Scotiabank Giller Longlist Announced

Posted 17 September, 2007 in Book News | 6 comments

And it can be summed up in one word: boooooring.

This is apparently the year that Giller runs home to mama, after last year’s dominance on the shortlist of two smaller houses, Cormorant and Anansi (neither of which is represented at all on this year’s longlist). Of the fifteen titles on the list, one is from Arsenal Pulp (Soucouyant), one is from Porcupine’s Quill (Zero Gravity), one is from Brindle & Glass (The Reckoning of Boston Jim), and one is from Douglas & McIntyre (A Secret Between Us). The other eleven are from large multinational houses, a staggering five from HarperCollins (Helpless, The Book of Negroes, Stormy Weather, Lauchlin of the Bad Heart, October).

And there are a goodly number of familiar names on this longlist: Barbara Gowdy, Elizabeth Hay, Michael Ondaatje, M.G. Vassanji, Richard Wright. The last three of these have all won Gillers before, in Vassanji’s case, twice.

Barring the unlikely eventuality that four of the five shortlisted titles end up being from the smaller or regional houses, it looks like Giller is playing in the big leagues once again.

The longlist in full:

• David Chariandy, Soucouyant
• Sharon English, Zero Gravity
• Barbara Gowdy, Helpless
• Elizabeth Hay, Late Nights on Air
• Lawrence Hill, The Book of Negroes
• Paulette Jiles, Stormy Weather
• D.R. MacDonald, Lauchlin of the Bad Heart
• Claire Mulligan, The Reckoning of Boston Jim
• Mary Novik, Conceit
• Michael Ondaatje, Divisidero
• Daniel Poliquin (Donald Winkler, trans.), A Secret Between Us
• M.G. Vassanji, The Assassin’s Song
• Michael Winter, The Architects Are Here
• Richard Wright, October
• Alissa York, Effigy

[UPDATE: From the Quill & Quire OMNI: “Asked about trends among the 108 books submitted, [Giller juror Camilla] Gibb cited ‘a real return to historical fiction’ as well as ‘explorations of our geography.’” Like I said: boring.]

T.H. Huxley Revisited

Posted 17 September, 2007 in Book Reviews | 1 comment

The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture, by Andrew Keen. Doubleday/Currency, $29.95 cloth, 230 pp., ISBN: 978-0-385-52080-5.

Polemic: n. a strong verbal or written attack; (also polemics) the art or practice of engaging in controversial debate or dispute.

– Source: Concise Oxford English Dictionary

Give Andrew Keen credit for this much: the man who has made himself roundly hated amongst the often petty and narcissistic denizens of the blogosphere does not shy away from the nature of his project. On the very first page of The Cult of the Amateur, Keen refers to the book as “a polemic about the destructive impact of the digital revolution on our culture, economy, and values.” Anyone looking for an unbiased, objective report about the current state of our digital culture should take their search elsewhere.

Keen is very angry, in the way only reformed sinners can be. Himself a former Internet maven, “a pioneer in the first Internet gold rush,” Keen had a road-to-Damascus experience on a retreat to Sebastopol funded by O’Reilly Media. What convinced Keen that the glittery new version of the Internet — what Tim O’Reilly had christened “Web 2.0″ — was in fact the harbinger of the downfall of Western civilization was the retreat participants’ insistence on its potential for democratization: “The Internet would democratize Big Media, Big Business, Big Government. It would even democratize Big Experts, transforming them into what one friend of O’Reilly called, in a hushed, reverent tone, ‘noble amateurs.’” (Author’s emphasis.)

It is these “noble amateurs,” Keen argues, the real-world equivalent of T.H. Huxley’s infinite monkeys banging away on their infinite typewriters, who are precipitating a crisis in our culture by dumbing down its discourse and by siphoning jobs and advertising dollars away from established media outlets that have traditionally been the gatekeepers of our collective wisdom and knowledge. This “professional mainstream media,” in Keen’s view, “over the last two hundred years, has reinforced American values and made our culture the envy of the world” — a debatable point, unless you agree that the apogee of culture involves this year’s cinematic box-office blockbuster Are We Done Yet? or Britney Spears lip-synching (badly) at the MTV Video Awards.

But let’s give Keen the benefit of the doubt and assume that he means the larger, Western culture that includes such things as Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte and Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby, both of which Keen references in his book. On the limited subject of how the Internet, bereft of quality filters or editorial oversight, allows a large cohort of unskilled, untrained, “noble amateurs” to wantonly express themselves through blogs and videos posted on YouTube, Keen makes a number of solid points.

The whole ideological basis of Web 2.0 involves an opening up of access to media that has traditionally been restricted to experts and trained professionals. Whereas in the past one had to go through journalism school and display some quantifiable ability to write in order to become a reporter for a newspaper, Web 2.0’s contingent of “citizen journalists” are able to publish anything they want — no matter how ill-informed or badly written — all without the benefit of editorial standards, fact checking, or libel restrictions. And anyone with a webcam and an Internet hookup is now free to post videos of themselves dancing in their underwear in their bedrooms or lip-synching to their favourite pop song (which might indeed be an improvement over professional “entertainers” such as Britney, although that’s a subject for another day).

The Internet provides no gatekeepers to vet this content, no editors to ensure quality control or factual accuracy. It is difficult to argue with the premise that, under such conditions, much — though not all — of what gets published will be untrustworthy at best.

Moreover, it is difficult to argue with Keen’s assertion that, although the new media may be democratic in its access, it is not able to bestow talent upon an untalented mass of content generators. Talent, sad to say for those proponents of “democratized” media, is not democratic, it is hierarchical. Some have it, others don’t.

Those talented writers and critics who used to find outlets for their creativity through employment in national newspapers and magazines, or by publishing books with reputable houses, are being squeezed out of the market by a ballooning number of untalented hacks posting their ravings on their free blogs or using self-publishing technologies such as Lulu.com (the digital era’s answer to a traditional vanity press) to unleash on the world writing that is not competent enough to get accepted by a traditional publisher. The result is that, as more and more people drift to the Internet and its free (although often less authoritative or high-quality) content, professional media organs are forced to lay off staff and reduce their own content outputs, which results in a diminution of our cultural heritage.

This much of Keen’s argument is right on the money (so to speak). However, Keen seems unable to imagine a situation in which a writer, for example, who has broken into the traditional realm of publishing, either in book form or as a journalist, might voluntarily choose to provide content over the Internet, often for free. Neil Gaiman and William Gibson are both well-respected, published authors, and both maintain personal blogs online. Keen has no rebuttal for this, no reckoning with why such authors might choose to do this, or whether they are contributing to the erosion of cultural authority that he is so exercised about.

Or take a more personal (Keen would say, with some justification, narcissistic) example. Your humble correspondent is a professional book critic, with publication credits in the Edmonton Journal, Quill & Quire, and Books in Canada. If I review The Cult of the Amateur online, on my personal site, without accepting payment for my review, do I suddenly become less authoritative, does my knowledge base, experience, or ability to construct a coherent sentence suddenly vanish? Keen provides no answers for these questions.

Further, it would be easier to accept Keen’s argument for the professional standards of traditional media as against the lack of any standards online, if Keen himself were more scrupulous with his facts. Over the course of his increasingly hysterical screed, he refers to Nick Hornby, the author of High Fidelity, as “Nick Hornsby,” adds an “e” to the surname of Dick Wolf, creator of Law and Order, refers to the indie band The Scene Aesthetic as “The Sound Aesthetic,” and misidentifies one of their songs, referring to it in the same paragraph variously as “Beauty on the Breakdown” and “Beauty in the Breakdown.” He also gets the title of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground wrong, leaving out the direct object, but perhaps this is just a result of working from a bad translation. Regardless, Keen’s assertion that editorial oversight provides for more factually authoritative content would carry significantly more weight were these mistakes not so prevalent in his own work.

He also commits what could be called “the Michael Moore error” of willfully ignoring information that doesn’t fit his argument. On the subject of the disappearance of independent, bricks-and-mortar bookstores such as Duttons, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, Coliseum Books, et al., Keen lays the totality of the blame for their demise at the feet of “cut-priced e-competition from the Internet,” completely eliding the erosive influence of big-box bookstores such as Barnes and Noble or Borders and the predatory deep discounts offered by large chains such as Costco and Wal-Mart.

On the subject of children being exposed to pornography online, Keen cites a study of 1,500 ten- to seventeen-year-old Internet users conducted by the Crimes against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. That study “found that of the 42 percent of kids who were exposed to online pornography, 66 percent reported that this exposure was ‘unwanted.’” It appears not to have occurred to Keen that ten- to seventeen-year-old kids, asked in a telephone survey whether they intentionally sought out pornography online, might be inclined to lie in their responses.

He is also prone to hyperbole without evidentiary backup, to wit: “The pasting, remixing, mashing, borrowing, copying — the stealing — of intellectual property has become the single most pervasive activity on the Internet.” (Author’s emphasis.) There is no evidence for this assertion; Keen doesn’t provide a footnote or a reference to indicate where this information comes from, or whether it is merely anecdotal speculation on his part.

All of which is a shame because, in his core concerns about the erosion of copyright, the death of the expert at the hands of the “noble amateur,” and the loss of paid jobs for trained content providers, Keen does offer much food for thought. It is unfortunate that the knee-jerk reaction of many bloggers has been to reject him out of hand, often without giving him the benefit of actually reading what he has to say. It is equally unfortunate that Keen himself provides so much ammunition for his detractors to dismiss, ignore, or reject his very legitimate concerns.

Books on Film

Posted 10 September, 2007 in Film | 4 comments

Today was a very literary day at the Toronto International Film Festival. This morning, I attended a screening of Joel and Ethan Coen’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. This afternoon I saw Nothing Is Private, Alan Ball’s adaptation of Alicia Erian’s novel, Towelhead.

On the surface, both books seemed ideally suited to their respective filmmakers. The Coens’ debut film, Blood Simple, shares both its Texas setting and a kind of unresolved existential dread with McCarthy’s tale of stolen money, revenge, and retribution. And Erian’s story of a thirteen-year-old half-Lebanese girl’s sexual awakening at the hands of a classmate and her racist — and very adult — next-door neighbour seems tailor made for the creator of American Beauty and Six Feet Under. Plus, both novels are extremely dialogue-heavy, rendering them obvious candidates for film treatments.

So why is it that the Coens’ film works so brilliantly, while Ball’s categorically doesn’t?

I suspect that the first and perhaps overarching reason is that the Coens are better filmmakers than Ball, whose directorial debut this is. In films such as (the aforementioned) Blood Simple and Fargo, the Coens have used landscapes to brilliant effect, such that the setting becomes an integral part of the story, indeed, becomes almost a character in itself. No one can convince me that the opening shot of Fargo, with William H. Macy’s car appearing wraithlike out of the blowing snow that envelops the screen, is not one of the most startling and effective opening shots ever inserted into an American motion picture. Similarly, the sweeping vistas of the Texas plains that dominate the opening scenes of No Country for Old Men provide a sense of hardness and alienation, even before the plot starts to kick in. This gives the film an advantage over the book, where the Texas landscape seemed oddly constrained and muted, particularly when compared to the epic grandeur of earlier McCarthy works such as All the Pretty Horses and — especially — Blood Meridian.

Tonally, the Coens’ film resembles McCarthy’s novel in its spareness, its complete lack of ornament. The storytelling is brutal in its efficiency, with not a wasted shot or line of dialogue and, except for one very brief moment, there is absolutely no music in the film. It takes a great deal of confidence and skill to pull off an entire feature film without a score, but the Coens’ decision to let the story propel itself is unquestionably the right one, as it simultaneously builds tension and inculcates in the viewer a sense of alienness and uncertainty. It’s often not apparent how a musical score can affect the experience of watching a movie until it’s taken away.

The film is also brilliantly edited: fluid pans of the Texas skyline are juxtaposed with short, sharp jump cuts during the action sequences; moments of calm quiet give way without warning to startling, graphic violence. The editing of a film determines its pace (which is something so obvious it’s often overlooked), and the Coens modulate No Country for Old Men magnificently, creating the visual equivalent of a symphony.

They’ve also taken the important step of casting the film flawlessly. There is not a false note in it, from Tommy Lee Jones as the laconic, world-weary sheriff Ed Tom Bell to Josh Brolin as the hapless antelope hunter who stumbles on a cache of money to Woody Harrelson in an inspired cameo as a gun-for-hire.

But the revelation of the film is the great Javier Bardem as Chigurh, the sociopathic killer who pursues the satchel of lost cash. Bardem has been terrific before in roles both large (Before Night Falls) and small (a chilling cameo that constitutes what are arguably the five best minutes in Michael Mann’s Collateral), but here he inhabits his character so completely that it almost appears he is channelling him. Bardem’s performance is largely in his eyes, which are watchful and intense, whether they are scanning a room for evidence of his prey, or focused unblinking on an incipient victim. Like Meryl Streep in last year’s The Devil Wears Prada, Bardem cleverly underplays a role that could easily have devolved into caricature, and in the process creates one of the most indelible screen villains in recent memory.

Casting is absolutely essential to any movie, but the irony is that when it’s done right, you don’t notice it. It’s only when it’s done wrong that it calls attention to itself, and this is one of the signal problems with Ball’s adaptation of Erian’s novel. In the key role of Rifat, the protagonist’s domineering Lebanese immigrant father, Peter Macdissi is so miscast that he ends up torpedoing the entire film, or at least those scenes in which he appears. Macdissi, who also appeared in Six Feet Under, proves congenitally incapable of manifesting the tonal modulations the character requires. The actor who plays Rifat must be charming one moment and vicious the next, but Macdissi can’t seem to pull off these one-eighty-degree turns; his performance is forced and artificial throughout.

Another problem with the movie is its unwillingness — or inability — to retain the edginess of its source material. This starts with the title, which has been softened from Erian’s deliberately provocative one-word epithet, perhaps as a balm to mainstream movie audiences who are presumed to be too easily shocked. But part of Erian’s project in the novel was precisely that: to shock people as a means of providing perspective on matters of race and a young girl’s burgeoning sexuality. This is not a story that is supposed to make its audience comfortable, and sugar-coating the title strikes me as just a bit cowardly on the part of the filmmakers.

To give Ball credit, he has set himself a challenging, not to say insurmountable, task. The central event in the novel involves the statutory rape of an underage girl, and it’s probably not possible to deal with this directly onscreen in the manner that Erian deals with it in the book. However, by diluting this material in the process of translating it, Ball has drained it of much of its potency.

Finally, Ball is simply not as good a director as the Coens. Much of the visual grammar in Nothing Is Private is pedestrian and uninspired; much of what is not is stolen from Sam Mendes’s suburban alienation film American Beauty, which Ball also wrote. Ball does not have a visual style or cinematic sensibility of his own, so what he’s left with is a straightforward adaptation that basically just photographs as much of the book as he thinks he can get away with.

In No Country for Old Men, by contrast, the Coens remain faithful to the source material, while simultaneously making it their own. The film has a distinct cinematic style and a unique visual approach, from bird’s eye panoramas of the Texas landscape to a low shot of a killer standing behind a motel-room door, his face half-illuminated by a beam of light from the outside. The poetry of McCarthy’s prose is seamlessly replaced by the poetry of the Coens’ camera.

There is an old saw that says you should never judge a book by its movie. This holds true for Nothing Is Private. No Country for Old Men, by contrast, is one of the best films of the year, and might also have the happy effect of driving more people in the direction of McCarthy’s book.

Man-Booker Shortlist Announced

Posted 8 September, 2007 in Book News | 2 comments

Michael Redhill’s novel Consolation didn’t make the cut, but McEwan’s on the list, giving him the opportunity to become only the third author (after Peter Carey and J.M. Coetzee) to win the award twice.

The shortlist in full:

• Darkmans, Nicola Barker
• The Gathering, Anne Enright
• The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid
• Mister Pip, Lloyd Jones
• On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan
• Animal’s People, Indra Sinha

ReLit Award Winners Announced

Posted 8 September, 2007 in Book News | No comments

The mighty Bill Gaston has won the ReLit award in the short fiction category for his collection, Gargoyles. Ivan E. Coyote won in the novel category for Bow Grip; the poetry award went to Daniel Scott Tysdal for his book, Predicting the Next Big Advertising Breakthrough Using a Potentially Dangerous Method.

Congratulations all around.

In Lieu of Actual Content, Some Insight into the Nature of Yr. Humble Correspondent

Posted 6 September, 2007 in Uncategorized | No comments

[T]he only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars … — On the Road

All regular readers of this site (you know who you are) — and, presumably, some interlopers — of course qualify.

I’m off to the Toronto International Film Festival from tomorrow through September 15th, so posts may be sporadic, or completely non-existent. Please don’t give up on me. I shall return. Bwahahaha …

More Kerouac Goodness

Posted 5 September, 2007 in Uncategorized | 1 comment

If you are in Toronto tonight, and want to do something to commemorate the 50th anniversary of On the Road, Pages Bookstore’s This Is Not a Reading Series is sponsoring a free event at the Gladstone Hotel, featuring authors Ray Robertson and David Creighton:

Pages Books & Magazines, Thomas Allen & Sons & Dundurn Press proudly present a This Is Not A Reading Series double book launch to honour the 50th anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road. Ray Robertson, What Happened Later (Thomas Allen & Sons), & David Creighton, Ecstasy Of The Beats (Dundurn Press), in conversation with Jian Ghomeshi of CBC Radio’s “Q”.

Gladstone Hotel Ballroom, 1214 Queen St West
Wed Sept 5, 7:30 PM (Doors 7PM) FREE
BOOKS ON SALE AT THE EVENT

More information on the event can be found here.

Rereading On the Road

Posted 5 September, 2007 in Book Reviews | 2 comments

On the Road, by Jack Kerouac. Penguin Classics, $18.99 pb, 286 pp., ISBN: 978-0-14-1182674.

On the Road, Jack Kerouac’s classic novel of the Beat Generation, was published fifty years ago today — September 5, 1957. It had been seven years since the publication of Kerouac’s first novel, The Town and the City, a massive tome written in the naturalistic mode of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, which took Kerouac two years to write and was published to middling reviews and largely ignored by readers.

On the Road, by contrast, was written in one feverish three-week burst of sustained writing, on a series of typewriter pages that Kerouac had taped together into one continuous scroll so as not to have to stop writing to change sheets.* The book abandoned what Kerouac felt was the too-conventional style and tone of The Town and the City in favour of a semiautobiographical stream-of-consciousness story involving Sal Paradise (Kerouac), who befriends a manic wanderer named Dean Moriarity (Neal Cassady). The book details their travels around the United States and down into Mexico, along the way featuring encounters with figures such as Carlo Marx (Allen Ginsberg), Old Bull Lee (William S. Burroughs), Tom Saybrook (John Clellon Holmes), and Slim Gaillard (Slim Gaillard).**

Fifty years after its publication, the book that the Village Voice called “a rallying cry for the elusive spirit of rebellion of these times” has become the defining document of the Beat Generation, just as Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises defined the Lost Generation, and Generation X defined its eponymous generation. It is a novel of constant, frenetic movement, which is appropriate since Kerouac felt that the “one and noble function of the time” was to move, to search, to explore.

This sustained motion is evident in the manner in which the book was written, and in its frequent flurries of lyrical prose, when the words seem to tumble over themselves in a flood:

On rails we leaned and looked at the great brown father of waters rolling down from mid-America like the torrent of broken souls — bearing Montana logs and Dakota muds and Iowa vales and things that had drowned in Three Forks, where the secret began in ice. Smoky New Orleans receded on one side; old, sleepy Algiers with its warped woodsides bumped us on the other. Negroes were working in the hot afternoon, stoking the ferry furnaces that burned red and made our tires smell. Dean dug them, hopping up and down in the heat. He rushed around the deck and upstairs with his baggy pants hanging halfway down his belly. Suddenly I saw him eagering on the flying bridge. I expected him to take off on wings. I heard his mad laugh all over the boat — “Hee-hee-hee-hee-hee!”

The danger with this kind of writing, of course, is that it descends into solipsim and self-consciousness, and Kerouac’s novel is certainly guilty of that on more than one occasion:

And for just a moment I had reached that point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. I could hear an indescribable seething roar which wasn’t in my ear but everywhere and had nothing to do with sounds. I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn’t remember especially because the transactions from life to death and back to life are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it. I realized it was only because of the stability of the intrinsic Mind that these ripples of birth and death took place, like the action of wind on a sheet of pure, serene, mirror-like water. I felt sweet, swinging bliss like a big shot of heroin in the mainline vein; like a gulp of wine late in the afternoon and it makes you shudder; my feet tingled. I thought I was going to die the very next moment.

This passage displays a lack of control that is persistent throughout the novel — the vague mysticism of “bright Mind Essence,” the purple prose of “innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven,” the plodding, clanging nature of the final clause in the penultimate sentence.

But the passage also evinces an undeniable exuberance in the tumbling, word-drunk opening sentence and the melodically alliterative “sweet, swinging bliss.” John Updike’s comment about Nabokov — he “writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically” — could apply equally to the Kerouac of On the Road.

The second quoted passage is also notable for its explicit linkage of the pursuit of physical sensation — “sweet, swinging bliss like a big shot of heroin in the mainline vein” — with a spiritual quest for enlightenment and transcendence, a subject that carries through the novel as a whole. For Kerouac, the pursuit of sex and drugs was not an end in itself; these things were doorways to spiritual understanding. Those who would apply the name of the Beat Generation to a group of unreconstructed hedonists miss an essential aspect of what Kerouac — who was born to a family of French Canadian Catholics — meant when he used the term: in the novel, Sal refers to Dean as “BEAT — the root, the soul of Beatific.” That last word is essential in grasping what Kerouac was after: not physical pleasure, but spiritual awakening.

This is what separates Kerouac, and his fictional counterpart Sal Paradise (note the surname), from figures such as the Jesuit college boys he hooks up with in the latter stages of the novel, boys who “were full of corny quips and Eastern college talk and had nothing on their bird-beans except a lot of ill-understood Aquinas for stuffing for their pepper.” Similarly, Sal comes to recognize that Dean’s soul “is wrapped up in a fast car, a coast to reach, and a woman at the end of the road,” whereas for him, the road represents a kind of spirit quest leading to something ecstatic and unknown.

That this spiritual aspect of the novel often gets lost in a secular society more interested in the immediate pleasures afforded by casual sex and recreational drugs is not surprising, nor does it necessarily detract from an honest appreciation of Kerouac’s novel. It can be read, after all, as a paean to the American spirit of adventure, of the ecstatic pursuit of freedom as symbolized by a convertible tearing down the open road. This was something that was already present in the American psyche and elsewhere when Kerouac fed his scroll of paper into his typewriter and began work on what would become his masterpiece. As William S. Burroughs commented later,

The Beat literary movement came at exactly the right time and said something that millions of people of all nationalities all over the world were waiting to hear. You can’t tell anybody anything he doesn’t know already. The alienation, the restlessness, the dissatisfaction were already there waiting when Kerouac pointed out the road.

*For those of you reading this who were born after 1990, a typewriter is a manual content-input device consisting of a keyboard, an ink ribbon, and metal keys with letters and figures imprinted on them. When a key is struck, the metal strikes the ribbon and leaves an impression of the letter or figure on a page, each sheet of which must be fed into the typewriter’s roller by hand.

**Kerouac included the names of actual people and places in the scroll manuscript; his publisher insisted these be changed for publication, to avoid libel lawsuits.

(Kerouac cover image courtesy of Empty Mirror Books.)

Couple o’ Thangs

Posted 4 September, 2007 in Uncategorized | 3 comments

• My review of Todd Babiak’s The Book of Stanley, from the September 2 issue of the Edmonton Journal, is here.
• I seem to have mislaid my copy of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. Anyone who knows of its whereabouts, please do contact me.

Re-evaluating Poe

Posted 4 September, 2007 in Literary Criticism, Flannery O'Connor | No comments

Maud Newton has an interesting post on her site concerning Edmund Wilson’s feelings about Edgar Allan Poe, specifically the question of why Poe had not been embraced by his own country. Writing in the early part of the 20th century (the essay Maud points to is collected in Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s and ’30s, the first of an upcoming two-volume retrospective of Wilson’s criticism to be published by the Library of America), Wilson complains that Poe’s writing “so completely failed to impress itself upon the literature of Poe’s own country that it is still possible for Americans to talk about him as if his principal claim to distinction were his title to be described as the ‘father of the short story.’”

This might arguably have been true in the early part of the 20th century, when no one had heard of Stephen King or Joyce Carol Oates; it would be difficult to make the same assertion today. Poe’s motifs, approach (the “singular effect” that Wilson points to), Gothic sensibility, and relationship with the subconscious have all found resonance in postwar American fiction. As Philip Van Doren Stern asserts in his introduction to The Portable Edgar Allan Poe,* Poe “tapped the rich reservoir of the subconscious mind to set free the strange and terrible images which had seldom been allowed to stalk the printed page until he introduced them into his work,” but which have seldom been far from the American fictional psyche since.

Is it possible, for instance, to read King’s The Dark Half or his novella “Secret Window, Secret Garden” without thinking about the ultimately fatal struggle between the narrator and his Doppelgänger in Poe’s “William Wilson”? And Oates’s Gothic stories, especially those in Haunted and The Collector of Hearts, are enormously Poe-influenced. (One story in Haunted, “The White Cat,” is a fairly explicit reworking of one of Poe’s most notorious stories, although Oates coyly changes the colour of the titular feline.)

This is to say nothing of Poe’s influence on works by writers such as Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club), Bret Easton Ellis (Lunar Park), and, perhaps surprisingly, Flannery O’Connor. In Flannery O’Connor: The Imagination of Extremity, one of the best works of O’Connor scholarship I’ve come across, Frederick Asals engages in a lengthy examination of Poe’s influence on the novel Wise Blood, commenting in part:

The parallels are at times so close that it becomes difficult to believe Flannery O’Connor was unaware of them. Such specific echoes as walling up cats (”The Black Cat”) and the story of the body in the chimney (”The Murders in the Rue Morgue”) would seem open (if tongue-in-cheek) allusions. Other, less overt borrowings, however, have greater significance. Hazel Motes’s recurrent fear of being “not dead but only buried” … has of course a number of possible sources in Poe’s tales, but the action toward the end of the first chapter of Wise Blood parallels remarkably that of “The Premature Burial.” … [W]hile Poe’s narrator claims that his experience has broken his obsession with death, Hazel Motes will suffer this defining terror again and again in the course of the novel.

American filmmakers have been similarly enamoured with Poe’s themes and stories. Roger Corman (The Raven, The Fall of the House of Usher) and Stuart Gordon (The Pit and the Pendulum) both filmed Poe’s material, and Quentin Tarantino has evinced a recent fascination with Poe’s own horror of being buried alive (both Kill Bill, Vol. 2 and Grave Danger, Tarantino’s two-part CSI episode, feature characters who are buried alive).

When it comes to Poe’s influence on American letters, perhaps the last word should go to Joyce Carol Oates, who wrote in the Afterword to Haunted: “Poe’s influence upon the literature of the grotesque — and the mystery-detective genre — has been so universal as to be incalculable. Who has not been influenced by Poe? — however obliquely, indirectly; however the influence, absorbed in adolescence or even in childhood, would seem to be far behind us.”

*Van Doren Stern, pace Wilson, also locates Poe’s influence in 19th century American writers such as Hawthorne, Melville, and Bierce, and, in the early 20th century, Faulkner.