SUMMER'D

'And when it is spent / You're rarely glad it went / When it is spent'
--Vic Chesnutt, 'Swelters,' (1996)


Or, to quote another song (from Paul Weller's Style Council, remember them?): 'I don't know whether to laugh or cry / the long, hot summer just passed me by.' Regardless, it's time to speak, I guess, of what is past (the Olympics) or passing (the conventions), or to come. What's passing is the summer, what's to come is 'election fever' in the Fall. Oh boy.

No, I didn't watch any of the Democrats' Convention. I don't have television reception. Honest. But that's a cop-out. I wouldn't have watched anyway. The reason has to do with that other great spectacle of August (the past): the Summer Olympics. That I saw plenty of while paying visits in the month of my birth until I was forcibly reminded of why it is I gave up on TV long ago: in a word, commentators. There is nothing in this world more mind-numbing than listening to TV commentators -- whether covering sports or politics, I realized, doesn't matter. The patter is the same. The entire game is the same. It's what Juvenal meant when he said that the people who had conquered the world (in his day, Rome) cared for only two things: bread and circuses. Circuses -- meaning any kind of common spectacle, such as processions, parades, athletic contests, chariot races, and of course political rallies -- are what make commentators froth at the mouth and fall over backward (cf Python, Monty). Drivel. Babble. Sound-bites.

Granted, the political speechifying is bad enough. It's that 'target audience' appeal of TV that each candidate must learn how to use. To out-Herod Herod, as it were. The 'hard sell,' the grab 'em and make 'em listen pitch. But also the sweeping, inclusive 'what the world needs now' rhetoric. What, around my house, is known (cf Brooks, Mel) as: 'Oh, prairie-shit, everybody.' Nothing makes one want to stop being an 'American' faster than hearing 'the American people' appealed to, addressed, spoken for, etc. Much as I wish Obama / Biden well (the latter, THE Senator from my home state! doth recall Roth? Boggs? No, it's been Biden since '72 -- I was still in Catholic school, so of course we cheered), I really don't want to have to listen to them overmuch.

As to McCain: I had to finally stop railing at his TV spot (during the Olympics) which intones: 'Washington is broken...' Which party broke it? It wasn't broken when Clinton left...directionless, sure, pointless, maybe, but broken? And his choice of VP nominee has to be the most shameless act of bad faith politics I've ever witnessed. Ever. As I view the world, that choice should piss off the Hillary supporters way more than Obama's pick. It's so 'thrown them a bone' condescending, and it also seems to me an acknowledgment of weakness. McCain, if he wins, will be as old as Reagan was going into his second term. Does anyone want to hand over, potentially, the reigns of government to McCain's VP, a political non-entity? Granted, maybe not as scary as when Bush the First had Quayle as his 2nd in command, but, scary enough. To put it simply: wtf?

Anyway, the word I really want to come down on here is 'historic.' It's one of the commentators' favorite. As in the quotation from Musil back there a few weeks: whatever is hawked as great, is great. This is understandable. It's such a relative term. It really has no meaning. But 'historic' does. What it means is that something has occurred which the history books (of the future) will have to take note of. It's 'for the ages' in some important or significant or surprising way. But what is historic is ultimately for the historians of the future to decide. It strikes me that a rhetoric that insists on 'historic' and 'classic' in its evaluation of the present is not only in a belated struggle with the past (about which those words can be used accurately) but is also not imagining, really, much shelf-life for its exploits. The history books of these times (if anyone ever gets around to writing them) may possibly note that this or that happened. But who wants to wait for that? So let's proclaim it ourselves.

The point of historic is that it does have shelf-life. When Spitz won 7 gold medals at one Olympics in 1972, it was a first and stood as a record for awhile, so 'historic' from our viewpoint. What Phelps did, in winning one more gold, tops that, but is only really 'historic' if it stands for awhile. If next Olympics or the next, someone tops that, Phelps becomes less notable historically. That's the way it works. When Mondale named Ferraro his running mate it was 'historic' as a first ever (a female VP candidate); what McCain has done is 'historic' (more like 'hysteric') for the Republican party, but not, let's hope, a defining moment of 21st century politics that historians will have to note for ages to come. I'm hoping, in fact, that McCain joins Dole, Mondale, Dukakis, and the other forgotten and forgettable candidates who tried and failed in their pitch to 'the American people,' that collective unconscious that seems to be almost tangible out there beyond the TV and computer screens, but which really isn't. If it ever existed, it's 'historic' now. But if Obama can ride whatever version of it he appeals to to the top, that will be historic, for it will mark a change that makes most of what politics has been 'in my day' (now pushing fifty) 'historic' -- as in old.

USE TO ULYSSES

Once again from "Stately, plump" to "yes I will yes" in five weeks. This time through, my third summer reading/teaching, a student asked me which my favorite chapter is. I haven't given it much thought in some time. Early on, my early twenties, my favorite was "Proteus" (Chapter 3) which I thought the most beautiful prose I'd ever encountered. It knocked 'em all into a cocked hat, as the saying goes. Later, in those days when I read the book aloud with friends, nothing surpassed, for comedy, "Cyclops" (Chapter 12), which I still find the most entertaining. I've noted that students tend to react against "Aelous" (Chapter 7) because, after they've acclimatized themselves to the Bloomian interior monologue of Chapters 4, 5, 6, it seems a bit jarring. But 7 has, in these latter years, become one of my favorites, the chapter where JJ creates subtleties of dialogue and exchange and situation that put to shame most comparable examples in other fiction. It's a scene Altmanesque in its orchestrated chaos.

Then there's "Oxen of the Sun" (Chapter 14) which I've noted my colleagues tend to want to avoid or skim through quickly, thus missing, in many ways (it seems to me) a fulcrum of the book. It's the chapter, in the Lying-in Hospital, that brings to the surface some of the more pertinent undercurrents of the book -- regarding sex and birth and the two main protagonists' attitudes toward those two mainstays of existence (and by extension "woman" as representative of both). In fact, I suspect the aversion to the chapter is not simply due to its stylistic shifts and burlesques of authors and eras -- which seem to have few fans -- but to its relentless fixture on topics that do nothing for plot but much for theme. In other words, appreciation of "Oxen" may require a kind of reading that not only is unlike what other fiction prepares us for, but also unlike what Ulysses has already prepared us for, chapter by chapter. Consequently I've always had a special affection for it, particularly as it's the chapter with "the impossible paragraph" that stopped me cold on my first attempt of The Book at sixteen.

Then too my appreciation of "Sirens" (Chapter 11) seems only to increase each time through. Sometimes I think it's the chapter that most clearly evinces the magic of JJ's method, and what's more it excels in changes rung upon "the initial method" of the novel, so that -- unlike all the chapters that follow it -- it stays within the fictive realm the narrative has delineated thus far, while playing havoc with it in subtle, musical ways. It "goes too far" in its free play, but without going completely off the charts. "Circe" (Chapter 15), as the chapter completely off the charts, never fails to fascinate me -- the more so because, in teaching the novel, there's a real tension between what it tells us and what it shows, or rather between what it seems to tell and what what it shows means. For me, it's long been the chapter that makes Ulysses like no other novel. I can't say it's my favorite, but I think it's the most essential if the point of Ulysses is to divest us of our traditional methods of reading fiction.

Then there's the final three chapters. Time again, I find that each in its way is anticlimactic. Each takes us through so much while resolving so little. Granted, "Circe" has already exploded the notion of narrative and the fixed principles by which we might assume we are following a story of characters and not a story of treatments of situations. But nearly everyone tries to make the "Nostos" resonate as part of a narrative of continuity and resolution. Oddly enough, the final three chapters do let us read that way, but only at the expense of our illusions about what we have learned, or maybe it's the illusions about what the narrator, or author, or narrative wants us to know.

"Eumaeus" (Chapter 16) could never be my favorite though it is a tour de force of bad writing and captures, I'm convinced, something essential about JJ's humorous affection for the banalities of writing. The license taken with verbal form gets stretched even further with "Ithaca," the catechism chapter, 17, and this time round I found myself arguing for it as perhaps the quintessential chapter of Ulysses for us nowadays, more than "Circe" -- the pseudo-explanatory technicalities of "Ithaca" resonating more than the mock-Freudian theater-piece. Then there's Chapter 18, "Penelope," which remains a tour de force of rhythmic speech and flowing diction, a perfect match, in its way, to the clumsy literary tone of "Eumaeus," and a foil, in its way, to the high-flown poetic meditations of "Proteus." I seem never to tire of it as the "performance piece" of The Book, and, if it's questionable as a conclusive utterance, it's at least determinate as an ending that, like reading Ulysses, could go on forever.

And yet it's easy to become nostalgic, during the reading of those last three prolonged babbles of the "Nostos," for the sharp, precise, vivid, sculpted sentences, and varied situations of the first three chapters. The eclipse of Stephen's consciousness, after Chapter 9, "Scylla and Charybdis," is always for me a considerable loss and in many ways it's still his bravura performance in the library that shines for me as The Book's defining moment -- though, significantly, it's the chapter in which "the Homeric parallel" seems to me the least convincing or most spurious. In other words, it's the chapter in which we might not be in a book called Ulysses at all, but in a different narrative, having to do with Joyce's agon with Shakespeare by means of Stephen. Fascinating as that is, it's not essentially Ulyssean, so I'm more likely to hand the golden apple to "Sirens" this time 'round...

'THOU WOULDST BE GREAT...'

'The proverb has it that nothing succeeds like success, and nowadays even an ordinary man of letters is likely to have an inordinate fuss made over him long before he has become a Great Author, when he is still a reviewer, columnist, radio scriptwriter, screenwriter, or the editor of some little magazine; some of them resemble those little rubber pigs or donkeys with a hole in their back where you blow them up.

When we see our Great Authors carefully sizing up this situation and doing their best to mold it into an image of an alert population honoring its great personalities, shall we not be grateful to them? They ennoble life as they find it by their sympathetic interest in it. Just try to imagine the opposite, a writer who did none of the above. He would have to decline cordial invitations, rebuff people, assess praise not as a grateful recipient but as a critic, tear up what comes naturally, treat great opportunities as suspect, simply for being so great, and would have nothing of his own to offer in recompense other than processes going on inside his head, hard to express, hard to assess, merely a writer's achievement of which a time that already has its Great Authors has no great need. Would such a man not remain a total outsider and have to withdraw from reality, with all the inevitable consequences?

This was, in any case, Arnheim's opinion.'

--Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, Pt. II, Chapter 95: "The Great Man of Letters: Rear View"

I've made it to the end of the portion of Der Mann that Musil published in 1930 (725 pages). I'm taking a little hiatus while backtracking to read some of Musil's earlier work. But I've also been taking a little time to familiarize myself with what's been published, in English, on this beguiling and fascinating author. Not much in English exists on him. I don't think his work is forbiddingly Germanic, so it's a curious fact of literary history that he has not been more fully resurrected from the obscurity he had sunk into by the time of his death in 1942. While not exactly the outsider that Arnheim contemplates in the quotation above, it's clear that the kind of writer there being opposed to the Great Author, and to the 'ordinary man of letters,' is a figure much like Musil himself. And that's why he interests me.

It seems a safe assumption that, in Musil's day, Thomas Mann would fit the bill of the Great Author, a colleague whose success Musil resented and envied, not that he could have emulated it had he wished to. Mann was, more than any of that great literary generation born 1870s-90s, a traditional novelist, heir to the Tolstoyan sense of the novel. Almost everyone of note in that generation found that kind of novel 'in crisis' because the times themselves were in crisis. But the greatness of Mann is that he was able to weather those times with a conviction of how the novel, as it was for the 19th century, could still amount to a rational grasp of the inward movement of the times. But I don't mean to pick on Mann, I merely select him because of his pre-eminence as the German novelist of Musil's day. But what really interests me in Musil is not only the extent to which he is an outsider to his own generation, but also the degree to which the world he describes still applies in our day.

In our day, we could say the Great Author is the likes of Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, perhaps John Updike, Philip Roth. The authors who have attained a stature and status that lifts them above the productions of mere novelists -- whether the up-and-coming 'greats' or the page-turner-producing bestsellers. The Great Author, as Musil means it, is one who 'everyone who matters' reads, not merely 'anyone.' The Great Author has cornered a certain market -- might, like Morrison, like Mann -- have a Nobel prize, or at least has made the list for consideration at some point. The 'ordinary man of letters,' in our day, strikes me as all those writers ensconced in this or that quality writing program, or influential literary journal, or, as the case may be, celebrated at Cannes or Sundance.

Then there are the writers like Musil ... like Joyce, who never got a Nobel ... like Pynchon, whose novels don't get made into movies. Or like Proust or Kafka who are simply so great that the epithet 'Great Author' sounds like the weak, kitschy advert blurb that Musil means for it to be. Such writers simply defy everything to attain 'merely a writer's achievement.' It could be said that some of the writers I've named set out for such an achievement and what becomes of them -- as Great Authors, as celebrated occasions for readerly infatuation -- is not their business, can't significantly alter what they have achieved in writing. To some degree I do believe that, and I also see that the business of literary criticism is to separate the hype from the achievement, to determine, as it might, what is Great, in the sense Musil means, and what offers that particular kind of challenge that Musil has in mind, as exemplified by his own unfinished masterpiece. But, as he cannily saw, literary criticism isn't really up to that task, which explains the relative silence that still surrounds his achievement. For, in the world of letters as in everything else, we have 'the democratic dodge of replacing the immeasurable influence of greatness by the measurable greatness of influence. So now whatever counts as great is great; but this means that eventually whatever is most loudly hawked as great is also great, and not all of us have the knack of swallowing this innermost truth of our times without gagging a little.'

So that, in effect, the silence around Musil -- relative to the busy scholarly industries that swarm over the oeuvres of his major contemporaries, including the kitschy popular culture investments that make Joyce and Proust poster boys of modernist 'greatness' -- is in keeping with his own proscription of the fate that awaits those condemned to be considered great: 'Before he knows it, the Great Author ceases to be a separate entity and has become a symbiosis, a collective national product in the most delicate sense of the term, and enjoys the most gratifying assurance life can offer that his prosperity is most intimately bound up with that of countless others.' Out of many, one Great Author, in whose works we trust. A fate devoutly to be wished, for some, for others, a supreme irony, or an outright absurdity -- like the Bloomsday celebrations in Ireland where folks try to choke down a pork kidney at 8 a.m. or the efforts of acolytes attempting to activate their Proustian memory banks with the obligatory petite madeleine in tea.

Or is it true what Oscar Wilde said, 'the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about?' And greatness, in the end, is simply inspiring the most interesting talk? If so, Musil has a ways to go before becoming great in this country. But what if the criteria is inspiring the most challenging thought? If so, his greatness is assured and exists in the only place it can be found: on the pages of his book.