And that was just one little piece of my reading in recent months. I think I’ll be using the blog in the near future to review a good deal of this recent reading, returning to the original impulse under which I started blogging, which was to record a writer’s notes on his reading.

Ozu’s Late Spring is literary in this sense. Late Spring is about as far from the noise & movement of contemporary movies as it’s possible to get. From the middle of Ozu’s career & shot in black & white, the film consists mostly people talking to each other & key events happen away from the camera, while seemingly minor events are lingered over. Transitions are straight cuts, with the occasional use of a static shot of a building or landscape. These transitional frames feel very much like still photographs and sometimes invite a symbolic or metaphorical reading with their inclusion of lonely trees or clocks. Key dramatic moments are often implied rather than fully dramatized: one important plot turn takes place during the performance of a Noh drama when two characters merely look at each other and nod, with a third watching and “reading” this brief & conventional interaction.

For the contemporary Western viewer of Late Spring, the motivating problem of the story may be hard to grasp. (Assume that narratives have motivating problems or conflicts and that this is true across cultures (I think it is); nevertheless, conflict gets expressed in different ways in different cultures. And what is recognized as a particular sort of conflict in one culture might be seen is a very different light in another.) The twenty-seven-year-old Noriko lives with and cares for her widowed father, a professor. Both the professor and his sister would like Noriko to get married, but Noriko, despite being attractive and apparently happy, resists.

And it’s not that Noriko doesn’t like men, or is shy. She flirts with her father’s assistant and might have married him except that he is already engaged. One even gets the impression he’s have broken his engagement to marry Noriko. She does not want to get married because she feels genuine filial piety, a concept foreign to the West but highly developed in many Asian / Confucian cultures. This is one of the things that made this film feel so psychologically strange to me. It took me a long time to figure out that Noriko really did want to stay home and care for her father & that she genuinely preferred this to getting married, which she well understood was the expected thing to do. Actually, staying home with her father and getting married were both “expected” of her in post-war Japan and therein lies the conflict of the drama. Noriko is caught between two equally compelling social responsibilities, one traditional and one modern.

Noriko’s wedding is not dramatized. She is shown in her bridal regalia leaving to get married, then her father and a woman friend — a divorcee we’ve met earlier, a friend of Noriko’s — are shown in their wedding clothes in a bar drinking sake. The implication of this final scene is that the father will marry this not quite respectable woman rather than the woman to whom he nodded during the Noh performance, ironically proving himself to be more modern than his younger daughter, who even in marriage continues to represent the traditional Japanese virtues of filial piety and self-sacrifice.

The machinery of the interlocking narratives is not terribly subtle, but this is hardly a fault in a philosophical novel, where, presumably, the emphasis is in the reality of ideas rather than the realism of the setting & plot. It is clear from the beginning that the two narrators, living in different worlds in the same Paris apartment building, must inevitably be brought together; the way they come together is, however, both surprising and appropriate to their personalities. I thought the story sagged a bit about two-thirds of the way along, but it recovers itself quickly and rushes on to a surprising and, as noted, paradoxical conclusion. I am perhaps less sanguine than the author about the possibilities for communication and friendship across the boundaries of class and culture, but surely we ought to aspire to such intellectual and spiritual freedoms as this novel celebrates.

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*In this, as in other ways, The Elegance of the Hedgehog reminds one of another European philosophical novel narrated in the voice of a precocious girl, Sophie’s World, by Jostein Gaarder [NY Times Book Review, review of The Elegance of the Hedgehog  by Caryn James; review of Sophie's World by John Vernon]

As a poet I find it hard to take seriously any philosophical doctrine presented is clumsy or unconvincing language. (Sartre of course wrote effective fiction elsewhere, as in the novel Nausea, so the story being discussed here is perhaps nothing but an aberration.) Despite the aesthetic failures of this story, I remain of Sartre’s party, mostly because it offers a materialist like me the opportunity to exercise a certain amount of self-making within the overpowering historical and material forces that shape so much of human existence.

I like Kimberly Johnson’s poem because it does with economy & grace one of the things that lyric poetry is especially good at: turning the world inside out for a moment, perceptually, sometimes morally. Lyric moments in longer works such as novels and movies can also do this. One of the people commenting at Slate mentions the movie Patton, which certainly has such moment; so does Apocalypse Now, which makes war look beautiful and exciting, only to then turn the world inside out on the viewer, turning the beauty back into horror. Johnson’s poem does something similar on a small scale.

The problem with the lyric form — and with this poem — is that an ending is required. I don’t think “Catapult” ends very satisfactorily, what with it’s gesture toward the sacred. The beautiful is not always sacred, though lyric poets often pretend it is. I think I would have put a period after “earth” and let it go at that.

So now I have begun the Rilke novel, which I started years ago but never finished — I know this because I can see my marks in the margins — but not much of it registered with me. “The main thing is to live,” writes Brigge near the beginning. Yes.

The story involves a young woman kidnapped and used for sex by an anonymous man who keeps her locked in a garden shed behind his suburban house that he has converted into the self-contained Room of the novel’s title, which is in fact a very effective prison. The young woman is 19 when she is kidnapped and within a couple of years becomes pregnant and bears a son. The tricky and audacious thing about the novel is that it is told in the first-person point of view of this boy when he is five years old. There are plenty of novels in the voices of children, but five years old is pushing against the downward limit of verbal ability for a narrator; still, Donoghue manages the difficulties with a kind of intelligence and grace one wouldn’t think possible, given the narrative situation she has set up for herself.

The narrator’s name is Jack and he is surely a verbally gifted child, but not so gifted as to seem implausible even to a reader (such as me) skeptical of this particular technical choice. The story develops in such a way that Jack’s verbal gifts seem natural: he spends a great deal of time talking to his mother and reading his five books and they also play a game called Parrot in which they watch TV and then the mother hits the mute button, Jack’s task in this game being to parrot back the whole previous sentence he has just heard whether he understands the words or not. They then discuss the words and their meaning. This game is only mentioned once or twice, but in the huge silence that is their lives (the room is soundproofed) language takes on a nearly magical importance.

Because Jack has never seen the outside world except through television, he imagines that there is only one of each thing and that stories and TV are fantasies. He calls the bed Bed and the table Table, and so on for all the objects in Room. Each noun is a singular and proper noun. At night, when their captor — whom they call Old Nick — comes to rape his mother, Jack goes into a bed in the bottom of Wardrobe until Old Nick punches the numbers on the electronic lock and goes back to his house with its widescreen TV. The room is windowless except for a skylight high overhead and has chainlink fencing inside the walls, as Ma finds out long before she gives birth to Jack and acquires this name, also a proper and not a generic noun. The novel presents the reader with a space that is at once claustrophobic and entirely domestic. That claustrophobic environment begins to wear on the reader before long, but in one of the nifty technical sleights of hand Donoghue pulls off, the reader is also slowly let into Ma’s world through the device of having Jack report their conversations and actions.

Ma is clearly depressed and desperate but at the same time holding her sanity together for the sake of her son — and, too, with his innocent collaboration, Jack’s voice  coming to represent in the reader’s imagination both the limits and the power of radical innocence. He becomes her reason for survival and ultimately her mode of escape. Inevitably, about a third of the way into the narrative, Jack’s fascination but nevertheless limited voice begins to sound tedious, but just as that begins to happen the plot of the novel advances toward a plan for getting away from their captor. Ma had tried to get away a couple of times before Jack was born, once smashing Old Nick over the head with the toilet seat, but since his birth has put all her energy into protecting him, even to the extent of being “polite” to Old Nick. Because the simple plot of the first half of the novel relies on suspense, I’m not going to include any of the details in this review; I will note that I was taken in by a subtle red herring so that the actual method of escape surprised me.

The commentary I’ve read on Room understandably focuses on the central characters’ captivity, but nearly half the novel is devoted to what happens after their escape and I’d argue that this part of the narrative is the emotional and imaginative heart of the novel. It is the central function of literature to allow us to imagine what cannot be directly said. We might revise Wittgenstein’s dictum that “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence” to What we cannot speak about we must find a way to imagine. Literature — by which I mean language that aspires to the status of art — serves that necessity. To this end, what seemed at the beginning a technical liability in Room — a five-year-old’s point of view — turns out to be a strength: Jack is too young to philosophize or explain; Jack’s voice reports what happens to him and his mother and in doing so brings the reader into an imaginative connection with these characters and their situation that might otherwise be destroyed by sentimentality.

When I teach Lit and creative writing, I am often surprised by the vehemence with which some students defend specific examples of sentimentality and sentimentality itself as an appropriate expression of emotion, even after we have talked about the distortions of feeling it involves & the superficiality of emotion and psychological falsity that result from sentimental language. I have the sense that there is a connection between this defense of the sentimental and a parallel bit of unfocused belief — that only “direct experience” is completely real and that such experience is somehow unmediated by things like books or movies or songs, i.e., objects and processes of culture. The cultural, necessarily conceived narrowly, then becomes ontologically second rate. (Of course all experience is mediated by culture, but this is largely invisible.) As a consequence, the intellectual and emotional experiences we have as readers are demoted to entertainment and escapism, modes in which the sentimental is thought to be valid.

A novel like Room, though, demands to be read imaginatively, by which I mean that the reader takes his or her experiences inside the world of the novel as real, as ontologically equivalent to “direct experience.” There may be differences between one’s experience “out in the world” and experience “inside” the world of a novel, but they are phenomenological not ontological. It is much easier, of course, to relegate the imaginative to secondary status, for the imaginary makes rigorous demands upon the reader — demands that can be safely ignored only by treating the imagination as what Coleridge would call “fancy.” (Fantasy as a genre strikes me as the apotheosis of a broken and irresponsible conception of imagination.) A novel like Donoghue’s Room demands from the reader the same kind of attention demanded by friends, family, students, colleagues; that is, the reader who wishes to be a reader has an inescapable responsibility to the text that cannot be lightly put aside. A novel like Room reminds us that all texts are available to imaginative /theoretical reading, whether they are naive or self-conscious about their own demands upon imagination.

The first half of First as Tragedy, Then as Farce presents a flyover of post-9/11 politics & culture in the West — it is what I think would have been called a work of political economy before that term went out of fashion with the rise of economics as a science. Zizek is a fluent, even sprightly, writer who can explain difficult concepts clearly and whose point of view can thus come to feel completely natural to the reader, who, if I am at all typical, adopts the author’s assumptions as if they were his own. This is a very effective rhetoric, if that’s what it is — style as rhetoric — but the reader must be on guard so as to not be swept away on a current of enthusiasm, which, admittedly, can be a pleasant experience, especially with a maestro as charismatic as Zizek.

Two big concepts emerge from Zizek’s essay, which is conveniently divided into two parts: 1. An analysis of the ways in which neo-liberalism & late capitalism effectively subvert & incorporate insurgent political movements. Zizek is particularly interested in the way that movements on the political left suffer this fate, but it would be interesting to see how he’d think about the so-called Tea Party movements on the American right, which will almost certainly be absorbed by the neo-liberal Republican Party. The genius of neo-liberalism is its ability to absorb insurgencies & naturalize them, making them safe for domestic consumption, as it were. 2. A thesis about Human Nature in which the capital letters are appropriate. Zizek sets himself up as a champion of “communism” as a mode of life that depends on the assumption that there is a core set of human values that unites all people across any supposed cultural divides. In this, he directly opposes the position of Theory in all its manifestations over the last thirty years, which has held that human nature is a variable construct. In my view, Zizek’s second thesis consists of a great deal of wishful thinking, but perhaps that is because I have been ensnared by theory. In any case, I have a student who, along with a bunch of Dickens and Tolstoy, has just read The Fountainhead this summer: I have recommended Zizek’s book as an antidote.

Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others came along at just the right moment for me. I have been reading William Vollmann’s big book Imperial, about the California county where my mother was born & where I spent a lot of time growing up & looking, too, at the separate volume Vollmann published, under the same title, of his photographs of people and places in Imperial County. Sontag’s book is an attempt to understand the usefulness of images — photographic images in particular. In this late essay, Sontag revises and even reverses her earlier (more aesthetic?) view of photography as a technology of distancing & comes to an understanding of the photograph – particularly the war photograph — as a necessary, if never sufficient, moral document. The second half of this book strikes me as the epitome of what an intellectual discourse looks like: full of passion & doubt.