Whenever I read nonfiction—or listen to its verbal counterpart, the speech—rogue sentences always seem to lie in wait, ready to convince me that I’m better off reading or looking at something that is always true. In other words, it only takes about one disagreement in an author for me to seriously consider spending my time on someone I can trust all the way through. And if, say, it’s dangerous to trust them, like in Nietzsche or Schopenhauer, then thoughts of their mighty struggle in life act as bitters do in drinks, adding that layer of complexity or character. Beware then, nonfiction writers: be courageous in your life! Make some people laugh and don’t be afraid to cry like Hart Crane—or else I’m deeply afraid for both you and I, our writing won’t survive.

Still I must be honest and admit I could be mistaking intolerance for idleness since nonfiction makes me want to grab the pen myself and furiously respond in truth. Above all I don’t want to be misconstrued as wanting to live in La La Land. Whatever branch of knowledge you’re interested in—chaos theory, equitation, the study of cadavers—by all means learn it and read its brightest books. There is just something about that term nonfiction that begs my pedantic weenie of a brain to be recalibrated.

I want to establish a clearer definition of nonfiction, but that’s the problem. I encountered a disagreement in a nonfiction book recently, and now, gearing myself up to tackle the error, I realize how engrossed it is in categorization. And nonfiction is such a lame, lame categorization. Before we can say what nonfiction consists of, since it is negation, we have to say what is not nonfiction. As for fiction, that is but a French and Latin bastardization for story. A few people in charge of “textbooks” of a sort between the 12th and 15th centuries had to find a way to do away with some stories they didn’t like—shocker! You know what, Bill? Call it ficcioun or “that which is invented in the mind.” But as Kant shows us, time and space must be measures of the mind if math is to be factual, and if we don’t bow to time and space as gods. Or, fie on philosophy, for meanwhile Milton, Shelley, and Keats show us just necessary the human eye (>mind) is to rendering the truth. The bottomline, in clear terms: those who prefer a strict classification of non-fiction as “real” and fiction as “make-believe” neglect the immense overlap in every human endeavor between story and fact.

In nonfiction as we understand it in the 21st-century still abound with genre, I do not count anything purely scientific: that is, mathematical. That is not the domain of literature, or the humanities. I really don’t want to bog this essay down with a logical discrepancy, but I cannot refuse illustrating how topsy-turvy a grip nonfiction has on us. Please see this diagram for the quite tragic fate of nonfiction:

It is any writing that falls between <10% story (pure math—pure technique) and 90% story. It is that which beats around the bush. Note: give the reader sight—make knowledgeable love. But we run into a problem, because not only is pure math not necessarily negative, but its apodeictic (maximally intuited) certainty matches that of love’s, or pathos, therefore a straight line won’t cut it. We better render the relationship between pure math and pure story as a circle broken up by the will-to-systemization, with 100% representing wholeness, one, or as it’s sometimes called, the absolute (the creation of knowledge and love), Beauty’s husband. Reader, please. I know this is a lot to take in. Even more so then, do we need all the visualization we can get. Please study deeply the diagram above to understand nonfiction’s obscure place between pure math and pure story before moving onto the next diagram, the creation of—did I say knowledge?—fiction (story/poem/~truth w/character):

(Further clarifications on the diagram are made throughout the entire essay, but only two solid complete read-throughs will seal the deal. It’s that choice every bathroom trip to wash your hands for twenty seconds compared to a splash of water just on the tip of the one dirty hand—I totally get it.)

To begin, please take a look at nonfiction’s position in both diagrams. Look how grey of an area nonfiction is in the first diagram. How likely colorful in number two! If a repeated study of the diagrams and the explanations immediately following them does not clarify things, please meditate on what it means to categorize purity, or even put it on a scale. Consider too that by pure math, logos might be the best representation to account for our general understanding of math: the synthetic a priori stuff that had the Greek who knew Logos by ten different shades (definitions) saying both angle and angel, i.e. “pure reason” if you believe in such a thing. Pathos can be sympathy or empathy—those stepping stones in and out of love. Ethos is then what we’re dealing with in this current nonfiction essay, whether or not you still trust me. Continue?

I really don’t want to argue with science nerds. They will win. Like Faulkner’s Quentin, “I don’t hate math! I don’t! I don’t!” I only want to say that in what we know as nonfiction, even if there is no obvious error, eventually, to some capacity, “the other story” is left out. For that same reason, the best nonfiction goes to those historians and philosophers and natural scientists that cover every single subject they possibly could have, in a span of many works. Show me math—show me love! Since they write so much of the truth, character naturally follows, since it is the clash of motive, the neglect of which in the worst nonfiction (bungling the argument in speech, reason out of character) gives way to bias and plain error. Considering all this, how oppressing now does it sound, that division of fiction and nonfiction into real and make-believe? And so the best writers bend that bow and break open logos and pathos, touching their tips again for a spark, and then just letting it out, baby. Go! Go! Behold this character in the form of truth—enter Fate! What’s the result of writing without boundaries? If you haven’t seen it already, or my colorful joke didn’t give it away, look at diagram two closely: the knowledge of someone, or the knowledge of humankind. That which we obtain when we open up to one another. More than pure math, pathos, schmathos, migos and any chosen endeavor is the love of mankind and no banal iteration of this fact can ever extinguish its flame.

I originally began this essay saying it’s easier to judge nonfiction, and by that I meant it’s easier to turn down. Compare the style of this essay with my last few. Don’t I sound quite judgmental? At least when a character is wrong about something, I can still tolerate the narrator. And when the narrator is wrong, the author has the power to make us sympathize. But when the author is wrong, and I don’t know much about them, get me out of here!

A Gordian knot, the definition of nonfiction. Woe on those who categorize, I suppose, for passing that classification nonfiction down. I have already hinted at separating from nonfiction math, natural science, philosophy, and history, especially when the latter three are done rigorously and to the given field of study’s full extent, or when supplied by an author whose magnanimous personality justifies the error. I also do not count the autobiography or the dialogue as nonfiction. The autobiography is timeless because the best ones are true narratives, like Ray Monk’s Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius or Paul Mariani’s The Broken Tower: The Life of Hart Crane, and dialogues are trustworthy because in their best form they are the precise renderings of an eternal conversation. Let me say too that I do not mean to set this essay up to pick apart any social or softer science. I consider any deep study a natural science—psychology, anthropology, architecture, even business, the whole lot—insofar as the student of that nature holds steady in their cogitations a few metaphors between mankind and the plant and animal kingdoms.

I will bark a little more against nonfiction before I let it pet me. I have to bark the praise of my masters. Like Nabokov’s John Shade in defense of Shakespeare’s “purple” passages, I too “I roll upon them as a grateful mongrel on a spot of turf fouled by a Great Dane” (Pale Fire). From that same passage, Nabokov through his own life’s main character explains how best to teach Shakespeare: “First of all, dismiss ideas, and social background, and train the freshman to shiver, to get drunk on the poetry of Hamlet or Lear, to read with his spine and not with his skull.” Maybe nonfiction is just a little more skull than I’d like. For what it’s worth, by the way, I have scoliosis.

I don’t know how else to say it, but that I’m a spoiled dog when it comes to nonfiction. Maybe I’m that jealous stalker who gets upset when my loved one isn’t being noticed by others. Seriously I’m spoiled: Nabokov, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Emerson (all poets so far, some dabbling in philosophy—read Parerga and Paralipomena), Pascal, St. Jerome, Madame de Guyon, okay saints too, why read the others? And how are we even to classify the anecdotal truth constellations that span a work like In Search of Lost Time? What about the scientific implications of Thomas Pynchon’s historical fiction? Or other mighty compendiums in Plutarch, Gellius, and Robert Burton? Ah, this is why this essay can’t last too long, because it really is as simple as us just liking what we like. Peep a little bit more of my style reader, and then look at my other stuff, because if I have to wade the moral waters just a little bit more longer, I’m going to be quite the angry prune. You know what? The most concrete and efficient writer would win your trust somehow, and then, simply hand you a short list of his major influences. So, besides my loved ones (in my other works) please read the others I’ve listed in this essay, and Vauvenargues, Chamfort, and, in Emerson’s terms, those who practice high criticism, or sublime literary criticism: the close readers. Shelley is our prototype, and Coleridge our Vergil: there to highlight the things critical to the lovers of literature. Most exceptionally in the past fifty years I mean Harold Bloom, H.C. Goddard, and certainly my master in poetry Donald Revell, who always gave the most beautiful and engaging lectures on caritas, the space of the poem, being kind, being a civilian, the right words in the right order, writing to discover, editing savagely, cutting an onion signifying the good poet, sliding through mud at Woodstock, the devil writing at night, the trip > the journey, and trusting the metaphor. For a twenty-minute glimpse of his joy and poetic knowledge, see this Q&A he gave right around the time I got to know him. Or better yet, read his “Death” or one of my long time favorites, “Against Pluralism.”

Perhaps I must face the truth that I’m putting off beginning this essay because I’m struggling with the idea that I have a lot of catching up to do. That’s the kicker with nonfiction. It is dallying. It can either be one thing, or the next, or both, but it’s doing none of this. Give it to me straight, or hold my rotted attention. And the surest path for a writer to hold the reader’s attention is to be able to hold their own attention. Forget all other categorizations. Surely we all accept the power of pure attention.

Please know reader that I know that I’ve already begged your ultimate patience, and if it seems as if I’ve tethered on the end for quite some time, rest assured that I do not dare pen another line that does not attempt to delightfully instruct us both. And like Ishmael says in defense of the in-depth cetology, when is a better chance for the reader to experience such a lesson, than out with the whalemen themselves? And now that I’ve set my sail for literature…now that I approach that frontier alongside my contemporaries, I must be a good and fair a judge as I can. If I indeed join the realm of nonfiction, I must be ready to disagree, and I must be ready to be nice, and I must promise to read more, to realize discernment is best trained through experience, and if I want to lift my peers up, and prevent a few truths from slipping through the cracks, I’m going to have to brace for error myself. I don’t know what my hold-up is, reader. I’m almost ready to move on. I hope I never have to talk about this again. I do pride myself over the span of all my works in not saying the same thing the same way twice.

Who knows? Maybe I’m putting off writing about the brilliant Nadine Gordimer (this essay’s inspiration!) because I have 243 books in my room and 8 of these books are by women: Emily Dickinson, Sappho, Anne Sexton, Gertrude Stein, Celeste Albaret, E.B. Browning, and a few Jane Austens (I used to have all of hers…I think I let students borrow them.). Wow, Lucas. Wow. You should’ve bought that Complete Plath. I counted my 83 additional books downstairs for accuracy, and there I have no book by a woman author. I told my wife this and she smiled and shook her head and said, “I’ve been telling you.” Of the first eighteen books I counted of hers, twelve were by a woman. So yes you could say I have some catching up to do.

My polemics instead have taken us so far off course that I’ve put aside the original shower thought for this essay: that nonfiction is easier to judge. What I really meant by that is the errors in nonfiction are unforgivable whenever the narrator’s character is shallow. Who of us gravitates towards those that lack depth? Is this not why children are so delightful to be around, that the depth of their character is yet unknown? In any case the judge asks, what are the defendant’s signs of redemption? If the narrator tells you to call him Ishmael, or even if the author exercises our humor with a distinct voice, then the stumbling is not only tolerable, but now the writing has been lifted out of the obscure realm of nonfiction, and becomes poetry, which is the truth relayed by all the senses. Character necessarily develops in poetry, since the sum of every human motive works like the wind and water around us and through us. And since the most transcendental writing takes place in the mode of discovery, the attentive writer cannot help but wonder at the character of every single word. It is for this same reason that whenever we sense “the message” or “moral” being pushed upon us , the magic is lost. The writer, either tired, angry, depressed, lazy, or otherwise stubborn and mean, has forgotten to give themselves up to those around them, and so they have lost every character but their own. This is what every innocent child weeps at being the sad fate of the adult. Not to say we can’t write as ourselves or be ourselves, and that the writer can’t generally know the moral of the essay before beginning, but, just like when talking to someone—friend, foe, or fella—if you operate line by line in any other way then letting out the natural-born truth as it appears to you to say it, you’re either a phony, or you need way more slack.

Nonfiction is like stand-up comedy. (I don’t hate it! I don’t!) It really is hard to listen to someone for fifteen minutes, let alone fifteen hours, and even the most senseless polemicist knows when his diatribe is played out (admitting is another thing). I myself can only hold fast to arrogance for so long without feeling like a big dummy. Thank God for the medium of art that, instead of pretending to know what life means, shows us life at its every stage, and leaves the purpose for each of us to discover. Purpose cannot exist without the story. Cling to the idea of nonfiction, and you usurp Memory, who quite enjoyed watching you get along.

I’ve shown you my bias, but let me show you my fantasy. After having read a book from Hungary, Nigeria, then The Raw Shark Texts, then Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, then from Ghana and Kenya, and after having read the Prince of African Poetry, or Black Whitman and Yeats, Léopold Senghor, I thought I would take my talents to South Africa, and there I stumbled upon Nadine Gordimer, and, for some reason, I began with her essays. In the very first essay, “Three in a Bed: Fiction, Morals, and Politics,” despite a gorgeous style best described as H.L. Mencken and Chesterton’s younger, more promising cousin who learned by their negative examples to be kind, I found myself disagreeing with the essay’s central tenet that everything, in the end, is politics. Or “it seems there is no getting away from the relationship” between politics and fiction. I’ve heard this argument everywhere: on the four corners of the internet, as an undergrad and in graduate seminars, in my high school classroom after school where my 11th-grade-teaching coworkers flocked, from my papa, from my friends, from my wife. I don’t disagree—how can I? From a certain point of view everything is also sex, money, or Counter-Strike. So I soon found myself in the shower blurting out that line I’ve since erased: “Nonfiction is so much easier to judge than fiction,” the original start of this essay. So filled with bias are we and so bereft of clear influence, that if you pause to consider the manifold variables that precede every brilliant discovery—every word in the right order—then you might believe me when I say, hey, look, it’s Classification: Oppression wearing a red dress.

The only lament now I can’t quite shake is that this was my first impression of the magnificent storyteller Nadine Gordimer, not any of her fifteen novels or her short stories whose gravitas matches Hemingway at his best. But how can I complain when I’ve been spurned to add to the discourse? And does she not earn her mulligan by delivering, in the same essay, the most condensed, accessible allegory of the white whale?

‘The whale is the agent of comic retribution’: we have sought to destroy the splendid creature that is nature, believing we could survive only by ‘winning’ a battle against nature; now we see our death in the death of nature, brought about by ourselves (4).

After having eked out (quite leisurely) half of this current essay, I then moved onto Nadine Gordimer’s short stories all in one in Life Times, and even just in the first half a dozen stories, I’ve been blown away by her humanity. In “Face from Atlantis” we are treated to nostalgia being brought to life in the form of Carlitta, who won’t accept that her beauty fades. In “Which New Era Would That Be?” we see the behind-the-scenes before, during, and after a white woman tells a group of black men “it’s hard to be punished for not being black” (62). In “The Smell of Death and Flowers”—thanks to Gordimer’s negative capability—we follow the journey of a twenty-one-year-old white woman who wants to do something against social injustice, and we learn that it’s in the unprivileged seeing the privileged sacrifice themselves, where something miraculous happens. And in “The Soft Voice of the Serpent,” a young man with a missing limb and phantom pain is visited by Moby Dick in the form of a cricket. Gordimer’s fiction is so loaded with truth that I want to spend more time in it, and unveil a bit the magic of her style, and explicate the tragic and comic aspects of her characters, to help myself and anyone else who is looking for something sweet and useful to do. If her final story, the raw “Second Coming” (such a “Clean and Well-Lighted Place”) doesn’t convince the reader of categorization’s harm, nothing will.

These stories move me so much, that their elucidation deserves its own spotlight, which to make room for, even this eye-rolling grease monkey of an essay gladly shuffles off the stage, knowing he’s said what he has to say.

WORKS CITED

Gordimer, Nadine. “Life Times.”

-. “Three in a Bed: Fiction, Morals, and Politics.”

Monk, Ray. Wittgenstein.

Mariani, Paul. Hart Crane.

Melville, Herman. Moby Dick.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire.

Revell, Donald. “Against Pluralism”

-. “Death”

AUTHORS MENTIONED

Albaret, Celeste

Anne Sexton

Austen, Jane

Authors Mentioned

Burton, Robert

Chaucer

Chesterton, G.K.

Coleridge

Dickinson, Emily

Emerson

Faulkner

Gellius

Goddard, H.C.

Goethe

Guyon, Madame de.

Hart Crane

Jerome, St.

Kant

Mencken, H.L.

Nabokov

Nietzsche

Pascal

Plath, Sylvia

Plutarch

Proust

Pynchon, Thomas

Revell, Donald

Sappho

Schopenhauer

Shelley

Stein, Gertrude

Thoreau

“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale

Her infinite variety…”

–Enobarbus in Shakespeare’s Antony & Cleopatra II.II

If we concede that at least a handful of authors have been able to depict the most illustrious human characters exactly as they would have acted given the most complex and problematic scenarios realistically imaginable, then the field of literature endlessly blossoms with psychology to be reaped.

I do not know of any better joy in reading than to sympathize with a character. A not so easy task, for close readers. Who can say that by dissecting the motives of their friends they’ve had good times? But even the most critical reader, the most astute judge of character can be swept away in sympathy by trusting the story to unfold as the moment. And what higher task in communication is there than to bring to tears, laughter, or resignation, the most knowledgeable judges of mankind?

There has always ringed something radiant to me when a book, movie, game, or even painting has been able to sustain and interweave the story of six to twelve diverse human beings. If nothing else, the addition of several characters stamps the work with the universal parental reminder that everyone out here, not just us, is going through it. Such is the duty of the artist, to take us out of ourselves.

SPOILER (my dog)

Ruf Ruf! Ruf! Ruf! Ruf!

Abstraction aside, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat asks us to consider what might compel a homebody to betray his former friend to the oppressor; what might compel a woman, who in Penelope’s role prays for her husband’s return from a concentration camp, and upon being shown false proof of his return, gives in to her husband’s rival’s seduction; what might compel another man—most of these people childhood friends—to violate a widow after poisoning her dog; why, oh why would a Kenyan man sell out his countrymen, donning a white hood to select the Mau Mau “traitors” without being caught, if not for having lost a foot race to his rival in love: why did he hesitate after winning, knowing they must be in the forest making love? And after returning to our loved one after seven years of the most severe servitude, when we see she has a child and she admits it’s the other man’s, how could we not be beside ourselves with asking, “Why? Why? Why?”

A Grain of Wheat is a weft of psychology, a Kenyan epic that brings to light the machetes and hoes of motives that made up the country’s coming of independence throughout the 50s into the 60s. And yet by calling it A Grain of Wheat and not once alluding to the title in the story, Thiong’o also stellarizes his book, reminding us just how small any story is, bigger picture and all. At his most intimate, Thiong’o matches Dostoevsky’s psychological prowess, able to zoom in on a character at their most pitifully desperate—without moralizing, Nabokov be nice!—showing the reader nothing but the natural consequence of what happens when there is no easy way out. Even the most fate-loving of us have to make choices: gall, don’t you hate those tough ones?

Mugo is the shy boy, sad, who has spent his life with the notion that “if you don’t traffic with evil, then evil ought not to touch you” (221). He has generally kept to himself and lived such an ascetic life and like that Dostoevsky witnessed extreme cruelty in a camp, and his people see a prophet in his gait. By the end it is revealed (SPOILER: Ruf! Ruf!) one night when one of the more violent of his people came to him for help, that it was Mugo who turned him in to the white authority—who by the way spit directly in Mugo’s face and said he wasn’t the first to try and rat for money. Apparently this rebel, Kihika, killed someone employed by the white government, another violent individual. As to why Mugo “snitched” well, we have to enter the winding grooves of psychological penetration to do it justice, since “For a week he had wrestled with demons, alone, in an endless nightmare” (226). In short it was a spurious choice that felt right to do for both himself and his country. After confessing, he is caught by his people and silently hung, even though he also had the chance to run away, until he decided to linger in the old woman’s house, triple-taking on the idea, “his body aflame with a desire to escape” (268), so that by the same impulsive whim that led him to snitch on his countryman, Mugo was led to linger around and speak to the old woman. On one hand I want to point out the fickleness of choice, but that would be to undervalue the choice, especially when for Mugo it is so strong of a deliberation, that the book opens up on him seeing things in the dark. The force of the imagination is so universally strong, in fact, that another tragic character, Karanja, also sees his “hooded self” and “Mugo at the platform, like a ghost,” at the peak of his frightening catharsis and near suicide (262). So is it the opposite, and by such a close line in deliberation each time Mugo was damned, the choice gains weight? Or is it merely fate and luck? Nevertheless, I think that is a good book that has us questioning ourselves alongside the characters on the variety of life.

Gikonyo meanwhile possesses the rage of Homer’s Achilles, the jealousy of Shakespeare’s Othello, and the natural workmanship of Melville’s Queequeg. But for our closest parallel, and someone who also possesses these traits but a little more passionately primally, is Chinua Achebe’s Okonkwo. When we put Thing’o’s Gikonyo next to him, we can easily imagine looking at a grandson and a grandfather, and both the Kenyan and the Nigerian books are such a gift to literature, if only for their sheer perspectives of a generational gap in the decades it took white colonialism to settle into Africa. In other words, the psychological lessons we learn from meditating on our relationship with our parents (something that happens necessarily and physically by all of our growth), can be correlated historically with another culture, in order to cross-compare, at the very least, behavioral development. I remember having the thought when first reading Achebe not too long ago that Okonkwo to the author must have most resembled his grandfather or probably greatgrandfather, since it is the mighty Okonkwo’s meek son’s generation who first as adolescents heard of Christianity, and Achebe’s father was an evangelist. Villages differ, but thus by a little comparative analysis, we have opened up the path to draw more connections between two brilliant characters, hopefully to help ourselves notice just a teeny bit more often in our daily lives when we’re being a little mean. At the end of this essay I will furnish a personal example of such a lesson that occurred to me the same night I finished A Grain of Wheat, on my anniversary.

Gikonyo is part of the “Party” of men, mostly made up of childhood friends but not without the approval of the village’s elder men and women, who are trying to convince Mugo to give a speech that will turn the tide of the revolution, and liberate Kenya (13). The liberation does come but from elsewhere, and the village still celebrates, and Mugo still delivers his speech in the rain, which makes five out of the last six books having beautifully depicted rain (and it speaks for the indignant despair of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born that it couldn’t). But Gikonyo is a farm hand and carpenter, who was the one who to serve seven years and come home to his wife, Mumbi (Desdemona’s constancy, Ophelia’s brotherly love), who, when he asks whose child is that, she says, “Karanja’s,” his rival’s. He then vacillates Dostoevsky-style between anger and numbness and madness, and probably in the most unnerving description Gikonyo can imagine them having sex, and the noises, and the moaning. “Kill her and the child…end all misery” (132). But despite a powerful free indirect discourse commanding him to do so, he doesn’t, and instead he ignores her for a while, and even though his mother, who has lived with the girl, tries to set him straight, Gikonyo eventually hits his wife. By the very end of the book (MAJOR SPOILER, my dog wearing a helmet: Ruf! Ruf!)—in fact, the last few lines depend on the reader’s hope for it to happen—Gikonyo and Mumbi resolve their relationship, but not by apology and forgiveness. She visits him in the hospital, and he asks her if she’s returning there tomorrow (he doesn’t apologize), and she at first denies him. He then asks if she’ll tend to the house, and she says,

“No, Gikonyo. People try to rub out things, but they cannot. Things are not so easy. What has passed between us is too much to be passed over in a sentence. We need to talk, to open our hearts to one another, examine them, and then together plan the future we want. But now, I must go, for the child is ill.” (280)

He then immediately asks if she’ll come tomorrow, and she will. But before this resolution, he did hit her, and she left his house and went to her parents, who both said she must be in the wrong, because a woman should “stand by her man.” In a moment of the utmost pity, where Thiong’o’s style perfectly coordinates with the meaning, Mumbi tells her traditional parents, “I’ll not go back to that house. I may be a woman, but even a cowardly b**** fights back when cornered against a wall” (206). This might be a good time to remember how Okonkwo treated his wives, who themselves never rebelled. A Grain of Wheat is replete with character—weft!—and it is as Mumbi says: it takes more than one sentence to open our hearts to one another.

Karanja, desirer of Mumbi and Gikonyo’s rival, is what we in the early twenty-first century America understand as an “uncle Tom.” I will not get into the accuracy of this, because Beecher Stowe is still on my to-read list, but suffice it to say that he is working for the white authority, and he treats his people with disdain, and the people in power with nervous flattery. When the reader first gets to know him, Karanja gets so angry at a black man knocking at his door that someone’s mother’s and sister’s privates are mentioned, and in the same scene he goes to knock on his boss John Thompson’s door, and Thompson says, “Why do you people knock so loud?” (41). Karanja then is sent to deliver a letter to Thompson’s wife, whom he fantasizes about, and, although she flirts with him, he shudders before her nervously. He also hopes, Karanja, that someone sees them together, so a rumor could spread. He also delivers, Karanja, letters to a Dr. Lund, another woman near the center of colonial operations, for whom he sometimes is sent on missions to buy her dog food. At the center of A Grain of Wheat, however, is what happened when Karanja was young. He and Gikonyo raced for Mumbi’s love, and although Karanja sprinted ahead and ran, he thought the other two must be lingering behind and doing something, and they in fact were making love. This race comes back at the end of the story, when the young men grown up, for the sake of celebrating the festival, decide to race again, and Thiong’o moves between each racer and their sprinting mind, as they recall what they’ve become, and the choices they made in the course of their lives to get there. Karanja’s every thought is still on Mumbi. After Gikonyo was sent to the concentration camp, Karanja wooed her for years, and, as mentioned above, he forged a document that announced Gikonyo was to return, and Mumbi was so beside herself in excitement, that she let Karanja seduce her. So we have the classic jealousy story, with the spin that the man who is working with the powers-at-be has successfully tricked the wife, at least for a moment. Then there is John Thompson and his wife, both of whom I mentioned, but I didn’t mention that he decided to pursue positions in power in Africa because he was scholarly inspired to enlighten the ways of thought on the African peoples, and that his wife several times had sex with one of his white coworkers. And so by a mere inclusion of a minor character, Thiong’o shows how the manifold threads of a love like Gikonyo’s and Mumbi’s overweave love triangles clouded by race, power, and sex.

If A Grain of Wheat is part of a large bushel of rich African culture and literary worth, then this essay is the shimmer of that one single grain being poured in the sunlight. I want to mention a few other character insights and cute minor takeaways before I end on the story of how the psychological depth of Karanja (the most pitiful insofar as he is pathetic) helped prevent me blundering the night of my anniversary with my wife.

Two more characters. There is General. R. who in the final race reminisces on defending his mother when she was being beaten by his father. The mother struck General R. in return, and said that he should never rebel against his father, and he was changed. Then there is Kihika, Mumbi’s brother and the Mercutio who died getting the better of the opposing side. The following flashback gives A Grain of Wheat its coming-of-age sheen: the future violent rebel challenges a teacher in the classroom by saying that white people make up rumors about the Bible discussing female circumcision, and when the teacher opens the Bible, to I Corinthians 18 “[he] triumphantly started reading it loudly, and only after a couple of sentences did he realize the mistake he had made. Not only was there no mention of women, but circumcision of the flesh was not even specifically condemned” (100). The excitement of the boys at their teacher being thwarted culminates in a suspenseful school assembly (always a welcome scene) that we have also seen in Dead Poets Society (1989) or School Ties (1992) or Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The teacher calls for Kihika to be whipped. But when the teacher calls his name and for him to come forward, the future violent rebel runs home, and although his father advises him to go to another school, the son replies he wants to work on the land, but then he goes on to spend most of his time learning to read and write, and attending political meetings. I feel I could not leave this character out, especially with how prevalent that human trait is to want to win the argument, or have the last word. Everyone exhibits this characteristic to some extent. How else would you respond, reader, if someone beautiful told you “about the American War of Independence and how Abraham Lincoln had been executed by the British for leading the black folk in America into a revolt” (124)?

Now in clear and pleasant terms I introduce the personal element of this character analysis, the subjective input, or the merest observable effects on my life A Grain of Wheat has had. In addition to scoliosis I have ectopic atrial rhythm, which is an irregular heartbeat, mostly harmless, likely the result of me pumping that blood, baby. Seriously though: I went to the doctor a few years ago in 2024 for an itchy butt—I had it on and off for a few years—and my general physician after doing the standard once-a-year EKG said I’m suffering a mild heart attack (at 30 years old). She suggested I go to the ER and I was hesitant, but the nurse said listen to the doctor honey and I did. I spent the next four hours in the ER until a handsome doctor said, “You ready to get out of here? Alright give me a minute.” He told me then what I was suffering, and that I probably had COVID quite recently, and put me in touch with a cardiac specialist, who went on to say yeah I’m pretty dang good to go. But two other shorter times in my life I’ve had these chest pressures, and it’s usually the result of me overworking. A black urgent care doctor had to tell me, “Hey man, you’ve written a few books already. Take it easy.” The symptoms usually compound in me worrying about my heart and subside when I remember to relax. Hence why the following three quotes spoke to me:

“Yes…I gave myself, heart and body, to work,” Gikonyo said (141).

“His heart’s palpitations frightened him” (141).

[Mumbi:] “I don’t mean ordinary dreams at night when you are asleep. It is when you are young in a clear day and you look into the future and you see great things. Your heart beats inside because you want the days to come quickly (155).”

And I don’t remember where the last one is, but I think both Gikonyo’s mother and Mumbi tell him he has to listen to his heart to solve the problem.

Now I want to share the story of my recent anniversary, where after finishing A Grain of Wheat, something happened on our way to the restaurant. I was driving and my wife was giving me directions. She said she had it wrong, and that I should make a U-turn. I said, “You want me to make a U-turn? Really?” She said, “Yeah, you can. Or, you could have,” and I realized she was talking about a U-turn immediately where I was—which was feasible—instead of a U-turn at the soon-to-be red light, where there was no space. So I said, “Oh! Like this,” and I U-turned, and she laughed, said yeah, and laughed again and I could sense I did good, and I felt manly. However, immediately following my feeling of success, for some reason I thought about what my brother-in-law did a few weeks ago when we went to people-watch the ski lifts. I hadn’t thought about it since it happened—I must stress how sudden the thought appeared—but in that very moment after the U-turn and feeling powerful, I wanted to mention to his sister that, when we split into two groups, he told me he didn’t want to leave the car if it meant walking a little too far. But I did not tell her this, and just a few hours before this U-turn, I happened to read in A Grain of Wheat, of Karanja: “Later, this consciousness of power, this ability to dispose of human life by merely pulling a trigger, so obsessed him that it became a need” (260).

I originally wanted to end the essay on this U-turn note a little after it happened, but then the next day I was lucky enough to go to my grandmother’s house, where A Grain of Wheat also refreshed my perspective. My half-black half-Spanish Uncle Bob didn’t order anything at Jack in the Box when Ana and him picked me up from the dentist’s, and Bob lamented my grandmother being a little too controlling, and when we returned to the house, Ana studied in my sister’s old room, and I watched a few videos with Bob, and we split the curly fries I ordered, and I got a bowl for him, and I also got a banana, and after I finished my fries and started eating my banana, as we were watching an A.I. video on the Vegas tourism population declining, I begin in my mind to question the validity of the video, and as soon as I guess that he’s uncomfortable not eating with his tray, and having to reach over to dip into ranch, he says in a disgusted voice, “Man, you’re eating a banana while I’m eating fries. I can’t.”

And downstairs a little later my grandma told him to come into the garage and he said, “Let me get my slippers,” and I walked outside with just socks to help bring a few bags in, and Grandma and I came back with all the bags and there were none for Bob, who didn’t have to come outside after all. He grunted a little, muttered to himself, and I gave him attention until he said, “Did you need me, Mom?” and she told him that, “You know what, yesterday when I told you the pin for the ATM, I was wrong.” And it took her a good half a minute to get that out, and she didn’t apologize, and he just kind of indignantly nodded and shook his head at the same time and turned around fast but then back, and I asked him how it made him feel, and he couldn’t quite say anything, and I asked my grandma how it made her feel, but then she launched into her doctor’s appointment, and how she has to go back to the test center to fetch her results tomorrow, and then the next day back to the place she was at today, because she was supposed to bring the test results in to be read. Bob is halfway to the stairs at this point, and then he’s slowly making his way up, staying in the conversation, but wanting to go. I try to offer some closure but my grandma keeps talking, and I mean we are waiting for cancer results, so like…? and then Bob is literally leaning away from halfway-up-the-stairwell, and I really want to offer him closure, and then I see one of his feet is leaning down like a dancer’s, and I laugh and say, “I can’t. I’m sorry. We’re holding Bob so badly right now. You wanna go to your room?” and he mutters something and goes to his room. Sometimes he’ll play cards with us (my first time in a few years with grandma and other uncle and wife), but on this same night, he would just come down now and then and throw in a petty judgmental gibe at someone. But my uncle and I did have a good few laughs in the car punning on barrio and b/o, and a car’s engine sounding like a fart.

And after Bob went upstairs, I cut an orange up for Ana to tell her my grandma was here, and after I passed my grandma and was halfway up the stairs myself, the last thing she said in that first conversation was, “Mmm, that orange smell!”

Dear reader, you will have to judge whether what Oscar Wilde said is true that it’s so boring to hear someone talk about anyone but themselves. Either way, I think my fulfillment of this essay has been the remembrance of character’s “infinite variety,” a compliment Shakespeare reserved for Cleopatra, one of his most brilliant characters, and the one most like my wife.

WORKS CITED:

Armah, Ayi Kwei. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born.

Dead Poets Society (1989)

Dostoevsky, Fyodor…

Homer, The Iliad.

Joyce, James. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. A Grain of Wheat.

School Ties (1992)

Shakespeare, William. Antony & Cleopatra.

–. Hamlet.

–. Othello.

Wilde, Oscar…

How might you rage when your homeland is invaded, the majority of your countrymen turn to corruption, and both your wife and mother-in-law fawn over your most dreaded high school classmate, whom, because of the money he has sold himself into, they claim to be a better man?

Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born is a Kafkaesque story but grounded in the stark, palpable world of Ghana, where, after following the trip of the nameless protagonist train clerk through the monotony of class struggle, and the literal shit he so often finds himself surrounded by, whether in the work toilet or in his neighborhood’s latrine, the reader has to wonder: there must exist some individuals whom fate hounds so viciously, that no matter how much we propound free will, life to them, is darkness. Yet Armah avoids these black and white generalizations. He writes with Seneca’s gravitas and D.H. Lawrence’s passionate attention, successfully weaving a detailed narrative replete with fiery inward sermons on loss, dejection, and the remnants of hope.

Halfway through the book, in chapter six, the longest chapter at a little over two-dozen pages, the narration suddenly shifts to first-person, granting Armah full range to sustain the myriad of thoughts and memories that weigh on our souls every waking moment, whether we’re carving arguments trying to make sense of the world, or recalling the fading past likewise not to lose our mind. Up until this point we have been following the nameless protagonist as he has been spat on by an angry bus driver, mocked by a scammer whose bribe he refused, told by his wife that he is the chichidodo bird who “hates excrement with all its soul, but only feeds on maggots, which, you know the maggots grow best inside the lavatory,” and has confirmed with his teacher that not even Seneca’s lifestyle has the least grip on tranquility (45). After this initial turmoil, chapter six is a waterfall of confession, as if the coming-of-age catharsis in Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight (2016) or even Meirelles and Lund’s City of God (2002) was compacted into a few pages, wherein we experience the Ghanian story of a teen who 1) with all the other teens struggles for employment and the haziness of the future 2) who falls in love 3) whose love on the beach at night teaches him and his best friend the self-revealing nature of cannabis and 4) whose best friend takes his own life. When the reader is hit with such perspective-changing pity in the middle of the story, that pity is transferred to the overarching story, and, at least for me and my attention-deficit mind, I was compelled to finish the book in one more sitting, to see if the train clerk makes it through money’s corruption. In a not-too-dissimilar way, halfway through Don Quixote, the twenty-page story of Lothario the “curious cuckold” reinforces the reader’s sympathy for the windmill knight’s pathetic flaw, his dependence on imagination. But behold with what sweeping pathos Armah begins this midway point chapter, of which I would beg pardon for quoting extendedly, if it was not necessary to take it all in at once, this passage which by itself nearly enters Armah into the canon, and if I didn’t have in mind analyzing its manifold significance line by line:

Why do we waste so much time with sorrow and pity for ourselves? It is true now that we are men, but not so long ago we were helpless messes of soft flesh and unformed bone squeezing through bursting motherholes, trailing dung and exhausted blood. We could not ask then why it was necessary for us also to grow. So why now should we be shaking our head and wondering bitterly why there are children together with the old, why time does not stop when we ourselves have come to stations where we would like to rest? It is so like a child, to wish all movement to cease.

And yet the wondering and the shaking and the vomiting horror is not all from the inward sickness of the individual soul. Here we have had a kind of movement that should make even good stomachs go sick. What is painful to the thinking mind is not the movement itself, but the dizzying speed of it. It is that which has been horrible. Unnatural, I would have said, had I not stopped myself with asking, unnatural according to what kind of nature? Each movement and each growth, each such thing brings with itself its own nature to frustrate our future judgment. Now, whenever I am able to look past the beauty of the first days, the days of birth, I can see growth. I tell myself that is the way it should be. There is nothing that should break the heart in the progressive movement away from the beauty of the first days. I see growth, that is all I see within my mind. When I can only see, when there is nothing I can feel, I am not troubled. But always these unwanted feelings will come in the end and disturb the tired mind with thoughts that will not go away. How horribly rapid everything has been, from the days when men were not ashamed to talk of souls and of suffering and of hope, to these low days of smiles that will never again be sly enough to hide the knowledge of betrayal and deceit. There is something of an irresistible horror in such quick decay (62)

My italics highlight especially those moments where Armah’s syntax comes as close as it can to being disjointed without being stilted. The effect is a cascading feeling of power, surge after surge of eternal youth raging beyond morality, as if the son of Nature herself is coming to terms with having to be born. The D.H. Lawrence connection is clear from the first question:

I never saw a wild thing

sorry for itself.

A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough

without ever having felt sorry for itself. (“Self-Pity”)

But whereas Lawrence’s pithy beauty rings in mankind’s constant need to apologize, “Sorry! Sorry!” in Armah we get the distinction between sorrow and pity. In being critical we must never underestimate close reading, since every word matters, if even only for the hint we get here that the definition of sorrow is pity for ourselves. Then, in the first potential stilt, “It is true now that we are men,” fellow writers trained to cut any unnecessary words could raise quite the defendable qualm with “now that,” but both the style and meaning would suffer without it. We would lose the significance that this is only true now that we are men. Also there is that dactylic ring to “Now that we’re men!” that perhaps, I confess, I hold special to my heart because of the song with the same title from The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie (2004).

Armah’s cry out to the world soon becomes very philosophical, but to call it an entanglement—which at first it appears—would be to forget the baby with the umbilical cord and placenta. Hell, it could be a stillborn and beautiful, given it is located just where it needs to be. The metaphor is fitting, seeing as in Armah’s own raw words at the onset of his argument we should not forget “we were helpless messes of soft flesh and unformed bone squeezing through bursting motherholes, trailing dung and exhausted blood.” What a succession of images, where each adjective adds something new to the real makeup of our lives: that which we are embarrassed to discuss in front of others, in many circles more so than sex, although each of us reserves the utmost daily concern for our stool. But either we joke about it or fling it at others in the form of Rage’s pestering little sibling Disgust. Armah on the other hand jams right after this serious depiction of how we came to be, of just how raw the human experience begins, a row of questions on the root of nostalgia. If we couldn’t ask as children why we must grow, what gives us the right now to complain about time moving too fast? Instead we shake our head—Armah does not lose sight of physicality—and we even have the gall to challenge the idea that there can exist alongside one another youth and old age. In merely restating his argument, I am realizing how subtle a philosophical inquiry he proposes, that rage manifests itself in every judgment whether conscious or not. We have never had the right for things to come to a standstill, and we never will. Right before the little climax, appears the key word stations, echoing images of the protagonist’s job as a train station clerk, of the rewarding monotony he eventually comes to appreciate, even if it doesn’t automatically qualify a happy ending. These are the roles we feel comfortable settling down in, although they are temporal. Armah wastes no time patronizing, and he immediately hits us with the profound thought in staccato: “It is so like a child, to wish all movement to cease.” Even without correlating this momentous truth with the narrator’s (not the protagonist’s!) understood irony that the story is pausing here for Armah to let out his soul, this sentence calls for every faithful cogitator to pause and wonder. Sympathy-wise, we immediately think of the children we know and ourselves as children, and that is enough.

So much for the first paragraph. There remains a full flowering before Armah delves into his coming-of-age predecessor of Moonlight. He goes with “And yet,” which, although Shakespeare’s Cleopatra teaches us to detest it,

I do not like ‘But yet,’ it does allay

The good precedence; fie upon ‘But yet’! (II.V)

and Benjen Stark concurs, “Nothing before but counts,” it is Melville’s Ishmael, who, in the overwhelming sympathy we feel for him and Queequeg and the open water, wins us over to believe that his “and yet,” although a contradiction, is still a proof that trust and beauty and the profound abyss will always win out reason. We already learned in the opening paragraph that reason has a lot to answer for in terms of life and death. The purely rational mind, if there exists such a thing, is going to struggle with what happens next. After Armah again remains physical with “the shaking and the vomiting horror” he not only brings the individual soul into play—the rational mind can follow this much—but the effects of our nostalgic judgments on our stomachs and minds, causing all thought to spiritually swirl. As in the passage, so in life, it has all happened so fast. “It is that which has been horrible.” Armah admits he almost said natural, but in a burst of humanity he makes known his hesitation, or process of discovery, and instead of his style becoming juvenile as a result, it takes on a rhetorical flourish which, since the device only happens once, appears like the soldier calmly unsheathing his sword, prepared for one swift strike. In two dozen words Armah has shifted the argument from the soul to the stomach to the mind—so difficult it is for us to pin down our daily causes—and by grasping after the wisp and realizing the wisp for what it is, seems to confirm the inanity of whoever wants time to stop, and whoever demands life’s answer to come forth: “Each movement and each growth, each such thing brings with itself its own nature to frustrate our future judgment.” Thus immediately following the realization of just how many kinds of nature there are, Armah synthesizes this thought with his argument so far that life goes on independently of reason, and all future judgment is frustrated with its own nature. Philosophers eat your heart out.

From here on, priority is given to first things, and as Donald Revell reminds us in “A Hint to Lucretius,” “First things never die.” For Armah it is the first days, or the days of birth: that old nostalgia bug which only someone cruel or ignorant would squash instead of examine, preserve, or free. Since, as the blinded father Gloucester says before his son:

As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods.

They kill us for their sport. (Lear IV.I)

Whether the first days are a little ladybug or not, we certainly cannot stay within them anymore. For Armah, “whenever [he is] able to look past the beauty of the first days, [he] can see growth.” Soon we get the timeless artist’s confession that “When I can only see, when there is nothing I can feel, I am not troubled” and it is immediately followed with the real world’s “but,” since these feelings always return. Armah then vacillates, as we do when we suffer and compare the past with the future, and, although it makes for sublime poetry to give our all to pure attention, the narrator (again, not the protagonist!) in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born has given his surcharge, and must slip back into reality. In a recognition inseparable from his own shame of the sad fact that pain and time are two masterless lap dogs to which in the end we all must bow, he concludes “There is something of an irresistible horror in such quick decay.” It is a truism to say life moves too fast and time cannot stop, but not so much when we add that we cannot look away.

This style of indignant despair is scattered all throughout Armah’s relatively short novel, in-between the gritty descriptions and silent lamentation that goes on whenever two characters exchange ideas. Most often it is a character’s projection, like “He had looked into the face of the giver, and sure enough, the eyes had in them the restless happiness of power in search of admiration,” or “One always wonders why the sea is not much dirtier than it turns out to be” (2, 112). Sometimes, however, the indignant despair meets pure attention, and “a terrible beauty is born”:

The man sits down, and, feeling now a slight pain at the back of his neck, throws back his head. Small clouds, very white, hold themselves, very far away, against a sky that is a pale, weak blue, and when the man looks down again into the sea the water of it looks green and deep. A sea gull, flying low, makes a single hoarse noise that disappears into the afternoon, and the white bird itself flies off in the direction of the harbor and its inaudible noise, beautiful and light on its wings. (113)

I would be remiss not to mention at the novel’s climax the high-school friend turned politician goes on the run, and the nameless protagonist must help him escape by forcing him not only to enter the extremely dirty latrine which the politician previously refused to enter, but to crawl through the toilet itself, underground, and out through the hole to which it led. The release of every character ever’s pent-up anger can be summed up in this one comic action of “he who avoided shit, ended up by going headfirst into it,” but after the release, the protagonist is quite dazed. After helping him to a boatman who helps them escape, he leaves his political friend by jumping into the water and drifting back to shore. He then washes up on the beach, and sees a vision of the girl he used to love long ago, and the first conscious act he witnesses on the way home is a bus driver bribing his way through a police block, and on the back of the bus is one orange flower decorated with the phrase “The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born.” The protagonist’s final realization walking home is that he is merely returning to “the never-ending knowledge that this aching emptiness would be all that the remainder of his own life could offer him” (183). What prevents this from being a purely pessimistic ending is twofold: he walks “very slowly” home, and, like the halfway passage we analyzed hints at, it is complete immobility or quick decay that haunts us. Yes, there exists those people whom fate ultimately hounds and hounds. As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o writes in A Grain of Wheat, “God helps those who helps themselves, it is said with fingers pointing at a self-made man who has attained wealth and position, forgetting that thousands of others labour and starve, day in, day out, without ever improving their material lot” (67). And this is just the class angle. But in Armah it is never quite made clear that the narrator is the protagonist. The closest hint we get is that they share the same childhood crush, but that by no means disproves that the protagonist, or the train clerk, could be the man who succumbed to indignant despair, while the narrator could be the one who for the purpose of beauty gave into its style, and for his pains in art regained his innocence.

Thus the beautyful ones are born. The beautyful ones are not yet born.

WORKS CITED:

Hillenburg, Stephen (Dir.), The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie (2004)

Jenkins, Barry (Dir.), Moonlight (2016)

Lawrence, D.H, “Self-Pity”

Meirelles, Fernando (Dir.), City of God (2002)

Revell, Donald, “A Hint to Lucretius,” White Campion

Seneca, Letters

Shakespeare, William, Antony & Cleopatra

Shakespeare, William, King Lear

Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ wa, A Grain of Wheat

Yeats, The Second Coming

My biggest critical weakness has always been allusion containment, or the inability to resist the connection. Hardly can I see Pennywise anymore without thinking of the white whale, the relationship between Joel and Ellie in The Last of Us is the relationship between me and my papa, and whenever a character is praised as complex or to die for, I think of Shakespeare’s diverse cast of stars. Even when I pin my argument down in an essay and focus on something important in my life, whether grief or love or how to be a better man, the universal connections still fire away, and I often find myself, like in those conversations with the deepest friends who haven’t seen each other in a while, moving from topic to topic in brilliant, but maybe too bright, flashes. These are the 1.21 gigawatt moments of realization where truth backs truth, resulting in awe.

On the first page of Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, not thinking about the approach at all, I stumbled across a method for this current essay that allows me to relate what I like about a book scientifically and artfully, without losing my grip. Since I was reading my own copy and not the library’s, I was reading with a pencil in hand, and so annotating. My annotation method has gotten more taciturn over the years, but I still cannot resist drawing marginal lines and stars that might remind a later, lazier, latent me of beautiful moments. On this reading however an older habit of mine resurfaced, and in the margins next to a cute moment, I wrote the letter S. You see, back in the day and mostly to work my way through Kant and Proust, I developed basic little keys that either helped me reach the book’s end, or referred to my specialized areas of research, which I could then write about for a grad school seminar. S meant style, M meaning, N Nietzsche, Sch Schopenhauer, D definition, K key, T theme, R recap. The system was liable to change from book to book, and I must stress that I didn’t do this too often, and only a dozen or so times have my acronyms come in handy when composing an essay. But, for some reason, on the first page of Bleeding Edge, nay, first paragraph I marked an S. On the bottom of the page I marked a D, which later turned out to be an A, and on the next page I marked a C, and somewhere around this time I realized so luckily that my next essay could focus on the “ABCs of Criticism,” zooming in on all the aspects of literature that make me exult it, while also bridling my tendency to always bring to the forefront the creatures and loved ones that give me reason to live. Bleeding Edge is the perfect candidate for this sudden experiment, for not only was I able to identify 20 letters of the critical alphabet in the first fifty pages, but because Pynchon’s spring of 2001 novel is so loaded with allusion and meaning that it’s a ripe battleground for testing my restraint. Look at it this way: there are so many currents in this book, so many themes to be handled, that if I could just provide the skeleton of how exemplary a work of art it is, then I, or someone else, could flesh out what it has to say on parenting, terrorism, paranoia, and, well, that lovely idea that everything is connected.

It is by no means a perfect system, these ABCs I’m going to recite, and I even hesitate to call it a system. Mainly I want to highlight what makes reading so rewarding, and perhaps set a few things straight so that any of my following essays, instead of dawdling or rewinding, can pursue the truth and fire away at allusion, now that the nets and hooks are in order. And so, none of the letters below should be taken as the end-all be-all of criticism, rather they are each cute tools by which we can appreciate art. In fact, up until the end of the essay, I changed a half a dozen of the letters, sometimes because they were weaker versions of a stronger critical element, and sometimes because I had noticed an element was outright missing. Lastly I might add that I have not alphabetized the list, rather each critical element appears in the essay as it appeared to me while I read.

Without further ado then, the ABCs of criticism:

S for Style

Proof (1): It’s the first day of spring 2001, and Maxine Tarnow, though some still have her in the system as Loeffler, is walking her boys to school. Yes maybe they’re past the age where they need an escort, maybe Maxine doesn’t want to let go just yet, it’s only a couple blocks. It’s on her way to work, she enjoys it, so?

In the realm of criticism, style is king. We can no sooner separate style from substance or meaning than we can separate the appearance from the thing in itself. Try describing profoundly what something is without describing how it is, or how it looks. You can’t, or if you can, you do it in style. Hence the beauty of style: if we don’t know what someone means, we can at least explain how the author goes about getting that meaning across, and, by exploring the style, we unlock new aspects of meaning, which in turn cast light on the style, making art revolutionarily clearer.

Since, frankly, Thomas Pynchon is groovy, entire books have been written on his style. For our purposes here, examine the opening paragraph of Bleeding Edge and notice the foreboding accessibility. Examine the first five words! “The first day of spring 2001,” calls forth not only the atrocity of 9/11 but also Chaucer’s “Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote,” or if you prefer, “April is the cruelest month, breeding…” but even without bringing in these outside authors, who among us can honestly say they’ve thought about the spring preceding 9/11? This is meaningful, surely, but that Pynchon starts the book with these words in this order: that is style, baby. In the second sentence we get the casual “Yes maybe…” as if the narrator is actually conversing with us. In fact, like in our lives, there are two narrators, Maxine and the omniscient. Throughout the book only anything Maxine sees is revealed, and occasionally as life is unfolded to her, she has something to say, like, “It’s on her way to work, she enjoys it, so?” Sometimes we process the world in third-person, and sometimes we have something to say.

To cap the style on this opening paragraph, let’s lean on meaning. What does it mean for us to put two large truths next to one another: the impending national atrocity, and our inability as parents to let our children go?

A for Attention (formerly description)

Description is attention getting bored. Probably more of a tool for the artist than the critic, attention nevertheless is the dead giveaway of good art. If you pay attention, style will follow. Tell us, artist, how things are: how you see them, sense them, hear them, feel them, and nothing else. Follow attention, praise attention. For further reading on this, please consult my teacher Donald Revell’s lovely guide, The Art of Attention. I almost called him master but my current master is a fourteen-year-old pomeranian who barks at 8am to let her outside to bark at others.

Proof (7): “‘But,’ eyes wide as fairground lollipops, ‘it worked for Crazy Eddie.’”

Proof II (101) [and also the fourth book in a row proven good by how it describes the rain]: “it’s just starting to rain…sometimes she can’t resist, she needs to be out in the street. What might only be a simple point on the workday cycle, a reconvergence of what the day scattered as Sappho said someplace back in some college course, Maxine forgets, becomes a million pedestrian dramas, each one charged with mystery, more intense than high-barometer daylight can ever allow. Everything changes. There’s that clean, rained-on smell. The traffic noise gets liquefied. Reflections from the street into the windows of city buses fill the bus interiors with unreadable 3-D images, as surface unaccountably transforms to volume. Average pushy Manhattan schmucks crowding the sidewalks also pick up some depth, some purpose—they smile, they slow down…”

C for Comedy

More than just being funny, comedy is hope. In every good joke there lies something indomitably lofty, or else we wouldn’t heartily laugh and extend our life span.

Proof (2): “The school [Kugelblitz] is named for an early psychoanalyst who was expelled from Freud’s inner circle because of a recapitulation theory he’d worked out. It seemed to him obvious that the human life span runs through the varieties of mental disorder as understood in his day—the solipsism of infancy, the sexual hysterias of adolescence and entry-level adulthood, the paranoia of middle age, the dementia of late life…all working up to death, which at last turns out to be ‘sanity.’” … “‘Great time to be finding that out!’ Freud flicking cigar ash at Kugelbiltz…”

D for Dialogue

Oboy. I don’t know where to begin with my fascination of how we communicate with one another. I also don’t know why I’m feeling the strongest hesitation so far in our dissection. A few years ago over a Christmas break I was halfway through Shakespeare’s Coriolanus when I suddenly felt I wanted to write the story of that lovable curmudgeon Arthur Schopenhauer. I scooched my chair to my computer (I remember receiving the idea leaned forward, halfway across the room, a rare but not impossible position for me), and within two weeks I finished the tragedy. Then, before the next two weeks were over, I had also finished a boner comedy starring Plato and Aristotle chasing babes and bros around Athens. (A note to authors: I can’t quite remember when I started the second work—but I do remember when I was struck by the idea of the first.) As of writing this essay now three years later, I have just spent the last month writing a play called Play Achilles, where the stars of the Trojan war, turns out, have a lot of free time on their hands, which results, for the most part, in comedy. But I mention this all because the speed at which the pure dialogue comes to me speaks for its strong effect. It is less of a wonder Plato wrote so much. He must have been a quick scriber, I venture. At any rate, to write what is said is a purer art than to write what we see. I must stress this is quite an important discovery, and not to be taken lightly. What I see and what you see are vastly different. What I hear and you hear too, are vastly different. But r-o-s-e is r-o-s-e, and to record that word out of someone’s mouth, is a purer form than for any author to describe either how the flower is seen or felt, or even the flower itself.

Thomas Pynchon successfully records how the brilliant casts of characters that make up our third-millennia world speak to one another—whether high or low, both fast and slow, in good moods and bad—how, well, we speak to one another. The effect of dialogue on the human mind is quite momentous, and it almost singlehandedly qualifies literature as a science. Harold Bloom puts it best when he explains the effect of Shakespeare: he helps us overhear ourselves.

Behold Pynchon in a meta dialogue dance:

‘Um, no, I meant…’ Horst is almost cute when he fidgets. ‘You never forgave me for not learning how to dance, right?’

‘Horst, I am supposed to be what, here, tiptoeing around your regrets? If you like, I can teach you a couple of real simple steps right now, would that help?’

‘Long as I don’t have to swing my hips, a man’s got to draw the line someplace.’

She roots through the CD collection, pops on a disc. ‘OK. This is merengue, real simple, all you have to do is stand there like a silo, if you feel like moving a foot now and then, why so much the better.’

The kids look in after a while and find them in a formal clinch, slow-dancing to every other beat of ‘Copacabana.’

‘Vice-principal’s office, you two.’

‘Yeah, on the double.’ (300).

T for Trust

I confessed to Ana a few weeks ago that I try to read authors I don’t have to worry about disagreeing with, and expectedly, I got called out. In response to having to challenge ourselves and critically think, I say why not reserve our short time for reading those authors whose profound love of the truth, whose infinite character, also helps us discern bullshit.

See all the other critical elements for why we can trust Thomas Pynchon. Perhaps most striking and accessible, K for knowledge.

W for Words

This section more than any other overlaps with every other section, since we’re dealing words. Pynchon is the vocabulary heavyweight alongside Nabokov and Joyce, and he can pick flowers with them too.

Proof (4): “irrational exuberance.”

Proof (4): “kvell.” [later:] “kvetch…” “koan…”

Proof (9): “attitude…access issues.”

Proof (14): “‘Jujubes,’ they’re informed, ‘Generic Undiagnosed James Bond Syndrome…’”

Proof (20): “Where, in this chilled chaos, is the Pinot E-Grigio?”
Proof (71): “entreprenerds.”

Proof (73): “undead signifiers.”

Proof (255): “Polyvinyl chloride, something in bright red perhaps, though not inappropriate, is somehow absent from the inventory. Jeans are out of the question also. At length, deep in, at the event horizon of closet oblivion, she notices a chic cocktail-hour suit in a subdued aubergine shade, discovered long ago at the Galeries Lafayette going-out-of-business sale and kept for reasons that probably don’t include nostalgia.”

V for Violence

Without glorification. No reward, no applause for violence.

We are in a lot of subtle ways violent. Violence happens on a worldwide scale and we discuss it daily, and in our homes we like violence. In Bleeding Edge on the Saturday cartoon channel, the superhero Disrespect murmurs, “‘Suckers beginnin to get me upset,’ as armed personnel carriers and helicopters converge on his person.” Pynchon, certainly conscious of language and its wideranging effect, uses the slang sucker here, which, as standup comedian Nate Bargatze reminds us, used to be a really bad word in the 80s. Still is, like fire and sick. To really see the effect of suck on people, try saying no mames at several Mexican parties. But the violent effect of language I’ve covered enough in my books—Sleeping at the Light’s “Language Check,” Taking Away from Tonight’s “Random Essay,” and currently a working title that focuses on the differences between French and English language that in the seemingly slightest ways change each of these country’s general outlooks. Pynchon meanwhile uses the old Chaucerian method: show life how it is, let the truth come to light. To say more that violence in media has an effect on the growing mind paints me the preacher. Oh, if my twenty-one year old seething self could hear me now.

While we’re on violence, let’s take a look at video games, this schism of art to which even Pynchon the luddite still holds a candle in respect: the most critical video game moment in Bleeding Edge, besides the protagonist’s son referring to Hideo Kojima as God, or the kid’s grandfather on page 420 revealing to her daughter that in Metal Gear Solid Snake is rescuing the chief of DARPA, the internet’s original name when it was a cold war precaution to preserve the memory of the United States, besides these moments and a few girls playing Darkeden in a noraebang (karaoke room) and Maxine wondering if Psyduck is Jewish, Japanese yes, but also Jewish, my favorite video game moment comes halfway through the book when the protagonist’s husband leaves his two sons in a Midwestern arcade to play Time Crisis 2. In the rather empty arcade they are eventually confronted by two midwestern natives who, after some awkward tension, end up teaching them about the game Hydro Thunder. Soon in a faithful recreation the boys are “blasting souped-up powerboats through a postapocalyptic New York half underwater here, suffocating in mist, underlit, familiar landmarks picturesquely distressed. The Statue of Liberty wearing a crown of seaweed. The World Trade Center leaning at a dangerous angle. The lights of Times Square gone dark in great irregular patches, perhaps from recent urban warfare in the neighborhood. Intact buildings are draped in black scaffold netting all the way to the waterline. Ziggy is in the Armed Response, and Otis has the helm of the Tinytanic, a miniature version of the famous doomed ocean liner. [The other boys] have vanished, as if they were shills not quite of this earth, whose function in the realworld was to steer Ziggy and Otis into the ruinous waterscapes of what might lie in wait for their home city, as if powerboat skills will be necessary for Big Apple disasters to come, including but not limited to global warming.” Then, immediately, ‘So Mom, we were thinking, maybe we could move to someplace less at risk? Murray Hill? Riverdale?’ ‘Well…we’re up six floors…’

N for Names

Proof: Joel Wiener, Gabriel Ice, Spud Loiterman, Maxine Tarnow, Stu Gotz.

H for Historical

Thomas Pynchon writes historical fiction.

Proof (244): “From what Maxine can gather, Shawn’s therapist, Leopoldo, is a Lacanian shrink who was forced to give up a decent practice in Buenos Aires a few years ago, due in no small part to neoliberal meddling in the economy of his country. The hyperinflation under Alfonsín, the massive layoffs of the Menem-Cavallo era, plus the regimes’ obedient arrangements with the IMF, must have seemed like the Law of the Father run amok…”

Proof II (170): “Same as Nicaragua, El Salvador, Ronald Reagan and his people, Schachtmanite goons like Elliot Abrams, turning Central America into a slaughterhouse all to play out their little anti-Communist fantasies. Guatemala by then had fallen under the control of a mass murderer and a particular buddy of Reagan named Ríos Montt, who as usual wiped off his bloody hands on the baby Jesus like so many of these charmers do.”

Proof III (95): [as Horst takes the boys to his new office at the World Trade Center], “and they eat lunch atWindows on the World, which has a dress code, so the boys wear jackets and ties. ‘Like going to Collegiate,’ Ziggy mutters. There happens to be a more-than-moderate wind blowing that day, making the tower sway back and forth in five-, what feel like ten-foot excursions. On days of storm, according to Horst’s co-tenant Jake Pimento, it’s like being in the crow’s nest of a very tall ship, allowing you to look down at helicopters and private planes and neighboring high-rises. ‘Seems kind of flimsy up here,’ to Ziggy. ‘Nah,’ says Jake, ‘built like a battleship.’

P for Pastoral

Bleeding Edge itself is not a pastoral, but there are pastorals within it: safe stories that usually involve conscious animals like in New York’s case a lot of birds and mice who help the shepherds see the humor in things. When Maxine is at her lowest, and I mean really down on her luck, wondering how she could’ve gotten herself in a position so violated, a mouse appears on the floor, and provides allegorical escape. In Gravity’s Rainbow it’s the candies from the old lady and the hot air balloon trip and even Pirate’s bananas. In Mason & Dixon, the wheel of cheese rolling.

Pynchon, like the best authors, includes in his work a critique and most apt summary better than any critic could ever furnish. Maxine is describing how Christmas feels to her a problematic pastoral, reminiscent of one of Shakespeare’s finest comedies, which for the most part is happy, but for at least one person is very sad.

Proof (395): “The innocent are guilty, the guilty are beyond hope, everything’s on its head, it’s a Twelfth Night of late-capitalist contradiction, and not especially relaxing.”

B for Bleeding and E for Edge

We have long been living the cutting edge, this is now the bleeding edge. Pynchon’s style bleeds too, hence the oozing culture, whether it’s Japanese, Arabic, American, or the literal thousands of other cultures and subcultures done justice in this book. On the surface Pynchon is mocked by skimmers as the foremost pop-culture reference maker and certified yuckster, but this is because we’re not familiar with someone both keen and benevolent—a most rare combo! And as culture bleeds, and style, of course the material world around us does too. As David Foster Wallace in Infinite Jest had the sage who could stand on a chair and lift it from the floor say: never underestimate the object.

Proof (205): “After a couple of token laps, Maxine and Conkling pretend to head for their respective locker rooms, but meet up again, sneak into a staff-only stairwell, presently they’re underneath the pool, moving flip-flopped and semiclad through the shadows and mysteries of the unnumbered thirteenth floor, which belongs to a disaster always about to happen, a buffer space constantly under the threat of inundation from above if the pool—concrete, state of the art back then, grandfathered exempt from what today would be a number of code violations—should God forbid ever spring a leak. For now it’s the outward and structural form of a secret history of payoffs to contractors and inspectors and signers of permits, dishonest stewards long gone who expected the deluge after them to take place well after any statue of limitations has run. Creaking underframe, early-20th-century trusswork and bracing. A range of animal life in which mice could be the least of one’s worries.”

This might be a good time in the essay for a reminder that none of these letters are set in stone, and some of them are cheeky stretches. By edge I initially meant that uneasy feeling, actually worrying for the people in the story, the thrill of sympathy. Near the end of the story the bleeding edge turns out to be a development phase that we’re still in, and Reg Despard recording the POV of a semi-truck in the deep snow somewhere way north (Bozeman is one guess) confesses that the messages from here on out are going to get more intermittent (437-438). There’s something about this we can’t quite understand, and Maxine tries to fast forward the tape for more, but that is it.

Z for Zeitgeist

Oh the spirit of the times, or popular culture, not even Thoreau could have done without seeing.

Proof: “‘Oops, I did it again, as Britney always sez’” (7), or a mug that reads I BELIEVE YOU HAVE MY STAPLER (77), or graphics in a game that “make Final Fantasy X, anyway, look like an Etch a Sketch” (75), or the idea that everytime you see your avatar online, you’re reincarnate (70), or ‘Yes but tell me Heidi, what happened to your obsession with Arnold Vosloo from The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, or “people are wandering around in and out of this place, sounds of jollification and a music track including Motor City pscyhobilly Elvis Hitler, at the moment singing the Green Acres theme to the tune of “Purple Haze” and providing Maxine an unmeasured moment of nostalgia so unlikely that she begins to feel targeted personally” (177).

Pynchon knows the limit he pushes. At a party a few days before the towers go down, Maxine laments “what passes for nostalgia in a time of widespread Attention Deficit Disorder” (302). On this we all seem to be in denial.

F for Frick, I Don’t Know. Faust? Finesse?

I’m struggling on this one, boys and girls. I want to say Faust because not only is Pynchon all-encompassingly knowledgeable while being taken aloft by woman, but Maxine seems to be Faust inverted, and we owe ourselves as critical thinkers to ask: could Faust have solved the case of the mysterious money-movings around the dotcombubble, or who short-sold the two airlines involved in 9/11? And although she doesn’t know everything, she’s damned perceptive and full of heart, so much so that we wouldn’t want to navigate 2001 and 2002 with any other hero. As for finesse, Pynchon can rap too, and when he does, he somehow manages to simultaneously condense his entire oeuvre into a verse, and pay homage to his favorite type of story (282-283):

“Tryin to do Tupac and Biggie thangs

With red velvet Chairman Mao piggy banks,

like Screamin Jay in Hong Kong

jumpin to wrong conclusions

old-movie confusions, yo who be dat

Scandinavian brand of Azian

ya dig wid some Sigrid be

the daughter of Kublai Khan

Warner Oland, Charlie Chan, General Yan,

bitter tea, for her stupidity pullin rank

Bette Davis shanked by Gale Sondegaard

like they as on the yard

or down in some forgotten cell

far, far from the corner of

Mott and Pell—

I for Invisibility

Joyce’s Stephen Daedalus sang in the beginning of Ulysses, “I am the boy that can enjoy invisibility.” Bleeding Edge’s first chapter ends, “‘Well, Reg. Do get your ass on in here. Long time.’” In the white space below the reader fills in, “No see,” which rings like an overture to the book’s resounding theme and Pynchon’s favorite, and Shakespeare’s too: love over paranoia.

K for Knowledge

My paternal grandfather used to express to me that one of his favorite parts about reading a book was when he learned something specific from it—something like what we learn in that TV show “How It’s Made,” how something functions or is made to function under a certain circumstance—insider, or rare knowledge. I myself fancy knowledge of people and how humans interact with one another—prudence nuggets, if you will. For the proofs here, I’ve combined both types.

Proof (9): “‘It’s this company I’ve been shooting a documentary about?’ I keep running into…’ One of those funny looks Maxine by now knows better than to ignore.’”

Proof (11): “‘That’s…it? Reg, in my vast experience, embezzlers don’t need shooting at very often. Some public humiliation usually does the trick.’”

Proof (14): “‘...Focused? you have no idea—sometime in the mid-eighties, she actually changed her name to Krystle. A less understanding husband might call this unnatural.’”

Proof (20): “The past, hey no shit, it’s an open invitation to wine abuse.”

Proof (51) [and I too hated Times Square when I went to New York, and I didn’t hate much else there]: “[Maxine] ends up in Times Square, which for a few years now she has made a conscious effort not to go near if she can help it. The sleazy old Deuce she remembers from her less responsible youth is so no more, Giuliani and his developer friends and the forces of suburban righteousness have swept the place Disneyfied and sterile—the melancholy bars, the cholesterol and fat dispensaries and porno theaters have been torn down or renovated, the unkempt and unhoused and unspoken-for have been pushed out, no more dope dealers, no more pimps or three-card monte artists, not even kids playing hooky at the old pinball arcades—all gone. Maxine can’t avoid feeling nauseous at the possibility of some stupefied consensus about what life is to be, taking over this whole city without mercy, a tightening Noose of Horror, multiplexes and malls and big-box stores it only makes sense to shop at if you have a car and a driveway and a garage next to a house out in the burbs. Aahh! They have landed, they are among us, and it helps them no end that the mayor, with roots in the outer boroughs and beyond, is one of them.”

Proof (375): “A silence she has to categorize as amused. ‘They don’t say KGB anymore, they say FSB, they say SVU. Since Putin, KGB means old guys in government.”

G for God

We gotta mention him a few times, don’t we?

Proof (10): “Just like to know who I’m working for. I haven’t sold my soul yet—well, maybe a couple bars of rhythm and blues here and there, but…”

M for Metaphor

The answer to why the whale is so white is Gravity’s Rainbow. As for simile, take this one:

Proof (441): The woman’s smile, in this bright noisy flow of city indifference, comes like a beer on the house in a bar where nobody knows you.”

X for X-factor

y = f(x). According to Spengler, this is how the modern or Faustian man processes the world. I like Pynchon’s rendition, and what he has his main character say several times throughout Bleeding Edge, “What, then, the fuck is going on?” Most poignantly she says it a few days after 11 September, when three schoolgirls she usually sees at a bus stop appear to be old men who, “worse, were looking at her with a queer knowledgeable intensity, focusing personally on her, sinister in the dimmed morning air” (336). I really want to know what it means to see something like this in the fallout of such a catastrophic event. I want to know what Maxine’s friend means when she laments the state of the nation not improving after 9/11: “[we’ve always been] living on borrowed time. Getting away cheap. Never caring about who’s paying for it, who’s starving somewhere else all jammed together so we can have cheap food, a house, a yard in the burbs…planetwide, more every day, the payback keeps gathering. And meantime the only help we get from the media is boo hoo the innocent dead. Boo fuckin hoo. You know what? All the dead are innocent. There’s no uninnocent dead.’ After a while… ‘You’re not going to explain that, or…’ ‘Course not, it’s a koan.’

Rereading is highly encouraged.

O for Obsession

Obsession is pregnant with violence. Some are obsessed with 9/11. Why, three times in my life, was I taken in by the urge to collect Pokemon cards? Not to mention the 5,000 hours confirmed, likely 7,000 hours I’ve put into the collective Pokemon video game series?

Proof (14): “And my dream is to become the Bill Gross of duck stamps.”

J for Judaism

What can I say, I’m a sucker for the Hebrews from Adam to Solomon to Spinoza to Larry David to Maxine Tarnow. Think critically.

Y for Youth

Pynchon’s works teem with life. If it’s difficult to write for all time and the present time, it’s also difficult to write for a twenty-year-old and a seventy-six-year old (his age at Bleeding Edge’s publication), especially in the same book. It was Goethe who said that what we write at twenty is best enjoyed by twenty-year-olds, and so on (Conversations with Eckermann ~). What Pynchon seems to realize, if I may, is that for the most part elders and youngins respect one another. What really makes me carve this section out as an element of criticism, though, is that Thomas Pynchon tells such a true story—reminder, folks, this is historical fiction—that I would go out on a limb and say that I could’ve convinced Schopenhauer to include Pynchon alongside Cervantes and Benjamin Franklin as what a formative mind should read, instead of romance and fantasy. Here I will provide one proof from Bleeding Edge of how brilliantly Pynchon speaks to the budding young mind, but for the strongest proof we will have to look at an excerpt from his debut novel V., which, when I read it in grad school, I was awestruck, and since then it has remained among the ranks of quotes that has had a serious effect on my life as an artist.

Proof (6): “When will Maxine be allowed to kick back, become Angela Lansbury, dealing only with class tickets, instead of exiled out here among the dim and overextended?

Proof II (54-55, V.): “She knew instinctively: he will be fine as the fraternity boy just out of an Ivy League school who knows he will never stop being a fraternity boy as long as he lives. But who still feels he is missing something, and so hangs at the edges of the Whole Sick Crew. If he is going into management, he writes. If he is an engineer or architect why he paints or sculpts. He will straddle the line, aware up to the point of knowing he is getting the worst of both worlds, but never stopping to wonder why there should ever have been a line, or even if there is a line at all. He will learn how to be a twinned man and will go on at the game, straddling until he splits up the crotch and in half from the prolonged tension, and then he will be destroyed. She assumed ballet fourth position, moved her breasts at a 45 degree angle out of his line-of-sight, pointed her nose at his heart, looked up at him through her eyelashes. “How long have you been in New York?”

Q for Quizzical

Once, during a graduate seminar on Victorian literature, on a slideshow with a political cartoon of a giant egg, I saw in a footnote that the etymology of to quiz was to prank, or to troll. There was quite the trustworthy 16th-century source applied to it that I of course forgot, and since then I haven’t been able to confirm it. But yes, old Pynchon can be quite the kidder sometimes. At one point, Maxine’s son is watching Scooby Goes Latin! and Maxine, worried about if someone is after her life, “wants to enfold him forever. Instead lets him recap the plot for her. Shaggy, somehow allowed to drive the van, has become confused and made some navigational errors, landing the adventurous quintet eventually in Medellin, Colombia, home at the time to a notorious cocaine cartel, where they stumble onto a scheme by a rogue DEA agent to gain control of the cartel by pretending to be the ghost—what else—of an assassinated drug kingpin. With the help of a pack of local street urchins, however, Scooby and his pals foil the plan. The cartoon comes back on, the villain is brought to justice. ‘And I would’ve got away with it, too,’ he complains, ‘if it hadn’t been for those Medellín kids!’

R for Relevance

This critical element is evident by all the rest. Pynchon is as relevant as Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022).

L for Love and U for Understanding

Same thing, really. He knows so much, and yet he understands. See Oscar Wilde’s wise man who shared his knowledge of god, felt weak, but in turn gained the love of god. Or see Ben Jonson’s “To the Reader:”

Pray thee, take care, that tak’st my book in hand,

To read it well: that is, to understand.

And gall, can Pynchon write a good love story. I’m talking the most you ever believed in love—he captures that. Love, in fact, is what pulled me into Gravity’s Rainbow, and what helped me through Shakespeare. Learning how to love, too.

Proof (445): “By the time she thought to get up and run after him, he’d vanished down the hard roads and into the heavy weather of a northern destiny she’d thought she could protect him from.”

Not just romantic love either, but love for friends, parents, and children. And any parent who is worried about letting their child out into this dangerous world owes it to themselves to read Bleeding Edge.

Conclusion

Pynchon is as wholesome as he is zany, difficult as he is easy, and all-around a cool and nice guy. The ABCs of criticism meanwhile have proven to be a good reminder on just how much there is to explore in literature. Above all I am tempted to write an essay on The Current State of Video Games according to Thomas Pynchon and Clair Obscur, where the word current is to be taken in the running, flowing sense. In the meantime, arrivederci, and in case I don’t see you, Gorlami, Antonio Marghereti, and Dominic Decoco.

Three books in a row now I’ve confidently judged by their ability to describe the rain: “Sometimes it poured down in such thick sheets of water that earth and sky seemed merged in one gray wetness” (36).

By the way, I call my dog Spoiler because when people come over he gets so excited he barks and barks and can’t stop. I have to put him in a room for a few minutes until everyone has gotten to know one another, and then he can come out and sniff and lick and be petted. He’s in his room now.

No two people are the same. As much as Maxxxine is Joe Dirt against religion, as much as Big Smoke is Zeus in his own game against the man, as much as, I don’t know, Mr. Hanky the Christmas Poo is Jiminy Cricket revived by the spirit of American consumerism (or taking things in)—these characters surely interlace and rely on one another—but they come to life and die themselves uniquely. I only ask, if we cannot compare one character with the next, preferably dead or fictitious, how can we ever learn? I suppose in this sense the character is a complex symbol, and the character’s motive, which always implies another character, is the most complex universal symbol, assuming everyone has got on their humanity hat. We might do well to pause here and think on that question: what would we know at all without the presence of a few loved one’s beings?

But we can’t quite go about studying one another’s beings, can we? It’s quite the thorny path, obscure, mystic, and hostile. By all means it’s possible, but far be it from me to look at a few loved ones in my life and write entire books on the coalescence of their motives. No, although in the hands of someone like Byron or Rousseau and even Goethe at his most egotistically sublime our subjectivity can balance the objective and offer a magnificent view of the world from a certain real person’s eyes, for the most part, were we to synthesize the style and meaning of our friends with one another, we would cause harm. I don’t know how exactly, all I know is that when I think about characters or people that are dead, I have all the freedom to say, “He was this, she was that, when together, they were this,” but when I say the same things of someone alive, I want to resign myself to solitude. Whether the person is present or not, I think I sense something quite shameful talking about anyone but the one person before me. Unless I’m with my wife.

Maybe it’s because conversation can be so easily butchered, and although with friends we learn a lot by the glimmers of their thoughts on other friends, at what cost? We all know the harm of playing too much the psychologist. At the very least let what we discover in reading be the study of the manifest ways in which opinion engrains itself in the psyche. Let the three characters that have recently occupied my mind, Achilles, Queequeg, and Okonkwo, plus all my daddies and granddaddies, be the model examples of such humane exposure, since by each of their brilliantly savage rages against the universe, my stubborn argument has been forged. We are the amalgamation of all we have consumed and all the things those things before us consumed. And I don’t see how I can read a book that moves me to see my father and grandfather in lights more brilliant and dim, and not share with others how they might also reap!

So much for an apologetics of character. Now a thing or two about culture’s edge. Somewhere in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart between the alligator peppers and the kola nuts, the sweet yams and the story of the Turtle taking to the sky and fooling the birds by calling himself “All of You,” somewhere alongside protagonist Okonkwo’s disappointment in his lazy father, and then his own downfall of working too much and beating his wives and children and getting red eyes as the result of pent-up anger and the uncomfortability when alone—somewhere here, in the beauty of these Nigerian villages where no tree, crop, or other body dead or alive is taken for granted (all attention is paid), somewhere in this very real magic I wondered: how can we possibly do any of this beauty justice other than holding it close, rereading it, forwarding a few of its words, maybe writing just a few in response, and then going on being a good boy? There are so many cultures in this world teeming with life and death and celebration and art, that if we merely pointed out things here and there, connected a few dots to show that we are all also human, that would be a good start.

For example, even the brave men of Umuofia fear the dark. “A snake was never called by its name at night, because it would hear. It was called a string” (14). I don’t think I could find an author who gets away with setting up a weightier exegesis in fewer words. Do not mutter the thing’s name, they say, the snake especially. Now tell me young one: what do we know about strings, nay theories? Things Fall Apart is filled with such curiosities and cuts, sorry, cultures—the moon and the crickets are meaningful, and of course there are some men that don’t much think so. “Most men are so natural that,” Oscar Wilde said, “they can’t see beauty.” Model men of this sort are Achilles, Queequeg, Okonkwo, my daddy, and my granddaddy. But I’m not quite ready to subject them to the indiscriminate white line of synthesis. Hmm.

I sometimes wish nature could hear me. In Umuofia, the main village in Things Fall Apart, moonlight nights are lived differently than moonless nights: children sing, old folks remember their youth, and “as the Ibo say: ‘When the moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for a walk.’” Like Hemingway but a little more open, Achebe writes clearly and to the point and when it is time to describe something beautiful he isn’t afraid to extend the simple sentence and when it’s time to show two characters talking he does, they speak, and the meaning of life—as it often does when we’re waking and moving or watching a good movie—seems to rumble underneath. The reader that reads the first few pages will be convinced this is the real story. When you couple all the things said so far with the fact that according to some Umuofian laws cocks are sacrificed to the god of yams (the king of crops, a man’s crop), and in our story a young woman recently was killed by a neighboring tribe but the oracle must be consulted before war (but not necessarily listened to if the war is just), it is almost quite the shame I have shaken my booty for the Ancient Greeks so long and have almost missed my closer elders. I might’ve cuddled with a strong New Zealand harpooner, the best of the savagely best, but I’ve missed out on a lot of kola nuts and alligator peppers!

“Fear of failure and weakness for Okonkwo (Achilles + Queequeg + granddaddy) was deeper and more intimate than the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest and the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw.” Sounds like a personal problem, buddy. You deal with your trauma yet, big guy? Myself, I might as well take this time to say that neither my father, his father, or my papa (mother’s father-in-law) are religious. Mainly my grandmothers are in secret. Where Okonkwo quite differs from me is that he hated everything his father loved, mainly “gentleness and idleness.” One of Okonkwo’s sons begins to show signs of “incipient laziness” however, and “[Okonkwo] sought to correct him by constant nagging and beating. And so Nwoye was developing into a sad-faced youth.” This is what happens when we synthesize someone’s character for them. If, instead, we synthesize characters of a higher, aetherial order, dead or fictitious, maybe then with the loved ones we might be a little more keen to notice when one of us is being too silly or mean. I don’t want to be understood as saying we should never correct or examine one another’s lives, but if we’re going to do this, we surely must be thorough examiners of ourselves and those before us as well.

We’re still setting the scene. Things have fallen apart, haven’t you heard? Why should the essay be as straightforward and dry? Let’s read an extended quote, if only to contrast the ascetic gothic beauty of every tarnished self-flagellant enjoyer and villager of Umuofia, with the mothering beauty of prayer or confession—in whatever form. I probably could not have come to this bleak view of manhood had I not seriously marveled at the following passage’s similarities to the Dark Souls franchise:

“The way into the shrine was a round hole at the side of a hill, just a little bigger than the round opening into a henhouse. Worshippers and those who came to seek knowledge from the god crawled on their belly through the hole and found themselves in a dark, endless space in the presence of Agbala. No one had ever beheld Agbala, except his priestess. But no one who had ever crawled into his awful shrine had come out without the fear of his power. His priestess stood by the sacred fire which she built in the heart of the cave and proclaimed the will of the god. The fire did not burn with a flame. The glowing logs only served to light up vaguely the dark figure of the priestess.”

Why synthesize? Why trust prophecy? After two glasses of wine, and while they wait for the first wife to show up so the other wives may drink, Obwonko’s friend Obiako says, “There must be something behind it. There must be a reason for it. A toad does not run in the daytime for nothing.” Our incessant need to apply reason to everything and also to believe in spirits. It’s the main reason to pity Ahab that he says, “Hist, then. How dost thou know that some entire, living, thinking thing may not be invisibly and uninterpenetratingly standing precisely where thou now standest; aye, and standing there in thy spite?” But proverb is met with proverb, and Obiako is called strange. Apparently this young man, when the oracle said to him, “Sacrifice a goat to your dead father,” he said, “Ask my dead father if he ever had a fowl when he was alive,” and Okonkwo is the only one not to laugh, for in his mind he hears the other proverb, “an old woman is always uneasy when dry bones are mentioned in a proverb.” Words are met with words, thoughts with thoughts, in real life after work and sweat and dance and play, from villages next door and civilizations far away, animals and plants before us, animals and plants for all time. There is so much hearty allusion to the animal and things other people have said for millenia that Things Fall Apart, were it not for the violence, would on principle be a pastoral. But violence is a part of culture as much as pain is a part of reality. It’s culture’s edge. Hell, I’m hardly escaping violence myself by synthesizing this beautiful Nigerian story with a Grecian and a New Zealandian and mock-American. What exactly culture’s edge is hard for me to say because I’m barely discovering it and unveiling it fully just now reading Achebe. I’ll let him take the lead here, when he relays that evening supper where Okonkwo and his friend Obierika are discussing the aftermath of a quiet white man being slain and his iron horse (bicycle) being tied to a tree. The elder Uchendu says they should have feared killing the quiet man—”always fear killing the quiet man, not the loud.” The young men somewhat agree, but are more taken up with the stories they’ve heard of white men inventing guns and strong drinks and transferring slaves. This fear follows a fable of a kite stealing a duck, and the elder ends storytime by delivering one of the book’s most profound lines:

“There is no story that is not true,” said Uchendu. “The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others. We have albinos among us. Do you not think that they came to our clan by mistake, that they have strayed from their way to a land where everybody is like them?”

In four lines we get the confirmation that all is true and nothing is true, the construction of the double negative here borders on litotes, as does the true on the false. Mercy and cruelty revolve around immortality, says the elder, and then it is put in an unanswerable rhetorical question to the younger whether the blood war isn’t a result of someone who had already strayed straying again in return. If this is not culture’s edge—I apologize for trying to make this phrase happen—it is at least an overview of culture, which Achebe handles mightily. In fact, let’s let him put the cap on the overview himself, too, in this early passage that paints Umuofia’s natural brilliance in the wake of universal humanity:

Ogbuefi Ezeudu, who was the oldest man in the village, was telling two other men who came to visit him that the punishment for breaking the Peace of Ani had become very mild in their clan. “It has not always been so,” he said. “My father told me that he had been told that in the past a man who broke the peace was dragged on the ground through the village until he died. But after a while this custom was stopped because it spoiled the peace which it was meant to preserve.” “Somebody told me yesterday,” said one of the younger men, “that in some clans it is an abomination for a man to die during the Week of Peace.” “It is indeed true,” said Ogbuefi Ezeudu. “They have that custom in Obodoani. If a man dies at this time he is not buried but cast into the Evil Forest. It is a bad custom which these people observe because they lack understanding. They throw away large numbers of men and women without burial. And what is the result? Their clan is full of the evil spirits of these unburied dead, hungry to do harm to the living.”

I think it is time to face the music like Achilles faced the death of Patroclus, like Queequeg faced each whale and waking moment, like my grandfather moved away from his family and started his own. I think it’s time to let my dog Spoiler out of his room. I’ve said enough and shown my personality enough where I can just look to the text, find a few words, and say, “Now we’re talking.” We’ve painted a broad enough stroke of this Nigerian village, but we have not scratched the surface on how complex some of its characters are, how profound and pitiful, how teeming with reality. So let’s synthesize, or weave the traits and motives of others along the way, all in the name of improving our ability to connect the dots. Where should we begin? How long is it going to last? Let’s just dive in, and with our one last breath invoke what maybe should be every critic’s mantra: how complex we are! how much happens within us and around us for us to go about claiming we know!

Okay—I haven’t jumped in yet. It’s high up from here! The book is deep, man. Deep! I’ve jumped cleanly from the third-story of a houseboat before but still wonder why and before that as a teen I broke my ankle by jumping from ten feet onto the ground, so maybe I’m a little cautious on how I want things to unfold! I admit I am torn in reading my third novel from a different country this month by the idea that moving too much from one art to the next doesn’t allow us to dive deep. But wait: that water is deep, and I’m still me. I won’t be able to do Chinua Achebe justice fully, but not even the stellar H.C. Goddard fully did Shakespeare justice, and he wrote deep wells for essays for each of the plays. So just dive in! By all means be afraid of the white line, but not the blue! Jump in! Go! Go! Go!

SPOILER

Bark! Bark! Bark! Bao! Bao!

Behold Okonkwo, as manly as the sternest grandfather we can imagine, barrel-chested, a renowned fighter in his prime, three wives and, not counting the ones that died prematurely, a half a dozen kids whom he is proud of the manlier they are and the more they control women, even his daughters. Unlike his father who was afraid of blood, on great occasions [Okonkwo] drank palm-wine from the human heads he brought back in war (15). If I recall correctly he has killed five men before the story begins. I cannot recall one scene in which he sits and consults his wife on anything, and maybe two or three times when he speaks to them angrily to consult where another wife is, or the children, often preceding to yell at them for something nature did, threaten to break their jaw, or actually ending up shooting a gun near them or beating them. “Okonkwo was not the man to stop beating somebody half-way through, not even for fear of a goddess” (32). On his respectable compound he grows sweet yams and other vegetables and works all year building and repreparing, and without work barely gets through conversation. “Somehow Okonkwo could never become as enthusiastic over feasts as most people. He was a good eater and he could drink one or two fairly big gourds of palm-wine. But he was always uncomfortable sitting around for days waiting for feast or getting over it. He would be very much happier working on his farm” (39). Early in the book when Okonkwo is contradicted by a man who has no village titles he says, “This meeting is for men” (29). The narrator then casts light on the village dynamic, the not-so-black-and-white Umuofian fireside, where men of all types interpret the world differently, no matter the superstition that lingers in this particular corner of the world: “Okonkwo knew how to kill a man’s spirit. Everybody at the kindred meeting took sides with Osugo when Okonkwo called him a woman.”

The first main plot point involves Okonkwo taking in Ikemefuna, a boy from a neighboring village whom the oracle or masked spirit gods have decided is Okonkwo’s burden. Soon enough “even Okonkwo himself became very fond of the boy inwardly of course. Okonkwo never showed any emotion openly, unless it be the emotion of anger. To show affection was a sign of weakness; the only thing worth demonstrating was strength” (30). (And in fact, as the book goes on and the rage builds, we see how rare it is for Okonkwo to hold someone dear.) Approaching the end of the first act, the oracles have decided that this adopted son must be taken out of the village and killed, and although Okonkwo was warned not to go by a friend, he did, and “As the man who had cleared his throat drew up and raised his machete, Okonkwo looked away. He heard the blow. The pot fell and broke in the sand. He heard Ikemefuna cry, “My father, they have killed me!” as he ran towards him. Dazed with fear, Okonkwo drew his machete and cut him down. Hе was afraid of being thought weak.”

Life is complicated, and it almost seems silly to synthesize someone’s life or character with another’s when we realize that if we just fully hear someone’s story, we can synthesize all we need later, on our own time, when the moment arises. “Okonkwo did not taste any food for two days after the death of Ikemefuna. He drank palmwine from morning till night, and his eyes were red and fierce like the eyes of a rat when it was caught by the tail and dashed against the floor. He called his son, Nwoye, to sit with him in his obi. But the boy was afraid of him and slipped out of the hut as soon as he noticed him dozing.” If I need to think of my daddy or granddaddy, if I need to help a son or grandson, moments like this revolve latently in my mind like sparks that dim and brighten insofar as I maintain a cool head, see one beautiful thing a day, and, again, continue to be a good boy. I pause while writing, thinking, is this enough for a prolegomena on all future character study, and is this enough for a primer for Things Fall Apart, and then I’m hit with the next note: “When did you become a shivering old woman,” Okonkwo asked himself, “you, who are known in all the nine villages for your valor in war? How can a man who has killed five men in battle fall to pieces because he has added a boy to their number? Okonkwo, you have become a woman indeed” (63). Achilles, Queequeg, Big Smoke, my Papa—what a reviving question! Who is your daddy, and what does he do?

But I will not fight Okonkwo on this point. Without bringing in Achilles, Queequeg, and the rest of my daddies—shoot I even thought to mention that Tony Soprano’s “Oh it must be nice to know everything” from his mother and “You go around in pity for yourself” from the hospitalization resembles Okonkwo’s reaching for any saying in his head no matter the argument—without bringing anything from outside the text, though there really is too much to say on colonialism, Chukwu vs. Yahweh, the arts of the fable and the pastoral, the suffering of woman, eggs as a delicacy, locusts as welcome food, medicine men, mutilation and the evil forest, flapping breasts, Okonkwo’s romantic side—he really peaked as a teen–rumor, rage, despair, the effects of exile and absolute oppression, the spiritual power of the white man’s glasses, and much, much more in Things Fall Apart—I want to bring in more outside text, but I won’t, lest this essay actually derail, or become a book.

Suffice it to say that Okonkwo is his own man as far as rage lets us be our own man, to the very end on his own raging terms, and in his last act he even seems to defy rage in claiming himself. Like McCarthy’s disconnected Suttree, Okonkwo’s end is one of those where as the story of this man sits with us, and we linger outside maybe to let the dog spoiler out, we can’t help but feel like the cricket who spoke to the boy puppet felt: there is immense hope, and there is not.

When I was fifteen I came out to my grandfather telling him I wanted to be a critic, and I cried on the porch in the wind as he told me why don’t you create. I used to get GameInformer magazines once a month and I would read them cover to cover. Sixteen years later today and I’m still working out the kinks of criticism, the blending of duty and play. I originally started this essay with the following declaration: let what we say about momentous art be as short as it is sweet, so we not only reserve life for living, but so we also don’t forget what beauty is. Melville himself would eventually give us the old Henry James, had we hounded him to say more on the whale: “There’s really too much to say.” This is the critic’s drive, at least for me, that since the budding and eventually flourishing trust in all forms of art around us acts as the aetherial gateway to all possible lofty art ever, we find purpose in exalting those one-of-a-kind arts, those little humanities that have delightfully instructed us.

Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts is such a humanity. To what extent will we go to regain certain memories? How do we hold onto memory? What do we create in its place when memory’s gone? Can we love and imagine at the same time? What in god’s name is allusion? Protagonist Eric Sanderson must navigate these questions after receiving a letter from his past self that warns him a giant conceptual shark is on the hunt for him. If I wasn’t teeming to exult this book’s effect on me, I could cut the review short and say that everything I’ve wanted for our times as a diehard fan of Ishmael’s whale voyage, everything I’ve hoped could happen in a 2007 novel with regards to juggling reality and allegory, all these expectations were met in Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts. It’s as if Ishmael liked Austin Powers, Fight Club, and roguelike video games. (Of note, this book was published in 2007, a year before Spelunky, arguably the most explosive game in the genre.) In fact, this book is like Mobius Digital’s 2019 space-exploration game Outer Wilds, had it starred humans, and there was a love interest. The Raw Shark Texts is a book whose narrator would enjoy elucidating the idea that to rate a work of art out of ten is nearly as bad as to rate out of ten a woman’s looks.

Half-expecting something like House of Leaves, or at least a postmodern (postapocalyptic) incoherence, I began reading The Raw Shark Texts much like Eric began reading the letters his former self scheduled for him: quite suspiciously. I suppose there’s always a threat in the excitement beginning to read the book, not letting us forget that we tend to lose interest quickly, and, frankly, reading is a commitment. But like every good book given the right mood, it pulled me in fast. The Raw Shark Texts stars the hero that dares escape the House of Leave’s labyrinth by the thread of allusion given to him by his love, Clio Aames. The whole story is lucidly written, and if I was forced to say something negative about it: on the first read-through, I hardly struggled. This is the curious case of criticism that asks, if it comes off too easy and if we don’t have to work a little for it, how are we going to work up the pity? Why would we reread it? We’ll answer these questions too, but for the time being let’s remind ourselves, that which we don’t understand or understand too well, let us not immediately underrate! But hold: talk of difficulty forces us to readjust our criticism’s bridles, and whenever that happens, it’s time for a style check.

On the book’s cover, the San Francisco Chronicle says it is “Paced like a thriller, reads like a deluge… Herman Melville meets Michael Crichton, or Thomas Pynchon meets Douglas Adams.” This not only helped convince me to open the book, but it’s the perfect launching point to describe Hall’s style. He is as down-to-earth as the popular scientist without ever getting too cheeky (a little cheeky helps us see the big picture, as he proves). The two cheekier buggers mentioned here are Adams and Pynchon, but I mean more Adams, for Pynchon’s cheeks are more like moons, which are shrouded by third-person narration, a magnificent cast of characters, and his comic power for allusion. Hall indeed manages to find the middleground in humors high and low in The Raw Shark Texts. In other words, no matter your field, your profession, you will find what it means to be human here. Hall is borderline accessible, and borderline deep. If the canon were an anti-gravity walkway into the sublime, Hall, aptly named, would stand there on that path with this book right when white turns to black, black turns to white, and colors explode.

Anything is accessible as long as we trust it and relax (read Finnegans Wake three minutes a day after your minute plank, and mark how your tongue gets stronger), but being borderline deep might be construed as being too centered, and murky, or not deep at all, for we haven’t entered the deep. But if we’re going to talk the abyss, frankly I have been putting off getting to the meaning of this book because I have dozens of pages of notes many of which are direct quotes that seemed too beautiful not to forget, INSERT LEVI’S STAPLE IT OR ELSE.]. Like Ishmael before losing his Platonic bias, I’m atop the crow’s nest searching for meaning, not the whale. Like Eric Sanderson, I don’t know if it’s best for me to listen to the doctor’s advice and stay at home, or peer again into the mounds and mounds of letters that keep piling up, indicating my forgotten past and my will to live.

How difficult it is to speak of a complex being! In my Who Threw Mama Off the Aircraft Carrier?, it took dozens of poem fragments for me to put together a glimmer of what even one of my friends mean to me (forty for Levi, fifty-five for my wife!), and those cogitations are stretched out over a year. Here, now that we’ve had a whiff of the style, we can track its scent as we wade through the plot and pull out the meaning. I think I have reached the point where I have sufficiently recommended the text, and I think my dog Spoiler likes you, so I’m going to take off his leash. You like dogs, right? Ever fish for criticism? Yeah, you can pet him.

Protagonist Eric Sanderson has a cat named Ian, who often expresses antediluvian disappointment in our hero. Eric also has a doctor who says, “But don’t write letters for yourself… it could be incredibly destabilising for you.” Enter the idea of writing as destabilising not a dozen pages into our story. As Plato relates, the Egyptian god Theuth came to his superior Thamus with his inventions, and Thamus praised some, but disapproved first and foremost writing:

“For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.”

We have a lot to attempt to contain if we’re not going to mention how much Plato has written, how much I have written, and how much I agree. In my previous lecture I focused on the Doctor in Satantango, around whom that story spins, and who spies on his neighbors and writes every single thing he sees and says, creating his own bleak world within the apocalypse. Thamus wasn’t wrong. So, when at the onset of our mystery adventure in The Raw Shark Texts, the narrator is advised not to write to himself, and not from himself to read, that, at least for me, is the apocalypse.

So what do we do when we can’t read, write, or remember how to live? When there’s something within us that simultaneously drives us to know and to shut the hell up. “What in the world do we have to do with allusion?” I ask one minute, and then “I need meaning and I need it now,” the next. The Raw Shark Texts poses such questions, and then, before the question can be clipped and the idea felled, enter reality, where Ian the cat stares at us displeased, another wet package of letters from our self has arrived, and we still haven’t taken a leap. Or have we?

Every single cell in the human body replaces itself over a period of seven years. That means there’s not even the smallest part of you now that was part of you seven years ago (Hall 7%).

Our Heraclitus connection according to the scientific standard: everything moves, nothing stays still. The planets are always spinning, our characters too, and if we’re going to be hunted by a giant conceptual shark, we’re going to have to be rather spinned into the major ideas that drive our desire to know. For the first quarter of the book, Eric Sanderson carries the weight of these ideas, as his own clues left behind around the house drive him to rediscover pain and memory, or, why he’s even living in the first place. To what allusive extents we go to lead ourselves to discover that which we’re dying to forget!

Ishmael on the first page of Moby Dick explains why he takes to the high sea—so he doesn’t go around and knock other people’s hats off. The only hint we get regarding the blue waves of Eric Sanderson’s past is that he used to have a girlfriend, Clio Aames, and god was she cool and real. I can’t imagine Ishmael with a girlfriend—not because the marriage of the bosom friends with their black and white heads together warms my homosocial heart—but, because I think the little melancholic Christian with the ounce of good humor he had left sacrificed his sexual impulse to the search of truth in nature. This is not to say that Hall’s hero haunted by the phantom sharks of the collective consciousness does not himself love truth, but he also loves a woman, and has sex with two more women than Ishmael does, and at any rate we have to admit that complicates things.

Say what you want about Ishmael (leave Melville out of it, they are not the same), but we must admit it he put everything on the line, and in his first three words he wins us over as someone who knows what he is talking about. Call me Ishmael—only a best friend could utter something so coolly. When he errs, of course he errs, the beauty lies in aligning his majestic cognition faults with the water ruptures coming to life in the wake of thunderhead Ahab’s pursuit of the thing in itself. Queequeg is Ishmael’s love, the whale is Ahab’s Lucifer, and The Raw Shark Texts’s Eric Sanderson in his first-person account loved Clio Aames, who, all MAJOR SPOILERS, SERIOUSLY MAJOR SPOILERS, and other grief-stricken postponed interconnected allusions to ourselves aside, died on holiday while scuba diving, after taking dozens of photos of a rainbow assortment of fish the photos of which—after Eric threw them out—totemized his regret, the trauma-laden half-widower.

My grandfather died in 2019 at 81—my dad’s dad. I was at work when my grandma called me and was crying and I was there in a half an hour and halfway up the stairs I cried. He was a strong black no-nonsense man who wasn’t afraid to sing and tell a joke. He was mighty and had big hands and a good ear for jazz, himself a baritone. He was the deep voice in Blue Moon. He was Clint Eastwood mixed with Clay Davis, saying “Shiiiiiiiit,” and then catching you on the low. Six months after he died Ana and I were on vacation in Chicago, as close as I’d ever been to my grandpa’s hometown of Ashtabula, Ohio. His niece whom I never met lived there, and I talked to her on the phone that day, but we agreed not to visit for covid was breaking out. At night, Ana and I walked the bars with her two friends, and at one point we stopped for hot dogs, and I imagined my grandfather walking around and laughing and smiling at me, and I cried, and I cried, nonstop for a half an hour, no exaggeration. As proof I cried that long, I was called out by Ana and her friends for being weird. (She has long since made up for it and I’ve done much worse.) Thus grief is complicated by that law of humanity which states our motivations are anything but a straight line. In Moby Dick it is the white line of the horizon by which the white whale flaunts, in Blood Meridian it is the red horizon line of those red planetary characters surfacing, and in The Raw Shark Texts it is the absence of a woman once loved which holds the lover home, and the light can’t surface in the dark if love cannot. We are hunted and haunted by our heartbreaks. Thankfully my grandpa died at home. But a few months before that, when he spent a month in a little old folks’ home, I spent maybe 1/7th of the time with him that I should have. I’ve since forgiven myself now on his account, and he said many things in his last few days that helped me remember him rightly, but to this day the grief has remained the wind and the rain to the allusion deluge. It revolves, too. Near the end of the book,

“I feel like I fell off the world,” Scout said [the love interest’s image]. “You ever get that?”

I shook my head. “For me, it’s more like everyone else fell and left me and Ian on our own.”

There’s the whale and then there’s the clown. Death is the tortoise. Allusions, however latent, revolve. Just last summer after three years of crying only twice as a teacher, I sat on the toilet, thought of Hart Crane’s death, and burst into tears for an hour. Six months later I’m just now realizing I was grieving. Here is my account of that day (borrowed from a poem in progress):

I sat on the toilet and looked at the curtains and thought of Hart Crane jumping to his death into the raging water below and I cried, and I cried, and I thought of everything, and I couldn’t stop crying, and I saw myself, and I moved to places I hadn’t been before. I sat on the kitchen floor, I leaned against the couch and gripped, I shook the kitchen sink, at one point black ooze appeared, I kicked behind me like a horse, I raged, and writing seemed stupid, and I was sorry for everything, for what I’ve done, and I called myself stupid again and again, and when I saw butterfly stickers above the dryer I cried again thinking of my students, of Brian out there roaming, and Alyssa, and I gripped the counter, and I pulled my hair, and I cried my eyes red and snot out my nose and I washed my face in the sink and rubbed it with a towel and thought of decay and transience and our general disconnect and everyone living their lives and my inability. I cried, I barked, I raged, and I called myself stupid, fucking stupid, oh my god, you fucking idiot, and I thought of everyone and Suttree, and every thought was a tear. I was still for a moment on the couch when I thought of Mom and I looked up and paused and was Cabanel’s Fallen Angel and I was still. I cried again and roared and barked four different pitches throughout and raged and hated dope and every sin I’ve committed and ever being afraid of touching anything. Ana called and could tell I had been crying, and she came home immediately, and I partially relayed what I felt, and soon I was calm.

Sometimes I feel so overwhelmed by meaning that I strictly pursue style, and only now after synthesizing these texts do I think maybe we could improve general critical thought if we treated the reaction of style to meaning more like a chemical reaction that requires an immediate result according to natural law. How else are we ever going to see if we cannot admire how something looks? Here are fifteen excerpts which I think exemplify Hall’s clear blue style which, as much as it borders on being young adult, exasperating, and vainly sentimental, so do I. In fact, by splicing fifteen fragments from across the book like this, it appears as if I’ve created one of my strings of day-long poems from my Who Threw Mama or How to Time Travel:

“Now, right on that tap – stop. Stop imagining. Here’s the real game. Here’s what’s obvious and wonderful and terrible all at the same time: the lake in my head, the lake I was imagining, has just become the lake in your head. It doesn’t matter if you never know me, or never know anything about me. I could be dead, I could have been dead a hundred years before you were even born and still – think about this carefully, think past the obvious sense of it to the huge and amazing miracle hiding inside – the lake in my head has become the lake in your head.”

“From four degrees of separation, the shadow under the water catches the scent. A curved, rising signifier, a black idea fin of momentum and intent cuts through the distance between us in a spray of memes.”

“One morning, I pulled a cup from the draining board too quickly and knocked a plate into the sink. The plate didn’t break but there was a loud crash and the noise made me burst into tears for no reason at all.”

“My heart was deep space and my head was maths.

My life as a shopping list.”

“I nodded. She was being nice and I was feeling even more stupid than before.”

“I looked at her and a voice inside me said, we only see starlight because all the stars are bleeding.”

“I learned what little Eric could remember about the labelless car parks, access tunnels and buried places that made up un-space. I learned how to set up fake conceptual flows and short-circuit the existing ones, how to attach the bracken and lichen of foreign ideas to my scalp and work the mud and grass of another self into and over my skin and clothes until I could become invisible at will, until anyone or anything could be looking straight at me and never see the real me at all.”

“‘At the end of the day.’ That’s one of mine which is particularly virulent in the UK at the moment. [Right? Right?]”

“[On making people laugh,] I’ve always been better at the long-range stuff. “

“Clio’s badness smile is something else – the edges of her normal smile turn sharp like little blades and her eyes go all shiny and electric. “

“[The humanity in couples catching up with other couples]. We had to keep explaining things, backtracking and filling gaps. We realised our own conversations had evolved into a kind of shorthand, a tidy, neat little minimalism. Covering the whole canvas in broad obvious brushstrokes for outsiders felt like a waste of sounds, time and effort. Speaking with footnotes, Clio would call it later, as we ambled back towards the tent. Still, they were nice enough and we did have some fun with them.”

“[In the first dark scene…]The little green smoke detector light on the ceiling became my distant North Star.”

“[I’m going to start judging authors by how they describe the wind and the rain.] The rain came down so hard it had real weight, beating my head and shoulders into a flinch, pouring heavy over my waterlogged clothes and streaming in flukes from my hood and from my elbows and from the bottom of my coat. Hard, heavy, roaring and angry. It was difficult to see. I brought a hand up to shield my eyes but this created a new shelf and a flow of fresh rivulets were soon throw-twisting themselves off the ends of my fingers and curling their way under my hood to run down my cheeks and chin. I struggled to blink away as much water I could.”

“We told jokes, getting into a rhythm of acting like: a) our own jokes were far funnier than they really were; and b) that each other’s jokes were bad beyond belief. After one of my punchlines Scout stopped suddenly, standing still under the flickering lights.”

“The last of the summer still finds its way through the clouds some afternoons, but the night is coming in earlier and the fat-bodied spiders have built a maze of webs across the alleyway at the bottom of the garden. In the early morning they’re all silver with dew. I’d not really noticed any of this until today. For me, it still feels like late August. The clocks tick but nothing seems to change, no matter how far the hands travel.”

I want to end on something naughty, and since the burden is not on me to put everything together, as we’re cleaning up and waiting for our rides, why not a ghost story? A third of the way through the book Eric Sanderson navigates the un-space of abandoned staircases, sewer systems, backrooms, and deep, deep into the underground world he meets Mr. Nobody, who appears to be a handsome young Tom Cruise type with sunglasses. As Eric speaks to him about the conspiracy, though, he notices Mr. Nobody starts to sweat, and at one point he seems to melt:

“‘Geniuses don’t go mad,’ he said. ‘That’s what people don’t understand. They get out so far out that the water is like glass and they can see for miles and see so much, and in ways people have never seen before. They go out over such depths, down down down and down, and some of them get taken. Something rushes up out of their thoughts, from the insides of their own heads and through the act of looking and the thinking itself – because the deep blue is in there too, do you understand? And it takes them.’

Right at the point of Mr. Nobody telling Eric what his allusive self wants to hear, Mr. Nobody starts taking on characteristics of that other evil offshoot of Moby Dick, Pennywise the Clown:

His wet white face became serene and angelic, the way a face in a coffin is serene and angelic, calm and wise. His head tilted a little, mechanically.

‘The important thing now is to give up, he said, quietly. His voice was different, there was something far away behind the word sounds. “You know the truth. You know you’re already dead. Deep down you know it. Eric Sanderson’s gone, a long time gone. And Clio Aames. All of it, everything he was is over now. You should let his body go too. You should stop kicking and let it float, bob and slip all away. Let it sink down to the bottom with the quiet and the stones and the crabs. It will be alright, storms on the surface can’t hurt us anymore.’

“Don’t you want it? Don’t you want it?” I can hear Tim Curry’s voice and I think Steven Hall could too, for even his immediate description of what happens next reads like it was directly inspired by the 1990 IT TV movie:

Constant brown water flowed off the ends of his fingers and elbows as he pushed himself up in the chair. It ran from his trouser bottoms and leaked from his shoes, making dirty growing puddles that smelled of seaweed rotting in the sun.”

I’ve reserved the campiest for last. Pennywise the Clown has transmogrified into that giant shark, that Ludovician that’s after Eric, and Eric—at once the Cyclops and Odysseus—is saved from this world-eater situation in a way that only someone who sings along loudly to a band like Linkin Park can enjoy. When everything is dark and seems to be lost, when not even the north star can help, when even high literature seems to be a mug’s game:

“Shhh,” a girl’s voice said, close behind my ear.

I froze.

“Do you still smoke those horrible menthol cigarettes?”

“No. No, I –” Babbling not thinking. “No, I don’t –”

“Well, you do now.”

Another hand reached around me and pushed a lit cigarette into my mouth.

I want to speak to both those who haven’t read this book and those who have in the same breath. Read this, I want to say, as well as aren’t you glad you reread? Luckily, the structure of Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s Satantango lends itself to this task, weaved as it is like a giant spider’s web, each chapter an anti-gravity spindle rattling loose on the verge of authorial contention, and yet as the reader spins with it, and spins, our sense of where we are zooms out, and the strings come into view, and so do the spiders, the many spiders to the backdrop of the accordion, and we realize at the same time this post-apocalyptic world is a little thing.

When I say this I do not minimize Krasznahorkai’s authentic vulgar grandeur. Rather I straightforwardly mean it: the beginning of each chapter rings the bleak and fantastical rooms and halls of Kafka and Nabokov in their folkiest moods, and the book quite literally opens on bells ringing in the stark and raving ruins of a rural township on the level of those of Dostoevsky, wherein have walked the maddest and most passionate characters in western literature. It is somewhere around this time in reading, I think, seeing that we have so little time to choose what to read, that the reader consciously or unconsciously confronts the question of why this book and not that one? Why this person, not that? Here the whimsy sway of curiosity poses a problem, and the variety of all our disciplines and the subjectivity of taste, but a firm, concentrated look at the text undoubtedly reveals that Satantango dances this critical line itself—what critical line?—in such potential a tangle of thought Krasznahorkai leverages like life does his characters psyches and faults, and he shifts the style and he shifts the dative object, and the web weaves, and it’s big and it’s small and the theme resounds our choice: either “I’ll dance,” or “You ain’t nothin.”

My brother-in-law Jason said to me recently, “Everything is funny if you zoom out enough.” (This is how he prefaced the family Christmas stories that I missed out on, and a few weeks later he also recommended me this book). It’s true: zoom out and laugh. And what book wouldn’t you read that laughs and makes you think? What does it mean then, at the heart of Satantango, after the climax of a carousing chapter where the fire blazes and the music cascades and the woman’s chest whose been glanced at by everyone the whole story, for a moment the nipples are roses—what does it mean then, after everyone falls asleep, that when we zoom out of their desire and ours, literal spiders come out in the dark, and weave webs over the counters, the drinks, and put the drunk, sleeping peasants in cocoons, before returning “lightning-quick” to their holes? For thirty pages after this reveal the spiders are hardly, if not at all, mentioned, until one of the characters considers using them to make money—sell them for science. The allegory of the spider here could make for extended exegesis, but for now I’ll just say that if I were to write a pastoral starring Moby Dick, I would be foolish in my gathering of the animals not to rush to include the spider.

If that’s not funny nor sublime nor Kafka on Hugo’s shoulders, there’s the handsome villain who is the desired woman’s desire, saying, “There’s no escaping that, stupid. [The miserable pulp of decay]” Or how about Krasznahorkai’s rare metaphor of the sun as a beggar…’the sky brightens, scarlet and pale-blue and leans against the undulating horizon, to be followed by the sun, like a beggar daily panting up to his spot on the temple steps, full of heartbreak and misery, ready to establish the world of shadows, to separate the trees one from the other, to raise, out of the freezing, confusing homogeneity of night in which they seem to have been trapped like flies in a web, a clearly defined earth and sky with distinct animals and men, the darkness still in flight at the edge of things, somewhere on the far side on the western horizon, where its countless terrors vanish one by one like a desperate, confused, defeated army.’

It probably is something we don’t even decide, who to read and when. A few chapters into Satantango, Krasznahorkai gives us the knowledge-hungry town doctor, who all day drinks and spies on every neighbor from what must be his panopticon home, though I think that’s purposely left unclear. (The outskirts are brambles and every building is decaying.) This doctor’s thoughts are the closest the book gets on specifically commenting on the authorial question, and his first vision and primary thesis is that “he was afraid that in itself the desire for change was only a subtle sign of his failing memory.” This doctor, as a result of his extreme condition, does not clean, and furiously takes notes of everyone he knows. Sound familiar? He pays everything he sees the most minute attention, my favorite description of his being “He quickly put on his glasses, reread the last sentence in his journal then leaned back in the chair and looked through the chink in the curtain at the fields beyond.” Well geez, if he isn’t zooming out but blinded! It is no coincidence some of the book’s last words are reserved for him. But near the beginning:

“He decided to watch everything very carefully and to record it constantly, all with the aim of not missing the smallest detail, because he realized with a shock that to ignore the apparently insignificant was to admit that one was condemned to sit defenseless on the parapet connecting the rising and falling members of the bridge between chaos and comprehensible order.”

By the end of this book, sentences like this become metacognitive vessels between humor and oblivion, but I don’t think in all my readings in writings I have seen it more beautifully put what so clearly is the reminder that everything that happens matters. Not only is this sentence a treatise on how we pay attention, and its results, it is the erection of the bridge in space and time (look in the sentence how it hangs), what Hart Crane would have called (as he called “The Bridge”) the synthesis of American values. Read the sentence above again and see how every word is essential. Meaning and style are bridged, but where to? And is stopping at their intersection such a transient stay as it is a derelict? I don’t know, but I envision it on the south pole to Moby Dick’s north, a slightly more boner comedy to Melville’s mighty mystery play. I could see this sandy, muddy, and windy world “the rain drove into their eyes!” being the final destination of Cormac McCarthy’s Judge Holden, who, as Harold Bloom cued us in, is a chunk of the evil part of the whale. “He’s ninety-nine parts something malfunctioned and horrible, and one part me,” says the love interest’s image in The Raw Shark Texts of all the lover’s interests. We get a more comic Judge Holden, made up at the last minute by the powers that be. North pole and south pole, or twin planets, I’m unsure. Near the end of the book, Krasznahorkai matches Melville’s Sermon (which was at his beginning) with a botched recital of The Lord’s Prayer: “The ‘kid’ turned off the light and they fell quiet. The only thing to be heard for a while was the sound of Petrina [Judge Holden’s Sancho Panza] mumbling as he tried to remember the words of a prayer he’d heard his grandmother say:

Our father…um, our father

which art there, art, art in the sky, er,

in heaven, let us praise, er…hallowed be

our lord Jesus Christ,

no…let them praise… no, let us praise

rather, let them praise your name,

and give us this…what I mean is,

let everything be according to, er,

whatever you want… in earth as

it is on earth… in heaven…

or in hell, amen…

There’s high poetry, and there’s low, but the best poets both ways can go. When we zoom out enough, high and low poetry at their finest, are sublime. Think Dante’s vulgari eloquentia, Shakespeare’s Bottom or Barnardine, Plato’s ragebaiting asides. But to say these things is to invite a longer discussion on the marriage of vulgar wit and the dreamy up-high, which I’ve somewhat handled elsewhere. Suffice it to say that by the final two chapters in Satantango, we see how radiant with humor is the word.

If none of the above is worth our consideration when I recommend Krasznahorkai’s Satantango, how about shedding light on the complex and underrepresented problem of eye contact. At the heart of the book and its center, the book’s [I almost called it a character] most pitiful character, the little sister of a big brother who calls her the r-word, ‘looks at him with the utmost respect. Yet, “She didn’t raise her head to look at him because she knew how much Sanyi hated making eye contact with her.”

ADDENDUM:

Through its revels and shades and tramping, Satantango proposes to Moby Dick’s explication the idea of the narrative being botched. What, in other words, might it have looked like if someone got a hold of Ishmael’s text, and tinkered with it, only this Hungarian Ishmael going Nietzsche in question never found his substitute for the pistol and the ball, or philosophical contention, so he never took a proper turn in the crow’s nest where pantheists must heed, and instead he stayed in his room, pretended to know others, and pretended to know the land by only the blue and yellow sight of it in slits in his curtains. Not to mention Krasznahorkai’s stand-in is living in the fallout of not a few very, very devastating wars that have no doubt left him with fewer neighbors than the sympathetic reader can ever be willing to accept.