Multiple Reading Personalities

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?

I’m drowning in notes like these. Half a notebook of them.

Pages upon pages, summaries, thoughts, feelings, digressions. I feel like I’m beginning to get it, to understand how it works, but I’m not sure “I’m feeling it”. The magic of Combray — the first part of the first book in the In Search of Lost Time series — is long gone.

I’ve abandoned my excruciatingly slow reading pace for the end of Les jeunes filles (Within a Budding Grove), just so I could enjoy the text more, and as the narrative itself was picking up I had a really good time with it. I feel like I intellectually understand most of what the text is telling me, be it the story or the vision of Art, the importance of writing by one’s own vision, the filtering of reality which is not the weakness but the mark of a true artist; and yet I am still ill at ease.

(My apologies for the discombobulated post; it reflects my state of mind).

La Recherche is written by a narrator (which I’ll call Marcel, though that might be up for debate) largely inspired to Proust by himself — convoluted construction intentional. Proust was however adamant that the narrator was not him, and he indeed constructed Marcel’s life with noticeable divergences from his (and attributed other aspects of him to other characters). What is more, the narrator is telling his life through the prism of memories — something one could forget in the immediacy of the narration, but which obviously (the title says it well) is at the core of the novel. Memories and imaginations are so closely related as to be indistinguishable in Proust’s world… That is yet another caveat against taking the tale at face value.

Against this foggy background, Proust and Marcel both strongly assert that their only goal is to fish for these “deep truths” which reveal reality in the light of the creator’s idiosyncratic vision (careful, I’m reaching into my 50-cent words jar today!)

My problem is, I’m not sure I trust either of them.

For an “anti-intellectual” writer, one who wants to talk from the immediacy of sensations, Proust is incredibly wordy, and so theoretical that a lot of the material for his novel originates in earlier essays (gathered for the most part in the Against Sainte-Beuve collection I read along the novel). That’s the least of my worries: Proust’s interest with homosexuality and Jewish identity, for instance, are unquestionably genuine, but the incoherent ways he talks about them make me wonder whether he is honestly reflecting his inner conflicts or more simply lacks self-awareness in these matters. Another example might be in the romantic obsessions his young hero develops for unreachable girls. Is he depicting some true aspect of his romantic self (with a substitution of a “she” for a “he”, which I would not consider deception in the world of fiction); or is he just reflecting the cover-up lie he used for many years, when he pretended to be madly in love with women he could not have, to dispel any doubts as to his real sexuality?

These are some really big examples, and once these questions breach the trust between reader and writer/ narrator, everything else follows: by the end of his vacation in a chic hotel, was the initially rude lift operator really talkative, or is Marcel rearranging facts to claim one more social victory? Did the nobleman really stare at him unprovoked, or did he do something to attract attention? Did he really miss such train accidentally, or did he never really mean to follow through with his romanesque but unrealistic move? Am I meant to wonder about all this?

I’m hoping further volumes will help, but at that stage I feel like I’m trying to find my way by the moonlight in a beautiful, “Lewis Carollien” maze. I’m still unsure whether I like the feeling or not — but these sure are interesting times.

Translation.

The word with its sibilants is one of my favorites, the word as it slides like doors, like a pint of beer on a copper counter, with a rustle, from one place to another, the hint of geometry in it — one of the most basic transformations, the mirror image, so familiar and yet subtly altered by the very process of being reflected, or as is the case, translated. So much better than the presumptuous French “traduction”, as if you were leading anything from anywhere… Side notes, tangent – that’s what I think about when I think translation.

For years I didn’t think much about it; I was “translating”, sometimes, for work, a questionnaire or a presentation from English to French or, against all rules (but I didn’t know that), from my native language into my second. I was often the unofficial translator of choice, in part because I spoke decent English, in part because I was happy to, but I wasn’t naming what I did. It was just “writing in English”, or “putting it in French” — or at most, “traduire”. The innapropriate French word was a shield: as long as translation was only traduction, I could enjoy it casually. I liked it because it put me in touch with English, and in English, everything is simpler for me. Except, of course, complexity, but that was not the goal.

(My guess is that everything is simpler in English because my command of the language is so much more rudimentary that my thinking has to follow suit. In this regard, maybe my trying to improve my English is an enormous mistake that will eventually deprive me of the safe haven of a familiar but still foreign language).

Then two things happened: first, Sophia Coppola catapulted the phrase “lost in translation” into my life, and translation became incredibly alluring — mysterious, nostalgic and sexy. My younger sister enrolled in translation studies, and I realized I was a little jealous, but only the tiniest bit; mostly I was fascinated. Translation had become something both otherworldly – a puff of smoke in blue light — and something real, something an actual person who brushes her teeth twice a day was concerned with.

That’s how translation entered my consciousness, and how I started paying attention to it. It’s become one of these magic words — like ”gin fizz” or “by the sea”, for instance – that makes me pay attention. This is why I knew I had to read Vengeance du traducteur when I heard about it (first on Stella Polaris’s blog, and then all over the Internet); this is also the probable reason I didn’t enjoy it very much. I expected it to be a fun novel, which it is; I wasn’t expecting it to be the next Great Novel, which it isn’t; but I was also expecting it to give me some insight into the process of translation, which it really didn’t. I was expecting it to be more elegant than it is. It’s not so much that I expected it to be a greater novel than I expected it to be a different novel. In other words: it’s not his fault, it’s mine.

Because of this little disappointment, I don’t know if you can trust me to review the book, but here are my impressions: Vengeance du traducteur is a smart novel which tries a little too hard. It follows a translator (let’s call him, as he introduces himself, Trad) working on a novel about a triangle between a writer, his translator and his secretary/ mistress. Unsatisfied with the novel, Trad decides to break the Golden Rule of translation and to meddle with the writing; however, he soon notices that his interfering has consequences way beyond the closed world of the book.

This story line worked fairly well for me, and Trad’s language when he let it loose was alternatively sensual, wicked and whimsical, all with the clear mastery of a cultured writer with a musical ear. However Matthieussent seems to have found this too easy, and he added more levels, more complexity, notably through endless dream scenes, dramatic suggestions that maybe nothing is quite as it seems and reality could be elsewhere, a generous helping of heavy-handed symbolism, and a jump back in time to 1937 Paris with Dolores Haze, the actress and woman Nabokov’s Lolita became when she left her literary nymphet self behind. All of this felt a little too much, a little too referential, a little too reverential.

Early on in the book, Trad mocks his writer who indulges in adjectives and adverbs; perhaps he should have heeded his own advice and lightened up his own tale.

The Judgment

A young man, Georg, writes a letter to a friend living far away in St-Petersburg. He had hesitated to announce his upcoming marriage to the friend, as he was reticent to create an obligation to come back for the wedding, but finally decided to do so at the insistence of his fiancée. When he talks about this to his father, whose business he has mostly taken over and developed since his mother’s death, the old man reacts violently, first accusing his son of having invented the friend, then telling him that he has contracted an alliance with the friend against a fiancée depicted as a seductress. Georg tries to defend himself, at first feeling pity, then anger, for his diminished father, but the father wins the confrontation and condemns his son to die drowned – a sentence Georg promptly carries out by throwing himself under the nearest bridge.

The Stoker

For an indiscretion with a maid, Karl has been sent to America by his parents. As his ships docks in the New York City harbor, the young man realizes that he has forgotten his umbrella in his cabin. Leaving his luggage with a ship acquaintance, he rushes back, only to get lost and end up in the cabin of the ship’s stoker. The two men strike a discussion, and Karl decides to support the stoker’s complaint against his officer to the ship captain. The two men find the captain in a large room, with a following of other men, and bring the case to his attention. Unfortunately, the stoker ruins this artful introduction by mangling his explanations, hindering his cause instead of defending it. In the animation that follows, Karl is recognized by a Senator uncle alerted to his presence by a letter from the loving maid. Much to his dismay, Karl is dragged along the man and forced to abandon the stoker to fend for himself.

In the Penal Colony

A tourist visiting a penal colony is required by the new director to attend a ceremony – a complex, almost mystical way to execute a man for a minor offense. The executioner, an officer faithful to the memory of the previous colony’s director, implores him to support his methods to the new director. The tourist, quite disgusted by the method, refuses. The officer then decides to be the last one to die through his machine, but every ounce of dignity is denied to his sacrifice as the machine breaks down and kills him without grace. The tourist flees the colony, followed by an inmate and a guard he barely manages to leave behind.

A Fratricide

This very short story depicts a stabbing in a street, at night, with a cold precision. It could seem very pedestrian but for two elements nagging the reader: one is the presence of a witness, Pallas, who seems to condone the murder but will speak out against the murderer; the second, of much greater interest to me, is the title. Even more radically than with the opening sentence of Metamorphosis, Kafka kills the apparent source of tension in the story, revealing its murderous object before even revealing a single narrative detail; and yet, the motive is never explained, and the fraternal relation between the men neither confirmed nor denied, leaving to the reader free choice to interpret that “fratricide” literally, figuratively, or anything in between.

Gregor, a traveling salesman, is in the clutches of an exploitative boss to whom his father has an important debt. Being a model son and a good employee, Gregor keeps his life is firmly in the camp of hard work and self-sacrifice, his only aspirations being to send his sister to the Conservatory and to one day, all debts repaid, leave his job for a more lenient one.

Inexplicably, Gregor wakes up one day transformed into a repulsive insect and what is worse, late for work. Never thinking to hide his condition, Gregor is rapidly exposed for what he has become, driving away the clerk who came to check on him; his family, more tolerant, will content itself with his exile in his bedroom. His sister Grete even takes it upon herself to feed him to his new tastes, which go to the rotten and the foul, and to clean his bedroom.

Little by little, the situation degrades. The family struggles not only financially (as even with the three of them working, they do not seem to bring in the same income than Gregor used to), but also mentally, as their jobs sap the energy to deal with Gregor. Things come to a first crisis when Gregor’s sister and mother decide to empty his room of furniture so he can crawl on walls more easily; in a fit of attachment to his human past, Gregor tries to protect a picture from their zeal, but his attempt is misunderstood by his mother and scares her so that his father ends up pelting Gregor with apples, one of which becomes embedded and rots in his back.

After this episode, Gregor’s care deteriorates, and when the family takes lodgers, they have no second thoughts about using his room as storage space for anything unwanted. A second crisis occurs when one night Gregor’s sister plays the violin: listening to her, Gregor forgets himself and comes in full view of the lodgers. Driven back to his bedroom, he overhears his family renouncing him. He dies during the night. After a few minutes of mourning, his family regains a dose of optimism, realizing that their hard labor is opening new possibilities to them, especially now that they are free of Gregor.

Notes:

• Why and how does everyone know that the bug is Gregor? Is it really a totally unheard of phenomenon?
• There could be a darker subtitle to Gregor’s family – possibly that they have been consciously exploiting him (the dad looking suddenly weaker when he is around, then proving himself quite capable to work; the money he set aside instead of reimbursing the boss, not mentioning it to Gregor). Similarly, the exploitation of Gregor, which seems extreme even for the time (or when he compares himself to other traveling salesmen, when he says that his colleagues think he makes a lot more money than he does). Is it just an abusive boss emboldened by the debt, or is there some collusion?
• The tendencies in this family to have the children do the dirty work (Gregor’s hard work, Grete’s taking care of him) could lead to a facetious reading of the last lines of the story – a creepy, suspenseful question mark to the project of marrying off Grete now that their “work” with Gregor is done.
• On the other hand… Gregor’s taking the family in charge, and later his mere presence, confines them to being his “parasites”. They find new purpose and strength in his degradation and then death…
• Could it be the aspirations of Gregor that makes him an outcast? (he framed a portrait just before his transformation, which ends up being the cause of the first crisis; he is so attracted to the music played by his sister that it causes the second).
• Is there something to the mom’s feelings than by treating Gregor like an insect, they’re making him become one? The family rejects the idea that he still understands them, though he gives them evidence to the contrary, and little by little convince themselves he is not Gregor anymore.
• Note his inability to feed – “nothing appeals”, nothing nourishes me in what the family has to offer, this sense that there might be “something else”, locked in the pantry, that is refused to him. Does that mirror his new inability to feed his family?
• Physicality of rejection (each time Gregor gets emotionally hurt, it translates physically)

“We admire in her what we are far from admiring in ourselves; in which matter, by the way, she is in full agreement with us.”
Josefine, the Singer, or the Mouse People

The 2007 Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Kafka’s short stories and novellas covers 20 years of his literary life, from 1904 to 1924. While it includes published fragments of his three unfinished novels (such as Before the Law, which was part of The Trial, or The Stoker, the first chapter of Amerika), it stops just short of anything longer than the Metamorphosis novella.

The collection is organized chronologically, and it is interesting to witness the evolution of the writer as he grows into a more expert storyteller. The early pieces often feel more like exercises, exquisite vignettes depicting an isolated incident without meaning or point-in-time sensations; it is however striking how artful they are already, the writing precise and elegant, the pictures vividly drawn.

In time the fragments expand to short stories, or even novellas, and yet the reader never loses the troubling sensation that something is missing. The explanations are just not to be found, whether it’s Kafka’s way of saying that they do not exist, that they do not matter, or that they’re just absent for the reader that we are, but who knows if another… Another feeling I had was that the stories grew darker. Certainly, the same themes kept reappearing: the call of freedom, the attraction of otherness, the deadly wonderfulness of people, the pragmatic world and its demands not to be denied, the constant judgment characters endure… But where the child in the very first story, Children on the Road, was a first-person hero who broke free of his origins to joyously go become “a fool”, the later characters will not quite so succeed. It is perhaps telling than in the very last story of the collection, Josefine, the Singer, or the Mouse People, the artist is held at a distance from the narrator, considered a little absurd and denied the freedom she requests to better dedicate it to her art.

It would not make sense here to look at every single story, as the collection contains forty of them, but that theme of the artist as an outsider who cannot be completely approved of is probably the one that struck me most. Much has been made of Kafka’s status as a perfect outsider (a man who “consisted of literature”, in his own words, born to a pragmatic and somewhat narrow-minded businessman; German-speaking among the Czechs, Jewish among Germans, and a non-believer among Jews), and he himself probably has added to the image with such pronouncements as “I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe”…  Yet there is something amused in his looking at artistic pretenses; it is Gregor, in Metamorphosis, who gets transformed into a giant insect, not his somewhat predatory parents, and to add insult to injury, this happens just after his menial talents have been put to creative use making a frame for a pretty picture, and just before he can put to execution his plans to send his sister to the Conservatory; it is the free monkey who tries to become a crude human in A Report to an Academy; it is the Hunger Artist, in the eponymous story, who dies disregarded when he finally realizes his art to the fullest; it is Josefine who embodies something un-admirable in her race, which she simply brings to light, feeling full of herself for doing so – and whatever it is that she does, which appears to be indescribable, certainly it is made clear that it should not be excessively valued.

To my current state of mind of wanting to escape the necessities of business to explore my literary side and aspirations, this was an interesting read, id slightly anxiety-inducing at times. To this reader, in this reading, Kafka’s humor remained quite secondary to the anguish seeping from stories such as The Judgment, In the Penal Colony, Metamorphosis or A Country Doctor! And yet it was there, pointed not only at the absurdity of the world but also at the ridiculousness of our pretense, and I cannot think that Kafka excluded himself and his oft-commented life struggles from this amusement. Certainly that makes the task ahead seem a little less daunting: if ever he can be poked fun at, then my own ridicules will be in good company!

[summaries in a different article]