brown-sugar-crumble

I'll try Kate's Six Degrees of Separation game because Whispering Gums vouched for it. This month* she asks you to start with June Chang's Wild Swans, 1991, which I may or may not have read. If I did then I have forgotten everything. I am in the same position as everyone who has done nothing more than look at the cover – I know the author describes a number of interrelated Chinese women. Probably there are no swans. Chang submerged the bird in the human, delivering a coup de grace insult by naming her book after the animal she savagely dissolved. I realise I could run now into J.A. Baker's The Peregrine, 1967, a book in which a human wishes he could dissolve into a bird. Instead I want to mention Joseph McElroy's Women and Men, 1987, because I think I will forget it as completely as I may or may not have forgotten Wild Swans. As I was reading I wanted to finish so that I could start forgetting it. By the end I was only continuing so that it wouldn't stay with me. Women and Men proposes constant interconnections. The mysterious boy who hitched a ride with you in your smalltown American childhood is the same man who asks you for a lift when you are an adult living in New York. The unexpectedness of the connection is pleasing, confirming that life is strange. Magical Native Americans attach you to both the past and the future. No one is really alone and the stuff of life is not chronological but simultaneous or time-interflowing. The author's sentences often try to replicate that idea of overflow by running and bursting with a kind of gabble, spreading his interest onto details - telling you that Jim was on specifically a Bermuda beach when he saw "shadow-rays over the ocean" – or that the chocolate bar in someone's past had a name – (Stephen King does that too) -

Upon the sinking of Sarah's teeth into the outer-skinned chocolate of the Clark bar on into the honey-colored brown-sugar-crumble inside you would not build a broken marriage, or a self-destroy scenario either.

An opera-singer's father is tortured in Chile. We are not directly introduced to that figure of immediate pain, the ghost of everything the book does not want to look at, a person for whom interconnectedness is less important than his own isolated flesh, who cannot be reprieved even for a moment by identity of a chocolate. McElroy, unlike Dickens, doesn't see interconnectedness laying a holistic responsibility on people. There is no smallpox, death, guilt, disfigurement, or anything else like that, there is invention, progress, and stimulation. The brand of chocolate is interesting and so is the sprite-boy. Meanwhile the tortured man invents nothing.

There is one phrase in Women and Men - "it might be an exciting death coming his way" - that suggested the tone of a different author, maybe Beckett, though the impression didn't last longer than that sentence. The last Beckett I read was Mercier and Camier 1946/70, a story with two names in its title, like Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécuchet, 1881, a book mentioned by name in Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle, Book 5, 2016, the last thing I read by that author.



*Thanks to international time differences I posted this on September 30th, in spite of the date under the title.

alone and unchanged, however surrounded and accompanied

Reading the first of Knausgård's six volumes I remember John Pistelli's post about the similarities to Richardson's Pilgrimage (Anthony linked to it on twitter) and feel uneased by the comparison -- not the details of the comparison, simply the fact that the comparison exists -- seeing, strongly, the two writers placing themselves distinctly in separated isolation, and their views of themselves different, Richardson serious about her "joy," diagnosing a tragic abdication of people from the challenge of joy and believing that it is her duty not to abdicate from joy (not questioning that assumption but trusting it) ; and therefore working, working with a conscious effort to maintain her own access, having a plan for it, avoiding marriage because of it, living and walking in places where she hopes she will find it -- whereas Knausgård describes himself as a haphazard clown who has the vaguest ideas about anything that he might want, and almost no plan to get it, feeling desires instead of plans; he would like to be cool ("cool" is his word, in the translation by Don Bartlett) but he is ordinary; he does everything that he doesn't want to do; he is "feminine" when he wants to be masculine, he cries when he doesn't want to cry, he is a bad musician when he wants to be a talent, he capitulates to people, he has studied art but he can't tell you why he likes a painting ("It was a fantastic picture, it filled me with all the feelings that fantastic pictures do, but when I had to explain why, what constituted the "fantastic" I was at a loss to do so" -- where Richardson will tell you how she comes to appreciate a piece of music); his little success in journalism is an accident and he junks it by being cocky, then he knows that he has been cocky: his cockiness is revealed to him: and his humiliation is constantly revealed to him and refreshed with a new event as if this is Fawlty Towers and he is Basil, "I was getting drunk too often, and I did not flinch from harassing someone once I got the idea in my head," also with Basil Fawlty's pettiness: "Usually something to do with their appearance, or small, silly mannerisms that I might have observed."

Richardson meanwhile perceiving transcendent vigour or insight in "small, silly mannerisms," and the transcendence of the world is up to the person who is perceiving it, that's her belief : anything is some sort of gateway, even a bit of light; and there is a question of things having or not having a hold -- "Immediate things had lost their hold" -- whereas the hold-having for Knausgård has dissolved with childhood; it is impossible now, he is too adult. The petty emotions in her can flow into a whole, and are restructured by their relationships: "But even as she felt this jealousy's deep-seeking manipulations, the vision of Amabel alone and unchanged, however surrounded and accompanied, sent it to its death [...] Released, she could seek those to whom she belonged."

She has what you could call a better self. She can be rescued, she can rescue herself, but he can't, and here is part of his clown atmospheric in My Struggle, the impossibility of self-rescue, and the undisciplined disappointment of that.