It is sometimes amusing, and sometimes downright disappointing, to flip through a book and happen across a picture of the author on the back cover. It happened to me a few times today while sorting through books at the bookstore. Take, for example, Cynthia Ozick. For 'Cynthia' I pictured a pearl wearing, cardigan sporting, 35 year old belle in pastels, and the 'Ozick' might have added a Jewish Eastern European twist. It's not Cynthia's fault that she's twice the age, and not as dainty as her name suggests. It most definitely should not affect my reading of her newest book, Dictation, but occasionally I caught a glimpse of her picture, watching me as I turned pages.
The woman in the picture does not seem capable of precious metaphors and rolling, almost sexual, rhythms. Both 'The Shawl' and 'Dicatations' have something very youthful about them, in their presentation and in their greedy desire to plunge deep into descriptions. The plot of 'Dictations' is even amateurish--as if a first time writer were trying to justify a piece of historical fiction. And instead its source is a woman of 80, her eyes peering out from behind owl-like lenses. Her face, her hair, nothing seems to indicate that she might be hip in her old age, that she might have a hidden understanding of younger generations.
I don't like authors hidden behind their texts, and I don't mind seeing the pictures that might prove disappointing. It would be nice, though, if the authors whose pictures are going to glossily gaze at their readers from the back covers of books would take at least SOME precautions to look the part of their text. It is a silly expectation, but I also expect pet owners to look like their dogs. And if they don't, I can't help but blame them a little.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Sunday, May 4, 2008
E.B. White
Good old Elwyn reminds me why I am sometimes in the mood for nothing but American literature. Russian literature is all well and good until the Grand Inquisitor's aura wears off, and I stop wondering if I'd better manage my guilt than Raskolnikov did. My obsession with the Russian culture even becomes somewhat laughable, and I fall back on the American traditions that I so often overlook.
E.B. White has the rough but kindly spirit of an America that I never knew. It is not as a passionate artist that he achieves greatness. Instead, he was a citizen, a grammarian, a New Yorker legend, and a correspondent. His greatness is in the way he presented himself as fully human. He, like American literature itself, is complex but subtle, riveting but calm. The author of Charlotte's Web, or Stuart Little, could easily be passed over with a nod and a smile of approval, but to me E.B. is the essence of small town America--wise but not unnecessarily dramatic.
He once wrote to a friend: "Have just written a piece for the Yale Review on the subject of Walden and am having nightmares from the fear that I have plagiarized myself. At my age, Miss T., a writer repeats like an onion." E.B. White knows himself, knows how to laugh at himself, and, beyond that, invents a quality onion metaphor.
Perhaps I am romanticizing both the author and the America that I imagine him to have inhabited. An American of Model-T's, of Maine farmhouses, of intellectual New Yorkers. But the foreigners to whom I have recommended E.B.White have silently wondered at my enthusiasm. He does not possess the European requisite traits of genius. He once wrote, "I must read the Book of Job, for laughs." So no, it does not seem that he takes tragedy seriously, or that he is sucking at the marrow of life, the way the Europeans have in their densest fiction. But the lightheartedness of American Literature is not to be passed over as naive. It is with humor and subtlety that authors like E.B. White slyly comment on society, on the life of a writer, on America, and on themselves. Everything he wrote is great because of the spirit in which it was written.
E.B. White has the rough but kindly spirit of an America that I never knew. It is not as a passionate artist that he achieves greatness. Instead, he was a citizen, a grammarian, a New Yorker legend, and a correspondent. His greatness is in the way he presented himself as fully human. He, like American literature itself, is complex but subtle, riveting but calm. The author of Charlotte's Web, or Stuart Little, could easily be passed over with a nod and a smile of approval, but to me E.B. is the essence of small town America--wise but not unnecessarily dramatic.
He once wrote to a friend: "Have just written a piece for the Yale Review on the subject of Walden and am having nightmares from the fear that I have plagiarized myself. At my age, Miss T., a writer repeats like an onion." E.B. White knows himself, knows how to laugh at himself, and, beyond that, invents a quality onion metaphor.
Perhaps I am romanticizing both the author and the America that I imagine him to have inhabited. An American of Model-T's, of Maine farmhouses, of intellectual New Yorkers. But the foreigners to whom I have recommended E.B.White have silently wondered at my enthusiasm. He does not possess the European requisite traits of genius. He once wrote, "I must read the Book of Job, for laughs." So no, it does not seem that he takes tragedy seriously, or that he is sucking at the marrow of life, the way the Europeans have in their densest fiction. But the lightheartedness of American Literature is not to be passed over as naive. It is with humor and subtlety that authors like E.B. White slyly comment on society, on the life of a writer, on America, and on themselves. Everything he wrote is great because of the spirit in which it was written.
Dr. Faustus
I read but don't absorb most of the passages about music, in much the same way that I read whole sections, or all, of Ulysses, and in much the same way that I learned to skip over the French vocabulary I didn't understand in pursuit of the coherent whole. That notes, chords, harmony and dissonance can have language and ideas as their foundation I believe, but I can't disassemble the structure and have a little laugh at its ingenuity.
It's nice to have an intellectual artist-hero for once, one who makes art from the parody of epiphany, who doesn't make stark emotion the hallmark of artistry. Adrian thinks himself into art, and the structure he discerns within music he does not use to critique it, but make his own intellectual sort. But he does preserve the Joycean hero's bothersome penchant for loneliness...bothersome because it seems to be a prerequisite of genius, and those who love company seemed doomed to mediocrity. Even before "hell's horrid hole" makes its claim, Adrian is removed from the world, reluctant to shake hands and wary of emotion, and of humanity. Every artist must be susceptible to reclusiveness, like Adrian susceptible to the devil.
And the narrator is as extreme as Nick Carraway, calling attention to his flaws only to remind us of his humanity, but never putting into question the material that is supposedly entirely accurate. He and Nick, both strangely drawn to another person, get swallowed up in their protagonists' stories. But neither is meant to be invisible, they both call attention to their reliability and care and diligence and spirit. As shadowers we write them off, and never think of this brand of artistry: observation. But they are just as closed off, just as obsessed, and have made the sacrifice. There's a whole group of characters out there (Mansfield's Bertha included) that don't realize they are artists, that don't realize that their stories should be about them.
There is an anecdote about a man who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for monumental time. God, in mercy, has the man die of disease before the devil claims him, and the death is tragic, but also is the salvation of a soul that would otherwise have suffered infinitely more. I haven't yet found out whether this will happen to Adrian, but it's a reasonable allegory for Hitler's Germany: Germany sells it soul to the devil (Hitler?) but God intervenes ensuring that Germany loses the war. This is tragic for the German nation and spirit, but not so tragic as Germany's fate had Hitler won.
Finally the philosophic devil: appearing in The Master and Margarita and now here. Checkered shirt, pince-nez, changing forms, but always innocuous forms, checkmating the heroes not through force or evil, but through intellect. It makes the world take on a theoretical hue, when the possessor of the most evil powers uses them in logic games and circus shows. And if the devil is never scary, then who is God in these stories? The devil renounces his evil, God renounces himself, the narrator renounces his character, Germany renounces its humanity...
It's nice to have an intellectual artist-hero for once, one who makes art from the parody of epiphany, who doesn't make stark emotion the hallmark of artistry. Adrian thinks himself into art, and the structure he discerns within music he does not use to critique it, but make his own intellectual sort. But he does preserve the Joycean hero's bothersome penchant for loneliness...bothersome because it seems to be a prerequisite of genius, and those who love company seemed doomed to mediocrity. Even before "hell's horrid hole" makes its claim, Adrian is removed from the world, reluctant to shake hands and wary of emotion, and of humanity. Every artist must be susceptible to reclusiveness, like Adrian susceptible to the devil.
And the narrator is as extreme as Nick Carraway, calling attention to his flaws only to remind us of his humanity, but never putting into question the material that is supposedly entirely accurate. He and Nick, both strangely drawn to another person, get swallowed up in their protagonists' stories. But neither is meant to be invisible, they both call attention to their reliability and care and diligence and spirit. As shadowers we write them off, and never think of this brand of artistry: observation. But they are just as closed off, just as obsessed, and have made the sacrifice. There's a whole group of characters out there (Mansfield's Bertha included) that don't realize they are artists, that don't realize that their stories should be about them.
There is an anecdote about a man who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for monumental time. God, in mercy, has the man die of disease before the devil claims him, and the death is tragic, but also is the salvation of a soul that would otherwise have suffered infinitely more. I haven't yet found out whether this will happen to Adrian, but it's a reasonable allegory for Hitler's Germany: Germany sells it soul to the devil (Hitler?) but God intervenes ensuring that Germany loses the war. This is tragic for the German nation and spirit, but not so tragic as Germany's fate had Hitler won.
Finally the philosophic devil: appearing in The Master and Margarita and now here. Checkered shirt, pince-nez, changing forms, but always innocuous forms, checkmating the heroes not through force or evil, but through intellect. It makes the world take on a theoretical hue, when the possessor of the most evil powers uses them in logic games and circus shows. And if the devil is never scary, then who is God in these stories? The devil renounces his evil, God renounces himself, the narrator renounces his character, Germany renounces its humanity...
Saturday, October 13, 2007
it has me worried...
I wish I could say that books were my religion without sounding defensive and barbaric. I wish that, somehow, people who were religious could consider their religiosity a system of viewing the world, and not as the world itself. Because only by accepting the premise that religion is a system (and not an entity higher than other disciplines) can I compare it to other systems - to the system of literature. I'm hounded alternately by both the thought that the highest calling is to religion, and by the thought that my mind is only made to struggle with lesser subjects, not the divine. The world of human sciences and the human mind, at least, offers encouragement, solution, reason to be analyzed. But perhaps I substitute it for religion because my mediocre mind is not structured for higher yearnings...and that bothers me to no end.
But if religion and literature are both systems, then I could say without shame that literature offers to me what God may offer to someone else. I do not dare to compare individual authors with God, but the overall expanse of literature offers a vision of humanity that is comparable to the vision given to believers. Both religion and literature demand loyalty and sacrifice to a life does not exist but in thought, that you live your own life but judge it from without simultaneously, that you be devoted to the past and representations of the past. Both are designed to make you aware of your own insignificance without rejecting you, rather promoting that you join the ranks of those who have come before. And both systems are cloaked in a philosophy of self-examination and self-consciousness that lies beyond the ego, that requires us to recognize ourselves.
People pray without feeling sometimes, and people read without connecting the words to outside meanings. Each system is threatened by hedonism and misinterpretation. Both systems can be blamed for death, for wars and the tracts calling for those wars.
It remains that these two systems (and there are more) offer visions of the world that are comforting. Not comforting because they are forms of escape, delusion, or insecurity, but comforting because they provide a framework into which all additional knowledge can be organized. Literature is my framework, but I don't doubt that for another it is music, or another form of art. But as the world presents me with an array of places and information and emotion, so varied and chaotic, literature can allow me to match old ideas with new ones, fear with another's fear, and life in the context of other lives. And because each system of art is dynamic, it can expand to incorporate and explain the most shocking contemporary knowledge with the slight comfort of familiarity.
Here an advocate for the supremacy of religion would say, no, religion is not intended to offer only comfort, but also negate the comfort that it offers, by having each person suffer individually and struggle with their faith in the system of coherence, in the vision of the world. But literature is not so stable a friend in itself, for a book's pages are limited, and the familiarity that it offers within those pages ends at the back cover. So a reader, too, is left abandoned, awake to that chaotic world of impressions that have yet to be sorted. Neither system takes the fear from life. I only make the comparison between the systems because I would like to know, for myself, whether I create a vision of my world in ways that others create visions of their worlds. Or, do my ways, because of the limitations of my system, lack depth.
Making religion an art is scandalous, as was the vision of history as art. To declare something 'subjective' is to make it relative, susceptible to individual whims, to make it serve and not be served. But what it loses in omnipotence it gains in feeling-- history and religion have never been so appealing in all their forms as when I could apply my own thoughts to them. Still, religion cannot be an art to those who prop it above the entire world. But if there is a God, I can't imagine that He would object to our serving the world, but substituting Him with a vision of humanity that is as complicated and honorable as He himself.
But if religion and literature are both systems, then I could say without shame that literature offers to me what God may offer to someone else. I do not dare to compare individual authors with God, but the overall expanse of literature offers a vision of humanity that is comparable to the vision given to believers. Both religion and literature demand loyalty and sacrifice to a life does not exist but in thought, that you live your own life but judge it from without simultaneously, that you be devoted to the past and representations of the past. Both are designed to make you aware of your own insignificance without rejecting you, rather promoting that you join the ranks of those who have come before. And both systems are cloaked in a philosophy of self-examination and self-consciousness that lies beyond the ego, that requires us to recognize ourselves.
People pray without feeling sometimes, and people read without connecting the words to outside meanings. Each system is threatened by hedonism and misinterpretation. Both systems can be blamed for death, for wars and the tracts calling for those wars.
It remains that these two systems (and there are more) offer visions of the world that are comforting. Not comforting because they are forms of escape, delusion, or insecurity, but comforting because they provide a framework into which all additional knowledge can be organized. Literature is my framework, but I don't doubt that for another it is music, or another form of art. But as the world presents me with an array of places and information and emotion, so varied and chaotic, literature can allow me to match old ideas with new ones, fear with another's fear, and life in the context of other lives. And because each system of art is dynamic, it can expand to incorporate and explain the most shocking contemporary knowledge with the slight comfort of familiarity.
Here an advocate for the supremacy of religion would say, no, religion is not intended to offer only comfort, but also negate the comfort that it offers, by having each person suffer individually and struggle with their faith in the system of coherence, in the vision of the world. But literature is not so stable a friend in itself, for a book's pages are limited, and the familiarity that it offers within those pages ends at the back cover. So a reader, too, is left abandoned, awake to that chaotic world of impressions that have yet to be sorted. Neither system takes the fear from life. I only make the comparison between the systems because I would like to know, for myself, whether I create a vision of my world in ways that others create visions of their worlds. Or, do my ways, because of the limitations of my system, lack depth.
Making religion an art is scandalous, as was the vision of history as art. To declare something 'subjective' is to make it relative, susceptible to individual whims, to make it serve and not be served. But what it loses in omnipotence it gains in feeling-- history and religion have never been so appealing in all their forms as when I could apply my own thoughts to them. Still, religion cannot be an art to those who prop it above the entire world. But if there is a God, I can't imagine that He would object to our serving the world, but substituting Him with a vision of humanity that is as complicated and honorable as He himself.
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