Doris Lessing

Just posting a collection of links. Beginning reading Martha Quest. I forgot how fabulous Doris Lessing is. I'm actually quite excited about this reading. I think Praise is a bit ahead of me right now.

Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007. Here is the interview conducted by John Mullan.

Here is her bio on the Nobel site.
Here is her bio on wikipedia.

A clip from an interview with Lessing translator, Krista Kaer.

I'm struck by Lessing's presence as an author. She really does belong to a liminal community of writers caught between the late 19thC and the late 20thC, early 21st. She willfully and gleefully, if I can say so, shrugs off the confines of polite society and intellectual clothing that wraps much of modern European prose. What appears at first traditional slowly becomes radical, diatactical rather than dialectical perhaps? I'm thinking of Hayden White's Tropics of Discourse. However, she is disciplined and intellectual, a true master of the craft of the novel unlike much of contemporary fiction, especially in the United States. The post 60s novel can be a rather anti-intellectual affair that poses as a radical representation of identity and consciousness. Writers are much more in tune to the market, even the writer-critics, teacher-writers, writer-artists, of which the last is the current vogue, are keen observers of the small press market and, in my opinion, much too interested in their noteriety and reception than they are in cultivating their craft and discourse community. In fact, there is no discernible writing community among fiction writers. There are many writers' groups, which like group therapy are about acceptance more than craft. I digress.

I just reached the point in the Nobel Prize interview where Mullan asks Lessing about Harold Bloom's critique that her prose was "an attack on the male sex." HA! Harold Bloom. What a fart!

Here is her reaction to being stalked by the British press after winning the Nobel Prize.

Lessing always expresses that her writing represents a kind of realism. For example, when answering criticism about how men are represented in her work, she responds that it's the "strictest realism." No apologies for her manner of observing everyday life. It is real. Very encouraging. It's not literature serving a social or political cause, in fact and for example Lessing says that being labeled a feminist author never did her any good. It's her prose and in that manner it is real. The personal is political. In other words, she is not carrying water for anyone. I like that. A lot.

"The novel is not where the passion is situated." Lessing criticizes the place of the novel. Well, she was correct. Is correct. The novel is currently the domain of the amateur and talented novelists are not promoted for their intellectualism. They are quite often shunned for it. Difficult books are a bad thing. And this is not only a problem in the more traditionally artistic circles, this extends to the genre market. I don't know what to make of this. Although it's safe to say that the market needs a resurgence of patronage. Authors need to get back in the habit of cultivating scenes that are picky and exclusive. We need to cultivate our literature. Some people do not write well. Look at the number of writing programs in the US. It's no surprise that much of the work being published is crap. MFA programs are as much about introducing writers to people who can get you published as they are about workshops. Unfortunately, they are less about developing a rigorous attention to the detail of working on theory and craft. In fact, I have yet to meet more than a few students from MFA writing programs that know anything about theory or care to learn. They are looking for opportunities to publish. What do we expect?

The novel should not be permitted to become the form for the amateur. We need patrons. It's incredibly difficult to work fulltime and write fulltime. That's the practical matter of fact. What's most lacking is a group of people to speak to about my work. I'm speaking form personal experience here. I take this rather seriously.

In the background, over Lessing's left shoulder, is a yellow box of Go Cat cat food. Wonderfully herself. Unprepared. Honest.

From Lessing's essay on journalism:
The fact is, with journalists as with every profession, only a minority are any good.. Most repeat what others say. This process can be observed in all kinds of context. An exciting bit of music is used to introduce a hundred programmes on television: or an opinion, a catchphrase, taken up, and used to death. (January 1990)

Here is a link to a fansite that is a good retrospective of her work, with many links.

Always keep them running

Invisible Man has always been a great read for two reasons.  It reminds me of 1995 and in 1995 I made the decision to change my life (that's another story) and attempt to become a teacher and writer; in addition, I came to realize I am a race traitor.  I'm likely to explain more of this in detail while writing about Ellison's novel.  Maybe not.  It's hard to write about.

It's safe to say that I see myself in this novel and what I see I don't like.  Not that I don't like myself.  I don't like what I am encouraged to inherit on behalf of all the other folks who look like me.  Moreover, I don't like feeling guilty of being white.  For some white men, this means bitching everyday about everyone who is not white always bitching about white folks.  I am not one to whine about being called white, though.  And really that is not getting at the heart of the matter at all.  It just scractches the surface.  Yet this introduction to my complex relationship with my own whiteness begins a story I have been attempting to tell since '95 about seeing myself as helplessly tied to something I have been vehemently rejecting since I was a child.

It wasn't that I thought it was wrong to call black kids in my East Tulsa neighborhood niggers, or brown people spics, or the Vietnamese refugee families, gooks.  I  did think it was wrong; I was taught it was wrong.  This is the simple way to tell the story of race:  talking about name-calling and finger-pointing.  More significantly, what I suffered was a pain in my gut and head, a real pain that often left me lying in bed writhing in real physical pain.  What pleasure is there in treating others in such a way?  Maybe I was naive and sensitive.  But I was affected when I was a kid.  Too smart for my own community, too creative and free-thinking for school, and too emotional for my own good.  In short, while genius, a total nutcase.  (It helps to have a good sense of humor.  You're supposed to smiling.)

I'm sure to write about this a little more.  But the difference I felt was always knowably not the difference the black kids endured.  For many folks in power, knowing about injustice absolves a person from guilt.  And that absolution then serves as a pass to participate in the unjust intstitutions anyway.  What I was upset about was that I was always encouraged to say yes to something others were never going to be allowed to access.  And that bargain has always made me sick to my stomach.

I never picked the fight against white.  It chose me.  Maybe it's genetic:  or maybe to support the white power structure is unnatural--a perspective I choose to support on my more optimistic days--and unnatural because it is at the core of some of the more grotesque social and cultural realities we confront everyday without thinking about them:  realities like "Capital is self-valorizing" and "Might makes Right."

I am not perfect.  It's hard to reject the allure of self-righteousness and Right.  I find no comfort in our Original Sin.  I do find that its mark--Whiteness--and its practice--Masculinity--and its economy--Capitalism--are quite easy targets actually.  But though the facility with which we can point to the visible errors in these institutions may suit a comedian's need for a quick, efficient and intelligent or timely joke, I think we need a dedicated fight to destroy each of these institutions and revise our work and common goals.

I am not patting myself on the back or trying to be eloquent.  And I am not saying anything new.  It's hardly shocking.  You may have every right to say, "Hey, here's another white guy who has discovered injustice!  Go figure."  I understand.  But I do believe that I have been tasked with overcoming the intellectual cynicism and smirk of educational professionalism and I ought to do something about it.  It's a vow.  I suppose this is why I am an Americanist.  This drive is written over and over again throughout our short history.  Yet, we go nowhere with the knowledge that we have sinned against humanity in a most severe way.  We are racists, sexist pigs; we hate the poor, the working class; we heap unearned ambition and morality on the wealthy.  It's almost as if because we know these things we feel we have done enough.  By the way, this is a problem I feel we have inherited from Europe and what we call Continental Philosophy is rife with smart bigots who we insist we cannot overcome because their innovative thoughts are so rich and complex:  for an example read Kant.

And this is what Ellison's Invisible Man is about.  And this is why I love it.  It reminds me that I should do something.  It's only that, at times, I wonder if a guy who looks like me can do anything other than betray his race?  (And you do realize that race is an illusion.  What we are talkign about is a social construction.  The biology is different thing altogether.  But the biology is about our similar mothers.  The sociology is about the sexist pig fathers and their attempt to find, by any means necessary, hoard all the material exploits our planet has to offer.)

But this should serve as a quick introduction to my reason for picking the novel to read.  I do have a simple reason, too:  Praise has not read it.  I loved the idea of reading it with her for her first time.

Ellison has two kinds of reader:  people who love his novel and cherish it, and folks who will admit the book is great but are upset at the subject matter.  It isn't that people don't know the truth (about white power in America,) it's just that some people don't want to do anything about.  It's hard work betraying the power structure:  it has benefits for everyone.

I had fits about one thing that nearly drove me crazy--and it did leave me in a deep depression from which I emerged 6 months after undergrad graduation, in 1997, with a bottle of pills in stomach, from which all the rest of my life has sprung.  The One Thing:  I am white and though I want to transform the power structure, I have had to learn to let go.  To betray my racist, unearned inheritance...well, it's not easy.  Ellison's novel is refreshing.  It is comic.  It is shocking.  It is revelatory.

The unnamed narrator of Invisible Man is the greatest Modern male protagonist in American literature.  There are a handful of these great, male protagonists:  Isaac McCaslin, Quentin Compson, Bigger Thomas.  Look I love Melville.  A lot.  Moby Dick is a great novel.  But some things happened to the American novel in the early twentieth century:  color, expressionism, surrealism, war, genocide, and psychoanalysis.  Maybe I should use the troubled term High Modern.  I really am superfocused on 1910-1960 when it comes to film, literature, theory, and art overall.

More to come.

Surface Noise: Or, How He Learned to Love the Structure More than the Tale Itself

I dunno what it is about books like Essays in Love and Me.  We don't get along too well.  The writing is smart, the prose is snappy, the composition is sound, the representations ring true.  It's even genuinely witty at times.  Yet, I hate it.  And I tried hard to like this book because of a growing optimism I have experienced since meeting my fellow reader who so recently and successfully pushed me not only to finish the book but to write about it here on DagSign (result of her wonderful post.)

Remember, later on, I have said here, early on:  Alain de Botton is a talented writer.  I just happen to think this novel is a poor exercise in Form and Content.  I admit that I disagree with how he uses Plato and Nietzsche, too, among others.  But that is beside the point.  I should be able disagree with an author's ideas and still appreciate his or her work.  Well...not when there is no other content to speak of.  Maybe not then.

Those of you who know me know my hate-on is turned-on regularly by certain kinds of authors, some of whom (but not many) write wonderful verse and prose.  I experienced a seemingly never-ending series of gag-inducing readings over my years in Denver cafes and graduate school.  But that's OK: I want everybody to write and to read and to share.  I'll give anyone a chance.  I'll always find a line, a phrase, even a word to like.  It's writing afterall.  I love it.  And I love language's democratic impulse to be freely shared.  However, the cynical intellectual elitist attitude, or pose, shared by many writers has always bummed me out.  What is it they have that they don't think I have?  What do they think they know that they believe needs so badly to be shared?  I ask this, of course, recognizing that I am often confused as one of these snobs because I freely consort with them.  I even have the nerve to call myself a writer.  Can you believe it?  (Notice how I continue to believe I am not one of them.  That's proof of my optimism, he's says as he leaves the room.) 

I have chosen to live the lifestyle.  But I have reaped my share of alienation(s) by vocally distancing myself from my colleagues with snorts of disbeliefs and even very direct "I cannot believe you think what you have to offer is any better than what anybody else has to offer" statements of disbelief.  I was not nice to many of my fellow grad students who I felt acted like children and behaved as if they deserved their leisurely lives.  They often admitted that they couldn't be bothered with things like teaching, research, and study.  (Well, not Duncan; but I have a perpetual boy-crush on him.)

I can paint you a pretty good portrait of what many 26 year-old women believe a poet should dress like--ugly scarves and turtlenecks--and speak like--husky voiced renderings of each line with an ear for her startlingly cool and quirky metaphors.  (Even she can't believe how good she is.) Or, a portrait of a young man writing what he thinks is genius prose.  This is the guy who chooses to be alone, who is smarter than you and me, and who laughs at the notion that he should represent IT in any other way.  Usually, this cynical prick and that poetess find each other after her reading, drink a bottle of wine over department gossip and sleep together sometime around three in the morning when she is drunk enough to lose prudish inhibitions about being naked around anybody other than her muse and he has shut-up long enough to appear attractive.  (OK it's bile this, but it's good to get these excesses out.)

I am a perpetual critic.  I am my own worst critic:  terrified to let go of everything I write.  I work sentences for years.  I think more out of fear of letting them go--does that even make sense--than for fear of being rejected.  I will find something to hate on.  That's my point.  That's me.  But I am tender, too.  I love to pet and be pet.  I am a closet Romantic.  I actually am a big softy.  And so to get back on track with this post.  To leave hyperbole alone:  Prelude to the post about why I almost finished Alain de Botton's Essays in Love but stopped short and finally gave up this morning is over.

All I ask of an author is to leave the gimmick alone.  In this case, I mean:  we should write responsibly or with Care about the process of writing itself.  Alain de Botton's book is a novel about being in love with the idea of love and all that is generative, regenerative, and degenerative in it.  And he chooses a discourse about social and political philosophy as well as Love to set his story.  He should have something to show me he knows how his narrative and characters work within the work he quotes.  But he doesn't do the work required.  

He says what he thinks.  Let me be clear:  the gimmick is that the narrator is the man in love.  So, shit.  He's lost in love.  He wraps up everything in clever remarks that satisfy his own POV and, in the end, his own ability to make fun of himself.  (See the novel's last two paragraphs.)  I believe that The Gimmick in fiction is a device that aids in the genre's continued path to permanent anti-intellectualism.  It also aids in displaying a quirk common in many contemporary novels: authorial laziness dressed up as innovation in form.  (Man I sound like a conservative.  But I am not.  Just a let-down lover of innovation.  After all, Novels should be novel.)

Much of mainstream Western Fiction is anti-intellectual.  I have my ideas about this, and most of my ideas focus on the market and our education industry.  But the authors don't help.  I think it's unfair to blame the readers.  Authors are to blame, for example, when they boil down complex philosophical forms and content into trite dialogues that merely summarize prior significant work.  De Botton's book, for me, is fiction's equivalent of Robert Fulghum's All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.  Take an idea that uniquely dwells in its topic's complexity, then flatten it into something that can be stated as if it were common sense all along, then sell it as problem solved.  Apparently solved, as in the narrator's case in this book because, don't you know, he will simply fall in love all over again.  Or, don't even bother to tell the story, to illustrate the details, rather opting for hastily sketched caricatures in order to fit the structure of the artist's vision: package the caricature as the History of the Form Itself, content included.

I suppose I can be blamed for what my fellow Koreans call Eye-Shopping.  I mean the book looked good with all it promised.  What did I expect?  My standards were low:  a story, some inside theory jokes, literary references galore, and some sex.  Isn't that what a book called Essays in Love should offer?  What I got was a book that outlined an argument about Love by referring to a lot of things the author has read in lieu of actual scenes that illustrated his argument.  In other words, the book IN Love is a book without it and sold as told by a guy who may have been in love or may not have but so it goes.  

If I could eat a pint of ice cream and not feel full of ice cream, that is how I feel after reading de Botton's novel.

I feel empty of ice cream.

[By the way, this is a problem:  confusing Philosophy with Common Sense.  Common Sense is the explicit rejection of paradox.  Paradox is what Philosophy dwells in.  Common Sense is explicitly anti-Philosophical.  And Common Sense is killing much more than philosophy these days.  It's killing intellectualism in literature.  Hey Poets!  It's just not prose, you know.  You guys have Billy Collins to cope with.  Have you been reading what he's saying about Poetry!  That guy will haunt poetry for decades after he is gone because there are hundreds if not thousands of high school teachers who will use him as a weapon against all that is intellectual in verse.  Sorry Smart High School Teachers like the one I love.  But you know it's true.]

I guess it comes down to two things for me:  1) Alain de Botton's first novel is a practice in fidelity to structure (not form) over content and 2) I just don't care about the characters.  Let's ignore 2.  I mean, maybe I just don't like folks like the narrator and Chloe.  I'll focus on 1.

I will be quick.

First, the good:  I like the structure of the novel.  Funny, huh, after I trash the book itself and question de Botton's fidelity to Social and Political Philosophy as well as to The Novel, I have the nerve to say I like the way he structured the book.  Well, I do.  Each Chapter examines love in what appears to be an ever-evolving and increasingly mature vantage point on Love vis-a-vis a walk/talk through an ever-increasingly complex vantage point on human relationships, or How We See Ourselves In-the-World.  I thought to myself looking at it:  WOW, this is the shit.

He begins with Romantic Fatalism and moves out from there to trip through: Idealization, Seduction, Authenticity, Mind & Body, Marxism, False Consciousness, Liberalism, Beauty, Everyday Language, Something Called "What do you see in her?", Skepticism and Faith, et al.  It looks fun.  Looks.

In Authenticity, de Botton writes 

6. I had to find out more about Chloe, for how could I abandon my true self unless I knew what false self to adopt.  But the patience and intelligence required to fathom someone else went far beyond the capacities of my anxious, infatuated mind.  I behaved like a reductive social psychologist, eager to press my companion into simple categories, unwilling to apply the care of a novelist to capturing the subtleties of human nature.

I marked this early paragraph with a question mark.  It's clear to me now that it holds the key to my distaste for the novel.  As I continued to read, I continued to ask myself what I was supposed to think about the narrator and his relationship to "the author."  I firmly believe that Alain de Botton is not the narrator nor do I appreciate readers who knee-jerk respond to first-person narratives by associating the narrator's beliefs and personalities and actions to the author's beliefs and so on.

But this paragraph confuses me.  Here lies an authorial excuse for not describing Chloe, a woman as a reader I wished I knew more about.  The narrator-in-love is telling me why he fails at getting to know her better:  he is infatuated with her.  Ok.  I waited, though.  And de Botton never got around to telling me about Chloe.  And he couldn't.  The structure of the book proscribes Chloe's development as a character I can care about enough to understand why the narrator might move beyond infatuation to possess her to love to be with her. (It doesn't matter anyway because SPOILER, their relationship doesn't work out.)

If what de Botton calls "the care of a novelist" is, in fact, "capturing the subtleties of human nature," then de Botton fails.  His novel fails even to catch the subtleties of the philosophers he quotes.  Even if this can be seen as a nod to the readers that "even I, the author, am failing too," then I am not satisfied because the line then becomes an excuse (a plea for an excuse) not to do the work it takes to present content that attempts to cope with human nature. 

David Foster Wallace complained about the abundance of irony in contemporary fiction.  Well, I have whined about Wallace, but maybe this novel is an example of what he was railing against.  I think de Botton is terrribly ironic.  And I mean terribly as in poorly or as in sinfully.  Is it too much to say that I find his book too cheeky even?

In Skepticism and Faith, de Botton cites Friedrich Nietzsche from Beyond Good and Evil.  Nietzsche was looking for grand attempters.  Whether or not a judgement or an attempt in life was false or true, who is willing to make the judgment regardless?  Nietzsche writes "the falseness of a judgement is not necessarily an objection to it."  The value of an undertaking is examined then.  What does it mean to attempt to love somebody if we cannot know whether or not our assessment of our lover or the circumstances in which we fell in love are/were true or not?  I think this is what de Botton is getting at with his novel.  Well, this is all fine and good to me and, quite frankly, it intellectually pleases me.  BUT where is my friggin story author man?

Anyway, on to the next novel.  I could go on but I am teaching 800 high school kids and 40 of them are waiting for me.  I want to write about a novel that will permit me to talk about the mechanics of fiction in a way that gets into the material not simply the structure.  I really am annoyed by Essays in Love.  Annoyed because I like the author and feel let down.  sniff sniff.

(i'll proofread this later.  pardon any errors.)

Alain de Botton. Essays in Love. 1993.

Praise and I will be using this blog to post about the books we are reading together. We'll first read Alain de Botton's 1993 novel, Essays in Love. I have wanted to read this for a while. I am particularly interested in the author's attempt at what I have often called creative philosophy. For better or worse--and he has his share of lovers and haters--de Botton purposefully combines theory and fiction in his narratives.

This novel is my choice for our first read. Praise will pick our second book. Our rule about choosing books is simple: I must pick a book she hasn't read; she must pick a book I haven't read. That's it. No restrictions on genre. While we have a few strikingly similar tastes, we really do come at things, like reading, differently. So, there should be some fresh discussion on a DagZine blog for the first time in 3 years. I am very excited.

Essays in Love is a novel about two folks who rapidly fall in love after meeting on an airplane. It's how the author handles the description of this important event--the falling "in love"--that needs attention. De Botton receives his harshest criticism from the literati crowd which claims, if I may summarize, he turns complex philosophical topics into trite cliches. He receives his most passionate support from readers who find his work fascinating for its attempt to dwell in complex discussions about topics such as Love.

I am afraid that de Botton's best and worst criticism opens a worthless binary opposition for considering his work: Is it good or bad when a writer uses fiction to discuss complex issues usually left to a philosopher? That is a bad question. It begs so much and seeks a knee-jerk "Yes" or "No" answer. In the U.S., Fiction--the genre as well as its practitioners--is often regarded as anti-intellectual, and for good reason I suppose. English Departments worldwide are populated with lit-critters who do not read the philosophers they cite in essays and discussion; a lack of scholarly rigor in some departments is infamous and to make matters worse many people are in denial that a problem exists at all; teachers read their peers writing about other writers and cite it rather than reading complex works for themselves; the Cambridge Companion series is a replacement for actual contemporary research; anthologies are too common; Harold Bloom has become an expert in everything literary in the English language that is important; Terry Eagleton has become an expert in everything Marx & structural; ETC. I have heard some things in conferences that would make many quoted philosophers puke blood.

On the other hand, we might expand this issue slightly by stating English-speaking authors who write novels are often encouraged not to handle complex issues. It's a shame. It's a critical phenomenon I don't understand. It reminds me of the crazy insistence that we should leave philosophy to the philosophers. I would suggest, and I am hopeful that Praise agrees, such insistence is nonsense and harmful. Shouldn't we all make grand attempts? It appears de Botton is attempting to attempt.

Is de Botton's novel worthy of its subject matter? We'll see.

Below is a concise list of useful links about the author.

Google "Web" Search.

Google "Blogs" Search.

The British Council's Contemporary Writer's entry for Alain de Botton.

The Complete Review's collection of de Botton reviews (with some links to originating reviews.)

The Author's web site.

[edition note: We are reading the 2006, Picador edition. It's the edition currently available in the UK. The edition currently available in the US and in Japan is from 2008 and has different art direction.]