magic, story, lesson

Ruled by @vladimir-nabokov-official

[literary-structures]

Now, I am not sure that realism is quite as universal in [‘Third World Literature’] or quite as definitively superseded in what Jameson calls ‘first-world cultural development.’ Some of the most highly regarded US fictionists of the present cultural moment, from Bellow and Malamud to Grace Paley and Robert Stone, seem to write not quite ‘like Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson’ bur surely within the realist mode. On the other hand, Césaire became so popular among the French Surrealists because the terms of his discourse were contemporaneous with their own, and Neruda has been translated by some of the leading US poets because he is even formally not ‘outmoded.’ Novelists like Garcia Marquez or Rushdie have been so well received in US/British literary circles precisely because they do nor write like Dreiser or Sherwood Anderson; the satisfactions of their outrageous texts are nor those of Proust or Joyce but are surely of an analogous kind, delightful to readers brought up on modernism and postmodernism. Césaire’s “Return to the Native Land” is what it is because it combines what Jameson calls a ‘national allegory’ with the formal methods of the Parisian avant-garde of his student days. Borges, of course, is no longer seen in the USA in terms of his Latin American origin; he now belongs to the august company of the significant moderns, much like Kafka. To say that the canon simply does nor admit any Third World writers is to misrepresent the way bourgeois culture works – through selective admission and selective canonization. Just as modernism has now been fully canonized in the museum and the university, and as certain kinds of Marxism have been incorporated and given respectability within the academy, certain writers from the ‘Third World’ are also now part and parcel of literary discourse in the USA. Instead of claiming straightforward exclusion, it is perhaps more useful to inquire how the principle of selective incorporation works in relation to texts produced outside the metropolitan countries.

Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (112–3)

[literary-structures]

Look, I myself, as you have seen, believe in the cross-pollination of culture, believe in borrowing and, if necessary, stealing from other cultures in order to create the things that I think are most precious to all of us. If Basho, the great haiku poet, Japanese haiku poet, had been denied access to Chinese and Indian culture, he wouldn’t have had access either to writing or to Buddhism, both of which were very important to him. If people had said to Basho, ‘Well, you’re appropriating Chinese culture when you write or you’re appropriating Indian culture when you appeal to Zen Buddhism,’ then that would have left him with nothing of the sort that he was best at to do. So my basic tendency is to think that as long as one respects reasonable intellectual property regimes and so on, you should take what you can wherever you find it useful and work with it. But look, there are ways of using the culture of other people that express disrespect for them and it’s bad to express disrespect. So I think that what people are worried about very often when they’re talking about cultural appropriation isn’t actually an issue of property; it’s an issue of respect. And I have some sympathy with the arguments about respect, though not – as you see – very many positive feelings about the idea of cultural objects belonging to one ethnic group or one nationality or anything else like that.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘Lecture 4: Culture,’ Reith Lectures 2016

[freuds-cokedealer]

Appropriation suggests theft, and a process analogous to the seizure of land or artefacts. With artefacts and land the meaning of ownership is clear, even if in many cases disputed. But when it comes to what UNESCO calls ‘intangible’ cultural forms – ideas, language, folklore, cuisine, religious symbols and so on – the question of ‘ownership’ becomes far less meaningful and far more tortuous to define. What really lies behind the debate about cultural appropriation is not ownership but gatekeeping – the making of rules or an etiquette to determine how a particular cultural form may be used and by whom. What critics of cultural appropriation want to establish is that certain people have the right to determine who can use such knowledge or forms, because at the heart of criticism of cultural appropriation is the relationship between gatekeeping and identity. One of the key arguments of many such critics is that one speaks through one’s identity; that one speaks, as writer Nesrine Malik has put it, ‘as a’: ‘as a woman’, ‘as a Muslim’, ‘as an immigrant’. And those who are not ‘as a’ must take their cue from those who are, especially if they happen to be privileged by being white or male or straight. ‘Lived experience’, as Malik has put it, ‘is on its way to becoming the superior and most veracious form of truth.’ And as the novelist Kamila Shamsie has observed, ‘What started as a thoughtful post-colonial critique of certain types of imperial texts somehow became a peculiar orthodoxy that essentially denies the possibility of imaginative engagement with anyone outside your little circle.’ What is really being appropriated, in other words, is not culture but the right to police cultures and experiences, a right appropriated by those who license themselves to be arbiters of the correct forms cultural borrowing.

Kenan Malik, Truth About Cultural Appropriation (via freuds-cokedealer)

[literary-structures]

When we have clarity of mind and heart we are able to know delight, to engage the sensual world around us with a pleasure that is immediate and profound. In his essay “Down at the Cross,” James Baldwin declares: ‘To be sensual […] is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.’ Poet Adrienne Rich cautions against the loss of the sensual in “What Is Found There? Notebooks on Poetry and Politics”: ‘Sensual vitality is essential to the struggle for life. It’s as simple—and as threatened—as that.’ Estrangement from the realm of the senses is a direct product of overindulgence, of acquiring too much. This is why living simply is a crucial part of healing. As we begin to simplify, to let the clutter go, whether it is the clutter of desire or the actual material clutter and incessant busyness that fills every space, we recover our capacity to be sensual. When the asleep body, numb and deadened to the world of the senses, awakens, it is a resurrection that reveals to us that love is stronger than death.

bell hooks, All About Love (218–9)

[mystacoceti]

Gass: The question that lies, I think, between John and I here is whether or not writing fiction is a good method for such an exploration rather than philosophy and one of the problems of course is the demands of the art and the demands of philosophy, which is dedicated to these problems — coming to conclusions about moral matters — it has its own disciplines, its own areas and I think it’s seeking a method of talking about such issues and coming to clarity about these issues in which the way we talk about them won’t twist the conclusions. The difference for example between a presumed syllogism and a sophistical argument is if you start your syllogism with truths you’re supposed to get truths out; they somehow get through the form unscathed. Whereas in rhetoric if you start with any proposition you can come out with quite a different one, and you can twist. I think fiction is a method which in its very nature, by practice, in demands, twists, so I would be suspicious of that

Then John goes on to say, in writing he’s facing the problem of revision, getting the right words — which of course every writer is after if they can make it — by constantly asking “Is this what I really believe?”, and I think that’s fine. I don’t care how the right words get out there, so long as they’re the right words. But my condition is much bleaker. I don’t know most of the time what I believe, and indeed as a fiction writer find it convenient not to believe things. Not to disbelieve either, just to move into a realm in which all those things are held in suspension. And one hopes the amount of meaning one can pack into the book will always be more than what you are consciously capable of understanding, otherwise the book is liable to be as thin as you and so I think one of the problems is always to trick your medium into doing far better than you yourself as a conscious and clear-headed person might manage.

So one of the problems I face is exactly the opposite of John’s. John’s concerned to communicate. I have very little to communicate, I’m not sure I even understand what little I do have — I think it would be thin and uninteresting and hardly useful. If I did want to communicate, then I’d move over to the area of philosophy and submit to the rigors that are concerned with the production of clarity, of order, of logical order, of truth and so on.

Thus I’m interested in fiction in transforming language away from, disarming, the almost insistent communicability of language. When you are not asserting you are not confusing.

from Gardner, John and William H. Gass : discussion; October 27, 1978

[literary-structures]

‘I’ll perish,’ Tanya says, ‘but perishing from him is lovely. I murmur not: why murmur? He cannot give me happiness.’

Alexander Pushkin (tr. Vladimir Nabokov), Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse (228)

[literary-structures]

One of the terrifying things about “Othello” is that its racial poisons seem so casually concocted, as if racism were just something that Iago, drawing in his improvisational way on a gallimaufry of quite unsystematic prejudices and superstitions, made up as he went along. The characteristic pleasure he takes in his own felicitous invention only makes the effect more shocking. Iago lets horrible things loose and delights in watching them run, and the play seems to share that narcissistic fascination—or better, perhaps, Iago is the voice of its own fascinated self-regard. The play thinks abomination into being and then taunts the audience with the knowledge that it can never be unthought: ‘What you know, you know.’ It is a technique that works close to the unstable ground of consciousness itself, for it would be almost as difficult to say whether its racial anxieties are ones that the play discovers or implants in its (implicitly white) audience, as to say whether jealousy is something Iago discovers or implants in its black hero. Yet discovery, in the most literal theatrical sense, is what the last scene cruelly insists on. Like no other drama, “Othello” establishes an equivalency between psychological event (what happens ‘inside’) and offstage action (what happens ‘within’); thus it can flourish its disclosure of the horror on the bed like a psychoanalytic revelation.

Michael Neill, ‘“Unproper Beds”: Race, Adultery and the Hideous in Othello,’ in Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics, and Society in English Renaissance Drama (249)

[literary-structures]

Then, since this earth affords no joy to me, But to command, to cheque, to o’erbear such As are of better person than myself, I’ll make my heaven to dream upon the crown, And, whiles I live, to account this world but hell, Until my misshaped trunk that bears this head Be round impaled with a glorious crown. And yet I know not how to get the crown, For many lives stand between me and home: And I,—like one lost in a thorny wood, That rends the thorns and is rent with the thorns, Seeking a way and straying from the way; Not knowing how to find the open air, But toiling desperately to find it out,— Torment myself to catch the English crown: And from that torment I will free myself, Or hew my way out with a bloody axe. Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile, And cry ‘Content’ to that which grieves my heart, And wet my cheeks with artificial tears, And frame my face to all occasions. I’ll drown more sailors than the mermaid shall; I’ll slay more gazers than the basilisk; I’ll play the orator as well as Nestor, Deceive more slily than Ulysses could, And, like a Sinon, take another Troy. I can add colours to the chameleon, Change shapes with Proteus for advantages, And set the murderous Machiavel to school. Can I do this, and cannot get a crown? Tut, were it farther off, I’ll pluck it down.

Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part III (Act 3, Scene 2)

[literary-structures]

I have always been amused by the stereotyped compliment that a reviewer pays the author of a ‘new translation.’ He says: ‘It reads smoothly.’ In other words, the hack who has never read the original, and does not know its language, praises an imitation as readable because easy platitudes have replaced in it the intricacies of which he is unaware. ‘Readable,’ indeed! A schoolboy’s boner mocks the ancient masterpiece less than does its commercial poetization, and it is when the translator sets out to render the ‘spirit,’ and not the mere sense of the text, that he begins to traduce his author.

Vladimir Nabokov, ‘Foreword,’ in Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse by Aleksandr Pushkin (ix)

[literary-structures]

We do not have to love one another to engage in meaningful solidarity. The emergence of a critical faculty, of critique itself, is bound up with a vexed and precious relationship of solidarity, where our ‘sentiments’ navigate the ambivalence by which they are constituted. We can always fall apart, which is why we struggle to stay together. Only then do we stand a chance of persisting in a critical commons: when nonviolence becomes the desire for the other’s desire to live, a way of saying, ‘You are grievable; the loss of you is intolerable; and I want you to live; I want you to want to live, so take my desire as your desire, for yours is already mine.’ The ‘I’ is not you, yet it remains unthinkable without the ‘you’—wordless, unsustainable. So, whether we are caught up in rage or love—rageful love, militant pacifism, aggressive nonviolence, radical persistence—let us hope that we live that bind in ways that let us live with the living, mindful of the dead, demonstrating persistence in the midst of grief and rage, the rocky and vexed trajectory of collective action in the shadow of fatality.

Judith Butler, The Force of Non-Violence: An Ethico-Political Bind (203–4)

[literary-structures]

Pushkin’s composition is first of all and above all a phenomenon of style, and it is from this flowered rim that I have surveyed its sweep of Arcadian country, the serpentine gleam of its imported brooks, the miniature blizzards imprisoned in round crystal, and the many-hued levels of literary parody blending in the melting distance. It is not ‘a picture of Russian life’; it is at best the picture of a little group of Russians, in the second decade of the last century, crossed with all the more obvious characters of western European romance and placed in stylized Russia, which would disintegrate at once if the French props were removed and if the French impersonators of English and German writers stopped prompting the Russian-speaking heroes and heroines. The paradoxical part from a translator’s point of view, is that the only Russian element of importance is this speech, Pushkin’s language, undulating and flashing through verse melodies the likes of which had never been known before in Russia. The best I could do was to describe in some of my comments special samples of the original text. It is hoped that my readers will be moved to learn Pushkin’s language and go through “EO” again without this crib. In art as in science there is no delight without the detail, and it is on details that I have tried to fix the reader’s attention. Let me repeat that unless these are thoroughly understood and remembered, all ‘general ideas’ (so easily acquired, so profitably resold) must necessarily remain but worn passports allowing their bearers short cuts from one area of ignorance to another.

Vladimir Nabokov, ‘Translator’s Introduction,’ in Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse by Aleksandr Pushkin (7–8)

[literary-structures]

Although [Christopher] Okigbo, in his personal life, was willing to die for a political cause, he routinely rejected the notion that he be bound by political obligations in his professional life. For instance, when he was awarded a prize at the 1er Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres in Dakar in 1966, he declined it on the grounds that black literature was an absurd concept. In this declaration Okigbo expresses a longing to be recognized as a writer, not as a black writer. For him, the aesthetic realm transcends, or ought to transcend, racial and political boundaries. In life he might be a firm believer in the need for black people to assert their rights. As a poet, however, he felt that his work should not observe systems of racial exclusion or separatism in any form. Also, his rejection of the prize might be construed as a classic modernist gesture of distancing oneself from careerist or financial ambitions in the name of artistic purity. Sometimes, as in “Black Orpheus,” the idea of an apolitical literary sphere represented a pragmatic compromise, a willingness to suspend or forestall political differences that might hinder the establishment of independent African cultural institutions. In other cases, the discourse of aesthetic autonomy could function as a self-conscious professional strategy, a belief that literature and its producers ought not to be influenced by wealth or by vested political interests. […] The modernist ideal of autonomy, refashioned to speak to the circumstances of the Cold War, could permit African intellectuals to reject ideological binaries. Commitments to artistic and political sovereignty were frequently blended in the fabrication of anglophone African cultural institutions of the decolonization era. The doctrine of nonalignment, expressed both politically and artistically, bolstered anticolonial sentiments by insisting on African self-determination in all its forms. Even apolitical art, in a paradoxical formulation, could have some political resonance in that it insisted on the right of Africans to determine their aesthetic future without interference from the Cold War superpowers, which were prone to evaluate every aesthetic object by its ideological utility.

Peter Kalliney, ‘Modernism, African Literature and the Cold War,’ in Modern Language Quarterly (2015) 

[literary-structures]

To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck. Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom.

Susan Sontag, ‘Literature is Freedom,’ in At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches (209)

[literary-structures]

Brentano’s and Mach’s monism – their rejection of a dualist conception of conscious and unconscious mind – is another reason why Kafka did not use interior monologue or stream-of-consciousness narration. Depth psychology such as that promulgated by Freud was incompatible with their belief that everything was surface. Consciousness, relying on perception, could have areas that were more or less focused, but it had no depth. This ‘flat’ view of our relation to the world is crucial for understanding the two thinkers’ monist approach to psychology. […] Kafka’s attachment to psychological monism probably explains his avoidance of narrative strategies that derived from Freudian theory, although he knew it well, and used or even parodied it in some of his own stories. Instead, he developed a method that became his special signature. This was the use of limited third-person narrative, in which a single character’s perceptual field is presented, but not in the first person, as would normally be the case if we had direct access to the character’s sensory impressions. The third-person pronoun creates just a touch of distance and ambiguity, enough to hint that not everything is as it seems. Gradually, we come to understand that the character may be deceived about what he or she is experiencing. What used to be termed the ‘einsinnig’ (monoperspectival) vision of Kafka’s narrative fiction has come to be understood as a strategy that allows, and even encourages, a more critical perspective on the part of the reader. Even in some of Kafka’s first-person stories, the narrator’s blind spots can become apparent, as in the omission of human beings from “Forschungen eines Hundes” (“Investigations of a Dog,” written in 1922).

Judith Ryan, ‘Literary Modernism,’ in Kafka in Context (79–80)

[artist-aivazovski]

Creation of the World, 1864, Ivan Aivazovski

[literary-structures]

While I was ruining down to the depth there appeared before me one who seemed faint through long silence. When I saw him in that vast desert, I cried to him, ‘Have pity on me whatever you are, shade or living man!’ ‘No, not a living man, though once I was,’ he answered me, ‘and my parents were Lombards, both Mantuans by birth. I was born “sub Julio,” although late, and I lived at Rome under the good Augustus, in the time of the false and lying gods. I was a poet, and I sang of that just son of Anchises who came from Troy after proud Ilium was burned. But you, why do you return to so much woe? Why do you not climb the delectable mountain, the source and cause of every happiness?’ ‘Are you, then, that Virgil, that fount which pours forth so broad a stream of speech?’ I answered him, my brow covered with shame. ‘O glory and light of other poets, may the long study and the great love that have made me search your volume avail me! You are my master and my author. You alone are he from whom I took the fair style that has done me honor. See the beast that has turned me back. Help me against her, famous sage, for she makes my veins and pulses tremble.’

Dante Alighieri (tr. Charles Singleton), The Divine Comedy: Inferno (9)

[radishreader]

Children caused landlords headache. Fearing street violence, many parents in crime-ridden neighborhoods kept their children locked inside. Children cooped up in small apartments used the curtains for superhero capes; flushed toys down the toilet; and drove up the water bill. They could test positive for lead poisoning, which could bring a pricey abatement order. They could come under the supervision of Child Protective Services, whose caseworkers inspected families' apartments for unsanitary or dangerous code violations. Teenagers could attract the attention of the police.

It was an old tradition: landlords barring children from their properties. In the competitive postwar housing market of the late 1940s, landlords regularly turned away families with children and evicted tenants who got pregnant. This was evident in letters mothers wrote when applying for public housing. "At present," one wrote, "I am living in an unheated attic room with a one-year-old baby. . . . Everywhere I go the landlords don't want children. I also have a ten-year-old boy. . . . I can't keep him with me because the landlady objects to children. Is there any way that you can help me to get an unfurnished room, apartment, or even an old barn? . . . I can't go on living like this because I am on the verge of doing something desperate." Another mother wrote, "My children are now sick and losing weight. . . . I have tried, begged, and pleaded for another place [it's] always 'too late' or 'sorry, no children.'" Another wrote, "The lady where I am rooming put two of my children out about three weeks ago and don't want me to let them come back. . . . If I could get a garage I would take it."

When Congress passed the Fair Housing Act in 1968, it did not consider families with children a protected class, allowing landlords to continue openly turning them away or evicting them. Some placed costly restrictions on large families, charging 'children-damage deposits' in addition to standard rental fees. One Washington, DC, development required tenants with no children to put down a $150 security deposit but charged families with children a $450 deposit plus a monthly surcharge of $50 per child. In 1980, HUD commissioned a nationwide study to assess the magnitude of the problem and found that only 1 in 4 rental units was available to families without restrictions. Eight years late, Congress finally outlawed housing discrimination against children and families, but as Pam found out, the practice remained widespread. Families with children were turned away in as many as 7 in 10 housing searches.

--Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016)