Reviews and News:
Francine Prose on why judging a book—even partially—by the identity of the author rather than its literary merit is “problematic”: “What’s distressing is the frequency—and the unexamined authority—with which the words ‘experience’ and ‘lived experience’ define who is qualified to write or even to weigh in on a book. If it’s not your ‘lived experience,’ you’re not writing in ‘your own voice.’ It doesn’t suggest much faith in the power of the imagination—our ability to envision what it might be like to belong to another group, another gender, to live in another historical era. To take the argument to its illogical extreme, how can one write a historical novel if one has no ‘lived experience’ of that period? Meanwhile, the fact that the Kirkus reviewer of American Heart was chosen partly because she came from the same community as the novel’s ‘problematic’ character seems not to have mattered when Kirkus caved to the pressure from online community critics. Isn’t reading an experience that the writer allows us to ‘live’? Doesn’t fiction let the reader imagine what it might be like to be someone else? Or to enable us to consider what it means to be a human being—of another race, ethnicity, or gender? Should we dismiss Madame Bovary because Flaubert lacked ‘lived experience’ of what it meant to be a restless provincial housewife? Can we no longer read Othello because Shakespeare wasn’t black?”
What Prose doesn’t mention is that using non-literary criteria to judge books goes back over thirty years to when decisions about whether to include a book or an author in a college literature course—or nominate a book for a literary award—began taking into account a writer’s color or sex. I’m all for recovering obscure or “forgotten” writers and think that reading widely is interesting, but presenting such choices in political terms is of a piece with the current preoccupation with “appropriation.” It is also insulting, implying that the literary merits of these works are not justification enough to read them. You may be familiar with the VIDA Count, which just released its 2016 tally of female bylines (well, female and transgender) in certain magazines and literary publications. It claims that its efforts enrich the “literary community” and help women writers. It’s bad for both.
Speaking of gender-inclusivity, the Académie Française is taking a stand against making French more “inclusive.” Naomi Firsht: “The Académie Française does not always pick its fights well. Its battle against widely used anglicisms like le weekend was stubborn and stupid. But it is right to make a stand on gender. We should always be wary of elite political groups seeking to alter our language. Behind the claims of inclusivity, there is always an authoritarian demand to police what we say and ultimately how we think. If the French start down this slippery slope they will really be dans la merde – that’s a feminine noun, in case you were wondering.”
Matthew Bevis defends distraction in Poetry: “Whatever this freedom is, I would like a little of it. More than a little. I’m writing this sentence as a distraction from a book about poetry that I’m meant to be writing, but also with a hunch that the book may get written via the distraction, that something in the book needs to get worked out — or worked through — by my not attending to it.”
Sarah Manguso on the surprisingly happy journals of Jules Renard: “Renard, who grew up in the village of Chitry, in rural Burgundy, started keeping his journal at twenty-three, married and moved to Paris at twenty-four, and maintained the journal until he died in Chitry at forty-six, from arteriosclerosis. His best-known work, an autobiographical novel titled Poil de Carotte (Carrot Top), was published in 1894, when he was thirty, and later became an overwhelmingly successful play. By 1890, the red-headed Renard had published a number of short prose pieces in various outlets. He met the famous Alphonse Daudet that year, and the older writer ‘got to his feet, looked at me in the light, and said: “I recognize Poil de Carotte.”’ Renard frequently deploys the Carrot Top character in his journal as an alternative persona. ‘Every time the wind blows down the chimney, Poil de Carotte remembers his childhood,’ he writes in 1892. In the journal, he also refers to his parents as M. and Mme. Lepic, the parents’ names in the novel; his anomie toward them emerges from time to time, as when, in 1906, he broods, ‘Still and all, I did not dare write everything. I did not tell this: M. Lepic sending Poil de Carotte to ask Mme. Lepic if she wanted a divorce, and Mme. Lepic’s reception. What a scene!’ If one is to read Poil de Carotte as unambiguously autobiographical, Renard was hideously neglected as a child. And yet, if we’re to go by the journal, he was a rather cheerful adult.”
“England’s radicals of the 1790s championed Pantisocracy, or equal government by all. Of course, it never materialized.”
Daniel McCarthy is the new editor of Modern Age, replacing the late Peter Augustine Lawler, who died suddenly earlier this year.
Essay of the Day:
In The New Criterion, James Penrose revisits the late career of Gioachino Rossini:
“During the last decade of his life, Gioachino Rossini, the ‘Swan of Pesaro’ and composer of some of the most popular operas of the nineteenth century, held regular Saturday evening receptions at his Paris apartment at 2 Chaussée d’Antin or, during the summer, at Beau Séjour, his house in Passy, then in the countryside outside the city.
“Although this sort of salon was fairly typical (the well-connected could easily attend different salons almost every night of the week), within a few months of the Rossinis’ first samedi soir in December 1858, an invitation was the city’s highest social prize. Musicians, danseuses, critics, and authors mixed with the great bankers and politicians of the Second Empire and purple-clad members of the Holy See, all cramming into the reception rooms hoping to hear a snatch of the great man’s causeries charmantes. Admission was by ticket only, surrendered at the door to the formidable Madame Rossini who was described (anonymously, of course) in the Moniteur as la femme à trois têtes.
“Rossini would often serve Italian delicacies, then rare in Paris, to favored guests beforehand, but the real focus of the samedis was neither conversation nor cuisine, but music— particularly the music written after Rossini’s return to Paris in 1855. Many of these songs and piano pieces that he called his Péchés de Vieillesse (Sins of Old Age) were performed from manuscript, with Rossini contributing praise and the more-than-occasional barbed comment when played by others. Afterwards, Madame collected the Péchés and, in an ironic foretaste of their future, hid them away in a large mahogany cabinet in Rossini’s bedroom. Delightful to listen to and play, the Péchés are extraordinary, in part because they were the last creative flowerings of Rossini’s life, but even more because they bloomed after decades of deep physical and mental suffering.”
Photo: Rainbow over Shahrud
Poem: David Middleton, “Parlors”
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
