WRB—July 20, 2024
For, though Managing Editors of the Washington Review of Books, as I see them, have little or no feeling of responsibility towards a county or a country or a career—although they may be lacking in any kind of communal solidarity—they have an immense and automatically working instinct that attaches them to the interest of managing editors.
N.B.:
The monthly D.C. Salon, on the topic “Can nonbelievers pray?”, will take place tonight. If you would like to attend, please email Chris for the details.
Links:
In Granta,
on reading novels through the lens of publishing:One of those things is autofiction, a term borrowed from the French that came into vogue among anglophone critics and writers of jacket copy over the past fifteen years, after the rise to prominence of Karl Ove Knausgaard, Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, and Teju Cole. “Just because autofiction is old, though, does not mean its mode of deployment is unchanged,” Sinykin writes. “That it has a new name ought to tip us off. It, for one, is another kind of genre play that makes a bid for a large readership under the current market dispensation.” What genre isn’t a “genre play”? Were Augustine, Margery Kempe, and James Joyce not making bids for large readerships under their market dispensations, furthering their brands? Sinykin quotes a remark of mine, from an essay in Bookforum, that autofiction “restores at least the illusion of autonomy in the hands of an authorial alter ego,” but I wasn’t talking about the publishing. I was rather drawing a contrast between characters in books of autofiction and those in systems novels. Sinykin’s theory of literature is what Guillory would call a “strong theory”: it is broad and reductive. When everything a writer does is a market play, nothing written is not a market play. And if everything we read is just a highly evolved marketing campaign, why read at all?
Two in The Drift:
Simon Leser on translating Proust:
It is a fantasy of immediacy Davis seems to subscribe to when she writes that, in Scott Moncrieff’s translation, “we do not see Proust clearly but rather through clouded glass; wrapped in scarves; lost in a forest.” Sure—but then what Proust wouldn’t be fogged up in the English language? Had we compared translations of another passage, they might have shown that Davis’ rhythms can sometimes be far less evocative than Proust’s or Scott Moncrieff’s, and that Nelson, at times (and to his occasional detriment), is clearly influenced by her choices, rather than those of the revised Scott Moncrieff. Davis may be interested in ridding us of those layers Scott Moncrieff wrapped around Marcel to keep him warm, but her interpretation of Proust’s style, which she calls “essentially natural and direct,” is no more clear-sighted than his—certainly not always an equally “natural and direct” English, as her own best work shows, in part because Proust’s supposedly plain prose is replete with understatement and intricate syntactical contortions.
Frances Lindemann on “auto-criticism”:
Three distinct but related types of identification are at play in this genre, which we might call auto-criticism: the author’s personal identification with a character, her identification with the writer at hand, and her identification of that writer’s life with her work. (This last type is also known as biographical criticism.) In exploring these varied kinds of identification as methods for reading, auto-criticism responds to an academic tradition that, broadly speaking, scorns them all. Yet the impulse toward identification and love—whereby affect replaces interpretation—ultimately reinforces the anti-intellectual notion that there is no place for critical thinking in the public sphere. In reclaiming novels and poems by way of identification, auto-criticism cheapens the very texts it claims to champion. The method of reading on display in these books not only risks a vast oversimplification of a writer’s particular literary achievement, but also comes at the expense of interpretive possibility, which lives precisely in the space of difference between a reader and a writer, and between the writer and her text. That women writers bear the special burden of this kind of criticism is not a break with tradition, but rather an extension of the long historical association of women writers with feeling instead of thought.
[And I thought Chris was being mean to the Plath girls a little while back. —Steve]
In The Hedgehog Review, Ed Simon on H. P. Lovecraft’s verse:
But when it comes to his better verse, part of what makes Lovecraft’s poetry interesting is the same quality that renders his prose so arresting—the union of an almost Victorian manner of description with a nihilistically modern sensibility. Even among the dross, there are poems that are interesting, even a few that are actually good. Most remarkable is the 1929 sonnet cycle of thirty-six poems, Fungi from Yoggeth. Working within the most venerable form of English poetry, the genre of Surrey and Wyatt, Shakespeare and Wordsworth, Lovecraft builds ingenious little fourteen-line mechanisms expressing a ghoulish sensibility. Ostensibly, the cycle recounts the journeys of a man in possession of a volume evocative of the Necronomicon which allows him to travel between parallel realities. However, as in the cosmic horror of his prose works, there is always Lovecraft’s potent anti-vision of a cold and dead universe.
[Since reading this piece I’ve been trying to fit Cthulhu into “Dover Beach.” I was also happy to see Michael Wigglesworth mentioned; I have a soft spot for his The Day of Doom: or, A Poetical Description of the Great and Last Judgment (1662) which is fun even if it isn’t very good as poetry. I also like these lines of his, from his “Prayer Unto Christ the Judge of the World”:
Thee, thee alone I’ll invocate,
For I do much abominate
To call the Muses to mine aid:
Which is th’ Unchristian use and trade
Of some that Christians would be thought,
And yet they worship worse than naught.
Oh! what a deal of Blasphemy
And Heathenish Impiety
In Christian Poets may be found,
Where Heathen gods with praise are crown’d!
Heathenish Impiety? In my Christian Poets? It’s more likely than you’d think! —Steve]
In the LOA blog, Sarah Ruden on her correspondence with Ursula Le Guin:
But then I heard from the writer Ursula K. Le Guin, whom I had revered from my teens, when I read the first three Earthsea books and the short-story collection The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975). She thought that my Aeneid in English (2008) was beautiful.
What a shockingly old-fashioned judgment, but at the same time it seemed just like her, just like the openness and sympathy that allowed her to pour out so many works full of pure, deep literary pleasure. She sent me a copy of her own latest book, Lavinia (2008), about the speechless princess over whose pending marriage Italy explodes in war in the Aeneid.
Her Lavinia is her original simple self, loyal to her difficult home, passive in the face of upheavals, later a tender wife and mother. But at the same time, she has her own thoughts, her own self-protective life; she is a worthy partner in conversation with the time-traveling Vergil, who in historical reality elected to represent her in a depressingly painterly way.
In Engelsberg Ideas, Muriel Zagha on the cathedrals of Paris and Rouen in French art:
In a pivotal chapter, the cathedral appears as the setting of Emma Bovary’s disastrous decision to engage in a liaison with Léon Dupuis, a notary’s clerk. Emma and Léon, who had met before and engaged in a tentative romance, have met again by chance at the theater in Rouen with Emma’s husband in attendance, and later arranged to meet alone in the cathedral. The two pages that follow are wonderfully strange. Léon is a man of prosaic sensibility who, while waiting impatiently for Emma, examines a “blue-stained window representing boatmen carrying baskets” and carefully counts “the scales of the fishes and the buttonholes of the doublets” in the religious scene. But—and this unfortunately confirms how compatible the two lovers are in their delusions—he also experiences the sort of feverish hallucination that is typical of Emma herself, imagining her arrival as: “the church as a huge boudoir spread around her; the arches bent down to gather in the shade the confession of her love; the windows shone resplendent to illumine her face, and the censers would burn that she might appear like an angel amid the fumes of the sweet-smelling odors.” When she does appear, Emma, clinging to “her expiring virtue,” hands Léon a letter of renunciation and—at once comically and tragically—attempts to pray for succor in the chapel of the Virgin, making every effort to connect sensorially with the atmosphere of the cathedral, but to no avail. The couple—an exasperated Léon and a passively resistant Emma—are led around the cathedral by an overbearing beadle who points out the many beauties of the church in a well-worn commentary of crushing banality.
[I’ve said it before, but a lot of the greatest works of art don’t get credit for being the funniest works of art. And Flaubert, who loves piling up seemingly useless details, is always attentive to their incongruities. —Steve]
In our sister publication across the pond, Alexandra Reza on one of those many little magazines lost to history:
Mensagem (“Message”), whose last edition appeared sixty years ago, in July 1964, was published by students at the Casa dos Estudantes do Império, a center set up in 1944 by the Portuguese government for students from the colonies coming to university in Lisbon. It occupied a building in the Saldanha area of central Lisbon, with a library, a canteen, a common room and an infirmary. Students met there, ate there and held events. At first the Portuguese state provided funding for activities and the journal was distributed for free, printed in black and white on thin paper. For now, “this is nothing more than a fortnightly bulletin,” the first editorial opened in 1948, but “we want to publish a magazine, a real magazine, perfect in form and content, that brings the intellectual message of its students to the empire.” It was an age of reviews, and to have one was to be part of the times. Around the decolonising world, magazines were being launched, fluttering into life, sometimes disappearing after a couple of issues.
[“Perfect in form and content” is admirable. —Steve]
In The Believer, Elisa Gabbert on fear and games:
Looked at in Suits’ terms, watching a scary movie is a kind of game. It’s a way of taking on unnecessary fear. There is, for many people, some pleasure in the fear. We like the fear itself—the heightened physical arousal. But we also feel pleasure when we overcome the fear—by finishing the movie and going to sleep, hopefully not having nightmares forever. Haunted houses and roller coasters are also forms of games. A roller coaster isn’t just formless fun, if such a thing exists; it’s a kind of game, a finite engagement with fear, which offers both the pleasure of playing and the pleasure of winning. I like this kind of game—I like allowing myself to feel just enough fear that I know I can overcome it. The ski lift, the ropes course, those sheer-drop rides—for me those were too much fear, too much trembling, to be fun. I’m not Philippe Petit, who once said of his stunt at the World Trade Center, “When I see three oranges, I juggle; when I see two towers, I walk!” He saw those buildings, at that time the tallest in the world, and the gaping void between them, as a game he could win.
Reviews:
In our sister publication on the Hudson, Anna Leszkiewicz reviews Dodie Smith’s first novel (I Capture the Castle, 1948):
Smith’s anxieties about the literary status of her book were not incidental to its narrative. This is a book about literature, asking what makes a work “literary” rather than middlebrow or, God forbid, pretentious. As the critic Victoria Stewart has noted, two types of writing are set against each other in I Capture the Castle: the dutiful realism of Cassandra’s diary, with its conventionally “feminine” concerns (family relationships, domestic problems, romance, the private emotions of a seventeen-year-old girl), and her father’s high modernism, which mixes genres (“fiction, philosophy and poetry”) and undertakes experiments like a “ladder chapter . . . printed so that it actually looks like a ladder.” James Mortmain is modeled on Joyce: he is one of “the forerunners of post-war literature . . . a link in the chain of writers who have been obsessed by form.” It has been “a good twelve years” since he was last published, meaning that Jacob’s Wrestling would have appeared around the same time as Ulysses. Now he spends hours absorbed in middlebrow culture—children’s stories, detective novels, comics, and crosswords—and mutters to himself about literary form: “Design, deduction, reconstruction—symbol—pattern and problem—search for ever unfolding—enigma eternal.”
N.B. (cont.):
“Anchovies Are Always a Good Idea” [True. —Steve]
People are doodling.
The aesthetics of Costco.
A guide to constructing Roman capital letters.
Orion is seeking pitches about mushrooms.
New issues:
The Drift Issue 13 [As linked to above.]
Granta 168: Significant Other [As linked to above. Don’t miss James Pogue on gold mining in Mauritania. —Steve]
Local:
Former DCist staff are working to launch the 51st, a worker-run newsroom with a similar aim.
The National Museum of Asian Art will show July Rhapsody (2002) on Sunday, July 21 at 2 p.m.
Poem:
“Love Poem with Dead Leaves & Color” by Esther Ra
with a line from Jane Eyre
All of my plants kept dying, so I started drying
them out instead, what bright scraps of color
and green-flushed shoot could be preserved.
My sister laughed: The plant serial killer
of Bonum Street—behold, her house
full of skeletons! But even petrified,
tenderness is better than nothing at all.
Than birds with cold tongues sliding
out of their beaks. Or love poems over
an axed corpse. Things happen to make us
defensive: I crossed my arms over my head
and made a threshold, a door, and smiled
enough to keep everyone out. To pretend
to be well-adjusted. But the truth is
I would always rather be happy than
dignified. Rather held than held
in awe. I first learned the language
of love from the rush of spilled ink
on sheared trees: no wonder I flinch
at your touch. Yet now I am here,
in my house full of frozen leaves and flowers,
so brittle they splinter in my fingers,
scatter fragments on carpet and hair.
I would rather be touched than in terror.
Would be pleased to crumble in your arms.
You kept bringing me ham & seaweed
& ginger, bananas & tulips & cake,
& because love is not my first language
I cried out in distress, Does this mean
you like me? Does this mean you care?
And you bowled my face
in the width of your hands, laughing,
Yes. Very much. Look around you.
Isn’t it obvious I do?
[This is from the May 2023 issue of Abandon Journal. —Julia]
Upcoming books:
Hogarth | July 23
Liars
by Sarah Manguso
From the publisher: When Jane, an aspiring writer, meets filmmaker John Bridges, they both want the same things: to be in love, to live a successful, creative life, and to be happy. When they marry, Jane believes she has found everything she was looking for, including—a few years later—all the attendant joys and labors of motherhood. But it’s not long until Jane finds herself subsumed by John’s ambitions, whims, and ego; in short, she becomes a wife.
As Jane’s career flourishes, their marriage starts to falter. Throughout the upheavals of family life, Jane tries to hold it all together. That is, until John leaves her.
Liars is a tour de force of wit and rage, telling the blistering story of a marriage as it burns to the ground, and of a woman rising inexorably from its ashes.
What we’re reading:
Steve finished reading The Good Soldier. [What a fantastic novel. I need to sit with it for a while, but I can say now that it sharpened my thinking on the “unreliable narrator.” I am sympathetic to Taylor’s view that he is “fundamentally unable to distinguish between [an unreliable narrator] and the rest of narrative art and indeed life itself.” But his framing of what unreliable narrators are, which is more or less the usual one—“This story was created by omission and selection and motivated by the character’s secret agenda”—does not cover the narrator of The Good Soldier. There is obviously something wrong with the way he is telling the story, and yet it is impossible to say why, what his motivation is, or if he even has one. He may be, as his narration suggests, incredibly naive, uninquisitive, and silly, which would explain his stunning lack of perception and consistent inability to give accounts of characters’ motivations that match their behavior. Or this may be the pose of an adept manipulator covering up his tracks. You can read various articles in scholarly journals arguing for each side; right now I find it impossible to come down on one or the other. But the question helps pull apart two different considerations that might make a narrator “unreliable.” The first is “to what extent is the narrator trying to deceive the reader?” (Even if I basically agree with Taylor that this is a continuum on which all human storytelling can be placed.) And the second is “to what extent is the narrator deceived about what happened in the story?” (This too is a continuum, and narrators are deceived for all kinds of reasons; they could be poor judges of human character and situations, lack crucial information, deceive themselves about the morality of their actions, be insane, and so on.) Keeping in mind that these are separate questions should help to avoid the oversimplification Taylor identifies, which ends up saying nothing at all. —Steve]
Critical notes:
In
, Anthony Domestico reviews Rachel Cusk’s new book (Parade, June) [The Upcoming book in WRB—June 12, 2024; we linked to earlier reviews in WRB—June 15, 2024, WRB—June 22, 2024, and WRB—June 26, 2024.]:For Cusk, the task of the artist isn’t entertainment but truth. (The word appears over two dozen times in Parade.) And so she has set out to excise from her fiction all that she sees as distracting from truth: neatly shaped plots; clearly differentiated characters; stylistic virtuosity. Scrupulousness is her aesthetic and ethical ideal, writing a practice through which the self is disciplined and controlled. Cusk has described “point of view” as not just a “narrative technique” but how we “put the subjective self to the test of objectivity.” Writing is an effort to “exteriorize sensibility,” give it the hardness of fact.
- on male vulnerability in fiction:
But I suspect a big reason why the work Tobin is calling for doesn’t exist as much as we’d like it to is because many in the literary fiction world are asking that men, and particularly straight men, become more vulnerable, but also, at the same time, express that vulnerability in a palatable way.
They’re asking that we adhere to goal posts and rules that are constantly shifting beneath our feet, which is quite a dance to tell someone to pull off while also asking them to bleed their heart out, too.
[Cards on the table: I have the same esteem for Bukowski and Kerouac that I do for a man who stubs his toe and yells “Ouch!” That said, I find it interesting that Boryga repeatedly takes “white, upper class women (the women who make up the large majority of editors, agents, and readers)” to task for their assumptions, but it never occurs to him to question their assumption that “vulnerability” is inherently a desirable characteristic of literature. He is already fighting on their terrain, trying to show them that works and writers they reject actually have the vulnerability they desire. I admit (thank you Julia) that Boryga is writing specifically about why such works aren’t published, and maybe he has other ideas about what makes them good. But, if he is willing to make a sweeping and important accusation like “publishers don’t understand men,” he should also be willing to make another sweeping and important accusation like “publishers don’t understand literature” (which would also affect what gets published). He never does—I can only conclude that he thinks they do understand the importance of vulnerability and are merely misled in this case by their prejudice against certain male attitudes. I, personally, would rather defend a work on the grounds of artistic merit. —Steve]
- on Charles Taylor’s new book (Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment, May):
Yet, while we can easily see in the Romantics influential forerunners of our contemporary obsession with personal subjectivity, Taylor’s account also challenges us to inhabit their aesthetic optimism. He wants us, I take it, to be open to the possibility that even after the collapse of a shared concept of the cosmos, artistic experience of the sublime is evidence not just of the profundity of our own souls but of the strength and depth of some force, even as we approach, but can never reach, the full expression of what it is.
[We linked to earlier reviews in WRB—May 29, 2024, WRB—June 19, 2024, and WRB—July 6, 2024 and an excerpt in WRB—June 29, 2024.]
- on Taylor Swift and Emily Dickinson:
Does Taylor’s outsized fame end up performing the same function for her as Emily Dickinson’s privacy—that is, it conceals her from others, removes her from the world, makes any contact happen strictly on her terms? That thought felt very stupid when it first occurred to me but the more I think about it the more I wonder if at an extreme level fame is almost a way of hiding. It’s the people in the middle, where she used to be, who have to hustle, sign brand deals, do the interview circuit. Taylor has managed to withdraw almost entirely into her art.
[These examples point to a better understanding of the use of life in creating art than “vulnerability.” —Steve]