With interlocking approaches of antic myth, oneiric philosophy, iconographic satire, existential apocalypse, sexual transference and inversion, historical erasure, and folkloric recovery, Olga Tokarczuk’s 1998 novel, House of Day, House of Night, may be seen as an over-ambitious stew of spare parts and mismatched formulas. But the author mostly succeeds in holding it all together through geographical, temporal observation and imagination. Set in fictional Nowa Ruda after WWII, when that town was ceded to south-west Poland from Germany, the novel intersperses many narratives: longer segments on the co-existing mixed-up sexual identity of the protagonist’s life with his work on the tragic fate of Saint Kummernis; sexual boredom and excitement centring on another hermaphroditic interloper into the life of a couple in a moribund marriage; death recipes involving gathered forest mushrooms; a woman who (hazily) ‘succeeds’ in pursuing the man in her repetitive dreams; a wise old crone (neighbour Marta) who is presented through a subtly ingenious filter, in a mythical play against stereotype in modernist re-occurence, and with whom the head narrator is unable to communicate with rationally, but whose pervasive ruminations on entropy and death underscore the work. Here’s an extended passage, as seen through Marta’s eyes:
“Once she saw a valley, over which hung a low, orange sky. All the lines of this world were indistinct and the shadows were blurred, cast by some alien light. In the valley there were no houses, no traces of humanity, not a single clump of nettles or a wild currant bush was growing. There was no stream, though the place where one used to be was overgrown with thick, hard, tawny grass, like a scar. In this world there was no day, and no night either. The orange sky kept shining all the time—neither warm nor cold, motionless and indifferent. The hill was still covered in forest, but when she looked at it closely she could see that it was dead; at some point it had hardened and turned to stone. Pine cones hung on the spruce trees, and their branches were still covered in ashen needles, because there was no wind to scatter them. She has a terrible foreboding that if any sort of movement were to occur in this landscape the forest would come crashing down and turn to dust.”
Similar to the frequent Kummernis-Paschalis narrative, though, the above passage is used, earlier in the novel, word for word, from the mind of a clairvoyant widower, Leo, who follows it up with, “That was how the end must look. No deluge, no rains of fire, no Auschwitz, no comet. This is how the world will look when God has deserted it, whoever he is ... In this spectral light everything will crumble.” There is an attack, online, on the Antonia Lloyd-Jones’ translation of House of Day, House of Night by a reviewer who posits that the novel fails, in its transferred language, to understand a supposed feminist take on what Tokarczuk was up to. I can’t comment as to specifics since I don’t understand Polish and I won’t access the complete review (it costs $41), but my imperfect understanding is that the author is erasing the more superficial gender complaints with a wider sympathy, that once an existential realization occurs (typically, in the novel, when age has granted wisdom to some of the characters), a universal application, among men and women, takes over.
You’ve gathered this isn’t light fare, but in that Eastern European vein, humour hovers over the often bleak narratives like a mischievous, levitating sprite, the best scene of which involves a man who, reflecting on a three-score-and-ten well-lived, dies on a hillcrest at the exact junction between Czechoslovakia and Poland, and is then discovered by authorities who drag him to the more bureaucratically expedient side of the border.
Dense in observational weight and light, Tokarczuk’s novel is a metaphysical gem.
Saturday, December 10, 2016
Juan Goytisolo's Juan the Landless
The final entry of Juan Goytisolo’s loose trilogy, 1975’s Juan The Landless is more of the same, with, if possible, even more vitriol, sarcastic irony, rage, mockery, denunciation, and repetitive accusation. This anti-novel, bilious prose-poem fusillade, or diary-in-exile, starts with a model – in both the moral and aesthetic meaning of that word – Catholic couple’s excremental necessities (with ham-fisted symbolism) and ends with a mock trial against the in-story author at a reading of his work. You have to admire an author who not only cares not for his bookish image, but who trashes its conception: “his gaze travels from one review to another with a serious, pained expression as his lips utter the magisterial reproaches as though he were telling the beads of a prickly rosary (a) excessive use of foreign phrases (b) lack of linguistic rigour (c) suspect representation of reality (d) inability to communicate the facts coldly and objectively (e) meaningless accumulation of sick, morbid personal obsessions (f) deliberate employment of substitutive myths (g) abandonment of all claim to truth ...”. The ‘faults’ are admitted, and the accuser seems not only petty, but obtuse, with the embedded, ironic critique: “coldly and objectively ... reality ...truth”. Further scatalogical irony builds in a long, hilarious exchange between a cultural defender trying, in apotropaic futility, to counter our good narrator, the tail-end of it noted here with: “leave me alone!, he will say: you can go jump in the lake! I’d be happy to, but I don’t happen to have my swim trunks with me. I can’t stand this!, he will howl: I’m about to explode! and that is literally what happens, without your being able to do anything to prevent it: a bland, gelatinous substance spurts out of his head, as though it were a bursting shell, and splatters all over the walls and ceiling of the ultramodern office painted in restful pastel colors”.
Reviews, synopses, and blurbs are frequent in their claims that this book somehow relaxes into a counter-proposal, a positive emotional balance, the vibrant Moors appearing as the longed-for corrective. I don’t see much of it, except in a narrowly-based nomenclature.
Helen Lane stays aboard for this translation, fortunately, managing Goytisolo’s relentless outrageousness to great effect. More reminiscent in structure to the first novel of the trilogy, Marks Of Identity, with its frequently long block paragraphs, hallucinatory discombobulation, and brutal historically-flavoured anecdotes, Juan The Landless is best taken as a bitter on an empty stomach, though it’s not distilled for most tastes, for which Goytisolo, no doubt, would react in loud, nasty laughter.
Reviews, synopses, and blurbs are frequent in their claims that this book somehow relaxes into a counter-proposal, a positive emotional balance, the vibrant Moors appearing as the longed-for corrective. I don’t see much of it, except in a narrowly-based nomenclature.
Helen Lane stays aboard for this translation, fortunately, managing Goytisolo’s relentless outrageousness to great effect. More reminiscent in structure to the first novel of the trilogy, Marks Of Identity, with its frequently long block paragraphs, hallucinatory discombobulation, and brutal historically-flavoured anecdotes, Juan The Landless is best taken as a bitter on an empty stomach, though it’s not distilled for most tastes, for which Goytisolo, no doubt, would react in loud, nasty laughter.
Friday, December 9, 2016
Cormac McCarthy's The Road
Readers perusing reviews of Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 The Road hardly need one more consideration of that mega-hit, but I read it, and’ll have my say. (Perhaps one or two things here have been bypassed by the reviewing community, I couldn’t tell.)
Most will be familiar with the story: post-apocalyptic, (and probable), nuclear winter; man shepherding young son through the horror in a constant search for food, clothing, warmth, and (not least) secrecy to avoid murderers and cannibals.
Two quibbles: there are sporadic sections of writing that strain for the profound. For McCarthy, this comes about through grand abstractions and easy metaphors: i.e., “commissaries of hell”. That’s a pretty good association, but by that slice in the novel, we’ve had “[fill in] of hell” many times. Ditto with “black [fill in].” McCarthy’s powers of description – in vocabulary, in understanding of the (un?)natural world’s flux, and from the narrator’s self-sufficient wisdom – are awesome (I hope that last word still retains, somewhat, the power of its original meaning), and don’t need the buttressing overkill. The other problem has to do with biological and physiological plausibility. It’s hard to credit the father with the energy needed to carry out several of his arduous tasks in the desperate environment he and the boy find themselves in. The intricate (and fast) threading of sutures on his own arrow wound in the cold and dark, covered in dirt, already exhausted; the power needed to wade through ocean waves to scramble onto an ancient, decrepit ship in search for food and other items, therefrom crashing into a locked hold, all while seriously ill; and, (from the grimly amusing points taken from a blogging biologist), the mistakes made by cannibals on caloric comparisons in the two most lurid scenes (which I won’t spoil here for those who haven’t yet read the book).
Those negatives are easily washed away, though, in the hurricane-level strength of sure pacing (drama; narrative and tonal shifts), religious underpinning, philosophical deftness, and, most importantly, rhythmic drive. Some have reacted negatively to the relentless force of the prose, its biblical solemnity. But surely the content deserves the appropriate approach. McCarthy delivers, and the rhythmic intensity, at times, floods into a mystical super-container, no small feat when the narrative dwells on drifting ash, shivering, hunger, and constant fear.
The dialogue between father and son is also handled with great care, and gathers into an emotionally stark resolution. This would be dangerous material for any novelist to negotiate with. How McCarthy avoids mawkishness and unintentional hilarity is a tribute to his dramatic gifts. How he avoids descending into easy messaging on human sin and redemption is also impressive, given the layout.
Yeah, Oprah gave the book a shove. And it’s not a ‘beach read’ (stupid category).But if you haven’t read it, don’t be dissuaded by the synopsis. I’m no fan of genre fic, including the sub-genre of apocalyptic horror, but this has nothing to do with falling into the conventions of a plot on autopilot.
Most will be familiar with the story: post-apocalyptic, (and probable), nuclear winter; man shepherding young son through the horror in a constant search for food, clothing, warmth, and (not least) secrecy to avoid murderers and cannibals.
Two quibbles: there are sporadic sections of writing that strain for the profound. For McCarthy, this comes about through grand abstractions and easy metaphors: i.e., “commissaries of hell”. That’s a pretty good association, but by that slice in the novel, we’ve had “[fill in] of hell” many times. Ditto with “black [fill in].” McCarthy’s powers of description – in vocabulary, in understanding of the (un?)natural world’s flux, and from the narrator’s self-sufficient wisdom – are awesome (I hope that last word still retains, somewhat, the power of its original meaning), and don’t need the buttressing overkill. The other problem has to do with biological and physiological plausibility. It’s hard to credit the father with the energy needed to carry out several of his arduous tasks in the desperate environment he and the boy find themselves in. The intricate (and fast) threading of sutures on his own arrow wound in the cold and dark, covered in dirt, already exhausted; the power needed to wade through ocean waves to scramble onto an ancient, decrepit ship in search for food and other items, therefrom crashing into a locked hold, all while seriously ill; and, (from the grimly amusing points taken from a blogging biologist), the mistakes made by cannibals on caloric comparisons in the two most lurid scenes (which I won’t spoil here for those who haven’t yet read the book).
Those negatives are easily washed away, though, in the hurricane-level strength of sure pacing (drama; narrative and tonal shifts), religious underpinning, philosophical deftness, and, most importantly, rhythmic drive. Some have reacted negatively to the relentless force of the prose, its biblical solemnity. But surely the content deserves the appropriate approach. McCarthy delivers, and the rhythmic intensity, at times, floods into a mystical super-container, no small feat when the narrative dwells on drifting ash, shivering, hunger, and constant fear.
The dialogue between father and son is also handled with great care, and gathers into an emotionally stark resolution. This would be dangerous material for any novelist to negotiate with. How McCarthy avoids mawkishness and unintentional hilarity is a tribute to his dramatic gifts. How he avoids descending into easy messaging on human sin and redemption is also impressive, given the layout.
Yeah, Oprah gave the book a shove. And it’s not a ‘beach read’ (stupid category).But if you haven’t read it, don’t be dissuaded by the synopsis. I’m no fan of genre fic, including the sub-genre of apocalyptic horror, but this has nothing to do with falling into the conventions of a plot on autopilot.
Thursday, December 8, 2016
Tom McCarthy's Satin Island
The disorder, distraction, and incomprehension of our accelerated digital age has spawned a warehouse full of fiction dealing with the insanity in either a detached, heavily ironic documentary-style, or as sci-fi, into-the-rabbit-hole thriller. Creating a novel of depth out of the material is harder than writing new string theory postulates that successfully apply to a starburst of new universes. But attempts have been made.
This is to segue into Satin Island, Tom McCarthy’s novel from last year. The narrator is an anthropologist working for a mysterious web-saturated communications-advertising company which tasks U (the narrator) with vague, byzantine projects. At first, U takes to his work with mid-level enthusiasm: “the image of a severed parachute that floated, like some jellyfish or octopus, through the polluted waters of my mind ... I found my focus, my point of identification within it and my attendant sympathy, shifting from the diminutive man to his expanded, if detached, paraphernalia”. Sub-scenes (one can’t call them plots) include a colleague dying of throat cancer, and a girlfriend unforthcoming as to her background and to how she appeared at the airport wherein the two initially met. The former is handled with affecting complexity and association: “He had one [dark lump] just above his ankle; it was more than dark – it was black. The windows of the hospital were smudged and blackened too; his room was on the twenty-first floor and they obviously didn’t bother to clean them that often, or at all.”
McCarthy’s first novel, Remainder, involved a haunting narrator-created world, removed but familiar, ridiculous and terrifying yet possible. Satin Island’s reality, by contrast, mouse-clicks over well-surfed territory. Oil spills exist next to, and with, soccer highlights; mothballed archaeological curios, their use or religious function unknown, are sold to Texas millionaires for vain display, perhaps finding their way as lifestyle images in advertising. McCarthy, however, manages to conjure wit and wisdom at each level of the rabbit hole: after the narrator’s girlfriend is let go from a horrifying experience, post-raid, she tells U “that it was ironic ... That it was my credit card that saved me after I’d been protesting against capitalism”.
The novel – short but dense – has attracted a lot of negative press. Much of it seems to be based on Satin Island’s lack of narrative thrust or direction. (The author, winking, warns of this early in the novel: “events! if you want those, you’d best stop reading now”.) But this, of course, is purposeful, and in line with the thematic concerns. Swamped by information – most of it ephemera, or is it? – all of us have at least a section of our brains available and appreciative of efforts to delineate and synthesize, sort and order. But U gives up. Late in the novel, letters of the eponymous words – appearing in a previous admonitory dream – transpose themselves on a Staten Island ferry before vanishing altogether among the ordinary, weary, down-at-heels passengers. The final image of the homeless man at a pay phone is sublime.
This is to segue into Satin Island, Tom McCarthy’s novel from last year. The narrator is an anthropologist working for a mysterious web-saturated communications-advertising company which tasks U (the narrator) with vague, byzantine projects. At first, U takes to his work with mid-level enthusiasm: “the image of a severed parachute that floated, like some jellyfish or octopus, through the polluted waters of my mind ... I found my focus, my point of identification within it and my attendant sympathy, shifting from the diminutive man to his expanded, if detached, paraphernalia”. Sub-scenes (one can’t call them plots) include a colleague dying of throat cancer, and a girlfriend unforthcoming as to her background and to how she appeared at the airport wherein the two initially met. The former is handled with affecting complexity and association: “He had one [dark lump] just above his ankle; it was more than dark – it was black. The windows of the hospital were smudged and blackened too; his room was on the twenty-first floor and they obviously didn’t bother to clean them that often, or at all.”
McCarthy’s first novel, Remainder, involved a haunting narrator-created world, removed but familiar, ridiculous and terrifying yet possible. Satin Island’s reality, by contrast, mouse-clicks over well-surfed territory. Oil spills exist next to, and with, soccer highlights; mothballed archaeological curios, their use or religious function unknown, are sold to Texas millionaires for vain display, perhaps finding their way as lifestyle images in advertising. McCarthy, however, manages to conjure wit and wisdom at each level of the rabbit hole: after the narrator’s girlfriend is let go from a horrifying experience, post-raid, she tells U “that it was ironic ... That it was my credit card that saved me after I’d been protesting against capitalism”.
The novel – short but dense – has attracted a lot of negative press. Much of it seems to be based on Satin Island’s lack of narrative thrust or direction. (The author, winking, warns of this early in the novel: “events! if you want those, you’d best stop reading now”.) But this, of course, is purposeful, and in line with the thematic concerns. Swamped by information – most of it ephemera, or is it? – all of us have at least a section of our brains available and appreciative of efforts to delineate and synthesize, sort and order. But U gives up. Late in the novel, letters of the eponymous words – appearing in a previous admonitory dream – transpose themselves on a Staten Island ferry before vanishing altogether among the ordinary, weary, down-at-heels passengers. The final image of the homeless man at a pay phone is sublime.
Wednesday, December 7, 2016
Tom McCarthy's Remainder
A true success story, first published by an art-based micropress, then picked up by a small literary press, then, strictly through word-of-mouth, to Vintage, Tom McCarthy’s Remainder is that curious object: a novel with narrative propulsion that soars above the overbaked combat of lyrical realism vs metafictional filtering. It’s easy to see it, as did Zadie Smith’s positive essay on McCarthy (contrasting Remainder with another novel from Joseph O’Neill), as modernism’s new circuitry, but McCarthy has, himself, disavowed the pro forma connections.
The first-person, post-coma, emotionless, instant millionaire (over a million pounds as settlement from a mysterious accident) obsesses on his sense of unreality. McCarthy exquisitely navigates through the exterior dimensions of his madness, covering, in fastidious detail, the narrator’s demands and orders to his new minions – directors, actors, logistics experts, blue-collar contractors – in a desperate attempt to “re-enact” (his insisted-upon term) a previous déja vu moment, that moment filled with fluency, grace, a oneness of being, the memory and manifestation merging in spiritual bliss.
Now this is a terrific premise, and an exciting and timeless one. And it’s terrifically complex. The narrator’s team – at its peak involving over a thousand employee re-enactors – are given no interior detail (the narrator doesn’t care about others, and in any case, McCarthy stays inside this one man’s head), but the narrator, also, has little desire in illuminating the why of his quixotic plans. At just past the two-thirds mark, though, we get this, from a doctor, speaking to, and summoned by, the troubled man’s top director:
“ ‘[t]he body administers its own painkillers – hefty ones. The problem is, these can be rather pleasant – so pleasant, in fact, that the system goes looking for more of them. The stronger the trauma, the stronger the dose, and hence the stronger the compulsion to trigger new releases. Reasonably intelligent laboratory animals will return again and again to the source of their trauma, the electrified button ... although they know they’ll get the shock again.’ “
It’s here (if not before) the book’s biggest problem materializes, as startling in its way as the recreated smells of liver, re-enacted from two floors below the re-enacted building with the re-enacted players, the cats meanwhile falling off the roof, not being able to follow directions. That is, the wish for oneness, glimpsed at in the earlier déja vu vision, somehow merges with the wish for repeating, impulsively, painful behaviour. Philosophically and spiritually, I don’t buy it, unless the reader wants to entertain the possibility that the goal wasn’t spiritual unity, but a desperate bid for time-released soporifics. That said, the novel then faithfully drives the destructive element to its nadir. After the re-enactment of an actual murder and then an imagined bank heist, the narrator conspires with director Naz to attempt an actual bank robbery, with an attendant and absurd spiraling of logistical detail. I thought the novel would surely fall apart here in a ridiculous thriller-based riff, but the writing becomes almost unbearably beautiful, the actions slowed down, the detail relentless and fascinating, and the narrator’s vision morphing into further unexpected territory (“light and blood”). There’s a little too much direct nodding to Camus’ L’Etranger, but its more for emphasis than in homage. And the final scene is perfectly set-up and realized.
Despite its dark narrative and despicable lead character, there are flashes of loud humour throughout – the narrator complaining to his directors that the sun won’t behave, ditto for his doctor (“I’d even have let him stay if he’d only behaved himself and not moved”), and, when going through the rehearsals for the elaborate murder re-enactment after a dizzyingly difficult set-up by his employees, congratulating himself for his supposed largesse (“I thought of asking to try too, but didn’t want to get all self-indulgent”).
There are many suggestions throughout the book as to how to process the information, the “materiality” of the novel, how to integrate that with possible meanings and to what purpose any conclusions may point to. But I haven’t yet seen the rather obvious one mentioned. That the superstructure may suggest the problems a novelist may (will) have in writing his or her work – how to move characters around seamlessly and believably, how to demand certain actions from those characters without caring about their own projected wishes, and, certainly not least, how porous are the borders between reality and fiction.
The first-person, post-coma, emotionless, instant millionaire (over a million pounds as settlement from a mysterious accident) obsesses on his sense of unreality. McCarthy exquisitely navigates through the exterior dimensions of his madness, covering, in fastidious detail, the narrator’s demands and orders to his new minions – directors, actors, logistics experts, blue-collar contractors – in a desperate attempt to “re-enact” (his insisted-upon term) a previous déja vu moment, that moment filled with fluency, grace, a oneness of being, the memory and manifestation merging in spiritual bliss.
Now this is a terrific premise, and an exciting and timeless one. And it’s terrifically complex. The narrator’s team – at its peak involving over a thousand employee re-enactors – are given no interior detail (the narrator doesn’t care about others, and in any case, McCarthy stays inside this one man’s head), but the narrator, also, has little desire in illuminating the why of his quixotic plans. At just past the two-thirds mark, though, we get this, from a doctor, speaking to, and summoned by, the troubled man’s top director:
“ ‘[t]he body administers its own painkillers – hefty ones. The problem is, these can be rather pleasant – so pleasant, in fact, that the system goes looking for more of them. The stronger the trauma, the stronger the dose, and hence the stronger the compulsion to trigger new releases. Reasonably intelligent laboratory animals will return again and again to the source of their trauma, the electrified button ... although they know they’ll get the shock again.’ “
It’s here (if not before) the book’s biggest problem materializes, as startling in its way as the recreated smells of liver, re-enacted from two floors below the re-enacted building with the re-enacted players, the cats meanwhile falling off the roof, not being able to follow directions. That is, the wish for oneness, glimpsed at in the earlier déja vu vision, somehow merges with the wish for repeating, impulsively, painful behaviour. Philosophically and spiritually, I don’t buy it, unless the reader wants to entertain the possibility that the goal wasn’t spiritual unity, but a desperate bid for time-released soporifics. That said, the novel then faithfully drives the destructive element to its nadir. After the re-enactment of an actual murder and then an imagined bank heist, the narrator conspires with director Naz to attempt an actual bank robbery, with an attendant and absurd spiraling of logistical detail. I thought the novel would surely fall apart here in a ridiculous thriller-based riff, but the writing becomes almost unbearably beautiful, the actions slowed down, the detail relentless and fascinating, and the narrator’s vision morphing into further unexpected territory (“light and blood”). There’s a little too much direct nodding to Camus’ L’Etranger, but its more for emphasis than in homage. And the final scene is perfectly set-up and realized.
Despite its dark narrative and despicable lead character, there are flashes of loud humour throughout – the narrator complaining to his directors that the sun won’t behave, ditto for his doctor (“I’d even have let him stay if he’d only behaved himself and not moved”), and, when going through the rehearsals for the elaborate murder re-enactment after a dizzyingly difficult set-up by his employees, congratulating himself for his supposed largesse (“I thought of asking to try too, but didn’t want to get all self-indulgent”).
There are many suggestions throughout the book as to how to process the information, the “materiality” of the novel, how to integrate that with possible meanings and to what purpose any conclusions may point to. But I haven’t yet seen the rather obvious one mentioned. That the superstructure may suggest the problems a novelist may (will) have in writing his or her work – how to move characters around seamlessly and believably, how to demand certain actions from those characters without caring about their own projected wishes, and, certainly not least, how porous are the borders between reality and fiction.
Tuesday, December 6, 2016
Mordecai Richler's Cocksure
Hard to believe this pervasively nasty short novel was published just three years before St. Urbain’s Horseman. It seems to have served the author as a purgative for the recent (1968) sins – newly, bureaucratically entrenched – flowering like psychedelic sun blisters throughout journalism, the movie industry, literary magazines, education, and (broadly) civic society. It’s not hard to believe, however, that Cocksure would have, today, been dead in the water during a first editorial pass if its author submitted it under a pseudonym.
Values are inverted, not in a simple reversal, but as sarcastic, scabrous commentary on the inanities of the ‘free’ society, so that egalitarianism, bizarre and plotted ‘gotcha’ racial accusations, bizarre child-rearing practises, sexual attitudes, and ideologically created and technologically dumbed-down movie images conjoin with criminality and moral bankruptcy to squash ‘square’ social norms. But Richler, an across-the-board equal-opportunity satirist, lampoons, also, prigs and tight-asses, the cuckold as well as the bull.
“ ‘God damn it, Miss Ryerson, you can’t go around blowing school kids. It isn’t done.’
‘Don’t you dare,’ Miss Ryerson said evenly, ‘take the Lord’s name in vain in my presence.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Are you dead set against blowing, Mortimer?’
‘I wouldn’t know how to answer that, Miss Ryerson. We’ve never discussed, well, sex– ‘
‘Put out that cigarette immediately.’
‘Yes.’ ”
Shocking, yes. Offensive, certainly. But it’s in reaction to the toothless, whimsical literature that passes for satire, then and—as it turns out—now. To paraphrase Robert Altman on the TV version of MASH: the updated take wasn’t funny (compared to his original vision) because the stinger was pulled out; the show didn’t earn its laughs.
That this novel came out during the peak of the counter-culture shows Richler’s bravery. (One idiotic blurb, on its original Bantam Book cover, praised its “anti-establishment” stance.) And it’s fun, a great exercise, to draw parallels between political positions then and now. The names of movements and causes change, but the attitudes just circle out and back.
Values are inverted, not in a simple reversal, but as sarcastic, scabrous commentary on the inanities of the ‘free’ society, so that egalitarianism, bizarre and plotted ‘gotcha’ racial accusations, bizarre child-rearing practises, sexual attitudes, and ideologically created and technologically dumbed-down movie images conjoin with criminality and moral bankruptcy to squash ‘square’ social norms. But Richler, an across-the-board equal-opportunity satirist, lampoons, also, prigs and tight-asses, the cuckold as well as the bull.
“ ‘God damn it, Miss Ryerson, you can’t go around blowing school kids. It isn’t done.’
‘Don’t you dare,’ Miss Ryerson said evenly, ‘take the Lord’s name in vain in my presence.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Are you dead set against blowing, Mortimer?’
‘I wouldn’t know how to answer that, Miss Ryerson. We’ve never discussed, well, sex– ‘
‘Put out that cigarette immediately.’
‘Yes.’ ”
Shocking, yes. Offensive, certainly. But it’s in reaction to the toothless, whimsical literature that passes for satire, then and—as it turns out—now. To paraphrase Robert Altman on the TV version of MASH: the updated take wasn’t funny (compared to his original vision) because the stinger was pulled out; the show didn’t earn its laughs.
That this novel came out during the peak of the counter-culture shows Richler’s bravery. (One idiotic blurb, on its original Bantam Book cover, praised its “anti-establishment” stance.) And it’s fun, a great exercise, to draw parallels between political positions then and now. The names of movements and causes change, but the attitudes just circle out and back.
Monday, December 5, 2016
Gabriel Josipovici's Everything Passes
This episodic novelette from 2006 underscores several problems meta-fiction has found itself backed into. Ostensibly about an asshole who’s alienated his wife (now ex), daughter, son, and literary friends, these segments serve only as set-up to the book’s main focus: asshole creator shirking familial and literary duties in order to turn the tap of existential angst to ten, tricking himself with that faint hope of literary self-worth. But even that faint hope can never be realized, of course, because, as the narrator/Josipovici has it, the creator, post-Rabelais, is speaking to an invisible audience. The sections of meta-assertion, a historical critique much more fully positioned and developed in the author’s What Ever Happened To Modernism?, slams the brakes on whatever enchantment, interest, or intrigue his clipped narrative may have achieved, but there’s a more serious, more fundamental problem in the meta-critique.
Josipovici is, of course, right to point out the long history of novelist as self-conscious navigator in bellwether works . But Cervantes, Sterne, and others, used that awareness in the service of the author/narrator voice as fictional and imaginative hijinks largely separate from the transparent worries of the author over his or her own creative process. The reader of many late-postmodern works is often left with a solipsistic defense of the writing process, interesting, even fascinating, no doubt, to the author and (similarly) philosophically inclined writers, but of limited (and redundant when scrolling through book promos) appeal to those wanting to get out of the overseeing, stifling, never-ending loop.
The book is sixty pages, with plenty of white space. Most poetry collections contain more words. Despite that, Everything Passes isn’t compressed or concise. The refrain, some variation of, “He stands at the window./Cracked pane./His face at the window./Greyness. Silence.”, gathers irritation, rather than profundity, by repetition. The protagonist (if that’s the appropriate word) reminisces. Those thoughts aren’t interesting, and can’t be improved by pleading for a multiple suggestiveness from other characters or the reader her- or himself. The meta-commentary was philosophically problematic, but it was also problematic structurally. The bridge between glum remembrance and meta-aspiration was poorly synthesized, and the latter focus ended in a terribly overwrought ecstasy of creative explosion (however ironically one wants to take it) that reminded me of that ridiculous cliché to be found in the movie Amadeus, where the effervescent hero pens a new score in dramatic frenzy.
Josipovici is, of course, right to point out the long history of novelist as self-conscious navigator in bellwether works . But Cervantes, Sterne, and others, used that awareness in the service of the author/narrator voice as fictional and imaginative hijinks largely separate from the transparent worries of the author over his or her own creative process. The reader of many late-postmodern works is often left with a solipsistic defense of the writing process, interesting, even fascinating, no doubt, to the author and (similarly) philosophically inclined writers, but of limited (and redundant when scrolling through book promos) appeal to those wanting to get out of the overseeing, stifling, never-ending loop.
The book is sixty pages, with plenty of white space. Most poetry collections contain more words. Despite that, Everything Passes isn’t compressed or concise. The refrain, some variation of, “He stands at the window./Cracked pane./His face at the window./Greyness. Silence.”, gathers irritation, rather than profundity, by repetition. The protagonist (if that’s the appropriate word) reminisces. Those thoughts aren’t interesting, and can’t be improved by pleading for a multiple suggestiveness from other characters or the reader her- or himself. The meta-commentary was philosophically problematic, but it was also problematic structurally. The bridge between glum remembrance and meta-aspiration was poorly synthesized, and the latter focus ended in a terribly overwrought ecstasy of creative explosion (however ironically one wants to take it) that reminded me of that ridiculous cliché to be found in the movie Amadeus, where the effervescent hero pens a new score in dramatic frenzy.
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