John Donne, Undone

Imagine Donne’s famous poem/meditation rewritten to read,

Every man IS an island unto himself.
Ask not for whom the bell tolls.
It’s not my problem.

Politics aside, I’m thinking of a fairly recent literary trend in which the characters of the novels shun human relationships and responsibilities, display little affect and seek isolation. They barely have a pulse.

The celebrated French author, Michel Houellebecq, writes with a chilling remoteness. In his 2012 book The Map and The Territory the protagonist, an artist, is so cold his most enduring relationship is with his boiler. Made objects hold his fascination more than people. Both parents in the book end their own lives and he lives out his own as if on an island in a sea of grassland. In real life he was born and raised on a small island off Madagascar in the Indian Ocean until age six when his mother and father are said to have, lost interest in him.

The English novelist Tom McCarthy writes with the same obsessive impulse. Characters populate his pages you would never invite to your fantasy dinner party much less meet at Starbucks for a cuppa. They seem bloodless, so de-humanized they dissolve into ideas. The action is deliberately repetitive. One critic said while reading him he experienced a will to no longer live. Indeed, both writers dwell on death in its many permutations.

Yet these are risning stars in the literary night sky. McCarthy was short-listed for the Man-Booker prize and Houellebecq is winner of the Priz Novembre, the French equivalent. Like it or not they are important voices, conceptual literary artists, in our midst whose purpose seems to be to provoke and thereby widen our perception of what our market-based system and technology have done to us. Under the illusion of connectivity we may be moving further toward an atomized existence.

Whether they are writing parody, forcing us to confront life and death or are simply unable themselves to create emotionally fleshed out characters remains unanswered for me. One critic characterized Houellebecq’s language as having a crystalline brutality. He seems to wallow in the vulgar and vile aspects of existence. Michiko Kakutani, a N.Y. Times critic, called him a deeply repugnant read.

The French writer enters his novel as a major character only to be murdered and dismembered with his body parts assembled around the room to resemble a Jackson Pollack action painting. He puts death in our faces as a way to force us into a confrontation with mortality. Their counterpart in the art world would be Damien Hurst whose dead sheep in formaldehyde was recently exhibited at LACMA.

In McCarthy’s novel C we are given a surfeit of codes, signs, hums and whirs which may be metaphors for larger meanings or lead us nowhere. Again, intimacy is depicted with objects rather than through human relationship. When Serge, our protagonist is close with his sister, incest is suggested.

These are writers who set out to disturb, to rattle us from complacency. They proceed, as far as possible, to break the rules of conventional narrative with digressions, misdirection, plotlines withheld and an absence of motivation. Worldly goods are seen as utilitarian. Characters live austere lives above any interest in possessions. I take this as a statement rejecting the commodification we have come to embrace as consumers. Psychological probing to explain behavior is absent as well. Whereas 19th century fiction moved toward the revelatory these books seem to propel the reader to the abstruse. The translucent is much preferred over the transparent. There is no resolution to our predicament.

Non-literary page-turners of the best-seller variety are designed to shorten the flight-time from LAX to Hong Kong. In contrast, the aforementioned books will make you squirm and demand your attention. You may get agitated. Whether you will see the world from a slightly different angle or just attack the flight attendant I’m not sure.

Reading Proust

Our teacher, Frank Dwyer, who is also a poet-actor-director-raconteur, is reading aloud to the class, in his mellifluous tones, Remembrance of Things Past, starting with Swann’s Way, in between his own digressions which only peripherally connect to the text just as Proust himself seems to have had total recall for events and observations in their minutia which probably never happened though it reads like a memoir and he writes in enormous sentences like this one with the subject and predicate separated by a dozen subordinate clauses so that without Frank’s anecdotes, such as the one in which he had recently finished his role in a high school production where he sat in a large cushioned chair and portrayed a king or some such potentate and later was walking in New Orleans with a girlfriend when he spotted a similar looking chair in a shop whereupon he entered, sat down and his friend grew angry and started crying and when asked why, she first said nothing at all but then admitted that she no longer recognized him when he sat in that cursed throne and so this somehow illustrated a point made by Proust but no one could remember just what that was; nevertheless we were all thankful for his interruption of himself so we wouldn’t, ourselves, slip into some reverie because our collective lids were getting heavy, not from boredom but due to the transport of his delivery of Proust's language as if forgotten ports were calling and we could not resist the flotilla down small tributaries, nor could we suspend the effort of holding the heft of the narrator’s brilliant illumination of bourgeois conventions many of which still pertain; namely how we do not quite say what we mean for fear of revealing aspects of ourselves we do not wish to disclose to those persons, though they may already be well-known to them or possibly how we withhold our true sentiments in polite conversation by habit and perhaps, on the way home, rehearse retroactively what we had wanted to say, all these revelations of the psyche worthy of pause commensurate with their value to us as truth-seekers, as I lapsed in and out of consciousness I was rewarded by the way meticulous details conveyed by the author brought to mind my own madeleine which was cooked bell peppers served at a neighbor’s table when I was about six years old and stored in my olfactory warehouse since then, along with my association of a brief inability to pronounce words beginning with the letter “L” causing much embarrassment since a girl across from me was named Lillian; all this comes back to me as Proust slowed time so that we, too, might regard the objects of our lives, largely unseen by familiarity, to be apprehended in their fullness, not only visually and by touch but metaphorically for what cargo is carried in each for us, as symbols; how a rubberband might regress me to age nine when I carried baseball trading cards in my pocket under crossed rubberbands or a sheet of onionskin paper reminds me of letters sent during World War II by an uncle in his graceful hand and the flood of memories released in that image in addition to which Proust’s rendering of a church steeple or a visit by a priest to his great aunt is described with manifold allusions which align him with the impressionists who painted seasons of haystacks as well as the cubists in their prismatic depiction of the human face as seen from various angles, all anticipates the demise of the European colonial system, thereby replacing the single perspective of a dominant culture with the post-modern view that we contain a multitude of versions.

They Didn't Give Up Their Day Jobs

It’s a good thing William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens or Franz Kafka stuck it out. It didn’t seem to limit their output; in fact they mined their professions in quite different ways.

Stevens was a Modernist poet who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955. He died that summer having worked up until his death as a lawyer for Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co. He was offered a faculty position at Harvard but declined because it would have interfered with his post at the insurance company.

His desk job as vice president of Hartford Insurance was what Stevens called, his necessary angel. He regarded reality as an essential grounding for his imaginative flights. Without it maybe he would have written in tongues from cloud nine. As it is, Stevens’ body of work is both cerebral and sensual; sometimes silly, other times it resists interpretation almost successfully.

A few years ago Peggy and I made a pilgrimage to his Hartford home; a modest house on an upscale block. He is said to have walked to his office and back each day, about a mile, rain or shine. There is a story of someone offering him a lift one day which he accepted provided there would be no talking. Apparently when his work day ended he switched immediately to his transcendent mode and guarded that time fiercely.

Dr. Williams was a Rutherford, New Jersey general practitioner. He didn’t write so much about his medical experience but it made him a close listener and observer. His poetry picked up the cadences of ordinary speech. Many contemporary poets, including Allen Ginsberg, are his heirs. Williams was a descendent of Whitman in terms of his plain language and inclusiveness.

I once met a woman who was delivered by Dr. Williams. Imagine being brought into this world by the pre-eminent poet; first seen by his knowing eyes. That would be better than a signed first edition. I wonder if she carries that specialness around with her.

I expect Franz Kafka labored, not happily, at his job with the Workers Accident Insurance Company. Yet he was able to transform the tedium and detached nature of the work into high art. He captured the predicament of twentieth century man. Kafka grasped the existential despair of bureaucracy and the labyrinthine path which separates man from the consequences of his job.

It is remarkable how these writers found the creative energy, after a day’s toil, to give us the gift of their genius. Most poets in America are forced into academia. Yet Ted Kooser, a former Poet Laureate, was also in the insurance business and Philip Levine still draws upon his days on the assembly line in Detroit.

In South America it isn’t uncommon for writers to hold political office. Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa saw no division or distraction from their chosen art form.

The closer an artist can live in the working world the more enriched is his work, provided he doesn’t get sucked up in the workaday mindlessness and conventions. The writer/poet/artist lives both in and outside the circle. Too far inside blunts consciousness, too far removed blinds and deafens the scribe.

And then there is Emily Dickinson………….

Meta-narratives

It's been my habit to look for the metanarrative which is a way of locating a story within a greater context such as the Enlightenment or Feminism or the American Dream etc... To the post-modernists this is nothing more than a triumph of logos over mythos. They might say that my reading of the tapestry is weighted with certain pre-digested beliefs and expectations. What if I went to the other side of the tapestry and read the dis-embroided and absurd tangle. What if......

Well-suited said Marx of Hart & Schaffner to which Marx of Engels added, manifestly so, whose threads proclaim your class, at which time Marx, of many brothers, waved his cigar and with his eyebrows overthrew the order to the great dismay of Marx, the clothier, whose vested interest was seen as dialectical by Marx the bearded and seconded by Marx the mustachioed who declared whatever it was, he's against it while Harpo harped, communing with the down-trodden, as Chico fast-talked Hart & Schaffner selling them his Tuttsie-Fruitsie as Engels was installing Captain Spaulding, the African explorer, to head the dictatorship of proletarian Fredonia and that may be a wise-crack but I doubt it.

The problem with meta-narrative in history or geo-politics is that it assumes a single point of view, usually the one of the dominant culture. Brits are taught a different history from the French or Germans. Texans re-wrote their textbooks which have little resemblance to New Yorkers. We are in a prismatic world with everyone bearing witness. Twitter, Twitter!

However with competing small narratives, objective reality has been dismissed. Truth, drummed out of our vocabulary. We are becoming a nation with an erased past. History has been consigned to the revisionists who now oversee a growth industry. All this has tragic consequences. Global warming is relegated to just one of several opinions. Evolutionists are made to compete with the Bible-thumpers. Even vaccinations have been called into question. And then we have the Holocaust deniers.

I would argue that Science makes room for skepticism and pursues an evidence-based truth which is as close to objective fact as we can get. History happens in real-time to real people. To be sure, events are often clouded, even deliberately obscured but a measure of objectivity can be achieved. Even in literature the choice of words or their omission can reveal layers of meaning. There is room for all this in a pluralistic society and a reasonable place exists between relativism and the absolute.

Groucho is not Karl even if they both took aim at the upper class. But neither a Day at the Races nor a Night at the Opera compares to a year in the Gulag.

What's New In The Novel

Pick up any novel and we expect to turn each page, silently muttering, and then what, between Once upon a time and …..lived happily ever after. Who doesn’t love a good story? We each have one or more to tell. At the same time we know life doesn’t quite happen that way. We omit the boring parts and embellish the rest with each telling. Henry James said, ”There are no plots in life.” They are constructs; the illusions we create and cherish in order to sort out through the clamor and simultaneity . Over time we even get to believe our own consoling myths.

Something has been happening in all the arts for the past century. There’s murder afoot, as Sherlock would say, an assault on old forms to which we still cling. Poetry yielded its end rhyme but some can not accept blank verse even though it has been around since Whitman. The butterflies have fluttered by. There are still those among us who choose art on their walls to match the throw pillows. Impressionism, which we loved to death, is safe since it first offended sensibilities 125 years ago. Now we embrace it as we would a bedtime story.

James Joyce put a gun to the head of 19th century lyrical fiction with Finnegan’s Wake. But it was only a flesh wound. Even Beckett and Pynchon only scarred our taste for the straight ahead narrative. Perhaps the tidy tale set in a chronology is grounded in the receptors of our double helix. The paradox is that we really don’t think that way. Do we?

My head is swarming with digressions and ellipsis. I’m inhaling odors, looking out the window, scratching my back, hearing a car alarm, wondering what time it is, which reminds me that we’ll soon be setting our clocks back an hour and I’ll need to take my car in because I can’t figure out how to re-set the clock……

If literature, like any other art form, is meant to shake our perceptions shouldn’t it be at least faintly subversive? Not to lull us with a recognition of the familiar but to upset our complacency a bit. To wake our resistance and do battle with the new terms offered. What was Warhol about with his repeatable Campbell soup labels except to call attention to the broth of images we are drowning in?

Certain givens may be in for review….such as the belief that language can reveal truth, unravel the mystery and offer us the meaning of life. That authenticity of character can be revealed through deep probing into our psyche and old wounds. That a coherent childhood memory comes to us resulting in a great ah ha. That a perfect metaphor can be an essential key to unlocking the door towards resolution. Even though the cloud looks like Kentucky or my grandfather’s beard or a reaching hand it is just a cloud.

On the other hand what is left after stampeding our sacred cows over the cliff? Is there a literature of a wireless age for the generation whose eye reads a field on a computer screen easier than we read the linear sequential of a page? Can we even conceive of a new literacy that rejects the singular POV for the one claimed by Picasso’s cubism? Perspective in art or on the page suggests a dominant, singular eye. The Rashoman approach allows for infinite telling.

If you are disturbed by all this, move over. I can’t quite give myself over to the literary revolution either. But I know it’s out there and coming at us inexorably. A new way of saying follows a new way of seeing. Instead of epiphany, authenticity is achieved by accumulation of bits and scraps; by circling the subject as the Cubists did from shifting eyes including what is absent or unsayable. Characters, are hard to identify. They are more like blank screens on whom reality is projected from the material world. Ultimately, what connects us is a shared sense of bewilderment and a reaching, like Ahab, for the unattainable.

There is room and reason enough to welcome both forms. If change occurs it will be glacial and the reading public may be the last to notice.

A Chance Meeting

Imagine a dinner party with 30 literary and visual arts luminaries and you are the fly on the wall or perhaps in the soup doing the backstroke listening to them jabbering away.

From mid-century 19th to mid-century 20th Rachel Cohen in her book, A Chance Meeting brings these poets and writers and photographers and artists alive on the page. After enormous research from diaries, memoirs and biographies she has found connective threads that became the tapestry of the American literary landscape.

We are treated to a stream of numinous moments such as Helen Keller remarking how she felt, in Mark Twain's handshake, the twinkle in his eye. We tag along with W.E.B. Dubois and his professor, William James on their visit to Helen Keller.

Small gestures are carefully observed as Charlie Chaplin ducks into a Hungarian restaurant to avoid a crowd and stays for four hours studying a violinist whose body movements he will later use in a film. Joseph Cornell is arrested for loitering outside a movie theater. He was entranced by the lit booth of the ticket seller on an otherwise dark street.

We are brought along with Henry James Sr. and his eight year old son, Henry as they have their daguerreotype taken by Matthew Brady. We learn that the self-conscious look on young Henry's face may be accounted for by a remark made a few days before by William Makepeace Thackeray concerning his nine button coat shown in the portrait.

We come to learn of the centrality certain figures played in gathering and supporting their contemporaries. William Dean Howells was such a man of letters. He edited the Atlantic Monthly and lent encouragement to Mark Twain, Henry James and Willa Cather.

Another person to whom his peers flocked was Alfred Stieglitz. His early pictures were seminal in elevating photography to an art form and his gallery in the first decade of the century was the first to show Matisse and Picasso in this country. Stieglitz could talk for eight hours at a stretch. Some visitors to the second-floor gallery would purposely come when he went to lunch just to see in quietude what hung on his walls. This juicy anecdote comes from his elevator operator who also revealed that the door was always kept open. After a Picasso exhibit in which 2 of 85 pieces were sold Stieglitz offered the Metropolitan Museum of Art the remaining 83 for $2,000. They refused.

From Whitman to the Harlem Renaissance we get an inside peek at the passing parade; the same sex loving relationships known as Boston marriages, the father-son affection between unlikely people to the grudging support, jealousies and rivalries. I come away from the banquet satiated and thank Rachel Cohen for the invitation.

Indeed there is a generative body of poets, writers and artists who together can be heard as an authentic American voice, a noisy conversation across the century, unique in its struggle to articulate the inclusive yawp of the newly-arrived, the blues of the underclass, the untamed frontier and urbane East. It’s the hum and the hum-drum, the air we breathe.