Maybe King is a real writer

So now the NYT Book Review weighs in on Lisey's Story, and pronounces it real literature.

Boo’ya Moon is “this world turned inside-out like a pocket,” and it’s as real as J. M. Barrie’s Never-Never Land, L. Frank Baum’s Oz or the Grimms’ forest. Like those places, Boo’ya Moon arises from childhood longings for the things not provided by one’s parents or guardians, and it’s as forbidding as it is wonderful. You come away from “Lisey’s Story” convinced of the existence of King’s fantastic realm and of something else rarer still in fiction, a long, happy marriage.

Other reviewers like Janet Maslin downplay the horror and fantasy elements in the book to concentrate on the love story, but this reviewer, Jim Windolf, finds both aspects equally worthy of interest. In Windolf's view, the fantastic aspects don't detract from the detailed portrait of the married couple. The two worlds blend in King's fiction, strenghtening it.

Windolf shows how writers like Michael Chabon and Dave Eggers, nostalgic for the schlock (including King) they grew up on, have become the new literary gatekeepers right under Harold Bloom's nose. And they have let King come on in.

It struck me also, in reading the NYT Book Review yesterday, that many children's books blend fantasy and realism in similar ways. I kept reading the reviews, thinking "that sounds interesting," then finding out it was "for ages 12 and up." Are children's books more daring that adult fiction now?

Naturalistic unreality

Harold Bloom, in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human:

It is difficult to describe Shakespeare's mdoes of representation without resorting to oxymorons, since most of these modes are founded upon seeming contradictions. A "naturalistic unreality" suggests itself, to meet Wittgenstein's annoyed comment that life is not like Shakespeare. Owen Barfield replied to Wittgenstein in advance (1928):

...there is a very real sense, humiliating as it may seem, in which what we generally venture to call our feelings are really Shakespeare's "meaning."

Life itself has become a naturalistic unreality, partly, because of Shakespeare's prevalence. To have invented our feelings is to have gone beyond psychologizing us: Shakespeare made us theatrical, even if we never attend a performance or read a play. After Hamlet literally has stopped the play--to joke about the War of the Theaters, to command the Player King to enact the absurd scene in which Aeneas recounts Priam's slaughter, to admonish the players to a little discipline--we more than ever regard Hamlet as one of us, somehow dropped into a role in a play, and the wrong play at that. The prince alone is real; the others, and all the action, constitute theater.

Is it true?

I wish I could celebrate the huge Democratic victory yesterday. Just about everything, including state propositions like 85, came out the way I wanted... I can't remember the last time this happened. Maybe that's why I don't know how to feel. Also we've lived under this cloud of Republican gloom for so long it's hard to shift gears. Mostly I just don't believe that the Dems could overcome all the bullshit, voter intimidation, media distortions, gerrymandering, and their own frequent cowardice to make this happen. So I'm still waiting for another shoe to drop. But so far all the shoes have been good ones.

Erich Auerbach appreciated

I am rereading Mimesis, the ur-text of comparative literature, and one of the first works of lit crit I read as a grad student. (It should be noted that I read very little lit crit as an undergrad, a sign of the very traditional honors English program at Michigan back in the day... and also the reason I decided to pursue a PhD in literature. I thought I'd be studying literature. Who knew?) But anyway, I loved Auerbach and particularly "Odysseus's Scar," the first chapter, about externalization and presentness. A key early argument is that Homer doesn't attempt to create suspense by using flashbacks, which requires the current action to stay at least somewhat in the reader's mind while the author goes into the past. For suspense to occur, the reader has to remember what's going on in the present and want to get back to it.

On the second page of the library book I took out, a reader has underlined "But Homer--and to this we shall have to return later--knows no background. What he narrates is for the time being the only present, and fills both the stage and the reader's mind completely." And then that reader has noted in very small letters in the margin: "I agree. Dankeschoen E.A." Another reader writes below that, "thank *you,* benny. E.A. (never had no one appreciate me)"

That's just a little appreciation to the anonymous annotators of this copy of Mimesis. I don't normally approve of writing in library books, but you have to love this.

Is Azar Nafisi a neocon?

Overstated, just a tad.

Hilmar Cheese Factory

If you had told me on Friday that on Saturday I would find myself at the Hilmar Cheese Factory just outside Turlock, CA, watching an industrial video on how wonderful gigantic dairies are for animals and the environment and our health, I would have been amused by you. However, it happened. Through the miracle of CGI, the real live cows in the video stopped eating hay, raised their heads (as much as they could between the bars) and smiled to say they were happy. Indeed, the host of the video, a fully animated cow, asked them several times if they were happy and they assured us they were. Also we learned how clean and environmentally friendly the whole process is. They use waste water from the cheesemaking process to hose down the factory floor. We then went upstairs to view a corner of the actual factory. On the wall next to the window there were two sets of hard hats that children--I guess--could wear while viewing: the white one said "I work in the cheese factory" and the green one said "I work in maintenance." We only saw white hats on the floor. The process did seem very clean and efficient, with gigantic blocks of cheese dropping out of "towers" and the white-hatted workers skimming the excess off with a shovel.

However, up near the ceiling where we were standing, we saw something that looked like bird crap.

I could be a vegan.

MLA conference program

Just received the MLA convention program for this winter's meeting in Philadelphia. The address label says "POSTMASTER: DESTROY IF UNDELIVERABLE." What is so dangerous about the PMLA and the conference program, if it should fall into the wrong hands? Perhaps that people will realize that things are, in fact, as bad as they seem in literary studies today.

Don't worry, Stephen King is still not a real writer

It appears Stephen King has written a "Joycean" novel, according to Janet Maslin in today's NYT. She hastens, twice in the first two paragraphs, to assure us that this does not mean King is a real writer:

This is no occasion to make great literary claims for Mr. King, or even to exalt his linguistic experimentation. His use of language in “Lisey’s Story” is so larded with baby talk that it borders on the pathological. Here is a writer who has a thousand ways of naming a toilet, and whose work can thus be an acquired taste. But “Lisey’s Story” transcends the toidy-talk to plumb thoughts of love, mortality and madness — and to deliver them with gale-force emotion. When Mr. King writes in a coda to this blunt but stunning book that “much here is heartfelt, very little is clever,” he is telling the truth.

I have not yet read the novel in question, but is this a case of one's reputation preceding one? Has Joyce not written his own encomiums to workings related to the toilet? How about other "real" novelists (Pynchon, DeLillo)? Is it even possible to judge King's latest work in light of everything he's done before? And could we have asked this question about some of his previous offerings?

What is the big risk of suggesting that King has "crossed the line" into literature? There must be one, for Maslin, anyway.

As seen from everywhere

...the house itself is not the house seen from nowhere, but the house seen from everywhere. The completed object is translucent, being shot through from all sides by an infinite number of present scrutinies which intersect in its depths leaving nothing hidden...

--Merleau-Ponty

Ghost World

We watched Ghost World last night, thanks again to the always surprising San Carlos Library DVD collection. It's been five years since we saw it in the theater, which is depressing. (I just noticed that I say we "watched" GW on DVD but "saw" it in the theater. Is one verb more active than the other? Does "watched" imply the smaller screen? "Saw" perhaps implies more of a spectacle, a shrinking before the awesome sight...or more of a chance happening.) Anyway. I liked it even better this time. I hate to say this, given the way I'm trying to get past this very statement in my research on character, but: the characters were so real. Scarlett Johansson's character was a little flatter this time around, more minor--but Thora Birch's character, Enid, was spectacular. And so was Steve Buscemi as Seymour. They didn't seem to be acting at all, but inhabiting...being. Perhaps it's easy even for successful actors to portray clinical depression. Or maybe it's because the characters are already acting, clearly putting on a front--at least Enid does--so any artificiality in the portrayal works for the character. There are one or two outsize characters, like Doug, the guy with the nunchucks in the convenience store.

Actually it's a textbook case for Alex Woloch's theories on major and minor characters, which I'm reading about now. And maybe for Stanislavsky. Maybe I should teach it...

Franzen redux

Jonathan Franzen is really taking a beating for his new memoir-ish thing, The Discomfort Zone. First Michiko Kakutani (not surprising) and now Daniel Mendelsohn in the Times Book Review. Mind you I haven't read the new book, except for the piece on birdwatching in the New Yorker, which I thought was pretty good, if not *so* interesting about his personal life. But these critics are just piling on about his self-centeredness and overall "loathesomeness." And it is clear that the essays have led them to believe that Franzen himself is loathesome, not the author persona he's created. Moreover, Kakutani and Mendelsohn both say that pretty much all the characters in The Corrections are loathesome. But here's the thing I really don't get. Mendelsohn says:

This project is, however, fatally marred in Franzen’s nonfiction by a flaw that readers of Franzen’s fiction are already likely to be familiar with, which is the author’s total lack of humor — a quality without which, as every stand-up comedian knows, obsessive self-exposure is tedious rather than entertaining or edifying. It’s hard, indeed, not to be struck by the almost willful refusal to consider the humorous — and, indeed, the amusing, the pleasurable, the beautiful — in Franzen’s work: a body of writing in which every landscape is a landfill (all three of Franzen’s novels are, in fact, filled with surreally detailed descriptions of blighted cityscapes), every season is rainy. “There was something dreadful about springtime itself,” the author recalls here, somewhat astonishingly, of a season in his childhood. But then, what else do you expect from the son of a man (now clearly revealed as the model for Al Lambert, the dyspeptic paterfamilias of “The Corrections”) whose reaction to the sight of his child enjoying himself — reading a book or playing with a friend — was the disdainful exclamation, “One continuous round of pleasure!” If anything, Franzen’s new book, whose title refers to the heavily symbolic setting on a thermostat that the author’s parents continually argued over, sheds light on the extent to which the author seems to have internalized rather than rejected his father’s awful severity and lifelong resistance to pleasure, and to have responded to this psychic squashing by embracing a clever, superior, smarty-pants persona.

OK, I get the smarty-pants, and maybe the ultimate resistance to pleasure; I'll have to think about that. But humorless? The Corrections is hilarious--not all the way through, but there are plenty of scenes that are so funny I can't quite believe it. Does Mendelsohn mean something different by humor here? He seems to be eliding a sense of humor with senses of pleasure and beauty, which I don't think are the same thing. Isn't our world full of dyspeptic humorists, and aren't they funnier than, say, the Dalai Lama?

Bartleby film

The film of Bartleby, starring Crispin Glover, is pretty great. You have to admire someone for actually trying to film Bartleby, and the story's been updated in a pretty smart manner--to a terrifying office building overlooking the freeway. The design is really interesting, sort of Jetsons / 70s. The one part I thought didn't work was when the boss (David Paymer) notices aloud that everyone in the office has started using the word "prefer," as Bartleby does. I thought that was too obvious. But Melville has his boss point the same thing out, in the same language.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0230025/

Representation / simulation / model

Pointed out by Allen Liu, in a workshop on digital technologies and humanities research: What are differences among a representation, a simulation, and a model? In literature we're used to working with the concept of "representation," while computer scientists look to simulations and models. Simulations, as Liu put it, have a "truth status" and a "predictor status" that representations don't--at least in the way we're used to thinking about them.

Seems like an important question for thinking about literary character in the digital age...

Stanislavsky

I'm reading Stanislavksy's Building a Character, which is the second book in his complete how-to-for-actors trilogy. Step one of building a character turns out to be tearing down the actor. Stanislavky breaks down everyday actions, such as walking, into minute detail, including the functions of various toes. I'm surprised he didn't have his students take an anatomy course, or maybe he did. They definitely did acrobatics. You also have to know grammar like a linguist, and take singing lessons to learn to control your voice--thoroughly understanding the mechanics of the tongue, of course. He writes from the point of view of one of his students (a young version of himself), and describes staggering home after the walking lesson. I haven't gotten to the part where the actors are rebuilt, better, stronger, faster.

Woody Allen

I can no longer hold my peace...What unbelievably bad crap Woody Allen is publishing in the New Yorker. Why is this happening? Does the New Yorker owe him something? Did he die and they discovered a cache of his unpublished juvenalia? It is the same exact shtick he was doing 40 years ago, dentistry and police procedurals, only the old stuff seemed to be funny. Or maybe it was funny to me twenty years ago and isn't now. It really must be true that he's artistically spent. I'm not sure I've seen this happen with any other contemporary artist, over such a long period of time. Most people, when they're spent, shut up. It's terrifying to see that it's actually possible to run out of talent.

From The Man Without Qualities

About the Man Without Qualities' father:

"As with many men who have achieved something of note...[his fundamental feelings about life] sprang from a deep love of what might be called the generally and suprapersonally useful, in other words, from a sincere veneration for what advances one's own interests--and this not for the sake of advancing them, but in harmony with that advancement and simultaneously with it, and also on general grounds. This is of great importance: even a pedigree dog seeks its place under the dining-table, undisturbed by kicks, and not out of doggish abjection, but from affection and fidelity. And indeed the most coldly calculating people do not have half the success in life that comes to those rightly blended personalities who are capable of feeling a really deep attachment to such persons and conditions as will advance their own interests." (p. 11, tr. Wilkins and Kaiser)

How old would you be...

How old would you be if you didn't know how old you was?
--Satchel Paige, as quoted in Zen to Go.

The book also quotes OJ Simpson, saying something like "Thinking's what gets you caught from behind." Now that makes you think.

Empathy and fiction

Suzanne Keen writes in the journal Narrative: "readers' perception of a text's fictionality plays a role in subsequent emphathetic response, by releasing readers from the obligations of self-protection through skepticism and suspicion."

In other words, perhaps we can empathize more with fictional characters than with real people--a striking idea to consider--because the former type of empathy costs us less. I haven't read enough about this yet, but presume the empathy itself is real even as the characters are not. I wonder exactly what the nature of this empathy is: do we feel a fictional character's pain more sharply? Intuitively that seems impossible, but maybe what we think of as empathy is our own fear--what if that happened to me? Or--I feel bad that this happened to X (but I don't necessarily feel bad for X, I feel bad for myself because X's life affects me). But empathy is not necessarily altruistic, so maybe substituting yourself for another is legitimate within empathy's definition. And if that's the case, it would seem easier to superimpose yourself upon a fictional character, whose mind you can usually read.

Theory of Mind

I'm doing some research for my new class this spring, which is about character. (What is a character? What makes a character seem real?) I've come across lots of great stuff on narratology. I always wondered what that was, but I'd say it's the closest thing to the analysis of creative writing processes that exists on the scholarly side of things. But also there's some really interesting work going on in cognitive psychology and literature. I'm thinking of a recent article by Lisa Zunshine that talks about Theory of Mind and the ways in which we understand intention. For instance, someone trembles (she's using an example from Mrs. Dalloway) and we "know" that's because of his excited emotions--not because he has Parkinson's, for instance. But how do we know? Or why does Woolf assume that we know? What recent studies of autism tell us is that not all people automatically make this inner/outer connection. Autistics can't read internal states from external signals, raising the question: why does everyone else? And can we make this assumption when reading or writing literature? Is a character's smile enough to tell us what we need to know?

This could be the end of Show Don't Tell as we know it.

Shotgun house

In my fiction I've been working on slowing down and observing all details in every scene, in every piece of the scene. I've thought of a metaphor that helps me do this. It's the shotgun house, the signature architectural style of New Orleans. Its key feature is that there's no hallway. The rooms are all in line, one after the other; so in order to get from the front of the house to the back, you have to go through every room. There's zero privacy but it's a great community builder, or so they say. Anyway that's what fiction writing is like. You can't just trot through the hallway to get where you want to go. You have to go through every room. That means you build every room, and see everything in every room, before you can move on to the next one. There could be such a thing as overdoing the details if you actually wrote out all this description in your final draft--but you do have to write it out at some point, and take out the extraneous stuff later.