Kant on Veridicality of Objects

For some reason, this quote reminded me an awful lot of certain bits of Kafka, particularly from the journals, the way Kafka creates harsh landscapes for his analogies. It also sounds a lot like Lovecraft, who really fits rather well into Kant’s questioning the veridicality of objects. Where Lovecraft questions external instability in relation to internal instability (i.e. the instability of what we consider the real world revealing itself to be the Cthulhu playground resulting in the instability of a human mind going crazy at the thought of said playground), Kant’s questions are mostly internal, given his assumption that if space and time are not outer, are apriori, are intuitions, then space / time cannot really be considered apart from one’s own subjectivity. Subjectivity becomes the form or substance through which an individual receives an object. Which, technically, might still work with Lovecraft and his predilection for very purple, very mad first-person narrators.

The land of things in themselves is an island…surrounded by a broad and stormy ocean, the true seat of illusion, where many a fog boat and rapidly melting iceberg pretend to be new lands and ceaselessly deceiving with empty hopes the voyager looking around for new discoveries, entwine him in adventures from which he can never escape and yet also never bring to an end. (Aa 235-236; B 294-295)

Capsule Review: William T. Vollmann’s Europe Central

Uneven as Vollmann always is–the first few pages of this book a bizarre mixture of onomatopoeia and unclear movement–he’s also frequently very good. Though it’s been packaged as a novel, Europe Central is really more of a short story and novella collection, giving the reader a look at WWII goings-on that are oftentimes left in the distance when it comes to most media interpretations of the war. Someone once described Vollmann to me as being “prolific, but careful” as a writer. I’m not sure if that second part is entirely true, given how flat a lot of the sentences and turns of phrase here and elsewhere in his corpus fall, but the energy of his prose is consistently wild and engaging. It all feels very straight-from-the-somewhere, and that’s usually a good place to be.

Capsule Review: William Gaddis’ Carpenter’s Gothic

A lot of later Gaddis (which is to say: beyond J.R. and The Recognitions) has been given, I think, a bit of an unfair reputation–perhaps because of just how great and new those two first books were, perhaps because of an equally unfair Franzen article published in the New Yorker. It’s true, Gaddis’ later work doesn’t much challenge the first two books of his bibliography, but that doesn’t mean that the work is bad or deserving of scorn. In a way, we have to give Gaddis the benefit of the doubt each time we open one of his books. There is no need for him to have written any better than he has, and we should be grateful that he wrote at all. Carpenter’s Gothic–his third and shortest novel–is satirical in many of the same possibly cartoonish ways those first two books were, though he makes the interesting choice of stripping down his style even further, so that in the end what we are reading is essentially a play, a melodrama, and not altogether different than those house-bound southern Gothic narratives of Tennessee Williams (which, too, are oftentimes cartoonish), rife with sexual betrayal, mysterious strangers from out of town, artistic flowering, variant deflowering, depression and malaise, et cetera. That Carpenter’s Gothic arrives in such a spare style denatures the potential humor of the work (there are some big laughs even still, no doubt, though not quite as good-hearted as the laughs found in J.R.) and makes the book into quite a strange and unexpectedly powerful / abrasive reading experience. All of Gaddis’ characters are inevitably both tragic and hopeful, and in Carpenter’s Gothic we are treated to the essential raw distillation of those traits. A worthwhile read, and a very moving one at that.

Capsule Review: Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings

Though the first ninety or so pages of this book outmatch a bit for stylistic and pure gutsy integrity the remaining six-hundred, the harsh critical treatment of Ancient Evenings still seems largely unfair now years after the fact. One of the things I admire most about Mailer as a writer is the fact that he really does write very well, and in a style that could almost be called metaphysical, matching the poets like Marvell and Donne who are sometimes grouped together under that same textual adjective. Like the metaphysical poets, Mailer is interested in sex, and yet he is also not hedonistic about it, preferring to place sex and his ongoing discussion of sex within the confines of a larger discussion, or perhaps rumination, on time. If Marvell had written only base seduction poems, he would not have become Marvell. Similarly, if Mailer were as bad and as bankrupt as his critics sometimes claim, we as a public body would never have had a reason to think the words “Norman Mailer” important in a conversation, even if that means from a conversational standpoint of disagreement. Ancient Evenings above all is the book which addresses head-on Mailer’s lineage with the metaphysical poets, and for once places the distinct and rather rich style of Mailer’s prose above the oftentimes zeitgeisty cloud of his subject material. This is an aggravating, enlightening text, despite its rougher edges–made rough in the first place, perhaps, from the sheer boldness and remarkable attention paid to the core.

Hemingway on Love Between 1926 and 1929

1926, The Sun Also Rises

Pedro Romero had the greatness. He loved bullfighting, and I think he loved the bulls, and I think he loved Brett. Everything of which he could control the locality he did in front of her all that afternoon. Never once did he look up. He made it stronger that way, and did it for himself, too, as well as for her. Because he did not look up to ask if it pleased he did it all for himself inside, and it strengthened him, and yet he did it for her, too. But he did not do it for her at any loss to himself. He gained by it all through the afternoon. (22o)

1929, A Farewell to Arms

“You understand but you do not love God.”

“No.”

“You do not love Him at all?” he asked.

“I am afraid of Him in the night sometimes.”

“You should love him.”

“I don’t love much.”

“Yes,” he said. “You do. What you tell me about in the nights. That is not love. That is only passion and lust. When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.”

“I don’t love.”

“You will. I know you will. Then you will be happy.” (71-72)