A Note on Nietzsche’s “experiments” as technique

Mar 122010
 

I was rereading Walter Kaufmann’s Nietzsche last night, focusing on the bit about Nietzsche’s “style of decadence.” This should be interesting to any of us but especially to writers of nonfiction. Like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche is an anti-system thinker; he attacked the idea that the classic philosophical ideals of system, coherence and completeness were a guarantee of truth (recall how Kierkegaard mischievously titled his great work Concluding Unscientific Postscript). His style of decadence was aphoristic and fragmentary. Each piece was a thought experiment, not necessarily meant to reveal a truth. He called them Versuche, experiments or attempts (reflect on how this resonates with Montaigne’s essais, the root of which is the verb essayer, to attempt or try), and they varied in length from a line to several pages. He’s difficult to read because he is playful and ironic and because of this open and hypothetical quality. His style is also dialectic in the sense that he often approaches a topic by critiquing the assumptions of conventional philosophical arguments, thus trying to find a negative or backwards path to a substantive claim.

Kaufmann:

Each aphorism or sequence of aphorisms–and in Nietzsche’s later works some of these sequences are about a hundred pages long, and the aphoristic style is only superficially maintained–may be considered as a thought experiment. The discontinuity or, positively speaking, the great number of experiments, reflects the conviction that making only one experiment would be one-sided. One may here recall Kierkegaard’s comment on Hegel: “If Hegel had written the whole of his Logic and then said… that it was merely an experiment in thought…then he would certainly have been the greatest thinker who had ever lived. As it is, he is merely comic.” (Journals, ed. Alexander Dru, 134). Nietzsche insists that the philosopher must be willing to make ever new experiments; he must retain an open mind and be prepared, if necessary, “boldly at any time to declare himself against his previous opinion” (FW 296)–just as he would expect a scientist to revise his theories in the light of new experiments.

Think how liberating it must be to imagine each piece of writing as an experiment, as a trial balloon, as inquiry instead of conclusion; too many writers inhibit themselves by trying to stake out their territory, by trying to tell the truth. Instead of writing, This is what happened; you write, Is this what happened, or this, or this?

Theodor Adorno practiced Nietzsche’s dialectical and aphoristic style in spades. See his Minima Moralia. Ludwig Wittgenstein invented one totalizing systematic philosophy in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and then turned around and invented a fragmentary anti-systematic philosophy in the Philosophical Investigations (fragments and thought experiments on the nature of language). See also E. M. Cioran’s books of aphorisms. e.g. The Trouble With Being Born.

dg

Venice Death Trip 2008 (Thomas Mann up to date)

Mar 112010
 

I went to Venice with a doughty band of Vermont College of Fine Arts students in the summer of 2008. Unlike most visitors to the sinking city, I did not hang out on the beach looking for young Polish boys. In fact, I did not see the beach. Faced with large, confusing situations (life, for example), I try to focus on tiny goals. I went to Venice intending to find one bar and one painting; my friend Karen Mulhallen (see her poem in an earlier post) had suggested both. Right away, I could not find the bar. I got separated from the group. I wandered aimlessly in foetid, miasma-ridden back alleys that always seemed to end at a canal. I saw black clad beggar women, a sinister blind accordion player with a wedding party, chess sets in the shapes of animals or Saracen armies. Sometimes in the distance I would see VCFA students who would wave wanly in my direction. The heat was terrific. I felt as if I were in a Thomas Mann story. I felt as if there wasn’t enough passion in my life. I drank too much coffee. After many hours of wandering, I found what I was searching for, the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, a sort of guild hall for Slovene immigrants (long ago). It was closed. I wandered in the old Slovene quarter, saw a woman walking away from me down an alley that led to a canal who seems, in the photo I took, not to be wearing underpants. I saw stray dogs and a couple making out on a bench in a weedy square. The sun was hot. By chance (I later realized) I took a second photo of the woman. I felt that she was my Tadzio, that she would lure me to some malarial doom. At a stall that sold fine, ancient works of art to discerning tourists, I bought a kitchen apron with Michelangelo’s David on the front and a Venizia baseball cap. I returned to the Scuola which was now open. The inside was like a large square chapel with huge paintings on the walls, all by Vittore Carpaccio depicting the truly exciting life of St. Jerome. The last on the right as you come in showed St. Augustine in his study (how St. Augustine comes into the life of St. Jerome I don’t know). St. Augustine sits at his writing desk amid piles of books, pen in hand. He’s staring off to his left, slightly amazed. You can’t quite tell what he’s looking at. There’s a window; perhaps he’s spotted a woman going by without any underpants. But his eyes aren’t aimed at quite the right angle. He could be looking at that the orrery suspended above the window. Mostly he’s just looking. The painting is called “Vision of St. Augustine” which makes me think, you know, that it’s meant to imply that he was short-sighted or perhaps myopic. The study seems outsized and empty. Books along the wall, a special reading chair with a lectern (looks like a piece of exercise apparatus). At the back, there is some sort of home entertainment centre. In the middle of the bare floor sits a diminutive, fluffy, white dog staring up at the saint. Unlike the saint’s eyes, the dog’s are focused, deliberate, curious and intelligent. The dog looks just like Karen’s dog Lucy. As I was examining the painting, two beautiful Venetian women came in with plastic sheets and ladders and covered it up “for restoration.” They climbed ladders, put on attractive white masks that made them look even more beautiful, mysterious and Venetian and set to work with tiny instruments. I stumbled out into the blazing sunlight with my precious Michelangelo art work under my arm. There is another Carpaccio in the city, with the same dog. I could have gone on, but time was late and my students, no doubt, had been missing me.

dg

Leitwort, a technique

Mar 102010
 

I am back from the dead, er, I mean packet flu, er, I mean the really enjoyable weekend I had reading through your wonderful packets.

I was reading a bit in The Portable Nietzsche last night; Jacob is writing an essay about Beyond Good and Evil. Anyway I noticed a passage I had marked years ago, and it reminds me to remind you that technique can be discovered anywhere.

This is a paragraph from Walter Kaufman’s introduction to The Portable Nietzsche.

Taking their cues from Wagner’s leitmotifs, Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig have pointed out, in connection with their remarkable German translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, that the style of the Old Testament often depends on Leitworte, words which are central and particularly emphasized in one passage and then picked up again elsewhere, thus establishing an unobtrusive cross reference–an association which, even if only dimly felt, adds dimension to meaning. Perhaps no major writer is as biblical in this respect as Nietzsche.

And here’s Kristian Evensen’s site explaining Wagner’s leitmotifs. Leitmotifs in Der Ring des Nibelungen – an introduction

See also Wagner’s Use of Leitmotifs on The Horn.

dg

Character Thought (technique)

Feb 282010
 

Capture2

Here’s a note on what I call “novel thought” or “character thought.” It’s an excerpt from a letter to a student.

Novelists use character thought to sew the novel together. Novel thought is very stylized and systematic, unlike real thought. Characters are 1) always looking back, always remembering where they have been and why they have come to where they are. This happens over and over, repetitiously, so that the reader is always being reminded of the past story of the novel/character and the current motivation; 2) always assessing where they are now, what am I doing, why am I doing it, why is that other character doing what he is doing, what does this look like, what does it remind me of? (Thought is action: your characters don’t have to necessarily be right in their assessments, they just have to be true to themselves in the context of what’s gone before.) 3) always looking ahead: given what’s just happened what do I want to do next, what plan can I make, what do I think the other character(s) will do next, how will I react to that?

These sorts of thought should be in the text all the time. Characters should always be connecting events in their own heads (so the reader can remember and see the connection). Every chapter should have some memory or reference to previous chapters, especially the one just before. And every chapter should look ahead, have reference to what’s coming up. All in the character’s mind. Over and over in novels you’ll find a pattern. Chapter opening, then a tiny bit of backfill connecting this chapter or plot step to the last once, maybe a summary of the steps to this point, and a clear sense of what the character plans to get out of the coming scenes, then the event/scenes, then as the chapter closes a bit of reflection on what has just happened and a moment of decision or plan-making, where do I turn next. A novel is always making connections.

For an expansion of this idea with examples from novels see my essay on novel structure  in my book Attack of the Copula Spiders and also in the relevant section of my book on Cervantes The Enamoured Knight.

—Douglas Glover

Gyury & Irma

Feb 232010
 

Capture

This is a revisiting of the post on Kierkegaard and Regine Olsen and the essay Georg Lukacs wrote about them. When I read the essay last week, I saw it as a cunning proto-deconstruction (ie. deconstruction before deconstruction was invented) of Kierkegaard’s gesture of renouncing Regine to ensure her future happiness. Over the weekend, I discovered a biographical essay about Lukacs, “Georg Lukacs: The Antinomies of Melancholy” by Levee Blanc in Other Voices, v.1, n.1 (March 1997). What we find out here is that while Lukacs was writing about Kierkegaard’s “real” reasons for dumping Regine, Lukacs himself was dumping Irma Seidler for the same reasons he attributes to Kierkegaard, ie. that happiness and domestic union might interfere with his philosophical work. In his notes from this period, Lukacs wrote:

Scruples: the impossible nature of marriage…Dread of the destructive influence of happiness, dread that it is beyond my capacity to get my bearings in a broader-based life.

And in a letter to Irma that positively reeks of the freshman romantic poseur and macho intellectual bravado, he writes:

There are people who understand and do not live, and their are others that live but do not understand. The first kind cannot ever really reach the second even though they understand them, and the second can never understand the essence, but then, it doesn’t matter. The feeling of love or hate, the liking somebody or the possibility of learning to like someone, exists, but the categories of understanding do not exist for them.

The message loop then is that in the Lukacs essay on Kierkegaard, Lukacs writes Kierkegaard as channeling Lukacs, but who knows what Kierkegaard really thought?

Regine Olsen eventually married and survived Kierkegaard. Irma Seidler was not so fortunate. Just a few years after Lukacs dumped her, she killed herself by jumping off a bridge in Budapest.

I am trying to draw some lessons from this.

  • No matter how hard we try, we never leave high school behind.
  • There is still something to Lukacs’s critique of the gesture, the pose: all tragic heroes will have terrible home lives because their grand gestures never take into account close human relations. Think, King Lear. Think, Oedipus.
  • There is, on the other hand, something insidious about the barely tacit premise that women and marriage somehow interfere with a man’s ability to think. I am reminded how in one of his novels Lawrence Durrell has a character say, “Women are incapable of categorical thought.” Lukacs seems to be coming close to this in his letter to Irma. There is some evidence here that testosterone causes brain damage. Many women, I think, have remarked on this in the past.
  • And this is not to mention the broken symmetry of Lukacs’s argument about gesture. Somehow deciding to renounce a woman so you can think better is a gesture, a heroic self-creating choice, while the alternative, opting to hang with a someone and think at the same time, is not a gesture, not a heroic self-creating choice, but a kind of muddled life-chaos. There is something fuzzily tautological about what he gets to call a gesture. And this is one of the basic problems with Existentialism as a philosophy; it cheats by surreptitiously applying a secondary value system. Existentialism says choice creates value. But then some choices are better (more authentic) than other choices. (Not, of course, that Lukacs was an Existentialist, but his analysis of Kierkegaard and gesture is about the roots of Existentialism and he works within the premises.)
  • Finally, avoid bridges.

dg

My latest foray into global affairs (an epigram)

Feb 222010
 

Copernicus

THE THROW OF FICTION these days is decidedly dystopian. Novels and movies are chock-a-block with images of the Ends of Times, wherein humans scurry about in shadows, while machines run amok, or the Earth heats up or cools down with catastrophic suddenness, or the undead rage in the streets for healthy blood. The future is a Mad Max movie on hyper-drive, and the stupid and brutal shall rule…

Read More at Global Brief–>

“On the Coming Order, Looking for the new century’s Copernicus”

dg

Feeling blue

Feb 202010
 

My favourite part is the girl who says, “I see you. I see you. I see you.”

Though I can’t quite put my finger on it, there is something ineffably sad about this (aside from the obvious comedy). It’s a parody of a reality TV show about really stupid people re-enacting a really obvious Hollywood reiteration of the Romance of the Noble Savage old-style Euro-colonial racism, thus a parody of an imitation of an imitation of a bad idea. It reminds me of Don Quixote, of course, who is imitating characters in a romantic adventure novel about knights in armour long after people had forgotten what those thugs-in-chain mail  were really like. And Dostoevsky said Don Quixote was the saddest book of all.

Maybe it’s this: our inability to feel real unless we are acting a role, our need for a gesture or form that gives us substance. When we see this in others, it’s comic. But it’s the kind of comedy that expresses a latent fear, in this case the fear that if we look too closely the Self will seem unbearably empty.

dg

Søren & Regine & The Decline of Gesture

Feb 192010
 

Regine Olsen

A few posts and comments back, I counseled people to step back from taking sides in certain sorts of public cultural debates, to take the Hegelian approach and rise above and restructure the argument itself. I just reread Georg Lukacs essay “The Foundering of Form Against Life, Søren Kierkegaard and Regine Olsen” which, as you might expect given Kierkegaard’s antipathy toward Hegel, suggests the opposite view, or at least constructs an opposite view. (Full disclosure: Lukacs was an Hegelian.)  The opposite view is that the gesture (form) can crystallize or shape life, or attempts to do so, while mostly life presents itself as a muddle of motives and options. This is the germ of the  Existentialist idea of creating value by making choices, by committing oneself. The bulk of the essay is an analysis of Kierkegaard’s gesture of renouncing his beloved Regine Olsen. Not only did he renounce her, but he pretended to be a cad, an inveterate seducer, so that she could more easily give him up in her own mind and get on with her life. If there was a chance that she thought Kierkegaard really loved her, she might wait for him or be uncertain about getting into another relationship. Kierkegaard loved her all the while. The gesture was a concrete act, a kind of heroic pose, and a choice he made. But Lukacs is cagey about tracking the uncertainties and ambiguities in the situation (this is where life beclouds the gesture). Kierkegaard performed the gesture because he thought he would ruin Regine’s life, but it seems also clear that he realized that she might clutter his life with pleasure (possibly happiness) and domesticity. So the gesture wasn’t entirely self-sacrificing. Through the rest of his life Kierkegaard waffled in his heart. He never wanted to see Regine because he didn’t ever want to remind her of the happiness they had hoped for or in case she might doubt that he was a cad and seducer; but it seems clear Regine never really quite bought his story and at least sometimes suspected that it was all a pose (Kierkegaard starts to look a bit comic). And once Kierkegaard wrote her a long letter explaining everything (was he hoping to reignite the old passion?), but Regine discussed the letter with her husband and decided to send it back unopened. So the gesture, examined in its particulars, seems less monolithic, less heroic, and less pure than when viewed from afar.

Reading this story from a contemporary standpoint, one is also surprised at the male comedy of Kierkegaard presuming to decide what is right for Regine without, um, actually talking to her. We don’t ever do that today, do we?

Also this is my sly way of introducing Lukacs who was an interesting thinker. See his book The Theory of the Novel which he tells you himself not to think of as a guide.

—Douglas Glover

Pileated Woodpeckers and Gombrowicz

Feb 162010
 

Lucy checking possible fox hole just before Pileated Woodpeckers appeared

Walking Lucy in the woods behind my house on the weekend, I found a pair of Pileated Woodpeckers, male and female. I’ve seen single males from time to time but never a pair–and in the same tree, the male making that strange clucking sound. This was about 15 seconds after my camera ran out of battery.

I read Witold Gombrowicz’s short story “Lawyer Kraykowski’s Dancer” (from his collection Bacacay). A weedy little semi-invalid (he suffers from epilepsy) tries to jump the ticket line at the opera. A wealthy, handsome lawyer drags him back. The semi-invalid, surprisingly, becomes obsessed with the lawyer. He stalks him, tries to imitate him, even tries to help him bed the married woman he is pursuing. When the lawyer finally manages a clandestine kiss with his sweetie in a secluded park, the narrator has a (very literary) grand mal seizure (the “dance” of the title) and is hospitalized. The lawyer escapes to the country. Deep shades of Dostoevsky and Gogol here. Notes from the Underground and “The Overcoat.” But it also, very interestingly, echoes some of the things René Girard says about the triangulation of desire in Deceit, Desire and the Novel, for example, the idea that the self is created when it identifies with the desire of the other (which is the principle upon which all modern advertising works). What is fascinating about the story is the power it generates from the protagonist’s surprise reaction to being yanked back into line. Instead of feeling anger and resentment, he falls under a kind of spell of obsequious adoration for his persecutor. Shamelessly, he debases himself, courts public humiliation. Very mysterious.

dg

Night thoughts of an insomniac reader

Feb 122010
 

I finished re-reading Gombrowicz’s A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes. G was sick with heart disease and his wife realized the only thing that could take his mind off his trouble was to get him to talk about philosophy. So she and a friend sat through these little talks and, I guess, took notes or these are G’s notes. Apparently, some of the original was unreadable hence the dropped lines indicated in the text. G’s main idea is that the history of philosophy is the story of the step-by-step reduction or narrowing of our conception of what can be accomplished by reason. He can be pretty acerbic. Here he is on Nietzsche:

In order to understand Nietzsche, it is necessary to understand an idea as simple as that of raising cows.

A cattleman is going to try to improve the species in such a way that he will let the weakest cows die and will keep the strongest cows and bulls for breeding.

All of Nietzschean morality finds its basis here.

Then I read the first and last stories in James Purdy’s 63: Dream Palace. Purdy is something else. He works to create a patina of anxious ordinariness that he then ruptures with violence. A young father grapples with his little son, forcing him to spit out something metallic concealed in his mouth. The object turns out to be the father’s wedding ring (the mother/wife had run off with someone else shortly after the boy was born). The boy (he really is little, sleeps with a stuffed crocodile–now that I think of it, that should have been a clue) kicks the father in the balls and leaves him weeping on the carpet.

I went on reading into the morning.

dg

The end of everything as we know it, but then I never made any money out of writing anyway

Feb 112010
 

Here’s a smart piece about the future of book publishing by Susan Piver called “Book Publishers, Stop Scaring me.” I notice posters, pundits and journalists talking about the similarities between publishing now and the music industry just before digital music hit. Piver used to be a music exec. Here‘s her take on Amazon v Macmillan and the history of the music industry.

After this I am going to take a break from the terrifying implications of the meltdown of the publishing industry and think only happy thoughts.

dg

The Subjectless Subject and the Death of the Author

Feb 032010
 

Funny how ideas seem to develop threads of their own. The theoretical subject is important to writers because it has an impact on ideas of self, soul, character, and society. The subject here is what we used to call the self, Descartes’ thinking self, that which is conscious (of something). More and more it is thought of as a relation and not an thing itself. That’s because it is difficult to imagine being conscious without being conscious of something. Hence consciousness (the subject) somehow resides in the object (the thing you are conscious of). I come into focus the moment you (the Other) are on the scene. This is much like what happens in a story or an essay in which characters come to life as soon as they are in action (relation, conflict) with other characters or society (or some force or rule which begins to define the subject in opposition).

“I don’t think there is actually a sovereign founding subject, a universal form of subject that one might find everywhere. I am very skeptical and very hostile towards this conception of the subject. I think on the contrary, that the subject is constituted through practices of subjection, or, in a more autonomous way, through practices of liberation, of freedom, as in Antiquity, starting of course, from a number of rules, styles and conventions that can be found in the cultural setting.”

Michel Foucault. (1996) [1984]. An Aesthetics of Existence. In Foucault Live. collected Interviews, 1961-1984. Sylvère Lotringer (Ed.). New York: Semiotext(e), p. 452. Translation modified.

In this regard, here’s a link to the famous Roland Barthes’ essay about the Death of the Author.

I got set onto this little meditation looking at Andrew Gallix’s blog. See the blogroll for the site.

I also realize we seem suddenly to be descending into Theory in a big way. Not to worry–it is a temporary fever that will pass.

dg

The subjectless subject & point of view from the point of impossibility: Insomniac obsessions

Feb 022010
 

Interestingly, from the point of view of a writer creating an objective correlative, there are places language can go that are impossible actually to think. They are like Black Holes in the text, haunting, uncanny. Fascinating to contemplate and try to get into a piece of fiction not just theoretical nonfiction as here.

“All theoretical projects require a subject that can conduct the project. At least this is a marker of all successful theoretical projects. One can imagine a theory which cannot be conducted by a subject, but any elucidation of this project would be–in Austin’s terms–infelicitous.” Geoff Wildanger See full post here.

“And this brings me to a possible Lacanian definition of auratic presence: it is simply the fantasm, the fantasm as – for Lacan – an imaginary scenario which stages an impossible scene, something that could only be seen from the point of impossibility.” Slavoj Zizek. See full excerpt from Lacanian Ink here.

dg

Over the Weekend

Feb 012010
 

Over the weekend I read Michael Slater’s tiny 104-page biography of Charles Dickens. In the same mail delivery, I received Peter Ackroyd’s 1144-page biography of Dickens. I spent a lot of time just looking at the two books side-by-side on my bed (where I read) wondering about the disparity between the two. I haven’t finished the Ackroyd book yet (check out his novel Chatterton). I also read Theodor Adorno’s essay (in his books of essays called Prisms) on Kafka which was brilliant as usual and made strange sense out of Kafka’s desire to have his papers burned and to remain obscure. And then I read a dreamy, odd, surprising William Faulkner story “Red Leaves” about Indians (probably Chickasaws), slaves and human sacrifice. (For an interesting thematic variation, see D. H. Lawrence’s human sacrifice story “The Woman Who Road Away.”) I had earlier read something about this: the Chickasaws were one of the Five Civilized Tribes forced to move to Oklahoma by Andrew Jackson in the Trail of Tears episode (as in how America invented Ethnic Cleansing). The Chickasaw had African slaves which they took to Oklahoma with them. After the Civil War and Emancipation, the Chickasaw refused to give up their slaves since they believed they weren’t governed by American legislation. If I remember correctly, the actor Don Cheadle had an ancestor who was a Chickasaw slave. This is mentioned in Henry Louis Gates’s book In Search of our Roots.

dg

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

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

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

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

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

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