I just finished my AP English Language
& Composition test and my brain is falling to pieces, so here goes: a
mildly comprehensive list of the books I'll be reading this summer. Recently, I saw an
article in which writers discussed the books that crushed their young souls, a
prospect that amused me for two reasons-- first, in that I can sympathize, and
second, in that it erroneously assumes writers have souls. While I
doubt this is true in some or even most cases, the books that will be crushing
my soul this summer are enumerated below, in no particular order. Remember Woolf? "Often... I begin counting up; what I've read
and what I've haven't read."
-The Divine Comedy -Nightwood -Confessions of an English Opium Eater -The Waves -Lectures on Literature -Speak, Memory -Pale Fire -Ada, or Ardor -The Master and Margarita -The Brothers Karamazov -Crime and Punishment -Notes from the Underground -War and Peace -Anna Karenina -The Changeling -Dr Faustus -The White Devil -Lear -Hamlet -Bleak House -The Trial -Liaisons Dangereuses -Moby Dick -Suttree -Consider the Lobster -Infinite Jest -Walden -V -Gravity's Rainbow
-Finnegans Wake -A Reader's Guide to Finnegans Wake -Joyce's Book of the Dark -Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable
-Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady -Beloved
"Everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious." - Rainer Maria Rilke
I know I often complain about being busy, but lately-- with AP tests, scholarship essays-- I'm now so busy that I have no sleep or rest for a moment, no time to even read-- though I can't quite say that. I do read, in fragments and snatches; when I do, I read Rilke.
Rilke is one of the greatest German-language poets, and inivetably the one I turn to in times of crisis. I recently had to buy a new book of his collected poems, as the binding of my old copy had split so many times that several pages had fallen out, lost forever. I re-ead the Duino Elegies, though I know a few by heart. I re-read "Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes," and wonderingly wondered if it's possibly the most perfect poem ever written. I read literary theory, reveled in written conversation of Rike's life and work, the peculiar turns of genius. And, of all the fascinating minutae in his life, it's a certain aspect of his relationship with Rodin that has left the largest impression on me, especially now-- his adoration of hard work, of doing that which seems unbearable.
What Rilke admired in Rodin, more than anything else, was his work ethic-- he made things with his hands, descended with apparent effortlessness into "great, inner solitude" and contructed what he saw there. Already fascinated by the themes he encountered on his trip to Russia-- emptiness, Nietsche's hyperborean wastes-- Rilke began to delve into the depths of the literary vision he would perfect in the Duino Elegies-- "For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are barely able to endure/ and we are awed so because it serenely disdains to annhiliate us. Every angel is terrible."
Rilke, with his repetitive imagery-- terrible angels, roses, "cosmic space"-- is less monotonous than hypnotic, mesmerizing-- a soft, even voice murmuring, murmuring, almost too low to hear. Solitude and infinity and the horrible burden of one's individual soul-- there is some essential truth to be found, he tells us, but it will never be realized because it exists outside of the self, apart from it. The panther paces its cage, explosion of an almost-Joycean epiphany-- "an image enters in/ rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles/ plunges into the heart and is gone." At the center is nothing, a great, positive abscense, a perfect void. Tensed, it watches and waits.
A cold comfort, yes. The purpose of life, Rilke wrote, is to be defeated by greater and greater things-- defeated? I suppose I'll wait and see.
Rustle of pages, I wake up at night with the book on my night table, a bible. God-making. "For here there is no place/ that does not see you. You must change your life."
Possibly, this whole post was partially
inspired by my wordless fury about the
the The Bell Jar's new cover
art-- yes, a woman applying lipstick.
How's that for feminism, America?
Yesterday, I read Atonement, by Ian McEwan. Although I admit it's not the sort of book I usually read, I attmepted to begin it with an open mind, as it was highly recommended by a friend.
A book hasn't made me this angry in a long, long time.
However, as I hate ranting over the internet, I'll attempt to remain civilized. This is going to be difficult, I'll admit. Below, I'll include my main grievances-- not against Ian McEwan in particular, but against all authors (think Lev Grossman, Stieg Larsson &c.) who have committed this particular crime-- in a numbered list,in hopes that it will lend me an air of impartiality.
First, I feel the need to establish that books about rape are important. This is not an opinion, but a statement of fact. One in four women are victims of an attempted or completed sexual assault, and a scarce 5% of rapists are ever convicted. Clearly, a dialogue needs to be established about rape culture, about sexual violence, about the manner in which we treat rape victims. Though I admit I don't much enjoy reading about said issues, I think it absolutely crucial that books address them. Some books do so very well, with both sympathy and with an understanding of the inherent brutality involved. Others, not so much. Can you guess which sort I'll be discussing today?
Secondly, narratives-- whether fictional or non-fictional--provide perhaps on of the best medium to discuss rape. I could list countless statistics about rape's prevalence and effects, but nothing would convince readers of the horrors involved like testimonies from families and victims. So yes, write about rape. Talk about rape. Establish a dialogue about rape. Do it well enough, and perhaps the world will finally listen.
Inspired by the new Bell Jar cover,
annoyed readers have been
creating their own modern
interpretations of various classics.
But do not, ever, EVER, use rape as an gratuitous, throwaway plot device. Do not fetishize it. Do not construct a minor character for the sole purpose of being raped. Do not write a rape scene simply to lend ethos to your female characters-- because that's the absolute worst thing that can happen to a woman, right? Because a woman substantiates a combination of parts to be violated?
I'm sorry, I said I wouldn't rant. Beginning again. In McEwan's Atonement, a female character--or rather, a caricature of a female character-- is introduced simply, given a name and a few defining attributes. In the most cursory of sketches, McEwan informs his readers that she is manipulative, sexually precocious and attention-seeking, generally unpleasant to all familiar with her. She is then raped, so that the book's central characters-- a pair of lovers, of course-- can be tragically separated.
Here's another, quite the parody of the sort
of cover art meant to appeal to a female
audience.
Immediately afterward, she is carted offscreen like a used stage prop, not appearing again until the book's last few pages. She existed solely to be raped, and had no additional narrative purpose.
When feminists throw around the phrase "rape culture"-- an ubiquitous term, almost a buzz-word, long stripped of meaning by overuse-- they are often referring to rap songs or tabloids or beauty pageants, and not best-selling, award-winning novels.
A draft of "Circe." I can understand why, in theory at
least, Joyce's work may have proved
a challenge to copy-edit.
As reader(s) of this blog will know, I
recently bought a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses—a reproduction of the 1922
copy, to be exact. Riddled with dramatic errors in punctuation and spelling, this
edition nonetheless seems nearest to Joyce’s original vision, freed of the flaws
and bowdlerized “corrections” later versions imposed. It’s almost 1000 pages
long, contains several hundred pages of annotations, and has monstrously small
type—all superficial complaints, I’m aware, though I’ve never understood why
publishing houses are able to produce such poorly made editions of so-called “modern
classics”– possibly because the only people who read them are broke students. I have a much, much more to say about
Ulysses. Possibly, this blog might even begin alternating between
Proust-related posts and Joyce-related posts, at least until I’m able to
purchase the next three volumes of À la rechere du temps perdu. However, I'll reserve my opinions on Ulysses until a later date, when I’m able to offer the book the sort of
scrutiny it deserves. As of yet, I’ve only read up through the third episode, although
I have read other bits out of order—Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, the Oxen and the
Sun, &c. I was hoping to finish the rest on
vacation—there’s a lovely BBC broadcast, released last year, which would have enabled me to simutaneously endulge my growing obsession and avoid interacting with my family during an eight hour long car ride. Here's a short clip, with Andrew Scott as Stephen Dedalus:
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find the full broadcast online. By the time this post is uploaded, I'll be on my way to the Smoky Mountains, constantly paging through Ulysses, re-reading it, endeavoring to behave as though relatives' petty interruptions don't feel like intentionally malicious attacks.
"This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.” -Franz Kafka (Diaries of Franz Kafka)
I know it's a bit untoward of me to start a Proust-related blog post with a Kafka quote-- my slipshod, informal literary education again, tangling genres and epochs irreparably in my head-- but I couldn't help it. In his journals, Kafka is recognizably the author of such logical works as The Castle and The Trial, but also a total stranger, prone to fits of numbness and misanthropy, growing steadily more desperate by the hour. Weltschmerz is the word for it, I think-- not just "world-pain," but a sort of homesickness, a longing for some unattainable ideal. Proust describes this feeling often, as does Woolf-- "One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with ones words."
A sinister proposal, considering her eventual demise. I was searching for her diaries recently at my local chain bookstore, and -- although I couldn't find them-- I did locate no less than six biographies of Princess Diana, four volumes on zombie apocalypse survival strategies, and an incalculable number of Fifty Shades of Gray spin-offs. Not that there's anything wrong those sorts of books, of course, not that I have any right to judge their merits. Nevertheless, some small portion of my bibliophilic heart broke to see the few slim volumes Ms. Woolf had on the shelf-- an aging copy of Orlando, a single Mrs. Dalloway erroneously jammed between two romance novels, a few volumes of To the Lighthouse thrown in with gratuitous carelessness. Much aggrieved, I finally broke down and bought Ulysses. More on that later. Afterwards, I went home, brewed myself some strong tea, and started doing research on the subject of literacy levels and the amount of people who still genuinely read for pleasure, who are capable of reading for pleasure. The results, summarized here, are more than a little depressing:
According to the US Department of Education, 1 in 7 adults-- 32 million people-- are illiterate
43% of Americans polled by the National Endowment for the Arts in 2004 hadn’t read a book all year
33% of students tested have reading comprehension abilities so low as to render them unable to understand material printed in an average newspaper.
I suppose the question is-- what now?What does post-modernism even amount to, at this point? No one to listen. A slog, a stagnation. Nearly a century later, and we're still stuck doing Joyce imitations-- O why? Listening to the teenage proto-babble that surrounds me all day, every day, I often find myself wondering what linguistic tricks Joyce could have payed on our modern vernacular-- el-oh-el, oh-em-gee, hahaha, likeisthislegit, like, reeeally? Then I inevitably realize that it's highly unlikely that my generation will have a Joyce, a Proust, a Woolf. Hyperreal and hyperactive, we worship quick fixes, data-data-data, and who cares about the future, who cares about anything, ever? The Walking Dead is on. A funny cat video is waiting. "Il faut etre absolutment moderne." Hard for me to chatter on about text as an artistic medium when we lack the ability to articulate even our simplest thoughts, when we can scarcely speak. Weltschmerz. Listen, I don't know why I started talking about this, and I don't why I expect anyone to listen to me besides-- I'm too young, too sentimental, too serious to ever really be taken seriously. Rilke supposed writing to substantiate a communion between nature and the self, but his definition seems a bit too simplistic for me, a bit too limited-- I would like to think that some sort of audience must exist, that all words are formulated for the purpose of communication, if even a liminal, subconscious kind. Now, the audience is dwindling, and writers are forced to ask themselves a few crucial questions-- who exists to communicate with, if there is no one left to listen, no one left to care? What worth have words addressed to the void?
Also known as the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, this loathsome piece of legislation represents a California Congressman's efforts to prevent Disney's miserable mouse from falling into public domain. Since its ratification, all works published before 1923 have become protected under US Copyright Law, and cannot be re-produced in new editions or translations.
C. K. Scott Moncrieff,
looking boyish and faintly
contemtuous.
This is going to be a problem.
There exist, of course, older translations of Proust, though they are generally acknowledged to be inferior to the more recently published ones-- which are not by any means modernized or simplified, but instead truer to the originals, divested of the previous english versons' bastardized, purple prose.
And so, it appears that I have several options, all of them more or less distasteful:
A. Reading the 1992 C. K. Scott Moncrieff editions-
Whenever I read a piece originally writtten in another language, I'm unusually scrupulous about finding the best or most correct translation, as I've had some truly horrific experiences in this area(for instance, below I link to a site that-- although offering free English translations of Rimbaud's poetry-- once translated his "shrinking violet" to a "smaller purple"). C. K. Scott Moncrieff's Proust reads very differently from the French, changing a more literal “the entrance to the Underworld” to "the jaws of hell," "oblivion," to "the waters of Lethe," and a simple "said" to "remarked," "murmured," "assured," and so on.
I'm not sure that I could bear seeing my beloved Proust so distorted, robbed of his clear-eyed wit. Below is are two translations of a line from the book's most famous scene (courtesy of readingproust.com):
Lydia Davis (Penguin edition)-
"It had immediately made the vicissitudes of life unimportant to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory, acting in the same way that love acts, by filling me with a precious essence: or rather this essence was not in me, it was me."
C. K. Scott Moncrieff-
"And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its
disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory--this new sensation having had on me
the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this
essence was not in me, it was myself."
See what I mean?
B. Waiting until 2017-
Maybe I'm showing my age, but three years seems a very, very long time. What will I be doing in three years? Certainly not waiting to finish A la recherhe du temps perdu.
C. Violating my personal Amazon boycott-
I was going to elaborate on this, but I don't think it really necessary. Basically, Amazon is on its way to definitively ruining the publishing industry, which is already about as ruined as it can get while still functioning (for more information on this, do a bit of research on the Amazon-Macmillian fiasco a few years back. It was nightmarish, I promise you.) Regardless, if I want to read the modern versions of the last volumes of À la recherche du temps perdu, I'll have to purchase them over Amazon UK, or else have a British bookstore ship them over the pond for $40 each. And, while I largely stand by my principles, I'm nothing if not thrifty.
D. Joining the cult of Proust-
Despite the fact that I have not yet read
Ulysses, I sort of want this t-shirt. It would
be absurdly amusing to wear it around
election day, and see how confused
bystanders react.
Given the numerous authors I'm obsessed with, I have a certain amount of familiarity with literary cults. T. S. Eliot fans, for instance, have some bizarrely competitive obsession with memorizing his poetry. Rimbaud fans assume that his "Letter of the Seer" is the prescription for following in the footsteps of the original infant terrible(and so pursue, with varying levels of success "a boundless, immense and systmatized derangement of the senses"). Ulysses fans-- well, they already have Bloomsday, which isn't really fair. Why isn't there a Marcel Day?
Pehaps because-- instead of indulging in stereotypical Celtic revelry-- Proust fans generally sit down and write extremely long books about him, some of which are biographies. The very best-- and the longest to date-- is Jean-Yves Tadie's Proust: A life, weighing in at a truly massive 1052 pages and almost five pounds. I need, need, need to read it.
On the other hand, I'm not really sure I have the time to sit down and read a thousand-page biography, however much I might want to. Usually, when adding another activity to my permenantly frenetic schedule, I remain fairly blase-- and sure, why not? I can always sleep when I'm dead, and I hardly sleep regardless. However, I've recently become so busy that I don't have a minute to spare, much less several hours.
Actually, that's not quite true-- I took the SAT this weekend, and I spent the rest of the afternoon-- four hours and one minute, to be precise-- doing nothing, a novel esperience. I know it was exactly four hours and one minute because I listened to this song 15 times:
Afterwards, I felt ridiculously guilty-- four hours wasted? How am I ever going to compete with all the other teenagers who spent those four hours in more productive ways, like getting perfect scores on their standardized tests and running every high school club and feeding the homeless and saving impoverished countries in Africa? How?
I'm going to end this post now, as it will otherwise devolve into a near-hysterical rant about how College Board-- like its even eviller twin, Disney-- is brainwashing America's youth. And about how I'm the unfortunate poster child.
Given the fact that I obviously did not draw the comic above and cannot, for the life of me, find out who did, I'm somewhat worried about copyright laws-- but this is technically an educational blog, right? Regardless, I think that it excellently introduces today's topic: the intersection of the writer and the self in fiction-- or, as I'll focus on today, in the shady, labyrinthine realm of creative non-fiction.
Generally, I'm almost physically incapable of writing myself. This blog you've been reading? That's me impersonating a digressive, book-loving high school student, right down to the parenthetical asides, the chatty tone, the sense of humor. If you were to read my fiction, you would encounter a completely different voice, one that might sound a little closer to who I am, how I think-- but, even then, it's not quite right. There is no self, no "I." Which is, if I'm not mistaken, the reason they call it fiction.
However, I'm going to have to learn to write about myself, as myself, and quickly. The Norman Mailer High School and College Writing Awards, which previously had been open to fiction submissions, are now only allowing creative non-fiction submissions from high school students. What they mean by "creative non-fiction" is unclear, but I'm assuming it will involve a certain amount of autobiographical, first-person narration.
And that means I'm going to have to open the nasty Pandora's box of the personal*, the very subject matter that, as an aspiring fiction-writer, I am most desperate to avoid. In the face of such hardship, as per usual, I've been looking to my personal literary idols for answers.
Which is relevant to this blog, as À la recherche du temps perdu is somewhat auto-biographical. While Proust refuses to name the narrator for the majority of the book, he does so in the fifth volume, with flourish-- and (you guessed it), like the author, the enigmatic "I" of the novel is also named Marcel. Other characters find their origins in the lives of real people, as well--the Duchesse de Guermantes is largely modeled after the Comtesse de Greffulhe, and M. de Charlus-- a sort of Anthony Blanche-esque figure-- is based off the Comte de Montesquiou, just as Blanche was based off Acton*. This is creative non-fiction at its most abstract, most obscure: life distilled, conveyed in lucid, cast-off fragments, recognizable only through the most skewed of lenses. And Proust's prose, despite the age of his narrator, remains decidedly mature, thoughtful, adult-- an adult reflecting on his childhood, tossing on the edge of sleep, mind redolent with heady, long-ago perfumes.
For some reason, I can't picture Joyce without the lovely
moustache-and-eye-patch look. This, I suppose, is simply
how his writing sounds: so smug, so self-important,
so generally piratical.
At the very opposite end of the spectrum, however, is another supposedly semi-autobiographical book I've been reading: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, one of Joyce's stream-of-consciousness masterpieces. While I generally adore modernism, I do have a slightly trickier relationship with Joyce, as-- though A Portrait and Dubliners were both fairly easy reads-- the bits of Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake I've read were, to say the least, a tad incomprehensible. "But Noodynaady's actual ingrate tootle is of come into the garner mauve and thy nice are stores of morning and buy me a bunch of iodines..."-- what? I usually try to avoid reading literary criticism, as I feel it's sort of an insult to my intelligence**, but I'm not quite sure I'd be able to get through these books on my own.
But then, I'll get to a certain passage that makes me stop, breathless. Think of the end of The Dead: "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” Usually, I'm a coherent annotate-er, but all that I was capable of writing next to that line were a couple of emphatic exclamation marks.
Oh, Twain. Even if he wanted to do unspeakable things to
Austen's corpse, at least he loved cats.
But, while I'm convinced during these moments that he was an absolute genius (Fitzgerald said he admired Joyce so much that he'd jump out of a window to prove it, and I understand the sentiment completely), I feel like throttling him the rest of the time, or-- as Twain said of Austen-- digging him up and beating him over the head with his own shin bone.
Whether or not any gravedigging is going to occur, it can't be denied that certain parts of the book are reminiscent of Joyce's life. Even so, they're not entirely helpful to me at the moment, given the fact that I would be wary of submitting anything so stylistically experimental to a contest. So, in sum, I should probably start reading more creative non-fiction, for a broader idea of what the genre is/was/can be. The only strictly non-fiction pieces I've read lately are In Cold Blood and Fear and Loathing, and I'm not sure they're going to help me in regards to writing anything I'd feel comfortable showing to teachers, acquaintances and/or small children.
However, I have been reading a lot of ridiculously brilliant writing of late (see Proust, Joyce, Nabakov, et al.) and I think that, if my writerly self-esteem isn't going to plummet irreparably, I ought to read something by an author who's not a genius, or even particularly good. Possibly Bret Easton Ellis, because -- although I'm usually not a fan****-- I'm just in that sort of mood.
As far as writerly suicides go, Chatterton's was
probably one of the most flagrantly romanticized.
Apparently, after the debut of Vigny's play on the topic,
one could hear "solitary gunshots" echoing through Paris.
* I'm not saying that, for a writer, personal subject matter is always dark and dreary, but I find it often is. I used to abhor the cliche of the depressed, pill-popping novelist, until I read about a recent Swedish study. Apparently, writers are 50% more likely to kill themselves than other people, and are vastly more likely to have bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, &c. Another study linked high levels of creativity to a lack of dopamine receptors-- yep, the same dopamine receptors that exist at lower levels in the brains of schizophrenics. Connection? I'm not sure, but I do have some concern for my future mental health.
** Apparently, that part of Brideshead Revisited in which Blanche recites The Waste Land through a megaphone actually happened. Why, why, why doesn't anyone I know do things like this?
*** I'm beginning to wonder if this will prove to be a serious problem when I go to college. Even if my autodidactic, haphazard sort of literary education has given me a fresh perspective, I'm not sure it will necessarily be a correct one.
**** Some of his comments about women make me furious. I realize that this is the same guy who wrote American Psycho, that he's trying to shock me, but he still manages to push all of my angry-feminist buttons.
I just finished my AP English Language
& Composition test and my brain is falling to pieces, so here goes: a
mildly comprehensive list of the books I'll be reading this summer. Recently, I saw an
article in which writers discussed the books that crushed their young souls, a
prospect that amused me for two reasons-- first, in that I can sympathize, and
second, in that it erroneously assumes writers have souls. While I
doubt this is true in some or even most cases, the books that will be crushing
my soul this summer are enumerated below, in no particular order. Remember Woolf? "Often... I begin counting up; what I've read
and what I've haven't read."
-Notes from the Underground 
-The Trial 
