Book Review: A Tangled Mercy by Joy Jordan-Lake

In this post, I write a review of the novel A Tangled Mercy by Joy Jordan-Lake. Warning: spoilers are included in this review. 

I Had Read Octavia E. Butler Recently

I had recently read Octavia E. Butler's novel Kindred. It's also a story that goes back and forth between past and present, and it's also about piecing together clues about family relations, enslavement, and how Black protagonists resisted their White enslavers. Butler's novel is about a Black novelist in 1970s Los Angeles who goes to the past in 19th century Maryland. This novel is about a White graduate student from Boston who travels to her mother's hometown of Charleston, South Carolina. I mention this because it shows my reading trajectory and how I picked up this book. Also, the novel, as the author states in an interview, took her twenty years to write, and through the course of its development takes on many twists and turns. As you will see. 

Kate Drayton — Graduate Student from Boston

In A Tangled Mercy, Kate Drayton is the protagonist. But I found myself decreasingly interested in her. She's found herself in her deceased mother's hometown of Charleston, South Carolina. The novel is long, though. About four hundred pages, and it spends at least three hundred pages slowly revealing how Kate and her family's lives are interwoven with the events of an enslaved blacksmith named Tom Russell from 1822. And it ends — spoiler alert — with an explosive current event. All of the events, how they all fit together into one story, is a bit confusing, and I had to read certain parts twice, stop reading the book, put it down, and do some online background reading just to puzzle out what was happening. 

The novel plays into the historical events of a slave revolt that occurred in 1822, called the Denmark Vesey Rebellion. The novel juxtaposes Kate's narrative with the third-person story of Tom Russell. In my mind, the Kate chapters had a female voice and the Tom chapters had a male voice. We find out that Tom Russell was hung and shot for being part of the revolt. As I said, I did get confused at this point, because this sticking point, Russell's death, is put forth as possibly not ever happening — and that Tom might have survived. Spoiler alert: he didn't survive. But I will leave it to you, the reader, to figure out his legacy. 

Historical Events are Interconnected — But What Does it All Mean?

So there is a lot of historical backdrop here, the AME church in Charleston where the riot originated, the story of how Charleston became the port of entry for half of the new world's enslaved population, and lots of other details the author obviously had done tons of research to mine for a novel. But I found myself losing interest in Kate's ambiguity; her, mission. And more interested in the novel's minor characters. I liked the character of Gabe, a young boy she befriends. He is funny, quirky, and often has the right answers to what's going on around him. 

I did like literary references in the book — and I laughed out loud when Kate and Scudder Lambeth are stuck in his pick-up truck discussing William Faulkner and Southern Literature. The character of Scudder, Gabe's uncle, is so much more eloquent than Kate. And the story offers a would-be love story that made me tear my hair out. Just go there! I thought. But perhaps it was not meant to be. Although Kate quotes Faulkner, I don't think she got the idea that the past seeps into the present. By the way — I do want a spin-off novel about either Gabe as a woke kid in South Carolina or about the subtle poetic genius of Scudder Lambeth.

And I liked how the city of Charleston is portrayed as a Southern town of secrets, gossip, and the like. My gripes were minor — like if you're going to dive into the ramifications of racial tension in America, go all the way. When Kate talks with Gabe and his father, both Black characters, she seems so tentative that it's like, OMG — get over your white fragility. But then I realized that's probably a realistic depiction. 

Because A Tangled Mercy is not about the experience of being Black in America, however, it doesn't purport to be (although it does include Black history, as seen through Kate's eyes, and the third-person narrative about Tom Russell). It's a story about a woman who doesn't trust others, is fragile, and is trying to become woke. It's a story about familial disappointment, failure, and other adult worries and anxieties. As, that, the story is fairly decent. Kate Drayton reminds me of very articulate, educated people who are so caught up in their search for truth that when they discover something special, it's hard for them to see it. Even when it's right in front of their face. 

Hints at Racial Tension Simmer Beneath the Novel's Historical Charm

I am not sure if certain plot points were included in later drafts — for example how Gabe is portrayed. I get that maybe including the bit where Gabe is thought to have a firearm in his pocket — and a policeman overacts — it's based on the lived experience of being Black in America — I thought the story could have explored this issue more deeply. Those elements seem forced and it felt misplaced, here. All American Boys by Jason Reynolds does a much better job at exploring this topic — and it also includes different point-of-view chapters. And while Lake, in her novel, alludes to Trayvon Martin, a boy who was gunned down when the skittles in his pocket was mistaken for a gun, it is an actual current event, its allusion in this novel confused me about the themes the novel wishes to convey. Why does the novel include these references? But why does it not go further?

I'd like to have seen Gabe's experience more, his point-of-view, rather than just being that intelligent, gifted kid who helps Kate gain clarity. Also — the novel alludes to an incident in 2009 when the Black historian Louis Gates, Jr., was arrested for trying to gain access to his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Someone called the cops because they thought he was a burglar. The novel mentions the incident, but Gates's name is not used. I appreciated the reference to current events, but it seemed a tangential mention and made me wonder what the book was trying to say. 

The Novel Includes the 2015 Charleston Shooting

Now, I do want to say that when I read the novel, I did not realize that it includes events from the 2015 Charleston shooting, when a white supremacist, Dylann Roof, walked into the basement of the church and gunned down nine church members who were participating in a bible study: The Rev. Clementa Pinckney, Cynthia Hurd, The Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Tywanza Sanders, Ethel Lance, Susie Jackson, Depayne Middleton Doctor, The Rev. Daniel Simmons, and Myra Thompson. 

I had to stop reading the novel, at this point and read about how Joy Jordan Lake had decided to include the event. It seems that Lake had written her novel before the shooting; but, if you did not know that, you would have been surprised to see that Lake mentions the AME church, from the beginning, because it is the same church where the Vesey revolt was planned, and it is the site where the shooting took place. And the pastor has the same last name, Pinckney, that Lake uses in the novel. Lake was alarmed by this and almost didn't publish her novel, on that June day in 2015. Also, the murderer, Dylann Roof, knew of the importance of the church, which is why he chose it. 

Lake says that her original manuscript was not the final product. The novel went through a lot of changes after the shooting. She almost abandoned the project altogether. But she decided to include it on the advice of her publisher. I mention this because if you did not know this backstory, like me, it'd catch you by surprise. And then, it made sense why Lake had included those references earlier, to Trayvon Martin, and Louis Gates, Jr — in relation to Gabe.

Also, Lake chooses to have Gabe witness the events of the church shooting; in reality, there is no evidence of a boy named Gabe at the church that day. So it made me wonder how much of Gabe was in the first draft of the novel, and how much the character changed after the Lake changed it because of the events of 2015. Gabe is a witness to the shooting in the novel, so we the reader, have a enactment of events, down to Roof's description, and details of the massacre.

Anyway — there is a lot to unpack here. I started a novel thinking one thing, and by the end, it became something else. Entirely.

I give the book three out of five stars. It aims for eloquence, but ultimately fizzles at putting a finger on the pulse of real events.

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Advice on Friendship from Charlotte's Web

“The quickest way to spoil a friendship is to wake somebody up in the morning before he is ready.”

- Charlotte, from Charlotte's Web by E.B. White

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Image Source: EForceManWonder

On the Experience of Reading Novels

What is the experience of reading a novel? 
The experience of reading novels is a solitary one. While it is common to hear authors read from their newly published books at signings or to listen to a novel on tape, these are subsidiary experiences of the novel that I relegate to the category of performance rather than reading. Orality is to the epic what solitude is to the novel. The Greek epics the Iliad and the Odyssey were not meant to be read silently to oneself but were told out loud and spun by a storyteller as part of an oral musical performance. Prose fiction did not begin with the novel; Satyricon was written centuries before Moll Flanders. Scholars debate as to what constitutes the first novel — is it Cervantes’s Don Quixote, or Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, or is it Richardson’s Pamela, or DeFoe’s Robinson Crusoe? — I think the answer to this question lies in the shift between reading publicly versus reading as an internalized experience. The epics were meant as univocal expressions of storytelling governed by the principle of archetype and standard mythological rendering. Often the plot was well known by the hearers.
Reading Novels is Not Exactly the Same as Going to a Play 
Ancient Greek theatergoers who attended Sophocles’ production of Oedipus Rex were well aware of the plot. And this is true even for Shakespeare. Midsummer Night’s Dream, while certainly not lost in an individual reading, the dramatic form, like the epic, is meant to be performed, not read. The point of storytelling has been for centuries a ritualized experience and not at all adumbrated by individuality or an experience with everyday particularities. To read a novel once is an individual experience and to read the same novel twice is yet another distinct reading. Even movies, another modern discovery, are more akin to public storytelling than what happens when I read a novel. Reading as an individualized personal experience is a modern discovery. Augustine, for example, was shocked to discover Ambrose reading to himself. In the West, reading has been considered mostly a public act. Those who owned books were either the clergy or the very wealthy. Books were proclaimed rather than read. The correlation between introspective thought and reading troubled Augustine because he did not equate reading with individuality. What we consider the modern novel is instantiated by introspection and was only made possible broadly by the invention of the printing press which made books cheaper and more easily accessible to the masses.
Novels Deliver the Particulars of the Everyday
Novels are heavily entrenched in the particulars of everyday life, such as bathing, doing the laundry, eating a sour grape off the vine, making love on an unmade bed, reflections on the banal and the mundane, and so on. The novel lingers in the details of everyday lived experience. The novel is a repudiation of the epic form’s dependence on universals. Once we are inside a novel we are wrapped up in a world of particulars. Like Pip, in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, who traces his fingers over the particular raised letters of his dead parents' names inscribed on their tombstone, to conjure an image of what they must have been like, either stout or tall, fat or grim, we do the same when we read a novel, trace our fingers over the individual characters, in their instantaneous contingencies in order to trace out a life, to search out a proper name for universal life, to match both life and literature.

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What Happens When I Read Novels (Inspired by Reading and Proust and Freud)

When I read novels I do not see images when I read. 
I may see an image emerge in my mind’s eye after the reading has been done, but during the reading itself, I read in black and white without images. I've been reading selections from Proust's Swann's Way. What I conjure in my mind's eye of Marcel dipping a madeleine cake into a cup of tea anticipate images. Novels do not generate images. They anticipate.

Reading Novels is a Similar Cognitive Experience to What We do When Dream
What we do when we read novels is similar to what happens to us when we dream. Freud calls the dream image a rebus (p. 276); in this way, I think he is correct. If there is an image in the novel it is more akin to a rebus, a hallucination of loosely strung together spectral thoughts. 

Free Association of the Imagination When Reading Novels
We free associate when we read a novel; what comes before our mind’s eye are parts and pieces that do not form an entirely thought together whole. In the novel's image, like the dream, parts stand for wholes. Novels are constituted by their love for particularities. Epics and grand eloquent drama are the stuff of another art form; they form archetypical images. Novels are a unique art form in that they work similarly to the way our minds work. 

In the Novel-form the Individual is Privileged 
Novels arose as the predominant art form because they privilege individual experience over grand narrative; the mundane and the banal are championed in the novel over the hero trope and archetype. It is not the photographic image that is desired in the novel, but rather, what we see in the novel is the recognition that the mirror is broken; we see in the novel a skewed mirror and we call it real.

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Books I Remember Reading in 2011

I didn't keep an official list for 2011, but here is what I recalled from my fragmentary mental database. Also listed is my best and honorable mention in three categories: novels, philosophy, and history and culture. I am thinking I need to read more science-related books in 2012!

Novels

The best novel I read in 2011 is Home by Marilynne Robinson. Honorable mention goes to Remainder by Tom McCarthy. 

Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman

• Apart from the American Gods series, this one retells the story of the spider god Anansi. Expect charming Gaiman prose! B+

The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace

• His Master's thesis turned novel, Wallace goes all Wittgenstein and ponders the limits of language in novel form. A-

The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem

• Read this book only because I felt like I need a fictional introduction to Brooklyn. While the novel centers on two boys' friendship in and around the Boerum Hill neighborhood, I found the novel to be evocative of the borrough as a whole. Wasn't too much into the invisibility theme, however. B

The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust

• Volume Three of Proust's Recherche corpus exudes with haute-bourgeoise shenanigans -- will Marcel just get a boyfriend already! The more mature of the volumes, in my opinion -- but equally as funny. A

Home by Marilynne Robinson

• The most beautiful and tragic novel I read this year. Shame I never read Gilead. I am working backwards. Agreeing with a critic (I forget who), Robinson creates a classic American tragic hero with Jack. A+

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

• First saw the BBC version. Loved it. London's Tube never seemed more inviting. And scary. One thing I love about Gaiman is the way he tells a story and his attention to quirky details. C+

Remainder by Tom McCarthy 

• Reminded me of Synecdoche, New York. Wonderful book nonetheless. Think: what if I could externalize my inner thoughts? This is the book's philosphical premise. A

Something Missing by Matthew Dicks

• Dicks wanted to write a great American novel but he failed. Or. It's just a nice romp into benign criminality. You decide. C-

Swann's Way by Marcel Proust

• The Combray section all by itself is justification enough to read this book. Kisses, memory, and a sweet piece of cake ... ahhhhh. A+

Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust

• If Swann's Way is about Marcel as a child, WBG is about blooming adolescence -- I guess. A-

Philosophy

The best philosophy book I read in 2011 was Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage by Stanley Cavell. Honorable mention goes to Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview by Jacques Derrida.

Essays by Michel de Montaigne

• I didn't read every one of the essays, but I recommend the Apology for Raymond Sebond. My favorite quote: "How do I know I am not playing with my cat but in fact, it is my cat playing with me?" A+

Francis Bacon: the Logic of Sensation by Gilles Deleuze

• A readable Deleuze. In fact all of his "art" books are more readable than Anti-Oedipus, etc. You have to read this book with Google Images handy (or a monograph of Bacon's paintings) or the book does not make as much sense. B-

Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview by Jacques Derrida

• Derrida speaks eloquently about legacy and mortality. Nicely done interview. The Last Interview is to Derrida what the Phadeo is to Socrates. A+

Must We Mean What We Say?: A Collection of Essays by Stanley Cavell

• The best essay is the one on modernity and art. Cavell writes as if every sentence is its own stand alone work. He is said to be our new Emerson. Hmmm? I am thinking of giving him serious consideration for 2012. A

Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage by Stanley Cavell

• Writing a paper on this book linking it with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Should be fun. This books does serious philosophy with classic American comedies from the 1930s - 1950s.  A+

The Republic by Plato

• Never actually sat and read this from Socrates's first words to the end in order -- mainly because when I did read it as an undergraduate it was cut up in pieces. Bad beginning made right. Now I done read it. Check out the last book. A+

Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality by Sigfried Kracauer

• Classic book on film theory. B+ 

The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film by Stanley Cavell

• Unusual book. I think I need to read it again to fully understand. The section on silence and film is brilliant as well as his meditation on Joan of Arc. A

History and Culture

The best in History and Culture goes to Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan, and Derrida by John Forrester. Honorable Mention goes to Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson.

Are You Considering Psychoanalysis? by Karen Horney

• Usually I avoid book titles that double as questions, but Horney's classic introduction text helped me to conceptualize psychoanalysis from the point of view of an analysand. Perhaps a bit dated, but helpful nonetheless. B+

Who Was Jacques Derrida?: An Intellectual Biography by Jason E. Powell

• Not a straight forward bio, but rather serves both as a survey of his work interwoven into a sort of love song about a life. Written from the perspective of a disciple rather than a distanced critic. A-

The Painter of Modern Life by Charles-Pierre Baudelaire

• This book is a gem. A must read for anyone seriously interested in aesthetics. Baudelaire does a reflection on painting that I feel corresponds to how we can think about film. A+

The Rise of the Novel: Studies in DeFoe, Richardson and Fielding by Ian Watt

• The first chapter is a bit of philosophizing about the novel and its relationship (or lack thereof) with realism, while the rest of the book positions the novel form historically within the context of the mass production of books and the emergence of a reading middle class. B+

Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan, and Derrida by John Forrester

• To write a book on psychoanalysis is difficult enough, but Forrester rises to the occasion by linking together seemingly effortlessly Lacan, Derrida, and Freud into a cohesive structure that makes this book a pleasure to read. Forrester's chapter on Freud, Breuer and Anna O. is exceptional criticism. I love how he interweaves the theme of gossip and psychoanalysis throughout the text.  A+

Sh*t My Dad Says by Justin Halpern

• Got hooked on Halpern's twitter feed and anticipated the book. Not as funny as the twitter posts that started the whole thing, mainly because the books attempts a cohesion that loses the ephemeral nature of tweeting. Good effort though! C-

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

• Wow. What can I say? I loved every page of this book. Besides the reason why Jobs is famous -- Apple, Pixar, iPads, and whatnot -- the book reveals a man who is certainly binary, both impassioned and cruel, visionary, but pig-headed. Now when Jobs's wife comes out of mourning, the world will come to know the other half of Steve. A+

We Boys in Love: Teenagers in Love Before Girl-Craziness by Jefferey P. Dennis

• Thought this book would be more of a literary criticism, but rather I found Dennis frames the adolescents in the films too rigidly through this idea that homosociality is more real when divorced from sexual desire. The book writes about homosociality in these great films, which by themselves are ripe for cultural criticism, but at the end of the day, Dennis says nothing substantial. C

Shout Out:

I would like to say thank you to the Brooklyn Public Library and the New York Public Library for providing me with access to most of these books, both in print and Kindle editions, when available! Go Public Libraries!

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Proust, the Photograph, and Chance in Literature

Involuntary memory is a chance
happening precipitated by an object

Voluntary and Involuntary Memories
      For Proust, time stands still, ”As though there had been no time there but seven o'clock at night” (p. 59). A memory like this is not a memory of the intellect, for Proust, a voluntary memory — a memory likes this preserves nothing of the past. To capture an involuntary memory is a chance happening precipitated by an object. Proust likens it to reincarnation, of souls lost in some inferior being — does a touch, a taste bring them out to play? I think for Proust the soul is a prison yearning to reach out beyond its own limits -- this desire for transcendence is a desire of the human soul but the sheer will is not enough. 

Adoration of the Material World
Proust adores the material world; he has faith in the world because it offers a promise. The past is hidden beyond the realm of the intellect. The material world promises a portal to that hidden realm. But the key is not readily accessible. Proust's heaven is in the immanent reality of the material world. Proust's object is a material signifier — something like the effects of literature, “of which we have no inkling” (p. 60) — only chance. I come back to this passage: “it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves die" (v. 1, p. 61).  What Proust calls “chance” Barthes call the punctum. Art depends largely on chance — this is what Proust means by involuntary memory. Every photograph is an imprint of the world. But not every photograph evokes something akin to what the madeleine cake did for Marcel. Why? It is not the cup, the cake, the photograph itself that constitutes the structure of the involuntary memory — it is the self's response to the world, both hidden and open, governed by chance, in which we hope to light upon something called truth before we die. The experience of involuntary memory is an "unremembered state" (v.1, p. 61). Neither the novel nor the photograph holds the memory inside of itself; the memory is "unremembered" by a chance encounter. 

Comparing Barthes's Unary Image with Proust's Habituation

What Barthes calls the "unary" image," Proust would call habituation. What Barthes thinks of as the prick, the punctum, of the photograph is not far from how the Recherche confronts the problem of photography. Why does Swann prefer the daguerreotype of Odette? But Marcel disparages the Kodak snapshot? Why does Marcel study the photograph of Berma in bed, but is disconcerted by a photograph of Gilberte? Marcel cannot stand the vanity of his grandmother in wanting to have her likeness taken, but he concedes that his feelings are complicit with his own fantasy of a good night's kiss. The photograph promises a "supplementary prolonged encounter" (v. 3, p. 99). What is troubling about the photograph is the way it unsettles us.

A Cruel Trick of Chance

     In a "cruel trick of chance," Marcel sees his dead grandmother as a photograph (v. 3, pp.183-185). In this scene, the theme of the photograph is introduced without the actual presence of a photographic object. The grandmother appears "as a photograph." The grandmother is not there; she is absent, but Marcel perceives her similarly to a photograph, a spectral object, however, something akin to an hallucination or to a dream. The nodal point of the novel and the photographic image is the anticipation of an image not fully seen; for as Proust says, "We never see people dear to us except in the animated system, in the perpetual motion of our love for them, which, before allowing the images that faces present to reach us, seizes them in its vortex and flings them back upon the idea we have always had of them, makes them adhere to it, coincide with it" (v. 3, p. 183). What is striking here is that Marcel curses "the cruel trick of chance" that conjures up the image of his grandmother, as if his eyes were a photographic plate. Even in the moment that he sees his grandmother, a spectral image of her, sitting on the sofa — it lasts only a moment — he does not know her. "I who had never seen her save in my own soul, always in the same place in the past, through the transparency of contiguous and overlapping memories .... I saw [the spectral image of my dead grandmother] sitting on the sofa beneath the lamp, red-faced, heavy and vulgar, sick, day-dreaming ... an overburdened woman I did not know" (v. 3, p. 184).

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Disparagement of the Photograph in Proust

Man Ray. Harper's Bazaar, November 1936.

The Unkind Treatment of Photographs in La Recherche     Photographs are not treated kindly in Proust’s Recherche. In the “Mother’s Kiss” episode in the Combray section of Swann's Way, there is a humorous account of why photographs ought not to adorn the walls of Marcel’s room — for his mother found in them “vulgarity and utility” (v.1, p. 53). The sheer fact that a photograph is reproducible, that another child could have the same photograph hanging in his or her room as some other kid seems scandalous to Marcel’s mother’s aesthetic taste. A photograph is “common” since it can be reproduced mechanically. The photograph is vulgar since it “captures” objects in the world only to reproduce them as commercial banalities. The photograph does not get under the skin of everydayness. Photographs reveal nothing more than the banal surfaces of things and do not penetrate any deeper. To put it another way: the novel is concerned with animating reality, not the banal apprehension of reality.
According to Proust Photographs Point to Vanity     Proust also links photography to vanity. Saint-Loup takes a photograph of Marcel’s grandmother. Noticing she puts on her best dress for the occasion, Marcel reports he feels annoyed at his grandmother’s childishness in wanting to appear her best, a fact that surprises him for he had always imagined her to be freed from vanity (v. 2, p. 500). Proust is echoing the idea that “having one’s likeness taken” is offensive to a pure concept of beauty that ought to look deeper than surface appearances. However, Proust’s aversion to photograph goes deeper than a moralistic stance against vanity. It is not an ethical deprivation which is at stake in the photograph, but rather, what Proust seems to deride is the distraction the photograph promotes and the aura of unreality it promotes. Marcel is annoyed that his grandmother will sit for Saint-Loup to have her likeness taken but she will not spend time with him, a theme that can retrace itself back to the young Marcel in Combray waiting for his mother to arrive with the long-awaited kiss. The photograph gives a false promise, one of deferral, the promise of halting time, anticipation in the guise of distraction.

     Take for example the magic lantern: an analog for the disparaged photograph which is linked to the mother’s kiss episode in Combray. It is important to note the unsettling feeling aroused by the magic lantern at the start of Proust’s masterwork for it serves as a prelude to the disparagement of the plastic arts throughout the work along with a distanced awe and astonishment. Where Proust disparages he also obsesses. Where photographs are mentioned in Proust, even in passing phrases, metaphors, or allusion to photography, there is often the anticipation of themes we are more familiar with in Proust, the anticipation of a kiss, questions of real and unreal, the sensory world and the world of ideas, insight versus mere appearance.

      Placed over his bedside lamp, the magic lantern entertains the boy Marcel by a show of several points of multi-colored light creating a luminous kaleidoscopic effect that evokes both the camera and the cinema, appearance, and reality, dark and light, all of which make Marcel uneasy. The iridescence is too much. Like light pouring through stained glass, the child’s magic lantern creates a “supernatural phenomenon of many colours,” causing an unreal effect to superimpose itself on the familiarity of Marcel’s childhood bedroom in Combray. Marcel is both awed and discomfited by the parade of lights the magic lantern produces, as it illuminates a story outside of Marcel’s own experience, thus limiting access to an inside inner experience. The magic lantern produces an unreal effect that shakes Marcel, the budding writer, and puts into question his desire to create uniquely and inwardly. “But my sorrows were only increased thereby, because this mere change of lighting was enough to destroy the familiar impression I had of my room …” (v. 1, p. 10). Proust’s point is to show how the luminous photographic and kaleidoscopic effects of the magic lantern discomfit and unrest the artist’s -- the novelist’s -- ability to capture reality. The magic lantern, and by extension, the play of light that is the photograph, an inscription of light on paper, is set against what novels can do, viz., what Proust feels he can do as a young artist, as a novelist.

First Sentence of a Failed Novel

Do you have failed first sentences of novels you tried to write? Here's one:

Her skin was chalky white, but Patrick thought she was rosy. Amelia was stretched out on the bed, beneath the mosquito netting.
Please share your own failed sentence in the comments section:

Image source: the new yorker

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Quote from Don Quixote

Henry Caseroti, Cock-A-Doodle-Doo, 2010

Every cock crows on its own dung hill

Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote

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Book Review: A Thief, A Girl, A Moral

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Something Missing
Book Review:
Something Missing: A Novel
by Matthew Dicks
Broadway Books © 2009
304 pages

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    Matthew Dicks’s first novel begins with the careful machinations of a professional thief cataloging the contents of a person’s refrigerator: “A gallon of milk, long since expired, cold cuts, opened jars of jam, tomato sauce, a carton of eggs, and, in the door, what Martin had predicted: salad dressing.” After the first hundred pages, I felt like I was reliving the book The Boy Who Could Not Stop Washing. We quickly learn that the protagonist, Martin Railback, is an anti-social, neurotic sophisticated thief. He thinks nothing of taking a person's liquid plumber but agonizes over a dropped toothbrush in a toilet. Crazy guy that Martin Railback.
     Martin has a cleanly strategic work week that includes breaking into the homes of at least a dozen homes a week stealing stuff. He stakes out the homes of upper middle class home dwellers in Connecticut who would make for good unsuspecting victims of his kleptomania. No single people. No children. No people with roomies. Only married couple without children. He systematically absconds objects people will least likely notice to go missing. Martin is no ordinary thief. For example, he has been stealing Liquid Plumber and Parmesan Peppercorn salad dressing from the Pearls for a decade, along with the occasional pearl necklace or bowl hidden in a dusty corner of the house. Martin goes through great pains to determine whether an item will go missing or not. I don't want to adumbrate his meticulous steps he undergoes to determine whether an item is steal-able or not. It is ammusingly exhausting and Dicks does a fine job of bringing us into Martin's world.
       The odd thing about Martin is that he not only steals from people; he is a first class creeper. He notices his clients’ (the name he gives his victims) idiosyncrasies, the kinds of toothbrushes they use, whether or not they lift the toilet seat when they go to the bathroom, even the contents of their journals, e-mails, and grocery lists. Martin is the ultimate voyeur, which makes him creepy in most people’s estimation. Dicks attempts to make him likable, even adorable at times. I found myself hoping he would not get caught as a thief when in one scene he is trapped inside a client’s home when they arrive before he can make an exit.
    The novel reads at a quick pace. The first quarter of the book introduces you to Martin’s burglar lifestyle and gives background to how he became the kind of person he is. We quickly learn his anti-social habits. He has a crush on the waitress at the diner he frequents for breakfast but he never asks her out on a date. He has one true friend, Jeff, who does not know of his daily break-ins into people’s homes. He lives in his deceased mother’s house where he stores the objects he steals behind refrigerator panels and inside sofas. He doubles on Ebay as a chic Northeastern woman who has a penchant for handbags. In one of the novel’s funnier moments, we learn how Martin uses Ebay to sell off his client’s unmissable stuff.
    Right away we are led to believe that Martin is not an ordinary thief. I did not find myself hating him for his thievery simply because he seemed to steal only out of a sense of odd moral principles. He never stole items from his clients that they would miss. In this regard the novel seems to be a criticism of middle class America. Martin’s clients are people who work many hours a week, have amassed a large amount of cash, buy plenty of things, but do not have the time to enjoy what they buy. The Steinway piano that sits in the living room unplayed without an open music book, or the wood burning stove that no one uses, or the extra set of diamond ear rings that go unnoticed. The novel appears to be saying that Martin steals out of a high moral standard. As if his thievery suggests the hypocrisy of a middle class that buys stuff that could be used to support others (and they would not notice the loss). But Dicks never brings the novel to moral indictment of the upper middle class. We only know that Martin does not care for dogs, the very rich (because they do notice when their stuff goes missing), and general disarray. In fact instead of moral disdain, Martin acquires a bizarre intimacy with his clients even though he has never met them.
    The novel encourages us to root Martin on in his search for intimacy and love. Not finding the love of his life with the diner gal, Martin seems destined to find love with a client, or at least we are led to think so. I won't spoil the plot but suffice it to say this book enters boy meets girl territory. Why begin a novel that promises to be a critical rapprochement with American middle class values with the formula of a brazen romance. I wanted more class struggle and less amour between burglaries.
    the best scenes are the voyeur moments Martin has with his clients. He seems more at ease with the migh-have been moments in his life than real in your face person-to-person encounters. Dicks wants his Martin Railback to be both a quriky neurotic and a lovable boy next door. I don't completely buy it. In perhaps the most moving passage from the novel, Martin overhears a client speak of the sadness she feels of never having received a single rose from her husband. Martin crafts an anonymous letter to the husband suggesting he buy his wife a rose tomorrow. At this point the novel shifts in timbre from film noir espionage to the reverse of Gyges’s Ring. Instead of doing the immoral act when no one is looking. Martin turns out to be the hero who does the good despite the fact that he breaks the law for his day job. I thought the novel presented the character of Martin as too glib and neatly OCD. It never seemed to me that Martin ever questioned the rightness or wrongness of things in a searching, palpable way. His neuroticisms easily aroused him to make a quick buck from his svelte thieving as well as create delusions about his relationship to his clients.
     The novel kept me in its quasi-ethical grip until about three quarters through. By the last hundred or so pages I felt the author had become too self-aggrandizing and his character appeared to don hero wings without sufficiently revealing what made him tick. The book ends too neatly on the premise of another book to follow.

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Book Review: The Broom of the System

Ornate Language / Simple Language

David Foster Wallace does a grand job of showing ornate language and its simple substitutes. Who is better, Mr. Bloemker, with his arcane, long, jargony way of speaking, or Lenore, with her simple quips phrasing what he meant to say in two or three words?
Lenore Beadsman's great-grandmother Lenore Beadsman goes missing in David Foster Wallace's novel The Broom of the System and this is the conversation between her and the nursing home director, Mr. Bloemker about her great-grandmother's whereabouts:

[Mr. Bloemker:] "What I have been able to determine is that at some point in the last, shall we say, sixteen hours some number of residents and staff here at the facility have become . . . unavailable to access."

[Lenore Beadsman:] "Meaning Missing."


[Mr. Bloemker:] "Yes."
. . .
Bloemker took a deep breath and rubbed a gold eye with a white finger. In the air around him a whirlpool of dust motes was created. It whirled. 


[Mr. Bloemker:] "There is in addition the fact that the resident whose temporary unavailability is relevant to you, that is to say Lenore, enjoyed a status here — with the facility administration, the staff, and, through the force of her personality and her evident gifts, especially with the other residents -- that leads one to believe that, were the mislocation a result of anything other than outright coercion on the part of some outside person or persons, which seems unlikely, it would not be improper to posit the location and retrieval of Lenore as near assurance of retrieving the other misplaced parties."


[Lenore Beadsman:] "I didn't understand any of that."


[Mr. Bloemker:] "Your great-grandmother was more or less the ringleader around here."


[Lenore Beadsman:] "Oh."
source: Wallace, David F. The Broom of the System. New York: Penguin Books, 2004, 34; 36. Print. Italics and brackets are my own.

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The 4 Train On Sunday

He told me this morning the four train is beast. Not beast as in animal. But beast as in best. I had taken it on Sunday after a visit to my Shrink. (I capitalize her name to make it proper). So I knew what he was talking about.

Book Review: Repulsion as Metaphor in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Met Go

Never Let Me Go

    Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go has recently been released as a film, due out in theaters today. I am anxious about the film because I want to see how the adaptation treats the theme of repulsion, which is my interest in the novel. Ishiguro describes a world where humans have become obsessed with extending one's lifespan. To reach this goal, humans have created a subset of human beings, manufactured in test tubes to serve as body farms for organ tissues. The novel is ostensibly a science-fiction narrative about clones used for organ harvesting in an alternative, but possible dystopic posthuman future in Britain in the late 1990s. Humans, because of the rapid advance of biotechnology, have developed an industry by which cloned human beings are manufactured as “gifts” to stave off death.  These “beings” then, can be picked off when needed — a lung here, skin graft or a heart, there.

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

In this post, I write a comparison essay outlining differences in "cave allegory" imagery in Plato's Republic and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

Two Books in Conversation

In an ancient conversation two-thousand five hundred years ago between friends, now called The Republic, recorded by the Greek philosopher Plato, Socrates discusses the problem of whether human beings are capable of educating true lovers of wisdom and the possibility of living within a just society. In the course of the dialogue, there is a section in the seventh part, after a discussion on the degrees of knowledge, when Socrates and his friend Glaucon speak analogously of life is like a cave, a dark shadow of the real world. Socrates imagines the cave as “an underground cave-like dwelling place” (514 A).

“The Allegory of the Cave”

As Socrates discusses the cave-dwelling to his friend, He conceives of people living in a cave, with their “legs and necks fettered from childhood,” so that they remain in the same spot, able to look forward only, and prevented by the fetters from turning their heads” (514 B). They do not realize that behind them is a fire. Between them and the fire are fake animals and statues, reproductions in stone or wood carried by men that are cast in shadow form on the wall by the fire “like a screen at a puppet show in front of the performers who show their puppets above it” (514 B). They imagine one prisoner being freed from this cave-like existence and finding light in the real world. When the one prisoner adjusts to the light in “the real world” and sees that it is beautiful he retreats back into the cave to free his friends, to enlighten them. But they rebel against him, comfortable in their lethargy and the convenient darkness, so they kill him. This story is popularly known as “Plato’s Cave” or the “Allegory of the Cave.” It has become a hallmark image of Western Philosophy and the ineluctable pursuit for the quest for truth.

Invisible Man

In 1952, a story was written about an unnamed, young, naive black man. The imagery of shadow and invisibility, imprisonment and freedom also mark this story as it did the ancient Greek allegory. After receiving a prize for a speech he gave to his high school somewhere in the South, the unnamed protagonist and a group of black students are invited to an underground meeting with the prominent white men of the town. After witnessing a shameful striptease by a young white girl with a tattoo of the American flag on her belly, the black boys are crowded into an open rink and forced to box in a battle royal. Afterward, the white men beckon the story’s protagonist to the crowded, bloody center to deliver his prize speech. When he proceeds to mention “social equality,” a forbidden phrase, the tension in the room is tightened, as if they would kill him if he advanced any further notion of racial equality. Thus the story of the Invisible Man begins. He goes to college up North. He joins a group of communist sympathizers called the Brotherhood. He is duped and used by both. After he has been jerked by the educational and political systems -- systems in general -- he retreats into the cave, for enlightenment. He finds shelter in a basement of an all-white apartment building in New York City, his cave. He goes into the cave, as he says, “The point now is that I found a home -- or a home in the ground, as you will” (5).

It is a cave of light, for he has strung the walls and floor with bright filament light bulbs. It is an act of passive aggression, though. It is his punch in the face to the outside, hegemonic white order. The protagonist imagines the above landlords wondering how so much electricity is being expended. And while the light is being sucked from Monopolated Power and Light, our hero listens to Louis Armstrong and rhapsodies into a metaphysical reverie to match the best of philosophical discourses.

Thinking Both Stories Together

Both stories, while obviously different, are parallel stories that think together issues of justice, education and as well gesture toward some answer to the question of what is truth and justice. It is not presumed that either story somehow miraculously interprets the other in some kind of fantastical hermeneutical wonderworld. But rather, the reason to think “Plato’s Cave” with Invisible Man is to ponder a bit about the central question(s) each text poses. So, what I will attempt to do in this paper is to discuss parallels of thought and imagery in both texts and the ways they both play and collide and converge images with going down into a “cave” and coming back into the “light.” In this way, hopefully, the exploration will provide a lens to discover plenteous fruits in both stories. We will look at the battle royal scene in Chapter One (which can be seen as an entire piece in of itself, separate from the novel, especially since it is highly anthologized and taught as a “short story” and also we will look at the sections in the novel that describe the narrator beneath a high tower residential apartment building in New York City.

Quote of the Day for a Viper

Why Madame Rawdon “was no better than a vipère”:

She became a perfect Bohemian ere long, herding with people whom it would make your  hair stand on end to meet.

William Makepeace Thackeray, - Vanity Fair

photo credit: ceillac

Book Review: The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald

Pairing image with text in a narrative is contradictory: the flowing voice of the narrator with the frozen, almost totemic, images, is a strange combination.  The experience of the novel is oddly anti-nostalgic. The recounting of memory, of four different German expatriates, in Sebald’s The Emigrants, the text reads like a journal entry, as if the reader has stumbled upon a found notebook, scribbled with memories, and affixed with images, almost as if, negating the idea of a novel.  The images gesture toward a heuristic, as if they are supposed to add meaning to the text.
    For example, the image of a train track, with a copse of trees in the background is coupled with “In January 1984 news reached me … that on the evening of the 30th of December … Paul Beryter, who had been my teacher at primary school, had put an end to his life” (27).  Floating above the narrative voice stands the image of a train track, taken at ground level as if the photographer were lying on his stomach on top of the rails.  The track curves a little to the right and vanishes out of view where the school teacher, apparently, “had lain himself down in front of a train” (27).  The “photographer” is the character, a stolen shot, of his own death.  Looking at the image, the punctum is the shot of the skewed line punctuated with the narrator’s voice.  The meaning of the passage is inextricably linked with the image itself.  Removed from the pastiche of story, the image is not a referent to the story; it could be inserted into any other narrative of train tracks in the woods, and take on another meaning, altogether.
    But, here, as if purposely placed to evoke expression, like the drawing of Beyaert’s classroom (33) coupled with the expression in the text of recognition of another classmate who schooled with the narrator under Bereyter’s instruction.  The two, “immediately recognized each other,” both separately reading in the British Museum, coincidentally looking up and noticing one another “despite the quarter-century that had passed” (33).  The drawing of the classroom seating plan somehow is supposed to evoke the chance meeting of the two students, and their discussion of their dead professor.
    The plan of the classroom, assigned by Bereyter as a classroom assignment, apparently an exercise in drawing space to scale, becomes a memento of both the student’s meeting together by chance in the British Museum, and also, an object representing their shared time in the same classroom in 1946.  The images are not seemingly “pictures” of the past. They are rather representations.  For example, the photographs of the school children seem to be archival, meaning that they are not autobiographical.  The narrator says, about the pictures, apart from his own shared experiences (not pictured) that he was “scarcely distinguishable from those pictured here, a class that included myself” (47).  But, you are not supposed to point him out.  Nor is the stern teacher in the background supposed to be Beyert.  It is as if the history is lost but the images remain.

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Response to Ngugi wa Thiong’o speech at Southeastern Louisiana University

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A new book by Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Wizard of the Crow, satirizes the West from an African perspective; Like Achebe, he brings old questions to the fore about Western colonialism and Christianity. 
The halls of Southeastern's Vonnie Borden theater was filled to hear the world's foremost East African writer. Having just completed a novel about a fictional despotic African leader, Ngugi also spearheads a program at Irvine, The International Center for Writing and Translation, to create and distribute indigenous African tongues apart from Western translations.

Whether or not the Colonial experiment in Africa tainted Christian missionary activity or whether Christian missionary activity is itself tainted is probably not the right approach to tackle Western Christianity’s attempt to proselytize non-Western peoples. It is not that the missionary activity is inherently tainted, but rather that the approach was marred, most significantly because of the imperial and univocal nature of Colonialism — the structure of Colonialism did not allow for, what we would call today, the recognition of the language of the subaltern. The Christian missionary movement was lead by many good-intentioned Christians. But, what many Christian missionaries failed to realize is that they were not only teaching Christian doctrine in their own Mother tongues, not the language of the people, but they assumed that the conquering language had a stake in knowledge that was not apparent in the indigenous languages. Although some missionaries attempted to learn the language of the conquered African colonies, for the most part, the idea of Colonialism was to teach them the history of the Conqueror, the language of the Conqueror, and the beliefs of the Conqueror. Get a few educated elites to learn English, for example, and to translate the ideologies and beliefs of the people into English. In this paradigm, there is no attempt to raise the native languages to the status of the elite — as if Jesus spoke English! Jesus did not speak English, as Ngugi playfully reminded us last week; Jesus spoke a rural form of Aramaic and spoke in simple terms using the imagery and language of the people he taught and lived among in Galilee, which is why it is sometimes very difficult to understand his parables and sayings. But his sayings were translated into the language of the educated elite, which is Greek in this case, and this is how the message of the New Testament writings was originally communicated. But perhaps the Jesus of Colonialism did not learn anything after 2000 years old and is still up to his old tricks, so the language of the elite is still the language of the Conqueror, in this case, English or French, or Dutch, or whatever the language of the conquering nation happens to be. But take this language and try to translate native Swahili to mirror it is obviously going to have problems. But of course, the Harvard educated professor cannot be told by a graduate from the University of Treetops that he speaks good English. “Of course I speak English. I went to Harvard!” Ngugi here is parodying how language is classed, like race or ethnicity. How can the Mother tongue of the Western Nations describe a God (or Gods) to a community of peoples who have their own language of God (or Gods)? It just doesn’t make sense. This has been parodied, as in the short story, "The Gospel According to Mark" when an unbeliever, Espinoza is crucified on a tree like Christ — the people believed him to be the Savior. But this view is terribly pejorative and simplistic. It is as if to say, people of a non-Western ideology or bound to mistake Western religion to the point of sheer, nonsensical violence. This does not make sense. Nor does the univocal injunction to impose one language, one faith, one way of thinking on a collection of people that do not fit into the hegemonic whole. Ngugi seems to be saying that Globalization is partly to blame for this branding of language and culture that seems to disavow the minority of a language for the sake of its own language, not needing to be mediated by a language like English or French to be understood or disseminated. But you may say, there is something innate about all human beings that no language, no matter how univocal its insistence to be the language of choice, can override the dignity and value of humanity, because any knowledge that is worth having is knowledge of a humanity that is universal. But the problem with this kind of thinking is that it ignores the nuances of languages and the inability to express in subtle language — say the texture of snow or the agronomy of the Kenyan plains — that cannot be translated. True, maybe translation from Nilotic to English actually enhances the Nilotic language — but for who? who benefits? Not the Nilotic speaker, but the English one. So, it seems this is what Ngugi is trying to do; he is not trying to disparage English or any other language, but simply insisting that the indigenous languages of a people, to be of value, to provide knowledge for its people, has to be kept within its own language families. Ngugi would say that a novel written in Swahili needs to be translated from Swahili to Nilotic as it is, not mediated by English or French. It would be like translating a letter written in English into another language and then using that language, not English, to translate it into another language. The more permutations of language the more diluted and lost the original becomes. I can see how this can become very problematic and detrimental the more it perpetuates itself. Although I, and millions of other people, know only Western Romance languages and have only read non-Western texts translated into Western languages, it still does not preclude the fact that my language, my Western Romantic language does not need to ipso facto the one language that swallows up the rest.

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