“For many years I have worked in film production and seen more than once how the directors, during the screenings before public release, said that these were just sketches, something that would have to be reworked in the future.
People cringe when showing something that’s most precious to them.”
(Viktor Shklovsky, Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot, trans. Shushan Avagyan, p. 7.)
“Even the snottiest young artiste, of course, probably isn’t going to beat personal ill will toward writers of trash; just as, while everybody agrees that prostitution is a bad thing for everyone involved, few are apt to blame prostitutes themselves, or wish them harm. If this seems like a non sequitur, I’m going to claim the analogy is all too apt. A prostitute is someone who, in exchange for money, affords someone else the form and sensation of sexual intimacy without any of the complex emotions or responsibilities that make intimacy between two people a valuable or meaningful human enterprise. The prostitute ‘gives,’ but – demanding nothing of comparable value in return – perverts the giving, helps render what is supposed to be a revelation a transaction. The writer of trash fiction, often with admirable craft, affords his customer a narrative structure and movement that engages the reader – titillates, repulses, excites, transports him – without demanding of him any of the intellectual or spiritual or artistic responses that render verbal intercourse between writer and reader an important or even real activity.”
(David Foster Wallace, “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young,” The Review of Contemporary Fiction Fall 1988: Novelist as Critic, p. 45)
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.
(Page from Proust’s composite manuscript for A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, ca. 1915–October 1916, Krannert Art Museum, Urbana, Illinois.)
Books
Films
Exhibits
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.
(Peanuts, 26 June 1995. From here.)
(Upper part of a marble female figure, Cycladic, Early Cycladic II, Chalandriani type, ca. 2300–2200 B.C.)
“The story of Abraham and Isaac is not better established than the story of Odysseus, Penelope, and Euryclea; both are legendary. But the Biblical narrator, the Elohist, had to believe in the objective truth of the story of Abraham’s sacrifice – the existence of the sacred ordinances of life rested upon the truth of this and similar stories. He had to believe in it passionately; or else (as many rationalistic interpreters believed and perhaps still believe) he had to be a conscious liar – no harmless liar like Homer, who lied to give pleasure, but a political liar with a definite end in view, lying in the interest of a claim to absolute authority.”
(Erich Auerbach, from “Odysseus’ Scar” in Mimesis, trans. Willard Trask, p. 14.)
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.