Late Capitalist Cartoons

"Cartoons and stunt films were once exponents of fantasy against rationalism. They allowed justice to be done to the animals and things electrified by their technology, by granting the mutilated beings a second life. Today they merely confirm the victory of technological reason over truth." -- Horkheimer and Adorno, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception"

"Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate victim in real life receive their beatings so that the spectators will become accustomed to theirs." -- ibid.

And so, choices. Horkheimer and Adorno seem not to consider them choices, actually, but of two occurrences on a closed social order. They bear the relation not of choices, but of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries or something: we used to have one, and now we have the other. But it has never been demonstrated to me that you are obliged to keep your bios in the same century as the one wear you keep your zoe, and, so, choices. Or a choice, between the second life of mutilated beings, and beatings to which the spectators have become, qua spectators, accustomed. The difference between the choices is not obvious; Horkheimer and Adorno evidently favor the former, allying it with truth over technological reason. But really, would not the granting of second lives to mutilated beings simply accustom one to the beatings that mutilate in the first life? Shouldn't the relative equanimity of Daffy Duck, his beak blown to the back of his head by rifle fire yet again, inure us to rifles? The history of cartoons, since their inception, is the history of backbreaking fallings down with backs rendered unbroken in the next installment. What else would accustom one to his beatings?

The interior logic of the cartoon is what changes; what accustoms is what makes sense. To grant of a second life to a mutilated being is to operate according to the special sort of justice that has nothing to do with reason, especially not technological reason: which is to say, justice outside of the Law. It is a grant that produces justice and truth. Technological reason gives Donald Duck and the unfortunate victim and the spectators all of the accustomed beatings that are reasonable, once one has taken on the premises that are offered by the Late Capitalist Cartoons. So, choices. Hidden is the justice in grants, the justice without premises, of truth without technological reason. Find it, I guess, and give your mutilated beings second lives.

Be Kind to Your Fictional Beings

So, I know I wrote empty promises last week about my triumphant return to reading fiction, but then I didn't read any fiction except for Kafka, which is glum and written in enormous oppressive paragraphs (he has the world's most annoying refusal, which is a double one: he refuses to make his characters speak distinctly, and then refuses to give each line of their dialogue a new paragraph). Now, please don't get me wrong, I love Kafka; but given that the flavor of fiction I was lamenting last week was Kingsley Amis, you can see how he wouldn't really address my needs. But the other thing I've been doing that may be some sort of fiction sop, is writing fiction. This is a little like knitting someone else a sweater because you're cold, but whatever. It is what I did.

And doing it, I have noticed one of the Worst Things in the World of Fiction, which is a particular problem of voice. I know it is the worst, because I do it all the time when I try to write fiction, and Young Fat Schratz did it ALL THE TIME even when he was writing nonfiction, and now there are certain sentences that I created that haunt me like Erinyes, reminding me not just that I used to be dumb but that I used to, in my dumbness, imagine myself clever. Anyway, the problem is something like "representing thoughts that no one would ever consciously form, as conscious thoughts". I went looking around for examples, and found a quite good one and a quite bad one, in the same chapter of Casino Royale by Ian Fleming.

As for robbing the caisse, in which Bond himself was not personally concerned, but only interested, he reflected that it would take ten good men, that they would certainly kill two or three employees, and that anyway you probably couldn't find ten non-squeal killers in France, or in any other country for the matter of that.

Great reflecting, Bond! Here we have Bond thinking about something he actually would think about (logistics) and that revealing facts about the mission (it's complicated and dangerous), cheery Francophobia (no non-squeal killers in France) and an even cheerier weltschmerz (it's a world problem, not just a France problem). You can imagine how, say, the penultimate attribute could've been gone into badly, if it hadn't had the concept of men who can reliably kill as a lead-in: "Bond checked into the caisse. France, he thought, how pathetically devoid of non-squeal killers!" Or something like that.

Or something like this, again from Casino Royale:

Some of this background...passed through Bond's mind. He was used to oblique control and rather liked it. He felt it feather-bedded him a little.

Gah! Who would think such a thing? Away from his therapist? This is the problem, of course, with free indirect discourse especially and with the head-on obligation to represent another human being that every fiction writer (most fiction writers) takes on: to say things that someone else would say, while knowing all that you, the writer, know about her. Ian Fleming is even more psychologically astute than James Bond, so he is in a position to talk about feather-bedding. I am fairly positive that I, as a thinking thing, have never had the sensation "I rather like this" pass through my mind about anything except food, and even then not often. It's an autodiagnosis that no one makes, but it's exactly the kind of diagnosis that smart writers find easiest to make on fictional beings, including their own. And it drives me nuts, both when I see it and when I do it. So please, fiction writers. Be kind to your fictional beings. Do not force them to say impossible things. They and I will appreciate it.

p.s.

my SU box is 2935

why let schratz have all the fun

well to be honest i am posting in order to receive a free book (why has no one else yet taken advantage?), but since i devote such a great portion of my brain to constant literary rumination, i may very well end up saying something relevant by the end. i spent winter study in china after convincing peter murphy and chris pye (piece of cake) that either a) i would work on my thesis every day or b) i didn't really need to work on my thesis at all. whichever story i told them, it worked, and i bet you can all figure out how much work i got done. but thats ok. i did get some reading done- most of "the birth of tragedy", henry james' "the altar of the dead", some murakami of course. as for the latter, i think he's pretty good. not much to say else. i don't have any gripes with him yet, and that says alot. oh and a few stories from a book called "dangerous laughter", i forget who it's by, far inferior to murakami.

what i have been thinking about these days is james joyce. i have a carrel on the 2nd floor of sawyer, tucked away in the northeast corner, facing the bold front of stetson and otherwise promoting scholasticism by the extent of its detachment. yet every time i walk around the corner to go to the bathroom i have to first walk directly towards joyce's claim in the stacks, and the spines of dozens of books with "ulysses this" or "ulysses that" or some stupidly clever thing like "a portrait of the artist in exile". A portrait of the exiled chamber music of ulysses finnegan as a young dubliner. so its virtually impossible that i go very long without being prompted to think about joyce, excepting rare cases of sustained dehydration. and now i am taking a break from reading some essay on JSTOR about the aeneid and the waste land. it's kind of convincing -- all i've read so far is a list of reasonably direct allusions -- but it's still equally plausible to me that Dante stands as an un-ignorable (help, schratz, i am always looking for a real word to say "un-ignorable" that is more accurate than undeniable or incontestible) middle man between the two. that is to say, i am not so far convinced that one is in error who continues to categorize bleeding trees in the waste land as a dantean, and not a virgilian, homage. but then again i still have to finish the essay.

what a strange relationship i have, and have had, with these two modernist poster children. i suppose i grew disillusioned with eliot at least a year or two ago, though i fear his personal influence will never truly leave my brain, eager though i am to move beyond his clutches. regardless, i don't think i have anything really new to say about him, other than i refuse to hold in too high esteem any critic who so vehemently attempts to disguise himself as a poet. and no, it is not the other way around. yet my thoughts on joyce i feel still need development. by the end of taking the ulysses class with tifft i thought i had made a huge breakthrough by recognizing that stephen is the true odyssean figure of the novel, lest we concede to acknowledging that all bloom had to do to consummate the odyssey's vastly important homecoming is, well, come home. so stephen's leaving the bloom house (and it is his heroic capacity to leave just as much as his mere presence which finally re-qualifies molly's sexuality) is some greater and more symbolic kind of homecoming. for example joyce's leaving ireland as the step by which he "returns" to some kind of real, pure, or worthwhile literature. which is really anti-modern, in contrast to the pride with which eliot seems to want to portray boring people and consider those portrayals as successful literary endeavors.

i mean, i guess i still agree with myself that all those things are interesting and perhaps true as long as one feels tied down to homer, but i am starting to feel, and gladly so, less and less of a real desire to think of homer at all. after all, it's not like i will ever really be able to absolve myself of a homeric consciousness, no more than literature itself will. but i feel its the mature thing to do at this point. but damn! it's still so hard to commit to any of these postures with someone you know is trying to trick you all the time. once you realize that joyce is so mischevious, it's like you say, "oh! i get it! he was just fucking with us the whole time" and you feel like you've got him figured out. but then after such a fleeting moment of self-satisfaction you begin to wonder, "but wait- what exactly is the trick he's playing on us?" there is a large pool to choose from there. i guess that's why it's such a good book. or why it's such a bad book. and in what senses do i mean "good" and "bad" here? i guess "good" if you like thinking alot. or if you just think he puts words together favorably. "bad" if you have some devoted concern with the sanctity of literature- which, if it is in fact threatened, i still feel we must attribute less to joyce himself than to the door he helped open.

A Team of Reggie Jacksons

I haven't read anything from Canonically Accepted English Literature Properly So Called in like a week, and I am starting to suffer a form of withdrawal, I think. Since I finished Lucky Jim on the Q train Super Bowl Sunday (good work, Saints, btw), and lovingly bumped it off of my Books Unread list, I have been reading, thanks to the vagaries of syllabi and just what at the time I happened to feel like reading -- a whole crapload of theory books, and also Better by Atul Gawande which is so clear and well argued that one hardly feels like getting what he has to say into one's brain represents any literary work.

It's been all steak knives and no steak, I suppose I want to say, or all straws and no drink, or something like that. (And thinking of the most famous use of the straw/drink metaphor, it is funny to imagine the authors whom I have been lugging around -- Horkheimer, Adorno, Marx, Deleuze, and Atul Gawande -- as a team full of Reggie Jacksons). All that nonfiction hurts my head. I remember one summer I decided that I was going to read nonfiction all summer, to rectify what I believed was a serious nonfiction deficiency in my diet, and boy, Did That Not Work. I've talked in various ways about this before, particularly the gap between real people, who are unknowable, and fake people, who aren't, and who is thus more available to counteract loneliness (this all being one of my famously vaunted concerns). But, eating ice cream and watching the best Desmond-Penny episodes of Lost on Valentine's Day, I thought, rather forcefully, of that vaunted concern in particular, and thought to write about it, and I guess to issue a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do: don't stop reading your fiction books! You'll never get enough from just Gilles Deleuze. I am now going to take a dose of my own medicine, and you will be hearing from me on I'jaam tomorrow.

The Overdetermination of Everything

It was a slow day reading today, for me. I went to Battery Park to read from the Freud Reader, because where else would you go to read Freud, and what else would you read at Battery Park? Then I went to Grand Central Station and sat in the Dining Concourse without buying anything, and read from the Marx-Engels Reader. The name of today was, evidently, Philosophers of Suspicion Day Among the Tourists. One of the things that I saw while I walked around Battery Park was the Battery Grill. The Battery Grill looks like it should be famous, in the way that particular restaurants look like they should be famous. Tavern on the Green, that one place that is blue and orange in Bryant Park...places in parks, I guess. Anyway, I saw the Battery Grill and thought, "that looks famous", and then I went home. Home, I continued reading of my philosophers of suspicion and watching the Food Network, as is my habit. And what should come up on the Food Network but the show Chopped, one of whose contestants was the executive chef of the....Battery Grill! Spit take! And, spoiler, he won. But there it was, right on the television, the place where I had been earlier in the day. What a crazy coincidence!

That's true, but whatever: the point is that, despite more or less everything I did today fitting into a pretty trim nomological account, really what I did was dick around all day, while floating in enough pieces of meaning that I could construct a trim nomological account of what I'd done. Read enough, watch enough television, go to enough places with names, and when you are called upon by yourself to give an account of what Things You Did, it looks like you did something that makes sense. The world is overdetermined with meaning; everything you do (by which I mean, of course, everything I do) is, to borrow Richard Poirier's description of Pynchon's V., "preposterously coherent". Life is preposterously coherent if you look at it the right way.

This reminds me, eventually, of Murakami: is he preposterously coherent? Certainly, coherence -- especially preposterous coherence -- is a different kettle of fish from ultimately making sense; otherwise no one would have ever said it about V. One of Murakmi's stories -- the story that I had in mind when I started to write this summing-up-of-Murakami post -- is all about this kind of preposterous coherence, the overdetermination of meaning that suggests meaninglessness. "Chance Traveler" is rife with overdetermined coincidences: the little local coincidence, that the piano tuner and the woman are drinking in the same cafe; the stranger coincidence that they are both into Dickens; the huge, huge coincidence that the woman and the piano tuner's estranged sister both have breast cancer; and even the slightly peculiar circumstance that, of all the triads of coincidence that there are in the world, this one, coincidentally, was presented, by his piano tuner to the Japanese short story writer Haruki Murakami. That, anyway, is the gabble of coincidence that makes up "Chance Traveler", and the kind of gabble that makes up, say, my days that I spend reading philosophers of suspicion at tourist places.

But it's easy to get overdetermined. What I think, in the last analysis (this being my last analysis for now, here, anyway), makes Murakami special -- why I think we should read him -- are those things that, rather than content themselves with finding meaning in the overdetermined gabble that anybody could've found, the literally quotidian meaning that I find in as dull a work of art as my own life, knock a damn hole in meaning and everything else. Better than coincidence, the ghost surfer that maybe appears in "Hanalei Bay"; better than a day that seems, eerily to make sense, the haunting private detective (working for free!) in "Where I'm Likely to Find It"; and, more splendid than damn near anything, the appearance and revelation of the title primate in "A Shinagawa Monkey". To be cleverer than either writer deserves: if Pynchon is preposterously coherent, Murakami, at his best, is coherently preposterous.

So that closes the digital book on Murakami, for us. I will write him down on the syllabus, for when the syllabus is again in need of a dusting-off (2013, probably). OUR NEXT BOOK: will be I'jaam, by Sinan Antoon. It is supposed to be quite good; it is an Iraqi prison narrative, written by a gentleman currently teaching at NYU; it was recently featured in the New Yorker's roundup of recent Arabic literature in English translation, and I am starting it tomorrow. Happy reading!

The Grown-Up

It's unthinkable, to me, what will happen when I run out of books that are on my bookshelf. The Matthew Schratz Pages to Read number is like the national debt: I know, in theory, what it is, but it is inconceivable in practice. For the last year or so, it has fluctuated around 65,000 or 70,000 pages; I don't know how different that number is, bigger or smaller, from the number when I started the list, or the number from a year ago. Today I finished reading Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, and the number of pages to read that I own went down by two hundred and fifty one. That represents, liberally, one third of one percent of the pages left on my bookshelf in the "To Read" section, a section built by overzealous purchasing, gift giving, and the (very) occasional reassignment of a book that I've already read and already too much forgotten. That is a lot of pages. It took me about a week to read Lucky Jim; assuming that all of the pages remaining are as easily read (they aren't) and that the number will only decrease (it won't), that means that I will have conquered my library in three hundred weeks, or about six years.

To have read all of one's books: not all of the books one wants to read, or needs to read, or ought to read, but all of the books one has on his bookshelf: that is the prospect I see before me, in six years. In six years I will be thirty years old, which means I will be inescapably a grown-up. And to have finished reading all of my books, in the narrow way I mean, is what I have to look at as a number that makes more sense as the number to tick down until I am a grown-up. I own a copy of A Tale of a Tub that I bought, from amazon.com, in 2002, obsessed with getting as much Swift as I could get my hands on after I read A Modest Proposal in high school. I own a copy of Thoreau's selected essays that I bought at the now long-defunct Waldenbooks in the Lockport Mall. And I own a copy of Decline and Fall that I bought at a used book store in Massachusetts, with long term aims of impressing with my knowledge of it a girl whom I knew, at the time, to be enjoying the Loved One, also by Evelyn Waugh. The point about these books, and many others of their near neighbors, is that I cannot possibly imagine ever self-identifying as a grown-up while they sit there, unread. Like Investing, or Quitting Smoking, Reading All of My Books seems like a task impossibly grown-up, like a thing I couldn't possibly currently do.

And yet, and yet, I finished Lucky Jim today on the Q train, around eleven thirty tonight. So there it went. And I currently want a cigarette about as badly as I can remember, and yet I took off my shoes and brushed my teeth instead of going to the bodega. So there that goes. I will whittle my pages down. Man never is, always to be, blest.