I have been assured by a very knowing New Yorker of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy Washingtonian well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasee, or a ragoust.
Links:
In The Hedgehog Review, Larry Lockridge speculates about Shakespeare’s possible suicide:
Shakespeare’s plays are full of suicides, some noble, others not very—thirteen or more, depending on how you count and whether Hamlet makes the cut. But George doesn’t bother citing these or the great dark soliloquies as evidence, silently acknowledging that literal extrapolations from the larger actions of the plays to the author’s life are usually circular and presumptuous. Rather, he dwells on a pervasive sensibility in life and work regarding sex and ignores the current celebration of a Shakespearean sexual plasticity. After all, Shakespeare’s plays are full of cuckolds, sexually abused women, and dirty language. Its significance debated, he left that second-best bed to Anne. The most powerful words of sex nausea ever written are “Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame / Is lust in action.” George concludes that the playwright was “fucked up in his sexuality. Of course depressed people forget they have any. They kill themselves.”
[“For in that sleep of death what dreams may come” comes from the same playwright who in Richard III gave Clarence a dream in which he dies and is carried off to hell. And the dream maintains its power to terrify him after he wakes up because he knows he is guilty of the crimes for which he is punished in his dream. —Steve]
In The New Statesman, an essay adapted from a talk Deborah Levy gave about the novel:
Writing and reading, like all relationships, require solitude, attention and time, but more provocatively, as Italo Calvino suggests, when we begin to read a novel for the first time, it involves “confronting something and not quite knowing yet what it is.” I believe this kind of confrontation is worth defending.
It is sometimes hard to nail why a novel connects with us. After all, if we could entirely explain this away it probably would not still be so lively within us. As Iris Murdoch suggested in her essay collection Existentialists and Mystics: “To be a human being is to know more than one can prove, to conceive of a reality which goes ‘beyond the facts.’”
If I write to find out something I don’t know, I have come to believe that the unconscious of the novel does know. It has gone beyond the facts and is adjusting the headlights for the long drive ahead.
A novel can drill into the facts of lived experience and come out the other side to somewhere the author never expected to land. If it works out, and sometimes it doesn’t, readers will stand alongside her to gaze at the view. Perhaps this is the only mystery about writing novels, which mostly requires stamina.
In Minor Literature[s], Kiana Rezakhanlou on the quarterlife crisis:
(Veritas est) adaequatio rei et intellectus. The understanding of the knower must be adequate to the thing to be known. Or must it? Whether the common medieval maxim, or the specific quotation from Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, the general idea of the adaequatio principle is that “nothing can be known without there being an appropriate ‘instrument’ in the makeup of the knower,” as E. F. Schumacher puts it, using the example of Beethoven’s musical talents: the gulf between my musical ability and Beethoven’s lies not in the instrument of the ear, both of which can hear just fine, but in his mind over mine in appreciating a piece of music. My mind would be inadequate in capturing a symphony, and so my intellectual powers fall short of the thing known, of music. If we extend this argument, that something (currently) inaccessible does not necessarily have no existence at all, the logic behind the sufferings of a Quarterlifer is that we assume an enjoyable (both stable and meaningful) life is not possible, because we lack the mental adaequatio to actualise it. That’s fine in theory, but as Doyle Byock’s diverse yet troubled cohort shows us, inadaequatio plagues all but the best of us in Quarterlife. It seems that we can only hope that, instead of increasing our anxieties, as Rilke’s Elegies suggest, time will sharpen our adequacy for the “integration” of ambition, desire, and practice. One wonders then, what the Quarterlifer is to do in the interim, when “all still lies ahead of [us].”
[The solution to a quarterlife crisis is, of course, to become the managing editor of an email newsletter. —Steve]
In our sister publication in Hollywood, Akanksha Singh interviews Jokha Alharthi about her latest novel (Silken Gazelles, translated by Marilyn Booth, August):
As a reader, it disturbs me to see every single detail of a story narrated. Sometimes, I really enjoy a novel—the scenes, the details—but still don’t like the fact that there is very little left to my own imagination. Thus, I like to leave a space for my reader to think and imagine what I have not written about. I like to emphasize some details, but not all the details. Also, this unspoken space opens the door for interpretation: readers can have their own versions of what has happened. Of course, I tend to leave hints and signs to guide them through my text. I just do not want to hold their hand all the way. One lets go at a certain point.
As a reader of English literature myself, I understand perfectly what you mean. Authors like Philip Roth or Barbara Kingsolver amaze me with their ability to narrate scenes in great detail, but this is simply not in my style of writing. Some readers have said that they think of my novels as puzzles or games. I didn’t mean for them to be puzzles, exactly. I just invite my reader to color in the white space. Some characters are felt most in their absence, and this is true of other novels too, however elaborate or pared-back the narrative. So I suppose we as readers are always coloring in, in some way.
Reviews:
In our sister publication Down Under, Christian R. Gelder reviews two books by psychoanalysts (Miss-ing: Psychoanalysis 2.0, by Bruce Fink, May; and Is It Ever Just Sex?, by Darian Leader, 2023):
One reason that crossed my mind as to why psychoanalysis seems so untimely, so out of place in our therapy-positive culture, is that it can sometimes be just as much an account of why the therapeutic encounter is liable to fail than a robust theory of why it works. At first glance, its key concepts—the unconscious, transference, resistance, repetition compulsion, defence mechanisms, screen memories—are all explanatory mechanisms that aim to account for why people who undergo therapy find it so difficult to change, why the therapeutic encounter is at risk of faltering or stumbling at a particular moment, why the relation between therapist and patient can entrench certain behaviours rather than dislodge them. Psychoanalysis is a fundamentally incredulous activity and seeks to disrupt even the sturdiest narratives we tell ourselves about ourselves. As Lacan remarked, “[t]he basic thing about analysis is that people finally realize that they’ve been talking nonsense at full volume for years.” For these and other reasons, as I once heard an esteemed analyst say, there is no reason why it has to survive—and indeed, given our current culture’s obsession with measuring every aspect of every second of every day, the future institutional reproduction of psychoanalysis appears less assured than ever.
[We linked to an earlier review of Is It Ever Just Sex? in WRB—Dec. 13, 2023. I want to take this opportunity to play a WRB greatest hit and use the phrase “the illegibility of desire.” —Steve]
In The Lamp, Peter Howarth reviews a new selection of William Morris’ work (William Morris: Selected Writings, edited by Ingrid Hanson, August):
But the worst fate an avant-garde can suffer is to become a marker of refined taste for the upper middle classes. If it feels jarring to call Morris an avant-gardist, it is because the war stayed within the poems and the socialist agitation, leaving the tapestries and stained glass sumptuous and desirable. Morris did not do the wrenching jolts of modernism, and as a decorative artist could only make money by at the same time furnishing the houses of the wealthy, an irony which sometimes drove him to fury. When his patron Isaac Lowthian Bell asked him why he was stamping round Bell’s new Arts and Crafts mansion, Rounton Grange, in a rage, Morris turned on him like a wild animal, saying, “It is only that I spend my life ministering to the swinish luxury of the rich.” Despite Morris’ mission to bring back a craft society where “all people shared in art,” the workers at his Merton factory could still never have afforded the wallpapers he was selling to pay their above-average wages. To point out the irony, the artist David Mabb has recently remade some of Morris’ wallpapers, replacing the flower pistils with the kopecks and beer bottle caps of Alexander Rodchenko, the Constructivist who used these common objects as part of his public designs. But the irony cuts both ways: Mabb’s own protest now lies within the realm of high art, protected in the print room of the Tate Gallery, and you cannot buy it in rolls from Home Depot.
[Porcine insults really should make a comeback. And becoming a marker of refined taste for the upper middle classes eventually happened even to the wrenching jolts of modernism. —Steve]
In Compact, Valerie Stivers reviews a book on the twentieth-century novel (Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel, by Edwin Frank, November 19) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Nov. 16, 2024; we linked to an excerpt in WRB—Sept. 25, 2024 and earlier reviews in WRB—Nov. 20, 2024 and WRB—Nov. 27, 2024.]:
But it has patchwork results; I found it sometimes illuminating, sometimes deadening, depending on how much I already knew about the authors, or how tired I was of their particular innovation. That Colette and Rudyard Kipling expanded the definition of who was allowed to speak—the onset of identity fiction—is surely true, but it’s the least interesting thing about them. In some cases, particularly in the book’s early chapters, a quotation Frank mentions from Robert Musil seemed to apply: “A thing wholly comprehended instantly loses its bulk and melts down into a concept.” Frank also has a tendency toward dad jokes—Wells “sees no difference between the best people and the beast people”; America, in Kafka’s Amerika, is “all business and busyness”—that’s lovable, but not equal to the glories of world literature.
In 4Columns, Ania Szremski reviews translations of the first two volumes of Solvej Balle’s septology (On the Calculation of Volume, Book I and II, translated by Barbara J. Haveland, November):
The first volume is, ultimately, a love story, the story of Tara and Thomas, her mounting despair at their inevitable separation, a separation caused by this uncanny repetition of time. Their love was never heightened by distance—it has always made them uncomfortable, to the point that they avoid long-distance phone calls when Tara travels to acquire books, “because such conversations seem to increase the distance between us,” Tara writes. “The conversation lapses imperceptibly into a kind of audio link, a muted love mumble.” Their love, microscopic in nature, depends on proximity and repetition. “For us it has always been about the days together, day after day, night after night, again and again. . . . There are no precipices or distances in our relationship. It is something else, a sort of cellular vertigo.”
N.B.:
“The New Business of Breakups” [I think the WRB should get in on this. Tell all your friends suffering from broken hearts that the key to healing can be found by reading this newsletter. If the article is anything to go by, this will really drive subscriptions. —Steve]
A tour of Knausgaard’s library.
The people crusading against headlights being too bright.
Do plants know math? [Yes. —Steve]
- on fossilized words and phrases at Christmas. [My favorite Christmas hymn is “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” and if recent translations of Beowulf are any indication we should replace the first word with “Bro!” —Steve]
New issues:
The Dial Issue 23: Deadlines
The Lamp Issue 26 | Christmas 2024 [As linked to above.]
Poem:
“Woods in Winter” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
When winter winds are piercing chill,
And through the hawthorn blows the gale,
With solemn feet I tread the hill,
That overbrows the lonely vale.O’er the bare upland, and away
Through the long reach of desert woods,
The embracing sunbeams chastely play,
And gladden these deep solitudes.Where, twisted round the barren oak,
The summer vine in beauty clung,
And summer winds the stillness broke,
The crystal icicle is hung.Where, from their frozen urns, mute springs
Pour out the river’s gradual tide,
Shrilly the skater's iron rings,
And voices fill the woodland side.Alas! how changed from the fair scene,
When birds sang out their mellow lay,
And winds were soft, and woods were green,
And the song ceased not with the day!But still wild music is abroad,
Pale, desert woods! within your crowd;
And gathering winds, in hoarse accord,
Amid the vocal reeds pipe loud.Chill airs and wintry winds! my ear
Has grown familiar with your song;
I hear it in the opening year,
I listen, and it cheers me long.
[While I’m not an avid or particularly athletic hiker, I am fond of going for a stroll in the woods while my children toddle ahead and then fall behind, watching Daddy Long Legs creep along and filling their pockets with rocks and acorns. Spring and autumn are the most gentle times of year for it. In summer sometimes I feel it’s too humid to possibly carry a baby up a hill, and in the winter I often shrink from the bulk of many layers and heavy boots and mittens that will not stay on. I do love and miss adventuring out on my own on winter days. My parents’ house is perched atop a hill, backed by a forest and overlooking rolling hills of agricultural land. When it snows deeply, you can crunch out to the edge of the lawn. The wind scrapes across the top of the snow, and the rasping of the ice crystals over the hill is as close I've ever come to the desert.
I like how this poem holds up a winter’s day and slowly turns it over. The grim trudging in the first verse gives way to grudging admittance of the beauty of the sun-dappled snow. The memories of summer are painful; gone are the birds and leaves. And yet there is something musical in the wind. Beauty is found. Maybe not so easily, but for the poet who braves the weather there is great reward. —Grace]
Upcoming books:
New Directions | December 10
The Beggar Student
by Osamu Dazai, translated by Sam Bett
From the publisher: A fictional writer in his thirties named Osamu Dazai has just mailed his publisher an awful manuscript, filling him with dread and shame. Wandering along a river in a nearby park in suburban Tokyo, he meets a high-school dropout and the two get into an intellectual spat. Eventually, Dazai finds himself agreeing to perform in the boy’s place that very night as the live narrator of a film screening . . .
So begins the madcap adventure of The Beggar Student, where there is glamor in destitution, and intellectual one-upmanship reveals glimmers of truth. Replete with settings incorporated into the popular anime Bungo Stray Dogs and with echoes of No Longer Human, this biting novella captures the infamous Japanese writer at his mordant best.
Also out Tuesday:
HarperVia: No Place to Bury the Dead by Karina Sainz Borgo, translated by Elizabeth Bryer
What we’re reading:
Steve read a little more of Bouvard and Pécuchet.
Critical notes:
- on prose style:
What we call stylish comes from the aesthetic movement: from the twin sources of Flaubert and Wilde flow the whole river of modern stylish writing. This is why, when I asked Claude, and asked on Notes and Twitter, almost all the answers I got about who were the top five English prose stylists named twentieth century authors. Orwell Didion, Waugh, Wodehouse, Nabokov, and so on.
There is something that unifies these writers, and so many more, some common assumption that style means polished, lapidary, whether plain or ornate. Elegance, pared to directness; steel painted as wood; the rococo in plain dress. Indeed, the old distinction between plain and ornate styles has perhaps come to be the new distinction of simple or complex, elegant or purple. It is now unstylish to use too many commas, to write with grandiloquence, or to allow sentences to uncoil like tangled rope. All of those things can be part of a style, though, which is why Martin Amis is so widely praised among modern writers.
[If forced to determine which writers from before the middle of the nineteenth century were “stylish,” I would say that those in the tradition of Seneca and Tacitus were, and those in the tradition of Cicero were not. Looking for something else on the subject I stumbled on this article from a half-century ago which suggests that the “stylish” writers of the eighteenth century should be used as models for student writing, which is worth your time even if it dismisses the better Ciceronians a bit too quickly for my liking. —Steve]
- Moul on Richard Lovelace’s “La Bella Bona-Roba”:
In fact, everything in this third stanza is working against the rest of the poem, it is a kind of counterpoint or foil: the embracing of leanness (slimness and also, perhaps, a sort of dependability) rather than “fat joys”; marriage rather than (possibly paid for) sex; husbandry rather than hunting; repairing a side rather than cutting it open. The poem seems to acknowledge the truth of this teaching (“Sure it is meant,” where meant probably means intended for, designed for), only to turn away from it. It’s almost as if it’s the mention of the rib—which, after all, the poet finds he doesn’t care that much about getting back—that reminds him of what does excite him: opening up other bodies, to check the flesh on their bones.
Eliot:
White bodies naked on the low damp ground
And bones cast in a little low dry garret,
Rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year.
In The Point,
and discuss (in three parts) the merits of Substack. Rothfeld:And of course, blogging platforms and other sorts of social media have transformed the literary landscape in just about every way—far too many to catalog. New micro-genres (the meme, the tweet) emerge daily; new vocabularies and sensibilities are forever appearing, then vanishing. The conditions of production have changed, too, probably irrevocably and mostly for the worse. Now that everyone can self-publish, imprints are competing with a deluge of free content; now that podcasts and videos are the preferred mediums of so many erstwhile readers, the market for literary fiction is shrinking. Some of these developments are positive (much of the language that has coagulated online is genuinely innovative, and I’m glad that low costs of production have enabled the appearance of a number of excellent new literary magazines). Old scold that I am, however, I think most of them are bad (I’m not convinced that the democratization of culture has been entirely salutary for the culture in question, and I’m certain that outsourcing curation to algorithms is a bad idea). But whether the internet has been good or bad for literature on the whole, I don’t see what Substack offers that digital culture was not already offering.
[At some point I’m going to save myself a bunch of time and replace all my editorial comments with “Actually nothing is new.” But then saying that nothing is new isn’t new, and we’re back at the beginning. —Steve]