Reading, Part I: Literature

It's amazing how much of a luxury real literature becomes when the bulk of one's reading is confined to The News and various articles of political analysis. Certainly not all of these are abysmal from a literary perspective; the latter genre tends to be by far the better of the two, with writers like Walter Russel Mead, Peter Berger, David Brooks, and Charles Krauthammer furnishing consistently readable columns for the more grammatically snobby among us.

However, it's beyond refreshing to be getting back into (English language) literature mode of late. (There's been plenty of French literature, which is fun in its own right: my current read in that language is Monsieur Larose, est-il l'assassin, a wonderfully vocabulary-and-slang rich psychological parody of the detective novel by one of Belgium's greats, Fernand Crommelynck.) Of course, getting back into the English stuff has required that I reconcile myself with the (rather abhorrent)  idea of "reading books online." I'm not a fan for several reasons, not restricted to my Bourgeois bias in favor of the smell of paper and the palpable roughness of its surface (I tell you, it makes a difference, seeing the way the ink has sunk into the slightly porous pages, rendering the letters coarser, individualizing them in a way you don't get onscreen). Reading something on a laptop also  a.) restricts your movement to places with an (accessible) wireless connection, b.) kind of wears on your eyes after a while, and c.) makes the reading feel cursory. However, it's not like there are English used-book stores everywhere around here, and I'm not about to buy any book that I don't love for full price at one of the many Barnes and Nobles-like establishments in the city. Admittedly, "not everywhere" and "unavailable" are two very different things: I could find the used English books if I wanted to, but motivation is lacking, since I then face the problem of transporting them back to the States.

Fortunately, I did bring one American novel, Saul Bellow's The Victim, along with me; I've been hoarding it up for the "ideal moment" as stingily as I used to hoard up Easter candy as a child. With the end of the semester now in sight, I've begun it, but am still reading it very slowly, preferring to savor it in the park during those rare afternoons when it is actually not raining. It's a good book so far, though I'm loathe to judge before having finished the story. The writing, at any rate, is elegant--simple in the best of senses, and adept at conveying and making realistic an emotional state (chez the main character) that could be easily overwrought or absurd. The violence of the "antagonist's" emotion and the sense of self-disgust that begins to pervade the protagonist's  mindset about halfway through the novel reminds me a lot of Dostoevsky. In fact, I'd have to say it's one of the most thoroughly Dostoevskian post-Dostoevsky works I've encountered. The notable difference here is that the most "Dostoevskian" character is in fact not the protagonist, but someone who's set himself up to work on the protagonist and force the poor guy to share (penitentially, as it were) in his own sentiments of self-loathing.

My more recent online reading (after an excellent short story by Edith Pearlman, available at Commentary magazine) has been Kate Chopin's Awakening. Once again, I'm only about halfway through and thus unable to comment on the story itself. The writing, however, is lovely; not quite Virginia Woolf lovely, but certainly lovely enough to lure the reader into the romanticism of Old Louisiana even as the plot remains somewhat critically aloof of the society it describes. Should be interesting to see how it concludes.

Apropos of little, I've also been reading a lot of Foucault and Hume lately. Mostly for my own "edification" (if one can say "edifying" of either one with a straight face--I am doubtful). Hume I'm rereading mostly out of interest (causality is a continually fascinating topic). However, Foucault's discussions of the discourse of power inherent in any formulation of history and of the way that history itself shapes notions of ethics is certainly relevant to my studies regarding the development of national identities and nationalism (and the ways the different historical circumstances of the Middle East makes certain presuppositions about those societies frankly absurd).

From whence we draw our inspiration...

In this case from my sister's latest trip "to the lighthouse". I was rereading the book by bits and reveling in Woolf's exquisite prose (which stands in first place in my admittedly subjective aesthetic system). This bit is one of my favorites--though as soon as I say that I remember four or five other passages that deserve the distinction just as much. When one begins to quote Woolf, it's difficult indeed to stop. I think what I admire so much about her style is how very intertwined each passage of a novel is with the others. The rhythmic repetition of ideas and phrases throughout doesn't leave me bored, but fascinated, as though I'm watching a weaver at work creating a tapestry--less like the Bayeux tapestry than like a Persian rug in which the same theme is elaborated until any "perceived" is an organic emanation from the picture as a whole. Perhaps that's an excessively complicated way of saying that while you can take a chapter from, say, Jane Austen, and read it as it's own sub-narrative, almost every moment in TTL depends on all the others.

Yes, yes, all moments in a good novel depend on the whole for their full explication, and one can admittedly isolate narrative moments from the rest of a Woolf novel. The distinction is meant to mark tendencies; if the difference were as extreme as the rough Bayeux-Persian analogy, I'd find it difficult to even call Woolf's work "novels".

In any case, here's the quote, and if you go look it up in the book (third section of part II), you'll see what I mean by hating to have to stop here. In itself it's a highly poetic expression of the "modernist dilemma," and you can see from this some indication of Woolf's skill as an essayist. But it's rather unsatisfying on its own; it's a moment that deserves its context, so to speak. I've left out the only narrative moment of the third section, incidentally, which is very short in comparison to the rest, although a huge spoiler, if you care about that sort of thing. Again, read it in context though; that narrative moment makes all the difference.

But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave. Night, however, succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, they darken. Some of them hold aloft clear planets, plates of brightness. The autumn trees, ravaged as they are, take on the flash of tattered flags kindling in the gloom of cool cathedral caves where gold letters on marble pages describe death in battle and how bones bleach and burn far away in Indian sands. The autumn trees gleam in the yellow moonlight, in the light of harvest moons, the light which mellows the energy of labour, and smooths the stubble, and brings the wave lapping blue to the shore.

It seemed now as if, touched by human penitence and all its toil, divine goodness had parted the curtain and displayed behind it, single, distinct, the hare erect; the wave falling; the boat rocking; which, did we deserve them, should be ours always. But alas, divine goodness, twitching the cord, draws the curtain; it does not please him; he covers his treasures in a drench of hail, and so breaks them, so confuses them that it seems impossible that their calm should ever return or that we should ever compose from their fragments a perfect whole or read in the littered pieces the clear words of truth. For our penitence deserves a glimpse only; our toil respite only.

The nights now are full of wind and destruction; the trees plunge and bend and their leaves fly helter skelter until the lawn is plastered with them and they lie packed in gutters and choke rain pipes and scatter damp paths. Also the sea tosses itself and breaks itself, and should any sleeper fancying that he might find on the beach an answer to his doubts, a sharer of his solitude, throw off his bedclothes and go down by himself to walk on the sand, no image with semblance of serving and divine promptitude comes readily to hand bringing the night to order and making the world reflect the compass of the soul. The hand dwindles in his hand; the voice bellows in his ear. Almost it would appear that it is useless in such confusion to ask the night those questions as to what, and why, and wherefore, which tempt the sleeper from his bed to seek an answer.

[I should hope, incidentally, that anyone reading this would catch the Matthew Arnold reference. If you don't immediately see what I mean, please refer to "Dover Beach" for your own good.]

The shift from childhood to adulthood, Or: does growing up mean you've "changed"?

Ever since I came to the unsettling realization that I'm "grown up", I've been fascinated by the subtlety of this process, particularly as it affects one's ways of thinking. How do kids think compared to how adults think?

One thing I've noticed is how easy it becomes once one hits, say about twenty, to start underestimating kids. "Oh, he's only ten, he doesn't understand," one thinks...and then one realizes, with a bit of a start, that one understood X or Y quite well at ten oneself. At some point, the move into the adult world at least mostly complete, one begins to separate the experience of being a child from that of being an adult. Yet this is constantly gainsaid by one's own memories, in which the experiences aren't distinctly divided at any point. More simply, you are still "yourself" in your memories of being ten. Not "a ten year old".

Certainly, thought becomes increasingly capable of nuance and tolerant of incompleteness; one loses a certain amount of one's previous faith in reason to carry through to the bitter end of all inquiry, and then realizes that's not such a bad thing. One becomes increasingly capable of making distinctions (between people and their ideas, between the "good" aspects of certain beliefs and the ones that are less than supportable, etc). But what I can't help finding fascinating is how constant one's basic principles, both intellectual and moral, and even one's interests, remain from about the age of four on. In other words, the aspects of one's identity susceptible to alteration seem to be given their penultimate form fairly early on in life.

Not that one can't change these later; the process of change in adulthood is, however, slow and difficult, working against one's "character".

It might be helpful if I allowed myself a moment to expand on my current ideas about character. "Character" is something that I understand to be a product of free will interacting with surrounding material circumstances which it cannot control. Therefore it is fully "chosen" in the moral/determinative sense, the sense that insofar as one is inclined to certain interests, one chooses freely to pursue them, and, more importantly, insofar as one understands right and wrong one's actions are free and may be judged according to the extent to which, within the constraints of that understanding of right and wrong, one chooses the "good". However, character is also "determined" to an extent by material circumstances (a notion perfectly compatible with Catholic theology if you note that God would have put different individuals in different material circumstances expecting people to react to them accordingly; you can find plenty of support for the notion in St. Paul). One's interests, one's intellectual preoccupations, and even (in a fallen world where natural law may be imperfectly perceived) one's understanding of right and wrong can be largely determined according to material circumstances. This is not to say that "material circumstances determine action"; acts are always to at least some extent the product of free will, unless you're talking about something like sleepwalking.* However, I do see the range of action to be determined by circumstance, which, when you're looking at moral issues, will have certain ramifications when it comes to culpability. What sort of ramifications and to what extent? Ha, well, that's why we've got that little reminder to "judge not lest ye be judged".

In short, I'm basically advocating a view that merges elements of the traditionally contradictory Greek moira and persona understandings of character, and that does so invoking the Christian distinction between absolute morality and individual culpability. That is, action considered purely vs. the state of the soul.

La di da.

To get back to what I was saying about the development of character, however: character can, in my view, develop, but the culmination of material constraints over the years, compounded by the force of habit (another material aspect--repetition--though one driven, at least initially, by choice), ensures that "character" is something quite deeply ingrained in an individual.  It's not simply a "mask" that one can put on and take off as the Greek notion of persona describes it. When you choose, you're choosing in the context of an ever-lengthening series of past actions, accumulated habits, and the material circumstances both totally out of your control and those which you had once chosen but which are now out of your control. Obviously, that's not to say character equates to one's moira either; one isn't "fated" to act a certain way. But unless you have a fairly strong will to change (and a fairly strong reason to do so), who you were and how you thought as a child is likely to stay constant in many important respects as time passes.

Now what got me thinking on this train of thought may serve to demonstrate how constant certain aspects of one's character (in this case mostly interests, which, yes, I do think belong in a consideration of character, and I could and probably will someday go into a long exposition of Elizabeth Bennet's apparently shallow "And of all this I might have been the mistress" reason for warming to Darcy...). Specifically, I was remembering the mass of childhood writing I found while cleaning out my room in early September. I found it rather amusing to see how little some things change. Oh, I really have been interested in X for all that long? Oh, wait, I've been thinking about that since then? For example:

•  The fact that I've been writing so long at all is the most obvious example. Tucked away in the corner of some box I found a tiny notebook in which I had been writing a story around the age of five...the estimate comes from the fact that I was writing it about "baby Jo-jo," who would be my now-seventeen-year-old brother. Who would be mortified, of course, to have such a name recalled now. Good thing he doesn't read blogs. It was basically about the difficulties of taking a baby to the hairdresser for my mom's appointment; I remember starting the story in the salon because the hairdresser had just given me the notebook. This story also had the fantastically idiosyncratic name of "Mer-mee-mook book". I do not remember why, but I suspect it may have had something to do with the fact that I always found rhyming extraordinarily funny. I do remember tucking it in the box soon after coming home with the intention of writing another chapter that never would be written; starting and leaving writing unfinished is another habit I've kept unfortunately intact over the years.
• I also kept a diary from the ages of six to eight, according to the dates. That's not to say that I kept it with any discipline. There's a total of about fifteen entries in there. What one can gather from them, however, is telling. For one, my rather inordinate pride in my family has been around for at least sixteen years! And here I thought it had developed in college. Nope. There's plenty of boasting about how "My sister is learning to read. I am very proud of her." "Jo-Jo is learning X". "William is the best baby." And many more extravagant claims for which I cannot remember the priceless wording. Much of the rest is devoted to talking about how great our animals are and my feelings when they died. Okay, not everything has remained so constant.
• An early entry records what I believe was probably my first "poem" (or so I dubbed it):
• Papa is walking and walking,/While Mama is talking and talking.
• Not altogether unobservant, I suppose. Apparently my interest in writing poetry, despite the stubborn hatred of reading it that lasted until I was in my senior year of high school, goes back a bit. I do remember being highly critical of all attempts, however. They usually ended up in the fire, which is rather a bad thing now, considering how amusing it is to look back on such things.
• I also discovered a "eulogy" I had written for our first cat, who perished in the most traumatic way possible by being hit by a car on my seventh birthday. It didn't make it any better that I was the one to find the body. Ah well. The eulogy was touching. Bearing excellent testimony to the obsession with cats that is still strong in our family, even taken to extremes by my brothers, the younger of whom seem to turn every conversation to the topic of: "Penelope just learned how to jump on our shoulders," etc.
• A list of "life plans" dated August 1997 includes these directives: 
• Write
• Find out how everything works
• Visit Russia (and yes, I am still fascinated by that country, having since hosted [or had my parents host] several Russian exchange students, read tons of Russian history and novels, compiled three full play lists of Russian music [classical, folk, and Orthodox chant], and commenced study of the Russian language)
• Read War and Peace (at that age I only knew that it was a big book and people would be impressed if I read it), the whole Bible, and any other important books I could find
• Learn Irish (this one sadly died off; my interests did grow a bit more practical with time)
• Go to Europe
• Practice the piano every day (if only) 
• Go to Colby College (I did actually apply, but then turned down admission in favor of UD in one of those nearly inexplicable changes of opinion that proves providential in the long run)
• Learn how to cook really well
• Get good at archery (I had gotten a real bow as a birthday present that year; again, not all interests are permanent--partly because of lack of time and opportunity) 
• There were plenty of other "to-do" lists, mostly compiled in cooperation with my siblings. The various lists included directions for how to:
• Stop fighting (haha, that one never worked)
• Train for the Olympics
• Send money to Africa
• Only that last was ever remotely successful. However, the interests in doing all these things have remained to one extent or another. No Olympics, nor any interest in getting to them, but I do at least want to be as good as possible at running.
• Some very elementary musings about what it means to be "good" that I wrote after a long conversation with my mom about Scarlett O'Hara, Bill Clinton, and Rush Limbaugh, in which she essentially introduced me to the idea that one must always distinguish between a person's value as a person, their "potential," as she put it, and their actions. Also that you need to give people the benefit of the doubt regarding their intentions; as I understand it in retrospect, it was basically a simplified version of the culpability vs. morality distinction. Scarlett's infamous "Even if I have to lie, steal, cheat or kill. As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again" speech had disturbed me greatly, I recall, and was the catalyst for the conversation. Which we had in the cellar while Mum was doing the laundry. Since then, it's been one of my core ideas (homeschooling works out pretty darn well when your mom is clever enough to put basic philosophical concepts into simple language and make them seem natural to little kids).
• One of my personal favorites out of everything I found, however, was a short essay on how "Knowledge is Power". You can't say that conviction has changed much over the years. It basically defended reading as a form of knowledge (was this an assignment or an argument that my reading time shouldn't be limited? I don't remember) and went on at length to elaborate on the various ways that knowing things will give you an edge in life, both materially and spiritually. As I may have mentioned before, the unbridled optimism of this conviction has been tempered. But the gist remains the same. So very amusing.

*Which I wouldn't actually consider to be an 'action' per se.

Problems with Writing

The problem with keeping a blog is that there's so much to write about. And choosing between topics can become so overwhelming that one just doesn't write at all. And then there's the fact that if I'm not at the computer, thinking with the keyboard, so to speak, I'm probably not going to write anything out at all. I've been figuring out recently that I really do write primarily to clarify my own thoughts. And so, suppose I have some really interesting idea about the relationship between the dream-world neoplatonism of the symbolists and the French reaction against naturalism...well, it's most likely that I'll have thought about it to my heart's content while attending lecture, or in between class, or on the fifty-minute tram ride back to my apartment. At that point, why write it down? It's become rather boring, and there are plenty of new things to read and think about. Writing would be (or so it seems in that state) superfluous, almost a waste of time.

There's another problem too. One that usually interferes with my intentions to write a "series", such as my so-far two part discussion of the development of European nationalism. Unless one writes out all the parts very quickly, one will almost inevitably read, hear, or think of something that complicates the predicted thesis. Such as Turkey. Or the Middle East in general. Now I really, really, really want to talk about Arab Spring in relation to the birth of nationalism, but I have to reluctantly admit that currently I know very little about the area's historical background. You know, Ottoman Empire, but not much more. So I'll have to confine myself to making oblique references suggesting connections and/or differences between what's going on there and what happened in the mid-1800s in eastern Europe.

On the other hand, I'm encouraged to start up that series again by the fact that all of my suppositions about the development of nationalism in France and England were 100% supported by the most recent lecture I attended. So I feel as though I'm somewhere near the right track, at least.

Now though, I'd rather give a few travel updates for those of my relatives who are actually probably a lot more interested in what I'm doing than in questions of the nature of the nation-state. And then perhaps finally answer Joseph's question at Ironical Coincidings--something I've been putting off along with the rest of my blogging for a few days. (Yay for long and boring IR readings! --Not Irving Renaissance...international relations.)

"I Want to Believe"

One starts by making one concession to popular culture, and it all comes rushing in. Everything is making me think of that really-not-quite-Shakespeare television show, the X-Files lately. Even this quote from Flannery O'Connor: "I think there is no suffering greater than that caused by the doubts of those who want to believe. I know what torment that is. But I can only see it in myself anyway as the process by which faith is deepened. What people don't realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket when, of course, it is the cross."

Interestingly enough, that's something that the show kind of gets right. The characters who "want to believe" (remember that rather corny movie title?) aren't exactly drawing comfort from it. The risks run from job loss to the discomfort of knowing that life is rather darker than it seems. But somehow the truth itself is worth knowing. The ultimate non-utilitarian understanding of truth: not the Jamesian definition of truth as "whatever works, but the age-old understanding of truth as that which is real. Aristotle starts his Nicomachean Ethics with the claim that: "All men by nature desire to know." A life run like a well-oiled machine, free from the discomfort of grinding gears and occasional breakdowns may be desirable from a utilitarian perspective. But courageous thinkers from Plato through Aquinas and Maritain find truth an end good in itself. X-Files, as I've complained before, doesn't know what that truth is, and only half hints at times that God might have something to do with it. But in a society where utilitarianism has so much sway on the cultural consciousness, "I Want to Believe" (one might clarify, "even if the truth is uncomfortable") isn't such a terrible place to start.

Part Three: Faulkner

Despite the vast differences between their narrative styles, both Austen and Flaubert seek to understand an individual through externals. Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, by contrast, uses a variety of first-person narrators to give the reader direct access to individual consciousnesses: these consciousnesses, then, become the defining aspect of each character. Within the framework established by a controlling, selecting “narrative consciousness” are fifteen different accounts of the novel's action, each given by a secondary narrator with his or her own understanding of reality. The portion that Addie Bundren narrates from her coffin is strikingly different in focus from Cora Tull’s hypocritically religious interpretation of events or Anse’s unthinkingly self-centered understanding. Whereas the rest of the characters address and interpret the action and events of the novel directly, she explains the journey to the cemetery in Jefferson in terms of the deep, underlying motivations that led her to request this burial in the first place. The following passage is taken from her account of her early marriage to Anse, just after the birth of her first-born, Cash. Central to the paragraph is her preoccupation with the randomness and insecurity of language, a preoccupation that directs the course of her gradual withdrawal from husband and children into what she attempts to make a world of pure act, unmediated by the forms and words that seem to her to betray the truth of experience.

“He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn’t need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear. Cash did not need to say it to me nor I to him, and I would say, Let Anse use it, if he wants to. So that it was Anse or love; love or Anse: it didn’t matter.” (164)

The narrative consciousness that frames Addie’s account preserves the idiosyncrasies of her stream-of-consciousness, to the point of using punctuation less in a conventional manner to separate discreet portions of dialogue (as an Austen would do) than in a manner that reflects the pauses and progressions of the experienced thought process. Commas mark mental pauses rather than grammatical units, and quotations are incorporated into Addie’s thought without the distinguishing quotation mark to set them off from her consciousness. This technique allows the reader, even as Addie explains her suspicion of language, to garner much additional information about her personality and character simply through the way in which this argument is presented.

The triad of short, dismissive sentences with which she commences indicates the skepticism that controls the paragraph; yet these abrupt dismissals of Anse’s “word” contrast with the complexity of structure and length at which she recounts her own visceral rejection of Anse’s perspective. She is either unwilling or unable (likely both) to examine the nuances of his consciousness, and will thus retain hers as the measure of everything she confronts. The anadiplosis and repetition of structures (I knew that. . ., that) also leads us to a sense of her everywhere-apparent intensity. She rejects Anse’s words out of hand and elsewhere rejects the verbal even violently, because she feels strongly about the insufficiency of this mode of understanding. Words cannot bring about the mingling of blood that she longs for as a means of defeating her isolation; Cash, as the fruit of her womb, is the only creature, at this point, she believes, to have “violated” her aloneness, and he correspondingly does not need words to communicate with her. One cannot truly, she argues, “fill a lack” satisfactorily with a “shape”; she has found this to be consistently the case in her experience, pointing to “the others” that have also failed to be of any use at “the right time”.

By the time we reach the end of the paragraph, the narrative consciousness has made clear precisely how Addie's rant about language relates, not merely to her personality and ideas, but to the plot unfolding as she speaks. Not only are words useless to convey meaning; Anse also is meaningless to her. His name can be interchanged with no alteration of what is being said with the “empty” term, “love”: despite being her husband, he too has failed to fill the lack, to connect blood with blood in the manner that she feels necessary. This point is crucial to her motivation for demanding the trip to Jefferson. Anse and love both are things that to her “d[on’t] matter,” and by the time she has had her affair with Whitfield she has similarly rejected both Cash and Darl, thinking them away so that “it doesn’t matter what they call” these two sons either. All that is left to her now as the root of her identity is the blood of her forbears in the soil in Jefferson; the family that she has acquired through ritual and verbal assent has no meaning for her. She demands the trip as “revenge” for being tricked by “words older than love or Anse”; her revenge is to get the better of this deception at Anse’s expense, to affirm the meaning of her roots above the meaning of the new life she rejects even as she participates in it.

Part Two: Flaubert

Performance is central to Austen’s aesthetic, both technically and philosophically. Flaubert’s meticulously-crafted short story, “A Simple Heart,” is similarly concerned with exploring the relationship between external action and the essence of a person, but unlike Pride and Prejudice, this tale of a simple servant woman with an extraordinary capacity for love does not focus on the relationship of personality to character. Félicité is, rather, a woman in whom choice and disposition are so fully integrated that there is no tension between the consistently selfless actions she undertakes and the sentiment towards which she is disposed. As we see in the following passage, Flaubert’s objective, removed narrator focuses not on tensions within Félicité’s character, but on the external challenges that the continual stripping-away of all the objects of her affection presents to her outlook on the world.

“For two nights Félicité never left the dead girl. She said the same prayers over and over again, sprinkled holy water on the sheets, then sat down again to watch. At the end of her first vigil, she noticed that the child’s face had gone yellow, the lips were turning blue, the nose looked sharper, and the eyes were sunken. She kissed them several times, and would not have been particularly surprised if Virginie had opened them again: to minds like hers the supernatural is a simple matter. She laid her out, wrapped her in a shroud, put her in her coffin, placed a wreath on her, and spread out her hair. It was fair and amazingly long for her age. Félicité cut off a big lock, half of which she slipped into her bosom, resolving never to part with it.” (39-40)

The death of the beloved young girl is only one in the series of losses that forms the substance of the narrative. Whatever brings Félicité joy—the arrival of a long-lost sister, the visits of her nephew, Victor, or the parrot Loulou—is stripped away from her, either by others or by circumstance. Yet despite every trial her character remains constant in its uncomplaining fidelity. The narrative voice juxtaposes the fidelity of the vigil with detail upon detail of the corpse’s inexorable decay, yet despite this narrative objectivity, the analytical comment “to minds like hers the supernatural is simple matter” does not leave the reader unaffected. Despite its objectivity, this observation, paired with the relentless material realism used to describe the corpse, propels us towards Félicité in sympathy while leaving us astonished at the constancy inherent in her response. Her simple, repetitive action culminates when she cuts lock of the girl's hair, preserving the single part of the corpse that retains its former beauty. This impulse to continue the vigil long past its material extent leads her to memorialize her lost loved one: a movement that she undertakes again and again in the story. Whether collecting a lock of Virginie’s hair or preserving Loulou’s stuffed body, Félicité accumulates material objects as tiny memorials to fill the shabby little room that is all that is left to her by the end of her life. In committing them to her memory, Félicité maintains her loving vigil, while the narrator's focus on these external manifestations of her memorialization avoids the sentimentality that might mar the description. Félicité's character is untarnished by loss because she has preserved all that she loves within an interior that the vagaries of the material world cannot access. Just as the narrator can access Félicité’s interior self only through the image of the time-worn room filled with bric-a-brac, so the ravages of time can only affect the external beings that contribute to her happiness, without accessing the core of joy that remains within herself.

Austen's Performative Art

Part one of a series of readings of three different novels, examining a dichotomy between individual life and social life that is very much pertinent to my study of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.

Pride and Prejudice is renowned for Austen's brilliant use of a satirical narrative voice, but equally brilliant is her use of dialogue to force the analytical narrator out of the spotlight and allow the interaction of one or more characters to stand on its own. The following exchange between Elizabeth and Darcy at the Netherfield ball is entirely performative, yet conveys a complete depiction of the dramatic tension of the novel, elsewhere explained by the narrator.

“Are you consulting your own feelings in the present case, or do you imagine that you are gratifying mine?”

“Both,” replied Elizabeth archly; “for I have always seen a great similarity in the turn of our minds. We are each of an unsocial, taciturn disposition, unwilling to speak, unless we expect to say something that will amaze the whole room, and be handed down to posterity with all the eclat of a proverb.”

“This is no very striking resemblance of your own character, I am sure,” said he. “How near it may be to mine, I cannot pretend to say. You think it a faithful portrait undoubtedly.”

“I must not decide on my own performance.”

As in any well-crafted theatrical piece, Elizabeth's hostility to Darcy is here conveyed through phrasing and implication rather than through narrative comment, while Darcy's growing attraction is communicated through his even-tempered response. Darcy's ironic “imagine” conveys his still-lively pride (she is wrong, he believes), yet leaves open the possibility that Elizabeth's “mistakenness” is rooted in an honest desire to “gratify” his feelings. Elizabeth, meanwhile, by presenting her judgment as an observation on their “similarity,” cleverly manages to maintain basic courtesy while criticizing him severely. They are not really similar in this respect: no attentive reader would argue that Elizabeth is unsocial and taciturn. Darcy himself understands this clearly, and rejects it as “no very striking resemblance of [her] own character”; his earlier reluctance to take offense at Elizabeth, however, again leads him to assume that “[she] think[s] it a faithful portrait” of him.

Within these few lines, Austen is able to address in miniature one of central the ethical concerns of the novel. Whatever emotional tensions are at its root, the subject of the conversation is the relationship between character and personality as this relation affects the possibility of judging another. Darcy rightly cavils at Elizabeth's claim to know him well enough to paint a faithful portrait of him. Yet whereas Elizabeth speaks of “disposition,” a term referring to the sum of one's personal inclinations, Darcy insists on saying “character,” a term traditionally associated with the way conscious choice builds upon the foundation of innate personality. Elsewhere in the narrative, he admits Elizabeth's claim about his disposition: he does incline to being reserved around strangers. Yet despite using the term “disposition,” Elizabeth moves implicitly into a discussion of character, of what the person inclined to taciturnity will actually do in a social context, when she asserts that Darcy is “unwilling to speak, unless [he] say[s] something that will amaze the whole room.” Elizabeth's judgment is hasty of course: Darcy is not merely arrogant, and if he does at times act thus, he struggles against the tendency.

However, while Darcy urges a qualification to her claim, he feels that he “cannot pretend to say” whether it is an accurate description of his own character cannot without being just as arrogant as Elizabeth considers him. Ironically, Elizabeth's lighthearted reply that she is likewise unable to “decide on [her] own performance” reveals that her understanding of the extent self-knowledge is fundamentally similar to Darcy's. One can have an accurate idea of one's own disposition, but it is arrogant to assume perfect knowledge of one's character: the latter is a social fact, not the sole property of an individual. Correspondingly one may, if highly perceptive (like Elizabeth) have some idea of another's personality, but this idea must necessarily be extrapolated from the other's social presentation. Only when Elizabeth comes to a better understanding of Darcy's character will she understand that he is in disposition more than a taciturn, arrogant individual: he is kind and generous precisely because he has cultivated these elements of his disposition through his performance of good actions.

“The Pseudo-Homeric World of Mrs. Dalloway.”

Hoff reads Mrs. Dalloway in light of Joyce’s contemporaneous publication of Ulysses, arguing that Woolf utilizes classical literary tradition in a manner that parodies Joyce’s “rigidly restrictive” employment of his Homeric inheritance. Finding obscure Homeric references in Woolf’s depiction of minor characters such as Mr. Bowley (who is “sealed with wax”) and Miss Kilman (recalling Scylla and Charybdis through her monstrous appetite both for food and people), the essay focuses on the parallels between Peter Walsh and Odysseus. Several of these parallels are persuasive at least in their potential as frameworks within which to understand this character; the identification of the garden world of Bourton as the Calypsean locus amoenus to which Peter desires constantly to return, but from which he is repeatedly distracted, is a particularly promising instance of this parallel. However, the essay suffers from two weaknesses. For one, it falls into the common trap of pushing a parallel a bit too far; many of the instances Hoff presents are almost impossible to give credence to, such as the idea that Peter’s visit to Clarissa is consciously reminiscent of Odysseus’ visit to Helen’s chamber towards the beginning of the Odyssey. Moreover, though purportedly aimed at pointing out the parodic nature of the text, Hoff neglects to provide any discussion of how exactly the parallels she discerns would be a parody  of Ulysses rather than a simple imitation, or at best, a project coincidentally similar in drawing on the Homeric world.

Lucio Ruotolo's "The Interrupted Moment: A View of Virginia Woolf’s Novels"

Devoting a chapter to each of Woolf’s novels, Ruotolo incisively examines the phenomenon interruption as seen in the lives of Woof’s characters. The ability to accommodate interruption indicates an openness to undefined experience, he argues.  He contrasts the average citizen as he or she appears in Woolf’s non-fiction works, with the heroines of her novels; the former tend to rest in society’s formulaic explanations for the complexities of human life, while the latter habitually indulge “interruptions,” physical or intellectual, that allow them to conceive of the world more richly. The chapter on Mrs. Dalloway is particularly illuminating, as he makes use not only of Woolf’s non-fiction, but is able to highlight the way this patience with interruption grows into a primary characteristic of Clarissa Dalloway by contrasting the finished novel with the study “Mrs. Dalloway’s Party.”  In the finished novel she is tempted to “crystallize the present” (108),  as Ruotolo puts it, moving, for instance, from an intense enjoyment of the particularities of London during her flower-buying errand, to see the footmen and mysterious car as permanent signs of an unchanging, stable reality within her society. Yet the climactic party succeeds so well, Ruotolo argues convincingly, precisely because it is an image of Clarissa’s triumph over such impulse to reduce her experience to symbols: circulating among her guests to ensure the comfort of each, she allows the party to develop a life of its own and so “entertains a world of motion and change” (117).

Jacob Littleton's “Portrait of the Artist as a Middle-Aged Woman”

Littleton’s essay teems with fruitful and perceptive observations about aspects of Mrs. Dalloway ranging from the eponymous character’s conception of life to the contrast between community and individual isolation. The body of the paper focuses primarily on defining Clarissa’s artistic endeavor, arguing that her love of life for its own sake is at the heart of her ability to transmute this love into a communal setting at her climactic party. Her heightened awareness of existence leads her to find unity with others in shared experience and memory of shared experience, and Littleton intelligently characterizes her secular “faith” in such communal moments as a counter to the fear of death (physical or societal) that plagues her even to the close of her triumphant party. This excellent argument, however, forms only the central portion of the paper, and is rather weakened by being couched in political language that relates only distantly to his attempt to characterize her artistry. Depicting Clarissa as a subversive element in the midst of a stifling traditional society, the close of the paper comes off as rather bathetic after the highly engaging discussion of the body.

Forbe's “Equating Performance with Identity: The Failure of Clarissa Dalloway’s Victorian ‘Self’ in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.”

What a pretentiously-titled essay, no? Forbes concentrates on the tension between private identity and the performance of a public role as it plays out in this day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway. Buying unquestioningly into her role as hostess, her day regulated by the demanding chimes of the Big Ben clocktower, Clarissa makes the error of equating her performance with identity, Forbes argues. The essay places much interpretive weight upon her occasionally-mentioned wish that everyone could “merely be themselves,” pointing out that her failure to pursue romance in the person of Peter Walsh, is an instance of her not being herself. Because personal desire conflicts with her social role, she is not, she believes, a unified self, as the Victorian aesthetic of her patriarchal society demands that she be. In pursuit of such unity, she substitutes role-playing for individuality, allowing the former state to dominate the latter impulse and decomplexify her identity. The essay makes in passing some valid points about individual symbols occurring throughout the novel (Big Ben, the streets of London), and some good observations about Clarissa’s thought process. But in seeing her as an essentially “failed” character, who has caved to the demands of a patriarchal society while ignoring all of the moments when Woolf emphasizes the ethically-oriented aspect of being a hostess, of trying to bring others into a temporary community, the essay makes essentially the same error it accuses Mrs. Dalloway of committing. Extrapolating a single, supposedly definitive, feminist interpretation of the novel from a few observations, it fails to see Woolf’s novel in the full complexity it deserves.

La Madeleine

Another, less purely humorous, but still not very serious poem. Since I'm being lazy about blogging of late (think: French thesis, long 20th Century paper, and the pesky little Am Lit paper I still haven't started), I'm just reposting things. Amateur, because this is effectively the first I've written.

The wind sprang up
at nine o'clock.
A sweeter breath
of autumn air
danced through my hair.

A honeyed scent
of falling leaves
and burning ash
breathed in here, now,
and I am back,

small, gazing up,
the summer breeze
quaking the heath
while honey bees
choreograph

spirals through gray
brush and lavender.
The peat moss bows
red caps—a grave
wind-bent salute—

until they brush
the brownish wisps
of younger hair,
then fall from thought.
Till scent breathed in

unearths some hoard;
till rustled hair
exhumes old air;
and kindled there,
autumnal leaves

are seen capped in
scarlet flame tips
tipping closer
as the wind-borne
wood breath dances.

Explanations and Excuses

The general lack of any original material on this blog of late can be explained away by a few facts.

-I have work to do this semester for what is arguably the first time in my college career. Writing twenty-five pages in French is actually a bit of a challenge. Not super-much, but it still requires a bit of time. Writing a twenty-page English paper is also something to get used to, not because it's hard to fill twenty pages (not at all), but because the usual mindless rhythm of the six page essay is no longer appropriate. One has to consider things like pacing for the first time since high school.

-Academia is not my life. Neither is blogging. If it comes down to it, I'd much prefer to spend all my free time (of which there is still quite a lot, marvelously!) cooking large dinners, having dinner parties, talking to people, drinking real eggnog, reading something for fun, or tasting wine on a Saturday evening.

Est modus in rebus, as Horace would say.

Auden Yet Again

This Auden fellow is really quite insightful sometimes. One further comment on one of the reasons writers generally have very mixed feelings about publicizing their work. It's a bit of an elitist remark in some respects; I think I'd be more comfortable with it in general if the conclusion were "if a good ethos were equally distributed among all men." But still.

Every writer would rather be rich than poor, but no genuine writer cares about popularity as such. He needs approval of his work by others in order to be reassured that the vision of life he believes he has had is a true vision and not a self-delusion, but he can only be reassured by those whose judgment he respects. It would only be necessary for a writer to secure universal popularity if imagination and intelligence were equally distributed among all men.

The Fictionality of Fiction

According to Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass. Rather brilliant little book.

`Now, if you'll only attend, Kitty, and not talk so much, I'll tell you all my ideas about Looking-glass House. First, there's the room you can see through the glass -- that's just the same as our drawing room, only the things go the other way. I can see all of it when I get upon a chair -- all but the bit behind the fireplace. Oh! I do so wish I could see that bit! I want so much to know whether they've a fire in the winter: you never can tell, you know, unless our fire smokes, and then smoke comes up in that room too -- but that may be only pretence, just to make it look as if they had a fire. Well then, the books are something like our books, only the words go the wrong way; I know that, because I've held up one of our books to the glass, and then they hold up one in the other room.

`How would you like to live in Looking-glass House, Kitty? I wonder if they'd give you milk in there? Perhaps Looking-glass milk isn't good to drink -- But oh, Kitty! now we come to the passage. You can just see a little peep of the passage in Looking-glass House, if you leave the door of our drawing-room wide open: and it's very like our passage as far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different on beyond. Oh, Kitty! how nice it would be if we could only get through into Looking- glass House! I'm sure it's got, oh! such beautiful things in it!

Let's pretend there's a way of getting through into it, somehow, Kitty. Let's pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through. Why, it's turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! It'll be easy enough to get through -- ' She was up on the chimney-piece while she said this, though she hardly knew how she had got there. And certainly the glass was beginning to melt away, just like a bright silvery mist.

In another moment Alice was through the glass, and had jumped lightly down into the Looking-glass room. The very first thing she did was to look whether there was a fire in the fireplace, and she was quite pleased to find that there was a real one, blazing away as brightly as the one she had left behind. `So I shall be as warm here as I was in the old room,' thought Alice: `warmer, in fact, because there'll be no one here to scold me away from the fire. Oh, what fun it'll be, when they see me through the glass in here, and can't get at me!'

More Auden

"In literature, as in life, affectation, passionately adopted and loyally persevered in, is one of the chief forms of self-discipline by which mankind has raised itself by its own bootstraps."

Auden on Writing

"Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about. There is a certain kind of person who is so dominated by the desire to be loved for himself alone that he has constantly to test those around him by tiresome behavior; what he says and does must be admired, not because it is intrinsically admirable, but because it is his remark, his act. Does not this explain a good deal of avant-garde art?"

Impersonality in Woolf

Being the T.S. Eliot junkie I am, I've been rather fascinated--if not particularly surprised--to see the concept of the "impersonality" of the artist explicitly voiced in many other writings than his "Tradition and the Individual Talent". Because of his towering status, and his remarkable talent for expressing critical concepts in a way that made them seem unquestionable, people tend to remember his formulation. But the same idea exists in Yeats, Pound, Hulme, and last, but certainly not least, Virginia Woolf.

This idea Eliot expresses as follows: "What happens [in creating a work of art] is a continual surrender of [the artist's self] as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality." One can get at a good idea of what he means here by considering that when you read an excellent book or poem, you're not primarily interested in what the author was feeling when he or she wrote it. (Not that the common assumption isn't the opposite--that art is sloppy self-expression.) The artist's actual experience and emotions will almost inevitable play a part in the creation of the work, insofar as the artist is a human person with emotions like everyone else, but the work itself is not merely an expression of those. The artist is "a medium and not a personality", as he puts it, not something himself to be communicated, but the means by which the pressure of the artistic process is exerted on the objects of everyday life to create a coherent whole out of what is otherwise disjointed.

It's hardly a surprise that Virginia Woolf, well-read and part of the highly literary Bloomsbury group which Eliot himself frequented would have been acquainted with this notion of impersonality, nor that this would be one of the objects she tried to achieve in her art. What did surprise me a little upon reading To the Lighthouse for the Twentieth Century Literature class was how explicitly she lays out this aesthetic within the novel itself.

The novel is famously divided into three parts, the highly experimental central part, "Time Passes", being (logically enough) a lyrical evocation of the passage of time and its inexorable erosion of the human constructs that have brought order to life. Both the first and second parts, by contrast, deal with the creation of a work of art. At the end of part one, Mrs. Ramsay, the paradigm of the gracious hostess, brings the "work of art" of a perfectly harmonized dinner party into being. Part three then ends with the parallel completion of a painting by Lily Briscoe, one of the guests at the Ramsays' summer house. Now just before either work of art is achieved, something rather important has to happen: both Mrs. Ramsay and Lily undergo a loss of personality that allows them to identify with the Lighthouse, the overarching guiding image of the novel.

"Losing personality," Mrs. Ramsay muses, "one lost the fret, the hurry, the stir; and there rose to her lips always some exclamation of triumph over life when things came together in this peace, this rest, this eternity". This peace, rest, and eternity are what she hopes to achieve in the dinner party, and what she will in fact accomplish. The tensions of "personalities" subside as each guest, under her tacit direction, subordinates his or her individual likes and dislikes to the artistic unity of the evening. This may be seen as regrettably hypocritical by some. Lily certainly feels a twinge of regret for the honesty of self-expression that Mrs. Ramsay's created order denies, saying to herself after a bit of conversation with the generally disliked Charles Tansley, "She had done the usual trick--been nice. She would never know him. He would never know her." But any brutal honesty displayed to Charles would be out of place in this unusual work of art that is so contingent not merely on Mrs. Ramsay's direction, but upon the cooperation of the participants. (By analogy one may imagine that the best of Shakespearean plays, untainted by the author's personality, may nonetheless be marred as a total work of art if the actors playing the parts cannot cooperate with the words on the page and insist upon bringing in their personal lives to their performances.) No cooperation would be necessary, however, without Mrs. Ramsay's personal success in effacing her own personality to the point at which she can be seen as "like" the Lighthouse. "It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things...felt they became one..." And in this disposition, she can attach herself to the other : to the Lighthouse's last, "long steady stroke" or--and this is most important--to another person. Because that is precisely what the dinner party and its aftermath end up being. Art as portrayed in "To the Lighthouse" is not merely some theoretical literary unity as it can come off in the essays of Eliot's younger days. It helps to effect human unity, to enable love that is the loss of the individual's preoccupation with self in his or her desire to know another. Lily, by not displaying her dislike for Charles at the dinner is enabled to later remember him not by that initial dislike, but by the moment of mutual liking brought about some indefinite time later with Mrs. Ramsay acting as catalyst. And in the aftermath of the dinner party, Mrs. Ramsay is able to wordlessly relate to her husband in a way that had been consistently elusive up to that point in the novel as she turns away from what is now her image in the Lighthouse to smile at him.

Lily's case can be covered in fewer words, now that this pattern is established. She is initially frustrated in her efforts to complete her painting by Mr. Ramsay's too-strong personality: "He imposed himself. He changed everything." (It will, incidentally, be Mr. Ramsay's moment of redemption when he too reaches the Lighthouse and has ceased in some way to impose himself.) But a sudden surge of sympathy in Lily allows her to resolve her resentment of him as he heads out on his journey to the Lighthouse, and this opens the door to a whole series of revelations about the nature of Mrs. Ramsay, of art, and of what is necessary to complete the painting. Mrs. Ramsay has been the one to teach Lily the value (though I would argue she only realizes it now) of "giving, giving, giving." And now Lily is able to make the connection between this selflessness, this lack of desire to merely express oneself, and the making of art. "'You' and 'I' and 'she' pass and vanish; nothing stays; all changes; but not words, not paint. The crucial aspect of the painting she creates is not the intent behind it, but "what it attempted", the effort to achieve unity is what "remained forever".

Why Style Matters

I've always been rather profoundly disgusted with much modern fiction. Let me express a caveat: I have certainly read very little of it in its entirety. Generally I pick up a book, read a few chapters, and then have to close it in disgust--the style is abysmal.

While digging around in the archives of First Things, I came across a mildly dismissive mention of this article from the Atlantic Monthly by B.R. Myers. Apparently back in 2001, this article provoked a barrage of criticism; no surprise--the entire thing bashes the literary establishment, particularly the tendency of critics to moon over "literary" writers at the expense of all others. I am not enamoured of the basic thesis of the article. Myers is expressing little more original thought than the classic Marxist criticism of elitist literature. He wants Stephen King's horror novels and such to be accorded an equal place in the developing canon of literature as the works of Proulx and McCarthy.

I think there's some merit in being stylistically excellent. The interesting thing is that despite his basic thesis, Myers clearly does as well. In fact the truly interesting part of the article (and the bulk) is devoted to incisive analyses of the prose styles of these darlings of the literary world. He's quite good at this.

In fact, the portion of the article that I most appreciated was the section entitled "Muscular" Prose, referring primarily to Cormac McCarthy. Now McCarthy is something of a sore spot for me. I've read so many snippets of high praise of his work from Catholic websites (particularly First Things), and yet despite giving him a fair test this summer, I found his prose little less than nauseating. One sentence that Myers quotes, in fact, I went around quoting in mild rage to anyone who would listen for at least a week after I read it: "He ate the last of the eggs and wiped the plate with the tortilla and ate the tortilla and drank the last of the coffee and wiped his mouth and looked up and thanked her." (The Crossing) Saints preserve us! (No, really!) Have you ever come across such a gratuitous use of repetition? Some writers use repetition to effect something--an emotion, for instance. This instance displays the sort of repetitiveness that, according to my first instinct, and now to Myers' article, seems aimed only at showing off how literary the author can be. I wouldn't take it from Myers either if I hadn't found the exact same thing happening for the five chapters before I had to put it down.

Another caveat: generally speaking, I rather despise arrogant young critics who think that their opinions must become literary doctrine merely because they are their opinions. Even the most revered T.S. Eliot gets annoying when he does that. But that's what I'm doing with McCarthy. So be it. It does at least have some basis in textual reality.

And again, I must admit that I've never managed to complete anything of his. The high praise I read is invariably focused on the Old Testament centric-ness of the work, its Christianity, etc. That may well be; I wouldn't know--my testimony is necessarily one-dimensional. On the other hand, my family has always strongly adhered to the idea that a bit of Biblical imagery and a dash of God language doesn't make something a Christian work of art. A Christian something maybe, but not art. (There are worse examples than McCarthy that I'm thinking of now. Especially various didactic items of childrens literature.)

Another amazingly irritating bit:

He said that the souls of horses mirror the souls of men more closely than men suppose and that horses also love war. Men say they only learn this but he said that no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold ... Lastly he said that he had seen the souls of horses and that it was a terrible thing to see. He said that it could be seen under certain circumstances attending the death of a horse because the horse shares a common soul and its separate life only forms it out of all horses and makes it mortal ... Finally John Grady asked him if it were not true that should all horses vanish from the face of the earth the soul of the horse would not also perish for there would be nothing out of which to replenish it but the old man only said that it was pointless to speak of there being no horses in the world for God would not permit such a thing. (All the Pretty Horses)

I started this book too. Didn't get up to this point. But read it. Ignoring the kind of painful abstraction that McCarthy seems to regularly allow free rein in his descriptions of anything whatsoever (interrupted only in appearance by the sort of mundane "realistic" detail of the previous example) consider the fact that John Grady is a cowboy. My understanding of character in fiction is that the language of the character should be suited to him. I think that's a fairly classical, Aristotelean view. Now, I understand that John Grady is a pretty unusual cowboy. He thinks a lot. He's "deep". But to suggest that he is speaking in the sort of convoluted syntax more appropriate to bad Cavalier poetry, and in terms more appropriate to an advanced philosophy class...that's a very poor use of free indirect discourse. For someone like Jane Austen (brilliant at the technique, by the way), free indirect discourse is indicated less syntactically (:"John Grady asked him..." ) and more by the tone that the narrator's prose assumes (see Austen's passages on Mrs. Norris' reactions to Fanny in Mansfield Park). Nothing that I saw in the first few chapters indicated that John Grady ever had a tendency to sound like that. In fact, one of the things that rapidly turned me off about the novel was just how banal and quotidien the dialogue was...sure cowboys may talk like that, but do you need to torture the readers with their "Nice day." "Sure is." "Goin' somewhere?" sort of exchanges, which far too often seemed to be there as scenery rather than plot-movers.

So, having just written a bit of an invective on the poor man's style, I do think that the derision in which Myers holds his work (and even his character) in is unwarrented. I'm willing to believe that he has nice Biblical themes. I can see justification for his use of Biblical language as the default narrative tone (although that's not helped much by his hyper-realism à la Zola). The first sentence of his that Myers quotes is entirely unobjectionable. Quite good, in fact. And I have heard that "The Road" is excellent.

The real point that irks me about it is simply what Myers put his finger on. It's too self-conscious. Too "artsy," while not being genuinely artistic. And that goes for so much contemporary prose. Perhaps I'll get past that one day and be able to give some of these writers the sort of thematic or plot-centered reading they may or may not deserve. Until then, such vaguely evocative sentences as "War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner" will be to me as Zola or Gide: rather clever in their own way, but dreadfully disappointing as a whole.

Also, it is not inherently literary to despise punctuation.