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| No dogs! |
May
22, 2011
Serious Confusion
Serious Confusion
Quelque
prétexte que nous donnions à nos afflictions, ce n’est souvent que l’intérêt et
la vanité que les causent. (La Rochefoucauld v:232) −
“Whatever pretext
we offer for our sorrows, it is often only self-interest and vanity that cause
them.”
And cause us to hold on to them. How to
let go of matters so truly serious!?
The Argument
Wait.
It may be best not to get there.
Excursus
Late May 2009. I am reading the June
issue of The New York Review of Books, wondering
at the assumptions of those that assume on the great rag’s behalf.
There
is Alison Lurie’s review of Julian Barnes’ Pulse,
“Master of the Downbeat.” [Rim shot!]
It is important to keep in mind, however, that reviews in NYRB are never only reviews, if they are
reviews at all. For, if they were, we could enjoy their musing − their music −
in quiet without the constant high-pitched whine of axes grinding nearby (or the
bang of plowshares beaten into swords). But sadly, reading NYRB reviews is like listening to chamber music in a small theater
next door to a blacksmith’s shop, with no intervening walls.
Lurie
is sharpening, not to mention cheerleading for, “literary fiction,” the term
she uses for the good stuff by the right people − the good stuff meaning “serious” and the right people meaning “her friends.” Literary fiction has, as it
ought to have, parted from Miss Prism’s rule for fiction in general that the
good end happily and the bad unhappily. Literary fiction adopts “Tom Stoppard’s
addition . . . : ‘The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily.’”
There
can be amusing moments in the serious meantime, between the beginning (in the
middle) and the unlucky end; that is, literary fiction can be witty and clever
and still serious. But, witty how? An example of Julian Barnes’ wit: “I don’t
believe in God, but I miss Him.”
Yes. Right. But: “What does God have
to do with it?” Sing that to Barrett & Strong’s “War, huh, yeah / What is
it good for?” and listen to the steel being ground or pounded in the
background: “Absolutely nothing.” Serious fiction ends in a combination of
unhappiness and unluck, that is, resigned to the world’s confusion, because
that’s the way it is: however much we may miss Him, “most of us no longer
believe in a God who will make everything clear to us . . . .”
Here,
however, “us” must refer to serious
writers of literary fiction and their ilk who haven’t talked lately with anyone
else of any other ilk, because no one who has spent more than twenty-five
minutes talking − and listening − to men
in bars or women in bazaars in Abilene, Aleppo, Benghazi, or Belfast, anywhere outside of Manhattan Island,
Iowa City, and parts of Oregon, France, and Denmark would say about most of us
that we don’t believe in just such a God.
Excursus Within (or getting off the subject in the
middle of getting off the subject)
My humble opinion: Serious writers like
– and want us to like – (serious) literary
fiction not because Tom Stoppard is right about the world but because if he is, then good writing need only be
well-crafted, a surprisingly easy task. How much simpler and straightforward,
how much less messy and mundane, to be a serious writer than a comic one. How
much easier to be witty and clever and leave something well begun unhappily,
unluckily half-done than to imagine a lively muddle with a beginning, a middle,
and even a temporary solution, much less “joy at the last.” And how much, much
easier to figure out a way to get there, because there’s no there to get to. But
is that the purpose of story-telling in any form? How much better a painting of
Diana and Actaeon without the dogs. How much better an account of the Civil War
that ends at Murfreesboro rather than Appomattox. How much better a dogmatics
without an eschatology. How much better the Hebrew Scriptures if they ended
between Genesis 3 and 4 with Eve angry at Adam because she’s pregnant with
Cain.
***
Late May 2009. I am reading the June issue of The New York Review of Books, wondering
at the assumptions of those that assume on the great rag’s behalf.
Another
review: Alison Lurie’s friend Tim Parks condescending to Stieg Larsson’s millennium
trilogy, nitpicking it apart to conclude: “All this suggests that Larsson’s
trilogy has not achieved its spectacular success thanks to the author’s
impeccable skills as a detective story writer or any scrupulous attention to
psychological realism. Loose ends and incongruities abound, lending the trilogy
an endearingly amateur feel.”
Wait! “Loose ends and incongruities” – aren’t those
good? Parks wouldn’t write this, or anything remotely similar, about – he would
never call “endearing” − the work of one of the “serious” magical realists, for
example, though surely there is also a world of loose ends, incongruities, and
psychological hocus-pocus. But, of course, it’s a matter of craft; Larsson isn’t
crafty enough. It’s a matter of craft unless
Parks’ real difficulty with the trilogy lies in the title of the review: “The
Moralist.” “It is the ingenuousness and sincerity of Larsson’s engagement with
good and evil that the give the trilogy its power . . . .” But that power is
not craft, dammit: there is enough not serious
confusion. Larsson’s is really only the “power to attract . . . many millions
of people,” who have failed to see that see we no longer live in a moral world,
that is, one where resolution is imaginable.
I hesitate to add, because I’m not
sure how it applies, but
Late
May 2009. I am reading the June issue of The
New York Review of Books, wondering at the assumptions of those that assume
on the great rag’s behalf.
One
more review: Martin Greenberg and Paula Fox on Howard Norman’s What Is Left the Daughter? Norman’s
novel may be serious enough – that is, it seems to be; I confess I haven’t read
it − or serious enough in intent, but the evil in the novel is not evil enough.
Where else but in NYRB would you read
a sentence like this (and hear through the missing wall above the sough of the
strings “the bellows blow” and the thump of the “heavy sledge, with measured
beat and slow”): “We are inclined to
miss an Iago in the novel. . . . If Shakespeare has an Iago, that is a strong
hint that one should have something at least comparable in one’s depiction of
the world.” In short, if all the
tragedies except Othello aren’t
flawed, all the comedies surely are −
as are Tom Jones, Trollope’s Barsetshire
novels, and all of Jane Austin and Dawn
and Anthony Powell. They’re all missing an essential element, an Iago..
Not
to mention they’re insufficiently serious. They are set in moral universes; and
they have plots.
The Argument
. . . ends up being quite simple, befitting
the simple-minded arguer. There are worse things than not being taken
seriously, floating lightly on the air of merriment and folly, “dust in the
wind.” (Gad, Dorothy, we must be back in Kansas.) There is being serious and not coming − not being
able to, not daring to come − to the end of it.
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