July Books

all the daughters of music

I continue my sabbatical from longform criticism as I write my novel, Major Arcana, which I am now serializing in both text and audio format for paid subscribers. For now, a catalogue of my last month’s reading cross-posted from johnpistelli.com. Please enjoy!

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Titian, La Sapienza (1560)

The Books of Psalms, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes
As it’s switched before from narrative to law, here the Good Book switches from narrative to poetry. (It should have occurred to me sooner, but it occurs to me now that this structural feature of what is in fact a library that we experience as a book must have influenced the modern novel, with its own rapid changes of mode from narrative to exposition to lyric: everything from Moby-Dick and Ulysses to To the Lighthouse and Beloved.) The Psalms are said to be the songs of King David to God: prayers of praise, prayers of anguish, prayers for delivery from sickness, prayers for forgiveness from transgression, prayers that the enemy be brought low, prayers of gratitude that there’s anything at all.

O Lord, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches. So is this great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts. There go the ships: there is that leviathan, whom thou hast made to play therein.

Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, like the Song of Songs, are similarly supposed to be the work of wise King Solomon. Like the Book of Job, these books seem to have wandered into the canon from a different religion. The Psalms are plausibly the utterance of a king in covenant with the God of Israel, but Proverbs and Ecclesiastes feel more Greek, Chinese, Indian—not so centered on a personal and national mono-god who promotes a severe and rigorous morality in the service of a linear and progressive history, but chastened rather in the face of a mysterious power or panoply of powers whose ways are inscrutable and to be aligned with or else endured. We all know about the bitter wisdom of Ecclesiastes, which, speaking of “that leviathan,” Melville’s Ishmael calls “the fine hammered steel of woe”:

Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them; While the sun, or the light, or the moon, or the stars, be not darkened, nor the clouds return after the rain: In the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease because they are few, and those that look out of the windows be darkened, And the doors shall be shut in the streets, when the sound of the grinding is low, and he shall rise up at the voice of the bird, and all the daughters of musick shall be brought low; Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets: Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it. Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher; all is vanity.

But, speaking of the daughters of musick, what about the beguiling song of the goddess of wisdom in Proverbs, whom some were later to call Sophia, God’s apparent daughter, sister, wife, and/or interior paramour?

The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were no fountains abounding with water. Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth: While as yet he had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the world. When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth: When he established the clouds above: when he strengthened the fountains of the deep: When he gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment: when he appointed the foundations of the earth:Then I was by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him; Rejoicing in the habitable part of his earth; and my delights were with the sons of men.

This canon is, as the Psalmist said of the architecture of his own body, “fearfully and wonderfully made.”

Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road
This is among the first novels that established the suburbs and the ’50s as the spatial-temporal locus of American despair. Is this the book that launched a thousand clichés about suburban ennui, or was Yates drawing on a pre-existent discourse? My own novel, The Class of 2000, features a writer husband and actress wife who give up their vocations and move to the suburbs, except that I found more interestingly lurid things for them to do than Yates does for his poor Frank and April; through the magic of retrospective influence, my novel can now be read as a critical comment on Yates’s book. It’s stunning how often the same debates and the same complaints recur in American culture. Here is a novel published in 1961 whose balked suburban husband scorns what today’s right-wingers call “the longhouse” of culture-wide feminization (Hawthorne and Melville were complaining of the same in the 1850s, never mind the 1950s).

“And I mean is it any wonder all the men end up emasculated? Because that is what happens; that is what’s reflected in all this bleating about ‘adjustment’ and ‘security’ and ‘togetherness’—and I mean Christ, you see it everywhere: all this television crap where every joke is built on the premise that daddy’s an idiot and mother’s always on to him…”

The novel is sociologically interesting: it tells us something about corporations and psychoanalysis and abortion circa 1955. It’s almost sociology itself. This type of essentially conservative realism, so natural to the French, is a minor tradition in American literature, however. We like characters with bigger souls, characters out of the Bible; we like to take the Revolutionary Road. Yates writes prose with a crisp poignance in the manner of Wharton and Fitzgerald, but Updike did more justice to similar subject matter the year before this was published in the grittier and wilder Rabbit, Run. I think in the end of Dorothy Richardson’s tart comment on Madame Bovary: “an examination de haut en bas of a ‘small soul’ is not great literature.”

Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed
In my memorial post to Kundera, “The Novel’s Only Morality,” I quoted Geoff Dyer to the effect that the Czech maestro may have been a better essayist than novelist. For that reason, I read this book-length nine-part essay in lieu of another of his novels in memoriam. If it could be said to have a thesis, that thesis is the defense of a rational modernism the author associates with the writers and musicians of early-20th-century Central Europe—Kafka, Janacek, Musil, Gombrowicz, Broch—against the irrationalism of Romanticism, sentimentalism, and totalizing political ideologies such as fascism and communism. With reference to the predicament of Rushdie, Kundera also defends the novel not as a literary genre but as a mode of apprehension that challenges both sentimentalism and fanaticism with its ironic multiplicity of perspectives.

The only thing I deeply, avidly, wanted was a lucid, unillusioned eye. I finally found it in the art of the novel. This is why for me being a novelist was more than just working in one “literary genre” rather than another; it was an outlook, a wisdom, a position; a position that would rule out identification with any politics, any religion, any ideology, any moral doctrine, any group; a considered, stubborn, furious nonidentification, conceived not as evasion or passivity but as resistance, defiance, rebellion. I wound up having some odd conversations: “Are you a Communist, Mr. Kundera?” “No, I’m a novelist.” “Are you a dissident?” “No, I’m a novelist.” “Are you on the left or the right?” “Neither. I’m a novelist.”

He amusingly compares Kafka’s translators to the original, finding again and again a desire to smother the master’s clarity in the schmaltz of fancy writing. Against the Marxist music criticism of Adorno, he defends Stravinsky as a classicist rather than an irrationalist, one whose transcriptive tour of available traditions was motivated by the passions of exile—a passage with autobiographical resonance, a passage in which passion is revealed to be at the root of this seemingly chill and remote praise of reason, irony, and formal play. And in case we miss that point, he ends one chapter with this, a little novel in itself:

When I was thirteen or fourteen years old, I used to take lessons in musical composition. Not because I was a child prodigy but because of my father’s quiet tact. It was during the war, and a friend of his, a Jewish composer, was required to wear the yellow star; people had begun to avoid him. Not knowing how to declare his solidarity, my father thought of asking him just then to give me lessons. They were confiscating Jewish apartments, and the composer kept having to move on to smaller and smaller places, ending up, just before he left for Theresienstadt, in a little flat where many people were camping, crammed, in every room. All along, he had held on to the small piano on which I would play my harmony or counterpoint exercises while strangers went about their business around us.

Of all this I retain only my admiration for him, and three or four images. Especially this one: seeing me out after a lesson, he stopped by the door and suddenly said to me: “There are many surprisingly weak passages in Beethoven. But it is the weak passages that bring out the strong ones. It’s like a lawn—if it weren’t there, we couldn’t enjoy the beautiful tree growing on it.”

A peculiar idea. That it has stayed in my memory is even more peculiar. Maybe I felt honored at getting to hear a confidential admission from the teacher, a secret, a great trick of the trade that only the initiated are permitted to know.

Whatever it was, that brief remark from my teacher of the time has haunted me all my life (I’ve defended it, I’ve fought it, I’ve never finished with it); without it, this text could very certainly not have been written.

But dearer to me than that remark in itself is the image of a man who, a while before his hideous journey, stood thinking aloud, in front of a child, about the problem of composing a work of art.

Witold Gombrowicz, Cosmos
I didn’t only read this because I’ve never read Gombrowicz and because Kundera spoke so highly of him. The eerily beautiful hardcover of the 2005 translation by Danuta Borchardt has been staring at me reproachfully from my shelf since 2007. This—the Polish author and Argentine exile’s 1965 final novel—was assigned to me as the final reading in a graduate course called Introduction to Semiotics. It was supposed to cap and to demonstrate—to cap by demonstrating—the themes introduced in the theoretical texts we read by Peirce, Saussure, Lacan, Barthes, and Derrida. But I got 50 pages into it, thought I had a handle on what I judged to be its rather tedious post-Kafka and pre-Lynch study in delirious paranoia, and put it aside to concentrate on the 25-page paper on Derrida I was writing for the course. I wish I could say I like it better now that I’m 16 years older and have actually finished it, but I still find it thematically obvious and affectively unpleasant: the claustrophobic narrative of a vacationing young man who becomes obsessed with all the possible “signs” that the inn where he’s staying is a site of perversion and murder, even though these possibilities blatantly represent his own rapacious desire. The titular cosmos is too complicated, too teeming and profuse, to interpret solely with paranoid reference to oneself—maybe too manifold to encompass in signs at all, rendering the very act of narrative futile:

But how can one describe something except ex post? Can nothing be ever truly expressed, rendered in its anonymous becoming, can no one ever render the babbling of the nascent moment, how is it that, born out of chaos, we can never encounter it again, no sooner do we look than order…and form…are born under our very eyes? No matter. Never mind. (original ellipses)

Obvious now, the premise rather than the Q.E.D. of our own literature, this thesis perhaps needed to be stated so baldly then. Maybe this novel shouldn’t have been introduced to me as illustrating a theory, a sad destiny for any novel. Even so, among roughly contemporaneous narratives making the same point, I’d rather read Pale Fire or The Crying of Lot 49.

Craig Seligman, Sontag and Kael: Opposites Attract Me
This breezily conversational comparative book has come up in “the culture” recently. I read it back it was first published in 2004, back when I was a 22-year-old college graduate who hadn’t yet studied semiotics or been assigned Gombrowicz (a writer Sontag revered). I decided to reread it, to see if it held up. It does. I want to type out some long passages of continuing relevance. With reference to Sontag’s controversial 1982 statement at the Solidarity rally that “Communism is fascism,” Seligman defends critical hyperbole:

Literal-minded writers doggedly spelled out the differences between Communism and fascism, as though they thought Sontag didn’t know them. She knew them. It’s a sign of respect to your audience to assume that they can draw distinctions so obviously implicit in your argument that to draw them yourself would be insulting. But as most polemicists sooner or later learn, putting your trust in your audience is a dicey proposition. […] The uncrossed t, the undotted i are always vulnerable to attack by the malicious and the plodding. Much of what gets said in criticism—much of the best—consists of generalizations that either can’t be proved or aren’t worth using up the wind to prove. A reader can tell when a critic is on to something even if she’s stated it hyperbolically—often because she’s stated it hyperbolically.

With reference to what Seligman takes to be the baseless charge of Kael’s homophobia, he condemns the “circular firing squad” dynamic that has long plagued the political left:

The gay attacks on Kael are obviously painful to me, and not just because, as a gay friend of hers, I feel injured by assaults on her good name. To me they represent something far more destructive. They embody the same hopeless scripts that progressives have enacted again and again for the past century. Why does the left persist in exhausting itself by attacking its allies instead of its enemies? Why do deviations from orthodoxy provoke so much bitterness that the left winds up shifting its energy, its passion, away from the true threats?

With reference to Sontag’s insistence that her novels are better than her essays—our author is unpersuaded—Seligman speculates that as visual spectacle has subsumed narrative, so nonfiction has subsumed prose:

We like to think of our art forms as set in stone, but they’re not. It’s unnerving for those of us who grew up before the era of the VCR and the DVD to reflect that the classical motion picture, projected on a large screen in a darkened auditorium, may belong to the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries as expressly as the tragedy written in heroic couplets belonged to the Restoration. The symphony, which developed in the eighteenth century, was nearly exhausted by the middle of the twentieth. It’s probably safe to say that the sonnet’s great age is as finished as the LP’s. And the life signs of the novel, which hasn’t been a heavyweight form for three hundred years yet, aren’t looking so hot. Consider, for example, a statement Sontag made in relating the circumstances that led her to write Illness as Metaphor: “A narrative, it seemed to me, would be less useful than an idea.” And then imagine George Eliot saying something like that. No novelist would have drawn Sontag’s distinction between narrative and idea in the era when the novel was the choice literary vehicle for conveying ideas. Flaubert and James, with their advanced notions about art, brought the form to its maturity, but the very term maturity implies aging, and aging implies dotage and death. I don’t mean there aren’t masterpieces yet to be created. Another Pynchon is no doubt enduring a diaper change as I write these words. But the situation of the art novel today resembles the situation of the long poem a century ago: The Waste Land and Howl were among the supreme works still on the horizon, but the form no longer answered to the needs it once had, and its audience was dwindling. The rising popularity of nonfiction forms in recent years hasn’t just been a matter of marketing.

(See Philip Lopate’s Notes on Sontag for a Nietzschean refutation of this Hegelian theory of art.) Seligman ends up concluding that “geniuses, almost necessarily, are monsters,” a hyperbolic statement we would do well to get more comfortable with. The reason most nonfiction books aren’t worth reading is that they elaborately expatiate upon a thesis that could have been summed up in an article. This book has no thesis, or just is its thesis. Because in it we encounter less an argument than three personalities—Sontag’s, Kael’s, and Seligman’s—it embodies rather than elaborating the idea that criticism may share the weight and the worth of good fiction. It’s worth reading—twice, in fact.

Madeline Cash, Earth Angel
More like Madeline Fash, am I right? After that recent Verso article forcibly assimilating this book to the supposed “serious protofascism” of the Dimes Square scene—see my own newsletter on the faulty thinking at work here—I decided I had to read for myself this recently published collection of short stories by a promising young writer. There’s really no better advertising than moralistic denunciation. You’re telling me this book is evil? Well, now I have to read it! This book isn’t evil. I would contrast it with Richard Yates above: it makes poetry rather than sociology out of the maladies of the present. Cash writes, sometimes showily, without the moralism of the last decade. While she’s attentive, for example, to the problem of sexual predation—“All the girls at the all-girl Catholic school had experienced something that fell under the nuance of rape”—she also writes a story that is all tenderness about a “problematic age-gap relationship” between a Catholic schoolgirl and a working-class Croatian immigrant. She might be at her best when most surreal. My favorite story is about the calamities that befall a company of glitterati and literati on a doomed yacht. There are dog assassins, companies that sell slumber parties, evil corporations that sell scent pods, strange office parties, and drug deals gone wrong. Cash’s style is the star of the show, however: half DeLillo, half Dasha. Its signature is an unpredictable cascade of sentences either registering the outrageousness of the present with deadpan understatement—

Anika’s little brother is on the couch watching Frozen 5 in Arabic. He tells her that Helen Keller was gay. There’s new evidence. She nods.

—or quietly exalting the narrators’ equally outrageous self-regard, a baffled sense of wonder at her (sometimes his, but usually her) own reality, fearfully and wonderfully made:

My mom’s parents were immigrants from Ireland who lived through famine and witnessed civil war and car bombings and revolution and came to America with only $36 in their communal pockets and I lived through a moderate recession and monitor my caloric intake and the revolution was an arcade game and I can spend $36 on drinks at the Good Luck Bar in a night easily. But the difference is that they were nothing. The difference is that I’m a Lutheran and an American and a hostage, perennially updating like a smartphone, barreling forward into the profound depths of the universe.

I don’t know if she’s a monster, I’m pretty sure she’s not a fascist—though I love the unforgettable and unforgivable audacity of “they were nothing”—and I’m glad I read this book either way, since it appears that prose fiction isn’t dead after all.