The Year of the Flood

Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood (Bloomsbury, 2009) chronicles the sort of post-apocalyptic world familiar to readers of Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins, Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, or Cormac McCarthy's The Road--worlds devastated by those supposedly civilizing animals we call humans.

In Atwood's world, the corporation has trumped the state, the suburbs have fallen into ruin, the artificial has replaced the natural, and murderous violence has become commonplace in the sandlots where kids continue to play out their make-believe games. And yet, somehow, Atwood's world isn't nearly as haunting as McCarthy's wending, minimalist Road. But it sure ain't Mayberry, either.

Our focus is drawn to a band of resistance centred in "The Gardeners," a green cult, living out a consistently vegan discipline rooted in an interesting combination of biblical metaphors and an unblinkered appreciation for natural selection, articulated in a rich set of practices including their own liturgical calendar of Feast Days and Saints Days (including some Canadians like Saint David Suzuki and Saint Terry Fox!), as well as their own hymnbook. (Indeed, I'm starting to think that knowledge of theology is a handicap while reading this novel because one could so easily get sucked into the minituae of Gardener theology, and be tempted to draw all sorts of parallels and analogies with Christian theology. It would be an interesting read for Christians concerned with creation care--but I'd worry that this would be instrumentalizing the story Atwood wants to tell.) The Gardeners are a remnant, squatting on what corners and ruins of former suburbia they can find, led by a cadre of Adams and Eves who are responsible for catechesis, education, and government--but regularly haunted by CorpSeCorp, the privatized industry that has assumed responsibility for what used to pass for "the common good."

While the world as described seems bad enough, things get worse when a plague ("the Waterless Flood") is unleashed--"a plague that infects no Species but our own" (p. 424), thus giving Creation a chance to try again without us.

So not unlike The Road, this is a relationship-as-the-means-of-survival story. We follow a small band of acquaintances whose relationships are bound by a kind of love, though they might not think so. In particular, the book is organized around Toby (a Gardeners convert who becomes an Eve) and Ren (a child in the Gardeners commune). The book is spliced in two parallel tracks: the "Toby" track is narrated in the third person (just who is that?), while the "Ren" track is told in the first person. We regularly jump from Year 25, "The Year of the Flood," back through the years leading up to Year 25, back as far as Year 10. Eventually, these two tracks intersect in the final chapters. (It is also significant that time in the book is organized according to the liturgical calendar of the Gardeners.)

What to make of it? It's been a long time since I'd read any Atwood (who is the doyen of Canadian letters). Having, of late, read stuff that wears its literary flourish on its sleeve (Thomas Wolfe, John Updike, etc.), Atwood's prose is spare and simple--and yet not quite the charmed minimalism of McCarthy. But it has a remarkably cumulative effect--she is carefully drawing a character such that 300 pages in, one can look back on a rich development that seemed transparent at the time. (Is this is the sign of someone whose medium is rightly the novel rather than the short story?) While her lexicon is tight and rather puritan (I can see how the realism of Ren's first person demands this, but not sure why the third person narration of Toby's experience had to hew to the same rules--perhaps this is a sign I'm missing something about that narrator?) And in the end, there were just a few too many "coincidences" for me; or at least, it seemed to me that the world would have been bigger, and our encounters more anonymous, then the close of the story suggests.

But that said, the story also turns into a beautiful page-turner with 100 pages to go, and the glimpses of friendship, charity, and compassion are welcome respites in such an appalling world.

Still More Mortification

I'm still enjoying Mortification, one of those books that's so easy to read in snippets and small bites--and yet you just keep taking bite after bite, turning what should be a little snack into a meal. The result, of course, is that while you could have, in the same amount of time, enjoyed a meal of moroccan chicken with couscous and a little Gewurtztraminer, instead you've eaten an entire supper's worth of Combos pretzel snacks.

It's also one of those books--of which there is an entire cottage industry--which makes aspiring writers feel like they're part of some 'insider' club, listening in on the anecdotes of real writers, as if we were overhearing these stories in the corner of Nicole Krauss's Brooklyn apartment. We aspiring writers are suckers for illusion and want nothing more than to "be a writer"--indeed, if we're honest with ourselves, we spend more time wanting to "be a writer" than actually wanting to write. Alas.

As it turns out, many of the writers in this collection seem to confuse shame and mortification with being bored or not receiving a lavish red-carpet reception, such that some of the supposed scenes of "mortification" are really just episodes of a lackluster event. Don't give me your down-the-nose scoffing about the deplorable buffet at the Kalamazoo Literary Festival and Dwarf Toss. I want shame. I bought this sucker for the schadenfreude, not to hear your whining about poor train connections!

The best stories of mortification seem to involve copious amounts of alchohol, but even then the mortification is delayed until the next day (as when Michael Donaghy makes a deposit in the car-door pocket of his host the morning after: "an acid indigo porridge of red wine, Jameson's and aubergine curry").

Robin Robertson should also be credited for selecting some wonderful epigraphs for each chapter. My favorite, so far, is a proverb from Jean Cocteau:

An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.

This heads John Lanchester's contribution, which includes an honest assessment about the culture (cult?) of "public readings":

The truth is that the whole contemporary edifice of readings and tours and interviews and festivals is based on a mistake. The mistake is that we should want to meet the writers we admire, because there is something more to them in person than there is on the page, so that meeting them in the flesh somehow adds to the experience of reading their work. The idea is that the person is the real thing, whereas writing is somehow an excresence or epiphenomenon ["the metaphysics of presence!]. But that's not true. The work is the real thing, and it is that to which readers should direct their attention.

While I'm as much of an egomaniacal sucker for such opportunites as the next author, I concede a latent truth in the combination of Cocteau's maxim and Lanchester's observation. It is, I find, very hard to speak about books one has published. (Lanchester goes on to say that the writer finds it easier to speak about the book that one is in the process of writing.) The irony, of course, is that when a book appears, and if one is fortunate enough to have readers, and perhaps even a few enthusiastic readers who might invite you to an event, they want you to talk about the book. But, of course, what you wanted to say about X or Y is in the book. And you're already on to the next project, in the muck and mire of a new book-in-the-making which is filling your head and stealing your sleep, and it's difficult to go back and get excited about the book you put to bed a couple of years ago, but which is just now "appearing" for others. The trick, I think, is to find ways to put yourself in the shoes of the reader. And there's no shame in that.

Mortification: The Public Shame of Writers

Writers are no more prone to public shame than others. However, unlike others, they're likely to mine the experience for material. (And given their mistaken self-importance, they're also likely to over-amplify the significance of their mortification.) When such shamed writers have a flair for wit, the result can be quite entertaining.

I've been enjoying Robin Robertson's collection of such embarrassing tales in Mortification: Writers' Stories of Their Public Shame, full of bite-sized vignettes. Some of my favorite authors and poets (like Julian Barnes, Simon Armitage, John Banville, and James Wood) recount episodes of empty lecture halls, amorous (and mentally-unstable) fans, dead pets, mistaken identities, and writerly awkwardness. Judging from these anecdotes, the public reading is the prime site for writer's shame.

The writer's greatest mortification is perhaps summarized in an epigraph from Samuel Johnson:

There is nothing more dreadful to an author than neglect, compared with which, reproach, hatred and opposition are names of happiness.

Bringing It To the Table

While we were in Asheville, NC last month, we visited what has to be one of the coolest bookstores on the planet (in one of the coolest cities in the country): Malaprop's. A feast. Spent way more than we should have (but since my wife bought as many books as I did, the guilt-factor was diminished).

The one book I devoured right away was a new Wendell Berry anthology, Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food, with an Introduction by Michael Pollan (of The Omnivore's Dilemma). It's a wonderful collection of Berry's writings on food production, farming, and husbandry, including some fiction selections that picture mealtimes and practices of eating. The selections span his entire writing career (and the early selections show how prescient he was/is). An excellent introduction to, and compendium of, Berry's thought.

Scotland, Genre Fiction, and Literature

When I was living in York, James Kelman's experimental novel, Kieron Smith, Boy was getting a lot of attention (and it remains on my "to read" list). So I found this dust-up between Kelman and some of his Scottish confreres (Ian Rankin, J.K. Rowling, Alexander McCall Smith) of interest. Here's Alan Bissett's report from The Guardian:

There is an unspoken rule among Scottish writers that we don't slag each other off in public. The rule runs thus: coming, as we do, from a small, colonised nation, we automatically find ourselves marginalised by literary London and must fight doubly hard to gain the recognition abroad that is granted to English writers. While we may express private reservations about the work of another writer, we don't scupper their chances by saying this publicly. After all, each of us takes enough of that from critics.

That changed over the weekend. Speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Scotland's only Man Booker prize winner, James Kelman, lambasted his country's literary establishment for praising the "mediocrity" of "writers of detective fiction or books about some upper middle-class young magician or some crap". Attention paid to the twin commercial giants of (presumably) Ian Rankin and JK Rowling had served, Kelman argued, to obscure Scotland's more radical tradition.

This has split the nation's literature in two. In a debate in the Sunday Herald headed 'Is Pulp Fiction Taking Over Scotland's Bookshelves?' daggers were drawn over the crime-ification of Scottish letters. The novelist Rodge Glass said that Kelman had been "very brave" in his remarks, while playwright John Byrne, spoke of "the danger of Scotland becoming known as the home of genre fiction, a factory churning out these things". And the response was ferocious. Professor Michael Schmidt of the University of Glasgow, defended the common reader against Kelman's "Stalinist" and "parochial" approach. Crime writer, Denise Mina, derided "this awful schtick about pushing the boundaries of literary technique", comparing it to "asking people to appreciate the welding on their plumbing".

As a manifestation of the old 'genre v real literature' chestnut, the debate should be just as interesting to those outside of Scotland. Kelman, committed to experimental form and language, sees genre fiction as redundant, compromised by commerciality. Mina, while still calling Kelman a "beautiful writer", regards his stance as a mere "play for status"; a failure of the writer's duty to entertain.

There is another to level to this, however, about the ways in which any country's indigenous literature – especially those of smaller or post-colonial nations – is threatened by the commercial imperative to produce page-turning, airport-friendly thrillers. A third level concerns the collusion of the literary establishment in this. It's certainly the case that the books editors of broadsheet newspapers will bemoan the fact that we're not all reading Tolstoy, while providing acres of coverage to crime writers. Genre fiction doesn't need highbrow attention in order to sell by the bucketload, yet editors must cover it precisely because it is so visible. This crowds out more risk-taking writers, for whom a single review from a perceptive critic can provide a career breakthrough.

It is galling, then, that a country like Scotland, home to an enormous, bristling, experimental tradition which includes James Hogg, Alexander Trocchi, Hugh McDiarmid, Muriel Spark, Edwin Morgan, Tom Leonard, Alasdair Gray, Janice Galloway, Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, Ali Smith, James Robertson and Kelman himself, is marketed to tourists as the home of Rebus and Potter.

One doesn't wants to decry authors who are certainly outstanding in their field (constructing a page-turner requires narrative skill); neither does one want to sneer at the tastes of book-buyers, for whom reading at all in this age of distraction is an increasingly fought-for pleasure. And it's not as though writers such as Mina, Val McDermid or Christopher Brookmyre aren't working a left-wing agenda into their books; they are. But genre fiction is, by definition, generic. Mina's disdain, in her comments, for pushing boundaries of form is palpable. The genre writer's first responsibility is to the genre itself: they must fulfil readers' expectations for convention, or they have failed. It's easy to see how this becomes part of a capitalist enterprise, which requires market 'product' and fears innovation as a 'risky sell'. At a time when capitalism is scouring livelihoods, however, we must empower writers such as Kelman to speak out against it, and put forth new ways of expressing and thinking about ourselves. This is far from being just a Scottish issue.

Philosophy, Film, and Biblical Studies: Two New Treasures

In addition to being generally remiss in cataloguing my reading here, I've not commented on any books in philosophy or theology for a long time. That's largely because I spend most of my evenings reading poetry and literature now. I don't often find myself picking up theology or philosophy for enjoyment. However, in the course of working on a project this summer, I had occasion to read two new books from very different fields that are both provocative in different ways--but which also share some surprising resonances.

Ian W. Scott's Paul's Way of Knowing: Story, Experience, and the Spirit (Baker Academic, 2009) is a book in a bit of a growing field, exploring the epistemology of Scripture and biblical authors (cp. The Bible and Epistemology recently released from Paternoster). As the title indicates, Scott analyzes of “Paul’s way of knowing” inviting us to look to Paul as a contemporary resource for thinking about knowledge precisely because “[i]n Paul we have the opportunity to see how someone approached religious knowledge who was at one and the same time foundational in the development of Western culture and yet relatively untouched by epistemological currents which so many now suspect are bankrupt.” Scott unearths a “narrative structure to the Apostle’s knowledge,” a distinct narratival “logic” that is operative beneath his speech. In doing so, Scott brings “to the surface [Paul’s] tacit assumptions about how people in general can come to knowledge,” discerning “assumptions which the Apostle himself may never have brought to full consciousness.” In this articulation of Paul's implicit epistemology, Scott discerns a fundamentally narratival structure to Paul's understanding of what counts as "knowledge." And what's fascinating is that this is so counter-intuitive: Paul, of course, is the author of epistles, not Gospels. Yet Scott makes a convincing case that Paul thinks in story. I hope some Christian philosophers working in epistemology will venture into a dialogue with this strain of biblical studies.

On quite a different front, I've been absorbed by Carl Plantinga's new book, Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator's Experience (University of California Press, 2009). (Carl is a colleague of mine at Calvin, sort of the resident philosopher in our Film Studies department.) Plantinga has long been analyzing the role of affect and emotion in film (his earlier work considered non-fiction film or documentaries; in this book he's considering "Hollywood" cinema). Here we find him contesting reductionistic paradigms in film theory that want to reduce a film to its “message.” Some film critics and scholars talk of “reading” a film, implying that “film viewing is a cool, intellectual experience.” Thus the critic decodes the film by boiling it down to the hidden meanings which can be simply articulated in propositional form. But such a paradigm of criticism assumes that films are basically just elaborate vehicles for information that is ultimately propositional and intellectual. "This way of thinking about film," he comments, "diminishes the art form by reducing it to a bare bones propositional message.” And as a result, all that is “moving” about movies is relegated to the non-essential and superfluous.

But as Plantinga rightly asks, “Are all of these affective elements of film spectatorship mere epiphenomena, the throwaway detritus of what is worthwhile about the film viewing experience?” The burden of his book is to suggest otherwise: that the affective, emotional aspects of film—precisely those aspects of movies that move us—are essential and irreducible. As he comments, “Any abstract meaning that a film might have is ancillary to the experience in which that meaning is embodied.” What a film means cannot be reduced to the proposal “message” that might be gleaned from it. This is because “[e]xperience creates its own meaning, and in some cases the meaning to be taken from the experience of the film may contradict the abstract meaning an interpreter might glean from film dialogue, for example. Affective experience and meaning are neither parallel nor separable, but firmly intertwined.”

The book is rich with concrete analyses from both the "classical" era of Hollywood film-making as well as the "New Hollywood" (the running commentary on The Royal Tenenbaums was one of my favorites). Anyone interested in film will find this is a fascinating read. Indeed, one could read it as a kind of cinematic analogue to James Wood's How Fiction Works. Plantinga shows us that movies work by moving us, not just telling us; they tap our affective centers and emotional life, not just feed information into our intellects. And the narrative force of cinema is tethered to film's visceral ability to connect with our emotions; we feel stories.

More Proof

Over at Fors Clavigera I've shared a bit about the secret joy of receiving the proofs of a book. Today, reading an interview with Farrar, Strauss & Giroux publisher, Jonathan Galassi, I was encouraged to learn that even for someone for whom books are their business, the same thrill holds. As Galassi shares:

"The second great moment is when it actually becomes a book—a physical thing. I always feel that when you put a book into proofs it gets better just by virtue of being set in print. I know a lot of writers feel that way too. It takes on a kind of permanence. And then it's even more satisfying when it becomes an actual book."

As I've said before, I'm not entirely convinced by that last claim (post-publication depression seems comon, like post-dissertation depression), but I share the sentiments about page proofs.