grace and beauty...

...and something else, in the speechless regions of the heart.

Tamara Karsavina -- Prima Ballerina

Jimmie Spheeris

The LP Isle of View came out the year I (barely) graduated high school. A year later, I bought it. I remember the spell it cast on me. Just drifting off to an unusual planet where dreams, melancholy, and souls float through the atmosphere.

literary fiction or...

...extended, boring, author-heavy "poem"?


I haven't read much literary fiction. It's almost like a force-field repulsion keeping me away. I mostly have to rely on excerpts and things gleaned from reviews. For me to pronounce on literary fiction is ridiculous, bordering on stupid. I don't care.

I don't see any valid reasons for not writing a novel the way Dostoevsky did. He told tales, and the narrator was not showing out. The narrator mostly spoke from the background. Also John Steinbeck and Harper Lee -- stories. But not just stories like our plot-drivel best sellers of today. They wrote tales in which life itself participated through the art of their language and within the matrix of their vision.

I get a sense that some modern and most contemporary literary fiction is not really about story-telling. If there is plot and characterization, those are mostly happening in the background. The foreground is occupied by a knowing, "cool," ironic author on self-parade. Opening paragraphs or pages are monologues or descriptive inventories, with the footlights shining on how profound and artistic the writer assumes himself to be.

I suppose this stuff is thematically about some meta-cultural comment. Oh my.

Thomas Mann pushed the envelop a bit. As author, he protruded here and there on the page. But we forgive him, we actually welcome him. Because he was profound and a genius. Our contemporary geniuses are few and far between. Maybe or probably W.G. Sebald. Otherwise, we have some folks who think they are geniuses writing their "important" literary fiction.

Reading synopses of today's literary fiction novels is not a pleasant activity. Even reading about those that contain some kind of plot and with some emphasis on character(s) is a hurtful thing. Banality raised to an assumed level of high art. Uninteresting or contrived situations containing counterfeit relationships shoved down the readers' eyeballs.

But that other kind -- the kind praised in all the big literary reviews -- where asininity is fused with pretentiousness, where the author is being all meta on center-stage...well that just won't do.

Let's say that literary fiction has a valid place and function in the world of books. Okay. All I request is that the truly talented and truly wise indulge in such a thing, someone approaching the level of Kafka. Or if some writers can't stop themselves, at least reviewers should intervene with both barrels, instead of enabling such stuff. Writers not on the level of a Mann or Sebald should probably turn their language skills to the production of potboilers. Those can be fun and are not pompous.

But what do I know? Not a whole hell of a lot.

GRIMM

I watch hardly any network TV. But there's this show on NBC that I like -- GRIMM.

The production value is really good for this series. In one episode, Nick (a Grimm) drops by Monroe's house. Monroe -- a wolf-like Wider Blutbad -- has decorated his living room for Christmas. The detail of it all! And how a sort of Bavarian effect has been wrought -- a fairy tale, old world aesthetic.

how to compromise a review

The more talented an author and more worthwhile his or her works, the less need for hyperbole when writing a review.


Here's a review of a William Gaddis book by Cynthia Ozick:

review of Carpenter's Gothic


I empathize with Ms. Ozick. I have also written review things that are overstated. I am determined to reduce or eliminate such a tendency toward ridiculous hyperbole. I think it's harder to write without hyperbole. It's so easy to allow oneself to float off on a cloud of pretentious words. The irony is that these important reviewers (Ozick a big-time novelist herself) who choose inflated over sober terms shows a disrespect for language. What's also irksome is how certain reviewers are so thoroughly sucked into an insular literary world that expects and requires preposterously worded appraisals.

Get a load of these from her review:

"...should disclose Mr. Gaddis's terrifying artfulness once and for all."

"...omniscience thrown into the hottest furnaces of metaphor."

"Mr. Gaddis knows almost everything...how myth flies into being out of the primeval clouds of art and death and money."

"...the dazzling irruption...."

"He is a possessed receiver of voices, a maniacal eavesdropper, a secret prophet and moralizer."

Goodness gracious.

Having said what I said, I will also say this: Ms. Ozick's review overall is really excellent. She has read deeply into this novel (as opposed to close reading, which is a soulless intellectual exercise). She brings out things in such a way that I want to read this book. 

I just wish she hadn't compromised her mostly well-written review by sprinkling into it some overblown and fancy-pants sentences.

an impression of HYMNS TO THE NIGHT

After a number of years, I read again Hymns to the Night, by Novalis (or Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772 -- 1801). The full text of this poem-thing can be found here:

Hymns to the Night

And if you click on the “Links” there, you'll find a page from which to download a nicely formatted Word version.


*    *    *


I had forgotten the power of this piece by Novalis. I suppose events in life tend to push even important things farther back into the mind's chambers. But like my dreams, which persist with powerful resonance, I'm confident that Hymns to the Night is also alive in my unconscious regions, doing its silent work there.

Hymns to the Night is an “ecstatic” turning away from the daylight of usual experience, a rejection of the temporal, a refusal of psychological normality.

Novalis's beloved wife died at age 15.

There is something about the death of a young woman that touches a bass organ chord, disturbs sensitive nerves, and inspires a change in one's sense of reality. This could be an evolutionary effect working into our unconscious regions: when timely vessels of propagation are overturned, a faith in time itself is poured out and evaporates; when nature attacks with illness our human hope in the form of woman, nature has darkly injured something in our organic tissues of meaning.

Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain is an extended reverie on the dubious and equivocal nature of time. And how time can be psychologically (spiritually?) deferred or even rejected. A quietly ecstatic turning toward the melancholy of non-participation. In one poignant scene, Hans Castorp and his cousin Joachim accompany the tubercular and terminal young woman Karen Karstedt on an outing to the hillside above the town of Dorf. The winter day is beautiful, and their nature hike takes them by the town cemetery. They discover there, amid the narrow aisles and crowded gravestones, a cleared and unoccupied space, obviously a grave space awaiting its future occupant. All three realize who that space will soon be for. The cousins stand there in clumsy, silent commiseration with Karen. A strange smile happens on her face. For me, it was as if a shy and curious bride were awaiting Death, her groom. A sense of betrothal to eternity, a submission of the temporal before the uncanny.

The composer Alban Berg wrote his Violin Concerto (1935) in memorial to Manon Gropius, who died of polio complications at age 18. From measures of mourning and anguish, the piece moves toward a concluding transcendence or apotheosis. It moves toward the rapture of night and away from vicissitudes of time.

Edvard Munch's sister died when she was 15. Edvard Munch's paintings have a quality of twilight leaning into darkness. Over time, he painted several versions of The Sick Child. Munch, owing to his early sorrow, turned to a night of the soul. The red-haired teenager in his painting – his sister – stares from her bed at something in the distance, beyond the curtained window. Something is drawing nearer and is profounder than time or experience. A pact between painter and Death was early struck, and his wounded oeuvre holds a consistent theme of ecstatic night.


*    *    *


Part 5 of Hymns to the Night – oddly the longest section – sounds a wrong note for me. It seems like an incursion of an artificial element, something out of tune with the other parts. Or like an extended didactic aside, with a nod to the religiosity of readers. A genuinely Romantic pulse has been interrupted by the conventional.

But of course, Novalis could be simply layering his eccentric vision into the only tropes familiar to him. He lived when he lived. Maybe he held a conventional Christian belief, or maybe he was casting emotion into allegory. My sense of a wrong tonality might be an anachronistic reading, a projection of my perspective onto a different era. Whatever the facts might be, the last stanza of Part 5 is astonishing in its poetic effect and in its opening onto eternity:

The love is given freely,
And Separation is no more.
The whole life heaves and surges
Like a sea without a shore.
Just one night of bliss—
One everlasting poem—
And the sun we all share
Is the face of God.

Maybe there is a clue in Part 6 that Novalis remains true to the flame of a pagan, ostensibly Christian Romanticism, to the dying light of a beautiful spark as it falls toward the grave:

Blessed be the everlasting Night,
And blessed the endless slumber.

That “endless slumber” seems to me a contradiction of literal or dogmatic deliverance. To me, this is a turning to art, to poetry as an environment of hope against hope, much like the spiritual musings of Miguel de Unamuno.

Novalis's dead bride is vivified by the dark light of his own poem. By his turning away from wounding phenomena and toward the Dream of Night.