WRB—Oct. 9, 2024

“The Barefoot Contessa”

The only thing worse than talking about the Washington Review of Books is not talking about the Washington Review of Books.

N.B.:

This month’s WRB Presents, with readings from Osita Nwanevu, Lewis Page, Lyle Jeremy Rubin, and Tonya Riley, will take place on Tuesday, October 15.

The next monthly D.C. Salon, on the topic “Is art more beautiful than nature?”, will take place on Friday, October 25. If you would like to attend, please email Chris for the details.

Links:

• In our sister publication on the Hudson, an essay adapted from Merve Emre’s introduction to a collection of stories by Djuna Barnes (I Am Alien to Life: Selected Stories, edited by Merve Emre, October 8):

  The world of Barnes’ stories is divided between those who speak the truth and those who refuse to hear it. One wonders which is the light and which is the shadow—ignorance or the knowledge of pain? Yet, whether her characters accept it or not, suffering is the grounds of existence. “There is something in me that is mournful because it is being,” the gynecologist Dr. Katrina Silverstaff cries in “The Doctors,” suggesting that, from the beginning, life is pathological; that it is “rotten with virtue and with vice,” as Madame von Bartmann informs her daughter. For Barnes, life’s rottenness eats away at us all: virgins and whores, murderers and saints, humans and horses, flowers and vines. Her masochism is relentlessly democratic, and it cannot be unraveled from her deep sense of sympathy or her conception of love; the uncommon interest that she takes in any creature, however degenerate, who turns up on the doorstep of her imagination. It would be easy for all this talk of suffering to turn brittle or humorless. But Barnes knows when to cue our laughter; Dr. Silverstaff is a fantastic name for a gynecologist.

  [As someone who has sent the text “Thomas Pynchon call your office” hundreds of times, I also have to hand it to “the gynecologist Dr. Katrina Silverstaff.” —Steve]

• In Public Books, a roundtable on The Lover (by Marguerite Duras, 1984). From Rebecca Liu’s contribution:

  It would be simplistic, and really not the point, to evaluate the novel against the rubric of empowered/not empowered, stereotype/individual, et cetera, and so determine its value. The truth is more interesting. Life is a series of capitulations and rebellions. We fail each other; we fail ourselves. It’s remarkable how love, in The Lover, turns on a knife’s edge to hate. Violence is everywhere, no more so in the narrator’s own family. Her mother’s madness lingers over the family; her brother’s spiteful need for dominance poisons the well. “It’s a family of stone, petrified so deeply it’s impenetrable,” the narrator says. There is no catharsis, no resolution for the family—just deaths, and lingering questions passing into the ether. I don’t know why it came as a shock to realize that Duras had written the novel at 70. What does a life look like, on the other side? Mothers who remain impenetrable mysteries; childhood friends lost to time; lovers weaving into view, with affairs that were rousing, reckless, marked indelibly on the mind. Everything happened; it’s all over. Everything remains still.

• In UnHerd, Terry Eagleton on Heathcliff:

  This is an important milestone in the evolution of the English novel. With the exception of Samuel Richardson’s great eighteenth-century work Clarissa, which few have read because it’s a million words long, hardly any English novel before Wuthering Heights ends on a tragic note. Even Wuthering Heights is ambiguous in this respect: do Catherine and Heathcliff find fulfillment beyond the grave or not? Then, from the fiction of Thomas Hardy to our own time, the norm becomes a tragic (or at least non-comic) ending. There are a number of reasons for this seismic literary shift, among which is the fact that the Victorians (who lived in perpetual fear of revolution) saw a link between gloom and political disaffection. Part of the purpose of art was to edify its audience, and edified audiences were less likely to tear up the paving stones to build barricades. Charlotte Brontë conforms to this demand in Jane Eyre, blinding and disfiguring Rochester in order to punish his bigamy and bring him, chastened and repentant, to a marriage in which Jane is definitely the boss. Emily bravely refuses this conventional strategy.

  [Cf.

  BDM
  on Wuthering Heights, as linked to in WRB—Aug. 14, 2024:

  But Heathcliff, finally reunited with Cathy’s ghost, gets his happy ending too. A book that ended with him simply alone and abandoned is imaginable. But would it be satisfying? I feel we probably need him to lose and to win—the monster has to lose, but some part of him should be given this warped paradise of his own choosing.

  —Steve]

[Behind the paywall: Steve on internet culture, Grace on nature’s details, Conrad, Ved Mehta, the CIA, Plath, Tom Clancy, and more links, reviews, news items, and commentary carefully selected for you, just like on Saturdays. If you like what you see, why not sign up for a paid subscription? The WRB is for you, and your support helps keep us going.]