’ll end up reading about it. Perhaps it’s better to say that this book is something of a time-capsule: it’s the way we thought about writers twenty years ago. 

Do I feel the need to read Updike at the end of this? Not particularly, though I can understand why Baker likes him. But Updike is beside the point, really: this is a book that could have been about any forebear.

henry green, “concluding”

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Henry Green
Concluding
(Dalkey Archive; originally 1948)

It’s hard not to tear through the last Henry Green novel I have left, Concluding. Still on the shelf is Surviving, the volume of odds and ends put together by Matthew Yorke. I am glad I went through Caught and Back before Concluding: this book is not so consumed with World War II. Rather, it’s class that concerns Green; this is a usual subject for him, though here it appears in a different sense entirely that what might be expected. No two novels by Green that are entirely similar – Nothing and Doting, maybe, though I’m not sure how well that holds up – but this might be the oddest of them. Maybe this is why I like Green so much: after eight novels, he still surprises.

The plot takes place over a day; the previous night, two girls disappear from a girl’s school. The two administrators of the school, Miss Edge and Miss Baker, are more concerned with scheming on how to get an elderly scientist, Mr. Rock, to leave his house on their grounds; Mr. Rock does not want to leave, as he lives happily with his cat, goose, and pig, named Alice, Ted, and Daisy, respectively, as well as his granddaughter, Elizabeth, who is recovering from a nervous breakdown. At the school, a dance, for Founder’s Day, is to happen that night. 

This is a lighter book than Back and Caught, almost pastoral, though this is a pastoral distinctly tinged with shadow. The image of dappled sunlight and shadow is one that comes up repeatedly here; this happens down to the level of the book’s sinuous sentences, which often start in one place and end some place else altogether. Here, Miss Marchbanks, interim administrator, considers what to do:

Extremely short-sighted, she had taken off her spectacles and put these on Miss Edge’s desk as though, in the crisis, at a time when she had been left in charge, she wished to look inwards, to draw on hid reserves, and thus to meet the drain on her resolution which the absence of the girls had opened like an ulcer high under the ribs, where it fluttered, a blood stained dove with tearing claws. (p. 39)

Or this love scene:

“Adams won’t like this,” she said, and turned with a smile which was for him alone to let him take her, and helped his heart find hers by fastening her mouth on his as though she were an octopus that had lost it’s arms to the propellers of a tug, and had only its mouth now with which, in a world of the hunted, to hang onto wrecked spars. (p. 46)

Immediately after this, one of the missing girls is found; but we never entirely learn what happened to her. Nor are her superiors in a hurry to find out.

There is something odd about this book. One notices first that Miss Edge tends to capitalize many of her nouns. At first one assumes this is cod-Victorian emphasis, though one wouldn’t expect that in a book by Green; likewise, the girls of the school all have names starting with “M,” which might be a stylistic choice to show off how interchangeable the girls seem to be. But as the book progresses, it becomes clear that the world that this book takes place in might not be a realistic portrait of Britain in the late 1940s, as one might have assumed from Green’s other books. Halfway through the book, letters arrive for Edge and Baker from a state functionary, directing them that a change has been decided upon, and the girls are to be trained to be professional pig farmers, because there is not enough opportunity for the girls in the “State Service”. We seem to be in a socialist Britain, albeit one that still has a queen. Going back to the beginning, the book reads differently; it becomes strange. We find Mr. Rock explaining to Adams how he got his cottage: “Why, when the State took over from the owner, and founded this Institute to train State Servants, it was even in the Directive that I was to stay in my little place” (p. 7). This doesn’t particularly stick out the first time through: all institutional language is affected and mildly ridiculous.

But here is the reason that Edge and Baker aren’t particularly interested in the girl’s disappearances: it will mean an agony of reports. Elizabeth explains to Mr. Rock, her grandfather, how things are, with particular reference to her lover, one of the girls’ teachers:

“You see, when you’re young and all that,” she went on, “starting in the State Service, because I know, Gapa, I’ve done it, things have so changed since your day, well then, then slightest bad report he gets and he’ll never receive promotion. Never. It isn’t a story, honest. No redress, nothing. And you realise what an Enquiry means, if you appeal against one of these awful Reports. It’s the end. Absolutely. Even if you think you’ve brought it back, it boomerangs back onto you. (p. 143)

An explanation for the other girl’s continued disappearance becomes apparent: Mary was orderly to Edge and Baker and was worn out from working, so she’s run away from the Institute. The delusional Edge considers this possibility and dismisses it:

Because they all knew that attendance on Baker and herself was an honour for which every one of the girls longed, it was just the little extra to be intimately close to them both. Nevertheless, she saw how the whole thing could be made to look if Mary did not come back soon, how black if this latest fantastic story was allowed to creep around. (p. 131)

Another explanation becomes apparent later: the girls, it turns, might not be as innocent (or as interchangeable) as they might appear. But, as the title suggests, nothing is ever concluded. 

It’s not entirely surprising that this should turn out to be speculative fiction – the book did appear in the window between Animal Farm and 1984, and one might assume that something was in the air in Britain after the war – but it’s a surprise to be getting this from Green. The politics aren’t particularly surprising: Green never tries to disguise the fact that he was upper class, despite his empathy for the lower classes. It might make sense that this is the book Green wrote after Back; following this, he turned (self-consciously, presumably) to the upper-class trifles of Doting and Nothing, a turn that might be seen as a retreat if those books weren’t so good in their own rights.

henry green, “back”

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Henry Green
Back
(Dalkey Archive; originally 1946)

It’s hard for me to get around how good Henry Green was; one starts every novel expecting that this might be the one to let you down, but it doesn’t happen. Back might be seen as a sequel to Caught, the third of a rough trilogy starting with Pack My Bag, his oblique memoir: besides being the books that don’t have a participle for the name (leaving aside the early Blindness), these are books that document Britain during World War II: they show how things were, not how they are. They’re not as funny as his others, of course; Pack My Bag seems to have been written in a stately panic, while Caught comes out of the claustrophobia of the Blitz. Back seems to follow from the haunting final section of Caught, where Richard Roe has been evacuated to the country and is talking obsessively about what happened to him; but Charley Summers, the protagonist of Caught, seems to be the opposite of Roe: he can’t speak at all about what happened in a German prison camp, though one of his legs is missing.

For all its documentary force, Back is very much a novel – more explicitly so than Caught. There is a clearly constructed situation, with two different triads of children and parents. Charley, before leaving for the war, had an affair with Rose, who was married to James; Rose died while Charley was a POW, but she did have a son, named Ridley, that both Charley and James believe to be their own. (The reader is given no hints as to the parentage of this child; we view this through the lens of Charley, but his judgment is shown to be deeply faulty.) And Rose’s father, Mr. Graves, had another daughter, Nancy, by a different mother. After Charley returns, he visits Rose’s parents; Mr. Graves sends him obliquely to visit Nancy, not mentioning who she is. When Charley finally meets her, he thinks that she is a revenant Rose; there, paternity is the source of identity. With Ridley, who he sees for the first time not knowing who he is, he can reach no conclusions about paternity: 

He was appalled that the first sight of the boy had meant nothing. Because one of the things he had always hung on to was that blood spoke, or called, to blood. (p. 9)

This incident, at the start of the book, sets the rest of the plot in motion. Having met Nancy through Mr. Graves’s machinations, he confuses her with her half-sister; there seems to be no real resemblance between the two women that any one else notices. This is not the first familial confusion in the book: visiting Rose’s parents, her mother, under strain, imagines Charley to be her dead brother. He chalks it up to the war; others, noting his confusion about Nancy/Rose assume the same of him.

What’s most interesting about Back are the odd relationships engendered by the war: Charley is on friendly behavior with the man he ostensibly cuckolded before the war, and on friendly behavior with Rose’s parents. There is no mention of Charley’s own parents; we might assume that they are dead. But it’s worth noting that Charley doesn’t pursue a relationship with Ridley, whom he believes to be his son; once, he makes a sign to the boy, putting his finger to his lips, but this is their only real communication. It’s the substitute family that becomes his: when Mr. Graves has a stroke, he visits often, and is there when Mr. Graves finally dies. This switch isn’t his alone: Mrs. Graves, who knows of the extramarital liaison that produced Nancy, has Charley bring Nancy to her house when Mr. Graves is dying; Nancy moves in and effectively becomes the couple’s daughter. Nancy does have a mother of her own, of course, with whom, she takes care to note, she was the best of friends; but the mother has been evacuated to the country and doesn’t appear. (Nor does James – the son-in-law of the Graveses and father of their grandchild – appear when his father-in-law is dying.) When Nancy and Charley finally decide to get marred, they plan to live with Mrs. Graves: an odd family of elective affinities.

Everything ends happily, or reasonably so, with a marriage on the way: it’s very much a novel in that way. It’s entertaining to watch Charley to bumble his way through his job, his life, and his relationships with women. But Back is a book about trauma; reading it, I found myself thinking again and again of David Cronenberg’s underrated Spider (based on a novel by Patrick McGrath that I haven’t read), another closely-observed story about a damaged man returning home after years spent away. The viewer of Cronenberg’s film doesn’t know what happened to Clegg in the mental hospital, though it can be assumed to be terrible; nor do we know what happened to Charley Summers in Germany. He does make one tiny admission about what happened to him, two sentences, ten pages from the end of the book: these two sentences don’t describe what happened directly to him, just how he was living, and they hit the reader with the blow of a hammer. We realize just how much has been unsaid in this narrative. Moments like this are scattered through the book: when Mrs. Graves admits to Charley that she knows about her husband’s other daughter, for example, and we realize how complex real world relationships can be. Mr. Graves, stricken dumb by his stroke but still conscious, can only watch the reassembly of a family (his wife, Nancy, Charley) which goes on in front of him on his deathbed. There’s little mention of Charley’s missing leg in the book, though it must cause him a great deal of trouble; most characters seem not to notice it, and even a doctor is surprised to hear that he has a missing leg. All these things have been swept under the rug, necessary, one supposes, for survival during wartime. 

jean-philippe toussaint, “self-portrait abroad”

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Jean-Philippe Touissant
Self-Portrait Abroad
(trans. John Lambert)
(Dalkey Archive, 2010)

What, precisely, is this book? My copy is a galley; the front cover and the title page say “Self-Portrait Abroad, a novel by Jean-Philippe Toussaint”; on the cover, the category tags it as “fiction”. The info sheet tucked inside this copy says that in the book “our narrator – a Belgian author much like Toussaint himself – travels the globe”. The Library of Congress headings on the copyright page don’t suggest that it’s fiction, rather tagging it travel. To the reader, it doesn’t feel like a novel: this is a small book, a collection of short travel pieces that might have appeared separately in a newspaper, as I thought I heard Toussaint indicate last Friday in his appearance at BookCourt. Were one coming at this book as a tabula rasa, one would probably not tag it a novel.

This book might be thought of as falling between genres in tradition of Butor: his Mobile, while formally much more experimental, takes the same approach to travel. At the end of that book, the reader has an idea of Butor’s sensibility, what interests him; but a sense of Butor as a traveler is entirely lacking, and one wonders whether Butor actually took the trip laid out in the book. Toussaint’s approach is more personal (a bit more like Butor’s later, and more stylistically restrained, The Spirit of Mediterranean Places), but there is the same vagueness: if this is memoir, it’s considerably oblique one. It’s certainly not trying to be travel writing, as that’s usually understood: one can’t learn very much about places from this book. (“Seen from above, at four thousand feet,” the narrator writes in the first paragraph of “Tokyo,” “there isn’t much difference between the Pacific and the Mediterranean.”) Rather, as the title suggests, we learn about the narrator.

The narrator sees not where he is, but where he’s from. On his arrival in Tokyo, a Corsican friend insists on filling him in on what happened there; he is “perfectly indifferent to the surrounding atmosphere,” an indifference that the narrator seems to share: “Although it was pastis time,” the narrator notes, “we contented ourselves with green tea.” The section named “Hobg Kong” describes that city from a bench in its airport and, most notably, from the airplane prior to arriving in the city. The subjectivity of the narrator is paramount:

The silent cabin of my sleepy seven-forty-seven was still convinced of its being night, however, as it flew in perfect stillness toward Tokyo to the hushed drowning of its motors, my watch showing one o’clock in the morning, the other passengers dozing around me in the feeble light, the small plastic blinds on the window carefully lowered, to say nothing of my own fatigue after seven or eight hours of flight, my eyes heavy and closing softly, yes, everything seemed to indicate that it was night – apart from one important detail: it was now broad daylight outside. (p. 13)

There’s an accuracy to this depiction: while a clock declares one time, the passengers understand it to be something else entirely, just as the airplane only appears to be still to those inside with windows closed, so the relative motion of the rest of the world can’t be noticed. The passengers arrive in a city still in the grips of this disjunction, in no state to understand anything. The airport becomes a dreamscape, and we understand the behavior of the narrator earlier in the piece; the airport is anything but an interesting place, but it seems impossible to traverse. One wonders what the great novels of airports are; Brian Eno’s Music for Airports gets at this feeling with its etherial, possibly inhuman, choirs.

One thinks back past Butor to another French traveler, Raymond Roussel, who traveled all over Africa in his specially designed motorhome and famously didn’t bother to look out the window. This is the conspicuous consumption of the idle rich; but Roussel also realized that enough narrative to fill any number of books could be found in anything – the label on a bottle of water, for example – and that the act of looking could be more important that what you actually looked at. (Dalí tried to run with this in his film Impressions de la Haute Mongolie – Hommage à Raymond Roussel – skip to about forty minutes into the bloated film for the big reveal, that the seemingly abstract landscapes of the second half of the film were in fact generated by zooming in on the the ferrule of a pen that Dalí urinated on with an electron microscope.) Robbe-Grillet is also in the background, of course: a number of his novels are set overseas, but one forgets this because Robbe-Grillet is never that interested in his setting: Project for a Revolution in New York could have happened anywhere; a more direct antecedent to Toussaint’s novel, La maison de rendez-vous, another of the later, kind of terrible Robbe-Grillet book, is as inconsequentially set in Hong Kong, taking only chinoiserie from its location.

This is a slight book, tracing out an itinerary across Asia and Europe, dropping south to Sfax, the town in Tunisia that Georges Perec described in Les choses; Japan has the most pages devoted to it, but it’s difficult to work out whether multiple trips are being described or the same trip split into moments. Time is a focus: the individual pieces go back and forth in time. In the last piece in the book, the narrator describes returning to Kyoto (a previous piece has indeed been about Kyoto) and trying to be overcome by emotions; he is not, though the setting is right, and he describes a desolate landscape as straightforwardly as he does in the book. The ending is uncharacteristically emotional, and suggests that the jumps back and forth in time are not verbal acrobatics but an attempt at something else:

This wasn’t the first time I’d seen a place I’d frequented in the past disappear in this way, the transformation of a location I’d known, but seeing this desolate spectacle, this abandoned station out of bounds behind iron bars, this deserted station with its disused platforms, whose tracks had become a craggy rain-soaked wasteland and whose main hall with its ticketing machines was now a junkyard where a rickety turnstile lay askew in the mud, I realized that time had passed since I’d left Kyoto. And if this affected me so deeply on that day, it was not only because my senses, numbed by the prevailing grayness and the alcohol in my blood, naturally put me in a melancholic frame of mind, it was also because I suddenly felt sad and powerless at this brusque testimony to the passage of time. It was hardly the result of conscious reasoning, but rather the concrete and painful, fleeting and physical feeling that I myself was part and parcel of time and its passing. Until then, the feeling of being carreid along by time had always been attenuated by the fact that I wrote – until then, in a way, writing had been a means of resisting the current that bore me along, a way of inscribing myself in time, of setting landmarks in the immateriality of its flow, incisions, scratches. (pp. 83–84.)

The echoes of Proust (and perhaps Leiris) here might be unexpected: the reader is sent back to read the book again, to make sense of this record again.

henry green, “caught”

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Henry Green
Caught
(Harvill Press, 1943)

Caught seems to be the odd one out of Green’s books: it’s the only one that’s out of print in the United States. Berkley Medallion published a paperback in 1960 available on Amazon for wildly inflated prices; since then, as far as I can tell, potential readers have had to have recourse to the British edition. It’s also, and perhaps relatedly, the only book of Green’s that John Updike didn’t like, as he admits in his introduction to Loving/Living/Party Going. But the strangeness of the book really starts with the title: Caught is a verb, like most of Green’s other titles, but it’s in the past tense, not a gerund. Green’s other books describe how things are; this one describes how things were. Caught depicts a specific point in time – the Blitz in London – and was published soon afterwards (1943). There’s a documentary character to this book that isn’t in Green’s other novels; it feels much more like Pack My Bag, Green’s memoir of his youth than Loving, which followed two years later (and which is also set during World War II). Most of all, it’s not comic: there are comic elements, of course, but this is a much more serious book.

Caught describes the lives of firefighters in London at the start of World War II as they wait for the bombing of London to begin. It’s an exceptional state: no one behaves as they normally would, and no one is quite sure what the new rules are or how long this will last. The characters hang suspended: they are doing what they know is dangerous work; indeed, at the end of the book, a number of them are dead. The lives that they are living are unsustainable; the book ends with a coda where we learn that the central character, Richard Roe, has been sent home:

Some months later, after nine months of air raids on London, Roe was unlucky one morning. A bomb came too close. It knocked him out. He was sent home, superficially uninjured. They called it nervous debility. (p. 173)

The nine months of air raids on London fall into the eight blank lines above the beginning this section: they’re not described directly, though Roe haltingly attempts to describe them to his sister-in-law. But the disaster is not written about directly: preparations for it fill most of the book, and its repercussions finish the book. What happened can’t be described directly; maybe it’s something that can’t be explained. Green, it should be said, was a firefighter in London during the war; like Roe, he would have been upper class and somewhat out of place, but how closely Roe’s life corresponds to his, I don’t know. This is a book written in the middle of WWII; the grand narrative that came out of that war (of good defeating evil) had not yet been constructed, and whether the actions of the firemen in London were brave or delusional hadn’t yet entirely been defined. Roe attempts to explain what happens to his sister-in-law:

“The first night,” he said, “we were ordered to the docks. As we came over Westminster Bridge it was fantastic, the whole of the left side of London seemed to be alight.”
(It had not been like that at all. As they went, not hurrying, but steadily towards the river, the sky in that quarter, which happened to be the east, beginning at the bottom of streets until it spread over the nearest houses, was flooded in a second sunset, orange and rose, turning the pavements pink. Civilians hastened by twos or threes, hushed below the stupendous pall of defeat until, in the business quarter, the streets were deserted.) (p. 177)

Two more paragraphs encircled in parentheses follow, describing what happened from an omniscient point of view. Roe at this point has not entirely regained his language: he struggles to explain something that made an immense impression on him, but largely fails, and his sister-in-law remains uncomprehending. But the omniscient narrator’s point of view is curious and worth scrutinizing. Roe describes what he saw from his perspective (“the left side of London”); the narrator’s description is not so much more objective but more artful. Detachment seems to be necessary to attain this artfulness; a beautiful description, coming from Roe, would seem callow, as he’s describing a situation in which his fellow firefighters – “friends” doesn’t really work, as Green’s books are always attuned to class distinctions – are going to be killed.

These parentheses have appeared before in the book, more mystifyingly, at the beginning. Roe is second-in-command to Pye, an older trade-unionist; Pye lives with his elderly sister, who is not quite right in the head. Pye’s sister, wanting a child, kidnaps Roe’s son Christopher; the situation is soon sorted out, but it necessarily complicates the already fraught relationship between Pye and Roe; Pye’s sister is sent to an asylum, and Christopher is sent to the country. Roe attempts to reconstruct what must have happened, but fails; the two primary participants, a child and an insane woman, can’t explain what happened. Parenthetical paragraphs serve to do this; we are dragged outside of the character’s point of view so that we can understand what happened.

Christopher figures only in the fringes of this book, but he’s especially well done as a character. He’s decidedly not romanticized:

Christopher was like any other child of his age, not very interested or interesting, strident with health. He enjoyed teasing and was careful no one should know what he felt. (1)

This is perfect: when such a description appears on the first page of the book, you know it’s worth reading. It’s not altogether unexpected – but still shocking – when we near the end of the book Christopher has this interaction with his father in the country:

“Look,” his father interrupted, “haven’t you knocked those branches about enough? There’s hardly a bird left in the garden since you’ve been out. You’d do better to put food for them. They starve in this weather you know.”
“They’re Polish people,” Christopher said, “and I’m a German policeman, rootling them about.”
“Well, if that’s so, hadn’t you better carry on the good work where it’s drier? Why not go back to the stables and see if you can’t kill some more mice with a spoon? You could think they were Czechs,” his father said.
“Oh thanks, I say. That’s a lovely idea,” and he ran off, stumbling in the snow, diminutive. (p. 190)

Children are more terrible than they know; but there’s a realism to this description.

This is necessarily a solemn book; and the effect from reading it is different from any of the other books by Green. It’s not my favorite of his work; I wonder if it would be anybody’s, just because his other novels are so powerful. But it’s not the worst of his books: Blindness is clearly juvenilia and suffers in comparison to the rest. 

homer, “the odyssey” (redux)

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Homer
The Odyssey
(trans. Samuel Butler)

While on a visit home, looking for something to read, I picked up the Great Books edition of Homer, volume IV in that series. This edition of the Great Books of the Western World, edited by Robert Maynard Hutchins and published by the Encyclopæedia Britannica in 1952, was my family’s one real pretension to intellectualism. I am not entirely sure how it got into the house; it was never really read, as, my mother explained, the type was too small to read. It was also vexingly incomplete, as some religion-crazed relative had made off with Volume II of Thomas Aquinas; this bothered me as a youth. I don’t think anyone actually read any of these; I’d periodically pick up one volume or another (“Darwin” or “Swift/Sterne”) with intent, but I don’t remember how far I would get. Looking at the list of authors now, it seems decidedly weird: Plotinus gets a whole volume? Is it really worth reading Lavoisier or Fourier or Faraday now? The English-language novelists are the aforementioned Swift & Sterne, followed by Fielding, then a big jump to land on Melville. The ending sequence, volumes 49 through 54, seems particularly ominous: Darwin, Marx & Engels, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, William James, Freud. Presumably there’s a good history of the Great Books project, though I haven’t seen anything other than Wikipedia’s entry, which points out that ours was the first edition of the em>Great Books of the Western World, and that Sterne and Fielding were dropped in the second.

But picking up Homer, it turned out that the translations are by Samuel Butler, which translation I am interested in because it’s the one Joyce used. It’s a decidedly idiosyncratic translation: most prominently, names are given their Roman rather than Greek version, so Odysseus is Ulysses. It’s also prose. It’s an odd choice for a version to include as one of the Great Books: while it’s eminently readable, Butler’s ideas about Homer and how he should be translated were very much his own, and his introduction and footnotes explain his view that the Odyssey was written by a woman (probably Nausicaa) and point out details in the text that support this view; Butler had first advanced this view in The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897), and came at his translation with an argument, albeit one argued in a way that leaves much to be desired. (This note on III.266 might be taken as typical: “The writer – ever jealous for the honour of women – extenuates Clytemnestra’s guilt as far as possible, and explains it as due to her having been left unprotected, and fallen into the hands of a wicked man.” What’s weirdly interesting about the Great Books edition, however, is that the editors have swept away Butler’s introduction and notes. (An online edition of his translation of the Odyssey is available at the Internet Archive; that edition is undated, but includes the original illustrations.) Not, however, particularly well: consider the start of Book IV, which starts, in Butler’s original, in mid-sentence, the sentence having been started at the end of Book III. While the Great Books Book III ends in a comma (“Now when the sun had set and darkness was over the land,”), Book IV starts, in house style, with a drop-cap, capitalized, of course: “They reached the low lying city of Lacedæmon, where they drove straight to the abode of Menelaus”. The next phrase starts with a bracket: “[and found him in his own house, feasting with his many clansmen”; at the end of the next paragraph, we find the end bracket. No explanation, in the Great Books edition, is given for these brackets; however, turning to the scan in the Internet Archive, we find an interesting note:

The lines which I have enclosed in brackets are evidently an afterthought – added probably by the writer herself – for they evince the same instinctively greater interest in anything that may concern a woman, which is so noticeable throughout the poem. There is no further sign of any special festivities nor of any other guests than Telemachus and Pisistratus . . .

One wonders, really, how many people ever actually read Homer in the Great Books edition: did the editor? (This is also, for what it’s worth, a poorly designed book for reading: so that both the Iliad and the Odyssey can fit in 322 pages, they’re laid out in two columns, and the type is rather small.) Butler’s ghost brackets, for what it’s worth, don’t end in 1952; the online edition at MIT’s Internet Classics Archives also has them and no notes; the Project Gutenberg edition, from 1999, includes Butler’s notes, but in unwieldy fashion (they are numbered, at the end), and, inevitably, a huge number of people have issued cheap print-on-demand & Kindle versions of Butler’s Odyssey; looking inside one revealed it to be lacking notes though it did have brackets, and one assumes that the rest are similar. (My favorite of Amazon’s lot is the nicely titled The Odyssey B utler – one hopes the extra space is significant – a new work by Samuel Butler, unknown, presumably, to him.) One knows, of course, that the people creating these POD and Kindle editions are hacks, if they’re even people at all and not a batch script running on the Gutenberg library; but it’s odd to realize that the editors of the Great Books seem to have also had their hackish tendencies. The reason for the choice of the Butler translation for inclusion is almost certainly not because they thought Butler’s was the best (or because they realized the importance of this translation to Ulysses); rather, Butler’s was probably the most recent translation out of copyright in 1952. I wonder again about the ending sequence of the Great Books: did the Great Books series come to that conclusion because copyright gets in the way? In this edition, Freud is presumably the only author that they would have had to pay for.

What I like about the Butler translation is precisely how idiosyncratic it is: his Nabokovian concern for how Ulysses’ house was laid out led him to include his photographs of houses in Sicily which, he supposed, might be similar to the Greeks’; in his introduction, he apologizes that a man and a dog appear in one of the pictures; this, he says, was “accidental, and was not observed by me till I developed the negative”. Looking at the illustration in question, one notes that there’s also a person in the lower illustration; this person is not apologized for, and one wonders who he might be. But the reader is reassured that they are safely in the hands of a man at least slightly crazy; academic rigor is clearly not what Butler was interested in, which is what makes it more interesting that his would be the translation selected to go into the Great Books. Maybe that’s why Joyce liked him; presumably Butler’s notes had not yet been swept away by the time Joyce read him.

And there is something to be said for Butler’s phrasing, which, while it may not be exact (and may well be distorted) is euphonious, and bits feel familiar to those who know Ulysses. Here, Telemachus explains things to Minerva in Book I:

“My mother,” answered Telemachus, “tells me I am son to Ulysses, but it is a wise child that knows his own father. Would that I were son to one who had grown old upon his own estates, for, since you ask me, there is no more ill-starred man under heaven than he who they tell me is my father.”

No one speaks this way, of course; but it feels right and properly fictional: in Butler’s Odyssey, everyone talks this way. It’s a pre-Raphaelite Homer.

thomas frank, “what’s the matter with kansas?”

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Thomas Frank
What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America
(Metropolitan Books, 2004)

Our building has bookshelves down in the laundry room in the basement, and among the books was this one, which I didn’t read when it came out, in no small part because I was deeply depressed by where the country was going – 2004, it doesn’t need to be said, was a bad year – & I was afraid of sinking deeper into that. I was familiar with Frank’s argument, of course, from his writing in The Baffler; he was right, I thought, but to me he’d be preaching to the choir. So I put off reading the book, assuming that a copy would show up sooner or later: now one has. (Similarly, I have assumed for most of the past decade that sooner or later I will wind up staying the weekend in a house with a copy of Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex, upon which point I will read that book; that has not happened yet.)

I am in Champaign-Urbana for work, a place that I have not been, as far as I remember, for fifteen years. One finds, browsing the local paper, that the mayor of Champaign just announced at a Tea Party rally that he doesn’t believe the President was born in this country; local residents write letters for and against. It’s not entirely surprising, as Champaign was never the Madison of Illinois, but it’s still a touch disappointing. Champaign was mildly exciting in my youth; now it seems like a college town, with the same shops and chain-story eateries as any other college town, plus a couple of sad and decrepit non-chains. It’s hard to know if the town’s changed or if I’ve changed: probably both, but I don’t remember things feeling quite so generic the last time I was here. Would I have been excited by a Panera Bread in high school? Caribou Coffees? Probably not, though it’s hard to know. 

This is by way of saying that I do have something of a personal stake in Frank’s book, being very much someone shaped by the middle of the country, anguished and distanced as that relationship might be. The landscape where I grew up in looked almost identical to where I am now (though of course it didn’t have the benefit of a major state university). And there’s a similarity to the Kansas that Frank describes in this book: it’s the same sort of country with the same sort of people, mutatis mutandis.

There are sober, sociological explanations for Kansas’s penchant for martyrdom . . . . I personally prefer the more romantic notion that the extremity of the land itself accounts for the bumper crops of martyrdom-minded folks that Kansas so reliably produces. Most of the state is an empty place, a featureless landscape capable of quickly convincing anyone of their own cosmic insignificance. For this reason it has often been compared to the Holy Land, where a similarly blank vista generated an endless stream of prophets who descended on the cities to preach “world-worthlessness,” as T. E. Lawrence once summarized the creed of the desert: “bareness, renunciation, poverty.” (p. 215)

There’s an odd, if not necessarily surprising, similarity between this book and Harold Bloom’s The American Religion, the book in which Bloom inspects the history of American Christianity – particularly the evangelical movements and Mormonism – and comes to the conclusion that American Christianity is fundamentally gnostic in character, in the sense that it’s fixated on declaring the real world as an error which must be destroyed to achieve the kingdom of God. Gnostics, for Bloom, are revolutionary; he seems chagrined in that he’d like to see himself as likewise being a Gnostic but doesn’t like his bedfellows. This is also the book, written in the early nineties, where Bloom despairs of ever seeing a Democratic president again in his lifetime; reading it in the late nineties, it was easy to sneer at that, but now I wonder if he wasn’t right. 

Frank’s thesis is familiar right now, and it still seems operational. The players have changed slightly in the six years since this book, of course: Ann Coulter’s inanities have been replaced by those of Glenn Beck; George Tiller was murdered, as everyone must have known would happen. Sam Brownback is leaving Washington for Kansas to run for governor. David Brooks is still an idiot. Frank divides Kansan Republicans into “Mods” (the traditional upper class Republicans, now presumably being damned as RINOS à la Charlie Crist) and “Cons” (the conservative rabble-rousers): it’s easy to forget when surveying the doings of the Cons that what the Mods were up to wasn’t, in the end, that much better; with the Democrats moving further and further to the right, we see this playing out on a national scale.

What’s most valuable about Frank’s work, I think, is how he points out that economic arguments have largely been driven out of American political life: we argue endlessly (ceremonially, almost) about taxes, but nobody says anything about class. This is a problem, of course, because class exists whether or not we acknowledge it. At the heart of Frank’s book is a core of autobiography: growing up as a Young Republican in the affluent Kansas City suburbs, he’s generally unaware of class until he arrives at university and is confronted with those much wealthier. It’s a familiar enough story, though not one that’s usually talked about: Frank moved to the left when confronted with the upper class (as did I), though that’s not the usual response. Frank, to his credit, stayed engaged, despite moving to Chicago and then D.C.; I left. Real life happens elsewhere; there’s not a lot of future to be found in the rural Midwest. But Frank can still talk to Kansans, and there’s value in that: he can make sense of those who might be written off as lunatics. But as much of the problem that he’s pointing out is one of discourse: what we talk about and what we don’t talk about.

alexander pushkin, “the tales of belkin”

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Alexander Pushkin
The Tales of Belkin
(trans. Hugh Aplin) 
(Hesperus Classics, 2009)

My knowledge of nineteenth-century Russians is embarrassingly bad: most of Dostoyevsky, a reasonable amount of Tolstoy, Oblomov, some Chekhov, a handful of others. Eugene Onegin, in a translation that I’m sure is lacking in some way, is sitting on the shelf yet unread, awaiting a project. In the mean time, here’s Pushkin’s The Tales of Belkin, a collection of early short stories. The book belongs to that familiar subject: how people in the provinces live who have gain their knowledge of the outside world through books. A problem invariably arises: how can a literate and knowing narrator tell their stories from within? A variety of frames of narration are constructed around the stories to permit this: as much as anything, The Tales of Belkin is an investigation of how storytelling works.

The central image of “The Shot” is a painting with two shots fired through it. The narrator marvels at the closeness of the shots; the second turns out to be the work of Silvio, an officer the narrator once knew, and is the occasion for the telling of the story of how those shots came to be there. In a duel, the painting was shot the first time by accident; the second time, it was not an accident, but rather a demonstration by Silvio of how he could kill if he chose to do so. The painting is the occasion for the telling of the story: the narrator meets both parties of the duel, but separately, and if he had not remarked upon the two shots in the painting, he would never have been able to put the two parts of the story together. The painting is thus a plot device; the content (described offhandedly as “some scene from Switzerland”) is not important, but its existence is, because without it the story couldn’t be told. Coincidence makes the story possible; it grabs the reader’s attention, but coincidence by itself is not enough to serve as a plot. It maneuvers the narrator into place so that he can tell the two halves of the story of Silvio; but coincidence in fiction is a very different thing from coincidence in life. The narrator comes off, as he must, as blithely oblivious of the forces moving him about. 

This is complicated by layers of narration: “The Shot” is told in the first person by a narrator, who we learn in a quoted letter in the publisher’s note which serves as introduction, is “Lieutenant-Colonel I.L.P.” who ostensibly told it to Ivan Belkin, who wrote down the story; Pushkin (if we may assume that Pushkin is the “A.P.” of the publisher’s note) ostensibly only edited these stories into a volume. We have then a story retold several times; presumably it merited retelling because of its use of coincidence. Coincidence grabs a listener; does it grab a reader in the same way? It’s worth looking back at the twice-shot Swiss landscape: it might be taken as a representation of realism, what the artist sees in nature. What makes interesting fiction isn’t realism: the painting only appears in the story because of the bullet holes the author added to it.

Coincidence also features heavily in the next story, “The Blizzard”; here, we are told the story of a girl who “had been raised on French novels, and consequently was in love”. A secret marriage is arranged; a blizzard fortuitously arrives, and the marriage doesn’t happen. Years pass, a second suitor turns up, the girl sits in the garden “like a true heroine from a novel”. Rousseau’s Julie is imagined. The new suitor turns out to be known to the girl; earlier gaps in the narrative are explained. Re-reading the story, the reader sees how the author has carefully left out events to build suspense, which is held when the story ends, unresolved. With this story, what Pushkin is doing becomes more clear: this is a systematic investigation of how fiction works and what can be believed. The reader is advised of this again near the start of “The Undertaker”: 

The enlightened reader is aware that Shakespeare and Walter Scott both represented their gravediggers as cheerful and humorous people so as to strike our imaginations the more powerfully with this contrast. Out of respect for the truth, we cannot follow their example and are forced to admit that our undertaker’s disposition corresponded perfectly to his sombre trade. (p. 31)

This is straight-up metafiction; the first person plural of the narrator suggests the unreliability of the multiple narrators behind this: unreliable in the sense that we know full well that they are twisting the truth to suit narrative needs. When the reader then finds the titular undertaker confronted by his late charges, we don’t know if this is a tale of the supernatural – as we know the narrator is unafraid to play with reality – or if it’s all a drunken dream, as it turns out to be. In his forward, Adam Thirlwell presents Pushkin’s work is an analogue to Sterne’s, an unacknowledged elaboration on a passage in Shklovsky’s Theory of Prose; I think the Tales of Belkin suffer in this comparison, but one senses that these stories are intended to be slight. They’re still pleasant. The other material tacked on to the end of the book – two fragments that Pushkin wrote in the voice of Belkin – feel extraneous. 

I like how Hesperus Classics look: I like that they’re marketing small books, and they tend to pick up things that other’s don’t. That said: there’s a lot of marketing evident on this book. Adam Thirlwell’s name appears as many times as Pushkin’s on the covers; Hugh Aplin, the translator, is nowhere to be found, though he also contributes a useful historical introduction. Maybe Thirlwell’s name goes further in Britain than it does here. And I presume Pushkin won’t sell himself. The cover – crows on a snowy landscape – has a solemnity that suggests that the designer never read the book. Aplin’s translation is unobtrusive, though this isn’t the case with his annotations: they are necessary because of Pushkin’s heavy use of references, but generally not particularly revealing.

homer, “the odyssey”

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Homer
The Odyssey
(trans. Robert Fagles)

Obviously, I should have read this a long time ago, probably in high school: I remember, very vaguely, extracts from Homer, but nothing in particular; it would have been in an enormous anthology of world literature that I’m sure I’d find deeply, deeply entertaining if I found it again. In Social Studies we were shown the Ray Harryhausen Clash of the Titans (to balance out Ben-Hur, maybe: it was a public school after all). In college, I remember spending a lot of time on translations of the Homeric Hymns in a class on lyric poetry; also, somewhere I learned about Millman Parry and how songs were passed down in the Balkans, but I don’t remember if that actually entailed reading Homer. To a certain extent, it’s a book that you don’t have to read any more because everybody’s already read it for you.

Obviously, Ulysses, but I’m fairly certain that when I first read that I had some sort of crib for what the various sections were referencing. A sound-bite thay periodically bounces through my mind: Jack Palance as the impecunious producer in Godard’s Contempt:

I re-read the Odyssey last night. And I finally found something I’d been looking for a long, long time; something that’s just as indispensable in the movies as it is in real life: poetry.

(Add your own translations into French between phrases for full effect; I couldn’t find the relevant clip on YouTube.) Even Jack Palance has read (re-read) the Odyssey. Fritz Lang’s abortive movie version in that film (most here) looks fantastic: I wonder how much was his idea and how much Godard’s?

What’s surprising about the Odyssey now? First, the structure – it’s not the straightforward picaresque (in the style of, say, Tolkein) that I’d somehow imagined it would be. Everyone knows, of course, that the story starts in medias res; I hadn’t understood what that would mean for the way the book is narrated, the way storytelling jumps back and forth in sequence and the multiple layers of narrators. It’s also surprising how it speeds up and slows down: in Book 12, four seemingly major episodes happen in fast succession (Sirens, Wandering Rocks, Scylla & Charybdis, the Oxen of the Sun). I am, of course, taking my sense of what’s an important episode from the chapters in Ulysses. Of the 24 books, the first 4 are the adventures of Telemachus trying to find his father; the next 8 see Odysseus leave Circe’s island for the land of Nausicaa and the Phaeacians (where he relates his story, much of what we remember about the Odyssey) and then the Phaeacians take him back to Ithaca. The second half of the book (Books 13–24) relate Odysseus’s adventures regaining his throne in Ithaca. It’s surprising how little of the book is concerned with Odysseus’ journey: only a third, really. 

Bits of it, of course, seem like anticipatory plagiarism: when Odysseus finds the various sinners (Titytus, Tantalus, Sisyphus) being punished appropriately in the Land of the Dead, it’s almost like the Inferno. (I presume that Dante wouldn’t have read this directly, though I haven’t checked.) The general outline of what happens is familiar, of course; but little of the language is, perhaps because I’m reading Fagles’s translation. 

One of the things I find myself focusing on is how people behave – especially in comparison with the insanity of Genesis, which I re-read late last year in Crumb’s edition. Here there are codes in place (which do get broken, of course) but it’s clear that the rules function in an orderly fashion. Cause and effect is operational: if guests, for example, are mistreated, there will be revenge, divine or otherwise. There’s a feeling of civilization that isn’t really there in Genesis. While there are gods, the gods are pointedly not omnipotent: generally, they can only act indirectly. Athena can guide Odysseus, but she can’t stop all of his crew from being killed; there’s a give and take between her power and Poseidon’s.

How human are these characters? We like Odysseus because he’s imperfect: he’s a braggart, and is punished for it, although his crew, of course, is punished far more. Most of Odysseus’s relationships are master/servant: there is a strong hierarchy, and people behave in that manner; the loss of Odysseus’s crew is Odysseus’s loss, not their own. There are values that shape his behavior: home, certainly; duty, hospitality; but we don’t see Odysseus being friends with anyone in this book. Friendship does exist in the book, in the example of Telemachus and Pisistratus, though it’s possible that exists only in the context of battle. Odysseus seems more hero than person. Erich Auerbach points out in Mimesis that Odysseus never seems to change in his twenty years: he wants exactly the same thing at the end that he wanted at the beginning: to Auerbach, the characters of Genesis, who are uniformly beaten down by God, are more realistic. 

I don’t love Fagles’s translation (as i didn’t love his translation of the Oresteia, but I’m not entirely sure of the reasons for my dislike. There are occasional infelicities in the translation. Odysseus narrates: “But now I cleared my mind of Circe’s orders— / cramping my style, urging me not to arm at all. / I donned my heroic armor . . .” (12.245-247) That “donned”, slightly archaic sounding, and the epithet “heroic armor” set off how strange “cramping my style” is here: it’s too James Dean, and that’s not how Odysseus should be. (Or, if he is, he should be consistent: then “donned” stands out.) Odysseus tells Polyphemus that his name is “Nobody”; again, this seems a little too colloquial. Certainly this is a readable translation; maybe it’s just not the translation for my ear. Ian MacKellen reads the audiobook version of it: he sounds entirely appropriate, but I don’t know if he fits my idea of ancient Greek. Maybe I’m at fault.

Bits of the language can’t help but stand out, regardless of the translation. Here, for example, Odysseus and Telemachus are reunited:

They cried out, shrilling cries, pulsing sharper
than birds of prey – eagles, vultures with hooked claws –
when farmers plunder their nest of young too young to fly. (16.246–248)

Again, I don’t love the phrasing of these lines in English (“young too young” seems off to my ear) but the metaphor still surprises. The present-day reader realizes how different Homer’s world must have been if such a comparison could be made: why, one wonders, would farmers have been doing that? Were the eagles and vultures eating their livestock? Later, we hear about eagles eating geese; and we remember that it was only in the mid-twentieth century that farmers stopped shooting birds of prey. Or are the farmers stealing chicks for falconry? Why must they be too young to fly? There’s a distance here between us and the text that we can’t entirely get around. 

Hugh Kenner points out that Joyce got many of his ideas about the Odyssey from Samuel Butler’s translation, which is online; Butler, for example, uses Roman names rather than Greek names, and has Telemachus living in a tower. His Authoress of the Odyssey is online, as is his translation; primarily interesting that are the introduction, illustrations, and notes, which seem to be lost in many of the online editions of that. (The Gutenberg edition, from which many editions have been made, is something of a disgrace, full of “[Greek]” where there should be Greek text; also page references are useless, and illustrations are lost.) Maybe I’ll look at those next.