Two Descriptions of John Berger

Editor’s Note: John Broening is a regular contributor. His column note:

I’m a lapsed member of the Church of Theory. I don’t believe in Theory anymore, but I do believe in criticism.

What is criticism? Criticism is a kind of trenchant social commentary, credo, and witty, freewheeling philosophizing exercise whose starting point is the individual work of art. This has been the m.o. of the great critics: Dr. Johnson, Matthew Arnold, Susan Sontag, Dwight MacDonald, Clive James (Hell, let’s even throw Benjamin in there!).

What criticism means to most people, alas, and certainly to those who write on the Internet is a kind of consumer guide. Ever since the age of Reagan, the consumer guide—thumbs-up, thumbs-down, 4 out of 5 stars, cheers/jeers—is what most of the audience for art expects. Pace Eagleton, this isn’t commodifying the individual, but it is commodifying the work of art.

I’m conscious of not tailoring my style to this medium, of writing an archaic, overcomplicated literary prose for a medium that depends on a language whose meaning can be grasped instantaneously. But I have a problem with the language—with the sloppy, snarky, write-before-you-think dialect that has become the Internet’s lingua franca.

Here, among other things, I’ll explore my weakness for forgotten works of literature; even if they are barely worth revisiting, they often remind us of what we have lost in our culture.”

Two descriptions of John Berger. The first is from Kingsley Amis: Amis recalls seeing a violently animated Berger having a heated exchange with a Maitre d’ at a restaurant, his hands resembling ‘two airplanes in mid-dogfight.’ Amis tells us that he thought a scuffle was about to break out, but it turned out Berger was merely confirming a reservation.

We have every reason to mistrust Amis’s account, to believe he would go out of his way to make Berger look ridiculous: Berger—politically radical, artistically experimental, Anglophobe—represented everything the Blimpish Amis detested about intellectuals.

The second description comes from Berger himself, from the 1988 afterword to his first and best novel, A Painter of Our Time. Surprisingly, it goes a long way towards confirming the essential truth of Amis’s observation. In his afterword, Berger, an Englishman, writes about himself at the time Painter was published in 1958, and his adoption of the more open, emotive, and, one imagines, more gesticulatory manner of the Eastern European refugee painters who were the model for his engage hero, Janos Lavin:


There was a predilection on both sides, theirs and mine, a certain complicity..It was based upon our experience of the English and the English refusal of pain…Our complicity, our opposition, grew from the assumption that pain is at the source of human imagination, This didn’t make us solemn, but it did make us embrace, put our arms around one another, to the embarrassment of any watching Englishman….

There is the faintest acknowledgment, isn’t there, that the writer is not merely following his heart but also performing for an audience, and that what he is performing is a rejection as well as an impersonation.

The impersonation didn’t stop with Berger’s outward personal style: Berger’s Marxism is itself a continental style, and his writing can be viewed as a rejection of the English Establishment style and an embracing of the pan-European. For example, Berger’s art criticism: at the time Berger started publishing in the mid-Fifties, the typical English art critic was a connoisseur—so, Berger resolved to expose the capitalist roots of connoisseurship. The typical English critic wrote in an elevated, vaporizing style; Berger was concrete and dwelt on the specific materials and the specific challenges within the artist’s studio. The typical English critic spoke to an audience of his own class and background (as Denis Donoghue once observed about the prose of a certain English literary critic, there is an unspoken ‘of course’ at the end of each sentence); Berger hopefully addressed his art writings to the enlightened working class.

Seen from the outside, Berger’s life has been a series of public rejections: as a young conscript in WWII, he refused the officer’s commission that was his due in favor of life as an enlisted man; when he won the Booker Prize in 1972, he resolved in his notorious acceptance speech to ‘turn the prize against itself’ and fight the Booker-McConnell’s history of economic exploitation of the Caribbean by giving half his prize money to the London chapter of the Black Panthers; shortly afterwards, he rejected London and its cultural life for a farm in the French Alps (as is the case for every literary type from Tolstoy onward, being able to leave the farm six months out of the year is a precondition to finding truth and meaning in rural life).

What I’m describing is a kind of symbiotic relationship, one that benefits both the rebel and the Establishment (to borrow a term that was coined around the time Berger started appearing in print): the rebel uses the Establishment to negatively define himself—whatever it is, he is not. He uses the Establishment’s crimes and abuses of power to arouse the anger he needs in order to create, and he uses the Establishment’s inevitable retaliation as a way to both generate sympathy for his causes and to make a name for himself.

The Establishment, for its part, uses the rebel’s more extreme charges—that it is as fascistic and repressive as Nazi Germany, for example—to nullify less extreme charges that might have more truth to them; the Establishment uses the rebel’s attacks as a way to unify itself; and the Establishment points to the fact that it allows the rebel to publicly attack it as a sign that it actually supports the free society that it claims to believe in.

This dynamic can be seen in the careers of D.H. Lawrence, of Allen Ginsberg, and more recently, of Noam Chomsky and Ward Churchill.

It also describes some aspects of Berger’s career. But, to his credit, Berger has rebelled against his own rebellion. Now, I’m not implying for a second that Berger, as he has grown older, has succumbed to the inevitable rightward drift that marks the careers of so many former Lefties, writers like John Osborne, Christopher Hitchens and, yes, Kingsley Amis. Berger in recent years has been, if anything, more intransigently Hard Left in his politics.

Berger, though, has looked for another path through Marxism: as he said in a recent interview: “The problem with Marxism is there is no real space for ethics. Okay, there is plenty of space in it for the struggle of justice against injustice, but the notion that an act is good or bad in itself — there is no space for that. There is no space for that which is outside time or, if you wish, for the eternal…”

Berger has passionately argued against a kind of reductionist utilitarianism in Marxist writing (a tendency which Dylan Thomas memorably parodied in How to Be a Poet: “spring gay/ as the workers’ procession/to the newly opened gymnasium/look! the full employment of the blossoms!”). Much of his best work makes room for what is outside time, for the eternal. Very few writers have written in such a clear-eyed and moving way about what he calls ‘the shared subjectivity of sex’ or about the struggle to find something eternal in a love that is secular and time-bound:

The flower’s ovules
will be seeding still
When Aravis then aged
is no more than a hill.

The flower in the heart’s
wallet, the force
of what lives us
outliving the mountain

Berger has been compared to Shelley and Lawrence, for his very English combination of rebelliousness and mysticism, but his real peer is probably Ruskin. Like Ruskin, Berger has put his remarkable eye and prose at the service of a tragically unrealizable moral vision. Berger has dreamed that his writings would help bring about a plebeian industrial democracy—Ruskin imagined an art world that returned to preindustrial values. And Berger resembles Ruskin in the sad nature of his legacy: Ruskin directly inspired two of the ugliest art movements in history: the pre-Raphaelite and the Neo Gothic. Berger’s dream of a ‘radical art history,’ as one his best critics, Geoff Dyer, has pointed out, “was no sooner realized than betrayed’ in “numerous cultural studies departments…where second–rate Eagletons discoursed away in the confident belief that no one was paying attention.”

But we don’t judge a writer by his legacy: what we continue to value in a writer is that which is inimitably his own. No other writer could find hidden affinities between Francis Bacon’s paintings and Walt Disney’s cartoons, or could explain why Rodin’s insatiable need to dominate women fatally weakened his sculpture, or could show how Turner’s lifelong preoccupations in paint originated in the blood and water of his father’s barber shop, or could use a auto mechanic’s testimony to refute the unquestioned assumptions of a Surrealist painter, or, finally, could write so movingly about how the rise and fall of political hopes makes us see the same painting in such a different way.

—John Broening is a chef and writer based in Denver, Colorado. His work has appeared in the Baltimore Sun, the Baltimore City Paper, Gastronomica, Edible Front Range, and the Denver Post, for whom he writes a weekly column about food.

REVIEW: The Murderess By Alexandros Papadiamantis

Editor’s Note: This is the next installment in Wythe Marschall’s novella project. See his thoughts on the project here.

The Murderess
By Alexandros Papadiamantis
Translated by Peter Levi
New York Review of Books Classics, 2010


The Murderess does not look like a novella.  Its central character—an old woman named Hadoula—is portrayed realistically; its structure is familiar—short, action-filled chapters; and it has an ending, which falls into place inexorably after several characters’ deaths.

The typical question (“what happened?”) seems either not to apply—too obvious; Hadoula is the titular killer—or to apply multivalently.  From the first murder onward, many lines of flight unfold out of many centers of action.

But our character is a stock “lonely old woman.”  All she does is wash clothes and complain and pray.  Her son-in-law drinks at dawn each day; her sons have taken jobs on ships and will never return to Greece.  In her stock-ness, Hadoula serves as an efficient means for the reader to experience the book’s dreamlike action, all of which unfolds from the single putting-into-effect of Hadoula’s ancient, nihilistic, mirror-glass version of Christianity:

Because “nothing is exactly what it seems… grief is joy and death is life and resurrection,” Hadoula kills a young girl, only a few weeks old—her own granddaughter.

This “what happened” leads to the killings of more girls, all young, none suspecting that Hadoula has made a final break with the ethics of her society.

The Murderess is at once difficult and easy to read.  Its prose is lyrical and languid: Greece’s tiny islands come alive, and an impoverished, moral sense of community suffuses the lonely seaside cliffs and montane goat-runs where Hadoula wanders and—eventually, as her work is revealed for murder and not a series of grotesque accidents—where she hides.  (Where “she carried her wound with her.”)

We all feel Hadoula’s inborn, human pain of self-blame, of looking-in-any-incident-for-a-story, looking-for-a-moral.

(Is this the pain of the novella?)

But The Murderess is hard to read when intellectualized:

As Bad Nature is a meditation on the hunt, set in a wonderfully absurd pocket-world within Mexico City that is created by the alchemical combination of Elvis and his sphere of handlers and his translator’s moral mistranslations;—as No Tomorrow is a meditation on desire, set in a pocket-world created by outright lies and an Epicurean commitment to play, to following an adventure through, enjoying a ramble into the unconscious, by both narrator and reader;—

—so is The Murderess a meditation on murder, on the compassionate act of release from the misogynistic brutality of coastal-urban life in Greece in the first years of the century of Hitler and Stalin.

This meditation is set in a real-feeling world that is continually elided in favor of mountain peaks so olive-lush, so remote, so dotted over with the cells of eremites that, in them, it seems not only immoral but impossible that Hadoula’s brazenness—pushing girls down a well only a few yards from the house where their dying mother lies asleep, dreaming of them; strangling the child of a goatherd who helps her avoid the “regulars,” the police sent to question her after a girl falls into a well—seems an affront both narrative and ontological.

…In the forest that crowned all the western slopes… there it was said that a sea-eagle had nested for three human generations… In its abandoned nest was found an entire museum of monstrous bones of sea-snakes, seals, dogfish and other marine monsters, which the huge, powerful bird, with its blue hooked beak and is vast cinder-coloured wings, had picked out of the seas…

With language such as this, we must flatten the olive trees onto the same painting as the murders. But Hadoula is the real link.  We become complicit in her nihilism, and—because this is a novella—we never finally reach a resolution, even when Hadoula is forced into the reach of the law.   She is finally not a character at all, but the narrative shadow of her actions—the gravity of murder, rolling through the idyllic island, distorting it, deepening a brutal, unseen dimension to which we cannot deny existence:

Would it not really be right, if only humans were not so blind, to assist the scourge that fluttered in the angels’ wings…?  But look, the little angels take no sides and make no favours.  They take away boys and girls alike into Paradise.  In fact all the more boys.  So many precious only sons who died utterly…  Girls have seven lives, the old woman reflected.

The world is righteously hard for little girls, certainly in the Greece of the first years of the twentieth century.  Here Papadiamantis’s book resembles a grim Realist version of A Modest Proposal.  The Swiftian gag is Surreal (“more than real”), however, because Hadoula’s logic is not satire, and her invocations of deadly angels dredge up our own maltheism, or at least our Malthusianism.

Papadiamantis (1851-1911, “The greatest Modern Greek prose writer,” Milan Kundera) forces us to question and to affirm what is absolutely essential about life, and he does this cunningly, by forcing us into the consciousness of a woman for whom maltheism has become absolute, rigid.

But was she genuinely second-sighted?  She whose dreams… had often foretold something… or left some strange impression.  Even her lies when she told them became the truth against her will.

Lies, moral lies.  We may want to test our moral positions by announcing or even acting on our convictions before we feel them.  Perhaps the ultimate fear is that we will do so as does Hadoula.

-Wythe Marschall can be found here.

REVIEW: Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s The Woman with the Bouquet

The title of Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s forthcoming story collection, The Woman with the Bouquet, sounds like it might refer to a painting, and there is a quality to Mr.Schmitt’s writing that takes one back to a time when photography had yet to make the painted portrait obsolete. With this particular portrait, Mr. Schmitt aims to depict a woman in love, a woman with a secret, a woman whose heart is a mystery of passion and longing, capable of great happiness and deep sorrow. That is no small task, and Mr. Schmitt acquits himself admirably, even if his style can, at times, feel too formal. One of Mr. Schmitt’s chief strengths is the ability to precisely chronicle the shifts in his characters’ mental and emotional states, a skill he employs to illuminate the changeable nature of the mind and heart. If his stories could be said to have antagonists, they would be intellectual and spiritual rigidity, intolerance, and, for lack of a better term, low self-esteem. This last afflicts at least three of his stories’ heroines at one or another time in their lives, with profound consequences, and while Mr. Schmitt treats some of them with more kindness than others, in the end each is able to see herself as beautiful. That this is invariably achieved with the help of a man’s love can, I suppose, be forgiven, as Mr. Schmitt’s intentions, like those of an earnest therapist or self-help guru, are clearly good. The collection’s subtitle might have been, “Woman, Love Thyself.” Indeed, the unmistakable feeling of tender affection for their subject that pervades these stories helps one overlook the often formulaic plot development (it would seem quite fresh were it written a century earlier) and the occasionally heavy-handed moral didacticism. The author seems to have deliberately chosen anachronistic, clunky narrative vehicles–which are, however, tried and true, and keep you reading even as you foresee their resolution–as a reflection of his sense that what’s truly important about these stories is not their plot twists, but the message of positivism (and the accompanying object lesson) they are intended to deliver. To his credit, in the end Mr. Schmitt does not presume to have unraveled every mystery of a woman’s heart. In the final, eponymous story, he gallantly acknowledges his helplessness before its secrets, and his awe at its fierce, boundless strength.


The Woman with the Bouquet is forthcoming from Europa Editions on August 31, 2010.

-Ilya Lyashevsky lives in Brooklyn, where he writes fiction and software. His current project, combining technology and literature, can be found here.

How Wattpad Does Its Thing

Editor’s Note: Wattpad is a thriving online community populated with largely genre and teen-oriented fiction and a youthful and excited audience of readers and writers. We asked Nina Lassam to discuss Wattpad’s success and the role of social media in the writer’s life.

When I talk to writers about using social networking and providing free content to encourage word of mouth advertising and to drive sales, by far the biggest concern that I hear is whether they will see a measurable return on their investment of time. If you know that you can get paid to write, it can be difficult to rationalize doing any type of writing for free.

It is important to remember though that online readers are also investing their time – to read what you’ve written, comment, respond, and often to recommend your work. Interacting with this community is a way to give back while also growing your fan base and developing reader loyalty.

In many ways, using Web 2.0 media to promote your fiction makes your online presence less about what you’ve written and more about you. That is why it can be so effective. The general rule is, whether you have spend time to write a chapter, a short story, or an entire novel, you should spend comparable time writing about yourself and interacting directly with readers.

One way to successfully reach out to your audience is to give readers an annotated edition of your story peppered with footnotes of your experiences as a writer, requests for feedback, and reasons for writing the story. Humanizing your work will not only draw people to the story but also increase loyalty online and in the bookstore.

On Wattpad, the eBook community where I work, Abigail Gibbs is serializing an as yet unfinished story that has been read almost 7M times. Because she solicits feedback and inserts details about her writing process and daily life, her eBook becomes as important to readers as the relationship they’ve established with her. Because we can relate to her, we become more interested in supporting the characters and plot she has created.

Alex Greenwood, author of Pilate’s Cross, posted a free short story on Wattpad to generate interest in his novel. With Twitter, Wattpad, and other web tools, he has created an expanding group of readers that, as author Jeremy Gordan explains when discussing his own social networking experience, expands his group of guaranteed customers out of his backyard.

Without your presence, your story or profile in a reading community is about as good as setting up a Facebook account and expecting to turn to your computer the next day to hundreds of friend requests. Posting something is only part of the job; writers who have successfully grown awareness of their work using social media tools have taken considerable time to do so, and readers have rewarded them by taking time to share with others. To connect with readers and encourage book sales, a writer should use social media for what it was designed: to let an audience know that she is actually there.

-Nina Lassam works at Wattpad.

3 Micro-Stories by Alex Epstein



Three Pieces of Time

1.
A year ago, in a small town in the United States, I saw a beggar sitting beside a cardboard sign that read: “Help: my time machine is out of order. I need money for replacement parts, so I can go home to the year 2118.”

2.
To accept the assumption that God created the world less than six thousand years ago, one must accept the claim that He also created signs and traces of everything we assume happened before that: dinosaur skeletons, continental drift, cave paintings and so on. In one of his essays, Borges quotes Russell, who writes that one can argue in the same vein that the world, with its entire glorious past, was created a few minutes ago. A more radical idea is found in a Zen parable from which I copied the next lines: A teacher was asked by one of his students when the world was created. He answered, “Now.”

3.
The legend goes that Virgil wrote the Aeneid for ten years, no more than three lines each day. And at the end of his days he began subtracting from his poem: Among the lines he was satisfied to leave out was one of the tales of Aeneas, who wanders and wanders the streets of Carthage, until he comes to a square bustling with people. He pushes his way into the crowd and listens to a blind storyteller, who tells of the journeys and hardships of a man who cannot find the way home—Odysseus is his name. “But not even a single road leads out of Troy!” cries Aeneas, perhaps to the gods, perhaps to the storyteller, “We are doomed to march them all.”

The Book of Sleep

This story is somewhat familiar: On the seam of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Orientalist Antoine Galland translated The Thousand and One Nights into French, and wove in legends and tales of Scheherazade that he invented himself, or that he’d just heard during his travels in the East (like the one, for example, about Aladdin and the magic lamp). In Galland’s journals, by contrast, in an adaptation by the Argentine writer Bioy Casares, we encounter another story, which Galland actually neglected to include in his translation of The Thousand and One Nights: He states that at a market in Toulouse he obtains a tattered book said to have been written by a Gypsy. Whoever reads from this book from dawn until dusk, the bookseller instructs Galland, will fall asleep and awaken after one hundred years. Only then will he continue to read the book at the exact place he’d stopped, without knowing that the world outside is unrecognizably changed (again). Galland returns home and one morning begins to read the book as instructed. At night he falls asleep and awakens the next day: a lazy autumn in the south of France. The only thing that happened, he recalls through the curtain of waking, was that also in his dream he’d slept and awakened from another dream, and it isn’t clear to him which of the two dreams is real. Galland copies into his journal one of the opening lines from the book, “The god prayed. But to which god? Thus is the universe made,” and then places the fraudulent book in his library, and returns to the labors of translating The Thousand and One Nights. Elsewhere in his journal he remarks that perhaps it isn’t the man who sleeps for one hundred years, but the book.

Super Zאn

Like many superheroes, in her everyday life she works at a dreary job: as a clerk at the post office. But from time to time she has to use her special powers even from behind the counter. Once a thief entered her post office and pointed the gun in his trembling hand at her. She said, The Buddha’s heart was also not on the right side. Enlightenment was within reach.

—Alex Epstein was born in St. Petersburg in 1971 and moved to Israel when he was eight years old. He is the author of three collections of short stories and three novels; Blue Has No South, his most recent collection of short-short stories, is available in English, from Clockroot Books.

—Becka Mara McKay is the author of the poetry collection A Meteorologist in the Promised Land and a translator from the Hebrew; her recent translations include Suzane Adam’s Laundry (Autumn Hill Books) and Alex Epstein’s Blue Has No South (Clockroot Books). She is currently a professor of creative writing and translation at Florida Atlantic University.

Fallacy in Puffy Paint, c. 1992

Lately I keep thinking about this t-shirt I had when I was nine. Back then, I dreamed of one day owning a whole wardrobe of clothing designed—i.e., puffy-painted—by me. I’d started by making three t-shirts. The first two I wore all the time. One had a big exclamation point on the front and a lime-green question mark on the back. The other read “BELEK FOR PRESIDENT,” and featured a stick-figure illustration of the perfect president America would never have.

But the third t-shirt, the one I’ve been remembering, I was allowed to wear only a few times. This one consisted of a drawing of a cat that took up most of the back of the shirt—I think it also read “Flat Cat”—and then, the cool part, my idea, the cat’s tail went over the shoulder to dangle down, just a bit, on the front. I messed up coloring in that tail, though—I wanted it to have a different-colored tip—and so it didn’t turn out quite how I’d wanted. Most of the tail was a striped lavender, but the very tip was pink, and, because that particular tube of paint had been hard to squeeze out evenly, it was a little misshapen, more swollen than the rest. I couldn’t get it to taper quite like a tail does, either. When my parents first saw it, disappointingly, they’d actually asked me what it was. “You can’t tell?” I’d said, turning around to show them the back of the shirt. In stores, too, people gave my shoulder curious looks. Once a teenage boy gave it a stare, then came back to snicker at it with a friend. That must have been one of the last times I was allowed to wear the shirt in public, before my parents told me (I don’t remember the actual conversation) that probably I shouldn’t wear it out anymore, that the tail on my shoulder actually looked a lot like a penis.

Yes, there was a time when I unknowingly wandered the earth with a puffy-paint penis on my shoulder. But while I like to talk about it for laughs, what I feel when I remember that t-shirt, and what I think I felt at the time, is actually something more like grief. There it was in my drawer: this thing I’d conceived and designed, imagined and realized, and then been asked to put away. As the puffy paint on the other two t-shirts cracked and began to peel away from its fabric, the cat shirt stayed pristine. Sometimes I slept in it—after all, as I’d argued to my parents at first, what did it matter what other people thought it was? What mattered was what it actually was, and as I well knew, it was a cat’s tail. But even wearing the shirt in the privacy and darkness of my own room began to feel vaguely illicit. Because as much as I insisted on the tail-ness of the thing on my shoulder, and as much as I insisted that the only point of view that mattered was my own, it became clear, as time went on, that those ideals had lost some of their truth. Come on. Now that I knew what the tail looked like to other people, was there really a way for it never to look that way to me too?

One lesson here being, of course, that when you are an artist—as when you are a nine-year-old—sometimes you draw cats and people see penises. Or: sometimes you draw penises when you think you’re drawing cats. Or (go away, Freud): you just never know how your work will be read by the rest of the world.

So you take a risk. Right? You wear that t-shirt in public, and in the act of wearing it, of revealing it to whoever will look, you let it go. It’s not all yours anymore, that shirt, even when it’s secured firmly around your torso, even when it sews circles around your arms and your neck. Because sometimes people will stare and laugh, and other times they will stop you and ask, “What does Belek mean?” And even after you tell them, “It’s just a name I made up,” they’ll say, “But what does it mean?” or “How did you think of it?” and it won’t be until almost twenty years later that you’re able to look back and tell whoever will listen that the name was a very prescient cousin of Barack. Duh.

I’ve been remembering and wanting to tell this story, the puffy-paint-penis story, partly to resurrect that cat shirt, to give it some other function (butt of joke?) and thus save it from its pristine, buried-in-drawer fate. And I’ve been wanting to tell it partly out of sorrow for all the unworn t-shirts of the world, all the artistic misfires, the bungled cat’s tails no longer perched on artists’ shoulders. Mostly, though, I want to figure out what that experience taught me about artistic intention. (And intention’s attendant phallusy.) A few years later, when I was a teenager making teenage art stuff, I worked vigilantly to excise conscious decisions from my process, vowing to create everything with eyes closed. Was the t-shirt incident at the core of that conviction?

And if so, am I telling this story to remind my older self not only that risk is necessary, is elemental, to the artist, but also that intentions, those early decisions about meaning, are, finally, beside the point? Yes, perhaps that is the thing I’d like to convince myself of now, again; perhaps that is the reason that this story has been humming so loudly between my ears.

It’s tempting to ask whether, if I were the parent now, I would have allowed the girl to wear the shirt. The question, though, belies the fact that, ever since I learned what else that tail looked like, I have been both parent and child—both knowing and unknowing, complicit and innocent—with respect to my work. Every day, I have to ask, What is this? The answer I give will inevitably be naïve, and the subsequent decision—Can I wear it? Publish? Should I?—will be informed by the knowledge that the thing in question may be perceived as a tail or a penis, or neither. Maybe it’s just some lavender puffy paint squeezed onto a t-shirt that came in a pack of three. I can’t think about it too much; if I really want the wardrobe, I just have to put it on.

—Helen Rubinstein also wrote here about writing offline, and currently has fiction up at Assembly Journal.

On James Merrill’s The Seraglio & the literary ‘frisson’


Reading is a physical process, and the body of every avid reader retains the faintest traces of the physical effects left upon it by the books he’s read. I’m not talking about eyestrain, or backache or even a stiff neck. And I don’t mean just laughter and tears—although these are both rare and welcome by-products of our reading. Nor do I refer to the force that impels us to fling a book across the room because of its sheer fatuousness or the unearned demands it makes on our time or attention.

I mean a physical reaction, a deposit of complex pleasure, that’s unique to art: what the French call the frisson. The word ‘frisson’ means both shudder or shiver, and thrill: in other words, the frisson is, equally, a reaction of fear and pleasure. It is an art-emotion that Rilke captured so well in those famous lines from the first of the Duino Elegies:

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror we can just barely endure, and we admire it so because it calmly disdains to destroy us.

No writer more assiduously analyzed or nourished this art-shudder than Nabokov: he described it variously as a “thrill,” “aesthetic bliss” and “the sudden erection of your small dorsal hairs.” In his lecture on Dickens, he rhapsodizes, “although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite the highest emotion humanity has evolved.”

Every serious reader cultivates the art-shudder and will happily list the works that have given him this singular thrill. For many readers it begins in youth with horror fiction; I would start my list with books that are on most lists: at eight, the end of Johnny Tremain, and Johnny running through the streets of Revolutionary War Boston and yelling ‘Rab’s dead!’ Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, read at thirteen. The final thunderous pages of The Great Gatsby, read my senior year in high school; in my twenties, Larkin’s poetry ; in my thirties Walter Raleigh’s What is our life? with its clinching line “but we die in earnest, that’s no jest.”

One favorite work that is probably on few lists is James Merrill’s first novel The Seraglio (1957). The Seraglio hardly what you’d think of as a poet’s novel. Merrill’s second novel, The (Diblos) Notebook, which is plotless, experimental and preoccupied with language, especially the aesthetics of literary revision, is more what you’d expect from a poet.

The Seraglio is in many ways a period piece: Freudian and antiquarian like many cultural products of the Fifties. It even features that favored character of Fifties culture, the sinister, self-hating homosexual, with the perfect sissy name of Francis.

Merrill’s work resembles a brittle novel of manners, with its precisely observed social milieu—the artsy old money set in and around Boston and New York—and its carefully doled-out apercus.

The Seraglio tells the story of Francis Tanning, the homosexual scion of an old, ailing but still potent financial tycoon, Benjamin Tanning. Around the elder Tanning, at The Cottage, his summer house, is the seraglio, the harem of available women: fiancées, ex-wives, the wives of penniless colleagues, bohemian artists. Francis himself, so sensitive as a boy that a recipe for apple pie causes him to burst into tears, drifts around Europe, has a few disastrous entanglements with women, tries in vain to please his father.

Then, halfway through the novel, Francis takes a straight razor and cuts off his own penis. The scene is realistically rendered—“The blade was very sharp; something began easily to separate then to resist, tougher than a thong of leather”—one shudders to imagine the research involved in bringing it to life.

The novelist has artfully prepared us for this shock: a portrait is mutilated on the opening page, and in the novel’s metaphorical language and ornamental detail, there are decapitations and disfigurements everywhere we look. Francis has already tried to rid of himself of his manhood once by attempting to give away his inheritance.

A lesser novelist would have ended with the self-castration. For Merrill, the act initiates a psychic journey that is ultimately unknowable. Francis proclaims his own freedom from rules and entanglements, dabbles in the occult (here is the beginning of Merrill’s unfortunate lifelong infatuation with the Ouija board), drives too fast, quotes Lady Macbeth’s line about unsexing herself, and displays a genius for making everyone around him uncomfortable.

The father, Benjamin, who in some ways resembles a more benign version of the rapacious tycoon from Chinatown, loves his son in his own way.

Towards the end of the novel the elder Tanning remarries, but that hardly puts an end to his kind of seigneurialism. Sex is at the center of this novel in ways that it can never be in James’s work. Creepily, Francis eyes another prospect for his father, and awakens his father’s interest in her. It is as this point that we realize the significance of the title: aha! We say, every harem needs its eunuch!

But the real surprise is in the final pages of the novel.

I read the last pages of the novel on a summer day very much like the one the novel’s ending describes. It would be a cliché, and untrue, to say that I was transported, or suddenly lost awareness of my surroundings; if anything I was more aware of the fat mosquitoes that I slapped on my shins, the huge elm tree above my head, the stagnant, lichen-rimmed inlet below the house, the handful of pleasure boats out on the bay.

And here was the art-thrill again, in the last few pages of the novel; in the walled garden of the summer house, Francis is drawn into a game of Hide-and-Seek with his nephews and nieces:


Lily…rehearsed the rules he obeyed at her age, in the same walled garden.

“Uncle Francis is It,” she announced proudly at last. “If he wants to play he has to be It.”

Francis shuts his eyes and counts to a hundred:

“Ready or not!” he shouted…With exaggerated stealth and flashing stern glances into the greenery he started across the lawn…Where were they? No sound of smothered laughter came to ease his confusion.

But only after coming upon the children building castles at the sea’s edge, oblivious to him, did Francis stare over the lulled water and understand. He was It. He tentatively said so the first time, then once more with an exquisite tremor of conviction: “I am It.”

The words carried with them wondrous notions of selflessness, of permanence. His father coughed behind him in the house. The children trembled against the sea. He knew the expression on his own face. The entire world was real.

Up to this point, The Seraglio has been threaded with images of insubstantiality, of theater, of the unreal. Read as a self-enclosed set piece, the ending of The Seraglio is as finely shaped and cadenced as a short story; the ending could be that of a Hesse novel, in which the protagonist, after stumbling through a forest of spiritual confusion, finally comes upon a clearing, and enlightenment.

Read as a set piece, the ending describes what Zen Buddhism calls satori, the sudden flash of enlightenment in which the true nature of the universe is revealed, or what Hinduism calls Samadhi, in which all ego boundaries dissolve, and the watcher realizes that he is all things. The ending is the capital ‘E’ epiphany, that moment of enlightenment that, as Charles Baxter warned us, our modern fiction tirelessly manufactures.

But of course we can’t read it without knowledge of what’s gone on before. Francis is also ‘It’ in the way the character in the horror movie, who has been observing the strange goings-on in the small town from the periphery and suddenly finds that the townspeople have turned their malevolent predators ‘gazes in his direction, is ‘It.’

And he is ‘It’ in the way someone with no sex, a man who has hacked off his own genitals, is no longer a he or a she but an ‘It.’ We are also reminded that if a loss of ego boundaries is the sign of enlightenment, it also a sign of madness.

Both readings are formidably present: the beauty and the terror, the chill in our bodies, the stamp of great literature that is like a muscle memory.

—John Broening is a chef and writer based in Denver, Colorado. His work has appeared in the Baltimore Sun, the Baltimore City Paper, Gastronomica, Edible Front Range, and the Denver Post, for whom he writes a weekly column about food.

Images courtesy of bluffton.edu & wustl.edu

Juxtaposition, the Modern Sublime, Poetry Responding to The Deepwater Horizon Disaster

Column Note: POETICS APPLIED
In pursuit of those methods, techniques, theories and figures that can contribute to one’s own poetry by their application in poetic praxis, Curtis Jensen comments on, reviews and analyzes contemporary and past literatures from the perspective of an emerging poet, which he is.

Say for instance a subject is confronted with the endless array of a system of signification, as is often the case in the postmodern context. This array of unending signification happens to resemble a cloth of red silk, extending in all directions at once. The subject is struck by the overwhelming vastness of the array and the beautiful silken resemblance, and sets about to express this. The subject, an artist, selects elements that are distant (and so contrasting), and draws them together in juxtaposition, fashioning their figure into that of a cloth rose. The figure is a fine aesthetic object, and each time the artist re-encounters it, she projects the unbounded context of the vast and terrifying array of signification into it, re-expanding the array’s unbounded context, and re-accessing the sublime.

Now say for instance this example permutates: the unbounded array, a horrific oil spill, and the artist, a poet powerfully struck by the vast unbounded context of the spill’s disastrous unfolding. The poet selects contrasting elements from the complex of the oil spill, perhaps a little girl playing on the beach with a broken containment boom and a dead, oil-drenched turtle; the poet fashions these elements into a juxtaposed figure, perhaps including a couple other figures to go along with the girl and the turtle; the poet attaches a title to her work, something like Oil Spill, or Oil, or The Girl and the Oil Spill and the Dead Turtle, and then the poet posts her poem on her blog. Again, it is likely that the poet, when re-encountering Oil Spill or Oil or the Girl and The Oil Spill and the Dead Turtle, is able to access the sublime that sparked her poem. Other poets and readers who share with the poet an awareness of and a perspective on the disaster’s unbounded context (its material, social, political and human implications) are able to project this context into the juxtaposed figures of Oil Spill, or Oil, or The Girl and The Oil Spill and the Dead Turtle. Such a projection invokes the fear, despair and terror of the unbounded and uncapped disaster still unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico, and so accesses the sublime. In this way the Oil Spill or Oil or The Girl and The Oil Spill is an affirming poem.

But what of, say for instance, the poet’s brother-in-law? He encounters the rose figure at work one afternoon while responding to the day’s emails; he recognizes the figure as an aesthetic object of great skill and craft, appreciates it as such, and goes on with his business till knocking off early to stop by the local pub for a tall glass of cool beer before heading home to dinner with the artist/poet’s sister and their two small children. The rose figure does not facilitate his accessing the sublime because he is not already familiar with the array’s unbounded context, he is not informed previously of a theory of signification systems, and the rose figure in its compression does not bring him any closer to becoming conscious of it. This is not to suggest that the brother-in-law is not capable of becoming conscious of semiotic theory, but that the rose fails to invoke an encounter with the sublime, the encounter that the artist had set out to express.

When the brother-in-law encounters Oil Spill or Oil or The Girl and the Oil Spill and the Dead Turtle, he does not share with the poet the same consciousness of or ideological perspective on the disastrous oil spill, and recognizes the poem as an aesthetic object only, knocks off work early to enjoy a cold beer at the bar before heading home to dinner. Again, this is not to say that the poet’s brother in law cannot become conscious of the disaster’s unbounded context, but that the poem failed in invoking for the brother-in-law an encounter with the sublime nature of the disaster.

As a class, poems in response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster seek to express and comment upon the horror, fear, despair, disgust, anger, and frustration felt as a result of the disaster’s unfolding. Most of these emotions are attributes of the perception of the sublime. The postmodern sublime differs from the romantic sublime in that it is a refiguration of the subject-object interaction characteristic of the former. In postmodernity, practically all aspects of the natural world have been effected by human activity, hence the postmodern sublime is understood to be the subject and a human-effected object in its unbounded context. In theory, such an encounter sparks overwhelming sensations, and so accessing the sublime initiates a powerful affective mode in poetry. Accordingly, poems written in response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster (Gulf Coast’s Poets for Living Waters features the bulk of the best of these) share a tendency to attempt to access the sublime. Such attempts are intended to further the poet’s expression of, comment upon, or protest against the disaster.
I suggest that the poetry responding to the Deepwater Horizon disaster over-relies upon the device of juxtaposition, and that in this over-reliance, it has failed to access the sublime.

The ecopoetics movement has taken a vanguard position in contemporary poetry, its supporters writing and criticizing some of the most compelling poetry written today. The poetry circulating in response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster is not all the result of the ecopoetics movement, but the primary themes of the two camps, ecopoetics and practically everyone else writing about the disaster, overlay one another.

The poems circulating in response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster are influenced by a prominent maxim of the ecopoetics movement: show the bird and the bulldozer together. This maxim presumes that the bulldozer and the bird are causally related, which, in the postmodern context, they often are, perhaps as a function of the destructive development of habitat as in the case of, say, a landfill or a subdivision or a catastrophic oil spill.
Though the bird and bulldozer maxim does lend itself to juxtaposition, it does not oblige the poet to rely upon it as a primary figurative device. Juxtaposition, by bringing together unlike terms for comparison, engages a contrast that results in powerful compression. Often juxtaposition is deployed for rhetorical purposes, say perhaps to defamiliarize some traditional literary convention, as the modernists were apt to do, or as in the case of poems in response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, to convey that the disaster is a giant horrible mess and a manifestation of a deeper set of highly destructive practices. (Jonathan Skinner mentions the bird and bulldozer maxim in his excellent and free literary journal, ecopoetics. See his statement from a talk presented at AWP in issue 4/5, specifically for his compelling (and I feel accurate) ethical arguments. For another treatment of the bird and bulldozer maxim, Christopher Arigo works at the topic in his review of Juliana Spahr’s last book in How 2, as well as explicating the role of the postmodern sublime in ecopoetics).

But for those that don’t share a similar awareness of the context of the Deepwater Horizon disaster and who encounter these highly compressed poems, what then? The poems’ figures are art objects that elicit an aesthetic response, but because of over-reliance on compressive devices such as juxtaposition, the poems do not facilitate the reader’s access to the sublime, and therefore fail in achieving their intentions. Furthermore, such poems do not bring the reader, the poet’s brother-in-law, or anyone else not broadly sharing the same ideological perspective, any closer to sympathy with the poet’s position in regards to the material, social, political and human aspects of the disaster.

I do not mean to insist that poetry must take a rhetorical position. I mean to insist that in relying upon highly compressive figurative devices such as juxtaposition in its treatment of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the poetry circulating in response to the disaster is affirming, but not convincing, thus failing in its rhetorical intentions. Showing the bird and the bulldozer is an ethically sound maxim; I hold it as an imperative in my own work. But reducing of vastly complex material, social, and political contexts to selected elements figured in compression results in poetry of affirmation, whether it is poetry in response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster or otherwise. And, Poetry of affirmation is poetry which holds very little significance.

-Curtis Jensen works and studies in Brooklyn, but he’d rather be here. He maintains a blog at theendofwaste.blogspot.com

REVIEW: No Tomorrow (Point de lendemain) by Vivant Denon

Note on Column:

What makes a novella a novella, as opposed to a long short story or a short novel? Why does the novella seduce us, even though relatively few are published or taught? (You never hear, for example, “Mommy, I want to grow up to be a famous novella-ist!”) Deleuze and Guattari offer a few hypnotic thoughts on the subject, but even they abandon the question after only—and perhaps appropriately—half-contemplating it.

Towards a literary–psychological theory of the novella, writer and compulsive short-text reader Wythe Marschall offers a biweekly review of classic and contemporary works that may or may not fit your definition of the term.

By focusing on their playful relationship with theme—a constant seesaw between story and meditation, narrative-packed-into-a single moment and timeless “whoa” of profound human experience—Wythe hopes to pin down just what the novella does to its reader’s brain: Can we situate “the novella effect” somewhere between the constrained, heightened consciousness of the short story and the taxonomizing–exhausting consciousness of the novel? Tune in every other week to find out—

Or, at least, to discover several novellas worth reading.

Thanks to Electric Literature, New Directions, NYRB Classics, and Melville House.

No Tomorrow (Point de lendemain)
By Vivant Denon
Translated by Lydia Davis
New York Review of Books Classics, 2009

The novella must look like one thing and be another, always. It cannot succumb to plot—then it is a story. It cannot unfold too spaciously—then your brain organizes it into a novel. No, a novella must remain wild…

In his introduction to No Tomorrow, Peter Brooks writes:

The whole art here is to stage a scene… without naming names, or parts, or detailing the acts taking place. Yet it is all perfectly lucid, even precise.

He could just as well be writing of the novella in general as of Dominique Vivant Denon’s slim opus—a classic “long short story,” as far from the “very short novel” type of novella as you can get.

Still, something holds this story, as well as Marías’s Bad Nature, and a short novel such as Papadiamantis’s The Murderess, in the same abstract gaze. Something makes No Tomorrow (translated by the maniacally precise Lydia Davis) a novella—lucid and compelling but without a breakneck plot; familiar without a deep character.

Part of that “something” of the novella—the mysterium in-betweenium—is the way it gives your unconscious more than enough material to create a meaningful experience without giving you too much.

When Picasso paints the fractured face of a woman—noses, eyes, and mouth-halves all more or less there and relatively proportional, but also wrong—he is not painting “a woman,” but using the trope of “painting a woman” to paint something else entirely, or rather several things:

  • the impression that seeing this woman makes on you;
  • the way that you yourself make meaning out of color and line to form “a woman” in your mind’s eye;
  • the way you take on something of the woman you make, the other—your own “becoming-woman,” as Deleuze & Guattari might’ve said.

This process of forcing the consumer-of-art’s unconscious to carry the heavy part of the creative load is at play always in the novella.

Here’s Denon, forcing you to become the narrator even as, in this same pithy sentence, he turns the plot over on you:

I felt that a blindfold had just been lifted from my eyes, and I didn’t even see the new one with which it was replaced.

We still don’t know the guy’s name, but now we coolly know that he knows that his new love affair with Mme de —— isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

The Mme is the best friend of the Comtesse de ——, with whom the narrator is unrequitedly in love, and this Mme has just informed the poor lad that his object of affection is a pathological liar at best and an inconstant succubus on her off days. The narrator thinks he’s traded glass for sapphire, when all he’s done, to employ Denon’s optical metaphor, is change one broken jeweler’s lens for another.
Desire carries him forward. Denon, inviting philosophy to intervene within melodrama:

Kisses are like confidences: they attract each other, they accelerate each other, they excite each other.

Soon the narrator’s post-Romantic/pre-scientistic impressions of sex and our own conflate, and we share an intimate threesome with the nameless dandy and the skilled, in-command Mme. Her husband is asleep in the other room, and her real lover, the Marquis—who has invited the Mme to take a false secret lover for the evening, if she’s going to stay at her cuckolded husband’s place—is still yet to arrive. All is quiet. (Denon: “Our sighs replaced language.”)

In the morning, we still don’t know our surrogate rake’s name. We continue liking the narrator because, in his way, he wins. He’s playing with house money, and he breaks even, plus maybe enough for an onion soup at the bar on the way home…

So what happened? Is the Rashomon-style, single-moment fulcrum of the “classically libertine” No Tomorrow its narrator’s first kiss with the Mme? Their first (and only) coitus—stranger with stranger, seducer with rake? Brooks:

One would be hard-pressed to find the meaning of No Tomorrow. Yet it has endured as a classic.

Why?

Denon was not a writer, principally, but an artist, one of Napoleon’s lieutenants. According to Denon, when the Little Colonel’s conquering army came upon the ancient city of Thebes in Egypt, it broke out into spontaneous applause.

The French were struck by what happened on a level entirely removed from war, from France, from wanting-to-be-struck. Their campaign was a colonial diversion, and they would end up fighting in Europe.

But what happened that day in Thebes was real beyond the bounds of experiential genre. In some ways, the novella invites this same break with expectation. What happened? A part of you that even you cannot always access will be the judge. Read on.

-Wythe Marschall can be found here.

A launch for Wythe’s first book (in a series), “Lecture, Live Human Dissection and Book Launch”, will happen Friday, July 16th at 8:00 PM at Observatory.

Judson Merrill writes to his Indie Bookstore

My literary career is young but it’s never too early to begin massaging the feet of posterity. For the benefit of scholars and fans alike, I will use this space on The Outlet, on a semi-regular basis, to release a selection of my correspondence and other papers. Enjoy. (Universities interested in acquiring the complete Judson Merrill archive should contact me through my web site.)

Dear Longfellow Books,


First, let me thank you for your many years of service to my hometown, the great city of Portland. These days there are fewer and fewer independent booksellers and it is heartening to see your store thrive and grow because it offers such a personal, human touch.

After years of receiving your emails sharing news and recommendations from the world of letters, I want to return the favor and share my own exciting literary update.

This week I released my new novel! Soldered in Half tells the dynamic story of a mechanical engineer with a dream but family obligations that threaten to weld that dream to earth. It’s edgy, but uplifting.

Please find below a link to Amazon.com where you can download Soldered in Half for your Kindle or other digital device with Kindle software. Being a brick-and-mortar store, you might not have a lot of experience with e-books but they present an exciting new opportunity for emerging authors such as myself to cut out the middlemen and reach readers directly.

And Soldered in Half has sparked an immediate connection with those readers. In the three days since the book has been available, it’s skyrocketed from 18,780th place in Amazon’s rankings to 7,400th. At this rate, Soldered in Half will be the number one seller on Amazon.com in two more days!

And I’d like to give you a chance to grab onto those coattails. I think Longfellow Books is the perfect promotional partner to help me build on the book’s early success. After all, you’re my local bookstore. Or, you were. Obviously, I couldn’t stay in Maine and make it as a writer. I’ve moved to the Big Apple and my bookstore here is a Barnes & Noble. Sure, they send me emails, too, but they’re mostly for massive online coupons. (Little do they know the discounted books I’m buying from them were recommended by an independent bookseller in Maine. Score one for the little guy!) Call me an idealist, but I don’t want to deal with that sort of anonymous corporation. Hypothetically, if I sent B&N an email similar to this one, 8 days might go by and I still haven’t heard back.

First, of course, you’ll want to read my book and make sure you feel (as I do) that we’re a natural team. So download the book (it’s just $9.99 — I tried to set the price higher but Amazon drives a hard bargain — lucky for you) and next time you’re walking around the shelves on a slow morning and need something to read you can reach (digitally) for Soldered in Half. I’m sure you’ll be drawn in by the gripping story. It’s trenchant, but approachable.

Once you’ve loved the book, I’m sure you’ll agree our first step is to set up a reading and book signing. Yes, it’s an e-book but I’ve done some experimenting and a sharpie works equally well on the back of a Kindle and human flesh. As far as reading dates go, I looked back through your old newsletters and it seems you give your biggest authors Thursday night slots, which is fortunate, since I’m free on Thursdays and can fly in for the event. (Don’t worry, I know times are tough for independent bookstores and I’m not going to stick you with a first-class airplane ticket. I’m happy to fly coach.)

With that event as our marketing springboard, I believe we can develop other exciting opportunities together. As an example, I know there are elderly or otherwise computer-illiterate readers who might suspect an electronic book is from the devil. In order to help us both reach that market, I am prepared to offer Longfellow Books the exclusive Maine rights to sell print editions of Soldered in Half. This is a new business model for a new millennium. Once we hammer out the details, you will be free to set up a terminal next to your New Fiction display, where customers can download the book and print it out on your printer. You won’t even have to shoulder the costs of hosting the file since it’s already posted on Amazon.

I could go on about the projects we might develop together, but for now allow me to close by giving you a taste of what readers are saying about Soldered in Half. The review most often voted helpful by Amazon’s users, by bookface234, reads, “Soldered in Half is … a roller-coaster … I’m speechless. The story [made me laugh] and [experience other powerful emotions.] This book absolutely … refunded … my full purchase price.” Another anonymous review said simply, “It’s lyrical, but resonant.”

Thank you much for your kind attention and I look forward to working with you.

Best,
Judson Merrill

* * *

Previously: Judson Merrill sends Letters to his Editor, tucks copy of story under Editor’s daughter’s sheets.

-Judson Merrill lives and writes in Brooklyn. Some of his work, including his e-novella The Pool, can be found at judsonmerrill.com.