Each fresh assertion that so-and-so-other-than-Shakespeare wrote the plays (and sonnets) provokes mild eye rolling from me. I can't think of a bigger waste of time than pondering that question, much less writing a magazine article or - heavens! - a book on the subject. James Shapiro and Michael Posner obviously disagree with me, the latter actually arguing that a Jewish woman, Amelia Bassano Lanier, wrote Shakespeare's works (I hardly know whether to kvell or cry at that theory).
If one is so maddeningly insistent on uncovering literary fraud, however, Walt Whitman strikes me as a vastly superior target to Shakespeare. As Christopher Benfey writes in his recent piece in The New York Review of Books, "Well into his thirties, Whitman was a non-poet in every way, with no mark of special talent or temperament."
Benfey makes this comment in the course of reviewing two books, Three American Poets: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Herman Melville, by William C. Spengemann, and On Whitman, by C.K. Williams, both of which argue strenuously that Leaves of Grass sprang as unexpectedly and unbelievably from Whitman's head as Athena did from Zeus's.
Here's Spengemann:
[N]o amount of information regarding such matters [as upbringing, early experiences, habits, sexual inclination, and the like] will account for the unforegrounded appearance of Leaves in 1855, the form those poems take, or the appeal they have held for poets and readers of other times, other places.
(second alteration in original). Williams is even more baroque:
It's as though [Whitman's] actual physical brain went through some incredible mutation, as though - a little science fiction, why not? - aliens had transported him up to their spaceship and put him down again with a new mind, a new poetry aparatus. It is really that crazy.
My first thought on reading these perspectives was, Occam's razor: the simplest explanation is usually correct: and the simplest explanation is not that Walt Whitman's brain was replaced by aliens, but that somebody else wrote the poems.
My suspicions grew as Benfey quoted from Williams's observations about the waning of Whitman's talent. Shortly after Whitman published his unprecedented Leaves of Grass, he "lost the connection to his music," Williams claims, a condition that lead Whitman to ever-more-desperate attempts at "sounding like himself" in his later poetry.
Sounding like himself? Isn't this a case for finding out who really wrote Leaves of Grass? More probable by far is the likelihood that Whitman had a falling out with the true author of Leaves and no longer had access to poems he could pass off as his own . . . right? Whitman himself apparently endorsed the theory that Shakespeare didn't write the works attributed to him - an attempt by Whitman to distract attention from his own literary plagiarism, no? And what about the fact that Whitman claims to have fathered six children without ever getting married? Shouldn't Whitman scholars be devoting more effort to researching whether one of Whitman's loved-and-left baby mamas was actually the author of Leaves of Grass? One doesn't have to troll very far through nineteenth century verse to find a weirdo woman poet with a mysterious relationship to an unidentified "master," a poetess who had withdrawn from the world for unexplained reasons (the trauma of out-of-wedlock birth perhaps): I speak, of course, of Emily Dickinson.
When the book arguing that Leaves of Grass is actually the work of Emily Dickinson, and that the cause of her seclusion was her seduction and abandonment by feckless Walter Whitman, I promise I won't roll my eyes. I expect a cut of the royalties.
(Cartoon punchline is "In fact, the work's been so good that we question whether it's Will's own"; from The New Yorker, June 14 and 21, 2010 issue)
During a recent swing through Zanzibar's Stone Town (a UNESCO Heritage Site), I happened upon this sign outside one of the houses:
Residence of the famous Arab trader Hamed B. Muhammad Al-Marjebi (Tipu Tip) who built up a large trading empire in the Eastern Congo in the 19th Century. With Belgian Colonization of the Congo he returned to Zanzibar where he acquired many clove plantations and built his house. He died in Zanzibar in 1905 and is buried nearby.
Considering that the sign seems to have been placed on the house by UNESCO, I found it notable for its evasiveness and contribution to revisionist history and general ignorance.
Tipu Tip was indeed famous. His men led Henry Morton Stanley to Dr. Livingstone. According to Charles Miller in The Lunatic Express, Stanley described Tipu Tip in glowing terms:
He was a tall, black-bearded man of negroid complexion, in the prime of life, straight, and quick in his movements, a picture of energy and strength. He had a fine, intelligent face . . . the air of a well-bred Arab and [was] courtier-like in his manner . . . . I came to the conclusion that he was a remarkable man, the most remarkable man that I had met among the Arabs, Wa-Swahili and half-castes in Africa.
(p. 49.) But Tipu Tip was not merely famous for his good looks, wit and manners, nor were his clove plantations the source of his notoriety. Rather, in Miller's words, Tipu Tip
was the Rockefeller-Croesus of the slave industry; the wealth he amassed in the quarter century during which he milked a region half the size of Europe of its people will never be measured. (The volume he handled, though, is suggested by the size of his caravans; some consisted of two thousand porters and one thousand armed guards.) . . . . [Tipu Tip] was always prepared, of course, to field any questions designed to shame his profession. A favorite rejoinder to missionary critics was that Abraham and Jacob had been slave owners. Once, when a European reproached him for rescuing an African village from a cannibal raid and then enslaving his beneficiaries, he shrugged his shoulders and replied: "Which would you rather be, a slave or a meal?"
(p. 49-50.)
While I appreciate that no one has ever accused UNESCO staff of cracking a book, I nonetheless charge the agency with the responsibility to do enough research to call a slave trader a slave trader. What's the point of a "World Heritage Site" if the stink of that heritage's shit is perfumed over with cloves by the time visitors arrive?
My parallel careers - novelist and communications specialist for humanitarian and aid organizations - have only one significant point of overlap: displaced people. Whether they are outside their home countries (refugees), or within their countries but unable to live in their homes (internally displaced people - IDPs), whether their dislocation is literal or metaphoric, displaced people claim my deepest reservoirs of empathy.
I think the reason for this is that displacement is the touchstone of the current historical moment. Modern trends - urbanization, gender equality, psychologizing (to name three almost at random) - usually displace people. The tendency in contemporary life is to create greater distance from tradition - by moving people from rural to urban settings, by introducing women into non-traditional roles, by inducing people to question their motives and understand themselves critically. (Even fundamentalism, which in its many varieties is typically a reaction to modernity, displaces people with its severity and extremity, despite its claims to reestablish "traditions.") Modern trends also increase the pace of change, requiring people to endure frequent displacement, followed by even-more frequent displacement.
My own life is a case study of the potential for displacement wrought by modern living. Professionally, I've had four professions in sixteen years. Geographically, during the same period, I've lived in five states in the U.S. and four countries. I've gone from being a misfit at home to a "foreigner" abroad. My identity is coalescing into that of a wanderer, a person whose country is her body and who can be said to belong fully only to the planet.
Although opportunities for humanitarian and aid work with displaced people are sadly common, my experience trying to sell my fiction to mainstream publishing houses suggests little interest in displaced people (who, in my fiction, are often expatriates). Given my view that displacement is a central concern in modernity's most sweeping, global trends, the lack of interest among commercial publishers disappoints as much as it seems to highlight a disconnect between the world of publishing and, well, the world.
So I was delighted to find a contradictory suggestion in Pankaj Mishra's recent The New Yorker review of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's second memoir, Nomad. Mishra wrote:
The fate of the truly modern nomad is . . . a ceaseless inner conflict between ways of life and value systems; this very quality has made the nomad an emblematic figure of the contemporary age.
I couldn't agree more. If only Mishra were in charge of publishing decisions instead of whoever it is who's promoting vampires (and now angels) as the emblematic figures of contemporary literature!
(Image of refugee holding UNHCR papers from New Proposals website)
Roberto Bolaño's 2666 is impressive beyond praise that can be offered in modern English. Like Milan Kundera, Bolaño's achievement is utterly unique and un-replicable.
At 893 pages in the English edition (apparently over 1,000 in the original Spanish), Bolaño's feat in 2666 is perhaps beyond summarization. But despite its heft and ambition, I think Bolaño's accomplishment is straightforward: he's modern literature's consummate realist.
Calling Bolaño a "realist" may strike those familiar with his work as odd. Bolaño, after all, began his writing life as a poet and, as Franscisco Goldman asserts in his New York Review of Bookspiece, Bolaño seems to have considered himself fundamentally a poet despite his turn to fiction writing. Indeed, reading 2666 (even in translation) evoked the active visceral engagement that usually only occurs with poetry: the book riled up my guts for irrational and inarticulable reasons, the way a poem might make me want to cry without knowing why.
Because of Bolaño's power to tap into the subliminal and the unconscious, he might readily be termed a stylist, in the model of Anne Enright, whose The Gathering operates similarly, or W.G. Sebold, whose The Emigrants has been reputed to have like power (though I found it merely boring when I read it six years ago). And, unquestionably, Bolaño's writing classes him among the leading stylists of literature.
But Bolaño distinguishes himself from the poet-stylist set in a significant way. Most poets and stylists transport the reader from reality: when their writing works, it grips the reader's viscera and pulls him or her into a realm that departs from the quotidian. The point of such writing is not to depict life realistically, but to evoke (and provoke) feelings, sensations and engagement.
Whereas Bolaño uses poetic-stylist techniques to depict reality. Indeed, the reality that emerges from 2666 is more "real" than any other attempt at literary realism I have encountered. As Benjamin Kunkel, writing in The London Review of Books, says of a Bolaño short story called "Enrique Martín":
You don't feel that Enrique Martín is a robust character inhabiting a well-made story; you feel - whether or not any real-life original ever existed - something perhaps more powerful and certainly, in fiction, more unusual: namely, that he is simply a person, and that instead of having a story he had a life.
Reading 2666, I didn't feel that I was inhabiting the world of a story: I felt that I caught in the sweep of 20th century history. Common themes and characters abounded, yes, but plot was only what I imposed on the events, and indeterminacy was the only honest conclusion.
Composed of five sub-novellas, 2666 can be read in any order. I read it in the order in which the novellas were assembled in the English-language edition, but I'm going to read the book again in a different order. The conviction intrinsic in 2666's construction is the same truth that informs the modern construction of consciousness: however one looks at the facts, doubt must temper clarity because story-lines are imposed, not organic.
To use literature as Bolaño does is a departure from the norm. His approach cannot be described as "escapist." My guess is that most people's realities are more escapist than Bolaño's literature. Nor does Bolaño's technique generate pleasure reading. The sub-novella, "The Part About the Crimes," in 2666 is almost unbearable to read - just as life is sometimes unbearable to endure. By depicting reality so . . . realistically, Bolaño has in some sense made the ultimate argument against realism: it's too intense.
And yet, enjoyable or no, Bolaño's triumph is impossible not to admire or praise (however inadequate the English language is for the task). In taking reality and wrestling it between the covers of a book, where it stays and performs at the command of the conjurer and the whim of the reader, Bolaño has assumed the mantle of a god. A Greek god, perhaps - flawed and ambiguous and happy to muck around with humans - but the progenitor of one a hell of a branch of literature.
I'm going to be reading more of Brad Leithauser's writing. Thus far, I've read only his criticism in The New York Review of Books, but he is also a novelist, poet and verse novelist. Obviously, a major talent (and did I mention MacArthur Fellow?).
He is also a very polite critic. His NYRBreview of Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs caught my attention with its opening paragraph:
Lorrie Moore's novels are remarkable for the number of linguistic detours they embark on. Off in the distance, a plot is likely hatching. But its unfolding will patiently have to wait until the characters - nearly all of whom have a penchant for wordplay - have explored the far-flung implications of the language that entertains and envelops them.
"Remarkable" sounds good, but it could also bear less positive connotations (e.g., remarkably misguided). That the plot is "likely" hatching evinces a positive attitude about what could be a serious failure (i.e., if the plot didn't materialize). And what must be "patient" with Lorrie Moore is not the plot, but the reader, who like Leithauser (and this reader) "kept looking for someone [in Moore's novel] who didn't parse and pun."
As Leithauser observes,
Moore's fiction proceeds by "near misses": misapprehensions, mishearings, misidentifications, misunderstandings. An innocent utterance floats out into the atmosphere, which turns out to be a hazardous and transformative medium, everywhere subject to misinterpretation. . . . . It's rare in contemporary American fiction to meet a writer so preoccupied with this sort of linguistic dissonance.
The reason for such rarity, I submit, is that stories don't proceed by linguistic "near misses": they proceed by action. The action can be physical, emotional or psychological, but it cannot be solely linguistic. (As Leithauser notes, "poets are another matter." In a sense, poetry is by definition linguistic action: the rhythm of the language stirs our viscera.)
The weakness of Moore's approach is plain in her plot, which Leithauser (even with his critical delicacy) highlights. "I turned skeptical, and a little feisty" when the protagonist, Tassie, and her boyfriend break-up (a scene which also caused me grief), Leithauser admits. "Pesky questions of plausibility arose again" when Tassie accidentally poisons her roommate, Leithauser continues. But worse awaits - "an utter suspension of suspension of disbelief," in Leithauser's words - when Tassie climbs into her brother's coffin.
To some extent, Leithauser excuses these problems with the explanation that
[m]any writers who are led by the ear, as I think Moore is, have little facility for visual detail. But she has an arresting gift for the one-line imagistic simile or metaphor.
While this statement may be true, the plot of A Gate at the Stairs fumbles, not because Moore has little facility for visual detail, but because she's trying to power a plot with linguistic acrobatics - puns, similes and metaphors - instead of action. Moore's is not a methodology worth replicating. Over 322 pages, the experience of verbal-shenanigans-in-search-of-the-plot-in-the-distance is, even for the patient reader, remarkable.
Over the last couple of days I've been corresponding with Maya Hanley, the daughter of Gerald Hanley, who wrote Warriors, about which I've blogged at this post and this post.
Maya Hanley is currently at work on a memoir - spectacularly titled Silence and the Black Wolf. In the course of researching her memoir, she came across my blog posts. She has thoughtfully written some responses to the posts, and about corresponding with one of her father's readers (me), on her blog, The Sound of the Night, here.
Maya's father, Gerald, wrote Warriors many years before it found a publisher, and now the original book in which it appeared, Warriors and Strangers, is shamefully out of print. In her correspondence with me, Maya Hanley expressed a desire to see her father's books return to print - a sentiment with which I could not agree more fully.
But conversations about books are also a means of honoring the author, his or her text, the book's story and its ideas; dialogue is nothing short of keeping alive a book - or a person - liable to slip from our grasp. In writing about Warriors, I was invigorated to participate in that process; in dialogue with Maya Hanley, that "keeping alive" function seems (to me) to have deepened considerably - one of the most moving rewards I've yet experienced from blogging.
Best of luck to Maya Hanley with her memoir. May the conversation about her work - and her father's - continue, and may many voices join!
Each fresh assertion that so-and-so-other-than-Shakespeare wrote the plays (and sonnets) provokes mild eye rolling from me. I can't think of a bigger waste of time than pondering that question, much less writing a magazine article or - heavens! - a book on the subject. James Shapiro and Michael Posner obviously disagree with me, the latter actually arguing that a Jewish woman, Amelia Bassano Lanier, wrote Shakespeare's works (I hardly know whether to kvell or cry at that theory).
