fuck reform

I've read my share of stories about "reform". For instance, privatization is a "reform." The prince of Saudi Arabia imprisoning other princes and billionaires and extorting money from them is a "reform". Austerity is a "reform." The press loves the word reform so much that if, tomorrow, the GOP in Congress passed a bill re-legalizing slavery, the headline in the NYT would read: "Labor reform voted."

Fuck reform.

the dream of the impossible plot

When I used to review novels for Publishers Weekly, the form was dictated partly by the editorial limitation of space: I had 250 to 300 words to operate in. Conventionally, the review would either start out with or end with some elaboration of an adjective – basically, blurb territory. Then would come characters and plot – or telling what the novel was about. If I could find the room, I might refer to the writer’s reputation.

Now, this procedure relies heavily on the idea that a novel is about a plot, and that a plot is something that one can extract from the text that ‘moves’ the events and characters in the novel forward. Even if the novel varies “forward” – even if it is arranged chronologically so that it looks backwards, or it mixes up narrative patches that are in the past or future of the narrative’s present – the plot is the thing that makes the novel. The plot is to the novel what the plays are to a game – a plot encloses, in a determined field, the chances that the narrative rehearses in its serial plot-parts. If an orphan goes out one foggy afternoon to visit the tomb of his dead mother and discovers an escaped convict among the graves  –  which happens in the first chapter of Great Expectations – I expect that this will have a bearing on the entire action of the book, an action which involves numerous small actions over the course of twenty some years. The action, the plot, is a great maker of pertinence, that very English virtue that Grice made into a fundamental part of conversational implicature.

There is, of course, another meaning of plot, which refers not to the implicate order of fiction, but to the conspiracies or plans of human beings in secret coordination, one with the other, to bring about some event. A plot in this sense hinges very much on secrecy.

The plots of fiction and the plots of non-fiction have a way of converging – in fact, the latter seems, sometimes, to have almost swallowed the former, as though none of the stunted rituals of modern life present the interest to the reader that is associated with plotting in secret.

In The Genesis of Secrecy, Frank Kermode brings together the narrative motive and secrecy as though, in reality, the plots of non-fiction have always been the secret sharers of the plots of fiction.  He usefully uses the notion of insiders and outsiders. A secret creates an immediate divide between those who share it and those who don’t. I itch to put the term “sharing” under scrutiny, here, since it seems to stand outside of the dominant exchange system and point to other systems of wealth and power – but I am more interested, here, in the categories of insider and outsider with relation to the form of narration.

Kermode takes the Gospels as an exemplary narrative. It is an inspired choice. From the perspective of secrets, the Gospels make the very strongest claims for the privilege of the insider. It is not that the Gospels unfold a conspiracy, although certainly some conspiring goes on to do Jesus to death. But the real secret, here, is in the double life of Jesus – on the one hand, a small time carpenter’s son, on the other hand, the beloved son of God. To understand the plot requires not only knowing that Jesus believed that he was the son of God, but believing it oneself. It requires metanoia, conversion.

Not only does the insider understand the plot, but if the insider is correct, the outsider can never understand the plot until he or she becomes an insider. The ritual of becoming an insider is not simply a matter of cognition, but of a special kind of semi-cognitive thing: belief. The belief comes not from the head – with its cognitive gearing – but from the heart – which understands that feeling is not subordinate to the world, but quite the reverse. And if this is true – death, where is thy sting?

To get away from the pull of the Gospel, Kermode’s point about secrecy and narrative is made in more general terms in a later essay published in Critical Inquiry: Secrets and Narrative Sequence.

“My immediate purpose is to make acceptable a simple proposition: we may like to think, for our purposes, of narrative as the product of two intertwined processes, the presentation of a fable and its progressive interpretation (which of course alters it). The first process tends towards clarity and propriety (“refined common sense”), the second towards secrecy, toward distortions which cover secrets.”

This does seem like refined common sense. And yet it shakes off, way too thoroughly, the insider/outsider categories that Kermode was using in the Genesis of Secrecy. I think that shaking off retreats to a classically ahistorical project: salvaging the presentation of the fable. As though the presentation came all in a block. After which – and the ‘after’ here signals, again, a certain ideal temporality, not an empirical one but a conceptual temporality – we find interpretation.

When I write the plot outline of my novel, I find myself writing, in a sense, about another book. Because the plot is so thoroughly part of the angles that determine the writing – angles that attempt to, as it were, hand the mic to many more characters – and even intellectual possibilities – than would be warrented by the plot alone.  Yet how could that be separated from the plot?

I have harbored Dadaist dreams of writing a novel which would have one surface plot for the reader and another for the author – and perhaps another outside of both the reader and the author. In this book, the plot that the reader thinks binds together the book is not the real plot, but incidental to the real plot, as it is understood and put together by the author. However, why  strain at that pitiable thing, the author? What if the real plot of the book is not understood by the author as well? As in the myth of Bellerophon, where a messenger carries a letter which, unbeknownst to him, requests that the receiver kill the messenger, perhaps the author of the plot could be considered a blind messenger, delivering a different plot from the one he or she knew? After all, there is a large degree of blindness in the world. Bellerophon is always a caution to those who think that a message can be reduced to the intention of the messanger.

In a sense, my dream novel would be an anti-gospel, because it would be closed, ultimately, to any access to its secret. The insider, here, would be defined by the fact that the secret he holds could not be shared. This would turn the world of the plot in a sense upside down. I don’t quite know how this kind of plot could even be constructed – a plot that resisted ever being known.

Surely, this is the great modernist temptation.  

advice for writers

The writer no more creates writing than the electrician creates electricity. Invisible currents move at their own speed, out there, among unknown elements – and the writer merely captures a bit of that invisible world in the poor conductors available to him, and measures it and deludes others – though not himself – that he made the conductor, the current, the speeds and fluctuations. 

New, yes, to our science, but not to that invisible world itself. Nothing is new or old, there. 

the economists and the plutocrats

Economists have really missed some chances in the last decade. For instance, where is the model that shows the way that the wealthy will, quite rationally, spend money on other than productive ventures to remain wealthy?  And since the wealth we are talking about was accumulated under the paradox of its not really being useful per se to the wealthy - once you have five hundred million dollars, it is unlikely your lifestyle is going to get better with another 100 million dollars - the amounts involved can be seen as pure instruments of prestige. 

This is an area that the economists never venture into, because, of course, it is at the intersection of economics and politics. In fact, it is the proper subject of the political economy, which until the twentieth century was where the study of economcs was located. As it ejected itself from this category, economics became technocratic - and pretended to become non-political. But of course that is nonsense. 

What the plutocrats do is not something unusual - they operate as aristocrats have operated for the last six thousand years or so of human civilization. Non-productive expenditure involves such things as raising the barriers to entry to wealth - that is, slowing down social mobility by freezing or pushing back wages - and buying off threats to prestige wealth - that is, producing a political system in which the politicians operate as bribed factotums of the plutocrats - and creating a universe of plutocratic spinners - as per the endowment of, say, libertarian think tanks, which exist in gross disproportion to the number of libertarians that live in this country, where libertarianism has never been politically popular.

When an economy reaches the point where a certain large percentage of the wealth lying in private hands is about maintaining the system in which the wealthy maintain their positions and prestige, you have a massive problem.  We have that massive problem at the moment, and it is getting worse. 

The unacknowledged father of YA - Dostoevsky

"On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation towards K. bridge.

He had successfully avoided meeting his landlady on the staircase."

Prophetic words, I thought. A whole future suddenly seemed possible to me. And I was fourteen.

My favorite young adult novel is Crime and Punishment. I read this before I read any of Dostoevsky’s other novels. I read it when I was in the ninth grade. It transfixed me. It did what I expect a novel to do, on the highest level: it became part of my inner equipment.

I read the translation by Constance Garnett. It was in the Clarkston High School library, which, looking back, was surprisingly well stocked. This was undoubtedly the result of the influx of suburbanites into Dekalb County in the 1960s, when Atlanta was still swanning it as the “capital” of the “New South”. My family had moved, like so many others, from New York (via Pennsylvania), and at the time, the regional difference was something that penetrated childhood games – accents were still markedly different, and of course the Civil War was the myth that boys could enroll themselves in when throwing nuts and burrs at each other in imaginary battle.

As a result of the swelling population and the can do spirit of the New Deal/Great Society, the County put up a number of schools, and even created a junior college. I have no idea, now, who was in charge of purchasing for the library – luckily, the person was not bothered, back then, by fundamentalist backbiters. Thus, our high school library had the wonderful Random House Ulysses, with the great big U on the cover. And it had the Modern Library collection. As I learned much latter on, Bennett Cerf bought the Modern Library titles from Boni and Liveright back in the twenties. The titles were a sort of wink – for back then, the modern classics were also risqué. Describing “lovemaking” or discussing “free love” was definitely a selling point for the modern. It was really one of the most significant business deals in American culture, though it is much less known than, say, the story of the Bell Labs inventing and giving away the rights to the transistor.   

So much of my education came from the Modern Library! I remember Dos Passos’s USA and its drawings, for instance: another great Young Adult novel, one that gave me a sense that history was a larger thing than dates and great names. But it was Crime and Punishment that pulled me out of my dogmatic, tv lulled slumbers. Although … really, TV cooperated with the Modern Library in my sentimental education. At the same time that Dekalb County was pumping money into the educational system, Public TV was coming on line – which, in the Atlanta area, meant channel 8 and, I believe it was, 36. Public TV was full of amazing things in the early seventies, little Dadaist American programs sandwiched among foreign movies and British imports. Among the latter was Masterpiece theater, which televised the Russians. My images of the characters in The Possessed are still yoked to the faces of  those probably now  deceased players.

As Adam gets older, I will doubtless discover a world of YA a bit different from Dostoevsky. I know little about the YA world, but from what I have read, the themes are still Dostoevskian. He is the unacknowledged father of adolescent angst, still.

Marx's hope - or mine

The hardest thing to recover from the wrecks of history is the horizon of expectation that the actors presupposed. Those expectations, that imagined future, all black on black, was intrinsic to the routines and habits that made it the case that people accepted x and came to reject y. The historian can make it easier on him or herself by simply borrowing the economist’s toolkit. It doesn’t really explain expectation, but it gives you a nice labels that you can paste over the gaps – for instance, you can talk about marginal disutility and make a graph.

A more sophisticated stab at the mystery was made by Marx, who assumed class conflict. By assuming an intrinsic violence that exceeded exchange, he opened up history to ethnography. His followers often have a hard time with this – they have a tendency to revert to the economic models of the neo-classicals, with the difference that, for the Marxists, profit is a dirty word, and for the neo-classicals it isn’t. This kind of Marxist will tell you, with a knowing smirk, that everything that happened in Iraq was planned, usually by some bigwigs, motivated purely by profit. Secret plans and the holy elevation of profit are the marks of this line of thought. Marx himself, thank God, was not given to such bogus analysis, since of course he realized that profit and loss has to be reconciled, in the end, with the realities of class conflict. Thus, in his analysis of how Louis Bonaparte became the emperor in France, he is very careful to underline the fact that the working class, which fought for the Republic, was fighting against its own interests, so to speak, insofar as the Republic was dominated by conservative business men, while the bourgeoisie, which did have an interest in preserving the Republic, went, to a man, to Louis Bonaparte’s side. Marx’s analysis – his journalism in general – confronted a fact that he tended to erase in the economic works – the lack of a truly homogeneous class.

This means, as well, that identifying class with its "interest" sacrifices the violence out of which class was forged - the meaning that endows profit with something more than the ability to afford a trip to a higher level fast food joint. That violence, sublimated in a thousand routines, makes up a collective lifestyle. One that, in our time, is snatched from the people to which it was promised at regular intervals. What to do with the anger that results from this is a problem that is left to... nobody, no structure, no church, no organization.

Marx, I think, thought that a working class consciousness could be forged - that it was not some natural demographic product. This was the point of the Communist Manifesto: this is the heart of revolution. Briefly, such homogeneity has occurred, but never, it seems to me, because of some universally shared class identification or recognition – instead, it is always about some collective threat. It is war, not the consciousness of one’s place in the system of production, that produces solidarity. And so that solidarity is, from the beginning, a reactive rather than a productive property.

on writing novels - joys thereof, and the torments of style

Writing a novel is one of the world’s best occupations, I think. It is what I have spent the last four years doing. And now that my novel, Made a Few Mistakes, is finished (and I am in the true hell of trying to find an agent), my days are brightened by the prospect of writing another novel – in fact, I’ve embarked. I sit here in the ideal circumstances: the quiet of an apartment in Paris, the sun shining in the little ruelle outside our terrace, a coffee cup (natch) on the table, and my fingers a little worn with the hundreds of thousands of letters they’ve run through still playing their old tune, like some band of ancient geezers kicking it up on my laptop keyboard.

What’s not to like?

Of course, this isn’t an opinion that is endorsed by all the best and brightest. Flaubert, whose letters are unsurpassable when it comes to all around bitching, generally viewed writing as a form of crucifixion, with himself playing the role of nail-er and nail-ee. Here, at random, is Flaubert telling a correspondent about his latest production:

“You can not imagine my fatigue, my anguishes, my tedium. As for the rest that you advice me to take, it is impossible. I can no longer re-commence. And besides, how am I supposed to rest, and what am I supposed to do during? As I advance, my doubts on the whole of it augment, and I perceive mistakes in the work, irremediable mistakes, which I don’t get rid of, a boil being worth more than a scar.”

That is Flaubert on Salambo, which might have been his most read work in his lifetime, and is now certainly his least read. We have, of course, the invaluable correspondence on Madame Bovary, which is a sort of novel about the novel.

During the composition of  L’education sentimentale, Flaubert wrote this to George Sand:

“My novel has been going pretty badly for a quarter of an hour. … You don’t know, you, what it is to sit for a whole day with your head in your hands trying to pressure your poor brain into finding one word. The idea flows from you largely, incessantly, like a river. For me, it is a little thread of water. I need a really large work of art in order to obtain a cascade. Oh, I have known them all, the torments of style.”

Generally, posterity has sided with Flaubert in valuing his little thread of water, and has looked down on those writers who flow largely. And I’ll admit, I haven’t really read George Sand’s novels. But myself, I am not one of those people who press my brain to find a word – saving of course those premonitory moments of Alzheimers, when I forget the names of everything. I suppose I am more the child of Bouvard and Pecuchet – it is the words of others that I am always trying to catch. My own words I save for, well, writing my little chronicle of my time, as sieved through my brain. And even there - I'm not sure these are my own words at all.