"To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance... To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple."

Bench Ansfield on a 20th-century triangle trade The post Why the Bronx Burned appeared first on The American Scholar.

The Kingdom of This World (1949), Alejo Carpentier, tr. by Pablo Medina (2017). What is this novel about.  It is about the Haitian Revolution, although not in the sense that it is a substitute for reading The Black Jacobins (1938). It is about – I am looking at the translator’s Afterword – “the clash of cultures and races; it is a book about overwhelming social injustice; it is, above all, a book about the good and the evil that people will inflict on one another” (133).  True up to the last item; I do not know where in the novel anyone is inflicting good.  There is certainly plenty of evil.  “Like Mark Twain before him, Carpentier tackles slavery head-on and in so doing helps us to understand the awful legacy of racial discrimination with which our society still struggles.”  I doubt anyone reading this will improve their understanding of racial discrimination at all by reading The Kingdom of This World, but maybe some readers at a much earlier point in their education will? The novel is about the failures of Surrealism, and it is also a positive argument for a particular kind of post-Surrealism that Carpentier calls “the marvelous real.”  Let’s look at the novel’s prose.  I’m on the second page here: While his master was being shaved, Ti Noël was able to study carefully the four wax heads propped on the shelf by the entrance.  The wigs’ curls framed the fixed faces before spreading into a pool of ringlets on the red runner.  Those heads seemed as real – and as dead, given their motionless eyes – as the talking head that a traveling charlatan had brought to the Cap years before as a ploy to help him sell an elixir that cured toothaches and rheumatism.  By charming coincidence, the butcher shop next door displayed the skinned heads of calves, which had the same waxy quality.  (4) I want to quote the entire page, I enjoy it so. … Ti Noël distracted himself  by thinking that the heads of white gentlemen were being served at the same table as the discolored veal heads…  All they needed was a bed of lettuce or radishes cut in the shape of fleur-de-lys as adornment. The novel is more or less written like this.  The point of view moves around.  There is, for example, an amusing digressive section starring Josephine Bonaparte.  Ti Noël becomes the protagonist because, essentially, he survives the violence.  Let’s see what happens to him at the end of the novel. Tired of risky transformations, Ti Noël used his extraordinary powers to change himself into a goose and thus live among the birds that had taken residence in his domain.  (128) Humans transforming into animals is one of the novel’s running themes.  Why, I see an example up above, way back on page 4.  Now, even within the realm of fiction is it not likely that Ti Noël transformed into a goose.  Sadly, he is rejected by the other “real” geese, because “no matter if he tried for years, he would never have access to the rites and roles of the clan” (129). Ti Noël believes he becomes a goose, though, and given how narrative works, what is the difference between him believing he is a goose and actually being a goose. I think you may be able to detect a little bit of Revolutionary political symbolism in the earlier passage, and the story of the geese has a parable-like quality.  The entire ending, the last three chapters, is full of marvelous symbolic writing, all with this Surrealist character, things transforming into other things, or things in illogical places or logical reasons.  Real and also marvelous. I might have figured out Carpentier’s argument with Surrealism from the novel itself, but in the Preface he openly says all this. By dint of wanting to elicit the marvelous at every turn, the magician becomes a bureaucrat.  Invoked by means of the usual formulas that make of certain paintings a monotonous junk pile of rubbery clocks, tailor’s mannequins, or vague phallic monuments, the marvelous never goes beyond an umbrella or a lobster or a sewing machine or whatever, lying on a dissection table inside a sad room in a rocky desert.  Imaginative poverty, Unamuno used to say, is the consequence of learning codes by heart (xiv-v). Although there are some recognizable targets in this passage, only poor Yves Tanguy is directly attacked for his “troubling imaginative poverty” in “painting the same stony larvae under the same gray sky for twenty-five years” (xv).  The de-bureaucratizing solution, by the way, is to go to America, Haiti for example, and write about what is actually there.  “For what is the story of all of the Americas if not the chronicle of the marvelous and the real?” (xx).  Americans still believe in magic and miracles. I will note that in the last two paragraphs of his Afterword, Medina takes up these more aesthetic ideas.  He also translated that Preface. I will also note that, although I have not read the older translation or compared it to the Spanish at all, Medina’s translation seemed wonderful, energetic and clear.  Brightly lit, like freshly restored baroque architecture. Carpentier’s subsequent novel, The Lost Steps (1953), strongly recommended to fans of the Pixar movie Up (2009), is also about aesthetics, Modernism versus Romanticism, say.  It is too long since I read Explosion in a Cathedral (1962) to argue that it is mostly about books, really, but now I wonder. Carpentier praises Wilfredo Lam in the Preface so I put a contempory Lam painting, La Jungla (1943), up above.

Dr. Johnson identifies nine meanings for composition in his Dictionary. The first -- “the act of forming an integral of various dissimilar parts” – recalls Aristotle’s notion that perceiving similarities among dissimilar things constitutes genius. A basic human drive is to find pattern in the seemingly random. Johnson’s sixth definition is the most succinct -- “written work” – and corresponds to my favorite subject in grade school: composition. That’s what they still called writing when I was a kid. I was a lazy student who excelled only at what interested him, and putting words together was always a kick, a way to organize my disorganized thoughts. Soon I discovered that often I didn’t understand something until I had written about it – a phenomenon that remains in place. Words are thoughts and sounds made real and sharable with others.  Writing, or course, is complemented by reading. A writer – say, Jonathan Swift – impresses you with his precision and concision, the power he musters with words. You imitate him, plagiarize him, try out his voice and technical devices. With time, you absorb his lessons and customize them to your own needs. Occasionally, you reject him entirely and find a new teacher.     A veteran fifth-grade teacher among my readers tells me her students, to put it bluntly, don’t read and can barely write. None find writing a pleasure, even at the level of storytelling and autobiography. It’s a familiar teacherly lament. I have no solutions. It may already be too late to fix things.   Eric Ormsby is a sensualist of sound, one of our finest poets and critics. In 2005, Canadian Notes & Queries dedicated an issue to Ormsby and included an interview with him, “Menageries of Vocables,” conducted by Robyn Sarah. It was later collected in her Little Eurekas: A Decade’s Thoughts on Poetry (2007). Ormsby is enviably articulate:   “I’d like to think that there’s no English word I couldn’t conceive of using in a poem somehow. And why not? The world is full of fantastic beings – why should our lexicon be any less so? But I have to admit too that this besottedness with words, this playing the ring master in menageries of vocables, can be a self-indulgence.”   That’s poetry. Ormsby’s prose is comparably accomplished. He chose it as a conscious act:   “Slowly I came to see, to my pleasure, that there were many things I could express in prose that would not have worked in poetry, and I began to enjoy writing prose enormously. . . [Y]ou fashion a different authorial voice when you write prose; you can be casual, digressive, a bit offhand or even genially banal – you can make various forms of small talk – all gambits that doom a poem.”   I’m speaking as a writer, one who learned the hard way that he can’t write poetry. Good prose of many sorts – reading it, writing it -- can be as intoxicating and fulfilling as verse. Ormsby says:   “[P]rose is connected in my mind with the world of affairs, with conversation and interchange, in a way that poetry isn’t – or at least not immediately so. . . . I can’t write the essay or review until I’ve mulled it over for a while, and I can’t actually put words to paper until I’ve thought of an opening sentence or, better, opening paragraph. Once I have that, the rest follows smoothly.”

When John Updike read À la recherche du temps perdu after having read Scott-Moncrieff's translation, he was surprised to find Proust less Proustian, the epithet we associate with flowery prose blossoming over prodigious sentences proliferating clause within clause. While I cannot read French, this was also my experience of reading the new translations, first The Swann Way by Brian Nelson and now In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom by Charlotte Mandell. In the glow of remembering the experience of reading Within a Budding Grove, the prose of the new translation is less ornate, one might say more colloquial, at least no longer at arm's length from the decadence of fin de siècle France, an impression created perhaps by Scott-Moncrieff's grandiloquence. This worried me, as I've often described Proust to those who haven't read the novel as mind-expanding; one begins to follow thoughts into their depths of variation and reversal, suggesting that the recognition and interpretation of the signs of the world offers more to life than a novel's notable events, and I wondered if the overripe vocabulary and unusually generous size of the original typeface had something to do with this. With the new translations, one is sobered up enough from Scott-Moncrieff-intoxication to draw alongside Marcel the man himself, realising only too painfully one has failed to heed the lessons in love he presents with such eloquence and precision. With some shame, the reader comes to identify with Swann and Marcel. In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom is a novel written in shade and sunlight. In the first part, Marcel's frustrated love for Swann's daughter Gilberte is given a long post-mortem, much as The Swann Way is a post-mortem for Swann's jealous love for Gilberte's mother Odette, while in the second Marcel has moved on from Gilberte and is spending Summer in a high-end hotel in Balbec on the Normandy coast. There he becomes infatuated with a "little band" of teenage girls he sees cycling around the resort, getting up to minor mischief. He describes their clothes and features lit by sunlight brightened by the sea, trying to discern their secrets, longing to get closer. Each day is charged by the thrill of catching a glimpse. The evocation of teenage kicks is hard to beat, provoking memories and melancholy shared by the reader. It comes so quickly, the time when you have nothing left to look forward to, when your body is fixed in a state of immobility that promises no more surprises, when you lose all hope at the sight of faces that are still young framed by hair that's falling out or growing grey, like a tree in full summer with leaves that are already dead; it is so short, this radiant morning, that one comes to love only very young girls, the ones in whom the flesh, like a precious dough, is still rising. They are nothing but a pliable flow of matter, constantly moulded by whatever passing impression dominates them at the time.  Back at the hotel, the family becomes acquainted with the painter Elstir who, impressed by Marcel, invites him to his studio, but Marcel keeps putting it off because he cannot bear to miss an opportunity to spot the little band. This proves to be an error. It is decades since my reading of Terence Kilmartin's revision of Scott-Moncrieff's Remembrance of Things Past and then Penguin's retitled re-translation, and I was alarmed by how much detail was unfamiliar; I had forgotten entirely Madame Swann's little salon and images of train journeys, visits to Elstir's studio and sightings of the little band were only vague. What I do remember very clearly is fresh air and brilliant light, as if the novel itself is a holiday in the sun. While this exposes dilettantish tendencies, it may be fairer to compare the condition to the narrator's experience of enchantment with the group of girls. Likewise, we are enchanted by certain books and, like Marcel, we can be "profoundly surprised" each time we are in their presence, which in his case he puts down to "the multiplicity of each individual" compared to when "we are left alone with the arbitrary simplicity of our memory". Our relationship to a book can also follow the via dolorosa of disenchantment and Marcel's post-mortem commentary bulks out that path, accessorising what is otherwise an unremarkable story, so perhaps I had become jaded over the decades. Except, commentary does not constitute forgotten detail, as the winding sentences unconsciously nourish the growth of the reader's quality of perception, acting at a crude level like a prose exposition of a poem or to the summary of a dream minus the purity of its experience. Purity shines like the Balbec sun.  Seeking to recover the dream, to give the purity of the experience a presence we might hold and share, we turn to plot summaries, biographies, scholarly monographs, documentaries, film adaptations, even blog posts, leaving us in a state of literary insomnia comparable to a night in the hotel in which an exhausted Marcel tosses and turns in bed, kept awake by the dread of sleeplessness. All of a sudden I did fall asleep; I fell into that deep sleep that opens up for us a return to childhood, the rediscovery of years past and emotions once felt, disincarnation, the transmigration of souls, the recollection of the dead, the illusions of madness, regression to the most primitive forms of nature (for it's said we often see animals in our dreams, but we forget that, almost always when we dream, we ourselves are animals deprived of the rationality that projects the light of certainty onto things; on the contrary, all we can direct at the spectacle of life is an uncertain gaze constantly being obliterated by forgetfulness, each reality vanishing before the next takes its place like the ever-shifting projection of a magic lantern as the slides are changed) all these mysteries we think we don't know but into which we are actually initiated almost every night, just as we're introduced to the other great mystery of annihilation and resurrection.  The places to which we are taken in this passage and the music in Charlotte Mandell's beautifully invisible translation is reminiscent of the unrelenting procession of the dreams of which it speaks, and in this we might recognise that literature is, like dream, in excess of the world. We cannot access its mysteries by day.   Blanchot notes that modern literature has "a preoccupation with a profoundly continuous speech" giving rise "with Lautréamont, with Proust, then with surrealism, then with Joyce...to works that were manifestly scandalous". Scandalous not because of the content but because an "excess of continuity unsettles the reader, and unsettles the reader's habits of regular comprehension". Again, like dreaming. The excess of continuity draws us close to what is discontinuous of habitual life, to what remains stubbornly unfamiliar and yet into which we are initiated in certain books, the axe-books Kafka said we needed. This may in turn explain why novelists like Beckett and Bernhard, as different from Proust as one can imagine, are nevertheless closer companions than those who write regular novels of time and memory. If we compare this to Heidegger's claim that the measure of a great poet is to the extent they are able to commit to "one single poetic statement", a statement that is not explicit, we can appreciate that such continuousness is the outpouring of what cannot be stated and that our attachment to a particular book is not something we can properly articulate without becoming novelists ourselves. Marcel recognises this once he is initiated into friendship with the little band: It was on them that my thoughts contentedly dwelled when I thought I was thinking of something else, or of nothing. But when, even without realizing it, I thought of them, at an even deeper level of unconsciousness they were the hilly blue undulations of the sea, a procession silhouetted against the sea. It was the sea I was hoping to find again, if I went to some town where they might be. The most exclusive love for a person is always love for something else.   To discover something else, our true love, we might ask: how can we sleep? This may be the question for the literature of our time. Note In Proust Regained, I wrote about Brian Nelson's translation The Swann Way and included links to other posts of mine on Proust and In Search of Lost Time.