Ganging Agley

So. My big plan, for the summer, to read nonfiction books from the library, thus expanding my horizons and holding dear to my ducats, not so hot. It started with a schedule, and with a burst of enthusiasm; it performed execrably during June and July; and, despite a few solid efforts in August, it retreated shamefully into the fall. So, if there were an award for Specious Book Club's Specious Program Most Resembling the Last Twelve Years of Baltimore Orioles Baseball, I would have won.

Anyway, the inaugural and terminal selection of this summer program was Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz, which I liked, did not get so interested in, owed the library money on, and finally deferred on, partially due to the stern reminders the NIOGA system kept sending me, partially because the copy itself was like falling apart, and partially just because, when I surveyed my stack of books littered next to my bed, I kept opting for like Cavell or Marx or Nabokov or Dickens, and getting just distracted away in general.

And, then, two weeks ago, I thought that I would do this: I would write about how, having given up on Confederates in the Attic, I had picked up a new book, Garbage Land by Elizabeth Royte, which I had just started then, and i would write about the differences between books about people and books about garbage, and wonder why I found a book about garbage so much more engaging than a book about people keeping the Civil War alive. It was for that post, in fact, that I wrote the above paragraphs, except...then, eventually, I kept reading books by Murakami and Wodehouse instead of my book by Elizabeth Royte, either. So, it was a short little collapse. A little more Mets than Orioles (sorry, Misk). And I think I came up with something.

See, originally, I thought of writing about how I found Royte's angle -- she's on a mission to see what happens to her garbage, rather than a nonspecific mission to find the soul of the South -- worked better because a nonfiction book should be all process (this is how this works) rather than just talking (this is what some people say) because why those people, why this talking? But even Royte, following her garbage, talks to people; naturally, that is how she finds out most of what she finds out (and, I should add, she writes well and interestingly and the people to whom she talks say interesting things, and I swear I'm going to finish this book, just -- I can't get into a groove about it). My problem, in neither book, was with the narrative voice, which in both nonfiction cases I found charming and interesting. It was with all those other people, because what were all those people doing there? This -- and I think this marks for me the reason that I can never get wholeheartedly into nonfiction narratives (n. narratives, I should mention, that are not essays [on which see]): it didn't have to be these people whom we are hearing about; and it could just have well have been somebody else.

Who but Blazes Boylan could have left potted meat in Leopold Bloom's bed? Who but Anatole Kuragin could have nearly run off with Natasha? Nobody, that's who: everything, every single thing that we learn about Blazes and Anatole is there exactly because it is important. It is not important because it is the part of the person's life that is most related to the Civil War, or to waste disposal, interesting as, say, Boylan's methods of waste disposal would surely be. But what the novel, what good fiction, offers to us is a vision of the person as an agent not of illumination but of meaning, of a person who does not help us to see something bigger because of what he does, but who is himself something bigger because he is. I really think that the best characters in fiction are the ones most like this, the people who exist best not only in themselves but for themselves, keep us able to believe that there is a meaning in people. I think that I find nonfiction narratives unengaging -- rather than stupid or not worthwhile -- because they only just fail in presenting the kind of richly determined characters imaginable in the novel.

Of course, if that is so -- if the benefit of reading a novel is seeing the most meaningful (in the fullest sense of meaning-ful) versions of people like ourselves -- it needs some kind of defense against a charge of mere escapism. For that, I'm going to want to talk about Pnin, though, so I will say: that sometime in the early (singly digited) days of October, we will hear my final thoughts on Timofey Pnin and his novel and then: a new selection for the Unpacking My Library Book and Film Discussion Club.

Two Things

Ok, so, two things, for now: one, you guys should check out the essay in the Times Book Review. It is a short piece of humorous writing, of the type that usually shows up in the Shouts and Murmurs section of the New Yorker, and it is about humorous writing (hooray, as saw in "The Avoidance of Love", for meetings of form and content). It is a funny look, I think, at the problem of humorous writing, and how serious to take it -- it is especially intriguing, I think, because of the depth of the authors he names at the end of the piece (Thurber, Woody Allen) compared to the more facile stuff that gets named generically (golf jokes, sex jokes).

Anyway, I need to cut out spending so much time reading essays because....I am packing my library. Now, before you get all excited, I am not quitting my almost imperceptible commitment to writing this blog. And, I am not physically putting my books in boxes. But! I am curtailing the number of books I buy. I am packing in the bounds of the ol' library, I guess. I am announcing here, before you and god, that I will not buy another book until I own no more than one hundred books that I have not read (current tally: 289).

That's a lot of books to read before I can get after my favorite pastime of buying books. But I think I can do it. I actually unofficially made this pledge about a month ago, and have been good since then, with one exception (I had lunch plans that fell through and felt so sorry for myself that I bought a book of short stories by Giovanni Verga). So wish me luck! I will keep you posted as we go along.

David Foster Wallace

As I was finishing up the foregoing about loneliness, I read the very sad news that David Foster Wallace had died. The sadness of this occasion is obvious. Wallace was a writer all of whose work I admire, and some of whose work I love. For me, he was a writer who also typified the loneliness of the essayist -- I remember reading his greatly enjoyable Everything and More the same semester as Infinite Jest, and being struck powerfully and for the first time the way an authorial voice could sound so much like itself, but so stripped, when moved from the world of his created characters to the world direct address to a reader.

I don't presume to know anything about the real-life loneliness of David Foster Wallace, the real human being, but I do want put up here one of his many brilliant formulations, this one from Infinite Jest's litany of lessons learned at Ennet House. These can read like koans against loneliness, and this one is my favorite:

"That God -- unless you're Charlton Heston, or unhinged, or both-- speaks and acts entirely through the vehicle of other human beings, if there is a God"

Finally, when I graduated from high school, my mother sent a letter to David Foster Wallace asking if he had any advice to give me as I headed off to college. He sent the letter back, with his very practical advice written on in blue ink, along with his initials: Ave atque vale. In some small way, I wish I could say so back to him.

Celebrating Old Birthdays

The first day of this month, when I started this essay, is the birthday of my dachshund Schnitzel, Chris, our friend who cuts my mother’s hair, and of Stanley Cavell, the Walter M. Cabot Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. In honor of that, and because I have almost nothing not totally general to say about Schnitzel (against him) or Chris (for him), let’s talk about “The Avoidance of Love”, a very long essay by Cavell, of which I am a very big fan.

The first time I read “The Avoidance of Love”, I had just walked home, around five in the morning, from a night I had spent writing English papers at the very end of my senior year at Williams. I decided I would sleep for a few hours, couldn’t, and decided I would start in on this essay instead. I read the whole thing, and finished it at eight in the morning. The second time I read it, in a different collection of Cavell’s essays, I made special time so that I could read it all at once, without at the same time watching tennis or cooking dinner or driving to a coffeeshop, or any of the other things I sometimes do when I read. Both times, it paid off.

I have been asked, after effusing about this essay, what it is about, and what Cavell’s argument is. It is about King Lear, and it is about spectatorship, and it is about how to deal with other people as separate moral agents. Dealing with them doesn’t look real good. Quoting from it helps a little (maybe), to try to address what it is that I find so lovely about this essay, or at least to explain what points he is making:

"Certainly blame [for cruelty to Gloucester, for Cordelia's death] is inappropriate, for certainly I do not claim to know what else Lear might do. And yet I cannot deny that my pain at Lear's actions is not overcome by my knowledge of his own suffering."

"Now I can give an answer to the question: Why do I do nothing, faced with tragic events?...[I]f I do nothing because there is nothing to do, where that means that I have given over the time and space in which action is mine and consequently that I am in awe before the fact that I cannot do and suffer what it is another's to do and suffer, then I confirm the final fact of our separateness. And that is the unity of our condition."

(That last I view as kind of the punchline.) This, of course, tell only a little tiny bit of the story, especially from my point of view, because I read the essay both times that I did, in the holistic manner described above. I think that the poignancy of this essay lies in the way in which knowledge of the phenomenon it describes -- the fundamental separateness between each of us and each of everyone else -- hovers as a constant threat. And I think that the power of this essay lies in the way in which its form -- that of an essay itself -- marries into that content of separateness, and forms a kind of unspoken answer to it.

Let me try to explain this by talking about the special power of an essay compared to a novel. The novel -- like, say, Nicholas Nickleby, which I am reading now -- seems to be an act of world-building, which is to say world-replacing, which is to say a staving off of the reader's loneliness. The facsimile world (this is especially true for Dickens, I think) creates a space in which the reader can move around and, at some important level, forget that she reads alone. She reads with Nicholas, or Smike, or the Brothers Cheeryble. She can even, for cathartic anger purposes, read with Wackford Squeers. But the people she reads in the novel are themselves not alone; they have always their narrator, at least, for company. She is always reading a simulacrum of a community, which she can observe or imagine herself a part of as she pleases.

Not so the essayist, though, who carries on but by himself. The essay cannot provide a peopled, ruminative world in which its reader might (however critically) indulge. Rather, what I think the essayist offers (think of Montaigne ruminating by himself) is a fantasia of what a person can do in spite of loneliness, what a person can do sitting just by herself, writing, independent of any other consciousness. I think that I love "The Avoidance of Love" so much because of the way in which it represents a discussion of that loneliness -- that inability to successfully acknowledge another human being that is the problem of King Lear as well as the problem of tragedy -- while being, itself, the product and the glory of just that loneliness, the loneliness of the reader.