repetition, repression, modernism
The first story in Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives, “The Good Anna,” is a something like a translation of Flaubert’s “Un coeur simple” adjusted for the advent of the discipline of psychology. Instead of saying once “Elle avait eu, comme une autre, son histoire d’amour,” it says it again and again and again and again, establishing its version of the phrase (“The widow Mrs. Lehntman was the romance in Anna’s life” and variations thereupon) as an index of psychological blockage rather than literary irony. In Flaubert’s case, it follows, the phrase registers low bovarisme - the pathetic or bathetic implication of life in literary models. In Stein’s case, the phrase registers tautological euphemism, when we keep saying the same thing for lack of ability to say the next thing, the true thing.
après
He was a strange and complex man. He had peculiar tastes. He was never at peace with the world.
The only way to know that you were his intimate was if he treated you as roughly as he treated himself. If, at certain pitched moments, he savaged himself and you at the same time and to the same degree, then you knew you were in, for better or worse.
This, you knew, has how love, or whatever it was, worked with him. The fact was that he was at once incredibly tolerant of and incredibly impatient with human nature. His optimism was abyssally pessimistic, and vice versa. At privileged moments, his speech would take on the dark lyricism that comes of such cross-wiring, such implicit contradiction. At other moments, he would remain silent, which amounted almost to the same thing.
You would have stopped, if you knew then what you know now, and said “But when and where did I sign on for that? Can you produce a contract? A duly notarized document?”
“Certain processes and functions,” he would have responded, “are as implicit in human relations as the tree is implicit in this garden, the squirrels in these trees, the train on those tracks.”
“This is a cross to bear,” he would have said. “But haven’t we all got to have one?” he would have asked.
sublimation
Sinking back into a wine-induced, near-constant stupor, he reads the review and wonders whether the joke was on him or he is the joke on all of it.
His wife, well sort of, tells him to quit, move back to Brooklyn, and scratch the itch that’s been itching, that he’s not been scratching, since at least 1995. All of it comes back to that, all of it, she says when she’s in the mood to say such things.
Once, at a conference, drunk, he expounded upon the literature of the no. But now he has a hard time reading it. He is embarrassed about it, years later. It was in Chicago, or was in Long Beach, that he did that?
His wife says We’ll open a bookstore and then you will have some time. In return, he wonders aloud, pessimistically. Still, the food would be better.
He wonders, not aloud, later, about turning the screws tight, stripping them in fact, and then never being able to unscrew them.
His wife, well sort of, tells him to do an hour a day on it, that that is him at his best. But he simply can’t
He wonders whether the joke was on him or he is the joke on all of it, and then he writes this post.
our orwell, ourselves (i)
- No end to his impatience, he sometimes fills the time as he makes his way from place to place with the subvocal, always incomplete, composition of poems. But reading Keep the Aspidistra Flying has made this impossible, would make him feel like a massive douchebag if he did.
- Keep the Aspidistra Flying is 1984 without the excess governmentally. Literally, almost exactly the same novel for most of the run. So what to make of the anti-totalitarianism of the latter? Or was the message from the start simply that Britain is a bloody grim place to live.
- No line captures the psychopathology that drives Orwell’s writing like “How right the lower classes are! Hats off to the factory lad who with fourpence in the world puts his girl in the family way! At least he’s got blood and not money in his veins.”
- He wonders what it means that this whole thing started for him with Orwell. He used to think that meant one sort of thing; now it clearly means another.
- Fabian inversionism, the birth of Ballardianism? No line captures the psychopathology that drives Orwell’s writing like “He never felt any pity for the genuine poor. It is the black-coated poor, the middle-middle class, who need pitying.”
- Do all the middle class British believe that the lower orders are having more fun (having better sex), just as white Americans believe on some level about black Americans?
- Early on in the newly released Diaries, Orwell is floored to see one of the authentic homeless whom he befriends while doing his touristic overnights on Trafalgar Square receive a small sum of money and then instantly blow the whole sum on booze. Haven’t these people any money sense? That could have lasted for weeks!
- One wants to say that the libidinal unconscious of his works is driven by an extreme form of persistent adolescent frustration at not having anywhere to have sexual encounters – parental prohibition, parental surveillance. But he went to Eton, where assuredly things at least worked a bit differently.
- Why wasn’t Orwell a modernist? Because he seems to have utterly lacked capacity for self-reflection. Interestingly, this gives modernist reflexivity a better name than he thought possible at this late date. Someone interjects But he was, in large part, a leftist! Yes, a leftist whose works became a if not the primarily tool for anti-communist interpellation via literature-instruction over the past sixty years! In every high school in America, the novels stacked to the ceiling! And look what’s come of that!
- Orwellian post-lapsarianism: poverty is bearable, even enjoyable, as long as you haven’t any experience of the other side (which is even more, somehow, unbearable).
stein query
If you had to teach a seminar on Gertrude Stein, and the seminar was to be focused on “queerness” however construed, which text would you discuss?
Filling in a bit of a glaring gap here, as it were. I’ll admit it.
irish fordism:
A sizable percentage of the patrons one night are working behind the bar the next night. And vice versa.
“no water but only rock”
He dreams of getting mugged, missing appointments, fighting with someone and hurting them quite badly at first but by the end getting severely injured himself, being told off by both adults and children, getting caught in compromising positions, walking around with his fly open, and forgetting what he was going to say at a key moment.
Secular society’s lack of any viable purification rituals leaves everything up to the dream, and dreams don’t really work, not like that.
kitchen table
Full force, he suddenly sees it: the animal strangeness of spending an entire Saturday sitting at the kitchen table, typing revisions into a piece that was begun in 2000. Others are walking and looking, soon they’ll be eating and drinking. He, on the other hand, is in keystroke dialogue with a younger version of himself at once cleaner and less intelligent but somehow braver for it.
A cat drips from a bush out back and scatters towards home. Back at the table, state-sponsored classical music trickles out of his laptop’s speakers.
The structural stress of his line of work is abstract but profound – at once ridiculous and, unfortunately, utterly real. Everything else follows, as if fatally, when one takes it too seriously. That is to say, when one takes it at all.
style indirect occupé
Another word for confession is anti-theodicy. Justify the ways of man to God. But then there’s the problem of prepositioning, of answers without questions, and ultimately of authorship.
He thinks of Satan and his real thoughts after the Fall. But who put the thought in my head? Who made the drive that drove the thought? Did He who made the lamb make me?
intensity
A realist in the fullest sense of the word, he knows that the real reason Satan’s story starts, if it were real, is not because non serviam ex nihilo’d itself into his horny head, but because he was the sort of guy who wanted something absolutely fucking amazing to happen every single night. Only this time it did.
more flight
The conceit of this virtual world is that you fly from place to place. There are resorts and shopping malls, sectors devoted to polymorphous sex and others where you can worship the god (or gods) of your choice. Condominium complexes range around amusement parks and zoos full of dinosaurs – a entire world where adult infantility reigns supreme beyond the darkest (brightest?) dreams of Houllebecq.
At first the flying goes fine – he is soaring about a zone of chain restaurants, then a meticulously reconstructed Mayan temple. But soon enough, as he heads out over a beach where thousands of volleyball teams are holding a massive double-elimination tournament in the nude, he starts to slow down. He slows down… or the frame rate of the world he is in slows down. He seems to hang in place for seconds at a time and then lurch a few meters forward. Eventually he comes to a complete halt, his eyes locked on nothing but the sun and the deep blue sky.
He hasn’t the bandwidth for this sort of thing, he lives too far from the central servers.
dream
He is co-teaching a seminar with one of his colleagues. Just before the session is about to begin, she asks him to produce his handouts, the images that he has chosen to distribute. But he only has one copy with him, and so he lies and says that he had thought he would show them a Powerpoint presentation (he never does Powerpoint presentations) but there is no computer in the room. He even takes a memory stick out of his pocket to underscore the point.
She scolds him – It’s your job to check the room before you teach. You know that. Look at the copies that I’ve made. You can’t just pass around a single copy of the images – there are thirty students in the class! He responds, first, by saying that no, yes, he’ll just pass around the single copy that he brought, he’s done that sort of thing before and its fine, and next by standing up and walking out of the room. On his way out, he tells her he is going to make copies. But then he calls her a foul name just loud enough for the students, now starting to fill the room, to hear.
He leaves the building and goes to the Modern Language Association conference, which as it happens is being held this year at the nearby State Fairground. Offseason rates. Tents, corn dog stands, beer stands, hay… After some time wandering around with a pack of friends, academics acting like Nebraska teenagers, he realizes that he’s past due to go back and finish the seminar. It’s a three hour seminar, and he had planned upon leaving to return after the break at the middle. But now there are only thirty minutes left…
As he flies through the air, over the tents and attractions, and then sparse winter forest, he thinks to himself that this is the first time he has ever flown in a dream and that he’s not sure he really knows how to do it, feels safe doing it. He clips branches and flies slower than he might, and when he has made it back to the classroom he discovers that everyone – his colleague, the students – is already gone.
canonicity
When a certain book becomes a treasured object, when he wakes in a sweat about having lost it like he does about his passport, the stack of cash, or his Macbook Air.
what katie roiphe missed
It occurs to him, suddenly but while reading Handke, how much fiction writing must have changed – or at least should have changed – since the advent of ubiquitous pornography.
fb
The facebook update, and the low round of applause it brings: symptom of our meager times and meager, parent-applauded selves. “I visited the toy shop and didn’t buy anything!” Thumbs-up! “I am here where I am and can you see?!” Thumbs up! All of them! “I ate my whole dinner tonight!” Yay for you!
Desperation that inhibits work, or bends work back to the banal patter of mice running through the walls, clapping while they stop to gnaw.
