WRB—Sept. 28, 2024
Never commit yourself to a Review of Books without having first . . . examined it.
N.B.:
The next monthly D.C. Salon, on the topic “Can we choose our beliefs?”, will take place this evening. If you would like to attend, please email Chris for the details.
Links:
In NLR, Enrica Villari on Franco Moretti’s analysis of the novel:
In his account, it is with the 1815 Restoration that the novel reveals itself to be such a formidable literary form. After the betrayal of the ideals of the Revolution, the harmony between self-determination and socialization achieved in Austen and Goethe is rendered impossible. Yet the novel’s anti-tragic and anti-epic tendencies remain. The notion that the biography of a young individual entering adulthood is “the most meaningful viewpoint for the understanding and the evaluation of history” was sustained for nearly a century. The youthful protagonists of Stendhal, Pushkin and Lermontov, of Balzac and Flaubert, also come to accept the way of the world; yet, voided of symbolic legitimacy, this now comes at the cost of the integrity of the self.
It is thanks to this formal reconfiguration, Moretti proposes, that modern interiority now makes its novelistic debut—an imaginary life that no longer integrates with reality but pursues its own independent path, free of any constraint, like “the ‘strange men’ discussed by contemporary Russian culture,” who are no longer legible in the manner of Wilhelm Meister or Elizabeth Bennet.
[There are many signs in my life that I need to get around to Lukács’ The Historical Novel. (Another is Adam Roberts’ long-running series on Walter Scott.) I’m going to read it next, I promise. —Steve]
In Lit Hub, an excerpt from John MacNeill Miller’s book connecting ecology, economics, and the realist novel (The Ecological Plot: How Stories Gave Rise to a Science, September 24):
In Martineau, though, the plots were much weirder.
It’s common, in a Dickens or Eliot novel, for one person’s unthinking action or local relationship to dramatically influence the fate of someone seemingly unconnected with them. Highlighting such connections was an integral part of the moral work of Victorian fiction, which sought to remind readers how all members of society depended on one another to survive and thrive.
In Martineau’s work, though, these uncanny networks of connection did not stop at the borders of society. Her stories involved lives upended by unexpected patterns of rainfall, by the felling of trees, by the importing of new crops, and by the movements of fish.
Martineau’s work wasn’t just social or sociological. It was ecological. She put far more thought into the entanglements that draw the fates of humans together with those of trees, water, grain, cattle, and fish than any English-speaking novelist I could find before her—or after her, for that matter.
In Arc, Blake Smith on Marilynne Robinson’s (il)liberalism:
The sort of humor that her husband theorized and championed suffuses Robinson’s first novel, in a rare (and surprisingly little-commented-upon) case of criticism and practice shaping each other. This makes the studied seriousness of Robinson’s dissertation, and later essays—and indeed the relatively more mournful, joyless, unironic tone of her Gilead novels—all the more notable. Robinson has not commented on either how her relationship to her husband and his scholarship informed her work—she might persuasively say that it didn’t—or how her relationship to comedy has changed over years and genres. The closest, perhaps, she has come to such a reckoning is in a rejection of the influence of Flannery O’Connor, whom she condemns, precisely, for being too funny, saying in a 2005 interview: “For some reason it is not conventional for serious fiction to treat religious thought respectfully—the influence of Flannery O’Connor has been particularly destructive, I think, though she is considered a religious writer, and she considered herself one.”
[Flannery O’Connor was a Presbyterian writer. —Steve]
Reviews:
Two in our sister publication on the Hudson:
Hannah Gold reviews Kathleen Alcott’s first collection of short stories (Emergency, 2023):
Throughout the stories, femininity and money are construed as assets that are too easily spent and that might leave a woman indebted to choices she made lightheartedly or in desperation. In “Worship” a translator named Hannah moves to Nashville to be with Phillip, her boyfriend of four months. The details accumulate like a gathering storm: Hannah worries about aging, Phillip is sometimes too rough in bed, a faded tattoo refers to his ex-girlfriend, and his sexual charisma is a given—“wherever they went, women bent toward him like reeds under hands.” Then, when Hannah asks for more information about the end of Phillip’s last serious relationship, the sky cracks open. He tells her that he hit the woman, just once, and in the moment of confession he looks at Hannah “with the face of someone woken in the middle of the night, the alarm of holding two worlds.” It is one thing to see the intolerable past safely receding from view, another to find oneself suddenly smashing into it.
The lamp said,
‘Four o’clock,
Here is the number on the door.
Memory!
You have the key,
The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair,
Mount.
The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.’
The last twist of the knife.
Clare Bucknell reviews a collection of writing about Daniel Defoe (The Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe, edited by Nicholas Seager and J. A. Downie, March):
Defoe believed experience, even bad experience, made him an authority. “He always thought he could give everyone in the world good advice,” Paula Backscheider, one of his biographers, observes in an essay in the Oxford Handbook. Much of what he wrote was didactic, explicitly instructing people on how to live. In “Advice from the Scandal Club,” a regular section of the Review responding to readers’ letters, he provided tips on “Poetry, Marriage, Drunkenness, Whoring, Gaming, Vowing, and the like.” (“The Gentleman that seems under some difficulty for being concern’d in robbing an Orchard, shall have an Answer in our next.”) His conduct books—The Family Instructor, Religious Courtship, and others—contained practical wisdom alongside what he called “needful Censure of preposterous and immodest Actions.”
[Maybe the WRB should have an advice column. Offering suggestions on things to read is pretty much instructing people on how to live, after all. And Defoe, I learn here, “liked to be known as ‘Mr. Review’ or ‘the Author of the Review,’ the embodiment of the paper.” “Managing Editors” sounds pretty good, but just imagine—“Messrs. Review of Books.” —Steve]
In our sister publication on the Cuyahoga, Bailey Trela reviews J. M. Coetzee’s latest (The Pole, 2023) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Sept. 16, 2023; we linked to earlier reviews in WRB—Sept. 20, 2023, WRB—Oct. 25, 2023, and WRB—Mar. 2, 2024.]:
Because late works tend to give vent to a disordered subjectivity, as Adorno observes, they are often “relegated to the outer reaches of art, in the vicinity of document.” Coetzee does not believe that the work of art reaches beyond itself. There is no room in his art for inspiration, for the warm and wimpling touch of divine afflatus. Whatever formal perfection the objet d’art achieves is the work of discipline and industry, of merciless technique. The denial of late style is, in a sense, the denial of death—as well as the denial of the transcendence offered by the work of art.
Another way of saying all this is that the problem of how to avoid subjective disorder is central to an understanding of Coetzee’s late works. His solution in The Pole, oddly enough, is to indulge in the obscuring pedantries of language and love. When Witold passes away, he bequeaths to Beatriz a binder containing “what are evidently poems, in Polish, one to a page, typewritten and numbered I—LXXXIV.” The process of divining the poems’ meaning—both their basic semantic content and the intent behind them—occupies most of the remaining text. As Coetzee makes clear, it’s an ultimately quixotic venture. To translate poetry from a language as notoriously prickly as Polish is one thing; to pin a final meaning on a textual artifact is another; to plumb the depths of the human soul that created it is, one would hope, an utter impossibility.
An excerpt from Said’s book on late style (On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain, 2006) using that same Adorno quote:
This is almost pure Adorno. There is heroism in it but also intransigence. Nothing about the essence of the late Beethoven is reducible to the notion of art as a document—that is, to a reading of the music that stresses “reality breaking through” in the form of history or the composer's sense of his impending death. For “in this way,” if one stresses the works only as an expression of Beethoven's personality, Adorno says, “the late works are relegated to the outer reaches of art, in the vicinity of document. In fact, studies of the very late Beethoven seldom fail to make reference to biography and fate. It is as if, confronted by the dignity of human death, the theory of art were to divest itself of its rights and abdicate in favor of reality.” Late style is what happens if art does not abdicate its rights in favor of reality.
In Engelsberg Ideas, George Woudhuysen reviews a book about preservation of medieval manuscripts (History in Flames: The Destruction and Survival of Medieval Manuscripts, by Robert Bartlett, August):
Bartlett’s story is not, however, simply a grim sequence of destruction. He uses each of the five episodes as a perch from which to survey some aspect of medieval culture: the production of maps of the known world, for example, or the registers that documented the activities of the Angevin kings of southern Italy. He also devotes a good deal of attention to the heroic efforts to recover some of what has been lost. By piecing together singed fragments or hunting down the notes of an early-modern antiquary, we can sometimes get a sense of the contents of a lost manuscript or document. This is painstaking and unfashionable work, but Bartlett treats it with real sympathy and sensitivity. As he notes, most of the records of medieval Ireland were destroyed in a few explosive seconds—the work of reconstruction is now well into its second century.
[Who will preserve the WRB? What scribe will posterity thank, as we thank a predecessor in that line of work for Catullus? —Steve]
In our sister publication on the other side of America, Dennis Wilson Wise reviews two works of Tolkien criticism (The Literary Role of History in the Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien, by Nicholas Birns, 2023; and Representing Middle-earth: Tolkien, Form, and Ideology, by Robert T. Tally Jr., 2023):
Tally’s argument is refreshingly simple: Tolkien helps us think historically. Marxist critics have long bewailed the seemingly ahistorical archetypes of genre fantasy, but as Tally points out, The Lord of the Rings is literally inundated with historical depth. A key moment occurs on the stairs of Cirith Ungol when Sam Gamgee reflects that the “great tales never end.” When Sam suddenly recognizes himself as participating in one such great tale, Tolkien manages to render history both visible and knowable to its participants. The Lord of the Rings thus fulfills what Lyotard once called the “desire called Marx”: our collective wish to make sense of the world in terms of a narrative. Enhanced by such techniques as Tolkien’s deployment of multiple generic forms (myth, realism, fairy tale, and more), this narrativity enables readers to form “cognitive maps” that encompass a larger global system. Far from living for ourselves alone, Tally claims, Tolkien lets us see ourselves as historical beings.
[You’d better build an ark, buddy—I’m about to literally inundate this series of fantasy novels with historical depth! —Steve]
N.B. (cont.):
Fragrances for hair are becoming a thing. [I don’t have any hair myself, and my beard is not long enough now to hold onto anything, but reading this took me back to middle school. One of my best friends then (and now) was a girl with long hair, and, as long hair is wont to do, it drank up whatever she used for shampoo or conditioner. If she shook her head in conversation or something like that you could really pick up on the aroma. Writing this a decade and change later I cannot recall the scent in my mind, but I remember enough of my impression to attempt a description: it was not all that far from “your standard shampoo,” but there was a strength and directness to it, as if it sustained that initial impression of being freshly cleaned. Ah, for youth! Ah, for the unadorned! Now we have hair fragrances—how far we are fallen from republican simplicity! —Steve]
Scientists are studying the DNA in ancient cheeses.
If this had been an option at the time Eliot might not have worked at the bank.
The Brontë sisters’ memorial at Poets’ Corner just got diaereses.
People are going on dates to cemeteries. [There is, of course, a Smiths song for this. —Steve]
Vice is relaunching its print magazine.
New issue: New Left Review 148•July/Aug 2024 [As linked to above.]
Local:
The Megabus New York-D.C. route is coming to an end. [Now the most efficient route between New York and D.C. is the WRB. —Chris] [Fifty percent of the Managing Editors are in New York, and fifty percent are in D.C., and so all things are in balance. —Steve]
A review of the National Gallery’s Impressionism exhibit.
Poem:
“August Walk” by Rosanna Warren
The forest fungal, and a seethe of rain.
Indian pipes prod white, crooked fingers up through mulch,
boletus and inky caps glutton in the dank.
Lichen glues coral to moist granite.
We follow cleft hoofprints
of a bull moose, you striding ahead, I lagging;
you reading woods-lore—ice stripped bark, deer-nibble,
last winter’s furry, matted Fischer-cat spoor—; I distracted,
musing. The soil springs at our tread, mossbanks
bristle with spores. Rainlight shivers down.
The felled giant sugar maples has broken out
in boles: baroque, all bulging eyes,
beaks, foreheads, claws, diseased
and dark as a mahogany Roman choir stall.
Off the moose path now, it’s an old farm you seek:
rock piles from last century’s sheepfolds;
inward lapsing cellar hole;
a tumble where the chimney stood;
at the threshold, by the granite door slab,
a cluster of weed-choked lilies sprouted from lilies
the farm wife planted before the Civil War.
The road is a soft, Caesarean scar in tufted grass.
Each rain-glossed leaf emits a stab of green.
Somewhere, here, survives the idea of home.
[After mentioning the late Robert Penn Warren in the last issue, I could hardly do without bringing up his daughter’s work. She does not imitate her father’s poetry, but the questions that she asks and the care she takes with the objects in the natural world are similar. “August Walks” is from Departure (2003). I love the first part of this poem; I can feel the fresh, green dampness of the hike, which I imagine she took in Maine. That world is wild, a little dangerous, a little grotesque. Things lurk beneath the surface, ready to burst out. And then they come to the farm. Lilies burst out, descended from a garden so old it rivals the disfigured sugar maple. The elder gods here are not giant, hoary, wild things but the lovely long-throated lilies. The Caesaerean scar of the road is not a putrid gash but a gentle reminder of birth and newness. In the midst of the untamed forest, there remains the domestic sphere, diminished but not, somehow, extinguished. —Grace]
Upcoming books:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | October 1
The Position of Spoons: And Other Intimacies
by Deborah Levy
From the publisher: Deborah Levy’s vital literary voice speaks about many things.
On footwear: “It has always been very clear to me that people who wear shoes without socks are destined to become my friends and lovers.” On public parks: “A civic garden square gentles the pace of the city that surrounds it, holding a thought before it scrambles.” On Elizabeth Hardwick: “She understands what is at stake in literature.” On the conclusion of a marriage: “It doesn’t take an alien to tell us that when love dies we have to find another way of being alive.”
Levy shares with us her most tender thoughts as she traces and measures her life against the backdrop of different literary imaginations; each page is a beautiful, questioning composition of the self. The Position of Spoons is full of wisdom and astonishments and brings us into intimate conversation with one of our most insightful, intellectually curious writers.
[We linked to an excerpt in WRB—Sept. 18, 2024.]
Also out Tuesday:
Hurst: A Twist in the Tail: How the Humble Anchovy Flavored Western Cuisine by Christopher Beckman [We linked to a review in WRB—Sept. 14, 2024.]
New Directions: Suggested in the Stars by Yoko Tawada, translated by Margaret Mitsutani
Penguin: The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Martin Aitken
Seven Stories: The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, translated by Alison L. Strayer [We linked to an excerpt in WRB—Aug. 21, 2024.]
What we’re reading:
Steve finished It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium.
Critical notes:
- on the power of writing:
During a recent interview my interlocutor paid me a great compliment: He said “You have the power to name the thing.” That is a power indeed, even if it’s only expressed in stories read by a relatively small number of people. But any time you name a thing you define it and the definition is inherently limiting; when you name a thing you cut out a lot of other things, and no human can name all the things—at least not by all their possible names—or even see them.
More reviews of Intermezzo (by Sally Rooney, September 24) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Sept. 21, 2024; we linked to some discussion of Rooney there and previous reviews in WRB—Sept. 25, 2024.]:
In Sidecar, Ryan Ruby:
If this proves true for Peter it is because he is not a person, but a character in a work of fiction. His God is none other than Sally Rooney, and she has selected, out of indefinitely-many possible worlds, the one with an outcome that best illustrates the theory she has slipped into Ivan’s pillow talk. In a Rooney novel, order emerges from chaos, meaning emerges from meaninglessness, and beauty emerges from ugliness in the form of providential good fortune.
My knowledge of Mr. Forster’s works is limited to one novel, which I dislike; and anyway, it was not he who fathered that trite little whimsy about characters getting out of hand; it is as old as the quills, although of course one sympathizes with his people if they try to wriggle out of that trip to India or wherever he takes them. My characters are galley slaves.
In America, Robert Rubsam:
This point of real substantive conflict is smoothed over, being safely in the past, along with almost everything in their lives of dramatic or thematic weight. You could read this as the hangover of grief, how in their desperation to avoid looking their loss in the face, the brothers are dredging up a comfortingly familiar conflict. But the decision also seems a fearful one, as if Rooney is worried we will not believe either brother worthy of love should their souls become too compromised.
In appreciation of Fredric Jameson (R.I.P.) [We linked to an obituary and an earlier appreciation in WRB—Sept. 25, 2024.]:
In the Verso blog, Terry Eagleton:
He was without doubt the greatest cultural critic of his time, though the term “cultural critic” is a mere placeholder for a kind of intellectual work spanning aesthetics, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, political theory and the like, for which we have as yet no adequate name. There was nothing in the field of the humanities which didn’t claim his attention, from film and architecture to painting and science fiction, and he seemed to have read more books than anyone else on the planet. He could talk about Parmenides as well as postmodernism, and when Stanley Kubrick’s film Barry Lyndon (1975) appeared, based on an obscure novel by Thackeray that nobody had heard of, one of his students confidently remarked “Fred will have read it,” and was probably right. He had a voracious American energy combined with a high European sensibility. He maintained that no Marxist criticism was worth much if it couldn’t engage with the shape of the sentences, and could detect a whole ideological strategy in a narrative turn or shift of poetic tone. Yet he also took the pulse of an entire civilization, as in his classic essay on postmodern culture.
In The Nation, Kate Wagner:
He was a thinker of vast scope. In reading his essays, one wonders how it was even possible for someone to have read so much material across so many different fields. Yet, despite pulling from so many sources—film, philosophy, literature, architecture, art—he never did so in a way that narrowed his audience. On the contrary, he often expanded it. There is a reason his work is perhaps the most beloved of all his contemporaries by autodidacts. He believed fundamentally in the intelligence of the reader and understood that the readers of his work may not be as well-acquainted with certain terms or thinkers from outside his core field of literary studies, so he filled his essays with brisk, accessible summaries, helpful footnotes, or short tangents that solidified his own purpose in using such references.
In the local Post, Jacob Brogan:
Yet the pithy precision of such phrases often belied the real difficulty of his work, which asked his readers to follow him through the bramble thickets of the whole history of thought without catching yourself on the thorns of one model or another. Understanding him fully required intuiting, say, why a Hegelian-Marxist might object to the ahistorical approaches of French structuralism or Russian formalism. One sometimes had the sense that to read him well, one had to be him—or at least be the sort of person who might begin the day with a stack of books on the right side of the chair and end it with them on the left, all before heading out to feed the goats. It can be so hard to keep up with him that his greatest legacy may be his unfortunate, and accidental, popularization of the phrase “late capitalism,” which has—by no fault of his own—lost its original Marxist resonance and come to mean something like “the unique badness of the present moment.” No one reads anything (not literature, not film, not even the uncannily lit corridors of a casino) quite like Jameson did, but to read him well, when you could, was to be dazzled by the gargantuan generosity of his mind.
In Sidecar, Benjamin Kunkel:
Of a piece with this diminution of one’s individual ego from the standpoint of both utopia and revolution was Jameson’s equally characteristic dismissal of the unique personal subjectivity meant to be so definitive of aesthetic modernity in general, and the modern novel in particular. In A Singular Modernity (2002), Jameson propounds a straightforward maxim: “The narrative of modernity cannot be organized around categories of subjectivity; consciousness and subjectivity are unrepresentable; only situations of modernity can be narrated.” Needless to say, consciousness and subjectivity exist inside oneself and perish when one dies. By contrast, a situation (in Jameson’s typically Sartrean term) takes place outside oneself, in history, and goes on after one’s departure from the scene.