When the hurly-burly’s done

ENG223 students: By Friday, 5/4, please write a comment on this post that addresses the following question:

What, if anything, did you find in The Odyssey that is relevent or interesting to people now, in April of 2007?

Two extremely powerful literary experiences last night.

Ellie, Ian, Heather and I saw The Namesake. The film’s been getting a lot of positive reviews, at least in my limited word-of-mouth world (my parents liked it a lot). I can see why. Despite some odd pacing, and a couple of anachronisms that make following the progress of time a little difficult (pay attention to the airport scenes), I found it to be an extraordinarily moving story. Now, I haven’t read the novel yet (though I plan to–I liked the stories from Interpreter of Maladies a lot), but if it’s anything like the movie, I’ll have a hard time reading it critically.

After the movie, we retired to a local public house to discuss what we’d seen, as is our custom. The consensus was that Mira Nair (and Jhumpa Lahiri, natch) absolutely nailed that awkward state between behaving how you think you should behave according to your parents and traditions, and behaving how you think you should behave according to your contemporary culture. Gogol Ganguli is quite literally trapped between his very intense desire to please his Bengali immigrant parents and his equally intense desire to live an American life. He winds up miserable no matter what he does. I couldn’t help thinking about events in my recent life, questions I’ve raised. I used to, for example, be embarrassed about my dietary choices (limited pseudo-kosher), telling people I was vegetarian when we ordered pizza.

Leaving the theater, my first thought was that The Namesake made me want to write. A lot. I’m working on a piece that might become a novel, but I’m really dissatisfied with it. I think I need to take a couple of the ideas I have (the grandfather with Alzheimer’s, the family spread across the country trying to hold on to their common points of reference) and scrap the cute literary tricks, the cloudiness, all of that. I need to be more honest and direct when it comes to the narrator’s emotions. I need to get out of the way and let the story be told.

By the time I got home I realized that I wasn’t going to get any writing done, so I decided to read until I fell asleep. I wound up finishing Six Memos for the Next Millenium, about which I’ve written before. The last lecture in the book, “Multiplicity,” made the whole reading experience worthwhile (”Visibility” almost made me swear off reading forever). Check this out:

[I]n our own times literature is attempting to realize this ancient desire to represent the multiplicity of relationships, both in effect and in potentiality.

Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature. Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function. Since science has begun to distrust general explanations and solutions that are not sectorial and specialized, the grand challenge for literature is to be capable of weaving together the various branches of knowledge, the various “codes,” into a manifold and multifaceted vision of the world.

Calvino here is talking about the kinds of writers who use every possible piece of information and follow every digression (what Faye calls “birdwalks”) in the course of telling their stories. I haven’t read any of the authors Calvino discusses (as is the case for about 99% of his books), but I think I know the type. I’m thinking specifically of people like David Foster Wallace, who is sad when he can’t tell the reader everything in extreme detail. Or James Joyce, who found glee in explaning Dublin’s water system for pages on end.

The problem, though, for the reader and the writer, is finding the balance between extreme detail (when the protagonist starts his car, do we need to know the make and model of the car, as well as how cars work?) and pure impressionism (it’s nice to know where the story takes place, is it not?).  It’s a balance that our finest writers seem to achieve effortlessly.  In The Namesake, we get a lot of information about Indian customs (at least visually–there’s no real explanation, but we can figure it out) and why Gogol’s father chose that unusual name for his son.  But there’s also a lot of emotion, and that emotional weight isn’t dependent on the details of the story.  Gogol is simply trying to muddle through his life as a 20-something man, trying to find the middle ground between keeping himself happy and satisfying his parents.  And that little idea–Gogol’s situation–carries the whole thing.  Author Lahiri and director Nair transform this simple idea, one that nearly everyone can relate to in some way, and firmly ground it in the specific experiences of a specific group of people.  That, right there, is the film’s success, and what I hope to be able to do with my own writing.  Wish me luck.

Rather than speak to you of what I have written, perhaps it would be more interesting to tell you about the problems that I have not yet resolved, that I don’t know how to resolve, and what these will cause me to write…

Italo Calvino’s book Six Memos for the Next Millenium is my current obsession. My dad got it for me a couple of years ago, back before I was ready to read a major work of literary criticism (I was knee-deep in figuring out how to teach, where to live, etc). Leave it to a nor’easter, though, to make me want to do nothing more than to sit in my room, listen to quiet music, and hunker down with a book like this one.

Six Memos consists of five lectures–Calvino died before he could complete the sixth one–on what makes good literature and why we still need it. Although the lectures date from the mid-1980s, they’re still highly relevant today. The first pieces, “Lightness” and “Quickness,” describe exactly the kind of writing I hope to achieve on this blog. Lightness, Calvino writes, can mean more than one thing: the lightness achieved through using words carefully, imparting an airy, floaty type feeling; and the lightness that we need to find in our lives to avoid our world’s “slow petrification, more or less advanced depending on people and places but one that spare[s] no aspect of life.” This heaviness is something I feel in the constant bombardment of media signals and consumer pressures: YOU MUST CARE about Anna Nicole Smith’s baby! STOP QUESTIONING WHAT I SAY and pay attention to my intent! BUY a new iPod! YOU NEED an SUV! It is only through literature, argues Calvino, that we can order the heaviness of the world, remixing it into something lighter, more ethereal, and more beautiful.

Anyway, back to Calvino. The quote in the beginning of this entry neatly fits into the ideas about writing I’ve been working with.  Having spent all of last week reading, pro bono, my sophomores’ history research papers, I think I am qualified to say that the great majority of student writng–even honors-level student writing–is boring.  There is a tendency to build pyramids of hard facts and minutiae until, it is hoped, the entire essay is unassailable and the teacher gives an A.  “Whee!” we teachers yell, high-fiving each other.  “Scout found out everything about the Battle of Gallipolli!  And look!  Young Jem knows, through the acquisition of irrefutable evidence, that the case of the Lindbergh Baby’s kidnapping was an unfair media circus!  What great work!”

Sadly, no.   Students, writers, intellectuals, all–there is nothing more boring, more soul-crushing, than to read pages upon pages with no questions, no uncertainties, only heaviness and slowness.  When you fail to make a reader think, you have failed to engage that reader.  And making him or her think doesn’t mean doing the thinking FOR the reader.  This should be obvious by now.

More on this later, I am sure.  Right now, though, I’ve got more reading to do.  Quickness and light, people.  Quickness and light.

“Is it possible that seemingly incredible geniuses like Bach and Shakespeare and Einstein were not in fact superhuman, but simply plagiarists, copying great stuff from the future? ”

(from A Man Without a Country, 2005)