Richard Powers, _Playground_ (2)

 THE MAJOR SPOILER: the whole Ina-&-Rafi-in-Makatea narrative was generated by some powerful AI engine at Todd's request. Rafi actually became a librarian in Champaign-Urbana and died a few years ago. Evie Beaulieu, who had inexplicably and somewhat implausibly also shown up on Makatea, also died some while ago. Todd is not on his way to Makatea in some luxury yacht to launch a sea-steading operation. 

Nope, the whole thing comes down to dying Todd's wish for a final reconciliation with the already dead Rafi and tech titan Todd's access to unimaginably powerful AI, which he has asked to generate a convincing happy ending for him. Which the AI does, and that is what we read in the final pages. Not only are the three college friends reunited, but Todd's immense fortune will be put towards the restoration of the oceans. Everything is going to turn around!

I've been wondering what to make of this ending since I finished the book. On the one hand, it's a doozy of a happy ending, full of love and hope. It feels lovely. On the other hand, you know it's a computer-generated illusion. It didn't happen. Perhaps it could never have happened. It's a striking example of our ability to delude ourselves. The oceans are doomed. 

The finale of the novel is thus radiantly optimistic and forbiddingly dark at the same time. 

Richard Powers, why dost thou f*ck so with our heads?

Richard Powers, _Playground_ (1)

 IF YOU CARE about such things: big bright flashing spoiler alert.

The quickie description of this when it was published last fall was "does for the ocean what The Overstory did for trees," but that seems misleading to me. There is a diver/oceanographer character, Evie Beaulieu, whose role in the novel resembles that of Patricia Westerford in The Overstory, and Powers delivers some rich descriptions of what she sees on her dives, but Evie and her research do not seem as deeply incorporated into the fiction as was the case with Patricia Westerford. Her path crosses those of the novel's other main characters towards the end, but she does not seem to be at the book's thematic heart.

The novel is mainly about the other three main characters, whose lives are deeply interlaced and are presented in two narrative strands. 

One strand is the first-person narrative of Todd Keane, addressed to a "you" whose identity we do not learn for a long time. Todd grew up a child of privilege in a north shore suburb of Chicago. At an elite private high school he meets Rafi Young, a black Southsider who is in the school thanks to a scholarship funded by Todd's father. Both ridiculously brainy, they bond first over chess, then over the ancient Chinese game Go, and eventually over the whole range of nerdish realms that insatiably intelligent high school kids are attracted to. 

They both go to University of Illinois, Rafi because he can afford it, Todd in large part because of the school's research into artificial intelligence (which longtime Powers readers will recall from Galatea 2.0). There they meet Pacific Islander and aspiring artist Ina Aroita--the latest in a series of impossibly magical and charismatic young women conjured up by Powers (cf. Olivia in The Overstory, Alyssa in Bewilderment, Thassadit Amzwar in Generosity). 

Both young men fall in love with Ina, naturally. She chooses Rafi, but Rafi and Todd become profoundly estranged. Todd then goes on to create Playground, a social media platform that is also a game (following Rafi's suggestion), which makes him billions and billions of dollars. But--unhappily--he has developed Lewy Body dementia. In response, he is formulating a major plan to tie up his life's loose ends, in which the "you" he addresses will play a part.

The other strand, of course, is the story of Ina and Rafi. They have ended up on a tiny island in the South Pacific, Makatea (non-fictional), and are raising two kids. Makatea is recovering, scarred and abandoned, from extensive phosphate mining by western companies. The people of the island have recently gotten an offer from a consortium of tech bros who want start a sea-steading operation in their vicinity. The people are about evenly split, for and against, with Ina and Rafi against. Then they find out the main tech bro in the consortium is...Todd Keane.

Quite a set up, no? Will Todd, Rafi, and Ina reconcile and live happily ever after, or are we headed for murder and mayhem?

To  be continued. 

Annie Ernaux, _Les années_

THIS IS THE first book I have read by Nobel laureate Ernaux, and I understand it is atypical for her. She is a pioneer in autofiction (the term also exists in French, apparently), and most of her books are about particular eras or events in her own life. This one, while still autobiographical, is about the whole span of her life, from childhood up to the time it was published in 2008 (when Ernaux was 68). 

Les années is atypical in a more general way as well, as I find myself unable to think of another book quite like it. 

For one thing, it is as much her generation's "autobiography," one might say, as it is her own. She scrupulously avoids the first person, generally using instead the French pronoun "on"--"one," we might translate, although it also means something roughly like "you and me and just about everyone we know."

 The book's narrates from a point of view that aligns with Ernaux's own--her education, her marriage, her children, her career, her commitments--but is at the same time looking outwards, observing and recording, trying to map the social forces, fashion trends, and historical pressures experienced by anyone born in France circa 1940, especially anyone born female. "Une existence singulière donc mais fondue aussi dans le mouvement d'une génération" is how she puts it near the end of the book: in my own translation, "One person's existence, then, but also melted [dissolved?] into the movement [evolving?] of a generation." 

I can think of another book a little like that--Fintan O'Toole's We Don't Know Ourselves-- but it came out after Ernaux's, and it lacks the other astonishing dimension of Les Années: the ways its style evolves as she gets older.

I don't know quite how she did this, but the voice in the earlier sections sounds young--hesitant but fresh, naïve but energetic--and it metamorphoses gradually as experience accumulates into something maybe wiser, or maybe just more jaded, or deeper, or maybe just more tired...never less than graceful, though.

Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man does something a lot like this, but only up to age 23 or so, and it doesn't even try to represent a generation's experience.

The book has the effect of a  highly condensed Proust, the history of one consciousness in its historical generation boiled down to its essence in just 250 pages. It must be interesting to read this as a French person near Ernaux's age--a whole carton of madeleines. You'd be brought up against long-faded but arresting memories again and again. It must be interesting too to read it a long-time reader of Ernaux, as she revisits times and events she had written about earlier in her career, but from a new angle.

Every few pages, Ernaux makes an observation that just nails it--for instance, her noting near the end of the book that as adolescents we feel we are continually changing in a world that stubbornly stays the same, while in old age we feel we are staying the same in a world that is continually changing. We don't get it quite right in either case.

Roger Reeves, _King Me_

BEST BARBARIAN (2022), Reeves's second collection, was so good that I decided his first was worth a shot. King Me, published in 2013, is very nearly as good. 

It has the kind of audacity one often sees in strong young poets (especially strong young male poets, I would say), a little bit of "watch what I can do with...this!". A lot of syntactical gymnastics, a lot of astonishing imagery, a lot of erudite code-switching. Reeves, thank goodness, can actually pull this sort of thing off. Here is the beginning of "Maggot Therapy":

Not the debridement of the wound--the wedding

Dress decanted of the bones and snow-blown skin

Of a bride circling through the splinters of winter,

The ash and orchard of a gray heaven surrounding

The tumble of guests leaking out into the night

To wish her sloughing off of dress and wound well--

No, not this debridement, which is greeted with cake

And cymbal and the calling on of a mastering god, [...]

The sentence goes on for another eighteen lines, right to the end of the poem, but just about the time I was thinking Reeves was showing off a bit as he spun out this disambiguating explanation, it turned out the wound in need of cleaning was made by Reeves's brother's suicide--"eat around the bullet still thrumming against / the salt and clatter of a brother's brain [...]". The topic of mortality shunts us into a quick detour through Hamlet ("maggot how lightly you travel / Through the ribs of beggars and barns, kings and convents"), but we are still talking about debridement, since doctors often placed maggots in wounds to consume necrotic tissue back in the day. And then the poem tones down, but becomes all the more powerful as its language becomes simpler and more subdued:

Teach me again that I do not own this body

That walks me over this snow and cracked pavement,

The winter light pulling at my bare ankles, teach me

What to do with the dead I carry in my mouth,

Teach me to travel light with their bodies in my belly.

Not every poem in the book is as striking as "Maggot Therapy," and the verbal fireworks do sometimes seem to be set off for their own sake. But Reeves was writing strong poems right out of the gate.

Martin Heidegger, _Elucidations of Hölderlin's Poetry_, trans. Keith Hoeller

WHAT, THIS HOBBYHORSE again? Yes, I'm afraid so.

None of my local libraries had this, so thank you, University of Tulsa's McFarline Library, and thank you, Interlibrary Loan. 

Thank you, too, Humanity Books (an imprint of Prometheus Books), while I'm at it. I'm not sure why an ordinary university press didn't publish this...although I do have a guess.

The book is a translation of volume 4 of Heidegger's Gesamtaugabe, and it gathers several essays and talks he devoted to close readings of poems by Hölderlin. The longest, at about seventy pages, is devoted to "Andenken" ("Remembrance"), but there are also analyses of "Homecoming/To Kindred Ones" and "As When on a Holiday."

Many of the questions that drew me to find the book are (as it happens) nicely stated on the back cover:

   During the 1930s and '40s Heidegger published little, lending an additional air of mystery to his famous "turning" (Kehre) from the language of classical philosophy to that of poetry. Why did Heidegger turn from philosophy to poetry? Why did he choose Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843), perhaps Germany's greatest, yet most difficult, poet? How can the poet help the the thinker to complete his thoughts? How can Hölderlin's poetry help Heidegger  to think the truth of being?

I also had a big question not summarized above: what does it mean that Heidegger's turn to poetry coincided with a grave political misjudgment? I say "grave," but "sinister" would also do, not to mention "nauseating." Heidegger turns to poetry, and the next thing we know, he's a Nazi. What does that mean?

Heidegger is good at explaining why poetry matters. A poetic idea, he insists, is not just a philosophical idea with frosting and ribbons on it, which have to be scraped off to get the real idea. No, the poetic idea is in the poetry, in the possibilities of figurative language, of sentence structure, of sound. As he puts it:

Poetry is not merely an ornament accompanying existence, not merely a temporary enthusiasm and certainly not excitement or amusement. Poetry is the sustaining ground of history, and therefore not just an appearance of culture, above all not the mere "expression" of the "soul of a culture."

Poets, for Heidegger, are demigods. They mediate between us and divinity. They create a home for us all by enabling us to see where we have always been. They draw from the past and the future to enunciate our now.

Heidegger goes quite quickly from there, though, to saying Hölderlin has a particularly important message for the Germans, who, if they heed Hölderlin, can turn the West away from the disastrous detour it has taken towards math, abstraction, Aristotelian logic, science, and technology for far too many centuries. Of "Wie Wenn am Feiertage" ("As when on a holiday"), Heidegger writes:

The poem was written in 1800. It was not until 110 years later that it became known  to the German people. [...] Since then another generation has passed. During these decades, the open insurrection of modern world history has begin. Its course will force a decision concerning the future character of the absolute domination of man over the whole terrestrial globe. Hölderlin's poem, however, still waits to be interpreted.

Until now, that is, as Heidegger launches into his interpretation, which concludes:

   Hölderlin's word conveys the holy thereby naming the space of time that is only once, time of the primordial decision for the essential order of the future history of gods and humanities.

   This word, though still  unheard, is preserved in the Occidental language of the Germans.

This essay was given as a talk several times in 1939 and 1940, the editor notes. That is, exactly the moment when the world was going to hear from Germany in the most terrible way possible.

So, I am as stuck as ever, loving how Heidegger explains how we need what the poets say, but horrified at his insistence that what the poets are saying amounts to "today Germany, tomorrow the world." 

You know who else is good at saying how important poetry is? Ezra Pound. See the problem?

Paul Auster, _4 3 2 1_ (2)

 MINEFIELD OF SPOILERS ahead. Proceed at your own risk.

To recap the previous post on this novel (July 7, 2024): 4 3 2 1 is quite different from Auster's other novels due to its length (866 pages), its longer, catalog-like sentences (Auster, usually a "less-is-more" kind of writer, gets very expansive here), and its drawing deeply on his own own childhood, boyhood, and youth, up to about age 23 (the point his memoir Hand to Mouth begins).

The novel's main character, Archie Ferguson, maps quite closely on to Auster himself. Born March 3, 1947 (a month later than Auster himself) to a (not very observant) Jewish family, he grows up mainly in a the northern New Jersey suburbs, with frequent forays to New York City. His keenest interests are literature, film, sports, and girls, the priority among which is always in motion.

There is a twist, though. The novel is about not one, but four Archie Fergusons. They all start out on  the same day, born to the same family in the same place. But then things begin to diverge. One Archie's father dies while he is still a boy, becoming the victim of insurance-scam arson when he works late one night. Another Archie's parents divorce, the father becoming wealthy while the mother struggles. Another Archie's parents stay married, but the father has given up, resigned himself to failure.

One Archie loses fingers in an auto accident. One dies in adolescence. One is bi-sexual. One Archie's first serious girlfriend is another Archie's stepsister. One ends up going to Princeton, another (like Auster) goes to Columbia, while yet another skips college to make a go at being a writer in Paris. 

Archie 2, when still a child, has a moment of insight that establishes the key to the novel. A boy in the neighborhood dares Archie to climb a tree; Archie does, then falls and breaks a leg. He muses on how the whole episode could have gone down differently, a train of thought that leads to surprising conclusions:

If his parents had moved to one of the other towns where they had been looking for the right house, he wouldn't even know Chuckie Brower, wouldn't even know that Chuckie Brower existed, and it wouldn't have been stupid, for the tree he had climbed wouldn't have been in his backyard. Such an interesting thought, Ferguson said to himself: to imagine how things could have been different for himself even though he was the same. The same boy in a different house with a different tree. The same boy with different parents. The same boy with the same parents who didn't do the same things they did now.

The whole development of the novel lies in these alternative scenarios. What if X had happened, rather than Y? If this person had moved away, if that person had stayed? The forking paths proliferate as the novel proceeds, one consequence being that the Archies become very, very differentiated, going from being nearly indistinguishable in the early chapters to being quite different people by the end.

And a thought-provoking idea emerges, for 4 3 2 1 is not just one of those now-familiar plural-universe stories, but a kind of unfolding demonstration of the role chance plays in our lives. 

When Auster was a boy at camp, as he has mentioned in interviews, he was nearly killed by a bolt of lightning. The lightning killed a boy standing near him, and Auster was untouched, but it stuck with him that the lightning might just as easily have killed him.  It was just a matter of chance. Reflection on the role of chance is everywhere in Auster's work; besides The Red Notebook and The Music of Chance, think of all the plot turns in his novels that depend on some event that could just as easily have flipped differently. And we all have stories like that, don't we? Roads not taken, snowy woods left unexplored?

This feels profound to me. In my part of the world, there is deep reluctance to grant that chance has any important role in our lives. This reluctance is audible in a bundle of expressions we hear all the time: e.g., God Has a Plan for Your Life, It Was Meant to Be, It Had to Happen, There Are No Accidents. Not to mention the variants in which whatever happens to you is your own doing, the precise consequence of your own decisions and actions.

In 4 3 2 1, we are in another kind of cosmos. No God, no plan for your life, no destiny...mainly accidents, which you will have to navigate as best you can, with absolutely no guarantees that virtue or hard work or talent will be rewarded. Scary but heady.

And then, in the final pages, the snake eats its tail.

Glad I lived long enough to get around to reading this.

Paul Celan, _Threadsuns_, trans. Pierre Joris

THE ONLY CELAN I have read is the selected poems volume translated by Michael Hamburger, and that was years ago--mid-nineties, I think. Reading Yoko Tawada's novel (see yesterday's post) inspired me to seek out Threadsuns (in the original German, Fadensonnen), the volume that is the subject of the paper Patrik is planning to deliver at the Paris Celan conference. I was in luck--a handy library had Joris's Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry of Paul Celan.

Joris's commentary includes the observation that "Threadsuns may well be the least commented on and most critically neglected volume of Celan's oeuvre." That made a neat additional datum on Tawada's character; he does seem like a reader who would gravitate to the less-populated precincts of reading. Not only is he drawn to the famously difficult Celan, but also to Celan's least read book. According to Kai Fischer, whom Joris goes on to quote, Threadsuns "is not only the gateway into  the late work but also introduces and performs a new way of saying that will be characteristic for the following volumes." In other words, this is when things get really challenging.

I cannot shed much light on the poems, I'm afraid. I found them baffling, though baffling in a compelling and arresting way. Sorry about the self-contradiction--that is, saying the poems both compelled me, which suggests they pushed me along, and arrested me, which suggests they brought me to a stop--but there you go. I was, indeed, compelled and arrested.

The poems are full of abrupt turns, opaque allusions, and newly-coined words. For instance:

THE HEARTSCRIPTCRUMBLED vision-isle

at midnight, in feeble 

ignition key glimmer.

"Vision-isle" conjures up something without much readerly effort...but "heartscriptcrumbled"? The effect is a little like the coinages of Finnegans Wake, but only a little--somehow they land differently, less playfully than Joyce's compounds, seem more effortful, harder-won. I always felt like something was at stake that could be said no other way,, even without knowing what the something was.

The word "Trans-Tibetan," as used in Tawada's title, shows up in one of the poems: "Ashrei, // a word without meaning, / trans-Tibetan, / injected into the / Jewess / Pallas / Athene's / helmeted ovaries, // and when he, // he, // fetally, // harps Carpathian nono, // then the Allemande / bobbins her lace for / the vomiting im- / mortal / song." There's a Thomas Mann  novella in there somewhere.

I recently learned that Celan, a Holocaust survivor, on one occasion met Heidegger, a former member of the Nazi party. What was that like? There is at least one book about it, apparently.