Hiatus Update

Great news everyone, I am posting again. I am sorry for the delay, and sorrier to announce that I don't even have anything to say about new selection Grendel, beyond the fact that I just read a different book by John Gardner (the manifestoey The Art of Fiction) and another book directly pertinent to Our Selection (the Beowulf translated by Seamus Heaney). Also, I went to the scene of the crime itself, England, only to find out, while reading on the airplane, that though Beowulf was written in English, it takes place in Denmark and in Geatland. Who knew! But a few things about Beowulf before starting in on Grendel. One of the things I noticed about it, was that, like Aeschylus and Sophocles, I thought it was kind of boring. I think this is because it is so old that no one had to do anything even remotely interesting to make it worth writing down. Just like how everyone cares about your first word and not your millionth, the fact that the first story like Beowulf even was made it noteworthy. Now, I ask you -- does that make it worth reading still? Everyone says you should like the blues and bands like Orange Juice, because without them there wouldn't be bands like the Kinks or the National. I do not say this. I think it is silly. But it seems as if for things like Beowulf and ancient Greek plays (I'm excluding Homer, because his epics seem to me to have enough plot to be interesting, rather than just being examinations of emotions -- rage, pride, woe -- that are broad enough to now be stock) are, through a function maybe of literature's being totally obsessed with itself, important to at least sort of understand. For future reference purposes, at least -- to appreciate, for example, Grendel by John Gardner, or Les Mouches (which I really liked) by Sartre. I don't know if that's good or bad -- that so many books gain resonance through reminding us of old things -- but it does seem worth pointing out, at least when I have been totally slacking on saying anything on here. Also, one last note on the above comparison between pop music and literature -- pop music seems to be, for the most part, unliterarily unconcerned with its own past (there are vaguely deconstructionist bands like Art Brut and Pavement, but leave that kind of influence-spotting to critics, who love to do it). It is unlike, in this respect, classical music (as I understand it from Alex Ross's the Rest is Noise, which is very informative about the tendency of composers at least since the fin-de-siecle to quote from each other liberally) and especially rap music, which is constantly about rap music. Again, I don't know quite what to make of this -- the observation that fiction is more like classical or rap music than pop music -- but, on an off month, there it is. Soon in the week -- a post on Grendel, more on why I found Beowulf boring, and, if we pray hard to the bloggods, maybe a post from Brian Blood on what he thought of his handsome edition of Atonement.

it's at least better than the road

i'm sure that we can all agree that among many fundamental differences between the two books which we have read thus far is the fact that atonement lends itself to a much greater extent to reading for pleasure, at least for those who would rather fantasize about bourgeois life in england than about being the last remaining symbol of human decency in a barren, post-apocalyptic wasteland. however, i thoroughly believe that, in addition to its greater entertainment value, atonement surpasses the road as an all-around literary and intellectual achievement, mostly because of the much greater maturity McEwan shows as a writer.

the book opens with an account of briony's creative process, in which she seeks to produce a work which will "inspire not laughter, but terror, relief, and instruction, in that order" (mcewan 8). in all her naivete, she assumes that as an author she is obligated to assert, without question, her intellectual superiority over her audience. her work must be impersonal, as any form of self-acknowledgment contained within is likely to portray her as human, and thus as fallible and questionable in whatever epic moral prophesy she wishes to impose on her readers. for me, this immediately brought mccarthy to mind. though it's not to say i didn't enjoy the road or respect him as an author, i do think he was, at least in the road, to some extent restricted by briony's same childish persistence in thinking that previously established standards of literature have created in writers an obligation to impersonality, lest they be deemed flawed as actual, non-writing human beings. even through the boy does mccarthy decline the opportunity to express the vestiges of his youthful ignorance, and the result is insight which, though often philisophically intruiging, is hard to believe to have come from such a young mind. the characters in atonement i find much more believable, and in most cases it is because mcewan is not afraid to imbue them with the flaws that he knows they must have, because he surely finds in himself, even as a writer. we identify with briony's creative struggles because we know that mcewan does too; we believe what we are reading because we know that the person telling it to us does not consider himself, even in the context of his own story, to be infallible or omnipotent.

unlike briony, at least at the book's beginning, mcewan is not afraid to inspire laughter, or any other indication of the emotions which we are often afraid to admit that we feel. this sort of emotional appeal seems to be what mcewan values most in the literary craft, and he therefore places the establishment of absolute artistic superiority, seemingly adored by both briony and mccarthy, further down, if anywhere, on his list of priorities. perhaps Cecelia's insistence that the flowers be arranged with perfect imperfection is symbolic, but at no point does he shove it down our throats. yet with painfully contrived lines like, "Who is it? said the boy. I don't know. Who is anybody?" mccarthy seems much less conscious of the merits of artistic subtlety.

Why I am Not a Novelist; or, Epigrams Revisited

So. This is why I am not a novelist: whenever I come up with an idea that I like, usually spend between seven and eight hundred words teasing it out into some form that, when you squint at it, kind of makes sense. And then, invariably, I read something by a novelist (or poet, or lyricist -- this one's pretty broad) in the ensuing days that says whatever I wanted to say 900 times more clearly. So, apropos of the benefits of textually constructed people (painting with a broad brush, Brionys) relative to personality constructed people (Cecelia, you, me, everyone we know), here is Proust, from Lydia Davis's translation of Swann's Way, on novelists:

"These were the events taking place in the book I was reading; it is true that the people affected by them were not 'real,' as Francoise said. But all the feelings we are made to experience by the joy or misfortune of a real person are produced in us only through the intermediary of an image of that joy or that misfortune; the ingeniousness of the first novelist consisted in understanding that in the apparatus of our emotions, the image being the only essential element, the simplification that would consist in purely and simply abolishing real people would be a decisive improvement...The novelist's happy discovery was to have the idea of replacing these [corporeal] parts, impenetrable to the soul, by an equal quantity of immaterial parts, that is to say, parts which our soul can assimilate." (Proust, 86-87)

Fittingly, for Proust, that's way too long for a normal epigram. But, despite its strong claim ("equal quantity of immaterial parts"?), I think it distills the heart of what I was trying to talk about, about the end of Atonement. And since I just read it, it struck me, and now it's out here to strike you too. Happy Grendeling, and I hope to have something soon about the relationship to books had by either my mother's book club or my aunt Molly's solo adventures with the Diving Bell and the Butterfly within the week. Also, though Grendel's been announced, feel free to toss up any more comments on any part of Atonement.

Now, Here Is a Book With Which to Start Your Book Club

Two posts in two days! Woohoo! Also, our new pick – the book for February-ish, since we seem to be busting through about a book a month – is at the end.

Anyway, I finished Atonement some time ago, and here are my thoughts on it. Because I can never keep them straight in my head though, first I am going to rehash the kinds of questions I think it is a good idea to consider when finishing a book. Here they are again:

Why would anyone think reading this book is a good way to spend time?

How has the fact that I have read this book impacted the way I will do things from now on?

Now, the easiest ways to answer these questions – and the way I answer them about reading, say, message boards on IMDb – is, they wouldn’t and it won’t. But the second question should be answerable for almost any book (Dr. Johnson said something like that, that there was no book so bad that you couldn’t get something out of it, but I can never find that quote and my papers on Dr. J are in Buffalo, in storage). What can one get out of reading Atonement? More narrowly, and maybe combining the two q’s, What has reading Atonement got me that I couldn’t’ve been given by another book?

One thing it might give you, is a reason to have a book club. Atonement exults in words and wordiness at every conceivable level. There is the multivalent way in which Briony, the writer, exists only in her wordiness – we get her powerful drive to express herself and to achieve meaning through words, in writing this novel, but we also get a debased version of it and a cartoon of it, in her false testimony to Robbie and in her puerile writings like the Trial of Arabella (which cartoon is one of the novel’s purest exultations, with its “hieroglyph”s and “evanesce”s). As I discussed earlier, we get things like the talismanic power of words for Robbie and Cecelia, with their “I will wait for you, come back to me”.

And one of the promises that I think we can find in Atonement is the promise that we can achieve understandings with the other people in this universe, and do it with words. I do not think that we ever really understand Robbie and Cecelia, or rather, we understand them only when they are at their most Briony-like. (The same goes, actually, for Emily, the other character to get major point-of-view duties). This makes sense in the world of the book, since Briony is its putative author and, at the end of the day, the lonely, only person between these words and us. (The “BT London 1999” is a remarkably powerful piece of typography, even without the beautiful epilogue that fleshes it out; it collapses the world of the text suddenly, from a relatively broad and democratic set of characters mediated through an authorial conscious to a radically undemocratic story filtered through two). Robbie and Cecelia, once we know the status of this fiction, are totally closed to us. Consider their moment of passion, again one I mentioned earlier, when the text refuses to spell out the fact that they have each said “I love you”: the text retreats in the face of their intimacy, and strives to become, instead, the sort of thing Our Writer Briony would understand. It is impossible for us to know what Cecelia or Robbie mean when either says “I love you”, and it is usually impossible to know what that means, when someone says it to someone else. It is a fundamentally private declaration, and people are usually fundamentally private entities.

But Robbie is told he is loved by not one, but by two Tallis sisters, and the other one is readily understandable. It comes from the writer Briony, and not only is it presented unelliptically but it is introduced by Briony’s statement that it is obvious. And it is, at that moment, obvious to us, because we know what kind of person young Briony is, because we have read about her in this book. Briony is available to us, because she is the genius of the book. Whatever it is that Robbie and Cecelia have is undoubtedly moving, and it is undoubtedly rare, and it is undoubtedly private. Whatever it is that Briony has – whether it’s when she is juvenilely confessing an imaginary love to Robbie as a ten year old, or it’s when she is racked with dissatisfaction with a world that can offer her no atonement – it is something that we can share with her, because it has been totally transfigured into the words that make up this novel.

“She is beginning to get the full grasp of what she did and what it meant,” says Cecelia of her belatedly penitent sister (McEwan, 199). The promise of a novel like this is that what we do can mean something not just in the sense offered by Cecelia’s letter, but in the sense of the novel of which Cecelia’s letter is a part. Briony’s crime and her need for atonement mean something about people, far broader than her narrow original milieu. She shows the kind of community possibly in reading that seems, when put baldly by people like C.S. Lewis, to be a little naive, and thus, to my way of thinking, the kind of thing an ideally running book club might be. Briony represents the promise of meaning – the liberation, by words and wordiness, from her isolation within her particular small set of experiences. It’s a promise, handily enough, of a broad atonement.

Can’t beat the end-with-the-title trick. Next book: after a lot of soul-searching, I made the decision to bait the Crow with another book that is, arguably, related to recent motion picture history, to wit: John Gardner’s Grendel, a book that tells the Beowulf story from the point of view of Grendel, the monster. Enjoy.

Atonement: The Movie

When the Old Crow heard what our second reading selection was, he asked if every one of our endorsements were going to have been optioned for a movie. I don’t think this is quite fair because a) I didn’t know that The Road had been optioned when I picked it, and b) I like movies, so hey c’mon. I decided to avail myself of the undeniable pleasure of sniping that a movie “was good, but not as good as the book” by going to see Atonement yesterday, and here is my report.

One of my Indie Tastemaker friends told me, a few weeks ago, that there was a shot in Atonement that was “unparalleled in the history of shots”. Now, caveat emptor – this same I.T. told me that there was a scene in I am Legend “unparalleled in emotional depth”, and when I saw I am Legend and asked, bemused, what that scene was, she could not recall it. But this time she delivered, and there was indeed a tracking shot that was simply incredible in Atonement and of which many of you have probably heard. I had heard that this unparalleled shot was a tracking shot, but that was all I knew about it, so every time the camera started to track, I got all excited and wondered if this was it. When it finally rolled around, I knew after about a minute. The scene was handled with the bravura appropriate to a five minute tracking shot (I don’t really know if it’s five minutes; IMDb has consecutive trivia items about it naming it as 4 ½ and 5 ½ minutes, so I will split the difference). After about a minute, though, I – and my moviegoing companion, who had neither read the book nor had advance warning about this shot – stopped thinking, “what an incredible illustration of the things that humans, for some reason, do to each other” and began thinking “what an amazing tracking shot”.

Now, the adjective for things like that is “virtuosic”, and the last time I dragged out “virtuosic” it was to talk about the paragraph in the novel Atonement in which Briony reacts to Robbie’s letter. The difference between the virtuosi behind them, though, was that during the book, I never stopped thinking about Briony, and in the movie, I actually spent time thinking only about Joe Wright and how goddamn expensive it must’ve been to lay down all that track. I don’t think that should be a slag on Joe Wright – the scene is beautiful, and moving – but it I think I found it moving principally as a contrapuntal example to what it portrayed (what nasty things people can do) by being an exquisite example of what people like talented filmmakers can create. In the novel, because Briony only exists in the milieu of words, a bravura performance of words can make her more real. In film, the camera cannot draw attention to itself without enforcing its status as an observer, rather than a creator. So what? I’m not really sure. I enjoyed both the film and the book (more on the end of the book later in the week), but I think that since one of the concerns I have is the reason for reading, this contrast with film might provide one element of an answer. The alloyed pleasure, of an artist’s virtuosity and of characters’ presentation of experience, may be one unique to written fiction.

Print Recommendation

This month’s Harper’s not only features three pages of something new “in progress” by David Foster Wallace, but also a small, enjoyable piece by Ursula le Guin about the state of reading in this country. She makes the case, first of all, that the gloom-and-doom people that you hear every month or so on NPR bemoaning the lack of reading in this world are wrong; compared to almost any other time in history, our literacy is ok. It is only the freakish, overachieving century between 1850 and 1950 that’s making us look bad: that was the century of the book, when, as she and the Dudebrodogman independently point out, eager New Yorkers herded around ships from Britain wanting to know what had happened in the latest Dickens installment. We are not up to that level. But we are not so bad.

The rest of the essay, which I am recommending wholeheartedly, includes a discussion of the physical, printed nature of books; several snarky and hilarious comments about the stupidity of outfits that treat books like commodities (with at least one of which outfits I have some familiarity); and a brief comment on why electronic books will not take off. All things close to my much-vaunted and ballyhooed "concerns" about the status of reading, that I mentioned in the last post. I started out writing more about this essay, but it was mostly summary peppered with out-of-order quotes, and was kind of lame. But the essay is good, and out now, and comes with some David Foster Wallace writing, so go for it.

That, and my mother and aunts keep asking about the blog, and I felt bad-ish sending them to one whose first post was on dirty words. Can anyone else tell based on how concerned I am about those words that I went to catholic school? This is the last you'll hear about them, I promise. More on Atonement, and the announcement of the next pick, later in the week.

"I love you" and the c-word

I am through the first part of Atonement, which details the events of one day in 1935 (I’m pretty sure it’s 1935). Part two picks up again in the thick of the second world war. On the day in question, the younger daughter of a wealthy family intercepts and reads over a note written to the older daughter that contains a particularly nasty word.

The word – which the younger daughter, Briony, will not say and will only spell backwards when she explains it to her slightly older cousin – is the c-word, which I will not say either. The effect that the letter has on Briony is complicated – “the very complexity of her feelings confirmed [her] in her view that she was entering an arena of adult emotion and dissembling from which her writing was bound to benefit” (McEwan, 106) – but it is remarkable the degree to which that word affects her as a word, prior to anything else. Since Briony is a writerly – which is to say, a hyperliterary – character, she is of particular interest to us as readers. More so than many other characters – Leon, for example, or Emily – Briony has a particularly sensitive relationship to words, and since she lives in a novel that makes her a character particularly open to us. McEwan’s description of the c-word’s effect on her is a virtuoso performance, and it is representative of Briony’s writerly nature.

At first, the representations of the word are totally divorced from any but the most oblique insinuations: she thinks of words that rhyme with the c-word, but won’t even say those rhymes (“the smallest pig in the letter” rather than “runt”). The word, “a typographical demon” (McEwan, 107; all the rest of the quotes are actually from the same paragraph, so I’ll stop attributing) has a specially typographical life for Briony because she has “never heard the word spoken, or seen it in print, or come across it in asterisks”. But she knows to what it must refer – apart from context,

“the word was at once one with its meaning, and almost onomatopoetic. The smooth-hollowed, partly enclosed forms of its first three letters were as clear as a set of anatomical drawings. Three figures huddled at the foot of the cross.”

That, I think, is virtuosic; and, beyond its pure entertainment value (and its sophomoric charm – this is, after all, a little girl outraged by a dirty word), its negative presentation of a word is a forceful depiction of the power of words. Later in this chapter, Briony’s cousin Lola calls Robbie, the letter’s author, a maniac, and that word similarly becomes more and more resonant until Briony’s conception of Robbie as a maniac overcomes her. This passage enacts such an engulfment in miniature, culminating in the strange and wonderful description of what is probably the dirtiest word in English as “three figures huddled at the foot of the cross”. This reimagining of the word as a form of feminine humility before religion, I haven’t quite figured out yet. But this is a frenzied castle that Briony has built out of words, and triggered by one word. That triggering, I think, is what enchants me the most about the passage. It seems as if reading, as an activity, is daunting going outwards – the number of things that have been written is staggering, a point that has been beaten pretty much to death by anyone who’s ever written about the interwebs. But Briony’s, or McEwan’s, reading of a single word in Robbie’s letters reminds us that there is an equally daunting depth to books – even the dirtiest word can (as a piece of “demon typography”, no less) be transfigured into one of the most sacred scenes in human history – that is more inviting than anything else. It is a supreme act of readerly creation, and has an echo in Briony’s horrible crime (which crime becomes hers and horrible by an imposed misreading of a different, already nasty crime scene). Briony’s reading of the letter may not be a particularly palatable reading – and it may forebode the terrible act that gives the shape to the book – but it serves as a testament nevertheless to the raw power of reading.

A partially integrated footnote: I imagine that this determination to avoid the word – it has not, in its proper form or even in asterisks, cropped up since Robbie’s original letter – might clue us into another echo, when the text is far more elliptical than we’d expect when, in their appropriately bibliotechnic lovemaking, Robbie tells Cecelia that he loves her.

“Finally he spoke the three simple words that no amount of bad art or bad faith can ever quite cheapen. She repeated them, with exactly the same slight emphasis on the second word, as if she had been the first to say them” (McEwan, 129).

Again, the words themselves don’t show up near this passage. This obfuscation is what puts me in mind of Briony’s reaction to the letter, and I think this counts as a vote for the power of words to do good: it is not just Robbie’s love for Cecelia, or hers for him, that has been able to survive centuries of abuse uncheapened; it is the words themselves. Later, Robbie will have his personalized mantra: “Come back. I’ll wait for you.” But the talismanic property of unassociated words – words qua words – is on display here as steadfastly as the demon that typographically infects fervent Briony.

Your thoughts on words, talismanic, dirty, or otherwise, are appreciated. More on non-Atonement stuff in the coming week.