Shklovsky and Lish

Jan 312010
 

Now think about how Shklovsky and Lish fit together. Lish is a child of the stillborn American avant garde (postmodern) of the 60s and 70s. I mean people like Gass, Coover, Barthelme and Hawkes. Hawkes was famous for having said that plot, character, setting and theme are the enemies of the novel. Shklovsky’s Russian Formalism evolves out of Futurism and Don Quixote and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. (Cervantes and Sterne invented most of the techniques of literary experiment; we just keep rediscovering them–note the blank pages in Lish’s novel Arcade and then go and look at the famous blank chapter in Tristram Shandy.) He says art is about technique (not about its subject matter). But the techniques he discusses are delay, stepped construction, deceleration, repetition, parallelism, differential perceptions and baring the device. His novels, even his essays for that matter, are strange, discursive, tangential, experimental narratives that include bits of memoir and literary criticism. Russian Formalism led through structuralist linguistics (Jacobson) and post-structuralism (Saussure and Barthes) to European literary theory–Barthes, Derrida and after.  Lately Lish has been quoting European theorists like Kristeva, Deleuze and Lyotard in his epigraphs. Though they talk and write quite differently, both Lish and Shklovsky believe that subject matter is secondary to technique. They both use the formal disruption of mainstream expectation to jar the reader into paying attention to the reading of the text.

dg

Lish

Jan 282010
 

Despite the fact that he was Captain Fiction while he was editing fiction for Esquire and later worked for Knopf and discovered people like Carver, Hempel and Hannah, i.e. despite the fact that he has had a mainstream job list, Lish is not a mainstream writer, nor does he possess a mainstream aesthetic. He’s really a modernist of the experimental sort. This is a classic American misreading of the signs. He edits fiction for Esquire, therefore he is one of us. But mostly his own fiction gets terrible reviews, and, after he left Knopf, he hasn’t really had mainstream soapbox from which to pontificate and so he’s become a bit of a cult figure/teacher which is how America relegates and diminishes its off-centre wise men/women. His fiction is actually brilliant but looks idiotic if you try to apply mainstream expectations. The first thing of his I read was the novel Extravaganza which is basically a couple of hundred pages of old-style Jewish stand up comedy, old-style as in dating from about the 1930s. As the jokes go on and on and on, a rupture or fissure begins to appear and expand within the joke language itself. Through the rupture, words that belong to the discourse of the Holocaust begin to appear. The book had no conventional narrative  arc; the narrative, if there was any, was purely linguistic; the words became the sign, the objective correlative. The next thing of his that I read was My Romance which purports to be the text of an extemporaneous talk beginning with Lish’s father’s watch, Lish’s skin problems, his affairs, and ends up, if it really does end up, being about his father’s death (I am writing from memory). It’s much more conventional than Extravaganza but still very peculiar, self-obsessive, recursive, confessional. If you want to see what Lish means when he talks about attack sentences, consecution, torque, swerve, etc., this is the place to start. Many of the people who study with Lish are American mainstream writers trying to catch Captain Fiction’s coattails without understanding that what he teaches is really an unconventional, unmarketable, cosmopolitan aesthetic. He wants people to be brilliant, to write for the ages (not for the dumbed-down readership of our Kindle-lit era). Everything he says could make you better than you are. Do you want to be better than you are? Or worse, better than most everyone around you, including the people who buy books?

I say all this while quite aware that Lish sells a lot of snake oil and can be belligerent, self-aggrandizing and irritating. This is mystifying to people who have been educated by the marketplace to expect brilliance in neat, digestible (half-hour) packages with commercial breaks. If it helps, think of Lish’s life as performance art.

dg

Insomnia, Lawrence, Wrigley and Lawrence

Jan 222010
 

I finished reading D. H. Lawrence’s story “None of That” which Kenneth Rexroth mentioned in his introduction to the selected poems. What’s interesting about the story, other than the fact that Ethel reminds me of someone I used to date, is the narrative setup. There is a first person narrator who is solely an interlocutor, not a character in the story at all. And he meets an old acquaintance in Venice who tells him in dialogue the story of Ethel and the bullfighter Cuesta. (I love Lawrence’s impish directness–e.g. the male orgasmic “spurt of blood” as Cuesta stands over the dying bull.) This second narrator is involved in the story but mostly as an observer and a go-between. In effect, the text is all telling and in dialogue and the narrators are nested. If you look at Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, you’ll see it’s similar. There is a first person narrator who’s barely mentioned who is listening to Marlow tell the story. This is a really difficult narrative structure to carry off nowadays, difficult because it’s hard to achieve immediacy–or maybe none of us is good enough to write it.

I was almost asleep, then made the mistake of reading Robert Wrigley’s poem “Thatcher Bitchboy” which I thought was going to be something about gay s&m but turned out to be about a boy watching his beloved chicken-stealing dog being led off to die. Obviously, I couldn’t sleep after that and had to read some comforting Lawrence death poems. E.g. “Kissing and Horrid Strife”

dg

4 a.m.

Jan 202010
 

Up til 4 a.m. The Robert Wrigley epigraph sent me to D. H. Lawrence’s Selected Poems with the amazing Kenneth Rexroth introduction.

In a world where death had become a nasty, pervasive secret like defecation and masturbation, Lawrence re-instated it in all its grandeur–the oldest and most powerful of the gods.

Read “The Ship of Death” as soon as you can.

Piecemeal the body dies, and the timid soul/has her footing washed away, as the dark flood rises/ We are dying, we are dying, we are all of us dying/and nothing will stay the death-flood rising within us/ and soon it will rise on the world, on the outside world./We are dying, we are dying, piecemeal our bodies are dying/and our strength leaves us,/and our soul cowers naked in the dark rain over the flood,/cowering in the last branches of the tree of our life.

Also check out, for that matter, Rexroth’s gorgeous An Autobiographical Novel which isn’t really a novel but a memoir.

dg

Adorno on Spengler

Jan 192010
 

I finished reading the essay last night. A touch of hopefulness at the end.

“In a world or brutal and oppressed life, decadence becomes the refuge of a potentially better life by renouncing its allegiance to this one [life] and to its culture, its crudeness, and its sublimity.”

I too am admirer of decadence, of mixed form, parodies, anatomies and Menippean satires.

Now I am reading Lives of the Animals by Robert Wrigley, a book of poems mentioned by Cheryl Wilder in her graduate lecture at the last residency. The epigraph is from D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Ghosts.”

“And as the dog with its nostrils tracking out the fragments of the beasts’ limbs, and the breath from their feet that they leave in the soft grass, runs upon  a path that is pathless to men, so does the soul follow the trail of the dead, across great spaces.”

dg

“In the Fifties.”

Jan 192010
 

Dug into this story by Leonard Michaels today.  I thought it was interesting that the story mentions Spengler.  “We talked about Worringer and Spengler.”

The story is odd on the surface…essentially a man recounting his life during the 1950’s.  It’s taken me three reads to even begin to understand how to approach it for my thesis.  It’s certainly an ‘outlier’ in terms of structure or plot.  I’m wondering about the idea of invisible resistance patterns, about characters not written on the page.  Maybe something that could be called ‘implied conflcit’?  This story seems to just move around a lot, but I’m thinking that perhaps the tension is built into the story by the time which has passed from the telling to the subject (perhaps fifteen or more years.)  I’m curious to see if this story makes more sense with repeated readings, though even after three, certain images patterns have already begun to appear: suicide, Communism, language, youth, sex, violence, activism.  It seems like in all these outlier stories, the image patterns hold the structure together when the other elements recede.  I’m not sure if that’s where I’ll end up, but that’s what I’m thinking now.

—Richard Farrell

Adorno and Mad Max

Jan 182010
 

I am still reading Adorno’s essay on Spengler.

Jonah and I went to see The Book of Eli Saturday night and then last night, pursuing our quest for the roots of dystopian movie-making, we rented Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome. The Mad Max movie was infinitely superior–wittily baroque and light at the ending with great 80s music (sounded like Maurice Jarre). The weirdly touching ironies of the “tell” are parodic, human and funny (the girl framing each cave drawing with sticks tied together at the end of a pole). Both movies have the same plot: stranger wandering through dried up, post-apocalyptic landscape comes to a town run by evil-doers and adventures happen. Both strangers are really good at fighting. But The Book of Eli is a violent pseudo-Christian strangeness. It reveals the paranoia, selfishness and self-righteousness behind some (not all) recent threads of Christian discourse (surprising to a Canadian who grew up in a country where Christian-based political parties fired the push for universal medical care in the 1950s). Denzel, intent on his mission (to save the book), can’t stop to help a woman being raped and murdered by a bunch of motorcycle thugs. Whereas Mel as Mad Max gets into trouble repeatedly for showing pity and forgetting to save his own skin. There are no children in The Book of Eli, but Mad Max is surrounded by innocence. (Both movies make young women look great in animal hides and rags.)

I’m not sure what this has to do with Adorno except that in my head I keep thinking about how he tells us the culture industry has rolled over for the unnameable powers of repression contained in our late stage capitalist so-called democracy, pouring out infotainment, reality tv and comforting or distracting folk tales which lull our pulverized synapses. All the modern dystopian, end-of-the-world movies have happy endings, often sneakily Christian (remember the “arks” that save the world at the end of John Cusack’s latest).

Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome doesn’t escape unscathed by Christian symbolism. The cave painting of Captain Walker is Christ on the cross. What does this mean? The Bible is a paradigm of a novel with a happy ending? The Biblical message has turned inexplicably dark between the 1980s and 2010?

dg

Mary Gaitskill

Jan 162010
 

I’ve been re-reading Gaitskill’s story, “The Little Boy” and using it as a structural model for a story I’m working on.  I like the way she blends the front story with the backstory, using both scenic flashbacks and more willowy type memories.  I think (hope) that using a story model to build from is considered kosher.  The weird part has been how it freed up the writing for me.  I had this idea for a story but couldn’t figure out how to squeeze it into an actual form.  I had read Gaitskill’s story a month or so ago on a plane ride and thought it would be a good one to look at later, but didn’t really consider it with my subject matter until recently.   We’ll see how it ends up, but it’s been a fun start.  Also started reading Audrey Niffenegger’s “Her Fearful Symmetry” for a book club I’m in.  Not a huge fan of it so far.  The book feels very plot-driven to me, with lots of things happening just because they need to.  There is an OCD character though that’s pretty interesting, but I think her POV shifts are awkward and arbitrary.  Some good descriptive scenes and lots of movement, but whenever a writer uses a scene set in Starbucks, with a latte as a prop, I feel a bit cheated.

—Richard Farrell

E. K. Brown

Jan 162010
 

I was killing time in Saratoga Springs this morning waiting for my son Jonah who was in the library seeing his math tutor. I went to Lyrical Ballad, the antiquarian bookstore on Phila Street, and stumbled upon two copies of the paperback of E. K. Brown‘s book on Willa Cather. Brown was a Canadian critic and academic with interesting Formalist leanings. His little book Rhythm in the Novel is terrific on subplot and imagery (he calls extended image patterns expanding symbols). The book is out of print but not hard to find. dg

Seriously Disgruntled

Jan 162010
 

I spent too much time reading Adorno’s essay on Spengler’s Decline of the West in the middle of the night and now I feel like I am in a serious decline myself. As a general rule of thumb, I would advise against reading Adorno in the middle of the night and, especially, Adorno on Spengler.

dg

The Barnum Museum

Jan 152010
 

I’m reading Millhauser as part of my exploration of short stories that seem to disobey the rules.  My question–my thesis, perhaps–seems to hinge on the question, what is a short story?  In “The Barnum Museum”, the narrator appears to be a 3rd person plural, ‘we’, but at times the closeness of the narration feels much more like first.   Even though nothing about the narrator is ever revealed as a character, there is a strong sense of ‘voice’ about this narrator.  I think Millhauser in particular does this really well…hides his narrators without making them characters.  In reading James Wood’s chapter on narrating in How Fiction Works, I was struck by the idea of ‘free indirect’ narration, a concept akin (I think) to stream of consciousness.   This topic came up in Jess Row’s lecture at residency.  The thing is, I don’t think Millhauser is doing this even.  He’s almost using ‘close-omniscience’ as a narrative voice.  Speaking collectively for his village but not really allowing the reader access to this narrative presence.  Of course that’s just one aspect of this story that shakes it free of the confines of traditional short story structure.  I was also listening to a podcast of Jeffrey Eugenides reading the Harold Brodky story, “Spring Fugue,” in which Eugenides and Deborha Treisman discuss whether or not Brodky’s story is in fact a story, or a prose-poem.  Eugenides says that he doesn’t think it matters that much (though he does think it is a story.)  I wonder what others think about this.  When does a story stop being a story?  In the Millhauser story, there are no main characters, other than the invisible, plural narrator and the museum itself.  Yet it does move like a story.  There is tension, drama, movement through time.  I’m not looking for anyone to write the thesis for me, but I am interested to know what others thing about the weird stories out there.  I know these lines are getting blurrier with time, but is there still a line?   By the way, the NewYorker fiction podcasts are great, and free, on Itunes if you haven’t been there before.

—Richard Farrell

Princess of Cleves

Jan 142010
 

So Jacob read Madame de Lafayette’s novel The Princess of Cleves yesterday and noted how it clearly influenced Madame Bovary (a sort of instruction-book idealized version of love set against the real thing). Then his lecturer this morning mentioned that a precursor of  The Princess of Cleves was Marguerite de Navarre’s 16th century short story collection Heptameron which contains, coincidentally, the first account of how a young French woman was marooned on an island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence–which is, yes, the story on which my novel Elle is based. A sample title from the Heptameron: “The wife of a saddler of Amboise is saved on her deathbed through a fit of anger at seeing her husband fondle a servant-maid.”

I will stop mentioning Jake (well, probably not). It’s just that he’s reading more than I am (myself I am grinding slowly through Theodor Adorno’s essay “Cultural Criticism and Society”) and we have these fascinating conversations that get my brain going. This was a surprising little loop of a conversation.

dg

Montaigne, Hastily

Jan 132010
 

My son Jacob is writing an essay on Montaigne’s “Of Experience” and so I was skimming that and then skimming some secondary sources–all the reading I could manage today. In graduate school I wrote an essay on “On Cannibals” and that had an echo later on in my interest in natives that came out in The Life and Times of Captain N and Elle. Montaigne is such a character in his essays, weaving the abstract and the personal, and by “personal” I mean really personal. In “Of Experience” he goes on about his bowel habits. And he says, in my translation, “Kings and philosophers go to stool, and ladies too” which in Jacob’s translation comes out as “and women shit.”

dg

Checking In & Recent Readings.

Jan 132010
 

I read Julio Cortazar’s “Axolotl” yesterday.  In this story, a man visits a Parisian aquarium and becomes captivated by a strange species of salamnder until he becomes one.  Though the story is unusual, there were clearly desire-resistance patterns built into the structure and it seemed to follow a logical (albeit odd) progression.  This pattern seemed less clear in Leonard Michael’s story, “In the Fifties.”  I’m curious to see how that story comes apart on closer readings.  I’ve also been trying to make my way through Shklovsky’s Theory of Prose.  Here are some gems from chapter 1: Quoting Spencer…”The merit of a style consists in precisely this: that it delivers the greatest number of ideas in the fewest number of words.”   “The purpose of art, then, is to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition.”  This idea was particularly interesting.  My children do this all the time.  They try to describe something they don’t understand or have a word for.  Tolstoy calls it (according to Shklovsky) “seeing for the first time.”   Shklovsky is more dense and harder to understand in chapter two.  I’ve also been reading Leon Surmelian’s “Techniques of Fiction Writing: Measure and Madness.”  This is an older book but very thorough…a few quotes from him.  “Plot dramatizes the idea.”  “Pain is the difference between what we expected and what we discovered, what we hoped for and what we got, the difference between illusion and reality.”    “Desire would cease to be desire without pain.”  I’m wading in to Calvino, Angela Carter and Millhauser’s “The Barnum Museum” today.

—Richard Farrell

Adorno, Shklovsky and Michael Berube’s American Airspace Blog

Jan 122010
 

I’m not sure how much time I will have for this as the semester wears on. But I will try. As RichH noticed I did briefly have a post up about Theodor Adorno. I was reading his essay on Thorstein Veblen through the residency, a few lines at a time. I finished that the other night in the wee hours. Then as I was adding more things to the resource file-sharing site for you guys, I was rereading some more recent pieces on Shklovsky who is undergoing a surge (that word) of in the U.S. because my publisher Dalkey Archive is bringing out more and more of his books which were hitherto mostly unavailable. But then I happened upon a blog (American Airspace) by Michael Berube (I can’t figure out how to get accents on the letters, sorry) who is a culture critic I met years ago when I gave a talk at a university somewhere in Missouri (the name is out of my head). Michael later did a really nice piece on my novel The Life and Times of Captain N for the magazine Lingua Franca. Anyway I liked his blog post on Shklovsky although I can’t quite get my mind around some of his objections to Formalist theory–more on that another time. In any case, the whole blog itself is fun to read.

dg