I have never bothered to write anything in memory of a public figure before, and I may never do so again, so this should be some indication of how significant a figure Maurice Sendak is in my own personal canon and how deeply saddened I am at his recent passing.  His Outside Over There, is probably my favourite picture book ever made, and his illustrated editions of George MacDonald’s The Light Princess and The Golden Key are too beautiful even to describe.  What they possess, as all of his stories and art possess, is an understanding of the darkness that is a part of even the happiest child’s world.  He writes to children, but he never patronizes them, never makes light of their fears.  Instead, he takes these fears seriously enough that facing them becomes an act of true courage, and we begin to see that the fears of childhood always remain to be faced, that living with them is one of life’s hidden heroisms, and we find that he is writing to adults as well.

It grieves me that he will have no more stories for us.

For reasons I don’t fully understand, I’ve spent a fair amount of my reading time over the past month educating myself on North Korea.  During the past few years I’ve become aware of my ignorance about the issues surrounding the country and its people, and I don’t think I’m alone.  It’s been something I wanted to fix.  Above all, I’ve been interested to understand how a situation like North Korea could come about at all.  It seems unfathomable that a people could become enslaved and exploited by its own leaders, leaders who simultaneously install themselves as gods and destroy their “worshipers.”  And yet because it has happened, and happened so successfully, I feel that I need to understand it in order that I might guard against it in my own civilization, community, and life.

To that end I started reading.  My first two books were both about North Korea’s infamous concentration camps.  Blaine Harden’s “Escape from Camp 14” is a shocking retelling of Shin Dong-hyuk’s birth, life, and ultimate escape from one of the more brutal camps.  I had finished the Hunger Games trilogy some weeks previous, and tweeted that this book, the “4th in the Hunger Game series,” is by far the most brutal.  What upsets so many parents and school teachers in the Hunger Games novels, the way its sadistic narrative so easily and compellingly flows, is similarly present in Harden’s book; the only difference is that this isn’t fiction.  Here we encounter a child born to parents with no time or energy to love him, who view him as competition for food, who he can no more trust than hoped to be trusted by, with punishment, relentless indoctrination, hard labour, murder, death, and impossible living conditions taking the place of childhood, education, life, and hope.

From Harden’s book I went to “The Aquariums of Pyongyang,” which is Kang Chol-hwan’s account of life in another of the camps.  What compelled me to read another account was that, unlike Shin who had been born into slavery, this account was about an affluent family who found themselves on the wrong side of the government’s suspicions.  The two men couldn’t have been more unlike in their station and backgrounds, and yet their fates were similar.  Laying the two accounts beside one another, and listening to the echoes of the horrors experienced by each man, it was shocking and terrifying.  Instead of some historical document with enough distance in time to erase the hardest lines of the picture, these men talked about the same period in which I grew up.  While I was a child here in the west, these men and their families were suffering unspeakably.  We aren’t only talking about something that happened, but something that’s happening still today.  I am deeply saddened at the thought of so many hundreds of thousands still held in these camps.

Finally I had to know more about what made this all possible, and I turned to Bradley K. Martin’s “Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty.”  This is a massive book, but very engaging.  I am still in the midst of it, and would highly recommend it to anyone willing to spend some time really digging into the history of North Korea’s leadership and culture.  His research and journalistic style make this both informative and engaging.

I’m not going to write about North Korea, since I don’t know enough to provide good information.  But I wanted to recommend these books for anyone who is interested in learning more about the country, its people, its past, and its future.  It’s important that we in the west do more than simply laugh at parodies of the Kims, become distracted with talk of failed rockets, or make fun of the acts of the leaders; behind them, well hidden from view, are a people under terrible oppression who deserve much more.

1. eBook

For my birthday my wife bought me a Kindle.  Since then I’ve had a chance to read a number of books using it, and I wanted to say something about my transformation from anti- to pro-eBook.  The first thing to say is that I received a Kindle vs. a tablet.  I got what Jesse Brown has recently called “dedicated hardware” and not a multi-use device.  I spend my days working on all kinds of computers and in all kinds of computer programming languages.  When I read I don’t want to be there anymore.  It’s why I don’t read anything longer than a blog post on a computer screen.  I need to be present with the text, without risking that I might slip off the edge and fall into my editor, browser, or mail.

In this regard, my Kindle is wonderful.  It actually can surf the web (I ran Processing.js code on it!), but in such a clunky way that I’m hardly tempted to do so.  What it does really well is let me flip pages through a book.  And so do all the hundreds of books in our house.  So why bother with an electronic book?

A few things convinced me.  First, I have too many books, and because I like to read, I acquire them too quickly.  In short, I don’t want to store them anymore.  Some books I read more than once, and these I can see having in physical form.  For the rest, I’m enjoying not having to find a shelf for them.

Second, I’m tired of traveling and holding large books.  On a recent vacation, I took a bunch of books, some of them from the library.  It took room in our luggage, was something I had to worry about losing or wrecking, and since a few of them were large hard-cover books (library binding), they were unwieldy to hold.

The third thing that convinced me is that many of the books I want to read are free (I read lots of literature or otherwise public domain texts) and out of print.  This weekend, for example, I read Aristotle’s Ethics and Dicken’s Bleak House.  In both cases I went from, “I really wish I could read such-and-such,” to having it available on my Kindle.  In both cases the books were free.  When I’m buying a physical copy of either book, I care about the state of the binding, the typography, etc.  In eBook form, these things vanish.  A $40 edition provides me with no more pleasure.

I’m enjoying the ability to instantly access free books, and while I will buy lots of books as well, this alone will pay for the device in short order.

2. A Bag of Books

For my birthday my friend, Luke, gave me a bag of books.  A bag.  Where some friends would hand you a slim volume wrapped and with a dedication, Luke handed me a shopping bag full of 11 books.  “You mentioned that you were looking for things to read, so I thought I’d get you started.”  Because I love lists, and would enjoy stumbling on something like this myself, I wanted to present the list of books he gave me.  Imagine if you could ask a great reader what they’d recommend you read over the coming months.  This is that list:

• “The Sunlight Dialogues” by John Gardner
• “The Club Dumas” by Arturo Pérez-Reverte
• “Captain Alatriste” by Arturo Pérez-Reverte
• “The Fencing Master” by Arturo Pérez-Reverte
• “The Pyramid” by William Golding
• “The Spire” by William Golding
• “Briefing for a Descent into Hell” by Dorris Lessing
• “Ficciones” by Jorge Luis Borges
• “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” by Milan Kundera
• “Blindness” by José Saramago
• “Staring at the Sun” by Julian Barnes

I’m coming to the end of my Christmas holidays.  It has been a very restful and slow time.  I’ve filled it with family, long, slow recipes, and reading.  I logged off irc, closed my mail program, ditched twitter, and allowed myself to become properly isolated from my daily routines.

I also tried an experiment.  My reading tends to follow the paths begun in my literary degrees.  Studying literature causes one to accumulate huge lists of books that need to get read.  I mostly read philosophy, capital ‘L’ literature, and essays.  And I read some of this over the holidays.

But in addition to my usual reading, I game myself permission to venture off the lists.  While in line at the local drugstore I noticed a shelf of books next to the magazines.  Among the paperbacks on the shelf, I recognized two titles.  First, Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” a book I could remember my brother loving and telling me to read.  Second, Suzanne Collins’ “The Hunger Games.”  I’ve heard various people mention this book, not least my niece and nephew, who were both amazed and horrified I’d never read it, and implored me to correct this oversight.

I found both books nearly impossible to put down, with fast, clever plots.  It was fun to get swept up in dark, unrelenting stories.  The down side of plots this fast is that you don’t linger, don’t need to, the point is what happens next.  I can’t imagine rereading either.

Encountering Larson’s Lisbeth Salander next to Collins’ Katniss Everdeen was interesting.  Both girls (Lisabeth, though an adult, is still very young) have no father, lack a loving relationship with their mother, fend for themselves by breaking the law, and take care of their own safety in ways traditionally left to male characters.  Neither girl lets the world around them into their inner life, and even the narrators struggle to understand much of what is really happening in their heads.  And yet, it’s hard as the reader to not love them both.  It is their very rejection of love that draws so many people to them, makes them so desirable.

Beyond these two strong female characters, the books deal with violence and death, lust (both sexual and otherwise), and power and control.  The books are very different, and intended for different audiences (adult vs. teen).  I found Larson’s repeated graphic rape scenes disturbing and hard to read; though I didn’t find them gratuitous or unnecessary.  However, the novel’s ending was harder to believe than its beginning.  At some point violence piled on violence isn’t achieving more, but begins to create a landscape where such things are common enough that they must be accepted or ignored.  Collins, on the other hand, intentionally creates such a landscape, where children killing children is simply good television.  Her presentation of the Capitol, and its mostly unseen populace, is haunting in what it doesn’t reveal about this acceptance.  Who are these people who take such pleasure in such horror and pain?  Larsson wants us to understand that they are the people we least expect, the people who are most completely unlike what we expect.

Friendship plays a central role in both books.  For Larsson, the word is sometimes used as a euphemism, sometimes as a threat, and often as an impossibility.  Lisabeth and Katniss are both right to distrust the people around them, both so well practiced at it that the impossibility of real friendship is really the point.  Neither book affords its character the chance for anything more than temporary agreements: friendship as deep relationship is simply not available in either of Collins’ or Larsson’s worlds.

Reading the books also put me in mind of other similar books I’ve read, especially in the case of “The Hunger Games.”  In the first third of this novel I was repeatedly taken back to Herman Hesse’s “The Glass Bead Game,” a book so incredibly different in many ways, but eerily similar in others, especially in its narrative of children being taken from their families and trained for games that the rest of the society will witness.  The latter part of the book echoed Tom Brown’s “The Tracker.”  The scenes with Katniss caught up trees, hunting, and tracking through the woods were very well done.

Both books are first in a trilogy.  I don’t think I want to continue in Larsson’s world.  The first book was gripping, horrifying, and stands on its own.  Much as I feel about the evil in Charles Williams‘ novels, I understand its point in the story, but don’t want to subject myself to more of it than necessary.  I will likely read the next Hunger Games book, though.  I thought that there was much left to do in that story, and I’m interested to see how Collins will manage it.

Will I continue to read using the drugstore as my guide?  I’m not sure I will.  However, I loved this holiday from my usual patterns of reading.

I have this idea.

The publishing industry has traditionally produced different editions of texts in order to market them to different kinds of customers, from lightly annotated popular editions to help readers with places, names, archaic terms, and unusual language, to heavily annotated academic editions that come complete with relevant historical material, critical essays, chronologies, bibliographies, and every other textual apparatus imaginable.  These editions are, of course, limited by the number of customers willing to buy them, so they tend to include mostly the major texts, and they tend to be edited by scholars who are more or less experts in their fields.  Texts that are not commercially viable or that are edited by people who are not experts in their fields are understandably left unpublished.

However, publish-on-demand style websites like Blurb or Lulu or Xlibris, among many others, now make it possible, at least in theory, for people to make their own editions of public domain texts quite easily.  The texts themselves are readily available from sites like Project Gutenberg and Digital Book Index, and they can be simply copied and edited and published as new editions with the tools provided by the publishing sites.  The cost is nil, except to have the new edition printed, and the result is an edition that meets the precise needs of the one who edited it.

The most obvious users of personal editions would be teachers.  In fact, the idea first occurred to me when I tried and failed to find a decent academic edition of G. K. Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill.  How hard would it be, I reasoned, to lift the text from Project Gutenberg and add my own introduction and notes specifically for my class?  As I thought about this, I also realized how easy it would be to make course specific collections of essays or short stories, so that I would always have exactly the texts that I wanted and not have to bother paying for anthologies that restricted my choices and never had the texts I really wanted anyway.  I am at the moment working on some of these kinds of ideas.

There are other less obvious uses for personal editions, however.  For example, I might make notes directly into a digital copy as I am reading it and include appendices of anything that it prompts me to write, so that I can publish a very intimate edition of the text.  A group of friends might read a text together and compile their responses into an edition.  A conference on a text might collect the papers that were presented and gather them into an edition.  Wherever critical or scholarly work on a text takes place, in other words, it should be possible to gather that work together and to create an edition of the original text that includes this work.

Of course, these editions would not often be interesting to anyone who was not directly involved in their production.  An edition prepared for my class or myself or my friends or my conference will likely only be interesting to my class or myself or my friends or my conference, but just because something is only locally valuable does not necessarily mean that it is less valuable.  In fact, for me, the one involved in the production of these editions, personalized texts of this sort might very well be an invaluable record of my intellectual practice through my teaching, studying, and discussion with others.  Their interest to third parties would hardly be relevant.

On the other hand, by publishing personal editions publically rather than just making notes privately, it becomes possible that someone just might find the personal edition useful and be able to access it.    As a teacher, I might be able to find an edition of The Napoleon of Notting Hill or a collection of Renaissance literary criticism that is in fact useful to me, because someone else has taken the time and the energy to make it.  As a reader, I might be able to find an edition with a style of notation and commentary that is particularly conducive to me, because someone has taken the time and energy to make it publically available.

So, there you have it: my idea.  Let me know if you think it has merit.

I came into the pub in the middle of the day, not for any reason really, not even to have a beer, just aimlessly, because I had nothing else that needed doing that afternoon, and there was a guy at the bar, the only other person in the pub, reading a book.

“What are you reading?” I asked him, because I always ask people this, even if I’ve already seen what they’re reading.  I like to give them the chance to say it out loud, to confess it with their own lips.

“It’s Bolano’s 2666,” he answered.  He said this quietly, only flicking his eyes away from the book for the barest of moments, annoyed, then hunched down with his brown corduroy jacket up around his neck.

“What do you think of it?” I persisted.  I still hadn’t ordered anything, and the bartender hovered across the bar from me, but I wouldn’t meet his eyes, wouldn’t give him the chance to ask me if I needed anything.  I turned my back to the bar to avoid him.

The reader looked up this time, set the book on the bar, open, hard covers spread, without its dust jacket.  “Are you really asking,” he said gravely, “or are you just making small talk, because if you’re just making small talk, I’ll probably punch you in the mouth.”

His eyes were dark and round and something else, speckled maybe, and I saw that he meant it, and I thought, “This guy reads for real,” and I wanted to talk to him even more.  “I really want to know,” I assured him, and I tried to sound as sincere as I could, because I’ve read 2666 twice now, and I love that book, and I’m always trying to get people to read it, so I really did want to know.

“Fine,” he said, gripping the lapels of his jacket like a child reciting a presidential speech, “let’s just start by saying it’s the greatest novel written by anyone in any language in at least a quarter century.”

“Good,” I answered, “as long as we don’t end there, I think that’s good.”

Well, here I am blogging again, despite myself, the fault of Jose Saramago, whose novel, All the Names, will not let me be, though I have been telling it for several weeks, politely at first, then more and more firmly, all to no effect, that I simply do not have the time to write about it properly.  Here is all I will say:

1) It is a wonderful novel, well-crafted, and well-deserving of both close attention and repeated reading, so do read it, all of you;

2) Someone (not me, but someone, probably with more time and energy) needs to think through the novel in relation both to the Ariadne myth and to the ancient Jewish account of the Holy of Holies, in relation to Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever; and in relation to Franz Kafka’s depiction of bureaucracy, though perhaps not all at the same time.

I apologize for saying so little, but if I were to say more, I might never stop.

This post should perhaps be subtitled “The Children’s Literature Edition” because since Christmas I have been reading almost exclusively in preparation for a course on fairytales that I am teaching this semester.  If this sort of thing does not appeal to you, it may be best simply to skip the whole post and wait for something more your age.

Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn – This book has trouble deciding whether it wants to be a fairytale or a fantasy novel.  It has many elements of a good fairytale, and it sometimes approaches the sensibility of a good fairytale, but it is never quite able to attain to this level, always slipping back into mere fantasy.  I quite enjoyed the book as a whole, but it could have been and almost was something very much better.

Peter S. Beagle’s Giant Bones – These stories are not fairytales and make no claim to be.  They have too much detail, too much reality, and too little of the sense of nowhere and neverwhere that is necessary to fairytales.  One of the stories, “Choushi-wai’s Story”, is structured very much as a fairytale, and it may even have become a fairytale had it been written by another hand, but it too has a sense of time and place that prevents is from attaining to a fairytale properly.  This is not a failing of the book, of course, because it never sets out to be anything but anything but a collection of fantasy stories, but I was hoping for more when it was recommended to me.

Joan Aiken’s The Complete Armitage Stories – I have been told by many people on many occasions that I should read the work of Joan Aiken, and this was my first of her books.  Unfortunately, it does not live up to expectations.  The stories are simply too ridiculous.  I like fantastical stories, true, and these stories are certainly that, but they lack the gravity that I find so essential to fairytales and other tales of this type.  It is not that I object to a little silliness or humour, but the effect of a good fairytale, on the whole, must be of a certain seriousness and propriety, and the Armitage stories are silliness, pure and simple.  They amuse, but there is nothing really true in them.  I could not even finish the book.

Joan Aiken’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase -  Despite my disappointment with the Armitage stories, I decided to give Aiken a second chance and to read her most famous work, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, and I was much better pleased.  I did find it a bit odd that the wolves, which give the book its title, and which play such a large role in the first chapters of the story, and which are distinguished by being the only obviously fantastical element of the novel, disappear completely after the first half of the book, never to return.  It is as if Aiken grew bored of them or could not figure how to work them into her conclusion and so left this seemingly central motif entirely unresolved.  Even so, the pace is good, and the story is quite charming, telling a tale of unfortunate children that is very much preferable to some other more recent attempts that I could mention.

E. Nesbitt’s The Magic World -  Nesbitt’s stories often approach and occasionally even attain the sensibility of a true fairytale.  They are generally too moralistic, I confess, and they are so very properly British that they will sometimes be unintentionally amusing to the modern reader, but I like many of them anyway.  There are many of them that I will share with my children.

Steve Augarde’s The Touchstone Trilogy -  These novels have much to recommend them.  The plot is interesting, and the characters are engaging.  The second of them, Celandine, does fall into an English public school novel for a time, which can happen in any British novel of any genre at any time apparently, since the British seem to delight in nothing more than to share the horror of their school days, but the story is otherwise very enjoyable.  Augarde manages to avoid the standard representation of fairies as delicate and dainty flower spirits, choosing instead to portray the little people as exactly that, as smaller people, and I count this as a strong point in his favour.  The book as a whole is pleasing, even to someone like me, who is twenty years older than the intended audience.

Paul Glennon’s Bookweird -  The concept of this novel, where a boy begins stumbling into the stories of his books by eating their pages, is interesting in its way, but I would not call its application a success.  The various stories that the boy enters are represented too briefly to make them very compelling, and they are written in the styles appropriate to their genres, so the prose often takes on the faults of the sources it is emulating.  I do not much enjoy reading genre animal fantasies or genre horse novels or genre murder mysteries, so being dropped into these kinds of stories one after the other, however briefly, does not make great reading for me, and the book has little else to it.  There is, of course, a sequel, and it is, of course, called Bookweirder, but I doubt very much that I will read it.

I was watching the classic animated version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas the other afternoon, one of the occupational benefits of being a mostly-stay-at-home father, and I had the sudden realization that its story is parallel to the story of Beowulf in some significant ways.

First, both stories centre around a small community that is terrorized by a monster who lives in the surrounding wilderness: Whoville by the Grinch and Heorot by Grendel.  This in itself is perhaps not very remarkable, not considering the vast number of other stories that are also structured in this way, and not considering the many historical and mythological and poetical reasons that make this plot structure narratively compelling.

Where the Grinch and Grendel are really similar, however, is in their reasons for attacking their nearby communities.  Neither are motivated be greed or revenge or instinct or even hunger.  Both are motivated solely by anger at the sounds of happiness that they hear in the communities from which they are excluded.  Grendel is enraged by the revelry in Heorot, and the Grinch is similarly unable to tolerate the singing down in Whoville.

The two monsters are not just angered because there are others who are perhaps happier than they are, nor just because there is happiness from which they have been excluded.  They are angered because the others who are happier than they are have had the temerity to make their happiness loudly and vocally public.  This is the crime for which the two communities are punished, the crime of proclaiming their happiness, and in this sense at least, these two very different stories are quite similar.

I am not sure what conclusions we might draw from this parallel, but it is exactly the sort of textual connection that I cannot resist marking, so I will simply mark it and leave the rest of you to make of it what you can.

“The man of one woman is very rare,” Robertson Davies declares in World of Wonders, the final novel in The Deptford Trilogy, and he does not refer here merely to the monogomous man or to the family man or to any other such thing, but rather to the man whose life is essentially bound up with one woman, whose life is entirely dedicated to one woman. The reason that this kind of man is rare, he goes on to say, is that such a man “needs resources of spirit and psychological virtuosity beyond the common,” and this is perhaps true, but his next statement is truer: “He needs luck, too, because the man of one woman must find a woman of extraordinary quality.”

It is in this sense that I can truly call myself a man of one woman. I am not sure that I have resources of spirit or psychological virtuosity beyond the common, but I have indeed found a woman of extraordinary quality, a woman of such quality that my life seems always to have been bound up in hers, always seems to have been dedicated to hers, as long as I have been with her. It is not only that we are well suited to each other or that we relate well with each other or that we are commited to each other, though all of these things are true as well. It is that she is an extraorinary woman, in every sense that I can imagine, and she creates a desire in me to be an extraordinary man, a man who is truly of one woman.

Dave Humphrey has written on the idea of seeing several times, and it is a topic that comes up frequently in our conversation, so I thought that I would share with him, and with all of you as well, a passage from Ernest Hemingway’s True at First Light that speaks very directly to the nature of seeing and does so in relation to birds, which is another subject of great significance to Dave.

The passage begins with Hemingway describing how he has been so focused on tracking the big game that he has failed really to notice the local birds in the way that his wife has.  He says, “I realized I had only paid attention to the predators, the scavengers, and the birds that were good to eat and the birds that had to do with hunting.  Then as I thought of which birds I did notice there came such a great long list of them that I did not feel quite as bad but I resolved to watch the birds around our camp more and to ask Mary all about the ones I did not know, and most of all, to really see them and not look past them.”  This is a nice passage all in itself, with its exhortation really to see and not look past things, but he then goes on to say, “This looking and not seeing things is a great sin.”

This phrase, I think, sums up very nicely what Dave has described in his own writing on the act of seeing, and I think that Dave would agree with his next comment as well, that “we do not deserve to live in the world if we do not see it.”

Alessandro Baricco’s Silk – This book is a perfect little dream. It is very short, with chapters of single pages, a fine-boned and delicate novel. It is almost too smooth, too light, too silken. It needs some coarseness, I think, to make it a truly great novel, and yet, a single grain of coarseness might ruin its effect. It is a beautiful thing, to be sure, but I am not sure what to do with it. It is like a silk shirt: it looks and feels wonderful, but it is almost too delicate to wear.

Mario Vargas Llosa’s In Praise of the Stepmother and The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto – When Llosa won the Nobel Prize for Literature this year, I had never heard his name, so I noted it as one of the many glaring gaps in my literary education and promptly went to my local bookshops to see if they had any of his books.  I eventually found two: In Praise of the Stepmother and  The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, but they were nothing like what I expected.   All of the discussion I had heard about Llosa had emphasized the deeply political nature of his work, but these two little novels are far more erotic than political.  Both are extended reflections on ideas of fantasy and fulfillment, fetish and taboo, innocence and seduction, and they are both certainly the work of a very talented writer, but I was expecting something very different, and I intend to see if I can find some of his other works as well.

Robertson Davies’ The Deptford Trilogy – I remember enjoying these books when I was in highschool, but I enjoyed them even more on my second reading.  Davies writes books that combine mythology with realism in marvelous ways, and the stories of his characters embody this ability, being told and retold so that fact and myth fold inextricably into one another.  There are some bits of each novel, especially the second, that I could very easily do without, but the effect of the novels are not greatly diminished by these narrative lapses, and I would rank them as highly as any Canadian novels I have ever read.

Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity – The narrative voice of this novel is so engaging and so amusing that it almost makes up for the story’s lack of substance.  Beneath the narrator’s banter, however, there is really only a self-absorbed, faintly neurotic, mostly aimless, middle-aged, otherwise average guy, and the climax of the book is really only his realization that he is indeed a self-absorbed, faintly neurotic, mostly aimless, middle-aged, otherwise average guy, which is rather less than earth-shattering.  Now, it is still a very amusing book, but unless you need help learning that you should probably give people the music they like rather than the music you like, it is not a very profound book.  I would save it for reading on the bus or on the toilet or any other place where you will not likely have the chance to think about it too deeply.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s I Will Marry When I Want – Ngugi wa Thiong’o was a finalist for this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature, and another writer whose name I had never heard before.  Ngugi is Kenyan, and so I asked a Kenyan friend of mine about him, only to discover that this friend had met Ngugi personally, had traveled with Ngugi’s daughter when she came to Canada, and had acted in one of Ngugi’s plays, I Will Mary When I Want, which he was then kind enough to lend me.  The story takes place in Kenya during the rule of dictator Daniel arap Moi, and it explores the injustices that remained in Kenyan society as a result of colonization and that were being retrenched by the new Kenyan upper-class.  It is a simple story, in many respects, but a powerful one, and I enjoyed it very much.

Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s – The Club Dumas – This is a book for which there is no ready genre.  It is a mystery, certainly, but it is also a literary homage to the person and the work of Alexandre Dumas, a kind of literary mystery, perhaps, so that its ideal reader would not be the traditional mystery aficionado (who might understandably be bored by the many allusions to the serial novel culture of France in the 1800s), nor the traditional reader of literature (who might understandably be critical of its many generic elements), but the unabashed lover of story in its many guises, generic and literary both, the kind of reader who made Dumas so popular in the first place.   The novel has its faults, to be sure, and I would myself have separated its two plots into independent novels, but it is a good read nevertheless, one of those rare books that stimulates the mind and the imagination in equal measure.

George Herbert’s The English Works – I took this book off the shelf, where it had been sitting since university, mostly because Dave kept telling me how big an influence Herbert had been on him when he was younger.  Try as I might, however, I was unable really to love Herbert.  His poems, however sincere, and I do think that they are very sincere, seem too morally obvious to me, too contrived.  They seem too much like exercises that he had set for himself and too little like true feeling.  I will withhold any final judgment until Dave and I can speak further, but I am not hopeful that I will ever appreciate Herbert in the way that he does.

Ernest Hemingway’s True at First Light – This was, by complete coincidence, the second book set in Kenya that I read in less than a month.  After going thirty years and change without reading anything at all set in that country, I feel that the word ‘coincidence’ is almost inadequate here, but it will have to do.  The novel, based more or less on Hemingway’s experiences as an unofficial game warden in Kenya, is set decades earlier than Ngugi’s I Will Mary When I Want, during the early stages of the Mau Mau uprising against the British, sometime about 1953.  It has all the vivid simplicity of image for which Hemingway is justly known, but there is a greater easiness about it than some of his other work, a sense of something like contentment.  This may be because it remained unfinished at his death and was edited for publication by his son Patrick, but whatever the reason, it has a decidedly different quality about it than his other work, and it makes a truly interesting addition to Hemingway’s body of work.

I sit before myself, wide-eyed, and somehow, calm
I see my life in black and white, but it isn’t that simple, unfortunately
It is the constant reminder that aside from being gone, I have also been replaced
She marks the skeptic pulses of my uncharted apparel
Hovering thickly above my cold flesh

I began reading John Gardner’s The Sunlight Dialogues because my friend John Jantunen recommended it to me as one of the greatest novels ever written and as his personal favourite novel besides, and if I do not like the book quite as much as he does, this is more a reflection of how much John loves the book than of any defects in the book itself, which is superb.   Its strength is founded in Gardner’s ability to fashion characters whose actions and ideas and beliefs seem both absolutely coherent from their own perspectives and also deeply incomprehensible from the perspective of everyone else.  His characters are always trying to understand each other and their world, always trying to make themselves understood, but always somehow failing in this.  They are always looking for the one thing, the key thing, that would finally make sense of things, but always finding that it remains just beyond them.  They are beautiful characters, even when they are full of ugliness, beautifully full and complex and human.

The story is told by many of these characters at one point or another, taking on their perspectives for a time, lengthy or short, but the voice that it inhabits most often is that of Clumly, a small town Police Chief who is struggling to maintain a life that is inexplicably deteriorating around him.  His marriage is quietly withering.  His job is increasingly dominated by paperwork that he can never bring himself to do and by budgetary and procedural restrains that keep him from being able to police the town as he used to do.  He is at odds over these things with the mayor and the townspeople and even his own officers.  He is filled with doubts and uncertainties, paralyzed, unable to do even the things that seem simplest and most obvious.

This personal malaise is brought to a crisis by the Sunlight Man, a mysterious vagrant who is arrested for spray painting the word ‘LOVE’ on a city street.  The Sunlight Man is a character of the highest order, an immense and impssible character, like Dostoyevsky’s Mishkin or Melville’s Ahab.  He is both saintly and devilish, brutally sane and dramatically mad, an embodiment of the moral impulse that has been driven by our modern culture past the thresholds of both logic and feeling.  He is the desire for justice and truth made schizoid or even psychotic by the relentless injustice and deception of the world.  Clumly sees something strangely familiar in him, the key to the questions of his life, and the novel revolves around Clumly’s attempts to understand his own life by finally understanding who or what the Sunlight Man really is.

This is not the sort of book where mysteries become solved, however, not in the ways that really matter.  While the identity and the motivations of the Sunlight Man are eventually made clear, the deeper questions that his character poses remain unsolved.  The Sunlight Man might be said to have accomplished his aims before he is killed, but these aims are ethically ambiguous at best, and Clumly is never able to find satisfying answers to the questions of his life, not unless his final speech of the novel arrives at conclusions that I am not able to decipher.  Instead, Gardner leaves the lives of his characters as complex and ambiguous and unresolved as he found them, and he leaves his readers in this place also, contemplating the intricacies and the ambiguities of lives that strive to be what they ought to be in a world that often seems at odds with their purposes.

It is this, I think that makes the novel so compelling: we recognize ourselves, not in the specificity of its characters perhaps, but in their complexities of their humanity.  We recognize their striving and their longing and their confusion, and we discover ourselves among them, for better or for worse.

I was at my local bookstore this morning, on the way home from the market.  I was not intending to buy anything, just visiting a place that is an old friend to me by now, but the proprietor recognized me and pulled from behind the counter a copy of Georges Perec’s A Void.   We had talked about it at the cash register several months before because he had just found a copy and was intending to read it himself.  He suggested that I might borrow it when he was finished, but I had not thought anything of it since.

He handed the book to me.   He would never get to it, he said, and I may as well have it.   At ten dollars it was a gift, unexpected, a gesture whose significance would only be recognized between one reader to another.  I will sit down with it as soon as I can, as soon as the tomatoes are all sauced, tomorrow perhaps.

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.

Paul Graham has an interesting essay up about the Acceleration of Addictiveness, in which he argues that our ability to refine and improve things through technology is leaving us increasingly susceptible to addictions, many of which develop too quickly for cultural norms to temper:

As far as I know there’s no word for something we like too much. The closest is the colloquial sense of “addictive.” That usage has become increasingly common during my lifetime. And it’s clear why: there are an increasing number of things we need it for. At the extreme end of the spectrum are crack and meth. Food has been transformed by a combination of factory farming and innovations in food processing into something with way more immediate bang for the buck, and you can see the results in any town in America. Checkers and solitaire have been replaced by World of Warcraft and FarmVille. TV has become much more engaging, and even so it can’t compete with Facebook.

While I don’t agree that there’s no word for something we like too much, I think Graham comes to a more interesting place as he ends:

But if I’m right about the acceleration of addictiveness, then this kind of lonely squirming to avoid it will increasingly be the fate of anyone who wants to get things done. We’ll increasingly be defined by what we say no to.

Here he says something really important, making a point one doesn’t encounter enough on the web, nor in the street.  I’m talking about the seemingly irreconcilable link between freedom and personal renunciation.  Illich discusses it length:

Christians who imitate him [Christ] soon discover that little practices of renunciation, of what I won’t do, even through it’s legitimate, are a necessary habit I have to form in order to practice freedom

…it reminds me of the things which, in the modern world, we can give up — not because we want a more beautiful life, but because we want to become aware of how much we are attached to the world as it is and how much we can get along without it. These unnecessary things have now multiplied to such an extent that you can’t easily give a social shape to them. Some people will give up writing letters on a computer — not because it’s bad, and not because they don’t like to have to answer letters at the speed of e-mail. Others will give up the services of physicians or, as somebody who I know has done, guaranteeing that each of his children will get a college degree.

The certainty that you can do without is one of the most efficacious ways of convincing yourself, no matter where you stand on the intellectual or emotional ladder, that you are free. Self-imposed limits provide a basis and a preparation for the discussion of what we can can renounce as a group of friends or a neighborhood. I have seen it, and I can witness to it. For many people who suffer from great fears and a sense of impotence and depersonalization, renunciation provides a very simple way back to a self which stands above the constraints of the world. (Illich, “The Rivers North of the Future,” 101-2)

Graham writing about his refusal to own an iPhone, and further, his recognition of this act as a personal, and therefore inessential, move, is significant.  We don’t lack for models of consumption, excess, and self-fulfillment online; what we need are more acts like this that are disengaged from the web yet which nevertheless exert an influence through it.  Our need to learn to say no is not simply about addiction; it is more importantly about the possibility of the self.

Much of my time writing on this blog is spent advocating for the open web, and the potential it brings for distributed, global, collaboration.  I don’t believe in this any less, despite the critique that follows.

At the same time that I am passionately involved in the creation of the open web, I am also intimately tied to book culture.  Unlike some of my fellow open web advocates, I am not against the book as a result of being for the web.  While I’m usually not one to make predictions, I feel confident in saying that the book is not going to disappear.  There are many reasons for this, but let me pick-up on one for now.

Reading on the web is mainly interested in information, in results, data, etc.  It is about  manifest- much more than latent content.  It is driven by the immediate reaction, by Liking, by linking, by query results.  Reading on the web is influenced by time: the time it takes to find it among so many other results, the time it takes to load, the time it takes to read, the likelihood that this text will be here tomorrow.

Reading on the web is also very often (always?) a first reading.  “Have you seen this?”  “Yes, I saw it.”  It is what I read, not what I am reading.

The reading of book reading is different from the reading of the web.  This reading is much slower.  It takes time.  It participates in history.  Recently my wife and I went to a nearby inn for two days, in order rest and spend time together.  We each took along books to read, and when she saw me reading my book she asked, “I thought you were finished that?”  She was right, I’ve read that book many times, and will likely read it many more.

The reading of book reading is rereading.  The book provides a place of return in a way that isn’t impossible on the web, but in practice never happens.  What does the replacement of progression with return do?  I believe that one of the most important things it does is to open a place for thinking.

The reading of rereading is how we get on the path to thinking.  The way to thinking is a path that is easily lost.  Tracking such a path, one is forced to return to the last known sign and walk in a slow circle around it, fanning out ever so slowly, until it can be picked up yet again.  Without return there can be no progress.  Without going back there is no going forward.  Books can provide such signs, and allow us to once again stumble on the path toward thinking.  This is important, since the path to thinking is so long.  One needs reliable signs from the past, places of return, places which are left alone rather than being trampled by progress.

“Dad, do you know the Odyssey?”
I do.
“How do you know it?”
I’ve read it in English many times, and fought with it in Greek, too.
“Tell me something about it.”

I leave you in Browning’s hands for a more complete account of a similar exchange.  Allow me to quote “Development” at length:

MY FATHER was a scholar and knew Greek.
When I was five years old, I asked him once
“What do you read about?”
“The siege of Troy.”
“What is a siege, and what is Troy?”
Whereat
He piled up chairs and tables for a town,
Set me a-top for Priam, called our cat
—Helen, enticed away from home (he said)
By wicked Paris, who couched somewhere close
Under the footstool, being cowardly,
But whom—since she was worth the pains, poor puss—
Towzer and Tray,—our dogs, the Atreidai,—sought
By taking Troy to get possession of
—Always when great Achilles ceased to sulk,
(My pony in the stable)—forth would prance
And put to flight Hector—our page-boy’s self.
This taught me who was who and what was what:
So far I rightly understood the case
At five years old; a huge delight it proved
And still proves—thanks to that instructor sage
My Father, who knew better than turn straight
Learning’s full flare on weak-eyed ignorance,
Or, worse yet, leave weak eyes to grow sand-blind,
Content with darkness and vacuity.

It happened, two or three years afterward
That—I and playmates playing at Troy’ Siege—
My Father came upon our make-believe.
“How would you like to read yourself the tale
Properly told, of which I gave you first
Merely such notion as a boy could bear?
Pope, now, would give you the precise account
Of what, some day, by dint of scholarship
You’ll hear—who knows?—from Homer’ very mouth.
Learn Greek by all means, read the “Blind Old Man,
Sweetest of Singers’—tuphlos which means ‘blind,’
Hedistos which means ‘sweetest.’ Time enough!
Try, anyhow, to master him some day;
Until when, take what serves for substitute,
Read Pope, by all means!”
So I ran through Pope,
Enjoyed the tale—what history so true?
Also attacked my Primer, duly drudged,
Grew fitter thus for what was promised next—
The very thing itself, the actual words,
When I could turn—say, Buttmann to account.

Time passed, I ripened somewhat: one fine day,
“Quite ready for the Iliad, nothing less?
There’s Heine, where the big books block the shelf:
Don’t skip a word, thumb well the Lexicon!”
I thumbed well and skipped nowise till I learned
Who was who, what was what, from Homer’s tongue,
And there an end of learning.
Had you asked
The all-accomplished scholar, twelve years old,
“Who was it wrote the Iliad?”—what a laugh
“Why, Homer, all the world knows: of his life
Doubtless some facts exist: it’s everywhere:
We have not settled, though, his place of birth:
He begged, for certain, and was blind beside:
Seven cities claimed him—Scio, with best right,
Thinks Byron. What he wrote? Those Hymns we have.
Then there’s the ‘Battle of the Frogs and Mice,
’That’s all—unless they dig ‘Margites’ up
(I’d like that) nothing more remains to know.”

Thus did youth spend a comfortable time;
Until—“What’s this the Germans say in fact
That Wolf found out first? It’s unpleasant work
Their chop and change, unsettling one’s belief:
All the same, where we live, we learn, that’s sure.”
So, I bent brow o’er Prolegomena.
And after Wolf, a dozen of his like
Proved there was never any Troy at all,
Neither Besiegers nor Besieged, nay, worse,—
No actual Homer, no authentic text,
No warrant for the fiction I, as fact,
Had treasured in my heart and soul so long—
Ay, mark you! and as fact held still, still hold,
Spite of new knowledge, in my heart of hearts
And soul of souls, fact’s essence freed and fixed
From accidental fancy’s guardian sheath.
Assuredly thenceforward—thank my stars!—
However it got there, deprive who could—
Wring from the shrine my precious tenantry,
Helen, Ulysses, Hector and his Spouse,
Achilles and his Friend?—though Wolf—ah, Wolf!
Why must he needs come doubting, spoil a dream?

But then, “No dream’s worth waking”—Browning says:
And here’s the reason why I tell thus much.
I, now mature man, you anticipate,
May blame my Father justifiably
For letting me dream out my nonage thus,
And only by such slow and sure degrees
Permitting me to sift the grain from chaff,
Get truth and falsehood known and named as such.
Why did he ever let me dream at all,
Not bid me taste the story in its strength?
Suppose my childhood was scarce qualified
To rightly understand mythology,
Silence at least was in his power to keep:
I might have—somehow—correspondingly—
Well, who knows by what method, gained my gains,
Been taught, by forthrights not meanderings,
My aim should be to loathe, like Peleus’ son,
A lie as Hell’s Gate, love my wedded wife,
Like Hector, and so on with all the rest.
Could not I have excogitated this
Without believing such man really were?
That is—he might have put into my hand
The “Ethics”?
In translation, if you please,
Exact, no pretty lying that improves,
To suit the modern taste: no more, no less—
The “Ethics:” ’tis a treatise I find hard
To read aright now that my hair is gray,
And I can manage the original.At five years old—
how ill had fared its leaves!
Now, growing double o’er the Stagirite,
At least I soil no page with bread and milk,
Nor crumple, dogs-ear and deface—boys’ way.

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.

I’ve written about Girard before, and always glossed over some of his ideas that mean the most to me.  Today is Good Friday, and as I ponder the meaning of it for my own faith, I decided to post an old lecture I gave as part of a lecture series Luke organized many years ago.

This is a discussion of Girard’s book, I See Satan Fall Like Lightening.  The crucified Christ is important to me, but I don’t tend to talk about it much with my friends who don’t also share the same belief.  However, on this special Friday, allow me to exceed the bounds of this blog’s form and my readers’ expectations, and share with you the ideas of a man who has influenced me greatly.

Girard, René.  Je vois Satan tomber comme l’éclair. Paris: Grasset, 1999. [trans]: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. Translated, with a Foreword, by J. G. Williams. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001.

Girard begins the book by examining the last of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:17):

• You shall not kill.
• You shall not commit adultery.
• You shall not steal.
• You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour
• You shall not covet (i.e., desire) the house of your neighbour. You shall not covet the wife of your neighbour, nor his male or female slave, nor his ox or ass, nor anything that belongs to him.

Notice how this list moves from forbidding particular acts to the forbidding of desires. The final commandment seems, at first glance, to be out of place. How could such a simple and irrelevant command be placed next to prohibitions against murder? And yet there it is, and among such dangerous crimes it cautions us of dismissing it too quickly.

The danger it seeks to avoid is the danger of desiring what our neighbour has. The fact that this prohibition is included, the fact that it had to be included, points to our human tendency to do this naturally. We do desire what our neighbour has; more importantly for Girard, we desire what our neighbour desires.

In this final commandment, Girard thinks you can see the intellectual movement necessitated by a law that would prevent sin: at first it begins with the objects of desire—the neighbour’s house, his wife, his slave, etc. However, at some point the list of objects is overwhelming and the language shifts: “nor anything that belongs to him.” Herein lies the point: we desire not our neighbour’s house as such, but rather we desire it because it is his house. The object is made desirable to us by our neighbour’s desire. Our neighbour’s desire becomes our desire.

What the Bible does here is to alter our understanding of desire, which up until this point had been thought of as objective or subjective; surely we desire what is inherently desirable? Girard argues that according to the Bible this is not the case. Instead the Bible shows us that desire is dependent on a third-party who gives value to the object. So the neighbour becomes the model for our desire, teaching us what we should desire. Our desire is, then, imitation of our neighbour’s desire. This is what Girard calls mimetic desire.

Mimesis, from the Greek, meaning to imitate. You can still hear its echo in our word “Mime.” Mimetic Desire is a kind of unconscious imitation of others. It is important to stress that we are unaware that we do this. The other, what Girard calls the Model, mediates reality (i.e., the world, experiences, specific assumptions about life, etc.) to us, to the subject. As humans we are constituted by the model/other, the self is a set of mimetic relationships operative in the individual, both in the present and from the past.

The Model can (and often will) become a Rival to us when he/she is associated with an object we desire. In such cases the important thing is not as much the object of desire, but the defeat of our model, our rival.

A Crisis occurs when we cannot win, and the model/rival cannot be overcome or obtained. Girard says that in such cases the rival has become a “stumbling block” to us—a term he translates from the Greek skandalon, or just scandal. The word is important for Girard, for it is the same one used in the Gospels to describe an obstacle. For example, when Peter rebukes Jesus for claiming that he needed to die and suffer, Jesus responds by saying: “Get behind me Satan! You are a skandalon to me…” (Matt. 16:23).

Mimetic desire is dangerous because there is no object underneath the desire—the desire is simply imitating another’s desire, which is itself imitation, and so on. The recursive nature of our desire means that it tends to spiral out of control, eventually leading to violence. How is this so?

Returning to the tenth commandment: someone desires his neighbour’s wife, however, his neighbour is (obviously) not going to share her. The husband, in witnessing the neighbour’s desire, desires his wife even more (i.e., he imitates the other’s desire who is imitating his desire). Neither man would admit to himself or anyone else that his desire of the wife is an imitation of the neighbour, for there is nothing more embarrassing to the individual than the idea of imitation. And yet the increased desire of his neighbour shows it to be true. Nevertheless, the desire continues to grow, and the two men become rivals.

The paradox of the mimetic desire at this stage is that the antagonists always become more alike in attempting to differentiate themselves from one another. Consider two people/groups who are fighting, but seem to bear no resemblance to one another. In attempting to differentiate themselves from one another, they become the same, in that they are both imitating this desire for difference.

I once saw a shirt for sale in the mall with the slogan: “I am my own role model.” The ridiculousness of this statement is amplified by its duplication on a rack full of identical shirts, all of which will be worn by people whose actions are incapable of revealing what they hope their shirt will declare; for if I was really my own role model, I wouldn’t need to tell you. Contemporary youth culture, as portrayed by marketers, is a classic example of mimetic desire, where everyone is “original,” but strangely everyone’s originality takes the on the same shape.

Returning to the two neighbours…the object of both men’s desire is not really the wife, but the other man’s desire of the wife, and as such there is no end to this rivalry. The neighbour becomes scandalized, and only violence (i.e., the elimination of the neighbour) can end the stand still.

We will be returning to the idea of mimetic desire again, and before you draw a negative conclusion about its effects, let me point-out that Girard does not say imitation is wrong in and of itself.

The problems of mimetic desire should not be taken to mean that it is bad. Rather, Girard argues, it is “intrinsically good.” “The essence of desire is to have no essential goal. In order to truly desire, we must have recourse to people about us; we have to borrow their desires.” (Girard, 15). Mimetic desire helps us to know what to desire. It is what separates us from the animal, whose “desire” is predetermined (e.g., cows will always eat grass).

As an example of the positive effects of mimetic desire, consider how children learn to talk by imitating their parents.

So if mimetic desire is not the problem, what is required is an appropriate model for our imitation.

Girard says that “the tenth commandment signals a revolution and prepares the way for it. This revolution comes to fruition in the New Testament. If Jesus never speaks in terms of prohibitions and always in terms of models and imitation, it is because he draws out the full consequences of the lesson offered by the tenth commandment. It is not due to inflated self-love that he asks us to imitate him; it is to turn us away from mimetic rivalries…What Jesus invites us to imitate is his own desire, the spirit that directs him toward the goal on which his intention is fixed: to resemble God the Father as much as possible…In inviting us to imitate him, he invites us to imitate his own imitation.” (Girard, 13).

Only God is free of egotistical desire; only in Jesus do we have a model who will not, cannot, become our rival.

Another of Girard’s ideas that will be important for us to understand is that of mimetic contagion and the single victim mechanism. In addition to exploring how mimetic desire works at the level of individual relationships, Girard has also shown how mimetic desire operates at the level of the group or community. Much as it has the power to disrupt relations between neighbours at the micro level, mimetic desire at the macro level threatens to destroy whole communities through violence. How is it that we have survived at all if our imitation of one another’s desires can only be resolved through violence?

The answer is the single victim mechanism. Consider first the operation of mimetic desire in the crowd.

Two people begin by desiring a common object, which Girard reminds us is really the desire of the other. As the imitation of the model turns to rivalry, the process escalates. This escalation appears to the participants to be about difference; however, from the outside it is clear that the two antagonists, in trying to differentiate themselves, are becoming more and more the same (i.e., each one seeks to differentiate from the other, thereby becoming more closely aligned with the desire of the other). Initially this process is fixed for each antagonist on the other; however, as this process happens within a community and among many different sets of people, the tendency is for the rivalry of some other warring pair to overtake the current rivalry in terms of its attractiveness. Because the desire of the two is no longer on the original object of desire but on the other’s desire, the way is opened for a third’s desire to become even more desirable. In communities where there are literally many “others,” this becomes not likely but inevitable. As the rivalries give way to greater and fewer rivalries (i.e., more people sharing the same rivalries), a pattern emerges of the many against the few, and finally the many against the one. We would recognize this as the “mob mentality.”

The one, whom the mob centres out and fixes its anger upon, is the scapegoat of Leviticus 16, where the sins of the people are transferred to a he-goat, which is then “cast out” and literally driven into the wilderness. The same phenomenon can be found in one form or another in all cultures, for example the pharmakos in Greece.

The crowd is whipped into a fury as each person imitates the anger of the other in an uncontrollable spiral. Because the desire of the individuals has become united in its imitation within the crowd, mimetic desire becomes contagious—this is mimetic contagion. The crowd, if allowed to continue, would destroy itself; but strangely it doesn’t.

Girard’s work in other books has been to examine mimetic contagion, and he has observed that the crowd’s anger is always changed from “all against all” to “all against one.” Examples of this abound in literature, history, the news, and the Bible. You’ll no doubt recognize this as the witch hunt, the “scapegoating” of a public figure, or the call to “Crucify Him, Crucify Him!” Mimetic contagion never destroys the community because it gets channeled to a single victim.

As the single victim mechanism takes over, the crowd is finally united—all desire one and the same thing, the death of the one. In doing so they provisionally accept the desire of the other, where the other also accepts their desire. So when the single victim is killed or cast out, there is an immediate sense of peace within the community.

Girard notes that this pattern is the hallmark of myth, with an initial sense of disorder in the community, whether the result of some kind of unexplained epidemic, the warring of twins (cf. the role of twins as mimetic doubles), or warring brothers, etc. Whatever the crisis, it typically threatens to destroy the community (Girard, 62-3).

The crisis is resolved through violence, usually by the mob ganging-up on an outsider, who is seen to be the cause of the trouble. However, once the victim is killed and peace restored, the very one who only moments ago seemed evil and the cause of the calamity, seems strangely responsible for the complete restoration.

Girard observes that “the transformation of the evildoer into the divine benefactor is a phenomenon simultaneously marvelous and routine. In most cases the myths don’t even indicate this change. The one who is lynched at the beginning of the myth because he or she came as a destroyer—lo and behold—presides in the end over the reconstruction of this same system or over the construction of a new one. Unanimous violence has transformed the evildoer into a divine benefactor in a manner so extraordinary, yet nevertheless ordinary, that most of the myths do not say anything about this metamorphosis.” (Girard, 65)

Girard’s work shows that the peoples of the world do not invent their gods, but deify their victims. How else could the victim restore order unless he was really a god in disguise? Even if they do not understand why or how it worked, the single victim mechanism did work, and maybe it will work again.

Girard argues that sacrifice comes out of an observation by a community that the process that worked before must have been a “gift” from the god that they killed. Perhaps he wanted them to do this again, and showed them how it could be achieved. Initially the victims were human, then animal, and then sometimes the murder was simply enacted ritually or theatrically (cf. Aristotle’s idea of tragedy and catharsis). However it survived, the single victim mechanism is always codified in religion and ritual.

Girard argues that even though this phenomenon is visible everywhere in the world and throughout history, the key to understanding the workings of the single victim mechanism is the Gospels. For in the Gospels we are able, for the first time, to see that it is really Satan that is responsible for this phenomenon, and more, to see how he accomplishes it.

Girard says that the Church and current readings of the New Testament fail to deal with Satan properly or fully. Satan, like Jesus, seeks to have people imitate him, but not for the same reasons and not in the same way. Satan is easier to follow than Christ, because he counsels us to abandon ourselves to all our inclinations in defiance of morality and its prohibitions.

What does Satan do? He is the seducer who provides for us a model to be imitated. Satan, above all, wants us to imitate him, and in so doing, to not imitate God.

We see him acting as such in the exchange between Peter and Jesus in Mark 8, which ends in Jesus’ rebuke of Peter: “Get thee behind me Satan.” Why? Jesus goes on to say that Peter desires the things of men over the things of God. What does this mean? When Peter initially hears Jesus describe the Passion, he rebukes Jesus and tries to tell him that this is wrong. Peter tries to give Jesus new hope. In short, he offers himself as a model for Jesus. Jesus rightly sees that in accepting Peter as his new model in place of his Father, he would eventually enter a mimetic rivalry that would destroy the kingdom of heaven. He refuses and continues to imitate the Father.

What makes Satan so dangerous is not simply that he distracts us from God. Satan also destroys us. For Girard, the principle text on Satan’s role in the single victim mechanism comes in Mark 3:23-26, where Jesus responds to those who accuse him of expelling Satan by the power of Beelzebub:

“How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, it cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, it cannot be maintained. And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot endure and is finished.”

Girard notes that Jesus does not deny the reality of Satan’s self-expulsion; he asserts it. However, Jesus also says that this power is coming to an end—“I see Satan fall like lightening.” Satan is here revealed by Christ to be at once the power of disorder and order: he casts himself out. However, Satan’s expulsion of Satan, unlike Christ’s, is always temporary. Satan whips up the community to the point of destruction, but just in the moment of destruction offers a way for peace to be restored, before continuing the process again. The peace, however, is always at the cost of a victim.

Girard imagines Satan’s power as working in the following way. Satan is not only the seducer, but also the accuser. He is able to insight and sustain the mimetic rivalry in the community. He allows the rivalries to explode to a mimetic contagion, and then just before the moment of complete destruction, he unites everyone against a single victim, accusing him/her of the crimes of the community. Satan is the accuser when he convinces the crowd of the victim’s guilt.

Girard comes back to this point again and again: the crowd, whether in myth or the Bible, really does believe the victim to be guilty.

The crowd does not know what it is doing, for the very thing they are doing is Satan, just as Peter is Satan when he tries to tempt Christ. We hear Jesus pray from the cross for forgiveness for the ones around him, for they know not what they are doing.

Girard observes the working of Satan and the single victim mechanism everywhere in history, in all of the world’s myths and also in the biblical stories. It is due to his insistence on comparing the Bible with myth that some Christians have dismissed his work. However, Girard recognizes among the many similarities between the myths and the Bible differences that accord the Bible its uniqueness.

Where anthropologists originally tried to show that the Gospels and myths were so similar as to be the same, Girard says that they were only on the right track, but never found what they were looking for. Instead, he says that what is common to both is the mimetic cycle, what he calls the “Satanic cycle.” What kept them from finding the truth, and allowed Girard to locate it, was the starting point: the Gospels are transparent in their portrayal the this cycle, while the myths conceal it, are unaware of it. By reading myth through the light of the Gospels, the truth is revealed. The opposite does not happen.

This revelation about the “Satanic cycle” begins in the Old Testament, although it is never fully revealed until the New Testament. In the Old Testament we see only the first of the two parts of the mimetic cycle presented, that is, the resurrection that reveals the innocence of the victim is missing. In Hebrew monotheism, unlike myth, the God is never victimized, nor do the victims become divinized. As such, the Hebrew God is not the product of the scapegoat mechanism that so visibly produces the gods of primitive polytheism (Girard, 107).

As an example of the difference between the Bible and myth, Girard compares the story of Joseph with the myth of Oedipus.

Joseph

• Family crisis leads to Joseph being expelled from his family by being sold into slavery. (mimetic crisis, where the brothers band together against a single victim)
• Joseph barely escapes death by being sold into slavery—his father thinks him dead, however.
• Joseph is accused of rape by Potipher’s wife—Potipher has become as his own father too him. This recalls the accusation of incest raised against Oedipus. However, Joseph is innocent of the crime.
• A great famine strikes the land. Joseph is not responsible for it, and in fact, helps navigate Egypt through it.

Oedipus

• Family crisis based on oracle that leads parents to expel son when still a child. (mimetic crisis, where the parents band together against a single victim)
• Oedipus barely escapes death, but his parents think him dead.
• Some time later, Oedipus kills his father (unknowlingly) and then later answers the Sphynx’s riddle and wins the right to become king of Thebes, and therefore marry his mother (unknowingly). Oediups is guilty of the crimes the oracle spoke earlier.
• A plague comes over Thebes. Oedipus is responsible for the plague, which Apollo has brought upon the city as a punishment for Oediups’ crimes. He is powerless to stop the plague, short of leaving Thebes.

The Hebrew Bible refuses to side with the crowd, which would claim the victim guilty of his apparent sin. Rather, he is innocent of the crimes brought against him. However, the myths work in the opposite way: “The myths always condemn all victims, who are isolated and overwhelmed. They are the work of agitated crowds that are incapable of identifying and criticizing their own tendency to expel and murder those who cannot defend themselves, scapegoats that they always take for guilty of the same stereotypical crimes: parricide, incest, bestial fornication, and other horrible misdeeds whose perpetual and improbable recurrence point up their absurdity.” (Girard, 110).

Nowhere but in the Bible do we encounter the truth that the crowd is wrong, that the violence is unjustified, and that the victim is innocent. We see this everywhere in the Bible, from the Psalms, with the lament of victims before God, to Job, who is accused by his friends of guilt he knows is not his own.

The story of Joseph goes on to foreshadow what is to come in the New Testament, namely, the end of the mimetic cycle. Joseph’s brothers come to Egypt to beg for food, but leave the youngest, Benjamin, behind with his father. The brothers do not recognize Joseph, but he recognizes them and grants their request, adding that if they come again, they must bring Benjamin. Years go by, and the famine continues to destroy the land. Once again the brothers are forced to go to Egypt, and this time they take Benjamin. Joseph receives them again, and grants their request for food. However, he has a servant plant one of his cups in a bag carried by Benjamin. The brothers leave and Joseph complains that someone has stolen his precious cup. The brothers’ bags are searched, and the cup found. Joseph says that Benjamin must be arrested, and that the other brothers are free to return to their father. Joseph has created the same situation once again for his brothers to repeat: the youngest and weakest is to be sacrificed. Nine of the ten brothers agree to this. However, Judah offers himself in Benjamin’s place. Joseph forgives all the brothers based on the act of Judah. Girard argues that this act of forgiveness is the only possible way to break the mimetic cycle. It is what Christ will do once and for all. (Giard, 106-111).

“It’s not accurate to say that the Bible reestablishes a truth that the myths betrayed. If we did, we would give the impression that this truth was already accessible, at human disposal before the Bible discovered it. No, not at all. Before the Bible there were only myths. No one and no tradition before the Bible were capable of calling into question the guilt of victims whom their communities unanimously condemned.” (Girard, 118).

Many people before Girard have claimed that the Gospels read like myth (cf. Tom Harpur’s book The Pagan Christ: Recovering the Lost Light where he argues that Christianity comes right out of ancient myth, specifically Egyptian myths). However, unlike other comparisons of the Gospels and myth, Girard’s notices important differences among the similarities—differences that are only visible when you see the similarities.

First, the central figure is innocent. Second, the community unites against him, including his closest followers and the authors of the accounts. Third, the resurrected victim appears not to the whole community, but only to those who believe in his innocence. Christ has revealed the workings of the single victim mechanism, and as such, it no longer has the power it did before.

In the Passion accounts, we see the single victim mechanism at work. Initially the crowd was with Jesus as he entered Jerusalem. However, very quickly it turns against him. Not only the Jews and Romans rise up against Christ, but also his own disciples are overcome with the power of the mimetic contagion.

Girard takes Peter as the best example of this. Jesus fortells his betrayal, pointing out that even Peter, whose love for Jesus is openly expressed and never in question, is a slave to mimetic desire. When Peter is thrust into the hostile crowd, he denies his lord three times so as to become one of the crowd. So too do we all.

Further, we see the “healing” effects on the community after Jesus’ death is finished—both for the crowd and even, we are told, for Pilate and Herod, who become friends (Luke 23:12).

As I said earlier, the single victim mechanism is always invisible to the ones involved. So too in the death of Christ, where we hear Jesus pray from the cross: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” (Luke 23:34). Girard argues that we should always take Jesus at his word: he is not using a rhetorical formula or sentimental exaggeration; rather, he means what he says, namely, that his persecutors are caught in mimetic contagion of which they are unaware. (Girard, 126).

Also, unlike the myths, Jesus death is unique because his divinity is not the product of the crowd:

“There is no prior demonization behind the divinity of Christ. Christians don’t ascribe any guilt to Jesus. Thus his divinity cannot rest on the same process as mythic deifications. Moreover, contrary to what happens in the myths, it is not the unanimous mob of persecutors who see Jesus as the Son of God and God himself; it is a rebellious minority, a small group of dissidents that separates from the collective violence of the crowd and destroys its unanimity. This minority group is the community of the first witnesses to the Resurrection, that is, the apostles and those who gather around them. This dissident minority has no equivalent in the myths. Around the mythic deities we never see the community divide into two unequal groups, of which only the smaller one would proclaim the divinity of the god. The structure of the Christian revelation is unique.” (Girard, 123).

What truly separates the Gospels from the myths is not Christ’s death (which is so similar), but his resurrection and the revelation to the disciples:

“Only the Resurrection, because it enlightens the disciples, reveals completely the things hidden since the foundation of the world, which are the same thing as the secret of Satan, never disclosed since the origin of human culture: the founding murder and the origin of human culture.” (Girard, 125)

The Cross is victorious, yes but, says Girard, maybe not in the way we have always thought. The cross triumphs not by beating violence and Satan at their own game, but by allowing them to do what they always do, to do it better than it has ever been done before, but, to then put this process on display for everyone to see. The cross reveals, or in Girard’s phrase, re-presents mimetic violence, and in so doing, reveals its existence and inner workings: the origin of violent mimetic desire is revealed. “The powers are not put on display because they are defeated, but they are defeated because they are put on display.” (Girard, 143).

“Christ does not achieve the victory through violence. He obtains it through a renunciation of violence so complete that violence can rage to its heart’s content without realizing that by so doing, it reveals what it must conceal, without suspecting that its fury will turn back against it this time because it will be recorded and represented with exactness in the Passion narratives.” (Girard, 140).

How does the cross triumph over sin and death? For Girard, the answer is that for the first time in history we are able to see that the victim we thought was guilty is innocent, and more, that the violence committed against Jesus is the same violence that is always committed against any victim.

“To understand this is to understand why Paul sees the Cross as the source of all knowledge about the world and human beings as well as about God. When Paul asserts that he wants to know nothing besides Christ crucified, he is not engaging in ‘anti-intellectualism.’ He is not announcing his contempt for knowledge. Paul believes quite literally that there is no knowledge superior to knowing the crucified Christ.” (Girard, 142).

Girard believes that the truth and simplicity of the message of the cross was so impossible to see before Christ’s resurrection that even Satan did not understand it before it was too late. Paul writes to the Corinthians: ‘If the princes of this world had known [the wisdom of God] they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory’ (1 Cor. 2:8). Since the ‘princes of this world’ were not in communion with God, they did not understand that the victim mechanism they unleashed against Jesus would result in truthful accounts. If they had been able to read the future, not only would they not have encouraged the Crucifixion, but they would have opposed it with all their might.” (Girard, 148).

It is here that Girard’s ideas have caused the greatest controversy in the Church. In another book he has called this Christ’s “nonsacrificial sacrifice.” By this he means that Christ’s death works not by satisfying God’s justice, as has been taught, but by unmasking and destroying the power of Satan, and thereby freeing all those who would follow after Christ and imitate Him.

“Medieval and modern theories of redemption all look in the direction of God for the cause of the Crucifixion: God’s honor, God’s justice, even God’s anger must be satisfied. These theories don’t succeed because they don’t seriously look in the direction where the answer must lie: sinful humanity, human relations, mimetic contagion, which is the same thing as Satan. They speak much of original sin, but they fail to make the idea concrete. That is why they give an impression of being arbitrary and unjust to human beings, even if they are theologically sound.” (Girard, 150).

Girard believes that Jesus not only reveals the workings of the Satanic Cycle, but also offers the antidote: imitation of himself, who is imitating God. To be a Christian is, like Paul, to recognize and repent the persecution of Christ. It is to reject Satan as a model for our imitation, and instead to accept Christ.

Christ’s model to us is always non-violent, but also contagious. Take the example of the woman caught in adultery and brought before Jesus. Girard argues that Christ disarms the episode by drawing attention to the problem of the “first stone,” (i.e., “Let whoever is without sin among you cast the first stone.”) which he says is the hardest to throw, for there is no model. Jesus refuses to become the model of violence, as the crowd wishes.

Instead, he becomes a new model, one that refuses to condemn the woman. And so each man walks away from the woman. By drawing attention to the problem of the first stone, Jesus magnifies and exposes the way in which Satan works.

As we have seen, in order for the process to work at all, it must be hidden. Jesus unveils it. Jesus does not do battle with Satan—he disarms him from the start, never letting the mimetic contagion begin.

If Girard is right and the cross revealed once and for all the workings of Satan and mimetic desire, why are we still experiencing it? What was the result of the cross?

Girard argues that our society is the most preoccupied with victims of any that ever was. Even if it is insincere, the phenomenon has no precedent. No historical period, no society we know, has ever spoken of victims as we do. (Girard, 161) Yet if this is true, why has this knowledge of the victim not brought an end to all victims?

As was stated earlier, mimetic desire was not done away with at the cross; rather, a new model was introduced, and the old one dragged into daylight. Yet the choice of which one to follow is what defines us as humans.

Girard points out that the knowledge of the single victim mechanism, the knowledge of the workings of the scapegoat, are not enough to save us. “…more frequently we turn our knowledge into a weapon, a means not only of perpetuating old conflicts but of raising them to a new level of cunning…Instead of criticizing ourselves, we use our knowledge in bad faith, turning it against others. Indeed we practice a hunt for scapegoats to the second degree, a hunt for the hunters of scapegoats. Our society’s obligatory compassion authorizes new forms of cruelty.” (Girard, 158).

He goes on to show how Paul recognized this, and warned against it in his letter to the Romans: “You have no excuse, O man…when you judge another, for in judging you judge yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same thing” (Romans 2:1). Whether we condemn our neighbour, or condemn our neighbour for condemning our neighbour, the problem is the same.

“The concern for victims has become a paradoxical competition of mimetic rivalries, of opponents continually trying to outbid one another. The victims most interesting to us are always those who allow us to condemn our neighbours. And our neighbours do the same.” (Girard, 164).

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.