One-Way Street

Nell Zink: The Committed Spitballer

 

Andrew Martin wrote an excellent review of Nell Zink's five novels. Before reading Zink's novels (Nicotine and Doxology), I read several reviews of her work. However, the difference between reading about her work and actually reading it is like the difference between a punk band's studio album and its live performance. Zink writes with a bravura wit, but her prose can miss some notes and the narrative gets sloppy in places--much like a punk rock band live. At the same time, the performance hangs together as something fresh if not wholly satisfying. Martin is the first reviewer who captures the live punk band experience of reading Zink's work.

My first Zink novel was Nicotine. Like Doxology, it was better in the upward slope of premise than the downward slope of resolution. Doxology is a more considered work, so its turning more explicit. Martin identifies where the novel goes wrong: the death of Joe Harris, a 1990s rock star. Joe's rise to rock stardom struck me as implausible, even by loose standards of the day. His fame was such a lark he could only come to a bad end, which he does. As Martin points out, after his death, the novel downshifts as Zink subjects her heroine to a marriage plot as the 2016 election approaches. Zink’s female characters are better at reading the room than finding a comfort zone. In her latest novel, Zink has new plans for which her heroines are ill-equipped. Martin precisely identifies what Doxology means to Zink's career development:

It may be the case that her strengths as a writer are fundamentally those of the disrupter and the caricaturist rather than the nuanced social chronicler, but the madness of the current moment calls as much for disruption as it does for breadth and grace. Doxology may prove to be a transitional book in her career, like, say, Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, the work of a committed spitballer creeping toward a more sober reckoning with the world, then bailing out when things get too real.

I'm not sure if "the madness of the current moment" Martin refers to is the madness of the Covid-19. Destruction seems to be happening all by itself. It wouldn't seem necessary for Zink to come along and topple things over. Yet shelter at home seems to be more promising material for Zink than finding Mr. Right, where she landed in her last novel. The improvisatory culture that's bound to emerge from all this might be just the thing for her. She writes fast, so we may learn very soon.

Worldmaking and Showrunning: The End of Game of Thrones

So I watched the series finale of Game of Thrones on Sunday night. Watching the finale it occurred to me that GoT, like all limited series, ends both too early and too late. Game of Thrones didn't end when it should have because of the differences in its source material and the imperatives of television production.

 

Adapted from George R.R. Martin's novels, GoT started as the history of an entire world and ended with a reformed libertine dwarf sobbing in front of his brother, "You were the only one who treated me well." At some earlier point in the body count GoT reached the limits of its known world and became a melodrama of interpersonal relationships--with dragons. Perhaps not coincidentally, somewhere around season five GoT switched from a literary adaptation to an original TV production--in other words, from novelistic worldmaking to costume and set design for celebrity actors.

 

This isn't to say that the novel is a superior medium to television. I want to suggest merely that GoT extended its story beyond what Martin's initial premise could support. The series finale made choices that made sense given developments from the last few seasons but were unsatisfying dramatically. Tyrion is arrested yet again, but he doesn't suffer his long-overdue execution. Experience has softened his self-interest, so he's thrust, almost literally, into a position in which he speaks for the showrunners, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. Tyrion argues for Bran's ascent to the throne, even though Bran is a flimsy vehicle for such power and narrative weight. In effect, Tyrion posits that storytellers are ultimately more important than the people, which is consistent with Martin's original vision of the series but inconsistent with the ways in which the showrunners have developed the female characters, especially the Stark sisters. His creepiness and lack of charisma aside, Bran is a disappointing king because he isn't a storyteller. Rather, he's a repository of narrative details which he dispenses whenever the narrative wheels threaten to grind to a halt. A novelist would have handled these problems through a third-person narrator. A television series needs a character to provide the same information. Bran is sort of the hand of the showrunners. Ever the narrative functionary, at the conclusion Bran was there to brush aside unresolved conflicts.

 

Storytelling is important, and so is television production. The narrative sped up to television pace up once the series moved beyond Martin's novels. At some point in season five GoT transitioned fully to television production and, consequently, to spectacle in place of text. In the finale we saw lengthy scenes of Jon and Arya being whisked offstage with barely a word. There's no more meaning to be gleaned from these scenes. The characters have nothing left to say.

 

The hastiness of the last season and the last episode in particular goes against the essential pleasures of long narratives and continually partial knowledge they offer. In the endgame of GoT Cersei was clearly only a placeholder, her power arising not from change but from delay. Pretty much all she does in season eight is stare our from a balcony, waiting, like us, for a just ruler to appear to bring the story to an end. Daenerys' mad strafing of King's Landing in the penultimate episode moved the series toward this ending, but she never really explains herself, having been consumed by her passions so her lover can be freed from his. She survives only long enough to bellow out her tyrannical plans before meeting her inevitable end.

 

Westros is spared another bloodthirsty (and colorful) tyrant. Instead,  GoT resolved itself into fantasy rather than tragedy, in spectacle rather than mimesis. Sure, there could be a sequel that follows Arya to whatever is west of Westros (or Restros, as someone joked on Twitter), but updating the adventure narrative with its exoticism may prove too great a challenge for HBO's showrunners. It would also be expensive to shoot. 

 

Now that it's over, what to watch next? How about impeachment hearings?

The Last Pages of Philip Roth

It's possible, although I can't confirm it, that Philip Roth passed away at the very moment I was reading the final pages of Lisa Halliday's Asymmetry, a novel supposedly based on her affair with Roth. Maybe it was Roth just checking out when the "indigenous American berserk" had intensified to the point at which language was finally defeated. But I like to think of it as a Rothian moment, collapsing fiction and real life into one.

First, a few personal opinions regarding Roth's work. Of the three great white male writers  who, for readers like myself, define American experience in the mid-century--Roth, Saul Bellow and John Updike--I felt the least affinity with Roth and came to him last after my first pass through the best work of Updike then Bellow. However, of the late works of the three I paid serious attention only to Roth. I returned to his work when the vastly darker Sabbath’s Theater appeared in 1995. I would choose that novel as his best over American Pastoral his greatest because it touches upon the origin of Western literature: the singing the virile rage of Achilles.  At that novel Roth perfectly balanced his two themes--sex and death, the great preoccupations of the Freudian era.  

My personal narrative of Roth's work has Sabbath's Theater (1995), the story of a its lust-wrecked puppeteer, as the transition from the sex books (Portnoy's Complaint, with all its delight in recklessness) to the death books in the remarkable string of late novels that followed. Roth's keen awareness of last days came out in the interview with the imaginary Roth in the last pages of Aysmmetry. It's also present in the interview the actual Philip Roth gave to the New York Times in late 2017. Roth insisted that the interview was conducted by email, and it reads like a written exchange. Every response is carefully wrought, suggesting Roth missed writing more than he let on. He was frank about his age, writing "in just a matter of months I’ll depart old age to enter deep old age — easing ever deeper daily into the redoubtable Valley of the Shadow. Right now it is astonishing to find myself still here at the end of each day." 

Roth meant so much to me as a young writer. Anyway, the big 50s-60s literary (male) personalities --Roth, Capote, Mailer, Bellow, Updike, (to a certain degree) Cheever -- all gone. https://t.co/DRgfYetxf9

— Darinstrauss (@Darinstrauss) May 23, 2018

One could also add Tom Wolfe to the list of recently deceased American writers who lived in a vanished literary culture, one that was dominated by white males, to be sure, but a culture that also had room for Susan Sontag and Joan Didion. There are no more Sontags or Didions, either. These writers grappled with the same themes a whole generation of Americans faced together: war, civil rights, Freud, the Holocaust, and the transition from urban to suburban life. What are the urgent themes of today? Trump, staring at iPhones too much, and a long list of other stupid things.  

It's often been remarked that Roth never one a Nobel Prize or fathered a child, which is odd considering how movingly he wrote about fathers. Perhaps he could write so directly about death because he didn't have children himself, so he had no one to protect. The death of the childless writer feels like the death of a father, a literary achievement greater than a Nobel Prize.

The President of Magical Thinking

From Michael Chabon's open letter to "our fellow Jews, in the United States, in Israel, and around the world."

The President has no filter, no self-control, you have told yourself. If he were an anti-Semite — a Nazi sympathizer, a friend of the Jew-hating Klan — we would know about it, by now. By now, he would surely have told us.

Yesterday, in a long and ragged off-the-cuff address to the press corps, President Trump told us.

Chabon lists a number of alibis Jews have created for Donald Trump--in effect, speaking for Trump, or rather around him, in order to create their own president. Every Trump supported I've ever talked to has done something very similar to what Chabon describes.  It has seemed to me that support for Donald Trump necessitates some form of magical thinking that some sort of different Trump will emerge when he's placed in the context of government. "He's not really X; he is really (or will become) Y."  Charlottesville revealed the possibility that only one group will ever see their magical thinking become real: the alt-right, the rag-tag, inchoate band of outsiders who seem to reflect Trump inner core of Id-fueled resentments.

Chabon urges his fellow Jews to realize the magical thinking about Trump wasn't limited to the public/real self dichotomy people have assigned to Trump. An even more dangerous part of the magical thinking is the dynamic Martin Niemöller first pointed out in regard to Hitler. The malevolence can't be contained. Chabon writes, 

First he went after immigrants, the poor, Muslims, trans people and people of color, and you did nothing. You contributed to his campaign, you voted for him. You accepted positions on his staff and his councils. You entered into negotiations, cut deals, made contracts with him and his government.

Now he’s coming after you.

At this moment Chabon is speaking specifically to Steven Mnuchin, Gary Cohn, Sheldon Adelson and others who have offered material support to Trump.  One could add, of course, a long list of Republicans of all stripes to this list. Despite the "open" letter, Chabon is using insider language to appeal to insiders. Toward the end of his letter Chabon switches from address a public who speaks to a demand to a small group of people who can act. Mnuchin and Cohn should resign. Adelson should stop donating money. The rest of us trapped in language, excluded from the sphere of political action, must be content with the same magical thinking that got Trump elected in the first place. Responsible men and women will enforce democratic norms to forge a reasonable Trump and contain the malevolence. 

The scariest thing is this may be our best chance.

The Literature of Traumas to Come: The Novel in the Age of Trump

 

In the days leading up to the election last November, many people vowed if Donald Trump was elected they would emigrate to some genial and inconsequential place, Toronto or a Canada of the imagination, as if all they had to endure were toxic policies until our electoral system somehow rights itself. When I arrived at work on November 8th, the day after the presidential election, my boss greeted me, "Welcome to the first day in Trumpland!" I thought she was being ironic, but she wasn't. Not only had she enthusiastically voted for Trump, but so had several other of my co-workers. I was completely shocked. This is Chicago, I thought. The globalized economy provides our livelihoods. Sure, last summer I heard people I considered friends talk about how Clinton was just as bad as Trump, but once we learned the restless little hands of our future president liked to plunge themselves into women's private parts, I though the equivalency argument was put to rest. No one liked Clinton, but Trump would besmirch the office of the presidency. Agreed?

 

To this day I walk around my workplace and wonder, did that software developer vote for Trump? Is that executive still looking forward to a Trump presidency? Is that customer service person reading Brietbart News while waiting for the next call? Am I the only person who voted for Hillary Clinton? 

 

Actually, over 80% of voters in my town voted for her and she carried Illinois easily, so no, I'm not alone. Yet I have a new mindset, one similar to that Aleksandar Hemon first experienced while wandering the streets of Sarajevo in his youth. War had broken out in neighboring Croatia, but it seemed impossible for it to reach Sarajevo. Nevertheless, Hemon couldn't help spotting good places for a sniper to go to work. Hemon now recognizes those imaginings as the first stirrings of a "war mind" preparing itself for the trauma to come. 

 

The pre-war mind was still busy convincing itself that war is, must be, avoidable, because it simply didn't make sense — who would want war? I took my involuntary thoughts to be symptoms of a minor mental breakdown, and exerted myself to dismiss them [. . .] 

 

People asked me if I had known the war was coming — I did, I'd say, I just didn't know I did, because my mind refused to accept the possibility that the only life and reality I had known could be so easily annihilated. I perceived and received information but could not process it and convert it into knowledge, because the mind could not accept the unimaginable, because I had no access to an alternative ontology.

For the Age of Trump Hemon wants a "split-mind literature" in which the deer hunters come looking for you. Remember when you first saw a plane slam into the World Trade Center? There should be a literature of that kind of trauma, the story of staring at 757's flying overhead and feeling uneasy. Trauma renders everything uncanny, but Hemon points out "the upside is that living with and in a mind where nothing appears normal or stable is the best antidote to normalization." When you're comfortable in your house, snug against your neighbors, imagination functions to smooth over the sharp edges that keep popping up. In this context conventional literature, as an art of the imagination, stamps the quotidian real as fixed, inevitable, as the normality we all crave. Trauma, however, interrupts the smooth flow of language and thwarts easy reconciliation with immediate circumstances. In the years to come literature should teach us to be alert to how our worst fears are, in fact, coming to pass. Then we can see a moment from the past as a harbinger of a future we have troubling imagining, such as a call from Hemon's mother from Sarajevo during the siege of 1992. "They're already shooting less than yesterday," she assured him.

Red Counties, Blue Counties, and the Pastoral Idyll

We've all seen the 2016 election results maps: isolated spots of blue surrounded by vast fields of red. If the blue spots look even smaller this year, it's because they are. Look at Illinois, for example. My home state went 55% for Hillary Clinton, yet her support is clustered in the Chicago metropolitan area, Peoria, the suburbs of St. Louis, the Quad Cities, and the college towns of Champaign-Urbana and Carbondale. The closer to a city center or a college classroom, the more likely voters will choose Democrats. Most of the state, though, is thoroughly red. Not coincidentally, most of the state is countryside. Yet these people voted for Donald Trump, a billionaire Manhattanite. How did that happen? 

One way to read the electoral map is through the history of the ancient clash between city and country. In The Country and the City Raymond Williams traces its origins to the earliest moments of the modern age, 16th-century England. At that time mercantile interests started working with rural landlords to fence off the open farmland and convert it to pastureland for sheep, initiating a process of rural depopulation that culminated in the industrial revolution of the 19th century. Thousands of farmers lost their way of life, but a new literary form, the pastoral idyll, was born. For Williams, the idyll obscured the social and economic changes threatening the yeoman farmers' way of life. 

Defense of a “vanishing countryside”—“the open air,” “the life of the fields”—can become deeply confused with that defense of the old rural order which is in any case being expressed by the landlords, the rentiers, and their literary sympathizers. A physical hatred of the noise and rush of the city can be converted . . . to a powerful but acrid vision of the metropolis reclaimed by the swamp and the reappearance of a woodland feudal society.

The conflict between the country and the city changed considerably over the next three centuries, with literary genres appearing to track the changes. The Romantic "counter-pastoral" of Goldsmith, Wordsworth, and Coleridge recognized the loneliness and isolation of country life. Urban life was the domain of the novel. Loneliness was a prominent theme here, too, in the work  of Dickens, Hardy, Wells and Joyce, but it was a loneliness within diversity and competition rather than rural decay. 

From the city the countryside was sometimes a changeless Eden, sometimes a realm of ignorance and despair.  For farmers the city also had a dual face. It was the place in which men could find new brides--or fall into traps laid by prostitutes. Merchants bought their livestock and crops, and sometimes cheated them. Bankers loaned them money and lawyers took away their farms. The city was alluring and mysterious realm where an honest, ordinary man (or, occasionally, a woman) almost inevitably came to ruin. 

People in the urban blue patches in the Illinois map want gun control and Obamacare. Voters in the college town blue patches care about climate change and genderless bathrooms. For them, intractable bigotries and inexplicable fears of terrorist attacks lurk behind shuttered main streets and isolated farmhouses. What urbanite doesn't get a little uneasy stopping for gas in a small country town? Conversely, gun control makes little sense in the fields and woods of the red lands. A good country doctor is vastly preferable to the bureaucracy of Obamacare. Climate change is an abstract threat to people who live on far-away coasts.

The red counties voted for a man from the biggest city in the country because he knows how it's rigged against decent, ordinary people, and always has been.

Mr. Analog Wins the Nobel Prize for Literature

In June 1970 Bob Dylan released Self-Portrait, a double album of original songs and covers. Dylan's mystique was then at its peak. He'd transformed American popular music in a sequence of popular and acclaimed albums, from Bob Dylan (1062) to Blonde on Blonde (1966). In 1966 he was injured in a motorcycle accident, a totally Dylanesque way to get hurt. Upon recovery he headed to Nashville to soak up another form of American music, documented in Nashville Skyline (1969). Self-Portrait promised to sum up his career so far and to point to his future direction. Then one of rock's preeminent critics, Greil Marcus, listened closely to the album and asked, "What is this shit?"

Dylan has been riding a wobbly motorcycle ever since. After his great run between 1962 and 1966, Dylan has produced music of wildly uneven quality. Read the appreciations of his music and you'll see how tilted they are toward his early work. Throughout the years, however, one constant has been the figure of Dylan himself: secretive, unpredictable, and, above all, Beatnik cool. In a career of puzzling moves, he's never strayed far from his original project, which was taking the acoustic, performative tradition of American music and adding literature.

Now he's won the Nobel Prize for literature. The award isn't totally a surprise; his name has been bandied about as a possible Nobel laureate for years. I get the sense that the Nobel committee made the decision to award him a prize while drinking in the same bar in which they chose Dario Fo in 1997. One of the objections to Dylan's award is that song lyrics aren't literature. Somewhere in the tweet storm this morning someone said it's as if Gordon Ramsey won the Nobel Prize for chemistry. This is a valid objection, if a flimsy one. Genre problems aside, one has to grant Dylan's Nobel is a recognition of the performative aspects of literature. 

The other argument in Dylan's favor is that he's remained a popular poet while somehow never pandering to his audience. This may be true, but Dylan's moment was a brief one--everything that happened before his crackup in 1966. 

I'm a Dylan fan, but this is an ill conceived nostalgia award wrenched from the rancid prostates of senile, gibbering hippies.

— Irvine Welsh (@IrvineWelsh) October 13, 2016

Welsh's characteristic hyperbole overstates the role of nostalgia in Dylan's award, but Welsh raises a good question: if Bob Dylan had started recording in 1972 rather than 1962, would he have been awarded a Nobel today? His music is really of a moment that has passed. His work isn't timeless, only his sources. 

His primary claim to contemporary relevance is that he's an analog guy in a digital age.  He's the Moleskine of American musicians. He has an archive of notebook writings. Uncountable bootleg tapes of his music circulate among aficionados. His songbook ranges from the gramophone to the Harmon Kardon turntable. Even his wardrobe is from the vinyl era. One wonders if unconsciously the Nobel Prize committee is protesting digitized culture and the drowning of literature in the data stream. Last year they recognized Svetlana Alexievich, who also infused orality with literature. The literature prize has long been known as a vehicle for making points about the state of writing in the world.  Why else would they choose an old Symbolist with a raspy twang?

The Rooting Hog King (or President)

Richard [III], as Shakespeare conceived him, was inwardly tormented by insecurity and rage, the consequences of a miserable, unloved childhood and a twisted spine that made people recoil at the sight of him. Haunted by self-loathing and a sense of his own ugliness — he is repeatedly likened to a boar or rooting hog — he found refuge in a feeling of entitlement, blustering overconfidence, misogyny and a merciless penchant for bullying.

From this psychopathology, the play suggests, emerged the character’s weird, obsessive determination to reach a goal that looked impossibly far off, a position for which he had no reasonable expectation, no proper qualification and absolutely no aptitude.

via www.nytimes.com

The conventional wisdom says Donald Trump is motivated by a pathological narcissism. By drawing a comparison to Shakespeare's Richard III, Stephen Greenblatt opens up a different way of seeing Trump, one that seems germane after the Access Hollywood tape revelations. The live mic caught Trump trying to impress an insignificant toady in the celebrity-fawning industry. Somewhere deep inside Trump there's a "bunchback'd toad," the "loathed issue of thy father's loins." Could this soliloquy be lurking inside?

There is no creature loves me,

And if I die no soul will pity me.

And wherefore should they, since that I myself

Find in myself no pity to myself?

 

What Karl Ove Knausgaard Learned from Walter Benjamin

In a nice acceptance speech for the Welt Literaturpreis, Karl Ove Knausgaard discusses what he learned from Walter Benjamin about the difference between literature and media. 

Knausgaard says contemporary culture is flooded with images that we can see anywhere at any time. Everything  is the same in the image stream. We view images as if they were in a movie. They distract us from the boredom of our everyday lives. But every once in a while an image appears that interrupts the image stream. For Knausgaard it was the image of  the dead Syrian boy washed up on a beach in Bodrum, Turkey.  Knausgaard realized the boy

was dead, and all of a sudden I understood what death meant. All of a sudden, I understood that the people coming across the sea were not people in the plural, but in the singular. This I understood because I myself have children. I saw their deaths in his death. The image thereby penetrated my defenses, broke through the murmur and appeared to me as what it was: an image of reality. The boy was real, and his death was a real death.

Novels, Knausgaard continues, break down the distance between the unreal many and the real one in encounter between reader and author. The novel allows the reader to see a character without the constraints of the social under which we encounter actual people. We see a person specifically, unlike in the media, which presents people as general and abstract. The standardized language of media serves to further protect us from the real. 

 

At this point Knausgaard  introduces Walter Benjamin, who he read as a student. Knausgaard doesn't specify which texts, though. What he picked up from Benjamin is purely idiosyncratic, but worth considering anyway. Benjamin taught him that a whole society can be seen a fragment, that "even the smallest fragment of a society is always an expression of that society’s culture, of its dreams and of the conceptions it holds." From there Knausgaard makes the improbable jump to Hitler imagined as an individual, as a real person. Hitler, Knausgaard urges us to realize, was was part of the same society and spoke the same language as Benjamin. By focusing on particulars, Benjamin maintains the path to the real, however disturbing that place might be.

Ukrainian Literature's Executed Renaissance

Every national literature is always in some form of crisis, but the crisis of Ukrainian literature is a special case.

Official Ukrainian literature is doing just fine. The state-supported National Writer's Union of Ukraine (know by its Ukrainian acronym NSPU) makes sure there are plenty of literary awards, which, the NSPU has figured out, is all you really need to support a literature. Readers--books even--are purely optional when you're a member of a government-supported writers' organization. 

But for Ukrainian writers who actually write for real readers the situation has been dire for a long time. The first problem is language. Ukrainian was once a stand-alone language, but since Soviet times it's been relegated to a dialect of Russian. "Little Russian" is its nickname. To claim anything--a word, a poem--as uniquely Ukrainian is to court charges of nationalism, a touchy subject in the Soviet Union and the regions claimed by separatists fighting their farcical war against the Kiev government.

The second problem is the long-extinct Ukrainian Modernism. Natalka Sniadanko says just as Ukrainian artists had developed their own type of Modernism, in the 1920s the Soviets arrived and swept it away. The preferred method was shooting artists. Cut off from European Modernism for nearly a century, Ukrainian literature has been in a steady retreat. "Ukrainian literature – or Ukrainian culture more broadly – employs the word 'last' quite often," Sniadanko writes, "last territory, last bastion, the last issue of a magazine, the last books of a bankrupt publisher, the last Ukrainian-speaking readers, writers, translators."

Perhaps because the official Ukrainian literature is so vapid and craven, when somebody manages to produce a work of serious literature, it finds a ready audience. Particularly keen on Ukrainian literature are soldiers fighting in the east. Yet, as popular as these books are, Sniadanko suggests, they're really just "the last bastion" of what Ukrainian literary critics call "the Executed Renaissance." The Soviets put a bullet in the Modernist renaissance of the 1920s, and the Russians are still firing bullets at it.