{"id":1010,"date":"2015-01-20T23:39:21","date_gmt":"2015-01-20T23:39:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/?p=1010"},"modified":"2015-01-20T23:39:21","modified_gmt":"2015-01-20T23:39:21","slug":"what-have-you-been-reading-stephen-massimilla-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/2015\/01\/what-have-you-been-reading-stephen-massimilla-2\/","title":{"rendered":"What Have You Been Reading, Stephen Massimilla?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since last summer, I\u2019ve been not only rereading but translating a lot of Neruda\u2019s landmark work; the task has been dizzying, intoxicating. In the early fall, I read and reviewed the collected poems of Alfredo de Palchi, and I\u2019m always reading and re-reading shorter books of poetry and prose. Some recent ones have included Natasia Saje\u2019s Vivarium,<\/em> Derek Burleson\u2019s Melt<\/em>, and Thomas Gardner\u2019s Poverty Creek Journal<\/em>. This past semester, I also taught Mary Shelley\u2019s Frankenstein<\/em> and an array of authors from Lao-Tzu (there may have been no such individual) to Sartre to Paul Tillich to Michael Pollan.<\/p>\n

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This winter, I reread James\u2019s Washington Square<\/em>, and I\u2019m now immersed in Faulkner\u2019s Light in August<\/em>. Though this sequence of books was relatively random, I thought I\u2019d say a few words about the meanings this juxtaposition has taken on. Both authors play off brilliantly against older conventions of the novel. For all their dark revelations of life\u2019s disappointments, both books are also very funny. Faulkner\u2019s use of Biblical allusion is bitingly ironic, and the complex expression of his entire twisted sensibility is a constant pleasure. His characters Lena Grove, Gail Hightower, Joe Joanna Burden, and Joe Christmas are all alienated souls. The pregnant and abandoned Lena is so na\u00efve that, whenever she speaks, others readily interpret her circumstances much better than she can. And we backtrack into the troubled past of the tortured Joe Christmas, whom nobody knows quite what to make of; he doesn\u2019t understand who or what he is and never will. Faulkner makes self-conscious use of Victorian and Southern gothic tropes in a way that only highlights the characters\u2019 warped relationship to the past and their sense of estrangement. His handling of questions of race, gender, and class is also fascinating because his protagonists can defy categorization and accordingly tend to be perceived as subversive. Since events are not narrated chronologically, it takes time for us to grasp how Joe\u2019s isolation and hostility escalate into homicidal rage. Oddly, however, Lena manages to achieve a bit more acceptance in the immediate community than other major characters precisely because she unwittingly plays into certain sexist conventions. From the perspective of the socially conscious reader, that observation is another double-edged sword. A colleague of mine recommended the book as a eulogy to the outsider, but can we simply read it that way, given Joe\u2019s doom and Lena\u2019s unquestioning pursuit of her simple destiny?<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s coincidental that I had just re-read James\u2019s Washington Square<\/em> prior to undertaking the Faulkner novel. After all, it is here that James inverts the precedents set by Austen in Pride and Prejudice <\/em>and Elliott in Middlemarch<\/em> by giving center stage to a young woman who\u2014like Faulkner\u2019s later heroine, Lena Grove\u2014 is decidedly not<\/em> regarded as \u201cclever.\u201d (Then again, Austen\u2019s novel Sense and Sensibility<\/em> arguably sets the precedent for this uncompromising refusal to present us with idealized characters or a fairytale plot.) In response to Dr. Sloper\u2019s expressed wish that his daughter Catherine be taught to be more than plain, innocent, and honest, his sister Lavinia inquires \u201cDo you think it is better to be clever than to be good\u201d? The Doctor retorts, \u201cGood for what? You are good for nothing unless you are clever.\u201d At times, Catherine\u2019s greatest virtue seems to be that she lacks the virtue of cleverness (she isn\u2019t manipulative and doesn\u2019t make scenes); but making such a determination would only flatten James\u2019 portrait. In a sense, the point is just the opposite, since Catherine grows to understand that her father was right to object to her courtship with her suitor, Morris Townsend, who turns out to be quite self-serving. Catherine\u2019s eventual realization comes at the cost of her youthful idealism, and she never remarries. What\u2019s more, Dr. Sloper\u2019s dedication to cleverness can read as foolishness. He even chooses his patients on the basis of how much \u201coriginality\u201d he recognizes in their symptoms, and he contracts the illness that kills him while on the way to visit a patient in a mental asylum. On the whole, the novel is too \u2018careful\u2019 to be among James\u2019s best, but it is interesting that it was followed by A Portrait of a Lady<\/em>, which famously opens with the courtship of Isabel Archer, who is arguably too \u201cclever\u201d for her own good, insofar as that quality fosters overconfidence. Unlike Catherine, who imprudently believes that she is in love with a particular person, Isabel is ingenuously enamored of her own bold and brilliant sense of possibility. (The suitors that Isabel turns down early in life even remind us of those that the heroine of Washington Square<\/em> turned down later in her career.)<\/p>\n

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In his still later work, James goes on to explode the very distinctions between the foolish and the clever, the ordinary and extraordinary, the real and the ideal, knowledge and interpretation, and even content and form, making him a true father of Modernism. That said, just as Washington Square<\/em> still bears the hallmarks of the pre-modern novel on which James proceeds to innovate, the whole enterprise of Light in August<\/em> is less radically \u201cexperimental\u201d than that of his earlier masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury<\/em>. It is as if Faulkner had reached his version of the limits of what James, Conrad, Ford, Joyce and he himself had shown could be attained and then trimmed the sails a bit. Though they both combine great novelistic precision with vivid poetic imagination, James and Faulkner also write quite differently. I\u2019ve been continually marveling at how, in contrast to James\u2019s maddening rhetoric of qualification, Faulkner offers us an equally hypertrophic rhetoric of speculation: Lena pauses \u201cas if she\u2019d just thought of something that she hadn\u2019t even been aware she didn\u2019t know.\u201d This kind of subtlety was made to outlast the Millennium.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since last summer, I\u2019ve been not only rereading but translating a lot of Neruda\u2019s landmark work; the task has been dizzying, intoxicating. In the early fall, I read and reviewed the collected poems of Alfredo de Palchi, and I\u2019m always reading and re-reading shorter books of poetry and prose. Some recent ones have included Natasia […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1010"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1010\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1011,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1010\/revisions\/1011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}