Stephen Mitchelmore offers his take on Josipovici’s lecture.

By the way, how was it that Josipovici came to write the introduction to the Portable Saul Bellow in 1974, as Stephen pointed out a while ago? I’m curious.

I stopped into a used bookstore over the weekend to see if by some chance if I could find the Portable Bellow or even one of Josipovici’s own books. Nothing doing. I left with copies of Prus’s The Doll and Lao She’s Rickshaw. In the same bookstore not long ago I found the New Directions Firbank volumes, one and two. And earlier they had the Penguin Henry Green volumes, one and two. Crazy, huh?

Anyway, how can you still not know Josipovici? I’ve read to you from Moo Pak, I’ve touted (in passing) the criticism, I’ve explained to you the twilight … why? Especially since your mother, by which of course I mean the Chicago Public Library, has assembled such a nice selection of works for you?

Libraries are wonderful that way, aren’t they? They hold those books very faithfully, hoping someday you’ll come around.

Ellis Sharp offers a superb account of Gabriel Josipovici’s lecture in London on Wednesday night.

An excerpt:

In the case of fictional narrative, to give something an end does not signify that it supplies meaning. Novels are not mirrors of the world but rather machines that secrete spurious meanings into the world. Modernists had a deep sense that the bad faith of the novel should be acknowledged. Very few modern British novelists write out of that awareness. Two who did, he argued, were William Golding, in Pincher Martin, and Muriel Spark, in The Hothouse By The East River.

He then contrasted their writing with three contemporary examples. The first was the opening of a short story by a successful writer of fiction and journalism (not identified and I didn’t recognise the story). The second was from a novel by a Booker Prize winner (again not identified, and again it wasn’t something I’d read). The third was an extract from Suite Francaise.

They were all bad writers, going through the motions, Josipovici argued. Each extract raised questions of narrative authority. Each author displayed a complacent omniscience about their characters.

(Steve, who was also there, says the first example was Philip Hensher and the second V. S. Naipaul.)

Here’s a related idea, which I encountered at the excellent Mel Bochner exhibition recently at the Art Institute.

Thoughts on novels and novelists, from TLS issues old(ish) and new(ish). First, from Stephen Henighan, “On the Literary Oblivion of James Agee,” from August 2, 2006 (full-text online):

It is difficult to imagine a novel as remarkable as A Death in the Family slipping into its present obscurity had Agee made a career of writing novels. The earlier work’s self-questioning distance from the characters is abolished; the modernist techniques, notably a restrained version of stream-of-consciousness writing, are employed with great skill. Morrison mentions Proust, Joyce, Kafka and T. S. Eliot as models for the work, but the obvious model, already acknowledged as a source of detail—of gesture, landscape, costume, air, action, mystery, and incident—in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, is William Faulkner. A Death in the Family, which was on the verge of completion at the time of Agee’ death and won him a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1957, opens with a blatantly Faulknerian evocation of suburban fathers watering their lawns on a summer evening in Knoxville, Tennessee.

And from Robert Folkenflik, “Deviations,” a review of Patricia Meyer Spacks’s, Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction, March 9, 2007 (not online):

Why should [Ian] Watt’s major criterion, “Realism,” — which was used in medieval times as a philosophical description of the reality of universal ideas, and in the nineteenth centry to describe the novels of Balzac and the art of Courbet — have been taken up so fully for the British eighteenth-century novel? The paradoxes it entails are many. The writers usually put forward as the major eighteenth-century English novelists — Daniel Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne — rarely or never claim that they are writing novels at all, unlike earlier writers such as Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood, who often call their works novels. The word “novel” is not in Sterne’s vocabulary. Why, to take a few other paradoxes, are the most “realistic” novelists of the period (Defoe and Richardson) also the most didactic, and how is it that the most self-conscious of fictions (Tristram Shandy) can also be seen as the most realistic? Spacks asserts that Defoe, Fielding, and Richardson are not “realistic.” And she counters that last paradox by noting that although Tristram Shandy is not usually considered “realistic,” “the attempt to perform and represent the disorder of consciousness … suggests a principle or realism more profound than any previously established.” I would only add that this paradox was operative already in Don Quixote.

And I would only add that “realistic” has often been applied to any work that takes ordinary people as its subject, so some of these apparent paradoxes are not so paradoxical after all.

There must be a term for words like these, which can describe two very different characteristics. Such as, for example, “outsider,” which in relation to artists can mean either “unschooled” or “insane.”

I still love Spacks’s Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind, in which I learned a piece of literary trivia I often repeat: Johnson considered it sinful to be bored; Boswell considered boredom something that other people imposed on him.

I build on both Johnson and Boswell. I consider it sinful for other people to bore me.

The New York Review of Books has my attention again. Every issue lately has something I want to read. The March 1, 2007, issue had two poems by Adam Zagajewski, translated by Clare Cavanagh. I like this one in particular:

Reading Milosz

I read your poetry once more,
poems written by a rich man, understanding all,
and by a pauper, homeless,
an emigrant alone.

You always want to say more
than we can, to transcend poetry, take flight,
but also to descend, to penetrate the place
where our timid, modest realm begins.

Your voice at times
persuades us,
if only for the moment,
that every day is holy

and that poetry, how to put it,
rounds our life,
completes it, makes it proud
and unafraid of perfect form.
I lay the book aside
at night and only then
the city’s normal tumult starts again,
somebody coughs or cries, somebody curses.

Wonderful stuff, isn’t it? Not definitively, or exclusively, or in the sense of everything-a-poem-could-ever-be, but in itself, for what it is: wonderful stuff.

The phrase “poetry … rounds our life” made me think of Prospero’s speech in Act 4, Scene 1 of The Tempest:

Did Zagajewski consider this connection? Did his translator, Clare Cavanagh? I say they did.

Years ago, I took a class in poetic meter and form taught by the poet Richard Tillinghast. We wrote poems in different forms just to show we knew how to work the levers and cranks, and Tillinghast would comment on our efforts in the manner I mentioned once before. Anyhow, in one poem I took as my subject the art of laying sewer pipe. In that poem I used the word “impediment,” and Tillinghast wrote in the margin a few lines from Sonnet 116.

That’s a stretch, I thought to myself.

Eventually it dawned on me what Tillinghast was trying to convey. No one writing a poem in English can use the word impediment without thinking of Sonnet 116. If you are, it might be said that you aren’t writing poetry at all. Does it also hold true that if you don’t think of Prospero’s speech when you see that word in Zagajewski’s poem, you aren’t reading poetry at all? I think I would say that. I would. I just did.

I suppose this question occurs to most people when they begin reading literature and also start to read literary reviews and criticism. Is all that stuff is really in here? Assuming that it is, how much am I supposed to notice? How much is anyone supposed to notice?

Literary allusions, references, and intertextuality of all kinds I refer to collectively (and colloquially) as “jokes.” And, like any normal person, I want to “get” all the jokes.

However, I’ve realized over the years that no one gets all the jokes. There are some jokes that only the author gets. (We have some access to these through the efforts of diligent critics and biographers.) There are others that are accessible only to a small group of initiates, which include the writer’s family and colleagues, his or her most devoted critics, etc. Neither class of joke need bother us “laymen” or “civilian” readers, nor are truly even available through what we’d normally call reading, as distinguished from study, analysis, interpretation, hermeneutics, deconstruction, etc.

Still, there are an awful lot of jokes to be got, even by regular readers. You get more of them as you get older, but mostly you get more of them as you read more. Do they matter to the regular reader? Yeah, of course. They add the fun of the book. But they matter to writers too, because if you don’t know the jokes that your readers get, you can end up looking pretty foolish.

I think that’s what Coetzee was talking about not long ago when he mentioned that young writers today don’t read. Or rather, that they read more of each other than they do of Conrad or Woolf or Melville or Bronte or Defoe or Cervantes. Coetzee was saying, I think: you can’t be a serious writer if you don’t know all the jokes.

Late preoccupation: the strange and funny titles of the chapters in Burke’s On the Sublime and Beautiful (1909-14). Here are the chapters in Part IV:

1. Of the Efficient Cause of the Sublime and Beautiful
2. Association
3. Cause of Pain and Fear
4. Continued
5. How the Sublime is Produced
6. How Pain Can be a Cause of Delight
7. Exercise Necessary for the Finer Organs
8. Why Things not Dangerous Produce a Passion Like Terror
9. Why Visual Objects of Great Dimensions are Sublime
10. Unity, Why Requisite to Vastness
11. The Artificial Infinite
12. The Vibrations Must be Similar
13. The Effects of Succession in Visual Objects Explained
14. Locke’s Opinion Concerning Darkness Considered
15. Darkness Terrible in its Own Nature
16. Why Darkness is Terrible
17. The Effects of Blackness
18. The Effects of Blackness Moderated
19. The Physical Cause of Love
20. Why Smoothness is Beautiful
21. Sweetness, Its Nature
22. Sweetness, Relaxing
23. Variation, Why Beautiful
24. Concerning Smallness
25. Of Colour

Peter Schjeldahl, “Flashes of Light: Jeff Wall’s Pictures,” in the March 5, 2007, issue of the New Yorker:

Tastes may honestly differ apropos the painstaking illustrations of scenes from novels by Ralph Ellison and Yukio Mishima.  I take it on faith that Wall has represented all one thousand three hundred and sixty nine light bulbs in the protagonist’s basement lair which Ellison mentions in the prologue to “The Invisible Man.”  I prefer my own old, surreal imagining of that space, which Ellison hardly describes, to the picture’s nitpicky realism.  But I’m impressed by Wall’s bravery in tackling literary illustration, perhaps the single most despised genre in modern art.

(By the way, I recently updated my art list here.)

Joseph Epstein in the Wall Street Journal, March 2, 2007 (subs only):

Mr. Daley has by Chicago standards been a great mayor, possibly the greatest the city has known. With this new term, he shall also be the mayor longest in office. The reason for both — his greatness and his longevity in the job — is that he keeps the machine oiled, the joint running, the tax base low, the town prosperous. Is everybody happy?

Not a lengthy period is required for cities, even magnificent cities, to fall apart. In his novel “Life and Fate,” the Russian writer Vasily Grossman notes: “Man never understands that the cities he has built are not an integral part of Nature. If he wants to defend his culture from wolves and snowstorms, if he wants to save it from being strangled by weeds, he must keep his broom, spade, and rifle always at hand. If he goes to sleep, if he thinks about something else for a year or two, then everything’s lost. The wolves come out of the forest, the thistles spread and everything is buried under dust and snow.”

Chicagoans understand this better than most. In the interregnum between the two Daleys, pére et fils, that is in the years between 1976 and 1989, when Chicago was without a Daley as mayor, the wolves were out, snows clogged the pavement, thistles rolled down crime-ridden sad streets, dust was everywhere, that old decline-and-fall feeling was in the air. Rich Daley put an end to that: The city he has governed has become a vibrant place, culturally booming, buildings and civic works shooting up all over, without obvious racial tension, a place in which the talented young are eager to live.

Epstein and I have had our differences, and I certainly don’t agree completely with his sunniest conclusions here, but I think, on balance, that Grossman’s right, and Epstein’s right. 

From Robert Birnbaum’s interview with Martin Amis in The Morning News:

RB: Do you bother to acquire the various translations [of your own work]?

MA: Yeah, one of each, I like to have. I don’t want six copies of the Czech Night Train. It’s nice to see them. It’s a pleasure to see them.

RB: But then again, it’s a psychological relief — it’s an image but you don’t think of the contents, do you? You are contemplating the sheer volume?

MA: Yeah, and some languages make the books much longer — what’s a medium-sized novel is fucking enormous in French. I don’t know why that should be.

RB: Maybe they changed the size of the type.

MA: Maybe — but a hundred pages longer?