My Fifteen for Today

Several lit blogs (including one I usually read, A Commonplace Blog) have been tossing around a challenge to decide, within 15 minutes, one's 15 most significantly "mind-forming" books. I take this to mean any kind of book, and the point is not to name those that are "the best" in any absolute sense (whatever that would mean), but those that happen to have been the most influential for a given person.

Why 15 I wonder? I suppose it is more generous than the conventional 10 and less cumbersome than 20. Obviously the list I come up with today may be different from that of a year ago or a year from now. And again, I claim these not as the best of their genres, only as those that stuck with me most tenaciously and that have beckoned me back again and again.

How revealing is a list like this? Given all the books out there, it seems doubtful that a million examples of such lists would be identical. Armed with no knowledge of a person beyond this list, how much could be deduced? At any rate, here's my list for today, in no particular order:

Nathanael West, "Miss Lonelyhearts"
Freud, Civilization and its Discontents
Thoreau, Walden
Loren Eiseley, Essays
Anton Chekhov, Stories
Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
Peter Kramer, Listening to Prozac
Hamlet
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon
Emily Dickinson, Poetry
Wallace Stevens, Poetry
Nietzsche, The Geneaology of Morals
Kafka, Stories
Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Several of these make the list not because of any towering literary merit, but because they exposed me to crucial ideas at particular times. And it is a shame that this kind of list excludes several favorites altogether--Proust, Blake, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, Tolstoy.

Anyone else out there care to share?

The Bore

So [said the doctor]. Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?

Portnoy's Complaint


By way of Arts and Letters Daily, I enjoyed Mark Edmundson's reflections in The American Scholar on his great personal aversion to the bore, that dreaded figure who--oblivious to his hapless auditor--expatiates endlessly on his personal doings or philosophy of life. He memorably invokes the helpless frustration of having to listen to someone drone on for ten minutes about himself without even a polite inquiry in return.

Edmundson speculates about the psychology of the bore--about whether he is actually lonely and particularly needy for the adoration of others--without mentioning what should be obvious, that the bore and the narcissist, if not always the same creature, have a great deal in common. Describing the feeling one gets with the bore, he quotes Robert Greene: "There is no more infuriating feeling than having your individuality ignored, your own psychology unacknowleged. It makes you feel lifeless and resentful." That is exactly how one feels with a narcissist, who is by definition unable to fully acknowledge another's personhood.

Undergoing psychotherapy is such a peculiar experience because, among other things, it requires that one simulate being a bore, that is, to talk about oneself for fifty minutes without the inquiry of the other that non-bores take for granted in social exchange. Most people find this awkward at some level, and endure it only in the hope of eventual self-knowledge. However, some patients take to this so much like a fish to water that the therapist, feeling both talked at and ignored for an hour, may find the n-word come spontaneously to mind as diagnosis.

In his essay Edmundson wonders that while he is exquisitely sensitive to the bore in person, it may be puzzling that he himself is an indefatigable reader. For the book--and one may emphatically add, the blog--is the venue in which the writing bore is able to indulge his worst impulses. And yet in the deliciously available option of putting down the book in disgust, one is able to accomplish the otherwise impossible: to walk away from the bore in mid-sentence.

Inasmuch as I have long abhorred the prospect of the bore, I see in Edmundson a kindred spirit. I rarely attend lectures unless the subject is so interesting to me that it can hardly go wrong. Some professions, like academia and medicine, seem to attract more than their share of bores and narcissists. So over the years there have been a lot of talks to avoid.

Yet I am a passionate reader, because reading affords the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff, true authority from the pseudo-authority of the bore. Edmundson touches on the fact of our actual ambivalence with the bore, whether in person or in print--in his glib self-assurance, the bore evokes in us the hope that he may actually have access to a Truth that we crave. That is, the bore awakens an aspiration for the human prophet. Edmundson describes this experience wonderfully:

Perhaps my allergy to bores--along with an attraction to reading that can border on addiction (hell for me is being caught in a strange place with nothing to read)--is at the center of a paradox: we want to be told authoritatively, once and for all, what's what--and we want nothing of the kind. We love the character that therapists call the Subject Who Is Supposed to Know--he (and it almost always is a he) promises Truth. But we're sickened at the thought of taking our truth from another--it's belittling. And maybe we're dismayed, too, at the idea that the world, so rich in appearances, with its strangeness, beauty, horror, and the rest, should give way and open to one golden key. What a shrinking of the manifold! What a bringing down of the angels to dance minuets on the head of a pin.

In other words, as part of our normal, as opposed to pathological, narcissism, we feel a need to idealize an authoritative other, but an authority that also mirrors--and thereby accepts and validates--our own complicated imperfection. I remember reading somewhere in Harold Bloom's vast oeuvre that we do not read Shakespeare--he reads us. That is the experience one is always looking for in the next book: an experience of understanding in which one also feels understood.

The greatest reading experiences I have had have involved a kind of pleasurable paranoia--this writer, centuries before I was born perhaps, knew me. There is no escaping his or her gaze of recognition. But before the bore, I am invisible, as nothing.

The bore does not--cannot--understand his auditor or reader. That is why, as one grows older and time grows more precious, few things are more urgent than the need for real prophets--the wise--as opposed to the false prophets--the bores.

That Teenage Feeling

And nothing comforts me the same
As my brave friend who says,
"I don't care if forever never comes
'Cause I'm holding out for that teenage feeling"

Neko Case


"O Edward, Edward, wherefore art thou a vampire?" So seventeen-year-old Bella, already an old maid next to fourteen-year-old Juliet, should have exclaimed in Stephanie Meyer's Twilight. I am usually pretty insensitive to literary fads (I have yet to encounter Harry Potter on page or screen, and no Da Vinci Code graces my shelves), but this time a friend of mine had recommended it to me, which I am sensitive to, and then my daughter asked to read it. As she is, alas, not usually a bibliophile, but is approaching that most peculiar phenomenon of female adolescence, I thought it worth looking into. And whatever its literary merits, any book that sells over 50 million copies is of anthropological interest if nothing else. I have not had the pleasure of the sequels or the movie.

I do have the consolation of at least one other adult heterosexual male who has at least willingly made his way through the book, as Brad Meltzer acknowledges in his "Guilty Pleasures" entry at NPR. And Caitlin Flanagan took Twilight both quite seriously and favorably in her review in The Atlantic Monthly. Flanagan unsurprisingly views the latent menace of Edward's vampirism as symbolic of the sexuality that threatens to overwhelm adolescent affection. This may be (vampires have had strong sexual overtones at least since Bram Stoker), but I don't know that it accounts for the book's popularity any more than the carnal undercurrents of "Little Red Riding Hood" account for that fairy tale's enduring interest. There is a risk, in literary criticism as in psychology, of explaining phenomena by appeal to other, supposedly more fundamental factors. But sometimes what you see is what you get.

What I see in Twilight is a contemporary fairy tale, combining a well-paced plot, the clever use of a mythological entity, and an intense love story. Bella is something of a young Everywoman, the girl next door: sensible, down-to-earth, self-doubting but capable, awkward but winning (a nerd's perfect date, in other words). Her appeal is left deliberately ambiguous--in Phoenix, where she grew up, she was apparently something of an outsider, and yet when she moves to the small town of Forks, she is embraced by male and female peers alike. So she manages to be in the group and yet not of the group, which is every teenager's (perhaps every adult's) fantasy.

One does not look to Twilight for stylistic artistry; even in a book apparently intended for the young adult market, its prose seems almost willfully flat. Even the editing leaves something to be desired, as shown by this sample that, believe it or not, my eyes landed on the first time I re-opened it at random to look for a representative passage:

I ate breakfast cheerily, watching the dust moats (sic) stirring in the sunlight that streamed in the back window...By dint of much elbow grease, I was able to get both windows in the truck almost completely rolled down.

Enough said (as a rejection letter of an adolescent story of mine read, "Read The Elements of Style, over and over." Eventually, I did). But the heart of the story for me is the extraordinarily close tie between Bella and Edward, which conveys fairly convincingly the experience of erotic love: the blind adoration of the other, who for a time seems to have no faults; the feeling of an arbitrary yet unique bond; the sheer pleasure of the other's company; the agonizing insecurity should the attachment seem threatened. It is the ecstasy of first love, the echoes of which we can only hope to faintly recapture later in life; it may be inane and stupid, but if so, intelligence may be overrated.

If Twilight's audience is predominantly female, it may be less because it is chick-lit than because the figure of Edward is nauseatingly familiar to some male readers, thanks to the rather different experience of male adolescence. Ironically given Edward's famous actual restraint with Bella, to the male gaze he is the ultimate player: he has the perfect looks, the preternatural power, the money, the smarts, the smug superiority, the ineffable cool. He even drives slick cars (fast) and has a great sound system in his room. He is a brief for evolutionary psychological accounts of female attraction: he is the alpha male.

What I would like to ask perfect Edward is why, as a 105-year-old vampire, he is angling for a 17-year-old girl (okay, I know the answer: evolutionary psychology). And yet the ambiguity of Bella's attraction for him may make the story particularly powerful for female readers, for every girl or woman who reads the book can see herself as Bella. After all, while Bella's character is appealing enough, she exhibits neither spectacular wit nor stupendous beauty so far as we know, and her background is ordinary enough. Edward himself is puzzled by her pull (which seems related to his inability to read her mind as he does most humans'). The encounter with the virtuous vampire is much like the quasi-supernatural experience of love, the thunderclap on a calm day that comes unbidden and unexplained.

The Consolations of Lucy Snowe

I came across this utterly representative Romantic credo, a mighty riff by Charlotte Bronte, once again from the striking but strange Villette. It brought to mind David Hume's claim that 'tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the world to the scratching of his little finger:

I groaned under her bitter sternness. Never--never--oh, hard word! This hag, this Reason, would not let me look up, or smile, or hope: she could not rest unless I were altogether crushed, cowed, broken-in, and broken-down. According to her, I was born only to work for a piece of bread to await the pains of death, and steadily through all life to despond. Reason might be right; yet no wonder we are glad at times to defy her, to rush from under her rod and give a truant hour to Imagination--her soft, bright foe, our sweet Help, our divine Hope. We shall and must break bonds at intervals, despite the terrible revenge that awaits our return. Reason is vindictive as a devil: for me, she was always envenomed as a step-mother. If I have obeyed her it has chiefly been with the obedience of fear, not of love. Long ago I should have died of her ill-usage: her stint, her chill, her barren board, her icy bed, her savage, ceaseless blows; but for that kinder Power who holds my secret and sworn allegiance. Often has Reason turned me out by night, in mid-winter, on cold snow, flinging for sustenance the gnawed bone dogs had forsaken: sternly has she vowed her stores held nothing more for me--harshly denied my right to ask better things...Then, looking up, have I seen in the sky a head amidst circling stars, of which the midmost and the brightest lent a ray sympathetic and attent. A spirit, softer and better than Human Reason, has descended with quiet flight to the waste--bringing all round her a sphere of air borrowed of eternal summer; bringing perfume of flowers which cannot fade--fragrance of trees whose fruit is life, bringing breezes pure from a world whose day needs no sun to lighten it. My hunger has this good angel appeased with food, sweet and strange, gathered amongst gleaning angels, garnering their dew-white harvest in the first fresh hour of a heavenly day; tenderly has she assuaged the insufferable tears which weep away life itself--kindly given rest to deadly weariness--generously lent hope and impulse to paralyzed despair. Divine, compassionate, succourable influence! When I bend the knee to other than God, it shall be at they white and winged feet, beautiful on mountain or on plain. Temples have been reared to the Sun--altars dedicated to the Moon. Oh, greater glory! To thee neither hands build, nor lips consecrate; but hearts, through ages, are faithful to thy worship. A dwelling thou hast, too wide for walls, too high for dome--a temple whose floors are space--rites whose mysteries transpire in presence, to the kindling, the harmony of worlds!

All my old English teachers told me not to write paragraphs this long, and this unruly. But as the wag said, "Less is a bore."

Flannery

"Everywhere I go I'm asked if the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them."

Flannery O'Connor


Brad Gooch's economical biography of Flannery O'Connor (reviewed here by Christopher Benfey) suits its subject's concise literary style and externally uneventful life. It was a life dominated by her writing, her Catholic faith, and by the devastating lupus erythematosus that killed her at age 39 in 1964. By sheer temperament, she was a great original: contrary, self-contained, and highly creative from early childhood.

As Benfey suggests, with respect to her literary legacy, O'Connor's death may have been perfectly timed, perpetuating the tradition of genius tragically cut short. However, by her late 30's her short stories already weren't coming to her as quickly or as naturally, and she had become very much the literary sage, besieged constantly by curious well-wishers and by academic lecture series. Given that O'Connor's stories were variations on a theme to begin with, one wonder if she hadn't already conveyed the heart of her vision--what would thirty or forty more years have brought, really?

I went back and reread "A Good Man is Hard to Find," partly because it may be the single most famous of her stories, and also because it is available online. All of the O'Connor essentials are here in potent form: the tacky white-trash "protagonists" (if one can call them that); the heady brew of heat, squalor, and nostalgia that is the South; the mordant wit that makes reading her such a deceptively effortless experience; the preoccupation with evil and faith; and the eruption of death into the quaintly quotidian family adventure. Only the open brutality of the story's violence, usually more veiled in O'Connor's work, prevents it from being exemplary. The story is worth reading for the hilarious southern caricature of Red Sammy Butts alone (before reading the biography I didn't realize O'Connor had been a cartoonist in college, although it makes sense to me now).

One danger in reading O'Connor is that one so easily feels superior to her characters, who are typically an odious combination of gross ignorance, smug complacency, and breathtaking entitlement. The endlessly chattering and infinitely annoying grandmother of this story fits the profile. It is hard to avoid a certain schadenfreude when fools like these get their crushing comeuppance, as they usually do, and yet it may be that in provoking this wicked feeling, O'Connor is in effect making the reader complicit in the (original) evil that is inseparable from human nature.

The Misfit is as good a depiction of the psychopath as one can find--he seems genuinely perplexed by the moral categories that he seems unable or unwilling to fathom or to conform to: "I found out the crime don't matter. You can do one thing or you can do another, kill a man or take a tire off his car, because sooner or later you're going to forget what it was you done and just be punished for it." And yet his predicament is also the universal human one: "I call myself The Misfit," he said, "because I can't make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment." Indeed, the basic problem of the moral life--the problem of theodicy too--is that it ultimately isn't fair. And yet the Misfit makes the error of the fundamentalist, the purist, and the fanatic--if morality is not absolute, then it must be meaningless.

In her essay "Some Aspect of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction," O'Connor allied herself with Nathaniel Hawthorne as a writer more of "romances" than of conventional fiction. She wrote, "All novelists are fundamentally seekers and describers of the real, but the realism of each novelist will depend on his view of the ultimate reaches of reality." This seems crucial, as it is the nature of reality--physical, emotional, moral, spiritual--that is at issue in the arts. In an amusing anecdote, O'Connor objects to the notion of the writer as a supporter of social agendas or as an uplifter of public morale--she likens the writer to a porter who, "when he is given the function of domestic, he is going to set the public's luggage down in puddle after puddle."

The following seems a pretty complete statement of O'Connor's mission, and it explains to me why I find her work so compelling even though our theologies differ so completely:

On the other hand, if the writer believes that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious, if he looks upon us as beings existing in a created order to whose laws we freely respond, then what he sees on the surface will be of interest to him only as he can go through it into an experience of mystery itself. His kind of fiction will always be pushing its own limits outward toward the limits of mystery, because for this kind of writer, the meaning of a story does not begin except at a depth where the adequate motivation and the adequate psychology and the various determinations have been exhausted. Such a writer will be interested in what we don't understand rather than in what we do. He will be interested in possibility rather than in probability. He will be interested in characters who are forced out to meet evil and grace and who act on a trust beyond themselves--whether they know very clearly what it is they act upon or not. To the modern mind, this kind of character, and his creator, are typical Don Quixotes, tilting at what is not there.

That pretty much sums it up for me: the artist does not reflect reality--she furthers, deepens, and recasts reality, and this makes sense only in the context of Mystery. And O'Connor, along with Kafka, was one of the great moral and metaphysical comedians of the last century.

Love on the Brain

Last post provoked reflection on love, for a person, for the universe. Anything else I would have to say about this at the moment would be an embarrassment, but I was struck yesterday by this passage from Charlotte Bronte's Villette (the reminiscences of Miss Marchmont).

I haven't finished the book, so don't send any spoilers, Villette fans (you know who you are).

"I love Memory to-night," she said: "I prize her as my best friend. She is just now giving me a deep delight; she is bringing back to my heart, in warm and beautiful life, realities--not mere empty ideas--but what were once realities, and that I long have thought decayed, dissolved, mixed in with grave-mould. I possess just now the hours, the thoughts, the hopes of my youth. I renew the love of my life--its only love--almost its only affection; for I am not a particularly good woman: I am not amiable. Yet I have had my feelings, strong and concentrated; and these feelings had their object; which in its single self, was dear to me, as, to the majority of men and women, are all the unnumbered points on which they dissipate their regard. While I loved, and while I was loved, what an existence I enjoyed! What a glorious year I can recall--how bright it comes back to me! What a living spring--what a warm, glad summer--what soft moonlight, silvering the autumn evenings--what strength of hope under the ice-bound waters and frost-hoar fields of that year's winter! Through that year my heart lived with Frank's heart. O my noble Frank--my faithful Frank--my good Frank! so much better than myself--his standard in all things so much higher! This I can now see and say--if few women have suffered as I did in his loss, few have enjoyed what I did in his love. It was a far better kind of love than common; I had no doubts about it or him: it was such a love as honoured, protected, and elevated, no less than it gladdened her to whom it was given. Let me now ask, just at this moment, when my mind is so strangely clear,--let me reflect why it was taken from me? For what crime was I condemned, after twelve months of bliss, to undergo thirty years of sorrow?"

Is there anything more sad than this? As Samuel Johnson said of friendship, one must keep love--of someone, or something--in constant repair.

The Great Cham

I finished Peter Martin's well-written biography of Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), who would have to rank as among the most prodigious of literary giants who suffered from melancholia, or what is more tamely termed Major Depression today. The best known English literary critic and general man-of-letters of his century, Johnson earned fame with his essays, his groundbreaking English dictionary, and his work in biography and translation. He was also renowned for his wit and powers of conversation. James Boswell described Johnson's affliction thus:

The 'morbid melancholy,' which was lurking in his constitution and to which we may ascribe those particularities, and that aversion to regular life, which, at a very early period, marked his character, gathered such strength in his twentieth year, as to afflict him in a dreadful manner...he felt himself overwhelmed with an horrible hypochondria, with perpetual irritation, fretfulness, and impatience; and with a dejection, gloom, and despair, which made existence misery. From this dismal malady he never afterwards was perfectly relieved; and all his labours, and all his enjoyments, were but temporary interruptions of its baleful influence.

While Johnson was a highly prolific writer overall, he abhorred what he considered to be his own propensities for sluggish indolence, and indeed, long periods of inactivity punctuated episodes of herculean writing (although I have never encountered any suggestion that he was bipolar). Throughout his life he had a morbid dread of death and of what he perceived as his own sinful nature, although to all appearances he led a largely blameless life. In his last years he noted his conviction that he was "one of those who shall be damned." Asked to clarify, he famously and bluntly replied, "Sent to Hell, Sir, and punished everlastingly."

Johnson' s melancholia infected what was otherwise an iron will, and he fought the black dog indefatigably. He "coped" (to put in anachronistically) by seeking out social contacts, engaging in vigorous exercise, throwing himself into his work, and fortifying his religious faith--pretty much the same methods people use today. However, as was the medical fashion of the era, he was also bled copiously and frequently during his depressive episodes (which would, of course, have produced the opposite of the intended effect).

Johnson was also notorious for ungainly and disconcerting bodily movements that have been speculated to represent Tourette's syndrome, although this is not decided, and he did not exhibit the involuntary profanity that often accompanies that disorder. Martin quotes Boswell's classic description:

...while talking or even musing as he sat in his chair, he commonly held his head to one side towards his right shoulder, and shook it in a tremulous manner, moving his body backwards and forwards, and rubbing his left knee in the same direction, with the palm of his hand. In the intervals of articulating he made various sounds with his mouth, sometimes as if ruminating, or what is called chewing the cud, sometimes giving a half whistle, sometimes making his tongue play backwards from the roof of his mouth, as if clucking like a hen, and sometimes protruding it against his upper gums in front, as if pronouncing quickly under his breath, too, too, too: all this accompanied sometimes with a thoughtful look, but more frequently with a smile. Generally when he had concluded a period, in the course of a dispute, by which time he was a good deal exhausted by violence and vociferation, he used to blow out his breath like a whale...

However, these signs reportedly diminished whenever he was closely engaged in work or conversation, and he could suppress them for limited periods of time, such as in church or while sitting for a portrait.

And here is Martin's remarkable account of an 18th century stroke:

The night after sitting for this last portrait, at about three in the morning, he awakened suddenly with 'a confusion and indistinctness in my head which lasted, I suppose, about half a minute.' To test whether or not it was a stroke and had affected his mind, he immediately composed a prayer to God in Latin, discovering to his infinite relief that 'the lines were not very good, but I knew them not to be very good.' However, he also discovered he could not speak. Calmly, he drank 'two drams' of wine 'to rouse the vocal organs' and 'put myself into violent motion,' but his speech would not come. He could say 'no' but not 'yes.'

One would expect a melancholic, I suppose, to be able to say 'no' but not 'yes' under the circumstances. But throughout his life Johnson was, like Oscar Wilde, supreme master of the one-liner, a few of which follow:

Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.

More knowledge may be gained of man's real character, by a short conversation with one of his servants, than from a formal and studied narrative, begun with his pedigree and ended with his funeral. [In psychiatry we call this collateral information].

Sir, we know our will is free, and there's an end on 't.

It is strange that there should be so little reading in the world, and so much writing. People in general do not willingly read, if they can have any thing else to amuse them.

No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.

(Moon) Pie in the Sky

A world of made
is not a world of born--pity poor flesh

and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if--listen:there's a hell
of a good universe next door;let's go

E. E. Cummings


After considering human enhancement over the weekend, it seems fitting to reflect on its evil alter ego, cultural degradation, on a Monday. I had long meant to get around to Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet, but taking it on the cruise ship was a deliberate exercise in incongruity, sort of like schlepping Madame Bovary to a boxing match, or packing "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" for an outing to Chuck E. Cheese's. But its theme of cultural decadence seemed somehow appropriate in the sybaritic surroundings, and Bellow's coruscating prose served as a model in miniature for the blazing Caribbean sun that, ultimately, was its progenitor.

Mr. Sammler's Planet was discussed in a typically trenchant post by D. G. Myers at A Commonplace Blog; it is easily the most entertaining and thought-provoking novel about a basically crotchety character that I have ever read. Published in 1970 and set in New York City, it is the story of the Holocaust survivor and general avatar of Old World culture Artur Sammler and his deep dismay amid a society that seems to have cast aside all cultural, material, sexual and scientific restraint. The very first paragraph frames the book well:

Shortly after dawn, or what would have been dawn in a normal sky, Mr. Artur Sammler with his bushy eye took in the books and papers of his West Side bedroom and suspected strongly that they were the wrong books, the wrong papers. In a way it did not matter much to a man of seventy-plus, and at leisure. You had to be a crank to insist on being right. Being right was largely a matter of explanations. Intellectual man had become an explaining creature. Fathers to children, wives to husbands, lecturers to listeners, experts to laymen, colleagues to colleagues, doctors to patients, man to his own soul, explained. The roots of this, the causes of the other, the source of events, the history, the structure, the reasons why. For the most part, in one ear out the other. The soul wanted what it wanted. It had its own natural knowledge. It sat unhappily on superstructures of explanation, poor bird, not knowing which way to fly.

I love that last part--Freud in a nutshell, no? Or inasmuch as Freud himself aspired to be the ultimate explainer, this is perhaps the narrative and aesthetic riposte to Freud, and the whole modernist and Enlightenment project.

The classically deracinated, alienated man, Sammler finds himself in a world he barely recognizes. Obviously he interacts with what, biologically, are other Homo sapiens, but some kind of cultural speciation seems to have taken place--by means of his transit across the Atlantic Ocean and the 1960's--such that he no longer feels he is among his own kind. There has been a transvaluation of values, embodied in the general kooky flakiness of his own daughter and in the appalling children of his nephew and New World benefactor. Common sense appears to have drained from the world. All of this occurs against the backdrop of the time's fervent enthusiasm about the moon landing and mankind's presumed cosmic destiny. As all eyes turn toward the heavens--and away from the earthly decay all around--the irony, perhaps even the pathos, is rich.

I highly recommend the book--Bellow's best in my opinion except perhaps for The Adventures of Augie March.

Bellow's book came to mind when I was reading Thomas Mallon's article in The Atlantic about prospects for sending (unmanned) spacecraft to other solar systems. Around the same time that Sammler had appeared, when progress of the space program paralleled growing awareness of overpopulation and environmental destruction, the anthropologist Loren Eiseley had published The Invisible Pyramid, which evinced similar ambivalence about human restlessness. As a writer long fascinated both by humanity's mercurial ambition over the eons and by the wider natural world, Eiseley couldn't help being alarmed and saddened by the tremendous environmental threat posed to the latter by the former. As a somewhat bitter metaphor for space exploration he proposed the tendency of some fungi to shoot spores randomly into the air when their own life cycles and locales are exhausted. On this account humanity's perennial sense of Manifest Destiny is not so much heroic as cancerous.

What does it say about us if the essence of human nature is to change its own nature, that is, to have no essence? Doesn't that mean that consciousness is basically destructive, or should we say creative? Is self-enhancement a rejection of the self (death, in effect), or its natural developmental trajectory (greater life)? Is space exploration a rejection of the earth, or the fulfillment of a promise that evolved on earth? We must accept ourselves, yet we must change. Paradox.

Story and Schizophrenia

This year marks the bicentennial not only of Darwin and Lincoln, and of Edgar Allan Poe, but also of Nikolai Gogol (1809-1853), who will fittingly turn 200 on April Fools Day. In addition to his comic masterpieces "The Nose" and The Inspector General, he is remembered for his short story "The Overcoat" as well as the novels Taras Bulba and Dead Souls. And in "The Diary of a Madman" (1834) he produced an early description of what may be schizophrenia.

Compared to psychoses related to substances or to depression or mania, which are relatively common in historical and fictional accounts over many centuries, schizophrenia is relatively scarcely documented in past records before the 19th century. This has led some historians of psychiatry to argue that schizophrenia could in fact be a relatively novel disease, related perhaps to an as yet undiscovered virus or to modern society itself (a number of studies, although not all, have suggested the urban environment as a risk factor for schizophrenia). Or schizophrenia may just have had a lower profile because its unremitting, less forgiving course has afforded less historical opportunity for articulation in memoirs and literary works.

A summary of "The Diary of a Madman," as well as the historical speculations about schizophrenia, may be found here. The story is notable for being Gogol's only work written in the first person, as the remarkable account of the clerk Poprishchin, who hopelessly admires the daughter of the office director, comes to overhear the conversations of dogs in the street, and ends up convinced he is the King of Spain.

The story is an interesting amalgam, on the one hand a whimsical parody of the hapless functionary oppressed by the system, yet on the other a poignant treatment of a deteriorating mind. It ends as follows (trans. Pevear and Volkhonsky):

No I no longer have the strength to endure. God! what they're doing to me! They pour cold water on my head! They do not heed, do not see, do not listen to me. What have I done to them? Why do they torment me? What do they want from poor me? What can I give them? I have nothing. It's beyond my strength, I cannot endure all their torments, my head is burning, and everything is whirling before me. Save me! take me! give me a troika of steeds swift as the wind! Take the reins, my driver, ring out, my bells, soar aloft, steeds, and carry me out of this world! Farther, farther, so that there's nothing to be seen, nothing. Here is the sky billowing before me; a little star shines in the distance; a forest races by with dark trees and a crescent moon; blue mist spreads under my feet; a string twangs in the mist; on one side the sea, on the other Italy; and there I see some Russian huts. Is that my house blue in the distance? Is that my mother sitting at the window? Dear mother, save your poor son! shed a tear on his sick head! see how they torment him! press the poor orphan to your breast! there's no place for him in the world! they're driving him out! Dear mother! pity your sick child!...And do you know that the Dey of Algiers has a bump just under his nose?

It is telling that Gogol ended this harrowing passage with the grotesquely comic note at the end. It brought to mind the way that well-meaning folks outside of psychiatry, curious about the inscrutable, want to hear about the flamboyant absurdities of the truly around-the-bend, and end up disappointed that these are far outnumbered by sordid banalities. In the interest of understanding stigma, why is craziness so often found to be laughable, in life and in popular culture?

Three possibilities occur to me. One is the theory of humor as incongruity, as the sight of animate persons behaving as things or automata (thus slapstick and, potentially, psychosis; but it's not funny if someone really gets hurt, which is why real schizophrenia is not amusing).

Second is the theory of humor as a way to take down the powerful or pretentious. Oddly, all paranoia can be seen as massively self-centered or grandiose--in a clinical and not a moralistic sense--inasmuch as the target is implied to be sufficiently important as to mobilize intricate schemes of surveillance or hostility. Paranoia is not self-abnegating--quite the opposite. Pathologically this may be unconscious over-compensation for what is in fact the disintegration of the self, but to observers it may appear as self-aggrandizing, which may in turn inspire humor as a way to deflate the paranoia.

Third is the possibility that madness provokes massive anxiety of the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I variety, and humor is the way we manage this discomfiture.

DFW Revisited

Fear the hearts of men are failing
These our latter days we know
The great depression now is spreading
God's word declared it would be so.

Uncle Tupelo


D. T. Max's review of the life and work of David Foster Wallace in the current New Yorker comes six months after the writer's death by hanging--another victim of the wretched "black dog." Lately I was rereading some of Wallace's essays--on tennis, on television, on David Lynch--and I was most struck by their coruscating intelligence, their fierce intensity. If I knew nothing about him apart from his writings and the fact of his suicide, I would have inferred that he had bipolar disorder, but apparently, from what little I have picked up from the press, he was never classically manic (in the Robert Lowell sense anyway).

But the sheer urgency and obsession with detail of his prose make one wonder, although not because it veers out of control--indeed, it is fascinating because it seems always on the verge of shivering to pieces, but pulls back just in time. And his incredible humor is evident in every line: very dry, yet unself-conscious, ingenious, yet never supercilious. His exuberant brilliance doesn't overwhelm, because he is constantly reminding the reader how much he himself, the author, doesn't know.

Wallace's illness began in adolescence, it seems, with anxiety and panic symptoms, and it sounds like the depression that followed for nearly three decades rarely abated altogether, although the symptoms were more or less controlled at times. He had ECT twice, once as a young man (when it was somewhat helpful) and again in the year before his death (when it wasn't).

Interestingly he did relatively well on Nardil for years, just as some rare individuals seem to do better on MAO inhibitors than on newer and supposedly "cleaner" antidepressants. But sometime in the year or two before his death he may have had a tyramine reaction after eating at a Persian restaurant (MAO inhibitors and exotic cuisine don't mix well), and as he struggled for years to crank out a third novel he developed the classic concern that the antidepressant was dulling his creativity. So he stopped the Nardil. It sounds like it was pretty much downhill after that, although obviously we don't know if staying on it would have made a difference.

Wallace seemed always to struggle from a conviction that something was seriously wrong not only with himself, but with his era. And while he did serious student work in philosophy, he always came back to literature as a possible way out; it's hard to think of another author who so urgently looked to fiction as a "writing cure." According to Max's review:

His goal had been to show readers how to live a fulfilled, meaningful life. "Fiction's about what it is to be a [freaking] human being," he once said. Good writing should help readers to "become less alone inside."...The central issue for Wallace remained, as he told McCaffery, how to give "CPR to those elements of what's human and magic that still live and glow despite the times' darkness."

Literature as moral and existential CPR--that is a tall order. Indeed, in contrast to his non-fiction works, which Wallace seems to have tossed of fairly easily, he agonized over his fiction. After his second novel and magnum opus Infinite Jest in 1996 twelve years had passed when, after struggling for years with an uncompleted third book, he took his own life. One wonders if, despite his general genius, he was asking too much of his own fiction.

Max quotes from Wallace's first novel The Broom of the System:

Apparently she was some sort of phenomenon in college and won a place in graduate study at Cambridge...but in any event there she studied...under a mad crackpot...who believed that everything was words. Really. If you car would not start, it was apparently to be understood as a language problem. If you were unable to love, you were lost in language. Being constipated equaled being clogged with linguistic sediment.

Without being reductive, I wonder if Wallace sought in words a cure for a depression that ultimately was not about words, but about the way his brain was wired. But if you're looking at a nail and don't have a hammer, you might use a heavy book instead. And some get by with that, if the wires aren't too tangled, or the nail isn't too big (metaphors mixing here). But as Wallace wryly put it in an interview, "I had kind of midlife crisis at twenty, which probably doesn't augur well for my longevity." He died at 46, and his story suggests that he braved much to get that far.

Wallace never wrote directly about his own depression, but Max quotes the following from the story "The Planet Trillaphon:"

I'm not incredibly glib, but I'll tell what I think the Bad Thing is like...Imagine that every single atom in every single cell in your body is sick...intolerably sick. And every proton and neutron in every atom...swollen and throbbing, off-color, sick, with just no chance of throwing up to relieve the feeling. Every electron is sick, here twirling off-balance, and all erratic in these funhouse orbitals that are just thick and swirling with mottled yellow and purple poison gases, everything off balance and woozy. Quarks and neutrinos out of their minds and bouncing sick all over the place.

Malaise that penetrates to the sub-atomic fundamentals of being: it's hard to think of a better metaphor for severe depression. And yet Wallace's writings show his capacity to be more delightfully alive to the wonder of living than most of us ever manage. Sometimes our current treatments are no anodyne: but I can't help wishing he hadn't stopped the Nardil. Maybe the third novel never would have been, but perhaps he would have survived; as it is we have neither. There is depression and then there is depression; his was not the kind to toy with.

Female Scribblers

Elaine Showalter's A Jury of Her Peers, according to one review, points out that 19th century Great Britain produced several literary titans with two X chromosomes--Jane Austen, the Brontes, George Eliot, and then Virginia Woolf later on--while the United States during the same period produced, well, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Why? Apparently Showalter suggests that even poor British women had servants, while their American counterparts kept house. But it would seem that children above all may have barred the way to literary greatness.

The Library of America series may serve as a rough guide to canonical status, and only seven women have volumes devoted to them: Stowe, Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Flannery O'Connor (who is the subject of a new and reportedly excellent biography), and Katherine Anne Porter. With the exception of Stowe, who amazingly bore seven children, none of these women ever answered to "Mommy." (Emily Dickinson, who obviously warrants a volume but doesn't have one yet--some copyright issue I guess--obviously wasn't a mother either).

Uncle Tom's Cabin is among my sheepishly as yet unread classics. Stein I have never yet been able to stomach (the emperor's clothes problem for me). Cather, Wharton, and Porter I find very good indeed, but probably only O'Connor would I consider absolutely essential, if only because she is sui generis.

Jewett (1849-1909) I had never read until recently, and given her general obscurity since her death a century ago one wonders whether her Library of America status may be owing to a bit of feminist affirmative action. The daughter of a successful country doctor, and granted independence by family wealth, she was much acclaimed in her lifetime and traveled widely in literary circles. In an interesting parallel with O'Connor's lupus, she struggled with rheumatoid arthritis for much of her life.

The text of Jewett's striking story "A White Heron" is here, and I also read her short novel The Country of the Pointed Firs, a local color affair based on the Maine coast and featuring eccentric but tough farm women and old salt-of-the-earth sailors. Not much happens, but the characters, relationships, and above all the sense of place are conveyed quietly but powerfully--perhaps a kind of premodern Virginia Woolf.

Late Romantic

Out on the winding, windy moors

We'd roll and fall in green.

You had a temper like my jealousy

Too hot, too greedy.

How could you leave me,

When I needed to possess you?

I hated you, but I loved you too.

Kate Bush

Had I not endured a most lame lapse in Internet connectivity over the weekend (I guess it's a good thing I'm married and was not mid-sentence on Match.com), I would have written about that least romantic of Romantic texts, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (no, I can't seem to generate the diaeresis in her name here). A recent rereading of it reminded me that it makes "love" of the Hallmark-card-variety seem mild indeed.

The Irish Anglican curate Patrick Bronte (1777-1861) lived long enough to bury his wife and all six of his children, but not before Emily (1818-1848), Charlotte (1816-1855), and to a lesser degree, Anne (1820-1849), became acclaimed novelists. In conjunction with their ill-fated brother Branwell, the girls had famously devised the childhood fantasy worlds of Angria and Gondal--their upbringing was austere and isolating, of the kind that a television in the background effectively dispels today. It was the perfect English Romantic family, with equal parts genius and tuberculosis.

Emily Bronte was an enigmatic figure who left few unpublished writings behind. Charlotte later recalled her sister as follows: In Emily's nature the extremes of vigour and simplicity seemed to meet. Under an unsophisticated culture, inartificial tastes, and an unpretending outside, lay a secret power and fire that might have informed the brain and kindled the veins of a hero; but she had no worldly wisdom; her powers were unadapted to the practical business of life: she would fail to defend her most manifest rights, to consult her most legitimate advantage. An interpreter ought always to have stood between her and the world. Her will was not very flexible, and it generally opposed her interest. Her temper was magnanimous, but warm and sudden; her spirit altogether unbending.

If claustrophobia and agoraphobia can ever be said to coexist, they would seem to do so in Wuthering Heights; it is like a game of violent chess played in a closet set down on an endless plain. Interpersonally the book is minimalistic and constricting, comprising two families four miles apart who seem to despise each other but who can't stop having encounters, presumably because the rest of the human race is nowhere in evidence. If here, as for Sartre, hell is other people, it is still far preferable to the lack thereof. If anyone doubts that the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference, read this book.

Here is a tidy vignette on love: The intimacy thus commenced grew rapidly; though it encountered temporary interruptions. Earnshaw was not to be civilised with a wish, and my young lady was no philosopher, and no paragon of patience; but both their minds tending to the same point--one loving and desiring to esteem, and the other loving and desiring to be esteemed--they contrived in the end to reach it.

Heathcliff is of course the dark conundrum of the novel. Even as a child he is described as having a kind of native churlishness about him, what in that century may have been termed "spleen." But he had been a homeless child, and was treated cruelly and resentfully at times after his adoption, so as always we cannot separate inheritance from environment. His exceeding cruelty supposedly scandalized critics of the day, but his extreme attachment to Catherine Earnshaw, however perverse and extending, in classic gothic fashion, beyond the grave, rules out psychopathy. His is not the "motiveless malignity" of Iago. Malignant narcissism, perhaps: he does have a monomaniacal need for control combined with real sadism. And yet his great strength and firmness of character are granted grudging admiration, particularly beside the mild and weak characters of Edgar and Linton.

Emily Bronte wrote a few great poems as well, which Charlotte "happened upon," as would occur to another poetic Emily on the other side of the Atlantic years later (Emily Dickinson was eighteen years old when Wuthering Heights appeared and Emily Bronte died). Not having revisited the novel for twenty years, I had forgotten how many affinities exist between the two Emilys: inscrutable intensity, to the point of morbidness at times; otherworldliness, yet compounded with exquisite sensitivity to natural and spiritual realities; the stern and distant fathers; the supportive sister; and both way before their time.

The book may be ideal for both romances and break-ups, a particularly barbed reminder that if we think we're done with love, it may not be done with us (and Cupid's arrows are not rubber-tipped). Red is for romance--and for blood.

(We had a fine weekend, really, don't get the wrong idea).

The House of Woe

"A sad tale's best for winter."

Mamillius

Sometimes I buy Library of America editions just to prod myself into reading someone I wouldn't usually seek out, and so it turned out with Edith Wharton. American prose fiction roughly between Twain and Faulkner has never been a favorite, and I can't abide Wharton's literary stablemate Henry James apart from his short stories (which limit his gratuitous and vague prolixity, something I might be said to know something about), but I decided to undertake The House of Mirth (I remember enjoying Ethan Frome in High School and The Age of Innocence when I read it some years ago).

It's not a prepossessing title (has "mirth" ever been in regular use, even in 1905?), and I find Wharton's style to be fastidious at best and precious at worst. And her metier, like James's, seemed to be writing about the superrich gallivanting around on permanent vacation; these characters had either to generate some drama or die of a cosseted boredom. But Mirth turned out to be worth it, largely of course thanks to protagonist Lily Bart.

Bart is intelligent, sensitive, and, we are repeatedly told, beautiful, but her tragic flaws appear to include a certain vagueness and passivity in her character, and an inability to go after or even fully recognize what she wants; she seems to float through the book, buffeted by her own occasional impulses and beckoned by rewards that finally provoke only distaste. She craves luxury and admiration, yet cannot enjoy them with a compliant conscience; she also craves respect (from herself and, for some reason, from the aloof and censorious Lawrence Selden), yet is unwilling to take the road not taken that might lead there. As she drifts and dreams, riches, esteem, and dignity all end up eluding her. As Wharton writes in this grimly diagnostic passage:

And as she looked back she saw that there had never been a time when she had had any real relation to life. Her parents too had been rootless, blown hither and thither on every wind of fashion, without any personal existence to shelter them from its shifting gusts. She herself had grown up without any one spot of earth being dearer to her than another: there was no centre of early pieties, of grave endearing traditions, to which her heart could revert and from which it could draw strength for itself and tenderness for others. In whatever form a slowly-accumulated past lives in the blood--whether in the concrete image of the old house stored with visual memories, or in the conception of the house not built with hands, but made up of inherited passions and loyalties--it has the same power of broadening and deepening the individual existence, of attaching it by mysterious links of kinship to all the mighty sum of human striving. Such a vision of the solidarity of life had never before come to Lily.

It occurs to me that what are now often spoken of as the sins of our time--self-indulgence, superficiality, triviality, rootlessness, relativism--have always been among us, but mainly in the persons of the rich. Our contemporary ills may be primarily those of prosperity: too much free time, too many diversions, and too much latitude for self-creation--or self-destruction. This manifests itself in bodies as well--Wharton repeatedly notes (and not in a good way) the corpulence of the rich, never quite concealed beneath the finery.

The book is also an interesting reminder that the problems of prescribed psychotropics long antedate benzodiazepines in the 1960's. Lily overdoses on what is described as "chloral," and I assume that means chloral hydrate, which is a very old hypnotic drug (synthesized in 1832), but one that we were still prescribing when I was a resident a dozen years ago. Misery and self-medication go back a long way, unfortunately.

Overall I commend The House of Mirth as a fitting midwinter read. Something to put aside for the next ice storm (results may vary, use as directed, and do not combine with Jude the Obscure--or chloral hydrate).

The Realist

Polonius: What do you read, my lord?

Hamlet: Words, words, words.


I am a few days late in noting the passing of John Updike, but there is a good reason for it--as many have noted, it doesn't really seem possible that he's gone. As will be the case when Dylan passes into memory some day, it seemed that Updike--like the poor, with whom he had nothing else in common--would always be with us.

In recent years I have mostly encountered Updike through his New Yorker criticism, which always seemed very much at home in that urbane and perspicuous publication; his fiction, I confess, I generally found to be pleasant, but in a vague and uncompelling sort of way (he wrote prolifically, and I also confess I haven't read more than a small fraction of his output). He wasn't to my preferred literary taste, but that probably reflects more on my not unlimited reading range than upon his worth.

Frankly, I have trouble enjoying and really being moved by contemporary American realism, which for me is typified by Updike, Cheever, and to a lesser degree Raymond Carver. Its very ordinariness feels journalistic to me; in prose fiction I have always been drawn more to fabulism, broadly considered, than realism.

To my mind the prose writer's eye cannot merely be a contemporary camera; it must imbue its subject with an illuminating oddity, whether owing to temperamental exoticism (Hawthorne), metaphysical depth (Melville), a deranged but transfiguring style (Faulkner), an exquisite taste for absurdity (Nathanael West), a specific and powerful point of view (Flannery O'Connor), or sheer exuberance that carries all before it (Bellow and Roth).

To me Updike was none of these things. In the stories and novels upon which his reputation will rest, he casts a finely perceptive and appreciative eye upon the rituals of suburbia and American culture. Many have cited, with either admiration or contempt, his prettifying prose, and indeed, he could make a trip to Wal-Mart sound eternally glorious. But there seemed to be something facile and glib in this project.

I do not mean to speak ill of the dead, or to pick a fight with anyone who deeply loves his work. Again, my preferences have as much to do with my own particular needs in literature than with any serious foray into literary criticism. But Kafka wrote somewhere that literature must crack up the frozen sea within us; Updike's work felt less like an axe than like a massage. Some people love massages; I don't. (Axes I love only in a literary sort of way).

Poe Country

The Carolinas are shut down by a devastating winter storm. Snow up to the eves...okay, they're expecting just three inches here, but in Tar Heel terms that would seem to be a blizzard; considering the two lane country roads all around, and drivers inexperienced on snow, I'm thinking I'll be going in late if at all.

Any unfortunate double-entendre in today's header is unintended; after all, politically if not economically speaking, we are looking at a relative embarrassment of riches starting today at noon.

No, the title refers of course to Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), who, I happened to see, turned 200 yesterday. He led an interesting life, if one marked by much suffering and a premature death that deprived us of who-knows-what wonders. As part of a venerable literary tradition, he was, of course, severely alcoholic.

I had forgotten, until I reviewed his bio, that he spent some ill-suited time at West Point (a less likely military man can hardly be imagined) and that he married his cousin Virginia Clemm when she was thirteen. I am sure some psychobiographers have worked up that relationship. Come to think of it, Samuel Taylor Coleridge ludicrously signed up for military service as well--is there something about poets and martial reaction formation? It's a bit like cats presenting for obedience training.

Poe has a special place in my reading remembrance--at an impressionable time he was one of several "gateway" authors for me. Encountering stories like "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Cask of Amontillado," and "The Masque of the Red Death" in Junior High School was a kind of dark revelation (well, there were a number of those in Junior High, but this was of the good variety). His work opened up vistas of alternative reality, Bizarro-worlds in which everything was as it is "here," but rotated one quarter turn, with highly morbid consequences.

The plots were ingenious, but literature has never been primarily about plot for me, but rather about place and about character. Like the infernally enchanted worlds of Robert E. Howard, but refined beyond literal and figurative barbarism, Poe's places seemed to exude an eldritch kind of energy, powered by the use of words like "eldritch" that are irresistible to many thirteen-year-olds with a Y chromosome. And I suppose his tales may have provoked an early interest in abnormal psychology--who would not want to treat the distinctly dysfunctional dynamics of the Usher family?

What attracted me in Poe's mystery was not the puzzle of ratiocination, but rather the deeper, metaphysical mind-benders that have no solution. So my adolescent literary interests proceeded more to fantasy and science fiction than to detective or horror fiction; I have always found wonder to be a more primal and a more interesting experience than either fear or wordplay.

Some authors are great, but great chiefly at a certain crucial age, after which their pleasures diminish. So when I reread Poe now it is still with interest, but an interest imbued with a good deal of reminiscence. As is the case with much of so-called genre fiction, he seems more gimmicky now--one can hear the creak of the literary machinery. An interesting comparison for me is H. P. Lovecraft; I somehow never read him until I broke down and bought the Library of America edition a few years ago. I appreciate the deep strangeness of his style, and am glad that I have finally encountered Cthulhu in the original, but somehow it is not something that I can take seriously at this point (but had I read him twenty five years ago I would have thought him fantastic).

It may seem obvious, but it bears noting that the most significant thing about Poe's worlds is that death is not merely always a heartbeat away, but indeed keeps intruding inconveniently into life. His young cousin-wife died early from tuberculosis, and considering his lifestyle and his milieu he cannot have expected a comfortable old age. So we have "The City in the Sea:"

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne

In a strange city lying alone

Far down within the dim West,

Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best

Have gone to their eternal rest.

There shrines and palaces and towers

(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)

Resemble nothing that is ours.

Around, by lifting winds forgot,

Resignedly beneath the sky

The melancholy waters lie.

And the grievous "Annabel Lee:"

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams

Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

And the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes

Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side

Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride

In her sepulchre there by the sea--

In her tomb by the side of the sea.

And this cheering lyric:

Out--out are the lights--out all!

And, over each quivering form,

The curtain, a funeral pall,

Comes down with the rush of a storm,

While the angels, all pallid and wan,

Uprising, unveiling, affirm

That the play is the tragedy, "Man,"

And its hero the Conqueror Worm.

May he inspire adolescents, including the grown-up kind, for another two centuries at least. He is for the ages now, as was said of another American of his time, and if he was obsessed with death, he could now say, with John Donne, "And Death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die!"

By the Book...worm

"A little in nature's infinite book of secrecy I can read."

Soothsayer (Antony and Cleopatra)

I pick up a book every now and then, so I was interested to see another elegy on reading's long-foreseen demise, this one by Christine Rosen in The New Atlantis. She cogently presents the standard arguments for reading's unique and endangered virtues; bibiophile that I am, part of me sympathizes, yet I'm not sure that I buy the overall panic. But there must be many stages of moderation between her the-Dark-Ages-have-come-again gloom and the simplistic better-living-through-screens views of Internet boosters.

The problem is that like other book apologists, Rosen begins with distinctly moral advocacy of reading (and we are talking habitual and volitional reading here, not literacy in the basic and technical sense), but glides inevitably into wistful appreciations of the aesthetic culture of books. The two points of view raise rather different issues.

Rosen argues, like other literary eulogists, that reading uniquely exercises powers of concentration and attention, which in turn enable facility with abstract concepts, the kind of faculty which, as she points out, has powered modernity for the past five centuries. How does reading do this? Well, the central point seems to be that reading requires humility and "submission" (Rosen's word) to the author, that is, a certain openness to another's reality. In other words, in undertaking reading one acknowledges one's ignorance about some corner of reality and approaches a teacher in the guise of a learner.

To make sense of a book, one has to patiently proceed from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, page to page, much like Dante being guided through hell by Virgil. In contrast, in a computer format one is immediately "empowered" to scan however few words per pages one wishes and to click away with barely a thought. Unlike a book experience, one doesn't take the author whole, but rather skims over whatever bits and pieces one thinks are relevant; Rosen would argue that one often doesn't know ahead of time what is relevant and what isn't--that's part of what a book is supposed to teach.

The argument reminds me of the lament over the rise of music singles over albums; while one "submits" to hearing a full album to learn what "teachings" it may hold, with an mp3 player one is free to jump around from track from track, even from chord to chord. In a metaphorical version of this argument, if book-reading is gliding above a forest, dipping low from time to time to appreciate individual trees, then screen-reading is like driving among the trees at high speed--one may feel more in control and more intimate with the experience, but the actual result is disorientation.

Rosen even quotes a description of screen-users as "promiscuous, diverse, and volatile." Wow, that would certainly seem to be directed at bloggers--I'm thinking of myself differently already. Forget the library--where's the party?

I don't know that reading is mainly about submission. On the contrary, books offer enormous liberation as compared, say, to attending live performances (at a theater today or, in pre-literate cultures, at some oral storytelling event). One is free to take in a book at one's own speed, to reread, to skim at times, and of course to say the hell with a particular work without having to offend anyone.

There is no doubt that reading is a very worthwhile and even (trans)formative experience for those who relish it; the question is whether it inculcates skills and virtues that necessarily carry over into non-literary avenues of life. As Rosen notes, Harold Bloom among others has thought not, that reading is a deeply personal and spiritual activity, but not one that enhances the wider culture in any straightforward way.

So far as I know, the alleged cognitive and emotional virtues of reading are based largely on speculation and anecdote ("kids these days just seem more distractible"). I know we're talking about prose above a certain moderate level of complexity, but are we talking only fiction here? Is philosophy better or worse than history or fiction, and does biography count?

And as I said, such concerns always seem to segue into panegyrics about the aesthetics of books--the feel and even the smell of them and their paper, the pleasures of scanning a bookshelf, etc. While Rosen seems aware of being deemed an old fogey (I don't know her age or if she is in fact a fogey), she can't resist references to young people being noisier in libraries than they used to be (kids these days!). Well, I think books are sexy too, but the aesthetic details are irrelevant to the wider cultural concerns; I'm sure that with the advent of the automobile some mourned the loss of leisurely rides in an open carriage drawn by fine horses (an experience for which people continue to pay for today, it is worth pointing out).

There is no doubt that things are changing, but it remains an open question whether for the Worse. Book-reading seems unlikely to become "an arcane hobby," as Rosen puts it, and I would guess that books and screens will be complementary, that is, used for different purposes, for most folks who read at all (and recall that there have always been people who, even if they could read, have not done so for fun). But avid book-lovers probably will become more uncommon. Many opera-lovers probably assume that society would be much better off if more people loved opera; some book folks are likely the same way.

Rosen's essay notes that one study showed regular book-readers to be high Internet-users as well, but I wonder what age groups that involved, and whether that is a transitional phenomenon. My family got our first computer, a Neolithic Commodore 64, probably when I was in my early teens, so my generation is unusual in getting computer exposure at an impressionable time, but also in having pre-computer memories.

So let's see--if you visit this site you know your way around the Internet but presumably have some off-the-beaten-search-engine interests. Are the days of books "fallen into the sere?"

Gatsby

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise."

F. Scott Fitzgerald

"The Crack-Up"

That quote came to mind yesterday when I was thinking about the paradoxes of psychiatry (the medication is making me sick but seems to be helping; I must accept myself yet learn how to change myself; I have lost control over my drinking but must stop drinking). I hadn't read Fitzgerald's great essay "The Crack-Up" in some years; rereading it, I see how poignantly it chronicles a classic mid-life crisis and depressive episode.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) had some contacts with psychiatry, not only through his own severe alcoholism, but more extensively through his wife Zelda's descent into diagnosed schizophrenia beginning in the late 1920's. The Fitzgeralds were a hard-partying literary glamour couple in the decade of the novelist's acclaimed success with This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Great Gatsby (1925).

Around 1930 things started to go sour all around for them: the era of good feelings gave way to the Great Depression, Zelda began to go in and out of sanatoria, and Scott's writing came less easily. Tender is the Night (1934) is considered strong in retrospect, but at the time it garnered critical disappointment, something the author was not at all used to. The story of an ambitious young psychiatrist's ill-fated marriage to one of his patients (we avoid that for good reason), the book was well-known to draw upon real-life marital details. In 1936 Zelda entered Highlands Hospital in Asheville, just a few hours down the road from here, where she remained until 1948, when she and eight other patients were tragically killed in a fire.

So when Fitzgerald published "The Crack-Up" in 1936, things were not going at all well, and overall it is a striking account of personal disintegration. The ever macho Ernest Hemingway (who would of course later receive ECT and eventually suicide) was said to be appalled by the vulnerability on display. The essay is substantial and is written in a puzzlingly (or not) elliptical style, but it certainly merits reading in its entirety. Fitzgerald died of a heart attack four years later. That was tragedy enough, but to my mind it begat an even greater one when Nathanael West was killed in an auto accident on his way home from a trip to Fitzgerald's funeral service.

"The Crack-Up" is filled with arresting images of emotional struggle and disappointment. Fitzgerald is remarkably vague about the specific causes of the breakdown, although he claims early on to have been sober for six months when it happened. But he alludes cryptically to "drawing on resources that I did not possess...mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up to the hilt." His own model for it seems to be a process of depleted energies more than of psychological conflict; if anything, then, his view is more allied to today's depression than to the psychoanalytic paradigms of his time.

More than any DSM checklist, he depicts the withdrawal, the self-isolation, and the fading of general passions that depression entails. Once routine undertakings become herculean challenges, and the range of interests narrows. He writes, "All rather inhuman and undernourished, isn't it? Well, that, children, is the true sign of cracking up." When a friend tries to boost his spirits, he counters that "of all the natural forces, vitality is the incommunicable one" (so the deeply depressed view the "power of positive thinking" with incomprehension).

One gets the sense that early success may have come to him too completely and with too little effort. Life beyond early adulthood can only be a relative disappointment compared to this:

"My own happiness in the past often approached such an ecstasy that I could not share it even with the person dearest to me but had to walk it away to quiet streets and lanes with only fragments of it to distil into little lines in books."

I thought of Wordsworth's "Immortality Ode" ("But yet I know, where'er I go/ That there hath past away a glory from the earth"). The joys of mid-life and later are not lesser necessarily, but they may be more subtle, and may require more conscious labor in their attainment.

Fascinatingly in view of recent concerns about video and the decline of reading, Fitzgerald mourns the ascent of movies:

"It was an art in which words were subordinate to images, where personality was worn down to the inevitable low gear of collaboration. As long past as 1930, I had a hunch that the talkies would make even the best selling novelist as archaic as silent pictures."

This was in 1936, in an era which, compared to today, is held to have been a veritable Golden Age of American literature!

"The Crack-Up" does not end with any great affirmation, whether reassuring or corny. On the contrary: "This is what I think now: that the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness. I think also that in an adult the desire to be finer in grain than you are, "a constant striving" (as those people say who gain their bread by saying it) only adds to this unhappiness in the end -- that end that comes to our youth and hope."

While he lived four more years in physical form, it is tempting to see a moral and psychological death here, the fall of an idealist. He had written, of an early life disappointment, "A man does not recover from such jolts -- he becomes a different person and, eventually, the new person finds new things to care about." If he's lucky, which in the end, perhaps F. Scott Fitzgerald was not. Or perhaps we should say: call no man unlucky who wrote, in The Great Gatsby, what many deemed "the perfect novel."

Archimboldi

Ay, in the very temple of Delight

Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,

Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue

Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;

His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,

And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

Keats

I don't use the term "mind-blowing" very often; or if I do, this time I really mean it. As I touched down on page 893 of Roberto Bolano's astonishing and sprawling 2666, I couldn't remember the last time I was so far into a book before realizing that it was a great one. That may sound like faint praise, as if it were merely slow to warm up, or it grew on me, or whatever; the actual literary impact is prodigious, as if one stretched Ravel's circling crescendo Bolero to a tome nearly the size of War and Peace.

Bolano (I still can't manage the tilda in his name, which is lame of me), the Chilean expatriate who lived in Mexico and later in Spain, died in 2003 at only fifty, the victim apparently of hepatitis C contracted from earlier heroin use. Since then he has become a posthumous literary superstar in the English-speaking world as his last novels are being translated. This book was included among the 10 most notable works of 2008 by the New York Times (Jonathan Lethem's review is here), and here is a useful post on it by Chekhov's Mistress.

A poet who reportedly turned to novels in his last years to support his family, Bolano was writing against time in this crowning work, and it shows, not at all in any sloppiness, but in the propulsive force of its sentences. I had the sense that Bolano was racing ahead, turning around now and then to urge haste, as I rushed to catch up to him before he got out of sight. The work contains everything expected of epic--family, love, sex, crime, war, politics, history--but in the most surprising contexts and contortions.

The framing device of the book, comprising five large, semi-autonomous and linked sections, is the fictional, extremely reclusive, and floridly pseudonymous German novelist Benno von Archimboldi. The appallingly dark heart of the book is the horrific epidemic of "femicides" occuring in Santa Teresa, Mexico, supposedly a fictionalized version of Ciudad Juarez (the real-life, drug culture-related mayhem of which is chronicled here). For three hundred pages Bolano provides a harrowing litany of women, many of them prostitutes but many factory workers or waitresses, who turn up raped and mutilated, dumped in ravines and beside desert roads. Many of them go unclaimed, and the police, whether inept or corrupt, can't make any progress in solving the crimes.

The intertwined themes of the book are beauty--the sheer indulgent delight of story--and horror--the reign of apathy in the face of absolute evil. Like all great literature, it aims to find redemption amid desolation and loss. Bolano's style strikes me as an improbable cross between Hemingway and Proust; individually, his sentences are flat, dispassionate and often wry, but their cumulative effect is noble, sweeping and reflexive, like a bird circling above a great expanse. The result is at once gritty and, at times, grandiloquent. Here is Bolano, grimly, on men and women:

Ingeborg laughed too. Then she began to talk about the way some women were attracted to men who killed women. About the high regard in which woman-killers were held by whores, for example, or by women who chose to love without reservations. In Reiter's opinion these women were hysterics. But Ingeborg, who claimed to know women of the sort, believed they were just gamblers, like cardplayers, more or less, who end up killing themselves late at night, or like the habitues of racetracks who commit suicide in cheap rented rooms or hotels tucked away on back-streets frequented by gangsters or Chinamen.

Here he is, using the very wide-angle lens, on nature:

"All this light is dead," said Ingeborg. "All this light was emitted thousands and millions of years ago. It's the past, do you see? When these stars cast their light, we didn't exist, life on Earth didn't exist, even Earth didn't exist. This light was cast a long time ago. It's the past, we're surrounded by the past, everything that no longer exists or exists only in memory or guesswork is there now, above us, shining on the mountains and the snow and we can't do anything to stop it."

Here he is describing Archimboldi's style, which captures his own as well:

The style was strange. The writing was clear and sometimes even transparent, but the way the stories followed one after another didn't lead anywhere: all that was left were the children, their parents, the animals, some neighbors, and in the end, all that was really left was nature, a nature that dissolved little by little in a boiling cauldron until it vanished completely.

Bolano's way is narrative abandon, but crucially tempered by the constraints of mortality and human frailty. The book's first section recounts the quest of four European literature professors for the elusive Archimboldi whom they both love and specialize in. The academic life is depicted in all of its alternating profundity and vacuity. The long middle of the book, set in arid Mexico, is also a narrative desert; like a plant that struggles vainly to sprout despite lack of rain, the story can't seem to escape the squalid nightmare of Santa Teresa's murderous culture. But the last section, a chronicle of Archimboldi's amazing, bewildering life, erupts in narrative ingenuity, with one story found to be encased within another in a way that put me in mind of The Arabian Nights. The best word for this book is narrative plenitude, without superfluity.

That last section brings all of the book's disparate characters together, but not in a physical sense or even in a thematic one, unless one counts the detached contingency with which people, across continents and decades, come together--for a book, for love, or for murder--and then drift away into the murk of time or forgetfulness. The story comes to an end, like life, with finality but without resolution.

Read it; no review can give a sense of it. I am encouraged to find a contemporary novel this good. The holidays may not require great literature, but January definitely will. The solstice is less than a week away.

Spooky

"One can smile, and smile, and be a villain."

Hamlet

The political and literary parallels between Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) and Barack Obama are uncanny. Okay, perhaps I exaggerate. But I have been reading the former's short stories and the latter's Dreams From My Father, and they both tempt and test my ability to connect seemingly disparate characters. For one thing, the moral hazards of Hawthorne's fictions, no less than the pre-Election Day dread of some appalling Republican upset, demonstrate that there are far worse things to fear than goblins this Halloween.

Literary Hawthorne and political Obama strive to overcome two related bugbears: alienated apartness on the one hand and radical distrust on the other. And Hawthorne was more political than most fiction writers, while Obama is more genuinely a writer than most politicians. Both explore the dark regions of the soul, although Obama has had to suppress this inclination in favor of "sweetness and light" for the general election.

Compared to the very dark materials of his fictions, and compared with some of his famously eccentric contemporaries--Poe, Dickinson, Thoreau--Hawthorne was outwardly conventional, happily married and raising three children. He got into politics by penning a campaign biography of his college friend Franklin Pierce, who unfortunately turned out to be one of the worst presidents ever. Pierce was followed by James Buchanan, who was apparently just as bad, but Lincoln came next. If history were to repeat itself, we would have to endure another mediocrity before getting someone exceptional. Hmmm...

For Hawthorne isolation is both blessing and curse, the progenitor of both creativity and suffering. In a preface he wrote of his early years: "I sat down by the wayside of life, like a man under enchantment, and a shrubbery sprung up around me, and the bushes grew to be saplings, and the saplings became trees, until no exit appeared possible, through the entangling depths of my obscurity."

This may sound somehow magical and comforting, almost uterine. But at the end of "Wakefield," a disturbing story about a man's escape from domestic life, we read: "Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another, and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever. Like Wakefield, he may become, as it were, the Outcast of the Universe." For Hawthorne, human solidarity is so precarious that even momentary inattention or carelessness can send one spinning into the void, as it were.

Another anathema for Hawthorne's protagonists, yet always a temptation, is the prideful manipulation of humanity. This is termed the Unpardonable Sin in "Ethan Brand," and manifests itself as an overweening impatience with human imperfection in "The Birthmark." A witch seems to mock human beings by animating a scarecrow in "Feathertop," while magic fails to overcome human folly in "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment."

But reconciliation with the human race does not come easily in Hawthorne. The reason is the corrosive human propensity for iniquity and deception. The protagonist of "Young Goodman Brown" is devastated to learn the secret lives of those he previously put trust in, while "The Minister's Black Veil" is Junior High symbolism for hypocrisy. For Hawthorne as for Hamlet, the real zinger is not the fact of Evil itself, but the fact that it can hide so effectively from sight. The isolated individual withers, while solidarity is threatening.

The first part of Obama's Dreams From My Father eloquently yet without self-pity describes his childhood dismay at having to straddle black and white cultures (actually "brown" as well as the book puts it, with respect to the time he lived in Indonesia). He came to know alienation intimately. He tried to overcome this in part in his years as a community organizer in Chicago, but he was brought up short again and again by the brutal realities of human oppression, complacency, and corruption. It is the same "can't live with them, can't live without them" quandary.

In one telling dialogue, Obama describes his half-sister, Auma, expressing her dislike of politics. The reason? "People always end up disappointed" (p. 209). To me, this captures the fundamental political dilemma. In politics one is thrown together with others who may have radically different value systems and different points of view, and yet some kind of workable coexistence, or even better, consensus must be reached. One must overcome both alienation and distrust, and to my mind it is one of the harder things we attempt to do. Obama's story is a willed perseverance through both psychological and cultural obstacles in an attempt to reconcile with a society that he had every reason to be at war with. McCain's military courage and sense of honor are admirable, but Obama exhibits a moral resilience that originates in murkier psychological regions. Happy Halloween, and here's hoping for an illuminating Election Day and dispersal of our recent gloom.

The Writing Cure

"Once more--for it is hard to be finite upon an infinite subject, and all subjects are infinite."

Melville, "Hawthorne and his Mosses"

An article today (astutely noted by Dr. X) describes the work of psychologist James Pennebaker, who is using textual analysis to examine the writings of those either suffering or recovering from mental illness. In short, he is looking at the prevalence of certain pronouns and other categories of words to try to get a quantifiable (always the holy grail it would seem) sense of a person's state of mind. Since narrative is such a hot paradigm these days, therapeutic writing is getting a closer look. While writing is virtually always a worthwhile endeavor, particularly if it aids recovery, I got to wondering whether any significant (in a narrowly literary sense) writing careers have originated primarily as a consciously therapeutic exercise. Only two came to mind: Anne Sexton and Kate Chopin, shown above (both women, alas, a fact I might get an earful/eyeful about).

Being the better known, Anne Sexton I mention only in passing. Apparently she had written some quality poems as a teenager, but any literary ambition went underground at least during her marriage and disastrous attempts at mainstream 1950's domestic life. After her breakdowns began, and under otherwise highly questionable therapeutic circumstances, Dr. Martin Orne saw her creative potential and suggested that she start writing. She was very reluctant and lacking in confidence at first, but she went to a poetry workshop, and the rest is literary history.

Kate Chopin (1850-1904) had also done some modest amateur writing as a young woman, but she put this aside in her 20's when she moved to Louisiana and bore five children. In the course of several years her husband's business ventures failed, he died in 1882, and then her mother died in 1885. Struggling with these losses and with the strains of single motherhood, she was advised by an obstetrician and friend to write. In the next fifteen years or so she wrote dozens of short stories, a number of which were published in national magazines. However, The Awakening, the short novel for which she is best known today, was critically panned at the time as both risque and generally without merit. For much of this century she was known if at all as a minor short story writer until around 1970, when feminism brought her overall work and especially The Awakening into higher esteem.

The Awakening takes place in a wonderfully recreated and languorous New Orleans. It is the story of Edna Pontellier, a middle-aged woman dismayed by her stultifying life with her husband, a financier of some type, who is often both geographically and emotionally distant. By the standards of the time, he is depicted as being only moderately chauvinistic, but I suppose the standards of the time may be the issue. But Mrs. Pointellier makes for an intriguing and not entirely sympathetic psychopathological study, and arguably her problems are more than feminist in scope; she struggles to connect with a number of people in her life, and while she initiates steps toward independence, she ultimately fails to decisively change her situation (in the way her author/creator succeeded in doing). Surprisingly for a quasi-feminist work, the end is tragic (or perhaps, from a sufficiently radical point of view, transcendent). But don't let that stop you--it is definitely worth a read (and it's not long).

John Stuart Mill famously recovered from a severe depression as a result of his encounter with English Romantic poetry (especially Wordsworth I believe), but I don't know that his own philosophical writing career was any direct outgrowth of that.

Obviously a great deal of writing (most? all?) is done for very good unconscious or implicit reasons, but I struggle to think of other well-known cases in which such writing began or really took off as a result of a medical recommendation. But I'm probably overlooking some obvious ones.