Going to Church With the Irish, Jamming, 05/09/2016

A couple of weeks ago, I finished reading a book by Colum McCann, one of Ireland’s most critically acclaimed living writers. Quite appropriately for Let the Great World Spin, I found it accidentally. 

Around Canada Day, I saw a couple of books that had been left behind on top of a ledge in my building’s side porch. The next day, they were still there, so that was enough time to presume the original owners didn’t want them. So they’re mine now.

McCann’s seemed like the most interesting book, so I gave that a go first. It’s a touching story, told in a very engaging style. I'll describe that style using a very long, pretentious phrase, then break it down into what it actually means.

First-person polyphonic coincidental juxtaposition.

Philippe Petit about to start tightrope walking between
the World Trade Center towers.

The coincidence. Let the Great World Spin tells the story of two concurrent events – Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the World Trade Center towers on 7 August 1974, and a shattering tragedy involving a 19 year old prostitute and her friend Corrigan, an Irish monk experiencing a peculiarly intense period of his lifelong crisis of faith.

The juxtaposition. Petit’s walk is a remarkable and famous historical event. McCann’s book was written in 2009, and included an epilogue taking place in 2006. To a 21st century reader, even this explicit acknowledgement is more than we need to feel how the brutal destruction of the towers haunts the narrative.

Most of the actual storytelling in Let the Great World Spin describes the life of two unremarkable prostitutes – a mother and daughter – and the people involved in the fatal accident. Few lives could be as pathetic and abject as these.

First-person polyphonic. The first chapter, one of the longest, is the story of the monk, told by his older brother. In his voice, we see most of the material circumstances of his brother’s and the prostitutes’ lives, told as a fairly straightforward story. He moves to New York from Ireland, moves into his brother’s apartment in the Bronx, and gets to know everyone. 

Then we cycle through other characters’ perspectives. A wealthy WASP woman having a meeting with her support group of other mothers – from a wide range of social, racial, and economic backgrounds – who’ve lost children to the Vietnam war. Her friend in the support group Gloria, the group’s only black member. 

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Philippe Petit in The Walk.

Her husband, a Jewish circuit judge who sentences the mother prostitute on a robbery charge and delivers Petit’s comically honorific sentence of a $1 fine and a free performance in a city park. That older prostitute herself as she sits in prison regretting pretty much everything she's done in her entire life. The failing, cocaine-addicted artist who meets the monk’s brother after the day of Petit’s walk. The monk’s lover, a co-worker at a seniors’ home.

There are three short chapters from the perspective of Petit himself. Some short chapters from people who don’t interact with the prostitute’s story at all. A teenage phreaker tapping into pay phones talking to people at the site of the walk. The freelance photographer who takes one of the iconic shots of the walk.

That's probably the greatest strength of the book as far as technique goes – he’s spot on with the cadences and character of so many different voices. Irish Catholics with a complicated relationship to their faith – yeah, of course he can write one of those.

But black New Yorker street prostitutes? Hispanic teenage photographers? Silicon Valley geeks who call pay phones in Times Square for fun? I’m especially impressed that he can express such convincing voices for the interior monologues of women – that’s a task where I’ve seen so many male writers fall on their faces. 

There are limits to polyphony as well, and I’m glad McCann stays within them. I don’t think polyphony can construct a coherent narrative if voices change from frequently than chapter-by-chapter or section-by-section. Any faster than that – among paragraphs, sentence to sentence, or even within a single sentence – and the result is a maelstrom.

Let the Great World Spin author Colum McCann.

More poem than narrative. And very difficult to do well. I’d say the only one who really did – at least among those I’ve read – was Finnegans Wake. 

Yes, I have to be one of those people who mentions James Joyce in any discussion of Irish literature. Because he and McCann both deal with a theme that resonates quite strongly with me – an exploration of how Catholicism shapes a subjectivity.

I’m not a Christian – I consider myself more aligned to Judaism today than ever. But I grew up in a very Catholic country, Newfoundland. I count former priests and nuns among my friends and family. And there’s a wonderful idea in the Catholic philosophical and moral tradition that McCann’s book explores.

The most abject and spat-upon of people in just as holy in the eyes of God as the most historically significant and fantastic because they all contribute to building the same complex and beautiful world that is God’s unfolding creation.

That's why the remarkable and inspiring achievement of Philippe Petit is juxtaposed with the sordid and filthy lives of these prostitutes. Unfolding their narratives together shows the equivalent dignity of both.

That's a fundamentally democratic idea, profoundly democratic too, since the notion applies to ordinary life and the divine simultaneously. 

If Irish literature is going to have a popular definition, I’d prefer that its Catholicism grapple with themes that lend dignity to humanity. If only to demonstrate that we deserve it.

A Vision of a World Better Than Humanity’s, Composing, 18/05/2015

There’s a short story contest running at the writing website Inkitt.com, where you can submit for free a single fantasy or science-fantasy story. Now that my college program is finished, my days are still hectic with my internship and applications for jobs, but I at least have more time on the weekends to write. 

I realized this weekend, as I thought about some ways that I could contribute to this writing contest, that it could be an appropriate place for the return of Alice. The short story contest wouldn’t be the best context to display the character in all that she signifies. That would simply be impossible in the condensed form of a 2-3000 word story, and I haven’t even fully thought through all the philosophical implications of Alice as a character.*

* Ethically, politically, morally, sexually, epistemically, ontologically, narratively. I think I’ve made something really interesting with this character. I hope Vaka Rangi sees this post and has something to say in the comments. He’s always very insightful with these concepts. 

The cover image I'll use for my story submission, from Flickr Creative Commons.

I’m not really sure how successful this story will even be in the contest. Its style isn’t what I’d call experimental, but it is different. My girlfriend recently finished Irvine Welsh’s novel Crime. I haven’t yet read Welsh myself, though I’ll steal this and her copy of Trainspotting soon too. 

As she explained his writing style to me, I realized that it resembles the modernist techniques of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf: long, introspective, first-person, stream-of-consciousness monologues delivered with a particular ear for the character’s cultural vernacular. Welsh innovates by drawing his plots and storylines from genre fiction, as with Crime.

While I don’t have a cultural vernacular for my narrator, interstellar space pilot Jorge Patel, the story describes his “Epic World” through digressions in his memories that spark from snippets of dialogue between he and Alice as they travel to the world-ship where most androids live in their fictional universe. The story opens with a remark Alice makes about slavery. 

As they speak, Jorge recalls lessons about Earth’s history on his own homeworld, Delta Pavonis, which vilified the planet as a society addicted to slave economies. But another remark later reminds him of his disillusionment with the economy and society of his own world, which quite resembles ours. 

I also include a dig at Ed Miliband

and the UK’s Labour Party, who

differ from the Conservatives only in

being the pro-austerity political party

that feels a little sad about endorsing

economic policies that drag almost

the entire country’s population into

inescapable poverty. And if Liz

Kendall wins, I doubt they'll even

feel sad about it anymore.

Falling wages and a bloated oligarchy are justified to the public as the cost of staying competitive in an economy that needs planet-wide austerity for the indefinite future to overcome a crisis. He spends his teenage years watching his friends drop out of school one by one, as their families can no longer afford the fees. Unlike the rest of us, he’s able to train to become an interstellar pilot, and fly to other worlds. 

I try to paint a whole world through the digressive memories of one person seeking a better life. The other stories at the Inkitt contest are pretty good, and also quite interesting. But they favour descriptions of events, followed by dialogue. For someone more accustomed to this, I admit that my style can be challenging.

The story’s politics carry an explicit left-wing message and an implicit feminist ideal. I think it’ll definitely have an appreciative audience, but most of the stories that I see at the top of its leaderboards right now are very typical fantasy plots like roguish action heroes kidnapping sarcastic princesses, or stereotypical grimdark fantasies about the horrors of war.

So I’m not sure how well my story, “Dancing in the Harshest Starlight,” will do in this context. In essence, the story is about someone who turns away from the cesspool of misery and violence that his human society has become, then discovers the paradise that superior creatures, the androids, have built. But he remains human, and the community of peace, prosperity, neighbourliness, and happiness that he sees remains forever separate from him precisely because he’s only human.

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.