The dream life of metabooks

[imomus]

As a student of literature, something you find yourself doing a lot is reading books about books -- narratives which tear through the plot outlines, critical receptions and choicest quotes of other books, giving you some kind of rapid gist or taste of hundreds of titles you'll probably never read. What I've always liked about these books-about-books (opening my newly-arrived boxes from New York, I've already pulled out a couple of juicy ones, Modernism by Malcolm Bradbury and Surrealisme et Sexualité by Xaviere Gauthier) is that they leave you free to fantasize about the books they're describing and actually construct them -- with all their peculiarities heightened and exaggerated -- in your head.

In a weird, inverted way, some of the books which must be most hellish to read in real life, in real time, turn out, in these metabook accounts, to be the most entertaining to read about. The worse they sound, and the more negatively they were received, the better the story of them becomes. Let's take one I've been intrigued by descriptions of recently -- The Dream Life of Balso Snell by Nathanael West. This "anti-kunstleroman" sounds so bad it's bloody great!

Plot: Balso Snell is a lyric poet who finds the Trojan Horse abandoned in tall grass near Troy. “The mouth was beyond his reach, the navel provided a cul-de-sac," so Balso climbs in through the anus. Deep in the entrails of the beast he meets a series of failed and frustrated writers who merely convince him of the futility of writing. That's the whole story. He meets these delusional writers one by one and listens to them ranting. It's like Dante's rings of hell and Pope's Dunciad set inside the digestive tract of a horse.

The book, written during West's nightshifts at New York's Kenmore Hotel, appeared in 1931. The critics hated it, responding to its spirit of snotty, punky, nihilist rejection with snotty, punky, nihilist rejection-of-the-rejection. I loved the bad reviews so much I printed them on the back of the dummy copy of The Book of Jokes. Here they are:

"Formless, chaotic, a juvenile pastiche of bathroom jokes, college magazine parody, and borrowings from contemporary avant-garde authors." Deborah Wyrick

"Squalid and dreadful." Harold Bloom

"A hysterical, obscure, disgusted shriek against the intellect.” James F. Light

"A protest against the writing of books." Nathanael West

"A privately printed little exercise that never should have been printed at all." Daniel Aaron

"A sneer in the bathroom mirror at Art.” Alan Ross

"All it says is 'stink, stink, stink.'" Anna Weinstein, West's own mother

I don't know what it must be like as a book, but as a nutshell gloss in a metabook, The Dream Life of Balso Snell is fantastic.

Comments

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

I actually kind of liked it. It's not Miss Lonelyhearts though.

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

"In a weird, inverted way, some of the books which must be most hellish to read in real life, in real time, turn out, in these metabook accounts, to be the most entertaining to read about. "

Indeed. The same sorta applies to news, which is why the British tabloids churn out little other than sensationalism nowdays. Nobody really wants to read a well written and perhaps complex article about the real impact immigration has had on the British ecomony, because their interest has already been grabbed by headlines about asylum seekers eating swans (http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-5603545-details/'Asylum+seekers+eat+swans'/article.do;jsessionid=NPgCGgyQ0f0v1bmdyFyF2JwTZVWVVwMRpJFcZZG1T7gmv17xP39G!-1833051214!-1407319226!7001!-1), those fucking foreigners!

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Also, for your blurbs, it's "Nathanael," not "Nathaniel."

[desant012.livejournal.com]

Sometimes it's disappointing when you actually read works after fantasizing what they must be like based on the reviews. and sometimes it's more fun to just skip around the no vel randomly, making u pp your own story as you go a long. it's especially great when there are illustrations.

Not to say that the "tyranny of the artist" isn't valid, but it's just one of the ways to experience a work .

Oh yeah, and nice on finally covering some literaturee

[reggie-c-king.livejournal.com]

I had every intention of saying the same, except that I can't remember whether or not I actully liked it. I read it only two and a half months ago, but recall very little beyond it taking me an hour and a half to finish. It's not Miss Lonelyhearts though.

[sm255.livejournal.com]

I liked it.

It's not Miss Lonelyhearts though.

About a bibliography

[geweih.livejournal.com]

some of us have some catching up to do with our reading. As a former student of art it was always easier to just look at the pictures. It's perhaps not so disimilar, the reproduction standing for the thing itself - the juxtaposition of images forming there own meta-narrative (kind of better than the 'real thing').

Sometimes I enjoy researching music more than I like listening to it as well (Les Rallizes Denudes, anyone?). Sometimes the review must stand for the film.

I heard this feature on the radio recently about the distinction between reviewing and criticism. A proffessor made a plea at a conference that the text took its meaning from the end (and therefore could not be meaningfully discussed without a willingness to give away the plot) - the contributors to the feature tutted about the authenticity of the cinema and how surely people didn't watch films just to find out what happens in the end.

I found myself thinking that this was surely counter to the immersive pleasures that most of the audience are seeking but the idea of meta-books (a sad lacunaie in my education) intrigues the writer in me- unlocking bite sized chunks of structure, so Balso Snell finds himself rubbing shoulders with lesser or greater company - a clear paradigm for the Book of Jokes.

How about a short bibliography Nick?
(hark at the cheekof it!)

[dreamyshade.livejournal.com]

that's totally borges-style: instead of writing or reading a whole book, write/read the review of it - it's far more entertaining.

vaguely related...

[zenmonkeykstop.livejournal.com]

Stanislaw Lem wrote a few sets of introductions to and reviews of fictional books:
http://www.rpi.edu/~sofkam/lem/#booksnotwritten
I've only read the introductions one though, haven't found the review one yet.

[(Anonymous)]

Balso Snell is a hell of a book IN THE FLESH (just as any other books West write before he accidentally died at a young age). You would actually have to take the time to READ it, but I doubt you would waste that precious time, giving that you need it to rave about reading rather than actually do it. oh well. And i totally disagree with the fact of loving a piece of art for the precise reason that it's been hated and discarded - or it would be simple and plain snobbish, right? (olivier)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'd have to find it before I could read it -- and in English. In Berlin, and with no credit card, and no money for books... well, I need to keep writing books just to stay alive. I'll read 'em when I'm dead.

And, to be fair, I wasn't loving a piece of art because it was hated, but loving "a nutshell gloss in a metabook".

I do, though, tend to like marginal stuff. Rilke's "Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge", for instance, can't have found many readers. And I was just reading last night about how well Manzoni sold, while Leopardi languished in obscurity. It's not that Leopardi is difficult to understand. It's that he doesn't give you a very reassuring view of humanity, or your nation, or your family, or life in general.

[collisionwork]

Balso Snell is indeed a great book - though very short and a quick read. Maybe it's from overfamiliarity with Miss Lonelyhearts and Day of the Locust, but I wound up preferring Snell and A Cool Million to the later ones when I finally got a chance to read them. They're more than worth actually checking out beyond descriptions.

[peacelovgranola.livejournal.com]

it's also fun to read blog posts about books about books. meta-meta-meta-meta!

since we're talking books, some recent ones:

barthes--empire of signs (japan, the final philo-frontier)
derrida--margins
foucault--what is an author? (relevant to this post, i think)
paramahansa yogananda--autobiography of a yogi
a seedy basquiat biography
a travelogue about kyoto "cuisine"

what's everyone else reading these days?

[cheapsurrealist.livejournal.com]

I loved the bad reviews so much I printed them on the back of the dummy copy of The Book of Jokes.

Don't forget "the feelgood hit of the year".

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Books on houseplants.

I should have lied, eh?

[peacelovgranola.livejournal.com]

goodness, no...much more practical than all my headache-inducing perusing...

...i'm sure there's plenty of "seedy" prose in your garden books, anyway. :p

[(Anonymous)]

Today I read a book about spider mites, which is even more down to earth. I love those little critters. Thet're the real thing. I guess I should have lied, but I can't prevent my blue-collar background showing through my deliciously inauthentic persona.

bowler

[(Anonymous)]

You're absolutely right. It isn't Miss Lonelyhearts.

bowler

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Snark mites are especially bad this season.

[(Anonymous)]

go to the library

[smithsimon.livejournal.com]

Interesting review in the latest Times Literary Supplement by Adrian Tahourdin of 'Comment parler des livres que l'on n'a pas lus?' by Pierre Bayard.

I'd never heard of this before, but apparently it's been a bit of a hit in France already. He breaks down "livres que l'on n'a pas lus" into four categories:

1. LI (livres inconnus) - books he is unfamiliar with
2. LP (livres parcourus) - books he has glanced at
3. LE (livres dont j'ai entendu parler) - books he has heard discussed
4. LO (livres que j'ai oublies) - books he has read but forgotten.

A classic example of a LE (for *most* people* being Ulysses, in that he "claims not to have read the novel, but can place it within its literary context, know that it is in a sense a reprise of the Odyssey, that it follows the ebb and flow of consciousness, and that it takes place in Dublin over the course of a single day. When teaching he makes frequent and unflinching references to Joyce."

Which sums up MY knowledge of Ulysses for a start - that, plus "snot-green sea". And Molly Bloom's long soliloquy at the end.

It's strange for me the number of canonical things that fall into categories 2 and 3, and also the number that fall into 2 and 3, and then when I really think about it, also fall into category 4!

Tahourdin brings up Oscar Wilde: "He recommended six minutes as the proper time to spend reading a book for review, and advocated reviewing as a good way of talking about oneself."

Which all reminds me of the days when I used to passionately hold forth against Ocean Colour Scene, despite not having heard a note of their music. Turned out I was right.

BBC documentary on Japan

[hadleyburg.livejournal.com]

It's completely off today's topic, but this recent BBC radio podcast is on Japan, cuteness, formalism, and various other topics often discussed here.
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/downloadtrial/worldservice/documentaryarchive/documentaryarchive_20070719-1600_40_pc.mp3

It might be of interest to other Click Opera folk.

re. Bayard

[geweih.livejournal.com]

seems to cover most of the options. Most of my reading falls into the category of LO - immersive pleasure, not plot precis.

Sick and wrong, I suspect but I was always a bit more inclined towards the Dionysian than the Apollonian.

As for the rest, rumour is always pervasive. LE matters to!

[(Anonymous)]

I'm reading 'Confessions of a justified sinner' by James Hogg, with a post-script by Andre Gide, I'm liking it so far, I havent read any Nathaniel West yet, but hopefully I'll get to it sooner or later, and I recently read 'Six memos for the next millenium' by Italo Calvino, an interesting short work about the development of writing through the 20th century

[imomus.livejournal.com]

'Comment parler des livres que l'on n'a pas lus?' by Pierre Bayard.

How fascinating! I shall make a point of not-reading it!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

By plane?

[geweih.livejournal.com]

One of my favourite unread authors is Pessoa, though the list is extensive.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The Hogg novel is one of my favourites. Fantastic use of unreliable -- and multi-perspective -- narrative!

Re: BBC documentary on Japan

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Refreshingly free of puritanical judgementalism... and some interesting insights, like the idea that sex in Japan is not about self-expression but about trading one set of rules for another, or that even politeness itself is sexualised.

[flying-squid.livejournal.com]

How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life: Stories by John Fahey.

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

If Harold Bloom calls the book "squalid and dreadful" then it must be good. Perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems fairly obvious these critics are being merely defensive in the most telling way possible. The book struck a nerve. Some writers, critics and intellectuals obviously did not want to consider for a moment that they are entirely fatuous, and had to launch a counter-attack.

I really want to read the book now.