Currently Reading, Wrestling With A Giant edition

Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems
It was a Patricia Lockwood LRB article that did it, as it often is these days. I read The Bell Jar as a callow youth in 8th or 9th grade, with little or no sympathy and less understanding. (I didn't hate it, for the record.) I never pursued her poetry or anything else about her. So I come to her work in something like total ignorance, but having pieced together some of her contemporary milieu in my reading in poetry over the last few years.

Look, I'll be honest: I mostly don't like it. She has a flair for observation and image, and any poem that begins with "I was going on a walk the other day" or a near equivalent will be worth your time. She is open and experimental in tone and form in ways that are really admirable: it seems clear enough that she has something she wants from her writing and goes right for it. 

The obsessions are right there on the surface, too: she uses the n-word far more than I expected. She has a fascination with the Holocaust that I think is of both the "I will look unflinchingly at the worst people can do" variety (sister, I can relate) and of the "the fetishism of bodies and body parts is not really so far removed from the treatment of bodies, especially female bodies, in post-war medicine and psychiatry, especially when those bodies are considered to be 'wrong' in some way" variety. But it's very unsettling. Suicide is everywhere; from the safe remove of 60+ years I wonder how no one saw it or did anything about it. It is all, as charitably as I can put it, deeply unpleasant to read. (Her beekeeping poems are this in miniature: brilliant. horrifiyng.)

But: that's surely the point. She is a great mind and an exceptional woman who is trying very hard to be a particularly narrow idea of a "normal" wife and mother, surely the mind rebels at all points, and at the men who enforce the system (father, husband, doctor) most especially. I am precisely the person who should squirm in reading them, and rush to reassure myself, as I did, that I have nothing in common with Ted Hughes. (For many reasons.) And she shuts herself off from the Adrienne Rich option of analyzing her condition with an eye to change it--a poet with a similar background who is sometimes awkwardly personal or embarrassingly political but does sometimes train her eye on me, the skeptical male reader. The world of poetry I inhabit is a lot of things, but it is not essentially and unrelentingly negative. But it's an honest word, honestly come by. I don't think it matters how I feel about it.

I come back to the thing Lockwood comes back to in her essay: Sylvia Plath was once the most boringly normal postwar American girl, and then she was a great poet. But there's no spur, no demarcation point, nothing in the biography or in the work you can point to as the reason she goes supernova. Lockwood, as a writer, mostly focuses on the implications of this for writers: what does your method, practice, training, slow improvement mean when someone can just show up and do that, and not even really be able to explain how it was done? (And distressingly: is it because she was crazy and suicidal? Must I be crazy, too?) A singular writer who leaves no path to follow, and did in a few years more than you will in a lifetime.

But it seems to me that Sylvia Plath works the other way, too: the normal woman who wanted very much to be normal until it couldn't be stifled anymore. Maybe she wasn't really special, she just lucked into a situation that allowed her genius to come out. How many more Sylvia Plaths are out there across all the areas of knowledge, beauty and excellence, now, trying to be normal? 

Currently Reading, Katabasis Spoilers Abound, Proceed With Caution

R.F. Kuang, Katabasis
I liked it quite a bit, but to be clear, it's more Foucault's Pendulum than The Name of the Rose: a perfectly enjoyable outing for academics who want to turn their brains off for a bit, not anything resembling a classic. It's also, to my surprise, more Piranesi than Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: the plot machinations are few, it's mostly about the inner life of the main character.

[spoilers]

Of course, as soon as you can piece together that Alice is not going to die in Hell, you can be pretty certain Peter won't, either. And yes, it is stupidly obvious that they're in love with each other in the way that only grad students can muster--they both kinda know it to be a bad idea and it doesn't stop them. So it then stands to reason that Peter won't actually be dead at the end, and everything else kind of unspools from there. (It was also clear right away that Peter had no plans to sacrifice Alice, it didn't make sense in the arc of the story.)

I see the reason for the negative reviews: people don't want a happy ending. I also see the frustrations with the academic side of things, but I was once in a freshman philosophy class and fascinated by paradoxes--the topic of my first paper was the Sorites Paradox. So I'm clearly the audience for it, to grasp pretty much all of the references. 

Currently reading, Catch-up edition

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
If I had to pick the least romantic thing in this book--there are many to choose from--it is our nominal hero taking for his last non-love-of-his-life sexual conquest (there were well over 600) a literal schoolgirl with braces whom he grooms for a year before trying anything. When this poor girl finds out she's being jilted, she kills herself, information which is communicated to our hero in a brief aside and never dwelt on.

The book easily reads as an anti-romance, but somehow I think that's not how it was intended.

 

William Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom!
The book that briefly broke my reading system. Whereas your George Eliots, Charles Dickenses, your Dostoevskys and Tolstoys, etc etc, all break into nice little solitary units of reading, Faulkner demands to be read whole. There's something oddly compelling about the incantatory tone: not Proust, exactly, or Henry James; nor at the other end Thomas Bernhardt, where the long sentences are a kind of fugue repeating the same themes over and over again. Any particular piece of the writing will make next to no sense, but you emerge at the end of a chapter with a picture of the whole even so.

Not much to say about the plot except that if any one of the characters had hated black people less, none of it would have come to tragedy, but that's the American south for you. Well, that and the unwillingness to look a situation square in the face, or have an open and honest conversation.

 

James Joyce, Dubliners
A bunch of stories which are somewhere between perfectly fine and good, and then, wham, "The Dead". I suspect it plays better the older that you get, but even so, it's incredible to get ten versions of "this Irish father is drunk and sad" and then one of the high points of European literature.

 

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides
Another one that hits differently because I am older when I read it. I think sort of astonishing for the author to get at such a young age what it is like to be an older person looking back.  

Lyric of the day

"[I] never let a computer tell me shit"

-Del the Funky Homosapien, "Things You Can Do", Deltron 3030 

Something for the season

Currently Reading, Recently Read Edition

Anna Seghers, Transit
There are plenty of war novels that traverse a familiar groove: the futility of war (Catch-22, The Good Soldier Svejk), the overwhelming scope of war (War and Peace, The Charterhouse of Parma), the radical expose of evil where it seems like there is none. Seghers' The Seventh Cross is an example of the last. We know, she knew, everybody kind of could have known that the Nazis were the bad guys, and they received important passive and active support from regular Germans with all kinds of motives. The Seventh Cross is notable in this respect because it was written and published during the war; people come to know the truth in all sorts of ways, and that novel was one of them. Important, but hammering home a point we all know.

Transit is instead a very weird novel, because it is about a German who refuses to leave Europe even though he has very good reasons to want to leave; more importantly, he has--through a series of misunderstandings--the ability to leave. But he doesn't stay for noble reasons, to resist the Germans or to rebuild Europe once it's over: he just wants to be a farmer and not leave. It's like Casablanca if Rick decided to stay but because all he really wanted in life was to run a casino. The novel is even more interesting because it is the exact opposite of the decision Seghers made for herself; it has strong autobiographical elements except that, well, everything the main character does is different than what Seghers did. And it this was it becomes an interesting book, but also a frustrating one: Exillituratur without the exile.

 

Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections
I read the first three stories. Every one was brilliantly done. Every one twisted the knife at the end. I decided to abandon it.

 

Charles Portis, True Grit
One of the hosts of my favorite podcast made an offhand reference to Portis, whose The Dog of the South I had read and felt indifferent about several years ago; I saw this while browsing the library shelves and decided to give it a go. Iconic, perfect, inimitable. Hard to say a bad word about it, except the part with the snakes at the end, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, though this was certainly the point.

 

Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None
Reading this one day and then watching Wake Up Dead Man the next was a real exercise in--actually, you know what, going to blog this separately.

 

Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
I was required to read this in high school and did not especially like it, finding it to be well short of scary or horrifying. Maybe five years ago I read and enjoyed We Have Always Lived In the Castle, so I thought I'd give it another go. I don't dislike it as a book, but I also think I am not its ideal reader. One must believe something I don't to make the plot work, but I'm at a loss for what that thing might be. It moves along well until the wife and the other person show up and then there's just too many ideas trying to reconcile themselves in not enough space. Maybe I'm not really convinced that Eleanor was captured in any meaningful sense by the house?  

Currently Reading, Guess I Don't Like Milton edition

John Milton, Paradise Lost
Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

An apology to one of my good friends from grad school, who loved Milton and tried to get us all to read him: I did not like Paradise Lost. On a poetic level, I did not like it because it was a fusion of a bunch of things I don't especially like: a Roman cadence and insistence on highlighting the depth of reference of which he was capable (having recently read Ovid, this came across as Ovid in spades), a Greek insistence that every thought must be represented in speech (hat tip to Erich Auerbach for pointing that one out to me a long time ago), and a Catholic willingness to invent little filigree details to make the story "richer", which is to say longer. I had been led to believe Satan was a major character, but he disappears pretty early in the poem; its real hero is Angel Who Provides Exposition.

The thing about the story as represented in the Bible is that it is short and woefully short on details. It's not merely that Milton adds details, but that they begin to change the substance of the story itself in ways it's not clear to me that he's aware of. If Adam is prohibited from eating from a tree in Eden that's one thing; if he gets a long explanation from Angel Who Provides Exposition about what happened before Eden and also there's a bad guy who might be trying to sneak in, the meaning and import of Adam's actions change--especially if he does not pass any of this information on to Eve but subsequently blames Eve for not knowing it. Similarly, the human point of the Eden story seems to be that something has definitively come to an end with no particular hope of resolution; it's the first low point in a history full of low points. But Angel Who Provides Exposition explains to Adam that no, it's cool, it's all going to work out in the end; being banished but having definitive proof that things will be fine is very different than being banished and having no particular idea of how things will go. This is compatible, I suppose, with a certain kind of Calvinist reading, but it's not one that I'm aware of a Calvinist ever making, exactly.

It did strike me that this might just be churlishness, so I should read something that attempted to make use of a similarly gnomic passage in the Bible, and so I repaired back to Fear and Trembling for the first time since 1999? 2000? No later than 2001? And as it turns out, it uses similar material to quite a different end. Kierkegaard is working with some respect for the material and his own limitations--the text says what it says and he does not consider himself free to change it. In fact, he demonstrates conclusively that any other way one might frame the story would make it worse, and weaker, and that Abraham can only be a model in part because we cannot enter into the story or his mind other than how it is presented to us--it's just, in the end, a mystery.