Poem: John Keats

John Keats

If there is a perennial pre-1900s poem about art from the Anglo-American literary tradition, the English Romantic poet John Keats's (1795 - 1821) "Ode on a Grecian Urn" would be it. Keats, in contemplating the Greek artifact, sets a standard for how to write about it, and art in general. The "tl;dr" version of this poem would be "Art lasts, life is brief, the beauty in seemingly dead, antiquated art provides deeper truth." Our mortality is assured, and the art work's instructive and illuminatory qualities will outlast us, a sentiment that would not have been lost on Keats, who died very young from tuberculosis, his health rapidly declining after he published his first book of poems in 1817. This poem's argument pretty much agrees with many of the poems I've posted so far in as much as their argument interrogates the relationship between art and life, between artifact within the moment it was created and the moment, millennia later, in Keats's case (and ours), in which an art lover, a connoisseur, a viewer looks at and tries to understand it, to gain something from it.

The "Grecian urn" that Keats's speaker is viewing--or thinking of--has not been cracked or chipped, unlike so much of what people bring these days to The Antique Roadshow, eager to learn the financial value of some heirloom or family treasure, or a painting, poster or dresser they picked up at a garage sale or church fair; it would not be out of place in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, given its pristineness. Its specific references also remain somewhat opaque to a viewer like Keats. We would assume that a scholar of Hellenic pottery would be able to grasp what the urn's images depict, what "leaf-fringed legend haunts about" the urn's curves and sides, who those "men or gods are," "what maidens loth?" (I love that "loth," though there is no conceivable way to weave it into contemporary conversation or prose.)

Akin to Friedrich Nietzsche's notion of the Apollonian and Dionysian, in The Birth of Tragedy, Keats assesses the tension between the "cold pastoral" (punctuated by an exclamation point) the urn's form and still imagery embody, and the "wild ecstasy" the urn depicts, its record of human and deific pleasure and excess, and how what we cannot know from experience but gain from the art work can delight us even more, just as we take pleasure in the very act of trying to figure out what the urn is showing us. It will survive and a new generation will come along to try and figure out what the urn's images mean, what its function was, just as some four centuries later I am reading and interpreting Keats, and finding knowledge and truth in his poem.

As for "beauty" being "truth" and vice versa, reading this too simplistically is a problem. Scientific considerations of symmetry, the role of mathematical order in nature and natural systems and so forth set to the side, I don't think that Keats is necessarily saying that something "beautiful" is intrinsically "true" (or good, for that matter). The relationship between the two that Plato explores is, we know today, much more complicated than a facile reading would imply. The beautiful can be quite false, and fake things can beguile us far more than something intrinsically beautiful (by various criteria). Yet, as Keats seems to be saying, there is something lasting in truly beautiful art, something that compels us generation after generation, even taking into account the effects of the social and political,  cultural shifts and changes, and so on. And we can learn something from that lasting beauty, those art works that do survive. That is all "ye" need to know, or at least something we should not forget too quickly.

ODE ON A GRECIAN URN



by John Keats



 Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, 
  Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express 
  A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape 
  Of deities or mortals, or of both,
    In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
  What men or gods are these? what maidens loth? 
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
   What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
 
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard 
  Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d, 
  Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave 
  Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
    Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss, 
Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;
  She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, 
    For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed 
  Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
  For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love! 
  For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,
    For ever panting, and for ever young; 
All breathing human passion far above,
  That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d, 
    A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice? 
  To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, 
  And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore, 
  Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
    Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn? 
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
  Will silent be; and not a soul to tell 
    Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede 
  Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed; 
  Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold pastoral!
  When old age shall this generation waste, 
    Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
  ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’—that is all 
    Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Below is an image of the Sosibios vase, which Keats sketched and which inspired his poem, along with his drawing below it:

Sosibios vase, image
from the Louvre

Keats's drawing of the Sosibios
vase in 1818, his annus mirabilis

Wilson Harris, Among the Ancestors

Sir Wilson Harris, with his final novel,
The Ghost of Memory (2006)

Such is life, so death comes calling. Sir Wilson Harris (1921-2018), the great Guyanese-British author whose fiction, poetry and essays form a singular, ever experimental whole, left the earthly plane on March 8. I only learned about his passing recently, when Chris Stackhouse shared the news. Oddly enough, I had been thinking about Wilson Harris quite a bit of late, as returned to several longstanding fictional projects, and would wade back into various works of his for knowledge and fortification. He was and remains one of the most important literary artists in my personal firmament. His imagination, daring and craft really were peerless, as was his exacting inner aesthetic compass, which led him to write over two dozen books, at a steady clip, and it is fair to say that none of them are easy, but ever last one offers multiple rewards.

Over the years, I have invoked his name and work many times on this blog, particularly in conjunction with the annual folly known as the Nobel Prize in Literature, an award that almost completely debased itself when its jury gave the prize to Bob Dylan, arguably the most decision amidst a host of recent ones, while literary pathblazers like Harris, John Ashbery, E. L. Doctorow, and countless others died overlooked. One post from 2006 focusing on Harris bore the title "Four Books," and his was the second I discussed. I will repeat it verbatim here, because everything I said then I still believe, with even stronger conviction:

Speaking of passing through strange mirrors, I recently reread Wilson Harris's Carnival (Faber Faber, 1985, out of print) for the graduate course I'm teaching. I realized upon finishing it once again that it must be one of the most difficult novels written in English in the last 25 (50? 75? more?) years. Though it only runs to 168 or so pages, it serves up prose so densely lyrical, disorienting, distancing, and taxing that I have to admit my reading strategy involved pausing, then rereading, then rereading again certain passages, even though I'd already read the novel several times in the past. My conviction remains that this is a work of manifest artistry that manages tosimultaneously embody multiple genres and modes while also functioning diegetically as an allegorical narrative. I also think it stages, from the level of syntax all the way up to the level of the plot, a very complex textual embodiment and performance of epic and ritual, as a revisionary "Carnival" site in prose (Carnival and the carnivalesque, masking/masqueing, transformation and metamorphosis, performance and performativity, trauma and recovery). In this work, Harris employs a relentlessly dialectic, fractal, negative capability in writing the social, economic, political, and spiritual "history" of Guyana, the Western epic tradition, the Diaspora and diasporas, society and the self. I also suggested to the class that though he was (and is) interested at the time in quantum theory, which is most evident in The Four Banks of the River of Space (yet operative, in terms of ways of reading time and space in Carnival and the carnival), he seems also to have anticipated string theory in this book, at least as I understand it from many articles and Brian Greene's and Lisa Randall's books on the topic (which isn't very well). Harris brain nevertheless strikes me as having been on the branes before almost anyone else--in the literary world, that is.

I again looked at Carnival last fall, as I was mentoring one of my brilliant graduate students, Simeon M., and shared, by reading aloud, Harris's opening to that novel, a series of passages that seem to take metaphysical flight as the eyes and voice box move from word to word. It is a remarkable performance, refined in that novel to sublimity, and for it alone Harris should have received every award under the sun. As these things go, of course, it did not work out that way, but he kept writing, and published right into his 80s. I have his final novel, The Mask of the Beggar, and though a late(r)/last work, it glimmers with his distinctive genius. In his work, Guyana, the Caribbean, black diasporic and mixed people of the new and old worlds, the spiritual and scientific, the metaphysical, the cross-cultural imagination, as he once put it, all take flight.

I never had the opportunity to meet Wilson Harris, but I did work with him quite pleasurably for a brief period in the early 1990s, when I was the managing editor of a literary journal that was planning to dedicate an issue to him. This involved written correspondence, and I noted then his graciousness and warmth, but also his exactitude when it came to how his work should appear and what we would include. What provided me with a lesson I had never gotten before was to see his edited manuscripts, and to note how, perhaps more so than any other author I had ever read, he distilled everything on the page down to an intoxicating brew.  Covering the typewritten text like a spiderweb, his penned cross-outs and substitutions suggested a continuous search for concision not with the aim of efficiency but of discursive precision was incredibly instructive. To put it another way, Harris was not in search just of the right word, but the combination of words through which the force of his narration, his ideas, the presence of the story, would resonate most fully. To give an example, here are two paragraphs from my quotation, back in 2011, of his Four Banks of the River of Space:

"The flute sings of an ancient riverbead one hundred fathoms deep, far below the Potaro River that runs to the Waterfall. Two rivers then. The visible Potaro runs to the Waterfall. The invisible stream of the river of the dead runs far below, far under our knees. The flute tells of the passage of the drowned river of the dead and the river of the living are one quantum stream possessed of four banks. We shall see!

"So deep, so far below, is the river of the dead that the sound of its stream may never be heard or visualized except when we clothe ourselves with the mask, with the ears of the dancer in the hill. Then the murmur of the buried stream comes up to us as if its source lies in the stars and it may only be heard when we are abnormally attentive to the mystery of creation and the voice of the flute within the lips of three drowned children.

Out of that interaction came an intermittent dialogue, and I made sure to send him my work as it appeared. He also did one of the kindest things an established writer can do when back in 1994, I sent him a copy of the manuscript of my first book Annotations, and, busy though he was--and though we had never met in person and only communicated via letter or electronic means--he sent back a one-page assessment that both summed up the novel in impressive form, affirmed what I was striving for, and provided me with my first blurb. It was a generous gesture, which he did not take lightly, and I will be forever grateful to him for doing so.

Theodore Wilson Harris was born in New Amsterdam, British Guiana, now Guyana, in 1921. He studied at Queen's College in Georgetown, Guyana, then worked as a surveyor in the country's interior, an experience that informed his work for the rest of his life. One can see the landscapes of his native country in his first novel, The Palace of the Peacock (1960), which made his reputation, and in one his late-career masterpieces, the beguiling, trenchant Jonestown (1996), which explores the US preacher Jim Jones' religious cult and its subsequent mass suicide that took place outside Guyana's capital. Harris took up a career as a writer and editor in the late 1940s, publishing poems and essays in journals such Kyl-over-Al, and emigrated to the UK 1959, primarily to foster and further his literary career.

Wilson Harris in 2006 (The Guardian)

The Palace of the Peacock also demonstrated his interest in an approach to narrative that broke down the strictures of realism, which he had linked in his critical work to the rise of colonialism, empire and the global slave system, in favor of storytelling which was more fluid in temporality, metaphorical and metonymic, speculative, oneiric, and philosophical. In as much as Harris took Guyana's multilayered history as his template, he also drew upon numerous European canonical texts, re(-en)visioning them so that his work entailed less of a rewriting and more of a dialogue with the prior texts. In this debut novel, the quest story leads to a profound reckoning for its characters but for the Caribbean novel, and Anglophone fiction, going forward. This was a new kind of mythic fiction, and Harris would, in all his subsequent work, demonstrate its numerous possibilities.

The Palace of the Peacock initiated what came to be known as the Guyana Quartet of novels, which appeared in rapid succession: The Far Journey of Oudin (1961), The Whole Armour (1962), and The Secret Ladder (1963). In each he explored aspects of Guyana's colonial history and present, while also delving into aspects of its indigenous past and the complex merger of cultures that opened up spaces within and beyond reality. The rainforest, the plantation, the bush, and the river become not just the sites where the novels unfolded, but chronotopes permitting an innovative mode of literary and critical exploration. Through the 1960s Harris would publish roughly a novel a year, the subsequent novels often centering on women protagonists grappling with various forms of loss, as the mythic component already present in the work moving ever more fully toward the forefront of the texts.

In the 1970s, his novels shifted to the UK and other points across the globe, including Mexico, but the revisionary conversation with Guyana's past and present, the Caribbean and Latin America, the African Diaspora and Amerindia's multiple currents, only deepened, as did his exploration of reality's multiplicities culminating in the remarkable Carnival trilogy of the 1980s, which includes the eponymous novel, as well as The Infinite Rehearsal (1987) and The Four Banks of the River of Space (1990). He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2010, and received a lifetime achievement award from the Anisfield-Wolf Foundation in 2014. His wife of many decades, Margaret, predeceased him in 2010. He leaves four children by his first wife, Cecily Carew, as well as his sister, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

Shakespeare, Plagiarist?

A page from the George

 North manuscript that

starts the poem about

Jack Cade. The last stanza

lists terms for dogs,

which Shakespeare used

in King Lear and Macbeth.

(New York Times)

In a field as deeply explored as textual studies of William Shakespeare's work, it might seem as there were little more to be said. But if you think that, you would be wrong, as independent scholar Dennis McCarthy demonstrated in conjunction with Professor Emerita June Schlueter of Lafayette College. In the forthcoming "A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels” by George North: A Newly Uncovered Manuscript Source for Shakespeare’s Plays (D.S. Brewer, an imprint of Boydell & Brewer, with the British Library), out next week, they discuss how they used WCopyfind software, which English, composition and other faculty members sometimes employ to find out whether students have committed plagiarism, to discover that the source of at least 11 of Shakespeare's plays, including several of his most famous, such as King Lear, Richard III, Henry V, and one of my favorites, the verbal and dramatic masterpiece Macbeth, was the eponymous tome by the obscure writer George North.

According to Michael Blanding's New York Times report, McCarthy does not believe that Shakespeare actually plagiarized North's unpublished work, which he somehow acquired, but as was the case with other sources of his borrowings, North's text served as a crucial guide and source, down to words deployed in the exact same order, but repurposed in style and often, it seems, meaning.  A self-taught Shakespearean and magazine journalist, McCarthy was inspired both by the idea of evolutionary development, which he had already written about, and practically by former ETH Zurich Professor Sir Brian Vickers' use of similar software in 2009 to establish that Shakespeare had co-written Edward III. McCarthy began sussing out the sources of Shakespeare's work, and followed that led him to George North's volume. Next, the Times notes

To make sure North and Shakespeare weren’t using common sources, Mr. McCarthy ran phrases through the database Early English Books Online, which contains 17 million pages from nearly every work published in English between 1473 and 1700. He found that almost no other works contained the same words in passages of the same length. Some words are especially rare; “trundle-tail” appears in only one other work before 1623.

In the past, some scholars have identified sources for Shakespeare from a few unique words. In 1977, for example, Kenneth Muir made the case that Shakespeare used a particular translation of a book of Latin stories for “The Merchant of Venice” based on the word “insculpt.” In recent years, however, it’s become rare to identify new sources for Shakespeare. “The field has been picked over so carefully,” [former University of Chicago Professor David] Bevington said.

I would add that back in 2013, I blogged about Saul Frampton's assertion that the Renaissance scholar and translation John Florio not only edited Shakespeare's works, but enriched them linguistically, adding to the Bard of Avon's already rich trove of innovative language. I found his argument quite convincing, and when I have taught the foundational course in literary studies, it is one of the essays I share and discuss with students.

Before Florio got to Shakespeare, though, Shakespeare was gleaning all kinds of gems from North, and polishing them up, McCarthy and Schlueter will suggest in their study. In the Times article, McCarthy points out how North's preface contains a unique series of terms, many familiar to us today--"proportion," "glass," "feature," "fair," etc.--to urge those who seem themselves as unattractive instead to create an inner beauty, against the stamp of nature; as it turns out, Shakespeare uses the exact set of words, in the same order, to make a different statement in the opening soliloquy of one of his unforgettable villains, the hunchbacked and unloved Richard III. What McCarthy and Schlueter divined was that this is not a one-off case; Shakespeare repeatedly not only borrowed exact terms from North, but also employed in similar series and scenes, as well as similar figures from history.

For example, in Macbeth, Shakespeare has his protagonist declaim,

"Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men;
As hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs,
Shoughs, water-rugs and demi-wolves, are clept
All by the name of dogs (Macbeth, III, 1)

In King Lear, Edgar says:

Tom will throw his head at them. Avaunt, you curs!
Be thy mouth or black or white,
Tooth that poisons if it bite;
Mastiff, grey-hound, mongrel grim,
Hound or spaniel, brach or lym,
Or bobtail tike or trundle-tail,
Tom will make them weep and wail:
For, with throwing thus my head,
Dogs leap the hatch, and all are fled. (King Lear, III, 6)

This list, McCarthy and Schlueter argue, is almost a mirror of North's text, with the ultra-rare "trundle-tail" a term appearing only in the source text, Shakespeare's play and one other early 17th century text. The playwright spins these borrowings out into something memorable in both plays. In another example, the reference to Merlin's speech in King Lear diverges from any previously known prophecy by the wizard, yet McCarthy and Schlueter found a version of Merlin's speech in North's text, and that it not only influenced what Shakespeare later wrote, but also the figure of the "Fool," who delivers it.

In Henry V, McCarthy finds many correspondences, as Quartzy demonstrates in the following chart:

 

According to reports, including one in Atlas Obscura, scholars have praised McCarthy and Schlueter's work, and it suggests that digital humanities scholars and students looking at texts might do well to utilize all the software at hand, including a tool often used to catch potential miscreants, to learn even more about the roots of key works of the past. Mr. McCarthy, it appears, certain intends to do so. His book hits bookshelves this Friday, February 16.

Poem: Adam Johnson

Adam Johnson (1965-1993), not the recent Pulitzer Prize winner but the late lyric poet bearing his name, was one of the promising British versifiers of his generation when he died of HIV-related disease in the early 1990s. A native of Stalybridge, Cheshire, he arrived on the London literary scene in 1984, and cut a stylish figure, while also producing poems very much in keeping with the mainstream conventions of that era. What began to set him apart was his fastidiousness with language and his openness in writing from the perspective of an openly queer young poet, taking up the thread that predecessors Thom Gunn, W. H. Auden and others had bequeathed him. Like so many queer male poets of that moment, of that generation, my generation, he was cut short before he even reached his prime. Johnson published one book in his lifetime, a second appeared only weeks after his death at 28; his Collected Poems, edited by Neil Powell, did not appear until 2002. Johnson's poems are usually only a few stanzas long, show almost no formal experimentation or elaborate wordplay, draw upon observations of nature, and often invoke an unnamed beloved, though he was quite clear who, in later years, this was: James Levondowski, his love for whom underlines many lines. Below is "Nocturne," one of Johnson's earlier poems that shows the talent he possessed and gives a hint of what might have been possible had he lived longer. All art is ultimately in part a memorial, and in the case of those many artists struck down before they were able to accomplish what they hoped to, it's but a tiny cenotaph, yet one that, especially in Johnson's case, keeps drawing us back, to read, and remember.

NOCTURNE

October makes censers
Of these wooded places.
Out of the cool ether
Of darkness strike the
Branching crystals of trees,
By night's definition
Of a rarer substance -
The texture of bark
Is wholly light's privilege.

The path leads us to
A locked gate we climb. There is
Tension in our nearness -
The feel of you, our hands
Clasped in recognition
Of their own engaged warmth.

In embracing we earth,
Here, where a stream's course
Through banks of cypresses
Designs a garden,
The motion of its cool blade
As purposeful as blood.

Now the spell of your voice
Concedes to other sounds,
Falling into dark air
That cherishes each note -
This water easing
Over known rocks, through reeds,
The soft consent of leaves.
Drawing me close, there is
Nothing you would not give.

December 1986

Copyright © The Estate of Adam Johnson, from Adam Johnson, Collected Poems, edited by Neil Powell, Manchester: Carcanet, 2003. All rights reserved.

Remembering Carlos Fuentes & Christine Brooke-Rose

Carlos Fuentes, at home in Mexico, 2001 (Henry Romero/Reuters)

In the mid-1980s, Carlos Fuentes (1928-2011) was at the height of his fame. He had published a dozen novels, many formally experimental, including a handful that made and cemented his reputation, among them his début, Where the Air Is Clear (La Región Más Transparente, 1958); Aura (1961), which continues to be censored in certain countries; The Hydra Head (La Cabeza de La Hidra, 1978); and his masterpieces The Death of Artemio Cruz (La Muerte de Artemio Cruz, 1962); Terra Nostra (1975), a work not unlike Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien Años de la Soledad, 1970) in its scope and ambition; and The Old Gringo (Gringo viejo, 1985), a shorter novel reiminaging the life of writer Ambrose Bierce that garnered tremendous attention and readership in the United States, a country in which Fuentes, one of Mexico's leading authors, had spent many years, including part of his childhood.  He had also by that point published four collections of short stories and five collections of essays, and written four plays and seven or so screenplays. The honors he received for his work steadily increased, from the Xavier Villaurrutia Award in 1976 to the Mexican National Prize for Arts and Sciences in 1984, and a few years later he would win what is arguably the most important prize for a Spanish-language author, the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, in 1987. But this period was significant for another reason: Fuentes had begun to teach at a number of American universities, and it was during one of these stints that I was able to take an undergraduate class with him, an experience that made a profound impression on me and led me, perhaps, to a life of writing and teaching myself.

Fuentes held, I believe, an august chair for visiting writers, and taught a lecture course that permitted him to expound, in magisterial fashion, on all sorts of subjects. The specifics, I must admit, I do not remember. But I vividly recall how he would hold forth, in each class, on stage before a vast crowd, how he wove together a narrative that seemed to capture everything in its net, how he looked and acted the part of an international man of letters, of the engaged writer, which he had been and still was. Tall, handsome, witty, able to range across languages, to cite authors and ideas without recourse to notes, no name dropper but someone who actually knew and had worked with the people he was invoking, he truly loomed larger than life. I had no idea at that time that he'd been a Communist in his youth and a supporter of Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution, though I did know his general ideological orientation was on the left, and that his work, as in Where the Air Is Clear and The Death of Artemio Cruz, openly critique the Mexican elite and governing classes, as well as Mexican history itself. But Fuentes had gone much further; a diplomat from 1965 on, he resigned as Ambassador to the UK to protest the 1968 massacre of students in Mexico City, and left the foreign service in 1977 to protest the appointment of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, the president of Mexico during the 1968 assault, as Ambassador to Spain. Morever, Fuentes refused the 1972 Mazatlán Literature Prize to protest the Mexican state of Sinoloa's actions against students at the State University of Sinaloa. (Such actions sparked criticism within Mexico's commentariat; in 1988, writer Enrique Krauze deemed Fuentes the "guerilla dandy.") I don't think he ever mentioned any of this in his lectures, but it was clear that he stood against dictators and democratically-enabled tyrants both (and this included not only Mexico's long dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party and its leaders, but Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and George W. Bush as well), and that literature, even if seemingly not overtly political, might stand as a bulwark against both. As I said, the specifics of the course I have mostly forgotten, but the model he set is one I have taken to heart, even if I have not thus far been able to come anywhere close to it.

One of my favorite Carlos Fuentes stories entails something I did not personally witness, but which I heard and have recounted many times to fellow writers and to students to let them know that, when they feel they are so deep in a poem or story or novel chapter they almost feel they're in another world, that it's perfectly okay.  It may be utterly apocryphal, but bear with me nevertheless.  Supposedly Fuentes was visiting Rome, perhaps on vacation, and was in his room in the middle of the day.  The chambermaid came to clean the room, and as she approached the door, she could hear raised voices, and then what sounded like a violent argument. A man was yelling, passionately, and then his voice fell to a normal tone, and then another voice, likely a woman's, responded, with fury. This went on for a while, the voices going back and forth, the tempest between them such that the worker thought twice about knocking, let alone opening the door. She also wondered whether she ought contact the concierge, or security, so passionate were the exchanges at certain points.  Other guests staying on the hall paused momentarily at the brouhaha, and went on their way. But finally the voices died down, and she proceeded to rap on the door to find out if she could enter. The gentleman who opened the door beckoned her in. The chambermaid, expecting to see a woman seated somewhere in the room, in a chair, on the bed, peering at the man from an interior doorway, saw instead only him, and a sheaf of papers, on the bedspread, some of them fanned out as just tossed down. The man was clutching a few. The chambermaid asked the gentleman if everything was okay, for she had accidentally overheard a fiercesome quarrel. The gentleman smiled and reassured her that all was fine. There was only he in the room; the quarrel was his reading through his novel, still underway, his voice animating those of the characters. This gentleman, this writer, was Carlos Fuentes.

Carlos Fuentes, Union Sq., 1995 (AP Photo/Rick Maiman, File)

Fuentes, one of the pilots of the Boom movement in Latin American literature, which placed numerous fictional works from across the Hispanophone global south on the literary landscape, was tipped to win the Nobel Prize in Literature several times; his compatriot, the poet Octavio Paz, did win it, in 1990, as did Fuentes's friend, García Márquez, in 1982, but the great Mexican fiction writer did not. (Instead, the most recent Hispanophone writer to receive the award was the right-leaning Mario Vargas Llosa, of Peru, in 2010.) Not that this oversight stopped Fuentes. He kept pouring forth fiction, essays, occasional pieces, everything, publishing the English translation of his 2003 novel, The Eagle's Throne (La Silla del Águila) last year, and an essay on the French election in Mexico's Reforma newspaper the day he died.  His finest works, and the example he set, both in his fiction and criticism, and as a public literary and cultural figure, an ambassador of the word in the fullest sense, will endure. So too will his importance to the literature of his country, a multifaceted portrait of Mexico taking shape in and through his works, and to all writing across Latin America, and the Americas. Carlos Fuentes passed away in a hospital in Mexico City on Tuesday. He was 83 years old.

***

Brooke-Rose, 1970

Perhaps as publicly and widely acclaimed as Fuentes was, so obscure and little known in contrast was, and remains, Christine Brooke-Rose (1923-2011), a writer almost his exact peer, and nearly as prolific too, with 17 novels to her name, and many other works of short fiction, nonfiction, literary translation, and academic literary criticism.  Brooke-Rose passed two months ago, on March 21, at the age of 89. Fuentes was, from the very beginning, experimental in terms of form; perhaps not as experimental, say, as Mexican writers such as Fernando del Paso or Daniel Sada, whom I mentioned in a previous post, but no straightforward realist either. The Death of Artemio Cruz, for example, is narrated by a dead man, shifts in time and voice, and uses the second person to great effect; Christopher Unborn begins, in Sternian fashion, before the character leaves the womb; Destiny and Desire, I believe, is narrated by a severed head. But Brooke-Rose went much, much further. She is, by an easy mark, one of the most innovative writers in English-language prose in the late 20th century, and sui generis in Anglophone letters in many ways, for she went beyond diegetic experimentation to the level of grammar itself, pushing the limits of how one might tell stories as a way of embodying the deeper themes and critical possibilities of those stories, and the enacting the concepts underpinning them.

What do I mean? One of the techniques Brooke-Rose played with was the lipogram. In the hands of a number of writers affiliated with the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (Oulipo), this lipogrammatic technique, of leaving out a letter, say, across an entire work, presented a constraint that they could nevertheless resolve.  Thus there's the famous example of Georges Perec's La disparution (A Void), which eschews the most frequently used letter in the French language, "e"--which is also, interestingly enough, the most frequently used letter in English as well. (In the prior sentence alone, "e" appears 32 or so times.) Quite a challenge. But Brooke-Rose extended the lipogram to the grammatical level, and thus in her novel Between, which explores the experiences of a translator, she leaves out the most common verb in the English language, which happens to be the verb..."to be." That is, the copulative verb ("I am a writer," "She's hungry," "Are you there?" etc.), also used for the past voice ("I was led to believe you had emailed me"), progressive tenses ("We're heading there now"), and so forth, one of those English language tools, learned at the earliest stages of language acquisition, to which a speaker and writer learns she can attach a subject and predicate and turn anything into a sentence--is missing, in this entire novel. Note of course the multilayered irony of a novel about a translator, a woman trapped between languages (and names, places, everything) without recourse to the very verb--the grammatical form signifying action-- that elementally connects and binds in most European languages, titled "Between."

Such was Brooke-Rose's genius. And she did this again and again. She wrote novels exploring the language and the concept of discourse itself (Out, 1964; Such, 1966; Thru, 1975; Amalgamemnon, 1984), novels that treated questions of cybernetics and the dawning digital age (Xorandor, 1986; Verbivore, 1990; Textermination, 1991), novels that reimagined the human (Next, 1998; Subscript, 1999), and a very personal, autobiographical works that hovered between genres (Remake, 1996; Life, End Of, 2006). Before she wrote any of these, she had already published conventional works in poetry, prose and criticism (Gold: A Poem, 1955; The Languages of Love, 1957; A Grammar of Metaphor, 1958), and then several satirical novels (The Sycamore Tree, 1958; The Dear Deceit, 1960; The Middlemen: A Satire, 1968), but it was with Out that she went truly out beyond almost anything most of her British peers, save a few (J. H. Prynne; B.S. Johnson; Ann Quin; David Jones; Basil Bunting; etc.) were up to, creating an post-apocalyptic world that turned racial identification on its head. Subsequent novels involved leaving out the verb to have (Next); requiring readers to construct, as with a puzzle, the narrative (Thru); writing a work narrated by rocks speaking in what approximates computer language (Xorandor); and picturing a convention, in the United States, in which characters from famous novels convened, absent their authors, with pandemonium breaking loose (Textermination). It is therefore fair to say that Brooke-Rose not only pushed formal boundaries but those of content as well, making many of her works a challenge for readers, and this, coupled with the fact that she spent a great deal of her career teaching in France, and with the fact that while she explicated the likes of writers like Ezra Pound and speculative fiction writers and Harlan Ellison yet spent little time, at least until the end, explicating her own work (which of course should have been left to the works themselves, and to others), and because she was a woman writing the sort of work that men usually get all the acclaim for, she has been critically underexplored and popularly underread.

Her own account of her life is worth savoring, so I'll offer a few points that suggest another reason both for her linguistic curiosity and for her lack of attention. Brooke-Rose was born in Geneva, Switzerland, to an English father and an American-Swiss mother, and grew up mostly in Brussels, Belgium--think of all the languages she was coming into contact with--where she received her education, later heading to Somerville College, Oxford University and University College, London. Already gifted with linguistic ability, she worked as a Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) in intelligence at Bletchley Park, the UK's main decryption center during World War II, and after the war's end, completed her degree, married, and worked as a journalist and author. Divorced in 1968, she took a position teaching at the University of Paris-Vincennes, the radical, experimental campus outside Paris, and taught there till 1988. Throughout this period, she published steadily and with no loss of imaginative daring, though her only major award came in 1966, when she received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Such.

More than once when I have students who turn out to be voracious readers and are seeking out anything that will challenge them, and I hope to get them past the writers they are more likely than not to encounter, contemporary and past, I will recommend Brooke-Rose. I have thus far never had a student tell me that she or he took to Brooke-Rose's work as they have to novels by George Saunders, or Cormac McCarthy, or Renee Gladman, or Nalo Hopkinson, or Kenzaburo Oe, or Maryse Condé, or Ricardo Piglia, or any of the other people I have sent them off to explore. For numerous reasons, the gantlets she throws down are too difficult to tender. (I find the same to be the case with another British experimentalist, J.G. Ballard, whose unparalledly strange vision also never ceases to astonish me.) Or maybe other reasons are at play. I do know that I have found her work enthralling at times, and often quite funny. Life, End Of, even as its textures steep with sorrow because it's clear the author has reached the end of her life, is nevertheless so compelling I found it hard to put down, and I felt the same way about Remake, which tells a personal tale so dramatic and delicious that many a lurid nonfiction writer would be hard-pressed to match it. Then there are her experiments in the speculative realm, which some writers might devote an entire career too. The novels of the late 1960s, on the other hand, should have dissertationists reaching for their (the books') spines. This very well may be occurring somewhere. I don't know.

I do know that in her equally heartbreaking collection of essays, Invisible Author: Last Essays, which, after I finished it, I believe I had to run and call Tisa B. I was so struck by the frustration infusing it, Brooke-Rose points out how almost none of her academic critics ever seemed to be able to figure out what she was doing, instead noodling off on one or other points. She even laid this at the doorstep of a champion, Hélène Cixous, about whom I'll say no more. Instead, I urge people to read Brooke-Rose, perhaps beginning with Remake and Life, End Of (which leave out the pronoun "I"), and then, Out and Textermination. If you dare take up her dare, keep jumping around her fiction after that. Your brain will get a workout, a very good one. And you'll keep the memory of her dazzling originality, sadly too little heralded, alive.