Another grab bag, as I clean up my email and broswer tabs.
Two pieces from John Pistelli, two works by Thomas Mann that I have not yet read.
Thomas Mann, Mario and the Magician
It is an old problem: how not to become what we behold, how not to transform into one’s enemy—how to be sure anti-fascism doesn’t become fully indistinct from fascism itself. Given our psychology, with its tendencies toward projective and dichotomous thinking, and given political realities, which often make violent confrontation seem fated, this may be an insoluble problem. Perhaps every anti-[X] is doomed by the occult law of similarities to become [X]; perhaps our time is better spent in simply not being [X] rather than defining ourselves against and therefore by [X]. The strongest fiction, if it is too complex to serve as historical evidence, succeeds in its world-making complexity by alerting us to these flaws inherent in the soul—the human soul, northern, southern, or otherwise.
The several outward crises of Leverkühn’s life are erotic, and are to a striking degree surmised rather than being verified by Zeitblom. (For all of Nabokov’s hatred for what he took to be Mann’s lumbering Dostoevskean overinvestment in ideological fiction, Doctor Faustus is a novel of almost Nabokovian trickiness, about which more later.) As a young man, Leverkühn deliberately contracts syphilis by coupling with a prostitute named Esmerelda; later, he becomes involved in a love quadrangle with a male violinist who is his friend and lover and with two women in their social circle. This entanglement ends, in a passage of shocking melodrama for this slowest of novels, in a public murder on a streetcar.
***
In fact, Mann, who received a teenaged Susan Sontag in his California exile, seemed almost unable to write without deploying illness as metaphor, a metaphor above all for artists’ Nietzschean dalliance with the Dionysian forces of nature’s primordial flux. This dangerous encounter with Dionysus is necessary to make artists’ ordered Apollonian images vital enough to command and console an audience. Doctor Faustus does for syphilis what Death in Venice does for cholera and what The Magic Mountain does for TB. (By the way, the limitations of this metaphor can be shown by recent scholarship’s recision of some high-profile syphilis diagnoses: for instance and to the best of my knowledge, neither Nietzsche nor Wilde are currently thought to have had the sexually-transmitted disease, as they once were.)
***
So it appears that Doctor Faustus is, for all its dense and riddling disquisitions on modernism and music, a story with a very clear moral: Mann comes out for humanism, reason, moderation, and against modernism’s Faustian ambition and romance with the inhuman. On the other hand, who wants to read a tract? And does the novel not frequently raise the possibility of parody, to say nothing of irony? There is that Nabokovian trickiness I mentioned at the outset. Could so staid a narrator as Zeitblom, who is always telling us just how staid he is, just how “eerie” and “uncanny” he finds the story he is telling us, be unreliable? Yes: simply because he is always telling us we can trust him, we should suspect him.
Doctor Faustus uses a narrative mode that Anglophone readers will recognize from Melville’s Moby-Dick, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby: all of these books feature narrators of self-proclaimed humanism and enlightenment who tell us about the grand catastrophes of other, very different men, “ungodly god-like men,” to borrow from Melville. Yet each of these books, Doctor Faustus no less than the others, carefully shows us the secret yearning, even the erotic longing, of its stolid narrator to be more like its tragic anti-hero.
From LARB:
Incredible Prophecies, Sick Truths; Oedipal iterations, from Sophocles to Arundhati Roy. - left me battered and bruised mentally; I never felt the Oedipus Complex, so I am not sure what credence to give it.
...It was a vital component of his self-analysis in the aftermath of his father’s death even though Sophocles’s luckless Oedipus is innocent of both a patricidal and an incestuous tendency. He is a tragic hero without a tragic flaw. As Cynthia Chase aptly observes, “Sophocles’ play portrays Oedipus as the one person in history without an Oedipus complex in the conventional sense: he has murdered his father and married his mother in an appreciation of expediency rather than in satisfaction of a desire.” Unlike Roy, whose toxic relationship is sublimated in the search for a shibboleth or vocation that is neither inherited nor imbibed but auto-generated in privation and pain, Oedipus is left babbling “unholy words” in his mother tongue, begging to be released from the house under a curse that is his own. The name Oedipus, “Swellfoot” or “Knowfoot,” is a found object, like the foundling in swaddling clothes, not a moniker given by a mother or a father to shape the son’s destiny but merely a banal descriptor of his disability (or special ability). Parents traumatize the feet as they cast him away; the Sphinx tries to further constrict and strangle the unwanted life. Yet the myth drags on. This text is the plague we turn to generation after generation for incredible prophecies that yield sick truths.
LILY FELSENTHAL: You’ve published four novels—two in English, two in French—and this is your first collection of short fiction. When you have an idea for a story, how do you know if it’s destined to be a condensed piece or something longer?
CAMILLE BORDAS: I think I don’t really have ideas in general. I mean, as the story develops and decides to go in a certain direction, I will kind of build the ideas that the characters need to survive. But as a writer, I don’t start off with a premise or a theme that the story should touch on—I usually start with a weird thing that someone is thinking and try to pull that thread. It happened once that I wrote a novel and it ended up being a story. I spent three years on a novel and I was really disappointed with it; I realized the only thing that interested me was this one character and this particular job that he had, and so I wrote a story from his perspective. But usually I kind of know what I’m doing in terms of is this long or short form?—I know it pretty instantly from the kind of problem the narrator has. If the problem is very clearly and quickly there, I’m like, That’s going to be a story. And if the problem takes a little time to arise, I’m like, Okay, this sounds like a more complex web of things to untangle.
From Counter Craft: Don't Draft Shakespeare into Your Genre Wars
One refuge from the news is small stakes literary scuffles. What else are we on literary Substack for, anyway? One silly discourse that caught my attention was bickering about whether William Shakespeare was a “genre writer” or a “literary writer.” I’ve hidden the user names because I’m not trying to dunk on any individuals (and I think the “outright literary” poster is being at least a bit tongue-in-cheek). Still, anachronistic shoehorning of past writers into “teams” based on contemporary literary divisions is a pet peeve of mine. Was Jane Austen a commercial Romance writer? Did Homer write fan fic? Should we call Anton Chekhov MFA fiction? No. Be quiet. Isn’t Tumblr still around to quarantine these takes?
Seriously though, I write a lot about the question of genre fiction and literary fiction because I think these are interesting traditions and that learning about them can deepen your understanding and appreciation of literature. As I wrote in my “The Grand Ballroom Theory of Literature” essay, I like to think of literature as a unending part in a vast ballroom the stretches throughout time. Genres and styles are conversations that take place between authors (and readers, editors, etc.) in that ballroom. Genres aren’t mere marketing labels. They are conversations where authors speak, rebut, compliment, and subvert each other. This, for me, is an illuminating way to think about books.
Never mind the lit-bros: Infinite Jest is a true classic at 30 (The Guardian).
It is tempting to see Infinite Jest as one final act of heroism in the name of fiction. Certainly, I think it’s no stretch to say it’s unlikely we’ll see another book like this in our lifetimes. Ten years from now, Infinite Jest may exist as an artefact of an era when humans still wrote, from a writer who could describe the weather with detail as compelling as the realists, a work that combines Shakespearean lexical boldness with literary brat-pack druggie precocious cool and mainstream momentum to create one of the enduring literary successes of the 20th century.
When I was approached to celebrate the novel’s 30th anniversary edition, it was perhaps hoped that I might assist in assuaging the unfair, outsized connotations of what it means to be a David Foster Wallace reader, which, at its worst, has come to signify misogyny, and at its best, someone who’s just slightly annoying.
When I emerged from those weeks of dedicated reading I had a feeling of intensified mental acuity, but more importantly, there was the sensation of grief. It was a type of mourning I had not experienced before, one contingent on the fact that this book had demanded so much of my attention for so long a time. I missed these characters. I had lived with Hal, Joelle, Orin, Stice, Pemulis, and meaty, square-head, heart-of-gold Don Gately, witness to their deformities and obsessions so meticulously detailed and made so alive on the page, and suddenly without them I felt hollow. And just as with real grief, I found myself wanting to be surrounded by fellow mourners, to seek them out and convene in our collective memory, people who I realised were defined by a set of attributes wholly different from those I had assumed, people who had committed an act of defiance and tenacity, curiosity and rigour, and after it all, were sad to see its end.
I can agree with all of that, even if I am still uncertain about my feelings towards this novel.
sch 2/9
