Garbage Robots and Housekeeping

Great news, everyone, I am back from vacation on the glorious and lobster-rolled Cape Cod. I am going to take advantage of this momentous occasion to first, tell you about something that has nothing to do with books, really, and then eventually throw in some affaires d'etat. There are big things afoot. Also, I will justify this non-book stuff by talking about Canadian Ace Northrop Frye and his Anatomy of Criticism. So, prepare to be bored, amigos.

Have you seen Wall-E, citizens? Wall-E, a story about robots and floating space colonies of humans, made me think, of course, of the great Anatomizer, who has this to say about Highly Advanced Comedy:

The materials of the cognitio of Pericles or the Winter's Tale are so stock that they would be "hooted at like an old tale" yet they seem both far-fetched and invariably right, outraging reality and at the same time introducing us to a world of childlike innocence that has always made more sense than reality (Anatomy of Criticism, 184).

So it goes with the cognitio of Wall-E, a piece of childlike innocence that keeps up the tradition that has been building at Pixar of using the most stock materials to make the most fascinating and intellectually respectable entertainments provided today. Like its forebears (especially Ratatouille, The Incredibles, and Finding Nemo), Wall-E represents in a way that I have not seen anywhere else, the continuation of the green-world comic mode that goes, as Cavell tells us, from Shakespearean romantic comedies through the screwball comedies of the thirties. Cavell called these latter comedies of remarriage, and in many ways that is what Wall-E is: both in the romantic pursuits of its protagonist (whose final scene is very much redolent of the anagnoresis of the great screwball comedies) and in the remarriage, as those of you who have seen it will know, of the people of this Earth with their home.

This business, I guess, could be done with books just as well. Because the chief searcher for this strain of comedy is the cinephile Cavell, I have tended to follow his lead and look for it just in dramatic work. (If any of you know of a novel that works this way, by all means, let me know). But, and this is where I will tie this post even more back into books than mere Frye-babble could: it negotiates both of its remarriages in the two terms I find to be the most uniquely cinematic, which are dancing and space. I am a person, as the old saw has it, who is more in thrall to Martin Chuzzlewit than Martin Scorsese; there are virtually no things that movies do that I would not rather see done in a novel, but boy, you can't beat film for sheer openness -- like the space of the trashscapes with which Wall-E opens -- or for sheer intimacy -- like the dance in which our hero and heroine unite their fates. Still, I will keep novels for my guide through my life, just as I keep Newtonian physics as my guide through physical medium-sized objects.

And now, the business of business: Did you hear, my Unpacking crew, that there is a rival gang of book nerds with a Benjaminy name? Well, there is. They rove unchecked across western New York, they are called the Mechanical Reproductionists, and their encroachment on our turf has not gone unnoticed. I will monitor them with an attention that borders on infiltration, and infiltrate their ranks with a thoroughness that borders on having actually started the club myself.

Business item two: while on my crustaceany vacation, I read a book called Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen, which was just as good as I-Wish-He-Were-My-Uncle James Wood said it would be in the New Yorker.

And speaking of the New Yorker, in the most recent issue, there is a great piece by another avuncular-in-a-perfect-world chap, Adam Gopnik, on GK Chesterton (the link just goes to the abstract, desfortunadamente). In the course of discussing Chesterton's untoward political and cultural views, Gopnik says this thing I found true and amusing: "Besides, if obviously great writers were allowed onto the reading list only when they conform to the current consensus of liberal good will --voices of tolerance and liberal democracy -- we would probably be down to George Eliot."

If you thought that was uproarious and were a girl, I will marry you, and if you thought that was uproarious and are a guy, I will go with you to California and marry you there. Until then, stay tuned for more jokes about our inability to live up to George Eliot's standards next time, on Unpacking My Library.