A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures a Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The Managing Editor would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the Managing Editor can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
N.B.:
Save the Date: The next WRB Presents will be on November 12 at Sudhouse D.C., featuring Ralph Hubbell, Johannes Lichtman, Mikra Namani, and Danuta Hinc.
Next month’s salon will meet on the evening of November 30 to discuss the topic, “Is order more important than justice?” If you would like to attend, please please email Chris for the details.
Links:
In NLR, the first chapter of Fredric Jameson’s unfinished first volume of The Poetics of Social Forms, which deals with agon in the Iliad:
The endless hours of the oral recital, however, cannot be so easily unified, in memory or thematically: the latter in any case depends on the former, the repetition of the motif will be inscribed on some larger “faculty,” one scarcely imaginable for literate peoples, as Parry and McLuhan have taught us. The modernizing temptation, faced with this enormous textual experience, will be to organize it in one of two anachronistic ways: genre and psychology, the older fixed forms and the psychological interiority of the novelistic that replaces them: two distinct layers of post-Homeric tradition overlapping and contaminating one another. These two modes from different moments and structures will generate two distinct kinds of interpretation; the psychological will tend to project readings which, organized around the individual subject, tend towards the moral lesson: the maturation of Achilleus, his development into that ethical being who joins with Priam in communion and pardon (a reading we have seen to be utterly erroneous and inconsistent with the text itself). The emphasis on the ethical and its development, however, will inevitably find its formal expression in the Bildungsroman, a paradigm that begins to organize the novel and the novelistic as soon as that non-generic reading emerges from the breakdown of the older genres. These shadowy and larval organizations are what we seek to strip away (or subtract) from the Iliad in order to draw closer to its raw materials and building blocks: mindful at the same time of the counterforce with which the dactylic hexameter tirelessly imposes another rhythm on the repetitive or segmentary structure of the agons as they replicate one another. History and structure are the two poles of this material, but they can only be detected as forces and not in any immediate representation.
The new issue of NLR also has an obituary of Jameson by Perry Anderson.
In The New Statesman, Jude Rogers on Kraftwerk:
[“Autobahn”] perfectly captures Kraftwerk’s compelling mix of blissful, nursery-rhyme naïveté and crackling unease. The opening tune glistens with possibility, full of light and air. The central section is different, with synthesized percussion suggestive of wheels speeding on tarmac, then single-note stabs and doppler-like sirens bringing punctures of tension.
The relationship between the human and the machine lay at the heart of Kraftwerk’s work ever after. Their next album, 1975’s Radio-Activity, explored the potential of radio waves for communication and contamination. Trans-Europe Express (1977) had tracks about mannequins coming to life (“Showroom Dummies”) and a borderless continent (“Europe Endless”), at a time when the Iron Curtain still hung heavily. Many of their subjects could have come from a child’s toy chest (trains, robots, bicycles), but Kraftwerk were returning to an early sense of awe in their work, trying to renew their identity. “We certainly represent the generation with no fathers,” Hütter told the NME in 1981, referring to the legacy of the Second World War in their country. “It was very hard to accept at first, [but] it is also in some ways encouraging because it gives you possibilities of doing new things.”
[I wonder if Francis Ford Coppola is a fan of Kraftwerk. —Steve]
Reviews:
Two in our sister publication across the pond:
Jenny Turner reviews two by Gillian Rose (Love’s Work, 1995, March; Marxist Modernism: Introductory Lectures on Frankfurt School Critical Theory, edited by Robert Lucas Scott and James Gordon Finlayson, September):
Love’s Work has now been published as a Penguin Modern Classic, with an introduction by Madeleine Pulman-Jones, a poet, linguist and translator from Russian, Polish and Yiddish. In 2020 she was diagnosed with Stage IV Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, and writes of cancer treatment as one more dull, hard language to be attended to and brought to life: “I began to wonder whether the language of cancer—the words that wind themselves in and out of one’s veins like chemicals—is a dialect of a more important language: love.” Maybe, and it’s neither avoidable nor a bad thing that in the ever more precisely targeted publishing market, Love’s Work now stands as a classic memoir of mortal illness. But I was dismayed to see Pulman-Jones write that Rose “was committed to the agon—the creativity—of writing.” “Creativity”—eugh—was not at all a Gillian thing. What I haven’t said about her but should for truthfulness is that she could be harsh with students she felt weren’t trying. I totally adored her, as must be obvious, but even now, thinking about her occasional harshness makes me wince.
[We linked to an excerpt from Marxist Modernism in WRB—Aug. 10, 2024.]
Julian Barnes reviews a book about wine in the First World War (A Thirst for Wine and War: The Intoxication of French Soldiers on the Western Front, by Adam D. Zientek, February):
At this time, the French “drank substantially more than any other people in the world,” according to Adam Zientek’s A Thirst for Wine and War. But whereas abstinence movements in Britain put the “total” in teetotalism—you were dry or wet, and nothing in between—the French made a very large exception in the form of wine. According to both folklore and the medico-scientific thinking of the time, wine was in and of itself healthy, indeed nutritious; it had “anti-microbial” properties and filled the drinker with useful sugars as well as putting a smile on the face and a song in the heart. One “reformer” suggested that as long as men drank in moderation—no more than four liters a day—“wine was no more harmful, and markedly more beneficial, than bread.” And whereas distilled alcohol came from some soulless factory, wine arose from the very soil of France (except for benighted northern and western parts where they drank beer and cider); so the map of France and the map of wine were co-extensive. Wine-drinking, in short, was not just enjoyable, but patriotic. And the argument was pushed even further. If you drank wine instead of industrial spirits, this actually prevented you from becoming an alcoholic. Armand Gautier, an eminent biochemist, proposed that wine’s hygienic properties “protected men from illnesses such as bronchitis, pneumonia, diarrhea, rheumatism, frostbite, and, of course, alcoholism.”
[It puts our “maybe red wine is good for the heart in moderation” to shame that the French were explaining that, as long as you have less than a gallon of wine a day, it’s better than eating bread. What beautiful lunatics. I, though, come from a benighted part of America where apples grow and not grapes, so I know that actually it’s cider which has near-magical health benefits. —Steve]
Two in our sister publication on the Hudson:
Ruth Bernard Yeazell reviews a book about John Singer Sargent and one of his patrons (Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers, by Jean Strouse, November 19):
The picture shows the two women boldly striding forward, Ena’s arm wrapped around Betty’s waist, their low-cut gowns a vivid juxtaposition of gleaming ivory and crimson that simultaneously heightens and reverses the contrast between the rosy-cheeked older sister and her paler sibling. When Ena and Betty, Daughters of Asher and Mrs Wertheimer (1901) took its turn at the Royal Academy, The Times pronounced it “instinct with life,” a verdict that even Roger Fry, who typically had no use for Sargent, managed to echo when he followed up his qualified praise of the picture—“in its way a masterpiece”—by remarking on its subject: “The poses of the figures are full of spontaneity and verve, and the contrast between the leaning figure of the younger girl and the almost exaggerated robustness of her sister is entirely felicitous.” As Strouse pointedly observes, “the lacy strap sliding off [Ena’s] right shoulder summons the ghost of Madame X,” whose similarly placed strap had precipitated a minor scandal at the Paris Salon almost two decades earlier. But rather than “the icy artifice” of that “professional beauty,” with her “powdered pallor, theatrical sexuality, and air of arriviste hauteur . . . these young women are warm, natural, radiantly alive.” Unlike that solitary beauty, one might add, they face the viewer directly, and what they are proudly putting on display is also their affection for each other.
[Every once in a while the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston will pull together a Sargent exhibit (on top of all the Sargent they already have); you really owe it to yourself to go if you can. I have a distinct memory of being made to stop moving and look by the portrait of Mrs. Charles E. Inches (1887). —Steve]
Tim Parks reviews a biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Life of the Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne, by Dale Salwak, 2022):
On numerous occasions Salwak seeks to pin down the “confidential relation” Hawthorne establishes with his readers. Turner notes the author’s remark that his fiction would fail “unless the speaker stand in some true relation with his audience,” one that nevertheless allows him to “keep the inmost Me behind its veil.” To achieve this balancing act, Hawthorne developed a distinctive style in which words of high, often archaic register are deployed in elaborate syntax teeming with relative clauses but delivered in a friendly, self-deprecating speaking voice, one always ready to report the outlandish imaginings of the superstitious community yet at the same time firmly grounded in modern skepticism. Ideas are introduced and dismissed in a phrase or two, yet they remain as indicators of what people are inclined to believe or are even granted a certain psychological perspicacity. So we hear that “the vulgar” with their penchant for “grotesque horror” claimed that the scarlet letter was “red-hot with infernal fire, and could be seen glowing all alight, whenever Hester Prynne walked abroad in the night-time.” Absurd. Yet the letter “seared Hester’s bosom so deeply,” the narrator assures us, that there was perhaps more truth in this rumor than “our modern incredulity may be inclined to admit.” Readers are drawn into a reassuring complicity precisely as they are systematically disoriented. It is a style, as Wineapple puts it, of almost “voluptuous” insight and “exquisite ambiguity.”
In Prospect, Jeremy Noel-Tod reviews a new collection of Eliot’s prose (T. S. Eliot: The Collected Prose, in four volumes, August):
The Eliot I would spotlight is the waspishly honest critic of contemporary letters. This is where The Collected Prose delights: as a clean, uncluttered expanse to dip into for page after page of pithy judgment. The poet kept a professional eye, for example, on the literary pretensions of politicians, remarking in 1916 that the philosophy of the former prime minister Arthur Balfour was a kind of “Tennysonian naturalism”—which was not intended as a compliment. (A couple of years later, Eliot would observe that Tennyson had “a large, dull brain like a farmhouse clock.”) In the oratorical prose of Winston Churchill, meanwhile, he heard “the author pause for the invariable burst of hand-clapping.”
Eliot disliked crowd-pleasingly “poetic” effects, and his early, pseudonymous round-up reviews pop with the fun of a sharpshooter hitting every tin at the fair. Sacheverell Sitwell’s verse, for example, has a tendency to “fly off like a beautiful but ineffectual aeroplane, beating its propeller vainly in a tree”. (A note would explain this Looney Tunes simile as a parody of Matthew Arnold’s description of Shelley: “a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.”)
[Please subscribe to the WRB so I can get around to handing Johns Hopkins University Press seven hundred American dollars for their Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot in eight volumes. This would dramatically improve my quality of life. —Steve]
N.B. (cont.):
“There’s Finally a Solution to All of McDonald’s Broken McFlurry Machines”
You can ride an old logging train in Taiwan. [Revive the Eagle Lake and West Branch Railroad, you cowards. (I’ve seen those locomotives with my own eyes. Really cool.) —Steve]
Sublunary Editions is having a 40% off everything sale for its fifth anniversary.
New issues:
The Brooklyn Rail November 2024
Literary Review November 2024
The Madrid Review Volume 1 Issue 2
New Left Review 149 | Sept/Oct 2024 [As linked to above.]
Paul Bailey died on Sunday, October 27. R.I.P.
Local:
The Washington National Opera is putting on Fidelio at the Kennedy Center until Monday, November 4.
Lux Choir is performing William Byrd’s Mass for Five Voices at St. Jerome Catholic Church in Hyattsville on Thursday, November 14 at 8 p.m.
An exhibit of the early twentieth century avant-garde, Art and Graphic Design of the European Avant-Gardes, is on display at the Irene and Richard Frary Gallery until February 21, 2025.
Poem:
“Mother, I cannot mind my wheel” by Walter Savage Landor
Mother, I cannot mind my wheel;
My fingers ache, my lips are dry:
Oh! if you felt the pain I feel!
But Oh, who ever felt as I!No longer could I doubt him true;
All other men may use deceit:
He always said my eyes were blue,
And often swore my lips were sweet.
[We’re playing the hits. The first line is taken from Sappho 102, which Anne Carson translates as
sweet mother I cannot work the loom
I am broken with longing for a boy by slender Aphrodite
and, since I think Sappho was on Landor’s mind, the next three lines are a reduction of part of Sappho 31. Anne Carson’s translation of the relevant portion:
for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking
is left in meno: tongue breaks and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
fills earsand cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead—or almost
I seem to me.
A reduction but also the beginning of the poem’s trend towards the bathetic. Instead of Sappho putting the feeling of being in love into a few well-chosen images, Landor’s speaker is content to say that you just wouldn’t get it, Mom. And that teenage attitude carries into the next stanza and its hilarious naïveté. Before we had comedians we had epigrammatists. —Steve]
Upcoming books:
Belt Publishing | November 5
Creative Nonfiction: The Final Issue: The Best of Thirty Years of Creative Nonfiction
edited by Lee Gutkind and Leslie Rubinkowski
From the publisher: When Creative Nonfiction debuted in 1994, the literary genre it championed was largely the target of skepticism or downright ridicule. But at a time when few editors were interested in the personal essay, the magazine doggedly explored new ideas and fresh modes of expression, and over the next three decades, its contributors pioneered what would come to be known as the “fourth genre.”
The thirty-two essays collected here bring together some of the finest work Creative Nonfiction published over its seventy-eight issues. Read Pulitzer Prize-winner Charles Simic’s boyhood remembrances of the bombing of Belgrade, Carolyn Forche’s haunting, lyric catalog of her daily life as she faced down a cancer diagnosis, and John Edgar Wideman’s meditation on the photo of a murdered boy his same age—Emmett Till—and how the image haunted him forever. Here, you'll find work by such luminaries as Adrienne Rich and John McPhee, but also essays from more contemporary voices like Brian Broome, Elizabeth Fortescue, and Anne McGrath.
With an introduction by Lee Gutkind, Creative Nonfiction’s founder and editor, this collection captures the evolution of a genre and the amazing work of the little magazine that helped make it all happen.
What we’re reading:
Chris finished reading The Transit of Venus in a Culver’s in Indiana. [The butter in the burger makes the butter burger better. —Chris]
Steve is still on that The Historical Novel grind. [More on this in Critical notes.] In connection with the ideas expressed below Chris told him to read Benjamin’s “The Crisis of the Novel: On Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz” (1930), which he did.
Critical notes:
- on divine discontent:
Divine discontent is about patient, unyielding discipline. It’s Flaubert’s four and a half years spent writing Madame Bovary, and complaining to friends and lovers about how displeased he was with his writing. “Yesterday evening,” he wrote to his lover, Louise Colet, “I started my novel. Now I begin to see stylistic difficulties that horrify me.” He had begun other novels before, but abandoned them. With Madame Bovary, he persisted—although his exacting standards led to very slow progress.
Lukács:
The span of the hugest novel is limited. If one were to take the Comédie Humaine as a single novel, it would give only an infinitesimal fraction, even in breadth, of the incommensurable reality of its time. An adequate quantitative, artistic reflection of the infinity of life is quite out of the question. The naturalist writers set themselves a Sisyphus-like task, for not only do they lose the totality of an artistically reflected world by producing simply an extract, an inwardly incomplete fragment, but not even the greatest naturalist accumulation of detail can possibly reproduce adequately the infinity of qualities and relations possessed by one single object of reality. And the novel does not in any case set itself the task of reproducing faithfully a mere extract from life; but, by representing a limited section of reality, however richly portrayed, it aims to evoke the totality of the process of social development.
[The problem Lukács identifies here is more or less the problem faced by cartographers. It is impossible to make a map that depicts every possible fact about an area; such a map would be identical to the area itself and so useless as a map. The novelist, then, must select details that, while existing only in the text of a novel, nevertheless indicate something about the world where the novel’s events would take place, if they were real—in other words, they must speak to something beyond their function in the novel, in the same way that the ink marks on a map point to locations in the world.
How is this done? Something like Pound’s Luminous Details, of which Kenner writes:
“The New Method in Scholarship,” furthermore, turns out to be “the method of Luminous Detail,” used intermittently “by all good scholars since the beginning of scholarship,” and hostile both “to the prevailing mode of today, that is, the method of multitudinous detail, and to the method of yesterday, the method of sentiment and generalization.” Luminous Details are the transcendentals in an array of facts; not merely “significant” nor “symptomatic” in the matter of most facts, but capable of giving one “a sudden insight into circumjacent conditions, into their causes, their effects, into sequence, and law.”
This is a treatment of historical facts, but the same applies to the “facts” of a novel, which also provide “a sudden insight into circumjacent conditions, into their causes, their effects, into sequence, and law.” They speak not just about the novel but about its connection to the world, providing a framework through which to interpret the world, just as a map does.
It may help to look at an example. Consider the penultimate paragraph of Pride and Prejudice:
Lady Catherine was extremely indignant on the marriage of her nephew; and as she gave way to all the genuine frankness of her character, in her reply to the letter which announced its arrangement, she sent him language so very abusive, especially of Elizabeth, that for some time all intercourse was at an end. But at length, by Elizabeth’s persuasion, he was prevailed on to overlook the offence, and seek a reconciliation; and, after a little further resistance on the part of his aunt, her resentment gave way, either to her affection for him, or her curiosity to see how his wife conducted herself; and she condescended to wait on them at Pemberley, in spite of that pollution which its woods had received, not merely from the presence of such a mistress, but the visits of her uncle and aunt from the city.
Now of course this is a statement about things done by characters in a novel. But it is also a statement about the social world (which exists outside the novel) to which these characters would belong if they were real. The hauteur of people like Lady Catherine is, after an appropriate period, set aside because the actions of people like Mr. Darcy are justified; justified to himself and everyone else because he has, as they say, fuck-you money. (Note that Darcy says fuck you and Elizabeth tries to rein him in.) The Lady Catherines of the world, not wanting to acknowledge how crass this is, can frame it as curiosity about the interloper to the world they believe they have created for themselves, which is a thin excuse but one that serves to prevent their facing what is actually happening.
Jane Austen never says any of this in those words (let alone “I, the author of this novel, regard this as an important aspect of the society being depicted here, which is why I have included this detail.”) The reader is left to infer it. But the novelist, through choosing what details to include, and then having those details correspond to the world and allow a better understanding of it, is engaged in the work of a cartographer. The NYC subway map includes every subway stop because, given how it proposes we understand and navigate the city, knowing the location of every subway stop is essential. It does not display relative distance correctly because that information is not. “Why doesn’t the subway map display relative distance correctly?” is the same sort of question as “Why do we hear about Mr. Darcy’s tenants maybe twice?” It misunderstands what the map is doing and its priorities in making what it represents more comprehensible.
I admit this is half-formed, but I couldn’t find anything to read on it (besides “more Lukács”)—if you Google phrases like “novel map” and “novel cartography” you get a lot of advice on how to design a map for your fantasy novel. —Steve]