Write like you were dead

Novelist Jeffrey Eugenides's speech given at the 2012 Whiting Awards (awards given annually to ten emergent American writers of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and plays) centers around the idea of writing posthumously.

It's a liberating idea; by this I mean, Eugenides seeks to liberate young writers from the burden of writing under the "usual constraints--of fashion, commerce, self-censorship, public, and perhaps especially, intellectual opinion."

All of the above-mentioned constraints, says Eugenides, "represent a deformation of the self":

To follow literary fashion, to write for money, to censor your true feelings and thoughts or adopt ideas because they’re popular requires a writer to suppress the very promptings that got him or her writing in the first place.

Eugenides's models his figure of the posthumous writer on Franz Kafka, who is famous for his refusal to write with an eye to publicity and fame or popularity:

When Kafka was diagnosed with tuberculosis, in Berlin, he reacted at first with a serenity amounting almost to relief. As his health deteriorated, he became more fearful: “What I have playacted is really going to happen,” he wrote in a letter to a friend. “I have not bought myself off by my writing. I died my whole life and now I will really die.”

To be Kafkaesque is 

To die your whole life. Despite the morbidity, I can’t think of a better definition of the writing life. There’s something about writing that demands a leave-taking, an abandonment of the world, paradoxically, in order to see it clearly. This retreat has to be accomplished without severing the vital connection to the world, and to people, that feeds the imagination. It’s a difficult balance. And here is where these ruminations about writing touch on morality. The same constraints to writing well are also constraints to living fully. Not to be a slave to fashion or commerce, not to succumb to arid self-censorship, not to bow to popular opinion—what is all that but a description of the educated, enlightened life?

Eugenides is one of the few contemporary American writers who cares little for publicity and has an absolutely zero social media presence.

Happiness

Years ago I had seen Todd Solondz's film Happiness. The film is like a rolodex of unhappy Americans, leading a seemingly "happy" suburban life, one in which they have everything that is redolent of what happiness is supposed to be.

However, as the film unravels--heartbreakingly--these are singularly unhappy campers in a land of cosmetic delights.

Happiness lingers in my mind as an exploration of profound unhappiness, and I had thought it to be an extraordinary, expectation-confounding movie.

The one scene that left an indelible mark on my mind was that of a father telling his son honestly that he likes young boys, and consorting with them makes him really happy. He is Bill Mapplewood, a white, upper-middle class (there weren't any significant characters if color) male, a father and husband, living in a sprawling suburban home with all the right accoutrements of happiness.

Bill is also a pedophile. Seen through the eyes of a judging audience, Bill is a criminal--he has sodomized two of his son's school friends. But Bill, as the film implies, is not to be judged. He is to be regarded as someone in quest of happiness.

No moral lesson needs be derived from the predicaments of the Bill Mapplewoods of this world.

These days, instead of subtle, fictional explorations of the real embedded in the seeming, we have blatant documentaries like Roko Belic's Happy.

Happy explores what makes people happy and the subjects of his exploration lurk everywhere, in the poorest neighborhoods of Louisiana to the slums of Kolkata.

In a Huffington Post blog, Belic writes of the inception of the documentary and claims Manoj Singh, a "dirt-poor" rickshaw puller, as one of his inspirations. He mentions Singh in a tone of wonderment.

What makes Singh, leading a sub-human existence "happy"? At the end of the day, when he returns home--a ramshackle hut made of bamboo and plastic tarp--the sight of his son makes his heart leap in joy.

Is Belic suggesting that the likes of Singh are truly happy, their impossible poverty notwithstanding?

Somehow, I'm not quite inspired to see Happy, regardless of its promise to deliver a cute, moral message.

Besides, having just read Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers, an exploration of life in Mumbai slum, I'm not ready to ingest such simple-minded truisms like "there is no correlation between material affluence and happiness."

But I wish the documentary well, and there is evidence of it gathering acolytes: Note Belic's input on happiness in the NYT's most recent Room for Debate.

For those interested in demystifying the concept of happiness itself, I'd still suggest the Solondz flick.

In praise of the "slow" and "demanding"

Giles Harvey composes a wonderful paean to Philip Glass and Robert Wilson's 4 and a 1/2 hour long avant-garde opera Einstein on the Beach.

But the tribute is really paid to all works of art that are "slow", like Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, and consequently "demanding," i.e. cannot be consumed instantly.

According to Harvey such works of art are all the more valuable in an era of distraction and short attention span.

Some moments from the piece:

The thought of spending a month, or several months, with a single work—a “The Magic Mountain” or an “In Search of Lost Time”—is somehow enervating [...] Of course, there is a pernicious logic at work here. Why read a long novel when you can read a short one? Why read a short novel when you can watch a movie? Why watch a movie when you can watch a TV show? Why watch a TV when you catch a minute-long video of a kitten and a puppy cuddling on YouTube? As soon as we start to think of art simply as something to be consumed, discarded, and replaced, we rob it of one of its greatest powers: its capacity to free us from the grip of easier but shallower pleasures.

The experience of witnessing "slow" and "demanding" art works is rewarding:

The payoff is handsome [...] I saw “Einstein on the Beach” over three months ago, but I have hardly stopped thinking about it since; the manically even “Night Train” duet plays on an almost endless loop inside my head.

It can sometimes seem as though modern life has no room for four-and-a-half-hour-long experimental operas or difficult poetry; but this is a mistake. In a world of speed and distraction, the slow, demanding art work is more indispensable than ever, for it holds out the possibility of those elusive commodities: stillness, clarity, and peace.