The Day of the Rabblement

The Critical Writings of James Joyce by Ellsworth Mason

Joyce begins his essay "The Day of the Rabblement," written when he was 19: “No man, said the Nolan [Giordano Bruno of Nola], can be a lover of the true or the good unless he abhors the multitude….  [I]t is strange to see the artist making terms with the rabblement.”

Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600 for asserting that the sun was a star like any other.  Just the sort of man Joyce was likely to admire, as he never met anybody's terms but his own--whether at 19 when Father Henry Browne rejected his essay from a literary magazine at University College Dublin (he self-published it with his buddy Francis Skeffington), or in his mid-50s, at the height of his fame, when he was paid little for the manuscript of Finnegans Wake, which took him 20 years to write.  He cared less about pay and more about commas, omissions of which were among many errata Joyce discovered in Viking's edition of the Wake.  He caused them to publish a pamphlet listing every last correction down to the comma and kerning of the letters.

This collection of expository prose, mostly written when Joyce was himself the young man he portrayed in his first novel, is not for the casual reader of Joyce.  But there's much here of interest for those with a serious interest in Joyce's art, his aesthetics, and his biography.

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The House of Paper

The House of Paper by Carlos María Domínguez

This elegant little novella devotes itself obsessively to one topic: the sensuous pleasures of reading.  For a good book is a world of sensation, and furthermore the record of life within a book--for Domínguez's characters, at least--invests the corporeal being of that book, the cover, the pages, the typeface, with sensuous life.  The physical experience of reading the book commingles with the sensations depicted within.  One of Domínguez's characters for this reason prefers to read nineteenth-century novels by candlelight and pairs his reading with particular pieces of music as a sommelier pairs wine with food.  (I read most of this book underground, jammed ribcage to ribcage inside various cars of the Lexington Avenue number 4 and 5 trains as they lurched and halted, lurched and halted, with an ambience of other people's body smells and loud, annoying iPods.  While this didn't prevent me from enjoying the book, it didn't much enhance the experience either.)  The narratives within books acquire some timbre from the minutes of real life in which they are read, and from the larger moment in a life in which they are read.  A vivid book can become irrevocably associated with a certain trip, a certain relationship, a certain phase of development.  Life phases influence the reading experience and a book in turn imbues a phase of life with its particular character.

A copy of Joseph Conrad's novel The Shadow Line, covered in lime and crumbled cement, plays a central role in the story here, but its physical being is far more important than its narrative for Domínguez's purposes.  That said, he does quote this fascinating passage from Conrad's author note to The Shadow Line: "The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is--marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state."  This was Conrad's way of disavowing any interest in the "supernatural" in his work.  One senses that for Domínguez, literary art at once honors and embodies those marvels and mysteries of the natural world.  A book, a real book, not a spell book in a fairy tale, is a magical thing.

The American Dream

Ellis Island: And Other Stories by Mark Helprin

Is “Ellis Island,” the titular novella in this story collection, the best thing written on the American dream since the Declaration of Independence?

In 1981, when this book came out, The New York Times’s Anatole Broyard said of Helprin, “Nothing is familiar in his stories: he is interested only in the fabulous, the borderline between perception and hallucination, knowing and wishing. His characters exist in a state of sweet anxiety.”

This romantic tension between dream and reality selects his subject matter, but also distinguishes his style.  The cover of my edition is a painting of Lady Agnew of Lochnaw by John Singer Sargent, and Mark Helprin seems to paint his images in the mind with Sargent’s sumptuous colors and a similar blend of romance and realism.

And yet he differs from other practitioners of “magical realism,” such as that style’s founding father, Franz Kafka, or Kafka’s famous disciple Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  For one thing, Helprin’s much funnier than Marquez.  He can make me laugh out loud in 11 words; his rootless, rudderless narrator, fresh off the boat from Ellis Island, says, “No place would take me in, not even the Harvard Club.”  There’s a lunacy to his humor that resembles Kafka’s, but Helprin is willing to dare something that Kafka wouldn’t: happiness.

Especially in “Ellis Island,” there’s a sense of joyous, wild abandon akin to that of a Jewish wedding, where for a moment everybody forgets every painful thing that has ever happened--to himself, to herself, to the Jews, and to all people--and drinks, and dances a sweaty dance of near perilous disorder, and hoists the bride and groom and even the parents of the bride and groom--people old enough to break a hip--onto teetering chairs, life-mates linked only by a betrothal white kerchief or table napkin as tenuous as hope, and supported on an unstable, moving buttress of generally unathletic, but surprisingly strong Jewish men in an improvised scrum.

Celebratory Jewish dance is in fact an image in “Ellis Island”:

The dancing was an engine, drawing light through the eyes of each soul into a cylinder of tightly bound rays that went up past the dome.  I had heard of this in the East.  They used to say that the great synagogues of Asia were like this.  But I had never seen it. p. 184

And Helprin makes engines, trains, industry into emblems of joy, hope, humanistic power—who else dares to celebrate America in that way?  How different from Edith Wharton’s America or Kurt Vonnegut’s.  Mark Helprin sees America as a steam engine—or perhaps better to call it a dream engine—an engine casting off confusing clouds of vaporous dream, but also feeding on dreams to fuel the real work that makes dreams come true.  And they do.  “Everyone was in love with freedom,” Helprin writes, “and it is one abstract quality which, somehow or other, always manages to love you back.”

The tension of dreaming derives from the uncooperative, inhuman aspects of reality.  Like skulls peering out between the happy letters A-M-E-R-I-C-A in “Ellis Island” are the ghost letters A-U-S-C-H-W-I-T-Z.  The story seems to take place before 1940, but the cultural memory of Auschwitz has imprinted itself here.  Helprin says that the immigrants at Ellis Island had to go upstairs to examination rooms.

They prayed as they went up.  Even had we not had the sense of floating in Heaven, the idea of judgment was implicit in every angle of the place.  Some had great difficulty struggling up the stairs, and at the top were led away to be sent back—since the doctors could easily see that their hearts were not strong enough for America. pp. 137-138

The narrator appears to interpolate or imagine this fatal sorting of weak and strong by doctors, but does the image not call to mind Josef Mengele and Nazi eugenics?  On p. 141 the narrator states: “They made us take a shower.”  No Jew can picture his ancestors in an en masse compulsory shower without thinking of Auschwitz and Zyklon B, and that will likely be true for the next ten thousand years.  Finally, on p. 168, Helprin refers to “the morning industry of the city’s six million hands.”  “Six million” too is an unmistakable symbol—the number of Jews who perished in the Holocaust.

By a trick of metaphor, Helprin’s America resurrects those six million dead, turns death showers into innocent ones, the nakedness of death into that of love and sex (an art teacher says, “America to you now is a big nude woman, and that’s just fine”), tombstones into towers of glittering glass.  It isn’t perfect, it can’t bring the dead back, and in the end, the narrator must lay aside certain evasive dreams in favor of realities that include death, but the reality is that America has made many a dream come true for real, that it plays host to gigantic love, health, freedom, and industry, to all that grain out there in Nebraska, to many of the profoundest aspirations of men and women, conceived in the dream engine of the world and transformed with great labor into more complex, but still satisfying, realities.

The narrator of “Ellis Island,” a former rabbinic student with a literary bent, hides behind a variety of pseudonyms and ends up writing for the Jewish Daily Forward.  He shares all these attributes, one notes, with the real writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, a master of that age-old dialectic between dream and reality.  And so Helprin realizes his own dream, I think, of joining the ranks of his literary forefathers.

The Poet of Nature

A New Mimesis: Shakespeare and the Representation of Reality by A.D. Nuttall

A.D. Nuttall is a god damn genius.  As of May 6, 2011, I am his only Goodreads "fan" (as well as the only "fan" of supreme literary critic Robert Alter) and that's a testament both to the meaninglessness of literary fandom and to the intellectually backwards times we live in.  But at least this Nuttall classic is still in print.

This short piece of Shakespeare criticism, first published in 1982, begins with some useful philosophical deprogramming of contemporary French literary theory, and proceeds to the best close readings I've ever read of Othello, Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, Coriolanus, and other plays.  (In truth, how many close readings of Shakespeare's plays can I say I've read?--but you can't hold this against Nuttall, or even against me, having been miseducated by New Critics and Deconstructionists.)  Nuttall illuminates the meanings and artistic methods of these plays so brightly, I wanted to reread all of them then and there (but he quotes liberally from the plays so you don't have to).

Nuttall addresses his philosophical argument specifically to the absolute skepticism and devout uncertainty that has infiltrated so much literature and literary criticism of the past 50 years (when he wrote it, it was only 20 years).  Next he goes on to reaffirm a notion that's been tossed out of English departments all over America for its supposed naivete and quaintness: viz., that Shakespeare is indeed "the poet of nature," as Samuel Johnson said in 1765.  Nuttall quotes from many other 18th c. literary critics such as John Armstrong, who in 1770 praised Shakespeare’s "deep knowledge of human nature" and his "characters drawn with the strongest, truest, and most exquisite strokes…."

Johnson and Armstrong's view is the common sense view of Shakespeare; but what's so great about Nuttall's argument is not just that it's correct, but that it's sophisticated and ought to be deemed so even by the ultraviolet lights of postmodern literary theory.  Nuttall doesn't contest the postmodern view that literature is filled with aesthetic and social conventions.  He merely asserts that literature does not proceed through convention alone, but through convention and mimesis--the imitation of nature.  And in fact, how could it be otherwise?  How could we rate a convention dubious or inadequate without the capacity for reflection on the truth of nature?  How could we possibly know what's false without also having some idea of what's by contrast true?  (There are many philosophy papers, both older and current, that explain this point in more detail--see a theory of knowledge anthology such as the one edited by Louis Pojman.)  What 18th c. critics found revolutionary about Shakespeare was that he so often cast aside "fake" conventions in order to be more truthful to the more complex reality of human nature.  Through the close readings, Nuttall shows the many different ways that Shakespeare invokes conventions, cliches, stereotypes, audience expectations and then overturns them in favor of a more complex and realistic character or situation.  In this sense, Shakespeare himself was a skeptic of phony conventions long before the postmodernists were.

It's also refreshing that Nuttall actually has a sense of humor.  This is his prefatory commentary on the style of A New Mimesis: "an alternation of donnish knowingness with aggressively simple assertion which is slightly repellent even to me, the author."

But it isn't repellent.  If I were a literature professor, I'd assign this book to everyone.

On My Grudging Disrespect for Nabokov and His Cheval Mirror

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

I recently returned to Pale Fire after leaving it unfinished over ten years ago.  I returned not least because the sage Robert Alter commended it and quoted from it this brilliant passage on mirrors:

He awoke to find her standing with a comb in her hand before his--or rather, his grandfather's--cheval glass, a triptych of bottomless light, a really fantastic mirror, signed with a diamond by its maker, Sudarg of Bokay.  She turned about before it: a secret device of reflection fathered an infinite number of nudes in its depths, garlands of girls in graceful and sorrowful groups, diminishing in the limpid distance, or breaking into individual nymphs, some of whom, she murmured, must resemble her ancestors when they were young--little peasant garlien combing their hair in shallow water as far as the eye could reach, and then the wistful mermaid from an old tale, and then nothing.  pp. 111-112.

The 999-line poem in heroic couplets that begins Pale Fire is a technical achievement with many stirring images (like the first one, which has long been stuck in my head: “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane”).  But I had not understood the conceit that makes up the rest of the book: the fictional academic Charles Kinbote annotates the poem, which is by his neighbor John Shade, and Kinbote’s endnotes have little to do with the poem and more to do with Kinbote’s bizarre remembrances of his homeland, a Baltic kingdom called Zembla.  But according to Alter, the two parts of the book are in fact connected.  Alter suggests that the commentaries should be read as a distorted reflection of the poem, Kinbote as a distorted reflection of Shade, both figures as distorted reflections of their creator, Nabokov.  Alter points out that while Nabokov has drawn Kinbote as a farcical figure, he’s also just like Nabokov in an important way: he’s a fugitive from his homeland, living out his post-exilic life in the United States, haunted by nostalgia for his home.  (Nabokov’s family fled Russia in 1919, when he was 20, in order to escape the Bolshevik Revolution.)  On pp. 191-192 of Partial Magic, Alter’s study of the self-conscious novel, he comments on Nabokov’s passage on the cheval mirror (which is a full-length tilting mirror on a stand, or 'horse,' thus 'cheval'):

[C]onsciousness, as the example of Joyce’s technique must remind us, is essentially built up out of the infinite laminations of what the individual has seen, felt, read, fantasized in the past, however attuned he may be to the present moment.  The mirror itself here is a legacy of the past, not properly King Charles’s but his grandfather’s….  [A]s she [Fleur] observes herself transfigured in multiple reflection, we are moved further back in time into a legendary past where pastoral ancestors preen themselves by still waters.

It began to seem to me that Pale Fire was an examination of the structure of consciousness as a sort of cheval mirror: consciousness reflects reality but also tips it in its own direction, according to its own machinery.  If the commentaries were meant to mirror the poem and Kinbote to mirror Shade, I thought, then perhaps Pale Fire was really as brilliant as its adherents said.  Maybe the poem part of the book was meant to be the naturalistic and conscious way of seeing and reflecting reality, while Kinbote’s farcical commentaries were meant to be an expressionistic way of seeing and reflecting the same thing.  And in that case, maybe all that crazy rambling in the commentaries had a real meaning.  Maybe all the mirrors everywhere in the book were not postmodern symbols of infinite regression to nothing, but rather modernist symbols of the multiplicative meaning-making powers of the mind and of art.  (I alliterate in mirroring deference to Nabokov's style--and because it just came out that way.)  So, armed with 40 pages of Alter’s interpretations, I went back to Pale Fire with renewed enthusiasm and note-taking pen in hand.

Mirrors were in fact everywhere, starting with the title, Pale Fire.  Alter points out that Nabokov borrowed the phrase from a passage in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, Act IV sc iii, ll. 440-441: “…the moon’s an arrant thief, / And her pale fire she snatches from the sun….”  He points out that the name of the glassmaker referred to in the passage above, Sudarg of Bokay, is a near mirror image of the name of the assassin who pursues Kinbote throughout his semi-fantastical memories: Jakob Gradus.  It occurred to me, furthermore, that the name of Kinbote’s fantastical kingdom, Zembla, must be derived from the word ‘resemble.’

I was excited about all those mirrors as I read and hunted for meanings in their reflections.  I confess, however, that what had seemed elegant, artful, beautiful, and meaningful in Alter’s account, was upon actual reading elegant, yes, artful and beautiful, yes, but mostly not very meaningful and on top of that extremely tedious and irritating.  While both Kinbote and Shade have lost their parents prematurely, Nabokov does very little with this subject, or any other of psychological importance to his characters, and instead scatters his attention in a million different directions, introducing new characters every other page.

I wanted to like Nabokov.  He has Joyce’s gift for allusion and Woolf’s poetic sense.  But in my view—a view that could be wrong, but derives at least from serious consideration—Nabokov lacks the courage and character of both of his modernist forebears.  He can’t sustain his gaze on the complexities of reality for the duration of an entire novel, but would rather spin the mirror around and around.  I suspect that if he let it come to rest, he’d see something he didn’t want to see.

In Pursuit of Tranquillity

Hellenistic Philosophy: Introductory Readings by Brad Inwood

A.D. Nuttall, the Oxford literature professor, has observed that ancient philosophy falls into two periods--the first being that of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the second being the generation that followed: Epicurus, Zeno (father of Stoicism), skeptics like Pyrrho, and others.  Socrates died in 399 B.C.E., but the rest lived and wrote mostly in the 4th century B.C.E. (I mean the 300s B.C.E.).  "Hellenistic Philosophy" refers to this post-Aristotelian group, whose ideas, like those of their forebears, were spread far and wide by the Romans.  Few of Epicurus's many works are extant and Pyrrho, for reasons that will become evident if you read about his philosophy, refused to write anything down--an approach that would have been preferable in the work of a great many other philosophers.  Consequently, much of what is known of the Hellenistic philosophers comes down to us through the Roman commentators like Diogenes Laertius, and it's these commentaries which make up most of the texts in Inwood and Gerson's anthology.

Nuttall writes of the Hellenistic philosophers, "In the second period a strange alteration comes over the philosophers: they now present themselves as purveyors of mental health.  It is as if some immense failure of nerve, a kind of generalized neurosis, swept through the ancient world, so that the most serious thinkers found that their most urgent task was not to inform or enlighten but to heal.  They begin to sound like psychiatrists."  They promise ataraxia, that is, tranquillity.  (It looks more promising in the original Greek characters.)

Does anybody read this stuff anymore?  They should.  The proffered path to tranquillity differs greatly between philosophers; Epicurus urges understanding through study and analysis of nature--methods that would later be called science.  He feels this is the way to dispel anxiety and fear and achieve tranquillity (there is little in the actual philosophy of Epicurus to do with hedonism per se).  Other philosophers seek relief from reality in skeptical denial of it or in a denial of one's passions (homey don't play that).

The dialectic between knowledge and denial, these differing strategies of mental pain management, is still unfolding.  As Wolverine of the X-Men says, "There's a war coming.  Are you sure you're on the right side?"

The Greatness of George Eliot

Middlemarch by George Eliot

"That greatness is here we can have no doubt," Virginia Woolf wrote of George Eliot in 1919, a century after Eliot was born (and christened with the name Mary Anne Evans).  "[A]s we recollect all that she dared and achieved ... we must lay upon her grave whatever we have it in our power to bestow of laurel and rose."  It's a fitting eulogy for one of the greatest English novelists of the 19th century.  Though Woolf criticized Eliot as sometimes verbose and inelegant, she also rightly proclaimed Middlemarch "the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people."  Rebecca Mead, writing in The New Yorker adds that it's "also a book about how to be a grownup person--about how to bear one's share of sorrow, failure, and loss, as well as to enjoy moments of hard-won happiness."  Though Eliot was hugely famous in her lifetime, and to my mind deserved every bit of it, she wrote straight-out against fame.  She was just too wise and experienced to believe that the world justly rewards merit.  The characters of Middlemarch clearly have merit--they have moral fiber and they have genius, even--but their merit usually exceeds what they're recognized to have achieved.  Lydgate, for instance, is a young doctor whose brilliant thinking brings him close to the discovery of the cell as one of the organizing principles of life.  He doesn't discover it, but it's no fault of his.  He isn't a tragic figure ruined by his vices.  He's a hero.  He's the hero with whom history wouldn't cooperate.

The authors of the Hebrew Bible, Homer, Tolstoy, George Eliot: these writers know well the unpredictable wooly mammoth that is history, an animal that's bigger than the human will.  The human will plays a part, yes, but time, history, physics, accident, these unfeeling inhuman forces have equal power over human destiny.  Of her character Mary Garth, Eliot writes, "having early had strong reason to believe that things were not likely to be arranged for her peculiar satisfaction, she wasted no time in astonishment and annoyance at that fact." (p. 349)   And the proximity of other human wills holds powerful sway over an individual's fortunes.  Eliot examines the institution of marriage as a case study of such influence of one person on another, an influence that can be both enlarging and delimiting.  "In half an hour he left the house an engaged man, whose soul was not his own, but the woman's to whom he had bound himself," she writes of Lydgate (p. 336).  Society, too, looms large as a potential frustration to the individual will--society, with all its lies and errors.  All these forces arrayed against the vulnerable little wishes of the human individual seem to combine in Eliot’s mind to inspire the final lines of her masterpiece, Middlemarch:

Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. A new Theresa will hardly have the opportunity of reforming a conventual life, any more than a new Antigone will spend her heroic piety in daring all for the sake of a brother’s burial: the medium in which their ardent deeds took shape is forever gone. But we insignificant people with our daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose story we know.

Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Developmental biology seems to function as a controlling metaphor for Eliot in this account of life.  (Her ability to integrate disparate characters and storylines through sustained metaphor is one of her great attributes as a writer.)  In her prose embryonic potential everywhere meets a world that is foreign to it and that directs its growth as the soil and light direct the growth of a tree.

So we do what we can, and have George Eliot to console us about the frustration, the unfairness, the despair—and also to inspire us with the greatness that ambition and accumulated skill can truly achieve, even in a complex and unaccommodating world.  She avers the power of the human will, particularly as it manifests itself in language, by her example of course, but also more directly: “The right word is always a power, and communicates its definiteness to our action,” she writes not six lines from her somewhat pessimistic account of Lydgate’s engagement on p. 336.  It’s up to us to speak and act with definite purpose.  The world’s reaction is not our affair.