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“How’s the carrot?” Vladimir asks. “It’s a carrot,” Estragon replies….“That’s what annoys me….I’ll never forget this carrot.”
If a food writer describes an ice cream cone with such description that we can taste it – ah, but that’s just the problem, we can’t taste words. Words have shape, perhaps even texture. They fill our mouths, or used to, when we read like the monks, but words don’t have flavor. This is the existential predicament of the restaurant and food critic.
Perhaps it explains the poetic license of their exaggerations. Reichl, explaining her resorting to fiction to enliven a restaurant review, explains to her editor at the LA Times, “Haven’t you noticed that food all by itself is really boring to read about?…It’s everything around the food that makes it interesting. The sociology. The politics. The history” (p. 250). Nevertheless, “…this won’t do,” her editor replies. “In journalism you have to tell the truth” (p. 250). She then goes on to describe the historic Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, where “…the houses were decrepit…” (p. 251). It’s been awhile since we’ve driven through Hancock Park, but surely only a food critic could describe the dwellings and lawns there as bedraggled.
But then the perspective is from one for whom meals last five hours, and where “For great balsamico, the process takes an entire lifetime, the vinegar becoming more concentrated as it progresses through subsequent barrels of oak, chestnut, mulberry, and juniper” (p. 59). She can comfort with words, and the words do, for the most part, describe food.
“Crritic!” says Estragon, “(with finality).”
Reichl, R. (2001). Comfort me with apples [with recipes]. New York: Random House.
Crossan finds Jesus living on the wrong side of the tracks – among the politically oppressed and the socially shamed, low class cynics roaming homeless camps.
Beckett’s Waiting for Godot begins with a gospel attestation analysis by Vladimir:
Vladimir: One out of four. Of the other three two don’t mention any thieves at all and the third says that both of them abused him….But one of the four says that one of the two was saved….But all four were there. And only one speaks of a thief being saved. Why believe him rather than the others? (p. 9).
As Crossan shows, they were not all there. Very few, if any, were there. The problem then, for Crossan, is one of attestation, correlation, cross referencing the varied and disparate stories for credibility and reliability, explaining the running editions, the omissions, the additions, the different emphases – the “theological damage control” of later traditions (p. 232). Crossan’s book begins with a remarkable story, taken from ancient Egyptian papyrus, about a common family, illustrating basic household transactions, including everyday hopes and disappointments. His research reveals the social, political, and religious landscape of the Mediterranean world, and discusses the survival skills practiced by ordinary households – the concessions, the breaking points, the sacrifices, the everyday hopes and fears.
Out of this anthropological view emerges a Jesus walking a landscape consistent with Beckett’s typical stage directions – for Godot: Act I, “A country road. A tree. Evening”; Act II, “Next day. Same time. Same place.”
“He was neither broker nor mediator but, somewhat paradoxically, the announcer that neither should exist between humanity and divinity or between humanity and itself. Miracle and parable, healing and eating were calculated to force individuals into unmediated physical and spiritual contact with God and unmediated physical and spiritual contact with one another. He announced, in other words, the brokerless kingdom of God” (Crossan, p. 422).
Jesus was an existentialist; there is no Godot.
Beckett, S. (1954). Waiting for Godot. New York: Grove Press.
Crossan, J. (1992). The historical Jesus: The life of a Mediterranean Jewish peasant. New York: HarperCollins.
Harold Bloom prefers his literature neat, and not served with a twist. Adverse to literary criticism that substitutes a doctrinaire reading for the actual text, Bloom’s approach to reading is summed up in his epigraph, from the Wallace Stevens poem “The House was Quiet and the World was Calm”: “The reader became the book; and summer night / Was like the conscious being of the book.”
Bloom’s book on reading consists of a short introduction, which sets the stage for the kind of reading he prefers, followed by sections devoted to short stories, poems, novels, plays, more novels, and an epilogue.
Bloom’s favorite writers are Shakespeare and Samuel Johnson. But it’s Francis Bacon who provides the prose equivalent for Stevens’s poem: “Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.”
Bloom augments Bacon: “I urge you to find what truly comes near to you, that can be used for weighing and for considering. Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.”
Bloom hopes to inspire an “authentic reader.” Yet, “It is not the function of reading to cheer us up, or to console us prematurely.”
“You are more than an ideology,” Bloom says.
“Chekhov and Beckett were the kindest human beings,” Bloom says. Reading Bloom, here and elsewhere, one wants to add his name to the list of the kindest readers, writers, and teachers.
Bloom, H. (2000). How to read and why. New York: Scribner.
If at first glance we can’t figure out what Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is all about we might at least recognize one of its themes as the alphabet. Beckett told us Wake is about normal things in the usual sense: “Literary criticism is not book-keeping.” Explaining Vico, Beckett said, “When language consisted of gesture, the spoken and the written were identical.” Later, “Convenience only begins to assert itself at a far more advanced stage of civilization, in the form of alphabetism.” Beckett argues that Wake is ”direct expression,” in a pre-alphabet way. “They (words) are alive. They elbow their way on to the page, and glow and blaze and fade and disappear…His writing is not about something; it is that something itself.”
Turning to Finnegans Wake itself, directly (never-minding the book-keepers), we find the alphabet itself. “(Stoop) if you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curious signs (please stoop), in this allaphbed! Can you rede (since We and Thous had it out already) its world?” (p. 18).
Finnegans Wake, like most of Joyce’s work, is, in fact, memorable; its auditory impact sticks long after its photographic memory fades. For example, we continue to hear “When a part so ptee does duty for the holos we soon grow to use of an allforabit” (pp. 18-19) long after we read it.
Wolfram von Eschenbach notwithstanding: “I don’t know a single letter of the alphabet” (last paragraph Book II, Parzival, translated and with an introduction by Helen M. Mustard & Charles E. Passage. Vintage Books Edition, March 1961).
Our Exagmination Round His Factification For Incamination Of Work In Progress, first published as New Directions Paperbook 331 in 1972.
Early yesterday, reading Nick Paumgarten on “The lives of elevators” (New Yorker, April 21), about a person stuck in one for forty-one hours, we were reminded of the weightlessness of reading and writing. The video, from the Kafkaesque security tape, is a work of art Warhol could have made; or Becket might have written a one-act play, but would have omitted the piano score, though the tempo is perfectly counterpointed to the Chaplinesque speed of the fast forwarded film. Of course, we also thought of John Cage: “It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else” (“Lecture on Nothing,” Silence, p. 119).
Later, at the Triple-A baseball game in a cold, near empty ballpark, a woman in the row in front of us turned around and asked if we had a pen. She seemed surprised when we said yes, and pulled the pen out of our jacket pocket, handing it out to her. She was a few seats away, down the row in front of us. There was no one else around. She was bundled up for the cold day of the game, in wool cap, and she had brought a full pack of incidentals to the game, to help pass the time, the way some people do at a ballgame, but no pen. She got up and walked over, smiling, and took the pen.
The person stuck alone in the elevator is essentially weightless, can neither rise nor fall, cannot change seats. There is no exit. He pries open the doors to find a cement wall. He is a character in Sartre’s No Exit, sans the other people.
Take a piece of blank typing paper. Fold it in half, then in thirds. Place the folded paper in a pocket with a pen. You never know when you might get stuck – in a station at the metro, waiting anywhere – and it will not be nearly so irritating thinking you might like to be somewhere else. Pen and paper provide one with a play against the angst of any existential waiting game.
When we read and write, we argue. We all argue from time to time, and we generally apply, from an opponent’s prompt or from our own desire to make ourselves clear, examples and proofs, persuasive tools, but as we ramble on, as is often our wont, making claim after claim, supporting or not, making assumptions left and right, some stated, others not, we shortly may find ourselves caught in a riptide of our own words.
As Samuel Beckett said, “You can’t listen to a conversation for five minutes without noting inherent chaos.” But we swim on, using what persuasive tools we find handy – tools described and explained nicely for us in Aristotle’s Rhetoric. It’s not only OK to argue; arguing is our responsibility.
In Aristotle’s view, argument is what makes us human; we engage in argument as a consequence of our living together, working together, playing together – reading and writing together. It follows, though it may sound paradoxical, that when we learn to read and write arguments effectively, we more effectively cooperate with one another, and we learn to live together in greater harmony. But not all arguments are equal. Some are specious, others obfuscated, sometimes deliberately so. Some, contrary to Aristotelian principle, persuade to do wrong. As Woody Guthrie said, “Some men will rob you with a six gun, others with a fountain pen.”
If arguing is good (and necessary), not all arguments are good (or necessary). But what’s necessary? And what’s good? The answers to those questions are what we work toward when we work on learning to read and to write arguments.
