wilsonltaylor

out of hopeful green stuff woven

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Robert Macfarlane, Underland (2019)

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Hari Kunzru, White Tears (2017)

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Hari Kunzru, Red Pill (2020)

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Alejandro Zambra, Ways of Going Home (2014)

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Mathias Énard, Tell Them of Battles, Kings & Elephants (2018)

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Yoko Ogawa, The Memory Police (2019)

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Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca (1938)

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

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Elizabeth Rush, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore (2019)

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Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel (2020)

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Susan Choi, Trust Exercise (2019)

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Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael (1947)

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Nick Pyenson, Spying on Whales: The Past, Present, and Future of Earth’s Most Awesome Creatures (2018)

Whalesong, however, remains a riddle to anyone who isn’t a humpback whale. We can capture its variation, details, and complexity, but we don’t know what any of it truly means. We lack the requisite context to decipher and understand it—or, really, any part of cetacean culture. Even so, we send whalesong into interstellar space because the creatures that sing these songs are superlative beings that fill us with awe, terror, and affection. We have hunted them for thousands of years and scratched them into our mythologies and iconography. Their bones frame the archways of medieval castles. They’re so compelling that we imagine aliens might find them interesting—or perhaps understand their otherworldly, ethereal song.

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Andrew Sean Greer, Less (2017)

And we realize that we thought we were the only changing thing, the only variable, in the world; that the objects and people in our lives are there for our pleasure, like the playing pieces of a game, and cannot move of their own accord; that they are held in place by our need for them, by our love. How stupid.

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Agustín Fernández Mallo, The Nocilla Trilogy 1: Dream (2006) (trans. from Spanish by Thomas Bunstead in 2015)

Deserts, like the sick, are objects: though living, they are on the edge of everything, are undergoing a process of consumption, and are fundamentally gaunt. Each has white-yellow skin, and subsists in a state of exhaustion, though each also always finds a genetic oasis to save it in the end. The lack of resources leads them to both fantasize situations of out-and-out abundance and pleasure, even in the most grueling moments reach levels of delirium that border on the lysergic, and gather into their domains all manner of strange creatures, hoping for the feeling that someone loves them, someone cares about them. Also, their gauntness makes them the most aesthetic objects on earth, and this is why Tom, who was born in Little America and who knows he’ll never himself live in the Nevada in which his parents grew up, decided to become a doctor.

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Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House (2019)

Before it was the Yellow House, the only house I knew, it was a green house, the house my eleven siblings knew. The facts of the world before me inform, give shape and context to my own life. The Yellow House was witness to our lives. When it fell down, something in me burst. My mother is always saying, Begin as you want to end. Bit my beginning precedes me. Absences allow us one power over them: They do not speak a word. We say of them what we want. Still, they hover, pointing fingers at our backs. No place to go now but into deep ground.

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C.L.R. James, Mariners, Renegades, & Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (1953)

A great part of this book was written on Ellis Island while I was being detained by the Department of Immigration. The Island, like Melville’s Pequod, is a miniature of all the nations of the world and all sections of society. My experience of it and the circumstances attending my stay there have so deepened my understanding of Melville and so profoundly influenced the form the book has taken, that an account of this has seemed to me not only a natural but necessary conclusion.

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Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992)

For some time now I have been thinking about the validity or vulnerability of a certain set of assumptions conventionally accepted among literary historians and critics and circulated as “knowledge.” This knowledge holds that traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of, first, Africans and then African-Americans in the United States. It assumes that this presence—which shaped the body politic, the Constitution, and the entire history of the culture—has had no significant place or consequence in the origin and development of that culture’s literature. Moreover, such knowledge assumes that the characteristics of our national literature emanate from a particular “Americanness” that is separate from and unaccountable to this presence. There seems to be a more or less tacit agreement among literary scholars that, because American literature has been clearly the preserve of white male views, genius, and power, those views, genius, and power are without relationship to and removed from the overwhelming presence of black people in the United States. This agreement is made about a population that preceded every American writer of renown and was, I have come to believe, one of the most furtively radical impinging forces on the country’s literature. The contemplation of this black presence is central to any understanding of our national literature and should not be permitted to hover at the margins of the literary imagination.

These speculations have led me to wonder whether the major and championed characteristics of our national literature—individualism, masculinity, social engagement versus historical isolation; acute and ambiguous moral problematics; the thematics of innocence coupled with an obsession with figurations of death and hell—are not in fact responses to a dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence. It has occurred to me that the very manner by which American literature distinguishes itself as a coherent entity exists because of this unsettled and unsettling population. Just as the formation of the nation necessitated coded language and purposeful restriction to deal with the racial disingenuousness and moral frailty at its heart, so too did the literature, whose founding characteristics extend into the twentieth century, reproduce the necessity for codes and restriction. Through significant and underscored omissions, startling contradictions, heavily nuanced conflicts, through the way writers peopled their work with the signs and bodies of this presence—one can see that a real or fabricated Africanist presence was crucial to their sense of Americanness. And it shows.