Asides

Two short notes:

Firstly, on the title of this journal. It is more or less entirely a reference to this Pictures For Sad Children comic. I like the idea of a piece of art made out of pages from books; even moreso, I like the idea that every person is a collage or a papier mâché sculpture made from the pages of the texts that we've read and incorporated (incorporated-- embodied, made part of our selves). I think it would be very cool to make a sculpture like that. I've started including the names of the people who have recommended these books to me, because I like that image as well-- it is as if, in reading a book someone else has recommended to us, we take the pages from that book, with our friend's marginalia, and add them to the papier mâché sculpture that is our self, and so there is a beautiful continuity of words and texts linking us together as we read the books that our friends have read.

Also webcomics are the best.

Secondly, apparently there is a word for the type of books I described earlier as "sprawling" and "breathless." According to this Wikipedia article it is called hysterical realism, or, recherché postmodernism (I suppose the literal translation is "researched", or, "re-searched", postmodernism?), or literary maximalism. The article cites both Salman Rushdie and Dave Eggers as examples of hysterical realism, as well as certain passages of Kundera. Having read about half of one Kundera novel, I can't really comment on that, but sure, why not. Critic James Wood, writing about Zadie Smith's White Teeth, criticises hysterical realism for attempting to turn literature into social theory, for ""know[ing] a thousand things but... not know[ing] a single human being" and for depicting "how the world works rather than how somebody felt about something." I am not really sure I like hysterical realism aesthetically-- I prefer extremely understated, unadorned, straightforward prose-- but I am not sure that telling us how the world works rather than how someone felt about something is really a pitfall of a certain genre of literature. For one thing, I don't even think it's true; A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, while incredibly self-conscious and, at times, painfully clever, is pretty much entirely about how Eggers feels about things; I would say an important feature of Midnight's Children is how Saleem Sinai feels about himself, being a fairly unreliable narrator and hence making the story as much or more about how he feels about the world rather than how it objectively works. Secondly, even if that were the case, is that a bad thing? I can't help feeling that telling us how the world works (whatever that means) makes literature more politically relevant than self-involved. I mean, as far as I'm concerned, if literature isn't social theory, then there is no reason to read it.

UPDATE: So I have now read about three-quarters of the article, and I don't think it is very good. Knowing nothing about James Wood, I would peg him as a fairly conservative, old-fashioned literary critic. He claims his "hysterical realism" is not the same as magical realism, but I don't quite see the difference; given the claims he makes in this review, his argument is necessarily that the function of art is to be the mirror of life. Which makes art, ultimately, vanity.

Anyway, I discovered all of this at work yesterday while looking up Jonathan Franzen, who is a pretty big deal, but I don't think I'll put him on the list-- white North American male writing big sprawling novels about family? Doesn't sound like the sort of thing I'd enjoy. White Teeth, on the other hand...

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, or, what I probably thought about this thing I read last week

I guess the idea of writing this journal was to write my thoughts down before I forgot about them.

BUT. BUT. I am just blazing through my new and unread shelf! I am now on my third book post-Midnight's Children! I am incredible!

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Dave Eggers
Vintage 2001
ISBN 978-0375725784






Ummmm, right, so, generally I hate memoirs and also books dealing with the "family" theme... which memoirs usually are, because everyone has a family. Somewhat. More or less because they're boring, but also because they're self-involved and useless as a genre. I mean, obviously there are exceptions and that's probably unfair, but the idea of writing a memoir, if you are not fucking, like, Gandhi or someone, is preposterous. As if anyone cares.

(Inconsistently, I love blogs and the entire idea of blogging. I have absolutely no philosophical integrity.)

Time to be intelligent. Family: another theme I dislike. I dislike the language of "family values" because of its obvious ties to conservative politics, and as an extension of that, I find (crappy) literature's obsession with family in general to be an example of essentialism, and thus conservativism, that makes this kind of literature philosophically, if not offensive, at least irritating. Family-oriented literature asks "How do we deal with what we are given?" Whereas the question I am more interested in asking is "How do we change what we are given to make it better for everyone?"-- thus making the radical change necessary for any sort of social justice possible. Just because something is "natural" does not make it good. This is a very common intellectual error that is completely unfounded.

That said, Dave Eggers' Pulitzer-prize nominated A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is both a memoir, and about family, which I didn't realise when I bought it. It is about Dave's life as a twenty-something raising his kid brother after both parents die of cancer within months-- one month?-- of each other.

It kind of reminded me of one of my favourite favourite albums of all time, The Mountain Goats' The Sunset Tree, in that it is about family tragedy and California. Those are really the only real reasons, but also because of the joy that gets mingled in with the anger and bitterness-- I would not have described The Mountain Goats as anything but completely tragic before I saw them perform in May, but John Darnielle's performance at the Garrick Centre was so joyful, he hardly ever stopped smiling, even during songs like Woke Up New, objectively the saddest song from the saddest album in the history of indie rock-- which is saying something. Likewise, Eggers' sense of humour, along with his textbook postmodern self-awareness, makes an Oprah's-book-club-type tragedy much more than it could be.

(Disclaimer, there are some very good books in Oprah's book club. But you know what I mean. Stuff your mom reads and cries a little bit while reading.)

Other thoughts. I don't know. I generally liked it; I found the self-aware, postmodern discussions on the necessary violence in turning life to art fairly interesting and not nearly as irritating as stuff like that can be. I mean, you can't do stuff like that without a certain air of clever-assery, but I think Eggers' very funny list of themes and metaphors preceding the actual "text" did a lot to help that-- i.e., if you've got to be self-aware, at least be self-deprecating about it. And they were infrequent enough so as to actually be interesting, allowing the story to function on its own without the added metafictional layer. Which I remember someone saying was the particular strength of The French Lieutenant's Woman-- that it functioned equally well as a nineteenth-century novel and a twentieth century novel. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius reads equally well as a memoir and a postmodern treatise on the act writing. Or something.

Anyway, clearly I don't have much to say on this one, and I was going to do some actual work while I was here this evening, in order to make my 45-minute bus ride not completely irrelevant.

Next: J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace.