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In The New Yorker, Karl Ove Knausgård on The Brothers Karamazov:
What is the light in The Brothers Karamazov?
It is the voices. The Brothers Karamazov is a novel of voices. Men, women, young, old, rich, poor, foolish, wise: all are allowed to make themselves heard in their own right—all speak with their own voice. And in each individual voice there are echoes of other voices, contemporary or past, written or oral, political or philosophical, from the Bible or from newspaper articles, rumors about town, memories of someone long dead. Everyone in the novel speaks from their own self, their specific and unique place, some of them utterly unforgettable in their magnificent individuality, but they do so using the same language. And, if some of the characters in The Brothers Karamazov rank all the way up there with Shakespeare’s creations, still this is not a work dominated by a single protagonist, the way Hamlet is Hamlet’s play, or Othello is Othello’s. It is the opposite: The Brothers Karamazov is a collective novel—it is about the profusion of voices, how they are intertwined and, though they themselves are unable to see it, how they form one whole, one connection, one chorus.
Mikhail Bakhtin (translated from the Russian by Caryl Emerson):
Dostoevsky, like Goethe’s Prometheus, creates not voiceless slaves (as does Zeus), but free people, capable of standing alongside their creator, capable of not agreeing with him and even of rebelling against him.
A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoevsky’s novels. What unfolds in his works is not a multitude of characters and fates in a single objective world, illuminated by a single authorial consciousness; rather a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, combine but are not merged in the unity of the event.
In our sister publication on the Hudson, Wyatt Mason on Guy Davenport:
[The Geography of the Imagination (1981) provides an education in the same good-humored voice as the letters, refined for the varied subjects of the essays, all of which, despite their variety, can be said to be about the same thing: finding. Davenport’s essays are a set of paths that lead us to places we haven’t been. All it took, he said, was an open eye. “I was never trained to argue,” Davenport told me. “I only observe.” But observation requires curiosity, and one of the remarkable features of Davenport’s essays—which overwhelmingly explicate “difficult” modernist texts by Joyce and Pound, though they are no less interested in Welty, Joyce Kilmer, and Tarzan—is how his writing moves the reader into darknesses in their knowledge that yield to illumination. A text is revealed to be a cave into which an intelligence has descended, by torchlight, to make marks that, once discovered, will require some work to see: an inversion of Plato’s gloomy allegory.
A number of distinctive critics were working in parallel during Davenport’s lifetime, among them Randall Jarrell, Mary McCarthy, Lionel Trilling, Frank Kermode, Elizabeth Hardwick, Northrop Frye, John Updike, and Helen Vendler. I set Davenport apart. He was our most insightful reader of modernist writing, one no less able to confront Pound’s obvious difficulty than to reveal the hidden complexity of Welty, a writer he judged the American equal of Joyce. Proust’s definition of style—“a quality of vision, the revelation of the particular universe that each of us sees and that no one else sees”—may also be applied to Davenport’s way of seeing, of detecting what had been there all along.
[Davenport is one of the heroes of this newsletter, although I will admit that the nature of a books-and-culture roundup newsletter lends itself to the first part of his criticism—“here’s a bunch of cool stuff I’ve observed.” The second part—organizing all those observations such that each one illuminates the others, revealing a network behind them all—is harder.
Another element of Davenport’s work I try to replicate here is the sense that he is never talking at you or explaining things to you while you sit there passively. He is instead a guide. He shows you the way through the territory, but you are still on a journey with him, and it feels as though you are discovering things alongside him. (One of the most delightful reading experiences I have had was, on my first time reading The Geography of the Imagination, guessing where he was going to go.) —Steve]
In The New Republic, Meghan Racklin on Fanny Howe’s romance novels:
If it was her apprenticeship in the workmanlike plots of romance novels that first caught her in plot’s trap, it is also in those first novels that you can see her start to work the trap, discovering that fiction’s primary tool turns easily against itself. The archetypal end to a romance novel, after all, is a new start: a wedding. Perhaps the genre, so seemingly unlikely a starting place for Howe, is rather fitting. She preferred plots with “strange returns and recognitions and never a conclusion.” When the inevitable happy ending is reached, in both the Della Field novels, they bend back on themselves, as if they are circling back and beginning again. Vietnam Nurse (1966) began with Lee’s first fiancé dead in the midst of the Vietnam war and ends with Johnny and Lee newly engaged. But Johnny is also wounded and on a plane to the United States, while Lee is staying on in a war zone for another year; there is a lingering fear of death, an unshakeable sense that the story may be starting over again.
The very thing that makes the romance novel feel like so unlikely a genre for a writer like Howe, and that makes these works so easy to overlook in her oeuvre, is what makes them so compelling a place for her to start. The conventionality the genre requires comes to seem like an impossible demand, the novelist seeking the unreachable; the end unraveling itself. This kind of continual seeking, this spiraling search, came to define Howe’s writing. In West Coast Nurse (1963), the ending comes hurriedly; with neither Ellen nor David having found anything like a solution to the problem of silence and speech, there is nothing to mark their coming together now as more secure than their previous attempts. Howe’s first novel ends, appropriately, in a confusion of beginnings and endings—the last word spoken between her lovers is, “Hello.”
One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away:
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.
“Vain man,” said she, “that dost in vain assay,
A mortal thing so to immortalize;
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eke my name be wiped out likewise.”
[I have omitted the volta on the grounds that it is a rather uninspired version of “you will live forever through this poem.” But the need to write her name over and over again is true to love, which never reaches a set ending and always requires a renewed commitment. The best kind of work about romance understands this and shows the lovers in conversation, a conversation which we understand continues after the romance novel or movie ends. You have to keep writing her name. —Steve]
[The rest of today’s WRB has even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, as well as Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today, from my desk and the desks of other WRB contributors:
I finally finish The Faerie Queene (potential new “brodernist” fixation? You heard it here first)
New advancements in marketing water
A Poem by A. E. Housman and autumn foliage
If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe below.
And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]
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