tropical-malady - Tumblr blog

[tropical-malady]

7. 15.50

The title of The Unbearable Lightness of Being alone, and the fact that the author is Franco-Czech, may alert you as to what kind of book it is: philosophical, (quasi?) intellectual, highly stylised and probably pretentious. You would be close to the mark. If this is not up your alley, then that is perfectly understandable. If it is, then I invite you to read one of the most beautiful books I have read. (I am incapable of such hyperbole as “one of the most beautiful books ever written,” as I have read only the most minuscule fraction of these books, and I still find it half amusing when scholars refer to a work as “important” - thereby awarding themselves the authority to judge what is “important” and what is not. Still, The Unbearable Lightness of Being is very, very beautiful.)

I will assay a summary, as follows: Tomas, Tereza, Sabina, and Franz are bound up in dichotomies (love/sex, soul/body, lightness/weight) that they are not fully aware of; because they are different people they react differently to these dichotomies (some refuse the dichotomies and try to unite them without success, some polarise the dichotomies rigidly but experience both poles, some polarise the dichotomies and experience only one); because they are people, who only occur once, they make choices that have unpredictable outcomes, and that are inconsequential. This plays out within a tumult of Eastern European Communism, informants, kitsch, Grand Marches, Christianity (mostly Genesis), hospitals, rented apartments.

Kundera’s narrative wanders and discovers beauty along the way. Often he begins with a concept, which he clearly enjoys hypothesising about (and I enjoy his hypotheses, because they are mostly at least funny and intelligent, if not poignant). This concept then wanders into the territory of Tereza’s life, or Tomas’, or Sabina’s or Franz’s. In doing so, it wanders also into our own: keenly I recognise kitsch and the extent to which I indulge in it; Sabina’s cemeteries are also my cemeteries, teeming with overgrown foliage and overgrown tombstones; Tereza’s horror at her own body and at sex is familiar, probably, to the many women who write violent poems about their breasts and genitals and skin colour. There are things, I think, which anybody would be able to recognise - most potently isolation, and choice. Speaking of which, a dichotomy I neglected to include earlier is that of distance vs. intimacy - the misunderstandings between the characters evoke how (how much, and how often!) the two can coexist.

One funny coincidence I’d like to note is Kundera’s ponderations on the science of choices: because our lives do not repeat, we cannot conduct experiments to see whether one choice would have had a better outcome than another. So instead we bump around clumsily, with little by way of personal fore- or hindsight. Just prior to The Unbearable Lightness of Being I had read Guns, Germs and Steel which likewise discusses the impossibility of conducting experiments on history: we cannot know, if coincidences had lined up in a different way, if a continent other than Europe would have acquired imperial hegemony; similarly, we cannot predict based on events that have taken place over the past century or so what will happen a hundred years from now, because patterns are difficult to find and, when found, still unreliable. Like individual lives, human history is a singular occurrence: “What happened once may not have happened at all.” I don’t have a conclusion to this thought per se. Anyway I hope the book has pushed me a little further towards moderation, and away from obsession or extremism or rigidity.

The novel happened to touch on things that I’ve been talking about with people lately; perhaps this is why it struck such a chord (I cried). It’s a beautiful books, with beautiful characters and beautiful scenery, and beautiful prose. I’d set out a nice bit of time to just absorb it.

[tropical-malady]

6. 20.12

I have revisited Forster, in England now rather than in India, and found him as prosaically beautiful as before. His beauty is that of the early 20th century English intellectual, whose political bent leans left but not far, who approaches transcendence but keeps enough distance to reconcile it with the real. He speaks in deflating tones but occasionally cannot help but indulge a little in ecstasy. He is ardent sometimes, logical others, and has met enough people to portray them all with sympathy. Such is the narrative voice of Forster: satiric and fair, idealistic and wry. If the characters of Howards End fail to “only connect”, their demiurge does so with an even hand. (This is how you do social commentary; take notes other novels on the A-Level syllabus*.)

I’m biased - Forster is dear to me because I studied A Passage to India with one of my favourite teachers. Of the two novels, A Passage to India is, to my mind, superior: its transcendence is a touch more ardent and certainly more profound, its drama less petty and more inexplicable. And I guess I’m miles (about 6000) from being “English to the bone”, which Forster is, so Howards End is in some respects further from my locus of knowledge and temperament. But the Schlegel sisters are wonderful, and their meditations on idealism vs. pragmatism, art vs. life, highly relevant to me at a point where I am trying to reconcile what my (younger, more ferociously passionate) mind sought to mold the world into with what it is. Margaret’s political mediation and acceptance of things as they are reflects reformist moderation, while Helen’s intensity (of rage, of love) is that of the radical - eternally a relevant contrast. And logical conservatives are always interesting to read of. One complaint I have is regarding Forster’s treatment of Leonard Bast, which I guess is necessarily limited by Forster’s bourgeoise life experience/outlook; class dynamics are nowhere more prominent than in modern-day UK and one can feel the nascent development of class consciousness here, but it is very much still nascent and Bast suffers as a result, disappearing often from the novel (which dwells instead in parlours), standing in as a token, then dying. So it goes.

I won’t dwell long because I haven’t many new thoughts; Forster’s brand of novel is familiar to me now and waxing lyrical waxes tedious. I’m feeling obliged to dip my toe back into things that aren’t Literature or Philosophy or things in that vein, so I’m pretty determined to read Guns, Germs and Steel; we’ll see how long I last before I clutch for some Japanese literature.

*Americanah

[tropical-malady]

5. 14.23

A Visit from the Goon Squad is one of those New York novels/films/pieces of media generally that make everyone else distinctly aware that New York is a world unto itself. It is a collection of fragments that charts time’s passage in a manner both chaotic and controlled (the stories find a constellated, desultory order); it is an elegy for rebellion turned clean by technological inundation; it concerns children who are too old and adults who, thinking themselves old once, have found themselves actually old and are half-inoculated by routine, half-horrified with themselves. The story’s jittering landscape reminds me of saccades on phone screens, which I think is the intention - there is, on a multitude of levels, a profound sense of disconnection.

By contrast the prose is mostly bare and a little colloquial; it has a New York kind of rush about it (or what I imagine to be a New York rush); occasionally Egan verges on poetic, in the way that bad lyrics are sometimes poetic. My favourite chapters were the least conventionally prosaic ones - Jules’ article, with its wry intelligent footnotes; Ally’s powerpoints. I thought the powerpoints actually weren’t used to their full potential (i.e. as a kind of midway reversion to pictorial communication) - they were clearly made by someone who thinks in words and not in graphic relations. Which is ineluctable. She approached something interesting with the more dissonant slides that were arranged not by left-right, up-down, semi-paragraphic linearity, but interlocking shapes and digital iconography. Space and silence, I thought, were especially beautifully treated. Content and form seemed almost to meet, in a manner that language (always alienating signifiers from signifieds) cannot achieve. The effect as a whole was incredibly poignant given the algorithmic austerity with which Powerpoint is associated.

Four years later - no, six! Six years later! I’m always having to remind myself that it isn’t 2010 and it isn’t 2012 and it isn’t 2014 and it isn’t 2015 either. - Six years after the novel was written, Egan’s technological projections already feel outdated, which is inevitably the case - increasingly so, as technology develops in exponential bounds. (Also her text-speak is weird and, from the point of view of someone who is perennially on her thumbs, impractical.) But the intention is there: an honest attempt to explore the change in people, and the change in literature and art as a whole - as well as their stagnation, sometimes willful, sometimes unexpected. Humans are rendered impotent against coincidences arising from barely-made decisions whose consequences cannot be predicted. I appreciate Goon Squad for what it is, though the events of Egan’s novel are so far-removed from my life as to be incomprehensible, and (more pertinently) though the execution was not fully realised. I wouldn’t recommend it unequivocally, because I think there are films, novels, theatrical pieces, art installations etc. that deal with similar themes to greater effect, but it was an interesting enough experiment - indeed, it fits surprisingly well with my previous post on Synecdoche, New York. So I think that may be enough post-modernism for a bit - moving on soon to something different! I’m thinking either Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel (note the awful lack of Oxford comma) or Howards End by Forster, who I love. Or both!

[tropical-malady]

4. 23:34

Keeping it short: Synecdoche, New York was heartbreaking; it did several interesting things with chronology, meta-narrative, love, and the creative struggle; it was also very self-indulgent and glutted itself on tragedy (we get it, people die) such that it reached its tragic climax perhaps two thirds of the way through, after which each new tragedy that presented itself lost its independent value - although perhaps that was the intended effect, given how the edges of identity were smudged/the collective human condition was explored in this two hour memento mori. I didn’t find the string of deaths so effective; and occasionally, particularly towards the end, Kaufman became unsubtle and I felt a little like I was being hit over the head. But overall, a beautiful and ambitious film yearning for truth in a postmodern age of instability (of identity, relationships, chronology, the future). I cried a lot - even more than usual. And as an aspiring creative person I go for pretentious meta films like this, or Birdman for instance. In particular I enjoyed the half-noticed, half-remembered, terrifying way that time passed; Hazel (adorably, charmingly, beautifully played by Samantha Morton) and her counterpart Tammy (Emily Watson); and the awful unrelenting slew of missed opportunities and Kaufman’s refusal of any kind of closure whatsoever. Which is why, I guess, I’m writing this now.

The image I will be going to bed with is Cotard leaving Hazel’s answering machine (unchanged for decades) a message (”the day before you died was the happiest day of my life” very cheesy now that I think about it in isolation); as a young person I wonder what it is like to live with the distinct possibility that the happiest day of your life has passed; and it occurs to me that this is not the kind of pessimism that I want to have; and I have a lot of time to be idealistic and optimistic, and make as much as possible out of my life (which is a lot!); and I ought to do that.

[tropical-malady]

3. 17.35

I’ve just finished Madness and Civilization by Foucault. It’s taken me far too long - I probably started it in late November, then got distracted by a variety things, and picked it up again some time last week. It’s a slim volume - this edition is just under 300 pages - but a double spread requires an embarrassing amount of time for me to read, or more accurately, to comprehend. The language is elegant and abstruse, the syntax a wandering splay of embedded clauses and delayed subjects. The qualities that make it charming and persuasive - its intelligence, its conviction, its far-reaching analysis - are also alienating and intimidating for a beginner in philosophy like me. In fact, Madness and Civilization is the first book by a philosopher that I’ve read. Thus far I’ve only read things about them, written by some kind professor or scholar who has, for the layman’s benefit, distilled ideas expressed in the most esoteric language to their essences in simple (if perhaps simplistic?) terms. So it was a challenge, and something I will have to practice.

Madness and Civilization concerns “Insanity in the Age of Reason”: conceptions of, attitudes towards, and treatment of madness during the Enlightenment. As such I had to doubly accustom myself to two sets of jargon: firstly the poststructuralist lexicon of Foucault, and then the vernacular of the Enlightenment - so thoroughly does Foucault immerse himself in the (medical, legal, economic) zeitgeist of the 17th to 19th centuries. A lot of it definitely went over my head; I was basically enchanted but also terrified by such passages as:

“The essential thing is that the enterprise did not proceed from observation to the construction of explanatory images; that on the contrary, the images assured the initial role of synthesis, that their organising force made possible a structure of perception, in which at last the symptoms could attain their significant value and be organised as the visible presence of the truth.”

What bold analysis, but also what...tosh? After reading the sentence multiple times I discerned what I think Foucault meant (that empirical evidence didn’t inform a way of thought, but that a paradigm influenced and gave structure to empiric observation, after which these observations, organised by the paradigm, became the established “truth”), and indeed I think this sentence alone is excellent insight into the post-structuralist scepticism of truth that informs Foucault’s analysis of “madness” and its socioeconomic construction. But, considering the fact that the book is filled with such sentences, most of which I didn’t spend time pulling apart, I don’t think I put enough effort into the book to have grasped its entirety. I’m also inclined to agree with a man I spoke to recently who, upon finding out that I was reading Madness and Civilization, said, “You know he’s crazy right?” The connections that he draws, and the narratives that he constructs therefrom, are almost too impossible, too well-shaped in their linearity, to be real. The book is admirable and worth reading just to witness Foucault’s originality of thought (sublime, ridiculous, absurd?). Personally, though, I have a lot more learning to do before I can decipher Continental philosophy.

Having recently read Passion of the Western Mind by Richard Tarnas, an overarching examination of Western thought from Plato up until the modern era, it was pleasant to see how Madness and Civilisation doubly fit into the salient narrative: the milieu described fits with the Enlightenment, the analysis fits with 20th century thought. If I hadn’t read Tarnas and also a VSI to Post-structuralism (by Catherine Belsey), however, I would have been completely lost - which just goes to show that in order to get the most out of what you’re reading, you have to have read a great deal more. A slight paradox. I’m thus trying to strike the right balance between reading as much as physically and logistically possible, and actually absorbing in depth what I’ve read.

Next: A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (unless I change my mind, which I might!)

[tropical-malady]

2. 00.33

While in Tokyo, I picked up Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto, who I had never heard of before (basic ignorance? West-centrism? the usual reasons), feeling that a modern author writing about young people would be both insightful and personally relevant. I don’t know that my expectations were met. If I were to attempt an allegory in vague keeping with the title I would probably dub Kitchen the milk chocolate of books: sweet, and sometimes warm and profound, but lacking depth in which to ground the narrative, which instead floated unanchored and ephemeral - like a marshmallow, if I may. There was warmth and there was alienation, there was death and there was the subconscious, there was also magic in the nonchalantly surreal manner that magic happens in Japan (or something); but in her little stories that wander in small circles and short lines, I could not perceive the bones of humanity. Perhaps it was the prose, which was honest and colloquial but not always evocative; or the weightlessness of the magic. I have no problem with implausibility and suspension of disbelief (this I engage in with unhealthy regularity) but her magic was inconsistent and oscillating, and too specific to be completely nebulous and thus unsusceptible to internal rules. Just as the narrative began to become human to me, I would be met with a small-scale deus ex machina that alienated me from catharsis. So Kitchen and I, for all its intimacy, did not eventually meet.

On the same national note, I have been meaning to watch Polanski’s The Woman in the Dunes, and found a copy of Kobo Abe’s original book. I was entranced. Despite the detachedness of his writing, Abe’s novel is fundamentally human, if to be human is to be an animal whose distinguishing feature is the illusion of choice. Here is the postmodern figure, debased and decentralised. The two writers deal with the human condition in entirely different ways (Abe’s surrealism is claustrophobic, Yoshimoto’s amniotic; Abe’s humans are small and cruel, Yoshimoto’s small and kind), so the comparison is unfair - I simply happened to read the two of them consecutively. If I wanted to cry and have positive feelings I would probably still read Kitchen, because I’m a sap.

I seem to be suggesting that all novels aspire to the condition of humanity - and I suppose I think they do, insofar as humanity constitutes the entire breadth of our experience and thus is the inherent subject of all art. My interest in each book actually lies in my desire to see what comes next in art - having parodied and stripped and fragmented itself in the first half of the 20th century, what is happening now? I have frankly no idea what direction people are going in, or if there even is a broad direction or if it is just scattered wandering. I’d love to know what to read in order to find out.

[tropical-malady]

1. 2.5

It is late and I’ve been slightly overwhelmed by a feeling of unaccomplishment lately, so this blog is (now) here to keep track of all the things I have read or found interesting lately, and with luck when I look back a sense of salient progression will strike me and I will have established a little history or narrative, just for and of myself. Something small like that would be nice! Despite the anonymity my self-consciousness is stalling my fingers, so I will leave it here for now - a get-it-over-and-done-with kind of first thing - and be back with books, as always.