Alta Ifland's Blog: Notes on Books, page 8
April 24, 2011
The Double Life of Alfred Buber
I should start by noting that I won David Schmahmann’s The Double Life of Alfred Buber as a Library Thing early reviewer. Usually, I can tell pretty quickly whether I like a book or not, but this was one of those rare cases in which it was not easy to form an opinion. This was, at least in part, because I read the bound galleys, which were in need of some editing. And the publisher’s comparison to Nabokov, which we’ve all seen before, may have on some readers (like myself) the opposite effect: “Oh, no! Another Nabokov?” Having said this, I should also add that it was clear from the beginning the Schmahmann is a serious writer.
The comparison with Lolita is justified by the narrator’s infatuation with a girl twenty years younger than he, and by a certain tone of the confession. But Buber’s Lolita is, of course, a creature of our times: she is a young prostitute in Thailand, and Buber is himself a very introspective, complex intellectual, who constantly analyzes himself and the others. He is, in fact, a Proustian character, a romantic, though an ironic one, of course. What saves Schmahmann’s novel from being a cheap thrill or a poor pastiche of Nabokov is the fact that his narrator is truly interesting (and I am using this word in its deepest sense); he has a mind and sensibility that stay with you long after you finish the novel. I am a reader who is interested more than anything in the author’s mind and sensibility, and Buber’s creator seems to me at least as intriguing as Buber. The novel has many paragraphs that are stylistically beautiful and it is, generally, intellectually engaging.
The comparison with Lolita is justified by the narrator’s infatuation with a girl twenty years younger than he, and by a certain tone of the confession. But Buber’s Lolita is, of course, a creature of our times: she is a young prostitute in Thailand, and Buber is himself a very introspective, complex intellectual, who constantly analyzes himself and the others. He is, in fact, a Proustian character, a romantic, though an ironic one, of course. What saves Schmahmann’s novel from being a cheap thrill or a poor pastiche of Nabokov is the fact that his narrator is truly interesting (and I am using this word in its deepest sense); he has a mind and sensibility that stay with you long after you finish the novel. I am a reader who is interested more than anything in the author’s mind and sensibility, and Buber’s creator seems to me at least as intriguing as Buber. The novel has many paragraphs that are stylistically beautiful and it is, generally, intellectually engaging.
April 14, 2011
Politics & Literature: Aleksandar Hemon in The Writer’s Chronicle
In a very interesting interview conducted by Jeanie Chung in The Writer’s Chronicle (March/April 2011), Aleksandar Hemon talks about the role of imagination in literature, memoir—in particular the confessional memoir—versus fiction, and the relationship between politics and literature.
I wasn’t surprised at all to hear Hemon, a Bosnian-born American writer, declare that “politics should be kept out of literature.” Anyone who has grown up in a country where everything was political or politicized, and where the regime tried to infiltrate itself in every aspect of people’s lives, knows only too well how easily “politics” can become propaganda. That’s why I’ve always been surprised that so many American intellectuals—scholars, writers, and academics in particular—aren’t bothered by the presence of political jargon in works that claim to be literary, or that they read works of literature within the frame of whatever political ideology they happen to favor.
To be clear, Hemon doesn’t say that a writer shouldn’t be interested in politics; on the contrary. But he makes an essential distinction between the person who writes as a citizen, and as a writer. If politics is present in Hemon’s work it’s not as some kind of “political statement:” “I don’t think of it as politics. It’s just social context.”
If a writer wants to be literally involved in politics, then the writer acts as a citizen:
“If I am pissed as a citizen, I’m going to act as a citizen, not as a writer. If it’s about politics, I’ll submit it to a newspaper: I write about it on Monday, it comes out Tuesday, rather than write about it in a book that takes six years to come out. There’s politics in this book (The Lazarus Project), but not because I wanted to change the world by writing about it. The world has changed while it was getting printed.”
Indeed, Hemon writes a column for a paper in Sarajevo, and in the States he hasn’t shied away from expressing strong political opinions. But he does this in a public space that is different from the space itself of literature—i.e., interviews, articles, etc.
What I am trying to get at is that many academics are today under the impression that they “are doing” politics because they (safely) apply their “politics” to some white male who died four or five hundred ears ago. Some of them even believe that they are “changing the world.” When I taught in academia I was surrounded by people who “changed the world” by fighting some dead people in their comfortable armchairs. And what I found puzzling was that whenever a serious political event happened around us, none of these people felt compelled to speak publicly. Their “politics” was confined to the space of literature, which they usually read as an “interplay of ideological forces”—to use one their favorite expressions. But, curiously, the space where politics is supposed to take place, the public space we all inhabit in the present, was out of their “political” statements. It is, of course, a lot easier to call Shakespeare a white male chauvinist—it’s not like he’s going to answer back—than to speak publicly against the Iraq war at a time when no one dares to do so (and now that everybody is against this war, we have conveniently forgotten that at the very beginning of it very few dissident voices were heard).
When I was a student in France in the mid-nineties, for about three months the students and some of the teachers were on strike. The strike had been started by the students and many of the teachers joined them. The professors I took classes with didn’t stop teaching because they had many foreign students who were there for a short time, but every single one of them started his class with a personal statement about the political situation and presented his position in relation to the strike. They took questions from the students about the current events, and answered them candidly. After the discussion about the political situation of the country, we went back to our close reading of Hegel or Derrida or Diderot or Descartes or Stendhal. These professors were very leftists, yet they never imposed their ideologies on whatever we were reading. When we read literature every writer was read in his own context. Unlike the discussions in today’s American academia in which both instructors and students often feel obligated to “subvert” the “canon” by faulting the writers of the past because they don’t think like us—something they call “politics”—those discussions made a clear distinction between the sphere of the “political” and the sphere of literature. The professors I had then acted as citizens by speaking publicly about the political situation of the day, and not by projecting their ideology on some dead writer of the past.
I wasn’t surprised at all to hear Hemon, a Bosnian-born American writer, declare that “politics should be kept out of literature.” Anyone who has grown up in a country where everything was political or politicized, and where the regime tried to infiltrate itself in every aspect of people’s lives, knows only too well how easily “politics” can become propaganda. That’s why I’ve always been surprised that so many American intellectuals—scholars, writers, and academics in particular—aren’t bothered by the presence of political jargon in works that claim to be literary, or that they read works of literature within the frame of whatever political ideology they happen to favor.
To be clear, Hemon doesn’t say that a writer shouldn’t be interested in politics; on the contrary. But he makes an essential distinction between the person who writes as a citizen, and as a writer. If politics is present in Hemon’s work it’s not as some kind of “political statement:” “I don’t think of it as politics. It’s just social context.”
If a writer wants to be literally involved in politics, then the writer acts as a citizen:
“If I am pissed as a citizen, I’m going to act as a citizen, not as a writer. If it’s about politics, I’ll submit it to a newspaper: I write about it on Monday, it comes out Tuesday, rather than write about it in a book that takes six years to come out. There’s politics in this book (The Lazarus Project), but not because I wanted to change the world by writing about it. The world has changed while it was getting printed.”
Indeed, Hemon writes a column for a paper in Sarajevo, and in the States he hasn’t shied away from expressing strong political opinions. But he does this in a public space that is different from the space itself of literature—i.e., interviews, articles, etc.
What I am trying to get at is that many academics are today under the impression that they “are doing” politics because they (safely) apply their “politics” to some white male who died four or five hundred ears ago. Some of them even believe that they are “changing the world.” When I taught in academia I was surrounded by people who “changed the world” by fighting some dead people in their comfortable armchairs. And what I found puzzling was that whenever a serious political event happened around us, none of these people felt compelled to speak publicly. Their “politics” was confined to the space of literature, which they usually read as an “interplay of ideological forces”—to use one their favorite expressions. But, curiously, the space where politics is supposed to take place, the public space we all inhabit in the present, was out of their “political” statements. It is, of course, a lot easier to call Shakespeare a white male chauvinist—it’s not like he’s going to answer back—than to speak publicly against the Iraq war at a time when no one dares to do so (and now that everybody is against this war, we have conveniently forgotten that at the very beginning of it very few dissident voices were heard).
When I was a student in France in the mid-nineties, for about three months the students and some of the teachers were on strike. The strike had been started by the students and many of the teachers joined them. The professors I took classes with didn’t stop teaching because they had many foreign students who were there for a short time, but every single one of them started his class with a personal statement about the political situation and presented his position in relation to the strike. They took questions from the students about the current events, and answered them candidly. After the discussion about the political situation of the country, we went back to our close reading of Hegel or Derrida or Diderot or Descartes or Stendhal. These professors were very leftists, yet they never imposed their ideologies on whatever we were reading. When we read literature every writer was read in his own context. Unlike the discussions in today’s American academia in which both instructors and students often feel obligated to “subvert” the “canon” by faulting the writers of the past because they don’t think like us—something they call “politics”—those discussions made a clear distinction between the sphere of the “political” and the sphere of literature. The professors I had then acted as citizens by speaking publicly about the political situation of the day, and not by projecting their ideology on some dead writer of the past.
April 3, 2011
Discovering Sherwood Anderson
Not having grown up in this country, I haven't read many American classics; so, every now and then I discover some great writer I should have read a long time ago. One such writer is Sherwood Anderson, whose book, Winesburg, Ohio, I just finished. From the back cover, one (especially one like me) can find out that this book has had a huge influence on Faulkner, Fitzgerald and, generally, on the American short story. It is hard to add up this statement with what these days we are told are the “rules” for writing a short story, since Anderson’s stories don’t obey most of these rules.
To begin with, his stories have a certain shapelessness, as if they were unfinished, or as if they were merely drafts. This impression is enhanced by the way he introduces some of the characters, who have an episodic appearance, and then disappear. Of course, this being a collection of linked stories, the episodic appearance of some of the characters is justified; but I would say that in Anderson’s stories, the accidental and the episodic are part of the ethos itself of his world. I’ve encountered something similar in Gogol: the author would mention and briefly describe a character, who would then never appear again. According to the most basic “rules” of fiction writing, this is a no-no; that is, if you think fiction is written according to rules. But if you are Sherwood Anderson or Gogol you are just creating a world—which, as any creation, is unfinished. It is also part of the essence of modernity to let the reader sense the “artifice” of the story, as if the latter were a sculpture whose clay hasn’t entirely dried, and if you wanted, you could reshape it into a different form. It is a feeling you often have in reading these stories.
But all of the above doesn’t, really, say much about these stories. What makes them so powerful, in the end, is the humanity of the characters, who, in their grotesqueness, are still extremely touching. Anderson is a master at taking “simple people” and at looking at them in a way that, suddenly, makes them very “queer.” It is a world of weird people who are all very normal. Many of the characters are young men and women who long to be loved, but who are too shy to express their feelings—nothing more normal than that. But under Anderson’s pen, these people attain a grotesqueness that is the grotesqueness of life itself: a youth hugging a pillow and whispering love words to it, or walking on Main Street talking to himself and thinking about doing something “big,” and then being humiliated by some other, similarly clumsy youth; or an older man who has “ideas” that he can’t stop sharing with everyone; or an older woman whose life has passed by, and who suddenly metamorphoses into her younger self before dying, and is finally seen by her own son as the young woman he never knew.
The book starts with a “framing story” about an old writer who has written a Book of the Grotesque. The grotesque is, of course, the aesthetic underlying Winseburg, Ohio insofar as the grotesque is a representation of something strange and exaggerated, but which can still trigger one’s empathy.
To begin with, his stories have a certain shapelessness, as if they were unfinished, or as if they were merely drafts. This impression is enhanced by the way he introduces some of the characters, who have an episodic appearance, and then disappear. Of course, this being a collection of linked stories, the episodic appearance of some of the characters is justified; but I would say that in Anderson’s stories, the accidental and the episodic are part of the ethos itself of his world. I’ve encountered something similar in Gogol: the author would mention and briefly describe a character, who would then never appear again. According to the most basic “rules” of fiction writing, this is a no-no; that is, if you think fiction is written according to rules. But if you are Sherwood Anderson or Gogol you are just creating a world—which, as any creation, is unfinished. It is also part of the essence of modernity to let the reader sense the “artifice” of the story, as if the latter were a sculpture whose clay hasn’t entirely dried, and if you wanted, you could reshape it into a different form. It is a feeling you often have in reading these stories.
But all of the above doesn’t, really, say much about these stories. What makes them so powerful, in the end, is the humanity of the characters, who, in their grotesqueness, are still extremely touching. Anderson is a master at taking “simple people” and at looking at them in a way that, suddenly, makes them very “queer.” It is a world of weird people who are all very normal. Many of the characters are young men and women who long to be loved, but who are too shy to express their feelings—nothing more normal than that. But under Anderson’s pen, these people attain a grotesqueness that is the grotesqueness of life itself: a youth hugging a pillow and whispering love words to it, or walking on Main Street talking to himself and thinking about doing something “big,” and then being humiliated by some other, similarly clumsy youth; or an older man who has “ideas” that he can’t stop sharing with everyone; or an older woman whose life has passed by, and who suddenly metamorphoses into her younger self before dying, and is finally seen by her own son as the young woman he never knew.
The book starts with a “framing story” about an old writer who has written a Book of the Grotesque. The grotesque is, of course, the aesthetic underlying Winseburg, Ohio insofar as the grotesque is a representation of something strange and exaggerated, but which can still trigger one’s empathy.
March 23, 2011
Three Generations of East European Writers
Some of the most interesting novels are coming today from Eastern Europe. Three such recent books have caught my eye: Kornél Esti (New Directions, 2011, trans. by Bernard Adams) by the Hungarian writer Dezsö Kosztolányi (1885-1936), Coming from an Off-Key Time (Northwestern University Press, 2011, trans. by Alistair Ian Blyth) by the Romanian writer Bogdan Suceava (b. 1969), and All This Belongs to Me (Northwestern University Press, 2009, trans. by Alex Zucker) by the Czech writer Petra Hulová (b. 1979).
Kosztolányi is one of the greatest (alas, unknown) 20th century writers, a writer so versatile he could pen a novel in the realist, lifelike style of Flaubert (Skylark) or write in the absurdist tradition of his Viennese contemporary, Peter Altenberg (Kornél Esti). In the latter, each chapter can be read separately, like a vignette, or like a dialogue between the narrator/writer and his friend and alter ego, Kornél. In one of these dialogues, Kornél travels by train in Bulgaria, and although he only knows a few Bulgarian words, he decides to have a “real” conversation with the Bulgarian train guard, without betraying himself as a foreigner. What follows is one of the most hilariously absurd dialogues ever written.
Suceava’s novel describes the turmoil of the early nineties, immediately after the fall of communism, in Romania’s capital, Bucharest. The novel focuses on two of the mystical-nationalist sects that had appeared at the time: The Tidings of the Lord, whose leader is Vespasian Moisa; and the Stephanists, whose leader is a reincarnation of Stephen the Great (famous Moldavian 15th century prince, who won forty-six of forty-eight battles against the Turks). One of the founding members of the Tidings of the Lord, a professor of history, believes that Romanian language is a chosen language that conceals a code, and another one believes that this code encloses in it the cure to baldness!
Petra Hulová’s novel was published in the Czech Republic when she was in her early twenties, documenting her experience during the time she’d spent in Mongolia. It is written in the voices of five women from the same family, who belong to three different generations, and it depicts the conflicting interactions between them, and those between a traditional, rural world and the modern (albeit poor), urban world of Ulaanbaatar. The English translation was awarded the 2010 translation prize of the American Literary Translators’ Association.
Kosztolányi is one of the greatest (alas, unknown) 20th century writers, a writer so versatile he could pen a novel in the realist, lifelike style of Flaubert (Skylark) or write in the absurdist tradition of his Viennese contemporary, Peter Altenberg (Kornél Esti). In the latter, each chapter can be read separately, like a vignette, or like a dialogue between the narrator/writer and his friend and alter ego, Kornél. In one of these dialogues, Kornél travels by train in Bulgaria, and although he only knows a few Bulgarian words, he decides to have a “real” conversation with the Bulgarian train guard, without betraying himself as a foreigner. What follows is one of the most hilariously absurd dialogues ever written.
Suceava’s novel describes the turmoil of the early nineties, immediately after the fall of communism, in Romania’s capital, Bucharest. The novel focuses on two of the mystical-nationalist sects that had appeared at the time: The Tidings of the Lord, whose leader is Vespasian Moisa; and the Stephanists, whose leader is a reincarnation of Stephen the Great (famous Moldavian 15th century prince, who won forty-six of forty-eight battles against the Turks). One of the founding members of the Tidings of the Lord, a professor of history, believes that Romanian language is a chosen language that conceals a code, and another one believes that this code encloses in it the cure to baldness!
Petra Hulová’s novel was published in the Czech Republic when she was in her early twenties, documenting her experience during the time she’d spent in Mongolia. It is written in the voices of five women from the same family, who belong to three different generations, and it depicts the conflicting interactions between them, and those between a traditional, rural world and the modern (albeit poor), urban world of Ulaanbaatar. The English translation was awarded the 2010 translation prize of the American Literary Translators’ Association.
March 3, 2011
nahoonkara by Peter Grandbois
If I tried to summarize nahoonkara, I’d probably come up with something like this: a story told in the voices of several members of the Gerrull family, moving back and forth between mid-nineteenth-century Wisconsin and a mining town in late nineteenth-century Colorado. It would be a summary that wouldn’t necessarily inspire me to pick up this novel and read it, which goes to show that summaries don’t tell you anything about a book.
Even more than the (his)story of a family in a particular space and time, this novel depicts the chemistry and alchemy of a community. Surprisingly, the warmth with which it accomplishes this is not incompatible with the dreamlike universe of snow that emerges toward the end of the novel. In the town of Seven Falls snow falls for three months in a row and people start building tunnels in order to survive and move from place to place, thus creating an alternative, underground world where all the laws from the world above are abolished. This universe of snow that ends up covering the entire town is identical to the one Killian (the novel’s main voice) has seen, much earlier in the novel, in a trance induced by a mesmerist.
The novel has the flow of a rhapsody in which people and natural elements are equal characters. It requires the attention one needs to read poetry and it has the same entrancing power.
“All through the night, I held her close, hoping the pressure would solidify her, that the friction would smooth the rough edges, reshape the pieces that had not been abraded, but I was new to the ways of love, and I did not know that just because one soul wills something that intention cannot always cross the vast gulf to another.”
Even more than the (his)story of a family in a particular space and time, this novel depicts the chemistry and alchemy of a community. Surprisingly, the warmth with which it accomplishes this is not incompatible with the dreamlike universe of snow that emerges toward the end of the novel. In the town of Seven Falls snow falls for three months in a row and people start building tunnels in order to survive and move from place to place, thus creating an alternative, underground world where all the laws from the world above are abolished. This universe of snow that ends up covering the entire town is identical to the one Killian (the novel’s main voice) has seen, much earlier in the novel, in a trance induced by a mesmerist.
The novel has the flow of a rhapsody in which people and natural elements are equal characters. It requires the attention one needs to read poetry and it has the same entrancing power.
“All through the night, I held her close, hoping the pressure would solidify her, that the friction would smooth the rough edges, reshape the pieces that had not been abraded, but I was new to the ways of love, and I did not know that just because one soul wills something that intention cannot always cross the vast gulf to another.”
February 17, 2011
Duo Duo's Snow Plain
Duo Duo (b. 1951), one of the most important contemporary Chinese poets, is from a generation that witnessed the persecution of its parents—intellectuals qualified as “degenerate bourgeois” by the communists—and came of age during Mao’s so-called “Cultural Revolution,” when these intellectuals and bourgeois were exiled to the countryside to do manual labor. After the crush of Tiananmen Square in 1989 Duo Duo lived in Europe for fifteen years, and then returned to China. These two very different experiences are, obviously, present in his writings. A newly released translation from Zephyr Press (trans. by John Crespi), Snow Plain, includes translations of six short stories written in the 1980s and 90s, some set in China, some in Britain and Canada. The stories set in China are far better, as they exude a certain strangeness the other stories don’t have. “Sumo” and “The Day I Got to Xi’An” are among the strangest stories I’ve ever read. It’s hard to find an equivalent in Western literature, as their strangeness is different than, say, Kafka’s. “Sumo” is vaguely reminiscent of Robbe-Grillet’s “Last Year in Marienbad”—except much better. The only writer with a comparable style is another contemporary Chinese author, Gao Xingjian (winner of the Nobel Prize).
March 10, 2010
On Randy Kennedy’s “The Free-Appropriation Writer” (New York Times, Feb. 28, 2010)
Randy Kennedy’s article on the question of appropriation in the works of two contemporary writers, a teenage German novelist, Helene Hegemann, and an American former novelist turned essayist, David Shields, whose recent works are made (extensively in Hegemann’s case; almost entirely in Shields’s case) of quotations borrowed from other writers, is predictably confused.
Kennedy presents the two writers’ arguments, namely their claim that the entire history of literature is made of borrowed things (“There is no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” says Hegemann) with barely controlled annoyance. Instead of trying to discuss the intelligent distinction, especially coming from a teenager, between originality and authenticity, Kennedy simply informs us that the above statement is reminiscent of Sartre—college graduates out there will have also recognized the sartrian concept of “authenticity.” I guess in Kennedy’s mind, if one uses this word, that automatically must have something to do with Sartre. Quoting Shields’s remark that the other arts have been doing these kinds of appropriations for a long time, while literature has lagged behind, Kennedy wonders how borrowing can accomplish the same thing in literature as, say, the use of a can soup by Warhol. That’s really a great example because the answer is very simple: literature can accomplish exactly the same thing!
The reason why Kennedy thinks that such appropriation is “normal” in painting (and not in literature) is simply because he is used to it since it has already been done. He chastises Hegemann and Shields for trying to do away with the concept of originality, but fails to see that Warhol isn’t really any more original (although I guess we should give him points for coming up with the idea way before the others). Not to mention that it doesn’t even cross his mind that the concept of “originality” is relatively new (that is, it is a modern concept) and that in the old days, creations were appreciated because they reminded people of something they already were familiar with. Kennedy quotes Patrick Ross, executive director of the Copyright Alliance, who, also predictably, tells us that Hegemann doesn’t say “anything original, yet the passages she lifted from other books were original expressions in those books, even if the ideas were not new.” This idiotic dichotomy between “expression” and “idea” or form and content, on which Western thinking has been based for some time, is something lawyers might find useful (in law, indeed, there is a difference between form and content). But for a real writer or philosopher it has no meaning for the simple reason that an “idea” cannot exist without being expressed; it cannot exist “in itself,” it can only exist in words, that is, in a form.
The main problem with Kennedy’s article is that he thinks that the fight between, on one side, “a growing culture of borrowing and appropriation,” and “on the other, copyright advocates,” is the same thing as the fight between the culture of appropriation and the culture of individual creation based on the concept of originality. In reality, these are two very different fights. The lawyers who forced Shields to list the “sources” of his quotes and thus betray the essence of his book (it would have been much more interesting for the reader to guess where they came from) would have also forced James Joyce to do the same thing, had he lived today (that is, if any publisher would have accepted to publish him in the first place). These lawyers and the laws they represent do not “defend” creation or “originality,” quite the contrary. Because of these lawyers and of copyright laws there are many great works of literature that cannot be translated and made available to readers. This happens because the heirs to the writers have the power to stop any kind of publication if they so decide, and what a thrill to have such power when you are an idiot and you happen to be related to a great writer! (Incidentally, Joyce’s nephew is one of these difficult heirs). I know many brilliant translators who cannot publish their translations because the writer’s relatives who have the copyright have decided that they don’t want to approve it. Why? Simply because they have the power to do it. These are the “creation protection” laws lawyers defend: they have nothing to do with “originality;” all they have to do with is money and power.
And then, there is another problem. Kennedy and the mainstream publishing industry have discovered now that this “growing culture of borrowing” exists. In fact, writers have been using these kinds of techniques for years, though you wouldn’t know this if you read the reviews published in the American mainstream media. One of most respected and original contemporary European novelists, the Hungarian Peter Esterhazy, whose work is published by the biggest publishers in all European countries, often “burrows” entire pages from a Czech writer he very much admires. If Esterhazy lived in the States, he very likely wouldn’t be able to publish his work, except in truncated form. Why? Because of the laws that defend “originality.”
What Kennedy and the publishing industry cannot understand is that there is a huge difference between plagiarism and “appropriation.” The first thing that distinguishes them is that the plagiarist is afraid of being caught, while the “appropriator” has nothing to be afraid of (both writers discussed in Kennedy’s article, as well as Esterhazy, have publicly acknowledged their appropriations). But the main question is: how do you distinguish between the two? It is true that this distinction is easier in painting, where it is graphically obvious when an artist has appropriated someone else’s work (by the way, Kennedy doesn’t even mention the technique of the collage). It is much more difficult to do this in the case of literature (though, I for one, have done this in the past by using Italics). But the same is true of music: how can you tell when a modern musical piece quotes Beethoven or the Beatles? Well, there is only one way of telling: by being familiar with these pieces and with the history of music. It is exactly the same in literature.
Finally, there is another way of telling the difference: if you write like Dan Brown and, all of a sudden, you have a passage that sounds like Joyce, chances are you are a plagiarist. But the unfortunate reality is that most readers couldn’t tell the difference because… well, because… (one study done at Harvard with graduate students proved that almost none of them could tell the difference between a piece written by a famous writer, including classics, and some totally obscure and irrelevant pieces of writing). Well, here, there is only one way of really telling the difference: it takes one to know one. It takes a real writer to read another real writer.
Kennedy ends his article by quoting Louis Menand who very wisely notes that like any new technique, it all depends on how the appropriation is done. I can already predict that in the years to come this way of writing will become not only popular, but, as in painting, it will become the norm of the new avant-garde (or rather, post-garde; if for the French, everything cool is “avant,” that is, “before,” for the Americans, everything must be “post”). This is the problem with all new or “revolutionary” art: in the end, it is co-opted by the mainstream and it becomes just another cliché.
I will paste here on Goodreads under “Alta’s writings” a story I wrote years ago, “The Castellan,” made entirely of quotes from five works by five different authors (I won’t give you their names). No magazine wanted to publish it, so I guess this is as good a place as any. You will see that in spite of its “lack of originality” it seems written by the same person from the beginning to the end. I should mention in this context that Kennedy is very surprised that Shields’s book too “can sound at times eerily consistent” in spite of its numerous sources. There is a reason for this. He, Shields, is the one who made the selection, in the same way that any “original” piece of writing is based on a process of selection. And to select means to look at the world through a unique, individual perspective. That’s why even a collage can be, if it’s done by someone with a vision, an original work.
Post Scriptum: I will grant the defenders of “originality” this: no collage could trigger in me the same reaction as, say, the works of the great Flemish artists. But then, how many “original” contemporary writers do you know who are comparable with Dostoevsky or Turgenev or Emily Brontë?
Kennedy presents the two writers’ arguments, namely their claim that the entire history of literature is made of borrowed things (“There is no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” says Hegemann) with barely controlled annoyance. Instead of trying to discuss the intelligent distinction, especially coming from a teenager, between originality and authenticity, Kennedy simply informs us that the above statement is reminiscent of Sartre—college graduates out there will have also recognized the sartrian concept of “authenticity.” I guess in Kennedy’s mind, if one uses this word, that automatically must have something to do with Sartre. Quoting Shields’s remark that the other arts have been doing these kinds of appropriations for a long time, while literature has lagged behind, Kennedy wonders how borrowing can accomplish the same thing in literature as, say, the use of a can soup by Warhol. That’s really a great example because the answer is very simple: literature can accomplish exactly the same thing!
The reason why Kennedy thinks that such appropriation is “normal” in painting (and not in literature) is simply because he is used to it since it has already been done. He chastises Hegemann and Shields for trying to do away with the concept of originality, but fails to see that Warhol isn’t really any more original (although I guess we should give him points for coming up with the idea way before the others). Not to mention that it doesn’t even cross his mind that the concept of “originality” is relatively new (that is, it is a modern concept) and that in the old days, creations were appreciated because they reminded people of something they already were familiar with. Kennedy quotes Patrick Ross, executive director of the Copyright Alliance, who, also predictably, tells us that Hegemann doesn’t say “anything original, yet the passages she lifted from other books were original expressions in those books, even if the ideas were not new.” This idiotic dichotomy between “expression” and “idea” or form and content, on which Western thinking has been based for some time, is something lawyers might find useful (in law, indeed, there is a difference between form and content). But for a real writer or philosopher it has no meaning for the simple reason that an “idea” cannot exist without being expressed; it cannot exist “in itself,” it can only exist in words, that is, in a form.
The main problem with Kennedy’s article is that he thinks that the fight between, on one side, “a growing culture of borrowing and appropriation,” and “on the other, copyright advocates,” is the same thing as the fight between the culture of appropriation and the culture of individual creation based on the concept of originality. In reality, these are two very different fights. The lawyers who forced Shields to list the “sources” of his quotes and thus betray the essence of his book (it would have been much more interesting for the reader to guess where they came from) would have also forced James Joyce to do the same thing, had he lived today (that is, if any publisher would have accepted to publish him in the first place). These lawyers and the laws they represent do not “defend” creation or “originality,” quite the contrary. Because of these lawyers and of copyright laws there are many great works of literature that cannot be translated and made available to readers. This happens because the heirs to the writers have the power to stop any kind of publication if they so decide, and what a thrill to have such power when you are an idiot and you happen to be related to a great writer! (Incidentally, Joyce’s nephew is one of these difficult heirs). I know many brilliant translators who cannot publish their translations because the writer’s relatives who have the copyright have decided that they don’t want to approve it. Why? Simply because they have the power to do it. These are the “creation protection” laws lawyers defend: they have nothing to do with “originality;” all they have to do with is money and power.
And then, there is another problem. Kennedy and the mainstream publishing industry have discovered now that this “growing culture of borrowing” exists. In fact, writers have been using these kinds of techniques for years, though you wouldn’t know this if you read the reviews published in the American mainstream media. One of most respected and original contemporary European novelists, the Hungarian Peter Esterhazy, whose work is published by the biggest publishers in all European countries, often “burrows” entire pages from a Czech writer he very much admires. If Esterhazy lived in the States, he very likely wouldn’t be able to publish his work, except in truncated form. Why? Because of the laws that defend “originality.”
What Kennedy and the publishing industry cannot understand is that there is a huge difference between plagiarism and “appropriation.” The first thing that distinguishes them is that the plagiarist is afraid of being caught, while the “appropriator” has nothing to be afraid of (both writers discussed in Kennedy’s article, as well as Esterhazy, have publicly acknowledged their appropriations). But the main question is: how do you distinguish between the two? It is true that this distinction is easier in painting, where it is graphically obvious when an artist has appropriated someone else’s work (by the way, Kennedy doesn’t even mention the technique of the collage). It is much more difficult to do this in the case of literature (though, I for one, have done this in the past by using Italics). But the same is true of music: how can you tell when a modern musical piece quotes Beethoven or the Beatles? Well, there is only one way of telling: by being familiar with these pieces and with the history of music. It is exactly the same in literature.
Finally, there is another way of telling the difference: if you write like Dan Brown and, all of a sudden, you have a passage that sounds like Joyce, chances are you are a plagiarist. But the unfortunate reality is that most readers couldn’t tell the difference because… well, because… (one study done at Harvard with graduate students proved that almost none of them could tell the difference between a piece written by a famous writer, including classics, and some totally obscure and irrelevant pieces of writing). Well, here, there is only one way of really telling the difference: it takes one to know one. It takes a real writer to read another real writer.
Kennedy ends his article by quoting Louis Menand who very wisely notes that like any new technique, it all depends on how the appropriation is done. I can already predict that in the years to come this way of writing will become not only popular, but, as in painting, it will become the norm of the new avant-garde (or rather, post-garde; if for the French, everything cool is “avant,” that is, “before,” for the Americans, everything must be “post”). This is the problem with all new or “revolutionary” art: in the end, it is co-opted by the mainstream and it becomes just another cliché.
I will paste here on Goodreads under “Alta’s writings” a story I wrote years ago, “The Castellan,” made entirely of quotes from five works by five different authors (I won’t give you their names). No magazine wanted to publish it, so I guess this is as good a place as any. You will see that in spite of its “lack of originality” it seems written by the same person from the beginning to the end. I should mention in this context that Kennedy is very surprised that Shields’s book too “can sound at times eerily consistent” in spite of its numerous sources. There is a reason for this. He, Shields, is the one who made the selection, in the same way that any “original” piece of writing is based on a process of selection. And to select means to look at the world through a unique, individual perspective. That’s why even a collage can be, if it’s done by someone with a vision, an original work.
Post Scriptum: I will grant the defenders of “originality” this: no collage could trigger in me the same reaction as, say, the works of the great Flemish artists. But then, how many “original” contemporary writers do you know who are comparable with Dostoevsky or Turgenev or Emily Brontë?
December 8, 2009
What distinguishes an artist from the other people?
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Memories of the Future (trans. from the Russian by Joanne Turnbull)
This book written in the 1920s in Russia by a man who couldn’t publish because what he wrote couldn’t satisfy the “realist” taste of the Communist authorities is not an easy read, but it has some extraordinary pages. Some American reviewers call him “surrealist” because the reality he describes doesn’t correspond to their definition of reality. What would people do if the word “surrealist” didn’t exist? This has nothing to do with surrealism. Maybe the Soviet reality of the time was surreal, but poor Sigizmund had no intention of being “surrealist”! Let’s remember that the surrealists were either being playful or were trying to subvert the “rational” way of looking at things. But Russian and East European writers don’t need to “subvert” this rational way of perceiving the real because they don’t perceive it in this rational way to being with. They are naturally “irrational” (that is, according to the Western definition of “reason”)—ie, they do not necessarily use a cause-effect logic.
SK was a kin soul to Felipe Alfau. His characters not only become independent of their creator, but turn into critics, denying their author’s existence—“they are the book’s atheists.”
In one of the book’s dialogues, one of the characters asks, “What distinguishes a creator of culture from its consumers?”
The answer is the best definition of the artist I have ever read:
“Honesty”—and this is why:
What distinguishes them is the fact that, unlike other people, the creator gives back what he receives on credit from nature. Every day the sun “lends its rays to every one of us.” To give something back is a duty of anyone who “doesn’t wish to be a thief of his own existence. Talent is just that, a basic honesty on the part of ‘I’ toward ‘not I’, a partial payment of the bill presented by the sun: the painter pays for the colors of things with the paints on his palette […:] the philosopher pays for the world with his worldview.”
In other words: Honesty toward a higher order of things (not toward your next-door neighbor)
This book written in the 1920s in Russia by a man who couldn’t publish because what he wrote couldn’t satisfy the “realist” taste of the Communist authorities is not an easy read, but it has some extraordinary pages. Some American reviewers call him “surrealist” because the reality he describes doesn’t correspond to their definition of reality. What would people do if the word “surrealist” didn’t exist? This has nothing to do with surrealism. Maybe the Soviet reality of the time was surreal, but poor Sigizmund had no intention of being “surrealist”! Let’s remember that the surrealists were either being playful or were trying to subvert the “rational” way of looking at things. But Russian and East European writers don’t need to “subvert” this rational way of perceiving the real because they don’t perceive it in this rational way to being with. They are naturally “irrational” (that is, according to the Western definition of “reason”)—ie, they do not necessarily use a cause-effect logic.
SK was a kin soul to Felipe Alfau. His characters not only become independent of their creator, but turn into critics, denying their author’s existence—“they are the book’s atheists.”
In one of the book’s dialogues, one of the characters asks, “What distinguishes a creator of culture from its consumers?”
The answer is the best definition of the artist I have ever read:
“Honesty”—and this is why:
What distinguishes them is the fact that, unlike other people, the creator gives back what he receives on credit from nature. Every day the sun “lends its rays to every one of us.” To give something back is a duty of anyone who “doesn’t wish to be a thief of his own existence. Talent is just that, a basic honesty on the part of ‘I’ toward ‘not I’, a partial payment of the bill presented by the sun: the painter pays for the colors of things with the paints on his palette […:] the philosopher pays for the world with his worldview.”
In other words: Honesty toward a higher order of things (not toward your next-door neighbor)
October 5, 2009
On the Advantages of Writing in English
Poor Felipe Alfau! If he had stayed in Spain rather than immigrate to the States he would very likely be considered today one of the most interesting writers among the “avant-garde” artists of the 20th century.
Locos, a book he apparently wrote in the late 1920s but only published in 1936, and no one paid any attention to it until more than 50 years later, anticipates trends that can be found in other major 20th century writers. In fact, there is no doubt that the structure of Cortazar’s Hopscotch, with its chapters that can be read in any order is literally taken from Locos. The interruption of the fictive time of the narrative by the “real time” dimension in which the author writes—I need to stop writing because the doorbell rang, he says at some point—can be found later (also literally) in Clarice Lispector, another modernist writer known all over the world as the most important South American female writer, who is only now discovered in this county. True, the characters that act independently of their author (another feature of Locos) can already be found in Luigi Pirandello, whose works were published before Alfau's. But think of the fate of all these other writers: Cortazar, Lispector, Pirandello—all of them celebrated worldwide as some of the greatest writers of the 20th century. And Felipe Alfau—who has heard of him?
It is a general misconception that if you write in English, and especially if you are from the States, you have more chances to public and universal recognition. That may be the case if you write the kind of literature Stephen King writes; but if you write anything that attempts to rethink the process of creation, forget it! The most you can hope for is that some specialist in “theory” will discover you and write a paper about you, and then one of his students will devote you a thesis no one will ever read. From then on everyone will refer to you as an “experimental” writer, that is, some bizarre specimen stored in a museum from where they will retrieve you from time to time to temporarily dust you off and apply a lotion of “theory” to your mummified body.
Locos, a book he apparently wrote in the late 1920s but only published in 1936, and no one paid any attention to it until more than 50 years later, anticipates trends that can be found in other major 20th century writers. In fact, there is no doubt that the structure of Cortazar’s Hopscotch, with its chapters that can be read in any order is literally taken from Locos. The interruption of the fictive time of the narrative by the “real time” dimension in which the author writes—I need to stop writing because the doorbell rang, he says at some point—can be found later (also literally) in Clarice Lispector, another modernist writer known all over the world as the most important South American female writer, who is only now discovered in this county. True, the characters that act independently of their author (another feature of Locos) can already be found in Luigi Pirandello, whose works were published before Alfau's. But think of the fate of all these other writers: Cortazar, Lispector, Pirandello—all of them celebrated worldwide as some of the greatest writers of the 20th century. And Felipe Alfau—who has heard of him?
It is a general misconception that if you write in English, and especially if you are from the States, you have more chances to public and universal recognition. That may be the case if you write the kind of literature Stephen King writes; but if you write anything that attempts to rethink the process of creation, forget it! The most you can hope for is that some specialist in “theory” will discover you and write a paper about you, and then one of his students will devote you a thesis no one will ever read. From then on everyone will refer to you as an “experimental” writer, that is, some bizarre specimen stored in a museum from where they will retrieve you from time to time to temporarily dust you off and apply a lotion of “theory” to your mummified body.
September 7, 2009
“Craft” and “Writing”
Many years ago, a neighbor who was in constant competition with my mother and tried to prove her that her son was smarter than me because he studied engineering while I merely “memorized” foreign languages, expressed an idea that seemed puzzling at the time, but which, as I realized later, represented the view of many people who don’t know other languages. For her, in order to learn another language one needed a good memory, but one didn’t need to “think;” one just looked up the word that is the exact equivalent of the word in the original language, memorized it, and when one had memorized all the words, one had learned another language.
In fact anyone who ever tried to study another language knows that words in the dictionary rarely are an exact equivalent of the word in the original, and behind each word in a given language there is a vision of the world that may not exist behind the word in the other language—in spite of the reassurance given by the dictionary that they are “the same thing.”
I often think of this neighbor when I meet people who don’t seem to realize that the concepts they have of certain things are merely reflections of the language they use, and that, if they thought in a different language, they would hold an entirely different view. To a great extent, our “beliefs” are the result of the language we use. Which brings me to the notions of “craft” and “writing,” two words that for many American writers seem to be synonymous.
The notion of “craft” doesn’t really exist as such in other languages. The idea of “craft” is expressed in many other languages in words derived from the Greek "techne," which has given, for example, "technique" and "technology" in English. The word “craft” implies a technique of the hands—as in “arts and crafts,” a concept expressed in Romance languages by a word derived from the Latin and meaning “folk art:” “artisanat” (Fr. and Rom.), “artigianato” (It.), “artesania” (Sp.). “Craft” also conveys the idea of labor, of a repeated gesture that eventually leads to a work whose perfection—or closeness to perfection—is the direct result of hard labor. A puritan idea, if I may say so.
Briefly, in its current usage, this word carries simultaneously the ideas of hard labor, manual work, repetition, but also, paradoxically, mechanical work. Through repetition, the work of the hand becomes somehow synonymous with the work of the machine, insofar as technology always harks back to the machine. It is not by accident that the definition of man by an Anglo-Saxon—Benjamin Franklin, more precisely—is that of “a tool-making animal,” while for Aristotle man is a political animal, and for French and German philosophers, man is an animal endowed with the gift of language.
That the essence of man is in one’s hands (literally and figuratively) is probably the main characteristic that defines, from the perspective of a non-American, an American. The word “craft” may be used by most American writers or would-be writers in the sense of “writing,” but behind this word an entire (American) view of the world is hidden: the belief in the possibility of continuous (self-) improvement and the idea that one is what one makes.
But what does it mean to make something? Because for us making has shifted from manual work to mechanical work, that is, from man’s hand to the machine, the idea of making is also related to that of producing something mechanically, according to a given pattern. In the same way that the idea of work has shifted from the industriousness of a unique hand to generic mass-scale production, the idea of craft has insidiously shifted from something unique to something generic, from the individual print to the industrial, mechanical pattern, and thus the marketable recipe. This is why for those who think that a writer is a “craftsman” there is no contradiction—as it should be, logically—in thinking that one’s craftsmanship comes from the practice of the individual hand, but also that this craftsmanship can be “improved” if one follows some general rules.
A writer is a craftsman. We hear this again and again. That may be so, but this is true only in English. In other words, this is not necessarily a universal view (though, to a certain extent, this idea is associated with the notion of “writing” in many other languages). But to see literary writing primarily as a “craft” means to value (American) ideas like making, production, hard labor, and to believe in the virtue of repetition (i.e., mechanics) and rules.
In fact anyone who ever tried to study another language knows that words in the dictionary rarely are an exact equivalent of the word in the original, and behind each word in a given language there is a vision of the world that may not exist behind the word in the other language—in spite of the reassurance given by the dictionary that they are “the same thing.”
I often think of this neighbor when I meet people who don’t seem to realize that the concepts they have of certain things are merely reflections of the language they use, and that, if they thought in a different language, they would hold an entirely different view. To a great extent, our “beliefs” are the result of the language we use. Which brings me to the notions of “craft” and “writing,” two words that for many American writers seem to be synonymous.
The notion of “craft” doesn’t really exist as such in other languages. The idea of “craft” is expressed in many other languages in words derived from the Greek "techne," which has given, for example, "technique" and "technology" in English. The word “craft” implies a technique of the hands—as in “arts and crafts,” a concept expressed in Romance languages by a word derived from the Latin and meaning “folk art:” “artisanat” (Fr. and Rom.), “artigianato” (It.), “artesania” (Sp.). “Craft” also conveys the idea of labor, of a repeated gesture that eventually leads to a work whose perfection—or closeness to perfection—is the direct result of hard labor. A puritan idea, if I may say so.
Briefly, in its current usage, this word carries simultaneously the ideas of hard labor, manual work, repetition, but also, paradoxically, mechanical work. Through repetition, the work of the hand becomes somehow synonymous with the work of the machine, insofar as technology always harks back to the machine. It is not by accident that the definition of man by an Anglo-Saxon—Benjamin Franklin, more precisely—is that of “a tool-making animal,” while for Aristotle man is a political animal, and for French and German philosophers, man is an animal endowed with the gift of language.
That the essence of man is in one’s hands (literally and figuratively) is probably the main characteristic that defines, from the perspective of a non-American, an American. The word “craft” may be used by most American writers or would-be writers in the sense of “writing,” but behind this word an entire (American) view of the world is hidden: the belief in the possibility of continuous (self-) improvement and the idea that one is what one makes.
But what does it mean to make something? Because for us making has shifted from manual work to mechanical work, that is, from man’s hand to the machine, the idea of making is also related to that of producing something mechanically, according to a given pattern. In the same way that the idea of work has shifted from the industriousness of a unique hand to generic mass-scale production, the idea of craft has insidiously shifted from something unique to something generic, from the individual print to the industrial, mechanical pattern, and thus the marketable recipe. This is why for those who think that a writer is a “craftsman” there is no contradiction—as it should be, logically—in thinking that one’s craftsmanship comes from the practice of the individual hand, but also that this craftsmanship can be “improved” if one follows some general rules.
A writer is a craftsman. We hear this again and again. That may be so, but this is true only in English. In other words, this is not necessarily a universal view (though, to a certain extent, this idea is associated with the notion of “writing” in many other languages). But to see literary writing primarily as a “craft” means to value (American) ideas like making, production, hard labor, and to believe in the virtue of repetition (i.e., mechanics) and rules.
Notes on Books
Book reviews and occasional notes and thoughts on world literature and writers by an American writer of Eastern European origin.
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