Recently in Art and transcendence Category

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 Books piece, 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.

(Image of Roberto Bolaño from The New York Times book review)

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! 

(Image of Maya Hanley from Twitter)

I am a fan of art transcending reductive ideologies and, in A Grain of Wheat, Ngugi wa Thiongo may have provided us with an example of such transcendence.  

The story follows Mugo, a young Kikuyu man, who has been tapped for leadership roles in his village in the aftermath of the 1952 Emergency that pitted the British colonial forces against Mau Mau freedom fighters.  Mugo is deeply conflicted about serving as a leader because he has a shameful past: during the Emergency, he betrayed Kihika, a fiery rebel commander, to the British.  In the end (spoiler alert), Mugo confesses his betrayal to the assembled villagers, and he is condemned to death by the former resistance fighters who have long been seeking Kihika's murderer.

Despite two audacious acts - betrayal and public confession - Mugo is an ambivalent person:  

Mugo . . . . had always found it difficult to make decisions.  Recoiling as if by instinct from setting in motion a course of action whose consequences he could not determine before the start, he allowed himself to drift into things or be pushed into them by an uncanny demon; he rode on the wave of circumstance and lay against the crest, fearing but fascinated by fate.

(p. 23-24.)  In the course of the novel, Mugo struggles to identify with his family, which has abused him; with his tribe, which wants to force him first into war and then into leadership when he'd rather abstain; and with the British, from whom he craves absolution but receives, instead, total rejection.  These struggles endow Mugo with the strength to make a final moral decision (public confession) that leads to his death, rather than to enjoy a diminished life as a corrupt leader with a guilty conscience.

By contrast, Kihika is a person to whom ambivalence is a stranger.  Here, for example, is Kihika discussing his forebearers' responses to colonialism:

I despise the weak.  Let them be trampled to death, I spit on the weakness of our fathers.  Their memory gives me no pride.  And even today, tomorrow, the weak and those with feeble hearts shall be wiped from the earth.  The strong shall rule.  Our fathers had no reason to be weak.  The weak need not remain weak.  Why?  Because people united in faith are stronger than the bomb.  They shall not tremble or run away before the sword.  Then instead the enemy shall flee.

(p. 180.)  Throughout his life, Kihika has exhibited a devil-may-care rebellious bravado.  He alone among the boys at school challenges the religious instruction against female circumcision (a Kikuyu custom).  He similarly rejects his devoted girlfriend, Wambuku, because accepting her love would require him to settle down into village life.  In the end, Kihika dies because - unused to any approach involving compromise or tolerance of differences of opinion - he too forcefully tries to push Mugo into fighting for the cause.     

And now we arrive at what may be transcendence.  From his two-dimensional and unsympathetic depictions of the colonists in A Grain of Wheat, we know that wa Thiongo is not especially interested in a holistic understanding of the white man.  From his choice (after A Grain of Wheat was published) to write only in Kikuyu, we know that wa Thiongo is not even especially interested in communicating with non-Kikuyus, let alone whites.  And yet A Grain of Wheat ultimately discourages the reader from embracing inflexibility of mind or heart.

By the novel's end, two conclusions - both arrived at by women - complicate the novel's moral landscape.  First, Wambui - a feisty crone who'd risked her life running guns to the Mau Mau fighters and who served as the judge in Mugo's trial - is seized with regret at Mugo's execution.  Mugo was a conscientious man who could have contributed much to an independent Kenya; instead, he had been executed for ideology:  "Wambui was lost in a solid consciousness of a terrible anti-climax to her activities in the fight for freedom.  Perhaps we should not have tried [Mugo], she muttered."  (p. 228-229.)

The second conclusion involves the resolution of a sub-plot involving Mumbi, a gorgeous woman, and Gikonyo, her husband who was imprisoned by the British.  During his imprisonment, Mumbi succumbed to the sexual advances of a former suitor, who has been installed as a village leader by the British.  Returning from prison to find his wife having given birth to his former rival's child, Gikonyo punishes Mumbi for her unfaithfulness.  By the end of the novel, however, Gikonyo wishes to rebuild his relationship with Mumbi, and she refuses any easy reconciliation:

"No, Gikonyo.  People try to rub out things, but they cannot.  Things are not so easy.  What has passed between us is too much to be passed over in a sentence.  We need to talk, to open our hearts to one another, examine them, and then together plan the future we want.  But now, I must go, for the child is ill."

(p. 232-233.)

In short, although the novel condemns white missionaries and humiliates a black teacher in a missionary school for his complicity in the white man's Christianity, A Grain of Wheat also preaches for the redemption of Judas and the forgiveness of Mary Magdalene - on her own terms.  Despite its unquestionable allegiance with the anti-colonial cause (and what appears to be genuine dislike of white people), the message of A Grain of Wheat is hardly the propaganda of militant nationalism.  This textured multi-facetedness - even (possibly) inconsistency - imbues the novel with an admirable humanity.  With these qualities, A Grain of Wheat joins the ranks of works that enlarge the author - and, by extension, all of us - beyond the confinement of our personal limitations.  

I could wish that wa Thiongo had taken the additional step of providing a nuanced portrait of Pontius Pilate and his ilk, but perhaps such a greedy desire for even more transcendence would be un-Christian of me.

(Image of Ngugi wa Thiongo from University of Kwazulu-Natal website)