A strange brew is this, and not all of it is pretty. Partially a record of a crackup and partially a tale of rising from that crackup back into a useful life; and part of that is how I decided writing was necessary to my life and recovery; and another part is just keeping a record of where I have been and what I have learned. You can see the topics I cover the sidebar. The hope is to help others; the purpose is figuring out where I am going. Thank you for dropping by. Feel free to comment.
Paradoxically, though, the book’s emergence as “the Great American
Novel” may have inhibited its enjoyment by ordinary men and women, left
them daunted by its reputation. Yet Moby-Dick should be read, not
just revered or studied in school. This Folio edition, sumptuously
produced, beautifully illustrated, allows you to experience this
masterpiece directly, unencumbered by critical apparatus. Someday, you
may want to seek out the innumerable scholarly commentaries or the
several Melville biographies. But only later. For now, shipmates, turn
instead to that immortal opening and begin the voyage: “Call me
Ishmael.”
For scale, for breadth (even though it is set on a whaling ship!), for verve, it is hard to beat Moby Dick. It may be crazy but that is what makes it American.
I read something over the weekend, now I forget what, that got me thinking about a list of Civil War books. I cannot say I am all that impressed, but about that later.
I can go with Cold Mountain, and The Red Badge of Courage (which I have read), and I liked seeing The Good Lord Bird, March, by Geraldine Brooks, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, by Allan Gurganus, although I have not read them.
What I find missing is Raintree County. Yes, it has been in and out of print. Yes, it is long, but no longer than Gone With The Wind (which does show up on one list.) It is better written than 99% of the books appearing on these lists. Also missing was William Faulkner's Sartoris. Probably the simplest Faulkner novel to read, and not so sentimental as Gone With The Wind.
This one might be more for me than for you. I remain awed by Morrison - the last of the Midwestern writers to hit the big time. This essay comes as I am still trying to work out “Chasing Ashes”. My starting point was, however, Ross Lockridge's Raintree County where America is a multi-colored swamp; where race is a three-corner affair. The Native Americans are in the background, driven off from Indiana. The following seems to me as proposing the same in the works of Morrison.
When I was in prison a fellow from New Jersey asked if there were Indians in Indiana. He didn't believe me when I said there were none. I knew they had been removed but the details were either forgotten or never known. When I was back here and had access again to Google, I found out the removal happened in the 1840s. My Livingston ancestors got to Ripley County in 1819, and there were still Indians, but when my Hasler ancestors arrived in 1849, they were all gone.
This might be a thing that comes easier to Midwestern writers, that race was not always a black/white dichotomy but had a tripartite nature. Moreover, that it had a settler colonialist nature with genocide as a feature. Although Faulkner touches on the Native Americans expelled from his Mississippi.
We try hiding these facts, and when we cannot, we romanticize or otherwise excuse and deny our history. In my opinion, we do well to face up to our errors and the damage still needing recompense. We cannot let our hypocrisies fester.
When talking to my students about how to make sense of these passages, it is helpful to emphasize that Morrison always distinguished between a character’s beliefs and an author’s. She also adamantly opposed censorship, complaining of the canon wars of the 1980s that they threatened both to destroy a canon precious to her (“I, at least, do not intend to live without Aeschylus or William Shakespeare”) and to degenerate “into ad hominem and unwarranted speculation on the personal habits of artists, specious and silly arguments about politics.” Nevertheless, I have found one literary “sin” of Morrison’s rather more difficult to defend in these terms: her strange, often awkward representation of Native Americans.
***
Whether eager to condemn Morrison or quick to excuse her, these critics all take her analyses of race as a remit to apply that lens to her own writing. To treat literature as if it has a responsibility to fill historical gaps or adjudicate demographic imbalances, however, is to ignore the fact that fictional characters are not sources of historical, sociological, or anthropological truth. They are literary forms, a matter of aesthetic representation, not political representation. A focus on aesthetics is in fact key to Morrison’s close readings in Playing in the Dark, which she says are less about any “particular author’s attitudes toward race” than about “the origins and literary uses of this carefully observed, and carefully invented, Africanist presence”—one that bears only an oblique relation to the real human beings to whom white writers were responding.
***
We know this logic well, and still use it all the time in our discourse on race: there’s white America, and then there’s everybody else, fighting over, assimilating into, or forging solidarity against it. If we were to represent this model visually with regard to European, African, and Native Americans, it might look like a “white” background against which the “black” and the “red” encounter one another, whether in competition or communion. I want to suggest that, with her aesthetic choices in depicting Native American figures, Morrison swaps this schema around. What results is a “red” background over which “black-white” racial relations play.
Charles Dickens sits at the head of a long oak table, peering over
his spectacles. Jane Austen raises an eyebrow. George Orwell taps a pen
thoughtfully. Margaret Atwood in her low, ironic, monotone, tells me to
sit. My application lies before them, thin and unconvincing. I mumble
almost incoherently about my professional identity issues.
“Has he suffered enough?” Dickens asks the panel as though it was a prerequisite. No answer.
“Has he observed society with sufficient wit?” Austen enquires demurely. No answer.
“Has
he told the truth?” grunts George Orwell almost absentmindedly while
scrutinizing the Burmese tattoos on his knuckles. No answer.
I am jittery, a bundle of nerves, and attempt a response, apologizing for the quality of my work.
“Nobody
is making you write. So don’t whine,” Atwood says, looking me straight
in the eye, her soft Canadian accent cutting through the tension in the
room. “And oh, by the way, you might write from the heart, but you’d
better polish with your brain.”
At which point I am advised to try again in a few decades and summarily dismissed.
***
And perhaps that is where the unease originates. The expectation that
writing should feel certain, when in fact it rarely does. When writing
is not mastery, but a disciplined form of uncertainty. And the more I
read about writers, the more I suspect that feeling like a fraud is not a
disqualifying condition—it may, in fact, be a prerequisite. A sort of
secret handshake. Perhaps if you’re certain of your brilliance, you may
have taken a wrong turn somewhere. Personally, Kurt Vonegut’s words
playing in my head like a mantra, keep me grounded: “When I write,” he
says, “I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.”
***
And maybe I am a fraud. That thought doesn’t quite go away. But neither
does this quiet pull back to the page, this small, persistent hope that
if I keep showing up, something honest will eventually meet me there.
Along with Salman Rushdie and Orhan Pamuk, I found Mario Vargas Llosa on YouTube. I read his book on writing while in prison and have read several of his novels (including Feast of the Goat). I found reading him more than worthwhile.
In many ways, mythic fiction is more popular than ever. Even as the Hero’s Journey
has arguably lost some of the obsessive luster from decades past,
storytellers and audiences alike are more entranced than ever by myth,
fairy tale, cultural symbolism, and psychological archetypes. Yet in
some ways, I feel like we’re also in a time in which we have somewhat
lost touch with the underlying touchstones of why these forms are
meaningful.
For the most part, we understand the idea of mythic fiction through a
few specific lenses. On the one hand, we might think of the old
stories—fairy and folk tales (e.g., Beauty and the Beast, Bluebeard’s
Wives, the Girl With No Hands, Vasilisa the Beautiful, etc.) or
mythological stories that largely arose from interpretations of the
supernatural (e.g., Kronos and the Titans; Isis, Osiris, and Horus;
Eros, Psyche, and Aphrodite; Thor and Odin, etc.).
We also experience all these stories through the more anthropological
perspective found in the works of Joseph Campbell, Clarissa Pinkola
Estes, and others like them—who not only collected the old stories, but
studied their underlying similarities, patterns, and symbolic messages.
From here, we might also think of the influence of archetypal
psychological approaches, such as Carl Jung’s, in which the symbolism
becomes increasingly internalized. These explorations are what gave
birth to the fascination for modernizing such (arguably) ancient forms
as the Hero’s Journey.
Increasingly, contemporary storytellers and audiences also understand
myth and archetype specifically through popular culture’s
reinterpreation of these myths and their underlying structures—most
famously with Star Wars, but since then through an
ever-increasing number of stories that seek to understand and tap the
deep power and resonance of these old storyforms.
Not that I think it is possible to write an epic about Indiana, albeit Raintree County made a damn good stab at the epic. I do not have the time left me to write a book like that, even if I had the talent.
Here are four reasons I think the writing of mythic fiction is particularly important right now:
1. Our Relationship to the Old Stories Has Grown Thin
2. Mythic Fiction Requires the Partnership of Intuition and Intellect
3. Mythic Fiction Reconnects Writers to the Deep Source of Story
4. The Need for New Myths in a Changing World
And my critique of my writing:
Reading We Could’ve Been Happy Here made me think that I did not do enough with personal relationships in
my stories. Not all, maybe not even in the best of them. But that was
not the idea. What I wanted to do the personal and what I will call the
economic. Probably read too much Dreiser. Who is a chore to read. He is
not sentimental in a sickly way. Mostly, this email goes back to what we
have been talking about all along - that what we grew up with is no
longer fashionable. We might be the tail end of the Industrial Age. We
have not retreated from the world into emotional navel-gazing. Perhaps I
could turn up the emotional stakes, but I can neither see how nor do I
want to revise further. The novella might actually do better at the
emotional stakes in the Daria stories and in the Kate Harvey parts. The
Mike Devlin divorce story was already emotional enough - even if it had
to do with Mike trying to play hero. I was joking about camels, but
there is little I see in some published stories that concern
political/social issues. Also, not fashionable? Science fiction - some
of it, anyway - does not shy away from these kinds of issues. I do think
I did get how these people live and love in their environment. After
all, we did. We were just trying to figure out how to have a life in a
world of economic and social uncertainty, and we did not have the luxury
of navel-gazing. A bit more thoughtfulness might have helped us, but
there is the humanity, isn't it?
The basis for this screed came in yesterday and today through my email. I thought the first too long to be added to anything I published yesterday. That second article came in today, I felt my delay justified. It also left me when I should publish. So far, I have posts scheduled to September 14. I thought September 15 was too far off. This left me with putting it to be published today.
I have fallen behind in my reading, so let me note my possible ignorance that might contradict me. I do not think that American writers rebel against what is American that has brought us MAGA; not even in what has come to me through literary journals. Yes, there are writers writing articles against Donald J. Trump. They are doing a grand job. But fiction lets us take a different kind of journey that exceeds the grasp of the polemic. There is a darkness in America, it has always been here, and we need to confront that darkness through our literature. For my models, I take first Ross Lockridge Jr's Raintree County. Find it in your library, or, even better, buy it and read it. Second is William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!. Both touch on slavery, genocide, racism, and economic classes; subjects we wish away under the epithet "woke".
Lea Ypi’s prize-winning memoir, Free, detailed the experience of growing up in Albania both before and after communist rule. Her new book, Indignity, reconstructs the life of her grandmother, who arrived in Tirana from Salonica as a young woman and became closely involved with the country’s political life. She currently holds the Ralph Miliband chair in politics and philosophy at the London School of Economics. The Turkish writer Elif Shafak is author of more than 20 books, both nonfiction and fiction, including the Booker-shortlisted novel 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World and, most recently, There Are Rivers in the Sky. When the pair talked over videocall, Ypi travelling in India and Shafak at home in London, their conversation ranged over the threats of censorship and the rise of populism, the challenges of being writers with multiple identities and the importance of representing complex historical events in their work.
This idea of true justice only existing in homogenous societies is something I never thought of, never encountered. Not even Nietzsche thought of racial purity as a prerequisite to justice. If that is in the mind of our white supremacists, then do they really believe it? It is propaganda, if the leaders do not. I hear Karl Marx having a good laugh, if leaders and followers believe this.
Lea Ypi What’s striking for me is the contrast between this really rich life that you find in literature and in academia, and the platitudes of politics. In literature there is an experimentation with genres and with cultures and with languages, and so you get this sense of complexity. You have almost the exact opposite happening in the political realm, where it’s all about simplicity. It’s all about being on message, not making it too complex. It has to be short. It has to be very simple, on the verge of banality. And increasingly, it’s also exclusionary. So there is this tendency in contemporary political discourse to say: OK, let’s drive out the migrants – a sense that you can only get a just society if you have homogeneous societies.
Perhaps, Ms Ypi, American politicians recognize a few facts: 1) most of America is functionally illiterate; 2) most Americans have the intellectual curiosity of a rock; and 3) troubling most Americans with complex ideas benefits neither the politician nor the citizen.
I doubt most Americans will even recognize the importance of the ideas in this passage:
LY What has been important for me about growing up in Albania and then navigating the transition from communism to the post-communist period is that living in a totalitarian society makes you very, very sensitive to propaganda of all kinds, all the time. And so there was never actually this break where first I lived in an unfree world and then I became part of the free world, it was always about remaining vigilant to see where there is censorship and ideological manipulation and propaganda – even coming from places that seem completely innocuous and innocent at first.
You’re always thinking about what is critically missing in a society in which you live: where is the gap in democracy? There is all this praise of freedom, and yet we live with politicians and people who make decisions that are so obviously constraining the freedom of other people everywhere.
We have this expression in Albania: “Istanbul is burning and the old woman is combing her hair.” You worry that in some ways, what you’re doing is completely irrelevant, but you say to yourself: my job is just to be critical and to put pressure and to remember, to try and make people think about how the past shapes the future, how these ideas repeat themselves, and how these political conflicts in the present all have a history and all come from some unresolved trauma in the past.
ES We have so much in common: the subjects, the themes that we deal with, the geographies that we come from, but also the silences that we dig into. I think for both of us, memory is important, not in order to get stuck in the past, but because without remembering we cannot repair.
LY It starts by understanding how every voice out there is always a result of some power relation or other. This was my experience with writing Indignity, which was about my grandmother, and going into the archives. It turned out it was really hard to research a woman who lived in the 1920s and 30s in particular. She lived in Salonica, which was still very much culturally Ottoman when she was growing up. It had just become part of the Greek state, and they completely shaped the discourse of what they wanted to be told and how it was told.
If you’re relying on official authority sources, they all have their own agenda, and by the way in which they construct the archive, by the way they write history, even by the way they shape literary traditions, they always have an agenda that is usually the agenda of the people in power. So how do you challenge that? I think it’s only when literature becomes resistance that it can challenge that, but it needs to explicitly want to do that.
What ideas?
Always remaining vigilant to see where there is censorship and ideological manipulation and propaganda. (I remember the phrase, "Don't believe everything you read in the papers", but do not hear it from anyone today. Those watching Fox and its attendant entities think they are getting the word directly from the burning bush.)
"Memory is important, not in order to get stuck in the past, but because without remembering we cannot repair." (MAGA does not remember, they fantasize; they want not to repair but impose their fantasies on reality.)
Know your power relationships.
All official authority sources, have their own agenda.
Official sources want to prop up those in power.
Literature becomes resistance when it challenges the official position.
And speaking of literature:
LY Literature has this democratic function only because it doesn’t preach. If it were to preach, it would lose it. If you were to tell the reader: “This is how you should see the world, this is what’s right, and this is what’s wrong”, then you become authoritarian.
And then, actually, literature loses this power that it has to continue with the reader. I don’t think the book is finished when the writer writes it: it continues to write itself in its reception, in the way people discuss it, in the way its themes feed into societal and cultural debates more broadly.
In 2021, when Randa Abdel-Fattah began working on her latest novel, Discipline, she questioned whether a story about state violence, the right to protest and the racialisation of Arab youth in Australia would resonate.
Suspicion of Arab communities – particularly young Muslim men – in media and political commentary had been potent in the years after 9/11 and had formed the subject of her academic research (and her 2022 nonfiction book Coming of Age in the War on Terror) – but, she says, the issue seemed to have “fallen off the radar”. She wondered whether people still thought it was a problem deserving of attention, and even emailed her publisher in September 2023 to ask if it believed there was a market for the novel.
***
Watching the genocide unfold in Gaza after the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023 left Abdel-Fattah creatively paralysed. As the relentless, live-streamed bombardment continued, the book was put on hold. But as the days and months rolled on, crackdowns on protests, freedom of speech and political expression gave her impetus to revive the work, and it morphed into a tale with profound new resonance in a nation where pro-Palestinian sentiment is being fought privately, and publicly, like never before.
***
And earlier this month she withdrew from Bendigo writers’ festival – where she had been invited to speak about Discipline – after a code of conduct was issued directing panellists to “avoid language or topics that could be considered inflammatory, divisive, or disrespectful”. Speakers appearing on panels presented by La Trobe University were also told they must adhere to La Trobe University’s anti-racism plan, which contains a contentious definition of antisemitism.
The following does make me confront reality: what American reader exists that wants to read about the dark things done by us and our ancestors?
Abdel-Fattah does not hesitate when asked who the intended audience is. “I was writing it for my community,” she says. “I felt like this was my way to validate all the private messages and angst.” Unlike some of her previous young adult novels, which she concedes sought to appeal to white audiences, Abdel-Fattah says, “I have no interest in that white gaze any more.”
I went downtown for the Labor Day demonstration, and heard someone talking about a genocide. I had to take that to mean Gaza. It is a genocide. I cannot reconcile it with the idealism towards Israel I grew up with. Whatever Zionism means, should mean, is beyond my ability to speak about. What I can see is that what has always ruined idealism for me: nothing of this world is perfect. We cannot let the good in anything keep us from ignoring the evil. Americans must take responsibility for our support of Netanyahu's evil.
“Bendigo felt like a turning point in terms of solidarity,” she says. “I didn’t ask anybody to withdraw … There was this momentum of people withdrawing of their own volition.”
Abdel-Fattah wants all those who have not spoken up against the injustices inflicted on Palestine to confront the “violence of their silence”. The opening page of Discipline states: “I humbly dedicate this book to all the Palestinian academics and journalists killed in Gaza who would be alive now if academics and journalists in the West had spoken and acted when they had the chance.”
But it was the events of 1968 that changed her life the most, as they did for many in Czechoslovakia.
The couple happened to be in the US during the invasion in 1968, so they stayed there and later moved to Toronto, where they founded the publishing house 68 Publishers, as Tomková told me. Over the course of twenty years, it published more than 200 works by Czech authors in exile. Tomková with more:
“She dedicated nearly her entire adult life and all her energy to the Toronto-based publishing house 68 Publishers, which she ran. Without her, it probably wouldn’t have even existed. I think many books and authors would have been forgotten without it. They published both exiled authors and those living in Czechoslovakia who were not allowed to publish at home. These books would then get smuggled back into the country, so through this work, they filled a critical gap that would otherwise have existed.
Who will be there for American writers if fascism does take over here?
[ I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars.
But I know now that there is not a chance of America becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts and absolute power corrupts us absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many lifeless bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.
Chapter 7
***
Do you know what a humanist is?
My parents and grandparents were humanists, what used to be called Free Thinkers. So as a humanist I am honoring my ancestors, which the Bible says is a good thing to do. We humanists try to behave as decently, as fairly, and as honorably as we can without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife... It was enough that we were alive, we humanists serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community.
Chapter 9
We no longer have anyone capable of disinterested common sense. The only hope I place in Obama is he is sane, but the more I read and hear about drones, the more I think he enjoys his power. I gave up on a sane, reasonable America the more I see of its criminal justice system on display at Fort Dix Federal Correctional Institution.
The second paragraph reminds me how deranged I got in 2009. I urge you to think hard on that second paragraph. Forget the gaudiness of spectacle we think ought to be our lives, and focus instead on decency and honor. I think Ross Lockridge Jr chose the "The Old Stone Face" as the root myth of his Raintree County with great deliberation. It fits the Hoosier mentality.
sch
[7/23/2025:
One thing missing from prison is information. No Google. I would have liked to see what others thought about the books I noted above. Well, I got that chance now, and you can decide if I am a moron or not. You may also want to follow the links provided in the text.
Vonnegut’s message is ultimately hopeful in Cat’s Cradle: thoughtfulness about how our actions impact others and constant questioning and reevaluation of the world around us and its institutions will perhaps lead to more productive and ethical scientific practices, as well as improve the real effectiveness of religion and our ability to truly love one another. Just as the targets of the San Lorenzan Air Force to fire upon are “cardboard cutouts shaped like men” (Vonnegut 154), so are the satirical targets of Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. After all, what are we but cardboard cutouts of those who have come before us if we choose not to employ our distinctly human qualities of reason and thoughtfulness to evaluate and rework ideas that have come before us? Vonnegut does not suggest that life is meaningless; nor can he necessarily offer us the meaning of life. That would undermine what he does do—he invites us to create and understand meaning through our own thought processes, as opposed to blindly accepting what others offer us as meaningful.
***
As Peter J. Reed points out in his book Writers for the Seventies: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., there are three writers in Cat’s Cradle: Vonnegut, Jonah and Bokonon. “Each of these three writers,” Reed explains, “is concerned with truth, using the word repeatedly, and appears to feel great need to declare the truth of the human condition. Yet each also warns of the writer’s willingness to lie in behalf of his truths, and cautions that the truths that he sees may themselves be lies” (125). This, of course, is Vonnegut’s point. We create meaning in our lives by thinking about the world in which we live. What may be truths for Vonnegut (or for Jonah or Bokonon) may not be quite the same for his readers. Each of us must evaluate the value of these writers’ statements for ourselves. Some may ring true, while others do not. Our tendency, though, as is evident in the title, Cat’s Cradle, is to accept the “truths” passed on from one generation to another.
The idea that you can achieve whatever you want if only you try hard enough is fiction, but accepting personal limitations is painful. We often set high expectations at the outset because we hope to go as far as possible and don’t know where our limitations are yet, but sometimes aiming too high can make us fall short of our goals. It’s like shooting an arrow: you want to aim a little higher than the target, but if you aim too high you can expend too much energy on height and not get enough distance.
We want to believe that everyone has the same capabilities, but some people’s limitations are more rigid than others. Height is one aspect of ourselves that we can’t really change, so it’s better to accept it and move on than to keep standing on one’s tiptoes. There are a lot of instances where people expect too much from those with limitations or expect too much from themselves despite limitations and end up causing harm. It’s good to be ambitious, but it’s also important to be aware of limitations.
Kurt Vonnegut has expressed in interviews how badly American POWs did in European camps during WWII in terms of getting depressed and not taking care of themselves physically and how it was partially due to an American inability to recognize and accept failure. American culture is built on prosperity gospel, we believe in a type of magic where we attract more of what we focus on (aka “law of attraction” or The Secret). The shadow side of that is we believe that if we refuse to acknowledge something negative it will go away. The problem with this is that it doesn’t work and it can delay addressing the problem.
Vonnegut was critical of the American tendency to look away from problems. When his mother died of suicide the coroner’s report said it was an accident and everybody in his midwestern hometown of Indianapolis, Illinois kept saying it was an accident, but Vonnegut himself was interested in talking about it (according to PBS It’s Lit video).
Near the end of the novel, Billy sees the prayer again, this time engraved on a locket worn by his companion, the actress, in the Tralfamadorian zoo. “The wisdom always to tell the difference.” Vonnegut is putting us in Billy’s seat, something he says he’s going to do at the beginning of the story, where he says with what words the story will end: that bird’s question, “Poo-tee-weet?”
Vonnegut’s telling us readers there’s a quiz at the end of his “beautiful and surprising and deep” novel. The question still matters. So do our answers.
It is also deeply ironic. Beneath the apparent resignation is a sadness for which there are no words. This is the manner of the entire novel, and it has led to the novel being, in many cases, misunderstood. I am not suggesting that “Slaughterhouse-Five” has been poorly treated. Its reception was largely positive, it has sold an enormous number of copies, the Modern Library ranked it eighteenth on its list of the hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century, and it is also on a similar list issued by Time magazine. However, there are those who have accused it of the sin of “quietism,” of a resigned acceptance, even, according to Anthony Burgess, an “evasion” of the worst things in the world. One of the reasons for this is the phrase “So it goes,” and it is clear to me from these critiques that the British novelist Julian Barnes was right when he wrote in his book “A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters” that “Irony may be defined as what people miss.”
Kurt Vonnegut is a deeply ironic writer who has sometimes been read as if he were not. The misreading goes beyond “So it goes,” and has a good deal to do with the inhabitants of the planet of Tralfamadore. As it happens, I am a great fan of Tralfamadorians, who look like toilet plungers, beginning with their mechanical emissary Salo, who, in an earlier Vonnegut novel, “The Sirens of Titan,” was marooned on Titan, a moon of the planet Saturn, needing a replacement part for his spaceship. And now comes the classic Vonnegut subject of free will, expressed as a comic science-fiction device. We learn in “The Sirens of Titan” that human history has been manipulated by Tralfamadorians to persuade the human race to build large messages to Salo, and to get our primitive ancestors to develop a civilization capable of doing so. Stonehenge and the Great Wall of China were some of the messages from Tralfamadore. Stonehenge read, “Replacement part being rushed with all possible speed.” The Great Wall of China said, “Be patient. We haven’t forgotten about you.” The Kremlin meant “You will be on your way before you know it.” And the Palace of the League of Nations, in Geneva, meant “Pack up your things and be ready to leave on short notice.”
Dan Leach writes about his own experience embarking onto an anti-novel:
And since the speaker/situation foothold was the only foothold I ever needed to get started on the short stuff, I went to work on the novel as if it was the short stuff. Which is to say, I cracked open a new Word doc and a began to pepper its white space with scenes and fragments and voicy little riffs, all of which felt faithful to Junah’s intelligence and connected to Junah’s situation, but none of which necessarily corresponded to novelistic mechanisms such as the “structured” plot, the “measured” tone, and the “well-developed” character.
Okay, that sounds tempting to me - some doubts about doing the measured tone and the well-developed character abide in my mind. Plus, I decided long ago, while still in Fort Dix, that publishing was unlikely, I was too old to actually hone a style and writerly talents, that I might as well throw caution to the wind and write what I want to read.
Again, Mr. Leach, describes something that attracts me because it does describe the world as I experience - with and after my depression - it.
I was writing a hundred-page shoebox likely to resonate with readers on the basis of voice, fragment, and flow. What I wrote, in the end, was an anti-novel. A mixtape. A collage. A text which mimics its conceit: the book the reader holds is the time capsule Junah culls out of his lived life; the shards on the page, the shards of his memory.
He also reminds me what I need to do, to get back to, now I am using now to return to my writing:
And what I discovered (and it pains me to present this as an epiphany, since in 2020 I was three books and fifteen years into my career) is that a pandemic is not an excuse to write the book you can sell—it’s an excuse to write the book you can love.
I know of only one of the novels in Five Experimental Anti-Novels That Break the Form (Beautifully), Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. They should be read, of course, but I want to add up the parts that make think this idea is sound, and that this is
... isn’t just a rebellion against novelistic dead weight—it’s a rebellion against any printed syllable that isn’t exploding with the concurrent mysteries of sound and sense.... Nelson’s anti-novel is like a mixtape without a single bad or boring song. Which is to say, each of the 240 fragments that make up Bluets sings like a standalone poem (yet also miraculously coheres into a book-length meditation on love and suffering)... which tells its story via a year’s worth of customer comment cards, all submitted by an unnamed narrator who treats the fast-food space as a conduit for existential riffing.... this book has sentences (or lines?) so sonically resonant and philosophically interesting that you will linger on a page for half an hour. This book even has a chapter (now infamous) in which the speaker achieves sexual intimacy with a Frosty..... Delivered in dense (but lush) fragments that braid themselves against disparate registers (imagine reading a mini-essay stuck between a folk tale and a catalogue)... This includes the epistolary intrusions of May Kasahara, the labyrinthine computer files of Cinnamon Akasaka, and the deeply discursive frame stories of Lieutenant Mamiya (which could easily exist as a self-standing novella); but it also includes pseudo-newspaper articles, excerpts from whatever history book Toru happens to be reading, and those infamous and enigmatic third-person vignettes towards the end which no scholar has ever adequately explained
Okay, the Frosty sounds demented as well as distasteful, and what really sticks is the mixtape analogy.
Award-winning author Alan Michael Parker displays his love for playful narrative and breaking all the rules in Bingo Bango Boingo, a collection of flash fiction and stories told through Bingo cards
Flip the page. Choose your game. Is it "Community Garden Bingo"? "High School Reunion Bingo"? "Don't Hate Your Daddy Bingo"? Or are you finally ready for "Change Your Life Bingo"?
Featuring 40 Bingo cards, interspersed with flash fiction and an opportunity to try the Bingo game yourself, this is a wholly original collection. Delightful, unexpected, and tongue in cheek--they're stories, they're Bingo cards, they're wild, you'll like them.
Taking a look now at Have You Considered an Anarchist Approach to Plot?, its thesis is:
All too often, plot is taught as architecture, as per Freitig’s Triangle: rising action, climax, falling action, resolution. But we suggest that plot might better be understood as an emotional strategy: a controlled burn of surprise, contradiction, revelation. And—we might add–especially, connection.
Architecture and plotting makes me think of a criticism/comment about Thomas Hardy's plots being architectural. Hardy would never do what Davison and LaPlante suggest.
First, what do we mean when we say “throw bombs”? We mean inserting any unanticipated event that is completely disconnected (on the surface, anyway) from what came before it.
There are two kinds of bombs: external and internal.
First, external: a surprising (even shocking) event beyond the control of the characters. An earthquake, tornado or some other act of God. Or a stranger or other unidentified character doing something out of the blue that completely disrupts the story.
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Internal bombs are when an unexpected chain of events is put into motion—but instead of being random and uncontrolled, it can be directly (if subtly) caused by your character(s). In other words, due to who they are, they bring it on themselves.
Here you must be careful not to make it either obvious, or—at the other end of the scale—outrageously unbelievable. It can seem out of character (see nonconforming oddities in our first essay in this series) but it should also be attributable to a herethero unknown (unconscious, hidden) aspect of your character.
What both types of bombs have in common: they should leave you, the writer, with a problem: no idea what will happen next. If you turn your back on cliched or familiar reactions, this can be difficult. If traditional plotting devices are off bounds, you must consider how the bomb changes the characters, the theme, and the situation of the story in surprising yet convincing ways. (Thanks, EM Forster for that nugget of wisdom.).
So, why cannot bombs be thrown in an anarchic way?
Davison and LaPlante write about using a character's emotions to drive a story:
The other plotting strategy we’d like to explore is when a story is driven, not by events, but by the emotional movement of a character. In our forthcoming book from W.W Norton, The Lab: Experiments Writing Across Genre, we use the example of Lydia Peelle’s story, “Reasons For and Advantages of Breathing.”
You can chart the emotional progression of the story’s first-person protagonist as she navigates the loneliness and heartbreak of a divorce. But this is no cliched break-up story. Instead, you can see how the narrator goes through alternating moments of connection and disconnection as she struggles to heal emotionally. The tension between these coming-togethers and alienations from self and others is palpable, although nothing of real significance happens. And you’re often surprised by the things that connect versus the things that emotionally separate this narrator from other people, and the world.
I can imagine doing this with fragments - the see-sawing of emotions, the triggers for those emotions, seem to be very conducive to fragmentary telling. Arias comes to mind.
Then are ideas that Milan Kundera put into his Art of the Novel - that the novel is expansive enough to include an essay, a short story. What I got all those years ago from Kundera was the limit was our imagination and the story needing told.
How does the necessary complexity get into Kundera’s fiction? The process is illuminated in The Art of the Novel by two dialogues which draw on detailed illustrations from his novels and which valuably help one to understand how they work. Although Kundera throws away much traditional apparatus – elaborate description of character and setting, psychological realism, interior monologue, historical background, and so on – he insists that the concentration on his characters’ existential situations that this permits does not make them less life-like. A character, after all, is not a real person but a kind of ‘experimental self’, and the novel in Kundera’s hands is a ‘meditative interrogation’ conducted in the hope of getting to the heart of that self in that situation.
In that sense, he resembles the science fiction writer Ted Chiang, with story after story serving as a thought experiment, a parable or a koan, seeded with a big idea. But what he’s interested in is how ordinary people, horny or hungry or a little petty, will react in their ordinary ways to the extraordinary. Hence the opening of one story, for instance: “The world is about to end and I’m eating olives. The original plan was pizza, but …” Or another: “The aliens’ spaceship arrived every Thursday.” In still another, For the Woman Who Has Everything, someone trying to find his wife an original present for her birthday names an asteroid after her – a few hours before that same asteroid is due to obliterate the Earth: “The birthday card Schliefer bought had a picture of a shooting star, and the caption said ‘Make A Wish’ in gold letters.”
Like I suppose many people, magical realism came to me from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Joel C recommended the novel while we were both at Fort Dix FCI. Since then, I have found magical realism elsewhere. It serves as an answer to a question that came to me when I was trying to figure out what I wanted to write and how to write my stories - namely, the limitation of the realist novel. Even more specifically, where does imagination and dreams and the culture into which we are immersed belong in a realistic novel? Magical realism showed me how it could fit all of those parts of us beyond the reach of the "facts only", journalistic trappings of the realistic novel. When I came to re-read Ross Lockridge Jr's Raintree County, I found he, too, had a few elements of magical realism. Everything had come back to Indiana, to me being fifteen years old.
From YouTube:
Why Magical Realism is a Global Phenomenon (It's Lit): provides a simple, but not simple-minded exposition of the tenets of magical realism.
The World According to Haruki Murakami: If you can resist the temptation to sleep, the presenter is so mellow, you get a tie into magical realism.
This video brings us back to Colombia, discusses the confluence of history and film, as influencing literary magical realism; it seems to me to approve of letting the weirdness all hang out, and that seems like a good idea to me:
Pardon this slight intrusion:
What is MAGICAL REALISM? Gives us a wide-ranging reading list, corresponding to my own thoughts that magical realism is not exclusive to South America (for all it is a fecund source).
I keep coming back to it as an answer to a question I came up with while in prison: how do I get into a novel the ideas that feed my imagination? Excluding imagination reduces the realistic novel to journalism. If I can look at a plot of land and see Native Americans and pioneers and escaped slaves and modern Americans intersecting, even conversing with one another, as the reality of the place, how else can I put it into a story without magical realism? I want to think of imagination as magic,
Another reading list showing the expansiveness of magical realism (and that imagination as magic is not limited to South America).
Among the many problems of prison is being sequestered from ideas and information. No Google, no Wikipedia. I would also add now no YouTube. One can have ideas and not have any idea if they are shared, if they have any validation outside one's head. These posts about writers and writing are me catching up with ideas I had in prison about writing and about the writers I did read. Salman Rushdie was one writer I finally caught up with in prison. He was also one of the first who pointed out to me that magical realism was not limited to South America. YouTube kicked this video out to me (the mysterious algorithm strikes again!), which answered a question or tow for me. It also validates my own interest in magical realism - that the truth may escape the realistic novel.
Another intrusion, but just trying to make a point here about imagination and the magic of reality:
If magical realism extends across continents and has a history before Marquez, then it is because humanity shares an imagination encompassing a sense of wonder exceeding the literal. We imagine freedom, and freedom lives on in our imaginations. Impoverish our imagination, we lose our freedom. Which is why I close out with the following from Cleveland Review of Books - Gregory Jones-Katz'sImagination is a Battlefield: Elon Musk, Techno-Fascism, and Dungeons and Dragons.
Musk’s contempt for marginal members of American society is typical of techno-fascists. Now the most prominent billionaire contributor to an international far right movement spanning the United States, Europe, and Latin America, Musk has, in so many tweets, called for a “defense of liberal values” against critical race theory, the “woke campus,” and cancel culture. In March 2022, Putin compared the West’s reaction to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine to the left’s cancellation of J.K. Rowling. Ultimately, Musk’s fantasy to buy Hasbro is part of the global far right’s attempt to seize, remake, and control our imaginations. They act with the understanding that the kind of imagination nurtured by D&D has the potential to undermine foundational hierarchies and binaries.
What does freedom and imagination do other than undermine the clichés and restrictions of literal reality? Consider what the naked sphinx is doing in the Post Office at the start of Raintree County?
But as troubling as D&D’s past remains, the most fantastic power of D&D is precisely the one that, I believe, threatens Musk and the techno-fascist imaginary: D&D is a co-conjured stage upon which players co-imagine boundless possibilities. With an open game licensing concept implemented in 2000, which allowed independent developers to modify D&D as they saw fit, playable races and character classes have long proliferated: over 200 races and 54 base classes, in contrast to the four races and three character classes of first edition D&D. “Dark MAGA” Musk’s attachment to a foundational iteration of D&D is at one with MAGA fixations on past glories of America, such as the auto, steel, and oil industries, which, not coincidentally, were, like D&D, made in the Midwest; but D&D’s player base has, for many decades, extended far, far beyond that space to galaxies far, far away. More than all that, though, D&D “workers” not only create an imaginary world but guide its development and growth. D&D “rulebooks” are in fact guidebooks, and Gygax himself was fond of reminding players to ignore whatever rules they disliked. “Workers” could therefore change the system if they so wished. While geekdom has been appropriated by mainstream America, D&D and the imaginative play it nurtures can function like a pluralist democracy in miniature. Musk’s attempt to de-wokify the game is rooted in a dream of restricting the game’s diversified play and democratic imagination.
Fantasy and imagination that emboldens and embroiders the literal real enriches our lives.
...My students also tell me that they have completely abandoned the use of moral alignments, a categorization of the perspectives of characters. Their characters’ elaborately imagined backgrounds instead serve as the guidelines for the decisions they make, offering a freedom that I never considered when playing as a teenager. Still, my students also understand that imagination provides the possibility that myth, narrative, and metaphor might rescue humanity from the nightmare of destruction regularly justified by rationalistic claims; they unanimously expressed outrage to me about Musk’s Hasbro tweet.
And what more can any of us say that better encapsulates the purpose and effect of imagination?
We need to write; we need to imagine; we cannot let humanity be degraded any further.
Time flies. I wonder what do the people outside of this place think goes on with me. Do they think I am frozen in time?
I lost two roomies this month. One mouthed off to a guard - or so we heard - and went off to the SHU (Special Holding Unit - the cooler for those having seen The Great Escape). The other went to a camp. The first one was a Dominican and the other black. The Dominican caused no problems in the room. The black had participated in taking over one of the small television rooms from the whites, and that had repercussions in the room. Too bad because he did not actually cause problems in the room. No doubt, though, he did increase them.
The second guy came down from a medium security prison. Yes, this dropping down through the different levels of security in our federal prison system happens every day for every category of prisoner (so far as I know and care about), except for sex offenders. I am too dangerous for a camp - unlike a career criminal. The people coming here from medium security prisons cause us the most trouble.
That prisoners have done whatever they needed to do to get their security rating lowered to allow for transfer to a lower security prison does not mean they are psychologically prepared for a lower security prison. Not that the BOP cares about this. What happens is these downward transferees attempt to recreate the culture they had in the higher security prison. Tempers twitch, groups form, injuries and thefts occur, and lines get drawn. Not good. Add into this the first-timers - either of the gangbanger or the non-violent type - and all that is needed is a catalyst. Thank you, mandatory minimum sentencing. Thank you, our brutish national culture.
We have a bunch of white guys who might just be the catalyst. Gay men, here for illegal porn, would generally be enough for shunning. That they have what seems to be the emotional age of 13 and all the self-centeredness of 13-yearolds incite them into confrontations and demands that I will get them hurt. I suspect such information will make some of you out there happy. Enjoy your picking on the weak.
Meanwhile, Lou Reed sings "Sweet Jane" on the radio.
News from the outer world convinces me the republic is in its death throes, and the world stands on the brink of world war. I wonder why I keep writing. Why should I care? Why do I believe art, creativity, may make a difference? I do, and I do so because the arts represent the best part of us. The creative acts are us giving the finger to the universe. Besides, it gives me something to do other than succumbing to the nihilism of my depression.
I got a letter from Catherine Poole & one from KH. Nothing from LAH or Gayann. It was a good letter from Cathy. I do not understand why she & KH still take an interest in me. I will write her this weekend. I suspect she will get as bored with me as Gayann & Tim & T2 have.
A line of communication out of this place is needed. I have the fiction, but I need a connection to what goes on outside of here; something rational, something away from the echo chamber. I hear nothing from dad or RE. I assume dad accepted my terms regarding some money, and I am now de facto disowned. He might have done that years ago.
I read Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain. It was a slow, steady read that got under my skin. It struck me as one of those mountain ballads written large in emulation of James Joyce. I really do not understand its rating as one of the 100 best novels of all time. Maybe I need to re-read Raintree County. It did give me ideas - or, at least, sharpened some James Joyce inspired ideas - about braiding some stories in an odyssey. Evangeline comes to mind. So does Moby Dick. And some strays from Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or Neil Gaiman. I keep working at my Jackson stories, but just over the horizon, just out of earshot, are "Moby Dick on the White River" and "Chasing Ashes". Titles are all I have now, along with some glimpses of a story.
I wrote Kevin when I finished "Cruising Down a Blind Alley". Next week, assuming he reads the letter - he will have an idea about my ambitions as a writer. I see myself far more perverse than the federal government thinks me. I will use the opportunity given me to exercise my ambition. Thirty years too late, but we will find out if I am a writer and if a writer, then what kind.
I also read The Best American Short Plays 1990(Applause Theatre Books, 1991). I'm not so worried about the strangeness of my "Sex Fiend" after reading Christopher Durang's "Naomi In The Living Room" (which I found annoying), or Horton Foote's "The Man Who Climbed the Pecan Trees" (which I thought a bit obscure with hints of Tennessee Williams). Lanford Wilson's "Abstinence" and Ed Bullins' "Salaam, Huey Newton, Salaam", and Carol Mack's "Unprogrammed", and David Ives' "Sure Thing" showed me the form's slipperiness. I finally read Wendy Wasserstein and Aaron Sorkin. I think I was correct, using the one actor format for something absurd and/or comedic. But who was Romulus Linney? His "Akhmatova" stunned me as some sort of absurdist tragedy. I could do my "A Mother's Tale" as a one act, but I knew that from reading Synge. Now, I cannot see it any other way.
[I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order. The date in the title is the date it was written.Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch6/8/2025]
I spent the last two weeks (is that all?) wrestling with a monster. I finished typing up "Cruising Down a Blind Alley". (I just realized I cannot recall its full title - I have been calling it "Cruising" - and it is back at the unit while I write this at the track.) It was 55 pages handwritten is now just barely 32 pages typewritten. I have just written my best short story or wasted too much time on pretentious pathological crap. It tells the story of a man; it is depression and crack cocaine story. I will proofread it and give it over to Joel. I told him we're not going to discuss this one - give an up or down opinion - because this one was far too personal. Personal, as I put way too much of myself into it. But it is not strictly autobiographical. A- will hate it, if she only reads the opening. So another story sure - in my opinion - to anger someone. Seriously, folks, I do this without any sense of malice.
There comes a time when I am writing when the character starts talking to me. This has really been the case for the last three stories. Odd thing, the character I base myself upon myself starts sounding different from me. All this wearies me.
And I read, too. I finished off the Steinbeck novels from the reading list. The Moon is Down impressed the most - many of the invader's remarks about the natives echo what Americans said about the Vietnamese and Iraqis. Go think on that. I surprised myself by how much Of Mice and Men I retained, and also how little I retained of Cannery Row. Tortilla Flatsamused, but it seemed a chore to read - too dated, too slight. The Pearlfelt predictable - like the parable suggested in the Introduction. I wonder how much of Steinbeck Viking keeps in print.
Against my judgment, I read The Maltese Falconfor the third time. If any one writer made me want to be a writer, it is either Hammett or Faulkner. I got two surprises from this reading. First, how much I thought of the novel was actually the movie. Second, how completely Hammett subverted the PI novel and his hero. Maybe he quit writing because he had subverted all the forms known to him?
I read Douglas Adams' The Salmon of Doubt. I think I have now read all of his Hitchhiker books. Have you read any of them? Yes, you, my hypothetical reader. They helped correct my course. Wish it had done so earlier. Maybe I could be talking about books face-to-face. Certainly do not wait till you are an old man like me. I really hope you do get old and are much different from me. Adams made a point about art in the way of the creative. Please be creative.
Been not so much drifting this time as getting knocked off course. Joel has "Cruising down a Blind Alley" and I really ought have shelved it for a few days (my procedure lately) and then not give it to him till I had another draft in hand. Then there have a new crisis or two in the room: 1) we agreed one prisoner was not welcome in the room, he was in the room, and one white SO prisoner made it out to be persecution of him and the remainder of the whites; and 2) an issue about bathing and body odor - again featuring the fellow from #1. I let myself get put into too many things. This happened at work today. My mom trained me to solve problems. It is very hard to go against one's training. It has worn me out. The left eye started throbbing. Right now - 4 hours later - I have what is at most a low grade headache.
Yesterday, I got a letter from Cathy Schrenker. It caused me a great deal of trepidation. It turned out quite well - she was rather formal. Either harshness or sentimentality would have crushed me. I will write her in the next few days.
I spoke with KH on Tuesday night. He will be trying to help me on publishing my work. That was a good thing.
I want to finish No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories (translated by J.S. Bernstein; Harper Perennial, 1979). Steinbeck's The Pearl made me think of Marquez, and Marquez has me thinking of Steinbeck. They have those stories told simply about common people doing what ordinary people do with the simplicity That seems to have a mystical and deeper meaning. I had similar thoughts with Alice Walker's The Color Purple. So much different from Hemingway or Faulkner.
No word from LAH, or anyone else except for Eileen and KH. LAH has been on my mind as I read Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara.
I have Shaw's Saint Joan to re-read. I also have read his Heartbreak House. I have no idea why Shaw did and still does resonate with me as he does, and I think he will, influence whatever plays I do write. I like his three act structure.
I started Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain. It does not warm my heart. The skill is there, but why are so many novels about "The Lost Cause"? I think it is too much sentimentality. One would think Faulkner's Sartorisor Gone With The Wind would have done away with the genre. Or it might be envy. The epic novel told from the northern p.o.v. coming to mind is Raintree County. (Was John Shawnessy's wife a Medea figure? Was he Jason on an argosy? These all came to mind.)
That brings me up to date. Revising stories over the next few weeks. Maybe outline the ones in my head. Taking a break on anything major until I get past War and Peace on my reading list. That should be the beginning of October! So much for 104 novels in a year.
The commutation went out last month. Letters to newspapers and several magazines went out the past week. Do not expect any to take an interest in my petition. Do hope I can raise awareness of the Dorvee case's footnote 10. If I raise a stink, so be it. The only real tool for the porn problem is persuasion. Force will be used because we think force is always effective. Violence solves nothing more than does whistling past a graveyard.
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.
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!
