Why unusual? Well – read the full review to find out.
Stephen Nelson’s “Thorn Corners”
Why unusual? Well – read the full review to find out.
Category: Uncategorized
Why unusual? Well – read the full review to find out.
2666, aka “The First Great Novel of the 21st Century”
I no longer remember how I first heard about 2666. I have a faint recollection of reading somewhere about the Ulyssesof Latin America that came out only a few years ago. Since Latin American literature KICKS ASS, I was immediately interested. I wanted to read it in the original Spanish, but didn’t want to spend god knows how much to buy it on the internet. So I waited.
In early 2012 I found myself in Spain, in what I believe was the same contract that led me to purchasing another Great Classic. Going to a different country is always a great opportunity to pick up some books, especially poetry, but 2666 by Roberto Bolaño was one particular novel that I was on a mission to find. Once I did, it rested in my library at home for another two years until last Christmas I started leafing through the first few pages, more out of curiosity than out of a genuine decision to start reading it.
To my great surprise, I was hooked. When you start a book thinking that it’s going to be kind of like Ulysses, you expect difficulty and challenge. Instead, the beginning of 2666 is the reading equivalent of riding a bicycle down a gently sloping hill. The story is gripping and the writing is beautiful. I ended up taking the book with me back to England. A few days ago I finished it.
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| He does look a bit like Joyce I suppose |
I already knew I was going to write an article about this novel, though the original intention – that of spreading the word about a piece of literature that I thought to be relatively unknown – sounds a bit funny now. In only ten years since its release in Spanish (six since that in English), the book appears to have garnered a global reputation as the first Great Novel (R) of the 21st Century. I was feeling pretty swanky as I progressed through it, thinking I’d be able to show off about reading something so advanced and modern and difficult nobody even knew it, but everywhere I pulled it out of my rucksack people went ‘Oh, Bolaño’. Heck, if you Google ‘2666 reviews’ you’ll get a hundred pages of critical commentary – and it’s so ubiquitously positive that it boggles the mind.
In effect, one of the (many, many) springboards for discussion around this book is simply that of its critical reception – and if I had more time and were more qualified, I’d be tempted to question the seemingly homogeneous response that the book has generated.
But that challenge, not unlike the others posed by this book, is one I will defer to the better judgment of others, not because I don’t believe it may be rewarding, but because 2666– and in this, if in very little else, it truly resembles Joyce’s great work – is a hydra that will devour you no matter how many heads you chop off. I do not know if it is a Great Novel, but it’s certainly the kind of book that you can go on discussing FOREVAH, and that’s scary (and also, perhaps, the very definition of a Great Novel… see me being sucked into yet another of the questions raised by Bolaño even as I declare my resistance to it).
I write this article because I know my limits. A few scattered thoughts is all I can afford; any more than that would be dangerous; any less, an insult.
So – a few thoughts about 2666. If you’ve read this far I assume you must have a vague notion of what the novel is, or what it’s about. Me, I purposely eschewed all information about the book until I could read it, to get as fresh an experience as possible (come to think of it, perhaps that’s why I was unaware of its reputation…). 2666 is a novel divided into five independent parts – or, if you prefer, five separate novels collected together in an anthology. They are only loosely related to each other – they share a fictional city where all the novels are set (or where they end up), and a handful of reappearing characters.
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| Regrettably “The Neverending Story” was already taken, but it would have been a fitting title |
The story behind the writing of this book – how the author was dying, how he planned the books to be published posthumously to support his family – is as legendary as the book itself. It deserves its own article, but I’m going to assume here that you’re at least partly familiar with it.
What can I say about this book? I suppose I could do worse than sharing Alessandro Baricco’s impression: ‘Normally, if you write books, reading your contemporaries provides you with some self-esteem, it stimulates and challenges, sometimes it gives you a bitter perception of your limits: only very infrequently does it crush you.’ In an attempt to describe what the novel is about, he says: ‘I think it’s something like Evil. But I wouldn’t put my money on that. Maybe Evil and the delight of the living. Or Evil and the mystery of the living.’
This is no doubt one of the common threads that I’ve perceived in reviews / summaries of this book: it’s about the problem of evil, in and across the problem of history (or perhaps the two are one and the same). This is because the longest, most difficult and in my opinion the best of the five novels is just a long relation of serial murders in which women are raped and butchered in a town called Santa Teresa (inspired by the real events in Ciudad Juárez).
Though these are clearly important themes in the book, if I had to put my finger on what the book is essentially about, I’d go for something different. In fact, all the way until the end of the third book, I could have sworn that the topic of the whole work was that of dreams, or dreaming, and the significance thereof. It seemed to me that all of the novels were composed of characters experiencing events that take up an oneiric quality, moments in which the real and the surreal mingle at the edges. It’s impossible to tell when something really significant is taking place, and when, on the other hand, you’re faced with something that’s just random. Like the five novels themselves, the episodes within them stand alone as frescoes of sanity and madness, and simultaneously connect to all the others in ways that are subtle and suggestive but never quite definite: everything in this book is referential and intuitive, never quite important in and of itself but always somehow hinting at something that you should be aware of.
It helps my argument that there are several actual dreams being described. I usually dislike it when a writer interrupts the narrative to describe one of his characters falling asleep and having a dream, especially if the description is extensive. But Bolaño pulls it off with remarkable grace, perhaps precisely because all the other episodes are so dream-like anyway. This is but one of a number of small miracles that the author performed for me over the length of the book – another is the fact that the first three novels are about characters that I usually have no interest in reading about, such as critics, academics, philosophers, teachers, and scribblers of various nature (some journalists, though this category I don’t mind too much). And yet I was spell-bound, and very much intrigued by all of them.
If you were to follow the path that I took into the novel – that is to say, reading it as a novel fundamentally about dreams and dreaming – and it is but one of numerous paths that you can take, among other things because the five novels can be read in any order you like (and yes, this will change your experience of 2666dramatically!) – if you were to follow this path, I was saying, you will inevitably be faced with a challenge when you reach the fourth novel, the one about the crimes in Santa Teresa.
I suppose you’ll be challenged by that bit regardless, because it’s so different from all the others. But for the purposes of my reading, it’s relevant because in many ways it seems to represent the opposite of dreaming: the horrors of the serial killings are so down-to-earth, so grimy, so exhaustively and exhaustingly physical, that you could almost call it a representation of a world without a dreams. Not that it lacks some oneiric moments of its own, including a very esoteric clairvoyant and a whole subplot about ‘giants’ dreamt of by a German convict, but these are far more infrequent, and by comparison they almost seem crushed, powerless, insignificant when confronted to the horrors before them, or tainted in such a way that they partake in the evil.
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| Mexican noir. The fourth novel is kind of like this, but really long. |
It goes without saying that having a part of the book, perhaps the most important part, being about the opposite of dreams does nothing but reinforce the sense that the whole thing may be explicitly about dreams.
At least this was the impression that I walked away with. I can’t really guarantee I’ll be holding to it a year from now – which is really the other half of the reason I’m writing the article, not just to spread 2666 to others, but to record it for myself. There is so much content in this book that the process of forgetting has already begun: like a dream, its details and characters are already becoming fainter.
Is this really the first Great Novel of the 21stCentury? I find that question tiresome, but it’s certainly a novel that belongs to a special, personal category: the Novel That I Write an Article About (or, That I *Need* to Write etc.). Not even a semi-humorous article, but a proper article. Yes, that’s rare enough. And I hope someday you’ll join us, as I look forward to reading your own articles. Some novels cause ten thousand words to be written for every word of their own. And when that happens, I guess it doesn’t even matter if the book is good or bad.
Marion McCready’s ‘Tree Language’
Explaining Football to a Poet
Why do I like football? Near as I can tell, most poets don’t. I’ve tried to explain it to them sometimes. People who listened to me were usually familiar with my arguments (the tribal experience, the sway you feel when being part of something, the aestheticism of the athlete, etc.), the problem as they put it was just that they didn’t feel it. I couldn’t get them to ‘feel’ something by explaining it, of course, so I dropped it there.
I don’t want to start ridiculous comparisons, but there is at least one way in which poetry and football are similar. In both cases, people who don’t understand them usually think that the object they are looking for is somewhere inside the field or the page, and that they just can’t see it. It can be the feeling, it can be the meaning. Not many seem to intuitively grasp that they should be looking inside themselves.
Meaning is not something that you find ‘in’ or ‘inside’ a poem. It’s the result of the interaction between yourself and the poem, and that’s why there can be different meanings of the same poem that are equally valid. Football works, I think, in the same way. If you stare at the game and try to ‘find’ what it is that makes it click, you never will. Or you may get to a point where you think you found it, and will discover later (maybe a long time later) that you never did, like someone who thinks they finally discovered what a poem ‘really’ means and finds himself or herself reading it in a different light at a time when everything has changed.
You may think that I’m working towards an argument about football being as important as poetry (or as sophisticated, meaningful, interesting, etc.). Perhaps in a way I am, but not in the sense that I’m trying to raise football to nobler heights. From this as from any other sport you can draw abundant metaphors about life and the world. A man or a woman who understands football completely is a man or a woman who has understood life completely, and if you change the word ‘football’ for ‘poetry’ you’ll see what that statement really means.
I made the same mistake when I approached literature, or what you call high literature anyway. I was younger then in every way that matters and believed that there was something to ‘find’ in literature, some secret I could be in on, something to be revealed to me after reading a finite number of books. There was a supremely clever joke that I just didn’t get, but I could get it, and as I saw it, eventually I would. It took some time before all that washed away – and while this may sound cynical, in truth the ride was gratifying, even fun. I stress ‘the ride’, not ‘the literature’.
If you want to get football, and feel what other people feel, you will have to engage with it. I’m not suggesting that you should, because at the end of the day it’s just a game. But thinking that you’re exposing yourself to the sport by watching a match once in a pub is like thinking that you’re exposed to poetry because you’ve read a poem on the tube while commuting to work. Try reading a full collection, or a few collections, and try following a season or a few seasons, and see what happens.
Educate yourself. In football as in literature, the process of learning is enjoyable and beautiful. The process, not the football itself – get this clear. It’s ‘the ride’ that matters. You will start out knowing only the name of one or two stars in your team, the big ones. Then you’ll learn the names of the rest of the players. You will recognise their faces. You’ll find out what they do on the field and you may even discover an appreciation for the work of some yeoman who, at the beginning, you barely even noticed was there. You will develop sympathies and dislikes. You will look kindly on that young promise whom you noticed before everyone else did and who talks with an accent kind of like someone you knew. You will loathe that overpaid South American who always screws up the end-game.
Things will begin to come together. You will learn the playing styles of different teams and different coaches, and when some gang of champions loses 3-1 to the mid-table team, you’ll think goddamn if that doesn’t make sense. Goddamn if I didn’t see that coming. You’ll think formations and tactics. You’ll begin to watch games in a way that you don’t even think of now, barely even looking at the ball, only watching the patterns that the men make as they run on the football field. You’ll listen to the pundits and shake your head and think, why are they even being paid to talk?
And then you’ll make a prediction and mess it up completely. And you’ll castigate yourself for your arrogance and go back to the chalk-board. You’ll learn from your errors. You’ll start reading football history, the great teams of the past, and discover an entire universe made up of grainy colours that barely earns a mention in the sports media. You’ll start reading Zonal Marking. You’ll wonder how you could even think you understood the sport at all.
All of this process is internal. You won’t be captured by football, really – you will be captured and fascinated by your own knowledge, by the sense of your mind growing new wings. From this point of view, it’s no different than beginning to learn about literature. Knowledge, which I am not at all confusing with wisdom, is a joy in and of itself, a game in and of itself. It tantalises you with a sense of completion that never comes. It rewards you with a sense of entitlement when you interact with your peers. Many things in life we study only for the pleasure that is found in the study. My most personal example is wine. I don’t even particularly like the beverage, but the variety and the history and the complexity and the beauty of the language that describes it and the symbolism evoked by taste and so much more – that’s what drives me to learn about wine. You may think that I’m embracing vanity but I’m not. Knowledge works in this way, whatever the field. Wisdom doesn’t, but knowledge does.
I suppose literature has a more important role than football, though I’ve given up on trying to find a positivist explanation for its benefits to us, either individually or as a whole. In my own little life, literature has taught me nothing that football couldn’t have taught me as well. Or maybe neither could have taught me anything at all, which is kind of the same thing. The things I’ve learned that changed me came from the countries I lived in, the friends I made, the women I loved, the people I worked with. Not from books. Not from fucking books and football games.
Coming to this point of the article you may object that I’m just being a relativist – that I’m saying that what matters is knowledge in and of itself, regardless what the knowledge is of. Like being erudite in philosophy is the same thing as mastering the subtleties of Magic: The Gathering. That’s not really true though, because knowledge only matters to a certain extent. You need knowledge to start getting into football – and the fact that knowledge is a process (or a game) that is so seductive is part of what allows us to get there in the first place. But when you get there, and you will always get to a place that is both unique and inside yourself, it will be a specific place that nobody else can get to. It will be somewhere that only football could have led you to.
I can describe, as an example, the particular street and the particular house inside my spirit that football takes me back to, conscious that my experience will not be the same as yours, nor can it be. It is a rewarding exercise because looking back at my relationship with football helps me make sense of time. It is not very different with literature. There are phases, moments, things you grow out of, things you learn too late. Today, if I had to say what it is that keeps me in football in spite of everything, I would say – and this will be odd – that it is the sadness. You cannot do anything in football without stumbling into sadness. Not only because you will see your team lose so many times, and then so many times, and so many times, to the point that even those rare moments of jubilation (mine was in Rome, 9th of July, 2006) will quickly become the object of mawkish nostalgia rather than comfort. And not just because of all the filth that there is in football – the racism, the violence, the vulgarity, the sexism, the self-indulgence of celebrities, the culture of excess, all those things that give people a good reason to stay away from it and in the best of cases turn to rugby, or basketball, or athletics. Not even because of the most open lesson you can learn from the short-termed chronicles of the sport – that the job history does best, in football as in life, is not that of recording but that of forgetting.
No, for me football is so inescapably sad because its world is built on a foundation of lies. Everything that holds together its microcosm is false. There’s a story that takes place in the game, but the reason that game exists is that it allows for a different game – one in which people compete at who can tell that story best. Distrust anyone who speaks about football in a way that seems to make sense – they’re the best storytellers, which makes them the worst ones if you see what I mean. My own brief and mostly inconsequential experience with sports journalism saw me gaining a great deal of popularity very quickly before I let it all go – and the reason was not my preparation in the field of football, which was never anything more than passable, rather my preparation in that of poetry. My reputation was entirely built on articles like this, in which the only thing that really matters is the language in which the sport is described, and not the truth of it.
You may say that I was fooling my readers, bamboozling them. Believe me when I say that I was not. I was giving them football. The question of whether I believed in it at all is of no consequence – do I believe in poetry? Do I believe in literature? I’d love to say yes… but then the eyes of my next metanarrative, the one I told myself when I was sixteen years old as I forced myself to read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, come out from behind the door-frame and the hypocrisy of it all just gets overbearing.
And yet the reason I kept writing those articles, and the reason I still write poems, is that in the chasm of truth that they leave behind – and perhaps only in that chasm – I see something that is kind of like beauty. I won’t say that it’s beauty, but it’s something like that. And maybe that’s why there is so much sadness in football, because it teaches you that beauty is a lie that you can’t stop telling yourself. Maybe that’s why I can’t explain football to a poet, any more than I could explain poetry to a football fan. Maybe this whole article is a lie.
Classical versus Modern Poetry in Football
The Criteria
I’ve set the demarcation line between classical and modern at the year 1700, picking poets born before and after that date to compose my teams. I’ve also been kind of liberal with the term poet, in that I’ve included playwrights in there. And as long as I’m making arbitrary decisions I might decree that every paragraph has to end with the phrase “in accordance with the prophecy”, just to get on your nerves.
With no further adue, then, this is what the two teams look like, in accordance with the prophecy.
1. The Classical Poets.
The formation, what else could it be, is a classical 4-4-2. The goalie selects itself, really. Homer is at the back of any poetry team in the West and no-one else could take that position in his place (ok, so he’s blind, which doesn’t really help a goalkeeper, but still…). Virgil and Petrarch also represent the bedrocks, and they’d make for great defenders. Virgil has the technical ability to play in several other positions as well, so he could potentially play as a libero, while Petrarch is somewhat more limited in terms of his tricks on the ball, but far more influential: it’s really very difficult to get past him, which makes him an ideal centreback. His talent for throwing long balls ahead can come in handy too.
Placing those three together makes for a defensive triangle of exceptional talent and authority. Arguably the world’s greatest goalkeeper and two legendary centre-backs – on the whole this would be a daunting prospect even for a team as talented as that of modern poetry.
And yet the classical team’s fulcrum of strength lies in central midfield: Dante and Shakespeare put me in the embarrassing position of having to describe two players in terms of propagandistic hyperbole. They are inarguably the most dazzlingly skilled pair of players in the game. Dante’s position in the midfield is a given – his obsession with the (typically medieval) notion of centrality draws him to a spot where he can make full use of his tremendous arsenal of skills. We’re talking about a player who has quite possibly the best sense of tactics and vision in the history of the game, a tremendous passer and play-maker, domineering in possession, and with a murderer’s long- and short-range shot to boot. It is true that he is not the fastest player around, and at 747 years, he may be a touch old for the frantic pace of the modern game – at the very least, he could lose some energy in the last parts of the game, which opens some opportunities for the younger team of the moderns. Nonetheless, a genius midfielder whose only parallel is perhaps his own team-member – a Mr William Shakespeare.
Shakespeare needs no presentation unless you’re teaching advanced literary history to Liberal Democrats, who don’t have a clue about not having a clue. Potentially the number 10 of this team (but the position is not quite right for that), Shakespeare’s versatility is compounded with a set of dazzling tricks that are effective both defensively and offensively. Unlike his fellow, he is anything but slow, and his abilities allow him to create danger from virtually any position on the field. The presence of Dante alongside him suggests that Shakespeare’s duties would be more offensive, with the Italian acting as the playmaker and Ol’ Will making runs into space (the combinations between the two would be gorgeous to watch). But it would be a shame to waste his defensive skills, and the man can be counted on even if the game is just about defending a result.
The wings are tough. While the classical poets have greater players overall than the moderns, they do suffer from a comparative lack of variety – you can throw in such talent as Milton, Lucan or Lucretius, but what are they adding to the game that isn’t already provided by Virgil and Dante? Hence the controversial decision of fielding Ronsard on the left, mainly for his abilities at running into his space and his speed on the dash. Ariosto and Lope De Vega are both ambidextrous, but the former was preferred behind Ronsard for his defensive skills – the Frenchman’s forays going ahead are likely to leave his flank exposed to counters, meaning that someone is required who can hold the line on his own. Ariosto is a player who has the potential for some truly damaging and creative runs, but in this formation he’d probably have to curb them back in favour of his defensive abilities – which are truly great. By writing an epic that’s as long as War and Peace but rhymes and scans everywhere, Ariosto has created one of the great fortresses of literature. If he can bring the same qualities to the actual pitch, there is no doubt that he’d make for a great complement to Ronsard’s harmonious offensive runs. (Incidentally, Ronsard’s ability to cut himself a space – even when he is outclassed, as he was in international Renaissance literature – is one of the reasons he earned himself a spot among the starters. You need some unpredictability out there).
The other side sees in Lope De Vega an enormous resource for the team. A better and more balanced fullback than Ariosto, De Vega can be expected to move more in the offence, liaising with Ovid’s sustained runs. Both of these players play a very beautiful game (the latter too much so, perhaps – some cynicism may sometimes be desirable). De Vega is in fact one of those multi-talented players who would have fared very well in the midfield, had the spots not been occupied by the Big Two. His positioning as fullback is mainly due to his stamina – De Vega is the Gareth Bale of poetry, able to run twice as fast and as long as anyone else on the pitch. He is not perhaps the most original player, but coupled with Ovid, it should mean that offensive opportunities (or just openings for the passes of Dante and Shakespeare) should always be provided on the left hand.
The coupling of Ovid and Lope De Vega is untested and questions remain as to whether it would work properly.
Finally, the offensive duo represents a bit of a gamble. Neither Sappho nor Sophocles are pure strikers, and their nimble build suggests they might struggle against more physical defences. They are, to some extents, limited players – and sort of similar, not just because they’re both Greek and both of them have names that begin with the letter S. Sappho has a better shot from the distance, Sophocles is better at playing on both sides of the pitch. In the end, however, they’re both electric strikers – able to create sudden chances by dashing in and freezing everyone. Their middle- and short-range shots are piercing and they’re both outstanding in one v one scenarios.
Sophocles would probably play a little further back and help in connecting gameplay, with Sappho charged with finishing plays. Their ability to swap positions might be a real asset, but their partnership is even more uncertain than the one between De Vega and Ovid, and there is some internal evidence that the players do not get along with each other. Personal differences may in fact be one of the weaknesses of this apparently impregnable team – if England can fail with a midfield composed of Gerrard and Lampard, maybe even the duo Dante / Shakespeare might turn out to be abortive in spite of the enormous individual talents of the two players. But that’s something that only practice can tell.
(I imagine most people by now will have figured out that this is one of those articles where I write and drink simultaneously… and I’m about halfway through my stack, and halfway through the article. The pace is working out.)
2. The Modern Poets
The modern poets are less talented individually, but they provide a much wider array of skills – allowing, at least in principle, for a stronger overall team. Let’s take a look.
There are plenty of candidates for the position of goalkeeper, but Pablo Neruda, if only for his tremendous international reach, probably takes it. I can’t imagine anything that he would not be able to “reach” in that sense, never mind an adversary’s shots. The guy’s fucking Dhalsim.
The central defence is handed to Jorge Luis Borges and TS Eliot, my personal favourites from this team, and also the two guys who would much rather have played for the other side. Eliot may come across as the kind of poet who would play as a striker, but really he is the most conservative and backward-looking guy out there, and Borges is not very different in this sense. Together they make for a fine defensive pair (allowing for the fact that, again, Borges is blind). Rainer Maria Rilke is a very defensive choice as far as fullbacks go, but he is probably necessary as the formation is on the whole slanted going forward. John Keats, possibly not the most obvious choice for a defender seen how he could barely defend his own self in his time, makes it into the team for his altruism – something quite rare and therefore most welcome in this team.
On to the midfield, it’s worth spending a few words to discuss the formation – the 4-2-3-1 is much more original and complex than the archaic 4-4-2, but it demands players with very specific attributes from the midfield upwards. The right wing tends to fall back with the midfield trio, while the central offensive midfielder is expected to make a great deal of runs both forwards and back. The left winger is in some ways a decoy – s/he functions as a wide striker, really – while the actual striker plays in a false nine position. The two midfielders need to be a playmaker and a defensive mid.
Goethe’s position is obvious – he’s possibly the only one in the post-1700 pool of talent who can stand to the classical midfielders in terms of sheer multi-tasking abilities. He’s the playmaker here, with Federico Garcia Lorca as the defensive mid (another guy who wasn’t especially good at defending himself, but he should be fine on the pitch if nobody decides to shoot him). Lorca is a splendid talent, strong both in breaking another team’s offensive traditions and also in imposing his own game. There’s no way that the modern midfield pair can hold in a comparison against the duo of Dante and Shakespeare, but their slick players might be able to dominate the game by relying on the numerical superiority offered by the 4-2-3-1 in that part of the pitch – especially when they can count with the French pairing of Baudelaire and Rimbaud.
Rimbaud is a highly imbalanced player, being extremely offensive and quite poor at covering spaces, which is why Rilke is clearly a necessity behind him. Yet his ability to do unpredictable things with the ball makes him an asset that even Lope De Vega might have trouble dealing with. If the classical team is caught on the counter and Vega is left alone to cover Rimbaud, this may result in some very real goal opportunities. As for his partner, Baudelaire (will there be chemistry?) is clearly more wide-ranging, which makes him a better fit for the position. Technically he’s one of the better players in the team, and his presence in the advanced middle should allow him to bring that technique to bear in combination with any of the players that surround him. The results are anyone’s guess, though he does tend to get dispirited when he’s losing, and his athletic condition – like Dante’s, but for different reasons – is not of the best.
The moderns are playing with fire by placing Dickinson on the right and Plath as a striker. They are, in some ways, similar players. Plath is somewhat mono-dimensional, a great striker, but not necessarily the best fit for the false nine position (Baudelaire himself might have taken that role). In a different formation, she would have been the perfect striker, but here she’s a gamble. Still, no-one can close quite as effectively as she can, and faced to the defence of the classicals, a single moment of poaching genius by the American poet might just make the difference. As for Dickinson, in the right-wing position she’d have to provide a lot of breath to the team – if Rimbaud goes forward all the time on the other side, then Dickinson will have to compensate for that by offering support to Goethe and Lorca when they need it. Considering that she’s got Keats behind her it’s unlikely that most of the opportunities will emerge from that side of the field, but they’re both very fast players, meaning that they should at least be dangerous on the counter.
CONCLUSIONS
Who would win? I actually don’t have a clue. I suppose I could try finding out, but by this point I’m all out of wits and beers, and I’m expected somewhere. Plus, I suspect not everyone will agree with my decisions in terms of who should play and where – plenty of options on both sides. I think I’ll close this article here.
War Poetry. I Mean Today
Let’s talk war poetry. Not Wilfred Owen, not Giuseppe Ungaretti, not any of the poets who wrote of that old war (it is a hundred years ago now, so I guess it counts as old). Let’s talk of war poetry today, and how it differs and resembles the efforts that defined the category, set a standard, and laid out the rules.
Among the various books that I’ve been (very kindly) sent to review, I count two that belong to the genre. One is Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting by Kevin Powers, which David Clarke reviewed not too favourably last week. The other is War Reporter by Dan O’Brien, which I didn’t send out to my critics because I wanted to review in person. I’ll have to base my article on these two sources because, I liberally admit, I don’t know any other contemporary war poetry – if you have suggestions, my e-mail’s at the end of this page.
I’m less than halfway through reading O’Brien’s book and my inclination to review it is already dwindling. It’s not that the verse isn’t good. Not at all: O’Brien has a real talent for imagery and his poems are subtle and rich, evoking the poet’s own life as well as his strange relationship with war photographer Paul Watson. Perhaps it’s just the fact that I was looking for something else. I was looking for war poetry, and neither of the two books delivered (yes, I read Powers as well before sending it to David, though not with the same levels of concentration I’d dedicate to something I’m reviewing).
Hold on a second – how are these books not war poetry? Isn’t Powers a genuine veteran of the war in Iraq, speaking / writing from lived experience? Aren’t O’Brien’s poems stark and real and full of the unchanging horror of war? Take these lines by the latter poet:
On a bed we discover the body
of a child at the bottom of a pile
of dead children. Quartered like chickens. Outside
another’s buried alive. The hand is
like a tuber. At the refugee camp
a girl stumbles barefoot into a ditch
of corpses. Some wrapped in reed mats. Looking
for help, crying. But nobody’s coming.
I say to myself, This will make a great
picture. This is a beautiful picture
somehow. Raising my camera to my face
I step on a dead old woman’s arm: it
snaps like a stick. In Nyarubuye
we open a gate on a courtyard
of Hell. Tangles of limbs junked. They’d come to
this church hoping God would protect them but
it only made things that much easier
to be hacked to pieces. […]
(‘The War Reporter Paul Watson on Suicide’).
Isn’t this just the gruesome reality of war? Aren’t these the words of someone who jumped down the black shaft of war and came back to tell us what it’s really like? Isn’t this enough? What more do you want? How horrifying does it have to get before you recognise it as genuine war poetry?
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| No more words. |
It’s probably a good idea at this point to state my respect for Powers, O’Brien, the photographer Paul Watson and anyone else who lived through this unspeakable inferno. As David noted in his review, there is only silence that makes for an appropriate response to this suffering. I don’t know what they know, and in this particular case I am grateful for not knowing.
That being said, there is a problem here and our inability – our unentitlement – to respond to this kind of imagery is part of it. Contemporary war poetry is not unlike World War I poetry in its occasional tendency to make a catalogue of horrors. But one of the crucial differences between the two canons is context. WWI poetry was written at a time when war was highly romanticised and patriotism was seen as a basic moral standard. Indeed, war poetry of the times includes the writings of young romantics like Rupert Brooke who extol the beauty and the nobility of war (before they saw it, anyway).
The merit of the war poets was that of reinventing the imaginary of war (or, should I say, erasing the ‘imaginary’ bit). It said that war was hell at a time when people were saying that war was god. Reproducing the crude horror of war was part of that task of reconfiguration.
 |
| Off to war with a smile. Yeah, it doesn’t fool anyone any longer, does it? |
Contemporary war poetry appears at a time when society speaks in a very different voice: the lines on limbs flying and children torn to pieces are horrifying, yes, but also kind of a given. They feed the reader of war poetry what s/he wants to read from war poetry, which is what s/he thinks people don’t want to read. Not only are they customary, they also risk falling somewhat short of their peers in other media: no matter how good your language is, it’s a damn challenge to reproduce the visceral impact of seeing the effects of steel and fire on flesh as we get them in every war movie since Saving Private Ryan (so much so that it’s hard to even shock us anymore – carnage may leave us dumb, but sometimes it leaves us dumb with boredom, because we’ve seen so much of the ‘mutilated arm’ and the ‘hand holding his own guts’ and the ‘neck torn open so I only have a line of breath to say write to my family dear brother’ and so on).
If war poetry from one hundred years ago was radical, contemporary war poetry is conformist. Certainly, it has more levels of reading (O’Brien is especially subtle, but from what I’ve read so far his subtlety doesn’t invalidate any of my criticisms), and it is more delicate in its approach than Spielberg’s bombast, but it’s still treading much of the same ground, where you know that nobody hid any mines.
You may ask, what more can be said of war? What more should be said of horror but to say that this is the horror? Again, I must qualify my arguments by saying that this is not about the experience of the war poets in and of itself. I’m not discounting that – how could I? The problem in this case is not the poet, it’s the reader.
War poetry changes because war changes. The classical war poets were responding to a new form of war – a mechanical type of warfare that brutalised the mind to the point that even a body all in one piece could be made useless, that blasted the land and made the skies permanently grey, that corroded your insides with chlorine gas. It was a new type of war – of course it called for a new type of poetry.
War, in the last hundred years, has changed again. It has changed more radically than poetry has. Notin the way that people die – that’s the crucial thing. It’s not that Powers’ statement, that ‘war is just us / making little pieces of metal / pass through each other’ is substantially dated. It was as true a hundred years ago as it is true today. It may well be true a hundred years from now, if nobody’s taken war seriously enough that (you know the rest, & God forbid).
But here’s the thing: it’s not the experience of soldiers that has changed, it’s the way that society metabolises that experience that is different. Calls to patriotic fervour no longer take the shape of softness – they seduce with hardness, with violence, with the same language that supposedly should deter you from war – the same language, of course, invented by the classical war poets. Old war propaganda was a lap-dance: it seduced by suggestion. Contemporary war propaganda fucks you hard and tells you that you like it. It tells you that you know you like it. It doesn’t sugar-coat its product: it makes it as hard to swallow as possible and then challenges you to down it. It borrows the manly contest from bars, where it really works because everyone loves it.
From this point of view contemporary war poetry is just another form of war propaganda. You’re not going to convince young people not to go to war by describing piles of dead bodies because that’s exactly what young people are setting out to see. The spectacle of war has replaced war: it is the idea of going to hell and back, of being able to say ‘I’ve been to hell and back’, that defines the beauty of war (and yes, it’s beauty – for in the words of Alessandro Baricco, ‘no pacifism today should forget or deny that beauty or pretend that it never existed; only when we will be capable of a different beauty shall we be able to dispose of the beauty of war’.)
The reality of contemporary warfare may still involve blood on the bricks, but the experience of war that really matters, the experience that sells and motivates us and keeps us interested, the experience that lets war happen, belongs to those who live at home. In the West, where we write and read our poetry, war no longer invades our land. It no longer burns down our cities or rapes our women. When the ‘enemy’ does make an appearance in our cities we call it terrorism, which is something else. War today happens far away and to a restricted number of people. It happens on a TV screen, which is kind of like saying that it doesn’t happen. In the sense of human loss one may be justified in saying that war is a business of negligible import to the Western countries: compare the 5000 American soldiers that died in Iraq since 2003, with the 383,000 that died in car accidents in that same country starting from the same year. One almost wonders whether the war really worth fighting is not in our roads, rather than in the desert. And let’s not get started on workplace deaths. Let’s not get started on drugs.
These numbers do not include the real victims of war, that is to say, the people who did not do the invading – the civilians, who die by the hundreds of thousands. I’m not forgetting about them, at least no more than the war poets themselves are – both Powers and O’Brien seem more interested in their own experiences and what war says to them or their friends like Watson. The victims only matter to the extent that they inform the experience of the poets: like war itself, they’re just images.
But the material reality of these civilians is another expression of how war has changed. It used to be a conflict between two sides subject to equal conditions, it is now a conflict with no mutuality in which only one part does the invading, the killing, the filming, the TV reporting, and – on the long run – the war poetry.
In my opinion, which is as humble as it can be without being tacitly conformist for that, the mistake of contemporary war poetry is that of being about war. If it is true that the Gulf War did not take place, then it is reasonable to assume that all the other wars since then have not happened either: that they took place in the media, and not in the battlefield; that they exist not for the lands that they invade but for the share of audience that they annex; that the role of the modern war is not to conquer: it’s to convince.
If that’s true, then what should war poetry do? I don’t know, of course, but one possible answer is: the opposite. Like in the old days: say the opposite of what is being said by everyone else. Don’t convince me that war is terrible, cause everyone is already doing that: convince me not to be convinced. Show me that war is there because of me, thanks to me, not me the soldier, but the one who stands on the side-lines looking at the soldier as though he were an athlete, or an actor. Show me that the story of war is best sold when it is most authentic and it is most authentic when it is most brutal and it is most brutal when it is most distant. Show me the war that takes place not worlds away but in my taxes and in my passport and in my internet. Show me not the experience of battle but this new and very silent type of war that makes do with experience and replaces it with media reports. Show me that the horror is not what is shown through their videos, it’s what is created by them. Show me war in the 21st Century. And I’ll believe you.
Kevin Powers’ “Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting”
A long and really quite interesting review by David Clarke this Sunday, who takes a look at Kevin Powers’ Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting.
Powers’ is a war poet who writes about his experience in the conflict in Iraq. It makes for interesting material, of course, but also, as David argues, rather problematic. Read the review to find out why.
Leopardi’s Canti: The Most Difficult Book of Poems Ever Written?
I’ve been meaning to write about Giacomo Leopardi’s Canti for a good while. Actually I’ve been meaning to write a series on the most difficult books of poetry out there, which was going to include an article about Nikos Kazantzakis’ Odyssey. Eventually that idea proved itself too difficult, so I wrote one piece on the latter epic and suspended Leopardi – who was most definitely going to be in there – for a later stage.
Naturally the question behind this article is rhetorical. I’m sure there are collections of experimental and/or ancient verse that are even more impermeable than the Canti. Pound’s homonymous text, for example, may be even harder than old Giacomo’s (though I certainly haven’t read the whole of that, and don’t intend to, unless I get locked in a space prison and the alternative is trying to escape with Christopher Lambert). And I’m sure there are French poets who must have produced especially long and difficult works, because of course that’s what French poets do.
The thing that makes the Cantidifficult, however, and which accounts for their relative obscurity (at least by comparison with other poetic masterpieces of international fame), is that their difficulty is deceptive. There is little that is ‘experimental’ about them. They aren’t grammatically disconnected like some works by Eliot, Rimbaud or Mallarmé, where just making sense of a phrase can take away an hour of your reading time (or more, of course – though it’s worth noting that the difficulty of these particular poets I mentioned is allayed by the fact that their works are mercifully brief). The Canti, for all that may be said of them, are straightforward. Upon first touching them, they may look to be easy.
And that’s exactly why this article is worth writing.
For those who are unfamiliar with the text, the Canti represent the collected poetic output of Giacomo Leopardi (1798 – 1837), who can grossly be introduced as Italy’s third greatest poet (after Dante and Petrarch, and on an equal footing, perhaps, with Tasso and Ariosto – I’m leaving the Latins out of this). Leopardi’s work must be read under the lens of his life-story – even for a Romantic poet, the poor man’s health was exceptionally fragile, and his spinal problems turned him into a hunchback long before he could experience any ‘romantic’ (I mean amorous) relation. His outlook became profoundly, cosmically pessimistic, comparable to that of his contemporary Schopenhauer: he was convinced that life is essentially an experience of pain, and all of his poems treat or rotate around this topic.
What makes the Cantiso difficult? Not the length of the book, which is considerable but not overwhelming (certainly not near as intimidating as the same guy’s two-thousand page strong collection of philosophical meditations, the Zibaldone). Not the grammar, as you can follow Leopardi’s sentences with relative ease. The subject matter? That certainly plays a part in it, as the idea that all life is shit gets burdensome after a while (not to mention that it seems a bit outdated, philosophically). And the format of the poems isn’t particularly welcoming: other than a few exceptions (especially the legendary The Infinite), they usually go on for several pages, making multiple, elaborated arguments that aren’t always easy to connect to each other. Leopardi sees the poem as more than a lyric; to him, it’s also a philosophical treatise with a complex rhetorical construction, embracing a variety of topics and interests. It takes a lot of effort to read more than one or two Canti at a time, and the book as a whole deters casual reading.
But there is something much more essential than the mere length of the poems. I think the simplest way of putting it is to say that, in my opinion, Leopardi’s Canti are the most difficult text to translate ever written, even topping virtuoso works such as, say, those of Joyce or Mallarmé. It is not that the meaning is hard to render. It is the language itself that is so stylistically unique that I cannot think of how it could be transposed without losing the effect. Leopardi is virtually unreadable in the original language to anyone who does not have the most advanced command of Italian: the vocabulary and the syntax are so archaic that even mother-tongue Italians normally read the poems with a dictionary by their side. What’s tricky is that Leopardi’s archaisms do not belong to Romanticism – it is not language that is archaic because, y’know, it was written two centuries ago. Instead, Leopardi is (very deliberately) being archaic relative to his own time. He is embracing Classicism as a rejection of most of the values that typically define the other Romantics. It is the equivalent of a contemporary poet who uses ‘thou’ and ‘thee’, and not ironically, but as a serious stylistic choice. To a hypothetical reader of the distant future, this archaism may seem congenital to the age (as Leopardi’s archaisms do today), but in reality they grate with it. Such a contemporary poet would be hard to translate in his/her own right – but when it comes to a Romantic, you’d have to repeat (in the target language) the voice of someone from two-hundred years ago who assumes the voice of someone from three- or four-hundred years before him. How the hell do you do that?
The result is that all translations of Leopardi – and I’ve read them in English, in French and in Spanish – sound nothing like the original, however hard they try (and they do try, no argument, they really try). The Canti are exceptionally inaccessible to an international audience.
On top of that, the structure of the book is unwelcoming by necessity. The beauty and the merit of the Cantilies in the way that the book draws and encapsulates a universal lyric trajectory; closing the book after you’ve followed Leopardi from his teenage nationalist fervours to his profound, disillusioned reflections on the universe and the stars leaves one with a sense like you’ve just lived ninety years of life. But this does not change the fact that the best poems are (mostly) contained in the second half of the book, and much of the early content – when deprived of the counterpoint that comes later – seems uninspired, much like the later poems are impoverished if they are not approached as a conclusion to a narrative.
In spite of the fact that the Canti are really meant to be read front to back, the task would take so long that I’d advise new readers against that. My personal opinion is that the book only comes alive when you reach the ninth Canto, called The Last Song of Sappho, and I would recommend newcomers to start from there. The opening is much more accommodating as a Romantic poem:
Placid night, and unsullied ray
of the declining moon, and you who tip
midst the silent woods above the cliff,
messenger of the day…
Beyond that, Leopardi’s Cantirequire a lot of careful handling, and while the purpose of this article was, to a substantial extent, to throw away an evening cause I’m shit out of weedto promote this masterwork, I find myself closing with a warning rather than a recommendation. There are some poets who make it worth learning a language just to read their work; Leopardi is exactly one such poet, but he is distinct from others like Dante, Baudelaire or Rilke in that the translations are more likely to obscure than to illuminate your understanding of his ultimate book. In order to approach Leopardi, and to unlock the unparalleled lyric heights that he reaches in some of his poems, the investment required is enormous. Even if you can skip the hurdle of the language, there is a lot of wading through philosophy, bitterness, old-world ideas, rambling, and unusual formatting before you begin to sense the incredibly modern and powerful core of this book. You may think that I’m making up excuses but I’m not making up excuses: this is quite simply the most difficult core to access of any book I’ve read, and the reason this book will most likely remain (relatively) obscure in the bookshelves outside of the man’s own country. Still, what a core.
Kate White’s “The Old Madness” (video review)
In case you missed it on the site – here’s this Sunday’s (video) review of the Pighog Pamphlet Competition winner. Enjoy!
Matt Merritt’s “The Elephant Tests”
Here’s Matt Merritt, chillin’ out with his best friend after yesterday’s party.
Oh yeah, and he wrote a book too. Read the review of it here, courtesy of Ned Carter Miles.
