David Shields - How Literature Saved My Life

Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello eviscerates, chapter by chapter, a commitment (antiapartheid activism, animal rights, friendship, art, love, sex) that Coetzee, in previous books, had once affirmed. The “novel” consists almost entirely of a series of lectures that Coetzee himself gave, but in the book a fictional character named Elizabeth Costello gives the lectures. Coetzee/Costello is trying to find something that he/she can actually believe, and by the end of the book the only thing Coetzee can affirm, the only thing Costello affirms, is the belling of the sound of frogs in mud: the animal life of sheer survival. I love how joyous and despairing that is. It’s on the side of life, but along a very narrow ledge. My favorite books are candid beyond candid, and they proceed from the assumption that we’ll all be dead in a hundred years: here, now, in this book, I’m going to cut to the essence.

David Markson’s This Is Not a Novel is a book built almost entirely out of other writers’ lines—some attributed, most not, many mashed-up (weirdly, he insisted upon verbatim quotation of his “own” work in Reality Hunger ). One of the pleasures of reading the book is recognizing so many of the passages. A bibliophile’s wet dream, but it’s no mere collection of quotes. It’s a sustained meditation on a single question: Against death, what consolation, if any, is art? Against the dark night of death, what solace is it that I still read Sophocles? For Sophocles, Markson implies, not a lot, but for me, maybe a little. Markson constantly toggles back and forth between celebrating the timelessness of art and mocking such grandiosity. The book forces me to ask myself: What do I push back with? Maybe art, and if so, barely .

Our ground time here will be brief

SHORTLY AFTER the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, the editor of Image , a magazine interested in the intersection of art and faith, asked dozens of writers to respond. Annie Dillard’s “This Is the Life,” fewer than 1,500 words, is, to me, by far the best essay yet written about 9/11; she addresses the event extremely obliquely and doesn’t come even close to mentioning it. Instead, she uses 9/11 as the catalyst for an extremely far-ranging contemplation of the inherent relativism of all cultural “truths,” and given the actuality of death, the irreducible ephemerality of all human experience (each of us is, apparently, “as provisional as a bug”). And yet if nothing is meaningful, everything is significant.

Aggressively ambivalent, Dillard contains the contradictions: between ecstasy and despair, herself and the world, life and death. In The Writing Life , Dillard advises, “Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place. Assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?”—which is precisely what she does here: she’s utterly unblinking, unapologetically sober (but still funny) about the fundamental questions of existence.

In case we need reminding, Dillard reminds us at the beginning of the essay, “Somewhere in there you die. Not a funeral. Forget funeral. A big birthday party. Since everyone around you agrees.” This sets the terms for all that follows: everything we do—seek to know Rome’s best restaurants and their staffs, take the next tribe’s pigs in thrilling raids, grill yams, hunt white-plumed birds, burn captives, set fire to a drunk, publish the paper that proves the point, elude capture, educate our children to a feather edge, count coup, perfect our calligraphy, spear the seal—is, in a sense, nothing more or less than a prelude to, distraction from, death. She relentlessly questions her own position as she rigorously investigates the world: “The black rock is holy, or the scroll. Or nothing at all is holy, as everyone intelligent knows.” She establishes the problem, deepens the problem, suggests “solutions,” explores the permutations of these solutions, argues against and finally undermines these solutions, returning us to the problem (pretty much the M.O. of this book as well).

We know only the culture in which we live and we abide by its “truths.” The “illusion, like the visual field, is complete. Each people knows only its own squares in the weave, its wars and instruments and arts, and also the starry sky.” Can we not get beyond our own ethnocentrism? Of course, sort of, but say “you scale your own weft and see time’s breadth and the length of space. What, seeing this spread multiply infinitely in every direction, would you do differently? Whatever you do, it has likely brought delight to fewer people than either contract bridge or the Red Sox.” There is a good-sized rock in the garden, there is no way to remove the rock even if you peer at it from above and at many different angles, and all rocks are equally significant/insignificant: “However hypnotized you and your people are, you will be just as dead in their war, our war. What new wisdom can you take to your grave for worms to untangle?”

There is no wisdom, only many wisdoms—beautiful and delusional.

Other people

IN THE FIRST of the eight interlocked stories or chapters of Butterfly Stories: A Novel , William Vollmann tells “what happened to the child,” establishing the psychic interconnection—for the butterfly boy—between solitude, beauty, loss, pain, and punishment. The lyric catalogue of childhood humiliations in the first story yields, in the seven stories that follow, to litanies of the butterfly boy (who as an adult is called first “the journalist,” then later “the husband”) reenacting—with a lesbian traveling companion, the son of a former SS officer, a sybaritic and amoral photographer, and especially with a Phnom Penh prostitute named Oy—the sadomasochistic scenarios of his childhood.

Vollmann begins Butterfly Stories with an evocation of war torture by the Khmer Rouge. On the next page, he writes, “There was a jungle, and there was murder by torture, but the butterfly boy did not know about it. He knew the school bully, though, who beat him up every day.” Vollmann makes absolutely explicit the link between the butterfly boy’s childhood and his adult experiences in Thailand and Cambodia. The butterfly boy thinks about the school bully, “The substance that his soul was composed of was pain,” but this is at least as true of the butterfly boy, who “was not popular in the second grade because he knew how to spell ‘bacteria’ in the spelling bee, and so the other boys beat him up.” One evening, a monarch butterfly lands on the top step of his house, squatting on the welcome mat and moving its gorgeous wings slowly. Then it rises in the air. He never sees the butterfly again; he remembers it the rest of his life.

Butterfly Stories is told in more than two hundred very short sections, many of which deal with the economies of desire: “A middle-aged midget in a double-breasted suit came down the alley, walked under one girl’s dress, reached up to pull it over him like a roof, and began to suck. The girl stood looking at nothing. When the midget was finished, he slid her panties back up and spat onto the sidewalk. Then he reached into his wallet.”