Multiple Reading Personalities

Kafka’s Letter to his father was his only creative work in at the end of 1919/ early 1920; and while it is not absolutely a piece of fiction, it does certainly have some fictional traits, the most egregious being that the ostensible addressee of the letter (you’d never guess that would be Kafka’s father, would you?) was certainly not its intended readership. Kafka made sure his mother and his sister Ottla read the letter, but his father never saw it. Fictional however does not necessarily mean that he meant for the letter to ever be published: the letter was not part of the documents he entrusted to Max Brod (the story goes that Kafka asked his friend to destroy most of his papers after his death, and that Brod went against his instructions; it’s dubious whether Kafka really intended to have his manuscripts obliterated, and the fact that he bothered to keep some papers — such as this letter — in more private storage would confirm that. Never to be deterred, the good Max found the letter and included it in his biographical notes on Kafka). I do wonder what else in this letter is thought out to produce a certain effect on the reader, rather than to entirely reflect the mind of the writer. Take for instance this sentence: “Mother unconsciously played the part of a beater during a hunt“. If “Mother” was the intended reader, there’s a casual cruelty there that’s worth noting, and it’s all the more interesting for being indirect and hardly answerable. Franz might be playing a different manipulation game than his father, but he’s not exactly being straightforward himself.

The whole letter, in fact, contains plenty of evocations of the perverse power plays that Kafka wrote compulsively about. The father is a figure of distant, invasive, incomprehensible power. He is explicitly politic (“On your side there was the tyranny of your own nature“, “it is not to plot something against you“, “I might go on to describe further orbits of your influence and of struggle against it“), but to be fair the writer himself does not appear to be much less manipulative. Kafka does indeed close any possibility of an answer, not only by not sending his letter, but also by imagining his father demonstrating that his son has placed him in an indefensible position… And answering that objection by nothing less than annihilation (“To this I answer that first of all this whole rejoinder (…) does not originate in you but, in fact, in me“), followed by a “clause of evasion” applicable to anything he has written before (“Naturally things cannot in reality fit together in the way the evidence does in my letter“). This brings us back to the child Franz, who was so afraid of his father that he for a while took to only talking to him through the mediation of his mother; the adult Kafka doesn’t seem to have changed his strategy much despite its limited success at allowing him to gain his independence. This in turns recalls the pretext for the letter in the first place: Kafka’s “inability to marry” (the letter was written after he had broken marriage plans for the third time in his life… Fatherly disapproval seems to be the reason at first, but later Kafka confesses that he feels unable to marry, as it is the realm of his parents and would be a way to escape his father’s influence — and is therefore impossible).

All in all the letter is a fascinating peek into Kafka’s mental word, and reading it I felt that everything, everything I ever read from him was about his father and their relationship. Oh, that’s the Trial! Here’s the allegory of Justice! Here’s the Penal Colony! However there’s also much less of Kafka’s ‘signature’ coldness. I must confess that I don’t enjoy reading his fiction at all: it leaves me feeling cold, guilty and dirty. Judging by this letter, this is how Kafka himself was made to feel in the presence of his father. It’s not however what I experienced reading this letter. Heartbreak, certainly, every time he evoked the child he was, faced with the brute of a father he had to contend with; interest, hope, doubts, indignation… And much more. A less specific experience, but one that was easier to relate to.

Une si longue lettre, un si court roman, et pourtant si longtemps pour en noter quelques idées… Lu au coeur de la tourmente de la préparation des examens, pour faire une petite pause plaisir, que me reste-t-il en mémoire avant que de rouvrir le livre pour y vérifier mes souvenirs ? J’ai oublié les noms, l’écriture, mais ni les personnages ni leur histoire. En fait, le récit vit plus dans ma mémoire sur le plan de l’histoire personnelle que sur celui de la littérature, c’est-à-dire qu’il a pris place sur l’étagère mémorielle “biographies des amis et de la famille”, une petite place a-spectaculaire, difficilement analysable ou critiquable, car relevant de l’expérience personnelle et non d’une construction intellectuelle. C’est faux: Une si longue lettre est un roman, non un mémoire. Il a parfois été qualifié de semi-autobiographique (c’est un premier roman, après tout), mais “semi” est un terrain sur lequel mieux vaut ne pas trop se précipiter.

“Hier, tu as divorcé. Aujourd’hui, je suis veuve.”

Ces mots sont parmi les premiers de la lettre que Ramatoulaye (je viens de vérifier le nom) écrit à son amie  de toujours, Aïssatou, pendant les quarante jours de réclusion que lui impose son veuvage. Ces mots disent tout le livre. Les coeurs brisés, mais aussi l’opposition qui apparaît immédiatement entre les deux amies, entre celle qui a choisi son destin même dans l’échec et celle qui l’a accepté. Nous apprendrons en effet assez vite que les époux des deux femmes les ont soumises à la même épreuve, celle de devoir accepter une seconde épouse, et que les amies ont pris des décisions opposées. Mariama Bâ, qui avait pour sa part divorcé, fait donc un choix éclairant de point de vue en choisissant de donner la parole à la femme qui est restée. Le propos n’est pas de prendre parti, mais de comprendre.

Cette volonté d’empathie va d’ailleurs plus loin — les jeunes filles qui sont entrées, par une violence plus ou moins pernicieuse, dans la vie des maris, sont en grande partie justifiées, comprises, “contextualisées”  (Binetou, la seconde épouse du mari de Ramatoulaye, pourrait faire figure de chasseuse d’or tout à fait détestable si sa cruauté n’était expliquée : “victime, elle se voulait oppresseur”…). Il y a certes des figures féminines rien moins que positives (la mère de Binetou, la “belle-tante” haineuse d’Aïssatou) ; ce  sont systématiquement des femmes plus âgées, présentées comme des instruments de la société traditionnelle.

Les hommes en revanche manquent terriblement de profondeur dans ce livre, pas tant je pense par échec de l’écriture que comme représentation d’une incommunication réelle. Lâches et fuyants, ils sont surtout totalement incompréhensibles. Pourquoi deviennent-ils l’obstacle principal à la société plus moderne et plus bienveillante à laquelle ils aspiraient pourtant, jeunes hommes ? Pour une femme docile, jolie, et ne ressemblant plus en rien à ce qu’ils adoraient à vingt ans ? Il y a là un mystère irréductible, car Bâ n’évoque pas de simples beaux-parleurs, mais bien des hommes qui ont sérieusement consacré des années de leur vie à un rêve qu’ils “cassent” ensuite pour une manifeste chimère qui ne leur apporte évidemment pas le bonheur.

Le livre a été dédié par Mariama Bâ “à toutes les femmes et aux hommes de bonne volonté“. Cela reflète parfaitement l’aspiration désabusée, le désir de croire encore en l’homme (sans majuscule),  mais aussi la méfiance qui s’est installée, le besoin de qualifier : de quels hommes parlons-nous ? La tristesse, la déception dominent ; l’espoir a reflué de la vie de Ramatoulaye, même si elle veut encore se convaincre qu’il subsiste pour ses enfants, pour les générations à venir. Ses fils et ses filles semblent mieux armés, plus forts qu’elle ne l’était; l’amitié ne l’a pas trahie. La fin du livre est même ostensiblement positive, une décision d’aller de l’avant, de vivre à nouveau… Pourtant ce que j’en retiens c’est d’abord un profond sentiment de tristesse, les ”lacérations dans l’individu” évoquées, et une image (étrangère au livre) qui m’a accompagnée dans sa lecture, celle d’une Pénélope “inversée”, qui tenterait de tisser un ouvrage qui se déferrait sans fin. Bien sûr, la lettre écrite dans une période de deuil en a forcément une amertume circonstancielle que je ne voudrais pas généraliser. En fait peut-être le souffle d’espoir est-il cyniquement justement dans ce deuil : le vieux monde meurt, la société paternaliste meurt avec ses pères, et le deuil est possible. Alléluia?

I may be daydreaming about a reasoned, thematic reading plan, but this summer so far has been the Summer of Random — be it reading or otherwise. From One Thousand and One Nights to The Turn of the Screw, from Matthew Lewis to Arthur C. Clarke, anything goes — which might well be the perfect mindset to read If on a winter’s night a traveler, Calvino’s mishmash-of-novels novel. The book is unified around the figure of a Reader who, after purchasing the latest Calvino and reading a few pages, realizes he has been sold a defective copy of the book. Due to a printing mistake, the book he has in hand (not a Calvino) stops at page 32. Our Reader returns to the bookstore for an exchange, unknowingly starting on a quest that will have him begin reading a great many books, without ever being able to go past the first chapter or so. If on a winter’s night then alternates chapters of the Reader’s own story and the literary fragments he reads on his journey. While each new novel contains signs of the previous stories (a name, an object, an image…), they are all ostensibly different, ranging geographically from Japan to the fictional Eastern European country of Cimmeria, thematically from thrillers to psychological fiction, and have been authored by at least three different writers (very likely more — and that’s without the fiction-writing machines and unfaithful translators which were also involved). As for the Reader’s story, while it is unified by the presence of the Reader and that of a few other protagonists, it also fluctuates between genres: love, detective, adventure, spy…

Calvino was a respected fiction critic in addition to being a writer, When he wrote If on a winter’s night, he was struggling with the edicts of the “new” French critics (Calvino had lived and worked in France for many years, and has shown a certain defiance with the more traditional literary forms; as for the Nouveau Roman, Tel Quel, structuralism and such, I will not expound here, though I certainly need to explain all of this to myself at some point. Not my favorite subject of all times, I’m afraid, sorry St Barthes et al.). If on a winter’s night is a very self-conscious attempt to talk about plot, a notion writers were supposed to leave behind as trivial and primitive (I caricature, bear with me…). This self-consciousness results in several mannerisms I found frankly annoying, for instance Calvino’s insistence on using the second-person point of view (which reminded me more of the choose-your-own-adventure books of my childhood than of Bright Lights Big City; in other words, it was as unsuccessful for me). This distance between reader and Reader might well have been intentional (even when we’re reading over the Reader’s shoulder, there are notes of his and the writer’s presence all over the text: “the page you’re reading should convey this violent contact“, for instance, or in what starts as the voice of a character in a story-within-the-story, “perhaps I am thinking this only now, or it is only you, Reader, who are thinking it“).

Despite these criticisms, the book remains a pleasure: no matter how tortured Calvino might have been about it, he still is a fantastic storyteller, and he cares deeply about writing. Delirious situations, slippery characterizations, even the occasional bout of stilted writing could not keep me from wanting to know what happens next. Moreover, the passion Calvino brings to his discussion about truth and illusion in art, his pleasure in playing hide-and-seek with readers — these are highly contagious. I reread The Baron in the Trees right after If on a winter’s night (admittedly a more childish book than I remembered, but still a fun read). While I found the same simple pleasure in it, it also made me realize how much more If on a winter’s night had to say, and to ask. Ludmilla*, the “Other Reader” in the book, says it when she explains that “authors are never incarnated in individuals of flesh and blood, they exist (…) only in published pages — the living and the dead both are there always ready to communicate (…) in the fickle, carefree relations one can have with incorporeal persons”. I don’t know that all my relations with authors are “fickle and carefree“, but to me, Calvino is at his best right there, in playfulness.

* on a completely unrelated note, I found that the most potentially interesting characters in both Calvino books were the female “leads”, who he perplexingly keeps at arms’ length and doesn’t develop.

Finally reading through Antigone (and Oedipus the King) after the arduous walk through Antigone’s Claim felt really pleasurable — and so much more so for having some context as to the various readings of the play made by the likes of Hegel, Lacan and Luce Irigaray. Some pieces fell into place and some aspects that had not been discussed detached themselves more vividly against the backdrop of the rest of the text (for instance, what is this creonesque* obsession with monetary corruption? And how interesting that it echoes Oedipus’ suspicions about power hunger!). I still cannot pretend to understand everything Butler was trying to show, nor even most of it, but I at least felt like I had a richer experience with Sophocles’ plays.

Most readings of Antigone seem to focus on the opposition between the unwritten laws of family (of which Antigone, a woman, is the champion) and those of the state (defended by her uncle, Creon). I was struck, having read the Oresteia relatively recently, by how close this interpretation is to some of the commentary on Aeschylus’ trilogy (Electra and the – female – Furies would embody the preeminence of revenge and of family rights over official power; the situation is reversed at the end, when the Furies, changed into Eumenides, are sent into a softer, more domestic sphere — and the task of Justice transferred to an assembly headed by the appropriately male Apollo). I can see how that would reflect political preoccupations of the time (the passage to organized cities cannot have been all that simple), but I wonder how much of this also reflects the way critics wanted to read these works. Butler makes compelling points about how the readings categorize things that really are not so neatly distributed (Oedipus’  daughter standing for traditional family is a grand joke, of course, and her opposition to Creon is not all that evident — her speech, the way she makes her stand, even her multiple descriptions, most notably as manly… Their similarities are enough to not oversimplify their relation into a simple opposition).

Probably what I liked the most about the plays was how individual each of the characters are, and how essential to the storyline their personalities are. Everything that happens may happen because of an incredible coincidence or two (Fate, the Gods, whatever you want to call it)… But mostly it happens because Sophocles created characters who are who they are. What drove them to where they are is consistent with the way they act: Antigone is strong, stubborn (and used to leading blind men!); Oedipus is smart, relentless and swift to anger; Creon is principled to the point of self-righteousness, but ultimately smart enough to adapt (even though his timing is uniformly atrocious). These are no cardboard characters acting out the roles designed for them, they are making that destiny. Contrary to our current Sacred Principles of Writing, Sophocles shamelessly has his characters tell their own story, rarely ever bothering to put on a ‘show’ moment. The idiosyncrasy of each individual’s speech however is the show elements; characterization in a way is the story. It’s easier to enjoy of course because the story is known enough that we don’t really care how subtly it is revealed — but that really brings me back to translation and the importance of finding one that works for you to be able to identify the singular voices of the characters. Fagles’ worked for me again, though it was not as breathtakingly visceral as his Iliad. I would guess that’s because the plays are less epic, but how to ever be sure?

* yes, I made that up

Finally! I was craving Antigone last night, so I went to bed a little earlier with my Kindle… I had downloaded the Theban plays from amazon.com a few days ago. Encouraged by the fact that somebody commented positively on the translation, I had gone with the Storr version. Yesterday, after reading just a few lines of Oedipus the King, however, I had to give up: the rythm felt flat, slilted. The translator’s fault? Mine? Sophocles?

Things were no better this morning, so I have decided to look for another translation. A little research suggested a few alternatives: Stefanie read  the play in Heaney’s translation (I loved his Beowulf, but her account of  his Antigone is leaving me unconvinced), Braun’s translation sounds very good (and might even be available from my local library!), and Antigone’s claim referenced both the Hugh Lloyd-Jones edition and the David Grene translation.

I know I probably only have three readers here, but I also know they are the kind of bright minds to have an opinion on such matters. Any suggestion?

EDIT: I wrote the above from our local coffee shop… Upon coming home, I grabbed the first volume of the Norton’s anthology of World Literature, a little randomly. It has the full Fagles version of Antigone — probably not the choice I would have made for this specific read through (a slightly more literal version might have been better to read the play in the light of its critical discussion in Antigone’s claim), but it will do beautifully for now!

I don’t know what is wrong with me lately — I just don’t seem able to get into a book. I did make my struggling way through Antigone and I, and I’m slowly reading the first tome of Les Mille et une nuits (Arabian nights), but I keep postponing Sophocles and… pretty much anything else. Ironic, since for the first time in almost a year (well, ten months), I have enough time on my hands that I could pretty much tackle anything I’d like. I’m allowing myself the break, though, and letting myself waste time reading blogs and articles. Perhaps the blog-thirsty part of my brain has its reasons?

What I talk about when I talk about running was however an easy read, perhaps because of Murakami’s specific qualities. I am a somewhat conflicted Murakami fan – I can absolutely understand why one wouldn’t like him very much, but I always fall under the charm of his white sentences and his flimsy tales. I was a little cautious about this specific book – I don’t run, and this is ostensibly a memoir on running, though it touches on such themes as writing, aging, self-discipline and self-image. I was interested in reading it mostly because I am making my own efforts to adopt a regular exercising discipline. My sport of choice is swimming, which I envision as some sort of active meditation. I felt there might be some things Murakami had to say which would resonate with me. There were, especially in the early pages, and I would certainly recommend that book as a motivational tool for wannabe-healthier bookworms. I also found some reading pleasure in the book, though not as much as in the Murakami novels I have read.

There are two conflicting qualities which I very much enjoy in Murakami: one is a talent for silence (what he doesn’t write or just barely mentions always seems to be the most poignant and most ferocious part of what he has to say), the other is very personal, almost surreal perception of the world, with his knack to incorporate a devious pseudo-American pop-culture touch as the magical element of the world. By “devious pseudo-American pop-culture touch”, I refer to his treatment of a certain modern American iconography from a non-American perspective (witness the use of Colonel Sanders in Kafka on the shore, the title What I talk about etc., the use of music in his work, and so on. And note that I use “American” in the loosest sense – a sense which would for instance allow me to lump in Johnnie Walker Scotch whisky with “American pop culture”). It might be an obtuse conversation to Americans, a recycling of surprisingly-chosen American clichés strung together with masking tape and bubble gum; however, this distorted, childishly-naïve vision of the “outside” and the “beyond” speaks to the distorted, childishly-naïve vision I also developed through whatever American “cultural goods” (!) reached over the ocean and came into my life before I was old enough to process them rationally. It’s a pictorial, emotional rendition of a fantasy. Of course, Murakami’s vision and mine are very different (different ages, different locations; and to make matters worse, some of the oldest lessons I learned about the US were given by manga versions of classics such as Tom Sawyers), but there is a surprising amount of commonalities.

To go back to Murakami’s silences – they are plentiful in What I talk about when I talk about running despite his trying to push himself to articulate certain personal truths. Most of the time, I’m not very convinced by these efforts. When he writes about heading “towards a taciturn, unadorned maturity” or about his supposedly unlikeable personality, his modesty feels like an intermediary truth and disappoints compared to the moments when you are left to infer your own conclusions from a one-sentence description of his wife welcoming him at the end of a race in which he didn’t do well, or when he mentions that the frame of his triathlon bike is inscribed with “’18 Til I die’, the name of a Bryan Adams hit. It’s a joke, of course. Being eighteen until you die means you die when you’re eighteen”. Killing the “joke” is an interesting way of creating a silence the reader can no longer easily fill (this is not the joke you were expecting from a middle-aged man reflecting on aging). It takes a mundane anecdote to a more interesting state of imbalance. All in all, the quiet, slightly disjointed collection of essays manages to create these empty spaces regularly.

The dreamlike quality of Murakami’s best writing, however is mostly lost here. By dreamlike I don’t mean “ethereal”, but his collage approach to fiction. That’s of course probably to be expected with a book that doesn’t want to be fictional, but I was still a little let down  – I felt Murakami had been trying to channel his writing too vigorously, that he had let go of the “use your imagination” explicitly whispered to him by his instinct. There are a couple passages when that innate fantasy is perceptible (for instance when comparing himself to “Danton or Robespierre eloquently attempting to persuade the dissatisfied and rebellious Revolutionary Tribunal, [trying] to talk each body part into showing a little cooperation”, before remembering what happened to Danton and Robespierre; or when he repeatedly refers to global warming as a “villain”); but all in all, his unique way to feel seemed diluted. The rhythm of the writing still felt right in its flair for the right detail, for snappy titles and in the dialogue feel of the argument (I know nothing about Japanese literature so cannot form any kind of definite opinion on this, but it seems to me that there is a rhythm to American-English dialogue that informs Murakami’s writing – adverbs used as a conclusion at the end of a paragraph or as a sentence introduction, a sort of concessive balance of sentences often starting in “but” or “and”, a relaxed “whatever-ness”…).

I realize what I just wrote might seem fairly negative – not that it was a bad book, but in that it was not the best Murakami… Of course! And yet the book got me thinking for a couple of days, and I even got a copy for a friend who is a runner. Isn’t it strange how the more you read and try to think about your reading, the more layered and inconclusive your thinking seems to get?