I’m Many Different Readers Myself, A History Boy, 01/03/2016

This cover is my copy.

Yesterday was the last post I had based on my notes reading Empire. I started Multitude a while ago, but I don't quite want to share that yet. I've also, in the spare moments I can get for it, been re-reading Soul Mountain.

I’ve mentioned Gao Xingjian on the blog before. I don’t know that I really got into much of my history with him. It’s a pretty simple story, really. One day when I was 17, I remember reading that a Chinese author had won the Nobel Prize for Literature for the first time.

His name was Gao Xingjian, and his most impressive, imposing, and inspiring large work was the novel/memoir Soul Mountain. Or Lingshan as the Chinese goes. So later that week, I went to my local Chapters and bought a softcover copy of the English translation.

Later that summer, I read it, entranced. At the time, I had just decided that I wanted to develop my fiction writing abilities and eventually publish novels. That this was something I wanted to do with my life.* And I had read James Joyce’s Ulysses earlier that year, which left me fascinated with how writing could play with subjectivity.

* Two books out already, plus a play produced and developing a couple of movies. Not bad.

This struck me most plainly about Soul Mountain when I first read it. It’s composed of short chapters. Some unfold normally, from a realistic first-person perspective. But many chapters, especially in the first half of the book, are more impressionistic. 

They’re sparse descriptions of the physical environment, as if that’s no longer important. Instead, most of the writing is a biting back-and-forth conversation, written in second-person, between you and she. Most of these conversations are aggressive, lovers wounding each other.

Our author as a young man, wandering Sichuan and
Yunnan on an existential journey into the twisting
depths of his own mind. And to avoid the police.

Those formal innovations made the most impact on me initially. When I read Soul Mountain for the second time shortly after moving to Ontario, its formal quirks stood out for me again. I think it made me feel at home as I was building myself a new home for the first time.**

** Very unpatriotic of me as a Newfoundlander to say that a Chinese novel made me feel at home. Well, too bad for the patriots of my old country. Patriotism is just a gauche self-deception you share with a few million neighbours.

The third time, which I’m in the middle of now, is a very different experience. Yes, I see the formal experimentation. But I see more easily that Soul Mountain isn’t just an exercise in the depiction of subjectivity. It’s about the psychology of loneliness.

When Gao writes his intense chapters, ‘you’ is how you refer to yourself when you’re talking to yourself because there has been no one else to talk to for so long. And ‘she’ is the imagined amalgam of all the women that Gao has ever done wrong in his life. 

And when he’s relating some event that happened to him in casual style, he speaks from the ordinary first person because he doesn't crave company anymore. He’s with people. He doesn’t have to have these disorienting cyclones of conversations with imagined selves and lovers. 

• • •

A more recent photo of Gao, taken now that he lives in
France.

A curiosity I realized reading it now for the third time. Soul Mountain is written (in English) in the present tense. It made me think that having made such an impact on me, it influenced my decision to write almost all of Under the Trees, Eaten in the present tense. 

It wasn’t a conscious homage or anything. I didn’t even think of Gao at all when I was writing that novel. It was more like, I didn’t think writing Under the Trees, Eaten in the present tense was a big deal. The style just seemed normal to me.

• • •

I also now understand how incredibly different it must be to engage with Soul Mountain in the original Chinese, if only because I’ve read about how experimental it is with the Chinese language itself.

Gao wrote in colloquial Han Chinese, as well as in the dialects of ethnic minorities in Sichuan, and in classical dialects and registers. Its explicitly political content in this case – how the Chinese state suppressed the cultural traditions of ethnic minorities – becomes clear in the very words of the novel.

Many of the later chapters I didn’t really like when I first read it because they seemed focussed on folk singers and old men from traditions I didn’t understand. I wanted to see more perspectival gymnastics when I was 17.

A priest of the religion common to the
ethnic minorities of Yunnan, China, which
Gao observed throughout his long walk in
the 1980s.

But now, my sensibility has changed. I can more easily see the real human tragedy in stories like Gao’s encounter with an old folk singer who used to perform religious rituals before the government cracked down on local worship.

Gao goes with the old man on a comically long journey down narrowing, increasingly decrepit roads until they reach his village in the middle of the night. The old man's demonstrations of the old rituals draws a crowd until his performance for the sake of a visitor depending to be an anthropologist is another ritual. The community comes together again.

And then the town’s government and army representative comes to shut down the performance because the old man never got the proper permit to perform the ritual. On top of that, the singer suffers one last indignity – the officer is his oldest son.

I think I’ve become a better reader, writer, and person for knowing to engage with these stories of lost and oppressed cultures instead.

A Life in Shelves, A History Boy, 16/01/2015

I’ve been packing up a lot of my books over the last week, as we prepare to move to Toronto at the end of the month. It’ll be easier this time, even though we’re moving to an entirely different city and last year we were moving across the street. We actually acted like reasonable adults with real jobs and responsibilities and hired a moving company from Brampton. Reviews will follow.

Not only is this very much a new beginning for me, with the bright new town of Toronto laid before me, a vibrant and promising while also risky and extremely unknown new career to start, and all the other stereotypical bullcrap phrases and clichéd descriptions of looking optimistically toward the future that I could barely allow myself to type even in a sarcastic context. I’m also thinking a lot about my past, and how that’s taken me here.

And the part of the deep and nuanced reflection on my own idiosyncratic history that’s led me to this delicate point of regeneration is that I’m noting what books I want to re-read. That’s all I’m going to talk about this post.

I think that if I'd studied more sociology in courses,
I would have had more casual encounters with
Bourdieu, but I don't know how effective a casual
encounter alone would be.

I have a Pierre Bourdieu book that I bought a couple of years ago, but that I never got around to finishing. Pascalian Meditations was one of his last books, and a summation of many of the deeper philosophical influences and ideas that underlay his straightforwardly sociological studies. I actually find his dense writing style quite fascinating, and his ideas about society and human nature converge a lot with my own, but from very different perspectives and priorities.

I packed up Soul Mountain the other day, Gao Xingjian’s masterpiece. Inspired by his own solitary walks through the interior of China, existentially renewing himself after a mistaken cancer diagnosis, a victim of the purges of the Cultural Revolution. Gao writes the story of a man whose own subjecthood tears itself apart as a beautiful drama of mental mirrors. I’ve been meaning to re-read this for so long. It’s been almost a decade. 

There’s a massive Oscar Wilde collection that I’ve had with me ever since I moved out of my mother’s house, but I haven't cracked it open since I lived there. And a biography of Japanese Emperor Hirohito that I once bought for $2. And an old copy of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim. One of those antique softcovers small enough to fit in your pants or purse pocket.

As two good friends moved at different points over the last few years, one to Toronto and one to Chicago (who has since moved to Toronto), they each gave me a couple of different books by Jürgen Habermas. Apart from a few essays scattered here and there around courses and reading groups, I’ve never just sat down for a while and read Habermas. 

Because our apartment will be bigger than this one, I’m eventually going to get more bookshelves. So I’ll need more books, of course. I want finally to complete my collection of Douglas Adams fiction with the second Dirk Gently book and The Salmon of Doubt, the blend of Gently and Hitchhikers that was unfinished at his death. And Gareth Roberts’ adaptation of Adams’ old Doctor Who story Shada. I’d listened to the audio reconstruction with Paul McGann and it still holds up. Roberts is in a lot of ways an artistic child of Adams. 

There are still a few books by Gilles Deleuze that I don’t have. I want the Francis Bacon (the artist) book, the Clinical and Critical (or is it the other way around) essay collection, his book on Foucault. And when I’m making more money, hard copies of my favourite ebooks: Rosi Braidotti’s The PostHuman, anything by Clarice Lispector, Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (if only to shake my fist at it in the morning), Ralph Ellison. Definitely more J. G. Ballard. 

I like to read long, difficult, ambitious books. So what?

And to start reading the Jewish traditions as well. I want to start with Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, because those were favourite authors of my old friend Arnold. Then more hardcore theology and philosophy. Along with more Emmanuel Levinas, who Arnold always said was more deeply influenced by Jewish ethical philosophy than official academic consensus would ever say.

I also want to slowly complete my Thomas Pynchon. I bought Against the Day first, because I’m a crazy person, and McMaster’s bookstore was selling it for only $6.50 in a 2008 clearance. Two years ago, I read Gravity’s Rainbow because if not now, when? And I’ve started Inherent Vice because the movie is out, and I’d like to absorb both concurrently. Maybe I’ll get Bleeding Edge next. Vineland and The Crying of Lot 49 after that. Then V because his first one isn’t really supposed to be his greatest or anything. Last would be Mason and Dixon, because it’s supposed to be the maddest, and I want to build my anticipation as long as possible.

I’m in it for the long game.

Some Paradoxes of Literature’s Politics, Composing, 18/10/2014

A recent essay that I saw in Jacobin Magazine discussed the futility and politically problematic nature of the Nobel Prize’s attempt to separate its prizes in literature from the political motives of the Prize’s recipients and the political nature of their works. Their brief, poetic abstracts that the Nobels publish with their literature awards justify their choice by references to the general human condition and gestures to universality. 

Artists and their works are never described in terms of their singular situations and their political realities are marginalized. As the article’s author Sarah Brouillette writes, understanding art as apolitical is itself a political act, the silencing of an artwork’s political meaning and a creator’s political voice.

The Nobel committee in 1988 wrote about Naguib Mahfouz, "who, through works rich in nuance - now clear-sightedly realistic, now evocatively ambiguous - has formed an Arabian narrative art that applies to all mankind.” The emphasis is on how his work applies to all of humanity, but the singular situation of his work is subtly discussed. While the Nobel committee shies away from political descriptions of its award winners, so many of the winners’ works are fantastically politically relevant.

Reading her work teaches you that Elfriede
Jelinek is not a woman to be fucked with.

Some examples.

In 2004, the Nobel Literature committee gave its prize to Elfriede Jelinek "for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power.” Yeah, I don’t really know what that means either. 

But here’s my experience of reading Jelinek’s masterpiece Greed: a strident, enraged, beautifully articulate voice yelling at me for 300 sublimely shrill pages about the evil that self-absorbed men do when they trip on sexual and institutional power. It’s the story of a police officer who’s carrying on affairs with multiple women who all feel inferior to him because of his physical attractiveness and prowess, and he’s turned on by their self-hatred. He accidentally kills a 15 year old girl while she’s going down on him, dumps her body in a lake, and enlists his older, overweight lover to help him cover up the crime. It’s an uncompromisingly brutal depiction of physical, psychological, and social violence against women. I have never read a more powerful feminist voice.

Wole Soyinka is a Nigerian playwright and poet who’s spent years speaking out against the brutality of war and politics in his homeland, and has gone to prison there for his trouble. He is still a powerful critic of Nigerian and wider African politics today, denouncing widespread fraud, corruption, and violence. His art helps articulate how the injustices of colonialism and the gangsterism and partisanship of the political culture that supplanted it assault the dignity of humanity, and how that dignity perseveres through even the most terrible tortures. Like a Nigerian prison in the 1960s.

Yeah, the Nobel committee described his art as existing “in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashions the drama of existence,” whatever pablum that means. Then you research what Soyinka wrote, what he did, and what he continues to do as one of a continent’s greatest authors, and you start to understand what some of the real criteria are for this award.

John Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. He wrote The Grapes of Wrath. How much more political and confrontational do you want than Rose laying aside her dead infant from her breast to feed a desperate fellow homeless person? Speaking of the uncompromising view of America’s injustices by its greatest writers, Toni Morrison. Her masterpiece Beloved literally depicts the destruction that slavery wrought on black Americans, a single family of former slaves liberated by Lincoln expressing the horror and anguish of a whole country. 

Seriously. Soul Mountain is a masterpiece. Read it.

Gao Xingjian is one of my favourite authors, and Soul Mountain is a book that deserves to be read for thousands of years. He was hunted by the Cultural Revolution, forced to burn a trunk full of manuscripts to survive the cataclysm that rocked Chinese society. His absurdist theatre was so provocative to the official dogma of the Chinese government that he eventually found himself better off living in France. Gao’s work is profound enough to speak to many strange dimensions in all people, but his life and the social ramifications of his work in his home country speak to the experience of the political exile and the dissident.

So while the rhetoric of the Nobel Prize in recent years has focussed on a vision of art and aesthetic creation as apolitical, transcendent, and removed from the dangerous, volatile, social conditions from which works and artists emerge, the reality of who gets chosen for the Literature prize belies a simple reading like this. 

Perhaps in Europe, a land where liberalism has become a tired old political faith, the notion that art achieves vibrancy and greatness when it has an eye on justice is too controversial for an award like the Nobel Prize to accept openly. But the political dimensions of so many of its winners are so obvious when you look at their work, it’s easier than you may at first think to look past the flowery emptiness of the committee’s abstracts to the real content of the prizes. 

And about Patrick Modiano? I’ve never read his work, but I guess it’s good. The journalists tell me it’s a lot like Marcel Proust, so I think I’ll stick to Proust for now. Enough French writers have won the prize by now. I was a little sad that Philip Roth or Ngugi wa’Thiong’o didn’t get it.

What Are These Words For? A History Boy, 06/09/2014

Another one of those memes about the books most influential in your life has been going around my Facebook friends, and I thought I’d spell out the list more clearly on the blog, because I think it would be interesting. It’s also a good way for me to get a sense of my own influences as my own writing career finally picks up a little. But the reason these books were each influential on me kind of overlaps. So I thought I’d make several sub-lists of factors and group the books under them.

The Whole List, in chronological order of my discovering them

- Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

- Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle 

- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot 

- Isaac Asimov, The Foundation Series

- James Joyce, Ulysses 

- Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason 

- Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain 

- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

- Graham Greene, The Quiet American 

- Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

- Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?

- Philip K Dick, Ubik

- Benedict Spinoza, Ethics

- Kojo Laing, Search Sweet Country

- Alan Moore, Swamp Thing Vols. 1 & 2

Amazing Worlds

• Cat’s Cradle, Foundation, Ulysses, The Savage Detectives, Ubik, Search Sweet Country, Swamp Thing

The many are modifications of the one, but are no less
individual for that. Swamp Thing is something of a Spinozist.

These books opened my mind to the possibility of worlds that were very different from my own, threading narratives of a few particular people through a setting that was so complex to be an actual ecology. Foundation saw this enormously complicated galactic human civilization that was so much more than a simple metaphor applying to a single story, which too much science-fiction in the Golden Age was like. It also helped that I was maybe 13 years old. 

Ubik did the same thing, but escaped the epic register of which Asimov was so fond, and rooted a strange story in a humanity very much like our own, with shysters, criminals, nagging bosses, and loveable schlubs. The film version of Ubik in my head will always feature Seth Rogen as the protagonist Joe Chip. It was the first Philip K Dick I’d ever read.

Cat’s Cradle and Swamp Thing found strange corners within our own world to build their fantastic settings. Ulysses made the ordinary fantastic, and once again, brought the epic to the scale of ordinary folks and their personal and political struggles. Bolaño and Laing brought foreign lands that I’d never visited before to my own mind, and made them feel so familiar, it was almost as if they had physically taken me there.

Yearning for Justice

• The Idiot, Soul Mountain, The Quiet American, Swamp Thing

I felt in these stories a powerful force straining against and overcoming political and social oppression. Alan Moore used fantasy and horror to explore the struggles of humanity with the ecology where we developed, and the paradoxes that our fear of nature’s power and yearning to protect ourselves from its wrath may destroy us.

The Idiot is a profound story of one person whose basic kindness struggles against the more heartless perspectives of the people around him; the tragedy is that his virtue ultimately lacks the strength to combat the worst that humanity can offer. Soul Mountain is the story of one such person who succeeded, despite the violence and backwardness around him and in his own heart.

Graham Greene taught me never to trust the conclusions of anyone who looks at the world and says, “I know exactly what’s going on. It’s quite simple!” Ruin and death lie in these words.

New Ways to Think

• Cat’s Cradle, The Critique of Pure Reason, Soul Mountain, Beyond Good and Evil, What Is Philosophy?, Ethics

Philosophy isn’t just a matter of searching for the truth, and it isn’t just a matter of criticizing the ideas of others. It’s also about developing new ways to understand the world. Studying Kant first taught me how to explore a system so complex that it’s literally like rewiring your mind as you understand it. After my old philosophical mentor, Jim Bradley, walked me through the Critique of Pure Reason, I felt like I understood not just how to read philosophy, but how to philosophize.

When he was young, Vonnegut could still
laugh without crying.

Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Spinoza ended up doing the same thing for me, and taking me to places where I wanted to go anyway. I’ve read other philosophers than these three, but concepts at the forefront of their works are the biggest concrete influences on how I do philosophy myself. Beyond Good and Evil introduced me to the strongest critiques of morality, and I never took another moral philosopher or preacher (even an atheist one) as an authority again. Deleuze introduced me to an entire new paradigm of doing philosophy, geological or ecological philosophy, and What Is Philosophy? was the first of his large books I’d read. Spinoza was the ethicist of immanence that started it all, and was the first to make explicit the inter-relation of all the domains of philosophy, which common academic practice keeps separate.

Gao wrote a literal exploration of the multiplicity inside each of us as individuals. Vonnegut developed a playfulness to his own voice that was so utterly unique that the world is richer for its existence. And Cat's Cradle, his first book that I read, came early enough in his life that it had not grown too cynical to inspire.

Excitement for Writing

• Moby-Dick, Ulysses, Soul Mountain, The Savage Detectives, Search Sweet Country, Ethics

Moby-Dick was one of the first novels I ever remember reading. I first had an illustrated copy for children when I was maybe eight years old, and it fascinated me. I don’t know how many times I read it. I ended up having to buy multiple copies. That illustrated edition I left in a box in my grandmother’s house when I moved out and it was destroyed in a fire over a decade later. Then I bought an old second-hand copy, but that was too badly water damaged after loaning it to a friend. Then I found a cheap edition at a Coles in Hamilton and have had that on my shelf ever since.

Ulysses, Soul Mountain, and The Ethics were three books I read that redefined for me the limits of what language was capable of. I’m now leaning toward a definition of those limits as limitless. Bolaño taught me a way to express a character that was wholly new to me. Most importantly, reading The Savage Detectives inspired me to start writing fiction seriously myself. And reading Search Sweet Country two years ago nearly made me stop because I don’t think I’ll ever be able to write such beautiful, poetic sentences as Kojo Laing.

Singularity in Art

• Cat’s Cradle, The Idiot, Ulysses, Soul Mountain, The Savage Detectives, What Is Philosophy?, Ubik, Search Sweet Country

Gao spent many years in rural China, on
the run from the oppression of the Deng
government and the Communist Party. So
did I, you, and she, as well as he.

They used to teach me in high school literature class that a good character is consistent. What a load of shit. A character that’s true to what a person is will be paradoxical, self-contradictory, and utterly inexplicable. This isn’t the same as randomness, which is genuine sloppiness. A character truly adequate to human nature will contain genuine multitudes, and there will always be new complexities to discover. No one explanation for their behaviour will ever suffice to complete them. A person is impossible to complete. 

Characters who genuinely embody this impossibility of completion are Prince Myshkin and Rogozhin (and Stepan Verkhovensky, and Nikolai Stavrogin, and the Karamazov brothers), the narrator(s) of Soul Mountain, and Joe Chip. Vonnegut’s very narrative voice embodies this singularity. Laing did this for the entire city of Accra, as did Joyce for Dublin and our culture's most popular Greek epic.

The Savage Detectives showed me something different: the impossibility of, no matter the depth of your research and how many different angles you find to view a person, ever truly understanding them to the depths of their souls. After 54 narrators, we understand so much about Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, but in all that multiplicity, there is no essence. Of course, that’s the point.

Deleuze and Guattari’s work did this for the authors themselves, channelling their ideas and styles of expression and argument through so many different prisms and contexts the philosophy seemed adequate to the world if only because it approached a similar complexity (not in the dismissive sense of a reader’s confusion, but in the ecological sense of new details emerging from every new examination). The freaky thing is, Guattari wasn't even involved in writing the book; he was too sick with depression and heart failure. Deleuze writes as if he’s channelling his old friend, and when you read it, it seems that he’s really there. All of him. All of them.