What Do We Mean When We Ask What a Story Is About?

What Do We Mean When We Ask What a Story Is About?

Reading a story called “False Spring” by Ben Lerner in Paris Review #205, I came across this sentence:

Bundled debt, trace amounts of antidepressants in the municipal water, the vast arterial network of traffic, changing weather of increasing severity—whenever I looked at Lower Manhattan from Whitman’s side of the river I resolved to be one of the artists who momentarily transformed bad forms of collectivity into negative figures of its possibility, a proprioceptive flicker in advance of the communal body.

 I was floored. At that moment I realized I had no idea what his story was about.

This revelation sent me into a hallucinatory moment. I could see myself in front of a college classroom, “Contemporary Literature” perhaps, even though teaching is one job I have studiously avoided all these years. “Today we are discussing ‘False Spring.’ Does anyone want to start by telling us what this story is about?” Some smart-alecky kid (myself, in college) would have an answer.

                Up until that stupendous sentence, this particular story had been a fairly straightforward tale, told in the first person, apparently about a guy in New York post 9/11 (in the same paragraph, there is a reference to “the present absence of the towers.”) who is wrestling with the concept of fatherhood brought on by being asked to be a sperm donor.  He takes some swipes at hipster Brooklyn. There is a story within a story about a woman who finds out that the man she thought was her father wasn’t, negating her cultural and personal identification. These details of plot are what a story is about in some sense. They might make up the first paragraph of the publisher’s blurb or a review in a popular magazine. It wouldn’t do for my mythical English class though. We would be more interested in the sudden appearance of Whitman, and that wonder word “proprioceptive.” It gets harder and harder to know what a story is truly about the more you think about it.

                In most non-imaginary English classes, the topic of what a story is actually about is not open to discussion. Or maybe that opinion is the product of one bad experience I had in college. I got an “F” on a paper about Margaret Atwood’s first novel Surfacing. It was the only thing on our reading list that hadn’t been discussed in class, so I had no idea of the professor’s interpretation. Apparently, we did not agree. I never took another lit class. I gave up on the idea of talking about books in public at all.  It seemed such a challenge to try and say what any book was truly about much less what it meant to me.

                And yet literature still had its formative grip on me. I read everywhere, everything. My worldview was formed by the authors I’ve talked about in this blog and elsewhere—Anais Nin, Gertrude Stein, Lawrence Durrell, and then there are the classics like Pride and Prejudice and the contemporary scene, where I am guided by my daughter. Yet I never gained the confidence to be outspoken about my devotion, in fact, I avoid it. What’s going on? Working in bookstores has taught me that everyone has their opinions, and it’s a good thing, too, or the last few bookstores would be gone. The bookseller‘s skill is not necessarily knowing what someone should have read in the past, but to know what they should read next. It is our constant search for surprising sentences.

Coming of Age

                Now that I commute to work, I read the New Yorker cover to cover on the train each week. In this, I imagine that I am following in the footsteps of my forebears, specifically my Uncle Charley, who took the train every day from Plainview, Long Island, to his law firm in Manhattan. He took me along one day. I had landed at his house as I tried to decide whether to move to the East Coast. In California, we went everywhere in a clunky Ford station wagon that my mother had decided would look good painted bright yellow, so a train into Grand Central Station at the height of rush hour was quite an adventure for me. For my uncle, who groused on the crowded platform when we made the switch from the Long Island Railway to the grittier subway, it was just his routine, an everyday occurrence. I was seeing famous people rushing off to various assignations. He was seeing a bunch of people in his way.

I didn’t move back East. At nineteen, I couldn’t bridge the gap between wondering around wide-eyed to actually living there. Part of me didn’t want it to become routine. I keep that romantic attachment to the place alive by reading The New Yorker. It was a guilty pleasure because I worried that if I indulged every week I would start believing that my “real life” and that Grand Central fantasy could merge somehow, or that they already had, in some “Letter from California” way.  So there must be some kind of small irony in the fact that now I too commute to work by train, here on the other side of the continent. And what a surprise, I am around the same age as my uncle was then, with a teenage daughter who wants to move to, you guessed it, New York.

                I just finished reading Daniel Mendelsohn’s article “The American Boy” about the role Mary Renault’s novels played in his personal coming of age saga. It is not a profile of her; although there are biographical details I was not familiar with, about her having grown up wanting to be a boy. This article was something different, and is called by the magazine a personal history. It describes, among other things,  that intensity with which a literature-obsessed adolescent approaches a newly discovered author. He relates devouring books like The Persian Boy practically in one sitting, much as I remember reading Mary Stewart’s Arthurian novels. These are not Literature with a capital L, but a world of the author’s making, although the young reader does not realize the art involved, or necessarily even acknowledge the author’s existence.(He did, which is why we’re reading about it now.)  Instead we are the Ringbearer, or young Hal, or even Elizabeth Bennett.

                The trouble is that as adulthood approaches, we are told that those books are fiction, wonderfully written, but not “real.” Instead, we are assigned the books that have been deemed meaningful for us by the adult world. We forget the miracle of literature’s personal nature, the joy of stories, written by individuals separated from us by space and time, and yet so immediate that we can use them as building blocks in our own lives here and now. Thank you, Daniel Mendelsohn, for sharing your story, and thereby reminding me why to read.

Grim Times

Grim Times        

                It would be an interesting school project to correlate the release of new collections of the Grimm Brothers’ tales with the economic and social climate of the time. In these times of cautious hope and widespread misery, there are two that I know of: a large illustrated reissue of Maria Tater’s The Annotated Brothers Grimm with an introduction by A.S. Byatt put out by Norton in  October, and a thick, densely researched retelling by Phillip Pullman, newly published by Viking.  

I realize when I reread these stories that somehow they helped form my world-view, even though I have no memories of my parents using them either as instructional literature or a scare tactic. I have no experience whatever with fish who grant wishes or talking foxes, or houses made of candy and gingerbread, but I do remember reading the stories aloud to my daughter when she was seven or eight, along with Perrault’s Fairy Tales and a collection of folk tales from all over the world that she got for Christmas that year. She was the one who initially saw patterns common to all of these tales, and together we began to verbalize the rules of magical living: events always happen in threes; the youngest son is always the smartest; take the advice of any animal that talks to you; people always get what they deserve; death is no barrier to justice.

The tales told by the Grimm brothers always seemed to illustrate life’s most difficult truths. In them mother’s love is sweet, but fleeting; men hardly ever pay attention except in the moment of conquest, and will sell their own brothers for gold; and the overwhelming need to get something good to eat knows no bounds. Women rarely fare will in the Grimm stories. The reign of the stepmother is long and hard. Virgins are never safe from being ravished, even in the tallest tower. The spinning wheel may be banished in hopes of holding off a spindle prick, but blood will out. And if the childbearing years are survived, appetites often turn monstrous, and the witch is not averse to using the dark arts of concealment and trickery to possess what she desires.

                But there is also an inherently renewing element in many of them—the forest, where anything can happen. It can be a place of safety, a refuge from the casual cruelty of everyday family life. It is by turns abundant, dangerous, mystical. To find your fortune, you must pass through it, and trust that you will be clever enough find your way out of it without losing sight of your new-found knowledge you have gained in the little huts of society’s misfits, be they bandits, witches, or little men. In the forest, the world is revealed as not merely human and responds to rules not written by man. There is no power but what comes naturally—the wolf must eat Red Riding Hood, just as the huntsman must kill the wolf.                Phillip Pullman’s retelling of the Grimm stories is serviceable. He understands their internal logic, and doesn’t attempt to modernize or ornament them. He seems to relish the inevitable retribution meted out in more and more fantastic way and empathizes the strict morality of the tales. His notes on provenance and the intricacies of the original German mark this as a scholarly volume, although it is not ponderous or boring in any way. Yet he seems unwilling to attach any but the most obvious meaning to the stories, which denies their magical nature. And, despite his scrupulous cataloguing of similar stories from sources other than  Grimms’, he declines to speculate on the universality of the subject matter. I suppose this resolute rationalism is a turning away from the overwrought romanticism of previous interpretations. He seems to be saying that these tales, as clever and satisfying as they may be, are best seen as simple renditions of traditional storytelling, nothing more. It is not magic fish or disguised witches that we need fear, he seems to be saying, but other people, in all of their non-magical duplicitousness.

               

Life in the Third Person; or What’s Going On with Salman Rushdie’s New Book?

Life in the Third Person; or What’s Going On with Salman Rushdie’s New Book?

                I was confused by Salman Rushdie’s new book when it came in to the bookstore, and made the literary faux pas of shelving it in the fiction section. Sure, it said “a memoir” right there on the cover next to the improbable title Joseph Anton but, thumbing through it, I immediately ascertained that it was a third person narrative. At the same time, it did not resemble any of his novels, always filled with playful language, and colorful, some might even say allegorical characters. No, this looked ponderous, with long paragraphs unbroken by dialogue. If it was a story what was the story about?

                Now, thanks to a generous loan policy. It is indeed about the author, referred to so far as “the writer” and “he” and “him.” Am I the only one to think this is an odd way to write about yourself? The book details his life leading up to and including the time he spent under the “fatwa” pronounced by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, a death sentence for supposedly blaspheming the prophet Muhammad in his book The Satanic Verses. This is all well and good—many people would like to hear how one survives such a thing, and whether or not literature can also be blasphemy is an interesting literary subject, but I’m more than 75 pages in, and I still have no idea why he has chosen to write about himself in the third person.

                So what does the third person do for a writer? It seems to me that it sacrifices the power of a personal story for the ability to describe or explain more than one narrator could reasonable know or find out. As a form in memoir, it reduces the author’s personal experiences to the level of literary gossip, and you know how I feel about that. At the same time, there are some heartbreakingly personal portrayals, such as being frightened out of his mind on the day his son misses a planned phone call.

                Joseph Anton is Rushdie’s chosen code name, taken from the first names of Conrad and Chekov, and used to hide his identity while in hiding. And that false name leads to possibly the conceptual reasoning behind the third-person conceit. The book, at its best, is about authorial identity, who you are when you are in hiding, forced to see your own face in protest posters, your body burned in effigy. Who are you when bombs begin to appear in book stores that carry your book, when people are murdered or maimed for being you translator or editor? That would have been a good story—how an author can more than just a guy that writes books and becomes an international cause celebre instead.

Of course, his cause was just. Freedom of speech must be absolute to be real. But I, like most artists I’ve talk to, hope that understanding that freedom would lead to saying something meaningful. Instead, we are treated to the story, freely expressed, of how he dumped his second wife shortly after the birth of his second son, married a beautiful model and started hanging out with movie stars in Hollywood. Not a very attractive story, in my opinion, but surely I defend his right to tell it. But really, is that’s all ya got? The Satanic Verses was at least interesting.

Page after Page about a Man Trying to Catch a Fish

Page after Page about a Man Trying to Catch a Fish         

                Started reading Harold Bloom’s Anatomy of Influence: Literature As a Way of Life, in an attempt to delve deeper into the question that I raised writing about Virginia Woolf. Does the biographical details connected with an author enrich our understanding of their work?

                I happened to be downstairs in City Lights one afternoon looking at the Philosophy and Lit Crit sections, picked Bloom’s book off the shelf, attracted by the plain white cover, and the happy subtitle. I opened randomly, and started reading. I had happened upon his description of a weekend with W. H. Auden. It’s the kind of piece that, once read, tends to fix an image of the subject in the readers’ mind. I mean, Bloom knows how to use his words, and since I am not likely to ever meet Auden (he died in 1973) it is easy to assume this portrait is a true likeness. He describes a scene that will instantly be recognizable to the readers of New Yorker-style literary gossip—the suitcase that contains nothing but alcohol; the bad behavior concerning the reading fee; the brilliant, if eccentric pronouncements. And, since Bloom is deeply interested in creating a literary canon, he must build up the literary reputations of his favorites (and his own, too, of course). But does it add to the texts involved?

He also looks down his patrician nose at popular literature, the Harry Potter books in particular. I suppose we are to go through life with nothing but a Riverside Shakespeare and poetry anthologies to sustain us. But what shall we read on the train? If someone reads the first Harry Potter book, say out of curiosity or simply because they are following a trend, and they love it, and so then they read all of them, and love them, and talk their friends into buying them and reading them so they can discuss how much they all love them, are they any less of a literary hero than Professor Bloom?

                Because as a bookseller, I’ve seen that kind of thing happen all the time. Just when I start to get depressed about the state of contemporary publishing, or worried about the survival of my tiny part in it, somebody will ask me for something like Doctor Zhivago or Sons and Lovers. I have no idea how they decide on any specific title, but it makes my day that they do.

                The title of this post refers to a conversation my husband and I overheard on a #30 bus as it made its way through Chinatown a few years ago. The conversation was between two high school students.

                “Did you read that book for English?”

                “Nah.”

                “I did. It was hella boring. Page after page about a man trying to catch a fish.”

                That’s what happens when literature loses its relevance. All of the salacious details in the world (and we know a lot of them) can’t save Hemingway from this scathing review.

                That’s what bothers me about Bloom’s book as a representative of literary criticism. Obviously, he has read everything, and for that he is to be commended. As an esteemed professor and author, he has most definitely influenced how we think about reading. It’s easy to pontificate on the primacy of Shakespeare and Milton, but what about those kids on the bus? What would make them want to read past The Old Man and the Sea?

                How many books have been ruined by being assigned in high school? But the need for narrative is still achingly strong, as evidenced by the success of 826 Valencia and Poets in the Schools here in San Francisco and elsewhere. The hardest thing to teach is the practice of literature as a living art, alive in the present, with roots that go deep in the past.

                That’s the thing—the canon is the canon for a reason, not just because some guys in New York, or some other literary capital say it is. If Shakespeare (Bloom’s touchstone) has been absorbed into our psyche because of his literary perfection (although I find myself wondering if at least some of Shakespeare’s lasting appeal isn’t due to the visual nature of his original medium—the theater), others are there too, and not merely for those of us that read. Not everyone will go to Yale and study literature, but surely we can all decide for ourselves what books we like.

My Carefully Constructed Edifice Turned Out to Be a House of Cards

                She dies in the end, you know. That is the trouble with reading literary biographies—you get attached to a story with this same predicable ending, over and over. You’ve spent a good few months (not as long as it took the subject to live it, but still a chunk of time) enmeshed in someone else’s life, and they always go were you cannot follow in the end. You’ve gone through their childhoods and perhaps compared it with your own, looking for any particular genius that might have been evidenced early. Then there’s usually the adolescence and early adulthood, another formative period, especially when it comes to sex, and the history of literary influences and alliances, and to the circumstances, sometimes heartbreaking, under which the masterpieces we love were created.

                Sometimes there is an element of voyeurism (ya think?), or even some professional jealousy. Does it really change the impact of Hemingway’s or Fitzgerald’s work to know how badly they treated their wives or that they were often drunk and maudlin? Up until now, I would have said no, but now I must admit that there is a certain feeling of schadenfreude involved. Maybe, at my worst, I use those pathetic stories to validate my own life choices—I may not be a famous writer, but at least I’ve never abandoned my family. Sometimes I wonder if the biography, instead of being a way to understand and empathize with our heroes’ basic humanity, isn’t sometimes used as a way to denigrate the artists among us who have managed to create something that we can only attempt to consume.

                So, it is with these kinds of mixed feelings that I approached the end of Quentin Bell’s biography of Virginia Woolf. I’d like to think that my intentions were good going in. I was re-discovering the author, and truly wanted to know about her. I guess I was a little shocked that up until this latest reading, she had not merited a place in my literary pantheon. Surely she belonged there, yet somehow I had missed her influence. Was it the suicide? Did my superficial knowledge of a few biographical details somehow predispose me to dismiss her work? Or, was my younger self, one who often consumed books two or three a week, not discerning enough to recognize her subtle genius? It’s not like she was the first writer ever to commit suicide, in one way or another, although personally I tend to admire the lives of those, like Djuna Barnes and J.D. Salinger, who choose solitude and live to a crusty old age.

                But now, I’m faced with the last hundred pages, and the dread is starting to build. This biographer had rather little to say about the genesis of her books, and seems more interested in her relationship with the family, most specifically his mother, Virginia’s sister Vanessa. Maybe the gossip aspect, how she felt at certain times, or how she reacted to personal challenges, is easier to illustrate than the interior process of writing. It sometimes seems that he is answering contemporary criticisms that are no longer part of the literary conversation, and therefor rather opaque. And what about that mysterious footnote near the end, alluding to materials that could not yet be published? Of course, we all like the particular details of who slept with whom when, and in what position, which he reveals with an urbane delicacy that I find very entertaining. Yet there is no way around the fact that, when she was about the same age I am now, she walked out of a morning with the intention of taking her own life. And now, at the end (of the book) it becomes clear that either everything in her life had led up to that point, or nothing had.

Because that’s the way it is with our lives. The details—that suicide was a common subject of conversation in her circle, that it was not her first attempt, that she had suffered more than one psychotic breakdown in her life, are just that—details, not reasons. Perhaps I was hoping that the slow accumulation of facts would somehow mitigate the enormity of that final scene, but, of course, they don’t. She had chosen her method, and was lucid enough to search out the perfect rocks that would both fit in her pockets, and be heavy enough to provide the proper ballast once she was in the water. It all seems so rational, the easiest and most elegant solution to the intractable problem of, according to her suicide note, her returning madness. (“I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate.”)

                So much was gone already. A whole world, her world was rapidly disappearing. Women no longer wore long dresses or alighted at parties from hansom cabs and carriages. Most of the Bloomsbury set, those glittering boys from Cambridge with their dazzling intellects, were either dead, sick, or hadn’t somehow lived up to their potential. Perhaps she felt irrelevant in the new age of airplanes and mechanical competence. It seems that from her letters she felt so—that the decorous, buttoned-up world she had been born into was being destroyed, that her time was finished. How sad to preside over the death of an age.

                And now, re-reading Mrs. Dalloway, how could I have not seen its greatness the first time around? It goes against my inclination to believe that great literature doesn’t somehow transcends its author, but I did get more from the book having spent so much time in her life, and now I can’t help wondering who I should read about, and re-evaluate next.