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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Christmas Letter from New Orleans

For Christmas season 2011, I went back home to New Orleans to visit my family and friends. Here is what I did and saw. Read it!

An Ignatius Reilly Mardi Gras float
rolls through town / Image credit: Flickr

“I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.”  

― Ignatius J. Reilly 
Anthony sits at a wooden table at the Balcony Bar, a place that looks regal during the daytime but becomes the center of considerable brouhaha at night. Having had a few cocktails, we sit together eating bar food. Anthony feeds me a French Fry. Carrying a tray with hamburgers, Andrew almost runs into a cadre of revelers who are talking so loudly the entire building seems to close in on itself with the noise. We sit and attempt conversation. This is our city every night. It has been a year and a half since leaving New Orleans. Having returned home for eight days I leave again with renewed something for the Crescent City. Martin says Nola (as locals call it) is the best city. He's right.

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.

Marcel Proust On the Advantage of Books Over Images

"... a new book was not one of similar objects but, as it were a unique person, absolutely self-contained .... Beneath the everyday incidents, the ordinary objects and common words, I sensed a strange and individual tone of voice" (v.1, p.55-56). While photographs capture objects in the world, they are vulgar since they find what they happen to capture at the moment and so remain in quality a "commercial banality" (v. 1, p. 53).

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

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Why I Don't Write 500 Words A Day

500 Words a Day?
I read once that a writer should write at least 500 words a day before any real writing occurs. To encourage writing one must write. Even if the words evoke nothing. Write. The idea is if you coax the axles of your tired mind, give it a little shake, deeper thoughts will issue forth. To me, it is an innate theory of mind that touts the philosophy that the writer must write. I say only write when you feel compelled to write. Even if it is a short thought write it down. Type it out. I refuse to submit to the notion that there is a wellspring of creativity deep inside of us and the only way to unleash it is to write a bucket load of crap first. To write is to continue upon a notion. Upon a trigger. Upon an idea. To write means to follow up on a nagging thought that doesn't go away with a nap or a dream. To say I write 500 words a day would be to lie to you. But I am not a writer who believes I must write into exhaustion. Once you get the idea. Write. Until then, do other things. Observe. Read. The best advice I can give to writers is to read. A lot. I don't just mean blogs and newspaper articles. To be a good writer read the best of what you wish to write. Not so as to emulate. It is a fable to think that to read others will rub off on you in a bad way. The anxiety of influence is there, of course. But one reads because one realizes that it has already been said, written, done before. The only hope we have as writers is to say something about what has already been said. The most freeing experience is to read a writer who puts into words a thought you've already had at some point. This revelation conjoins you with the world of ideas. The best writers enter into the history of thought by reading the history of thought. And read with a pencil. Underline. Strikethrough. Spit on. Spill coffee on it. The book. If it is an ebook or a library book buy yourself a reading notebook. If you are a young person you will never write anything that amounts to "good" for a long time. I have not written anything good yet. But I feel that I am close to writing something good. It has taken at least thirty-one years to even begin to think I could write something pitch-perfect. I have yet to stumble upon my topic. What compels me to write. Which is why I repudiate the inner writer thesis. It is not so much that what I must write is within me but more that what I want to write about has not been found yet. So, here ends my five hundred words for today. I did it for spite.

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84 Year-Old Retired Teacher Pepper Sprayed in Seattle

Dorli Rainey, an 84-year-old retired school teacher was pepper-sprayed in Seattle's Westlake Park on Tuesday along with other protesters on the corner of 5th Avenue and Pine Street. A mass of protesters had gathered to show support for the Occupy Wall Street Protesters in New York. Police forced the crowd back and threw pepper spray into the crowd; a priest, and a pregnant woman were sprayed.
source: JOSHUA TRUJILLO / SEATTLEPI.COM

Even Michael Bloomberg in a press conference today acknowledged that the protester's anger should be heeded.

It is foolish to think the recent spate of protest movements that have sprung up in the United States in the last three months have been orchestrated only by young people, the unemployed, and the n'er-do-wells-of-society. The movement embodied by Occupy Wall Street in New York City, which has spread nationwide, has only gained in momentum, not only by the young but also by older generations; by teachers, the supporters of youth; by mothers; priests. People we look up to as well as people who care about society in general. Activism is supposed to be about doing something to promote change.

When an 84-year old retired school teacher in Seattle was pepper-sprayed on Tuesday on her way to show support for ousted protesters in New York, I felt anger towards all the people who have said that this movement is irrational, unorganized, fake, not able to gain momentum, should stop, protesters should go to work, and so on.

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Movie Review: Love Story

A capsule review on fragility and loss in Love Story (1970) with a special nod to love in libraries.

Ryan O'Neil and Allie McGraw in Arther Hiller's Love Story (1970) 

Yes, I must say, love that begins in a library is a trope we find in Music Man or in the fantasy of bookish nerds, so we naturally equate it with Cinderella syndrome — the woman patiently waiting for her man to appear from behind the stacks. In the 1970 Arthur Hiller film, Love Story, Allie McGraw and Ryan O’Neil butt heads at a library circulation desk; hardly the madame librarian named Marianne, or some ethereal intellectual fantasy. Ryan O’Neil, a Harvard jock, deemed “preppie” by his inimical counterpart, the black-haired brilliant musician sprung from humble Bostonian roots. The two make for a nice compare and contrast (as far as romances go). In the scene, shot in the interior of the library at Radcliffe, O’Neil attempts to check out The Waning of the Middle Ages. “Do you have your own library?” she asks, goading him, revealing the difference (at least to the viewer) between the sexes at ivy league American schools. Harvard is gendered as male: more books, more knowledge, more opportunity. Why should a man march into a woman’s space demanding their knowledge when he has his own, and more? The two argue. She wants to play. He just wants a book. The heart and spunk of the intellectual romantic comedy is born. The tropes are obvious. And we see the two soon-to-be-lovers as distinct yet compatible. The jock likes the girl’s toughness and rebellious approach. She likes his body, as she playfully says, and perhaps notices he is not put-off by her intellectual affronts. The psychology is laid out in pieces in the movie. He comes from privileged New England wealth but disdains his background. She has pulled herself up by her bootstraps and wears her intellectual and musical acumen like a badge. 

Allie McGraw projects beauty in this movie and the ability to engage in playful rapporté — not quite a femme fatale, however, since beneath her brilliance lies a fragility that marks the film and gestures towards its intrinsic theme, namely the fragile nature of relationships thwarted by circumstances often beyond our control. Despite their outward differences, the two come together because of a shared sameness. The movie takes turn portraying Ryan O’Neil’s character as vulnerable, for example when his father shows up unexpectedly at a Harvard hockey match and Allie McGraw’s character is there to support him, to hold him up. On the way to visit his parents, Ryan O’Neil eases her apprehensions about the visit. Of course, the movie is set up to be about the oscillation between loneliness and fragility. The opening shot, if I recall, is the former Harvard jock looking out onto an empty ice skating rink in Central Park. We as viewers do not know the significance of this scene until much later when we learn that our intractable, confident heroine has contracted leukemia. Preppie skates the rink in solitude while she looks on from the bleachers, both aware of the fragility of their soon to be broken apart bond. The editors chose to superimpose Allie McGraw’s image over that of Ryan O’Neil as he skates. For me, this was unnecessary for I think it dismisses the impact of the loss to come. We are reminded of the playful moments of their relationship earlier in the film: for example when both make snow angels and build a snow fort at Harvard. Director Arthur Hiller mentions in a documentary on the film, that this scene was serendipitous in that there was a record snowfall that day, but he decided to film anyway. Since he had made it clear he wanted Allie McGraw and Ryan O’Neil to portray what lovers do when they are new in love, he just had them play naturally in the snow. Here we see the two without words, without intellectual sparring, or agonizing over class difference. It is in other scenes that we see the intellectual difference between the two. She is graceful and brilliant in music and he is stalwart in achieving success cut off from the breast milk of his rich upbringing. The movie would be mediocre if we knew from the outset that our heroine will die. We only know this later; and, we can then feel for their loss. We are meant to project our own emotions and our own memories of love and love lost onto our formal lovers on screen. Perhaps this is why the movie was so popular, nominated for seven academy awards — not to forget the original score that is transcendent in its tonal representation of love and loss. I don’t think Love Story is a great film, but I do feel it would have been a lesser film if not for the work of our two stars who truly embody on screen the give and take of living with one another, the give and take, ease and struggle, life and loss, separation and link of conversation and togetherness.

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A Few Favorites: Books, Instant Books, and Libraries

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”  -- Jorge Luis Borges

I had asked my sixth graders, whom I meet faithfully every Saturday to work on writing and reading comprehension, to write an essay about a favorite thing, a wished-for happening, and one place they would like to visit. My hopes? That they would tie the pieces together and craft a five-paragraph essay.

Here's what I wrote as my students composed:

My favorite thing is a book; my wished-for happening is to have any book I ever want or hope to read at my immediate disposal; and my favorite place is a library, of course. It is a miracle of free association that my "three" cohere. I didn't begin it this way. Nor intended it. So, since this is a timed piece of writing, I may as well trust the process.

First, books. Books comfort me. I won't even mention content, for now. The form is important only to the extent that it helps me reach the content. Even a book nestled in the 01000100s of my iPad comforts me. Since purchasing an iPad several months ago, I still find it a delight to load up the Google Books app and add classics from the seemingly endless supply of out-of-copyright books. Lest I deceive you into thinking I only love digital books, let me remind you that I used to have a sizable library which I had to give up when I moved to space-deprived New York City. What is it in a book that is so great? It's the option I have to dip into words, without which, I would be lost in an already feeling-kinda-lost world.

To end the misery of finding an out-of-print gem is a great wished-for happening. Have you ever stumbled upon a book you would like to read but your local library does not have a copy and Amazon's used marketplace lists it at a price more than you are willing to spend? If I had a superpower it would be to summon at my fingertips any text I want to peruse at any time. Imagine Google Books if it were a realized reality.

I agree somewhat with Borges who said paradise is like a library filled with an endless array of books. I should qualify this wish, however. I do not envision a Borgesian library of books filled with every possible letter combination. To me, this would be hell. To search through endless mismarked copies of Hamlet in the hopes of finding the ur-text is a maddening enterprise, which is why Borges has a few of his library travelers sprawled on the floor dead — dead of exhaustion? Dead after searching aimlessly for an ur-text. No. Sir. Not that my paradisaical happy place must have the "great books". It must be replete with Barbara Cartland as well as Homer's lost epics. I prefer a bad book, a good book — even a book like Finnegan's Wake — which is bad and good at the same time.

I'm not sure such a reader exists, or will ever exist.

Certainly, the fantasy I have described here is long in coming. And to think that it could be foreshortened by a dystopian regime akin to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is a disastrous thought. I would like to think ideas and philosophy will be continued to be vouchsafed by man's pen -- whether it is n the guise of a keypad or a voice dictation service, doesn't matter. I shiver at the thought that ideas are written only to appease: this would be the Huxley imagined nightmare. The Orwellian nightmare is farcical -- for hasn't Big Brother been shown to be inept? If the Bradbury nightmare is the most plausible then I must add a fourth wish: to hope, beyond hope, that I can memorize, commit, vouchsafe, one book to memory. The problem is I am stuck in the choice. I wouldn't know which to choose; instead, Montag's firemen would find me like they found the madwoman who burned herself up with her cherished books. For me, though, they won't burn me up, instead, they will laugh.

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Joyce Carol Oates at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute

Joyce Carol Oates
(image source: Jewish Week)

Lois Oppenheim Interviews Joyce Carol Oates
As far as inimitable serious novelists go, Joyce Carol Oates ranks right up there with Flannery O'Connor and James Joyce (the two that come to mind). And maybe Herman Melville. But his beard is way more stubby that Oates's wan piercing disposition.

At the New York Psychoanalytic Institute on 82nd street in the city Upper East Side, Lois Oppenheim interviewed Oates on Friday night (October 28th) as part of the Institute's conversation series.

Does Joyce Carol Oates Play?
Having paid the ten dollar student fee and considering myself interested in the intersection between literature and psychoanalysis (wherever that particular intersection will lead me — or one — I am not so sure), I sat myself down in the staid auditorium hall with a plastic glass of free cheap Cabernet Sauvignon.

Oppenheim began the conversation by commenting on how in an e-mail she had asked the author if she had wanted to "play" in Manhattan before the slated time she was supposed to speak at the Institute but then realizing that asking Joyce Carol Oates to play was probably the wrong word to use. Does Joyce Carol Oates play?

One would think not considering how much work she has produced since her first published book in 1963. She was born in 1938 (so that makes for about fifty years of literary output — about fifty books total).

I think Oates took offense to the question because she answered the question about "play" noting she loves to go to museums and view art as well as her teaching career which she considers playful (there is always laughter in the classroom). And there is the point Oppenheim missed that writing can be a form of play.

On Writing From Oates' Point of View
Oates spoke about the craft of writing, how the writer has the idea for a short story, novel, and so on, but the idea has to meet the limits of language. Writing is a process of falling short.

Oppenheim was interested in Oates's biography. Oates was molested as a girl. Her great grandparent was murdered. She spoke about the unspoken violence behind closed doors in the small town she lived in. Did the violence embedded in her background influence her writing and its emphasis on violence?

Oates seemed to resent the question. As if writing about violence, perhaps too much close attention to violence, automatically spoke about the writer's personality.

Oates seems to be a fiction writer not interested in people seeing her writing as an extension of Joyce Carol Oates. She would rather want people to see her writing as art, as an expansive testament to the human spirit.

Does Art Inspire Life Or Does Life Inspire Art?
The question of the evening was, "Is a writer's biography directly inferred by their writing, what they choose to write, what topics and themes they explore?" Does the writer write about herself or does she write about the universal stamp that makes us human, that makes us tick?

Oates made the remark that most writers write about themselves. Proust writes about himself. Phillip Roth writes about himself. Many writers write about themselves. Their stories are reflections of their own lives in some form or fashion.

Oates dismisses the idea that her writings are a mere byproduct of her own traumatic life. She wants to say, I think, that she is no different from anyone else. Most people on this planet, except maybe for the rarified individuals who inhabit the one percent of the world's first-class elite, experience suffering, and violence. She is no different. She writes about violence because it is something people experience.

The room was a bit electric. I loved hearing her speak. She spoke firmly yet not loudly. She seemed to project an aura of quite yet powerful (almost angry) intellectual power. In a certain sense, she is not the docile novelist. She would not be a good analysand, as I heard someone say after the discussion.

After the Interview, Oates Signed My Copy of Sourland
She signed my copy of Sourland. I told her I liked her short story "Dear Joyce Carol" published recently in her short story collection "Dear Husband,". Yes, the comma is included in the title.

She said I didn't look like a guy who would write her letters like the ones described in "Dear Joyce Carol." I think I agree with her. I have written letters to authors but never a series of letters like the ones described in this short story. Oates told me the story was inspired by real-life events. She said she has received letters like the one in the story many times. So maybe there is an element of biography ...

Maybe it is not so much that Oates writes about violence so she can talk about herself in a novel or story, but rather, what constitutes her as a person, as a novelist, as a serious writer, is one who attends to violence because it is immensely important. The novelist attends to the particular in the hopes of reaching for something profound. Is this not the paradox?

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Blaise Pascal On The Contradictory Nature of Human Beings

What follows is a short analysis of fragments 164, 19, 142, and 80 from Blaise Pascal's philosophical work Pensées.

 “What a chimera is man! What a novelty, what chaos, what a subject  of contradiction.”- Blaise Pascal, Pensées (1657-58)  

Beginnings: Fragment 164 of Pascal's Pensées

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

Let us begin with fragment 164 of the Pensées where Pascals likens human beings to a freakish chimera, an amalgam of different natures: a monster with the combination of lion's head, goat's body, and a serpent's tail (p. 41). Pascal's thesis is the human condition is contradictory in nature. Subjectivity emerges out of conflict. Knowledge emerges out of paradox. A "cesspool of uncertainty" and "storehouse of truth," the modern subject is a novelty and a monster, the "glory and reject of the universe" (p. 41). "Man is beyond man," Pascal writes (p. 42). In his ability to see himself as mere man, as finite, contingent, yet uniquely novel and independent, man is able to transcend himself through self-awareness. But, as we will see, despite the human capacity to reflect on our own condition we become distracted by the banal and mundane and are bored easily. We often prefer distraction to thinking but we realize that through thinking we are little more than the animals but less than the gods. What makes us who we are as humans is an oscillation back and forth between our greatness and our wretchedness, our distractibility and our insightfulness; in effect, we are a mixture of sense, natural reason, and the ways of the heart.

Pascal and Montaigne

The truth of man's condition is not revealed solely by natural reason nor is it based on dogmatic assertions. Similar to Montaigne, Pascal argues truth is "neither within our grasp nor is it our target" (p. 42). Truth lies in the lap of God. For Pascal to be a skeptic is to deny incarnate nature. To be a dogmatist is to "repudiate reason." For Pascal, the answer lies somewhere in between these two, between nature and reason.

     The incarnation is a key theological point for Pascal (barely mentioned by Montaigne). Jesus is an ideal concept for Pascal, both fully human and fully divine, "begotten not made," "one in being with the Father." Christ is the new man - a manifestation of man as he would have been in his preternatural state. Because of original sin, ordinary man has lost his divinity except for a fragmentary shard which still remains. Unlike Christ, who revealed himself as God through his divine humanity, Man is a shard of a lost divinity; his greatness lies in his lack, his wretchedness. Pascal’s uncanny psychological insight gleaned from a traditional Catholic Christology becomes a radical statement on the human condition. Man's greatness lies in his capacity to recognize his wretchedness. Unlike a tree man is endowed with a capacity to both recognize his futility and simultaneously derive greatness from it. When Pascal writes, "Within this gnarled chasm lie the twists and turns of our condition," he is acknowledging man's in-betweenness (p. 43). Our animality is mechanistic and made redeemable through the operation of grace, a concept Pascal employs to explain how man is able to understand God at all. Grace makes man "as if on the level of God, participating in his divinity." Without grace we would be "deemed equivalent of brute beasts" (p. 43).

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Man Doesn't Know What Level to Put Himself

In fragment 19 Pascal says man's quandary is that he does not know what level to put himself (p. 8). Resonating with later existential themes concomitant with Kierkegaard or early existential writing, Pascal paints a modern picture of man lost and unable to find himself. Pascal modifies Augustine's thought that man is restless until he rests in God by stating man is restless and looks for God in “impenetrable darkness” (p. 8). We are neither Protagoras's ideal of "man is the measure of all things" nor are we the scum of the earth, either. We are thinking scum. What makes human beings great is the capacity to acknowledge our fallible, fallen nature. Pascal writes, evoking the Psalmist: we are a "thinking reed". Our wretchedness is a "felix culpa" (happy fault).

Pascal writes, "...without this most incomprehensible of all mysteries we are incomprehensible to ourselves" (p. 43). The oracle of Delphi with its inscription "know thyself" is too naive for Pascal nor is the promise of idle distraction the answer either. Reason cannot untangle the mystery of our wretched human condition, Pascal contends, but through "simple submission" can "we truly know ourselves" (p. 43). Humility is crucial for knowledge. Humility is counter to the claim of an all-encompassing logos that can know everything. Pascal equates total submission to logos as hubris. Access to knowledge does not depend on mental acuity or even keen understanding, but possession of a "humble heart and [those] who embrace lowliness" (p. 7).

Our Entire Knowledge is Not Made Uncertain

Pascal argues in fragment 142 that reason is not enough. Just because reason reveals the fallible nature of the mind, Pascal insists that "our entire knowledge is not made uncertain." Pascal is not a skeptic in the negative sense. He does not distrust reason outright. It is rather that he sees reason as part of the larger story of what constitutes thinking. The ancient skeptics taught we cannot know reality. Montaigne's skepticism is suspicion of scholasticism while Pascal is a skeptic of univocal reason. Reason, Pascal claims does not have to reveal knowledge of first principles: time, space, numbers, etc. We know first principles through the heart (p. 35). The "reasons of the heart" ground knowledge. Pascal's concern is faith in empirical reason. A plank wide enough to hold a philosopher yet suspended over a precipice will be unable to quell panic and -- "his imagination will prevail" -- and he will go pale and start sweating (p. 17). Even with the certainty of clear and distinct reason, we become powerless when our imagination takes over. 

Everyone Should Study their Thoughts

In fragment 80 Pascal writes that "Everyone should study their thoughts," but he leaves the impression, apparent in the immediacy and the urgency of his prose style, that humanity has not taken thinking seriously. Our reading for today ends with disappointment in humanity: "How hollow and full of filth man's heart is" (p. 49). Pascal is keen to see how diversion and distraction intertwine and disrupt a path to knowledge (see fragments 170, 171, and in other places).

Diversion is a promise of happiness man makes for himself. Man knows he is not a God. He knows he is mortal. In spite of this, man still wants to be happy; so he entertains himself. Man cannot stop himself from wanting to be happy even though he knows he is wretched so he chooses to not think about it: "Not having been able to conquer death, wretchedness, or ignorance, men have decided to stop himself from thinking about it" (p. 44). We are equally incapable of either absolute happiness or total access to truth. Pascal's diagnosis is man lives in despair. Pining for happiness, man searches for it through distraction and diversion. Yet he remains hollow and empty. The task of giving up diversion is likened to a king who has many courtiers filling up his empty moments. A king left alone would think. If we removed duty, preoccupation, diversion, distraction, and work from man he would "then see and think" about himself, removed from superfluous duty man would think about what he is, where he comes from, and where he is going" (p. 49).

References

Pascal, Blaise, Honor Levi, and Blaise Pascal. Pensées and Other Writings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Print.

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