The book review Rêver la littérature mondiale by Jérome David will be behind the Times Literary Supplement's paywall, but it does serve as my theme for this post.
Equal parts anecdotal and analytical, David’s essay explores the history of the discipline from an unapologetically personal perspective. If world literature is a chimera, perhaps it is also a dream.
I think World Literature exists because humanity shares existential qualities regardless of local specificities. It seems to me a tension exists between exoticism (such as the location and politics of, say, Orhan Pamuk's Snow) and generalities (the ethical demands of life of the individual in society and an absurd universe). That is what I will call the reader's perspective.
For writers, such as what I am trying to be, there is what I will call the dialog of technique and themes. Magical realism did not start with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but he brought its techniques and themes to the forefront. The Magic Mountain shows how to bring ideas to life.
Reading the review of Blowfish (Necessary Fiction) brought to mind both aspects of world literature.
Where is the American novelist who attempts disorientation? It seems to me that our current political and social problems have us retreating into reassuring that the strangeness of existence has a Hollywood ending of security. Perhaps there are novels and novelists who are doing what is done with this novel and by this novelist. I can think of American novels that did confront the disorientation of living in a world without security: The USA Trilogy and Naked Lunch.
Toward the end of Blowfish, the unnamed thirty-something female protagonist hears a harsh truth from a friend. “You should know something,” the friend says. “You’re always thinking about yourself.” She’s right: The sculptor has spent the entirety of the novel planning, attempting, or moving on from trying to die. But apart from this preoccupation, nothing else about this book or its narrators is reliable. As soon as Jo Kyung-ran settles into a theme or conflict, she subverts it. Although it is tempting to reduce the book to a moralistic or predictable parable, its relentless disorientation does not seem accidental. It’s more a knowing tease.
As for a story's universality, what is more universal than the subjects of the "arbitrariness of life and death"?
Jo might agree that their bond is a miracle of fate. Or, more likely, she scoffs slyly at her protagonists’ need for a tidy narrative that ignores the arbitrariness of life and death. In her author’s note, Jo confesses it had never taken her so long to write a novel: “I would think about the act of writing, the meaning of it.” There is no lesson to be learned or meaning to be gleaned. Matters of life and death can be just as urgent or pointless, or both, as taking the subway or creating a sculpture. Just like her protagonist’s works, Blowfish is evidence of that physical, aimless, sometimes futile, attempt.
Engelsberg Ideas's essays always make me think, even if I do not always agree with them - such as The case for a conservative canon. I never thought the conservative claim to a more substantive moral core than liberalism was anything than a fig leave for asserting power. But when this essay started examining Nathaniel Hawthorne, I paid attention. Hawthorne is one American writer who I think is underestimated; as terrifying as Poe, a more quietly weird Melville; too conscious of passing time and moral standards.
Yes, I was one who had to read The Scarlet Letter in high school. If the essayist is correct, our reading was not butchered.
Hawthorne’s novel, The Scarlet Letter, embodies many of the characteristics of the conservative mind. Most English classes today, if they read the book at all, tend to butcher it – but Kirk understood it as a truly fine literary achievement. In this story of sin and shame, Hawthorne dramatised the eternal tension between the individual and society and captured his complicated relationship with his Puritan ancestors.
I have no use for his lingering Calvinism and the idea of original sin - yet predestination and original sin dominates the American culture. Which is one of several reasons I joined the Eastern Orthodox Church. The Orthodox reject predestination for free will and see The Fall as creating a fallen world without us carrying the burden of Adam's sin.
Reading the short stories, there seemed to me a conflict between American history and ideas current at the time of their writing.
‘Hawthorne was no idolizer of the past’, Kirk wrote, ‘he knew the past to have been black and cruel, often; but for that very reason, apprehension of the past ought to be fundamental to the projecting of any social reform. Only through scrutiny of the past can society descry the limitations of human nature.’ Just as the American Republic was being engulfed by the self-interested radicalisms of antebellum politics, Hawthorne offered a warning about the hubris of moralistic extremism.
If "moralistic extremism" refers to the sides of the slavery issue, then Hawthorne's warnings were wrong. Abolition cannot be seen now or then as a self-interested radicalism. It was the very thing that conservatism claims for its justification: substantive morality.
I prefer "moralistic extremism" and self-interested radicalism referring to moral causes fronting for narrow, partisan, temporal political purposes, so that leaves Hawthorne hitting the mark. We certainly could use that kind of thinking nowadays. Our new puritans seek not to lead us to a more Christ-like life, but to our giving them control over our bodies and consciences.
In other works, from The Blithedale Romance to ‘The Birth-Mark’ and more, Hawthorne pilloried the new puritans of his time for failing to understand both the tides of history and the unchanging nature of the human person. Their senseless optimism, he knew, would not ameliorate suffering in the world – it could only cause more of it. Kirk admired this realism and noted that Hawthorne has much to teach a careful reader. ‘By heroic efforts, Hawthorne suggests, man may diminish the influence of original sin in the world; but this struggle requires nearly his undivided attention,’ he wrote, ‘Whenever man tries to ignore sin, some avenging angel intervenes, progress material and spiritual collapses, and the reality of evil is re-impressed upon men’s minds by terror and suffering. Only one species of reform really is worth attempting: reform of conscience.’ This is much-needed conservative wisdom in an age of shrill utopianism.
Returning to world literature, what is more universal than "nature of the human person"? I would add Hawthorne to that conversation.
In The Guts of the Russian Brontosaurus-Cow: A Conversation with Vladimir Sorokin by Joshua Cohen, I see the following as speaking to what foreign writers can teach us about writing.
INTERVIEWER
The Sugar Kremlin, like certain strains of your work, partakes of multiple genres, multiple forms—folktales, theater or film scripts, letters, dreams, and songs—but there’s a sense that this variousness isn’t yet another postmodern reinvention of the novel so much as a waking-up-from-a-long-nightmare declaration that the novel never existed. Do you recognize this reading? What does the novel mean to you?
SOROKIN
It seems to me that the best novels are produced when authors creatively disrupt the form of the novel. We need simply recall Gargantua and Pantagruel, Ulysses, or War and Peace. These are referred to as great novels, even though, formally speaking, it’s almost as if they weren’t novels at all. They’re simply novels that are well suited to their time, which is why they turn out to be great novels. The contemporary world is so complex and protean that it is no longer possible to describe it with linear prose and squeeze it into a traditional novel’s structure. In order to conceive of the contemporary world, I make use of complex optics, which can be referred to as faceted vision, like what insects have. Keeping in mind that, today, in post-Soviet Russia, the imperial past, which was not buried in time, presses in on the present like a glacier, the question of the future is suspended. As young Russians admit to me, “We do not feel the future as a vector of life and development.” This is an absolutely pathological situation and a writer needs a special sort of vision in order to adequately re-create this on the page (you’ll notice I say “re-create” and not “describe”). For this, I make use of a system of mirrors set up on two platforms–one is the past and one is the future. You can call this postmodernism or grotesque metarealism, I don’t mind either way. But the grotesqueness of Russian life didn’t begin with post-Soviet Russia, we need only recollect the worlds of Gogol.
INTERVIEWER
Why do you prefer the verb re-create to describe? What’s the difference? And why, when it comes to the contemporary, does recreation-on-the-page seem to be possible or at least more possible than description? Has something happened to realism or reality?
SOROKIN
I don’t like the term description of the world, it contains a clear reference to secondariness—to illustrativeness. No, instead, a writer must conceive of his own worlds—not describe the world that’s already been created. Tolstoy, Kafka, and Joyce were able to create their own worlds, which is why their prose stuns with its intellectual authenticity.
Mario Vargas Llosa, The Art of Fiction No. 120 Paris Review (1990) presents the idea from a different perspective:
INTERVIEWER
But among your contemporaries that you do read, whom do you particularly admire?
VARGAS LLOSA
When I was young, I was a passionate reader of Sartre. I’ve read the American novelists, in particular the lost generation—Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos—especially Faulkner. Of the authors I read when I was young, he is one of the few who still means a lot to me. I have never been disappointed when I reread him, the way I have been occasionally with, say, Hemingway. I wouldn’t reread Sartre today. Compared to everything I’ve read since, his fiction seems dated and has lost much of its value. As for his essays, I find most of them to be less important, with one exception perhaps—“Saint Genet: Comedian or Martyr,” which I still like. They are full of contradictions, ambiguities, inaccuracies, and ramblings, something that never happened with Faulkner. Faulkner was the first novelist I read with pen and paper in hand, because his technique stunned me. He was the first novelist whose work I consciously tried to reconstruct by attempting to trace, for example, the organization of time, the intersection of time and place, the breaks in the narrative, and that ability he has of telling a story from different points of view in order to create a certain ambiguity, to give it added depth. As a Latin American, I think it was very useful for me to read his books when I did because they are a precious source of descriptive techniques that are applicable to a world which, in a sense, is not so unlike the one Faulkner described. Later, of course, I read the nineteenth-century novelists with a consuming passion: Flaubert, Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Stendhal, Hawthorne, Dickens, Melville. I’m still an avid reader of nineteenth-century writers.
As for Latin American literature, strangely enough, it wasn’t until I lived in Europe that I really discovered it and began to read it with great enthusiasm. I had to teach it at the university in London, which was a very enriching experience because it forced me to think about Latin American literature as a whole. From then on I read Borges, whom I was somewhat familiar with, Carpentíer, Cortázar, Guimaraes Rosa, Lezama Lima—that whole generation except for García Márquez. I discovered him later and even wrote a book about him: García Márquez: Historia de un decidio. I also began reading nineteenth-century Latin American literature because I had to teach it. I realized then that we have extremely interesting writers—the novelists perhaps less so than the essayists or poets. Sarmiento, for example, who never wrote a novel, is in my opinion one of the greatest storytellers Latin America has produced; his Facundo is a masterwork. But if I were forced to choose one name, I would have to say Borges, because the world he creates seems to me to be absolutely original. Aside from his enormous originality, he is also endowed with a tremendous imagination and culture that are expressly his own. And then of course there is the language of Borges, which in a sense broke with our tradition and opened a new one. Spanish is a language that tends toward exuberance, proliferation, profusion. Our great writers have all been prolix, from Cervantes to Ortega y Gasset, Valle-Inclán, or Alfonso Reyes. Borges is the opposite—all concision, economy, and precision. He is the only writer in the Spanish language who has almost as many ideas as he has words. He’s one of the great writers of our time.
There's a reading list for you.
sch 8/15
