Braten – Innate Intersubjectivity

Adams, W. A. (2007). Innate Intersubjectivity and the Science of Mind-Reading  [Review of the book, On Being Moved: From Mirror Neurons to Empathy]. PsycCRITIQUES—Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, October 24, 2007, Vol. 52, Release 43, Article 2.  Retrieved October 24, 2007 from the PsycCRITIQUES database (http://www.psycinfo.com/psyccritiques/).

On Being MovedEditor Stein Bråten brings together seventeen papers that collectively argue that mind reading has been demonstrated scientifically and that it is innate, a remarkable pair of claims. Intersubjectivity is deep empathy. Many of the papers present evidence demonstrating empathy, the ability of one mind to enter into another’s experience and participate in it.  For example, human infants only 42 minutes old can stick out their tongue in imitation of an adult’s face. How else can that be explained except as some kind of innate social understanding? Other evidence of intersubjectivity involves imitation, gaze-following, synchronous movement, altruism, language, and cooperative behavior of non-human primates. Mirror neurons in the brains of macaque monkeys fire when a monkey makes a goal-directed act or watches another monkey (or even a human) do the same.  Thus, it is argued, the mirror neurons form a physical representation of intentional understanding, or mind-reading. It’s nice to see intersubjectivity well-documented, but I am not convinced that mirror neurons are the explanation of it.  It is more prudent to say only that they are neural correlates.

Kerrigan – Little Criminals

Little CriminalsA Mild Kidnap

Kerrigan, Gene. (2005). Little Criminals. New York: Europa Editions 

This straightforward cops vs. baddies story mostly focuses on the criminal characters, a gang of Dublin lowlife men who kidnap the wife of a wealthy lawyer. The kidnappers are small-time thugs with delusions of criminal grandeur, and the third-person narrator supports their worldview, but we, the readers, quickly see that they are incompetent and stupid. That contrast gives the novel a subtly humorous tone and makes it more enjoyable than it otherwise would be.

There is also a mysterious first-person narrator who pops up from time to time to comment on events and explain things. We sometimes get the impression that this narrator is one of the gang members, since he seems to know what’s going on, but he is never identified or referred to by the other characters. He appears in a single cryptic line on the first page, then reappears with increasing frequency, in short bursts, throughout the novel.  When, at 300 pages or so, an entirely new character and new story theme is jarringly introduced in backstory, we finally infer who the mystery narrator was. Clever perhaps, but it is not satisfying to introduce a new character at the 11th hour to explain how the rest of the story works.  It violates the implicit contract in the crime genre between the reader and the author.

A nice writing technique was the author’s way of re-setting the clock back a few minutes or a few hours, and re-telling an episode from a different character’s point of view. It worked surprisingly well, although it was a bit odd, since if you have an omniscient narrator, you can always intercut character points of view using traditional markers for POV change. With Kerrigan’s method the narrator can stay close to the psychology of one character for a whole scene, then go back and re-do the scene, staying close to a different character, in a kind of Roshomon effect.

Overall then, the story was not too bad, although very traditional, not especially clever or amusing, and the writing was slightly above average, with a few innovative narration techniques, and some of the characters were mildly interesting.

Workshop: Turning Something into Nothing

IMG_8599The workshop I went to recently was called “advanced” because you needed product. You couldn’t walk in with just an idea or an outline. I went with 75,000 words, the ninth revision of a suspense novel.

What I learned at this workshop was was that my novel had too many substories and consequently, no clear throughline.  I was advised by some participants to drop the corporate malfeasance angle and go with the murder mystery or with the sexual abuse story. Other class members suggested every possible combination of those themes. But I got the message: it’s too complicated. That’s what I paid the big bucks to hear.

That was over a month ago. Since then I haven’t wanted to look at the manuscript. I thought about putting it in a drawer forever and saying, “Oh, well.”  The workshop had turned something into nothing.  But I finally decided there was nothing to lose by trying a revision ten.

My idea is to drop the murder-mystery component, but keep the sexual abuse theme and the corporate crime theme.  The corporate crime is the external story driver for my character. While she addresses that crime, she discovers her traumatic past. I didn’t want her to directly investigate her family history. I don’t like family stories.

In the rewrite I’m going to make her an older character talking to a counselor about her past, alternating with real-time investigation of the corporate crime. Right now I don’t know where to begin.  I have a concept for the rewrite, but I can’t feel my way in. It needs more time to bubble.

Abu-Jaber – Origin

Origin Abu-jaberA Gentle Crime Novel

Abu-jaber, Diane. (2007). Origin. New York: W.W. Norton

This novel is in the rarified category of  “literary” crime novel, which means the characters are well-developed and the writing is above average (that’s the literary part) AND, it has a good, plausible crime story without too many loose ends (the crime genre part).

The main character and protagonist and first-person narrator is Lena, a thirty year-old fingerprint expert with the police crime lab in Syracuse, N.Y. She investigates a serial killer who murders infants in their cribs, making it look like SIDS, or crib-death. For a long while, she is the only one who rejects the SIDS diagnosis and suspects a killer. Eventually she is forced to find the killer herself.

Lena is gifted with keen intuition and a preternatural sense of smell. Like an animal, she can detect faint smells that linger long after at a crime scene. She has vague early childhood memories of being raised by gorillas in a rain forest. The information she gets from her foster mother is that she was a strange, animal-like infant, with no documentation, when she was recovered by an orphanage. So Lena half-believes she is part gorilla and the writing is so skillful that we accept that as a plausible background, even though we can tell Lena is not entirely reliable, being extremely withdrawn, maybe even depressed.

At risk of criticism, I will say the book is more of a “women’s” crime novel, because of its focus on family, kinship, babies, relationships and childrearing, and the absence of guns, knives, car chases, fistfights, explosions, drugs, money, swearing, smoking, mobsters, and similar tropes that populate a lot of “male” crime fiction. This is a gentle crime novel, every bit as suspenseful as the usual fare, and certainly better written than most, but without the  action-orientation some crime readers might expect.

Nabokov – Despair

Despair - NabokovWink, Wink; Nudge, Nudge

Nabokov, Vladimir (1989) Despair. New York: Vintage.

Nabokov wrote this little doppelganger mystery in the 1930’s then revised it in English in the 1960’s. The first two thirds are very slow going, as the pompous, self-aware, first-person narrator pretends to be keeping a diary documenting the writing of  his new novel, while also telling the story the novel is about. So right away we are immersed in a fun-house hall of mirrors.

The narrator and main character, Hermann, is a middle-aged Russian immigrant living in Berlin in the 1930’s. He is arch, unreliable, probably waxes his moustache, and indulges in plenty of postmodern metanarrative games, such as “Oh wait a minute, I can’t tell you that detail because I can’t find the receipt. Just a minute. Okay, I’m back. It had fallen to the floor.” I’m sure that sort of thing was innovative in the 1930’s, but it has not aged well. Today it has the sound of college freshman writing.

We are supposed to admire the narrator’s wit, erudition, and snarky remarks about all the other characters, but his comments can just as easily seem boorish and boring. The language is elevated and sophisticated however, and there are some clever cultural references (although dated: sly remarks about Bolsheviks, for example), but since any plausible context is lacking, the clever language amounts to unsustainable drivel. That’s what makes the first part of the book a slog.

While on a country walk, Hermann, the narrator/diarist/novelist, encounters a tramp who he believes looks just like him, his literal doppelganger. We grant the author this conceit at first, but soon it becomes doubtful if the two men really are alike, and we slowly come to realize that Hermann is a Narcissus who would be thrilled to have the universe mirror his face to him, like any novel writer, get it? This inference of Hermann’s frailty is supported by his novelistic efforts and his comments on them, which are ludicrously naïve and self-centered. So we understand that he is highly eccentric, if not mentally abnormal (again, like anyone must be, who would attempt to write a novel).  I emphasize that all this takes 70 pages of almost intolerable triviality to form into a clear theme.

Hermann forms a plan to kill the double, have his wife collect the insurance on his own life, then retire. At least this last third of the book has a traditional plot line, however lame. It turns out, the plot is just as unreliable as Hermann himself, for it quickly emerges that the murder scheme is really a metaphor for the perfect novel Hermann believes he is writing, the novel we are reading. The novel will be a “killer,” as it were. But since it is plain that what we are reading is poor quality for a mystery novel, we realize that the murder plan is flawed. The investigative police then stand for literary critics, the flaw in the plan is the flaw in the book, the criminal/writer denies culpability, claims to have been misunderstood, flees the criticism, but finally must confess to artistic failure.

The whole novel should be read a second time after one is fully aware of its metanarrative intent. However, I never read a novel a second time. Life is too short — my life is too short. I feel that a work of art only gets one shot at me. Does this novel miss? Not quite. There were plenty of clues to the self-referential theme in the early part, and it was all made clear in the last part, so I “got” the message, the joke, the point. But I was underwhelmed. The characters were cartoon placeholders and the main character, Hermann, is an unpleasant chap, and the narrator’s voice is deliberately annoying. So the analogies between Hermann’s narcissism and every writer’s self-delusion is clever and witty, but not insightful or fun to read.  As a study in how to execute an unreliable first- person narrator however, this novel is perfect.

Margolis & Laurence – Creations of the Mind

artifact (200)Natural or Artificial?  Implications for Science, Religion and Phenomenology   [Review of the book, Creations of the Mind: Theories of Artifacts and Their Representation]. PsycCRITIQUES—Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, February  20, 2008, Vol. 53, Release 8, Article 4.  Retrieved February 20, 2008 from the PsycCRITIQUES database (http://www.psycinfo.com/psyccritiques/)..

Water is natural, especially if it falls from the sky, but what about distilled water, pure H2O: is that natural or artificial?  Are these natural or artificial: landscaping, spider silk, seedless grapes, a suntan, a race horse, cheese, a rock used as a doorstop?  Editors Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence present sixteen chapters written by psychologists, philosophers, and other academics, all trying to understand what artifacts are, how we learn about and understand them, and when artifacts emerged in evolution.

Whether you categorize something as an artifact or as a natural object has consequences for what you think science is about, whether the intelligent design hypothesis makes sense, and whether phenomenology can really get to the essence of a thing.  If a feathered wing is considered an artifact rather than a naturally occurring object, that implies an intelligent designer.  If scientific categories, of species, for example, are designed for human needs and interests, they are artifacts, not descriptions of how the world really is.  If there are mental categories wired into the brain or learned in infancy, then phenomenology is a waste of time.  Unfortunately, the editors do not draw out such implications, but the sixteen papers, many presenting original scientific findings, are fascinating in themselves.

What is Literary Fiction?

louise-gluckAgainst Sincerity

To frame a discussion of literary vs genre in marketing terms encourages cynicism, because marketing pretends discourse while designed only to separate you from your money. So let’s forget about how the distinction between literary and genre is used for selling books. What is it really?

A non-marketing definition of literary fiction arises from Louise Gluck’s (pictured) well-known essay, “Against Sincerity.” Click the highlighted link at the top of this post to read it.  The essay focuses on poetry but applies to all art, and literary fiction is, in my definition, an art form (or at least it’s attempted art — few succeed but that’s another story).

Gluck defines art as: An actuality that expresses truth via honesty. Three nouns, one verb, one qualifier.

Her definitions of the nouns:
Truth: Illumination of the human condition in the work.
Honesty: Interrogation and expression of the artist’s self via craft.
Actuality: The world as shown by the artistic product.

Her thesis now makes sense: Literary fiction is a view of the world that illuminates the human condition through the artist’s crafted self-expression.

Why is she “against sincerity?” Because self-expression, no matter how sincere, is not enough. You must craft your self-expression so that it illuminates the human condition in a way that creates a world.

Gluck’s article invites and rewards many readings, but it’s dense. A reader-friendly exegisis is… http://www.robertpeak…

My writing goal has been to produce a well-plotted story that reaches beyond genre, to literary fiction. Models  are Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men, and John Le Carre’s A MostWanted Man. Gluck’s ideas clarify my goal.

Grisham – The Summons

Grisham-SummonsWriting For the Money

Grisham, John (2002). The Summons. New York: Random House.

A lawyer in Mississippi finds three million dollars in cash in his father’s house after the old man dies. The money is not mentioned in the will, and there is no obvious way the judge could have amassed that much cash. Should the lawyer declare it to the IRS and lose half in taxes, as the law requires, or quietly split it with his no-good, loser, drug-addict brother who would probably use it to overdose, or should he just stuff it into the trunk of his car and keep quiet? Choice number three, obviously. But threatening notes appear, followed by break-ins and fires. Somebody knows about the money and wants it.

That is a pretty good set up, because it’s a nice fantasy everyone has had, finding a hoard of cash, and a good question, what would you do with it, with respect to the law, with respect to family, and especially, what would you do if your life was threatened by having the loot?

We can’t have the protagonist just buy houses, cars, and airplanes, because that’s not interesting. We can’t have him give half to the IRS, because that just rubs greed the wrong way. We could have him split it with his brother, but, again, that goes against the greed motive, and also, maybe he really does care about his irresponsible brother. But he has to do something. He cannot just drive around the south with the money in the back of his Audi for two hundred pages. Can he?

But that’s exactly what he does. The promise of the premise is not fulfilled. If the writing were lyrical and insightful, we might not care, but the writing is pedestrian, and also pretty clearly written by a committee. The plot wanders here and there, as if nobody were in charge of directing it, and the ending is incomplete and arbitrary. It was the old make-it-up-as-you-go method.

I’m not a Grisham fan, but I got the book on a remainder table to  see how he works his magic. Unfortunately, there was no magic in this book, other than the author’s name. The writing is spare, competent, and kinetic, with few digressions into scenery, costumes, or characters’ interiors. That’s the formula that sells, apparently.

Also there were a couple of well-wrought moments of chilling suspense, when the protagonist receives threatening notes, that reveal the pursuer’s intimate knowledge of his movements and motives. The idea that someone is watching you that closely is frightening. It might have worked even better if the narrative had been first-person and the main character a little more reflective. This narrator is third-person, andoverall inert.

There is just nothing going on here. It’s a Grisham novel for the sake of a Grisham novel, and there is no artistic reason for it to exist.

Abe – Woman in the Dunes

Woman in the dunesMeaning in Each Grain of Sand

Abe, Kobo. (1960-1962/1991). Woman in the Dunes. New York: Vintage.

This novel is considered by many to be Abe’s best, and a prime example of mid-century Japanese fiction. It’s difficult to determine exactly when it was first published, but it does capture the post-WWII existentialism of much philosophy, literature and art. The devastation of the two world wars had proved that history, culture, and human life itself, were all meaningless.

The opening line of the novel cues us that the characters are archetypes and the story a timeless parable. “One day in August, a man disappeared.” The man (called, “the man”), a teacher and amateur entomologist, visits a remote seaside Japanese village to search for rare beetles. The village is built on and among shifting sand dunes, and some of the houses are located in deep pits cut into the dunes. A villager offers the man accommodation in one of these pit houses. He climbs down a rope latter to find a decrepit shack and a thirtyish woman (called simply, “the woman.”) She feeds him and offers a mattress. But in the morning, the ladder is gone.

The rest of this short novel is about the man’s psychological coming to terms with his situation, and with the woman, and the village. He is outraged and makes demands and threats, but nothing happens. He tries unsuccessfully to escape. Each night, the woman must shovel sand into buckets which the villagers above haul up on ropes. If she doesn’t do this, the pit and the house will be buried.  Eventually, the man helps her shovel, resentfully at first, then gradually, out of compassion.

He asks why she doesn’t try to escape. She can hardly understand the question. Escape to what? The man is enraged at her stupidity, then his anger turns to pity, and by the end of the novel, understanding. The ending is as bleak as any that can be imagined.  The woman is removed for medical treatment and the rope ladder is left hanging down. The man declines to use it.

I see the theme of the novel as a subtle answer to Camus’ essay, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), which was well known in the educated world in both French and English by the 1950’s. I don’t know if Abe read Camus, or if these existential ideas were merely “in the air” at that time.

Camus argued that life is meaningless and hope is vain. He cites the ancient Greek myth of King Sisyphus, who thought he was smarter than Zeus, and for his hubris, was sentenced to forever push a great boulder up a hill, whereupon, near the top, the boulder would roll to the bottom, requiring Sisyphus to start pushing again. Thus the clever and powerful king was reduced, not to death, which would be too easy, but to an eternity of meaningless, futile effort. As with our lives.

There is also a theme of political oppression in the novel. The man and the woman are exploited by the villagers above who keep them enslaved. The villagers sell the sand they mine to concrete-making companies. In Japan, as in India, there is a so-called “untouchable” class of people who clean sewers, pick garbage, render meat, and so on. In a sense, the woman in the dunes is a member of that caste and seems to accept it as her natural fate. Abe does raise that economical-political dimension in his story, which could be seen as a rebuff to Camus: It is not that death renders life meaningless; rather, it is the economic and political oppression of society’s powerful that render it such. If that is true, it can be changed, unlike Camus’ inexorable Fate. (Abe was a Marxist). 

Abe’s is ultimately a story of human salvation, not damnation. The final “missing persons report” notes that the man was gone without a trace for seven years. We are justified in assuming he chose to stay in the village because he found there, for the first time in his life, meaning. That is another refutation of Camus’ thesis that there is no meaning. 

Camus also said that one should not cling to illusory hope or comfort because they are false. But that is not quite what Abe says.  Tomorrow might hold adventure, curiosity, excitement, a rare beetle, or even love. Death at the end, sure, but until that day, you can find or create meaning. I think that argument gives Camus the knock-out punch. It reduces Sisyphus’s boulder to a grain of sand and finds, at that level of analysis, there is meaning.

Coetzee – Disgrace

Disgrace-CoetzeeA Moving Allegory 

Coetzee, John. M. (1999/2008). Disgrace. New York: Penguin, 220 pages.

Written shortly after the end of apartheid in South Africa, the story tells of a professor who has sex with a student, and when the affair becomes public, he is subject to a faculty disciplinary hearing. This inquiry by his peers and superiors crackles with subterranean emotion. The professor openly admits his transgression, but that is not sufficient for the committee, which insists on… what? Heartfelt apology? Contrition? Groveling? This opening episode is wonderful in its own right but can also be read as an allegory for the emotional complexity of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

The professor retreats in disgrace to his daughter’s rural farm where he helps her care for stray dogs. In the country, the tyranny of anarchy replaces the tyranny of authoritarianism. A terrible crime occurs and in its complex cultural, political, and ethical  aftermath, we wonder if the daughter is disgraced or not, if the white race is  disgraced, if the black race is disgraced, if South Africa is disgraced. What is disgrace?

I should mention that the terrible crime is a gang rape of a white woman by black men. That’s a bit of a spoiler, I know, but I believe some readers would like to be prepared for something like that. The actual violation occurs off-page, but it is still a horrific thing to contemplate. As was apartheid.

Narration is first-person, present tense, told by the professor. There are no postmodern  self-referential tricks, no time compressions, flashbacks, anti-realist elements. It is a straight-ahead, down-to-earth story told in chronological order. The writing is spare yet deeply expressive. Every sentence is a crafted work of art. Characters are only sketched, yet seem fully rounded because of the skill with which they are described. Thematically, the story can be read as a political allegory, or enjoyed simply as a compelling human drama.

Disgrace won the 1999 Booker Prize. Coetzee won the Nobel prize for literature in 2003. (Coetzee is pronounced “Cut-ZEE-ya”)