The Road

The Road is Cormac McCarthy's version of the perennial sci-fi genre, the post-apocalyptic novel. McCarthy does not impose the supernatural/fantastic element on the genre, although there is plenty of horror to go around, including the constant threat of cannibalism. This isn't a stretch for the author, who explored necrophilia in Child of God, incest in Outer Dark, and general moral depravity in Blood Meridian. He is, however, a thoughtful and precise writer- qualities which distinguish him from the Stephen Kings of the world in his treatment of a common theme.

The Road follows an unnamed man and his son as they make their slow hazardous trek to the sea some years after an apparent nuclear holocaust. The landscape is ashen and dead and the bleakness of the extended nuclear winter and the hopelessness of survival on earth in the wake of the catastrophe are well portrayed. I can't write too much about the plot without giving spoilers to the narrative. Suffice to say that McCarthy tries to give some faint glimmer of hope at the end, but that hope is surely a mirage, a temporary reprieve from suffering in a future in which all hope has been annihilated.

On a personal note, as the father of young boys, the narrative of the man and his son adrift in the wasteland holds a real poignancy. This father-son relationship is surely the most tender and true bit of writing that McCarthy has yet written. The dedication, to John Francis McCarthy, is presumably to the author's son.

The Beckett Trilogy

While reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road, the sense of despair in that novel made me think of one of the masters of existential hopelessness, Samuel Beckett.* I have been a Beckett fan for years, admiring him no less for his humor than for his articulation of 20th Century angst. In that vein, I am posting some older observations on the trilogy comprised of Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable. There is no dearth of worthwhile interpretive books and essays on these works: what follows are simply my synopsis and thoughts regarding them.

(*One contrast with regard to McCarthy: Beckett doesn't have to imagine a post-apocalyptic world - for him, each human life is an ongoing apocalypse, a decrepit ramble towards nothingness.)

The Trilogy

Molloy, the first volume in Beckett's trilogy, is comprised of two sections, purporting to be notes scribbled by two quite different characters, each in his own state of isolation. The first is Molloy, an almost feral vagabond whose goal, when discernible amid the odd and humorous reveries of life as a tramp, is to reach his "mother's room." He writes, apparently, from her room, but she is absent and there is no real idea of where she has gone or of how Molloy has come to take her place. Molloy is a wild man, hardly verbal, shaggy and urine-soaked with a bum leg and an aversion to human contact. For all this, he seems comfortable with his extreme situation, and with being outside of society and its norms. He has no great love of life, and appears to be content in his room, waiting to die.

The second "author", Jacque Moran, begins as a self-satisfied, if rather obsessive, suburbanite. He is given vague instructions regarding Molloy that take him out onto the open road, where his mode and manner of living rapidly disintegrate as he loses touch with the sense of society and his place in it that he so highly values. He badgers his son into abandoning him, murders a man for no real reason, and, after descending into his own kind of madness, returns to pass the remainder of his existence in his own now dilapidated house.

Beckett's prose is poignant and scatological, reflecting the disturbing situations each of these men find themselves in. Molloy is the individuals desire to escape from society and its suffocating norms, taken to the nth degree. He is taken into police custody for vague reasons concerning which he has no real curiosity. He is subsequently taken in (for sexual purposes, he suspects) by a charitable matron whose dog he has accidentally run over on his bicycle. He cannot wait to regain his grubby clothes and make his escape from this intolerable confinement. He is content to gather "sucking stones" (to ward off hunger) on a beach and spends pages devising elaborate mathematics for the purpose of shifting the stones from pocket to pocket.

Moran is the man cut loose from society, whose values and pretensions disintegrate in the absence of that society. There is a tinge of Buddhist thought in these pages: Molloy is almost Buddha-like in his detachment and his pessimism regarding the human condition and the tragedy of birth, the escape from which is the elusive goal - the annihilation of nirvana. Moran is the fool, discovering the abyss that confronts the unprepared mind when the illusions of life and its apparent certainties are swept away.

Malone Dies and The Unnameable thematically continue the narrative begun in Molloy. Whereas the first novel in the trilogy possessed at least a modicum of dramatic action, these simply reflect the thoughts of first a dying, and then a dead (vegetative?) man. The search for the self and the realization of the horror of existence continue, and some of Beckett's most grotesque images occur in these works: the bizarre sexual relations of Malone and Moll, the Dante-esque episode wherein the Unnameable/Mahood trudges through the entrails of his dead family in the course of a spiral descent into nowhere. These works, especially the third volume, are emotionally difficult to read. Still, they are powerful statements on the hopelessness of existence and the stasis of the self in the absence of meaning.


Also Of Interest

Michael Robinson's The Long Sonata of the Dead (out of print) is a somewhat useful guide to Beckett's work, and to the trilogy in particular. James Knowlson's book on Beckett, Damned to Fame, is by far the best biography, rounding out the somwhat dour view of Beckett presented in Diedre Bair's earlier biography.

Various editions of the trilogy are available. They are of course included in the superlative Grove Centenary Edition of Beckett's work, now available from Amazon at a very attractive price (down from the original $100 list price). Personally, I am hard pressed to abandon my collection of Beckett's works, mostly dog-eared paperbacks and foreign editions, painstakingly assembled over the years.

But What About the Books?

I have neglected any book posts for a while. Having kids means that one's reading time is necessarily limited, although I do usually get some time to read later in the evening. Gone are the days when I had several books going at once: now I just hit them one at a time. Currently I'm reading John Hale's The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance, a fairly hefty tome, but quite worthwhile. I hope to post some notes on past books read sometime in the next few days.

Weird Coincidence

I tend not to get too weirded out by things, but strange smells permeating Manhattan (I don't know what it is, but I'm sure there's nothing to worry about, says the Mayor)-

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/01/08/nyc.odor/index.html

- and dozens of birds mysteriously dead in downtown Austin on the same day

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/01/08/austin.birds.ap/index.html

sure strikes me as a little.....odd.

And I will be more than a tad concerned if Bush shows up on the teevee within the next few hours, wearing a gas mask and telling us to go shopping.

Now where the hell did I leave that duct tape?

Dancing with Mom

Black Water Anthologies

There is nothing that God hath established in a constant course of nature, and which therefore is done every day, but would seem a Miracle, and exercise our admiration, if it were done but once.
-John Donne, from LXXX Sermons


Anyone interested in fantastic tales, a la Saki, Borges and Aickman, should check out the two thick Black Water anthologies compiled by Alberto Manguel in 1984 and 1990. I have been perusing the second volume again over the last few days, and am amazed by the wide range of authors represented, from Melville to Lampedusa to Eliade to Satyajit Ray (director of the wonderful Apu trilogy) to my old classics professor at the University of Texas, Peter Green. Really, there are over fifty authors in this volume alone, and it's a shame to single out only a few. If you like stories with an element of the weird and supernatural, you might want to find a copy of one of these books.

The George Tooker paintings on the covers fit the mood of these books quite nicely.

Manguel has also compiled Dark Arrows, an anthology of revenge stories (including William Trevor's deliciously sinister "Torridge", in which a family learns some secrets about Father's boarding school days from one of his victims) and the very readable A History of Reading.

Accumulated Wisdom

Echidne's Paradox

There are two kinds of people: Those who find the universe irreducibly complex and those who prefer simple but false dualisms.

http://echidneofthesnakes.blogspot.com/

Amazon Links

I have been resisting all temptation to discuss politics on this blog, now that the November elections are behind us. I originally set this up to post about books that I have read that might be not be particularly well known outside a small group of aficionados. In the event that anyone actually reads this and has an interest in some of the books discussed, I have decided to add Amazon links to those books. If you order through these links, I will get a small reward for leading you to them. I probably won't get rich, but it can't hurt, right?

Let's start with one that certainly will not be obscure, but which I am looking forward to reading. Cheers!

Chatwin's Travels

In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin.

Bruce Chatwin died of AIDS early in 1989. Almost 50 at the time of his death, he came to literary life and fame relatively late. It is part of his legend that he announced his departure from the (London) Sunday Times in 1975 with a short telegram: “Gone to Patagonia for six months.” In Patagonia is, I assume, his first book, and it is quite an excellent traveler’s tale. Chatwin was a keen observer with a dry (but not precious) wit and a well-developed sense of the absurd.

His curiosity regarding one of the ends of the earth, the southernmost tip of South America, was instilled early in his childhood by a piece of “brontosaurus” skin given to his grandmother by a distant relation at the turn of the century. Charley Milward’s specimen may have been the excuse for Chatwin’s journey, but the story is not confined to it. Along with some history of 19th and 20th century Patagonia as related by various quaint inhabitants, we also learn of immigrant Welsh sheep ranchers; Butch Cassidy’s South American adventures; the Sect of the Brujeria (socialist sorcerers with gruesome, if improbable, rituals); a rumored plesiosaurus which set of a brief frenzy in the scientific community of two continents; an anarchist rabble-rouser named Simon Radowitzky; Jemmy Button, a native Fuegian who knew Darwin and whom Captain FitzRoy sought to “civilize”; a destitute but persistent Frenchman who tried to forge his own Patagonian Empire; Henri Grien, aka Louis de Rougemont, the charlatan; and the corpse of a suicidal barber with a hidden past.

Patagonia, a seemingly desolate land at the end of the world, seems to have attracted an endless stream of dreamers, eccentrics, and exiles over the centuries. Chatwin brings together a plethora of stories and personalities, scattered in time, into a seamless narrative, compulsively readable. And we even learn the rest of the story of Charley Milward, the unlucky sailor, and that little piece of skin.

Bruce Chatwin’s finest collection of short prose is What Am I Doing Here. The Songlines, in largest part a work of fiction set in the Australian outback, reflects Chatwin’s lifelong interst in nomadism and is also a pleasure to read.

Isaac Newton

In the Presence of the Creator: Isaac Newton and His Times
By Gale E. Christianson

One of my literary heroes, William Blake, implores God to “keep us from single vision and Newton’s sleep.” In my personal list of times to which I would wish to have been witness, Isaac Newton’s Cambridge would rank with my dreams of being present on Alexander’s campaigns. I would love to have seen Newton’s lodgings – his scientific apparatus, experiments in progress, the notebooks filled with musings on religion and alchemy, and the rest of the shabby scene.

Christianson’s biography of Newton deserves every superlative. I savored it from beginning to end, and can think of few more engrossing biographies with which to pass a few winter’s nights. I don’t pretend to know much about either mathematics or physics (I am what an educator several years ago described as innumerate – the mathematical equivalent of an illiterate), still, the evocation of Newton and his milieu is fascinating. In grade school, I won a magnet for knowing the fairy tale about Newton and the apple tree. Later, I was aware that Blake and the Romantics deplored him for taking the mystery out of the rainbow. This was more or less the extent of my knowledge of the man who redefined science at the beginning of the modern age.

Newton was a complex and difficult person who decidedly did not mellow with age. His reticence to publish his most significant discoveries, made when he was a young man, led to others (particularly the philosopher Leibniz) gaining recognition with similar, but later, discoveries. When Leibniz publicized his own discovery of the calculus (which Newton left out of the early editions of the Principia), Newton cried plagiarism, leading to a long, rancorous fight to establish primacy. This was an experience which Newton had more than once, and some of the most outstanding intellects of the day, such as Edmond Halley (of comet fame) and the Royal Astronomer John Flamsteed, learned the bitter lesson which came from crossing Newton.

Newton felt that the great secrets he had become privy to came directly from the Godhead, and that he himself had a singular relationship with the Creator. Small wonder that he could not abide anyone else who, to his mind, infringed upon that relationship. (It is a little known fact that Newton’s religious and alchemical writings, tedious as they are, far exceeded his scientific works.) He was, truth be told, a man who could carry a grudge to the grave.

Personality quirks aside, Newton was quite simply one of the few true geniuses of human history. He refined the scientific method of verification through carefully controlled experiment, he brought about a rejection of Cartesian assertions regarding how objects influence each other through his thoughts on the nature of gravity (although the secret of gravitational attraction still eludes us), he outlined the nature of light and conducted groundbreaking work on optics (through the nauseating conjunction of a knitting needle and his own eyeball). He also, predating Leibniz by several years, did in fact discover the calculus, to the eternal chagrin of generations of high school students. Christianson’s biography, if you can find a copy, is highly recommended.

For insights on Newton’s lifelong preoccupation with alchemy, see the Nova presentation “Newton’s Dark Secrets,” available through Netflix. See also: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/newton/principia.html

Robert Irwin

Robert Irwin's The Arabian Nightmare is an old favorite, a modern classic of horror/fantasy, written by a medievalist. A short review can be found at http://www.nthposition.com/thearabiannightmare.php

Presented by Washington Post book Michael Dirda columnist as an answer/rebuttal to Edward Said's Orientalism, Irwin has just published Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents. It looks to be a nice meaty (409 pp.) history of Western perceptions of the Middle East. I look forward to reading it.

Dirda's review can be found at:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/09/AR2006110901770.html

The Blind Owl

Some notes on an old favorite.

Sadegh Hedayat was born "of an aristocratic family" in Iran in 1903. He committed suicide, in Paris, in 1951. His best known work, The Blind Owl, was published in Bombay (Mumbai) in 1937 and in Teheran in 1941. An English translation was published by Grove Press in 1957. This small, repetitive book is as exquisite a portrait of madness as one is likely to find.

The narrator, a pen-case illustrator, lives in a small house in a decrepit suburb. Addicted to opium, he is obsessed by visions seen through a chink in the wall, high up in a closet. He sees a beautiful woman and a harsh, mocking old man with a "hollow, grating laugh, of a quality to make the hairs of one's body stand on end." There are gestures between the two, a cypress tree, and a small stream, images which recur throughout the narrative. The artist seeks the source of the scene, but it exists only when peered at through the aperture, not in the objective world.

The artist obsesses over the repetitive vision, painting it on his pen-cases. When the visions cease, he sinks into despair fueled by wine and opium. The mysterious woman appears to him one night, remote and spectral. On his bed, she turns cold and inanimate. Her eyes open and shut, and then her beautiful body begins to putrefy. In panic, the artist dismembers the body and stuffs it into a suitcase. He leaves the house with the gruesome luggage, and encounters the old man, face covered, sitting at the base of a cypress tree. With derision, the sinister old man offers to help dispose of the body...

At this point, the narrative takes a backwards turn. We learn of the narrators betrothal, at his mother's insistence, to a woman he despises as "the bitch, the sorceress." His anger and misogyny explode with bitterness at the hated woman. The elements of his vision- the gestures, the tree, and the woman- reappear repetitively. We find clues to the opium vision, fears of mortality, and the horrors of eternal recurrence, life as a dark ride and a closed circle from which there is no escape, neither through death nor madness.

The Blind Owl is a masterpiece of existential horror, a portrait from inside a mind deranged by obsession. It is an angry, uncomfortable book, a Persian descendant of Poe, prefiguring Beckett, with touches of central Asian Buddhist imagery. For those intrigued by this text, Hedayat's The Blind Owl Forty Years After, edited by Michael C. Hillman (University of Texas Press, 1978) is an excellent resource for examining its intricacies.