Confessions of a Book Lover (1984)Felix Krivin is one of those Soviet writers who will never be translated--he will barely even be remembered. He was a resolutely middlebrow and mostly unfunny humorist, whose work almost never exceeded the narrow conceptual limits of Brezhnevist quasi-edginess. Mostly he is known for fantasias centered around the theme of the "secret life of things," vaguely endearing and slightly sad moral fables about household objects and animals and the like. Ideology appears only at a great distance, like a seagull seen from a lighthouse, and critique never shows up at all. (Although one of his Simple Stories is particularly brilliant: it's narrated by a cow which exists only on paper, invented in order to "fulfill" a production quota.)
I came to love books. Really love them. And I decided to assemble a library.
So I come to the bookstore:
"Have you got any Pushkin?"
"We don't have any Pushkin. We have Peshkin, a substitute for Pushkin. Aleksandr Peshkin, quite a respectable poet."
"Maybe you have Bunin?"
"There's Dunin. Evdokim Dunin. A substitute for Bunin."
Fine, Dunin it is. Peshkin it is. So I get all these substitutes together--nowhere to put them.
So I come to the furniture store:
"Have you got any bookshelves?"
"We don't have any bookshelves. Go to the post office," they advise me, "buy shipping crates, stack one on top of another, or hang them on a wall. There's some bookshelves for you."
I come to the post office:
"Do you have any shipping crates?"
"We don't have any shipping crates, we have substitutes for shipping crates. Take this rag, sew it around your package..."
"But how do I make a bookshelf out of that?"
I'm walking and thinking: how do I make a bookshelf out of a rag?
I come to a pharmacy:
"Have you got any heart medicine?"
"We don't have any heart medicine, take some stomach medicine instead. It's an irreplaceable substitute."
So I take the stomach medicine and call 911.
"I need a doctor!"
"There's no doctor. There's a substitute doctor. He's got a diploma, experience, it's all there."
So I die. I appear before God.
"And that," I say, "that was life?"
"What life?" God asks, surprised. "We ran out of lives a long time ago. That was a substitute for life."
I want to make a scene, but he smiles in a conciliatory way:
"What do you want? I'm not God, after all."
And then I remember: God doesn't really exist. As a book lover, I should have known that.
Dunin writes about it, and Peshkin writes about it...
There's no God. The position exists, though. And who occupies it? A substitute...
- from Felix Krivin, Simple Stories (Простые рассказы)
In the halcyon days of the early '90s, when people were still listening to what Russian academics had to say, Mikhail Epstein argued that the Russians were almost ontogenetically well-suited for postmodernism. Image without substance has been the defining feature of Russian life: we have "democracy" without democracy, "communism" without communism, "progress" without progress. So it is unsurprising that so much of Krivin's work is formalistically obsessed with the distinction between reality and its image. The uncertain relationship between the two was the very prima materia of Soviet social existence.
What is particularly interesting, though, is the similarity between Krivin's work and trendy Western novels cast in the David Foster Wallace lost-in-the-supermarket mold. The orthodox story of postmodernism as a "cultural logic" always underscores its relationship to capitalism: glitzy, substance-free brand marketing, "reality" shows, abstract finance capital. But, just as Debord's spectacle was both a communist and a capitalist phenomenon, the same logic also reasserted itself in the East--much earlier, in fact. The difference was that Soviet postmodernism, the postmodernism of the banal, was not self-conscious. It was dramatically "under-theorized." If an image is gray and drab, is it any the less an image for not being coated in neon?
The novels of Pynchon and DeLillo and what-have-you, especially the older and better ones, are always written with a kind of look back to what they are not doing. They're not doing the linear narrative; they're not trying for moral rigor; they're not going for the modernist's eternal verities. Here, have a brand name! Have five! Soviet postmodernism is a different beast. Not only is it not written with any clear sense of what has been lost; it is also filled with the sense that no alternative can even be thought. In its unproblematic substitution of the postmodern for everyday life, it succeeds at doing what DeLillo only aspires to do.
By far the best self-consciously postmodernist fiction I've ever encountered is written by Victor Pelevin and a number of similar authors. In fact, "postmodernism" in Russia denotes primarily a literary genre. Pelevin's career, like that of Sorokin and the others, only took off after the fall of the Soviet Union. It makes sense: a truly self-conscious postmodernism could not have coexisted with the likes of Krivin. But it would also have been unthinkable in Russia without its predecessor, the postmodernism of the banal. Pelevin can only realize postmodernism because he has lived it, more than even DeLillo has.
This is great. Your discussion of Krivin reminds me a bit of Gramsci's notes on Loria and Bresciani, two exemplary intellectual non-entities who he thought really captured something about the critical deficits of popular culture at various levels.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure I entirely agree about how you've got modernism and postmodernism sectioned off, but I can't quite put my finger on it. Kafka fits your postmodern, and that can't be right, or can it? For the most part I think of modernism and postmodernism as having the same content but different moods - all that fragmentation and meaninglessness meant something to the moderns, angst or exultation, obsessions of various kinds; while to the postmoderns it's just play or life itself.
Thanks! I agree with you on that division, definitely. What I meant to say was not that the dividing line between modernism and postmodernism actually runs along the linear/nonlinear or eternal/fleeting axis. Rather, that's where postmodernists, or theorists of postmodernism, think it runs. Do you see what I mean? The attribution of all kinds of stodgy traditionalist characteristics to modernism is, in a sense, postmodernism's way of killing the father.
ReplyDeleteYeah, that's a great point. Anxiety of influence again.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed this post a lot. Made me wish I knew Russian (as so much of Hat's and, recently, your writing does). Only question: by DeLillo's better later novels, you mean Libra and Underworld, not Cosmopolis and Falling Man, right? DeLillo's late style, as somebody termed it, drives me nuts.
ReplyDeleteThanks! I've only read two of DeLillo's books, actually (I'm not much of a fan)--White Noise and Mao II. But the difference between the two is striking enough that I can assume the line of demarcation to run somewhere in the late '80s. (Glib, yes. But Mao II read like the preface to a much better book that remained unwritten.)
ReplyDelete'Mao II read like the preface to a much better book that remained unwritten."
ReplyDeleteExcept he wrote it. The opening of Underworld:
"He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.
It’s a school day, sure, but he’s nowhere near the classroom. He wants to be here instead, standing in the shadow of this old rust-hulk of a structure, and it’s hard to blame him — this metropolis of steel and concrete and flaky paint and cropped grass and enormous Chesterfield packs aslant on the scoreboards, a couple of cigarettes jutting from each.
Longing on a large scale is what makes history. This is just a kid with a local yearning but he is part of an assembling crowd, anonymous thousands off the buses and trains, people in narrow columns tramping over the swing bridge above the river, and even if they are not a migration or a revolution, some vast shaking of the soul, they bring with them the body heat of a great city and their own small day — men in fedoras and sailors on shore leave, the stray tumble of their thoughts, going to a game.
The sky is low and gray, the roily gray of sliding surf."
Now I don't love everything DeLillo writes; his latest stuff bores me to tears (as I said), and though I do think there are still interesting things to be done with consumerism (easy as it is to sneer at the attempts), the only thing coming back to me now as I try to remember White Noise is half-baked wonder at Superfresh (see?). But that, above, is gorgeous to me. "Longing on a large scale is what makes history." Read literally that's pretty silly. Yet within the context (rhythm, mood) it works for me every time; I know what he means, even if I couldn't express it in other words. That's a pretty neat trick to keep up for over eight hundred pages. More:
"For the first time Brian became aware of music playing somewhere in the house. Maybe he'd been hearing it all along at the assimilated edge, music blended with the room tone, the airplanes drifting into Newark, the faint wail of bullet traffic on the speedways out there -- a moderated sorrow, piano work that had the texture of something old and gentled over, a pressed rose faded in a book."
I guess if you don't like that you don't like DeLillo. (Which isn't to say there isn't a lot more to Underworld. There is. He folds a lot of enjoyable, straightforward sketches and even sustained stories into this moody texture. But you do have to enjoy the texture to get into the book at all, is what I am saying. Also, the point of the comment, that Mao and White Noise aren't his best.)
Also, I just found on DeLillo's website (this little exchange moved me to Google him again) this letter from Norman Mailer congratulating DeLillo for writing Libra(his second best novel):
ReplyDelete"What a terrific book. I have to tell you that I read it against the grain. I've got an awfully long novel going on the CIA, and of course it overlapped just enough that I kept saying, 'this son of a bitch is playing my music,' but I was impressed, damned impressed, which I very rarely am. I think we keep ourselves writing by allowing the core of our vanity never to be scratched if we can help it, but I didn't get away scot-free this time. Wonderful virtuoso stuff all over the place, and, what is more, I think you're fulfilling the task we've just about all forgotten, which is that we're here to change the American obsessions—those black holes in space—into mantras that we can live with. What you've given us is a comprehensible, believable, vision of what Oswald was like, and what Ruby was like, one that could conceivably have happened. Whether history will find you more wrong than right is hardly to the point: what counts is that you brought life back to a place in our imagination that has been surviving all these years like scorched earth, that is, just about. It's so rare when novel writing offers us this deep purpose and I swear, Don, I salute you for it."
Heh. Those are some nice excerpts, it's true, and certainly some high praise from Mailer. I'll give DeLillo a fairer shot one of these days, and I'll start with Underworld.
ReplyDeleteScore! I'll be interested to hear what you think.
ReplyDeleteAfter B.R. Myers, DeLillo will never get any of my beer money.
ReplyDeleteBut when it comes to Pushkin, Peshkin, Bunin, and Dunin, there's this:
Consider the matter of Analytic Philosophy. Dennett and Bennett are well-known. Dennett rarely or never cites Bennett, so Bennett rarely or never cites Dennett. There is also one Dummett. By their works shall ye know them. However, just as no trinities have fourth persons (Zeppo Marx notwithstanding), Bummett is hardly known by his works. Indeed, Bummett does not exist. It is part of the function of this and other postings, therefore, to do what they can to create him.
In the USSR, the joke was that an intellectual was someone who could tell Gogol from Hegel, Hegel from Bebel, Bebel from Babel, Babel from a cable, a cable from a kobel' (a male dog), a kobel' from a bitch, and a bitch from a respectable woman.
ReplyDelete(I do agree with you about B.R. Myers. He's put me off Cormac McCarthy for good.)
B.R. Myers, that half-smart curmudgeon? That's a real shame. Nothing's easier than pulling sentences out of a novel and mocking them. To me Myers is such an obviously not worth reading critic I'm not even sure where to go from there. Maybe I can appeal to your desriptivist sympathies; here's how he ended a review of Denis Johnson's "Bright Shining Lie" in the The Atlantic:
ReplyDelete"Let’s hear from a man who, for all his intellectual shortcomings, never said anything he didn’t mean. Ezra Pound wrote this in 1931:
'The individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised litterati …when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot.'
The “application of word to thing” has been rotting for some time now, and in the very terms described. The social and political consequences are all around us. Literati who contribute to the rot—whether to preserve a writer’s reputation, to stimulate the book market, or simply to go with the flow—have no right to complain about incoherent government. The next time they want to praise a bad book, they should rave about the plot instead."
So bad writers are responsible for W, huh? I don't think I have to point out the irony in using Pound to draw a connection between good writing and good political thought; not to mention that these are the closing the paragraphs of a BOOK REVIEW and if I hadn't told you, you wouldn't know what the book is.
Yes, but the sentences Myers quotes are by and large the same ones reviewers had singled out for special praise. And I did read that review--and cringed at the self-righteousness of "social and political consequences." That's always the temptation for someone who presents himself as exposing the emperor's nakedness, and Myers often fails to resist it.
ReplyDeleteBut it doesn't mean that he's wrong about contemporary literary fiction being full of turgid and purple prose broadcasting I'M LITERARY in neon to the whole world. It's true, and it's nowhere more obvious than in McCarthy's pseudo-Hemingway git-'r-dunn macho posturing.
For whatever my opinion's worth, I thought "Underworld", sentence-for-sentence, the best prose of any 90s novel that I've read. (With possible exceptions for stylistic experiments like "Mason & Dixon" and "The Age of Wire and String".)
ReplyDeletethe sentences Myers quotes are by and large the same ones reviewers had singled out for special praise.
ReplyDeleteIf you accept the truism that a good novel creates its own language (I do), then you must admit a critic who's fallen for that language is in something of pickle trying to share it with his audience in the space of a thousand words -- and most critics aren't even very good! So big whoop, Myers can ridicule a few of their chosen sentences. Overall, his own judgments are hit and miss: wrong about DeLillo, right, maybe (from the little I've read of them), about Proulx and McCarthy. That's not a good enough record for a critic trying to wield a sledge hammer. Whatever happened to do no harm? Has he ever helped you APPRECIATE a book more, the real test?
It's just silly, really, for someone of such spare talent to be making generalizations about contemporary fiction -- and even sillier to take his advice about books you haven't read yourself. I'm looking at the bookshelf behind my desk right now: Philip Roth, Richard Powers, JM Coetzee, Richard Ford, EL Doctorow, John Barth, Helen DeWitt, Ian McEwan, Michael Chabon, David Foster Wallace, Andrew O'Hagan, Don DeLillo, Salman Rushdie, John Banville, Alice Munro, Tobias Wolff, Martin Amis, Steven Millhauser -- and I'm supposed to believe there's something wrong with contemporary fiction because Cormac McCarthy isn't very good?
For whatever my opinion's worth
ReplyDeleteA hell of a lot more than BR Myers's, that's for sure. I've been eyeing "Mason & Dixon" for some time -- maybe now I'll give it a go.
Jamessal, to be honest, I'm generally just looking for an excuse not to read contemporary fiction. It's easier for me to dismiss it than to feel bad about not getting to it, and it leaves me more time to read old books. (I did, however, very much enjoy The Savage Detectives.) I also love polemics, and Myers is an excellent polemicist, so I can't help but give him his due.
ReplyDeleteI couldn't handle more than 20 pages of Mason and Dixon, even though I'm very used to the eighteenth-century writing style by now. Maybe I'll try again soon, though--I probably should. Pynchon's coming out with a new book, incidentally, about the end of the hippie era or something. (A little late for that, innit?)
I'm generally just looking for an excuse not to read contemporary fiction.
ReplyDeleteI think that's the case with a lot of people, which is why Myers makes me see red. I guess I have to admit he's a good polemicist, though.
to be honest,
To be honest myself, I'd probably do better reading some of those old books -- and, more importantly, worrying less about justifying the ways I spend my time.
I did, however, very much enjoy The Savage Detectives
I didn't read it, but I'm now about two hundred pages into the big one, 2666. Loving it, in many ways. But I may have to set it aside for a while. I hope I come back.
I've read his story Breakfast, lunch, dinner (in Russian) and I've lost the will to read anything else that he wrote. But I wasn't impressed by DeLillo's Cosmopolis either. Anyway, I'm going to stay away from Krivin. Far far away.
ReplyDelete