There are three active possibilities for Go Set a Watchman. In order of likelihood:

1. Everyone forgets about it in a few years. By all accounts, it is not a good novel, and what makes it notable is only the fact that it differs in tone and characterization from To Kill a Mockingbird. The book is properly considered either as juvenilia or as something close to a last novel/posthumous novel/unfinished novel. If the former, people will recognize that it is not particularly interesting on its own: Trimalchio to The Great Gatsby, or "The Waste Land" before Ezra Pound edited it. If the latter, it will go into the same camp as The Last Tycoon or Hemingway's last novels: for completists only. I mean, Jane Austen has juvenilia and posthumous fiction, and no one pretends like either is part of her mature work.

2. It kills off To Kill a Mockingbird in high school curricula, and thus kills the novel altogether. The complications to "Atticus" as a character deprive him of his moral force in Mockingbird, and it's an awkward thing to try and explain to cynical teenagers. The novel can't serve as a simple (not to say simplistic) morality tale, and it becomes a historical curio of a particular time and approach to racial issues, a mid-20th century Uncle Tom's Cabin, to speak of once-influential works on race in America that are no longer widely read.

[A wide distance of probability]

3. The attractions of a novel wherein the narrator is a thinly disguised version of the author who moves to New York City and discovers that even the nice-seeming southerners are terrible racists and her father's not the hero she once thought he was, is a perfectly fine sentiment of the moment, no matter how cliché it is in all details. It feels more real, which is to say dirtier and more degrading of the human spirit, and thus will be taken for the 'adult' version of the children's story. Assuming she is of sound mind (a big assumption, where all people with opinions have vested interests in those opinions being true), then it seems to indicate that Lee didn't understand the value, importance and meaning of her own book. This would hardly be the first time such a thing were true, but it'd be sad all the same.

Agreement with Ruth Graham at Slate on reading Young Adult novels as a non-young adult, with one exception:

I don't begrudge anyone reading anything. I spend time on the internet and with light reading, as well. Literary fiction is certainly in thrall to a handful of techniques, styles, and topics that may be of limited interest, or can become of limited interest if you've read enough examples of them. Tastes change over time, people can/will run out of preferred works by preferred authors, and there's great virtue in changing up the types of authors or books one is reading.

When I think about the really pleasurable experiences of reading in my life, they are all in the tackling of something that seemed far outside by ability or interest but proved itself to be worth the work invested. "Pleasure" is the right word: related to but distinct from the pleasure that comes from reading in general. Part of the thrill of working through my current novel--The Mill on the Floss--is the fact that I began it without much success on several occasions before finding myself interested and able; the initial difficulty and the work are the pleasure of it, no less than the story and its telling; those are the parts of the experience of reading that are mine.

If the debate between the two camps seems stultifying, the primary cause lies in how the YA-ers and the lit fiction-ers treat the two as mutually exclusive options. That literary fiction has mostly surrendered writing about or considering the feelings of childhood and adolescence is a great loss, and better that YA pick it up than no one at all. But before there was a divide, the world had no shortage of literature that spoke to and was usefully adopted by the young.

I am old enough to remember, if slightly, the world of fiction young adults were supposed to inhabit before there were books specifically written for them: David Copperfield, Huckleberry Finn, Little Women, Jack London, Jane Austen or the Brontes, Kerouac or J.D. Salinger, and many others. That is to say: young adults read adult fiction written for adult audiences, but whose subjects were people of their own approximate age and experience in life. Thus you get, ideally, not only the accurate representation of how it feels to be at a certain age, but the knowledge that one will one day surpass all those feelings and come to see the world differently, with more perspective and with greater equanimity. The Mill on the Floss could hardly be matched as an account of a certain part of childhood, where intentions are incompletely transferred to action and emotions come and depart with startling intensity (Maggie pushing her cousin into the mud gets the jumble exactly right). It will not be consumed with immediacy, because its world is different and requires translation, but adult life is about encountering people who have had different experiences and learning how to translate and understand them.

On Charles Dickens

I made offhand reference to this view in the comments to a post of Phoebe's on The Goldfinch, and occasionally make reference to the same on twitter, so it seemed worthwhile to flesh out the entire view that Charles Dickens Being the Primary Highbrow Literary Reference of Our Time Says Nothing Good About Our Time:

When I was making my first serious inroads into adult literature in high school--attempting to be systematic in my reading--I read a lot of literary theory. All the figures I read, regardless of where they sat on the major critical questions of the 1950s (I was reading at my school library, of course), agreed that Dickens was a novelist of the second rank. "Of second rank," for those unfamiliar with British-inflected critical discourse, means "basically unimportant, and producing nothing worth discussing at all." The argument for this position is simple: the 19th century was full of excellent authors and novelists, particularly in English, and was the century in which non-English novelists took the form to new heights. Dickens has to be judged against Flaubert's realism, Zola's political and economic interests, bravura scenes like the battle in The Charterhouse of Parma, Balzac's commitment to depicting every corner of his world (one of the few people who can out-volume Dickens, and with a more obvious masterwork--Lost Illusions--as well), Dostoevsky on religion and psychology, and Tolstoy's Tolstoy-ness. In English, he has to be set against Thomas Hardy's introduction of realism and Henry James' stylistic refinements. Even in the world of the plot-driven novel he has to compete against Jane Austen and George Eliot. And this is to say nothing of modernism, or any of the various changes of the 20th century.

On the level of detail, it's not hard to see why he comes up short. Dickens produced very few memorable lines, far fewer than any master stylist might, astonishingly few for the volume of his writing and its wide readership. Of course, authors like Dostoevsky were also terrible stylists, but could produce quite memorable scenes. Here again Dickens must be judged to be lacking: for the number of stories and their penetration into the collective unconscious, there are very few that are memorable in detail: people remember Miss Havisham, not any one particular scene she was in. So also Mr. Micawber, et al. The most common compliment paid to Dickens is to say he wrote 'memorable characters,' but this is another backhanded compliment: it's not very hard to write a memorable character or two even in the most hopeless of books; it can usually be managed even when the novel itself is mismanaged.

What Dickens has in abundance is dramatics, which in his case are melodramatics: the story must be written in such a way that the characters are thrown into peril or subjected to 'unexpected' twists, where one must neglect to notice the presence of the twist near the end of the relevant section of the text. Occasionally this works to great effect: David Copperfield has the lived-in quality of an autobiography precisely because its narrator can effectively pretend not to know where his own story is going, as he must have in experiencing it for the first time. At the worst, there's the Oscar Wilde line about The Old Curiosity Shop: "One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing."

That is to say, the characteristic Dickensian effect is to lose the distinction between drama and melodrama, between those things that accurately reflect plausible dynamics in a story well-told, and those that are there because the novel needs another 100 pages and something has to happen between now and then, those artificial manipulations that slide easily into self-parody or camp. And to read or appreciate Dickens as a first-rank author, one has to neglect to notice this distinction oneself.

And so it is these days: one has to fill 13 episodes, or 22, or 90 (120, 150) minutes of a movie with something, and dramatic twists or fight scenes have to be spaced out.* But those twists have to land, so whatever happens in the meantime can't have too much effect on the story, and thus: backstory, expository dialogue, pointless 'philosophical' ramblings or playing with (obvious) symbolism or metaphors.


*Terminator is an excellent example of a movie with this problem--it's just three big fight scenes/chases--that resolves it by doing interesting and relatively cliché-free things with the downtime.

Art and the Artist

(In response to Phoebe specifically, but also in general)

I tweet the following semi-periodically, and it probably deserves a longer explanation:

"A periodic reminder of how much relevance an artist's personal life has to the aesthetic evaluation of their work: none."

There are two primary reasons behind this: it is difficult, if not impossible, to know enough about an artist's personal life to make a definitive moral judgment about who they are, and the decision to let ethical questions dictate aesthetic responses has a tendency to crowd out the time one might take to enjoy art.

In order to get this argument off the ground, I have to stipulate one--hopefully uncontroversial--element: all human beings engage in a mix of good and bad behavior, and almost everyone's bad end includes some actions, opinions, and mental states they would prefer not to be made public. Nick Hornby has a riff on this in High Fidelity, where the narrator, having just admitted to having done five terrible things to an ex, asks his readers to think of the five worst things they've done to someone they were dating, and then asks them how they feel about being judgmental. People tend to want to accentuate the good things they have done and ignore the bad, or simply questionable, things. Outside observers who are not neutral tend to focus on the good or the bad. Consequently, the information that's available to us about artists from secondhand sources tends to be either good or bad, depending on whether it's a friend or an enemy speaking. But the information these people have is limited, and only the artist will ever really know.

Which is, as it happens, how it works with most of the people we meet: we just accept as a fact that their personal mix of goodness or badness remains unknown, and so we judge on those elements of their personality that are visible to us.

For artists, whose personalities tend to be in larger view, intentionally or not, the judgments appear to be trickier. How do we feel about Roman Polanski, or, assuming the charges are true, Woody Allen? I liked Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, and The Yiddish Policemen's Union, but I also read the book of essays where he gets very judgmental about his single mother's dating habits, and humblebrags that even though he wasn't cool, he definitely slept with at least one of her friends, and many other women he found desirable. What do I do with that? Jonathan Franzen appears to want to be the world's worst posthumous friend to David Foster Wallace, and seems to have some issues with anger and women. Dan Harmon appears to be obsessive and alienating to a number of people he works with, and the Hollywood grist mill provides more examples than I could even list here.

(I also note that the routine excess of popular musicians never generates the same ire, or certainly doesn't now. The last things I can think of are David Bowie's saying England was ready for a fascist leader, and Eric Clapton's effusive praise of Enoch Powell, both of which have obviously harmed their careers. (It's also, I believe, not entirely clear that Clapton does not still agree with Powell))

The issues multiply with past artists: what are we to do with Hitchcock's misogyny (especially as it is mostly absent from his earlier British films)? Should we lend credence to the rumors about Grace Kelly's active personal life? The grubby details of Barbara Stanwyck's rise to fame? Spencer Tracy's multi-decade affair combined with a refusal to divorce his wife? How should we react to the more sordid details of W.H. Auden's personal life, or T.S. Eliot's anti-Semitism and crypto-fascism? Ernest Hemingway leaving his wife and young child for his mistress? Scott Fitzgerald's drinking, and treatment of his wife? How about Jean-Jacques Rousseau sending his children to the orphanage? And what of the people whose morality we can discern nothing at all: Homer, for example?

At this point, there are two options: one is to define a standard of those shortcomings which are morally relevant to consider, both present-day standards and those which are appropriate for the time. Failure to do the latter would require excluding large swaths of culture for insupportable stereotyping by race and gender. The former is also revealing, in that there are a number of indiscretions which are not considered to be reasons to boycott an artist's work. Even so, one can define an acceptable standard, assess the information available, determine what in it is reliable and does not come from a source that might be compromised, and come to a conclusion about whether the artist's work can be supported. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, a lot of work, and fully engaging in this process would eat up more time than the average book or movie would be worth.

The other is to conclude, perhaps even reluctantly, that ethical questions are separate for aesthetic ones, and aesthetic reasons should guide our decisions about what to consume. Works of art can get away from their creators, after all: even the staunchest defender of the view that Mark Twain was a racist has to acknowledge that Jim is the human and moral core of Huckleberry Finn, and Woody Allen can say something important about the need for moral standards in Manhattan even if he's a lout. If Roman Polanski makes a good movie, it is good because it is in some important way human, or truthful, or beautiful, or excellent, even if its director is none of those things. The capacity to create something unexpectedly great is one of the formative reasons for reading and watching and listening. And, moreover, the capacity to recognize in the thing one has done wrong its meaning is the redemptive possibility of art, and not to be taken lightly; Fitzgerald's late-in-life stories are his failures realized, someone who understands the depths of what he has done wrong. The emotional core of Annie Hall is those final scenes in which the character understands exactly how and why he was wrong, and creates something to fix it, which leads him to fix himself.

All that being said, I am fine with moral reasons working on the margin of aesthetic choices: vita brevis, longa ars after all. I've seen a couple of the 'good' Polanski movies and did not much care for them, so my uninterest and the additional moral reasons provide an incentive not to attempt a new film that garners good reviews. This is not incidental, since I consider periodically revisiting things I have disliked in the past to be one of my responsibilities as a consumer of culture. The moral judgments themselves I am also comfortable with: if Woody Allen did what is alleged, he deserves a mark against him. 

(A theological aside: I am uncomfortable with this even as I acknowledge my attitude about it. I think I am bound to hope for his redemption and to believe in its possibility, so even while maintaining my moral judgment I think I must also accept that one day I might need to transcend it, and let it go. And accept the possibility that this might come about without my ever being aware of it.)

There are also relevant economic angles and authorship questions along the lines of "A Woody Allen film or one he co-wrote and directed and which a bunch of other people made critical aesthetic contributions to?" and "Scott Fitzgerald or Fitzgerald and Maxwell Perkins?", but this post is too long as it is. 

I am a little disappointed at the prospect of a Javier Marias novel in which something happens, but I'll read it anyway. Reading through some of the coverage in advance of his book, I was excited to learn that he's considered a short-list candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature: it'd be interesting to be in the position of having already read most of a laureate's work when he won the Prize.

I mean, goodness:

How beautiful would it be if what kids were taught about this book is that this is a universal experience? ... You have the rest of your life to read 1984 and Brave New World and Animal Farm, but save for Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret?, it seems like no one wants to touch the emotional turmoil of growing up. They just give you an anatomy book and figure that’s all you need, but it’s more than that. It’s realizing that following the rules isn’t what’s always right. It’s learning that adults don’t have it all figured out. It’s doing deep, personal calculus about what you think is right and wrong, and what you can accept in this world and what you can’t. And often, no matter how many friends you have, it’s an incredibly lonely process.

The odd thing about this line of complaint is that this is more or less exactly what most adult literature is about; it's also a set of issues so well-compassed by tv and movies as to be absurd. There's something strange about the idea that adolescence is this unique time in which a person becomes who they are going to be, as opposed to W.H. Auden's idea, expressed in The Dyer's Hand, that an individual is going through the process of becoming themselves until age 40 or so. If you're going to become an adult, then it might be useful to see and understand that adults are not people fundamentally different than you, and they deal with many of the same problems, sometimes even with the same intensity.

There's also the issue that--how does one put this politely?--the concerns of an adolescent do not track onto the seriousness of the issues they're concerned about. Teenagers tend to make a big deal out of everything. It's one of the reasons middle school is such a universally recognized bad experience. So while it's good to be concerned about concerning things, one should be gaining perspective, not necessarily sympathetic voices. The same thing repeats for adults, too: a wise and perceptive older friend once told me that everyone mellows out quite considerably around the age of 30, and I've found this to be true. When I was younger, I read Scott Fitzgerald's "What I Think and Feel and 25" and was on his side--it's odd that older people don't sympathize with his new sense of vulnerability. But they don't sympathize with it because it's a passing phase, one that it's better to move through than wallow in.

Adventures in Cultural Consumption

The Black Minutes, Martin Solares: There's a dearth of critical vocabulary for things in the middle of cultural experience. Praising something to the skies is easy, and though there's a fine art to panning something bad, it's an art that the internet has helped to spread democratically. There's a variety of cultural defense for the thing one likes that others might not--'taste'--and another for the thing enjoyed even when it is known to be bad--the 'guilty pleasure.' In grading terms, three of these are As, and one is an F.

The Black Minutes is a Mexican crime novel whose weaknesses are all in its choice of genre. The narrative borrows from film noir and paranoid-style movies of the 1970s (The Parallax View, say, or Z more than Three Days of the Condor). These require the reveal at the end of the story to be suitably big and surprising, and confirm the worst assumptions of the protagonist we have been aligned with. But the narrative fails to bite: the killer is a minor character and the political stakes insufficiently developed to achieve even a Chinatown-level condemnation of business as usual, which appears to have been the aim of the novelist. So in these respects the novel has to be judged a failure.

But I am still inclined to think positively of the book as a whole despite its obvious shortcomings. The protagonist is well-drawn, and avoids being a stereotype; the plot is advanced with fluidity; the writing is assured and neither showy nor clunky. Reading more by the same author seems like a good way to see whether his good aspects or his problematic aspects develop. So in this respect, the novel has to be judged a qualified success.

One additional note: it seems apparent to me that we've reached a point of overcorrection in Latin American and Spanish literature. If the appeal of "El Boom" was high modernism and magical realism, making of Latin America a place of magic and enchantment, and if the appeal of the second wave of the same literature was to replace that picture with scrupulous accounting of political, legal, and social realities in light of decades of fascist and dictatorial rule, done in a postmodernist style, then we've hit a saturation point. That Latin American politics bears the scars of decades of postcolonial abuse, poor rule, and a descent into perpetual warfare is known. The clinical description of horrific violence can only retain its shock value for so long before the violence must become even more pronounced or the bodies themselves become statistics. There's an evident need to do something new.

The Problem With First-Person Perspective

Prior to this past weekend, I had never heard of Tao Lin. If the reviews at the LA Review of Books and The Millions are to be believed, I'm not missing very much. The complaints about Lin's style and content appear devastatingly well-founded, but the critique puts me in mind of a broader complaint about contemporary fiction's love for first-person narration by a more or less fictionalized version of the author.

In any story that is fiction, for which there is going to be a narrator, it is important that the author clearly demarcate their control of the novel from the narrator's control of the novel, a problem much more severe when the story is being told in flashback. The usual way this gets solved--in Zola or Dostoevsky, for example--is by use of the third person: the novelist provides a perspective character, but the novelist gets a degree of remove. In highest fashion, this is the ingenious method of Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time. First person narration can do the same, though it doesn't always. To choose the most obvious example: Nick Carraway is not Scott Fitzgerald; Huck Finn is also not Mark Twain.

The Huck Finn example is instructive of the benefit given to an author: the central moral conflict involves the fact that Huck believes freeing Jim to be wrong, and Huck's view is the only one expressed. The reader, nevertheless, knows as well as the author the irony of the situation. But this is only possible because Twain creates his own space in the narrative.

Lin's problem, so far as I can tell, is that there is no such space in his writing. No one can tell if it's intended as a satire, and if so, the aim of that satire. That's a failure of writing. It hits on, incidentally, the problem I sometimes have with Lena Dunham or Louis CK: the author portrays a character who has the same name and some of the same characteristics of the author. Hence the much-praised 'realism.' But crucial questions in the work are left unanswered: is it satire? Of whom? How could we tell?

The Roberto Bolaño Backlash

Discussed at some length here. The backlash will never amount to much, and it's not hard to see why. The Millions did a ranking of Bolaño's corpus. Notable on that list is that, of the nine works listed as "The Essential," six were already published (if in Spanish) at the time of Bolaño's death. One is the novel he was frantically working to complete--there's dispute over exactly how finished 2666 was. One is almost entirely composed of published articles and speeches (Between Parentheses). Only one is new and contains a substantial amount of unpublished material. The other two ranks--"Merely Excellent" and "For Completists Only" contain the slapdash and unpublished material, most of it never intended for publication. Now that the every-six-month discovery of yet another 'unpublished' work is over, things will settle down and more measured judgments may be drawn.

The judgment will eventually be this: Bolaño was a good at assessing the quality of his work. The work he published contains a few weak items--stories and poems, mostly--but is quite strong. The unpublished material is mostly not very good. The problem was not the author but the posthumous guiding of his literary output.

He has a better shot at canonization at most, and the reason is found in the top two books on the Millions list, which are the top two books on everybody's Bolaño list (not mine, but you get the point): 2666 and The Savage Detectives. They are each big, sprawling, and inspiring. Each has its slavish adherents. But aside from the tics of Bolaño's style, they have nothing else in common: one is a writers-writing-about-writing novel with conventional plotting and a slightly askew narrative, the other is political, lacks a narrator, and pulps up genre conventions. That is to say, Bolaño wrote two books which can be considered his most serious, mature work, each of which appeals to a slightly different portion of the people who read literature. Those two books invite the debate they have already received, and that they will generate in years to come. Add into this a novella whose formal excellence is a matter of agreement (By Night in Chile), the obvious influence of the great names of the previous two generations of Spanish-language authors, and the recipe for success is near complete. Bolaño will not have the problem of a David Foster Wallace who, for all his formal inventiveness, wrote one long novel that most people read (but did not finish), which is remarkably different from the fiction environment out of which it emerged, and which produced no literary heirs worth mentioning.

This last will be the key: people have been reading Bolaño. The question is whether anyone will write like him, picking up his thematic interests and narrative tics. This is not an incidental concern: the inability of critical judgments of, say, T.S. Eliot to stabilize has a lot to do with the fact he produced very few followers. If the fiction environment of ten years from now bears his impression, then we can safely assume that everyone's favorite Chilean novelist is at least in the running for a Garcia Marquez-like level of influence.

Adventures in Cultural Consumption

Emile Zola, Germinal: The word to use to describe the book is 'cinematic,' though it is also highly inappropriate as a descriptor. It's cinematic in the sense that the book, unlike most of Zola's, consists of several large action-oriented set-pieces. Moreover, the action is written with particular attention to physical movement and the continual heightening of the emotional stakes. At every moment when there should be some kind of rest, the story picks up intensity. It spends several hundred pages right at the edge of naturalism and melodrama, in the way modern action movies do--if you are committed to the story, it can be gripping, but stand too far outside the emotion and it borders on camp. Even fishing the novel was something of an accident: I had approximately 80 pages left that was to be divided up between two days, but I couldn't leave in the middle of the action.

But the novel is anti-cinematic, as well, in a way that's illuminating of the problems with action-oriented movies. Germinal has constant action, but the action is slow. Movies tend to go quickly, the better to shock and astound and keep you watching. Novels plod along one word at a time. The effect is liberating: it's hard to watch Lord of the Rings or a comic book movie and not feel as though you're being assaulted in ever faster and harder waves. Germinal is constantly ratcheting the tension down: the mob scene includes a number of reflections on what the mob is doing that manage to capture its aimlessness as well as its violence. When three of the main characters are trapped underground, they repeatedly think that time is progressing more quickly than it actually is: they think it's been 18 hours when it's been three days, they think it's been not quite three days when it's been six, etc--action is being cut by boredom. Most unusual of all, the narrative occasionally abandons the main characters altogether, establishing instead the scene as a whole. The reader has to remember what is at stake, and the author is free to use those pauses to do other, more interesting work.

Apparently Must Have These Now

Javier Marias, The Dark Back of Time: Marias was first suggested to me by Roberto Bolaño, who mentioned him in approving tones in Between Parentheses. Bolaño's plots are all driven by movie conventions and genre, with a narrative propulsion central to what he does. Marias is the opposite of this, something like Proust with the long, winding sentences of Henry James, but driven by a mania for completion: the same character names and details are repeated from novel to novel, and much of this one is devoted to filling in the backstory of the only non-fictional characters in his previous novel All Souls. To read him, one must enjoy his authorial voice, since the book is spent almost exclusively in its company. It's a novelistic version of My Dinner with Andre: a series of monologues well-told.

And, like My Dinner with Andre, the theme emerges rather surprisingly at the end. It has looked like a series of disconnected stories, but it isn't--people claim to like reality, but interlace it with fiction even in their supposed memories: it's better to invent than not to know, better to have narrative finality that accept randomness. This explains why most autobiographies are bad. In addition to people being unable to understand the truth about themselves, the autobiography always begins with the part given (false, imposed) narrative scope over the course of many years, and ends with events that cannot be put into any narrative at all, and so must wander aimlessly. The narrative impulse in fiction is not problematic because the author controls all the terms of the universe, but the narrative impulse in life makes for real distortions, usually at the expense of people no longer around to correct the record.

I was reading (re-reading) Irving Howe yesterday and came across his essay on Richard Wright and James Baldwin, which is a great example of a perceptive critic saying incredibly stupid things, especially about Baldwin.

The one that stuck out to me had to do with religion. I used to joke that political theorists on the whole had three categories of (Christian) religious belief, which appeared to be exhaustive and mutually exclusive: Catholic, Calvinist, and atheist. Howe describes Go Tell It On the Mountain as a book about the experience of black Calvinism, which... not even close. It's about black Pentecostalism (I mean, goodness, the church is "The Temple of the Fire Baptized Church," which is not any kind of Calvinist), which was emerging as a religious option at the time Baldwin's book was set, and is about as far from Calvinism as one can get. But if your theological categories are limited, and you already have an axe to grind about 'Calvinism," well...

"I don't read Russian but someone wrote an article saying this translation was bad and I think it's bad, too."

Nabokov has a perfectly acceptable defense of translating a language you don't know very well--the language it's being translated into matters as much, and probably more*--and Borges points out that the test of a great work of literature is that it can survive a bad translation (and, incidentally, it's not like anyone reads Dostoevsky for the style, which is by reputation atrocious). I've spent enough time in the translation-style wars to recognize that there's no wrong answer, just different answers depending on one's intended usage. But that's slightly less fun than denouncing something otherwise popular because you want it denounced.**


* For example, the endless rounds of debate about Bible translation are not, in the main, arguments about how to understand the Hebrew or Greek, they're about how to best express them in English.

** I am all in favor of denouncing on the basis of expertise, either professional or assembled from long experience.

Zadie Smith is amazing, and the rest of us should probably just pack it in.

Adventures in Cultural Consumption:

Logicomix: Three tangentially related observations:

1. Bertrand Russell comes off as a jerk. Based on my otherwise-gathered impressions of him, this is because he was, in fact, a jerk. However, I don't believe this is the impression the authors wanted to give.

2. The metafictional conceit was annoying, though I guess is now a central feature of the graphic novel. The link between Russell's change of opinion on World War I and World War II would have been handled sufficiently well without reference to the Oresteia. Metafiction has a point when it adds something concrete to the story; when it doesn't, it's a way of papering over trouble advancing the plot or a sneaky way to give exposition. The best example of metafiction well-used in a graphic novel is (unsurprisingly) Maus, where the author interjects himself into the story he's telling because it's his father's story, and the impetus for telling it comes out of the author's complicated relationship with his father. There metafiction earns its placement, and gives something to the story it would have lacked otherwise.

3. Looking at Bertrand Russell gave me an idea of how non-believers must look at religious believers: his combination of atheism and romanticism resulted in many, many eye rolls: "I will be perfectly logical at all times, except when I engage in bathetic quasi-pantheistic worship of nature and the mystery of life and maybe all human emotions and behaviors are beyond logic too! But religion is irrational!"

4. In spite of these problems, the turn at the end was really effectively done.

While I agree with the general point about Roberto Bolaño expressed here--that his unfinished work is being published in a scattershot manner--I disagree with at least two of the other points being made. First, I don't think it tarnishes his legacy to do so: no one who reads him can be mistaken that 2666, The Savage Detectives and By Night in Chile are his best works. I find that spending time with the lesser works increases my appreciation for the greater ones because it makes clear how precise Bolaño had to be amongst the chaos of his ideas. It's rather like reading lesser Fitzgerald: it looks wild and uncontrolled but is the exact opposite, which you wouldn't know except to see it when it fails.

I also disagree about Bolaño 'crowding out' the translation market:

The general scarcity of translated work makes the shortcomings of this novel more pointed. On the one hand, it is difficult to criticize any publisher for bringing foreign works before an American audience. Just 3 percent of books sold in the U.S. are translated works; for literary fiction and poetry, that number dips to 0.7 percent. But on the other hand, the more Bolaño that is translated, the less room there may be for other writers whose work falls in that 0.7 percent. Of course, this would not be a problem if every Bolaño work shone. But with Woes of the True Policeman, that argument becomes exceedingly difficult to make. We have enough.

Bolaño was one of those figures who wore his loves and his enmities openly: if not for him, I wouldn't have heard of, much less read, Enrique Vila-Matas, Javier Marías, Javier Cercas, Cesar Aíra, Mario Vargas Llosa, and even (roads of intellectual influence being funny that way) Jorge Luis Borges. He was confident in his work but quick to praise the work of others. I would not be surprised to find out he creates the market in addition to taking up so much of it.

Adventures in Cultural Consumption:

Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston:
Let's say the problem is this: the average person on whom privilege is conferred will be unaware of the scope of that privilege; the capacity to regard his situation as normal defines it. That person will require education if they are to recognize this most basic of facts, and nothing educates quite like good literature. It's even better if the literature they encounter is not only didactic--written for the privileged audience--but transcends this, and is simply excellent. In this context, excellence allows the privileged reader to see how other people live without making the point of the book demonstrating this to the otherwise-ignorant. The challenge for the privileged reader is then to not make the book simply about their own dawning awareness.

Their Eyes Were Watching God has this problem, no less than Invisible Man, whose conclusion is hard-won through the construction of the narrative but easily reduced to a slogan, if that's what one wants to do. It's a book that looks at the world through female eyes, but has the grace and warmth and acuity of perception to not be only that. In pacing, plotting, and construction, it is a model of balance: the lyrical voice can be sweet but not treacly, the dialects a good contrast not overdone. In all respects a perfectly executed book.

And, yes, useful, for the things it allows women to say about themselves and, in particular, to let them look the way at least some of them look. The novel is full of the female gaze, and double useful for it: an authentic expression of one way of looking at the world, which becomes useful because it dispels illusions about how women look at the world. It's not hard to notice that when Tea Cake is introduced as a character, there are certain things about him that are very important (i.e. talking to her like she's a human being, and not an object requiring special care) and others which are not. If you're prepared to listen, it will tell you a lot.

Amazingly, the reviews of the movie Cloud Atlas manage to identify the two most substantial problems with the book itself. Instead of identifying them as such, however, they attribute them to problems with the movie (e.g.). These two problems are:

1. The genre "mash-up" that involves taking stock plots and doing little to enliven them (a robot develops the feelings of a human; a postapocalyptic wasteland that's much more like primitive nature, etc).
2. The vague quasi-spiritual transcendental nonsense which is mostly hinted at in the book.

The problem with the movie is that it forces this content to become literal, and when it is literal, rather than implied, it comes across as banal or insipid (or camp). This is not because the movie is a failure: it's a problem with the source material: the plots really are stock genre plots with little to enliven them; Mitchell conspicuously avoids saying anything concrete about the spiritual consequences of the overlapping plots: you might think this is skillful omission requiring the reader to draw their own conclusions, but you might just as easily think it's because there isn't any unified, satisfying explanation of it.

What this gets us to is the problem with the cult of style in contemporary literature. It's possible to write beautiful sentences that never actually say anything useful or interesting, and this, it seems to me, is Mitchell's problem. Readers get caught up in the sentences--in the feeling of reading the book--and never really wonder about what the book itself is about. Readers think that something technically difficult--writing across different genres--is impressive quite apart from the strength of those individual units (it puts me in mind of the praise for Louie, which seems at least as much to derive from nothing more than the sheer fact of his writing comedy and drama, or Socrates' observation in the Republic that artists go astray when they attempt to work in more than one rhetorical mode), and the fact of having completed the book somehow compensates for this. But surely it also matters what a book says, and this, I think, is much less commented upon, so much the worse for our aesthetic tastes.

So it turns out that the guy who won the Nobel Prize for literature is the author of Red Sorghum, on which the movie of the same name was based. This would be the Red Sorghum that I saw as an observer in someone else's film class my freshman year of college, the same time I first saw The 400 Blows and The Seventh Seal and a number of Robert Altman films that I did not care for in the least. The same Red Sorghum that I spent several years (unsuccessfully) trying to find on DVD, and attempting to get information about from the then-primitive internet, and which by 2005 or so had convinced myself I misremembered the name and would never be able to find it again. Another Professor Longhair situation, basically. But here we are. Too bad I can't remember anything about the movie now.

Zadie Smith on Jay-Z. My only regret is that it's not twice as long. If she ever decides to write a hip-hop novel, it will probably be the ultimate marriage of those two worlds (the hip-hop thread in White Teeth is exquisitely done).

I have not yet begun NW, if only because the mediocre reviews don't inspire confidence: apparently, she really did decide to be done with literary realism in favor of experimentalism.