De Profundis: Brazil

Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector

“He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amidst a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight and gayclad ligthclad figures of children and girls and voices childish and girlish in the air.” It is from this passage from Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, that the late Brazilian-Jewish writer Clarice Lispector takes her epigraph for her astonishing first novel, Near to the Wild Heart. Indeed her debt to Joyce is clear. Published in Rio in 1943, the novel is nothing if not a tribute to the language he unleashed. 

Still, it is more the spirit of Virginia Woolf who haunts these lonely pages. It is really from Woolf, from her particularly feminine oppression and longing, that this novel takes its heartbeat and blood. Jumping back and forth in time, the story concerns itself with the startling interior landscape of a frustrated, deeply introspective, almost monstrously imaginative child and young woman known only as Joana. In this age of Facebook and Tumblr, one might be tempted to mistake the story for just another drunken foray into the temple of Self, but one would be wrong. As with most great modernist fiction, the fons et origo of this novel is Character with a capital C, a single individual whose perspective, whose psychology, not only subsumes and comprises the story’s plot and setting (for what little they mean), but actually proves macroscopic in its obsessive focus on the self, on the intricate clockwork of mind and heart and soul, so that what one gets in the end is not just a story of a woman but a story of the world.

Charged, poetic, at points as angular, dissonant, and unpredictable as Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” such fiction is at first quite demanding to read. Those not experienced with poetry will feel the weight of her words, the almost reckless invention of her prose. Given some patience, some faith, they are sure to be moved. Yet perhaps the most rewarding part such modernist fiction as Near to the Wild Heart is that one’s very notion of reading is changed. One sees freshly, with bold, new eyes. Freed from the tyranny of plot, such fiction delights in subtlety, in complexity, in the riddle of human things. Nothing is clear-cut, nothing certain; one stands astonished, mouth and mind agape. As Adorno puts it, in speaking of art in general:

Artworks that unfold to contemplation and thought without any remainder are not artworks…every artwork is a picture puzzle, a puzzle to be solved, but this puzzle is constituted in such a fashion that it remains a vexation, the preestablished routing of its observer.”*

This summer set yourself a challenge and read this book (or any others by Lispector or Woolf).  You’ll be happy you did.

Clarice (formerly Chaya) Lispector (1920-1977) was a Brazilian novelist and short story writer who was  born in Chechelnyk, Podolio, Ukraine on the ninth of December 1920. She was the youngest daughter of a Jewish family. They were targeted during pogroms that happened during the political turmoil of the early twentieth century. Following the destruction of Ukraine in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Civil War, the family fled to Romania. Still, harried, still anxious, they left Romania, sailing to Brazil in 1922, where they settle first to Maceió, Alagoas, and then in Pernambuco.  There she was educated at the Colégio Hebreo-Idisch-Brasileiro and Ginásio Pernambucano where she encountered Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, a novel that convinced her that she was meant to write.  Journalist, activist, author of numerous prize-winning novels and short story collections (most of which have been translated into English), she published her last novel, A Hora da estrela or The Hour of the Star, in 1977, the year she succumbed to ovarian cancer.+

* from Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, London: Continuum, 2002), p.158.

+ Thanks to The European Graduate School for this excellent short biography. 

Peter Adam Nash

"Then as Farce"

The Successor by Ismail Kadare

"In other words, consciousness is not, strictly speaking, in earnest with moral action: what it really holds to be most desirable, to be the Absolute, is that the highest good be accomplished, and that moral action be superfluous."

"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."

"The events of this novel draw on the infinite well of human memory, whose treasures may be brought to the surface in any period, including our own. In view of this, any resemblance between the characters and circumstances of this tale and real people and events is inevitable." --Kadare

   
Marx's memorable mot juste, made in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, referred, of course, to the contrast between uncle (Napoleon I) and nephew (Louis Napoleon), but can be applied, as Marx indicated, to Caesar and Octavian, Robespierre and Louis Blanc, and many other historical odd couples.  Take you pick: tragedy or farce, though one wonders at times at the difference between them, apart from the body count.

The wags among you might apply this Marxist witticism to the Man himself--Hegel as tragic, Marx as farcical.  But then, as Marx was inclined to do, we could turn the mot upside down; after all, nothing could be clearer nowadays than that Hegel's turgid ramblings on history presciently described the farcical times in which we live, while Marx--maligned for crimes he could never have imagined let alone condoned--clearly foresaw the tragedies of our world.  We find ourselves residents of an age of absolutes: God's Will, or Mammon's--one as farcical as the other--squalor amidst ostentation, cynical wealth mocking humane values, a global priesthood (all faiths and none at all) eager, in the style of Robespierre, to destroy those who do not share their particular Apocalypse. 

In his extensive body of work, the great Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare has explored both the tragedy and farce of history--of all history, but in particular of the mostly hidden past of Albania, a country he loves and has courageously stood by despite the risks that his novels and public statements have entailed. The Successor, a novel based on murky Balkan facts, might be read as a Hegelian satire or as a lightly fictionalized version of a tragi-farcical event of the not-too-distant past. Not comic: Kadare is very funny, but never comic. 

Mehmet Shehu, the designated successor to Supreme Power (the caps are required), henchman of the Guide of Albania--the forgettable Enver Hoxa--heir to power that was absolute in the precise sense that Stalin's power was absolute--this unknown Mehmet Shehu died mysteriously on December 17, 1981.  The official story was that Shehu committed suicide, a crime in the Socialist Peoples' Republic, so Shehu was denounced post-mortem as a traitor to the Party and his family was arrested and imprisoned.  Kadare is at his best in describing the alternating apotheosis and demonization of Party hacks--what's the Guide's mood today?  Shall the body be disinterred or allowed to remain "at peace" for a little while?  Hagiography quickly becomes scurrilous condemnation--Kadare memorably portrays the shifting currents of totalitarian mythology. Rumors surfaced that Shehu was an agent of the CIA; another view was that Hoxa had Shehu killed for his role in Albanian maneuvering between alliances with Moscow and with Beijing.  Suspects abound. In any case, Shehu was, like Hoxa, a brutal, hard-line Stalinist, responsible for making Albania the most repressive of Eastern European dictatorships, the last of the Stalinist enclaves.

[For this history in more detail, see Miranda Vickers, Albania: A Modern History (1999).]

I won't make the unavoidable comparisons to Kafka--let's face it, if you write about politics these days, who but Kafka can you invoke?  Albania, about which we know too little, strikes me as aptly comparable in the Hoxa years to North Korea--insular, xenophobic, repressive, paranoid, poor, and rotten with Communist apparatchik kleptomania--a place of tragedy and farce.  Kadare, whose books consistently uncover the mingled terror and absurdity of life in a totalitarian state, has the great gift of indirection--he places his narrative voice in the apparently neutral zone between naïve witness and Swiftian satirist.  He seems to be saying throughout The Successor, "Look, I know this is absurd, but what can I do? I'm as baffled by all of this as you are."  The effect is funny and sad and unsettling,  

There are many suspects--at least one man confesses to the murder out of loyalty to the Guide: "On several occasions he came close to writing a letter to the man Himself.  He was prepared to assume responsibility for all possible and imaginable crimes--murder, incitement to self-destruction, etcetera--if that could be of use to the Cause.  The first lines of his letters provided him with a sense of relief, but then he was overcome with a sense of defeat.  He realized with alarm that he had  not known how to interpret His signs. In fact, the Guide had never been very forthcoming, as, for instance, in the Kano Zhbira affair: each time the body was exhumed, the current winners were cut down, until the next unburying brought down their successors too."

What do the signs say? Who is in, and who is out (forever)? Orwellian to be sure, but worse, because all the maneuvers and betrayals and mysteries (we never learn the truth; there is no truth) are pointless--power doesn't even seem to matter as power implies the ability to make changes and Hoxa's Albania never changed, so power could only exist for its own sake, as a kind of chess game locked in endless stalemate. 




It is difficult to overemphasize the power and poetic beauty of Kadare's books, at least as we have them in English.  Unfortunately, Albanian is a language that is not generally known.  The Successor was written in Kadare's native tongue, translated into French, and then rendered into English by David Bellos. (Kadare is fluent in French and lives in Paris for part of each year; I assume he oversees the French translations).

Some years ago I had an Albanian friend, a chess player, a master tactician who would beat me in game after game, a refugee from a country he loved and of which he despaired, who told me that Albanian was the purest of languages, the proto-language of Europe.  Kadare says the same thing in a marvelous Paris Review interview.*  Once again I am defeated by Babel and must take my pleasure in Kadare at third hand. But in any language, The Successor is an engaging and provocative book.

Kadare, born in 1936, has tread a fine line throughout his literary career, cloaking his jabs at the forty-year reign of Hoxa in myth, folklore, and the Beckettian world of the absurd. Kadare is a political writer--"Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible... The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship”--but one of remarkable subtlety.  When I read him I try to think of a comparable figure in our own literature, a writer of great intelligence and wit who nonetheless offers a devastating critique of our own farcical political culture.  The only writer I can think of who manages a Kadarian voice is Philip Roth, whose American Pastoral and The Plot Against America approach Kadare in their uncovering of the tragedy and farce of American history. 

Who did it?  Who murdered the Successor?  Who knows.  Send in the clowns. 

*See the excellent interview with Kadare in The Paris Review, right here:

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1105/the-art-of-fiction-no-153-ismail-kadar

George Ovitt (6/19/13)

Paris, 1944: How Shall We Live?

The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir

The dead are dead; for them there are no more problems. But after this night of festivity, we, the living, will awaken again. And then how shall we live?

                                                                           Simone de Beauvoir

When I was young my mother moved her study to the empty milk house on the old farm where we lived on a bluff above the Susquehanna. She had moved her books and papers and electric typewriter there in order to finish her dissertation, a task that had proven too much for her in a house with six kids. Always close to my mother, I used to visit her there while she worked, sitting quietly in the canvas chair beside her and studying the books on the shelves, the pictures on the walls. I remember there were prints by Ben Shahn (one of which I have above my desk right now) and the large, now-iconic image of the young Black Panther, Huey Newton, in a basket-backed chair armed with spear and rifle, the poster given her as a gift from her late friend and admirer (and the subject of her dissertation), the radical historian, militant, and suicide, Robert Starobin. I remember the pictures and I remember the books, can recall trying in vain to decipher their content from their titles alone. There was The Feminine Mystique, Fear of Flying, The Wretched of the Earth, Women, Race & Class, and by the door a thick paperback  copy of The Second Sex, a book I wouldn’t read for many years to come.

Even then, The Second Sex was not my first exposure to Simone de Beauvoir.  The first thing I read of hers was her short and sterling work, An Easy Death, a brave, nearly day-by-day accounting of her mother’s death. While I knew that de Beauvoir had written fiction as well I’d simply never read any, that is, until recently, when I picked up a copy of her prize-winning, semi-autobiographical  novel, The Mandarins.   

Opening in Paris in 1944, at the end of the Nazi Occupation, the novel follows a group of intellectuals--writers, philosophers, newspapermen, and activists--as they struggle to salvage the future from the ashes and rubble of war. Based in part on de Beauvoir’s own experience of that period in Paris in the restless company of Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Arthur Koestler, and her one-time lover, Nelson Algren (to whom she dedicates the novel), the story is more than merely anecdotal, more than a just paean to these brilliant, headstrong men. After all the author calls them mandarins (no doubt including herself), after the ancient Chinese order of bureaucrats, meaning also “esoteric” and “consciously superior”, if not pretentious, pedantic, effete. As much as the author clearly admired these men, as much as we all admire them today, she doesn’t pull any punches in telling this tale. For if these men, her characters, are brave, even visionary, they are also arrogant, chauvinistic, and vain.

The particular brilliance of this novel stems from the fact that we, the readers, are never locked too long inside the minds of these men, smart, prophetic as they are, but asked to see the story, first and foremost, through the eyes of a seemingly lesser player in the drama of Paris at the time, the psychiatrist, Anne Debreuilh, who serves as the novel’s governing intelligence and emotional keel. It is to her perspective, and to her own trials and tribulations--her relationship with her husband, an imperious Communist party leader; her work with her war-traumatized patients; and her affair with an American writer--that the reader is most closely, most poignantly wed. 

Yet what the author achieves with this novel, finally, is much more than that. Thanks to de Beauvoir’s extraordinary skill as a writer, to her exceptionally fine ear for dialogue, the reader is transported to Paris itself, in 1944, to sit amidst the crowded tables with these men and women and eavesdrop upon their heady, ever-provocative conversations about politics and war, about loyalty, women, and love. It is a rich, rewarding book that makes one wonder, some days, where such urgency and passion have gone.

Here, for those interested, is an engaging, if lengthy interview with Simone de Beauvoir from 1959: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGn0O2ECunk

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) was a highly influential French writer, feminist, activist, and intellectual who wrote novels, essays, biographies, as well as books on politics, philosophy, and social theory.  As a young woman, she was intellectually precocious, passing her baccalaureate exams in mathematics and philosophy in 1925, only to continue her studies at the Sorbonne where she wrote her thesis on Leibniz. There she worked with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Claude Lévi-Strauss.  It was while studying for the agrégation in philosophy that she met École Normal student, Jean-Paul Sartre, with whom she formed a tumultuous, if enduring relationship. In 1954 The Mandarins was awarded the Prix Goncourt, the highest literary award in France. 

Peter Adam Nash

Into the Heart of the Heart of Darkness

Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih

   موسم الهجرة إلى الشمال

It has taken me a couple of weeks to solve the problem of Salih's remarkable novel (published in 1966 and considered "the greatest novel written in Arabic in the 20th century" by the Arab Literary League).  The problems inherent in discussing--in reading--a novel by a Sudanese writer are many and are the result of the tragic history of that country. As I thought about Season of Migration to the North I wondered if in writing about the novel I should write about the South Sudan, the Janjaweed, Darfur, al-Gaddafi's military campaigns on the Libyan-Sudan-Chad border, genocide, Omar al-Bashir's government...in other words if I should treat Season of Migration to the North (SMN hereafter) as the political novel it is, or simply roll out the standard lit-crit comparisons--wholly justified and already deeply explored--between Salih's novel and Conrad's various secret-sharer books, especially Heart of Darkness. Since Heart is the touchstone for all books treating colonialism and imperialism, for all investigations of the mutually self-destructive psychology of Western hegemony in Africa and Asia and Latin America, it isn't difficult to find the obvious comparisons that Salih built into SMN (e.g. the unnamed narrator is a Marlowe clone, Mustafa Sa'eed a Kurtz and, as in many of Conrad's stories, the attractions of evil overwhelm a naïve and morally unformed bystander--a person who has somehow survived a catastrophe he has unwittingly witnessed, e.g. Axel Heyst of Victory). I was thinking I might also write about Wide Sargasso Sea, the post-colonial Jane Eyre, a book that I thought of while reading SMN because of the tipping into madness that comes with living in a world for which one is unsuited, or in a culture too unlike one's own.

However, I knew that I had nothing original to say about Tayeb Salih's novel as influenced by Shakespeare or Montaigne or Conrad or anyone else.  For one thing, SMN has too many progenitors, too many reference points in the Western canon.  Yes, Othello is part of the story--the "dark" Mustafa Sa'eed tempts buxom white English girls to sordid demises--and if Sa'eed is Othello he is also Iago, and Caliban, and maybe Mr. Rochester for good measure.  And as far as the contemporary history of the Sudan goes, I'm avoiding that topic as well, hence my choice of the cheerful men in colorful jallabiyahs rather than any of the hundreds of disturbing Oxfam photos of starving children in Darfur or of the strutting armies of the Janjaweed.

Salih, who worked for most of his life as a BBC broadcaster, died in 2009, and was, insofar as I can judge by the translation of Denys Johnson-Davis, an extraordinary writer--a master of psychological density, of balancing nuance and ambiguity with melodramatic action, mystery and understatement with painful honesty.  The unnamed narrator of SMN has been living in England and has returned to his native country to work as an educator. He speaks English with an eerie fluency and admires English poetry.  In a tiny village on the bank of Nile he meets a man not unlike himself--an Anglophone Sudanese named Mustafa Sa'eed whose incredible, terrifying story reveals his seduction by the "North," the lure of the culture of the oppressor. Sa'eed's account of his "season in the north" is apolitical, strangely detached and almost clinical; Salih requires us to fill in the history which strikes me as a good choice. There's no chance a Western audience is going to read a novel with a lot of third world politics cluttering up the story-line.

As if to pay the English back, or, perhaps, to satisfy his own dark desires, Sa'eed destroys several (to put it mildly) suggestible English women--he murders one, and is called to Old Bailey for the crime.   (These English women are cartoonish, not due to any lack of talent on Salih's part, but because that is how they must look to a man like Sa'eed; I won't be touching the subject of a Sudanese man's view of loose European women). Soon after Sa'eed tells his story he vanishes from the tiny Nile village he has chosen for his exile--perhaps he drowns himself in the Nile, or disappears into some heart of darkness we can't imagine--in any case he leaves his family, his wife and children, to the narrator--the "secret sharer" becomes their legal guardian.  Many bad things follow, and I won't spoil the power of SMN's final fifty pages by revealing what they are--but, strangely, SMN ends with an affirmation of life, the one rather implausible bit of plotting Salih indulges in; not because the story's fundamentally tragic nature is betrayed, but because his literary models were themselves tragic, and the history--the one I'm avoiding here--is too horrible to contemplate.

In Orientalism, Edward Said examines Lord Balfour's view of Egypt and comes to this conclusion: "Knowledge [of the Orient] means rising above immediacy, beyond self, into the foreign and distant. The object of such knowledge is inherently vulnerable to scrutiny; this object is a 'fact' which, if it develops, changes, or otherwise transforms itself in the way that civilizations frequently do...to have such knowledge of such a thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it. . . . " 

To know a people or a culture is to own it, to exercise power over it. Western rationalism takes this premise for granted--politicians since Machiavelli have called this view realism. Add a fair helping of racism and a self-serving economic theory (disguised as "that which is natural") and you have the makings of Orientalism.

It turns out that the heart of the heart of darkness isn't in the Sudan or London, and it isn't in Mustafa Sa'eed's Oriental soul--the heart of the beast resides in the assumptions of Western rationality itself, in the mistaken view that knowledge bestows power.  This dangerous view--that there is an essential way that things really are, that some blessed individuals have knowledge of these ineffable truths, and that their knowledge entitles them to rule over those who lack their historical cunning--this is the theme of Season of Migration to the North.  In fact, as Salih demonstrates, knowledge is as likely to reveal our powerlessness as our mastery. 

"Now I [the narrator]  am making a decision. I choose life. I shall live because there are a few people I want to stay with for the longest possible time and because I have duties to discharge. It is not my concern whether or not life has meaning. If I am unable to forgive, then I shall try to forget. . ."

We wonder, at the end of the book, if he will forget, or can, or should. 


George Ovitt (6/11/13)

Does Great Literature Make Us Better?

An Appreciation of William Gass, and some remarks on moral fiction

"The aim of the artist ought to be to bring into the world objects which

do not already exist there, and objects which are especially worthy of

love . . . Works of art are meant to be lived with and loved, and if we
try to understand them, we should try to understand them as we try  
to understand anyone—in order to know them better, not in order to
know something else."  William Gass


As a lover of fiction, I owe a special debt to William Gass--who will turn 89 next month and who still thinks and writes with clarity and insight (I will discuss his new novel Middle C in this blog soon; he has published a typically stirring review of his contemporary M.H. Abrams's new book of essays in the current New York Review)--for it was Gass who, thirty-five years ago, first awakened me to the sensuality and moral depth of great writing.  In his many books of literary essays and in works of fiction like Omensetter's Luck and In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, Gass shows us that great books are, as he has written, "objects worthy of love," and that serious readers will have the world opened for them, have their awareness pitched higher, discover what is mysterious in ordinary things, and see more clearly into the lives of those around them if they will but pay attention. [I suspect Gass would hate the previous sentence for its pretension, but I will let it stand.] Gass is a poet in prose, who, like his beloved Rilke, has the rare gift of being able to make of language both a bearer of meaning and an object worthy of admiration in itself. The Tunnel hypnotizes me with its meandering fragments of memory and description; I will read four or five pages, entranced, and then return to unwind the thread of the narrative (if I can--Gass disdains plots).  Gass has his imitators, but, in my view, there is no one who can play language with and against meaning in quite the same way.

"In the winter he often slept inside the station. He knew to an inch how far from the stove to sleep. He knew where everybody spat and where we stamped the snow from our boots, shaking the floor, and where the wind came pouring, snowflakes with it, rattling the paper spills we kept in the woodbox. He knew where a live ash from a pipe might land or a whittler's shavings, and he figured the fall and roll, I'm sure, of every check to the corner where the board was spilled, as it often was if Jenkins played....Kick's cat knew everything about the station. He knew where most of the light fell, and talk, and where the smoke went...."

Kick's cat under the stove.  Out here in the West, where the winters are long and a lot of heat comes from fireplaces, paper spills are common--they probably were up near Cornell where Gass received his Ph.D. in philosophy (linguistics, I think, since there was no one to direct his thesis in aesthetics) and maybe in St. Louis where Gass has lived and taught since 1959. "Where everybody spat."  Generally I read Gass aloud when the house is empty--"Furber had come in the late fall following that enormous summer...."  I'm leafing through Omensetter's Luck  (1966).  Here's Middle C, nine cat's lives later (2013):

"When the soup was clear broth, as it often impecuniously was, Joey could occasionally see his face floating in a brown dream, and he thought of his mother's real self submerged in a brown dream too, beyond the reach of life."

I remember the debate between John Gardner and William Gass concerning the "morality of fiction;" Gardner, a realist and a bit straitlaced when it came to literary form, attacked "post-modern" writers like Coover, Barth, Hawkes, Barthelme, and Gaddis for their focus on language as opposed to the moral quandaries of their characters (if these writers could even be said to have created  characters).  At the time I thought Gardner had a point--I disliked Barth and Hawkes and couldn't understand a word of Gaddis--but Gass's aesthetic represented a bridge, I felt, between literary aestheticism and a not-too-rigorous concern with moral questions.  And it was reading Gass's literary essays, especially Fiction and the Figures of Life  (1970), that allowed me to see the connection between language and meaning in literature--Gass argues, and rightly, that fiction, like philosophy, is constructed from concepts: "There are no events but words in novels."  So the love of language comes first, the aesthetic work of the writer, and then, if you're lucky, and if the writer is good, the ideas, the moral problems, the inner life of the characters--they too unfold. 

The New York Times published an opinion by the philosopher Gregory Currie this past week on the question that titles this post.  Currie's argument puzzles me a bit; he seems to be wondering how anyone could prove that fiction makes us better, or rather he believes there is no evidence for such a connection.

"There is a puzzling mismatch between the strength of opinion on this topic [the moral effect of literature] and the state of the evidence. In fact I suspect it is worse than that; advocates of the view that literature educates and civilizes don’t overrate the evidence — they don’t even think that evidence comes into it. While the value of literature ought not to be a matter of faith, it looks as if, for many of us, that is exactly what it is." By this measure marriage, religion, opera, National Parks, and philosophy are suspect: how could one ever prove in a way that would satisfy a philosopher that any of these cultural institutions, like literature, make us moral?  What would such proof even look like?  I don't expect much from editorial opinions, especially from philosophers who write sentences like this one: "Many who enjoy the hard-won pleasures of literature are not content to reap aesthetic rewards from their reading; they want to insist that the effort makes them more morally enlightened as well. And that’s just what we don’t know yet."  Not content?  In his desire to make reading serious books seem tainted by elitism, Currie makes an odd argument.  Reading (say) William Gass, or many of the books discussed in this literary journal, one isn't wishing or hoping or reaching for moral enlightenment anymore than philosophers teaching Kant's Groundwork are thinking "I hope my students don't merely comprehend the idea of the categorical imperative; I hope they adopt it!"

Great literature works on us in all sorts of ways, often not at the conscious level of "mere" aesthetic enjoyment.  Reading William Gass over three decades has taught me, for example, to pay attention.  But I didn't set out to learn this, or learn it all at once, or even figure out for years that it was something I had learned.  The causal relation between reading serious books and becoming a more empathetic and therefore a more moral person is murky: novels aren't self-help books, and the subtle influence of any serious experience is never felt at once and always intermingled with other experiences. When and where and with whom I read Gass matters as much as who I marry, what sort of religion I subscribe to, which philosophers I read.  So: there isn't likely to be any proof that will satisfy Mr. Currie that great literature makes us better.  Books don't make us moral, force us or trick us into behaviors we might not otherwise adopt; living makes us moral, and good books change the way we live, if only because while reading books we aren't doing other things whose claims to enhancing our character would be prima facie weaker. If, as Gass says, works of art induce love in us, who would argue that this is not a moral good?

 p.s. I apologize for the formatting glitches in this post. Blogger is free and not bad, but there are several significant problems with its operation. 

I owe a debt to John Madera's remarks on, and interview with, William Gass found here:

http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2013spring/William%20Gass%20Interview.pdf

The Currie piece is here http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/01/does-great-literature-make-us-better/

Happy Birthday Mr. Gass!  And my there be many more.

George Ovitt (6/7/13)

When God Was Sick: The Voice of Vallejo

The Complete Poetry, César Vallejo, A Bilingual Edition, edited and translated by Clayton Eshleman

I was born on a day/when God was sick.

                       César Vallejo

“Vallejo is hard.” I’ve heard it for years--and it’s true.  Grounded firmly in modernism and the avant-garde schools that followed it, his poetry is very difficult to read. Of this he, the poet, was well aware. For the epigraph of The Black Heralds, his first collection of poetry and first anguished tussle with Catholicism and God, he chose from the Gospel the well-known injunction: “He who is able to receive it, let him receive it.” While I still don’t know if I am able to ‘receive’ his poetry, to fathom it at all, it is not for want of interest or trying. And perhaps that’s a good place to start with Vallejo, with a sense of humility, a sense of one’s own limitations. 

Beyond Eshleman’s truly heroic commitment to rendering Vallejo in English, a dedication and struggle more than fifty years long, a part of what distinguishes this extraordinary collection of Vallejo’s poetry for me is the eloquent Foreword by Peruvian novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa. I felt consoled, emboldened, by his opening paragraph alone:

There are poets whose work can be explained, and there are inexplicable poets, like César Vallejo. But being able to explain does not mean being able to understand, or that his poems are incomprehensible, totally hermetic. It means that, contrary to our reading of explicable poets, even after we have studied everything about his poems that rational knowledge has to offer--his sources, his techniques, his unique vocabulary, his subjects, his influences, the historical circumstances surrounding the creation of his poems--we remain in the dark, unable to penetrate that mysterious aureole that we feel to be the secret of his poetry’s originality and power.

Llosa goes on to suggest that any understanding of Vallejo’s poetry has less to do with a rational, analytical approach to the material than with what he calls “a sort of osmosis or contagion”. This especially intrigued me, gave me hope.

Born in 1892, in an isolated village in the Peruvian Andes called Santiago de Chuco, Vallejo quickly fled the provincial confines of his childhood to seek a life for himself, first in the small city of Trujillo, where he attended the National University, and then to the capital, Lima, where soon he produced his first collection of poetry, Los Heraldos Negros,  a work highly influenced by that of his countryman, Manuel González Prada. Following the publication of his second volume of poetry, Trilce, and two collections of short stories, Escalas melografiadas and Fabla salvaje in 1923, Vallejo emigrated to Europe, to Spain, where briefly he served--with Neruda, Carpentier, and Paz--as a Peruvian delegate to the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers in Defense of Culture in Spain, before moving to France, to Paris, where he lived a fitful, penurious, largely melancholy life, only to die there in 1938 (possibly of malaria), a fictionalized account of which one can find in Roberto Bolaño’s short novel, Monsieur Pain.

What follows is a brief, chronological sampling of some of his shorter poems from the  collection:

Sacred Defoliacity

    Moon! Crown of an immense head,

which you keep shedding in golden shadows!

Red crown of Jesus who thinks

tragically sweet of emeralds!

   Moon! Maddened celestial heart

--why you are rowing like this, inside the cup

full of blue wine, toward the west,

such a defeated and aching stern?

    Moon! And by flying off in vain,

you holocaust into scattered opals:

perhaps you are my gypsy heart

wandering the blue weeping verses!

Under the Poplars

            For José Eulogio Garrido

    Like imprisoned hieratic bards,

the poplars of blood have gone to sleep.

On the knolls the flocks of Bethlehem

ruminate arias of grass in the setting sun.

     The ancient shepherd, shaken by

the last martyrdoms of light,

has caught in his paschal eyes

a chest cluster of brilliant stars.

    Wrought by orphanhood he descends the instant

with rumors of burial, to the praying field;

the cattle-bells are autumn-cast with shadow.

    The blue survives warped in iron,

and in it, eyeballs shrouded,

a dog traces its bucolic howl.

Huaco

   I am the blind corequenque

who sees through the lens of a wound,

and who is bound to the Globe

as to a stupendous huaco spinning.

   I am the llama, whose hostile stupidity

is only grasped when sheared by

volutes of a bugle,

volutes of a bugle glittering with disgust

and bronzed with an old yaraví.

   I am the fledging condor plucked

by a Latin harquebus;

and flush with humanity I float in the Andes

like an everlasting Lazarus of light.

   I am Incan grace, gnawing at itself

in golden coricanchas baptized

with phosphates of error and hemlock.

At times the shattered nerves of an extinct puma

rear up in my stones.

   A ferment of Sun;

yeast of darkness and the heart!

XVII

   This 2 distills in a single batch,

and together we’ll finish it off.

No one’d heard me. Striate urent

civil abracadabra.

   The morning doesn’t touch like the first,

like the last stone ovulatable

by force of secrecy.  The barefoot morning.

The clay halfway

between gray matters, more and less.

   Faces do not know of the face, nor of the

walk to the encounters.

and without a toward the exergue may nod.

The tip of fervor wanders.

   June, you’re ours. June, and on your shoulders

I stand up to guffaw, drying

my meter and my pockets

on your 21 seasonal fingernails.

   Good! Good!

And finally my favorite of all (see Natalka Bilotserkivets’ allusion to this poem in my earlier post, ‘We’ll Not Die in Paris”), in which Vallejo forecasts his own death:

Black Stone on a White Stone

   I will die in Paris in a downpour,

a day which I can already remember.

I will die in Paris--and I don’t budge--

maybe a Thursday, like today, in autumn.

   Thursday it will be, because today, Thursday,

as I prose these lines, I have forced on

my humeri and, never like today, have I turned,

with all my journey, to see myself alone.

   César Valeljo has died, they beat him,

all of them, without doing anything to them;

they gave it to him hard with a stick and a hard

   likewise with a rope; witnesses are

the Thursdays and the humerus bones,

the loneliness, the rain, the roads…

César Vallejo (1892-1938)  The Complete Poetry, César Vallejo, A Bilingual Edition, is published the University of California Press.  It is a collection worth owning for the beautiful book itself! See it here: http://www.ucpress.edu/

*Eyes-in-Hands Photograph: “The Lonely Metropolitan,” Herbert Bayer, 1932.

Peter Adam Nash