How to Read James Joyce's Ulysses on Bloomsday

Via Open Culture, here is a quick guide to everything you need to enjoy reading James Joyce's Ulysses on this, June 16 (1904), the day of the action in the book, otherwise known as Bloomsday. Interestingly, 1904 was the last year that Joyce was to see Dublin, the city of his youth. And June 16 was the day on which he and Nora, who would become his wife, first went out on a date.

The only novel in the history of literature more daunting to most readers than Ulysses is Joyce's last novel, Finnegan's' Wake, the companion to Ulysses. In Joyce's mind, Ulysses was the "daytime" book, but Finnegan's Wake is the nighttime book, a nearly impenetrable text, written over a period of 17 years (with the assistance of Samuel Beckett as typist) and written in an idiosyncratic language that is almost code more than language.

In comparison, Ulysses is a piece of cake.

If you were in Dublin today, you could take a tour of all of the place Leopold Bloom visited through the course of the novel. It's amazing the Joyce was able to remember Dublin so precisely despite not having lived there in the two decades prior to writing the book.

Everything You Need to Enjoy Reading James Joyce’s Ulysses on Bloomsday

June 16th, 2014

Since its publication in 1922, James Joyce’s Ulysses has enjoyed a status, in various places and in various ways, as The Book to Read. Alas, this Modernist novel of Dublin on June 16, 1904 has also attained a reputation as The Book You Probably Can’t Read — or at least not without a whole lot of work on the side. In truth, nobody needs to turn themselves into a Joyce scholar to appreciate it; the uninitiated reader may not enjoy it on every possible level, but they can still, without a doubt, get a charge from this piece of pure literature. Today, on this Bloomsday 2014, we offer you everything that may help you get that charge, starting with Ulysses as a free eBook (iPad/iPhone - Kindle + Other Formats - Read Online Now). Or perhaps you’d prefer to listen to the novel as a free audio book; you can even hear a passage read by Joyce himself.


The work may stand as a remarkably rich textual achievement, but it also has a visual history: we’ve previously featured, for instance, Henri Matisse’s illustrated 1935 edition of the book, Joyce’s own sketch of protagonist Leopold Bloom (below), and Ulysses “Seen,” a graphic novel adaptation-in-progress.

Even Vladimir Nabokov, obviously a formidable literary power himself, added to all this when he sketched out a map of the paths Bloom and Stephen Dedalus (previously seen in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) take through Dublin in the book.

Other high-profile Ulysses appreciators include Stephen Fry, who did a video expounding upon his love for it, and Frank Delaney, whose podcast Re: Joyce, as entertaining as the novel itself, will examine the entire text line-by-line over 22 years. Still, like any vital work of art, Ulysses has drawn detractors as well. Irving Babbitt, among the novel’s early reviewers, said it evidenced “an advanced stage of psychic disintegration”; Virginia Woolf, having quit at page 200, wrote that “never did any book so bore me.” But bored or thrilled, each reader has their own distinct experience with Ulysses, and on this Bloomsday we’d like to send you on your way to your own. (Or maybe you have a different way of celebrating, as the first Bloomsday revelers did in 1954.) Don’t let the towering novel’s long shadow darken it. Remember the whole thing comes down to an Irishman and his manuscripts — many of which you can read online.


Related Content:

• James Joyce’s Ulysses: Download the Free Audio Book
• James Joyce Reads From Ulysses and Finnegans Wake In His Only Two Recordings (1924/1929)
• Henri Matisse Illustrates 1935 Edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses
• Read Joyce’s Ulysses Line by Line, for the Next 22 Years, with Frank Delaney’s Podcast
• The First Bloomsday: Watch Dublin’s Literati Celebrate James Joyce’s Ulysses in Drunken Fashion, 1954
• James Joyce, With His Eyesight Failing, Draws a Sketch of Leopold Bloom (1926)

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googlepex - Authors@Google

Philosopher-novelist Rebecca Goldstein (wife of Steven Pinker) has a new book out, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away (2014). Recently, she stopped by Google to talk about her new book.

Rebecca Goldstein - Authors@Google

Published on Mar 27, 2014

Goldstein returns to Google, this time with Plato, to talk about her new book.

Abstract from Goldstein's site: "At the heart of the latest work from acclaimed philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein lies one question: is philosophy obsolete? In PLATO AT THE GOOGLEPLEX (Pantheon Books/March 4, 2014), Goldstein proves why philosophy is here to stay -- and in fact more relevant today than ever before -- by revealing its hidden (though essential) role in today's debates on religion, morality, politics, and science. Goldstein does so in a wholly unique way -- by imagining Plato (the original philosopher) come to life in the twenty-first century. As he embarks on a multicity speaking tour, Goldstein asks: how would Plato handle a host on FOX News who denies that there can be morality without religion? How would he mediate a debate between a Freudian psychoanalyst and a Tiger Mom on how to raise the perfect child? How would he answer a neuroscientist who, about to scan Plato's brain, argues that science has definitively answered the questions of free will and moral agency? And what would Plato make of Google, and the idea that knowledge can be crowdsourced rather than reasoned out by experts? Goldstein also provides an in-depth study of Plato's views, while examining the culture responsible for producing them. With scholarly depth and a novelist's imagination and wit, she probes the deepest issues confronting our time, by allowing us to understand the source of Plato's theories, and to eavesdrop as he takes on the modern world."

Authors@Google: George R.R. Martin (Game of Thrones)

This appearance at Google was from 2011, but I just discovered it. When it first aired, Game of Thrones had probably just started on HBO, but certainly did not have the following it has now.

I should probably offer a spoiler alert, but hell, we're all adults here. Take care of your own needs.

Authors@Google: George R.R. Martin

Uploaded on Aug 6, 2011


George R. R. Martin, the acclaimed author of the Game of Thrones novels -- also a recent hit HBO series -- came to Google for a live-streamed interview where he answered your questions submitted online. The interview, part of the Authors@Google series as well as Martin's book tour promoting his latest novel A Dance with Dragons, took place on July 28th at 12pm PDT.

Martin is a bestselling author most famous for his A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series of novels that has been adapted to the popular HBO drama Game of Thrones. Time magazine has dubbed him an "American Tolkien". In his series, Martin creates a rich world populated by a large cast of intriguing characters and interwoven storylines.

It should come as no surprise that in addition to technology, Googlers love things like dragons and fantasy worlds, and we also love meeting talented writers like Martin.

David Cronenberg's Introduction to Kafka's Metamorphosis

Who could possibly be better to write an introduction to a new edition of Franz Kafka's classic novella, Metamorphosis than David Cronenberg? No one, that's who.

From The Paris Review:

The Beetle and the Fly

January 17, 2014 | by David Cronenberg

From the original cover of Kafka’s Die Verwandlung, 1915.

I woke up one morning recently to discover that I was a seventy-year-old man. Is this different from what happens to Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis? He wakes up to find that he’s become a near-human-sized beetle (probably of the scarab family, if his household’s charwoman is to be believed), and not a particularly robust specimen at that. Our reactions, mine and Gregor’s, are very similar. We are confused and bemused, and think that it’s a momentary delusion that will soon dissipate, leaving our lives to continue as they were. What could the source of these twin transformations possibly be? Certainly, you can see a birthday coming from many miles away, and it should not be a shock or a surprise when it happens. And as any well-meaning friend will tell you, seventy is just a number. What impact can that number really have on an actual, unique physical human life?

In the case of Gregor, a young traveling salesman spending a night at home in his family’s apartment in Prague, awakening into a strange, human/insect hybrid existence is, to say the obvious, a surprise he did not see coming, and the reaction of his household—mother, father, sister, maid, cook—is to recoil in benumbed horror, as one would expect, and not one member of his family feels compelled to console the creature by, for example, pointing out that a beetle is also a living thing, and turning into one might, for a mediocre human living a humdrum life, be an exhilarating and elevating experience, and so what’s the problem? This imagined consolation could not, in any case, take place within the structure of the story, because Gregor can understand human speech, but cannot be understood when he tries to speak, and so his family never think to approach him as a creature with human intelligence. (It must be noted, though, that in their bourgeois banality, they somehow accept that this creature is, in some unnamable way, their Gregor. It never occurs to them that, for example, a giant beetle has eaten Gregor; they don’t have the imagination, and he very quickly becomes not much more than a housekeeping problem.) His transformation seals him within himself as surely as if he had suffered a total paralysis. These two scenarios, mine and Gregor’s, seem so different, one might ask why I even bother to compare them. The source of the transformations is the same, I argue: we have both awakened to a forced awareness of what we really are, and that awareness is profound and irreversible; in each case, the delusion soon proves to be a new, mandatory reality, and life does not continue as it did.

Is Gregor’s transformation a death sentence or, in some way, a fatal diagnosis? Why does the beetle Gregor not survive? Is it his human brain, depressed and sad and melancholy, that betrays the insect’s basic sturdiness? Is it the brain that defeats the bug’s urge to survive, even to eat? What’s wrong with that beetle? Beetles, the order of insect called Coleoptera, which means “sheathed wing” (though Gregor never seems to discover his own wings, which are presumably hiding under his hard wing casings), are notably hardy and well adapted for survival; there are more species of beetle than any other order on earth. Well, we learn that Gregor has bad lungs they are “none too reliable”—and so the Gregor beetle has bad lungs as well, or at least the insect equivalent, and perhaps that really is his fatal diagnosis; or perhaps it’s his growing inability to eat that kills him, as it did Kafka, who ultimately coughed up blood and died of starvation caused by laryngeal tuberculosis at the age of forty. What about me? Is my seventieth birthday a death sentence? Of course, yes, it is, and in some ways it has sealed me within myself as surely as if I had suffered a total paralysis. And this revelation is the function of the bed, and of dreaming in the bed, the mortar in which the minutiae of everyday life are crushed, ground up, and mixed with memory and desire and dread. Gregor awakes from troubled dreams which are never directly described by Kafka. Did Gregor dream that he was an insect, then awake to find that he was one? “‘What in the world has happened to me?’ he thought.” “It was no dream,” says Kafka, referring to Gregor’s new physical form, but it’s not clear that his troubled dreams were anticipatory insect dreams. In the movie I co-wrote and directed of George Langelaan’s short story The Fly, I have our hero Seth Brundle, played by Jeff Goldblum, say, while deep in the throes of his transformation into a hideous fly/human hybrid, “I’m an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. But now the dream is over, and the insect is awake.” He is warning his former lover that he is now a danger to her, a creature with no compassion and no empathy. He has shed his humanity like the shell of a cicada nymph, and what has emerged is no longer human. He is also suggesting that to be a human, a self-aware consciousness, is a dream that cannot last, an illusion. Gregor too has trouble clinging to what is left of his humanity, and as his family begins to feel that this thing in Gregor’s room is no longer Gregor, he begins to feel the same way. But unlike Brundle’s fly self, Gregor’s beetle is no threat to anyone but himself, and starves and fades away like an afterthought as his family revels in their freedom from the shameful, embarrassing burden that he has become.



Jeff Goldblum in Cronenberg’s The Fly, 1986.
When The Fly was released in 1986, there was much conjecture that the disease that Brundle had brought on himself was a metaphor for AIDS. Certainly I understood this—AIDS was on everybody’s mind as the vast scope of the disease was gradually being revealed. But for me, Brundle’s disease was more fundamental: in an artificially accelerated manner, he was aging. He was a consciousness that was aware that it was a body that was mortal, and with acute awareness and humor participated in that inevitable transformation that all of us face, if only we live long enough. Unlike the passive and helpful but anonymous Gregor, Brundle was a star in the firmament of science, and it was a bold and reckless experiment in transmitting matter through space (his DNA mixes with that of an errant fly) that caused his predicament.

Langelaan’s story, first published in Playboy magazine in 1957, falls firmly within the genre of science fiction, with all the mechanics and reasonings of its scientist hero carefully, if fancifully, constructed (two used telephone booths are involved). Kafka’s story, of course, is not science fiction; it does not provoke discussion regarding technology and the hubris of scientific investigation, or the use of scientific research for military purposes. Without sci-fi trappings of any kind, The Metamorphosis forces us to think in terms of analogy, of reflexive interpretation, though it is revealing that none of the characters in the story, including Gregor, ever does think that way. There is no meditation on a family secret or sin that might have induced such a monstrous reprisal by God or the Fates, no search for meaning even on the most basic existential plane. The bizarre event is dealt with in a perfunctory, petty, materialistic way, and it arouses the narrowest range of emotional response imaginable, almost immediately assuming the tone of an unfortunate natural family occurrence with which one must reluctantly contend.

Stories of magical transformations have always been part of humanity’s narrative canon. They articulate that universal sense of empathy for all life forms that we feel; they express that desire for transcendence that every religion also expresses; they prompt us to wonder if transformation into another living creature would be a proof of the possibility of reincarnation and some sort of afterlife and is thus, however hideous or disastrous the narrative, a religious and hopeful concept. Certainly my Brundlefly goes through moments of manic strength and power, convinced that he has combined the best components of human and insect to become a super being, refusing to see his personal evolution as anything but a victory even as he begins to shed his human body parts, which he carefully stores in a medicine cabinet he calls the Brundle Museum of Natural History.

There is none of this in The Metamorphosis. The Samsabeetle is barely aware that he is a hybrid, though he takes small hybrid pleasures where he can find them, whether it’s hanging from the ceiling or scuttling through the mess and dirt of his room (beetle pleasure) or listening to the music that his sister plays on her violin (human pleasure). But the Samsa family is the Samsabeetle’s context and his cage, and his subservience to the needs of his family both before and after his transformation extends, ultimately, to his realization that it would be more convenient for them if he just disappeared, it would be an expression of his love for them, in fact, and so he does just that, by quietly dying. The Samsabeetle’s short life, fantastical though it is, is played out on the level of the resolutely mundane and the functional, and fails to provoke in the story’s characters any hint of philosophy, meditation, or profound reflection. How similar would the story be, then, if on that fateful morning, the Samsa family found in the room of their son not a young, vibrant traveling salesman who is supporting them by his unselfish and endless labor, but a shuffling, half-blind, barely ambulatory eighty-nine-year-old man using insectlike canes, a man who mumbles incoherently and has soiled his trousers and out of the shadowland of his dementia projects anger and induces guilt? If, when Gregor Samsa woke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed right there in his bed into a demented, disabled, demanding old man? His family is horrified but somehow recognize him as their own Gregor, albeit transformed. Eventually, though, as in the beetle variant of the story, they decide that he is no longer their Gregor, and that it would be a blessing for him to disappear.

When I went on my publicity tour for The Fly, I was often asked what insect I would want to be if I underwent an entomological transformation. My answers varied, depending on my mood, though I had a fondness for the dragonfly, not only for its spectacular flying but also for the novelty of its ferocious underwater nymphal stage with its deadly extendable underslung jaw; I also thought that mating in the air might be pleasant. Would that be your soul, then, this dragonfly, flying heavenward? came one response. Is that not really what you’re looking for? No, not really, I said. I’d just be a simple dragonfly, and then, if I managed to avoid being eaten by a bird or a frog, I would mate, and as summer ended, I would die.

This essay appears as the introduction to Susan Bernofsky’s new translation of The Metamorphosis.

David Cronenberg is a Canadian filmmaker whose career has spanned more than four decades. Cronenberg’s many feature films include Stereo, Crimes of the Future, Fast Company, The Brood, The Dead Zone, The Fly, Naked Lunch, M. Butterfly, Crash, A History of Violence, and A Dangerous Method. His most recent film, Cosmopolis, starred Robert Pattinson and was an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 2003 novel. Consumed, his first novel, will be published in September.

 

Via the internet's curators of cool, Open Culture, here is Orson Welles' film version of Franz Kafka's brilliant novel, The Trial.

Watch The Trial (1962), Orson Welles’ Worst or Best Film, Adapted From Kafka’s Classic Work

January 10th, 2014


Earlier this week, we featured the Internet Archive’s audio of conversations between Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich. According to the Archive’s description, Welles’ “defense of his controversial adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial is so fascinating that listeners might want to rush out and rent the film.” But hang on — you need neither rush out nor rent it, since Welles’ The Trial has fallen into the public domain, or rather, it never had a copyright filed in the first place. The full movie, a visually inventive tale of unspecified crime, extreme punishment, and the procedural vortex in between, appears above for you to watch and judge, as it were, for yourself. You’ll have to, since the picture has long divided critics, including some of Welles’ strongest adherents. Even Welles biographer Charles Higham considers it “a dead thing, like some tablet found among the dust of forgotten men.”


“Say what you like,” Welles himself would tell the BBC in the year of the film’s premiere, “but The Trial is the best film I have ever made.” When Bogdanovich went to interview Anthony Perkins (best known, surely, for Hitchcock’s Psycho), who stars as the beleaguered Josef K., the actor spoke of the pride he felt performing for Welles. Perkins also mentioned Welles’ stated intent to make his adaptation a black comedy, a tricky sensibility to pull off for filmmakers in any league. Just as Welles wanted to “set the record straight” by recording his interviews with Bogdanovich, so he must have wanted to do with the 1981 footage just above, in which he speaks about the process of filming The Trial to an audience at the University of Southern California. He’d meant to shoot a whole documentary on the subject, which ultimately wound up on his heap of unfinished projects. Still, we should feel lucky that we have The Trial itself (which, in its prolonged creation, even missed its own Venice Film Festival premiere) to watch, debate, and either convict or exonerate of its alleged cinematic crimes.

Related Content:

• Listen to Eight Interviews of Orson Welles by Filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich (1969-1972)
• Watch Orson Welles’ The Stranger Free Online, Where 1940s Film Noir Meets Real Horrors of WWII
• The Hearts of Age: Orson Welles’ Surrealist First Film (1934)
• Orson Welles Explains Why Ignorance Was His Major “Gift” to Citizen Kane

~ Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, literature, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on his brand new Facebook page.

Alissa Quart - Is Applying Neuroscience to the Study of Literature the Best Way to Read a Novel?

I wonder how my life would have been different if the field of neurohumanities existed when I was in school this first time, getting my master's degree in humanities. At this point I'm not sure how I feel about neuroscience invading literature, poetry, and art.

Adventures in Neurohumanities

Applying neuroscience to the study of literature is fashionable. But is it the best way to read a novel?

Alissa Quart
May 7, 2013 | This article appeared in the May 27, 2013 edition of The Nation.

Brain scan image from Libertas Academica

At Stanford University in 2012, a young literature scholar named Natalie Phillips oversaw a big project: a new way of studying the nineteenth-century novelist Jane Austen. No surprise there—Austen, a superstar of English literature and the inspiration for an endless array of Hollywood and BBC productions based on her work, has been the subject of thousands of scholarly papers.

But the Stanford study was different. Phillips used a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine to track the blood flow of readers’ brains when they read Mansfield Park. The subjects—mostly graduate students—were asked to skim an excerpt and then read it closely. The results were part of a study on reading and distraction.

The “neuro novel” story was quickly picked up by the mainstream media, from NPR to The New York Times. But the Austen project wasn’t merely a clever one-off—the brainchild, so to speak, of one imaginatively interdisciplinary scholar. And it wasn’t just the result of ambitious academics crossing brain science with “the marriage plot” in unholy matrimony simply to grab headlines. The Stanford study reflects a real trend in the humanities. At Yale University, Lisa Zunshine, now a literature scholar at the University of Kentucky, was part of a research team that studied modernist authors using fMRI, also in order to better understand reading. Rather than a cramped office or library carrel, the researchers got to use the Haskins Laboratory in New Haven, with funding by the Teagle Foundation, to carry out their project, in which twelve participants were given texts with higher and lower levels of complexity and had their brains monitored.

Duke and Vanderbilt universities now have neuroscience centers with specialties in humanities hybrids, from “neurolaw” onward: Duke has a Neurohumanities Research Group and even a neurohumanities abroad program. The money is serious as well. Semir Zeki, a neuroaesthetics specialist—that is, neuroscience applied to the study of visual art—was the recipient of a £1 million grant in the United Kingdom. And there are conferences aplenty: in 2012, you could have attended the aptly named Neuro-Humanities Entanglement Conference at Georgia Tech.

Neurohumanities has been positioned as a savior of today’s liberal arts. The Times is able to ask “Can ‘Neuro Lit Crit’ Save the Humanities?” because of the assumption that literary study has descended into cultural irrelevance. Neurohumanities, then, is an attempt to provide the supposedly loosey-goosey art and lit crowds with the metal spines of hard science.

The forces driving this phenomenon are many. Sure, it’s the result of scientific advancement. It’s also part of an interdisciplinary push into what is broadly termed the digital humanities, and it can be seen as offering an end run around intensifying funding challenges in the humanities. As Columbia University historian Alan Brinkley wrote in 2009, the historic gulf between funding for science and engineering on the one hand and the humanities on the other is “neither new nor surprising. What is troubling is that the humanities, in fact, are falling farther and farther behind other areas of scholarship.”

Neurohumanities offers a way to tap the popular enthusiasm for science and, in part, gin up more funding for humanities. It may also be a bid to give more authority to disciplines that are more qualitative and thus are construed, in today’s scientized and digitalized world, as less desirable or powerful. Deena Skolnick Weisberg, a Temple University postdoctoral fellow in psychology, wrote a 2008 paper titled “The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations,” in which she argued that the language of neuroscience affected nonexperts’ judgment, impressing them so much that they became convinced that illogical explanations actually made sense. Similarly, combining neuroscience with, say, the study of art nowadays can seem to offer an instant sheen of credibility.

But neurohumanities is also the result of something else. Neuroscience appears to be filling a vacuum where a single dominant mode of thought and criticism once existed. That plinth has been held in the American academy by critical theory, neo-Marxism and psychoanalysis. Alva Noë, a University of California, Berkeley, philosopher who might be called a “neuro doubter,” sees neurohumanities as a reaction to the previous postmodern moment. “The pre-eminence of neuroscience” has legitimated an “anti-theory stance” within the humanities, says Noë, the author of Out of Our Heads.

Noë argues that neurohumanities is the ultimate response to—and rejection of—critical theory, a mixture of literary theory, linguistics and anthropology that dominated the American humanities through the 1990s. Critical theory’s current decline was somewhat inevitable, as all intellectual movements erode over time. This was exemplified by the so-called Sokal affair in 1996, in which a physics professor named Alan Sokal submitted a hoax theoretical paper on science to Social Text, only to unmask himself and lambaste the theorists who accepted and published his piece as not understanding the science. Another clear public repudiation was the harsh Times obituary in 2004 of the philosopher Jacques Derrida, who was dubbed an “abstruse theorist”—in the obit’s headline, no less. But as critical theory’s power—along with that of Marxism and Freudianism—fades within the humanities, neurohumanities and literary Darwinism are stepping up, ready to explain how we live, love art and read a novel (or rather, how the cortex absorbs text). And while much was gained as “the brain” replaced “individual psychology” or social class readings, much has also been lost.

Critical theory offered us the fantasy that we have no control, making a fetish of haze and ambiguity and exhibiting what Noë terms “an allergy to anything essentialist.” In neurohumanities, by contrast, we do have mastery and concrete, empirical ends, which has proved more appealing, even as (or perhaps because) it is highly reductive. At least since George H.W. Bush declared the 1990s the decade of the brain, the media have been flooded with simplistic empirical answers to many of life’s questions. Neuroscience is now the favored method for explaining almost every element of human behavior. President Obama recently proposed an initiative called Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies, or BRAIN, to be modeled on the Human Genome Project. The aim is to create the first full model of brain circuitry and function. Scientists are hoping that BRAIN will be as successful (and as well funded) as the Human Genome Project turned out to be.

* * *

There are things that neuroscience is useful for, in terms of understanding behavior, but there are also things it is not all that useful for, like understanding the nuances of our reactions to poetry.

Literary studies before the advent of the neurohumanities tended to rest on murkier categories than science likes—categories such as subjectivity and interpretation. In a novel like Mansfield Park, for instance, the heroine Fanny Price is cornered into servility by both her social class and her feminine role. The judgmental Fanny smiles upon conservative social formations and condemns most others. This has led to vastly different interpretations. Lionel Trilling famously wrote that the novel’s “praise is not for social freedom, but for social stasis,” but it has also been read as feminist: a “bitter parody of conservative fiction,” in the words of Princeton University Austen scholar Claudia Johnson.

That is not to say that all neurohumanities scholars are insensitive to nuance and ambiguity. Some, like Lisa Zunshine, combine neuroscience with original interpretations of consciousness and multiple points of view in modernist novels. But other neuroaestheticians offer blunt accounts of areas of study that have long been appreciated for their complexity, such as the meaning of art or aesthetics as a means of transmitting politics and interpretation. In other words, some underlying principles of neuroscience are useful when applied to the humanities, but it needs to understand its limits.

Neuroaesthetics, an au courant mix of art history and cognitive science, asks whether our brains are structured so that paintings and precious objects move us in one way or another: one neuroimaging study, conducted at University College, London, set out to explain how we experience beauty in visual art. Ten people were shown 300 paintings while their heads were in an fMRI machine. They were asked to label the paintings as neutral, beautiful or ugly. The paintings they thought were beautiful led to increased activity in their frontal cortex, while the ugly paintings led to a similar increase in their motor cortex.

Professor Semir Zeki at UCL was responsible for this study, which he conducted through the Institute of Neuroesthetics in London and UC Berkeley. The center sets out a bold claim on its website: “the artist is, in a sense, a neuroscientist exploring the potentials and capacities of the brain, though with different tools.” Zeki’s latest paper? “The Neural Sources of Salvador Dali’s Ambiguity.”

* * *

But are multiple—and politically minded—meanings possible in the land of the neuro novel or neuro-aesthetics? Is neurohumanities, like “neuromarketing,” simply trying to help us understand and then produce cultural artifacts that will have the best effect for readers, writers and artists—political and historical context be damned?

The response to this question depends on whom you ask. Some are suspicious of what has been called “neuro-reductionism.” Jonathan Kramnick, a Rutgers University English professor who wrote a provocative essay, “Against Literary Darwinism,” for the journal Critical Inquiry, notes the rise of books with titles like The Art Instinct. “There’s an attention to the fine grain of a text that neuroscience can’t get at,” he says.

“Humanists are unwilling or unable to evaluate the science, so we just take scientists’ word for it, without following up on the evidence or knowing these claims are highly contested within their community,” says Todd Cronan, a professor of art history at Emory University. “‘Mirror neurons’ are highly debatable, yet art historians now just apply them to artworks. I think it’s worrying. And when there’s a ‘call for collaboration’ between art scholars and neuroscientists, we just marshal the scientists’ evidence.”

Jennifer Ashton, an English professor at the University of Illinois, wrote a takedown of neuroaesthetics in the academic journal Nonsite in 2011. She put it like this: “How your brain is firing won’t tell you if something is ironic, metaphorical or meaningful or if it is not.”

What does it mean, Cronan wonders, “if Matisse uses a lot of red and a neuro person says, ‘Red produced neuronal firing’?”

Literary Darwinism, another route by which the language and analytical frame of science has entered the humanities, can have an even more formulaic aspect. In one study, Jonathan Gottschall, an evolutionary lit scholar, compared 1,440 folktales from nearly fifty cultures in order to counter feminist critics and the assumption “that European tales reflect and perpetuate the arbitrary gender norms of western patriarchal societies.” His finding: there are biosocial norms that all cultures perpetuate—i.e., the feminists are wrong.

Critics also point out that neurohumanities scholars prefer formally conservative artists. Such artists are more likely to help them make general points about beauty or the act of reading: Austen or Michelangelo, for instance, were both animated by classical values like order and symmetry. And while neuroimaging may help us understand what our mind does when we read quickly or with a more careful attention, these data sets tell us next to nothing about the actual literature, nor do they give us a political understanding of a text.

It’s not hard to imagine a future when neurohumanities and neuroaesthetics have become so adulated that they rise up and out of the academy. Soon enough, they may seep into writers’ colonies and artists’ studios, where “culture producers” confronting a sagging economy and a distracted audience will embrace “Neuro Art” as their new selling point. Will writers start creating characters and plots designed to trigger the “right” neuronal responses in their readers and finally sell 20,000 copies rather than 3,000? Will artists, and advertisers who use artists, employ the lessons of neuroaestheticism to sharpen their neuromarketing techniques? After all, Robert T. Knight, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Berkeley, is already the science adviser for NeuroFocus, a neuromarketing company that follows the engagement and attention of potential shoppers. When neuroaesthetics is fully put to use in these ways, it may do as Alva Noë said: “reduce people and culture to ends, simply to be manipulated or made marketable.”

And he has a point. Today, there’s the sudden dominance of so many ways to quantify things that used to be amorphous and that we imagined were merely expressive or personal: Big Data, Facebook, ubiquitous surveillance, the growing use of pharmaceuticals to control our moods and minds. In other words, neurohumanities is not just a change in how we see paintings or read nineteenth-century novels. It’s a small part of the change in what we think it means to be human.

Philosopher Thomas Nagel’s broadside against Darwinism and materialism is mostly an instrument of mischief, wrote Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg in “Do You Only Have a Brain?” (Oct. 22, 2012).

Orwell's "Animal Farm" as an Animated Film

Via Snag Films, the 1955 animated version of George Orwell's classic political allegory, Animal Farm, is as much as was the original book. Here is a good synopsis from Wikipedia:

Animal Farm is an allegorical novel by George Orwell published in England on 17 August 1945. According to Orwell the book reflects events leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917, and then on into the Stalin era in the Soviet Union.[1] Orwell, a democratic socialist,[2] was a critic of Joseph Stalin and hostile to Moscow-directed Stalinism, especially after his experiences with the NKVD and the Spanish Civil War.[3] The Soviet Union he believed, had become a brutal dictatorship, built upon a cult of personality and enforced by a reign of terror. In a letter to Yvonne Davet, Orwell described Animal Farm as his novel "contre Stalin"[4] and in his essay of 1946, Why I Write, he wrote that Animal Farm was the first book in which he had tried, with full consciousness of what he was doing, "to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole".

The original title was Animal Farm: A Fairy Story, but the subtitle was dropped by U.S. publishers for its 1946 publication and subsequently all but one of the translations during Orwell's lifetime omitted the addition. Other variations in the title include: A Satire and A Contemporary Satire.[4] Orwell suggested the title Union des républiques socialistes animales for the French translation, which recalled the French name of the Soviet Union, Union des républiques socialistes soviétiques, and which abbreviates to URSA, the Latin for "bear", a symbol of Russia.[4]

It was written at a time (November 1943-February 1944) when the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union was at its height and Stalin was held in highest esteem in Britain both among the people and intelligentsia, a fact that Orwell hated.[5] It was initially rejected by a number of British and American publishers, including one of Orwell's own, Victor Gollancz. Its publication was thus delayed, though it became a great commercial success when it did finally appear—in part because the Cold War so quickly followed WW2.[6]

Time magazine chose the book as one of the 100 best English-language novels (1923 to 2005);[7] it also places at number 31 on the Modern Library List of Best 20th-Century Novels. It won a Retrospective Hugo Award in 1996 and is also included in the Great Books of the Western World.

The novel addresses not only the corruption of the revolution by its leaders but also how wickedness, indifference, ignorance, greed and myopia corrupt the revolution. It portrays corrupt leadership as the flaw in revolution, rather than the act of revolution itself. It also shows how potential ignorance and indifference to problems within a revolution could allow horrors to happen if a smooth transition to a people's government is not achieved.

Enjoy!

Animal Farm 

(1955) 73 mins

Animal Farm Synopsis
George Orwell's classic satire in a feature-length animated film. A brilliant and captivating tale that cleverly points out faults in human nature and politics. 

Film CreditsStarring: Maurice Denham, Gordon HeathDirector: John Halas  

The BBC Presents a New Dramatization of Orwell’s 1984, with Christopher Eccleston as Winston Smith

Via Open Culture, the curators of cool on the internets. As a bonus, I have included a 1954 film version of the book at the bottom (starring Peter Cushing and Yvonne Mitchell.)

The BBC Presents a New Dramatization of Orwell’s 1984, with Christopher Eccleston as Winston Smith

February 15th, 2013



Like the idea of totalitarianism, perhaps best articulated by Hannah Arendt in her post-war Origins of Totalitarianism, George Orwell’s post-war scrutiny of repressive governments has become a staple, catch-all reference for pundits on either side of the political spectrum, particularly the concepts of doublespeak, doublethink, historical revisionism, and the hyper-intrusive Big Brother, all from the 1949 novel 1984. In fact, few adjectives seem to get deployed with more frequency in urgent political discourse of all kinds than “Orwellian.” But the name George Orwell, pen name of journalist Eric Blair, hides an enigma: Orwell identified himself explicitly as a Democratic Socialist of a particularly English bent (most notably in his essay “The Lion and the Unicorn”), but his scathing critiques of nearly every existing institution sometimes make it hard to pin him down as a partisan of anything but the kind of freedom and openness that everyone vaguely wants to advocate. That ambiguity is a strength; despite his steadfast leftist roots, Orwell would not be a partisan hack—where he saw stupidity, avarice, and brutal inhumanity, he called it out, no matter the source.

The seeming contradictions and ironies that permeate Orwell’s thought and fiction are also what keep his work perennially interesting and worth rereading and revisiting. He was a probing and unsentimental critic of the motives of propagandists of all stripes, both left and right. Beginning in late January, BBC Radio 4 launched a month-long series on Orwell, with the avowedly ironic name, “The Real George Orwell.” Part of the irony comes from the fact that Orwell (or Blair) once worked as a propagandist for the BBC during WWII, and later based the torture area in 1984, Room 101, on a meeting room he recalled from his time there. His experiences with the state broadcasting network were not pleasant in his memory. Nonetheless, his former employer honors him this month with an extensive retrospective, including readings and dramatizations of his essays and journalism, his semi-autobiographical accounts Down and Out in Paris and London and Homage to Catalonia, and his novels Animal Farm and 1984.



In this latest dramatization of Orwell’s most famous novel, protagonist Winston Smith is voiced by actor Christopher Eccleston, who has inhabited another key post-war character in English fiction, Dr. Who (Pippa Nixonvoices Julia). In a brief discussion of what he takes away from the novel, Eccleston (above) draws out some of the reasons that 1984 appeals to so many people who might agree on almost nothing else. At the heart of the novel is the kind of humanist individualism that Orwell never abandoned and that he championed against Soviet-style state communism and hard-right imperialist authoritarianism both. Winston Smith is an embodiment of human dignity, celebrated for his struggle to “love, remember, and enjoy life,” as Eccleston says. “It’s the human story that means that we keep coming back to it and that keeps it relevant.” Listen to a brief clip of the1984 dramatization at the top of this post, and visit BBC Radio 4’s site to hear parts one and two of the full broadcast, which is available online for the next year. When Europe and America both seem rent in two by competing and incompatible social and political visions, it’s at least some comfort to know that no one wants to live in the world Orwell foresaw. Despite his novel’s deeply pessimistic ending, Orwell’s own career of fierce resistance to oppressive regimes offers a model for action against the dystopian future he imagined.

For other free, online readings of Orwell’s work, you can visit our archives of Free Audio Books, where you’ll find:

• 1984 – Free MP3 Zip File – Multiple Versions, Free eBook available here.
• Animal Farm – Free MP3 Zip File – Free iTunes, Free eBook available here.
• Homage to Catalonia – Chapter 1 here – Remaining Chapters here

Related Content:

• Aldous Huxley Reads Dramatized Version of Brave New World
• Free: Isaac Asimov’s Epic Foundation Trilogy Dramatized in Classic Audio

Also find major works by Orwell in our collection of Free eBooks

Josh Jones is a writer, editor, and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him @jdmagness

By the way, you can watch an older version of 1984 online (a 1954 production of the novel):

An Evening with Neil Gaiman - Sydney Writer's Festival

In this clip from the Sydney Writer's Festival (January, 2013), author Neil Gaiman talks about and reads from his new novel for adults, The Ocean at the End of the Lane. Gaiman is also the author of Coraline (2003), The Sandman series, beginning with The Sandman Vol. 1: Preludes & Nocturnes (New Edition), and many other books.

Author statement:

I make things up and write them down. Which takes us from comics (like SANDMAN) to novels (like ANANSI BOYS and AMERICAN GODS) to short stories (some are collected in SMOKE AND MIRRORS) and to occasionally movies (like Dave McKean's MIRRORMASK or the NEVERWHERE TV series, or my own short film A SHORT FILM ABOUT JOHN BOLTON). 

In my spare time I read and sleep and eat and try to keep the blog at www.neilgaiman.com more or less up to date.

An Evening with Neil Gaiman 

Neil Gaiman is one of the world's greatest storytellers. He is a multi-award winning novelist who writes across genres and has been credited as one of the creators of modern comics. At this Sydney event, Neil talks and reads from his next novel for adults, The Ocean at the End of the Lane. Presented by Top Shelf in association with Sydney Writers' Festival, City Recital Hall, Jan 2013.

NPR - Sebastian Faulks: Searching For The Self In 'Possible' Lives

Novelist Sebastian Faulks has a new book out, A Possible Life: A Novel in Five Parts, which offers five seemingly different characters from different times, but Faulks suggests they are connected by theme. In various ways, the characters all deal with issues of identity and selfhood. Sounds interesting.

Sebastian Faulks: Searching For The Self In 'Possible' Lives

NPR STAFF
December 04, 2012

Listen to the Story

Download
Transcript

Weekend Edition Sunday
6 min 49 sec

A Possible Life: A Novel in Five Parts

by Sebastian Faulks

Hardcover, 287 pages 

A young intelligence officer during the Second World War survives life in a Nazi concentration camp. A music producer in the 1970s falls in love with a young bohemian singer who breaks his heart. A lonely Italian neuroscientist makes a revolutionary discovery: Humans have no souls. These are some of the stories Sebastian Faulks weaves together in his latest novel, A Possible Life.

"The five parts of the novel connect in certain quite mechanical ways," with occasional characters and locales recurring throughout the stories, Faulks tells NPR's Rachel Martin. "The more important, the more interesting way I see it fitting together is that all the five sections of the novel are variations on a theme."

Though the parts of the story are quite different, Faulks says he'd like readers to think of the book "rather as they might [be] going to hear a symphony, and when you come back out of having heard Mozart's Fifth, I don't think you say, 'I just heard four interesting pieces of music.' 

The book begins with Geoffrey, a clean-cut young Englishman, rather innocent, on the eve of the Second World War. "He's not a very good soldier, gets essentially kicked off his regular infantry position and ends up joining special forces in France, so he's a kind of spy," Faulks says. Taken prisoner, Geoffrey winds up in a concentration camp, where he must deal with the person he's becoming under the terrible circumstances — and the person he becomes after the war.

"The change that takes place in him after a period of years enables him to survive," Faulks continues. "So in this first section of the novel, I'm setting up the idea that the self, and our idea of ourselves as individual human beings, is not quite as clear cut as we think, and that we can become different people in our own lives as they go along."

The stories jump back and forth in time — one even takes place in the near future, in an Italy ravaged by global recession. "The reason this section had to be set in the future is ... I wanted somebody to have discovered what it is about the human brain that makes us human, that gives us this extraordinary gift of self-awareness," Faulks says. But today's technology isn't up to that challenge, "so it had to be set 30 years ago into the future." But Elena, the neuroscientist who cracks the brain's code, discovers that it doesn't make life any easier. "All the normal kind of emotional, romantic, family and daily problems persist."

Novelist Sebastian Faulks, a former journalist, is the author of Birdsong, A Week in December, and Pistache, among others. Muir Vidler/Courtesy of Henry Holt and Co.

All of the characters in A Possible Life "struggle with the idea of selfhood, and who they are and identity," Faulks says — though not all of them come at the issue through science, as does Elena. Jeanne, whose story follows Elena's, is an illiterate peasant woman in 1820s France. "She is also very religious, and I must say that these big philosophical questions about death, and who we are, and is the self really something that exists or is it just a delusion, don't really apply so much for people who do have a strong religious faith."

Faulks describes a passage in Jeanne's story where a more educated young man tells her that someday, science will explain how her thoughts work. "And she looks at him and says, 'What on earth would be the point of that?' because to her these are not significant issues." And while it may be tempting to say that Jeanne, with her simple faith, is happier than the young man, Faulks says that's not quite right. "Otherwise we're really saying that everything, all human knowledge and education and things that we've acquired, act against our own interests ... and that's not really true, is it?"

Could all of these characters have had very different lives from the ones Faulks described? He says yes. "You take the path marked A, and you could very easily have taken the path marked B, and you look back and sometimes you regret it, and sometimes you bless your good fortune or your good sense, but certainly we all have within us the potential to live in a hugely different way. And how happy you can make yourself, I think, a lot depends on how much you beat yourself up about that.

"I'm not trying to preach in this book," he adds. "It's a book in which I really hope the reader can come, and they can inhabit the space ... It's me saying, here are five linked pieces of music. It should send you out of the concert hall with tears in your eyes, but feeling, I hope, a little bit uplifted."

Read an excerpt of A Possible Life

Martin Amis - ‘A Clockwork Orange’ at 50

Novelist Martin Amis looks back at Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, 50 years after it's original publication, in the New York Times Sunday Book Review.

It is unfortunate that Burgess eventually (1985) repudiated his best-known book in a book about D.H. Lawrence, while discussing Lady Chatterley's Lover:

The book I am best known for, or only known for, is a novel I am prepared to repudiate: written a quarter of a century ago, a jeu d'esprit knocked off for money in three weeks, it became known as the raw material for a film which seemed to glorify sex and violence. The film made it easy for readers of the book to misunderstand what it was about, and the misunderstanding will pursue me until I die. I should not have written the book because of this danger of misinterpretation, and the same may be said of Lawrence and Lady Chatterley's Lover.

The novel is brilliant, although the American edition was originally published without the crucial final chapter in which Alex realizes he no longer enjoys violence and sets about living a different life.

The Shock of the New: ‘A Clockwork Orange’ at 50

By MARTIN AMIS
Published: August 31, 2012

The day-to-day business of writing a novel often seems to consist of nothing but decisions — decisions, decisions, decisions. Should this paragraph go here? Or should it go there? Can that chunk of exposition be diversified by dialogue? At what point does this information need to be revealed? Ought I use a different adjective and a different adverb in that sentence? Or no adverb and no adjective? Comma or semicolon? Colon or dash? And so on.

These decisions are minor, clearly enough, and they are processed more or less rationally by the conscious mind. All the major decisions, by contrast, have been reached before you sit down at your desk; and they involve not a moment’s thought. The major decisions are inherent in the original frisson — in the enabling throb or whisper (a whisper that says, Here is a novel you may be able to write). Very mysteriously, it is the unconscious mind that does the heavy lifting. No one knows how it happens.

When, in 1960, Anthony Burgess sat down to write “A Clockwork Orange,” we may be pretty sure that he had a handful of certainties about what lay ahead of him. He knew the novel would be set in the near future (and that it would take the standard science-fictional route, developing, and fiercely exaggerating, current tendencies). He knew his vicious antihero, Alex, would narrate, and that he would do so in an argot or idiolect the world had never heard before (he eventually settled on a blend of Russian, Romany and rhyming slang). He knew it would have something to do with Good and Bad, and Free Will. And he knew, crucially, that Alex would harbor a highly implausible passion: an ecstatic love of classical music.

We see the wayward brilliance of that last decision when we reacquaint ourselves, after half a century, with Burgess’ leering, sneering, sniggering, sniveling young sociopath (a type unimprovably caught by Malcolm McDowell in Stanley Kubrick’s uneven but justly celebrated film). “It wasn’t me, brother, sir” Alex whines at his social worker, who has hurried to the local jailhouse: “Speak up for me, sir, for I’m not so bad.” But Alex is so bad; and he knows it. The opening chapters of “A Clockwork Orange” still deliver the shock of the new: a red streak of gleeful evil.

On a night on the town Alex and his droogs (partners in crime) waylay a schoolmaster, rip up the books he is carrying, strip off his clothes and stomp on his dentures; they rob and belabor a shopkeeper and his wife (“a fair tap with a crowbar”); they give a drunken bum a kicking (“we cracked into him lovely”); and they have a ruck with a rival gang, using the knife, the chain, the straight razor. Next, they steal a car, cursorily savage a courting couple, break into a cottage owned by “another intelligent type bookman type like that we’d fillied with some hours back,” destroy the typescript of his work in progress and gang rape his wife. And all this has been accomplished by the time we reach Page 20.

In a brief hiatus between storms of “ultra-violence,” Alex goes home to Municipal Flatblock 18A. Here, for a change, he does nothing worse than keep his parents awake by playing the multi-speaker stereo in his room, listening to a new violin concerto, before moving on to Mozart and Bach. Burgess evokes Alex’s sensations in a bravura passage that owes less to nadsat, or teenage pidgin, and more to the modulations of “Ulysses”:

“The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets three-wise silverflamed, and there by the door the timps rolling through my guts and out again crunched like candy thunder. Oh, it was wonder of wonders.”

Here we feel the power of that enabling throb or whisper — the authorial insistence that the Beast would be susceptible to Beauty. At a stroke, and without sentimentality, Alex is realigned. He has now been equipped with a soul, and even a suspicion of innocence. Burgess airs the sinister but not implausible suggestion that Beethoven and Birkenau didn’t merely coexist. They combined and colluded, inspiring mad dreams of supremacism and omnipotence.

In Part 2, violence comes, not from below, but from above: it is the “clean” and focused violence of the state. Having served two years of his sentence, the entirely incorrigible Alex is selected for a crash course of a Reclamation Treatment, a form of aversion therapy. Each morning he is injected with a strong emetic and wheeled into a screening room, where his head is clamped in a brace and his eyes pinned wide open. Alex is then obliged to watch familiar scenes of recreational mayhem, lingering mutilations, Japanese tortures and finally a newsreel, with eagles and swastikas, firing squads, naked corpses. The soundtrack of the last clip is Beethoven’s Fifth. From now on Alex will feel intense nausea, not only when he contemplates violence, but also when he hears Ludwig van and the other starry masters. His soul, such as it was, has been excised.

We now embark on the curious apologetics of Part 3. “Nothing odd will do long,” said Dr. Johnson — meaning that the reader’s appetite for weirdness is very quickly surfeited. Burgess (unlike, say, Kafka) is sensitive to this near-infallible law; but there’s a case for saying that “A Clockwork Orange” ought to be even shorter than its 141 pages. It was in fact published with two different endings. The American edition omits the final chapter (this is the version used by Kubrick) and closes with Alex recovering from what proves to be a cathartic suicide attempt. He is listening to Beethoven’s Ninth:

“When it came to the Scherzo I could viddy myself very clear running and running on like very light and mysterious nogas, carving the whole litso of the creeching world with my cut-throat britva. And there was the slow movement and the lovely last singing movement still to come. I was cured all right.”

This is the “dark” ending. In the official version, though, Alex is afforded full redemption. He simply — and bathetically — “outgrows” the atavisms of youth, and starts itching to get married and settle down; and he carries around with him a photo of “a baby gurgling goo goo goo.” We are asked to accept that Alex has turned all soft and broody — at the age of 18.

It feels like a startling loss of nerve on Burgess’ part, or a recrudescence (we recall that he was an Augustinian Catholic) of self-punitive guilt. Horrified by its own transgressive energy, the novel submits to a Reclamation Treatment sternly supplied by its author. Burgess knew something was wrong: “a work too didactic to be artistic,” he half-conceded, “pure art dragged into the arena of morality.” And he shouldn’t have worried: Alex may be a teenager, but readers are grown-ups, and are perfectly at peace with the unregenerate. Besides, “A Clockwork Orange” is in essence a black comedy. Confronted by evil, comedy feels no need to punish or correct. It answers with corrosive laughter. 

In his 1973 book on Joyce, “Joysprick,” Burgess made a provocative distinction between what he calls the “A” novelist and the “B” novelist: the A novelist is interested in plot, character and psychological insight, whereas the B novelist is interested, above all, in the play of words. The most famous B novel is “Finnegans Wake,” which Nabokov aptly described as “a cold pudding of a book, a persistent snore in the next room.” The B novel, as a genre, is now utterly defunct; and “A Clockwork Orange” may be its only long-term survivor. It is a book that can still be read with steady pleasure, continuous amusement and — at times — incredulous admiration. Anthony Burgess, then, is not “a minor B novelist,” as he described himself; he is the only B novelist. I think he would have settled for that. 

~ Martin Amis is the author, most recently, of “Lionel Asbo: State of England.” This essay is adapted from his introduction to a new 50th-anniversary edition of “A Clockwork Orange” published in Britain by William Heinemann.

New York Review of Books - Tim Parks: The Chattering Mind

This is an intriguing post for literature lovers by Tim Parks for the New York Review Blog. Parks looks back at some of the most popular characters in the last 100+ years of literature and examines the state of the inner consciousness.

Reflecting on the peace and freedom from suffering offered by Buddhism, Parks is finally forced to wonder if would really want our best novelists to find inner peace and freedom from suffering.

Imagine! All the great sufferers saved by Buddhism, declining the second arrow: quietness where there was Roth, serenity where there was McCarthy, well-being where there was David Foster Wallace? 

Do we want that?

I suspect not. I suspect our destiny is to pursue our literary sickness for years to come.

I disagree - I would gladly trade great novels for the author's happiness. 

The Chattering Mind

Tim Parks

Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos

Hamburg, Germany, 1987

“Who is the most memorable character in the novels of the twentieth century?”

It’s a typical radio ploy to fill some mental space on a Saturday morning. Dutifully, people phone in. Studio guests discuss their choices. The obvious: Leopold Bloom, Gatsby. The wry, Jeeves, Sir Peter Wimsey. To select Proust’s unnamed narrator in In Search of Lost Time indicates a certain sophistication. Somebody, not a child, proposes Harry Potter. Then Miss Marple, Svevo’s Zeno, James Bond, Gustav von Aschenbach, Richard Hannay. People are telling us about themselves of course. They want to talk about themselves. There’s no question of establishing if Frodo Baggins is really more influential than José Arcadio Buendía or Bellow’s Herzog. But Sherlock Holmes can be safely ruled out because first published in the nineteenth century and Lisbeth Salander because she doesn’t turn up until 2005.

I can’t be bothered to think of a name myself. I resist these games—the most this, the best that. Surely these characters are all actors in a grand cast; they all have their roles in the larger drama of the collective psyche. But now suddenly it occurs to me that by far the main protagonist of twentieth century literature must be the chattering mind, which usually means the mind that can’t make up its mind, the mind postponing action in indecision and, if we’re lucky, poetry.

There were plenty of forewarnings. Hamlet is the most notable. To take action would be to confirm his identity as his father’s son, his father’s avenger, but Hamlet thinks too precisely on the event, he’s too smart, and so fails to become anyone at all, either his father’s son or Ophelia’s husband. He suffers for that failure and spins out unhappy procrastination in fine poetry. In a comic vein, Tristram Shandy is another forerunner, too aware of his narrative performance to narrate anything coherent, let alone act. Both Hamlet and Tristram are characters who didn’t reach the height of their popularity until the twentieth century. We had become like them.

Prone to qualification, self-contradiction, interminable complication, this new kind of character finds his most sinister early manifestation in the narrator of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. “I am a wicked man,” this nameless individual introduces himself, then reflects “but as a matter of fact, I was never able to become wicked. I never managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect.”

Again, the reason for this indeterminacy is an excess of intellectual activity; so the cause for failure is also a source of self-esteem: “An intelligent man of the nineteenth century,” Doestoevsky’s narrator tells us, with a mixture of complacency and despair, “must be and is morally obliged to be primarily a characterless being; and a man of character, an active figure—primarily a limited being.”

Seeing the pros and cons of every possible move, this modern man is paralysed, half-envying those less intelligent than himself who throw themselves instinctively into the fray: “[The man of action] is stupid, I won’t argue with you about that, but perhaps a normal man ought to be stupid.” And the voice is actually pleased with this formulation. It’s great to feel superior to those happier than oneself.

In the twentieth century this monstrously heightened consciousness meshes with the swelling background noise of modern life and we have the full-blown performing mind of modernist literature. It starts perhaps in that room where the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo. Soon Leopold Bloom is diffusing his anxiety about Molly’s betrayal in the shop signs and newspaper advertisements of Dublin. In Mrs Dalloway’s London people muddle thoughts of their private lives with airborne advertisements for toffee, striking clocks, sandwich men, omnibuses, chauffeur-driven celebrities.

Looking back, what surprises how enthusiastically the literary world welcomed this new hero. Prufrock’s mind might be trapped, inept and miserable, but it is wonderfully poetic. I’ll never forget how my high school teacher gushed. Bloom may be incapable of imposing any direction on his marriage, drifting between fantasy and frustration as his wife prepares to betray, and Stephen Dedalus may be marooned in an impossible relationship with his father and jobs that give him no satisfaction, yet Ulysses is a celebration of the inexhaustible fertility of their minds as they move through the commercial flotsam and jetsam of Dublin against the vast backdrop of world literature and myth. It’s all quite reassuring, even self-congratulatory. What wonderful minds we have, even though they don’t seem to get us anywhere, or make us happy.

Virginia Woolf sounds darker notes, warning us that the mind risks being submerged by the urgent blather of modern life, yet in the end even the crazy, shell-shocked Septimus Warren Smith gives us paragraph after paragraph of poetic prose before he throws himself to his death from a high window, something that Clarissa Dalloway will think of as an act of impulsive generosity. It’s as if the stream of consciousness had been invented to allow the pain of a mind whose chatter is out of control to be transformed into a strange new beauty, which then encompasses the one action available to the stalled self: suicide.

The way this aesthetic consolation is constructed shifts constantly through the century. Faulkner has no time for the easy lyricism of the mind adrift on the ebb and flow of urban trivia. Now the unending voice revolves obsessively around the traumas that block any positive forward movement: past wrongs, sexual violence and betrayal, incest, the disgrace of institutionalized discrimination. Still, there is grandeur in the sheer scale and awfulness of the mind’s shipwreck, individual and collective. Slowly you get the feeling that only mental suffering and impasse confer dignity and nobility. Our twentieth century author is simply not interested in a mind that does not suffer, usually in extended syntax, and not interested in dramatizing the traumatic event itself, only the blocked and suffering consciousness that broods on it afterwards.

Beckett resists and confirms the formula. He understands its perversity: pleasure taken in the performance of unhappiness: “Can there be misery loftier than mine?” he has the aptly named Hamm remark in the first moments of Endgame. Beckett exposes the spiral whereby the more the mind circles around its impasse, taking pride in its resources of observation, so the deeper the impasse becomes, the sharper the pain, the greater the need to find a shred of self-respect in the ability at least to describe one’s downfall. And so on. But understanding the trap, and the perversity of the consolation that confirms the trap, doesn’t mean you’ve found a way out of it; to have seen through literary consolation is just another source of consolation: at least I’ve understood and brilliantly dramatized the futility of my brilliant exploration of my utter impotence.

Butor, Sarraute, Robbe-Grillet, Thomas Bernhard, Phillip Roth, Updike, David Foster Wallace, James Kelman, Alison Kennedy, Will Self, Sandro Veronesi, and scores upon scores of others all find new ways of exasperating and savouring this mental chatter: minds crawling through mud in the dark, minds trapped in lattices of light and shade, minds dividing into many voices, minds talking to themselves in second person, minds enthralled in sexual obsession, minds inflaming themselves with every kind of intoxicant, minds searching for oblivion, but not finding it, fearing they may not find it even in death.

Not long after that Saturday morning radio show I sat in a meditation retreat and heard a speaker expound the Buddha’s well-known reflection on the so-called “second arrow.” A student had come to him with questions about pain, meditation, suffering. The Buddha replied with a question of his own: “When someone is struck by an arrow, is it painful?” “Yes,” said the student. Then another question: “When this someone is struck by a second arrow, is it painful?” “Of course it is,” said the student. Then the Buddha said, “There is nothing you can do about the first arrow. You are bound to encounter pain. However the second arrow is your choice. You can choose to decline the second arrow.”

Sitting for ten days on a cushion, eyes closed, cross-legged, seeking to empty your mind of words, it’s all too evident how obsessively the mind seeks to construct self-narrative, how ready it is to take interest in its own pain, to congratulate itself on the fertility of its reflection. That chattersome voice will even be pleased with its progressively more elaborate analyses of how difficult it is to quiet the mind and empty it of the very reflections it is making. But alas, you cannot sit cross-legged without pain unless you learn to relax your body very deeply. And, as neuroscience has recently confirmed, when the mind churns words, the body tenses. As if in a laboratory one is obliged to experiment the perils and pleasures of what the Buddha called the second arrow, the mind that brings energy to its own pain.

But you can also choose not to go that way. You can decide that your mental chatter is not after all so damn interesting; the second arrow declined. How else would these people around you have learned to sit so still, for so long and in such serenity? Imagine Dostoevsky’s man in Notes from Underground, or Beckett’s Unnameable, or Thomas Bernhard’s narrator in The Loser at a meditation retreat, learning to be silent, learning to sit still, learning to put to rest the treadmill of reflection.

Or again, imagine if the literary folk suddenly tired of it all, realized how unhelpful it all was; if the critics and academics wearied of untangling torment for a living (I see you haven’t got any better, Beckett’s old analyst responded after the author sent him a copy of Watt). Imagine if the publishers—let’s call them the Second Arrow Publishing Corporation—informed all their great authors, all the masters of the mercilessly talkative consciousness, that they are winding up their affairs; they have seen the light, they will no longer publish elaborations of tortured consciousness, lost love, frustrated ambition, however ingenious or witty. Imagine! All the great sufferers saved by Buddhism, declining the second arrow: quietness where there was Roth, serenity where there was McCarthy, well-being where there was David Foster Wallace?

Do we want that?

I suspect not. I suspect our destiny is to pursue our literary sickness for years to come. It is hard not to congratulate oneself on the quality of one’s unhappiness. “Every word,” Beckett told us “is an unnecessary stain on silence,” then began:

Where now? Who now? When now? Unquestioning. I, say I. Unbelieving. Questions, hypotheses, call them that. Keep going, going on, call that going, call that on.

---

This is part of a series of blog posts by Tim Parks on writing and literature.
June 29, 2012