Tag: novel

Crypto currents

I have a little review up at Entropy Mag, a venue I really admire. “Jae-in Doe” might as well be essay of this year as well!

Reader reception ought to be a big part of a materialist literary criticism. More specifically, we should be monitoring the ideology of literary culture, and that’s not just the ideology articulated inside literary texts, but how these literary texts get deployed by reviewers, the press, and the academy. What political lines do such deployments serve?

Nowhere does our literary culture betray itself as an organ for western capitalist imperialism better than in that bugbear “totalitarianism.” What hath Hannah Arendt wrought?! That signifier is how liberals merge two into one: they conflate Nazism and revolutionary socialism in the 20th century together. One of these delivered the world from the other. That historical reality alone ought to suggest that this conflation is an irresponsible thing to do.

And it only ever seems to demonize communism rather than fascism. (At least fascists are still pro-capitalist.) Even Arendt herself was bashed by other intellectuals for applying her concept to Israel. Nazi Germany and non-western states are the only politically correct targets.

(And now people want to merge two into one again, and subsume totalitarianism into terrorism. How will we ever keep our account of the enemy straight with all this blending?)

Anyway, I happened to have been reading a lot of Jewish mystical texts and Benjamin and phenomenology last year. It was fortuitous that LICHTER, a really enjoyable short book if that wasn’t clear in my review, was put out by NYRB Classics. I love this outfit and their cool covers, but it’s funny that their back copy for THE SEVENTH CROSS, a novel set in Nazi Germany, and deals with Nazism and only Nazism, nevertheless must use the T-word.

The story of this novel’s production, how it slipped by the censors in socialist Romania, is of course a perfect candidate for the T-word cottage industry in the literary press. And indeed after glossing other reviews in the respectable venues, I tried to offer a modest alternative take.

Awoo

PATTERNS OF CHILDHOOD
Christa Wolf, tr. Ursula Molinaro and Hedwig Rappolt
FSG, 1984

Wolf’s style is linked in my mind to brutalist architecture or at any rate the built environments of socialist modernism. You feel like she could make a dialectical sentence with just one word. They have simplicity and coarseness, like exposed concrete, but the actual arrangement of shapes and ideas in the text remains super refreshing even today.

The first chapter of this novel is tres modern, taking up the beginning to ponder how to start. And that’s how she presents the frame story, visiting post-war Germany in the early 70s with her husband and teenage daughter. The patterns of childhood are in the third person, about a girl named Nelly.

All three Wolf books I’ve at least leafed through start with a plane ride. (CASSANDRA is tricky but in the original the essays come before the novel.) I guess it’s her preferred way to talk about multiple temporalities, either entering them by air travel in a globalized world, and also by missing your flight.

Ten pages of beautiful and enigmatic details, like stone steps, and outlines of all the fragmentary material, the limitations of realism.

Suddenly, a shock that penetrates even the roots of your hair: in the big room on the table lies the manuscript, with, on the first page, only one word, “MOTHER,” in large letters. She’ll read it, guess your purpose, and feel hurt.

(There’s your start, advised H. But you didn’t want that; let other people give themselves away. [10]

Everything feels too easy. The options are either classical realistic plotting and narration that for Wolf have no conviction left, or psychoanalytic cliches and gut-spilling. Wolf is too modern for confessionalism. Modernism kept what was worth keeping from Romanticism, like experimental forms, but raw subjectivity was not one of them. Too commercial, among other things.

Finally we get what we came in for: the memories start coming through, but in what order?

What next? The bead.

(The understandable but perhaps dangerous desire for associations, against which H. warned from the beginning, not in words so much as by the expression of his face. He distrusts anything that falls into place [21]

We can’t have “story” anymore. Likewise, neither can we have necessity. There can’t be an obvious order to the material, one that makes sense only because of the dominating consensus on how narrative should work.

It’s tempting to view the rationale for these modern devices through a liberal mindset: Wolf is simply a private woman, or her husband is controlling her aesthetic ideology. But this is a fictional memoir — an autofiction? — about growing up under the Nazi regime. There’s a political distaste for the subjectivity and coherent narrative of mainstream literature, because they better serve the totality, the conformity of taste and consumption, reproducing patterns of domination.

Wolf in these pages puts much of Adorno’s literary theory into practice, turning her work inside out so we can watch her own modernist totality that might pop the reader out of the false one of her social reality.

Memoir’d out

TÓMAS JÓNSSON, BESTSELLER
Guðbergur Bergsson, tr. Lytton Smith
Open Letter Books, 2017

I am recommending a novel from the outfit Open Letter Books, which is having a fundraiser at the moment.

In the film SE7EN the detectives find and search John Doe’s apartment, and he doesn’t live well to say the least. In a notorious piece of production design, Morgan Freeman’s character leafs through one of many composition notebooks, which were all actually filled up with deranged writing. If someone went through 18 such notebooks and typed them up, you’d get something like this Icelandic novel.

In the 60s, memoirs are all the rage, as they are today. A senile, pervy petty-bourgeois man, who worked as an accountant and also rents out rooms in his house, wants in on the market, and combines his notebooks to form his own memoir, a certain bestseller.

Of course it’s actually an avant-garde mashup of trivial thoughts, strange tales, a passport for his dick; a composition method closer to Kathy Acker than to Lena Dunham. I returned it to the library a while ago but you can read the opening paragraphs HERE.

It’s the aesthetic end point outlined by the early formalists, and followed through by Walter Benjamin and others: a literary work, to bring forth the repressed truth that discourse is always made up of other pre-existing pieces of language, would have to itself become a bricolage of found textual material.

Moreover, these handwritten notebooks, which are inconsistently titled in a funny way, are being typed up, if I remember right, by one of his tenants. And he also makes choices in preserving the formatting and punctuation — sometimes there isn’t any. As I read it, it made me think about how language intervenes, prism-like, into the speech we try to convey in practical living. It doesn’t take too many adjustments to actually de-familiarize the most basic and familiar forms of personal writing.

A few weeks later, though, what’s fascinating about this book is that it highlights that particularity of first-person narration. On one hand, you have the clarity of the most celebrated personal essays, with I guess E.B. White’s “Once More to the Lake” as a ur-text. The valorization of personal non-fiction at this moment, generating a lot of discourse, indicates a market for lucid gut-spilling, indeed, the most fruitful outlet for black women, women of color and other marginalized subject positions, at the cost (I worry) of folding literary culture into the inspiration industry.

(There’s a lot more to say. I’ve read powerful arguments that these books are super commercial and are not created the kind of breakthroughs that cultural production is starving for under neoliberal capitalism. At the same time the personal essay is less white than ever, which is of course a good thing. In NY you can go, as I have sometimes, to panels organized by We Need Diverse Books. The slogan may imply that certain forces or counter-forces must be created to break open the door. What of the existing forces that are keeping the “diverse” voices out, except for through certain texts produced in a certain way?)

On the other hand, for writers like Nabokov and Gass, who whip up language in a way that sometimes overwhelms the speech (the language/speech distinction is crucial for me), rely on the first person as well. The pyrotechnics of their prose styles come off better if the narrator is unreliable and probably insane. The centralizing power of the voice of the I-pronoun is the promise of a subjective truth and the most elaborate of rhetorical masks, all at the same time.

It’s this contradiction that TJ,BS brings forth with a dry irony. It’s constantly reshaping itself too. Even the title changes, with sometimes a colon or a comma or nothing at all. It’s obsessed with the material body, which is the only significant link that makes it the “Icelandic ULYSSES” the cover blurb says it is. But it’s full of modernist games. And like the best satire, it clearly shows that the issues it provokes have not gone away.

I only took down one quote: “What’s literature but mental masturbation for the emotions?” (42).