Hiatus Update

Great news everyone, I am posting again. I am sorry for the delay, and sorrier to announce that I don't even have anything to say about new selection Grendel, beyond the fact that I just read a different book by John Gardner (the manifestoey The Art of Fiction) and another book directly pertinent to Our Selection (the Beowulf translated by Seamus Heaney). Also, I went to the scene of the crime itself, England, only to find out, while reading on the airplane, that though Beowulf was written in English, it takes place in Denmark and in Geatland. Who knew! But a few things about Beowulf before starting in on Grendel. One of the things I noticed about it, was that, like Aeschylus and Sophocles, I thought it was kind of boring. I think this is because it is so old that no one had to do anything even remotely interesting to make it worth writing down. Just like how everyone cares about your first word and not your millionth, the fact that the first story like Beowulf even was made it noteworthy. Now, I ask you -- does that make it worth reading still? Everyone says you should like the blues and bands like Orange Juice, because without them there wouldn't be bands like the Kinks or the National. I do not say this. I think it is silly. But it seems as if for things like Beowulf and ancient Greek plays (I'm excluding Homer, because his epics seem to me to have enough plot to be interesting, rather than just being examinations of emotions -- rage, pride, woe -- that are broad enough to now be stock) are, through a function maybe of literature's being totally obsessed with itself, important to at least sort of understand. For future reference purposes, at least -- to appreciate, for example, Grendel by John Gardner, or Les Mouches (which I really liked) by Sartre. I don't know if that's good or bad -- that so many books gain resonance through reminding us of old things -- but it does seem worth pointing out, at least when I have been totally slacking on saying anything on here. Also, one last note on the above comparison between pop music and literature -- pop music seems to be, for the most part, unliterarily unconcerned with its own past (there are vaguely deconstructionist bands like Art Brut and Pavement, but leave that kind of influence-spotting to critics, who love to do it). It is unlike, in this respect, classical music (as I understand it from Alex Ross's the Rest is Noise, which is very informative about the tendency of composers at least since the fin-de-siecle to quote from each other liberally) and especially rap music, which is constantly about rap music. Again, I don't know quite what to make of this -- the observation that fiction is more like classical or rap music than pop music -- but, on an off month, there it is. Soon in the week -- a post on Grendel, more on why I found Beowulf boring, and, if we pray hard to the bloggods, maybe a post from Brian Blood on what he thought of his handsome edition of Atonement.

it's at least better than the road

i'm sure that we can all agree that among many fundamental differences between the two books which we have read thus far is the fact that atonement lends itself to a much greater extent to reading for pleasure, at least for those who would rather fantasize about bourgeois life in england than about being the last remaining symbol of human decency in a barren, post-apocalyptic wasteland. however, i thoroughly believe that, in addition to its greater entertainment value, atonement surpasses the road as an all-around literary and intellectual achievement, mostly because of the much greater maturity McEwan shows as a writer.

the book opens with an account of briony's creative process, in which she seeks to produce a work which will "inspire not laughter, but terror, relief, and instruction, in that order" (mcewan 8). in all her naivete, she assumes that as an author she is obligated to assert, without question, her intellectual superiority over her audience. her work must be impersonal, as any form of self-acknowledgment contained within is likely to portray her as human, and thus as fallible and questionable in whatever epic moral prophesy she wishes to impose on her readers. for me, this immediately brought mccarthy to mind. though it's not to say i didn't enjoy the road or respect him as an author, i do think he was, at least in the road, to some extent restricted by briony's same childish persistence in thinking that previously established standards of literature have created in writers an obligation to impersonality, lest they be deemed flawed as actual, non-writing human beings. even through the boy does mccarthy decline the opportunity to express the vestiges of his youthful ignorance, and the result is insight which, though often philisophically intruiging, is hard to believe to have come from such a young mind. the characters in atonement i find much more believable, and in most cases it is because mcewan is not afraid to imbue them with the flaws that he knows they must have, because he surely finds in himself, even as a writer. we identify with briony's creative struggles because we know that mcewan does too; we believe what we are reading because we know that the person telling it to us does not consider himself, even in the context of his own story, to be infallible or omnipotent.

unlike briony, at least at the book's beginning, mcewan is not afraid to inspire laughter, or any other indication of the emotions which we are often afraid to admit that we feel. this sort of emotional appeal seems to be what mcewan values most in the literary craft, and he therefore places the establishment of absolute artistic superiority, seemingly adored by both briony and mccarthy, further down, if anywhere, on his list of priorities. perhaps Cecelia's insistence that the flowers be arranged with perfect imperfection is symbolic, but at no point does he shove it down our throats. yet with painfully contrived lines like, "Who is it? said the boy. I don't know. Who is anybody?" mccarthy seems much less conscious of the merits of artistic subtlety.

Why I am Not a Novelist; or, Epigrams Revisited

So. This is why I am not a novelist: whenever I come up with an idea that I like, usually spend between seven and eight hundred words teasing it out into some form that, when you squint at it, kind of makes sense. And then, invariably, I read something by a novelist (or poet, or lyricist -- this one's pretty broad) in the ensuing days that says whatever I wanted to say 900 times more clearly. So, apropos of the benefits of textually constructed people (painting with a broad brush, Brionys) relative to personality constructed people (Cecelia, you, me, everyone we know), here is Proust, from Lydia Davis's translation of Swann's Way, on novelists:

"These were the events taking place in the book I was reading; it is true that the people affected by them were not 'real,' as Francoise said. But all the feelings we are made to experience by the joy or misfortune of a real person are produced in us only through the intermediary of an image of that joy or that misfortune; the ingeniousness of the first novelist consisted in understanding that in the apparatus of our emotions, the image being the only essential element, the simplification that would consist in purely and simply abolishing real people would be a decisive improvement...The novelist's happy discovery was to have the idea of replacing these [corporeal] parts, impenetrable to the soul, by an equal quantity of immaterial parts, that is to say, parts which our soul can assimilate." (Proust, 86-87)

Fittingly, for Proust, that's way too long for a normal epigram. But, despite its strong claim ("equal quantity of immaterial parts"?), I think it distills the heart of what I was trying to talk about, about the end of Atonement. And since I just read it, it struck me, and now it's out here to strike you too. Happy Grendeling, and I hope to have something soon about the relationship to books had by either my mother's book club or my aunt Molly's solo adventures with the Diving Bell and the Butterfly within the week. Also, though Grendel's been announced, feel free to toss up any more comments on any part of Atonement.

Now, Here Is a Book With Which to Start Your Book Club

Two posts in two days! Woohoo! Also, our new pick – the book for February-ish, since we seem to be busting through about a book a month – is at the end.

Anyway, I finished Atonement some time ago, and here are my thoughts on it. Because I can never keep them straight in my head though, first I am going to rehash the kinds of questions I think it is a good idea to consider when finishing a book. Here they are again:

Why would anyone think reading this book is a good way to spend time?

How has the fact that I have read this book impacted the way I will do things from now on?

Now, the easiest ways to answer these questions – and the way I answer them about reading, say, message boards on IMDb – is, they wouldn’t and it won’t. But the second question should be answerable for almost any book (Dr. Johnson said something like that, that there was no book so bad that you couldn’t get something out of it, but I can never find that quote and my papers on Dr. J are in Buffalo, in storage). What can one get out of reading Atonement? More narrowly, and maybe combining the two q’s, What has reading Atonement got me that I couldn’t’ve been given by another book?

One thing it might give you, is a reason to have a book club. Atonement exults in words and wordiness at every conceivable level. There is the multivalent way in which Briony, the writer, exists only in her wordiness – we get her powerful drive to express herself and to achieve meaning through words, in writing this novel, but we also get a debased version of it and a cartoon of it, in her false testimony to Robbie and in her puerile writings like the Trial of Arabella (which cartoon is one of the novel’s purest exultations, with its “hieroglyph”s and “evanesce”s). As I discussed earlier, we get things like the talismanic power of words for Robbie and Cecelia, with their “I will wait for you, come back to me”.

And one of the promises that I think we can find in Atonement is the promise that we can achieve understandings with the other people in this universe, and do it with words. I do not think that we ever really understand Robbie and Cecelia, or rather, we understand them only when they are at their most Briony-like. (The same goes, actually, for Emily, the other character to get major point-of-view duties). This makes sense in the world of the book, since Briony is its putative author and, at the end of the day, the lonely, only person between these words and us. (The “BT London 1999” is a remarkably powerful piece of typography, even without the beautiful epilogue that fleshes it out; it collapses the world of the text suddenly, from a relatively broad and democratic set of characters mediated through an authorial conscious to a radically undemocratic story filtered through two). Robbie and Cecelia, once we know the status of this fiction, are totally closed to us. Consider their moment of passion, again one I mentioned earlier, when the text refuses to spell out the fact that they have each said “I love you”: the text retreats in the face of their intimacy, and strives to become, instead, the sort of thing Our Writer Briony would understand. It is impossible for us to know what Cecelia or Robbie mean when either says “I love you”, and it is usually impossible to know what that means, when someone says it to someone else. It is a fundamentally private declaration, and people are usually fundamentally private entities.

But Robbie is told he is loved by not one, but by two Tallis sisters, and the other one is readily understandable. It comes from the writer Briony, and not only is it presented unelliptically but it is introduced by Briony’s statement that it is obvious. And it is, at that moment, obvious to us, because we know what kind of person young Briony is, because we have read about her in this book. Briony is available to us, because she is the genius of the book. Whatever it is that Robbie and Cecelia have is undoubtedly moving, and it is undoubtedly rare, and it is undoubtedly private. Whatever it is that Briony has – whether it’s when she is juvenilely confessing an imaginary love to Robbie as a ten year old, or it’s when she is racked with dissatisfaction with a world that can offer her no atonement – it is something that we can share with her, because it has been totally transfigured into the words that make up this novel.

“She is beginning to get the full grasp of what she did and what it meant,” says Cecelia of her belatedly penitent sister (McEwan, 199). The promise of a novel like this is that what we do can mean something not just in the sense offered by Cecelia’s letter, but in the sense of the novel of which Cecelia’s letter is a part. Briony’s crime and her need for atonement mean something about people, far broader than her narrow original milieu. She shows the kind of community possibly in reading that seems, when put baldly by people like C.S. Lewis, to be a little naive, and thus, to my way of thinking, the kind of thing an ideally running book club might be. Briony represents the promise of meaning – the liberation, by words and wordiness, from her isolation within her particular small set of experiences. It’s a promise, handily enough, of a broad atonement.

Can’t beat the end-with-the-title trick. Next book: after a lot of soul-searching, I made the decision to bait the Crow with another book that is, arguably, related to recent motion picture history, to wit: John Gardner’s Grendel, a book that tells the Beowulf story from the point of view of Grendel, the monster. Enjoy.