Vasily Grossman on guilt and grief

How can one convey the feelings of a man pressing his wife’s hand for the last time? How can one described that last, quick look at a beloved face? Yes, and how can a man live with the merciless memory of how, during the silence of parting, he blinked for a moment to hide the crude joy he felt at having managed to save his life? How can he ever bury the memory of his wife handing him a packet containing her wedding ring, a rusk and some sugar-lumps? How can he continue to exist, seeing the glow in the sky flaring up with renewed strength? Now the hands he had kissed must be burning, now the eyes that had admired him, now the hair whose smell he could recognise in the darkness, now his children, his wife, his mother. How can he ask for a place in the barracks nearer the stove? How can he hold out his bowl for a litre of grey swill? How can he repair the torn sole of his boot? How can he wield a crowbar? How can he drink? How can he breathe? With the screams of his mother and children in his ears?

– Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

Gaddis on the way we live now

And herein lay the admirable quality of this work: it decreed virtue not for virtue’s sake (as weary Stoics had it); nor courtesy for courtesy (an attribute of human dignity, as civilised culture would have it); nor love for love (as Christ had it); nor a faith which is its own explanation and its own justification (as any faith has it); but all of these excellences oriented toward the marketplace. Here was no promise of anything so absurd as a chimerical kingdom of heaven: in short, it reconciled those virtues he had been taught as a child to the motives and practices of the man, the elixir which exchanged the things worth being for the things worth having.

– William Gaddis, The Recognitions

Chekhov and the worth of wisdom

And I despise your books, I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world. It is all worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a mirage. You may be proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor, and your posterity, your history, your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe

– Anton Chekhov

Mervyn Peake on being prisoners to language

We are all imprisoned by the dictionary. We choose out of that vast, paper-walled prison our convicts, the little black printed words, when in truth we need fresh sounds to utter, new enfranchised noises which would produce a new effect.

– Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan

Stephen Dedalus grapples with post-prandial grease

He ate his dinner with surly appetite and, when the meal was over and the grease-strewn plates lay abandoned on the table, he rose and went to the window, clearing the thick scum from his mouth with his tongue and licking it from his lips… His soul was fattening and congealing into a gross grease, plunging ever deeper in its dull fear into a sombre threatening duck, while the body that was his stood, listless and dishonoured, gazing out of darkened eyes, helpless, perturbed and human for a bovine god to stare upon.

– James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Philip K Dick on voices real and imaginary

What sort of an imaginary voice is that? I asked myself, suppose Columbus had heard an imaginary voice telling him to sail west. And because of it he had discovered the New World and changed human history… We would be hard-put to defend the use of the term ‘imaginary’ then, for that voice, since the consequences of its speaking came to affect us all. Which would have constituted greater reality, an imaginary voice telling him to sail west, or a real voice telling him the idea was hopeless?

– Philip K Dick, Radio Free Albemuth

Grenouille and the onanistic pleasures of solitude

He had withdrawn solely for his own personal pleasure, only to be near to himself. No longer distracted by anything external, he basked in his own existence and found it splendid.

– Patrick Suskind, Perfume

The significance of echoes and the sense of things in space

It is not by accident that choirs singing psalms are most always recorded with ample reverb. Divinity seems defined by echo. Whether the Vienna Boys Choir or monks chanting away on some chart climbing CD, the hallowed always seems to abide in the province of the hollow. The reason for this is not too complex. An echo, while implying an enormity of space, at the same time also defines it, limits it, and even temporarily inhabits it.

– Mark Z Danielewski, House of Leaves

William Gass on the sacrifices of a literary life

So don’t talk to me of miners, Martha… the sacrifice of doctors, the beatings pugilists receive, or the personal poundings politicians get; not when I’ve lived my life at a desk, here or there among nailed-down chairs… for I have a black lung, too, a bent nose, a tarnished reputation, an abandoned wife (that’s you, my dear); and I have spent so much of my time in the study, settled as a lesson plan… that I’ve passed whole days on my ass in the posture of the constipated or the guru; weeks, months, seasons, semesters, years, sluggish as a python; and consequently led – just like the books I’ve written, read and taught – a small, square, solid, six-buck, clothbound, print and paper-jacket life.

– William Gass, The Tunnel

On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan – a review

The first of Ian McEwan’s bits of writing that I’ve been able to finish despite numerous attempts (and subsequent failings) in the past few years. A short and affecting novella that I read in a single sitting during dinner time while my partner was out of the house. Perfect conditions really, as McEwan explores the nastiness that can lurk in romantic relationships.

I found it a painful exploration of intimate love – and the difficult truth that we perhaps only end up loving our self-created constructs of our partners, and send out our own crafted selves to be loved in turn. But then as you wear the mask, the face does grow to fit it… It can be very difficult to establish true understanding of another, particularly when one is young and dumb and not particularly knowledgeable about your own self let alone that stranger over there (intoxicating as they may be).

I was drawn (as I tend to be) to the depiction of the powerfully damaging effect of early abuse on the ability of the person to form bonds later in life. To be betrayed by a trusted person is the worst sort of thing. But in a way, I felt it was a bit too easy to ascribe the would-be-wife’s ‘frigidity’ to sexual abuse – is it then only the woman who has been abused who might have such a strong aversion to physical intimacy with their beloved? ‘Too easy’ here meaning I feel the abuse (only ever obliquely hinted at in the novella) too neatly explains her human behaviour. How novelistic! Yet one plus one is two, isn’t it always?

The final few pages – the flashing of our man’s life before his eyes, the years unfolding rapidly within the space of a paragraph, articulating his descent into mediocrity (of a sort – not necessarily a life not worth living) and his old beau’s rise to acclaim. Reminded me of the final scene of ‘La La Land,’ the musical movie! Bittersweet and beautiful. Though I’m not sure it’s quite convinced me to read more McEwan.

A review of and excerpts from – Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy

A strange mixture of sparsity and density. Psychologically sparse, sensorily dense; altogether incredible, the prose blended a deep purple.

The following evening as they rode up onto the western rim they lost one of the mules. It went skittering off down the canyon wall with the contents of the panniers exploding soundlessly in the hot dry air and it fell through sunlight and through shade, turning in that lonely void until it fell from sight into a sink of cold blue space that absolved it forever of memory in the mind of any living thing that was.

A novel that deserves to be called biblical, a construct of bleak mythic proportions, an emptily exuberant wasteland, deeply serious, deeply violent, deeply significant. Such a tight control of language I have never read in a novel. I’ve read no Faulkner and so can’t comment on any claims of inspiration drawn, but Southern and most definitely Gothic this novel is.

The descriptions of violence are visceral and more real than any I’ve read.

Now driving in a wild frieze of headlong horses with eyes walled and teeth cropped and naked riders with clusters of arrows clenched in their jaws and their shields winking in the dust and up the far side of the ruined ranks in a piping of boneflutes and dropping down off the sides of their mounts with one heel hung in the withers strap and their short bows flexing beneath the outstretched necks of the ponies until they had circled the company and cut their ranks in two and then rising up again like funhouse figures, some with nightmare faces painted on their breasts, riding down the unhorsed Saxons and spearing and clubbing them and leaping from their mounts with knives and running about on the ground with a peculiar bandylegged trot like creatures driven to alien forms of locomotion and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so slathered up with gore they might have rolled in it like dogs and some who fell upon the dying and sodomized them with loud cries to their fellows… Dust stanched the wet and naked heads of the scalped who with the fringe of hair below their wounds and tonsured to the bone now lay like maimed and naked monks in the bloodslaked dust and everywhere the dying groaned and gibbered and horses lay screaming.

That violence begets more violence is so pervasive that as an idea it loses significance – no need to reveal the ubiquity of brutality when life itself requires it.

And by and by they came to a place where the road was darkened in a deep wood and in this place the old man killed the traveler. He killed him with a rock and he took his clothes and he took his watch and his money and he buried him in a shallow grave by the side of the road. Then he went home…
     The harness maker lived until his son was grown and never did anyone harm again. As he lay dying he called the son to him and told him what he had done. And the son said that he forgave him if it was his to do so and the old man said that it was his to do so and then he died.
     But the boy was not sorry for he was jealous of the dead man and before he went away he visited that place and cast away the rocks and dug up the bones and scattered them in the forest and then he went away. He went away to the west and he himself became a killer of men.

A savage dance that never ends and is beautiful in its power as proselytised by the judge:

You speak truer than you know. But I will tell you. Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance.
     Even a dumb animal can dance.
The judge set the bottle on the bar. Hear me, man, he said. There is room on the stage for one beast and one alone. All others are destined for a night that is eternal and without name. One by one they will step down into the darkness before the footlamps. Bears that dance, bears that dont.

And they were dancing, the board floor slamming under the jackboots and the fiddlers grinning hideously over their canted pieces. Towering over them all is the judge and he is naked dancing, his small feet lively and quick and now in doubletime and bowing to the ladies, huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, he says. He says he’ll never die. He bows to the fiddlers and sashays backwards and throws back his head and laughs deep in his throat and he is a great favorite, the judge. He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.

The landscape is hallucinatory, nightmarish, fearsome. Not fear to be lived in but one that permeates atmosphere and clots air.

All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunderheads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear. The thunder moved up from the southwest and lightning lit the desert all around them, blue and barren, great clanging reaches ordered out of the absolute night like some demon kingdom summoned up or changeling land that come the day would leave them neither trace nor smoke nor ruin more than any troubling dream.

Characters are rough – brutal as the land they inhabit and no doubt just as craggy.

They rode on. They rode like men invested with a purpose whose origins were antecedent to them, like blood legatees of an order both imperative and remote. For although each man among them was discrete unto himself, conjoined they made a thing that had not been before and in that communal soul were wastes hardly reckonable more than those whited regions on old maps where monsters do live and where there is nothing other of the known world save conjectural winds.

Then one by one they began to divest themselves of their outer clothes, the hide slickers and raw wool serapes and vests, and one by one they propagated about themselves a great crackling of sparks and each man was seen to wear a shroud of palest fire. Their arms aloft pulling at their clothes were luminous and each obscure soul was enveloped in audible shapes of light as if it had always been so. The mare at the far end of the stable snorted and shied at this luminosity in beings so endarkened and the little horse turned and hid his face in the web of his dam’s flank.

Oh it may be the Lord’s way of showing how little store he sets by the learned. Whatever could it mean to one who knows all? He’s an uncommon love for the common man and godly wisdom resides in the least of things so that it may well be that the voice of the Almighty speaks most profoundly in such beings as live in silence themselves.

But more than any other it is the judge who dominates this novel. His presence guides the pages as his character does people. Blood Meridian is worth reading to meet him alone.

When he talks he is articulate in a novel full of the ineloquent. He is charming and strange and terrifying. His speech demands attention:

Look at them now. Pick a man, any man. That man there. See him. That man hatless. You know his opinion of the world. You can read it in his face, in his stance. Yet his complaint that a man’s life is no bargain masks the actual case with him. Which is that men will not do as he wishes them to. Have never done, never will do. That’s the way of things with him and his life is so balked about by difficulty and become so altered of its intended architecture that he is little more than a walking hovel hardly fit to house the human spirit at all. Can he say, such a man, that there is no malign thing set against him? That there is no power and no force and no cause? What manner of heretic could doubt agency and claimant alike? Can he believe that the wreckage of his existence if unentailed? No liens, no creditors? That gods of vengeance and of compassion alike lie sleeping in their crypt and whether our cries are for an accounting or for the destruction of the ledgers altogether they must evoke only the same silence and that it is this silence which will prevail? To whom is he talking, man? Cant you see him?

A born preacher and a man among men though not one of them.

He wore a round hat with a narrow brim and he was among every kind of man, herder and bullwhacker and drover and freighter and miner and hunter and soldier and pedlar and gambler and drifter and drunkard and thief and he was among the dregs of the earth in beggary a thousand years and he was among the scapegrace scions of eastern dynasties and in all that motley assemblage he sat by them and yet alone as if he were some other sort of man entire and he seemed little changed or none in all these years.

Whatever his antecedents he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go. Whoever would seek out his history through what unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of any ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing. In the white and empty room he stood in his bespoken suit with his hat in his hand and he peered down with his small and lashless pig’s eyes wherein this child just sixteen years on earth read whole bodies of decisions not accountable to the courts of men and he saw his own name which nowhere else would he have ciphered out at all logged into the records as a thing already accomplished, a traveler known in jurisdictions existing only in the claims of certain pensioners or on old dated maps.

The story of the judge’s joining of the group by ex-priest Tobin is a standout scene.  A parable of his appearance in the desert, the pursuit, and final making of gunpowder on the sulphurous slopes of a volcano, where McCarthy’s Morning Star joins Milton’s on the mount. Beautiful, disgusting.

We hauled forth our members and at it we went and the judge on his knees kneading the mass with his naked arms and the piss was splashin about and he was cryin out to us to piss, man, piss for your very souls for cant you see the redskins yonder, and laughin the while and workin up this great mass in a foul black dough, a devil’s batter by the stink of it and him not a bloody dark pastryman himself I dont suppose and he pulls out his knife and he commences to trowel it across the southfacin rocks, spreading it out thin with the knifeblade and watchin the sun with one eye and him smeared with blacking and reeking of piss and sulphur and grinnin and wieldin the knife with a dexterity that was wondrous like he did it every day of his life…

The judge seeks dominion, and arguably achieves it; over the characters and the land of Blood Meridian, a landscape which is natural to him in its unnaturalness, but also too over the reader.

The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I’d have them all in zoos.
That would be a hell of a zoo.
The judge smiled. Yes, he said, even so.
Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.
     He looked about at the dark forest in which they were bivouacked. He nodded toward the specimens he’d collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men’s knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth…
     This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation.

He is captivating and he is terrifying.

The judge was seated upon the closet. He was naked and he rose up smiling and gathered him in his arms against his immense and terrible flesh and shot the wooden barlatch home behind him.

So much symbolism and its power seeps through the novel, the combination of which with such unearthly prose invests things with import and colours the iconic scenes depicted in the narrative with spiritual grandeur and beautiful violence. The book is filled with impromptu executions, baptisms, portentous meetings. Reads less like a novel and more like a monument.

Now the judge on his midnight rounds was passing along at just this place stark naked himself – such encounters being commoner than men suppose or who would survive any crossing by night – and he stepped into the river and seized up the drowning idiot, snatching it aloft by the heels like a great midwife and slapping it on the back to let the water out. A birth scene or a baptism or some ritual not yet inaugurated into any canon. He twisted the water from its hair and he gathered the naked and sobbing fool into his arms and carried it up into the camp and restored it among its fellows.

His feet thawed and burned and he woke and lay staring up at a sky of china blue where very high there circled two black hawks about the sun slowly and perfectly opposed like paper birds upon a pole.

Cancer, Virgo, Leo raced the ecliptic down the southern night and to the north the constellation of Cassiopeia burned like a witch’s signature on the black face of the firmament.

Repetitive, round and round it goes and reaches terminus at great moment and no meaning at once.

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
     The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.

[This scene concludes as the judge tosses a coin far into the air, beyond sight in the dark night, catching it on its inevitable return to earth.]

It blurs to insignificant significance, this meeting and travel and passing of days howls of dogs and killing of men.

They were remote places for news that he traveled in and in those uncertain times men toasted the ascension of rulers already deposed and hailed the coronation of kings murdered and in their graves. Of such corporal histories even as these he bore no tidings and although it was the custom in that wilderness to stop with any traveler and exchange the news he seemed to travel with no news at all, as if the doings of the world were too slanderous for him to truck with, or perhaps too trivial.

A setting that ought to be overfamiliar cliché by now – that of the American West – is depicted as a haunting, preternatural landscape. I would not have thought that cowboys could ever be so captivating.

If much in the world were mystery the limits of that world were not, for it was without measure or bound and there were contained within it creatures more horrible yet and men of other colors and beings which no man has looked upon and yet not alien none of it more than were their own hearts alien in them, whatever wilderness contained there and whatever beasts…
     If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.  He loves games? Let him play for stakes. This you see here, these ruins wondered at by tribes of savages, do you not think that this will be again? Aye. And again. With other people, with other sons.

No explicit insights into minds, didactic digressions into philosophy or science or whatever particular article of sociocultural weaponry the author might decide to grind on day of writing. I can see why he mightn’t like Proust. It deserves its reputation.

A review of and thoughts on – House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

I read this over the Australian summer of 2014-15, in parks and at home and on benches, sober and not so sober, sitting, supine, awkwardly postured with the heat mellowed and cicadas clicking. Quite a contrast to the cold draughty sheaves, but a lovely one. I enjoyed it all – though certainly the Navidson Record more than Johnny Truant’s beatnik escapades.

Good fun, chopped up texts chasing tails throughout it all. An enjoyable exploration of literary criticism built on the foundations of a very haunted house. A well constructed deconstruction. The house, bigger on the inside than the outside is a classic horror trope beautifully executed. Wonderfully creepy.

Danielewski plays with a lot of interesting thoughts, such as echoes and their power:

It is not by accident that choirs singing psalms are most always recorded with ample reverb. Divinity seems defined by echo. Whether the Vienna Boys Choir or monks chanting away on some chart climbing CD, the hallowed always seems to abide in the province of the hollow. The reason for this is not too complex. An echo, while implying an enormity of space, at the same time also defines it, limits it, and even temporarily inhabits it.

On the significance of scars:

… though of course scars are much harder to read. Their complex inflections do not resemble the reductive ease of any tattoo, no matter how extensive, colourful or elaborate the design. Scars are the paler pain of survival, received unwillingly and displayed in the language of injury.

And ageing:

An old man’s mind is just as likely to wander as a young man’s, but where a young man will forgive the stray, an old man will cut it out. Youth always tries to fill the void, an old man learns to live with it.

The book is interspersed with layered text, changing fonts and strange shapes that require reading right to left, back to front, upside down and you get the idea. Don’t feel like a gimmick, however – and they do tie in with the idea of a reality distorting house nicely. You feel like an explorer yourself! There are even some make-you-think one liners and real(ish) relationships.

A more modern rendition of the tale of Theseus and the Minotaur is one of few moments of levity in a novel dedicated to the creepy. Humour always interspersed with a healthy degree of the bleak. (NB: to understand the funny in the following excerpt: the Minotaur in this retelling is King Minos’ cursed son).

Soon enough, a bruiser named Theseus arrives (Chiclitz describes him as a shrunken, virtually retarded, frat boy) who without a second thought hacks the Minotaur into little pieces. In one of the play’s most moving scenes, King Minos, with tears streaming down his face, publicly commends Theseus’ courage. The crowd believes the tears are a sign of gratitude while we the audience understand they are tears of loss.

There are many puzzles to parse through, a labyrinth to solve – and though I’m sure it would be rewarding to fully find my way through it, I’m content with getting lost.

A review of and excerpts from – Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley

I first read Point Counter Point at that awkward transition between older child and younger man, shortly after Huxley’s Brave New World. The reading of it woke me from my dogmatic slumbers (not that I’ve done much overtly Kantian with my newly acquired wakefulness. And I wouldn’t necessarily compare Huxley to Hume. But I digress…) It immediately became one of my favourite books. I had never read anything with such psychological fidelity before, that explored in such depth the common experiences of humanity.

The girl had treasures of sensuality as well as of beauty. Afterward she took to drink and decayed, came round begging and drank up the charity. And finally what was left of her died. But the real Jenny remained here in the picture with her arms up and the pectoral muscles lifting her little breasts. What remained of John Bidlake, the John Bidlake of five and twenty years ago, was there in the picture too. Another John Bidlake still existed to contemplate his own ghost. Soon even he would have disappeared. And in any case, was he the real Bidlake, any more than the sodden and bloated woman who died had been the real Jenny? Real Jenny lived among the pearly bathers. And real Bidlake, their creator, existed by implication in his creatures.

The first few chapters are excellent, just as I remembered. Insightful, aphoristic. The novel opens with a series of chapters exploring the people attending a party held by the Tantamounts, and digs deep with this conceit. So many perspectives, ideas swirling.

Dressed in blue, one might be stared at as an oddity; in badly cut black (like a waiter) one was contemptuously ignored, one was despised for trying without success to be what one obviously wasn’t.

After, the novel loses itself and the pace finds itself submerged in a meandering morass – a shame! But still, at that slow gait multitudes of ideas explored through the characters and their lives – and what is the sacrifice of a brisk pace for all of that?. Here are some of them.

At forty Lord Edward was in all but intellect a kind of child. In the laboratory, at his desk, he was as old as science itself. But his feelings, his intuitions, his instincts were those of a little boy. Unexercised, the greater part of his spiritual being had never developed. He was a kind of child, but with his childish habits ingrained by forty years of living. 

Some drown their sorrows in alcohol, but still more drown them in books and artistic dilettantism; some try to forget themselves in fornication, dancing, movies, listening-in, others in lectures and scientific hobbies. The books and lectures are better sorrow-drowners than drink and fornication; they leave no headache, none of that despairing post coitum triste feeling… Truth-Seekers become just as silly, infantile, and corrupt in their way as the boozers, the pure aesthetes, the business men, the Good-Timers in theirs. I also perceived that the pursuit of Truth is just a polite name for the intellectual’s favourite pastime of substituting simple and therefore false abstractions for the living complexities of reality. 

The relationship between success in human endeavours such as art and science, and such a base thing as material wealth, is satisfyingly and explicitly explored through the character of Illidge – a poorer man in the service of the scandalously rich Lord Edward Tantamount:

Illidge resented the virtues of the rich much more than their vices. Gluttony, sloth, sensuality, and all the less comely products of leisure and an independent income could be forgiven precisely because they were discreditable. But disinterestedness, spirituality, incorruptibility, refinement of feeling, and exquisiteness of taste – these were commonly regarded as qualities to be admired; that was why he so specially disliked them. For these virtues, according to Illidge, were as fatally the product of wealth as were chronic guzzling and breakfast at eleven…

The amused affection which he felt for Lord Edward was tempered by a chronic annoyance at the thought that all the Old Man’s intellectual and moral virtues, all his endearing eccentricities and absurdities were only made possible by the really scandalous state of his bank balance…

Illidge was an enthusiastic biologist; but as a class-conscious citizen he had to admit that pure science, like good taste and boredom, perversity and platonic love, is a product of wealth and leisure.

A playful portrait of Christ in the context of class:

“He was born with the title; he felt he had a divine right, like a king. Millionaires who make their money are always thinking about money; they’re terribly preoccupied about tomorrow. Jesus had the real ducal feeling that he could never be let down. None of your titled financiers or soap boilers. A genuine aristocrat. And besides, he was an artist, he was a genius. He had more important things to think about than bread and boots and tomorrow.”

Walter Bidlake is the first character we are introduced to and functions, for a time, as a nexus around which the narrative revolves. He works as a critic – much easier than being an artist, I suppose.

On paper Walter was all he failed to be in life. His reviews were epigrammatically ruthless. Poor earnest spinsters, when they read what he had written of their heartfelt poems about God and Passion and the Beauties of Nature, were cut to the quick by his brutal contempt. The big game shooters who had so much enjoyed their African trip would wonder how the account of anything so interesting could be called tedious. The young novelists who had modelled their styles and their epical conceptions on those of the best authors, who had daringly uncovered the secrets of their most intimate and sexual life were hurt, were amazed, were indignant to learn that their writing was stilted, their construction non-existent, their psychology unreal, their drama stagey and melodramatic. A bad book is as much of a labour to write as a good one. But the bad author’s soul being, artistically at any rate, of inferior quality, its sincerities will be, if not always intrinsically uninteresting, at any rate uninterestingly expressed, and the labour expended on the expression will be wasted. Nature is monstrously unjust. There is no substitute for talent.

His relationship with his employer, Burlap, is painfully inauthentic:

He called Walter “old man” and squeezed his arm affectionately, looking up at him from his chair with those eyes that expressed nothing, but were just holes into the darkness inside his skull. His mouth, meanwhile, charmingly and subtly smiled. Walter returned the “old man” and the smile, but with a painful consciousness of insincerity. Burlap always had that effect on him; in his presence, Walter never felt quite honest or genuine. It was a most uncomfortable sensation. With Burlap he was always, in some obscure fashion, a liar and a comedian. And at the same time, all that he said, even when he was speaking his innermost convictions, became a sort of falsehood.

And Burlap is not alone in his despicableness. This is a novel full of horrible people, enough for any misanthrope to revel in.

He seemed to turn it on, this love of beauty, like an electric light – turn out the love of power, turn out efficiency and political preoccupations, and turn on the love of beauty. But why shouldn’t he, after all? There was nothing wrong in liking beautiful things. Nothing, except that in some obscure, indescribable way Everard’s love of beauty wasn’t quite right. Too deliberate, was it? Too occasional? Too much for holidays only? Too conventional, too heavy, too humourlessly reverent? She preferred him as a lover of power. As a power-lover he was somehow of better quality than as a beauty lover. A poor beauty-lover, perhaps, because he was such a good power-lover. By compensation. Everything has to be paid for.

A protest against the Protestant work ethic (rougher than Russell’s In Praise of Idleness):

“Our civilisation being what it is” – this is what you’ll have to say to them – “you’ve got to spend eight hours out of every twenty-four as a mixture between an imbecile and a sewing machine. It’s very disagreeable, I know. It’s humiliating and disgusting. But there you are. You’ve got to do it; otherwise the whole fabric of our world will fall to bits and we’ll all starve. Do the job, then, idiotically and mechanically, and spend your leisure hours in being a real complete man or woman, as the case may be… The other’s just a dirty job that’s got to be done… Don’t be deceived by the canting rogues and the Christian service that business men do their fellows. It’s all lies… don’t try to cheer yourself up by pretending the nasty mechanical job is a noble one. It isn’t; and the only result of saying and believing that it is will be to lower your humanity to the level of the dirty work. If you believe in business as service and the sanctity of labour, you’ll merely turn yourself into a mechanical idiot for twenty-four hours out of the twenty-four.”

And on the significance of the child:

For a moment the child was her father-in-law, her absurd, deplorable father-in-law, caricatured and in miniature. It was comic, but at the same time it was somehow no joke… Here was her child – but he was also Philip, he was also herself, he was also Walter, her father, her mother, and now, with that upward tilting of the chin, he had suddenly revealed himself as the deplorable Mr. Quarles. And he might be hundreds of other people too. Might be? He certainly was. He was aunts and cousins she hardly ever saw; grandfathers and great-uncles she had only known as a child and utterly forgotten; ancestors who had died long ago, back to the beginning of things. A whole population of strangers inhabited and shaped that little body, lived in that mind and controlled its wishes, dictated its thoughts and would go on dictating and controlling. Phil, little Phil – the name was an abstraction, a title arbitrarily given, like “France” or “England,” to a collection, never long the same, of many individuals who were born, lived, and died within him, as the inhabitants of a country appear and disappear, but keep alive in their passage the identity of the nation to which they belong.

And many more that I’ve no doubt merely skimmed over. I found the explicit clarity of a writer like Huxley compared to the more frantic, imagistic assault found in some modern works refreshing. Some might call it artless (I don’t agree). Though I admit the book would have benefited from a more thorough editor.

Huxley establishes a didactic tone, raising a topic and elaborating again and again and in various permutations. It’s almost as though he were trying to make some point about the polyphonic nature of narrative/humanity/life or something…

What was one day a sheep’s hind leg and leaves of spinach was the next part of the hand that wrote, the brain that conceived the slow movement of the Jupiter Symphony. And another day had come when thirty-six years of pleasures, pains, hungers, loves, thoughts, music, together with infinite unrealised potentialities of melody and harmony, had manured in an unknown corner of a Viennese cemetery, to be transformed into grass and dandelions, which in their turn had been transformed into sheep, whose hind legs had in their turn been transformed into other musicians, whose bodies in their turn… It was all obvious, but to Lord Edward an apocalypse. Suddenly and for the first time he realised his solidarity with the world.

I enjoyed the many descriptions of the beauty inherent in a scientific understanding of the world. The concept of science as a means to better understand reality, and the significance of that even in the mundane experiences of human life, is ravishingly rendered. I’ve never read it done better.

“Because everything’s implicit in anything… you and I sitting here on an enormous ship in the Red Sea. Really, nothing could be queerer than that. When you reflect on the evolutionary processes, the human patience and genius, the social organisation that have made it possible for us to be here, with stokers having heat apoplexy for our benefit, and steam turbines doing five thousand revolutions a minute, and the sea being blue, and the rays of light not flowing around obstacles, so that there’s a shadow, and the sun all the time providing us with the energy to live and think – when you think of all this and a million other things, you must see that nothing could well be queerer and that no picture can be queer enough to do justice to the facts.”

And Illidge, again, with a bleaker perspective:

“But if animals can get more than they actually require to subsist, they take it, don’t they? If there’s been a battle or a plague, the hyenas and vultures take advantage of the abundance to overeat. Isn’t it the same with us? Forests died in great quantities some millions of years ago. Man has unearthed their corpses, finds he can use them, and is giving himself the luxury of a real good guzzle while the carrion lasts. When the supplies are exhausted, he’ll go back to short rations.” Illidge spoke with gusto. Talking about human beings as though they were indistinguishable from maggots filled him with a peculiar satisfaction. “A coal field’s discovered, oil’s struck. Towns spring up, railways are built, ships come and go. To a long-lived observer on the moon, the swarming and crawling must look like the pullulation of ants and flies round a dead dog. Chilean nitre, Mexican oil, Tunisian phosphates – at every discovery another scurrying of insects. One can imagine the comments of the lunar astronomers. “These creatures have a remarkable and perhaps unique tropism toward fossilised carrion.”

But never a good idea to be too self-serious. Nothing is known (hello again, Hume!).

“Poor Illidge! He’s sadly worried by Einstein and Edington. And how he hates Henri Poincare! How furious he gets with old Mach! They’re undermining his simple faith. They’re telling him that the laws of nature are useful conventions of strictly human manufacture and that space and time and mass themselves, the whole universe of Newton and his successors, are simply our own invention. The idea’s as inexpressibly shocking and painful to him as the idea of the non-existence of Jesus would be to a Christian.

It can get tedious though, as in the repeated references to conception, pregnancy and fetal growth repeatedly throughout the novel. The first time it is very effective, but further acquaintance through unrequested encores renders it reading as something uninspired. Repetitious, rote.

Something that had been a single cell, a cluster of cells, a little sac of tissues, a kind of worm, a potential fish with gills, stirred in her womb and would one day become a man; a grown man, suffering and enjoying, loving and hating, thinking, remembering, imagining. And what had been a blob of jelly within her body would invent a god and worship; what had been a kind of fish would create, and having created, would become the battleground of disputing good and evil; what had blindly lived in her as a parasitic worm would look to the stars, would listen to music, would read poetry.

As we approach the coda a crescendo builds upon multiple mildish sorts of tragedy –  and gratifying ones at that. Neatly done, though I suppose nowadays it might be thought that the interests of a novel lie in not being completely neat.

The ending scene with Burlap is a bleakly humorous mixture:

Thank goodness, he reflected, as he walked along whistling “On Wings of Song” with rich expression, that was the end of Ethel Cobbett so far as he was concerned. It was the end of her also as far as everybody was concerned. For some few days later, having written him a twelve-page letter, which he put in the fire after reading the first scarifying sentence, she lay down with her head in an oven and turned on the gas. But that was something which Burlap could not foresee. His mood as he walked whistling homeward was one of unmixed contentment. That night he and Beatrice pretended to be two little children and had their bath together. Two little children sitting at opposite ends of the big old-fashioned bath. And what a romp they had! The bathroom was drenched with their splashings. Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.

Lewd, love it.

At some points I think that it all might have worked better as a series of essays. Though I suppose fiction tends to have more lasting power. I still love it.

A review of – The Pale King by David Foster Wallace

Feels very unfinished. Plays with some interesting ideas – exploring the nature of boredom, super powers, psychical shenanigans. But nothing is resolved. Doesn’t feel like a stylistic choice (despite the editor’s/collator’s insistence to the contrary). A shame – unfulfilled potential. Not Great but with the glimmerings of it.

I loved the chapter devoted to Stecyk’s story of overnicenesses from boyhood onwards. A wonderfully nasty sense of humour seethes.

Ludicrous scenes are done extremely well – an absurdism that is affecting despite its self-consciousness. Odd characters abound, as a boy obsessed with kissing every part of his body. Never goes overboard into twee territory, thankfully.

The boy’s mid- and upper back were the first areas of radical, perhaps even impossible unavailability to his own lips, presenting challenges to flexibility and discipline that occupied a vast percentage of his inner life in Grades 4 and 5. And beyond, of course, like the falls at a long river’s end, lay the unimaginable prospects of achieving the back of his neck, the eight centimetres just below the chin’s point, the galeae of his scalp’s back and crown, the forehead and zygomatic ridge, the ears, nose, eyes – as well as the paradoxical ding an sich of his lips themselves, accessing which appeared to be like asking a blade to cut itself. These sites occupied a near-mythic place in the overall project: The boy revered them in such a way as to place them almost beyond the range of conscious intent… the inaccessibility of these last sites seemed so immense that it was as if their cast shadow fell across all the slow progress up toward his clavicle in the front and lumbar curvature in the rear that occupied his eleventh year, darkening the whole endeavour, a tenebrous shadow the boy chose to see as lending the enterprise a sombre dignity rather than futility or pathos.

My favourite is an encounter with baby endowed with an aura of curious ferocity:

My Audit Group’s Group Manager and his wife have an infant I can only describe as – fierce. Its expression is fierce, its demeanour is fierce, its gaze over bottle or pacifier – fierce, intimidating, aggressive. I have never heard it cry. When it feeds or sleeps, its pale face reddens, which makes it look all the fiercer. On those workdays when our Group Manager brought it in with him to the District office, hanging papoose-style in a nylon device on his back, the infant appeared to be riding him as a mahout does an elephant. It hung there, radiating authority. Its back lay directly against the Group Manager’s, its large head resting in the hollow of its father’s neck, forcing Mr. Manshardt’s head out and down into a posture of classic oppression. They made a beast with two faces, one of which was calm, bland, and adult, and the other unformed and yet emphatically fierce.

… we stared at each other across our respectively wood-grain and lurid blue surfaces and the five or six fluorescent feet of air between us, both our hands now identically out and clasped, the infant’s gaze fiercely expectant and a small, creamy gout of mucus appearing and receding in one nostril as it breathed, looking directly at me, the cowlick at its crown like a tag or receipt from a register’s slit, its eyes lashless and without circumference or bottom, its lips pursed as if considering how to proceed, a bubble in its bottle of juice ascending slowly, leisurely towards the bottle’s top, the salient nipple brown and shiny from recent use. And the moment hung there between us, borderless and distendant, my impulse to clear my own throat only blocked by a fear of appearing impertinent – and it was in that seemingly endless, expectant interval that I came to see that I deferred to the infant, respected it, granted it full authority, and therefore waited, abiding, both of us in that small and shadowless father’s office, in the knowledge that I was, thenceforth, this tiny white frightening thing’s to command, its instrument or tool.

At the end none of it ties together in a truly meaningful way. Why are these people being collected at large and brought into the flabby fold of the IRS? Still a wild ride, man.

Rand and Drinion’s conversation in a bar in regards to psychiatry and hospitals was interesting, if overtly constructed.

“The psychiatrists. They came in in the afternoon for like an hour, in suits – they always wore nice suits; they were professionals – and talked more to the RNs and the parents when they came in, mostly. And then they’d finally come in and you’d have a weird, stiff conversation, like they were your dad or something. And they had zero sense of humour, and looked at their watch the whole time. Even the ones who you could halfway see might be human beings were more interested in your case, not in you. Like in what your case might mean, how it was like or different than other cases in the textbooks. Don’t get me started on the medical establishment at psych wards. They were bizarre to deal with; it could really mess with your head. If you said you hated it there and it wasn’t helping and you wanted to leave, they saw it as a symptom of your case, not as you wanting to leave. It was like you weren’t a human being, you were a piece of machinery they could take apart and figure out how it worked.

“They saw everybody through this professional lens that was about half an inch across – whatever didn’t fit in the lens they either didn’t see or twisted it or squished it in so it fit.”

“One of the weird things about being in a psych hospital is you gradually start to feel like you have permission to say whatever you’re thinking. You feel like it’s OK or maybe even in some way expected to act crazy or uninhibited, which at first feels kind of liberating and good; there’s this feeling like no more smiley masks, no more pretending, which feels good, except it gets kind of seductive and dangerous, and actually it can make people worse in there – some inhibitions are good, they’re normal, he said, and part of the syndrome they call some people eventually getting institutionalised is that they get put in a nut ward at a young age or a fragile time when their sense of themselves is not really very fixed or resilient, and they start acting the way they think people in nut wards are expected to act, and after a while they really are that way, and they get caught in the system, the mental health system, and they never really get out.”

The above certainly mirrors some of my experiences. And I’ve never read a book where a doctor has been portrayed in an unambiguously altruistic light (now that would be a real fiction, wouldn’t it?)

“He looked so sick and washed out and delicate that you never got the idea that here was this smug, normal, healthy, rich doctor judging you and being glad he wasn’t you or just seeing you as a case to resolve.”

Unnatural dialogue wends its way through the whole book so that the talk is comprised more of monologues than genuine conversation. Not necessarily a problem. But in this it does bother – due mostly to the novel’s earnestness. New Sincerity? Doesn’t qutie feel like it. Childlike conceptualisations at the crux- but presented seriously, with an air of erudite, recondite, weaving wending intellectualistic stuff (but faux-all, obvs).

I knew, sitting there, that I might be a real nihilist, that it wasn’t always just a hip pose. That I drifted and quit because nothing meant anything, no one choice was really better. That I was, in a way, too free, or that this kind of freedom wasn’t actually real – I was free to choose ‘whatever’ because it didn’t really matter. But that this, too, was because of something I chose – I had somehow chosen to have nothing matter… The point was that, through making this choice, I didn’t matter, either. I didn’t stand for anything. If I wanted to matter – even just to myself – I would have to be less free, by deciding to choose in some kind of definite way. Even if it was nothing more than an act of will.

Robust passages every so often, at least on a first read – but coming back to them leaves something lacking. The style of the prose is not as affected as Infinite Jest – and this is not a good thing. Where is that incredibly modern voice that says so little with so much? Less virtuosity but still good fun – though I did miss that self-consciously masturbatory logorrhoea.

Quite funny at times – in particular, the heroic speech by a substitute teacher in finance’s lecture of the valourousness of the profession: ‘gentleman, you are called to account.’ The scene isn’t just played for laughs, however; the speech and its delivery is an earnest lionisation of the dreary clerkish mundanities of everyday white-collar existence.

The substitute’s presentation… was rapid, organised, undramatic, and dry in the way of people who know that what they are saying is too valuable in its own right to cheapen with concern about delivery or ‘connecting’ with the students. In other words, the presentation had a kind of zealous integrity that manifested not as style but as the lack of it. I felt that I suddenly, for the first time, understood the meaning of my father’s term ‘no-nonsense,’ and why it was a term of approval.

The self-critical metafictional narrative of David Wallace/DFW was entertaining, in particular his pastiche of his own style (so many footnotes). Quaint.

The novel’s thesis, of a sort (though there’s really more to it than just all that):

I learned that the world of men as it exists today is a bureaucracy. This is an obvious truth, of course, though it is also one the ignorance of which causes great suffering.
          But moreover, I discovered, in the only way that a man ever really learns anything important, the real skill that is required to succeed in a bureaucracy. I mean really succeed: do good, make a difference, serve. I discovered the key. This key is not efficiency, or probity, or insight, or wisdom. It is not political cunning, interpersonal skills, raw IQ, loyalty, vision, or any of the qualities that the bureaucratic world calls virtues, and tests for. The key is a certain capacity that underlies all these qualities, rather the way that an ability to breathe and pump blood underlies all thought and action.
          The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air.
          The key is the ability, whether innate or condition, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable… It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is nothing you cannot accomplish.

Powerful but somewhat insincere. It was fun.

A review of – The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

That magic I felt as a child reading fantasy and science fiction was rekindled with this one. There’s a didactic quality in Le Guin’s writing that is entrancing – gives it a solemn mythic power. Although the style is somewhat affected – almost in the manner of a fable – it doesn’t read as pretentious.

Words can be used thus paradoxically because they have, along with a semiotic usage, a symbolic or metaphoric usage. They also have a sound – a sentence or paragraph is like a chord of harmonic sequence in music: its meaning may be more clearly understood by the attentive ear, even though it is read in silence, than by the attentive intellect.

Many spaces between the lines to read of gender and society and balance, although I don’t think the overall thrust of it will stand too excessive a scrutiny. It doesn’t really matter though – a sweet story, compact and competent. A gem.

My edition of the book came with an introduction that sums up the ‘point’ of the novel form very nicely.

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction, does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

It wasn’t quite enough to convince friends and family that reading fiction isn’t just a vaguely more respectable version of daydreaming. I suppose sometimes personal perceptions of points can be more important than their supposedly literal sharpnesses.