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I haven’t read The Infinities
Then there’s The Infinities by John Banville, a high-falutin’ philosophical kind of book that I really wanted to read, because it’s got modern families, Greek gods and a crazy alternate history scenario in which England has remained Catholic since the age of Mary Queen of Scots. This is my kind of book, so I gave it a try, but was stopped cold dead by the opening page:
Of the things we fashioned for them that they might be comforted, dawn is the one that works. When darkness sifts from the air like fine soft soot and light spreads slowly out of the east then all but the most wretched of humankind rally. It is a spectable we immortals enjoy, this minor daily resurrection, often we will gather at the ramparts of the clouds and gaze down upon them, our little ones, as they bestir themselves to welcome the new day. What a silence falls upon us then, the sad silence of our envy. Many of them sleep on, of course, careless of our cousin Aurora’s charming matutinal trick, but there are always the insomniacs, the restless ill, the lovelorn tossing on their solitary beds, or just the early-risers, the busy ones, with their knee-bends and their cold showers and their fussy little cups of black ambrosia. Yes, all who witness it greet the dawn with joy, more or less, except of course the condemned man, for whom first light will be the last, on earth.
I feel like the condemned man when I read a paragraph like this. What this lacks (along with plot and interest) is truthiness. These are empty pretty words. It’s a show of style. It’s a 20 minute guitar solo.
I actually don’t think this is so bad, although I would agree that the content to style ratio is a little high for my tastes. When I read, I want to be able to believe that every single sentence, image, metaphor, and even word needs to be there. That’s why I admire writers like JM Coetzee, who can convey so much that feels real with prose that in fact says very little. When I read Coetzee, there’s always a feeling of utter tightness, his prose can be so taut that I can’t imagine sliding a single word in or out.
The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)
The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)
Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)
We just published a review that similarly questions Banville’s book: http://blog.semcoop.com/2010/03/12/the-infinities/
I can’t help but wonder if you feel the same about Maria’s’s writing. Personally, I love his work; I believe the content is kind of secondary, emerging or revealing itself slowly in a way that is somehow dependent upon his style. Very much like poetry I guess.
I like my prose a little purpled-up, but I also like 20 minute guitar solos. Followed by a 30 minute drum solo. (Which is not to say that I dug this paragraph–I’ve read Banville before and it wasn’t my thing, but in general I like it when I start a book and I don’t feel like it is immediately trying to tell me something I should know.)
Stephen: This is an interesting question. I guess my answer is that I enjoy style when there’s a purpose to it, but not style for style’s sake. I think poetry often embodies the former . . . it’s an extremely stylized kind of writing, but usually if the poet is doing a good job the style is communicating a lot of importance. When I read something like the Banville quoted above, I feel like this is someone who likes to play with words but doesn’t know what he really wants to tell us.
From the little that I’ve read of Marias so far, it’s clear that his writing is extremely stylized. I’d say his style is tending toward style with purpose, so far.
Banville is the kind of writer I really want to like…he’s got interesting plots, unreliable narrators, a healthy amount of cynicism, an interest in what constitutes “madness,” and so on (not to mention always tending to say things I agree with in his interviews), but despite having great recipes uses mediocre ingredients.
Not every writer ought to be is capable of being revolutionary, of course, but except for occasionally teaching me some cool new words there’s not much he provides that other “big name” English-language authors haven’t already become boring for doing.
“Truthiness”, it should be said, is from Shields’ Reality Hunger which Levi has swallowed whole.
As I wrote in my review of that dreadful book, the great writers *go through* literature. They don’t dispense with it. Kafka called truthiness the blood oozing between the great stones of the law. He couldn’t contain it in the work but we all sense it there oozing from the sentences. It’s why his work is special to us. Each writer does it differently, some better than others. Banville isn’t my thing either but to react to this opening like that is rather impatient.
Truth isn’t a matter of choosing between in flowery or stark prose. Proust is as economical as Kafka and shares Kafka’s fascination with comprehending reality and imagination (think of the centrality of coming to consciousness in bed at the beginnings of their famous works), while those who write like Proust are really nothing like him in terms of ambition and vision (Marias, for example).
Recognising and trusting to the paradox of literature doesn’t suit Levi Asher in his new gushing fandom but it *is* the real thing.
Steve: I didn’t mean to imply that a stark style is the only way to go. As you note, in both Proust and Kafka there is the same feeling of necessity, although each has a very different level of “starkness.”
I agree that tossing a book on the first page is usually a sign of impatience. I would have read further, if only because a number of books I love left me wanting after the first few pages.
I’m one of the people who liked Reality Hunger. The book obviously isn’t rigorous in the way some want it to be, but as an incitement to think it does its job very well.
“When I read, I want to be able to believe that every single sentence, image, metaphor, and even word needs to be there.” Why? That sounds like literary Calvinism, all dour and glum and, well, economical. I would agree that tautness can be fine, and is certainly a legitimate style, it’s just not the only one, and certainly not the best one. A bit of exuberance for its own sake, even whole books of it, is bracing.
In that paragraph in particular the lines felt clunky. It says something, a good number of things, and I’d be able to tolerate more empty verbiage than it has – but it doesn’t SING. An opening paragraph like that is the introduction to a book I wouldn’t read; you have to EARN your tough sentences, and you earn them with lines that BREATHE.
Gary: I can see how you might have gotten that from what I wrote, but I didn’t mean to write against exuberance, etc. For instance, I love the writing of David Foster Wallace, whose prose tends toward extreme exuberance.
But I do believe that in Wallace’s good works, every word–or virtually every word–needs to be there. It’s not really economical so much as . . . I guess savvy would be a good word for it.
The story goes that Ezra Pound once tried to summarize a F.M. Ford paragraph, only to realize when he was done that he’d copied the thing verbatim. Pound is said to have seen that as a Good Thing. I’m more inclined to think of it as a Thing, neither good nor bad. The real question is whether a particular set of words presents a reader with an object that a reader willing to wrestle with it can make something of. So what does the first paragraph of The Infinities give us? It tells us that it’s spoken by a god, so perhaps gods will have something to do with the book. It shows us that the gods think of themselves as something like young parents in greeting cards and TV ads around Christmas time: “[We] gaze upon them, our little ones, as they bestir themselves to welcome the new day.” We know the gods have tried to comfort their “little ones,” but have largely failed—except for dawn, that works. Now we know what time it is. We also know the only exception to the “little ones” who welcome dawn are the condemned, which sets up the first sentence of the second paragraph. And so on. Now, from the point of view of style, we might ask: Is “matutinal” necessary or there just to show that Banville owns a dictionary? Who’s Aurora? (Alas for the thinness of our mythological education!) “Fussy little cups of black ambrosia?” Why not say “coffee and be done with it? And so on. I would argue that all the stylistic tics aren’t tics at all, but that in his very first paragraph Banville is using such things—and the gazing-upon-little-ones bit gives it away—to set the tone of his book, which is playful throughout and culminates in a delicious send-up of happy-ever-aftering at the end. Now, it’s a separate question entirely whether a given reader responds positively or negatively to this kind of writing, but to say as Levi does that this paragraph consists of “empty, pretty words” is just silly. I think it’s a glorious paragraph and a perfect beginning to a delightful book.