My Late Discovery of Hitchens’ Essays
It was only after his death that I begun to read Christopher Hitchens. Unconsciously I had ignored his work, associating him with the fraternity of English bloviators that were his friends: Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie.
I’m reading his last book of essays Arguably and, though they are not without a familiar pomposity, quite enjoying them. As a proficient essayist Hitchens is able to interest me in subjects as diverse the early nineteenth century Barbary Wars (the first US ‘War on Terror’), Benjamin Franklin’s wit and the death penalty.
Though only a quarter of the way through this 788 page volume I am so far hooked, not only by the diversity of subjects, but the penetrating quality of his well-researched essays. His Nabokov and Newton essays are so far my favourites. Here’s a taster of the Nabokov, a review of Lolita, which succeeds in offering me new insight into a well-loved fiction.
Once you start to take a shy hand in the endless game of decoding the puns and allusions and multiple entendres (the Umberto echoes, if I may be allowed) that give this novel its place next to Ulysses, you are almost compelled to agree with Freud that the unconscious never lies. Swinburne’s poem Dolores sees a young lady (‘Our Lady of Pain”) put through rather more than young Miss Haze. Lord Byron’s many lubricities are never far away; in the initial stages of his demented scheme Humbert quotes from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: “To hold thee lightly on a gentle knee and print on thin soft cheek a parent’s kiss,” and when we look up the lines we find they are addressed to Harold’s absent daughter (who like Byron’s child and Nabokov’s longest fiction, is named Ada). Humbert’s first, lost girlfriend, Annabel, is perhaps not unrelated to Byron’s first wife, Anna Isabella, who was known as “Annabella,” and she has parents named Leigh, just like Byron’s ravished half-sister Augusta.
Saul Bellow’s Hunger for the Universal
At Bellow’s memorial meeting, held in the Young Men’s Hebrew Association at Lexington Avenue and 92nd Street, two years ago, the main speakers were Ian McEwan, Jeffrey Eugenides, Martin Amis, William Kennedy, and James Wood. Had it not been for an especially vapid speech by some forgettable rabbi, the platform would have been exclusively composed on non-Jews, many of them non-American. How had Bellow managed to exert such an effect on writers almost half his age, from another tradition and another continent? Putting this question to the speakers later on, I received two particularly memorable responses. Ian McEwan related his impression that Bellow, alone among American writers of his generation, had seemed to assimilate the whole European classical inheritance. And Martin Amis vividly remembered something Bellow had once said to him, which is that if you are born in the ghetto, the very conditions compel you to look skyward, and thus to hunger for the universal.
From Christopher Hitchens’s review (2007) of two Library of America collections of Bellow’s fiction. In Arguably this easy is entitled Saul Bellow: The Great Assimilator (pages 62-63).
Though I’d agree with the central premise of McEwan’s position, I’d couple Bellow and Philip Roth as heirs to European classicism.
The Snares of Consciousness
I’ve taken to skimming Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality. Though I agree fully with the book’s premise, and particularly like the bracing concept of nice nihilism, the writing style is supercilious and wearing. I have however made many notes, including the one below.
To escape the snares of consciousness, we won’t really need much empirical science about the mind. This is fortunate, since there isn’t much yet. The real science of psychology is only just getting started now that we have some tools for figuring out how the brain works. Producing results in psychology is going to be very difficult because it is the hardest science. It is harder than quantum mechanics or superstring theory. This is not because the right theory of how the brain works requires a lot of math we can’t make sense of. The full story about the brain will be complicated because it is such a fantastically complicated organ.
Dusklands by J. M. Coetzee
It is by lowering or changing the status of the Other that we unleash the possibility of inhumanity. Acts considered inhuman if applied to family or friends become permissible, in certain circumstances, if we label the Other as enemy, animal or, if times permit, slave.
Eugene Dawn, in the first part of Dusklands, writes an avant-garde report detailing techniques for psychological warfare (PSYWAR in today’s military terminology) in The Vietnam War. The methodology may be primitive by the standards of institutionalised barbarism in contemporary Abu Ghraib or Gitmo, but the techniques designed to dehumanise the enemy are eerily familiar. It becomes quickly evident that Dawn’s participation, to what extent is never clear, has desensitivised him to the point of giggling at the memory of “a mother with her son’s head in a sack, carrying it off like a small purchase from the supermarket”. His psychosis leads eventually to a mental institution, after a chilling scene that culminates in Dawn stabbing his son.
The second part of Dusklands introduces Jacobus Coetzee who bears none of the anxious guilt of Eugene Dawn. An eighteenth century elephant hunter, in what is now Namibia, Coetzee is beaten and humiliated by local Bushmen that he considers “wild animal with an animal’s soul”. Coetzee later wreaks a terrible revenge on the Namas Bushmen. His part of the narrative is told through lecture notes and a report that reveals the depth of racist egocentricity.
Coetzee’s (the author, not the elephant hunter) persistent themes of violence and casual racism are to the fore of this first novel, as are the broader questions he poses of authorship and identity. The second part of Dusklands suggests a superficial Conradian influence, though I wondered whether this straddled the thin line between homage and parody.
Anselm Kiefer White Cube Exhibition
I might have been born into a very literal sense of chaos, but in fact that state is true of all of us.
To the White Cube today for the Anselm Kiefer: Il Mistero delle Cattedrali exhibition, which does not include the painting below. The exhibition paintings are colossal, in size and impact, truly breathtaking. If you’re in London don’t miss the show.
Aschenblume, 2004 - Anselm Kiefer
Kiefer studied with Joseph Beuys in the early 1970s, but soon began to develop his own, deliberately indigenous set of subjects and symbols that he used to explore the fraught territory of German history and identity. In his muscular artistic language, physical materiality and visual complexity enliven his themes and content with a rich, vibrant tactility. His subject-matter ranges over sources as diverse as Teutonic mythology and history, alchemy and the nature of belief, all depicted in a bewildering variety of materials, including oil paint, dirt, lead, models, photographs, woodcuts, sand, straw and all manner of organic material. By adding found materials to the painted surface of his immense tableaux, he invents a compelling third space between painting and sculpture. Recent work has broadened his range yet further, and in 2006 he showed a series of paintings based around the little-known work of modernist poet Velimir Chlebnikov (1885-1922). Few contemporary artists match Kiefer’s epic reach, and his work consistently balances powerful imagery with acute critical analysis.
The Crisis of Literature
Hardly a year goes by without a novelist, poet, or critic coming forward to express this sense of sourness, which is actually a compound of despair and resentment. Despair, because every department of literature seems to undergoing crisis, a multiple organ failure of the kind that leads inevitably to death; resentment because of the contemporary American writer’s sense that he has been like the final investor in a Ponzi scheme, having bought into the venerable enterprise of literature only to discover that it is on the verge of default.
Adam Kirsch in his Why Trilling Matters, offers this quotation before revealing that it comes not from any contemporary soothsayers of the demise of literature, but was written in 1952 by Lionel Trilling.
Of Kirsch’s book I am torn; the reviews are good, but I have found Trilling’s writing thought-provoking but tedious. The TLS review is available. Let me know if you have read it and found it worthwhile.
Zona by Geoff Dyer
Without reservation, I am a deep-seated admirer of Geoff Dyer’s work. Since reading his D. H. Lawrence book I have continued through each of his titles. Last year I went to a talk that Dyer gave on Camus, (available here, but registration needed for the full video. It is worth it when you have a free 55 minutes.), when he spoke of Camus as a kindred spirit. It is a similar, extraordinary kinship I feel for Dyer’s writing. There is a connection beyond some murky similarities in our backgrounds.
Dyer’s latest book Zona has as its foundation Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, which has haunted me through three successive viewings. I am far from finished with Stalker so I am thrilled Dyer chose (and was permitted) to weave his discourse around (almost) a shot by shot post-mortem of the film. If you haven’t read Dyer before or seen Stalker, I recommend you watch the film and start elsewhere with Dyer.
At one point Dyer writes,
There are no clichés in Tarkovsky: no clichés of plot, of framing, no clichés of music to underline the emotional meaning of a scene (or, as is more usually the case, to compensate or make good for an emotional meaning that would be absent were it not for the music). Actually, we need to qualify this slightly; there are no one else’s clichés in Tarkovsky.
By the time you’ve read several of Geoff Dyer’s books, fiction or non-fiction (these categories become irrelevant), the same statement could so easily apply. Conceptually and in its realisation Zona is reliant on Dyerian cliché, but that is not a negation of the book’s virtuosity. Dyer’s writing is idiosyncratically brilliant for its immunity from the traditional contrivances of literature. Ostensibly about Stalker, Dyer digresses far from his original theme. This latest Dyer is brilliant, but on this occasion please don’t expect objectivity.
Book Shelves #6
Biblioklept posted the sixth in the series of book shelf photographs, featuring a stash of comic books.
My sixth post takes us onto the first floor hallway, where mostly eighteenth and nineteenth century classics gather. This is one of the few areas where S. and my reading tastes coincide, though I rarely read much from these shelves. I have insufficient patience for Henry James, though S. adores his work, and that of Wilkie Collins, who I have not read.
In addition to the classic fiction, the lower shelf is home to our old “how-to” baby books. I’ve always turned to books when needing guidance. Why those old Dr. Christopher Green books are still in the house I’ve no idea; S. and I are both guilty of following the old fraud’s counsel on controlled crying, though Green has long since renounced such advice.
Karaoke Culture by Dubravka Ugresic
For the title essay of Dubravka Ugresic‘s rewarding Karaoke Culture the author expands commonplace usage of “karaoke” (Japanese for “empty orchestra”) to embrace what Andrew Keen termed “the cult of the amateur”.
Today people are more interested in flight from themselves than discovering their authentic self. The self has become boring, and belongs to a different culture. The possibilities of transformation, teleportation, and metamorphosis hold far more promise than digging in the dirt of the self. The culture of narcissism has mutated into karaoke culture or the latter is simply a consequence of the former.
The internet, Ugresic argues, is the linchpin of a cultural transformation putting the creation of art and culture into the hands of amateurs, who are both creators and consumers of the material they appropriate, remake and recycle. Ugresic cites Alan Kirby’s argument and its adoption of the term “pseudo-modernism”.
Postmodernism conceived of contemporary culture as a spectacle before which the individual sat powerless, and within which questions of the real were problematised. It therefore emphasised the television or the cinema screen. Its successor, which I will call pseudo-modernism, makes the individual’s action the necessary condition of the cultural product.
Ugresic may wistfully recall the time before this age of karaoke, but recognises its irrevocability.
Beyond the title essay of one hundred and four pages in my edition, there are more than twenty further essays, some of a few pages, some extended. Ugresic writes with fervour and anger, but also with a great eye for absurdity. Beside the essays that speak of the heartache of exile and disappearance of motherland, are essays on the irrationality of hotel minibars.
“Long Live the Vortex”
We are against the glorification of “the People,” as we are against snobbery. It is not necessary to be an outcast bohemian, to be unkempt or poor, any more than it is necessary to be rich or handsome, to be an artist. Art is nothing to do with the coat you wear. A top-hat can well hold the Sixtine. A cheap cap could hide the image of Kephren.
Read more [PDF] of author and artist Wyndham Lewis‘s inaugural issue of Blast. Launched in June 1914 it survived for only two editions.
