Dangling Man

Saul Bellow’s ‘Dangling Man’ is a short Novel in the form of a journal.  The journal keeper is an unemployed history graduate, supported by his working wife.  The book explores how he came to the condition of his present inertia (he abandoned an attempt at philosophical essays), and began to ‘dangle’.  I chanced upon this in the library and for some reason felt compelled to devote some time to it.  I just wanted to reproduce a couple of passages at length to give a flavour.

Great pressure is brought to bear to make us understand ourselves.  On the other hand, civilization teaches us that each of us is an inestimable prize.   There are, then, these two preparations: one for life and the other for death.  Therefore we value and are ashamed to value ourselves, are hard boiled.  We are schooled in quietness and, if one of us takes his measure occasionally, he does so cooly, as if he were examining hi fingernails, not his soul, frowning at the imperfections he finds as one would at a chip or a bit of dirt.  Because, of course, we are all called upon to accept the imposition of of all kinds of wrongs, to wait in ranks under a hot sun, to run up a clattering beach, to be sentries, scouts or workingmen, to be those in the train when it is blown up, or those at the gates when they are locked, to be of no significance, to die.  The result is that we learn to be unfeeling towards ourselves and incurious.  Who can be the earnest huntsman of himself when he knows he is in turn a quarry?  Or nothing so distinctive as quarry, but one of a shoal, driven toward the weirs.

But I must know what I myself am.

And earlier in the novel he writes:

Shall my life by one-thousandth of an inch fall short of its ultimate possibility?  It is a different thing to value oneself, and to prize oneself crazily.  And then there are our plans, idealizations.  These are dangerous, too.  They can consume us like parasites, eat us, drink us, and leave us lifelessly prostrate.  And yet we are always inviting the parasite, as if we were eager to be drained and eaten.

Is it because we have been taught there is no limit to what a man can be.  Satan and the Church, representing god, did battle over him.  He, by reason of his choice, partially decided the outcome.  But whether, after life, he went to hell or to heaven, his place among other men was given.  It could not be contested.  But, since, the stage has been reset and human beings only walk on it, and, under this revision, we have, instead, history to answer to.  We were important enough then for our souls to be fought over.  Now, each of us is responsible for his own salvation, which is in his greatness.  And that, that greatness, is the rock our hearts are abraded on.  Great minds, great beauties, great lovers and criminals surround us.  From the great sadness and desperation of Werthers and Don Juans we went to the great ruling images of Napoleons; from these to murderers who had the right over victims because they were greater than the victims; to men who felt privileged to approach others with a whip; to schoolboys and clerks who roared like revolutionary lions; to those pimps and subway creatures, debaters in midnight cafeterias who believed they could be great in treachery and catch the throats of those they felt were sound and well in the lassos of their morbidity; to dreams of dreams of greatly beautiful shadows embracing on a flawless screen.  Because of these things we hate immoderately and punish ourselves and one another immoderately.  The fear of lagging pursues and maddens us.  The fear lies in us like a cloud.  It makes an inner climate of darkness.  And occasionally there is a storm of hate and wounding rain out of us.

I suppose the late great novelist must have been about my age when he wrote Dangling Man, his first published novel.  War hangs heavily over the book and clearly the author was influenced by European literature of the previous couple of decades.  But there’s clearly something universal in the existential angst he captures in these two passages, the precise nature of the protagonist’s circumstance aside.  Bellow, for me, is up there with the very best – among the authors that help one make sense of one’s own life.

February 4, 2010 | No Comments »

The God Delusion: new paperback preface

Below is a video of Richard Dawkins reading the new preface to the paperback of The God Delusion. Those people that have already formed stringent opinions about Dawkins probably won’t be reassured by him rattling off a list of responses to the press criticisms of his book. Nevertheless have a listen to the content of what he has to say anyway. There is a response to every pub-based criticism of his book also and that is nice to hear coming from the man himself. I’m rather pleased that this book became a best seller, and with the paperback edition coming out, it could well become a fixture of many household shelves.

June 20, 2007 | 5 Comments »

Good Reading

It’s proper good reading this Augie March, it really is. Don’t always get it and some of it is frankly over my head, but so often passages deserve to be read again and savored. Like this one where Augie is returning from an accidental road trip across Michigan:

When evening came on we were tearing out of Gary and toward South Chicago, the fire and smudge mouth of the city gorping to us. As the flamy bay shivers for home-coming Neopolitans. You enter your native water like a fish. And there sits the great fish god or Dragon. You then bear your soul like a minnow before Dragon, in your familiar water.

Or this passage where Augie is ruminating on the subjectivity of bitterness:

And if the highest should come in that empty overheated tavern with its flies and the hot radio buzzing between the plays and plugged beer from Sox Park, what are you supposed to do but take the mixture and say imperfection is always the condition as found; all great beauty too, my scratched eyeballs will always see scratched. And there may gods turn up anywhere.

It’s really bloody good this book.

May 30, 2007 | 1 Comment »

Houellebecq’s Brave New World

It’s really interesting reading Huxley’s Brave New World again after Houllebecq. Houellebecq’s reading of the society portrayed in the novel is morally ambiguous in comparison to the way in which the phrase ‘Brave New World’ has entered the vernacular to signify a technological consumerist dystopia.

The idea that Houllebecq borrows is that, in late capitalist society the traditional family unit and viviparous motherhood are totally incommensurate with a system where sex is just another commodity. This dissonance results in epidemic levels of depression and to some degree, ideological conflict. The so-called sexual revolution of the sixties, in conjunction with certain other factors, precipitated the total meltdown of western society.

The solution: remove competitiveness from reproduction; engineer the animal out of the man. Humans have outgrown their biology. It’s time create our successors. Pretty wacky I know – but after you’ve read enough sordid Houellebecq sex scenes it seems quite an attractive idea.

Sometimes when I look at the all the evidence of our ‘raunch’ culture I think Houellebecq may be correct in this rather depressing view of things. Maybe the Jihadists are right! But predictably enough, I’m more inclined to just blame capitalism, or rather the way it’s managed, or not managed, if you see what I mean. Not much of a conclusion I know, but it’s a start.

April 11, 2007 | No Comments »

Tom Wolfe I am Charlotte Simmons

Tom Wolfe’s latest novel charts the the trials and trepidations of a beautiful, poor, working class southerner in her first semester at a fictional elite University. Critically the book was poorly received but having just finished it myself I think that this general appraisal is unfair. If anything this book is not so much intended for the audience that lapped up The Bonfire of the Vanities in the 80s. I believe this book is of more interest to, and perhaps intended for a younger generation of readers.

As a novelist who only releases an opus into the world every ten years or so, it’s only natural for him to try and capture the zeitgeist in some way. Though in some respects true to form, this is more than just an expansive journalistic novel about life for American University students in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

I believe it’s telling that one of the ‘athlete friendly’ courses available to students of Dupont University is entitled ‘The French Novel: From Flaubert to Houellebecq’ (and I don’t believe this to be just a casual reference). For me Houellebecq is the most successful contemporary novelist in capturing the spirit of our times and unfortunately, it ain’t pretty. There are themes and set-pieces in Wolf’e's last novel that synthesise the nihilistic houellebecqian world-view that reduces us just to the subject of our drives. I am Charlotte Simmons, like all of his novels, positively oozes testosterone despite the principle character being an eighteen year old girl. Indeed, they are in accordance with the way in which societies denigrate status along alpha beta distinctions, and one’s success or failure is further complicated by the unrealistic expectations fostered by a hyper-sexualised consumerist society. Weedy beta-male Adam who is Wolfes’s counterpoint to all the muscular superstar jocks and frat boys is a sexual failure and makes desperate trips to the gym in order to ‘buff up’ and adhere to the fashionable ideal for male students. He indulges in revenge fantasies about Dupont’s celebrity ‘student athletes’ who are the source of much of his torment.

Amongst other things, this book is very much about sport and the pre-eminent position it occupies in the American University system. How the system works, of kids going to college primarily to play ‘football’ for instance, on the basis of sporting prowess rather than academic ability, had always been something of a mystery to me. My conclusion: it’s just plain weird; and a little creepy. In Wolfe’s novels the main athletes and alpha-fratboys think of themselves as a privileged warrior class who are entitled to all the spoils of war.

The ‘might is right’ attitude that reflects America’s imperial ethos and pervades its educational system has crept steadily into the British system also. The Yealmpton press the other month had an article about Yealmpton Primary school and it reminded me of my experience there as a student teacher on an observation week in late September last year. It was quite an enjoyable week in that I was able to walk there through the woods everyday as I had done as a child, and be home again by about a quarter to four each day. The children were incredibly sweet, some of them at least, and I was quite smitten with them towards the end of the week. I got a sense of the school as being at the heart of the community with parents (mostly mums) having an integrated relationship with the institution. Rural village primary schools are a little microcosm, everyone knows everyone else, parents are involved on a day to day basis with the running of the school, and staff have to be amenable to this. This aspect of village life remains constant and rightly so, but much has changed in the last twenty years or so.

When I attended it form the mid eighties to the early nineties it was a primary school with a second to none reputation for music tuition in the county. This was due largely to the commitment of the then Head, the eccentric but well meaning Dennis Breeze. He must represent the last of a generation of teachers for whom the national curriculum was something to be promptly disposed of each year. For better or worse, you wouldn’t be able to get away with it now. He taught what he knew and what he knew was music, perhaps to the detriment of non-musical children, but nevertheless he was widely respected, despite some of his more unsavoury views. The local community was aware of what the school was like, what it valued and tried to nurture, and could opt out of sending children there if it wanted to.

These days the school is still widely respected but in a different field altogether. Now it is regarded an exemplar in the world of primary physical education. I picked up on this in my time there by the fact that a few of the staff were wearing tracksuits; all of the time. Now, I believe that as a youngster myself I would have found this slightly out of the ordinary and questionable. The reason being that staff on the days they were teaching P.E (which seemed to be most days) there simply wasn’t enough time to get changed, with all the demands on your time that the job entails. I believe however, that attire is important as it gives of certain messages, it reflects deeper structures. Call me old fashioned, but doesn’t a school master have a duty to dress smartly and like an educator, not like an athlete?

It’s a slippery slope if you ask me. Once our culture has been so utterly ravaged beyond all recognition all that’ll be left is sport and millions of baying screaming morons at the side-line.

Tom Wolfe doesn’t do things by half and there’s no doubting his dedication and success, to my mind, in capturing the vernacular of his young subjects, an aspect that some critics found unsatisfactory. Unfortunately the book is more infamous for it’s winning the Bad Sex Award in 2004. This in my view is not entirely undeserved, the excrutiating accounts of copulation are calculatedly cringe-worthy. And at times he lays in on a bit thick and you can’t get that voice out your head reminding you that this is a book about modern teenagers written by someone in the their seventies.

If I am Charlotte Simmons has one main flaw it is that that it is overly long at nearly seven hundred densely printed pages. I think this maybe Wolfe’s ‘up-yours’ to the contemporary convention of shorter novels. Having finally gotten through it myself I feel I have spent a whole semester at ‘Dupont’ University my self – and that is how it should be. Personally I like longer novels – it becomes more of a voyage, the joy of the novel is that it is long and involving process in way that a piece of cinema never can be for instance. Wolfe consciously adopts a literary style that predates cinema and television and I admire his commitment to this ideal. I think more people should read this book and that the popular press did us a disservice by so promptly dismissing it, bad sex and all.

March 30, 2007 | 3 Comments »