Thomas Bernhard, _Correction_. trans. Sophie Wilkins

 I have read a good handful of stories by Bernhard, but this was my first Bernhard novel. I chose it for a somewhat perverse reason: I had read that its sentences had the highest score on someone's "difficulty of reading" index. The sentences of Correction are long, true, but are not complex in the way that (say) Proust's or Faulkner's or Broch's are; they extend over whole pages because the narrator keeps interrupting himself to explain, or qualify, or revise, so the effect is more one of garrulity than complexity. The prose is not all that hard to read.

It's a worthwhile read, though. The (unnamed) narrator is writing to explain to us the life and work of his brilliant friend Roithamer, one of the sons of a wealthy and prominent family and a polymath of genius.  His final project was to build a cone-shaped dwelling for his sister in the center of a forest on or near their family estate. He completes the project, but his sister dies before she can move in, and Roithamer then kills himself--his suicide is the "correction" of the title.

I don't think the preceding paragraph would count as a spoiler, by the way--we learn of all these events within the first few pages. There is no suspense in the novel, nor plot, really--just the intelligent-but-not-brilliant narrator doing his painstaking, constantly self-correcting best to understand and help us understand his terrifyingly brilliant friend (based on Ludwig Wittgenstein). Rough analogues might be Serenus Zeitblom in Mann's Doctor Faustus trying to explain Adrian Leverkühn to us, or Lenù trying to explain Lila in Elena Ferrante's quartet, or even Jeffrey Cartwright trying to explain Edwin Mullhouse in Stephen Millhauser's strange and wonderful Edwin Mullhouse.

Bernhard's vision of the situation is a bit darker than Millhauser's, Ferrante's, or Mann's, which should come as no surprise. Genius is pain, as John Lennon explained to Jann Wenner back in 1970, and the pain in Correction is as bottomless as Roithamer's genius.

Theodor Adorno, "Parataxis: On Hölderlin's Late Poetry," trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen

 THE ENGLISH VERSION can be found in Notes to Literature, Volume II, if you are interested. Dates from 1960. Heidegger only crops up in the essay a few times, but he is definitely in Adorno's crosshairs.

I found this a demanding read, with its paragraphs sometimes stretching past the two-page mark and sentences such as "The sublimation of primary docility to become autonomy, however, is that supreme passivity that found its formal correlative in the technique of seriation." Hmm, okay. After three passes at such pronouncements, I tend to give up and plunge ahead, hoping things will clear up later. In other words, if you want a truly accurate précis of Adorno's argument, you will have to look elsewhere than here.

A few points emerged for me, though. The content of a poem is not what it explicitly states, Adorno writes--that is, not simply equivalent to the propositions it makes. How things are said matters as much as what is said. The form is part of the content. So far, so good--Heidegger would not dissent from that, I imagine. However, when Adorno writes, "Every interpretation of poetry that formulates it as Aussage [message] violates poetry's mode of  truth by violating its illusory character," I have a feeling he sees Heidegger as one such violator.

Heidegger definitely might dissent from the next part of Adorno's argument, which is that the form of Hölderlin's later poems (the Hymns, mainly) is dialectically engaged with (what we will call) the propositional content of the poems. That is, the sentences of the poems may be saying one kind of thing, but the form of those sentences--their parataxes, the ways they scramble or abandon classic Ciceronian sentence construction--is saying another kind of thing, posing a challenge to the propositional content of those very sentences. Thus, the truth content of the poem is not at all identical to the truth (or otherwise) of the propositions of the poem. 

I'm not in a position to judge how strong Adorno's evidence for this argument is, relying as I do on English translations of Hölderlin. But it made sense, as a general argument, and lines up with the widespread tendency to see Hölderlin as anticipating the ruptures of literary modernism (Adorno sees him a precursor to Beckett, for instance). 

I had not read Adorno on poetry before this--apart from his famous parenthetical aside that writing it after Auschwitz was barbaric--and I have to admit I was enlightened and impressed. I will have to build up some stamina before attempting another, though.

Morgan Parker, _There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé_

 PARKER'S 2019 COLLECTION Magical Negro was a favorite around here. She has since published a book of essays and a YA novel (and perhaps an analysis of Project 2025--can that be the same Morgan Parker?), and they certainly look worth investigating, but while waiting for the successor to Magical Negro I thought I would look into her back catalogue.

The cover of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé offers Carrie Mae Weems in bed, in a nightgown, legs splayed, cigarette in hand and wicked look on her face...as if to say, "if you can't deal with this, just go on back to that Mary Oliver book you were looking at." Somewhat like Roger Reeves and Shane Book, Parker can go from the canonical (W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens) to in-your-face contemporary ("99 Problems") in an eyeblink--no apologies, no explanations. She can be funny and furious at the same time ("99 Problems" again, or "Heaven Be a Xanax," or "13 Ways of Looking at a Black Girl"). 

Her verbal invention never flags.

when moon rises peach
over Mom's kitchen table
some grasses bending
                     homegirl way

   ("Beyoncé, Touring Asia, Breaks Down in a White Tee")

It hits me first thing: I've never been cool.
I am driving with glass eyes and lead feet. 

I jetpack into the heaviness alone.
My bare face hanging out all over the kitchen counter. 

   ("My Vinyl Weighs a Ton") 

I'm sorry. Let me fucking mourn me.

For the diamonds that didn't shake loose.

   ("Funeral for The Black Dog")

The collection's leading theme is Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, named in at least a dozen of the book's poems. I wish I knew enough about Beyoncé to say something credible about Parker's analysis of her place in the culture, but I just don't. I gathered she matters somewhat more than Barack Obama does, an insight that rearranged my own sense of the cosmos in what I suspect is a very healthy way.

Charles Taylor, "Engaged agency and background in Heidegger"

THIS IS A chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, edited by Charles Guignon and published in 1993. I picked up the volume hoping for some clarification of my question (i.e., how was it that Heidegger, an eloquent advocate for poetry and general and Hölderlin in particular, was also a Nazi?). Hölderlin only comes up in Guignon's volume a couple of times, and Taylor does not mention him at all in his contribution, but Taylor was still helpful. Very helpful.

Taylor's first sentence: "Heidegger's importance lies partly in the fact that he is perhaps the leading figure among that small list of twentieth-century philosophers who have helped us emerge, painfully and with difficulty, from the grip of modern rationalism."

If Heidegger wanted to get us out of the grip of modern rationalism, poetry would certainly be a way to do it. Poetry can be rational, of course, but it tends not to deal with straightforward propositions that are either true or false. When Keats says of the nightingale, "Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!", he is making an obviously false statement...arrant nonsense, even, if you are a strict logical positivist sort of person. Within the poem, though, the statement moves things forward, gets us somewhere, helps us understand something. Is there a rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem? No, there is not. And yes, there is.

The problem arises because fascism in general, and Hitler in general, also tended to look down on rationality as inferior to blood, national feeling, intuition, instinct, the will to power, and so on. With disastrous results.

So, to restate my problem in the terms that Taylor has enabled me to see, can we have the opening-up-possibilities, new ways of seeing thing kind of irrationality that good poetry provides without at the same time inviting the demonizing, fear-mongering, blood-shedding kind of irrationality that turns our communities into war zones? 

I need to look into Taylor's most recent book.

Jenn Shapland, _My Autobiography of Carson McCullers_

AS SHAPLAND'S TITLE suggests, this is not exactly a biography of McCullers; Shapland tells us a lot about herself in it, but it's not exactly about her, either. Let's call it a meditation on what writers can come to mean to us even though our only relationship with them is actually only with the writing they left behind, much of which was not even intended for us, but which inexplicably has a power to explain us to ourselves. 

My Autobiography of Carson McCullers reminded me of A. J. A. Symons's brilliant but unorthodox Quest for Corvo (1934), in which he gives us a biography of the brilliant but unorthodox novelist Frederick Rolfe, who published as "Baron Corvo." Rather than start with Rolfe's birth and duly march readers forward to his death, Symons begins by telling us how he came to read Rolfe, how he began his investigations, what he found and where he found it, and how he was able to piece together Rolfe's life story. Biography as detective story, if you will.

Shapland's book is also about her investigations, her time in the archives, her spending time in the places McCullers spent time, her piecing together of a story...in this case, a story that (unlike Rolfe's) has already been entombed in weighty formal biographies (Virginia Spencer Carr, et al.). As with Symons's book, a portrait emerges that is all the more interesting because we have seen some of the process through which the portrait emerged.

Shapland goes much further than Symons does in revealing her own investment in the subject of her portrait, though. Rolfe was gay, and Symons straightforwardly acknowledges that while leaving his own sexuality out of the discussion. (Was Symons gay? On the one hand, he was married; on the other hand, he was also planning to write a biography of Wilde.) Shapland places McCullers's queerness in the foreground of the portrait right from the opening pages, and states plainly enough that writing about McCullers has been crucial in the recognition, acknowledgement, and embrace of her own lesbian sexuality. 

McCullers's other, more academic biographers tend to be cagier or more cautious on this subject. They tend to talk about bisexuality, conflicted feelings, ambiguity, that sort of thing. I don't know whether Shapland is right that Mary Mercer was McCullers's lover as well as a devoted friend. Clearly, Shapland wants Mercer to have been lover as well as friend, for reasons that have a lot to do with Shapland's own sense of kinship with her subject. In an academic biography, letting your own feelings tip the balance this way would not be okay...but it does feel okay here, because Shapland is so upfront about it, even calling our attention to it, and because it makes a valid point about how and why we read.

Shapland's portrait of McCullers has more than a bit of the portraitist in it, but Shapland is so honest about that (again, see title) that her book seems something more worth having than another biography. 

Sam Riviere, _After Fame_

NOT A TRANSLATION of Book I of Martial's epigrams, let's emphasize--maybe an "imitation," along the lines of Alexander Pope's Imitations of Horace or Samuel Johnson's "Vanity of Human Wishes." Apparently some of it was translated using a digital translation program, the kind of program which at the time the book was published (2020) was still capable of producing refreshingly odd results, but still, very far from a translation. Martial in a wobbly 21st century mirror, we might say.

For example, number 47 in Martial's Book I is about a contemporary of his who has switched careers from being doctor to being an undertaker, and Martial makes the joke that he has not really changed his work at all, as he is still putting people underground. Riviere's 47 reads:

This is to acknowledge

that poets do admin

in 2018: received

I think the joke here is that poets who get jobs in academia find themselves saddled with stultifying tasks, but perhaps in some cases their poetry was already stultifying, so no major change has occurred. So the relation between Martial's poems and Riviere's is more oblique and through-a-cloud-darkly than that between Pope and Horace or Johnson and Juvenal, but still discernible and sometimes wickedly funny.

After Fame certainly aligns with Riviere's 2021 novel, Dead Souls, a picaresque trip through the institutions contemporary writing inhabits (see LLL post of Oct 2, 2023). Martial is an urban poet whose short, sharply pointed poems conjure up a setting of ill-gotten wealth, literary sophistication, intoxication, sexual adventurism, and plagiarism, a setting which (mutatis mutandis) is an awfully close match for that of Dead Souls.

I wondered whether Riviere himself had had to bat away any accusations of plagiarism, since Martial accuses a few people of appropriating his work and Solomon Wiese, a key character in Dead Souls, has his own troubles on that score. Riviere's early poetry had incorporated random search-engine finds (like what the USA called "flarf") and that may have led to the kind of sticky intellectual property questions that Wiese deals with in the novel. (Working with Martial is risk-free in that regard; he has been dead for about 1900 years, and that may be part of the joke.)

The irony is, though, that Riviere is about as original poet as you are ever going to encounter these days. Reading him is a continuing surprise.

Ernst Junger, _The Glass Bees_, trans. Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Mayer

 I WANT TO be careful slinging around the word "prescient," since the specter of replacing humans with machines has been haunting western literature since at least 1920 thanks to Karel Capek's R. U. R., but the frontier of what machines can do has moved so far since the original German publication of this novel in 1957 and even since the New York Review Books reprint of this translation in 2000 that one has to give Jünger a tip of the hat, at least.

Jünger's career was unique. His first book, Storm of Steel, differed from almost all fiction and non-fiction by WWI veterans (e.g., Robert Graves, Erich Maria Remarque, Henri Barbusse) in being frankly celebratory of combat experience. He was a prominent voice on the hard right in Germany after the war, but he didn't like the Nazis, even though they courted him assiduously; his On the Marble Cliffs (1939) is a novella-length parable about Hitler that makes you wonder how it even got published in Hitler's Germany, or why Jünger was not immediately arrested. He served in the German army during WW II but (according to Wikipedia) was in the remoter orbits of the officers who tried (and failed) to assassinate Hitler.

The Glass Bees is a short novel (roughly 200 pages) about a job interview. The narrator is Captain Richard, who was trained to be a cavalry officer but had to settle for being a tank commander--a suitable analogue for the crushing of the old ways under the wheels of modernization. He has landed a job interview with Zapparoni, a figure a bit like Peter Thiel and Walt Disney rolled into one, a Master of the Universe whose empire is built on automation. Captain Richard has been having a hard time since the (unspecified) war, his reputation suffering from his close association with the bad old days that his society is trying to forget (or repress). The interview is his best shot at getting a secure spot in the modern world.

He doesn't much like the modern world, though, "an age when hierarchy is determined by mastery of technical apparatuses and when technics have become destiny." "Human perfection and technical perfection are incompatible," he writes; "If we strive for one, we must sacrifice the other." For the Zapparoni business plan to be achieved, "man had to be destroyed as the horse had already been destroyed."

As he goes through the interview, Captain  Richard tells us a lot about his past, all of which underlines how uncongenial to him are Zapparoni and all of Zapparoni's works. Over the course of his interview, it occurs to him again and again that he has given himself away and blown his opportunity. Somehow, though, he gets the gig. We don't learn how it worked out.