Reasons my week is getting better

• At Three Percent, Dan Vitale reviews Anne McLean's translation of The Armies (Los ejércitos) by Evelio Rosero.
• Rosero's new novel, Los almuerzos, comes out this month.
• In "The Brazilian Sphinx", Lorrie Moore explores the life and work of Clarice Lispector.
• A review of Lispector's The Hour of the Star (translated by Giovanni Pontiero) appears in the new issue of The Quarterly Conversation.
• I'll have to comment on their take on translation as criticism soon--Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man, and others have gone back and forth on this issue for years...
• From Scott Esposito's excellent essay, "Horacio Castellanos and the New Political Novel": "What for Ford Madox Ford was primarily a story of infidelity in inter-war England, and for Kobo Abe was about existentialist malaise in mid-century Japan, and for Walker Percy was about the alienation of the individual in a radically mediated society, and for Kazuo Ishiguro was a story of classism in contemporary England, becomes for Moya a story of the great political subconsciousness that seethes through life in 21st-century Latin America. Each of these writers shares an interest in portraying the space between objective reality and human subjectivity. Fundamentally, they are interested in what happens as the human mind attempts to piece together a reality, though it lacks the necessary information to do so. As the diversity of these writers’ output shows, the dramatization of this gap is a very malleable tool: an individual’s quest for objective truth can interrogate realities about the cultures that range from a bottom-rung operative in a Latin American state on the verge of failure to a wealthy, privileged gentleman in a European nation at the height of empire. What is most characteristic about these novels is that vital facts about the culture each is set in are bound up at the deepest levels with the narrators’ own gradual realization that there is no such a thing as an objective reality. The process of self-discovery is contingent on comprehending one’s cultural context."
• And Suzanne Jill Levine offers an excerpt from her spectacular book (to be reissued in October), The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction.

Infinite richness

I've been trying to work out what I think of Ilan Stavans' claim that "There are more Quixote possibilities in English" and Michael Orthofer's questioning of the way in which the former presents his case (regarding English translations of the classics in general). Happily, the reading that I've been doing this morning has helped me understand things a little better.

In researching the translation theory essay I'm (supposedly) writing, I've discovered the work of Wolfgang Iser. His essay "The reading process: a phenomenological approach" (anthologized in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, edited by David Lodge and Nigel Wood) is giving me some insights into the nature of translation:

The fact that completely different readers can be differently affected by the 'reality' of a particular text is ample evidence of the degree to which literary texts transform reading into a creative process that is far above mere perception of what is written. The literary text activates our own faculties, enabling us to recreate the world it presents. The product of this creative activity is what we might call the virtual dimension of the text, which endows it with its reality. This virtual dimension is not the text itself, nor is it the imagination of the reader: it is the coming together of text and imagination.

This may sound a bit obvious, but the distinctions he makes have very interesting implications. As David Albertson says in this profile,

For Iser, the reader does not mine out an objective meaning hidden within the text. Rather, literature generates effects of meaning for the reader in a virtual space created between reader and text. Although reader and text assume similar conventions from reality, texts leave great portions unexplained to the reader, whether as gaps in the narrative or as structural limits of the text’s representation of the world. This basic indeterminacy "implies" the reader and begs her participation in synthesizing, and indeed living, events of meaning throughout the process of reading.

Such a theory of aesthetic response denies the simple dichotomy of fiction and reality. According to Iser, fiction proposes alternate worlds created within the virtual reality of the text’s meaning. In other words, in literature the actual and the possible can exist simultaneously. Literature thus takes on a greater human function of imagining beyond the given constraints of experience.

If (as Charlotte Mandell says) translation is "the truest form of reading," one can replace "reader" with "translator" in this passage of Iser's:

For this reason, one text is potentially capable of several different realizations, and no reading can ever exhaust the full potential, for each individual reader will fill in the gaps in his own way, thereby excluding the various other possibilities; as he reads, he will make his own decision as to how the gap is to be filled. In this very act the dynamics of reading are revealed. By making his decision he implicitly acknowledges the inexhustibility of the text; at the same time it is this very inexhaustibility that forces him to make his decision.

This can help explain what Ilan Stavans was talking about in the article on the multitude of translations of Don Quixote:

All this is to say that, while it might seem preposterous to suggest that the fanciful adventures of Don Quixote are far richer in English than in Spanish, the proof is in the pudding. By rich, I mean abundant and comprehensive. There are more Quixote possibilities in English.

(via The Literary Saloon)

I think this goes along with what Jacques Delille meant (back in the 18th century) when he wrote, "I have always thought of translation as a way to enrich a language. If you write an original work in a particular language you are likely to exhaust that language's own resources, if I may say so. If you translate, you import the riches contained in foreign languages into your own, by means of a felicitous commerce."

But multiple translations do not only "enrich" a target language. As Lawrence Venuti writes in The Scandals of Translation,

Foreign texts that are stylistically innovative invite the English-language translator to create sociolects striated with various dialects, registers and styles, inventing a collective assemblage that questions the seeming unity of standard English.

So (although it may sound paradoxical) the act of translating a work into English can also help to undermine the hegemony of English.

This means that Stavans could've (should've?) taken it one step further. As Iser writes,

With all literary texts, then, we may say that the reading process is selective, and the potential text is infinitely richer than any of its individual realizations. This is borne out by the fact that a second reading of a piece of literature often produces a different impression from the first. The reasons for this may lie in the reader's own change of circumstances; still, the text must be such as to allow this variation.

In this light, one can begin to see that eighteen translations of Don Quixote consitute eighteen different readings--and many more are possible.

So in reality, it isn't simply that "the fanciful adventures of Don Quixote are far richer in English than in Spanish"--but that the various translations help to reflect the infinite richness of Don Quixote itself.

Thou and thou

Between buildings and meetings and appointments, I've been reading Glass and God by Anne Carson (which "conflates all but two of the pieces from Glass, Irony and God with the full text of Short Talks"). I will have to agree with Michael Ondaatje when he says, "Her long poem 'The Glass Essay' is one of the best of our time." In it, she reads Emily Brontë's poetry while on a visit to her mother in the aftermath of a five-year relationship's end.

One of the remarkable things about it is how she explicates Emily's poetry within her own poem. After quoting "I'll come when thou art saddest" in its entirety (but for the last line of the first stanza, "From evening's chilly gloom"), Carson muses,

Very hard to read, the messages that pass
between Thou and Emily.
In this poem she reverses their roles,

speaking not as the victim but to the victim.
It is chilling to watch Thou move upon thou,
who lies alone in the dark waiting to be mastered.

It is a shock to realise that this low, slow collusion
of master and victim within one voice
is a rationale

for the most awful loneliness of the poet's hour.

Her discussion of Charlotte's comments on her sister's work adds yet another layer to the poem's multidimensionality. She walks along the moors, lies awake at night, thinks of her suffering parents, and tries to process the internal fragments of a dead relationship. It's harrowing reading, but one of the most satisfying poems I've ever experienced.

Marvelously suggestive

James Pollock explores Anne Carson's Decreation at the Contemporary Poetry Review:

Carson has been for many years a professor of classics, she is a superb translator from ancient Greek, and in her own writing she returns again and again to the ancient roots, the classical and biblical origins of Western literature. These obsessions, self-consciously combined with her more fashionable interest in the new traditions of certain great innovators of the twentieth century like Paul Celan, Samuel Beckett, and Gertrude Stein, enable her, at her best, to be truly original. Merely to rank her with “the triumphant march of the avant-garde,” in Zbigniew Herbert’s sardonic phrase—cultural amnesiacs endlessly shooting at the easy target of novelty—is to miss completely much of what is most interesting and valuable in her work. In fact, Carson has always been a writer in the Romantic tradition of the sublime, a tradition stretching back through Longinus to Sappho, Homer, and the Bible. And never more so than in her recent book, Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera.

The book explores, from a wide variety of perspectives, the theme of the sublime annihilation or decreation of the self. Carson borrows the term “decreation” from the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, for whom the purpose of such an act was to get out of the way of God, to let God’s will prevail over one’s one. Any student of religions will recognize this as a very old idea. But one way of understanding Carson’s focus on this theme is to think of her place in literary history: as a self-consciously post-confessional poet, she is concerned with finding ways to displace the self from the centre of the work. Not, mind you, in order to replace it with the cold, inhuman babble of Language, but rather to make way for “spiritual matters”. And this, as I say, places her squarely in the Romantic tradition of the sublime. “Not I,” writes D.H. Lawrence, in his “Song of the Man Who Has Come Through”: “Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me.” The main difference is that where English Romantics like Shelley and Lawrence speak of “wind,” Carson often speaks of the still more traditional “God.” [...]

Lest we forget that the sublime is a concept that was applied in the eighteenth century especially to certain aesthetic experiences of nature, Carson’s third essay, “Totality: The Colour of Eclipse,” considers the sublime experience of the total eclipse of the sun. She describes it as follows: “You are now inside the moon’s shadow, which is a hundred miles wide and moves at two thousand miles an hour. The sensation is stupendous.” Carson takes her literary examples this time from Archilochus, Pindar, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, and Annie Dillard. Surprisingly, she finds the experience is often associated in these writers with copulation, marriage, questions and doubts about marriage, and, less surprisingly, with a feeling of wrongness; in a metaphor borrowed from her own essay in praise of sleep, she compares seeing an eclipse to “waking from a dream in the wrong direction and finding yourself on the back side of your mind.” Taken by itself, this is the slightest of the four essays; however, when read together with the other three its images and ideas help to link all four in marvelously suggestive ways. For instance, although she never makes the link explicitly, the image of a total eclipse of the sun is perhaps her most powerful metaphor for her central notion of “decreation,” which may be understood as a kind of eclipse or annihilation of the self.

I also recently enjoyed listening to Michael Silverblatt's conversation with Carson (from January 2007) about her translations of Euripides.

Confronting misconceptions about Blake

Northrop Frye does this brilliantly in the first few pages:

• "[I]t is only by cutting out two-thirds of Blake's work that [one] will be able to wedge the rest of it in with that of the minor pre-Romantics."
• "The prophesies form what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the language, and most of the more accessible editions of Blake omit them altogether, or print only those fragments which seem to the editor to have a vaguely purplish cast."
• One prevailing impression is "that Blake is to be regarded as an ultrasubjective primitive whose work involuntarily reflects his immediate mood. The Songs of Innocence are then to be taken at their face value as the ourpourings of a naïve and childlike spontaneity, and the Songs of Experience as the bitter disillusionment resulting from maturity--for when Blake engraved the latter he was no longer a child of thirty-two but a grown man of thirty-seven. It is logical inference from this that the prophecies can reflect only an ecstatic self-absorption on which it is unnecessary for a critic to intrude."
• "It is pathetic to read his letters and see how buoyant is his hope of being understood in his own time, and how wistful is the feeling that he must depend on posterity for appreciation. And it was not only recognition he wanted: he had a very strong sense of his personal responsibility both to God and to society to keep on producing the kind of imaginative art he believed in. He despised obscurity, hated all kinds of mystery, and derided the idea that poets do not fully comprehend what they are writing."
• Frye insists that "all of Blake's poetry, from the shortest lyric to the longest prophesy, must be taken as a unit and, mutatis mutandis, judged by the same standards."
• He also believes (quite logically) that Blake should "be placed in his historical and cultural context as a poet who, though original, was not aboriginal, and was neither a freak nor a sport."
• "Further, Blake's poems are poems, and must be studied as such. Any attempt to explain them in terms of something that is not poetry is bound to fail."
• Also, "No one who has read three lines of our straightforward and outspoken poet can imagine that he wished to be pursued by a band of superstitious dilettantes into the refuge of a specialized cult. Whatever Blakes prophecies may be, they can hardly be code messages. They may need interpretation, but not deciphering".

Of interest

• Scott Esposito writes about the necessity of supporting the literary outlets we love and why he's begun to pay writers of The Quarterly Conversation (one of the best literary journals out there).
• The official website of Kate Summmerscale's The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher has completely sucked me in. (Too bad there's no ebook version of the novel yet! I'd really like to read this one.) Update: Stay away from Maureen Corrigan's NPR review. She gives away the identity of the killer! I am deeply annoyed and disappointed.
  
• Jenny Davidson offers a fascinating account of her adventures in research in preparation for the sequel to The Explosionist.
• Mark Sarvas has embarked on his Summer of Roth: "The majority of readers see only finished reviews but I want to show you what goes into a sausage – the things I notice, the patterns I detect, the strengths and weaknesses. And then, as I turn to Indignation and prepare my review, I will give you some specific glimpses into that process – the preparation, the contemplation and the composition."
• A new Alina Simone song is up at NPR Music.

Transcending time

Once upon a time I contemplated taking a master's course on William Blake. There were so many aspects to his work that my undergrad English classes inspired me to explore, and I wanted to keeping learning about him. His theories on art and the imagination seemed to link him more closely to the metaphysical poets than the Romantics (in my humble opinion), and having been lucky enough to see an exhibit of his work at the Tate, I wanted to understand more about his holistic vision of reality.

I bought a used copy of Northrop Frye's Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake a few years ago, but have only now begun reading it.

Holy crap.

I'm only on page 68, but my mind has been officially blown. Frye is examining everything I've ever suspected about Blake, offering a refreshing look at one of the most misunderstood poets in the English language. The timeliness of Frye's work is also compelling. As he says in the preface,

I wrote Fearful Symmetry during the Second World War, and hideous as that time was, it provided some parallels with Blake's time which were useful for understanding Blake's attitude to the world. Today, now that reactionary and radical forces alike are once more in the grip of the nihilistic psychosis that Blake described so powerfully in Jerusalem, one of the most hopeful signs is the immensely increased sense of the urgency and immediacy of what Blake had to say.

Frye penned this passage in 1969. There's a special urgency to what he has to say as well, and this beautifully wise work of literary criticism (that also encompasses philosophy and theology) deserves a wide readership today. I look forward to continuing my journey through this spectacular book.

Despite the "delicate original"

Wyatt Mason defends translated literature and takes a look at Adam Thirlwell's The Delighted States, an examination of how literary style "survives translation":

Most discussions of translation take this generalization as unquestionable truth: If only the translator were more careful, or more gifted–or merely competent!–the delicate original would not have arrived in shards and tatters, ruined for readers, upon our shores.

The trouble I have with this conventional wisdom is how patently it flies in the face of practical experience. If translations were so routinely terrible and so generally unreadable, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and Flaubert and Stendhal and Kafka and Proust and Mann—whose translators have been mocked and derided by generations of critics—would have had no hope of finding readers beyond their respective shores. Given that these writers have readers around the world, the ire and indignation felt by those who take at translators comes not over the errancy of translation but its adequacy: however error-ridden and technically troubling a translation might be—the syntax clumsy, the vocabulary misleading, the dialogue wooden—translations have nonetheless managed, somehow, to convey their sources sufficiently for their originals survive, not to say thrive, far from home.

That “somehow”—a compelling mystery—is explored in a fine new book by British writer Adam Thirlwell.

And on to the wish list it goes...

Update, 24 July: As promised, Mason has posted his interview with Thirlwell. Happily, they discuss several nuts-and-bolts issues concerning the latter's translation of Nabokov's "Mademoiselle O," as well as specific issues of translation in general:

Did the practice of translating “Mademoiselle O” produce any changes in your thoughts on the nature of translation?

I realized more precisely than ever that the problems with content and form were more complicated than I had thought. Often, the phonetic tricks, like alliteration, were quite easy to mimic: what proved recalcitrant were the small elements, like songs, or slang, or objects. And I became aware of the more personal problem: how to avoid one’s own tricks, or even, how to avoid the excessive imitation of the original writer’s tricks—how to prevent their later style from dominating one’s version of the earlier style.

There's also a nice tip of the hat to Roberto Arlt and Macedonio Fernández.

Rilke and self-identity

A.N. Wilson reads Rilke:

If you have ever read W G Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, you will realise that this cult book of the 1990s is heavily influenced by the Malte Laurids notebooks. Rilke completed it in 1909, when he was 34.

The book takes the form of meditations by a young Danish aristocrat, living a lonely and impoverished life in Paris and observing the extraordinary street "characters" of that city. [...]

The central question of the book is self-identity. It ends with a retelling of the Prodigal Son, who runs away from home precisely to escape being loved on his family's uncongenial terms. In his return, he wonders whether he is ready for the love of God - about which, in his reading of St Teresa of Avila, he has already meditated.

He wonders, moreover, whether God is ready to love him. If I had to teach creative writing, I think I would use this book as a text.

So many bad books - either novels or autobiographies - charge artlessly into their theme, assuming that the author's soul is (a) interesting and (b) self-evidently existent.

Rilke's prose masterpiece reminds us of the questionability of either statement.

Given the connection Wilson makes between Rilke and Sebald, it would be interesting to read Laird Hunt's The Exquisite alongside The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (since the former was inspired by The Rings of Saturn).

(via The Literary Saloon)

Midweek links

• The Bat Segundo Show may be no more. I can't even begin to talk about what this podcast has meant to me--especially as someone who lives outside the U.S. The loss is incalculable. Update, 18 July: There's still hope--lots of it.
  
• Open Book, a collaborative online "writers on writing" project by Slate and NYU, posts its maiden episode: an insightful interview with Junot Díaz. Although the interview feels a little rushed, I loved how openly in debt he is to his reading. While working on a draft, he thinks of the books he loves and if they would say, "This page can't hang out with us"--into the trash it goes. (via The Millions)
• Matthew Tiffany quotes from a recent interview with the inimitable Wendell Berry.
• Miriam Burstein discusses Jennifer Egan's The Keep, perfectly describing my own frustrations with it.
• Anne Fernald reads Woolf's letters and has her grandmother to thank.
  
• Tim of Baby Got Books questions potential misreadings of Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances.

Thursday links

• The London Review of Books hosts a literary contest that asks entrants to list as many literary allusions as they can find in Adrian McKinty's thriller The Bloomsday Dead (to be published in June).
• Michelle of in the Lourve discovers George MacDonald's fairy tales.
• Ed is back to his old posting habits. He officially made my day. (And I must once again say how much I love the ever-fascinating Bat Segundo.)
• I'm watching John Berger's Ways of Seeing right now, which leaves me in debt to both Marks.
• I also enjoyed the fifth episode of Titlepage.tv in between classes this morning. So many great books to get to!
• Garrick Davis of the Contemporary Poetry Review has edited Praising It New: The Best of the New Criticism, the "first anthology of New Criticism to be printed in fifty years."
  
• Meanwhile, I'm nearing p. 950 of Against the Day (plan on finishing it during the three-day weekend) and am feeling positively nostalgic about leaving it behind. I can barely remember a time when I wasn't reading this book...
  

Teaching oneself

Another excellent point about litblogs from Dan Green:

The question is not whether another "opinion" is needed but whether that opinion is linked to a specific analysis of the book--pointing out specific attributes of form, style, or theme through quotation or extended description--that might reveal to other readers some angle of understanding or interpetation they haven't previously considered.

In addition, I think writing one's thoughts down in this medium can be a way of teaching oneself. I know that I can have many ideas and impressions about a text, but it isn't until I flesh them out in black and white that I can fully comprehend the nuances and implications of these thoughts--which sometimes extend into even more illumination and ultimately lead to a better understanding of the text itself.

This ties in to what Darby wrote about "the notion of overpopularity." If you love something, why shut up about it simply because others already love it too? It isn't the topic or work that should be accepted or rejected, only the way in which we write about it. There can never be enough "specific analysis" of a text's merits.

Intertextual intermarriage

Eric Griffiths' "Dante, Primo Levi and the intertextualists" is a wonderful essay that explores the erstwhile uses, true definitions, and revelatory functions of intertextuality. Perhaps I'm quoting too liberally here, but I suppose it's more for myself than anyone else. This is the sort of writing I never tire of rereading:

At one point during Dante’s impersonation of Arnaut Daniel, in Purgatorio 26, there occurs a word, “escalina”, which, Prue Shaw points out, “exists neither in Provençal nor Italian”. Amid the gloss of the mosaic, her knowledgeable eye singles out, as it were, one square of matted chewing gum. Maybe the agent Dante mistakenly believed there was such a word; maybe he thought it ought to exist and made it up (neologism is a permanent possibility in any language, reluctantly though langue admits this); maybe a corrupt scribe had a hand in the text, and Arnaut was not describing Dante as “al som de l’escalina” – “on the highest pavement of the stair”, as T. S. Eliot, whom the phrase haunted, once translated it – but as “ses dol e ses calina” (“without pain and without heat”). No system can spare us these “maybe”s. You may call this “literary word” an “intersection of textual surfaces”, but that will not help you cope with the fact that what we come across at this intersection is a crux.

And

Milton’s great poem is not, as Bakhtin was inclined to label all epics, “monological” but in dialogue over time with himself, both intersubjective and intra-subjective. This is why it often sounds like a play by Shakespeare. Sometimes the resemblances are probably happenstances. When, at the outset, he promises his readers “things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme”, we had better not hear “unattempted yet” as an echo of the same words from King John, Act Two, scene one (line 601), where the Bastard torrentially reflects that the only reason he is railing against bribery is that nobody has so far troubled to try greasing his palm. We discount this as “static”, interference from a shared, but insignificantly shared, atmosphere, unless we impute to Milton a desire to hint with inordinate faintness that we should think of him as a bastard, too. But when Satan leads Eve to the forbidden tree, and she explains that it is off-limits to her, “To whom the tempter guilefully replied. / Indeed?”, a family resemblance between two tempters may strike us. We can hear here an echo of that “Indeed?” with which in Act Three, Scene Three, Iago initiates Othello’s downfall. Textually, and a fortiori intertextually, there is more in common between Milton and the Bastard than between Satan and Iago – two words rather than one – but if we personify “Indeed?”, embody it with camp surprise and mock solicitude, with the paraded reasonableness that comes pat to both these insinuators, we find they are a match for each other.

And

An unargued preference for “more general discursive structure” over attention to a “particular intertextual source” or two has the further drawback that it conduces to fetishism of the categories brought to bear on utterances. “Structure”, “system”, “genre” and “discursive formation” remain drastically under-described pseudo-entities; like nation states, their existence and frontiers acquire a bogus solidity. As in nationalist historiography, sham demarcations are established; a weird protectionism envelops the resultant intellectual domains, so that when a writer like Primo Levi alludes in one of his poems to the “Shema Yisrael” this is called “appropriation” (who was expropriated by it ?). Contributors to the Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi think it odd that Levi, a “secular humanist”, according to them, “nonetheless uses the language of the Hebrew Bible in his poetry”. Yet Levi “uses” terms, cadences and their implied commitments from Diodati’s 1603 Italian version of the Scriptures (he does not quote Hebrew) throughout his prose as well as his poetry. When he speaks of the “shame which il giusto experiences facing a crime committed by someone else”, the Italian word is the equivalent of the King James’s “the righteous”. When he is drawn, as he so often is, to people who are “mite”, like his best friend, Alberto, “la rara figura dell’uomo forte e mite, contro cui si spuntano le armi della notte” (“the rare example of a man at once strong and meek, against whom the weapons of the night fall away blunted”), the magnificence of his phrase stems from Wisdom 2:19 and Matthew 21:5 and the many other places where that notable intersection, Judaeo-Christianity, transvalued meekness. You don’t learn about these detailed realities of Levi’s writing from the Cambridge Companion; the contributors’ attachment to their own labels is such that they even describe “compassion and forgiveness” as “Christian virtues”, a slur on the Hebrew Bible if ever I heard one. For them, an iron curtain has fallen between the “cultural” and the “religious”, so they imagine Levi must be a double agent, engaged in “ironic rewriting of divine utterances in secular terms” (they do not mention what the point of his irony is), whereas, in fact, the Scriptures are already written in “secular terms”, there being no other terms available even to God, supposing he wishes to speak with his creatures. The Word itself, as Bakhtin said, has to be “embodied”, “enter another sphere of existence” and “become discourse”.

And

To hear why Levi in the camp heard Ulysses’s injunction “Considerate la vostra semenza” (“ask yourselves what seed you spring from”) as “come uno squillo di tromba, come la voce di Dio” (“like the sound of the trumpet, like the voice of God”: Deuteronomy 4:33, Jeremiah 4:19), you need to bear in ear the continuity of promise carried through the word “seed” from Genesis to the offertory of the Roman Catholic Requiem where it begs God to be freed from death “which of old you promised to Abraham and his seed”. You need to recognize this “seed” as enshrining a concept of human solidarity across times and frontiers, a concept at the heart of Levi’s resistance to the violence unleashed upon the “human” by pseudoscientific expertise about “race”, for example, by Mussolini’s hireling academics who in 1938 issued a manifesto proclaiming that “we must regard as dangerous theories which . . . include Semitic groupings within the scope of a common Mediterranean race . . . . The Jews do not belong to the Italian race”. When Levi describes in the words of Diodati’s version of Scripture his response to Dante, an unbelieving Jewish Piedmontese writer (exiled in Poland), nourished on the words of a bible translation made by a devout Tuscan Protestant (exiled in Switzerland), comes to life at the sound from his own mouth of the account given by a Florentine Catholic poet (exiled somewhere in what was not yet known as “Italy”) of the response given to a Roman pagan by a Greek pagan (self-exiled till drowned in the antipodes). I don’t think “intersection” is a good enough word for what happens here; “intermarriage” would be better.

(via Light Reading)

Present concerns

• A new free international e-mail list co-hosted by the Universities of East Anglia, Warwick and London Metropolitan has just been launched. STRAP - Stage Translation Research Adaptation and Practice - aims to promote collaboration and discussion between academics and practitioners working in the field of stage translation and adaptation. It is intended that this facility will help subscribers create networks and further the discipline of stage translation and adaptation.

• García Márquez's Of Love and Other Demons has become an opera.

• Bud Parr has a few things to say about John O'Brien's recent screed, "Scamming in Translation: The Philistines Have Arrived." As a fledgling translator about to begin an MA program in the fall, my immediate reaction was a sad disappointment and confusion. How did it come to this?

• Darby has spoken:

  I hereby propose that we banish the notion of overpopularity from the litblogosphere. Surely it's an idea that can do well on its without further help from us.

  Hear hear!
  

• A friend introduced me to Better World Books--an "online bookstore with a soul." Definitely worth your time.

Beyond yourself

Matthew Cheney posts a really wonderful snippet from Lydia Millet's conversation with Jonathan Lethem (found in the current issue of BOMB Magazine):

Novels should do anything and everything they can pull off. The pulling off is the hard part, of course, but my feeling is if you don't walk a line where you're struggling to make things work, struggling with the ideas and shape and tone, you're not doing art. Art is the struggle to get beyond yourself. And if you want to use talking animals to do that, and you can make them beautiful, nothing is verboten.

Narrow and constraining

Dan Green rolls up his sleeves:

In a recent profile in The Chronicle of Higher Education of M.H. Abrams, Jeffrey Williams comments in passing that "Today the New Criticism, the dominant approach to close reading from the 1940s until the 1960s, seems narrow and constraining." New Criticism was constraining only to the extent that to use it meant to attend entirely to the literary qualities of literature, to withhold biography, history, and politics as subjects tangential to the focused analysis of literary writing. Presumably those more interested in history or politics than in literature would indeed find New Critical close reading "narrow and constraining," although one could ask why such scholars chose literature as their course of study as opposed to, say, history or politics.

The cultural apparatus and "French Theory"

Scott McLemee on François Cusset's French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States (translated by Jeff Fort):

To put it another way: the very category of “French Theory” itself is socially constructed. Explaining how that construction came to pass is Cusset’s project. He looks at the process as it unfolded at various levels of academic culture: via translations and anthologies, in certain disciplines, with particular sponsors, and so on. Along the way, he recounts the American debates over postmodernism, poststructuralism, and whatnot. But those disputes are part of his story, not the point of it. While offering an outsider’s perspective on our interminable culture wars, it is more than just a chronicle of them.

Instead, it would be much more fitting to say that French Theory is an investigation of the workings of what C. Wright Mills called the “cultural apparatus.” This term, as Mills defined it some 50 years ago, subsumes all the institutions and forms of communication through which “learning, entertainment, malarky, and information are produced and distributed ... the medium by which [people] interpret and report what they see.” The academic world is part of this “apparatus,” but the scope of the concept is much broader; it also includes the arts and letters, as well as the media, both mass and niche.

The reversal of alienation

Last Thursday, Maud brought up a telling issue:

American creative writing instruction, in my experience, tends to discourage would-be novelists from working with philosophical concepts. Large, abstract ideas are seen as the province of scientists and Nobel laureates. Everyone else, the thinking goes, should stay squarely in the realm of concrete troubles like adultery or thievery or murder.

But don’t the best novels — Crime and Punishment, for instance, or The Sea, The Sea or Disgrace — blend the two? Aren’t we interested in the reasons for and implications of characters’ predicaments and actions?

She went on to cite an interview of Walker Percy's where he explained how Kierkegaard had already laid the philosophical foundation for what he wanted to do in The Moviegoer.

Paul Elie's group biography, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, takes a good, long look at the abstract ideas behind Percy's fiction (as well as the work of Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day).

In his essay, "The Man on the Train," (republished in The Message in the Bottle), Percy begins by explaining,

There is no such thing, strictly speaking, as a literature of alienation. In the re-presenting of alienation the category is reversed and becomes something entirely different. There is a great deal of difference between an alienated commuter riding a train and this same commuter reading a book about an alienated commuter riding a train. (On the other hand, Huck Finn's drifting down the river is somewhat the same as a reader's reading about Huck Finn drifting down the river.) The nonreading commuter exists in true alienation, which is unspeakable; the reading commuter rejoices in the speakability of his alienation and in the new triple alliance of himself, the alienated character and the author.

Elie further explains the difference (using Percy's essay):

Put a novel in the commuter’s hand and things get more complicated. The train rounds a bend. Sunlight glints off the glass. There is a pretty girl waiting to board on the platform up ahead. Still, the novel is absorbing. This is what art does: it lets us escape our alienation temporarily. But some works of art do this better than others. Some banish our alienation; others distract us from it; some show it to us without offering any consolation. Whether they do so is a matter not only of quality, but of kind.

Making these distinctions, Percy is oddly assured: he seems to be writing from experience, even though [at this point] he has never completed a novel to his satisfaction. Repetition, he declares, is usually diminished in a work of art; as the hero goes home again his passionate quest for the meaning of his life will strike the reader as interesting at best, because the reader wasn’t there the first time. Alienation, in a novel, becomes something else: the novel of alienation, like a symbol, re-presents alienation, and so will dispel it in the reader, and as the alienated reader recognizes his condition in the text, the book "heals the very wound it re-presents."

This achievement, Percy says, "is an aesthetic victory of comradeliness, a recognition of plight in common. Its motto is not 'I despair and do not know that I despair' but 'At least we know that we are lost to ourselves'--which is very great knowledge indeed." Whereas "the nonreading commuter exists in true alienation, which is unspeakable," Percy goes on to explain, "the reading commuter rejoices in the speakability of his alienation and in the new triple alliance of himself, the alienated character, and the author. His mood is affirmatory and glad: Yes! That’s how it is!"

That is ecstatically said, and for a moment the insight banishes alienation in just the way Percy claims it does. It also suggests that Percy is celebrating the novel of alienation. After all, he says the reversal of alienation is "the supreme intersubjective achievement of art," which is to "set forth the truth of it: how it stands with both of us."

The problem with "high art"

Over the weekend, I tried to pinpoint what it was about Stephen Marche's essay on Robbe-Grillet that bothered me. (I really liked Raymond + Hannah--there's no axe to grind here, just some honest questioning.) I couldn't get to a computer and wound up scribbling my thoughts in a notebook. Such a strong statement was bound to get a reaction: Daniel Green and Scott Esposito have already posted their well-substantiated views, but here are my purely subjective thoughts (for good measure).

For all I know, Marche may be right. I don't have the qualifications or the knowledge to dismantle his arguments. But there's something about this that doesn't sit well with me. As a "common reader" (whatever that really means), armed with only a BA and without any writerly pretentions, I actually enjoyed reading Jealousy...perhaps because of the challenge it presented. Doesn't any disparagement of this style of writing, this quibble with form, go against the exploration he's discussing? Granted, I have not read any of Robbe-Grillet's criticism and only a couple of interviews (and only one novel). Strict dictums such as Marche describes cannot be religiously adhered to any more than plan traditionalism should be (as he states in the essay).

But I can't help but think that the whole idea of "high art" comes with the unnecessary labels of difficulty-for-its-own-sake, sterility, and elitism only because that's what the "experts" say and so that's what people come to accept--without having read any of the actual work itself. The repuation becomes a barrier to engagement for the reader. Unfortuantely, too many people unthinkingly tend to accept these qualifiers and so deprive themselves of the pleasure of reading the work for its own sake (and even of discovering that it isn't so "difficult" after all).

I've posted about the problem of the academy's intervention between the reader and the text before. I'll also add that terms such as "difficult" and "pleasurable" create false dichotomies in that they are entirely subjective words that only serve to make judgments for others, denying individuals the right to think for themselves.

I was very interested to read about Miriam Burstein's current adventure in teaching The Erasers to a group of freshmen. I hope she posts more about the class as time goes on. This is what higher education should be about--introducing students to something different (and maybe even a little strange) and seeing what they make of it.

If only attitudes about art could be those of exploration--even adventure!--and not of holier-than-thou, too-serious boredom (regardless of whether this be the fault of critics or even of the authors themselves). Let the readers decide.

On the Mabinogion

A post of Imani's reminded me of something else that I've been meaning to mention--Oxford University Press has published a new translation of The Mabinogion. Translator Sioned Davies explains:

Certainly, poets were acquainted with traditional stories, as reflected in the many allusions scattered throughout their work; yet it would seem from the surviving evidence that verse itself was not used for extended narrative in medieval Wales––the preferred medium, unlike most Indo-European countries, was prose. The situation, therefore, was not only a complex, but surely a dynamic one: despite the hierarchical legal structure, one could expect a certain degree of interaction between the various professional ‘performers’ as they entertained at feasts and gatherings. Moreover, there are examples within the Mabinogion themselves of personal narratives arising out of informal conversation at table, as in the Second Branch when Matholwch, king of Ireland, tells his table companion Bendigeidfran the history of the Cauldron of Rebirth. It would appear, therefore, that storytelling was the domain of both the professional and the amateur, while the numerous words for ‘story’, as reflected in the tales themselves, point to a wide range of forms within the narrative genre.

In order to fully appreciate the Mabinogion, we have to understand the effect that this oral milieu had on the written tales. Oral and performance features are an integral part of their fabric, partly because the authors inherited pre-literary modes of narrating, but also because the written tales were composed for oral delivery, so that their reception and dissemination continued to have an influence on both style and structure. Indeed, one of the overriding concerns of this new translation has been the attempt to communicate to readers the exhilarating power of performance.

I must also add that it was through reading The Mabinogion and work by Lloyd Alexander and Stephen Lawhead that gave me a deep affection for Welsh mythology that sometimes verges on prejudice when I think of the French and their silly love triangles.