Wednesday, October 16, 2019
Book Review
The Adventures of Augie March
by Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow set
out to write the quintessential American novel. The Adventures of
Augie March touches
on a lot of the themes that qualify it to be so. It involves
immigrants, youth, class mobility, capitalism, and American identity.
It is a sprawling book that probably covers too much ground for most
readers though, especially considering the short attention spans and
anti-intellectual nature of American society in our day.
The
Adventures of Augie March can
be approached from several different angles but to get a handle on
it, it is best to consider the main character himself. Augie comes
from a Jewish family living in Chicago during the Great Depression.
Too much can not be made of these details since the events of the
story could be about people of any ethnic background, happening in
any American city, and probably at any time in the early to mid-20th
century. The
narrative follows young Augie from his boyhood into his early adult
life. He is a handsome and charming boy, prone to the minor
troublemaking that teenagers
are drawn to by nature. Those around him believe he is destined to do
something great with his life but Augie himself can not figure out
what that is and everything he sets out to do turns into a mess,
usually for reasons beyond his control. His good looks and good
nature make him attractive to beautiful women. Augie narrates the
book, telling the stories of all the people in his life. This is a
picaresque novel and has no central plot; the journey of his young
life simply
flows
from episode
to episode.
This
thick book can probably be broken into three parts. The first, and
longest part, would be the beginning of Augie’s life up until the
time he moves to Mexico. The bulk of the descriptive writing is about
family members, friends, and the odd jobs he takes on
to survive. His
grandmother is mean. His older brother is ambitious, sometimes
violent, and on the path to becoming a big shot businessman. Augie
makes a living by taking care of Einhorn, a disabled and wheelchair
bound businessman with a crooked streak and a taste for minor scams.
After dropping out of college, he survives by selling stolen
textbooks, most of which he reads first. At one point Augie realizes
he has to discover who he is.
Augie
March himself is mostly a fly on the wall type narrator through most
of this first section. To say the writing is descriptive would be an
understatement. When successful, Bellow creates characters who are
unforgettable. As a reader you feel as if you can physically see
them, feel them, and relate to them as if they are real people in
your life. The novel’s biggest problems lie in this descriptiveness
too; it is not always necessary to know about every nose hair and
toenail of each character. Too much description
hinders the flow of the writing at times and the details become a
burden to the narrative. Even worse, there are passages where Augie
sinks into subjective and abstract descriptions of these people so
that the actual characters themselves disappear into a fog of his
inner
perceptions. These
paragraphs do not enhance the writing in any way and even an
experienced reader can get lost in what reads like a haze of white
noise and dense smoke.
The
narrative takes a turn when Augie’s friend Mimi needs to have an
abortion. For the first time, Augie tries to take control of the
situation by getting her to a doctor for the operation and then
getting her into a hospital afterwards when she starts having massive
hemorrhaging. The
pace of the language quickens from here on. Augie’s
attempt at taking control leads to problems though since his fiancee,
Lucy,
and her family find out about his
friend’s abortion
and Lucy
breaks off their engagement. This scene leads to a bigger shift in
Augie’s life when he meets up with Thea and leaves Chicago.
So
begins the second major section of The
Adventures of Augie March. Thea
is a beautiful heiress going through a divorce. She takes Augie to
Mexico with a recently purchased eagle. Her big plan is to have Augie
assist her in training the eagle to hunt giant lizards so she
can
sell a story about their venture to National
Geographic. But
the eagle turns out to be scared of the lizards and Augie feels
uneasy about Thea’s strange interest in hunting. After Augie’s
horse throws him and kicks him in the head, she ditches the eagle and
takes to catching pit vipers in the mountains instead. While on her
expeditions, he makes loads of money playing poker in town. Augie
finally has a taste of freedom but his life is not where he wants it
to be.
During
this period he meets an irresistibly attractive woman who is in
danger and asks Augie to help her escape to Cuernavaca so she can get
back to the USA. As they drive up into the mountains, the car gets
stuck
and they end up sleeping together. Of course, when Thea finds out she
leaves him, even
though her snake hunting was actually a cover for an affair she was
having with a Mexican man.
Their relationship was failing anyways; they had nothing in common
and Augie felt used by Thea who he, and everyone else, thought was
too eccentric to truly be loved. The affair with Stella is a major
turning point in another way; Stella connects with Augie because she
tells him he always has to be a player in somebody else’s game.
This is a big revelation to him and thereafter he sets out to escape
from the fate of his character and this epiphany sets the tone for
the rest of the novel. Stella feels the same way about herself too.
Augie
March’s sojourn in Mexico is where the novel peaks. His
return to Chicago marks the beginning of the final phase of his
stories. Augie finds his brother has become a millionaire but his
life takes a dark turn as he has an affair with a young woman who is
after his money. World War II begins and Augie sets off to train for
the Merchant Marines in New York City. There he marries Stella before
setting off on a ship gong into battle. After his military service,
Augie and Stella move to Paris where they continue to be what they
always were: characters in someone else’s play. This is literally
true for Stella because she becomes an admittedly talentless but
beautiful
actress in the French film industry. Neither of them escape the fate
of their character.
The
novel ends abruptly without resolving any of the many conflicting
threads that keep popping up all the way to the end. This works well
though because it leaves the reader feeling like Augie’s life will
continue on as it has all along.
In
The Adventures of
Augie March, Saul
Bellow has written a good quality novel. It is a solid narrative with
unforgettable characters but in terms of descriptive writing, he
overplayed his hand. It
has a cinematic quality; a
young Dustin Hoffman would have done well as Augie in a movie version
of this book. It
might even be possible that his classic film The
Graduate is
a moderately distant echo of Saul Bellow’s writing.
Bellow,
Saul. The
Adventures of Augie March. Penguin
Books, New York: 1981.
Tuesday, October 15, 2019
Brian Eno - Everything Merges With the Night
Brian Eno
Everything Merges With the Night
from the lp Another Green World
Monday, October 14, 2019
Sunday, October 13, 2019
James White and the Blacks - Irresistible Impulse
James White and the Blacks
Irresistible Impulse
from the lp Sax Maniac
Excerpts from an Interview with Sonny Sharrock, WKCR-FM, New York City, 1989, by Ben Ratliff
Ben Ratliff: …Was your family at all musical?
Sonny Sharrock: No, not instrumentally. My uncle who recently died: He was about five years older than me, he was a singer, and we sang doo-wop back in the '5Os; my brother sang and recorded back in the'5Os, '6Os; other than that, there was no real musical activity in my family.
Ben Ratliff: …Did you record with that group?
Saturday, October 12, 2019
Book Review
The Outsider by Colin Wilson
A century or so
after the Industrial Revolution started, Western societies set into a
pattern where the masses of people appeared to be doing little more
than working, sleeping, eating, and never fully developing as human
beings. In response, those who were unhappy with this arrangement
became more individualistic and socially isolated. Colin Wilson wrote
The Outsider to address this
situation. While this somewhat influential work of non-fiction begins
with a departure into an interesting territory,
it also never arrives at any kind of useful destination.
A
large portion of The Outsider is
literary analysis. Wilson delves into the works of Sartre, Camus,
Hesse, Nietzsche, Blake
and others. He begins by
defining the Outsider as someone who thinks and feels more deeply
than other people; this causes them to break away from the herd
to purse a life lived to the fullest. He describes this as
existentialism and,
although he does refer to some existentialist authors, this is not a
standard definition of the term. Existentialism was a modern
philosophical and literary movement that addressed the idea of
humanity in the absence of God; without divine revelation or the
dogmatic beliefs to be blindly accepted by religious leaders, truth
is determined by empirical experience and meaning is created and
chosen rather than received. Wilson does indirectly address these
existentialist themes but he does so in a truncated and indirect way
that makes this book only tenuously related to existentialism. In
any case, The Outsider has
problems with definitions throughout the whole book. His concept of
the Outsider is incredibly narrow and actually addresses only a small
category of alienated people; most of his examples come from
fictional characters, not reality,
and the details of those he does portray are cherry-picked. Besides,
the real outsiders are those who are terminally alone for more
mundane reasons like the awkward high school kid who gets bullied
because he has zits, the schizophrenic man sitting at the bus stop
having conversations with imaginary people, the forty year old
guy who commits suicide
because he has not lost virginity
at the age of 40 or the prisoner who tries to kill himself by bashing
his head against the wall after being kept in solitary confinement
for four weeks. Colin Wilson is too superior to deal with those kinds
of outsiders, though, isn’t he?
His
description of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra as being a man who wants to
start a new religion could easily be undercut by the fact that
Nietzsche was a proponent of moral relativism and linguistic
situationism, believing that definitions have fluid, malleable
meanings that do not remain fixed but alter according to their
circumstances. This idea is in direct contradiction to the concept of
religion being about eternal, unchanging values. Nietzsche was an
atheist and an anti-metaphysician; Zarathustra was on a quest to
experimentally find a better way of life because
religion is about controlling masses of people rather than making
life a more profound experience.
He had not intention of
establishing a new religion.
But these facts never get in the way of Wilson trying to make his
case; he simply ignores the ideas of Nietzsche that contradict what
he wants to say and extracts the ideas that he wants. Wilson’s
literary analyses are like seeing a garden bush carved into the form
of an elephant; the gardener cut away all the pieces he did not want
in order to
make the bush appear to be something that it is not. Wilson does,
however, write some interesting literary criticism but it is
sophomoric and inaccurate, kind of like an undergraduate student’s
term paper for a course on modern novels.
Wilson
has other problems with definitions. He keeps referring to the Will,
with a capital W, but
never once explains what this will is
supposed to be. He does not even use the word in a semantically
consistent enough way to make it possible to deduce what he actually
means by this. He also keeps referring to the need for religion but
his ideas of religion are never defined and what he has to say about
it sounds more like mysticism in response
to the existential dilemma rather
than orthodox concepts of religion as an institution. Without
responsibly defining and explaining terms like these it is impossible
to clearly understand what it is he advocates for or why it is even
important or relevant to our lives.
Getting
worse from there, Wilson proclaims that systematic thought like
science, logic, and mathematics, are what keep the masses of people
enslaved to modernist mediocrity. He blames Hegel especially for
this. Quite often people who who condemn such kinds of rationality
are people who either do
not understand them well enough to use them or
people who reject them because they do not support belief in angels,
fairies, gods, demons, ghosts and other forms of supernatural junk.
Most likely this is true for Wilson, the
occultist, who condemns
Hegelian thought but can not see that he wrote
a book that is a dumbed-down
and overly-simplified version
of Hegelian ideas. The
inherent conflict between the individual and society, as well as the
physical, mental, and spiritual conflicts within each individual are
all rooted in Hegelian phenomenology; Wilson’s ideas about
achieving wholeness through the synthesis of opposing forces is also
entirely Hegelian. Wilson was not broad-minded enough to see the
Hegelian themes in his own writing.
Worse
for Wilson is the
fact that
he depends on systematic thought all throughout The
Outsider. It is a linear
narrative the proceeds from point to point along an organizational
shceme; that is what is known as systematic thought.
Early in the book he mentions
the Jewish kabbalah and refers to it a couple times afterwards.
Familiarity with the kabbalah makes it clear that the outline
of his work is based entirely
on this mystical formula which he appropriated from Hebraic
tradition. The Outsider begins
with the chaos of Sartre’s existentialism, leads into the
self-consciousness of Hesse, the mind-spirit-body
conflict of T.E. Lawrence, Vincent Van Gogh, and Nijinsky. This
hurdle is overcome with Nietzsche confronting the great void,
Dostoevsky overcoming it, and William Blake emerging into the
spiritual enlightenment that results in a brilliantly colored
kaleidoscopic orgasm that hits you like a psychedelic cumshot in the
face. This, ladies and
gentleman, is the kabbalah in a nutshell and, believe it or not, it
is a system of thinking, one that Wilson did not scheme up on his own
but borrowed from another culture because he did not really have any
ideas of his own. Wilson does
not truly reject systematic thinking; he just does not like the
systems of thought that do not justify his own spiritual prejudices.
Wilson was too amateurish of a thinker to see his own contradictions.
Besides, isn’t this just
Plato’s “Allegory Of the Cave” dressed up in Modernist
clothing?
Colin
Wilson’s concept of the Outside is one of a solitary genius who can
not be understood because he experiences life too deeply. His
solution to the problem of the Outsider is to become a saint, a
prophet, a visionary, or
the founder of a new religion. Almost all the literary figures, and
others, described in this book are, in the end, regarded as failures.
Like everything else in this tract, Wilson’s idea of failure is
inherently problematic too. Just
because some of these authors and artists, some of which were
atheists, did not become mystic visionaries does not mean they failed
in what they set out to do. It means they failed to do what Colin
Wilson thinks they should have done. This is the hubris of a second
or third-rate thinker. While condemning these people for failing to
become prophets and visionaries, it also has to be pointed out that
Wilson states in the last chapter that he does not know how to solve
the problem of the Outsider either. So he fails to meet his own goals
while criticizing others for failing too.
Colin
Wilson was a literary hack, a pseudo-intellectual, and a gullible
dupe. After writing The Outsider he
went on to write trashy novels about rapists and serial killers,
dopey books about UFOs, spiritualism, parapsychology, and other forms
of corny occultism. In all, his oeuvre
totals over 100 volumes. Do
not ever trust a writer who publishes too much; it is a sign of
shallow thinking. The Outsider gained
some notice because of the slight influence it had on the Beat
Generation authors and the hippie movement of the 1960s. It has
maintained a cult following over time. Filled with historical
inaccuracies and weak reasoning, it possibly will only be remembered
as a historical artifact from the middle of the Modernist era, if
it gets remembered at all.
But it is not popular enough to be overrated and not written well
enough to be underrated.
Wilson,
Colin. The Outsider. Jeremy
P. Tarcher/Putnam, New York: 1982.
Alexei Leonov, 1st Human To Walk In Space, Dies In Moscow
Alexei Leonov, the legendary Soviet cosmonaut who became the first human to walk in space 54 years ago — and who nearly didn't make it back into his space capsule — has died in Moscow at 85.
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