Günter Grass: My century

 Life sure seems like a series of pronoun referent errors sometimes.  Am I, as Descartes would suppose?  Or is Sartre to be believed, and is what seems to be I really a He?  Perhaps I am really a we, a near infinity of selves, overlapping at points to create the illusion of existence.  It gets even more dizzying when grammatical case is applied.  Am I or is Me?  Subject or Object?  

Grass here throws the entire question into the blender by slapping the genitive case on the title, and then doggedly refusing to clarify.  One would assume that the century in question belongs to the author, and for large stretches of the book that is true.  He, or some version of him, is the I of many of the chapters, and there is an air of straightforwardness to those years that leads the reader to trust their account.  

More often, however, "I" is as far removed from Grass himself as possible.  Presumably fictional characters, historical figures, and often narrators without any perceptible identity at all.  The book culminates in a Gordian knot of identity, where I is not only a real person--the author's mother--but also quite explicitly dead while narrating.  

While Grass leaves us in this pronominal quandary, however, he at least does so knowingly.  "I'm He now," says the narrator in "1972".  "He--no longer I--never had an easy time of it" (191).  The I, the narrator of the story, is in this section explicitly as fluid as the narrator of the whole book is implicitly.  The genitive, eponymous owner of the century is both I and They and, to the extent possible, You.  It is only in this way that Grass can capture the most turbulent 100 years that humans had known up until that time in ". . . rhymed and unrhymed poems and short stories and overly long chapters representing 1) work currently in progress on both sides of the wall, and 2) the world in miniature" ("1975", 202).

Nathaniel: Psychic Development Simplified

 Simple is different than easy.  While this was certainly straightforward and clear, as advertised in the title, it was no small or light task to get through.  It took me years, peppered with setbacks, recidivism, and distraction, to finish the lengthy and involved exercises herein.  It would have taken less than a day to simply read.

And what did I get for my trouble?  Clarity, certainty, and direction?  Far from it.  As with every other thing I've read or practiced in the line of Spirit and Religion, the results are unclear at best, and possibly even misleading.  When I feel or see some energy that is not discretely quantifiable, do I really?  Reality and experience have a convenient way of lining up with whatever one has already decided.  The placebo effect is just as real in theology as in medicine.  Is my intuition leading me this way or that?  Or is it my ego?  My desire to believe, and to be special? I have demonstrated time and again that I cannot be trusted to make that determination.  

There are certain concrete moments that I cling to as evidence of spirit, of an underlying force moving and stirring reality.  Viewed objectively, though, such moments would not pass peer review.  There has never been a moment where I can objectively say, "Yes, this is true.  This works."  

his would not be so discouraging if I were not surrounded by people who testify to a different experience.  Nobody seems as unsure of their reality as I am.  My family, of course, are deluded and wishful in their beliefs.  But I know plenty of people who follow a religious tradition that I consider wrongheaded, who testify to demonstrable proofs in their own lives.  The same is true of the people I know who follow something resembling Nathaniel's path.  They all seem so sure.  They actually see spirits.  They actually hear messages.  Either reality is closed to me and me alone for some reason, or all of these people are insane.  Neither prospect is edifying.

For now, however, I will continue to search.  Just as most of my religious friends are laughably deluded, so too are those of my friends who pooh-pooh anything remotely supernatural.  There must be something greater than me; I can feel it, and I can sometimes see and hear it even.  Or am I merely in the control group of a double-blind metaphysical trial?

Wang Ch'ung: Lun Heng

 I've been seeing clouds differently lately.  Every sky has been so vivid, so entrancingly, hypnotically lovely.  Nearly every day, I've been awe-stopped in my tracks by the formations, never the same, never boring, never staying put for even an instant.

It is not in my nature, however, to leave such feelings of awe and gratitude alone.  My mind invariably tries to pour those feelings into little test tubes and swirl them around with reactants to see what they mean, or portend, or reveal.  In this case, the result has been the question, "What must the ancestors have thought when they had moments like this?  What were clouds to them?"

Old paintings show a version of clouds with puffing cheeks, bringing the wind, themselves agents of change and movement.  I can't put myself in the mind that would have interpreted them this way though.  I can't see that version of clouds.  To me, and maybe to whatever ancestors gave me this way of thinking, they are more like flowers, growing, budding, blooming and disappearing in a time-lapsed, aerial Spring. 

Of course whatever version of clouds the ancestors knew, it was wrong.  Clouds are not now the mystery that they once must have been.  Whatever was said about clouds--and about blood, and rain, and water, and fire, for that matter--is now manifestly ridiculous.  If my ancestors had spoken up and said, "Clouds are not like gods; they are more like plants," they might have been seen as visionaries, or at the very least iconoclasts.  But their version would have been as wrong as the one they purported to correct.

Which is the only way to see Wang Ch'ung.  A beacon of clarity, he dared to contravert the contemporary understanding of the natural world.  He saw inconsistency, and where others were content to leave it in a limbo of cognitive dissonance, he was not; he dragged reality flailing into the light, submitted it to rigorous questioning, and left it in what was to him a purer form.  

It's easy for us to look back at his writing and see that, for all his questioning of convention, he was never really escaped it.  He may have poked a few tiny holes in the assumptions of his time, but remains encased in inconsistent, ludicrous, or circular reasoning.  In the section 雷虛篇, for example, he interrogates the idea that lightning strikes are the result of divine anger, and comes to the conclusion that lightning and thunder are indiscriminate, and not tied to anyone's good or bad behavior.  This is demonstrably true, and far ahead of its time.  Well done.  For every misguided understanding that he untangles, however, he replaces it with another, equally tangled one.  In the case of lightning and thunder, and with fate in general, he cannot free himself from his assumptions and asserts that they are the result of to much or too little of the heavenly liquid.  He has reasoned himself out of a blind well, and stumbled immediately into another.  Perhaps more accurately, he has escaped one box and satisfied himself that the larger box he finds himself in does not exist.  

It is frustrating to the reader to witness.  "You are so close!  Keep going!  Keep questioning!" I found myself cheering.  But he never does.  The version of reality that Wang Ch'ung posits is just as convoluted as the one he criticizes.  Clouds are not huffing and puffing gods, but neither are they flowers, and wrong is wrong.  

As I look at my path, the myriad things I have unlearned, and the things with which I have replaced them, I cannot help but assume the same of myself.  The religion I escaped has no power over me.  But are the beliefs and perceptions with which I have replaced it any different?  In how many boxes am I sealed, and is there any escape possible?

Kurt Vonnegut: Cat's Cradle

 Revisiting this book took a bit of the sheen off of it for me.  When I first read it [checks blog] 13 years ago, I was smitten with the philosophy of Bokononism, and even now cheekily identify myself as a Bokononist when people have the temerity to ask after my religious beliefs.  On this reading, however, I find myself jaded even to that belief system.  

Instead of gazing starry-eyed at Vonnegut's philosophy, this time I was more aware of his craft.  All of the elements were there in fine form: the metaliterary structure, the book in my hand eventually revealed to be nothing more than a pillow; the orthographic innovations, in this case the calypso interludes; and of course the kernel of truth.

What is the truth here though?  If it is not the religion itself, nor even the wider ideas about religion, which reveal themselves to be shallower than I remembered, then what?  It is revealed in the title, naturally.  The Cat's Cradle is the real religion here.  Everything, including this book, is an elaborate twisting of yarn, one upon which we project our own forms.  There is no such thing as a Karass, sadly, likewise society, love, and culture.  This is the ultimate in string theory: the seemingly intricate connections that make up our reality are but one knotted line, revealed as flaccid and formless with a simple tug. 

Agatha Christie: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

I don't suppose it's entirely fair of me to say that I got the best of Agatha this time.  While true that I guessed at her tricks well ahead of the ending, I was aided by two things: the endorsement on the back cover that promised "an ingenious and surprising twist," and my knowledge of her tendency to choose the most surprising outcome possible.  Thus forewarned, who else but the narrator could it have been?  what other ending would satisfy those criteria?  

My own cleverness in predicting the ending, however, pales in comparison to that of the writer in constructing it.  The mechanism of the book in one's hand being the very book mentioned in the story is a favorite mechanism of mine, and Christie executes the trick as deftly as, if not more so than, Vonnegut in Cat's Cradle.  Christie had to speak with two voices here, the writer's and the narrator's, and keep them both firmly in hand throughout.  The balancing act between revealing what the writer would want without confounding the narrator is so deft as to be invisible.  It is especially satisfying as a feat that would be utterly unsuitable for other media, and I can only imagine that any filmed version is a pale shadow of the printed.

Add that to Christie's gift for characterization, mastery of pacing, and playful misdirection, and one has a book that transcends her others and, by my definition at least, becomes something very like literature.