Jack Kerouac's Harmonica and Mary Shelley's Hair

The Museum of Modern Art defines a Wunderkammer like this:

Wunderkammern, or cabinets of curiosities, arose in mid-sixteenth-century Europe as repositories for all manner of wondrous and exotic objects. In essence these collections—combining specimens, diagrams, and illustrations from many disciplines; marking the intersection of science and superstition; and drawing on natural, manmade, and artificial worlds—can be seen as the precursors to museums.

To celebrate its 100th anniversary, the New York Public Library has unleashed from its storehouse of artifacts a Wunderkammer to rival even those in the Morgan Library, which owns more Gutenberg Bibles than I do televisions. On Thursday, I decided to work for a bit at the library at 42nd Street before a lunch meeting.

However, I couldn't work there, because I was ensnared by the unexpected Wunderkammer there on the first floor. Within, I saw in glass cases: e.e. cummings's typewriter (a Royal); Hemingway's Nobel acceptance speech, which he wrote inside the back cover of John P. Marquand's Thirty Years (because it was blowing so hard that day by the pool in Havana); Charlotte Bronte's writing desk; Charles Dickens's letter opener, apparently ivory and of rapier length, with "C.D. In Memory of Bob 1862" engraved on it and bearing a handle made from the paw of his deceased cat (Bob); Virginia Woolf's diary and the cane that Leonard Woolf found floating in the River Ouse after she killed herself; a lock of Mary Shelley's hair (which Mary had sent to Thomas Jefferson Hogg as a token of affection at the behest of Percy, who encouraged her to have affairs so that he could in good conscience have his own); Jack Kerouac's harmonica and Valium pills; George Washington's handwritten farewell address (never delivered orally, but evidently the precedent for many later empty farewell platitudes); a letter from Picasso to Jean Cocteau; a Gutenberg bible (just one, though--point to Morgan Library); a funny typed letter from Groucho Marx to Harold Robbins of The New Yorker, signed; a Beethoven score messily handwritten (by Beethoven); Jerome Robbins's colorful diaristic collage including tickets to shows, programs, drawings, and scribblings; a book hand-painted by Joan Miró; a marked-up draft of Jorge Luis Borges's story "The Lottery in Babylon," written on graph paper in his micrographic hand (each letter is about three millimeters high); the first photographically illustrated book (Photographs of British Algae--Cyanotype Impressions by Anna Atkins, 1880); Richard Wright's diaries; Malcolm X's diaries (he wrote the most mundane things in them--apparently he took a lot of naps); a signed copy of Mein Kampf; a Kiki Smith self-portrait that's described as having been painted with her "hair" (when it's fairly obvious it was painted with her pubic hair); a Thomas Edison "Gem" Wax Cylinder Phonograph in pristine condition; a typed draft of "The Wasteland" by T.S. Eliot with handwritten comments and suggestions from Ezra Pound (such as "Wonderful!" alongside some now famous verse as if "The Wasteland" were a high school term paper and T.S. Eliot the student!); and thirty or more small cuneiform tablets from several millennia ago, one of which was juxtaposed with a plugged-in MacBook showing Thursday's New York Times, digital edition, with an image in the middle of it of a poster of Vladimir Putin.

I was enthralled--until I began to feel a little like I did while going through my wife's great aunt's personal effects at her house in South Bend, Indiana after she was dead. (There was nothing in the great aunt's house so rarefied as Mary Shelley's hair, but there were jugs of Canadian Mist whiskey and Fleischman's vodka on the floor of her bedroom closet.) I told an editor enthusiastically about Virginia Woolf's cane and he said ironically, "Do you think you have a morbid side, Austin?" I realize now that the rarest and most exotic items in the NYPL Wunderkammer were indeed also the most morbid. It occurs to me that even a one-of-a-kind painting gives out a faint scent of the morgue; but the huge reproduction of Kiki Smith's pubic hair, besides focusing the viewer's mind on genitals, was also redolent of life because it wasn't entombed in the coffin of a solitary glass case. It was a participant in the present and the future--in some way alive in the way that living things are alive. It was replicated, propagating itself through many doors, into many spaces, many minds, moving, engaging, interacting, changing others (if itself incapable of change) and incorporating itself into others and so into the future, alive, alive, alive, like Shelley's monster, alive.

Which is to say: I don't think I can join Walter Benjamin in his gloom over the prospects for art in the age of mechanical reproduction.

Lost in the Labyrinth

Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Borges is the most elegant, clever, and original of truly nihilist writers.  He is so ambitious and yet so constipated with anxiety about writing in the wake of Kafka and Joyce, to say nothing of Cervantes and Shakespeare, that he can hardly bring himself to say a single intelligible word.  While he partakes of the life-is-a-dream philosophy that's so modish now, this philosophy is to me ultimately sterile and a cowardly retreat from reality.  His stories while sometimes funny and in places beautiful are mostly unpleasant if not impossible to read.  I think he's destined to be a museum piece, like a Restoration comedy by William Wycherly, something you'll encounter in a literature class ages hence as the finest example of crooked times long ago or an unusually fine example of a certain perversely intellectual form of self-destruction.


But he is a brilliant and influential writer, no doubt about it, and it's worth at least sampling some of his offerings.  The collection Labyrinths includes essays as well as maddening short stories, and some of the essays are quite lucid.  His essay "The Argentine Writer and Tradition" is for me the final word on how a writer ought to relate to his or her own national and ethnic heritage.  It's exactly right.


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In the Penal Colony

Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka

A Goodreads friend makes the point that Kafka is funny.  He's probably the funniest writer I've ever read.  Partly the world of paranoid fantasy he depicts is just so familiar to me.  (What?  Is there something wrong with that?  Why are you judging me?)  I have laughed till I was in tears reading Kafka, and supposedly Kafka himself, his friend Max Brod, and others of his tiny Prague literary circle would often laugh quite a bit when he read aloud from his work.  That said, it's true that Kafka's subject matter never strays far from paranoia, self-loathing, loneliness, and self-destruction; so how can it be funny?

Kafka is the great innovator of psychologically sophisticated expressionism.  Many writers before him depicted their dreams and imaginings, but Kafka does so with a certain groundbreaking insight into the psychological motives and irrational methods of dream-life.   And I believe it's that sophisticated faculty of psychological observation that makes him so funny.  More than any other writer, Kafka is alert to the conscience as a potentially overactive and irrational psychical force, a wily, tormenting inner adversary which uses the imagination as its weapon in its internecine wars against the human self.  It's that insight that allows him to parody (and describe) the conscience and its irrational methods, rather than be duped by them and take them at face value.  Borges, who was so influenced by Kafka (he invokes the name "Qaphqa" in his Kafkaesque story "The Lottery in Babylon") is rarely very funny precisely because he chooses to take seriously the perversities perpetrated on him by his conscience.  The Borgesian conscience bricks Borges up in a labyrinth, but unlike Kafka he mistakes the bricks and walls of the labyrinth for reality.  He isn't onto the mischief of his own conscience and cannot laugh at it as Kafka can.  This makes Borges rather lugubrious reading, even though his conscience destroys him and his claim on reality with grace and elegant persuasion.

Kafka's short story "In the Penal Colony" is the finest parodic description of overzealous conscience ever written.  It's about a torture device for prisoners (that is faintly reminiscent of Pilates equipment) and the penal colony where prisoners are senselessly tortured.  Try reading the story as an allegory on the structure and function of the human conscience.  Where it says "penal colony" read "conscience."  Where it says "our former Commandant" read "childhood."  Certainly, where it describes the torture device, read "conscience."  "It's a remarkable piece of apparatus," says the officer in the very first line.

"In the Penal Colony," like "Metamorphosis" and the novel The Trial, is of course tragic as well as witty.  Every Kafka story is wise, profound, darkly humorous in some way, and so dense with knowledge, joy, and pain that I have to read a little bit and walk away (it's hard for me to read many Kafka stories in a row).  Some stories are more subdued (like "In the Penal Colony" or "The Hunger Artist"), some more flagrantly ridiculous.  "The Judgment" is flat-out hilarious.  So is "Report to an Academy."  But every Kafka story is brilliant, crafted with a blend of artistic control, imaginative freedom, and fearlessly scientific self-observation unique to Kafka, and realized with a nuance and specificity found only in the greatest of all works of literature.