IN QUEER LONDON, Matt Houlbrook inserts quotation marks whenever he uses the word "homophobia," which he rarely does, and at one point refers to "the historically and culturally blind category of 'homophobia'," leaving the impression he finds the concept unhelpful for serious analytical purposes.
He doesn't say why, though. Some critique of the concept is in progress, obviously, which he assumes we know about, but about which I, for one, haven't a clue. Extrapolating a bit from his obiter dicta about the category being historically and culturally blind, I am going to guess that he objects to the idea that some unchanging, essential, transhistorical attitude reappears throughout human history, taking various guises in different eras, but in substance always one and the same.
So I imagine Houlbrook would have reservations about a project titled Homophobia: A History. No, no, no, he might--I imagine--object, we need to understand the particulars of a society at a particular time, its laws, its institutions, its modes of life, before we can understand what gay men and lesbians of that time and place were up against. We don't have to postulate a transcendent bogey-figure and call it "homophobia."
Byrne Fone acknowledges historical differences; he is clear on the point, for instance, that the repression, exclusion, and punishment of gay men goes from being a campaign against a sin to being a campaign against a vice to being a campaign against an illness as we move from the middle ages into modernity. However, he does at times seem to assume all these campaigns share basic premises at their dank, greasy, unconscious cores. For instance, he prefaces a particularly ugly passage ("inverts are not fit to live with the rest of mankind") from 19th century moral crusader Anthony Comstock by noting Comstock's judgment was one "with which the author of Leviticus, [the apostle] Paul, [St. John] Chrysostom, and [Pope] Gregory [IX] would have concurred." Okay, yes, all five condemned men having sex with men. But since they lived in quite different societies at quite different times, can we really imagine them all nodding sagely as a Victorian postal inspector holds forth?
Fone's history of homophobia begins with a quick look at Greek and Roman antiquity and the relevant texts in the Old and New Testaments, then focuses on western Europe up to the trial of Wilde, then hops the Atlantic and discusses the Americas, mainly the North and mainly the United States, from the arrival of the Europeans up to Stonewall (an epilogue goes up to about 2000, the year the book was published). The larger part of the book relies heavily on secondary sources, some of them a tad overfamiliar perhaps (K. J. Dover, John Boswell), but when Fone gets to the United States from the founding to the Kinsey Report, he obviously knows the material extremely well and the analysis becomes more original and more illuminating.
Back to that point about a "historically and culturally blind category," though. Is there no such thing as homophobia, then? In his epilogue, Fone writes:
For some, it [homophobia] seems to have the command of a force of nature, to speak from the deep structures of the inner self, and in those psychological or even pathological dimensions, homophobia emerges as a condition, even a disease, of the psyche as well as a disorder of the imagination, the spirit, and the soul.
I may be just carried away by the rhetoric here, but that sounds true, somehow, doesn't it? Like something we've seen manifest itself?
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
Monday, February 4, 2013
Jonathan Littell, _Les Bienveillantes_, interim notes
IT MAY BE years before I finish this--I am 230 pages in, with 1,150 to go--so I may as well record a few notes now.
Daniel Mendelson's review in NYRB persuaded me to take this one up--he called the novel "a serious one, deserving of serious treatment," and even compared it to Moby-Dick, suggesting that it is one of those "improbable hybrids whose two sides seem to have little to do with each other, that, however unlikely we are to find them in nature, can give us nightmares that will haunt us long after the show is over."
Having trusted Mendelson that far, I wish I had also heeded his observation that "Littell’s style is unremarkable, even pedestrian—his translator, Charlotte Mandell, has produced an admirably fluid English version that is more pleasing to read than the French." No, I had to go and do the conscientious thing and find a French copy, and I can confirm that the style is less than lively. Sometimes it seems like an over-literal translation from American English. We have the familiar expression that something of other is "stuck in my head," but I don't think any French native speaker would say something is "collée dans la tête." Similarly, we speak and write of people "sweeping away objections," but would a French speaker say a character "balaya ces réserves"?
But it certainly makes sense, for reasons of verisimilitude, that Littell's narrator and main character, Maximilien Aue, would write his memoirs in French. He's a former S.S. officer, now in hiding, who was present at the beginnings of the Holocaust in the Ukraine, including participation in the mass killings of Babi Yar--which is roughly the point in his narrative I have reached. Over the course of the book, according to the reviews I have read, he shows up in other sites associated with the Holocaust, ending up in the bunker with Hitler. The reviews noted that Littell's descriptions of the killing are intensely and graphically rendered. I can confirm that.
What really intrigued me, though, is Mendelson's account of how Littell structured the narrative around the Orestes myth. The title is the French translation of "Eumenides," the "kindly ones" as the traditional English translation has it--that is, the Furies, the supernatural beings that pursue Orestes after he has avenged his father by murdering his mother. Thus far in the novel, the connection between Aue and Orestes is not too emphatic--his father disappeared mysteriously during his childhood, he's a bit tight-lipped on the subject of his mother, there are queasy intimations about his sister, but so far, nothing overt.
I'm looking forward to the unveiling of this element, though. There is something quintessentially modern about Orestes: inheritor of a titanically fucked-up situation created by the preceding generation, desperately attached to his peers, mentally imbalanced, self-destructive streak, damned if he does, damned if he doesn't. It does not seem accidental that the Orestes myth got picked up by such quintessentially 20th century writers as Eliot, in his most convincing play, and Sartre. There is a lot of Orestes in Hamlet, so by natural descent there is a lot of Orestes in Stephen Dedalus, who has to do battle with his mother's ghost in the Circe episode, and in Hal Incandenza in his agon with Avril.
At the end of the first chapter, "Toccata" (all the chapters are titled after sections of a Bach instrumental suite), Aue tells us, "je suis un homme comme vous," "I am a man like you." Orestes in the SS as everyman? I'm thinking, well, could work.
Daniel Mendelson's review in NYRB persuaded me to take this one up--he called the novel "a serious one, deserving of serious treatment," and even compared it to Moby-Dick, suggesting that it is one of those "improbable hybrids whose two sides seem to have little to do with each other, that, however unlikely we are to find them in nature, can give us nightmares that will haunt us long after the show is over."
Having trusted Mendelson that far, I wish I had also heeded his observation that "Littell’s style is unremarkable, even pedestrian—his translator, Charlotte Mandell, has produced an admirably fluid English version that is more pleasing to read than the French." No, I had to go and do the conscientious thing and find a French copy, and I can confirm that the style is less than lively. Sometimes it seems like an over-literal translation from American English. We have the familiar expression that something of other is "stuck in my head," but I don't think any French native speaker would say something is "collée dans la tête." Similarly, we speak and write of people "sweeping away objections," but would a French speaker say a character "balaya ces réserves"?
But it certainly makes sense, for reasons of verisimilitude, that Littell's narrator and main character, Maximilien Aue, would write his memoirs in French. He's a former S.S. officer, now in hiding, who was present at the beginnings of the Holocaust in the Ukraine, including participation in the mass killings of Babi Yar--which is roughly the point in his narrative I have reached. Over the course of the book, according to the reviews I have read, he shows up in other sites associated with the Holocaust, ending up in the bunker with Hitler. The reviews noted that Littell's descriptions of the killing are intensely and graphically rendered. I can confirm that.
What really intrigued me, though, is Mendelson's account of how Littell structured the narrative around the Orestes myth. The title is the French translation of "Eumenides," the "kindly ones" as the traditional English translation has it--that is, the Furies, the supernatural beings that pursue Orestes after he has avenged his father by murdering his mother. Thus far in the novel, the connection between Aue and Orestes is not too emphatic--his father disappeared mysteriously during his childhood, he's a bit tight-lipped on the subject of his mother, there are queasy intimations about his sister, but so far, nothing overt.
I'm looking forward to the unveiling of this element, though. There is something quintessentially modern about Orestes: inheritor of a titanically fucked-up situation created by the preceding generation, desperately attached to his peers, mentally imbalanced, self-destructive streak, damned if he does, damned if he doesn't. It does not seem accidental that the Orestes myth got picked up by such quintessentially 20th century writers as Eliot, in his most convincing play, and Sartre. There is a lot of Orestes in Hamlet, so by natural descent there is a lot of Orestes in Stephen Dedalus, who has to do battle with his mother's ghost in the Circe episode, and in Hal Incandenza in his agon with Avril.
At the end of the first chapter, "Toccata" (all the chapters are titled after sections of a Bach instrumental suite), Aue tells us, "je suis un homme comme vous," "I am a man like you." Orestes in the SS as everyman? I'm thinking, well, could work.
Thursday, January 31, 2013
Elaine Pagels, _Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, & Politics in the Book of Revelation_
I'VE BEEN A fan of Elaine Pagels since I read The Gnostic Gospels in...1988, I think it was; she's one of the writers whose books I buy the second they show up in the store, before I've even read a review.
This most recent one makes a dandy companion to Mark Davis's Left Behind and Loving It (LLL, July 2012); Davis offers a compelling contemporary reading of the theology of Revelation, and Pagels gives a deeply informed and persuasive account of its composition and early history. Like her other books for general audiences, Revelations is written so gracefully that you scarcely notice the pages zipping by, yet rests on the deep foundation of a career's worth of scholarship and reflection.
What can we reconstruct of the life and circumstances of John of Patmos? My impression from having read his text a few times was that he was a dyspeptic, unpleasant sort with a strong but somewhat repetitive knack for grotesque imagery, but needless to say Pagels draws a richer portrait.
John likely was a kind of itinerant preacher/prophet with well-developed ties to a group of congregations in Asia Minor (the "seven churches" he addresses at the beginning of Revelation), some of whom he thought were paying too great heed to the wrong sort of people (e.g., "Jezebel"). He was haunted by the destruction of the Second Temple, which likely occurred twenty-some tears before he wrote his text, and by the persecutions to which Christians were subject under Nero and later emperors. Powerful and seemingly indestructible as Rome was, though, John had a vision of a complete transvaluation of values, the cruel and powerful overthrown, the weak and godly raised up, the Temple restored and more glorious than ever, never again to be brought down.
For me, the most powerfiul image in Revelation is not the dragons, the whores, the beasts, the horsemen, and so on, but "he will wipe every tear from their eyes." You can tell from that--and Pagels brings this out eloquently--that John belonged to a community that had suffered terribly, and he found a way to give them hope.
John may not have thought of himself as a "Christian"--some in the early church did, notably the gentiles converted by Paul, but John was probably a Jew (hence his grief over the Temple) and may have been one of the Jesus-following Jews who could get prickly about non-Jews wanting to get on the bandwagon without observing the dietary laws and such. Pagels finds traces of such an attitude in various easy-to-overlook pockets of the text.
There were lots of other apocalypses circulating in those days, and Pagels gives intriguing details about of some--a large part of what makes Pagels appealing is her ability to offer glimpses of the roads not taken by Christianity--but only John's got into the canon. Why? Pagels is good on that point, too. When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire in the 4th century, the gravy train pulled into the station, and suddenly a whole lot depended on which persons and which texts and which doctrines could claim authority. Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, and judging from Pagels's account somebody you would not want to mess with, was particularly enamored of John's apocalypse, not for its anti-Roman sentiments--which were largely forgotten until the Lutherans rediscovered them--but as a vivid account of what was in store for heretics, a category into which Athanasius tended to lump all those who got in his way. It was Athanasius's list of the New Testament canon that became the New Testament, ending with the big bang of John's apocalypse.
This most recent one makes a dandy companion to Mark Davis's Left Behind and Loving It (LLL, July 2012); Davis offers a compelling contemporary reading of the theology of Revelation, and Pagels gives a deeply informed and persuasive account of its composition and early history. Like her other books for general audiences, Revelations is written so gracefully that you scarcely notice the pages zipping by, yet rests on the deep foundation of a career's worth of scholarship and reflection.
What can we reconstruct of the life and circumstances of John of Patmos? My impression from having read his text a few times was that he was a dyspeptic, unpleasant sort with a strong but somewhat repetitive knack for grotesque imagery, but needless to say Pagels draws a richer portrait.
John likely was a kind of itinerant preacher/prophet with well-developed ties to a group of congregations in Asia Minor (the "seven churches" he addresses at the beginning of Revelation), some of whom he thought were paying too great heed to the wrong sort of people (e.g., "Jezebel"). He was haunted by the destruction of the Second Temple, which likely occurred twenty-some tears before he wrote his text, and by the persecutions to which Christians were subject under Nero and later emperors. Powerful and seemingly indestructible as Rome was, though, John had a vision of a complete transvaluation of values, the cruel and powerful overthrown, the weak and godly raised up, the Temple restored and more glorious than ever, never again to be brought down.
For me, the most powerfiul image in Revelation is not the dragons, the whores, the beasts, the horsemen, and so on, but "he will wipe every tear from their eyes." You can tell from that--and Pagels brings this out eloquently--that John belonged to a community that had suffered terribly, and he found a way to give them hope.
John may not have thought of himself as a "Christian"--some in the early church did, notably the gentiles converted by Paul, but John was probably a Jew (hence his grief over the Temple) and may have been one of the Jesus-following Jews who could get prickly about non-Jews wanting to get on the bandwagon without observing the dietary laws and such. Pagels finds traces of such an attitude in various easy-to-overlook pockets of the text.
There were lots of other apocalypses circulating in those days, and Pagels gives intriguing details about of some--a large part of what makes Pagels appealing is her ability to offer glimpses of the roads not taken by Christianity--but only John's got into the canon. Why? Pagels is good on that point, too. When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire in the 4th century, the gravy train pulled into the station, and suddenly a whole lot depended on which persons and which texts and which doctrines could claim authority. Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, and judging from Pagels's account somebody you would not want to mess with, was particularly enamored of John's apocalypse, not for its anti-Roman sentiments--which were largely forgotten until the Lutherans rediscovered them--but as a vivid account of what was in store for heretics, a category into which Athanasius tended to lump all those who got in his way. It was Athanasius's list of the New Testament canon that became the New Testament, ending with the big bang of John's apocalypse.
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
David, Cook, Brady, & Houlbrook
PURSUANT TO A project tedious to explain, I've been reading up on the history of gay men in England, focusing on the 20th century...and since that is what I have been reading, that is all I have to offer LLL today. The four names above are not a law firm, but rather the authors of the four books on the topic I've been through.
Hugh David's On Queer Street: A Social History of British Homosexuality 1895-1995 (1997) is a serviceable introduction aimed (I would say) at the general rather than the academic reader, more synthesis than original research. David announces in the beginning that he wants to focus on the lives of ordinary gay men rather than the famous literary ones, but he starts off with the Wilde Trial, then it's Carpenter, Housman, Forster, Auden, Spender, Ackerly...since literary people are a lot likelier than anyone else to leave documentation of their private lives, what is a historian to do? David includes more ordinary sorts of folk once he gets past W W II, though, and provides a fairly detailed picture of the 1950s and 1960s--less so of the 1970s and 1980s, which he seems faintly out of sympathy with, but there's always The Swimming Pool Library.
A Gay History of Britain: Love and Sex Between Men Since the Middle Ages (2007), edited by Matt Cook, didn't look promising--it's published by Greenwood, who are not always choosy--but as an introduction it is more scholarly and more concise than David's book, with chapters by such authorities in the field as Cook himself and Harry Cocks (stop that sniggering in the back, please). A bit more academically grounded than David's book and a real find.
Books can get a little too academic, however, as is the case, I would say, with Sean Brady's Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain, 1861-1913 (2005). This one has the unmistakable pong of a dissertation, built around a not wholly articulated quarrel with the "medico-legal" wing of gay history, by which Brady means Foucault and epigones(Weeks and Halperin, I guess?). Foucault's paradigm just will not work in the British context, Brady wants us to know. Well, okay. Really interesting chapters on John Addington Symonds and Edward Carpenter, though. I got the feeling Brady really would have preferred to write just about those two men and wound up sidetracked into the anti-Foucault polemic.
And the blue ribbon goes to Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957 (2005). Houlbrook has his theory game down--Foucault, Butler, Sedgwick, some sophisticated stuff about public and private space--but the heart of the book is that he spent some real time down in the mildewed precincts of the archive, just like a real historian should: trial records, newspapers, parliamentary proceedings. It's not a long book, under 300 pages, but it gives a fine-grained sense of the lived geography of being gay man in London between W W I and the Wolfenden Report. And Houlbrook has his own highly original and surprising theses to advance at some points. The famous police crackdown in the late 1940s and early 1950s? Not so thorough-going and widespread as it is remembered, according to Houlbrook. The breakthrough of the Wolfenden Report and, ten years on, de-criminalization? Easy to turn this into a heroic redemption narrative, but that feels "Whiggish" to Houlbrook, who asks, what (or who) had to be sacrificed to achieve it? An excellent book.
Hugh David's On Queer Street: A Social History of British Homosexuality 1895-1995 (1997) is a serviceable introduction aimed (I would say) at the general rather than the academic reader, more synthesis than original research. David announces in the beginning that he wants to focus on the lives of ordinary gay men rather than the famous literary ones, but he starts off with the Wilde Trial, then it's Carpenter, Housman, Forster, Auden, Spender, Ackerly...since literary people are a lot likelier than anyone else to leave documentation of their private lives, what is a historian to do? David includes more ordinary sorts of folk once he gets past W W II, though, and provides a fairly detailed picture of the 1950s and 1960s--less so of the 1970s and 1980s, which he seems faintly out of sympathy with, but there's always The Swimming Pool Library.
A Gay History of Britain: Love and Sex Between Men Since the Middle Ages (2007), edited by Matt Cook, didn't look promising--it's published by Greenwood, who are not always choosy--but as an introduction it is more scholarly and more concise than David's book, with chapters by such authorities in the field as Cook himself and Harry Cocks (stop that sniggering in the back, please). A bit more academically grounded than David's book and a real find.
Books can get a little too academic, however, as is the case, I would say, with Sean Brady's Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain, 1861-1913 (2005). This one has the unmistakable pong of a dissertation, built around a not wholly articulated quarrel with the "medico-legal" wing of gay history, by which Brady means Foucault and epigones(Weeks and Halperin, I guess?). Foucault's paradigm just will not work in the British context, Brady wants us to know. Well, okay. Really interesting chapters on John Addington Symonds and Edward Carpenter, though. I got the feeling Brady really would have preferred to write just about those two men and wound up sidetracked into the anti-Foucault polemic.
And the blue ribbon goes to Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957 (2005). Houlbrook has his theory game down--Foucault, Butler, Sedgwick, some sophisticated stuff about public and private space--but the heart of the book is that he spent some real time down in the mildewed precincts of the archive, just like a real historian should: trial records, newspapers, parliamentary proceedings. It's not a long book, under 300 pages, but it gives a fine-grained sense of the lived geography of being gay man in London between W W I and the Wolfenden Report. And Houlbrook has his own highly original and surprising theses to advance at some points. The famous police crackdown in the late 1940s and early 1950s? Not so thorough-going and widespread as it is remembered, according to Houlbrook. The breakthrough of the Wolfenden Report and, ten years on, de-criminalization? Easy to turn this into a heroic redemption narrative, but that feels "Whiggish" to Houlbrook, who asks, what (or who) had to be sacrificed to achieve it? An excellent book.
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
William Styron, _The Long March_
READING REVIEWS OF the new edition of William Styron's letters reminded me that I had never read any of his books, even though he was a heavy hitter when I was young--a Rome Prize for Lie Down in Darkness, a Pulitzer for Confessions of Nat Turner, and a National Book Award for Sophie's Choice, which also found a spot on that Modern Library list of the best novels of the 20th century. While I was in graduate school, more or less ignoring contemporary literature as I got through seminars on Piers Plowman and Herman Melville, just about everyone I knew who was not in grad school read Sophie's Choice.
Yet I never picked up a Styron novel. He just wasn't a writer you were expected, in my grad-school milieu, to have read. Mailer, Updike, Roth, sure, maybe Cheever... but Styron was in that big box of writers who were well-established but somehow not obligatory, if you were my age: John Marquand, Erskine Caldwell, James Gould Cozzens, James Jones, writers well-represented in the used book stores I haunted, but whom I ignored in my quests for Ford Madox Ford, Don DeLillo, Henry Green, Paul Bowles, and the like.
So...I decided I should read some of Styron's fiction, at long last, and went with this novella, first published in 1952.
Lt. Culver (our POV character) is a WW II vet, now in the reserves, and is called up for a stint in South Carolina, as is Capt. Mannix, whom he befriends. Being a few years out of active service and having settled into satisfying lives, both are annoyed and resentful at being back under military discipline. Col.Templeton, sensing that the reserves need to be shown who is boss, orders an overnight 36-mile forced march. Mannix publicly objects, but rather than decline the gambit and risk being designated a wuss (though he is a veteran of Peleliu, one of the most terrible battles in the Pacific theater of the last war), he pushes himself and his unit through every god-damned mile of the march, nearly crippling himself in the process.
The story rang true. That men will try to meet, even surpass, expectations set by authorities they despise, just to show that they can do it--that's true enough. That we will go further to prove things to people we hate than we would ever go for people we love--sadly, also true.
Styron's prose was something of a long march itself, though, for me. I'm guessing his generation was still in thrall to Thomas Wolfe (speaking of the no-longer-much-read) and Wolfe's creakily stilted, down-filled prose:
Freezing marsh and grass instead of wood beneath his feet, the preposterous cold in the midst of summer, Mannix's huge distorted shadow cast brutishly against the impermeable walls by a lantern so sinister that its raging noise had the sound of a typhoon at sea--all these, just for an instant, did indeed contrive to make him feel as if they were adrift at sea in a dazzling, windowless box, ignorant of direction or of any points of the globe, and with no way of telling.
Just when you are wondering how a shadow can be cast brutishly, or why the impermeability of walls needs pointing out, you meet that noisy and apparently enraged lamp. If you decide to leave those questions in abeyance, you get to wonder how a windowless box can contain so much light that it dazzles.
It's the pile-up of modifiers that's causing most of the problem, I think: preposterous, huge, distorted, brutishly, impermeable, raging, dazzling. And they haven't even begun the march yet, which is when Styron pulls out the stops, and every noun gets its adjective, or possibly two, and at full sail three:
a persistent, unwhipped, scornful look in his eyes
high, throaty, lilting mockery
Of course, for all we know, our own models of excellence in fictional prose will look just as fussily antique in fifty or sixty years time. But I think The Long March is going to do it for me so far as Styron goes. Think I'll get to that most recent Alan Hollinghurst--now that guy can write.
Yet I never picked up a Styron novel. He just wasn't a writer you were expected, in my grad-school milieu, to have read. Mailer, Updike, Roth, sure, maybe Cheever... but Styron was in that big box of writers who were well-established but somehow not obligatory, if you were my age: John Marquand, Erskine Caldwell, James Gould Cozzens, James Jones, writers well-represented in the used book stores I haunted, but whom I ignored in my quests for Ford Madox Ford, Don DeLillo, Henry Green, Paul Bowles, and the like.
So...I decided I should read some of Styron's fiction, at long last, and went with this novella, first published in 1952.
Lt. Culver (our POV character) is a WW II vet, now in the reserves, and is called up for a stint in South Carolina, as is Capt. Mannix, whom he befriends. Being a few years out of active service and having settled into satisfying lives, both are annoyed and resentful at being back under military discipline. Col.Templeton, sensing that the reserves need to be shown who is boss, orders an overnight 36-mile forced march. Mannix publicly objects, but rather than decline the gambit and risk being designated a wuss (though he is a veteran of Peleliu, one of the most terrible battles in the Pacific theater of the last war), he pushes himself and his unit through every god-damned mile of the march, nearly crippling himself in the process.
The story rang true. That men will try to meet, even surpass, expectations set by authorities they despise, just to show that they can do it--that's true enough. That we will go further to prove things to people we hate than we would ever go for people we love--sadly, also true.
Styron's prose was something of a long march itself, though, for me. I'm guessing his generation was still in thrall to Thomas Wolfe (speaking of the no-longer-much-read) and Wolfe's creakily stilted, down-filled prose:
Freezing marsh and grass instead of wood beneath his feet, the preposterous cold in the midst of summer, Mannix's huge distorted shadow cast brutishly against the impermeable walls by a lantern so sinister that its raging noise had the sound of a typhoon at sea--all these, just for an instant, did indeed contrive to make him feel as if they were adrift at sea in a dazzling, windowless box, ignorant of direction or of any points of the globe, and with no way of telling.
Just when you are wondering how a shadow can be cast brutishly, or why the impermeability of walls needs pointing out, you meet that noisy and apparently enraged lamp. If you decide to leave those questions in abeyance, you get to wonder how a windowless box can contain so much light that it dazzles.
It's the pile-up of modifiers that's causing most of the problem, I think: preposterous, huge, distorted, brutishly, impermeable, raging, dazzling. And they haven't even begun the march yet, which is when Styron pulls out the stops, and every noun gets its adjective, or possibly two, and at full sail three:
a persistent, unwhipped, scornful look in his eyes
high, throaty, lilting mockery
Of course, for all we know, our own models of excellence in fictional prose will look just as fussily antique in fifty or sixty years time. But I think The Long March is going to do it for me so far as Styron goes. Think I'll get to that most recent Alan Hollinghurst--now that guy can write.
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Is "Poet Lady" Jorie Graham?
i AM BEHIND in my reading of the London Review Books--which leaves the misleading impression that I am caught up in everything else, when my house clearly testifies otherwise, a labyrinth of dusty stacks of subscription guilt--so I only recently read the 27 September 2012 issue, with Terry Castle's lead review of Lisa Cohen's As We Know: Three Lives.
Castle begins the review with an anecdote; it's the early 1980s, she is having lunch with several other women who, like her, are among that year's fellows at the Bunting Institute (now renamed the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study). She describes some of the party (no names), most of whom seem to be lesbians or experimenting with lesbianism; Castle seems to know in at least a vague way, as do most of the others, how everyone else's love lives are faring.
But then another member of the party--"aggressive, competitive, exorbitantly heterosexual Poet Lady with long flowing hair"--pipes up. "Hey, guys, you'll never believe the weird gossip I just heard!" Heads turn and attend. "Yeah, somebody told me the Bunting Institute is full of lesbians!"
Clunk. Poet Lady knows she has stepped in it, but doesn't know what it is. Poor, clueless Poet Lady!
The connection from this story to the review itself is a bit tenuous; it turns on the idea that some phenomena, like lesbianism, can be right there to be seen yet remain invisible to those who do not hold the key to what they are looking it.
Fair enough--but as a reader, I felt Castle was narrating with a relish that went well beyond having an interesting introductory anecdote. To be blunt, I felt Castle was taking a certain pleasure in Poet Lady's discomfiture, even at a remove of thirty years.
So--is "Poet Lady" Jorie Graham?
Poet? Check. At the Bunting Institute in the early 1980s? Check. Long flowing hair? Check. Exorbitantly heterosexual? Don't know...could well be. "One of the Reigning Poetry Divas of Our Time"? Ummm, check.
So...is the point that one can have an extraordinarily acute, finely calibrated sensorium, registering the most ethereal trembles on one's emotional seismograph, and yet be so clueless in certain matters that one can loudly call the attention of a table full of lesbians to the rumored presence of...lesbians? Even if one is, shall we say, Jorie Graham?
I guess one can.
The Cohen book sounds amazing, by the way. It's on my list.
Castle begins the review with an anecdote; it's the early 1980s, she is having lunch with several other women who, like her, are among that year's fellows at the Bunting Institute (now renamed the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study). She describes some of the party (no names), most of whom seem to be lesbians or experimenting with lesbianism; Castle seems to know in at least a vague way, as do most of the others, how everyone else's love lives are faring.
But then another member of the party--"aggressive, competitive, exorbitantly heterosexual Poet Lady with long flowing hair"--pipes up. "Hey, guys, you'll never believe the weird gossip I just heard!" Heads turn and attend. "Yeah, somebody told me the Bunting Institute is full of lesbians!"
Clunk. Poet Lady knows she has stepped in it, but doesn't know what it is. Poor, clueless Poet Lady!
The connection from this story to the review itself is a bit tenuous; it turns on the idea that some phenomena, like lesbianism, can be right there to be seen yet remain invisible to those who do not hold the key to what they are looking it.
Fair enough--but as a reader, I felt Castle was narrating with a relish that went well beyond having an interesting introductory anecdote. To be blunt, I felt Castle was taking a certain pleasure in Poet Lady's discomfiture, even at a remove of thirty years.
So--is "Poet Lady" Jorie Graham?
Poet? Check. At the Bunting Institute in the early 1980s? Check. Long flowing hair? Check. Exorbitantly heterosexual? Don't know...could well be. "One of the Reigning Poetry Divas of Our Time"? Ummm, check.
So...is the point that one can have an extraordinarily acute, finely calibrated sensorium, registering the most ethereal trembles on one's emotional seismograph, and yet be so clueless in certain matters that one can loudly call the attention of a table full of lesbians to the rumored presence of...lesbians? Even if one is, shall we say, Jorie Graham?
I guess one can.
The Cohen book sounds amazing, by the way. It's on my list.
Monday, January 21, 2013
Amy Waldman, _The Submission_
A COMMITTEE CHARGED with selecting a design for a 9/11 memorial on the site of the World Trade Center reviews a number of blind submissions and picks a winner; the winning designer, it turns out, is a Muslim. His design, furthermore, seems on examination to have identifiably Islamic elements. How would this play out?
The premise has potential. Imagine it as the given for a novella by Sam Lipsyte, say, or T. C. Boyle, who would be sure to lay bare every species of hypocrisy, folly, fatuousness, and opportunism that would quickly ensue. Going the other way, it could work as the seed for a big, baggy neo-Victorian sprawl like Bonfire of the Vanities, with a cross-section of New York City in the early Ohs.
Waldman's novel is neither quite the one nor the other. She eases up on the satire pedal, seeming to want to be fair to everyone, never going for the jugular as Lipsyte would. At 300 pages, it's not all that compact, yet it does not have the attention to milieu that Wolfe would have brought to bear--if one thinks of what Wolfe might have done with the committee meetings, or the public hearing about the design, or the apartment where the Bangladeshi 9/11 widow Asma Anwar lives, some of the novel's big scenes feel thin.
Waldman is certainly on the money, though, that the circumstance she posits would produce a swirl of controversy, that the media's magnifying-glass would turn that swirl into a tornado of hysteria, and that everyone involved would be much the worse for wear.
The premise has potential. Imagine it as the given for a novella by Sam Lipsyte, say, or T. C. Boyle, who would be sure to lay bare every species of hypocrisy, folly, fatuousness, and opportunism that would quickly ensue. Going the other way, it could work as the seed for a big, baggy neo-Victorian sprawl like Bonfire of the Vanities, with a cross-section of New York City in the early Ohs.
Waldman's novel is neither quite the one nor the other. She eases up on the satire pedal, seeming to want to be fair to everyone, never going for the jugular as Lipsyte would. At 300 pages, it's not all that compact, yet it does not have the attention to milieu that Wolfe would have brought to bear--if one thinks of what Wolfe might have done with the committee meetings, or the public hearing about the design, or the apartment where the Bangladeshi 9/11 widow Asma Anwar lives, some of the novel's big scenes feel thin.
Waldman is certainly on the money, though, that the circumstance she posits would produce a swirl of controversy, that the media's magnifying-glass would turn that swirl into a tornado of hysteria, and that everyone involved would be much the worse for wear.
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