If you have on your personal bucket list the thought that you should read one novel by John Updike before you die, what one should that be?
The Rabbit series is over-rated.
The best single Updike, in my opinion, is Roger's Version.
Amazon's "most helpful" review, by someone calling himself "Outside Looking In," captures a nice moment from the book. The protagonist, Roger Lambert, is thinking about ancient Jews and contemporary Protestants.
"How did those Israelites get their hooks into us so deeply, sticking us with their frightful black Bible and it imprecations while their modern descendants treat the matter as a family joke, filling their own lives with violin music and clear-eyed, Godless science? L'Chaim! Compared with the Jews we protestants do indeed dwell in the valley of death."
In essence, Lambert is a Barthian. His "rascally pet" as he says at one point, is the great Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968). What he most admires in Barth is the utter Otherness of Barth's God, the rejection of even an "analogic" relationship between God's Being and our own being. God is essentially a hidden God.
Updike pits this Barthianism against the seemingly more naive views of a younger man, Dale, who believes that contemporary physics is making God visible, and who believes he can complete that uncovering of God through computer science.
Lambert helps Dale get the grant for his project, but in subtler ways undermines both that project and Dale's faith.
As to the reviewers, David Wisehart thinks the book "both fascinating and frustrating."
David Lodge, writing in The New York Times, speaks of its "richness and viruosity," and says he finished it with "renewed respect for one of the most intelligent and resourceful of contemporary novelists."
Mark Athitakis, writing for Critical Mass, admires the way Updike "smoothly embeds dense scientific discussion into his narrative, anticipating the controversy over Intelligent Design more than a decade before it became a mainstream issue."
Not everyone liked it, though. In The New York Review of Books, Frederick Crews spoke of "the growth of a belligerent, almost hysterical callousness" in Updike's career generally, which he sees as epitomized here.
I don't see what Crews thinks he sees.
Showing posts with label American Literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label American Literature. Show all posts
04 December 2011
24 September 2011
A birthday
Today, September 24, was the birthday -- in 1896 -- of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
In his memory then, I'll simply reproduce here the opening of The Great Gatsby.
-----------------
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought — frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.
In his memory then, I'll simply reproduce here the opening of The Great Gatsby.
-----------------
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought — frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.
16 July 2011
Random Literary Quotation
"A Sunday repose prevailed the whole moribund town, peaceful, profound. A certain pleasing numbness, a sense of grateful enervation exhaled from the scorching plaster. There was no movement, no sound of human business. The faint hum of the insect, the intermittent murmur of the guitar, the mellow complainings of the pigeons, the prolonged purr of the white cat, the contented clucking of the hens--all these noises mingled together to form a faint, drowsy bourdon, prolonged, stupefying, suggestive of an infinite quiet, of a calm, complacent life, centuries old, lapsing gradually to its end under the gorgeous loneliness of a cloudless, pale blue sky and the steady fire of an interminable sun."
- Frank Norris, The Octopus
That's a nice bit of stage setting.
I especially like the word "bourdon," for a low-pitched tone, a word that seems to have dropped out of use since Norris' day. I also love the unexpected modifiers, "grateful enervation," "mellow complainings," "infinite quiet." The generation of writers after Norris became very reflectively anti-adjective, but here one sees there is nothing disreputable about that form of speech.
- Frank Norris, The Octopus
That's a nice bit of stage setting.
I especially like the word "bourdon," for a low-pitched tone, a word that seems to have dropped out of use since Norris' day. I also love the unexpected modifiers, "grateful enervation," "mellow complainings," "infinite quiet." The generation of writers after Norris became very reflectively anti-adjective, but here one sees there is nothing disreputable about that form of speech.
24 October 2010
The Broom of the System
I've lately been reading the 1987 novel "The Broom of the System," by the late David Foster Wallace. Broom was his first novel, though he later became famous with "Infinite Jest" (1996).
The title reference to a "broom" alludes to the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, which is a theme of the novel. LW wrote: "For a large class of cases — though not for all — in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language." That line is often shortened to just three words: meaning is use.
One character in this novel explains this to another using the example of a broom. What is the more essential part of a broom, the straw bristles or the wooden handle? Most people if pressed, will say the bristles, because the bristles do the actual cleaning. But one says this because one is thinking of the use of a broom -- its use is to clean. If one thought of the same object as a baseball bat, or as a burglar's tool for breaking windows, the handle would be vastly more valuable. The change in use would change the meaning.
The protagonist of the novel is a young woman named Lenore, a 24-year-old telephone switchboard operator for a publishing company that does hardly any publishing (since it is in reality somebody's tax dodge). The catalyzing crisis of the plot is Lenore's discovery that her Wittgensteinian great-grandmother, the one who uses the broom example to explain language -- this woman, also named Lenore, had studied in England in her youth and had known LW personally -- is no longer in the nursing home where she is supposed to be -- that she and several other residents have disappeared.
One intriguing character in the novel is the manager of that nursing home, David Bloemker. Bloemker repeatedly expresses himself in an overly elaborate manner, only to have to reduce his own locutions to a much simpler form. For example, he tells Lenore that if they find her great-grandmother they will likely also find the other missing residents of the facility. Why? Because, she "enjoyed a status here -- with the facility administration, the staff, and, through the force of her personality and her evident gifts, especially with the other residents that leads one to believe that, were the mislocation a result of anything other than outright coercion ... it would not be improper to posit the location and retrieval of Lenore as near assurance of retrieving the other misplaced parties."
The younger Lenore says that she doesn't understand all of that.
Bloemker tries again, "Your great-grandmother was more or less the ringleader around here."
That sort of trick -- the comic reduction of ornate speech to plain speech -- is commonly attempted, yet it is rather hard to pull off, and I think Wallace handles it well when he uses it.
Better than, say, the screenwriters for the old television show "Gilligan's Island." In one episode of that show, the castaways discover helium escaping from the ground, and attempt to leave from the island in a balloon. When Gilligan shows the professor the source of helium, the prof says, "why, it's obviously an invisible and odorless gas." Gilligan replies, "not only that, you can't see it or smell it."
The Gilligan version of the joke is lame, Wallace's version shows how it can be done properly.
The conjunction of the two isn't unfair to Wallace, because he actually introduces Gilligan's Island into this novel. There is a restaurant in this novel's fictional version of Cleveland Ohio that is decorated like the set of that TV show.
"Once an hour the bartender would be required to do something cloddish and stupid -- a standard favorite had the bartender slipping on a bit of spilled banana daiquiri and falling and acting as if he had driven his thumb into his eye -- and the patrons would, if they were hip and in the know, say with one voice, 'Aww, Gilligan,' and laugh, and clap."
Wallace's use of the baroque-speech-turned-plain meme is not just a gag to pull out, and pull off, when Bloemker happens to be in a scene -- it is a contribution, after all, to the novelistic meditation upon language -- a contributor to the Wittgensteinian theme of the whole.
One character suggests (this is young Lenore's father, the older Lenore's grandson) that the elder Lenore has left the home because she no longer believes that she has any use. In her worldview, use is meaning. And without use, as a broom incapable anymore of sweeping, she has no further meaning. So she is willing to involve herself in a biochemical experiment in order to again have a use.
I will leave this open-ended.
The title reference to a "broom" alludes to the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, which is a theme of the novel. LW wrote: "For a large class of cases — though not for all — in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language." That line is often shortened to just three words: meaning is use.
One character in this novel explains this to another using the example of a broom. What is the more essential part of a broom, the straw bristles or the wooden handle? Most people if pressed, will say the bristles, because the bristles do the actual cleaning. But one says this because one is thinking of the use of a broom -- its use is to clean. If one thought of the same object as a baseball bat, or as a burglar's tool for breaking windows, the handle would be vastly more valuable. The change in use would change the meaning.
The protagonist of the novel is a young woman named Lenore, a 24-year-old telephone switchboard operator for a publishing company that does hardly any publishing (since it is in reality somebody's tax dodge). The catalyzing crisis of the plot is Lenore's discovery that her Wittgensteinian great-grandmother, the one who uses the broom example to explain language -- this woman, also named Lenore, had studied in England in her youth and had known LW personally -- is no longer in the nursing home where she is supposed to be -- that she and several other residents have disappeared.
One intriguing character in the novel is the manager of that nursing home, David Bloemker. Bloemker repeatedly expresses himself in an overly elaborate manner, only to have to reduce his own locutions to a much simpler form. For example, he tells Lenore that if they find her great-grandmother they will likely also find the other missing residents of the facility. Why? Because, she "enjoyed a status here -- with the facility administration, the staff, and, through the force of her personality and her evident gifts, especially with the other residents that leads one to believe that, were the mislocation a result of anything other than outright coercion ... it would not be improper to posit the location and retrieval of Lenore as near assurance of retrieving the other misplaced parties."
The younger Lenore says that she doesn't understand all of that.
Bloemker tries again, "Your great-grandmother was more or less the ringleader around here."
That sort of trick -- the comic reduction of ornate speech to plain speech -- is commonly attempted, yet it is rather hard to pull off, and I think Wallace handles it well when he uses it.
Better than, say, the screenwriters for the old television show "Gilligan's Island." In one episode of that show, the castaways discover helium escaping from the ground, and attempt to leave from the island in a balloon. When Gilligan shows the professor the source of helium, the prof says, "why, it's obviously an invisible and odorless gas." Gilligan replies, "not only that, you can't see it or smell it."
The Gilligan version of the joke is lame, Wallace's version shows how it can be done properly.
The conjunction of the two isn't unfair to Wallace, because he actually introduces Gilligan's Island into this novel. There is a restaurant in this novel's fictional version of Cleveland Ohio that is decorated like the set of that TV show.
"Once an hour the bartender would be required to do something cloddish and stupid -- a standard favorite had the bartender slipping on a bit of spilled banana daiquiri and falling and acting as if he had driven his thumb into his eye -- and the patrons would, if they were hip and in the know, say with one voice, 'Aww, Gilligan,' and laugh, and clap."
Wallace's use of the baroque-speech-turned-plain meme is not just a gag to pull out, and pull off, when Bloemker happens to be in a scene -- it is a contribution, after all, to the novelistic meditation upon language -- a contributor to the Wittgensteinian theme of the whole.
One character suggests (this is young Lenore's father, the older Lenore's grandson) that the elder Lenore has left the home because she no longer believes that she has any use. In her worldview, use is meaning. And without use, as a broom incapable anymore of sweeping, she has no further meaning. So she is willing to involve herself in a biochemical experiment in order to again have a use.
I will leave this open-ended.
16 May 2009
A Defense of "Old Originalism"
The law review published by my alma mater, known aptly enough as the Western New England Law Review, has just published a theoretical article by Walter Benn Michaels, called "A Defense of Old Originalism."
Michaels is a professor of American Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Illinois, in Chicago. It isn't unusual for a literary scholar to turn his hermeneutical attention to the reading of legal texts -- Stanley Fish more famously followed the same career path -- and the results here are intriguing. A good "get" for WNELR.
As the title of Benn's article indicates, he distinguishes between two ideas in the law -- U.S. constitutional law especially -- which he calls "old" and "new" originalism.
Justice Scalia advocates what Benn calls the "new" originalism, which Benn means to criticize (he also means to criticize, though only implicitly in this article, the wide range of non-originalist theories). Scalia says that he is not interested in what the framers of a statute, or constitutional provision, meant. He is unconcerned, that is, with private significance inside their skull. He concerned with what they said, and with what was the public significance at the time they said it of the words they used.
We divine the meaning of the term "cruel" in the prohibition against cruel and unusual tortures, then, not so much from anything the wielders of the relevant quills may have said they meant but from the dictionaries of the era, the "public and objective rules of the language."
Benn considers this position untenable, and wants to return to a more frankly subjectivist notion of originalism. I will leave you to discover the particulars of his case from him.
Michaels is a professor of American Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Illinois, in Chicago. It isn't unusual for a literary scholar to turn his hermeneutical attention to the reading of legal texts -- Stanley Fish more famously followed the same career path -- and the results here are intriguing. A good "get" for WNELR.
As the title of Benn's article indicates, he distinguishes between two ideas in the law -- U.S. constitutional law especially -- which he calls "old" and "new" originalism.
Justice Scalia advocates what Benn calls the "new" originalism, which Benn means to criticize (he also means to criticize, though only implicitly in this article, the wide range of non-originalist theories). Scalia says that he is not interested in what the framers of a statute, or constitutional provision, meant. He is unconcerned, that is, with private significance inside their skull. He concerned with what they said, and with what was the public significance at the time they said it of the words they used.
We divine the meaning of the term "cruel" in the prohibition against cruel and unusual tortures, then, not so much from anything the wielders of the relevant quills may have said they meant but from the dictionaries of the era, the "public and objective rules of the language."
Benn considers this position untenable, and wants to return to a more frankly subjectivist notion of originalism. I will leave you to discover the particulars of his case from him.
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