• Category Archives *THE LAUREATES*
  • Buck, Pearl S. | Walcott, Derek | Elytis, Odysseus | Garcia Marquez, Gabriel | Naipaul, V. S. | Milosz, Czeslaw | Sholokhov, Mikhail | Morrison, Toni | Golding, William | Tomas Tranströmer | Mahfouz, Naguib | Brodsky, Joseph | Symborska, Wislawa | White, Patrick | Mo Yan | Müller, Herta | Le Clézio, J. M. G. | Mistral, Gabriela | Hemingway, Ernest | Simon, Claude | Gide, André | Mauriac, Francois | Heaney, Seamus | Munro, Alice | Lessing, Doris | Paz, Octavio | Gordimer, Nadine | Modiano, Patrick | Lagerkvist, Pär | Bellow, Saul | Pirandello, Luigi | Alexievich, Svetlana

  • Herta Müller, J.M.G. Le Clézio, and Me – or: The Melancholy Resistance of Autographs to Life

    Posted on by David

    I.

    I’ve never chased autographs. Not on principle; simply, I’ve never put myself in the path of anyone whose signature might carry for me a valence. To do so requires a quality of ego which, for all my petty narcissisms, I evidently lack. I love the story of the man who followed William Golding into a men’s room in Stockholm to requested his autograph. To have the…frame of mind to make such an approach – what I wouldn’t give.

    A few authors’s penmanship samples have dropped into my collection. As an eight-year-old I stood in line, all day it seemed, at the May D&F store in downtown Denver to have Theodor Seuss Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, sign my copy of The Lorax. I have no idea where this book is now. Two more autographs came my way just out of college, while working in a bookstore at Stapleton International Airport: I recognized Erica Jong the moment she walked in off the concourse. We had just sold out of The Devil At Large, her then recently published biography of Henry Miller, but we did have one copy of Every Woman’s Blues, which I made haste to put by the cash register before she approached. “Oh,” she said, “You have my book.” Whereupon she signed it – “Best wishes to David and Sam, Erica Jong”, across the title page such that the eye need never alight on the actual title – and, with my employee’s discount, I bought it. Annie Proulx was far less prolix when she signed The Shipping News – “E. A. Proulx”, like the title’s bastard sibling wavering fiercely in the surrounding glare of page.

    Until last year, this comprised my entire collection of autographed books. Then my friend, Viet Dinh, who teaches writing at the University of Delaware, came into town with a copy, signed especially for me, of Twilight of the Superheroes, by the American master of the short story, Deborah Eisenberg.

    Except for the Dr. Seuss, which required mastering my child’s legs and bladder, I did nothing for any of these.

     

    II.

    Death is an ass, even when it doesn’t quite strike. For nearly a month it was forever darting out of sight whenever one of us entered Sam ‘s hospital room. It wasn’t fooling anyone, we all knew it was there. For form’s sake, as with someone else’s rotten child, we played along, talked to Sam, held his hand through his deliriums, fed him ice chips, celebrated the ice chips, watched a slightly soured strength creep back into his etched limbs. Did you see a little snot-nose slip in? Who, me? No. Did you?

    Death is a despot, exacting from you all your thoughts, more than you have to survive on yourself.

     

    III.

    Viet is a gifted writer. Find a copy of the 2009 PEN/O’Henry Award Stories and read “Substitutes”, in which his narrator recalls childhood in Vietnam, and the string of substitute teachers hired to teach his class, each of whom mysteriously failed one day to show up. It is the kind of story that sneaks up on you, then stays. Keep your eye out for his first novel, about the experiences and relations among disaster relief workers. He’s not shared with me the title, but last we spoke, he was on the prowl for a publisher.

    Viet chases autographs. Sometimes literally. At a writers conference in Washington D.C., he pursued Orhan Pamuk the length of the Washington Mall to procure the great man’s scrawl. I could hardly speak to him after he told me this, so envious was I. The author of (and, wonderfully, the builder of) The Museum of Innocence is one of my foremost author crushes. Viet was the first to tell me about László Krasznahorkai, the great Hungarian novelist, whose Nobel Prize is, at the moment, rising in The Swedish Academy’s warming oven, and whose The Melancholy of Resistance is currently giving me giddy fits of amazement. Viet met him, which will mean he has at least one example of his handwriting on something.

    This summer, he presented me with, not one, but two remarkable gifts which left me rather at a loss for words. Regular readers of my posts will no doubt find this hard to believe. Nonetheless, when he handed me a signed copy of Herta Müller’s Nadirs I was helpless to arrive at a proper response. Into my hands he had placed an object which had been held in the hands of a Nobel Prize winner. What, really, does one say?

    “I haven’t read her yet,” I ventured. “Do you like her?” Such a weak question. “Oh yes,” he said. “She’s excellent. I just read her new book, The Hunger Angel. Wonderful.”

    I turned this somehow mysterious object over and over in my hands, as if the existence of the black fountain pen ink on the title page made it less understandable as an actual book, trying to take in alternately the austere blue university-press-style cover and the author’s photograph on the back, which shows an apparently humorless woman whose youthful appearance is belied by a few lines discernible around her large, steady eyes, hair close-cropped in a manor associated with American lesbians of a past decade, the shoulders and high collar of a dark and probably stylish coat, small dangling earrings apparently oblivious of their role as ornament, heightening rather than allaying the desolation of the cheekbones. So unlike a Nobel laureate. Which begs the question, just what is a Nobel laureate like? I tried to picture her holding the pen with which she’d signed this book. My book. “She looks different now,” Viet said. “She’s older. Her hair is straight, framing her face. She’s very severe, which makes me love her all the more.” His eyes danced; I could see him seeing her. And I knew that, in at least one sense of the word, he meant what he said – about loving her.

    And what I really found myself wanting, or believed I wanted in that moment, and had not the moment before, and which I could not have said, which is why I could, finally, say so little, was Herta Müller herself.

     

    IV.

    There is a compelling illusion that attends an autograph, the illusion that you are actually, magically, connected to the person whose signature you’ve come to possess. And being so connected means somehow touching that person’s importance. And the thing about importance is the sense of permanence it holds, it’s promise of immortality. An autograph is a fetish to wield, like all fetishes, against death.

     

    V.

    Viet likes a tea shop on 15th and Platte called “House of Commons”, and it was there, over cucumber sandwiches and Darjeeling, that he presented me with his second gift, The Round & Other Cold Hard Facts, by J. M. G. Le Clézio. The Müller had primed me and, like a gouche hausfrau checking the hallmark on a plate, I surreptitiously glanced at the the title page. Shouldn’t it have been enough that he he had brought me the book? The giving and receiving of books is one of the primary forms of social commerce among my friends, and here was an especially thoughtful offering, knowing as he does that I keep this blog. But something in my psychical basement had been stirred from recumbence, a need, bleached and crying, which believed its relief could be achieved by a nod from a notion of greatness. An autograph is not a Chartres, but in the moment, if prepared for, it can feel, if not like something transcendent itself, then a gratifying brush with something that is. An autograph invites you to forget that it’s medium is friable. Ink and paper, when it comes down to it, won’t outlast much. How else could the Dead Sea scrolls so astonish? It is quite possible, however, that it will outlast you.

    My friend Nathan, who knows about books as objects, guessed that a Nobel laureate’s autograph in a fourteen dollar paperback could jump the price to sixty or seventy dollars. “Enough of these, and I could move to Mallorca?”

    I looked across the table at Viet, trying to ascertain whether he had caught me peeking. While he spread lemon curd on his scone, I opened the book outright. There it was. This time in blue ballpoint and friendlier for it: “pour David/ —Le Clézio/ 2012” Look. He even knew my name.

     

    VI.

    When Herta Müller won the Nobel Prize in 2009, Sam’s response was at first dismissive. “Another dour Eastern European.” But his opinion changed, and decisively, when he read The Appointment. He proceeded to buy all of her books then in translation (save Nadirs). It was different with Le Clézio. His mild curiosity dissipated upon reading the short story the New Yorker ran in conjunction with the Nobel announcement. He found it thoroughly dreary and has not been able to muster any interest in him since.

    A few recent Nobel laureates are close to his heart. Wislawa Szymborska is a nearly religious figure for him. Imre Kertesz’s Kaddish for an Unborn Child moved him as deeply as any modern novel has. Towards the end of summer, as his health was closing in, he instinctively reached for Saramago, the great opener; he got only a little past the strange, luminous passage of the annunciation in The Gospel According To Jesus Christ before the crisis took root, and his life as usual. The book followed him to his various rooms on ever-ascending floors of St. Joseph’s, waited for him on the table behind the metal tree hung with tubes for steroids, saline, and nutrients, waited as his mind, body, and spirit guttered.

    He’s reading again, for short spans. He listens to music in earnest. His own especially, and Debussy’s. Soon, perhaps, he’ll have the reserves to see where the annunciation leads.

     

    VII.

    Sam won’t be home for Thanksgiving this year. I think when he does return I’ll ask him to write his name. Perhaps on the back of an envelope. I’ve always loved his handwriting, impossible to read but beautiful, like a hybrid of Korean and Arabic. I’ll ask him to write his name, maybe three times, on whatever comes to hand, an old receipt, the back cover of the Saramago, a paper sack we use for recycling. I’ll ask him to write his name no more than ten times, on the walls maybe, and the dashboard of the car. Just ten times a day. The side of the house could use the lift, and the trees on the block. It won’t be much to ask, really, every day, for the next year or two. Or however long it takes.


    Le Clézio, J. M. G. Müller, Herta 📎and tagged

  • Mo Yan: China’s Chronicaler and Critic wins the 2012 Nobel Prize

    Posted on by David

     

    “If I were to choose a Nobel Laureate, it would be Mo Yan.”

    – Kenzaburo Oe, winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize

     

    Mo Yan, winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature

    As I stood in the morning sun on that first day of the year, I kept digging in my hooves to keep from falling over. Then I took my first step as a donkey, thus beginning an unfamiliar, taxing, humiliating journey. Another step; I wobbled, and the skin on my belly tightened. I saw a great big sun, a beautiful blue sky in which white doves flew. I watched Lan Lian help Yingchun back into the house, and I saw two children, a boy and a girl, both in new jackets, with cloth tiger-head shoes on their feet and rabbit-fur caps on their heads, come running in though the gate. Stepping over the door lintel was not easy for such short legs. They looked to be three or four years old. They called Lan Lian Daddy and Yingchun Mommy. Hee-haw, hee-haw— I did not have to be told that they were my children, the boy named Jinlong and the girl called Baofeng. My children, you cannot know how your daddy misses you! Your daddy had high hopes for you, expecting you to honor your ancestors as a dragon and a phoenix, but now you have become someone else’s children, and your daddy has been changed into a donkey. My heart was breaking, my head was spinning, it was all a blur, I couldn’t keep my legs straight…I fell over. I don’t want to be a donkey, I want my original body back, I want to be Ximen Nao again, and get even with you people! At the very moment I fell, the female donkey that had given birth to me crashed to the ground like a toppled wall.

    She was dead, her legs stiff as clubs, her unseeing eyes still open, as if she had died tormented by all sorts of injustices. Maybe so, but it didn’t bother me, since I was only using her body to make my entrance. It was all a plot by Lord Yama, either that or an unfortunate error. I hadn’t drunk an ounce of her milk; the very sight of those teats poking out between her legs made me sick.

    – from Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out


    2012 Nobel Prize for Literature Chinese language laureates Mo Yan 📎and tagged

  • THE TREE OF MAN: Patrick White Comes to Grips with a God of Spit and Mud

    Posted on by David

    I.  THE BOOK: GOD APPEARS IN A GOB OF SPITTLE

    It is hardly a spoiler to say that on page 508 of Patrick White’s novel The Tree of Man Stan Parker dies. One gathers from the opening pages, in which we find the young Stan Parker establishing himself as a pin-point of humanity in the vast Australian bush, that this is going to be “that kind of a book”. One could even suspect it from the title itself, proclaiming, as it does, the novel’s encompassing intentions with perilously grand echoes: The Descent of Man, The Tree of Life, The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, Man’s Fate, Man’s Hope, The World Tree, The Rise of Man, The Fall, etc.. No question that we are going to be reading through the full gamut, life, death, and all the rest. By the time we turn the last pages, having lived with  Stan Parker, his wife, Amy, and their children, Ray and Thelma, through fire, flood, griefs, infidelity, failures and quiet triumphs, and, yes, Stan’s death, that potentially burdensome title, we find, has long since shed all grandiosity, and become merely apt.

    Stan Parker has been called Patrick White’s “first good man”. David Marr, White’s biographer, records his struggles to create him: “The greatest technical difficulty White faced, one which drove him to rages and left him sitting, at times ‘three days over just one sentence’ was the challenge of making goodness live and breathe on the page. ‘I’m not a good person,’ White often confessed to his friends. ‘But I know goodness.'” Stan Parker is stubborn and a bit of a fatalist, like White himself. He is practical, strong of body, taciturn, with a great, uncharted continent of poetry lost somewhere inside of him. This subterranean spiritual thirst sends out signal flares in fragile moments, as when he takes Ray, with whom he has spent the years leading up to the boy’s puppy-killing adolescence inadvertently constructing a great edifice of relational failure, into the bush, in hopes that the vast, open distances will do for his son what it always does for him.

    Stan intuits God, without ever naming God, in the elements. On a hot night, after Amy, has gone to bed, he remains outside, waiting for a storm to break. When it does, he is, at first, exultant.

    But as the storm increased, his flesh had doubts, and he began to experience humility. The lightning, which could have struck open basalt, had, it seemed, the power to open souls. It was obvious in the yellow flash that something like this had happened, the flesh had slipped from his bones, and the light was shining in his cavernous skull.

    Yet, for all the intimations, God remains elusive. Only at the end, minutes before his death, does Stan receive his revelation. He is sitting in a chair, old and failing, amidst the trees in the yard outside his home, where he is accosted by an earnest young man aflame with the Gospel. God, the young man believes, has saved him from a life of women and alcohol. Such conversions crave ratification through the conversions of others, and Stan Parker has been elected. Which means that this most private moment at which his life has, at last, arrived, is threatened by farce. During this encounter, Stan relieves himself of phlegm:

    Then the old man, who had been cornered long enough, saw, through perversity perhaps, but with his own eyes. He was illuminated.

    He pointed with his stick at the gob of spittle.

    “That is God,” he said.

    As it lay glittering intensely and personally on the ground.

    Stan is not being impertinent. He is responding to a great unveiling. The bewildered young man departs, leaving behind some tracts which he hopes will finish the job he, and of course the Holy Spirit, have begun, while Stan continues to stare at the spittle. Only now, a “jewel”.

    A great tenderness of understanding rose in his chest. Even the most obscure, the most sickening incidents of his life were made clear. In that light. How long will they leave me like this, he wondered, in peace and understanding.

    The “gob of spittle” passage is famous in Australian literature. It is one of the very few overtly religious moments in what is a deeply religious novel. White’s God, when finally called forth, is, as we see, viscous. What’s more, this God has emerged from Stan himself. Quite literally. In all of White’s work, and in this book in particular, it is only when his characters cease resisting their messy, humbling, secreting bodies, and the often ramshackle lives through which those bodies stumble, that they encounter what they had always believed lay beyond themselves. What they encounter is no less transcendent for this, no less luminous. It is a difficult truth. But then, Patrick White is known as a “difficult” writer. Difficult, too, because he uses a richly allusive, subtly symbolic language to coax his reader into a parallel awareness. Sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase, White nudges his reader awake, quietly drawing attention to  something just off the page, or behind it. Listen to how White evokes Stan, on that last afternoon, sitting:

    That afternoon the old man’s chair had been put on the grass at the back, which was quite dead-looking from the touch of winter. Out there at the back, the grass, you could hardly call it a lawn, had formed a circle in the shrubs and trees which the old woman had not so much planted as stuck in during her lifetime. There was little of design in the garden originally, though one had formed out of the wilderness. It was perfectly obvious that the man was seated at the heart of it, and from this heart the trees radiated, with grave movements of life, and beyond them the sweep of a vegetable garden, which had gone to weed during the months of the man’s illness, presented the austere skeletons of cabbages and the wands of onion seed. All was circumference to the centre, and beyond that the worlds of other circles, whether crescent of purple villas or the bare patches of earth, on which rabbits sat and observed some abstract spectacle for minutes on end, in a paddock not yet built upon. The last circle but one was the cold and golden bowl of winter, enclosing all that was visible and material, and at which the man would blink from time to time, out of his watery eyes, unequal to the effort of realizing he was the centre of it.

    I quote at length because White does a better job than I could ever do of summation. We have come to know this rangy garden, these trees. By drawing attention, at the novel’s end, to its inception as a kind of horticultural flailing, and its subsequent emergent design, White invites us to consider at least two layers of meaning beyond the the physical. First, there is the life of this couple, more like the garden described than the garden itself. Notice that here Amy is named “the old woman”. Throughout the book, at intervals, Stan and Amy are stripped of their given names and called simply, “the man”, “the woman”, rendering them at once mythic and fragile. We’ve met them before, most memorably in The Book of Genesis. We watch these two ordinary, unformed, people, grope their way toward each other, generally missing each other by a mile. We watch as they try, and fail, to be the parents their children need. We watch Amy become possessive, while Stan grows ever more distant. We watch their erotic lives travel along incompatible arcs of meaning. The flood they survive and the fire they survive, leave scars on their souls far more lasting than those left on the land on which they survive. And that land, on which they were the first to settle, will not long bear up under the ugly banality of urban encroachment. Along the way they learn that death is always a violence, regardless of its means, and that death can mean something quite other than the demise of the body. As they approach the end of their great meander, not far in miles, but metaphysically epic, they find they have arrived at a life. Its been going on all along, of course. They can look across it now, find its design, and a kind of undeclared grace. Through their story, White draws our attention to a process, the mystery of creation itself. What wasn’t, now is, simply for something having been “stuck in” along the way. It is as if, at the end of the novel, we are witnesses to its birth.

    And how about all those circles. This passage’s most obvious antecedent is the famous final paragraph of The Dead, in which Joyce lifts his lens to ever more encompassing circles of snowfall. In White’s homage, Stan sits at the heart of a veritable mandala: a circle of shrubs and trees first, then the vegetable garden, then the paddocks, and, the last but one, the “cold and golden bowl of winter.” Like a Hasid, White refuses to name the final circle. And yet, it is into this circle that all is, finally, subsumed.

     

    II.  THE BACKGROUND: THE REPATRIATED PATRICK WHITE LANDS ON HIS BEHIND

    White might never have written The Tree of Man. The poor reception, in Australia, of his previous novel, the brilliant The Aunt’s Story, had all but disposed him never to write again. But then, Australia itself began to encroach upon his always negligible peace of mind. In his autobiographical essay, “The Prodigal Son”, he writes about the inception of The Tree of Man:

    Then, suddenly, I began to grow discontented. Perhaps, in spite of Australian critics, writing novels was the only thing I could do with any degree of success; even my half-failures were some justification of an otherwise meaningless life. Returning sentimentally to a country I had left in my youth, what had I really found: Was there anything to prevent me packing my bag and leaving…? Bitterly I had to admit, no. In all directions stretched the Great Australian Emptiness, in which the mind is the least of possessions, in which the rich man is the important man, in which the schoolmaster and the journalist rule what intellectual roost there is, in which beautiful youths and girls stare at life through blind blue eyes, in which human teeth fall like autumn leaves, the buttocks of cars grow hourly glassier, food means cake and steak, muscles prevail, and the march of material ugliness does not raise a quiver from the average nerves.

    It was the exaltation of the ‘average’ that made me panic most, and in this frame of mind, in spite of myself, I began to conceive another novel. Because the void I had to fill was immense, I wanted to try to suggest in this book every possible aspect of life, through the lives of an ordinary man and woman. But at the same time I wanted to discover the extraordinary behind the ordinary, the mystery and the poetry which alone could make bearable the lives of such people, and incidentally, my own life since my return.

    This discontent, and the urgency to ameliorate it through writing, had a background which he did not reveal until late in his life, when age had, if anything, sharpened his powers of ruthless self-observation. In his memoir, Flaws in the Glass, he recounts a  Damascene moment which, like Stan’s final transfiguration, was at once intensely personal and catalyzed by farce. Actually, in White’s case, slapstick: White and his partner, Manoly Lascaris, were raising Schnauzers on a six-acre farm on the outskirts of Sydney. He hadn’t written anything for nearly seven years, and had grown used to it. A few days before Christmas 1951, a frail but kicking faith broke through while feeding the dogs in a downpour…

    During what seemed like months of rain I was carrying a trayload of food to a wormy litter of pups down at the kennels when I slipped and fell on my back, dog dishes shooting in all directions. I lay where I had fallen, half-blinded by rain, under a pale sky, cursing through watery lips a god in whom I did not believe. I began laughing finally, at my own helplessness and hopelessness, in the mud and the stench from my filthy old oilskin.

    It was the turning point. My disbelief appeared as farcical as my fall. At that moment I was truly humbled.

    …and from this faith, the need to carve out a place for it in a world that seemed at odds with it. From the opening sentences of The Tree of Man, we hear him wrestling to draw forth “the extraordinary behind the ordinary”, what Annie Dillard calls “Holy the Firm”, a mystical substance on which the physical world is made, but which is, itself, in touch with God. On every page you can hear White explaining to himself that Advent-season ass-plant in the mud, smeared with what he could no longer resist.

    Worse things, by far, have taken root in the mud. This is a very great book. I hope you read it.

     

    III.  AN INTERVIEW WITH WHITE’S BIOGRAPHER, DAVID MARR: “THE LIFE AND FAITH OF PATRICK WHITE”

     


    English language laureates Nobel Prize for Literature Novelists Novels White, Patrick 📎and tagged

  • Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Avatar of Eros, suffers dementia

    Posted on by David

    Just as, inevitably, the scent of bitter almonds always reminded Dr. Juvenal Urbino of the fate of unrequited love, so there is a cadence of sentence, that always reminds me, in my evil hours, of what I love. Extravagant, poised, penetrating sentences. Sentences which, contrary to contemporary writerly morality, draw my attention to themselves. In the way Montserrat Caballé’s voice draws me into its own sound as she sings “Costa diva”, every tremulous note in every phrase extending beyond mortal breath. I hear it and requital becomes moot; I love again. That Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote more, and more consistently, such sentences than most twelve other writers combined, makes him one of Love’s great exponents. An avatar of Eros. Imagine signing that on your taxes.

    So that when, early this month I got a text from my friend Nathan, saying that Jaime Garcia Marquez had made a public announcement that his older brother, Gabriel, now 85, was suffering from dementia and, in all likelihood, would not be writing any more, I felt a moment of disorientation. Remember, as a child, emerging from the waking dream of your life to discover that your parents were not where you had, you thought, left them? You felt the earth roll. Without realizing it, I had come, in some way, to rely on Don Gabriel being on the rolling earth, somewhere, breathing air continuous with the air I breath, somewhere working, writing those reminders to love I so regularly require.

    Nathan, a slender man in his early thirties, quick of wit and large of heart, is one of the hidden treasures of the North Denver book scene. He works at West Side Books, one of those remodeled auto garages which belie their former incarnations less through architectural traces than through arcane profusion, book mold replacing axle grease and sparking metal in the nose, hopelessly overflowed shelves replacing hydraulic lifts. Nathan works among the books a bit like a grounds keeper tends a public garden, planting, weeding, mulching, watering, all the while  steadily reading his way, both in English and Spanish, into a formidable mastery of Latin American literature. His knowledge already encompasses wide swaths of the literary landscape out of sight to most of us who are not ourselves Latin American. His current obsession, for example, is the apparently great Argentine writer, Juan Jose Saer. Nathan’s desire, rather avaricious, for the horde of the mind is one of the things I love about him. No one better to have delivered the hard news about Gabo.

    The day before, he had texted me about the Argentine.

    “Who the effen wg sebald is Juan Jose Saer!?” I sent.

    His reply came a few minutes later: “A great Argentine writer whose works weren’t, apparently, exotic or magical enough for the North American publishers to market to our name-brand-hungry audiences when they started appearing in the late ’60s. Something like Cortázar meeting Faulkner from what I’ve read so far.”

    What he was referring too, I soon learned, was the germ of a backlash among younger Latin American writers against the literary esthetic known popularly as magic realism, of which Gabriel Garcia Marquez is the most famous exponent. In the mid 1990s, the germ sprouted verdantly and bloomed into a two-headed Godardian attack against the cultural hegemony of the major North American publishing houses: In Mexico it became known as “La generación del crack” (The Crack Generation), while elsewhere in Latin America, it became known, rather bitingly, as “McOndo”, a subversive conflation of McDonald’s with Macondo, the mythical setting of One Hundred Years of Solitude. The two movements differed ideologically, but agreed on a repudiation of Realismo mágico, conversely known as Macondismo. The authors of these movements believe that magic realism too easily reduces real life as lived by real Latin Americans to stereotype and kitch, and was not equal to the portrayal of the diverse, complex, and messy Latin American moment.

    Then, the announcement that Gabo suffers from dementia.

    I texted him: “Terrible news! He’s been a fixture for so long in my literary world. Actually, calling it my “literary world” sounds vaguely silly, and certainly reductive. Garcia Marquez, Annie Dillard, now Patrick White, all the others, they are my world, simply, as much as you are, and Sam, and Bach, and Rachmoninoff, and damned old Protestantism. When one of those fixtures prepares to move, so autonomously, out of the picture, it’s rattling. I’ll still have his books. All of him I ever had, really, or could have. But it has been a tacit reassurance knowing he’s around.”

    He texted me back: “I know what you mean. But… All types of madness were always just around the corner in all of his works. I’d still so love to have tea with him in his living room, whatever condition he’s in.”

    Me: “I wasn’t aware that he has been the object of some resentment among Latin American authors. I wonder if its the same species of resentment many Japanese directors held against Kurasawa.”

    Nathan: “All the Latin American talk against magic realism was never against him, just against publishers only wanting works that cheaply replicated that aspect of his style and stereotyped Latin American culture. McOndo tried to open doors for writers who had trouble publishing because their work wasn’t about country folk in sombreros feeding their burros which, incidentally, fart prognosticating ghosts, while the menace of a dictator is felt from afar. The realities of life in Latin American countries has changed a lot in the last fifty years, and those realities, and the strength of other Latin American literary traditions, and the distinctness of individual nations, are not well represented by works that pander to a market demand for magic realism. But Gabo himself, as far as I can tell, is universally venerated.”

    Me: “Thanks for the clarification. The perfidy of a consumer public and its lackeys faulting gifted artists for not being sufficiently someone else.”

    Nathan: “These writers are as good as it gets, but aside from possibly Bolaño, I don’t think any of them, at least that I’ve read, achieve Garcia Marquez’s grandeur. What royalty he truly is. So thankful for the many books he gave us!”

    The conversation continued, through text, and then over dinner at our house. Nathan suggested that a gifted Latin American writer trying to carve out a space in the shadow of Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a bit like a 19th century German composer working in a different vein from Wagner while Wagner was still living. Sam asserted that, while the point was taken, the analogy breaks down because of the Brahms/Wagner divide and how passionate and how evenly split the two factions were. And as we talked, the colloquy become ever less about its apparent subject. Even as we continued to lay before each other our offerings, what we knew about the books we’d read, the music we’d heard, the history we’d learned, in hopes of having them returned to us in such a way that we might ourselves understand them better, it became apparent that the real colloquy was on love. The love of these artists for their culture and craft. Our love for them, for the company they keep us. Our love for each other. Our love for our own lives, of all in ourselves we want affirmed. We’ve known all along, though we adore forgetting, that we live in a world in which a man with orange curls aching on his tormented head can walk with legally purchased weapons into a movie theater not a dozen miles from where we live, and try to appease the other demons by laying waste to the lives he finds there. We live in a world in which the political blather narrows to absurdity the native human capacity to look up and to look around. All that Nathan and I texted, all the three of us said over vegetarian food, all that Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote, and all that his dissenters hold true, Brahms, Wagner, the rest, all runs counter to this decay. It is the resistance we stage against the public dementia. Such resistance is, practically speaking, futile. Only, many years later, or tomorrow, when we face the firing squad – and we all will, one way or another – we will remember that distant afternoon, or the evening last week, when we took each other to discover, not ice, but our own loves, and through those loves, our lives.

    Gabo knew this. And I believe that, whatever lines of magical reality his mind now follows, he always will.

     

    Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows and the flapping of their wings  stirred up the stagnant time inside, and at dawn on Monday the city awoke out of its lethargy of centuries with the warm, soft breeze of a great man dead and rotting grandeur. Only then did we dare go in without attacking the crumbling walls of reinforced stone, as the more resolute and wished, and without using oxbows to knock the main door off its hinges, as others had proposed , because all that was needed was for someone to give a push and the great armored doors that had resisted the lombards of William Dampier during the building’s heroic days gave away.

    — The Autumn of the Patriarch, opening lines


    Garcia Marquez, Gabriel Novelists 📎and tagged

  • DARKNESS VISIBLE: William Golding’s Fiery Meditation

    Posted on by David

    A question for you: If a book’s opening pages amaze you, and its closing pages bring you near tears, have you read a great book? The need to pose the question at all is probably its own answer. Nevertheless, Darkness Visible, William Golding’s troubling and troublesome novel, had me hashing out this question long after closing the back cover.

    The title refers to Milton’s evocation of hell in Paradise Lost:

    A dungeon horrible, on all sides round
    As one great furnace flamed, yet from those flames
    No light, but rather darkness visible
    Served only to discover sights of woe,
    Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
    And rest can never dwell, hope never comes.
    (I. 61-67)

    And so, before we even open the book we have some idea of that into which we are about to be plunged. When Darkness Visible came out in 1979, Golding had not published a novel in twelve years, and you can tell. The pages are heavy with density of meaning. The writing is gorgeous, in places baroquely claused, allusive. Golding begins with hell on earth, a furnace – 1940 London during a German Blitz – out of which walks a flaming child. Listen to his description of the moment the child is spotted by the fire crew peering into the blaze left by a bomb:

    At the end of the street or where now, humanly speaking, the street was no longer part of the habitable world – at that point where the world had become an open stove – at a point where odd bits of brightness condensed to form a lamp-post still standing, a pillar box, some eccentrically shaped rubble – right there, where the flinty street was turned into light, something moved. (12)

    That phrase, “no longer part of the habitable world”, is large, and apt, to the passage and the novel, for clearly, after his twelve-year silence, Golding had come to wonder what part of the spiritually decimated post-WWII post-Vietnam world, whose only hopeful generation was being conquered by and divided between the guru and the radical, remained habitable, “humanly speaking.” To explore  this problem, he adopted the convention of the double, two characters opposed, the guru and the radical, who, though they never meet, set in motion a philosophical weather system.

    The first is Matty, the flaming child, whose stride out of the Blitz and onto the page loudly echos the most famous photographic image from the Vietnam War. Severely burned, he becomes, almost point by point, the “burning babe,” in Robert Southwell’s somewhat off-putting allegory of Christ.

    My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns,
    Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns;
    The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals,
    The metal in this furnace wrought are men’s defiled souls,
    For which, as now on fire I am to work them to their good,

    In the character of Matty the saccharin is, thankfully, neutralized by his daunting literalness, which makes him at once a holy fool and destructive element. His face makes visible his character, and the darkness therein: the left side has been burned away to a bald white scar while the right remains intact. After his rescue, Matty (Matthew Septimus Windrove, as he has been named, though no one uses the middle name or can ever quite get a handle on the last) is taken to the mythical town of Greenfield where he is put in a school for foundlings. There he meets  the homosexul pedophile, Sebastian Pedigree. Mr. Pedigree, to deter rumors about his practice of giving the most beautiful boys private “tutelage”, bumps one, his beloved Henderson, for Matty, whose grotesque appearance disgusts him, but, he hopes, will quash suspicion. Matty is only able to take this turn in his favor at face value, and so believes Pedigree to be his “one true friend”, and pretty Henderson to be essentially bad because fallen from grace. When Henderson falls even further, from the lean stairs outside Pedigree’s window to his death, Matty is implicated because his gym shoe is found near the body. Accident, suicide, murder – Golding is admirably ambiguous on this point. In any case, both Pedigree and Matty are removed from the school in disgrace, but not before Pedigree spits out a curse on Matty, calling him “That horrible, ugly boy!” and telling him “It’s all your fault!”.

    Matty spends the next years of his life attempting to atone for a sin he accepts without attempting to understand. He becomes a highly idiosyncratic Bible freak, expatriates to Australia where, among other things, he undergoes a “crucifarce” in which he is nearly emasculated by an Aborigine. He keeps a journal in which he records his conversations with two angelic presences, one dressed in red robes and hat, the other in blue, the first “more expensive” than the second, who tell him he is “very near the center of things.” He puts himself through a bizarrely convoluted cleansing ritual or baptism in a swamp near Darwin before repatriating to Greenfield, which he enters riding the bicycle equivalent of Monsieur Hulot’s automobile. He becomes a handyman at an exclusive boarding school, and emerges as a kind of prophet, at least in the minds of two rather mediocre men, a retired school teacher named Edwin Bell and a bookseller named Sim Goodchild.

    Matty’s double is Sophy, the more deadly of two beautiful sociopathic twins. Early in our acquaintance with this character, one of Golding’s vilist, we see her as a small girl, throwing stones at dabchicks as they swim down a river. With awful precocity, she ascertains the exact arch and moment of release which will cause her stone to kill one of them. To her, the mere possibility of doing so makes it an imperative.

    Then there was the longer pleasure, the achieved contemplation of the scrap of fluff turning gently as the stream bore it out of sight. (109)

    Well then. She awakens to sexuality early, through her preternatural awareness of her feelings for her emotionally distant father (the twins’s mother left early on), and his relationships with a series of “aunties”. It is almost a matter of course that her eroticism turns violent. She has her first orgasm only when, during sex, she stabs her thuggish boyfriend, Roland, deep in his shoulder. She can’t fathom his fuss. A radio broadcast on the subject of entropy articulates for her the sense that “the whole universe is winding down.” She believes the only viable course of action is to help it along. While her sister, Toni, heads out for a career in international terrorism, Sophy remains in Greenfield where she uses sex as a magnet to bind a handful of dupes to her like iron filings, and, with them, hatches a terrorist plot of her own. This involves kidnapping the son of an oil sheik from the school where Matty is employed. As the operation commences, she imagines murdering the boy in such graphic detail, and in such an orgiastic swoon, that I had to read the passage twice to satisfy myself that the murder didn’t actually happen. The bomb the terrorists use to incite the chaos brings Matty full circle; as the kidnapping gets underway, Matty, immolating, pursues the kidnappers and thwarts the operation.

    The accumulation of pages, up to this point, had left the book’s importance, and Golding’s urgency, thoroughly overdetermined, and I was looking forward to being done with it. So much so that I was entirely unprepared to find the novel’s beating heart, right there in the last four pages. Matty, as it turned out, was not finished with his task on Earth. Pedigree was still out there, all those years later, old, disintegrating, and still grievously in thrall to his addiction to “the sons of the morning”. We see him, lonely and broken, in the park with its public restroom where he habitually operated. He positions himself on a bench near the gravel playground. He has with him his lure of choice, a big many-colored ball. Just as he is preparing to use it Matty appears to him, transfigured. The tables are turned, and Pedigree finds himself the object of an unwanted advance. A tussle ensues, more awesome than any of the preceding conflagrations, for Pedigree’s soul. It is a paradox that here, at the end, when the story becomes most blatantly metaphysical, it also becomes most believable.

    Darkness Visible groans and buckles under converging pressures: Vertically, it staggers under its freight of symbolism. Horizontally, it is stretched by the tortured exigencies of plot.

    Take Matty, by comparison the more approachable of the two protagonists. He is an amalgam of metaphors. In addition to being Golding’s most transparent Christ, there is his name, Matthew Septimus. Looking up Matthew 7 in the Bible, one finds Christ’s warning against false prophets. Though he be Christ, he is one of these too. Then there is his face, split between the hideously wasted left and the healthy right. In the bicameral brain, the left hemisphere controls speech and sequential reason, the right is inarticulate but feels, has visions, making him a fool-proof fool to play against Sophy’s extreme rational materialist. A. S. Byatt, who loved the book, can’t get enough of this game:

    If the beautiful twins are the fallen Whore, Matty, piebald, mutilated, is the incarnate Second Coming, the figure in the fiery furnace in the Book of Daniel, the alchemical conjunction of opposites in one body and thus the Philosopher’s Stone – which was often pictured as a naked child and referred to as the orphan. He is also Horus, Horapollo, one-eyed God of Light, who was imagined as a naked boy with one bald side to his head and one “lock of youth” over his temple. Horus is also falcon-headed, and it is as a great golden bird that Matty finally appears to Mr. Pedigree at the end of the novel, flaming, feathered, golden, loving and terrible. That is why I also believe that the name which came into the hospital superintendent’s mind, the name no one speaks, was Windhover – Hopkins’s Falcon, the Christ whose blue-bleak embers fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion…. If Satan is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Golding has said that he believes man is “the local contradiction to this rule,” that in him “the cosmos is organising energy back to the sunlight level.” Matty is the contradictory burning bush that is not consumed.

    Matty, it seems, is a veritable kitchen sink of symbols an and allusions. He is everything, it seems, except an actual human being, about whom one can feel a shred of empathy. To me, he comes across as a Joan d’Arc cum Don Quioxte without the romance of either.

    In spite of a lot being said about her, including how her pointy breasts rise in her father’s presence, Sophy is even more reduced. With Matty we can at least feel pity. With Sophy, only revulsion. Everything about her pertains to her nihilism. She is more a type of sin than a person. Her belief in the ennobling power of gratuitous acts of violence makes her a cousin to Gide’s Lafcadio, albeit drained of all wit or charm.

    Golding clearly wanted much for this novel, so much, in fact, that its complexity comes perilously close to mere complication. For example, before the kidnapping, Matty holds a kind of seance with Bell and Goodchild, his devotees. I won’t go into how it comes to be held in the room in which Sophy and Toni grew up. Bernard F. Dick, in his excellent study of William Golding, tries to rescue the book from charges that it strains credulity past bearing, and nearly succeeds. If Darkness Visible

    is judged solely on a narrative basis, it would be like subjecting Twelfth Night or The Tempest to the standards of literary realism. Although Golding’s novels abound in realistic detail, they are not realistic novels; one does not “believe” in a Golding novel the way one believes in, say, Madame Bovary.

    For Golding, it seems, his plot was but a point of departure, a hook on which to hang his meditation on the late 20th century world, the nature of evil, anomie, the divorce of heart from mind. Very well. I can accept this. But this means that, for all of Darkness Visible‘s undeniable riches, its narrative, that for which, when it comes down to it, we read novels, is subsumed under its own meanings. His characters become illustrations of arguments rather than agents of the actions, or even thoughts, Golding provides for them. Which is what makes Pedigree’s final moments so shattering. Faced with the awful prospect of redemption, he at once longs for its release and recoils from it in terror. After 260 pages, Golding at last exhausted his topic, and could afford this moment of true, human drama, of which our recognition is immediate and total. And it is worth all the rest combined.

     


    Golding, William Novelists Novels 📎and tagged