Consuming Oeuvres
In a piece on dismantling the library of his father-and-law after his passing (“Shelf Life: Packing up my Father-in-law’s Library,” The New Yorker, Nov. 2, 2011, 40-43), James Wood quotes long-time New York Review of Books editor Edmund Wilson on his practice of “working my way through the oeuvre” (41) of a writer upon whom he was penning an essay. This doesn’t strike me as a symptom of a “relentlessness” particular to Wilson, as Wood characterizes it, but rather what one does to enjoy and understand an author.
The first writer I consumed in a systematic way was Kurt Vonnegut, starting with Breakfast of Champions (1973) when I was fifteen. I was startled by having a book make me laugh out loud (though it happened again soon enough when I picked up Don Quixote, which was all the more surprising as the humor transcended five hundred years!) I kept coming back for more Vonnegut until I had consumed over a bookshelf foot of his paperbacks. When I pursue this strategy with a reasonably productive author the law of diminishing returns sets in eventually. I know I’ve reached it when an author starts repeating herself; in the case of Vonnegut reiterating what he considered to be amusing anecdotes (I wasn’t so taken with them) in his essay collections. At this point my own authorial pride kicks in: ‘Instead of consuming every scrap by this guy whose imperfections are becoming increasingly apparent, I need to get some dignity, stop sitting around, and write some myself!’
The downside of this policy is that there are few authors with whom I have the satisfaction of being able to truthfully assert that I have read everything by them. The claim to have read “everything” by any given person is patently absurd if taken literally. The one time an enthusiastic admirer exclaimed to me “I’ve read everything you’ve written!” my initial reaction was bemused paranoia: ‘oh yeah? Even that misogynistic novel about breaking up with my high school girlfriend? The shitty angsty poetry … My dream log?’ He meant, of course, the few published books and articles; an infinitesimal fraction of everything I’ve ever scribbled on.
If one restricts oneself to plausibly public realm compositions, where, for example, do letter collections come in? And these, even if a comprehensive reproduction of surviving correspondence (which they rarely are), are inevitably incomplete in regards to what a historical personage produced on pen and paper in a lifetime. And what of alternate or expanded works which have come to light well after initial publication? Can I still claim to have read Naked Lunch or The Jungle without going back to the expanded editions? And translations? For all the languages I’ve studied and yet plan to tackle, there are a number I accept never being able to read in this lifetime. Russian ranks high among them. I “read” Anna Karenina, but haven’t yet gone back to the translations by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, whose renditions are undoubtedly more faithful to the originals than those available to me when I first read these works (though I did “re-read” their Notes from Underground).
Few writers have the stature to have their entire works made available in English. Browsing Japanese bookstores I was surprised to find how much of Murakami Haruki’s work hasn’t been translated into English. Short stories, essays, travel writing… none of which struck me as masterworks, but neither do many of his pieces that have been translated! Murakami himself is a prolific translator from English; the Complete Works of Raymond Carver among other credits. Can English language readers claim to have consumed Murakami’s oeuvre without reading his renderings of American literature into Japanese?
As globally prominent an author as Paco Ignacio Taibo II has a number of wonderful works still unavailable in English (My favorite being the collection of portraits of radical agitators Arcángeles: Doce Historias de Revolucionarios Herejes del siglo XX). How many Middle Eastern writers have their entire works available in any language other than Arabic? Even Tayeb Salih (1929-2009), one of the most piercing thinkers on the conundrums of the ostensibly post-colonial period, can’t claim this distinction in regards to his three published works of fiction, less alone his nine volumes of criticism.
Then there’s the B-sides problem. Burroughs is a prime example of a gratuitous offender in this regard. He was so fucking high that he doesn’t even remember writing much of his most famous work. Regardless he and Brian Gyson’s fascination with the “cut-up technique” of automatic writing gives Burroughs ‘60s works (Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, Wild Boys…) a ticker tape feel from which a missing or inserted component here or there fail to radically alter the gist of the exercise—the point of which, as with spirit-writing before it, is to transcribe discrete slices of cosmic consciousness. Chasing down Burroughs’s minor works—such as Painting and Guns, currently moldering in my dad’s basement— is amusing for the fan or bibliophile, but hardly requisite in cogitating what the “literary outlaw” was all about…
The answer-that-there’s-no-answer here is that these sorts of problems are what keep us engaged and interested, roped into loops of re-discovery at oscillating levels of intimacy and relevance. They are inscrutabilities in a living—rather than dead and pickled—world, and, despite the frustrating impossibility of complete consumption, I image most of us wouldn’t have it any other way.
Verbose disclaimer disposed of, who are the authors I can claim to have read pretty fully? Vonnegut, Richard Brautigan, and Dostoyevsky in high school. Indiginist and prisoners’s rights activist Ward Churchill and Critical Whiteness Studies pioneer David Roediger when I got more political my first couple of years in college (it is nearly impossible to make a claim of comprehensiveness in regards to Chomsky because of his Linguistic-anti-imperialism dichotomy and the relentless redundancy of his oeuvre). I didn’t read all of Poe or Flannery O’Connor in high school or college, which is unfortunate because such a feat is quite doable and they both deserve it. I went through William Vollmann thoroughly until the mid-‘90s, when I outgrew his irredeemably john sexuality. Intrigued by African religions I gobbled up Amos Tutuola’s three very oral novels without being able to light upon a critical lens through which to really get a hold on them. I only read two or three of Chinua Achebe’s considerable works—I found them dry—but all of Ngũgĩ’s novels (I finally met him at a reading on Cody’s on Fourth Street for Wizard of the Crow in 2006, though wasn’t able to talk to him at greater length because I couldn’t find a local tie-in to pitch to the Bay Guardian’s Lit section).
Between graduating from college in 1998 and the present I didn’t attack and methodically consume the oeuvres of authors so much. One factor was that while working on Guerrilla USA and Creating a Movement with Teeth the books I was writing was the only one I wanted to read; which helped me avoid the common grad school procrastination technique of reading to avoid writing. In this period, rather than reading everything by a single author, I read everything I could on a certain topic: left-wing armed cells in First World countries in the 1960s and 1970s. I didn’t read much fiction to off-set this rather intense material, but soon started to pick up more titles on East Asia reading. Robert van Gulik’s Judge Dee mysteries were a candy-coated introduction to classical Chinese bureaucracy.
In orienting in East Asian literature, I followed certain translators to good effect: primarily Howard Goldblatt on China and Donald Keene on Japan. I made only a dent on their immense outputs, but both are work sticking with.
And it doesn’t end…
The first writer I consumed in a systematic way was Kurt Vonnegut, starting with Breakfast of Champions (1973) when I was fifteen. I was startled by having a book make me laugh out loud (though it happened again soon enough when I picked up Don Quixote, which was all the more surprising as the humor transcended five hundred years!) I kept coming back for more Vonnegut until I had consumed over a bookshelf foot of his paperbacks. When I pursue this strategy with a reasonably productive author the law of diminishing returns sets in eventually. I know I’ve reached it when an author starts repeating herself; in the case of Vonnegut reiterating what he considered to be amusing anecdotes (I wasn’t so taken with them) in his essay collections. At this point my own authorial pride kicks in: ‘Instead of consuming every scrap by this guy whose imperfections are becoming increasingly apparent, I need to get some dignity, stop sitting around, and write some myself!’
The downside of this policy is that there are few authors with whom I have the satisfaction of being able to truthfully assert that I have read everything by them. The claim to have read “everything” by any given person is patently absurd if taken literally. The one time an enthusiastic admirer exclaimed to me “I’ve read everything you’ve written!” my initial reaction was bemused paranoia: ‘oh yeah? Even that misogynistic novel about breaking up with my high school girlfriend? The shitty angsty poetry … My dream log?’ He meant, of course, the few published books and articles; an infinitesimal fraction of everything I’ve ever scribbled on.
If one restricts oneself to plausibly public realm compositions, where, for example, do letter collections come in? And these, even if a comprehensive reproduction of surviving correspondence (which they rarely are), are inevitably incomplete in regards to what a historical personage produced on pen and paper in a lifetime. And what of alternate or expanded works which have come to light well after initial publication? Can I still claim to have read Naked Lunch or The Jungle without going back to the expanded editions? And translations? For all the languages I’ve studied and yet plan to tackle, there are a number I accept never being able to read in this lifetime. Russian ranks high among them. I “read” Anna Karenina, but haven’t yet gone back to the translations by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, whose renditions are undoubtedly more faithful to the originals than those available to me when I first read these works (though I did “re-read” their Notes from Underground).
Few writers have the stature to have their entire works made available in English. Browsing Japanese bookstores I was surprised to find how much of Murakami Haruki’s work hasn’t been translated into English. Short stories, essays, travel writing… none of which struck me as masterworks, but neither do many of his pieces that have been translated! Murakami himself is a prolific translator from English; the Complete Works of Raymond Carver among other credits. Can English language readers claim to have consumed Murakami’s oeuvre without reading his renderings of American literature into Japanese?
As globally prominent an author as Paco Ignacio Taibo II has a number of wonderful works still unavailable in English (My favorite being the collection of portraits of radical agitators Arcángeles: Doce Historias de Revolucionarios Herejes del siglo XX). How many Middle Eastern writers have their entire works available in any language other than Arabic? Even Tayeb Salih (1929-2009), one of the most piercing thinkers on the conundrums of the ostensibly post-colonial period, can’t claim this distinction in regards to his three published works of fiction, less alone his nine volumes of criticism.
Then there’s the B-sides problem. Burroughs is a prime example of a gratuitous offender in this regard. He was so fucking high that he doesn’t even remember writing much of his most famous work. Regardless he and Brian Gyson’s fascination with the “cut-up technique” of automatic writing gives Burroughs ‘60s works (Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, Wild Boys…) a ticker tape feel from which a missing or inserted component here or there fail to radically alter the gist of the exercise—the point of which, as with spirit-writing before it, is to transcribe discrete slices of cosmic consciousness. Chasing down Burroughs’s minor works—such as Painting and Guns, currently moldering in my dad’s basement— is amusing for the fan or bibliophile, but hardly requisite in cogitating what the “literary outlaw” was all about…
The answer-that-there’s-no-answer here is that these sorts of problems are what keep us engaged and interested, roped into loops of re-discovery at oscillating levels of intimacy and relevance. They are inscrutabilities in a living—rather than dead and pickled—world, and, despite the frustrating impossibility of complete consumption, I image most of us wouldn’t have it any other way.
Verbose disclaimer disposed of, who are the authors I can claim to have read pretty fully? Vonnegut, Richard Brautigan, and Dostoyevsky in high school. Indiginist and prisoners’s rights activist Ward Churchill and Critical Whiteness Studies pioneer David Roediger when I got more political my first couple of years in college (it is nearly impossible to make a claim of comprehensiveness in regards to Chomsky because of his Linguistic-anti-imperialism dichotomy and the relentless redundancy of his oeuvre). I didn’t read all of Poe or Flannery O’Connor in high school or college, which is unfortunate because such a feat is quite doable and they both deserve it. I went through William Vollmann thoroughly until the mid-‘90s, when I outgrew his irredeemably john sexuality. Intrigued by African religions I gobbled up Amos Tutuola’s three very oral novels without being able to light upon a critical lens through which to really get a hold on them. I only read two or three of Chinua Achebe’s considerable works—I found them dry—but all of Ngũgĩ’s novels (I finally met him at a reading on Cody’s on Fourth Street for Wizard of the Crow in 2006, though wasn’t able to talk to him at greater length because I couldn’t find a local tie-in to pitch to the Bay Guardian’s Lit section).
Between graduating from college in 1998 and the present I didn’t attack and methodically consume the oeuvres of authors so much. One factor was that while working on Guerrilla USA and Creating a Movement with Teeth the books I was writing was the only one I wanted to read; which helped me avoid the common grad school procrastination technique of reading to avoid writing. In this period, rather than reading everything by a single author, I read everything I could on a certain topic: left-wing armed cells in First World countries in the 1960s and 1970s. I didn’t read much fiction to off-set this rather intense material, but soon started to pick up more titles on East Asia reading. Robert van Gulik’s Judge Dee mysteries were a candy-coated introduction to classical Chinese bureaucracy.
In orienting in East Asian literature, I followed certain translators to good effect: primarily Howard Goldblatt on China and Donald Keene on Japan. I made only a dent on their immense outputs, but both are work sticking with.
And it doesn’t end…
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