Should you read Proust?

With most great writers, I’d answer such a question with an unhesitating “Yes!” With Proust, however, the honest answer would have to be: “That depends.”

It depends on a lot actually. For one, have you read wide swaths of Western literature? If not, you maybe shouldn’t read Proust. Your efforts would be better spent reading other major writers you’ve so far missed. The reason is simple: the time it will take you to read Proust’s massive novel would be enough to read well into your list of neglected greats. And you’ll certainly get more from immersing yourself in five or six different writers than you’d get from burying yourself alive in one writer, however great he may be.

A friend asked me years ago if he should take up Proust. “You can if you like,” I said, “but you won’t be able to finish it.” He was a bit miffed, but understood the gist: the work’s stylistic density plus its sheer length have left thousands of corpses in the ditches of Volume I or II.

“What if I read five pages a day, so I don’t get bored with it?”

“Yeah, that’s not a bad plan.”

“I wonder how long it would take.”

“Well, you’re 34. If you start now, and read five pages a day, you’ll likely finish before you retire.”

I was exaggerating, but not by much. Because hey, how many people planning to read “five pages a day” of something actually end up reading five pages a day?

Proust as a young man, portrait by Jacques-Emile Blanche.
I don’t find Proust boring, except in stretches, but the work is often exasperating. To give one early example, the denouement of the narrator’s failed love for Gilberte in Volume II (which has the delicious French title A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur) seems well-nigh interminable, insufferable. He explains how he has decided to break with Gilberte, analyses his reasons, lays out his plan of action, then … a handful of pages later, explains again how he has decided to break with Gilberte, analyses his reasons, lays out his plan of action, etc. This gets probably four iterations over what may be thirty pages. I realized just how bad it was only later in Volume II when my eye fell upon Gilberte’s name again, long after the affair was over, in a paragraph on Balbec. I shuddered. Just to see the name. At that point I didn’t want to see the name Gilberte again. Ever.

Proustians will say I’m not being fair. Proust is a supreme artist of the tricks desire plays on us, of the inevitable pain of love. An artist of pain, he needs to detail that pain as experienced by his narrator. He needs to do this even when that pain is drawn out and overwrought, because that’s what really happens when one is smitten, no?

I remain unconvinced. Because, to take the same example, the Gilberte passages are not redeemed by the brilliant formulae that make Proust worth reading. They are, for instance, pale stuff compared to his treatment of Swann’s love for Odette in Volume I. That grim tale, though also lengthy, traces a clear movement. And in it Proust offers us one of his first great insights into the mystery of love. Namely, that we are subject to falling most deeply in love with those who are precisely not our type. The treatments of Gilberte and Odette offer a contrast revealing much about what works in Proust and what doesn’t.

But I digress. Still, I’m writing of Proust. And if a two-paragraph digression bothers you, here’s your takeaway: You will not enjoy reading him.

The problem is this: What makes Proust supremely worthwhile is also what makes him, at intervals, a bore. That’s the paradox you’ll have to shoulder. The wellsprings of everything in Proust reside in his narrator’s indefatigable inwardness. The work prods out what lurks at the margins of the narrator’s psyche, prods it into the light, then sketches the shades and contours of what is there. Needless to say, Proust is masterful at this, unmatched really. And as he’s also one of us, a being who lives in time and loves and suffers, the shapes he reveals are shapes we often recognize. Much of the joy of reading him, as with other great writers, is in the frequent recognition of something we already knew, but weren’t conscious of knowing, because we aren’t possessed of the same analytical inwardness. But as Proust is also prone to diagnostic forays that risk tripping over into verbosity, there’s the paradox again. It is, finally, part of the deal. One doesn’t get the brilliant revelations without having to sit there while the master polishes his microscope. And polish it he will, a couple times each volume.

Still, I don’t want to give a false impression. Though he delves obsessively on the games our psyches play on us, the perfidious landscape of the self, Proust’s work doesn’t at all read like the journal of an introvert. In this respect he’s very different from, say, Pessoa, whose Book of Disquiet stands as modern Europe’s great monument to introversion. For me Proust is best when he’s narrating encounters with others, setting down the echoes others provoke in his narrator, “Marcel”, at the moment of encounter. Here too we see his keen attentiveness to how the world impacts the self, the reverberations of that impact. But if the person or place whose impact is in question is allowed to lose immediacy—if, say, she drifts out of the narrative and becomes entirely a matter of thought, it’s there the sentences will tend to circle into tedium.

Still sticking to Volume II, we could contrast passages that show the law at work. If the break with Gilberte is overwrought and redundant to the point of intolerable, against this, however, in the very same volume, we have the brilliantly oblique introduction of Charlus and then the supreme opening pages of “Frieze of Girls at the Sea”—both passages deriving their strength from their staging of the affect these others provoke in Marcel. Both passages depend, in short, on the same unflagging inwardness that makes other stretches of Volume II falter.

Likewise, in Volume V, we meet similar contrasts: the wonderful pages on Albertine sleeping, followed by pages in which Marcel lays out the metaphysics of jealously. In the former Albertine is present, grounding the narrator’s attention. He cannot go wrong. The latter pages, however, grow needlessly recursive.

I’m just giving examples. And perhaps it comes down to that fundamental rule recognized by all good writers: Don’t tell, show. When Proust begins to tell at length, he risks losing us. When he is showing us a scene as it unfolds, we cannot set the book aside. His handling of the back-and-forth between external event and the immediate echo provoked in his narrator gives us some of the finest pages in 20th century prose. Yes, all good writers know the rule Don’t tell, show—but Proust is not merely a “good” writer, he’s one of the greatest. Thus the paradox.

Some may again protest: "To appreciate the impact others have on his narrator, we have to know that narrator intimately. We have to know just what he is." Thus Proust’s lengthy passages of self-analysis and hand-wringing are claimed as necessary to give us such knowledge: they are are needed as ground for everything else that “works”. I’d disagree, insisting that whole pages could have been cut, and the work would still stand, and we’d still know just who it was that was so taken by the clique of rude girls strolling down Balbec beach. We’d know who it was and why he was so taken. The doldrums aren't necessary to the work.

But yes, there are also crucial passages of telling, even telling at length: most obviously the series of epiphanies in the final volume, where Marcel at long last realizes what he is to do. The rule, then, doesn’t always apply. Proust succumbs to telling as soporific only on occasion.

But a Disclaimer: If I’ve read Proust myself, it was … partly a matter of duty. As a grad student in literary studies, I thought it necessary to know this writer. And in fact I didn’t read all the novel in grad school, only the first two volumes, in French, then some of the rest in English translation. So in a way I was similar to the friend I warned above: I too had once fallen in the ditches. I’d only finish it a few years later, and am rereading it now, decades later, spurred on by René Girard's brilliant assessment in his early study Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. (Amusingly, during those grad school years, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, there was a course offered by Prof. Elaine Marks in which students were to read the whole work in one semester. Which, honestly, is obscene. I knew how obscene it was, and didn’t take the course. As to how many students took it and “faked” it, not actually reading the whole, I’m not sure. 97%? 100%?)

Whether telling or showing, Proust is not entirely a novelist of human relations, a “psychological” novelist full of labored character analyses and dredging in the Self. The passages I complain of here don’t make for a sixth of the whole, if that. And the rewards of reading him outweigh these dull stretches any day. The work is stunning in its rhetorical effects: Proust’s metaphors, often extended over pages, are among the most subtle in literature. The work is also rich in penetrating passages on music, landscape, painting, architecture—the range of aesthetic experience. Marcel is, as always, the medium of perception, the writer tracing the troubled encounters with art of one coming of age in a society for which art mattered greatly. Marcel’s long struggle with literature especially, culminating in the final volume, effects a signal shift in the history of the novel, in our idea of literary writing per se.

The work is, besides, often very funny. From the indomidable dignity of the family servant Françoise to the grave hysterias of the Baron de Charlus, Proust catches all classes and types, yet manages to remain sympathetic to those he satirizes. Such sympathy is perhaps necessary in this narrator, who records his own manias and follies in detail, yet it's another mark of the work’s greatness. Proust is something one would think impossible: a high aesthete who is also a wisdom writer. (Girard, by the way, reveals much about the writer's wisdom, relating it to the extremity of his follies.)

In Search of Lost Time immerses us in the Belle Epoque world of Proust's youth, a world that already in the writing is recognized as lost. To read it, for us, is also to travel back more than a century, to engage the struggles and subtleties of a culture now distant and growing more distant with each decade. I’d say that Proust’s world is foreign, though not entirely so. We recognize things both familiar and intimate, things being lost even as we read, lost both in our own lives and in the swiftly changing culture we’re subject to. To read him, above all, is to attain to a deeper grasp of the power of time and how it shapes and warps us.

Finally—need it be said?—reading Proust is unlike reading anything else. In this, he’s similar to only a handful of others, Kafka for instance, writers who create a world one enters, rather than write a novel set in this or that milieu—a novel which, if one reads random pages, might be mistaken for someone else's s work. There are great writers of this latter sort, but the greatest are the former.

Should you take up the challenge then? I’ve tried to offer some aspects of what it entails. If you’re going to read Proust in English, I recommend you stick with the C.K. Scott Moncrieff translation, originally titled Remembrance of Things Past. Certain precisions are gained in the later translations (titled In Search of Lost Time) but Scott Moncrieff’s work is a masterpiece in its own right, he was a contemporary of Proust’s, and his prose captures the era in an English style closer to that era.

I should acknowledge that Proust does have his detractors among other major writers. Though Conrad, Woolf, Faulkner and Nabokov saw an absolute value in him, Joyce, Borges, Evelyn Waugh, a few others, left mostly negative assessments. Some of these No votes, however, come down to incidental carping, even individual pique. Those who voted Yes offer more in the way of actual argument. Conrad for instance: “What compels my admiration for M. Proust’s work is that it is great art based on analysis … I don’t think there is in all creative literature an example of the power of analysis such as this.”

Proust’s novel, at 3,000-plus pages, demands time. And will test your patience. But after the passing of many decades, Conrad’s judgment still holds true.

Lefties: Why the NPC Meme doesn’t faze them

Mid-March Elon Musk rocked the Twitter styrofoam raft by posting a recent version of the NPC meme:

Myself I think it’s good to have Elon around: a national figure who says what he thinks rather than spreads wokeisms.

And I like the NPC meme, though I find it toothless given where we're at. Since this is a serious article, I’ll explain myself via pro wrestling. Yup, serious. A post I saw today. Someone wrote:

Remember when everyone knew pro wrestling was fake and they finally admitted it and the fans continued to watch it anyway?

We’re almost there with politics and the media.

“We’re not almost there,” I replied. “We’re already there, and have been for years. Worse, this fakery is not a bug, but a feature.”

All around us fake news is known to be fake but still touted as news. And oddly, it’s our “educated” who are most aggressively touting it. This didn’t use to be so. So how did we get here?

It's the universities, stupid.

In classrooms and seminars across the country, academics have for decades been teaching that “there is no truth, only narratives". I won’t go into the intellectual background of the doctrine. But starting in the 1980s, our left took it and ran with it.

"No truth, only narratives" has since trickled down and oozed beyond the campuses. It's seeped into every corner of American culture. And it's changed the way Americans process reality. As follows: A huge swath of the citizenry now watches news not to find out what is really happening, but only to find out what Today's Narrative is. For millions, what is really happening is tacitly assumed to be beside the point.

It’s hard for a lot of us on the right to grasp this. But we need to grasp it, because this is the country we now live in.

We call them NPCs and think they're dumb sheep--but by doing so we ignore what they're about. Because for them, to be sheep, sheep out to trample all others into silence, is the very meaning of being educated. It’s what their whole education has taught them to do and what all their peers do 24/7.

Which is what makes the NPC meme toothless. At least to them. Because it’s not that our NPCs are especially dumb, but rather that they're deeply indifferent to the facts underlying the social realities in question. They are entirely creatures of the Narrative, they know they are, and they're even proud to be so because they assume the Narrative tends to "the right side of history”.

This doctrine of the "right side of history" is perhaps the only truth our lefties still subscribe to: they believe in Progress religiously.

And here, if you’re paying attention, you’ll maybe see that we’ve caught them in deep self-contradiction, because the claim that progress is inevitable, that it’s somehow built in to history, is a truth claim. Here, in other words, is where our lefties truly are dumb.

But good luck trying to get that point across. The Enlightenment myth of progress is so deeply embedded in the modern world that almost no one recognizes it as a myth. Especially not our lefties, who breathe it through their cloth masks as their very air.

We've now tens of millions of these people. They're scaling the ladders in every corporation and instution. Since the point for them is to enact the Narrative, calling them NPCs carries no sting. As you may have noticed. They'll just bleat at you--Baaahhh--and move on. Because as they see it, it’s you who are backward to stick to that outmoded concept truth. To stick to things like evidence, law, constitutions, transparent elections.

This is also, by the way, why it’s become impossible to debate our leftists, as you also may have noticed. If there’s no truth, and if it’s virtuous to believe there isn’t, what weight will be given to “evidence” or “reasoned debate” or “analysis” or “statistics”? Our lefties officially don’t care about such things. Debating them is wasted time, and has been since about 2010. They won’t recognize defeat, because they never recognized the validity of reasoned argument to begin with.

So if our politics and media now seem to have no more reality than pro wrestling, and if the mainstream “virtuous” voices keep cheering ever louder, you can blame our fallen universities. They made it possible. And the triumphal march of that key claim "there is no truth" was made all the easier because it played off the Deadly Sin called sloth. Anyone who spends time around our academies can attest it: sheer laziness has played an enormous role in our cognitive decline. Because whether you're an academic or a student, it’s much easier to enact narratives than to dig for truth. It’s also much easier to bend to the Narrative than to defend any truth that is unpopular. And since the postmodernism that rules our universities gives our lefties “intellectual” cover for being lazy in just this way, why not just go with it? All the kids at the cool table are.

Calling them NPCs is accurate, sure. But the malaise runs deeper than just dumbness + conformity. It derives from a systemic discrediting of truth in favor of narrative. Where we go from here is a more difficult question, but that we’re dealing with a large and now dominant “post-truth” culture is a brutal fact we must face. I'd say the best use of our energies is in building an alternative education system, whether through homeschooling or classical schools.

More on how we got here:

The Left is a Religion

Fakes upon Fakes: Why the Left has Become so Completely Daft

The Gospel Truth: Michael Pakaluk’s Hermeneutics of Faith

Michael Pakaluk is doing really extraordinary things with the gospels. I predict his translations (of Mark in 2019, and now of John) will only grow in stature over time. He gets right to the marrow, both at the level of English rendition and in terms of his brilliantly subtle approach to the place and uniqueness of each text.

This work is long overdue. After two centuries of scholars laboring under a “hermeneutic of suspicion,” Pakaluk does something like the opposite. He goes straight to what the very earliest records tell us of the gospels, then asks himself the question: “If the early testimonies about the writing of these texts are correct, what might we expect in terms of the kind of text we’d get?” In short, Pakaluk applies what we may call a hermeneutics of trust, or more properly, a hermeneutics of faith. In both Mark and John, this approach ends up bearing much fruit--multiple new insights, multiple questions previous translators never thought to ask.

For years I’ve been waiting for a scholar who took Mark’s widely remarked “roughness” seriously enough to try to render it in English. It matters because Mark’s was the first gospel, the text that established the model for what a gospel was to be. The reeling speed and breathlessness of Mark’s narrative are part of what make it so powerful as witness and account. This narrative speed makes sense given the ancient testimony of how the gospel came to be.

The Apostle Peter, leader of Rome’s Christian community, naturally recounted his experiences to the faithful there. Getting on in years, it was recognized that Peter's memories should be recorded in writing, and Mark was called to transcribe them. That the gospel we have shows all indications of being a spoken narrative, a fact Pakaluk demonstrates at multiple levels, stands as strong evidence it is in fact what it was said to be: Peter’s memoirs.

What we’ve lacked is an English translation that showed sufficient care in rendering just these more spoken aspects of the text. In Pakaluk’s translation, which he titles The Memoirs of St. Peter, we finally have just that. His English Mark is supremely effective as spoken narrative, and follows the tense shifts and quick perspectival shifts of the Greek. The translator lays out these uniquely Markan characteristics in his commentary, and convincingly makes the case that, indeed, they indicate the speech of a witness. In any case, no ancient writer was sufficiently cunning to fake so many natural characteristics of firsthand narrative. The most economical conclusion is likely the true one: this gospel is a transcription from speech, and it is a transcription of the speech of someone who was there when the events happened. Pakaluk's renderings, attentive to the shifts and immediacy of the original, strike like lightning.

With his second translation, Mary’s Voice in the Gospel According to John, Pakaluk again begins by carefully considering the situation of the gospel’s composition. He knows that both the text itself and the earliest testimony tell us that after his crucifixion Jesus’ mother Mary went to live with John. How then, the scholar wonders, would sharing a house over many years with the Lord’s mother, remembering and recounting His life in company with her, likely shape the evangelist's later portrayal of Jesus? It’s a brilliant thought experiment, and in his introduction and commentary, Pakaluk lays out the possibilities. These, in turn, go a long way toward explaining why the Gospel of John is so strikingly different from the synoptic gospels.

Pakaluk’s actual English translation of John, his word choice and phrasing, are explained in his notes via reference to the Greek. But what is really different here is how sharp and precise, and often poetic, the English is. One feels the pith of debate in these sentences (John tends to record Jesus in dialogue) and one feels it in chiseled, natural English. Why is this so rare in our translations?

Robert Alter wrote somewhere that the problem with the King James Version was that they didn't really know Hebrew, whereas the problem with modern Bible translations is that they don't really know English. The observation is apt.

Modern Bible translators tend to fall into one of two opposing vices. Some seek to render scriptural texts in an English as wooden and unproblematic as a high school textbook. They flatten out the power of the Spirit-inspired writers--whose verbal formulations are often intentionally problematic--even as they smuggle their own theological biases directly into the English phrasing. This latter of course “for clarity’s sake”. (Think of the NIV.)

The other, opposing vice is to believe that the Greek, by virtue of its inherent linguistic difference, conveys things that can’t be conveyed in English. And so, to get to the scriptural meaning, one must create a kind of “Hellenized English”. In this way we end up with translations that are neither really Greek nor English, written in an unwieldy, eccentric new language that often, again, only conveys the translator’s own interpretive claims. (Think David Bentley Hart.)

Pakaluk somehow manages to avoid both vices. Partly, I’m sure, it’s his training as a philosopher, partly it’s his strong literary grasp of English that keeps him on the straight and narrow. He’s done the hard work of finding a native English that grabs the reader even as it conveys what is there in the Greek.

Pakaluk’s Mary’s Voice in the Gospel According to John, just published this Lent, is a must read for anyone serious about the gospels. More, it's a blessing to have, besieged as we are by cant, ideology, and misguided attempts to make the gospels "accessible".

Eric Mader
Taipei

At Amazon:

Check Pakaluk's Mary’s Voice in the Gospel According to John

Check Pakaluk's The Memoirs of St. Peter

[Note that there is currently an offer
to buy both books together at discount.]

Some deadpan with your coffee? My Idiocy, Ltd. is now in print. Dryest humor in the west.

Idiocy, Ltd. / 白痴有限公司 and Why I Love the Prose Poem

With Sharky Chen at TIBE 2018
I was very glad to join Sharky Chen of commaBOOKS (逗點文創) at the Taipei International Book Exhibition to talk to readers about the new Chinese translation of Idiocy, Ltd. Here were my comments:

謝謝各位來到這裡。

我是寫3種文類的自由作家，也是住台北20年的台灣女婿。

我很感謝詩人枚綠金幫我找到陳允石這麼好的譯者來翻譯我的這本和台北有關的散文詩故事集《白痴有限公司》。我也特別謝謝陳允石。我和她溝通很多次，詳細說明， 讓她知道寫作的用意。也非常謝謝逗點文創的各位幫忙這本書。

台灣讀者知道的法國詩人波特萊爾是努力推散文詩的十九世紀大師。我寫的散文詩故事已經有世界其他大師的影響。

我寫出很多新的實驗，還有我對台灣的愛。

書裡面有推薦文和序，註解，幫助讀者明白我的語言實驗，很多益智闖關遊戲和謎的神秘感覺，等待大家發掘。

That’s quite brief. Initially I’d planned to spend more time giving some rough ideas of what I’m trying to accomplish with the book. But I didn’t have time to get my comments rendered in Chinese. And anyhow, I’m not sure people sitting there wanted to listen to my painfully accented Mandarin for that long. (!)

Still, I’ll post my draft comments here because, for readers new to the prose poem, they might be helpful.

Eric Mader 枚徳林

On Idiocy, Ltd. and the Jacobian Prose Poem

Thank you all for coming to listen. I’ve been writing seriously for many years now, I’ve published a novel, a collection of essays, and other things, all in English. But since the 1990s I’ve been living here in Taipei, my life is here, I love Taiwan, and so I’m very happy finally to publish one of my books here in Chinese. Because many of my best friends are here, and now they can read some of what I’ve been working on. What’s more, I’m especially happy it’s my weirdest book that’s been translated first: Idiocy, Ltd. I’m thankful to 逗點文創 for taking on the project.

This book is a collection of short texts, including a few short stories, but mostly it contains what we in the West call prose poems. The prose poem has a very odd history, beginning in French in the 19th century with Baudelaire and Rimbaud and eventually being practiced by writers elsewhere in Europe and the US. What started me writing in this genre was my discovery many years ago of one 20th century French prose poet: Max Jacob.

With Max Jacob and a few other European writers, the prose poem took on a very different character from what it was earlier, and became very different from lyric poetry in general. Jacob turned it into a space of play. For one, he used the genre to play with narrative conventions. Jacob mastered a certain tone, both intimate and detached at the same time, a very ironic tone connected, I think, to his Jewishness, and arising from his being something of an outsider to European culture.

What do I mean by Jacob’s “playfulness”?

This will be difficult for me to express in Chinese, so I’ll try to make it very simple.

Whenever you sit down to read a story or newspaper article or novel, you immediately, in the very first sentence, are infected by a rhythm, by a certain style, that determines how the genre works and tells you what kind of thing you are reading. What Jacob did brilliantly was set off in the style of one genre--his first sentences leading the reader to anticipate automatically what kind of writing would follow--but then suddenly he would switch in some other direction, the initial style would stop making sense, or the logic of the writing would break down. In other words, Jacob was constantly tricking the reader, making the reader expect one thing, then surprising him with an entirely different thing. He would begin stories that would go nowhere, that would end up in a joke on the main character, and he’d do it all in a handful of sentences. His writing is intentionally confusing in a way that makes you think not so much about the content of the story, but about the rules according to which stories are told. Or sometimes the rules by which newspaper articles are written. Because Jacob played this kind of game with all kinds of different genres of writing: newspaper articles, love letters, family histories, fairy tales.

I don’t know if you follow what I mean. In a few brilliant sentences, Jacob would mock the way we use language, and the way he would do it would make us notice how stiff our genres are. He would show this stiffness by breaking the rules in funny ways.

I give an example from everyday life: If you’re used to using a knife to cut vegetables in your kitchen, you don’t think about it, you just reach for it and start cutting. But if one day you pick it up and it’s broken, if the blade cracks and falls off of the handle, suddenly you have this odd feeling: “This is my knife that I’ve been using for years. And now?” You look at it as a suddenly alien thing; you notice it. You realize how long you’ve been taking it for granted only because, suddenly, it is something completely different: it can no longer cut your vegetables.

This is what Max Jacob and a lot of modern prose poets after him do with language. They break language in order to wake us up. They show us what we took for granted by misleading us in unpredictable ways. Of course as a writer Jacob does more than this, he does much else as well, but this is for me his most essential accomplishment.

In a lot of the texts in Idiocy, Ltd., I’m working in this way too. In many of them I use the language of persuasion and argument to make claims that aren’t persuasive at all. Or I state facts about things that aren’t actually facts, but absurdities. But I state them in a tone as if everyone already accepted the claims as true. Or I start out in a certain style, say adventure narrative, and shift into something very different, putting the whole notion of adventure in doubt.

Reading this kind of thing, some readers just say “Huh? It doesn’t make sense,” but other readers, they laugh. They’re led to laugh because the effect has worked.

Another thing I want to say about this kind of writing--I mean the kind of prose poem writing that a lot of writers have been working on during the recent decades: it is a method that can take up almost any genre of text and deform it in humorous or revealing ways. So, for example, here are some kinds of texts that could be taken up by a prose poet:

political speech;
fable;
folk take;
restaurant review;
message in a bottle;
public service announcement;
travel log;
medical report.

I make fun of some of these in my book by infecting and bending them.

Now this kind of writing is hard to translate into another language, and I’m very lucky that for this book I had Pansy Chen as translator, because she worked very hard to make the odd changes in tone work in Chinese. From people who’ve read the book so far, people here in Taiwan, I can tell that she often succeeded brilliantly. She and I met regularly for awhile, discussing most of the texts in the book line by line, so she always knew just what I was trying to do.

I want to thank Pansy for that careful work. I think any of you here, though you’re likely to find some of these texts just strange or opaque, other texts will make you laugh or make you look at things in a different way. So it’s a book about breaking perceptions, or at bending them in unexpected directions. I’d love to hear from you if you have any comments.

You can look at the handout I’ve given you. I invite you to follow my author page on Facebook and post comments there. In the coming weeks I’ll post any reviews that come out about the book. So you can see what other readers think of it.

Again, thanks for coming.

E.M.

白痴有限公司在台灣:

books.com

Eslite 誠品

Kingstone 金石堂

The English original is available through Amazon:

Idiocy, Ltd.

Reviews of Idiocy, Ltd., etc.:

Who’s the Idiot?

My novel A Taipei Mutt is out in a second edition. The Asian capital unmuzzled:

A Taipei Mutt

Cheers.

The Gospel of Mark: a World-Historical Text

And there came a leper to him, beseeching him, and kneeling down to him, and saying unto him, If thou wilt, thou canst make me clean. And Jesus, moved with compassion, put forth his hand, and touched him, and saith unto him, I will; be thou clean. And as soon as he had spoken, immediately the leprosy departed from him, and he was cleansed. And he straitly charged him, and forthwith sent him away; And saith unto him, See thou say nothing to any man: but go thy way, shew thyself to the priest, and offer for thy cleansing those things which Moses commanded, for a testimony unto them. But he went out, and began to publish it much, and to blaze abroad the matter, insomuch that Jesus could no more openly enter into the city, but was without in desert places: and they came to him from every quarter. --Mark 1:40-45

This passage appeared in a friend’s post. Mark, the earliest of the the Gospels, and the shortest, is also in many ways the most powerful--a brilliant, world-altering text. Think about it. Whoever this author was, he created a new genre of writing to communicate a new reality that had entered the world. Scholars point out that his Greek was crabbed, uncouth. But his narrative skills were immense.

In Mark we see the human side of Jesus. We see him almost as a man reeling from his own powers. Much in the narrative also indicates a closeness to the crowds that thronged to get near this power.

Erich Auerbach, the first couple chapters of whose Mimesis are sheer brilliance, points out that Mark was the first writer in the ancient world to write of the lower classes as fully human characters. He brought into writing an entirely new, and more fully human, way of communicating social reality. I would suggest that this is because, like many a first Christian, he recognized that Jesus' coming radically altered social reality as such.

E.M.

Check out my Idiocy, Ltd. at Amazon.com and begin the long, hard reckoning.

Eugene Vodolazkin and our Spiritual Void

Though Nabokov had high admiration for Andrei Bely’s arid symbolist novel Petersburg, and others have heaped accolades on Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, it seems safe to say that the twentieth century never gave us a Russian novelist of the stature of Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. Perhaps now, in this new century, we have a Russian writer worthy of comparison to these great forebears. I’m thinking of Eugene Vodolazkin, whose Laurus, just out in English last year, is nothing short of breathtaking.

Vodolazkin’s novel narrates the life and struggles of a medieval Russian yurodivy, or Holy Fool, driven to his spiritual calling by a burning need to atone for the death of his childhood love. Having grown up as an apprentice to his grandfather, a respected herbal healer, Laurus practices his trade across the plague-stricken villages of the Russian north and ultimately makes the pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the company of his friend Ambrogio, an Italian visionary subject to piercingly detailed visions of the future and obsessed with discerning the exact date of the end of the world. Vodolazkin, medievalist by profession, brings this ragtag and spirit-haunted world to uncanny life, even as he engages hard philosophical questions about time, history and the nature of the binds that hold us to one another.

But if Laurus strikes with such force, it’s not simply because of the tale being told or the writer’s mastery of his historical subject. Vodolazkin has also mastered late 20th century narrative modes, the approaches to storytelling developed by Garcia Marquez, Borges and others, and here combines them with a deep knowledge of the medieval Christian vision to make this vision gleam for postmodern readers. The result is a kind of literary lightning: a hard-hitting wake-up call for all who’ve succumbed without struggle to the “playful” (read: jaded) sensibility that now dominates our literature. It's a wake-up call delivered with all the more punch because it’s delivered in a narrative idiom more reminiscent of our career literary cynics.

There’s not a hint of cynicism in Vodolazkin however. With Laurus, the writer brilliantly proves that Christian literary prose need not remain faithful to 19th century realist modes, nor need it drift into allegory or fantasy.

I’d go even further. Though he’s sometimes compared to Umberto Eco (just deceased) or the magical realists mentioned above, I'd judge that Vodolazkin has surpassed them, both in artistry and depth. I can’t think of another work since Dante’s Comedy that more powerfully links love for a departed woman with a deep spiritual vision of the universe.

Laurus will hit many who read it as a bombshell, especially those who feel the anomie and pointlessness of our consumerist culture and who yearn for something deeper, wiser, weightier. Vodolazkin’s ideal reader would be the spiritually curious, literate seeker who has so far remained unimpressed by what contemporary organized religion offers, but who nonetheless continues to yearn.

I look forward to Vodolazkin’s next work to appear in English and I thank God we have him.

Eric Mader
Taipei

Thanks to Rod Dreher at The American Conservative for posting a version of these comments on his blog.

Check Laurus at Amazon.com

Eimear McBride: A Rugged New Feminine Voice

Irish novelist Eimear McBride

"I met a man. I met a man. I let him throw me round the bed. And smoked, me, spliffs and choked my neck until I said I was dead. I met a man who took me for walks. Long ones in the country. I offer up. I offer up in the hedge. I met a man I met with her. She and me and his friend to bars at night and drink champagne and bought me chips at every teatime. I met a man with condoms in his pockets. Don’t use them. He loves children in his heart. No. I met a man who knew me once. Who saw me around when I was a child. Who said you’re a fine looking woman now. Who said come back marry me live on my farm. No. I meat a man who was a priest I didn’t I did. Just as well as many another would. I met a man. I met a man. Who said he’d pay me by the month. Who said he’d keep me up in style and I’d be waiting when he arrived. No is what I say. I met a man who hit me a smack. I met a man who cracked my arm. I met a man who said what are you doing out so late at night. I met a man. I met a man." --Eimear McBride: A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing

I’m about halfway through Eimear McBride’s edgy novel of youth A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. My friend Duncan Chesney, who’s read more grim modern European writing that I’ll ever read, recommended it as the stand-out book of his last six months of reading. I had to take it up.

McBride creates a sinewy idiom all her own to narrate this work. As Duncan put it: “There’s hardly a grammatical sentence in the whole book.” That’s an exaggeration, but certainly there are many pages where one has to work through a kind of clipped telegraphy--a whole new English McBride has created. It’s a jarring and pleasurable labor. Her prose hews halfway between speech and something like stream of consciousness, integrating dialogue with a deep and hard-hitting transcription of a young self in perilous balance. It's a rare accomplishment--rare in that such aggressive handling of language doesn’t usually succeed as it does here. Though McBride isn’t aping Joyce or Beckett, she does continue obliquely in something of an akin Irish tradition. But her Irishness is different: a suffering and fighting feminine voice very much its own.

I’ve read nothing on McBride or her background, deciding just to read the book first. I’ve only checked her age, to see what generation of writer I’m reading. She’s now 38, but wrote the novel in her late twenties. It apparently took her seven years to get the book published, the sort of trek that many masterpieces have had to undergo before being noticed.

I’ve no idea how autobiographical McBride’s book is. It is however a Bildungsroman of sorts, the tale of a girl growing up in a small town, raised in a household with no father, suffering through school as the younger sister of a brother with learning disabilities (the mother refuses to acknowledge this fact and so very likely makes things worse for all involved). The family is Catholic, though at first not very devout.

Eros is a wrenching force in this book. At age thirteen the narrator is introduced to sex by an uncle visiting from out of town, an experience not so much traumatic as awakening, leading her to use her newfound knowledge to rebel. She proceeds with her rebellion by throwing herself into one random sexual encounter after another--rough trysts which both liberate and degrade her. The idiom McBride has invented is brilliantly suited to the mix of trauma and release such a rebellion entails.

I’m only half finished with A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, but the newness of this prose pushed me to write out some reactions forthwith. It isn’t every day one is moved by something new in narrative.

Eric Mader
Taipei

A Dialogue with Shin Yu Pai on "Jun in Taipei"

With Shin Yu Pai in Taipei on her last visit. Photo by Mélusine Lin
Well aware that my story "Jun in Taipei" played fast and loose with American stereotypes of Asian students, I wanted some input as to whether or not it at least worked as a story and how the elements of stereotype played out. Did the stereotypes put in play come off as cheap or mean-spirited; or did they rather, as I hoped, get absorbed in the glee and cross-purposed ironies of the tale?

Who better to ask than poet Shin Yu Pai, a sophisticated reader and friend whose writing experience as Taiwanese American had often put her right in the tangle of these same issues. Shin Yu was generous enough to spend some time in online dialogue with me on details of the tale. (Aside from her accomplishments as poet, Shin Yu has recently done more writing on Taiwan, her ancestral home and now for many years my own home and one of my favorite places on the planet. If you're interested in Taiwan, and you should be, here's one of her pieces from a recent visit back.)

I think, based on Shin Yu's reaction, that too many ambiguities remain in the tale. In short, just as I'd hoped! But she wasn't all that happy with the execution, so I have to work harder next time.

Since I'm not prolific in terms of literary work, I'm grateful for Shin Yu's comments on this one piece. I try to address some of the issues she raises in my reply.

The tale "Jun in Taipei" is posted on my blog.

Eric Mader
* * *
March 3rd, 1:21am, SHIN YU writes: The way the story starts makes me uneasy as a reader. It is an opening/introduction that relies on trust, patience, and a reliable narrator (I’m not saying that the narrator is unreliable, but that combined with some other issues, he becomes suspect and that destabilizes the reading experience--it’s actually Parrish who’s the unreliable narrator). The story starts with a story within a story, a kind of hearsay until we arrive much later at meeting Jun the legend. So a lot relies on how the characters are introduced and represented.

Jun seems like a caricature. A kind of Long Duk Dong character from “16 Candles” that is “totally hopeless” and “kinda funny.” He is stereotypical in that he is a highroller/gambler, smokes incessantly, does not talk much, remains fairly undeveloped and is without a significant voice. White dude takes pity on Jun and adopts him as a kind of project/pet and doesn’t really know the guy--Jun’s behaviors are surprising to Parrish. I mean--he’s a gambler--is that like an addiction thing? He’s losing all this $--does he come from wealth and privilege, or does he have guys coming after him trying to break his knees? And then the scene with the older woman kind of being a servant/mother figure--that also felt unsatisfactory to me. There are questions that are unanswered--but I get that that’s also the point.

Parrish “has a good heart” and doesn’t know what questions to ask, because he’s not able to see himself or others clearly. Back to the depiction of the stereotypical in Jun’s character: the dialogue around the cigar was reminiscent to me of that moment in Lost in Translation when Bill Murray’s character is confronted with an escort who tells him to “lip my stocking.” (Rip my stocking.) It’s not exactly that the depiction of language and cultural misunderstanding is mean-spirited--but it might be useful to you to read some of the critiques of that film from Asian American viewers/critics.

The point of the piece seems to be about something of the anticlimactic. That and semantics/words--what is a legend. Is a legend supposed to be like a badass? And what is a badass. And what is privilege. And what is excess. And what is pathetic. But the characters are not very sympathetic. The guy from London seems like a stand in for the opposite of Jun and Parrish--but we never see what makes him charming.

It's actually a very complex story--albeit one that made me feel uncomfortable and cringy at times--not a bad thing per say--but it did lead me to question the position of the speaker

This kind of story could be very funny to a certain kind of audience/reader, but at the same time this is exactly the kind of reader who would identify with a Parrish vs. the speaker.

Issues of representation are very complex, and I could picture a dumbass reader just being like "Yeah, that Jun, how pathetic!" when actually there are many other layers of patheticness running through the whole thing.

I think you know this is not an issue of yeah I liked it, no I didn't like it. That's besides the point. I found the piece to have a lot of complexity. Was it fully unpacked, I'm not sure. It's very intelligent writing that invites a more critical mind, but I'm not sure all readers are going to bring it.

March 3rd, 3:48pm, ERIC writes: I knew I was doing the right thing throwing this little tale at you, Shin Yu. You raise a whole series of issues, some I was already aware of, others not.

I was initially happy with the story because I felt there was a lot there and that I'd done it through very simple language. I didn't however know whether the enclosed-tale structure worked on such a small scale, or if the shifting temporality and perspective would even be picked up by most readers. Or rather: I suspected most readers would pick it up, but would a sophisticated reader, like yourself, be satisfied with how it was done? Which is a different issue. So I was very curious how you'd react.

The narrative voice for the first half is, as you note, channeling Parrish. It's in free indirect discourse (at least that's what we used to call it) and I believe most readers have become so used to this kind of thing that they know this is not simply a personal narrator speaking from a kind of stable "I".

Nonetheless, I know there are many readers out there who will immediately react: "Hey, WTF! You stage this Korean guy as 'smallish' and 'quiet'--you even say he's 'hopeless'! That's just racist stereotyping."

Indeed I am staging Jun this way. Or rather: Parrish is. Through free indirect discourse. But the fact that the word "smallish" is not in quotes, followed by "Parrish said"--certainly it confuses some readers. Or perhaps we might say it invites them to feel consonance with that voice. Which I can see is an aspect of free indirect discourse which makes it less that trustworthy if one intends to provoke distance from this or that voice.

As for your comment about the "dumbass" reader who'd simply enjoy the story because in fact he's totally in harmony with the racist stereotypes and sees no irony there, I hear ya. I know there are many people who would read the story this way. But what I was hoping was to trip them up--in part through the shift to "legend" territory. But that, I know, is itself ambiguous at best--because yes, what IS the status of legend here? Isn't it ultimately a pretty pathetic concept of legend that's put in play?

I guess I'd have to answer that for many men out with friends in a bar what I narrate here is in fact the most commonly evoked notion of "legend". A legend is not quite the same as a "badass". Rather, the legend is a fuck up who nonetheless has character and is not even really miffed by being, or being seen as, a fuck up. The real legend may not KNOW how ridiculous it is for a man to name his dog Lancôme, but the main point is--once he's shown how ridiculous it is, he doesn't give a damn. He laughs himself. At himself. And is on to the next "adventure". That's my best explanation of "legend", of the redeeming element in the concept, and I think you largely got it.

But again: Does this sudden jump in Jun's stature in the eyes of a bunch of white guys who took him "under their wing"--does the jump to legend status really show that their initial attitude toward him, as a sort of "pet", as you put it, was wrong? I think the answer to that is complex. I think it shows them as largely wrong.

But again: Is this a story that shows up racist stereotypes or isn't it? Hard to answer, I believe. What makes things even less clear: When I called Parrish and his friends "good-hearted", I meant it, or meant it, say, 80%. The word "good-hearted" is still channelling Parrish, who ascribes to himself good-heartedness, but it's also, to a great degree, meant to be literally true. Yes, they were having fun with Jun, they were laughing at him, but ALSO: they were likely most of the time to have such mocking fun at each other's expense too. And were likely besides to know how to laugh at themselves. So for them this embrace of Jun was actually an act of true friendship. Arguably, at the very least.

There's much else in the tale that's ambiguous, I know. I found it interesting that you thought the character Laurence was meant to counteract both Jun and Parrish. I intended that only to a very slight degree. I couldn't give Laurence an actual voice in the tale without destabilizing the general narrative tone, which was set by Parrish and by the narrator, who only comes into selfhood toward the end, and who really does laugh heartily at the Jun "legend" as it's narrated.

As for the first appearance of Jun's real character in his demand for a "singer", I think it's hard to really characterize this as mean-spirited. Everyone who lives as an expat or who lives between two languages knows that much of the joy in life is in other's and one's own linguistic mistakes. The best we can do is celebrate it. The only instance where I find laughing at such mistakes to be problematic is when those laughing assume English to be a kind of default language--assume it to be, indeed, language as such. This typically only happens with people who've never seriously studied another language. Which is to say: Most Americans. But not in Taipei, which is where the tale is set.

I will see if I can find some of the writing on Lost in Translation you refer to. You end by asking if the story was fully "unpacked". If I understand what you mean here, my answer is: By no means. The whole thing remains in tension, with much left unanswered. For instance: How did Jun have that much money to lose in Tulsa? The reader isn't supposed to know, but perhaps will guess: Family money. Is this, then, a rich family? The smart reader will likely guess: A family rich enough that their son losing thousands of dollars does not mean the end of the world. But is a catastrophe nonetheless. Jun's idea of showing up his American friends by showing off having seduced the Korean wife of another white guy, and his pathetic staging of Korean chauvinism, in which the wife nonetheless seems a fully willing accomplice--even, perhaps, the source of the lunch idea--this is meant to be troubling and ultimately unexplained. One of the tiny touches in the tale I'm proud of is the obvious fact that the Parrish character and his friend don't even realize what's going on: they just go for the food. It's only later they get it. And when they do get it it of course is just added onto Jun's status: Legend.

Yes, I'm a partisan of fiction, especially short fiction, as troubling, ambiguous, annoying, unexplained. I'll say one more thing: reading your comments I was led to realize this kind of story is likely to get (or perhaps to reveal) three kinds of readers: 1) the dumbass reader, who never quite notices that much of the tale is framed via shoddy American stereotypes of Asians; 2) the smartass reader (with a class or two of cultural studies behind her/him) who ONLY notices these stereotypes and doesn't notice how they're being put into question; 3) the good reader, who may end up satisfied or not by the tale, but sees the tension in it.

Many many thanks for your excellent comments, Shin Yu. You think this tale worthy of trying to publish somewhere? Just a thought. I don't much care one way or the other. I'm likely going to come out with a collection of short prose pieces (prose poems; tales) later this year and may place it in there in any case. Any time you want to throw something at me, I'll do my best to comment. But: I'm likely to be less useful commenting on your poetry than you are commenting on my prose. It's been a great little dialogue. Thanks.

[Shin Yu sent me a link that collected a sampling of Japanese and Japanese-American press reaction to Sophia Coppola's film Lost in Translation. There was a pretty wide spectrum: accusations of racism, defenses of the film as focussing on the characters' confusion rather than stereotyping, etc. Unfortunately the link is now dead.]

March 3rd, 10:20pm, ERIC writes: Thanks. A good range of pieces, and in fact I think pretty well balanced. The fact that Asia Media Watch went against the film isn't surprising. Asians in America, who probably are especially sick of being stereotype, would be more likely to focus precisely on the otherness (and zaniness) of the Japanese depicted. I think we have something similar when we project how Stateside readers (whether Asian or not) vs. expat or more international readers will interpret the staged miscommunication of Jun's "singer" request. A Korean in America, faced every day with Americans who seem to think English is the only language that exists, would think it's mean-spirited. One of these monolingual Stateside folks (what you might call the "dumbass" reader) would think it's funny because it shows Jun's aberrant English. Those whose mother-tongue is English but who have done serious time in another culture would likely see it as the kind of day-to-day mishap that gives life flavor. How would Jun himself see it? As a "legend", as I defined it, I think he's likely laugh too, once the mistake was explained to him. And then might joke about Americans in Korea and their absurd pronunciation of Korean words.

Anyhow I ought to go back and watch that film again. Been a long time and have only seen it once.

March 4th, 11:49pm, ERIC writes: As for short fiction, I often think of you as the one who introduced Ben Fountain to me. A brilliant short collection. I haven't read his more recent novel however.

Did you ever get to the writer I suggested in exchange--George Saunders. He's gotten famouser and famouser since then. And I still think he's often great. But the collections have gotten a bit weaker. At least in my estimation. The best is still CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. One of the things I object to in the recent work is his move toward more structured closure in the tales--tales you can see setting up their closure from the first pages.

March 6th, 3:38am, SHIN YU writes: I also really enjoyed the dialogue. I have always been impressed by the quality of your mind and your thinking and reading your story helped me to think and to ask questions of my own biases. As for whether or not you should send it out to journals, etc.--I want to say again that it's a very complex and multi-layered piece. And it deals with race/culture, a sensitive topic. That might make is more difficult to publish. But I think you could send it out--it has a quality of completeness, but also ambiguity.

I haven't yet gotten around to reading George Saunders. I have him on my library list/queue, but I think I have user #250 or so in a long line of readers waiting for like five copies in the Seattle Public Library system. Since you first told me about him, I've noticed his career skyrocket. He's always doing big gigs and readings these days.

Rowan Williams on Dostoevsky

I've just finished the first chapter of Rowan Williams' book on Dostoevsky. I'm elated with the vigor of Williams' writing. He cuts right to the bone, tracing out a theological-critical approach that promises to show more of what drove the great novelist than any previous critic, including Bakhtin. I can see Williams is building on Bakhtin in a more direct and existential way. A quote on the Enlightenment sense of truth Dostoevsky refused to settle for:

To settle for "the truth" in the sense of that ensemble of finished propositions we can securely defend is one of the ways of removing ourselves from the narrative continuum of our lives; to opt for Christ in the face of this is to accept that we shall not arrive within history at a stage where there are no choices and no commitments to be made. The truth of defensible propositions, a truth demanding assent as if belief were caused by facts, generates a diminished view of what is human; it educates us in ignoring aspects of human narrative that we disapprove of or find impenetrable. Meaning comes by the exercise of freedom--but not any sort of exercise of freedom. By taking the step of loving attention in the mundane requirements of life together, something is disclosed. But that step is itself enabled by a prior disclosure, the presence of gratuity in and behind the phenomena of the world: of some unconditional love. The narrative of Christ sets that before us, and the concrete historical reality of Christ is what has communicated to human nature a capacity for reflecting or echoing love.

Williams is keenly aware that Enlightenment truth--or "scientific," factual truth about human beings--once it is accepted as definitive or cutting edge, tends to lead eventually to the violent purging of that which does not fit the theory. The last century amply demonstrated this potential in an overvalued or wrongly valued science, whether we look at Leninist communism or fascism. What Williams shows is how Dostoevsky developed a narrative strategy that subverts this even as it puts in narrative action the struggle of faith--a struggle that, by definition, is never finished.

The book is Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction.