Musical Loose Ends

Hopefully this post will be less controversial:

Locust Street has a great post about early Dylan material, including an interview in which he claims to have been raised in the carnival.

It took me a long time to warm up to Dylan's solo acoustic material, having started with the mid-'60s rock records and moved on to the warmer and moodier 21st-century material pretty quickly. But I picked up The Times They Are A-Changin' on the cheap and listened to it while walking the cold 32 Nebraskan blocks to work one morning, and something about the record struck a chord with the bleakness and grayness of the Omaha morning. Now, if I'm not mistaken, that's the highest-ranked Dylan record on my list.

I still haven't picked up his debut, and the few songs I've heard from it are interesting mostly as a historical curiosity, but that post is a must for Dylanphiles.

---
David Remnick of The New Yorker asked jazz expert Phil Schaap to come up with 100 Essential Jazz Albums. Nothing too surprising, although when a particular genre hasn't really moved forward in thirty years, that's kind of by necessity. After my concerted effort last year to get into jazz, I'm pleased that I have tracks at least by 70-80 percent of the performers on the list.

Loose Ends

Anybody want to defend Nathaniel Hawthorne to me? I've always hated him (and I've read his three major novels--The Scarlet Letter, House of the Seven Gables, and The Blithedale Romance).

When I described my loathing to Dr. Boudreau, the graduate coordinator of UGA's English department, she asked if I'd read The Scarlet Letter since high school. I sheepishly admitted that I had not. "Give it another try," she said. "You need to read that book when you're old enough to imagine your life falling apart."

And so here I am, plowing through the book again. I do like it more than I liked it eight years ago--but I still don't connect with it the way I connect with Hawthorne's contemporary Herman Melville, who is frustrating in a totally different way. Melville's problem, as I've discussed elsewhere, is that he's a mess; his books never seemed planned at all, but instead they're Darwinist approaches to literature. He tosses everything in by chance and the cream of each reader's crop rises to the surface.

Hawthorne, on the other hand, seems to have planned every comma of The Scarlett Letter. It's masterfully controlled, but it seems to me as though that control has suffocated the book. I'm so aware of Hawthorne's intentions and his artistry that the characters can't breathe, and he won't allow me to really feel anything for them. Do any of you have a similar experience? Meredith, aren't you a Hawthorne fan?

---
Meanwhile, the latest trend seems to be to question John Steinbeck's place in the literary canon. In an interesting and personal piece for the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley wrestles with the ghost of old Tom Joad, finally coming down on neither side of the love-him-or-hate-him fence. A few thoughts on that article:

- Yardley notes that the Nobel Prize committee privileges "political orthodoxy" over "literary distinction." No kidding. Take a look at this list of Nobel Prize winners for literature; you've never heard of most of them. Look at the reasons the committees give for their choices; they will not out-and-out state that "we like this person's opinions rather than their art," but that's the subtext behind phrases like "lofty idealism" and "spiritual perception." The Prize was originally meant to go to "the most outstanding work of an idealistic tendency," and if the World Wars killed that notion, the committee still loves "correct" opinions.

- He also says that his love for Steinbeck abated at about the same time his love for Faulkner grew. I've always been told that's a natural progression--Steinbeck and Faulkner are never in vogue at the same time, taking as they did completely opposite (political vs. impressionistic) attitudes toward what was essentially the same mileau: poor people in the 1920s and '30s. I wonder if we'll see a rash of Faulkner-bashing ten years from now when Steinbeck re-enters the Academy.

The Stooge

I avoided reading Tom Wolfe for some time because of his fifth-grade reaction to criticism from John Updike (whom I love), John Irving (whom I like), and Norman Mailer (whom I've never read). So now that I'm finally reading Bonfire of the Vanities, I'm wondering if their criticism was fair.

Updike said that Wolfe's "A Man in Full still amounts to entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest aspirant form. Like a movie desperate to recoup its bankers' investment, the novel tries too hard to please us." Updike is usually not such a bloodthirsty critic; in my fairly extensive reading of his nonfiction, I've been struck by how magnanimous he is, always trying to find good things about books he doesn't like. So I'm going to assume that either (a) He really, really hates A Man in Full; or (b) He is somehow personally threatened by Tom Wolfe.

Mailer was a little more veiled in his criticism, calling Wolfe ""the most gifted best-seller writer to come along since Margaret Mitchell" and coyly noting that "Extraordinarily good writing forces one to contemplate the uncomfortable possibility that Tom Wolfe might yet be seen as our best writer. How grateful one can feel then for his failures and his final inability to be great--his absence of truly large compass."

I'm going to avoid dealing with Updike's criticism of Wolfe, mostly because doing so would involve defining "literature," which Updike is probably happy to do but which I am not. But I think Mailer is on to something here. Bonfire is enormous, fiction (or literature, whatever) on a grand scale--other critics have noted a similarity to Dickens (as they have with Irving), and that's fair enough. But at the beginning, the book gave me the impression that it will be a Percyan novel ideas, wrapping Wolfe's wordy prose around guilt and sin and bigotry and a million other issues.

But Wolfe can't control this for long; like Mailer, I think he lacks a "truly large compass." Less than halfway through, Bonfire of the Vanities turns into a potboiler, plot-driven and hurried. That doesn't make it bad--it just makes it less permanently interesting. It's a page-turner, but I don't think I'm going to remember much about it next year. On the other hand, other than its length, the novel is custom-made for a film adaptation, whereas something like Lancelot is less immediately engrossing but has more permanent value, at least for me.

The same is true of Irving, although I'll argue that Irving's prose is better-written. Lisa Simpson introduces Wolfe to Moe the Bartender by saying "He uses more exclamation points than any other living author." I'll vouch for that and add to it, elipses. Nearly every paragraph features ten-plus exclamation points and at least five aggravating dot-dot-dots. In this, he reminds me of that most overrated of 19th-century authors, Edgar Allan Poe (who himself plays a minor role in Bonfire of the Vanities). I come close to hating Poe, and I hate him because of the stagy melodrama of his prose. Like Wolfe, he's plot-driven, despite his fan base's concerted attempts to prove otherwise, and like Wolfe, he's a fan of exclamation points, italics, and dashes. Too many of Poe's short stories end with a frenzied interjection: "I had walled the monster up within the tomb!"; "[he]--was the man that was used up"; "These are the full, and the black, and the wild eyes--of my lost love--of the lady--of the LADY LIGEIA!" It's the stuff of B-grade horror films, and it's no wonder Vincent Price adapted so many Poe stories.

Wolfe is better than Poe, though. While he cannot sustain a philosophical theme through the course of his enormous novel, he at least has grand ambitions (I am still not convinced E.A.P. did), and his prose is never less than enjoyable, while any trip through Poe is like slogging through the streams of vomit and urine that so populate his stories. Literature? Who cares? Cohesive? Probably not. But Wolfe's worth reading--if not for the questions he halfheartedly raises . . . then at least for the way he ignores them!

Sherman McCoy Fulfills Lance Lamar's Quest

How odd that I decided to read The Bonfire of the Vanities, which has been languishing on my bookshelf for six months, directly after Lancelot. It seems fitting, since Wolfe, in his overblown and occasionally hamfisted way, wants to answer the question Percy asks.

Wolfe's characters live in the same amoral wasteland that Percy sets up in Lancelot; a combination of Rousseauian Romanticism ("You're good--it's society that corrupts you") and pop psychology ("It's not your fault--you were made this way") has created a world in which no one has any faults, let alone sins. For example, one of the book's protagonists, Sherman McCoy, gets caught in flagrante delicto by his wife and manages to successfully convince himself none of it is his fault:

It was in the air! It was a wave! Everywhere! Inescapable!...Sex!...There for the taking!...It walked down the street, as bold as you please!...It was splashed all over the shops! If you were a young man and halfway alive, what chance did you have?

By the end of the chapter, Sherman has convinced himself that his wife is a "bitch" and had it coming to her. Bad faith reigns, and we're responsible only for our successes--if, that is, we have any failures at all.

But Sherman's undebateable sin is not his adultery--after all, he slips right out of that one--but his complicity in a hit-and-run. As he and his mistress, Maria, are lost in the Bronx, his Mercedes stalls, and two young black men approach him and ask if he needs help. Without warning, he attacks them, and as he jumps back into the car, Maria gets it started and backs into one of the men, putting him into a coma. The pair speed away and decide not to say anything to the cops, not wanting their adultery to be discovered.

Sherman is a bonds trader at Pierce and pierce, a wealthy and successful man (he calls himself a "Master of the Universe" when he's not naming his erection "King Priapus") whose life and selfhood are subsumed by his work. No pangs of conscience are allowed through the gates of his 50th-floor fortress, not even when his wife discovers his adultery. But his role in this possible homicide makes it impossible for him to work; he can only think about the damage his sin may cause to his life and reputation.

Now, I realized that's not exactly redemption and is still full of the selfishness that characterizes the rest of his life, but this event has shocked him and made him aware of his own responsibility for what appears to be the first time ever. The old world is shattered, and perhaps he can build a new one. He even develops, as Lance Lamar suggests, as newfound need for God; one section closes with Sherman (who once considered praising his grade-school-age daughter for doubting the existence of God) begging the Almighty for assistance--financial assistance, sure, but assistance.

I'm only about 170 pages into this 700-page novel, though, so I'm sure all this is going to be complicated.

I am Deaf-Mute, Eye of a Statue

Lancelot is the only Walker Percy novel that I haven't read in the past couple years, and now that the vague rumblings of an idea for my dissertation have begun popping up in the back of my mind, I'm giving it another chance. It's simultaneously like and not like his other novels--there's a plot in there somewhere, but it's buried in a mental patient's mind, and like Notes from Underground (the novel Percy clearly wants us to think of when we read it), we shift rapidly from trust to skepticism when Lancelot Andrewes Lamar says something.

Language has always been important for Percy. At least half of his nonfiction essays deal with language in some form, building off of Charles Saunders Peirce and forcing linguistics into existentialism. In "The Delta Factor" (from The Message in the Bottle, his first anthology of non-fiction), he goes so far as to claim that language is what makes human beings human beings, and says that it's the key to understanding man in an age where we simultaneously believe we're the image of God and just another animal.

But here the most important things are ones that can't be vocalized. I'm reminded of Kierkegaard's Either/Or, in which our young aesthete, "A," declares the musical to be the erotic and the demonic (and of Melville's Pierre, which has a strikingly similar theme). But here, the unspeakable seems neither musical nor demonic. Lance connects it with innocence--his plan for a new society involves the girl in the room next to him in the insane asylum, who cannot speak but communicates vaguely through taps on the wall. (When Lance attempts to create a code to have an actual conversation, she can't follow it.)

But a new society is necessarily because of an unspeakable evil, the evil that Lance makes it his quest to find. He sets himself up as a knight-errant on an unholy quest, a "quest for evil," a quest to find "one sin, one pure act of malevolence." Doing so would shatter the complacency of the psychiatric age, in which "mothers and fathers who beat and kill their children have psychological problems and are as bad off as the children." Lance finds himself surrounded by "good" people, people whose faults are either not faults at all or at least not their fault, and he's disgusted. Finding one pure, unspeakable sin would destroy the modern world and allow him and Anna to build a new and superior one.

In doing so, he modifies Kierkegaard--the musical-erotic-demonic is a stage (like Kierkegaard's aesthetic sphere) that must be passed through in order to reach something better. I hated Lancelot when I first read it five years ago, but now that I've read the existentialists (and Percy's other novels), it makes perfect sense and has a strange and sinister beauty.

Alice Walker Is an Unfit Mother

The Times online just ran a piece on Alice Walker's estrangement from her daughter Rebecca. Walker does not come out smelling like roses. She apparently ignored her daughter for years, running off to writer's retreats and Tracy Chapman's house, while her daughter languished ignored at home, pregnant at fourteen and high on God knows what. Then, a few years ago, she sent Rebecca an email formally ending their relationship. That's dark stuff.

But it's just another example of why we should trust the art and not the artist--the feminists who call John Updike (and many others) a sexist pig should keep Walker's example in mind. We don't canonize authors because they were good people but because their books are beautiful/important/moving/deep. I've got no doubt that The Color Purple should be in the canon--not just the "African-American" or "female canon," but the big one, alongside Homer and Shakespeare and Hemingway, and Walker's being a terrible mother or a terrible person has no bearing on that decision.

Open Question

I'm too busy and brain-dead to write an actual post, but I'd like your thoughts on the following question (based, of course, on the horrifying tenth book of The Republic):

What is the purpose of art?

Okay, so I won't leave it at that. Plato says art is horrible in part because it allows us to express the worst parts of ourselves. We appreciate it when grown men cry on the stage but GOD FORBID we ever do that at home; we laugh at jokes we'd never tell; etc. Aristotle, whom I've not read yet (this summer, depending on how the Summer of Hamlet and my Milton course go), says that that catharsis is good and necessary. Why? Does art serve a function beyond emotional manipulation? Is it meant to be a lesson? (Should we then censor all art with an immoral lesson?) Is beauty in and of itself good?

I feel like I'm teaching a Comp class here, but I wanted to post something, and I'm out of ideas for a week or so.