Tag: modernism

What We Can’t Know

Mark Davis2 Comments

I’ve been wandering in cities, unlocking the secrets of metros, funiculars, tipping expectations, museums, and ride-sharing services in languages that, despite several years of study, I know will never reveal the finer brocades and stitches of cultural subtleties reserved for the natives. The gestalt that lingers over Portugal and now Barcelona (Malta soon enough) is of palimpsests in crush and stone, accumulated over the centuries in a barely-controlled layering. There is an incompleteness to the spaces where boarded facades in gothic quarter alleyways carry neat signs promising renovations beside “Free Palestine” graffiti arcing imperfectly above the work of an artist with a careful touch. Banksy has imitators and challengers. I blended into a crowd this morning surrounding and cheering a socialist politician demanding support for “pensionistes” due to some meticulous failure of the current regime.

Maybe.

There is all this that I can’t know with any precision. Foggy barriers of time, space, language, culture, and even pulsing jet lag keep me from having the instant recognitions of motives and the occasional capacity to irony and winking humor that I drift along with in American culture.

I travel very light these days (“Eu sou minimalista” as I constructed and then confirmed via Google Translate) with just a 16 liter sling bag. Three shirts, three underwear, three pair socks, one pair pants…Everything in merino wool except the pants, which are in capable technical materials. I have a charger bag and a small toiletries kit. I have my phone and an iPad Pro with keyboard. I do laundry in my bathroom sink every other day or so, rolling clothes in my bath towel and then hanging to dry overnight.

And on those devices I just finished Ian McEwan’s newest novel, What We Can Know, read on planes and trains, at cafe tables, and in the crepuscular uncertainty before I am forced into the night for dinner.… Read the rest

Quivering Towards Warmth

Mark Davis1 Comment

I was not surprised when death came for Cormac McCarthy. It had to come, dragging along, cross, a tatterdemalion through the sagebrush and panicgrass. Cormac was a creator of a literary West that was both recognizable to those of us who, like him, lived in the sparsities of New Mexico, wrenched from indigenous hands and corralled by the quilted fencing for overshot missiles and sandfusing bombs in the atomic age, and also a construct of an unfamiliar language that relinquished authenticity for a kind of topological liturgy. What I am surprised by is how distant the literary works of his era seem now: Joan Didion’s reckless and shapely California; Don DeLillo’s fetishized consumerism; Thomas Pynchon’s endless array of clauses slouching towards sentences. Each produced shockwork against the conventions of modernism. There were so many others, too, from Hawkes to Plath to Roth to Amis. But the aloof distance is what hits me now. The striving to construct an artifice. I want to go back to before vernaculars loosely re-encoded, before the scandal of showing-without-telling, to where the writer was explaining his or her thoughts the way we all think them, with insight and articulation, with depth and that incomplete glow of everyday awareness. Even Mr. Sammler’s Planet, in the stern assumptions in gray-toned introspection, seems hard and callous here in the 21st century.

There was an unexpected reduction in crime across America and Western Europe in the 1990s. No one is sure why. But there is a sense in the literature that predates that change that people were perhaps less civilized on average, more prone to instrumentalize one another, more willing to exact revenge. Cold warriors debated realpolitik.… Read the rest

The Great Crustacean

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little-lobster-costumeDavid Foster Wallace’s Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky in Consider the Lobster is worth reading for nothing else than the following two paragraphs:

The big thing that makes Dostoevsky invaluable for American readers and writers is that he appears to possess degrees of passion, conviction, and engagement with deep moral issues that we—here, today—cannot or do not permit ourselves. Joseph Frank does an admirable job of tracing out the interplay of factors that made this engagement possible—[Dostoevsky]’s own beliefs and talents, the ideological and aesthetic climates of his day, etc. Upon his finishing Frank’s books, though, I think that any serious American reader/writer will find himself driven to think hard about what exactly it is that makes many of the novelists of our own place and time look so thematically shallow and lightweight, so morally impoverished, in comparison to Gogol or Dostoevsky (or even to lesser lights like Lermontov and Turgenev). Frank’s bio prompts us to ask ourselves why we seem to require of our art an ironic distance from deep convictions or desperate questions, so that contemporary writers have to either make jokes of them or else try to work them in under cover of some formal trick like intertextual quotation or incongruous juxtaposition, sticking the really urgent stuff inside asterisks as part of some multivalent defamiliarization-flourish or some such shit.

Part of the explanation for our own lit’s thematic poverty obviously includes our century and situation. The good old modernists, among their other accomplishments, elevated aesthetics to the level of ethics—maybe even metaphysics—and Serious Novels after Joyce tend to be valued and studied mainly for their formal ingenuity. Such is the modernist legacy that we now presume as a matter of course that “serious” literature will be aesthetically distanced from real lived life.

… Read the rest