Robert Cormier's The Chocolate War

This book blew me away when I first read it in the late 1970s. I was a pre-teen then, and I'd never been to America, so the whole American context of the book was strange to me. I still don't know if Catholic schools on the East Coast are actually like this... maybe I'm better off not knowing.

The first sentence, “They murdered him,” is meant figuratively in the context of the opening scene, an American football try-out, but is simultaneously a close-to-literal plot synopsis. How often do three words do that much work?

Nor does the book slow down much after that. I think it disturbed me more deeply than William Golding's Lord of the Flies, which I must have first read around the same time. According to his “Guardian” obituary, Cormier was surprised when his agent told him The Chocolate War was a book for teenagers, but the agent had a point – adults are probably too impressionable to be allowed access to this sort of thing.

First published in the year Nixon resigned – although a few hippie street people are the only explicitly topical reference -- The Chocolate War is about the competitive pressure to meet sales targets, with corruption extending all the way to the top. The dodgy accounting, the unbuckable system -- it's the America we think we know, immaculately mythologized. Amazingly, The Chocolate War topped the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom's list of most challenged books as recently as 2004, which perhaps shows how few things changed between 1974 and 2004. The purpose of rules is to crush those who ignore them, and consumerism is a duty worth killing for – this book is a bleak portrayal of the fate of a conscientious objector under corporate Fascism.

Part of what parents object to may be the pervasive atmosphere of unsatisfied teenage lust. There are no woman characters -- women are unattainable objects throughout. Characters include Brother Leon, one of the creepiest teachers in fiction, Archie Costello, a delightful villain and a master at manufacturing consent, and the hero Jerry Renault, who I've taken three decades to recognize as myself. According to an interview with ipl2, The Chocolate War was inspired by Cormier's son's decision not to sell the chocolates during his school's annual sale, and Cormier's true heroes included Graham Greene and J.D. Salinger.

This is rather a klunky segue, but I just heard that Salinger died today (January 28th 2010)...

Muckers, Muckrakers and Mythmakers

Tom Wolfe wrote -- in the appendix to his classic piece “The New Journalism,” which for now you can find here -- that myth couldn't have been “further from the minds of the realists who established the novel as the reigning genre over a hundred years ago. As a matter of fact, they were turning their backs, with a kind of mucker's euphoria, on the idea of myth and fable.”

The phrase “mucker's euphoria” is characteristic -- Wolfe sees mythmakers as afraid to get mucky. But the great novelists are muckers, muckrakers, and mythmakers. Great Expectations, for example, although rich in contemporary detail, is simultaneously a fairy-tale. Why does Miss Havisham never take off her wedding-dress? Not because this is sociologically plausible. Rather, she encodes mythologically the way women tend to get hella pissed if you don't show up to the wedding, with repercussions extending unto the next generation. Miss Havisham has things to tell us about Victorian social mores, but the essence of her story could easily be transplanted to any other society at any other time. Magwitch, likewise, is both an exposé of the practice of transportation to the colonies and that character from a fairy-tale who, if you do him a good deed early on, will later repay you with interest.

The journalistic immediacy of these characters helps them to hold our attention in the first place -- but it's their mythological resonance that makes them stick in our memories.

In the early 1980s, semiotician Thomas Sebeok composed a report for the US Office of Nuclear Waste Management titled "Communication Measures To Bridge Ten Millennia." An excerpt appears on the Long Now Blog. Seeking a way to prevent future civilizations from entering geographic areas contaminated by our nuclear waste, Sebeok proposed establishing an "atomic priesthood" of physicists, anthropologists, semioticians to disseminate “folkloristic devices.” As Umberto Eco comments in The Search for the Perfect Language, “It is curious to see that, having been presented with a choice of various types of universal language, the choice finally fell on a 'narrative' solution, thus reproposing what really did happen millennia ago. Egyptian has disappeared, as well as any other perfect and holy primordial language, and what remains of all this is only myths, tales without a code, or whose code has long been lost. Yet they are still capable of keeping us in a state of vigil in our desperate effort at decipherment.”

On Realism and Werewolves

Susan Palwick's story “Gestella” can be found in her collection The Fate of Mice. It's a very realistic portrayal both of the ways men mistreat women, and of the ways men mistreat wolves.

Palwick could have made the woman and the wolf distinct victims, but then the parallel between their fates might have felt too forced, too “unrealistically” coincidental. So having the woman in “Gestalla” be a werewolf is a more “concentrated” solution -- the story carries more emotional punch that way.

Gene Wolfe, in the introduction to Volume VI of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, “Fables and Reflections,” writes regarding Gaiman's graphic short stories -- “What is important and central is that, time after time, the stories themselves are true.” For writers, this sort of mythic truth is more desirable than realism per se.

In Neil Gaiman's “The Hunt,” from the volume just cited, a grandfather tells his granddaughter a story about the Old Country – the rub of the story is that inter-marriage is inadvisable. Few of us can take that principle seriously nowadays – only the fact that we're dealing with a family of werewolves shocks us into considering the possible truth in what the man is saying, the idea it really might be perilous to marry somebody from too different a background... Of course, there's more to the story than that, and as the grandfather himself says, “You shouldn't trust the story-teller; only trust the story.”

My point is that any adequate definition of realism needs to make room for werewolves. Otherwise we might even lose Heathcliff. Here's one adequate definition, from Norman Mailer -- “Realism is not a direct appeal to the truth so much as it is the most concentrated form of fantasy.”

Which is to say that realism is best understood as one means to an end. James Wood in How Fiction Works calls this end “lifeness,” and writes that to achieve it, “the writer has to act as if the available novelist methods are continually about to turn into mere convention and so has to try to outwit that inevitable aging.”

By all means include werewolves then, provided they help you get your point across in a way that feels truly fresh...

Describing Body Language

A playwright who used to write short stories told me how much he likes being able to leave it up to actors how to interpret a line of dialog.

A novelist who writes “He stared wistfully into space” may feel obliged to strike it out as a cliché, then try to come up with something more evocative. A screenwriter can leave this to the actor or director. An actor knows a lot of different ways of starting wistfully into space. But this is knowledge stored in a non-verbal area of the brain -- when I stop writing dialog and start describing a gesture, I have the sense of reaching for a different tool-kit.

Here are a couple of instances of body language from novels I read recently. The first is from Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now. Georgiana Longstaffe is under pressure from her family to break off her engagement to a Jewish businessman, Mr. Ezekiel Brehgert. In correspondence with Brehgert, Georgiana inadvertently reveals that her main motive for marrying him is that he has a fashionable London address, and in response he breaks off the engagement. Trollope is concerned to emphasize that Brehgert comes out of this business better than the Longstaffes – this might conceivably have gone over the head of a complacently anti-Semitic reader -- so he includes a scene where Brehgert, dealing with Longstaffe senior on other business, alludes to the broken engagement and comments “I think that throughout I behaved like a gentleman.” Here is Longstaffe's response --

“Mr. Longstaffe, in an agony, first shook his head twice, and then bowed it three times, leaving the Jew to take what answer he could from so dubious an oracle.”

When I visualize Mr. Longstaffe shaking his head twice and then bowing it three times, this seems entirely plausible. But when I try to picture an actor doing the same thing, it seems like over-acting. In a television production, you'd probably just get a close-up of Longstaffe's face at this point, and the actor would find a more economical way to do the heavy lifting.

This next example is from Malcolm Braly's On The Yard. In a flashback, Chilly Willy runs into a schoolteacher soon after having a one-night-stand with her.

“She was looking at the magazines racked on the counter of the cigar stand, and there was something in her posture that suggested to Chilly she had seen him first and turned away to avoid an encounter.”

This works because there's something distinctive about the way we stand when pretending we haven't seen someone. An actress could demonstrate this posture easily -- the schoolteacher is standing stiffly, over-intent on the magazines? But Braly does well not to provide more details than he does – the way he writes the scene keeps the focus on Chilly's realization that the woman is avoiding him, which is what's emotionally significant in context.

InsideStorytime DANGER

Napoleon reportedly said the time of greatest danger was the moment immediately after victory.

They used to have posters in the U.K. saying THE FIRST FIVE MINUTES OF LIFE ARE THE MOST DANGEROUS, on which a graffiti artist commented, The last five can be pretty hairy too.

“If you're keeping a dozen balls in the air, the moment you drop the first one is when you're in most danger of dropping the others.” I don't know if that's true either, or where it comes from... aphorisms about danger are probably designed to mess with your head. Enough.

Danger is the theme of tonight's (Thursday January 21st, 6.30 - 8.30 pm, at Cafe Royale) InsideStorytime. About tonight's readers:

Lee Konstantinou is the author of the satirical novel Pop Apocalypse, and is
also at work on a book on the problem of irony in postwar U.S. literature. Which, like, who even knew it was a problem?

Sophie Littlefield is the author of the crime novel A Bad Day for Sorry.

Mary Stein is the author of The Gift of Danger, an aikido journey.

Luke Heyerman is the author of novel-in-progress Euthanize my Love.

Saqib Mausoof is a writer and film director who looks pretty dangerous in his website photo.

The MC tonight will be Ransom Stephens, author of The God Patent. Say you heard about the event through this blog and we waive the customary $3-$5 cover charge.

Okay and one more aphorism. “In counsel it is good to see dangers; but in execution not to see them unless they be very great.” -- Francis Bacon

Do Not Push The Red Button

What does this game have to tell us about holding the reader's attention? Give it a go.

Could you stop pushing the red button? I couldn't. In the words of David Foster Wallace, “There’s some weird, delicate, I-trust-you-not-to fuck-up-on-me relationship between the reader and writer, and both have to sustain it.” For me, this game somehow sustained that relationship.

Storytelling at its simplest? There's a narrator with a personality. There's humor and suspense and apocalypse. Was it a sense of competition that kept me engaged, even during the most boring stage when there were 127 decoy buttons?

There aren't many novels whose opening pages rely this heavily on reverse psychology – Clive Barker's Mister B. Gone is one that comes to mind...

Pressing the button is like turning the page. There's a rhythm involved – I think that rhythm is part of why I kept going -- and there's an escape into a world with its own rules... What's missing is a larger purpose – “Do Not Push The Red Button” doesn't leave us with an enhanced sense of the plight of today's woman etc. It's merely a page-turner -- there's no reason to play the game a second time, except to study narratology...

The Last Speakers of Half the World's Languages

Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word is about widely-spoken languages, but Ostler is also the chairman of the Foundation for Endangered Languages. He mentions in Empires of the Word that “it is reasonable to believe that, for half the world's languages, their last speakers may already be alive today.”

I'm obsessed with how it feels to be the last speaker of a language -- a state perhaps as far removed as it's possible to get from having what literary agents call a “platform.” Here's an unbearably poignant statement I once found in an oral history --

“I am the last full-blood Chunut left. My children are part Spanish. I am the only one who knows the whole Chunut or Wowol language. When I am gone no one will have it. I have to be the last one. All my life I want back our good old home on Tulare Lake. But I guess I can never have it. I am a very old Chunut now and I guess I can never see the old days again. Now my daughter and her Mexican husband work in the cotton fields around Tulare and Waukena. Cotton, cotton, cotton, that is all that is left. Chunuts cannot live on cotton. They cannot sing their old songs and tell their old stories where there is nothing but cotton. My children feel foolish when I sing my songs. But I sing anyway:

Toke-uh lih-nun Wa-tin-hin nah yo
Hiyo-umne ahe oonook miuh-wah

That is all.”

-- Yoimut, 1933, from The Way we Lived: California Indian Reminiscences, Stories and Songs, copyright 1981.

Daniel Nettle's and Suzanne Romaine's Vanishing Voices: the Extinction of the World's Languages contains photographs of the last surviving speakers of Ubykh, Catawba Sioux, Wappo, Manx, Eyak, and Yahi. All wear somewhat haunted expressions, although of course, one can hardly conclude that they went around looking that way all the time...

“It's not that I worship language for its own sake. Nor do I want to preserve a lot of cultural-linguistic groups for my own (or my colleagues') pleasure of studying them. I'm concerned instead that humanity itself; the species H. Sapiens, may be at evolutionary risk. The wholesale disappearance of languages, and what I will argue is the consequent reduction of cultural diversity, may threaten our survival.” -- H. Russell Bernard, “Preserving language diversity" in "Human Organization" 51:82-89.

Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs

In this witty, Midwestern novel, sadness laps around the edges of every joke. Here, for example, Moore dissects Wisconsin speech patterns --

“’I’d been going to do that’ seemed to live in some isolated corner of the grammatical time-space continuum where the language spoken was a kind of Navajo or old, old French. It was part of a language with tenses so countrified and bizarrely conceived, I’m sure there was one that meant ‘Hell yes, if I had a time machine!’ People here would narrate an ordinary event entirely in the past perfect: ‘I’d been driving to the store, and I’d gotten out, and she’d come up to me and I had said…’ It never reached any other tense. All was backstory. All was preamable. The past was severed prologue and was never uttered to be anything but.”

Moore’s characters lead fragile lives. Her prose relentlessly probes the uneasy implications of the everyday.

“Women now were told not to settle for second best, told that they deserved better, but at a time, it seemed, when there was so much less to go around. They were like the poor that way, perhaps. What sense did anything they were being told possibly make, given the scarcity of their world?”

In Moore’s America, everyone’s being educated not to see the elephants in the room. Civilization itself comes across as a form of denial. The point of every joke seems to be the emptiness at the heart of everything. Here she is on cookbooks –

“They were the opposite of poetry, except if, like me, you seldom cooked, and then they were the same.”

As if not being used is enough to make something beautiful?

Words and Worlds

Tonight (Thursday January 14th) marks the inauguration of a new reading series, Why There Are Words, at 7 p.m., at Studio 333 on Caledonia Street in Sausalito. Reading will be Tamim Ansary, Shana Mahaffey, Kemble Scott, Mari Coates, Michael Alenyikov, and Gravity Goldberg. Hope to see you there.

The theme is “Different Year, Different Worlds.” So in accordance with the school of associational blogging that I've just invented, I've strung together some quotes containing the word “world” -- a word I just tried staring at until it stopped looking like a word at all. Then I read all these quotes in sequence till I no longer understood what "world" even means...

G.K. Chesterton on the writer's experience of the world:

“... there is at the back of every artist's mind something like a pattern or a type of architecture... It is a thing like the landscapes of his dreams; the sort of world he would wish to make or in which he would wish to wander; the strange flora and fauna of his own secret planet; the sort of thing that he likes to think about.”

Robert Boswell on the reader's experience of the writer's world:

“When the reader’s experience of a story results in a world that is too fully known, the story fails."

Richard Powers, in Generosity, on the fictional character's experience of the world (and the reader's experience thereof):

“... story starts when a character's core value no longer suffices to stabilize his world.”

David Grann, in The Lost City of Z, on the biographer's experience of the non-fictional character's world:

“I had often heard about biographers who became consumed by their subjects, who, after years of investigating their lives, of trying to follow their every step and inhabit their world completely, were driven into fits of rage and despair, because, at some level, the people were unknowable. Aspects of their characters, parts of their stories, remained impenetrable.”

Richard Hamming on the scientist's experience of the world:

"I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But ten years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, 'The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing -- not much, but enough that they miss fame.”

Reading these quotes one after another pushes me towards Wittgenstein's position that the world is everything that is the case.

Tom Paine's “Will You Say Something, Monsieur Eliot?”

This story can be found in the collection Scar Vegas and Other Stories. It moves fast – Eliot's molars shatter in the fourth sentence. A nautical tale by an author who was briefly a Marine, it reads rather like a story by Robert Stone.

And it's a story that makes you feel guilty about Haiti, which is why I bring it up today. Haitian earthquake news here.

“The world loves me,” Eliot believes. He's an American, he is America, living life to the full, and it takes a shipwreck for him to find himself in a situation at all resembling normal life for the poor of Haiti.

He's rescued by Haitian refugees, who are themselves lost at sea. Their spokesman Alphonse says, “Because you are American, we are saved,” but it doesn't turn out that way.

"Will You Say Something, Monsieur Eliot?" really blew me away when I first read it in the “New Yorker” back in 1994. It's a story that makes you think about the difference between what a disaster means in one country as opposed to another. “Some countries are just not lucky,” as Joel Dreyfuss notes.

Interviewed by Robert Birnbaum a few years back, Tom Paine had some interesting comments about what it's like being a writer nowadays.

Roberto Bolaño's “Henri Simon Leprince”

This story can be found in Last Evenings on Earth. Its humor is Borgesian and many-edged.

Like many Bolaño stories, it's about a writer, a struggling writer if that isn't an oxymoron --

“Publishing houses and their accredited readers (that execrable subcaste) seem for some mysterious reason to detest him.”

Whether the joke here is more on writers or more on publishers is also mysterious.

When France falls to the Nazis, “the writers, who until then have been divided into scores of pullulating schools, gather to form two bands opposed by a mortal emnity,” those prepared to resist and those prepared to collaborate. While ostensibly the story is about being a French writer post-1940, the experience feeding the story is surely that of being a Chilean writer post-1973.

A collaborationist offers Leprince a well-paying newspaper job, apparently assuming Leprince will collaborate because he is a mediocre writer. Artfully, Bolaño leaves Leprince's motivation for not accepting this job unexplained.

For a brief period following Pinochet's coup, the young Bolaño was a courier for the resistance in Santiago. The fictional Leprince does similar work in France. But despite treating his hero with understanding and sympathy, Bolaño gives Leprince no credit whatsoever for his heroism... which is what convinces me that deep down Bolaño is really writing about himself here.

"Henri Simon Leprince" is a savage, tender story about a hero who cannot be taken seriously because of some deficiency in his writing. The sense conveyed is that Leprince's work for the French Resistance is merely an attempt to compensate for his not being prestigiously published. Leprince – and this time I'm pretty sure the joke is on writers -- is far less preoccupied with the tyranny of the Nazis than with that of the literary establishment. He is snubbed by the writers he helps as a “reverse opportunist” --

“... they ask where he has published his works. Leprince mentions mouldering magazines and newspapers whose mere names provoke nausea and sadness.”

And I shudder at the contradictory emotions packed into the following sentence:

“Nobody can be bothered to look up the works of the writer who saved their life.”

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Veganism

From Masson's The Oceanic Feeling -- “we cannot indulge in wild analysis and claim that every case of vegetarianism is a reaction formation (that is, an overcompensating and ultimately ungenuine lurch in the opposite direction) against unacceptable cannibalistic urges, yet we will have to acknowledge that the problem with reaction-formations, as Fenihel informed us long ago in his important article on counterphobia (1939), is the leakages, the sudden, seemingly inexplicable eruptions of sadistic behavior that are in direct contrast with the manifest life style.”

The Oceanic Feeling is a fascinating Freudian analysis of Indian religious traditions, and for me one of Masson's most entertaining books, but the quote above stuck with me mostly as an example of just how willing non-vegetarians are to talk shit about vegetarians... Masson in his Freudian incarnation seemed to congratulate himself on his open-mindedness in not insisting that all vegetarians really want to be cannibals...

Another sweeping statement from the same book -- “It is then possible to recognize that much within Buddhism is a manic defense against depression.”

Masson's life would make a great opera. He grew up in a household that venerated a guru, as wonderfully described in his book My Father's Guru: A Journey Through Spirituality and Disillusion, then rejected this belief system for Freudianism. His subsequent break with Freud is described in The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory.

In The Face on the Plate, published in 2009, Masson writes, “Only when I decided that I could no longer be a psychoanalyst in good conscience did I reconnect with my former vegetarian self: I started investigating the emotional lives of animals, and what I learned turned me back into a lifelong vegetarian.” I experienced The Face on Your Plate as a life-changing book, and must conclude that while Masson's later work lacks the cutting humor of his earlier work, he has gained in wisdom.

Personally I stopped eating mammals and birds twenty-three years ago. The arguments in The Face on the Plate have convinced me that, deep down, I really want to give up eating dairy products and eggs too. From now on I only intend to make vegan food for myself... although I don't know if it will be possible to stay vegan when traveling etc. Plus I also have a daughter and a cat to buy food for, both of them carnivores. The perfect realization of an ideal is elusive... what puzzles me most however is that it took me a whole twenty-three years after becoming a vegetarian to reach the decision to go vegan...

Blogging as Social Activity

Caleb Crain claims the Internet “is always welcoming you to the party; it is always patting you on the back to congratulate you for showing up.” Crain's experience as a blogger is that “writing on the internet tends to be more popular when it satisfies the reader's wish to be connected – the wish not to miss out.”

Crain is talking about ways blogging feels different from writing – he says reading blogs feels more like work than reading books does. And I think I see what he means.

When writing, I get to enter what Mihály Csíkszentmihályi calls a “flow” state – at some physiological level, the need to enter this state may be what motivates me to write?

But while blogging... not so much. Blogging feels more like a chore. Online writing tends to be immediate and social. When blogging, I don't get to shut down the part of my brain used at parties for answering the question "What do you do?"

In Generosity by Richard Powers, when a pupil asks, “Why don't we write online? Aren't journals just dead blogs?” the teacher replies, “I want you to think and feel, not sell.” So is all blogging marketing? Must one be offline to write in a spirit of pure self-exploration? Is blogging a cross between writing and social networking?

Story as Worm

E. M. Forster, in Aspects of the Novel, called sunrise in the tales of One Thousand and One Nights “the tape-worm by which they are tied together.”

He wrote that story “is the lowest and simplest of literary organisms. Yet it is the highest factor common to all the very complicated organisms known as novels.”

Also – “When we isolate the story like this from the nobler aspects through which it moves, and hold it out on the forceps – wriggling and interminable, the naked worm of time – it presents an appearance that is both unlovely and dull. But we have much to learn from it...”

A story is like a worm because it has twists and segments, is linear, and elastic, and comes from the depths.

A story has to be dug up. It's organic, slippery, and dirty. You drop one down a child's neck to see her shiver. They eat us in the end.

A story can also be used for bait. A worm is like a freelance throat, and can also be a dragon, as in A.S. Byatt's “A Thing in the Forest,” and as there are worms within worms, so are there stories within stories...

The Purely Literary Distorts the Outlook Upon the World of Phenomena

In Mimesis, Erich Auerbach compares the world of Flaubert and the two Goncourts to the world of Stendhal and Balzac. He finds Flaubert's world wanting --

“we sense... something narrow, something oppressively close in these books. They are full of reality and intellect but poor in humor and inner poise. The purely literary, even on the highest level of artistic acumen and amid the greatest wealth of impressions, limits the power of judgment, reduces the wealth of life, and at times distorts the outlook upon the world of phenomena. And while the writers contemptuously avert their attention from the political and economic bustle, consistently value life only as literary subject matter, and remain arrogantly and bitterly aloof from its great practical problems, in order to achieve aesthetic isolation for their work, often at great and daily expense of effort, the practical world nevertheless bests them in a thousand petty ways. There is vexation with publishers and critics; hatred of the public, which is to be conquered despite the fact that there is no common basis of emotion and thought. Sometimes there are also financial worries, and almost always there are nervous hypertension and a morbid concern with health. But since on the whole they lead the lives of well-to-do bourgeois, since they are comfortably housed, eat exquisitely, and indulge very craving of refined sensuality, since their existence is never threatened by great upheavals and dangers, what finally emerges, despite all their intellectual culture and artistic incorruptibility, is a strangely petty total impression: that of an 'upper bourgeois' egocentrically concerned over his aesthetic comfort, plagued by a thousand small vexations, nervous, obsessed by a mania – only this case the mania is called 'literature.'”

Has Auerbach got it right as to why some readers are irritated by Flaubert?

Pellerin, a character in Flaubert's Sentimental Education, predicts that “the way things are going, art will become some sort of bad joke, less poetic than religion and less interesting than politics. You'll never achieve art's goal – yes, its goal – which is to cause an impersonal exaltation, with minor works, however finely executed.” Reading Auerbach leaves me thinking Pellerin's generation was anomalous in believing art could even in principle be so clearly separated from religion and politics. An impersonal exaltation -- “une exaltation impersonelle” -- doesn't sound like much to write home about... and an art that tries not to trespass at all into the sphere of religion or politics ends up feeling rather insular. Flaubert of course understands this, and "A Simple Heart" trespasses about as far into the sphere of religion as a story can.

But while I've always loved Flaubert, isn't he sometimes guilty of condescending to his characters? I might suggest it as a rule that a writer can be worldy or unworldy... but should not be anti-worldly.

Jeffrey Ethan Lee is onto something in this post: he argues that it's important for writers not to succumb to bullshit, kitsch, received ideas, the official truth etc... but that an even greater danger, for writers, is the danger of simply striking non-writers as irrelevant...

No Perfect Novels

"The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it." — Randall Jarrell

“Novels that don't look like novels? When it comes to the canon – to steal a line from Lorrie Moore – novels like that are the only novels here.” -- Zadie Smith

“Curiously, there are many perfect short stories, but no perfect novels.” -- J.G. Ballard

Perfection, Roberto Bolaño suggests in 2666, is a rather paltry objective: Amalfitano thinks poorly of a pharmacist for liking short stories and novellas --

“He chose 'The Metamorphosis' over The Trial, he chose 'Bartleby' over Moby-Dick, he chose 'A Simple Heart' over Bouvard and Pécuchet, and 'A Christmas Carol' over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.”

I feel guilty quoting this because I myself tend to prefer Bolaño's short stories to his novels... although having said this, I immediately want to stress that he couldn't have written those short stories without writing those novels... Doubtless the impossibility of perfection is part of the appeal of novel-writing, and in this, writing resembles life. In the words of theologian Stanley Hauwerwas --

“For finally I think this is the best most of us can do: make interesting mistakes.”

But I disagree with Amalfitano at least to this extent -- I would insist that "The Metamorphosis," "Bartleby," "A Simple Heart" and "A Christmas Carol" all do blaze paths into the unknown...