The American greats, and Oprah

When Oprah added William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury to her bookclub list as a summer read, said bookclub gulped and shrivelled in the path of The Establishment's raucous laughter. The plebs fell for it and sales of books by Faulkner increased (I know because I sold a few to unwitting fans of Marianne Keyes and Jodi Picoult). This was after the James Frey A Million Little Pieces, which he sold as memoir but was really almost entirely made up, and the 'almost entirely' is debatable.

This introduction is a red herring, but now you know that I know what I'm talking about. To add to your store of Oprah trivia, her bookclub really did shrivel (maybe not gulp). (Although it did come to life again a few years ago. Because, this is Oprah.) Put those two facts together, bind them with logic, and you realise Oprah rarely actually read the books she touted - they were chosen by assistants and publishers' publicists. (What they were thinking when they included Faulkner is a mystery.)

I recently tried to read The Sound and the Fury, but read no further than three pages (read being a misnomer: I daydreamed through three pages - I cannot remember a thing). I don't abandon books after I have committed to them, ever. Even Atomised, and that was at least as traumatising as something I saw in the supermarket the other day (and which shall forever remain wordless, so don't even ask).

Oprah generalised that 'Faulkner is the greatest American writer, like, ever' (sure, along with Hemingway, Twain, Poe, Steinbeck, McCarthy...). But I would imagine even the most stalwart Faulkner fan would harbour a teensy bit of bitterness at having to work so hard to read for fun. I felt that, at present, the only author deserving of that degree of effort is James Joyce. (We have a tempestuous relationship. He channels through the book on my dresser and I ignore his cursing.) He was using up my time with Joyce, even though I haven't so much as picked up the cursed (har!) book in six months (I was polishing the furniture).

Imagine if Oprah had nominated The Odyssey... Now there is a book to bury a bookclub near to the centre of the earth.

Having said this, I am a Faulkner fan (and a Joyce fan - I swear I will finish that book one day, you Irishman!). As I Lay Dying is on my list of books that will haunt me for life. Ok, no, it is silly to lay claim to choices in your future. It haunts me and I hope it haunts me for life (at least because there are way worse types of ghosts to be haunted by... Actual ghosts, for example). In two sentences, the characters sum up the world for me in a Cormac McCarthy-worthy musing:

"It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end."

The book is set in the American south, among a po' family, the matriarch of which has just died. The novel tells of the the family's efforts to arrange her funeral, which chiefly consist of couriering her body on the farm's wagon to another, more affluent part of the family. Really (because this is how literature works), it is about the relationships between the characters, how they live, their relationships with the matriarch and the wisdom that comes from being po'.

That last bit is facetious, but Rousseau's Noble Savage is still alive and well, just now living in shacks constructed from the cardboard of cellphone ads. Faulkner can be forgiven, by historicity, but what is our excuse?

To climb up that tree of great American authors (figuratively, because I tried to climb a tree the other day and found I no longer have the muscles), Faulkner inspires the work of Toni Morrison, the sun of Oprah's universe together with Maya Angelou and her dogs. We studied Morrison every. single. year. of my degree, largely because one of our lecturers was Obsessed with her. Because of this I can name every novel she has ever written, have read them, and know that she is a frightening woman who use to be an editor at Faber & Faber and now terrifies undergrads.

I would sell organs to be terrifying. Or to work at Faber & Faber (I would even volunteer my services as a fridge-cleaner. Someone would see the obsessive way I scrubbed at stains hidden under shelves and would know me for a perfectionist and would let me edit manuscripts so they could take the credit and I would be happy).

Morrison's characters are almost exclusively Southern, African-American, discriminated against, they discriminate against and tattooed with mythology. Slavery, chauvinism, racism, all the meaty -isms. Her novels are uplifting and inspiring, and (I'm going to be serious now) brilliant. Songs of Solomon is my favourite and Paradise my least favourite. Where Faulkner plays devil's advocate, Morrison pursues abuse single-mindedly, creating her own mythologies.

Now, along the way up that greatness tree, we missed two brown-tipped offshoots (like that of the bamboo in my bathroom), titled Zora Neale Hurston and Carson McCullers. I am starting to feel like I am trailing in Oprah's shadow - Oprah ('s assistant) picked books from both authors for her bookclub. In fact, Hurston is (allegedly) her favourite author. Huh, perhaps I and The Establishment have been overly judgemental. Though, still, Faulkner?

Carson McCullers has featured on this blog, more than once, so for equality's sake (it's election day!), let's stick to Hurston. I read Their Eyes were Watching God a couple of months ago, set in... if you have been reading carefully, you, you can guess... yes, the American south, that muddy well of discrimination and abuse (drinking game: take a shot every time this post uses 'discrimination' or 'abuse'. Or 'southern'. Or 'and') and muddied vowels. In this book, the abuse is persistent but limited to the background.

Written in the vernacular (like As I Lay Dying), the novel tells the story (a secondhand account of her telling of the story) of a woman from her childhood to the death of her husband. Based on your cultural dips into Faulkner and Morrison, you expect a certain theme and for a while Hurston gives it to you, until she begins to channel Faulkner, and soon we know that we are all abusing one another, which makes for another less than uplifting tale, but a poignant one.

Zora Neale Hurston, not on Oprah...

At this point, I am wondering why I have read so many of the American greats, when the first great South African title I think of is Cry the Beloved Country (partly because it is long and long equals great, obviously) and authors are Nadine Gordimer and Andre Brink (neither of whom write... enjoyable fiction). (JM Coetzee? This is one of the few instances where man and work deserve to be equated. In short, there is no need to bolster his egoism by acknowledging him.) Oh, and a couple of Fugard's workshopped plays.

(Please don't redirect me to African fiction, because Chinua Achebe is about as close to Nadine Gordimer as spaghetti is to curry.)

While I want to tell you that I am replacing my to-read list with South African greats, to rectify this situation, I would be lying, and why lie in cyberspace? Every culture seems to have an inflection in its writing, some style that is unique. American fiction is vast, given its very nature as a land of immigrants made up of many states. These four authors have been chosen, by me (and Oprah), artificially, by the links I make between them. And perhaps the same could be said for Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Calvino and Eco, Marquez and Bolano.

South African fiction, especially the political works - sometimes it feels like they're all political - is dry. Metaphors are like kites tied to a fence, like wallflowers that can't dance, like colours mixed into a muddy brown. These works remind me of the Karoo, which I think of fondly but would not live there. When I read, I want to be tossed around, not by emotion, but by the acrobatics of the words. I read to read. To consume the experience and feel bloated with it - and the only way a plot can catch up is to jump and freefall.

We don't have an Oprah (I don't have a TV, but no, whatsherface who used to have an afternoon show on SABC 3 does not count), so there is no one to nominate setworks for the nation to read over the December holidays. If we did, what would she pick? Disgrace? Confessions of a Gambler? Agaat? Fiela se Kind? Maybe Coetzee would admit that his fiction is actually straight-up memoir. We definitely need an Oprah.

Who's afraid of Samuel Beckett?

Way back when (yes, it was a long time ago), I was an undergrad discovering (literally mining, it felt to me as it feels to every young'n) the works of great (and minor) authors who described parts of my world. Grand, twisted, confusing, unfair, ironic if irony were unstructured, but poetic. (See previous post.) Like medication wrapped in a plastic capsule, the world is easier to swallow when mangled into black typeface. That was when I rediscovered my desire to write.

Every great writer (I hope?) has to first be a bad writer. (I'm ready to fight for this illusion.) The assignment for that  month's creative writing workshop was to write a one-act play. So, I wondered why one might hate a colour. A colour is like a number - innocuous - but still, I do not like the number 7. Even numbers have a pattern (please, tell me you know what that is) and so do primes, but odd numbers in general?! Their only pattern is that they aren't evens!

Can you explain your own reactions to innocuous things? And I'm not referring to favourite colours, which are based on preference, aesthetic. I'm talking about a judgement on something that is by nature exempt from judgement. So, is my explanation above really an explanation? Or is it hidden within the black typeface?

Dear reader, the point is a-coming. Hang in there.

The protagonist of my play is afraid of the colour red, as above. She is in the queue of a bank (clearly not the red one) and breaking the rules of All Queues: talking to people around her, with no reason; commenting on their clothing; skipping places; revealing very intimate information; and questioning the rationale behind All Queues.

Her real motivation is to confront a man who she sees the vortex of every trauma in her life. But the plot of the play is not the plot of this post.

One of the other workshoppers (very knowledgeable but irritatingly so) was intrigued by the pattern of my characters, by the misanthropy and the tragic, self-deprecating humour. She recommended I read Watt by Samuel Beckett. I was racing on the adrenalin of inspiration and dutifully had to have that book. I ordered online and it arrived, in Russian-doll squares of cardboard and bubble-wrap.

The production specs tell you this is something different (though I could not have told you how at the time - please note this, cynics of the influence of an experience of a book). The cover is clouds of dark puce, which fold into the ghost of a man and his suitcase at a train station, facing down the tracks. The title is written in yellow caps in a stark and thin font, as is the name. The surname dwarfs everything. This is a writer of stature, it says.

The cover is matt laminated. (Expensive and a risk, because the film comes off at the corners after a while.) The paper is thicker than the usual 70 gsm and yellowed. (Thicker paper is again expensive and paper nowadays is often acid-free because acid yellows the paper.) The type and layout is old-school, and the design leaves wide margins at all four sides. (The typeface is a thick, calligraphic serif font, which takes more space than a modern, cleaner font, as do the margins. This means more pages and more expense.) The last two points suggest that this a reprinting of the original film - also suggested by the copyright date on the imprint page, which would need to be renewed with each edition.

Where on earth does one find a printing press that prints this outmoded format? None that I know of.

I'm getting carried away. You can ignore that entire paragraph if you like. My point is, this is a work of substance, immune to time. Remind you of any other author? Another author I am afraid to read? Yep, James Joyce and Beckett were friends - groan - friends!

As with Ulysses, I have not read Watt, ten years later. It sits comfortably on my bookshelf, between Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry and Alexandra Fuller's The Legend of Colby Bryant, part of a section dedicated to books I will read next. (Next being a comfortably indeterminate word.) I have a reading eye larger than available leisure time, so this shelf grows like a creature from Aliens.

At least I have read 90 pages of Ulysses, set schedules and worn the cover a bit. Watt is pristine, which is why I can wax lyrical about its specs. I pick books to read depending on my mood. But when you are feeling dark and deep, does it make sense to read something equally or perhaps more dark? In those moods (in this mood) I pick something wherein the characters kill the fantastical bad... things... (projection intended), where the moral high ground is easy to identify and where I can fixate on seemingly indestructible things like direwolves and dragons.

But this is not the real reason, although whatever sense of self-preservation I have does revolt at the idea. You know my tired complaint, the one I can actually do something about, but am afraid to. I have not published. Yet. But there's another, less obvious one. I have not accomplished. This book reminds me of myself before I graduated into the big bad world (although I would argue I already a foot in the muck and felt the promising squelch).

My play was not very good, although it has some redeeming points, but I never wanted to be a playwright. I also have never really bothered with plot except as a coat hanger for my characters' baggage. Now here is a mentor for my characters, to help me make them great - standing on the shoulders of giants and all that. But I have to accept that, at first, they won't be. They won't be giantific - they will be dwarfish - subjectively dwarfish.

Will reading Watt help me feel more optimistic or less? Will I get farther than I have with Ulysses? (Will I understand more of it? Come'n, you didn't understand 95% of it either.) Will I remember how it felt to be so sure of success that I was prepared to fail? And will I finally find some balls and write the damn thing?! It may be a while before we find out, so hold on, kids.

The definition of futility

Stupidity or futility? Sometimes they're the same thing - but not synonyms. Maybe just cousins so far removed that the only have one gene in common anymore: ginger hair or astigmatism or bad taste in men. They never meet (in the dictionary) but they are unwittingly reunited here. Not by me.

No, they are being reunited by the most powerful book in English literature.

It's also long, but definitely not the longest. Agaat and Song of Fire and Ice, even in Kindle form, were weights that strained my thumb and index finger. Crime and Punishment literally bruised the web between those two fingers. Google is indecisive (personification intended, because none of us are responsible for our statements here, right) about the longest novels, and they all hurdle the 1 000 page mark as if this were the Olympics. On the podium are Proust, Ayn Rand, Tolstoy and David Foster Wallace. I genuinely think they haven't accounted for Ms Marlene van Niekerk.

Now I'm purposefully stringing you along, because I anticipate your doubt, your accusations of hubris, your dire prophesies, and your own stories about stupidity and futility.

Suspense cut like a ribbon around a statue: I am about to read all 4 000 pages of In Search of Lost Time by Michel Proust. Nah, not really. Ribbon still intact. The title is deceptive (I'm thinking dinosaurs here), but apparently a lot of nothing happens except a brief affair, perhaps unconsummated.

Now, really, scissors in hand and no glue. Ulysses by Joyce. Ribbon is taken up by wind and blown into the crowd. James Joyce. He deserves that Bond-esque calling card.

I received this copy for my birthday and tried twice to read it. The first time, I confess, I understood nothing, except something about milk, a dog, and two poorer and wealthier college boys who are friends. I wanted to believe in this book. I want the anecdotal character of the man to be alive in his books. I believe in the Modernists, with an indefinable emotion best represented in the cave of Passage to India.

I am a Modernist born with Post-modern baggage.

The second time the milk, the dog and the relationship between the boys stood out. But more than that: I discovered a whole new way of using language. Scoff - I have done it myself. Don't justify the scoffing with Portrait of an Artist - I did too. But Ulysses...

I am trying to find you an example of the best of his prose, but it can't be extracted without being meaningless or trite. The story may jump in some places and delay in others, but every sentence is inseparable from the next. The sentences are short but tight: a design lecturer once told me that the best design is not the one with the most elements, but the one from which you have removed every element except the ones you need. That's Joyce. If he doesn't need a verb, preposition and so on, he doesn't use it.

So why did I stop re-reading? Joyce's may not be the longest book, but it is a weight even for the reader. By 90 pages I was exhausted. The denseness of the prose is its genius, but also the thing that turns the reader away, clutching the ribbon. Based on my last attempt, I think each chapter needs to be re-read to be understood on even the most superficial level of plot.

Ribbon blown away, like a plaster ripped off.

You have noticed the title again and are wondering whether I am prophesying my own failure. (After all I predicted your scoffing.) You know the saying: Stupidity is failing, and then using the same methods and expecting a different outcome. Or is it futility? Stupidity, futility - they're more closely related than their birth certificates indicate.

Because maybe the more you beat at a brick wall, the bricks begin to crack and crumble. Maybe one brick loosens enough for you to pull out, and your fingers toughen and once you've weakened the base, the rest crumbles too. It may take longer to pull down the Great Wall of China than it took to build. But did the job need to be done any faster? And I'm guessing that when builders had only completed a thousandth of the wall, someone commented about the job's futility.

This analogy, I realise now, describes the writer's efforts more than mine. Many people thought he was a profiteer and others tolerated him. I can compile some nasty reviews based on Portrait myself. But he trusted his instincts and wrote prose that would not change the needle on a balance scale. I suppose it's a bit like knowing there is treasure on the other side of the wall and that there is only one way to get there. Well, there are always more options, but reading Sparknotes defeats the object of the exercise.