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December 27, 2009  

From Behind the Mirror---Javier Marîas's Trilogy

Last night I finished Javier Marías’s trilogy, Your Face Tomorrow. What has he done?  He specifically invokes Ian Fleming and James Bond and so we can see how he has taken a Bond novel and written a work that fills in the genre’s “negative spaces,” to borrow from the visual world.  This trilogy is a “spy novel” the way an abstract painting is always, first and foremost, a painting, and, second, the way it is somehow as well a painting of X, whereby X has been made absent and only non-X is now visible.  Our narrator, Jaime, is a sort of spy with a British unit of M5 or M6, those details really don’t matter, sort of, and they float into an out of focus throughout the story.  And what the novels do, mainly, is tell stories, collect a number of stories that ‘go with” the genre, loosely conceived according to what we now know to call a “tag cloud” (even though Marías composes his work on a typewriter and not a computer keyboard)---this tag cloud includes “spy novels, war stories, Spanish civil war, revenge, betrayal, protection, identity flux, narrative flux, narrative horror, death, aging, murder, bombing, WWII, Hitler, Nazis, Jews, camps, Göering, Himmler, racial definition, intelligence, propaganda, black game, wet game, white game, grey information, love, jealousy, adultery,” and we could go on a good while longer, for the novel is huge, and the tag cloud includes of course the helpful subtitle terms that guide our way through the labyrinth---fever, spear, dance, dream, poison and shadow.  And of course Face and Yesterday and Tomorrow.

So single terms aside, how else encompass this work?  If a normal spy novel/movie features action, especially these days, this novel inverts that by having very little happen in the usual way of action.  It is all “Proustian” interior meditation, thinking, commenting, pondering, rationalizing, explaining, searching, all in the service of how best to tell the next great story in this private compendium of stories.  There is no whiff of magic realism, of course, nor is there a wish to tell “the real truth,” to do the work of history as well as or better than history---or philosophy for that matter---either.  I don’t know if the term “a novel of ideas” is used much these days, or “the literature of thought,” but both terms came to mind.  Still, Marías is not out to compete with the philosophers either.  God forbid.  We all know his father was a distinguished philosopher in his day, for his generation.  And in his day, Julian Marías was usually tagged as the best living disciple of the earlier great Spanish philosopher of the early 20th century---Ortega y Gasset.  I remember being in Spain when I first saw a book written by Javier and I immediately asked---ah, is this perhaps one of Julian’s sons?  Sure enough.  And then skepticism pops up at once and says, Well, he got published because he is the son of the famous----but is he any good in his own right?  Novel after novel he has proven he is.  Orhan Pamuk now says Marías should get the Nobel soon.  Could a writer expect a better kudo?

But back to what he has done, is doing, in his work.  I just discovered a few weeks back when Marías published a short story in our New Yorker magazine that it could easily be read as a re-working of two famous works by Robert Browning.  And now that I’ve finished the trilogy I have this very much in mind---that Marías is much the contemporary ---& here adding “Borgesian” to the mix is inevitable--- bookish, literary writer, who quietly and playfully, with great seriousness of purpose, re-writes other literary works, or, rather, re-explores some of the potential left recently hidden in the evolution or history of the limited set of narrative forms available to any writer.   Perhaps a future Marías novel will re-examine the sort of Romance novel written by men---some could say he has already done that in some ways.  Or novels of passion.  This is only an awkward and first-draft way of saying that Marías is steeped in literature and creates from within this living experience with it.  Isn’t this what any writer does?  To some extent, yes, of course.  But Marías belongs to those contemporary writers for whom the play of allusiveness to other literary works becomes part of the living tissue of the story one is reading----giving resonance to the experience a good deal like watching a Tarantino movie.  Tarantino’s most recent movie is all about Nazis and so when I got near to the end of Marías’s novel and it too was about Nazi Germany, Tarantino’s movie came immediately to mind.  Marías allows himself throughout the trilogy very few borrowings from or connections to Pop Culture, other than the Bond novels, but the few supremely well chosen links amplify the books with great shrewdness and delight.  Movie historians will have a field day finding all the real and invented links Tarantino has planted in his movie---see especially the basement tavern scene in Germany where every nuance of every move the actors make and speak, every shading of brow, eye and finger surely comes from some German expressionist movie.  And from other movies of the 30s and 40s.  I don’t think Marías’s novel is quite that densely packed---but I may be quite wrong----and now I am sure in fact that the whole trilogy is just as densely packed---even more so since words can reverberate more over time than images can---- and will feed many many dissertations on sources and influences and quotations and allusions.

If Marías becomes a great writer.  Only time will tell, as all of his works tell us over and over and over, being profound remembrances reshaped out of Time, over against the destructive forces of Time.  That old theme.

It is the pleasure of the experience of being in the story that we can never persuade someone else of---will your pleasure be as great as mine when you read this book?  No one can know or guarantee that.  Still, when crowds gather to buy the next work off the press or to see the writer appear in public and speak and read----as Marías was just in New York and read at the 92nd street Y a few weeks back----then we have the excitement of saying yes this time and yes again tomorrow.  The dead novel has been resurrected once again.  Literary experience lives.  The doubling of consciousness when you are living inside a book for a while, lives and that keeps giving life to thee.

PS

In the second volume of the work Marías tells a story he heard from his father about life after Spain’s Civil War and the times of continuing betrayal and revenge that the survivors of his father’s generation lived through.  (One of his father’s most successful books is called in English “Generations”---one element of that is that children more easily and readily can imagine the lives of their grandparents than they can the lives of their parents).   In the third volume he tells stories he heard from Peter Russell, a British intelligence officer he met in England.  I forgot to talk about how much the cross-cultural material is in the work---the narrator is Spanish but has worked and lived in England---and characters speak back and forth in both languages---not too much.  This mainly shows up in pauses the narrator makes in his telling to note idioms in Spanish and idioms in English---and that way we get this flux between two rich cultures and histories.  Here I thought of Beckett----he “killed” his childhood Ireland by living in Paris and writing in French.  Only then could he tell his great Irish tales and make them world tales, translating his own French back into his “reborn” English.  Marías stays poised on the knife’s edge----going back and forth from Spanish to English and making himself and us aware of it.  There are wonderful meditations on Spanish and English phrases and on the possibility or impossibility of capturing them well in the other language.  This is something Beckett did not want to do, maybe could not do, in the sense of his inner artistic process.  Marías makes a substantial artistic achievement here alone by building these questions of translation into his work----for all authors today know that their work probably will not gain universality or timelessness in their native language alone.  I think of Haruki Murakami, for one.  Is he perhaps the chief contender whom Marías must defeat for the Nobel?  Or will they precede or follow one another?

PPS

Relatively speaking there is “no action” in volumes 1 & 2.  So when there is action in Volume 3 it is all the more striking, horrifying, gruesome, troubling, disconcerting.  It makes us reconsider, reevaluate everything we had come to believe and assume, about our narrator, about what he tells us, about how things connect, about all of it.  The actions are straight out of the genre---the B-movie/novel about spies, terrorism, torture, fear and protection.  The instruments are right out of any cheap novel or tales by Conrad, Kipling, Fleming and Hemingway--an old pistol, a rifle, spear, sword.   Marías shamelessly brings in a cameo by a famous bullfighter, uses the cityscape of Francoist Madrid, even a well-known tourist souvenir shop across from the Prado.  Oh, and in this volume Marías indulges himself in the use of pictures---surely permission granted (posthumously) by W. G. Sebald, to all authors everywhere.  So we have paintings in the Prado and then, most brilliantly, posters from the two featured wars---the Spanish Civil and the World.  Marías has tried---like many others now, more and more?---to take the greatest genre invented in the last century (maybe so) the cine noir and turned it upside down, inside out, backside front, expanded it, contracted it, lifted it from B to A, from sub-genre to art, art we see more and more as an art of paranoia, destabilization, disinformation, psychosis, sociopathology, unending war and everyday terror.

As it turns out, I am just finishing another novel that shares a good deal with Your Face Tomorrow in terms of the noir genre being reinvisioned and reinvented and that is Thomas Pynchon’s recent LA crime novel set in the 70s, Inherent Vice.  More comments on this linkage after I have finished it.

December 2009  posted on Goodreads

Read in December, 2009

Last night I finished Javier Marías’s trilogy, Your Face Tomorrow. What has he done? He specifically invokes Ian Fleming and James Bond and so we can see how he has taken a Bond novel and written a work that fills in the genre’s “negative spaces,” to borrow from the visual world. This trilogy is a “spy novel” the way an abstract painting is always, first and foremost, a painting, and, second, the way it is somehow as well a painting of X, whereby X has been made absent and only non-X is now visible. Our narrator, Jaime, is a sort of spy with a British unit of M5 or M6, those details really don’t matter, sort of, and they float into an out of focus throughout the story. And what the novels do, mainly, is tell stories, collect a number of stories that ‘go with” the genre, loosely conceived according to what we now know to call a “tag cloud” (even though Marías composes his work on a typewriter and not a computer keyboard)---this tag cloud includes “spy novels, war stories, Spanish civil war, revenge, betrayal, protection, identity flux, narrative flux, narrative horror, death, aging, murder, bombing, WWII, Hitler, Nazis, Jews, camps, Göering, Himmler, racial definition, intelligence, propaganda, black game, wet game, white game, grey information, love, jealousy, adultery,” and we could go on a good while longer, for the novel is huge, and the tag cloud includes of course the helpful subtitle terms that guide our way through the labyrinth---fever, spear, dance, dream, poison and shadow. And of course Face and Yesterday and Tomorrow.

So single terms aside, how else encompass this work? If a normal spy novel/movie features action, especially these days, this novel inverts that by having very little happen in the usual way of action. It is all “Proustian” interior meditation, thinking, commenting, pondering, rationalizing, explaining, searching, all in the service of how best to tell the next great story in this private compendium of stories. There is no whiff of magic realism, of course, nor is there a wish to tell “the real truth,” to do the work of history as well as or better than history---or philosophy for that matter---either. I don’t know if the term “a novel of ideas” is used much these days, or “the literature of thought,” but both terms came to mind. Still, Marías is not out to compete with the philosophers either. God forbid. We all know his father was a distinguished philosopher in his day, for his generation. And in his day, Julian Marías was usually tagged as the best living disciple of the earlier great Spanish philosopher of the early 20th century---Ortega y Gasset. I remember being in Spain when I first saw a book written by Javier and I immediately asked---ah, is this perhaps one of Julian’s sons? Sure enough. And then skepticism pops up at once and says, Well, he got published because he is the son of the famous----but is he any good in his own right? Novel after novel he has proven he is. Orhan Pamuk now says Marías should get the Nobel soon. Could a writer expect a better kudo?

But back to what he has done, is doing, in his work. I just discovered a few weeks back when Marías published a short story in our New Yorker magazine that it could easily be read as a re-working of two famous works by Robert Browning. And now that I’ve finished the trilogy I have this very much in mind---that Marías is much the contemporary ---& here adding “Borgesian” to the mix is inevitable--- bookish, literary writer, who quietly and playfully, with great seriousness of purpose, re-writes other literary works, or, rather, re-explores some of the potential left recently hidden in the evolution or history of the limited set of narrative forms available to any writer. Perhaps a future Marías novel will re-examine the sort of Romance novel written by men---some could say he has already done that in some ways. Or novels of passion. This is only an awkward and first-draft way of saying that Marías is steeped in literature and creates from within this living experience with it. Isn’t this what any writer does? To some extent, yes, of course. But Marías belongs to those contemporary writers for whom the play of allusiveness to other literary works becomes part of the living tissue of the story one is reading----giving resonance to the experience a good deal like watching a Tarantino movie. Tarantino’s most recent movie is all about Nazis and so when I got near to the end of Marías’s novel and it too was about Nazi Germany, Tarantino’s movie came immediately to mind. Marías allows himself throughout the trilogy very few borrowings from or connections to Pop Culture, other than the Bond novels, but the few supremely well chosen links amplify the books with great shrewdness and delight. Movie historians will have a field day finding all the real and invented links Tarantino has planted in his movie---see especially the basement tavern scene in Germany where every nuance of every move the actors make and speak, every shading of brow, eye and finger surely comes from some German expressionist movie. And from other movies of the 30s and 40s. I don’t think Marías’s novel is quite that densely packed---but I may be quite wrong----and now I am sure in fact that the whole trilogy is just as densely packed---even more so since words can reverberate more over time than images can---- and will feed many many dissertations on sources and influences and quotations and allusions.

If Marías becomes a great writer. Only time will tell, as all of his works tell us over and over and over, being profound remembrances reshaped out of Time, over against the destructive forces of Time. That old theme.

It is the pleasure of the experience of being in the story that we can never persuade someone else of---will your pleasure be as great as mine when you read this book? No one can know or guarantee that. Still, when crowds gather to buy the next work off the press or to see the writer appear in public and speak and read----as Marías was just in New York and read at the 92nd street Y a few weeks back----then we have the excitement of saying yes this time and yes again tomorrow. The dead novel has been resurrected once again. Literary experience lives. The doubling of consciousness when you are living inside a book for a while, lives and that keeps giving life to thee.

PS

In the second volume of the work Marías tells a story he heard from his father about life after Spain’s Civil War and the times of continuing betrayal and revenge that the survivors of his father’s generation lived through. (One of his father’s most successful books is called in English “Generations”---one element of that is that children more easily and readily can imagine the lives of their grandparents than they can the lives of their parents). In the third volume he tells stories he heard from Peter Wheeler, a British intelligence officer he met in England. I forgot to talk about how much the cross-cultural material is in the work---the narrator is Spanish but has worked and lived in England---and characters speak back and forth in both languages---not too much. This mainly shows up in pauses the narrator makes in his telling to note idioms in Spanish and idioms in English---and that way we get this flux between two rich cultures and histories. Here I thought of Beckett----he “killed” his childhood Ireland by living in Paris and writing in French. Only then could he tell his great Irish tales and make them world tales, translating his own French back into his “reborn” English. Marías stays poised on the knife’s edge----going back and forth from Spanish to English and making himself and us aware of it.

PPS

Relatively speaking there is “no action” in volumes 1 & 2. So when there is action in Volume 3 it is all the more striking, horrifying, gruesome, troubling, disconcerting. It makes us reconsider, reevaluate everything we had come to believe and assume, about our narrator, about what he tells us, about how things connect, about all of it. The actions are straight out of the genre---the B-movie/novel about spies, terrorism, torture, fear and protection. The instruments are right out of any cheap novel or tales by Conrad, Kipling, Fleming and Hemingway. Marias shamelessly brings in a cameo by a famous bullfighter, uses the cityscape of Francoist Madrid, even a well-known tourist souvenir shop across from the Prado. Oh, and in this volume Marías indulges himself in the use of pictures---surely permission granted (posthumously) by W. G. Sebald, to all authors everywhere. So we have paintings in the Prado and then, most brilliantly, posters from the two featured wars---the Spanish Civil and the World. Marías has tried---like many others now, more and more?---to take the greatest genre invented in the last century (maybe so) the cine noir and turned it upside down, inside out, backside front, expanded it, contracted it, lifted it from B to A, from sub-genre to art, art we see more and more as an art of paranoia, destabilization, disinformation, psychosis, sociopathology, unending war and everyday terror.

As it turns out, I am just finishing another novel that shares a good deal with Your Face Tomorrow in terms of the noir genre being reinvisioned and reinvented and that is Thomas Pynchon’s recent LA crime novel set in the 70s, Inherent Vice. More comments on this linkage after I have finished it.

the keystone quote

"  He must have stolen my story when he told you that, to make his own more interesting.  That's the trouble with telling anything--most people forget how or from whom they found out what they know, and there are people who even believe they lived or gave birth to it, whatever it is, a story, an idea, an opinion, an anecdote, a joke, an aphorism, a history, a style, sometimes even a whole text, which they proudly appropriate--or perhaps they know they're stealing, but push the thought to the back of their mind and thus hide it away.  It's very much a phenomenon of the times we live in, which has no respect for priorities.  "  (509)  Your Face Tomorrow vol. 3

December 27   Marías  The Keystone Quote

"  He must have stolen my story when he told you that, to make his own more interesting.  That's the trouble with telling anything--most people forget how or from whom they found out what they know, and there are people who even believe they lived or gave birth to it, whatever it is, a story, an idea, an opinion, an anecdote, a joke, an aphorism, a history, a style, sometimes even a whole text, which they proudly appropriate--or perhaps they know they're stealing, but push the thought to the back of their mind and thus hide it away.  It's very much a phenomenon of the times we live in, which has no respect for priorities.  "  (509)  Your Face Tomorrow vol. 3

December 29, 2009  

Back to Burke for Comfort on a Meta-Wintery Day

45mph gusts in superbright sunshine & white.  A great day to stay indoors and catch up on how Kenneth Burke’s notion of Freud’s unconscious jives with, or not, ideas on the same topic by Jacques Lacan.   Help on this from Kevin A Johnson’s great paper at KB Journal --- 

Quote

Moreover, both Burkeian Dramatism and Lacanian psychoanalysis share the notion of a moralistic negative as being established against a radical nothingness (or “Void” of subjectivity). For example, Žižek (2002a) explained that “Not only do both religion and atheism insist on the Void, on the fact that our reality is not ultimate and closed—the experience of this Void is the original materialist experience, and religion, unable to endure it, fills it in with religious content” (p. xxix). The Void is the original materialist experience because there is no soul or “other world” for the materialist—we live, breath, eat, sweat, shit, fuck, die, decompose—we were originally without material form, then we attained material form, and we will lose our material form. There is nothing “more” to life than “mere” biological organisms. In the Lacanian sense, death-drive is what clears the space of the Void. Žižek (2002a) noted that “in order for (symbolic) creation to take place, the death-drive has to accomplish its work of, precisely, emptying the place, and thus making it ready for creation” (p. xxx). It is death-drive that thus creates what Burke (1984a) described in the famous passage:

We in cities rightly grow shrewd at appraising man-made institutions—but beyond these tiny concentration points of rhetoric and traffic, there lies the eternally unsolvable Enigma, the preposterous fact that both existence and nothingness are equally unthinkable. And in this staggering disproportion between man and no-man, there is no place for purely human boasts of grandeur, or for forgetting that men build their cultures by huddling together, nervously loquacious, at the edge of the abyss. (p. 272)  [Burke, K. (1984a). Permanence and change: An anatomy of purpose. 3rd edition. Berkeley: U of California P.]

If it is the negative that people build their cultures around, then the “abyss” and the “Void” may be identical terms where both are cleared/made possible by the death-drive. In this sense, the moralistic negative is made possible in both the Burkeian and Lacanian systems by affirming a culture of “thou-shalt-nots” in response to the nervousness that confronting such an abyssal existence brings forth. Therefore, the moralistic negative is both “weak” and a product of the Lacanian death-drive. To study language as it pertains to the moralistic negative is thus to place it in the context of the Void/abyss as the original materialist experience. This is also a way to study the connection between language and culture that is built around the abyss.

Unquote