From Word To Word

I try to read promiscuously, to read attentively, to read continually.  This means, often, that the books I read in proximity to each other are not otherwise alike in any substantial way.  This is not to say that they are unrelated, but that they relate to each other differently, not just cumulatively to create a sense of an author’s corpus or a culture’s ethos, but also contrastingly to create a sense of the broader range of literary possibility.  This kind of reading functions as a sort of oppositional practice, calling into question the kinds of narrow and pseudo-scientific reading that are too often practiced by the professional readers of our culture, the professors and the critics and the theorists. This broader approach to reading permits different kinds of connections to appear, and also prevents particular kinds of connections from becoming overemphasized at the expense of others.

There is the temptation, however, when reading in this way, to impose on texts a unifying structure that they cannot actually sustain.  Even when there is no textual justification for it, there remains in the reader, or, at least, there remains in me as a reader, a strong drive to manufacture points of relationship between the books that I am reading.  It is precisely this temptation to which I found myself succumbing as I was thinking about the books that I have been reading and about the things that I would like to say about them.  So, in order to resist this tendency in me, here are some notes on what I have been reading, kept as distinct as possible and organized only in the order that I read them.  This is a false representation of my experience also, of course, but perhaps it can stand as a correction to my usual practice.

Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion - I was forced during my undergraduate to read another of Winterson’s novels, Sexing the Cherry, and, perhaps merely because I was forced, I did not enjoy it very much.  I appreciated the mode of humour that Winterson was employing, but it had too sharp an edge for me to laugh along with it.  I felt somehow that even Winterson was not really laughing, that she was only wielding humour as the weapon of a deeper anger or frustration.

The Passion, however, seems to employ a gentler kind of laughter, a laughter that is mixed very closely with the kind of love that has become a passion, the kind of love that needs laughter as its perspective and as its release.  Winterson says in various ways throughout the text that passion is what lies between fear and sex, and I think that the humour of the novel finds a similar place, between the wholly earnest and the wholly cynical, between the wholly naive and the wholly bawdy.  Though it has at times the same sharpness, it is not often used to wound, and the book is more subtle and more effective because of it.

Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall - This was my first experience of Waugh, and I found myself mostly ambivalent about it.  It is certainly very funny at times, and it is also very deft in its satire, but it lacks a sense of gravity and purpose.  Its irony falls closer to the flippancy of P. G. Wodehouse than to the commentary of Oscar Wilde, and its appeal, at least for me, suffers for it.  It is, as a confection, quite tasty, but only because it has so much sugar, and I prefer even my pastries to have a little more substance.

Malcom Bradbury’s Eating People is Wrong -This book reminds me strongly of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin, another story about a socially and culturally confused professor.  Bradbury’s book may suffer a little through this comparison, his characterization leaning closer to caricature than Nabokov’s, but I think that the connection is justified by the similarities in sensibility between the two books.  There is in them both a genuine sympathy for the uniquely awkward position of academics who discover themselves to be socially and morally irrelevant to the cultures around them, and this commonality interests me very much.

The role of the academic, particularly in the humanities, is a problem that is carelessly posed far more frequently than it is seriously confronted.  Academics themselves seem to take an almost perverse pride in decrying their increasing cultural irrelevance, all the while doing everything possible to ensure that this irrelevance remains entirely undisturbed.  There is, after all, no real necessity for them to be relevant, not so long as they are necessary to grant degrees, and not so long as they are content to have academic careers rather than to have educational vocations.  Those who are not content with this situation, those who feel that they should in fact be having a moral and social influence on their students and their surrounding cultures, find themselves in an uncomfortable position.

Bradbury and Nabokov both explore this situation in different ways, and Bradbury’s most significant contribution is to show how academic irrelevance functions to alienate academics from themselves as well as from their social contexts.  The central character, a professor named Stuart Treece, is constantly noting how his vaguely liberal ideals are no longer capable of definition or application, and this situation is always forcing him either to act according to social norms that he does not accept or to be entirely passive.  This representation of the academic’s role is incisive, I think.  At least in my own experience, it is to one degree or another the fate of any academic who is unwilling merely to have a career but who is also unable to abandon the academic institution.

Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth - This was one of the many novels that I have suggested to students in my novel course without actually having read it.  It is much less and much more than I expected.  It is less as a cultural and historical depiction of pre-revolutionary China, not because it represents these things inaccurately, which I do not have the knowledge to judge in any case, but because these things are not essential to the story and are mentioned only in passing to provide a context for the story.  It is also less as a traditional novel, its characterization and its plot often feeling closer to the mode of a parable than a novel strictly speaking.  It is more, however, precisely as a kind of parable, as the stylized representation of a life that will be recognizable to anyone, despite the story’s historical and cultural remove.  It is also more as an argument for the significance of the relationship between people and the earth, affirming the goodness of being on the land and of tending the land and of making the land fruitful.

I had a student submit an assignment on Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales the other day that is among the most original submissions that I have ever received.  It takes “The Knight’s Tale” for its topic, the story of Arcite and Palamon that Chaucer retells from Boccaccio’s Teseide.  Rather than assuming the form of a linear text, the assignment is presented through Facebook, each of the various characters having a profile, and it uses the program’s various functions to relate the events of the story.

In the capacity of a teacher of English Literature, I am mostly concerned, of course, with whether this approach to the assignment is effective in saying something useful about Chaucer’s text, but as a observer of contemporary media practises, I am far more interested in its implicit comparison between two modes of textual interaction.  There are some obvious differences between the two that are mostly consistent with a shift from an early-modern cultural aesthetic to a postmodern one: the displacement of a unified  narrator with multiple narrative voices; the rejection of a reliable narrative position in favour of unreliable narrative perspectives; and the shift from an external narrative position to internal ones.  The result of these shifts, according to standard postmodern theory, is a story that is necessarily less unified and less coherent but also more reflective of the multiple ways in which a story is lived and told and experienced, because they replace a single subjective voice with a multiplicity of voices that puts in question the stability of the subject as such.

These kinds of observations have often been made before, and I feel no desire to recapitulate them any further, because the distinction that interests me most between the two stories does not lie in this postmodern shift in cultural and aesthetic sensibility.  Rather, it lies in the technologically driven shift in how the reader is constructed.  The knight, as the narrator of the story in Chaucer’s text, is ostensibly performing for other characters who are as much literary creations as he is, but his performance is also a part of a larger performance by the anonymous narrator of the whole text and of an even larger performance by Chaucer himself, both of whom are in fact literary creations as well.  These performances assume readers who are apart from the text, an audience that certainly performs the text for themselves, but who cannot stage these performances for the literary creations of the text.

The Facebook adaptation of the story, however, constructs its readers, not as an audience apart from the text, but as fellow performers able to participate in the text directly in ways that are not distinguishable from the rest of the performance.  It opens the possibility that readers might interact with my student’s characters in a mode that my student could not control and that either readers could not distinguish from his text.  These additions to my student’s text would not function as commentaries or supplements, but would become an essential part of the story being performed.

These kinds of additions have always been possible, of course, through multiple authorships and other authorial complexities, and they might even be said to be unavoidable, through the essential indeterminacy of the authorial function, but it has never before been possible for a story to incorporate its readers essentially and indefinitely into its own text.  Though the reader always played a performative function in relation to the text, it has never before been possible for the text to be structurally inclusive of this function in an essential way.

The implication is that the reader is, in fact, no longer a reader, but is only another literary creation who can participate indistinguishably in the performance of the story itself.  The reader is no longer separable from the author, even if the reader does not in fact add anything visibly to the story, because the reader must have a profile to read another profile, must actually be inscribed into the other profile in order to be a reader of it.  To read the profile, the reader must already be written into it, must already have contributed to the authorship of the story.  There are no readers, on Facebook, only authors, only literary creations who perform a story that they can never comprehend in its entirety.

This conclusion accords well with my intuitive sense of how new media is functioning.  I suspect that it offers the unprecedented opportunity to be writers of ourselves only at the cost of discouraging our opportunity to be readers of others.  They make imperative the development of reading practices that choose to read as such, for the sake of reading, in order to honour the act of reading, though these practices will almost certainly take the form of a discipline that cannot avoid being called religious.

I should preface this post by saying that I am mostly ambivalent about the graphic novel as a genre. I am certainly not one of those who regard it as entirely devoid of artistic value, but I also fall significantly short of the opposite position that wants to characterize it as rejuvenating a too often stagnant and elitist literary culture. My admittedly limited experience with the graphic novel has not persuaded me that it is any different from other art forms as they are practised in our culture: capable of making significant artistic statements, certainly, but most often productive of mere amusement. Art Spiegelman’s Maus books are an example of graphic novels of the first sort. I also find most of Neil Gaimon’s books interesting, with a particular fondness for The Dream Hunters, a retelling of a Japanese myth that is illustrated by Yoshikata Amano. Beyond these, however, I have not usually been impressed by the narratives that form graphic novels, even if they are visually interesting at times.

Yesterday afternoon, however, I stumbled upon a graphic novel that is beautiful both visually and narratively, despite having no text at all. I was at the library with my two sons, and I happened to see Shaun Tan’s The Arrival out on a table as I was following my youngest on his energetically random path. I read as I followed, and I was soon utterly immersed in the story, in its blending of the fantastic and the familiar, in its almost tactile sense of intimacy.

The narrative is very simple. It follows a man who flees his country, leaving behind his wife and daughter, to begin a new life for them in a foreign land. Its simplicity is made compelling, however, by the beautiful way that the art attends to the smallest gestures of face and hand. A page often holds many small and discrete images that differ from each other only in subtle ways, and yet their progression forms a clear, intimate, and therefore powerful narration. In one very early sequence, for example, the daughter is shown in three stages of waking, then eating, then turning her head toward the next frame, which holds only the suitcase that her father has packed for his trip. There is then a frame of her father donning his hat and looking away from his daughter, followed by one of her mother tying her shawl and looking away from her husband. The next three frames are of the mother’s hands buttoning her daughters coat, the daughter’s hands pulling on her own boots, and the daughter lifting the suitcase to a father who is absent from the shot. The final frame is of the father from the perspective of his daughter, looking down at her, his hand extended to take the suitcase.

This sequence is a masterfully constructed narrative. The everyday activities of the girl’s morning interrupted by the glance at the suitcase. The characters isolated in their individual frames, never joining each other, almost always looking away from each other. The girl handing the suitcase to the already absent father. The father receiving it from the already absent daughter. The whole sequence emphasizes the aloneness of the characters in the face of the coming departure, a departure that has separated them before it has even occurred. This sort of pictorial narrative is made effective by a relentless attention to the intimate details of faces and hands. Each expression and gesture is made to speak a visual language that is almost evocative of a choreography. The characters seem less to move from frame to frame than to shift from pose to pose, telling a story in a kind of lived dance. The effect is beautiful and compelling.

Tan also changes the depth of field in ways that are very effective and that function as a kind of narration in their own right. The sequence in which we discover that the man is aboard a ship to the new land, for example, opens with a close frame of the family photo that the man has packed. The next frame broadens to include the hand of the man as he eats his soup. The next broadens further to show the whole of the man and the gaze that he has fixed on the photo as it sits atop his suitcase. The fourth recedes through the porthole window, through which the man is looking. The frames then continue to recede: the porthole becoming smaller as the ship becomes larger, until the man’s one window is lost among the many windows in the massiveness of the steamer’s side. The sequence is effective enough on its own, but Tan follows this series of smaller images with a huge picture that includes both of the following pages, representing the ship, which had grown massive in comparison to the porthole, as small in itself against the hugeness of the sea and of the sky and of a cloud that fills most of the picture. The effect is powerful. I almost exclaimed aloud in the library as I was reading, so completely does the shift from the smaller images to the much larger one accomplish the diminishment of the one solitary man into the hugeness of the vessel and, in turn, into the hugeness of nature itself. This effect is then further heightened by the following two pages, which are filled entirely with sixty small, tile-like pictures of clouds, where the ship and everything else disappears altogether, and then is reversed by the next two images, which recede to a single page of the ship at sea and a single page of passengers on the ship’s deck. The focus continues to narrow on the next pages, through several smaller frames of individual passenger groups, then to the man himself, and finally to his hands as they write to his absent family.

Again, the narrative here is accomplished beautifully. It establishes an effective frame, beginning and ending with the man’s only connections to his absent family: the photo and the letter. Between these markers it stretches his loneliness through the vastness of the ship, of the sea, of the clouds, and of the huddled and anonymous mass of his fellow passengers. His smallness and isolation are made almost palpable, as are the tenuous threads that hold him to himself. There is nothing, the sequence makes clear, that keeps him from disappearing entirely into the massiveness of the unknown world except the family who exists for him now only through the fragility of pictures and letters. These kinds of sequences drive the book narratively despite or even because there is no textual narrative at all.

However effective the art is narratively, however, it would be unfair of me if I were not to comment also on its visual beauty as well. The images are all distinct and framed, like old pictures in an album, an effect heightened by the black and white and sepia tones, by the kinds of creases and blurring that can be found in many old photos, and, in some places, by borders that are meant to portray the frames explicitly as photos. This photographic quality is further reinforced by a beautifully realistic style and by the costumes and culture of the man’s homeland, which look very much like those of England in the early 1900’s. These elements all contribute to the sense that the reader is following the history of some family member as told through an old picture album. The effect is disarmingly intimate.

However, all of this familiarity is contrasted by many elements that are entirely fantastical. The man is driven from his home by long, spiky tentacles, for example. He meets those who have fled colossal giants that suck people into barrels of flame through huge vacuums. The new country to which he flees is itself an eerily beautiful fantasy, entirely original and different from his own. On a certain level, these fantasy elements function to represent the strangeness that any immigrant feels when arriving in a new culture, but they have a larger effect also. They make the story surreal enough to surprise its readers in a culture that is so saturated by knowledge that it is often incapable of surprise any longer. No foreign culture would be foreign enough to surprise us, but Tan’s fantastical foreignness forces us to see and experience apart from our expectations. We find ourselves surprised in the midst of what had seemed to be a familiarity.

There is, of course, no way that my writing can hope to do justice to what Tan has done visually. The Arrival, like any literature worth reading, needs to be read on its own terms. Even so, I hope that I have at least succeeded in making Tan’s book intriguing enough that others will go and read it themselves. It is well worth a place in any library.

I sometimes have a moment when I first pick up a book, maybe just after I have heard someone describe it, maybe just after I have read the back cover, maybe just after I have scanned the first few pages of the introduction, and I have the sensation, clear and terrifying, that it will change me. I find myself looking at the thing in my hand, the lump of ink and glue and paper, horrified and elated, transfixed by the possibility that it might overturn me, that it might transform how I think or live. Jean Luc Marion’s God Without Being caused this in me. So too did Ivan Illich’s Rivers North of the Future. In a different way, a way I cannot quite qualify, so did George MacDonald’s Lilith. Of course, these sensations do not always prove true.  In this moment, however, with Michel de Certeau’s The Practise of Everyday Life beside me, I do not think that I will be disappointed. I feel an expectancy, an assurance that it holds for me a transformation. I take it up with a certain joy and a certain terror.

I had two experiences of sharing yesterday that, while seemingly different in many ways, taught me something about how it is possible to share or introduce a place, a subject that has been turning in my head since I returned from Manitoulin Island.

My friend Chris Land came by with his young daughter in the morning, and we had a chance to walk to a downtown used bookstore together in the afternoon.  Chris is not from Guelph and had never been to this particular bookseller, so I showed him around the shop a little, and we spent some time browsing, occasionally noting a book to one another or asking each other’s opinion on a title.  Chris bought Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, which was a fairly revolutionary text for me when I read it in university.  I bought two collections of essays: George Orwell’s Inside the Whale and Other Essays, and William Styron’s The Quiet Dust and Other Writings, neither of which were known to me before I saw them on the shelves.  We both left the store well pleased with our purchases.

In the evening, I went to help my mother move a desk from the house of Bob Brown, a mutual friend.  While we were there, Bob took the opportunity to show me a little of his unique garden.  It was not the first time that I had seen it, since the Browns allow me to pick their grapes every fall, but I am almost always picking when Bob is at work, so I have never heard him explain how unique some of the plants in his garden really are.  He cultivates only those plants that are native to southern Ontario, and he tries to include as many uncommon species as he can.  Not wanting to take these plants from the wild, he notes where developers will be beginning a new project, and takes any valuable specimens from these areas before the bulldozers arrive.  From among his many interesting edible specimens, too many to mention, he was gracious enough to give me some mayapple plants (podophyllum peltatum) for immediate transplantation, and to promise me some pawpaw tree seedlings (asimina triloba) for transplantation later in the fall.  Of the two, mayapples can still be found wild in various places in Ontario, but pawpaws are almost never seen this far north any longer. Along with the sandcherry bushes (prunus pumila var. depressa) that I am trying to force grow from seeds, these new plants will make an interesting beginning to a garden of local and edible plants.

In each case, I would suggest that what was being introduced was, more than anything else, a space, a specifically local space, a locality.  In the first instance, I was the guide; in the second, I was the guided; in both, what was actually exchanged between us was a familiarity with a locality, a familiarity both with the space of a bookstore or of a garden, and, through this locality, an increased knowldge of the broader spaces of literature and of southern Ontario flora.  The sharing is not really of literature or flora, of course, not as a whole, not even as the whole of what might be shared.  It iis the sharing only of those aspects of literature and flora that appear within a particular locality, a locality where one is familiar and is will to familarize another.  In the same way, my opportunity last week was not to introduce the Humphreys to Manitoulin, or even to everything of Manitoulin that I know.  Rather, it was an opportunity to make them familiar with a place where I am familiar, in order to introduce them to the experience of Manitoulin that is particularly mine.  They may gain a broader knowledge of Manitoulin through this experience, but this is not primarily what is being shared.  What is being shared is my familiarity with the locality.

I would argue that this understanding of sharing has implications far beyond physical space, because I think that it characterizes, or at least should characterize, every instance of sharing that takes the form of an introduction.  In terms of pedagogy, for example, I think that it is far more useful to understand the teacher’s function to be sharing in this way.  Clearly, despite frequent pretense to the contrary, the teacher is never able to introduce students to the entirety of a subject.  The teacher is never able even to introduce students toa ll of the possible knowledge of a subject that the teacher has to sharet.  The teacher is really only able to introduce students to a locality within a subject, a locality with which the teacher is familiar, a locality which the teacher can make familar to the students also.  This kind of teaching does not pretend to somehow cover a subject entirely, but to familiarize a locality of the subject in such a way as to cast light on the whole, which will always remain beyond mastery of both teacher and student.

In this sense, I familarize Chris with the bookstore so that he can carry out of it something that was always larger than the bookstore in any case: the text.  Bob familarizes me with his garden so that I can carry out of it something that was always larger than the garden in any case: the plant.  Without these localities, and without a familiarity with them, taught and learned, there would be nowhere to begin discovering the things that we need to carry with us.

While on Manitoulin Island this past week, I discovered an interesting literary coincidence.  I am always looking for bargain books and films to add to my collection, even in as unlikely a place as Manitoulin, and I purchased several things during the course of the week.  At the Providence Bay Fair, in a stall of used and abused odds and ends, I found Rob Epstein’s and Jeffrey Friedman’s The Celluloid Closet, a very good documentary on the history of how homosexuality has been depicted in Hollywood film.  At the Providence Bay Library, which is open all of three hours a day on two days a week, I also acquired George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin and Aldous Huxley’s Island.  I watched The Celluloid Closet several months ago, and I have read The Princess and the Goblin several times over the years, so, the moment that I finished Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, I turned, with immeasurable relief, to Huxley’s Island.

Island is a fascinating novel in many ways, though it is sometimes a little stilted, in that the events of the plot often seem to serve the necessities of the philosophical argument rather than to tell an involving story.  This is probably a greater issue for readers today than it was for those who were contemporaries of the book’s initial publication, simply because so much of its philosophy is historically circumscribed and no longer compelling.  The sort of utopia that the novel advocates, a pseudo-Buddhism mixed with some scientism and topped with a little mescaline induced self-realization, is too much the idealism of another time to have much intellectual force any longer. Even so, the structure of the story is strong, and its conclusion, which I will not disclose for those who have not read it, is forceful.  Also, despite the now unconvincing solutions that it presents, the novel’s political, social, and economic critique remains often valid and insightful.  There is much in this respect, along with a very readable story, to recommend the novel even now.

None of this, however, has much to do directly with the the literary coincidence that I set out discuss, a coincidence that appears very early in the novel, when Will Farnaby, the protagonist, refers to another utopian novel, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon.  The coincidence here is that I only just recently read Erewhon after finding it in a North Carolina used bookstore on my last trip, so that, with the strange illogic that seems to characterize my existence, I actually purchased two different novels by two different authors in two different countries on two consecutive trips, and one just happened to reference the other in an explicit and substantial way.

What makes this coincidence even more interesting is that it plays a significant role in establishing one of Island’s central themes.  The reference consists in Farnaby saying, borrowing the words of Higgs, Erewhon’s protagonist and narrator, “As luck would have it, Providence was on my side.”  Farnaby actually quotes these words three times, twice mentioning their source explicitly, and dwelling on their irony each time.  I am not interested in providing a definitive explanation of why Huxley emphasises this allusion so heavily.  There are probably several such reasons, and there have likely been more than one unreadable PhD dissertation written on the subject.  My own interest has to do with how the allusion defines the nature of Faraday’s appearance on the island, either as chance or as destiny.

Higgs, who spoke the words first, during his discovery of Erewhon, very much confuses the ideas of luck and providence.  Though he clearly believes himself to be under the influence of a divine providence, his words unconsciously make this providence seem to depend on luck, revealing that he is less a man of religious belief than he is a man of convenient belief, which is characteristic of how Butler depicts him.  His real religion is in profit, and providence is merely a convenient word, roughly equivalent to luck, that he can use to describe the good fortune that he finds in his pursuit of gain.  His story is not one of spiritual or even personal growth.  Quite the opposite, Higgs ends the novel almost precisely as he began it, determined to exploit Erewhon for his own ends just as he was initially determined to exploit the unclaimed mountain pastures for his own ends.  Higgs’ story is entirely irreligious, entirely unprovidential, in this sense.  He is not brought by an external force toward a salvation.  He merely pursues his own interests and uses the idea of providence to justify his successes after the fact.  He sees no irony in a providence that depends upon and is little different from plain luck.

Faraday, however, is acutely aware of how ironic Higg’s phrase really is, and he uses it to describe his equivocal feels about how has arrived on the island.  “As luck would have it,” he keeps saying, “Providence was on my side.”  Though he does not believe in providence, neither can he fully believe that the circumstances of his arrival on the island and of his survival of the storm are merely luck.  He seems to quote Higgs defensively, seeing something almost providential in what has happened to him, and disparately placing Higgs’ irony between him and this possibility.  Whereas Higgs does not even recognize that he makes providence depend on mere luck, Faraday sees and clings to this dependence as a defence against the possibility of providence, even when other characters present him explicitly with the possibility that he was destined to come to the island.

Faraday’s fear and rejection of providence are interesting because his story, in contrast to Higgs’, is precisely a providential one, where he is brought to salvation, seemingly by forces beyond himself.  In opposition to Higgs, whose experience of utopia fails to change him any significant way, Faraday’s narrative is one of a journey to a kind of intellectual, political, social, and personal salvation.  His is a conversion story and a salvation story, though he is converted and saved in ways that are quite different from his preconceived religious notions.  His journey, though he fails to recognize it entirely, has all the markers of the providential.  It is a religious journey, for the same reasons that Higg’s journey is irreligious.  Where Higgs espouses a providence that really depends upon luck, Farady espouses a luck that comes to depend upon providence.

Huxley does not actually decide for his readers in favour of providence, of course, and I will refrain from doing so also.  Huxley does, however, decide for his readers in favour of posing the question of luck and providence, not just as a simple binary, as in most utopias, nor just as a simple irony, as in Erewhon, but as a complex question that cannot, and perhaps should not, ever be answered definitively.  Rather than argue for a providence that can be defended as such, he seems to propose a kind of providence that never appears clearly as what it is, but can always be understood as merely luck, a providence that might just exceed the very opposition between luck and providence.  I think there is something true in this.

So long as I am reading for pleasure rather than for work, so long as I am really reading rather than merely studying, I prefer to measure a novel in hours or, at most, in days.  In the case of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, however, which I have only just finished, my reading has been measured in weeks, three long weeks, not because of any abnormal amount of distraction, and not because of any abnormal lack of opportunity, but merely and utterly because I had to force myself, against all inclination, to finish the book at all, page by page, word by word. I have not felt such complete disinterest for a novel since I read Herman Hesse’s Magister Ludi, which is, perhaps only coincidentally, also written by a German.  Except that my sample of German novelists is so small, and except for the salient anomaly of Franz Kafka, I would begin to suspect that there was something essential about German novels that disagrees with me.

It is not that Doctor Faustus is badly written, or that it is without its artistic and intellectual excellences.  It is that, like with Victorian novels, for example, or with Restoration poetry, I find myself admiring the craftsmanship and the genius of writing that nevertheless bores me so completely that I can hardly bring myself to read it.  I can recall reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch with precisely this same sentiment, appreciating the complexity of the tale, the aptness of the characterization, the unity of the narrative, and yet yearning through every page for its conclusion.  I reflected at the time that Eliot had authored a work that was the literary equivalent of a perfectly cut jewel, with every angle ground to precision, only that she had practised her art, not on a gem, but on a piece of gravel.  Her cutting was superb, but her material was entirely unremarkable.  She had produced a perfectly cut hunk of granite.

I have much the opinion of Dactor Faustus.  The narrative voice is well controlled and maintained.  The protagonist and his tale are interestingly conceived and rendered.  The parallels between his story and the story of Germany during World War II are often masterly.  None of this, however, comes together to make a compelling novel.  Except for certain scenes, which, perhaps by design, stand out all the more in comparison, most of the narrative is comprised of long conversations on music, theology, politics, philosophy, and a myriad other things, mostly of the sort that would have been better suited to another medium than the novel.  The result is a sort of technical mastery that mostly falls short of inspiring artistic interest.  I am glad to be done with it.

In the process of preparing for my Survey of Literature I course in the fall, I have been looking for adaptations of the major texts we will be studying, especially contemporary examples that would serve as points of comparison for my students.  Both Beowulf and William Shakespeare’s King Lear have a wealth of adaptations both old and new.  Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and John Milton’s Paradise Lost have many fewer adaptations, but enough to serve my purpose.  Edmund Spencer’s The Faerie Queene, however, has been almost entirely ignored by adaptors, at least as far as I can tell.  The title shows up in various places, like Henry Purcell’s semi-opera, but not often attached to adaptations of Spencer’s text.  The narrative of St. George and the dragon has been retold in different ways, but this is only a very small part of the work.

I am at a loss, so consider this a general call to adapt The Faerie Queene.  An opera would be lovely, something really heroic in the style of the German romantics.  I would also like a theatrical version in an impressionist mode, a little abstract, a little surreal.  A film would even be acceptable, so long as it avoided casting anyone remotely recognizable as a Hollywood star.  I also want a graphic novel, but with full page illustrations, not the comic style boxes, something vaguely artistic.  In place of this I would also take a cycle of illustrations, preferably by someone interesting, like Dave McKean or Yoshitaka Amano.

So there it is.  Go do it.  You have until September.

In preparation for my course this fall, I have been rereading some of the major texts, one of which is Beowulf. The lines that always impress my imagination the most come late in the narrative, just before the now aged Beowulf goes to face the dragon who will be his destroyer. They are the words of the last of the people whose treasure has now become the dragon’s hoard, and I am drawn to them because they do well what much early-English and Norse poetry does well. They lament the passing of the noble and the heroic.

The translation from which I will be quoting can be found in Broadview Press’s anthology, which is the text that my students will be using. There is another translation that I much prefer, but I cannot seem to find it at the moment, and I do not have the time to make a serious search. The version I quote is more than adequate in any case.

“Death in war

and awful deadly harm have swept away

all of my people who have passed from life,

and left the joyful hall. Now have I none

to bear the sword or burnish the bright cup,

the precious vessel - all that host has fled.

Now must the hardened helm of hammered gold

be stripped of all its trim; the stewards sleep

who should have tended to this battle-mask.

So too this warrior’s coat, which waited once

the bite of iron over the crack of boards,

molders like its owner. The coat of mail

cannot travel widely with the war-chief,

beside the heroes. Harp-joy have I none,

no happy song; nor does the well-schooled hawk

soar high throughout the hall, nor the swift horse

stamp in the courtyards. Savage butchery

has sent forth many of the race of men.”

Whatever advances our civilization considers itself to have made over the one that produced these words, I suspect that there will be few such words of lament when ours passes away. There will be few odes to the businessman or the lawyer, few ballads of the politician or the advertising executive, few eulogies for the banker or the insurance salesman. Our only heroes are such that cannot bear this kind of immortalization without cyniscism: the sports hero, the pop diva, the movie star. These may have their tributes, but none that will bear reading a thousand years from now.

I think I have probably written on more than one occasion about how much I enjoy the kind of magic realist or fantastical stories authored by people like Salman Rushdie and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Franz Kafka and G. K. Chesterton and Jorge Louis Borges. Unfortunately, because my English Literature degrees introduced me to more literary theory than literature, and because my life now offers me little enough time for books, there is much that I have not yet had the opportunity to read, even of these favourite authors. One such book, Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories, has been sitting on my shelf for several years now, and probably would have remained there for some time yet if I had not been reminded of it by a recent correspondence with TC, who mentioned that she had read it to her son.

Yesterday evening, however, after an overfull day, my sister-in-law took my eldest son for a few hours, and my youngest son went to sleep for the night. My wife and I made some tea, sat on the front porch in the finally cooling air, and read. She finished Miriam Toews’ A Complicated Kindness, which fell somewhat short of her expectations. I picked up Rushdie’s story about Haroun and his Sea of Stories, which certainly did not fall short of mine.

The book is unlike much of Rushdie’s other fiction. It is more explicitly fantastical, closer in this respect to Grimus, his first novel, but it is much lighter in tone than Grimus. It has the feeling of an oriental fairy tale, something like Arabian Nights, but with a decidedly modern influence. It reminded me of some of Neil Gaiman’s writing, though pulling from very different mythological sources.

At first, perhaps because its tone is so different from Rushdie’s other work, I found the book merely flippant. The easy puns particularly annoyed me, and I prepared myself to be disappointed with the whole. As the story progressed, however, it began to grow into its tone, or perhaps I began to grow into it, and even the puns began to seem appropriate to the lightly ironic sensibility of the narrative. By the time I finished, I found that I was enjoying myself very much, even wishing that the book was a little longer. I would not compare it to some of Rushdie’s more serious work, but it has a novelty of imagination that makes it remarkable nonetheless, and it was certainly a very pleasant way to spend a summer evening on the porch.