I have a new short story at The Airgonaut. I admire this venue most of all for its simplicity. Only text, no pictures, just the way my brain likes it.
This is an economic folk tale, the first of a cycle generated by a constraint system that’s formally simple, but involves a few more determiners for the content.
It’s been quite a hiatus on the diary; I’ve had to write a lot of short papers this semester, and the rest of my writing time has been devoted to executing this procedure.
Some prose books, in alphabetical order.
A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN by JAMES JOYCE. Read casually, staying in the surface language. But I kept in mind Moretti’s arguments in WAY OF THE WORLD of this novel as a structural failure, compromised between two roads for the bourgeois novel. The end of chapter 4 feels like the end of the work, but instead comes chapter 5, which is aggressively boring and taken up with multiple campus discussions on aesthetics.
BECKETT AND BADIOU: THE PATHOS OF INTERMITTENCY by ANDREW GIBSON. This was the best introduction to Badiou’s use of set theory I’ve read. I used to dislike Badiou’s math philosophy because I couldn’t understand it. But now I can say I dislike it because it is a sophisticated rejection of the vanguard party form. Badiou’s new book on cultural revolution, this interview suggests, will be walking the tightrope of arguing for masses struggling against power without falling into anarchism (how he can manage this, I do not know).
THE BOTTOM OF THE SKY by RODRIGO FRESAN. Really interesting because it works like INVENTED PART except it is really compact, which actually makes the background action easier to detect. My feeling now is that what I first read as a large perceptible gap between story and discourse is actually a switcheroo: the story (the background action which conventionally would be in the foreground) gives way to foregrounded discourse. I impatiently await translations of THE DREAMED PART and MANTRA.
COMPULSORY GAMES by ROBERT AICKMAN. Stories with blackouts, some of them non-alcoholic. Aickman is really curious: he writes Gothic and dark fantasy narratives like an Edwardian modernist. My feeling about the fantastic is that it’s taken on multiple historical functions (metaphors for colonial and domestic violence, romantic imagination, modernization–paradoxically), but I still don’t know what to make of weird tales, their particular mixture of content and style.
CONTINUITY AND RUPTURE by J. MOUFAWAD-PAUL. What I absolutely agree with in JMP’s historiographical presentation here is that Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is in one direction a continuity of revolutionary proletarian theory after Leninism (introducing concepts like “party as leading core of the whole people” and developing Leninist concepts like the masses and cultural revolution), and in the other direction a rupture from revisionist lines of thought that crop up after revolutionary gains. The nitty-gritty of the history itself is questionable. Needs re-reading.
DEATH IN SPRING by MERCE RODOREDA. An excellent way to start the reading year, and my first MR. This work, like WAR, SO MUCH WAR and unlike her more realism-driven texts from the 60s, is shapeless yet utterly compelling. A village seen through the eyes of a boy who grows up to be a father; ghastly ritual practices. So a defamiliarization of the adult world and perhaps Francoism, sure. But the parts are more important than the whole here.
FOX by DUBRAVKA UGRESIC. A great contemporary novel that on the surface works like a series of esoteric inquiries into marginal literary figures or the marginal aspects of the lives of central ones. But it parascopes, W.G. Sebald style, into nested narratives about the ultra right after Yugoslavia, the refugee crisis, the fate of art and global capitalism, unexploded ordinance…
LE GUIN novels: THE LATHE OF HEAVEN, ROCANNON’S WORLD, PLANET OF EXILE. The last two are early Hainish novels and they were all right stories with cool initial ideas, like a retelling of Icelandic Myth. LATHE is a classic, and the setting is wonderful; the eclecticism of Le Guin’s politics got in the way of my enjoyment.
TRISTRAM SHANDY by LAURENCE STERNE. A romance, not a novel, according to the narrator. And yet foregrounds with scientific thoroughness all of the formal problems of fictitious narrative. Which isn’t surprising because there are prose forms all through the 17th and 18th centuries that we’d call novels and stories no problem–it is the “novel” which has consumed all other discourses (Moretti in MODERN EPIC calls it the apex predator).
THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD by COLSON WHITEHEAD. This is an amazing novel that literalizes a metaphor in order to ironize it. So the subway locomotives work not just spacially, but temporally, that is, as historical progress that is repeatedly questioned by the level of violence experienced in each southern state. What a great idea: multiple state governments on cotton economies, multiple planter capitalist dictatorships. South Carolina is a liberal welfare regime (with modernist structures that are banks and museums) that practices eugenics; and North Carolina is a fascist state that lynches white race traitors with no hesitation. It is a science fiction novel accepted as lit fic because of how Whitehead compresses space and time in his narration, and his willingness to not string us along by the plot.
Poetry books:
ELECTRIC ARCHES by EVE L. EWING
MY MOTHER WAS A FREEDOM FIGHTER by AJA MONET
ADVANCES IN EMBROIDERY by AHMAD AL-ASHQAR
By JOHN ASHBERY: SOME TREES, RIVERS AND MOUNTAINS, THE DOUBLE DREAM OF SPRING, THREE POEMS, THE VERMONT NOTEBOOKS, SELF-PORTRAIT IN A CONVEX MIRROR, HOUSEBOAT DAYS.
By PHILIP LARKIN: THE NORTH SHIP, THE LESS DECEIVED, THE WHITSUN WEDDINGS.
This was also the year I seriously studied classic texts by Lenin and Mao. Internalizing dialectical materialism has been a paradigm shift in terms of its liberating impact on one’s subjectivity. A way to perceptively work through all of the contradictions in life and society. I won’t go on.
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
Jane Austen
Oxford UP, 2008
Finished P&P Christmas morning, adored it, laughed from beginning to end.
I was struck by some lines by Elizabeth in volume 2. She’s invited by her aunt (and the Gardiners, while the least people according to the gentry hierarchy, since they are urban professionals, are the best human beings in the cast according to the text’s moral arguments) to take a trip to the Lakes, which is significant not only for its literary associations with Wordsworth and Coleridge. Picturesque tourism, the role of natural beauty in 18th century aesthetic discourse, is so well observed in Austen’s work, and is neatly worked into the rest of what the novel is about, an early but fully formed example of bildung, the cultivation of the self, the harmony of autonomy and socialization, for a rational basis for happiness.
Elizabeth answers the invite with raptures about how it will cheer her up after the disappointments regarding some marriage prospects. Then she says,
And when we do return, it shall not be like other travellers, without being able to give one accurate idea of any thing. We will know where we have gone — we will recollect what we have seen. Lakes, mountains, and rivers, shall not be jumbled together in our imaginations; nor, when we attempt to describe any particular scene, will we begin quarreling about its relative situation. Let our first effusions be less insupportable than those of the generality of travellers.
As a bit of characterization, Elizabeth acknowledges that gentry society is more often than not abominably boring and complacent and self-absorbed (reminding me of literary society in New York). But for her the issue is based on discourse. Other travelers don’t get their recollections of their tourism straight. She values good discourse, which in this case articulates how natural beauty confirms the rational sense making that is necessary to get by in this world, to accurately perceive people, and make correct choices.
Later on in the middle volume of course she reads Darcy’s letter, which contains the truth about that rake Mr. Wickam.
‘How despicably have I acted!’ she cried. — ‘I, who have prided myself on my discernment! — I, who have valued myself on my abilities! who have often disdained the generous candour of my sister, humiliating is this discovery! — Yet, how just a humiliation! — Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love has been my folly. — Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned. Till this moment, I never knew myself.’
So, these lines rang kind of false for me in the same way the previous quote does; the thoughts are too well considered to be reported speech. They seem more like things Elizabeth would write in letters to a sister or confidante. Indeed, the earlier version of PRIDE, from the 1790s, was an epistolary novel, apparently.
“Generous candor.” Which here means not being honest but being sweet, diplomatic, unwilling to find fault. Elizabeth took secret pride in thinking herself more discerning and discriminating in her judgement than her sister Jane.
And “vanity.” That is the woman-specific version of pride, which Mr. Darcy also has. But actually the way pride works in the novel suggests that the gendered distinction, voiced by Mary at the very beginning, is not useful. Both Miss Bennet and Mr. Darcy have the wrong opinion about themselves and care too much about what other people think about them.
But it’s a remarkable self-criticism, and its climax brings out what is at stake for a bildungsroman: that to get the relationship between the self and the world wrong is to misapprehend the self entirely.
Here’s Mr. Darcy’s self-criticism, devastating for melancholy boys.
‘I cannot give you credit for any philosophy of the kind. Your retrospections must be so totally void of reproach, that the contentment arising from them, is not of philosophy, but what is much better, of innocence. But with me, it is not so. Painful recollections will intrude, which cannot, which ought not to be repelled. I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle. As a child I was taught what was right, but I was not taught to correct my temper. I was given good principles, but left to follow them in pride and conceit. Unfortunately an only son, (for many years an only child) I was spoilt by my parents, who though good themselves, (my father particularly, all that was benevolent and amiable,) allowed, encouraged, almost taught me to be selfish and overbearing, to care for none beyond my own family circle, to think meanly of all the rest of the world, to wish at least to think meanly of their sense and worth compared with my own. Such I was, from eight to eight and twenty; and such I might still have been but for you, dearest, loveliest Elizabeth! What do I not owe you! You taught me a lesson, hard indeed at first, but most advantageous. By you, I was properly humbled. I came to you without a doubt of my reception. You shewed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased.’
The bourgeoisie may not factor into this story world, but Austen is introducing its progressive values into it, values of merit. It’s accident of birth that gets you an aristocratic title, but one can always earn the title of gentleman or lady; that simply comes from how you’re willing to treat others.
And to do so, she introduced modern bourgeois narrative discourse seemingly at a stroke. The self-consciousness of the 18th century is replaced with confident realistic illusion crafting. This is a narrative that can’t really be relayed in letters to suspend disbelief. We have to be looking over Elizabeth’s shoulder as she goes on her reconnaissance missions at each party and estate visit, gathering reliable intelligence on what’s going on and who’s who. Limited third person simulates the sequence of human perception, the exercise of our inferential reasoning power (Kant’s term). And in the process we characterize not just Elizabeth but also that mysterious narrating entity, not Jane Austen herself, of course, but one of her images.
I regularly get preoccupied on Cesar Aira, go back through his interviews (especially the Spanish ones like this one for Lokunowo), dip through the New Directions translations (which I am compulsively collecting–I’m compelled to take in his whole translated body of work as it comes; the nature of his work seems to demand it).
Had a hard time getting into CONVERSATIONS, but today (Nov 23) I started a reread of GHOSTS, which I read way too fast and too distractedly the first time, because these opening pages are thrillingly gorgeous. Aira is linked with me right now to Magritte. I always liked Magritte, but sometimes I wonder if it’s kitsch. Only the paintings full of commodities, perhaps, but kitsch isn’t merely illustrative technique. Magritte was an ad illustrator for a living, and his surreal pictures have the same instant readability. So too with Aira and Gothic novels in general — opaque, materialist styles come from Modernism — no, the narrative is linguistically transparent, all the more to see the romantic, magical content.
In the long first paragraph, which feels very 19th century with its floor plan and set dressing and portraits of people coming and going on business, the actual first glimpse of the ghosts in the prime apartment building are slipped non-nonchalantly in a series of images.
A woman in violet was catching her breath on the stairs between the sixth and seventh floors. Others didn’t have to make an effort: they floated up and down, even through the concrete slabs. The owners were not bothered by the delay, partly because they didn’t have to make the last payment until they took possession, but also because they actually preferred to have a bit more time to organize the furnishings and fittings.
Another image, of two naked ghosts sitting on the TV dish, “a sharp metallic edge on which no bird would have dared to perch,” evokes a stillness that gets picked up with the young mortal workman balancing on a dumpster with an empty bucket.
The only unusual thing about him was that stillness, which is rare to see in a person at work, even for a brief spell. It was like stopping movement itself, but without really stopping it, because even in those instants of immobility he was earning wages. Similarly, a statue sculpted by a great master, still as it is, goes on increasing in value. It was a confirmation of the absurd lightness of everything.
Suppose that these elements, the workman in his pose with the bucket, the reflections on wage labor and the contemporary art market, are in fact dictated by chance as Aira claims with his flight forward method. Somehow we still get, at least here, a thematic progression. The class contradiction is taken up from here in the portrait of the architect Felix Tello. The narrator reflects on page 10 that Tello is caught between bourgeois and proletariat, and from his perspective they are almost two of a kind: neither hang on to their money, because they both need to seize whatever opportunities come their way — it actually makes sense. This clarifies the class contradiction in one way, but the thought is also tethered to Aira’s dream world, a world of the id (defined against Tello’s ego), which is all expenditure, all ludic play, and no work.
And the bit that’s hard to forget, with the two proletarian ghosts. Naturally if there are ghosts in the story we want to know how they interact with matter. This passage answers with something whose plain cartoon otherness is just as easily mediated as that wonderful last construction, “the lowest string of a Japanese harp.” And the details of “naked” walls and paving.
A builder who happened to be passing by with a bucketful of rubble on the way to the skip stretched out his free hand and, without stopping, grasped the penis of one of the naked men and kept walking. The member stretched out to a length of two yards, then three, five, ten, all the way to the sidewalk. When he let it go, it slapped back into place with a noise whose weird harmonics went on echoing off the unplastered concrete walls and the stairs without marble paving, up and down the empty elevator shafts, like the lowest string of a Japanese harp.
Every Aira book lays bare the common device. We have a narrative that imitates a 19th century family chronicle; indeed, what we really have a version of the bourgeois interior that is the fuel for fine art. Laying it bare means creating this comical situation where it is still being produced (and the producers are still present).
Second Slope 