Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
White Noise by Don Delillo
The Sun Also Rises by Earnest Hemingway
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh
Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
The Defense by Vladimir Nabokov
The Eye by Vladimir Nabokov
Despair by Vladimir Nabokov
Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Vladimir Nabokov
Bend Sinister by Vladimir Nabokov
Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
Animal Man by Grant Morrison
The Dying Animal by Philip Roth
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Tao Te Ching: A New English Version by Stephen Mitchell (12/08)
This is the critique to which one must be sensitive when reading Western treatments of Eastern religions such as Taoism:
Or to quote Wikipedia, "Russell Kirkland argues that [versions such as Mitchell's Tao Te Ching] are based on Western Orientalist fantasies and represent the colonial appropriation of Chinese culture" (Tao Te Ching).
This is a meaningful scholarly critique, going right back to Said and Orientalism. It cannot be dismissed lightly.
Mitchell is a well-know translator of ancient religious texts and modern poetry - I grew up around his translations of Rilke and remember selections of his Duino Elegies to be very beautiful. He favors a free "poetic" approach in his translations - in support, he quotes Johnson: "We must try its effect as an English poem. That is the way to judge of the merit of a translation," i.e. stuttering literalism does not make for beautiful poetry or even, in an important sense, an accurate translation. Mitchell's Tao Te Ching is not a translation, however; it is a "version," as he makes clear in the book's concluding, absolutely indispensable question and answer section. Mitchell speaks no Chinese and is no scholar of Chinese culture or history. He worked between a number of literal translations of the Tao Te Ching as he composed his intrepretation. Listen to this:
Here and there, Mitchell takes that freedom very far indeed. He basically composes Chapter 50 on his own, writing as Lao Tzu. If you hadn't read the book's supplementary sections first, you would probably mistake Mitchell's own composition for 2,600-year-old Chinese wisdom, whatever that's supposed to be. Mitchell's priorities also seem suspect. For example, the literal translation of Chapter 3 reads:
Saying that this depiction of a "proto-fascist leader" simply "couldn't be correct," Mitchell changes the text to
Quite a change, no? Altering an ancient text, with a cultural context no doubt far more alien than we might like to imagine, to fit suspiciously into some Western writer's white boy, post-60s meditation fancies. If Mitchell were a scholar, he should rightfully be lambasted and discredited. But Mitchell is not a scholar and is not attempting a scholarly contribution. He is using his own considerable Zen background and training to reinterpret an old text to better suit modern sensibilities, and if that renders the meaning unrecognizable to some imagined, idealized Lao Tzu squatting in bronze age China, so be it. That's all anyone has ever done with religious texts, make them their own, update them for a more contemporary setting. That's how religion manages to survive, by morphing, and really the only difference between Mitchell's wisdom and Lao Tzu's is the latter's considerable pedigree. If the original, "authoritative" Chinese text of the Tao Te Ching is anything like the Bible, it has already undergone revision after revision, adaptation after adaptation, in its long history of recopying and transmission. No, Mitchell isn't even reinterpreting; he is using the Tao Te Ching as an inspirational urtext; he is working from from it, reacting to it, drawing the meaning out to share with others. Perfectly reasonable. The only harm comes from misrepresentation, when a reader takes Mitchell's Tao Te Ching for something other than it is. The scholarly critique of the work is not valid because Mitchell has no illusions as to what he is doing. My only complaint is that this should be made more explicit in the book's brief foreword.
Colonial appropriation? Probably, but the empire has its spiritual needs as well. If you disdain that, you're a short-sighted fuck.
It was necessary for moderns to lie to themselves about Taoism before they could take it seriously. For many, it was necessary to project a dichotomization of "good Taoism" - narcissistically constructed to reflect modern secular individualism - from "bad Taoism" - caricatured in the same terms used to dismiss Catholicism and any other traditional religion. And to make the good "Taoism" palatable to moderns, it was necessary to say that it had no specific teachings or practices that might be unpalatable to modern tastes: as "a Taoist," all a person has to do to be good is "to be one with Nature," or to believe some such comparable tenet of contrarian modernism. (Kirkland and Girardot, 2004)
Or to quote Wikipedia, "Russell Kirkland argues that [versions such as Mitchell's Tao Te Ching] are based on Western Orientalist fantasies and represent the colonial appropriation of Chinese culture" (Tao Te Ching).
This is a meaningful scholarly critique, going right back to Said and Orientalism. It cannot be dismissed lightly.
Mitchell is a well-know translator of ancient religious texts and modern poetry - I grew up around his translations of Rilke and remember selections of his Duino Elegies to be very beautiful. He favors a free "poetic" approach in his translations - in support, he quotes Johnson: "We must try its effect as an English poem. That is the way to judge of the merit of a translation," i.e. stuttering literalism does not make for beautiful poetry or even, in an important sense, an accurate translation. Mitchell's Tao Te Ching is not a translation, however; it is a "version," as he makes clear in the book's concluding, absolutely indispensable question and answer section. Mitchell speaks no Chinese and is no scholar of Chinese culture or history. He worked between a number of literal translations of the Tao Te Ching as he composed his intrepretation. Listen to this:
[I'm not really translating here.] That's why I called the book a version of the Tao Te Ching, not a translation. I gave myself the freedom to take off in any direction, when that felt appropriate. (12)
Here and there, Mitchell takes that freedom very far indeed. He basically composes Chapter 50 on his own, writing as Lao Tzu. If you hadn't read the book's supplementary sections first, you would probably mistake Mitchell's own composition for 2,600-year-old Chinese wisdom, whatever that's supposed to be. Mitchell's priorities also seem suspect. For example, the literal translation of Chapter 3 reads:
The Master rules by emptying people's minds and filling their bellies , weakening their will and strengthening their bones. He sees to it that they lack knowledge and desire, and makes sure that those with knowledge don't dare to act. [Incidentally, this reminds me awfully of the Grand Inquisitor.]
Saying that this depiction of a "proto-fascist leader" simply "couldn't be correct," Mitchell changes the text to
The Master leads
by emptying people's minds
and filling their cores,
by weakening their ambition
and toughening their resolve.
He helps people lose everything
they know, everything they desire,
and creates confusion
in those who think that they know.
Quite a change, no? Altering an ancient text, with a cultural context no doubt far more alien than we might like to imagine, to fit suspiciously into some Western writer's white boy, post-60s meditation fancies. If Mitchell were a scholar, he should rightfully be lambasted and discredited. But Mitchell is not a scholar and is not attempting a scholarly contribution. He is using his own considerable Zen background and training to reinterpret an old text to better suit modern sensibilities, and if that renders the meaning unrecognizable to some imagined, idealized Lao Tzu squatting in bronze age China, so be it. That's all anyone has ever done with religious texts, make them their own, update them for a more contemporary setting. That's how religion manages to survive, by morphing, and really the only difference between Mitchell's wisdom and Lao Tzu's is the latter's considerable pedigree. If the original, "authoritative" Chinese text of the Tao Te Ching is anything like the Bible, it has already undergone revision after revision, adaptation after adaptation, in its long history of recopying and transmission. No, Mitchell isn't even reinterpreting; he is using the Tao Te Ching as an inspirational urtext; he is working from from it, reacting to it, drawing the meaning out to share with others. Perfectly reasonable. The only harm comes from misrepresentation, when a reader takes Mitchell's Tao Te Ching for something other than it is. The scholarly critique of the work is not valid because Mitchell has no illusions as to what he is doing. My only complaint is that this should be made more explicit in the book's brief foreword.
Colonial appropriation? Probably, but the empire has its spiritual needs as well. If you disdain that, you're a short-sighted fuck.
Monday, December 29, 2008
American Pastoral by Philip Roth (12/08)
Why the long, rambling, psycho-analytic excursions? Why the repetition of action - page-long analysis - action, with each "action" often no more than a word or two, some line of dialog? Why the sudden, histrionic scenes of violence and cruelty and grotesque suffering, like Swede in the hotel room with Rita or vomiting into his daughter's face, especially when they jar so with the rest of the novel?
Pastoral has its flaws, but it is a great novel. Gripping, and not just because it's the first non-Nabokov I've read in months. Important to remember that every analytic digression is written from the perspective of either the Swede or Zuckerman, never Roth. Maybe that's just Roth's way of disguising his own bad habit - frame the whole thing through Zuckerman and blame him for any failings - but I think it has a point. We are more immediately caught up in the minds of our protagonists. Their thought processes are made explicit to us long before the characters themselves could put them into words. Roth is his characters' loquacious interpreter. I wish I had him by me, day to day, to do the same.
An Amazon reviewer points out that Merry is, at best, a hysterical parody of 60s activism, which is not to say that no one existed like her, fully sociopathic, fully a murderer ex nihilo. But she's a symbol, not a person, what the 60s looked like to an older America. The book's not about the 60s. It's a record of the death of everything that was good about pre-60s America. It's an allegory and an elegy, and it achieves this soberly, without too much sentimentality. Perhaps that's why Roth works so hard on the Moby Dick-realism, the intricate details of life, say, in a glove factory. The meticulous care Roth takes with details allows him to escape sentimentality.
The Swede is a bit formulaic. He starts off entirely one dimensional. Then we learn of his rich inner life. The course of the book is his introduction to the willfully unreasonable, the deliberately bizarre and perverse and berserk, in American culture. This goes on quite a while, this acquiring of a third dimension. Mr. Levov (aka Our Halcyon Past) is so decent that it requires over 400 pages to tear down his last illusions. "The Education of Seymour Levov." But his agony is meaningfully rendered. A parent's agony. Saves the book from grim didacticism.
Roth has his programme, and he hammers away at it relentlessly. Decline and Fall of the American Footballer, with the Weathermen as the Vandals and the Black Panthers as the Goths. High school seniors could locate his thesis with ease, since it recurs, again and again, ad nauseam, either concise or rambling, blah tortuous tedium. Here it is, on page 418, amidst an ending that finally manages to become wearisome because it's more or less exactly what you envisioned 200 pages ago: "The daughter had made her father see. And perhaps this was all she had ever wanted to do. She had given him sight, the sight to see clear through that that which will never be regularized, to see what you can't see and don't see and won't see until three is added to one to get four [murders]."
Quotes
"How could he have gone around dopily believing he was making her happy when there was no justification for his feelings, when they were absurd, when, year in, year out, she was seething with hatred for their house? How he had loved the providing." (193)
"You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception." (35)
Pastoral has its flaws, but it is a great novel. Gripping, and not just because it's the first non-Nabokov I've read in months. Important to remember that every analytic digression is written from the perspective of either the Swede or Zuckerman, never Roth. Maybe that's just Roth's way of disguising his own bad habit - frame the whole thing through Zuckerman and blame him for any failings - but I think it has a point. We are more immediately caught up in the minds of our protagonists. Their thought processes are made explicit to us long before the characters themselves could put them into words. Roth is his characters' loquacious interpreter. I wish I had him by me, day to day, to do the same.
An Amazon reviewer points out that Merry is, at best, a hysterical parody of 60s activism, which is not to say that no one existed like her, fully sociopathic, fully a murderer ex nihilo. But she's a symbol, not a person, what the 60s looked like to an older America. The book's not about the 60s. It's a record of the death of everything that was good about pre-60s America. It's an allegory and an elegy, and it achieves this soberly, without too much sentimentality. Perhaps that's why Roth works so hard on the Moby Dick-realism, the intricate details of life, say, in a glove factory. The meticulous care Roth takes with details allows him to escape sentimentality.
The Swede is a bit formulaic. He starts off entirely one dimensional. Then we learn of his rich inner life. The course of the book is his introduction to the willfully unreasonable, the deliberately bizarre and perverse and berserk, in American culture. This goes on quite a while, this acquiring of a third dimension. Mr. Levov (aka Our Halcyon Past) is so decent that it requires over 400 pages to tear down his last illusions. "The Education of Seymour Levov." But his agony is meaningfully rendered. A parent's agony. Saves the book from grim didacticism.
Roth has his programme, and he hammers away at it relentlessly. Decline and Fall of the American Footballer, with the Weathermen as the Vandals and the Black Panthers as the Goths. High school seniors could locate his thesis with ease, since it recurs, again and again, ad nauseam, either concise or rambling, blah tortuous tedium. Here it is, on page 418, amidst an ending that finally manages to become wearisome because it's more or less exactly what you envisioned 200 pages ago: "The daughter had made her father see. And perhaps this was all she had ever wanted to do. She had given him sight, the sight to see clear through that that which will never be regularized, to see what you can't see and don't see and won't see until three is added to one to get four [murders]."
Quotes
"How could he have gone around dopily believing he was making her happy when there was no justification for his feelings, when they were absurd, when, year in, year out, she was seething with hatred for their house? How he had loved the providing." (193)
"You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception." (35)
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov (12/08)
From a class paper:
'With Kinbote’s supposed insanity such a poor and unconvincing thing, Nabokov seems to invite deeper, less obvious interpretations of Pale Fire. Some critics have argued that Kinbote and his commentary are a creation of John Shade, who has annotated his own poem either mischievously or for some artistic purpose. Inversely, some claim that Kinbote is the sole author of the work, composing the poem and inventing John Shade. Both theories have the virtue of resolving some of the novel’s trickier puzzles, such as Shade’s sole mention of “Zembla,” in line 937 of “Pale Fire.” Other clues suggest the fictive nature of Kinbote’s contribution. For example, the introduction to the book’s index, which is written from the perspective of the annotator Kinbote, refers to Gradus, Kinbote, and Shade all as “characters” in a “work” (303). This apparent admission of fictionalization would seem to point to Shade as sole composer, using his life and death as literary devices, rather than the more earnest Kinbote.
'Ultimately, however, the clues that Nabokov leaves us are sparse and inconclusive, and any interpretation of the “true” events underlying the work will be highly contestable. At least one possibility that should be considered is that Nabokov simply failed in his portrayal of Kinbote: seeking to create an unreliable, unstable narrator who divulged the details of the plot despite himself, Nabokov went too far and created an implausibly self-aware madman, more an artificial literary device than a believable character. The result is that, as with many Nabokov novels, it is impossible to ignore the operation of Pale Fire’s conceit—the novel becomes an intricate literary bauble, reliant on a constant awareness of Nabokov’s authorship, and not a self-contained story-world into which one descends suspending disbelief. This is not to say that Pale Fire is a failed work. Rather, Pale Fire is an undeniably complex and multilayered work, and no critic should imagine that his interpretation accounts for the book’s every subtlety.'
'With Kinbote’s supposed insanity such a poor and unconvincing thing, Nabokov seems to invite deeper, less obvious interpretations of Pale Fire. Some critics have argued that Kinbote and his commentary are a creation of John Shade, who has annotated his own poem either mischievously or for some artistic purpose. Inversely, some claim that Kinbote is the sole author of the work, composing the poem and inventing John Shade. Both theories have the virtue of resolving some of the novel’s trickier puzzles, such as Shade’s sole mention of “Zembla,” in line 937 of “Pale Fire.” Other clues suggest the fictive nature of Kinbote’s contribution. For example, the introduction to the book’s index, which is written from the perspective of the annotator Kinbote, refers to Gradus, Kinbote, and Shade all as “characters” in a “work” (303). This apparent admission of fictionalization would seem to point to Shade as sole composer, using his life and death as literary devices, rather than the more earnest Kinbote.
'Ultimately, however, the clues that Nabokov leaves us are sparse and inconclusive, and any interpretation of the “true” events underlying the work will be highly contestable. At least one possibility that should be considered is that Nabokov simply failed in his portrayal of Kinbote: seeking to create an unreliable, unstable narrator who divulged the details of the plot despite himself, Nabokov went too far and created an implausibly self-aware madman, more an artificial literary device than a believable character. The result is that, as with many Nabokov novels, it is impossible to ignore the operation of Pale Fire’s conceit—the novel becomes an intricate literary bauble, reliant on a constant awareness of Nabokov’s authorship, and not a self-contained story-world into which one descends suspending disbelief. This is not to say that Pale Fire is a failed work. Rather, Pale Fire is an undeniably complex and multilayered work, and no critic should imagine that his interpretation accounts for the book’s every subtlety.'
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