Books and Writers: Learning From Foreigners, Vietnamese and Thomas Mann

I started this post with Thuy Dinh's Exile and Communion: Literature of the Vietnamese Diaspora (Words Without Borders). 

In their presumably adaptive, yet stoic and untethered states, multilingual or transnational even when they’re writing in Vietnamese, our contributors have more in common with Milan Kundera, Vladimir Nabokov, Chinua Achebe, and Ágota Kristof than with Vietnamese American writers whose English-language narratives often illuminate the hard-toiled lives of US-based refugees from the former RVN. Our contributors’ personal backgrounds, on the other hand, span both North and South Vietnam, and reflect Vietnam’s domestic problems and global migration movements that took place from the 1970s to the 1990s. For example, Thường Quán was a scholarship student representing the soon-to-be-extinct RVN when he arrived in Australia in 1974; Nguyễn Đức Tùng and Trương Vũ were boat refugees who fled Vietnam during the dark years of the postwar period, and who resettled, respectively, in Canada and the US; Thuận, born in Hanoi during the escalation phase of the Vietnam War, studied in Russia in the 1980s before migrating to France; her husband, Trần Trọng Vũ, also Hanoi-born, left his birth city for Paris in 1989, on an art scholarship to further his training at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts. Đặng Thơ Thơ arrived in the US in 1992 via the Orderly Departure Program, designed to provide asylum seekers with a safe alternative to illegal departures. As most of these contributors had reached adulthood by the time they left Vietnam, their cultural identities are well-established, unlike other diasporic writers and artists of Vietnamese descent whose “ make-believe” roots are exuberantly or swaggeringly defined by linguistic distortions and generational ruptures.

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Trương Vũ seems more hopeful about art’s redemptive power. Meditating on Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal return in “The Rain in Weicheng,” he solemnly yearns for a reconciliation with the self, with history, and with art, at a time when Vietnam’s dizzying economic progress still has not healed all wounds from the war. Trương Vũ feels less alone when he sees his longing for peace reflected in well-known works of literature. For example, the bridge over the Drina in Ivo Andrić’s eponymous novel is not just a bridge that connects disparate cultures, i.e., Islamic, Jewish, and Christian, but also a dream passage that brings all exiles home. Accordingly, Trương Vũ considers his many returns to Vietnam as open-ended gestures of reconciliation, even if, or precisely because, some of these journeys turn out to be “failed” homecomings. The reference to Wang Wei’s poem “Morning Rain in Weicheng” in his essay embraces both the temporal and the eternal, for the poem acknowledges separation and departure but also affirms the beauty of friendship and community.

I will keep on trying to make the case that Americans need to see how we are seen from the outside; this includes American women and minority writers, and it certainly includes foreign writers. If this how they see, why do we not? If these themes interest them, how do these themes apply to us? If you think they do not, why not? I am too old to take these ideas very far, perhaps you can.

Then Englesberg Ideas published Morten Høi Jensen's Thomas Mann's cathedrals in prose. Mann is a foreign writer, he was an exile and, for a time, an immigrant to America. While I have not read as much of Mann as I could wish (Buddenbooks, Death in Venice, and The Magic Mountain are all I have read), I am in awe of him. Jensen reinforces and makes a good case for that awe.

Of all the great European novelists of the modernist period – James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka – Thomas Mann is perhaps the least loved, and in the Anglophone world certainly the least read. Laboured, ponderous, chillingly austere: the great cathedrals of his prose are ringed with reverent distance. He is not as impish as Joyce and never as intimate as Proust. Brecht quipped that meeting him was like having 2,000 years of culture looking down at you.

Yet there is something about Mann which makes me feel unexpectedly protective, partly out of compassion for the strange man himself, and partly out of admiration for the decades of daily exertion he put in at his desk even under the most savage external pressures. Born in Lübeck in 1875, his life was marked by the eruptions and upheavals of history: the First World War, the German Revolution, the Weimar Republic, Nazism, the Second World War, the Holocaust, McCarthyism. And though he was not a political writer in the narrower sense that his brother Heinrich was, neither can Mann’s fiction be isolated from Germany’s political development in the first half of the century. The Magic Mountain, completed in the years immediately after the First World War, took shape in a Munich wracked by revolution and right-wing terror, events that impressed themselves, obliquely, on the manuscript. Joseph and His Brothers, Mann’s retelling of the biblical story of exile, is impossible to read without considering Mann’s own exile from Nazi Germany in 1933.

I read Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a teenager, and I have kept reading through the years. Proust and Mann I did not read until prison. I found out Proust to be fun. Nor would I denigrate Joyce or Proust, but Mann is somewhat easier to read than the others. Which is a bit of a deception. Proust maybe the writer of memory and emotions; Joyce may be the voice of Ireland crashing into modern history with wit and a high intellectual play; but Mann's deceptiveness is for me in how he writes about the clash of cultures, philosophy put on stage.

As the late Polish poet Adam Zagajewski once wrote, ‘We’re still dealing with the heroes of The Magic Mountain.’ And, let’s add, Adrian Leverkühn and Serenus Zeitblom, the ‘heroes’ of Doctor Faustus. But Thomas Mann did more than simply write about the cultural and spiritual transformations of German society in the early 20th century. He lived them. The reason that he became such a forceful foe of Nazism is because he shared the same intellectual and cultural roots. As he provocatively put it in a 1938 essay, Adolf Hitler was ‘a brother – a rather unpleasant and mortifying brother’. This was echt Mann: at once self-aggrandising and self-incriminating. As Lukács said of him, he was always his own most ruthless judge. The distant, Olympian figure of Mann is misleading; in his pursuit of literary form, no writer revealed more of himself

Again, my questions apply, albeit perhaps more specifically here with the appearance of spirituality. Where is the American novel about our culture and spirit? The Great Gatsby? I fear that gets close to our  amorphous identities in the face of the monied class, without capturing our energy; I am also biased against Daisy as the ideal of an American man. Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass captures the energy without touching on the more jagged and cutting edges of our culture; he is too soon for some of that, if not the issue of racism. And, yes, it is a poem, but it lets me segue into Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel and You Can't Go Home Again - which have the largesse of Whitmanesque energy, but my memory finds them parochial in scope - a family story. (It has been decades since I read Wolfe). Parochial brings to mind William Faulkner, not a term probably anyone else would use for him - because he is interrogating Southern culture against its own standards and pretensions; I do not think he does so against the broader American culture (oh, he can be seen as shedding light on American racism, but that is a by-blow, in my opinion; even as I have in mind Dilsey from The Sound and The Fury). Outside The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck is transposing allegory to California's working class, as I recall East of Eden. Theodore Dreiser looms large with ideas, but who would call him interested in the spiritual? Maybe towards the end of An American Tragedy; I find much of Fitzgerald's interest in money and class prefigured in Dreiser and, like Gatsby, Dreiser falls short in explicating American optimism in the face of capital. If satire critiques the failure of the ideal, of the spirit, then Sinclair Lewis should have reached the point that Mann did, but Lewis feels more like a muckraker than an American Jonathon Swift. Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison may have been only able to critique an American ideal that threaten to crush them, if not kill them out right. Joyce Carol Oates may have been addressing the issues of American culture, only her works are so vast, it is hard to say. Oh, I almost forgot Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Auggie March - which has the energy, touching on some of American culture. The closest I can come is Ross Lockridge Jr's Raintree County; a novel gone onto obscurity. 

I did not intend to write that much. The words just spilled out. I can see why the writers I mention may not have been to touch on the ideas and the ways of Thomas Mann: Americans are too parochial, our perspectives too personal. White writers having no contact with minorities are without the means to include minorities into their writing. Women, African-American, working class, and other minority writers by definition cannot contain the majority culture, for all they understand that culture better than the majority; at best they can do is shame the majority by refusing to go away and not writing what appeases the majority culture. 

There may also be a technical problem. How to put together all the ideas in the ways that Mann did? John Dos Passos and Ross Lockridge use a fragmentary style - montage, to use a cinema term. That makes them hard to teach. It may also put their techniques into obscurity. The European ideas portrayed by Mann are more complicated by American fragmentation (sedimentation?), or it seems to me. Montage seems to me to have advantages for Americans.

Bruce Springsteen Gets It (Sheila Kennedy)

During a concert in Europe, Bruce Springsteen issued a criticism of Trump and his administration that generated a typically childish response from our thin-skinned autocrat. Springsteen’s comments–unlike Trump’s– displayed a fundamental understanding of what it means to be an American–“the union of people around a common set of values.” That union, he said, is “now that’s all that stands between a democracy and authoritarianism. So at the end of the day, all we’ve got is each other.”

Springsteen recognized an essential element of American identity, an element that MAGA appears incapable of comprehending: America is, and has always been, about a set of ideals.

And here I need to close. There are other things needing done - of a far more mundane nature!

sch 6/7