From Word To Word

Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist – I can hardly count the number of people who have recommended this book to me over the past few years, and even during the short day and a half that it was off my shelf and in my hand I had several people tell me how much they enjoyed it.  Unfortunately, I fail to see what is so compelling about the novel.  Its story is heavy-handedly allegorical and moralistic, endlessly talking over the most simplistic kinds of spiritual truisms.  Its central argument would run something like, “If you truly desire your destiny, the whole universe will conspire to fulfill it,” and this is about as profound as it ever gets.  It has almost no literary value and only the most superficial intellectual value.  Its sole quality, to my mind, is that it took me very little time to read.

Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé – This is a remarkable book, and I hardly know what further I can say about it that would not immediately entail writing a thesis length treatise.  Let it suffice for me to quote a small section: “Novels are so many wedges which the novelist, an actor with his pen, inserts into the personality of the reader.  The better he calculates the size of the wedge and the strength of the resistance, so much the more completely does he crack open the personality of his victim.” In light of this idea, I can assure you that Canetti calculates very well indeed, and that his novel certainly cracked this victim’s personality widely open.  Either this will recommend the book to you as another willing victim, or it will not.

Russell Hoban’s The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz – In some ways this book reads like The Alchemist: parable-esque, ambiguously spiritual, and always trying just a little bit too hard.  It is somewhat better written, however, and its moral is somewhat less ridiculous, something like, “The only place is time, and that time is now,” but I was not much impressed on the whole.  I would take it over The Alchemist, but not over much else.

Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises – There are many writers who try to emulate Hemingway’s famously terse and unornamented prose, but they generally fail because they mistake a lack of literary imagery for a lack of imagery generally, and they are unable to make the details of a scene or a character stand as images in themselves.  The result is a spare and impoverished prose, where Hemingway’s writing feels full and complex and complete even in its stylistic simplicity.  The difference is that Hemingway is continually choosing the facts and the details that produce an imagistic effect without the need for formalized and contrived images.  He does not need to draw parallels between bull fighting and the social interactions of his characters through metaphor or allusion.  He merely describes the bullfighting and the social interactions of his characters closely and in proximity.  His readers are left to draw the parallels.  It is not that he does without imagery, therefore.  Quite the opposite.   He raises everything, even the smallest detail, to play the role of the image, to make every fact as pregnant as a metaphor.

Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth – This is the novel that was supposed to have followed Invisible Man but was burned in a house fire and then rewritten for the next fifty odd years until it comprised thousands of type-written pages and countless more handwritten notes but still remained unpublished at Ellison’s death.  This is not the novel that Ellison would have published, however, if indeed he would ever have published a second novel it all.  It is what the editors of Ellison’s estate gathered together to publish on his behalf, a practice that often produces only garbage but in this case has provided for the world some truly remarkable writing.  That the form of the novel may be different from Ellison’s intent is almost irrelevant, because the characters, Reverend Hickman and Bliss/Senator Sunraider, are so wonderfully rendered and their relationship so powerfully explored that they would make a unique and valuable addition to English Literature whatever form their story took.  The prose too is beautiful, moving with a sureness and a polish born from fifty years of editing, finding at times the register of poetry, and drawing evocatively on the tradition of African-American preaching in the American south.  A truly beautiful work of literature.

Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler -  This is a novel for readers who take an interest in what it means to be a reader as such.  It forces the reader, directly, in the second person, to reflect on the role that readers plays in the creation of a novel, in the creation of a literary experience, and in the creation of literature as such.  Reading it was not always a comfortable experience for me.  There were several times, especially later in the novel, when I grew tired of being so directly manipulated, where I wished for the return of a more traditional kind of narrative.  Even so, the novel accomplishes something quite unique, and the narrative fragments that are woven in among the sections directed to the reader contain some wonderful examples of the gorgeous prose that has always captivated me in Calvino.  It is not an easy book, and I would not recommend it for the beach.  It requires too much from its readers for that.  On the other hand, it is very much a book worth reading with the proper time and attention, so I suggest that you set aside enough of both to do it justice.

Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge – This was my second Maugham novel.  I read the first, Of Human Bondage, almost two years ago now, when a friend was outraged to hear that I had not included it among the several hundred novels approved for my novel course.  I almost wish, however, that I had read them in the opposite order, because The Razor’s Edge is quite good, but it suffers in comparison to Of Human Bondage.  Both have the compelling characterizations that I am coming to regard as Maugham’s genius, and both follow the complexities of a young man’s search for truth and meaning, but Of Human Bondage is narrated by the voice of its protagonist, which creates a greater sympathy between reader and hero, while The Razor’s Edge is ostensibly narrated by Maugham himself and includes large portions that deal with several other lives as well, all of which creates a sense of detached observation that does not always allow for the reader to engage in the hero’s situation.  I found myself disliking Maugham’s voice by the end of the novel, wishing that it would suspend its cool detachment, even if only for a moment.  It is this coolness of tone, however, that ends the novel, and I would sincerely have wished it otherwise.

Irving Layton’s A Red Carpet For The Sun – I am a little dumbfounded by Irving Layton’s poetry.  Some of it, including almost all of his love poems, seem nothing short of puerile to me, as if they were written by a boy still young enough to believe that he will be manly if only he talks often enough and familiarly enough about a woman’s sexual organs.  These poems rarely have more to say than, “Here is what this woman looked like, and this is what I did to her.”  At the same time, some of his more reflective poems are quite powerful.  They have something of the same bravado about them, perhaps, but it seems better founded, like in “Boys Bathing”, where he says,

The sun is bleeding to death,
covering the lake
with its luxuriant blood;
the sun is dying on their shoulders

or like in “For Mao Tse-Tung,” the from which the book’s title draws its name, where he writes,

They dance best who dance with desire,
Who lifting feet of fire from fire
Weave before they lie down
A red carpet for the sun.

These poems, along with others like “Reconciliation”, “The Birth of Tragedy”, and “Metamorphasis”, have a sureness and a depth to them that justifies their aggression and arrogance of tone and that make them more than mere poetic playground talk.

John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction -  I have too much to say about this book.  It deserves and may yet be granted a post or two unto itself, but I will have to start by saying what I can in this more limited space.  It is, to be very simplistic, a book about how to write, but not at all in a technical sense.  Though Gardner was a famous teacher of creative writing, and though he has also published on the more technical aspects of the craft, this book is dedicated to the question of how the writing of fiction should be approached as a moral act.  To recapitulate his stance on this question would take too long and would probably spoil the read for those of you who bother to read it for yourselves, but it is the very fact that he is willing even to take such a stance that makes the book worth reading.  He does not, as so many critics now do, simply throw his hands up at ideas like truth and beauty because they cannot be made to stand as absolutes. Rather, he reasserts that the task of art is constantly to reiterate the true and the beautiful as best it can, precisely because these ideas cannot be approached as absolutes.  “Art asserts,” he says, “an ultimate rightness of things which it does not pretend to understand in the philosopher’s way but which it nevertheless can understand.”  While this way of talking runs counter to much of the critical writing now being produced, and while it is a position that is most difficult to defend from any vantage point beyond art itself, it is Gardner’s willingness to occupy a firm position on the moral place of fiction that is interesting in itself, and I would love it if some of you would do me the service of reading it as well, so that we can begin discussing it between us more closely.

Philip K. Dick’s Counter-Clock World – I have been under substantial pressure for some time by some of my friends to read Philip K. Dick, whose work I have managed to avoid until now.  Unfortunately, I disliked the premise of  Counter-Clock World so much that I will likely have to read another of Dick’s books just to give him a fair chance.  The central idea of the novel is that time has reversed itself, so that the dead are being returned to life, and people are growing younger, and stomachs are regurgitating the food they ate long ago.  The problem is, for me, that the premise cannot possibly be held consistently.  It is not that the premise is strange or impossible per se that bothers me, because I delight in the strange and the impossible when they are well accomplished.  I just object to the fact that the novel cannot even maintain its own premise internally, falling into all kinds of absurdities.  Though I certainly recognize that Dick is merely employing a plot device, and that he is probably not terribly interested in the question of consistency, I cannot abide a literary world that falls foul of its own logic.  So, I will give Dick the benefit of the doubt, and I will try to find one of his novels that I can read in fairness.

I finished Ivan Illich’s In The Vineyard Of The Text some time last fall, and I wrote about it once at that time, warning that I might write several times more because I had found so much in it that provoked me to reflection.  I never did get the chance to write what I had planned, but I was recently reminded of one of its ideas, so I will take the opportunity now to make good, at least in small part, on what I promised those several months ago.

At one point in the book, Illich describes a kind of utopian space where those who have learned to approach reading as a kind of spiritual discipline can gather in community.  “I dream,” he says, “that outside the educational system there might be something like houses of reading, where the few who discover their passion for a life centered on reading would find the necessary guidance, silence, and complicity of disciplined companionship needed for the long invitation into one or the other of several spiritualities or styles of celebrating the book.”  The kind of reader that he imagines for this place is “one who has made himself into an exile in order to concentrate his entire attention and desire on wisdom, which thus becomes the hoped-for home.”  There are thus two kinds of places being described here: the physical houses where readers might come together, and the hoped-for home of wisdom that such readers seek, and I think that these two places come to inform each other, creating between them an image of homes that are characterized by a love of wisdom and an image of wisdom that is characterized by a love of the home.

I am powerfully drawn to this utopian vision.  Though I cannot imagine the conditions under which it might be accomplished in its entirety, not for me, not at this time, not given the ways that my priorities of family and community currently constrain me, I nevertheless find it a beautiful ideal, one of many often incompatible ideals, to be sure, but no less beautiful for that reason.

Illich’s vision attracts me so strongly because it implies an approach to reading that I find myself insisting upon more and more as time goes by, one that I hope to outline more fully at some later time, one that is characterized by a threefold discipline: close and attentive reading; thoughtful and patient reflection; and learned and leisurely conversation.

What is common in these three things is time.  The text is treated, not as a task to be completed, not as an item to be checked, but as a site through which an intellectual and spiritual discipline can be exercised.  It becomes, to use the dominant metaphor of Illich’s text, a vineyard, a garden, a forest, in which the reader walks and lingers and then shares with other readers.  This approach to the text takes time.  It requires that we make a time, that we create or shape a time that is suitable and respectful of the text and of our fellow readers.

Illich’s utopian vision, therefore, is less about reserving a space for its own sake than it is about reserving a space where time can be dedicated to the needs of a convivial community of reading.  The hoped-for home, in other words, is not primarily a matter of a physical space, though certain physical spaces may be more or less conducive to it.  Rather, it is the opportunity, the time, the discipline to read well and to do so in community, to read in the pursuit of wisdom.

If this is the case, and I believe that it is, then it may be that the hoped-for home is closer to us than it first seemed.  All it would require would be readers committed enough to reading well that they would make the proper space and the proper time for their texts and for each other.  All it would require is for these readers to form intentional community with one another, to go along with one another, to spur each other along the road to reading.

This kind of community probably even exists among us already, at least in part, at least in rudimentary and provisional ways, in the times that we already reserve to reading well, though they be sporadic and uncertain, and in the times that we give our fellow readers around our tables, even if they be infrequent and unpredictable. We must begin by cherishing and nourishing these times of the hoped-for home that we have already been able to fashion in our lives.  These times, however small, however tenuous, are precious.  They must be carefully maintained.

We must then seek diligently to expand the compass of the hoped-for home, to discipline ourselves to a slow and careful reading, to a thoughtful and patient reflection, to a learned and leisurely conversation.  We must make of these things a kind of all-informing passion, a passion that comes to order the life of the mind in such a way that it opens onto worship.  I am much concerned lately with how I might begin to accomplish this in my own hoped-for home.

Graham Ward’s The Politics of Discipleship -  I really enjoyed Ward’s earlier book, Barth, Derrida, and the Language of Theology, a careful and insightful work that responds to Derrida’s thinking with a respect that I have not often found in Christian thinkers, so I was expecting something more than I got from The Politics of Discipleship.  It still carries itself with a certain care and respect in its more philosophical sections, but much of its argument ventures into sociology and economics and politics in ways that I thought were less convincing.  I frequently found myself wishing that Ward would move more slowly, more cautiously, more precisely, more rigorously.  Each of the book’s sections needed its own book, needed to take its time, needed to make some time for what it had to say. Even so, there was much in it that I found useful, and I have quoted one section of it on several occasions now, so it is probably worth a read.  Just moderate your expectations.

John Gardner’s Grendel – I first read this book a number of years ago.  I liked it very much then but even more now on my second reading.  It is short, and it reads quickly, so it can feel deceptively simple, but it rewards an attentive reading with profundity.  I am addicted to the Beowulf legend, so I read or watch every adaptation that I can find, but I am almost always disappointed by portrayals of Grendel.  Everyone seems to want Grendel to be more human.  They try to develop sympathy for him by humanizing him, and they fail to understand how essential it is that he be evil, essentially and absolutely, in order that Beowulf might become the sort of hero that he is.  If Grendel is humanized, then Beowulf’s heroism is ambiguous, and this might make a perfectly good story, but it is no longer the story of Beowulf.  Gardner’s Grendel does not fall into this error.  Though his Grendel does inspire a certain sympathy, it is a sympathy for the role that he must play as monster rather than a sympathy for a humanity that is simply hidden behind a monstrous appearance.  This Grendel is never anything than a monster, and it is precisely this that inspires our sympathy.  He is my favourite portrayal of the Grendel figure outside of the original.

Charles Williams’ The Greater Trumps – I never understand a Charles Williams novel.  I only experience it.  I experience it as a mystery and as a pleasure and as a wonder.  My capacity for description is always beggared by his writing, and I can only ever tell others to read him for themselves, so I will say it once more: read Charles Williams for yourselves.

Margaret Atwood’s  Oryx and Crake – I read this book on the recommendation of a friend, though I have never been a big fan of Atwood’s.  It is not a bad book.  If I had not known who the author was, I would even have said that it was a fairly good book, on the higher end of the science fiction genre with respect to its writing, though not much by the way of science fiction, seeing as it represents a futuristic world in which people are still using CD ROMs.  Yes, I said CD ROMs.  Unfortunately, it is not the work of some middling science fiction writer but of the most recognized name in Canadian literature, and so it stands as one more example of why Atwood simply does not deserve this status.  The story is mostly interesting.  The characters are sometimes engaging.  The plot is well structured.  All well and good, to be sure, but none of this sets Atwood above any of a dozen genre writers I have read over the years, and she offers precious little else.  There is not a single sentence in the whole of the book worth savouring as a sentence, as language, as literature.  It is not a bad book, as I said, and maybe it was intended to be nothing more, which I can respect, but I do wish people would stop telling me how wonderful a writer she is.

John Porcellino’s Thoreau at Walden – If I had ever imagined the story of Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond being told in cartoon, which I assure you is a thing I have never imagined, I would have been very doubtful about the wisdom of such a project.  I would have suggested that the very fine balance between romantic ideal and practical wisdom in Thoreau, a balance that too often teeters in one direction or another even in the original, would have been impossible to maintain in something as simple as a cartoon.  I would also, it seems, have been wrong, since Porcellino’s book maintains the sensibility of Thoreau’s writing admirably, though its art is very simple.  It was only a matter of minutes to read, but it’s effect lingered much longer.

“Ambrose Bierce,” says the Publisher’s Note to Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary (Peter pauper Press, 1958), “was an angry young man who got angrier as he grew older,” and I think that any author who can be described with a line like that deserves a chance to be read.  Not all angry old authors are worth reading, of course, but so many of the old authors worth reading are indeed angry that your chances are probably better with angry than with otherwise.

Bierce’s dictionary is exactly what it purports to be: a dictionary, only its definitions are characterized primarily by irony, cynicism, ridicule, contempt, bitterness, anger, and a good deal of wit.  It is nothing more than this, but if your sense of humour leans in this direction, which mine absolutely does, The Devil’s Dictionary should give you an hour or two of entertainment.

Let me offer a few examples:

Abstainer, n.  A weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure.

Cynic, n.  A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.

Discussion, n.  A method of confirming others in their errors.

Impunity, n.  Wealth.

Presidency, n.  The greased pig in the field of American politics.

Wheat, n.  A cereal from which a tolerably good whiskey can with some difficulty be made, and which is used also for bread.

I like that last one particularly.

As you will probably have gathered on your own by now, very few of my interests lie in the realms of science or mathematics, but this was not always the case.

I was very interested in botany and entomology in my early teens.  During the summers that I spent with my father and brothers at the hunting camp on Manitoulin Island, I used to go for long walks, taking specimens of anything that seemed interesting.  I would dissect, pin, arrange, bottle, and collect things.  I would grind them and make infusions out of them and even paint with them as  pigments.  It was amateur science mixed with some strange instinct to herbalism and alchemy, all born out of months spent in the midst of nature without much else by way of distraction.

I was also fascinated by some of the more or less philosophical questions that mathematics raises.  I can remember pondering for hours about what zero was, for example.  If it was not a number, then I wanted to know what it was precisely, and this was my first flirtation with the idea that nothingness is actually necessary to thingness, not just as a placeholder, but in essence.

Unfortunately, as I have recounted to many people over the years, these kinds of interests were soundly beaten out of me by the very people who were supposed to be teaching me about them.  One mathematics teacher, for example, came by my desk one day to ask what exactly I was doing.  I showed her my notebook and explained that I was trying to work out the nature of zero.  She told me to stop fooling around and start doing my homework.  I never did any kind of mathematics again except under compulsion, and I dropped the subject entirely as soon as I was able.

A whole semester of memorizing the parts of a cell, for reasons that were never explained to me in any way, had a similar effect on my interest in biology, and my chemistry teacher the following semester actually told me, only two weeks into the course, that I should drop it because I was most likely to fail it anyway.  I ended up taking Science in Society instead, where we baked bread and wrote poems about scientific principles and mostly did very little of anything.

Since that time, however, I have found any number of books that have appealed to the initial interest that I had in science and mathematics, as rudimentary and uninformed as that interest was.  Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings was the first such book I can remember.  Its story engaged me so thoroughly that it inspired me to read further about dopamine and to learn more about chemistry than I ever did in any class. Its attraction for me was that it situates a particular scientific problem in its narrative context.  The reader is invited to identify with the scientist and with the patients and with the story.  The science becomes meaningful because it is a part of a story, and it was this story and that caused me to go beyond Sack’s book to some of the more technical details of his work.

This is one of the reasons why I encourage my students to read Robert Adams’ The Land and Literature of England if they are interested in the history of English literature.  As opposed to most history textbooks, it employs an interested narrative rather than trying to achieve some kind of disinterested objectivity.  It revels in the anecdotal and the tangential, even when it admits that some of these things are a little suspect historically.  It makes the historical study of literature into a series of tales that could be shared over a few pints, assuming that you are the sort of person who would share literary stories of any kind over a few pints, which I must assuredly am.  I find, invariably, that this narrative of English literature not only entertains and informs the students who bother to read it, but that it also encourages them to go to the historical documents themselves.  The story not only helps them to learn the basics.  It also creates the desire to learn more deeply.

I am writing about all this now because I have just finished another of these books:  Colin Tudge’s The Secret of Trees.  The front cover of my edition proclaims that it is “a love-letter to trees,” but it is more accurately a love story about trees, a story that goes back millions of years and is by no means finished yet.  Tudge does not at all shy away from the technical details of his subject, giving introductions to plant biology, natural history, and botanical classification, among other things, but neither does he dwell on them.  They are simply included as elements of his larger narrative, and this narrative, written as only a lover can write, inspires its readers to love trees too.  More than that, it gave meaning and interest to some of the mere facts of biology that were inflicted on me in highschool.

If some teacher, any teacher, had thought to tell me the story of how mitochondria, and other organelles as well, probably originated as independent simple cells and then invaded other single cells in order to form complex cells, this would have lent a whole lot more meaning to the apparently random shapes that I was labeling in my notes.  If anybody had taken the time to explain how plants use hormones to respond to their environment, I would have had a meaningful point of entry into chemistry.  Yet everyone was so busy trying to transmit information that they failed to make the information meaningful.  Everyone was too busy, too scientific, too objective, and too educated to tell a story.

Yet stories are how we learn, certainly as children, and also, if we are willing to admit it, as adults.  I understand that scientific papers and mathematical proofs serve their purpose, and I am not suggesting that we do without them.  I am only arguing that these things remain mostly meaningless without the context of their stories, and I am also perhaps suggesting that the increasing irrelevance of academia for many people has to do with its inability to remember and recount the stories that give its work meaning. It is these stories that inspire people to learn more, inspire them to love what they learn, and so these stories need to be shared more often.

I often wonder how this blog might have been different if I had started writing it before I became a parent.  Very likely my poor readers, if there had been any readers at all, would have endured many more posts on literary theory and many fewer posts on children’s literature.  This is not to say that I was not interested in children’s literature before I became a parent.  I have always loved stories and storytelling, fairytales and fantasies, illustrations and drawings.  I have also taught classes on the subject, even before I had children.  The difference now, it seems, is that most of my time is snatched here and there between the duties of parenthood, so I have few of the lengthy stretches of continuous time that I need to read theory, but I have many of the short bits of time when my kids would like me to read to them anyway, and so I find myself reading so many children’s stories that I almost have to find something interesting every once in a while, even considering how poor most writing for children generally is.

This past week, I happened to pick up The Moon’s Revenge, a fairytale written by Joan Aiken and illustrated by Alan Lee, mostly because I liked the cover illustration, and because, all painfully cliche adages aside, it is often possible, in fact, to know a good deal about a book from its cover.  To be fair, I also recognized the names of both the author and the illustrator, so my bets were well hedged, and they was not at all disappointed.

Joan Aiken has written many novels, shorter tales, and picture books in a wide range of styles for almost all ages.  Her best known work is probably The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, which is a series of twelve fantastical and quasi-historical novels, but she is also known for her Armitage Family Stories, and some of her short fantasy tales are very good as well.  I have not read any of her longer books, I will admit, but I have enjoyed her children’s books, and I suspect that I will be exposed to her novels more as my children grow.

Alan Lee is probably best known for his illustrations of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and for his subsequent work as a concept artist on the film adaptations of these novels, but he has worked on many different books and films, though consistently in the genres of the fairytale or ancient mythology.   Faeries, which he illustrated with Brian Froud, was one of the books that I happened to pick up from the library of my friend’s father the other day, and I also remember his art from some of the Rosemary Sutcliff books that were a staple of my reading for several years in my early teens.  He has a lightness of touch that usually manages to navigate between the two extremes that make most fantasy illustrators so horrible, falling neither into overly-dainty fairy cuteness nor into overly-heroic sword-and-sorcery stereotype.

The Moon’s Revenge is an example of both the author and the artist at their best.  The story follows the simple yet inexplicable logic that characterizes all good fairytales, where wishes can be obtained by throwing seven shoes at the moon, but only at the cost of the moon’s wrath and of  seven barefoot years and of a sister who cannot speak and of a terrible danger that will threaten the wholetown.  The pace of the story is impeccable.  It does not hurry, making time for the little complexities of the fairytale, but it swells to its climax with a grand inevitability.  It is very good storytelling.

The illustrations, fortunately, are equal to the story, as too few are.  Lee’s watercolours lend the images a softness and a mysteriousness that is well suited to the subject, but his consistently dark and natural colours, heavy blues and greens and greys, continually suggest the sea and the mist of the seashore, and they ensure that the detailed watercolours do not become mere pastel prettiness.  The effect is wonderful, and the work is easily as good as anything that Lee has done in his many grander projects since.

Suffice it to say that I am now officially scouring the local bookshops for a copy of my own.

I read Roberto Bolano’s The Savage Detectives and 2666 one immediately after the other, having never read Bolano before, and I knew immediately, from the first few paragraphs, even in translation, that he was the kind of writer who would remain with me.  I wanted to write something about 2666 immediately, but I had made  a promise to a reader that I would wait until he had finished it, and this served as a convenient excuse to avoid the reality that I had no ready way to articulate the book’s effect on me.   My excuse has now been removed, however, and so, with a good deal of trepidation, I will venture to say what I can.

2666 is composed of five mostly independent narratives, five novellas if you like, that could very well stand on their own, to the point where there is some debate among Bolano scholars as to the order in which these narratives should be arranged, a debate that has been further complicated by a sixth section of the novel that appears to have been found among Bolano’s papers after his death.  Though the novel’s five narratives are not dependent on one another,  neither are they entirely unrelated.  Not only do some of the characters and events and locations directly overlap, but the sections also contain seemingly coincidental references both to each other and to some of Bolano’s earlier fiction, including The Savage Detectives.  These references are often strikingly and unavoidably coincidental.  They drew my attention repeatedly as I read, often more strongly than the central narrative, until they seemed to become a figure for the novel itself.

Let me give an example.  In one section of the novel, Professor Amalfitano finds a geometry book among the books that he is unpacking.  He cannot remember ever having purchased it or ever having been given it as a gift.  He cannot even remember packing it.  He is uncertain what to do with it, but then he recalls having read about Marcel Duchamp instructing his newly married sister to buy a book of geometry and hang it by strings from her balcony, so Amalfitano takes the mysterious book and hangs it on his clothesline.  Then, in a later section of the novel, another character is passing by a backyard in the course of investigating the many killings of women in the city.  He notices a book hanging on a clothesline, but he continues on his way, and the book plays no further role in his story, but the two narratives are nevertheless linked by this allusion one to the other.

These kinds of references are never strong enough to provide a metanarrative for the five sections, seeming rather to emphasize how tangentially, how coincidentally, how randomly they intersect one another, even if this insistence on coincidence is certainly also also a metanarrative of sorts.  In fact, Bolano seems to make this point explicitly at one point in the novel, saying, “Coincidence is total freedom, our natural destiny.  Coincidence obeys no laws, and if it does, we don’t know what they are.  Coincidence is like the manifestation of God at every moment on our planet.  A senseless God making senseless gestures at his senseless creatures.  In that hurricane, in that osseous implosion, we find communion, the communion of coincidence and effect and the communion of effect with us.”

Here, Bolano seems to be articulating a principle of coincidence that does in fact operate in the place of traditional metanarratives, even in the place of the ultimate metanarrative, in the place of God.  The void that is opened by the end of metanarratives is a void where coincidence becomes the source of freedom and of destiny and of mystery and even, especially, of communion.  Coincidence becomes God, a senseless God to be sure, but a God nevertheless, and if coincidence becomes God, then only coincidence itself provides a metanarrative that might join things together, that might make of us and of our stories a communion.

All this reminds me of a passage from The Savage Detectives, where Bolano says, “The heart of the matter is knowing whether evil is random or purposeful.  If it’s purposeful, we can fight it.  It’s hard to defeat, but we have a chance.  If it’s random, on the other hand, we’re fucked, and we’ just have to hope that God, if he exists, has mercy on us.  And that’s what it all comes down to.”  Though coincidence is not directly conflated with God here, there is the same sense that the necessity of God is found in randomness, in coincidence.  As long as evil has a purpose, there is no need for God.  We can fight a purposeful evil, even if it is difficult.   What we cannot defeat is a purposeless evil.  We do not know how to begin such a fight.  We do not even know that it is evil, not for certain, not without a purpose, without an intent.  In the face of such a random evil, we are left with nothing but hope in the mercy of a God whose very existence remains in doubt.

If, then, the senseless God of coincidence offers our stories the possibility of communion as the passage from 2666 suggests, it would seem that this possibility, this mercy, is not assured.  In the face of purposeless of evil, and the evil of 2666 often seems purposeless indeed, there can be only a tenuous hope in the mercy of a God who may not even exist and who might appear merely as a book hung on a clothesline or something else even less recognizable.  Yet it is only these appearances, these coincidences, these acts of a senseless God, that bind Bolano’s stories together, and I think that these places are precisely where his work might be read most profitably.

Dave Humphrey gave me a book a month or so ago, a collection of pages really, a printout of a pdf  document.  It was a novel, written by Robin Sloan and entitled Annabel Scheme.  Dave passed the book to me, he said, because it had been published in an interesting way, where the author had solicited people, a posse of patrons as he calls them, to sponsor the project in return for a copy of the book when it was completed.  This idea intrigued me, and I put the pile of pages on my desk to await a more or less quiet afternoon, which finally happened yesterday.

Sloan describes the novel as “Sherlock Holmes for the 21st century”, but I am not sure this accurately describes the sense of the book for me.  It feels like a less drug-induced Philip K. Dick mashed with a more tech-savy Douglas Adams and a more playful William Gibson, all writing of a world with demon-possessed computers and ghosts using electric lines as an internet to haunt the living.  The paranormal is mixed liberally with the technological, and both are infused with a mischievous and affectionate satire of google, hard-boiled detective novels, start-up culture, urban ghost stories, and sundry other things.  It may not be great literature, but it is certainly good entertainment.

The story moves quickly and directly with a minimum of description and introspection.  In some places it reads almost like a more fully realized film script rather than a novel, but this feels like a strength rather than a fault because the tone and the narrative arc proceed in similarly easy ways.  The accomplishment of the novel, I think, is that it can move at this pace and still comment interestingly on the almost mystical ways that our culture relates to its technology.  It manages both to be an entertainment and a playful reflection on the gods and the ghosts in our machines.

All this is encouraging to me, because it is an example of  an alternative publishing model that has been largely successful in achieving its admittedly limited goals.  Though the model is still unable to provide a sufficient living for the author, it is perhaps a movement in that direction as it reimagines patronage apart from wealthy benefactors or corporate sponsors or government grants, where people can come together to support the kind of writing and music and art that is most meaningful to them.  I am interested to see if Sloan, or someone else for that matter, will be able to push the model further, to make the posse of patrons a means through which our increasingly virtual communities are able to choose and support adequately the artists that will define and represent them.

I have written before about how much I love the strange, dream-like, mystical novels of Charles Williams, but they are hard to come by now. They can be purchased new, of course, though they are never in stock and are often “unavailable to order a this time,” and I do not often buy books new in any case. My local library is even less helpful, as it usually is, so I am reduced to looking in used bookstores and thrift shops, which has so far met with only very limited success.

Last semester, however, I found one of Williams’ novel’s in the EBC library discard sale, so I thought I might check to see if there were any more of his books in the school’s collection. I had low expectations. The EBC library, serving a Bible College as it does, is adequate in areas like theology and biblical studies, but its English Literature section is literally a few shelves in the furthest corner of the stacks. I did not even bother to check the computer catalogue. I just went to the section and scanned the shelves, and there, against all my expectations, were every one of Williams’ novels and a book of his theology besides.

In retrospect, I should have expected that a Bible College library would be likely to include the fiction of a writer who was also a Christian theologian and a who was, perhaps more importantly, a close friend of C. S. Lewis, for several decades now the closest thing that Protestants have to a patron saint. None of analysis after the fact was able to spoil my mood, however, and I have just finished the first of these books, entitled Descent into Hell.

The novel is superficially about a group of actors who are putting on a play at the residence of its famous playwright, Peter Stanhope. More deeply, it is concerned with the way that some of these actors relate to themselves as selves. For example, the heroine, Pauline Anstruther, sometimes sees a copy of herself approaching along the street, and another of the actors, Laurence Wentworth, creates for himself a succubus that is never really distinct from his own substance, and he falls into a kind of demonic narcissism. Others of the characters are also self-obsessed in the more usual ways, and much of the book’s philosophizing has to do with this question of self.

In this context, Williams has Stanhope muse to Pauline about the shift that occurs from the Greek philosophical tradition’s “know thyself” to the Christian tradition’s “love thy neighbour”. The shift, he implies, is not just from knowing to loving, but also, perhaps primarily, from the self to the neighbour. Though Stanhope does not articulate this distinction at any great length, some of his other comments make it unlikely that he is opposing knowing the self and loving the neighbour absolutely. Rather, he seems to be arguing that it is only possible to know the self through loving the neighbour, that loving the neighbour is precisely what produces true knowledge of the self, and the conclusion of the plot goes so far as to suggest that knowing the self apart from loving the neighbour is productive only of a kind of hell on earth, where the human imagination creates succubi for itself and the dead cannot rest in their graves.

Of course, Stanhope’s observation makes most of Christian history an irony, since Christianity, especially in its Protestant guises, has been intimately bound up with all the various individualisms of personal salvation, democratic politics, capitalist economics, individual rights, and private property. The self trumps the neighbour here, again and again, resoundingly, even if this self remains largely unknown. What is more, this triumph of the self produces, at least according to the logic of the novel, a descent into hell on earth, and it implies that the Christian tradition, far from bringing about the heaven of the neighbour, has been far more concerned with bringing about the hell of the self.

I am not certain whether Williams would actually have levelled this criticism against Christianity, but I think that his logic is worth following. If Christianity, or any other faith for that matter, has anything worth saying in this age where the hell of the self has become our greatest ambition, surely it is that we can only come to know ourselves by loving our neighbours.  This is surely the only thing that it has ever had to say, the thing that it has always been saying, without end, though it is all too seldom heard, so I will quote:

“This is the first and greatest commandment: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”