#golly didnt i look a fool when i mistook bonaventure the italian philosopher with bonaventura the german writer in one of me seminars

[bakechochin]

The Book Ramblings of January 2019

In place of book reviews, I will be writing these ‘book ramblings’. A lot of the texts I’ve been reading (or plan to read) in recent times are well-known classics, meaning I can’t really write book reviews as I’m used to. I’m reading books that either have already been read by everyone else (and so any attempt to give novel or insightful criticisms would be a tad pointless), or are so convoluted and odd that they defy being analysed as I would do a simpler text. These ramblings are pretty unorganised and hardly anything revolutionary, but I felt the need to write something review-related this year. I’ll upload a rambling compiling all my read books on a monthly basis.

Wise Blood - Flannery O’Connor I haven’t read much American literature, but far be it from me to state that the sole reason for this is my position as a staunch Englishman. In truth, I genuinely just don’t have much of an interest for the great American texts; the enforced reading of such literature during GCSEs and A-Level taught me that even the American texts with the best prose were not on the most interesting of subject matters, concerned with social progress or supposedly deserving of merit because of relevant historical context, as opposed to actually just being, well, enjoyable. Yes, I am obviously over-simplifying to a ludicrous extent, but these were the thoughts that I had way back in the halcyon days of school, and subsequently these are the thoughts that I’ve carried with me since, simply because I haven’t been arsed to actively try to challenge them. However, my infatuation with the grotesque was bound to bring me to the realms of American literature at some point, and so asking my American friend to procure me a copy of this book with a decent cover, I started on this Southern Gothic classic. I love the idea of transposing the gothic genre to a setting different than one would conjure up from the word ‘gothic’, and the fictional deep South town of Taulkinham does a bloody good job at capturing what I want; there’s madness and isolation and a sense of oddity in the air, and the town is populated by a gallery of fantastic and memorable grotesques. The fantastic and evocative prose, almost comical at points, belies how fucking odd the story’s events are, and breathes life into this setting in a similar way to Hammett’s Red Harvest; this is perhaps one of my favourite techniques in literature, simply because I’ve never thought of envisioning America in this fantastical way. The story is rather fragmented, with many of its major scenes basically being some of O’Connor’s short stories stitched together (and the Frankensteined nature of the story does result in a few chapters having noticeably different writing styles to the rest, or some characters’ decisions that would develop into these slotted-in short stories seeming odd and poorly explained). With this awareness, I remain unconvinced with critics’ dogmatic statements along the lines of ‘O’Connor evokes an individual voice/style, unburdened by the rules or conventions of story writing’; if she had that in mind, as a deliberate means of creating a fragmentary narrative in the name of the genre or in reflection of the characters or what have you, she came up with that shit after she started writing. It is a view that I could subscribe to, on account of the fact that this is not a stereotypical narrative. Characters don’t do much or evolve much, with the decisions made by the characters seemingly motivated more by manic episodes than actual rational thought; Hazel, for instance, is depicted as basically coming up with the teachings and philosophies of his Church without Christ as he goes along, repeating his new discoveries to himself and to anyone who will listen as soon as he formulates them, and it is this improvisational drifting (motivated by his own warped thinking) that defines his story’s progression. What separates gothic stories set in recognisably recent times to gothic stories set in the distant histories of castles and deep dark woods, is the changed understanding of madness, and I’ve talked about this a lot in my rambles on Le Fanu but I’ll delve into this book’s treatment of it. In the words of Bakhtin, ‘in Romantic grotesque, … madness acquires a somber, tragic aspect of individual isolation’, but before the advancement of scientific knowledge as to what actually constituted ‘madness’, it often took the form of histrionics and melodrama. This is all fine and dandy when you’re writing a story about tormented murderers hearing hearts beating under the floorboards, or masked men with skeletal faces scuttling around opera houses, but when you’ve got to transpose this madness to a recent-ish society, with said madness being expressed or brought out via recognisable themes such as religion, you’ve got to tone it down a bit. As such, Hazel and Enoch are manic, not mad, and this is excellently conveyed through their individual speech styles and the ways that other characters interact or interpret the two; my favourite example of this is Enoch running down his day’s activities to himself as a strict and sacrosanct ritual of undeniable importance, swiftly followed by the reveal of the actions’ trivial nature (and his co-workers negative opinions of him as a result). WOULD I RECOMMEND?: HELL YES

The Crock of Gold - James Stephens Trying to ascertain the seriousness of this text boggles my brain. Let it first be said that I rather like this book, despite the shoddy John Murray publication that I have it in; I was prompted to purchase it on account of its place in the great ‘Irish comic tradition’, basically expecting something along the lines of The Unfortunate Fursey, but I instead was greeted with a much more thoughtful and interesting read that I advise everyone to pick up at some point, with the caveat that you have to be in a very specific mindset to read it. It’s a funny story, but it is quietly funny; the humour comes from little quirks in the writing, in the speech and actions of its characters, in the ultimate charm of the story. The dialogue is deliberately circumlocutive and often rather meaningless, pondering incessantly on philosophical matters big and small, and ofttimes the narrative itself reflects these rambling trains of thought, most notably a long aimless pilgrimage wherein the Philosopher stumbles across snippets of other peoples’ lives, experiencing quibbles and learning folk wisdom and ruminating on the head and heart. The book’s world is charming, all made up of storybook character archetypes and Irish folklore (described matter-of-factly and easily accepted as truth); ofttimes, the information that we are given is ultimately unimportant and has no bearing on the overall story, and this is a statement that can, truthfully, be applied to much of the text, but it is all the same delicately written and rather pleasant. The book does perhaps toe the line on this point with its rambling philosophical paragraphs from the Gods, with its grand allegories and metaphysical nonsense getting a tad wanky and mind-numbing, but it’s not the most egregious thing in the world. In any case, the philosophising of the Philosopher is entertaining enough to make up for the rather more dense philosophising of the Gods, being much more like the aforementioned circumlocution, going off on unrelating tangents and eventually bringing the rambling back around to the initial point that catalysed said rambling. I bring this up not only as a point of comparison, but because it ties in nicely with the commonly-utilised storytelling method of basically going off on a tangent, following one person off on their quest before jumping back to where the narrative left off to see how things are doing then. This can perhaps be attributed to this book’s lack of urgency or real danger, and thus lack of a need for hastiness and rapid jumping from one person’s story to another. This extends even to the final resolution of the humans’ storyline, which basically amounts to one sentence saying that what they set out to do was done and dusted; there isn’t even a scene to show everyone happy again, because it is simply implied that things will go back to the jolly equilibrium. Hell, when the book incorporates wistful or thoughtful or even flat-out sad tales, no resolution is offered for them. The story just goes on, and we are presumably meant to just assume that all will end up alright in the end, or at the very least, all will just end, and then it’s not worth worrying about any more. Reading what I thought would just be another fucking The Unfortunate Fursey type of fantasy book has really evoked some unexpected feelings in me. So that’s nice. WOULD I RECOMMEND?: YES, IF YOU’RE IN THE RIGHT MOOD

Gulliver’s Travels - Jonathan Swift I’ll level, I went into this book expecting a low-brow adventure story about little dudes and fucking massive units. It is, in fact, a tad more complex than this. This book is a lot of things; it can be read as a storybook adventure novel, but it is also a satirical piece, both of Swift’s society in general and of the travel writings form, and it is this satire that I am not too fond of. But we’ll get to that. The main technique utilised in this novel (yeah I’m just going to call it a novel for simplicity's sake) is optical conceit, and the idea of viewing familiar things from different perspectives or in different ways, presenting them in a new light as ridiculous or laughable and perhaps to make us reevaluate the workings of society so farcically presented. This technique is noticeable mainly in the first and second travels, coincidentally the two travels that are most widely known, and this optical conceit is a concept that I like a lot more in theory than in practise. The first travel takes us to Lilliput, the island of the small blokes, and here the small size of the people links in with their small-mindedness and melodramatic quibbling over minor matters, but in the second travel to Brobdingnag, land of the big dudes, the size of the folk is seemingly unrelated from the satire. With the possible exception of the pompous Prince, none of the natives have any sort of comical largesse or egotism that might have related to the satire. And then when I had this in my mind, I began scrabbling around to try and find some other snippets of how the native people tie in with the satire, to little to no avail. The Lilliputians put great faith in long and formal written legislations and diatribes (related in full in Gulliver’s account), suggestive of shrewd ink-nosed clerks hiding behind their papers, and much of the Brobdingnagian report is one long rambling philosophical back-and-forth between Gulliver and the Prince, suggesting these large people have large mouths and loud opinions, but the satire, in my opinion, is a) tenuous and b) not what I’d consider engaging reading. And that’s not even considering the specific basis of the satire: contemporary politics! This book is striking an interesting balance between being entertaining in its own right, and ostensibly being entertaining because of its significance as satire, that every character or event in the story is comically reflecting some real-life event in English politics. To this, I have to compare it to Calvino’s story Invisible Cities, and it’s varying depictions of Venice through different disguises; it doesn’t matter how you tart up your source material, or how colourful your new layer of paint is, because if I’m not interested in the original source material then I probably won’t give too much of a toss about how it is newly presented. And contemporary English politics really could not appeal to me less, even if Swift does dress them up as Lilliputian acrobatic displays or thinly veiled warring kingdom allegories. That’s not to say that there is nothing funny to be found in this text; the details in the stories that are not intended to serve any satirical purpose, and instead merely to emphasise the differences between worlds, are always great fun. My favourites are the Lilliputian’s alien descriptions of the gigantic contents of Gulliver’s pockets, and two great instances of humungous monstrosities in Brobdingnag, namely the huge lice on the giant beggars and the scene of a Brobdingnagian mother breastfeeding; the sheer revulsion that Gulliver has to this spectacle is fucking hysterical. The travel to Laputa has got a good grasp on linking the fun content with the satirical aspect (not only is the flying island a great pisstake of science-minded learned folk, but is also like something out of a fucking Lem story), but the overall story is generally rather boring and without much in the way of obstacle or threat. The Land of the Houyhnhnms doesn’t really have the optical conceit, being more of an abstract switcharoo of horses and people, with not much relationship between the two races and a lot of obvious satire about man’s bestial nature. There are occasions of overt physical comedy, again tied in with these changes in size; Gulliver is in one story dousing great fires with his almighty piss stream, and in another being dressed up like a doll or dunked in a bowl of cream by a mendacious dwarf (or rather, a dwarf by Brobdingnagian standards). I am fully in accord with the former sort of comedy, not only because such imagery of dousing fires with a slash puts me in mind of Gargantua and Pantagruel, but because it reflects this book’s fun indulgence in crude toilet humour. Crude toilet humour is fun to begin with, but Swift uses scatalogical humour to demean the noble form of travel writings, taking a moment from seriously discussing the learned folk and their cultures and customs to describe his shitting habits. The latter sort of comedy, however, that serves to emasculate Gulliver by having him toyed with by giant folk or entrapped by tiny folk, only highlights to me the lack of character that Gulliver has, beyond being our narrator. I’m sure that critics will argue for his supposed egotism or pomposity or whatnot, but such details in the text are thin on the ground, and if Gulliver is not characterised as being a dick, why should the reader find it entertaining or cathartic when he gets his shit handed to him? These problems perhaps originate with Swift’s worries of the character of Gulliver being a reflection of himself; he is willing to put the character through light slapstick shenanigans, but he hasn’t got the balls to go too far lest it tarnish his own reputation. Apparently in one early publication of this text, Gulliver partakes in the custom of eating shit with the ape people, but oh no no, Swift couldn’t possibly have something that funny in the story in case anyone thought that he himself might truly be a coprophagous ninny! There is a strange bequeathment of snooty scholarly worth unto this book, considering that it does have talking horses and ape men who shit everywhere, as illustrated by the study done around this book (handily referenced in the editor’s annotations). Let me briefly give some examples. This book uses a lot of nonsense ‘little language’ for its place names and whatnot, and as you can tell by the fact that I’ve taken every opportunity to use the word ‘Brobdingnagian’ in this ramble, I’m rather fond of it all. However, amidst all the daft place names (all bizarre anagrams of existing places), the editor makes sure to highlight some as being ‘obvious, and therefore uncharacteristic’, as though there is a scholarly level of obfuscation or stupidity to adhere to in order to be respectable. This sense of superiority continues to the demeaning of one particularly transparent and obvious satirical paragraph, which is described as being ‘artistically weaker’ than the rest of the text; not that I’m defending the aforementioned insulted paragraph, because it isn’t that good, but the implication that the text deserves artistic merit because of the obfuscation of its satire rubs me up the wrong way a bit. WOULD I RECOMMEND?: PROBABLY NOT

The Nightwatches of Bonaventura - Bonaventura The new introduction to this text, written by the uppity translator Gerald Gillespie, is rather dogmatic in its excessive insistences of all of the things that this text is, or takes inspiration from. As much as I like to portray myself as a learned man and top-quality dude, I’m not so invested in contextualising this book’s composition that I’m willing to engross myself in Napoleonic war history or the works of Kant. What I am interested in, however, is the Romantic grotesque, for whilst Bakhtin’s infatuation with Rabelais’ grotesque completes eclipses any appreciation he might have of any writer who deviates from Rabelais, Bakhtin manages to spare a brief word of praise for this text amidst all the wanking over Rabelais, so I was intrigued enough to get myself a copy. This a book densely populated with great grotesque imagery and content, and as such it is a book that probably warrants re-reading with a certain subject in mind so as to allow for further unpacking, but within the framework of the grotesque, Bakhtin was right to say that this book basically epitomises the Romantic grotesque, because it’s all here in amazing detail. The story is a rambling introspective on dark topics, either prompted by the morbid and corrupt sights of the world around our narrator or plucked from the memories of our narrator’s own dark past. Said narrator, Kruezgang, brilliantly speaks on such subjects with amazing and colourful prose, with literary allusions and warped rumination galore. The other characters in the watches seem more like marionettes or shadow puppets, necessary to tell separate stories or fill a hole where there should be an aspect of Kruezgang’s past, but their purpose as such is fascinating enough and so excellently done that it doesn’t warrant criticism. The world is grim and grotesque, but depicted out as a joke via Kruezgang’s own view of it, described with poetical allegories and bitterly laughing at awful events by portraying them as black comedy farces. This book’s infatuation and idolisation of the mad and the strange and the grim is something fantastic, it really is. Now, having prefaced this ramble with such positivity, I can delve into a truth that looms over this text like a storm cloud; it is so incredibly fucking dense that I could not imagine rereading this book for any reason other than literary analysis. There is so much content, rich bloody content, in this book that it is easy to equate the feeling of numbness in one’s mind with an overload of such fantastic stuff, from the prose to the ideas to the fascinating storytelling, but this process of thought precludes the very important contributing factor to said mind-numbness, which is that the book seemingly just rambles about nothing at all! Am I to assume that such rich prose in the name of maddening circumlocutive (is that a word?) nothingness actually does have a purpose, and my mind just slides over it because it can’t comprehend the information, or perhaps just can’t contain so much information? Am I an uncomprehending fool for glossing over chunks of text, or am I just inadequately prepared to cram so much prose into my bonce at any one time? Such thoughts bounced around in my head as I was reading, and the only conclusion that I could come to was that I would be hard-pressed to recommend this book to anyone, for what if they encountered the same problems, and asked me to elucidate on such matters, when I have no answers to give them? Wouldn’t I look a fool then! But I digress. The introduction snootily says that to break down the narrative’s events chronologically would only ‘contravene the spirit… of the work’, which I believe insofar as a fragmented narrative obviously reflects the fragmented mind of the narrator (real in-depth analysis going on here), but that doesn’t mean that I won’t say that the narrative isn’t all over the shop, generally rather confusing, and interspersed with fragments of other stories of seeming tangential relation to Kruezgang’s storyline, all described with Bonaventura's same grandiose verbosity but often nowhere near as interesting as Kruezgang. Sure, I could have read into the exact (and no doubt important) purpose(s) of these segments, but a) just reading this book and revelling in its dark prose is an enriching enough experience without having to learn all the context clues that contributed to such nonsense being formulated, and b) most of the research writing about this book by Gillespie is just trying to figure out who Bonaventura is, a mystery to which I honestly could not give any semblance of a fuck about. WOULD I RECOMMEND?: NO, UNLESS YOU WANT TO READ IT FOR ACADEMIC PURPOSES

Shit I read this month that I couldn’t be arsed to ramble about: Shakespeare and Co. by Stanley Wells (absolutely amazing, incredibly informative, would absolutely recommend if it’s your thing), and City of Sin by Catharine Arnold (generally fun and informative, Arnold’s voice can get annoying at times, overall would recommend just for the chapters about sex in the medieval/early modern period and the chapter on Victorian pornography).