Posts Tagged ‘Paul Valery’
The lantern battery and the golem
Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.
—Paul Valéry
Yesterday morning, my wife asked me: “Have you seen the illustration for Michael Chabon’s new essay?” She thrust the latest issue of The New Yorker in my direction, and when I looked down, I saw a drawing by Greg Clarke of a little boy reading what was unmistakably a copy of Astounding Science Fiction. The kid is evidently meant to be Chabon himself, and his article, “The Recipe for Life,” is about nothing less than how his inner life was shaped by his father’s memories of an earlier era. Chabon writes:
He talked about comic books, radio dramas, Astounding magazine, and the stories they’d all told: of rocket-powered heroes, bug-eyed monsters, mad scientists bent on ruling the world. He described to me how he had saved box tops from cold cereals like Post Toasties, and redeemed them by mail for Junior G-Man badges or cardboard Flying Fortresses that carried payloads of black marbles. He told me about playing games like potsy, stickball, handball, and ringolevio, and, for the first time but by no means the last, about an enchanted pastry called a charlotte russe, a rosette of whipped cream on a disk of sponge cake served in a scalloped paper cup, topped with a Maraschino cherry. He described having spent weeks in the cellar of his Flatbush apartment building as a young teen-ager, with some mail-order chemicals, five pounds of kosher salt, and a lantern battery, trying to re-create “the original recipe for life on earth,” as detailed in the pages of Astounding.
The younger Chabon listened to his father intently, and all the while, he was “riding the solitary rails of my imagination into our mutual story, into the future we envisioned and the history we actually accumulated; into the vanished world that he once inhabited.”
Chabon’s father seems to have been born around 1938, or right around the time that John W. Campbell took over Astounding, positioning him to barely catch the tail end of the golden age. He would have been about twelve when the article “Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science” appeared in the May 1950 issue, which means that he snuck in right under the wire. (As the fan Peter Graham once said: “The golden age of science fiction is twelve.”) In fact, when you account for a gap in age of about eighteen years, the fragments of his childhood that we glimpse here are intriguingly reminiscent of Isaac Asimov. Both were bright Jewish boys growing up in Brooklyn—otherwise known as the center of the universe—and they shared the same vocabulary of nostalgia. Robert Chabon reminisced about stickball and the charlotte russe; Asimov lamented the disappearance of the egg cream and wrote in his memoirs:
We used to play “punchball,” for instance. This was a variant of baseball, played without a lot and without a bat. All you needed was a street (we called it a “gutter”) and a rubber ball. You hit the ball with your clenched fist and from then on it was pretty much like baseball.
I don’t know if kids these days still play punchball, but it survived for long enough to be fondly remembered by Stephen Jay Gould, who was born in 1941 in Queens. For Gould, punchball was nothing less than “the canonical ‘recess’ game…It was the game we would play unless kids specifically called for another form.”
Like many polymaths who thrived at the intersection between science and the arts, Gould and Asimov were raised in secular Jewish households, and Chabon’s essay unfolds against a similar, largely unstated cultural background. He notes that his father knew “the birth names of all five Marx Brothers,” as well as the rather startling fact that Underdog’s archenemy was named Simon Bar Sinister. Recalling his father’s “expression of calm intensity,” Chabon links it to another Jewish icon: “A few years later, I will watch Leonard Nimoy, as Mr. Spock, look up from his scanner on the bridge of the USS Enterprise, and catch an echo of my father’s face.” As he silently watches Fritz Lang’s science fiction epic Metropolis in his ailing father’s bedroom, he imagines the conversation that might have unfolded between them under happier circumstances: “Lang’s mother was Jewish. His wife was a member of the Nazi Party.” “Hey, that would make a great sitcom.” Chabon doesn’t emphasize these connections, perhaps because he’s explored them endlessly elsewhere. In his earlier essay “Imaginary Homelands,” he writes:
For a long time now I’ve been busy, in my life and in my work, with a pair of ongoing, overarching investigations: into my heritage—rights and privileges, duties and burdens—as a Jew and as a teller of Jewish stories; and into my heritage as a lover of genre fiction…Years spent writing novels and stories about golems and the Jewish roots of American superhero comic books, Sherlock Holmes and the Holocaust, medieval Jewish freebooters, Passover Seders attended by protégés of forgotten Lovecraftian horror writers, years of writing essays, memoirs, and nervous manifestos about genre fiction of Jewishness.
This is one of the richest veins imaginable for cultural exploration, and Chabon has conducted it so expertly for so long that he can trust us to make many of the associations for ourselves. Revealingly, this is actually the second essay that he has written under the title “The Recipe for Life.” The first, published almost two decades ago, was a meditation on the myth of the golem, a prototypical science fiction story with anticipatory shades of Frankenstein. In his earlier piece, Chabon quotes the philosopher Gershom Scholem: “Golem-making is dangerous; like all major creation it endangers the life of the creator—the source of danger, however, is not the golem…but the man himself.” Chabon continues:
When I read these words, I saw at once a connection to my own work. Anything good that I have written has, at some point during its composition, left me feeling uneasy and afraid. It has seemed, for a moment at least, to put me at risk…I have come to see this fear, this sense of my own imperilment by my creations, as not only an inevitable, necessary part of writing fiction but as virtual guarantor, insofar as such a thing is possible, of the power of my work: as a sign that I am on the right track, that I am following the recipe correctly, speaking the proper spells.
The recipe, Chabon implies, can come from either “The Idea of the Golem” or Astounding, and we owe much of his remarkable career to that insight, which he implicitly credits, in turn, to his father: “The past and the future became alloyed in my imagination: magic and science, heroes and villains, brick-and-steel Brooklyn and the chromium world of tomorrow.”
Quote of the Day
It’s a good plan to work on several things at the same time. It yields the best results; one thing helps out the other and each is purer, more itself. For when ideas crop up you can fit each of them into the place that suits it best, since there are several pigeonholes to choose from.
The exact placing of a comma
It happened at certain stages in my life that poetry became a way of cutting myself off from the world…It is no bad thing if certain men have the strength of mind to attach more value and significance to determining a remote decimal number, or to the exact placing of a comma, than to the most resounding of news items, the most terrible catastrophe, or even to their own lives…
To outlaw the arbitrary: to shut out accidents, politics, the chaos of events, and the fluctuations of fashion; to attempt to draw from oneself some work more exquisite than one might have hoped for; to find strength in oneself not to be satisfied with less than prolonged struggles, to set about a passionate quest for the solving of problems imperceptible to most people, in defiance of the headlong rush, the distractions (however affecting) that intrude from the outside world—this is something that appeals to me…In circumstances so appalling, what could be done except to endure, destitute as one was of any means of action that might cope with the extraordinary commotion of a world gone mad?
Reading your own future
If you were to ask me why you should bother reading the science fiction of the thirties and forties, I’d say that you probably shouldn’t. At least not until you really felt like it. “The golden age of science fiction is twelve,” the fan Peter Graham famously said, and he was even more right than he knew: most readers get into science fiction in their preteens, and they read it in the way everyone should at that age—which is to say, essentially at random. A tattered paperback cover that catches your eye counts for a lot more than a recommendation from any adult, and you follow your nose from one title to the next, like a bee moving between flowers. For my generation, the gateway drug was likely to be a novel like Ender’s Game, which is still going strong, but the specific books and authors don’t matter very much. What counts is that science fiction scratches an itch that certain young readers never knew they had, and once they’ve experienced that feeling, they’re bound to seek it out again, even if it’s in a haphazard fashion. And it should be haphazard, at least at first. Science fiction has always been characterized by the intense pleasure that it gives to its readers, and by the inexpressible psychic craving that it satisfies, and the writers who do it best for any given individual can’t be predicted in advance. What young readers are really doing, aside from falling in love with the idea of the genre, is refining their instincts about where the loot is buried, which often involves finding characters who look and talk more or less like they do. They take plenty of wrong turns and they read a lot of junk along the way, but it mostly evens out in the end.
Here’s the funny thing: a young reader of twelve today, left to his or her own devices, is recreating exactly the same process that led to the creation of the science fiction community more than eighty years ago. Readers of that generation weren’t particularly picky. They were mostly limited to what appeared in the newsstand pulps every month, much of which was frankly terrible, and there weren’t any anthologies available. When you go back to read some of those forgotten stories now, it’s easy to wonder how the genre survived at all. But if it hung on so tenaciously, even as the magazines themselves struggled or folded, it was because of the urgent, primal need that it filled. When you’re reading to save your life, or to convince yourself that there’s something more to this world than the sticky hell of early adolescence, you’re not going to be overly discriminating in what you consume. This isn’t to say that fans couldn’t criticize the stories once they were done: one of the first things you notice when you go back to read the old letters columns in Astounding is how cheerfully the readers savage the magazines that they claimed to love. Tearing apart stories that don’t meet your standards is a pastime as honorable as fandom itself, and it only works when your confidence isn’t limited by your age or experience. Their opinions were idiosyncratic, unreasonable, prone to falling into violent disputes over tiny differences, and cobbled together from some of the least orderly reading lives imaginable. They were sorting it out for themselves, and the last thing you wanted was to tell them what to read—no more than you’d try to control a preteen who was discovering science fiction for the first time today. The only project that matters is the creation of the reader, and it emerges when it’s left mostly alone.
This doesn’t happen overnight. It might take six months, or twenty years. But once that reader bursts into existence—full of conviction, righteous prejudice, and disdain for the status quo—it becomes easier to see why it’s worth going back to those older writers. Along the way, the average fan will have read scraps of the old tradition here and there, but as soon as you go back to engage with it more systematically, it’s usually for a reason. As Paul Valéry said: “One only reads well that which one reads with some quite personal purpose. It may be to acquire some power. It can be out of hatred for the author.” And it’s fair to say that you can only arrive at these emotions after you’ve spent a while figuring out the genre for yourself. The reasons will differ widely between readers. You may read these stories so that you can cross a title off a list and say so, even if it’s just to a hypothetical interlocutor in your head. Maybe you’re starting to write your own stories, and you see yourself as “a wildcat miner drilling out resources that are shrinking,” in David Brin’s words, which means that you have to see what your predecessors have done for the sake of competitive advantage. You might be reading them solely with an eye to picking them apart. And you might even simply be reading these authors because you’ve heard from multiple sources that you’ll enjoy the hell out of the experience. None of these motivations is better than any other, and they probably only achieve their true strength in combination. But reading the stories of the past is just one aspect, and not always the most important one, of a reading life that can hardly help but assume its own unique, necessary form.
And along the way, something strange happens. If you’ve remained true to yourself, followed your nose, and expressed strong opinions in advance of having the knowledge to back them up, you discover that you’re part of a conversation that has been going on since long before you were born. The test for admission isn’t the mastery of any particular list of stories, but the fact of having been a certain kind of twelve year old—and it’s never too late to begin. Unlike most conversations, much of it took place in print, so you’ll eventually want to investigate what has been said before you arrived on the scene. You may not see much of yourself in the writers you discover, and they might not have seen much of themselves in you, but you also have more in common with them than you will with anyone else. Maybe you’ll only dig a little, or not at all, or maybe you’ll dig so deeply that it becomes an obstacle to your development in itself. But you’re building up an inner life that won’t look like any other, and you’ll spend much of it raiding other writers for parts. Sooner or later, I think, most readers realize that there are useful components that they won’t find if they confine themselves to the obvious: it’s how I felt when I discovered A.E. van Vogt, whom I never would have read if I hadn’t made a conscious effort to seek out these older stories. It will probably be someone else for you, and I can’t tell you who it will be or where to begin, although I’m happy to give you a list if you want it. All that matters is that you become the reader you were meant to be, who is both utterly unlike and surprisingly similar to all those who came before you. Because the only future science fiction has ever been good at predicting is that of its own readers.
Quote of the Day
It takes two to invent anything. The one makes up combinations; the other one chooses, recognizes what he wishes and what is important to him in the mass of the things which the former has imparted to him. What we call genius is much less the work of the first one than the readiness of the second one to grasp the value of what has been laid before him and to choose it.
Quote of the Day
A man is a poet if the difficulties inherent in his art provide him with ideas; he is not a poet if they deprive him of ideas.
Quote of the Day
One only reads well that which one reads with some quite personal purpose. It may be to acquire some power. It can be out of hatred for the author.
Solving problems with a blindfold
The constitution of poetry…is rather mysterious. It is strange that one should exert himself to formulate a discourse which must simultaneously obey perfectly incongruous conditions: musical, rational, significant, and suggestive; conditions which require a continuous and repeated connection between rhythm and syntax, between sound and sense…
[This] creates problems of extension and convergence which poets solve blindfold—but they solve them (and that is the essential thing), from time to time.
Thoughts on finishing a novel
In a few hours, if all goes according to plan, I’ll deliver the final draft of Eternal Empire to my publisher. (Whether or not anyone will be on the other end to receive it is another question entirely—the power situation in downtown New York is still pretty dicey, and in any case, Penguin has a lot of other things on its mind.) The funny thing, of course, is that it doesn’t really seem like I’m done. It doesn’t feel anticlimactic, exactly, but there’s never just one moment when you can look at a novel and know you’re finished. This manuscript has been more or less in its final form for about a week, and although I’ve continued to make small revisions up to the last minute, there haven’t been any major structural changes since earlier this month. I also know that I’ll do at least one more rewrite before the end of the year in response to notes from my editor, along with a second set of revisions after the copy edit, and yet another when I receive the page proofs. So even apart from Valéry’s observation that a work of art is never finished, but abandoned, I know that this isn’t really the end of anything.
All the same, it feels good, because this was a challenging novel in more ways than one. The timeline wasn’t quite as compressed as that for City of Exiles: that book was taken from initial synopsis to delivery in about nine months, and Eternal Empire benefited from an extra four weeks or so—which may not sound like a lot, but it went a long way toward preserving my sanity in what was already a very eventful year. Writing it was also tricky given its status as the conclusion of a trilogy. The story had to be accessible to readers who hadn’t read one or both of the previous books, but also had to revisit themes and characters in a way that would be satisfying to those who had followed the series from the beginning. I had a lot of unfinished business from the first two books to resolve, with numerous important players returning alongside entirely new characters. Finally, I wanted to raise the stakes, with heightened suspense and consequences, which meant writing more action, on a page by page basis, than the first two books combined. As a result, it ended up being a very crowded novel, and although I think I’ve managed to find a shape for the story that works, it wasn’t easy.
And there’s another sense in which this novel, like the others, will never really be finished. A first novel is a fluke, but two establish a pattern, and one of the most fascinating and difficult things about writing a third book is navigating the lessons and expectations that the previous ones have established. Each of my first two novels had elements that I wanted to preserve: The Icon Thief is denser and more complicated, City of Exiles faster and more streamlined, and my goal for the third installment was to combine the complexity of the first with the momentum of the second. The result was a kind of ongoing triangulation, as I found myself steering the narrative along a winding channel with the previous two books as markers. And I suspect that this is a process that will repeat itself with every book I write. I’m always going to be looking back at my old stuff, keeping what I like, discarding what I don’t, and trying to put together a body of work that makes sense when you stand back and look at it as a whole. Books talk to one another and shed light on their predecessors in surprising ways, and there’s a sense in which my first novel, for instance, will never read in quite the same way, now that it has two others lined up behind it.
As to where things go from here, I’m not entirely sure. After delivering the draft, I expect to spend the rest of the day handing out candy—we got something like two hundred trick-or-treaters last year. Certainly I’m hoping to take a couple of days off to read some good books, take care of a few projects around the house that I’ve been postponing for a while, and do my best to avoid obsessing over the polls. But I expect that I’ll get back to work on something soon—I feel nervous whenever I’m not writing, and as enticing as it sounds to do nothing, the appeal wears off pretty quickly. I have a general idea of what I’d like to do next, although for the first time in more than two years, I find myself without a book under contract. It’s a slightly precarious position, but it’s also liberating: I’ve been writing about the same ideas and characters for a long time, and as much as I’ll miss Maddy, Wolfe, Ilya, and the rest, I’m looking forward to trying something new. That’s the thing about writing: for all its constraints and pitfalls and frustrations, it really does allow for limitless possibilities. And the idea of pursuing these possibilities in a new direction, wherever they end up taking me, is very exciting.
Quote of the Day
Talent without genius isn’t much, but genius without talent is nothing whatever.
Quote of the Day
Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.
On listening to dreams
About a decade ago, MTV and Rolling Stone published a list of the hundred greatest pop songs of all time, topped by “Yesterday” and “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” What strikes me now about this list, aside from some dubious choices (such as “I Want It That Way,” which made the top ten), is the fact that while the list covers four decades of music history, the top two songs were recorded just over a month apart, in the late spring of 1965. Even more startlingly, both songs came to their composers in a dream: Paul McCartney dreamed the melody to “Yesterday” while staying with his girlfriend on Wimpole Street, while Keith Richards dreamed the guitar riff to “Satisfaction” in St. John’s Wood, getting up to play it into a tape recorder and immediately passing out again. The distance between St. John’s Wood and Wimpole Street, incidentally, is something like three miles. Which implies that something very interesting was happening in London that year.
Dreams naturally lend themselves to mystical interpretations. On Sunday, I posted two examples of the creative power of dreams: Friedrich August Kekulé’s discovery of the ring structure of benzene, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s composition of “Kubla Khan.” Both stories have inspired much speculation, serious or otherwise, about the larger meanings of such messages from the dreaming world. Thomas Pynchon, in Gravity’s Rainbow, speculates that Kekulé’s dream might have been sent to him by a bureaucracy on the Other Side (“So that the right material may find its way to the right dreamer, everything involved must be exactly in place in the pattern”), while Jorge Luis Borges, noting that Kublai Khan’s palace was also inspired by a vision in a dream, something that Coleridge couldn’t possibly have known, has an even more striking hypothesis:
The first dream added a palace to reality; the second, which occurred five centuries later, a poem (or the beginning of a poem) suggested by the palace; the similarities of the dreams hints of a plan; the enormous length of time involved reveals a superhuman executor. To speculate on the intentions of that immortal or long-lived being would be as foolish as it is fruitless, but it is legitimate to suspect that he has not yet achieved his goal. In 1691, Father Gerbillon of the Society of Jesus confirmed that ruins were all that was left of Kublai Khan’s palace; of the poem, we know that barely fifty lines were salvaged. Such facts raise the possibility that this series of dreams and works has not yet ended.
Turning to other major works of art, two of the three great canonical works of horror, Frankenstein and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, appear to have had their origins in dreams. (The third is Dracula, which stands apart as the most left-brained of horror novels, built on a substantial foundation of diligent work and research.) According to interviews, Francis Ford Coppola’s upcoming movie Twixt Now and Sunrise was also inspired by a nightmare. Finally, to compare small things with great, some of the elements in my novelette “Kawataro” were rooted in dream imagery. Which shouldn’t blind us to the fact, of course, that there’s nothing more boring than hearing someone else’s dream—at least until the rational brain has done the hard work of editing and refining the material.
The most useful advice on the relationship between dreams and art is still that given by Kekulé: “But let us beware of publishing our dreams till they have been tested by waking understanding.” McCartney dreamed the melody to “Yesterday,” but obsessively tinkered with it for weeks afterward, much to the annoyance of his bandmates. Coleridge, contrary to his own account of the poem’s creation, seems to have carefully revised “Kubla Khan.” Stevenson burned the original draft of Jekyll and Hyde, rewriting it entirely, and the result is one of the most ingeniously structured novels in any genre. In the end, as Paul Valéry points out, the creative process requires both halves of the artist’s personality: “The one makes up combinations; the other chooses, recognizes what he wishes and what is important to him in the mass of the things which the former has imparted to him.” Which only reminds us that if our dreams are sometimes messages, art is the province of the waking mind.
The special terror of writer’s block
In less than a week, if all goes well, I’ll begin writing the first draft of Midrash, the sequel to Kamera, which I’m contracted to deliver to my publisher by the end of September. Finishing the manuscript on time will require a fairly ambitious schedule—basically a chapter a day when I’m writing, alternating with equally intense periods of research, outlining, and revision. I’ve tried to build some leeway into my schedule, in case I hit any unforeseen obstacles, but at this point, there isn’t a lot of wriggle room. If I reach a point where I can’t write for a month or more, this book isn’t going to get done on time. Which is why I’m going to tempt fate and spend the next few days talking about one of the most terrifying subjects in the world: writer’s block.
There are really two kinds of writer’s block. The more dramatic kind, and one I hope never to feel qualified to talk about, is the kind that lasts for years. As Joan Acocella points out in her very good New Yorker article on the subject, this sort of writer’s block—the kind that plagued Samuel Coleridge, Paul Valéry, and others—is less a professional problem than a metaphysical or linguistic predicament: the sense that inspiration or language itself is inadequate to express what the writer wants to say. I can’t dismiss this condition entirely, if only because the advancement of art depends on such struggles by a handful of exceptional authors. That said, for the vast majority of us, conventional language probably works just fine, and while daily drudgery is no substitute for inspiration, it’s often the next best thing.
The other kind of writer’s block, the kind that every author needs to confront at some point or another, comes from the collision of the two intractable facts of a writer’s life: one, that the heart of a novel, like or not, is built on moments of inspiration that can’t be predicted or willed into being; and two, that these moments require hours of tedious work to bring them to fruition. When inspiration and discipline go hand in hand, a writer can easily work for six or more hours a day; if they don’t fall into line, the writer produces nothing. While such dry spells can last for anything from a few hours to months on end, it’s probably impossible to avoid them altogether. And they hurt like hell.
So what’s a writer to do? Tomorrow, I’m going to be talking about some of the methods I’ve used in the past to get past writer’s block, whether on account of fear, lack of ideas, or simple exhaustion. And by discussing it so openly, I’ll also ensure, by a kind of anticipatory magic, that it won’t actually happen to me. Right?
Quote of the Day
To write regular verses…destroys an infinite number of fine possibilities, but at the same time it suggests a multitude of distinct and totally unexpected thoughts.
—Paul Valéry
Quote of the Day
One only reads well when one reads with some quite personal goal in mind. It may be to acquire some power. It can be out of hatred for the author.
—Paul Valéry
Alec Nevala-Lee 