The Greatest Literary Works

Nietzsche, Kafka, and Literary Paternity

2010-03-02T23:54:00.000-08:00

What things do we copy, writing and painting, we mandarins with Chinese brushes [mit chinesischem Pinsel], we immortalizers of things that can be written . . . ?
—Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Pardon that for a barren passion’s sake,
Although I have come close on forty-nine,
I have no child, I have nothing but a book,
Nothing but that to prove your blood and mine.
—W. B. Yeats, Responsibilities

Aut liberi aut libri.
—old monk’s saying

A good death consists in an illumination before dying. One such illumination is the prospect of cultural immortality, and yet it can seem odd to describe the death that consists in an illumination before dying as an affair of cultural immortality. But if we leave out of this account the good Gnostic death—which Kafka did not die, as witness his deathbed concern with the textual body of Josephine the Singer—both kinds of death we have described involve a cultural reference. In the instance of the ecstasy of writing, the product of Kafka’s states is literary works meant to be published, to see others’ light of day. In the instance of the final insight into one’s own law as obtained by the victim of a writing machine, the prisoner’s epiphany is witnessed and interpreted by a crowd of citizens.

Kafka is inclined to represent deaths as events that are witnessed, as “always already” public. The disgraceful death of Joseph K. is witnessed by his killers, as is that of the murdered Wese of “A Fratricide”:

Pallas, choking on the poison in his body, stood at the doubleleafed door of his house as it flew open. “Schmar! Schmar! I saw it
all, I missed nothing.” (CS 404)

When Kafka reflects on the deaths of his heroes as secretly a game—for he intends to die contentedly—he imagines a plurality of readers who share his heroes’ anguish:

someone is dying, . . . it is hard for him to do so, . . . it seems unjust to him, or at least harsh, and the reader is moved by this, or
at least he should be. (D2 102)

In “An Old Manuscript” the nomads “tear morsels out of the [ox’s] living flesh with their teeth” in the public square in front of the emperor’s palace (CS 417). The death of Gregor Samsa is an exception; but then again the story might have turned more than just “a bit horrible” (“fu¨ rchterlich”) if the family or the boarders or the charwoman had been on hand to watch the monster expire (LF 58, F 116). Death is an opportunity for public recognition; the prospect of cultural immortality depends on the medial means to attain it.

In “In the Penal Colony,” Kafka’s reflections on a public, medial death were left unresolved. In this chapter, I mean to put these terms—
the good death and the media (which involve the inscription of signs)— in conjunction once again, widening their context to include the example of a predecessor. My focus is Nietzsche’s and Kafka’s preoccupation with survival through their writings, which they sometimes figure as theoffspring of a literary paternity.

In the matter of Nietzsche and Kafka we have alluded (and will continue to allude) to the diffuse and inexplicit presence of Nietzsche in
Kafka’s work. The task now is to address their relation directly. But the outcome will not be a small monograph on “Kafka as a Reader of
Nietzsche,” because there is nothing in Kafka’s oeuvre resembling a direct, plainly articulated preoccupation with Nietzsche’s writings of the kind one finds in the work of Kafka’s contemporary Thomas Mann.

Unlike other young Jewish intellectuals in Vienna and Prague in the 1890s—such as Herzl and Werfel and Buber and to some extent
Kraus—Kafka was not ostentatiously engaged by Nietzsche. And yet he was well aware of him. According to Max Brod, while he and Kafka
were both law students at Charles University, they attended a lecture on Nietzsche that irritated Brod. Kafka replied by defending Nietzsche; and knowing Kafka’s character, we may assume he did so on the strength of having read him. To judge further from the evidence of a woman named Selma Kohn, we know that Kafka had read Thus Spoke Zarathustra—or at least parts of it: toward the end of her life she reported in a letterto Max Brod that in the summer of 1900, when she was a girl in Roztok, Kafka, a house guest, read her passages from Zarathustra.1 Kafka’s certifiable Nietzsche reception begins (and ends) with this probably unsuccessful attempt to seduce a young woman. We may conclude, then, that Kafka’s earliest, strongest experience of reading Nietzsche was marked by sexual desire, irresolution, misogyny—and writing. (Kafka would not have failed to note that Selma was the daughter of the chief postman.) Thereafter, we have additional recollections by Kafka’s friends that Kafka was interested in Nietzsche; yet in all his journals and correspondence, he never once writes the name “Nietzsche,” so that except for Selma Kohn’s letter to Max Brod, there are no irrefragably hard data connecting him to Nietzsche’s works.2 This state of affairs has led to the consensus that, like Thomas Mann in Doctor Faustus, Kafka did not have to mention Nietzsche by name since he is everywhere in his work, like salt in seawater.

With the customary route of influence blocked, the relations of the two must be an affair of the critic’s induction, of hermeneutic speculation. In selecting texts and topics of Nietzsche that lead to Kafka’s themes and aper¸cus, one will be following one’s own bias.4 The path I shall take addresses Kafka as a reader of Nietzsche on the question of literary paternity—the relation of the producer of literature to his products as male parent to offspring. The issue is not one of a hypothetical paternal relation between Nietzsche and Kafka. That Kafka read Nietzsche as a young man and was captivated by what he read should not suggest that his literary personality came out of Nietzsche as, let us say, Kafka’s story “The Judgment” came out of him, “like a regular birth” (D1 278). We have more than once mentioned Kafka’s concern for a sort of cultural immortality through his writings; this concern has also come to be reflexively cast back upon him in the matter of the survival of his manuscripts. I am asking about this same issue in a different way. The question is Nietzsche’s and Kafka’s own views on literary paternity, a subject on which they did indeed have strong views; this allows us to formulate a relation between them on the basis of their shared illusions and critique.

Now, even to consider “literary paternity” of a “proper” or legitimate kind is to strike a defiantly modernist stance, for this stance is
radically anti-Platonic, and, in Nietzsche’s words, modernity is “the fight against Plato.”5 Literary paternity, the conjunction of male acts of writing with live proper offspring, joins what Plato’s Socrates put asunder, even if this figure remains well within the orbit of his influence. The metaphor of literary paternity is of Socratic origin, but the notion of a proper literary paternity is for Socrates untrue or incomplete.

Plato’s translator and commentator Benjamin Jowett sums up Socrates’s position in the Phaedrus:

Writing is inferior to speech. For writing is like a picture which can give no answer to a question, and has only a deceitful likeness of a living creature. It has no power of adaptation, but uses the same words for all. It is a sort of bastard and not a legitimate son of
knowledge, and when an attack is made upon this illegitimate progeny, neither the parent nor anyone else is there to defend it. . . .

to be continued

* this article quote from chapter 5 of Lambent traces: Franz Kafka / Stanley Corngold, 2006, Princeton University Press.

Nietzsche, Dionysus and Apollo

2010-03-02T15:41:00.000-08:00

Nietzsche does not fit any ordinary conception of the philosopher. He is not only remote from the world of the professorial or donnish philosopher, from tomes and articles, footnotes and jargon -- in brief, from the more modern image of the philosopher. He is equally far from the popular notion of the wise man: serene, past passion, temperate, and Apollonian. But this is clearly -- for those of you willing to explore -- part of Nietzsche's point: that is, to offer a new image, a philosopher who is not an Alexandrian academician, nor an Apollonian, but Dionysian.

Apollonian and Dionysian are terms used by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy to designate the two central principles in Greek culture. The Apollonian, which corresponds to Schopenhauer's principium individuationis ("principle of individuation"), is the basis of all analytic distinctions. Everything that is part of the unique individuality of man or thing is Apollonian in character; all types of form or structure are Apollonian, since form serves to define or individualize that which is formed; thus, sculpture is the most Apollonian of the arts, since it relies entirely on form for its effect. Rational thought is also Apollonian since it is structured and makes distinctions.

The Dionysian, which corresponds roughly to Schopenhauer's conception of Will, is directly opposed to the Apollonian. Drunkenness and madness are Dionysian because they break down a man's individual character; all forms of enthusiasm and ecstasy are Dionysian, for in such states man gives up his individuality and submerges himself in a greater whole: music is the most Dionysian of the arts, since it appeals directly to man's instinctive, chaotic emotions and not to his formally reasoning mind.

Nietzsche believed that both forces were present in Greek tragedy, and that the true tragedy could only be produced by the tension between them. He used the names Apollonian and Dionysian for the two forces because Apollo, as the sun-god, represents light, clarity, and form, whereas Dionysus, as the wine-god, represents drunkenness and ecstasy.

Finally, a word or two from Walter Kaufmann:

Nietzsche's ideas about ethics are far less well known than some of his striking coinages: immoralist, overman, master morality, slave morality, beyond good and evil, will to power, revaluation of all values, and philosophizing with a hammer. These are indeed among his key conceptions, but they can be understood correctly only in context. This is true of philosophic terms generally: Plato's ideas or forms, Spinoza's God, Berkeley's ideas, Kant's intuition all do not mean what they would mean in a non-philosophic context; but scarcely anybody supposes that they do. In Nietzsche's case, however, this mistake is a commonplace -- surely because few other philosophers, if any, have equaled the brilliance and suggestiveness of his formulations. His phrases, once heard, are never forgotten; they stand up by themselves, without requiring the support of any context; and so they have come to live independently of their sire's intentions.

image caption: The Theater of Dionysus is said to be the place where Greek tragedy began.

[Source: Walter Kaufmann, From Shakespeare to Existentialism: An Original Study (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), pp. 207-8.]

Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag

2010-01-29T19:46:00.001-08:00

“Content is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash. It’s very tiny - very tiny, content.”
- Willem De Kooning, in an interview

“It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”
- Oscar Wilde, in a letter

1

The earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory, magical; art was an instrument of ritual. (Cf. the paintings in the caves at Lascaux, Altamira, Niaux, La Pasiega, etc.) The earliest theory of art, that of the Greek philosophers, proposed that art was mimesis, imitation of reality.

It is at this point that the peculiar question of the value of art arose. For the mimetic theory, by its very terms, challenges art to justify itself.

Plato, who proposed the theory, seems to have done so in order to rule that the value of art is dubious. Since he considered ordinary material things as themselves mimetic objects, imitations of transcendent forms or structures, even the best painting of a bed would be only an “imitation of an imitation.” For Plato, art is neither particularly useful (the painting of a bed is no good to sleep on), nor, in the strict sense, true. And Aristotle’s arguments in defense of art do not really challenge Plato’s view that all art is an elaborate trompe l’oeil, and therefore a lie. But he does dispute Plato’s idea that art is useless. Lie or no, art has a certain value according to Aristotle because it is a form of therapy. Art is useful, after all, Aristotle counters, medicinally useful in that it arouses and purges dangerous emotions.

In Plato and Aristotle, the mimetic theory of art goes hand in hand with the assumption that art is always figurative. But advocates of the mimetic theory need not close their eyes to decorative and abstract art. The fallacy that art is necessarily a “realism” can be modified or scrapped without ever moving outside the problems delimited by the mimetic theory.

The fact is, all Western consciousness of and reflection upon art have remained within the confines staked out by the Greek theory of art as mimesis or representation. It is through this theory that art as such - above and beyond given works of art - becomes problematic, in need of defense. And it is the defense of art which gives birth to the odd vision by which something we have learned to call “form” is separated off from something we have learned to call “content,” and to the well-intentioned move which makes content essential and form accessory.

Even in modern times, when most artists and critics have discarded the theory of art as representation of an outer reality in favor of the theory of art as subjective expression, the main feature of the mimetic theory persists. Whether we conceive of the work of art on the model of a picture (art as a picture of reality) or on the model of a statement (art as the statement of the artist), content still comes first. The content may have changed. It may now be less figurative, less lucidly realistic. But it is still assumed that a work of art is its content. Or, as it’s usually put today, that a work of art by definition says something. (“What X is saying is . . . ,” “What X is trying to say is . . .,” “What X said is . . .” etc., etc.)

2

None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew (or thought one knew) what it did. From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art. We can only quarrel with one or another means of defense. Indeed, we have an obligation to overthrow any means of defending and justifying art which becomes particularly obtuse or onerous or insensitive to contemporary needs and practice.

This is the case, today, with the very idea of content itself. Whatever it may have been in the past, the idea of content is today mainly a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism.

Though the actual developments in many arts may seem to be leading us away from the idea that a work of art is primarily its content, the idea still exerts an extraordinary hegemony. I want to suggest that this is because the idea is now perpetuated in the guise of a certain way of encountering works of art thoroughly ingrained among most people who take any of the arts seriously. What the overemphasis on the idea of content entails is the perennial, never consummated project of interpretation. And, conversely, it is the habit of approaching works of art in order to interpret them that sustains the fancy that there really is such a thing as the content of a work of art.

3

Of course, I don’t mean interpretation in the broadest sense, the sense in which Nietzsche (rightly) says, “There are no facts, only interpretations.” By interpretation, I mean here a conscious act of the mind which illustrates a certain code, certain “rules” of interpretation.

Directed to art, interpretation means plucking a set of elements (the X, the Y, the Z, and so forth) from the whole work. The task of interpretation is virtually one of translation. The interpreter says, Look, don’t you see that X is really - or, really means - A? That Y is really B? That Z is really C?

What situation could prompt this curious project for transforming a text? History gives us the materials for an answer. Interpretation first appears in the culture of late classical antiquity, when the power and credibility of myth had been broken by the “realistic” view of the world introduced by scientific enlightenment. Once the question that haunts post-mythic consciousness - that of the seemliness of religious symbols - had been asked, the ancient texts were, in their pristine form, no longer acceptable. Then interpretation was summoned, to reconcile the ancient texts to “modern” demands. Thus, the Stoics, to accord with their view that the gods had to be moral, allegorized away the rude features of Zeus and his boisterous clan in Homer’s epics. What Homer really designated by the adultery of Zeus with Leto, they explained, was the union between power and wisdom. In the same vein, Philo of Alexandria interpreted the literal historical narratives of the Hebrew Bible as spiritual paradigms. The story of the exodus from Egypt, the wandering in the desert for forty years, and the entry into the promised land, said Philo, was really an allegory of the individual soul’s emancipation, tribulations, and final deliverance. Interpretation thus presupposes a discrepancy between the clear meaning of the text and the demands of (later) readers. It seeks to resolve that discrepancy. The situation is that for some reason a text has become unacceptable; yet it cannot be discarded. Interpretation is a radical strategy for conserving an old text, which is thought too precious to repudiate, by revamping it. The interpreter, without actually erasing or rewriting the text, is altering it. But he can’t admit to doing this. He claims to be only making it intelligible, by disclosing its true meaning. However far the interpreters alter the text (another notorious example is the Rabbinic and Christian “spiritual” interpretations of the clearly erotic Song of Songs), they must claim to be reading off a sense that is already there.

Interpretation in our own time, however, is even more complex. For the contemporary zeal for the project of interpretation is often prompted not by piety toward the troublesome text (which may conceal an aggression), but by an open aggressiveness, an overt contempt for appearances. The old style of interpretation was insistent, but respectful; it erected another meaning on top of the literal one. The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs “behind” the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one. The most celebrated and influential modern doctrines, those of Marx and Freud, actually amount to elaborate systems of hermeneutics, aggressive and impious theories of interpretation. All observable phenomena are bracketed, in Freud’s phrase, as manifest content. This manifest content must be probed and pushed aside to find the true meaning - the latent content - beneath. For Marx, social events like revolutions and wars; for Freud, the events of individual lives (like neurotic symptoms and slips of the tongue) as well as texts (like a dream or a work of art) - all are treated as occasions for interpretation. According to Marx and Freud, these events only seem to be intelligible. Actually, they have no meaning without interpretation. To understand is to interpret. And to interpret is to restate the phenomenon, in effect to find an equivalent for it.

Thus, interpretation is not (as most people assume) an absolute value, a gesture of mind situated in some timeless realm of capabilities. Interpretation must itself be evaluated, within a historical view of human consciousness. In some cultural contexts, interpretation is a liberating act. It is a means of revising, of transvaluing, of escaping the dead past. In other cultural contexts, it is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling.

4

Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world - in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings.” It is to turn the world into this world. (“This world”! As if there were any other.)

The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have.

5

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, comformable.

This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else. Sometimes a writer will be so uneasy before the naked power of his art that he will install within the work itself - albeit with a little shyness, a touch of the good taste of irony - the clear and explicit interpretation of it. Thomas Mann is an example of such an overcooperative author. In the case of more stubborn authors, the critic is only too happy to perform the job.

The work of Kafka, for example, has been subjected to a mass ravishment by no less than three armies of interpreters. Those who read Kafka as a social allegory see case studies of the frustrations and insanity of modern bureaucracy and its ultimate issuance in the totalitarian state. Those who read Kafka as a psychoanalytic allegory see desperate revelations of Kafka’s fear of his father, his castration anxieties, his sense of his own impotence, his thralldom to his dreams. Those who read Kafka as a religious allegory explain that K. in The Castle is trying to gain access to heaven, that Joseph K. in The Trial is being judged by the inexorable and mysterious justice of God. . . . Another oeuvre that has attracted interpreters like leeches is that of Samuel Beckett. Beckett’s delicate dramas of the withdrawn consciousness - pared down to essentials, cut off, often represented as physically immobilized - are read as a statement about modern man’s alienation from meaning or from God, or as an allegory of psychopathology.

Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, Rilke, Lawrence, Gide . . . one could go on citing author after author; the list is endless of those around whom thick encrustations of interpretation have taken hold. But it should be noted that interpretation is not simply the compliment that mediocrity pays to genius. It is, indeed, the modern way of understanding something, and is applied to works of every quality. Thus, in the notes that Elia Kazan published on his production of A Streetcar Named Desire, it becomes clear that, in order to direct the play, Kazan had to discover that Stanley Kowalski represented the sensual and vengeful barbarism that was engulfing our culture, while Blanche Du Bois was Western civilization, poetry, delicate apparel, dim lighting, refined feelings and all, though a little the worse for wear to be sure. Tennessee Williams’ forceful psychological melodrama now became intelligible: it was about something, about the decline of Western civilization. Apparently, were it to go on being a play about a handsome brute named Stanley Kowalski and a faded mangy belle named Blanche Du Bois, it would not be manageable.

6

It doesn’t matter whether artists intend, or don’t intend, for their works to be interpreted. Perhaps Tennessee Williams thinks Streetcar is about what Kazan thinks it to be about. It may be that Cocteau in The Blood of a Poet and in Orpheus wanted the elaborate readings which have been given these films, in terms of Freudian symbolism and social critique. But the merit of these works certainly lies elsewhere than in their “meanings.” Indeed, it is precisely to the extent that Williams’ plays and Cocteau’s films do suggest these portentous meanings that they are defective, false, contrived, lacking in conviction.

From interviews, it appears that Resnais and Robbe-Grillet consciously designed Last Year at Marienbad to accommodate a multiplicity of equally plausible interpretations. But the temptation to interpret Marienbad should be resisted. What matters in Marienbad is the pure, untranslatable, sensuous immediacy of some of its images, and its rigorous if narrow solutions to certain problems of cinematic form.

Again, Ingmar Bergman may have meant the tank rumbling down the empty night street in The Silence as a phallic symbol. But if he did, it was a foolish thought. (“Never trust the teller, trust the tale,” said Lawrence.) Taken as a brute object, as an immediate sensory equivalent for the mysterious abrupt armored happenings going on inside the hotel, that sequence with the tank is the most striking moment in the film. Those who reach for a Freudian interpretation of the tank are only expressing their lack of response to what is there on the screen.

It is always the case that interpretation of this type indicates a dissatisfaction (conscious or unconscious) with the work, a wish to replace it by something else.

Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.

7

Interpretation does not, of course, always prevail. In fact, a great deal of today’s art may be understood as motivated by a flight from interpretation. To avoid interpretation, art may become parody. Or it may become abstract. Or it may become (“merely”) decorative. Or it may become non-art.

The flight from interpretation seems particularly a feature of modern painting. Abstract painting is the attempt to have, in the ordinary sense, no content; since there is no content, there can be no interpretation. Pop Art works by the opposite means to the same result; using a content so blatant, so “what it is,” it, too, ends by being uninterpretable.

A great deal of modern poetry as well, starting from the great experiments of French poetry (including the movement that is misleadingly called Symbolism) to put silence into poems and to reinstate the magic of the word, has escaped from the rough grip of interpretation. The most recent revolution in contemporary taste in poetry - the revolution that has deposed Eliot and elevated Pound - represents a turning away from content in poetry in the old sense, an impatience with what made modern poetry prey to the zeal of interpreters.

I am speaking mainly of the situation in America, of course. Interpretation runs rampant here in those arts with a feeble and negligible avant-garde: fiction and the drama. Most American novelists and playwrights are really either journalists or gentlemen sociologists and psychologists. They are writing the literary equivalent of program music. And so rudimentary, uninspired, and stagnant has been the sense of what might be done with form in fiction and drama that even when the content isn’t simply information, news, it is still peculiarly visible, handier, more exposed. To the extent that novels and plays (in America), unlike poetry and painting and music, don’t reflect any interesting concern with changes in their form, these arts remain prone to assault by interpretation.

But programmatic avant-gardism - which has meant, mostly, experiments with form at the expense of content - is not the only defense against the infestation of art by interpretations. At least, I hope not. For this would be to commit art to being perpetually on the run. (It also perpetuates the very distinction between form and content which is, ultimately, an illusion.) Ideally, it is possible to elude the interpreters in another way, by making works of art whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that the work can be . . . just what it is. Is this possible now? It does happen in films, I believe. This is why cinema is the most alive, the most exciting, the most important of all art forms right now. Perhaps the way one tells how alive a particular art form is, is by the latitude it gives for making mistakes in it, and still being good. For example, a few of the films of Bergman - though crammed with lame messages about the modern spirit, thereby inviting interpretations - still triumph over the pretentious intentions of their director. In Winter Light and The Silence, the beauty and visual sophistication of the images subvert before our eyes the callow pseudo-intellectuality of the story and some of the dialogue. (The most remarkable instance of this sort of discrepancy is the work of D. W. Griffith.) In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret. Many old Hollywood films, like those of Cukor, Walsh, Hawks, and countless other directors, have this liberating anti-symbolic quality, no less than the best work of the new European directors, like Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player and Jules and Jim, Godard’s Breathless and Vivre Sa Vie, Antonioni’s L’Avventura, and Olmi’s The Fiancés.

The fact that films have not been overrun by interpreters is in part due simply to the newness of cinema as an art. It also owes to the happy accident that films for such a long time were just movies; in other words, that they were understood to be part of mass, as opposed to high, culture, and were left alone by most people with minds. Then, too, there is always something other than content in the cinema to grab hold of, for those who want to analyze. For the cinema, unlike the novel, possesses a vocabulary of forms - the explicit, complex, and discussable technology of camera movements, cutting, and composition of the frame that goes into the making of a film.

8

What kind of criticism, of commentary on the arts, is desirable today? For I am not saying that works of art are ineffable, that they cannot be described or paraphrased. They can be. The question is how. What would criticism look like that would serve the work of art, not usurp its place?

What is needed, first, is more attention to form in art. If excessive stress on content provokes the arrogance of interpretation, more extended and more thorough descriptions of form would silence. What is needed is a vocabulary - a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, vocabulary - for forms.[1] The best criticism, and it is uncommon, is of this sort that dissolves considerations of content into those of form. On film, drama, and painting respectively, I can think of Erwin Panofsky’s essay, “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures,” Northrop Frye’s essay “A Conspectus of Dramatic Genres,” Pierre Francastel’s essay “The Destruction of a Plastic Space.” Roland Barthes’ book On Racine and his two essays on Robbe-Grillet are examples of formal analysis applied to the work of a single author. (The best essays in Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, like “The Scar of Odysseus,” are also of this type.) An example of formal analysis applied simultaneously to genre and author is Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Story Teller: Reflections on the Works of Nicolai Leskov.”

Equally valuable would be acts of criticism which would supply a really accurate, sharp, loving description of the appearance of a work of art. This seems even harder to do than formal analysis. Some of Manny Farber’s film criticism, Dorothy Van Ghent’s essay “The Dickens World: A View from Todgers’,” Randall Jarrell’s essay on Walt Whitman are among the rare examples of what I mean. These are essays which reveal the sensuous surface of art without mucking about in it.

9

Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art - and in criticism - today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are. This is the greatness of, for example, the films of Bresson and Ozu and Renoir’s The Rules of the Game.

Once upon a time (say, for Dante), it must have been a revolutionary and creative move to design works of art so that they might be experienced on several levels. Now it is not. It reinforces the principle of redundancy that is the principal affliction of modern life.

Once upon a time (a time when high art was scarce), it must have been a revolutionary and creative move to interpret works of art. Now it is not. What we decidedly do not need now is further to assimilate Art into Thought, or (worse yet) Art into Culture.

Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there. This cannot be taken for granted, now. Think of the sheer multiplication of works of art available to every one of us, superadded to the conflicting tastes and odors and sights of the urban environment that bombard our senses. Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life - its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness - conjoin to dull our sensory faculties. And it is in the light of the condition of our senses, our capacities (rather than those of another age), that the task of the critic must be assessed.

What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.

Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

10

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

[1964]

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[1] “One of the difficulties is that our idea of form is spatial (the Greek metaphors for form are all derived from notions of space). This is why we have a more ready vocabulary of forms for the spatial than for the temporal arts. The exception among the temporal arts, of course, is the drama; perhaps this is because the drama is a narrative (i.e., temporal) form that extends itself visually and pictorially, upon a stage. . . . What we don’t have yet is a poetics of the novel, any clear notion of the forms of narration. Perhaps film criticism will be the occasion of a breakthrough here, since films are primarily a visual form, yet they are also a subdivision of literature. o deplete the world — in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings.” It is to turn the world into this world. (“This world”! As if there were any other.) The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have.”

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McCarthy and the freedom of the will

2010-01-28T01:16:00.000-08:00

In this thread I want to discuss the work of Cormac McCarthy and the degree in which it is concerned with the freedom of the will. My claim, such as it is, is that his work is an extended examination of the extent to which a man (for it is always a man) is free in this world or if his life is mapped out for him and he ultimately has no choice but to follow his path wherever it takes him and eventually ends for him.

I had intended to work on a much longer piece but not everyone has read McCarthy. I therefore decided to leave his other works, particularly Blood Meridian and The Border Trilogy, until later; to begin with, I will look at No Country For Old Men because there is a good chance that those who have not read the book might have seen the recent film by the Coen brothers, which gives an excellent insight into the character Anton Chigurh, who - in my opinion - is played by the incomparable Javier Bardem as one of the truly mesmeric and unforgetable villains of cinematic history, although to call Chigurh a villain is a mistake as we will hopefully see.

Briefly, in No Country For Old Men a man named Llewelyn Moss comes upon a drug deal gone wrong and is faced with a dilemma; namely, whether or not to take a suitcase full of money from the scene. No one is around (those involved in the deal are all dead, bar one) so he goes ahead. The sole survivor is a dying man who asks Moss for water, which he refuses because he has none. However, later that evening Moss returns because he feels guilty about not giving the man water (this is the decision that places him on his final path), and when he gets there the owners of the money have come looking and find him and chase him, and so he is pursued for a long time throughout the book. Anton Chigurh is hired to find the money and he follows both Moss and those looking for him, killing a variety of people along the way in a strangely detached fashion.

There are three main scenes in which Chigurh talks to potential or actual victims, and these are where we find the most philosophical discussion. The first occurs when Chigurh visits a petrol/gas station and meets the owner, who quickly decides that he does not like the look or sound of Chigurh and tries to get him to leave. Chigurh asks him what is the most he has ever seen lost on a coin toss; he then tosses a coin and invites the owner to call it. The owner is reluctant because he says he has not bet anything but Chigurh tells him he has been always been betting; he just did not realise it. Eventually, he calls heads and is correct. Chigurh gives him the coin and suggest he keep it as a charm. When the man fails to understand, he says the following:

No Country For Old Men

Anything can be an instrument, Chigurh said. Small things. Things you wouldnt even notice. They pass from hand to hand. People dont pay attention. And then one day there's an accounting. And after that nothing is the same. Well, you say. It's just a coin. For instance. Nothing special there. What could that be an instrument of? You see the problem. To separate the act from the thing. As if the parts of some moment in history might be interchangeable with the parts of some other moment. How could that be? Well, it's just a coin. Yes. That's true. Is it?

In the second scene, Chigurh has captured Carson Wells, another assassin who has been attempting to find the money but also find and kill Chigurh. Facing Wells with a gun pointed at him, Chigurh asks: "If the rule you followed led you to this of what use was the rule?" Wells refuses to look away from the gun and challenges Chigurh to just get on with it and kill him, but Chigurh will not and clearly wants Wells to look away, to accept and resign himself to what is about to happen. Again, Chigurh brings up the sequence of events that leads people to their current situation - to an accounting:

No Country For Old Men

It's not the same, Chigurh said. You've been giving up things for years to get here. I dont think I even understood that. How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life? We're in the same line of work. Up to a point. Did you hold me in such contempt? Why would you do that? How did you let yourself get into this situation?

What Chigurh cannot understand is why Wells - or anyone - can hate him for being the instrument of his accounting. The choices we make lead us to where we are and at the end of our lives, whenever that should occur, the responsibility lies with these choices and not with the instrument. They talk some more and finally Wells tells Chigurh to just do it and looks away, whereupon Chigurh kills him.

The third scene involves Moss's wife. Earlier in the story, Chirgurh talks to Moss on the telephone and tells him that it is too late to save himself but that if he gives himself up then Chirgurh will not harm his family. Moss refuses and so Chigurh finds himself much later sitting with Moss's wife, again with gun in hand, explaining that due to Moss's earlier decision he has no choice but to kill her. It is almost as though Chigurh is to kill her on principle, because he gave his word to Moss. Here is part of their conversation:

No Country For Old Men

Chigurh smiled. It's a hard thing to understand, he said. I see people struggle with it. The look they get. They always say the same thing.
What do they say.
They say: You dont have to do this.
You dont.
It's not any help though, is it?
No.
So why do you say it?
I aint never said it before.
Any of you.
There's just me here, she said. There aint nobody else.
Yes. Of course.
She looked at the gun. She turned away. She sat with her head down, her shoulders shaking. Oh Mama, she said.
None of this was your fault.
She shook her head, sobbing.
You didnt do anything. It was bad luck.
She nodded.
He watched her, his chin in his hand. All right, he said. This is the best I can do.
He straightened out his leg and reached into his pocket and drew out a few coins and took one and held it up. He turned it. For her to see the justice of it. He held it between his thumb and forefinger and weighed it and then flipped it spinning in the air and caught it and slapped it down on his wrist. Call it, he said.

For Chigurh, "the justice of it" is important because again the decisions that various people have taken throughout their lives have led to the point at which he sits with Moss's wife. He tells her: "For things at a common destination there is a common path. Not always easy to see. But there." She loses the coin toss but, like Wells, she resists his argument and he does not yet act. He tries to explain further and she finally resigns and accepts her fate, like Wells:

No Country For Old Men

I had no say in the matter. Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person's path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning.

[...]

When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the end. You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way. You're asking that I second say the world. Do you see?
Yes, she said, sobbing. I do. I truly do.
Good, he said. That's good. Then he shot her.

For Chigurh, the key is not to understand him as a coldblooded murderer but as the means by which the world undertakes its accounting. He does not kill because he enjoys it or because he refuses to let people live as they might; instead, he kills precisely because the world is such that we make decisions and they eventually lead us to the end of the paths we have chosen, which always involves death. Our mistake is in assuming that death can come early or unfairly when in fact whether we are killed by someone like Chigurh or die in our sleep it remains the case that our decisions have led us inevitably and irrevocably to that point.

Chigurh is the embodiment of the argument that we cannot truly reconcile in ourselves the freedom of the will with the fact that our choices determine our destiny. We think we are free to choose our paths but when we arrive at the end of them we deny that we are there and try to continue, even though if our choices really were free then we can have no complaint. The force of this is carried in the book via the character of Chigurh and he is an assassin because the same argument would hold little strength were he a saint. The people he kills must resign themselves to the inevitability of it because he confronts them with the incompatibility of their beliefs, that they can choose freely and yet try to avoid the consequences. We see this every time we try to shirk responsibility or deny that some event is our fault, but because Chigurh brings death instead of an unpleasant or uncomfortable situation the problem is placed in such stark relief. Hence "if the rule you followed led you to this of what use was the rule?" The freedom of the will is a nice idea but when confronted with the argument taken to its conclusion we deny it.

All of the above is not necessarily what I believe to be true but how I prefer to read the book and what I take McCarthy to be exploring through it. In his other works he looks at this in more detail, even though No Country For Old Men is more recent, so I think Chigurh might represent the embodiment of what he had earlier hinted at but now chose to confront his readers with. In this sense, The Road is the aftermath. I will return to this thread and these other titles in due course but for now I am interested to see what others make of it and of No Country For Old Men. [source: http://academy.galilean-library.org

Philosophy and the Meaning of Life

2010-01-27T05:44:00.000-08:00

Philosophy and the Meaning of Life
Julian Baggini
Pub Date: September 2004
ISBN: 1862076618
Format: Hardback
Extent: 256 pages

Having reviewed many books of popular philosophy, I have come to form a fairly low opinion of the genre. Some specimens are clearly aimed at injecting "depth" into dinner-party conversation; others offer self-help maxims in the guise of profound wisdom. Philosophy is presented as a form of cultural capital, a means of impressing or seducing. We are invited to share the secrets of the enlightened few - and wow the ignorant many.

All the more pleasant to come across a work of popular philosophy that is simple, serious and devoid of ostentation. The question of "the meaning of life" has long been a byword for pretentious rambling. It takes some nerve to tackle it in a brisk and no-nonsense fashion. Julian Baggini describes his work as "deflationary", because it "reduces the mythical, single and mysterious question of 'the meaning of life' to a series of smaller and utterly unmysterious questions about various meanings in life". This sounds like a worthy undertaking. Nevertheless - and here I reveal myself as one of the pretentious ramblers - I think there is more to the original question than Baggini's paraphrase captures.

Baggini's inquiry is, in his own words, secular and rational. It accepts the Darwinian story as the most plausible on offer, and draws the familiar conclusion that human life has no ultimate purpose. Baggini invokes a famous simile of Jean-Paul Sartre. We are not like paperknives, designed to fulfil a determinate function. We are more like bits of flint found on the beach, which can be put to many uses without being essentially "for" anything. Meaning, in other words, is not something that belongs to life as such; it is something that we give it, through our own free will. To pretend otherwise is what Sartre called "bad faith". Those who live in bad faith shirk responsibility for the creation of meaning, taking refuge in the illusory security of faith, tradition or social status.

The discovery that human life has no meaning outside itself filled the original existentialists with an emotion sometimes likened to vertigo: a heady mixture of terror and euphoria. Camus described life as "absurd"; Sartre spoke of "anguish, abandonment and despair". This is not Baggini's style. From his "deflationary" perspective, all that angst is just an exaggerated reaction to the disappointment of equally exaggerated hopes. We denizens of the floating world no longer expect life to have any transcendent purpose, and so we are quite happy to accept that it has none. In any case, why should a meaning we make up for ourselves be less valid than one that is "built-in"? Post-it notes have an undeniable use, even though their original inventor had no idea what it might be. Baggini's existentialism is what you might call existentialism-lite. The philosophy of Sartre has outgrown its adolescent hysterics and settled comfortably into middle age.

Yet existentialism-lite has its darker side, as Baggini sometimes seems to admit. We may be free to give our life any meaning we choose, but this meaning is "valid" only in so far as it is recognised by others. Not for us the insouciance of Bunyan's pilgrim, who, secure in his love of God, could afford to "care not what men say". We care desperately what men - and women - say, because there is no longer any higher court of appeal. Failure in this world is absolute. The checkout girl is just a checkout girl, the tramp just a tramp. Modern capitalism has given bite to Sartre's hard doctrine that "man is nothing else . . . but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is". The terrors of hell have been replaced by the terrors of social and sexual failure.

Baggini quite rightly wants to distinguish "true" or "inner" success from its outward validation, and bemoans the endless jockeying for status that dominates our culture. But do his own naturalistic premises entitle him to this lofty stance? What measure of true success does he have to offer, other than the collective judgement of society? At one point, Baggini equates true success with "becoming who we want to be". Remove the transcendental perspective, however, and why should anyone want to be anything other than what society deems valuable? If value is not cosmic, then it is social. The alternative to God is not a world of self-creating Nietzschean supermen, but universal conformity.

In any case, the idea that we create meaning for ourselves has never had much currency outside the fantasies of admen, self-help gurus and existentialist philosophers. I imagine that most people are like each other, going through life with the perturbing feeling that its meaning lies just beyond their grasp. If a sense of meaning does occasionally come our way, it is usually experienced as something unsolicited, unexpected and hard to put into words. Anyone who can tell you the meaning of his or her life - let alone claim to have created it - is a humbug.

Baggini is scornful of mysticism, seeing in it nothing more than the glamorisation of ignorance. This is why he wants to replace the big, mysterious question concerning the meaning of life with a series of smaller, unmysterious questions concerning various meanings in life. These are supposed to exhaust the big question, or at least that part of it which has any sense. This kind of "deflation" has long been a favourite technique of positivist-minded philosophers. Bertrand Russell argued in a similar vein that we cannot legitimately ask for the cause of the universe as a whole, but only of particular objects within it. However, even if it is in principle impossible to answer such "global" questions, it does not follow that it is impossible to ask them. We do not get rid of metaphysical puzzlement by declaring it logically out of bounds. The question of the "meaning of life" is of this kind. It cannot be answered, at least not in any ordinary sense, nor can it be dissolved into a series of more mundane questions. And yet it retains its power to disarm and perplex.

What's It All About? does as much as a secular, rational inquiry can do to elucidate the meaning of life. And, in the process, it reveals how little this is. [sartre.org]

Historical Origins of The Surrealist Art Movemen

2010-01-27T05:19:00.000-08:00

Sometimes through history, something comes along that changes everything as it has been known thus far. In the 1920’s, such an art movement came around that changed the way art was defined. The Surrealist art movement combined elements of its predecessors, Dada and cubism, to create something unknown to the art world. The movement was first rejected, but its eccentric ideas and unique techniques paved the way for a new form of art.

The Surrealist art movement stemmed from the earlier Dada movement. Dada was a movement in which artists stated their disgust with the war and with life in general. These artists showed that European culture had lost meaning to them by creating pieces of “anti-art” or “nonart.” The idea was to go against traditional art and all for which it stood. “Dada” became the movement’s name as a baby-talk term to show their feeling of nonsense toward the art world (de la Croix 705). Art from this movement was often violent and had an attitude of combat or protest. One historian stated that, “Dada was born from what is hated” (de la Croix 706). Though the movement was started to emphasize nonconformity, Picabia declared Dada to be dead in 1922, saying that it had become too organized a movement (Leslie 58). Despite the fact that it was declared dead, the Dada movement planted the seeds of another, more organized movement.

The Surrealist movement started in Europe in the 1920’s, after World War I with its nucleus in Paris. Its roots were found in Dada, but it was less violent and more artistically based. Surrealism was first the work of poets and writers (Diehl 131). The French poet, André Brenton, is known as the “Pope of Surrealism.” Brenton wrote the Surrealist Manifesto to describe how he wanted to combine the conscious and subconscious into a new “absolute reality” (de la Croix 708). He first used the word surrealism to describe work found to be a “fusion of elements of fantasy with elements of the modern world to form a kind of superior reality.” He also described it as “spontaneous writing” (Surrealism 4166-67). The first exhibition of surrealist painting was held in 1925, but its ideas were rejected in Europe (Diehl 131). Brenton set up an International Exhibition of Surrealism in New York, which then took the place of Paris as the center of the Surrealist movement (Pierre i). Soon surrealist ideas were given new life and became an influence over young artists in the United Sates and Mexico. The ideas of Surrealism were bold and new to the art world.

Surrealism is defined as “Psychic automatism in its pure state by which we propose to express- verbally, in writing, or in any other manner- the real process of thought. The dictation of thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason and outside any aesthetic or moral concerns” (Leslie 59). In other words, the general idea of Surrealism is nonconformity. This nonconformity was not as extreme as that of Dada since surrealism was still considered to be art. Brenton said that “pure psychic automatism” was the most important principle of Surrealism. He believed that true surrealists had no real talent; they just spoke their thoughts as they happened (Leslie 61-63). Surrealism used techniques that had never been used in the art world before.

Surrealists believed in the innocent eye, that art was created in the unconscious mind (Mak 1). Most Surrealists worked with psychology and fantastic visual techniques, basing their art on memories, feelings, and dreams (Scholastic 3). They often used hypnotism and drugs to venture into the dream world, where they looked for unconscious images that were not available in the conscious world. These images were seen as pure art (Mak 2). Such ventures into the unconscious mind lead Brenton to believe that surrealists equaled scientists and could “lead the exploration into new areas and methods of investigation” (Leslie 61).

Surrealists strongly embraced the ideas of Sigmund Freud. His method of psychoanalytic interpretation could be used to bring forth and illuminate the unconscious (Surrealism 4167). Freud once said, “A dream that is not interpreted is like a letter that is not opened,” and Surrealists adapted this idea into their artwork (Sanchez 4). Although Surrealists strongly supported the ideas of Freud, Brenton visited him in 1921 and left without his support (Leslie 61).

Freud inspired many Surrealists, but two different interpretations of his ideas lead to two different types of Surrealists, Automatists and Veristic Surrealists. Automatists focused their work more on feeling and were less investigative. They believed automatism to be “the automatic way in which the images of the subconscious reach the conscious” (Sanchez 2). However they did not think the images had a meaning or should try to be interpreted. Automatists thought that abstract art was the only way to convey images of the subconscious, and that a lack of form was a way to rebel against traditional art. In this way they were much like Dadaists. On the other side Veristic Surrealists believed subconscious images did have meaning. They felt that these images were a metaphor that, if studied, could enable the world to be understood. Veristic Surrealists also believed that the language of the subconscious world was in the form of image. While their work may look similar, Automatists only see art where Veristic Surrealists see meaning (Sanchez 2-5).

Surrealism drew elements from Cubism and Expressionism, and used some of the same techniques from the Dada movement (Leslie 4). Nonetheless there were certain techniques and devices that were characteristic to Surrealist art. Some devices including levitation, changing an object’s scale, transparency, and repetition are used to create a “typical” surrealist look (Scholastic 4). A very common Surrealist technique is the juxtaposition of objects that would typically not be together in a certain situation or together at all. This has been described as “beautiful as the encounter of an umbrella and a sewing-machine on a dissecting table” (de la Croix 710). Juxtaposition can be used to show a metaphor or to convey a certain message. Many surrealist artists painted very realistically but had one displaced object that changed the painting entirely. Another technique called “objective chance” used images found in nature that could not be created by an artist. Stencils and rubbings were used to utilize these images (Leslie 71). An additional characteristic of Surrealist art is the fact that many pieces have very obvious or simple titles stating the subject matter simply (de la Croix 709). These techniques are typical of most Surrealist art but it would not be correct to describe Surrealism as “typical.” Some of the most famous Surrealist artists used these techniques to make masterpieces.

René Magritte, a Surrealist artist, used traditional techniques to paint very realistic images. As a poster and wallpaper designer, he learned to paint realistically. His art frequently depicted images of everyday life; however, he creatively changed some aspects to give his work certain meaning. Magritte was able to turn dull images into extraordinary ones. Magritte’s own image, dressed in a dark suit and bowler hat, frequently appeared in his work. Many of his paintings had sinister and violent meanings, and the importance of surroundings was often stressed (Scholastic 2-7).

Although many Surrealist painters studied traditional art, Max Ernst was a self-taught painter. He felt that true subconscious art was the images in the minds of those thought to be insane. He studied philosophy and psychiatry and even visited an asylum to experience those images first hand (Leslie 69). His paintings repeatedly used the vegetable, the animal, the mineral, and the human kingdoms (Diehl 132). In 1925 he began to use frottage to express his feelings of fantasy and of the bizarre. Frottage is a rubbing technique in which the texture of an object is rubbed onto a piece of paper. These rubbings were then arranged into collages (Mak 1). [source: www.arthistoryarchive.com]

Nihilism and Modernist Literature

2010-01-25T09:59:00.000-08:00

The Arts reflect the spirit of the age and literature is no exception. Nihilism, a worldview that rejects ultimate meaning and purpose in life, heavily influenced the literature of the early 20th century, in which this philosophy was illustrated and addressed. The influence of nihilism is particularly evident in The Sun Also Rises, The Sound and the Fury, and “The Wasteland”.

The early 20th century was ripe for the advent of nihilism. Indeed, its arrival had been predicted by one of the most influential philosophers of the previous century, Friedrich Nietzsche. “What I am now going to relate is the history of the next two centuries,” he wrote in his notes which would be published in The Will to Power, “I shall describe what will happen, what must necessarily happen: the triumph of nihilism.” The nihilism that Nietzsche viewed upon the horizon was the inevitable consequence of the undermining of traditional Western thought that was underway in his own day.

Darwinian evolution, the psychoanalytical theories of Freud, the First World War, and the consequent decline of the Christian faith in the Western world were the primary contributors to 20th century nihilism. Darwin’s theory left mankind bereft of his own unique status in the natural order. Freud transformed man into a psychological marionette whose invisible puppeteers were the various neuroses that he had developed from repressing (largely sexual) desires. World War I with its incredible death toll and socio/political upheaval left the modern world wondering what had happened to the utopian vision inspired by the industrial revolution. And looming over everything like a great, gray thundercloud was the solemn declaration of Nietzsche, “God is dead”.

Nietzsche’s declaration seems to capture the spirit of the age better than any other. When the ultimate Absolute is stripped away, where does humanity get its existential bearings? What remains for man when objective beauty, truth, morality, and immortality have vanished? To quote Nietzsche once again:

What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space?” (The Parable of the Madman)

While these questions occupied the minds of many philosophers in the early twentieth century, the First World War was the catalyst that caused their consideration outside of the ivory tower of academia. The horrible events that took place between 1914 and 1918 shattered the illusion that the civilized world was morally progressing as millions of men were slaughtered in a mechanized massacre that proved to be more pointless with each death. Western civilization was stripped of its ideological finery and compelled to grope its way through the “infinite nothing” that had been predicted by Nietzsche’s madman. How could this have happened? What will become of mankind? These were the questions that modernist authors attempted to address in the years that followed the war.

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source: http://quadri.wordpress.com

also read part 2, part 3, and part 4

Surrealism and expressionism

2010-01-25T09:47:00.000-08:00

What is the difference between surrealism and expressionism?

Surrealism=art movement influenced by Freudianism and dedicated to the expression of imagination as revealed in dreams, free of the conscious control of reason and free of convention

Expressionism=a general term for a mode of literary or visual art which, in extreme reaction against realism or naturalism, presents a world violently distorted under the pressure of intense personal moods, ideas, and emotions: image and language thus express feeling and imagination rather than represent external reality.

Surrealism is an expression of imagination and expressionism is a mood, idea or emotion convayed about subject matter.

Source(s):
http://www.artbymackburoker.com

Expressionism in Wikipedia
Surrealism in Wikipedia

Miguel de Cervantes

2010-01-19T18:00:00.000-08:00

Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), Spanish dramatist, poet, and author wrote Don Quixote de la Mancha (Part I, 1605; Part II, 1615).

The life of this extraordinary man, whom for the space of two centuries civilized Europe has admired above every other Spanish writer, has been so frequently related, that a brief abstract of his biography, derived from the most authentic sources, will be sufficient for the purpose of this history.

It is a singular fact, that the contemporaries of this celebrated man, whom every town, not merely in Spain, but throughout the world, would be proud to have produced, should have neglected to record his native place. After long investigations and warm disputes, which, call to mind the contests of the seven Greek towns for the honour of having given birth to Homer, it is at length agreed that, according to the most probable supposition, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was born at Alcala de Henáres in the year 1547. His parents, who were not rich, were merely enabled to give him a moderate, but at the same time a literary education.

They sent him to the school of Madrid, where he acquired some knowledge of classical learning. At Madrid, he had an opportunity of witnessing the dramas, which the ingenious Lope de Rueda represented on his rudely constructed stage. Juan Lopez, the tutor of Cervantes was an indefatigable writer of poetry, particularly of romances, and he sought every means of cherishing his pupil's taste for poetic composition. Some verses by Cervantes were introduced in a description of the funeral of a Spanish princess, which Lopez published in 1569.

But young Cervantes, who had now attained his twenty-second year, seems to have had no certain means of gaining subsistence. He wrote numerous romances and sonnets; and it was probably about this period that he composed a pastoral romance, entitled Filena, which, if we may give credit to his own testimony, was very generally read. It appears that he thought he could better his condition by travelling; and he resolved to proceed to Italy. Here commences the period of his adventures. In Rome, cardinal Acquaviva for a short time became his patron and protector. But, impelled either by necessity or choice, he entered into the military profession. He enlisted under the banners of his sovereign, to serve in the wars against the Turks and the African corsairs, who at that time disturbed the tranquillity of Spain and Italy. During the war he proved himself to be wholly devoted to his new profession; and being engaged in the great battle of Lepanto, in 1572, he received a wound, which deprived him of his left hand together with a part of the arm. This honourable mutilation, to which he proudly alludes in his latter writings, obliged him to return to Spain. The ship, however, in which he had embarked was captured by an Algerine corsair and Cervantes was conveyed to Algiers and sold for a slave. His captivity, which lasted for nearly eight years, must have been of the most romantic description, if the fact be, as has frequently been conjectured, that Cervantes described his own adventures in the novel of the Captive. He was at length ransomed, and in the year 1581 he returned to his native country.

The third period of the life of Cervantes was exclusively devoted to literature. He had now attained his thirty-second year, and with a matured understanding, joined to considerable practical knowledge of the world, and an ardent passion for literature, he resolved to withdraw from the busy scene of life. In his retirement he wrote his second pastoral romance, entitled Galatea, which has so eclipsed Filena, that the latter is quite neglected and forgotten. He shortly afterwards married, and it would appear that he lived for some time on his wife's dowry. At length he began to write for the stage; but the dramas, which he composed at this period of his life, though amounting to about thirty in number, are nearly all lost. About this time arose the rivalry between Cervantes and Lope de Vega, whose dramas were so much admired that they bore away the palm of public favour. Mortified, as it would appear, by the ill success of his dramatic efforts, Cervantes laid aside his pen for a considerable period. It is conjectured, that in the meanwhile he obtained a post in Seville, the emoluments of which enabled to subsist. He did not again appear in the literary world until the death of Philip II in the year 1598.

It can scarcely be doubted, though no Spanish writer has advanced the conjecture, that the death of Philip II had a favourable influence on the genius of Cervantes. After the accession of the indolent Philip III, every man in Spain felt that he might then have more freedom than he had dared to take during the gloomy intolerance of the preceding reign. The Spaniards now ventured to sport with the chains, which they had not the power to break, and delicate satire was soon freely employed. Cervantes quickly found a subject to ridicule, in a furious contest, which arose in Seville between the spiritual and municipal authorities, concerning the funeral obsequies of the deceased monarch. There is reason to believe that he composed, about the same period, some of the instructive novels (Novelas Exemplares), which he subsequently published. What accident gave rise to the idea of his Don Quixote is unknown; for his having, while travelling through the province of La Mancha, become engaged in disputes with some of the inhabitants, and his being, on that account, for a short time imprisoned, can, at most, be only supposed to have suggested the idea of making that province the scene of the first part of his romance. Some fortunate circumstance, which cannot be traced, seems to have impressed Cervantes, who was then in his fiftieth year, with the consciousness of the true bent of his genius. The commencement of Don Quixote was first published at Madrid, in 1606; but the enthusiastic reception which this original romance experienced from the Spanish public, produced very little change in the author's fortune; for the folly which felt itself disturbed in its security, united with envy in seeking to trace in the work allusions of an offensive kind. Cervantes accordingly continued poor, and had now to contend with exasperated enemies. Those enemies imagined they had completely defeated him, when an unknown writer of their own party, under the name of Avellaneda, published a continuation of Don Quixote, full of invective against the original author. Precisely at the period when this continuation appeared, Cervantes published the sequel of his instructive novels, which he dedicated to the count of Lemos. In that nobleman he found a protector who never withdrew his favour, and who, as it appears, afforded him support in various ways. Pecuniary necessity seems, however, to have urged him, as a last resource, to write for the stage.

The latest works of Cervantes were the genuine continuation and completion of Don Quixote, the Journey to Parnassus, which was first published in 1614, and finally the romance of Persiles and Sigismuinda, for which a few days previous to his death, he he wrote a dedicataon to the count of Lemos. From various passages in the prefaces and introductions to these last works, it is obvious how highly Cervantes prized that celebrity which after many abortive efforts, he had at length obtained in his old age. But even where his vanity is not disguised, it is easy, from the candid tone in which he speaks of himself, to recognise the man of firm and upright spirit, the declared enemy of every sort of affectation, and the honest and liberal judge of himself and of others. He died in poverty, though not in extreme want, at Madrid, in 1616, in the sixty-ninth year of his age. He was buried privately, without any kind of distinction, and not even a common tombstone marks the spot where the ashes of Cervantes repose.

Were we to arange the works of Cervantes according to their merits, the first place must be assigned to Don Quixote, which is moreover entitled to the supremacy, inasmuch as it is single in its kind.

To enter into a description of the contents of this universally known masterpiece, or to give a circumstantial analysis of its plan, would be equally superfluous. A few words, however, on the happy and original idea, which forms the foundation of the whole work, may here be introduced. It has often been said, though the opinion has, perhaps, not been fully weighed, nor even expressed with sufficient precision, that the venerable knight of La Mancha, is the immortal representative of all men of exalted imagination, who carry the noblest enthusiasm to a pitch of folly; because, with understanding in other respects sound, they are unable to resist the fascinating power of a self deception, by which they are induced to regard themselves as beings of a superior order. None but an experienced observer of mankind, endowed with profound judgment, and a genius to whose penetrating glance one of the most interesting recesses of the human heart had been newly disclosed, could have seized the idea of such a romance with energetic precision. None but a poet and a man of wit could have thrown so much poetic interest into the execution of that idea; and none but an author who had at his disposal all the richness and variety of one of the finest languages in the world, could have diffused over such a work that classical perfection of expression which gives the stamp of excellence to the whole. The originality of the idea of Don Quixote is not only historically demonstrated by no romance so a similar kind haying previously existed—for pictures of ingenious roguery, in the style of Lazarillo de Tormes, belong to a totally different species of comic romance—but it is also psychologically certain, that a creative fancy, which was only capable of continuing to invent where another had stopped, could not, with the boldness of Cervantes, have combined traits, apparentlyheterogeneous, in order thereby to exhaust to the utmost the idea by which he was inspired. Those who are acquainted with Don Quixote only through the medium of the common translations will not certainly be inclined to regard it as a work of inspiration, in the highest sense of the word. But it is impossible to form a more mistaken notion of this work, than to consider it merely as a satire intended by the author to ridicule the absurd passion for reading old romances of chivalry. Doubtless this is one of the objects which Cervantes bad in view; for among the romances which the Spanish public indefatigably perused, few were tolerable, and only one or two possessed first-rate merit. We must not, however, attribute to him the absurd conceit of wishing to prove the prejudicial influence which the reading of bad romances produced on the taste of the Spanish nation, by exhibiting the individual folly of an enthusiast, who would have been just as likely to have lost his senses by the study of Plato or Aristotle, as by the reading of romances of chivalry. The merit and the richness of the idea of a man of elevated character, excited by heroic and enthusiastic feelings to the extravagant degree of wishing to restore the age of chivalry, must be regarded as the seed of inspiration whence the whole work originated. As a poet, Cervantes was aware of the resources, which this idea furnished; and he must also have been satisfied with his power to prosecute it, as he has proved in the execution what he was capable of accomplishing. In the invention of a series of comic situations of the most burlesque kind, he found full scope for the exercise of his fancy. The painting of these situations afforded opportunities for the free and energetic development of his poetic talent. Finally, he knew how to combine the knowledge of human nature he had acquired during a life of' fifty years, with the most delicate satire, so as to render his comic romance also a book of moral instruction, to which no parallel existed. These brief remarks on the idea forming the foundation of the romance of Don Quixote, must be allowed to supply the place of a detailed analysis of the manner in which that celebrated work as composed. Other critics have sufficiently proved that the composition is by no means faultless. In the preface to the second part, Cervantes has himself pointed out some inadvertencies, which produce incongruities in the history, but he disdained to correct them, because he conceived that they had been too severely condemned.

The character of the execution of this comic romance is no less original than the invention. Character in the strictest sense of the term is here meant. The superficial sketches of a sportive fancy, for which the Spaniards in the age of Cervantes entertained so high predilection, had not sufficient interest for him. He felt a passion for the vivid painting of character, as his successful works prove. Under the influence of this feeling, he drew the natural and striking portrait of his heroic Don Quixote, so truly noble-minded, and so enthusiastic an admirer of every thing good and great, yet having all those fine qualities, accidentally blended with a relative kind of madness; and he likewise portrayed with no less fidelity, the opposite character of Sancho Panza, a compound of grossness and simplicity, whose low selfishness leads him to place blind confidence in all the extravagant hopes and promises of his master... The subordinate characters of the great picture exhibit equal truth and decision; but the characteristic tone of the whole is still more remarkable. A translator cannot commit a more serious injury to Don Quixote, than to dress that work in a light, anecdotical style. A style perfectly unostentatious and free from affectation, but at the same time solemn, and penetrated, as it were, with the character of the hero, diffuses over this comic romance an imposing air, which, were it not so appropriate, would seem to belong exclusively to serious works and which is certainly difficult to be seized in a translation. But it is precisely this solemnity of language, which imparts a characteristic relief to the comic scenes. It is the genuine style of the old romances of chivalry, improved and applied in a totally original way; and only where the dialogue style occurs is each person found to speak as he might be expected to do, and in his own peculiar manner. But wherever Don Quixote himself harangues the language re-assumes the venerable tone of the romantic style; and various uncommon expressions of which the hero avails himself serve to complete the delusion of his covetous squire, to whom they are only half intelligible. This characteristic tone diffuses over the whole a poetic colouring, which distinguishes Don Quixote from all comic romances on the ordinary style; and that poetic colouring is moreover heightened by the judicious choice of episodes. The essential connexion of these episodes with the whole has sometimes escaped the observation of critics, who have regarded as merely parenthetical those parts in which Cervantes has most decidedly manifested the poetic spirit of his work. The novel of El Curioso Impertinente cannot indeed be ranked among the number of these essential episodes but the charming story of the shepherdess Marcella, the history of Dorothea, and the history of the rich Camacho and the poor Basilio, are unquestionably connected with the interest of the whole. These serious romantic parts, which are not, it is true, essential to the narrative connexion, but strictly belong to the characteristic dignity of the whole picture, also prove how far Cervantes was from the idea usually attributed to him of writing a book merely to excite laughter. The passages, which common readers feel inclined to pass over, are, in general, precisely those in which Cervantes is most decidedly a poet, and for which he has manifested an evident predilection. On such occasions, he also introduces among his prose, episodical verses, for the most part excellent in their kind and no translator can omit them without doing violence to the spirit of the original.

Were it not for the happy art with which Cervantes has contrived to preserve an intermediate tone between pure poetry and prose, Don Quixote would not deserve to be cited as the first classic model of the modern romance or novel. It is, however, fully entitled to that distinction. Cervantes was the first writer who formed the genuine romance of modern times on the model of the original chivalrous romance that equivocal creation of the genius and the barbarous taste of the middle ages. The result has proved that modern taste, however readily it may in other respects conform to the rules of the antique, nevertheless requires, in the narration of fictitious events, a certain union of poetry with prose, which was unknown to the Greeks and Romans in their best literary ages. It was only necessary to seize on the right tone, but that was a point of delicacy, which the inventors of romances of chivalry were not able to comprehend. Diego de Mendoza, in his Lazarillo de Tormes, departed too far from poetry. Cervantes, in his Don Quixote restored to the poetic art the place it was entitled to hold in this class of writing; and he must not be blamed if cultivated nations have subsequently mistaken the true spirit of this work, because their own novelists had led them to regard common prose as the style peculiarly suited to romance composition. Don Quixote is, moreover, the undoubted prototype of the comic novel. The humorous situations are, it is true, almost all burlesque, which was certainly not necessary, but the satire is frequently so delicate, that it escapes rather than obtrudes on unpractised attention; as for example, in the whole picture of the administration of Sancho Panza in his imaginary island. The language, even in the description of the most burlesque situations, never degenerates into vulgarity; it is on the contrary, throughout the whole work, so noble, correct and highly polished, that it would not disgrace even an ancient classic of the first rank. This explanation of a part of the merits of a work, which has been so often wrongly judged, may perhaps seem belong rather to the eulogist than the calm and impartial historian. Let those who may he inclined to form this opinion study Don Quixote in the original language, and study it rightly, for it is not a book to be judged by a superficial perusal. But care must be taken lest the intervention of many subordinate traits, which were intended to have only a transient national interest, should produce an error in the estimate of the whole.

It would be scarcely possible to arrange the other works of Cervantes according to a critical judgment of their importance; for the merits of some consist in the admirable finish of the whole, while others exhibit the impress of genius in the invention, or some other individual feature. A distinguished place must, however, be assigned to the Novelas Exemplares (Moral or Instructive Tales). They are unequal in merit as well as in character. Cervantes doubtless intended that they should be to the Spaniards nearly what the novels of Boccacio were to the Italians, some are mere anecdotes, some are romances in miniature, some are serious, some comic, and all are written in a light, smooth, conversational style. With regard to the practical knowledge, which these novels are intended to convey to the reader, Cervantes has affected more than Boecacio; and at all events he extended the literature of his country by their publication, for no similar compositions had previously existed in the Spanish language. In the Novelas Exemplares Cervantes has again proved himself the experienced judge of mankind, and has given, with admirable success, truly genuine and judicious, representations of nature, in the various situations of real life. The reader must naturally feel inclined to pardon the want of plan which this little collection of novels occasionally exhibits, when he finds that the author, through the medium of his characters, relates and describes all that he had himself seen and experienced under similar circumstances, particularly during his abode, in Italy and Africa. The history of the Licenciado Vidriera, which is the fifth in the collection, is totally destitute of plan, and is related in simple prose like a common anecdote. But the novel of La Gritanilla, the Gipsey Girl is ingeniously conceived and poetically coloured; and the same may be said of some others. The story of Rinconete y Cortadilla, or Lurker and Cutter, as the names with reference to their etymology may be translated, is a comic romance in miniature.

Galatea, the pastoral romance, which Cervantes wrote in his youth, is a happy imitation of the Diana of Montemayor, but exhibiting a still closer resemblance to Gil Polo's continuation of that poem. Next to Don Quixote and the Novelas Exemplares, his pastoral romance is particularly worthy of attention, as it manifests in a striking way the poetic direction in which the genius of Cervantes moved even at an early period of life, and from which he never entirely departed in his subsequent writings. As, however, the Galatea possesses but little originality, it constantly excites the recollection of its models, and particularly of the Diana of Gil Polo. Of the invention of the fable, likewise, but little can be said, for though the story is continued through six books, it is still incomplete. In composing this pastoral romance, Cervantes seems to have had no other object than to clothe in the popular garb of a tale, a rich collection of poems in the old, Spanish and Italian styles, which he could not have presented to the public under a more agreeable form. The story is merely the thread, which holds the beautiful garland together; for the poems are the portion of the work most particularly deserving attention. They are as numerous as they are various: and should the title of Cervantes to rank among the most eminent poets, whether in reference to verse or to prose, or should his originality in versified composition be called in question, an attentive perusal of the romance of Galatea must vanish every doubt of these points. It was remarked by the contemporaries of Cervantes that he was incapable of writing poetry, and that he could compose only beautiful prose; but that observation referred solely to his dramatic works. Every critic sufficiently acquainted with his lyrical compositions has rendered justice to their merit. From the romance of Galatea, it is obvious that Cervantes composed in all the various kinds of syllabic measure, which were used in his time. He even occasionally adopted the old dactylic stanza. He appears to have experienced some difficulty in the metrical form of the sonnet, and his essays in that style are by no means numerous; but his poems in Italian octaves display the utmost facility; and among the number, the song of Caliope, in the last book of the Galatea, is remarkable for graceful ease of versification. In the same manner as Gil Polo in his Diana makes the river Turia pronounce the praises of the celebrated Valencians, the poetic fancy of Cervantes summoned the muse Calliope before the shepherds and shepherdesses, to render solemn homage to those contemporaries whom he esteemed worthy of distinction as poets. But the critic can scarcely venture to place reliance on praises dealt out with such profuse liberality. The most beautiful poems in the Galatea are a few in the cancion style, some of which are iambics, and some in trochaic or Old Spanish verse. Cervantes has here and there indulged in those antiquated and fantastic plays pf wit, which at a subsequent period he himself ridiculed. The prose of the Galatea, which is in other respects so beautiful, is also occasionally overloaded with epithet.

Cervantes displays a totally different kind of poetic talent in the Viage al Parnaso (Journey to Parnassus), a work which cannot properly be ranked in any particular class of literary composition, but which, next to Don Quixote, is the most exquisite production of its extraordinary author. The chief object of the poem is to satirize the false pretenders to the honours of the Spanish. Parnassus, who lived in the age of the writer. But this satire is of a peculiar character: it is a most happy effusion of sportive humour, and yet it remains a matter of doubt whether Cervantes intended to praise or to ridicule the individuals whom he points out as being particularly worthy of the favour of Apollo. He himself says -"Those whose names do not appear in this list may be just as well pleased as those who are mentioned in it." To characterise true poetry according to his own poetic feelings, to manifest in a decided way his enthusiasm for the art even in his old age, and to hold up a mirror for the conviction of those who were only capable of making rhymes and inventing extravagances, seem to have been the objects which Cervantes had principally in view when he composed this satirical poem. Concealed satire, open jesting, and ardent enthusiasm for the beautiful, are the boldly combined elements of this noble work. It is divided into eight chapters, and the versification is in tercets. The composition is half comic and half serious. After many humorous incidents, Mercury appears to Cervantes, who is represented as travelling to Parnassus in the most miserable condition; and the god salutes him with the title of the "Adam of poets." Mercury, after addressing to him many flattering compliments, conducts him to a ship entirely built of different kinds of verse, and which is intended to convey a cargo of Spanish poets to the kingdom of Apollo. The description of the ship is an admirable comic allegory. Mercury shows him a list of the poets with whom Apollo wishes to become acquainted and this list, owing to the problematic nature of its half ironical and half serious praises, has proved a stumbling block to commentators. In the midst of the reading, Cervantes suddenly drops the list. The poets are now described as crowding on board the ship in numbers as countless as drops of rain in a shower, or grains of sand on the seacoast; and such a tumult ensues, that, to save the ship from sinking by their pressure, the sirens raise a furious storm. The flights of imagination become more wild as the story advances. Thy storm subsides, and is succeeded by a shower of poets, that is to say poets fall from the clouds. One of the first who descends on the ship is Lope de Vega, on whom Cervantes seizes this opportunity of pronouncing an emphatic eulogium. The remainder of the poem, a complete analysis of which would occupy too much space, proceeds in the same spirit. One of the most beautiful pieces of verse ever written by Cervantes, is his description of the goddess Poesy, whom he sees in all her glory in the kingdom of Apollo. To this fine picture the portrait of the goddess Vain-Glory, who afterwards appears to the author in a dream, forms an excellent companion. Among the passages, which for burlesque humour vie with Don Quixote is the description of a second storm, in which Neptune vainly endeavours to plunge the poetasters to the bottom of the deep. Venus prevents them from sinking, by changing them into gourds and leather flasks. At length a formal battle is fought between the real poets and some of the poetasters. The poem is throughout interspersed with singularly witty and beautiful ideas; and only a very few passages can be charged with feebleness or languor. It has never been equalled, far less surpassed by any similar work, and it had no prototype. The language is classical throughout; and it is only to be regretted that Cervantes has added to the poem a comic supplement in prose, in which he indulges a little too freely in self-praise.

The dramatic compositions of Cervantes, were they all extant, would be the most voluminous, though certainly not the best portion of his works. Possibly those which are now lost may yet be recovered; for a fortunate accident brought to light two dramas which had remained concealed in manuscript till near the end of the eighteenth century. Cervantes includes some of his dramas among those productions with which he was himself most satisfied; and he seems to have regarded them with the greater self-complacency in proportion as they experienced the neglect of the public. This conduct has sometimes been attributed to a spirit of contradiction, and sometimes to vanity. The editor of the eight plays (chiefly heroic) and eight interludes, which were the last dramatic productions of the author, has adopted the absurd notion that Cervantes, in writing these pieces, intended to parody and ridicule the style of Lope de Vega; which is merely saying that he attacked the whole literary public of Spain in the most discourteous way. No traces of parody appear in any of those dramas. They are, however, with the exception of a few successful scenes, so dull and tedious, that one might be inclined to regard them as counterfeit productions by another author, were it not that their authenticity seems to be sufficiently proved. The little interludes alone exhibit burlesque humour and dramatic spirit. That the penetrating and profound Cervantes should have so mistaken the limits of his dramatic talent, would not be sufficiently accounted for, had he not unquestionably proved by his tragedy of Numantia how pardonable was the self-deception of which he could not divest himself. Cervantes was entitled to consider himself endowed with a genius for dramatic poetry; but he could not preserve his independence in the conflict he had to maintain with the conditions required by the Spanish public in dramatic composition; and when he sacrificed his independence, and submitted to rules imposed by others, his invention and language were reduced to the level of a poet of inferior talent. The intrigues, adventures and surprises, which in that age characterized the Spanish drama, were ill suited to the genius of Cervantes. His natural style was too profound and precise to be reconciled to fantastical ideas, expressed in irregular verse. But he was Spaniard enough to be gratified with dramas, which, as a poet, he could not imitate; and he imagined himself capable of imitating them, because he would have shone in another species of dramatic composition, had the public taste accommodated itself to his genius.

With all its imperfections and faults, Cervantes' tragedy of Numantia is a noble production, and, like Don Quixote it is unparalleled in the class of literature to which it belongs. It proves that under different circumstances, the author of Don Quixote might have been the Aeschylus of Spain. The conception is in the style of the boldest pathos, and the execution, at least taken as a whole, is vigorous and dignified. The ancient Roman History from which Cervantes selected the story of the destruction of Numantia, afforded but few positive facts of which he could avail himself. He therefore invented along with the subject of his piece a peculiar style of tragic composition, in doing which he did not pay much regard to the theory of Aristotle. His object was to produce a piece full of tragic situations, combined with the charm of the marvellous. The tragedy is written in conformity with no rules save those which the author prescribed to himself; for he felt no inclination to imitate the Greek forms. The play is divided into four acts, (jornadas,) and no chorus is introduced. The dialogue is sometimes in tercets and sometimes in redondillas, and for the most part in octaves without any regard to rule. The diction does not maintain equal dignity throughout; but it is in no instance affected or bombastic. Cervantes has evinced admirable skill in gradually heightening the tragic interest to the close of the piece. The commencement is, however, somewhat cold and tedious. Scipio appears with his generals in the Roman camp before Numantia. In a speech, which might have been improved by abridgment, he reprimands his troops, whose spirit has begun to be superseded by effeminacy. The soldiers are re-inspired with courage. Numantian ambassadors enter with proposals for peace, which are rejected. It is here that the tragedy properly begins. Spain appears, an allegorical character, and she summons the river Duero, or Durius, on whose banks Numantia stands. The old river god appears, attended by a retinue of the deities of the smaller rivers of the surrounding country. These ideal characters consult the book of fate, and discover that Numantia cannot be saved. What may be said against the bold idea of endeavouring to augment the tragic pathos by means of allegorical characters, it must be acknowledged that in this case the result of the experiment is not altogether unsuccessful, and Cervantes justly prides himself in the novelty of the idea. The scene is now transferred to Numantia. The senate is assembled to deliberate on the affairs of the city, and among the members the character of Theagenes shines with conspicuous lustre. Bold resolutions are adopted by the senate. The transition into light redondillas for the purpose of interweaving with the serious business of the fable, the loves of a young Numantian, named Morandro, and his mistress, is certainly a fault in the composition of the tragedy. But to this fault we are indebted for some of the finest scenes in the following act. A solemn sacrifice is prepared; but amidst the ceremony an evil spirit appears, seizes the victim, and extinguishes the fire. The confusion in the town increases. A dead man is resuscitated by magic, and the scene in which this incident occurs has a most imposing effect. All hope has now vanished. After the return of a second unsuccessful embassy, the Numantians, by the advice of Theagenes, resolve to burn all their valuable property, then to put their wives and children to death, and lastly, to throw themselves into the flames, lest any of the inhabitants of the town should become the slaves of the Romans. Scenes of the most heartrending domestic misery, and the noblest traits of patriotism, then ensue. Famine rages in Numantia. Morandro, accompanied by one of his friends, ventures to enter the Roman camp. He returns with a piece of bread smeared with blood, and, presenting it to his mistress, falls at her feet mortally wounded. The action proceeds with unabated interest to the end. An allegorical character of Fame enters at the end of the piece, and announces the future glory of Spain.

Allegorical characters, for instance, Necessity and Opportunity, likewise appear in Cervantes' comedy, El Trato de Argel (Life in Algiers, or Manners in Algiers). But their introduction amongst scenes of common life injures the story, which is besides by no means ingenious, and imparts a cold and whimsical character to the piece. This comedy, however, which is divided into five acts, is not destitute of interest and spirit.

The romance of Persiles and Sigismunda, which Cervantes finished shortly before his death, must be regarded as an interesting appendix to his other works. The language and the whole composition of the story exhibit the purest simplicity, combined with singular precision and polish. The idea of this romance was not new, and scarcely deserved to be reproduced in a new manner. But it appears that Cervantes, at the close of his glorious career, took a fancy to imitate Heliodorus. He has maintained the interest of the situations, but the whole work is merely a romantic description of travels, rich enough in fearful adventures, both by sea and land. Real and fabulous geography and history are mixed together in an absurd and monstrous manner; and the second half of the romance, in which the scene is transferred to Spain and Italy, does not exactly harmonize with the spirit of the first half.

If we cast a glance on the collected works of Cervantes, in order to ascertain what their author was entitled to claim as his original property, independently of his contemporaries and predecessors, we shall find that the genius of that poet, who is in general only partially estimated, shines with the finer lustre the longer it is contemplated. That kind of criticism that is to be learned, contributed but little to the development and formation of his genius. A critical tact, which is a truer guide than any rule, but which abandons genius when it forgets itself, secured the fancy of Cervantes against the aberrations of common minds, and his sportive wit was always subject to the control of solid judgement. The vanity, which occasionally made him mistake the true bent of his talent, must be confessed to have been pardonable, considering how little he was known to his contemporaries. He did not even know himself, though he felt the consciousness of his genius. From the mental height to which he had raised himself, he might, without too highly rating his own abilities, look down on all the writers of his age. More than one poet of great, of immortal genius, might be placed beside him in his own country; but of all the Spanish poets, Cervantes alone belongs to the whole world.

Salon's Book Review: The best fiction of 2009

2010-01-16T23:57:00.000-08:00

"The Children's Book" by A.S. Byatt
This ravishing epic of the Edwardian era traces the lives of several interlocking families, at the center of which is Olive Wellwood, who is based on the great children's novelist E. Nesbit. The novel begins with an idyllic amateur production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in the English countryside and winds through a series of often disturbing revelations about the participants. Their shared obsessions include fairy tales, the Arts and Crafts movement, social utopias and sex, but perhaps the most striking of all Byatt's themes is the drive to create and how it shapes (some would say distorts) the personalities of those possessed by it; nobody writes better about this than she does. This a classic Byatt fusion of fact and uncannily luscious imagery, mixed in the ideal proportions: not too hot, not too cold -- just right.

"Await Your Reply: A Novel" by Dan Chaon
This elegant page-turner begins with three seemingly disconnected characters -- a man in search of his long-lost twin, a high school girl getting the hell out of Pompey, Ohio, and a college student succumbing to the criminality he believes is in his blood -- all fleeing across forgotten stretches of the American heartland. Its theme is identity and the theft thereof, but also our national dream of jettisoning our old selves and becoming someone new. Chaon is that rare novelist who can combine intricate, suspenseful plotting with fully realized characters and unfussily lovely prose, but his great achievement here is the tenderness with which he explores the enigma at the center of the novel: What does it really mean to have a self, and what do you have left if you're foolish enough to throw it away?

"Chronic City" by Jonathan Lethem
A great New York novel should aim for the universal by way of the parochial. The Manhattanites in Lethem's near-future/alternative-now metropolis experience all the crises and travails of 21st-century life in a slightly more concentrated form. (It takes a novelist of exceptional talent and nerve to make you believe that matters of moment can hang on the outcome of an eBay auction.) A former child star coasting on his fading fame, a brilliant but terminally eccentric rock critic, a sarcastic ghostwriter and an activist turned municipal bureaucrat stumble through a city riddled with unreliable rumors, insufficiently explained disasters, dilettante millionaires, imperious celebrities and other signs and wonders. What they -- what all of us -- yearn for in a world full of engineered appearances and emotions is the truly beautiful and the truly moving. Can they find it, and will they even recognize it when they do? On this you can count: "Chronic City" is the real thing.

"Love in Infant Monkeys: Stories" by Lydia Millet
This collection begins with a short story about Madonna going on a grouse hunt, which might sound like an inauspicious start for a book whose theme is loss on an epochal scale. Guess again: With immense confidence, Millet takes a motley assortment of famous or pseudo-famous figures -- Thomas Edison, David Hasselhoff, the zoologist from "Born Free," a Sharon Stone impersonator -- and gives each a transformative encounter with an (often imperiled) animal. The result, a cumulative effect formed by all the stories in the collection, draws illuminating connections and comparisons between the trivial and the eternal. Millet's vision is startling, as often tragic as it is hilarious (and she can be very, very funny), but always shot through with the mystery of existence, a gift we can barely manage to appreciate even as we carelessly steal it from the rest of the earth's denizens. "Love in Infant Monkeys" is a slyly and unsentimentally profound exploration of what human beings can (but very seldom do) learn from our fellow creatures.

"The Little Stranger" by Sarah Waters
Waters takes one of narrative literature's most venerable genres -- the ghost story -- into fresh territory. Haunted houses usually stand as metaphors for misbegotten psychosexual situations. In "The Little Stranger," Waters masterfully redeploys the gothic tale to address the great theme of the British novel: class. During the lean years after World War II, a rural physician ingratiates himself into the remnants of a local "old family" as they rattle around their decrepit but still beautiful mansion. In time, eerie manifestations of some indistinct yet malevolent force begin to torment the house's aristocratic residents. What -- or, rather, who -- is causing the strange noises and mysterious stains? At once innovative and genuinely creepy, "The Little Stranger" is an astonishing performance, right down to its devastating final sentence.

more information about this list read here

Publisher's Weekly: Top books of the week (January 7, 2010)

2010-01-16T23:52:00.000-08:00

Ranking the most popular titles in fiction, non-fiction and more

HARDCOVER FICTION

1. "The Lost Symbol" by Dan Brown (Doubleday)

2. "I, Alex Cross" by James Patterson (Little, Brown)

3. "The Help" by Kathryn Stockett (Putnam Adult/Amy Einhorn)

4. "Sizzle" by Julie Garwood (Ballantine Books)

5. "Fired Up" by Jayne Ann Krentz (Putnam Adult)

6. "The Last Song" by Nicholas Sparks (Grand Central Publishing)

7. "The Honor of Spies" by W.E.B. Griffin and William E. Butterworth IV (Putnam Adult)

8. "Deeper Than the Dead" by Tami Hoag (Dutton Adult)

9. "Under the Dome" by Stephen King (Scribner)

10. "Altar of Eden" by James Rollins (William Morrow)

11. "Pirate Latitudes" by Michael Crichton (Harper)

12. "U is for Underflow" by Sue Grafton (Putnam Adult)

13. "Ford County: Stories" by John Grisham (Doubleday)

14. "The Girl Who Played With Fire" by Stieg Larsson (Knopf)

15. "I, Sniper: A Bob Lee Swagger Novel" by Stephen Hunter (Simon & Schuster)

HARDCOVER NONFICTION

1. "Have a Little Faith: A True Story" by Mitch Albom (Hyperion)

2. "Going Rogue: An American Life" by Sarah Palin (HarperCollins)

3. "What the Dog Saw" by Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown)

4. "SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance" by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (William Morrow)

5. "Stones Into Schools" by Greg Mortenson (Viking)

6. "Open: An Autobiography" by Andre Agassi (Knopf)

7. "True Compass" by Edward M. Kennedy (Twelve)

8. "Arguing With Idiots: How to Stop Small Minds and Big Government" by Glenn Beck and Kevin Balfe (Threshold Editions)

9. "Outliers: The Story of Success" by Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown)

10. "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" by Julia Child and Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck (Knopf)

11. "The Imperial Cruise" by James Bradley (Little, Brown)

12. "It's Your Time: Activate Your Faith, Achieve Your Dreams, and Increase in God's Favor" by Joel Osteen (Free Press)

13. "Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System--and Themselves" by Andrew Ross Sorkin (Viking)

14. "The 4-Hour Workweek Expanded & Updated" by Timothy Ferriss (Crown)

15. "The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean my Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have Fun" by Gretchen Rubin (Harper)

MASS MARKET PAPERBACKS

1. "Street Game" by Christine Feehan (Jove)

2. "Dear John" by Nicholas Sparks (Grand Central Publishing)

3. "The Lovely Bones" by Alice Sebold (Little, Brown)

4. "The Devil's Punchbowl" by Greg Iles (Pocket Star)

5. "Plum Spooky" Janet Evanovich (St. Martin's Paperbacks)

6. "Shades of Midnight" by Lara Adrian (Dell)

7. "Vanishing Act" by Fern Michaels (Zebra)

8. "The Man You'll Marry" by Debbie Macomber (Mira)

9. "Fire and Ice" by Julie Garwood (Ballantine)

10. "Forbidden Falls" by robyn Carr (Mira)

11. "The Associate" by John Grisham (Dell)

12. "Early Dawn" by Catherine Robertson (Signet)

13. "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy (Vintage)

14. "Cross Country" by James Patterson (Vision)

15. "Black Ops" by W.E.B. Griffin (Jove)

TRADE PAPERBACKS

1. "The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game" by Michael Lewis (W.W. Norton & Company)

2. "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" by Stieg Larsson (Vintage)

3. "The Lovely Bones" by Alice Sebold (Little, Brown)

4. "The Shack" by William P. Young (Windblown Media)

5. "Push" by Sapphire (Vintage)

6. "The Piano Teacher" be Janice Y.K. Lee (Penguin)

7. "Three Cups of Tea" by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin (Penguin)

8. "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell (L,B/Back Bay)

9. "The Time Traveler's Wife" by Audrey Niffenegger (Mariner Books)

10. "Dear John" by Nicholas Sparks (Grand Central Publishing)

11. "The Art of Racing in the Rain" by Garth Stein (Harper)

12. "Freakonomics" by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (Harper Perennial)

13. "Flat Belly Diet!" by Liz Vaccariello with Cynthia Sass (Rodale Books)

14. "Olive Kitteredge" by Elizabeth Strout (Random House Trade Paperbacks)

15. "Cook This Not That!: Kitchen Survival Guide" by David Zinczenko and Matt Goulding (Rodale Books)

Summertime by J.M.Coetzee

2010-01-14T17:48:00.000-08:00

Title: Summertime
Author: J.M.Coetzee
Genre: Novel
Written: 2009
Length: 266 pages

The subject of Summertime is 'John Coetzee'. As far as many of the autobiographical details that the general reader might be familiar with go, 'John Coetzee' bears a strong resemblance to author J.M.Coetzee: both have South African backgrounds, and returned there after stays abroad, in the UK and United States; both wrote works such as Dusklands, Disgrace, and two fictional memoirs, Boyhood and Youth; both won the Nobel Prize. There is one major difference, however: 'John Coetzee' is dead.
Summertime is an odd and somewhat creepy exercise in auto/biography and self-analysis, and while Boyhood and Youth were written in the third person, Coetzee here tries to remove himself even further -- while yet remaining at the very center of the book.
In this alternate reality, 'John Coetzee' also planned a third memoir, after Boyhood and Youth, but it: "never saw the light of day". A biographer, Vincent, has now decided to follow 'John Coetzee''s trail, and tell the story of this "stage in his life", his years in South Africa in the early 1970s, after he returned from the United States, a period during which he worked as a teacher, in various capacities, and also published his first book, Dusklands. The way Summertime is presented, however, suggests that this is not the final product, as it collects the material the biographer presumably plans to rely on in writing his work but reads very much like a research-work in progress.
It is noteworthy that Coetzee gives 'John Coetzee' the first and final words: the opening and closing sections of the novel consist of notebook fragments from and/or covering the period in question. They also include a few annotations, about which the biographer claims:

Coetzee wrote them himself. They are memos to himself, written in 1999 or 2000, when he was thinking of adapting those particular entries for a book.

The five other sections of the book each center on a different person who knew 'John Coetzee' during that period, and mainly take the form of interviews the biographer conducts with them. Some of the conversation partners offer expansive answers -- telling their stories, as it were -- while other exchanges are more of a rapid-fire back and forth of questions and answers. In one instance the biographer reads back what he has made of an interview with his subject, Margot, explaining:

I cut out my prompts and questions and fixed up the prose to read as an uninterrupted narrative spoken in your voice.

But the version presented here includes interruptions and further questions and elaborations as the subject comments on this revised version. Here and elsewhere, the biographer promises to take into account his subjects' concerns about what information is related, and how:

One final thing: if you are planning to quote me, would you make sure I have a chance to check the text first ?

Of course.

But though he promises things like: "I'll cut it. No problem", the text, as presented to the reader, appears to be entirely verbatim, and includes (presumably) all the information his subjects also wish withheld or reformulated, down to the: "one thing, entre nous, which you must not repeat in your book" (but which is repeated in this book ...). These are (it would seem) the 'raw' transcripts -- though, as in the case of Margot's, they aren't all entirely raw: in that case it is a transcript of both the revised earlier one and the reactions to those revisions .....
Some of the stories are also filtered by intermediaries, as the conversation with the Brazilian-born Adriana, for example, is conducted with an interpreter (though this is not immediately revealed); elsewhere, Vincent relies on "a colleague from South Africa to check that I had the Afrikaans words right".
Coetzee does not stress the unreliability of the narrative(s), but he hints at it constantly. The biographer, too, questions records -- though not (openly) the ones he is presenting: he reacts only with "[Silence.]" when it is suggested his interview subjects may have their own agendas -- in explaining why he has chosen to build his biographical work in this way, relying on others' stories rather than Coetzee's own words:

I have been through the letters and diaries. What Coetzee writes there cannot be trusted, not as a factual record -- not because he was a liar but because he was a fictioneer. In his letters he is making up a fiction of himself for his correspondents; in his diaries he is doing the same for his own eyes, or perhaps posterity

(Which begs the question what the hell an author who presents a mock-memoir of this Summertime-sort is up to -- and certainly confirms that, whatever it is, it is anything but reliable. This despite Coetzee's presentation, which, with its essentially documentary form, can not but lull readers into believing that some truths are being conveyed.)
Vincent explains:

I am not interested in coming to a final judgment on Coetzee. I leave that to history. What I am doing is telling the story of a stage in his life, or if we can't have a single story then several stories from several perspectives.

(The choice of provisional over final judgment is interesting: Coetzee may have been willing to kill himself off, but isn't quite ready to tie up all the loose ends and offer a summa. Just as the book's fragmentary, willfully incomplete form suggests, Coetzee sees himself (and his self-analysis) as a work in progress, with much revision of the accumulated records still needed for any neat and tidy summing up.)
In one of the accounts 'John Coetzee' claims: "I don't know any stories", and Summertime is a work of fiction so deeply rooted in the factual that it does (or at least seems to) without any pure invention -- what could be considered story-telling, in its most absolute sense. But as his biographer recognized, 'John Coetzee' is a fictioneer (and as the reader recognizes, J.M Coetzee is even more obviously one): everything is a flight of the imagination, no matter how hard he tries to ground it in any reality.
The stories that are presented here are the interactions five people had with 'John Coetzee' in the early 1970s: four women and one man. (Vincent also reveals that these are the only five accounts he will be relying on for his biography.) It's an unusual approach, all the more so because, as Julia, the first interview-subject, insists when relating her story:

I really was the main character. John really was a minor character

We essentially only get their versions -- and there is only so much they can tells about the man. Yet 'John Coetzee' remains an elusive figure to these five as well; even intimacy is not very revealing. They have their ideas and thoughts about him, and can diagnose some of his failures -- "he did not love anybody, he was not built for love" -- but beyond that he remains a shadowy figure. A minor character. (Yet he is also the dominant presence in the book: Plato is mentioned, and 'John Coetzee' is presented as a Platonic shadow. Even if, in our cave, we can't see him, we are pushed towards coming up with out own sense of him based on what information is available.)
'John Coetzee''s failures in relationships are the central issues Coetzee examines in Summertime. This includes his relationship with his father, with whom he lives. Repeatedly described as sickly and looking older than he is, 'John Coetzee''s father is a withdrawn, friendless man now in a state of decline. The final notebook entries, with which the novel closes, provide some background about the man -- and also about the burden he has become to 'John Coetzee'; tellingly, the complications are left unresolved.
More of the examples involve women, as 'John Coetzee''s hapless romantic (and sexual) efforts are described. As Julia puts it:

In his lovemaking I now think there was an autistic quality. I offer this not as a criticism, but as a diagnosis

His efforts at wooing are hardly any better .....
In a rare section where he is allowed to speak for himself (refracted, of course, through these intermediaries) he remembers his six-year-old self:

And all the time I was thinking, So this is what it means to be in love ! Because -- let me confess it -- I was in love with you. And ever since that day, being in love with a woman has meant being free to say everything on my heart.

Yet he fares poorly with these women, and poorly in unburdening his heart. It's no coincidence that what he thinks he recognizes as love -- and what he clings to, lifelong -- comes at an age when physical impossibility removes any sexual component; in adulthood, he is able (and presumably eager) to go through the motions (to Schubert, in one particularly misguided effort) but comes across as, at best ... autistic. The failures are various, but the conclusion the women reach, sooner or later, about the relationships is always the same: "It was not sustainable." (It's the final subject, Sophie, who sums things up that way without going into details; it could come across as cryptic, but it's not: little more need be said about 'John Coetzee''s intimate relationships.)
While 'John Coetzee''s writings are only incidentally dealt with, his biographer does elicit some literary judgements. Dusklands is described as: "a project in self-administered therapy" (a description that fits Summertime, too, as J.M.Coetzee uses it to come to terms with his father, his relationships with women, and South Africa), and it is suggested that writing became: "a sort of unending cathartic exercise" for him. Sophie, meanwhile, says she lost interest in his work after Disgrace:

In general I would say that his work lacks ambition. The control of the elements is too tight. Nowhere do you get a feeling of a writer deforming his medium in order to say what has never been said before, which is to me the mark of great writing. Too cool, too neat, I would say. Too easy. Too lacking in passion.

Coetzee makes it a bit too easy on himself with the self-criticism: while often accused of being passionless, and certainly always in control of his elements, he revels in medium-deforming -- including, of course, in this very book (but also in works from Dusklands to Diary of a Bad Year). And among the most revealing asides in Summertime comes when Vincent asks: "Am I taking too many liberties ?"
Does Coetzee take too many liberties ? This is a very elaborate game: so obviously based on fact, twisted into fiction (especially in removing himself from the scene by literally wiping himself from the face of the earth), the presentation meant to look almost sloppy -- like a set of notes waiting to be edited into a book -- yet obviously very painstakingly and carefully put together like this. The overlay of fact and fiction remains uncomfortable, but then this is meant to be a very uncomfortable book (as the descriptions of his love-interests alone would assure). Yet it's hard also not to see it as a vanity project.
Coetzee is an incredibly talented writer and a master craftsman -- and, yes, this is a meticulously crafted book, and one of its weaknesses is that it is so obviously a construct. Summertime is fascinating, but leaves one very uneasy -- about everything from Coetzee himself to the very idea of fiction and autobiography.

------
- M.A.Orthofer, 5 September 2009
- www.complete-review.com

Biography: Hermann Broch

2010-01-12T17:30:00.000-08:00

Austrian writer whose reputation rests on a number of formally inventive and intellectually ambitious novels. The dilemma of the artist in a period of historical crisis is the subject of Hermann Broch's masterpiece Der Tod des Vergil (1945, The Death of Virgil). Broch's attempts to reconcile the scientific world view with deep psychological and metaphysical ideas connects him to his Austrian contemporary Robert Musil, who also came to literature after first pursuing a technical and commercial career.

"Oh, Augustus, der Schreiber lebt nicht; der Erlöser hingegen lebt stärker als alle, denn sein Leben ist seine Erkenntnistat, sein Leben und sein Tod." (from Der Tod des Vergil)

Hermann Broch was born in Vienna into a well-to-do Jewish family. His father was Josef Broch, an industrialist, and mother Johanna Schnabel Broch. He was first educated privately, after which his education was intended to prepare him for an administrative position in his father's textile factory in Teesdorf. Broch studied at the Imperial and Royal State Secondary School (1897-1904), the Technical College for Textile Manufacture (1904-06), and Spinning and Weaving College in Mülhausen (1906-07). From 1907 to 1927 Broch administered family's factory in Teesdorf. During World War I he served as an administrator for Austrian Red Cross. In 1909 he married Franziska von Rothermann; their son Hermann Friedrich Broch de Rothermann (d. 1994) became a interpreter for UNESCO and the United Nations, he also translated his father's works into English.

In the cafes of Vienna, Broch met such intellectuals as Robert Musil and Franz Blei, and the talented journalist Ea von Allesch, a former nude model, who was called 'the Queen of Café Central'. Ea von Allesch's first husband was an English pianist, who died at the front during the war. Lieutenant Johannes von Allesch, her second husband, had a nervous breakdown three months after their weddings. Among the wedding guests were the writers Musil and Rainer Maria Rilke. Broch left Milena (Jesenská) Polak for her - and Milena started her affair with Franz Kafka. A Czech journalist and translator, Milena taught Broch Czech. Her short affair with Broch was an open secret at Café Herrenhof, where Milena and her husband, Ernst Polak, frequented. Milena died in 1944 in Ravensbrück concentration camp. Café Griensteidl was the favorite place of Karl Kraus, editor of Die Fackel, who attacked in it hypocrisy and militarized bureaucracy and whom Broch greatly admired.

In 1919 Broch became a reviewer at Moderne Welt, partly due to Ea von Allesch's contacts. She encouraged Broch in his literary aspirations and Broch wrote her passionate letters. Sometimes Broch complained her coldness. She was 11-years older than Broch, who concluded that marital traumas must be behind her problems. Their romance started to cool in 1927. Broch portrayed her in the second and third part of the trilogy Die Schlafwandler (1931-32). Ea was also Robert Musil's femme fatale in his play Vinzenz und die Freundin bedeutender Männer (1923). Anna Herzog became Broch's secretary and new mistress.

After working for many years in the family textile firm, Broch devoted himself from the age of 40 to intellectual pursuits. Broch divorced in 1923 and sold the factory in 1927. From 1926 to 1930 he studied mathematics, philosophy, and psychology at Vienna University, where the highly influential Vienna Circle was organized in 1929. Its members, including Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, and Friedrich Waismann, and other logical positivist, campaigned against metaphysics as an outdated precursor of science. They attempted to add the technical equipment and logical rigour of modern mathematical logic to the empirical tradition of Hume, Comte, and Mach. "... mathematics is a kind of last desperate stand made by the human spirit..." says one of his characters in Die unbekannte Grösse (1933, The Unknown Quantity). "In itself it's not really necessary, but it's a kind of island of decency, and that's why I like it." Broch himself saw that the unique task of literature was to deal with problems, whose solutions elude the "hard" sciences. Disappointed with his professors' reluctance to consider metaphysical questions, Broch abandoned his studies.

At the age of forty-five Broch published his first novel, the trilogy Die Schlafwandler, an essay novel, which reflected the author's Spenglerian conviction that history progresses in cycles of disintegrating and reintegrating value systems. "All epochs in which values are decayed are historically orientated," Broch once noted. Set in the period between 1880 and 1920, the characters experience social, political, and economic troubles as periods of personal difficulties and transition. Joachim von Paserow, a Prussian aristocrat and a military officer, breaks with the oppressive conventions with the Bohemian prostitute Ruzena, but ends in a joyless marriage with Elisabeth, his neighbor and social equal. August Esch, the impetuous bookkeeper and a visionary, is a transitional figure. His world falls apart when he is fired from his job. At the end of a period of wandering, he marries a restaurant owner. Wilhelm Huguenau is the "value-free" person, who swindles and murders his way to social and financial success. He epitomizes a social system devoid of traditional values. Huguenau deserts the army, kills Esch, rapes Frau Esch, and becomes a respected businessman. The structure of the novel is loose, fragments of philosophical essays, pieces of journalism, sections of dialogue, and fantasies follow each other. The disintegration of cultural values in Germany is dealt in the third part in an essay, written by one of the characters, Bertand Müller. He is perhaps the same person as Eduard von Bertrand from parts one and two.

The spread of fascism made Broch abandon his literary projects. In 1937-38 he worked on the Völkerbund-Resolution (Resolution for the league of Nations), suggesting that the international recognitions and enforcement of human rights might stem the tide of fascism. Broch's interest in the collective psychological sources of Nazism was later expressed in Massenpsychologie (1951), which was written with the aid of several American foundations during and after World War II. Die Verzauberung (1976) was a novel about mass psychology. The story was set in a small Tyrolean mountain village, where farmers fall for the promises of a fanatic fundamentalist and even participate in the ritual murder of a young girl. Broch worked on the book periodically since the 1930s, but it was left unfinished. At the time of his death, he was going through the third version of the text. In Die Schuldlosen (1950, The Guiltless) Broch traced the rise of Nazism to political apathy, "wakeful somnolence", and psychological disorientation of European society. His characters have lost their values, they are outsiders in their own life.

Broch was arrested by the Nazis on the day of the German annexation of Austria and detained briefly in 1938. Inspired by the visions of impending death in the prison in Altaussee, he wrote a few elegies, which became the core of Der Tod des Vergil. With the help of James Joyce and other writers, Broch was allowed to emigrate from Nazi Austria. He moved to London, then to Scotland, and finally to the United States, where he settled first in Princeton, New Jersey. Ea von Allesch took care of Broch's mother, but could not save her from the Nazis and she ended in a concentration camp. Ea died in 1953 in Vienna.

Because Broch did not have academic degrees, he was unable to obtain regular faculty appointments at Princeton or Yale. He received a series of stipends from various fellowships, including Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Bollingen, Oberlander, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. From 1940 Broch was involved in refugee work, and much of his money he gave to other European refugees of the war.

The Death of Virgil, one of the great monuments of exile literature, was completed in the United States - Broch began to write it when he was in the concentration camp. The four parts of the book are ruled by the four elements – water, fire, earth, and air. The first section consist of the poet's return to Italy through filthy and noisy streets of the port - he is carried from his boat to the palace in Brundisium. Virgil clings to his consciousness, "he clung to it with the strength of a man who feels the most significant thing of his life approaching and is full of anxiety lest he miss it, and consciousness kept awake by the awakened fear of obeyed his will: nothing escaped his observation..." The second is predominantly a fevered dream in the palace of the emperor Augustus. The third consists of Virgil's decision that the Aeneid must be destroyed, because society is doomed and poetry is useless, and his struggle with the emperor who wants the work preserved. In the last chapter Virgil finally accepts death.

Within the framework of eighteen hours, the dying poet is engaged in long philosophical conversations with his physician, with the emperor, and with his friends. The conversations with Caesar deal partly with the nature of totalitarianism and the relationship of religion and the state. In this work Broch attempted to represent the transition from life to death through a musical and poetic technique. Long, almost unstructured sentences, convey the complexity and emotional and aesthetic content of a single thought. Added with recursive language, the novel is a difficult read. Hannah Arendt and Aldous Huxley greatly admired Broch's treatment of the idea of art as "an affiliation with the human community, which was the aim of real art in its aspiration toward humanity." On the other hand, Huxley was bewildered by many of the the quasi-poetic sections of the novel.

Broch was among those intellectuals, who were convinced of the decay of the West, but like the cultural historian Egon Friedell, the writer of A Cultural History of the Modern Age (1927-31), he hoped for a rebirth of Western culture. He believed that in the Middle Ages there was a real totality. The nineteenth century was for him one of the most miserable periods in world history. Wagner was "an unmusical genius of music and an unpoetic genius of poetry" and Baudelaire paved the way for the darkest anarchy of the twentieth century. However, in Joyce's Ulysses and Mann's Joseph novels he saw signs of the rebirth of myth in the present age. Totality was a central term in Broch's literary criticism. According to Broch, "art which is not capable of reproducing the totality of the world is not art." He condemned the search for beauty – it can only lead to kitch. The term in his writings refers to repetition; technically kitsch always copies its immediate predecessor. "Kitch is certainly not 'bad art'," Broch once said, "it forms its own closed system, which is lodged like a foreign body in the overall system of art, of which, if you prefer, appears alonside it." (from Kitch: an Anthology of Bad Taste by Gillo Forfles, 1969)

Broch spent the last years of his life in close contact with Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. In 1949 he became a fellow at the Saybrook College. On the eve of a planned return to Europe, he died of a heart attack on May 30, 1951. Although Broch had converted to Catholicism as a young man, at the time of his death he was planning a return to the Judaism of his childhood.

For further reading: Dichter wider Willen, ed. by Erich Kahler (1958); Hermann Broch by T. Ziolkowski (1964); The Sleepwalkers by D.C. Cohn (1966); Men in Dark Times by H. Arendt (1968); Materialen zu Hermann Brochs "Die Schlafwandler", ed. by Gisela Brude-Firnau (1972); The Novels of Hermann Broch by M.R. Simpson (1977); Hermann Broch by Ernestine Schlant (1978); Herman Broch: Eine Biographie by Paul Michael Lützeler (1985); Hermann Broch; Werk und Wirkung, ed. by E. Kiss (1985); Hermann Broch: Literature, Philosophy, and Politics, ed. by Stephen D. Dowden (1988); Brochs theoretisches Werk, ed. by Paul Michael Lützeler and Michael Kessler (1988); Asthetik Ethik Und Religion Bei Hermann Broch Mit Einer Theologisch Ethischen by A. Mersch (1989); A History of Modern Criticism, vol. 7, by René Wellek (1991); Die Zeitdarstellung bei Hermann Broch by Jörg Zeller (1998); The Unfortunate Passion of Hermann Brochby José María Pérez Gay (2008)

Selected works:

* Die Schlafwandler: Ein Romantrilogie - Passenow; oder, Die Romantik, 1888, 1931; Esch; oder, Die Anarchie, 1903, 1931; Huguenau, oder, Die Sachlichkeit, 1918, 1932 - Sleepwalkers: A Trilogy (tr. by Willa and Edwin Muir) - Unissakulkijat 1: Luutnantti Pasenow eli Romantiikkaa, 1888; Unissakulkijat 2: Kirjanpitäjä Esch, eli, Anarkia, 1903; Unissakulkijat 3: Liikemies Huguenau, eli, Asiallisuus, 1918 (suom. Oili Suominen, 1988-1994) - televison film in 1979: Esch oder Die Anarchie, dir. by Rainer Boldt, screenplay by Jens-Peter Behrend, Barbara Bilabel, starring Lore Bronner, Alexander Kerst, Hans-Peter Korff, Karl Merkatz
* Die unbekannte Grösse, 1933 - The Unknown Quantity (transl. by Willa & Edwin Muir)
* Die Entsühnung, 1934 - The Atonement (tr. by H.F. Broch de Rothermann & George E. Wellwarth, in German Drama Between the Wars: An Anthology of Plays, 1972)
* James Joyce und die Gegenwart, 1936
* Der Tod des Vergil, 1945 - The Death of Virgil (tr. by Jean Starr Untermeyer)
* Die Schuldlosen, 1950 - The Guiltless (tr. by Ralph Manheim) - TV film 1994: Zerline - En tjenestepiges fortælling, dir. by Bente Kongsbøl, starring Bodil Kjer
* Der Versucher, 1953
* Dichten und Erkenne, 1955
* Essays, 1955 (ed. by Hannah Arendt)
* Massenpsychologie, 1959
* Gesammelte Werke, 1952-1961 (10 vols.)
* Short Stories, 1966 (ed. by E.W. Herd)
* Der Bergroman, 1969 (4 vols.)
* Zur Univärsitätsreform, 1969
* Briefw. mit D. Brody, 1970
* Gedanken zur Politik, 1970
* Hermann Broch Daniel Brody Briefwechsel 1930-1951, 1971 (ed. by von Bertold Hack and Marietta Kleiß)
* Barbara, und andere Novellen, 1973
* Hofmanstahl und seine Zeit, 1974 - Hugo von Hofmanstahl and His Time (transl. by Michael P. Steinberg)
* Schriften zur Literatur, 1975 (2 vols.)
* Die Vierzauberung, 1976 - The Spell (transl. by H.F. Broch de Rothermann)
* Kommentierte Werkausgabe 1-17, 1974-1981
* Geist and Zeitgeist: The Spirit in an Unspiritual Age, 2003 (ed. by John Hargraves)

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source: www.kirjasto.sci.fi

The Sleepwalkers by Hermann Broch

2010-01-12T17:23:00.000-08:00

Hermann Broch's novel, The Sleepwalkers, is one of the most remarkable works of modern times. Like Alfred Döblin's November 1918 or Musil's Man without Qualities it is a novel of an epoch. Like Joseph Roth's novels it follows the transformation of Central Europe from its last fin-de-siècle glory to its post-World War I decline. It is very much a novel of ideas, but it is also a work of art.

In three connected volumes it spans the period 1888 to 1918, revisiting that world at fifteen year intervals. Two volumes are realistic, straightforward narrative. In the third this approach will no longer do. In Huguenau oder die Sachlichkeit (translated somewhat unfortunately as The Realist) Broch pushes form -- not to breaking, or to incomprehensibility, but to best represent a new world (dis)order.

Mathematically minded, Broch always aimed for and achieved clarity. Obfuscation could not serve him. His novels -- and The Sleepwalkers especially -- are novels of ideas, but it is almost an injustice to them to emphasize the fact. What astounds, perhaps, is that The Sleepwalkers is so successful as a novel of ideas -- a rarity.
Broch was a talented writer. Characterization is not his strongest point, but the novel is dominated by strong, well-drawn, and memorable figures. Each of the central figures in each section -- Pasenow, Esch, and Huguenau --, be they sleepwalking through the times or resisting them, are fully realized figures. As are many of the others, including an unlikely Salvation Army girl, and the child, Marguerite.
As an evocation of the period and the place -- a collapsing Mitteleuropa, where the center will no longer hold -- The Sleepwalkers is also a complete success, though Broch's dark vision of those dark times is not one all agree with.

In an attempted review in The Spectator L.A.G. Strong wrote: "The Sleepwalkers is too large and indigestible for the ordinary fiction review." Undoubtedly so. To merely recount its plot-outlines, its themes, its approaches does a disservice to Broch's grand accomplishment. It deserves much closer and more careful analysis, as perhaps we will eventually be able to offer. For now we merely suggest: The Sleepwalkers deserves to be and should be read. It is indisputably one of the great novels of the 20th century, one of a handful that defined Western culture in our time.

Note too the publication history and reception of this enormous and difficult novel: though Broch was unknown at the time, the book was immediately translated into English and widely reviewed and acclaimed. In contrast, one the few comparable German novels of recent times, Peter Weiss' Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (see our review) -- a trilogy, too, the most significant German novel since Grass' Tin Drum, and by an author well-known to English-speaking audiences (as author of Marat/Sade (see our review)) -- has not yet been translated into English, more than 25 years after the first volume appeared in German. Despite having so far been translated into eleven foreign languages it remains inaccessible to American and English audiences. Sad times indeed.

Note also that despite nominally being a trilogy, The Sleepwalkers should be seen (and read) as a whole. Note also that the translations of the titles of the three sections do not completely reflect the German original. Penguin, in particular, by presenting the novel in tripartite manner place even greater emphasis on the titles -- but don't express them true to the original. Dispensing with the names -- Pasenow oder die Romantik (1888) becomes merely The Romantic -- is already a problem. Worse is that they make of, for example, of Esch oder die Anarchie (1903) (literally: "Esch, or Anarchy") an Anarchist And Sachlichkeit is also not quite "Realism" (or Realist) -- a word for which there is also a perfectly good German word which Broch decidedly did not choose -- "Realismus".

Another The Sleepwalkers's review link:
New York Time
Times

2010 Best Translated Book Awards

2010-01-09T13:36:00.000-08:00

The Loop by Jacques Roubaud
Translated from the French by Jeff Fort (France)
(Dalkey Archive)

Of the books left off the fiction longlist, this is one of the ones that most surprised me. Oulipian Jacques Roubaud’s “Great Fire of London” project—of which this is the second volume—is incredibly ambitious, and the opening book in the sequence, The Great Fire of London is considered by many Dalkey-ites to be one of the best books the press ever published. This is a dense book, a reflection on memory complete with “Bifurcations” and “Interpolations” (think Hopscotch but more branch-like), and quite possibly Roubaud’s best work to date. I suspect Dalkey will be doing more books from this series over the next few years (hopefully it won’t take another 17 to get to volume three . . .), so Roubaud will have a few more chances . . .

Running Away by Jean-Philippe Toussaint
Translated from the French by Matthew B. Smith (France)
(Dalkey Archive)

Toussaint made the list last year with Camera, so it wouldn’t have been surprising if this had made it as well. Christopher Byrd wrote a nice review of this for the New York Times the other week, but I personally think that Toussaint’s novels are sort of like popcorn—good while you’re eating it, but each handful tastes pretty much the same. (That doesn’t even make sense . . . ) Anyway, Toussaint has another shot next year, since Dalkey is bringing out Self-Portrait Abroad in May. Oh, and everyone should read The Bathroom.

Dance with Snakes by Horacio Castellanos Moya
Translated from the Spanish by Lee Paula Springer (Honduras/El Salvador)
(Biblioasis)

She-Devil in the Mirror by Horacio Castellanos Moya
Translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver (Honduras/El Salvador)
(New Directions)

Probably the biggest surprise for me was the fact that neither Moya book made this year’s list. Both of these are interesting books that are very different from one another. I reviewed She-Devil in the Mirror a couple weeks ago, and Brandon Kennedy is working on a piece on Dance with Snakes, and I’m sure this will be a positive review as well. So why didn’t Moya—whose Senselessness was one of the top three books for last year’s award—make this year’s longlist? I think it’s a problem of relativity. Senselessness was so fucking good that these two books, though great in their own right, paled in comparison. But there are more Moya titles on the way . . . And just as important—hopefully this will help bring more attention to the excellent Biblioasis Press. (Go Canada!)

The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell
Translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell (America/France)
(HarperCollins)

Maybe the most controversial omission from our list. The only (?) translation published in 2009 that received a million dollar advance. The most reviewed (??) translation of 2009. One of the only translations published by HarperCollins. And spectacularly translated by Charlotte Mandell. Yet, it didn’t make our list. Some panelists just didn’t care for it. (This was one of those divisive books. Even reviews tended to be adamantly against it, or very much in favor.) One interesting issue: there may well be a reverse bias on the part of the panelists against commercial presses and over-exposed books. People who read a shit-ton of international literature tend to spend a shit-ton of time reading books from smaller, indie presses. Start to develop an affinity. And feel like these presses—and their more obscure books—deserve some recognition. And they’re definitely right. But if this list were made by more conventional reviewers, I’ll bet it would be very different. In part because the system helps big books from big publisher get more attention from big reviewers/reviewing outlets. In part because our panelists have read much more broadly in the realm of translated literature and therefore have a wider base of comparison for what constitutes “the best” works of the past year. I stand by our list 100%, I’m just saying.

Your Face Tomorrow, Vol. 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell by Javier Marias
Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa (Spain)
(New Directions)

Marias’s three volume Your Face Tomorrow project may well constitute one of the past decade’s absolute high points. In many ways, this should be on the longlist, and I’m personally planning a little Marias bender for the last seven months of the year so that I can read this trlogy from start to finish. And therein lay the problem for the jury. (I think.) This is the third volume of trilogy. And yes, sure, so is Jan Kjaerstad’s The Discoverer, but that’s a trilogy of three interrelated books that can be read completely independent of one another without feeling like you’re missing the entire everything. Open this Marias book and you’re greeted with a title page for “Part V: Poison.” This trilogy deserves a special award.

Five Spice Street by Can Xue
Translated from the Chinese by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping
(Yale University Press)

It would’ve been great to include this book on the list if for no other reason than to highlight Yale’s “Margellos World Republic of Letters” series. But so it goes . . . One of the strangest books I read over the past year, I wrote a long review of this last spring. It also would’ve been cool to include this to highlight the role a good editor makes in making a translation work. But again, so it goes . . . Too many books. Way too many books.

There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
Translated from the Russian by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers (Russia)
(Penguin)

This collection got a ton of attention late in the year (such as this glowing New York Times review), and if the BTBA was more Oscar-like . . . Petrushevskaya is a very interesting writer, and this collection of strange, dark stories is pretty compelling. Hopefully this gets enough attention to convince someone to publish a translation of her novel Time Night, which Gessen refers to in his introduction as her “central masterpiece.”

The Naked Eye by Yoko Tawada
Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky
(New Directions)

Tawada has had a number of books published in English, including The Bridegroom Was a Dog and Where Europe Begins, which have received a decent amount of attention. Susan Bernofsky told me she thought this novel was Tawada’s best, and it is very interesting and beautifully written (and translated) book. I actually used a quote from here as a Facebook update a while back—mainly because I have a little thing for Canada: “Canada sounds like an ordinary noun that might mean, for example, something like ‘happiness.’ The entire world should become Canada . . .”

Metropolis Vienna by Peter Rosei
Translated from the German by Geoffrey C. Howes (Austria)
(Green Integer)

source: http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php

Michael Cunningham's New Novel: Olympia

2010-01-09T13:20:00.000-08:00

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham tells Entertainment Weekly that he's about two-thirds finished with a new 250-page novel called Olympia that may be completed by September.

Says Cunningham:

Peter is the central character. He’s an art dealer and he finds that he is increasingly drawn to his wife’s very much younger brother, who evinces for him everything that was appealing about his wife when he first met her. He’s not gay. Well, he’s probably a little gay because we’re all a little gay, right? But it’s certainly eroticized. It’s not because he wants to f— this boy. The boy is like the young wife.

From QueerReader.com:

The current issue of Electric Literature magazine has a new fiction excerpt from Michael Cunningham. As soon as I received my copy, I read this excerpt quickly, throughly enjoying it, but also expecting to be unsatisfied at the end. The piece is labelled “an excerpt from a novel in progress.” But to my surprise it read like a free-standing short story. And a great one. This is a word I rarely use. There are only a handful of short stories that I would label “great.” But since I first read this excerpt, I have been almost literally haunted by it. I have gone back and read it again and again and again. And each time I appreciate it more. Appreciate is not the right word. I love this story. And I have found myself wanting to cry out like Linda Loman in Death of a Salesman: “Attention must be paid!”

In this new fiction, Mr. Cunningham tells the story of two brothers–one gay, one straight–growing up in the midwest. It is a frequently humorous variation of the Cain and Abel myth. Reading this excerpt, I was reminded of why I loved Mr. Cunningham’s first novel so much. As in A Home at the End of the World, this new excerpt combines multi-faceted characterization with illustrative dialogue and a solid plot structure. But there is something new here. Mr. Cunningham has always been an expert at showing–at describing–the world his characters inhabit. But in this new excerpt Mr. Cunningham allows his omniscient narrator a voice. Thus, he tells more. And the effect is both delightful and insightful.

The narrator’s witty voice even shows up in the dialogue, as the older, gay brother tries to talk to his younger, straight brother about their mother:

“She’s still a beautiful woman. There’s nothing for her here. She’s like Madame Bovary.”

“Really?”

Peter at the time had no idea who Madame Bovary was, but imagined her to be an infamous figure who presaged doom–he had in all likelihood mixed her up with Madame Defarge.

I don’t want to say anything about the plot. Except to say that it is surprising, logical and poignant.

We live in a society of speed readers. We’re so bombarded by media that it’s sometimes easy to forget that we have the choice to slow down–to savor quality writing. On my fifth reading of Mr. Cunningham’s new work I found myself reading it extremely slowly–admiring each paragraph like a fine painting. Here is one of my favorites:

They are on their family summer vacation, a week in a musky pine-paneled cabin on Mackinac Island. Matthew is by now, and Peter is about to be, too old to delight in these trips. The cabin is no longer a repository of familiar wonders (the beds still shrouded in mosquito netting, all the board games still there!) but a dreary and tedious exile, a full week of their mother’s quiet fury over the fun they don’t seem to be having and their father’s dogged attempts to provide it; spiders in the bathrooms and cold little wavelets plashing and plashing against the gravelly beach.

An excerpt from Michael Cunningham’s Olympia, a novel in progress, is published in the current edition of Electric Literature.

Important Quotes from "The Catcher in the Rye"

2010-01-05T09:25:00.000-08:00

"I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all."

- J.D. Salinger
The Catcher in the Rye
Chapter 22

In the world of literature their exist many unique writers and storytellers. However, it takes much talent indeed for a writer to develop that same unique style and manner of storytelling. Through practice and patience, some writers simply come to develop their own unique and instantly recognizable style of writing. And, as is the case with most gifts, few writers can command this unique writing style forever. However, perhaps one of the most easily recognizable authors still read with great popularity today is J.D. Salinger. Within his novel, The Catcher in the Rye, one can notice many writing accents and techniques, some of which are subtle and some which are blaringly obvious, that help to give both the writer and the novel a unique style and narrative.

Perhaps the most unique device that leads the reader to identify Salinger's style is the viewpoint from which he writes. Note that Salinger writes directly from the eyes of Holden, the main character of the novel. In the selected passage above, that style can be especially noted. There are many literary devices, which help to identify this unique style. Mainly, the sentence structure of the writing, quite simply, is not written in the style of an adult. Not only are a major portion of the sentences in both the above passages in the novel as a whole run-on sentences, there are also many breaks and sudden changes in ideas. These characteristic switches in both tone and subject matter are as much the signature style of an adolescent as they are of one suffering from some type of emotional condition, as does Holden in his story.

Therein lies the beauty of Salinger's writing. He does not really write as one traditionally writes a coming of age story, instead, The Catcher in the Rye is written simply as a retelling of a series of experiences that have affected the main character at various times during his life. As a result, many examples can be found within the novel that helps to reveal and develop this signature style of writing. Note that word choice is one very important aspect of this telling. Reading through the book, it becomes apparent that the word and adjective choice with which Holden expresses his feelings are somewhat limited. He refers to most matters regarding the adult world as being "phony". This repetition of words can also be seen in the above passage, as many of the phrases used are simply repeated again and again. Interesting to note is that this technique is used repeatedly during certain segments of the novel in order to emphasize certain passages. In the scene in which Holden yells at Sally, his arguments appear to be poorly constructed and randomly put together. This schizophrenic style of writing is just one of the trademarks of Salinger's unique style.

Another instantly recognizable element in Salinger's work is the tone with which he writes his characters speeches. Within The Catcher in the Rye, rarely are Holden's opinions or observations on life and people far from cynical or otherwise uncaring. Holden's progressive descent into loneliness throughout the novel is well documents by Salinger's cynical and obviously teenage tone. The tone of the passage shares this tone in its ideas as to the ideal life of children, and their perilous fall into the world of adults and growing up. Holden's want to stop the innocence of the world from fading is a recurrent theme throughout the novel, and it is again brought up here. The tone that much of the novel shares is simply one more element that identifies the author's unique style.

Another major component of Salinger's work is the symbolism that he includes within his writing. Although there is little symbolism in the above passage, beyond the widely discussed "Catcher in the Rye" poem, there are many other sequences within the novel that contain a wide variety of symbolism and meaning. Note especially the duck pond that Holden often thinks of when remembering his younger brother Allie. Also of interest in terms of symbolism is the history museum that Holden visits. To him, that museum represents an ideal world, a place where things can stay as they have always been, and a place where time is really meaningless. There are many other works by Salinger that contain this same focus on symbolism and hidden meanings. However, within The Catcher in the Rye, the symbolic nature of the work is just one more element that helps to identify the style.

Likewise, it is mainly the speaking style of Holden, both in the above passage and throughout the novel that help to best identify the author's unique style. The Catcher in the Rye is written from the eyes of a sixteen year old, and Salinger does his best to write in that same style. In
the above passage, it becomes very apparent that it is not an adult who is speaking to the reader. Instead, it is a child, albeit an intelligent one, that has little experience expressing his ideas to the outside world and to others around him. The incomplete and run on sentences, the lack of proper grammar, the sometime obvious use of slang and lack of extensive word choice are all elements that can be found in both the above passage and throughout the novel that help to identify the signature style of Salinger.

In the same manner as John Lennon was said to be a spokesman for his generation, so too perhaps, can it be said that Salinger was a spokesman for the youth of the post World War II era. His novels and short stories are unique in that they are written from the very perspective of their main characters and intended audiences. There are few passages, which, if pulled from The Catcher in the Rye, would fail to be recognized by any alert reader. This instantly recognizable style is due in large part to Salinger's creative use of many writing elements, notably sentence structure, word choice, symbolism, and tone. Although Salinger's work may not be the best known among contemporary authors, his style is doubtlessly one of the most unique.

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D.Salinger

2010-01-05T09:10:00.000-08:00

Plot Summary

The protagonist of J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye", Holden Caulfield, has become one of the most iconic characters in American Literature. Part of Holden Caulfield's appeal is the way in which he has come to encapsulate and represent the fears, frustrations and thwarted ideals that mark the transition from childhood, through adolescence to adulthood.

Holden narrates the story as a seventeen year old looking back upon events which occurred when he was sixteen. It is apparent that Holden is currently in a psychiatric hospital however he does not seem to have any recognisable condition as opposed to more generally had a breakdown.

Holden begins his story from the day he left the elite private school, Pencey, having been expelled for achieving poor grades and failing to apply himself. He has bought a distinctive red hunting hat in New York. This hat acquires a symbolism throughout the story particularly at the end where the hat passes between Holden and his sister. Pencey is the third school we know of that Holden has left. Holden tells his teacher, Mr. Spencer, that he left the school Elkton Hills by choice because the shallowness he saw there depressed him.

Holden later tells his ten year old sister, Phoebe, about a classmate at Elkton Hills called James Castle who was set upon by a group of older boys who tried to bully him into retracting an offensive remark he had made about one of them. Rather than take the remark back James jumped out of a window and was killed, he was wearing a sweater borrowed from Holden at the time. It is more likely that this traumatic event prompted Holden to choose to leave the school rather than anything more trivial and this is one of the main indications that Holden is an unreliable narrator. Mr. Spencer, attempts to make Holden aware of the seriousness of his situation but he only succeeds in making Holden feel uncomfortable and melancholy. After talking to Mr. Spencer Holden goes to his dormitory room which he shares with a boy called Ward Stradlater and is next door to a room occupied by Robert Ackley. Holden's interactions with these two boys demonstrate how Holden criticises others for things which he does himself.

As the story progresses Holden occasionally acknowledges his own irritating or "phony" behaviour. Holden feels that the things which upset him are confined solely to the adult world and so he feels that the process of growing up is turning him into something which he despises. Stradlater has a date with Holden's childhood sweetheart, Jane Gallagher. Although Holden wants to see Jane and has fond memories of the time they spent together he backs out of going and saying hello to her.

Holden reveals that he had a younger brother Allie who was two years younger than him who died of leukaemia when Holden was thirteen. Holden was extremely traumatised by the death of his brother, on the night Allie died Holden says that he slept in the garage and smashed all the garage windows with his fist, breaking and permanently damaging his hand.

Later that night when Stradlater returns from his date Holden demands to know if he has slept with Jane. When Stradlater evades the question Holden flies into a rage and attacks him but Stradlater easily fights him off and gives Holden a bloody nose. Holden decides to leave Pencey early and stay in a hotel for a few days until he goes home. Despite Holden's indignation at Stradlater's date with Jane he admits that he is very interested in sex. From his hotel room window Holden sees a man in an opposite room dressing himself in women's clothing and in a room above Holden sees a couple spitting drinks into each other's faces. Holden refers to these people as perverts and says that he finds the behaviour distasteful and yet, he confesses, arousing. Holden has an idealised conception of relationships and this clashes not just with the world around him but with himself.

The elevator attendant offers to arrange for a prostitute to come to Holden's room. Holden agrees and he is keen to acquire some experience. When the girl arrives Holden loses his nerve and tries to initiate a conversation with her, eventually he makes an excuse not to sleep with her and
she leaves. The girl returns with the elevator attendant to demand more money and Holden is punched in the stomach during the altercation. Holden feels very depressed and starts to talk to his dead brother Allie, he says he often does this when he feels low.

The next day Holden calls a girl called Sally Hayes and they go on a date. Holden asks Sally to run away with him and ultimately marry him, Sally refuses and Holden insults her before leaving. He claims that he didn't want to go anywhere with Sally anyway but that he was sincere when he asked her. Holden calls a teacher from Elkton hills called Mr. Antolini and goes to spend the night at his home.

Mr. Antolini tells Holden that he thinks he is riding for a terrible, terrible fall and tries to persuade him that if he pursued his studies he would get past the irritations he feels for teachers and fellow pupils when he reaches the knowledge that really inspires him. Mr. Antolini tells Holden that many people have experienced the despair that he feels and that one day Holden might write an account of his thoughts and experiences. Holden falls asleep and wakes up to find Mr. Antolini stroking his head, Holden assumes that the gesture is sexually motivated and hurriedly leaves the house. Whilst Mr. Antolini was over stepping a boundary it is more likely that he was merely being overly affectionate on account of having consumed a lot of alcohol.

Later Holden reconsiders his rash assumption about Mr. Antolini and feels guilty for taking off from his house. Holden sends a note to Phoebe to tell her to meet him before he hitch hikes out West. Phoebe meets Holden wearing his red hunting hat and dragging a suitcase, she is so determined to go with him that Holden agrees to go home instead of leaving. At the end of the book Holden says that he doesn't know if he will be able to pursue his studies and apply himself, it is unclear whether Holden will sink into another cycle of negative thoughts and actions after he leaves the hospital.

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by stefanina hills, published at www.associatedcontent.com

read about this book on Wikipedia

Nihilism in Russian Literature

2010-01-04T08:11:00.000-08:00

Fathers and Sons and Crime and Punishment are two novels that deal with similar issues as well as having what might be considered as parallel characters between the two novels. Both of these great pieces of Russian literature focus on what was a big issue in Russian society during the time they were written, nihilism. Webster defines nihilism as "A doctrine or belief that conditions in the social organization are so bad as to make destruction desirable for its own sake independent of any constructive program or possibility". This definition fits our situation of 19th century Russia quite well, for it shows the conflict between the younger (those rebelling) and older generations (the authority).

The main characters in both novels, Bazarov in Fathers and Sons, and Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, are nihilists, and both have close friends who adhere more loosely to these ideals of nihilism. There are, however, some distinct differences in the characters that display themselves over time throughout the novels. We see that Raskolnikov acts out his nihilism; he respects no authority and even commits a double murder to act out his ideals. Bazarov, however, seems to only preach about nihilism and even seems to question himself as the story progresses. These differences in personality traits become interesting once we also begin to compare the living situations, the environments, of these different characters.

In Fathers and Sons, Bazarov and Arkady live in manors with large estates that are taken care of by peasants. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov and Razumikhin live in small apartments in St. Petersburg. After examining these differences in characters and their environments, we can begin to analyze what these differences actually mean, that is what the authors are trying to say through them.

To understand the characters in Turgenev and Dostoevsky's great novels we need to not only understand the persons themselves but their environments as well, for their living spaces reflect and create much of their character. Turgenev's novel, Fathers and Sons, takes place in rural Russia, on large manors such as Arkady's Marino. The open spaces lend themselves for a unique experience, much different from that of the city, especially one such as St. Petersburg.

St. Petersburg is as Dostoevsky says, "the most artificial city in the world". Peter the great ordered it to be constructed after conquering the land it was built on. Many of Russia's resources were spent constructing the city, and it was even forbidden for stone buildings to be created outside of St. Petersburg while it was being built so that all the stonemasons and serfs would work to build St. Petersburg instead of other things. The building itself was very tricky as well, for St. Petersburg lies right on the water in what is essentially a swamp. It is estimated that around thirty thousand people died in the creation of the city.

These details may seem trivial, but by examining them closely and learning about how St. Petersburg was built, we can begin to see the mood that it exudes - the city's personality. This is important because it was not by chance that Dostoevsky chose to use this particular city as the
setting for Crime and Punishment. The city itself creates a stuffy, suffocating sense of claustrophobia that can be felt throughout the story. Add to the general dirtiness of the city the fact that the main character, Raskolnikov lives in a bad part of the city in a tiny apartment that is constantly referred to as a "closet" and you can understand the horrible living conditions that Raskolnikov deals with every day. These conditions contribute to Raskolnikov's "illness" his sense of despair and his nihilism. Raskolnikov seems to be fundamentally different than Bazarov in this way, for Bazarov managed to be a nihilist despite living in relatively good conditions. Raskolnikov's seems to characterize a true, bred from the earth, nihilism that began only when society had pushed Raskolnikov down into the depths of poverty and despair. It is very interesting to look at how Dostoevsky characterizes Raskolnikov's nihilism, for he repeatedly refers to it as is an "illness". (quote) This treatment of Raskolnikov's nihilism paints is as a product of the environment, a reaction to inhumane living conditions. Therefore it can be seen as a true nihilism with just cause behind it, yet it is in the way that this kind of thinking unfolds itself for Raskolnikov through Crime and Punishment that will tell us Dostoevsky's take on this intellectual trend of his time. (discuss if raskolnikov is a real nihilist or just rebelling against circumstances)

Bazarov's conditions are quite different from Raskolnikov's, however, for he grew up in a more rural area of Russia and in a manor instead of an apartment. Instead of having a tiny one room "closet" for all his needs, such as Raskolnikov has, Bazarov's family has an entire manor and even peasants under him that work on the manor. Rural Russia proves to be quite the opposite setting as St. Petersburg as we can see when Arkady has a revelation upon seeing the beautiful landscape and forgets his problems. (quote). At face value it seems very strange that these two similar characters could come from such different environments, but it is only in closer inspection of Bazarov that we can see that they are not necessarily so similar.

Bazarov preaches nihilism to anyone who is there to listen, but never seems to act on his ideals, only talk. This inaction could quite feasibly be connected to the better than average living conditions that Bazarov benefited from. Growing up on a manor with peasants instills a certain mindset of superiority and a sort of managerial leadership - the notion that you can tell people what to do, or what to think in Bazarov's case, and they will do it. After learning of the movement of nihilism in school, it seems as if Bazarov has taken it upon himself to force it onto other people in this way even though he himself is not fully immersed in its ideals. We can see Bazarov's faith in nihilism begin to dwindle as he falls in love with Madame Odintsova and is confronted with a real situation in which nihilism should be applied.

(more info)

Due to the environment which fostered his nihilism, he is unable to follow through with its ideals and succumbs to the forces of love. Comparing this to how Raskolnikov treats a situation in which he can test his nihilistic beliefs and ends up committing a double murder, we can see the difference in character between these two despite their common belief system. Having studied Turgenevs treatment of Bazarov's nihilism through the novel we can now deduce how he, Turgenev, feels about this interesting social movement of his time.

Since Bazarov and Raskolnikov are characters with similar beliefs, by examining how they are treated throughout their respective stories, we can learn a great deal about what the authors' opinions were on these beliefs. Turgenev's character, Bazarov, follows through with the motions of
nihilism but does not seem to completely accept the tenets of this idealism, for he does not act out his belief. As Nietzsche states, nihilism is not just the lack of respect for authority, but it is the act of destroying authority and deconstructing society's values. Although Bazarov does not follow this course of action, it is clear that he does believe in the values (or lack of values) associated with nihilism. From this, one might say that Turgenev is attacking nihilism with this novel, showing how it is a set of values that is easy to preach but impossible to maintain in action, yet Arkady's relationship with Bazarov makes this a much harder interpretation to accept. Arkady idolizes Bazarov, considering him a great influential man. (quote). This other character's notion of Bazarov can show us something of what Turgenev is thinking, and perhaps is why Turgenev's novel was not received well from either the revolutionary (nihilist) group or the conservative group. It is hard to tell just exactly what Turgenev was saying, for he seems to straddle the issue here by presenting these contrasting views. (elaborate)

Dostoevsky, however, is quite clear in how he treats the nihilist movement. Raskolnikov's nihilism is more pure in form, more rooted in reality and experience. Since Raskolnikov is able to pass his test of his values (he commits a double murder instead of falling in love like Bazarov) we can tell that he is a true nihilist. From Dostoevsky's interpretation, this seems to only be possible if you are one of the downtrodden, living in despicable conditions such as Raskolnikov. Therefore, nihilism becomes a reaction, an "illness" associated with the poor and underprivileged. This "illness" causes one to be a delinquent in society, to cause trouble and commit heinous acts. It is therefore delegitimized and associated as a sort of hoodlumism that can attain no useful product. From this analysis we can see that Dostoevsky is blatantly conservative and that Crime and Punishment is an assault on this nihilist intellectual movement of his time. Therefore by analyzing the different environments of Bazarov and Raskolnikov and comparing them with their form of nihilism we learn that Turgenev is unable to take a distinct position on this matter, instead straddling the line in an attempt to please both sides yet ends up angering them, while Dostoevsky unabashedly criticizes nihilism and preaches his own conservative politics.

Russian Literature in the 20th Century (3)

2010-01-04T08:02:00.000-08:00

Writers began to get excited; Ehrenburg expressed the feeling that circumstances were improving for the literary world of the Soviet Union and that now they need not be afraid of what they wrote. Even with their new found freedoms, some of the administrators of the Union of Writers still clung to the styles and techniques that were required during Stalin's regime. They were very much opposed to the new "formalistic and negative writing" that was emerging.[29] More recent authors feel the best post-Stalin writings that emerged were the ones that had remained true to pre-Stalinist traditions and styles.[30]

Another sign that writers were gaining more freedom was the revival of the authors who had been pulled from the shelves of the Soviet Union. People, whose writings had not been seen for thirty years or more, emerged into circulation again as if nothing had happened. Writers who had been stricken from records reappeared on the lists. Nothing was said as to what had happened to the authors during those years; many having died in "unfortunate" circumstances. Occasionally it was mentioned that an author had "perished after unfounded accusations" but the public in general knew what had befallen the writers.[31]

Through the 1960 and 1970s, there were less government restrictions created and upheld. While the government was still not keen on criticism, it was not as controlling over the literature and press that was published. It allowed authors to speak their minds without fear of retribution. New forms of writing emerged and classical works were revived. Some areas suffered from the restrictions, like the poetry, but were able rebound eventually.

I have had to limit my research up to the 1970s, as I was unable to locate anything of significance past that.

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This article written by Rebbeca Wickert published at associatedcontent.com.

=============
Bibliography

Brown, Deming. Soviet Russian Literature Since Stalin. London: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

Ehrenburg, Ilya. Freedom or Death (SovLit.com: 2005) http://www.sovlit.com/war/freedomordeath.html> (5 December 2005).

Frankel, Benjamin ed. The Cold War: 1945-1991. Detroit, MI: Gale Research Inc., 1992.

Gibian,George. Interval of Freedom: Soviet Literature During the Thaw, 1954-1957. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1960.

Lowe, David. Russian Writing since 1953: A Critical Survey. New York: Ungar Publishing Company, 1987.

Moser, Charles A., ed. The Cambridge History of Russian Literature. Cambridge, Eng: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Parrish, Thomas. The Cold War Encyclopedia. New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc.,1996.

Reavey, George. Soviet Literature To-Day. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947.

Shneidman, N.N. Soviet Litureaure in the 1970s: Artistic Diversity and Ideological Conformity. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1979.

Simmons, Ernest J., ed. Through the Glass of Soviet Literature: Views of Russian Society. New York: Columbia University Press, 1953.

Struve, Gleb. Russian Literature under Lenin and Stalin: 1917-1953. Norman, Ok.: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1971.

Slonim, Marc. Soviet Russian Literature: Writers and Problems, 1917-1977. New York City: Oxford University Press, 1977.

[1] Marc Slonim,

Soviet Russian Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). 246

[2] Gleb Struve,

Russian Literature under Lenin and Stalin: 1917-1953 (Norman, Ok: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971). 3

[3] Harold Swayze,

Political Control of Literature in the USSR, 1946-1959 (Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press, 1962). 8

[4] Ibid., 10

[5] Marc Slonim,

Soviet Russian Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). 4

[6] Ibid.

[7] Deming Brown,

Soviet Russian Literature Since

Stalin (London: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 352

[8] Ibid., 374

[9] Ibid., 352-353

[10] Ibid., 356-357

[11] Thomas Parrish,

The Cold War Encyclopedia (New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1996). 258

[12] Ibid., 150

[13] N.N. Schneidman,

Soviet Literature in the 1970s: Artistic diversity and ideological conformity. (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1979). 47

[14] Ilya Ehrenburg,

Freedom or Death (SovLit.com: 2005) http://www.sovlit.com/war/freedomordeath.html>

(5 December 2005).

[15] Harold Swayze,

Political Control of Literature in the USSR, 1946-1959 (Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press, 1962). 31

[16] Ibid., 37

[17] N.N. Schneidman

Soviet Literature in the 1970s: Artistic diversity and ideological conformity. (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1979). 48

[18] Ibid., 3

[19] N.N. Schneidman

Soviet Literature in the 1970s: Artistic diversity and ideological conformity. (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1979). 3

[20] Gibian 6

[21] Gleb Struve,

Russian Literature under Lenin and Stalin: 1917-1953 (Norman, Ok: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971). 178

[22] George Gibian,

Interval of Freedom: Soviet Literature During the Thaw, 1954-1957 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1960). 7

[23] Deming Brown,

Soviet Russian Literature Since

Stalin (London: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 374

[24] David Lowe,

Russian Writing since 1953: A Critical Survey (New York: Ungar Publishing Company, 1987). 8

[25] Ibid., 6

[26] Ibid., 19-24

[27] Ibid., 32

[28] Ibid., 43

[29] George Gibian,

Interval of Freedom: Soviet Literature During the Thaw, 1954-1957 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1960). 9

[30] David Lowe,

Russian Writing since 1953: A Critical Survey (New York: Ungar Publishing Company, 1987). 47

[31] George Gibian,

Interval of Freedom: Soviet Literature During the Thaw, 1954-1957 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1960). 10

Russian Literature in the 20th Century (2)

2010-01-04T08:00:00.000-08:00

Post-war literature is characterized as being devoid of any artistry. It appears that Stalin cracked down on the government bashing and authors that published works with any negative sentiments were shipped off to prison or some other fate. This time was also very treacherous for writers, even those who chose to conform to the government requirements. It was not uncommon authors who believed themselves to be in a safe zone in their work to find themselves in trouble.[17] At times the "safe" topics were not safe.

Any literature that was written after the Cultural Revolution and before Stalin's death noticeably differs from pre-Revolution and Western writings in that the writers were required to convey a message to the people. They were permitted to reflect the authors' style, as John Grisham and Stephen King, but they had to remain with in the standards set by the government.[18] One definition of the requirements is as follows:

...requires from the artist a truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development. Moreover, truth and historical completeness of artistic representation must be combines with the task of ideological transformation and education of the working man in the spirit of socialism.[19]

This was the "official" method of Soviet Literature, known as socialist realism. The only literature that was published were writings that had been conformed to the requirements set forth by the Soviet leaders.

The mid 1950s is considered the beginning of the thaw in Russian literature. With the death of Stalin in 1953, the Soviet government eased up on the restrictions writers faced trying to have their works published. The next three years would see important changes take place for writers. Topics and ideas which had been considered taboo during Stalin's lifetime were not as unmentionable now as they once were. How World War II was viewed in literature also changed. During the war and up until the 1950s, the Russian soldiers and government were the heroes, often exaggerated, and nothing bad could be said against them. The end of the decade allowed more freedom to write the actual truth and nothing more.

Following Stalin's death, as soon as a month afterwards, some writers began to question and criticize the system that had been in place for the last thirty years or so. One of the first people to do so was poet Olga Berggolts. She had been asked during a poetry
program to add something a little more lyrical than what had been read. After examining the works that had been produced under Stalin, she saw that there was nothing all that lyrical about the poetry that had been written during the last ten years. This she blamed on the Soviet government's restrictions that had been placed on writers and not allowing them to write about "the most important thing...humanity, the human being."[20] What people were writing about were construction machinery and the outside of a person, nothing worthy of being called beautiful.

Russian poetry, which had previously dominated literature, began its decline about 1925. Poets for some reason stopped writing poetry and turned to fictional writings and those that did stick with poetry tried prose instead of lyrical. They were attempting to bring the two forms closer together in content and style.[21] The quality of Russian poetry did not improve. Stalin must have had something against poetry as well. He personally ordered several poets out of the country or had them arrested for one reason or another. This did not help the problem any. After Stalin's death, poetry was in dire need of help.

A prominent author, Vladimir Pomerantsev, said that the latest writings were bad for the simple reason that they did not give an accurate sense to reality. They polished up the disagreeable facts and gave a more pleasant description compared to what was actually true. Pomerantsev also blamed the government for guiding the writers astray, but also blamed the writers for following along so willingly. Ilya Ehrenburg, a famous war-time writer in favor of authors gaining creative freedom, said "Books cannot be ordered or planned,"[22] meaning that if good literature is desired there can be no restrictions or guidelines to what can or cannot be done. The post-Stalin government eventually realized the damage to the literary world that had been cause and made an effort to rectify the problem. They saw a need for a renewed sense of culture and aesthetics. While authors were still subject to government scrutiny, they were encouraged to get creative in their works.[23]

Since the Cultural Revolution, censorship had been a major obstacle in the literary world, especially when the Soviet government was first being established and during the post-war era. Many authors who were not of the Soviet era were removed from libraries in 1946 and forced into oblivion because their writings were too liberal, too contemporary for Soviet tastes and might be harmful to the literary world.[24] The next seven to eight years was a time where originality and independence for writers was non existent. Editors at companies were replaced and many writers were exiled or sent to prison. Throughout the mid to late1950s, the works of authors, living and dead, were slowly revived and their writings brought back into circulation. Even if they had not originally been removed from the shelves, these authors' works would not have had much effect on the common people. Even though the government denied it, the average Soviet reader had limited access to any writings that might have been available.[25]

Following Stalin's death, another area of writing began to prosper; memoirs and histories. The wish to give an accurate view of their experiences compelled many people who had been in prison or in exile to write about what they went through during their imprisonment. This was a taboo topic while Stalin was in power, and still even more so after he died. It would not do to have the late Soviet leader's name tarnished by bad reports of why people were arrested and what took place in the prisons of the Soviet Union.

Not surprisingly, countries would not publish the memoirs where the author gained the materials necessary to write their book. Since they could not find publishers within the Union, authors went to companies in Ann Arbor, New York, Paris and Milan to have their works published.[26] It was not just prison memoirs that had difficulty being published; some prominent Soviet workers who realized that what the Party was doing was not right wrote about their experiences to expose the wrong-doing that took place. Raisa Berg, a geneticist, gave an eyewitness account of the chaos Trofim Lysenko, an impostor, had on the biological and genetic research done in the Soviet Union. It was not until she emigrated to the United States in the late 1970s was she able to publish her book in 1983.[27]

Forms of writing expanded significantly after 1953. The literature that was in circulation was large, boring novels, fabricated histories and exaggerated propaganda articles. Short stories reemerged towards the end of the decade through the beginning of the 1960s.[28] Two types of prose also evolved at this point too; country and urban prose. Each gave a differing view point of contemporary lifestyles in Russia and the Soviet Union. Writers, since 1953, seemed to have a tendency to recreate the past in their works. But for no apparent reason, no one wanted to touch the time periods before 1900; they stuck with the current century. [part 3]

Russian Literature in the 20th Century (1)

2010-01-04T07:54:00.000-08:00

Here in America, we are granted in the First Amendment to the Constitution the right to freedom of speech and press, something our country has enjoyed since its founding. However, other countries have not been as fortunate as America in their governments allowing that freedom. The governments have changed hands several times in a short period of time and a good way for a government to put out its agenda is through the press. Hence, we find countries where authors and editors are restricted in what they can write, print and publish. Russian literature in particular went through a tumultuous period in the twentieth century. In the first five decades, through the Revolution, World War II and Stalin's regime, the literary world had decidedly less freedom than the two following.

Russian literature was decaying at the outset of the Revolution. There had been two major types of writing prominent in Russia in the early twentieth century, realism and symbolism. The realism style was a carry-over of the great Russian novels by authors like Tolsty and Dostoyevsky. The novels written in the decade following the Revolution were historical in theory, dealing with oppressed commoners who catered to a revolution to improve their situation.[1] It was old and worn out. Symbolism emerged from the modernist movement of art and literature that was taking place in Europe. At the beginning of the 1900s, it played a very important role in the cultural changes that took place in Russia. Symbolism is credited with rejuvenating literature and raising the bar on writing techniques. [2]

After Lenin's rise to power, he took over immediate control of the literary world. Based off Marxist ideals that literature should be geared towards the social and ethical problems of the country, he put into practice what he stated in an article in 1905, that "the literature must become Party literature," and "must become a part of the proletarian cause."[3] The article outlined a plan in which party supervision of literary procedures, including publishing companies, libraries and newspapers; all accountable to the Party. Lenin felt that the liberties "bourgeois writer" had were simply an excuse for how they earned their money. By 1924, there were no companies in the literary world that were independent of the government's influence and supervision. It was made clear there was no place for any author whose views differed from the Party.[4]

Under Lenin, a new period of literature emerged. I would not say it was all beneficial to the country, but book printing did increase. With the current authors slowly disappearing in their individual ways, a new group of writers faithful to the government emerged from the commoners and Party members. War Communism was the theme for a majority of the works published during the 1920s, forcing authors to face grisly situations with apathy and indifference. For a time, the government was kind and encouraging to non-Communist writers, but it did not last long.

Works written after the Revolution and before World War II, from 1917-1941, were marked by the transition of government from the tsarist rule to the Bolshevik regime. The government was very strict in what they permitted authors to discuss and publish in their writings. Shortly after the Revolution, writers had a decision to make; conform to the new government and their requirements for literature or not, very few chose to follow the new rules in the beginning. Many prominent writers chose to forgo their writings rather than "collaborate with usurpers of power.[5]Some decided to mingle with the common people and lived as peasants in the country until the end of the civil war. Then they returned to the cities as educated workers, such as librarians, teachers, technicians and the like. Others chose to leave the country altogether and go settle in Western Europe or America as political émigrés. The literary salons that had been in Russia now opened up in the areas where authors had moved.[6]

For the writers who did not leave the country, switch professions or conform to the Communist style of writing; they wrote underground literature, which meant that their works were not published legally. No distinct line between what was considered "underground" or "aboveground" literature existed. There are a few categories for why books were in the underground circulation. First, books were underground books because editors rejected them for publication based on the book's lack of literary merit. Second, the books were from authors who had been pulled from the shelves. Third, if the government suddenly made a switch in its literary policy, an author who had been in line with government regulations would run into censorship difficulties. The final category for underground books consisted of those authors who simply chose not to submit their works for publication. The method of government censorship is the main reason for the underground book movement.[7] In order to get published at all, writers had to been forced to become dishonest or phony.[8]

The underground literature had no coordination or organization; it just happened. The handwritten or typed carbon copy books circulated in a newspaper form. Those who participated in the movement, author or printer, lived a difficult, grueling and uneasy lifestyle. While the literature did not violate any edicts and technically was not illegal, the government was very adamant about quenching the movement. They went to great lengths to prove that the underground books were supported by anti-Soviet groups and foreign associations, arresting anyone found connected to the underground organization.[9]

The magazines that printed the underground works were known of abroad by word of mouth. Many of the manuscripts made their way to foreign nations where they were published and sometimes sent back to Russia where they were circulated in book form through the underground. While it was not illegal for authors to send their works abroad for publication, the government was also set on squelching that practice as well by pressuring authors and threatening criminal examinations of anti-Soviet propaganda. The topics were never totally anti-Communist in nature or directed against the government, but protested about the way the government held the domineered over the literary world in the Soviet Union. The magazines carried outlandish titles, such as Boomerang, Cocktail, and Sphinexes.[10]

Two prominent newspapers emerged under the Communists and were well known around the world, the Pravda (Truth) and Izvestia (News). Pravda was the best known Soviet paper; it was established in 1912 under the Bolsheviks. During World War I under the tsarist rule publication was forbidden. Printings resumed in February of 1917 at the outset of the Revolution under the editorship of a man named Joseph Stalin. Pravda was the chief paper for the Communist Party from the Revolution all the way until August of 1991 when the editor made the mistake of supporting the attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. It was shut down, but is now a private independent paper.[11] Izvestia was a government run newspaper before the Revolution and the Communists took over. While not as prominent as Pravda, Izvestia was still a top publication that the Party used to put out its agenda.[12] While both papers were used by the Communists, Pravda was used by the Party as a whole and Izvestia was a government publication.

Since the Cultural Revolution, there have been three distinct periods of Russian literature: war time writings (from 1941-1945), post war literature (1945 to the mid 1950s), and the 1950s until the present. War time works, better know as propaganda, were used to mobilize the Russian people against the Nazis. The common theme among writers was portraying the Russian soldiers as the heroes and they emphasized the horrors and atrocities committed by the German soldiers against their enemies.[13] Germans were described as being "barbarian SS, sergeant-majors fat with beer and arrogant foreigners" forcing "the intelligentsia to disappear."[14]Several writers who had been silenced and viewed with distrust during the 1930s where permitted to work again as they were contributing to the war effort.[15]

Throughout World War II, writers expressed optimism about the development of literature in the Soviet Union after the war. They hoped that there would be less government influence and they would be able to have more freedom in their creativity. Their hopes were dashed. In August and September of 1946, several decrees were made in reference to the Soviet Literature and what was expected. Two main points were set forth as follows:

The task of the Soviet literature is to aid the state to educate the youth correctly and to meet their demands, to rear a new generation strong and vigourous...Consequently, any preaching of Ideological neutrality, of political neutrality, of "art for art's sake" is alien to Soviet literature and harmful to the interests of the Soviet people...Such preaching has no place in our journals.[16] In short, all literature that was to be published for the public had to be related in some way or another to the Party, their leaders and policy. [part 2] [part 3]

this article written by Rebbeca Wickert published at associatedcontent.com. Read the completed article here

Georges Bataille Interview over Literature and Evil

2010-01-01T21:45:00.000-08:00

The TV interview that exists with Georges Bataille (1958). About his book Literature And Evil. Interviewer: Pierre Dumayet.

There are so many examples of such books or poems I tend to get drawn to: The Iliad, Crime and Punishment, The Brother Karamazov, Lolita, Les miserables, Notre Dame de Paris, La peste, Les Fleurs du Mal given as an example by George Bataille in the video clip, etc. The list can go on.

Is it because our life is boring? Why such extreme topics attract us? I have known men who read mostly war documents and books. Average people like me can be all petty, jealous, ambitious, unforgiving, ... in a small degree without actually causing any harm to others, since we try to fight off those minor vices in order to be good most of the time. And yet, we seem to want to know the darkest sides of humans. Is it to feel better about ourselves?

Uniques Casino Review

2010-01-01T21:34:00.001-08:00

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Problems with the Term PostcoloniaL

2009-12-29T07:37:00.000-08:00

"When," an Indian friend of mine (with a progressive cast of mind and a firm conviction in the idea of technological advancement) asked in exasperation, "does the state of postcoloniality end?" Questions of the same order have been plaguing literary scholars for a while, and a number of profound thinkers and theorists have done their best to abolish the term "postcolonial" altogether. In articles first published in 1994 in the journal Social Text, both Ella Shohat and Anne McClintock point out that "postcolonialism" never really existed except as a designation of convenience, and that it is no more, in essence, than colonialism attached to a "post-" (and straining at its tether to reassert its modes of thought).

In an essay of more than a decade earlier Salman Rushdie made a seemingly parallel argument: he, too, sought to banish an insufficient term, "Commonwealth," which according to him creates an "exclusive ghetto" whose effect is to change the meaning of English literature into "something far narrower, something topographical, nationalistic, possibly even racially segregationist." Rushdie went on to point out that "at best, what is called 'Commonwealth literature' is positioned below English literature proper," placing "Eng. Lit. at the center of the world and the rest of the world at the periphery," a situation which inverts priorities and obscures more fundamental literary issues. (I paraphrase Rushdie's angry essay, "'Commonwealth Literature' Does Not Exist" Imaginary Homelands 61-70.)

There is a distinction, however, between Rushdie's denunciation of "Commonwealth" and the no less passionate attacks of recent critics on "postcolonialism." For Shohat and McClintock the thing described by the offending word is no more real than the world mapped by colonialism, while for Rushdie it is not the thing described (to which he permits a tangible existence) but the concept represented by the term itself which is an insidious "chimera." Rushdie's essay is replete with references to writers -- Indian, Latin American and African -- who do share a certain commonality of experience, and throughout he is a celebrant of what he calls a "transnational, cross-lingual process of pollination" (69) -- what the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin terms, with no less approbation, "polyglossia" Bakhtin introduces the concept of polyglossia in his early essay "Epic and Novel" (The Dialogic Imagination 12), although he elaborates on its import only in his longer works (61-67).) Indeed, even in his fictions Rushdie seems to delight in the word "mongrel," a term he associates particularly with the grand melange that is India, but which can be applied more broadly to a polyglot state.

The occasion for my embracing "mongrel," however, is not Rushdie's predilection for it, but its use in 1996 by an Australian politician to describe the offspring of parents of mixed race. As a term which has already won some celebrity in other contexts, and one which would easily encompass such freckled monsters as Joyce and Yeats in the same polyglot potpourri (and those poor creatures could only wish they were postcolonial), it seems to have no less a ring to it than other fortunate pejoritives like "Impressionist" or "Fauve," and surely could be adopted with no less felicity than Aimé Césaire's "négritude." Moreover, the program for a theory of mongrel literature is already present, albeit in a form I do not find entirely acceptable, in Rushdie's essay:

. . . if we were to forget about "Commonwealth Literature," we might see that there is a kind of commonality about much literature, in many languages, emerging from those parts of the world which one could loosely term the less powerful, or the powerless. The magical realism of the Latin Americans influences Indian-language writers in India today. The rich, folk-tale quality of a novel like Sandro of Chegem, by the Muslim Russian Fazil Iskander, finds its parallels in the work-for instance-of the Nigerian, Amos Tutuola, or even Cervantes. It is possible, I think, to begin to theorize common factors between writers from these societies-poor countries, or deprived minorities in powerful countries-and to say that much of what is new in world literature comes from this group. This seems to me to be a "real" theory, bounded by frontiers which are neither political nor linguistic but imaginative. [69-69]

Where I think Rushdie falters in his definition is in vacillating in his choice of umbrella under which his writers shelter, at one moment an economic and political one, at another "imaginative." Interestingly, long before Rushdie placed the writers from the margins at the center of "what is new in world literature," Mikhail Bakhtin had made rather similar claims about the distinctive and innovative qualities of novelistic discourse; for instance, in "Epic and Novel" (The Dialogic Imagination 11-12).

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[The essay, which is Part One of Anthony R. Guneratne's "Virtual Spaces of Postcoloniality: Rushdie, Ondaatje, Naipaul, Bakhtin and the Others," has been adapted, with kind permission of the author, from the no-longer extant NUS site on which the original paper for the First Conference on Postcolonial Theory appeared. [External Link] = linked materials not in the original print version.GPL]