The Frame

Final Notes on Cosmopolis

As a follow-up to my weak post on DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, I want to provide some highlights from an excellent review of the book by The American Prospect’s Mark Greif.

In my last post, I was trying to put my finger on why DeLillo’s musings on the supermarket in White Noise succeeded, but why his musings on hip-hop in Cosmopolis failed. According to Greif:

DeLillo’s strength in the past came from his ability to show the limitations of people trying to hold on to the patterns they craved. He stood characters on the pivot between sense and senselessness. There is a moment in White Noise (1985) when Jack Gladney, exposed to vapors from a toxic cloud, has his chances of survival calculated by an infallible computer. It concludes he’s already dead. That moment captured what it feels like to live enmeshed in numbers, patterns, algorithms — and still be able to look down at your two hands and see nothing changed. DeLillo wanted to know what it was like to be a statistical person, or a historical personage (as in Libra or Underworld), and still a living person.

In Cosmopolis, the patterns Eric finds in hip-hop are not essential but superfluous. Eric does not “hold on” to hip-hop, or “crave” it. And hip-hop is such a flamboyant system that it hardly holds the same allure as one undiscovered, a pattern not yet traced.

The best part, according to Greif:

The texture of the novel is its most interesting feature. Characters appear and disappear. Eric’s route isn’t mapped and the chronology isn’t altered. Only one aspect of space-time is affected: The narration starts to take apart our experience of interior, of private spaces. Eric’s apartment unfolds, revealing a fantastic existence. We discover its expansion, as details grow like crabgrass: A rotating room erupts here, a shark tank there, and the apartment itself has “forty-eight rooms.” Eric’s limousine perfects this strangeness. Visitors stand up and leave it as if it were a bedroom. The floor is made of marble. The space contracts and widens.

And the worst:

As for the politics of the novel, don’t even bother. You can’t doubt that DeLillo’s heart is in the right place. In the mouth of Eric’s “chief of theory,” however, a semi-academic named Vija Kinski, the book repeats watery versions of the stupidest analyses of the present, which are so unmindful of real conditions as to be neither of the left nor the right.

A Few Notes on DeLillo's Cosmopolis

I picked up Don Delillo’s Cosmopolis at a library sale for $.50, and read it last week. I’ll put it this way: the book almost ruined DeLillo for me. Much of the book seemed wholly unecessary, and some of it even made me embarrassed for DeLillo—particularly the part about the rapper “Brutha Fez“‘s funeral.

DeLillo tried his best to mine some cultural gold here with Brutha Fez’s funeral, but his writing came off awkward like a middle-aged white guy bobbing his head to hip-hop. Why didn’t his exploration of hip-hop succeed like his exploration of the supermarket in White Noise? I suspect that it might have something to do with hip-hop’s obsession with the real. Or maybe it is because hip-hop is too cliche a target. It is already all around us. We have already thought about what it means, whereas a supermarket has in a sense disappeared. Anyway, I’ll have to think more about that, but here are a few ideas played out in Cosmopolis:

• Our imbalances, flaws and scars—like Eric’s driver’s missing finger, Ibrahim’s damaged eye—give us a history.
• Technology is a future.
• These imbalances cannot be turned into raw data or technology.
• What about language? How does language convert us? Eric continually thinks that certain words should be obselete by now, such as chair and table, suggesting that language is just as much a technology as cell phones.
• How does this line fit in with the rest of the book: “When he [Eric] died he would not end. The world would end”?

I might return to some of these questions, but I find the book not worth much time. Now I need to go read something good by DeLillo (perhaps The Names) to get this stale taste out of my mouth.

Scott Esposito on Cormac McCarthy's Paradox of Choice

Scott Esposito at the Quarterly Conversation recaps Cormac McCarthy’s career, focusing particularly on how McCarthy has “prob[ed] the fence-posts lining the borders of free will and develop[ed] his own distinctly postmodern view of identity, plot, and country.” The review is enlightening—especially the part on The Road because I have been able to find very little criticism on it.

Here’s a highlight:

Such profound and sincere engagement with his writing bespeaks an author who has very much struck a nerve with all kinds of readers. I think this can be traced to his lifelong obsession with the search for identity: no one thing has been as consistent in McCarthy’s work over his forty-year career as his insistence that we are only offered certain moments to really influence our identity, though we may not know them when we see them and we may be illusioned as to what the choices represent. Furthermore, his most financially successful books and his avowed masterpiece have powerfully stated this idea while also arguing for a distinctly revisionist idea of American identity. Yet what is noteworthy about the latter is that McCarthy has not revised using the typical subversive agents of literature; rather, he has made his revisionists cowboys, the very representatives of the rugged West that first gave birth to the myths McCarthy subverts.

A nice feature of this essay is that it traces this thesis through McCarthy’s ten novels, making a mini-argument for each one. In his section about Blood Meridian, Esposito points to the judge’s “typically convoluted” view on free will that informs the philosophy of many of McCarthy’s other novels:

This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation… .

The man who believes that the secrets of this world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.

Esposito explains the paradox of the judge’s logic:

Essentially, the judge argues that knowledge and willful action are only possible once all the facts of a life are known, but the problem is that the only way to make these facts known is to live a life. Thus, as the judge says, life is an already-woven “tapestry”; merely tracing one thread through it, a person will have “taken charge” of his life. But again, the paradox: this is only possible once the tapestry is woven, once a life has been lived and all choices are already made…

Is there a point in which a person can preview the tapestry whole-formed, and thus be in a position to truly choose his course in the world? Or must we always be in the dark as to what form our life will take when all is said and done, and therefore not truly be in a position to make choices that will define our future?

Book Notes: Remix by Lawrence Lessig

I found Remix more engaging, though less informative than Code. A different book, to be sure. Where Code focuses on the ‘architecture’ of innovations, Remix makes a mainstream appeal to renovate the copyright code and end the ‘war’ on piracy. In Lessig’s view, the battle between the RIAA and file sharing is not a zero-sum game. There are many ways to go about reform that would increase the public’s ability to engage with copyrighted content without harming the owners of the intellectual property.

Lessig’s problem is that his presentations are so effective that people are going to stop reading his books. Watching this video gives you all the highlights in less than an hour.

I do have one challenge to his argument. A large section of the book is about what it takes to succeed—or profit—in a “hybrid” culture. Lessig praises companies like Flickr for catering to their customers, for offering content freely and engaging a community. Because of Flickr’s willingness to offer a free product, his argument goes, they have built a valuable community and is able to profit while maintaining an enthusiastic community. But how much money are these companies really making? He throws youtube in the same category, omitting the fact that youtube has yet to turn a profit for google. For the most part, Lessig remains grounded in his optimism for the web, but when youtube is an example of success in the hybrid economy, perhaps we should curb our enthusiasm.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: The Problem of Evil

Amazon reviewer Kevin Salfen goes deeper:

In a sense, then, “Wind-up Bird” is a classic love triangle, but it has been made archetypal: the defiled is fought over between the defiler and the purifier. Because of its reduction to the archetypal, all defiled characters are functionally the same, and all defilers are functionally the same.

In my last post on the Wind-Up Bird, I sketched the novel in broad terms, observing its circular structure. There is plenty more to this book, including, as Salfen observes, the problem of evil.

While I would usually resist lumping characters together in broad categories, as Salfen has done, it makes sense in The Wind-Up Bird given its similarities between characters. ‘Archetype’ is an accurate word for the broad, shared existence of the characters both present and past.

Something else that needs to be covered is how these archetypes determine the characters’ behavior. At one point in the novel, Nutmeg describes the lack of control she has over her own life this way:

“I feel as if my every move is being controlled by some kind of incredibly long arm that’s reaching out from somewhere far away, and that my life has been nothing more than a convenient passageway for all these things moving throught it” (503).

But that’s for another day—or the comment section.

Book Notes: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

Here are a few rough thoughts about the novel:

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is the first book I have read by Haruki Murakami. I can say that it was the fastest 600+ book I have ever read. I appreciated its combination of entertaining plot points and ambiguous literary scenes.

If I had to sum up the book in a sentence, I would say it is a series of circles. I felt like I was reading the same story over and over (although the book was not monotonous at all—which speaks to Murakami’s mastery of the subtle). But I was never able to predict what would happen next—but after something happened, I often thought, “Of course!”

What I mean by a series of circles is that many of the novel’s characters live the same existence—not that they share experiences, but that they encounter the same psychological and emotional challenges: three of the characters spend time in the bottom of a well; multiple characters describe themselves as somehow “defiled”; multiple characters carry out violence via baseball bat; multiple characters have blue patches on their cheeks, see the wind-up bird (and describe it in those words) and dress well. It’s a novel of endless repetition. In the words of the novel, “the world [is] like a revolving door…which section you ended up in was just a matter of where your foot happened to fall” (411). There is a connection between the ‘unreal’ world of the unconscious—both individual and collective—and the physical world.

The rotating door of the novel passes through the real and the unreal. Characters make the jump from the physical to the non-physical world and it becomes harder to distinguish between the two. The novel’s use of Okada’s wet dreams are a great illustration of this conflation: Okada’s wet dreams, like anyone’s, blur the lines between the dream world and the physical. The stimulus is emotional or psychological, but the response is in the physical world, and Okada takes a shower.

Okada, stating his intention to get his wife back (who left him), combines the physical with the figurative. Claiming that “With [his] own hands, pull her back into this world.” (338). The word “world” is a good term to use in describing the different levels of reality—it’s the word the novel uses endlessly. I was actually surprised that Murakami came right out with this idea. Multiple characters end up speaking the same way and using the same words. While this similarity bothers some, accusing Murakami of carelessness, I think it contributes to the idea that every character is living the same existence.

In one of my favorite passages, on page 444, Nutmeg is discussing Cinammon’s loss of speech: “His words were swallowed up by the world of stories. Something that came out of those stories snatched his tongue away. And a few years later, the same thing killed my husband” (444). Here, the figurative world of the story, of the myth, is something physically dangerous. Just as the wet dream prompts a response in the physical world, the narrative prompts an equally visceral response. In the end, Okada’s imagined reality is just as important—if not more—than the physical reality.

Krik? Krak! Final Thoughts

I finished Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak? last night. Initially I was a little disappointed with this book. I started reading it after I finished Blood Meridian. The two couldn’t have been more different. I couldn’t get into the simple, sparce language of Krik? Krak! While McCarthy’s language is sparce at times, it is never simple. After I had time to adjust to its language, I began to appreciate a few things about the book.

I really liked how this book started weaving the short stories—referring to each other as if they are all related. What makes this move even more interesting is that some of the stories have a fairy-tale, fantastical style to them. By connecting these stories to the realistic stories, Danticat challenges our notions of realism. This move suggests that just because a tale is mythological doesn’t mean it is not real. I think this move is particularly apt in writing about Haitian culture, which is full of proverbs and expressions that refer to the culture’s mythology, but nevertheless contain the practical wisdom of the culture.

The title Krik! Krak? refers to an expression in Haitian culture roughly equivalent to the American “Knock knock. Who’s there?” The expression contains a reciprocity between the listener and speaker, young and old, reader and writer. This reciprocity is valued and demonstrated throughout the entire book. Having the stories refer to one another reflects this same sort of reciprocity—often the other tales are referred as history that came before the current story. This device makes the book circular so that reading the first story is in a way understanding the last—and vice-versa. The book’s self-referential form reinforces the book’s major theme of understanding one’s past to understand one’s self, or as expressed in the book’s language as, “You don’t just join a family not knowing what you’re getting into. You have to know some of the history.” Or take perhaps a better passage explaining this concept and how it relates to writing:

“When you write, it’s like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring them unity. Your fingers have still not perfected the task. Some of the braids are long, others are short. Some are think, others are thin. Some are heavy. Others are light. Like the diverse women in your family. Those whose fables and metaphors, whose similes, and soliloquies, whose diction and je ne sais quoi daily slip into your survival soup, by way of their fingers.” (220)

I also came to appreciate its simple language. There are times where the simplicity made the prose more powerful; it laid its tradegy bare.

Note: I’m not just speculating about Haitian culture; I am familiar with it because I served an LDS mission in Boston, MA and worked with the Haitian community there. I learned how to speak Haitian Creole and spent most of my days among Haitians. Having that background made this book more enjoyable, although I don’t think one would be missing out on anything without it. Just some of the gestures and exchanges between the characters made more sense having that background.

Here is a link to a list of popular Haitian proverbs: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Haitian_proverbs

Blood Meridian: Open Yale Lectures

To further understand the novel Blood Meridian, I watched the first of two lectures on it from Yale’s History of the Novel Since 1945.

Yale’s Amy Hungerford shows how Blood Meridian references Moby Dick, Paradise Lost, and Wordsworth. Apparently the second video (which I haven’t watched yet) wraps it all up, but in this first video she makes an insightful observation about a passage on page 4:

There is a lot of anxiety about origin, right here in these couple pages. We’re told, “Only now is it”—as he goes to Texas—“only now is the child finally divested of all he has been.” And you note, at the beginning, that he is, and his folk are known for, “hewers of wood and drawers of water.” These are the traditional adjectives given to the sons of Ham, the hewers of wood and drawers of water. Ham’s crime against his father, Noah, was that he saw his father, Noah, naked in his tent. Noah planted a vineyard, got drunk, and I guess he was naked in his tent while he was passed out. Ham happened to peep in and saw his father naked. His two brothers covered the father. The two brothers are therefore blessed; Ham is cursed. Why is this a curse-worthy action? Why is this a curse-worthy mistake? I think it’s because, in seeing the father naked, you see the mystery of your origin. And so, the kid is likened to someone cursed for looking upon their origin. There is a sense in which he can almost understand it. This is meant to be mystery, and yet by looking, somehow, he is closer to it than he should be. The problem for the kid is to divest himself of origin, to forget it, so if Ham is cursed because he saw his origin, the kid’s curse lies, in part, in the divestiture of all origin. He forgets it. It’s not that he sees it; he forgets it.

And then you can get a sentence like this: “His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world’s turning will there be terrain so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man’s will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.”

Here is the full video (part 1). It runs about 50 min (and is too wide for this column):

Blood Meridian: Final Thoughts

I write about books I am reading for my own benefit and enjoyment, but I will be posting my book notes here in hopes that I might start a discussion.

Naturally, McCarthy leaves me with more questions than answers, which is a good thing. Here are a few half-baked thoughts about Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian:

The Judge
•    He is not simply insane, but seems to be operating under a different set of principles and priorities. His talk about war as god suggests he sees the world as innately competitive, Darwinian in a survival-of-the-fittest way. Viewing war as “forcing the unity of existence,” the judge sees war as an instrument of natural selection.
•    I read something that compares Holden to Kurtz in Hear of Darkness. A major difference between the two is that Kurtz is somehow admired; Holden is not, even thought they both generate a lot of curiosity and don’t seem to fit into the world around them.  the judge is the “one man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen the horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance” (331). The judge transcends the “false dance” of society and remains the “true warrior,” at least in his own head.
•    The judge is outside of mortality: “He never sleeps, he says. He says he’ll never die” (335). And outside of history.

Writing Style
•    I found the book challenging in its vocabulary but very enjoyable to read. The best thing about McCarthy’s prose is that it reads like poetry; its rhythm is nearly as important as its content. There were many words that I didn’t know but didn’t look up because rhythmically, they worked. I found myself not wanting to stop and look up the word because it would interrupt the flow. His style has a nice subtlety, but also a vastness. His prose is simultaneously simple and complex, trivial and grave. After getting into its rhythm, I could not put the book down for several chapters.

The Western Genre
•    I am not familiar enough with Westerns that I could pick out where it is mimicking, mocking or deviating from the genre. During the part where the kid hides from Holden, I sense that it is closely following form. Holden appears to be a “bad guy” plain and simple. Of course, I know it drastically deviates from convention in its characterization of Indians and cowboys. It does not establish a good guys vs. bad guys dichotomy. Both Indians and cowboys are at times offenders and victims.

The Kid
•    In the end, the judge asks the kid, “was it always your idea that if you did not speak you would not be recognized?” This was the story of the kid, but he didn’t play much of a role. I guess a better question would be, How does the presence of the kid influence my reading?

The Dance

•    When the judge talks about the dance as “false,” when war “becomes dishonored,” it sounds like society, the artificial mores and boundaries of society. They have set a limit on something (war) which is, for the judge, natural for man. If society is the dance, and the dance is a “ritual,” which “includes the letting of blood,” this would suggest that war is a part of life, of the dance. This might help epxlain why the dance is the “warrior’s right” (331), and why only the “one who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war” is the only “true” dancer.
•    Dancing and war seem to be opposites. To name the most relevant difference between them, dancing is cooperative and war is, well, war.
•    At other times, the dance sounds like the accident of life, fate. It “contains complete within itself its own arrangement and history and finale.”
•    How does the bear’s dancing relate to this?

The Landscape
“Each man’s destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well. This desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls for largeness of heard but it is also ultimately empty. It is hard, it is barren. Its very nature is stone” (330).

Writing about this book, I feel like I am trying to analyze a madman. In writing these notes, I don’t mean to suggest that there is anything to “get” about this book—which is part of the book’s greatness. It’s hard to nail down.

If you have read this book, tell me what you think.