Now Reading

I’m sad to say I haven’t gotten much done since my last post. My classes began this past Monday, which meant that I spent much of the weekend in a futile attempt to recall the German I had forgotten. My health then proceeded to take a turn for the inconvenient. I’ve read a few things, though, and have some inane comments to make about them! While writing this I realized I had a lot more to say in conjunction about the nonfiction I read this week, and decided to split that off into a separate post, which I’ll hopefully make tomorrow.

Dubliners, James Joyce

Since I’ve decided to go back through Joyce this year, I recently read Dubliners in full for the first time in something like eight years. (Incidentally, the copy I read this time is the same as I read then, as I retrieved it from my parents’ house when visiting them for Christmas.) This brown Barnes and Noble Classics paperback, which also contains Portrait, was my first encounter with Joyce, at an age probably too young to really appreciate what I was reading. I haven’t reread either Dubliners or Portrait in the intervening time, not counting a few brief returns to individual stories in Dubliners. I don’t really remember how I reacted, other than “wow, cool!”, and having this copy is little help. The “annotations” consist of a question mark at some point during Two Gallants, which is inscrutable, and an exclamation point next to the last paragraph of The Dead, which strikes me as a bit of an understatement. Anyways, all this is to say that I’m approaching Dubliners with little personal baggage, and am giving something like a first reading of a book already very familiar by reputation.

And, like most first readings, this is a bad one. Of course, I had a great time — to state the obvious, it’s an amazing book, and as a first complete prose work it is absurdly intimidating to anybody, like me, dumb enough to try writing. But I don’t think I really paid much attention to the things I gather one is “supposed” to here. To start with, I read it as a collection of short stories. As many critics will tell you, the stories taken together form a whole, so much so that some take to calling the book a novel. This cohesion is overdetermined. In addition to the unity of setting indicated in the title, there’s also a structure of maturation as the children at the center of the early stories become young adults, then parents, an arc ending, of course, with “The Dead.” (I once saw a reference to a reading of Dubliners as Bildungsroman, a move that seems to me like a cheap trick after Hyppolite…) The point being: this book is not “Selected Stories of James Joyce,” and should not be read as such. But I did anyways!

My darkest sin has to be ignoring geography entirely. My edition had little maps with the routes of characters placed at the beginning of each story, but I looked for a second at each and did not refer back. At the very least, this is an affront to Joyce’s intention of capturing Dublin life in a book, not to mention the many Joyce scholars who have thought quite hard about the book’s arrangement within the physical space of his Dublin. I do think, though, that my ignorance may have been unintentionally helpful in keeping the table clear. By the time Joyce finishes Ulysses, he is layering so many functions in each moment that attempting to focus on any one can be as frustrating as the overall effect is astonishing. He’s not there yet in Dubliners, and so, while “immaturity” would be a ridiculous word to use here, I do think my unawareness of Dublin-as-space added to the relative sparseness of Joyce’s early style.

My ignorance forced my focus onto the more particular triumphs of the individual stories. “An Encounter” captures a certain stage in childhood of partial awareness with an amazing effectiveness that, I think, is entirely necessary for the story to work. Writing about children being creeped on from the perspective of those children requires this delicate balance between innocence and maturity. If the child is entirely innocent, the story becomes all about the horrible dramatic irony as the reader sees the evils to which the child is blissfully blind. This, I think, is titillation in poor taste. On the other hand, any overly mature child runs the risk of becoming Young Sheldon. Joyce avoids both fates, and by doing so gives us a genuinely frightening ending without the need for any shock or tragedy.

There’s something really satisfying about expert execution in a small space. This is why writers about literature love to call some authors (Kafka, Schulz, Borges, to name some prime suspects) “miniaturists.” The excitement of seeing a matchbook-size illuminated Shahnameh is the same that we get from reading a story like “The Boarding House.” The story is full of wonderful circumspection. The plot hangs on a series of conversations — Mr. Doran with Polly about her pregnancy, Polly with Mrs. Mooney about the same, Mr. Doran with Mrs. Mooney about marrying Polly — none of which are available to the reader. The brief interaction we get between Polly and Mr. Doran is not exactly dialogue-rich: she despairs, suggests suicide, he comforts, tells her not to be afraid. It is stunning that this story, about the complicated relationships and attitudes between three characters, should work so well despite not allowing us to read their verbal interactions. But it does! And at some point I might figure out why.

I’m realizing that the strategy of free-writing might leave me talking about Dubliners forever despite not having much of interest to say, so I’m going to cut myself short and skip ahead to “The Dead.” I’m hesitant to say much about a story that I love so much, other than to enthusiastically encourage anyone reading this to go and read it instead (here’s a link! https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2814/2814-h/2814-h.htm#chap15). The ending, I think, can be read as a fascinating articulation of the “stages” through which one encounters the Other. Gretta, who had left the story’s focus some time ago, returns to its center when Gabriel sees her standing on the stairs, listening to the tenor singing. Here, he treats her as an object for aesthetic and interpretive contemplation, attempting to find the “secret” of the painting he imagines her as. By the time they are walking home, she has moved from studied object to beloved object: Gabriel craves to protect her, treasure her. As they reach their home his joy is explicitly one of ownership, quickly shifting into carnal desire as they cross the threshold. Lust is a more interactive stance, to be sure, but Gabriel is still shocked when his extension of his own excitement to Gretta proves misplaced. The story of Michael Furey, and with it the forced recognition of his wife as an independent person before him, jars Gabriel into reflection. The story ends as Gabriel’s contemplation drifts out into a sort of universal consciousness, faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, over all the living and the dead. There are elements here of both Diotima’s ladder and a quasi-Hegelian mutual recognition, but I won’t waste more time teasing those out: the effect is beautiful and the execution is flawless. Read it!

Flights, Olga Tokarczuk

This is the second Tokarczuk novel I’ve read, after House of Day, House of Night a few months ago, and I’m happy to say that I enjoyed it nearly as much. Like “House”, Flights is structured as a series of short pieces whose link is not always apparent, but in Flights the structure has reached a much more advanced stage of dissolution. Some of the pieces are only a page, with no apparent connection to those that surround them. Cliche, but it “resists classification.” So, obviously, my instinct (and everyone else’s) is to classify it. I skimmed a few reviews and found the comparison to Sebald, which I think is comically misplaced. In Sebald, the flow and continuity of the anecdotes/digressions/observations is everything. Tokarczuk’s fragmentary structure is something else entirely. It reminds me most of something with eyes on the encyclopedic, like Moby-Dick. Melville’s novel appears repeatedly in Flights, most prominently via a character who speaks only in Ahab quotes after learning English from a copy in jail. A few of the chapters feel like Borges, another name that crops up a few times. These tenuous connections illustrate, I think, a larger point: despite being in some ways “experimental”, the book is deeply embedded in the history of modern literature and does not attempt to hide this inheritance. I’m reminded of one of the better parts of Elif Batuman’s decidedly mixed bag of an essay, “Get a Real Degree.” Batuman points out that a lot of American MFA-style fiction has no sense of the body of literature of which it is the newest part, and castigates “program writers” and their defenders for thinking they have just now invented the wheel. To her, one of the fascinating things about new fiction is that it both responds to and enters a tradition, becoming at once the very thing which it is forced to set itself against. Flights embodies the best possibilities of this complexity.

Flights eschews most of the cohesion provided by plot and character, and sometimes even the cohesion provided by narratorial voice. Tokarczuk instead unifies the novel around the conceptual binary change/stasis. Doing so risks banality: the observation that everything is changing, or that when viewed differently nothing is changing, is uncomfortably reminiscent of New Age fluff when standing alone. Flights, however, takes this binary and proceeds to echo, invert, and complicate the relation, spinning it out into the vast conceptual web in which the novel plays. Airports, the paradigmatic transient space in global capitalism, are reimagined as a static republic by focusing instead on their hermetic borders and individualized assignments of position and rank. A digression about plastinated bodies becomes a running thread of commentary on attempts at bodily preservation, bringing the body/soul dichotomy into the mix and providing another world of connotation and allusion to traverse.

The descriptive passages are wonderful; Tokarczuk has an amazing attentiveness coupled with a knack for inventive redescription, and the result is dozens of passages clever enough to provoke a grin when read. I didn’t quite like the style as much as House of Day, House of Night, which could easily be due to the different translators who tackled each book. Here, there’s passages (very few, but noticeable) that remind me of David Foster Wallace at his most annoying, generally (as one would expect) when addressing some aspect of contemporary consumerism. Perhaps “House” lacked this because so much of it is focused on a single village rather than various global cities, but in any case absence would be an improvement. That’s really my only quibble, though. For once, I can say that I’m grateful to the Nobel Prize for informing me of her existence!