Break Reading

One of my reading deficiencies is American fiction of the past 60 years. I used winter break to do a little catching up, reading Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint and Don DeLillo's White Noise. Though I enjoyed both novels (and I want to read more Roth), I don't have a special comment to make on either (though I will note that reading DeLillo after Roth made me appreciate how "natural" a writer Roth is. DeLillo's sentences often read like those of a 20th century craftsman of fiction, Roth's never so--though this may be attributed to the narrative form of Portnoy's Complaint. I might also note that White Noise made me reflect on the level to which I fear death. Though Christian, I don't have a convicted faith in God or afterlife. I fear death enough to do what I can to extend life, hence my vegan care for my bodily health. And I do think about death every day--quite literally, probably many times a day if I focused on it. But in a relative sense, I don't think my fear of death is terribly strong. Has this parenthetical gone far enough?). But each novel evoked things in my mind, frequently other books but occasionally events. Here are some of the things each work made me think about.

Portnoy's Complaint

Roth's own Sabbath's Theater and Operation Shylock, Fowles' Daniel Martin

White Noise

Camus' The Plague, Stephen King's The Stand and Dreamcatcher, Dostoevsky's Demons, A.E. Housman's "To An Athlete, Dying Young," Tony Harrison's "v." September 11th, Hurricane Katrina

Humans: the animals that get bored

What is the purpose of literature? I like the Marxist explanations (to teach cultural norms, to reinforce or subvert dominant ideology, etc.). I like the Existential-Spiritual explanations (to explore what it means to be human, to find the meaning of life, etc.). But those explanations don't seem quite there.

What I think about the meaning of literature, I picture a bunch of people sitting around a fire as somebody recites The Odyssey. I start thinking of long nights between days of work. And it all becomes clear just what the purpose of literature is.

To pass the time.

Literature exists to relieve boredom. My guess is that ancient people wanted something to entertain themselves with in the times between when they had things to do. Thus, literature.

Sure, it does other things. We've found all sorts of new ways to entertain ourselves and avoid boredom, and yet literature persists and wil persist because its meaning and purposes are deep. And yet, still literature's primary purpose is to pass the time, to entertain us, to relieve boredom.

Literature exists to pass the time (so do games/sports, which probably have a longer histoyr in human existence than literature, so don't be too snobbish in dismissing the pointlessness of sports and the supposed shallowness of those of us who follow and cherish them closely).

Anyway, today is a department meeting, so even though I'm still over two weeks from teaching my first class, I'm considering today the symbolic end to summer. So here are capsule reviews of the books I passed the time with this summer.

The World's Wife, by Carol Ann Duffy
I think it's silly that states have things like a state bird, a state flower, and all that crap. These are the clues that always stump me on crosswords. So I've started making up our household items. Our official household lighting fixture is lamp. Our official household mammal is cat. And if we have an household poet laureate, it would be Carol Ann Duffy, a rare poet that my wife and I both love. Should we write her a letter informing her of the honor?

Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther, by Roland Bainton
A conventional Lutheran biography of the man that does a good job providing historical context.

Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History, by Erik Erikson
It's a book of ideas as much as a biography, and a brilliant one at that.

Luther: Man Between the God and the Devil, by Heiko Oberman
Revisionist history that isn't utterly convincing, but is well-written and insightful.

A Gathering of Old Men, by Ernest Gaines
This novel takes place during one day, and in that day Gaines succeeds in describing the entire history of white-black relations in the South. An underrated achievement.

Beloved, by Toni Morrison
Frankly, I like The Bluest Eye better. It's an important book, though.

Operation Shylock: A Confession, by Philip Roth
Roth is growing on me. A good novel of ideas.

MacBeth, by William Shakespeare
The Bard gives you something new each time you read one of his plays. This time, the issue of gender roles and essence stuck out to me.

Spiral, by Koji Suzuki
Actually creepier than the first book.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, by Tom Stoppard
Funny stuff. Very funny stuff.

Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett
The play that inspired a generation of playwrights to write about two boobs sitting around inanely waiting is still probably the best one.

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, by Gregory Maguire
My favorite book I read this summer. Awe-inspiring. The soundtrack for the musical is wonderful, too.

Mantissa, by John Fowles
Certainly not Fowles' best or most important work, but he knows it (the title is from an old word meaning an addendum that may be minor or trivial). Still, he plays around.

Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller
I wish Miller were a poet. He writes some really incredible sentences. But I don't like works of literature or film that are just about a bunch of stuff that happens.

First-Person Dialogic?

Philip Roth's Operation Shylock is an interesting accomplishment. I really want to call it a polyphonic novel. It is dialogic in that many character-ideas get voiced, and there is often a broad judgment of the character-ideas, but the ideas are not filtered to the end dialectically. They are mostly left standing for us to examine. And yet, it is written in the FIRST PERSON. Further yet, the first-person narrator is THE WRITER PHILIP ROTH. An intriguing example of where innovations of the novel can be taken.

Thoughts while reading Bakhtin

In Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin writes of how Dostoevsky invented the polyphonic novel, where several consciousnesses simultaneously coexist, even if their ideas are contradictory. Bakhtin argues that D does this is a dialogical manner, rather than bringing the ideas together under a monological development. He cites Kirpotin on what Bakhtin calls D’s “special ability to see precisely the soul of others” and what Kirpotin calls D’s “capacity to visualize directly someone else’s psyche.” Kirpotin says of D that "His world is the world of a multitude of objectively existing and interacting psychologies, and this excludes from his treatment of psychological processes the subjectivism and solipsism so characteristic of bourgeois decadence."

It might not be that hard for a writer to write a fairly narcissistic story about one individual's psychological struggles. The reason is that each writer is an individual, and every individual has experience with individual psychological struggles. A skilled and insightful human being like Dostoevsky has the ability to not write a solipsistic novel, but to examine different people, different psychological struggles. In The Brothers Karamozov he gets into the heads, I mean really, really gets into the heads, of Alyosha, Ivan, and Dmitri. Three different characters with different issues, and he presents not their narcissistic struggle, but their interactions with the world and with each other in facing these struggles.

Of course, a postmodern writer like John Fowles openly admits, within his novels, that he is incapable of penetrating the souls of his characters (see chapter 13 of The French Lieutenant’s Woman).

But I see a fair amount of good writers really writing these solipsistic stories of an individual (at the very least, narcissistic). Often they show real skill in the writing. But I'm not sure it shows a great deal of insight, since, as I said, any reflective individual knows of the solipsistic emotional, spiritual, intellectual, psychological struggle. A true genius penetrates outside of that and into others.

Bakhtin also notes that a dialogical, polyphonic novel exists over space rather than time. It contrasts to Hegelian evolution in that it does not monologically develop an idea, even dialectically—contradictory ideas exist in different consciousnesses without being resolved. Some modernists, I think, picked up on Dostoevsky’s dialogism and wrote what could be called polyphonic works of literature. In Faulkner’s works, for example, we see multiple voices, and multiple ideas, coexisting, and I don’t think Faulkner tries to resolve these voices monologically.

But I’m really simplifying Bakhtin here, and perhaps bastardizing him, and most surely making his ideas confusing, so perhaps you should just read Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, or at least the first chapter, “Dostoevsky’s Polyphonic Novel and Its Treatment in Critical Literature.”

Other works I’m thinking about in light of Bakhtin’s theories:

Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater
When reading this novel, I thought it suffered from a lack of an objective correlative; Sabbath’s inability to cope with loss was not matched with any loss in his life that is atypical of human existence. Another problem is the narcissism. The book doesn’t attempt to penetrate anything other than one man’s totally narcissistic problems. Perhaps this novel is the epitome of the anti-Dostoevskian novel.

Sartre’s The Age of Reason
On the one hand, this is a dialogical novel—it’s a book of ideas, and ideas are held by different consciousnesses, and they seem to coexist and interact. On the other hand, it’s a dialectically evolving monological novel. Sartre the existentialist guides the novel, and for the most part it conforms to his individual worldview. He doesn’t, as Dostoevsky, allow his ideas/consciousnesses to coexist without resolution; he uses these different ideas/consciousnesses to develop his monological ideas.