I had a great-uncle who raised homers and other pigeons. He died in 1967. I recall the pigeons, but never saw any of them race. Reading Homeward Bound: On Pigeon Racing by Oliver Egger (The Paris Review) is the closest I have come to pigeon racing. I thought it was an extinct sport.
Imagine being blindfolded and loaded in a car, then dropped nearly four hundred miles from your house in a random field in rural Iowa and trying to get home before dark. Oh, and not only do you not know you’re in Iowa, you don’t even know what Iowa is. That’s what these pigeons do.
Review of Arundhati Roy’s ‘The God of Small Things’ (The Hemlock Journal) by Thamanna reminds me of what I liked about this novel. It has been over a decade since I read it - she came after reading (finally) Salman Rushdie - and has been the only work of hers I have read. Not out of any disdain for her writing, time and lack of attention are the causes for not following Roy. She has also gone away from fiction into other activities. Maybe this review will spark your interest.
This is one book of fiction that really pulls me back again. I have ruminated for days and days (absolutely awe-struck) by Roy’s sea-vast (like Estha’s sea-secret eyes) rhetorical vocabulary. These words and sentences narrate the histories and paces of people, locales, and cultures. It builds such memorable and solid characters. Even a reference to Reader’s Digest Great Encyclopaedic Dictionary sets an unforgettable detail of description upon their anglophilic disposition; a Dior perfume secured in Baby Kochamma’s cupboard, Pappachi’s studio photograph from Vienna, the “absurdly opulent” Plymouth or Rahel and Estha’s collection of books including Old Dog Tom and Janet and John (while I read Kalikkudukka and Balarama and Balabhumi comic books!). Set in Kerala, references to Kathakali and Communism as well remain compact remnants of the locale. But more significantly, Language spools out into repeated sentences, backwardly read sentences, sentences and conversations changed into humorous rhyming poems, referencing stories told from the perspective of the twin children.
Peter Huhne's A Mind So Fine: Two Scholars Tackle James - Cleveland Review of Books troubled my mind for a long time this morning. I have never been able to grasp Henry James. I have tried reading and understanding him for over 45 years. I know he is a Great American Novelist. Yet, his style is so different from the main run of what I have read that I have filed him away as an antique. Here is where the influence of Hemingway still has a hold on me. But I plunge into the mind behind the action - I cannot escape the voices and ideas in my head - and this seems to me what James does.
And Mr. Huhne's essay does a great job at demolishing my prejudices.
For Eliot, there was a good deal at stake in such manoeuvres, and for him to take James’s critical writing seriously (and not to find it ‘feeble’, as his essay goes on to label it), or to accept James’s attack on category distinctions, would have meant leaving behind much that was important to him. Eliot believed, as he put it in his essay, ‘The Perfect Critic’, in a division of criticism from artistic work which the creative artist was best-placed to police. ‘The artist’, Eliot wrote, ‘is […] oftenest to be depended upon as a critic; his criticism will be criticism, and not the satisfaction of a suppressed creative wish’. For James, thinking in terms of category was what made much speculation about literary production arid in the first place, and in ‘The Art of Fiction’ he lambasted the critical tendency to divide novels into separate genre classifications: ‘People often talk of these things as if they had a kind of internecine distinctness, instead of melting into each other at every breath and being intimately associated parts of one general effort of expression’. James wasn’t precious about literary terms, and even a word like ‘art’ could be modified out of special privileges: Gorra’s essays show him talking variously of ‘an art of fiction’ and even, once, ‘an art of keeping together’, as though novel-writing were simply a more exalted form of muddling through. Even his most famous essay’s title embarrassed him, as he was quick to point out at its opening. He would never have chosen ‘so comprehensive a title’ to the subject, he wrote, had it not been originated by a pamphlet written by Sir Walter Besant, to which James’s essay was a sustained riposte: his aim was merely ‘to edge in a few words under cover of the attention which Mr. Besant is sure to have excited’.
I admire Henry's brother James much more than I do him, but here - and elsewhere in the essay - leaves me seeing them closer than I have ever before. Henry no longer seems the champion of a class, a person who would disdain genre writing. The essay makes the tie in Pragmatism; to me, the idea of a Pluralistic Universe seems better. Of course, it is an idea dear to me.
One reason James seems to have found it impossible to dispense with his American heritage is that he knew how much this philosophy owed to the culture he had left behind. In fact, James was never so protective against attempts to limit meaning than when he felt the term ‘American’ itself was under threat. In 1898, when Theodore Roosevelt sought to drum up support for the Spanish-American War by rallying the populace around the banner of ‘True Americanism’, James had only harsh words for the then-naval secretary’s boosterish efforts. ‘Mr. Roosevelt’, as James put it, ‘makes very free with the “American” name, but it is after all not a symbol revealed once for all in some book of Mormon dug up under a tree. Just as it is not criticism that makes critics, but critics who make criticism, so the national type is the result, not of what we take from it, but of what we give to it, not of our impoverishment, but of our enrichment of it’. By arguing against categorical thinking, James was defending his heritage in spirit as well as letter – even if his own methods of comparison were themselves not free of such limitations: not everyone will be convinced, after all, that the best way to understand patriotism is to compare it to literary criticism.
I argued in another post that the novel attached itself to other literary forms, and here is another surprise from James.
There is only a certain amount a chronological approach can explain, however, and any editor of James’s writing will have to contend with the fact that at a certain moment in his career his style changed dramatically. Though explanations differ as to why this happened, there is a consensus that sees the dates pertaining to what is usually referred to as James’s ‘late style’ fall roughly between 1895 and 1897. That first date commemorates the disaster of James’s stage-play, Guy Domville, whose chaotic West-End opening is the stuff of theatrical notoriety: mistaking the mood of the audience at play’s end, the theatrical manager summoned James on to the stage to bow for what he hoped to be a receptive curtain call, only for James to be greeted by a round of boos. That two of Oscar Wilde’s stage-plays were then enjoying sell-out runs in neighbouring theatres must have magnified James’s sense of defeat – James deplored Wilde’s theatre-making – but according to scholar David Lodge, himself a fiction-writer who rendered that opening night in his novel, Author, Author, the disaster made an indelible and ultimately positive impression on James’s craft. As a result of thinking through theatrical questions, argued Lodge, James was forced to reckon with how theatrical technique could enhance novel-writing. The result – his famous ‘scenic method’ – entailed, as Lodge put it, a plot ‘unfolded in a series of scenes or dramatic encounters between the main characters, in which the issues of the plot are discussed or alluded to in dialogue’, a technique whose most notable example occurs in the opening to The Wings of the Dove, where Kate Croy’s reckoning with her father about his profligate spending habits outlines the necessity of her finding financial stability by other means.
***
‘It arrived, in truth, the novel, late at self-consciousness’ begins an early sentence in James’s essay ‘The Future of the Novel’, a kind of temperature test for the validity of his earlier prescriptions. Arriving at the abstract noun in its own belated fashion – and only after the wavelike series of clausal oscillations have been navigated – the progress of the sentence doesn’t need to be labelled as self-conscious to be felt as such. The sense that James is sorting through a series of potential (and unsatisfactory) lexical combinations, correcting himself as he proceeds, is instigated by the expletive beginning (‘It arrived’) – a classic weapon in James’s late-stylistic armoury, which pushes the clarification of the image as far along as possible to create the feeling of an immersive search, whose discovery may surprise its author as much as its reader.
I keep repeating on this blog how finding one support for one's own ideas are shared by people far more intelligent. Education is worthless if it perpetuates stupidity; all ideas worth their salt need to be contested against other thinkers.
The following paragraph gave me a new insight into James, and then made me think about blankness.
Though untrammelled by plot or story, James is using the descriptive resources available to the novelist to make a series of snapshot impressions about human hypocrisy that draw out the continued agency of the wrongdoers. What James is describing isn’t the ‘blank’ of the modernist novel – beloved of academics because it provides the opportunity to offload pet theories in defiance of any textual evidence – nor is James’s description conducive to an interpretation of ‘uncertain meanings’. Instead, James implicates the South, framing its posture of innocence as a childish one, its ‘blank’ repellent and unrepentant, similar in its way to James Baldwin’s later indictment of mid-century America’s disingenuous cultural icons, which represented another period’s attempt to sell a consoling myth to itself: the screen personae of Gary Cooper and Doris Day, said Baldwin, represented ‘the most grotesque appeal to innocence the world has ever seen’. In making use of storytelling’s empathetic rudiments, James makes the South’s deficits of memory seem elemental, and therefore inexcusable: his description is its own effort at ripping away that placid camouflage; of ensuring there can be nowhere for it to hide.
But where the idea attached to my thinking was in the blankness of the North. Not just our present historical amnesia. Perhaps, the North needed consoling for its own malevolence? For how racism turned the North against its own ideals? I may have been working towards this idea, but this paragraph sharpened my poor wits.
Yet perhaps after a week of such questionable instruction, and though no wiser about the core tenets of writing or responding to fiction (your doubts have if anything enlarged), you suspect you may finally be getting the hang of things. Perhaps the professor is not so bone-headed after all, and for all his emphasis on trying things out, there was really an underlying pattern to his pronouncements: a figure in the carpet connecting his seemingly scattered advice to a single structure, even if that structure depends on frequent adjustments to its assumptions. You’ve often heard the professor referred to as a writer’s writer, and originally this was inimical to your sensibilities: you find such formulas smug and self-satisfied, if not outright elitist (the audience for such fiction is bound to be a pretty small one, and part of why you got involved in literature was for the noble aim of broadening out such self-selecting coteries). Now you’re not so sure: after a few classes where you put up boundaries, you have to admit that it’s better to be a writer’s writer than a scholar’s writer – the fate meted out to Eliot and countless of the other modernists, whose work has been consequently entombed. As you contemplate James’s father’s complaint, a bizarre image occurs to you, one that merges the territory of The American Scene with the vast sum of critical opinions made subsequently about James and his associates. You see a field of scholarly handles – sad doorless mechanisms obscurely peppering the Midwest plains – that have only multiplied since the appearance of James’s early novels, yet which the experience of reading your professor’s difficult writing is enough to see off conclusively. Turning to one of those volumes – perhaps a well-thumbed but still somehow unfamiliar edition from the Penguin Modern Classics – you find that a renewed energy has taken hold of you: one that little recalls the weariness with which you sat through those seemingly interminable early classes. As you breeze past the apologetic introductory notes concerning James’s putative array of inhibiting stylistic difficulties – which is not to mention the, to you, not particularly relevant author-biographical detail about the invitations James received to many dinner parties – you take care to remove your earlier post-it note advising you to ‘get it right this time’: such post-its are a part of the problem, you think, as perhaps post-its always are. Passing your eyes over those first, electric sentences – with their style that, though often parodied, is almost impossible to imitate (you don’t try) – it occurs to you that in the matter of the Master’s voice, his readers are still catching up.
Which somehow traps my own reactions to James - a style that seems implacable and then irresistible.
'Poiesis' in Cervantes' Don Quixote has a terrible title - but the talk is not so obscure, if you have read Don Quixotic. I read the novel when a teenager - inspired by mother taking me to see Man of LaMancha at the now long-defunct Starlight Musicals. Then I re-read the novel while in prison, after reading how much Milan Kundera admired the novel. Kundera is right - it is a well-spring for all subsequent novels, a strange creature. The video hits all of this in less than 20 minutes.
I do not read much poetry - that is nothing I am proud about - but I did read Weiji Wang's My Nipples Are a Public Safety Hazard (Electric Literature). The title amused me, and then I started reading the poetry. They were not as amusing or as slight as their title.
And now onto other matters.
Happy Thanksgiving.
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