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Thursday, August 14th, 2008
For several minutes he watched his courage desert him, it was like watching sand run through an hourglass, an overworked metaphor which nevertheless keeps recurring. One day, when we live two hundred years and ourselves become the hourglass observing the sand inside it, we will not need the metaphor, but life is too short to indulge in such thoughts...
This chapter, in which Ricardo's relationship with Marcenda moves a little closer to passion and Ricardo's relationship with Lydia moves a little closer to being taken for granted, has me wondering, why are all of the characters' actions so clearly marked as male or as female. Ricardo walking around Lisbon and around his room is identified as male -- "It is indeed true that a man on his own is useless" -- Lydia is identified as having a woman's eye (more specifically a female domestic servant's eye) for what needs to be cleaned up in Ricardo's room -- the nameless people in the rooms and buildings around them are doing things as husbands, wives, fathers, mothers.I've been noticing all along that gender plays a very important role in this narrative; fortuitously I read a post today at Is there no sin in it? which touched on the subject of "gender performance," how characters on TV shows act out their genders. I'd heard the term before but this was a very useful reminder -- it gives me a name for the way the characters in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis are being depicted. I believe tentatively that gender performance, possibly interlocking with performance of Portuguese identity and of social class, is a major part of the meaning of this novel.
There are things we do automatically, our body, acting on its own, avoids inconvenience whenever possible, that is why we sleep on the eve of battle or execution, and why ultimately we die when we can no longer bear the harsh light of existence.
(Well, and to be sure there is a lot more going on than just gender or just gender and class and ethnicity.)
posted evening of August 14th, 2008: Respond
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I was happy this afternoon to get pointed toward Bryan Waterman and Cyrus Patell's blog, A History of New York. Waterman and Patell are English professors at NYU and are writing a cultural history of New York City; the blog is a record of their circumambulations as they write it. Good stuff!
posted afternoon of August 14th, 2008: Respond
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Wednesday, August 13th, 2008
OK, the new machinery is now active. READIN is now hosted by HostMonster. Comments don't seem to work yet nor does the RSS feed; these too will come.
 OK, comments are working...
posted evening of August 13th, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, August 12th, 2008
 Outage this weekend can be laid at the door of my ISP. Now I'm thinking strongly about moving the site out of my house, onto Dreamhost or some such. Recommendations welcomed -- the things I need are MySql, PHP, and ssh access.
 (Service is still kind of slow and/or occasionally nonexistent. A new ISP is in the offing, a new hosting service also: changing ISP's means no more fixed IP address for my house. But it ultimately makes way more sense to use a remote hosting service anyway.)
posted morning of August 12th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, August 11th, 2008
I have been taking a look back at Borges' fictions over the last few days -- very quickly I am again remembering what I love about them, and also seeing some problems with them that I was not conscious of in college. Jorge López' objection that they are "lacking in the emotional area" is particularly on my mind; I must say that the stories in part II, "Artifices," seem more emotionally developed than the stories in part I, "The Garden of Forking Paths." The last line of "The Form of the Sword" really cuts deep on an emotional level. (And yes, I seem to remember liking part I better than part II when I was in college. Make of that what you will.)
I have been reading Ficciones in the 1962 Grove edition, with translations by Anthony Kerrigan, Aleister Reed, Anthony Bonner, and a few others. I'm seeing some issues with the translations and thinking this could probably be a lot better done -- then I see over at Orbis Tertius today, there is a more recent translation by Andrew Hurley, published in 1998. So, I should check that out sometime.
I've also been happy about catching references that I did not get in college -- for instance, in "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim" I recognized the title character's name from the op-ed piece I linked on Friday, and knew about "The Colloquy of the Birds" from references to it in Pamuk.
posted evening of August 11th, 2008: 2 responses
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I'm seeing a lot of tropes in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis that will be repeated and magnified in Saramago's later work. For instance about halfway through the book Reis and Lydia (who are having an affair) have been talking for a little while, and Reis says,
...All I know about you is that you live here in the hotel, that you go out on your days off, that you are single and unattached as far as one can see, What could be better, Lydia retorted, and with these four words she wrung the heart of Ricardo Reis. It is banal to say so, but that is precisely how they affected him... We could go on in this manner multiplying words, adding them to the four already spoken, What could be better.... Lydia is about to leave, a clear indication of not having spoken at random. Certain phrases may seem spontaneous, a thing of the moment, but God alone knows what millstone ground them, what invisible sieve filtered them, so that when pronounced they ring like judgements of Solomon. The best one could hope for now is silence, or that one of the two interlocutors should depart, but people usually go on talking and talking, until what was for a moment definitive and irrefutable is completely lost.
-- And from here the conversation goes on, until what was definitive is lost. This seems to me to speak to Randolph's observations about the dialog in The Cave, that its realism stems from its fallibility and lack of direction. Saramago is laying out his thoughts about how conversation works, which will support his constructions of conversations in his later work.
I am curious about where Saramago is going with the developing conflict within Reis, opposing Lydia and his earthy affection for her to Marcenda and his more cerebral attraction to her. The archetypal nature of this conflict is pretty superficially clear -- the narrator even mentions at one point, Marcenda is understood to be a virgin, and has Reis wondering whether he should pay Lydia -- but it's hard for me to see how it will add to the story and to the characters Saramago is describing. (As I write "more cerebral" I think Hm, that's not quite what I mean -- the distinction is not really between "earthy" and "cerebral" but rather class-based. Reis is socially above Lydia but in the same class as Marcenda. Lydia is attainable but not an appropriate match. I was trying to think of Reis' attraction to Marcenda as similar to Dante's attraction to Beatrice, but that is probably not going to be a productive line of thought.)
posted morning of August 11th, 2008: Respond
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Sunday, August 10th, 2008
Midway through The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis I find Saramago stating his manifesto: ...Marcenda simply said, I am going up to put these things in my room and will come right down for a little chat, if you have the patience to bear with me and don't have more important things to do. We should not be surprised that Salvador is smiling, he likes to see his clients strike up friendships... Ricardo Reis also smiled, and speaking slowly, assured her, I would be delighted, or words to that effect, for there are many other expressions equally commonplace, although to our shame we never stop to analyze them. We should remember them, empty and colorless as they are, as they were spoken and heard for the first time, It will be a pleasure, I am entirely at your service, little declarations of such daring that they cause the person making them to hesitate, and cause the person to whom they are addressed to tremble, because that was a time when words were pristine and feelings came to life. [emphasis added]
This is, well, just delightful. This is written approximately 15 years before the comment in The Cave about stock phrases which I referenced last month, and it does not have the same tone of anger, but it's direction is most similar. The thought just crossed my mind, I wonder if the anger in the second passage is frustration at writing the same prescription for 15 years and fearing that it will never be followed... But I think probably not. Mainly this is giving me context for Saramago's habit of deconstructing cliché, which I had been thinking of as a fun and interesting verbal tic, that besides just having fun he is maybe practicing a sort of linguistic evangelism, trying to persuade people to listen to language as a quasi-religious experience. (That last sentence is pretty poorly formed, I'm not totally clear on what I'm trying to say. Look for me to try and clarify this a bit in the coming weeks.)
posted evening of August 10th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, August 8th, 2008
Today, I added a new quotation to the list of epigraphs for this site.
 Dream is not a revelation. If a dream affords the dreamer some light on himself, it is not the person with closed eyes who makes the discovery but the person with open eyes lucid enough to fit thoughts together. Dream -- a scintillating mirage surrounded by shadows -- is essentially poetry.
This seems like a beautiful description of what dreams are and how we can make use of them. I found it at deborahb's LiveJournal -- she had taken it from quoteworld, which rather bizarrely attributes it to Jesse Jackson. I believe the correct attribution is to Michel Leiris.
posted afternoon of August 8th, 2008: Respond
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 This morning at 8:08, nothing of much importance happened (to my knowledge); but this evening at 20:08, the Olympics will begin. China is obviously not on military time. I'm not sure why but somehow the numerology of dates holds a lot of appeal for me.
In today's NY Times, Ben Schott takes a look at the number 8 in history.
posted afternoon of August 8th, 2008: Respond
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Thursday, August 7th, 2008
badger's post about the Ivins investigation made me laugh out loud by pointing out that Camus anticipated the FBI's misreading of The Plague, having his own character misread Kafka's The Trial. And it made me think, how important and commonly used of a device are misreadings, in modern fiction? I've noticed several such bits lately -- Pamuk's epigraph to The White Castle springs to mind, as does The God of the Labyrinth and its use by Saramago and by Dick. Is this a widespread thing? Is it newly in use in the 20th-or-so Century (and probably Sterne and Rabelais), or does it go way back? Is there a common thread to the way authors use misreading?
posted evening of August 7th, 2008: Respond
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