SuperWeed

I began this post last week, while wrestling with a (finally finished) writing project that was breaking my brain. I’ve since moved on to other books, but let me share what would have been “What I’m reading right now (#4).”

Failure!

This anthology, put together by the editors of the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, looks at “earnest actions undertaken in good faith, with a hope for success, which not only ended poorly but were subsequently disavowed either individually, culturally or historically. The used-up, the embarrassing, the misguided and foolhardy who wagered much and lost, the ventures which led nowhere and which don’t serve as rallying cries or symbolic gestures, but are quickly buried away with no hope for a second act or distant redemption.” I picked this up at Bluestockings when I was there to do a reading this spring [Note to small bookstores: This is why you should invite me to read at your store, because at least I will buy something!] and was inspired to start reading it by my own failure to write what I was trying to write.

I guess I was looking for company in misery but instead what I found was an antidote to the theory of progress in history. As editor Colin Dickey writes in his introductory essay entitled Botched Millenniums, these “dead spurs off of the timeline of history which are either forgotten or actively repressed by the narrative of progress” help us to challenge that narrative. “To persist in a belief in redemptive history requires turning one’s back on this repeated catastrophe.” Turning our backs on that, Dickey asserts in tandem with German writer G.W. Sebald, requires us to wrench ourselves out of natural history, which is itself a process “not… of forward progress, but of endless experiments and mistakes.” In other words, the idea of linear progress in history — whether personal or world — is a function of our tendency to see ourselves as something other or more than the rest of nature, which as we animal liberationists know is a very dangerous tendency.

Quite apart from the other contributions to this anthology, some of which I found fascinating but others of which were far too, um, aesthetic for me, that essay was well worth the price of the book for me, since it provoked me to see the many losses and failures from which I have been able to learn nothing in a new light, as something that just happens in nature sometimes. That’s not to say I give up on the essential task of learning whatever can be learned from failures, especially in activism, but simply to say that it can be emotionally liberating to let go of the idea that our lives ought to progress in ways that nature does not.

Other standout contributions include a history of the Morningstar commune of the 1960s, a reevaluation of Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto, and an amusing personal narrative from a woman who found herself cursing out one of the facilitators of a workshop that was supposed to teach her tactics of nonviolent resistance.

Lots of Fiction
I’ve been sluicing through novels lately, as I often do when I’m writing something difficult myself. At the moment, I’m in the middle of Tracy’s Tiger by William Saroyan, which is one of five short novels collected in the 1956 anthology called Quintet. This novel is odd, as is the Aldous Huxley contribution, The Farcical History of Richard Greenow. That and Richard Wright’s contribution, The Man Who Lived Underground are both character-driven pieces that end with a shocking lurch. Gotta love those high-brow anthologies from the fifties!

Since I’ve not been keeping up (and, at the pace I’ve been reading could not possibly keep up) my online log of what I’m actively reading, here are comments on three of the notable novels I’ve finished recently, all of which have something to say about madness:

Arrows of Rain by Okey Ndibe
Set in the fictional African nation of Madia, this absorbing and disturbing novel is characterized by most reviewers as a dramatization of the struggle between the individual and the totalitarian state. That’s true enough, but to me the central themes seem to be madness, masculinity, and the vital value of telling the truth about power. The gist of the plot is that a “madman” on the beach tells the truth about who raped a dead prostitute. Through the mechanism of a story within a story, we learn that he had been driven mad by his failure to speak truth to power when a woman he loved was violated by another man. The male author does a remarkable job of portraying the cowardice and rationalizations that so often lead men to fail to be good allies to women. The moral of the story is spoken by the protagonist’s grandmother: “A story never forgives silence.” I think that’s true and that’s why I write even though I really don’t like writing.

Ahmed’s Revenge by Richard Wiley
Ahmed is an elephant. That was enough to make me pick up this book. The madness in this novel, which alights in different characters in various psychopathic or self-defeating ways, is the quest for revenge. The plot involves ivory smuggling. The protagonist is a white woman who grew up in pre-independence Kenya and returns after independence. The white male author does a remarkably good job of both inhabiting a female character and showing the all too common ways she has been and remains oblivious of her race-based privilege.

The Marshal and the Madwoman by Magdalen Nabb
This is one of Nabb’s mystery series set in Firenze. I’ve not read them all and probably won’t but this one transcends the police procedural genre in its empathic depiction of the victim, a deinstitutionalized woman whose madness turns out to be rooted in past trauma. What the author captures so well here is not mental illness itself but rather the profound loneliness of many institutionalized adults and the stark life of poverty that so many have faced in the years since the (rightful) closure of many state hospitals and the (wrongful) failure to make adequate provisions for people living with mental disabilities in our communities. Rarely, rarely does a book make me cry. This one did.

Postscript
Since I can’t possibly blog as fast as I read, I think that from now on I’m going to use Goodreads for my booklog and only blog, as I have just done, about the books I feel like writing about. I already use LibraryThing to catalog my home library, although I’m nowhere near finished entering all of the books spilling out of the carefully organized (Dewey Decimal, of course) library and into every other room of the house.

September 7th, 2007 | Category: Books | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL