I need to clear this backlog so it stops stressing me out. These are not going to be good. Sorry.

Microscripts, Robert Walser (trans. Bernofsky)

Why would Walser have written these? I think that’s the question that naturally presses itself on anyone who picks up the microscripts. Since, as usual, I write from a place of ignorance, it may be that any number of Walser biographers and scholars have put forth compelling answers, grounded in biographical-archival detail, telling us approximately what he had in mind. I wouldn’t know. I know that, while the microscripts are most associated with his stays at the mental homes in Waldau and Herisau, where he spent the end of his life, he began composing them five years before he was first committed. I also know that he began using the curious compositional method of miniscule text on leftover scraps of paper at least in part because he had begun having difficulties with his previous method of writing by pen. Beyond this everything breaks out in contradictions.

If he had intended for them to be published and eventually consumed, why did he not leave any instructions for either deciphering the fragments themselves or ordering and presenting the fragments once deciphered? So, we might assume that they served some private purpose, filling some need or satisfying some impulse. Why, then, did he not show any desire to have them destroyed after his death, like certain other authors to whom he is often compared? At the risk of hasty universalization, literary texts force upon the reader some conception of speaker(s) (in the broadest sense) and audience(s) (in the broadest sense). Does Walser imagine these fragments read, even in some far-off hypothetical? All these uncertainties combine to heighten and fill out the foggy world in which and of which the late Walser writes. When I read something like Kafka’s letters to Felice, I feel a small voyeuristic thrill knowing that these were never meant for public eyes. That effect, by no means limited to Kafka’s letters, should be distinguished from that which I am attempting to describe in Walser. Reading the microscripts is closer to catching pieces of a radio broadcast bleeding outside its designated band. They neither address nor chastise the reader; they simply don’t care. Apathy, set together somehow with immaculate concern for the everyday.

The Radical Reformation (ed. Baylor)

This book is a compilation of writings by the so-called “radical reformers”, those who saw Luther and company as insufficiently complete in their break from the corrupt medieval church. I don’t have much to say here about it: there’s some interesting theological details, and lots of fun bombastic rhetoric, but it strikes me for the most part as a useful supplement for those already possessing an interest in the period. It did make me interested in revisiting Marxist scholarship on the German peasant uprisings with which several of the figures featured in the anthology (most notably Thomas Müntzer) were associated. Unfortunately, my memory of both this book and that scholarship are weak enough that I don’t have anything to say here. The final inclusion in the anthology, Hans Hergot’s “On the New Transformation of the Christian Life”, is worthy of mention. In it, the coming religious restructing is run together with radical social upheaval, in which “all resources… will be used in common” and a new global system of common use will emerge. The details of his vision really do seem to prefigure the political struggles that would emerge following the rise of capitalism. He makes specific dispensation for redistributing surplus production and consistently frames his religio-political structure in terms of “the sustainers of the community,” those whose labor produces that on which the community lives. This seems, to me, a useful window onto both what contemporary peasants might have seen as the injustices of the world in which they lived and what they saw as the link between (or identity) the Church and the general social organization of their lives. Cool stuff!

A Universal History of the Destruction of Books, Fernando Baez

Baez has compiled as many instances as he could find of books being destroyed: burned, thrown overboard, dismantled for the repurposing of their material components, and so on, stretching from millenia in the past to the American invasion of Iraq and the consequent textual carnage (one of this book’s flaws is that the often-accompanying human carnage receives little attention.) The book itself isn’t exactly inventive, consisting primarily of a series of historical vignettes with little effort made to construct out of them some narrative. The barebones presentation might, however, accentuate what I found to be the book’s brutally depressing effect. Reading it straight through demands holding your attention fast to a catalog of senseless destruction and, willing or not, reflecting on how little of the past has made it to us. The book moves quickly past some staggering disasters and atrocities, spending (for instance) very little time on the wholesale destruction of the Mayan literary-historical-philosophical-poetic corpus by colonizing forces, an act of cultural terrorism much more horrifying and deliberate than the burning of the library at Alexandria.

I’m necessarily put in mind of the instability which we can expect in the mid-range future as consequence of climate change, and how one might attempt to preserve texts and records knowing that night is on the horizon. I don’t have time to think more about that here, but I’ll hopefully get to write about it soon.

The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West

This is a fantastic and dense satire of that part of America’s culture industry that we tend to refer to as “Hollywood,” which plays that metonymic role in the novel. I didn’t spend nearly enough time with it, and hope to revisit it in the future at a time when my mind is working a bit more smoothly. The role of the west in the American imaginary, the consumption of daily life by corporate narratives, and the sexual and racial pathologies that run through the American dream all come to a head in an exceptional example of the “final chaos scene” genre. Moving on, but I liked it!

Three Essays on the History of Sexuality and Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Sigmund Freud

I group these together because I read them for the same course. I don’t have much to say here: they’re famous, they’re Freud, you kind of know what you’re getting. I do find some bits of his methodology quite interesting. In the three essays, for instance, he almost seems to be engaged in the sort of binary-deconstruction that Derrida would later make a career out of. The sphere of the “abnormal” is shown to encompass and perhaps even undergird the “normal”, potentially clearing the way for the abolition of the normal-abnormal distinction altogether. He repeats this pattern throughout the book, returning all the while to clinical work and empirical research, something he famously does much less in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. There, his methodological experimentation takes the form of an insistence that his speculation is justified as a necessary part of forming a new psychological theory, juxtaposed with repeated notes that appeal to the physical sciences would prevent him from having to engage in such tentative attempts. This, too, is undermined eventually, as in the last instance he distinguishes psychology from (e.g.) physiology only in terms of its age: physiology is simply a set of figurative terms that have been worked through more extensively and whose uses and quirks are more familiar to us. He concludes the book by admonishing those who impugn the book for its uncertainty, claiming in fact that such certainty is more proper to a catechism than to a science. I’m woefully underread in psychoanalysis, and I’m familiar with the existence of work on Freud in this general line, but I’ll be more actively seeking some out soon, both for this course and for my personal edification.

The Ubu Plays, Alfred Jarry (trans. Connolly, Watson Taylor)

These are so fun! I can’t help but feel that I’m getting a dim shadow in translation, given how many lines clearly involve puns in the original French, but the translation read well and managed to actually be funny, a quality often ignored in literary translations of comedic or semi-comedic works. The words that kept coming to mind when reading these were “comedy of menace.” The phrase was coined originally to (only quasi-accurately) describe Harold Pinter’s plays, and has received limited use otherwise. The coiner, whose name I now forget and am too lazy to look up, had a rather specific definition, but I feel fine appropriating the term in the vaguest sense here. The impression I get from Jarry’s plays is an attempt to produce work in a comedic mode that does not partake in the traditional subject-matter of comedy. The comedic principles remain rock-solid, even as the story morphs into an odd exploration of disciplinary structures and what Foucault would later call “societies of control.” The effect is quite disconcerting, at the same time uproariously ridiculous and deeply sinister. I’m looking forward to improving my French sufficiently to read these in the original, but until then I’m very grateful to this version for both its insight and its humor.

Historical and Critical Dictionary: Selections (ed. Popkin)

The sampling here is only a small fraction of Bayle’s massive set of entries and annotations, but the bits presented were compelling enough to make me seek out further reading on him. Popkin is interested primarily in Bayle’s status as a figure in the history of philosophical skepticism, and these selections certainly make a compelling case for his inclusion in that genealogy. Bayle comes across here as a brilliant dialectician, capable of working with the full gamut of both Scholastic and Cartesian arguments and frameworks, and using them all to illustrate something like the futility of reason and the importance of faith. His attack on Spinoza comes off as strikingly modern: one of his assaults hinges on the worry that Spinoza has made a terminological substitution without worrying sufficiently about the previously-existing associations of the words (such as “mode”) that he uses. This line culminates in a wonderfully poetic passage where he lays out what he takes to be the brutal comedy of the Spinozist god, engaged always in futile attempts at his own destruction.

I think the historical decline of this format is rather unfortunate. Bayle manages to turn short articles on minor figures into occasions for extended philosophical or historical inquiry, the overall result being a portrait of one exemplary mind at work. He’s very conscious of his own presence throughout the notes, not being afraid to describe his research process or dedicate a few lines to his personal frustration with Josephus. With the increased specialization of intellectual life in the centuries to come, the idea of one person capable of providing his views on the whole scope of his culture’s knowledge slipped out of reach. While that possibilty continues to grow more distant, I would not mind more personal-critical works that eschew the trappings of the “essay” in favor of this older form.

Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon

This was such an influential book for me as a teenager that I have a hard time getting the distance necessary to say anything worthwhile about it. This isn’t helped by my most recent reading being a decidedly uncritical one, as I picked up the book mostly because I was in a rather bad mental state and needed something to distract me with which I was already familiar. A few elements jumped out on this reading: Oedipa’s conservatism, the analogy between the mail systems around which the plot centers and the internet around and through which so much of contemporary American paranoia flows, the role of palimpsestic and ambiguous texts. All these focal points have, of course, been explored ad nauseum both in academia and in endless 4chan threads. The scene in the motel room remains quite funny. I think I more fully appreciated some of Pynchon’s less openly clever prose this time around, which makes me want to revisit his other work to see what I’ve missed there (hopefully reading it in better circumstances than this.)

A Separate Peace, John Knowles

If I wanted an hour and a half of jerking off about Phillips Exeter with five or six well-crafted sentences, I would have stayed in my undergrad dorm. Don’t get the hype.