Kazuo Ishiguro - Genre Bender

Another writer it took imprisonment to get me to read is Kazuo Ishiguro. He was another to point out to me how fluid is genre. Amongst Katie Fitzpatrick's review of his latest novel, Klara and the Sun, in The Nation she makes no bones about Ishiguro's efforts at speculative fiction 

Despite its futuristic premise, Klara and the Sun is aimed at our present. It explores many of the subjects that fill our news feeds, from artificial intelligence to meritocracy. Yet its real political power lies not in these topical references but in its quietly eviscerating treatment of love. Through Klara, Josie, and Chrissie, Ishiguro shows how care is often intertwined with exploitation, how love is often grounded in selfishness. And this dynamic is not only interpersonal but central to today’s politics as well. Love, Ishiguro reminds us, is not always an antidote to exploitation and repression; it may even be the thing that makes us complicit in large-scale violence.

***

Klara and the Sun also allows us to draw similar parallels between Ishiguro’s science fiction and real-world exploitation. But there is one striking difference in the way these books depict oppression: In Never Let Me Go, the clones’ exploitation by humans hinges on people’s ability to dehumanize and forget them. Their lives are invisible to those who will one day use their organs. But in Klara and the Sun, the AFs’ exploitation hinges on people’s ability to humanize and know them. The AFs are harvested precisely for the kinds of human interactions they provide their human owners. While both novels consider the exploitation of so-called disposable workers, this book focuses on those we exploit primarily for emotional labor and care work—a timely commentary during a pandemic in which the essential workers who care for us are too often treated as disposable.

Anne Whitehead notes that in Never Let Me Go, empathy produces cruelty as much as care; empathizing with those close to us may be our justification for harming others. In Klara and the Sun, Ishiguro makes a related argument: When our affection for others emerges from our own loneliness and desire for connection, it may never shed itself of selfishness and violence. Josie empathizes with Klara enough to solicit her consent (“I don’t want you coming against your will,” she tells her at the store) and to treat her as a confidante and friend, but this kind of empathy is not enough to undo the uneven basis of their relationship. If Never Let Me Go demonstrates how easily we can exploit those we never have to see, Klara and the Sun shows how easily we can exploit even those we claim to love.

And is that not the essence of what we should be doing with any type of writing: fight dehumanization?

The review ends with:

...Klara and the Sun is a story as much about our own world as about any imagined future, and it reminds us that violence and dehumanization can also come wrapped in the guise of love.

Read the review. Read Ishiguro. 

Kazuo Ishiguro Reading Guide

 I finally read Kazuo Ishiguro in prison. He is another one who I really admire, and that shows on what I have managed to publish here.

The Guardian has published another of its reading guides, Where to start with: Kazuo Ishiguro. The Guardian has done its usual grand work.

The entry point

Ishiguro’s first two novels, A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World, had both directly addressed his lost Japanese background – he came to Britain with his family when he was five and did not visit Japan again for nearly 30 years, by which time he was a celebrated author. Both novels had developed his vision of people looking back on their lives in puzzlement and regret, leaving much to the reader to interpret.

Both are fine books, the second improving on the first, but it is his third take on much the same theme that remains the definitive entry point to his work: The Remains of the Day. Set this time wholly in Britain in the 1950s, Stevens the butler, a believer in the elusive concept of “dignity”, recalls his life of service to a man who was, we come to realize, a Nazi sympathizer. Stevens’s misplaced dedication has cost him his own chance of love and fulfilment, a realisation he comes to all too late.

The Remains of the Day is wonderfully funny and sad at the same time, “both beautiful and cruel”, as Salman Rushdie said. It won the Booker prize and was turned into a successful film, starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, winning eight Oscar nominations.

Ishiguro admitted that he had in effect written the same novel three times, getting closer and closer to what he wanted to say. The result is a book that is perfection in its own terms.

sch 6/4

Lit Hub Does Kazuo Ishiguro’s "Never Let Me Go"

Yes, Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize for Literature, is probably famous for Remains of the Day, but I prefer Never Let Me Go. I read all of my Ishiguro novels in prison, which is not to say I read all of his work. You may find another you like better.

But I think LitHub's Simple, Sparse and Profound: David Sexton on Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go makes a case for the novel:

Ostensibly a work of science fiction, Never Let Me Go is really nothing of the kind. Ishiguro says he’s perfectly open to people reading it as a chilling warning about biotechnology but feels they’ve missed the inner heart of the book if they take it that way. He has certainly given readers nothing to foster such a misread­ing. For the book is set in the past, not the future: “England, late 1990s” it is specified before the novel begins.

The narrator, Kathy H, is thirty-one as the book opens, and has been a “carer” for nearly twelve years. She looks back to her time at a school she remains very proud to have attended, Hailsham, recalling first when she and her friends were children there, and then when they were teenagers, so locating it in the early and later Seventies, perhaps. Then in Part Two, she tells us about their lives afterwards, in “the Cottages” as young adults, perhaps in the early Eighties. But such dating is never precise and there are few contemporary references. There is almost no allusion to technology, beyond humdrum cars, Rovers and Volvos, and old-fashioned cassette tapes and Walkmans.

###

And everything about the way in which it is written, from that absence of technology to the conversational, unremarkable language in which Kathy tells us her story, is calculated to bring it home to us that these are our own lives we are contemplating. In his invariably clear and modest way, Ishiguro describes this radical narrative thus: “The strategy here is that we’re looking at a very strange world, at a very strange group of people, and gradually, I wanted people to feel they’re not looking at such a strange world, that this is everybody’s story.”

As in all Ishiguro’s novels, he never explicitly states the condi­tions of life he is depicting but asks readers to realize what they are for themselves, to gather much not just from what is said but from what is not said as well. This internalizes the world of the novel for the reader in quite a different way from a more overt telling. His great admirer Hanya Yanagihara has spoken of his “remarkable way of using the white space —a lot of writers feel they have to say something all at once on the page, they’re maximalists and he’s not. He’s relying on the reader to understand what is happening off the page.”

Maybe that will get you to read the whole essay, if not get the novel. I bet you get the book when you do read the full essay.  Then you learn what I did: great story.

sch 4/26

 

Writers: Kazuou Ishiguro

   I find that knowing something of the writer's background is helpful for me in understanding their work. I should have been a historian, I tend towards categorizing writers not by personality but historical epoch. One thing wholly lacking in prison is information. The federal Bureau of Prisons is quite terrified of the internet, so no Google. This lack of information aids in infantilizing prisoners. This is part of a series of writers that I did look up when I got internet access. Some will be about the writer, and others may feature the writer. I went to YouTube for my main source, but others will also include some other material relating to the book or author discussed. One thing I did not have when younger was access to information about how writers wrote. I think that kept me from understanding the actual work, which, in turn, led me away from writing.

Kazuo Ishiguro on Writing

Kazuo Ishiguro won the 2017 Nobel Prize for literature. The Fort Dix FCI leisure library had of his novels An Artist of the Floating World (1986), The Remains of the Day (1989),The Unconsoled (1995), and Never Let Me Go (2005). I preferred Never Let Me Go,. How Ishiguro strayed into speculative fiction interested as by then I was already thinking I had let thinking about genre which I think of as marketing hindered me from telling a story.

I have a theory that the reason Memphis produced the music it did  and why the London bands were so big in the Sixties was competition creating a cross-pollination through inspiration. No Yardbirds without there being The Rolling Stones. Ishiguro, I think, makes my point for me in the following how this applies to writing:

Around this time, I came down with a virus and spent a few days in bed. When I came out of the worst of it, and I didn’t feel like sleeping all the time, I discovered that the heavy object, whose presence amidst my bedclothes had been annoying me for some time, was in fact a copy of the first volume of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (as the title was then translated). There it was, so I started to read it. My still fevered condition was perhaps a factor, but I became completely riveted by the Overture and Combray sections. I read them over and over. Quite aside from the sheer beauty of these passages, I became thrilled by the means by which Proust got one episode to lead into the next. The ordering of events and scenes didn’t follow the usual demands of chronology, nor those of a linear plot. Instead, tangential thought associations, or the vagaries of memory seemed to move the writing from one episode to the next. Sometimes I found myself wondering: why had these two seemingly unrelated moments been placed side by side in the narrator’s mind? I could suddenly see an exciting, freer way of composing my second novel; one that could produce richness on the page and offer inner movements impossible to capture on any screen. If I could go from one passage to the next according to the narrator’s thought associations and drifting memories, I could compose in something like the way an abstract painter might choose to place shapes and colours around a canvas. I could place a scene from two days ago right beside one from twenty years earlier, and ask the reader to ponder the relationship between the two. In such a way, I began to think, I might suggest the many layers of self-deception and denial that shrouded any person’s view of their own self and of their past.

These passages have enlightened me on what I am doing with "No Clean Slates" and what I have still to fully work out with "Chasing Ashes." 

The thought came to me – as I continued to stare at John Barrymore – that all good stories, never mind how radical or traditional their mode of telling, had to contain relationships that are important to us; that move us, amuse us, anger us, surprise us. Perhaps in future, if I attended more to my relationships, my characters would take care of themselves.

***

 I’ve been emphasising here the small and the private, because essentially that’s what my work is about. One person writing in a quiet room, trying to connect with another person, reading in another quiet – or maybe not so quiet – room. Stories can entertain, sometimes teach or argue a point. But for me the essential thing is that they communicate feelings. That they appeal to what we share as human beings across our borders and divides. There are large glamorous industries around stories; the book industry, the movie industry, the television industry, the theatre industry. But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it also feel this way to you?

Writing: Drafting & Revising

In prison, I read all of the available Kazuo Ishiguro novels available(which were quite a few). I thought him interesting before he won the Nobel and writer worth paying attention to when he talks about writing. The following comes from Kazuo Ishiguro, The Art of Fiction No. 196.

INTERVIEWER

Do you work on a computer?

ISHIGURO

I have two desks. One has a writing slope and the other has a computer on it. The computer dates from 1996. It’s not connected to the Internet. I prefer to work by pen on my writing slope for the initial drafts. I want it to be more or less illegible to anyone apart from myself. The rough draft is a big mess. I pay no attention to anything to do with style or coherence. I just need to get everything down on paper. If I’m suddenly struck by a new idea that doesn’t fit with what’s gone before, I’ll still put it in. I just make a note to go back and sort it all out later. Then I plan the whole thing out from that. I number sections and move them around. By the time I write my next draft, I have a clearer idea of where I’m going. This time round, I write much more carefully.

INTERVIEWER

How many drafts do you typically write?

ISHIGURO

I rarely go beyond the third draft. Having said that, there are individual passages that I’ve had to write over and over again.

I have one other post about him here. 

sch 7/3/22

Having Read The Remains of the Day 9/29-2014

[ 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. sch 6/15/2025] 

What a dangerously simple read. That is how I think of  Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (Vintage International, 1993). In 245 pages, Ishiguro tells of a love story, of a certain sort of Englishman's response to Hitler, and the vagaries of history. All told obliquely in a certain formal prose, mostly done as one character's interior monologue. Ishiguro even omits a key encounter - the ostensible purpose for the novel - and even a whole day. We, the reader, must make some jumps, some connections on our own. Omission can be as potent as inclusion.

Ishiguro opens with these two sentences:

It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been occupying my imagination now for some days. An expedition, I should say, which I will undertake alone in the comfort of Mr. Faraday's Ford; an expedition which, as I foresee it, will take me through much of the finest countryside of England to the West Country,a nd may keep me away from Darlington Hall as much as five or sex days....

I think these two sentences quite effectively and efficiently characterize the novel and its narrator. I continue working on such openings to my stories. I notice Ishiguro copyrighted this novel when he was thirty-five. That I find  almost daunting. I set my goals on getting published and giving my readers their money's worth. I have the residual craziness of writing something. Important and Worth Reading.

I do disagree with the narrator's conclusions about life:

... Perhaps, then, there is something to his advice that I should cease looking back so much that I should adopt a more positive outlook and try to make the best of what remains of my day. After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might ahve wished? The hard reality is, surely, that for the likes of you and I, there is little chance other than to leave our fate, ultimately in the hands of those great gentlemen at the hub of the world who employ our services....

"Day Six - Evening Weymouth"

I can agree with the first two sentences. Yes, me who has no future sees no profit in looking back to the past only for blame. I disagree with the third sentence. I threw myself not my fate and that got me into prison. We need to be responsible for our own fates. I should raise the flag of irony here - the narrator is a blockhead. He may be substituting stoicism for mere blockheadism.

 The back page advertises Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World and A Pale View of Hills. He is only sixty. What else has he done? (And here I miss Wikipedia.)

sch

[6/15/2024: There was much else that Ishiguro had done by that time, some of what I found and read, and there is more that he has done since 2014. His Nobel Prize for Literature was one item awaiting him. As for Wikipedia, just click here. sch]

 

Kazuo Ishiguro in January Magazine

I already cribbed Kazuo Ishiguro's Nobel speech, so here's an interview from January Magazine. Most of the article has to do with the movie versions of his novels and book tours but since parochialism has been a concern I have raised in this blog I found this relevant:

More than a literary movement. It's to do with a big shift in the way the British thought of themselves. Because you have to remember, for a long, long time Britain thought of itself as the center of a huge empire. For a long time writers who wrote English literature felt they did not need to think consciously about whether they were international or not. They could write about the smallest details of English society and it was, by definition, of interest to people in the far corners of the world because English culture itself was something that was internationally important. So they never had to think about what if somebody in Shanghai wasn't interested in how English people went about having their dinner parties in London: Well, they damn well ought to be interested. That was the attitude because that was the dominant international culture. That was the culture that was being forced or pushed onto other cultures around the world. If you wanted to know about the world for quite a lot of the last two or three centuries, you had to know about British culture.

But that finished, you see. And I think it took a little while after the end of Second World War for the British to realize this. And then suddenly, around the time when I started to write, I think people came to this realization: We're not the center of the universe. We're just this little backwater in Europe. If we want to participate in the world, culturally speaking, we've got to find out what's happening in the rest of the world. Similarly with the literature. It's no good anymore just going on about the difference between an upper middle class Englishman and his lower middle class wife, you know. That's just purely parochialism. You've got to start looking outwards and wider and we want writers and artists who can tell us how we can fit into the rest of the world. We want news from abroad. I think it was that big shift, the basic realization that Britain wasn't the heart of an Empire, but just a little -- albeit a powerful one, still -- just a little country.

American writers now are in a not dissimilar situation to English writers of the last several hundred years. You can write the most inward-looking provincial kind of American novel, because American culture is so dominant around the world. They're writing stuff of world importance. It's easier to write things that everybody should be interested in just by describing your own knee if you're American, you can write something that's very important. The rest of us can't do that.

So I think it was something deeper than just a fashion. And I think it's reflected in many aspects of British life. Literature is just one, small bit of it. The whole attitude to what "English" means has undergone a huge change since I was a child in England. | October 2000

Some Random Literary Notes

I wish A Literary Road Trip Across America: Indiana from Lithub included Raintree Country, but its choices are not bad, at all.

Also from LitHub, a witty reminder of the difference between writing and publishing, How the Prospect of Publishing Can Paralyze the Writing Process:

The dream is to create a book that will also be a tonic: not a course of study but a course of treatment. “I’m beginning a new book to have a companion,” wrote Hervé Guibert, “someone with whom I can talk, eat, sleep, at whose side I can dream and have nightmares, the only friend whose company I can bear at present.” He had been reading The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon in the country. Shivering with cold, he bit into an overly salty biscuit.

The Library of America has a tribute to Wendell Berry, of whom I have read a book of essays and a short story. The best thing to come out of Kentucky since Cassius Clay. Check out “Your Friend, Wendell”: A 90th Birthday Tribute to Wendell Berry , and then find his books.

I think I tried reading Balzac around the time I started college, and I did not finish him. Another of my many, many mistakes. Why? Well, maybe a review of The Lily in the Valley by Honoré de Balzac. NYRB Classics will explain.

GRAHAM ROBB CONCLUDES his superb 1994 biography of Honoré de Balzac by observing that, after two ambitious ventures in the 1890s to translate all of the author’s vast corpus into English, most of Balzac’s work—save for a handful of frequently reprinted and retranslated titles—has since lapsed into relative obscurity. As a result, Robb asserts, “unknown masterpieces are waiting to be rediscovered.” Over the past two decades, NYRB Classics has made an admirable effort to rectify this neglect, bringing out four books with texts that have been newly translated, in some cases for the first time in over a century: The Unknown Masterpiece (trans. Richard Howard, 2000), a gathering of two novelettes that focus on art and artists; The Human Comedy (trans. Linda Asher, Carol Cosman, and Jordan Stump, 2014), a gathering of 14 shorter works, including the brilliant novella The Duchesse de Langeais (1834); The Memoirs of Two Young Wives (trans. Jordan Stump, 2018), a luscious epistolary novel from 1842; and now The Lily in the Valley (trans. Peter Bush), a poignant 1836 novel that is one of the author’s most autobiographical.

Maybe the Great American Novel is not a single book attempting to sum up this country but a series of novels ranging over time and geography with an interlocking cast of characters. 

The Elsewhere Is Always There Krys Lee speaks with Kevin Barry about place, poetry, and genre in his latest novel, “The Heart in Winter. Kevin Barry deserves your attention - he's Irish and brash in his approach. The interview might get you to read his books.

James Baldwin turns 100 and The Guardian provides a reading list: Where to start with: James Baldwin.

An odd post from Thornfield Hall in that it waffles a bit on teaching a literary canon because of the need of pandering to students: Pop vs. the Canon: Teaching Literature in the 21st Century

Jessica Anthony on Getting a Grip on Fictional Time

Here’s the rub: scenes read quickly. The dialogue or power of the narrator’s imagery hastens us along, and the pages turn—but literal time is suspended in a scene. Time stops as the reader is imagining, say, thirty minutes of conversation at a wake. I’ll never forget the experience of reading, say, the lengthy courtroom scenes in Richard Wright’s Native Son, and boundaries of acceptability in all aspects of story should always be tested, but we typically we drop into scene specifically so we can drop out of it. Especially in short stories. That crusty old adage “show don’t tell” falls apart when reading Murakami’s “Tony Takitani.” The art of narration is the art of telling, and telling can hasten us through an entire life in six pages, as Murakami does with Shozaburo. Our kindergarten teachers were right: it’s show and tell.

The Glory and Freedom of Our Ukraine Has Not Yet Perished (LARB) Nick Owchar reviews Reuben Woolley’s new translation of Andrey Kurkov’s “Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv.”

SEVEN MONTHS BEFORE Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Vladimir Putin published an essay later seen as his rationale for the invasion. A 5,000-word argument that Russians and Ukrainians are really one people, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” frames Putin’s so-called special military operation as an attempt to erase the historical divide that has wrongly separated them. In the two-and-a-half years since, there have been many refutations of that argument—especially Putin’s deliberate oversimplification of the common heritage shared by Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians—but one of the more persuasive isn’t a work of scholarship or punditry—it’s Andrey Kurkov’s 2012 novel Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv (now available in an English translation by Reuben Woolley). The novel is at once a comic romp around Ukraine’s cultural capital and an unexpected glimpse into the complexities of cultural and national identity—something the Russian autocrat’s feeble essay fails to recognize.

***

That internal sense of meaning comes from the stories we tell ourselves. Stories give us a purpose, whether they’re true or not. Consider the book’s title. It refers to a concert that never happened, and also to a rumor that after his death, Hendrix’s right hand was smuggled into Ukraine by the KGB and buried in Lviv’s Lychakiv Cemetery. For old hippies like Alik, that story gives them a reason to show up every September, on the anniversary of the guitarist’s death, to pay their respects. It’s small rituals such as this that, Kurkov suggests, are the best—if not the only—way to cope with larger crises and challenges.

From Defector comes Kazuo Ishiguro Is A Repetitive Genius. which makes clear a point about Ishiguro (who, if you've not read, then go find his books!)

Ishiguro’s novels are built on tension between the characters’ lagging awareness of themselves and the reader’s quicker understanding, and at the cathartic moment, the characters seize on the realization the reader has craved for them all along. (Of course, this usually comes too late for them to save themselves.) His stories are like Jenga towers that tumble down at precisely the right moment, which overcomes any possible annoyance I could feel at the repetition in his novels. I’m not even enthralled by his writing on a sentence level—though I know many are—but his management and timing of plot and character development are unceasingly fascinating.

What Ishiguro knows, of course, is that these techniques work. Few things elicit sympathy more effectively than characters with a modicum of relatability who are doomed to lose what they most want. Little is more intriguing than a half-formed past that slowly fills itself in over time. I could not be less bothered that Ishiguro isn't a chameleon. “I think it is perfectly justified [for a literary novelist to repeat themself],” Ishiguro told The Guardian. “You keep doing it until it comes closer and closer to what you want to say each time.” I hear his words more clearly than any other novelist’s.

I have been trying to write stories where the reader is a little ahead of the protagonists or knows more than what the characters might know. My idea was to show the limits of our knowledge while in the middle of action.

And for a great takedown of Ryan Reynolds from the same blog: Ryan Reynolds Is Cinema’s Antichrist. Yes, I saw Deadpool & Wolverine. Yes, I liked it. But I wanted senseless silliness and that it is.

All at sea: two crises in Conrad by Jeffrey Meyers from The Article.

Lincoln Michel's What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last.

Emily Zarevich's Dorothy Richardson and the Stream of Consciousness (JSTOR Daily) discusses the first novelist to use this technique.

The Admirable Uncertainty of the Antidetective Novel

Kailee Pedersen: In Praise of the Difficult Women of East Asian Literature (LitHub) - a listing of novels that does exactly what it says. 

The Admirable Uncertainty of the Antidetective Novel by Eugenie Montague is another LitHub list. I have read The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster and The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, and recommend them.

The term antidetective generally refers to a category of stories that utilize, and then subvert, the conventions of a detective novel. These are stories that induce the desire to detect but often frustrate that impulse in various ways, casting doubt—not on the capability of the central detective figure—but on the methodology of detection itself. Antidetectives, a cousin of the metaphysical detective (books that use detective conventions to approach questions of knowing and being) exist on a spectrum of uncertainty; sometimes the investigations don’t solve; sometimes they do, but something else—like the narrative—breaks apart. Sometimes all investigation into the initiating crime peters out, or it becomes increasingly unclear if there ever was a crime in the first place. I have always been drawn to these kinds of books, but the internet likely increased this general leaning. It used to be that one could find things on the internet: new bands, who your ex was now dating, the history of the silk trade. Knowledge—complete and total—felt accessible, possible if you were willing to look long enough. And yet even before Google became mostly useless, there was always a snake-eating-its-own-tail aspect about it. After a certain amount of clicking, it was hard to feel as the place I was headed had much to do with truth or understanding.

sch 8/14, 8/18, 8/19, 8/21, 8/22

For Writers Over 50

 I doubt KH will find much to hearten him in 5 Over 50: 2022 from Poets and Writers. He will point out how four of the five are women, and that one does have an MFA degree. I would like to point out how all five kept on writing. They had more faith in their talents than I had in mine. For that alone, I would suggest you read their biographies. Striking closer to home were these remarks from David Santos Donaldson:

I had given up on the idea of getting published in my lifetime. By the time I reached forty, with an awful sinking in my chest I faced a brutal reality: I would never make one of those famous lists of “Writers Under 40.” I’d been haunted by an article I read in which Kazuo Ishiguro said most great novels were written by authors under forty. At first it sounded ridiculous. What about late bloomers like José Saramago and Penelope Fitzgerald? But there were multiple examples to back up Ishiguro’s claim. Sad and somewhat embittered, I began to mourn the artistic life I’d imagined for myself. When I turned fifty, and my latest novel was not picked up by editors, I faced the harshest reality of all: Not only would I probably never write a great novel, but I would also probably never get published.

There is a great teaching from Atisha, the eleventh-century Bengali Buddhist master: Abandon all hope. Initially this seems like accepting defeat. But the wisdom behind this teaching is that once we give up waiting for our fulfillment to happen in the future, we can fully accept what and who we are right now. Ironically I found that writing from that place of acceptance allowed me to write more honestly and urgently and even to face obstacles I may have been putting in my own way on the road to publication.

I came to the same conclusion when, after my arrest, KH suggested it was time for me to get back to writing. What I have written about is what interests me. I have been surprised by having had one acceptance. I have tried writing honestly without worrying about publication. In Mr. Donaldson's remarks I find much to reassure me that I have made good choices.

sch 10/16/22

My Apologies

Sorry, I have been rather quiet. Too tired and not a good explanation for that. There has been a complete lack of energy to do anything, let alone write. Being broke until yesterday, I have done nothing except work and sleep and watch history videos and then back to sleep. I did the group therapy today. Groceries and laundry, I did not do.  It has left me a bit cranky, too. 

I napped and have been doing a little reading, then I just lost the energy to purge my inbox.

So, these items are what I have made it through.

The 20 best US remakes of foreign language films – ranked!  The Guardian (Remarkably, I cannot disagree.)

‘I had a chance to pass my mum’s story on’: Kazuo Ishiguro on growing up in shadow of the Nagasaki bomb   The Guardian. (One of his novels I did not read.)

Start your summer with enjoying events in Muncie (I have got to get more.)

sch

Writing: Genre and Literature

 Dear Reader, I write here often about the slippage between literature and genre. I am not good at respecting the distinction. I like following Joan Jett on blurring lines.  This may not be so much a brave stance as much as proof of me not knowing what I am talking about.

If Charles Dickens is literature, then what about the detective story of The Mystery of Edwin Drood? Isn't William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom, a detective story also? Do I discount Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five for its science fiction elements?

One more item as a preamble: I just do not get Thomas Pynchon. I got to read him in prison after hearing about him for years. Not that I do not want to understand what is all the hoopla, which is why I read something like “Inherent Vice, Bleeding Edge, and Thomas Pynchon’s Hardboiled.". Yes, it is an academic paper, albeit one that is not completely buried under incestuous jargon:

A consensus seems to be emerging that the dominant literary develop-
ment of the 21st century is exactly the sort of process outlined by Formal -
ism and polysystem theory. Elements of marginal, non-canonized genres
have been adopted by canonical writers, and embraced by the institutions
involved in policing literary boundaries, while whole genres, previously
considered to be beyond the pale, have begun to migrate towards the
center(s) of the literary polysystem. Tim Lanzendörfer has recently pro-
posed the term “‘détente’ fiction” to describe the results of this process,
a form of contemporary literary writing that rejects a sterile bifurcation
between high and low culture (3). Similarly, Theodore Martin has identi-
fied an earnest engagement with genre as a key feature of 21st-century lit-
erature (7–8). Examples abound, such as Colson Whitehead’s 2016 The
Underground Railway, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the
National Book Award, but also the Arthur C. Clarke Award for the best
SF novel by combining a realistic slave narrative with elements of fantasy, science fiction, and alternate history.4 Similarly, Nobel Prize winner
Kazuo Ishiguro’s most recent works include a dystopian science fiction
novel (Never Let Me Go, 2005) and a piece of historical fantasy (The
Buried Giant, 2015). It seems that we are now prepared to recognize that
serious works of literature, worthy of popular and critical attention and
our most prestigious accolades, can involve or even rely on substantial
elements of genre fiction.

We live in a corrupted world - unless one is Pangloss and this is the best of all possible worlds - which means crime should exist in our fiction. Hester Prynne committed a crime that led to her wearing a scarlet A. Oliver Twist meets several criminals, witnesses several crimes. Early on I had an idea born out of exposure to the 1898 lynching in Versailles, Indiana, I set it aside when I felt unable to compete with William Faulkner, only to take it up much to my surprise when I was in prison, and it is a two-fold crime story: the gang terrorizing the county and the county's refusal to indict anyone for the gang's lynching. These crimes tell us about ourselves and our society.

The investigator lets us into the different strata of society, exposes us to a range of characters. I am drawn to this discussion of Pynchon for that very reason:

Jameson has argued that one of the main achievements of the hard-
boiled is its ability to “to bring us up short, without warning, against the
reality of death itself, stale death, reaching out to remind the living of
its own moldering resting place” (87). In Pynchon’s hardboiled we are
brought up short not only by the presence of death, but by a fundamen-
tal, inescapable wrongness, against which the investigator is powerless.
Bleeding Edge ends as Tarnow watches her children go to school, leav-
ing behind the “precarious light” of childhood’s grace and entering “the
indexed world” (476). For all her investigative talents, for all her quiet
heroism, there is nothing she can do about what is going to happen to
them and the world they live in. The last line of the novel (and what may
come to stand as the last line of Pynchon’s published body of work) is an
open admission of this powerlessness: “She can watch them into the ele -
vator at least” (477). The conclusion of Inherent Vice similarly confronts
readers with the limits of investigation. Sportello has solved a series of
interconnected mysteries, and deflected the attention of the Golden Fang
from a number of vulnerable people. Yet the novel ends not with triumph
but with Sportello driving through the fog, waiting for it “to burn away,
and for something else this time, somehow, to be there instead” (369).
Both Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge offer their readers a hardboiled vi-
sion of a fallen world in which the persistence of hope, however tenuous
and unjustified, is the only recourse — even for a private eye.

 I may have a better idea of the attraction others find in Pynchon having read this article. It may be he and I see the world differently, that what concerns him I have come to through others and find him less a novelty. Still, he points the way for incorporating the popular and the literary. I do not see how, if literature is to have relevance to reality, it can ignore the concerns of genre fiction. Justice and guilt are part of our real world.

About the hard-boiled detective, The Myth of the Private Eye: In Search of Hidden Truth makes a point I think relevant here:

...But along the way he has learned that in modern society guilt is pervasive and diffuse: he can’t defeat it all: no one can. The Grail he pursues can’t be fully realized. The modern urban Wasteland and its ailing potentates can’t be decisively healed or revivified. Thus, as George Grella concludes, in effect “the hard-boiled novel inverts the conventions of both the whodunnit and the romance.” The hero’s victory is compromised, the state of “innocence” is not restored, and guilt persists: Eden is irrevocably lost, or if not lost, it is merely internalized in one lone figure whose code enables him to walk down mean streets without being himself mean, in search of a truth that he alone knows and values. He is, we might say, a romance hero inhabiting a world devoid of romance. His stance toward this world is thus tenuous and elegiac. His only real victories are inner ones, and even these are often rendered hollow, fruitless, gained at too great a cost. And yet he persists in the arduous search for hidden truth.

Seems to me, the form presents a dialectic between society and the individual. Which is a very American dialectic. 

This may be the place to point out an earlier interest in pulp fiction as literature, Is it a Crime?

Stein delves into the pulp genre in her essay, “What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them,” while ruminating on literature and its aims. Or rather, she gives the reader a sampling of her theory in support of the crime story as literature; as a subset of something new awakening in American culture: whether it—the country, the populace—was aware of it, or not.

###

We might consider how this relates to writers such as Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon, who straddles the line between literature and pulp fiction. In “Making ‘Literature’ of It: Hammett and High Culture,” Mark McGurl makes the case for Hammett’s literary situation— as in where his work is situated in relation to “highbrow” literature and crime fiction. Hammett’s writerly efforts elevated pulp fiction to an art, in conversation with modernism. McGurl posits:

Admired by such [writers] as André Gide, André Malraux and Stein, Hammett’s fiction echoes the more obviously elite modernism whose central texts he appreciated and discussed even as he continued to sell his work to the pulp audience. His work shows us both what modernism looks like to mass culture and what mass culture looks like to modernism, without canceling the relative autonomy of these two discourses.

Hammett even says in a letter to Blanche Knopf: “Some day somebody’s going to make ‘literature’ of it,” referring to the detective story, and its nascent, yet-to-be-revealed potential. Indeed, Stein not only admired the genre from afar, she made her own attempts at the detective story. According to Brooks Landon, Stein wrote “a short play, ‘Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters,’ a curious 80-page short novel, Blood On the Dining-Room Floor, an impenetrable thirty-page piece enigmatically titled ‘Subject Cases: The Background of a Detective Story,’ and several other short works with detective themes or subjects.”

Taking a different genre, Liu Cixin in his afterword to The Three Body Problem, claims the science fiction novel as representing the social novel. Wasn't society the territory of Balzac and Thomas Hardy and William Faulkner and John Dos Passos?

Best Books of The 21st Century

 Since I am cheap, I have been avoiding The New York Times. The NYT recently published a list of the best books, so far, of this century. This I have not read, but the email has sent me two people who have read the list. 

Ted Gioia wrote The Best Books of the 21st Century. Mr. Gioia is someone who I have come to respect. He gives the top ten. 

(10) Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
(9) Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
(8) Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
(7) The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
(6) 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
(5) The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
(4) The Known World by Edward P. Jones
(3) Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
(2) The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
(1) My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrant

I have not read the Bolano. Jones, or the Wilkerson novel. While I admit to an anti-Franzen bias, that is a pretty good top ten. I like seeing Colson Whitehead there. 

More importantly, he goes on to write about My Brilliant Friend. I cannot recall when I read Ferrante - it was while I was in prison, let us say within the 10 years. Gioia points out what struck me most about the Neapolitan novels, a view into a different world than I see in American novels:

The image of success is almost more important than any financial measures of its magnitude. We have now left the Horatio Alger rags-to-riches story far behind. Instead we merely exchange today’s rags for tomorrow’s more expensive looking rags.

This sense of a constraining destiny is especially evident in the novel’s secondary characters—and these play a prominent role in the book. Ferrante even provides a guide to the nine different families involved in her tale, as well as other parties who help propel the narrative forward. The conflicts and rivalries will dominate the book, and though many of these friends and neighbors have dreams and ambitions, their freedom to act is limited at every hand.

Most people I know have given up on sticking-to-itness. I know I did, that was part of my depression - finding out that no matter how hard I worked during my fifties, I was not going to get where I wanted to go. Most people I know feel they are stuck. No, some did not attempt to further their education. Substance abuse got in the way of others. Some found success did not matter as much as attending the right schools. Many believed that corporate America would return with the jobs our parents had. Ferrante's world had none of our American examples; her go-getters resemble the people I have known.

Lincoln Michel plunged into a more detailed criticism of the list with his Three Thoughts on the NYT Top 100: Missing Millennials, Fading Autofiction, the Genre-Bending Era. Here are the issues he raises.

The biases toward American novels (and political and historical nonfiction) and against translated literature, poetry, story collections, graphic novels, and essay collections is notable but also expected. Americans simply don’t read much poetry or translated literature. Similarly, the bias toward big press books instead of indie press books. One thing I spent yesterday discussing with another writer that was surprising—at least to me—is the lack of younger writers. The list is heavily weighted toward writers over 65. There is not a single author under 40. Unless I missed someone, there are only two millennials on the entire list: Fernanda Melchor and Torrey Peters. If you move the cutoff to 1980 births, Justin Torres would also count. Still, only 2-3 titles out of 100 for the generation most of this century? There are no zoomers and even Gen X is underrepresented. This is a list of boomer authors, largely. (Generations are fake of course, but an easy shorthand.)

Being 64, I suppose that I should not mind this, but I do. KH and I were talking recently about bands/singers that should give up performing. They are not giving room for new talent, for new styles. I feel the same way about writing.

I think one can make an easy argument that the biggest trend in the literary fiction world has been, in fact, genre fiction. Or rather “genre-bending” work that bridges literary fiction style and themes with genre fiction tropes and concepts. Like autofiction, this is a fraught term. Both are labels people can claim are hardly new at all. There have always been books that blurred literary style and genre tropes, and however you define autofiction there are precedents stretching back centuries. But labels can be useful for thinking about larger trends in culture. And anyway, what’s the point of a literary newsletter but to dissect such hobbyhorses?

This trend I figured out in prison when I decided to start writing again and began reading as widely as I could. I find it silly not to look back at the 19th Century and see that many great novels did not fit into any genre. I have come up with answers to my question of why literature disdained genre: 1) the apprenticeship of American writers in journalism (although Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy is a crime novel); and 2) publishers paid attention to marketing experts.

Check out the original essays, please. 

sch 7/13