selfdivider

So I was walking on the 95th Street toward Broadway yesterday, taking my daughter home from school, and guess who I see, kind of staggering down the street Philip Roth. Uh-huh. For some reason, he looked really disoriented & wind-blown. I really wanted to say hello, but he didn’t look like he was doing so good, so just passed him. For a few blocks, I kicked myself for not having said ‘hi.’ And in the meantime, my mind had somehow started referring to him as Zuckerman, and it was really then that it occurred to me: perhaps no one had quite pulled off the fiction/reality entrechat like Philip Roth had over the past few decades. Pretty remarkable.

I was reading Stendhal’s delightful and brilliantly quirky autobiography, The Life of Henry Brulard, and I think he may have had a similar experience of encountering a person who seems like fiction embodied: he met, in one of those Parisian parties which he claims to have despised (yeah, right), an old woman named Mme de Montmaur, a character upon which Mme de Merteuil in Dangerous Liaisons is based -

I had met with society, and then only at long range, only at Mme de Montmaur’s, the original of Mme de Merteuil in “Les Liaisons dangereuses.” She was by then old, rich and lame. Of that I am sure; as for morality, she objected to them giving me only half a crystallized nut when I went to see her in Le Chevallon, she always made them give me a whole one. “Children take it to heart so,” she used to say.

That was all the morality I had met with… This detail about Mme de Montmaur, the original of Mme de Merteuil, is out of place here perhaps, but I wanted to use the anecdote of the crystallized nut to show what I knew of society.

What a fantastic passage! It’s weird, it’s funny, and most of all - it’s cryptic. What the fuck is Stendhal talking about with this crystallized nut anecdote What kind of “morality” is he talking about here, through this metaphor Pardon the pun, but seriously, this is a hard nut to crack. On the surface level, it does seem like Stendhal’s taking a pretty straightforward shot at the flippant morality of the society, but one has to take into account that he does so by using the crystallized nut as a metaphor. He strangely but pointedly mentions this incident as the “crystallized nut anecdote” at the end of the passage, as if by reiterating the phrase “crystallized nut,” he is pointing toward a hidden code. There’s a definite nudge there, but one has a tough time deciphering to what Stendhal is nudging us toward. He frustrates the easy, straightforward interpretation of the morality of the society.

Some of you may recall that Stendhal’s notion of “crystallization” expounded upon in Love is pivotal to his aesthetic theory. In Chapter 2 of Love, Stendhal describes a couple of lovers throwing a twig into the salt mines of Salzburg -

Two or three months later they pull it out covered with a shining deposit of crystals. The smallest twig, no bigger than a tom-tit’s claw, is studded with a galaxy of scintillating diamonds. The original branch is no longer recognizable… What I have called crystallization is a mental process which draws from everything that happens new proofs of the perfection of the loved one.

Simply put: it’s seeing your loved one everywhere, in everything. Then through the process, an ordinary person (a twig) becomes perfected in the lover’s eyes (as crystals). But Stendhal extends this metaphor into his theories on art & on literature… the process of making & perfecting art, too, the evocative power of the artist, is a crystallization process, according to Stendhal.

W. G. Sebald was preoccupied with Stendhal’s episode of the salt mine crystallization in Vertigo; apparently, he kept up his strange obsession with it: the crystallization/crystal metaphor becomes crucial in Austerlitz, and elsewhere (see Sebald’s description of Sir Thomas Browne’s crystalline quincunx in The Rings of Saturn; it relates to both Stendhal’s and his own “crystal” project.)

Back to Stendhal standing in front of Mme de Montmaur. He must have felt that he really was standing in front of Mme de Monteuil, as in a few paragraphs before, he admits that he used to believe in those days that he really was at once “a Saint-Preux and a Valmont.” He watches this fiction incarnate commanding people to give him a whole crystallized nut instead of a mere half, and concludes: “That was all the morality I had met with.”

As of now, I can’t unwrap this mystery. How much of his statement is ironic, how much is sincere Is he saying anything about art and its relation to morality, too, especially in consideration of his theory on “crystallization” Almost impossible to gauge. Maybe this joke isn’t meant to have a punchline. And let’s not forget that I may be reading way the fuck too much into this thing, as usual. But to me, this is Stendhal at one of his most inscrutable, delightful turns. I can’t stop thinking about this moment, want to see through to his heart.

P.S. - There are many film incarnations of Les Liaisons dangereuses, but you may not have seen the Korean adaptation of it, called 스캔들 (Untold Scandal), set in the Chosun Dynasty. Perhaps it’s my favorite film version of the Laclos’ tale, and Jeon Do-yeon, who won this year’s best actress at Cannes for her devastating performance in 밀양 (Secret Sunshine), is great in this movie, as are the rest of the cast.

(Image: one of many incomprehensible hand-drawn maps/diagrams from Stendhal’s The Life of Henry Brulard; for a vaguely and tangentially related post, go to Terry’s entry on Sebald’s useless map, which is actually more of a critique on the limitations of cultural-studies approach to reading Sebald…)

One classical music reviewer that I’ve been reading with pleasure is Bernard Holland of NY Times. His reviews usually are shorter than most, but he is remarkably deft at describing the compositions under discussion with concision and understanding. I learn a lot from reading his reviews. Yet he is also one reviewer I disagree with the most. For example, this Glenn Gould assessment. And this morning, in the review of Brentano String Quartet’s concert featuring “late style” compositions by Brahms and Shostakovich, Holland had this to say about Mozart and late style -

Late style is less appropriate to composers who might have thought they had another 20 years to go when unexpected deaths turned middle periods into late ones. Mozart had no late period; he died suddenly in his prime.

This seems like a preposterous claim to me. I am no Mozart scholar, but there are many indications that Mozart was very much aware of his failing health and mortality in the last years. Some of his last letters to Constanze are bone-chilling, and they contain none of the youthful exuberance of his earlier letters -

If people would see into my heart, I should almost feel ashamed… To me, everything is cold - cold as ice. Everything is empty.

The letters are quoted from Andrew Steptoe’s Mozart-Da Ponte Operas, and the icy emptiness which Mozart wrote about is again described by the composer as “a kind of emptiness which hurts [him] dreadfully - a kind of longing, which is never satisfied, which never ceases, which persists and increases daily.” Late style I’d say so. Edward Said, in his magisterial On Late Style which I’d briefly discussed in a previous post, writes about the last of Mozart’s Da Ponte operas, Cosi fan tutte, as the exemplary work of the composer’s late style. In short, Said describes Cosi as a work that bears its composer’s icy sense of control and rigor, cold-heartedness disguised as comedy, and refusal to bend toward customary views of emotions, especially, of love.

I suspect that Bernard Holland’s refusal of Mozart’s late style stems from a rather elementary view of what late style might be, insofar as today’s review is concerned. He describes Mendelssohn’s late quartet as “bitter and death-ridden… an act of mourning,” and Shostakovich of the Quartet #15 as “a man writing his own obituary.” Which are apt descriptions for those particular compositions, but I wonder if those phrases color the Holland’s notion of late style, as well. Not every work of late style veers toward mourning. Beethoven’s last works, for example. Yes, there is the mournful Richard Strauss of Four Last Songs and Metamorphosen, but also of Der Rosenkavalier: rigorously technical, impenetrable.

And there is Mozart.

(Image: by Anthony Goicolea)

First of all, welcome Ashraya, to the blogging community. She’s a precocious pre-med student who happens to be quite a writer, as well as a singer for the band, The Kitchen Cabinet. Second of all, if you haven’t already, grab a copy of Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks’ new album, Real Emotional Trash and go to track 6, “Baltimore.” Go ahead, dude: crank it up. It will quickly be apparent that younger bands haven’t forgotten how to jam. Psychedelic, wall-of-sound guitar, kick-ass drumming by Janet Weiss of Sleater-Kinney throughout the album… what can I say My favorite rock album in some time.

I noticed that this blog has actually gained readers while I was away. Interesting. I suspect that it was because my Murakami interview translations got picked up somehow in different channels. I had like two thousand visits one day. (Maybe I should purchase that weird book, Murakami’s Whiskey Pilgrimage in Europe, from the Korean bookstore & translate some passages…) But just maybe, the readers find my silence way more interesting. I wouldn’t doubt that possibility at all.

Taoists always knew the value of being silent, both in words & deeds. “One does less and less until one does nothing at all,” says Lao Tzu, “and when one does nothing at all there is nothing that is undone.” The gist of it all being that words & purposive action lead to the kind of instrumental reason which entrenches one in the ways of the world, away from wu wei.

I briefly mentioned Chuang Tzu by way of Eliot Weinberger in my previous post. He’s a more interesting philosopher to me than Lao Tzu, because while adhering to the same Taoist cautionary stance against “words,” Chuang Tzu’s functional valuation of “words” is more nuanced than Lao Tzu’s. There’s an interesting parable of an Artisan named Ch’ui in Section 19 of Chuang Tzu called “Mastering Life.” “Artisan Ch’ui could draw as true as a compass or a T-square,” Chuang Tzu tells us, “because his fingers changed along with things and he didn’t let his mind get away” -

You forget your feet when your shoes are comfortable. You forget your waist when the belt is comfortable. Understanding forgets right and wrong when the mind is comfortable. You begin what is comfortable and never experience what is uncomfortable when you know the comfort of forgetting what is comfortable.

Artisan Ch’ui had no need for mediating tools because he didn’t let his mind get away, just as how one forgets his body when the mediating apparel is comfortable. Then Chuang Tzu concludes with a culminating illustration of this principle -

The fish trap exists because of the fish; once you’ve gotten the fish, you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit; once you’ve gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning; once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can have a word with him

Any word that exists outside of meaning is a useless vessel, can only deter The Way. Even the words that successfully serve their mediatory function must be forgotten once the meaning is understood. Uncannily enough, these words of Chuang Tzu find their echo centuries later, in a different continent, in the words of Ludwig Wittgenstein which inform his readers of the limited, mediatory purpose of his words and propositions in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus -

My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.

Throw away the fish traps, throw away the ladder. Chuang Tzu’s instruction “once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words” slides comfortably into Wittgenstein’s famous last words of Tractatus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

This is all fine and dandy, but the ultimate irony is that Chuang Tzu depends on words and texts to theoretically deliver a conduit to The Way, the principles of which all but negate the primacy of words. Wittgenstein, likewise, would spend a solid chunk of his life digging himself out of the hole that was Tractatus, with words and more words. When Chuang Tzu asks, “Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can have a word with him” it is as if he is stoically acknowledging the impossibility of such a prospect. The question is a rhetorical möbius strip: it promises the enlightenment of the wu wei, but simultaneously puts at distant bay the practical attainability of The Way. The fact that both Chuang Tzu and Wittgenstein rely on the written word seems to testify to this - unmediated meaning exists in truth, but may be irretrievable in practice. Just as it is impossible to undo language, in this completely mediated and rationalized world, all one can do is sift through the mediations to get closer.

(Last image: by Rivane Neuenschwander)

After I wrote about my initial dismissive impression of J. M Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year, several readers contacted me via email and took me to task about not giving the book a proper shot, letting me know that Coetzee wouldn’t be such a simpleton to let the essayistic parts of the book stand in as his voice. Most of them posited that the voice of Senor C in “Strong Opinions” part of the book cannot be the voice of Coetzee himself, as some of the ideas are - as I’d noticed in my previous post - so transparently unimaginative.

I have given Diary of a Bad Year a more thorough read, and the readers were right: I had totally dropped the ball on how the book was operating. But an important distinction has to be made right away - the esssayistic “Strong Opinions” is a reflection of Coetzee himself, even if at times, he presents his ideas as a cursory parody of his real ideas. Many things support my claim. The rant about pedophilia and Catherine MacKinnon in “Strong Opinions” is a reprisal of Coetzee’s actual essay on pornography and MacKinnon, “The Harms of Pornography,” which was collected in Giving Offense. The themes of cruelty of torture in political regimes and the nature of the State and the helpless, Hobbesian condition of mankind expressed by Senor C in Diary of a Bad Year are Coetzee’s favorite preoccupations (Life and Times of Michael K, Waiting for the Barbarians, etc.) It would be as hasty to dismiss “Strong Opinions” as a purely fictional concoction, just as proclaiming the section as a straightforward view of the author would be. The question is: what game is Coetzee playing here, and to what ends

“I have an image of Bach as a man,” confides Coetzee in an interview almost two months after 9/11, “in which he is sitting next to me at the keyboard and he says: let’s try it this way.” The answer was prompted by the interviewer’s question regarding a moment remembered in Coetzee’s essay “What Is a Classic” in which the author, as a boy, listens to a passage from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier escaping from a neighbor’s window, transfixed. The interviewer, Peter Sacks, asks Coetzee if Bach has been a formative stylistic influence on him, and Coetzee, despite his usual reticence in interviews, muses at length about Bach. In his mind’s image, according to Coetzee, Bach is the antithesis of Beethoven, who is the very picture of the Romantic genius. Unlike Beethoven, Bach genially sits down next to him at the keyboard, Coetzee says, and shows him the possibilities before mysteriously disappearing without his cognizance.

Coetzee not only elaborates on his admiration for the master in Diary of a Bad Year (he calls Bach his “spiritual father”), but mimics the polyphonal structure of Bach’s music, appropriating the composer’s contrapuntal musical lines in a literary manner. If it’s difficult to simply categorize Diary as a novel, it should not be as difficult regarding the book as a literary fugue of sorts, in which different voices, themes, and ideas become interwoven according to the author’s order and inventio.

If judged conditionally as mimetic fiction, Diary is a spectacular failure. Of course this may be an irrelevant issue, as Coetzee presents the fictive story - of Senor C’s relationship with a young woman named Anya, whom he hires as his secretary after being smitten with her derriére - couched within a presentation of a book of essays called “Strong Opinions,” the very book that Anya is typing and commenting upon. Diary is deliberately fashioned as a metafictional parlour trick: on the top half of the book’s page, the readers get the actual text of “Strong Opinions” (and later, Senor C’s more private, “softer” thoughts), and on the bottom half of the page, we receive Senor C’s and Anya’s internal thoughts running parallel to the essays, with Alan’s voice joining the chorus in the latter half of the book. Surely, Coetzee’s attempt is to puncture the mimetic semblance and the illusion of traditional fiction by closely modeling Senor C after himself. Yet the unavoidable fact is that there is a traditional story lurking beneath the smoke. Crudely put: an old man is infatuated with a young girl, her boyfriend plots to rob the old man of his estate via a computer scheme, and the young girl departs from both the old man and the boyfriend in denouement. The story is replete with the usual peaks and valleys of - God forbid! - conventional plot.

As such, it may be tempting to attack Diary on the surface level of mimetic fiction. For example, the way Anya’s thoughts are presented is not so much differentiated from how Senor C’s thoughts are relayed; the syntax and the rhythm of Anya’s internal monologue are frequently indistinguishable from Senor C’s. Given Anya’s background and the repulsion she feels toward formal elitism, it is impossible to imagine her formulate her thoughts this way -

On the contrary, I don’t have the faintest idea what Alan means. Why this obsession of his with the old man and his money… something in the whole picture offends him, as though the old man were a Spanish galleon going down on the high seas with a hold full of gold from the Indies, that would be lost for ever if he, Alan, didn’t dive in and save it.

The whiff of formal construction in the sentences, the casual metaphor comparing Senor C to a Spanish galleon going down with a “hold” full of gold - these elements belong to Senor C’s rhetorical repertoire, not Anya’s. It is all the more incredible that Anya, in confronting Senor C, accuses him with all certitude, of hiring her based on the lovely shape of her derriére, as if she is privy to his personal thoughts. But just as it becomes tempting to dismiss such infelicities as a writer’s failure, it would dawn on any close reader of Coetzee’s work that there are simply far too many of these inconsistencies for them to be indeliberate errors.

Another thing: for the first time in Coetzee’s fictional career, the quotation marks have disappeared. Even in Coetzee’s more recent attempts to blur the demarcation between fiction and real life (i.e. Elizabeth Costello, Slow Man), the verbal reportage had alwyas been marked by quotation marks. In Diary, there are no “he said, she said” quotation marks, but an uninterrupted flow of three different voices. Or, the possibility arises, is it just a single voice of the author split into three

It becomes evident that not only Senor C, but all three “characters” in the book - C, Anya, and Alan - might be versions of Coetzee, fictionally incarnated, and it is in such a way that Diary is, simultaneously, a work of fiction and an “aleatoric” confession, as Senor C might phrase it. What one reads first as a mistake - a glaring coincidence - may have been according to Coetzee’s design all along. For example, in Senor C’s essay on intelligent design, he writes -

Why is it that the intellectual apparatus that has evolved for human beings seems to be incapable of comprehending in any degree of detail its own complexity Why do we human beings typically experience awe - a recoil of the mind, as if before an abyss - when we try to comprehend, grasp, certain things, such as the origin of space and time, the being of nothingness…

The language and content of the passage, especially the pointed phrase “a recoil of the mind, as if before an abyss,” specifically allude to Kant’s aesthetic theory of the sublime in Critique of Judgement. A few pages later, in a startling moment of “coincidence,” Alan - when explaining to Anya about pornography, of all things - says that everything is a perception. “That is what Kant proved,” says Alan, “That was the Kantian revolution. We simply don’t have the access to the noumenal.” Senor C’s Kantian notions about the incomprehensible Sublime find their perfect counterpoint in Alan’s observations on the “Kantian revolution,” the inaccessibility of the noumenal. Such coincidental moments become so numerous with the accretion of the book that they cease to be coincidental in earnest. The only feasible explanation is that the three voices are riffing on each other by design, adroitly in concert, each voice aware of how the other voice is playing out, just as a contrapuntal melody in Bach’s fugue will pick up the motif from the original theme and transpose it, develop it further. They are all different manifestations of the thoughts by the same person: the author.

As mentioned at the head of the essay, many themes and preoccupations of Coetzee are revisited in Diary, as if in a grand fugue. It is as though Coetzee is attempting to weave the different elements of his work into his life: the art of life become the Art of Fugue, as Bach might have put it. Coetzee, as his Senor C alter ego, writes that it is to Bach alone that he wishes to speak, not Cervantes, not Schubert.

Why Bach Senor C opines that “Bach shows how in almost any musical germ, no matter how simple, there lie endless possibilities for development.” In this era in which fiction is supposed to have exhausted itself of all possibilities, here is a writer telling us that it isn’t so, reminding us of the limitless amplitude of fiction, using Bach’s music as analogue. In a very important way, Diary of a Bad Year has succeeded where his previous attempts at metafiction have failed: the author has allowed his fictional characters to channel the multivalent, different strands of his thought, whereas in Elizabeth Costello, for example, such a translation never rose above its technical construct. That said, the paradox of Diary of a Bad Year is that despite its formal innovation, it is still profoundly a traditional work of fiction, albeit in a way that Proust’s fiction is, by now, traditional. Life and fiction seem as one, two lines running parallel to each other at times, intersecting at other moments, all pointing - as Bach’s fugues do - toward endless possibilities.

One of my wife’s first cousins died about 2 weeks ago. She was only 25 (or was she younger). She’d had this infection in her ear, and somehow it had spread into the brain stem. The hospital gave her some morphine, I believe, but then - for some inexplicable reason - she gave a desperate gasp, according to accounts, and slipped into a coma. She was on ventilators for about two days before they pulled the plug. She was a recent mother, is leaving behind a baby girl, just a few months old. Her husband, who had just now returned from Iraq, is only a kid, too. They were planning to move out to Texas before all this happened, finally a family again. From what I understand, no one knows how to best take care of the baby girl, which really wrings my heart.

In Eliot Weinberger’s An Elemental Thing, the author remembers a conversation he has with his dying friend, when his friend relates to him a passage from Chuang Tzu in which the philosopher uses an old skull as a pillow and falls asleep -

In a dream, the skull appears and tells Chuang Tzu that among the dead there are no rulers or subjects, no work to be done, and spring and autumn are endless. Chuang Tzu asks: ‘If I got the Arbiter of Fate to give you a body again, make you some bones and flesh, return you to your parents and family and your old home and friends, you would want that, wouldn’t you” The skull replies: “Why would I throw away more happiness than that of a king on a throne and take on the troubles of a human being again”

“It is comforting,” my friend said, “but I don’t believe it.”

It really is hard to believe. In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, it is said that the children lead the dead by hand to an acacia tree. Regrettably, I forget what happens after that. But in that moment which probably feels both brief and expansive at once: hard to believe that the innumerable souls of the dead do not look back and feel the nostalgia for the life of flesh and blood. Yearn for the ones they must leave behind.

But, still. Rest in peace.

Recently Written

• I Scream for Ice Cream!
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