The plot of Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves involves a spatially unbounded, ever-shifting labyrinth that sprawls beneath a suburban Virginia home, exhausting, maddening, and eventually devouring (almost) everyone who dares to enter—and on many occasions while reading the novel I too felt in danger of getting crushed under the book's labyrinthine narrative. Not because of the effectiveness of the author's scene-setting, or even the creative typesetting which twists and writhes on the page, but because of the sheer weight of the elaborate metafictional apparatus with which the novel is encrusted. More than a haunted house story or an examination of family, history, and the beast within (though it is all of these things), House of Leaves strikes me as an exercise in the aesthetics of excess.

For example. Danielewski, not content with a straight-ahead story or a single frame narrative, gives us a setup wherein anonymous editors remark on the copious, Charles Kinbote-style footnoting job done by young punk Johnny Truant on a faux-scholarly manuscript written by blind immigrant Zampanò—a mass of analysis on a film, The Navidson Report, which does not exist even in the world of the book, being either Zampanò's delusion or his fictional creation. And in case this triple-nested narrative, in which every level of editor comments on every other level, is not enough, Danielewski throws in an extra 200 pages of appendices containing everything from scrawled sketches, to personal letters, to surprisingly sophisticated poems supposedly written by Johnny Truant while in Europe. (The only things missing from the appendices are, of course, the materials Zampanò himself intended to include; this is the kind of joke Danielewski loves.) There is a film-within-a-film-within-the-book in which real-life celebrities like Harold Bloom, Camille Paglia and Stephen King comment on The Navidson Record while trying to hit on its director's wife—an section that, while hilarious and well-executed, is also insanely self-indulgent and seems, at least at first, to add little to the novel as a whole. Everything about House of Leaves is so flamboyantly complicated, self-consciously clever and self-referential that I passed through phases of eye-rolling impatience and muttered imprecations until eventually emerging into a clearing of wry amusement, in which I was forced to take the book on its own terms: calling it "overdone" seems beside the point. Like so much gothic fiction, the novel's overdoneness is part of its charm, even if it is overdone in a slightly different way than most.

Take the footnotes. Regular readers know I strongly dislike the Foster-Wallace-esque use of ironically overdone footnotes in modern fiction. Blogging friend Anthony provided me with the perfect articulation of my feelings when he quoted Noel Coward's quip that encountering a footnote is like going downstairs to answer the doorbell while making love. But In Danielewski's hands the footnotes get so bizarrely baroque that the experience is more like: making love; getting interrupted by the doorbell; going downstairs; opening the door to some kid delivering a pizza you didn't order; following the pizza delivery kid down to the docks; getting into a fistfight; stowing away and ending up somewhere in Japan. At which point complaining about lack of sexual satisfaction seems strangely inadequate. Not only are the footnotes often themselves footnoted—and every possible clever footnote joke is carried out here, from hiding all the sex scenes in the footnotes, to footnotes on foreign-language passages which refuse to translate them, to footnotes that go on for several pages, to footnotes that refer back or forward 100 pages from one's current textual location, to footnote feedback loops that lock the reader into a referential circle, to footnotes that consist of only blank lines—but in one case we get footnotes six levels deep, with most of the page-long sixth-level footnote being itself crossed out. Plainly, at this stage criticizing the text for lack of restraint is missing some kind of fundamental precept: the whole enterprise is intentionally eschewing restraint and (perhaps) hoping to come out the other side.

But why is excess so important to this novel? The question plaguing all such postmodern and/or experimental fiction must rear its ugly head: is there any substance to House of Leaves, beyond all its structural pyrotechnics? As Karen asks her bevy of enamored experts in the film-within-a-film-within-a-book, does it all mean anything, or is it just scary? For most of the novel, I assumed that the whole elaborate apparatus of House of Leaves was a very complex way of making the point that everything is open to interpretation, that it's impossible to tell a true story because as soon as you begin documenting events you are already dealing with a simulacra, and that even if you could somehow manage to speak truth, it wouldn't matter as there is no "meaning" behind events to begin with. And Danielewski certainly dwells at length on points like these, conjuring a heated (if imaginary—remember that in the "real world" of the book, the film doesn't exist) debate about the authenticity of the Navidson Record, in which "slick" and "grainy" filmic aesthetics are exposed as equally manufactured, and one of the most compelling arguments for this film's documentary reality is simply that none of the filmmakers had the money to fake it:

They just never had enough money.
      Sonny Beauregard conservatively estimates the special effects in The Navidson Record would cost a minimum of six and a half million dollars. Taking into account the total received for the Guggenheim Fellowship, the NEA Grant, everyone's credit limit on Visa, Mastercard, Amex etc., etc., not to mention savings and equity, Navidson comes up five and a half million dollars short. Beauregard again: "Considering the cost of special effects these days, it is inconceivable how Navidson could have created his house.
      Strangely then, the best argument for fact is the absolute unaffordability of fiction.

Thus reality becomes a kind of default for the poor man who can't afford anything better, and IRS records are more convincing then the evidence of our own eyes. Of course, given that the entire fiction of the Navidson Record film is created, in the world of the book, by an ancient and poverty-stricken blind man, we are, perhaps, meant to dwell on differences between media, the resources required to create convincing simulacra in words versus images, and the corresponding differences in our levels of belief. Is it easier to believe in the truth of a film because we see it with our own eyes, or more difficult because we know all the ways in which film can be manipulated? Are Johnny Truant's dread-filled and sometimes unreliable footnotes and appendices more convincing than Zampanò's text, since Truant's commentary creates the illusion that he shares our world, the world of the observer and analyst? And if there is no "meaning" attached to any of these real or faked stories, what is our investment in their reality or lack thereof?

Besides, not only can we not tell—or even sometimes care—what's real outside ourselves, but we're likely reading little more than ourselves into a work in the first place. One of the functions of all the elaborate setup is that, like the panel of experts whom Karen asks to respond to her film-within-a-film-within-the-book, Danielewski's hall of mirrors eventually makes it clear that most people, when they look at a piece of art, see only the reflection of themselves. When Johnny Truant reads and becomes obsessed with The Navidson Record, it's the ghosts of his own past that come back to him; when Harold Bloom watches Karen's film about the haunted house, he sees his own pet theories on the anxiety of influence, and when Navidson himself enters the labyrinth under his house, he's eventually left with absolutely no visual or tactile input except what's inside his own body and head. The minotaur at the center of the labyrinth is us, as all the unsuccessfully expunged footnotes indicate, and we are perfectly capable of tearing ourselves into shreds—or, occasionally, showing ourselves compassion.

Notes on Disgust
(for more information on the disgust project, see here)

For a book that's ostensibly a horror story (at least part-time), there is remarkably little explicit disgust in House of Leaves. Less than your average Edith Wharton novel, for example. And this is interesting on a couple of levels. On one hand, suggests that disgust is a bit of an intermediate emotion: generally characters can't be simultaneously disgusted and petrified with horror. In House of Leaves, the characters' experiences progress from domestic or mundane, to slightly creepy, and then straight from there to shuddering with existential dread or outright terror. There is one scene, for example, in which our post-punk narrator Johnny Truant is so scared that he loses control of his bowels while at work; in most situations, having one's pants full of shit would be a gross-out, but since Johnny believes he is about to get ripped limb from limb by some kind of vicious monster, it's not his top concern. Likewise, by the time Truant allows his apartment to generate into a filthy mess that probably would disgust us could we see or smell it, his mental state is too far gone to register that disgust or communicate it to us. Most of the book works like this: there's just not a lot of space in which the characters have the luxury of being disgusted without the disgust being trumped by terror, and it's tempting to extrapolate from here some general rule about disgust.

On the other hand, this split between fear and disgust isn't necessarily a constant. There are plenty of horror films, for example, that combine the scary with the disgusting. Over Twitter the past few days, Sarah and I have been having come great conversations about House of Leaves and the Aliens franchise (two different, unrelated conversations). Regular readers here probably imagine I have a strong stomach because of the disgust project, but in reality I'm a total wuss about gross-out films, and I've been avoiding the Aliens movies for that reason, even though the prospect of a kick-ass Sigourney Weaver is hard to pass up. Anyway, it got me thinking: films featuring monsters or zombies that drip pus, ooze, or other bodily substances while also threatening the protagonists manage to combine disgust and fear with very little problem. Maybe the difference is that, while the film's audience can be startled and drawn into the suspense of the story, they still know that they are not in real danger and so have that part of their brains free for the disgust reaction. Whereas, even in a film, when a character is in a life-or-death situation he or she is probably going to prioritize the fear and adrenaline over the "eww" factor.

In House of Leaves, in any case, the horror is all pretty non-disgusting. Unless you consider getting hit on by Harold Bloom or Camille Paglia disgusting, that is.

House of Leaves was the October selection for the Wolves reading group, and I am scandalously late posting about it, for which I really apologize. And also apologize for the several months of non-posting. This month: Nathalie Sarraute's The Planetarium.

You know what sucks? Reading slumps. All the while I've not been blogging over the past few weeks (with the exception of the sex scene entry, which, THANKS, by the way, for all those amazing comments), I bet that some of you were imagining that was due to writer's block or a busy social life or some such thing but I tell you now it's because I've barely picked up a book in all that time. I just can't seem to settle to anything. Whenever this happens to me, which is luckily not often, it makes me twitchy and irritable and generally unpleasant, but there's no use forcing the issue: it will come to an end eventually.

In any case, I did, finally, in dribs and drabs, finish Patricia Highsmith's classic psychological thriller The Talented Mr. Ripley, so I can at least post about that. The Ripley novels, I think, are examples of those books whose basic premises most people either know or think they know, to wit: charismatic psychopath social climber kills a wealthy friend of his and steals friend's identity. Yet I was surprised at the degree to which Tom Ripley (in this first book, at least) is not so much the winning, charismatic charmer he may later become—not yet quite so talented, perhaps—but more of a sullen, insecure kid one step ahead of the law, with the most unnervingly and convincingly unstable personalities I've ever run across in fiction. Ripley does not come across, to my surprise, as constantly on top of things, or particularly premeditating, and although he does have a fairly good ability to win people over, at least temporarily, it takes a gargantuan effort for him to overcome his distaste for "normal" behavior and for most of the people surrounding him, in order to do so. Nor can he rely on his own mental processes or moods being at all predictable. In this early scene, for example, Tom is being wined and dined by his "friend"'s parents in their Manhattan apartment, and has a sudden near-break with his own sense of identity:

When he had said to Mrs. Greenleaf just now, I'll do everything I can ... Well, he meant it. He wasn't trying to fool anybody.
      He felt himself beginning to sweat, and he tried to relax. What was he so worried about? He'd felt so well tonight! When he had said that about Aunt Dottie—
      Tom straightened, glancing at the door, but the door had not opened. That had been the only time tonight when he had felt uncomfortable, unreal, the way he might have felt if he had been lying, yet it had been practically the only thing he had said that was true: My parents died when I was very small. I was raised by my aunt in Boston.

What Highsmith does so well, I think, is to portray the difficulty Tom has in distinguishing between real and imaginary, fact and fiction. Logically, he knows that he ought to associate his true statements ("My parents died when I was very small") with a feeling of groundedness, of the reality of his own person-hood—and logically, he knows that lying ought to make him feel less real, more uncomfortable. He runs into two problems: one, that his sense of reality is tenuous at best, not particularly tethered one way or another to the truthfulness of his statements or the genuineness of his current persona. He is prone to bursts of manic confidence alternating with near-baseless panic attacks, and although the reader can see Tom attempting to correlate these moods with external causes ("He'd felt so well tonight!") and his own motivations ("He wasn't tying to fool anybody"), the truth of Highsmith's portrayal seems to me to reflect the fluctuations of severely unbalanced brain chemistry more than logical cause and effect. Tom's psychopathic blankness of personality lend him his frightening ability to inhabit whatever persona he chooses, but Highsmith also lets us glimpse how that lack of mooring within his own head is profoundly frightening (and exhilarating) for Tom himself.

A state which only worsens, of course, since Tom's second problem is that as the novel progresses he spends so much time crafting convincing lies, truly inhabiting his roles and becoming the characters he pretends to be—"Tom Ripley" just one among many—that there really is no longer much difference in his mind between the factually true and false, or between the imagined and actual. In one vertiginous scene, Tom imagines that he has killed someone who is actually still alive, and reels with the inability to reverse the action, not wanting to have taken that irrevocable step into the state of murderer. The irony being, of course, that while the object of his imaginary crime still lives, the victims of his two real murders do not: and Tom is not hyperventilating over them.

I definitely want to mention in this post the uneasy place this novel must hold in the emerging canon of queer literature. Citing The Talented Mr. Ripley as "LGBT Lit" might be similar to arguing a point about abortion using Hemingway's short story "Hills Like White Elephants": it's a masterful piece of work that has the issue as a prominent theme, yet offers no particular conclusions on the subject. Though Highsmith slept with both men and women ("relationships" might be too soft a word), and though Tom is a semi-closeted gay man whose issues around his sexuality play into his eventual crimes, The Talented Mr. Ripley comes across as neither a "pro-gay" or "anti-gay" novel. In fact, it seems perfectly possible to me to argue any of three positions, based on the text:

1. Tom's homosexuality is another facet of the mental illness or "wrongness" that leads to him becoming a murderer.
2. The social pressures that force Tom to remain closeted and ashamed gradually destroy his sense of self and lead him into murder.
3. Tom is a born psychopath who also happens to be gay. The two elements of his personality are unconnected.

Perhaps it goes without saying that I prefer the third analysis. However, I do honestly think one could cite evidence for any of the three, and it's hard to dismiss whispers of any of any of them completely. Highsmith is many things, but she is neither didactic nor reassuring. I can't help but respect her more because of it.

Notes on Disgust
(for more information on the disgust project, see here)

The Talented Mr. Ripley is a great choice for the disgust project, because disgust features in the novel just enough to be interesting, but not so much that it overwhelms the narrative. Most often, Tom's disgust is used to mark out his conflicted sexual feelings, especially where Marge, the friend and would-be girlfriend of Dickie Greenleaf, is concerned. Tom only admits to himself in flashes his desire to kiss, be close to, and later kill and replace Dickie, but his possessiveness and unacknowledged homosexuality make their way into the open via his extreme aversion to anything relating to Marge, from her clothes hanging to dry on the lines to her very presence on outings with Dickie. When Tom sees the two of them kissing, he feels nauseated:

Now Marge's face was tipped straight up to Dickie's, as if she were fairly lost in ecstasy, and what disgusted Tom was that he knew Dickie didn't mean it, that Dickie was only using this cheap obvious, easy way to hold on to her friendship. What disgusted him was the big bulge of her behind in the peasant skirt below Dickie's arm that circled her waist. And Dickie—! Tom really wouldn't have believed it possible of Dickie!
      Tom turned away and ran down the steps, wanting to scream.

He then runs back to the house he's sharing with Dickie, puts on Dickie's clothes, and pretends to break up with Marge in Dickie's voice—all of which foreshadows his eventual crimes toward Dickie, and adds another level of significance to Tom's disgust at seeing Marge's bras on the clothes line. Later on, Tom's disgust becomes ever more closely linked with his murders (he feels disgust on seeing the body of his second victim lying on the floor, and on recalling that person's actions leading up to the crime) and his contemplated murders (while thinking about committing the murder that never quite happens, he is disgusted by incidentals: people at a party, and some algae growing by his doorstep).

In none of these cases is the disgust directed inwards, towards Tom Ripley and the acts he has committed. In none of them does Tom feel moral disgust, only physical or circumstantial repulsion (the closest he gets to righteous disgust is late in the book, when he is being hounded by the Italian press and claims to be "irritated and disgusted" with them). Significantly, though, not only does Tom fail to apply any standards of disgust to himself, but the feeling usually indicates the bubbling up of feelings or memories he is trying to repress. Although Tom himself seems not to make the connection, disgust here seems to be a sign of cognitive dissonance which the rest of Tom's wildly swinging moods don't necessarily acknowledge. It often makes him seem less human—as when he's practically vomiting over a kiss between Marge and Dickie, or when he feels repulsed rather than horrified while gazing at the body of his victim—but in a way, the disgust is one of the most humane aspects of his reactions, one of the lingering remnants of whatever morality he may once have possessed.

I've been following Tom's Portuguese Literature Challenge reading lists over at Wuthering Expectations—and as a result my eye, on the lookout for things to do on a holiday weekend in Seattle, was caught by the description of Raul Ruiz's Mysteries of Lisbon. Adapted from a novel by the extremely prolific but barely translated 19th-century Portuguese novelist Camilio Castelo Branco, this nearly five-hour film seems at first glance a standard costume drama, albeit with rather more stunning cinematography. (Really stunning. Seriously.) As it turned out, though, Mysteries of Lisbon is more interesting than that.

Not in terms of plot. Any of the actual plot points here would be familiar to readers of Dickens, Collins, Brontë, or any other craftsman of Victorian-style melodrama. You've got your orphans, your rakes, your naive maidens, your hushed-up scandals, your duels and battles, your lovers expiring tragically in each others' arms, your picturesque descents into madness, your judiciously-placed revelations of previously-unsuspected parentage...you know the drill. What distinguishes Mysteries of Lisbon is its structure: rather than a narrative in which a multitude of disparate threads eventually come together into a neat conclusion, Lisbon presents a forking, open-ended structure in which each character's narration leads to the narration of another character. And while the details of each narrator's life do relate to and sometimes explain the details of others, each section raises at least as many new questions—and new avenues for potential in-depth exploration—as it resolves.

A concrete example: we begin the story with narration by young João, an orphan and ward of a provincial Catholic school, who is consumed by curiosity about his unknown parents. As he learns more about his origins, we're introduced to his mother, Angela de Lima, and the priest who runs the school, Father Dinis. The film branches away from João as Angela narrates the story of her life with her brutish husband; then branches again as Father Dinis narrates the story of how he met João's father; then branches yet farther as we get narration from João's father's point of view. In the course of all these stories we are introduced to further characters who later become narrators or primary players in another character's narration: Angela's count husband has a narrative section, as do Father Dinis, charismatic semi-pirate Alberto de Magalhães (played superbly by Ricardo Pereira), a Parisian ex-lover of Magalhães's, the elderly priest Father Dinis meets when attending the count's deathbed, and so on. With each branch of the story we encounter more details and secondary characters whom we suspect might become central in a future section; some of them do, while others remain cyphers. I imagine that one reason for the film's five-hour running time is simply to demonstrate the potential infinitude of this method of storytelling: there's no narrative reason it could not continue on, branching here and there, indefinitely.

Despite the film's unusual narrative technique, I don't want to imply that the viewer is left with a huge number of significant questions at the end of five hours. However, there are quite a few tantalizing suggestions that gesture at the open-endedness of the world presented here. Along with that open-endedness, I think, goes a certain faint whiff of the bizarre or grotesque: the film featured the occasional surreal detail (Magalhães's oddly mincing footman, for example, or the pacing background figure in the duel scene) presented without any explanation whatsoever, in a way that reminded me of David Lynch's Twin Peaks. It would take multiple viewings to track properly all the questions answered, let alone all that are asked, but here's what I was left wondering about, or interested in paying attention to on a re-watch:

• Father Dinis and his relationship with his "sister"; we never get the back-story here, and it's one of the most intriguing teases of the film. Possibly, we could deduce more based on early clues.
• Who is the kid walking back and forth in the background of the dueling scene, who then shoots himself after everyone leaves? There might actually be evidence of this in the film, but if so I totally missed it. It's a great example of Ruiz's use of the subtly bizarre, though.
• What's with all the characters falling over and having fits? Is João/Pedro epileptic? Is Father Dinis's father epileptic? Is there some kind of implied heredity there? Or is everyone just prone to swooning?
• Two back-stories we're explicitly denied concern the relationships of Eugenia—why doesn't she accept the money left to her by her lover, and how does she then end up married to Magalhães? We hear that she wants to tell Father Dinis her story, and we see the priest sitting at her table right after (presumably) having heard the story, but we never hear the story ourselves. This is the kind of trick Mysteries of Lisbon loves to play.
• Magalhães's semi-abusive relationship with his prance-y, occasionally violent manservant: delightfully weird, and never explained beyond Eugenia's offhand comment that the servant is "ill."
• There's a hilarious and affecting recurring motif of people (often servants) observing others through doors, windows, and other apertures. In one scene, for example, adulterous lovers who have just been found out by the woman's husband ask each other in consternation, "But how could he know? We were so careful!" Meanwhile, servants are watching them through at least two unbolted and un-sashed windows, creating an effect that's both funny and slightly sinister. In several other scenes, lovers woo while a third person looks on, raising the question of how the observer affects the scene unfolding, whether the lovers know they are being observed or not.

I'm so glad I got the chance to see Mysteries of Lisbon on the big screen, and it's the kind of film I hope to see released in some kind of Criterion Collection or special boxed DVD. Given that Branca's homonymous novel isn't yet translated into English, what I would most hope for from such a set would be clues about how much of the film's technique is taken from the novel—and how many of its lingering questions.

Oh yes, and I picked up a few books in Seattle, as well! I was going to avoid Elliott Bay Books in an effort to save money and space, but when it turned out that David was generously treating for food and lodging on this little trip (thanks, Sweetie!), and when, in addition, Lena pointed out on Twitter that the shop features bargain tables, and when, on top of all that, we ended up enjoying a delicious meal and wine next door at the Tin Table...well, enough of the excuses. Here's the loot. Except the Donoso these were each only five dollars, so I don't feel too decadent.

From the bottom up:

• The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen is the farthest I've diverged from my "comfort zone" in quite some time, as it was marketed as a Young Adult novel and garnered mixed reviews on release. However, the multimedia, non-linear presentation and the low price of $5 were enough to tip the balance.


• The Obscene Bird of Night by José Donoso was recommended by David Auerbach as relevant to my disgust project.


• The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker was on my list due to Rebecca's strong recommendation over at Of Books and Bikes; the combination of meditations on poetry and meta writing-about-writing is intriguing.


• A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro, in an extremely appealing new edition I haven't seen before. This and Nocturnes are the only Ishiguro I haven't read: his first and most recent.


• The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa comes highly recommended by Richard (maybe I should say recomendado con insistencia par Richard, as the post is Spanish-only), and I very much enjoyed the only other Vargas Llosa I've read.


• The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith, with which I'm already halfway done and which has broken me out of the reading slump in which I spent most of September. Good old Highsmith: why haven't I read more of her?

Wow, what happened to the past two weeks? The last thing I remember it was two Sundays ago and I was thinking to myself, "Huh, the next few days will be pretty bus—" and the next thing I knew I was waking up in a ditch by the metaphorical tracks while a bullet train composed of book signings, broken computers, early-morning and late-evening meetings, social calls and looming deadlines, raced past my throbbing head. In the far distance, receding all the time, I could just make out the tiny shapes of overlooked blogging commitments I had passed somewhere along the way.

My commitment, for example, to re-read Beckett's could-be-called-a-Trilogy with blogging friend Anthony, who has by this late date posted his thoughts on both the first and second books. I can barely distinguish this commitment, way back last Wednesday, waving forlornly to me from a distant platform. I knew, though, that I wanted to take my time with this post even if it meant delaying, because Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable are among those books in my personal canon—the ones which sustain me, which arrived in my life at a key moment and changed my ideas about what's possible in literature and even in life. The ones whose lines and rhythms and bizarrely beautiful narrative voices reverberate in my brain as I go about my days. This, for example:

And I said, with rapture, Here is something I can study all my life, and never understand.

Or this:

And I myself will never lend myself to such a perversion (of the truth), until such time as I am compelled or find it convenient to do so. And I knew this swamp a little, having risked my life in it, cautiously, on several occasions, at a period of my life richer in illusions than the one I am trying to patch together here, I mean richer in certain illusions, in others poorer.

This re-read of Molloy, hurried and fragmented as it was, lived up to all my memories. A two-part, cyclical work, it has the most plot of any of these three books, which incidentally is not very much. We get two sections, both narrated in first-person by two different (but not all that different) men: the first is the ancient Molloy, who recalls his own name with difficulty; the second is Moran, who believes he is an agent sent to track down Molloy. Both men set forth, one after the other, on torturous, convoluted journeys—in many ways the same journey, since Moran attempts to follow in Molloy's footsteps—in which they persevere in spite of mental vagueness and rapid, inexplicable physical deterioration. Both men become obsessed along the way by seemingly irrelevant details—the best manner in which to suck sixteen stones in succession without sucking the same stone twice, for example. In the end both men, somehow, return to what we assume is their beginning point, although in both cases much has changed and this change exceeds their understanding.

This is the classic Beckettian "pointless journey," much like Mercier and Camier and Waiting for Godot. These are journeys in which a character seeks fiercely yet intermittently after something that never appears; something of which the traveler often loses sight or memory, which the reader suspects may not exist in the first place, and which the traveler would probably not reach even if it did.

Yes, I was straining towards those spurious deeps, their lying promise of gravity and peace, from all my old poisons I struggled towards them, safely bound.

I must admit that I find this construct oddly comforting, this idea that the objects of our obsessions are irrelevant to our overall experience—or, if not irrelevant, they are related in ways not immediately obvious, especially as they often go unexamined for long periods of time and our minds and bodies do not cooperate with our stated aims. Molloy knows, although he sometimes forgets, that he is trying to visit his mother: an ostensibly simple task. But he is unable to remember why he wants to visit her; he can barely remember his own name and doesn't recall if hers is the same; he can't ascertain whether the town in which he finds himself is the one where he (and she) live, and he is prone to getting distracted for months or possibly years at a time, being taken in by batty old ladies, or washing up on the seashore for months, perplexed by the stone-sucking dilemma. Likewise, private detective Moran believes that he's pursuing Molloy: a straightforward tail job. However, he's not even sure if his object's name is Molloy or Mollose: most of his "facts" on the case originate in his own imagination; he devotes most of his energy to bullying his son and housekeeper rather than constructing a plan; and in the end none of it matters anyway, as his legs inexplicably become stiffer and stiffer until he can barely move at all, and he abandons the search for Molloy in favor of dispatching his son for a used bicycle. Nothing is accomplished and nothing is known. And yet in the midst of the despair and laughter at this futility there are glimpses of an abiding attachment to human life.

I went on my way, that way of which I knew nothing, qua way, which was nothing more than a surface, bright or dark, smooth or rough, and always dear to me, in spite of all, and the dear sound of that which goes and is gone, with a brief dust, when the weather is dry.

All this is rife with the hilarity and horror of being a) such a rickety contraption as a human, who must b) glean your understanding of the world through flawed sense perceptions, and your reality is moreover c) divorced from standard assumptions about cause, effect, and continuity, but you must nevertheless d) shape your experience into some kind of coherent narrative, or else cease to speak at all. Beckett's work is often called "absurdist," but in my experience it's actually less absurd than most of us might like to believe. Instead, it seems to me an accurate picture of life without the mental filtering mechanisms we use to stay sane. The systems of habit and filtration we use to make sense of our world are so delicate and complex, and can veer off the rails with surprising ease—yet we take them for granted out of necessity, because otherwise even the simplest task would be impossible. We pretend, for example, that we are the same person from moment to moment, when our reality may be more fragmented and unpredictable ("A little dog followed him, a pomeranian I think, but I don't think so."). Or that we perceive the world and then narrate based on what we perceive, rather than creating or half-creating the world via our acts of perception and narration ("I resumed my inspection of the room and was on the point of endowing it with other properties when the valet came back..."). In the absence of these trusty shorthands, the task of communication, even with oneself, becomes daunting.

I felt more or less the same as usual, that is to say, if I may give myself away, so terror-stricken that I was virtually bereft of feeling, not to say of consciousness, and drowned in a deep and merciful torpor shot with brief abominable gleams, I give you my word.

Yet there is something in us which spurs us onward, so that we continue attempting until the very end, despite our inevitable failures and detours along the way. Despite the lack of externally-imposed meaning, and the gaping holes in any system we create to understand the world around us, we are compelled to continue trying, to continue shaping our narratives however we can, incorporating the contradictions and random-seeming obstacles that rise before and within us.

And of myself, all my life, I think I had been going to my mother, with the purpose of establishing our relations on a less precarious footing. And when I was with her, and I often succeeded, I left her without having done anything. And when I was no longer with her I was again on my way to her, hoping to do better next time. And when I appeared to give up and to busy myself with something else, or with nothing at all any more, in reality I was hatching my plans and seeking the way to her house.

Notes on Disgust
(For more information on the disgust project, see here.)

The subject of disgust in this novel would take another long post all on its own, and I have to admit that I often found myself swept away with the beauty and hilarity of Beckett's language to such an extent that I forgot to examine the sections that deal in disgust. They are there, though, and plenty of them. On my first read, I remember being struck by the repugnance of Moran's character, his cruelty to his son, and in particular the scene in which he gives his son an enema. There's also Molloy's allusions to the fact that he may have had sex with his ancient crone of a mother. On top of this is the obvious disintegration of both men's bodies throughout the course of their journeys; Molloy is elderly and Moran appears simply to be inexplicably disabled, but both are falling to pieces, and mixed up sexually and otherwise with other human bodies which are falling to pieces, such as the old whore who may or may not have been Molloy's one experience of "love" (whatever he means by that). At the time she approaches him,

I was bent double over a heap of muck, in the hope of finding something to disgust me for ever with eating...

If I were to hazard a hypothesis on not very careful analysis, it might be that disgust here is something unavoidable which must be accepted, no more or less "meaningful" than anything else in life (unless we make it so) and something which we are all bound to both feel, and to occasion in others. Molloy depicts an undifferentiated world, where questions and observations we normally filter out of our stories and our thoughts (why a person is not a landmark; whether we truly recognize our home towns) instead get dwelt upon compulsively and become ordering principles, substitutes for meaning. As such, the disgusting, which normally dwells in that undifferentiated mass outside normal boundaries, can be found wherever you look and is neither a sign of any particular quality, nor a deterrent to finding meaning there.

And if ever I'm reduced to looking for a meaning to my life, you never can tell, it's in that old mess I'll stick my nose to begin with, the mess of that poor old uniparous whore and myself the last of my foul brood, neither man nor beast.

Way back when, in the days before Evening All Afternoon, I wrote about being so struck by the unexpected meter and richly textured language of Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem "Pied Beauty" while, of all things, taking a standardized test, that I wrote down the first line of the poem on a piece of scrap paper and shoved it into my pocket. My discovery of Hopkins probably still takes my personal prize for most intense aesthetic experience in a testing environment; never mind that I got the answer wrong. Ever since then I've meant to explore his poetry more fully, and the time has finally come...although I must admit that it's coming slowly.

Not that "Pied Beauty" is an uncharacteristic example of his oeuvre. Far from it: if anything, I've been surprised by the extent to which every poem of Hopkins's seems to be utterly representative of the rest of his work. They are nearly all, like "Pied Beauty," deeply attuned to the natural world, and, like "Pied Beauty," almost all those written after 1875 are in Hopkins's characteristic sprung rhythm. (Sprung rhythm differs from normal English-language verse in that it counts total stresses per line rather than total syllables. So technically, you could have as many syllables in a poetic foot as you wanted, as long as only one of them were stressed—a trick beloved of Bob Dylan. You could also potentially have many single-syllable feet in a row.) Almost without exception, Hopkins's word choice is as rich and suggestive as in "Pied Beauty," and his syntax is often much more complex. And, possibly most defining of all, his fervent, sometimes tortured Catholicism is the raison d'être of all but a small handful of these verses.

My slow progress is, I think, down to a combination of the last two qualities: the sheer density and unexpectedness of Hopkins's imagery is a plus, but a challenging plus. The religiosity, I must admit, gives this religious agnostic pause when consumed in larger doses than a poem or two at a time. I can't help but feel this is a personal flaw (a great book can be about anything, after all, and I read plenty of novels by and about Christians), but there you have it. Fantastic imagery, compelling rhythm, lots and lots of Christ and the Christian god.

GOD'S GRANDEUR

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
   It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
   It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
   And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
   And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And, for all this, nature is never spent;
   There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
   Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastwards, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Yes, I chose to pull this poem because of the odd image of God's grandeur "oozing" oilily; there are a few things here that might tie into the disgust project. Before I go there, though, a little diversion into Hopkins's odd placement in time; to me, he almost seems to belong to any era except the late 1800s, when this poem was actually written. The sprung rhythm, although pioneered by Hopkins in modern verse, was something he claimed to have gleaned from old English folk songs and nursery rhymes. This, together with his love of alliteration, archaic word forms ("reck," "trod") and almost kenning-like compound forms (no great example in this poem, but "The Windhover"'s "dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon" leaps to mind) give his poetry a faux-medieval cast. The oddness and experimentalism of his versification strikes me as Modernist. The way in which he cleaves to the natural world in the face of human corruption ("nature is never spent; / There lives the dearest freshness deep down things") strikes me as high Romantic, as does the sheer intensity of his spiritual angst. I suppose the religious piety itself is the only thing about Hopkins that comes off as particularly Victorian, if you don't count the seven years during which he refused to write poetry out of a sense of duty to his priestly order.

It makes that test question very devious, is all I'm saying.

In greater seriousness, what about the grandeur of God massing and oozing like oil? The image communicates well the pervasiveness Hopkins is getting at here—that the entirety of Creation is so super-saturated with God's grandeur that it seeps out of the world like oil from a crushed olive, and masses as it "gathers to a greatness." Like a staining sauce about to drip onto the carpet, or pitch seeping out of a wounded tree. So yes, hard to ignore, certainly. But also kind of gross, don't you think? Maybe "gross" is going too far, but disturbing. There's something disquieting about the idea of any substance "oozing" out of every surface around one, regardless of what that substance is. But come to think of it, there's also something a bit contradictory about even trying to imagine "grandeur" that "oozes." Grandeur as a bright flash "like shining from shook foil," yes: light is usually conceptualized as clean and illuminating, both Godlike qualities. It's hard to be contaminated by light, or even by fire. But oil, especially oil described as "oozing" (as opposed to, say, anointing), strikes me as both dirty and obscuring, more like the "blearing" and "smearing" of trade and toil a few lines later, than like anything grand or numinous.

I mean, personally, I quite like this image of an oozing, oily god. A very tactile, yet slippery god. One of the things that drew me to "Pied Beauty" was Hopkins's celebration of an imperfect, impure-seeming creation:

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                  Praise him.

Elsewhere, though—even elsewhere in this poem!—Hopkins seems to hew to the more traditional opposition between "freshness" of the natural world and man's "smudge" and "smell." The Holy Ghost broods with "bright wings," which associate the divine with both nature (birds' wings) and the light that flames out "like shining from shook foil" in the second line. Even in "Pied Beauty," my reading is that Hopkins is able to appreciate the odd and "fickle" because they are backed by the everlasting, uncorrupted being "whose beauty is past change."

So to associate the divine itself with oozing oil caught me off guard. I'm not sure what to do with it, but I quite like it. Maybe it's meant to suggest the dangerous aspect of God; after all, the following line is "Why do men then now not reck his rod?" where "reck" denotes concern or alarm, and the divine "rod" brings to mind that of Aaron (which turns miraculously to a serpent when laid before the Pharoah, then consumes all the rods of the Pharoah's sorcerers). So maybe the contaminating and dangerous elements of an "oozing" substance are reflected in the aspects of God that test and punish. "Crushed," in the Biblical tradition, brings to mind the serpent crushed under Christ's heel, which is echoed by the mention of the rod, and even something "flaming out" with purifying fire could be dangerous. These hints of threat and punishment seem an odd fit for Hopkins's theology, which at first flush appears more of the "Commune with the goodness of Nature and you're communing with the goodness of God" variety, but it's probably more complex than that. After all, the man did write a long poem appreciating the divine powers behind a shipwreck.

So, I continue along my slow way. I'll leave you with Hopkins being slightly more predictable but no less lingually delicious about the degeneration of humanity; I don't need to comment in-depth except that the penultimate line is one of my favorites in Hopkin's catalog thus far.

THE SEA AND THE SKYLARK

On ear and ear two noises too old to end
   Trench—right, the tide that ramps against the shore;
   With a flood or a fall, low lull-off or all roar;
Frequenting there while moon shall wear and wend.

Left hand, off land, I hear the lark ascend,
   His rash-fresh re-winded new-skeinèd score
   In crisps of curl off wild winch whirl, and pour
And pelt music, till none's to spill nor spend.

How these two shame this shallow and frail town!
   How ring right out our sordid turbid time,
Being pure! We, life's pride and cared-for crown,

   Have lost that cheer and charm of earth's past prime;
Our make and making break, are breaking, down
   To man's last dust, drain fast towards man's first slime.

As a break from the theoretical turn Evening All Afternoon has been taking of late, let me rhapsodize straightforwardly about the numerous things I love in the writing of Lydia Davis. In particular, I've just finished her 2004 The End of the Story, which treats of the end, beginning, and aftermath (in that order) of a love affair, and also of the process of transforming that love affair into a novel.

I was particularly intrigued to pick up Davis's novel, as her stories tend to the radically succinct—one or two paragraphs each, a page or less. Nor is her work overtly expressive, consisting of schematic yet detailed accounts of a character's actions, surroundings, habits, or mental processes. Like Proust, whose Swann's Way she translated, Davis pays attention to nuance and is intrigued by the often-perverse twistings and turnings of the human psyche. Unlike Proust, her paragraphs tend to fit on one page, and can usually be enjoyed on their own as single, jewel-like units. While some writers are most impressive at the level of the sentence or the chapter, Davis shines on the level of the paragraph—either single paragraphs or, often, a longer paragraph followed by a shorter paragraph, which shows the earlier paragraph in a new light. It reminds me of the way haikus often work, with the last line casting the first two in a new perspective. In this paragraph pair, for example, the narrator is describing a dream she had just after embarking on the relationship around which the book revolves:

Later that night I dreamed I had found a short piece of his writing on the hall floor. It had a title page and my name on it and my address at the university. Most of it was plainly written, but it contained a passage about Paris in which the writing became suddenly more lyrical, including a phrase about the "shudder of war." Then the style became plain again. The last sentence was briefer than the rest: "We are always surprising our bookkeepers." In the dream, I liked the piece and was relieved by that, although I did not like the last sentence. Once I was awake, I liked the last sentence too, even more than the rest.
        I see now that since I hadn't yet read anything by him at the time of the dream, what I was doing was composing something by him that I would like. And although this was my dream and he did not write what I dreamed he wrote, the words I remember still seem to belong to him, not to me.

I find Davis's paragraphs so compelling because, while each one does suggest narrative motion, they are short enough that no real resolution is expected. They allow the reader simply to notice contradiction and live within it at the level of the thought or the moment, without requiring that contradiction to be resolved. Above, for example, the narrator observes the contrast between the lyrical passage and the plain writing that surrounds it; between the brevity of the final sentence and those that preceded it; between her opinions of the last sentence before and after waking. In the second paragraph we have the narrator's feeling that her dream-composition belongs to her ex-lover, which contrasts with her intellectual knowledge that it was created in her own mind. She doesn't seek to explain or interpret any of this in any explicit way, or decide that one impression is correct and the other incorrect. She simply lays out paradox in clean lines, and allows the reader to do with it what she will. I enjoy the aesthetics of art that simply dwells within contradiction, possibly because I find this so difficult to do in my own life.

Nor is it easy for Davis's narrator. Despite the detachment of the narrative style, and the fact that reading this book imparted to me a sense of calm, the narrator in her daily life appears anything but peaceful. She is anxious and high-strung, and her behavior both during and after the relationship is often less than admirable—although she seldom makes this explicit judgment herself, writing instead simply, "At that time I liked to drink. I always needed a drink if I was going to sit and talk to someone," or "Most of his friends were as young as he was, and [...] I did not regard people of that age as very interesting, even though I had been that age myself." Oddly, it's the understatement in Davis's prose that makes her depictions of depression and bad behavior particularly uncomfortable for me, as if, in calmly acknowledging these unattractive aspects of her own personality, the narrator is making room for me to do the same. The emotions felt at a given time are simply another piece of information to be recounted, no more freighted or difficult than anything else. Or, if they are more difficult, then this difficulty can in turn be acknowledged, and the narrator can live beside it.

But no matter how clearly I saw what I was doing, I would go on doing it, as though I simply allowed my shame to sit there alongside my need to do it, one separate from the other. I often chose to do the wrong thing and feel bad about it rather than do the right thing, if the wrong thing was what I wanted.

Although it can sometimes be sobering, Davis's un-emotive delivery can also be dryly hilarious. I was particularly tickled by her portraits of her own compulsive or inconvenient habits of thought, which often had me chuckling and insisting on reading passages aloud to my partner David. The same technique I outlined above, of returning to things previously discussed in order to cast them in a new light, can be extremely funny as well as meditative and thought-provoking, and Davis uses it in all these applications to good effect. My favorite humorous example of this technique, involving the narrator's confusion in the face of her own elaborate filing system for different types of fictional material, is too long to share here, but trust me, it's worth a read. Instead I'll give you this passage on lying awake scheming, which strikes me as both funny and a great union of form and content. Just as the brain of the sleepless narrator becomes more and more fixated on her crusading busy-bodying, the paragraph itself focuses in on a particular, esoteric scheme:

Now and then I am too excited to sleep, because I have a plan to reform something: if not what we eat, which should be the diet of the hunter-gatherers, then what we have in our house, which should include as little plastic as possible and as much wood, clay, stone, cotton, and wool; or the habits of the people in our town, who should not cut down trees in their yards or burn leaves or rubbish; or the administration of our town, which should create more parks and lay down a sidewalk by the side of every road to encourage people to walk, etc. I wonder what I can do to help save local farms. Then I think we should keep a pig here to eat our table scraps, and that the Senior Citizens Center should keep a pig, too, because so much food is thrown out when the old people don't eat it, as I used to see when I went to pick up Vincent's father at lunchtime. The pig could be fattened on these scraps until the holiday season, and then provide the senior citizens with a holiday meal. A new baby pig could be bought in the spring and amuse the senior citizens with its antics.

For some reason, the isolated sentence "I wonder what I can do to help save local farms" is especially funny to me.

But as much as I enjoy the humor, my favorite thing about Davis might be her examination of the subjectivity involved in our experiences of reality and in the truths we believe we know. The narrator continually struggles with what to include in her story and how to tell it. The same incident appears differently in her memory each time she remembers it, depending on her mood at the time of remembering, information she has learned in the meantime, or other external factors. In one case, she remembers the same house as three completely different settings: the kitchen in which she played a word game; the back yard through which she entered a party with her lover; the front door and living room she visited after he left her. What is the reality? Are these "really" the same place, or three separate places? Likewise, Davis explores the mental tricks of perception which create a surprising percentage of the texture of one's reality.

In the same way, I will decide to include a certain thought in a certain place in the novel and then discover that several months before, I made a note to include the same thought in the same place and then did not do it. I have the curious feeling that my decision of several months ago was made by someone else. Now there has been a consensus and I am suddenly more confident: if she had the same plan, it must be a good one.

Of course there is not actually another person making editorial decisions for the narrator, but her lived reality includes a ghost or an impression of this other woman helping her write. In combination with her koan-like style, it's Davis's insights into the unexpected reverses of human consciousness and behavior that will keep me coming back to her work. And although I think she's probably more accomplished as a "micro-story" writer than a novelist, The End of the Story has no problem sustaining its novelistic momentum from beginning to end. I look forward to more of Davis's work, in any format at all.

Notes on Disgust
(for more information on the disgust project, see here.)

Davis's style tends toward the schematic and is unlikely to provoke any disgust in the reader. Still, there is this interesting passage, in which the narrator, just before her lover leaves her, encounters him unexpectedly at a party:

It was a feeling of absolute displeasure to see him there, as though he were a hostile element in that place, a thing that intruded where it didn't belong, so that as I watched him among the moving figures, over the shoulders of the other people in the crowded place, those same features of his that had held such a positive attraction for me not long before, and that would exert such a fascinating force again not long after, were just then repugnant to me, blunt and deadly, primitive and vicious, without intelligence, without humanity, the color of clay.

What struck me so forcibly about this passage is the narrator's extremely Douglasian description of her own revulsion. Seeing her lover at this party disgusts her because he seems "a thing that intruded where it didn't belong"—matter out of place, just as Douglas describes. The narrator's momentary revulsion even causes her to perceive her lover's feature as "primitive," and we notice the dehumanizing tendency that so often goes hand-in-hand with the disgust emotion. The lover's appearance in a place that the narrator doesn't expect to see him, when she is feeling alienated from him, gives him a repulsive and marginal appearance, almost seeming to melt back into an undifferentiated lump "the color of clay," yet in his distorted, sub-human form is still monstrous, "deadly" and "vicious."

True to form, there were also times when the narrator is disgusted at herself, in particular a passage in which she remembers with loathing the chips and playing cards she and her lover bought at the store in an attempt to disguise their growing boredom with each other. But it's this passage that really stood out as intriguing and oddly extreme.

The End of the Story was the August pick for The Wolves reading group; our apologies for being late to our own party yet again, but ambitious summer reading plans do not make for timely posts. Please consider joining us during the last weekend of September for Marguerite Yourcenar's The Memoirs of Hadrian!

The most surprising thing about reading Mary Douglas's 1966 anthropological classic Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, was my sheer enjoyment of the thing. This is a theoretical work, written less for a lay audience than for Douglas's fellow cultural anthropologists, and yet her style is clean and lively, with barbs of wit to keep things interesting. ("This fashionable presentation," she quips at one point, "was supported by no evidence whatever.") As a result, it was far more entertaining than I had anticipated, and although Douglas's approach is now out of fashion for being overly rigid and/or simplistic, she introduced me to some ideas and dichotomies that will be worth thinking about during my ongoing disgust project. (On which subject, I haven't forgotten that second post on Mary Gaitskill's Veronica, but it occurred to me that the Douglas may be relevant to Gaitskill, so I thought I'd post on Douglas first.)

That said, there is a lot contained in this slim book, and I'm sorting out exactly what relation it may hold to analyzing disgust in non-ritual settings. Essentially, Douglas is writing about ritual cleanness and uncleanness, and the role that rituals of purity and pollution play in both "primitive" and "advanced" societies. Since her focus is on ritual cleanliness and pollution, she is only addressing certain kinds of situations in which disgust may or may not arise, and the disgust itself is not her main focus—something that makes William Ian Miller's dismissal of her points a bit unfair, in my opinion. Her overarching claim is that ritual pollution tends to reinforce the structure of a given society, defending the boundaries of that structure when they're threatened. As such (although this idea is more mine than Douglas's) the idea of pollution is fundamentally conservative, helping to maintain the status quo in the face of whatever forces may the threatening it.

For example, in one chapter she analyzes the esoteric food restrictions in the biblical book of Leviticus. Here the link with disgust seems relatively strong: foods forbidden the Israelites are described as unclean abominations, even when, to the casual reader, there seems little difference between them and the permitted foods. Following her usual pattern, Douglas first debunks a couple of previous schools of thought that attempted to explain the food prohibitions: she is satisfied neither by the idea that the prohibited foods are those associated with neighboring "heathen" clans (since the Israelites often incorporated foods and behaviors from their neighbors elsewhere), nor by the notion of an allegorical reading of these prohibitions (since it's possible for a reader to construct an allegorical reading of any combination of animals, and nothing of the sort is mentioned in the actual text). She neatly pokes holes in both theories, and is even more dismissive of the idea that these prohibitions rested on a pre-knowledge of modern hygienic requirements.

She suggests instead that the prohibited animals are those which exist at the uneasy boundaries of animal types, and which therefore are unclassifiable, seen as hybrid or monstrous. What makes her argument so persuasive, at least to this theological innocent, is that this is actually what the text itself says, whereas other interpretations are deductions away from textual evidence. For example, Leviticus specifically states that the category of animals which chew the cud and have cloven hooves are permitted for eating. If this is a distinct type of animal by the Hebrew classification system, then animals which have only one of these traits (cud-chewing or cloven hooves) would be seen as odd border-cases and possibly contaminating. And indeed, "unclean" animals include "the camel, the hare and the rock badger [hyrax], because they chew the cud but do not part the hoof...and the swine, because it parts the hoof but does not chew the cud." Similarly, animals which move by "swarming" are forbidden because the Hebrew word for "swarming" is an intermediate form of locomotion somewhere between walking and slithering, and can be applied to both earth-bound and water-bound creatures—disrupting more boundaries. Thus, in Leviticus,

[I}n general the underlying principle of cleanness in animals is that they shall conform fully to their class. Those species are unclean which are imperfect members of their class, or whose class itself confounds the general scheme of the world. (55)

Through declaring certain animals unclean for eating, the Leviticus author was helping to "create and control experience," (65), which Douglas argues is a key role for all ritual, both religious and secular. And indeed, she argues passionately that many of the dichotomies used by previous anthropologists working in this area are either totally misguided (the separation of "magic" from "religion," for example, which Douglas sees as residual Protestant bias against Catholics, and establishes a dichotomy unsupported by actual conversations with tribal people) or irrelevant to the questions she is asking. In both primitive and modern cultures, "dirt" occupies a similar systemic niche:

[D]irt is essentially disorder. There is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder. If we shun dirt, it is not because of craven fear, still less dread or holy terror. Nor do our ideas about disease account for the range of our behaviour in cleaning or avoiding dirt. Dirt offends against order. [...] For I believe that ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience. (2 - 4)

Thus ritual, and the ideas of purification and cleanliness, hold power to impose order against the threatening chaos. Despite Miller's complaints against Douglas, this is essentially the flipside of his own argument: he claims that a major component of our experience of disgust is a confrontation with the ever-changing, chaotic flux of "life soup," itself the perfect symbol of Douglas's "essential disorder." Yet "life soup" also holds huge amounts of power and potential—in fact, one of the threatening things about it is that it reminds each of us that our bodies and brains are only temporary organizations of matter. In the chapter "Power and Danger," Douglas analyzes this idea on the level of social structures:

Granted that disorder spoils pattern; it also provides the materials of pattern. Order implies restriction; from all possible materials, a limited selection has been made and from all possible relations a limited set has been used. So disorder by implication is unlimited, no pattern has been realised in it, but its potential for patterning is infinite. This is why, though we seek to create order, we do not simply condemn disorder. We recognise that it is destructive to existing patterns; also that it has potentiality. It symbolises both power and danger. (94)

She goes on to elucidate who, in a given society, is likely to be endowed with the conscious use of the power of disorder (often termed witchcraft or sorcery), and who is likely to be thought to inflict the danger of disorder unconsciously. This section seems particularly relevant to Veronica and to modern disgust in general, since our disgust is so often directed toward those in the margins (homo- and bisexuals; the homeless; the visibly mentally ill), and their contagion is often felt to endanger those around them without any conscious malicious effort on their part. This accords with Douglas's analysis: in the tribal cultures she cites, conscious and directed use of sorcery is usually associated with those who possess structural power: chieftans, kings, patriarchs. The magic associated with those on the structural margins is often thought to emanate from them without their conscious intention. In this passage, which strikes me as profoundly relevant to Mary Gaitskill, Douglas moves from general points to a discussion of Maori boys undergoing an initiation rite into adulthood:

Danger lies in transitional states, simply because transition is neither one state nor the next, it is undefinable. The person who must pass from one to another is himself in danger and emanates danger to others. The danger is controlled by ritual which precisely separates him from his old status, segregates him for a time and then publicly declares his entry into his new status. [...] To behave anti-socially is the proper expression of [the Maori boys'] marginal condition. To have been in the margins is to have been in contact with danger, to have been at a source of power. (96-97)

I'm drawn to this idea of the disordered margins (source of so much of the disgusting) as both dangerous and powerful or compelling. And it's not just people passing through one stage of life into another: those who occupy ambiguous or double roles in a social structure are sometimes thought to be sources of dangerous pollution by the mere fact of their existence. Douglas brings up a number of examples in which groups or individuals who in practice hold some level of unacknowledged or uncertain power (Kachin wives, Jews in England, Joan of Arc, or the serf-like Mandari "clients," all of whom occupy uneasy, intermediate power positions) are thought to be involuntary sources of witchcraft.

[The witchcraft] may lie dormant as they live their life peacefully in the corner of the sub-system in which they are intruders. But this role is in practice difficult to play coolly. If anything goes wrong, if they feel resentment or grief, then their double loyalties and their ambiguous status in the structure where they are concerned makes them appear as a danger to those belonging fully in it. It is the existence of an angry person in an interstitial position which is dangerous, and this has nothing to do with the particular intentions of the person. (102, emphasis mine)

"An angry person in an interstitial position": surely a useful formula to keep in mind.

There are certainly problematic elements in Purity and Danger. Probably the section which gave me the most pause was Chapter 5, "Primitive Worlds," in which the author searches for a principle to distinguish "primitive" societies from those properly classed "advanced." And there's a reason I've used some variation of the word "structure" so many times in this post: Douglas is a proponent of high anthropological Structuralism, which has since fallen out of favor for its reductionism and simplification of human societies. She herself is not unconscious of these criticisms, though, and does address them in the book. And although her Anglo-centrism is grating at times to a modern ear—when she uses the word "we" it is always synonymous with English Protestant, as if she expects that these will be her only readers—she also makes a genuine and respectable effort to demolish many of the more egregious assumptions made by early 20th-century anthropologists and psychologists about "primitive" peoples. Her chapter debunking psychology's equation of primitive rituals with infant and childhood stages of development is particularly scathing. So, as I said, surprisingly enjoyable as well as very thought-provoking.

I am left with some questions vis-à-vis Douglas and my own project. Principally, what is the relationship between a person in a ritual state of pollution, a person who is disgusted, and a person who is (to some third party) disgusting? Is pollution synonymous with, or totally unrelated to, disgust? Obviously, given that I've spent this long writing about Douglas, I don't believe the two are irrelevant to one another, but neither do I believe they're identical. For one thing, pollution as Douglas is describing it is almost by definition a codified element of a social structure. Whereas the circumstances of the disgust emotion are socially constructed as well, it's not formalized in the same way, and it seems to me more individualized as well. There are things whole societies will find disgusting—indeed, there are things almost all humans, cross-culturally, find disgusting—but there are also many idiosyncratic quirks to the disgust reactions of individuals. There's no equivalent of Leviticus to tell us what's disgusting and what's not. In any case, teasing out exactly which of Douglas's writings on pollution are relevant to disgust, and what the relationship between the two might be, will be interesting fodder for future thought. In the meantime, I can't resist closing with one more quote, this one from Douglas's rich final chapter, examining rituals in which dirt and filth are sometimes re-contextualized as creative, positive forces. Those concerned about finding Douglas insensitive to the complexity of human society should rest easy:

Of course, the yearning for rigidity is in us all. It is part of our human condition to long for hard lines and clear concepts. When we have them we have to either face the fact that some realities elude them, or else blind ourselves to the inadequacy of the concepts.
      The final paradox of the search for purity is that it is an attempt to force experience into logical categories of non-contradiction. But experience is not amenable and those who make the attempt find themselves led into contradiction. (162)

I picked up Mary Gaitskill's 2006 novel Veronica as part of my ongoing disgust project, and indeed it is a rich repository of fascinating uses of disgust. Yet I find I can't bear to write simply about the disgust in the book, without addressing its greater appeal. I consciously avoid pronouncements about the Canon, which books are Great and which merely Good, or anything of the kind—and yet, I am beset by a strong desire that Veronica be studied, written about, appreciated, revisited. It is not a book for everyone, and not an easy read, but it is a book that will be important to some. And although I haven't written fiction or even songs in years, Veronica is the kind of book I wish I could write: utterly unsentimental, yet deeply thoughtful and thought-provoking, harsh and even crass at times but finely crafted and never cynical to the point of hopelessness.

So this will be a discussion of those non-repulsive aspects of Veronica, to be followed in a few days by a discussion of Gaitskill's many and intriguing uses of disgust. This novel contains a cesspool, but I don't want to leave you with the impression that that's all it contains.

No indeed, there's so much more. The surface plot elements revolve around the narrator Alison, a former model and pretty-girl who has lost her looks and her health, and has washed up, sick and in pain, on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Now that she is ill and unattractive herself, she finds herself remembering a pivotal friendship—or at least, a friendship that has since become pivotal in her memory—from twenty years before, with a frumpy, provocative, and often obnoxious copy-editor named Veronica, who died in the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

But stop right there, because here are some things this novel is not "about." It is not "about" modeling, or the fashion industry, either to romanticize that world or to vilify it. The modeling world as Gaitskill portrays it is sleazy and destructive, sure, but not any more sleazy and destructive than Veronica's relationship with her boyfriend Duncan—and neither set of relationships is lacking in humanity, even faint appeal. Neither is the novel "about" HIV/AIDS, although it certainly evokes some of the terror and bigotry in the air as the first and second waves of infection were breaking. Veronica's setting, although in a sense specific—Gaitskill paints millennial Los Angeles and 1980s New York in visceral detail—doesn't come off as illustrating an exception, but instead as presenting a more universal picture. In other words, Alison is a sick and selfish person, not because she fell down the rabbit-hole of modeling and drug use, but because human beings are generally infirm and selfish, and despite this they go from day to day doing the best they can, occasionally making genuine yet flawed contact with other human beings.

As opposed to so many meteoric-rise-and-fall stories which deal in "if only"s (if only she hadn't gotten hooked, if only he hadn't been drinking before getting in the car, if only their families had realized in time), Gaitskill presents struggle, compromise, and disintegration as inevitable, while at the same time according her characters total free will. There is nothing pre-ordained about Alison's choices to move to Paris or New York, to quit modeling or start up again, to ask Veronica to the movies. She suffers (and occasionally triumphs, and often slogs) because of her choices, but based on the evidence of the characters around her, she would have faced a similar ratio of suffering and triumph if she had made the opposite choices, as well.

Take Alison's sister Sara, who is locked in an uncommunicative battle with her suburban setting and probable mental illness. Or Alison's father, who attempts to communicate his regrets via music to which nobody listens anymore. Or Veronica, who decides that her semi-abusive relationship is so much a part of herself that she doesn't stop sleeping with her partner even when she knows he has AIDS. All these characters, however glamorous they may or may not look from the outside, struggle with similar levels of alienation and distress, similar levels of discomfort with the world around them, and a similarly inevitable downward trajectory. Veronica is one of the least moralistic novels I've ever read. Only you can decide your own trajectory, it seems to say; but whatever trajectory you choose, it will be difficult; and whatever trajectory you choose, you will stumble and fall. This is the problem with Alison's father's refusal to feel compassion for the early AIDS sufferers based on the argument that "they had choices." Everyone makes choices, and everyone suffers for them; and since suffering implies no sin or judgment but only the inevitable process of living a life, our imperfect treatment of each other is all we have.

And indeed that treatment will be imperfect, even if we are doing our best. Alison's relationship with Veronica is hardly a feel-good, Sex and the City version of female friendship. Alison is often self-congratulatory, often resentful; she often spews platitudes at Veronica and tells her what to do rather than listening to her. Her attempts at communication and communion often fall flat. Veronica, in turn, is often extremely grating, and only gets more so as she becomes ill. Gaitskill has much to say here about privilege—in this case, the privilege of the beautiful and the healthy person, to whom the experiences of the ill or unattractive are invisible until she too is sick or ugly. Looking back, Alison can see her own contempt and dismissiveness, her belief that she was in some way fundamentally different from Veronica—all things which were invisible to her at the time.

I said it with disdain—like I didn't have to be embarrassed or make up something nice, because Veronica was nobody—like why should I care if an ant could see up my dress? Except I didn't notice my disdain; it was habitual by then. She noticed it, though.

In one way, of course, all this is a huge downer. In another way, it's oddly reassuring. Because Gaitskill doesn't conclude, based on the suspect motives and often-unsuccessful results of attempts at human connection, that they are not worth making. Rather, despite Alison's recognition of her own bad behavior, of her own suspect agenda and Veronica's own obnoxiousness, her relationship with Veronica becomes a pivotal, and legitimately redemptive, experience. Even though most of the time she does a poor job at being Veronica's friend (and at general person-hood), her efforts to connect with Veronica still end up making a huge difference to both women—especially Alison herself.

One of the concepts that struck me most forcibly in Veronica was this combination of the invisibility of the habitual or privileged, and the rapidity with which the outward forms of privilege (and who possesses privilege) can change. These two themes are addressed frequently in fiction, but I'm not sure how often I've seen them together. So often we see the entrenched privilege of race or sex that perpetuates itself from generation to generation, and there is certainly some of that here, in the form of homophobia and sexual exploitation of women. Yet there is also an acknowledgment of how slippery privilege can be; how it can be founded on trivialities and superficialities that we nonetheless mistake for core realities. Early on in the novel, Alison introduces the concept of a "style suit," while looking at a series of photographs taken by her friend John:

Most of them don't have good bodies, but they are looking at the camera like they are happy to be naked, either just standing there or posing in the combination of relaxation and sexual nastiness that people had then. They all look like people whose time had given them a perfect style suit to wear: a set of postures and expressions that gave the right shape to what they had inside them, so that even naked, they felt clothed.

[...]

There is always a style suit, or suits. When I was young, I used to think these suits were just what people were. When styles changed dramatically—people going barefoot, men with long hair, women without bras—I thought the world had changed, that from then on everything would be different. It's understandable that I thought that; TV and newsmagazines acted like the world had changed, too. I was happy with it, but then five years later it changed again.

This is more than just an observation about the fickleness of fashion. It's an examination of the ease with which people who have lucked into a well-fitting style suit assume that the privilege and ease they enjoy inheres naturally in their person-hood, and that as a result there must be something fundamentally wrong with those who don't fit into the dominant suit. And as Alison remarks above, it's similarly easy to believe that the suit reflects the way things substantively are—and that when those superficial elements change, it means a sea-change in peoples' inner beings as well. Yet even when the style suit favors looseness and naturalness, that preference itself can be very strict, and if any one suit actually does happen to fit someone's innate personality, the next, equally-strong suit is almost guaranteed to squeeze and discomfit them, transforming them into an outsider and even an object of pity or repulsion in the eyes of those who subconsciously believe the world to have progressed in a meaningful way. Together with the idea of invisibility, the style suit and the effects of seeing difference play into Gaitskill's many uses of disgust.

More on Veronica in a few days; I'm far from done thinking and writing about this book.

That James Joyce and his final paragraphs. I have to hand it to the man, he sure knew how to end a book. The final passage of Ulysses is justly famous for Molly Bloom's orgasmic "Yes I said Yes I will Yes," but it's possible that the somnolent incantation of snow-blanketed Ireland in the final pages of The Dead is just as strong, with its repetitions and inversions ("falling softly"/"softly falling") and its vast but muted vistas. It's certainly one of those passages, like Mrs. Dalloway's "What a lark! What a plunge!" or The Unnamable's "I can't go on, I'll go on," whose echoes I hear in my head on a regular basis, triggered by a fragment of casual conversation, an everyday action, or another written phrase:

It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: the snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Fury lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Thus Gabriel Conroy, would-be cosmopolitan and darling of his elderly aunts, drifts off to sleep after attending the aunts' annual Epiphany dance. Having tipped the caretaker's daughter, gotten into an awkward conversation with a nationalist colleague, expertly carved the goose, and made a speech, he then leaves the party and experiences an attack of longing for his wife, only to find out a long-kept secret about her youthful past. This time through, I was surprised that most of what I remember as powerful, including Gabriel's lust for Gretta, her story and his pre-sleep musing—happens in the final fifth of the novella, with the rest being devoted to the Epiphany party. Bibliographing Nicole had a similar trick of memory, which sounds maybe more extreme than mine.

Knowing what was coming, it was interesting to re-read the long party section for elucidation of what comes later. Gabriel, for example, though the golden nephew in his aunts' eyes, is several times severely discomfited when women challenge him, or react to his pleasantries differently than he expects. The caretaker's daughter Lily makes an unexpectedly dark comment about men in response to Gabriel's teasing, and Gabriel "coloured as if he felt he had made a mistake," awkwardly making amends by slipping her a coin. Later on, he's similarly ill at ease when his colleague Miss Ivors confronts him for having (in her eyes) insufficient pride in his Irish heritage—deciding to alter his annual speech out of deference to her. In fact, he spends a good deal of the party worrying about his speech, about whether it will come off conceited or whether he will alienate his audience if he quotes poetry too sophisticated for their palates. Like Stephen Dedalus after him, Gabriel is too self-conscious to feel natural in his own skin most of the time. Even his yearning for Gretta late in the book is beset by similarly uncertain moments, intermixed with a powerful warmth of memory and strength of desire. This makes her final revelation, which seems to exclude him from an important part of her inner life, that much more of a blow—for Gabriel, if not for the reader.

And indeed, I was thinking throughout this reading of a debate I got into in a British Modernism class once, about whether Gretta's sadness at remembering the death of her young lover actually does invalidate somehow the years of warmth and memories that Gabriel is remembering just before she tells him the story:

Moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory. A heliotrope envelope was lying beside his breakfast-cup and he was caressing it with his hand. Birds were twittering in the ivy and the sunny web of the curtain was shimmering along the floor: he could not eat for happiness. They were standing on the crowded platform and he was placing a ticket inside the warm palm of his glove. He was standing with her in the cold, looking in through a grated window at a man making bottles in a roaring furnace...

At the time, I felt very strongly that a single tragic incident from Gretta's past does not "trump" the years of quotidian connection between husband and wife, however jarring it might be for Gabriel to hear his wife's story when he is in such a different mood. My own prejudice remains one that would privilege Gabriel's stockpile of seemingly mundane shared experiences over a more Romantic tragic love story. Now that I'm less invested in the idea that Joyce must necessarily be expressing my own feelings, though, I can see both sides. To take my original position, we are not presented with an incompatible or unhappy couple. Gretta's gentle ribbing of Gabriel as they arrive at the party, about the care he takes of their children and the way he makes her wear galoshes to keep her from getting a cold, makes clear their mutual affection. So too, Gabriel's indignant thoughts when he remembers that his mother never quite approved of Gretta, and always thought that he married slightly beneath him, would vouch for the store he sets by her even if his later lustiness did not. So it still seems to me that this is a portrait of one melancholic night in a more or less successful marriage—or, more generally, of the way in which we can never achieve complete knowledge of another person, even if we are close to them—rather than a picture of an unhappy woman putting on a brave face as she secretly pines away for her lost lover.

Still, Gabriel definitely has his self-deluding moments, in large part due to his insecurity. He is cold with Gretta when she says she would love to see Galway again, because he has just been made to feel uncomfortable by Miss Ivors and he doesn't want to hear enthusiasm for Miss Ivors's plans. He's unable to access Gretta's own excitement, and it's only when he sees his wife look melancholy and romantic that he feels the desire to reconnect with her. Even then, his desire takes a kind of scripted form: he wants to "defend her against something and then to be alone with her"; or to spirit her away to a never-never land far from their daily commitments. Perhaps some of his devastation at hearing the tale of Michael Furey speaks to his own investment in Romantic tropes like that of the of gallant male savior and damsel in distress, or that of the great tragic love that ends in death. Although Joyce's own commitment to these tropes might be significantly less (and given Ulysses it's hard to think differently), his portrayal of Gabriel's disillusionment is still affecting.

Revisiting that closing paragraph, I was struck by the odd-seeming sentence, "The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward." I hadn't remembered it, I'm still not clear exactly what it's doing there. It seems, in the context of the novella's title and Gabriel's mood, imbued with intimations of mortality, as if traveling west would be synonymous with starting down the road toward death. (Possibly this is backed by religious and/or mythic traditions of which I'm not aware?) Alternately, it could tie in with the scene in which Miss Ivors proposes that Gabriel and Gretta come with her on a trip to the Aran Islands, which are in the far West of Ireland (as opposed to the eastern-situated Dublin, where the action is taking place). Gabriel, would-be man of the world, prefers to take his holidays on the Continent, in France or Germany. In a subsequent conversation with Gretta, as noted above, she's more enthusiastic than Gabriel about visiting western Ireland, as she would "love to see Galway again"—the city in which she lived during her youth. Thus western Ireland is presented as particularly Irish, being both the favored destination of the nationalist Miss Ivors and the hometown of the slightly earthy Gretta. Perhaps Gabriel's journey "westward" is one of coming to terms with the Irishness he has been trying to escape, in addition to a journey in imagination back to the site of his wife's youthful tragedy.

Notes on Disgust
(for more information on the disgust project, see here)

Since I've started the disgust project, this is the first thing I've read in which I neither felt any disgust while reading, or noticed any characters feeling disgust. A disgust-free read, unless I'm missing something, for those who aren't as fascinated by the disgusting as I am!

I re-read The Dead as part of Frances's Art of the Novella Challenge. It's the fourth of six novellas from Melville House's Art of the Novella series that I hope to read over the course of August.

This novella was consumed in a sleeping bag on a camping trip, and alas, no beverages accompanied it. Given Gabriel's long pulls on a dark Irish porter during the party, however, I can only suggest that a pint of Guinness is the obvious choice here.

I'd forgotten how much I enjoy Joseph Conrad, with his tropical marine settings and his thoughtful, melancholy narrators. Spending a sunny afternoon with Freya of the Seven Isles kindled my interest in revisiting Lord Jim, Victory and Heart of Darkness, and in exploring the rest of his work that I haven't read.

Freya is a classic tragedy of the kind the reader sees coming from the opening pages due to the flaws-which-are-often-actually-virtues of the characters, yet still hopes will turn out right in the end. As we open, the narrator tells us he has just received a letter from an old sea buddy of his, who asks if he remembers "old Nelson"—an Englishman and former settler in the Dutch East Indies who, it turns out, is actually named "Nielsen." The narrator continues to call his old acquaintance by both names—"Nelson (or Nielsen)"—throughout the novella, and the this double moniker, marking him as somewhat English, or at least cozy with the English (Nelson) but also somewhat Scandinavian (Nielsen), turns out to be key to his character and the unfolding action. Nelson (or Nielsen) is Scandinavian enough to be permitted to settle in the Dutch-controlled Seven Isles group, but not Dutch enough to feel secure there, and is so perpetually terrified of the Dutch "authorities" that he allows himself and his daughter Freya to be walked all over by a petty officer named Heemskirk. Add into the mix the pride and attractiveness of Freya herself; the high-spirited English man she actually loves and who loves her; and the failure of the characters to communicate at key moments, and you have the makings of an inevitable love-triangle-cum-disaster. In case we were not getting the message, the narrator gives us passages like this one, in which he's talking with Freya's secret fiancé Jasper Allen:

"Mind you don't come to grief trying to do too much," I admonished him. But he dismissed my caution with a laugh and an elated gesture. Pooh! Nothing, nothing could happen to the brig, he cried, as if the flame of his heart could light up the dark nights of uncharted seas, and the image of Freya serve for an unerring beacon amongst hidden shoals; as if the winds had to wait on his future, and the stars fight for it in their courses; as if the magic of his passion had the power to float a ship on a drop of dew or wail her through the eye of a needle—simply because it was her magnificent lot to be the servant of a love so full of grace as to make all the ways of the earth safe, resplendent, and easy.

Oh man, the kid is doomed. "Nothing could happen to the brig," indeed. It's pretty plain that the earth will not remain for him safe or resplendent, and least of all easy. Still, with his parallel constructions and heightened imagery Conrad manages to elicit (in me, at least) a bit of the soaring feeling Jasper describes, even as my gut sinks with the dismal knowledge that his confidence is about to be crushed.

In contrast to Jasper's romanticism we have Freya's supposed "sensibleness," which her father believes will prevent her from falling in love with anyone in the first place, and which in reality means that even when she has fallen in love, she still wants a well-planned and executed elopement rather than a rushing off pell-mell into the wide blue yonder. Conrad's attitude toward Freya's seeming sensibleness is interesting to me. The narrator seems to admire it, contrasting it favorably with the "absurdity" (fearfulness in Nelson, jealousy in Heemskirk, impetuousness in Jasper) of all the men around her, and in a way it's refreshing to read a 1911 novella where the most down-to-earth character is the single woman. On the other hand, though, one wonders about how positive this quality really is; after all, had Freya simply consented to run away with Jasper earlier in the book, the couple would probably have had a happy life together—or at least some kind of life, which is more than either one ends up with in the end. Freya is a managerial type, and although her insights into others' characters—her father's likelihood to descend into anxiety attacks if she tells him her marriage plans ahead of time, for example—are spot-on, her fatal flaw is, perhaps, taking too much on her own shoulders and failing to communicate to any of the other characters until it's far too late. As the narrator laments,

And yet there was something she might have told a friend. But she didn't. We parted silently.

Freya's extreme self-sufficiency is part and parcel of her sensibleness, and is indeed opposite of the frailties so often laid at female doors (hysteria, clinginess, indecisiveness, etc.). Yet Conrad depicts even this as something that can be taken too far, however admirable it might be.

Notes on Disgust
(for more information on the disgust project, see here)

Disgust is mentioned twice in Freya of the Seven Isles, and in both cases it's used to underline the mutual aversion felt between the Dutch and English traders. As in Pamuk's Snow, this is very much a disgust marking the boundaries of "us versus them." In the first instance, the narrator is speaking about the Dutch attitude toward Freya's lover Jasper:

They considered him much too enterprising in his trading. I don't know that he ever did anything illegal, but it seems to me that his immense activity was repulsive to their stolid character and slow-going methods.

One senses here that the narrator is being slightly flip here: the Dutch are probably not literally repulsed by Jasper's level of industry. Still, as Willian Ian Miller points out, the rhetoric of disgust is still strong even when used in jest. The Dutch may not quite retch when they see Jasper approach in the Bonito, but they are averse to him; they distrust him. His way of being in the world does not accord with their own. To the Dutch "we," in other words, he is a "they." The narrator's own lightness in this paragraph perhaps mimics Jasper's own lack of seriousness around Heemskirk and the Dutch in general, while at the same time foreshadowing the tale's tragic end. In any case, the reader is certainly not supposed to share the Dutch disgust for Jasper. The boy may be a little foolish, but he's essentially a sympathetic, if doomed, character. Thus the Dutch revulsion against him makes them less sympathetic generally, or at least signals a tragic lack of understanding between the two parties.

In the second instance, Freya thinks of Heemskirk as "odiously...absurd" and a "grotesquely supine creature" as he sits sulking that she prefers Jasper, and she avoids going to talk with him, instead sitting down at the piano to play. Here the reader is meant to share her revulsion, especially since we have seen his thoughts and they are petty, selfish and vindictive. Disgust here marks true moral flaws in the person eliciting the disgust, reflecting our own opinion of Heemskirk and confirming Freya as a good judge of character. Given the passage quoted above, it's probably not irrelevant that Heemskirk is Dutch and dark-complected (that is, in opposition to the fair-haired, attractive English characters who would otherwise find happiness on the island). Conrad isn't above a bit of jingoism (infamously). Still, he makes Heemskirk a sufficiently loathsome and petty little man in his own right that I felt justified in sharing Freya's view. At the same time, her disgust in this scene prevents her from sweet-talking Heemskirk out of his funk, which might potentially have saved the entire progression of events from veering out of control.

I read Freya of the Seven Isles as part of Frances's Art of the Novella Challenge. It's the third of six novellas from Melville House's Art of the Novella series that I hope to read over the course of August. And thanks to Nicole for sending me this Melville House copy of Freya for my shelves!

As for drinks pairings, I spent a sunny Sunday afternoon sitting on my patio, reading Freya, and sipping iced mango black tea. Fresh-brewed as needed at double-strength, steeped for four minutes and immediately poured over ice and enjoyed. It seemed to combine the refreshing and the exotic in just the right combination.

A big thanks to everyone who offered such thoughtful suggestions for additions to my Disgust Bibliography! It's now at over 60 works, most of them book-length, so I'd better get reading. (For those just joining us, I'm doing a long-term project on the literary treatment(s) of disgust, and if you have anything to add to the ever-growing list, I'd be delighted to hear about it.)

In the spirit of getting this show on the road, I'm finally writing up my thoughts on William Ian Miller's 1997 The Anatomy of Disgust. This is the first disgust theory book I've tackled, and it was incredibly helpful in giving me some useful frameworks for my thinking about disgust. While there were a few areas I felt Miller's logic breaks down (for example, in his claim that the sensation of finding someone or something cute necessarily involves having contempt for that being), all in all it was very worthwhile. For the rest of this post, rather than critique Miller per se, I think I'll focus on recording the elements of his argument that I think most likely to be helpful to me in the future.

So, first of all, Miller agrees with pretty much every other source I've researched in putting together the bibliography, that disgust developed as a way to police the boundary between "safe" and "contaminating" states. At the most basic level this means that the feeling of disgust prevents us from eating and coming into contact with things that might contaminate us—eating rotting food, for example, or touching someone's running sores. Unsurprisingly, although the exact set of disgusting objects varies cross-culturally and with the individual, there are certain things that are pretty much universally disgusting, and others that show a strong tendency to disgust across cultures. Miller spends a large part of his opening chapters breaking down some general cross-cultural trends as far as categories of things we're likely to find gross: viscous things are generally more disgusting than solid or liquid things; tepid things more disgusting than hot or cold; wet things more disgusting than dry; organic more disgusting than inorganic; animal more disgusting than plant; many more disgusting than few, and so on. Again, there may be exceptions to all of these rules, but in general the more disgusting qualities are connected with what Miller calls "life soup": the writhing sites of generation and decomposition, birth and death. In his view these states are disgusting, "Not because all ends in death, but because there is no fixed point. [...] there is too much flux for fixed structures to get a grip on all the turmoil."

Perhaps inevitably, the direct physical variety of disgust long ago spread into the moral realm. As illustrated in Orhan Pamuk's Snow, disgust often manifests when we're confronted with other people who we perceive to be members of a "them" category: "they" are nearly always more disgusting than "us," especially if "they" are perceived as coming from a lower social position. Miller spends a lot of time dissecting this very rich set of issues: traditionally, women have been disgusting to men, Jews to Christians, the sick to the healthy, the poor to the rich, and so on. In a fascinating section on the medieval European Christian disgust toward both Jews and lepers, Miller writes

But one might distinguish a difference of emphasis between the disgusts and styles of loathing prompted by Jews and those prompted by lepers. More than lepers, who were associated with rotting flesh and cadavers, Jews were associated with excrement and menstrual blood. Such was the Christian demonization of the Jew—and the uncomprehending Christian horror of circumcision—that the Jewish male was believed to menstruate. Jewish men were thus feminized and all women were thus Judaized to make both more disgusting, more dangerous than they had been before. Without pushing the distinction too far one might notice that physical disgust at appalling sights and odors of lepers led to a belief in their moral loathsomeness; whereas the Jew's assumed moral loathsomeness led to a belief that his body must then be as disfigured as his soul.

This kind of "othering" disgust, which is a presumptive yet still hugely visceral combination of moral and physical disgust, presents some serious ethical problems. The presence of disgust is often processed as proof that the disgusting object is inherently wrong or objectionable—in the minds of the medieval Christians, Jews were objectively disgusting, both physically and morally. (Indeed, as Miller points out, Christian culture often found Jews more disgusting than lepers: although those aspiring to sainthood would willingly expose themselves to leprosy in order to mortify their flesh, there are no records of anyone converting to Judaism as self-flagellation.) This anti-Semitic disgust seemed to them just as rooted in reality as their disgust at leprosy, although from a modern perspective it seems clear evidence of religious bigotry.

Disgust is thus a persuasive yet unreliable witness. Not only does it suggest to us that the physically deformed or ill must also be morally flawed; it can actually elicit a visceral feeling of repulsion in us for someone "contaminated" with various kinds of otherness. And more than most other emotions, like love or jealousy, it seems to present us with objective fact about the object that disgusts us. Witnessing something disgusting, the temptation is strong to believe anyone would find that object similarly repulsive—yet in many cases, that assumption is unfounded. Miller writes:

The avowal of disgust expects concurrence. It carries with it the notion of its own indisputability, and part of this indisputability depends upon the fact that disgust is processed so particularly via offense to the senses. It argues for the visibility, the palpability, the concreteness, the sheer obviousness of the claim. Disgust poses less of a problem for intersubjectivity than perhaps any other emotion.

That is, it is easy for an outsider to imagine what we mean when we say we are disgusted. However, the claim to "sheer obviousness" does pose a problem when, for example, a person who finds menstrual blood infinitely more disgusting than feces, extrapolates this feeling into a universal claim that everyone shares this hierarchy of disgust-feeling (as Freud does in Civilization and its Discontents, following his traditional practice of not consulting any women before drawing his conclusions). The "sheer obviousness" aspect of disgust feelings are also a problem when the feeling of disgust is used as a rationale for justifying oppression, as in the example of the medieval Christians and Jews, or the more modern-day example of those who oppose allowing homosexuals to serve openly in the military, because the heterosexual servicepeople may find the idea of homosexuality disgusting. To those feeling the disgust in these cases, it seems like evidence of an obvious fact—because the person in question causes me to feel disgust, there must be something wrong with them. Such is not necessarily the case, yet a visceral disgust is a difficult hurdle to overcome. Miller argues, in fact, that the dehumanizing and ostensibly self-evident qualities of our experience of disgust present ongoing challenges to our democratic ideals.

One more theoretical construct offered by Miller promises to be particularly useful: he breaks down disgust into two basic types, the disgust of repression and the disgust of surfeit. Most attention, he claims, has been paid to the former. Freud and his followers explain disgust as a "reaction formation" in which our unconscious desires (leftovers from earlier stages of our evolution from animals to humans) are repressed, and the feeling of disgust is a mental roadblock convincing us that what our unconscious mind finds attractive is actually repulsive. Freud being Freud, most of these forbidden activities are sexual in nature, and our initial disgust actually functions to build tension so that we experience greater release and pleasure upon finally overcoming these mental barriers. The foul is revealed to be fair. In this type of disgust, we are initially revolted, but that revulsion is often coupled with emotions of attraction as well: fascination, curiosity, and so on, which draw us forward even as our aversion is pushing us back. On the flipside, the disgust of surfeit—the feeling following overindulgence in greasy or sugary food, alcohol, or similar—reveals something that initially seemed fair, to in fact be foul. In this type of disgust there is no push-and-pull; the source of the satiation appears utterly unattractive until the effects of the overindulgence have worn off, and all we want is to have it removed from our presence. There is a neat and appealing symmetry between these two types of disgust—perhaps too neat, but one I'll definitely keep in mind as I progress through the project.

Except for Flush and The Voyage Out, which I have yet to read at all (!), Jacob's Room is one of Virginia Woolf's titles with which I'm least familiar: this is only my second time through. The first one came shortly after my initial, world-changing discovery of Woolf, and I remembered the novella as being quite minor, a bridge work between her "apprenticeship" novels and the full-blown genius of her mid-career work. I had fallen in love with Mrs. Dalloway's rare but brilliant flashes of true communion between two people—the reunion of Peter and Clarissa, for example, or the hat scene with Septimus and Rezia—and by contrast the isolation of souls presented in Jacob's Room was a disappointment. Re-reading now, though, over a decade later, I quickly revised that low assessment. While perhaps not quite as finely-toned as Mrs. Dalloway or To the Lighthouse, perhaps a little wilder and less perfectly-controlled, Jacob's Room is its own project, different from that dyad of novels and stunning in its own right. This time through I was intoxicated as always by Woolf's language, and also intrigued by the questions this novella raises about the impossibility of knowing another person. Woolf delves into the ways in which the subjective reality of a human life compares to the evidence that life leaves behind—the high water-mark of physical and emotional detritus that remains after a human being has washed through the world.

What Woolf gives us here, after all, is Jacob's room—not Jacob himself. That's not absolutely true: we do catch glimpses of Jacob Flanders himself as he grows up; goes to University; gets a job; dies in the Great War. Direct contact doesn't happen very much, however. In the whole course of the novel, Jacob actually speaks only 29 times—and most of these are seemingly trivial remarks along the lines of "About this opera now..." or "Shall I hold your wool?" We get inside Jacob's head at even more infrequent intervals: he is said to have "thought," "wondered" or similar only 22 times, and most of these thoughts are similarly fleeting (though there are other passages in which his consciousness seems to be coloring the narration to some degree). It's as if the narrator, a roaming third-person voice who is far from omniscient—whose view of events is partial, and prone to infection by the perspective of any character she approaches—is struggling toward Jacob through a thick sea of information, washed this way and that when she encounters the thoughts of Jacob's friend, or the midnight walks of his neighbor, or the wicker chair in which he was sitting not two hours ago. On those few occasions when the she does manage to strive forward until she finds herself actually inside Jacob's mind, the feat lasts only a moment or two, and the thought she manages to extract gives the artful impression of chance—as might happen if one accessed another mind with no warning, at no time in particular. "A rude old lady, Jacob thought." Or again: "The dinner would never end, Jacob thought, and he did not wish it to." These thoughts fail to express any great depth of individuality or soulfulness, certainly.

The vast majority of the narration, then, focuses not on Jacob himself, but on his wake: rooms he has just left; artifacts he has used and abandoned; essays he is halfway through writing; and the thoughts and actions of people with whom, be it intimately or ever so slightly, he interacts. Much of Jacob's Room consists of details that Jacob himself would likely deem unimportant, toward which he is either unconscious or apathetic, such as the faded letter from his mother, sitting on the hall table:

Meanwhile, poor Betty Flanders's letter, having caught the second post, lay on the hall table—poor Betty Flanders writing her son's name, Jacob Alan Flanders, Esq., as mothers do, and the ink pale, profuse, suggesting how mothers down at Scarborough scribble over the fire with their feet on the fender, when tea's cleared away, and can never, never say, whatever it may be—probably this—Don't go with bad women, do be a good boy; wear your thick shirts; and come back, come back, come back to me.
     But she said nothing of the kind. "Do you remember old Miss Wargrave, who used to be so kind when you had the whooping cough?" she wrote; "she's dead at last, poor thing."

One of the things I so love about Woolf is her complex understanding of how truly roundabout human methods of communication can be—how most of the time, the words we actually say or write bear no resemblance to our actual meaning, as when Betty Flanders writes words describing the death of Miss Wargrave, but the meaning of her missive is the silent plea "come back, come back, come back to me." When you consider that the letter's recipient brings his own set of associations and preoccupations to bear, it's remarkable that humans manage to communicate anything at all—and this is what makes the flashes of successful communication in Mrs. Dalloway so glorious.

But it's also what gives Jacob's Room much of its pathos. How to sum up a human life? One can deduce a certain amount by examining a person's home, and the items they owned; by retracing the paths they walked and the places they visited; by eavesdropping on their conversation; by surveying the thoughts and feelings of the people who knew them. But in the end, it's impossible to enter into the being of another person. There is an emptiness at the center of Jacob's Room, which could only be occupied by the missing person: Jacob himself. And Jacob is gone forever, in a moment and a place which are themselves completely absent from the novella.

Although Woolf's brother Thoby Stephen died of typhoid rather than war wounds, he was undeniably the model for Jacob Flanders, and Jacob's Room performs a kind of mourning work for a lost sibling as well as for an entire generation of young men killed in the trenches of the Great War. And it occurs to me that Woolf's novella makes an interesting juxtaposition to a more recent work on a similar subject, Anne Carson's Nox. Both works deal with the loss of a young man, a brother, and both touch on the essential inability of one person truly to comprehend and make sense of another. Both too, in my opinion, verge on masterpieces.

It seems that a profound, impartial, and absolutely just opinion of our fellow-creatures is utterly unknown. Either we are men, or we are women. Either we are cold, or we are sentimental. Either we are young, or growing old. In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows. And why, if this and much more than this is true, why are we yet surprised in the window corner by a sudden vision that the young man in the chair is of all things in the world the most real, the most solid, the best known to us—why indeed? For the moment after we know nothing about him.
     Such is the manner of our seeing. Such the conditions of our love.

Notes on Disgust

In a move with which I have deep sympathy, one of the two mentions of disgust in Jacob's Room refers to moral disgust with a bowdlerizer:

Professor Bulteel, of Leeds, had issued an edition of Wycherley without stating that he had left out, disembowelled, or indicated only by asterisks, several indecent words and some indecent phrases. An outrage, Jacob said; a breach of faith; sheer prudery; token of a lewd mind and a disgusting nature.

Here the strength of Jacob's condemnatory adjectives demonstrates to the reader his intoxicated (on ideas, and possibly also alcohol) undergraduate enthusiasm and allegiance to the great and mediocre men of English letters. Here is a boy who cares enough about seventeenth-century English drama, or literature in general, that he is uses the rhetoric of disgust to express his feelings when someone monkeys with the text. Jacob also demonstrates in this passage the phenomenon whereby an overly fastidious person—a prude, or a censor—can actually elicit disgust in people observing his or her prudish or censorious behavior. The censor's tendency to perceive filth everywhere he looks (his own overactive disgust reaction) begins to suggest to the his acquaintances that the censor himself has a dirty mind, and is by extension generally dirty and disgusting. It's a similar mechanism to how people who perceive sexual subtext in everything they see often come to be regarded as perverts. (This is, by the way, a pitfall of choosing to write about disgust and something I hope doesn't happen to me!)

One of the only other hints of disgust comes later in the novella, when Jacob visits the prostitute Laurette:

Altogether a most reasonable conversation; a most respectable room; an intelligent girl. Only Madame herself seeing Jacob out had about her that leer, that lewdness, that quake of the surface (visible in the eyes chiefly), which threatens to spill the whole bag of ordure, with difficulty held together, over the pavement. In short, something was wrong.

The brothel's veneer of respectability, although largely convincing, is thus called into question by the faint tinge of something disgusting about its madame. William Ian Miller writes in The Anatomy of Disgust about the ways in which disgust polices the boundaries between fair and foul, but does so in contradictory ways that sometimes imply that what seems foul is really fair, and at other times hints that what seems fair is really foul. It seems to be the latter that's going on here: Jacob dimly perceives that the attractive façade conceals a "bag of ordure, with difficulty held together."

I re-read Jacob's Room as part of Frances's Art of the Novella Challenge. It's the second of six novellas from Melville House's Art of the Novella series that I hope to read over the course of August.

As for drinks pairings (perhaps the most unique portion of the Art of the Novella Challenge), I read this line and knew that Jacob's Room deserved something lovely:

...and without book before him intoned Latin, Virgil and Catullus, as if language were wine upon his lips.

So I decided to open this, which is one of three special bottles David got me for my 30th birthday. A remarkably full-bodied, black-fruit-and-leather Pinot noir from Oregon's own Dundee Hills (about an hour from our house). Delicious.

In the common run of things, I read and enjoy many books often criticized in the wider world as "boring." Omnibus editions of abstract contemporary poetry? Bring them on. Tomes of existentialist biography? Among my favorite books around. Histories of textile crafts? Can't imagine life without them. I generally consider calling a book boring to be a failure on the part of the reader, and when I read an essay that levels this criticism I am often left with a shrewd suspicion that the book under review is one I'll appreciate.

All of which said...I must admit that every time I picked up Orhan Pamuk's Snow, I was overwhelmed by sleep. Literally. I had trouble reading more than ten pages at a time without nodding off, so strong was the novel's soporific power. When you note its 440-page length, you'll have some notion why my post on Pamuk is overdue. This is especially disappointing because the book has so much potential, and sounds like irresistible literary candy to me rather than the mildly interesting but narcotic slog it turned out to be. I went into it expecting a Turkish version of the tight, labyrinthine plot twists in Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh, but without the magical realism and with a sinister pinch of David Lynch added. (Amazing, in other words. Do any of you know a novel that is actually like this?) Alas, it is more like a twelve-hour version of My Dinner with André, transposed into a Turkish tea-house and with occasional random shooting thrown in.

So many things about Pamuk's premise are intriguing to me. We have a frame narrative in which the unreliable narrator "Orhan Pamuk" pieces together, from interviews and documents, the story of his late poet friend Ka, and in particular a pivotal three-day trip Ka took to the provincial town of Kars, four years before his death. Ka is supposed to have composed his final book of poetry in Kars, although the manuscript has since gone missing. Orhan's romanticism, feelings of inadequacy, sorrow at Ka's death, and incomplete information lead him to draw conclusions about the poet's brilliance and seriousness that the reader will probably not share. Likewise, Ka's own set of biases and behaviors—including his childhood nostalgia for Kars, to which he is returning after many years; his infantile notions of love at first sight; his capricious and vacillating relationship to God and religion; the extreme, dream-like density that overtakes him at key moments; and his simplistic pursuit of the feeling he calls "happiness"—make him deeply untrustworthy as well. There are some clever moments that make use of the unreliable, un-self-aware narration, especially early in the book. I liked the description of the bus Ka rides in on, and the atmosphere as the falling snow gets heavier and heavier:

Fear had already fostered a strong fellow feeling among the passengers, and before long Ka also felt at one with them. Even though he was sitting just behind the driver, Ka was soon doing the same as the passengers behind him: whenever the bus slowed to negotiate a bend in the road or avoid going over the edge of a cliff, he stood up for a better view; when the zealous passenger who'd committed himself to helping the driver by wiping the condensation from the windscreen missed a corner, Ka would point it out to the man with his forefinger (which contribution went unnoticed); and when the blizzard became so bad that the wipers could no longer keep the snow from piling up on the windscreen, Ka would join the driver in trying to guess where the road was.

On one hand, we have probably all experienced that sensation of fellow-feeling that results from being in an enclosed area with other people during an emergency. On the other hand, it's pretty plain here that while Ka may feel "at one" with the other passengers, they probably don't feel at one with him. All his actions allow him the illusion of belonging, but no one else is responding to him: the wiper of the windshield either ignores his contribution or doesn't even realize he's there, while the driver can hardly benefit from Ka sharing in his attempts to guess the position of the road. It's a nice foreshadowing of the challenges Ka will meet later on in the town, and his over-confidence in his own impressions, even when those impressions veer wildly from one extreme to another from moment to moment. Orhan's narration seems to realize some of Ka's foibles (he points out the ignored input on the windscreen, for example), but also seems to buy in, at surprising moments, to Ka's own illusions.

In any case, this tricky double-blind narration is accompanied by yet more promising elements. Take the classic locked-door setup: all roads into Kars are closed due to heavy snow just as Ka arrives. Or the sinister provincial theater troupe which arrives on the same train as Ka and strikes him as oddly familiar. Or the dueling shady law-enforcement agencies leaning on the town paper, which reports events before they happen. Or the multiple tragic and spooky background events of Kars (an epidemic of young women have been committing suicide; a sherbet vendor may or may not be poisoning her customers; a small-time political coup will soon erupt on live television; a minister of education is gunned down in a pastry shop). With this great line-up, how could the book lose?

Through near-glacial narration, for one thing. See the passages on sleep, unavoidable sleep, above. I suppose one could view Pamuk's super-slow pacing as a clever reference to the fact that the town is locked down by ice, but in practice it very much drags by. Also, Pamuk's approach to politics strikes me as clumsy. Unlike in, say, The Moor's Last Sigh or Mario Vargas Llosa's Conversation in the Cathedral, where the political concerns are reflected in the events and fabric of the narration, in Snow we get chapters on chapters of people actually sitting in the various hotel rooms and tea-shops of Kars, and conversing about the relationship between the West and the East, the atheists versus the Islamists, and so on. I'm not saying there isn't a way to write an engaging novel made up largely of conversation, but in my opinion Snow is not that novel. The result here ends up feeling more like an author's notes on themes he wishes to address in a novel, than the novel itself. Add to that a similarly half-baked attempt at addressing gender issues, which pays lip service to the fetishization of female beauty but nonetheless fails endow its female characters with much depth beyond their opinions on whether to wear headscarves, and you have a frustrating execution of a stellar concept.

Notes on Disgust

Other than a few passing references to things most readers will find mildly disgusting (one character remembers a time several years ago when some religious high school students threw a bucket of sewer water over a statue, for example), the explicit mentions of disgust all involve the radical Islamist character Blue. As a Westernized Turk and rumored atheist who has spent many years in Germany, Ka is already the object of Blue's contempt, but when Ka displays these Westernized traits openly, Blue's emotions cross the line into disgust. Pausing in his "reminiscences" about a German couple he knows (he is actually making the whole thing up), Ka notes that "Blue was now eyeing him with open revulsion." Later, when Blue has been manipulated into collaborating with people from different factions from his own (Kurds and Westernized atheists), we have this scene:

Holding her father's hand, Kadife tried to make sense of the disgust and contempt she could see in Blue's face. Blue felt that he had walked into a trap, but, fearing what people would say about him if he left, he remained, against his better judgment.

In the first scene, disgust functions as a clear-cut policer of us versus them: Ka is revealing himself to be a proud member of "them" (Westerners), and Blue is repulsed because he considers members of "them" to be less fully human than members of "us." The role of Blue's disgust in the context of the book is to demonstrate to the reader his strong, dehumanizing opinions on Westerners.

In the second scene, some of Blue's disgust is turned inward: he is disgusted with himself for having allowed "them" to contaminate him to the extent that he has agreed to collaborate. Without doubt he is also disgusted at being in the presence of so many people he considers "them." Possibly, he might also be disgusted with himself that he cares enough about "what people would say" to let it influence his actions. For the reader, Blue's disgust in this scene further cements his stand-offish and volatile character. It increases the tension in the scene by convincing us any collaboration involving Blue will be unsuccessful, while making a larger point about the dehumanization of our political opponents. Or at least...that's what I think it's trying to do.

Snow was July's pick for the Wolves reading group. Please join us the last weekend in August for Lydia Davis's The End of the Story!

And thanks to Stefanie of So Many Books for kindly sending me this copy of Pamuk's novel. Despite the fact that I didn't love the book, it was still very nice of you! :-)