AMERICAN FICTION NOW – 2019

PRIMARY:

• Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (2001)
• Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010)

SECONDARY:

• Peter Boxall, Twenty-First-Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction (2013) *
• Stephen Burn, Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism (2011)
• Nicholas Dames, “The Theory Generation”, n+1  (2012) [here]*
• Jonathan Franzen, “I’ll Be Doing More of Same”, Review of Contemporary Fiction, 16:1 (1996), pp. 34-38 *
• Andrew Hoberek, “Introduction: After Postmodernism”, Twentieth Century Literature, 53:3 (Fall, 2007), pp. 233-247 (233)
• Amy Hungerford, “On the Period Formerly Known as Contemporary”, American Literary History, 20:1-2 (Spring/ Summer 2008), pp. 410-419
• Adam Kelly, “Beginning with Postmodernism”, Twentieth-Century Literature, 75:3-4 (Fall/ Winter 2011), pp. 391-422 *
• Robert McLaughlin, “Post-Postmodern Discontent: Contemporary Fiction and the Social World”, symplokē, 12:1/2 (2004), pp. 53-68 *

Pre-Class Notes

— Your pre- and post-class notes should look a little something like this (so begin with a double dash). They are meant to be a conversational yet critically-engaged record of your thoughts on the reading, and a space in which you can share suggestions and other reading/viewing/ listening material. So if, for example, you’re interested in the music history Egan sketches in Goon Squad, you might think it’s helpful to direct people to a spotify playlist of songs from the book, or other musical responses to the novel, like this one from the New Yorker . At the end of your first comment, put your full name followed by your initials in square brackets; for subsequent comments, just your initials will do. [Mike Kalisch, MK]

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Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

In “I’ll Be Doing More of Same,” Franzen discusses the decline of the novel which the “general” audience of “Americans who considered themselves civilized” would read. Indeed, Franzen’s writing style in The Corrections appears to lean toward detailed, longer, and realist passages reminiscent of the very writers he declares is “being rendered obsolete,” such as Dickens, Proust, or Pynchon; or as Nicholas Dames writes in “The Theory Generation,” “[describing] individual lives in a fairly linear manner.” The scrupulous omniscient narration and heavily descriptive passages, to me, felt slightly dense and almost anachronistic, but perhaps only because I have been steeped in modern “tribalist” literature which more often takes on the concise Hemingway approach to syntax and overall structure than that of the increasingly outdated style of Fitzgerald. 

At this point I have to admit I had little patience with the packed, linear narrative Franzen employs—which, admittedly, he suggests is due to a decline in the intellectualism of the literary audience—and had little sympathy for the characters in The Corrections; the messed up dynamics of a family with its undercurrent of dishonesty, frustration, and disappointments might have been what Franzen understood to be the average American experience, but whether you call it human or realist, their sense of entitlement seemed to verge on a luxury many Americans today would have no access to. Chip, for instance, is a sexual offender who faces no legal prosecution or long-term consequence, rebuilding his life with the help of Gitanas; Denise, wrapped up in the safety of middle-class exemption from moral imperatives; Alfred and Enid, fretful over anxieties that stem from their own expectations. 

Franzen further expresses dismay towards the contemporary literary trend which he calls “tribalism” and “identity politics,” describing them as totalitarian, albeit recognizing the writers to be doing us all “a favor.” I find it ironic that he claims to recognize Toni Morrison as the “beginning and end” of the list of “American novelists who might be heeded as a cultural authority,” and yet fails to recognize that Morrison, along with the likes of Alice Walker, Langston Hughes, or Zora Neale Hurston, are figures recognized as spearheading the so-called tribalism writing from the angle of marginalized identities that previously didn’t have access to mainstream platform; it is not that a general audience with an appreciation for literature has disintegrated, but that readers increasingly have a wider, and hopefully more diverse array of writers who offer the perspective of American life in ways that each reader is able to sympathize with. It might not be “identity politics” if mainstream writers and critics didn’t feel the need to categorize marginalized writers as token poc or lgbtq names to sprinkle on top of their sense of social awareness, failing to recognize they capture the essence of Americana. Perhaps Franzen recognizes a cultural identity that penetrates the American experience in those that reflect his own; after all, the mainstream literary intellectual has always been, and still remains, representative of white, middle class, male, heterosexual privilege. 

Jennifer Egan, The Visit from the Goon Squad

I enjoyed the clarity and candor of her prose and the distinctive voice she maintained for each character. The number of perspectives she includes could have easily become confusing to follow, especially as she jumps back and forth in chronology, but I found the novel didn’t fall apart, the connections between each chapter and character well developed, and her writing paced as such that the reader didn’t lose sight of the whole novel, or the network of relationships she delineates. I also appreciated how she tied the novel at the end by returning to the characters she’d started out with, this time focusing on Alex, who had initially been a more marginal character. The novel dismantles the idea of a single deserving protagonist, thus championing individualism .

The series of chronological diagrams which Egan employs toward the end of her novel suggests her own experimentalism, though not entirely in line with the mode she formerly writes in. I unfortunately found it less coherent and more difficult to follow than her narrative form, but also thought it disproved Franzen’s claim that “formal innovation is coming to an end.” On Nicholas Dames’ argument that Egan’s Mindy captures the theory generation, I read Mindy’s character as demonstrating irony by classifying simple reasoning into academic texts that begin with “structural,” an academic platitude. I found Mindy’s ironic thought pattern to be another example of dry humor, a kind of cleverness Egan displays when she provides brief future insight into her characters’ lives, as if to highlight the characters’ ignorance and the futility of the moment in which the narrative takes place; (ex. “Charlie doesn’t know herself. Four years from now, at eighteen, she’ll join a cult across the Mexican border. (80)) The cleverness of the irony renders the narrator as interesting as the characters themselves. 

On another note, I enjoyed her use of the second person perspective at certain points throughout the book, as in the case of Rob’s section. Writing in the second-person is a growing, if tricky, trend, again frowned upon by a sizable portion of established writers, and one that I also believe has to be justified; for the most part I believed she wrote successfully in this point of view, though I didn’t see enough explanation for the need to employ the particular perspective.  [Jane Kim, JK]

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I am struggling to articulate my thoughts on this week’s novels without a personal inflection. Dames’ observation in his n+1 article, ‘The Theory Generation’ that Theory has been subsumed into ‘the sociology of late adolescence’, that Mindy’s attempt to abstract her safari experience to the level of Levi Strauss in ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’ ‘is just another stage’ [of maturation] hits home. He is talking about author-graduates of the 1980s, but I’d argue that an academic steeping in – and hence an existential coming of age with – Theory is still relevant for contemporary graduates.

As a result, or perhaps as exemplification, reading ‘The Corrections’ made me especially uneasy. I felt implicated in the haplessness the characters, especially of Chip. I admit, this is not a connection I wanted to draw; as I read of his dismissal from D––– College, I judged him as helpless, indulgent, something like an underformed adult. I recoiled from sympathy even as I recognised in other characters’ narratives Franzen’s knack for introducing them first as dull or wheedling or bullying before revealing what might be called their human core. Instead, the deeper I read into Chip’s section(s), the harder I found it to distinguish between his floundering academic career and my own imminent embarkation on this MSt. There was this uncomfortable miasma of inevitability.

I think I saw in the root of his meaninglessness many of the practices in which I have learned to find meaning. I recall that sentence about scholarships and academic awards: ‘By getting out of bed much earlier than his grad-school classmates, who slept off their Gauloise hangovers until noon or one o’clock, he’d piled up the prizes and fellowships and grants that were the coin of the academic realm.’ (p 37 in the Fourth Estate 2002 copy) A combination of Franzen’s flippant employment of that antiquated term, ‘coin of the … realm’, which seems more at home in a fantasy novel, and my own begruding recognition that getting out of bed before noon is not, in fact, an achievement or an effective time-management stragegy, suddenly casts that academic realm as a very small one indeed within the wider world. And the significance of Chip’s achievements is swept away; I felt the same tug on my own aspirations. Was my investment in Theory, my continued difficulty in separating it distinctly from criticism, leading my studies in the same irrelevant direction?

I’d conclude, then, that Nicolas Dames’ ‘The Theory Generation’ serves a comforting purpose. For me, at least, it stabilised a field that Franzen and his contemporaries purposefully and successfully threw into flux by relocating Theory – and, to an extent, criticism – as just another component of the legible world. Is it ironic that my anxieties about the relevance of criticism were salved by a critical piece about the disintegration of my default mode of reading? Of course. Should I be less comfortable with this new equilibrium?

** As an aside, another thought that has occurred to me in writing this is what I perceive as a contrast between Franzen’s criticism of this ‘Media Age’ in his essay ‘I’ll be Doing More of Same’ and Egan’s fairly successful use of a PowerPoint presentation in ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’. PowerPoint and the world of visual, digital representation to which it guards the threshold seem to me firm features of that Media Age, and Egan has managed to make it expressive, tender, and the medium of the next generation, Sasha’s daughter. Egan’s PowerPoint seems like a direct refutation of Franzen’s hope that the Media Age won’t affect his work. I wonder whether her multi-media approach is going to prove the more productive? [Martha Swift, MS]

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Reading the Corrections I found myself regularly coming back to a couple lines from David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon College address. It’s a bit long, but I think worth quoting in full:

“[I]n the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship […] is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. […] But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is [… that] they are default settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.”

My suspicion is that a lot of what Franzen is doing in The Corrections is excavating some of the most worshipped idols in American culture, and making audible the “alarm bell of anxiety” they produce, which has otherwise been “ringing for so many days that it [has] simply blended into the background” (Location 53, (I’m using a Kindle)). To me, the core god-figure in the work seems to be status — the appearance of having a stable family, career success, and wealth. Save for Alfred, each family member serves in some way to dissect and disentangle the core aspects of this status-seeking and to identify the various tones of anxiety that echo from it. I should note that this reading requires some crude simplification of each character, since each exists unto themselves and serves many purposes in the work beyond this act of worshipping. But I still think this role is important.

Denise embodies a competitiveness that moves beyond work and seeps into the domestic sphere. The severity of her work ethic is fairly explicit throughout the novel, from her first job “she worked with an intensity that she was certain nobody could match” (6525) and thereon proceeds to give herself to 16 hour days as a chef. This aspect of her identity is a fairly established toxicity of American meritocracy, a worshipping of resume success. Where I think it gets more interesting is the way in which her competitiveness extends into her relationships. She falls in love with Emile for his ambition, has sex with Becky to establish dominance, and eventually pursues Robin and Brian in hopes of disrupting their superior home life. In this, I think there’s a commentary on the ways in which meaningful loves and relationships have been turned into a status item that is to be pursued ruthlessly, no different from a prestigious degree or job. The anxiety here becomes clear. No relationship can be enough, no love can be sated, but rather always gives way to an imagined better love. From her worshipping of a maximal family life, Denise is left with tatters of failed relationships.

If Denise self-destructs by pursuing a stable domestic life with the same ambition she applies to her career, Gary does so (in part) by his pursuit of mental health. His fights with Caroline reveal a meritocratic understanding of mental health. Psychological stability is not a given trait, but rather something one achieves through therapy and hard work. Poor mental health, then, is seen as a result of laziness and pride, rather than as an innate biochemical balance over which one has little control. Gary’s depression then becomes a sign of inadequacy, and so he resists acknowledging it for as long as possible. He worships mental health, and so feels shame and self-disgust when he fails to achieve it.
This process by which the children choose a particular idol — be it love, mental health, etc. — and are eaten alive by their inadequacy to it is all over the book. Gary worships not only his sanity but also pursues wealth with an equally profound insecurity and greed. Chip is nearly killed in a revolution as he tries to get rich. Denise’s career eventually implodes because she had to cut Robin and Brian down to her size. Each worships a slightly different idol, but all are destroyed by their striving.

What ties them together is that the seeds of each kid’s self-destructive worshipping can be found in Enid. Gary’s aversion to depression is scarcely different from what drives Enid to get addicted to Corecktall — in fact Chip likely gets addicted to the same drug when he takes “Mexican A” in a motel. Her obsession with squeezing each dime from her coupons is likely the root of Gary’s desperate pushing for more shares of Axon. Her fixation on a perfect Christmas with the entire family is mirrored in Denise’s fetishization of men with stable family lives.

This is what makes Alfred such a fascinating and tragic character in the work. He remains obstinately fixed in a past (imagined or real) where this all-consuming greed had no place. He refuses to demand more money for his patent because he refuses the avarice that Enid and Gary embody. He seems to be an individual who pursues no God-figure, and I think this is part of what makes him so difficult to understand as readers living in 2019. He is someone we desperately need to understand, but like Enid, Denise, Gary, and Chip, we silence him in a nursing home. [Michael Pusic, MP]

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Three characters–Rolph, Bosco, and Dolly–from Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) made a particularly strong impression on me. It seems as if Egan is confirming through Rolph and Bosco that in a largely consumerist society, the ultimate pitfall of authenticity is death drive. This thought expresses a level of jadedness which immediately brings to my mind one Emil Cioran: “Knowledge is the plague of life, and consciousness, an open wound in its heart,” and “One of the greatest delusions of the average man is to forget that life is death’s prisoner (On the Heights of Despair (1934)).”

Rolph (Chapter 4) is shown to be a perceptive preadolescent, unable to reason away powerful feelings of longing for the past, a simpler time perhaps of lesser consciousness. He displays a childlike commitment to values of honesty, love, loyalty, and family while also realising that the norm is entirely different. His eventual suicide can be read as an act of individual agency towards non-participation after having realised that reason is only a tool to mitigate the catastrophe of disillusionment, whose ultimate aim is to ensure participation in the “new” reality–the bleak one, seen after the said disillusionment. Rolph’s death is the welcoming of an irreversible unconsciousness, the end of being and knowing, permanently closing the “wound in its heart.”

Bosco’s (Chapter 7) new album is called From A to B, a musical account of how he came to be washed-up. As a young rockstar, Bosco does very well in the economy of the outrageous (I use the term outrageous to mean an aesthetic which leads to recognition and produces material value until, with time, it becomes common). His being washed-up entails the draining of his potential for being consistently outrageous. He has embraced the fact that he is “death’s prisoner.” He wants to die “flaming out” i.e. to produce shock value through a suicide tour–the ultimate farewell tour (which reminds me of The Rolling Stones’ many commercially successful “farewell tours”).

Dolly, a PR agent, who starts representing a genocidal dictator “had worked with shitheads before, God knew if she didn’t take this job someone else would snap it up; being a publicist is about not judging your clients–these excuses were lined up in formation, ready for deployment should that small dissident voice pluck up its courage to speak with any volume. But lately, Dolly couldn’t even hear it (Chapter 8).” Dolly “resolves” her ethical dilemma by reasoning away and silencing her “dissident voice” (which Rolph could never do) until that voice forces its way through from the outside, in the form of Kitty Jackson’s sudden, playful confrontation with the dictator (quite like the Furies of Greek mythology gone postmodern). The whole episode marks Dolly’s brush with causality and responsibility. She retires from the publicity business and starts to redirect offers from other dictators to her former rivals. Her role in the economy of outrageous becomes indirect but she can never truly be absolved of responsibility, owing to the connections she indirectly still facilitates.    

I drew two primary questions from my reading of these characters. What makes for a “respectable” exit? Is it to refuse to participate in the economy of the outrageous and die young (like Rolph) or to participate (directly or indirectly) and grow old (like Bosco and Dolly)–two disagreeable, yet only, alternatives. The more potent question would be: how to live? [Mehvish Siddiqui, MS]

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I am particularly interested in the economic aspects of The Corrections. Franzen’s use of economic structures (the Axon and W______ corporations) to access a social totality seems to hark back to the techniques of Victorian realism in representing an intersubjective social reality, to the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case, or Bulstrode’s bank. I think this may point to an awkwardness between Franzen’s technique and his aim to create post-postmodern art. Franzen’s economy is inextricably linked to the postmodern; I am persuaded by Eagleton’s observation that ‘[b]oth postmodernists and neo-liberals are suspicious of public norms, inherent values, given hierarchies, authoritative standards, consensual codes and traditional practices’ (After Theory, p. 29). The use of the title theme of market ‘corrections’ highlights the inherently random and volatile nature of the postmodern economic reality; ‘every year is different, every cycle’s different. You never know exactly when that green is going to turn’ (TC, p. 337). Chip’s activities in Lithuania seem to represent the reality of Baudrillard’s vision of ‘transeconomics’ – ‘[a] game and nothing but a game, with floating and arbitrary rules: a game of catastrophe’ (The Transparency of Evil, p. 38). There is, as Nicholas Dames notes, a certain distain for the pretention of academic Theory, especially in Franzen’s emphasis (in the character of Chip) upon money as real and necessary, causing real human suffering when absent. But this money is created by a system that sells America an ideological narrative which agrees with Theory’s distain of the real, using its methods (advertising – as seen in the class Chip teaches).

            Franzen seems unable to return to George Eliot’s counter-commercial logic of a “hidden hand” of human empathy. The postmodern consumer economy has won, and destroyed the illusions of Enid and Alfred’s world – as Fredric Jameson notes, ‘there is no such thing as a booming, functioning market whose customer personnel is staffed by Calvinists and hard-working traditionalists knowing the value of the dollar’ (Postmodernism,p. 271). These values are not replaced by anything in the novel, which renders it tragically bleak. He makes a very interesting sweeping comment in ‘More of Same’ that ‘serious literature’ has ‘a “pessimistic” conviction that the world (or history, or fate, or God) will be forever smarter than the people in it’ (p. 37). The market seems to take the place of Hardy’s gods, or his Schopenhauerean “Will”, in the determinism of the novel (James Annesley, ‘Market Corrections…’, 2006, reads Franzen’s economy as a ‘malign’ and ‘destructive force’ [read here – MK]). In Alfred’s attempt to fix his Christmas lights the contrast of the parallel circuit versus the simple circuit reflects the breakdown of his notions of social interdependency and of the importance of the individual worker. There are parallel circuits in the economy that he has no understanding of, for whom he barely registers as real. The ‘semiparallel’ circuit is a betrayal of Alfred’s  “values”; its shoddy workmanship is a betrayal of his hard-work ethic, the impossibility of fixing it the betrayal of boyhood dreams of individual cleverness and agency. He is aware that he is infantilised and isolated as a consuming unit as much as by dementia but unable to find any hope of escape.

            Egan presents this same dominance by a market with thrives on simulation in the music industry. Bennie’s selling of his label to ‘multinational crude-oil extractors’ (p. 24) is the sacrifice of the individualism and political autonomy enjoyed in his youth. He now produces music ruined by ‘precision, perfection… digitalization, which sucked the life out of everything’ (p. 24). In relation to this novel I am not sure I agree with Adam Kelly’s optimism regarding an ‘outside to the postmodern web of text, technology, and theory’ gained through ‘some kind of renewed historical understanding’ (p. 407). The ending of the novel is very ambiguous in the framing of Scotty’s concert with the cynical technological simulacra of Alex’s ‘parrots’. There seems to be a communal epiphany, almost a Wolfe-like ‘moment’ (‘A String Quartet’), of dissatisfaction at ‘two generations of war and surveillance’ finding recognition in ‘ballads of paranoia and disconnection ripped from the chest of a man who you knew just by looking had never had a page or a profile’ (p. 344). Yet in the moment of performance (viewed by Alex through the zoom of his handset) he immediately becomes a ‘myth’ not of universal narrative but of the hyper-real, the endlessly reproduced – ‘everyone wants to own him’.

Aside: I’m currently reading Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, and was horrified to find that my bank sent me a text advertising investment options – something they have neverdone before – a mere twenty minutes after I searched for information on market corrections on Google! [Rhona Jamieson, RJ]

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‘The Corrections’ is often oppressive, often painful, and often delivered in cluster of prose quite distant from the light, sharp fluidity of Egan.  From the start, Franzen’s mandate of ‘tragic realism’ (‘Why Bother?’ [an expanded version of “More of Same”, also published as “Perchance to Dream”; read here – MK]) seems in full force, literary allegiances in clear view. The first chapter, for example, is unapologetically Dickensian/Balzacian. The prose is thick and winding, the descriptive method very much in the nineteenth-century manner: the house meticulously, horribly rendered, ‘the house being the outward and animate visage of its inhabitants’ (George Steiner on Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet). Irony, hallmark of the social novel, is the pivot of each paragraph, and the consumption-cluttered, coupon-stagnant Midwest is presented in banal, painful comedy. 

Painful across the two-generation strata of white, middle-class America: The Corrections tears through – with acerbic precision, a relentless authorial gaze and surprising bedrock of understanding (multi-perspectival, more wide than warm-hearted) – the Mid-Western, passé, easily stereotyped parent generation, and then the damage diffused across the upwards swing of mobility, the ‘successful’ generation that escaped St. Jude (of hopeless causes). Chip, Gary and Denise are part of the generation who have the pressure of almost inevitable success in a never-more-optimistic America. To Franzen, this is a never-more-deluded America – ‘dreaming from exemption from the rules of history’ (‘Why Bother?”). 

In ‘Why Bother?’ (the essay from which ‘I’ll Be Doing More of The Same’ is half-distilled), he writes that part of regaining the ‘tragic perspective’ from which The Corrections was born was ‘the reclamation of a sense of history’. Franzen’s focus on the second generation here is a focus on the depression of singular characters in a time which is declaring itself (economically, medically, rhetorically) very much not depressed: the individuals who possess a drowning sense of history (above all, familial) despite the big, abstract, good-news present. In something like a 21^st-century American version of the Brothers Karamazov structure (three children as three parts of the ‘spirit of the nation’, father figure of a barbaric patriarchal past looming over), we get the singular, struggling, inveterately fucked-up characters below their tri-partite categories of classically-achieved mobility. Intellectual (Chip, where theory becomes a perverse joke of a defence against responsibility, a mask over deeply needy misogyny), Economic (Gary, whose capitalism / economic success becomes a perverse joke of a defence, a material bulwark, against chaos / complicated feeling), and blue-collar Professional (Denise, whose sexual life becomes a series of confused graspings for understanding of self, body, power, who burns out in the desire to prove her own worth) – the late-capitalist Karamazovs. There’s almost a gothic element – in its sheltered, mid-western, middle-class way the ‘sins of the father’ are just as much of a weight as in some Faulknerian Southern myth – but above all it has the sprawl of the ‘old-fashioned’ family saga: Michael Cunningham compares it to something like Buddenbrooks. 

The latter might be a useful perspective – ambitious yet local scale; character as locus for the wider pivot of view; lives knitted together in jumble and mess of contemporary history; semi-traditional, semi-linear narrative method – from which to judge the formal achievement, in some ways even more impressive than Egan. 

Goon Squad’s structure and prose seems self-evidently, unfailingly clever; it’s clean, adept, tough, dexterous, clinical – and carried out with such a lightness of emphasis, casual grace of style (‘Goon Squad hangs together with the airiness of a mobile’ – Sunday Times) that its ‘postmodern’ techniques carry little need for justification. They very rarely intrude on character, narrative clarity, etc. (the classic, solid novelistic virtues, the ‘dialectical counterparts’ to form (Franzen)) but seem more like intelligent, flexible-minded responses to the possible necessities of such. Hence maybe Egan’s insistent tribute (especially in interviews) to Proust, more pronounced than any single influence on Franzen. It’s too simple to set up her ‘postmodernism’, if it is such, as antithesis to the ‘more traditional’ techniques Franzen might seem to espouse – with her interpretations of Proust (music-as-madeleine, overlapping, interpenetrating time schema), she’s doing just what Franzen discusses in ‘I’ll Be Doing More of the Same’: ‘you re-examine old content in new contexts’. Egan’s interview quotes, public persona can be quite ‘Make It New’ type rhetorical and bombastic (‘linearity is the scourge of prose fiction’, etc.), but the book is much larger (in its light way) than being definingly ‘experimental’ or ‘avant-garde’.    

The Corrections is certainly less formally clean, but structurally follows other (and just as  ambitious) criteria: I would reference George Steiner’s defence of the ‘loose, baggy monsters’ Henry James criticised – the sprawling, national, family-epic Tolstoy sort of novel. Egan’s prose is intensively filtered, reduced (at one point, paragraph to powerpoint?), but Franzen is working on a big, accumulative scale which has a kind of omnivorous quality to it, dragging everything in just as, perhaps, life might do. 

(It is also, maybe, just as Proustian at points: Egan’s as a slicker interpretation, but The Corrections suffering under a greater weight of accumulated, confused past which surface in Proustian episodes/vignettes like the Chip Revenge dinner, Denise’s teenage Armours, etc.) 

This accumulative scale, which accumulates on the essential, ‘conservative’ base of character, is maybe the liberating epiphany of ‘Why Bother?’. For Franzen, the (Wolfe-ian?) Social Novel (‘Address the Culture’, ‘Bring News to the Mainstream’) had become overwhelmingly oppressive to the slow, isolate, big-novel writer in the age of modern ‘hyperkinesis’: television doing a better job of the ‘now’, journalism a better job of ‘truth’, and reality in the modern American sense stranger, more spectacular (very Baudrillard), and more generically assimilable than fiction. His pivot, which allowedThe Corrections (the presiding problem was ‘Why to Write?’), was that by writing about the deeply-rendered individual, the realistically conceived character, the social is inevitably there as well. The private and public don’t have to be reconciled, measured in conscientious, moral, literary reconciliation, but are part and intertwined parcel of the traditional methods: ‘context and character’. Theoretically, a return to Dickens, Balzac – before ‘The Theory Generation’ and rest of assorted modern baggage which peeps through into the novel and is knocked back down satirically (mainly through Chip, and not always successfully). It’s a move backwards (‘the day comes when the truly subversive literature is in some measure conservative’), towards some earlier, ‘redemptive’ (in the process of reading – hence insistent focus on readers in essays) mimetic principle. ‘Expecting a novel to bear the weight of our whole disturbed society – to help solve our contemporary problems – seems to me a peculiarly American delusion. To write sentences of such authenticity that refuge can be taken in them: Isn’t this enough? Isn’t it a lot?’ [Mo Barry-Wilson, MBW]

Post-Class Notes

— The two major ideas first discussed were the general audience and the academy. The general audience, Franzen claims in I’ll Be Doing More of Same, is now fragmented into a series of hyphenations. This is not to say, however, that there are no commonalities between these hyphenations. As Caroline noted in her presentation, it is then possible to create novels and characters that tap into said commonalities. Re: the academy, there are, broadly, two approaches, each originating in different periods. Formerly, the academy itself was the hub of the rebellious. However, the spread of such rebelliousness, relating to the Theory Generation, leads Franzen to suggest that a conservatism in literature (that is, a return in some part to realism after post-modernism) is the new way to rebel and reintroduce the lost ‘opposition’.

Having detailed the defining features of each member of the Lambert family and the resulting implications on Corrections, Caroline drew particular attention to Adam Kelly’s suggestion that there exists a ‘postmodern consciousness […] defined by its detached awareness, even in the moment of action, of being the subject of future narration’, noting that this consciousness creates performativity. I believe this performativity operates on two levels and contributes to the anxiety that Correctionsfrequently refers to and that, in moments, appears to drive Goon Squad. As we have discussed, Chip operates as the figure of the Theory Generation. His heightened self-awareness seems to be exactly the thing that brings about a personal crisis. Having written himself into a screenplay, it’s not a huge leap of the imagination to interpret that Chip understands himself, in some sense, as a character and therefore somebody subject to Kelly’s ‘future narration’. As such, he plays the role he has created for himself. The second level of performativity is social, operating between the characters – all of the characters, even those purely existing as background – in Corrections and draws attention to his anxiety, relating in particular to how other people perceive him. While he is waiting for his parents at LaGuardia, the narrative reveals Chip’s concern with the opinion of his parents, but, equally, the opinion of strangers: he hopes ‘the azure-haired girl was out of earshot’ when he greets his parents (and thereby reveals them as his parents), and becomes very quickly concerned with the ‘burden’ of seeing […] his life and clothes and body through the disappointed eyes of his parents.’ The former level of performativity – relating so closely to former success – in Chip’s case in particular, very likely drives the latter. 

Here, I once again draw attention to the unity of text and the ways in which we can ‘know’ characters, as Brandon noted. We discussed Sasha’s hyperawareness of the redemptive journey she expects to embark on and how this informs her behaviour in Coz’s presence. The relationship between Coz and Sasha contains both of the levels of performativity that Chip exhibits. Sasha, in these sessions, is an author (I have previously argued this, and sections of the following, in an essay). The opening chapter of the novel exists in two times and two places, time and place being another point that Brandon drew attention to. Sasha is at any given moment in Coz’s office and in whichever time and place she stole the object she discusses – the narrative must closely follow her. By operating as such, Sasha is simultaneously anticipating and fulfilling her own ‘future narration’, attempting to work through the past by placing herself back in it with the new knowledge that she’ll have to explain her actions and decisions. She performs, through re-enactment, the previous version of herself, and then performs the redemptive shaping that Coz’s profession requires of her.

The link between Chip and Sasha here is that they each perceive some ‘standard’ against which they must operate, some audience for which to perform. (I wonder now if that could in any way relate to the ‘general audience’ – I’m not sold on this idea, though.) Perhaps for Chip that standard is in part theory, but it is also the gaze of the people around him. For Sasha, this standard is Coz, who must shape Sasha to meet a higher expectation. This interplay between characters, much like the interplay between Enid and Sylvia, indicates a social co-dependency.

Narrative co-dependency is everywherein these texts. There are things that we only learn about a character via somebody else. A simple yet effective example is the provision of physical descriptions. In the Dickensian style of realism so often alluded to in the secondary reading for this week, descriptions are establishing features of the narrative – they exist very much to ‘set the scene’. In both Correctionsand Goon Squad­– such descriptions relate more to the focalised voice at that particular point in the narrative than to the subject of the description. We learn about Sasha’s appearance as part of a ‘litmus test’ for Bennie, and about Alfred’s appearance when Chip re-evaluates his father at the airport. (Truthfully, this makes more narrative sense – a section focalised through Alfred has no real reason to be concerned about his appearance. It’s the encounter between the two that prompts the evaluation.) The co-dependency, and therefore a sense of unity, operates on two levels. We attempt to know characters by examining the ways in which they know each other. 

I realise this is now very long – but a quick point I didn’t make in class regarding historicism vs. ‘personal history’, as appears in the secondary reading, and in relation to a point Brandon raised. Frequent references to 9/11 in the text appear to me to be a reminder of the way in which an event becomes an Event, capital E. I find a reflection of this in the ‘pre-wallet’/’post-wallet’ moment in Sasha’s narrative. Because it must in some way shape her personal history, the action becomes an Event.

Additional info: I thought it might be useful to include the version of the diagram of Alison’s family I would expect in place of the diagram she provides (taken from an essay I previously wrote on Goon Squad) to help make my point on narrative-co-dependency in the text – there are small pieces of information that only make complete sense at the specific intersection between two narratives, rather than purely by virtue of the fact that one narrative exists as part of a novel.

[Rachel Farguson, RF]

—

Rachel’s given a great overview of the class, so I’ll just use this note to pick up a couple of strands of the conversation I found particularly interesting, and to highlight a couple of areas we didn’t quite get onto.

One strand had to do with what I called my opening ‘bullshit’ question – When is/was the Now of ‘American Fiction Now’? In other words, what are the problems of periodisation we encounter in contemporary lit studies? How do we limit or demarcate a literary period that is by its nature still emergent? So we explored this idea that defining ‘now’ is an inevitably historicist enterprise that entails rethinking and refiguring earlier stages in literary history, and particularly what we’ve called, as a kind of shorthand, postmodernism. This is something that was discussed in the secondary reading – it was interesting to me that we talked more about the Kelly essay than the Hungerford – but that we can also see Franzen working through, in a different way,  in ‘More of Same’ and ‘Why Bother’? As Rachel has said, and as we discussed at some length in class, Franzen is preoccupied with what he sees as the declining social capital of the novel at the close of the twentieth century, and with the continued viability of writing socially engaged fiction, either along the lines of the 19th century realist novel, or in the vein of the big postmodern ‘systems’ novels he admired as a student and younger writer. For Franzen, the causes of this decline are, among other things, TV/ saturation of information technology and commercial culture (see also David Foster Wallace’s essay), and the role of identity politics in fragmenting the literary field and marketplace. Both of these causes were, for Franzen, incubated in the academy, and we discussed the at times  antagonistic, at times symbiotic relationship between literary production and universities – a history Mark McGurl sketches here, and which Gunter Leypoldt summarises here. 

I don’t think we explicitly made this connection in class, but this question of historicising the contemporary seems bound up with the question of the place of history in the contemporary novel  – something I’m sure we’ll also discuss next week. I quoted Jameson’s famous line of postmodernism being the age that forgot how to think historically – an epoch defined by a ‘weakening of historicity’, as he also puts it – and we might think more on how  ‘post-postmodernism’ (if we’re going to call it that) might mean a ‘return’ to trying to think historically. We got on to the Egan a little later than I wanted (time’s a goon, right?), but Brandon’s discussion of temporality in the novel and the role of nostalgia seemed, in an appropriately recursive way, to circle back to these originary questions. It also put me in mind of this other great Dames essay on ‘throwback fiction’, his longer history of nostalgia, and this wacky book on the subject. 

I also really enjoyed Brandon’s explanation of the A and B side structure in Goon Squad, which I’d somehow forgotten about when re-reading the novel for class,  and his idea of the novel as a kind of concept album. It got me  thinking about other contemporary novels that have a musical structure/ parallel, and about this broader tendency for ‘Theory Generation’ novelists in particular to see pop music as a kind of aesthetic cousin to the novel: I’m thinking of Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude, which he suggested was structured to resemble a CD box set chronicling the rise and break up of a soul group, or his novel actually about an alt- rock band, You Don’t Love Me Yet. 

(this is a slightly non-linear note…)

Something I found interesting during our discussion of The Corrections  was that we didn’t really talk about what seem to be the ‘big issues’ of the novel: late capitalism, globalisation, big pharma, surveillance etc… and since the class I’ve been asking myself why we didn’t talk about them. I don’t think they’re too difficult for us, so how come we avoided them? Too obvious? Too much like ‘theory’? Or are we just interested in other things? Caroline’s presentation certainly made a good argument for being more interested in character – if this is so, what does this say about Franzen’s attempt to combine the ‘deep’ characterisation of an ‘old-fashioned’ realist novel with some of the theoretical heft and cultural reach of a systems novel (what Rachel Greenwald Smith calls a ‘compromise aesthetics’)?

Two other things we didn’t get to: the reception history of The Corrections and in particular the Oprah entente. I purposefully left this off the reading list, because I didn’t want it to dominate our discussion of the novel, as it sometimes does in a class, and I figured you’d come across it. Anyway, if its new to you, I’d be interested in your thoughts. Second: how does our reading of The Corrections change when read alongside Freedom and Purity (we could ask something similar of Egan too)? [MK]

PRIMARY:

• Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004)
• George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017)

SECONDARY:

• Robert Chodat, “That Horeb, That Kansas: Evolution and the Modernity of Marilynne Robinson”, American Literary History, 28: 2 (Summer 2016), pp. 328–361 *
• Samuel Cohen, After the End of History: American Fiction in the 1990s (Iowa UP, 2009) *
• Philip Coleman and Steve Gronert Ellerhoff (eds.), George Saunders: Critical Essays (2017)
• Alex Engebreston, Understanding Marilynne Robinson
• Amy Hungerford, Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since 1960 (2010) *
• Shannon L. Mariotti and Joseph H. Lane (eds.), A Political Companion to Marilynne Robinson (2016)
• Robinson, What are We Doing Here? (2018)
• Rachel Sykes, “Reading for Quiet in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead novels”, Critique, 58:2 (2017), pp. 108-120 *

Pre-Class Notes

FYI, just seen this in the latest issue of American Literary History – useful on the intersection of the ‘post-secular’ and human rights discourse in Gilead . I’ve also found this very helpful in thinking about Lincoln in the Bardo. [MK]

With Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, I was primarily interested in the role of polyvocality in the text, and its usefulness in discussing the liminal space between the existing and the non-existent; I had encountered polyvocality primarily as a necessary tool taken up by black female writers navigating through different modes of, or rather, boundaries placed upon their identities and the different subjectivities that emerge from issues of race, class, and gender. But Saunders uses multiplicity of voices in a much more literal and formal sense; here the polyphonic text pushes the limit of the novel beyond the traditional boundaries of the narrator, text, and reader, and instead creates a space in which everyone participates in narrating, observing, and interacting with the novel, almost in time, in ways usually only reserved for stage plays. The book thus often betrays its origins as a play, clamoring with voices of confused and observant ghosts, but which allows Saunders to draw out both theatrical narration as well as intimate interior monologues from his speaker/characters. Thompson in Method Reading reasons that the mode in which Saunders writes embodies his ideas about the form of novel as a kind of spectral experience, a “fictional embodiment” , while also reflecting the way in which the ghosts in the novel are able to cohabit one another. The novel anticipates a kind of performative and active reading that forces the reader into a similar fictional inhabitation, navigating through the purgatory of the ghosts, implicated in the plot, particularly when the perspective turns into a first-person plural toward the climax. The idea of dismantling the novel’s form and its own fictional fourth wall has been a keen experiment for decades now, but I appreciated Saunders’ approach, perhaps more so for its capacity to require empathy for multitudinous voices/characters. 

Robinson’s Gilead, on the other hand, is an epistolary domestic novel; as Understanding Marilynne Robinson partly observes, the action is mostly interior, the pace only as fast as the dying pastor’s musings, and as honest or dishonest as a father’s sermon to his child might be. As someone who writes creative prose mostly in the first and second person, I found it primarily interesting to engage in the usefulness of the form of a letter/diary to young son to follow, in lieu of a conventional plot or chronological series of events, an interior train of thought and belief; It was thus refreshing to read Hungerford’s claim that “the discourse of reconciliation . . . is defined by second person address”; the second-person address gains momentum, I think, because it largely hinges on the narrator/writer’s faith that it will reach the addressee; somewhat hopeless, somewhat ungrounded, much in the same way that Ames upholds his belief, that he “must tell his congregation ‘even if no one listened or understood.’” The approach Robinson took, then, seemed apt for both its attempt to create a generational dialogue and to champion the utterly American, “vague” yet staunch Eisenhower-faith in the value of religion. [JK]

–

In an essay about the effect of polyphony in George Saunders’ short stories, Robert Wilson remarks:

‘Saunders argues that by losing oneself in a text and giving ear to the voices of the characters, one may find on’s capacity for compassion deepend: while most satire works by seeing others as “assholes,” fictions, says Saunders, “works on the assumption that They Are Us, on a Different Day.”’
(Wilson, “Microdialogues and Polyphony in ‘Victory Lap’, in Coleman and Ellerhoff (eds.), George Saunders: Critical Essays (2017), 222.)

Following Lucas Thompson’s “Method Reading”, that configuration might more aptly become: We are Them, at least for a Day. In other words, I agree with Thompson’s assessment of performative in Lincoln in the Bardo and, to an extent, the performativity of the reading-act.

However, in light of the quote from Wilson (above), I want to propose one slight addition, or qualification, to Thompson’s suggestion that method reading produces the possibility of greater self-knowledge, in some senses self-actualization. Maybe more than the transformative, literally (or literary?) transportative power of self-knowledge, I think that Saunders’ novel is about the restorative effect of compassion. In that pre-climactic scene of mass l’occupation of the president, the whole graveyard corporeally cohabitates, some of them even wilfully changing the shape of their very (spectral) bodies to accommodate his presence.** The experience is tripartite: felt (the ghosts experience each other’s feelings), formal (the novel’s polyphony is intensified as pronouns are confused and narrations exchanged), and performative (as Thompson explains, the reader is drawn into imaginative identification). How much more literal a performance of empathy could their be?

We may extrapolate, then, that the source of the self-knowledge Thompson identifies as the final hurdle for the ghost’s release from purgatory (or, the Bardo, to use Saunder’s carefully chosen non-Christian term), is actually in the practice of compassion. For them, bodily and literarily literal; for the readers, in the performative act of reading.

If, for Saunders, the performance exists in the reading-act, for Robinson, in Gilead, the performance exists instead in the act of writing. Arguably akin to the concept of compassion (albeit likely encompassing a larger prerogative), Robinson’s conception of performance is bound closely to the experience of belief. I say this in light of Amy Hungerford’s chapter on belief in Robinson’s novels, wherein she suggests that … ‘the modern Christian practitioner in America … cannot live religiously without on occasion trying to articulate that knowledge… Articulating the knowledge is part of the practice.’ (Hungerford, “The Literary Practice of Belief,” in Postmodern Belief (2010), 112.)

In Gilead, I suggest, the insinuation is that the narrating Reverend Ames is, in fact, performing his belief in the very practice of writing about it in this letter to his son. I’m straying into speech-act theory here; the act of writing is the act of faith. In fact, Ames’ composition of this novel-length letter echoes strongly his nighttime composition of the many sermons he preached during his dark and lonely years, a period that Robinson references regularly, reinforcing his feats of devotion. Conversely, it is only when the other Reverend Ames, our narrator’s father, stops writing sermons, that is stops demonstrating his faith, that he becomes apostate, as if his only defense against his eldest son’s cosmpolitan, European atheism were the language with which he could speak his belief.

Just as Saunders uses Lincoln in the Bardo to ask us to think about what (active) position we occupy as readers, it therefore appears that Robinson is asking us to reflect on what she – or even we – might achieve by writing. That is, a demonstration of belief. In Gilead, it is Ames’ needed affirmation of belief in an omniscient God (as he moves towards death and away from his son and the wildly different world the latter will inhabit). Nevertheless, I think we might read in other writerly performances the demonstration of other, more secular, beliefs as well.

** I am out of space, but I would like to posit a parallel between the ghosts inhabiting eachother’s (spectral) bodies and the concurrence of the textual bodies of Gilead and Home, which actually directly reproduces sections of the former’s dialogue and narrative. In this way, we can start to look at the function of compassion in Robinson’s work as well, particularly as it might relate to the corporeally-grounded act of the sacrament, of partaking of another’s body, noting that Thompson also observes Saunders’ empathizing to have a sacramental quality.

[MS]

—

The first note I made on Lincoln in the Bardosimply reads ‘collaborative’. The obvious rapport between vollman and bevins iii in the opening chapter seems well-established, yet there is a sense that the ability of these narrators to enhance one another’s narratives is set against a sort of “working through” of their individual experiences. They rely on each other to remain grounded, strange though it may seem for two souls in purgatory to wish to remain grounded when a whole chapter is dedicated to the speed at which younger souls may move on. I note this initial collaboration only to note the unwinding of it that follows in as early as the third chapter, even if this unwinding is not, by this point, overt. The various descriptions of spun sugar at Lincoln’s reception are very close to one another, referring either to stars and stripes or to Lady Liberty. The overlapping patriotism of the descriptions provided allow the grandeur of the evening that each narrative (each source? each text?) purports to describe to temporarily mask the inconsistencies. It is not until Chapter V that it becomes completely obvious that these accounts are outright contradictory, which serves to cast doubt on the validity of any account presented. Hari Kunzru’s review of the text in The Guardian points to Saunders attempting ‘to show that observers can be unreliable […] and that even such questions as whether the moon shone or not on a particular night can be distorted by memory.’ However, this doubt appears to me not so much an issue of the ‘unreliable narrator’ as much as it draws attention to the fact that each narrator believes their account to be true, distorted though it may be. This set up makes for a fantastic read. The one thing I haven’t been able to get over in the novel, though, is my inability to interpret anybody who isn’t in the crypt as a character. I’m not sure if this is because I believe the rest of the voices to be purely narrators, fictionalised or not, or because of the historical element of the text. Hopefully I’ll have made some headway with this dilemma by Monday!

Kunzru also describes Lincoln in the Bardoas Victorian Gothic, but it is Gilead that felt oddly Gothic to me – its representation of time and memory is uncanny. I think this is in part due to the continuous revisiting and enhancing of the same memories and in part due to the fact that John is not only reminding some assumed version of his son of memories that the two of them share, but imparting his own memories to a person who did not experience them alongside him. For John’s son, reading this letter will not be a recall of a past but an imagination taking place in the present; something familiar will become something that cannot be fully comprehended and fully experienced. (Thinking in the mode of the uncanny I referred then to John’s memories as homely – I’m not sure this is completely true, and so I’ve settled on ‘familiar’ for now.) In this way Gilead creates the same sense of the unattainable truth as we find in Lincoln in the Bardo.  [RF]

———-

As Spencer Morrison relates, Gilead functions as a “proleptic Bildungsroman” which “leaves that maturation [his son] to be imagined, probing instead its conditions of possibility” (461). With Ames’ direct paternal role permanently deferred, the novel develops around Ames as he contemplates how he can engage with this unrealizable future, which takes the form of an extended epistolary narrative addressed to his son. Yet, the most interesting thing about his letter is its scope; instead of projecting any clear directive or recommendation to his son–which might better serve as a “responsibility to protect” his son from the “wilderness” referred to on page 135 of Gilead–Ames leave a series of loose stories that deal mainly with Ames’ self-reflection (Morrison 462).  It is at this point of self-reflection I think Morrison’s discussion intersects with Rachael Sykes in an important way; namely, why in the face of not being able to participate in his son’s life does Ames forgo a more action oriented speech (to “shout,” per say), opting for the “quiet” introspective and passive model Sykes thinks is indicative of the novel’s style. What this model inevitably leaves for his son is a sense of the world that is “radically limited (Robinson 163).” An “epistemological uncertainty” in both religious and secular claims which Morrison thinks is symptomatic of the post-secular age in Gilead (459). Albeit recording a sense of how the child’s father might have thought, which I find to be the beauty of the novel (the only way the son might actually capture his father’s essence), the quiet’s inaction excludes the main “actions” of the novel: the racial politics in the town, as well as understanding Ames’ grandfather’s actions–the “political quietism […] rarely expresses discomfort at the social, economic, and racial inequality he witnesses,” an analysis I think that carefully conjoins quiet with quietism (Sykes 116). It is that striking dilemma within this novel which upholds the beauty of a private hermeneutic of various, isolated events while simultaneously showing the inability to interpret the most important afflictions of race in America. In that sense, the “protection” Ames’ provides becomes sadly synonymous with suppression. I also mentioned the role of the grandfather, mainly because I think he provides the counterpart to Ames. The grandfather is the unquiet character who’s act of will left the life of contemplation, and perhaps this is the reason Ames is so unable to interpret him (I still need to think more on this). At least in terms of the American “now,” Gilead brings forth the quiet and quietism, specifically its effect on the human spirit (contrary to the “white noise” of media consumption writers have mentioned to be indicative of the age), as an important topic to discuss in literature for the 21st century. 

Although I have little to say about this idea now, I will mention it nonetheless, and I will hopefully develop the idea further over the next few days: Both these novels occur in times very far from the present, but both were written contemporaneously, and we read them in the present. I guess the question goes: in what ways is this past more present than we think? Nostalgia comes to mind?

For Saunders I am sure many people will write and discuss the cemetery chapters, but I’m particularly interested in the citational chapters; mainly because it’s such an original style. I think Saunders problematizes historical writing much to his own advantage. In Chapter V we are presented with the contradictory accounts of the moon, which is to say that history itself becomes interpretative and opens the floodgates for the imagination Saunders adds to his citational excavation. It is similar in ways to the imaginative liberty that Egan takes with developing a literature based on a sympathy towards the Other—to the Sashas, Dollys, and Jules of the world. [BJS]

---

Lincoln in the Bardo seems one of the strangest novels I’ve read in significant while – and that stands as a distinct compliment. Franzen wrote that Saunders ‘makes the all-but-impossible look effortless’, and indeed one of the most impressive aspects for me was how easily the novel read: how fast, compelling and compassionate the style while that style is itself achieving remarkable things. The chapters which play out as melange of historical quotations were, often, the most moving of the lot – and what does it say to have a writer, and one so often lauded for his linguistic idiosyncrasy, his very individual verbal brio, who achieves such spell of emotion in words which are not his own?  

It interrogates, in part, the nature of composition. The quotations become Saunders’ own, ‘own’ in the chapter-by-chapter, whole-story sense, by the nature of his selection and combination of the material. In a sense, it’s an almost classic modernist collage aesthetic, particularly in combination with those frenzied, half-parodic polyphonies we get in the other chapters – the more chaotic of which are very reminiscent of the ‘Circe’ episode in Ulysses (the dramatic form in/as the novel, the similar style of humour, the similar emphasis on dialect / vocal oddities). But in the utter literalism of that collaging – not a word changed, and the references directly annotated in good academic fashion – it’s a very bold, naked take on that method. It draws attention to the author as, perhaps, a unifying temperament / compassion rather than a unifying pen / keyboard. His importance to the text is in how he pieces together the many contingent stories and possibilities that history may give us. 

There are inevitably many perspectives on any event of such drama/public consciousness as Willie Lincoln’s death, many accounts of many different tones – these are the materials from which any writer of historical fiction will construct their own narrative. In doing so, they’re choosing an individual ideological perspective, they’re deciding – by the very nature of what they use – a possible meaning of that history out of an almost infinite variety. It is, in a sense, an important ethical question, if only because this idea of selection, with exclusion as the ideological flip-side, is a necessity of fiction. The writer-as-god, as tyrant-over-history, exploiter of life/character, etc. The bravery or intrigue of Saunder’s use of all these direct quotations is that he lays this process open. He shows the disjuncts of the possible material out there, and what the writer of historical fiction has to choose between: Lincoln was ugly/sad-looking/handsome, the moon was shining/obscured/mysterious, there was/wasn’t a storm, etc. Saunders highlights the machinery of selection, he highlights the potentially monopolising, invariably excluding ways in which we read history. This, I think, is very important. All these details build a perspective of things which can easily become enshrined as a reality of things. That Lincoln was ugly/nobly-morose here is a narrative choice which is invariably part of other, wider narratives: e.g. politically, the civil war was good/bad; in relation to Willie’s death, life is/isn’t tragic. 

Fiction’s ethical importance lies partly, perhaps, in its ability to be subtle – to be discriminating in an open-minded, rangingly sympathetic, constantly sensitive way. It has to take account of the mass of narrative possibilities, and in building its own it has the ability to do so in more or less crude ways. The more sensitive, the more compassionate, the more human, the deeper the ideological perspective. Differences of sensitivity are the differences, in part, between cant and good fiction. By highlighting, in experimental, naked fashion, this process, and not flattening out the dissonances (he quotes those saying Lincoln was ugly and sad and noble and handsome), Saunders in part transplants this necessity of choice and measurement upon the reader, and shows them the game of composition that any story of history must inevitably be.  [MBW]

—–

I am very interested in Robinson’s assertion of the novel providing and working from an alternative ‘data’, in opposition to Darwinism’s conception of kinship, in order to reassert human sympathy (Chodat). I found both Lincoln in the Bardo and Gilead to be strangely disorientating to read, I think predominantly because they make such us of the notions of transcendence and the universality of human experience, and their depiction of faith in (or in Saunders’ case the actual depiction of) the human soul as separate from the material body. It is clear in Gilead that for Robinson the notion of the soul is intrinsically linked to an idealist metaphysics by which knowledge through literature, and literary language, of the soul enables glimpses of a greater unity, of the nature of reality. Seeing the moon, John Ames reflects:

‘Light within light. It seems like a metaphor for something. [. . .]

                  It seems to me to be a metaphor for the human soul, the singular light within the great general light of existence. Or it seems like poetry within language.’ (p.136)

I think that Lucas Thompson’s theory of ‘Method Reading’, and his reading of Lincoln, is extremely relevant to my own experience of reading Gilead. As an atheist who tends to shy away from overtly theological texts, I was initially alienated by the character of Ames and by such unashamedly devout language. Yet being immersed in Ames’s thoughts forces the reader to take such musings at his quiet pace, and in relation to a web of human relationships which demand emotional understanding. The address to the son who takes so little a part in the novel imbues the text with a tone of love, and the knowledge of certain loss and separation. Once the reader begins to understand this tone, the sermonic forms of allegory, typology and metaphor, which link everyday experience back to a Christian god, become something quite comprehensible:

‘your mother could not love you more of take greater pride in you. She has watched every moment of your life, almost, and she loves you as God does, to the marrow of your bones. So that is the honouring of the child. You see how it is godlike to love the being of someone. Your existence is a delight to us.’ (p.155)

I admire the prioritising of ‘compassionate imagination’ over the question of what ‘being’ exactly entails, that ‘you can assert the existence of something – Being – having not the slightest notion of what it is’ (p. 203).

It perhaps goes without saying that I found parts of Lincoln in the Bardo incredibly poignant – almost agonising to read. But I suspect that the value of this awareness of Lincoln’s pain comes particularly in the final incursion into his mind by roger bevens iii and hans vollman, in which the two spirits speak Lincoln’s thoughts on suffering and premature death:

‘Did the thing merit it. Merit the killing. On the surface it was a technicality (mere Union) but seen deeper, it was something more. How should men live? How could men live? […]               roger bevins iii’ (p. 307)

The at-times bizarre world of the graveyard bardo Saunders creates becomes a frame in which the loss of Willie comes to represent by synecdoche the sons of America lost in the Civil War. As with Robinson’s tendency towards metaphor, this unashamed use of a grand narrative links moral decision making to the experience of individual love and loss, through the ability of the human mind to imaginatively generalise this pain. The sharing of bodies and minds allows the chaotic heteroglossia of the graveyard to be crystallized into one illustration of human pain in an image resembling the pieta. [Rhona Jamieson, RJ]

Post-Class Notes

– Gilead

This week, our discussion started with the question of time. Whereas last week, both Franzen and Egan’s texts were clearly rooted in contemporary concerns, Robinson and Saunders are both dealing with (a fictionalised version of) the past. 

However, as Michael pointed out in his presentation, it seems as if Gileadcould have been written at any point in time. More specifically, he argued, drawing on James Wood’s New Yorker review,Gileadis a novel that exists “outside of time”. To support this argument, Michael pointed out that there are almost no dates mentioned to situate the novel, apart from the year our narrator was born (‘I, John Ames, was born in the Year of Our Lord 1880 in the state of Kansas’, Robinson p. 10).

Simultaneously, political events that would date the novel remain on the periphery. This moved our discussion to political quietism in the novel, drawing on Sykes’ essay. Michael rightly pointed out that in Gilead, questions of race, slavery, and violence are incorporated only in their absence. Although Ames himself acknowledges that ‘to do nothing is to do great harm,’ he remains passive. As Sykes argues, he ‘rarely expresses discomfort at the social, economic, and racial inequality he witnesses’ (Sykes, p. 116). There are several examples of this – for one, Ames describes the arson that drove away Gilead’s black community as ‘only a small fire’ with ‘very little damage’ (Robinson p. 171). However, Michael argued (drawing on William Deresiewicz) that when Jack is finally forced to leave Gilead, Robinson is offering a ‘damning indictment of Gilead’s – and, by implication, America’s – moral decline’ (Deresiewicz, p. 28). For a quiet novel, this speaks volumes.

As well as the political and moral failings of Ames, we spoke about the role – and failure – of language in the novel. Michael helpfully drew our attention to the section in which Ames is ‘thinking about the word “just.” […] There is something real signified by that word “just” that proper language won’t acknowledge.’ (Robinson p. 32). Our discussion centred on this tension: Ames wants to describe something as “just”, but using that word doesn’t do it justice. In other words, we need language to perform our faith, but language is insufficient to express it. However, as Rachel rightly pointed out, language is crucial – in fact, religion islanguage, and without it, you can’t express it. Ames’ mediation on the failure (or limits) of language led me to think of theBiblical Tower of Babel, and the fall of language. For a character so spiritual, and a writer so rooted in Christianity, I believe this connection is extremely important.

In fact, the whole novel is, I would argue, intimately interwoven with Ames’ (and thereby Robinson’s) attempt to teach us how to see the world through Ames’ eyes: with the beauty of his faith. As Thompson suggests in a footnote of his essay on “Method Reading”: ‘let the object or the work of your interest teach you how to consider it’ (Thompson, p. 320, footnote 34. Reference to Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage(Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984), p. 10). In other words, let the novel teach you how to read it. 

Lincoln in the Bardo

From the quiet narrative voice of Ames’ solitary epistolary, we moved onto the cacophony of Lincoln in the Bardo. In her pre-class note, Jane mentioned the concept of polyvocality– something which proliferates throughout Saunders’ novel. 

As readers, we must adjust to the multiplicity of narrators in Saunders’ ghost chapters, as well as a multitude of overlapping, and often contradicting, “historical” sources. Seemingly small details (Did the moon shine? Was Lincoln’s hair black or grey? Was he handsome?) suddenly become very important, and are debated at great length in the novel (and in our class). What this polyvocality shows us is that all history is fiction; that there’s a polyphony to history; and that polyphony is a kind of history in itself. Thus, Saunders’ historical chapters become not only a postmodernist pastiche, but also a commentary on what we deem “historical”.

Soon, however, our discussion moved to the ghosts, and the liminal spaces they occupy. In her presentation, Mehvish pointed out that the ghosts don’t believe they are dead – in fact they avoid the word entirely, using euphemisms such as “sick box” (coffin) or “the previous place” (life before death). Rather than occupying a space in the world, they inhabit a space in-between. As Jane perceptively noted: in the Bardo, liminality becomes the default state of being – and these characters only ever exist in a liminal space.

(A short aside: I found it strange (and interesting) that Saunders chose the Bardo, the relatively unknown Tibetan version of limbo, as the setting for his novel, rather than leaning on the traditional Biblical purgatory figured in the tradition of Dante and Milton. I would be interested in finding more examples where authors draw on alternative spiritual or mythological liminal spaces in their writing.)

Mehvish also called attention to Heidegger’s theory of the “meta-sign”: the ghosts (or people, characters, signs) only exist in relationship to each other. We frequently see that they finish each other’s sentences; and we have the sense that the only thing getting them through their time in the Bardo is each other. Here, Mo drew a comparison to Sartre’s No Exit: while his conclusion is that “Hell is other people”, in the Bardo, the only thing that keeps the ghosts going is exactly other people.

Something I really wanted to explore, but didn’t get to flesh out (no pun intended), is the idea of futurity in both novels. For example, the epistolary is always an address to an imagined future. In Gilead, Morrison argues that the son’s ‘unimaginable future’ is what gives the book narrative energy. Rather than following the traditional pattern of the Bildungsroman, in which we follow the son to maturity, in Morrison’s ‘proleptic Bildungsroman’ the maturation is left ‘to be imagined, probing instead its conditions of possibility.’ (Morrison, p. 461).

Bringing the two texts together

In Ames’ letter, writing becomes a place where the past, present, and future meet. Similarly, asMehvish pointed out in her presentation, the “bodies” of the ghosts become sites where the past, present and future can exist simultaneously. While reading, I noticed that during the “matter-lightblooming phenomenon”, we see the ghost’s past, present, and future selves all at once. To me, this indicates a kind of spectral potentiality. 

I was similarly drawn to the potentiality of ‘l’occupation’ in Lincoln and the Bardo: here, the ghosts can simultaneously occupy and be occupied (by the other ghosts) – an experience which is not dissimilar to becoming occupied with other people’s ideas through the act of reading.

In Thompson’s “Method Reading” essay, he presents the idea that we “project” ourselves onto the characters we’re reading, and we emerge transformed: ‘the reader does not merely identify with, develop sympathies for, or even recognize herself in a fictional character, but actually performs assomeone else’ (Thompson, p. 295). 

For Robinson’s Ames, writing is a solitary pursuit (something which he does alone in his room) – however, it is also in the process of writing his letter that he feels he has been ‘drawn back into this world’. In other words, writing offers him some connection to the world. This reminded me of Thompson’s argument that‘the liberating appeal of literature’ is that it ‘promises a temporary release from the solitude of the self’ (Thompson, p. 298).

When looking at Lincoln in the Bardo, however, strange things happen when the ghosts occupy each other – especially on a linguistic level. For example, when bevins iii and vollman both inhabit Lincoln simultaneously (see Saunders p. 171-176), they initially speak ‘as coherent selves who are momentarily occupying another “I”’; but later, ‘the objective “he” slips into a subjective “we”’ (Thompson, p. 301). 

I was particularly struck by Thompson’s idea that in the act of reading this section, ‘there are in fact four of us inhabiting one body. Five, if you also count Saunders. Infinitely more, if you count all the other readers who have made and will make their way through the scene’ (Thompson, p. 301-302). 

It’s a trippy image, definitely – but strangely compelling, an almost utopian ideal of the postmodern reading experience, in which the lone, solitary reader (such as Robinson’s John Ames) becomes part of a network of readers – a polyvocality of voices. “Reading” each other in this way offers a window of connection. As the ghost of Havens says, as rides inside Lincoln towards the end of the novel: “He was an open book. An openingbook.” (Saunders, p. 312)

A joint reading of Saunders and Robinson, to me, suggests that there is a certain potentiality inherent the act of reading and writing – but it can only be achieved by identifying with other people (characters, ghosts, or future selves).  [Caroline Koktvedgaard, CK]

—

Caroline has given a wonderful summary of our ‘polyvocal’ though never cacophonous discussion on Monday. I’ll just share a couple further thoughts. 

I was a little nervous about pairing these texts because, on the face of it, they seem so different: it would be easy to think of Lincoln as the stylistically ‘experimental’ novel and of Gilead as simply ‘conservative’. But we discussed how both novels share a preoccupation with voice that complicates this. They’re both, at a formal level, interested in the texture or even architecture of narrative voice (I realise that I’m thinking about architecture because of the references in Gilead to George Herbert’s wonderful poetry),  and with the the kinds of intimacy that voice can create (something the Thompson essay explored). Saunders on voice:

‘The prime quality of literary prose – that is, the thing it does better than any other form (movies, songs, sculpture, tweets, television, you name it) – is voice. A great writer mimicking, on the page, the dynamic energy of human thought is about as close as we can get to modelling pure empathy’. 

Caroline mentions the place of futurity in historical fiction,  and this is something I’ve also been wondering about: I’m thinking back also to The Corrections and to Enid, for whom life begins at 75, or the intersecting dystopian futurity and 70s nostalgia in Goon Squad. What kinds of future are imaginable in the present, in the novel today? 

Finally, one thing I brought up near the end of class, and which I’ve been thinking more about since – partly because I’m trying to write something about the idea of the ‘Obama Novel’ – is the concept of presidentialism and Lincoln’s role in the novel. We touched on how we might think of the bardo as a kind of metaphor for or image of the body politic, and that the mass occupation of Lincoln at the end is the final manifestation of this. One thing these novel teach us (to return to the great Cavell quote), or at least try to engage us in, is thinking about how to cultivate certain kinds of attachments within the novel-space – to ‘identify’ with characters, or to ’embody’, in Thompson’s terms, views that aren’t our own – and that this training in attachment has a civic dimension and application. And Saunders in particular seems interested in how we already do a version of this ‘inhabiting’ in public life through the symbolic figure of the president. It’s interesting in this regard to read the novel alongside Saunders’ New Yorker piece about the 2016 election. [MK]

PRIMARY:

• Dinaw Mengestu, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007)
• Benjamin Markovits, You Don’t Have To Live Like This (2015)

SECONDARY:

• Benjamin Markovits, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: how to write about race in the US”, Guardian, August 1, 2015 [here] *
• Peter Moskovitz, How to Kill a City (2018)
• James Peacock, Brooklyn Fictions: The Contemporary Urban Community in a Global Age (2015)
• Pieter Vermeulen, “Reading alongside the market: affect and mobility in contemporary American migrant fiction”, Textual Practice, 29:2 (2015), pp.  273-293.
• Aliki Varvogli, “Urban Mobility and Race: Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears and Teju Cole’s Open City“, Studies in American Fiction, 44:2 (Fall 2017), pp. 235-257

Pre-Class Notes

—

I want to conceptualise this week’s novels in terms of momentum and inertia. Particularly in Markovits’ You Don’t Have to Live Like This, I have been observing a sort of syncopation between the narrator’s motionlessness and the obvious, ultimately entropic, speed of the gentrification that is actively taking place around him. I should say actively ‘being generated’, but I do want to emphasise Marny’s peculiar inability to perceive the New Jamestown project as a specific output of his participation. I refer here to that distancing tactic he calls upon in almost every description. That is, inserting the phrase ‘one of those’before detailing a specific scene, as if willing it to become more general, less implicating; ‘one of those gated roads’, ‘one of those guys who thinks, they were the best four years of my life’, ‘one of those crazy guys who isn’t meant to be alone’. Even as he describes Robert James as having the face of ‘one of those statues’, he adds ‘there was something impersonal about it’ (Markovits, You Don’t Have to Live Like This, 6); thus we read the key to that crutch, ‘one of those’.

Of course, that contrast between character and context is evident in The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears as well. Vermeulen remarks on the juxtaposition of Sepha’s stasis and the quick renovation of Judith’s house, although this dynamic rather marks his exclusion from potentiality rather than the somewhat condemnable obfuscation of responsibility that Marny’s inertia indicates. (Vermeulen, ‘Reading alongside the market’) I am very interested in the charge of self-absorption, wilful ignorance, that I think Markovits is levelling against Marny; it exists at the level of style as well as plot and takes on a deeply ironic shade when we remember Marny’s early complaint that ‘…there should be a better test of who I am than middle-class American life’ (Markovits, You Don’t Have to Live Like This, 4). I need hardly explain that Marny’s greatest test has been the re-creation of that middle class life.

Taken in conjuction with the deliberately distancing narrative style described above, Marny’s inability – or unwillingness – to act throughout the novel, can be taken as the site of that accusation. He bears witness to two echoing confrontations (Clarence and Michael, Nolan and Tony), and both times he is left standing passively on the sidelines, living out the generic observational position he has narrated for himself. In fact, during the fight between Nolan and Tony, he ‘sat on [his] bed fighting a strong sense of unreality’ (Markovits, YDHtLLT, 297). Much is already made in the novel of his non-intervention and its symbolism, but I also want to point out the chilling implication of the word ‘unreality’ and the following reverie about highway driving; Marny cannot recognise the consequences of his (in)action and his participation in the New Jamestown project, even as they brawl in his living room. In some ways, I see Markovits’ charge against Marny in a very similar light to Robinson’s implicit criticism of John Ames’ failure to help Jack Boughton in Gilead; they have both abdicated their responsibilities to the world in favour of a fabricated internal life.

At the same time, I think this inertia is closely bound to the theme of repetition throughout the novel. Marny complains early on about people who ‘run out of their own thoughts and phrases and have to borrow material from other sources’ (Markovits, YDHtLLT, 65 – 66); he criticises Nolan for it, and we observe Robert James committing the same crime when he says to an interviewer, ‘The idea behind the whole place… is that we wanted to take a virtual community and make it real’. (Markovtis, YDHtLLT, 154). Nevertheless, Markovits has done exactly that in sourcing one of the most grating lines of the novel (perhaps more than one); in his 2015 Guardian article, he attributes ‘salt in a pepper pot’ to a 12-year-old friend from Junior High. But even this kid, as Markovits succinctly points out ‘must have heard it somewhere’ (Markovits, ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’, 2015). Now, the sound bite borrowings within You Don’t Have to Live Like This become a sort of inheritance of ideological hand-me-downs from the real world. And the stasis that Marny is creating from the language that we now know he too has borrowed can be fully recognised for its sinister self-interest. [MS]

—

There is no way to talk around race when it comes to gentrification; both You Don’t Have to Live Like This and The Beautiful Things Heaven Bears thus build up the tension between communities and characters of different races throughout the process of gentrification, and culminates in racial conflict. While they wildly differ in their approach—written from the perspective of the gentrifier and the gentrified, one written in a macro-scale scandal in Detroit around a widely publicized contemporary event, the other within a small radius of an obscure neighborhood—they both delineate, on an individual level, interracial relationships that, in a seemingly eventual/inevitable manner, fall apart; and on a larger scale, the racial divide in urban space. Gentrification models market themselves as reinvestment and creation of diversity and dynamism, but in fact turns cities and neighborhoods into another cog in the capitalist wheel that builds capital upon capital; eviction, alienation of people of color, and skyrocketing rent results in (often black) population decline, and solidifies the segregation of urban space drawn along invisible but marked lines of race and class. In The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, the stark contrast between Judith’s “shining big manor” and Naomi’s observation that Stephanos’ store obviously doesn’t carry honey foreshadow the ultimate incompatibility of the two.

Both novels further depict how each protagonist might be implicated in their lack of action. Stephanos, despite being an Ethiopian immigrant who fled the Red terror, appears unambitious and immobile in America, slipping into the role of helplessness, remaining in space he contends is “entirely his own” (228)—despite its being far from it. On the other hand, it was remarkable the degree to which Marnier embodies the nearly necessary carelessness of gentrifiers (at the expense of the very communities they seek to “improve”), and middle-class WASP defensiveness in the face of the harm he perpetuates with his choices. As Professor Kalisch pointed out, he distances himself from responsibility and claims neutrality to avoid accountability (“I don’t want to take sides here” (329) “I don’t know what I did”. (370)) The difference for the two lies in their access to mobility. Stephanos constantly faces fear of eviction, yet simultaneously is confined to stagnancy in an increasingly alienating neighborhood, while Marnier and his Old Boys Club easily flee the polemic, riotous conflict raging in Detroit to rebuild their lives in another form of middle-class comfort. 

This is partly due to the fact that gentrification is, as Moskovitz points out in How to Kill a City, abetted by civil and public institutions that “favor the creation of wealth over the creation of communities.” (p. 23) I Don’t Have to Live Like This fictionalizes the gentrification of Detroit amidst the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, which benefited large banks and investment firms who were safely bailed out by the government by the end of the year, while hundreds of thousands lost their homes as the economic bubble resulting from “clever real-estate” schemes burst into one of America’s worst depressions. 

It is difficult to write about race in America, precisely because the task requires an honesty that will cause sensitive reaction, discomfort, discrepant interpretations. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: How to Write about Race in America Markovitz argues that “fiction . . . should offer the freedom to tackle these subjects”, despite the perhaps inevitable guilt that follows. He acknowledges that in You Don’t Have to Live Like This, the “narrator is supposed to be a little off about race”; initially enraging, but ultimately a depiction true to modern-day America. [JK]

—

I have hit backspace so many times on this note that I’m surprised it eventually got written.

Time – is my favourite question to look at in any literary text I read, and I noticed that in The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, Stephanos runs only on his individual clock. He opens and closes his store when he feels like it, tries to avoid the rush hour of customers, and is basically intent on being the most underperforming black man in America. It doesn’t bother him much that his profits are abysmal and that he’s being evicted. His only wish is to lead a quiet life and read books all day. His individualism comes to him at a high price, which is where the fissure between the idea of America and its reality is most visible. As a black man, his subjectivity is already hyphenised – which means that agency can only be available to him conditionally.

Because Stephanos is not an African-American but an African immigrant from Ethiopia (which was never colonised by a European nation-state), one could say that the racialization of his subjectivity begins only when he moves to America. Without the shared history of slavery, he’s unable to relate very closely with the African-Americans. In Ethiopia, he had belonged to a somewhat wealthy family that lived an easy life before the emperor was deposed. However, wealth wouldn’t make living in America easier for him (as he observes in the case of Kenneth). Perhaps his inability to reconcile himself with his new reality betrays a struggle to hold on to his former truth, his pre-coup, pre-racial identity.  His father’s cufflinks, the “name-the-coup” game, and his outdated map of Africa aren’t just relics – they are talismans which allow him to board the nostalgia train indefinitely. He looks at his life in America as a “poorly-constructed substitute” for the one he lived back in Ethiopia.

Mengestu’s sketches in his D.C. a critique of the idea of the cosmopolitan capital as a site of convergence. According to Paul Gilroy, “methodical cultivation of a degree of estrangement from one’s own culture and history, an exposure to otherness…might qualify as essential to a cosmopolitan commitment (After Empire: Multicultural or Postcolonial Melancholia 67).” However, cosmopolitan capitals are structured in such a way that they do very little to promote a cosmopolitan commitment in their inhabitants. In Mengestu’s experience (and mine), the “exposure to otherness” offered by cosmopolitan capitals is so fleeting that it offers very little time or incentive for interaction or understanding (Everyone’s trying to get somewhere, quickly). What such an exposure mostly achieves is an unabashed assertion of the self through one’s own culture and history, and a further divergence from the other. [Mehvish Siddiqui, MS]

–– 

This week, I want to discuss the role of the body in the novels we have read so far – specifically the sexualisation of the female body and the black body, especially when they intersect.

In You Don’t Have To Live Like This, I noticed several disturbing instances where Marny’s descriptions of women seemed to break them down into their composite parts – like slabs of meat. 

For example, when Marny meets Clay Greene’s wife, Helen, she is described as ‘a very tall, handsome, likable, not at all graceful woman,’ (Makovits, p. 74). When Beatrice comes in, Marny observes as the ‘two big, good-looking women embraced, leaning over each other.’ (Markovits, p. 75). Even Beatrice, whom Marny purports to be in love with, is the object of his removed physical descriptions: when they are lying in bed together at Bill Russo’s lake house party, Marny refers to her as a ‘big warm female animal’, the thought of which gives him an erection (Markovits, p. 83).

Like Chip and Gary Lambert in The Corrections, Marny is plagued by fantasies about these women.  However, as he himself remarks, these intensely sexualised fantasies have very little to do with his interactions with the women he’s around: ‘this feeling of being in love had so little to do with my actual relations with her, with our friendship, which was real enough.’ (Markovits, p. 43)

Walter, in a way, is the polar opposite to Marny. He is, in one way, the character to is most reminiscent of Franzen’s Chip Lambert, in that they both have affairs with underage students. However, Walter’s approach to the affair is very different to Chip’s, more tender, less gross. In fact, he won’t even admit what kind of sexual acts he has committed with his underage girlfriend, Susie – instead he just says “I know her intimately.” (Markovits, p. 95) and when Beatrice presses him further, he says “I don’t like thinking about any of this the way you describe it.” (Markovits, p. 95)

However, the worst descriptions are those of Gloria, the beautiful black art teacher that Marny first meets at the lake house party: 

‘She was a ripe-colored black woman, almost eggplant-colored. Her lips were painted some glossy shade that made them look freshly licked. In her summer dress she stood the way a man stands in jeans – I could see her plump strong legs under the material. She was short, too, and looked about fifteen year sold.’ (Markovits, p. 72-73)

Here, Marny’s gaze lingers on Gloria, reducing her to ‘eggplant-colored’ skin and ‘plump legs’ – it’s almost like he’s describing a horse. Later, Marny thinks about kissing her: ‘I had never kissed a black girl and wondered if they tasted different.’ (Markovits, p. 77) This connection to taste, for me, sounded more cannibalistic than sexual. However you read it, Marny’s keen focus on Gloria’s body becomes something other, something darker, more twisted. And it made me distinctly uncomfortable throughout.

Reading Markovits was not the first time I was struck by this type of physical description, in which women are broken down into their smallest physical composites (lips, thighs, meat). I also recognised this in The Corrections, where both Chip and Gary Lambert’s observations of (and fantasies about) women are really disturbingly sexual – but also violent.

In a way, these novels deal with the body politic in a much more literal way than Saunders, with the bardo as the metaphor and the ‘occupation’ of other characters (through reading) as the manifestation. Here, that “manifestation” becomes sinister, linked to the morally questionable process of gentrification, perpetrated by Marny in You Don’t Have to Live Like This, and perpetrated on Sepha in All The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears.

The scene that most uncomfortably demonstrates this is perhaps Marny’s flashback to his college days, where he walks into a sorority party where everyone attending (except Marny) was black:

‘Even though there were maybe two hundred people in the room, which was hot with crowded bodies, I had the sense that something private was going on, and it was only after I walked out again, into the cooler evening, that I realized how that could be. What I had seen was somehow racially private […] a place where ‘things could be said and done without embarrassment, which wouldn’t be shown or discussed outside.’ (Markovits, p. 121)

Here, Many’s sexual attraction is literally reduced to the act of gazing at black bodies – something that both he and the reader are intently aware of, and something which becomes increasingly uncomfortable.

While Markovits acknowledges that the narrator “is supposed to be a little off about race” (Markovits, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: How to Write about Race in America) I find that these sexualised racial descriptions stray beyond that into uncomfortable territory. [Caroline Koktvedgaard, CK]

—-

You Don’t Have to Like This is a curious book. There are interesting questions raised about race, gentrification, colonisation, America – though I struggle to say precisely what they are. There aren’t any answers, though they’re never promised, and wouldn’t really belong with the tone of the book. At the least, I admire the novel for the strength of this uncertainty, and its commitment to such a tone: uncomfortable, idiosyncratic, undeniably memorable. Its very intense, in its flat way.

The main problem is Marny. In some ways, he’s the perfect narrator/observer, a self-confessed ‘periphery guy’: a question-asker, a follower, an observer, insipid, built in shades of grey. He can play, as the Guardian review puts it, Nick Carraway to Robert’s Gatsby. And yet even Robert is a very austerity Gatsby, a very undynamic mover-shaker. He was the ‘Greek God’ in college, a cut-out ‘Yalie’ archetype (‘He had the face of one of those statues. There was something impersonal about it’) who speaks in empty soundbites (‘Groupon model of gentrification’): an uninspiring and uninspired Pioneer who nonetheless gets Obama on board his personal ship to the future. 

Robert and most of his modern-day colonialists belong to a world run not particularly on reality but rather on what John Patrick Leary would call the ‘Keywords for the austerity age’: concepts like ‘innovation’, ‘entrepreneur’, ‘sustainability’ and so on, which combine a very exploitable vagueness with an air of moral significance. Hence the ‘visionary’ of ‘New Jamestown’ can nicely create a do-it-yourself, communal future which ‘has to make money too’: Ruskin as a hedge-fund-manager, without a particular sense of contradiction. It’s a prime example of what Marny labels in Robert as ‘a kind of efficient intelligence’ – a way to have your cake and eat it too. Max Weber once wrote of the capitalist future as the fabrication of an ‘ethical orientation towards profit’ (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism): here we see this in full ironic flight, real-estate and industrial impulse given the virtue of a calling. 

Marny, on the other hand, more ‘intellectual’, less efficiently intelligent, combines literal vagueness (see the style: ‘one of those …’ ad nauseam; ‘this and then this and then this’ stories) with moral vagueness. When Hillary Clinton asks him what he’s up to, he replies, vaguely ominously, ‘biding his time’. He could be in investment, he could be a school shooter – and this is the kind of tightrope of tension he walks throughout. This ‘biding’ seems a general existential condition for Marny. What is he waiting for? We don’t know. His deadened, absent, slightly misanthropic voice suspends a difficult, uneasy atmosphere over the entire narrative. It feels stale, brittle, like something that could go up at any time – as indeed ‘New Jamestown’ does. But Marny drifts onto something else, a football game ending, even after that. Resolution of any sort is impossible.

Throughout, there are odd, painfully banal vignettes – the girls eating burgers at the trailer park, wiping ketchup-stained hands? – which must be beside the point of any plot, but are somehow perfectly of a piece with the general tone. If the prose is ‘Franzen on slim-fast’ (Sunday Times), there’s some anaesthetic thrown in too. Ethical, aesthetic anaesthesia. The reader faces a wilful imposition of mundanity – mundanity with vague air of existential loss/wandering – that feels simultaneously aggressive and confused. Marny’s lack of purpose is so elusive that it’s hard not to trace it at least part back to the author. You wonder what exactly Markowitz is trying to do, and whether prose so suppressed and indistinct can really act as collective indictment/commentary on America entire? Might it not be closer to Eliot’s comments on The Waste Land (when suggested as such an indictment of a generation) – ‘the relief of a wholly personal … grouse against life’?

I don’t know, and I don’t think one excludes the other, but there is something so repressive about the prose, so uncertain, insoluble and occasionally abortive, that I find any political or social comment is hard to extract with anything other than a slight unease, or a sense of having missed the point. This is perhaps the point. The novel is bravely uncomfortable throughout, as indeed any discussion of race like this must be. But it’s more than just the topics dealt with, it’s personal and Markowitz/Marny-shaped too. Eliot said of Ruskin: ‘One feels that the emotional intensity of Ruskin is partly a deflection of something that was baffled in life’. In the novel, the emotional inertiafeels like a deflection of something baffled in life. What to make, for example, of the sexual dimension, the frustration, diversion and discomfort there? It continually rears it head as some background motor to everything Marny does, and there’s surely a substrata of homo-erotic tension? Discussions of ‘the kind of guy who falls in loves with guys’ (though ‘not in a gay way’), the self-conscious fixation on how ‘good-looking’ everyone isn’t, the Talented Mr Ripley type relationship with Robert, the wrapped-up language of insecure masculine America – so much seems not quite said. 

And who is Marny anyway? He says early in the novel that: ‘You get in the habit of living a certain kind of life, you keep going in a certain direction, but most of the pressure on you is just momentum. As soon as you stop the momentum goes away’. For him, identity seems a kind of momentum. He goes along with things, his plot is passive, and so things kind of run away with him, without him understanding why. That’s an impression I got with the book as a whole. I’m not sure if that’s a criticism.  [MBW]

Considering gentrification in relation to these two novels, I was struck by the degree to which the representation of the city in a novel is part of a long Western tradition of representation. It seems extremely difficult to escape the legacy of not only the Modernist city-walker, but also the Victorian city, even the Romantic city. Just as a city displays a ‘visible history’ (Middlemarch), the language of its description is a collage of tired tropes that accumulate within certain moments of perception to produce an effect of the breakdown of teleological history, of an archaeology which does not give a history of the present, which emphasises Marny and Sepha’s sense of estrangement inside neighbourhoods in states of transformation. I am thinking particularly of the reflection of the preoccupation with inside/outside in the Markovits in relation to metaphors relating buildings to their inhabitants.

Markovits has Marny think overwhelmingly in metaphor as he approaches and first sees Detroit (pp.28-31); the Woolfian vision of the structure of a city merging subjectivity and objectivity becomes the bizarre vision of ‘those sugar-spun cages you get over fancy deserts. I imagined lifting up one of those bridges with my finger, and watching all of the other highways, […] pulling away from the ground, because they’re all connected, and leaving a tan line across America, […] with a few worms digging around underneath, some pill bugs and dirty wet leaves.’ This accumulation of the consumable product, childhood game, decay, and undressing a (clearly white) woman – suggestive of the eco-feminist critique of the colonial history that, ironically, Marny has studied – is slightly ridiculous in its cynical presentation of Marny as a deeply problematic narrator. This emphasis continues with ‘cookie-cutter cul-de-sacs’, and is followed by more cliché anthropomorphism – ‘the cars had the air of survivors’, ‘the neighbourhood changed character’, and in his comparison of Detroit to his memory of Katrina, ‘the houses looked stepped on. Their insides lay spread out…’. It seems to me that Markovits layers traditions of city-description to suggest a decay in the literary city itself, vulnerable for renovation with the hollow certainty of neoliberal jargon and utopian vision which divorces it from the lived history and narratives imbued inside its architecture; Robert’s determination that he can ‘set up any kind of society’ (p.17). Taking the anthropomorphism of buildings through a reductio ad absurdum towards the end, Markovits presents Robert’s motivation as a crude desire to keep women looking beautiful; ‘A woman needs privacy to look good […] It’s a question of real estate’ (p.380).

As Varvogli explores, Mengestu’s play with time and memory layers the D.C. through which Sepha travels with the Addis Ababa he has left behind, keeping both in a sense suspended in the present; ‘I saw glimpses of home whenever I came across three or four roads that intersected at odd angles, in the squat glass off buildings caught in the sun’s glare’ (pp.175-6). Mengestu uses a similarly conscious tired language as does Markovits, but from the perspective of an immigrant. After abandoning his shop in reaction to receiving the eviction notion, Sepha looks back at his store and thinks, ‘I can imagine it wanting to be spared the burden of having to survive another year’, before reflecting on his action, ‘What is the proper equation, the perfect simile or metaphor? I’m an immigrant. I should know this.’ (p.74) This self-consciousness is also apparent in Sepha’s observation of the boarded-up houses in the south of his neighbourhood while walking; ‘There was a unique fear that came with feeling it was the inanimate objects around you that frightened you most. The crumbling brick facades streaked with black from fires that had raged decades ago didn’t need rumours of violence to intimidate. […] Like anything, they had softened with time. All I saw now was how sad and empty they looked’ (pp.162-3). With this traditional anthropomorphism, verging on animism (I’m reminded of ‘Time Passes’ in To the Lighthouse, and Dicken’s particularly racist initial description of Coketown as the red and black face of the savage as a precursor to Modernist primitivism), Mengestu both suggests a moment in which Sepha seems to have internalised a gentrifier’s discourse necessitating renovation through fear, and then by moving the metaphor on to sadness emphasises Sepha’s isolation as a immigrant who sees only a projection of himself in his surroundings. There is therefore a further irony in the merging of building and inhabitant in the vandalism towards the end the novel, which is carried out by means of bricks. [RJ]

Post-Class Notes

Our discussion this week focused on how — from the perspectives of both sides — gentrification can be used to draw out hypocrises in American narratives. Rachel gave us a brilliant sense of the way in which gentrification inverts and subverts the traditional immigrant/American Dream narrative, and Brandon drew out the means by which gentrification makes visible demarcations between in/out groups in the US.

Drawing on the secondary texts for this week, Rachel began by describing the archetypal immigrant narrative from which Mengestu departs. In typical immigrant stories, the protagonist embarks on a movement through space and time which begins in their home country and ends in the US, where they achieve some sort of social mobility. Sepha has already embarked on this journey, settled himself into Logan Circle, and this is where the narrative begins, and where a very different sort of movement occurs. Through act of gentrification, the “home” that he has developed in Logan Circle is erased — the movement of rich white families displaces those poorer individuals who formed the neighborhood. I particularly liked the term “spatial overwrite” as a description for this process; whereas in immigration, home remains rooted in space, in gentrification, the home is literally dismantled by developers and rich white families. Moreover, Sepha has no agency in this transformation. Gentrification is something that happens to you; immigration is something that you do.

Rachel developed the theme of agency through the metaphor of a pendulum. Sepha’s decade in the US has slid back and forth between illusions of socioeconomic ascension and decline, but all the while he has remained effectively in stasis. In pursuing social mobility he has always been the subject of economic forces — gentrification, low wages, etc. The eviction letter then serves as a means to escape this cycle. In pushing him out of this stasis, it allows him a sort of freedom, a means by which to become an agent in and of himself.

Our discussion moved across a whole range of topics, but one theme I want to pull out is that of time. Mo pointed out, I think really insightfully, that while most of the novel takes place in the present, in moments with Julia the work slips into the past tense. The closest we get to an explanation for this comes on page 81, when Sepha thinks: ““How was it that I never seemed to understand time when Judith was around? Too fast or too slow, or as in this case, not at all.” I wonder if this suggests Judith plays some role in the stasis of the novel, in keeping him moving back and forth with the pendulum. They might then be in the past tense because, if we follow Rachel’s reading, by the end of the novel he’s escaped this stasis.

Michael (Kalisch, i.e. “other Michael”) also noted the repetition compulsion of Kenneth’s adopted sayings, like “keep fighting the good fight.” I think these become particularly interesting given Rachel’s point on stasis in the novel. Despite prevalent American notions of linear progress, these white-male-executive catchphrases are repeated infinitely, suggesting that the idea of movement or progression collapses under its own weight. Through Kenneth, we see that Corporate America is itself a form of stasis, whatever it may profess about progress towards an infinite horizon.

Our discussion of You Don’t Have to Live Like This focused more on the role of perspective and in/out groups. Brandon brought out the theme of interior/exterior in the work, and they way it manifests itself across a variety of other topics, just two of which I’ll focus on here.

The first topic was how complex Marny’s perspective is in the work. The prose itself is incredibly bare; one Guardian reviewer wrote that the novel is build from “straight-plank prose, its lines and structure as pleasingly solid and clean as those of a Shaker chair.” As someone said during the discussion, he is “as a symbol of passivity, of weak character connections, he lacks a strong identity. But this unadorned prose and narratorial passivity hides a perspective that is insidiously biased and present in the work. Marny is exterior to almost every group, not only black communities, but even his college friends. Moreover, he seems meaningfully unable to imagine other’s interiority’s. And so rather than portraying the other characters, his writing becomes an act of projection through preconceptions. We come to understand this function through other characters in the work, like when Marny’s mother talks about Detroit and Marny responds “You’re totally out of touch with these things, Mom. All you know is what you read online or see on TV” (21); or when Marny writes that “Part of the point of driving was to see America, but you don’t see much of America from the road” (24). This unimaginative externality shows up in tons of other places in the work. I wonder what Markovits is expressing through this; maybe its about literature’s futility in trying to imagine other’s interiority, as this would flow in some way with the comments he made in the Guardian on writing from a black perspective.

The second topic was the way in which Markovits interrogates the formation of a community — what divides in from out. We spent some time on the passage where Robert describes his thinking on what size New Jamestown should be, and settles on about “a midsize college campus.” There are a lot of superficial answers like this in the work, not least amongst them the philosophy behind the “groupon model for gentrification.” Markovits seems to indicate the things that develop a community by their absence in Marny’s narration. For example, Marny has no solid conception of history outside its novelty role in lead soldiers and lectures on colonial America; so the idea that communities can’t be formed, but have to grow across generations, never arrives. Jamestown never becomes a community because its “founders” have no real sense of what a community is.

This interior/exterior theme came up in a lot more areas — on the depiction of modern colonization in the novel, on the creative attraction of Detroit, on the place of Obama in this black/white narrative — that I don’t have space to fully recount. But I do want to end on the question that’s been following me since our discussion: what is with bodegas and record shops?

In all seriousness, I really haven’t been able to shake the question as to why Jez Lansky’s record shop (and bodegas in general) are able to transcend the lines of in/out that elsewhere are drawn so strictly. If anyone has any thoughts, I’d love to keep discussing it next class. [IMP]

—

It’s been a real pleasure reading some of the pre-class notes that got caught upon the technical glitch, and relating them to our class discussion. I’ve been fascinated by the strength of response the Markovits novel has engendered (I like that its affectless tone should be so affecting), to the extent that it’s made me reconsider my own reading and reaction; I’m wondering if, having read and taught the novel a few times, I’d become a little desensitised to Marny. Reading the charge sheet levelled at him in Caroline’s comment (which we elaborated on in class), I’ve come to think that suggesting Mary’s a ‘bit off’ about race seems like Mary-esque indirection and understatement. I think one of the many troubling aspects is the ambiguity of agency in the novel – what Mo deftly picks up on in the idea of momentum, and which a couple of you compared to Chip’s situation. Rachel’s presentation brilliantly explored a similar dynamic in the Mengestu, via the figure of the pendulum, in the very different circumstances of an immigrant narrative. But I’m still wondering if we’re meant simply to dismiss Marny’s investment in the community project, such as it is, as simply self-serving and uncomfortably appropriative and potentially neo-colonialist, or whether there’s something salvageable in it. To answer this, it seem important to consider the opinion of Marny’s brother Brad, a high-flying businessman who still ‘dresses like a frat boy on spring break’: ‘You’re kidding yourself’, he says to Marny, ‘if you think that Americans want to help each other out. That’s not what I pay my taxes for. I pay my taxes so that other people are not my problem’ (268). In this, Brad sounds a little like Tony, the combative Italian-American, and one of the few native Detroiters in the book: Don’t expect me to say that some of my best friends are black. My best friends aren’t black […] I know some brothers, and like a few, too, but there’s a point beyond which I don’t really understand or trust them, and to be honest, the black guys I respect are the ones who feel the same about me’. (63) There’s a bullshit-free pragmatism to this, to be sure, but I’m wondering what we’re really meant to make of such a negative conception of liberty, and impoverished idea of citizenship and community. 

Another (unrelated) point that Rhona’s post brought to mind was the two very different cities in these novels, and that any account of these narratives would have to take in the racial and broad cultural  history of each city. Detroit makes sense for the Markovits, because it has been a city that has suffered  from racial tension and white flight since the 1960s, divisions that were exacerbated by the sub-prime mortgage crisis, an event that brings Obama and national politics into the orbit of the city and the novel. There’s also of course the city’s manufacturing heritage, a theme that gets played out in the aluminium scandal in the novel  But why does Mengestu pick D.C.?  I think part of the novel’s dynamic is about the small world of Sepha’s grocery store in the shadow of national, monumental history: in this regard, it reminded me a bit of a moment in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, in which a Jewish-American family from Newark also consider national identity and patriotism while on a tour of the Mall. 

On ‘the other Michael’s’ point about bodegas – which I fear I probably banged on about too much in class – I’ve been reading this for a course I’m teaching next term, and it’s fascinating on ‘shop girl’ narratives and department store modernism. [MK]

PRIMARY:

• Jhumpa Lahiri, The Unaccustomed Earth (2008)
• Lydia Davis, Can’t and Won’t (2014)
• Diane Williams, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine (2016)
• Ben Lerner, “The Polish Rider” (2018) [read and listen here]

SECONDARY:

• Kasia Boddy, The American Short Story Since 1950 (2010)
• Merve Emre, “Timeless Quickies”, NYRB, Feb 21, 2019 [here] *
• Jonathan Evans, The Many Voices of Lydia Davis (2016)
• Fiona Green (ed.), Writing for The New Yorker (2016)
• Ben Lerner, “Damage Control”, Harper’s (2012) [here]

Pre-Class Notes

— For Diane Williams’ Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, I’d like to focus on ‘Girl with a Pencil’ and ‘A Mere Flask Poured Out’. Time permitting, I’ll try to add some comments on ‘The Skol’ as well.

—

For Lydia Davis’ Can’t and Won’t, I’d like to look at ‘Reversible Story’; ‘Notes During Long Phone Conversation with Mother’; ‘The Letter to the Foundation’;’ Flaubert and Point of View’; and ‘Local Obits,’ if possible. Happy reading!

From Lahiri’s ‘Unaccustomed Earth’, I would like to look at the final three stories; ‘Once in a Lifetime’, ‘Year’s End’, and ‘Going Ashore’. [RJ]

––

Firstly, I’d like to preface my comments by saying that (by some very Lerner-esque coincidence) I bought the “wrong” edition of ‘The Polish Rider’ for this class. Not knowing it was a New Yorker essay, I ordered a physical copy off Amazon – you can find the version I purchased here, if you’re interested. Because of this, I had a slightly different (and very meta) reading experience of the short story.

In ‘The Polish Rider’, the narrator (a Lerner-like figure, an academic, a writer, an art lover) helps Sonia, a Polish artist, search for two paintings that she left in the back of an Uber before the opening of her show. I was surprised and intrigued to learn that Lerner’s story incorporates fictionalized elements of an event that actually happened in real life, to Lerner’s friend, the artist Anna Ostoya. 

In my edition, the non-fictional story sits alongside the fictional one, and both are framed by photographs and artworks produced by Anna for the edition. I thought it was interesting to contrast and compare fiction with reality here, and see what Lerner took from the real-life experience and incorporated into the story. 

In 2015, Anna told Lerner that she had recently lost two of her canvases in the back of an Uber. In real life, Ostoya’s paintings were based on Artimisia Gentileschi’s “Judith Slaying Holofernes”:

Lerner ‘didn’t want to minimize the loss of the paintings’ but ‘he did feel like there was something conceptually rich, maybe even beautiful, about what had transpired.’ (Ben Lerner and Anna Ostoya, The Polish Rider, MACK 2018, pp. 44-45). So he decided to write reality into the short story. But not an exact replica of reality – he would change things ever so slightly: ‘He would write a version of Anna’s story, he resolved,’ and ‘he’d insert a version of himself, a writer who wanted to recuperate the lost canvases through prose’ (Lerner and Ostoya, p. 53).

In the non-fictional essay, Lerner’s project for ‘The Polish Rider’ begins to take shape: and the narrator’s mission becomes an act of ekphrasis that restores Anna’s lost paintings through literature: ‘For several years he had been obsessed with the relationship between fiction and the other arts, hard started to think of fiction as a curatorial form, a medium in which you could stage encounters with other media, real or imagined; for him, fiction was fundamentally ekphrastic.’ (Lerner and Ostoya, p. 53)

However, even in his act of ekphrasis, Lerner changed the actual paintings that were lost. Feeling that ‘the complex history of Gentileschi would overwhelm the story’ (Lerner and Ostoya, p. 53), instead, he found another series of paintings by Ostoya, depicting a famous kiss between two men, the critic Benjamin Buchloh and the conceptualist Lawrence Weiner: 

‘He intuited that, metaphorically, a lost kiss would ground the story more than a lost beheading, could stand for the ekphrastic kiss of genres, and so he decided he would have Anna, whom he would call “Sonia,” lost “The Kiss” painting, thus crossing his nonfiction Anna with his fictional writing about Sonia.’ (Lerner and Ostoya, p. 53) 

However, finding that the real-life painting of Buchloh and Weiner were ‘just as overwhelming as Gentileschi’, he decided that he ‘needed Sonia to leave unreal canvases in the Uber.’ (Lerner and Ostoya, p. 54). For this fictional painting, he chose the well-known motif of the “social fraternal kiss” between Brezhnev and Hoenecker, a work that was ‘almost Anna’s’, and which opened up a whole Cold War thematic to Lerner. He writes that he drafted the story in a couple days – and thus his work of fictionalized ekphrasis was born.

As you can see, the notion of ekphrasis quickly starts to become narratively complicated. There is not only the real-life story about Anna, and her actual paintings of “The Kiss”; but now also the fictional “Sonia”, and her fictional painting of a different historical kiss. Notice, also, in the quotations above, that the non-fictional essay is written in the third person; in each of the variants, Lerner appears as a character inserted into varying degrees of fictionalised events. 

Here’s the kicker to this very meta rollercoaster: later, Ostoya decided to paint the fictional works that Lerner had invented, thus transforming the fiction into real-life art, in an act that Lerner calls ‘a reversal of the standard ekphrastic temporality’, ‘a gesture that would utterly transform the story without changing any of the words.’ (Lerner and Ostoya, p. 58-59). 

As the narrator in The Polish Rider writes: ‘This will be an entirely different piece of writing if it accompanies the returned paintings rather than taking their place… And, if the paintings aren’t found, we’ll publish this, the story of their loss and recuperation through literature – make a little book that includes the installation of shots of the two canvases before Sonia took them down to clean them up. Or maybe she’ll repaint them?’ (Lerner, ‘The Polish Rider’)

I thought this strange encounter with Lerner’s metanarrative really spoke to the thoughts about art that he puts forward in his essay, “Damage Control” in Harper’s Mag. There, he argues that ‘modern art is inseparable from the destruction of modern art’ (“Damage Control”). Linking destruction with loss, he writes about his encounter with an exhibit by the “Salvage Art Institute (SAI)”, which sampled the inventory of a large insurance company’s “total loss” art: the pieces that have been damaged beyond repair, and are now, legally speaking, worthless.

However, rather than being worthless, Lerner argues that the damaged artwork rather becomes ‘art outside of capitalism’: ‘an object freed from the market — freed without being shattered or spit on or torn.’ He felt that ‘Each work had been redeemed, both in the sense that the fetish had been converted back into cash, the claim paid out, but also in the more messianic sense of being saved from something, saved for something.’ (Lerner, “Damage Control”)

Is this what the narrator (and, by extension, Lerner himself) is attempting to accomplish in his search for Sonia’s (or Anna’s) lost paintings? I’m not quite sure – but chasing down this ekphrastic rabbithole was absolutely fascinating. I know I’ve gone completely overboard with this note, but I hope you enjoyed the introduction to the Ostoya-Lerner co-edition. I thoroughly recommend it! [CK]

– As we’re hoping to do a bit of close reading in class this week, I thought I’d do the same in my pre-class note. I’ve selected the below story from Lydia Davis which, in part, is a close reading in itself. 

Though most close readings resist a chronological approach, in this case I think it’s best to begin at the beginning. If it weren’t for the word ‘only’ in the middle of the first sentence, this opening would be merely a statement. But as with Ames’s ‘just’ in Gilead, ‘only’ is quite powerful here. Onlytwo paragraphs long, and yet, we infer, so much is happening. From this first sentence we also know that the story we’re reading isn’t the one the paragraph describes – we’re one paragraph short. This story exists relative to the one it describes. 

Maybe I’ve got B-Course essays on the mind, but it seems to me that this story, short though it may be, creates quite a large sense of spatiality. The title of the story turns printed text into place/space, but this is more disorienting than it is grounding. We have to imagine the text of another story on another page in some other text before we can comprehend the formal dynamic the narrator is trying to put forward. ‘The end’ is pushed away from ‘the beginning’ (perhaps a stretch here, but ‘up to’ seems to further this distance and reinforce the spatial aspect of the story – you would read ‘up’ the page to find the beginning); the parenthetical ‘(in the first paragraph)’ reflects a need to clarify the whereof the story; ‘and they’re in the very middle of it’ attempts to specifically place the characters in this ‘dense’ confusion.

I’m particularly interested in the word ‘intent’, and its recall of the idea of intention. The two clauses of this sentence in fact seem to contradict one another – if the speaker is so intent, so focussed, how is their back turned from something within it? The implication of this line is a sense of fragmentation: if ‘this work’ refers only to the second paragraph, then two paragraphs in the same text can function as separate works – a very interesting idea. The other implication is a dynamism of text that contradicts the fixed spatiality of printed word implied by the title, the idea that the text might get ‘up to’ something when no one’s looking. These ideas are indeed contradictory but not mutually exclusive – the page gives space for the characters mentioned in the title to move within.

The introduction of exclamatory phrases is somewhat frantic, contributing to a building sense of anxiety in response to a lack of control – it seems the narrator would much rather their characters stay put. The line ‘And they’re not very far away!’ indeed suggests the physical distance I detailed above, but also indicates that the author loses control of the characters almost immediately after they have written them. With the phrase ‘he seems’, the author becomes a reader, analysing without certainty the dynamic between these other characters despite having created this dynamic themselves. The work the author has created has become ‘dense’ and ‘dark’ even to them, but now that they have ‘left’ it, they can only watch on as the paragraph takes on its own life.

Between the reference to ‘intent’, the obvious loss of control, and the suggestion that the author becomes a reader the second the text exists, the conclusion I draw is that the author we take as this story’s narrator is a Barthesian one, and this story details the effect of The Death of the Author. [RF]

---

I’m very sorry for the delay in posting this note, I’ve been ill the last few days and late across the board. I’m glad I got to read Caroline’s note before writing mine though – I had no idea about the Gentileschi, etc. sides of the ‘Polish Rider’ genesis, and found it fascinating all around. (As a side-note, ‘The Polish Rider is also the title of a Rembrandt: an aristocrat riding a horse through a murky landscape)

As my own little layer to add from biography to the ‘ekphrastic rabbithole’, I thought I’d mention my own life half-parallels art, contexts-collide type story. I lost my phone (far less interesting) in an Uber about six months ago, and faced the same Kafka-esque spirals of deferral and faceless ‘reaching-outs’ as Sonia in the story. The phone, however, was still on, and the I could track it online. I found it the next day looping London in mocking circles closer and further from wherever I was – all over the place, north, south, east and west, twitching across boroughs with every refresh of the page. Clearly it was still in the Uber, but I could only send a request for the driver to call me: he would do so immediately, but when I picked up it was just dead air – with the suggestion, maybe, of someone breathing on the other side. 

And so ‘The Polish Rider’ echoed very true. There wasa kind of voyeuristic excitement/frustration in this game, a tendency towards unreality and self-dramatisation: casting oneself in the role of the amateur detective, or (one of Lerner’s games of parallel) the Cold War surveillance man behind the screen. Technology and systemisation, the whole faceless, teasing Uber network, provided a strange, alienated narrative, with ‘I’ pitched against something quite intangible in the quest for the lost phone. In an accompanying interview to the story, Lerner says that ‘this is where fiction become politically interesting to me, how it can represent – and how it can make felt – the inextricability of self and systems’. 

One temptation of this ‘inextricability’, this everyday reliance on vast, overlapping webs of ‘systems, private and public, aboveground and under’, is the tendency to look for the pattern of a ‘system’ wherever it might help – because the pattern might indicate a meaning. Despite the obvious absurdity, it was hard not to project some kind of significance onto the Uber routes I saw flashing along the computer map like a cop monitor, to trace them tentatively like Paul Auster might in The New York Trilogy (another author who writes himself into his own detective stories) and try to ‘see’ a logic in their arbitrary blips. We see the same with Lerner’s connection of the Ghostbusters address and the Shakespeare Sonnets, the portent of the ‘55’: 

‘The traces of a mysterious system. They lend the world a certain handmade quality. As if someone has reached out.’

As the human side doesn’t reach out, as we get shunted between start-up desks and blocked numbers, it’s very possible to yearn for different kinds of reaching out, the suggestion of some other Prime Mover / fate / coincidence / system, something ‘handmade’ in the imagination.

This is all very much in the ‘systems fiction’ vein, in the company of Pynchon, DeLillo, and so on. Here, the art theory or ekphrastic element tames the more paranoid side you might see, for example, in Pynchon, but there is a kind of exhilarating madness the writing builds towards throughout the story as it gets drunk on its own possibility: see the image of Lerner composing at the standing-desk, delirious, buzzing (‘a painted kiss is anti-literary, anti-ekphrastic, says the coffee’), and feeling for once as a writer that he’s doing something real,something now–  that he’s just as legitimate as Modigliani paint-spattered in his studio, Giacometti with his cut hands. I was reminded too of Strindberg’s Inferno, his obsessive gleanings of portent and possible narratives in the street names of Paris, the number of letters on a statue base. ‘The signs that mock me as I go’ (Joyce).

Then, the next day, the Uber (mine, not Sonia’s) stopped. I had found, it became clear, where the driver lived. And now I faced something like Sonia’s conundrum in the police station: does she ‘harass an immigrant driver who was just following the rules’? Do I try go to my driver’s house (opposite the ‘Al Kaashil’ mini-market)? Do I ring the landline and maybe interrupt a family? Do I report him and risk his job? In the end, I got him to ring me again (dead silence, then off) and left a tentative message saying I’m sure he wasn’t at fault but I was pretty certain the phone was in his car, perhaps behind a seat – and I mentioned his address. He called soon after, drove it to my house (I wasn’t in), and dropped it through the letterbox. Somehow, without any conversation, without any face-to-face interaction, the situation had resolved itself: the phone was found as Sonia’s paintings weren’t, from the driver I couldn’t even remember the face of but somehow knew where he lived. It was some some strange, uncomfortable intimacy, some Haneke-like overlap of incompatible worlds.

Lerner has a central line in the story: ‘Systems that can’t communicate, can only kiss’. It’s this kind of overlap, these collisions and shared points, which seem to interest him so much. Brezhnev and Honecker, random encounters and media memories, real life (whatever that means) and art. ‘That sort of thing’. [MBW]

Post-Class Notes

Phew! I have begun writing this note. I’ll be keeping it short because we did manage to discuss a lot of very different things on Monday. Expect another “Phew!” at the end. I couldn’t think of a cool opening for my note, so I wrote one for the note about my note. Such is the cryptic art of my note about by note. I believe that makes me clever. Isn’t this art-ier? Ben Lerner’s Polish Rider tries to negotiate the case that some art is art-ier, therefore could be more valuable than other art. That’s just wrong. Exchange-value is determined through a system of social-relations. All value is, in a sense, arbitrary – it isn’t inherent to any object but produced socially. The determining of value, therefore, is very prone to influence. Capital promotes the value of art through advertising, in order to create more capital. Oobah Butler – evil genius – explains it better than I can, here.

At some point during the discussion, Dr. Kalisch talked about the division of art into the curatorial and the epiphanic. This stuck with me and I kept thinking about how the epiphanic art is also curatorial in a way because it tries to represent the pure experience (that is, sensory,  pre-reflective, pre-linguistic articulation) of epiphany and realisation through its own medium (what I mean to suggest is that the epiphanic is not the epiphany itself). I’m thinking on the lines of Lacan’s symbolic and the real.

Moving on to Lydia Davis – I’d like to begin by offering a fist-bump to Michael (Pusic) because I didn’t enjoy reading her either. In fact, I was so pained that I ended up calling my most well-read friend in Delhi (this guy was reading Germaine Greer in 7^th grade) who helped me to come up with an assortment of mean tweets and offered to cyberbully Ms. Davis on my behalf. I politely declined my friend’s offer and after Jane’s presentation brought my own philistinism to my attention (“the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass”), I’m glad I did so. Jane explained Davis’ writing, quite brilliantly, as “one mark of impression on an empty space – like a skyscraper.” Davis collapses the boundary between the reader and the author through a deliberate lack of craft – the logic of the work itself is the work, rather than the plot. Now that I know how to approach it, I can read Davis’ work but I won’t enjoy it because it still feels like she’s forcing a feeling on me.

Diane Williams – a breath of fresh air! Reading her didn’t induce any claustrophobia at all, a quality I’ve come to appreciate after having read Lydia Davis. Martha put it beautifully that Williams’ character-figures are built on relationships, invented and suspended without a self beyond their role. However, her brevity and lack of too much description could be read as a reserving of space for the potential other world to come in – not an emptiness but an open-endedness, perhaps an invitation for the readers to bring their own meaning into the mix.

I was psyched when Rhona picked the triptych from Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth. The chapters are in continuous dialogue with each other, teasing the reader’s desired union of the characters. I use the word “teasing” because I recognised a very familiar pattern here – Bollywood bad boy from Bombay, rich, individualistic and direct, let go of by Bollywood good girl from Calcutta, delicate and rooted. We Indians write the same story over and over again, just a little differently. The desire for release from identity (temporary/permanent) remains the common thread between all modern South Asian literature, and if I may be bold enough to say so, very evident in Lahiri’s identification of herself as an American writer. Not that it’s a bad thing, but it is self-fashioning. Fin.

Phew! [Mehvish Siddiqui, M.S.]

—

I thought I’d use my untimely (read: late) note this week to, firstly, in Lerner-esque fashion, draw your attention to this short blog post I wrote a few years ago on 10:04, and the idea of a curatorial novel. Secondly, I thought I’d share a few of my notes from Lerner’s talk at the Tate last week, in which he talked about his new novel, The Topeka School, as a kind of ‘pre-history’ of our political moment, one that looks back to the 1990s and what he called a ‘therapist version’ of the end of history thesis we’ve spoken about in class in connection to Franzen, and which Lerner also related to the decline of 60s radicalism we discussed in relation to Egan. Asked about temporality in his new book, Lerner suggested that every novel involves a kind of ‘time travel’, though to me, what I’ve read of the new novel suggests that Lerner is less interested in the play of temporality, than in a play of voices, and at the talk he spoke about the ventriloquism of the novel’s narrative voice. He also confirmed that Topeka School was very much the third volume completing a trilogy, along with Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04 – worth bearing in mind if you’re working on Lerner. 

PRIMARY:

• Nicole Krauss, Forest Dark (2017)
• Joshua Cohen, Moving Kings (2017)

SECONDARY:

• Judith Butler, “Who Owns Kafka?”, London Review of Books (2011) *
• Philip Roth, “I Always Admired Your Fasting’; or, Looking for Kafka” (1972) *
• Naomi Sokoloff, “Israel in the Jewish-American Imagination”, in Wirth-Nesher (ed.), The Cambridge History of Jewish-American Literature (2015)
• James Wood, “A Novel Brings Israel’s Conflicts to New York”, New Yorker (2017)

Pre-Class Notes

— In the midst of Butler’s comments on the arrival/non-arrival of language in Kafka (“Who Owns Kafka”, London Review of Books, 2 March 2011) and Nicole Krauss’ reflections on her relationship to space, place and home in Forest Dark, I am struck by the reappearance of many of the themes/debates that are occuring (curatedly) in my World Literature A Course. I’m thinking specifically of translation theory and its concurrent debates about the functionality or the non-functionality of language to properly express an idea or make feasible the transition between word and meaning. In this vein, Krauss makes several early allusions to what might be termed philological philosophy in Dark Forests, as on page 71, where she muses about the multiple meanings of the German Heim and the Hebrew olam. I was reminded immediately of Barbara Cassin (et al)’s 2004 tome, The Dictionary of Untranslatables (actually, this is the English title, which was published in 2014). In this, olam is also given the English synonyms ‘world’, ‘humanity’, ‘life’ and ‘present’ and gets the definition:

“The Hebrew word for “world” is currently ‘ ōlām [ ‫עֹולָם‬ ]. It is present in the Bible, but probably not in this sense [of emphasizing being in the world], even in a late text like Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) 3:11. There is another, temporal sense, that of indefinite duration, usually in fixed expressions such as ‘ ōlām [ ‫עֹולָם‬ ], “to have an indeterminate future,” whence “for all time,” or me- ‘ ōlām [ ‫עֹולָם‬ ‫מ‬ ֵ ], “for a time whose beginning is unknown,” “since a moment which is not known,” whence “forever.”” (Cassin et al, Dictionary of Untranslatables, 733).

As Hebrew Literature scholar Adriana Jacobs told us in our A Course, this is a definition deliberately designed to play up the ‘untranslatable’ element, relying on strange and awkward constructions like ‘since a moment which is not known’. So we take Cassin’s definition with a grain of salt. At the same time, Cassin’s jumbled definition takes further some of the work that Krauss is asking the word, olam, to do in her novel as she has the narrator place it side by side with heimlich and unheimlich, asking them all to mean both ‘concealed’ and ‘illuminated’, home and Other. Belonging to the word and articulating a place in it, as this narrator is so anxious to do, seems bound to the language in which that attempt is articulated and endlessly denied by the inevitable imprecision of that language anyway.

In parallel, I think its productive to observe my inclination to read Butler’s “Who Owns Kafka” and the emphasis it places on the many misfired letters that circulate both within it and around the Kafka archive as entangled with Zizek’s sort of opposite explanation of the letter that ‘always arrives at its destination’ in Enjoy Your Symptom (1991) (Here’s a link to a photocopy of the operational half of the chapter that I found on Google, and here’s another attempt at explanation by Zizek in The Symptom, likely an impenetrable experience). Butler is talking about a person permanently displaced, while Zizek, basically, posits a letter that continuously makes its reader into its addressee; I know they seem like opposite motions, but I think they are both revolving around the same core of language and whatever dissonance exists between meaning and the written word. Butler’s Kafka is writing himself in and out of belonging, setting off periodically, linguistically on a journey away-from, never truly planning to arrive at all. Meanwhile, of the remnants of that writing is being forged the ‘letter’ of which all bidders believe they are the addressee, its destination.

Moving out of the psychoanalytic strata, I see some of the anxiety about / fear of / effects of readership taking ownership in Krauss’ novel as well. I am thinking of the three related anecdotes on pages 76 – 78 in which Krauss describes her interactions with readers who have taken her words uncomfortably to heart, mimicking the process of appropriation Butler describes in the production of a ‘cultural asset’ and making of her a symbol, or the source of symbolic language. Binding her. And, ironically, silencing her as she ‘desperately tried to write something on the first page [of the Yad Vashem notebook] to strip of its power’ (Forest Dark, 77) but managed only to write an aborted to do list.

I wonder, then, if the image she conjures through Epstein in the succeeding chapter, that of the spider which apparently moves from his imagination to ‘the wall in front of him, exactly as he had seen it in his mind’ (Forest Dark, 103) can be read as her ideal mode of authorship. That is, authorship not moderated by language, the fluent transposition of idea to material. There is no mistaking a spider for a cultural history. Or is there? After all, Epstein’s next wish is for ‘the assistant to take this down on her pad, too’ (Forest Dark, 103). And, of course, Krauss has written this all down for us to consume as written words. [MS]

—

I’m so sorry this comes so late–I’ve contracted a nasty cold and haven’t been up to much work this week. here are some thoughts!

I was struck by the intent focus on Kafka and his language in Jewish narratives. If Butler is right, neither German, nor Hebrew, nor Czech was Kafka’s true mother tongue; he had written, “What do I have in common with the Jews? I hardly have anything in common with myself”, though he strove to learn Hebrew in his later years. One wonders if this reckoning/wrestling with Jewishness comes from a place of disentangling/attempt to clarify one’s identity. Kafka’s archives, which Brod had salvaged rather than destroyed as Kafka had asked, have become a point of contention between the National Library of Israel and the German library, though many of them are also stored in the Bodleian. Ownership and identity are inextricable questions for Kafka, as well as for Krauss. In the novel, Nicole faces the same question as a Jewish writer: perhaps her writing belongs not to her, the individual engaged in the creative act, but the Jewish people, a collective consciousness/culture to which she belongs, and perhaps to whom she owes part of her understanding of the world, or even to the reception of the readers. It is not merely with whom she identifies or dedicates herself/work to, but who claims ownership.

Krauss’s novel thus demonstrates an evident awareness of authorship along with the question of belonging. Writing in the first-person for her self-referential, metatextual protagonist Nicole, she argues that “frustration was more than a subject for Kafka, it was a whole dimension of existence”. Throughout both Forest Dark and Moving Kings, there is a degree to which the characters seem to be navigating through, but inexplicably stuck in, this liminal frustration. Kafka had never made it to (had even perhaps never intended to) Palestine; had always struggled to reconcile with his Jewish identity; and indeed, with the assertion of self. This is what Nicole largely latches onto in Forest Dark; that Kafka is a writer whose ownership is constantly taken up by/contended upon, but also that he is a writer existing on the threshold, aware, yet unable to cross. 

On the same thread of identity enters the question of home and the nostalgia ever-present in postmodern literature. Nicole, the female protagonist in Forest Dark, writes that “When I woke again, it was into a homesickness that felt physical. . . Though never so acute, the longing for something I felt divided from, which was neither a time nor a place but something formless and unnamed.” Krauss delineates a nostalgia for a “home” that transcends spatio-temporal conditions; as Butler discusses as the problem of non-arrival in Who Owns Kafka, the longing for a destination that is “away from here,” [weg-von-hier] a destination, a home, to which one can never truly reach unless they escape the logic of the “here”; of a home that exists in a time or place that cannot be accessed. Epstein shares a similar comment about his family. He says he “had come from here” discussing Israel; but his parents had “come from nowhere”, as “where they had come from had ceased to exist and so could not be returned to.” There are different ways of looking at home; as a place, an identity, a sense of belonging, a family, a country, where you come from; and the paradoxical idea that home is that which you recognize with detachment. I find that with Jewish and Irish narratives in particular, the search for, or the Odyssey-like return to home, becomes a question closely linked to nationhood. A chapter belonging to Epstein muses, “to have family in country is to have country in the family.” Once displaced from it, the country becomes more than a physical place, but the object of longing and attachment, a homeland. National identity becomes a characterizing feature, even, or particularly, away from the physical nation. 

Constant displacement and an enduring faith in return appear as common crucial themes to the Jewish people; yet the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the ongoing eviction of tenants by David King’s company in Moving Kings go hand in hand to show them actively engaging in the displacement of other peoples. Here, the modern controversy over who owns Kafka’s archives is then perhaps comparable to the conflict over Jerusalem/ the Israeli occupation. 

It is unsurprising that the book further brings in Freud’s discussion of the unknown and the unheimlich in relation to home[heim]. What both Krauss and her twin protagonist claim to be a “novel about a Hilton in Tel Aviv” then strives to reckon with fear, frustration, and the loss and/or search for homeland. Unheimlich, as discussed at length by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror, is not merely a feeling captured by the English word “uncanny”; it is also the physical fear of that which is not “Heimlich,” that is, homelike, or familiar. The physical [unheimlich] felt by the Jewish characters attempting to return home—wherever it is, whichever form it takes—is perhaps the realization that what used to be has become unrecognizable, that the familiar has turned into the ‘unheimlich.’ 

Krauss proceeds to explain the homesickness she feels as a “division of being both here and not her, but there.” If the Jewish people do not have a history, but rather a memory, and home (or belonging) exists more in the collective memory than in a concrete place (ie. Hilton in Tel Aviv), destination becomes lost in its own teleology; Israel may be, after all, the ideal, the abstraction of home that has ceased to exist in the “here.”  [JK]

— (So, so sorry this is so late!)

As soon as I’d read the phrase ‘Out in the Blue’ on the Contents page of Forest DarkI couldn’t seem to forget it. I was – and am – incredibly grateful for the fact that Krauss’s chapter titles find their way into the main text, rather that only reflecting an essence of it. 

He’d received a phone call the day before, he told me. “Out in the blue,” he added. He took a special joy in English idioms but rarely got them right. (Forest Dark,p. 60)

What does it mean for an idiom to be “right”? Idioms in everyday speech ultimately equate to a repeated phrase in a repeated context. The longevity of an idiom gives it credence in the sense that every time an idiom becomes applicable it in some way gains strength. And yet, like any other sign, an idiom is made up, referring in actuality to no greater truth. The only thing that makes an idiom “right” in any capacity is its recurrence, and its exact repeated quoting makes it familiar, tethering this instance of the idiom to every instance prior.

If the idiom itself refers to no greater truth, then to misquote an idiom equally cannot make it inherently wrong, it only appears as such because it becomes unfamiliar – it’s the “wrong” phrase in the “right” context. In becoming unfamiliar the idiom draws attention to itself, and this heightened attention distorts familiarity further: what we previously hear in conversation and recognise but do not necessarily notice now soundswrong, feelswrong. A misquoted idiom – a “wrong” idiom – is uncanny. I should also note that, in the section above, only the idiom is quoted in direct speech, again drawing attention specifically to the misquoting. We recognise the context, here reflected in reported speech, easily workable into the narrative voice. The misquoting, however, is isolated, unfamiliar. 

But what about thisidiom in particular? (Moreover, what about this idiom in this book?) What’s the effect of changing ‘of’ to ‘in’? To say that something – a phone call, or whatever else – manifests ‘out of the blue’ is to say that it comes from nowhere, ‘randomly’ into the here and now. (I quote randomly because I’m certain it appears in the text but can’t remember where!) The ‘out of’ is really in some way past and serves to imply the fact of now ‘coming in’. It – whatever it may be – was once out, and is now in. ‘Out in the blue’, then, has an othering effect. In the misquoted idiom the ‘out’ is no longer past, but present, and ‘the blue’ is some unknown place. The it is still somewhere else.

As this novel is so concerned with place, the uncanny, and narrativisation – the latter being reflected in the longevity in the recurrence of the idiom which implies some connection between repeated contexts in the past and the present –  I cannot help but see this “wrong” idiom as in some way summative of the preoccupations of Forest Dark. 

(Side note: I don’t for a second imagine any of the above hasn’t been said of idioms before, it’s just something I’d never really thought about in any depth until reading this!) [RF]

——————————————-

“Switching off the bedside lamp, Jules Epstein’s soul stirred under the stiff sheets and he returned again to the intractable dark that he stared into on countless nights when he couldn’t sleep” (160).

I don’t know if this is necessarily going to be “illuminating,” partly because I’m not a huge fan of Descartes either, and so this might simply be my own Kaddish for Kafka—-

It is partly frustration–some lingering beauty—-but also a level of respect to which I ascribe Krauss’s style—-leaving me out in the blue as it were. Here, or maybe nowhere, I’m looking at this brutalist photo of the Hilton (the close up, specifically) and where I might have thought I could recognize something before—-the presence of form and control, the architectural symmetry—-I instead cannot help but be clouded by the strange formlessness the “novel” gives it.  But that darkness, the deep forest of unfamiliar words, places made unfamiliar (leaving “the shore of reason, with its familiar hills and landmarks”)—becomes slightly warm. There’s a kind of joy that arises when one walks the tightrope over unreason. The analogy of the uncouthed Forest experience like the Ardens of Shakespeare’s As You Like It or the forests Hester Prynne and Pearl find themselves in The Scarlet Letter lend a certain freedom, perhaps chaotically. City (structure) was never the place you’d want to go in a Kafka story…

On a side note, there is a really good book called Forests by a Stanford professor named Robert Pogue Harrison, which does a really good Job at taking us through the stories of Gilgamesh, the Greeks, the Romantics, and to the present in order to analyze this anxiety but also powerful identity regarding forests and their place on the periphery of the Polis—-

“I could no longer write a novel, just as I could no longer bring myself to make plans, because the trouble in my work and my life came down to the same thing: I had become distrustful of all the possible shapes that I might give things. Or I’d lost faith in my instinct to give shape at all.” (165)

Perhaps there is an irony in trying to complete a Kafka play, no? Or perhaps the “reason” they were left “undone.” It becomes meta-paradoxical to read a book that has a novelist that decries shape and form, but maybe that’s why Forest Dark’s texture doesn’t feel fully novelistic. It’s hard not to compare the text to the ramblings of Ishmael: the ability to be discussing some very concrete moment in the story and then jump to extremely deep philosophical comments, sometimes within the course of a single sentence. (examples on pg. 155-56).

Yet, all the remnants are left behind; we see the shadows of a novel. “Narrative may be unable to sustain formlessness, but life also has little chance” (138).  More than anything else in the plot, we see the fixation on Jewish thought, place, and “memory.” Where identity lies in those sentiments I think is the thematic tract of the text. I was as curious as Epstein in trying to weave through and carve out a sense of something in the ancestral experience–Though there was an anxiety to it right? About using heritage as the grounding form? Our Novel’s novelist couldn’t easily write a book about the structure of the Hilton…Krauss’ Novel couldn’t just be about following the physical forms of words in the act of meaning making in literature. I couldn’t merely follow Epstein on this path and expect a linear plot on his journey of self-realization. I slowly lost my sense of being a detective once I got through the first part of the novel. The novel, as it were, became Unheimlich for me. I don’t know if I could comfortably lay here while sick in bed as our novelist—-even if she retained a desire to move even if that one spot–the Aleph–allowed her the possibility to see all other spots. Hopefully there isn’t a sickness to reading…

—-Anyways—-there must be a door to this text :)?

“Kafka is never sinister or nihilistic, it’s because to even read the threshold requires a susceptibility to hope and vivid yearning. There is a door. There’s a way up or over. It’s just that one almost certainly won’t manage to reach it, or recognize it, or pass through it in this life” (136).

(BJS)

Post-Class Notes

–– In a New York Times reviewof Nicole Krauss’ Forest Dark, Peter Oren writers:

‘There’s an unnerving moment in Nicole Krauss’s new novel, “Forest Dark,” when a man in a suit struts to the edge of a wet roof and pulls on a pair of rubber gloves. A novelist watches from the window of her office in the house next door. For a few mesmerizing seconds the novelist waits for him to leap — or fall. Instead, he merely kneels and begins to clear leaves from the gutter. Turns out he’s a neighbor who’s decided to do a little housework without changing out of his office clothes. But this is the sort of fraught, disorienting moment that characterizes the novel. Ordinary actions assume a scary fragility. One false move and things might go to hell. And one of the beauties of this lucid and exhilarating book is that Krauss is unafraid, at times, to let it go where it will.‘ (New York Times, emphasis mine)

I, too, was struck by this moment of dramatic suspension. Throughout the novel, Nicole’s story is propelled forward by her obsession with the man who supposedly jumped from the balcony of the Tel Aviv Hilton Hotel, an incident we become less and less convinced has actually happened, as no one can remember him. 

It is only towards the end of the novel that this narrative suspension is resolved – oddly, through suicide. Drawn to ‘a concentrated sense of intent and drama that animated his body’, Nicole looks on as a man jumps actually jumps from a terrace on the ‘fifteenth or sixteenth floor’ of the Hilton:

‘It happened very quickly. He shifted his weight forward onto his hands, and vaulted one leg over the metal rail. A woman getting out of the pool shouted, and in a matter of seconds the man had swung the other leg over, and was perched on the railing, legs dangling over the two-hundred-foot drop. He seemed, suddenly, to be filled with enormous potential, as if the whole rest of his life had slammed forward into him. And then he leaped with arms open, like a bird.’ (Nicole Krauss, Forest Dark, p. 289-290)

Immediately afterward, almost glossing over this much-anticipated event that collapses the beginning and end of the novel, we hear that Nicole is returning to her home in New York, thirty-six hours after the incident. As she comes up to her house, she has one of her eerie premonitions:

‘They didn’t see me. And for a while I didn’t see myself either, sitting in a chair in the corner, already there.’ (Krauss, p. 290)

Thus, Krauss comes full circle, looping back to Nicole’s initial ‘idea of being in two places at once’ (Krauss, p. 40) – echoing the scene in which she ‘came through the door of the house I shared with my husband and our two children, and sensed that I was already there.’ (Krauss, p. 40). Not only does this collapse the idea of time, or even of reality – it collapses the idea of character, not just the one on the page, but the identity of Krauss herself.

In her presentation on Forest Dark, Rhona pointed out how the text is littered with metatextual elements, drawing on Freud and the concept of the Doppelganger, ideas of faith, literature, the (fictional) life of Kafka, and even the scientific concept of the multiverse. To Rhona, the novel is about the failure of bringing these things together – or, in other words, the problem of ‘non-arrival’ that Judith Butler articulates in her essay, ‘Who Owns Kafka’.

We spoke at length about the role of Kafka in Krauss’ novel, but also his role as a ‘Jewish’ writer – insofar that he is one. As Butler remarks in her essay, ‘“What have I in common with Jews?” [Kafka] wrote in a diary entry in 1914. “I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.”’ (Judith Butler, ‘Who Owns Kafka?’, London Review of Books).

Just as Kafka is ‘claimed’ as a Jewish writer, Nicole is ‘claimed’ as a successful Jewish author in Tel Aviv. As Friedman remarks to her: “You really think your writing belongs to you?”, he is echoing the questions of authorship and belonging that Butler puts forward in ‘Who Owns Kafka?’. Here, ‘belonging’ does not simply refer to the act of ‘belonging’ to a country or culture (or ‘feeling at home’), but of ownership – perhaps this is why the barriers holding stable identities start to fail in Krauss’ novel.

In Philip Roth’s essay, ‘Looking at Kafka,’ he charts an imagined future for Kafka, a ‘what if’. But in doing so he domesticates him – he has Kafka move to New York, gets him a teaching position, and sets him up with his aunt. Similarly, Nicole and Epstein are forced to inherit and live out Jewish narratives in the novel. Nicole becomes a new Kafka, locked away in his house in the desert (if indeed it is his house), and forced to live out the end of his life, thus fully ‘claimed’ as a Jewish writer, but also becoming ‘a Jew wandering in the desert’ – a cliché, a pastiche. Epstein, on the other hand, starts to inhabit the role of King David: Klausner insists that he is the descendent of King David, and at the end, Epstein ends up playing David in film, going through a Kafka-like metamorphosis into his supposed forefather.

I also think Kafka’s Metamorphosis creates an interesting framework to discuss the failure of language I touched upon earlier. Gregor Samsa’s inability to communicate as a beetle is certainly mirrored in Krauss: the novel is full of misunderstandings, missed connections, and miscommunications. Someone is always speaking the wrong language (Hebrew, Yiddish, English). Meaning is lost or distrusted – Nicole doesn’t trust narrative, and often questions her own writing (‘Is that what I wrote?). Krauss imagines that Kafka learnt to write in Hebrew, and so Nicole is given a Hebrew typewriter to complete his work. In real life, Butler explains how Kafka was claimed as a German author because of his perfect ‘pure’ German (see Butler essay) – thus, by ‘claiming’ Kafka as a Jewish writer at the level of language, and ‘claiming’ Nicole by forcing her to continue writing the story in Hewbrew, the novel enacts this battleground on language.

In Joshua Cohen’s Moving Kings, failure of communication is everywhere. Uri attempts to speak to his lawyer, who doesn’t understand Yiddish, but his lawyer thinks that he’s speaking Hebrew. When Uri speaks to the to the Rabbi, he says that his beard is the interpretation of Uri’s dream (Cohen, p. 116). The therapist mixes up the Hebrew word for ‘cool’ with ‘dad’. David’s daughter Tammy majors in communication studies, but she’s failing every class except Spanish. And then, of course, there are Dina’s emails, titled ‘Re: Bad New’. At every turn, communication falls apart.

In his presentation, Mo pointed out that Cohen’s previous novel, Book Of Numberswas described as ‘one of the five best Jewish novels ever written’. However, Mo wasn’t so sure this one lived up to the same standard. He argued that when you read it, it’s not as striking – the prose is interesting, but it doesn’t blow you away.

Mo brought up some convincing arguments. Firstly, there is the David Mamet-esque dialogue, filled with hard New York tough-guy characters and overplayed masculinity. Then there are the dense sentences, which can be, at times, overwritten or overwrought. As Michael Kalisch pointed out, the language is clogged, overly smart, frenetic, reminding him of David Foster-Wallace. Over-description clogs the reading experience at every turn – especially when we run into phrases such as ‘swimfit in a slimcut suit’ (p. 28), or ‘rubbleshouldered Route 1 rose into eyesquint and earpop’ (p. 40). 

I was really interested in the way that David’s language, and the dialogue of the early scenes, creates a frame of banality and insincerity around the novel. The overwraught sentences come as slabs of banality in the text, drawing us out of sincere moments. And the letters from evicted people jar with the overall tone established (precariously) at first. Rather than following the trend of ‘new sincerity’ that we’ve seen in other novels on this course, Cohen’s novel felt like a departure into ‘faux sincerity’. The prose is affectless, cynical. Because of this, the notes from the evicted tenants feel suddenly soppy. 

However, James Wood, in his review of the book for the New Yorker, doesn’t read these stories with the same cynicism – in fact, he seems more interested in these stories than in the novel itself. Somehow, I got the sense that if you read these like sentimental and heart-wrenching, it’s easier for them to pass. But, as they are framed by the insincerity and overwrought language, it becomes hard to read them un-cynically. The letters, then, become a parody, just like the novel as a whole becomes a parody of narrative coherence.

One thing I would have loved to discuss further is how Cohen’s book relates to the topic of gentrification, and how it differs from our discussion of Markovits and Mengestu. In his novel, Cohen draws out some interesting and disturbing similarities between gentrification and settlement. For example, Tammy is described as a gentrifier, living in an unnamed neighbourhood in New York; at times, Cohen also uses the word ‘settler’. Uri and Yoav, as part of the Israeli army, are also a form of ‘settlers’ – but their role is complicated by the idea of the Israeli-nation state.

Lastly, I’m interested in the idea of the body politic in Cohen’s novel, and how it is enacted differently in the Israeli nation-state and in the United States. In Israel, it seems that the politics exerted on the body are more straightforward, singular, physical. Young men like Uri and Yoav are drafted into the army and must serve for two years, falling under the command of a nation-state in which ‘Nothing ever happened out of whim or caprice. Everything was logical, logistical, systematic, each mission backed by a sacrosanct wisdom to which the average grunting soldier would never be privy.’ (Cohen, p. 104). In the States, however, the pressures of the body politic are more multiplicitous, as we saw in Markovits’ novel. What seems to be oppressing the American characters is money; Tammy’s life is defined by the pocket-money from her father; David is controlled by the ‘Pro-Growth’ body politic (Cohen, p. 15); and they are all active participants in gentrification. All this led me back to thinking of Butler’s essay, the politic of the Jewish nation-state, the politics of ‘non-arrival’, and the body politic. [Caroline Koktvedgaard, CRK]

—

Thanks for an excellent post-class note, Caroline. I want to briefly pursue the parallels between Krauss’s novel and Roth’s story, and to think more about the place of Kafka in the Jewish-American imaginary. In both texts, we could say that an alternative history brings Kafka ‘home’. In Roth’s story, that means Americanising Kafka, and imagining him in Newark, New Jersey; for Krauss, it means imagining Kafka making aliyah, living on a kibbutz, then working as a gardener in Tel Aviv. In both, Kafka’s ‘return’ prompts us to ask quite what we mean by ‘belonging’, a literary question but also a legal one, as Butler explores in relation to the ownership of Kafka’s manuscripts, and which she connects more broadly to the ‘right of return’ that is such an intractable problem in Israeli-Palestinian politics (sometimes called the Law of Return, recalling the Before the Law parable in The Trial, which Krauss makes much of). Kafka emblematises a diasporic sensibility that both writers want to claim or make their own, even as they explore the tension inherent to this. More ambitiously, both texts are also preoccupied with the relationship between survival and literary posterity: if Kafka had survived, he would not be remembered, at least, not in the same way. And behind this equation, there seems to be a darker anxiety about the place of the Holocaust in Jewish identity , the idea that memorialising always involves a kind of Max Brod-esque  myth-making – this is something Roth explores much further and more daringly in The Ghost Writer, in which Anne Frank is alive and well in America…

Thinking about the place of Israel and the Holocaust in the novel, its interesting to note – and not just as literary gossip – the parallels between Krauss’s work and that of her ex-husband, Jonathan Safran Foer. At the start of class, I described Forest Dark, a little flippantly, as Krauss’s ‘divorce novel’; Foer’s equivalent was Here I Am, published in the same year, and also involving the breakdown of a marriage, and a plot based in Israel. It’s not the first time this has happened: Krauss’s The History of Love (2005) and Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) also overlapped in ways that can be read not simply biographically, but as reflecting something broader about third-generation Jewish-American fiction, its relationship to traumatic Jewish history, and its changing perspective on Israel.

With references to Kafka, Spinoza, and Bruno Schulz, Krauss situates her work in relation to a much-mythologised Eastern European Jewish intellectual culture, and her novels seem to owe a lot to the sentimental shtick (which I love, by the way) of Isaac Bashevis Singer. I think what we took in class to be the acidic tone of Moving Kings – what we called its cynicism – has to do with a kind of hyper-vigilance against this shtick. In class, we talked about Cohen’s prose as frenetic and jarring, and discussed its inability to stick with one scene, with one character, with one narrative style, and how this related to the novel’s theme of displacement, of being ‘unsettled’; but I think it also guards against the dreaminess and easy reverie of Krauss’s prose. Cohen isn’t interested in a mythic Jewish, intellectual past; he’s pursuing a much riskier parallel between (near) contemporary American and Israeli politics, between the displacement and disenfranchisement of both late capitalism and military occupation. I’m not sure it always comes off – I think the narrative, unlike his other works, is a bit too summarily compressed – but its worth paying attention to how much we were troubled by the prose style. [MK]

PRIMARY:

• Teju Cole, Open City (2011)
• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (2013)

SECONDARY

• Katherine Hallemeier, “To Be from the Country of People Who Gave”: National Allegory and the United States of Adichie’s Americanah“, Studies in the Novel, 47: 2 (Summer 2015), p. 231-245.
• Alexandra Kingston-Reese, “Ambient Moods”, ASAP/J, July 18, 2019 [here]
• Caroline Levine, “The Strange Familiar”: Structure, Infrastructure, and Adichie’s Americanah“, MFS, 61:4 (2015), pp. 587-605.
• Werner Sollors, “Cosmopolitan Curiosity in an Open City”, New Literary History, 49:2 (Spring 2018), pp. 227-248 *
• Pieter Vermeulen, Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel: Creature, Affect, Form (2015)

Pre-Class Notes

––

In this week’s reading, I was struck by how both Adichie’s and Cole’s novels tie into last week’s discussion about belonging, and the idea of ‘returning’: in Amerikanah, to the homeland of Nigeria; and in Open City, to find his maternal grandmother in Belgium.

In both novels, the protagonists are constantly claimed by other Africans in America. In Open City, Julius manages to upset his cab driver by getting in without saying hello; the cab driver says to him: ‘Hey, I’m African just like you, why you do this?’ (Teju Cole, Open City, p. 40). Later, he meets the museum guard Kenneth, who is from Barbuda, who is ‘interested in African culture’, and who correctly identifies Julius as Yoruba. Julius thinks back to his previous exchange, noting their similarities; ‘I thought of the cabdriver who had driven me home form the Folk Art Museum – hey, I’m African just like you. Kenneth was making a similar claim.’ (Cole, p. 53). Only afterwards does it strike him that ‘his eyes were asking a question. A sexual question.’ (Cole, p. 54). The connection is severed – or, at least, Julius ‘felt a little sorry for him’, in thinking that they had a connection in the first place. 

Similarly, in Amerikanah, Ifemelu finds herself claimed by fellow Africans in America, especially Nigerians. In an odd echo of the cab scene in Open City, when Ifemelu is going to get her hair braided, she worries that she will get a Nigerian cab driver, ‘because he, once he heard her accent, would either be aggressively eager to tell her that he had a master’s degree, the taxi was a second job and his daughter was on the dean’s list at Rutgers’ or, even worse, would drive silently, ‘nursing humiliation’ that a fellow Nigerian, and a woman, ‘was looking down on him’ (Chamamanda Ngozi Adichie, Amerikanah,p. 8). However, when Ifemelu meets the African women in the hair salon, the reception is much warmer: ‘Halima smiled at Ifemelu, a smile that in its warm knowingness, said welcome to a fellow African.’ (Adichie, p. 11). In contrast, Obinze, when thinking of Ifemelu’s new boyfriend, calls him only ‘the black American’ (p. 19). There is a definite sense that it is different to be an African in America than to be a ‘black American’.

I felt that the sexual and racial politics were more clearly and explicitly articulated in Amerikanah, whereas in Open City, they are only intimated. Julius, when he hears the women’s march outside his building, simply closes the window. He feels a pang of sadness about his relationship with Nadège ending, but barely speaks about it for the rest of the novel. It didn’t exactly feel cold, but certainly affectless – contrasted with the emotional depth and richness of Adichie, I was often struck by the sparse, unemotional prose of Cole. Not that one is superior to the other – but in a way, I felt that, when read together, the contrasts between the texts, the respective chill and heat of their prose, illuminated the texts in new ways for me.

I was also interested in how Open City’s roaming protagonist, Julius, challenges these ideas about belonging – becoming something like Werner Sollors’ ‘cosmopolitan’, or Jean le Rond d’Alembert and Denis Diderot’s “cosmopolitain ou cosmopolite”, “un homme qui n’est étranger nulle part” (a man who is nowhere a stranger) (Werner Sollors, “Cosmopolitan Curiosity in an Open City”, p. 228). Amerikanah’s female protagonist, Ifemelu, embodies a much more (let’s call it) ‘traditional’ African immigrant experience: what drives her is her longing to go back home to Nigeria, not to roam new places. Early on, she describes a feeling of having ‘cement in her soul’: ‘an early morning disease of fatigue, a bleakness and borderlessness. It brought with it amorphous longings, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness.’ (Adichie, p. 7). Here, it’s almost as if the ‘borderlessness’ of Cole’s wandering protagonist evolves into a deeper (or different) desire for return. This makes me wonder: is the drive to roam and the desires to return linked in some way? I’ll be interested to discuss these themes further in our last class. [CRK]

I struggled with this text–Open City–not because it was necessarily composed of idiosyncratic content, but because of the sheer variety of its discussion, which is why I also ended up enjoying the read: How many characters? How many perspectives? This may be hyperbolic, but the range (or the feeling of reading such a range) can be akin to the European realist epics of the 19th century. We have discussions ranging from Palestine, Islamic relations, Japanese Internment, Brewster paintings, and the uses of Barthes, Benjamin, de Man, and Said to name a few: Set across not just New York but also Brussels and Nigeria; centers known for their worldliness or perhaps, especially in regards to our previous discussions, polyphonic voices. This narrative voice (or lack of Julius’s voice in certain parts) is emphasized by the obvious rejection of quotation marks while the dialogue is contained in normal paragraphs, which shows this interplay of voices taking control (I don’t know about you guys, but at times the uncontained “I’s” can sometimes blur the voice of Julius). Perhaps it relates the openness of the city; although I don’t know how to read the literal definition of the title regarding an undefended city to spare it from bombardment (I.e. Brussels in WW2). Maybe there are two meanings being conjoined towards some deeper meaning?
I felt that this structure, less linear, reads more like a series of short stories or tales (I got so enamoured when Julius listened in to each character— for me, Saito or Farouq particularly– in a very detailed way). It sort of gave a mosaic to the cityscapes, something akin to Joyce’s Dubliners…The aimless wandering through various street spaces giving a reading experience slightly similar to something like Mrs Dalloway. Yet, I think this aspect of the novel creates the pendulum between its ability to see huge swaths of cities to the more subtle, intimate moments of individuals: as Farouq mentions of good fiction, “what is important to me is that the world realizes that we are not monolithic either, in what they call the Arab world, that we are all individuals (Cole 126).”
But this wandering theme…It gives me the sense that Julius is trying to find his place in this larger story or monolith (intertextual, inter-historical, inter-city). We had this moment where Julius plays off the different stories of the Two Towers, specifically the hidden immigrant communities of Robinson Street, Laurens Street, and College Place that were obliterated by the original construction of the towers, which opens to other moments of immigration discussion. Importantly Kenneth relates the image of Ellis island: “Ellis Island was a symbol mostly for European refugees. Blacks, ‘we blacks,’ had known rouger ports of entry (Cole 55).” Julius is faced with different elements of story–navigating through monoliths that sustain metanarratives of the American story: one of which Kenneth tries to subsume Julius in as well: the African American experience which Julius is outside of. Therefore it makes sense the Julius would mention, “I, one of the still legible crowds, entered the subway. I wanted to find the line that connected me to my own part in these stories”–That bit of being “legible” being especially interesting which concerns one’s individual element amongst these larger stories (also a sort of meta moment in discussing the rest of the novel about what voice is legible) (Cole 59).
But all this is precisely why we get such an intimate look at Immigrant perspective, a sort of response to the usual narrative strategy that undermines this more individual, realistic look. The Monolithic ideology comes up again for Julius: “My presentation–the dark, unsmiling, solitary, stranger–made me a target for the inchoate rage […] I could, in the wrong place, be taken for a rapist or ‘Viking’ […] their violence in the name of a monolithic identity (Cole 106).” This book itself is set against a sort of racial politics about immigrant narratives. Farouq mentions, “Which Western publisher wants a Moroccan or Indian writer who isn’t into oriental fantasy or who doesn’t satisfy the longing for fantasy? That’s what Morocco and India are there for, after all, to be oriental (Cole 104).”

(BJS)

— Open City rekindled a question in my mind that has bugged me forever, and one that appeared again last week with Moving Kings. What is it about New York that attracts so many authors/makes it such a good setting for so many novels? The idea I usually return to is that, though the space can be overwhelming in a sensory capacity, it’s difficult to imagine being (geographically) lost there. Locations are defined by intersections that read like coordinates, plotting you to a point on a map. Such a strong sense of place – both geographically and in the sense of New York as a concept, in some way – then plays quite well with the literary representation of the feelingof being lost or uncertain. This metaphorically strong sense of place is also an anchoring device for the imagination of the reader, creating a recognisable space in which contradictory things can be simultaneously true. All of this plays out in Cole’s novel, but particularly so in the last chapter, with its speculative references to the future and its strange ending. 

I’m particularly interested in the sections where the discussion on Mahler and music begins. It’s worth noting that this takes place in Carnegie Hall, an obviously iconic venue that again reminds us of where we are. Before any philosophising begins, we’re rooted to this place again. Julius refers to ‘Mahler’s sense of an ending’ (p. 250), recalling immediately for me Kermode’s 1967 book by the same title. The section of this I always refer to is the ‘tick’/’tock’ section which details how we as humans attempt to give form to time by differentiating between beginnings and endings with two different sounds. His point is that clocks don’t actually “say” ‘tick’/’tock’, though – they just keep ticking. This musters the idea of repeated beginnings and a resistance to endings, which works quite well with this text in which people from the past reappear. 

Whether this constitutes a continuity in time or a fragmentation and subsequent overlap is up for debate, but the reason I find this to be relevant is the play between connection an isolation, of moments in Kermode and of both moments and people in Open City. (One of the articles I’ve read on the book touches on this idea, I’ll do my best to remember which one and add a reference here!) As the music continues, Julius is ‘steeped’ in the history of the piece and notes ‘how strange it was that, almost a hundred years ago, right there in Manhattan, just a short walk away from Carnegie Hall, at the Plaza Hotel, on the corner of Fifty-ninth Street and Fifth avenue, Mahler had been at work on this very symphony.’ (p. 253) In doing so, Julius provides a feeling of longevity accompanied by the sense of the specific location. The place becomes a site for a history dragged into the future. In this moment, he ‘felt [he] could also detect the intense concentration, the hundreds of private thoughts, of the people in the auditorium with [him]’. (p. 253) The connection between one person in the past (Mahler) and one person in the present (Julius) is reflected in the connection between these great many people all existing in the same time, in the same place. To use a musical phrase, this moment feels somehow harmonious. The succeeding scenes are all the more effective for this. The chapter then starts to do some strange things with volume, and reading it is indeed sensory (what with the overwhelming smell of the perfume of the woman sat next to Julius and the sound of the music). Despite these overlapping senses, synaesthesia isn’t quite the feeling that springs to mind, just an idea of the loudness, and the sudden silence, and the alternation between the two. The music stops, there is silence, the applause ‘explodes’, and Julius steps out into silence on the fire escape. 

Everything about this moment on the fire escape is liminal – he stands on something attached to a building but not inside it, off the ground but not as high as he could be and hovering at this height, looking both up at the sky and down at New York City, knowing that the stars he sees are all in the past and that those he can’t see represent some unknown future. (Maybe this is the instance between two of Kermode’s ticks?) 

What I particularly like about this moment is the implication that the unknown infinite and New York City are supposedly in opposite directions, and yet when Julius steps back into the building (i.e. into New York instead of hovering above it) and therefore out of the liminality and back onto some temporal trajectory, he enters the future that was before so distant. Long descriptions of stars and uncertainty of the future is followed by two pages full of references to location that makes me feel like I know where I am –Central Park, Twenty-third Street, West Side Highway, the Chelsea Piers building, Wall Street, World Financial Centre, Upper Bay, Statue of Liberty.

Open City is, in this sense, open-ended, tending towards the unknown future but in a place that feels like it should be knowable. Maybe this is comforting. Maybe that’s why New York makes ‘emotional sense’ to Julius. (p. 248) This chapter thus encapsulates many opposites – sound and silence, past and future, connection and isolation, ending and continuation – as New York itself is able to. 

Some questions I can’t get my head around – 

1. What on earth is that ending about? 
2. Does this work with any city? Perhaps this is something we can discuss in class. I can’t quite conceive of this working with London in quite the same way, for example, but I am more than aware that this could just be because in my mind New York does function as a concept as much as a place. [RF]

I’m really interested in the metaphysics that Teju Cole develops through his depictions of New York in Open City. There’s this sense of constant movement, creation, and destruction in the City, such that no single thing exists as fixed in the world he develops. He writes of “the swiftness and dispassion with which the market swallowed even the most resilient enterprises” and of the “Lenape paths [that] lay buried beneath the rubble? [sic] The site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased, rewritten” (19, 59). Time is collapsed in the work, so that we can see the total re-creation of the City across centuries and generations. 

My sense is that this depiction speaks to more than just the nature of New York. This might be too much of a jump, but I read the lines above as Cole hinting towards a cyclical vision of history, where all mores are destroyed and replaced such that no single system of belief ever attains permanence or becomes absolute truth. I was reminded of a line from Wallace Stevens: “there is no such thing as life; what there is is a style of life from time to time” (Letters, 48). The idea that Stevens makes explicit here is that no object, no idea, exists permanently — all things exist in a state of flux, waiting to be replaced or superseded by the next thing. This fluxional depiction of reality is effectively a form of existentialism.

This vision of reality, or metaphysics, then suggests a particular way of thinking about the world. Cole develops the normative implications of this fluxional City through the metaphor of his walking. He writes “My futile task of sorting went on until the forms began to morph into each other and assume abstract shapes unrelated to the real city, […] The walks met a need: they were a release from the tightly regulated mental environment of work […] The streets served as a welcome opposite to all that. […] I covered the city blocks as though measuring them with my stride, and the subway stations served as recurring motives in my aimless progress.” In the first line we get the futility of trying to develop any stable abstractions from fluxional reality. When Julius started going on walks, he tried to impose an abstract structure on it, develop some sort of stable mental model. But he finds that this task is “futile,” because the City has no intrinsic structure, its culture and patterns of movement don’t align with any particular model — they simply exist for a moment before they change. And so he adopts a different mode of being: he gives up trying to theorize the City, and instead walks aimless, just appreciating its pulses. We might read this as something like an artist’s statement, or maybe just an argument for the supremacy of literature over philosophy; the essential suggestion being that thought shouldn’t serve to fix reality into permanent structures, but should rather enhance and appreciate reality’s flow. 

The last thing I want to mention about this idea is the way in which it inflects on Cole’s cosmopolitanism. If Cole had subscribed to, let’s say a Platonic metaphysics, then I think there’d be a lot less room for the sorts of “conversations” that Sollors points out in the work; instead we’d have a couple philosopher-kings enlightening the rest of the group. The work would be hierarchical, conveying pure knowledge downwards. But the work’s epistemic humility conveys a more horizontal view of knowledge. Since there is nothing fixed or finally true about reality, each culture’s central mores can be equally valid. Conversation here has no need for persuasion, since multiple worldview’s can be equally valid.

This comes through particularly clearly in the scene where Julius reflects on his conversation with Khalil. He writes, “because I knew that my own fear of anti-Semitism, like my fear of racism, had through long practice become prerational. What I would impose on him would not be an argument, it would be a request that he adopt my reflexes, or the pieties of a society different from the one in which he grew up, or the one in which he now functioned” (124). Julius’s sense here is not that his beliefs are correct, but instead has a particularly socialized mode of talking about specific issues. His disagreement with Khalid, then, is not one in which either party is right or wrong (or needs to be convinced), but rather becomes an actual conversation as Appiah defines it: one “undertaken without the hope of persuading others or of reaching an agreement with them” where the sole goal is “to get used to one another” (230, 231). The essential thing I’m trying to point out here is that this mode of conversing is undergirded by an existentialist metaphysics, where no cultural truth is final and so all are equally valid. [MP]

——

[Disclaimer: to get this in on Friday night, I actually wrote this with about 50 pages of Open City still to go (very busy week) – so, unfortunately, right before the Moji twist. This completely changes most of what I wrote, since -obviously – it completely changes the idea of Julius. I’ll try amend if I have time, but just wanted to point this out!]

Julius of Open City is elusive: he begins the novel with the ‘photographic eye’ so often mentioned in discussions of Cole – and all the potential limitations of this attached. Sharp and literal, it captures, stops, and considers, almost without feeling. The Guardian review mentions the Isherwood analogy, the author as camera ‘with its shutter open, quite passive, recording’, and passive here is right. It’s remarkable how often the governing verb of a sentence or introductory sentence to a paragraph represents that I/eye as something governed by alien motive, by something outside the governing self: ‘made me think of’, ‘I knew then I was no longer heading home’, ‘I found myself all alone on the platform’, ‘one image drew me back in’. This is the flaneur who follows crowd and chance to the utmost extreme, almost to the point of impersonality: early in the novel, emotion rarely enters, it ‘flits’ in shadowy fashion (as by the river) only to disappear in the concrete of another immaculately rendered image. That’s not to say the prose is minimal though, or deliberately one-dimensional in a Robbe-Grillet type fashion – an ideological stance against surface, etc. In fact, there are numerous, rather grandiose philosophical leaping-offs, erudite cultural references, slightly hackneyed moments of lyrical transcendence (Mahler at the record shop). But because there’s a deficit of feeling, or because these references seem somehow loose, gratuitous, originally untethered in a greater or particularly likeable character, it all feels somewhat empty to start with, and hints at the pretentious in Julius.

My scepticism however, proved quite unfounded: the book proved far, far more subtle than I originally suspected, and far more brilliant. The development of Julius, and the blossoming out of the text, works by the moments when he begins to listen as well as look. He’s a character who works in a strange gestaltic fashion: he’s filled in as the shape of other people’s lives cluster around his. He works as a strange magnet for confession, for the (almost) passive collation of many voices which begin to give us an idea of him from the negatives, from his reticent responses to urgent, moving, intellectually and emotionally stirring appeals. There are emotionally wrenching stories of African immigrant internment in New York (Saidu), hard, cold stories of wartime Europe and upper-class bourgeois society (his mother, Annette Maillotte), falteringly incendiary, strenuously thought-provoking political discussions with the Islamic Farouq in Brussels – these and many more are told to Julius, who vacillates in the gaps between their words, constantly torn by ‘the skein of argument [which begins] to feel like futility piled on futility’.

Through most the book, the odd but immaculately handled role of Julius is as the facilitator of many mouthpieces, and the maker of bizarre, brilliant, highly idiosyncratic links across centuries and cultures – leaps from Walter Benjamin to Palestine to Van Eyck. The conversations give weight to the connections, the ballast missing at the beginning: the vivid personality of the encounters balance with the occasionally flavourless intellectualism of Julius and together they unfurl a muted, humble, massive scope of view which never forgets to interrogate itself for assumptions. As an ear as well as an eye, Julius reveals himself as the perfect intermediary.

He takes on voices incredibly easily. His passivity is even in the punctuation: there are very rarely speech marks or other notices of who exactly is speaking; direct speech is grammatically indirect, and the ‘I’ of the interlocutor invariably hijacks Julius’ paragraphs, taking it over with the stylings of their own speech and the ideology that entails. 

Julius knows this, however, and the flip-side of the coin then is the reticence that accompanies (or, more often, follows) the potential passivity. Julius is always scared of being ‘claimed’, and so every conversation meets an undermining, mediating current of scepticism. This might be the African taxi driver who calls him ‘brother’, the prisoner who seeks him as possible intimate (he is guarded about ‘the idea of myself that I presented in that story … the listener, the compassionate African’ … ‘I said that I would visit, but I never did’), mother as confidant (‘I listened with only half an ear, embarrassed by the trembling and emotion’), political radical as ally (‘it was hard to escape a feeling that we were having a conversation before the twentieth century had begun’; ‘I looked at my watch, though I really had nowhere to go’). He continually draws back before quite believing, quite giving himself over to anything, and changes his mind constantly: one moment Farouq is intimidatingly subtle, the next ‘a cancerous violence has eaten into every political idea’, he is one of the ‘thwarted’. We see that what Julius is really doing is searching: all his mighty leaps of cultural connection are just ways of trying to work out the incredibly uncertain world, and every thought is just process, constantly to be scaled down, modified, refuted. As such, he is unfailingly thorough, and we get exploration rather than explanation

The novel, in this, is almost endlessly discussable: its panoramic scope is such that it disdains the idea of a ‘great American novel’ which might haunt the fiction around it. It will not separate American identity and history and issues from the European from the African from the everything, and it is far too cynical to allow this vague notion of greatness. Its representation is fragmented, and – to use a Julius-like artistic intellectual leap – almost cubist. We get all these voices thrown at us as different angles, different views or experiences of the world, and each is offset, modified, thrown into relief by the others that collide against it. It is a refusal of the single ideological perspective, the single answer, and it requires a narrator like Julius to be the difficult, elusive, lonely artist/curator/camera/recorder/wanderer who bumps them all together, takes them to pieces, and forms the desperately subtle and far-reaching overall picture. 

[MBW]

—

What I liked most about Adichie’s Americanah is its candour.

It doesn’t force the reader to adopt a moral position with which one then indulges in reading-activism. It isn’t wrestling to erase the trace of a colonial past by chasing after a pre-colonial identity, or looking to create a new postcolonial identity through a vehement opposition to the legacy of colonialism. It presents its socio-political and cultural moment not as one flowing from a colonial and imperial history but more as a circumstance into which its characters are thrown. Perhaps the reason for this is that Adichie’s is the post-postcolonial generation. What does that mean? Homi Bhabha explains, “If the jargon of our times—postmodernity, postcoloniality, postfeminism—has any meaning at all, it does not lie in the popular use of the ‘post’ to indicate sequentiality—after-feminism; or polarity—anti-modernism. These terms that insistently gesture to the beyond only embody this restless and revisionary energy if they transform the present into an expanded and ex-centric site of experience and empowerment (The Location of Culture 6).” If I were to explain Bhabha, I’d say that he means to view the present as a site where experience happens the naturally muddled-up way, without being pre-emptively bracketed into neat theoretical categories. Because the pre-emptive bracketing of experience into neat theoretical categories maroons us on the “Now what?” island, where our inability to answer the very question spells the opposite of empowerment.  

The Afropolitan novel – as Katherine Hallemeier believes Americanah to be – is very attuned to the moment it is in. Its middle and upper-middle class characters grow up listening to American music, watching American television shows and planning their futures in the West. This is shown as a matter-of-fact, not as a tragic present attitude that needs to go in order for something nationalistic to take its place (which, for me, is reminiscent of India in the 90s and the early-00s. If I were to do a purely historicist reading of the American aspiration in Americanah, I would dive into Nigerian cultural history and look for something on the lines of the Unipolar Moment of 1990 and the Indian economic liberalisation of 1991, when the Soviets stopped flooding the Indian market with 19^th century Russian literature and the Americans started flooding it with heavy metal). The projection of a future elsewhere, removed from the barren and mundane here-and-now (the desire for a temporal and spatial displacement), can be counted among one of the earliest assertions of the self – the realisation of the individual. What then is the critique of individualism is also a critique of the Afropolitan novel – that it is out of touch with the realities of class privilege and the access it brings. Americanah does not make any pretensions at being a universal novel. This brings me back to my first point in this note about the reader’s unfounded need to adopt a moral position in order to read the novel through it: the novel isn’t a Victorian instrument of moralising anymore. The modern, postmodern, postcolonial, post-postcolonial (et al.) novel simply problematises. [M.S.]

I was irritated by the framing of the sudden rape allegation towards the end of Open City, because it seemed to be an inescapable challenge to the critic; to force one to decide to go back and reinterpret the text in light of this revelation, or to ignore it and continue with an interpretation that is already fairly established by page 244. Either is an awkwardly political act (I note that Werner Sollors chooses the latter course).

As an attempt at compromise (without doing any justice to the feminist issues at play here), I will take the issue of Julian’s lack of memory of the alleged assault as symptomatic of a central flaw in Julian’s character, and his homodiegetic narrative. I disagree with Sollors slightly regarding his reading of the ‘question at the heart of the novel’ being ‘whether there can be cosmopolitanism after the Holocaust and the many other twentieth-century atrocities that it overshadows.’ While I see the centrality of this to the text, I would argue that the most prominent concern is in fact the limitations of Julian’s empathy and perception of the subjective experience of others. In some respects Julian occupies an enviable position in his detatchment, cultural hybridity, and incredibly broad intellectual knowledge; he is able to observe his surroundings with both particularity, a clinical intensity borne of his medical training, and a strong sense of the historical. And yet his interactions with others seem troubled by his intense interiority, almost to the point at which the characters are in some sense a part of himself – the lack of speech marks heightens this effect, demonstrating through similarity the difference between characters’ speech and free indirect discourse.

The Farouq section is particularly interesting in this regard. I am particularly interested in the connections suggested by Farouq’s anecdote at being forgotten by the principle after a conversation (the incongruity of which the man seemed aware of at the time) about Deleuze; ‘when I saw him next, he not only refused to speak to me but actually pretended he had never seen me before’ (pp.112-3). This strange amnesia – its interruption of a human connection across the barriers of race, culture, and class – relates to the Beckettian nature of Julian’s first meeting with Farouq, which almost resembles a dream vision in its lack of contextual congruity; ‘our conversation had happened without the usual small talk. […] The biographical details had been irrelevant to our encounter’ (p.106). While the men have a connection, partly due to their experience of being immigrants in Western cities and partly their intellectual interests, Julian remains emotionally detached, even in their last meeting, not sharing Farouq’s sense of rage. And from here he, like most other characters, disappears from the narrative. While Farouq does have his place in a web of connections regarding Islamaphobia, terrorism, racism, scholarship and translation that run through the novel, there is seemingly minimal human development to this encounter. This detachment, a type of amnesia, may be reflected in the final accusation – I look forward to hearing what other people think about that episode.

This is a complete contrast to Americanah, in which the possibilities of an international cosmopolitanism are framed within human relationships. I’ve realised it is the only novel on our course to be centred on a romance plot. Adichie’s movement from the present back into the past throughout the narrative is the opposite of Cole’s narrative wandering; ‘Memories of him [Obinze] so easily invaded her mind […] Each memory stunned her with its blinding luminosity. Each brought with it a sense of unassailable loss’ (p.473). While I follow Hallemeier’s argument that ‘their reunification would seem to demarcate a political collectively that is undoubtedly capitalist’, in the final chapter I think there is a specific resistance to Ifemelu’s ‘reaching back to her past’ (p.475), largely against the violence of capitalist development as presented in her last blog post; ‘They walk under a cluster of trees which, only hours ago, housed the livelihood of food hawkers. […] But now the shacks are gone. They are erased, and nothing is left’ (p.474). The present tense gives the scene a mythic, atemporal quality, suggesting the post is an attempt to hold onto this past – and livelihood – and the people who still inhabit it. Is she moving into a Jamesian allegory here, by which the final invitation to Obinze becomes a victory for an imagined peaceful cultural continuity? Perhaps it is not so much allegory as a recognition of the significance of human relationships in shaping one’s views of a city and countering an isolating self-obsession. 

As a final thought, I wondered if it might be worth discussing the classification of Adichie’s novel as an American text? I am aware that she splits her time between Nigeria and the US, but I had thought of her as a Nigerian writer – I note that she is central to the reading list for the course on African Literature next term.  [RJ]

Post-Class Notes

We opened with Jane’s excellent presentation on Open City. A little Kant and a few quotes slipped by my notes but the major themes discussed were cosmopolitanism and the idea of race in urban space. Can the idea of cosmopolitanism survive the Holocaust, the many atrocities of the 20^thcentury? Jane ran briefly through a fraught and fascinating history of the concept: the ‘commitment to communication beyond rather than between nationality’ which seemed central to the legacy of the Enlightenment, to Diderot and the possibility of a universal humanism; to its later ambitious applications in chequered projects like that of Esperanto, the League of Nations; and then the confrontation with totalitarianism (Hitler, Stalin, our difficult last century) from which it could hardly continue unchanged. The possibility of a more modest, realistic goal was discussed: in which a dialogue remains with ‘other’, in which local difference is preserved while a wider sense of community achieved. Can the individual remain under the theory? Can community occur between the consciously ‘different’, might cosmopolitanism be used as an evasion of the ethics individuality demands? These are all concerns for Cole, as was nicely demonstrated in examples like his use of internet cafes, flights, radio stations – places where a multiplicity of voices are almost taken for granted. 

Julius, perhaps inevitably, then took centre-stage: the highly-educated black immigrant post-colonial cosmopolite; the dubiously philosophising, morally evasive rapist. His particularly Western erudition was marked as unusual in such post-colonial narratives – (Cole in an interview: ‘[one] can oppose white supremacy and appreciate gothic architecture at the same time’) – but equally uneasy. There was a wide feeling of the spuriousness, the hierarchical pretension, of many of his cultural connections, which become increasingly apparent as devices of diversion from emotion, guilt, the  uncomfortable matter-at-hand – discourse as escape from the responsibilities of reality. Historicism and abstraction as defence mechanism: bed-bugs to look away from death, and a Nietzsche anecdote to refuse the past.

Michael drew our attention to De Man: the insight as a form of blindness, and blindness as a form of insight – a curious hinge for Julius and his selectively blinkered intelligence, his Enlightenment commitments and genuine occasional insights. There was also the idea of the ‘post-humous revelation’: De Man as the anti-semite, and Julius as the misogynist. All this anxiety, this blind/insightful/blind narrative, manifests in some fascinating modes of writing: the classic family-search strand which dissolves almost immediately in Belgium, the collapse of that lyrical realist sense of purpose, the ‘fugue state’ which might take over the story, encounters lapping into the realm of dream (Farouq) and unreality. 

Curious too was the psychiatrist element: we discussed Judith Butler, the possibility of grief as the binding element of a certain idea of cosmopolitanism – grief doing the cultural, political work, being the intrinsic universality. Open City as a book generally haunted by a sense of mourning – a dark, internalised sense which spills into the tone, which creeps up in contingent narratives and inserted references (the Joan Didion book on the plane, etc.)

Martha gave us a great introduction to Americanah in view of some intriguing, if potentially over-reaching, critical perspectives. A lot revolved around ideas of genre, and the novel’s mode of discourse with social/political/economic realities. Was it a classic romance story? Was it a plot presentig a possibility of capitalist success outside the supremely white model? Does it make a political statement through its refusal to structure plot directly around political event? Adichie’s insistence, perhaps, is that ‘Americanah’ can be a novel in just the same spheres as a ‘first-world’ novel, with the same techniques and same freedoms. Her reticence to fall into some sub-set, potentially compassionate category – ‘postcolonial literature is something made up by professors to give themselves work’ – is a variation on this, an assertion of the self-as-writer above any smaller distinction. 

Americanah’s concerns with the global book-market, the relationship between writing and capital, were discussed, with a nice life-reflecting-art point towards Adichie’s 2014 blog (highly similar to Ifemelu’s). Martha noted Adichie’s repeated claims of observation not theory – the writer as social realist rather than social theorist. This opened out the conversation onto the topic of the novel generally: the plight of realism today, the flimsy and difficult-defined categories of avant-garde, highbrow, middle-brow, the necessity or pretension of obscurity and the radical in today’s literary world. The conversation was open-ended and strongly felt – it really seemed like we were drawing on a great amount we’d learned and read together over the term. It was a deserved conclusion to a wonderful run of seminars. 

My apologies for the late post (my timekeeping will never improve), but I’d like also to send a genuine thank you to everyone. I thought the contributions the last six weeks were consistently brilliant, and it really was such a welcoming environment to talk and think in – nothing of the sterile academic silence that pops up in some other seminars, and that was thanks to everyone around the table. Much love, thanks again, and a round of applause for our incomparable host Mr Michael Kalisch! Good luck on the writing, it’s been a pleasure.

[MBW]