This article about the behavior-altering effects of living in a security state is a reminder to me to find the part of Marias's Your Face Tomorrow where he talks about "loose lips sink ships"-type campaigns during World War II. Marias presents a quite convincing argument that they increased the frequency with which people told their secrets, whether trivial or substantial, that they encouraged people to conflate the two (because you never know what an enemy spy might find useful!), and damaged the social fabric by convincing people not to trust each other. Some or all of these may come into play now, as well.

A thought on literature and representation: One of the things that occasionally seems to be wrong in the usual approaches to representation of alternative viewpoints in literature or culture more generally is that it tends to assume representation itself as an unalloyed good. If there's one thing that's been made clear given the dominance of white, heterosexual, American (or western European), middle-class-ish males in literature, it's that no story about them is good just because it's about a person of that type: everybody recognizes that minutely and realistically depicting the world of such a person does not constitute an achievement: one has to actually write an interesting and unusual narrative about them. I worry sometimes that groups who have not been culturally oversaturated fail to understand this point, to the detriment of work that is sometimes done: i.e. I have represented my experience, hence art.* (This is not to say that these things don't have value, even (perhaps especially) great value: they just don't have artistic value)

In this respect, as in many others, it's the culture of creative writing workshops that has damaged things.


*So the danger of praising Their Eyes Were Watching God or Invisible Man is saying "they accurately represent the experience of women/black women/black people in general and are therefore great literature" instead of saying "they are great literature first and also give some valuable and unique insight into lives not otherwise well understood"

On Mo Yan and Chinese politics.

I found this New Yorker profile on Salman Rushdie and the fatwa to be quite interesting. I read The Satanic Verses about ten years ago and had very mixed feelings about it. As a novel, it's too Dickensian for my tastes: a number of indelible characters, but a plot that, magical realist beginning aside, hits mostly the expected points for a multiculturalist exploration of London (it may, in this respect, suffer from having birthed a genre that has surpassed it; I'm not a critic inclined to give points for having been there first). It also may be inadvertently responsible for the "everything in the world is connected!" genre of movie (e.g. Babel), which is possibly my least favorite movie genre. But even this is beside the point of the novel itself: it's perfectly fine and worth the time to read, though I'm not sure I'd ever out-and-out recommend it to someone.

As a political cause, it's an odd book, since it's a partial criticism of a lot of things: England rejecting Britishness, immigrants who want to deracinate, immigrants who don't want to deracinate, the backwardness of Indian culture, of the tendency to compromise revelation in the face of politics, of the unwillingness to compromise revelation in the face of reason, but rather emphatically not a criticism of Islam. But it's the cause we got, and Rushdie is obviously and indisputably within his rights as an author, and so we're on his side, even if the novel is not the greatest ever written, and even if Rushdie sometimes seems insufferable as a person. But then, who doesn't?

I've been pondering the following set of issues for the last few months: after reading Walzer on Judaism and politics, and following up with some additional research on Jewish ways of reading sacred texts, I've noticed the following trend, which repeats itself across religious and non-religious readings of texts of all kinds: a tendency to declare a text to be fundamentally broken, and use its broken-ness as permission to 'fix' it. A few examples:

• In the period following the canonization of texts and the return from exile, the discovery that the text of the Torah does not comprehensively address every aspect of personal life. Because it fails to do so, the text is 'broken' and requires supplementation in the form of priestly or rabbinic instruction, and thus the distinctive forms of the Mishnah and Talmud, as well as the wide variety of regulation of behavior.

• The tendency of Protestant Christians to assume the Bible is a comprehensive text that starts at the beginning and ends at the end, and also covers every useful piece of information one might need for life. Thus reading Daniel to find dieting advice. (This piggybacks on the need to find Christian-friendly versions of all pop culture phenomena.) (Other forms of Christianity begin with the assumption that the text is insufficient on its own, but this hardly gets around the problem: the text must now be read as unable to answer those questions Tradition or Authority has claimed to definitively interpret.)

• A number of books that are traditionally read against the express intentions of their authors: reading Descartes' Meditations as a skeptical work; reading The Brothers Karamazov as though Ivan is the dramatic center. These are failures of imaginative identification: because I, modern secular liberal, find skepticism to be more persuasive than the existence of God, Descartes must have known and intended to make the skeptical case more persuasive.

What these all have in common is, I think, the belief that a text one finds compelling or interesting or provocative can only ever possibly support the beliefs one has in the first place. If you like Bob Dylan and are a conservative, Dylan's work must have secret conservative themes; if you like Shakespeare and are Catholic, Shakespeare must have been a Catholic. The failure in all these cases is to treat the work in question as something that exists autonomously and permanently apart from the person who reads it: it gets to make a claim in its own voice. And this has to be the pleasure of reading: listening to another voice, taking it on its own terms, and only then deciding whether to agree or disagree, not as a final definitive judgment but as a way-station.

All of which is to say: I'm fairly certain the Spring Quarter will involve giving my students James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, since they will have to read W.E.B. DuBois and I would like to talk about something more interesting than the DuBois-Washington debate (or Malcolm X versus MLK); Baldwin says some things I think are completely correct, some that I think are wrong, and some about which I am not certain, most especially when he talks about the theoretical future when America elects a black president. Being confused, productively, is one of the most valuable things there is.

An interesting review of a novel-like substance on the destruction of Lidice. Interesting to me both as someone who just finished teaching two courses that spent a fair amount of time talking about World War II, and also because Lidice features prominently in Javier Marías' Your Face Tomorrow.

A taste of the review:

The object of Binet’s contempt, it seems, is nothing less than the imagination itself. In his view, the imagination is a form of mediation—it brings close something that is far from us, giving us the illusion of witness and participation. But when it comes to a historical event, the need for such mediation is a reminder of our distance from the original, of the inauthenticity of our relation to the past. This paradox is why Holocaust fiction has always been such a morally contested subject: to imagine the suffering of the victims is both to assert our solidarity with them and to demonstrate that we are not actually among them.

Adventures in Cultural Consumption:

Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison: This pretty much has to be the other contender for "Great American Novel," does it not? All that symbolic and expressionistic writing--very Dostoevskian, in its way--piled on top of a narrative that marked a track not unlike the one Malcolm X would go down ten years later--with some different beats--and that ending. I pretty much need to find a job where I can teach politics and literature to get some students talking about the last ten pages.

I've had the good fortune so far this year to read a number of books of higher-than-average quality, but this was certainly the best.

And, in a connection I'm sure Ellison wouldn't mind, this most elegant reflection on the life and worth of Earl Scruggs.

Adventures in Cultural Consumption, Thanksgiving Edition:

Javier Cercas, The Tenant and The Motive: The Tenant is an academic's worst nightmare, though a bit flubbed in the last ten pages. The Motive is Therese Raquin plus Cortazar's short story "The Continuity of Parks," but I daresay better than both. Unlike Raquin, it does not have pages of amateur psychological speculation that takes away from the narrative. Unlike "The Continuity of Parks," it's more than three pages.

China Mieville, The City and the City: I've never met a book more perfectly intended for a politics and literature course.

James Baldwin, Go Tell It On the Mountain: Quite excellent in a number of respects: it's a sympathetically-written account of pentecostal religion by someone who is clearly no longer pentecostal (having attended a number of those services, I can attest to its general veracity when in the church). Moreover, I think it's a well-written account of Christianity in general, in which churches are not populated by people striving for moral perfection and judging others for falling short, but are the places to go after having already fallen short. The historical dimensions of the story are illuminating in that they help to close the gap in collective consciousness between the 19th and 20th centuries.

Emile Zola, The Ladies Paradise: 150 pages to go. Report when done.

Bolaño, The Third Reich: In the last few days I've come to speculate that the central board game and the character who becomes obsessed with it are not about either the game or the character, but Bolaño's attempt, through metaphor, to come to understand the people who were really of interest to him: the German generals and soldiers in World War II, particularly those who stuck it out until the bitter end. This reading would be of a piece with his general interest in the motivation of those who knowingly or not-quite-knowingly align themselves with evil, and it would go a long way towards making sense of Benno von Archimboldi's Nazi soldier past in 2666. Good thing I'm writing a paper about that.

This week in incredibly obvious cultural commentary: rappers kind of have a problem with misogyny and homophobia. Film at 11:00.

Gil Scott-Heron in 1993:

But I think the young folks need to know, that things don't go both ways
You can't talk respect on every other song or just every other day
What I'm speakin' on now is the raps about the women folks
On one song she's your African Queen on the next one she's a joke
And you ain't said no words that I haven't heard, but that ain't no compliment
It only insults eight people out of ten and questions your intelligence
Four letter words or four syllable words won't make you important
It'll only magnify how shallow you are and let everybody know it

To be clear, I think it's a valid critique of a lot of rap music and hip-hop: even the nice-guy D.A.I.S.Y.-age stuff primarily considers women's value to be as something to have sex with. But I'm also not entirely certain that it has any bearing on the quality of the work being produced. It's that perennial tension that I have been trying to isolate my particular view on: I'm not sure someone's politics, sexual or otherwise, are sufficient to wipe out an impartial consideration of the quality of their work, but I'm also confident that it has to have some bearing on our judgment. If Childish Gambino really is no good, then it seems like the easiest thing to do is just ignore him, rather than providing the additional attention of another blog post.

Play 'em out, Gil:

"Reality always ends up betraying us; best to not give her the chance and get in there first."
-Cercas, Soldiers of Salamis


Even better, this line of dialogue is spoken by "Roberto Bolaño," a novelist then living in Blanes, Spain, who gives Cercas the idea he needs to write the section of the book in which this conversation takes place. Modernist or postmodern? Or perhaps they're the same thing...

I should also note the novel itself was excellent, the best I've read in several months.* So good, in fact, that I went to Amazon and ordered his four other novels.


*And may find its way into the "Politics and Literature" syllabus I'm organizing...

"I mean the fashion arose, in the best cases (the worst aren't worth mentioning), from the natural need all writers have to invent their own tradition, from a certain urge to be provocative, from the problematic certainty that literature is one thing and life another and that it was therefore possible to be a good writer at the same time as being a bad person (or a person who supports and foments terrible causes)..."

-Javier Cercas, Soldiers of Salamis

I should note also today's realization that Spanish-language writers, no less than English-language writers, tend to have strong narrators who postmodernly shuffle their novels along. Our Spanish-language brethren realize, however, that in a successful novel, the narrator should be the least interesting character, not the most.* Though he should have great insight about the world around him, he himself must remain somewhat opaque.


*This is the greatness of Gatsby, no? And the downfall of too many Sad White Man books.

A rather less favorable review of that book on cruelty and art, which I will read nevertheless:

The Art of Cruelty is a disappointment, and a sometimes frustrating one. And yet I hope that critics, and aspiring critics, and those who are interested in the relationship between art and ethics, read it. The questions that Nelson raises about what it means for artists—and audiences—to delve into cruelty need to be addressed, thought about, discussed, debated. Nelson’s analyses often fall short, but she is right to reject easy, definitive answers. In doing so, she forces us to think for ourselves—which, as Margaret Fuller knew, is often the critic’s greatest gift.

"Cruelty" is a word that pops up with surprising frequency in Grotius' work, and I've often considered that it might be worth the effort to exploring where and when the concept first gains traction in political thought (surely someone has already written this book, perhaps to flesh out the historical argument of Judith Shklar's Ordinary Vices?). And, come to think of it, this might make for an interesting organizing conceit--or at least a vein--in an intro or modern political thought class.

Several years ago, I got into a blog-squabble over whether the movie No Country for Old Men embraced and exploited violence even as it attempted to formally distance itself from condoning violence; a few years later, the same conversation re: The Dark Night. Since it also comes up in my imagined politics-and-literature course, you can rest assured I'm going to read this book.

I enjoyed the recent Friday Night Lights love fest as much as any fan of the show (have you seen the supercut Coach Taylor pep talk?; a friend and I unironically said "Texas Forever" to each other in talking about the finale), there was something that struck me as odd in the whole conversation: in our current age, we all love TV shows that aspire to be movies. The movie/TV distinction, in essence, is that in the former, there's one coherent narrative or plot which is pushed forward throughout the entire thing, where threads or subplots are continued or resolved in a satisfying manner, and substantive and stylistic flourishes raise the entire exercise to the level of 'art.' Leaving aside whether this is a sufficient explanation of movies, it's undoubtedly the impulse behind the rise of a certain kind of television style: Mad Men, Breaking Bad or The Wire are all often praised in these terms. The criticisms of the last season (or more) of Lost and How I Met Your Mother are also usually phrased in these terms: too many loose ends, no satisfying sense that the narrative is going anywhere, or the places that the narrative does goes are stupid and/or feel too much like a show spinning its wheels.

Friday Night Lights is a show that is critically beloved that falls into the category of shows with continuity problems. Everybody has a favorite example of a character that disappeared, or never materialized: Waverly in Season 1, Santiago in Season 2, Hastings and Buddy Jr. in Season 5, The McCoys, the many age-inappropriate boyfriends of Julie Taylor, etc etc. Fans of the show have an unspoken agreement that The Second Season Never Happened because of the world's stupidest murder subplot, which took up a surprisingly large amount of screen time. There are people who never cottoned on to the move to East Dillon, and there are those (myself included) that found the last two seasons much stronger than the first three.

Which makes me think of this from 2666:

Without turning, the pharmacist answered that he liked books like The Metamorphosis, Bartleby, A Simple Heart, A Christmas Carol. And then he said that he was reading Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. Leaving aside the fact that A Simple Heart and A Christmas Carol were stories, not books, there was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist, who ... clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecouchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze a path into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

Largely because I think my overall tastes are shifting from small projects executed to perfection to larger ones that can withstand many internal errors or problems. But more on this later.

The Part About 'The Part About Archimboldi':

I've been re-reading Roberto Bolaño's 2666 recently, for at least three reasons. First, it's an excellent novel in my preferred style, which is to say long and complex. Though I have a general belief that it takes at least two readings to begin understanding any text, it's especially true in this case: a first reading is so often dedicated to sorting out what, exactly, is going on, that finer points and subtleties can be lost--subtleties being so much easier to lose over 900 pages. Second, I am relatively certain there's a paper/article waiting to be written about it. My first belief--that despite portraying Ciudad Juarez/Santa Teresa as a Moloch of globalization, Bolaño is cosmopolitan and therefore actually somewhat pro-globalization--has some confirmation in the essays found in Between Parentheses, but I'm concerned that this take, like the pure anti-globalization take, is too simple and reductive.

Third, I wonder whether it might be worth teaching in a politics-and-literature type of course. By Night in Chile is the more obvious choice from Bolaño, as it's shorter and makes its main point in a startling, hard-to-miss manner. The flip side of those advantages is the concern that there's not that much more to grasp about the novella: once you get its point and have out an argument about whether the point is correct or not, there's not much left to discuss. Better something more ambiguous that might permit of more, and more complicated, readings.

Thus 2666. It has the novel-wide joke of Archimboldi and his critics: when the reader gets to the final section on Archimboldi, it becomes obvious how little his critics--academic interlocutors who argue fiercely for and against particular interpretations and understandings of his work--understand the author they have read so long and so lovingly. That's a proper cautionary note for any political theorist, or anyone else in the humanities: they spend so long reading themselves back into the works they love that they fail to notice they've stopped talking about the books at all. Then there's The Part About the Crimes, which one could very easily assign along with some literature about moral responsibility--say Norm Geras' "The Contract of Mutual Indifference" and Richard Rorty's Amnesty Lecture on human rights--to demonstrate how easy it is to become detached from and indifferent to human suffering even when presented in quite graphic terms.

The Part About Archimboldi was of interest to me this time around because a large portion of his story involves his time as a German soldier during World War II. This is the sort of thing Bolaño rarely lets pass without comment, but my memory was that he did not comment. The question was then: what's missing? Is it a cleverly concealed satire? A comment on art's relation to politics? (which it better not be because that would require Bolaño changing his mind)

I had forgotten, after my first reading, a key scene about halfway through, when Archimboldi is in a prison camp after the war is ended, and hears an extended monologue from a man who is attempting to hide his identity because he was responsible for the murder of about 500 Jews near the end of the war. Spoiler alert, but if you've made it this far, you're probably interested: Archimboldi ends up strangling the man to death later that night, which is reported in the book only after the man is found the next day, and which Archimboldi confesses to 30 or so pages later, to his wife, as part of an admission that he only ever killed one man.

For anyone else, this would unambiguously make Archimboldi one of the good guys: killed a man who killed Jews, came to see the deep corruption in Germany, never killed anyone else. In this case, though, something is still missing. Archimboldi is portrayed throughout his section as something of a moral autistic: exactly four characters ever receive more than a couple pages of attention. His war experience is written as half War and Peace meets The Charterhouse of Parma and half The Thin Red Line--some of it is confusing, and in parts Archimboldi seems concerned with anything in the world other than war. But there are no complicated reflections on the nature of being a German soldier, either on Archimboldi's part or Bolaño's: nothing on why he's in Poland, then in France, and then again on the Russian border; no reaction when passing mention is made of the extermination of Jews. Only in defeat, and only when personally confronted with someone trying to justify their unjustifiable action, does Archimboldi act or form an opinion.

In this respect I think of the end of Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved, in which he prints some of the letters he received after writing Survival in Auschwitz and his responses. Many of the letters (from Germans) make claim to some moral outrage at what happened, claim ignorance, etc etc. Levi has no patience for it, and diagnoses something morally troublesome in the behavior of people who could have done something but did not, and now, when it is safe, feel guilt or shame or just want to forget the whole thing. And so I'd like the broach the possibility that Archimboldi is a stand-in for postwar Germany, the generation that would rather forget (and so also a stand-in for Latin American literature, which attempts to scrub away both its own difficult political histories and the complicated politics of its great authors); and his moral autism is a much sharper reminder than By Night in Chile that terrible people can produce great works of art, and valorizing from the art to the man is a mistake.