I finally read Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbowin full in 2015. Then I immediately read it again (which is sort of like really reading it), occasionally dipping into Steven Weisenburger’s A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion. Rewarding, hilarious, challenging, perplexing, Gravity’s Rainbow is too brilliant to look at directly, and is perhaps best approached slantwise, as one Ms. Dickinson of Amherst has advised.
On page 588 of Gravity’s Rainbow, the narrator (?!) suggests that we “Check out Ishmael Reed.” So I did. His novel Mumbo Jumbois like nothing I’ve ever read before—the reviewer’s crutch “dazzling performance” comes to mind, because Mumbo Jumbois a performance (jazz, bebop, soft shoe, vaudeville, a hoodoo magic show, an exorcism: performance art), and it does dazzle, overwhelm, energize, haunt, titillate, reverberate, howl…and there are pictures! Reed uses photos in a way that Sebald would a few decades later—documentary evidence of a sort. I don’t know. I just don’t know.
Like Reed’s novel, Anne Carson’s novel-poem-myth-book Autobiography of Red is impossible to categorize and extremely difficult to describe. I tried to write about it a few times on this site and failed, which is fine. What matters here is the reading experience: Carson’s book zapped me, gave me tingles, reminded me that what I want to think and feel when I read is, How is this possible? How is this allowed? (Another huge thank you to BLCKDGRD for sending me Autobiography of Red and its sorta-sequel Red Doc>).
And finally, Ursula K. Le Guin, whose so-called Hainish Cycle I read most of this year. I still have to read The Telling, but great stuff, and a full write-up early in the new year.
Favorite Books I Read in 2015 That Were Actually Published in 2015
Favorite Films I Saw in 2015 That Came Out in 2015
I had a relatively contrarian opinion of Fury Road, but I enjoyed it overall, I suppose. The Force Awakenswas a better spectacle for my money/nostalgia. Overall, 2015 was kind of a weak year for movies, filled with overrated indies, comic book schlock, and self-serious entertainments that Tried Too Hard. Hard to Be a Godwas the only thing that really zapped me, although a quick google shows that it was actually released in 2014.
You know, Inherent Vicewas released in late 2014 too, but I saw it and loved it and obsessed over it in 2015…so, Inherent Vice, yeah…
I also liked that Scientology documentary, which was full-on Pynchon.
Favorite Television Shows of 2015
I thought the second season of Fargowas near-perfect and found the tawdry spectacle of The Jinx thrilling, but there was no show I enjoyed watching and reading about more than the second season of True Detective.
Favorite Albums of 2015
The albums I listened to the most this year were soundtracks that came out before 2015: Inherent Viceand The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. But I did like a number of new albums this year, including Joanna Newsom’s Divers, Jim O’Rourke’s Simple Songs, and Destroyer’s Poison Season.
Favorite Books I Didn’t Finish in 2015
I’ve been crawling my way through a full read of Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel, but: No end in sight. I also read most of the essays in William T. Vollmann: A Critical Companion (check out my interview with the editors). I also read a hefty chunk of the Ben Marcus-edited collection New American Stories.My favorite discursive reading though was dipping into William H. Gass’s nonfiction.
Favorite Rereads
…speaking of Gass—well, I read his essay “Even If, by All the Oxen in the World” in conjunction with a reread of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, which turned out to be most rewarding—both the rereading and the reading-in-conjunction. Reading Infinite Jest for the first time since 2001 ended up being a deflating, even depressing experience, but I wouldn’t trade it. I also reread against the second reading of Gravity’s Rainbow. Other rereading highlights included Pynchon, Ursula K. Le Guin, High Rise by J.G. Ballard, and Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy(which I’ve reread every year since I first read it). But it was McCarthy’s Suttree that I got the most out of rereading this year.
2016
I’ll finish out Le Guin’s Hainish books with The Telling, and then probably crack into William H. Gass’s Eyes. In between I might read Marianne Fritz’s novel The Weight of Things. More Lucia Berlin for sure. Thomas Bernhard if it ever cools down again. (End of December 2015 and it feels like early summer here in Florida). I’d also love to take a shot at William T. Vollmann’s The Dying Grass, but who knows…there are always more pages than hours.
I don’t remember the first time I heard David Bowie because I was born in 1979 and he was always there, ahead of me. Always on.
I don’t remember the first time I heard David Bowie, but I do remember my uncle and my cousin would riff this routine on Bowie and Jagger’s video for “Dancing in the Streets,” which I knew even as a child (the video; the routine) was campy fun. Maybe I didn’t know the fun was camp. Maybe I learned the camp from Bowie.
I don’t remember the first time I heard David Bowie, but I do remember the first time I saw Labyrinth.
I don’t remember the first time I heard David Bowie, but I do remember my babysitter, who I believed I was in love with—I was nine, a mature (?!) , impressionable nine—declaring, “David Bowie is my hero” in a dreamy voice. I didn’t that was an option, that a singer could be a hero. I hadn’t heard “Heroes” yet.
I don’t remember the first time I heard David Bowie, but I do remember being utterly bewildered as Macauly Culkin introduced Tin Machine on Saturday Night Live. This was in 1991. I was in, what, seventh, sixth grade? Why weren’t they David Bowie and Tin Machine? My father couldn’t tell me.
I don’t remember the first time I heard David Bowie, but I do remember the first Bowie tape I bought on my own, Diamond Dogs. I think I paid $7.99 for it at the Camelot in the mall. I was in the ninth grade. Then Ziggy Stardust—they were like novels, like sci-fi novels. (I think I tried The Man Who Sold the World next and didn’t quite understand its blues).
I don’t remember the first time I head David Bowie, but I do remember not understanding what the hell was going on in the beginning of Fire Walk With Me.
I don’t remember the first time I heard David Bowie, but I do remember the first time I head Earthling and I thought it wasn’t half bad.
I don’t remember the first time I heard David Bowie, but I do remember my first real Bowie phase, in my freshman year of college: Low, “Heroes,” Lodger. And later: Young Americans. Although all you needed for a real proper dance part was Changesbowie (even “Fame ’90” was a jam). You could (you can!) sweat and grind and flop and writhe with others to Bowie; you could (you can!) sit in your room and listen to Bowie on big headphones. Drive to Bowie.
I don’t remember the first time I heard David Bowie, but I do remember that my friend Nick was always ahead of me on Bowie, always sort of leading me into and through Bowie. That Bowie was and is somehow mixed into our friendship.
I don’t remember the first time I heard David Bowie, but I do remember coming home from college one weekend to discover my father had bought ‘Hours…’. This perplexed me. The old man was never a big Bowie fan. “I liked ‘Thursday’s Child.'”
I don’t remember the first time I heard David Bowie, but I do remember the first time I saw The Man Who Fell to Earth. And the next few times.
I don’t remember the first time I heard David Bowie, but I do remember the first time I heard Adrian Belew’s guitar playing on “Boys Keep Swinging.”
I don’t remember the first time I heard David Bowie, but I do remember his evocation of Andy Warhol in Basquiat. And how appropriate, now, I suppose: Bowie does Warhol. That Bowie extended Warhol was a given—Bowie transcended Warhol, and Bowie performing Warhol is a perfect trick, given the relationship of both artists to authenticity and art. Bowie intuited—and then exemplified and engendered and practiced—that authenticity is a performance, that authentic authenticity must be performed. This is why David Bowie was the signal artist of the emerging 21st century.
I don’t remember the first time I heard David Bowie, but I do remember a few months after I graduated college, on the way to work, sleepy, maybe a bit hungover, breaking down in tears at “Space Oddity” for no good reason.
I don’t remember the first time I heard David Bowie, but I do remember the first time I heard David Bowie at a wedding.
I don’t remember the first time I heard David Bowie, but I do remember drunkenly demanding that my best friend blast “Blue Jean” at a party he was having.
I don’t remember the first time I heard David Bowie, but I do remember my son asking who John was re: “John, I’m Only Dancing.”
I don’t remember the first time I heard David Bowie, but I do remember the first time I heard Blackstar. How?
I don’t remember the first time I heard David Bowie, but I do remember how sad I felt the day Lou Reed died—was he not immortal? If Lou Reed could die anybody could die. But not David Bowie. David Bowie is too immortal to die.
The intimacy we feel with our heroes. They sing for us. They sing loud and public, or privately for us. We sweat to them or fall asleep or space out or more. We jam them into our ear. We know that they wrote those songs for us. About us. How ridiculous to think, Well of course you didn’t know David Bowie! Of course I knew David Bowie.
I don’t remember the first time I heard David Bowie, but I do remember pulling out David Bowie records and playing tracks from them all afternoon.
I don’t remember the first time I heard David Bowie, but I do remember that there’s a lot I’m forgetting, but I’m just riffing and ranting and maybe you loved him too. I bet you did.
“A country, a people…Those are strange and very difficult ideas.”
— Four Ways to Forgivenss, Ursula K. Le Guin (1995)
—Each of the novels in Ursula K. Le Guin’s so-called Hainish cycle obliquely addresses Wells’s question by tackling those strange and very difficult ideas of “a country, a people.” The best of these Hainish books do so in a manner that synthesizes high-adventure sci-fi fantasy with dialectical philosophy.
—What am I calling here “the best”? Well—
The Left Hand of Darkness
Planet of Exile/City of Illusions (treat as one novel in two discursive parts)
The Dispossessed
—(How oh how oh how dare I rank The Dispossessed—clearly a masterpiece, nay?—so low on that little list? It’s too dialectical, maybe? Too light on the, uh, high adventure stuff, on the fantasy and romance and sci-fi. Its ideas are too finely wrought, well thought out, expertly cooked (in contrast to the wonderful rawness of Rocannon’s World, for example). None of this is to dis The Dispossessed—it’s probably the best of the Hainish books, and the first one casual readers should attend to. (It was also the first one I read way back when in high school)).
—The novels in Le Guin’s so-called Hainish cycle are
Rocannon’s World (1966)
Planet of Exile (1966)
City of Illusions (1967)
The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
The Dispossessed (1974)
The Word for World is Forest (1976)
Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995)
The Telling (2000)
—Okay, so I decided to include For Ways to Forgiveness in the above list even though most people wouldn’t call it a “novel” — but its four stories (novellas, really) are interconnected and tell a discrete story of two interconnected planets that are part of the Hainish world. And I pulled a quote from it above. So.
—(I keep modifying “Hainish cycle” with “so-called” because the books aren’t really a cycle. Le Guin’s world-building isn’t analogous to Tolkien’s Middle Earth or Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. (Except when her world-building is analogous). But let us return to order).
People write me nice letters asking what order they ought to read my science fiction books in — the ones that are called the Hainish or Ekumen cycle or saga or something. The thing is, they aren’t a cycle or a saga. They do not form a coherent history. There are some clear connections among them, yes, but also some extremely murky ones. And some great discontinuities (like, what happened to “mindspeech” after Left Hand of Darkness? Who knows? Ask God, and she may tell you she didn’t believe in it any more.)
OK, so, very roughly, then:
Rocannon’s World, Planet of Exile, City of Illusions: where they fit in the “Hainish cycle” is anybody’s guess, but I’d read them first because they were written first. In them there is a “League of Worlds,” but the Ekumen does not yet exist.
—I agree with the author. Read this trilogy first. Read it as one strange book.
—(Or—again—pressed for time and wanting only the essential, read The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness—but you already knew that, no?).
—Rocannon’s World, Le Guin’s début, is maybe her most overlooked novel. It’s overstuffed with ideas, concepts, riffs—a garden germinating in a frantic fun rush. From the get go, Le Guin spins fantasy tropes—the Tolkien shit, if you like—on their ear, spins them out into golden sci-fi stuff. New old yarn for a new tapestry. Or blueprint (?!). Rocannon’s World is the big Hainish blueprint (only it’s the kind of wonderful blueprint that is only a blueprint in retrospection; a blueprint that is in no way a plan at all).
A stranger comes to town. (Doesn’t he always?). And by town we mean planet. A stranger comes to town (planet) and bears witness to the town’s (planet’s) fantasies, myths, legends, cultures (the culture of the culture). Anthropology, of course. But our viewpoint character—Rocannon here—he makes us examine our own tropes anew: Elves, dwarves, angels. Heroes. Good, evil, etc. Are we not Men (and Women)? Are we not People? Are we not a People?
—With Planet of Exile, Le Guin initiates a refinement to Rocannon’s perfect rawness. We find restraint and a bit of balance, but lots and lots of fun. Reading Planet, I could not help but think that George R. R. Martin should be sending Ms. Le Guin barrels of that HBO loot, for in Planet of Exile we find
Seasons that last for years, decades even
Northern barbarians invading the “civilized” south
Monstrous snow ghouls who might as well be called “White Walkers”
Fear that “Winter is coming.”
Planet also foregrounds the Hainish cycle’s (so-called, eh) theme of colonization.
—City of Illusion is a marvelous discontinuous sequel to Planet; Le Guin tugs at threads from the previous work that we foolish readers might not have thought to tug at. City of Illusion feels like Le Guin’s first thorough philosophical exercise. (Please do not think I’m discounting the intelligence of the first two novels—I am not). This is a novel about memory and identity and place—and at its core, it makes its reader mull over truth and lie: about knowing, and how we know what we know. But it’s also a thriller, a page turner, a yarn. City of Illusion is an epistemological fantasia, and it points toward Le Guin’s greatest achievement in her Hainish suite: smart novels that frame enormous philosophical debates within engaging, propulsive fantasy fiction. And as I write this now, I wonder if it isn’t my favorite of the lot.
[Dear reader, I hope you didn’t think I’d be summarizing these books!]
—But back to Le Guin again, offering the roughest schematic for the reading of her Hainish books (which are not a Hainish cycle, as she’s warned us):
Then you could read The Word for World is Forest, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, in any order. In Dispossessed, the ansible gets invented; but they’re using it in Left Hand, which was written fifteen years earlier. Please do not try to explain this to me. I will not understand.
[How not to fall in love with those last two sentences!?]
—The Word for World Is Forest is an angry angry novel. What is the cliché?—“Choked on anger”? The Word for World Is Forest is choked on anger, the fat glistening bitter anger of the wholly righteous. This allegorical novel is about the awful evil stupid nihilism of the Vietnam War. It is effective and sad as an anti-war tract, and admirable in its persistence in showing how war makes people less than people (Wells’s “Are we not Men?” echoes perhaps most strongly here—or at least most existentially, in that word’s political shade). And Word for World doesn’t fall into the trap-plot of Colonizer-sees-the-error-of-his-ways-and-leads-the-native-people-in-righteous-revolt-against-the-baddies that James Cameron’s forgettable blockbuster Avatar utilized. (Like the aforementioned Mr. Martin, James Cameron owes Le Guin some bucks—Avatar ripped off quite a bit of The Word for World Is Forest). Ultimately though, Word for World is too on-the-nose in its criticism of the Vietnam War—the book fails to transcend its time. It’s a screed. It might be skipped. But it’s short.
—The Left Hand of Darkness is amazing. Perfect in its strange imperfections and crammed with fables and myths and misunderstandings, it is the apotheosis of Le Guin’s synthesis of adventure with philosophy. Darkness is about shadows and weight. About pulling weight—literally, figuratively. It’s also the story of an ice planet. (A stranger comes to the ice planet!). It’s a political thriller. It’s a sexual thriller. But the impression that lingers strongest: The Left Hand of Darkness is one of the better literary evocations of friendship (its precarious awful strange wonderful tenuous strength) that I’ve ever read.
—The Dispossessed—well I loaded my thoughts on it upfront, nay?—The Dispossessed feels closer to Le Guin’s non-Hainish 1971 novel The Lathe of Heaven in some ways than it does to its so-called Hainish kin. Both novels formally (and spiritually) evoke yin and yang, opposition, conflict, stress, and, ultimately, synthesis. The Dispossessed is a riff on anarchy and stability, allegiance to one’s community and family weighed against personal vision and ecumenical dreams. Again, to reiterate—of this cohort of novels it is, along with The Left Hand of Darkness, essential.
—-Four Ways to Forgiveness shows Le Guin flexing some formal prowess. We have here four novellas in different forms—two distinct romances, a bildungsroman, and a journal—employed to tell a story of slavery and civil war (not unlike our own American history in some ways). The book also features an appendix that reads like a textbook—another genre, I suppose—a formal device that hearkens all the way back to Rocannon’s World.
—The Telling, as its title suggests, is about storytelling, about how we remember (and forget) through what we choose to tell and how we choose to tell it. In previous Hainish books, Le Guin critiqued colonialism, egoism, racism, sexism, slavery, and war. The Telling condenses those major themes into a sustained but measured attack on late capitalist corporatism. Published in 2000, The Telling somehow feels like a post-9/11 novel; cyberpunk touches, like unmanned drones in warfare for example, feel darkly prescient. The Telling succeeds most in its evocations of what empathy means and looks like and sounds like. This novel is about listening—about the difficulty of and the vital need to listen while suspending judgment.
—If The Telling ends up being the last Hainish novel, then it will provide a fitting of answer of sorts to the question, Are we not Men? —that is, Are we not People? —or, really, Are we not a People? The dialectical spirit of The Telling—and all the Hainish novels, of course, suggest that, Yes, if we can listen and tell and listen and tell—and find adventure in listening and telling and listening and telling, then, Yes, we are People. A People.
I don’t like films where nothing good happens, my wife told me years ago. I can’t remember the film that occasioned this remark, and I don’t find myself beholden to her rubric, but I still find myself applying it to films now and then. Especially after watching Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight.
Does anything good happen in The Hateful Eight?
(This is not the right question to ask about a film, but—).
This question isn’t the same as, say, Is any part of The Hateful Eight good?—because so many of the elements are good—excellent even—Ennio Morricone’s score, Robert Richardson’s cinematography, Yohei Taneda’s set design.
And the acting is great, or sorta great, or it’s hard to tell, maybe. Let’s say the performances are great. I mean, it’s Tarantino, so the acting is always at least one level removed from reality—even in Sam Jackson, the realest dude, the dude who carries the film as former Union officer, Major Marquis Warren. Sam Jackson is Tarantino’s main man, his star of hyperreality, and his performance is electric here.
But for hyperreality, it’s Jennifer Jason Leigh who stands out in The Hateful Eight. Her portrayal of prisoner Daisy Domergue is refined Looney Tunes slapstick. Cartoon soul. Watching Walton Goggins (vile racist ex-Confederate marauder Chris Mannix) or Kurt Russell (bounty hunter John Ruth)—both of whom get lots and lots of lines and screen time—one can’t help but realize one is seeing an actor acting—or, more Tarantinoesque—a character acting.
But Jennifer Jason Leigh, remanded to a punching bag for much of the film—or even stranger, a chained work-wife to Kurt Russell’s John Wayne parody (via Kurt Russell’s John Wayne parody as Jack Burton in Big Trouble in Little Trouble)—JJL imbues her Daisy Domergue with a wily pathos that surpasses both the script she’s made to read and her Seussian name.
Not that JJL’s Daisy Domergue’s isn’t vile, nasty, deeply racist, and hateful…but her hatefulness points towards something, I dunno, complex. Real. True. (I should mention now Laura Bogart’s essay “Hipster Misogyny: The Betrayal of The Hateful Eight,” which I think offers an intriguing read on the film. Bogart seems to argue that JJL’s DD is not complex enough, or not given enough complexity, which, hey, okay, fair enough—but I think also that Bogart was disturbed by the film’s conclusion—which I was too, disturbed).
But: Does anything good happen in The Hateful Eight?
What do I mean here by good? Should I just admit I don’t know “good,” but rather feel “good”? Okay. I don’t know good through definition, but rather by example. Fuzzy precis. Good: Perhaps a moment of redemption, but like, say, an earned one, a real one, one not forced through a Hollywood formula. Good might be kernel of hope—a real moment of hope, not just an up established for a foreshadowed down. Or maybe by good I just mean something aesthetically true.
Tarantino’s best films—the Kill Bill films, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, and Reservoir Dogs—point to something good in their conclusions—and by conclusions I mean both literal endings and thesis statements. I’m not sure if I find this same “goodness” evident in the conclusion of The Hateful Eight, or, if it is there, it’s awfully ambiguous.
The conclusion of The Hateful Eight is the not-exact opposite of the end of my favorite Tarantino conclusion, the end of Kill Bill 2:
And The Hateful Eight’s conclusion is the not-exact opposite of the ending of Jackie Brown’s bittersweet take on redemption, loss, and escape—American lives that earn second acts.
And The Hateful Eight’s conclusion is the not-exact opposite of the ending Pulp Fiction, a film that resurrects Vincent Vega and sees Sam Jackson’s Jules Winnfield suspend wrathful violence and judgment on Tim Roth’s Ringo (or Pumpkin. Or whatever his name was).
And what about those films that didn’t make my silly little list of “Best Tarantino” — Inglorious Basterds (which is one of my faves, actually, just to watch for like, pure entertainment), Django Unchained, and Death Proof (which actually belongs on that best-of list, maybe, or at least the final sequence)? Shoshanna Dreyfus using film as weapon to end the Nazis? Django’s righteous rampage against slavery? Or the ecstatic violence of “the girls” destroying serial killer Stuntman Mike?
What most of QT’s conclusions share in common is that they somehow mediate the relationship between revenge and justice, and do so in a way that’s aesthetically convincing. The Hateful Eight also seeks to be a film about the relationship between revenge and justice. Its final moments attempt to aesthetically recapitulate much of American history into a morbid sequence of violence.
[Fair warning: There’s a discussion of the conclusion of The Hateful Eight coming up, including what some folks might call spoilers].
Tarantino’s long-simmering nightmare boils over: Poison, abjection, vomit. Castration, a bed, blood. A hanging, a howling, a witch. Cooperative violence. And then that letter from Lincoln. A false letter, but a beautiful one, its words buoyed by Morricone’s swelling strings. A document in a film that fetishizes documents, its characters requesting and demanding them of each other repeatedly. The Lincoln letter seems to provide some kind of solace to the last survivors as they approach death. The letter serves as a post-orgasmic-violence nightcap for these strange (literal) bedfellows. “Now that was a nice dance,” remarks Warren; “Sure was pretty,” Mannix replies. They are describing the hanging of Daisy Domergue. Panting, exhausted they fall to sleep. To death.
The note of hope The Hateful Eight’s conclusion might offer in the form of racial cooperation between Mannix and Warren administering justice seems tainted by everything that comes before it (the abjection, the racism, the sexism). However, the film’s punctuation mark, the aesthetic anesthetic of the Lincoln letter (followed by Roy Orbison’s anti-war tune “There Won’t Be Many Coming Home”) offers a kind of redemptive note. What does it mean though that Major Marquis Warren authored that letter himself? Is this the sham of a conman? Or the force of imaginative agency protecting itself in an unjust world? Both? In the Lincoln letter, rhetoric is transmuted into feeling and feeling into belief.
This is the power of aesthetics: To evoke the feeling of the feeling—the feeling of believing through feeling. Notably, Warren’s Lincoln letter darkly mirrors his earlier comment to General Sandy Smithers: “You startin’ to see pictures, ain’t you?”
Warren tells the story of sexually violating Smithers’s son in revenge for the man’s attempt to murder him. The story horrifies Smithers, and whether or not what Warren reports is “true” or not is irrelevant—the story he tells is aesthetically true—just as his Lincoln letter is aesthetically true. Warren’s explicitly sexual story capitalizes on Smithers’s fear of the black male body (Smithers’s fear is obviously allegorical) in an evocation of absurd cruelty and revenge that Tarantino may have meant to portray as, I don’t know, humorous.
And yet Tarantino seems to punish Warren’s telling of his story in the most primal, hateful way—through castration. This is bad and ugly and not good.
But: Does anything good happen in The Hateful Eight?
Is there something good in Daisy Domergue’s creative act, in her playing the Australian folk ballad “Jim Jones at Botany Bay”? I mean, I think so—or rather, to return to my language above, I guess I feel so. Daisy’s guitar and voice are strangely beautiful, a bizarre affront to the film’s ugliness.
(And yet Daisy is bad. Truly hateful).
But it’s a moment at the end of “Last Stage to Red Rock,” the first chapter of The Hateful Eight that captivated me the most. After a violent ejection from said stagecoach, Daisy sits up among silver birches, catching snowflakes on her tongue.
For a moment, all the ugly ideology—the racism, sexism, and violence—is suspended. Still: the snowflakes are the first signal of the approaching natural violence of the blizzard. The hateful eight—well, there were nine folks in there if we’re counting (RIP O.B.)—or ten, hell, really—but those hateful eight could have cooperated to survive the blizzard.
But: Does anything good happen in The Hateful Eight?
I’m still not sure. I thought I might figure out an answer to the question if I just started writing, but I haven’t. I don’t know. (And good god, I’m sorry if I wasted your time, gentle reader). I’m not sure if anything good happens in The Hateful Eight, but I do think The Hateful Eight is good—because I want to see it again.
After I posted a review on this site of Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Lathe of Heaven, the novelist Adam Novy recommended that I check out her under-read first novel, Rocannon’s World. So I did. Our email exchanges about the book developed over a few weeks (during which time I ended up reading all of Le Guin’s so-called Hainish novels), and Adam’s analysis of the novel is, I think, especially perceptive. An edit of our conversation is below.
Edwin Turner: Thanks for suggesting Rocannon’s World, Adam. I’m not really sure how I missed it in my first few forays into Le Guin—when I was younger it might not have been in my school library—but I’m glad I read it. Very vivid stuff. You told me it was your favorite Le Guin. Why?
Adam Novy: There are many reasons why I love Rocannon’s World. The beautiful and exact descriptive writing, and the syntax. Le Guin can really sing. The sadness of the heroes for their vanished civilizations. The way so many passages evoke the feel of hiking. The flying cats. The incomparable ending.
But it’s the way Le Guin explores the idea of agency sets the book apart for me. The protagonists, Semley and Rocannon, take decisive action they believe in, which sets in motion plots that spiral out of control and annihilate their intentions. Rocannon and Semley end up being massive historical figures, yet also tiny cogs in galaxy-sized machines. This comparison of the massive and the tiny is not a calculated stalemate—not the cultivated balance I think a lot of writers feel we must produce these days, as if our calculations will be checked and we might get partial credit—but an ambivalence that’s immune to human desire or even narrative. It’s one of the things I love about Le Guin. Her idea of a human being’s influence in the world is like the ancients’.
This is fascinating to me in a lot of ways, first at the level of plot. How much should a character affect the world around her? Too much power can seem unserious and thrillery, like a fantasy, like competence porn. (A possible new definition of literary fiction is “incompetence porn.”) Le Guin is just so elegant with this. Semley and Rocannon may be important figures in their communities—Semley is a kind of Duchess and Rocannon is a government anthropologist with administrative dominion over half the galaxy—and yet, by merely performing their own social roles, they ruin everything they care about, including the context in which their identities exist. Le Guin’s formula is magical: a central figure in a community commits a deliberate act, and the consequences are massive, unforeseen, accidental, and diminish this central figure to almost nothing. And yet, despite their total disempowerment, their influence endures in major ways. But even this is misconstrued by people in the future, who tell the history. There is no linear connection between intention and result. The reader feels the ages passing every time Rocannon takes a step.
This leads to the other aspect of the plot I really love, which is political. Rocannon is a bureaucrat in a colonial hegemony, and by honestly yet patronizingly trying to protect the subjects he administrates, he initiates a plot that will destroy them, and himself. He’s a kind of blinkered, well-meaning liberal who does not know what the hell he’s really doing, or how power works, since the force that does the destroying—an anti-government entity called “the enemy”—seems to emanate from the government Rocannon works for. In the end, his people simply don’t belong on the planet, which he only learns when he, too, is a refugee.
ET: But there’s also the sense that Rocannon integrates into the planet—he marries into the Angyar at the end, although we don’t really hear that story. It’s an epilogue that fulfills the legend-structure of the tale. So, on one hand Le Guin’s written this story that’s highly ironic—especially in the ironic title, Rocannon’s World—a title that points to the novel’s themes of colonialism. On the other hand, there’s a sense of discovery and exploration—a kind of High Adventure narrative à la Verne, where our viewpoint character ascends, peers down over the planet from his flying machine (in this case a winged cat).
And then Rocannon sort of achieves his Romantic quest of attaining Semley, or rather the idea of Semley—the exotic, the beautiful, the aristocratic—by marrying into her ancestral chain, and becoming a sort of Duke. This is all very much Fairy Tale stuff, Fantasy stuff. And Le Guin isn’t really synthesizing fantasy tropes with sci-fi in Rocannon’s World. It’s more like she’s tapping into a deeper, mythic vein—so on some level, I think that the novel is really about storytelling itself. There’s something oral and episodic about it, with its riffs on Eurydice and winged men and Valhalla. I reread The Dispossessed after Rocannon’s World. The Dispossessed strikes me as more deliberately structured than Rocannon’s World—more dialectical, more focused, but also centered much more on dialogue-monologue (similar to The Lathe of Heaven). Rocannon’s World is literally more fantastical than The Dispossessed. Do you think that Le Guin’s first novel has been overlooked as a book of ideas?
AN: The Dispossessed is certainly a novel about ideas. Ideas drive Shevek from one utopia to another, and power the book’s discursive engine. Rocannon’s World is less rhetorical, but every bit as intelligent. It’s not really a conversational book, and there aren’t too many meaningful arguments in it. To me, it is definitely neglected, and it’s interesting to think about why that is.
As you say, The Dispossessed is more conventionally binary. Rocannon’s World has two points of view, Rocannon and Semley, but these characters hardly meet at all, and never have an important conversation. Rocannon’s World is not about debate, it’s about losing one’s identity, and what it’s like to be an exile, and to live in a world where narratives are vanishing.
Rocannon lives out several roles within the book and his identity is chipped away completely, but none of this is really spoken about or described, so the reader has to understand these transformations, these movements from one narrative to another, for herself, she can’t compare what someone said to something said by someone else. The book does not have oratory, and I think it’s this implicitness that conceals the novel from its readers. There’s a way in which one reads the book, but may not have the words to understand what they are reading.
This is not an argument against arguing in books, even though, in the wrong hands, it can be a cheesy way to get ideas into a novel without actually embodying them. But Rocannon’s World is not a book that talks; it represents. Myths and stories overwrite each other and Rocannon has to keep transforming to adjust to them. At one point, he is abducted by what he thinks are angels, but—and I’m trying not to spoil this here—they turn out to be something very different. He only thinks they’re angels because they’re tall and thin and quiet and look golden, and their home is like a De Chirico city made by bees. He thinks they’re angels because his culture taught him angels look like that. The joke is that we, too, would think they’re angels, while they’re sucking out our blood. Like him, we’re living in the wrong myth, and in the wrong cosmology.
Every time a new reality befalls Rocannon—and they really do land on his head; this is an incredibly sad book—he has to shed another layer of himself. Both he and the reader feel how far he is from home, and how he’s never going back. Even at the end, when he is married, the marriage burns away the other lives he’d hoped to lead. One imagines he feels lonely on his wedding night. The last line of the book packs all the other narratives into itself and turns them into loss.
All this is mobilized but little of it is said. I don’t think Rocannon’s World is hard to read, exactly, but one may feel that major things are happening in it, without quite knowing what they are. That may turn some readers off.
Maybe the trendiness of Le Guin will reach this book. Another thing that makes the novel tricky is the way she deals with what we might call “Tolkien races.” That is an entirely different issue.
ET: Yeah, so there are these races in the novel that seem, at first anyway, like High Fantasy archetypes. There’s the Fiia, who are fair forest dwellers—they’re basically the Elves. And there are the “trogoldytes,” the Gdemiar, who live in caverns and aspire to various forms of technology—metalwork and basic engineering, for example. They’re like the Dwarfs. Even the humanish characters, the Liuar, are reminiscent of Tolkien’s human races—-there’s something epic or Nordic about the Liuar and their windsteeds.
But as you point out, “myths and stories overwrite each other” in this novel. We learn that the Fiia and the Gdemiar have split from an earlier ancestor, and are therefore “incomplete.” I think there’s a strong echo of Eloi and Morlocks here. Like Wells’s Time Traveler who preceded him, Rocannon becomes enmeshed in the people he’s trying to observe. And he also becomes enmeshed in that High Fantasy archetypal structure—he becomes The Hero with Transcendent Powers—but he pays a dear price for those powers. (Maybe “enmeshed” is the wrong metaphor. Maybe his identity “burns away” into a new one—to borrow your metaphor, which of course echoes literal narrative events in Rocannon’s World).
Rocannon’s World begins in the idiom of High Fantasy; the opening paragraph reads like the invocation of some fantastic muse—“How can you tell the legend from the fact on these worlds that lie so many years away?” The language then shifts into a kind of textbookese, offering a few descriptions of lifeforms from Handbook for Galactic Area Eight. These passages are anthropological, but also bureaucratic. The language then moves from bureaucratic “fact” into the realm of “legend.” Most of the prologue, the story of Semley’s necklace, transposes fantasy tropes into sci-fi territory in a way that’s unsettling or unexpected. We’re not talking about Star Wars here, but rather about viewpoints, ways of naming, ways of seeing. I suppose that’s a rough definition of anthropology. In a marvelous sequence, Le Guin shows us what interstellar space travel might look like to someone from a feudal Bronze Age society. She throws readers into a phenomenological description of an event that must be amazing and fucking terrifying—space travel! But she withholds naming it; instead the reader has to assimilate the language and remind himself, Oh, this is a spaceship. Semley doesn’t have the word spaceship. The next chapter punctures all that High Fantasy stuff, or reverses it. The fantastic shifts back into the bureaucratic language of Handbook for Galactic Area Eight. The rest of the narrative is Rocannon’s quest, in some sense, to overwrite the language of that book.
AN: You’re right, that space travel scene is outrageously good. Le Guin is so incredible.
The next two Hainish books, Planet of Exile and City of Illusions, are maybe less about mythic identity and more about accepting that a new and multifarious acceptance of identity is essential in a complicated world, that everyone has to be their own David Bowie.
ET: So, do you think those next two novels show a, I don’t know, jeez, I hate the word, but a maturation in Le Guin’s writing? I think I know what you mean by everyone has to be their own David Bowie, but what do you mean?
AN: I think she starts to write books that are more dialectical, as we said. Books that kind of say what’s going on, instead of just enacting it.
By their own David Bowies, I guess I mean the characters choose who they become. Having an identity is a political act in Le Guin, and it’s stylized. It’s a performance. Mogien dies like Mogien; he “Mogiens,” he becomes his own verb and dies the courageous death he always wanted when he flies his flying cat into a helicopter. Maybe the highest compliment I can give Le Guin is that the death I just described–a man flies a cat into a helicopter—is, in fact, incredibly moving and beautiful.
Hail, Caesar! film poster by Chuck SperryIn her cameo in the Coen brothers’ newest film, Hail, Caesar!, Frances McDormand gets her scarf stuck in her editing machine. It nearly chokes her (or, I should write, her character, film editor C.C. Calhoun) before Josh Brolin’s studio head/fixer Eddie Mannix hits “Reverse,” saving her life.
Like so many of the scenes in Hail, Caesar!, the editing scene is funny, well-acted, impeccably filmed, and ultimately superfluous. It’s a throwaway, a wonderful scrap, one of many scraps that the Coens seem to toss to their audience, goading, Hey, you put all of this together.
The McDormand scene is ultimately just another way for the Coens to highlight the artificiality of their medium. Hail, Caesar! is of course a film about film, a film that aims to satirize how the metaphorical sausage is made. As such, Hail, Caesar! is self-satirizing, meta-metaphorical. It’s the Coens pointing out the flawed seams or imperfect varnish before the product is even finished. McDormand’s editor getting caught in the machine is some kind of clumsy synecdoche then.
These metatextual gestures only helped to heighten my own awareness of Hail, Caesar’s! flawed seams. This is a film brimming with wonderful, energetic set pieces—synchronized swimming with Scarlett Johannsson! — Channing Tatum tap-dancing on a bar! — Alden Ehrenreich (not so famous, yet) stunting on horses!—that add up to almost nothing. The end result would almost be fascinating were it not so dull.
Alden Ehrenreich’s singing cowboy Hobie Doyle is not dull, and every time he’s on the screen Hail, Caesar! threatens to become interesting. “Called up” to be in more, eh, prestigious fare than the cowboy pictures he’s been doing so well in, young Hobie’s plot has the slightest (just the slightest) tinge of Mulholland Drive — “This is the girl.” (Or, eh, “This is the boy. The cowboy”).
Hail, Caesar! can’t commit fully to Hobie for its hero, alas. Instead the film, after an initial bout of goodwill-building (including an especially funny early scene in which religious leaders are invited to critique Hail, Caesar!, the film-within-a-film here)—instead the film (the Coens’ Hail, Casear!, that is) plods along a few not-quite-intersecting tracks, introducing the occasional grotesque for a cameo that serves no real plot point.
Look, I get it. Having a character’s fate expositioned away via clumsy dialogue at the end of the film is like, meta, right? It’s the Coens way of grinning at the corny clumsy past of their chosen medium, hey? It’s like, purposefully, self-reflexively bad, a piss-take on an audience’s willed suspension of disbelief, hm?
Suspension of disbelief—faith. Does Hail, Caser! aim to take on faith? It certainly dabbles, exploring (“exploring” is not the right verb—but I already used “dabbles”) political faith, economic faith, religious faith. Faith in the aesthetic power of film, which again and again Hail, Caesar! attempts to embody via kinetic spectacle before puncturing said aesthetic transcendence with ironc winking (or technical failure).
The signal moment in the film’s ironic treatment of faith is delivered in its penultimate scene. George Clooney’s character Baird Whitlock’s character (a Roman soldier whose name I can’t recall, but, hey, note the layering, man) deilvers a monologue. The speech is meant to be this kinda sorta Road-to-Damascus epiphanic transcendence deaile, and the aesthetic power of Clooney’s Whitlock’s delivery is confirmed internally on set by the various film people (grips and script folk, etc.) offering up admiring Brady nods—only Whitlock stumbles over the last word of the speech—which last word, of course, was faith. Charlie Kaufman did the same thing much better in the funeral monologue near the end of his film Synecdoche, New York. In Hail, Caesar!, the moment feels like a glib trick played on the audience
It’s entirely likely that there’s a much finer design to Hail, Caesar! than I’ve credited the Coens here. Maybe on a second viewing, I won’t be bogged down so hard looking for a thread to follow. (Shagginess is hardly a sin though, yes Lebowski?). And I’ve failed to point out some of the fine performances here—Josh Brolin anchors the film admirably (although half the time he was on the screen, I kept hoping the film would turn into Inherent Vice). Hail, Caesar! has plenty of great moments, and those moments, like I said, might cohere into something sharper upon a second screening. But right now there’s nothing that compels me toward a second screening any time soon.
I reread William Gaddis’s 1975 novel J R this February and, as is usually the case with a reread, I was pleasantly unsurprised by all its unremembered surprises—the jokes and japes, riffs and routines that had oozed from my brain-sieve since that first read back in 2012.
What I was surprised surprised surprised about in my rereading of J R was how much of the first reading had stuck. And stuck hard, soaked in, saturated—the sign of a great grand thing, the em-word thing, the masterpiece thing.
3.
Only a handful of novels are so perfectly simultaneously comic and tragic. Moby-Dick? Yes. Gravity’s Rainbow? Absolutely. (G R and J R, a duo published two years apart, spiritual twins, massive American novels that maybe America hardly deserves (or, rather: theses novels were/are totally the critique America deserves). I guess maybe what I’m saying is J R is the Great American Novel to Come (The Recognitions is perhaps overpraised and certainly not Gaddis’s best novel; J R is. The zeitgeist has been caught up to J R, the culture should (will) catch up).
4.
So I already wrote on J R on this blog: A misfire of sorts from halfway through (in which I offer more description of the novel’s plot and form than I intend to here, maybe), and a thing I wrote after finishing it which (this thing I wrote before, I mean) might be better than anything I can muster here, in terms of analysis, of like, theme. I’ll limit myself to, I don’t know, eleven points in this riff, yes? (Why 11? Why not? Why not go to 11? 11 for Chapter 11, for bankruptcy, for the moral artistic intellectual bankruptcy that the novel J R skewers). So, having limited myself to eleven points, and having not gotten to the damn point yet, which is—
5.
J R is so good, y’all. The book is a performance, an opera, an essay on America, a howl, a condemnation, a farce, a romance, a tragedy. When I read it in 2012 I couldn’t believe how prescient it was, a feeling reconfirmed with force four years later. J R diagnoses and describes and ridicules American corporatism, the industrial-military-entertainment-banking-education-etc. -complex. And then it weeps.
6.
But wait—what I wanted to say is J R is so good—so, uh, entertaining. It’s fucking funny. And sweet.
7.
(And bitter).
8.
And J R’s not as hard a read as some dudes would have you believe. Sure, it’s composed almost entirely in unattributed dialogue—and that can be tough, to start, but you can learn to hear it very quickly.
In his essay “William Gaddis and His Goddamn Books,” William Gass writes that, “J R takes time. J R takes patience. J R takes faith.” But Gass also points out the payoff of J R “unlike other faiths…is immediately and continuously redeeming.”
It is redeeming (continuously), and I don’t just echo Gass here as some kind of rhetorical flourish—reading J R again was a reminder that the novel posits redemption through Bast’s call to action, to his resolve to, as the failed writer (or stymied writer) Eigen puts it, “go do what [he has] to do” to make real art—or, in our hero Bast’s own terms: “…until a performer hears what I hear and can make other people hear what hears it’s just trash isn’t it…”
9.
And in J R the reader becomes the performer, making the voices, singing the voices, (muttering the voices), navigating all the trash, the entropy—J R is a novel of unraveling, where art trips over commercial trash and literal trash–old ads, betting tickets, stock ticker tape, phone book pages, train tickets, scraps. Is there another American novel so aware of its own textuality, its own metatextuality—I mean one that doesn’t goddamn wink all the time at its readers like so much clever postmodern slop?
Gass again: “[J R] is written in speech scraps, confetti-like wiggles of brightly colored cliché. As a medium, it would appear to be as unpromising as might be imagined. And the reader has to ride in the parade and organize all that fluttering that’s come down from on high.” High and low.
10.
And all the heroes of J R—Bast and Gibbs and Amy Joubert, but also the titular J R his own goddamn self (and maybe, if we’re feeling charitable examining this novel of capitalism, Eigen)–they’re falling apart and trying to put themselves back together (even their clothes unraveling, their shoes falling apart). Chaos, entropy.
The whole deal is best summed up in an early episode in which Gibbs rants against the modern education system: “Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos…”
Or maybe it’s best summed up (not the right phrasal verb—maybe described by the chaos of, but gee-dee that’s clunky) in the scraps Gibbs keeps wadded in his pocket or in his folders, scraps toward something bigger—
Gibbs’s novel is Agapē Agape, which is also Gaddis’s last novel. And to go back to whatever thrust this riff had re: rereading—J R coheres, perhaps (it doesn’t have to cohere) after a reading of Agapē Agape (which also, Agapē Agape, works to dismantle coherence, or to emphasize the chaos of thought, or to highlight entropy, or to you know what goddamn it pick your own phrase). What I mean to say is I think it’s a good move to read Agapē Agape after J R.
(What I mean to say is that I care and cry for Jack Gibbs, and find in Agapē Agape for him a redemption and resurrection (and dissolution, of course…)).
11.
So I get to point 11 and fail to say so many things I intended to say—about the novel’s sexiness (it’s sexy!)—about its wit (goddamn!)—
——-about its repetition of phrases like god damn and its unrelenting use of forms of the verb threaten—and ——– and
—–and here I see/read/hear that I’ve been referring to the novel as its own agency, its own its, as if it were its own beast independent of its master Gaddis—
—-which I guess, like any Great Novel (American or otherwise), it is.
Independent, I mean.
And great, I mean.
And, <enthusiasm> You should read read it! </enthusiasm>.
Reading the introduction to Ashley Dawson’s Extinction: A Radical History this afternoon (forthcoming from OR Books), I felt a surreal yet nevertheless familiar twinge of apocalypse anxiety creeping into my right eye, where it tussled around. Is unnerved the metaphor I look for, here? Or is my response more literal? “Extinction is the product of a global attack on the commons, the great trove of air, water, plants and creatures, as well as collectively created cultural forms such as language, that have been regarded traditionally as the inheritance of humanity as a whole,” writes Dawson, and I nod my head. Dawson continues: “capital of course depends on continuous commodification of this environment to sustain its growth.” I nod some more. “Indeed, there is no clearer example of the tendency of capital accumulation to destroy its own conditions of reproduction than the sixth extinction.” More nodding, more anxiety.
Chapter 2 of Extinction, “An Etiology of the Present Catastrophe,” assuages (not its intent, thank gawd) some of my anxiety by beginning with a passage from old ancient historical literature. Dawson gives us a passage from The Epic of Gilgamesh; we get Gilgamesh and his homeboy Enkidu killing the forest guardian spirit Humbaba. I’m more at home in literature, in history, outside of the awful present (I’m thinking that later in the book, in chapters titled “Anti-Extinction” and “Radical Conservation,” that Dawson might like call on me to do something other than to extol the virtues of Thoreau and Emerson to college sophomores. (And nod in agreement with him)).
But so and anyway, reading this prefatory paragraph from Gilgamesh, I made the immediate imaginative leap that literature licenses me: the episode that Dawson has invoked, this city-statesman vs. nature narrative featuring Gilgamesh straight up beheading the forest protector—well, that’s the central conflict/plot in Hayao Miyazki’s 1997 film Mononoke-hime (rendered in English as Princess Mononoke, but I think better translated as Spirit-Monster Wolfchild or something like that, although no one asked me).
More on that in a second, but first, Dawson again, from the middle of “An Etiology of the Present Catastrophe,” wherein we move from literature to history to the present:
The violence generated by what geologists call the Holocene epoch was directed not just at other human beings but also at nature. Indeed what is perhaps humanity’s first work of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh (1800 BCE), hinges on a mythic battle with natural forces. In the epic, the protagonist Gilgamesh, not content with having built the walls of his city-state, seeks immortality by fighting and beheading Humbaba, a giant spirit who protects the sacred cedar groves of Lebanon. Gilgamesh’s victory over Humbaba is a pyrrhic one, for it causes the god of wind and storm to curse Gilgamesh. We know from written records of the period that Gilgamesh’s defeat of the tree god reflects real ecological pressures on the Sumerian empire of the time. As the empire expanded, it exhausted its early sources of timber. Sumerian warriors were consequently forced to travel to the distant mountains to the north in order to harvest cedar and pine trees, which they then ferried down the river to Sumer. These journeys were perilous since tribes who populated the mountains resisted the Sumerians’ deforestation of their land.
Dawson goes on to to detail how the Sumerians’ short-sighted, expansion-oriented agricultural methods led to the downfall of their empire: A scarcity of timber and farming practices that led to a “salt-soaked earth” led to Iraq’s modern deserts.
Before my eye starts twitching again let me return (retreat) to Miyazaki—
—well, I watched Princess Mononoke just this Saturday, the Saturday before Easter—for like the first time in a decade. (We watch his films all the time with our kids (Ponyo, Totoro, and Spirited Away especially), but not Mononoke, which is too abject and violent yet for their tender years. And not Porco Rosso, which isn’t really for kids. Or The Wind Rises).
Anyway: So: Mononoke, I was thinking, rewatching it, was/is this wonderfully, beautiful, aesthetically astonishing take on the beginning of industrialization, and the weaponization of industry, and, like man vs nature, in a primordial sense. It’s also a Japanese Western, a meditation on purity and defilement, and a study of sorts on a feral child. Not having seen it in some time, I was perhaps most struck by how complex, brave, and intriguing I found the industrialist arms-designer/manufacturer Lady Eboshi (voiced by Minnie Driver). She fights against the forest gods, she destroys and pollutes nature, she creates new weapons capable of killing people with a proficiency not yet seen on this earth. And yet at the same time, she finds a home for lepers and prostitutes—and not just a home, but a reason to be, an agency, an existential calling outside of the feudal system that would otherwise reject them. She’s the most human character in the film, perhaps. Miyazaki’s villains are rarely absolute. They are gray, human. And in their complicated, seemingly realistic humanity, I find the consolation of fantasy, yes?
So in viewing Mononoke this Easter eve—well maybe it was the wine I drank transubstantiating (or do I mean consubstantiating?) my blurred vision toward something more (an aesthetic illusion)—
—or and but anyway, so in Mononoke, I found some kind of synthesis, some kind of reconciliation between the wolfchild (Princess Mononoke, human-divine emissary of the old gods, the human not in nature but of and for nature) and the film’s protagonist (the self-exiled marked man Ashitaka—a cursed wanderer like Cain).
But no redemption. Or maybe only aesthetic redemption—which is ultimately anaesthetic, no? The rebirth in Mononoke—spoilers, maybe sorry—well the rebirth is predicated on the same sacrifices (same same but different) detailed in the Easter story. Self-sacrifice: Obliteration of self. The tree-god-guardian—as in Gilgamesh—is beheaded. But Miyazaki contrives a heroic restoration of the godhead, one that turns the literal megafauna creature into a metaphor, an idea—a concept of nature to be attended to—stewarded by—humankind. This is wish-fulfillment, of course.
But hey and so: that fantastic wonderful megafauna, eh? They range and lumber and speak and act and assert agency throughout Mononoke. Boars, wolves, elk. A kirin. Hell, apes. In Extinction, Dawson takes us through the mass extinction of the megafauna that once trudged and bounded over the earth, detailing the “Pleistocene wave of megadeath.” (Should I note that saber tooth tigers and giant sloths and wooly mammoths populated my childhood fantasies more than any T-rex or triceratops?). We—that is humans—we are the big animals now, elephants be damned! (Dawson opens his book with the shocking line “His face was hacked off.” This, in reference to the elephant Satao, felled by poachers). Is it my dreams and fantasies that I find consolation in? In aesthetics? In the crusty rime of religion that sticks to my consciousness?
Extinction frightens me—wait, I said that already, forgive me, I’ve been applying anaesthetics, okay—Dawson’s take is real, urgent, vital. It makes me face that I prefer my ecological criticism couched in the fantasy of the fantasy-past (Mononoke) or the doomed-but-hey-maybe-not-so-doomed-future (I’ll call here on Mononoke’s twin, Miyazaki’s 1984 epic Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, as an example). But prefer is not the right mode/verb here (and neither is the spirit of this riff, a solipsistic navel-gazing blog of myself). This failure is my failure.
Maybe skip ahead, eh?— “The struggle to preserve global biodiversity must be seen as an integral part of a broader fight to challenge an economic and social system based on feckless, suicidal, expansion,” Dawson writes later. And skimming ahead more, I see notes on regenesis, ideas toward rewilding. Dawson’s last paragraphs—damn me, I skipped way ahead, looking for rhetorical solace—point toward “a human capacity to dream and to build a more just, more biologically diverse world.” A rhetorical flourish is easy but Dawson’s claim here is real—a future requires imagination, but an imagination beyond solace, beyond consolation. Miyazaki’s ecoverses perhaps point toward an imaginative collective future—or perhaps don’t. I don’t have a rhetorical flourish to finish off this riff.
I got a lovely email, with the subject line “Audiobooks,” a few weeks ago from a guy named Ben. Basically, he asked me to do a post on some of my favorite audiobooks, which I suppose I could’ve done fairly easy as a list (and which, yes, if you want to drop down, I will list below, oh-so-non-definitively)—but after thinking about his question, I thought I might break the post up into a couple of posts on audiobooks in general—the excellent ones, the average ones, the terrible ones afflicted by readers who misread the material; the audiobooks I’m auditing now/recently; childhood favorites (on vinyl!); hell, maybe even a totally pretentious post called “How to listen to audiobooks” or some such garbage.
Before I go on though, let me share Ben’s email (he gave me his permission), which is mostly a marvelous anecdote about Álvaro Mutis’s Maqroll novellas:
After reading your post on The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, I immediately ordered the book and read it with my father as we travelled through Borneo, passing it back and forth every dozen pages. The reading became even more significant as we reached the passage in which Maqroll is laid up sick in Northridge, California, in an area surrounded by orange groves. This area is where my father spent his childhood. Reading Maqroll with my father on that trip stands as my most meaningful reading experience. I thank you for putting us onto that book.
Have you done a post yet on your favorite audiobooks? I’d like to get your recommendations. I recall you mentioning a few in previous posts, but could not track them down. Keep at it.
Ben’s Maqroll story surely deserves a response in full, fleshed out detail, and my next post will discuss in detail why I praise the following audio productions. But for now a list (sans, alas, Álvaro Mutis: our Gaviero Maqroll has not found his way into an audiobook yet, at least to my knowledge).
In no real order, and by no means definitive, a list of eight perfect or near-perfect audiobooks:
Moby-Dick, Rockwell KentI am a huge fan of audiobooks. I’ve pretty much always got one going—for commutes, jogs, workaday chores, etc. The usual. I love to listen to audiobooks of books I’ve already read, in particular, but I of course listen to new stuff too, or stuff that’s new to me, anyway. There just isn’t time to get to all the reading and rereading I want to do otherwise.
Beyond the fact that audiobooks allow me to experience more books than I would be able to otherwise, I like the medium itself: I like a reader reading me a story. Like a lot of people, some of my earliest, best memories are of someone reading to me. (The narrative in my family was always that my mother fell asleep while reading me The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and that I picked it up and finished it on my own and that’s how I “learned” to read—I’m not really sure of this tale’s veracity, which makes it a good story, of course). So I’ve never fully understood folks who sniff their noses at audiobooks as less than real reading.
Indeed, the best literature is best read aloud. It is for the ear, as William H. Gass puts it in his marvelous essay “The Sentence Seeks Its Form”:
Breath (pneuma) has always been seen as a sign of life . . . Language is speech before it is anything. It is born of babble and shaped by imitating other sounds. It therefore must be listened to while it is being written. So the next time someone asks you that stupid question, “Who is your audience?” or “Whom do you write for?” you can answer, “The ear.” I don’t just read Henry James; I hear him. . . . The writer must be a musician—accordingly. Look at what you’ve written, but later … at your leisure. First—listen. Listen to Joyce, to Woolf, to Faulkner, to Melville.
Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Melville—a difficult foursome, no? I would argue that the finest audiobooks—those with the most perceptive performers (often guided by a great director and/or producer) can guide an auditor’s ear from sound to sense to spirit. A great audiobook can channel the pneuma of a complex and so-called difficult novel by animating it, channeling its life force. The very best audiobooks can teach their auditors how to read the novels—how to hear and feel their spirit.
I shall follow (with one slight deviation, substituting one William for another) Gass’s foursome by way of example. Joyce initiates his list, so:
I had read Joyce’s Ulysses twice before I first experience RTÉ’s 1982 dramatized, soundtracked, sound-effected, full cast recording of the novel (download it via that link). I wrote about the Irish broadcast company’s production at length when I first heard it, but briefly: This is a full cast of voices bringing the bustle and energy (and torpor and solemnity and ecstasy and etc.) of Bloomsday to vivid vivacious vivifying life. It’s not just that RTÉ’s cast captures the tone of Ulysses—all its brains and hearts, its howls and its harrumphs—it’s also that this production masterfully expresses the pace and the rhythm of Ulysses. Readers (unnecessarily) daunted by Ulysses’s reputation should consider reading the book in tandem with RTÉ’s production.
Woolf is next on Gass’s list. Orlando is my favorite book of hers, although I have been told by scholars and others that it is not as serious or important as To the Lighthouse or Mrs. Dalloway. It is probably not as “difficult” either; nevertheless, put it on the list! Clare Higgins’s reading of Orlando remains one of my favorite audiobooks of all times: arch without being glib, Higgins animates the novel with a picaresque force that subtly highlights the novel’s wonderful absurdities.
Faulkner…well, did you recall that I admitted I would not keep complete faith to Gass’s short list? Certainly Faulkner’s long twisted sentences evoke their own mossy music, but alas, I’ve yet to find an audiobook with a reader whose take on Faulkner I could tolerate. I tried Grover Gardner’s take on Absalom, Absalom! but alas!—our reader often took pains to untangle what was properly tangled. I don’t know. I was similarly disappointed in an audiobook of The Sound and the Fury (I don’t recall the reader). And yet I’m sure Faulkner could be translated into a marvelous audiobook (Apprise me, apprise me!).
Let me substitute another difficult William: Gaddis. I don’t know if I could’ve cracked J R if I hadn’t first read it in tandem with Nick Sullivan’s audiobook. J R is a tragicomic opera of voices—unattributed voices!—and it would be easy to quickly lose heart without signposts to guide you. Sullivan’s reading is frankly amazing, a baroque, wild, hilarious, and ultimately quite moving performance of what may be the most important American novel of the late twentieth century. A recent reread of J R was almost breezy; Sullivan had taught me how to read it.
Mighty Melville caps Gass’s list. I had read Moby-Dick a number of times, studying it under at least two excellent teachers, before I first heard William Hootkins read it. (Hootkins, a character actor, is probably most well-known as the X-wing pilot Porkins in A New Hope). As a younger reader, I struggled with Moby-Dick, even as it intrigued me. I did not, however, understand just how funny it was, and even though I intuited its humor later in life, I didn’t fully experience it until Hootkins’ reading. Hootkins inhabits Ishmael with a dynamic, goodwilled aplomb, but where his reading really excels is in handling the novel’s narrative macroscopic shifts, as Ishmael’s ego seems to fold into the crew/chorus, and dark Ahab takes over at times. But not just Ahab—Hootkins embodies Starbuck, Flask, and Stubb with humor and pathos. Hootkins breaths spirit into Melville’s music. I cannot overstate how much I recommend Hootkins audiobook, particularly for readers new to Moby-Dick. And readers old to Moby-Dick too.
“What can we do to find out how writing is written? Why, we listen to writers who have written well,” advises (or scolds, if you like) William Gass. The best audiobook performances of difficult books don’t merely provide shortcuts to understanding those books—rather, they teach auditors how to hear them, how to feel them, how to read them.
About halfway through Mahendra Singh’sAmerican Candide, our omniscientish (yet beguiled) narrator slows down for a moment to offer an internal critique (and useful summary) of the novel thus far:
If Candide could address the reader right now, he would probably apologize for both the breakneck pace and pixelated tenor of his adventures so far. Modern literature evolved beyond that sort of thing long ago, and an easy-to-swallow plot enlivened with a soupçon of ironic handwringing is all the rage today. The idea of a fictional hero running afoul of angry fathers, jihadi terrorists, secret police, corporate mercenaries, a cable TV network, and a secret cabal of global warmers simply boggles the reader’s mind, an authorial fate worse than death.
And yet of course many readers enjoy a good mind boggling every now and then.
I do, anyway.
Our narrator’s little condensation of the novel thus far reminds us that stylistically and formally, American Candide is a true heir to Voltaire’s Candide. Both novels offer a “breakneck pace and pixelated tenor”; both novels pulse with picaresque energy; both novels drip with delightfully venomous satiric acid; both novels are basically one-damn-thing-happening-after-another. Both novels are funny as fuck all.
Our narrator’s quick summary also jabs at the limitations of contemporary socially-conscious-realistic fiction—you know, “serious literature”—which limitations American Candide dispenses with in favor of frenzied fun. Instead of a soupçon of ironic handwringing, we get full-blown glorious agitation.
What’s all the agitation over?
American Candide’s full title is American Candide; orNeo-Optimism, a direct nod to Voltaire’s full title, Candide; or Optimism. But Singh’s subtitular prefix points to other connotations: Neoliberalism, neoconservatism—hell, neofascism—but most of all, the irony that very little of human nature really has changed in three centuries. The big ideals of the Enlightenment continue to radiate too radically for some folks.
To wit, American Candide carves sharply into the last two decades, synthesizing the dangerous follies of the Bush Gang (and the subsequent fallout of their crimes) into a kind of mythical transposition. Singh offers a cruel fun satire of the neo-optimism that underwrites blind belief in “the better-than-best of all possible worlds, 21st-century America”. The novel’s satirical sting is simultaneously sweetened by intense humor and painfully amplified by the cruel realism underneath Singh’s zany hyperbole. Tell all the truthbut tell it slant, as the poet advised.
And so American Candide is terribly terribly funny but also terribly terribly sad.
For example, Singh’s take on Hurricane Katrina shows American Candide’s capacity to condense historical critique into sharp moments that bristle with anger leavened in caustic humor:
The offending hurricane was clearly an act of god, and the Freedonian government prided itself on its special relationship with god.
Another snippet (“Hooterville” is New Orleans’s Freedonian stunt double):
The winds howled, the clouds unleashed a torrential rain, and the fetid waters of an entire ocean climbed over the heads of those surviving Hootervillains too patently lazy to live on higher ground.
Just a page or two later, Candide and Pangloss mistake armed and uniformed authorities for civil peacekeepers:
Rah! Ooh! We’re better than best police! … We’re Tender-Mercynaries® from Baron Incorporated, booyah, and this is a federally-restricted emergency disaster area, yoot-yoot rah booh!
Instead of helping our heroes, the mercenaries abduct, torture, and interrogate them. Candide and Pangloss find themselves in black hoods at a black site, and even though our young hero “had been lightly sodomized and beaten and even urinated upon…his innermost Freedonian convictions had not been too badly shaken.”
It’s the reader who shakes, in a mix of laughter and rage. The world of American Candide is simply our own world dressed up in a satirical frock that somehow reveals, rather than covers over, our society’s garish ugliness, our addictions to binding illusions. Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains, commented Rousseau (Voltaire hated Rousseau).
American Candide’s blurb warns that, “College-boy sissies will call it a Juvenalian satire upon America’s penchant for mindless optimism and casual racism.” Hooray for college-boy sissies! But no, really, I think that’s a fair assessment—as is Singh’s Candide’s assessment from the aforementioned blurb: “rage against the rage, Voltaire-dude!”
But it’s not just rage: Laughter—laughter in the all-seeing eye of absurdity—it’s laughter that undergirds American Candide.
The book’s longevity might easily be attributed to its prescience, for Voltaire’s uncanny ability to swiftly and expertly assassinate all the rhetorical and philosophical veils by which civilization hides its inclinations to predation and evil. But it’s more than that. Pointing out that humanity is ugly and nasty and hypocritical is perhaps easy enough, but few writers can do this in a way that is as entertaining as what we find in Candide.
Singh’s update-reboot-translation of Candide fittingly answers Voltaire’s pessimistic prescience with not just bitter affirmations of contemporary predation and evil, but also with an eye toward entertainment—to the affirmations of laughter.
[Note: All the illustrations in this review are by Mahendra Singh, and are part of American Candide].
Like, what is the 2016 U.S. presidential election but a short story Ballard might have written in 1983 (and hopefully thrown in the trash)?
Ballard’s 1975 novel High-Rise is particularly concerned with this present-future condition: the phrase to come (as in a future to come) repeats throughout the novel, a key dissonant note.
Near the end of the novel, Ballard’s free indirect style drifts into the mind of protagonist Robert Laing:
...he found it difficult not to believe that they were living in a future that had already taken place, and was now exhausted.
A version of this line shows up in the first minutes of director Ben Wheatley’s 2015 film adaptation of High-Rise.
While Ballard’s satire evokes the post-future’s psychological (ir)reality, Wheatley’s film adaptation feels like a nostalgic period piece for a future that came and skedaddled. Perhaps he (and his fellow filmmakers—screenwriter Amy Jump, the editor, the set designers and costumers, etc.) found it impossible to do more than stylistically recapitulate the Modernist contours that Ballard transcended.
The retro cars, suits, and architecture all put High-Rise more in a quaint, remote past than a dystopian future. They also add to the sense of otherworldliness that hangs over the film.
And so does the sense that High-Rise is driven more by Wheatley’s poster-ready striking images — a suicide falling from a high balcony in ultra slow motion, Laing expressionless and spattered with paint — than by any sort of human drives.
(I modify “review” in the above with “proper” because Robinson wrote a real review; I’m not doing that here. I think her take on the film is far more detailed and broad than what I’m doing here, and certainly attends more to the, like, plot of the film—even as she acknowledges that the plot basically gets put on the back-burner for long stretches).
So probably my biggest quibble with the High-Rise film adaptation is its nostalgia, its obsession with midcentury modernism and Brutalism and style—by which I mean the idea of style—over, like, ideas.
Those ideas: Ballard’s central critiques of capitalism, consumerism, and class do come through in the film, but Wheatley and his team resist giving them any air to breathe, let alone room to stretch their legs. (My god. Forgive me these metaphors, this terrible personification).
There are very, very few scenes in the film where people exchange ideas.
Instead, ideas are wedged in, often in snippets lifted directly from the book, crammed quickly into a frame that will surely veer back into the film’s main technique: Montage!
The first chapter of Ballard’s novel is titled “Critical Mass.” As I pointed out in my review of the novel, “Ballard dispenses with any simmering in his tale of depraved debauchery,” and gets his pot boiling in a hurry.
In contrast, Wheatley’s film gets a slower—but strong—start. (The first 50 or so minutes are actually pretty great).
At its midway point though, the High-Rise film tries to pick up the pace—dramatically. The solution is montage after montage.
Indeed, the final hour of the film slips into a state of near-constant montage. The big set piece scenes (y’know—dance parties and food riots and orgies and the like) dissolve into the film’s frenetic technique. It often feels as if Wheatley is more interested in making a bunch of cool music videos than a film. While this jumpy method might have been the filmmakers’ intention—y’know, to evoke paranoia, anxiety, exhaustion, claustrophobia, etc.—the result, at least for me, was a kind of paradoxical lethargy, a creeping dullness.
Key moments, like the first encounter between Wilder and Royal for example, fly by in rushed blips. It’s as if Wheatley was afraid that if he let two people talk on-screen for more than 30 seconds the viewers would not, y’know, pick up on the fact that we are witnessing the thin veneer of society crack open revealing an abject tumult of sex and violence underneath.
(Wilder—the Id man! Royal the Superego. So much of Ballard’s psychological stuff gets lost in the film, which foregrounds class hierarchy instead of synthesizing the two. But that’s a separate quibble).
What were likely great performances (and much potential for humor) get lost in all the short cuts and montage.
Still: Sienna Miller is great as Charlotte Melville, and Tom Hiddleston is charming enough.
But best in the film—at least for me—is Elizabeth Moss as Wilder’s pregnant wife Helen.
Still, the filmmakers insist on mining her pregnancy for cheap nostalgic jokes—she’s always smoking, always finishing a drink or pouring a new one.
Which brings me back to: Why a period piece? Why not update High-Rise—or, even better take it outside of time completely?
(It will be interesting to look at the film in twenty years: Oh! These were the aesthetic obsessions of the 2010’s, these were the nostalgic totems of that silly decade).
(And while I’m wedging points in parenthetically in a rush: The ending. I read the novel’s conclusion ironically—the high-rise is a phallic failure, and as its patriarchy devolves into chaos and death, a matriarchy arises (or maybe coalesces is the verb I want). But the film concludes more ambiguously—sure, it points to the idea of a matriarchy (or harem)—but it leaves Laing in the kind of alpha male position that the novel had sought to ironize).
And, to return to point 24: Did the filmmakers underestimate the currency of Ballard’s satire? We live in an era of radical wealth inequality, where the richest in our society are rapidly establishing their own private greenzones away from the plebeians. High-Rise is more timely now than ever.
(A short list of (non-)adaptations of J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise: Pete Travis’s Dredd (2012), Matteo Garrone’s Gomorra(2008), and George Romero’s Land of the Dead (2005)).
(And re: point 27 w/r/t adaptations—in a sense, Ballard adapted/revised the novel himself in his 2003 novel Millennium People).
Reading back over this riff, briefly, I see that there’s so much I left out—on stuff the filmmakers left out (why change the key plot point of Laing’s sister?)—on stuff I should’ve praised more (great soundtrack; good cinematography)—but most of all, what doesn’t come through is my admiration that the filmmakers tried. And they tried hard, successfully evoking a Ballardian style. But while the High-Rise adaptation delivers Ballardian style, that Ballardian style only points at itself, and not at our Ballardian present, our Ballardian future.
Mahendra Singh is an author, illustrator and editor in Montreal. His other published books include a graphic novel version of The Hunting of the Snark, illustrations for D.A. Powell’s Cocktails, BSFA-award winner Adam Roberts’s 20 Trillion Leagues Under the Sea and Martin Olson’s NYT-best selling Adventure Time Encyclopaedia. American Candide is his first novel—read my review of it here. He was kind enough to talk with me about American Candide over a series of emails.
Biblioklept: How long have you been working on American Candide? When did you get the germ for the book?
Mahendra Singh: The Iraq War and its brazen marketing campaign got me started on American Candide. Not just the war but the hopelessness of opposing it made me realize how lightly the Enlightenment sits upon modern America. The way that people insisted upon being told what to think, it was torn from 18th-century headlines. Also, the ease with which religion fit into the war’s marketing scheme, almost like it was made for that … It’s not just the USA, of course, this is human nature throughout the world but since modern America is the equivalent of the Ancien Regime in so many ways, a riposte from the Enlightenment seemed indicated.
I had always wanted to update a classic that is only a classic because it no longer stings. Voltaire’s attacks on god, the military, imperialism and money don’t make many people squirm anymore. I wanted genuine squirm … I wanted younger readers to realize that we read the classics not because of dead white guys or because everybody-says-so but because the classics show us how little human nature changes. And once you realize that things were just as weird in the 18th-century, then you are embarked on the path of genuine free-thinking. It worked for some of the Founding Fathers so it’s actually double-plus-more patriotic than being clueless-and-proud-of-it.
I started working seriously on American Candide around the time of Hurricane Katrina (which could have been a 21st-century Lisbon Earthquake if it had happened to Boston) and the book’s first draft was done in about 3 months. I wanted to match Voltaire’s MO as best as possible:
1. Same word count
2. As close to the original plot as possible
3. Easy to read with no stylistic stuff to impede the story. Voltaire knew people don’t want to be preached to, they want to laugh and then you slip them the mickey. Hence the book can be read in three sessions (toilet, subway, opium den), I really did plan that.
After the first draft, it took several years to finish because I also freelance as an illustrator. Unlike Voltaire, I don’t live off the stock market.
Biblioklept: Was there a particular translation of Candide that you worked from or favored? Or did you read it in French, perhaps?
Mahendra Singh
MS: I used the Barnes & Noble reprint of the old Henry Morley translation, revised by Lauren Walsh. I am not too fussy about translations and this one is fine. But the number one reason I got this edition is that it features the excellent illustrations of Alan Odle, a sort of Bloomsbury precursor of Ralph Steadman. I don’t know much about him but his sense of the grotesque was unique. An inspired choice of illustrator for this text. The cover price of $4.95 also influenced my decision.
I’ve read Candide in French and Morley is a bit more turgid than The Master … Voltaire’s French is slightly flatter and lighter. My French is not very good, most Francophones freak out when they hear me mangling their mother tongue. They are more touchy about that than Anglophones, which probably explains why English is the global lingua franca, ha!
Even people who don’t speak a word of French freak out when I do so. Must be the moustache, like watching Saddam Hussein doing his cocktail party impression of Pepe le Pew. You WILL laugh.
Biblioklept: I first read Candide in Lowell Bair’s translation, with some awfully bawdy illustrations (by Sheilah Beckett) that left an indelible mark on me. The book zapped me. I was in the 10th grade and I didn’t know that such literature existed—that serious literature, like, the lit that the English teacher assigned could be like Marvel Comics, with folks dying in wild ways and then coming back to life. I want to come back to illustrations in Candide in a bit, but I’m curious about your first encounter with the book…
MS: After a bit of internet poking, I found some samples of your Candide illustrator, Sheilah Beckett, and was very impressed. That old-fashioned, fluid American draftsmanship, I love it. I did some more poking and found the first Candide I read, probably when I was about 12 years old, the Washington Square Press paperback with Zadig included, translator Tobias Smollett. I remember enjoying both stories as amazingly fast-paced ripping yarns. I was also a Gulliver’s Travels fan and Smollett must have made the connection even stronger.
My father was an English professor so our home was a bookworm’s paradise, he had a home and office library. I had read pretty widely in the classics by then and I remember sensing that there was something hidden behind the surface in Voltaire, not quite accessible to a kid and thus even more intriguing. The authorial perversity of punishing the hero and allowing the wicked to prosper without ever once doing something about it, it was very adult … but clearly not the standard-issue adult of 1960s-70s America.
That is the genius of Voltaire, when it comes to ideas AND execution, he is perpetual beta. The Enlightenment still inspires fear and loathing in most quarters, the drooling imbecility of contemporary politics and mass-media is proof positive of that.
Biblioklept: The drooling imbecility of contemporary politics and mass-media is what makes American Candide a possible book, a funny book, but also, I think, a somewhat sad book.
MS: I made a reader laugh and weep simultaneously, success at last! The original Candide was also black-humored but at least Voltaire’s readers could hope that their on-going Enlightenment was going to change things. We know nothing’s changed that much and American Candide wallows in that particular Slough of Despond. We are a drooling species of slack-jawed idiots and the more we try to clean up, the more we smear ourselves filthy.
The core message of the Enlightenment is thinking-for-yourself, as clearly and simply as possible. It’s very difficult, no matter how clever we think we are, it’s genuine hard work and we are a profoundly lazy and shiftless species. You will never get a majority of Homo sapiens to simultaneously think logically about anything (especially in voting booths). We only think in disorganized spurts, usually on our own and in the privacy of our own homes, just in case any other monkeys are snooping around, looking for easy egg-head prey.
The current American political mess is just mass cognition waxing and waning in a natural cycle, it’s not an American thing, it’s a human thing. The wicked revel in their cleverness while the mob cheers them on, despite the hurt it does them … that’s as old as the Peloponnesian War. At some point, things will improve, probably after considerable pain and suffering for those who least deserve it and most tried to get out of its way. A clinching argument to prove the suitability of god’s plan for us if you think god was made in the human image.
Life’s a bummer but perhaps after we struggle and suffer all our lives for mostly nothing in particular, we’ll die and be reborn as cute puppies or cuddly kittens. That’s what religion’s about, mostly … it is all a bit sad, I agree, but it could be even worse — what if all the rubbish inside people’s heads was actually true?
So let’s count our blessings and laugh, laugh, laugh!
Biblioklept: In a way, it seems like our Slough of Despond makes composing a new Candide simultaneously easy (in that the material to satirize is pretty obvious) and challenging (in that the material to satirize is pretty obvious).
MS: You bet! Boring readers to death with Michael Moore style hectoring and cheap, easy laughs is so … boring. As an author, I don’t want to be bored either, I want to have a good time, every time, with my readers. Life is short, let’s have a few laughs instead, let’s take the obvious to its comical, logical extreme, far beyond the limits of decency and safety, all the way to utter stupidity, our core human value. Lurching between incongruous voices and POVs also helps. Seguing from Candide’s view of the Third World to the Third World’s view of Candide while also mixing up linguistic registers while also describing the most horrific atrocities, it’s like those cheap Saturday morning cartoons where the same landscape whizzes past the foreground no matter what’s going on.
And that’s the final twist of the knife, the fact that such matters must be discussed in an entertainment mode, not a reportage mode, to get people’s attention. That’s what’s really bumming you out.
On reflection, it’s all rather … Teutonic. That’s why I dedicated the book to my mother and her sister. Germans like to laugh black, very black. They know what happens when you ignore the obvious for too long, the punchline is apocalyptic.
Biblioklept:American Candide is called American Candide, but Our Hero is “Freedonian,” and visits all sorts of places outside of Freedonia (like Costaguana and Funkistan), as well as within Freedonia (Hooterville, Wollyhood, Kreationland, among others). At the same time, there are references to “New England” and “Latin America,” although these are a bit more oblique/less “fixed” as settings in the narrative—they’re more like concepts. Why are these geographical transpositions important to your Candide?
MS: Making up funny names for foreigners was a tip of the ink-stained turban towards Evelyn Waugh. Also, I didn’t want AC to become an exercise in finger-pointing at the USA because any problems America has are not unique to America, they are universal human problems … ie., American exceptionalism is anything but. Bundling various countries into cultural pseudonyms — such as making Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan et al. into Funkistan — makes it easier to poke fun at shared lunacies.
I have no nationalist/ethnic axes to grind (honest!), I just want to make things hot for readers, make them wonder if they’re looking at things through American nativist glasses or non-American glasses.
One reason AC was so hard to pitch to publishers was this confusion of POV. I discovered that some of them could not tell whose leg was being pulled and when and even why. Or they thought readers could not, which is even more damning. The idea that human behavior is universal and that Joe Six-Pack thinks pretty much like an Afghani peasant seems unpalatable in certain commercial quarters.
The mental force-field of imperialism is strong juju, in fact, that is the secret of American hegemony: the global spectrum power of American culture, delivered through mass media vectors, is unique in human history. But the money to maintain this comes from the top and the guys at the top are never as clever as they think they are. They’re as dumb as the rest of us, the money’s just a fig-leaf.
On reflection, so much of this book is written from an immigrant’s viewpoint, but not a sanitized, My-Secret-Daughter, made-into-TV-movie immigrant viewpoint. To some immigrants, countries are just labels for different flavors of shared delusions.
Biblioklept: To your last point—and this is more of a sad obvious observation on my point, not a brilliant insight toward a probing question—to your last point, the current American zeitgeist is infected with an ugly streak of xenophobia and nativism right now—on the level of something I never thought I’d see in my own lifetime, to be honest. But reading American Candide—which is, in a way, rereading Candide—shows that the progress we may think we’ve made is not as stable as we think it is. American Candide isn’t a “message book” (except that it is!)—I mean, as you say, it’s a comedy—but like most great comedy, its humor relies on intense pathos, on tragedy. Can American Candide — or Candide — change someone’s mind?
MS: Books rarely change minds, they only encourage the germination of ideas already lurking in you. Art always preaches to the choir, that’s the difference between art and advertising. That’s also the difference between art and pop-culture … another topic for further novels! I just want people, especially younger people, to think a little harder about what they already know to be true.
Biblioklept: So, speaking of young people, my son, five, is sitting here with me, now, and he picked up American Candide, and he wants to ask a question: What is that thing on the front of the book? Is it a monster or what?
MS: The cover depicts Pure Appetite … like a really mean version of Cookie Monster if he had to wear a hat to go out to fancy social events where he can eat people, not just cookies.
Biblioklept: So, my son has sort of taken over now—he wants to know about some of the pictures. The first one he found (I had the page dogeared), was an illustration that takes on Blake’s Newton His first question was, What is it? So I showed him Blake’s Newton and talked a bit about Newton, but my son wants to know why your Newton is a monster.
MS: Blake’s Newton is actually Blake updating the medieval idea of God as the Geometer, god as the logic of reality. This Christian idea is itself a slap in the face of the Greek idea of man-as-geometer, the knowledge seeking animal. All the Abrahamic religions loathe paganism, it’s harder to weaponize, for one thing.
If one ascribes everything to god, then one must ascribe all that is stupid and useless to her also, not just the cool stuff like math and physics. God as idiot man-child is more accurate when one considers the world as we find it. Unless you think the world is perfect which is heretical to a Christian, I would think.
I love Blake dearly but his religious ideas are laughable. Ditto Medieval Scholasticism. But both of them wrote amazing fantasy fiction.
Biblioklept: What are some of the other reference points for your illustrations in American Candide?
MS: About half of the drawings were either from my files or re-workings of previous illustrations. Time ran short on the book, I was also doing another book for Penguin/Random House plus all the design/typesetting on American Candide; Bill Campbell, the publisher at Rosarium, very kindly let me do the whole package exactly the way I wanted.
I’ll admit that some of the illos have only a tangential relationship to their assigned chapters … some of them are just weirdo eye-candy but that kind of fits the breathless, inane tenor of the book, I hope. Some of them are a bit subtler than I would risk with a paying client … commissioning editors tend to be literal about art. Some random notes
One illustration is a parody of Elihu Vedder’s Questioner of the Sphinx … the searcher for oracles deserves a cretin’s advice. The duck-headed woman throughout the book is a shameless swipe from Alberto Savinio, the brother of Di Chirico. There’s a trend in certain illustrative circles to stick animal heads on people bodies to make deadpan comments upon something or the other. This is my deadpan comment upon their deadpan comments.
Another illustration parodies the “Am I Not a Man?” emblem of the Abolitionists … playing with Rousseau’s announcement that “everywhere man is born free, yet everywhere man is in chains.” Usually self-imposed chains, we now know, thanks to modern science.
Another is a re-hash of Manet’s Olimpia which is itself a rehash of Titian.
Really hip readers will know also recognize one illustration is a swipe on 2 Live Crew’s As Nasty As They Wanna Be … Voltaire enjoyed scantily-clad women, as did most 18th-century rappers, so … why not? It’s always about women anyway, to paraphrase Flaubert.
Not only are there numerous visual quotes in the book, but I have also sprinkled quotes from various American political luminaries in the text. The reality of public discourse is so inane these days, you don’t need to make too much of it up.
Biblioklept: I had picked up on a few of these…the Manet, the Abolitionist image…and the 2 Live Crew cover parody too (I have a very vivid memory of my mother finding my cassette of that fabled record).
You’re probably best known for your illustration work…did any publishers ask for, I don’t know, like, a graphic novel of Candide?
MS: I hope your mother had a sense of adventure and fun. No publisher ever suggested a GN … it wouldn’t work as a GN without significant changes. Laughing words are not always laughing pictures and the laughter is key. Plus it takes so much longer to draw/write a GN than a novel. Writing is faster because it’s less physical; the brain muscles involved are not quite the same but roughly congruent, it’s the eye-hand stuff that slows you down.
I have a secret fantasy that a cartoonist such as Kaz or Gary Panter does the heavy lifting of penciling a GN so I would only have to ink the faux-engraving linework … that would look very cool, very unsettling.
I do think a GN is an excellent, and probably more profitable idea if done carefully … publishers never suggested it not only because they like their GNs commercially fool-proof but because they disliked American Candide. Some of them disliked the idea of charging people $9.95 to tell them how dumb they are and some of them disliked being told how dumb they were. The punchline is that I’m as dumb as any acquiring editor but just in different directions. I’m a self-aware idiot.
Biblioklept: Chris Ware kind of did it as a mini-graphic novel on his cover.
MS: Thanks for jolting my memory, I had forgotten Ware’s stab at it. He did a top-notch job of it. I like his work but in small doses, my eyes can’t process his visually compressed style anymore plus the emotional flatness works best in small doses.
He might have wanted to do the material as a contemporary update, he would have nailed it for sure, but few editors would allow that on a book cover. Like I said earlier, Candide is allowed to remain a classic in Corporate America (and Corporate Academia) because it seems like ancient history at first glance. If Ware had drawn a deadpan comix about slaughtering American and Iraqi teenagers just to make a defense executive’s boat payment, it would have really bummed out the marketing department. Marketing and PR departments are America’s moral gatekeepers now.
Biblioklept: I like that you’ve made the linguistic distinction here of “comix.” It seems that comics has come to dominate our mainstream culture. (In the late eighties, ten-year-old version of me, wishing for a Chris Claremont-penned X-Men film, created this awful timeline. I apologize). But…comix vs comics…Marvel Comics’s films often play with the idea of critiquing the industrial-military-entertainment-complex, but ultimately they seem to uphold Our National Myth. In some ways, these comic book films have co-opted some of the critical tools of comix while dispensing with the spirit of comix.
MS: We are getting to the heart of the darkness here, the unholy marriage of money and art. Those Marvel movies are brilliant technically, like Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and Olympia. The basic axioms underpinning the National Myth are ignored, just … because! It drives intellectuals nuts, that you can sell anything you like, no matter how patently nuts, by simply ignoring the facts. The corruption of the defense industry, for example, is a pop-culture perennial, but that’s an old propaganda ploy … by making bad apples, you create the illusion of a barrel of good apples.
The rift between American comics and comix is roughly speaking, the rift between making money or not making money. The rift widens and narrows periodically, according to the formulaic demands that publishers make on artists and writers. Which brings me to Bill Campbell and Rosarium Publishing; Bill’s insistence on getting minority viewpoints into print — not just comix but also novels — is bridging this gap.
The obstacles to expressing minority viewpoints, never mind just being a minority, in the media today are overwhelming. In fact, being a minority is not so much of a problem as the general public might think, it’s when you open your mouth, that’s when things get sticky.
Most minority narratives allowed into media distribution are like those Marvel movies, manufactured to maximize the majority’s sense of self-esteem and thus crack open their wallets. But it’s not because people in publishing are evil, it’s because they dare not risk too much of their employers’ money. Some publishers prefer minorities who don’t have the caste connections to game the system and thus must do more for less. Step ‘n Fetch-It can’t phone it in.
That’s another Marvel movie construct … that America would be OK if we returned to our mythical meritocracy. To paraphrase the Great Cham, sinecured hacks howl the loudest for meritocracy.
I’m probably going to be sent to diversity-awareness training after this interview … again.
Biblioklept: Calculated and cynical mass entertainment, a distracted body of citizens (tax payers!), one of the most ridiculous presidential elections in ages…a lot of the backdrop of our discussion points to a self-satirizing culture, a zeitgeist where parody seems almost impossible, or inadequate. American Candide (often obliquely) takes on some of the failures of the George W. Bush administration. How much time do we need for satire to “work”? Is our age as absurd as any other?
MS: Although I started my Candide in the Bush era, I guarantee it’s still applicable to the impending Trump or Clinton 2.0 administration or any clownshow administration for the next 50, nay, 100 years! And deep down inside, you know I’m right.
That’s the only way satire, or at least effective satire works: making the reader truly give up hope and understand that the USA in 2016 is not a freak occurrence, it’s how things usually are. That’s why I sent Candide overseas. The openly psychopathic mentality of Third World politics, for example, makes it easy to spot its more cleverly concealed counterparts in American politics and then reflect on the implications. All over the world, human beings are screwing other human beings out of laziness, greed, religion, sometimes even out of self-pity. America is not special, it’s just that late-imperial cultures prefer their citizenry a bit clueless. Defunding the educational system, encouraging public religion, deregulating the media, these have all done a splendid job of mass sedation and mass amnesia.
I’m trying to promote American Candide as the Chosen One, destined to rescue America from darkness and oppression by bringing a hilarious message of utter hopelessness to the nation’s youth. I think this generation in particular will really “grok” the dissonance and with the royalties I earn, I can afford a seat on the last flight out of the Führer Bunker.
I don’t know how to type a smiley-face but I think this is the perfect place for one.
Biblioklept: How do you read the end of Voltaire’s Candide? The famous last line seems open to multiple interpretations.
MS: That line is willing to run off with any world-view you care to entertain … we should cultivate our garden, that could have come from Ayn Rand, the Dalai Lama, Jesus … it’s amazing ad copy. The selfish Benthamite implications balance out nicely with a vaguely Christian notion that we might be doing something worthy to begin with. And there’s Voltaire’s 18th-century assumption that different people deserve their different, possibly less fruitful gardens, which is a shout-out to Plato and in a roundabout way, all the guys in jackboots and leather lurking in the shadows of dialectic materialism.
For me it’s always meant that one should leave the insides of other human being’s heads alone, which is often impractical because whenever human beings interact, they rummage around in each other’s brains, deliberately or not. Deep down in the cynical depths of American Candide’s faithless heart is the bitter realization that free-thinking is a (mostly) happy accident for all of us. But then he bounces back and starts bungee-jumping or parkouring because, hey, dude, cultivate your own garden.®
With a PBS voice-over it would make a great Monsanto-GMO TV ad and if you slap it on a coffee cup, it could empower a lot of people to drink more tasteless coffee grown by actors who look like illegal aliens to most Americans. Say it while drinking tasteless coffee and waving a gun at a dope fiend and you just coined this week’s catchphrase on a cop-reality-show.
Biblioklept: Without, like, uh, spoilers, I guess (which our contemporary culture so obsesses over)—do you think American Candide’s conclusion is a revision to Voltaire in any way?
MS: Spoilers … all of reality is a spoiler for the afterlife, I suspect. Voltaire’s approximate message of just minding your own business also makes a great, all-purpose threat when regurgitated from American Candide’s mouth. He can’t help making threats because that’s his reality: a world that is frightening and illogical, probably because the words he uses are either meaningless or opposite to their true meaning. Or perhaps words first lost their meaning, then the world dimmed for him … a subtle problem.
I’m not going to trot out Orwell here, instead I’ll whip out my King James Bible, the literary bedrock of the Anglosphere. Every sentence in the Bible is utterly meaningless because it is contradicted by another sentence and/or physically impossible. Yet millions of Americans think that this collection of words is logically and empirically true. This is where the trouble starts, by building a culture’s language upon lies and thus subverting all words for all people.
Language and religion are deeply related, but for now, let’s admit that the tribal paranoia we call religion is a major factor in Candide’s automatic perversion of all words into either threats or invitations to debauchery.
Which brings me to a word you see a lot in AC: freedom. In the USA, this word currently means the exact opposite of its traditional meaning, it means the willingness to let others tell you what to think and do. It even means the willingness to die so that someone more clever than you becomes even wealthier, in fact, it’s the secular equivalent of the word jihad in Muslim countries. Like jihad, freedom outflanks logic and makes all dissent treasonous. The common denominator in both cultures is that religion lays the groundwork for mass insanity and mass murder.
God, freedom, minding your own business … from the mouth of Candide they are feral threats … nothing means anything when everything is against me, me, me. The destruction of language is a powerful antidote to the Enlightenment.
This is not only a revision of Voltaire, it is a demonstration of how much our fellow citizens fear Voltaire’s message. The Enlightenment is a permanent revolution, Marxists can only talk about it, Voltaire did it!
Biblioklept: And art…?
MS: The hidden contempt that our culture harbors towards art will drive you nuts if you think about it … so don’t think too much … write instead! And if you can’t write, read smartly. I find great solace in the classics and have devoted most of my life to trying in whatever way I can to perpetuate the classical tradition (in concealment) and create situations where young people can gain access to the eternal truths and beauty of the classical world tradition. We are living in a time of imperial decline and must preserve the best of the past as our ancestors did in similar times of trouble. The pendulum will swing the other way in a few centuries.
Brazilian writer João Gilberto Noll’s 1991 novella Quiet Creature on the Corner is new in English translation (by Adam Morris) from Two Lines Press.
The book is probably best read without any kind of foregrounding or forewarning.
Forewarning (and enthusiastic endorsement): Quiet Creature on the Corner is a nightmarish, abject, kinetic, surreal, picaresque read, a mysterious prose-poem that resists allegorical interpretation. I read it and then I read it again. It’s a puzzle. I enjoyed it tremendously.
So…what’s it about?
For summary, I’ll lazily cite the back of the book:
…Quiet Creature on the Corner throws us into a strange world without rational cause and effect, where everyone always seems to lack just a few necessary facts. The narrator is an unemployed poet who is thrown in jail after inexplicably raping his neighbor. But then he’s abruptly taken to a countryside manor where all that’s required of him is to write poetry. What do his captors really want from him?
There’s a lot more going on than that.
So…what’s it about? What’s the “a lot more”?
Okay then.
Maybe let’s use body metaphors. Maybe that will work here.
We are constantly leaking. Blood, sweat, tears. Piss, shit, decay. Cells sloughing off. Snot trickling. Vomit spewing. Shuffling of this mortal etc.
(—Are we off to a bad start? Have I alienated you, reader, from my request that you read Noll’s novella?—)
What I want to say is:
We are abject: there are parts of us that are not us but are us, parts that we would disallow, discard, flush away. We are discontinuous, rotten affairs. Bodies are porous. We leak.
We plug up the leaks with metaphors, symbols, tricks, gambits, recollections, reminiscences. We convert shame into ritual and ritual into history. We give ourselves a story, a continuity. An out from all that abjection. An organization to all those organs. We call it an identity, we frame it in memory.
What has this to do with Noll’s novella?, you may ask, gentle reader. Well. We expect a narrative to be organized, to represent a body of work. And Quiet Creature on the Corner is organized, it is a body—but one in which much of the connective tissue has been extricated from the viscera.
We never come to understand our first-person narrator, a would-be poet in the midst of a Kafkaesque anti-quest. And our narrator never comes to understand himself (thank goodness). He’s missing the connective tissue, the causes for all the effects. Quiet Corner exposes identity as an abject thing, porous, fractured, unprotected by stabilizing memory. What’s left is the body, a violent mass of leaking gases liquids solids, shuttling its messy consciousness from one damn place to the next.
Perhaps as a way to become more than just a body, to stabilize his identity, and to transcend his poverty, the narrator writes poems. However, apart from occasional brusque summaries, we don’t get much of his poetry. (The previous sentence is untrue. The entirety of Quiet Creature on the Corner is the narrator’s poem. But let’s move on). He shares only a few lines of what he claims is the last poem he ever writes: “A shot in the yard out front / A hardened fingernail scraping the tepid earth.” Perhaps Quiet Creature is condensed in these two lines: A violent, mysterious milieu and the artist who wishes to record, describe, and analyze it—yet, lacking the necessary tools, he resorts to implementing a finger for a crude pencil. Marks in the dirt. An abject effort. A way of saying, “I was here.” A way of saying I.
Poetry perhaps offers our narrator—and the perhaps here is a big perhaps—a temporary transcendence from the nightmarish (un)reality of his environs. In an early episode, he’s taken from jail to a clinic where he is given a nice clean bed and decides to sleep, finally:
I dreamed I was writing a poem in which two horses were whinnying. When I woke up, there they were, still whinnying, only this time outside the poem, a few steps a way, and I could mount them if I wanted to.
Rest, dream, create. Our hero moves from a Porto Alegre slum to a hellish jail to a quiet clinic and into a dream, which he converts into a pastoral semi-paradise. The narrator lives a full second life here with his horses, his farm, a wife and kids. (He even enjoys a roll in the hay). And yet sinister vibes reverberate under every line, puncturing the narrator’s bucolic reverie. Our poet doesn’t so much wake up from his dream; rather, he’s pulled from it into yet another nightmare by a man named Kurt.
Kurt and his wife Gerda are the so-called “captors” of the poet, who is happy, or happyish, in his clean, catered captivity. He’s able to write and read, and if the country manor is a sinister, bizarre place, he fits right in. Kurt and Gerda become strange parent figures to the poet. Various Oedipal dramas play out—always with the connective tissue removed and disposed of, the causes absent from their effects. We get illnesses, rapes, corpses. We get the specter of Brazil’s taboo past—are Germans Kurt and Gerda Nazis émigrés? Quiet Creature evokes allegorical contours only to collapse them a few images later.
What inheres is the novella’s nightmare tone and rhythm, its picaresque energy, its tingling dread. Our poet-hero finds himself in every sort of awful predicament, yet he often revels in it. If he’s not equipped with a memory, he’s also unencumbered by one.
And without memory the body must do its best. A representative passage from the book’s midway point:
Suddenly my body calmed, normalizing my breathing. I didn’t understand what I was doing there, lying with my head in a puddle of piss, deeply inhaling the sharp smell of the piss, as though, predicting this would help me recover my memory, and the memory that had knocked me to the floor appeared, little by little, and I became fascinated, as what had begun as a theatrical seizure to get rid of the guy who called himself a cop had become a thing that had really thrown me outside myself.
Here, we see the body as its own theater, with consciousness not a commander but a bewildered prisoner, abject, awakened into reality by a puddle of piss and threatened by external authorities, those who call themselves cops. Here, a theatrical seizure conveys meaning in a way that supersedes language.
Indeed our poet doesn’t harness and command language with purpose—rather, he emits it:
No, I repeated without knowing why. Sometimes a word slips out of me like that, before I have time to formalize an intention in my head. Sometimes on such occasions it comes to me with relief, as though I’ve felt myself distilling something that only once finished and outside me, I’ll be able to know.
And so, if we are constantly leaking, we leak language too.
It’s the language that propels Noll’s novella. Each sentence made me want to read the next sentence. Adam Morris’s translation rockets along, employing comma splice after comma splice. The run-on sentences rhetorically double the narrative’s lack of connecting tissue. Subordinating and coordinating conjunctions are rare here. Em dashes are not.
The imagery too compels the reader (this reader, I mean)—strange, surreal. Another passage:
Our arrival at the manor.
The power was out. We lit lanterns.
I found a horrible bug underneath the stove. It could have been a spider but it looked more like a hangman. I was on my knees and I smashed it with the base of my lantern. The moon was full. The low sky, clotted with stars, was coming in the kitchen window. December, but the night couldn’t be called warm—because it was windy. I was crawling along the kitchen tiles with lantern in hand, looking for something that Kurt couldn’t find. I was crawling across the kitchen without much hope for my search: he didn’t the faintest idea of where I could find it.
What was the thing Kurt and the narrator searched for? I never found it, but maybe it’s somewhere there in the narrative.
Quiet Creature on the Corner is like a puzzle, but a puzzle without a reference picture, a puzzle with pieces missing. The publishers have compared the novella to the films of David Lynch, and the connection is not inaccurate. Too, Quiet Creature evokes other sinister Lynchian puzzlers, like Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (or Nazi Literature in the Americas, which it is perhaps a twin text to). It’s easy to compare much of postmodern literature to Kafka, but Quiet Creature is truly Kafkaesque. It also recalled to me another Kafkaesque novel, Alasdair Gray’s Lanark—both are soaked in a dark dream logic. Other reference points abound—the paintings of Francis Bacon, Leon Golub, Hieronymus Bosch, Goya’s etchings, etc. But Noll’s narrative is its own thing, wholly.
I reach the end of this “review” and realize there are so many little details I left out that I should have talked about–a doppelgänger and street preachers, an election and umbanda, Bach and flatulence, milking and mothers…the wonderful crunch of the title in its English translation—read it out loud! Also, as I reach the end of this (leaky) review, I realize that I seem to understand Quiet Creature less than I did before writing about it. Always a good sign.
João Gilberto Noll’s Quiet Creature on the Corner isn’t for everyone, but I loved it, and look forward to future English translations—Two Lines plans to publish his 1989 novel Atlantic Hotel in the spring of next year. I’ll probably read Quiet Creature again before then. Hopefully I’ll find it even weirder.
What book have you started the most times without ever finishing?
I asked this question on Twitter a few days ago (and then asked it a few more times, probably annoying some of the nice people who follow me), and I’ll write a bit about some of the responses later this week. I’m hoping too that some of this blog’s readers will share the novel (or novels) they’ve opened the most times without actually ever finishing.
I got to dwelling on the question a bit after talking with two friends, separately, over the past few weeks, both of whom were having a tough time with Gravity’s Rainbow. Up until last year, Gravity’s Rainbow would easily have been my first answer to this question. How many times did I try to read it between 1997 and 2015? Probably like, what, once a year? At least? And while I don’t think Gravity’s Rainbow is the best starting place for Pynchon, the book is endlessly rewarding, and fits nicely into a little mental shelf comprised of books I made plenty of false starts on before finally finishing (Moby-Dick, Ulysses, Infinite Jest…titles that cropped up on Twitter in answer to my silly question).
Gravity’s Rainbow impacted me so much that I immediately reread it. But I don’t think I would’ve gotten there if I hadn’t read more Pynchon first—and honestly, if I didn’t trust certain critics, if I didn’t trust the book’s reputation. But what about all the books I keep cracking open but can’t quite crack into? Am I missing something? I’m probably missing something.
I rounded up most of the novels I could think of that I’ve tried to read at least four times (conspicuously absent is Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, which I’ve tried to read, hell, what four times? Five including an audiobook?)—I’ll riff a little on them. (As an aside: There are certain books I’ll probably never “finish,” that I have no aim of finishing, which I’m not riffing on here—I’ll write about them separately. The include Tristram Shandy, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Don Quixote, and Finnegans Wake).
Nathaniel Hawthorne is one of my favorite writers, yet I can’t get past Ch. 6 of The Marble Faun. His pal Melville’s Moby-Dick is easily one of my favorite books, one that I return to again and again, and yet I can’t seem to get through Pierre without skimming. I “read” the book in grad school, but I didn’t really read it. I’m fairly determined to read both of these, if only to ameliorate my shame as a would-be completist.
Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma is another book I’m determined to finish (at some point, not now! Not today!—is there another translation besides the Moncrieff?!). If the bookmark in the edition above is true, I made it to page 43 on my last attempt (stopping in the middle of a chapter—never a good sign).
By my wholly unscientific calculations, Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice is the book I’ve started and quit the most times. It’s not even a novel. It’s barely a novella. I should be able to finish it. Maybe it’s a stamina issue. Maybe if I could just sit and read it in one go…
I’ll never finish Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark, but I tried to finish it repeatedly because I, uh, took it from a bookstore without, uh, purchasing it first—the only time I ever did such a thing. When I was a kid. A stupid kid. I confessed (on this blog, years ago—not to the store. The store is gone).
I think I might have read too much Thomas Bernhard too fast, because I keep stalling out on The Lime Works. To be fair, it’s almost impossible for me to read Bernhard in hot or warm weather, and I live in Florida, so the Thomas-Bernhard-reading-weather window is slim. Next winter.
Watching Tarr’s film adaptation of Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s Satantango was difficult enough. (No, I did not do it one sitting). I tried. I tried. I doubt I’ll ever try again.
My Struggle, Book 1. Again, I tried, I tried. Several times. I can’t get down with Knausgaard.
I’ve tried to read Georges Perec’s Life A User’s Manual every summer for a few years now, and I’m not really sure why I can’t get past Part I (about 75 pages or so in). Every time I start into Life, I feel as if I’m missing something, as if some of its humor or complexity is lost on me. Maybe I need something like A User’s Manual for Life A User’s Manual.
I’m sure I’m forgetting plenty of titles (I’m really great at not finishing novels)—but these are the ones that stand out in recent years.
By way of closing: I’m almost finished with Stanley Elkin’s 1975 novel The Franchiser, which would’ve been on this list just a few months ago.
And again, I’d love to hear what novel (or novels) you’ve started the most times without finishing (yet!).
A few weeks ago I finished The Story of the Lost Child, the last of Elena Ferrante’s so-called Neapolitan Novels, and now perhaps have enough distance to comment on them briefly.
The novels have been much-hyped, which initially put me off (nearly as much as their awful kitschy covers), but the same friend who urged me to give Bolaño’s 2666 a go (after I misfired with The Savage Detectives) insisted I read Ferrante.
I’m glad I did. From the earliest pages of the first novel, My Brilliant Friend, Ferrante crafts a world—a brutal neighborhood in Naples—which seems real, full, squirming with dirty bloody life. The novel also reminded me of 2666, although I couldn’t figure out why at first (my friend had not suggested a connection). A simple answer is that both novels are propulsive, addictive, impossibly rich, and evocative of specific and real worlds, real worlds anchored in dreams and nightmares.
But it’s also the horror. Ferrante, like Bolaño, captures the horrific violence under the veneer of civilization. While My Brilliant Friend and its three “sequels” (they are one novel, to be sure) undertake to show the joys and triumphs and sadnesses of a life (and more than one life), they also reverberate with the sinister specter of abjection—the abjection of violence, of history, and of the body itself. The novels are messy, bloody, and tangled, their plot trajectories belying conventional expectations (in the same way that the novels’ awful covers belie their internal excellence—kitschy romantic smears glossing over tumult).
It’s this horrific abjection that fascinates me most about the novels. I’ll offer two longish passages from the final book in the quartet, The Story of the Lost Child, to showcase Ferrante’s prowess with (what I take to be her dominant) theme and tone.
The first passage comes fairly early in the long novel, when our (now mature) heroine Lenù encounters a suicide’s corpse:
No answer. I knocked harder, I opened the door cautiously, the room was dark. I called him, silence, I turned on the light.
There was blood on the pillow and on the sheet, a large blackish stain that extended to his feet. Death is so repellent. Here I will say only that when I saw that body deprived of life, that body which I knew intimately, which had been happy and active, which had read so many books and had been exposed to so many experiences, I felt both repulsion and pity. [He] had been a living material saturated with political culture, with generous purposes and hopes, with good manners. Now he offered a horrible spectacle of himself. He had rid himself so fiercely of memory, language, the capacity to find meaning that it seemed obvious the hatred he had for himself, for his own skin, for his moods, for his thoughts and words, for the brutal corner of the world that had enveloped him.
Ferrante’s passage here strongly echoes Julia Kristeva’s 1980 essay “Approaching Abjection.” Kristeva writes (emphasis mine):
The corpse…upsets even more violently the one who confronts it as fragile and fallacious chance….as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border…the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. It is no longer I who expel — “I” is expelled.
In my reading, Ferrante’s heroines Lenù and Lila are detectives of the abject, of the (literally) unnamable forces of culture (and oh-what-a-culture patriarchal Naples is!) that threaten subjectivity. They each seek to assert an I in a world that would devastate such an assertion.
Lenù and Lila claim their assertion through creative agency—through art. And Ferrante’s greatest strength, perhaps, in the Neapolitan Novels is that she harnesses this art, she conveys the brilliance of these brilliant friends, and does not merely “tell” the reader of their brilliance (like so many contemporary “literary” novels do). Ferrante shows authorship (and genius) as a shared, collaborative process, not an isolation, but a synthesis.
If these novels concern synthesis, they also show fracture, fragmentation, and dissolution. Observe Lenù and Lila in a key moment from The Story of the Lost Child , during a calamitous earthquake (again, emphasis mine):
She exclaimed: Oh Madonna, an expression I had never heard her use. What’s wrong, I asked. Gasping for breath, she cried out that the car’s boundaries were dissolving, the boundaries of Marcello, too, at the wheel were dissolving, the thing and the person were gushing out of themselves, mixing liquid metal and flesh. She used that term: dissolving boundaries.
It was on that occasion that she resorted to it for the first time; she struggled to elucidate the meaning, she wanted me to understand what the dissolution of boundaries meant and how much it frightened her. She was still holding my hand tight, breathing hard. She said that the outlines of things and people were delicate, that they broke like cotton thread. She whispered that for her it had always been that way, an object lost its edges and poured into another, into a solution of heterogeneous materials, a merging and mixing. She exclaimed that she had always had to struggle to believe that life had firm boundaries, for she had known since she was a child that it was not like that—it was absolutely not like that—and so she couldn’t trust in their resistance to being banged and bumped. Contrary to what she had been doing, she began to utter a profusion of overexcited sentences, sometimes kneading in the vocabulary of the dialect, sometimes drawing on the vast reading she had done as a girl. She muttered that she mustn’t ever be distracted: if she became distracted real things, which, with their violent, painful contortions, terrified her, would gain the upper hand over the unreal ones, which, with their physical and moral solidity, pacified her; she would be plunged into a sticky, jumbled reality and would never again be able to give sensations clear outlines. A tactile emotion would melt into a visual one, a visual one would melt into an olfactory one, ah, what is the real world, Lenù, nothing, nothing, nothing about which one can say conclusively: it’s like that. And so if she didn’t stay alert, if she didn’t pay attention to the boundaries, the waters would break through, a flood would rise, carrying everything off in clots of menstrual blood, in cancerous polyps, in bits of yellowish fiber.
Kristeva’s abjection is again strongly embodied in those last few lines—the dissolution, the unspeakable and repressed forces, the trauma. The rivers of abject bodily filth. Here’s Kristeva, again from “Approaching Abjection” (my emphasis):
A massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as it might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries me as radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either. A “something” that I do not recognize as a thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes me. On the edge of nonexistence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safeguards. The primers of my culture.
Lila and Lenù face abjection, the primer of their culture. They trace its contours, aim at ways of speaking the unspeakable—through friendship and the fruits of that friendship: storytelling. The storytelling offers a literal form to handle the abject violence of the culture in its many, many forms (corrupt politicians, abusive fathers, abusive husbands, predatory rapists, predatory lenders, Cammorist gangsters, systemic class inequality, religion…).
The storytelling confronts abjection without seeking a transcendence, an exit, an out. Ferrante recognizes that humans are violent animals, and doesn’t want to comfort us. In an interview, she said:
I’m drawn, rather, to images of crisis, to seals that are broken. When shapes lose their contours, we see what most terrifies us…I cling to those that are painful, those that arise from a profound crisis of all our illusions. I love unreal things when they show signs of firsthand knowledge of the terror, and hence an awareness that they are unreal, that they will not hold up for long against the collisions.
Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels have no interest in consoling their readers. Yet they do evoke an essential power of storytelling, a power not to transcend abjection, but rather to endure a subjectivity through abjection: Love. “Love is something spoken, and it is only that: poets have always known it,” writes Kristeva in another essay, “Throes of Love: The Field of the Metaphor.” In the Neapolitan Novels, Lenù speaks her love to her brilliant lost friend Lila. The result is moving and exhausting, an epic of fragments, a saga as discontinuous and unexpected as a real and full life. And if not all those fragments will stick in my memory, what comes through in the end is a sense of love, an author’s love her characters that persuades the readers to love them too.
“Finish” is probably the wrong verb to use to denote the act of reading, in traditional sequence, all the words on all the pages of a grand great novel. I have never really “finished” the books that I’ve read the most times from cover to cover—books like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Moby-Dick, Ulysses, Blood Meridian, 2666.Something about such books remains somewhere inside of me, unfinished (in contrast to the many, many novels—most often contemporary “literary” fictions—that I truly finish by reading and then jettisoning from memory). The great books that I’ve finished are unfinished. Something of the really great novels wriggles around in the background of consciousness, whispering, howling.
Putting together a little list of books I’m always reading but will likely never finish was not difficult, although I should clarify that I’ve intentionally left off a good number of critical texts—stuff like Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, etc.—as well as the letters, notebooks, and journals of writers that I return to again and again. I tried to stick to novels. But are the works pictured/listed here—Tristram Shandy, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Don Quixote, Finnegans Wake, and 1982, Janine—are these actually novels? The question is complex and productive, but I’ll answer it with the simple, “Yes, but– ”
(And yet, parenthetically: That the novelness of these novels is suspect is perhaps a key to why these are the works that fascinate me, that these unnovelly novels make me stumble; I resort to shelving them, grab for critical interpretations, guides, commentaries, etc.—in the hopes of…of what?)
Joyce’s Finnnegans Wake is a nice starting place for this little list. The novel’s famous opening line (“riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs”) actually completes the novel’s “final” (non-)sentence (“A lone a last a loved a long the”). So Finnegans Wake is a loop, an infinite jest. Over the past decade, I’ve dipped into the book again and again, using Joseph Campbell’s Skeleton Key as a friendly guide. I’ve learned to have fun with Finnegans Wake, taking something from its language, its connections, its syntheses, while abandoning the pretense that I’ve anything to gain by trucking through it at full speed just to “finish” it.
I pick up Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman less often than I used to, having recovered from trying to understand it. The novel seems to me proof that the term “postmodern” is simply a description of a way of seeing, and not a set of aesthetic conditions. Also, I love that Sterne loves the dash—
It’s perhaps a great moral failing on my part that I’ve never made it past the first few chapters of the Second Part of Don Quixote. I’m familiar with it, largely by way of Nabokov’s lectures and summaries. Anyway, I fail to understand Don Quixote; I fail to read it rightly.
Alasdair Gray’s 1982, Janine doesn’t have the same reputation as the other novels I’ve listed here; its inclusion wasn’t so much an afterthought but a realization—I bought it four years ago and have yet to shelve it. It’s always on a coffee table, the edge of a sofa, next to my bed, cooing, Start again. I start reading it and then I skip ahead to its weird black heart, then I read from the end, then I go back to the beginning. Then I put it aside, having made no “progress.”
I don’t know what Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy is. Is it a novel? (Wait. I think we went through this above). I first encountered it as a bewildered undergrad, checking out an old huge hardback edition from the library. I made a small dent (aided by Ritalin). All that Latin is Greek to me. In his preface to the NYRB edition, William H. Gass advises, “Be prepared to proceed slowly and you will soon go swiftly enough. Read a member a day; it will chase gloom away.” I have not read a member a day, but I do like to pull Melancholy from the shelf late at night, after a few glasses of wine, and dip into it somewhere. I will never finish it.
And yet I’ve retained more from these unfinished novels than most of the contemporary fiction novels I’ve read. Anna Livia Plurabelle. The priest burning poor Quixote’s beautiful books. The marbled pages, the blacked out pages, the squiggles of Tristram Shandy. The typographic explosions in 1982, Janine. The dirty bits. The lists. The force of language, above all.
In a sense, not “finishing” these grand weird novels keeps them vital to me, present somehow, promising in their possibility, taunting and tantalizing in their pregnant unfinishabilty.
Roald Dahl’s 1982 children’s classic The BFG begins with a dedication to the author’s daughter: “For Olivia: 20th April 1955 — 17th November 1962.”
If I had noticed the dedication when I first read The BFG as a child, I certainly didn’t think about it then. The slim sad range of those dates would have meant nothing to me, eager as I was to dig into a book about child-eating giants, secure in my own childish immortality. However, when I started reading the book with my daughter, the dedication howled out to me, thoroughly coloring the lens through which I read.
Had Olivia Twenty Dahl not died from measles encephalitis at only seven, had she continued to live to be alive now, she would be approaching her sixtieth birthday. But because she died as a seven-year-old little girl, she remained a seven-year-old little girl to me, the reader, who saw her spirit under every page.
I believe she remained a seven-year-old little girl for Dahl as well—at least in the imaginative world of The BFG where she is recast as the hero Sophie. Reading The BFG, it was impossible for me not to immediately connect Sophie to Olivia, those names with their Greek roots and their long O‘s. It was also impossible for me not to connect these two girls to my own daughter Zoe, who is also seven.
(Parenthetically, I’ll admit that biographical interpretation of literature is often a terrible practice—especially when combined with a touch of reader-response criticism—and that what I am doing here is not something I think advisable, let alone commendable. And yet the central affective power for me in reading The BFG—as an adult to my little girl—rests in my inescapable intuition that Dahl wrote the book to make his daughter live again, to live forever).
The BFG does not have an especially complex plot: Young Sophie, up late at night, is snatched away to a strange country by a giant whom she spies blowing dreams into a room of sleeping children (she does not of course know at the time that he is blowing dreams into the room). Luckily, this is the Big Friendly Giant. Unluckily, she’s stuck in his cave, where he must hide her from nine awful giants (including the Fleshlumpeater, the Meatdripper, and the aptly named Childchewer), who set off into the world each night to guzzle “human beans” (they especially love to eat children). The BFG, smaller than the other giants, refuses to partake in their infanticidal, anthropophagic practices, dining instead on stinky snozzcumbers. While the other giants are out gobbling up humans, the BFG is in Dream Country collecting dream blobs, which he mixes into wonderful visions and blows into children’s homes at night. Sophie and the BFG concoct a special dream for the Queen of England and through this scheme manage to capture the nine terrible giants. Sophie and The BFG live happily ever after.
Dahl’s command of language in The BFG marks the book as one of his strongest achievements. The most obvious and endearing aspect of the book’s language is the voice of the BFG, who invents, inverts, and generally twists up nouns, verbs, and adjectives into a fine mess. He tells Sophie:
Words . . . is oh such a twitch-tickling problem to me all my life. So you must simply try to be patient and stop squibbling. As I am telling you before, I know exactly what words I am wanting to say, but somehow or other they is always getting squiff-squiddled around.
That squiff-squiddling though is what gives the giant’s voice such power. The tinges of nonsense actually reify and amplify what the BFG intends to say. There’s a sing-songy, burbling, bubbling rhythm to the BFG’s speech, which I took great joy in performing aloud for my daughter. Dahl clearly understood that his prose would be read aloud.
The BFG’s trouble with “correct” language derives from the fact that he never got to go to school. In fact, he’s learned everything he knows from one book: Nicholas Nickleby, “By Dahl’s Chickens,” the BFG tells Sophie. The underlying problem that governs the plot of Nicholas Nickleby is the unexpected death of Nicholas’s father. Dahl might have picked any of Charles Dickens’s novels here, but I believe he chose this one to thematically answer to The BFG’s secret plot: A missing father to match a missing daughter.
Dahl also not-so-subtly inserts his own name into the authorial position in this scene, which occurs about half way into the novel. This insertion happens again in the novel’s final chapter, which is appropriately titled “Author.” The book ends with the nine awful giants captured and held in a pit deep in the earth (shades of the Titans), their infanticidal violence contained and suspended, but still alive, still potential. The Queen has an enormous house built for the BFG right by her own palace, with a small cottage for Sophie in-between. The vision, rendered in Quentin Blake’s marvelous wobbly inks, suggests a fairy tale ending, as Sophie finds an ersatz family in the Queen (more of a fairy godmother) and the BFG, her new father.
And yet Sophie too takes on something of a parental role, teaching the BFG to read and write. He soon “started to write essays about his own past life.” Sophie reads these and urges him to become “a real writer … Why don’t you start by writing a book about you and me?”
Reading this chapter the other night devastated me and delighted my daughter. She cackled in glee and I found myself unable to perform the BFG’s voice through my tears. I finished the novel in my own, regular voice, doing my best not to let the sharp cracks of the emotion I felt break into those final lines, where we learn that the BFG, too modest to put his own name on his book (published by the Queen to bring joy to children), has chosen a pseudonym—the one on the spine of the book, Roald Dahl.
The BFG was of course always an author, even before he was literate; his medium was the dream, and he used dreams to tell stories to bring joy to children. He gave these dreams as protest, resistance, and counterattack to the consuming violence of his nine awful brothers.
Dahl’s rhetorical trick at the end of The BFG—claiming his own name as the pseudonym for the book’s real author, the Big Friendly Giant—is far less whimsical than a surface glance suggests. Rather, I find in it something sad, dark, and sincere, a moment of deep love and deep pain. The transposition—the squiff-squiddling, if you will—of the two names signals Dahl’s recasting of himself as the eternal BFG, bringing joy to children all over the world. The BFG gets to live happily ever after with his dream-daughter Sophie (the recast Olivia), their home and family sanctioned and provided for by the land’s highest authority.
But even before the Queen grants the father-daughter pair their own homestead, Sophie has already found her place by the giant—behind his ear, where she whispers to him. Is this not the fantasy of a consciousness that communicates beyond time, beyond death, directly and without the intermediary of a physical body?
Did Dahl hear Olivia’s voice in his own ear decades after her death? Did her spirit speak to him? Speculation of that sort is not my place or intention, and as I type it out, the suggestion appears far more lurid than I wish. I do know that the image was inescapable for me as I finished The BFG with my own daughter.
Our love and care for our children is shaded and intensified by an understanding of their fragility, their mortality, their susceptibility to disease, accident, chaos, the carelessness of others…factors easily metaphorized into child-eating giants. Our love for our own children precludes an equal love for children who are not our own, despite whatever ethical systems we claim to practice and subscribe to.
And this is what I find so moving about The BFG: Dahl converts the personal (and infinite) loss of his own daughter into a loving gift he seeks to share with all children. He shared that gift with me when I was a child, when I never imagined that I would grow up to be an adult with a child of my own to whom I would read that gift again, in a new, strange, sad, dark, joyous way.
Maybe all I am trying to say here, in this long, long-winded way, is Thank you.
[Ed. Note. Biblioklept ran a version of this review in July of 2014. Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation of The BFG is in wide release this week].
I am bored of Hell, Henri Barbusse’s 1908 novel of voyeurism.
Maybe I should blame the 1966 English translation (from the French) by Robert Baldick, which often feels stuffily stuffy for a book about “childbirth, first love, marriage, adultery, lesbianism, illness, religion and death” (as our dear translator puts it in his brief preface). Maybe I should blame it on Baldick, but that seems rash and wrong, and I have no basis of comparison, do I?
So I blame it on myself, this boredom of Hell.
Why write then? Why not write it off, rather, which is to say, do not write—I don’t know.
I’m bored with Hell and there are half a dozen novels I’ve recently read (or am reading) that I should commend, recommend, attempt to write about—but here I am bored of Hell, and writing about it. Maybe it’s—and the it here refers to writing about Hell, a book I confesss a boredom of—maybe it’s because I’ve allowed myself over the last few days to good lord skim the goddamned infernal thing, not skimming for a replenishing sustenance, but rather looking for the juicy fat bits, the best bits, in the same way a teenaged version of myself skimmed Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin in a powerful sweat.
(I was a teenage cliché).
Maybe it’s that the best bits of Hell weren’t juicy enough. (In this novel, an unnamed narrator espies all sorts of sensual (and nonsensual) shenanigans through a small hole in his hotel room). Or maybe the juicy bits were juicy, but the translation dried them out. So many of the sentences made me want to close the book. But it’s unfair for me to write this, I suppose, without offering a sample. Here, from early in the novel, is an excerpt that did make me want to keep going:
The mouth is something naked in the naked face. The mouth, which is red with blood, which is forever bleeding, is comparable to the heart: it is a wound, and it is almost a wound to see a woman’s mouth.
And I begin trembling before this woman who is opening a little and bleeding from a smile. The divan yields warmly to the embrace of her broad hips; her finely-made knees are close together, and the whole of the centre of her body is in the shape of a heart.
…Half-lying on the divan, she stretches out her feet towards the fire, lifting her skirt slightly with both hands, and this movement uncovers her black-stockinged legs.
And my flesh cries out…
Those last ellipses were mine. Did you want more? I did, I admit. And yet after 50 pages, I grew bored. The voyeurism was boring—sprawling. Perhaps I’m lazy. Perhaps I want my voyeurism condensed. Maybe…weirder. I don’t know. Reader, I skimmed. I skimmed, like I said, for morsels—but also to the end, the the final chapter, to the final exquisite not boring paragraph, which I’ll share with you now before “I have done,” as the narrator states in this final section. Promised paragraph:
I believe that confronting the human heart and the human mind, which are composed of imperishable longings, there is only the mirage of what they long for. I believe that around us there is only one word on all sides, one immense word which reveals our solitude and extinguishes our radiance: Nothing! I believe that the word does not point to our insignificance or our unhappiness, but on the contrary to our fulfillment and our divinity, since everything is in ourselves.
MS: About half of the drawings were either from my files or re-workings of previous illustrations. Time ran short on the book, I was also doing another book for Penguin/Random House plus all the design/typesetting on American Candide; Bill Campbell, the publisher at Rosarium, very kindly let me do the whole package exactly the way I wanted.
Really hip readers will know also recognize one illustration is a swipe on 2 Live Crew’s As Nasty As They Wanna Be … Voltaire enjoyed scantily-clad women, as did most 18th-century rappers, so … why not? It’s always about women anyway, to paraphrase Flaubert.
