Showing papers in "Chicago Review in 1994"

An Interview with John Barth

Abstract: Like Ernest Hemingway, another ground-breaking writer of twentieth-century American fiction, John Barth writes every day, the initial drafts always in pen. He says that his inspiration does not "waft like a gentle whisper from a Greek muse," but resembles, instead, a "rumbling King Kong," a metaphor for self-reference and self-reflection. But unlike his modernist predecessors, Barth has resisted the traditions of twentieth-century realism. Instead, he has collected an eclectic montage, the past with the present, the old story formulas in a postmodern guise, displaying the elements alongside each other to produce a curious image of a world with which we are not always immediately comfortable or familiar. But, then, neither is he, always. Barth's twelfth book of fiction was released in May 1994 by Little, Brown. The title is classic Barth, disarming but with a cryptic punch: Once upon a Time. And it is the book's subtitle, A Floating Opera, that comes like a finger's light touch, or reminder. Through it he has returned full circle to the riff that set him in search of a new literary form in his first long fiction piece, A Floating Opera (1956). Barth's description of his new novel as "a memoir wrapped in a novel" echoes his generative technique of searching for and therefore redefining the narrative perspective of fiction. Barth's version of postmodernism is less jagged at the edges than that of some writers in the mode, if it will sit still long enough to be characterized as a mode. He defined his approach in 1967 in "The Literature of Exhaustion" and refined it a little more than a decade later in "The Literature of Replenishment." The heart of his thesis is that the modern genre had been exhausted by the close of World War II. Writers at the turn of the century had picked up the torch of the Romantics and carried it once around the track: "The great project of modernism, the idea of shaking up bourgeois notions of 'linearity,' and 'consecutivity' and ordinary description of character and ordinary cause and effect, had honorably done its job." Writers after World War II rebelled against their modernist predecessors, realizing that nothing of the human condition was left to report in a modern sense, except through retold tales--which is something like re-tasting a stale raisin cookie that has been belched. New ground had to be broken if a place for literature was to be found in a life that not only sounded a distinctly different tone but one that could not be fully apprehended (a point already made by modern existentialists). And Barth was among the vanguard writers to seek a synthesis of art and life, itself an imitation of an imitation, thus making of fiction something of a two-way mirror through which one peers murkily. Barth makes this effort by employing repetition and by expanding the formal range available to modern fiction to include such forms as the epistolary novel (Letters), the eighteenth-century adventure novel (The Sot-Weed Factor), and the quest tale (The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor or Giles Goat-Boy). A narrative voice, usually omniscient, is central to traditional fiction, but in his work there is a tension between eliminating the omniscient narrator (since "apprehended" life is at best tentative) and achieving a synthesis towards which the text is headed. Forty years after his initial effort, many of his characters wave at each other from across novels, his house rule being "that no particular reader should have to be aware of their appearance in other books." A short piece which probably best captures Barth's effort to use fiction to grab life by the scruff of the neck is "Autobiography: A Self-Recorded Fiction," which was part of a monophonic tape series in which he participated in the 1960s. Here, fiction invents itself. As narrator, fiction is dissatisfied with the disturbing evolution of the product and argues with its father (Barth?) and its mother (the muse? …

Shylock after Auschwitz

Abstract: On a discussion night during the recent run of The Merchant of Venice, the air at the Hartford Stage Company was filled with emotional heat as a panel on stereotypes in general evolved into a clash over Shylock's character and the ethics of staging the play at all. At one point, Rabbi Leon Klenicki, Director of Jewish-Christian Relations for the Anti-Defamation League, leaned forward to look past a fellow panelist so that he could challenge Mark Lamos, the play's director. Since Lamos had already given several reasons for choosing to produce The Merchant of Venice, the Rabbi's rhetorical question, "After Auschwitz, why put on this play?" revealed how totally the horror of the Holocaust determined his response. Lamos could not, of course, effectively answer such a loaded question, one that preceded others like it from the audience. Ad hominem attacks covered buried accusations of anti-Semitism: Didn't Lamos know Jewish history? Was he ignorant of the blood libel? How could he allow an actor to wear a tallis outside the synagogue? What does it mean for Hartford Stage to assemble a panel on stereotypes with only one, outnumbered Jew? Discussion turned to controversy, and controversy to confrontation because Lamos wanted to talk about a specific production based on broadly humane premises while Rabbi Klenicki and others could not imagine any treatment of Shylock but a stereotypical, anti-Semitic one. In their view, the "legend" and "legacy" of John Gross's subtitle(1) are now fixed and immutable: Shylock is the type of the grasping, usurious Jew, the ritual murderer who lures good Christians to their deaths. As a result, one who puts on this play after Auschwitz collaborates with Shakespeare in the "teaching of contempt" and can be compared to the intellectuals in La Trahison des Clercs. When the moderator asked Lamos if he felt responsible for a betrayal of this kind, his reply tried to steer the discussion toward performance, "My production is not the text he [Klenicki] is reading." But dialogue was not to be, for another of his remarks prompted hisses and boos from part of the audience: "If Shylock is stereotypical to Jews, they have to examine their own view of stereotypes." Rabbi Klenicki's convictions, however, could not be shaken, grounded as they are in immeasurable pain. Near the end of his survey of the Shylock figure from Shakespeare's time to the present, John Gross reports a similar verdict on the play: "The sad truth, [Pierre] Spriet concludes...is that The Merchant of Venice...can no longer be adequately performed" (345). Gross does not accept Spriet's unqualified corollary, "The play must be abandoned," but his final paragraph subjects the play to reader responses conditioned by inescapable pressures: Exactly where the play now stands depends on one's wider reading of European history. I personally think it is absurd to suppose that there is a direct line of descent from Antonio to Hitler, or from Portia to the SS, but that is because I do not believe that the Holocaust was in any way inevitable. I do believe, on the other hand, that the ground for the Holocaust was well prepared, and to that extent the play can never seem quite the same again. It is still a masterpiece; but there is a permanent chill in the air, even in the gardens of Belmont. (352) If Gross is correct, no director, even the most sensitive to social and political contexts, could mount a coherent production of the play and at the same time satisfy an audience's various readings of history. At best, an enlightened post-Holocaust director is challenged to stage a timeless "masterpiece" with a timely "chill." The literary and cultural history that John Gross documents makes such oppositions between performance and text and between character and stereotype unavoidable in stagings of The Merchant of Venice. His preface notes the danger of abstracting a Lear or Prospero from his play, but argues that Shylock is "a special case": "Not only does he stand out from his surroundings in peculiarly stark isolation; his myth has flourished with little reference to The Merchant of Venice as a whole, quite often with none at all" (10). …

Poetry and Vision

Abstract: Visionaries, even if they happen to be like our Campana, are inevitably the most artless, the blindest of creatures on this earth. Eugenio Montale I am afraid to start this essay on "vision" in poetry because, like many Americans, I have been blessed and cursed with an acute terror of sounding high-minded. It's easy to guess where this terror comes from, but difficult to challenge it, and these days difficulty in poetry must with every breath justify its existence. Now when I find myself at the head of the workshop table, I can see firsthand how often a young writer's ambition toward "vision" in poetry is used to excuse a myriad of indulgences, that is, easy, paid-off absolutions. So often young writers do mistake mystification for mystery, obscurity for difficulty. I envy how my students can invent their sensibilities from scratch. Yet their sometimes arrogant insistence on freedom from expectation must have something to do with their sense of a prolonged and painful adolescence, with having physically left their homes and yet finding themselves in loco parentis, in purgatorial dormitories--still tethered financially to their parents. Their impatience is lovely, but impatience can lead to a mistaken notion of vision: the invention of inwardness through inscrutability. True, young poets have to defend their impulses before they can afford the leisure to examine them. Yet such unself-questioning inwardness may not be vision at all. What is vision in poetry? Vision doesn't happen without maturity, but along with maturity, maybe a certain unanswerability is also necessary. And unanswerability makes those who consider themselves the mature guardians of a reckless world a little nervous. So--and perhaps very justifiably--Montale's appreciation of Dino Campana that I'm quoting from betrays a little ambivalence: elsewhere Montale characterizes Campana as a voyant "visited by too many abstract possibilities," feeling no limitations in poetry, no need to answer to the exigencies of reality or prevailing taste. For Montale, this visionary is blind; he goes his own way, but he also stumbles into walls. A visionary poetry presumably becomes a heightened account of those stumbles. Curiously, the elder poet's characterization of the young Campana resembles our own culture's stereotype of visionaries as young, idealist, naive, beclouded more than clarified by possibility, and potentially self-destructive because not of this world. I must say I can't think of one poet-friend, however transcendental (to use another out-of-fashion epithet) his or her poetry may be, who would admit to being a visionary. It's easier by a few degrees to admit to having a drinking problem. Moreover, our culture's current caricature of visionaries as misfits has longstanding precedents. Here are some of the ways the Oxford English Dictionary defines visionary: "given to fanciful and unpractical views"; "having little regard to what is actual or possible"; "speculative, dreamy"; "seen only in a vision, unreal, non-existent, phantom, spectral"; "existing in imagination only, imaginary, not actual or real, incapable of being carried out, fantastic." A visionary is "one who indulges in fantastic ideas or schemes." With these dictionary definitions in mind, it's hard to imagine a visionary making it to the corner store without falling into a manhole. What also explain our distrust of visionary elements in poetry are our misapprehensions about ourselves and our hopelessly human motives. To take just one instance of how our collective self-distrust tempers our aesthetic responses to the world, consider how connected our attitudes toward the human body are to our aesthetics. We view our bodily senses as extensions of base--that is, untrustworthy--instincts. The prevailing attitude toward sensory vision since the Romantics has been a prejudicial one, informed by our attitude toward sensory vision in nature. At worst, sight is a hunting sense, with predators often having the sharpest sight (eagles can see their prey from a distance of two or three miles), and at best it is a defense against hunting. …

"The Oblique, the Indirect Approach": Elizabeth Bishop's "Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics." (Prose Poem)

Abstract: Elizabeth Bishop's prose poem, "Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics," though one of her least commented-on works, contains important articulations by Bishop about herself as a poet, and about her poetic principles and practice.(1) At the same time, its three monologues are relentless and revealing investigations of multifaceted subjectivity as captured in diverse voices through three animal personae. Both the form and content of these monologues are at once an assimilation of and a resistance to the confessional practice in American poetry. "Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics" first appeared in Kenyon Review in November, 1967 as a response to what Bishop saw as the excesses of confessional poetry. Earlier in the year, Bishop commented on confessional poets' work in Time (2 June 1967): "Now the idea is that we live in a horrible and terrifying world, and the worst moments of horrible and terrifying lives are an allegory of the world.... The tendency is to overdo the morbidity. You just wish they'd keep some of these things to themselves."(2) Bishop's rejection of this "morbidity" reflects her aesthetic principles and world outlook rather than a belief in an impersonal poetic stance. A few years later, in another interview, Bishop again favored an indirect approach over directly confessional self-disclosure: "T. S. Eliot, though, was right, I think, when he said that the more you try to express yourself, the less you really express. So much poetry I see seems self-indulgent."(3) Bishop avoids self-indulgence in the monologues of "Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics" by engaging others in a dialogic exploration and expression of the self. For Bishop, indirection is necessary for effective expression. It is also the result of her dialogic presentation of ideas and values, This oblique approach in her work has been identified by some feminist critics as a central strategy, typical of women's writing, which helped her gain "greater acceptance within the main (male) tradition of Western poetry than many women writers have achieved."(4) Analysis of Bishop's technique exclusively in terms of a female tradition, though, runs the risk of overlooking the complexity and merit of her artistry and her ideas by reducing them to mainly a consequence of her gender.(5) Responding to the prospect of a women's issue of Little Magazine in 1971, Bishop states: ...I have never believed in segregating the sexes in any way, including the arts... It is true there are very few women poets, painters, etc.,--but I feel that to print them or exhibit them apart from works by men poets, painters, etc., is just to illustrate in this century, Dr. Johnson's well-known remark--rather to seem to agree with it.(6) Rather than simply to evade the negative effects of being labelled a "woman poet," it was in order to reject the notion of "segregating" creative works in gender-based categories that Bishop always refused to be included in any anthology which consisted only of works by women.(7) Even though Bishop recognizes gender difference in matters of artistic creation, indirection, for her, is first and foremost an aesthetic approach and axiological consequence rather than a self-protective technique. In a conversation with George Starbuck in 1977, Bishop said, "Sometimes I think if I had been born a man I probably would have written more. Dared more, or been able to spend more time at it. I've wasted a great deal of time."(8) Bishop's awareness of the disadvantages of her gender, and the resulting psychological and social burden involved, may have contributed to her indirect approach. But gender is not by any means the most important explanation of the choice or manner of "the oblique approach" in her poems. An examination of Bishop's "Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics" in connection with its historical literary context and to Bishop's own beliefs and artistic principles will offer a fuller understanding of Bishop's poetics and her strategy of "indirection. …