Bookslut, via Gawker(About the Catcher in the Rye)

So, I found this article the other day on Bookslut via Gawker, as you can see from what this post is called. How very bloggy of me. This was good timing for me, as I had just had a long conversation about the Catcher in the Rye with my brother the Duck. He finished it a few days ago; it is one of the required reading books for the AP English class that he is going to start in a week. Now, my brother Connor loved The Catcher in the Rye; I liked it a lot. The Duck didn’t like it one bit.

His attitude was similar Anne Trubek’s; he didn’t so much complain about what’s going on in the book itself, as say that he just didn’t see what all the fuss was about. “If Salinger needed to acknowledge Dickens in 1951, today any new adolescent coming-of-age-tale must go through ‘all that Holden Caufield crap’”. Trubeck also points out the peculiar cultural entrenchment of Catcher in the Rye that we see from its current role as a touchstone: every book has to be the Catcher in the Rye for the beekeeping set, or the Catcher in the Rye met with the NEC Manual. The enshrinement of the Catcher in the Rye now seems unwarranted and unnecessary. The problem that Trubeck points out is that the original reason for enshrinement was relatability, and that relatability is totally diachronic – it is a function of history – and as such, we are no longer impressed with how much Salinger appears to understand us readers. What could relate to Holden in us changed; but we were stuck with his book on our syllabi nevertheless.

I think that the problem with Trubeck’s reading – and with the Duck’s – is that, having pinpointed a legitimate problem in the cultural fact of the Catcher in the Rye, they overlook a fact of the Catcher in the Rye in each of its readers’ biographies. At first, the book is indeed alluring for its relatability, but it does not stay so, or at least did not for me. Rather, Holden quickly loses his cache as a figure to whom I might relate, and becomes instead someone about whom I care, in the same way that I care about people without particularly relating to them, like Priam or Charles Bovary or Simon Dedalus. The reading my brother offers doesn’t allow for a reassessment of Holden once the fuss has died down in his reader’s mind; his primary function seems to him to be one of relating to people (affecting them in his malaise, anyway) and his mission seems to have not been quite as accomplished as has been trumpeted. But if his mission and function come to seem, as I think they should, as unconnected from anything the reception of the novel has occasioned, we see that Holden is just a sad, confused dude: not a hero, but a character from a novel.

“In the 19th century,” says Trubeck, “a bildungsroman showed the growing maturity and self-awareness of a young person.” She goes on to add that this remains “more or less true.” I think that what is less true about this is exactly what makes Holden compelling just when we no longer recognize our current selves in him: Holden exactly fails to become the hero of a nineteenth century bildungsroman, he exactly fails to become mature or self-aware. One of the things the Duck hated about the novel was that, at its end, Holden just goes off to do it all again, at a different prep school. I think that in that failure to grow, we can see in Holden a fixed portrait of a kind of hyperdeveloped childhood. He isn’t necessarily someone to whom we can relate; the proper reaction to this novel is no longer to identify with Holden and feel both you and he are part of a zeitgeist. He is just there, like all of our favorites in fiction, to be cared about.

That, anyway, is why I think we should still read the Catcher in the Rye.

I'll Get You, Carnivalesque

So the other day I went out to the ballpark, to see the Buffalo Bisons take on the Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs, in support of which latter my father owns a hat. I went with my brother Connor, my sister Elizabeth, my brother the Duck, and the Duck's friend Nate. I drank two beers and ate one bag of peanuts, and, naturally, I brought a book. The book I brought was Gargantua and Pantagruel, by Francois Rabelais. I figured that I could bang through a chapter or two about giants during, I guess, a pitching change, or the seventh inning stretch. So far, so what you'd expect. However, I left my book -- through a combination of jiggered and rejiggered seating arrangements and plain old negligence -- at the ballpark. Dammit.

Now, I should say that I have left books places before, or lost them forever. It took me three Signet Classics versions (and one Bantam, which my well-meaning mother bought for me but which had names transliterated totally differently) to get through Dostoevsky's the Idiot. I still can't find Brideshead Revisited or Brave New World, both of which I finished in the Lockport Public Library's copies. Once, I found my copy of Walden, on a sustenance break from my diligent search, in our refrigerator. So the quick pang -- where's my book? -- followed by slow acceptance -- huh, I need a new Idiot -- is an experience with which I am familiar.

I should also say that, at the time I was in the Dunn Tire Park mens' room and reading about Panurge the knave's haggling with shepherds, Rabelais wasn't exactly lighting my carnival on fire. I brought it partly because I figured that it would require less strenuous attention than Bend Sinister, which I was also reading at the time. I had described at one point my reading through the Gargantua book as a trudge, and when one of my friends said that few trudges were worth it, could defend the book only as a trudge with occasional fart jokes.

Nevertheless, on the 190, I realized suddenly and crushingly -- I had left Gargantua and Pantagruel under the seat. It might've hit harder because I knew exactly where it had been left -- it wasn't going to show up in the refrigerator -- and I knew that it was not going to be a particularly easy book to recoup. I kept imagining a bitter member of the grounds crew seeing the book next to a pile of peanut shells and throwing it vindictively into his dustbin. Sad, sad.

But -- and weirdest -- I didn't even particularly miss my commodity, for all that I am unemployed and that the MA Screech translation I had been using runs an extortionary twenty US dollars. Instead, I missed Pantagruel the sometimes giant and his preposterous, sometimes gigantic crew. I mean, these guys are not especially endearing, or even always separable guys -- earlier in this post I typed "novel" for what Gargantua and Pantagruel is and replaced it with "book" just because the characters sitting around and changing shapes and telling scholastic jokes seem, still, to fall short of the kind of fullness of characters that I associate with the novel. But I missed them intently. More than like, I missed Pierre Bezhukov when I had to do a problem set for Macro instead of reading about him in Petersburg, more than I missed even Kinbote when I finished my thesis. I think I missed Panurge, the "mad word-spinner", in particular, more than I miss most of the people with whom I lived my senior year of college.

The entire ride home, I whirligigged between waning woeful, on account of my lost book and missing Rabelaisian friends, and waxing joyous, on account of the fact that I just missed my book so much. It was a sort of base level mopiness -- and, my poor carmates will attest, that I was thoroughly and basely mopey -- with a commentary emotion of pride, that I had managed to successfully get so upset about something so theoretically minute, the opposite, really, of the way in which I felt bad about not feeling bad about most natural disasters.

I don't know what this means, as usual, because I don't tend to know what anything means, but like our old friend Briony Tallis, I am confident that what's happened to me at least means something. I don't think, for example, that it taught me to appreciate books more. I think I appreciated books just fine already. I think rather what it suggested to me was the way in which books can work just like people, a proof of George Eliot's claim that "art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellowmen beyond the bounds of our personal lot." Now I know how much some giants mean to me, surely an ampliative experience beyond the bounds of my normal personal lot.

The Water Father

Because none of us, not even Northrop Frye, is smarter than all of us, here is wikipedia on Free Indirect Speech, also called Free Indirect Style, Free Indirect Discourse, or Discours Indirect Libre:

[It is] a style of third-person narration which combines some of the characteristics of third-person report with first-person direct speech. Passages written using free indirect speech are often ambiguous as to whether they convey the views, feelings, and thoughts of the narrator or of the character the narrator is describing.

OK, so. The entry mentions Austen, Joyce, Kafka, and maybe Chaucer as noted F.I.D. practitioners, and my learned brother Connor informs me that our old pal Flaubert was a big fan, too. And I cannot stop thinking about the way that it is supposed to work, and how it appears to be going incredibly haywire, in Pnin, whose second and third chapters I have just finished rereading.

James Wood apparently makes a great deal of hay from F.I.D. grass in his new book, and in one of his old books, he mentions a misfire of attempted F.I.D. that, prima facie, looks like it is going on in Pnin. At several times, Wood finds fault with writers for using their own words rather than those of the characters while putatively absorbed in the character. This is not a negligible fault; the inhabitation of a character is one of the finest tasks of fiction, and to constantly retouch down on a piece of authorial showiness is to be a distraction, sometimes a hampering distraction, and to do less than right by one's characters. And, for the very long stretches of Pnin in which we can forget that the narrator is a character, that is what may be seen to be going on. The narrative consciousness can fit Pnin like a glove, but at moments the glove seems poorly tailored. So, for instance, we have the kind of joke that the narrator would make -- calling a sonic headache of the professor's jackhammering on "Brainpan Street, Pningrad" (Nabokov, 63)-- contrasted with the kind that Pnin would make, writing on: "the blackboard, which he wittily called a grayboard" (Nabokov, 67). One word from that, is, of course, the narrator's -- "wittily" -- but that is exactly ironical; his mocking claim of Pnin's wit, which is really a rhinestone among the narrator's jewels, is just the sort of judgment to which we and he are privy and not, his poor narrator.

So this is a deeply weird Free Indirect Discourse -- except, of course, that it is actually an embodied character, albeit one who thus far -- through the first three chapters -- has revealed himself only very obliquely. In fact, in the third chapter -- which I think my be my favorite, with Pnin being the victim of for the most part only harmless fun -- has no intrusion from the Narrator Character at all. This is the distinguishing mark of Pnin the novel: the narrator is not the normal, fallible first-person narrator we usually meet -- Nick Carraway, Ishmael -- Pnin's narrator seems to be on top of things in a way that is completely authorial. His near-omniscience is authorial, that is, and his prose style is (both obviously and obscurely) Nabokovian. Because of the latter, he is charming; but, because we are charmed, we can fail -- by which I mean, of course, that I had once failed -- to notice the degree to which, as a narrator, or at least as presenter of a character, our narrator leans toward the sadistic.

The morality of the narration is less of an issue in the third chapter than in the second, which I remembered as being cute -- Pnin meets the Clementses -- but had not remembered as poignant, nor as unsettling, which I found it to be on this go round. Pnin's confrontation with the horrible Dr. Eric Wind is not only heartbreaking -- poor, blindsided Pnin -- but it is structured almost sadistically by the narrator. We begin with a mundane, if slightly sad, story of Pnin's treatment at the hands of his colleagues. We then are lulled into a brief spell of Pninian contentment coinciding with real-world happiness, as he charmingly becomes friends with his fellow surd, Laurence Clements. But then the tone shifts again -- "The cat, as Pnin would say, cannot be hid in a bag," (Pnin, 43), and we are introduced to Pnin's sometime wife, Liza, who will be coming to visit him. When discussing Liza, the narrator is at his cruelest, as we have been set up to think Pnin is doing all right just before he springs Liza's wantonness on us, and also (to this point, anyway) the closest to actual engagement with the plot. Here, again and again, he skates close to the text -- the Pnins get into America with help from a relative of his, he mentions the noise that Eric and Liza wind make when they say the word "group", something that Pnin, who has only read their letters, could not know -- and so the text's malign treatment of Pnin seems to have more and more agency.

The final, devastated Pnin, who has "nofing, nofing", is told by Liza as she asks for money, that he is the "water father" of her child. This is Eric Wind's preposterous phraseology, and Pnin rightly laughs at it, even as he begins to weep. Of the first three chapters, though, this is the only one that has such a sad ending; the other two have near misses, just the sort of happy endings the narrator has professed to hate. As we go forth, this seems to me to be the most important thread of which to keep track, in which the narrator seems to effect his desire that "doom should not jam" only by effecting his own closeness to the text. By the end of the book, we should also hope to develop a sense of Nabokov's strategy in presenting such an amorphous relationship to narration, and also to giving poor Timofey such a bad time.

Pnin: What to Expect

Today I am going to talk about Our Official Selection. Later, I will have stuff to say about Confederates in the Attic, about which I am pretty excited and a very small bit into. That will be one thing that draws comment, the doings of the nefarious M.R.'s -- who, worried that their all-girl book club's Benjaminite name sounded a little too much like something that Chairman Mao would've called his repopulation program, now appear to have starting calling themselves les Amies des Canard -- and probably some more stuff about the New York Times Book Review, about which I think very often. And of course there will be more on the books that at least nominally give this site a raison d'etre, our reading club books. And now, that book is Pnin .

This is the third time I have read the first chapter of Nabokov's Pnin. The first time was encountered in the New Yorker collection of comedy writing, called Fierce Pajamas, many years ago. Back then, I think I mainly viewed it as strange -- a quirky throwaway -- because it was not a knee slapper like "On the Sidewalk" or like "What We Talk About When We Talk About Donuts", which I laughed at so much once at Denny's that the waitress came over and asked me if I were going to be ok. Years later, I read the first chapter of Pnin -- along with most of the rest of it -- on the Red Line, when I went into Boston to take the GRE, had the people there tell me that I was eight days early, and spent the rest of the day just cruising around. That time, I was more of a Nabokov initiate, having thrown back already Lolita, Invitation to a Beheading, The Defense, and, in a huge huge way, Pale Fire. And that time, I thought it was strange because Pnin, unlike the other English language heroes (Kinbote and Humbert Humbert) did not have the "fancy prose style" for which the latter says you can count on a murderer. Pnin was more like Cincinattus C., hero of Invitation to a Beheading, except that Cincinattus encounters a nightmare world of shady accusations and imprisonments, and Pnin encounters a confusing timetable. Comparatively boring, thought I.

Of course I was wrong, I being an idiot. I was told in a more flattering way than I deserved that I had gone about the book backwards by my good friend and advisor Prof. Fix, so I tried one more time. On my rereading now, I have only gotten through the first chapter, but already it feels more of a piece with its chronological neighbors, and less like a bagatelle -- because its narrator is so deeply weird. His attitude toward Pnin -- his sudden declaration that Pnin wrote a letter to an editor "with my help" -- and, overall, his outrageously explicit attitude of irony toward Pnin (telling us that Pnin will not make his train, he says "Now a secret must be imparted") -- this has all of the famous earmarks of the unreliable narrator, with none of the usual fullness of character for unreliable narrators (like Saleem Sinai, Dowell, and the more recent Leo Liebenstein). It will show you just how wretched of a reader I have been in times past that I am not 100% on much more he gets fleshed out, apart from the fact that I remember he gets somehow involved with the future ex-Mrs. Pnin. But we shall discover more on that anon.

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.

Walking

Yesterday, the T broke or something and I ended up walking from the Andrew Street Station, in South Boston, to Harvard, in Cambridge. Actually, I walked from the Broadway Street Station to Andrew, realized I was going the wrong way, turned around, and saw all of Boston in front of me. I am an idiot. However, it did give me plenty of time, while I was walking around, to read What Maisie Knew by Henry James. This was a splendid way to spend a sunny day, I thought. I have been fighting a long battle against What Maisie Knew, which was assigned to us in my Henry James class in late 2006, and which I didn't finish then and -- as of this writing -- still have not finished. I have ten pages left to go. I don't know why it is such a struggle to finish this book, which I enjoy mightily. The only other books that I have had such titanic battles with are Life of Johnson and Proust, both of which are Loose Baggy Monsters in a way that Maisie is certainly not.

One of my friends expressed incredulity that I can read and walk at the same time. "And with glasses!" she said. I don't know when or why I developed this talent, but I wonder if this peripatetic reading is a good or a bad method, and whether it is good or bad for Maisie in particular. I certainly feel as if the books I have read partially while ambulatory have been understood as well as any others. I still underline in them, for example, though I usually stop walking in order to do that. I have sometimes tried reading while driving, though I do not recommend it, not even for Maisie. At any rate, it is good to remember, on the eve of Bloomsday, the day celebrating the most peripatetic of novels, that you don't have to be stationary to read.

[Editor's note: this was written during a fourth quarter timeout in the Celtics-Lakers Game Five, which was indeed the day after the T stopped and the day before Bloomsday. It is now neither of those things, but the trusty MacBook ran out of batteries and didn't get replugged until now. So, uh, Happy Belated Bloomsday!]

Deep Discounts

Here, in honor of my final day of work having commenced, presented in roughly chronological order: the list of books I bought while working at Borders, using my employee discount:

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz*; Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human by Harold Bloom*; Volpone, the Alchemist, Bartholomew Fair by Ben Jonson; The Master of Petersburg by J.M. Coetzee; The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon; The Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton; The Marx-Engels Reader; The Road by Cormac McCarthy*; How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard; Grendel by John Gardner*; The Art of Fiction by John Gardner*; Author, Author by David Lodge; His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman*; The Time-Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger*; Leave it to Psmith by P.G. Wodehouse*; Like You'd Understand Anyway by Jim Shepard; The Performing Self by Richard Poirier; Bend Sinister by Vladimir Nabokov; The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse*; Fargo Rock City by Chuck Klosterman; Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris*; Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman; Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrakesaran; Through the Children's Gate by Adam Gopnik; Molloy, Malone Dies, the Unnameable by Samuel Beckett; Love and Death in the American Novel by Leslie Fiedler; The Anxiety of Influence by Harold Bloom; Must Me Mean What We Say? by Stanley Cavell; The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell; The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges; Everyday Drinking by Kingsley Amis; and Nine Innings by Daniel Okrent.

Asterisks denote books that I have actually finished. As you can see, my readerly eyes were obviously way bigger than my readerly tummy. Especially w/r/t the ol' Literary Criticism section though, in fairness, some of those were meant to augment my no-underlining summer reading. Gotta make up that underlining somewhere. Also, I am glad that my last three purchases as an employee were about baseball, alcohol, and things people made up, which I consider my three ruling passions.

Here, also, are the books that I read while on breaks/during down time, while at good old store 0196:
A Disorder Peculiar to the Country by Ken Kalfus*; I Was Told There'd Be Cake by Sloane Crosley*$; God is Dead by Ron Currie Jr*; After Theory by Terry Eagleton*; All the Sad Young Literary Men by Keith Gessen*; and Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama*.

Asterisks again denote books I have finished, for continuity's sake, and dollar signs denote authors whom I have Facebook friended.

And so of course I made these lists while I was bored at work, and waved them at my coworkers as a sort of conspicuous, tasteful consumption. But of course the more I thought about it, the more the list seemed to mean to me: there it was, laid out, what I wanted to do for nine months. Around January, I wanted to be a guy who knew about Walt Whitman and the Green Zone. I still know nothing about them, but I know more about me and what I'm doing, because of those books I picked up. Do any other commodities work like that? Can you still call something that works like this a commodity? I think that's one reason I am happy to be leaving my current position --I will get away from the commodification of books -- because, man, I love books. Them, and baseball, drinks, and imaginary beings.

Postscript -- glad to be leaving my current position as I am, I would be remiss, at any such juncture, not to quote the Doctor: "of a place which has been frequently visited, tho' without pleasure, the last look is taken with heaviness of heart". That sounds about right. Fleeting heaviness, though, I hope.