Call It Sleep, Henry Roth, 1934

Aristotle’s assertion that “poetic language must appear strange and wonderful” has been taken up and reworked time and again by theorists and writers as varied as the English Romantics and the Russian Formalists. Viktor Shklovsky, in “Art as Technique” writes, “the purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects unfamiliar.”

Two things can be seen to follow from Shklovsky’s position: if perception is based on the interpretation of stimuli, physical and psychological, then any object, including the art object, can be rendered in completely unexpected ways. The onus is on the artist to juxtapose novel or conflicting ideas or images next to each other to create new ways of seeing something.

And the art object, product of a decontextualizing, defamiliarizing project, will elicit a multitude of responses, often initially of surprise or incomprehension. The audience expects to understand the art work but the comprehension is often momentarily — and deliberately — delayed.

Henry Roth’s dense, poetic first novel, “Call It Sleep”, published in 1934, makes ample but judicious use of techniques that bring about “defamiliarizing” sensations in the reader. 

The quote I have chosen to demonstrate my proposal comes from the prologue. And while this section is written by an omniscient, third person narrator and the remainder of the story is told through the eyes of the child/protagonist, David Schearl, startling or dramatic tropes used to describe the immigrant experience in New York city at the turn of the twentieth century are present throughout the text.

I have selected a short, four sentence description of the Statue of Liberty with which to show how Roth works language to create feelings that are unsettling.

“And before them, rising on her high pedestal from the scaling swarmy brilliance of sunlit water to the west, Liberty. The spinning disk of the late afternoon sun slanted behind her, and to those on board who gazed, her features were charred with shadow, her depths exhausted, her masses ironed to one single plane. Against the luminous sky the rays of her halo were spikes of darkness rowling the air; shadow flattened the torch she bore to a black cross against flawless light - the blackened hilt of a broken sword. Liberty. The child and mother stared again at the massive figure in wonder.”

To achieve defamiliarization Roth creates unusual, startling metaphors - the flame is a “black cross”, a “broken sword”; the rays of the statue’s halo are “spikes” that are “roweling the air”. 

He uses the language of violence to describe what he sees and perhaps what he feels about the statue - she is “charred”, “exhausted”, “ironed”, “flattened”. She is almost two-dimensional. The backdrop is also monochromatic: the sun has slanted behind Liberty  and the people on board the ship experience her as “shadowed”, “dark” and “blackened”.

A black cross has negative religious connotations. A broken sword signifies defeat. A rowel is sharp. These are unusual and unsettling initial images of the symbol that represents a land of opportunity, one that offers freedom. Feelings of menace and precarity are described in similar fashion throughout the book making it a truly dark novel.

“Call it Sleep” is also a marvel: it is the first novel of a young man who has written a Joycean-inspired story that has become a classic of American literature. 

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Women in Love - D H Lawrence - 1920

While there is much to recommend the reading and re-reading of D H Lawrence’s Women in Love - from the precise and moving descriptions of the natural world and man-made environments to the psychological impulses that control the behaviour of people - the style and content of the novel elicits strong emotion, oftentimes positive but occasionally negative. On the one hand, readers love his descriptions of flowers and trees, the banks of a lake, the muddiness of a miner’s boots and the seductive way that he reports the colour and fit of a character’s clothes or the shape and feel of household objects. Many admirers applaud how strikingly well Lawrence is able to track the physiological and emotional modulations undergone by individuals as they contemplate sexual desire. Two days after Lawrence’s death in France, The Manchester Guardian published an obituary, laudatory in content and imitative of Lawrencian form which stated that his writing “made him a rebel against all accepted values of modern Western civilisation, one who challenged the disintegration not only of those who were actually caught in the blind mechanism of industry but of all who reflected a stultifying materialism either in a hard possessiveness, a soft emotionalism, or a sterile intellectualism.” The eulogy is all but explicitly referencing the main characters - Ursula, Gertrude, Rupert and Gerald.

On the other hand, many readers, some contemporaneous with Lawrence and others discovering his work in this new millenium have found aspects of his style and some of the underlying ideas that have shaped the content of the novel to be problematic and sometimes frustrating. T S Eliot writes that Lawrence is “the one contemporary figure about whom my mind will, I fear, always waver between dislike, exasperation, boredom and admiration.” A case can certainly be made for the notion that Lawrence’s content and style promote a kind of “bullying” or “declamatory didacticism”. Sometimes, he goes too far: when his style mimics what can be described as essentialist rhetoric (unmistakable in  “blood-knowledge”, “male vitality” and paradoxical couplings like “separateness in union”), readers are left wondering if, in his quest to create a new interpersonal paradigm and a new literature to express this new world, he doesn't begin to sound like a proto-fascist. 

It is true that D H Lawrence’s sexual politics are complex and not altogether palatable or justifiable, particularly to us, his modern readers, but it is also true that his prose is original, memorable and moving so perhaps the final word ought to go to him: 

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.

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Remembrance of Things Past - Marcel Proust - 1932 (English Edition)

Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past is a unique literary-philosophical text, exceeding the standards of the usual novel of both its time and ours in its breadth, depth and complexity. Committed students of these four thousand pages need to hold a multiplicity of elements in mind while reading the volumes. Some of the philosophical, psychological and literary ideas, as varied as Bergsonian reformulations of time and memory, the validation of the Freudian subconscious, and the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative strategy are all woven into the stories of several dozen eccentric characters. Modern readers are treated to long, unbroken reflections on the various categories of memory or aberrant love or the fanciful qualities of the imagination, for instance, all the while trying to follow plot lines and character development. If one adds the sometimes suffocating depth of detail presented by the narrators (sometimes omniscient, sometimes first person, sometimes he is a young man, sometimes old), the task of assimilating all that is written can appear impossible. 

But the effort expended yields considerable satisfaction if the reader persists to the last volume, Time Regained, where the novelistic responsibilities of the text are completed (the fate of all the characters is revealed, closure is established) and the philosophical underpinnings of the novel are distilled into a few pages of explanation. The narrator, after revisiting the the people and places that have shaped his life, after sharing with us some new secrets and introducing one or two new characters to the saga tells us of his epiphany:

Then a new light arose in me, less brilliant indeed than the one that had made me perceive that a work of art is the only means of regaining lost time. And I understood that all the material of a literary work was in my past life...stored up by me without my divining its destination or even its survival…

The message is hugely optimistic: the passage of time is not necessarily negative. In fact it can lead to a work of art: the narrator believes that if he can recall events, impressions and details of his life and then reshape them via his imagination, he will be able to transform a life lived and eventually finished, into a work of art that may resonate past his own death.

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Waiting For Gertrude, Bill Richardson, 2001

Alice B Toklas is dead. Her bones are buried next to Gertrude Stein’s remains in the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris but Alice’s soul resides in the body of a feral cat. She is in exciting company as the souls of celebrities as famous and accomplished as Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison, Maria Callas, Colette, Isadora Duncan, Heloise and Abelard, La Fontaine, Frederic Chopin, Sarah Bernhardt, Marcel Proust and a host of other cultural luminaries wander the cemetery, also in the bodies of cats. Each of these personages has changed only in form - their personalities are intact: they love and hate and lust after all that they did in their previous life. 

Poor Alice wants Gertrude but Gertrude’s soul has not yet found a feline host and the story begins to heat up when Alice sets a giant midnight orgy in motion, headed by the silent, slightly menacing but intoxicatingly sexy tomcat, Jim Morrison. Will the dozens of kittens born to the Pere Lachaise community two months hence yield up a new Gertrude? And who among the inhabitants is stealing body parts and trinkets? Who is opening letters and revealing secrets? 

 Waiting for Gertrude by Bill Richardson is a cleverly conceived, original and ultimately unclassifiable novel. If I were shelving this book in a library, I’d be spoiled for choice. It is part fable and Jean de La Fontaine, the original 17th century fabulist, himself a cat, chronicles, in mocking fashion, the goings-on in the community. It is part epistolary novel with letters flying from Oscar to Jim, Colette to her mother and also to Jim, Isadora to Modigliani. Waiting for Gertrude is part journal: many entries are penned by Alice who provides the reader with local colour and helps progress the plot. The book shares tropes with crime novels. It is certainly a romance where both consummated and unrequited love feature. It is a bedroom farce marked by mistaken identities and sexual innuendo, light pornography features as does the occasional slamming of doors and the “beating of hasty retreats” at just the right moment. But most of all, Waiting for Gertrude is a neo-gothic tale. It is subtitled a “graveyard gothic” and while it is comic and light of touch and not particularly scary, the usual elements that define a gothic novel are all there: omens and curses, the supernatural, nightmares, a mustachioed villain, a damsel (or two) in distress and a happy ending. If I were a librarian I would place Waiting for Gertrude on the “highly recommended” shelf with a tag that suggests it be read on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

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The Passions of the Mind: A Novel of Sigmund Freud by Irving Stone, 1971

This discussion of Irving Stone’s biographical novel, Passions of the Mind: A Novel of Sigmund Freud 1971, is my latest effort at amateur literary sleuthing. It has led me through essays on the changing definition of the biographical novel, the death of the liberal humanist subject, the rise and fall of the postmodernist subject and emerging 21st century movements like ecocriticism and Darwinian literary studies. 

Having finished the novel (a slow and thorough telling of a life, quite pleasant, if slightly formal in language) I next read an essay by the same author called The Biographical Novel, from 1957. It is a brilliant document, transparent in meaning and method, a work that captures the ideological presuppositions that have lain at the foundation of western ontological thought from Descartes onwards. His opening sentence captures the ideas and the mood, the self-assuredness and the belief in the existence of self-evident “truths” that informed the scholarship and zeitgeist of Stone’s era. 

Stone writes, “The biographical novel is a true and documented story of one human being’s journey across the face of the years, transmuted from the raw material of life into the delight and purity of an authentic art form.” If Stone’s definition is reliable and if he has followed the rules he has enumerated in his essay then “Passions of the Mind” ought to be considered a “true” and “documented” story of Sigmund Freud’s “journey”.1 And if the “raw material” is “transmuted” into an art form that is “authentic”, verifiable and if it is treated by expert hands, this biographical novel should be considered true. We can indeed know Freud: mid 20th century positivists like Stone tell us so and they teach us how to do it. 

Enter the postmodern biographer and reader and everything changes. Recent writers like Massih Zekavat2 investigate the history of the construction of identities and remind us of the paradigm shift that ushered in the postmodern moment. After 1970, thinking about identity and its representation moved laterally and the existence of the stable, unified subject disappeared. The quest for the “authentic” self became not only impossible but irrelevant.  The postmodern generation might expect a biographical novel based on the life of Freud to ask different questions, to be more speculative and to take more risks. To rewrite Stone’s definition, “the material selected from sources that are sometimes unusual or unauthorized or problematic will give up multiple meanings. The resultant ‘art form’ or text, while it will not produce something ‘pure’ or ‘authentic’, may nevertheless ‘delight’, particularly if it calls attention to its artifice.” Can we know Freud? Which Freud? Deleuze and Guattari’s Freud? Juliet Mitchell’s Freud? There are many to choose from.

Time passes. The postmodern subject grows old. The discursive language around issues grows strident. Contestatory positions appear and new appeals are being made to science to solve the problems brought on by the neglect of facts and figures. The individual is now reoccupying the agent position. Human nature is back and ecocriticism, Darwinian literary critics and other biology based movements applaud its return. 

What would Irving Stone make of these monumental shifts in the formulation of ideas about ourselves? Is it nature over nurture or vice versa? Are we whole or fragmented subjects? And who was Freud, in the end?

1Of the 837 pages that comprise the novel, 28 pages detail the scholarship involved in the researching of the book.

2Zekavat, Massih., Evolution of the ‘Subject’: Postmodern and Beyond., 2010

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Un peu du passé - Marie Palumbo Argentieri - 2005

I love immigrant literature, particularly autobiographies, and especially those written by ordinary people who are able to distill experiences into a few, well chosen vignettes which quickly get at the heart of a life lived. Sometimes long, chronological, detail-laden books are undesired. Marie Palumbo Argentieri’s two slim volumes of reminiscences entitled “Un peu du passé” - “A Bit of the Past” are the perfect size for the reader wishing to spend an afternoon visiting the early days of an Italian family who emigrated to Nice, France in between the two world wars.

Argentieri, an amateur writer who has come late to writing, was born in Italy in 1924, emigrated to France while still an infant and published her work in 2005 at the age of 81. Her stories are written in simple, elegant French and they evoke feelings as varied as apprehension, pride, fear and contentment all the while avoiding sentimentality.

Argentieri describes certain small events that mark the family’s initiation into French society from their early encounters with authority (the police, the school teacher) and neighbours and co-workers (both French and Italian). These stories, however, are much more than gentle, episodic recollections of people’s struggles to assimilate into a foreign culture - they are also cleverly wrought little morality tales. The author’s narrative skills keep her audience curious about the outcome of the little adventures and indignities suffered by her family.

Argentieri manages the expectations of the reader, inserts details into the stories only when needed, and she uses dialogue to impart information that cannot be delivered any other way. Her style is economical and her narrative decisions are effective. The bicycle story exemplifies the author’s story telling skills. We travel with young Marie and her father to the commissariat's office to pay a fine they cannot easily afford, passing by the building’s facade upon which is sculpted an image of the scales of justice, “perfectly even”, according to Marie but which “sometimes tip in one direction” warns her father. Inside, we hear the father defending himself in broken French, sentences immediately followed by Marie’s clever translation of his words. She is politic and the fine is reduced. We all cheer - justice, dosed with humanity has  been served. The story of the crayons is equally lovely and well worth reading.

These stories have not yet been translated into English but the language is not difficult if readers have only secondary school French.

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Salvador Dali - Freud's Moses and Monotheism

Salvador Dali is a kind of magician whose sleight of hand is all his own: it takes the form of fanciful obfuscation, it plays with the audience’s expectations and confirms the long-held opinion that Dali’s art is ultimately more about Dali than the world it represents. Frequently, unashamedly and unselfconsciously, Dali will insert ideas and images derived from his early childhood experiences, or his dreams, or his self-professed obsessions into his artworks. Take his 1975 work entitled “Moses and Monotheism”, a set of ten lithographs which are based on his interpretation of Sigmund Freud's essay of the same title. Here, in each of the ten lithographs, two layers of material are superimposed onto the painted surfaces: the primary material, whose themes are suggested by the titles of the lithographs, and the secondary material, the intensely personal images, found again and again in Dali’s art but which bear no relationship to the primary work.

Ants, crutches, elephants with spindly legs and snails, four of his favourite recurring images, appear in the depictions of Moses and his travails. None appear in Freud’s text, none help to advance Freud’s radical proposals but a little bit of research into Dali’s meeting with Freud may explain at least one of the odder images. In “Moses Saved from the Waters”, Dali starts with the story of the three-month-old Moses, who in the Bible is placed by his mother and sister Miriam in a papyrus basket set afloat on the banks of the Nile. Dali paints water, sky and reeds in keeping with the traditional telling of events but substitutes a giant snail for the basket and adds crutches and bones to the scene. Moses is depicted as a baby with rays emanating from his head, one leg and arm are extended and he is lying in the opening of the giant snail which is being held up by bones. Crutches are holding the entire bizarre edifice above the water.

The snail does not, of course appear in the biblical telling of the Moses story, neither does it appear in Freud’s version of the story. It is wholly a Dali invention, borne, he tells us, of several moments where real-life snails produce epiphanies which involve Freud, at least tangentially.

One occurs on July 19th, 1938 during the much anticipated meeting between Dali and Freud. Dalí writes that he was captivated by the sight of a snail on a bicycle outside Freud's house and connected the snail with the image of Freud’s head.

Dali also writes that while eating snails in a restaurant in France he notices a photo of Freud in a newspaper. "I uttered a loud cry. I had just that instant discovered the morphological secret of Freud! Freud's cranium is a snail! His brain is on the form of a spiral - to be extracted with a needle!"

The question of why a snail houses a baby in its shell still remains unanswered, of course. All we know is that Freud’s cranium is a snail, snails transport angels, they save babies from drowning and in Dali’s world, anything goes.

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