Month: December 2008

Frequent New York Times contributor and novelist Benjamin Kunkel has an article “Dystopia and the End of Politics” in the establishment journal Dissent that is the most recent in a lengthening line of State of Fiction (SoF) commentaries by various authors, picking up with James Wood’s book How Fiction Works (and related articles), tracing through a series of challenges to HFW, hopping to Zadie Smith’s “Two Paths for the Novel,” and then shifting to Kunkel’s piece with no basic new turns in the thinking of the status quo writers amid all declarations and pronouncements lavish, banal, seeking. Some parts of these essays hit the mark in noting the severe limits of various novels and their types, yet the status quo State of Fiction analysts can’t or won’t turn their heads far enough to note or to compensate for, let alone adequately address, ideological binds administered by the caging hands that feed, in academia and commerce.[1] 

In Dissent, the longtime cold war journal of Swiftian title, Kunkel writes like a character out of a Roberto Bolaño novel, rendering himself chaotically familiar and essentially inept. Chaotic because reasonable insight mixes with misprision leading to hapless assertions and vacuous conclusions.[2] As for content, Kunkel, focusing on all too prevalent sterile lit surrounds, looks to fly to fertile land, plunging instead into sand. Kunkel’s article stands as one of the many pinched walls and series of iron bars of the literature establishment, likewise the writings of Bolaño, at least as they function in the US, though Bolaño’s work is less familiar and less inept and contains a number of enduring qualities. (Kunkel’s writing can come across as less sophisticated or refined than that of the larger lit establishment, possibly willfully so, thus it may appear more evidently flawed to some, more bemusing to others, and so on. That the sentences in his Dissent article hang like debris clouds freeze-framed after a building collapse merely provides extra asthmatic effect. Kunkel may seem an easy or unnecessary object of criticism, but he remains an establishment outcropping, visible enough for critique.) Continue reading Kunkel, Bolaño, Ngugi, and the State of Fiction

Oh man, it was a tough day to stand by President George Bush, even for me, his main PR man, yours truly, Stan D. Garde. They threw everything they had at us today, everything but the book. They fired shoes, sure, you heard about those, size 10, truly a coward’s size, but we also ducked, dodged, and skirted random machine gun fire, rocket propelled grenades, and assorted other small arms fire attacks, half a dozen mortar rounds, and miscellaneous other missiles. Man, where’s the love, man? We liberated these ungrateful Oilans. You would think they would at least give us a pass for that gift. Not so. Instead it’s like they think we blew up their country and slaughtered their people and tried to steal their oil. Oh well, it’s probably only a minority here out to kill us. I’m sure the masses still love us. Well, it’s not like we’re too much safer on our homeland streets back in the good old US of A, you know, what with all those raging pot smokers and immigrant service workers and smart-aleck rappers we need to keep locking up in record numbers. Just what this world is coming to, I haven’t the faintest idea. Fortunately, reality this past century or so is totally optional especially now that we’ve got all the crucial propaganda safely on our side, billions and billions of dollars worth of glorious gloss in ever more righteous e-gaze and garde. Oila for the Oilans! I say. We’re all Oilans now. Continue reading Oilan Shoe to the Head

John Pilger:

One of the cleverest films I have seen is Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray plays a TV weatherman who finds himself stuck in time. At first he deludes himself that the same day and the same people and the same circumstances offer new opportunities. Finally, his naivety and false hope desert him and he realises the truth of his predicament and escapes. Is this a parable for the age of Obama? … He will continue to make stirring, platitudinous speeches, but the tears will dry as people understand that President Obama is the latest manager of an ideological machine that transcends electoral power. Asked what his supporters would do when reality intruded, Stephen Walt, an Obama adviser, said: “They have nowhere else to go.”

Not yet. If there is a happy ending to the Groundhog Day of repeated wars and plunder, it may well be found in the very mass movement whose enthusiasts registered voters and knocked on doors and brought Obama to power. Will they now be satisfied as spectators to the cynicism of “continuity”? In less than three months, millions of angry Americans have been politicised by the spectacle of billions of dollars of handouts to Wall Street as they struggle to save their jobs and homes. It as if seeds have begun to sprout beneath the political snow. And history, like Groundhog Day, can repeat itself. Few predicted the epoch-making events of the 1960s and the speed with which they happened. As a beneficiary of that time, Obama should know that when the blinkers are removed, anything is possible.

From Edwin Muir’s thoughtful The Estate of Poetry (1962):

“I’ve been trying to measure the gap between the public and the poet, and to find some explanation why it is so great…. The first allegiance of any poet is to imaginative truth…but it does not mean that he should turn inward into the complex problems of poetry, or be concerned with poetry as a problem. That is something which has commonly happened in the last fifty years. There was some excuse for it after the years of experiment associated with Mr. Eliot and Mr. Pound. To them, about 1910, poetry seemed to have come to a dead end, and intense thought had to be given to it. The experiments of that time and the succeeding years have become a part of literary history. As they were new and strange when they were first attempted, they were found difficult by the reader; and they seem to have left for a time in the minds of poets and critics the belief that poetry should be difficult. The experimenters have done their work, and we should be thankful to them. There have been many experimenters in English poetry: Chaucer was one; and Spenser, Milton, Dryden, and Wordsworth were all experimenters. The experimenters of forty years ago did something to poetry and something for poetry. One kind of poetry was written before T.S. Eliot, and another kind after him. But the point of an experiment is that it should solve the particular problem set for it. This was done in the twenties…. There remains the temptation for poets to turn inward into poetry, to lock themselves in to a hygienic prison where they speak only to one another, and to the critic, their stern warder. In the end a poet must create his audience, and to do that he must turn outward. Even if he is conscious of having no audience, he must imagine one. That may be the way to conjure it out of the public void.” Continue reading Edwin Muir on Poetry, the Public, and Audience – in The Estate of Poetry

Milton’s republic – by Terry Eagleton, in the Guardian – “Our great dissident poet, born 400 years ago today, did more than just hymn the praises of revolt”:

Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm. The two intersect only in such absurd anomalies as the poet laureateship. But whereas Andrew Motion does his bit to keep the monarchy in business, one of the greatest of English poets played his part in subverting it. John Milton, who was born in Cheapside 400 years ago today, published a political tract two weeks after the beheading of Charles I, arguing that all sovereignty lay with the people, who could depose and even execute a monarch if he betrayed their trust.

We are not used to such revolutionary sentiments in our poets. When he left Cambridge, Milton refused to take holy orders and, in his first great poem Lycidas, he mounted a blistering assault on the corruption of the clergy. He was a champion of Puritanism at a time when that meant rejecting a church in cahoots with a brutally authoritarian state.

His political dissidence, however, had its limits: he defended the notion of private property, unlike the more communistic wing of the parliamentary forces. As for sexual politics, Adam in Paradise Lost is a priggish patriarch. Yet Milton was also an early advocate of divorce, claiming that a lack of love and companionship was a more important ground for separation than adultery.

At the heart of Milton’s political vision lay a belief in liberty and self-government. Pressed to an extreme, this doctrine could appear anarchic: grace freed humanity from law and authority. He thus came to reject the Calvinist doctrine of predestination in the name of personal freedom. One of his most magnificent pamphlets, Areopagitica, inveighed against the state censorship of books. He denounced the censorship of works before publication as a strangling of free inquiry. “Almost kill a man as kill a good book,” he observed. If truth were to be established, an open marketplace of opinions was indispensable. “So truth be in the field,” Milton insisted, “we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth put to the worst, in a free and open encounter?” Continue reading Terry Eagleton and John Milton