We now return to my regularly scheduled reading--and the end of all the novels on the Latin-American half of my historical list!
Rayuela [Hopscotch], Julio Cortázar.
1963 novel considered to be the masterpiece by the famed Argentine writer. The titular hopscotch is rendered literally by the text, as the chapters are shuffled all out of linear sequence; you must follow the directions at the end of each chapter in order to know where to "hop" to next. It's a sort of Choose Your Own Adventure book but without any choice. As the introduction explains, the text can be read two ways: reading it straight from Ch. 1-56, at which point the reader can "end with a clear conscience," or begin at Ch. 73 and follow the instructions to hop around until every chapter is accounted for. That is, there are multiple ways to approach this text, and each reading will deliver a different experience; there are in fact multiple potential books contained within this book. (A philosophy that is positively Borjesian--it is a literal "Book of Bifurcating Paths"--which is ironic, given how Cortázar and Borjes were set up in stark opposition to each other in 1980s Argentine literary criticism). What's strange about these competing approaches to this novel (besides the gimmick itself), is the fact that neither approach appears to provide any sort of clear narrative or through-line that coheres together; any narrative unity is instinctively imposed upon the text by the reader, not naturally suggested by the text itself. Really, one does not need to follow any order when encountering this text; one could just as easily mix and match any number of potential readings of this bizarre text. I've noted before the recurring theme of the labyrinth in Latin-American literature, and this is as literally laberintine as it gets; I hadn't realized how much I rely on weighing how many pages are left in my right hand to feel how much of the book is left. When that convention is disrupted, I quickly lost all certainty as to how far along I was in this mammoth, 600+ page tome; I felt as disoriented as the text's characters themselves. On the cast and plot (as much as there is one); the novel is more philosophical that plot driven, and centers on a small group of passionate, unhinged, starving Argentine artists living in post-war Paris. Innumerable references are made to their native Buenos Aires (not to mention their daily ritual of drinking mate), though the action largely centers in Europe. Note to self: revisit ch. 113.
Adios, Happy Homeland!, Ana Menéndez.
2011 short-story collection by the Cuban-American novelist and journalist, with settings that bounce between Cuba proper, New York, New Jersey, and Miami (includes a parody of the Emilio Gonzalez fiasco mixed with the ridiculous self-help book The Secret) all across the 20th century, with a recurring thematic focus upon family history, as well as upon flight--whether in the form of airplanes, parachutes, hot-air balloons, V2 rockets, Laika, and Cold War spacecraft allusions. Added to my list by my Spanish professor, due to the opening and middle stories centering upon Irish expats either in Cuba or expressing tension with the labyrinth of Cuban poets (can the Cubans alone edit their own poetry? Or is there something the Irish can understand about them better than them, too?).
La Guaracha del Macho Camacho [Macho Camacho's Beat], Luis Rafael Sánchez.
1976 Puerto Rican novel. The various vignettes and chapter breaks are structured around a radio DJ singing the praises of the titular Macho Camacho's new hit song "Life is a Phenomenal Thing." In the prose style, with its repetitions, deceptively simple wording, and syntactical tweaks, it reads like a sort of Latin-American Gertrude Stein, drenched in all the sweat and passion of a Puerto Rican traffic jam. This short novel captured the novel's disjointed rhythms in such a manner that it was almost like I was living there again.
La vida breve [A Brief Life], Juan Carlos Onetti.
Famed 1950 novel by the Uruguyan novelist and member of "la generación de 45."
From a British newspaper: "A Brief Life, Onetti's finest novel, begins in bed. Brausen, the main
character, is lying there waiting for his wife to return (after her
mastectomy). Through the wall, Brausen hears noise and laughter from the
woman next door. It is soon obvious that, like all of Onetti's heroes,
he prefers what he can imagine on the other side of the wall to the
difficult reality he has to face on this.
"The hypothesis which sustains A Brief Life is that we are capable of
only a brief period of concentration on the horrors of whatever life we
find ourselves dumped in, before we struggle to get beyond it, seeking
consolation in what for a short while at least seem like the infinite
possibilities offered elsewhere. But this escape brings with it
lingering doubts, plus a sense of guilt, which infect the imagined
world, and convert it into the poisoned reflection of what we were so desperately trying to flee in the first place.
"In his own brief life, Brausen is a failed copywriter in a Buenos
Aires advertising firm. At the same time as he has one ear pressed to
the wall, he is also busily writing a film script, again in the hope of
escaping his grim everyday reality.[...] By the middle of the book, the reader is drawn into three levels of
fiction, which Onetti masterfully conducts in counterpoint. On the
first, we find descriptions of Brausen's 'real life' with his by now
estranged wife and his few friends in the bars and suburbs of Buenos
Aires. Then there is the story of Arce, the character Brausen has
invented for himself in order to infiltrate La Queca's life.
"Arce/Brausen even moves into an office owned by a person called
Onetti - 'the man with the bored face: he didn't smile, wore glasses,
and let it be divined that he only had time for vague scatterbrained
women or intimate friends' - while he starts to live out the scenario of
revenge and self-disgust he has imagined for himself. Events in the
screenplay Brausen is writing become increasingly disturbing; by the
extraordinary final chapters set during Carnival, all three levels have
become so intertwined that the characters of the 'real' fiction mingle
with the 'fictional' ones, and the ending of the book is resonantly
ambiguous." (Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/book-review--listening-through-the-wall-with-a-dirty-realist-a-brief-life--juan-carlos-onetti-tr-hortense-carpentier-serpents-tail-999-pounds-2322028.html).
I've included this synopsis from a 1993 review by the Independent because I honestly don't know what else to say, other than, well, it's an Onetti novel. It contains the same preoccupations with sex, violence, and drugs--it is in effect El Pozo stretched out to full novel length. It features (along with seemingly every other Rio de la Plata writer not named Borjes) the same focus upon desperate men paralyzed into inaction such that their lives can now only be expressed in a never ending stream of philosophic monologues and dialogues (perhaps restoring the primacy of orality). More broadly, it is defined by the same anxieties about epistemology, art, and metafictionality that have obsessed all Spanish art since Cervantes and Velasquez. As for the actual experience of reading the text, it is almost a sort of Tropic of Cancer set in Montevideo. I'll have to re-read this one day when I have far more time to delve into it--though as the title itself warns, life is too brief as it is. (Note to self: revisit pg. 48).
And of course the text's recurring song "La vie est breve" is French.
Pasion de historia y otras historias de pasion [Passion of (Hi)story and Other (Hi)stories of Passion], Ana Lydia Vega.
1987 short-story collection by a highly-awarded Puerto Rican author popular on her home-island but largely unknown stateside, such that there aren't even any English translations of this particular work. And of course she is a former French professor at UPR-Rio Piedras, and the opening story features a Puerto Rican in France (we just can't seem to escape that countries' orbit, can we). Noted for her Puerto Rican dialect and good humor, paired with a strong sense of ethical awareness. Like so much of Spanish literature (and as her own title indicates), she is preoccupied with the blurring between fiction and history, particularly with exploring how "official" documents can actually de-stabilize our sense of concrete understanding--that is, the official, by its very nature, just may be the most fictional of all. Not for nothing is "history" and "story" the same word in Spanish.
El
País de Cuatro Pisos [The Country of Four Floors], José Luis González.
Important 1979 essay that attempts to diagnose the failure of the Puerto Rican independence movement. Luis González's argument is primarily class-based, as he argues that 1) Puerto Ricans by and large have simply "not wanted" independence; and 2) the reason for that is because most of the leading figures of Puerto Rican independence have been conspicuously light-skinned, of aristocratic origin, and have privileged Spanish culture against the U.S. But to the masses of Puerto Ricans who are of African-slave, Indigenous, or otherwise impoverished origins, such calls for a "return to Spain" are anathema, for a "Spanish" Puerto Rico is one where they are enslaved on Haciendas without voice in government. As such, they would rather try out their lot with the U.S. which, for all its long, brutal history of racism and imperialism, still at least has traditions of abolitionism and Civil Rights movements.
El Pozo [The Pit], Juan Carlos Onetti
The legend is that Uruguayan-author Onetti wrote this 1939 short-story/novella during a single weekend when he was trying to quit smoking, and it shows. Filthy habitations, prostitutes, disjointed narrative (if you can even call it that), fights with friends, lonely expats on cold Alaskan nights, reports of foreign wars and other misery on Earth--this is a dispatch from a man at rock bottom, in "the pits", someone in the worst throws of addiction recovery.
::
And that pittance was all I got read this week. This was the week I finally had to return to Iowa City, you see, and the packing and final goodbyes to friends and family and the multi-day drive and the unpacking and the work meetings and etc, etc, meant that the breakneck pace of reading I've desperately kept up all summer long has finally suffered a sustained interruption. I'd say that maybe I needed the break, but 20 hours in a car I also slept in has not left me feeling particularly rejuvenated.
But this is too complainey--all things considered, I had an objectively amazing summer, and I should be doubly proud of all the reading I got done when I consider all the adventures I had; and perhaps now that this summer is already rapidly receding into the rear-view mirror, now is as good a time as any to at last reflect these experiences before they fade from my grasp.
Yellowstone
The summer began in late May with a visit to Yellowstone with two old college friends--we had in fact roomed together exactly 10 summers earlier at BYU-Provo, which was enough to throw me through a loop; and that without compounding the fact that the last time I visited Yellowstone was the summer of 2007, when I was a senior at BYU-I, on a double-date with my then-girlfriend and a work-friend. When I consider that the former friendships have lasted so long and so strong, while there is scarcely a person from that double-date--or even from my whole entire Rexburg days--with whom I am still in contact beyond the thinnest of facebook connections...and when I consider that on top of that, the last time I'd been to Yellowstone before then was in '98 when I was 15 and awkward and shy and my Mom was still alive, and I picked up a yellow rock that I did not have the eco-awareness to return to the Park till '07, which even clear back then I already considered to be such an unspeakably long time...well, it doesn't exactly make me feel young.
But then, when you've been living in the endless flat expanses of the Great Plains for 9 months, any return to the mountains is a welcome one. The mountains, after all, are blissfully indifferent to whatever you're going through right now, they don't even care if you call them mountains, or even try to differentiate them from the whole wide earth to begin with. The longer I live, the more I realize the absolute necessity of visiting places that remind you how small you really are (Yellowstone National Park alone is larger then some eastern states, than some European countries), of how much bigger the world is than you, and how pitiful your concerns are against the stunning beauty of a Caldera that could wipe out all of human civilization in a single apocalyptic eruption. Existentially speaking, we are all dumb bison, chomping grass atop an active volcano, biding its time and ours...
Cork, Ireland
As good as it was to revisit Yellowstone, it was there that I realized that all I've been doing since I first moved to Iowa is re-visit places--re-visiting Nauvoo, New York, Kansas City, Adam-Ondi-Ahman, Utah, Washington, Oregon, Puerto Rico, and now Yellowstone. I suppose Chicago was new--but then I promptly re-visited it to death. Revisiting can be good, but I've now realized that if all one does is revisit, well then, there's no faster way to grow old. Post-Yellowstone, I decided it was high time I start visiting new places, and feeling young again.
Fortunately, a paper of mine had been accepted by a conference held at University College Cork in Ireland. It was for SILAS, the Society for Irish and Latin American Studies--it was both reassuring to know that my dissertation topic wasn't as insane as I'd feared, as well as a tad depressing to know I wasn't nearly as original as I thought. A combination of a buddy pass from my flight attendant girlfriend and a scant $600 from the University is the only way I could afford to visit the Emerald Isle on a graduate stipend--but I figured if I was going to dissertate on Irish literature, well then I'd sure better visit Ireland, shouldn't I!
On the Emerald Isle--the moniker is deserved. The island is as green as you've dreamed. The accent really does sound like it belongs to another language. Cork itself feels like a smaller version of Seattle, save with a far weightier sense of history about it--but with the same exhilarating sense of possibility when the sun at last breaks the cloud cover, bringing the whole island to life.
My one regret is that I had 3 days there--I was only there for a conference after all, and again, my graduate finances did not exactly permit for a lengthier grande tour. Nevertheless, I still did all that one can do in Cork--played the bells and ascended the steeple at St. Ann's Cathedral; really, went inside every Cathedral I could; passed by the Butter Museum, with the rousing New York Times endorsement of "It really is worth the stop!" (we didn't go in); hung out with hostel mates I may never see again, like a real traveler; evaded pan-handlers, explored downtown, walked along the River Lee; and what was my pride and joy, but I visited legendary Castle Blarney, and kissed the Blarney stone itself! As the limestone stuck to my lips along with the million others who had preceded me, that's when I felt--I was finally traveling again!
The whole thing felt meant to be, right down to the buddy pass--which can just as easily mean missed flights, sleeping in airports, and middle-seats in the back--got me into First Class this time! My friends, if ever you needed greater evidence of the need for revolution, then consider how the 1% live: the seats lean allll the way back in First Class! I didn't even realize this; when the kind gentleman next to me realized this was my first Transatlantic First Class flight, he enthused: "Ooooh, man, you are in for a treat!" He then showed me the button that transformed my bed into a bona fide bed! It was, by a full order of magnitude, the best night's sleep over the Atlantic I have ever had.
Springville, Utah
Obviously I'm mostly just hitting the highlights; the truth is, most of my summer was much more prosaic. I mostly read from my comps list like mad (as shown by the majority of blog posts from this summer), while I crashed on my Aunt's air-mattress in Springville, Utah, and paid rent on my old place in Iowa City (unsurprisingly, small college towns in the middle of nowhere are impossible to sublet in the summer). Besides a general yearning to escape the corn fields and see the mountains again, my motivation for relocating to the Utah Valley was a desire to actually date my girlfriend in person, to try and have a relationship with each other, and not just with our phones.
I was initially going to adjunct at SLCC like old times--but ironically, a sign of the improving economy is the fact that fewer folks are enrolling in community colleges now, and so my class was dropped last minute due to underenrollment. (Geez, an improving job market and cheap gas and my friends with pre-existing conditions can get health coverage now? Thanks, Obama!). Consequently, a cousin got me a part-time job at a local hardware store, so that my finances wouldn't take quite as a big a hit during my summer of studying.
It was neither the best nor the worst job I've ever had. I suppose it was humbling in a good way, as I was reminded that there are innumerable types of intelligence out there, as shown by how my voluminous knowledge of world literature was utterly useless in helping customers find the right screw on aisle 34, or for explaining how to fix their sprinkler system. For reals, if there were advances degrees for home maintenance, then the managers at that store would be distinguished faculty.
I had been there a month and had finally memorized the basic layout of the store, when I was then moved out into the lumber yard. I actually preferred that position--loading 2x4s and cement bags into trucks and trailers strangely felt more manly, more writerly, more Steinbeckian, than merely restocking merchandise. And if there was a lull in customers and I was alone, I would often surreptitiously pull out a copy of Carpentier and keep reading.
On my last day there, near the end of July, I wondered my way through the the wood stacks, and took in the dry heat and the hovering Wasatch mountains, and I realized--as almost-aggresively unremarkable as this moment was, it was a moment that would never happen again, and the unbearable lightness of being overwhelmed me.
Lake Arrowhead, California
Over the 4th of July weekend, I drove with my gf and her younger sister to their hometown of Lake Arrowhead, California, for a family reunion. We made one impulsive stop in Las Vegas to ride a roller coaster, for which the gf has an incurable weakness.
It can be a little nerve-wracking to Meet The Family, but they were all gracious and welcoming folk, so non-such Ben Stiller shenanigans ensued. Rather, what struck me most was just the staggering amount of money that surrounds that tiny little man-made lake. We went on a little boat tour, where we saw vacation-mansions owned by Hollywood stars, Mafiosos, and politicians. The place is a resort-town with a service economy, possessing every expense and excess associated with southern California. It caused me to realize why my gf could be so generous with her money even in the days of her poverty--she's from a part of Cali where money is no object.
Iowa City--2 Days
Speaking of which, I let her talk me into just flying into Cedar Rapids the end of July and renting a car to move my things to my new place, rather than just drive out to Iowa City and be done with it, as would have been more financially responsible. Nevertheless, it somehow felt right to do it this way; the car rental was even upgraded to a minivan without extra charge, making the move infinitely easier.
Despite the hassle, I didn't mind moving--my place had been bought out by Apts. Near Campus, who had already announced that they would raise rent to a preposterous $800/mo next lease, as though we lived in downtown Chicago or Brooklyn, and not friggin' Iowa City! It's an open secret that Apts. Near Campus is in cahoots with at least two other local companies flouting anti-monopoly laws despite being owned by the same 3 brothers, and that they're trying to corner the entire downtown market. There is already a class-action lawsuit against one of them, and no one will shed one solitary tear for whatever happens to them.
Nevertheless, I did feel sad moving from the place itself--despite feeling a little dated, a little tired...it was still mine. I was caught off guard by how much I enjoyed living alone, and couldn't believe it had taken me so long to finally try it! My new place is far cheaper and I like my roommates (I'm even living with fellow BYU-I alums again, of all things!), but I'm already missing the sense of freedom, independence, and rejuvenating solitude that came with flying solo.
Yet what actually touched me most about moving that July day--what hit me harder than the humidity and the cicada's screaming and the unbearable lightness of being--was the same feeling I had my last day at Sunroc hardware, that this is a moment that will never repeat. And what's more, even as the years continue to fly by fast and faster as we age, that a year is still a full year--case in point, a year ago, I was single, Kristina a fading memory after a nasty breakup; I was still only half-way through coursework; I feared the coming semester of 4 classes. Now a year later K. and I were back together, I was done with course-work, I was comping and facing the real possibility that I would be ABD by Christmas. A lot can still happen in one year, and does, though it may never happen again.
Boston
But now I already knew the cure for such melancholies--it was time once more to travel somewhere new! K. was first stationed in Boston when she was hired by Delta, and had wanted to show me the place after we got back together. I also had a cousin out there I never saw outside of family reunions, and she and her husband graciously put us up for the weekend.
What can I say? I can safely add Boston to parts of America I wouldn't mind living in! Even the LDS Chapels feel New Englandy. It's almost like a European city, in how unique the architecture feels, how expertly it combines the ancient with the new, how the aura of history waifs through it. We saw the charming quaintness of Harvard and the bizarre Seussian buildings of MIT. We laughed at the irony of how Walden Pond is now carefully fenced off, paved, and regulated (you know, like Thoreau would've wanted). We took the tour of the Henry Wordsworth Longfellow home. We learned why Fenway gets to call itself "America's Favorite Ballpark". We wondered through the Boston Commons, walked along the pier, explored Quincy market, ate some of the most expensive seafood of my life--I don't throw around the term "Seattle-esque" lightly, but when I apply it to Boston, I mean it as the highest praise.
Mt. Timpanogos
Go figure, but a solid summer of reading means you don't get much exercise, and you don't get much hiking done. I knew I needed to drive back to Iowa City next week, and it pained me to have spent 3 months in the mountains here without hiking once. Well, we made up for all of that in one fell-swoop by hiking Timp. Goodness, I was not psychologically or physically prepared for that hike! We were initially going to do the midnight hike and watch the sunrise over the Utah valley, but overslept, which I was bummed about--until we were at mile 6 at the summit still taunted us, and I was a thousand times thankful that we weren't doing that hike in the dark! All of you have done the sunrise hike, you have my complete respect--and you all are insane.
It also didn't help my self-esteem when we were passed 3 times by the septuagenarian who now hold the record for 700+ ascents of Timp; he hiked the summit twice just that day. For fun.
The views were indeed spectacular, but boy did we pay for 'em. We made it back to the van with only minutes of daylight to spare.
Engagement
For an event that one awaits for so many years--that has such an oppressive weight of expectation surrounding it--the actual moment felt very natural, simple, calm, matter-of-fact, like it was just supposed to happen. I actually preferred it this way, as a moment of peace, of quiet assurance, not as some great sound and fury that could have signified nothing. Beginning the week before, she knew it was coming. She initially hoped it would be atop Timp; I even almost packed the ring up, but I (accurately) intuited that I wouldn't want to be too exhausted to enjoy it. Then we went to the Art Museum...and that's all. Then we visited the Temple...and that's all. She said she wanted to be surprised, so by golly, she would be surprised! Finally it was my very last day in Salt Lake; we visited Liberty Park up in Salt Lake, where we went on our very first date. We crossed the plank-wood bridge onto that little Gazebo'd island, to find the little bench where we first cuddled.
Of course, the bench was suddenly gone now--time escapes us, and moments cannot be revisited, which as you've seen has been my recurring theme this summer. But no matter, this time I was prepared; I quickly dropped to a knee and presented her with my dead mother's ring. She of course said yes.
Now I'm back in Iowa City, and it's stranger than ever to be here, now that I'm done with course work. Yes, yes, comps are coming up, which means independent study hours and thus tuition wavers from teaching--but I've also realized that I've only spent 2 years max at every college I've ever attended--Centralia College, BYU-I, Utah. To be at at Iowa longer than 2 years feels very strange indeed. But what helps is that I did not return here empty-handed, that I'm no longer living in the past, that I already look forward to the ever-coming future.
The Unicorn From The Stars and Other Plays, William Butler Yeats.
Yeats'
reputation as a poet looms so justifiably large over the 20th century
that it is easy to forget that he was also a playwright--that in fact
that was how he actually paid the bills early in his career. Here are
the selected plays of his included on my comps list:
"Unicorn From the Stars"
1907 three-act play co-authored with Lady Gregory. Young Martin falls into a trance, and awakened prematurely by Father John, announces a vision of unicorns breaking all in their path. A stray word from a beggar causes him to interpret the vision as a call to arms, for Ireland to not only break English law, but all law in general in a glorious anarchy, destroying all the in the world that can be destroyed, for only the soul cannot be destroyed, destroying all that stands between us and God. He begins by destroying the carriage he had been commissioned to build for the visiting King of England himself, and in one night leads 200 men to burn down a Mansion. He leads others to forsake the mundane "work" of this world, to eschatologically seek only the things of the next; it is an implicit rejection of the Protestant work ethic for an Edenistic world of reverie. The play thus far fits in comfortably with the apocalyptic Fin de siècle.
The next day Martin falls into another trance; this time Father John refuses to awaken him prematurely. Now when Martin at last stirs, he has the complete vision; it is not to destroy this world physically, but within our own minds that the world must be destroyed. He is accused of treason by his followers, but Father John restrains them. His followers in turn defend him when constables arrive to arrest Martin for arson; a gun goes off in the confusion, killing Martin. In his death-throws, Martin declares to Father John that we are mistaken about heaven--it is not a place of peace, but of battle, continuous, glorious battle.
It appears from this play that even at this juncture, Yeats was already losing faith in the capacity of armed rebellion to effect any real social change; little did he know that the Easter Uprising would occur in less than a decade.
"Cathleen Ni Houlihan"
Highly
nationalistic 1902 one-act play co-written with Lady Gregory, centered
upon the 1798 Irish revolt. The woman in question is a mythical symbol
of Irish Nationalism; she appears in the play as an old beggar at the
house of a newly-wed couple, who ends up calling the groom to take up
arms in revolt.
"At The Hawk's Well"
One-act 1917 play, Yeats' attempt at Japanese Noh theatre (so perhaps Jameson's choice to integrate Japan into his Modernist Papers is
not such a stretch after all). Centers on an adventure of Cuchulain,
the mythical hero of Ulster, his encounter with an Old Man standing
futile watch of the miraculous waters of immortality, at a dry well that have eluded him
for 50 years, and of his battle with a supernatural Hawk-woman who
carries a curse of violence and discontent which causes him to abandon
the Old Man and miss the bubbling of the well yet again (apropos for the
then-recent Easter Uprising).
"The Words Upon the Window Pane"
1930
one-act play likewise arguably indebted to Noh theatre; centered upon
Yeats' well-known affinity for seances. Although Yeats was a
Spiritualist true believer, he nevertheless surprisingly leaves room for
the skeptical in this dramatic portrayal of the sort of seance he
doubtless participated in many times. The spirits channeled upon this
particular encounter are those of the famed Anglo-Irish cynic Jonathan
Swift and his lover Stella, as they resume their old quarrel about
Swift's refusal to have more children, and thus add to the horrors of
the human race (almost Beckettian in its despair). I wanted to include
this play on my comps list due to its attitudes towards the presence of
the dead, far closer to Latin-America than the neighboring English.
The Rising of the Moon, Lady Gregory [Isabella Augusta Persse].
A charming little one-act comedy written by Yeats' co-playwright/partner in crime, Lady Gregory, from 1907. It involves an encounter between an escaping Republican agitator in disguise and a policeman with covert, unadmitted-even-to-himself Republican sympathies. The title refers to
a popular nationalistic ballad that the former intentionally mis-sings, prompting the policeman to start singing the correct words himself.
The Complete Plays, John Millington Synge.
"The Playboy of the Western World"
So this is the infamous play, huh--the one that incited bona fide riots in Dublin when it first premiered in January 1907, the ones immortalized by Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and that Yeats himself referred to nearly 20 years later when he lashed out against protestors of O'Casey's plays: "You have disgraced yourselves again! Is this to be the recurring celebration of the arrival of Irish genius?"
But is this play genius? It's certainly a fun play--one that's slightly risqué even by today's standards: a young drifter arrives in a provincial Irish town with a mopy story of having just murdered his tyrannical father. The novelty of a patricide causes all the young women of the town to fall in love with him, and further comic mishaps ensue when the actual Father--not dead at all!--arrives in town to taunt his son for the weak blow he gave. This causes the town to turn on the young man, who, to defend his reputation, must violently assault his Father again. The townfolk now realize that their goading has made them accessories to murder, and begin to lynch him before the authorities can make an inquest. But then the Father improbably gets up once more, and he and his son drunkenly reconcile and leave town together. A cowardly scholar who's fiancee had fallen in love with the drifter tries to propose to her once more, but she shrugs him off, bemoaning that she has just lost the "last playboy of the western world."
Ok, so the play's not a terribly flattering portrait of provincial Irish life--but it's clearly told in good fun, with a comedic ending and a colorful cast of characters. But I guess once you've suffered through centuries of English invaders justifying their brutal colonization by characterizing your people as backwards and barbaric--and if you're then in the midst of a high cultural revival meant to repudiate those stereotypes in the midst of your fight for homerule--then I suppose tempers can a little high.
"The Well of the Saints"
Another three-act comedy from Synge, written in 1905. Taking place "a century or more ago", a blind couple of beggars, who have been tricked into thinking they are beautiful by the cruel townsfolk, miraculously get their sight back from a traveling Saint. Hijinks and harsh disillusionment ensue, causing them to reject the Saint when their blindness returns and he offers to cure them again.
"Riders to the Sea"
A one-act tragedy written in 1904; set on the isle of Donegal, there is no real plot, except that the last of an old widow's sons is killed by the ocean. There is no real antagonist, except the sea and God. The widow even has second-sight by which to warn her sons, but the tragedy is compounded by how useless it is against the hubris of man and the cruelty of the sea itself.
"In Shadow of the Glen"
A one-act comedy from 1903; a tramp comes upon a young widow in a barn, dressing the body of her deceased, older husband. She goes inside to meet her young lover, whereupon the old man wakes up and reveals to the shocked tramp that he's just testing his young wife. When she returns to the barn to hear her lover's proposals for marriage, he gets up and banishes her from his property. The tramp takes umbrage, and offers to go with the young lady and show her a life of freedom. After they leave, the confused lover and old man sit down for drinks. This is a strange play.
"The Tinker's Wedding"
A one-act, Carnivalesque comedy from 1909 but that could've been written by Chaucer, wherein a young couple try to bribe a priest into marrying them for less than he usually accepts; and when her Mom steals the money to go drinking and so the Priest refuses to perform the wedding, they tie him up in a burlap sack until he agrees not to press charges. Also a strange play.
"Deirdre of the Sorrows"
Then after all that slapstick, we have a sober 1910 historical tragedy, taking place in the ancient times of pre-christian Ireland. Young princess Deidre is betrothed to the aged Conchubar, King of Ulster; but she is free-spirited, and runs off with her lover Naoise, and they live secretly in peace for 7 years. At last the King offers to at last make amends, but he betrays them, and has Naoise killed. Deidre then kills herself in order to deny the King his prize. Very melodramatic.
The Modernist Papers, Frederic Jameson.
This 2007 essay collection, corralling together articles written on the loose banner of "Modernism" from the '70s clear up to 2006, finds renowned cultural critic Frederic Jameson backing off from the Marxist analysis and Postmodernism that has defined so much of his career, to instead narrow down his focus onto close readings of some of the canonical writers of the earlier Modernist period. The work is intended as a sort of companion piece to his 2002 study A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present. Unlike some of the other works on my special topic reading list, this massive volume makes little effort to interrogate the "canon," neither exploring how it was formed, nor how it was defined, nor how or even if it should be defined. His one foray away from Eurocentrism is a fascinating section on Japanese writers of the post-WWII period (though even there, his focus is still upon First World imperial powers).
The focus of these various essays is on individual writers, not upon any sort of cohesive or encompassing conception of the era as a whole. With the exception of Japan, he hits on most of the standard players one comes to expect from any sort of Modernist study: Joyce, Proust, Pound, Stein, Beckett, Mallarme, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Thomas Mann, William Carlos Williams, Kafka, Wallace Stevens; the Japanese novelists Kojin Karatani, Natsume Soseki, Oe Kenzaburo, and the German novelist Peter Weiss are his only real fresh contributions to the field Modernist studies. Jameson's project here (inasmuch as he has a project) is not to break new ground, but to carefully analyze the broken ground itself.
I'll admit he almost lost me when he proclaimed "Ithaca" one of the two most boring chapters in Ulysses. Blasphemy, that extended satire of catechism is a delight to read; Joyce himself called it his favorite chapter to write, and it shows! Why won't Jameson let himself like nice things?
Paradiso, José Lezama Lima.
Nightwood if it were set in Cuba; Djuna Barnes as a Latin-American writer--and not just because of its bold-for-the-era eroticism (including some of the most pretentiously-written sex scenes you will ever encounter) and a philosophy-drenched homosexuality. (Really, in terms of genre expectation, this novel should be approached more as a philosophic text than as a straight narrative). Rather, this massive novel can't help but remind of Nightwood due to its labyrinthine prose, written in the same sort of dense, dreamlike, disjointed, difficult-to-follow neo-baroque style as Nightwood, with a similarly strange fixation upon over-literate European culture and aristocratic creature comforts (between this and Carpentier, what is it with post-Castro Cuban novelists and their obsession with Europe? Shouldn't the island's isolated geography, Afro-Caribe heritage, and 1959 Revolution leave them the best positioned to break free from the Continent altogether? Or do those factors paradoxically tie them to the Old World all the more desperately?).
TS Eliot had written in Nightwood's preface "that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it", and that statement is double so of Paradiso, which is the sole novel of an actual poet, José Lezama Lima. Like a poem, it is a text that one experiences more than understands. A turn-of-the-century Cuban Künstlerroman published in 1966, following the tale of young Cuban aristocrat José Cemí, an aspiring scholar/poet--the novel ends with him ready to begin. First published in 1966, the novel was celebrated by the likes of Vargas as well as Julio Cortázar, although the latter (reportedly with Lezima's blessing) made many "corrections" to the first edition--primarily grammatical, though given the great dialectical differences between Caribbean and South American Spanish, those corrections may not have been "minor" at all.
Note: Pg. 234 has a fascinating juxtaposition of a "James Joyce's Goethe" and "a sixth-century BC Chinese Sartre", establishing an interweaving labyrinth of disparate literary traditions that includes the Irish.
Tres tristes tigres [Three Sad Tigers, but usually translated Three Trapped Tigers], Guillermo Cabrera Infante.
Can you tell that the Spanish professor on my committee is Cuban? Because here comes yet another Cuban novel!
But what a novel--it is in many ways the perfect pairing with Paradiso. Whereas the latter is all aristocratic privilege and mellifluous philosophizing, this text is all about the poor, the working class, the dregs of Havana society. Interweaving the tales of the various denizens and tourists inhabiting cabaret society in 1950s pre-Castro Cuba, this novel is the wild philosophizing of the gutter--and features the dazzling experimentation of the jazz club! Cabrera Infante had once said "It's not a bad idea to read this novel out loud" (lending further creedence to the connection between traditional orality and experimentalism similarly found in Irish Modernism and Postmodernism), but he even undermines even that suggestion in the breath-taking mid-section of the novel, where pictograms, visual poems, footnotes, multiple revisions of the same story with lines crossed-out, blacked-out pages, whited-out pages (references to Castro censorship?) etc, and other unvocalizable elements, all collage together in the same wild chaos as the nightclub. These wild characters are fragmenting and spiraling out of control (sometimes literally--such as in the untimely death of the obese lounge singer La Estrella), and the text spirals out of control with it.
This novel, with its endless puns, wordplay, and stream of conscious, has been called the Cuban Ulysses--and that distinction is heightened by the fact that James Joyce, as well as TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Proust, Baudelaire, Kafka, Faulkner, Hemingway, etc, (goodness, was the Anglo-Modernist canon already so established by the mid-60s?), with their names often transliterated into Cuban dialect, are all liberally cited throughout--again, along with his contemporaries Lezama Lima and Carpentier, the Cubans seem intent on out-Europeaning the Europeans. (Cabrera Infante even performs pastiche of his contemporaries in a section fictionalizing literary responses to the then-recent assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico City). The Joyce Ulysses comparisons are openly courted and played with throughout this meta-text.
And though no mention is made of his contemporary Becket, the closing line "hes shoving it in hes rummaging in my belly and pulling my guts out he wants to see what color they are for sure cant go no further" is of a piece with The Unnameables' closing "I can't go on, I'll go on."
Note: keeping the Irish theme alive, pg. 384 contains an open allusion to Yeats' "The Second Coming." The narrator appears to wish to draw a direct connection between the insane violence of the Irish Civil Wars with this 1965 text Post-Revolution (Cabrera Infante initially supported the Castro, until his magazine was censored, then he went into exile and became the regime's bitterest critic).
Note: pg. 396-7 feature the French once more; and again on pg. 465-6.
Note: pg. 413 Discussion of exile polyglot identity with discussion of a Cuban born on a U.S. UFC ship sailing off Guatemala under a Liberian flag...
Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930, Ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane.
This massive 600-odd page collection from 1976 corrals together essays that cover the full spectrum of European Modernism, by country (with a primary focus upon the variations of Modernism found in England, France, Italy, Germany, and Russia, although Latin-America and North America all get a little more of their due this time around), by movement (the French Symbolists, Naturalists, Surrealists, and Dadaists, English Imagism and Vorticism, German Expressionism, the Futurists both Italian and Russian, etc), by historical time period (tracing the roots of Modernism back through the Symbolists, the Aesthetics, the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, the Romantics, and even clear back to the 18th century; there is also much debate about when, exactly, Modernism began in each country, and how historical events such as WWI, the consolidation of Italy, the industrialization of Germany, the rise of communism and fascism, etc., influenced and/or ended each respective movement), and by genre (poetry, plays, and novels; intriguingly, cinema receives little attention). Some of these essays are brilliant, others are skimmable, but none can claim this collection isn't breath-takingly thorough.
Nevertheless, there are some shortcomings: although the editors perhaps hoped to avoid accusations of euro-centrism by putting "European" right in the subtitle (thereby narrowing its focus), the European focus elides the fact that Europe had effectively conquered the world at this point--and that art from Africa, China, Japan, and India was already having verifiable impact upon these Western artists (e.g. Ezra Pound). Many connections are made between literature and art, but no images are included in any of these pages to assist the reader in making these comparisons. Each of these essays presumes the reader already possesses an in-depth knowledge of Modernist art; the goal of this collection is not introduction, but synthesis.
The book is excellent at establishing how the invention of new technologies (automobiles, photography, telephones, radio, automation, etc), the influence of Freud, Marx, Ibsen, Baudelaire, Malarme, and Nietzsche, and the devastating impact of WWI, were all instrumental in influencing the radical Modernist movement, which were all things I'd heard since an undergrad. I don't know if these book was instrumental in establishing these assumptions, or simply in communicating them.
Modernism: A Short Introduction, David Ayers.
Oh Hugh Kenner, why can't all Modernist scholars be as delightful as you? The more I read Modernist criticism, the more I miss you.
This 2004 tome is much shorter (134 pages, not counting references) than Modernism, but I found it that much more difficult to get through, and it stayed with me less than a day. Don't get me wrong, it is competently written, argued, researched, and cited. But that's just it: it is written in that dreadfully dull academese that takes a very fascinating, revolutionary, and colorful cast of characters and insists upon analyzing them as dryly as possible. The focus narrows down exclusively to British Modernism. What's more, a lot of the information here (the tensions between the Imagists and the Vorticists; the influence of Italian Futurism; etc) is covered much more fully in Modernism; it's goal really is to be "A Short Introduction", not a synthesis.
Despite these quibbles, there are interesting insights to be gleaned here: I appreciated his exposition on how Wallace Stevens both continued and broke off from the Romantics. I was genuinely intrigued by Ayers' argument that Jazz was initially seen to be a sign of the automation of society--as opposed to a strategy for organic liberation, as it is commonly perceived today; the automation of human beings, such that even sex is lifeless, became a huge preoccupation for D.H. Lawrence, Ayers argues. And though his analysis of Joyce largely side-steps much of the excellent Post-Colonial readings that were already a decade old when he published this, I did find insightful his exploration of how the topic of love is treated in the works of James Joyce, as something that must be experienced, not self-detached from. I also appreciated his nuanced analysis of the interplay between art and social class by means of the works of Virginia Woolf.
Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern, Janet Lyon.
This 1999 tome purports to be a study of the "undertheorized" genre of the manifesto. Although it's on my Modernist reading list and has "Modern" right there in the subtitle, the focus of this book is actually upon the genre of the feminist manifesto specifically as it has been deployed throughout Western history. The first 2 chapters in fact focus primarily upon the earliest feminist manifestos of English Civil War and the French Revolution--that is, Lyon utilizes the term "modern era" very broadly here. It is chapters 3 and 4 that centers upon the "Modernism" in the literary period sense; and even there, it is specifically to highlight the tensions that suffragists and feminist had with the deeply chauvinistic Vorticist and Imagist (despite H.D.'s prominence in the latter) movements helmed by the arch-chauvinist Ezra Pound--and again against the proto-fascists of the contemporaneous Italian Futurists. Chapter 5 then moves on to examine some of the more famous (and infamous) manifestos of Second Wave Feminism that cropped up in the 1960s and '70s.
Throughout all these comparisons, Janet Lyon interrogates the ironic exclusionary nature of "Universal" rhetoric that was deployed particularly in France, how Modernist-era feminists often flipped sexist rhetoric against their opponents, how they sometimes reified the very gendered stereotypes they were seeking to eliminate, and how manifestoes can be claimed as uniquely "modern" by the immediacy--the "nowness"--of their militancy.
The Concept of Modernism, Astradur Eysteinsson [Ástráður Eysteinsson].
A 1990 study by a fellow Iowa graduate alumni, an Icelandic fellow who got his PhD clear back in 1987, and is now Dean of the Humanities at the University of Iceland. Small world, bro!
As the title indicates, this 242-page book examines how the concept of Modernism with a capital-M came to be formulated post-WWII. This is a meta-analysis of how we as scholars perceive "Modernism," not of the works themselves. As many already know, the writers we now anthologize as "Modernists" did not actually call themselves Modernists--they may have on occasion called themselves "modern", lower-case-M, in the sense of being contemporary, or up to date--but "Modernism" only arose as a term by which to classify early-20th-century Anglo-literature in the years following WWII. Eysteinsson (perhaps as an Icelander afforded a more outsider perspective) chronicles how "Modernism" was initially a term utilized exclusively in the Anglosphere, and only relatively recently has the rest of Europe (largely due to the hegemonic influence of U.S. scholarship) begun applying the term to their own pre-WWII lit as well. (e.g. Germany used to largely just refer to the era as that of the Expressionists, France as the Symbolists, etc).
Eyesteinsson traces the genesis of how the term "Modernism" became formulated and conceptualized. As with all terms, it has a messy genealogy; were the Modernists anti-traditional or secretly crypto-tradional? Revolutionary or reactionary? Synonymous with the Avant-garde or opposed to it, or an outgrowth of it, or Avant-garde once it becomes canonized? Opposed to Realism or a reformulation of it? Was it all only Post Hoc conceptualized so that the Postmodernists (who did self-consciously name themselves) could have something to define themselves against? And what, exactly, is the genre's defining features if some of its most notorious elements--stream of conscious, metafiction, etc--can be traced clear back to Madame Bovary, or even Tristam Shandy?
The answers, of course, are yes to everything, depending on who you leave in and/or leave out.
Note to self: I may need to read Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle (1931) and Joseph Frank's "Spatial Form in Modern Literature" (1945) for my special topic. I'm also still chewing over Adorno's claim that how art disrupts society just by existing.
The Difficulties of Modernism, Leonard Diepeveen.
The title of this 2003 study is similarly straightforward: the author tracks how the single defining trait of Modernism is, well, it's difficulty--how Joyce and Stein and Eliot and Pound et al have defied and infuriated their readers from the beginning. This book is a history of the reception of Modernism, not of the works themselves, in other words.
In refreshingly lucid prose, Diepeveen chronicles how difficulty was commonly perceived as the single dominant characteristic of the period, and that all this debate on the nature and future of art was centered primarily upon this question of difficulty. As Diepeveen tells the tale, the battle-lines were starkly drawn in early-20th Britain and North America, with both the modernists and the traditionalists digging in their heals, lobbing vicious insults, and making grandiose, hyperbolic claims about how the other side was not merely making bad art, but was bringing about the decadence and downfall of Western civilization. There's a very colorful cast of characters on both sides of the question, and it's a surprisingly entertaining cat-fight.
The text pushes into the dawn of the Postmodern period, as well, to track how the question of difficulty in many ways still defines our debates about literature. One interesting moment from the book that has stayed with me is a history of the initial reception of Beckett's Waiting for Godot. It should surprise no one to learn that the play enraged theatre-goers across both Europe and North America when it first debuted; what may surprise is that the first rapturous audience the production encountered was at San Quentin Prison in California--it seems prisoners endlessly awaiting for a parole that never comes would in fact be the ideal audience for Beckett. The argument, then, is that it is actually intellectuals who find Modernist works too "difficult", that is, those too over-educated in genre tropes and expectations for their own good--that it is those who go in with the fewest assumptions and preconceived notions of what art should be that are the ideal audience for engaging a modernist work on its own terms, not theirs.
These various attempts to rehabilitate High Modernism by claiming that it really is accessible (I recall reading William Gaddis' JR last Christmas break, wherein the intro made the repeated--and frankly dubious--claim that this 700+ page small-print text composed almost entirely out of dialogue with 0 chapter breaks is actually easy to read) is interesting to me, because Diepeveen concludes by claiming that difficulty ultimately won, at least in the University. He cites Willa Cather and Robert Frost as examples of writers who have to be "recuperated" into the Modernist canon by scholars claiming that they were actually "deceptively simple", that there really is a hidden complexity to their works that renders them worth reading--as though something needs to be difficult to have value. (Though as someone who has sat through far too many uncritical college commencement readings of "The Road Not Taken" as exactly the sort of happy-go-lucky poem that it is clearly not, I'm generally OK with promulgating "deceptively simple" readings of Frost).
Diepeveen opens the book with a quote from TS Eliot, "Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult", and especially in his recounting of the Twisted Arc fiasco of the 1980s does spend some ink defending difficulty as a virtue; but seeing as how much difficulty has been privileged above all other aesthetic values in our day and age, he finally concludes with, "Eliot was just wrong."
