Analysis Yet Again

Another week, another reason to drag my favorite two-word Henry James phrase into things, that quote being "remorseless analysis." (Narrowly beating out "extravagant umbrella", "hang fire", and "sacred rage"). And the reason today is that my mother tells me, daily, and the other people who live in our house confirm, daily, that what my problem is ("I have just one problem?" -- Hal Incandenza) is that I overanalyze everything. She rarely uses the word "remorseless", but there it is: the problem: overanalysis. Now, this may be a bit of killing to cure, but, as the fact that I can't get through an entire sentence here without a variety of embedded clauses and parentheses might have tipped you off, my first instinct is in most circumstances, indeed, to analyze things. But is it over-such? Can one overanalyze, and do I? Let us overanalyze.

When Strether, in the Ambassadors, invokes that beautiful phrase, he is sad; he is disappointed that his friend Waymarsh will never remorselessly analyze him. It's as though he is jealous that his powers of analysis -- which seem to be involuntary and, we learn throughout the novel, not terribly keen -- will never be turned on himself. A friend of mine once told me that she was disappointed after making a certain song the music that others heard while her phone was ringing; because she did that, she was the person she knew who heard the song the list. I myself often consider it a cruel trick of fate that, while everyone else sees it all the time they get to listen to me, I only see my perfectly straight hairline on the occasion that I visit a mirror. So maybe remorseless analysis is like that. But probably not -- it doesn't seem as though being the object of it is enviable (I mean really, think about it). Nor does it seem as though overanalysis is exposing some ugly truths through which the rest of the world slumbers, because it is, after all, not just called enoughanalysis.

Rather, I think that what my mother pinpoints when she calls overanalyzing my problem is that overanalysis is exactly what makes something into art; and art is exactly useless. I read a story this morning -- a deeply weird story -- by Nabokov, about a dragon, called The Dragon. It wonders what it be like if a dragon flew into a little town in Germany, and comes up with: it would get papered with advertisements for a tobacco company, it would be attacked by a circus performer dressed as a knight and in the service of a rival tobacco company, and as a result of this, flies up to his cave, embarrassed, and dies of shame. Which doesn't sound really wrong, as far as dragons in 1930s Germany go. And I don't mean to suggest here that my babbled observations with which I annoy my mother (or whomever's ear is the one closest to my right {which, I notice, is the side to which I most often darkly mutter snark}) is of a quality similar to a Nabokov short story, even a weird Nabokov short story. Rather, that same stream of muttering is something that, as a person who reads and probably reads too much, I have come to take for just the noise of the world; and, of course, the real world is much more often just quite. Just enoughanalyzed. I am subjecting my poor family to that roar that lies on the other side of silence.

Now, I don't super know what to do about this. It is probably the most insidious thing I have ever noticed about my career as a reader, and, luckily, it is not all that insidious. It is one of those lucky problems whose solution is the not talking about it. I tried to defend my constant, remorseless overanalysis to my mother by telling her that it was compulsory, and I don't really know which of the two of us was correct. But obviously, broadcasting whatever Deep Analysis I think of is not compulsory. It's just the fruit of reading too many stories that really work through what the tobacco companies would do to dragons.

The False Azure of the Windowpane

Today I went for a run, and remembered that another reason I, as a literary nerd, like our house here: not our street, or the one next to it, but the one next to that is called Waxwing Lane, which is only a small, pluralizing sibilant away from being waxwing slain, and we all know what poem I have a crush on has that phrase in it's first line. Anyway, that made me think about a book issue that I often try to engage my family on, to their long-suffering: how much do you think about books when you're not reading them? Or actually, I guess the question is more: how much do you use books to think about other things?

Running is usually a thing that I don't use books to think about; that's one of the things I like about it. Unlike my interactions with other humans, myself, nature, and the rest, I never compare me running to things from books. I can't look at the color gradations in the ocean without thinking about Nabokov's description of colors; there are friends of mine I can't talk to without Maria Gostrey from the Ambassadors. But there is no such writer tied to running. Not even Haruki Murakami, though I loved his book about marathons, and not even Updike, though duh.

That said, on the run today I thought an awful lot about a few things. The main one was holy crap, my side hurts (it was the first run in several days). I also thought about the magnificence of Aaron Copland, because I had Appalachian Spring on my iPod; I thought about various pretty girls and how undoubtedly impressed they'd be with my thoroughly jogged physique; and, when I ran by that street sign, I thought about Pale Fire. Not really, though, or rather, not as usual; when I wrote my thesis, I spent about a month and a half sitting in a basement and thinking of very little but Pale Fire. Instead of thinking through Pale Fire -- instead of seeing my Maria Gostrey friend and imagining her entirely through a skein of Jamesian phrases like "remorseless analysis" -- I thought about it, about the beginning image of the Pale Fire poem just by itself, which I hadn't done for just a really long time. Then I thought about how much the cramp in my side hurt.

Why So Serious?

Did you know that the New Yorker has talking, animated cartoons at their website? They are exactly what you expect from talking New Yorker cartoons: there is one frame, one of the characters delivers what would, in the magazine, be the caption, and the other characters respond minimally (in the two I watched, one woman in a boardroom backed away from a guy with a hand puppet, and in the other one a slug frowned). Why does the New Yorker have cartoons, incidentally? I mean, I like them; I'm glad they are there; but in an organ of serious long form journalism, why cartoons? Wikipedia tells me that Harold Ross founded the New Yorker because his old magazine, Judge, was too corny. From what I've dug up of Judge, Ross could've included just one cartoon about cowboy slugs a week, loaded the rest with depressing Seymour Hersh articles, and handily won the New York Magazine humor battle. Anyway, the cartoons stuck around, like the poems, sort of atavistically, and now here they are, littered among more technically serious business.

So that's that in cartoon/solemnity abutment; what about cartoon/solemnity melding? Not stuff like Watchmen, which is hardly really a cartoon, but stuff like Steven Millhauser's Cat 'n' Mouse or Derek Zumsteg's Bugs Bunny, Greatest Banned Player Ever, both of which consider, very very seriously, very very frivolous things. The former takes as its object of study Tom and Jerry cartoons in general, and the latter a particular Looney Tune, "Baseball Bugs". The former performs a sort of literary analysis on the lives and motives of a cat and a mouse not unlike Tom and Jerry, and the latter performs sabermetrics on a ludicrous game of baseball played, on behalf of a collection of geriatrics, by Bugs Bunny against some thugs. What they have in common is a relentless commitment to not wink. Millhauser's story has passages like this:

This makes the cat dangerous, despite his stupidity, for the mouse recognizes that he himself has long periods when the cat fades entirely from his mind. Moreover, despite the fundamental simplicity of the cat’s nature, it remains true that the cat is cunning: he plots tirelessly against the mouse, and his ludicrous wiles require in the mouse an alert attention that he would prefer not to give.

And also passages like this:

The cigar explodes. When the smoke clears, the cat’s face is black. He gives a strained, very white smile. Many small lines appear in his teeth. The teeth crack into little pieces and fall out.

The diction is the same; the authorial attitude is the same; and yet.

Zumsteg is similar, though he keeps asking how, rather than why, the preposterous events of cartoons have come to pass. He considers Bugs Bunny's unorthodox fielding style, and has this to say:

That means that Bunny was able to cause the ball to accelerate by at least 50mph/s^2. Based on these calculations, it would seem possible for Bunny to actually fly and even to achieve escape velocity and orbit the planet using only his heckling. However, it’s important to note that as demonstrated in this game, we can only definitely establish from the footage that he is able to perform the acceleration when drawing an object to him, and only on the baseball.

There is a natural inclination to say (many of the people who commented at USS Mariner have said) that the focus of serious critical apparatus on cartoons is simply a waste of time. Really? For one thing, in neither of these cases does it seem like a waste of time relative to the most probable alternative -- say, doing literary analysis on Ralph Nickelby rather than a mouse, or doing sabermetrics on like the Seattle Pilots-- and I don't even think any of those things is really a waste of time. Another inclination would be to say that somehow it's an eiron's work to treat frivolous things like cartoons as bits of seriousness -- that it levels down, and shows as frippery our attempts to take serious things seriously -- but I don't think that's right, either. What I think is that this work is a kind of leveling up: if Bugs Bunny has merited sabermetrics, if we give the same attention to Jerry the mouse as we do to Lambert Strether, maybe that is good news too for the rest of us; maybe eventually we'll all deserve remorseless analysis.