Review of Julian Barnes' "The Sense of an Ending"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

I recently finished Barnes’ “A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters,” and gave it a pretty glowing review. Its combination of clever playfulness and meditations on important questions was one I tend to find less frequently in contemporary fiction, and was therefore a welcome one. Just as in “A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters,” the themes of memory and our relationship with it loom large, but here they are transmuted into a poignant story of personal revelation, not the latter’s illustration of the vast canvas of humanity. “The Sense of an Ending” retains Barnes’ humorous voice despite its subject, which could have easily let it devolve into a cheap, sentimental pity party.

The novel is told in two parts. The first introduces us to the narrator, Tony Webster, and his small circle of smart-alecky, pretentious friends in their last years before going off to university. They all think pretty highly of themselves (I guess that’s not too atypical of boys this age), but one among them – Adrian – really and truly does stand out. The other friends were too alike and immature to really stick out in my imagination. But Adrian’s interest in ideas, philosophy, and history even has his history teacher offering him his job one day if it wants it, and he wasn’t kidding. Adrian has such heightened moral scruples that he even writes a letter to Tony asking if it’s okay that he dates one of his ex-girlfriends, Veronica. Veronica, despite being a total passive-aggressive bitch who led Tony along on a string, was one of the few oases in an adolescence otherwise wholly unvisited by reciprocated love interests. Tony replies with a very sardonic, sarcastic, cutting letter in reply saying in effect, “Sure, but don’t mind my damaged goods.” 

After graduating from school, Adrian is accepted, to no one’s surprise, to Cambridge University. However, Adrian’s precocity turns out to be very much a mixed blessing; during their college years they lose touch, and Tony learns that Adrian has, apparently because of his unshakeable philosophical convictions, committed suicide. 

One day, Tony receives a letter from a solicitor informing him that Veronica’s mother has passed away, and that she wants to leave him Adrian’s diary. This re-opens a slew of old memories and associations that Tony may very well have wanted to leave untouched. After repeated attempts, he finally makes contact again with Veronica, who is still as conniving and cold as ever, even though we understand as the story wears on that she might have some small reason to be this way. In most reviews, I wouldn’t hesitate divulging even the most important parts of the book, but the unwinding of Tony’s memories come so quickly and are so important to the unfolding of the book that I would feel something would be lost to people who wanted to read it.

Thankfully, it won’t be divulging too much to say that this novel is about our complicated relationship with the past, how we come to understand and build that past, and how we must reconcile ourselves with it. A few people have noted that Tony seems to be self-pitying and his mistaken analyses of his friends. Of course, that’s Barnes’ point: wisdom and self-knowledge mean nothing, and might not even be possible, until we are blessed with the distinction between the promethean and the epimethean, before foresight and hindsight. The entire novel is about Tony slowly and painfully finding this out for himself.

Review of Michael J. Sandel's "Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

I was first introduced to Michael Sandel a couple of years ago on YouTube while I was looking for a productive way to spend my newly free summer days. His course at Harvard called “Justice” is one of the fastest in the entire university to fill up – not something I had to worry about, since I could watch all twelve of the lectures at my leisure. The lectures were filmed in an enormous hall (over 1,000 student register for his class every time it is offered), and are full of students who would never think of necessarily majoring in philosophy, but are still interested in deep, meaningful questions like “What does it mean to be a citizen in a democratic society?” and “How does one pursue the good life in a world of so many competing interests?” This searching quality, and Sandel’s open, interactive maieutic method of engaging his students were some of the best parts of his lectures.

That same Socratic spirit continues within the pages of this book, a series of previously published essays. Sandel’s willingness and insistence on being a knowledgeable cicerone through the history of liberal political theory is a sincere and much-appreciated one. However, some of these pieces are simply too short, both in length and in moral force, to merit inclusion in what otherwise could have been an extremely powerful collection. Most of the short pieces I’m talking about are in Part II, “Moral and Political Arguments.” These are articles (I use this word instead of “essay” because they almost look more like, and it pains me to say it, op-ed pieces than they do well-considered philosophical arguments) discussing the relative positives and negatives of state lotteries, advertising in public classrooms, the morality of buying and selling pollution credits, affirmative action, and the Clinton imbroglio. Some of these sound a little dated, having been written while the public discussions behind these issues was still hot; some of them haven’t been updated, not to mention more fully fleshed out as they should be.

The lengths of the pieces here are pretty proportional to their quality. The opening essay, “America’s Search for a Public Philosophy,” (p. 9-34) nicely sets the tone and informs the body of concerns that resurface throughout the book: our shift away from a kind of communitarian liberalism toward a more rights-based, autonomy-based, voluntarist liberalism in which the state is value-neutral. (This seems to be an essay-long distillation of his book, “Democracy’s Discontent.”) The best essays point out some of the contradictions residing within liberalism (liberalism in the broad philosophical sense, not the narrow sense pundits use the word): for example, is toleration a good in itself if the thing being tolerated is morally dubious, like the neo-Nazis marching in Skokie, Illinois? In other words, which is more morally fundamental – the toleration itself, or the inherent goodness or badness of the thing being tolerated? Sandel is right to point out that rudimentary questions like this rarely present themselves in the matter of public discourse.

Two more essays, “Dewey’s Liberalism and Ours” and “Political Liberalism,” a discussion of some of the readings and misreadings Dewey has incurred since his death and a critical discussion of John Rawls respectively, are both equally worthy of attention. In fact, Dewey’s influence on Sandel looms large; both are extremely concerned with the cultivation of a democratic citizenry, and what precisely this would entail. Both are also clearly disenchanted with the rights-based, voluntarist liberalism that has come to be almost unquestioned in the United States over the last century. 

While some of the shorter pieces come to the conclusions that you would expect of someone of a Deweyan, communitarian liberal bent who values goods before rights, the longer pieces that I mention above really are good places to see the various ways in which philosophy dovetails into practical political concerns. They are consistently thought-provoking and critical of the liberal tradition within political philosophy when necessary. The short articles, while not totally worthless, are more cursory and may be of interest to those with a passing or historical interest interest, but they don’t provide the intellectual sustenance found in other parts of the book.

Book Haul #11

I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.

Books discussed include:

Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights, Maria Warner
The Fate of Africa, Martin Meredith
Lincoln's Virtues: An Ethical Biography, William Lee Miller
Mapp and Lucia, E. F. Benson
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Thomas De Quincey
Pierre; Or, the Ambiguities, Herman Melville
Contemporaries (Collection of Literary Essays), Alfred Kazin
The Modern Mind, Peter Watson
Classics for Pleasure, Michael Dirda
On Jung, Anthony Stevens
Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Bernard Williams
Kolyma Tales, Varlam Shalamov
The Return of the Soldier, Rebecca West
The Strength of Poetry: The Oxford Lectures, James Fenton

Reading of Sylvia Plath's "Daddy"

Review of Carlo Ginzburg's "The Night Battles"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

This book presents an extraordinarily complex set of historical data that even beginning to write about it seems like a daunting task. Making matters short and sweet for the sake of reviewing a book of such scholarship might not be advisable, but that’s what I’ll try to do here.

This book carefully combines an analysis of folklore, popular tradition, and culture. In the Friuli region of Italy, a group known as the “benandanti” (literally “well-farers” or “good walkers” but literally translated here as the “night battlers”) leave their villages on prescribed nights of the year to engage in fights with witches. These men and women who identify themselves as benandanti are born with the caul – that is, a piece of amniotic sac around their necks – and are thereby marked as benandanti from birth. According to them, the purpose of these nighttime adventures were to fight witches who were trying to infect and kill crops; they saw themselves as protectors of the crop. Therefore, they are usually identified as an “agrarian cult.” The origins of this cult are ambiguous, but seem to date back to older German divinity cults, and especially the auspices of the goddess Diana. No matter their origins, this is most important: the benandanti always imagined themselves as warriors for the Christian God, and completely Christian themselves. 

The most fascinating part of the book, which by far takes up most of its content, is what happens when this cult meets the Catholic Church in the form of the Inquisition. Over a very long period of time, this interaction slowly turns a very Christian cult into a devilish coven of witches convening at a sabbat fighting against God, and therefore against the Church. Members were called before Church trials and demanded to explain their experiences. Some claimed that the night battles were oneiric visions, while others insinuated that they were quite “real.” Other irregularities were quickly latched onto by the Church, and it was soon turned into, at least in the eyes of the Church, nothing short of witchcraft. 

Because Ginzburg spends most of his time showing this careful transformation, the numerous – perhaps a few dozen – case studies presented are all carefully examined, sometimes dropped, picked up later in the text, and then re-examined; this can make the thread of the argument and its most prominent actors difficult to keep straight. Despite Ginzburg’s tight, short presentation, parts of the book can seem repetitive. Of course, this aspect of the book is essential for scholars of the Italian folklore of the time, but it can be more than a little tedious for someone just interested in one of the more seminal texts in the development of what we now call “microhistory.” While this might be difficult for someone with a less-than-scholarly interest in this material, it is nonetheless a careful and very important study that deserves the attention it has garnered.

Review of Julian Barnes' "A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

For whatever reason, I like my fiction to cohere in predictable ways; oftentimes when that doesn’t happen, I leave a reading experience feeling less than satisfied. Chalk it up to being weaned on something other than the so-called “postmodern” novel. In several ways, “A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters” complicates my expectations. It can feel more like a series of short stories than a traditional novel – however, one cannot avoid the interconnectedness they share. 

The chapters do span the scope of what we call human history, from a re-telling of the story of Noah’s Ark from the perspective of a stowaway woodworm to a chapter clearly based on the 1985 PLF hijacking of the MS Achille Lauro. A playful jokiness reminiscent of Nabokov and concomitant preoccupation with the mythic (resembling Borges) informs the way in which the chapters speak to and resonate with one another; in “The Wars of Religion,” a Bishop sits down on this throne during a service in church, and immediately falls down due woodworm infestation. Church officials decide to bring suit for the slow, careful, destruction of the Bishop’s seat. Against whom do they file suit? The woodworms, of course. Even for fiction, this sounds twee and jokey, but it works in a most convincing way.

I think it works so well because these pieces do hang together as something more than a series of stories, and many of them provide fascinating things to think about. “Parenthesis” (which might be the half-chapter of the title) provides an almost essayistic analysis of love which I find didn’t at all detract from the novel’s progress. It’s told through the voice of a man laying next to a woman, desperate to fall asleep but unable to stop meditating on the power and mystery of human love. It quietly informs other chapters without letting Barnes’ authorial voice get in the way.

Another entire chapter is dedicated to a fictionalized account of Gericault’s rendering of perhaps his most-recognized painting, “The Raft of the Medusa.” Incorporating the “real life” (we quickly learn how perfunctory such labels are) accounts on which the painting is based, Barnes adeptly shows how Gericault selected details carefully, leaves others out, and made still others up, in order for the painting to ring true to the viewer. This immediately raises important questions about history and any mode of representation, more generally. How is history possible if we recognize it only as a true account of past events? Is the historian always a writer? Or, to put matters more explicitly, is she always a novelist? 

Another theme that echoes throughout the novel is that of religion and its mystifying effects. Read without care, this can seem a harsh treatment of religion and the religious mindset. Noah is identified by the stowaway woodworm as a vicious drunk, the Catholic officials who try the woodworm for eating the Bishop’s throne come off as a little maniacal, and the last chapter coyly pokes fun at common ideas of Heaven. “Project Ararat” takes up a former astronaut who has had a religious conversion, and now has put his and his wife’s lives on hold to find Noah’s Ark. Despite coming from a conservative, Christian town, the locals have their reservations. The chapter ends with him having raised enough money to go on his mission. He finds the Ark, collects samples, and quickly returns home to have them tested. The tests show that they are no more than a couple hundred years old. This doesn’t matter, though. He is already planning his second mission next year, even more determined to find Noah’s remains. It’s not God that works in mysterious ways. It’s the human mind. That’s Barnes’ point.

Rarely do I find works of fiction so self-referential simultaneously so appealing. Barnes might be telling us about Noah’s Ark and Mount Ararat, but he’s telling us about very human, all too human, forces. Love, the weird preoccupations that perennially concern us, ideas – they’re all here, and not in the heavy-handed way we’re probably only too familiar with. This book is playful, and serious without taking itself too seriously, which gives it a coy sort of charm that’s nearly impossible to dislike.

Book Shelf Tour (More Miscellaneous)

Slowly working on showing each and every one of my books...