Noam Chomsky and Paul Celan

One of the things Noam Chomsky did to revolutionize linguistics was to point out that you could make sentences that were grammatically correct but did not make sense. His observation freed linguists to devote their attention to grammar without worrying about meaning, as they had tended to do.  An example he used is this sentence: “Colorless ideas sleep furiously.”

It seems to me that when Chomsky asserts this he is using ‘make’ in a narrow sense. The phrase “make sense” for him means something like ‘to harmonize rationally with the speaker’s notion of the world.’ But ‘make’ can also mean create, and ‘make sense’ can mean create meaning.

I once had a teacher, Yousel Rogat, who suggested that any metaphor, as opposed to a simile, behind the scenes evokes a universe in which the metaphor is literally true. If you say, “life is like a nightmare,” you point to certain resemblances that you might be able to list. “If you say, “life is a nightmare”, you evoke a universe of darkness and suffering where sordid details struggle for realization.

So it is with Chomsky’s own sentence.  If you speak it from the narrow, Chomskian perspective, then you say nothing about ideas or about sleep or about fury. But if you take ‘make’ in the sense of create, you have a resonant image of ideas, some reified (because they might have color), but without color and at once somnambulant and raging. And it does seem relevant to me that Chomsky is himself a furious wielder of abstract ideas intended to rouse others from complacency time after time.

And so it is with Paul Celan. His poems for the most part do not make sense in the narrow Chomskian definition.

         Here's pelt sky. Even now

         a clear wing writes
        

         I, too, remember,

         dust-

         colored one, arrived

         as a crane

But they make a great deal of sense by creating meaning.  Of course I’m reading in translation, but I doubt knowing German would make any difference. In fact I think the German inclination to create new words by joining old ones freely lends it self to this sort of sense making. You can put two words together in a way that does not harmonize rationally with the world, as you know it, but does create a new sense, a new batch of meaning.

This generation of meaning is one thing that makes Celan so exhilarating to read, and, in his context so moving. You are constantly involved in making sense.  Reading this book is a long struggle in which you time after time are forced to make (create) sense based on the chimeric materials Celan provides you. Nourishing your mind in the background as you work is Celan’s tortured history, his upbringing as a German-speaking Jew in what had been part of Austria, was then Romania and is now the Ukraine; the death of his mother in a concentration camp; his tormented attempts to recreate his nationality and his identity; his deep involvement with the German language though he was a Jew suffering horrors enacted by Germans; his eventual suicide. It is the history of a chimeric identity and the poems are chimeric.  That the evocation is mostly of tragedy and suffering does not make it less wonderful because it shows the capacity of the human mind to work with such dark material, and come out richer in meaning.

The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson

There are some good things about this novel: there are some wonderful descriptive passages, particularly descriptions of the sea during the period when the protagonist is on a fishing boat.  I thought of Moby Dick.  A section about 15 pages long where a North Korean delegation visits a Texas ranch is laugh-aloud funny.  The book as a whole has a certain imaginative, surreal zaniness.

That's about it.  Basically, it's a trashy piece of work.  Reading it is like reading the script of a B adventure movie.  It follows the life of an orphan in North Korea who, through a series of unlikely events, comes to masquerade as a member of the elite.  Outside of the descriptive passages mentioned, the prose is adequate to mediocre.  The dialogue is stilted.  The real problem has to do with plot and characterization.  Both are totally subservient to building scenes.  It's like one of those operas where the plot and characterization serve only to maneuver the singers onto the stage where they can emote beautifully.  I think of I Puritani, written during the height of the fashion of mad scenes, where the heroine goes mad and sings a gorgeous aria, then, since one mad scene is good two must be better, recovers but suddenly goes mad again when she sees her boyfriend out riding with another woman, and finally regains her sanity  - for the opera has a happy ending.  But here there is no beautiful music.  The Orphan Master's Son has not one, but two endings, both spuriously happy, one highly suitable for a grade B Hollywood adventure movie and the other for a grade B North Korean adventure movie.

Note that there are several scenes of horrendous torture.  Someone who would be uncomfortable with reading vivid torture should skip this book.

Someone trying to defend the plot and characterization might assert that life in a totalitarian regime is often arbitrary, and, as Michael Kundera has explored so movingly, under the pressure of constant police scrutiny, if you make up a story about yourself, or someone else makes it up, that is who you become.  The problem in this book is that the manipulative plot and jerky characterization give no feeling of authenticity.  I am no more convinced I have learned anything reliable about North Korea than I would be convinced I had learned about the settlement of the Great Plains form watching a spaghetti western or about Renaissance Scotland by attending a performance of Lucia di Lammermoor.

Several fine novels address the effect of authoritarian regimes on human fate and character from the inside with great insight and authenticity.  Here are a few that come to mind:  From nearby China, Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian. Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being and other novels. The long-term consequences of oppression are thoughtfully portrayed in Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Sepharad and The Rings of Saturn and other novels by W. G. Sebald. Read one of them instead.

I don't keep current on American fiction, so I don't have any idea what the Pulitzer committee had to choose from last year, but, if there was nothing better than this, it was a bad year.

I listened to this novel in the excellent recording by Sean Barrett of the English translation by Philip Gabriel. Kafka on the Shore is a Bildungsroman.  On his 15^th birthday our hero, who has renamed himself Kafka after the Czech writer (Kafka means 'crow' in Czech), runs away from home where he has been living in estrangement from his father and in the absence of his mother, who ran away years before.  Is there an instance in Murakami of a father and son who get on?  He is one of those Murakami young men who make a virtue for the reader of not knowing what to do with themselves.  He is also running from Œdipus’ curse delivered as extended by his father: that he would sleep with his mother, sleep with his sister, and kill his father. It is difficult to write about this novel without injecting spoilers, but I think I can say that whether Kafka fulfills or avoids his curse depends on what it means to say something really happens.  

This novel is not speculative fiction like Science Fiction, nor does it create a coherent alternate world like fantasy, but there are unworldly departures from the commonplace.

It includes at least two touching love stories, and a violent murder by a reluctant murderer.

This is a long novel with several fully developed secondary characters.  The most important is a man who as a child was traumatized in a strange event during the second world war, which is recounted in full, and involves something that suggest American bombing of Japan and as well the sexual fantasies of his grade school teacher.  The victim grows up in a sense retarded, but able to talk with cats (Who can name a Murakami novel without a cat?) and his special powers enable him to effect the denouement.  Another important character is a transsexual librarian who is a bit of an authority on everything and a mentor to the hero.  Another is an uneducated truck driver who befriends the cat whisperer, learns to like Beethoven, and is treated for his good works to a hot prostitute who explains Hegel to him.  His physical strength contributes to the denouement.  So you see, there are many threads and arrangements blended carefully into the conclusion.

A secondary personage who has important role in the plot manifests as Colonel Sanders.  He explains that he is neither a god nor a Buddha nor a person.  Really, he is a sort of plot device, but utterly credible in another way, and teaches us something about the issue of character-driven plots and vice versa.

During the course of many trials and temptations, the hero spends some time in a distant forest that suggests purgatory but also suggests the Western Paradise of Pure Land 

Buddhism.

The hero has some remarkable erections in unworldly circumstances. Can anyone name a Murakami novel without remarkable erections?

I feel I am failing utterly to give the tone of this novel. It must sound chaotic and self-conscious. It is not. It is orderly and full of surprising but inevitable plot maneuvers. It is serious, entertaining, and moving.

For me the key to apprehending reality in unreality lay in the character and action of lady Rokujo in TheTale of Geji, which the worldly-wise librarian is at pains to explain to the questing hero. Lady Rokujo is one of Genji’s many lovers. The Buddhist psychology that underlines Lady Murasaki’s characterization requires that each person have a ruling aspect, and allows people to have spiritual extensions of themselves, like ghosts.  But these extensions may manifest while the person is alive. Lady Rokujo's ruling aspect is jealousy, and, without the corporeal Lady Rokujo even knowing it, her spiritual extensions slowly kills a competing lover.

It is in a world that includes such kinds of reality that Kafka undergoes trials and temptations and learns to be a person through many adventures both realistic and remarkable.

Harriett Scott Chessman’s The Beauty of Ordinary Things

Spoiler Alert

Reading this book you're closely following the thoughts and feelings of the main character and the principal secondary character.  The main character a Vietnam vet, in 1974, is deeply burdened by memories of physically and morally horrendous incidents in the war.  The secondary main character is a novitiate at a farm that is a Catholic nunnery who is trying to make up her mind to take her vows.  Each character is seeking equanimity.  While this book focuses on the course their individual experiences, their experience is always involved in a set of binding relationships, mostly with his large family, to which the novitiate is a friend.  These friends and relatives have serious problems of their own, which is part of their closeness.  These characters sometimes feel lonely because of their struggle, but the reader always knows that they are not alone.

The critic Ivor Winters once described the poetry of Wallace Stevens as, somewhere "the thought takes place in the images.”  Chessman brings this technique to narrating the thoughts and feelings of her characters with remarkable felicity.  Often their conversations are rather tacit, but you know what they think and what their thoughts mean to them because of her lucid descriptions of the world as it exists at the moment they're speaking or when, later, their feelings are evolving.  Each scene is a metaphor for what people are feeling there.  This may seem like the much-disparaged pathetic fallacy (“It was a dark and stormy night….”) but she executes it with such grace and care that it is very seldom uncomfortable.  Here is an example:

[After a disturbing revelation] 

“Back at home, I sat out on my second-floor porch for a while, trying to calm down.  One of my neighbors, an old, old Polish man, came tottering out of his house with a watering can.  I watched him filling the cam, walking it over to the little patch of garden where he planted what books like tomatoes, lettuce, basil, zucchini, and a whole bunch of weeds.  Maybe the old guy had a landlord like mine who almost never came around to repair faucets or mow, much less help with the weeding.  The old man wore a canvas hat to protect his wispy haired head from the sun.”

Related to this, the vet is a lapsed photographer who resumes his craft during the course of the story, and it is no coincidence that he is capturing and delivering images, as images have captured and delivered him for the reader.

Similarities and contrasts reminded me of some of the work of Robert Stone, another writer I greatly admire.  Stone also frequently deals intimately with desperate people hostage to inward horrors, and as well with good nuns.  But, while in Stone equanimity is in short supply and self-destruction usually triumphs, often in scenes of histrionic violence, in Chessman similar characters evolve toward quiescence.

When I first read the last chapters of this book I shook my head in disappointment, thinking to myself, this is too nicey-nicey, this is to easy.  The novice filled with exultations and beset by doubts quietly becomes a nun offstage and seems satisfied and indeed delighted with her life.  The vet returns to his art, and through his art, through his friendship with the nun, and through his feeling for his family seems set on a successful, and tranquil life.  Do I believe that in the real world such outcomes are possible?  Absolutely, but they are somehow unsatisfactory in literary terms.  They do not provide what Aristotle called a catharsis of pity and fear.  .  Chessman provides soothing like an dissolution of pity and fear.  My discomfort raises questions about what ‘realism’ means in fiction.  I mean, if we take, say, Balzac, as realism, it partly means his characters’ motives are base and their periods of happiness brief.  But, really, people’s motives are sometimes noble, or at least not base, and lives are sometimes happy.  I think Chessman would not mind my discomfort.  She is noting that resolution lies in ordinary things.

Note the remarkable range of Chessman’s subject matter.  Her first novel, Ohio Angels, which I have not read, is set in the midwestern city she grew up in.  Her second novel, Lidia Cassatt Reading the Morning Newspaper, which I consider a masterpiece, is set in late 19th-century Paris among the sort of people your meet in James’ The Ambassadors.  Her third novel, Someone Not Really Her Mother, recounts the story of a family dealing with the Alzheimer's of their matriarch.  The family is in New England and the Jewish matriarch escaped from the Nazi’s in France and lived in England, though her memories are fleeting away.  Then this novel set among Catholics of Irish origin  in New England.  The three I know offer real characters with full verisimilitude.  They each involve certain preoccupations: family, the drama of non-drama, the importance of things unspoken, death, and the importance of inner life.

 Quite a level of accomplishment in the way of an author putting yourself in different worlds and people.

Kindle ebook sales for indie publishers | Books | The Guardian

http://www.authormedia.com/2012-publishing-predictions/

Amazon reveals quarter of Kindle ebook sales in US were for indie publishers | Books | The Guardian

But read it carefully. Yes, indie or self-publishing is no longer the kiss of death, but big-name publishers are still better if you can get them — wider exposure, more sales, better chance of reviews. If your aim is not big sales but producing better literature, all this is of secondary importance, but even the most literarily ambitious of us would still be pleased to have more readers.