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.
Thursday, January 31, 2013
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.
Friday, January 18, 2013
Ben Marcus, _The Flame Alphabet_
yet WHEN THIS CAME out about a year ago, and Marcus was interviewed on NPR, I was, I admit, a little worried that he had succumbed to some sort of commercial imperative for suburban-domestic fiction. But when I finally commenced the book last summer, and the first paragraph describes the narrator packing a bag with "sound abatement fabrics" and "anti-comprehension pills," I thought, well, this is promising, and then soon enough Thompson appeared, and I knew all was well.
The Flame Alphabet stirs into its mix a little of the Burroughsian language-is-a-virus idea, a little of Roth's The Plot Against America, perhaps a little of James's Sacred Fount, a little bit of your workaday post-apocalyptic thriller genus (species: "mysterious plague"), and yes, even a little suburban domestic realism. But the novel is plumped down squarely in Marcus-World, which, like Nabokov's Antiterra, is recognizably like our world in many ways, bewilderingly different in others. For instance, there are Jews in The Flame Alphabet, but they worship at holes in the woods, where they listen to radio broadcasts by Rabbi Burke. (We don't learn the cantor's name, but I'm guessing it's O'Flanagan.)
In The Age of Wire and String, Notable American Women, and The Father Costume, the hobbyhorses of parents create perilous obstacle courses for their children, but the polarity reverses in The Flame Alphabet, and parents are being made ill, sometimes fatally, by the utterances of their children. Marcus succeeds in making this both hilarious and terrifying. The novel literalizes the familiar phenomenon that parents feel judged and found wanting by things their children say, and there is an easily recognizable Archie Bunker/Bill Cosby kind of humor in this; it also literalizes the idea that words can injure, central to a lot of arguments, policies, and treatises within academic life in the 1980s and 1990s, and there is a kind of satirical humor in this. At the same time, Marcus draws sufficiently on the resources of realism to make the whole scenario vivid and plausible, so the novel is deeply unnerving.
Grisly ironies abound. Language, the medium that makes society possible, disintegrates society. In his desperation to save his family, Sam, our narrator, abandons them. Made ill by their children, the adults eventually--here the Shoah echoes become more intense--decide to corral, control, and eventually attach themselves like vampires to the young, sacrificing the human future in order to seize whatever little they can of the evaporating present.
There is a bubble of hope, perhaps, at the end of The Flame Alphabet. Sam has escaped the grim "research facility" directed by Murphy/LeBov (the novel's most fascinating character, malign as he is), reunited with his daughter, and awaits the return of his wife. However, language remains toxic, his daughter does not trust him, and his wife is more than likely dead. Even McCarthy's The Road seems like Frank Capra next to such reflections as this:
Thinking is the first poison, said someone. One often fails to ask this of a crisis, but why was it not worse? Why was the person himself not gutted of thought? Who cares about the word made public, it's the private word that does more lasting damage, person by person. The thinking should have stopped first. The thinking. Perhaps it is next in the long, creeping conquest of this toxicity, another basic human activity that will slowly be taken from us.
Oh, I fucking hope so.
But my abiding impression is that Ben Marcus has once again created a world that is manifestly a tissue of language, that is utterly fictional and deeply strange, while nonetheless managing to get closer to the aching bone of family emotion than any "realist" going. How does he do it? Dunno, but he's done it again.
The Flame Alphabet stirs into its mix a little of the Burroughsian language-is-a-virus idea, a little of Roth's The Plot Against America, perhaps a little of James's Sacred Fount, a little bit of your workaday post-apocalyptic thriller genus (species: "mysterious plague"), and yes, even a little suburban domestic realism. But the novel is plumped down squarely in Marcus-World, which, like Nabokov's Antiterra, is recognizably like our world in many ways, bewilderingly different in others. For instance, there are Jews in The Flame Alphabet, but they worship at holes in the woods, where they listen to radio broadcasts by Rabbi Burke. (We don't learn the cantor's name, but I'm guessing it's O'Flanagan.)
In The Age of Wire and String, Notable American Women, and The Father Costume, the hobbyhorses of parents create perilous obstacle courses for their children, but the polarity reverses in The Flame Alphabet, and parents are being made ill, sometimes fatally, by the utterances of their children. Marcus succeeds in making this both hilarious and terrifying. The novel literalizes the familiar phenomenon that parents feel judged and found wanting by things their children say, and there is an easily recognizable Archie Bunker/Bill Cosby kind of humor in this; it also literalizes the idea that words can injure, central to a lot of arguments, policies, and treatises within academic life in the 1980s and 1990s, and there is a kind of satirical humor in this. At the same time, Marcus draws sufficiently on the resources of realism to make the whole scenario vivid and plausible, so the novel is deeply unnerving.
Grisly ironies abound. Language, the medium that makes society possible, disintegrates society. In his desperation to save his family, Sam, our narrator, abandons them. Made ill by their children, the adults eventually--here the Shoah echoes become more intense--decide to corral, control, and eventually attach themselves like vampires to the young, sacrificing the human future in order to seize whatever little they can of the evaporating present.
There is a bubble of hope, perhaps, at the end of The Flame Alphabet. Sam has escaped the grim "research facility" directed by Murphy/LeBov (the novel's most fascinating character, malign as he is), reunited with his daughter, and awaits the return of his wife. However, language remains toxic, his daughter does not trust him, and his wife is more than likely dead. Even McCarthy's The Road seems like Frank Capra next to such reflections as this:
Thinking is the first poison, said someone. One often fails to ask this of a crisis, but why was it not worse? Why was the person himself not gutted of thought? Who cares about the word made public, it's the private word that does more lasting damage, person by person. The thinking should have stopped first. The thinking. Perhaps it is next in the long, creeping conquest of this toxicity, another basic human activity that will slowly be taken from us.
Oh, I fucking hope so.
But my abiding impression is that Ben Marcus has once again created a world that is manifestly a tissue of language, that is utterly fictional and deeply strange, while nonetheless managing to get closer to the aching bone of family emotion than any "realist" going. How does he do it? Dunno, but he's done it again.
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Jacques Rancière, _The Future of the Image_
I MAY BE--in fact, almost certainly am--missing something here. The back of this Verso paperback explains that "Jacques Rancière's work returns politics to its central place in understanding art," that "there is a stark political choice in art: it can either reinforce a move towards radical democracy or help create a new reactionary mysticism."
Problem is, I'm...just...not...seeing...it. Perhaps I need to read this in the context of some of Rancière's later work, get some ideas that close the circle. As it is, all I have read is Mute Speech, and my main impression of the five talks/essays collected here, originally delivered 1999-2002, is that they bring the crucial ideas of Mute Speech to bear on the visual arts: cinema, photography, painting, design. Mute Speech just did not hit the Christopher Caudwell/Edward Upward/Granville Hicks/Ben Shahn/Pete Seeger kind of keynotes the the Verso blurb announces, and I do not see how these five pieces do, either.
But I can see something like that, I guess. Mute Speech and the affiliated pieces gathered here posit a revolution in the "regime of representation" that occurred in the late 18th century, a break in the way literature and art were imagined, away from the early modern era's re-codifications of Aristotle (the artistic unities, decorum, mimesis) into something more rarified, perhaps, or less strictly organized, but maintaining while re-conceiving a relation between the visible and the sayable.
The ordinary history of this break, as Rancière frequently explains, emphasizes a divorce between the visible and the sayable--the break had a logic in it that led to blankness, silence, inanity. Not so fast, he says. Were the visible and sayable divorced, or was their relationship re-defined? Hence his discussion of the "sentence-image" in the second of these pieces, "Sentence, Image, History" (which would get my vote as pick of the litter were not "The Future of the Image" and "Are Some Things Unrepresentable?" perhaps even more interesting).
As the third term--"history"--of that second essay's title suggests, if the visible and the sayable are not--indeed, have never been--in fact divorced, then a lot of arguments about po-mo futility of art, desperate situation of art, ultimate dead end of art, and so on, simply collapse. If the visible can still get us to the sayable...well, where the sayable is, you can have history, and where you have history, you can talk about where we have been and where we should go next, and you arrive at the political.
So, in this sense, yes, I can see how Rancière restores a possibility for talking about art and the political. Furthermore, he can do this by focusing on the procedures and techniques of figures like Balzac, Flaubert, and Mallarmé, rather than on their explicit politics. Still, I do not detect much that is exhortatory in the essays here, although that is the impression the Verso blurb leaves.
However, Rancière does take on the best arguments for seeing art and politics as inhabiting incommensurable, incompatible spheres and shows the problems with those arguments, not just in their logic, but also in their failure to see what happens in canonical works of art.
Art does not face a stark choice between radical democracy and reactionary mysticism; we do. We can let ourselves be persuaded that art and literature, by their very nature, cannot help us much; Rancière gives us good reason to think they can.
Problem is, I'm...just...not...seeing...it. Perhaps I need to read this in the context of some of Rancière's later work, get some ideas that close the circle. As it is, all I have read is Mute Speech, and my main impression of the five talks/essays collected here, originally delivered 1999-2002, is that they bring the crucial ideas of Mute Speech to bear on the visual arts: cinema, photography, painting, design. Mute Speech just did not hit the Christopher Caudwell/Edward Upward/Granville Hicks/Ben Shahn/Pete Seeger kind of keynotes the the Verso blurb announces, and I do not see how these five pieces do, either.
But I can see something like that, I guess. Mute Speech and the affiliated pieces gathered here posit a revolution in the "regime of representation" that occurred in the late 18th century, a break in the way literature and art were imagined, away from the early modern era's re-codifications of Aristotle (the artistic unities, decorum, mimesis) into something more rarified, perhaps, or less strictly organized, but maintaining while re-conceiving a relation between the visible and the sayable.
The ordinary history of this break, as Rancière frequently explains, emphasizes a divorce between the visible and the sayable--the break had a logic in it that led to blankness, silence, inanity. Not so fast, he says. Were the visible and sayable divorced, or was their relationship re-defined? Hence his discussion of the "sentence-image" in the second of these pieces, "Sentence, Image, History" (which would get my vote as pick of the litter were not "The Future of the Image" and "Are Some Things Unrepresentable?" perhaps even more interesting).
As the third term--"history"--of that second essay's title suggests, if the visible and the sayable are not--indeed, have never been--in fact divorced, then a lot of arguments about po-mo futility of art, desperate situation of art, ultimate dead end of art, and so on, simply collapse. If the visible can still get us to the sayable...well, where the sayable is, you can have history, and where you have history, you can talk about where we have been and where we should go next, and you arrive at the political.
So, in this sense, yes, I can see how Rancière restores a possibility for talking about art and the political. Furthermore, he can do this by focusing on the procedures and techniques of figures like Balzac, Flaubert, and Mallarmé, rather than on their explicit politics. Still, I do not detect much that is exhortatory in the essays here, although that is the impression the Verso blurb leaves.
However, Rancière does take on the best arguments for seeing art and politics as inhabiting incommensurable, incompatible spheres and shows the problems with those arguments, not just in their logic, but also in their failure to see what happens in canonical works of art.
Art does not face a stark choice between radical democracy and reactionary mysticism; we do. We can let ourselves be persuaded that art and literature, by their very nature, cannot help us much; Rancière gives us good reason to think they can.
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