Long Pauses

Tag: Modernism

  • So We Beat On . . .

    Back in May, I asked for suggestions for an American novel to read with my English as a Second Language students. Twenty-two comments later, and after spending four or five hours browsing the shelves of my local Borders, I decided to ignore everyone’s suggestions and warnings and go with my first choice, The Great Gatsby. We finished it last night, and I have to say, the book killed. Absolutely killed.

    This was the third time I’d read Gatsby, after the requisite high school manhandling and an only slightly less incompetent stab as an undergrad. It’s only in recent years that I’ve come to relish the language of great writers — the language itself and, by extension, the imaginations that create it — and, strangely, that evolution can be attributed in large part to this website, which has allowed me to experiment as a writer and as a thinker and which has proven, again and again, just how damn ellusive great writing is. If you haven’t read Gatsby as an adult, I’d encourage you to give it another go. Because it is packed with great writing.

    Like, I’m sure my 11th grade English teacher pointed this paragraph out to us. I’m sure she explained how this paragraph, coming as it does on the final page of the novel, is Fitzgerald’s most explicit and bittersweet and poignant comment on the death of the American Dream. But I’d forgotten all about it until yesterday afternoon when I read it five times. It’s the end of summer, Gatsby’s dead, the lawns around his gaudy mansion are overgrown, and Nick is making one last visit. He wanders down to the beach and sits in the sand.

    Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

    I love how, despite his disgust and anger, Nick is still moved by the vision — how he is unable to ignore its beauty while also acknowledging the human misery that now populates the land. This one paragraph, in both tone and theme, is the entire novel in concentrated form. Amazing.

    A few observations from my students. By week three my friend from Iran was angry with Nick. “He is so indifferent to everyone and everything around him.” (I’ll never stop being impressed by the ways in which adult students of English take possession of the language in ways that most of us native speakers seldom do. “Indifferent” is the perfect word.) A young woman from Seoul told us that the novel felt like a fairy tale that she might read to her son, and she’s right. I’ve always thought of Fitgerald as a realist, but there is something Modern and disorienting to his style. His world is recognizable but a bit oversized, distorted.

    And I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that a novel that critiques so many of America’s defining tropes — Manifest Destiny, rugged individualism, egalitarianism, and the American Dream, in particular — should be such a great text to read with a class of immigrants and visiting students. Our discussion of the last two chapters lasted about 30 minutes last night; the rest of the evening was spent talking about America and the stories that define it.

  • Bartok’s Fifth String Quarter

    Bartok’s Fifth String Quarter

    Several years ago, in a seminar on modern and postmodern lit, I wrote a fun paper on Ezra Pound’s music criticism. In particular, I was interested in Pound’s admiration for Bartok’s String Quartet #5, which he described as:

    a work in [Bartok’s] own idiom, consistently in his own idiom, built up into a complete and coherent structure. It is like no other known quartet. It definitely adds to the literature or whatever we are to call articulate repertory of work written for four stringed instruments. It projects from the preceding borders and frontiers of quartet composition, and is highly satisfactory in so doing.

    Any study of Pound and music is inherently fraught with problems. Though he was able to play the clavichord, Pound never received formal training in music theory and lacked experience as a performer. As a composer, Pound has only one major work to his name, Le Testament de Villon, an opera first performed in 1926. By his own admission, Pound was also quite tone deaf, a fact not lost on his friends. Upon hearing of Pound’s work on Le Testament, William Carlos Williams joked, “Pound writing an opera? Why, he doesn’t know one note from another.”

    In his published criticism, Pound often responds to the music viscerally — the way it makes him “feel” — rather than formally. Except for the occasional “pizzicati” or “counterpoint,” his reviews are often devoid of technical terminology. He seems conscious of his own weaknesses and protects himself by couching his attacks in comments like, “at least I felt” and “seemed to me.” That his opinions often mirrored those of his musical advisors of the moment — George Antheil and Tibor Serly, in particular — has also not gone unnoticed by his critics.

    As I’ve never cared too much for most of The Cantos, my paper turned into a formal analysis of Bartok’s quartet, which really is a remarkable piece. The second movement, the Adagio Molto, is beautifully dissonant— one of those remarkable collisions of modernist invention and melody. People who “don’t like” post-Romantic music have surely never heard the Fifth.

  • Vendler and Stevens

    “Somnambulisma” by Wallace Stevens

    On an old shore, the vulgar ocean rolls
    Noiselessly, noiselessly, resembling a thin bird,
    That thinks of settling, yet never settles, on a nest.

    The wings keep spreading and yet are never wings.
    The claws keep scratching on the shale, the shallow shale,
    The sounding shallow, until by water washed away.

    The generations of the bird are all
    By water washed away. They follow after.
    They follow, follow, follow, in water washed away.

    Without this bird that never settles, without
    Its generations that follow in their universe,
    The ocean, falling and falling on the hollow shore,

    Would be a geography of the dead: not of that land
    To which they may have gone, but of the place in which
    They lived, in which they lacked a pervasive being,

    In which no scholar, separately dwelling,
    Poured forth the fine fins, the gawky beaks, the personalia,
    Which, as a man feeling everything, were his.

    Poet/scholar Helen Vendler, the 2004 Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities, last night gave her address, “The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar,” which is as inspiring a defense of the arts as you’re likely to read.

    The arts present the whole uncensored human person–in emotional, physical, and intellectual being, and in single and collective form–as no other branch of human accomplishment does. In the arts we see both the nature of human predicaments–in Job, in Lear, in Isabel Archer–and the evolution of representation over long spans of time (as the taste for the Gothic replaces the taste for the Romanesque, as the composition of opera replaces the composition of plainchant). The arts bring into play historical and philosophical questions without implying the prevalence of a single system or of universal solutions. Artworks embody the individuality that fades into insignificance in the massive canvas of history and is suppressed in philosophy by the desire for impersonal assertion.

    The arts are true to the way we are and were, to the way we actually live and have lived–as singular persons swept by drives and affections, not as collective entities or sociological paradigms. The case histories developed within the arts are in part idiosyncratic, but in part applicable by analogy to a class larger than the individual entities they depict. Hamlet is a very specific figure–a Danish prince who has been to school in Germany–but when Prufrock says, “I am not Prince Hamlet,” he is in a way testifying to the fact that Hamlet means something to every one who knows about the play.

    Wonderful stuff, and her inclusion of Stevens’ “Somnambulisma” is a brilliant touch.

  • O Pioneers (1913)

    By Willa Cather

    Willa Cather was nearly 40 years old in 1913 when she published O Pioneers!, her second novel. It’s difficult, then, to overlook the obvious similarities between her own life and that of her heroine, Alexandra Bergson. At this point, both women had devoted their lives to a single pursuit, sacrificing personal relationships — or, at least those of a romantic nature — for the cause. As she left no autobiography, no memoir, and few letters, we can only speculate about Cather’s personal life. Some have postulated that she was a closeted lesbian, but, as with all such claims, it is only that: speculation. What we do know is that she never married or had children, and that she devoted the majority of her energies during her adult life to writing and to seeing those writings published. It was quite a feat: she left a legacy of 13 novels and more than 60 short stories, which have helped to secure her place now in the company of her more famous contemporaries: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner.

    O Pioneers! is a wonderful novel and one that, I must admit, I have put off reading for years simply because its title has always reminded me of those sentimental prairie novels that twelve year old girls seem so fond of. That excuse, as unforgivably lame as it sounds, is not completely unjustified. Like much of Cather’s work, O Pioneers! is inspired by the years that she and her family spent in Nebraska, where she lived among Scandinavian, French, and Bohemain immigrants and where she witnessed first hand the back-breaking work of plains farming. What separates this novel from the pack, though, is Cather’s remarkable blend of lyricism and honest insight. O Pioneers! is an interesting transition piece, a novel caught between the Midwest naturalism of Hamlin Garland and the epistemological experiments of the modernists. While the fate of many of Cather’s characters are determined by forces beyond their control, the novelist holds on to some hope — a hope for real personal happiness and a more perfect future.

    The Bergsons are typical of the immigrant families Cather had known in Red Cloud, Nebraska. The mother and father are first-generation Americans who settled with the hope of owning land and of securing better lives for their children. John Bergson dies young, too soon to experience the fruits of his labors, but soon enough, for “he would not have had it again if he could, not he! He knew the end too well to wish to begin again. He knew where it all went to, what it all became.” His children, however, personify the American Dream. Alexandra, through hard work and ingenuity, breaks the land and watches it flourish. Lou and Oscar enjoy their wealth, marry well, and find success in business and politics. The youngest, Emil, graduates from college, sees the world, and welcomes opportunity and freedom, the dreams of every immigrant.

    Their lives, however, do not completely escape the suffering and alienation that so preoccupied artists at the turn of the century. Like Cather, Alexandra chooses to sacrifice her own love and happiness to a single-minded pursuit, in her case the education and unrealized potential of her brother, Emil. It is a “choice,” Cather argues, that many women are forced to make. She captures this plight in a beautiful image of Marie, the Berson’s young neighbor, whose loveless marriage and hopeless pining for Emil slowly destroys her vitality. The passage is typical of Cather’s preoccupation with the connection between her characters and the land they work:

    The years seemed to stretch before her like the land; spring, summer, autumn, winter, spring; always the same patient fields, the patient little trees, the patient lives; always the same yearning, the same pulling at the chain, until the instinct to live had torn itself and bled and weakened for the last time, until the chain secured a dead woman, who might cautiously be released.

    It’s an ominous passage that prepares us for the tragic end to Emil’s and Marie’s love. Separated by the laws of their land and their churches, they die too soon, killed by Marie’s jealous husband. Cather describes their deaths in brutal detail, but refuses to cast blame. Here, Alexandra becomes a naturalist heroine and Cather’s surrogate: “Being what he was, she felt, [Marie’s husband] could not have acted otherwise.”

    But despite the novel’s tragedy, Cather distinguishes herself from Norris, Dreiser, and Crane by painting the conclusion of O Pioneers! with a tint of optimism. Broken and beaten by Emil’s death, whose fate seems to make her life’s efforts futile, Alexandra is restored by the return of Carl, the man she has loved since childhood. What I find most interesting about this turn is that their saving relationship is built on selfless love, a conceit that her more cynical and disillusioned contemporaries would have likely scoffed as a romantic fiction. It works here, though, saving the novel from the reductive determinism of so much naturalist fiction.