Wednesday, February 25, 2015

What’s needed, it seems, is the right verisimilitude - Alcott, Baudelaire, Austen, and Knausgaard - highlights from The Hudson Review

Now I am going to look at the highlights of the Winter 2015 issue of The Hudson Review, my favorite literary journal.

For a long time, The Hudson Review had nothing online, and then a few things, and now quite a bit.  But not everything, so I can only insist that poet David Slavitt’s peculiar idea to write fake choruses to lost Sophocles plays, based only on the titles of the plays, is promising; or that classics professor Bruce Heiden’s translation of Charles Baudelaire’s “Les Chats” is perfect.  I can give a hint of the latter, I guess:

Their haunches emanate unnatural fires;
And golden speckles, fine as desert sand,
Constellate the marble of their eyes.

And I bought the Slavitt book, so more of that later.  The poetry in this magazine is usually strong.

Even with more articles given away online, I never see anyone promote it.  The piece that should be circulating widely is Bruce Bawer’s review of the Karl Ove Knausgaard My Struggle novels, the best thing I have read on them.  Bawer has the advantage that he has 1) read all six books, 2) read them in Norwegian, and 3) read them in Norway.  The latter point especially:

Sometimes it can seem as if every second or third novel you pick up in an Oslo bookstore is about a man (a literary type, naturally) in late middle age who’s lived alone in some remote place since his divorce and who, one day in dark midwinter, is given a grim diagnosis by his doctor, after which he goes home to reflect on his life – his failed marriage, disappointing career, estranged children – and to contemplate stoically his impending death.   (588)

While jolly Knausgaard is seen by Norwegian readers to offer “a naïve, credulous, American-style enthusiasm about life.”  How can an American reader know that Knausgaard was writing a complex parody?  By the way, anyone who has commented on the oddity of the English translation – Bawer says you are right: “innumerable errors that are minor but whose cumulative effect is distracting” (594).

I have not read Knausgaard, so I only care because the review is so good.  Of more direct interest was a long piece on “Mind and Mindlessness in Jane Austen” by Wellesley English professor Timothy Peltason, a careful ethical argument that pushes well past Austen’s romantic plots towards the inner lives of her characters, including those with no inner lives, or “inner lives that are astonishingly unvaried and unimaginative, so much so that the narrator pauses frequently to wonder, and obliges us to wonder with her, what it can possibly be like to inhabit such a consciousness, or such a lack of consciousness” (611).  Lady Bertram from Mansfield Park or the awful Elliots from Persuasion are examples.  “[T]he comic horrors of inward vacancy,” Peltason calls the theme.

The larger point is to contrast the mindless characters with the mindful, the heroines and their successful suitors.  The marriage plot is not just about the search for love, but the search for morally intelligent life in the universe.  Austen fans should seek out the magazine for this one.

Alexandra Mullen’s review of the latest Library of America collection of Louisa May Alcott novels is also excellent, and luckily it is online.  If Work or Rose in Bloom are not first-rate works of art, they are still of high interest, moralistic, improving fiction with artistic ambition and real humor.

One of her sons makes the argument [for Horatio Alger novels!] from verisimilitude: “A bootblack mustn’t use good grammar, and a newsboy must swear a little, or he wouldn’t be natural.”  His mother replies: “But my sons are neither bootblacks nor newsboys, and I object to hearing them use such words as ‘screamer,’ ‘bully,’ and ‘buster.’”  Genteel fictions meet with her disapproval when both the virtue and rewards lack verisimilitude – when boys run away to sea and behave so nobly that Admiral Farragut invites them to dinner.  What’s needed, it seems, is the right verisimilitude…  (680)

And even I agree with the aunt on that.  Mullen’s and Peltason’s  essays are model for something I never do but maybe should, working through the ethical argument in good fiction with clarity and force.

For The Hudson Review, routine stuff.

20 comments:

  1. Thank you for the heads up. I am hot on the trail of the Austen piece. By coincidence (?) I just posted something in which Austen's Persuasion shares the limelight with 19 other superb English-language novels. BTW, what is your favorite Austen novel? My vote goes for Persuasion. (Note: check out my posting at Beyond Eastrod, and please tell me your POV.)

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  2. From the review:

    For obvious reasons, Knausgaard has been compared to Proust (Time magazine even entitled its review “Norway’s Proust”), but he’s every bit as Norwegian as Proust was French, which is to say that while it came naturally to Proust to perpetrate elaborate, poetic, and witty prose, it comes just as naturally to Knausgaard to be blunt, straightforward, and prosaic—to spin out sentences so artless that they can read like excerpts from a hurriedly dashed-off letter.

    This is pretty much why I couldn't read more than a paragraph of the novel at the bookstore; it was so awfully written, it was like reading a 3000-page newspaper; who the fuck wants that? Alas, unlike everybody else I don't see his banality and boredom as transfixing and fascinating; just banal and boring. The acclaim this man has received baffles me, especially in a country like the USA where most people have never even heard of real novelists like William Gass and Alexander Theroux.

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    1. I've always been annoyed by the "Norwegian Proust" tag because I can;t imagine anyone less like Proust than Knausgaard. I've read the first 3 (In English)and am keenly looking forward to the fourth. The Third, I think, is the best. I agree about the wads of banality and detail so minute that it almost makes me scream; on the other hand, Knausgaard is capable of really superb writing, as in the second half of "A Death in The Family" dealing with his father's death and the first half of "Boyhood Island" where the descriptions of nature, the evocative descriptions of childhood play, the insights into the mind of a young child, and the cold mystery of his father's terrifying personality are wonderfully done.

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    2. The Proust thing was obviously a con from the beginning. I am amazed so many people fell for it.

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  3. For the best Austen, I point you to my week on Mansfield Park. There are many fine things in Persuasion, too. Peltason uses the latter and Emma primarily because the contrasts are so strong, but the same issues appear in all six novels.

    The acclaim this man has received baffles me - this has made him such an interesting case, and why Bawer's piece was so helpful, since he helps explain the phenomenon, which is a Norwegian cultural issue, partly literary but partly something else. A good part of the English-language response has been an attempt to guess at what the Norwegians find so great. I am now just parroting Tim Parks.

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  4. Thanks for bringing the piece on Knausgaard to my attention. I was hoping to find out from a reviewer who had read the complete work why he chose a title that echoes that of Hitler’s infamous memoir (very obvious in the Norwegian Min Kamp), but, other than contemplating the references to “anti-socialist sentiments”, I remain unenlightened.

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  5. No, Bawer does not explain the title. I do not know what it is meant to evoke either, in Norway or elsewhere. Maybe a Knausgaard reader will stop by and explain. I feel like I have read an explanation somewhere, for all the good that does.

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  6. He talks about it in an interview at Tin House which does not seem to be online but is summarized here:

    http://flavorwire.com/newswire/karl-ove-knausgaard-on-why-he-titled-his-opus-my-struggle

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    1. Thanks, Rohan. I liked the line:"After Knausgaard titled his opus My Struggle, he decided to read Hitler’s book. He found it self indulgent."

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  7. My friend and colleague Alice Brittan wrote what I found a fairly convincing piece on why she, at least, found the books compelling. And yet I'm not at all tempted to try them myself.

    http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/outrunning-the-constables/

    The Peltason essay sounds like one I should look up. You're right that the relative lack of online access to HR pieces has been an obstacle to appreciating it, but it does have a lot of good material -- more reliably, perhaps, than VQR, which runs some rather dubious things.

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  8. I have online access through the university where I work and will definitely check it out! As for Knausgaard, I tried last year to read My Struggle and gave up halfway through. Jolly? A lot of Minnesotans are of Norwegian heritage and even they are jollier than Knausgaard. But then the Norwegians here have been influenced by the phenomenally jolly Swedes and Germans so that explains it. I'll be sure to read the essay for more details. Thanks for calling our attention to it!

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  9. Rohan, thank you for the links. Further evidence I am not crazy, always welcome. I remember Brittan's OLM essay and thought it was quite good, although as with you it did not convince me to actually read the books.

    It has occurred to me that it is not just online access to The Hudson Review that is an issue. The paid circulation is just 2,500! And I am likely the youngest subscriber. No, that is just a joke, but I may well be in the youngest quintile, or decile. I will bet that the journal's readers are on the low (low, low) end of social media use.

    So it is all up to me, is what I am saying.

    The Austen essay, or other articles like it, is exactly why I recommended HR to you whenever I did as a place to send your work. The kinds of things you write would fit right in with it.

    Stefanie, jolly is relative, I guess. Calling Knausgaard's worldview "American-style" is so, so funny. Anyway, yes, please, try the essay on Austen, or the review of Alcott, or both.

    The bit of memoir by Jenny Erpenbeck, about the erasure of her childhood in East Berlin, is also quite good. Maybe I should have written about that.

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  10. "The comic horrors of inward vacancy"!

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  11. I know, such a good phrase. Just perfect for Anne Elliot's father or Lady Bertram or so many other great Austen characters.

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  12. http://www.webpsykologen.no/artikler/om-blogging-knausgaard/
    "Noen mener at Knausgård har skrevet Min Kamp fordi han ikke kjente til blogging og facebook."=> Some people think Knausgård wrote Min Kamp because he wasn't familiar with blogging and facebook.
    Ha. Ha.

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  13. No, because he was familiar and knew it didn't pay.

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  14. I really like this: "The marriage plot is not just about the search for love, but the search for morally intelligent life in the universe." And I always feel that people who dismiss Austen just don't see how high the stakes are for a genteel young woman in that world, and how easy it is to slip and fall into a kind of hell, never to return.

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  15. Marly, this was the insight, for or less, that really helped me get Austen - that for these protagonists the stakes are so high - but for other characters, the morally vacant, the stakes are not that high. Bennet is wrong about Darcy, but she is entirely right to be on her guard.

    The "date" was a great stakes-lowering social invention.

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  16. It's true that sometimes the version of hell is even a touch comic--life not as Maria the wealthy young socialite but as the squabbler doomed to Mrs. Norris--but there are young women spoken of but not seen who give birth out of wedlock or who run away and are lost, their troubles heart-wrenching for those left behind (as, Col. Brandon.) Those little anecdotes are sharp little reminders...

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  17. Yes, heart-wrenching for the moral sensitives. But not necessarily for the moral dullards.

    I think Peltason and I find Austen's ethos to be a little more cruel than you do.

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