Errata and Marginalia 025: Stendhal

Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma (New York, NY, Modern Library, a division of Random House: 1999); Richard Howard translation. Original work published in 1839. 

 Stendhal's late-career masterwork, The Charterhouse of Parma, is the sort of novel I tried the first time around to read when I was still too young to enjoy it. Almost ten years ago exactly, I picked up the novel and read through the first hundred pages or so at breakneck speed. Coming up for air at the end of the evening, I surveyed what had gone before. I remembered that there had been the Battle of Waterloo. And there seemed to be an aunt doomed to an incestuous love affair with her nephew. But otherwise, I could scarcely recollect who all these people were and what else was happening in the novel. I therefore put the book aside, realizing that—for whatever reason—here was a masterpiece that was not yet ready to disclose its secrets to me. 

Now, a decade later, having dug the same paperbound copy out of a storage unit and savored it at last, over the course of a long summer weekend, I think I am in a position to say why I struggled with the novel the first time around. The book is, for all its five hundred pages, a masterwork of compression. As the translator of the Modern Library edition, Richard Howard, tells us: this is a book that demands to be read with especially close attention. Stendhal heaps detail after detail, and often, events occur in such rapid succession, and are handled so elliptically, that if one allows one's mind to wander for an instant, one can miss crucial details of the plot. 

Fausta

On Count Mosca's orders, Fausta was taken to the Citadel. The Duchess laughed a good deal at the little act of injustice which the Count was obliged to commit in order to arrest the curiosity of the Prince, who might otherwise have managed to discover Fabrizio's name. 

    – Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma (Richard Howard trans.)

My god that's cold; and how differently
The tale could have been told!
For what provoked the Duchess's mirth
Was for you, Fausta, an abduction and curse 
Confined and immured—what Hardy termed
the fate of being "alive" yet—

"ensepulchred."

Luca

 In an earlier post I published in March, I complained about a set of recent popular films that I thought suffered from the same generic flaw: a lack of objective correlatives. The films' characters went through familiar arcs: they began with a flawed belief about themselves or the world; they eventually realized why they were wrong (the "discovery" of classical drama, to borrow a term from Northrop Frye); and they emerged with a new and sounder worldview. But the characters accomplished these alterations largely through a set of literal-minded conversations about the changes they were undergoing. 

We knew that they had a flawed belief, that is, because they described it to us. We knew that they had realized why they were wrong because they told us about it, or sang a song about it, with a chorus that went something like: "I just realized...." We knew that they had a new worldview that would inform their actions going forward because they said so. Meanwhile, nothing really happened to them in the story, and they didn't really do anything, that would justify or explain these transformations. The changes and storms taking place in the characters' emotional lives did not correspond to any outward narrative events: they lacked, in short, the "objective correlatives" that T.S. Eliot called for in a famous critical essay. 

Errata and Marginalia 024: Twain

 Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (New York, NY, Barnes and Noble Books: 2005); originally published 1889.

There are certain books that slumber for decades in hardbound editions on millions of American shelves without ever getting picked up and read; Twain's 1889 work of speculative fiction, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, must surely belong to that category. Like most such acknowledged 19th century "classics," it ought to be picked up more often, however—because its contents may surprise you. 

Here is the sort of book we thought we "knew," without having read it. We are familiar with it from countless references in our popular culture. If asked to describe its contents, we would no doubt depict it as a time travel fantasy and adventure story, appropriate for all ages. We would also imagine that it must be "funny"—the work of one of the country's great humorists. 

"First Thoughts"

 It can't be a good sign that everyone talking about generative AI language models—not least the people making them—keeps comparing the new technology to the nuclear bomb. Yet the analogy seems inescapable. Sam Altman, a co-founder of the venture responsible for ChatGPT—OpenAI—has likened the initiative directly to the Manhattan Project. Geoffrey Hinton, dubbed by reporters the "Godfather of AI," was fond of quoting Robert Oppenheimer. And when Altman appeared before Congress last week, alongside other tech executives in the AI field, his call for global regulation of the emerging industry had only a single logical parallel on the current world stage, which he name-checked explicitly: the International Atomic Energy Agency. 

It is an odd spectacle to see the same people who are actively working to develop the new language models implicitly warning us they have the power to be the next potentially world-ending technology, by analogy to nuclear weapons; but this kind of dual role is not unprecedented. The very progenitors of the nuclear technology, whom the AI developers like to cite, were of similarly divided minds about the value of their own creation. Many of the scientists most directly involved in building atomic weaponry went on to become advocates for disarmament and non-proliferation. Altman and his peers seem to be aiming for a similar rehabilitation; yet on an accelerated schedule: since they are still actively working to build and profit from the devices even as they warn against their use. 

American Democracy: Not Waving But Drowning?

 In a characteristic non sequitur in one of his novels, Donald Barthelme depicts the U.S. President sitting in the Oval Office, contemplating the falling of the Dow-Jones and the travails of the poor, and thinking to himself: "Great balls of river mud. [...] Is nothing going to go right?" 

The words were written in 1967, but reading them today, one cannot help but picture Biden in this same tragic role. Not that it can truly be said that nothing has gone right in his presidency. He has survived political disasters before (the Afghan withdrawal, e.g.), only to rebound with unexpected successes (such as the climate bill). 

The Literature of the Improbable

 In an episode toward the beginning of Donald Barthelme's 1967 postmodern novel, Snow White, the titular fairy tale protagonist confronts the seven men with whom she shares a ménage, saying: "Oh I wish there were some words in the world that were not the words I always hear!" (Well, I guess this isn't a confrontation precisely, so much as a request phrased as complaint; something on the order of "will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?") The seven men soon fall over themselves trying to supply words and phrases that fall out of the ordinary, and thus could not be the ones she is used to hearing: "fish slime," says one; "Injunctions," says another. "Left sucking the mop again" is a third phrase that gets thrown around, and this one sticks—it comes up at least twice more in the novel, where it appears to mean something like "left behind the eight ball." 

Now, I bring this up because I am persuaded that we are all about to experience some version of Snow White's complaint, in the next few years. We are living on the eve of a millennial deluge of over-familiar words. The reason is: AI language models. Humans have now built machines that are astoundingly gifted at guessing statistically-likely correlations of words, and can therefore generate the most plausible of texts. So gifted are they at this ability, that one can start to recognize the product of a generative AI language model by the sheer probability of its words. A human reading it gets the vague sense, "this feels like a genuine original text; and yet it is familiar somehow; it reads like precisely what you would expect to get, if you fed all the internet into a machine and asked it to reproduce the average content of the whole." And since the AI can produce this content in seconds, there is bound to be a lot of it soon. 

Stella Maris

 Well, I promised at the end of my last post that I would next read the second volume in Cormac McCarthy's latest pair of novels—Stella Maris (the companion volume to The Passenger)—and report back on whether it supported or contradicted any of my hypotheses as to the first novel's themes. I have read it and can now confirm: I think I was on the right track. If the first volume is about the realms of nonsensical and incoherent truths that our apparently logical reality forces us to confront, at its outer limits, then the second volume makes these same intellectual preoccupations even more explicit—and even more central to its narrative. 

The novel is told in a series of conversations—philosophical dialogues, really—between Alicia Western, the sister of the protagonist of The Passenger, and her therapist. Gone are the hardboiled noir-ish elements of the first novel in the series. Gone too are the passages of omniscient narration that provide the amplest scope for McCarthy's characteristic prose style. But otherwise the novels share an unmistakable kinship that makes them a package. They concern the same characters and many of the same events, for one, and are larded with intertextual references to one another (Alicia at one point calls the counselor a "nosey parker," and he remarks on the oddness of the phrase coming from an American—yet we know that Bobby Western has used the same unusual locution in the previous volume, suggesting she picked it up from her brother). 

The News

Has something terrible happened
Today?
No, not yet.
Will something terrible happen
Tomorrow?
Maybe; maybe not.
Or maybe it
Won't come all at once
But gradually.
Or maybe it happened
Already
And this now
Is it.

Nonsense

 My brain has never allowed me to hold onto a single grand theory of the world for long without undermining it in some fundamental way (there's a reason the title of one of Albert Hirschman's essay collections, A Propensity to Self-Subversion, speaks to me); but there was a stretch of a good few months at least—during my time in divinity school—when logical positivism seemed to me the last word in philosophy. 

I'd read a short essay by Rudolf Carnap, and it seemed to settle the hash of every metaphysician who ever scribbled. There were things that could be thought by human minds. And then there were things that even the believers in metaphysics confessed to be beyond the limits of human understanding and the human perceptual apparatus. Yet the metaphysicians undertook to make truth claims about this realm nonetheless. 

"Just Asking Questions"

 Since spring 2020 or thereabouts, everyone who has looked seriously into the matter has concluded that it is at least possible that COVID-19 escaped from a lab. Everyone also agrees, however, that it is equally possible the virus first made the leap to humans through some intermediate animal host—i.e., that it had a zoonotic origin. We just don't know yet which of these two it was. More than three years into the pandemic, with the formal emergency declarations behind us on both the global and domestic levels (even if the virus itself is still very much with us), we still do not have enough information before us to rule decisively either way.

Given this near-unanimity of opinion on the fundamental question of the virus's origins—namely, that it could have come from a lab leak, or it could have come from an animal spill-over, and we just don't know which it was—why then have we managed to have such vicious fights over the question? Given that everyone agrees, when pressed, that both leading hypotheses are still live options at this point, why have we not managed to simply accept the current state of uncertainty and peaceably wait for more information to arise, before pouncing on one another and digging in our nails? 

Beyond the Hills (2012): A Review

 I didn't set out consciously to write on this blog only about the specifically religious films I see—so the fact that I keep doing so may perhaps be a subconscious vindication of my career choice in my early twenties to go to divinity school. As much as I have strayed from the traditional ministry path since then, it is still the films grappling with religious questions that interest me most. And the latest of these that I've seen—and would now recommend to anyone with a Criterion Channel subscription—is the stunning 2012 Romanian film, Beyond the Hills. 

The film's director, Cristian Mungiu, has made something of a specialty in mining the most notorious aspects of modern Romanian history to create starkly realistic, emotionally gut-punching dramas. In his earlier 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, he portrayed the effects of former dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu's criminalization of abortion in harrowing detail. In 2012's Beyond the Hills, he explores some of the downstream consequences of this same policy—specifically, the coming of age in the country's post-communist era of a generation of unwanted children who were warehoused in Romania's gruesome state-run orphanages during Ceaușescu's rule. 

Cold Comfort Farm: The Ideal Comedy?

 I don't mean to keep droning on about Northrop Frye at every opportunity, but I can't help myself: once one has internalized his anatomy of literary tropes one starts to see them in everything one reads. Stella Gibbons's classic comic novel, Cold Comfort Farm, is no exception—and in my defense it must be said, seldom has there been a novel that was itself more self-consciously about tropes, so one cannot be blamed for bringing Frye in. 

The specific tropes of the now-extinct literary sub-genre that Gibbons was self-consciously parodying—the gothic tragedy of the dilapidated English countryside—are harder to spot than they would have been in her day. The only author she had in mind that I have read at all would be Thomas Hardy. But I must say she does execute some very fine Hardyisms, even if I can't speak to her parodies of the now-forgotten authors in the same genre. Gibbons has perfect pitch for the Hardy-esque purple passage—the shameless resort to the "pathetic fallacy" in the description of the countryside. Gibbons's image of the farmhouse as a "crouching beast ready to spring" recurs multiple times and is successfully mined for parodic mirth. 

The Machine-Wreckers

 Scarcely a day goes by lately without another set of panicky headlines about the new generative AI technology. Will the AI render screenwriting obsolete? Or voice acting? And what is the best way to describe its cataclysmic potential? The metaphors range from Ezra Klein comparing the machine to a demon let loose from another dimension, all the way to the Wall Street Journal calling generative AI the "next iPhone moment"—which likewise speaks well to the technology's disruptive capacities, but which sounds a lot less scary, one must admit (we all just lived through the first "iPhone moment" a few years ago, after all, and while it brought significant changes to many industries, we survived, didn't we?)

One of the few things the prophets can agree on, though, is that the new technology—however apocalyptic or mundane it may ultimately prove to be—will almost certainly alter or displace many current jobs. How exactly it may do so, and whether the displacements will result in incremental productivity gains that are ultimately beneficial, or rather extremely painful mass layoffs, is less clear. 

Twitter Brain

 Browsing through Politico the other day, I came across an account of a recent in-group dust-up among progressive journalists and commentators. The specifics of the controversy are not worth reviewing—they will almost certainly be consigned to the abyss of forgotten news cycles, if they have not been already. But what struck me in reading the piece was an all-too-familiar tone that all the combatants seemed to be using. 

Many of the quotes in the article, after all, were drawn from various commentators' Twitter accounts. And all had the same style: the vituperative outburst; the sense of the exaggerated, world-jeopardizing significance of what they were condemning, and thus of the supreme importance and heroism of their own willingness to speak out against it; the shrill note of denunciation, as if we were all seated in a cell meeting of a secret society, and the speaker had just stood up to thrust an accusing finger at an alleged spy or traitor. I recognized all of this too well, I repeat—because it is the tone I myself routinely adopted, when I was a more regular presence on Twitter. 

Sentimental Education

 My life as a reader proceeds through a series of predictable crises, each leading to the next and then back round again to the start, in a cycle that takes approximately one week to complete. To begin an account of this loop at a necessarily arbitrary point, let us say I am currently reading a book. I may be enjoying it immensely; I may regard it as a fine work of art; but even then, part of my brain will already be thinking about the next book I want to read, and so will start to feel burdened and detained by the one I am reading presently. 

And so, before I have even finished the book at hand, I eclipse my available desk space with a pile of new books to read, as soon as I am done with it. Finally, the glorious day comes. I've finished the current book at a sprint. Now, I am free! I can turn to the next book in the pile! But then, no less suddenly, I am stumped. Where to begin? The impulse that had seemed so irresistible and obvious while I was still finishing the previous book has died. My visions lie in ruins before me. The pile appears immense. All the books need to be read; but none more so than any other, and so I am paralyzed. As Rilke's alter ego Malte Brigge puts it, in the novel that bears his name: "Somehow I had a premonition of what I so often felt at later times: that you did not have a right to open a single book unless you engaged to read them all." (Hulse trans.)

Nothing and Nowhere and Endless

 I recently discovered David Lynch's 2002 video series Rabbits—notable for being both an early web-series (dating from a time when that must have seemed a very novel idea) and one of the director's more compact exercises in the art of the disjointed, the incoherent, and the surreal. Here, the great student of the uncanny—the same man who brought you such indelibly unsettling creations as the chipmunk lady who lives in the radiator—now gives us eight short episodes starring three anthropomorphic rabbits (played by live-action actors wearing fur suits and creepy animal masks). 

Nothing much happens in these episodes, which take place on a sitcom-style set with chiaroscuro lighting (casting tall bunny-ear shadows) and scored with a repetitive musical thrum and train whistle that augment the feeling of the uncanny. The three characters utter various incoherent non sequiturs and walk on and off the set, occasionally descending to the footlights to serenade us with disjointed hums and rambling associative lyrics. Beats occur that would signal—in an ordinary sitcom—some shift in the plot, such as footsteps approaching outside or the ringing of a telephone, but they lead nowhere. A character answers the door, steps out into the hall, then comes right back in again, or else there's no one on the line. 

First Reformed (2017): A Review

First Reformed is among that handful of films so completely apt to my own life that I could scarcely believe when watching it that I had not seen it long before. The film—an existentialist drama about a Protestant minister's descent into despair and political extremism, after losing to suicide a parishioner whom he had attempted to counsel (okay, none of that has happened to me, but keep reading)—is perhaps the most lifelike portrayal ever committed to celluloid of what it's like to be a minister in a declining small-town church in the Northeast United States. And while the film is certainly not without its faults—there are moments of such terrible apparent self-seriousness that even the most straight-faced viewer, utterly committed to the project of watching this as an earnest art film, will be tempted to snicker—it nonetheless addresses itself to the fundamental dilemmas in our time in a way few films do—and which in some sense makes it feel even more timely now, in 2023, than it was when it first came out. 

The film then, whatever else it does, continues to reaffirm my guiding principle as a moviegoer that there is no such thing as a bad Paul Schrader film. Admittedly, I have yet to see the entire oeuvre—maybe there's a dud hidden somewhere in the back catalog—but every Schrader film I've watched has been visually stunning and mysteriously suspenseful. I even admire the ones that many critics sniffed at with greater skepticism, such as The Canyons. I will defend that movie before anyone!