Austin Ratner's Blog, page 8

Reality Is a Dream -- You Wish

Partial Magic: The Novel as Self-Conscious Genre by Robert Alter
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Ever since Gutenberg," Robert Alter writes, "the conditions of mechanical reproduction made it necessary for the individual artist to swim against a vast floodtide of trash out of all proportion to anything that had existed before in cultural history...."  And when the furnace of time has digested the trash-heap of twentieth-century literary criticism, one hopes that Robert Alter's brilliant oeuvre will endure and stand forth for its clarity of vision and purity of heart.  Finishing a book by Robert Alter is like bench-pressing 500 pounds, the same way I feel when I finish wrestling with a classic.  At the end of the book, I feel I'm standing atop a mountain.  I feel the climb in my legs but I see the heavens and the earth from my new vantage point.  Alter seems to have read every book and to speak every language, and yet he's immune to pretense and to fads.  His often beautiful prose elevates criticism to art and his evidence-based analysis of texts is as scientific in its method as writing on literature can be.


This study of self-consciousness in the novel from Don Quixote to Claude Mauriac's 1961 The Marquise Went Out at Five contains indispensable help in understanding the Cervantes masterpiece, as well as Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, and Nabokov's Pale Fire.  As in any Alter text, he shines plenty of light on many other books in passing.  He situates modernism between 19th-century realism and the more self-conscious works that followed in a helpful way, and draws a very useful distinction between self-conscious novels which concern themselves with reality and those novels of "flaunted artifice" that are card tricks for the sake of the trick.  (Alter refers to some of John Barth's work as an example of such fictions that don't heed the complexities of reality.)  Self-conscious novels that pursue realism do so, according to Alter, by charting the dynamics by which imagination acts on the raw material of reality.  Self-conscious novels that lose themselves in artifice demonstrate a sort of avoidant pathology--and it's precisely that pathology which is the focus of good self-conscious works about the imagination.  There is only one reply to a novel that takes seriously the notion that 'reality is a dream.'  And that is: you wish.





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Tuna Holocaust

Swimmy by Leo Lionni


The good news is: great illustrations, some memorably poetic lines, nice short text.  A lobster is a "water-moving machine," an eel is so long that its tail is hard to remember, other strange fish move as if pulled along on a thread.  Those ideas are beautiful and, combined with the painted tableaux, suggest the silent and strange world of coral reef and dream.


The bad news is: it starts with a giant tuna that "one bad day" eats everyone Swimmy knows (in other words, his entire school), abandoning him to roam the undersea wastes like the young Roman Polanski wandering the fields of Poland after his escape from the Krakow ghetto.  This led to a half-hour discussion this evening with my four-year-old about sharks, whether they eat people, whether it's safe to go in the water, whether human bones are strong enough not to get bitten in half by a shark, and other sick and demented shit like that that sends me scrambling for my whiskey bottle.


The other good news: Swimmy finds a new school and proposes new strategies for prevention of tuna-Holocaust: never again.


The other bad news: his strategy recapitulates terrifying aspects of group psychology.  He compels all the other little fish to identify with the aggressor and sacrifice their individual identity to the state in the form of a giant tuna-shaped bait ball.  The lesson seems to be that if you're prey, you need only conform thoroughly to a large group whose en masse identity is that of predator--the paranoid, propagandistic, archly ideological, violent modus operandi preferred by your average fascist.


Am I over-thinking this?


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Gee Willikers

Henry Huggins / Henry Huggins by Beverly Cleary
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Henry Huggins" is a name irreversibly associated with my own childhood, like that of an old elementary school friend (or enemy) one thinks about now and then.  I read all Beverly Cleary's books and received about 30 years ago a signed copy of Henry Huggins at the Ohio Young Authors' Conference.  I held on to it, and I actually grew up to be a writer!  I remember Beverly Cleary telling the audience about how sometimes boys and girls say they're going to write about Henry Huggins and Ribsy and Beezus and Ramona just like she did, and Ms. Cleary told all of us what she told them: oh no you're not.  And that was my first lesson on the perils of copyright infringement.

Rereading Henry Huggins with my almost seven year old, I was surprised to discover that I'd apparently grown up in the 1950s.  This staple of my childhood reading life is filled with exclamations like "Gee willikers!" and "Swell!" and a not-so-nice kid named Scooter and a neighbor that pays you in pennies for catching night crawlers for his fishing trips.  I remembered the book as belonging to my own world, which was thirty years downstream of the book's 1950 publication, but reading it again, it really is certifiably written in 1950.  And it doesn't take place in Cleveland, either!  It takes place in Portland, Oregon.  They even refer to Mount Hood.  

But none of that mattered when I was 10.  What mattered was that Beezus Quimby is a masterpiece of a character, that Beverly Clearly can tell a story with a combined profluence, realism, and humor like no other children's author.  It is episodic and yet of a piece.  The last chapter is the inevitable and yet surprising sequel of the first.  I also found that last chapter, where one boy keeps the dog Ribsy and another loses him forever, so gut wrenching and actually melancholy, I had to just read it in a cheerful voice to my son and pretend there was nothing upsetting in it, like when we see anti-smoking commercials on TV that show open-heart surgery: nothing unusual there, just a man with his chest cracked open like the hood of a car, implying the terrifying fact of mortality and total annihilation ... nothing to see here ... business as usual.

I'm getting depressed.

The Fly in the Bottle

Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig WittgensteinMy rating: 5 of 5 starsThe cessation of hostilities in World War I seems to have had a salutary effect on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who began his philosophy career literally under fire as a soldier in the Great War.  And that goes to show that in addition to blowing people's limbs off, artillery fire also interferes with their ability to formulate coherent philosophies.  I wouldn't call Philosophical Investigations crystal clear (the Nazi bombardment of England interrupted Wittgenstein's work yet again in late career, one notes), but it's much clearer than the preceding Tractatus.  For one thing, it's written in plain English, having been apparently inoculated against Bertrand Russell and his infectiously supererogatory and unreadable style of writing about logic.  (Even commenting on Russell's logic writings appears to render me too incomprehensible.)

What's more, Wittgenstein's second book has great charm.  Ludwig Wittgenstein is a very underrated comedian.  Many of his thought experiments are exquisitely, comically absurd, almost like Monty Python sketches.  (He considers, for example, whether a dog could be a hypocrite.  The answer is no, but it's hilarious to think about.)  And something of Wittgenstein's long-suffering and, in a way, good-natured character shines through the book's disorder.  Fragments and aphorisms constitute the whole of Investigations; Wittgenstein seems to shun sustained argument as if that would only lead him back into the wilderness of paradox from which he was so desperate in the first place to escape.  He's unflagging in his battle with philosophical confusion, which he regards as a pathology of thought almost akin to those of speech, like stuttering.  And yet the battlefields of thought and of two World Wars have had their triumphs too in wearing down the noble philosopher.  He couldn't shepherd this important work into publication at all, and had to rely on friends to do it after his death.  The book wears signs of neglect, both that of the brutal world with which the philosopher mentally wrestled, and Wittgenstein's despairing neglect of himself: in addition to being disordered and unfinished, there's hardly any scholarly apparatus in it apart from a completely neurotic preface by the author.  It descends to us from the Upper Saddle River (where Prentice Hall ekes out a living publishing works that nobody outside academia cares to read) on Kinko's-white, Kinko's weight pages.  The cover of my third edition says exactly nothing besides the title, edition number, author, publisher, and translator (G.E.M. Anscombe), and its paint chips easily, leaving dings and scratches of white on a field of color that is either black or dark blue—a perceptual confusion which invokes the fallacious epistemic problems that Wittgenstein sought to cure.  Inside, little mice seem to have eaten away at its vowels and consonants, with many nicks on the letters where the ink never stuck.  The translation, it must be said, reads fluidly.  (Anscombe, for one, cared a great deal about this book, even if he didn't know how to spell the word 'show'.)  But some corrosive force seems to oppose Wittgenstein's insistence on the unity of letter and sound, the unambiguous influence of letters on our mind, even when describing ambiguous conditions of black or blue.

[309.] What is your aim in philosophy?—To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. p. 103

In this endeavor, W helps us solve many philosophical dilemmas (by showing them to be faux-dilemmas produced by bad grammar), but it's also a rather affecting image.  It encodes the desperate confusion and frustration of the human being, and W's wish to free himself and others from this prison of tormented consciousness.  One feels Epicurus's benevolent gaze here.

Of many philosophical questions that are self-evidently uninteresting and nonsensical to the layman, W assures us: they are also uninteresting and nonsensical to the philosopher (or, he says, they ought to be).  Sometimes the result is that W seems like a man struggling nobly to escape the quicksand of previous wrong thinking, only to get back to solid ground on which the reader already stands.  W himself articulates this position: "678…. Yes,—now you have only repeated with emphasis something which no one has contradicted anyway." (p. 170)  Reading Philosophical Investigations sometimes is like reading about that protégé of Oral Roberts who came belatedly to disavow the notion of eternal damnation for the unbaptized—it's a disproof of something that for me was never true to begin with.  W disavows all manner of dualist, skeptical philosophies, which are just religion by another name.

W is most helpful with more subtle and insidious forms of nonsense.  "464. My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense." (p. 133)  Solipsism is nonsense to Wittgenstein, a result of misapplying words like "consciousness," which were learned from other people in the first place and never intended to refer to a unique experience.  By definition, a word refers to shared experience.  Anything named in a communally shared language can refer only to objects of communal relevance.  The problem of induction is for W nonsense too.  And his arguments against these forms of skepticism are as powerful as they come, though developed in his curiously aphoristic, reticent way.  In debunking certain confusions in the use of language, he also points out that thought begins with pictures, not words.  Spoken language arises "as if we were translating from a more primitive mode of thought" ([597.] p. 156), a pictorial mode perhaps.  "[O]ne can point to a thing by looking or listening," W writes on p. 169, again citing levels of thinking deeper than mere words.  Today, cognitive neuroscientists search for the physiological correlates of such states by devising experiments that direct the subject's attention and intentions.

Before Wittgenstein's honesty, nonsense retreats, shorn of romance.  We call it nonsense.  We look at the stars, real and far away.  We love reality instead of nonsense.  The fly is out of the bottle.

Simon Van Booy

 His debut novel, which came out today, is wonderful.  I don't even hold it against him that he's younger than me.  I reviewed it for The East Hampton Star .

Lost in the Labyrinth

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

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


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


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The Sokal Hoax

Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science by Alan Sokal

In 1996 NYU physicist Alan Sokal submitted a fake essay to a postmodern literary journal.  The essay (which was published) was a Trojan Horse that badly embarrassed the journal's editors.  It purported to argue, in an intentionally incoherent way, that science has suffered "paradigm shifts" (in Thomas Kuhn's term) that throw doubt on the entire enterprise of rational, objective thought and on the notion of a reality that's in any way independent of cultural perspective.

As Sokal and Bricmont put it in Fashionable Nonsense, the book they wrote on what is now known as "The Sokal Hoax," "One encounters frequently, in postmodernist writings, the claim that more-or-less recent scientific developments have not only modified our view of the world but have also brought about profound philosophical and epistemological shifts—in short, that the very nature of science has changed.  The examples cited most frequently in support of this thesis are quantum mechanics, Gödel's theorem, and chaos theory…."  However, these Kuhnian conclusions drawn from quantum mechanics, Gödel's theorem, chaos theory, and the theory of relativity "are based mostly on confusions."

Kuhn is a surprise villain here, though Sokal and Bricmont concede that his work, while misleading, is far more serious, credible, and intellectually sincere than that of Jacques Lacan, Jean Baudrillard, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva.  On the other hand, radical left-winger Noam Chomsky is a surprise ally in the fight against radical "epistemic relativism."  Sokal and Bricmont quote from one of Chomsky's 1969 lectures: "George Orwell once remarked that political thought, especially on the left, is a sort of masturbation fantasy in which the world of fact hardly matters. That's true, unfortunately, and it's part of the reason that our society lacks a genuine, responsible, serious left-wing movement."

Alan Sokal is himself a self-described leftist and I think he's very good on this point.  He wrote in Lingua Franca in 1996: "Theorizing about the 'social construction of reality' won't help us find an effective treatment for AIDS or devise strategies for preventing global warming.  Nor can we combat false ideas in history, sociology, economics and politics if we reject notions of truth and falsity."  Which is why, as Sokal and Bricmont argue, "The traditional left, in both its Marxist and non-Marxist variants, generally saw itself as the rightful inheritor of the Enlightenment and as the embodiment of science and rationality."

The pithiest thing Sokal ever said isn't in Fashionable Nonsense, but in his 1996 essay which revealed the hoax: "[A]nyone who believes the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment.  (I live on the twenty-first floor.)"

Contrary to one of its blurbs, this is not by any stretch "a hilarious romp."  It's not entertainment, but it's a very important book that, as philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote in The New Republic, "should have an impact at least on the next generation of students."

Coffee and Beer Required

Tractatus Logico Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein



1. The world is all that is the case.
1.1 All that is the case is slightly better with coffee.
1.2 All that is the case is slightly less so with beer.
2. What we cannot speak of without the aid of coffee or beer, we must pass over in silence.

Wittgenstein composed some of the Tractatus while in the Austrian army and a World War I Italian prison camp--and it reads like the written equivalent of a man banging his head against his prison bars.

Some people credit this work with the notion that ideas are pictures of the world. My initial thought was that perhaps someone with a greater knowledge of philosophy could explain why this is noteworthy millennia after Plato, centuries after John Locke, and all the very many others who have written on mental processes and mimesis. You have to read Wittgenstein's next book, the much more straightforward Philosophical Investigations, for a comprehensible exposition of his inferences about pictorial thinking, and pre-verbal depths of thought.

The more frustrating Tractatus is written in the style of a geometric proof, with numbered postulates and corollaries, but it's evident that this structure has been imposed after the fact on a bunch of disorderly notes--of the sort that might be composed, I guess, while being shelled by the French.

While it's famous for its earth-shattering pronouncements on knowledge, thought, and language, in fact I found it almost entirely consumed with refuting obscure arguments in the work of Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege. (I have no doubt that that work is not obscure to students of the work of Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege, but Wittgenstein certainly does not provide a compelling reason to become one of those.)

This book had me wondering whether Wittgenstein's mentor, Bertrand Russell, was under the spell of Wittgenstein's domineering self-regard (perhaps, but W's brilliance is also evident in later work), and whether Russell's philosophy itself was also basically incomprehensible (haven't read enough to say). I've been away from math for a long time, but I studied it up through multivariable calculus; why can't I understand Wittgenstein's math-ish sentences? Why doesn't he define any of his symbols? Isn't that a basic element of math technique--to define your terms? Do some people adore Wittgenstein precisely because they can't understand the cryptic runes contained here and mistake them for religion? And is it religion?

These questions and many more will not be answered within the pages of the enigmatic Tractatus, whose philosophy Wittgenstein later retracted anyway.

Coffee and Beer Required

Tractatus Logico Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein

1. The world is all that is the case.
1.1 All that is the case is slightly better with coffee.
1.2 All that is the case is slightly less so with beer.
2. What we cannot speak of without the aid of coffee or beer, we must pass over in silence.

Wittgenstein composed some of the Tractatus while in the Austrian army and a World War I Italian prison camp--and it reads like the written equivalent of a man banging his head against his prison bars.

Some people credit this work with the notion that ideas are pictures of the world. My initial thought was that perhaps someone with a greater knowledge of philosophy could explain why this is noteworthy millennia after Plato, centuries after John Locke, and all the very many others who have written on mental processes and mimesis. You have to read Wittgenstein's next book, the much more straightforward Philosophical Investigations, for a comprehensible exposition of his inferences about pictorial thinking, and pre-verbal depths of thought.

The more frustrating Tractatus is written in the style of a geometric proof, with numbered postulates and corollaries, but it's evident that this structure has been imposed after the fact on a bunch of disorderly notes--of the sort that might be composed, I guess, while being shelled by the French.

While it's famous for its earth-shattering pronouncements on knowledge, thought, and language, in fact I found it almost entirely consumed with refuting obscure arguments in the work of Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege. (I have no doubt that that work is not obscure to students of the work of Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege, but Wittgenstein certainly does not provide a compelling reason to become one of those.)

This book had me wondering whether Wittgenstein's mentor, Bertrand Russell, was under the spell of Wittgenstein's domineering self-regard (perhaps, but W's brilliance is also evident in later work), and whether Russell's philosophy itself was also basically incomprehensible (haven't read enough to say). I've been away from math for a long time, but I studied it up through multivariable calculus; why can't I understand Wittgenstein's math-ish sentences? Why doesn't he define any of his symbols? Isn't that a basic element of math technique--to define your terms? Do some people adore Wittgenstein precisely because they can't understand the cryptic runes contained here and mistake them for religion? And is it religion?

These questions and many more will not be answered within the pages of the enigmatic Tractatus, whose philosophy Wittgenstein later retracted anyway.

Long Day's Journey into Night

Long Day's Journey into Night by Eugene O'Neill

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Eugene O'Neill is my favorite American playwright. He is the master portraitist of denial and its correspondence with the indelible pain of past experience. Occasionally he lapses into didacticism in plays that are otherwise beautiful, poetic specimens of naturalism, but even these lapses have an affectingly brutal honesty and directness about them. They feel inevitable, like the messy casualties of war. In his lifetime bout with the truth, to determine whether it will conquer him or he it, by setting it down in words, O'Neill stands up in the end bloody but, more than unbowed, victorious.

Long Day's Journey into Night flies in book form and is brilliant on stage with the right actors. I saw Philip Seymour Hoffman as older son Jamie, which was a wonder. Brian Dennehy played the father and Robert Sean Leonard the younger son, Edmund. Leonard seems to have a roughly average head circumference, but both Dennehy and Hoffman have heads like football helmets. Edmund is supposed to look like his mother and Jamie like his father, but the head circumference was so different, it introduced a certain phantom storyline into the text: what the hell was up with the head circumferences of the Tyrone family and did it have something to do with their drug and alcohol addiction?

Long Day's Journey into Night may have my vote for best American play, certainly it has the best title I've ever heard.



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