The waffled ceilings of Lourie-Love Hall will stand for another year, I have learned, as the university debates whether to allow students the freedom to customize the rooms there for its final school year. Of course I did my own customizations back in 1992-1994. Who can forget the Skinny Puppy poster that leered over campus? The relentless Ministry beats that came from my window (and that once attracted a crowd of like-minded outsiders)?
Of course I know that I am a different person today, and my vision of the world then was but a pale refracted shadow, the imperfect knowledge of an imperfect and not-fully grown man. But when I looked up as I fell asleep I would gaze at these waffled ceilings, even as, inches away, the chill breeze darted in and tickled my cheek (in my memories, Princeton is always a chilly late-September. I will miss Lourie-Love Hall).
Finished novel 398, now looking for 397.
Empire of the Sun by J. G. Ballard, is the (semi-autobiographical) story of Jim, a British boy born of global capitalism, raised in Paris of the East, Shanghai. The narrative follows the "terrible city" as it stumbles forward in its old habits (costume balls, nights at the clubs, etc) even as war unfolds around its hapless British and Americans residents. With the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, they find themselves turned overnight into enemy citizens in occupied Shanghai, and are summarily rounded up.
I won't bother to re-narrate how the proud British, the wiley Americans, the vengeful Eurasians, all slowly starved to death covered in flies, ravaged by disease and mosquitoes, unmourned, in the civilian camps outside Shanghai. What is striking is how Jim, a child, becomes acclimatized to the conditions at the camp, to the state of war, to the disingenuous and hopeless optimism the adults were compelled to express to them. What horrified the adults most was that Jim was beginning to enjoy the war and the life in the camps; that he resented the American air raids that threatened to end the war, that he was afraid to ever leave the camp.
The work is therefore an exemplary bildungsroman, a coming of age tale refracted through a particular lens. Therein, its narrative illuminates a social order teetering on the precipice, and the way a young mind can naturalize death's constant companionship. I could certainly never write a work of such power from behind the windows of Lourie-Love Hall. What possible inspiration could I draw from waffled ceilings?
One final comment about war and subjectivity, two of my pet terms for 2006.
The novel chronicles 1941-1945, ostensibly the years of the "Pacific War." Yet, the conditions that brought the killing (and dying) to Shanghai (and China) began long before "the war," and continued uninterrupted beyond its much ballyhooed closure. Ballard prophetically responds to the announcement of the "end of the war," with an exclamation that he was thus witness to "the start of World War III."
And all through it, the Chinese, as coolies, amahs, chauffeurs, thugs, pickpockets, and most commonly of all, corpses, retain their impenetrable silence. Their subjectivity is silence; they are executed, they are abused, they watch, all without a shred of interior dialogue. It is as if the narrator is incapable of imagining, much less, writing their emotions. Save for one final quip, Chinese death is part of the natural landscape (Jim feels more affect for the bayonetted Japanese pilots). But here I will quote that one exceptional moment of empathy (at length):
Provoked by their curious but silent audience, the sailors began to jeer at the Chinese. At a signal from an older sailor, the men unbuttoned their bell-bottomed trousers and urinated down the steps. Fifty feet below them, the Chinese watched without comment as the arcs of urine formed a foaming stream that ran down to the street. When it reached the pavement the Chinese stepped back, their faces expressionless. Jim glanced at the people around him, the clerks and coolies and peasant women, well aware of what they were thinking. One day China would punish the rest of the world and take a frightening revenge.
Written in 1984, Ballard would not have been able to ignore China's rising role in world affairs. In our own context, his statement has two ominous dimensions, even as his prophecy's credibility becomes substantiated day by day by world events.
1. The crime that would be repaid upon the rest of the world is none other than the erasure of Chinese subjectivity. The fact that Chinese death meant little to either the Japanese or the foreign contingent implied that they failed to register as human deaths. They could not be imagined as humans, in much the way you might identify with a protagonist in a novel. (That is what I mean by subjectivity.)
2. That frightening debt can only be repaid with none other than an equivalent dehumanization of the rest of the world, this time by the Chinese.
In that sense, Jim's final moment of empathy, insufficient and futile perhaps, is not only a warning but an epiphany as well. We are made to realize the pain and anger in each of those silent Chinese deaths scarcely mentioned in Jim's narrative, hinting at an alternative/obverse narrative shadowing the entire novel. From a Chinese perspective, that is. Is Ballard not saying that if the rest of the world cannot overcome this subjective gulf, then it deserves the revenge that surely is coming?
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Monday, June 05, 2006
400 Books, 398 to go
Kanehara Hitomi's Snakes and Earrings was number 399.
I've been a bit obsessed with time, mortality and limits lately. Calculating based on my average over the past two years of 9 novels a year, for the 45 or so years I have left I should be able to read 405 books. I've rounded that off to 400, just to give me some extra rest in my later years, but that's pretty much the aggregate sum. All this means is that I don't have time for crappy books anymore, even though I just read one.
Kanehara won the Akutagawa Prize in 2004 along with Wataya Risa. At the time, they were 21 and 20, respectively. There have been pointed criticisms of the selection of both of these excessively photogenic young writers, on the grounds that the Prize was trying too damn hard to drum up interest among the under-25 crowd, who are notoriously more concerned with comics, TV, and games. I can detect however, a minor parallel with the hot-selling novelists of the early '80s, namely the oddly-paired Murakami Haruki and Murakami Ryu who rode the economic wave (and materialism?) of their times. Critics were equally merciless to them, on basically the same grounds. One critic even remarked that Murakami's Norwegian Wood, published as a red & green two-volume set in the fall, sold more for its Xmas-time marketability than for its content. (My response? ridiculous). But really, focusing too much on the economic structure of the publishing industry is condescending to authors, and perhaps not too useful to readers either.
Kanehara's Snakes and Earrings is going to sell. I'm nearly certain of that. It's brutal, it's lurid, it portrays an underworld that we can be titillated by as well as moralize over. But it's also empty. It reminds me of Murakami Ryu's Almost Transparent Blue (the 1977 Akutagawa Prize-winner), which also reveled in the confused, nihilistic youth-culture of the '60s. And, in fact, Kanehara names Murakami Ryu as a primary influence, and somewhat nepotistically, Ryu was on the Akutagawa Prize selection committee. What bothers me most however, is how old-fashioned this call to action sounds, how often we hear that "the kids today are out of control," how "society's moral frabric" is in jeopardy.
Which is why I find Wataya Risa (and Haruki as well) so much more compelling; their stories are about characters who, bemused, self-deprecating, do find some shred of meaning. They can tell a story about people who are lost, with humor and a measured sense of wonder at how we put up with such absurdity. Really, the social message is muted, if present at all; but in comparison with all the overwrought hand-wringing about today's youth out there, isn't that in itself a political statement? Their likeable eccentrics seem to call out not for radical solutions, but for a greater tolerance for eccentricity.
I've been a bit obsessed with time, mortality and limits lately. Calculating based on my average over the past two years of 9 novels a year, for the 45 or so years I have left I should be able to read 405 books. I've rounded that off to 400, just to give me some extra rest in my later years, but that's pretty much the aggregate sum. All this means is that I don't have time for crappy books anymore, even though I just read one.
Kanehara won the Akutagawa Prize in 2004 along with Wataya Risa. At the time, they were 21 and 20, respectively. There have been pointed criticisms of the selection of both of these excessively photogenic young writers, on the grounds that the Prize was trying too damn hard to drum up interest among the under-25 crowd, who are notoriously more concerned with comics, TV, and games. I can detect however, a minor parallel with the hot-selling novelists of the early '80s, namely the oddly-paired Murakami Haruki and Murakami Ryu who rode the economic wave (and materialism?) of their times. Critics were equally merciless to them, on basically the same grounds. One critic even remarked that Murakami's Norwegian Wood, published as a red & green two-volume set in the fall, sold more for its Xmas-time marketability than for its content. (My response? ridiculous). But really, focusing too much on the economic structure of the publishing industry is condescending to authors, and perhaps not too useful to readers either.
Kanehara's Snakes and Earrings is going to sell. I'm nearly certain of that. It's brutal, it's lurid, it portrays an underworld that we can be titillated by as well as moralize over. But it's also empty. It reminds me of Murakami Ryu's Almost Transparent Blue (the 1977 Akutagawa Prize-winner), which also reveled in the confused, nihilistic youth-culture of the '60s. And, in fact, Kanehara names Murakami Ryu as a primary influence, and somewhat nepotistically, Ryu was on the Akutagawa Prize selection committee. What bothers me most however, is how old-fashioned this call to action sounds, how often we hear that "the kids today are out of control," how "society's moral frabric" is in jeopardy.
Which is why I find Wataya Risa (and Haruki as well) so much more compelling; their stories are about characters who, bemused, self-deprecating, do find some shred of meaning. They can tell a story about people who are lost, with humor and a measured sense of wonder at how we put up with such absurdity. Really, the social message is muted, if present at all; but in comparison with all the overwrought hand-wringing about today's youth out there, isn't that in itself a political statement? Their likeable eccentrics seem to call out not for radical solutions, but for a greater tolerance for eccentricity.
Sunday, June 04, 2006
Going Back to Nassau Hall
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
Princeton reunions are driven by a mythology of timelessness, the eternity of traditions, and the (preposterous) notion that your Princeton years were the best years of your life. We come back to Old Nassau, wax nostalgic, and sip beer in plastic cups under tents spread in the middle of campus. Every year the myth gains concreteness, just as the our actual memories shred and tear like a business card accidentally put through a washing machine.
I arrived on campus on friday evening, and was greeted by the eternal Princeton: the smell of damp grass, the slip and scrape of the soles of your shoes on the slate paving stones, the rain-darkened stone of the gothic archways. But this year, the spell is broken; my old dormitory is scheduled to be razed this year, and my old eating club recently went bankrupt. The past, it seems, will be truncated at 2006. Then the deluge began, and the battering rain sent us scurrying, birthed great muddy torrents running down Nassau street, a great flood to wash everything away. Ten years ago, I graduated a scientist, but in the intervening years, graduate school in the humanities (constructivism, relativism, subjectivism) has succeeded in erasing much of that previous self. It can be called growth, sure, but on the other hand I've yet to decipher the meaning of everything that I thought, and felt. Is that previous self still hidden somewhere inside, and do those old freshman-year debates about God and rationality still inform my ideas today? Or rather, does the past only exist to obliterate the present and future? More concretely, doesn't the past conclusively show us that nothing is permanent, that everything changes, that everything falls apart, that people disappear forever? And if we realize this, can the past not empower us to plot the future fearlessly, to reinvent ourselves fearlessly, because it teaches us that that which has passed is both irredeemable and irretreivable? To rephrase it in a concise axiom: historicity is the opposite of nostalgia?
Or, more bluntly, "If there's been a way to build it, there'll be a way to destroy it."
Princeton reunions are driven by a mythology of timelessness, the eternity of traditions, and the (preposterous) notion that your Princeton years were the best years of your life. We come back to Old Nassau, wax nostalgic, and sip beer in plastic cups under tents spread in the middle of campus. Every year the myth gains concreteness, just as the our actual memories shred and tear like a business card accidentally put through a washing machine.
I arrived on campus on friday evening, and was greeted by the eternal Princeton: the smell of damp grass, the slip and scrape of the soles of your shoes on the slate paving stones, the rain-darkened stone of the gothic archways. But this year, the spell is broken; my old dormitory is scheduled to be razed this year, and my old eating club recently went bankrupt. The past, it seems, will be truncated at 2006. Then the deluge began, and the battering rain sent us scurrying, birthed great muddy torrents running down Nassau street, a great flood to wash everything away. Ten years ago, I graduated a scientist, but in the intervening years, graduate school in the humanities (constructivism, relativism, subjectivism) has succeeded in erasing much of that previous self. It can be called growth, sure, but on the other hand I've yet to decipher the meaning of everything that I thought, and felt. Is that previous self still hidden somewhere inside, and do those old freshman-year debates about God and rationality still inform my ideas today? Or rather, does the past only exist to obliterate the present and future? More concretely, doesn't the past conclusively show us that nothing is permanent, that everything changes, that everything falls apart, that people disappear forever? And if we realize this, can the past not empower us to plot the future fearlessly, to reinvent ourselves fearlessly, because it teaches us that that which has passed is both irredeemable and irretreivable? To rephrase it in a concise axiom: historicity is the opposite of nostalgia?
Or, more bluntly, "If there's been a way to build it, there'll be a way to destroy it."
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