Get Over It

Lately I've been re-reading some of Lorrie Moore's stories, from both Self-Help and Birds of America, especially Self-Help. I'd been meaning to do so even before learning that she had a new novel out (A Gate at the Stairs), but certainly its appearance moved the stories a little higher on my pile. Then I read this post from Paul Dorell at flyover about the novel and its reception. The post has more to do with Moore's depiction of the American Midwest ("flyover country") in the book, but I'm more interested here in the short comment thread that followed. One reader referred to an allegedly "strong undercurrent of Misandry in her stories", which was supposedly exemplary of the "male-bashing cant [that] became a kind of popular de rigueur" in recent decades. I replied that "no such undercurrent exists". Dorell took the reader's side, saying that in Moore's work "the men are often implicitly responsible for the relative unhappiness of the women" and "tend to be ciphers whose main significance is their bringing of grief to the women", and that Moore has "virtually nothing to say about how [a functional adult relationship between a man and a woman] is possible or worthwhile".

Well, two things occurred to me when I read these words. First, the characterization bore little resemblance to my memory of Moore's stories. Therefore, I thought to myself, I will read them again. Second, and much more important, who fucking cares? That is, since when is it Lorrie Moore's responsibility to write about "functional adult relationships"? More to the point, it is not her job, nor any other woman's job, to make men feel better about themselves, nor is it the writer's job to objectively depict all sides of every one's reality, as if that were even possible. But, for many women--I'd go so far as to say most--it is in fact men who are primarily responsible for bringing grief and misery into their lives. Writing from such a perspective--the perspective of a woman's actual experience--is not automatically "anti-male" or what-the-fuck-ever.

Having now read many of the stories again, I am not in the least surprised to find absolutely nothing to support the kind of hyper-sensitive reading I am responding to. Naturally, I needn't have bothered. For I returned to flyover, looking for the link provided above, and I see Dorell's final comment, responding to me. Apparently Lorrie Moore's recent stories are "more male-neutral" (thank God for that!) but "some of her earliest writing seems to seethe with the the sort [of] anti-male feminism that was the hallmark of her generation of women who are now in their early fifties to mid-sixties". Thankfully, he says, we are now in a "post-feminist world". Golly.

No. It takes a certain kind of man to make such a remark. Basically, if you're capable of making a blanket statement about "anti-male feminism" then you have been missing the point on a massive scale for years. Frankly, men in general are lucky that most feminists are nothing like "anti-male". They'd certainly deserve it if they were. Look, men are in no position to criticize women on this score. It doesn't mean that every woman is always right or that every man is always wrong, but the experience of women means something. It matters! If the preponderance of women report that things are a certain way, then it would behoove men to fucking listen. And when it comes to fiction? Though I don't think Lorrie Moore's stories can in any way be characterized as "anti-man", if it so happened that they could be, my position is that men need to get over it.

The writer's true problem: Everything Passes

Over the Summer I was asked to contribute to a symposium on Gabriel Josipovici's novel Everything Passes and its relation to contemporary English-language literary fiction (a relation of distance). For various reasons the symposium never happened, so I'm posting my short essay below. It should be read with this context in mind. For another view, please see Stephen Mitchelmore's contribution at This Space.

How is Everything Passes different? It looks and feels almost like a poetry chapbook. It's very short--a mere 60 pages--and the writing is sparse; there is much repetition and lots of white space. Events are barely narrated, with specific details, images, sounds, repeated. A man standing at a window. Footsteps, snatches of conversation. What's going on? Slowly a narrative of sorts can be pieced together, but we can never be quite sure of it; it remains just around the corner (perhaps on the next page? but no). The writing is suggestive, not journalistic; the events are elusive, just briefly coming into focus. The repetition has the effect of slowing the reading, a necessary slowing-down, for it would be very easy to speed through this book, missing much.

Then, all of a sudden we're reading casual literary criticism about Rabelais. The text speeds up with the speaker's excitement in the topic. What's all this about? What does the noisy, ribald, bursting-at-the-seams Rabelais have to do with this quiet, restrained narrative? The man standing at the window is a writer and a critic, a teacher perhaps, a mentor certainly. His ideas are the sorts of ideas one would find in Josipovici's own criticism. It is this literary criticism, enjoyable and thrilling on its own terms, that I think is the key to this book. What is he saying?

--Rabelais, he says, is the first writer of the age of print. Just as Luther is the last writer of the manuscript age. Of course, he said, without print Luther would have remained a simple heretical monk. Print, he says, scooping up the froth in his cup, made Luther the power he became, but essentially he was a preacher, not a writer. He knew his audience and wrote for it. Rabelais, he says, sucking his spoon, understood what this new miracle of print meant for the writer. It meant you had gained the world and lost your audience. You no longer knew who was reading you or why. You no longer knew who you were writing for or even why you were writing. Rabelais, he says, raged at this and laughed at it and relished it, all at the same time.

He wants to "tell people about [Rabelais's] modernity. About what he means or should mean to all of us, now." He wants "to make our culture aware of what he sensed and how he responded to the crisis of his time, which is also the crisis of our time." He wants to "clear the ground for a genuine renewal of fiction writing in our day." Rabelais is also "the first author in history to find the idea of authority ridiculous." And yet, in the speaker's personal life, the glimpses we get are of one who insists on his own authority. This irony is perhaps the tragedy of his life; some of that which he insists on in art he cannot live. Though, consistent with his thesis, he is not forthcoming about what he himself needs or wants.

In Everything Passes, there is little "fine writing", though it is obvious that words have been chosen with care. What is the difference? What so often passes for literary fiction is very story-driven, even plot-driven, for all the periodic complaints from some about the alleged plotlessness of literary books. As such, the finely wrought sentences in such books end up being merely journalism, albeit journalism about fictional characters (or fictionalized people). The form of the novel is taken for granted (though different historical examples may be recombined as the author so chooses) as if the novel was simply there to be filled up with whatever story the author wants, as if this were a perfectly justified endeavor. In Everything Passes, the form is consistent with its content, with whatever it is there to say. The invocation of Rabelais (and, by extension, the lineage of writers including Cervantes and Sterne) is to a purpose. And since Everything Passes itself seems to look nothing like those rollicking books of the past, the connection must be much deeper. It has to do with what the writer can do, what the writer ought to do, now that he or she cannot know who will read. When he says that the writer "had gained the world and lost [his or her] audience"--this is not a facile statement implying simply that the audience is irrelevant (it does not refer to audience expectations, as built up by centuries of writers ignoring this problem), and that therefore anything goes, the writer can do whatever he or she wants. It means the writer no longer has any natural audience, though in theory anyone could be reading. And yet the need for the writer to be responsible remains. This is part of the writer's true problem. Everything Passes is both in part about this problem, and an example of one writer's solution to it.

Maintaining Masculinity

Speaking of baseball, as I was in passing below, I want to make a quick observation about sports fandom and the negative work it continues to do to reinforce accepted norms of masculinity and competition.

Around June this year I unexpectedly found myself obsessively following the Phillies again, really for the first time since they lost the World Series in 1993 (after which I had moved just far enough away from home so that I couldn't catch games on tv or radio). In part this meant spending way too much time on fan forums and message boards connected to the Philadelphia newspapers at Philly.com. As a result, I encountered the kind of sports-talk I'd always generally successfully avoided in the past, much of which is, of course, painfully sexist and otherwise retrograde. The most appalling in my view being the feminization of players who were struggling. The focus of this kind of talk was usually pitcher Cole Hamels.

In 2008, at the age of 24, Hamels was the MVP of both the National League Championship Series and the World Series. Much was made of his "Hollywood" good looks, his beautiful wife. He was on top of the world. Then this year he got off to a bad start, hurt his elbow, and never really settled into a decent groove. All season long there was speculation about his mental toughness, his maturity, his ability to not let mistakes, his or his teammates', rattle him, in sharp contrast to his apparently icy demeanor in 2008. Whereas last year he was the hero, this year it wasn't enough that he be merely the goat. On the boards he was now a "princess" or a "queen", a "prima donna". He was "pretty"; when things didn't go well, and he was unable to shake it off, he was a "pussy". Thus feminized in his struggles, it was only a short step to speculations on whether he might be gay, with the kind of mean-spirited certainty and graphic coarseness one encounters so often on the Internet. I probably don't need to spell out the kind of language used in such attacks. The sexism and misogyny and homophobia in these remarks is obvious and unfortunately not terribly surprising. But it is instructive. Thus we have reinforced for us that to be a woman is to be weak, to be unable or unwilling to handle pressure, to not be tough enough. If you are a man and are perceived to not be manly enough or to be otherwise failing in pressure situations, then you may as well be a woman and may quite possibly be gay, both of which are understood to be distinctly negative conditions, both unfortunate deviations from the masculine ideal. The logic is impeccable. The people making such remarks would no doubt claim it's all in good fun. It always is, isn't it? Not everyone says these things, of course, but no one objects or calls anyone else out. The relationship between this and the feminization of the enemy--or, even more important, of any would-be internal opposition (you gotta be "strong" on Iraq, you can't "lose" China)--that happens during a war, or even during ordinary politics, is clear. The norms and limits of masculinity must be and will be maintained.

Peeking Through

Er, right. I didn't expect to drop off like that. The last couple of weeks have slipped past me in a fog of sleepiness (so sleepy) and distraction (the World Series, where my Phillies lost, no shame, but to the Yankees, those bastards). Nonetheless, I do have a few things in the works. In the meantime, check out Yareah, a bilingual literary monthly, the November issue of which is largely devoted to Kafka, including my short piece, "Kafka and Brod" (which originally appeared here).

Fundamental Willingness to Share

After reading but one chapter in William Flesch's book on the evolution of cooperation, Comeuppance, Nigel Beale has already encountered a problem. He quotes Flesch thus:

narratives tend to contain or at least to suggest the possibility of three basic figures (though there may be more or fewer than three characters who ‘instantiate’ them): an innocent, someone who exploits that innocent, and someone else who seeks to punish the exploiter…The biological origin of this propensity is part of what has come to be called the "evolution of cooperation." which provides the insights that are central to this book.

In characteristic fashion, it doesn't take Nigel long to get to Hitler, but not before a bizarre reference to Shakespeare:

Shakespeare had as hearty a grip on human nature, I’d say, as any narrative writer in history. Plenty of innocents get expoited in his greatest plays, plenty seek to punish the exploiters…more often than not plenty of all three end up dead in pools of blood, prostrate on the stage boards. How is this co-operation?

Flip over to ‘real’ life: Hitler exploited the Jews. Used them as scapegoats, blaming them for hardships faced by the ‘German’ population. Then he exterminated millions of them. The Allies, despite knowing at least some of what was going on, were uniformly reluctant to provide safe haven for the innocent, let alone ‘punish the exploiter.’ They acted against the exploiter only when their own safety was in jeopardy.

This is not co-operation. It’s self preservation. Let us not forget, typically there is carnage before there is co-operation.

Well, this is pretty silly. I haven't read Flesch's book, but this sort of non-argument drives me crazy. I commented, asking, "Has it occurred to you that Flesch explains what he means, since he says that’s what his book is about? Do you think people who talk about the evolution of cooperation are completely unfamiliar with the history of war? Or that they haven’t heard of Hitler?" Godwin's law aside, my point is that you cannot cite events from human history (after we became culturally human) as evidence to refute an evolutionary theory. Of course, I am persuaded that evolutionary science suggests that that in order to become culturally human (that is, in that moment when language emerges, thus changing everything) we would necessarily had to have cooperated.

As a necessary corrective to the kinds of assumptions built into Nigel's post (and, to be sure, shared by many), take a look at the new issue of Radical Anthropology (thanks to Stuart for the link). The opening editorial suggests that, if the new issue "has a unifying theme then it probably is how fundamental willingness to share--food, stories, lipstick, medicine, beads, dances, childcare--is to humanity". This sharing needs to be explained "as strategic behaviour that survived the test of natural and sexual selection: that is, benefited our 'selfish genes'."

(Update: by the above, I should clarify that I mean you cannot simply point to events in human history as obvious self-evident proof against a given theory; that is, for example, simply pointing to the persistence of war as proof of the innate aggressiveness of human beings, and leaving it at that, will not do.

Also, having now had a chance to read through a fair portion of the Radical Anthropology, allow me to in particular recommend Camilla Power's interview with Darwinian feminist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy [whose latest book, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, sounds fascinating], Moran Finnegan's imagining of an "egalitarian body" via her investigation of female body rituals among the Mbendjele Yaka hunter-gatherers in Central Africa, and the interview with Simone Pika on what the non-vocal gestures of chimps and ravens might be able to tell us about human language.)

Reading blogs in the middle of the workday

Responding to a typically incoherent Thomas Friedman column, IOZ says the following:

Tellingly, no one seems much interested in the fact that an industrial economy is by necessity pyramidal, that not everyone can be a[n] inventor (or innovator, as goes the preferred neologism) or CEO. You know, even in the Imaginarium of Doctress Rand, it is taken as given that the Atlases of the world must at some point employ and direct the debased lumpenproletariat; there are no illusions that every man is a genius. Indeed, the economy whose passing Friedman perhaps mourns too soon, for from my seat it appears to be sputtering along as before, only at a more modest clip, was not simply a Housing Bubble economy or a Financial Speculation Economy; it was a middle management economy, in which productive labor, accomplished elsewhere and more cheaply, was replaced in the employment world by the bullshit white-collar pseudojobs with which so many of you, reading blogs in the middle of the workday, are surely familiar. Such people were never actually doing much, regardless of their level of educational achievement, and because their jobs were, are, and will forever be extraneous, they are easily cut without the need ever to be replaced.

Reading blogs in the middle of the workday! Who would do such a thing? Next he'll be telling us that people shop from work! (What would happen to the economy if we couldn't shop online from work?) But seriously, I've been fond of saying for a while now that one of our dirty economic secrets is how little actual work is done by the fairly well-paid, so-called white collar worker, myself included. IOZ talks about middle management, that layer of general ineptitude and uselessness one encounters virtually everywhere. But in my experience, large swaths of office workers have relatively little to do (whereas others, I am well aware, work very long hours indeed). Of course, this is because there is relatively little that really needs to be done. The jobs that most of us have are utterly unnecessary. But we have to be kept working, or at work, don't we? Heaven forbid we have time to ourselves, without need to worry that someone is looking, and without need to worry that we'll starve. Meanwhile, that work that is necessary (which is generally not found in an office) could easily be spread around, so that no one would be over-worked or under-compensated. Such an arrangement should be within our abilities, and is, except that a certain ownership class, we'll call it capital for the sake of convenience, can't and won't have that. How would they maintain their rate of profit and accumulation? How would they maintain power? Have I mentioned lately that the Luddites were right?

At the end of his post, IOZ says (italics in the final sentence are mine):

Entrepreneurship, innovation, and creativity are lovely words, but they cannot be taught, less yet can they be taught to students who cannot read, write, or add. Nor, in any event, does it make much sense to realign our national program of attempted-indoctrinated self-esteem and civic ignorance, i.e. public education, with the impossible conviction that every single American should own his own business, which uniquely produces the sole example of its own productorservice. In the world. Forever. Because of The Children. You cannot run a society of three hundred million people by requiring that each either invent the iPod or remain broke forever. Which rather brings up a tangential but dearly held point for the whole gang here at Who Is IOZ? Namely:

You cannot run a society of three hundred million people.

(Among other things, this point reminds me of a meeting I once attended--the topic was anarchism--in which one young fellow suggested that everyone should have iPods for free, as if in any plausible anarchist future it would be likely that society would be constructed in such a way that iPods would be mass-produced.)

This then acts as a placeholder for future posts about modernity and re-localization and Dunbar's number. Till then.

Noted: Willa Cather

From Death Comes for the Archbishop:

After he had laid aside his vestments, Father Latour went over the church with Jacinto. As he examined it his wonder grew. What need had there ever been for this great church at Ácoma? It was built early in sixteen hundred, by Fray Juan Ramirez, a great missionary, who laboured on the Rock of Ácoma for twenty years or more. It was Father Ramirez, too, who made the mule trail down the other side,--the only path by which a burro can ascend the mesa, and which is still called "El Camino del Padre."

The more Father Latour examined this church, the more he was inclined to think that Fray Ramirez, or some Spanish priest who followed him, was not altogether innocent of worldly ambition, and that they built for their own satisfaction, perhaps, rather than according to the needs of the Indians. The magnificant site, the natural grandeur of this stronghold, might well have turned their heads a little. Powerful men they must have been, those Spanish Fathers, to draft Indian labour for this great work without military support. Every stone in that structure, every handful of earth in those many thousand pounds of adobe, was carried up the trail on the backs of men and boys and women. And the great carved beams of the roof--Father Latour looked at them with amazement. In all the plain through which he had come he had seen no trees but a few stunted piñons. He asked Jacinto where these huge timbers could have been found.

"San Mateo mountain, I guess."

"But the San Mateo mountains must be forty or fifty miles away. How could they bring such timbers?"

Jacinto shrugged. "Ácomas carry." Certainly there was no other explanation.

"People know each other there"

I was struck by the final few paragraphs of this review by Roger Ebert of We Live In Public, a documentary about (previously unheard of by me) internet pioneer and visionary Josh Harris. Harris ("a myopic visionary, a man who saw the future more vividly than his own life") cashed in for $80 million in the 1990s for his Pseudo.com, which apparently anticipated the world of YouTube and other streaming content, and then he crashed and burned, with a massive project in which he paid people to live their lives under constant surveillance. The review ends like this:

By then, Harris had spent most of his $80 million and become disillusioned with living in public. He bought an upstate New York apple farm, and Timoner followed him there to find him having returned to the earth. His friends lost touch. He became forgotten as quickly as he became famous. I wonder, and the film doesn't tell us, what he thinks of YouTube. At the end of the film, he's living in Africa.

He did, however, fly to Sundance 2009, where "We Live in Public" won the Grand Jury Prize for best documentary. Sundance has become a place where the visitors can barely tear their eyes from texting, surfing, e-mailing or tweeting to actually watch at a movie. What did he make of this? Harris saw it coming in the days when a Tandy 100 transmitted text much more slowly than I could read.

This is a remarkable film about a strange and prophetic man. What does it tell us? Did living a virtual life destroy him? When Harris had a nervous breakdown after the "We Live in Public" Web experiment collapsed, was the experiment responsible?

Remember Jenny Ringley? She was the pioneer of Webcams. From April 1996 until 2003, she lived her life online, getting, it was said, tens of millions of hits a week. She never discussed why she shut down Jennycam. Today, she says she doesn't even have a MySpace page. And Josh Harris says Sidamo, Ethiopia, is the best place on Earth to live: "People know each other here."

Amnesia-inducing process

At Dusted Magazine, Kevan Harris reviews a book called Freedom Rhythm and Sound: Revolutionary Jazz Original Cover Art 1965-83, published by Soul Jazz Records. In doing so, he describes an approach to the history of jazz that runs counter to the tradition that sees jazz as "America's classical music" and, in George Lewis' words, as "dominated by autobiography" and thus sidestepping (obliterating) "issues of intellectual development, social context, racial conditions or the subjects’ view of culture, history, and philosophy". Revolutionary jazz especially was a collective enterprise, not dominated by the ego of the soloist. Harris' review is an invigorating and fascinating reminder of the kinds of music "self-appointed keepers of 'official' jazz history worked hard to efface any trace of" and ends with this:

Writing this piece from the periphery of the United States’ world reach [from Iran], I cannot help but read this collection as a book that is anti-Obama, though this is assuredly not the editors’ intention. After all, given what has occurred in the U.S. between January and now, it seems we are experiencing the fastest unraveling of a liberal consensus since the Weimar Republic. In 2008, the Obama campaign was astonishingly able to get 18-24 year olds from around the country to knock on doors in poor neighborhoods, engage strangers in debate, go sleepless nights occupied with political action that many had told them was futile and impossibly naïve (I know, because they constantly were skipping my classes to go to places like Iowa and South Carolina). These individuals have the rare experience of being involved in a social movement that actually wins what it sets out to accomplish.

Did it, though? It was recently reported that Obama’s staff had to get the President “fired up” to take on his critics before his recent address to Congress on health care. The passage from New York Review of Books is telling: “Obama, whose high self-esteem is well known among close observers, had previously assumed that a ‘following,’ a ‘movement,’ would be there without his having to do much to stimulate it.” Frankly, the movement is already gone, so someone should let him down easy. But it was Obama and his technocratic centrism that demobilized it, and the guy’s just too damn charismatic for anyone to admit it.

What if we lived in a world where all that youth energy, filled with utopian visions, knowing that history was on our side, foregoing the established routes of behavior, was directed into something other than the amnesia-inducing process known as an American presidential election? Something more locally and globally minded than simply a re-branded nationalism? Maybe, it would have produced something comparable to the arts, movements and lasting social resonance that underlie this book.

On Marx and foundering reading projects

Or, hey, how's that plan for reading Capital coming along?

Not so well. I read Harvey's The Limits to Capital earlier this year and had high hopes for moving on to Marx's great work. Attention spans and sleep patterns being what they are, these hopes have come so far to nothing. But I do take the book down at intervals, thinking maybe today? maybe tomorrow? No, I want to have my energies.

This post has been prompted by my reading of this entertaining post at Rough Theory, about Marx's dismissive handling of Malthus in chapter 25 of Capital (link via BLCKDGRD). A sample:

Marx goes on to “remark… in passing” that Eden “was the only disciple of Adam Smith to have achieved anything of importance during the eighteenth century” (766). The comment appears casual, trivial, and beside the point – a curiosity we could surely skip lightly past on the way to the substantive material in the next paragraph. Except that a massive multi-page footnote blocks our way and, when we decide that a footnote of such prodigious length might be important, finally locate the footnote marker at the end of the “passing remark” above, and cast our eyes down into the marginalia, we discover that special circle of textual hell into which Marx has decided he will deposit Malthus...

Malthus is therefore introduced into this chapter with an insult: Eden is the only disciple of Smith to amount to anything – making Malthus a disciple of Smith who... didn’t...

Heh: "special circle of textual hell". Note to self, when finally reading Capital, along with listening along to David Harvey's lectures, remember to go back through the archives at Rough Theory.

Noted: Thomas Bernhard

This is "Impossible", one of the 104 one-page-or-less stories in Bernhard's The Voice Imitator, translation by Kenneth J. Northcott:

A playwright whose plays have been performed in all the major theaters made it a matter of principle not to go to any of these productions, and for years, enjoying greater and greater success, he was able to hold fast to this principle. He had resolutely rejected all invitations from theater managements to see their productions, leaving most of their requests unanswered. Besides, there was nothing he hated mroe than theater managers. One day he broke with his principle and went to the Düsseldorf theater--considered at the time one of the best houses, which, in the nature of things, means that the Düsseldorf theater was in fact one of the best theaters in Germany--and saw his latest play being performed there, not, in the nature of things, on the opening night but at the third or fourth performance. After he had seen what the Dusseldorf players had made of his play, he filed a complaint in the Düsseldorf court that had jurisdiction over such matters, and this was enough to have him committed, before the trial took place, to the famouse Bethel lunatic asylum in nearby Bielsfeld. He sued the manager of the Düsseldorf theater for the return of his play, which meant nothing short of demanding that everyone involved in his play in any manner whatsoever produce and return anything that had the least connection with his play. Of course he also demanded that the people in the audiences, nearly five thousand of them, who had already seen his play return to him what they had seen.

On the nature of "Strong Opinions": Diary of a Bad Year

J.M. Coetzee's new book, the quasi-autobiographical novel Summertime, a follow-up of sorts to his earlier semi-memoirs, Boyhood and Youth, has been receiving near-unanimous praise in the UK, including being shortlisted for what would be Coetzee's third Booker prize. Adding to this chorus in recent weeks have been three excellent bloggers, John Self, Mark Thwaite, and Stephen Mitchelmore. Since I have not yet read the book--it isn't published in the United States until after Christmas--I want to take the opportunity to finally deliver my long-gestating inquiry into certain aspects of Coetzee's last book, Diary of a Bad Year.

I note that in his review of Summertime, Stephen observes of its widespread adulation, that "The consensus is a conspicuous reversal" of the general critical response to Diary of a Bad Year. In this novel, an elderly author, "JC", writes a series of short essays for inclusion in a volume to be called "Strong Opinions". JC encounters a woman, Anya, who he hires to type the essays. The book is structured such that the top of the page features the text of the various mini-essays, the bottom JC's account of his encounters with Anya. After some time, the page splits further, with Anya's thoughts intruding on the page, including her relations with her husband, Alan. Midway through the book, the top of the page shifts to more personal essays, under the heading "Second Diary".

These "Strong Opinions" made many readers unhappy, not just professional reviewers. It seems to me that many readers have become impatient with Coetzee; for example, in the comments to John Self's review, readers are evidently on balance happier with the Coetzee of Disgrace and earlier, one commenter calling his intervening books--including Elizabeth Costello and Slow Man, along with Diary of a Bad Year--evidence of a writer "bored with fiction". Such readers have seemed to look on Summertime with considerable relief. The formal restlessness of these three books has, perhaps, ironically pushed readers to focus on the arguments generated by the characters in them. As with the whole of Elizabeth Costello, many readers of Diary of a Bad Year have insisted on reading the pieces appearing in the "Strong Opinions" portion of the book at face value, as essays with which we are supposed to agree or disagree on their merits. It is often further assumed that the quality of the novel depends in some way on the effectiveness of these pieces, as essays. To do this is to, again, assume that the "Strong Opinions" reflect the thinking of J.M. Coetzee himself. In fairness, Coetzee playfully encourages some of this. Asked to contribute an essay or a talk on a certain topic, he has, for example, instead presented fictions featuring Elizabeth Costello and her arguments, which may or may not resemble Coetzee's own. He publishes excerpts of his work in the The New York Review of Books, a venue known for focusing on ideas in fiction.

But Coetzee gives us a variety of signals that this is not the way to read these books, signals that help point the way toward what the books are doing, why they are written the way they are. One of these signals is the quality of many of the opinions themselves. That is, much of what JC writes in his "Strong Opinions" is nonsense. Mr. Waggish has made this point more consistently than anyone else:

[A]ny comparison of the "Strong Opinions" to his real opinions in his thoughtful, careful essays makes the difference blindingly apparent. (It does take something approaching guts for a Nobel Laureate to write something so profoundly trite and irritating and attribute it to his own ostensible fictional proxy.) As with many literary intellectuals, J.C.'s excursions into math and science are particularly stupid. By the time J.C. writes, "I continue to find evolution by random mutation and natural selection not just unconvincing but preposterous as an account of how complex organisms come into being" and invokes Heisenberg without knowing what uncertainty even is, it's obvious that Coetzee has no wish even to defend these opinions; he is making them transparently foolish so that readers examine the rhetoric rather than the opinions. Underneath the sanctimonious white male liberal pablum, including defenses of pornography, Adorno-esque cultural snobbery in indictments of rock music, latent sexism (captured especially well, complete with tired attack on Catherine MacKinnon), and sympathy with enemies of whom he knows nothing, there bleeds the personality that is revealed in J.C.'s internal voice lower on the page. With most would-be political commentators in the literati, it is not quite so obvious, but in J.C., Coetzee gives us tools for easily making the connection.

Again, Coetzee plays with these readers: the author of the "Strong Opinions" is called only "JC" and bears certain obvious resemblances to Coetzee. Excerpts, again, were printed in The New York Review of Books--for example, the piece dealing with the film The Seven Samurai, which is a fairly silly piece taken on its own, but which is leant gravity by appearing in the NYRB, appears to be serious (and, in fact, was taken seriously by the excellent and usually perceptive Helen DeWitt, who knows quite a bit about that particular film, here). Whether readers assume these essays contain the considered positions of J.M. Coetzee is secondary to the fact that they consider them worthy of consideration on their own, independent of the form in which they appear.

Another signal is the tone of the essays. Where Elizabeth Costello was an often obnoxious presence on the page, in both Elizabeth Costello and, especially, Slow Man, JC more closely resembles Coetzee ("except dumber", per Waggish), yet his tone in his essays is just as offputting. This point is made fairly blatantly in the novel itself, by Anya when she says:

OK. This may sound brutal, but it isn't meant that way. There is a tone--I don't know the best word to describe it--a tone that really turns people off. A know-it-all tone. Everything is cut and dried: I am the one with all the answers, here is how it is, don't argue, it won't get you anywhere. I know that isn't how you are in real life, but that is how you come across, and it is not what you want. I wish you would cut it out. If you positively have to write about the world and how you see it, I wish you could find a better way.

As Stephen Mitchelmore has observed (scroll to the comments), these essays thus call into question the "commanding spirit of the writer - his mastery over the world in the form of a book".

I believe this tone is intimately tied in with what I see as the third signal on how to read these essays: the very words "Strong Opinions". Most readers will probably know that Strong Opinions is the title of a collection of Vladimir Nabokov's non-fiction ephemera: reviews, interviews, articles, letters, and so on. When Diary of a Bad Year was still forthcoming, there was some blog-talk about the Nabokov connection, but I don't recall seeing any reviews that mentioned it.

Why does Coetzee call these items "Strong Opinions"? Is it just a throwaway title, a convenient name? Coetzee is too meticulous a writer for that. I believe that Coetzee intentionally names these essays "Strong Opinions" to draw attention to them, with Nabokov being a kind of target. Not Nabokov the writer, but Nabokov the literary persona, or the kind of authority so often invested in such an out-sized persona--that is, the authority we too often invest in it, whether or not it is claimed by the writer in question. This is, I think, reinforced by the end of Diary of a Bad Year, with JC's short tributes to Tolstoy and, most pertinent for my argument, Dostoevsky. Of Dostoevsky, he writes, in part:

Far more powerful than the substance of his argument, which is not strong, are the accents of anguish, the personal anguish of a soul unable to bear the horrors of this world. It is the voice of Ivan, as realized by Dostoevsky, not his reasoning, that sweeps me along.

To again quote Waggish on this section, this

is one of the most straightforward passages in any of Coetzee's books, so heartfelt and elegant that it shames the "Strong Opinions" even further. Having achieved some rapprochement with Anya, J.C. stands in relation to Dostoevsky and his books and not to the world, leaving those connections to those more qualified to make them.

In addition, these words, which are analogous to the argument that holds that the old great philosophers, though perhaps "proven wrong" in some particulars, nevertheless remain worth reading for the flow of their argument and the rhetorical power of their writing, also serve as a gentle rebuke to Nabokov, with his famous animus towards the fiction of Dostoevksy, an animus, I have argued elsewhere, the repetitiveness and virulence of which had more to do with maintaining his literary persona upon arrival in the United States, than with the actual target itself.

Nabokov was one of the great writers of fiction, but his book called Strong Opinions, though not without its charm or entertainment value, is not itself a valuable book. Is it not one of Nabokov's worst books? Though we can profitably read his Lectures on Literature, Nabokov was not much of a critic, in that he didn't really write criticism. Critical remarks, however, are everywhere. And the opinions in Strong Opinions are tonally more akin to his many jabs in his prefaces and introductions to his own novels, where he frequently takes the time to attack Freud or Sartre or whomever. I'm not going to quote from the book Strong Opinions; I own most of Nabokov's books, but I don't own that, and I read it years ago. But read the introductory remarks to just about any one of his novels and you will find something like what I'm talking about. (The ones that were written originally in Russian, such as Despair or Invitation to a Beheading, are perhaps the best places to look, since he is self-consciously "introducing" them or framing them for an American audience previously unfamiliar with them.) (But I should give at least a little flavor, shouldn't I? I can't remember whether the text of the interview Rake linked to here--which seems to no longer be available--is reproduced in Strong Opinions, but the remarks found there are typical of what I'm talking about, where he dismisses both Freud--"I think he's medieval, and I don't want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me"--and Faulkner--a writer of "corncob chronicles".) Whether his targets deserve scorn is irrelevant; it's the nature of the attack that counts here. While it's true that writers, in their offhand way in diaries and journals, are often more interesting critics than the critics themselves (witness Kafka on Dickens, for but one example that Gabriel Josipovici is fond of pointing out), with Nabokov this is rarely the case. He was such a guarded figure that his offhand remarks were never really offhand, the dismissive tone calculated for effect, their authority resting entirely on his own fame, the only reason he's being asked in the first place. Nabokov was such an out-sized figure, a dominant literary master with a personal history that intersected tragically with History itself, that one is seduced by him, one wants to give him credit. I know when I was knee-deep in my early Nabokov fixation, I took him seriously on virtually everything, even when I already knew enough to disagree, as I did on political matters and, say, Faulkner. You want to measure up to his greatness, even defer to it. It took me a long time to realize how unsatisfactory I found his rigid approach to translation, though I still take his side in his battle with the generally pompous Edmund Wilson over Eugene Onegin.

Nabokov's stature and his history likely inclined people, journalists in particular, to want to ask him all kinds of questions, literary or otherwise, even though there should be no particular reason why Vladimir Nabokov's opinions on Vietnam, or communism, carry any special weight, except that he's Vladimir Nabokov. If his opinions on such matters evinced carefully thought out positions and actually added anything, that would be different. Similarly, there is no reason why anyone should care what Diary of a Bad Year's JC has to say about evolution, or about mathematics, or feminism, or any number of other topics. He might have something valuable to say about them, but such essays would need to be approached more in the spirit of his "Second Diary" entries, pieces which show evidence of meaning more to their author than did the perfunctory, obnoxious "Strong Opinions" themselves. The latter exist because he is asked to write them, solely based on his position as Famous Author. Their authority relies on this and this alone, and they are written as if he believed that authority to be thus earned. It is not.

Thoughts on Effi Briest

We've had Theodor Fontane's novel Effi Briest (translated into English by Douglas Parmée) for a while (Aimée brought it into the marriage), but I admit that it was the vague notion I had acquired that it was one of Beckett's favorite novels that moved it onto my ever-shifting pile of maybe-imminent reads. With such knowledge, however sketchy, you feel, ah, yes, now that's an unbeatable stamp of approval, eh? Quality, excellence, seems guaranteed. But of course it doesn't tell you much. Nor did I really expect it to. Does Beckett's own writing tell you anything about what Effi Briest might be like? It seems unlikely, doesn't it? Anyway, in the event, it does not. I read the novel last week, and Effi Briest is a fairly straightforward, enjoyable, 19th century novel, which also functions as a lightly ironic condemnation of certain 19th century German mores. (It's called the most famous German novel of the 19th century, and I realize that it's the only one I can name.)

In my cursory search on the book, I've noticed that Madame Bovary often gets mentioned as a point of comparison, in part so that the differences can be touched on. One is this: Fontane is nothing like as pleased with himself as Flaubert is in his attack on bourgeois values. Another is that Effi is not the figure of fun for Fontane that Emma is for Flaubert. Emma has gotten her head filled with all sorts of silly notions from the silly books she reads, and she suffers. Effi suffers too, and she is not without responsibility, but ultimately she is simply too young and innocent to be thrown into the adult world the way she is. Fontane's narration seems to hold conservative society, and its emphasis on honor and propriety, more responsible for her fate.

I mentioned above that the book is "lightly ironic". It was this lightness that carried the book for me. I admit that, the Beckett imprimatur notwithstanding, I approached the novel with some hesitation. As I began reading the book, I resisted the beginning of the narrative, the recounting of details, the introduction of characters. But I was gradually won over by this lightness and by the narrator's voice, which is by turns reticent and amused. This reticence is most evident in the plot, in which major events--including the very affair that is Effi's undoing--are barely recounted, if at all, and can only really be inferred via later references. At times this reticence led to some confusion, as I found myself wondering what had happened, and wondering why all the fuss over virtually nothing. (The latter sometimes happens when we read books depicting a society very different from our own, doesn't it?--we have a hard time understanding what all the characters are on about, why it matters so much, whatever it might be. An example: the play in Mansfield Park; I know I had a hard time understanding what could be so immoral about that; I simply had to accept it as such for the sake of the book.) The point is I spent some time deciding whether my confusion about the affair in question stemmed from a question of different values or from authorial reticence (itself perhaps a function of the former? a question I'd be better able to answer if I knew the first thing about 19th century German literature). I resolved the question in favor of reticence, a reticence that I think helps elevate the book above its apparently melodramatic material.

Speaking of melodrama, the day I finished reading the novel, I discovered that Fassbinder had directed a movie version of Effi Briest. I knew that Fassbinder played a bit with melodrama, so I thought his movie would be fun. Well, we rented it last Friday and fun is not the first word I would use to describe the film. The film was slower moving, and a bit more heavy-handed in its critique of society, and yet this very heavy-handedness seemed to work well in the translation to film. The film is like a series of awkward-seeming, and beautifully composed (in black-and-white), tableaux--characters often seem to be literally waiting for cues before they begin a scene. The characters seemed more stiff to me than they did in the book, but then I have little doubt that Fassbinder, being German, would have had a better handle on the German society being depicted than I would.

Please Please Me

In "Too much Alinsky, not enough Lenin", a post commenting on the influence of Saul Alinsky on the American left, as observed in the context of last week's student walkout at UC-Berkeley, Voyou writes about the left's dysfunctional attitude towards power:

This confused me when I first moved to the US; looking for the left in the Bay Area it seems at first like there’s no there there. The general left-wing sentiment in the area doesn’t seem to be matched by the existence of left-wing organizations. It turns out that that’s not quite right; it’s just that these organizations aren’t political organizations but are, rather, community organizations and non-profits. Some of these have radical rhetoric and a revolutionary pedigree, but they all share the weakness of the Alinskian (non-)understanding of power, where power is not conceived of as something that could be appropriated collectively and used creatively to common ends, but where power is something someone else (the state) has, and the limit of collective action is to force concessions from those who do hold power.

I particularly like that last sentence: the limit of collective action is to force concession from those who do hold power. It's true, isn't it? Power exists out there, and our responsibility, at best, is to force concessions. But even that's a bit strong--we don't force concessions, we ask, we beg, we beseech. Witness the spectacle of liberals, prominent or otherwise, writing open letters, or blog posts, addressed to Obama--please close Guantanamo, please end the occupation of Iraq, please take time to consider single payer healthcare, please keep your promises, please fulfill our hopes and dreams, please please listen to us!

Noted: Maurice Blanchot

From "Dreaming, Writing", in Friendship:

Let us in turn dream about the supposed kinship between dreaming and writing--I will not say speech. Certainly, the one who awakens experiences a curious desire to talk about himself; he is immediately in search of a morning auditor whom he would like to have participate in the wonders he has lived through and is sometimes a little surprised that this auditor is not filled with wonder as he is. There are dark exceptions--there are fatal dreams--but for the most part we are happy with our dreams, we are proud of them; we have a naive pride befitting authors, certain as we are that we have created original works in our dreams, even if we refuse to claim any part in them. One must nonetheless ask oneself if such a work truly seeks to become public, if every dream seeks to be told, even while veiling itself. In Sumerian antiquity, one was advised to recount, to recite one's dreams. This was in order to release their magical power as quickly as possible. Recounting one's dreams was the best way to escape their bad consequences; or one might decide to inscribe their characteristic signs on a slab of clay, which one then threw into the water: the slab of clay prefigured the book; the water, the public. The wisdom of Islam nonetheless seems more reliable, which advises the dreamer to choose carefully the one in whom he will confide, and even to keep his secret rather than give it away at the wrong moment: "The dream," it is said, "belongs to the first interpreter; you should tell it only in secret, just as it was given to you....And tell no one your bad dream."

We recount our dreams out of an obscure need: to make them more real by living with someone else the singularity that belongs to them and that would seem to address them to one person alone; and further still, to appropriate them, establishing ourselves, through a common speech, not only as master of the dream but also as its principal actor and thus decisively taking hold of this similar, though eccentric, being that was us during the night.

The Masters of Suspicion

Earlier this week I read Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, a book I was supposed to have read in college, but reading it now, it seems unlikely that I ever did. (I recall having used a lame version of one of his arguments in a paper I wrote. One wonders how I managed even that. I can only have been regurgitating the instructor's gloss.) Anyway, as with Nietzsche, I find reading Freud enjoyable, if frustrating. It's generally a real pleasure following his line of reasoning, but, also as with Nietzsche, I have a hard time taking seriously many of his specific conclusions. For one thing, of course, Freud's point of view was hopelessly male-centric, no minor detail; this stance probably led to many, if not most, of the arguments that I find problematic in what I've read. With both Nietzsche and Freud, it is especially their speculations on the "origins" of things that I find most difficult to take seriously, though they are often brilliantly argued.

In this focus on origins, I am reminded again of Gabriel Josipovici's great On Trust: Art and the Temptations of Suspicion. In the early pages of the book, Josipovici employs the language of Paul Ricoeur, who called Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx the "masters of suspicion", their work a "hermeneutics of suspicion". As Josipovici puts it, these writers

revealed that what we had taken to be natural, a 'given', was in fact man-made, the result of choices and decisions made by individuals and communities. Thus Marx laid bare the workings of capital, Nietzsche the workings of morality, Freud the workings of sexuality. Where the Enlightenment had seen all men as essentially one, and human nature as unchanging, the nineteenth-century masters of suspicion set about exploring the genealogies, the secret histories, of morals and social institutions, with the aim of freeing men from bonds to which they did not even know they were subject.

Nietzsche noted that, though men had (so it apparently seemed to him) largely abandoned Christianity, they "are a long way from being free spirits, because they still believe in truth" and "Any meaning is better than none". But for him, "inquiry [the search for truth] itself stands in need of justification". Josipovici uses these Nietzsche remarks as his springboard into his larger discussion, moving onto, first, Kierkegaard and, more generally, the problems for the writer posed by the crisis of modernity. Interestingly, of the three "masters of suspicion", it is Marx who emerges as the most accurate in his "laying bare" project. All three are still valuable thinkers, since the value of a thinker resides not completely in the accuracy of the conclusions reached, and, indeed, simply arguing persuasively that what had seemed natural was not has liberated other thinkers investigating the same areas. But Marx is the only one of the three whose particular conclusions remain relevant (I'm talking analysis here, not prognostication).

Returning to the matter of origins, an important factor in my having difficulty with the arguments on the origins of things made by Freud or Nietzsche has to do with my familiarity with the work of Chris Knight, which I have referred to several times on the blog, at some length here. One thing that Knight shows, in his application of feminist insights and "selfish gene" theory to the extensive anthropological record, is how right it appears that Marx and Engels were in their writings about the origins of things. Nietzsche and Freud seem to assume a Hobbesian state of nature when they consider such matters; thus, for example, Freud's focus on the so-called "aggressiveness" instinct, which must be repressed into aggression against one's own ego, against the instinct for primal freedom, itself necessarily suppressed by "civilization". Such accounts seem to bypass the emergence of language and culture, assuming that in our original human moment we would have necessarily been much like the other primates, when it's the very differences between humans and other primates that must be explained when one is attempting to explain human nature. Thus one must take into account language. Knight's theory of the sex strike, which puts female humans at the forefront of this process, would no doubt have been anathema to Freud, who, quite aside from his theories on women and sexuality, like Nietzsche, sees men at the origin, with women relegated to child-bearing and child-rearing. That these natural processes might be crucial to any understanding of human nature and origins is, for them, necessarily a priori out of the question.

Noted: Alfred North Whitehead

From "The Rhythmic Claims of Freedom and Discipline", in The Aims of Education:

We must take it as an unavoidable fact, that God has so made the world that there are more topics desirable for knowledge than any one person can possibly acquire. It is hopeless to approach the problem by the way of the enumeration of subjects which every one ought to have mastered. There are too many of them, all with excellent title-deeds. Perhaps, after all, this plethora of material is fortunate; for the world is made interesting by a delightful ignorance of important truths.

On Nader and Progressivism

Over at Read Red, Shelley Ettinger points, with deserved scorn, to the release of a novel by Ralph Nader, of all people, called Only the Super-rich Can Save Us! Apparently, the idea is to explore in fiction "what could happen if 17 billionaires and super-rich people" take on "the existing business power bloc and the politicians in Washington who serve it". Shelley says:

The spectacle of such a bizarre, twisted delusion being promulgated by someone who used to present himself as a fighter for progressive change might strike some as sad. It ought in any case to expose him once and for all as no legitimate leader in the cause of the class struggle.

Sadly, given the urgency of the problems facing us and the general disarray of the left, it's possible that it's true that we could only be saved by the actions of an imaginary small group of benevolent rich people. But it's still delusional.

This gives me an excuse to expand on my remarks from earlier in the week. I think Nader had revealed that he was no real leader, without the aid of any delusional novel, in the way he conducted his last two presidential campaigns. I voted for him without apology in 2000 because he seemed to be part of something larger, and the idea, however limited, was to expand the base, to be part of building a real movement against the stagnant two-party oligarchy (funding for third parties being part of that). I remember there was real excitement in the air. I voted for him again in 2004, this time without much enthusiasm. I didn't like his campaign that year, divorced as it was from any kind of wider movement, though I also did not appreciate the attacks by liberals unfairly and inaccurately blaming him for the considerable evils of the Bush Administration (liberals seemed uninterested in the truth about the stolen 2000 election; it's always more important to defend the system). The Kerry campaign was simply a joke.

As I mentioned, I voted for Obama last year, under no illusions about who or what he would be. And I could not justify another Nader vote, in part because I increasingly feel that he misses "the bigger picture". What I mean is this. Contrary to what Shelley says in the quote above, I do believe Nader is a progressive. That's part of the problem. Progressivism is intimately tied to the fortunes and methods of the capitalist state. I've referred here on several occasions to the "so-called Progressive Era", citing Gabriel Kolko's excellent history of the period, The Triumph of Conservatism, in support of the idea that, far from being this golden period of left-wing victories (though there were some victories, to be sure), in fact the era consolidated and strengthened the hand of the capitalists, the smartest among whom themselves argued for and largely created the extensive regulatory apparatus that was necessary to protect capitalists from the free market. But, in fact, my smarty-pants use of "so-called" is unwarranted, because this is exactly what Progressivism was.

Of course, the word "progressive" has become a sort of catch-all umbrella term covering any liberal or vaguely left-wing views, and this is how Shelley innocently uses it in her post. She is an avowed communist, so I know she harbors no illusions about liberals or the state. But I find the word unhelpful and have ceased using it to describe myself or my beliefs--there are big differences between those of us who are resolutely anti-capitalist and those who believe in liberal democracy and the tameability of the capitalist system. It's true that in the context of the existing system, a functioning regulatory framework is much preferred to the current situation. That said, it must always be remembered that not only was the regulatory system designed by capitalists, but the welfare state--the New Deal, for example--was part of a necessary accommodation with labor, in order to, again, save capitalism from itself. This deal was enabled by the incredible, unrepeatable growth of the post-WWII period (growth which itself was enabled by the burgeoning military-industrial complex and the insanity of the Cold War), and itself entered into crisis in the late 1960s/early 1970s. There is no going back. And yet going back appears to be all that progressives, Nader included, have to offer, in the face of ongoing, expensive wars and the lack of a powerful labor movement which could force such an accommodation. Nader sounds great when he talks about regulation and generally says the right things about particular wars and about Palestine, but he gives no indication that he appreciates that crisis is necessary to capitalism, that war is, that the capitalist state does not exist to serve the people.

Incidentally, the narrative of progress itself is another reason I object to the word "progressive". This is a narrative that exists within the Marxist teleological tradition, too. Usually this implies change that can be seen as a kind of necessary, inexorable "progress", in the way that history itself is seen as progressive--where, to rework a phrase from Marilynne Robinson (quoted by me, here), previous generations are seen as benighted in comparison with our own (as I used to assume, in my youthful naivete, that each generation would necessarily be less racist, less sexist, less religious than their parents). It's perhaps the blithe acceptance of technological progress that most disturbs me. We act as if technology simply progresses, as if technological change isn't a function of the capitalist process, as if it would continue to "progress" in the same manner in the absence of the capitalist pressures, or ought to.

Drastic changes are urgently needed, but many of the changes that I think are necessary would involve reviving lost forms from the past, a give and take with the best of what tradition has had to offer. I would call the world a better place if they took place, but I would not call it progress. More on this in future posts.

"Any hack could instruct him in the elements of his craft"

Just read Hugh Kenner's short but rich Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians. There is much to chew on here, in many ways very complementary with Josipovici, I find. There is also much I'd like to excerpt, in the entirely possible event I am unable to blog about the book in any detail, but for now, this:

Art is the perfect not-doing of what cannot be done, and peer as we will, we shall not discern Beckett doing. We are encumbered by no proof sheets, no keys, no outlines. There is no legend of the fabulous artificer. Not even the Paris telephone directory records his presence, though it did Joyce's. Photographs display the somewhat bemused expression of a man to whom numerous books have mysteriously happened. We do not track theme-words through the text of Comment C'est or Happy Days [as one does through Ulysses, for example - RC], marveling at the master's virtuosity. On the contrary, we note the stubborn (though fastidious) repetitiousness of a man who can barely keep going ("end at last of the second part how it was with Pim now only the third and last how it was after Pim before Bom how it is there is how it was with Pim"). His role is not the engineer's but the scribe's, or the medium's ("I say it as I hear it"). Any hack could instruct him in the elements of his craft, though it is not clear whether he would profit by instruction, for his virtuosity, such as it is, appears to diminish rather than grow accomplished. The early Murphy is at least something like a novel. It has even a timetable, and one would have expected practice to increase its author's facility. Five novels later, alas, he seems unable to punctuate a sentence, let alone construct one. More and more deeply he penetrates the heart of utter incompetence, where the simplest pieces, the merest three-word sentences, fly apart in his hands. He is the non-maestro, the anti-virtuoso, habitue of non-form and anti-matter, Euclid of the dark zone where all signs are negative, the comedian of utter disaster.

Notes on Beckett and Film Adaptations

Over the last several months, I've been very slowly making my way through the Beckett on Film series. Slowly because, frankly, the films are, on the whole, disappointing. They are too cinematic. They too often miss the point. They treat Beckett's plays as content to be filmed. The accompanying documentary is terrible, borderline unwatchable, primarily because the producers boast about being given the chance to make Beckett accessible. Given the Beckett estate's famous stinginess on allowing productions to move forward, I'm rather surprised this project was given the green light.

There are some highlights. Thankfully, one of the best is Waiting for Godot. Based on my reading of the play and my take on Beckett, it seems to me that, some fancy camera work aside, this production does ok by the play. We enjoyed it, anyway. Another is Ohio Impromptu, starring Jeremy Irons. I also felt that Not I, with Julianne Moore, was not bad. I still have yet to watch Endgame, Happy Days, or Play, among others.

Most recently, I watched Krapp's Last Tape, directed by Atom Egoyan and starring John Hurt, and it is, I think, symptomatic of the series' problems. This happens to be the only Beckett play that I've actually seen produced on stage, in a wonderful performance at Johns Hopkins by John Astin. To save some time, I'm going to quote what I said about this play and the performance in a post from last year. I wrote:

Krapp is an old man, alone. He spends part of the time listening to tapes he recorded at an earlier age. He was alone then too. We learn of paths not taken. There are, perhaps, regrets, though at the same time, he wouldn't undo what he's done, so he says. In the discussion after the play, one audience member in particular seemed fixated on the idea that Beckett didn't seem capable of "happiness". But there's happiness and then there's happiness. Krapp is alone, but he is alive. He has his pleasures. He delights in the word "viduity", as [Marina] Warner points out [in the Times Literary Supplement], but earlier he lingers on the word "spool"--theatrically savoring, to himself, the sound of "ooool"--and he enjoys his bananas, taking pleasure in their shape, color, smell. As Warner puts it:

For not everything is fizzling out, and wind is not mere wind, at least not quite, or otherwise we would not feel the tragicomic involvement that Beckett inspires. There is something to the fizzle itself.

Krapp the old man marvels at the ideas held by his younger self, grand plans that didn't come to fruition, blithe talk on tape about a lost love being for the best, when it's certain details of that lost love the older man seems to linger on, at least during the play.

Ok, so that's a rough outline of the "content". In the play, the stage features only a desk, with two drawers facing the audience, behind which Krapp sits at a chair, when he's not fumbling through his keys, or opening the drawers to extract bananas or a spool of tape, or leaving the stage to get the reel-to-reel player, or a drink, etc. Very minimal. Krapp himself is wearing nothing remarkable, except for a pair of insane white boots. Astin's performance was restrained, subtle.

In Egoyan's film, the same things happen, yet it's completely wrong. Why? Well, for one thing, no white boots! You can't even see Krapp's whole body! But more importantly, there's a too muchness to it that overwhelms, defeating the material. This is one of the basic problems with film adaptations in the first place: the need to fill in the blanks. Set designers appear to have been allowed to roam free and do whatever the fuck they wanted. The set is simply overflowing with crap. Papers everywhere, shelving, piles of boxes, tapes, remnants of a disheveled life. And when Krapp walks around front of the desk to open the drawers, the camera moves in, over his shoulder, so that we can see what else might be in them. To top it all off, Hurt's performance is way too emotive. When, for example, Krapp expresses some dismay about his life choices, Hurt plays it like he's doing a tortured Hamlet. He is not doing Hamlet.

I come back to this basic question: Why does someone decide to make a film adaptation? In a post about adaptations of Michael Chabon's novels, IOZ suggests that "adaptation is better accomplished by someone who appreciates a work than someone who loves it so much that he wants to improve it". I would argue further (in line with arguments I've made in the past on this topic), that appreciation should include a sense that there's some reason why the book or play being adapted existed in the form it did, particularly in the case of a writer such as Samuel Beckett. Beckett wrote poems, stories, novels, uncategorizable prose pieces, and plays, and he was rather famously interested in the problems with the forms in which he wrote. To simply film a Beckett play as if it were any old story lying around, as if it were in need of elaboration, is to fundamentally betray the play. Why did he write plays? Why is Krapp's Last Tape a play? Why does he have a play called Play? A film called Film? Why do his plays clearly not take the form for granted? I'm not going to venture answers to these questions here, but they are the kinds of questions that it seems to me are in play when problems of adaptation arise. It seems to me that the decision to adapt one of Beckett's plays for film should center on how the formal problems addressed in the play itself can be similarly addressed in a filmic context. If questions are being asked of the play format, can analagous questions be asked of film? If not, then why make a film?