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Monday, August 11th, 2008
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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Wednesday, August 6th, 2008
"It is said that repentance and atonement erase the past."
"I have heard that too, but I have not found it to be true."
In the thread below, Randolph recommends Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others. I am reading "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" right now, which is available free online (it is not in that collection), and digging it. Very nice -- and Randolph's observation that Chiang mines "some of the same kinds of ideas [as Borges], from a very different stylistic perspective" seems quite perceptive to me -- the story seems like something that would take place in Borges' fictional universe, but the narrative voice and the construction of the story are nothing like Borges. (Bits of the story remind me of The White Castle, but I think only because of the setting -- the similarity is not particularly close.) Making time travel a form of alchemy is just a fantastic idea.
The story is beautifully conceived -- maybe the most satisfying and wisest story dealing with time travel that I've ever read. Chiang really brings out Fuwaad's soul and lets you identify with his longings and his loss, and with his acceptance. Indeed, Chiang is so careful in his characterizations that Hassan and Ajib and Raniya are fully human, though they are two levels of meta-narrative beneath Fuwaad's story. Thanks for hipping me to Chiang's name, Randolph! One quibble: the archaisms in the dialogue and narration sound pretty strained and inconsistent to my ear, particularly in the beginning of the story.
posted afternoon of August 6th, 2008: 4 responses
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 =gusti-boucher's deviantART gallery includes some lovely self-replicating images. (Thanks to deborahb for the link.)
posted morning of August 6th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, August 4th, 2008
In the Gnostic cosmogonies, demiurges fashion a red Adam who cannot stand; as clumsy, crude and elemental as this Adam of dust was the Adam of dreams forged by the wizard's nights. Seduced further into Ficciones -- "The Circular Ruins" makes me think I was wrong in calling Borges a control freak, though I still think that description might hold some water when talking about "Herbert Quain." Borges' prose is (necessarily) much more tightly circumscribed than Saramago's, there is not the same reliance on rhythm, it is cerebral rather than physical. But that is not at all the same as saying "You are only allowed to hear it in one particular way."This looks like an interesting web site devoted to "The Circular Ruins".
posted evening of August 4th, 2008: 3 responses
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He thought that good literature is common enough, that there is scarce a dialogue on the street that does not achieve it. He also thought that the æsthetic act cannot be carried out without some element of astonishment, and that to be astonished by rote is difficult.
In the interests of understanding The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, I pulled down Borges' Ficciones this evening to reread "An Examination of the Works of Herbert Quain" -- one of Quain's works is the misleading detective story The God of the Labyrinth, which Reis is reading early in the novel.I'm finding this, well, a lot of fun -- the degree of layering of fiction on fiction is really astonishing. (Particularly when Borges admits to having adapted one of his own stories, "The Circular Ruins," from a manuscript by Quain.) I'm waiting for personalities to emerge, but am confident they will; for the time being I'm just enjoying the technical beauty of the composition. It has been several years since I read any of Borges' stories; his mastery of language is washing over me again. I'm reacting to his voice in a way I never did before, which is to feel like Borges is a control freak who wants me to react to every word of his in a particular way, and is leaving no room for my own reading; not sure how valid this is, it's just a spur-of-the-moment thought.
 (According to The Modern Word, Saramago is not the only author to make use of The God of the Labyrinth. In Philip K. Dick's notes for a sequel to The Man in the High Castle, there is mention of Joseph Goebbels reading Quain's book.)
posted evening of August 4th, 2008: 2 responses
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Some new pictures are up at the READIN Family Album -- a mix of stuff from the last few weeks including Ellen and Sylvia's trip to Cambridge, our outing to "Playing the Building", and an epic battle between Lola and Pixie. Here is a great shot of Ellen and Sylvia (who is herself the photographer): 
posted evening of August 4th, 2008: Respond
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