Review: In the Dust of This Planet

In the Dust of This Planet by Eugene Thacker
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

February 9, 2018

I've come back round to this after first looking at it during the summer of 2016, and find now that I have a snarl of responses, some of praise, some to criticize, even make fun of; still, the book has hardly left my mind since 2016, and has helped me re-start that life-long course in philosophy that keeps threatening to give out every now and then.

Recently, Adam and I watched the 2017 reboot of Twin Peaks, which features both Faust-like magic circles, the more insidious magic sites in the forests, characters like Woodsmen, material and immaterial at once, and a love for themes of darkness that comes out in the music and sound engineering, and the multiple image systems of woods and nature, the Black Lodge, swirling vortexes, Phillip Jeffries converted to steam, electricity apparently feeding Judy/Jowday. In a sense, Twin Peaks is much less pessimistic than, say, True Detective: garmonbozia and other human juices are so useful, then the world-without-us does care for us, at least a little.



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Review: Uzumaki, Vol. 1

Uzumaki, Vol. 1 by Junji Ito
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

读的是中文版，日本集英社正式权中文版，译者姓名没记，真可惜。《漩涡》本来是In the Dust of this Planet本书提到的恐怖漫画，里面明显有意象代表宇宙最不可思议的一边，就是它非人类性，宇宙超越残忍，完全不理人性的元素。这些意义全都集中在漩涡里。Eugene Thacker把伊藤润二的漩涡和《浮士德博士》里出现的所谓“魔术环节”，就是说，浮士德博士故意用科学方法创造通道宇宙另一边的渠道，就是五角星再画环节的魔术环节，而在《漩涡》里，漩涡是自然而然，全无创造者，才他们给读者的印象更若有所失的感觉。宇宙是怪怪的，连说残忍也不行，因为说真的，它完全不理我们人类。

至少，是Thacker这么说的。结果，我自己读这本漫画第一册，我发现还没介绍宇宙完全不理人性的元素，反而每股小故事（漫画里就写什么“第一话，第二话”等）都是说漩涡把人物的喜怒哀乐弄的更夸张，而最后小故事最明显，提到人性对吸引注目基础的冲突：“‘妮不觉得能受人瞩目，是很幸福的一件事吗？’‘啊……我不太喜欢引人注目。’”

因此我估计，很少有故事说到所谓“全无我们的世界”而不把这些非人类的元素连上人类的欲望和反感。

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Review: Pointed Roofs

Pointed Roofs by Dorothy M. Richardson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Mary Olivier, a Life was such an extraordinary experience, I had to find out more about the 'stream of consciousness' method, first by actually reading through May Sinclair's essay that made the use of the term famous in 1918, in the journal The Egoist, all issues of which are available online. Sinclair says Richardson plunges deep into reality, in the tradition of French writing by the de Goncourts brothers and Marie Claire, and of course Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The main thing was to hold her voice to the expression only of main character Miriam's fragmentary views, eschewing the role of the all-knowing Author; part of this game, it seems, was to let go, too, of drama and scene and character as such. "It is just life going on and on. It is Miram Henderson's stream of consciousness going on and on."

Not that the writing is formless; Richardson is a master of the image, showing us intense joy in the use of the senses, as when depicting human figures, landscapes, or interiors:

Mademoiselle, preceding her up through the quiet house carrying the jugs of hot water, had been her first impression on her arrival the previous night. She had turned when they reached the candle-lit attic with its high uncurtained windows and red-covered box beds, and standing on the one strip of matting in her full-skirted grey wincey dress with its neat triple row of black ribbon velvet near the hem, had shown Miriam steel-blue eyes smiling from a little triangular sprite-like face under a high-standing pouf of soft dark hair, and said, “Voila!” Miriam had never imagined anything in the least like her. She had said, “Oh, thank you,” and taken the jug and had hurriedly and silently got to bed, weighed down by wonders. They had begun to talk in the dark. Miriam had reaped sweet comfort in learning that this seemingly unreal creature who was, she soon perceived, not educated—as she understood education—was the resident French governess, was seventeen years old and a Protestant. Such close quarters with a French girl was bewildering enough—had she been a Roman Catholic, Miriam felt she could not have endured her proximity. She was evidently a special kind of French girl—a Protestant from East France—Besanon—Besanon—Miriam had tried the pretty word over until unexpectedly she had fallen asleep.

These extended sentences of description are worth pulling out and examining, endlessly, to writers who care to cultivate their craft.

And there is, after all, conflict and drama; it's just that it has to be deduced -- Fraulein Pfaff is more sensual than she lets on, and Pastor Lahmann does evidently enjoy Miriam's company, and he his.

Sinclair makes the point that Richardson enables us readers to capture Miriam's joy in the experience of life, despite its evident meaninglessness. There is a substantial, a thing...life and its force? The very love of it all? that dwells alongside Miriam, even as she chews her bread, and that will not allow sorrow to blot it out.

There is, in such hyperrealism, a mystical answer to the dilemma of absurdism, existentialism, and nihilism that so dominates the work of Beckett and Pinter and so forth. It is the hard-nosed attention to reason and feeling within, the generating motor of the sentences and brushstrokes of art. My favorite part of Pointed Roofs is a bit of writing against religion, reminiscent of very similar passages in Mary Olivier: A Life, and of course hinting at the proto-feminist pantheism of Emily Dickinson, captured so artfully throughout the film A Quiet Passion.

She felt safe for a while and derived solace from the reflection that there would always be church. If she were a governess all her life there would be church. There was a little sting of guilt in the thought. It would be practising deception.... To despise it all, to hate the minister and the choir and the congregation and yet to come—running—she could imagine herself all her life running, at least in her mind, weekly to some church—working her fingers into their gloves and pretending to take everything for granted and to be just like everybody else and really thinking only of getting into a quiet pew and ceasing to pretend. It was wrong to use church like that. She was wrong—all wrong. It couldn’t be helped. Who was there who could help her? She imagined herself going to a clergyman and saying she was bad and wanted to be good—even crying. He would be kind and would pray and smile—and she would be told to listen to sermons in the right spirit. She could never do that.... There she felt she was on solid ground. Listening to sermons was wrong... people ought to refuse to be preached at by these men. Trying to listen to them made her more furious than anything she could think of, more base in submitting... those men’s sermons were worse than women’s smiles... just as insincere at any rate... and you could get away from the smiles, make it plain you did not agree and that things were not simple and settled... but you could not stop a sermon. It was so unfair. The service might be lovely, if you did not listen to the words; and then the man got up and went on and on from unsound premises until your brain was sick... droning on and on and getting more and more pleased with himself and emphatic... and nothing behind it. As often as not you could pick out the logical fallacy if you took the trouble.... Preachers knew no more than anyone else... you could see by their faces... sheeps’ faces.... What a terrible life... and wives and children in the homes taking them for granted....

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Review: Go Tell It on the Mountain

Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Baldwin’s story of his own coming of age at first blush resembles Mary Olivier: A Life. Both feature young people who are smart, literate, critically-minded children of conservative Christian parents, conflicts with whom prove the crucial factors determining their values to come. Mary learns to live with her mother, but young James in Go Tell It on the Mountain says he loves to hate his father, who indeed is a perfect human portrait of evil, a tortured and torturing soul, so consumed by interior conflict that he morphs, in positively Greek fashion, into the monster of so many lives, James being merely one.

Where May Sinclair’s experimental self-references expand the views of the fragmented self, Baldwin instead dives deep into the lives of his step-father and mother. Elizabeth could have doubled for ill-fated Roberta in Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, her first lover in every way reminiscent of Clyde Griffiths, slim, handsome, an uncreative elevator boy in New York in the 1920s, except Richard is black, so instead of a leg up from a rich uncle, as Clyde got, Richard faces police brutality and quickly succumbs to depression and suicide.

The social realism of Baldwin’s style dissolves, in its final climax, into a heady, Romantic soup of gothic verse:

Then there began to flood John’s soul the waters of despair. Love is as strong as death, as deep as the grave. But love, which had, perhaps, like a benevolent monarch, swelled the population of his neighbouring kingdom, Death, had not himself descended: they owed him no allegiance here. Here there was no speech or language, and there was no love; no one to say: You are beautiful, John; no one to forgive him, no matter what his sin; no one to heal him, and lift him up. No one: father and mother looked backward, Roy was bloody, Elisha was not here.

Then the darkness began to murmur—a terrible sound—and John’s ears trembled. In this murmur that filled the grave, like a thousand wings beating on the air, he recognized a sound that he had always heard. He began, for terror, to weep and moan—and this sound was swallowed up, and yet was magnified by the echoes that filled the darkness.

This sound had filled John’s life, so it now seemed, from the moment he had first drawn breath. He had heard it everywhere, in prayer and in daily speech, and wherever the saints were gathered, and in the unbelieving streets. It was in his father’s anger, and in his mother’s calm insistence, and in the vehement mockery of his aunt; it had rung, so oddly, in Roy’s voice this afternoon, and when Elisha played the piano it was there; it was in the beat and jangle of Sister McCandless’s tambourine, it was in the very cadence of her testimony, and invested that testimony with a matchless, unimpeachable authority. Yes, he had heard it all his life, but it was only now that his ears were opened to this sound that came from darkness, that could only come from darkness, that yet bore such sure witness to the glory of the light. And now in his moaning, and so far from any help, he heard it in himself—it rose from his bleeding, his cracked-open heart.

Wow. Too much of this sort of thing can be maudlin, tedious. Still, one is struck by the memory of similar passages in Richard Wright’s Native Son, as Bigger awaits execution, or indeed back in An American Tragedy when Clyde awaits his own. It strikes me that the source for such strongly-flavored language must be the gothic doom of late Victorian poetry, like James Thomson’s City of Dreadful Night:

For me this infinite Past is blank and dumb:
This chance recurreth never, nevermore;
Blank, blank for me the infinite To-come. 30

And this sole chance was frustrate from my birth,
A mockery, a delusion; and my breath
Of noble human life upon this earth
So racks me that I sigh for senseless death.

My wine of life is poison mixed with gall, 35
My noonday passes in a nightmare dream,
I worse than lose the years which are my all:
What can console me for the loss supreme?

Speak not of comfort where no comfort is,
Speak not at all: can words make foul things fair? 40
Our life's a cheat, our death a black abyss:
Hush and be mute envisaging despair.—

Did James Baldwin read such work? Likely, since his famed mentor Countee Cullen certainly did. But it’s also possible that Baldwin, imbued with the Bible and the the stiff structures of his father’s law, somehow reproduced the structure of feeling the gothic and decadent poets felt for the laws of their fathers, making Baldwin an African-American decadent, at least in his early years. I think he’d like that characterization.

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Review: Mary Olivier, a Life

Mary Olivier, a Life by May Sinclair
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Breathtaking beauty inhabits every tiny little moment of this book, the story of a young genius learning, struggling, but building confidence and capacity layer by layer until she launches herself, confident, into her public. “There isn't any risk. This time it was clear, clear as the black pattern the sycamore makes on the sky. If it never came again I should remember.” What a fantastically inspirational text, in a way the high modernists, Woolf, and Joyce, and Pound and all the others, could never be. May Sinclair deserves to be taught in our schools in preparation to read these — or instead of!

Where the early generation of novel was always about marriage, from Clarissa and Tom Jones to Jane Austen, and the Edwardian novel is obsessed with adultery, Mary’s life story is of the spinster who comes to care for her mother, the philosopher artist and her progress of reading and consciousness, and how these two sides of her life play against each other to offer self actualization.

She saw that the beauty of the tree was its real life, and that its real life was in her real self and that her real self was God. The leaves and the light had nothing to do with it; she had seen it before when the tree was a stem and bare branches on a grey sky; and that beauty too was the real life of the tree.

Romance occurs, but men are to Mary only as the tree in the grey sky, the offer and the illusion, selves of God on display in innumerable forms. Olivier’s monism is evidently informed by Spinoza and Hegel, but also Beethoven, and the deaths of her brothers, and the painful, impassable gap of understanding between the proto-modern Mary and her put-upon Catholic mother. This book sparkles with insights at the psychology of the fragmented self repaired, stitched out of queer romantic shards of nineteenth century thought, to be sure, but with a collage effect of color and sound and knowledge and feeling that honestly brings me to tears just to write of it.

This is the most moving novel I’ve read since Middlemarch, and if it cannot approach that earlier work on its range of psychological insight, it more than makes up with depth of self-absorption, and of facing the structures and systems that warp, obstruct, but ultimately also constitute, the self.

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Review: The Street

The Street by Ann Petry
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Naturalism is an appropriate style for describing the poor and downtrodden, for humans seem like beasts when social and political force crushes their will and leaves them warped by their desperate efforts to survive — hence the characters of the street, like Mrs. Hedges, who crawls out of the fire to become a pimp, or the superintendent, Jones, who creates his own world, Ulysses-like, even if it is a dank basement apartment, and he is both Ulysses and Cyclops in one.

Lutie Johnson owes something to the romantic chastity of Samuel Richardson, facing the facts Clarissa and Moll Flanders before her faced, that one cannot remain in tact, unspoilt, and still spring for material advantage in the world. No, only a separation will do, which implies the shocking ending to The Street, an ending I certainly didn’t see coming and won’t spoil for anyone now.

Ann Petry’s work suggests deep empathy with a character much like herself, if she had faced the mean streets of Harlem as a single mother, without the advantages Petry had as an educated middle class black woman, with a husband by her side. Without certain basic conditions, Lutie imagines, reminding us of Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of Her Own,” there is no real way for Lutie or others in The Street to become human, individual, with possibility of free will. More practical and less metaphysical than Go Tell it on the Mountain or Native Son, The Street gives us the clear-sighted vision of the banality of inequality, how racial assumptions and gross self-absorption just reproduce the ugliness of society, over and over, essentially without end.

Kudos to the production on Audible.com, which features subtle, but significant sound effects like a door shut, a streetcar signal, a wall thudded, amplifying the realist dimension of Petry’s prose style.

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Review: The City of Dreadful Night

The City of Dreadful Night by James Thomson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As I came through this poem thus it was,
As I came through this poem: All was black,
The lines did burn like lamps yet light did lack,
A brooding tone, without a stirring note,
To read aloud, to stifle soul at throat.
The song does throb like enormous thing
That swoops with sullen moan and clanking wing:
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp But we read on austere;
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp Once done, we'll have a beer!

This poem will help us bring back goth in 2018, rife as it is with sighs for senseless death, mockery, moons of triump, rivers of suicides and a "There is no God" sermon to make Marylin Manson proud. I came across the poem in Raymond Williams' The Country and the City, with its catalog of pessimisms regarding the image of the city. (In theory, the image of the city could and should inspire dreams of dread in Chinese literature, as well.)

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Review: The Prisoner of Zenda

The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Action films, with their fight scenes, jump cuts, and triumphant soundtracks, have a history, too, of course, and The Prisoner Zenda is clearly a major work in the series:

Then I heard the clash of crossed swords and a tramp of feet and--I cannot tell the thing so quickly as it happened, for all seemed to come at once. There was an angry cry from madame's room,
the cry of a wounded man; the window was flung open; young Rupert stood there sword in hand. He turned his back, and I saw his body go forward to the lunge. "Ah, Johann, there's one for you! Come on, Michael!"

One of my students recently discovered the term "swashbuckling" and asked about its usage; I can now refer him specifically to the villain here, Rupert Hentzau:

Leaning forward, he tossed his hair off his forehead and smiled, and said: "Au revoir, Rudolf Rassendyll!"

Then, with his cheek streaming blood, but his lips laughing and his body swaying with ease and grace, he bowed to me; and he bowed to the farm-girl, who had drawn near in trembling fascination, and he waved his hand to Fritz, who was just within range and let fly a shot at him. The ball came nigh doing its work, for it struck the sword he held, and he dropped the sword with an oath, wringing his fingers and clapped his heels hard on his horse's belly, and rode away at a gallop.

And I watched him go down the long avenue, riding as though he rode for his pleasure and singing as he went, for all there was that gash in his cheek.

Marvelous! The conflict here ends mano-a-mano, a fantasy of power struggle pitting honor against villainy, light against the dark, and the implication that the universe is a consistent, even godly sort of place where the good will ultimately triumph over evil.

But it's notable that protagonist Rudolf Rassendyll has to travel away from an essentially modern England, to the fantasy land of Ruritania, to begin his adventure in the world of romance, passing over and away from a civilization that seems to bore him to one where real fun can happen. And once in Ruritania, the rightful king he meets is his own doubled self, which he must work to save. Aren't these doubled characters a significant symbol? They certainly form an important aspect of reality to poor Princess Flavia, who falls in love with Rudolf but must ultimately marry the doppelganger she doesn't love, for it is her "high duty" to unite the kingdom and the clans and keep the peace.

Princess Flavia is most wounded and unsettled by her experience, then, the true victim of wronged identity, and in the end, of the political system, a motif that puts her in curious familial relation to May Sinclair, Virginia Woolf, and all the other modernists to come.

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Review: The Good Soldier

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

With all those lands in so few hands, the English gentry needed an ideology of improvement, decorum in behavior and taste and values that would explain and justify the inequality, from the grandness of their manors to the tawdry ugliness of their employed poor. Hence Tom Jones, in which honesty and zest for life supplement material desire to match estate-building with satisfaction; hence, also, Jane Austen, who understood the seriousness of observing behavior, the better to make the match in a volatile society with wealth concentrated still further on every generation.

Sooner or later the social reality behind these novels of marriages made well would catch up, and what could we possibly have expected, but divorce and ruin, the specter of houses lost, values all too easy to abandon, and the floating feeling of social institutions becoming irrelevant, which can lead to depression, addiction, suicide. It’s a credit to Ford Madox Ford that his story of two couples and their adulterous affairs feels as fresh now, to me in Shenzhen, as it must have in 1915. Perhaps, as Ishiguro must feel, we are in another Edwardian age, when the grand narratives of our day are at last played out, and we drink and oversex ourselves out of worry for the world.

John Dowell, the priggish American narrator, is voiced on the Audible.com version amazingly well by actor Kelly Shale, who throws in a demonic, distant sort of laugh, bubbling with nervous energy. Surely there is a queer element to his feeling for Edward Ashburnham, the good soldier of the title, who Dowell twice calls handsome but stupid, who carries on an affair with Dowell’s wife? Dowell can not quite decide what to make of the English gentlemen, a peculiar type of fellow in any case, and rapidly on the decline, even before WWI virtually finished him off. And strong women characters, Florence and Leonora, we can feel from them across the gap so artfully styled between them and John: struggling, confused, with tough-skinned shades of Albee’s Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf, particularly in that both women don’t have children, which if doesn’t plunge their marriages into despair, doesn’t help preserve any Victorian values, either. And good riddance, we may perhaps add, if we didn’t remember that modernity is no less traumatic for the confusion it causes.

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Review: The Country of the Pointed Firs

The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Realism," an entry in A Theodore Dreiser Encyclopedia, calls the term a movement, underpinned by industrialism and free-market capitalism, one directing writers to attend to the workers, the nouveaux riches, the massive changes to society, including threats to family and community. Life in the Iron Mills, from 1861, is an obvious example of the form, with its overt portrait of the people doing the dirty work of resource extraction, stripping away their humanity for low wages, far from any real chance at dignity or happiness.

Sarah Orne Jewett's work at first seems to turn entirely away from such social reality, towards the homier world of dougnuts and herbal remedies, haddock and sitting through the winter, knitting. But gradually we begin to see that Maine is a ghostly shadow of what it once was, which must have been bustling villages that became cosmopolitan in the great days of whaling, but declined precipitously as the nineteenth century came to an end, with just aging widows and widowers left behind, turning queerly taciturn. I was reminded of a half-hearted joke from The Good Soldier, as the narrator describes one of two broken marriages in the book, "You see, Leonora and Edward had to talk about something during all these years. You cannot be absolutely dumb when you live with a person unless you are an inhabitant of the North of England or the State of Maine." Mainers are apparently fully capable of isolating themselves in woods, or on islands, or even just next door, right over a low, rock wall, stubborn and silent for nearly forever. (One thinks of Elizabeth Strout, who must be of Sarah Orne Jewett's literary lineage, with her all-too-modern Mainers in Olive Kitteridge)

There is something of misguided romance in such New England austerity, and people of warmer climes can recognize something of the tension between reserve and amity they must feel in their own lives. So it is that Jewett's regionalism, or "local color", as the entry goes in Facts on File Encyclopedia of American Literature can bring a country's readers back together after civil war. Sarah Orne Jewett and Rebecca Harding Davis, New Englander and West Virginian, were also both published by The Atlantic Monthly, which hints at the great literary tradition of that journal over many generations.

We must have the dark reality of the coal and the machines, but we must also, I hope, always remember what makes life livable, in all of this mess, such as the delightful Mrs. Blackett, 86 years old, living on a tiny island community attached to the village on the shore, caring for her avoidant and delicate old son, but a perfect hostess to villagers, taking joy in others and just in being sociable:

She was a delightful little person herself, with bright eyes and an affectionate air of expectation like a child on a holiday. You felt as if Mrs. Blackett were an old and dear friend before you let go her cordial hand....It was indeed a tribute to Society to find a room set apart for her behests out there on so apparently neighborless and remote an island. Afternoon visits and evening festivals must be few in such a bleak situation at certain seasons of the year, but Mrs. Blackett was of those who do not live to themselves, and who have long since passed the line that divides mere self-concern from a valued share in whatever Society can give and take. There were those of her neighbors who never had taken the trouble to furnish a best room, but Mrs. Blackett was one who knew the uses of a parlor.

Everyone should live and grow to be such as these, like old trees with roots in the rocks, springs unto themselves, as Mrs. Todd says. (I only wish I could have shared the reading of this text with my dear old grandmother, Carroll Gene Field, and but thank goodness that through her, such old traditions of Society do pass down to me.)

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Review: Life in the Iron Mills

Life in the Iron Mills by Rebecca Harding Davis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The entry on realism in A Theodore Dreiser Encyclopedia brings this up, and it's not hard to see the linear connection between Clyde Griffiths of An American Tragedy and this story's Hugh Wolfe, though the latter is shockingly more wretched, as we might expect of an 1861 Welsh mill worker:

Physically, Nature had promised the man but little. He had already lost the strength and instinct vigor of a man, his muscles were thin, his nerves weak, his face (a meek, woman's face) haggard, yellow with consumption. In the mill he was known as one of the girl-men: "Molly Wolfe" was his sobriquet. He was never seen in the cockpit, did not own a terrier, drank but seldom; when he did, desperately.

Shades of Dreiser's realist tones show up in the writing of Rebecca Harding Davis, and for the same reasons, too, to bluntly unveil the social reality that darkens and blots out the will to life and love, as in the portrait of Wolfe's only likely match in the community, Deborah:

Yet he was kind to her: it was his nature to be kind, even to the very rats that swarmed in the cellar: kind to her in just the same way. She knew that. And it might be that very knowledge had given to her face its apathy and vacancy more than her low, torpid life. One sees that dead, vacant look steal sometimes over the rarest, finest of women's faces,—in the very most, it may be, of their warmest summer's day; and then one can guess at the secret of intolerable solitude that lies hid beneath the delicate laces and brilliant smile. There was no warmth, no brilliancy, no summer for this woman; so the stupor and vacancy had time to gnaw into her face perpetually. She was young, too, though no one guessed it; so the gnawing was the fiercer.

To read the piece is to take a step back to an early example of raising awareness of inequality in America, which apparently Rebecca Harding Davis certainly achieved, along with the magazine she published with, The Atlantic. It's so cool that the magazine formats the story on its website like a contemporary piece. I happened to find the audio file on LibriVox, thanks to Elizabeth Klett for recording. This would be an excellent piece for advanced high school readers. The Wikipedia entry for it is unusually rich in material, too.

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Review: A Theodore Dreiser Encyclopedia

A Theodore Dreiser Encyclopedia by Keith Newlin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Okay, it's not like I have read this all the way through, but it's a nifty resource for building up knowledge of modern literature in general, while supplying us with a kind of periscope back into Theodore Dreiser's era, roughly late 1800s to 1930s. I learned about left-leaning journal of the early 1930s, "The American Spectator," the case of Chester Gillete who killed his pregnant girlfriend in 1906, the existence and contents of individual essays like "On Being Poor," "True Art Speaks Plainly," "The Novel Demueble" by Willa Cather, "Sanctuary," the influence of social Darwinism and Herbert Spencer, the influence of critics, especially H.L. Mencken and William Dean Howells, and more books and stories to read, like A Traveler At Forty, "The Problem," The Financier, Life in the Iron Mills, Documents of American Realism and Naturalism, and a new interest in the work of Frank Norris, Hart Crane, Harold Frederrico, Emile Zola, the brothers Edmund and Jules de Concourt.

This whole genre of writing, encyclopedias on narrow subjects and influential writers, or national literatures, seems super interesting to me this year. Browsing them is a great way to build knowledge fast; also, I'm procrastinating grading papers.This one is published by Greenwood, which contracts out to scholars. I remember doing one entry on LGBT culture in Malaysia, with my friend from that country. Recently, I've also discovered volumes from Facts on File, like the Facts on File Encyclopedia of American Literature, the Encyclopedia of British Writers 2 Volume Set, and the Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism. I'm not too sure about quality in these matters, but it does feel more substantial than hanging out on Wikipedia for my single source of background information.

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Review: An American Tragedy

An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A most painful case, this Clyde Griffiths, and never exactly a hopeful figure as he grows up in urban poverty in early 1900s America. God will provide, repeat Clyde’s parents, more weakly by the day, and yet, the bellboys of the Kansas City hotels rarely come to good ends, we feel by end of book one. In that first act, Dreiser’s signature newspaper man’s style gives us the gritty feel of a street urchin’s world, with its overpriced department stores, smoky restaurants, and dank dancehalls. I could imagine a similar style serving China well, telling us something about a town like Shenzhen, and how it pushes and warps its denizens.

Book two is tortuous, though, a romance told by a naturalist, telling in excruciating detail how Clyde gets a chance to improve his station, how he risks it to pursue a girl, both victim to their bodies’ “chemisms”, how his background and circumstances poke and prod his thoughts, to passion and promises at first, then faithlessness and deceit later, and then, facing an unwanted pregnancy, to dark, chilling murder. There are forty seven chapters of plot here, drawn out deliberately to add moral ambiguity and continuing critical reflection on American life in all its constricting forces, its unfairness, its damage done.

Book three is almost as long, but this time takes us into the heteroglossia of the American courtroom, with its lawyers and newspapers, and towards the end, the mother and the chaplain who bring Clyde back to wrestle with the discourse of authority that started his journey, including the enigmatic analogies of the Bible: “Ye are the salt of the earth; but if the salt have lost his savor, wherewith shall it be salted?” The “mental and moral coward” is cruelly cast off.

As with Native Son, at the center of it all is the question of the possibility of free will. Just as Bigger Thomas’ murder of the white girl is the chance act that reveals all the underpinning forces of race on individuals, so Clyde’s killing of Roberta can be understood as something like a natural occurrence, later giving the lie to a hypocritical legal system that pretends to treat individuals equally, a monstrous falsehood as the lawyers deep down know. One thinks of Joseph K, and it seems no coincidence Kafka’s The Trial is from the same era, for many people must already have gotten the distinctly post-romantic sense of being pawns of human institutions run amok.

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