Stupid Summer Project: The Puerto Rican Day

George: Look at me! I am man! I am you!

Jerry: I'm glad I cut you off, because black Saab rules! So long, jackass!

Kramer: Jerry, that's in Sweden.

Comment: So many of these episodes are familiar--I laugh, but I laugh at the joy I already know. But I haven't seen this episode since it first aired in 1998. I remembered the plot, but I didn't remember the dialogue or many of the jokes. It's almost--but not quite--like seeing a new episode. Perhaps I should wait ten years to watch it again.

Reflections on Summer

Going into the summer, I had rather high hopes for how much reading I would do. Now as summer comes to a close, I feel rather like William Wordsworth in The Prelude:

"Not that I slighted books,--that were to lack
All sense,--but other passions in me ruled,
Passions more fervent, making me less prompt
To in-door study than was wise or well."

If forced to play the partisan...

There is much I can say, both good and bad, about John Gardner's On Moral Fiction, but I'll sum it up with this: I want art to be what Gardner wants it to be, and I want to read the sort of book Gardner wants to read.

Continuing away...

I'm currently reading John Gardner's On Moral Fiction, with an odd result: I don't think I can quite view Jean-Paul Sartre the same. Put another way, I can't quite take Sartre so seriously. Gardner's critiques of Sartre are incisive, and I think they'll stick with me in further considerations of Sartre's ideas.

Another step toward being a former existentialist.

Science and Literature

I found this passage of John Gardner's On Moral Fiction rather interesting:

"Good science normally makes hypotheses based on observation or probability; art deals, at its best, with what has never been observed, or observed only peripherally--darts from what is to what might have been--asking with total interest and sobriety such questions as 'What if apple trees could talk?' or 'What if the haughty old woman next door should fall in love with Mr. Powers, our mailman?' The artists' imagination, or the world it builds, is the laboratory of the unexperienced, both the heroic and the unspeakable."

Perhaps this articulates my feeling at the suggestion that literary criticism needs to incorporate more science. I say, thanks but no thanks. The methods science uses to make sense of our universe, and the conclusions it reaches, while valid and important, are simply not the same as the methods and conclusions of literature, which are also valid and important.

Rereading "The French Lieutenant's Woman"

Something new stands out for me in my rereading of John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman. In the metafiction of the novel, Fowles may seem to explore the limitations of the omnipotent narrator. But that is hardly the case: Fowles is in fact asserting, reclaiming, and celebrating the omnipotent power of the author. To Fowles, some 20th century theorists and artists were denying the place or significance of the author to the work of literature. The French Lieutenant's Woman is written in the third person, and Fowles has injected himself into the text as fully as one can imagine a third person narrator possibly could. There are the obvious points: the 13th chapter when Fowles says he doesn't know what Sarah is thinking, the inauthentic dream ending in which Fowles parodies the ending of a novel, later in the book when he first enters the scene as a physical character, in the contrived double-ending, in the final philosophical commentary that concludes the novel. But even beyond those brilliant and enjoyable bits of metafiction, Fowles' voice powerfully controls the text. He injects his own comments and opinions, frequently compares the 1860s to his own era, talks about literature and the conventions of fiction, and seems to stop to chat with the reader while telling the story. Fowles critically examines Victorian England with the 20th century reader, but he's also speaking to the reader a bit like a teacher (or preacher).

The book is a rich and expansive exploration of Victorian England (the ideas, the culture, and the material conditions), and the conventions of the Victorian novel. It is also very, very funny. Fowles' tone is often hilarious, as he comments on characters, conventions, and eras. And there are many other interesting things about the book (the way Fowles forces readers to consider the ways they read or fictionalize, the theme of existential freedom). But in all that and above all that, in The French Lieutenant's Woman Fowles is showing the enduring significance and importance of the omnipotent author.

Stupid Summer Project: The Maid

George: Once she pinched my ass, but I don't know what that was.

Kramer: I'm on the corner of 1st and 1st. How can the same street intersect itself? I must be at the nexus of the universe!

Comment: This is really a dark episode. The maid plot line parallels the exploitative nature of prostitution, and Elaine is on the phone with a boy that doesn't know his grandma is dead ("Do you hate me because of my lazy eye?"), Elaine speculates whether she could get away with killing the phone guy, Jerry asks George if he's giving the suicide talk or the nickname talk, Elaine complains about how horrible it must be to havea real family. It just goes on--you can start to forget that you're watching a really cynical sitcom.

There are some great facial expressions and line deliveries in this episode, and I really love Kruger. What would happen if Mr. Kruger, David Brent, and Michael Scott all got together? Thse are the sort of questions that keep me up at night.

Stupid Summer Project: The Frogger

Jerry: You sure have a lot of friends. How come I never see any of these people?
Kramer: They want to know why they never see you.

Jerry: Well I'm sorry. I'm not Brad. I'm me! Nice to meet you!

Comment: In some ways this episode is typical of the series: Jerry dates a woman with an annoying social and conversational habit (finishing his sentences) and Elaine complains about the "forced socialization" of cake parties at work. But it's also typical of the later Seinfeld seasons, in that the plotlines just get too contrived and corny (like George playing frogger with the game).

Pederman calls somebody a "glorious tit-willow." What is the hell is that?

Fowles and Hawthorne

(I wouldn't read this post if you haven't read The French Lieutenant's Woman, but would like to).

It is by chance that I am re-reading John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman just after reading Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, but I can't help linking the two. The 19th century novelist looks back on the repressive 17th century Puritans, his heroine not quite modern but ahead of and outsider her time and society. The 20th century novelist looks back on the repressive 19th century Victorians, his heroine not quite modern but ahead of and outsider her time and society.

But as both are period novels of a sort, the successive readings are helping me to further explore how Fowles innovates his narrative. In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne often comments on those Puritans, and his introduction makes clear he is examining it from a later perspective. In The French Lieutenant's Woman, Fowles brings the authorial "I" to a much fuller reality than Hawthorne would. But even before he injects himself in the 13th chapter, or writes himself into the book as a physical character, he is playing on the period novel convention of commentary. He frequently injects himself to comment on the Victorian age, but with much more explicit comparisions between that and his own age. Often in his injections, he warns the contemporary reader not to judge the Victorians too harshly, comparing the zeitgeist of the 1860s and 1960s, with some incisive commentary of his (our) own age. And though sometimes Fowles says "you" to the reader, he often uses "we," "our," "us:" he is quite explicitly a contemporary writer looking at the Victiorian period with a contemporary audience.

So reading Hawthorne shows me that Fowles' early intrusions in The French Lieutenant Woman, while more explicit, forceful, and deep, are not necessary new to the novel. Such intrusions do, however, prepare the reader for what is coming in chapter 13--that shouldn't come as a complete punch to the head. Though I'm not sure anything can quite prepare a reader for Fowles' later metafictional flourishes. His physical entry into the text of the novel is inspired, and his two endings take the concept of an ambiguous ending into its most explicit--and artificial--exploration yet.

I also can't help feeling a bit of irony. While Fowles is rather more sympathetic to the Victorians than Hawthorne is to the Puritans, it is amusing that while a 20th century English writer looks back to 19th century England for a repressive, rigid social ethos, a writer from that same century looks back further to find his epitome of the restrictive, judgmental society. The concept of "duty" really besots both Hawthorne's vision of 17th century Puritans and Fowles' vision of 19th century Victorians. Without feeling any affections for either the Puritans or the Victorians, I can't help but wonder whether either group was really quite as bad as the two authors present them.

Hawthorne recognized just how influential and formative the Puritans were on America. Fowles recognized just how influential and formative the Victorians were on England, and the world (The French Lieutenant's Woman is in some ways about Darwin, about how the great scientific discoveries of the Victorian period affected the Victorians, and how such discoveries have formed us). Both writers recognize an era and a people that built their (our) world--but both writers recognized culture, an attitude, an order, that needed to be shattered.

John Fowles suggests realism and metafiction respond to the same problem

From "Foreword to the Poems":

"This uneasy consciousness of lying is why in the great majority of novels the novelist apes reality so assiduously; and it is why giving the game away--making the lie, the fictitiousness of the process, explicit in the text--has become such a feature of the contemporary novel. Committed to invention, to people who never existed, to events that never happened, the novelist want either to sound 'true' or to come clean."

In many of his writings and interviews, Fowles has referred to fiction as a "game," one played between the author and reader. I think here he's suggesting two ways the author can play the game: either pretend as hard as you can that you're not playing a game, or invite the reader in on the game with you. Fowles, of course, chooses the latter. And that's something I've always appreciated about Fowles' novels. He's aware that he's playing games, but he's not trying to pull one over on the reader, treating the reader like a dupe. In The French Lieutenant's Woman, the author often speaks to the contemporary reader as a partner: his intrusions don't read as if the author and reader are facing each other, but as if author and reader are standing together facing the same direction. In both The French Lieutenant's Woman and The Magus, Fowles practically insists that the reader consider his or her reading experience, in a way that I would call "meta-reading."

Having Multiple Editions

I've been planning on trying to get rid of some books to clear out space. My wife and I have multiple copies of several works, and I figured I would just sell those books we have copies of. Anything else, my wife, our child (or future children), or I may wish to read or re-read, so we should keep those.

But I'm finding that even when I have two or more editions of a particular work, there are reasons for me to keep both. If I have multiple translations of a work, I want to keep each different translation ( I now own three different translations of Crime and Punishment, and frankly, I don't want to choose which one to rid myself of). Sometimes a copy I might otherwise rid myself of has an introduction or something to make me keep it (Vincent Price wrote an introduction to one of my copies of Poe's short stories). Often I have one book I've marked up while reading, and another copy that is not marked up (I tend to mark up books, my wife doesn't). There's good reason to keep both editions--I may wish to find underlined passages at some point, but somebody in the household may also wish to read the book without any annotations (indeed, when I re-read Paradise Lost, I used a fresh edition so I wouldn't come across my notes from several years ago. I also bought a fresh edition of The Magus for future re-reading). And too often, there is some silly reason why I want to have two editions of a book.

A chance to really clear out some space has left me with a very small pile of books to sell, and all sorts of doubles that I just can't bear to part with.

Fowles on the novel's multiple uses

I try to avoid narrow, limiting definitions of what literature is, what it can be used for, and how one ought to approach it, for two clear reasons. First, approaching literature is primarily an individual activity, and the great diversity of humanity must call for multiple subjective approaches to literature. And second, there are so many potentials for literature, it seems harmful to try and limit those uses.

I found this passage from John Fowles' "Notes on an Unfinished Novel" particularly articulate on my thoughts:

"[Alain Robbe-Grillet's] key question: Why bother to write in a form whose great masters cannot be surpassed? The fallacy of one of his conclusions--that we must discover a new form to write in if the novel is to survive--is obvious. It reduces the purpose of the novel to the discovery of new forms, whereas its other purposes--to entertain, to satirize, to describe new sensibilities, to record life, to improve life, and so on--are clearly just as viable and important."

Fowles was an innovative novelist with a strong grip on manipulating form, particularly in The French Lieutenant's Woman. But it doesn't appear that Fowles considers innovation of form primary to his art (he suggests later in the same essay that his novels are "based on more or less disguised existentialist premises"). Indeed, there are purposes to the novel beyond innovating the form of the novel, and Fowles only describes a few.