On Keeping Up With Spanish

A few months ago, I posted on my attempts to re-learn Spanish using the mobile app Duolingo. In the meantime, I've kept at it: six days a week with at least some progress.

As the details of the language return to me, I find myself surprised that anything managed to stick.* At six months (more or less) of progress, I reached the point at which I recognized the need to now do something with my language study. Working on vocabulary exercises and verb tenses is nice but insufficient for any actual use. Consequently I've decided to supplement Duolingo with two additional sources. The first is a simple one-volume Spanish-for-reading textbook, and the other is with an actual in-Spanish version of a novel I know well in its English translation, 2666. Yes, like a crazy person I am beginning with a 900-page novel, albeit one divided into five smaller sections. The textbook is designed for people with no previous Spanish experience (thus I breezed through the first chapter in three or four days of 15-30 minutes of effort), and focused primarily on teaching one how to recognize the syntactical components of Spanish sentences: see the structure, figure out which words go together, learn what the words mean. And, indeed, there was something thrilling about making it through a page and a half of entirely Spanish text without need of a dictionary, even as I was perfectly aware of how basic the text was. For me, reading is at the basis of listening and speaking: if I can see the parts of a sentence that go together, then I can 'see' them when someone else is speaking, and I can produce them when I'm talking.

2666's purposes are more prosaic. As I learned many years ago with Latin, you can memorize all the verb tenses and noun declensions you like, but they are of little use reading and translating, because no one but Cicero ever wrote that way. The novel is a first cut of someone actually using the language to attempt to do things. I have found it to be considerably easier than I expected: after some growing pains, a couple pages a day presents no issues. The only thing hampering me at the moment, in fact, is the pedantic insistence on going over the text sentence-by-sentence in order to make sure I'm really understanding what is being said. Otherwise, I'd be worried that I relied too much on context clues to interpret the parts I couldn't directly understand. But how would that be any different than reading Shakespeare for the first time?

My goal remains reading Javier Marías' Así empieza lo malo before it is translated into English and, surprisingly enough, this looks to be an eminently plausible goal.


*I'm not convinced the textbooks we used in junior high and high school were part of the same program, and those from college were certainly different. The level of instruction was, charitably, variable, though I did benefit from two very good Spanish natives, one of whom was good at teaching us Spain's various dialects. Spanish instruction has to deal with a 'Mexico problem' in a way perhaps not comparable to other foreign languages--people who learn it primarily to be slightly better able to use it when vacationing in the culturally fraught sense of 'visiting Tijuana' as opposed to 'visiting Paris,' and instruction varies widely on how much in tolerates the also culturally fraught use of Spanglish (secondary education Spanish instruction, at least in my experience, has a lot of people whose experience of the Spanish-speaking world doesn't run much beyond visiting Mexico). Native speakers from Spain tend (again, in my experience) to be a lot less patient about all of this, and a lot more expansive in their concept of what Spanish has to offer, culturally.

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.

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.

Not unlike "The Part About the Crimes," but real. And fascinating, in the way that casually evil people are fascinating.

When I first came across it I had the assumption that I would have a significant amount to say about this Hairpin post about The Marriage Plot. As it turns out I don't. I have two much smaller things to say:

1. It's remarkable to me the correlation between negative-ish reviews of the book and reviewers who are convinced Leonard is nothing more than a DFW stand-in. In physical description, perhaps. But unless one thinks that "intelligent man who is attractive to women" must stand in for someone in the author's own life and could not possibly be an original or semi-original* creation (paired with, naturally, "intelligent man who has trouble with women"). I don't think Leonard's being an aspiring scientist was accidental, nor do I think the book's ambivalence about whether Leonard was a good scientist was accidental.

2. The thrust of the post, which is that Madeleine is rendered as nothing more than a somewhat vacuous female object to be possessed and/or fought over by men (except for the inconvenient fact that Leonard and Mitchell don't fight over her, ever**), mistakes the novel's bigger themes for failures of characterization. All three of the main characters go through different phases and identities over the course of the book, in search of something to which they can attach themselves--e.g. Madeleine from literature to critical theory to Leonard; Leonard from being a slacker to high achievement to hospitalization to science; Mitchell from Madeleine to academia to world travel to mystical religious enlightenment. Most importantly, all of these attempts to attach oneself to some cause or person fail. This failure, this ruling out of possibilities, is not itself taken in a particularly judgmental way: Eugenides treats it as the process of leaving the world of college and becoming an adult. Madeleine's being rich and beautiful confers on her no more or less advantage than Leonard's being brilliant.

I will leave aside questions about whether it's a faithful recreation of the female experience (about which I would be hopeless to comment anyway) and opt instead to reiterate as conclusion that I think all of the main characters are treated in approximately the same way and given something like the same general character arcs. There may be (and are) flaws in the novel, but I'm not sure that's the one to be looking for.



*Look: Leonard is probably a stand-in for DFW on some level. This does not make "the character of Leonard is obviously a working out of Jeffrey Eugenides' massive jealousy towards and fixation on DFW" a good argument, unless one happens to think Eugenides is not a very good author or unable to use that 'imagination' thing some people have. Javier Cercas in Soldiers of Salamis has a conversation with a Chilean author by the name of Roberto Bolaño who happens to live in Blanes, Spain, where the real Bolaño lived at the time. Even so, I am confident that the character is primarily a fictional creation, whatever real-world facts may be borrowed in the narrative. I am equally confident about Leonard.

**And, in fact, the one conversation the book ever mentions between the two of them is not about Madeleine at all which a. is not what Madeleine thinks and b. is a sort of delicious reverse Bechdel Test.

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.

First reactions to Bolaño's The Third Reich, now finished: better than all the short novels except By Night in Chile, and, for an unpublished novel, possessed of a high degree of polish. Impressively so. But the central metaphor is either far too obvious or very obscure. And the plot structure (following through one character's thoughts) is not a strong suit of Bolaño's, so it's no surprise he mostly ditched it in his later work, or superimposes on his characters an unspoken-but-acknowledged second narrator through whom the story is edited and told.

Ideal birthday present: a copy of Patti Smith's picture of Roberto Bolaño's chair.

Y'all have thousands of dollars to throw around, right?

Read Bolaño's Tres over the weekend, as part of my general principled interest in everything the man wrote. It's definitely a lesser work, and barely qualifies as a work at all: three big sections with facing-page translation and a very generous use of white space make for a 180-page book that's actually 70 or so. Why New Directions didn't just publish it at that length, as they do with Cesar Aira, Javier Marias, and others, escapes me. Probably because they could charge more for it.

I'm of two minds about the proliferation of Bolaño's work. Nothing that's come out since his death has been as good as By Night in Chile, The Savage Detectives and 2666. Much of it is interesting or revealing, but in ways interesting to me as a scholar and not as a reader. Bolaño's inferior works make the greatness of his better works more comprehensible: the reader sees the way in which things do not quite come together, or hint at but fail to develop an interesting idea or theme. They also make it clear what a good judge of his own talent Bolaño was: I'm not as sold on his poetry as he was but his relative appreciation of his work seems correct, and his decision not to publish various of his works almost always correlates to their literary worthiness.

As a scholar with a paper idea still waiting to be written, I'm glad to have the extra material, and anticipate still more. The form of publication is a source of annoyance, being mostly random collections of 150-200 pages of material sold for $12 a go, but once it's all published, it can be collected in a more useful way.

The process is particularly meaningful to me because in my regular academic life I have been constantly frustrated by the lack of these resources for the study of Hugo Grotius. They simply do not exist in any reasonably accessible form. The bibliography of all the editions of his work prior to 1950 (I have the book in my office) is 900+ pages, and yet: there is no completed critical edition of De jure belli ac pacis (the closest sells for $500-$1000 in the rare instance a copy becomes available); there are three critical editions of random religio-political books, but none of De veritate, De jure predae commentarius or his other important works; the best English-language translation of De jure belli is no longer in print, etc etc. Nor is this simply my choice of an esoteric subject: again, 900+ pages of editions and translations, and one of the major figures of European intellectual life for several hundred years. And again, these are academic subjects: surely someone has a few years to kill on one of these projects. All of which makes me think that the publish-everything cash-grab model may not be so bad, after all.

"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...

The re-readening continues. From 2666:

What was Ivanov afraid of? Ansky wondered in his notebooks. Not of harm to his person, since as a longtime Bolshevik he’d many brushes with arrest, prison, and deportation, and although he couldn’t be called a brave man, neither could it fairly be said that he was cowardly or spineless. Ivanov’s fear was of a literary nature. That is, it was the fear that afflicts most citizens who, one fine (or dark) day, choose to make the practice of writing, and especially the practice of fiction writing, an integral part of their lives. Fear of being no good. Also fear of being overlooked. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear that one’s efforts and striving will come to nothing. Fear of the step that leaves no trace. Fear of the forces of chance and nature that wipe away shallow prints. Fear of dining alone and unnoticed. Fear of going unrecognized. Fear of failure and making a spectacle of oneself. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear of forever dwelling in the hell of bad writers. Irrational fears, thought Ansky, especially when the fearful soothed their fears with semblances. As if the paradise of good writers, according to bad writers, were inhabited by semblances. As if the worth (or excellence) of a work were based on semblances. Semblances that varied, of course, from one era and country to another, but that always remained just that, semblances, things that only seem and never are, things all surface and no depth, pure gesture, and even the gesture muddled by an effort of will, the hair and eyes and lips of Tolstoy and the versts traveled on horseback Tolstoy and the women deflowered by Tolstoy in a tapestry burned by the fire of seeming.

...which links back to both the discussion of semblances in The Part About Fear and the two discussions of minor-v-major works, one also in The Part About Archimboldi, the other in The Part About Amalfitano. Amongst the satisfactions of academic life, I'm not sure there's any that matches mastering a serious, long text. My ability to read and comment on Grotius improved greatly once I had a full understanding of De jure belli as a succession of parts that fit within an overall architecture or plan, and knew which parts went where, and why (few moments in my career were as satisfying as realizing why Grotius' chapter on the rights of burial were at the end of the section on property and not in the section on how to handle the end of a war--this being the point on which most commentators will throw up their hands and admit defeat). It's a real mental discipline, not unlike knowing which solo comes next on Kind of Blue and how it goes.

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.