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Posts:
2008:
#51-60
(7/13)
#41-50
(5/27)
#31-40 (2/15)
2007:
#21-30 (10/3)
#11-20 (6/28)
#1-10 (3/31)
On St. Augustine (2/3)
On St. John Climacus (1/26)
2006:
12/25
9/24
9/5
8/23
6/1
An Introduction (5/10)
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9.5.06
From the
last entry, I guess it’s easy, when denouncing someone else, to make
your own ideas the obvious replacement for their error. I hope it’s
clear this isn’t what I meant, & what I ever mean. (A friend of mine
was good to point out that Wolfe says very little in his piece about
Norman Mailer, author of tons of “big” & “social” novels--novels which
must not be cosmopolitan enough for Wolfe; & along with this I have to
wonder what Wolfe thought of Don DeLillo's Underworld) All I
mean to get at is an alternative; those who assume whatever beliefs we
hold to most dearly are necessarily ours because we believe they
are better than all others are on a weird track I don’t
understand--if that were true I’d be a pretty angry & disillusioned
guy, wondering why all these people around me aren’t writing too, or
eating Chinese takeout as regularly as me.
But I still disagree with him, & have thought more about what Wolfe is
telling us is the best way to show a society to itself, & to give an
image of a certain place & time to the future who looks back on our
work. (It's struck me more & more recently that, if we're lucky, we're
only writing for fifty or so years of our own time--the rest is for
the infinite future) For him, length is a big deal, & in that length,
profusion of details, details, details: how people talk, what they’re
wearing, what they see, what exists on what street.
Has this
always been the point of a novel, or more generally any Grand
Expression of a People? I’m no expert in the history of the novel, but
from what little I’m aware of, the medieval romances the novel grew
out of didn’t care about this precision of actual detail, & (maybe I’m
mistaken!) nor does something like Don Quixote; when we move
into the time-period Wolfe wants us to emulate, of Fielding,
Thackeray, Dickens, Dostoevsky, & Tolstoy, I guess there is a much
greater sense of place--there is “Dickens’s London” & “Dostoevsky’s
St. Petersburg”--but is the mass of detail what makes Dickens’s London
or Dostoevsky’s St. Petersburg worth the read? Having just read
The Idiot, & started The Brothers Karamazov, neither of
these are even very interested in place, & even in the major novel of
Dostoevsky’s that is--Crime & Punishment--it isn’t the fact
that Raskolnikov’s hometown is painted so wonderfully on the page that
makes it memorable.
Joyce seems to have known this, that the details themselves aren’t
enough, & his Ulysses seems a kind of culmination of all that
kind of novel can do. Of course in his own way he did more with “that
kind of novel” than any has or is likely to do, as he made Dublin as
much a character as Bloom or Stephen Dedalus. We probably can, as he
said, rebuild his Dublin from reading his book, & more than a mere
“big book” about Dublin it brings all of history & literature with it
in a way Dickens or Dostoevsky’s books can’t--&, to be fair, didn’t
want to do in the first place.
What I think I’m getting at is that Wolfe’s given isn’t even
tenable--that a big social novel with all the details is all we need.
If it is, then he’s right that novelists & novels & “fiction” (&, by
extension, poetry too) really will pale next to journalism. But for my
thinking, & it’s been a line of thought that’s held me since I began
writing, I’ve always looked at the work that’s already lasted
thousands of years. Why take for your models things that have only
been around two, maybe three hundred years? Why take Thackeray’s hint
when Homer’s is a million times more solid?
It’s a funny thing I’ve noticed, no matter what kind of ancient or
mythic stuff I’ve come across lately: nearly all of it, whether it’s
the Book of Genesis or the Egyptian Pyramid Texts or poems or Homer or
the Irish myths, nearly all of them take for granted pretty standard
things that are asked of novelists today: characters are introduced
quickly & never mentioned again; the motivations and interior lives of
characters that do stick around are kept at such a minimum it’s
sometimes easy to mistake them as cardboard; plots, if they exist, are
sometimes buried in masses of repetition (of name-origins, local
customs, battle- or religious-ritual); plots, if they exist, are
resolved quickly, resolved not at all, or resolved mysteriously & in
ways that leave more open than they tie up; dialogue is sometimes
almost nonexistent, or the speech of one person goes on for so long we
can’t imagine no one tried to break in & comment. & so on. (I’m sure
I’ll continue to add to this as I re-read it) All of these things, I
can hear an editor or an agent saying, would not endear the reader to
the material, would not make the reader “comfortable.” & yet, it’s
these things, the mysteriousness of so much of it, the gaps we wish
were filled in (what was Abraham doing when God called him, & what
did Sarah say when he told her? etc.) that have supported
societies since (we can presume) human beings learned to write.
Because if the characters & what they did really were
cardboard or cliche, we wouldn’t be trying to interpret them down to
this day.
Granting that at least some of the mysteriousness is the unavoidable
result of poor transmission from one person to another, from another
to another, from word to paper, from paper to copies, & copies to
other copies--granting some of this, it certainly doesn’t explain away
all of the richness & the weirdness of this way of telling
stories.
Assuming
Wolfe were talking about the landscape of the afterlife, Dante might
fit his template Many-People & Many-Details, but he’s undeniably weird
in this way too, & it’s precisely this weirdness that allows him to go
from Hell to Purgatory to Heaven over the course of roughly 12,000
lines, meet hundreds of people, & along the way bring Greek & Roman
history, philosophy & mythology, Christian history, Italian politics,
& the latest thirteenth-century science into one great work. In the
same way as the others I’ve mentioned, characters are introduced &
disappear quickly, & any action (no matter those great descriptions of
hell) is almost entirely interior.
I don’t mean to compare things that shouldn’t be, & were never meant
to be (since by their very nature poetry & prose are meant to do two
different things), only to wonder that if we are trying to
create art that will last after we’ve gone, are there perhaps better
ways than those to be learned from Henry Fielding, good writer though
he may be? Even Dostoevsky, my old friend--even while reading his
Brothers Karamazov I’ve felt a weird itch to get back to some
good-old Egyptian resurrection spells.
But to stay with Karamazov--his two chapters, “Rebellion” &
“The Grand Inquisitor,” that follow together, get more to the heart of
the suffering of the world than any forty or fifty pages I can think
of, except maybe Job (which I don’t think anything can top),
& it does all this, essentially, with two long monologues. This is
what I meant in the last entry about the power of simply describing a
scene, or giving a speech, without the usual novelistic padding of a
scene & context. With our world today, where it’s possible to do so
much (& as a result, so cumulatively little) in such a short amount of
time, where we can literally watch the news updates in every country
in the world, see photos & video of every country in the world, can
Wiki or Google anything we want to know, are curious about,
or think we might remember from a movie or song, can waste a million
hours merely "surfing" or actually doing really work--can a simple
novel, with the usual plot, really hope to take all this in without
just becoming a catalogue of these things, which can’t help but
glorify them in some way?
I don’t mean to disparage technology or the internet (without which I
wouldn’t have met either my fiancée or my best friend), only that the
complexity of it all begs for a different form of expression. If we
want all the details we can find them easily enough--we can read the
news report, watch the news report, look at the photograph, listen to
the audio, even look over the map, & all the varied statistics
(whatever statistics you can imagine) that can be gleaned from these.
To get at the reality of these things, though--the spirit of
them--requires more than mere reportage. If the Genesis writer just
wanted to give a factual account of the founder of their race &
religion, he could have gone about that telling in a much different
way; instead, he wanted to get entirely deeper than that. & if Dante
only wanted to spill his grievances about his exile, & how he wished
so-&-so would go to hell, he could have done that in another way too.
Faulkner said it best, that we’re all trying to write the Lord’s
prayer on the head of a pin, trying to fit as much as we can in as
little space as possible. Because we don’t just want to tell
what happened, we want it to resonate, we want it to become metaphor,
we want it to become more than it merely appears to be, more than the
details.
This is all, of course, tied into my writing of To the House of
the Sun, & if anything is about how the ability of poetic or
traditional storytelling techniques can get to this heart of things
better than "mere" prose. I recently came to the part in my House
where the main character meets Walt Whitman in the winter camps
outside of Fredericksburg, & goes with him to Washington DC for the
next five months, wandering to & from the Union hospitals there. &
this problem immediately struck me: I can’t possibly describe every
instance of a dead or dying soldier, every anecdote they told, every
disease they had, every treatment they received; I can’t possibly take
in all of wartime Washington; & I can’t possibly create the character
of Walt Whitman as if he were living in a historical novel, rather
than what is closer to an historical poem. I had to take my lessons
from the others & create a world out of real details that is more a
fragmented collection of those details that nevertheless will
(hopefully) resonate deeper than itself, rather than a straightforward
telling of those five months (which has been better done by Whitman’s
own hand, his own letters, & the work of biographers). & also, the
temptation of introducing Whitman as a character into anything, is to
let him take over, ramble on & on, to never shut up. This is the case
for me anyway, as my affection for him is so great, & I really do just
want to write more & more scenes for him. But the middle-way I hope to
hit on is a sense not where more is needed because it doesn’t
seem finished correctly, but that, with a few strokes, characters &
scenes can be created & more is needed because the reader
really wishes to know more, & perhaps will fill in that rest
themselves.
This has
been the case, actually, with the entire poem so far, of really trying
to get in as much humanity as possible while using as little space as
I can. How to represent the American South during the Civil War, & all
its people? & the North? & a battle, a hospital, or travel?
A hint for
this came very early in the writing, while reading Melville's
Moby-Dick, when I noticed the city of New-Bedford, of the first
few chapters, is described only so far as it's needed. I've never
heard anyone mention "Melville's New-Bedford," but the tremendous
achievement of Moby-Dick goes without saying, & the dozens of
angles & perspectives from which he tells his story is probably a
greater use of experimentation to the expression of human & divine
ends than any of our post-modern novels, when we supposedly know so
much more.
But enough
of this for tonight. Hopefully more will follow soon, more excerpts
from books & less of me babbling.
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