Creative Restraints

The four books with which I am discussing are:

Alphabetical Africa by Walter Abish, New York: New Directions, 1973.

Complete Stories (“The Vane Sisters”) by Vladimir Nabokov, New York: Vintage International, 1997.

A Void by Georges Perec, London: Harvill, 1994.

Gala by Paul West, Normal: Dalkey Archive Press. 1993.

At the end of Nabokov's story "The Vane Sisters," the first letters of the words in the final paragraph contains a message to the narrator. Cynthia and Sybil Vane speak beyond the grave to get the him to notice the icicles on the house. I don't know whether I would have noticed the message had I not read Strong Opinions, in which a grinning Nabokov reveals the secret of the last paragraph, spoiling (as he says) a once in a lifetime literary effect. Now I cannot read the story without detecting how odd the last paragraph reads. Could it be too many "y" words -- yellow and yielded -- close together? Or the truncation of the sentences, unlike most Nabokov sentences, although the immediate preceding paragraphs seem to set up the last, paragraphs broken by dashes, commas, and colons. 

I am grateful knowing the reason for the disturbance of the language. For example, when the narrator refers to "her (Cynthia's) inept acrostics," we see a clue to Nabokov's game. There's also the pleasure of reading the secret communication from the dead women to the narrator. They have placed a thought in his head, subliminally, just as Nabokov tries to place one in the reader's, which takes us back to the start of the story. Incredibly, we really don't have to know Nabokov's game to understand the story. It is something extra and pleasurable if figured out -- and still pleasurable knowing about it before having read the story. The pleasure may initially be strictly the writer's, something sublime and unreachable, part of an invisible architecture within Nabokov's aesthetic, based on a creative restriction. 

Few writers have constructed novels on such a narrow creative foundation, that is, depending entirely on a stylistic nuance. Imagine the last paragraph of "The Vane Sisters" projected through the entire story. More than being an experimental story or novel, this type of story aspires to being a limited tour de force, that is, it might be more experimental than As I Lay Dying or Infinite Jest, but its aesthetic range and perhaps, even, our satisfaction with the work, may not be as great.

To some of my Humanities students, I had distributed pages from two of these kinds of fiction:

My memory isn't accurate anymore. Mentioning my memory makes me feel insecure. A few months ago Alex and Allen kidnapped a jeweler in Antibes and killed him almost inadvertently. Between eight and eleven a.m. his briefcase containing many fabulous diamonds disappeared from Alex's apartment. (32)

And from a different work:

At night, his spotting an ant or cockroach scrambling on top of his window crossbar only to fall back down again would, without his knowing why, instill within him a profound discomfort, as though so tiny an animal could function as a symbol of his own bad luck. (15)

Their response to both passages -- and the first clue to what is "wrong" -- points to the fact that neither has the word "the." How could such a basic word be absent, I ask the class. Perhaps it's the consequence of another, hidden game. Occasionally, someone figures out what's missing from the second excerpt: the letter 'e'. I had taken that passage from George Perec's La Disparation (A Void), to which some students remark how many e's are in his name.

But what about the first passage? I drop large hints. Look at the first letters of the words. Is there something odd about them? Finally, I write another passage from an earlier part of the book on the blackboard:

I haven't been here before. I had hoped I could hire a car, but I can't drive. I have been awfully busy finishing a book about Alva. First I contemplated doing a book about another character, and another country. Bit by bit I have assembled Africa. (21)

Finally, they notice the vocabulary restrictions. The presence of the words, I tell them, depends on their place in the alphabet. The last passage only had words beginning with the letters from 'a' to 'i'; the first, 'a' to 'm'. Appropriately, they come from Walter Abish's Alphabetical Africa. The novel is an alphabetical balloon, filling up with word possibilities -- first chapter all A's, second A's and B's, third A's, B's and C's -- until it reaches the letter Z, then the novel deflates slowly, alphabetically, to its flaccid "A" form. 

The two books differ in their respective constrictions in that Abish's has access to most words once it reaches the "M" and "N" chapters. Abish enjoys a sort of relaxation not available to Perec in A Void. Perec has chosen to eliminate the most common letter. While he's never as constrained as Abish is in the "A" to "H" chapters, the holding back of the letter E, along with his narrator, Anton Vowl, recomposing famous works ("The Raven" becomes "Black Bird" and "To Be or Not To Be" is rendered "Living, or not Living"), borders on maniacal obsession. 

Constriction, fortunately, translates into greater creativity just as having less time drives one toward increased production. Without the restraint, the novels would be bland and unassuming. Yet, taken as a whole, both novels may leave one unsatisfied because the forms have overwhelmed the content. At best, they reflect an aesthetic intuition for the limited power language. 

Abish touches on this troubling thought that words limit what we have to say. Is the answer: less is more? The readily available reservoir of vocabulary dissipates our imperative for concision and truth. Yet, this seems an unlikely conclusion after we have read Vladimir Nabokov. In fact, Abish stretched the limitations of expression to an extraordinary limit. Alphabetical Africa's advancing chapter after chapter represents the release of an invisible grip on the writer's and readers' throats. Built into his scheme is a near tragic sadness as we read the descending chapters and return to inevitable and severer verbal constraint. 

The implications of Perec's lipogram novel suggests other analogies. Imagine the absence of an organ -- kidney, lung, whatever you can spare -- and the effect it would have on the entire body. The elimination of E's -- as Stephen Donatelli suggests in a review of Perec's magnum opus: Life, A User's Manual -- could represent the absence of Jews in Europe, for Perec was a child survivor of a death camp. A Void itself takes on the burden of the absence of a vital part of the language and life. But as in Alphabetical Africa, the novelty of the form overwhelms the plot and drama. The reader wearies over the narrators' daunting elisions. Ultimately, they teeter on an aesthetic implosion. 

Years later, Perec reversed the restraints of A Void and wrote a novella whose only vowel was the letter E: The Exeter Text. Here, he must stretch usage and spelling. For instance, in the epigraph, we find:

Let me stress:

the events here represented

never reflect the trewth.

Another novel combines the two aforesaid creative restrictions. Paul West's Gala, a fictional sequel to Words for a Deaf Daughter, limits the narrator to starting every paragraph with a word beginning with a U, an A, a G., or a C. The restriction derives from the pattern of the genetic code:

I can still make the paragraphs as long or as short as I fancy, but I'll distribute the subject matter exactly as twenty amino acids are distributed over the grid of the sixty-four triplets. So:UUU and UUC, both phenylalinine, could be this or thatsubject (balloons perhaps), while UUA and UUG, which follow, are leucine and could be, oh, Milk's departureanticipated. . . . In any event, since phenylalanine doesn't occur again, whereas leuline does, I'd better work out the subjects I've most to say about and which I'll skimp. (113)

The structure relates to a genetic scheme outside of the narrator's control because it was the same arbitrary mix that caused his daughter's autism. At once fated to this result and giving himself up to a literary pattern, West's narrator embraces his destiny, not necessarily resolving but perhaps transcending it through imaginative necessity. West's code in the succession of paragraphs consciously communicates a joyful message of his love for his daughter. And what the messenger RNA is to human life, the model of the Milky Way he builds in his basement with his daughter stands for the universe. His humility in relation to the genetic code and model galaxy enunciates an uncompromising commitment to an aesthetic that Nabokov, Abish, and Perec also communicate to the reader. 

Books Free

My Kindle is just one part of my Invisible Library. I belong to service called Book Lender, formerly known as Books Free. “Invisible” not because it is digital but I borrow them for a $95 per year fee. This is to say the books aren’t free -- the $95 covers shipping costs but my shipping costs for two books a month is around $45. Still not bad: 24 books for $50 or approximately $2 per book.  If I read popular novelists and genres, I might have a queue as long as my Netflix one: over 200. Alas, I only have 20. When I started the service in November 2005, I had 40 to 50 books in the queue. But it was always a stretch, even more so now, to find something I want to read.

The books, paperbacks, fit into a middle range of my reading interests. First, I found as many authors I liked and ordered their books. The first two borrowed were written by Julian Barnes, a book of stories called The Lemon Table, and by Kobo Abe, a novel, Secret Rendezvous. I have read most of Barnes’ work, including Flaubert’s Parrot, History of the World in 10 and1/2 Chapters, and Arthur and George. Other Barnes books I got from Books Free were The Sense of an Ending, which I read in a day, Levels of Life (novel), and Nothing to be Frightened of (memoir). 

Kobo Abe is best known for Woman in the Dunes, but my favorite works of his are The Box Man and Kangaroo Notebook. . I have found one other Abe book, The Ruined Map, and I have read several books by Haruki Murakami, one of Japan’s greatest literary writers: Spunik Sweetheart (novel), After the Quake (stories), and The Elephant Vanishes (stories).

Another book by Murakami, After Dark, I never read. As I surveyed the 87 books I have rented, there were more than a few like After Dark. Unlike the unread books in my personal library, these I will not try again to read or finish. Other partially read or unread books were:\

1)      Two novels in one volume by Kathy Acker – I didn’t get into these. Couldn’t generate interest in the prose or the characters. She’s not an easy read even if one likes her work.

2)      Goodnight, Nobody (short stories) by Michael Knight – I remember nothing about it. Don’t know if I started it, read a few stories, or what. I had the book out for two months.

3)      Lunar Follies by Gilbert Sorrentino – this is an author I have struggled to read despite wanting to read his work. His magnum opus, Mulligan Stew, is one of the big unread novels in my library that I may try one last time to get through.

4)      Then a several in a row: Going Down by David Markson; The Old Child and Other Stories by Jennie Erpenbeck; Mermaids on the Golf Course (stories)by Patricia Highsmith; and Van Gogh’s Bad Café: A Love Story by Frederic Tuten.

You may or may not know these authors. It was my first time for several of them. But after not getting around to four books in a row, I dropped out of Books free in November 2008 after three years and didn’t reconnect until 2015.

I received two books before I could change my queue, one by Gilbert Sorrentino. The next ten books were hit or miss. Several favorite authors like Julian Barnes, Ryzard Kapuchinski, Jon Ronson, and Gore Vidal I read quickly. Ronson is best known for The Men Who Stare at Goats, which I haven’t read (but saw the movie) and The Psychopath Test. I received Them: Adventures with Extremists. I discovered a new book by Vladimir Nabokov called The Enchanter, his trial run for Lolita.

However, the misses pile up and I’m near to cancelling the subscription. I’ve tried getting shorter books. Below 200 pages. But the Books Free system works against me and has become my main source of dismay. Book availability is rated four ways: High, Medium, Low, and Rare Book (sic). I have received nothing but “High” for more than year. I have a few left and am not adding more books until I get a few that are Medium available.

Looking over the entire last, I found many reads which stand out the most:

Yellow Dog – Martin Amis                                             
Men and Cartoons – Jonathan Letham    

Elizabeth Costello – J.M. Coetzee                                  
Disgrace – J.M. Coetee           

The Dying Animal – Philip Roth                                     
The Big Clock – Kenneth Fearing

No Country for Old Men – Cormac McCarthy               
Reader’s Block – David Markson
Rashomon and 17 other stories – Ryunosuke Akutagawa    
Identity – Milan Kundera            
Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire – Matt Taibbi                        
Lion’s Honey: The Myth of Sansom – David Grossman     

A Mobius Universe

A small cronopio was looking for the key to the street door on the night table, the night table in the bedroom, the bedroom in the house, the house in the street. Here the cronopio paused, for to go into the street, he needed the key to the door. -- Julio Cortazar, "Story"

            Unfortunately for critics of the "Post-Modern," the term has gained enough currency to be included in Humanities surveys.  The last chapter of a text I used in a Humanities class dealt with the Post-Modern Age.  Indeed, I taught the course with this last chapter in mind. It seemed necessary for students to know the soil from which our times have sprung, even if they had difficulty understanding the definition of Post-Modern or the very works defining this period.

            As I suggested, defining Post-Modernism was difficult. My students barely knew what the Modern was! I found various pages and charts which pointed to some qualities.  To these I tried to find various works, especially television shows and movies, they may have been familiar with. For example: Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  Seinfeld.  Twelve Monkeys. Twin Peaks. The works of Cristo.  Then I distributed what were to my mind quintessential post-modern works -- given the short time I was given to conduct the class, I tried to find the smallest works to illustrate my points.

            First, I passed around John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse and had them look at the "Frame Tale," a cut-out story which when joined became a mobius strip with the words "Once upon a time there was a story that began" which ran into "Once upon a time there was a story that began."

            A neat trick.  Then I presented M.C. Escher's Mobius Strip II, with the giant ants crawling along the surface.  Another neat trick.  Then more examples of Escher's art, including Liberation and Ascending and Descending, to show how an artist can illustrate a single theme in various ways.

            Next, we would observe the same principles on a slightly larger scale with Julio Cortazar's story "Continuity of Parks" (it can be found on several web sites).  A well-to-do man returns to his den to finish a novel that he had begun a few days before: "Word by word, licked up by the sordid dilemma of the hero and heroine, letting himself be absorbed to the point where the images settled down and took on color and movement, he was witness to the final encounter in the mountain cabin."  A married woman and her lover meet here and plan her husband's death. The man advances to the woman's estate, sneaks into the house and proceeds down a corridor and up a stairway.  He enters the salon to kill the husband, who is in a red chair reading.  It is the same chair in which the man at the beginning of the story seats himself.

            It takes some time before the students understand what has happened.  At least a third of them have not connected the story's end to the beginning.  Most of the rest made the connection but are unsure of its meaning. How could this have happened?  Is the husband in the book? What's real life and what's the book?  Their questions and puzzlement are what Cortazar expects from readers.  Few students, however, dare to extend the story's logic to their own reading experience.  That is, they too have magically undergone a process sewing them into the story such that the connection between the real and unreal disappears.  (This last aspect troubles Post-Modernism haters because they project the apparent dissolution of boundaries to morality and, consequently, the end of civil society and/or equate the dissolution with everything they believe has gone wrong with the world.)  I try to show how one of the many possible meanings of the story can be conceived as a metaphor for storytelling.  The link between the "real" and "unreal" becomes indiscernible within the telling of the story itself.  For the reader, the suspension of "belief" regarding the “”story versus reality replicates a process similar to the author's when creating a fiction.  Further, the metaphor I've described can be projected beyond the story to life itself and the relationship between the individual and society.

            In the latter instance, I supplied a small story, "Games," from an anthology titled Anti-Story, an appropriate tome to introduce a student to dozens of post-modern fiction types. "Games" ably describes social integration:

Two gentlemen make an appointment, but in addition to that each sends a friend to a given place. These friends of the friends also walk up to each other at the proper time at the given place.

New appointments are kept and made until "the town is humming, a stranger who driving through it says: 'This is a friendly town.'"

*

            Just when students reach the brink of despair over the unraveling of customs and usages they have taken for granted on an elementary level, I turned to the beginnings of western literature. One of my goals was to show Post-Modern elements in literature and art throughout the length of western civilization. The seeds of the Post-Modern existed from the beginning, not because literature had a self-destructive instinct, but that the truth Post-Modernism magnified proved essential to understanding the basis of our existence.

            One of the first works they read is Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Amidst their repulsion over Oedipus' marrying his mother and being brother and father to his children, they didn’t understand why he's blinding himself at the end.  We'll get to that, but first they might have noted the circular nature of the story and how any attempts to evade the prophecy that Oedipus will kill his father and marry his mother merely pulled him more tightly to that fate.  In effect, knowledge alone won't save us.  For the Greeks, his tragedy resided in the fact that the best of men couldn't see what was happening to himself.

            Finally, the story twists back on itself as Oedipus himself as he leads the investigation to find who’s responsible for the plague and famine in the kingdom of Thebes. Apparently, it’s the result of a crime against nature itself.  Almost sounds like the plot of some films whence the investigator finds himself, knowingly and unknowingly, hunting himself or returning to a past experience: The Big Clock (and its remake No Way Out), Angel Heart and Chinatown.  When Oedipus makes his discovery, he blinds himself, at once acknowledging his guilt for being blind to reality, as well as taking on the burden of human guilt for always being blind to the reality of our motives and actions: our original sin.

*

            Heraclitus wrote in one of his fragments: "The beginning and end are common," and in another: "The way up and the way down are the same."  Both literally anticipate Escher's paintings.  More subtly, in the first, we detect its truth in more than just, say, the circumference of a circle coming back to itself.  When he says "common" he is not saying "the same."  The aphorism suggests that humans begin enclosed in the womb and end, enclosed, in the tomb. Similar states, but not the same.  Apply this to Cortazar's "Continuity of Parks," we find suggested that the book the husband is reading is full of life and danger, yet the same book ends as his tomb.

            The social implication taken from Lettau's story, "Games", would have the structure of society starting artificially and becoming real.  The individual born into this society wouldn't know the difference between authentic and inauthentic actions.  In effect, our lives start in ignorance, formed initially from usages, customs, signs, and symbols.  From this assemblage of artifice, we might begin to discern who we really are.  At the least, humans can find out who and what they are not.  The ignorance with which we started in life changes drastically as we grow and mature, but in the end we go to the tomb relatively ignorant of ourselves and our society.

            Like Oedipus.

            Only his problem, and the eventual complex, is below the surface, in the human unconscious.  Beyond the reach of even the best of us.  Our Ur-ignorance.  We might have an inkling of it there but even then. what can we do about it?  How can we tell when the unconscious deliberately drives our behavior?  Stuck in our minds we end up like the Cronopio looking for the key to the street door.  Trapped in our own constructs of reality we become immobilized by the prospect that to get to the key we have to enter the house in which we are already in.  Trapped in our own Escher painting.  Climbing and falling down. 

Rudimentary Sentences

A special section of my library contains twelve books from twelve authors. I refer to these works as my Zodiac of Literature. Three of these books are dealt with below. Part of my Zodiac project is to find meaningful links among the novels. For each book, I have chosen a rudimentary sentence from which I derive meaning that pertains to the entire work. The three sentences are:

It wasn't the driver's fault he was only going thirty. -- Monsieur Levert, Robert Pinget

'It seems a very difficult sort of easiness,' I answered. -- The Third Policeman, Flann O'Brien

I had been ready for anything, but not for a teapot.-- Cosmos, Witold Gombrowicz

i.

I had been reading Monsieur Levert when I arrived in Paris.  One evening I returned to my hotel on the Boulevarde St. Germaine carrying my Grove Press copy.  Previously, I had vainly sought in a Larousse dictionary a translation for the novel's actual title, Le Fiston.  The clerk spoke English and had been friendly, and I took this occasion to show him the book.  He had never heard of Robert Pinget, one of the nouveau roman contingent.  It didn't matter.  Could he tell me what fiston meant?

            No, he replied, but perhaps the hotel's owner would know.  Before I could stop him, he took the book to an adjacent parlor and returned a few minutes later.  He was smiling as he handed back the book.  Fiston, he was told, was an affectionate name a father would call his son. The word derived from fils.

            This made perfect sense, I told the clerk. He did not ask how.

            Monsieur Levert has been writing a letter to his missing son everyday for ten years. He never posts the letter. He can't be satisfied with what he has written but is compelled to write (the novel's last line: "Except for what is written there is death" solidifies the book's Beckettian lineage). The narrative is divided into two parts -- each part or letter may have been written years apart -- describing life in Levert 's village.  Part II contains similar information but with many additions, contradictions, and distortions. Indeed, the novel literally seems to start over.

            The quoted sentence above embodies the equivocal relationship between Monsieur Levert's two parts.  Initially, there's the claim for the driver's innocence and an apparently acceptable reason (he wasn't speeding), that is, within the flow of the narrative the explanation appears logical.

            I don't know why I returned to the sentence.  Perhaps I was pulled back to it before I could turn the page.  I wondered how the fact that he was going thirty miles an hour absolved him of responsibility.  Was speed a negligible factor for the accident?  Could we trust Levert's judgment?  The sentence's meaning, my initial understanding of its implications, detonated before my eyes.  The two parts of the sentence separated and drifted apart.  Looked at another way, their being together grew more absurd.  Especially so with the absence of a comma.  That's why I had to go back to it.  Read it again.  Two complete thoughts together uninterrupted.  Only I have discovered that they've little to do with the other.  Levert's word isn't good enough.  At this juncture of the novel, Levert's narrative is breaking down.  The breach of meaning in the sentence parallels the discontinuity between the novel's two parts.  The sentence has effected the novel's detonation!  Which is Levert's.  It will mean death.

            The way the sentence works, likening it to a patch of skin taken from the toe and placed under the microscope, as a cellular sentence, we see Monsieur Levert's DNA.  It resembles patches from other Pinget books.  In fact, the tremulous feeling one gets reading his novels is best exhibited in the first sentence of his first work, Mahu or The Material: "This is the story I can't make head nor tail of it, somebody said: 'You ought to write it down,' I can't remember who, perhaps it was me, I get everything mixed up, it's true sometimes when I'm being introduced to someone I concentrate so much I take on the same face as the person and the friend who is introducing us doesn't know if it's me or the other one, he just leaves me to sort it out for myself."  We have entered a detonated fictional zone and must try to put together a few of the pieces. The notion of reliable narrator doesn't enter our head.  In a more radical stroke than in Levert, Pinget abandons Mahu's narrative halfway through.  If we can make head or tail of the book, then we're slightly better off than Mahu.  As for Levert, we feel melancholic toward his paralyzed relationship with son.  The act of writing his son might not be worth the effort, but it's all he has. Like Beckett's narrators, he can't help going on.

ii.

The rudimentary sentence from The Third Policeman might seem less consequential, being spoken by the narrator as opposed to something from his narration.  It responds directly to something said by Sergeant Pluck at a police station where the narrator is being detained. However, the nature of the response lessens the immediate importance of Pluck's remark. In these few words, we get a tiny (abstract) picture of the whole novel.

            The oxymoron as a turn of phrase has been in the foreground of literary criticism very seldom.  Used familiarly as the pun but garnering fewer groans and appearing less often (especially in news broadcasts), the oxymoron embodies contradiction and paradox, two things most people want to avoid.  Perhaps this partly accounted for the wholesale rejection of the novel by publishers for twenty-seven years.  Few could make head or tail of it.  The sentence, the narrator's remark about a difficult sort of easiness, refracts the entire novel through an oxymoronic prism.  By definition, also, we view the oxymoronic statement as being fundamentally incorrect.  Just as we know in The Third Policeman's narrative, from the first sentence, and especially after the narrator puts his hands under the floor looking for the black box of money, something is very wrong.  More, when the Sergeant interrogates him about bicycles and then expostulates a strange atomic theory.  Not to mention the narrator's devotion to the philosophy of DeSelby.  When all is said and done, we apprehend the narrator's fate just as we realize that a crustacean, called a shrimp, could come in a variety of sizes, the largest being the Jumbo size and, hence, only seeming to be a contradiction.

            Seeming contradictions proliferate in O'Brien's book, none more germane to the action than DeSelby's belief that death is the greatest hallucination within the hallucination of life.  In a sense, its truth is undeniable.  While we know death's inevitability, we would be paralyzed should we concentrate on it and nothing else.  Our ability to act and respond loses force when thoughts of death cloud our minds.  The narrator's application of this philosophy seems a model for all philosophies to aspire.  Marxists could only wish the workers of the world united as well as this man seemingly avoided death.

            Only, the elusive third policeman is finally met and the narrator must find out he himself has in fact died and gone to a quite improbable hell.  While we might not fully understand the rationale behind the fascination with bicycles, it seems an easy sort of hell.  Reading the novel again and again, we are disabused of this notion.

            The odd feeling we carry through this novel may just be another form, an absurd form, of the melancholy and helplessness we suffer along with Monsieur Levert.  The fictional world comes apart the more we think about them.  How does the speed of the car relate to the driver's responsibility?  And what's really going on in O'Brien's nether world?

iii.

In any case, these mid-twentieth century novels suggest the chaos near us, whereas Witold Gombrowicz, in his last novel, Cosmos, doesn't disguise or hide from the world's cornucopia of meaninglessness.  His narrator wants to create order and understanding within his absurd universe.  Yet, as the sentence culled from the narrative suggests, he can never prepare himself for the unexpected, for the next object, for it will change the pattern of meaning he had derived from previous objects, a pattern meant to anticipate the odd, unexpected object.  Some things, apparently, are too odd, too great to handle, even simple teapots.

            Levert barely exists; O'Brien's narrator fools himself to believe he exists. Cosmos's narrator, beset by people and objects, can only live by finding meaning for those people and objects.  In fact, he discovers that he must fully participate in the mysteries surrounding him and others even if that means perpetuating the mystery.  Just as he had not counted upon a teapot having any significance, so we didn't count on him killing a cat and hanging the body from a hook on a door in order to finalize a symmetry started earlier in the novel when he had found a sparrow hung from a piece of wire on a branch.  We resist believing that our relationships to people and things are determined by randomness and coincidence.  Put another way, and seemingly more oppressively, everything connects.  Later in the novel, the narrator sees a bird hovering in the sky: "Was it a vulture, an eagle, a hawk?  At any rate it was not a sparrow, but it's not being a sparrow made it a non-sparrow, and it was connected with the sparrow by virtue of this." (99)  On the same page, an incongruous development, seeing a priest sitting on a rock on a roadside in the mountain, reminds him of the teapot because the priest was a superfluity.

            The novel's title refers to the order and meaning the Greeks applied to existence. At any moment, the order can breakdown, either when meaning can't be found or when too much meaning, too many relationships occur.  Cosmos is about excess, the "here comes everything" aspect of existence.  Or, better, about a narrator lured to the mysteries of objects and determined to craft associations. Monsieur Levert initiates an opposite process whereby the more we attempt to associate the two parts of the book (or the cellular sentence), the less meaning or greater the dissociation will strike us.  But by being the opposite of Cosmos, Monsieur Levert becomes connected to it.  Something DeSelby might agree with.  For The Third Policeman's oxymoronic stance grants us the illusion of certain associations. We endure the uneasiness, possibly because we sense O'Brien's narrator deserves everything he gets, including a repeat of the experience (just as we gladly read the novel). Perhaps we even sense that these three novels connect at a fundamental level and, somehow, this unity was discovered by the happenstance of putting these three sentences together. 

The Kindle

Besides the overflowing library with many unread books in upstairs study, I have an invisible library, my Kindle, which also contains books that I haven’t gotten to or have stopped reading. I use the Kindle because there’s no more room for hard copy books in my house. I have gotten rid of a hundred or more but this seems to be the limit. I can’t part with them.

Many people eschew the Kindle because it doesn’t feel like they are reading a book. This rationalizes a predilection for the printed page and suggests resistance to the insidious advance of the Digital Age. I’m not sure if these people are consistent, not knowing their magazine and newspaper reading habits. I have no problem reading Harpers, New Yorker, and Atlantic articles online. A great international writer, Mirorad Pavic, author of The Dictionary of the Khazars, before he died a few years ago had several books and plays available online and dependent on the choices an internet book permits.

Reluctant as I was to use the Kindle at first, I accepted its necessity and soon was publishing my own work on Kindle. I have six books on the Amazon Kindle, one is novel that is also in paperback and another originally was published as an e-book. Sales have been sparse, even when I reduced the prices more than 60%. One might expect friends (real and Facebook) and relatives to purchase them, but it seems not as many own a Kindle as I thought would (or they have Nooks).

To facilitate reading on Kindle, I try to buy books less than 250 pages. Longer works seem to take forever, especially as the percentage of the book one has read is at the bottom of the page. Doing ten pages or even fifteen, and remain on the same percent number is, frankly, depressing. There are exceptions to this, usually non-fiction works that I can put down (as if I’m  reading a hardcopy):

Lost at Sea by Jon Ronson (author of Men Who Stare at Goats) – one of the interesting pieces from this book is called “Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes”, which he also made into a film.

A Supposedly Funny Thing I’ll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace

One Hundred Names for Love by Diane Ackerman – My writing mentor, Paul West, suffered a severe stroke in 2005 and suffered aphasia. Ackerman took it upon herself to retrieve her husband’s ability to speak and grow his vocabulary. West recovered enough to compose a memoir and novels before he died in 2015.

Ninety Percent of Everything by Rose George – this work opened me to a level of reality in the world I had barely thought of.

I have used Kindle to pick up four works by one of my favorite authors, Flann O’Brien. Myles Away from Dublin is a collection of his newspaper pieces not found in the Dublin Times, where his most famous column, Cruiskeein Lawn, ran for thirty years. Myles before Myles includes O’Brien’s work before 1940. Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green: The Insect Play, a comedy, was produced in Dublin in 1943. The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien collects five stories from the Irish, nine stories in English, and an unfinished novel. O'Brien was a pen name for Brian O'Nolan. His newspaper pieces were under another pen name: Myles na gCopaleen (Myles of the ponies). His column was my inspiration for a feature column, A Sardine on Vacation, published by the internet magazine, Unlikely Stories, which eventually became my first published book (2006).

Kindle books can be inexpensive and I found one by my uncle, Trevor Nevitt Dupuy, a military historian, The Battle of Austerlitz, and another by his father, Col. Ernest Dupuy, St Vith: The Lion in the Way (the 106^th Infintry Division in World War II). Then there are several that were free:

Bertha Garlan – a novel by Arthur Schnitzler, who also wrote Dream Story (the source for Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut) -- unread

Memoirs of Aaron Burr – over 600 pages, unread; I have strong feelings that Burr is one of the most underestimated of the Founding Fathers. Two other books on my Kindle are Burr, Hamilton, and Jefferson: A Study on Character by Roger E. Kennedy and Jefferson’s Vendetta: The Pursuit of Aaron Burr and the Judiciary by Joseph Wheelen.

Shakespeare’s Othello

On Liberty – John Stuart Mill

Sophocles’ Oedipus Trilogy

Homer and Classical Philology – Friedrich Nietzsche

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding – David Hume -- unread

We Philologists – from the Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche Volume 8)

On the Future of Our Educational Institutions – Friedrich Nietzsche

Eureka: A Prose Poem – Edgar Allen Poe – unread

My concern for Nietzsche I’ll address in a future blog. I will enumerate and write about the many film books on my Kindle as well.

Women and Men

Joseph McElroy is not well known among general readers. His Wikipedia entry calls him “a difficult writer”. There are many difficult writers but the entry is an understatement.

His fiction is often impenetrable, by which I mean that you can’t get very far very quickly, and it’s difficult to comprehend and remember. His one book, Plus, took four efforts before I finished it. It was worth reading. A friend, who also read it, said that reading it was the equivalent of raising a retarded child. Extremely difficult. Demanding impatience and fortitude.

As for his other novels, I had first bought Lookout Cartridge and got nowhere fast. It became my whipping post for unreadable novels. Then I found an inexpensive hardback copy of the 1192-page Women and Men. I read twenty, maybe thirty pages. Like Infinite Jest, the idea of devoting so much time to one book dampened my interest.

Always hopeful, I found on Amazon Ancient History and A Smuggler’s Bible. They seemed approachable and of reasonable length (less than 400 pages). It didn’t matter. I couldn’t read them.

For a while I have toyed with the idea of the connection between a writer’s style and our reception to his or her writing. While it is difficult to pin down a style in so many words, we can approach it in a general way.

1. Schopenhauer wrote the aphorism: “Style is the physiognomy of the mind. It is a more reliable key to character than the physiognomy of the body.” Transfer the mind to an author’s writing, then consider the content of the writing as ‘the body’.

2. What is physiognomy? Judging a person’s character via the facial features.

3. A writer’s work gives us the features of a mind. Just as we may not like a person’s features (extreme example for me: Ted Cruz), a writer’s style may put us off.

4. My example of a writer I have less enthusiasm for than other writers whose entire work (save the obvious one) I’ve read is James Joyce. I didn’t get anywhere with Finnegan’s Wake, but style is the least of my problems with it. I have read and moderately enjoyed Dubliners, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses. But rarely have I studied Joyce closely. And I have been encouraged by professors and friends who are Joyce scholars to take a closer look. There’s a payoff. I resisted.

5. I have greater enthusiasm for one of Joyce’s proteges: Samuel Beckett. I have read all of Beckett’s books four times over. Even the most demanding, How It Is and The Unnamable still interest me. And these are books with virtually no breaks. How It Is is one sentence! A book similar to this, Conducting Bodies by Claude Simon, is one of my favorites. Thus, the outright difficulty reading the text does not constitute the ultimate reason for pushing away an author’s work.

6. Jean-Paul Sartre writes in his short autobiography, The Words, that we only read what agrees with our viewpoint. Think about it. It would take a great effort to read works that contradicted our view of the world. Equally difficult would be to navigate a writer whose style alienates us.

7. I can’t watch the films of Paul Mazurski. A sampling: Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice; Alex in Wonderland; Blume in Love; Harry and Tonto; and Down and Out in Beverly Hills. A decent sampling. A few of these movies are well regarded. I couldn’t get very far into them. I didn’t think they were awful or lacked artistry, although Blume in Love was hard to digest.

8. The same could be true for actors. I have heard people declaim the deficiencies of Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Richard Dreyfus, etc. I cannot watch Tom Cruise or Barbra Streisand, and I try to avoid Meryl Streep and Robin Williams. I can’t give you a solid reason. They bug me.

The difference between Women and Men and Infinite Jest lies in this style issue. David Foster Wallace's writing I find more than agreeable. Subjectively speaking, he's one the greatest I've come across. He still gives me difficulty but it's a difficulty that potentially can be overcome. Style doesn't enter into it.

Thus, my failed efforts to take on the oeuvre of Joseph McElroy I don’t blame on McElroy. It wasn’t meant to be. And I am pretty sure I won’t buy any more of his books. However, he has a short work, Night Soul and other stories, Can I be tempted to take a look? Give him one last try? Forget all the other books of his I couldn’t read?

Rare Books

Between September, 1983, and October, 1987, I purchased 21 books through Rare and Out-of-Print Book agencies.  The books cost between $35 and $80.  The process allowed me to send the agencies on a hunt for the book, then they mailed me a price quotation once the book was found, and I chose whether to buy it or not.  It appears cumbersome today compared to the near instantaneous quotations one can get from Amazon.com.  I stopped purchasing books this way ten years before I bought a computer, partly for lack of money, not that I had very much when I was buying them. 

I found an inventory of the books in an old personal journal. These were books I had seriously wanted and had sought them after having exhausted my closest resources: several bookstores in New York City and Philadelphia and many bookstores on or near several college campuses I visited.

My first purchase was Reasons of the Heart by Edward Dahlberg. Dahlberg interested me, among other reasons, because I collected books of aphorisms: E.M. Cioren, the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, Nicolas Chamfort, etc.  My passion for this form of writing had previously led me to try to complete an MFA at Columbia by writing a book of aphorisms.  The project never got beyond one class where we discussed fifty or sixty of them (I had written five hundred), but the teacher, Frank MacShane, received them coldly, despite his having written on Dahlberg’s aphorisms.  

As described in Jonathan Lethem’s Harper’s article in 2003, Dahlberg adopted a severe persona inside and outside of his books.  His writing style is one of the most demanding in American letters.  No less intensely does he judge the work of his contemporaries and classics. For instance, Henry James was plainly unreadable (I read this at the time I was trying to get through The Ambassadors and couldn’t have agreed with Dahlberg more).  Apparently, Dahlberg damned student writing in classes at Columbia University just as severely, advising the fragile egos in writing classes to give up trying to write.  His aphorisms continue the assault on those who expect life to relax for a moment and allow the horse’s ass to pass by.

A writer whose path crossed mine in one such writing class at Columbia, was William Bronk, a friend of my teacher, Richard Elman. Bronk read passages from The New World, a book rhapsodizing Mayan and Incan civilizations (a topic Dahlberg touches in The Gold of Ophir).  I was so impressed that ten years later I ordered The World, The Worldless by Bronk, a book of poetry.  I seldom bought books of poetry, but these poems lived up to my anticipation.  Several years later I joined a group which met weekly where one of us brought a poem into to discuss for thirty to forty-five minutes.  I chose Bronk’s “A Postcard To Send To Sumer”:

        Something you said--I found it written down--
        and your picture yesterday, brought back old times.
        We are here in another country now.  It’s hard.
        (When was it ever different?) The language is odd;
        we have to grope for words for what we mean.
        And we hardly ever really feel at home
        as though we might be happier somewhere else.
        Companion, brother, (this funny) I look
        for you among the faces as if I might find
        you here, or find you somewhere, and problems would then
        be solved. What problems are ever solved?
        Brother, the stars are almost the same
        and in good weathers--here it is summer now--
        when the airs are kind, it seems the world and we
        might last unchanged forever. Brother, I think
        you would like it here in spite of everything.
        I don’t know where to send this to you. Perhaps
        I’ll be able to find it before the mails have closed.

I was impressed by the poem’s melancholy stemming from the sense of fatal brotherhood with a past civilization and, simultaneously, our mutually expecting to never find final comfort with what we have become.  It is why we read, breathe, and write.  

I also purchased six works of fiction:

The Blue Flowers -- Raymond Queneau       Mahu, or the Material -- Robert Pinget
The Axe -- Ludvik Vaculik                           To the End of the World -- Blaise Cendrars
Sutter’s Gold -- Blaise Cendrars                  Brave African Huntress -- Amos Tutuola 

These books were written by authors I had read intensively the previous decade, most of them first encountered in several Comparative Literature classes taught by Paul West. I had wanted to read all of their novels, especially Pinget’s, whose nuances and narrative devices I had tried often in my own work. The title of my first novel was taken from Mahu’s first line: “This is a story I can’t make head nor tail of it....”  Overall, Queneau may have influenced me more greatly.  I have described my novel, Berthcut & Sons (formerly known as Head Nor Tail, in queries to editors, as being “Ameriqueneau.”  

The other thirteen books comprised various works of nonfiction – philosophy, history, memoir – from influential authors.  A Cendrars memoir of World War I, Lice, complemented another work about the French soldiers in the trenches, Humphrey Cobb’s Paths of Glory.  T. Harry Williams’ P.G.T. Beauregard: Napoleon in Gray I acquired because of my interest Southern Civil War Generals, especially Beauregard, who participated in many battles and campaigns: Fort Sumter, First Mannasas, Shiloh and the southern retreat into Mississippi, and the defense against Sherman’s drive through South Carolina at the end of the war.  After reading it I was more amazed by the organized chaos of battles in the Civil War (and probably all wars), especially the apparently arbitrary factors which allowed one side to carry the day (Battles of Bull Run and Shiloh) and how generals could make or break battles with decisions made in an instant with little or scattered bits of information with which to work.

Invertebrate Spain and Meditations on Hunting by José Ortega y Gasset added to my already large collection of the Spanish philosopher’s book, as Ortega was and remains the single strongest influence on my ideas and direction in life.  My aforesaid novel began with an epigraph from Ortega.  Invertebrate Spain proved to be a necessary prelude to his most famous work, The Revolt of the Masses.

The remaining purchases:

The Outlook for Intelligence – Paul Valery         The Greek Tyrants – A. Andrews          

Language: Its Nature, Development, and Origin – Otto Jespersen 

Terrorism – Walter Lacqueur             The Opium War Through Chinese Eyes – Arthur Waley

War and Human Progress – John Nef                      History of Rome – Thomas Mommsen

Idols of the Tribe – Harold R. Isaacs                  The End of Our Time – Nicolas Berdyaev

             

Only one or two of the twenty-one books I didn’t finish: The Greek Tyrants and War and Human Progress.