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Monday, February 11th, 2008
The final pages of Blindness are very strong, I think everything that has been rough and disorganized in the novel is crystallizing here, coming into focus. (I have not gotten quite to the ending, though I think I will finish it tonight.) I opened the book to get some pull-quotes and realized that really everything starting from where I stopped yesterday shines with such clarity as to be difficult to exerpt. The scene in which they bury the neighbor of the girl with dark glasses; the wedding proposal of the one-eyed man; the church with the defaced artwork... Here: I have not yet quoted any passages featuring the dog of tears.
...It won't be long before we have outbreaks of epidemics, said the doctor again, nobody will escape, we have no defenses left, If it's not raining, it's blowing gales, said the woman, Not even that, the rain would at least quench our thirst, and the wind would blow away some of this stench. The dog of tears sniffs around restlessly, stops to investigate a particular heap of rubbish, perhaps there is a rare delicacy hidden underneath which it can no longer find, if it were alone it would not move an inch from this spot, but the woman who wept has already walked on, and it is his duty to follow her, one never knows when one might have to dry more tears. Well ok, and also the church -- this really seems to me like a little masterpiece, a visual impression worthy of Buñuel:
She raised her head to the slender pillars, to the high vaults, to confirm the security and stability of her blood circulation, then she said, I am feeling fine, but at that very moment she thought she had gone mad or that the lifting of the vertigo had given her hallucinations, it could not be true what her eyes revealed, that man nailed to the cross with a white bandage covering his eyes, and next to him a woman, her heart pierced by seven swords and her eyes also covered with a white bandage, and it was not only that man and that woman who were in that condition, all the images in the church had their eyes covered, statues with a white cloth tied around the head, paintings with a thick brushstroke of white paint, and there was a woman teaching her daughter how to read and both had their eyes covered, and a man with an open book on which a little child was sitting, and both had their eyes covered, and another man, his body spiked with arrows, and he had his eyes covered, and a woman with a lit lamp, and she had her eyes covered, and a man with wounds on his hands and feet and his chest, and he had his eyes covered, and another man with a lion, and both had their eyes covered, and another man with an eagle, and both had their eyes covered, and another man with a spear standing over a fallen man with horns and cloven feet, and both had their eyes covered, and another man carrying a set of scales, and he had his eyes covered, and an old bald man holding a white lily, and he had his eyes covered, and another old man leaning on an unsheathed sword, and he had his eyes covered, and a woman with a dove, and both had their eyes covered, and a man with two ravens, and all three had their eyes covered, there was only one woman who did not have her eyes covered, because she carried her gouged-out eyes on a silver tray.
 Update: the woman carrying her gouged-out eyes on a silver tray is Saint Lucy, the patron saint of the blind.
posted evening of February 11th, 2008: Respond
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Sunday, February 10th, 2008
I put Blindness aside a few weeks ago to read The White Castle -- I was getting frustrated by a stretch of plot which seemed monotonous and deadening. Picked it up again the other night and my strategy of backing off and doing something else has paid off well: the book is fresh and surprising again. The scene in which the doctor's wife and the other two women are washing themselves and their clothing in the rain was especially gripping, even climactic. Perhaps in the building opposite , behind those closed windows some blind people, men, women, roused by the noise of the constant beating of the rain, with their head pressed against the cold window-panes covering with their breath on the glass the dullness of the night, remember the time when, like now, they last saw rain falling from the sky. They cannot imagine that there are moreover three naked women out there, as naked as when they came into the world, they seem to be mad, they must be mad, people in their right mind do not start washing on a balcony exposed to the view of the neighbourhood, even less looking like that, what does it matter that we are all blind, these are things one must not do, my God, how the rain is pouring down on them, how it trickles between their breasts, how it lingers and disappears into the darkness of the pubis, how it finally drenches and flows over the thighs, perhaps we have judged them wrongly or perhaps we are unable to see this the most beautiful and glorious thing that has happened in the history of the city, a sheet of foam flows from the floor of the balcony, if only I could go with it, falling interminably, clean, purified, naked. Only God sees us, said the wife of the first blind man, who, despite disappointments and setbacks, clings to the belief that God is not blind, to which the doctor's wife replied, Not even he, the sky is clouded over...
I also really liked this conversation between the doctor's wife and the writer who is squatting in the apartment of the first blind man and his wife:
...How have you managed since the outbreak of the epidemic, We came out of internment only three days ago, Ah, you were in quarantine, Yes, Was it hard, Worse than that, How horrible, You are a writer, you have, as you said a moment ago, an obligation to know words, therefore you know that adjectives are of no use to us, if a person kills another, for example, it would be better to state this fact openly, directly, and to trust that the horror of the act, in itself, is so shocking that there is no need for us to say it was horrible, Do you mean that we have more words than we need, I mean that we have too few feelings, Or that we have them but have ceased to use the words they express, And so we lose them,...
Saramago's practice of referring to his characters by their role in the story rather than by name (I express some skepticism here) pays off big time when he is able to name the stray dog the group adopts (whose first appearance in the story was on the street, licking the tears from the face of the doctor's wife) "The dog of tears" -- this is a beautiful handle for him.
posted evening of February 10th, 2008: Respond
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Wednesday, February 6th, 2008
But we should search for the strange and surprising in the world, not within ourselves! To search within, to think so long and hard about our own selves, would only make us unhappy. This is what had happened to the characters in my story: for this reason heroes could never tolerate being themselves, for this reason they always wanted to be someone else.
I have enjoyed the self-referential and pedantic qualities of The White Castle and have found ways to apply its lessons to my own mind; but in the end I don't think it quite works. Pamuk says what he is doing too often and too plainly for it generally to surprise; the lesson becomes dull through repetition. I find myself longing for humanity in the characters. The narrator's assertion at the end of his story that some mystery remains in its pages, one which "intelligent readers" will seek out and devour, isn't really enough to recapture my attention -- it comes off as sort of patronizing. I am going to consider this book a piece from Pamuk's apprenticeship and treasure it more for the glimpses I can catch of his later work, than for the book itself.
posted evening of February 6th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, February 4th, 2008
Further to the Codex Seraphinianus: Luigi Serafini also wrote a second book, the Pulcinellopedia (Piccola), concerning the Punch doll of "Punch and Judy". I have only been able to find a few scattered images, mostly on this page (the same blogger also has a beautiful Codex page) -- sure looks intriguing. And, another page from the Codex -- a rainy day: 
posted evening of February 4th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, February first, 2008
I heard about this book just a little while ago from a friend who was trying to figure out how much a copy costs now; pretty expensive it turns out. But, turns out also to be available on the internets for free. Just looking through it now for the first time -- it is entrancing to look at the letters and understand them as meaningful. Also some hilarious art like the rocket circumambulation. In a funny way it seems like reading that Dr. Seuss "On Beyond Zebra" book of invented characters, but taken to a whole 'nother level in terms of internal consistency and rigorous meaninglessness. -- Maybe comparable to what a baby experiences looking at a book, maybe a baby at the cusp of realizing that the book holds the story which is being read to him but not yet having the key to understanding it.  Apparently the egg-trees are crawling out of their holes in order to split in half that they might bear the fœtal tree developing inside them. I'm not sure why some of the little ones are splitting; maybe they are a separate species or variety.
posted evening of February first, 2008: Respond
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Saturday, January 26th, 2008
...And it occurs to me, apropos the previous post, that what makes The White Castle and The New Life less engaging than Pamuk's later novels, is precisely their aphoristic quality -- the characters seem very abstract, so that even though they have many specific, individuating attributes, I don't get a sense of them as personalities. One of the things I really loved in Snow and My Name is Red, was that all of the deep thinking was very firmly rooted in the concrete individuals telling and acting out the story.
posted afternoon of January 26th, 2008: Respond
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I'm reading The White Castle as a parable about loneliness. The narrator's and Hoja's striving after personal union reminds me of the presocratic philosopher* who postulated that every man's soul is half of a primordial unity, forever seeking its opposite. Their relationship is sadistic and masochistic and I am anxious to find out what will come of its "fulfillment" -- i.e. the eventual transference of identity which the narrator is hinting at -- from the narrator's tone I cannot believe it is going to bring him happiness. The writing exercises that Hoja insists on starting in Chapter 5 remind me in a funny way of blogging and of online relationships generally. The two are seeking to approach each other through a textual exchange; each has his own agenda. (Hoja is clearly the motive force, but this gives the narrator freedom to play his own games without worrying about the end point of the interaction.) I identify very strongly with both characters in this passage (and can't help thinking of the table they are sitting at as the Internet):
...just as a person could view his external self in a mirror, he should be able to observe the interior of his mind in his thoughts. He said I knew how to do this but was withholding the secret from him. While Hoja sat across from me, waiting for me to write down this secret, I filled the sheets in front of me with stories exaggerating my own faults: I wrote with delight about the petty thefts of my childhood, the jealous lies, the way I schemed in order to make myself more loved than my brothers and sisters, the sexual indiscretions of my youth, stretching the truth more and more as I went along. The greedy curiosity with which Hoja read these tales, and the queer pleasure he derived from them, shocked me; afterwards he would become even more angry...
 *Heraclitus maybe? Empedocles? help me out here -- I may also just be totally confused and there is not a presocratic philosopher answering to this description. Update: Aha! John knows what I was thinking of -- this is not presocratic, but rather from Aristophanes' speech in the Symposium. Transcript here. After the division the two parts of man, each desiring his other half, came together, and throwing their arms about one another, entwined in mutual embraces, longing to grow into one, they began to die from hunger and self-neglect, because they did not like to do anything apart; and when one of the halves died and the other survived, the survivor sought another mate, man or woman as we call them,--being the sections of entire men or women,--and clung to that.
 See also, Hedwig and the Angry Inch's adaptation of Aristophanes' speech.
posted afternoon of January 26th, 2008: Respond
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Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008
The White Castle is, like The New Life, not seeming a page-turner to me in the way that Snow and My Name is Red both did. As I read it I am encountering some very interesting bits -- like this evening I was feeling some kinship with Hoja over the question of how narrating one's experiences can communicate one's inner self -- but I do not feel invested in the characters in a way that would make me need to know what is going to happen next.
posted evening of January 23rd, 2008: Respond
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Saturday, January 19th, 2008
...I knew that at any moment the book would be snatched from my hand, yet I wanted to think not of that but of what was written on its pages. It was as if the thoughts, the sentences, the equations within the book contained the whole of my past life which I dreaded to lose... I desperately wanted to engrave the entire volume on my memory so that when they did come, I would not think of them and what they would make me suffer, but would remember the colors of my past as if recalling the cherished worlds of a book I had memorized with pleasure.
Cool: the inner story of The White Castle begins, like the outer story and like The New Life, with the narrator frantically reading a book, seeking to alter his consciousness through reading. Also I like seeing "the colors of my past", that brings to mind much of Pamuk's other work. This is the fourth novel of his I am reading, and the fourth markedly different narrative style. Which is cool, I guess, his voice rings clear in each of them. It is surprising, not what I expect -- reminds me a bit of Pynchon I guess, but I think offhand that the differences in style among Pamuk's books are greater than among Pynchon's.
posted afternoon of January 19th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, January 18th, 2008
I still have not gotten to the beginning of the inner story of The White Castle and already the layering of fictions is seeming intensely complicated. The book is dedicated to "Nilgun Darvinoglu: a loving sister (1961 - 1980)" -- I read this when I first opened the book and thought, Pamuk's sister lived such a short life! Then I started reading the preface (in which the outer story is begun), and leafed to the end of the preface to see it was signed "Faruk Darvinoglu". Hmm, think I, he attributes the preface to his brother-in-law. Perhaps that is meant as further tribute to the lamented sister. But then I read, at the end of the last paragraph of the preface,
Readers seeing the dedication at the beinning may ask if it has a personal significance. I suppose that to see everything as connected with everything else is the addiction of our time. It is because I too have succumbed to this disease that I publish this tale.
That totally knocked me for a loop. Does Pamuk have a sister who lived for the stated dates, who he is dedicating the book to? And if so, is that her name? Or is the dedication completely part of the fiction, the outer story -- or indeed part of the inner story that has taken over the life of the narrator, extruding itself into the outer story?
Update: more info here.
posted evening of January 18th, 2008: Respond
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