A New Start, Elsewhere

I'm trying to get back into reading, writing, blogging. The new effort can be found here.

---AC

The Word

Thanks to my lack of computer (read: limited internet time), I've been able to finish Goethe's Faust. I liked it a lot, and while I can't speak to the original, I felt that Walter Kaufmann did a fine job rendering the poetry into English. The lines have both rhythm and beauty without being full of archaisms. (Reading this made me think I should try Shakespeare, now that he isn't required).

Faust is an intellectual, a man who values action. And he is driven. In the prologue, the Devil (Mephistopheles) bets God that he can ensnare Faust's soul. The Lord replies that "A good man in his darkling aspiration / Remembers the right road throughout his quest." And while undoubtedly sometimes Faust recognizes his errors, he never really changes his course of action. To the end, he maintains his ambitions. [Skip this paragraph if you don't want a spoiler] So while I knew how the play ended, I was still very surprised that he was saved. The angels say, "Who ever strives with all his power, / We are allowed to save." Deus ex machina. But is it really because of Faust as a person, or because Mephisto can't be allowed to win? Please do comment if you can clarify the ending or point me towards some secondary sources.

[End spoiler]

There is a motif throughout Faust which I think will make for a nice segue into Mann's Doktor Faustus. Faust, as a man of action, often casts aspersions on 'the word.' At one point he opens a book and reads "In the beginning was the Word." He changes it in his 'translation' to "In the beginning was the Act." Faust is not really one to value art or aesthetics in and of themselves. Goethe sets up several exchanges to this effect. An excerpt:

Faust:
If you have anything to say,
why juggle words for a display?
Your glittering rhet'ric, subtly disciplined,
Which for mankind thin paper garlands weaves,
Is unwholesome as the foggy wind
That blows in autumn through the wilted leaves.

Wagner:
Oh God, art is forever,
And our life is brief.

In T.J. Reed's Thomas Mann: The Uses of Tradition, I read that Goethe, with Schiller, was a pioneer in aesthetics (drawing on Kant's influence). To paraphrase Reed (and this is from memory, sorry), they argued that art should be valued as an aesthetic creation, and not for its ability to deceive. Hardly a novel concept now, but at that time it was a challenge to the notion that art and literature had to be transparent 'windows' onto the world, that they were only worthwhile for their ability to depict life.

And interestingly, it is Faust himself who cannot see art's value. Wagner doesn't have a huge role, but Mephistopheles takes over, echoing the 'art is forever' dictum. He also says something that I found very surprising and very modern:

I lost much time on this accursed affliction,
Because a perfect contradiction
Intrigues not only fools but also sages.
[....]
Men usually believe, if only they hear words,
That there must also be some sort of meaning.

Faust never comes around, but as another spirit says, "The human being is, his life long, blind." Mann's Faust is himself an artist (a musician), so I am interested to see where he goes with this.

[And once again, I apologize for the lack of coherence. I'm just a bit stressed out.]

Decadence and Decline

I've been meaning to post on Buddenbrooks since last week, but I've been experiencing difficulties with my laptop (it needs a new part). Now that I'm back from vacation, I have the school's computer lab at my disposal. Anyway....

I enjoyed the book very much. As I said before, it is very different from The Magic Mountain stylistically. Its scale is both grand and minute. The book spans four generations, so it covers a lot plot-wise. But Mann zooms in on certain characters and fleshes them out in such a way that Buddenbrooks does not feel like a history. The decline is more intimate, more immediate. I read in The Uses of Tradition that Mann began with the end -- the last Buddenbrook -- and worked backwards, but as he did, he began to get sidetracked by other characters and other ideas. So what began as an end, a decline into 'artistic decadence,' in fact generated the entire family. For instance, much of the book deals with Tony Buddenbrook's ill-fated marriages which, even though the book was conceived around two of the male characters -- her brother Thomas and his son Hanno (Johann).

I would have had no idea that Hanno was the starting point for the novel had I read only the novel because the other characters dominate. The mood definitely changes when he is born, though; things become much more melancholy and self-reflective. A part of that whole idea of the linking of artistic sensibility, decadence, and decline.

And despite Mann's reputation for density, Buddenbrooks was very funny. During the uprisings of 1848, the consul Buddenbrook goes outside and sees that the gas lamps have not been lit even though it is evening. That makes him more indignant than anything else. "Really," he says, "that's taking the revolution too far!"

Much as I liked Buddenbrooks, though, I am very interested to see what Mann did later in his career, in his less 'realistic' works. I brought Doctor Faustus back with me (as well as Goethe's play, which I want to read first), but I doubt I'll get to it before the end of the semester. I've begun Goethe's Faust, but lately Gathering Evidence has been calling my name, so I might return to Thomas Bernhard. Which is perfectly justifiable, since I don't get my computer back until Wednesday....

Buddenbrooks

Since my last post, I've begun reading Buddenbrooks. It's strange, considering how scattered my reading has been over the past month or so, but I'm moving through it very quickly. I'm about 2/3 of the way done. (Some of my other work is languishing, I'll admit.)

Buddenbrooks is strikingly different from The Magic Mountain, and even from Death in Venice. This is his first novel (published at twenty-five!), and, as Bloglily commented below, it is much more in the tradition of the 19th-century novel. It does not have that same exquisite slowness as The Magic Mountain. It is made up sketches (sort of) of the Buddenbrook family at certain crucial moments in their history (understandable, given that this novel spans most of the 1800s), and this approach makes it a much faster read.

I've also checked out Thomas Mann: The Uses of Tradition (T.J. Reed) from the library; Reed has a whole chapter on Buddenbrooks and "The Making of a Novelist," which I plan to start over Thanksgiving. I think this will help compensate for my lack of knowledge of German literature. (Especially as I've read that some of Mann's later works draw very heavily on Goethe).

I'll have more to write about Buddenbrooks later. Right now I should get back to studying. "Should" being the operative word there.....

Returning

My reading has been disjointed these past few weeks. I started novels, then stopped. Yesterday was really the first time I sat down and read as I usually do. It was a beautiful day, so I sat outside with Death in Venice for an hour. And then I finished it today.

I'd read it before, but it's one of those that only gets better with rereading. And while I
remembered the basic plot, most of it felt new. Details and characters took on new significance in light of the outcome.

This time around, I read Michael Henry Heim's more recent translation. It's been a few years since I read the other one, so I didn't see much difference. (Well, I didn't remember the language being quite so flowery the last time around. I looked up the other version online and this one is indeed a bit more overblown. Not sure how well that reflects the original.) In the introduction to this version, Michael Cunningham waxes rhapsodic: "Here we have an Aschenbach who is harder to dismiss, whose fate is larger and nobler, if not exactly more comforting." That's a lot to put on a translation. And I'm not inclined to find Aschenbach's fate "noble." His is passionate, infatuated with beauty (which may itself perhaps be "noble"), but his actions are not. Isn't that what makes him so "hard to dismiss" in the first place? Why do we need to turn him into a hero in order to enjoy the book?

As usual, Mann's short (well...) fiction left me wanting more. I went over to the library to read some essays on Mann, but it wasn't the same. Like Dorothy, I may need to get my hands on Buddenbrooks soon.....

More to follow....

From Death in Venice:

It is surely as well that the world knows only a beautiful work itself and not its origins, the conditions under which it comes into being, for if people had knowledge of the sourcesfrom which the artist derives his inspiration they would oftentimes be confused and alarmed and thus vitiate the effects the artist had achieved. [....]

For how can a man be worthy as an educator if he has a natural, inborn, incorrigible penchant for the abyss? Much as we renounce it and seek dignity, we are drawn to it.

On Stevens

Last night, in my disjointed way, I read a few poems of Wallace Stevens' (my first). I did not read many, but instead read those few through several times, trying to wrap my mind around them. Those that I've read remind me a bit of Rilke.

From "The Motive for Metaphor:"

The obscure moon lighting an obscure world
Of things that would never be quite expressed,
Where you yourself were never quite yourself
And did not want nor have to be,

Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being

I love those lines. The more I read them, the more they remind me of reading, of writing. Things never quite expressed -- and never quite grasped. The writer partially expressing, the reader partially understanding, and yet both finding something there. Finding something here.

Scary Movie

Halloween is almost here -- how did that happen? The turning leaves should have been a clue, but it really didn't hit me until yesterday. I passed by a house with extensive decorations and commented that it was a bit early to be preparing for Halloween. Then I realized that that was a stupid thing to say. The weather is also shocking. It's in the 30s and 40s during the day -- I have to start adapting. And wearing gloves.

I love autumn. When I was younger, I loved Halloween because, in addition to dressing up, it was an excuse to watch scary movies. My dad didn't especially want me to because he worried that they'd give me nightmares (he was generally right, too). As a compromise, he let me rent the original versions of the classic horror movies -- Dracula, The Mummy, Frankenstein. I still haven't seen most of the famous ones -- Friday the 13th, Halloween, The Exorcist, Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But neither group strikes me as particularly frightening. The latter (in their modern incarnations, at least) are based on the grotesque, on shock value. Gore correctly synched with the appropriate soundtrack. You jump in your seat at the loud music. But is that the same thing as being scared? Surpirsed, sure. But scared?

I have a tendency to overanalyze scary movies. I think it stems from that early tendency for nightmares. I'd always ask myself, Is this scary? and try to figure out why a movie (or story) bothered me; it was a way of disarming the film, of removing its power. I still wonder -- what is it that terrifies? I still am not sure. But terror is not synonymous with the grotesque, or with shock.

The one film that I remember being genuinely terrified by is not a horror movie. It has a happy ending. It's a musical. What's this strange exception? The Wizard of Oz. That's right. Near the end, Dorothy has been captured by the Wicked Witch and is locked up in her castle. The Witch places an hourglass on the table and says, This is how long you have left to live. When this runs out, you die. I took that literarlly. It's not just that you're going to die -- it's that you know exactly how much time is left. And you have to watch as time runs out. All you can do is wait.

Of course, Dorothy gets her deus ex machina, the Witch her comeuppance. (My brother had to reassure me of this before I would come out of the bathroom and watch the rest). But that still remains one of the only truly horrific scenarios I can imagine: knowing that death is coming, and being powerless do anything but wait.

Which isn't a problem, unless you're human.

How's My Studying?

Here is the time for the sayable, here is its homeland.
Speak and bear witness. More than ever
the Things that we might experience are vanishing, for
what crowds them out and replaces them is an imageless act.
---Rilke, Ninth Elegy

I've been reading the Duino Elegies most nights before going to sleep. I worked my way through them slowly. It might has well have been for the first time -- except for a few lines, I didn't remember much. My edition is bilingual, and every so often I'd flick my eyes to the left-hand side and scan for familiar words. Not many of them, but some.

I am in a strange place with my reading. I find myself reluctant to start anything new, particularly anything long. I've been reading through books I've read before, opening at random and just following a few lines. Or looking for marked passages. I've been meaning to start Independence Day for a week now, and I can never do it. Instead, I page through Rilke, Franzen, Kafka, Bernhard, Roubaud, Proust.

And I am in a strange place with my academic work. I feel I don't study enough, don't work hard enough. It's strange to have so many free hours. I probably shouldn't. According to my wall calendar, I am supposed to have a working thesis/hypothesis for one paper and a topic for another by tonight. I told myself that in order to compensate for the .... well, slowness of campus life that I'd throw myself into academics, but so far that hasn't happened. I'm not a hard worker.

I need a book with a tone to match my current state. Starting something new carries the prospect of failure, of wasted time, but really there's nothing to lose. And at the same time, I can't understand what's stopping me from finding solace in the books I already love

Anyway, that research topic....