Austin Ratner's Blog, page 13

The Relevance of Psychoanalysis

Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Neuroscientist Eric Kandel, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2000 for his research on the neurochemistry of the Aplysia sea slug, wrote in 1999 that “psychoanalysis still represents the most coherent and intellectually satisfying view of the mind.”

That may come as a surprise to people who think of Freud as a relic or a quack, and there are many who feel that way, and with a passion; I've learned that Sigmund Freud, like politics and religion, is a dangerous topic of conversation. But Eric Kandel’s 1999 paper, “Biology and the Future of Psychoanalysis: A New Intellectual Framework for Psychiatry Revisited,” ought to give some pause at least to anyone who despises Freud without having carefully read and considered his ideas. Kandel’s paper opens like this:

“During the first half of the twentieth century, psychoanalysis revolutionized our understanding of mental life. It provided a remarkable set of new insights about unconscious mental processes, psychic determinism, infantile sexuality, and, perhaps most important of all, about the irrationality of human motivation.” Kandel, American Journal of Psychiatry 1999; 156:505. Or, to put it more simply, it provided insights into the relation between what you feel now and what happened in your childhood, even if you can't remember it clearly, and insights into dynamic relationships in the mind between desire, love, anger, loss, guilt, fear, and the lies we tell to ourselves to make it all feel better. Finally it made the point that talking about it (aka psychotherapy), and in so doing coming to look at yourself truthfully, is a real help. These ideas are so deeply subsumed into our culture that they're almost clichés at this point.

Yet canards, misconceptions, and prejudices against Freud abound, and many could be cured if Freud-haters actually read the brilliant and brilliantly written Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis from beginning to end, carefully, and with an open mind.

The British empiricist Karl Popper (who Ludwig Wittgenstein famously threatened with a fire poker) believed that psychoanalytic ideas were not only unproven but unprovable; he thought there was no way to evaluate the truth or falsity of a psychoanalytic proposition because psychoanalysts interpreted data in such a way that any and every possible finding would be consistent with their theories. (Some physicists have said as much about "string theory," by the way.) Popper's view is a common one, partly because Freud and the psychoanalysts who followed have sometimes treated doubters as patients and doubt of Freudian theory as a symptom (called "resistance"). While emotional "denial" and "resistance" are real phenomena, worthy of study and recognition, it seems like a bad strategy to forestall healthy intellectual skepticism in this way. Kandel argues that despite the tricky nature of the emotional and cognitive phenomena that psychoanalysts study, they have to do a better job demonstrating the validity of their findings in the methodological terms with which most scientists are familiar. He's right. If not, psychoanalysis insulates itself, prevents others from reaping its benefits, and prevents itself from reaping the benefits of advances in other fields of study, like psychopharmacology.

Psychoanalysts do, of course, base their theories on close observation, and their interpretations are no different in syllogistic form from other scientific interpretations. For example, we know the core of the earth is made of iron and nickel even though no one has ever seen the core of the earth directly; scientists have interpreted seismic wave patterns as signs of the presence of iron and nickel, just as psychoanalysts identify conscious and unconscious ideations by signs--mainly, words. You might say to a psychoanalyst, "I feel worried but I don't know why." You are conscious of part of the contents of your own psyche, but perhaps not all of them. You talk more and in the raw material generated by your talking you discover clues--signs--of the full nature of your worries. You find yourself talking about your health a lot. You are worried about your health, you've been having chest pains... It occurs to you that you are turning 52 years old this month... 50 was the bigger milestone, but you had no worries at the time of your birthday two years ago... You read an obituary about a famous lawyer. Your father was a lawyer who died, it occurs to you, of a heart attack at age 52...

Maybe you could care less about your own inner life. If you can get away without examining yourself, then you're lucky. For the rest of us, there's Sigmund Freud.

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Let the Wild Rumpus Start!

Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak




Until recently, I didn't understand the appeal of this book. The wildness of the boy and of the monsters, who have horns and sharp teeth, seemed inappropriate to a children's book. Then my younger son discovered a copy of it on the shelf and became attached to it; shortly after that I saw the movie version. The Spike Jonze adaptation is one of those rare instances where a movie enhances and enlarges a book by helping unpack its themes and artistic resources--and those are ample in this microcosmic little book. I realized after seeing the film (and after having my own children) that the problem of wildness and sharp teeth is not a problem of the Sendak book but a problem of life, perhaps the principal problem with which children grapple: what to do with their own wildness, which jeopardizes relations with loved ones and caretakers, which haunts kids in bad dreams with inversions of their own wildness, which, nevertheless, is closely related to creativity and joy, and which, in any case, will not go away. The wildness will be heard. The wildness will have its say. The wildness is an ineluctable endowment of our animal selves and of our raving grief. Not only does Sendak represent all these facets of wildness on the tiny object of a children's book, as on a gemstone, but he also captures the mood of despair of the animal caught between these obverse duties to self and to others, to chaos and order, to fantasy and reality, and he even suggests a kind of settlement: the parent wins out over the child's wildness, but wildness too prevails in the realm of imagination. The ambiguity of the unseen parent, who imprisons the child and threatens to withhold supper, but lovingly provides it anyway--in the uncivil confines of the bedroom and not at the dinner table--crystallizes this rapprochement between obversities. It will all be okay. Parents' ability to revise their decrees helps; children's ability to redirect their wildness into imagination, does too. A fellow Goodreads reader points out that the illustrations begin small with lots of white space around them and then page by page get larger until they fill the page and then creep from one page to the other, which they then fill up too, until the "wild rumpus" when the illustration displaces everything, even words, for six straight pages. Then the illustrations retract in sympathy with the boy's return to reality, order, and ... supper. It's a work of genius, I think, and proof that art can be both subtle and beloved, as long as it's true. Let the wild rumpus start!



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I Wonder What Henry James Would Say to Toni Morrison

My blog this month (this quarter?) appears on the website of the literary magazine A Public Space. It's a defense of historical fiction.

Please follow this link to read it.

I Wonder What Henry James Would Say to Toni Morrison

The Bible as Literature

The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb by Robert Crumb



Harold Bloom says that Freud learned all his psychology from Shakespeare. Would it be radical to suggest that Shakespeare learned all his psychology from the Hebrew Bible?

Robert Alter says of the Bible’s authors, "[T]he Hebrew writers manifestly took delight in the artful limning of ... lifelike characters and actions, and so they created an unexhausted source of delight for a hundred generations of readers." The Bible’s psychological realism is certainly different from other ancient works. You'll find jealousy, hubris, guilt, and family conflict in Greek myth (and perhaps in every story there is) but the Bible is more realist in style and more concerned with the minute details and subtle intricacies of mental life than say, Homeric epic, or the plays of Aeschylus, where emotions certainly occupy a central position but are seen at a longer psychic distance and are represented in more abstract ways.

When Cain is snubbed by God, who heeds Abel’s offering but not the older brother's, I can put myself in Cain’s shoes (sandals) more readily than I can in those of say, Menelaus, after Paris absconds with his wife. I understand Menelaus on a more intellectual level. When Cain is snubbed, the Bible says “his face fell” and that God asked him, “Why is your face fallen?” The narration and the figures in the stories themselves are more than in other ancient works attendant to the inner life, to discrepancies between the outward manifestations of thought and feeling and the inner facts, to discrepancies between intention and action, even between inner ideas and deeper levels of consciousness (i.e., the Bible depicts lies told to oneself; i.e., denial ain’t just the river where Moses turned up in an ark of bulrushes). Noah’s ostracism of his son and grandson and Sarah’s jealousy of Hagar are entirely modern-feeling accounts of guilt and jealousy and the way such emotions are handled in the psyche.

R. Crumb’s recently published illustrations of the Book of Genesis amplify this psychological pathos in a wonderful way without diminishing the Bible's subtlety. Crumb shows Cain sweating under the weight of his offering to God juxtaposed with the tiny lightweight lamb that Abel brings. You see how unfair and hurtful it was for Cain and understand what came next.

Some of the Crumb illustrations are funny and implicitly ask subversive questions about God, particularly in the earlier chapters, where God enters the story as a kind of lunatic artisan who likes to make things for reasons unknown to anyone, including, apparently, himself and who gets furiously dissatisfied with his creations and takes out all his frustrations on his children like the put-upon alcoholic Farrington in James Joyce’s story “Counterparts.” The things God yells about seem not to make any sense as in a real human temper tantrum. The opening passages of Genesis may lose some of their gravitas in this version, but the familial dysfunction at the heart of so many of the Bible stories is thrown into bold relief. Furthermore, the satire in these early parts lends a certain existential irony to the stories, which I appreciate, and which it might be argued is not even foreign to the biblical writers. Alter sees the Bible’s main agenda as the depiction of human character in all its variety and consistency, and that character's interrelation with forces beyond human control—fate, destiny, chance (or God, if you prefer)—to create what we call history. Sometimes the biblical heroes themselves don’t understand God’s designs, and sometimes laughter is the result, as when Sarah laughs at God’s annunciation of her pregnancy in old age and this laughter is commemorated in Isaac’s name, which means “he who laughs.” Sometimes the heroes object to God's designs, as when Abraham bargains for Lot’s life. Sometimes God seems like a personification of the sort of natural disaster that just befell Haiti as when God wantonly destroys Babel. It might be argued that the biblical writers purposely made God at times cruel and outrageous because fate is cruel and outrageous. And inasmuch as the Bible writers rationalized natural disasters as punishments for bad behavior (as Pat Robertson does even today) or otherwise rationalized them as in any way useful or necessary or morally ordained—well, then this benighted and primitive element of their worldview deserves satire.

On the whole, however, what’s so remarkable about the ancient writers of the Bible is not what's primitive about them, but what is modern. They have honored the complexity and majesty of the real world with the most meticulous artistry and have not only bequeathed their wise and beautiful stories to later readers but their techniques to later writers and artists.

I reread Genesis in Crumb’s illustrated edition (which uses Robert Alter’s translation, a major upgrade from any I’ve read, sensitive as it is to the artistic aims of the original Hebrew) and afterward I read Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative, a masterpiece of literary criticism and a highly accessible one at that. If you want a pair of excellent guides to one of the great artistic creations in the history of humankind, I commend to you the Roberts Alter and Crumb.

Addendum: On Bloom’s notion that Freud got everything from Shakespeare; this is surely “the anxiety of influence” in action—a wonderful concept Bloom invented with a little help from Freud. ("I get by with a little help from my Freud"... a line from the famous rock band The Bettelheims--cue rimshot.)

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Beware Hamlet on Broadway

A certain movie star will soon finish his run as Hamlet at Broadway’s Broadhurst Theater. Polonius and Laertes will again be safe from nightly perforation at the end of this actor’s sword, and Shakespeare’s play will also be safely out of his reach. It isn’t the first time that an accomplished movie star has entered the sublime domain of Shakespeare’s greatest play and engendered chaos. When Kevin Kline directed and starred in Hamlet for TV in 1990, he desecrated it in pretty much the exact same way.

In the famous “Alas poor Yorick” scene, Hamlet gazes at the old court jester’s skull and has this to say: “Not one now to mock your own grinning—quite chop-fallen!” Hamlet means that Yorick looks gloomier than he used to, i.e. “down in the mouth”—which is funny in and of itself since Yorick is not depressed, but in fact a corpse. And by “chop-fallen,” Hamlet also means that Yorick’s jaw has literally fallen off. Lines like this, entwining despair and humor, have made Hamlet famous for his depth and complexity. Hamlet uses cleverness, satire, and gallows humor to attack with words what he can’t attack with action: death, shame, powerlessness, self-hate. Hamlet’s defeatedness and softness mixed with murderous rage and dominance through wit are what defines him, and in this scene Shakespeare brings out his character in a very moving way.

The gravedigger’s recollections imply that Hamlet was seven years old when Yorick died. Hamlet’s memories of riding on Yorick’s back and of Yorick entertaining him constitute almost the sole example of familial warmth in Shakespeare's treatment of life at Elsinore. Hamlet obsesses over his father more than he expresses love for him, and the ghost of King Hamlet too does not love, obsessed as he is with his own misfortunes. The Yorick scene, however, like the hints of past love between Hamlet and Ophelia, demonstrates with great pathos what has been lost—not only a loved one, but mirth and love itself, which happens when “a noble mind is here o’erthrown” by grief, depression, rage, and self-hate.

What Kevin Kline did to these subtle lines recalls what Achilles did to the fallen Hector, which was to tie Hector’s corpse to the back of his chariot and, with a vain and ruthless ignorance of the meaning of life, to drag him behind his chariot around the walls of Troy. “Quite! Chop! Fallen!” Kline bellowed in a stentorian, public voice. He didn’t seem in the least curious about what the lines might mean, to say nothing of actually trying to act out the difficult mixture of humor and sorrow written there. He substituted three ludicrously pompous strong beats for the lovely falling meter of “chop-fallen,” a dactyl that conveys the fallenness of Yorick and of Hamlet’s heart.

Kevin Kline was not there to read Hamlet to anyone. Was he there, maybe, to read his own name over the marquee? From Jude Law’s comments to the press, it’s evident that he savors this role primarily for its prestige. He stated no qualms about understanding and revealing this difficult character. At the glorious moment of taking the stage as Hamlet, Law and Kline seem instead distended with pride and self-congratulatory joy. And why not, as long as they can also give the part what it deserves. The problem is that the role demands an intimate knowledge of self-hate, not self-infatuation.

Jude Law is less pompous in the role than Kevin Kline, but he’s equally brutal and unfeeling to the play. “My father’s brother, but no more like my father / Than I to Hercules,” Hamlet says in Act I. Pretty much everyone knows this is one of a thousand examples where Hamlet belittles himself in comparison to his father, where he asks himself “Am I a coward?” as he puts it directly in Act II. Hamlet wants to say, Claudius isn’t as good as the heroic and Herculean King Hamlet, and neither am I. The way Jude Law reads it, however, with aggressive self-assurance, Hamlet might as well have said, “no more like my father than I to a refrigerator.” Jude Law’s Hamlet is interested in revenge and in Ophelia and in a good joke, but he’s not even slightly curious about himself.

In discussing one of the trademarks of Shakespeare’s characters, Harold Bloom cites Hegel’s notion of “self-overhearing.” This is Shakespeare’s device for dramatizing introspection and looking inside his characters. Hamlet is the most self-observant, self-overhearing character of them all, and without this trait the play loses not only its meaning but its plot and the coherence of its other characters. Without self-doubt, Hamlet cannot be the underdog and the hero we care about, and Polonius cannot by contrast be the supremely comic figure he should be.

According to the critic Vladimir Kataev, Hegel defined a comic character as one with an “invincible faith in oneself.” (Apparently, Hegel actually was comprehensible more than once.) Polonius is all about that invincible faith in himself. He’s actually much farther from Hamlet’s nature than Claudius, who hates himself just like Hamlet and who envied the king, just like Hamlet. But Law plays Hamlet, not Polonius, as an invincible and hence ridiculous character.

You can hear the cogs and gears in the delicate apparatus of this great work of art seizing under the influence of Law’s performance which, to be fair, has a certain breathtakingly illiterate barbarism to it, like when the Taliban destroyed those ancient Hindu statues. And yet the audience gave Jude Law’s Hamlet a standing ovation. One of Chekhov’s characters, Mikhail Fyodorovich, tells a story of a man who applauded a play he wasn’t listening to (the man, who was drunk, said, “What’s he saying, something noble?”). I can only think that the audience, like Jude Law, came to the theater, as Fyodorovich says, "not for art but for nobility."

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Mark Helprin's "Paradigm of the Romance"

Refiner's Fire by Mark Helprin



Refiner's Fire was Mark Helprin's first novel, published in 1977, a semi-autobiographical fantasy that follows Marshall Pearl from his childhood in the Hudson Valley through many adventures on the sea, in the mountains, and in the plains, in the classrooms of Harvard and finally in the Israeli army. A London newspaper described the book like this: "As if The Odyssey had been updated and rewritten by Dylan Thomas." There is a sense in which that's true. There's another sense in which it's as if some gifted poet had rewritten a trashy spy-novel or romance. Either way, it's highly entertaining, engaging writing that's at times aesthetically magnificent.

Mark Helprin is an interesting case. His website says, "Mark Helprin belongs to no literary school, movement, tendency, or trend. As many have observed [including, perhaps most often, himself (-A.R.)] and as Time Magazine has phrased it, 'He lights his own way.' " In an American literary scene dominated by liberals, he’s an unapologetic conservative, a former speech writer for Bob Dole and an occasional columnist for the rightwing op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal. He once was published regularly in the New Yorker, but no longer, and he has expressed both frustration at the unprecedented level of corruption of literary art by commercial forces (somewhat iconoclastic for a conservative) and also the probably justified view that the literatti have expelled him because of his rightwing politics.

He is a self-styled maverick, but also an actual one. He believes in the art of truth and beauty in an age where cultural criticism has for many called Keats's maxim, and aesthetics as a whole, into question. Helprin is attracted to heroic ideals as in ancient myths and epics, not because he wants to deconstruct those ideals but because he more or less subscribes to them, and because he thinks the heroic "paradigm of the romance," as he calls it, "has been the preferred method of storytelling for human beings" since time immemorial--justification enough, perhaps, if what is old is good. In any case, his aesthetic achievements are often very great. His sentences spring to life. They overflow with sensation and a sense of the emotional and aesthetic importance of physical sensation, the meaning of sensation in the scope of a life history; places echo with the footsteps of forefathers, forests bend in the wind as if remembering the ancient enemies who trod there, etc. He's masterful with hyperbole and magnifies real life with the awe of fathers, lineage, great deeds of the past, and great men, the fear of not measuring up, and the joy of victory. I admire his iconoclasm, and have been influenced as a writer by his wonderful effects.

At the same time, he doesn't really "light his own way." For one thing, he’s afflicted with a certain submissiveness before ideology. This has led him to take political positions that are to my mind bizarre, such as his view that the U.S.'s top 21st c. priority is to build up our navy vastly to counter China's influence in the Pacific. (Uh, really? That is so last-century, it was actually last-century last century--an assessment to which he might not object since he wants to live like Perseus or King David.) And his ideology contaminates his work with a phony machismo, a warmongering and jingoism, and worst of all, an evasion of internal conflict. It’s as if in his reading of ancient texts he missed the parts about hubris as a tragic flaw, and guilt, and the curse of the house of Atreus, and the fear of the Furies. Beowulf has more internal conflict than Marshall Pearl.

Helprin said in an interview that in the 19th c., realism killed the "romance," by which he means his particular idea of a heroic, epic quest-narrative. But his greatest talent is, ironically, for a unique brand of magical realism—for wonderful naturalistic descriptions imbued with a kind of simultaneous memory and anticipation, a realism that situates all experience within a larger curve of father-son relations, and injects all experience with an idealistic, heroic yearning drawn from those relations. He is a realist, and a very good one. If he only realized that, I think he could succeed in depicting the heroic ideal as a beautiful psychological force rather than fall victim to that ideal's partly juvenile and ridiculous worldview. The tension of Marshall Pearl's unfulfilled promise to his forefathers and his destiny winds up Helprin’s narrative in an entertaining, but ultimately not literary way. And Marshall Pearl’s epic journey consequently does not lead him to Valhalla, where Helprin wishes him to go, but instead to Hell, where he's condemned to be a cartoon.

That said, Helprin is a writer of huge talent, and I love him for his love of truth and beauty, notwithstanding his circuitous efforts to find it, and, no matter how macho he pretends to be, I love him for the actual rugged individualism that dwells underneath. Most of all I love him for his sensitivity to the delicate affair of fathers and sons and the destinies they imagine for themselves and one another.

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Simplicio and Salviati

A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form by Paul Lockhart



Who could dislike a book on math with a chapter inside it called "High School Geometry: Instrument of the Devil"?

This is a radical and subversive work in the best sense; it's brilliantly and comically irreverent toward that which is inane. What this particular author finds so inane is the standard K-12 math curriculum, and in a very concise and lucidly clear little treatise, he tells you why in surprisingly convincing terms. I say that as someone who liked my math education, who felt that calculus helped to show me the beauty of the universe--but Lockhart made me rethink the way I'd been compelled to spend much of my time up until that epiphany in calculus. He made me wonder if I might not have seen the same beauty or more beauty without so much time burned up in the acquisition of basically trivial skills.

More than anything else, A Mathematician's Lament is a wholesale attack on learning by rote. "By concentrating on WHAT, and leaving out WHY, mathematics is reduced to an empty shell," Lockhart writes. "Mathematics is THE ART OF EXPLANATION.... Math is not about following directions, it's about making new directions." Lockhart anticipates all the objections he's likely to encounter as he assails the math education of "accurate yet mindless manipulation of symbols" (where students are trained to perform mathematical operations they don't really understand and will not likely use ever again). And he dispenses with these objections in a Socratic dialogue between "Simplicio" and "Salviati," who, not so coincidentally, are also the fictional interlocutors in Galileo's 1632 Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. In Galileo's dialogue, Simplicio clings to the (then) traditional Ptolemaic view of the heavens, and Salviati advocates for Copernicus. In a way, the revolution Lockhart proposes feels just that radical and that necessary. It's an argument that makes you feel very engaged with intellectual battles of our own moment in time. I hear the gears of intellectual history turning as I read Simplicio asking questions in defense of traditional education and Salviati answering them in a way that's often hilariously blunt:

"SIMPLICIO: But don't we need people to learn those useful consequences of math? Don't we need accountants and carpenters and such?

SALVIATI: How many people actually use any of this 'practical math' they supposedly learn in school? Do you think carpenters are out there using trigonometry? How many adults remember how to divide fractions, or solve a quadratic equation? Obviously the current practical training program isn't working, and for good reason: it is excruciatingly boring, and nobody ever uses it anyway."

Lockhart certainly has the credibility to make any argument about math he wants. He's a published mathematician and he's lived his iconoclastic creed; he dropped out of college after a semester and, on the basis of his independent mathematical investigations, was admitted to graduate school at Columbia, from which he received a PhD in 1990.

I am a little puzzled by the extent of Lockhart's hostility to applied math. I do understand that pure math research can or perhaps must proceed with the sole object of deducing new and interesting principles from propositions and definitions. But Newton invented calculus as a very precise language for describing the laws that govern change in the real world--i.e., for describing physics--and I think physics is pretty damn beautiful and awe-inspiring and important. Even the much-maligned "quadratic formula" is beautiful to me, because it describes the parabolic motion of projectiles under the influence of gravity. Furthermore, what's so wrong with getting excited about the POWER that math gives to human beings to do interesting things, like walking on the moon or predicting how fast a drug will clear from the bloodstream. Finally, at the risk of exceeding my philosophical depth, I want to ask whether it's really possible to pose mathematical problems and to consider abstractions without ANY reference to reality. Lockhart mentions an abstract problem of finding the shortest path from a point to a line and on to another point; but isn't the whole notion of a "shortest path" inspired and given value by the experience of literally moving through space and caring when you get where you're going?

But all in all, the degree of emphasis placed on applications (and the pedagogical value of real-life examples) is probably not as important as Lockhart's bigger point. He wants us to witness truth and beauty, to enjoy creation and discovery, and to cease indulging those authorities who give us hoops to jump through simply because it makes their jobs easier. "I will not serve," as Stephen Dedalus says!

Check out the book that, according to NPR's math columnist, "is already a recognized landmark in the world of mathematics education" and you may get the same feeling Paul Lockhart gets from the "art" of pure mathematics—a feeling of penetration to what really matters.

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Ulysses is a modern novel, not a postmodern novel

Ulysses by James Joyce



Somewhere, in the last ten or twenty years or so, Dale Peck wrote that the development of the novel in English took a wrong turn somewhere in the middle of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. His attack was really on post-modernism, and all literature that appears complex and self-referential and obscurantist. Apparently Peck blames James Joyce for this development in literature, and his attack has produced much bluster on the internet, most of it in defense of post-modernism. I have no wish to defend post-modernism, but I would like to defend Ulysses, which in my view deserves a throne among modern novels for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with the obscurantist literature that came after it.

Post-modernism is primarily concerned with skepticism, with what is false, with what we cannot know, with what makes us confused; the modernism that preceded it was above all else concerned with knowing reality in more depth than ever before, with depicting both the physical world and inner psychological experience with an unprecedented level of realism. A.D. Nuttall noted the profound engagement with reality in modern art when he observed, “Joyce, the disciple of Homer, listened to real Dubliners and Cézanne, the disciple of Poussin, stared at apples till they rotted on the cloth….” Joyce's naturalism is his real triumph. You see, hear, feel, smell, and taste Dublin on those pages. As Joyce's brother Stanislaus said, "Dublin lies stretched out before the reader, the minute living incidents start out of the pages. Anybody who reads can hear the people talk and feel himself among them." You see deep into the memory and the psychology of its three main characters.

In that sense I can't think of two more dissimilar writers than Thomas Pynchon and James Joyce (to whom Pynchon is sometimes compared). Both are hard to understand, but trying to understand Pynchon is like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle without the benefit of most of the pieces; he once told his friend Jules Siegel that "I was so f---ed up while I was writing it [Gravity's Rainbow], that now I go back over some of those sequences and I can’t figure out what I could have meant." Joyce's complexity, by contrast, rewards study and persistence, it illuminates new vistas of reality. W.B. Yeats at first dismissed Ulysses as "a mad book!" but on closer examination he recanted: "I have made a terrible mistake. It is a work perhaps of genius. I now perceive its coherence." Joyce's allusions are meaningful. The equivocations in his work honor the real fact of psychological ambivalence and the real nuance and complexity of reality itself. That is nothing so very new, in fact. Walter Pater noted this respect for the nuance of reality, which Francis Bacon called "subtilitas naturae," in the paintings of Leonardo Da Vinci. Post-modern equivocation and obscurantism rests on the thesis that reality is not knowable in the first place, that paradox and blindness is the order of the day. That's a million miles away from James Joyce, who considered himself, according to his biographer Richard Ellmann, to be in hot pursuit of a classical ideal of truth and beauty as articulated by Thomas Aquinas.

Don't be daunted by Ulysses. Don't be ashamed to skip a lot of it either. Joyce had acrobatic powers as a writer and he couldn't resist showing them off in Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake. Some of what he did can be appreciated by dipping into it without doing a years-long archaeological dig to unearth everything that's there. The parts of Ulysses I love and remember best are lucid descriptions of Bloom's kitchen, and Molly's memories of singing by the piano, Stephen's apprehensions about the future mixed with his sensations of the sea and the sand as he walks along the beach, that sort of thing. While Yeats came to appreciate the book's coherence and genius, he also admitted later that he never finished it. Neither did George Bernard Shaw. So if you skip some healthy chunks of it, you'll be in good company.

(By the way Ulysses was not published in 1914, as it says on the Goodreads info for some reason, but in 1922 in Paris by Sylvia Beach.)

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Sylvia Plath, Maestro of Despair

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath



Sylvia Plath's autobiographical portrait of Esther Greenwood, the 19 yr old protagonist of The Bell Jar (Plath's only published novel), must be one of the most intimate and realistic accounts of depression in all literature. Esther's a worthy heir to Hamlet in that respect. And like Hamlet, she's also acerbically funny, self-deprecating (to the point of self-destruction, unfortunately), and like the melancholy Dane, she's brilliant with words. Her brilliance is of course on loan from Sylvia Plath just as Hamlet's was on loan from Shakespeare. Plath is an absolute sorceress with a metaphor. I'm hard-pressed to think of anyone, any time, any place who does it better. In fact, she's a poet who can embarrass some of the giants of poetry by juxtaposition; try reading Plath's best poems side-by-side with some of her counterparts and you might be surprised by how much her rivals suffer the direct comparison in the brilliant light of her images. The feeling I get is like when I saw an exhibition of Matisse and Picasso side-by-side at MOMA; to my surprise, Matisse made Picasso's paintings look a little like subway graffiti, unsubtle and even cartoony. She's as good as Dante in depicting her descent into Hell in vivid terms:

I was the only girl on the beach in a skirt and high heels, and it occurred to me I must stand out. I had removed my patent leather shoes after a while, for they foundered badly in the sand. It pleased me to think they would be perched there on the silver log, pointing out to sea, like a sort of soul-compass, after I was dead.... The drench seemed to come off the sea floor itself, where blind white fish ferried themselves by their own light through the great polar cold. I saw sharks' teeth and whales' earbones littered about down there like gravestones.

The Bell Jar also contains some important social commentary on male chauvinism, particularly the sort that predominated in the 1950s, as well as a related paternalism in the field of psychiatry. Fundamentally, however, I think Esther's feeling of subjection to the whims of men conveys her larger despair about her place in the world as she gets more and more depressed and begins to see herself as more and more powerless and the world as more and more hostile.

The overarching metaphor of a "bell jar" as a crippling field of distortion surrounding someone's mind in a state of depression is an unforgettable and important contribution to literature in its general project of putting words to human experience. And ironically, given Plath's self-destructive, self-deprecating tendencies, she was an intrepid writer who never backed down from any challenge. After some significant early successes, she wrote a letter that said, "for the few little outward successes I may seem to have, there are acres of misgivings and self-doubt." And yet, even Shakespeare couldn't cow her; in her fabulous poem "Full Fathom Five" she goes toe to toe with him and she's utterly formidable right there in the face of the sea god.

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