"Signs are taken for wonders. "We would see a sign!""

Astonishing.

A counterpoint with which I largely agree. Wood is limited in his ability to speak of the patterns that prevent a work from collapsing into a mere cobbling-together of separate, stylistically distinguished strands. Wood's evaluations---about style, about consciousness, about the ability to render a scene or a character realistically, about, in other words, representation---direct the tyro novelist's attention to precisely those elements of his prose which already cause him a great deal of concern; distract him from the larger question of how to make those elements cohere.

If there's only one thing you can read this week, let it be this.

Heh.

This tactile, fey pleasure from Julian Barnes is the only good to come from the New Yorker's otherwise hackneyed, thematically transparent offerings of the past few months.

Also: don't forget William Styron.

The most excellent video in the observable universe.

I highly recommend...

...something not by James Wood, for a change.

Closed Timelike Curves (CTCs) and Computational Complexity

An argument that I only half-understand, but nevertheless love for its sheer subversive audacity.

Quoting Iris Murdoch

Snatches of The Black Prince keep coming back to me, some two years after I read it. This passage (the book's last) I can still quote from memory:

I hear it has even been suggested that both Bradley Pearson and I are both fictions, inventions of a minor novelist. Fear will inspire any hypothesis. No, no. I exist. And Bradley existed. Here upon the desk as I write these words stands the little bronze of the buffalo lady. Also, a gilt snuff box. And Bradley Pearson's story remains too, a kind of thing more durable than these. Art is not cosy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing.


(Mostly correct, I think, although I don't have the book beside me for reference.)

This song has prevented me from doing anything substantial today.

That's pretty f**ing good for a literary critic

"Joyce allays every anxiety ... except the anxiety of coming after him."

An excellent overview of The Man Without Qualities.

Something I wrote a while ago

I've stopped writing in this style nowadays, so this must remain unfinished. It's almost entirely fictional, of course.

Dez Lopez's month as a student in my twenty-strong calculus class went poorly. Usually several minutes late, he would slouch into his seat and fix a pair of reddened, stricken eyes on the blackboard, as if signaling to me his extreme familiarity -- and as a consequence boredom -- with the subject. The notebook on his desk would open only upon gentle but urgent pleas on my part, pleas that began by being general so as not to attract attention ("I'd really like it if everyone took out their notebooks, please") but then inevitably, as even the most obstinate of the rest had begun their scribbling, proceeded to the embarrassingly specific: "Dez, would you please take down the problems on the board"; "Dez, maybe you could work the second problem?". It seemed there was nothing to him that was more galling than being asked to "work", and he would squander tens of minutes inventing excuses that were plausible enough to demand my immediate and already compromised attention, "My grandmother's sick, and my step-grandfather's on the phone", excuses that would dissolve whatever earnestness the class had managed to accumulate until then. He would cast barely-concealed glances at the cellphone perpetually on his knee, and it was only during these times that his otherwise grim features would break into an occasional, rather beautiful smile, lightening not only his mood but my own, giving me a momentary sense of encouragement at my ability to accommodate even the most difficult of my students. The key to my interactions with him was precisely this overreaching brand of accommodation, one that sought to bring about, within him, a grudging quietude rather than a startling outbreak of sincerity, a rearrangement rather than a transformation. I was always realistic in my assessment of how far we, as casual teacher me and shiftless student him, could play our respective roles and still achieve our respective goals, mine a completion of the syllabus, his the obtainment of a good grade, preferably an A, in the class: I never, from the beginning, sought anything more than such a state of mutual poise.

Ten classes into the semester Mr. Lopez -- as I once, in finally expressed annoyance, had addressed him -- had already frustrated whatever fragile hopes I had sustained for our relationship. His tardy forays into my class were punctuated by his rather alarming accusations of my having begun my lecture session intentionally early, accusations that I dealt with not in the graceful, firm manner that is supposed of a teacher, but timidly, considerately, using his comments as an excuse to lure him into his seat, continually engaging him as he confronted me, his blue eyes looking unabashedly into my own, brandished cellphone palpable, a symbol of his defiance; and the class, silent, looking on to see who would in fact win this implicit battle of vitality. Even when he took his seat it seemed he had conceded nothing; as I toured the classroom on one of my supervisory patrols he would consider the creased wooden surface of his desk with a shrill nail, prompting an immediate but ineffectual reprimand. It seemed he was also prurient, a man in joyful rather than apologetic thrall to his masculine urges: the girls that sat close to him did so in the unsmiling knowledge that their presence would sooner or later exact a prospecting glance or prolonged stare, or worse, some easy declaration about their aspect that too unfortunately could not be reported, insubstantial as it was in isolation, as inappropriate. No, Desmond Lopez was unfit, a person that inhabited his obvious role as bad student with a practiced insouciance far too unbearable to witness, and in my report of his delinquency to my employers I was to admit that he was the first person in whose ultimate ability to succeed as a student I had lost all faith. A few days later he was told to discipline himself or drop the class, and it came as little surprise that he chose the last option; we agreed, in the days following his departure, that it was the best, in fact the only conceivable course.

When I saw Dez outside my classroom a few days later I had an abrupt, premonitory knowledge of his purpose: he had come to apologize. As I walked to the door to meet him I felt the oppressive awareness of the past weeks, the one that had grown unbearably sensitive to his presence and actions, peeling away. Who was I to have declared him bad student? When his inevitable apologies reached my ears they had already grown stale; I had already forgiven him. Or was 'forgive' the correct word? I felt like a drunk referee of power, a man who would rather assume the ascendancy that his position granted him than engage the empathy that he was supposed to bring to it. Had I only, vulgarly, stared at his faults? There had been the time when he had not only solved all the problems that were assigned him but also explained them to his audience; I remember having thanked him curtly and waved him towards the bag of incentive-candy on the table... my attitude to him had been forbidding from the outset; his sullenness was a simple answer to my own, deeper inability to accept him as he was. In the hallway outside the classroom he administered his apology, head bent downward, legs apart, figure slightly hunched: It seemed I had won, the colorless victory of an unequal battle. My hand reached across the space between us and rested itself on his shoulder. Our conversation ended; I wished him luck.

How I hate the post-structuralists.

Heaney in the evening

Something of his sad freedom
As he rode the tumbril
Should come to me, driving,
Saying the names

Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard.

Watching the pointing hands of country people,
Not knowing their tongue.

Out here in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy, and at home.

Please read this.

Don't let anyone tell you that free-indirect style is restricted to third-person narrative.

You'd better watch this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7IZmRnAo6s

James

Four months ago, in a coffee-shop by the mid-morning traffic, I had just finished -- for what must have been the second time, although I have no memory of the first -- reading Ivy Day in the Committee Room. The stupid bewilderment that asserted itself that day continued -- as I made my way through the rest of Dubliners -- to grip me for most of the rest of my month-long visit to India. Clearly I knew very little about literature, and what I did seemed then tied only to its stylistic gestures, the aspects of its structure that had purely to do with (say) the lengths of sentences, of paragraphs, of the webs of commas and semi-colons that entangled a seemingly innocuous sequence of words and imparted to it a meaning which it would no doubt otherwise lack. Hardly would I begin a sentence in Dubliners, than I would be confronted by what had just passed before my eyes, a story perhaps, or even a paragraph, aesthetically deficient (or so an old but recognizable self would have claimed), but still endowed with enough meaning to propel it beyond any hope of criticism. Of what use were `rules' about nouns, verbs and adverbs, about indirect style, about aesthetic, when there were such authors as Joyce, authors able to regard their subjects with such uncompromising attention as to make even the most seasoned reader incoherent? It seemed I had to start over, and this time really understand what I wanted to say; not only that, but what the character needed to say, and how what I needed to say related to him. I was -- and had been, ever since my adolescent obsessions with David Mitchell and his kind -- on the `wrong' path, which is to say, on a path that could only yield so much if measured in terms of pure meaning.

Henry James has mostly rescued me from the despair -- fortunately short-lived in my case -- that is the inevitable consequence of reading too much Joyce. His style is of course impeccable, and re-asserts with a vitality that the longest of sentences, the ones that can speak of the subject -- inevitably a character -- with the greatest of specificity, those not distracted by a yearning for the accumulation of detail without reference to who it is that is accumulating it, is are the one ones best adopted. His characters are perfect bearers of his themes, at once universal and unrecognizable, slaves as much to their own aspects as they are to his, and simultaneously in harmony with the plot, which seems to proceed untrammeled by the vagaries of its inhabitants. His explorations of `consciousness -- a term that is perhaps too broad to comfortably encompass the essentially metaphysical that is the unique quality of every single James story -- form a corpus of psychological truth that shall probably forever remain unchallenged. Of course he is known as `The Master', and of course he is deified even amongst the most critical of literary connoisseurs. And today, on his 166th birthday, there will of course be thousands of writers everywhere who will remember his writings with nothing less than pure reverence.

It came over him that the test result would be positive. The words that were said every day to others would be said to him, in that quiet consulting room whose desk and carpet and square modern armchair would share indissolubly in the moment. There was a large tranquil photograph in a frame, and a view of the hospital chimney from the window. He was young, without much training in stoicism. What would he do once he left the room? He dawdled on, rather breathless, seeing visions in the middle of the day. He tried to rationalize the fear, but its pull was too strong and original. It was inside himself, but the world around him, the parked cars, the cruising taxi, the church spire among the trees, had also been changed. They had been revealed. It was like a drug sensation, but without the awareness of play. The motorcyclist who lived over the road clumped out in his leathers and attended to his bike. Nick gazed at him and looked away in a regret that held him and glazed him and kept him apart. There was nothing this man could do to help him. None of his friends could save him. The time came, and they learned the news in the room they were in, at a certain moment in their planned and continuing day. They woke the next morning, and after a while it came back to them. Nick searched their faces as they explored their feelings. He seemed to fade pretty quickly. He found himself yearning to know of their affairs, their successes, the novels and the new ideas that the few who remembered him might say he never knew, he never lived to find out. It was the morning's vision of the empty street, but projected far forward, into afternoons like this one decades hence, in the absent hum of their own business. The emotion was startling. It was a sort of terror, made up of emotions from every stage of his short life, weaning, homesickness, envy and self-pity; but he felt that the self-pity belonged to a larger pity. It was a love of the world that was shockingly unconditional. He stared back at the house, and then turned and drifted on. He looked in bewilderment at number 24, the final house with its regalia of stucco swags and bows. It wasn't just this street corner but the fact of a street corner at all that seemed, in the light of the moment, so beautiful.
<\blockquote>

(From Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, a novel influenced and `in explicit dialogue with' Henry James. James himself is too varied to encapsulate in a blog quote.)

Another frustrating incomplete article

I may never finish writing this article, but here's an initial draft.

Infinite louda

I agree with Adam-Mars Jones when he says, in his review of James Wood's The Book Against God, that "[...]it is hard to be engaged by a novelist so awkward with figurative language[...]". He quotes this sentence as one of his (expectedly three) examples: "the air slowly labelled her white cheeks with two pink dots." I have a small theory as to how that sentence may have come about, and it assumes the following causal chain of authorial reasoning:

1) The verb `labeled' is inspired, probably spontaneous. At this point the phrase `The air labeled' is in the author's mind. He's probably asking himself: "What did it label?" to which the immediate answer is "her cheeks, of course".

2) The phrase "The air labeled her cheeks" is already encouraging, and needs only something a little more specific, because as it is it seems only puzzling "How can the air `label' anything?" At this point the author feels a conflict between his desperate need to cling to his beautiful and outre verb `labeled' and his awareness of the fact that the reader may not know what he means if he leaves the phrase untouched. This is usually a dangerous place to find oneself, inasmuch as it could lead to a string of frantic additions and deletions that could in turn lead to an abject abandonment of one's subject at the expense of `honing' a single sentence. More often than not what emerges is not only imprecise but also has the feeling of self-consciousness about it. Here Wood, oddly enough, has tried to qualify his airy metaphor with an absurd numeric attention to detail, "The air labeled her cheeks with two pink dots". Why "two"? The sense of relief that Wood no doubt felt at this happy rescue of his valuable sentence must have at least been qualified by his intense literary consciousness, his knowledge of his forbears and how they would have frowned upon this unseemly display of a figurative skill that is more bluster than brawn; must have at least kept him tossing that night.

`The Actors'

My latest female character is 40, married for 15 years, and has a husband that for the most part ignores her. Mrs. Ghosh (the character in question) is the secretary and part-time store manager of Selbeck Inc., and in the course of her routine has cause to meet with and speak to Jonathan Sweetwater, former bartender and current Selbeck Inc. employee. Their interactions, as seen (in third-person) through both Mr. Sweetwater's and Mrs. Ghosh's eyes, will form the first part of The Actors (the title of the novel that I will attempt to begin over the next several months). I'm of course not very sure as to where The Actors will take me; this is my third novelistic attempt in as many years, and none of the previous ones have amounted to much if measured purely by word-count. In fact, much of why I'm writing this novel has little to do with my being convinced that I have something substantial to say. I find myself gripped by a consternation nowadays, a certainty that my lack of novelistic output is a natural result of an inability to express myself rather than (as I would like to hold) a reluctance, and my beginning the The Actors is more directly correlated with an immediate need to dispel such a consternation than (say) with a burst of meaningful creativity that is supposed to propel such fictive pieces.

I have some goals for this novel. I want to finish writing a second 100000-word-ish novel with a greater consciousness of structure than was evident in my first. I want to mime a free indirect speech style that does not degenerate into character slang at any point (thereby drawing attention to itself) but instead is content to stay in the background, gently framing characters using their emotional adjectives (and adverbs, which, contrary to my unformed notions in the past, can be very important esp. when they are owned by a character) rather than the author's. I want to leave behind, for now, the obsession with the unreliable narrator that gripped me all of 2008, until I understand exactly what kinds of unreliability are interesting (as opposed to simply gaudy). Above all, I want to see if I can tell a story that draws my characters more sharply than any combination of descriptions, psychological or otherwise, can do. The last will possibly be the greatest challenge, because it seems more a structural aspect than a purely metaphysical one, bringing about questions of economy (like `is this paragraph appropriate here? or at all?') and organization (`What chronology is best?' `How will the present tense be used?') that are strictly external to any conception of character. I have, needless to say, ignored structure so thoroughly in my survey, these past many years, of modern literature and its precedents, that to now internalize its concepts seems daunting.

Speaking of metaphysical questions: I have one such here that I have been unable to articulate for sometime now: On a plane of pure consciousness, do males differ fundamentally from females? That is to say: it is unquestionable that both genders are capable of feeling, but is it possible that we not only feel about different things (like men about sports and women about jewelry) but feel about the things we feel about in different ways? (I can't explain this any better, I'm afraid. Perhaps a discussion would help. :) )

I rarely put up links for their own sake, but this one made me laugh out loud (for the first time in a few weeks).

Contains, as it surely must, several rather revelatory reflections about the nature of mathematical collaboration and approval. The author, William Thurston, is a Fields Medallist and Professor of Mathematics at Cornell University.

The elementary rule of three

From The Economist, March 14th, 2009:

For over an hour, Chiranjeevi, or “the immortal one”, as the actor has been known for three decades, addressed the multitude on March 10th. Except for one dreadful hush, the clamour of an estimated 400,000 was unceasing. When he attacked the corruption of AP’s ruling Congress party, it rose. When he accused the state’s main opposition Telugu Desam Party (TDP) of neglecting the poor during its previous rule, it soared. When Chiranjeevi promised to scatter both parties in AP’s state election and India’s general one, which will be held simultaneously next month, the din was tremendous.

From Terry Eagleton's review of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion:

What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them?

From William Thurston's On Proof and Progress in Mathematics:

This inner motivation might lead us to think that we do mathematics solely for its own sake. That’s not true: the social setting is extremely important. We are inspired by other people, we seek appreciation by other people, and we like to help other people solve their mathematical problems.

Eagleton on Spivak

Like most questions of style, Spivak’s obscurantism is not just a question of style. Its duff ear for tone and rhythm, its careless way with verbal texture, its theoretical soundbites (‘Derrida has staged the homo-eroticity of European philosophy in the left-hand column of Glas’), spring quite as much from the commodified language of the US as they do from some devious attempt to undermine it. A sentence which begins ‘At 26, graphing himself into the seat of Aufhebung, Marx sees the necessity for this critical enterprise’ combines the vocabulary of Hegel with the syntax of Hello! Spivak’s language, lurching as it does from the high-toned to the streetwise, belongs to a culture where there is less and less middle ground between the portentous and the homespun, the rhetorical and the racy. One whiff of irony or humour would prove fatal to its self-regarding solemnity. In the course of this book, Spivak writes with great theoretical brilliance on Charlotte Brontë and Mary Shelley, Jean Rhys and Mahasweta Devi; but she pays almost no attention to their language, form or style. Like the old-fashioned literary scholarship it despises, the most avant-garde literary theory turns out to be a form of good old-fashioned content analysis.

Why not feel?

Someone who:

-> Reads this blog.

-> Remembers my birthday, and,

-> Can spare $90.00,

should post-haste make arrangements to buy me this most excellent book.

Henry James's explorations of Maisie Farange's psyche can be, if not more, at least as complex as Dr. Rudin's terse expository charges into the nature of the real numbers. An hour reading each of these excellent authors will plunge anyone into a trance from which recovery may not even be desirable, leave alone possible; trances within which any art may be purveyed, any theorem proven.

Though what if the act of writing the task out is itself sufficient to remember it?

Oh, my blog turned two yesterday. This would be insignificant if not for one of my latest novelistic concepts (I have far too many floating about in my head for my own good), which depends on the many ideas that this medium has spawned over the past years. Here's to another two years of sporadic posts, I say.

A remarkably acerbic article...

... by Wood's standards. John Bayley, as some might recall, is a Professor of English at Oxford, Henry James scholar, man of letters, and until 8th February 1999 the henpecked husband of Iris Murdoch.

Two poems from Paul Celan

  "Untitled"

You lie amid a great listening,
enbushed, enflaked.

Go to the Spree, to the Havel,
go to the meathooks,
the red apple stakes
from Sweden--

Here comes the gift table,
it turns around an Eden--

The man became a sieve, the Frau
had to swim, the sow,
for herself, for no one, for everyone--

The Landwehr Canal won't make a murmur.
Nothing

       stops.

(From the translation by John Felstiner.)

"Death Fugue"


Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon death is a master from Germany
we drink you at sundown and in the morning and we drink
and we drink you
death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue
he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true

(Excerpt from the translation by Michael Hamburger.)

In memoriam

http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/788.html

An aspect of criticism is to coax a series of abstractions from a text that is brave enough to be ambiguous about them. Whether these abstractions help or hinder our understanding of the work depends mostly on the type of the text and its aims. A book that is about 'strife in India and its uncompromising effect on its subjects', for example, may in fact be literal enough that any difficulty in its interpretation can be traced directly to the authorial source; perhaps, we are warranted in feeling, the author does not yet control his themes well enough to enable him to be clearer about his meaning. Another problem with such thematically obvious writing is its tendency to degenerate into little more than a mouthpiece for its author's strident declarations; books like The White Tiger fall into this broad category, where characters are trodden upon in order to voice the apparently more urgent contentions of their creator (that in the case of The White Tiger these contentions are ordinary enough to be meaningless is not itself a valid criticism, because the first responsibility of such 'social-message' novels is to express such ordinary truths forcefully enough that any doubts about their ordinariness disappear. ). Such works are usually immune to criticism precisely because their so-called 'social message' is dire enough and weighty enough to expel any expectations of literariness. Implicit to such an appraisal is the thesis that the author is in a position to 'say something important', a position that we the 'common readers' can never obtain simply by the trivial tautology that we do not currently occupy it. This thesis is not unlike a potential argument for God, not unlike an argument for a preferred frame of reference that supersedes others, and contradicts rather than subverts the classical aims of literature. Novels like TWT and obviously interventional works like The Fountainhead cannot be subjected to any degree of meaningful discussion without first abandoning their 'social messages', and agreeing that such messages cannot be conflated with their thematic content. The question is then whether they are in fact possessed of themes that can be annotated and meaningfully pointed to, and characters that reflect a certain aspect of reality that is tied with these themes.

In fw, waiting. There are the most unique and beautiful buildings here, buildings made entirely of brick of varying shades of redness. One particularly striking example I saw on my way to main street: faded orangish-claret and punctuated with scrapings of a white cement-like essence that imparts a decided character to its facade, like an old man not afraid to conceal the invasions of grey on his scalp. Further down on main street, as if affirming the kind knowing senility of the place, there are roads made wholly of brick. The uniform ruled redness in the distance clarifies itself when approached, defies charges of sameness by presenting its varying contours as evidence of an inner unperceived essence. The cool sunlight meanwhile suggests to the mind an image of black metallic steel chairs, stretched feet, and the promise of some moistening beverage.

Jacob is 24, unmarried, and loves fw. He told me his friends were 'all moving to Austin' and scoffed at the thought. I assured him that if the rest of fw was as featured as downtown, his decision was the wiser one. He explained the bricks by pointing to the wall where a photograph of fw in its early days, a hansom in the foreground and an old man beside it. He said the brick roads were laid to facilitate the horses that trotted to and from the slaughterhouse, so that their hooves would feel more at home on their loving surfaces.

Later: in barnes and nobel. Almost bought three more Henry James novels but had to stop myself: this book buying profligacy has gone far enough already.

(From a journal entry dated Jan 23).

Why not take the plunge?

Just read Coetzee's review of Naipaul's Half A Life (the final essay in Inner Workings, a collection of articles about authors that have influenced Coetzee). What I take away from such articles nowadays varies in fundamental ways from the enthusiastic but finally callow appraisals of style that have marred my thought in the recent past; I have begun to understand, for example, that the primary function of a literary novel lies in the themes that surreptitiously inhabit it: what it is about, what it appears to be about, what it wants to be about. Style on the other hand does not seem a commodious enough vehicle to contain the separations between the social and individual that distinguish art from reality. Structure in a novel, by this token, can be interpreted as a desire to frame the more meaningful aspects of one's reality (a necessary combination of social events and individual thought and expression) while omitting those that do not appear to contain any meaning. Such a structure, far from being (as I previously felt) a vulgar attempt to make the art more 'presentable' to an audience, tokens a perhaps genuine desire to say what is meant. There is nothing inherently social in the desire to impart form to a formless reality; in fact, I feel now that this is more scrupulous an aspiration than a more obviously individual, specious subversion that is a hallmark of the stylistic writer.
(From a journal entry dated January 7.)