Category Archive
The following is a list of all entries from the literature category.
Craking the code
When idly browsing through the Daily Telegraph’s lists of 100 books and movies that defined the noughties (here and here, respectively) I couldn’t but notice a very interesting discrepancy. I had seen (if not always watched) 39 of the total 100 movies mentioned on the list but only read 2 out of 100 titles in books—one of those a rather bland novel that had me simply shrug my shoulders (The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith) and the other a complete atrocity against literature and civilization in general (none other than Da Vinci Code).
Now this had me scratching my head in puzzlement.
It could be that my personal criteria for approaching books and movies are somehow very different—that I am somehow a lot less discerning when it comes to movies than I am when choosing which book to read next, and subsequently my taste for literature is a lot more snobbish and eclectic than my choice of movies. It is also true that while it takes seldom longer than 2 hours to see a movie there are relatively few books that can be consumed in less than a couple of days (unless you’re Harold Bloom, of course, in which case you can read The War and Peace in the same time that it would take to watch Shrek), and thus the decision whether to see a movie is more trivial, so to say, less of a commitment. It is quite possible to watch movies rather passively, spacing out at home or in an airplane, while reading a book takes at least somewhat conscious effort. However, eventually I don’t think that all this would get us very far in explaining the 39:2 score. It must be something else why I haven’t read 98 out of 100 books that define the decade.
This all got me thinking a bit more deeply about this curious thing we refer to as a “taste”—as in “taste for music” or “taste for certain kind of literature”. When I refer to “books that I like” (or those that I don’t), and if I want to get beyond a simple ostensive statement—then what qualitative set of features am I actually talking about? It is quite easy to specify my likes and dislikes when talking about particular books (movies, songs, paintings or whatnot) but it is not easy at all to actually put your finger on what precisely do I like about them.
As the things are, there seem to be two principal ways of doing it. First, functional way, would be to say that even if there is such a set of qualitative features then it really doesn’t matter. This is why we are comfortable asking our friends “read anything interesting lately?” and then heed the recommendation, assuming that a certain level of interpersonal compatibility would also translate into similar tastes—if they liked it then there’s a good chance that so do we. And there seem to be pretty good grounds to believe that this is true. Pierre Bourdieu has done some research on that topic and found out that, although we are nominally completely free to like or dislike whatever the hell we choose, our actual tastes are remarkably similar to those of the other people in our immediate social surroundings. We learn to like things not because of their innate qualities but simply because other people like them and thus our musical, literary or whatever other sympathies cluster together. This is, of course, the idea behind phenomenons such as J.K. Rowling Dan Brown and Stieg Larsson, the Beatles or Oasis. In the case of all those examples, their literary/musical merits (or respective lack thereof) matter a lot less than the fact that they are liked by so many. Incidentally, this is how amazon.com-s recommendation engine works—it ultimately treats us as members of a crowd, even if the crowd in question is a pretty small and elitist one. In music, this is how the self-proclaimed internet music revolution Last.fm operates, profiling you by the music you seem to like and then suggesting you artists from the playlists of people whose listening habits have a significant overlap with yours.
However, there are people who insist upon taking a different, ontological approach. Here’s an article on how Pandora, an alternative service to Last.fm, works—it’s an interesting and, at least to me, quite a counterintuitive idea. Last.fm is completely oblivious of the content it streams to you, differentiating between Britney Spears and Metallica only based on their different listener bases. Pandora, however, employs a bunch of specialists with PhD-s in musicology who pick every musical piece apart to its constituent parts and assign a numerical value to each of them. As a result, Pandora completely disregards who listens to (or even who performs) any particular tune and makes its suggestions based on what could be called a genome of the musical piece, a certain set of quantitative similarities rather than certain number of shared listeners. And with more than 6.5 million subscribers, they seem to be doing something right.
If this approach works with music then there should be no reason why shouldn’t we be able to similarly sequence the genome of literary works. If it is possible to quantify the level of “emotion” in a Jimi Hendrix guitar solo or tone of Fela Kuti’s voice then it should also be possible to score how “engaged” is Nabokov compared to, say, Kafka. And as it turns out, there are people crazy enough to try and do just that.
Apparently, a group of Swedish physicists undertook a study where they examined some of the formal properties of literary works by authors such as Thomas Hardy, DH Lawrence and Herman Melville, quantifying the rate of appearance of new words in their texts, looking for a distinctive pattern, sort of “literary fingerprint”. If you find this intriguing, then here is the article itself, but be warned that it is not a stuff for the squeamish—I once used to be reasonably good with maths but what I found in there had me recoil in terror.
Once all is said and done, the proofs have run their course and the mathematical dust has settled, the authors come to a rather interesting (and very Borgesian) conclusion:
These findings lead us towards the meta book concept—the writing of a text can be described by a process where the author pulls a piece of text out of a large mother book (the meta book) and puts it down on paper. This meta book is an imaginary infinite book which gives a representation of the word frequency characteristics of everything that a certain author could ever think of writing.
Now, if we take this insight and approach it he way Roland Barthes might—claiming that, in terms of what they say or mean, books are “read” rather than “written”—then it would follow that when it comes to literary taste, each reader also has his or her meta book, consisting of everything that this particular reader would like, or find personally moving and/or meaningful. A kind of reader’s fingerprint, a receptive literary genome, if you like.
I do wonder what mine would look like.
Glimpse of a beautiful mind
A few months ago, in Harvard bookstore, I picked up a thin pocket-sized volume titled This Craft of Verse by Jorge Luis Borges. It waited in my bag for a proper moment since about two weeks ago and I finished it just today. For a book of mere 121 pages it certainly took me a long time to get through – and the reason was not it being tedious or difficult to read, quite to the contrary. The book is actually a transcript of six lectures that Borges delivered at Harvard in 1967, recordings of which were only recently discovered in an archive. In his talk, Borges masterfully strikes this elusive balance between simplicity and sophistication – in fact he shows convincingly that it is not at all necessary to compromise between the two.
However, there is one thing that makes those otherwise quite remarkable lectures on poetry (and literature in general) truly amazing. Borges had been gradually losing his eyesight and by 1960 he was almost completely blind. This means that those six lectures were delivered without notes, simply by walking up to the stage and starting to talk. And reading them one cannot but marvel at how Borges picks up a thread and then effortlessly follows it, without ever losing his bearings or repeating himself. While doing so, he often quotes lines poetry and entire passages by Shakespeare, Homer, Joyce, Milton, Tennyson, Rossetti, Frost, Cummings, Chesterton, Manrique, Omar Khayyám, Yeats, Coleridge, Whitman, Quevedo and countless others in English, Spanish, German, Arabic, German and Old English. The only comparable feat of erudition and command of the subject I can think of must be Auerbach’s tour de force and magnum opus “Mimesis” that was written in Istanbul, where the author was in exile without access to library – and thereby the veritable study of Western literature from Tacitus to Proust and Woolf was written similarly “blind” and out of memory, without taking a look at source texts or anything else that had been written on them. Giants such as Borges and Auerbach stand as towering monuments to the art of reading and imbuing, immersing oneself in literature with a seriousness and dedication that almost scares me.
Borges concludes his series with a deeply personal and intimate creed, by looking back to a long life lived with, in and by literature. He opens his last lecture by saying:
I think of myself as being essentially a reader. As you are aware, I have ventured into writing; but I think what I have read is far more important than what I have written. For one reads what one likes – yet one writes not what one would like to write, but what one is able to write.
He reminisces a scene from his childhood, when he first heard his father reading “Ode to a Nightingale”, a poem by Keats, and describes an effect that this experience had on him:
I have toyed with an idea – the idea that although a man’s life is compounded of thousands and thousands of moments and days, those many instants and many days may be reduced to a single one: the moment when a man knows who he is, when he sees himself face to face. I suppose when Judas kissed Jesus (if he indeed did so), he felt at that moment that he was a traitor, that to be a traitor was his destiny, and that he was being loyal to that evil destiny. /…/ When I heard those lines of Keats’s, I suddenly felt that that was a great experience. I have been feeling it ever since. And perhaps from that moment I thought myself as being “literary”.
I don’t think I’ve had a moment like this, and I probably never will. I suppose most of us never will. And maybe this is the thing that ultimately separates us mere mortals from those few that are truly great.
To be or not
The first week of SCT is now over and it has been really rather good. It was to be expected that the level or presenters is high, but what has came as a pleasant surprise is the likewise excellent overall quality of participants. It is very easy to have a spirited and at the same time very informed and competent discussion on a wide range of different topics with fellow students – as well as professors, for that matter. Not only does everyone seem to really know their stuff – they are also intellectually curious about things that do not necessarily fall into the confines of their own research or academic field of expertise. Most of the people seem to share quite a wide theoretical background, comprising of usual suspects what I would have imagined being a sort of canon of literary theory and cultural studies – but where I have had so far been somewhat disappointed in the US when meeting graduate students in humanities. In addition to that, pretty much everyone seems to have their own theoretical bent in terms of in-depth expertise on a particular subject or field – which of course leads to a lot of interesting discussions and new discoveries.
Today we had a public lecture by Simon During on an interesting and certainly controversial subject why would we need literary criticism. As I have mentioned before, this seems to be a kind of shared anxiety in humanities but especially pertinent to literary theory departments in the United States right now. As Simon During described it, it is really not so much of a question of legitimizing the existence of English departments to the administrative wing of academy and to the outside world, rather than a question of identity and sense of purpose internally. In that regard, I suppose the US and UK share a somewhat similar predicament. Literary theory (or English Department, as it is often referred to in the American academy) has experienced a long and constant erosion of its field of expertise with all the different emergent disciplines, such as cultural and media studies, anthropology, history in its cultural and social flavors, political studies and so forth, chipping away on what traditionally used to be its home turf. There are several contingent reasons that have led to this situation, but I won’t get into them right now.
So the question really becomes – what is specific to literary criticism that makes it a worthwhile effort to support for the outside world and a reason to dedicate your own life and professional career to as a scholar? Of course, it does provide one with a certain kind of critical framework for engaging with the world, but so do several other diciplines. What, if anything, would we lose if we simply let it go and split people who currently work in English departments between those of history, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, rhetorics, ethics, political science, economy, philosophy and so on? This was the crux of the question that got the big auditorium filled with grad students and professors of humanities fumbling around for about an hour worth of Q&A session after the lecture. Because I think that Simon During was right – it does not appear that people engaged in the field really know the answer, even for themselves. Or perhaps especially for themselves, as it is not very hard to come up with some kind of a rather silly-sounding utilitarian justifications or kind of a nihilistic point of l’art pour l’art á la Stanley Fish.
I actually quite liked Simon During’s take on the issue. His point (or actually, my take on his point) was that literature provides us with a unique angle to human experience, the kind of subjective mode of being-in-world that, for instance, history or anthropology or even psychology can never offer because of their inherent totalizing claim to certain objectivity; and literary studies (or criticism, or English departments) allow us to make sense of that mode of representation. They allow us to meaningfully ask questions such as “how exactly does literature do that” or “how do we experience the things we do” on an unashamedly personal way. In that sense, a book like “Les Bienveillantes” or a movie like “La vita è bella” can offer us a perspective on holocaust like no historical account can. By doing that, literature also provides us with a potentially powerful means of social and political critique – as it would seem to me that any good piece of literature necessarily thrieves on some kind of a tension against the prevailing mode of social existence – if it didn’t, it would be simply something like The People Magazine or Vanity Fair. I guess that’s the sense in which Frederick Jameson was right – all literature (at least what’s worth reading) is inherently political.
And while I think it wouldn’t be wise to reduce all literature to this single function (which is besides something that again several other disciplines do as well if not better), it is nonetheless true that literature, and literary criticism along with that, does give us a distinctive, personal and subjective way to engage with the world that nothing else can match. At least nothing else that I can think of.
Life worth living?
A few weeks ago I wrote about the Guardian’s list of books to read while still alive. Today I found another and a more concise list of 10 books to read before you die that left me pretty much speechless. OK, it’s an American list and there is kind of a category mistake embedded in it – it is based on the results of a Harris Poll that asked 2,413 U.S. adults to name their favorite books and therefore it really is actually descriptive rather than normative. But then again, I would imagine that when asked about books worth reading most of the people would probably name those that they have read and liked rather than those they have heard about as being important.
Anyway, to the list. #1 spot is predictably occupied by the Holy Bible. Then we have American popular classics such as Gone with the Wind, To Kill a Mockingbird and Catcher in the Rye. Stephen King features on the list with The Stand and Ayn Rand with Atlas Shrugged. Backed by its Hollywood success, Lord of the Rings has also made it there (although I am a bit suspicious on how many of the people who cast their vote in favour of LotR had actually read all the three books rather than simply watched the movie), as has Harry Potter series. And the two remaining slots are occupied by – hold on to your chairs – two books by Dan Brown: Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons.
OK, I have actually read only six of those ten books, and a few of those only partly. And there are a couple of books on that list that I would have no reservations recommending to anyone to read. However, I could die with a clear conscience and absolutely no regrets not having read a single one of them, and in case of Da Vinci Code (yes yes, I know, *sobs*) I almost wish I HAD died before I read it.
This positively disastrous result of trying to compile a list of literary merit based on the popular opinion leads one to think that while in the developed world today literacy is indeed available to everyone, literature still remains very much a part and parcel of elite culture.
Because if the life worth living would indeed be defined by those ten books I could as well be dead.
Tragic hero
When the election of Obama was making headlines all across the world it was almost too easy to miss those few retrospects to the two-term tenure of George W. Bush. It seemed that pretty much everyone (not least the americans themselves) were just happy to see him go, finally. In a BBC debate, the question was voiced which must have been on the minds of many people all around the world – “was George W. Bush the worst president of the United States ever”?
I was certainly never among his fans either. For many people, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 was something that really captured the essence of what GWB was all about – an arrogant, dumb, cynical and despicable man on a 8-year ego-trip. However, I don’t believe that this view is doing president Bush a full justice.
A few days ago I was reading a book of lectures and essays by a peruvian writer and intellectual Mario Vargas Llosa. It was his essay on Don Quixote that got me thinking. Like the famous protagonist of Cervantes’ masterpiece, George Bush was a man who gave us almost constantly something to laugh at, and for most of the time rather unintentionally at his own part. Like Don Quixote, Bush also saw the world not for what it is, but as a backdrop to an epic struggle between good and evil. And this made him the first true tragic hero of a new millennium.
In his essay, Llosa asks us to consider what exactly does an adjective “quixotic” mean:
It means audacious, effusive, idealistic, visionary, and heroic. But also meddlesome, humourless, and suspicious of reality. /…/
Is this a defect or a virtue? It depends on the prism through which we view it. From a certain standpoint, attacking windmills mistakenly taken for giants could be an admirable undertaking, if we see it as the result of a dissatisfaction with the narrow confines of reality that provokes in nonconformist spirits a desire to enrich life – that is, if we see it as the refusal of the rebellious to yield to a pedestrian existence. However, it is also possible to define that attitude as a form of profound alienation which prevents people from fully judging the world or understanding historical events, making these individuals incapable of distinguishing between reality and non-reality and causing them – rather like children – to act in an imprudent, irresponsible, and catastrophic manner, creating havoc in themselves and their social environment.
If Cervantes’ brave hidalgo was a true believer driven by novels of chivalry – texts defining the concepts of honour and justice of their age – then president Bush was similarly taken in by a contemporary elitist view of the world of the West (and United States in particular) as a bastion of freedom and democracy, ethics of hard work and perseverance that the rest of the world is, or at least should, should aspire to. And it should be pointed out that this view, in both its extremist as well as more moderate forms, shows very little sign of relenting – it is enough to cast even a cursory glance at books filling the current affairs, history and global politics shelves in any major airport in the world to confirm this.
Although the actual reasons for going into war were certainly closer to American interests rather than ideals, the justification for doing so was firmly related to what president Bush believed he was called to do – to fight the evil and uphold freedom and liberty across the world. In his famous “mission accomplished” speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, president Bush was saying:
In the images of celebrating Iraqis, we have also seen the ageless appeal of human freedom. Decades of lies and intimidation could not make the Iraqi people love their oppressors or desire their own enslavement. Men and women in every culture need liberty like they need food, and water, and air. Everywhere that freedom arrives, humanity rejoices. And everywhere that freedom stirs, let tyrants fear.
This is of course another striking parallel: “Don Quixote”, says Llosa,
… practices freedom in all acts without the least concern for what risks this may entail, convinced that “Freedom, Sancho, is one of the most precious gifts bestowed by heaven on man; no treasure that earth contains and the sea conceals can compare with it; for freedom, as honour, men can and should risk their lives and, in contrast, captivity is the worst evil that can befall them” (vol 2. chap. 58). /…/ Quixote, unlike the respectful Sancho, who is fearful of authority and the law, believes that justice in this world is not something to be administered by the state – a remote and abstract entity whose existence he does not even notice.
Justice is, rather, the work of idealistic, honest citizens like himself and his kind, the knights errant who set out “for the service of their republic” and take on their shoulders the task of “righting wrongs, offering succor to widows, and protecting damsels” (vol 2. chap. 9), along with defending the needy. His idea of justice is not subordinated to secular or religious law. It obeys strong, personal conception, which he puts into practice even though it sends him on a collision course with the established order.
So, when judging George W. Bush’s presidency it is easy to dismiss it as a complete disaster with monumental blunders and misunderestimatings, a war and foreign policy that wrecked the United States’ position in the world and alienated it from its’ closest allies, plus a financial meltdown on a scale unseen in a whole generation. However, Bush did certainly not fail for the lack of trying and the sheer epic scale of those failures is something that will perhaps, just as with a hidalgo from La Mancha, end up defining his time in the White House more than the fact that he ended with his time in the office with the lowest approval ratings that any American president has ever had.
What the hell?!
Apparently Electronic Arts, one of the world’s leading video game producers, is gearing up for the release of a new action adventure game that is based on the first cantiche of Dante’s Commedia – Inferno. The aficionados of medieval poetry are bound to get upset by the news – and indeed, at first thought it is difficult to imagine how could Dante’s allegorical masterpiece possibly be converted into a video game format without a major butchery. The trailer has a distinctive Lord-of-the-Ringish feel which will probably further deepen the suspicion that the end result will not be up to the notch. The Divine Comedy has became one of the central and sacred texts of the Western literary culture – something to be awed by, studied and treasured, looked but not touched. Commedia is kind of a perfect example, something that can’t be improved and every attempt to translate it to another medium, such as prose for example, will inevitably leave out something fundamentally important. And even if it wasn’t Dante – there is a fair amount of general scepticism in whether video games are intrinsically suitable for conveying anything but the most primitive of narratives. Also, there is certainly not much in terms of successful examples of great works of literature having been successfully converted into video games – or vice versa, for that matter.
This led me to approach the same issue from the other end – the so-called adventure games actually do have a genre of sorts. Of course, it depends on what exactly does one consider as “adventure games” – I think most would agree that Indiana Jones’ series rightfully belong there, while I would personally be hesitant qualifying Tomb Raider as such. Also, many MMORPG-s draw heavily from the original adventure game genre while doing away with the scripted storyline for the most part (in-game quests or missions being an important exception here). And then there are the likes of Myst or Diablo and Neverwinter Nights.
However, if I were to try and bring one analogy from the literature in order to summarise what adventure games are like, I would probably pick bildungsroman. Adventure games are usually in third person (although many also allow first person perspective, if not for anything else then for combat parts) and usually consist of more than just a string of puzzles – they are about character development. At their best, adventure games have actually came pretty close to literature in creating both the narrative and the ambience - Benoît Sokal’s Syberia is probably the best example of this, but there are several others. Best adventure games employ clear stylistic elements – Syberia draws from steampunk, Max Payne from film noir and hard-boiled detective genre, Silent Hill from horror, etc. And while I must agree that so far I haven’t came across a computer game with a story-line remotely as gripping as a good novel can be, there is a lot more to good literature than gripping plots – or even plots in general, as Mario de Andrade’s Macunaíma demonstrates. So maybe it is not the problem of video games after all. At the time when Lumière brothers screened their first short movies about workers leaving the factory or train arriving at the station it was no doubt difficult to imagine how could that medium ever tell a gripping emotional story or be a form of high art.
All that being said – The Divine Comedy is certainly a challenge on many different levels. In that regard I’d say that Don Quixote would have been much safer a bet. It remains to be seen whether the project will prove successful, and, even more interestingly, SHOULD it prove successful shall it have a sequel – Dante’s Commedia certainly has a potential for that. A video game based on Paradiso – now that would be really interesting, although I’d be ready to lay my money on the fact that it will be a complete flop in commercial terms.
A hero without a character
I recently finished what must be the second weirdest book of fiction that I have read – Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma. It was published in 1928 at the height of the modernist movement and which was destined to become one of the defining works of Brazilian literature. It’s a strange book that got turned into, as some say, even stranger a movie 41 years later.
Late 1920-s was a very colorful and productive period in literature worldwide – for example in Russia alone, 1927 saw the publication of a small gem Envy by Yuri Olesha, and 1928 was apparently the year when Bulgakov started writing his Master and Margarita. European literature had just recently been shaped and changed by giants such as Kafka, Hesse, Mann, Joyce, and Proust. A new surrealist movement was spreading fast, that in turn was preceded by symbolists and dadaists of the decade before.
Although Mário de Andrade (not to be confused with his contemporary and another great name of the modernist Brazilian literature, Oswald de Andrade) never left his native Brazil, he was well familiar with both the European literary tradition and avant-garde. His early poetry was particularly influenced by French symbolists. Andrade was a keen student of Brazilian folklore, especially the music, but he also collected a huge amount of traditional stories over his many years of travel in both in the state of São Paulo and in the wilder areas to the northeast.
It was against this backdrop that Mário de Andrade wrote Macunaíma.
For somebody who is used to reading books that have a clear plot and character development, the second part of Macunaíma’s title, A hero without character, should serve as a warning. Andrade’s book is a idiosyncratic riot of different voices and influences that only loosely follows a general story-line where Macunaíma, the book’s unheroic protagonist, travels from his birthplace in Brazilian jungle to São Paulo and back. Macunaíma is a classic trickster figure, and as such he is beyond the categories of good and evil. Although he does have a quest of a kind – to recover a necklace from the hands of the evil man-eating giant Pietro Pietra – he goes about it in a decidedly unheroic manner – hanging around, deceiving and playing tricks and pranks to everyone he meets, running away from fights and copulating with every maiden and wife he comes across. Whenever faced with a decision or responsibility, Macunaímas response is to utter Aaai que preguiça! (a play of words in both tupi and portugese which was translated into english as “Aww what a fucking life”) and find a place where to crash and sleep a bit.
Strange as Macunaíma may seem, he is however not alone in the fiction of 20th century, the novel is very much part of the Zeitgeist of its time. This is not only because of drawing upon (and in many ways, parting from) some formal properties of its contemporary literary culture. It is a striking coincidence that in the very same year, in 1928, a book was published halfway across the world in Estonia by August Gailit that talks of a promiscuous vagabond called Toomas Nipernaadi, who travels Estonian countryside, telling tall tales to women he meets, only to leave them shortly thereafter. Neither did it stop in 1928 – the similar line of drifters and purposeless heroes can be traced through Tutuola’s Palm-Wine Drinkard (which, by the way, so far is the weirdest book I have ever read) and Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften to Cohen brother’s Big Lebowski.
There is a poem in Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal which was a major influence for French symbolists:
La nature est un temple où de vivants pilliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L’homme passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers.
Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.
Nature is a temple where living pillars / Sometimes let confused words escape / Man passes there through forests of symbols / Which observe him with familiar looks. / Like long echoes becoming confused from afar / In a mysterious and profound unity / Vast like the night and like clarity / Perfumes, colors, and sounds answer each other.
Inherent in the poem is the concept of Baudelaire, which was enthusiastically taken up by symbolists, that the mundane world we all are living in is a “forest of symbols” that is speaking to us in a multitude of different ways. It is the task of a poet and writer to attentively listen to that speech, to make sense of it and render it understandable, but also to synthesize it into new realities. As such, the writer is only a medium, not a conscious agent. And this, I believe, is the key to understanding and approaching what Macunaíma is all about. Macunaíma, Andrade’s alter ego, is a hero without character and ultimate purpose – or at least whatever purpose he has is only secondary to the function he serves – to walk in the forest of symbols and let the new emerging nation and culture make itself heard.
