A Commentary: Summer 2024
L’Esprit Literary Review || July 2024
High above Zurich is a zoo. Next to this zoo is a cemetery, kept in immaculate Swiss condition and left open at all hours. During my flight back from Paris last week, with a twelve hour, overnight layover, I stopped by this cemetery to see Joyce’s grave. It felt like something I might have done a decade ago, although this time I got a hotel. I only slept for four hours, but then I wasn’t planning to fly the plane. Anyone who has a chance to go see this cemetery, should. Go in the morning, preferably in mid-June, when the sunrise comes right through a gap in the trees running along the ridge falling back from Joyce’s tomb. Afterward, walk along the park nearby and watch the fog burn off from the hills as it makes its way down towards Zurich, huddled around the lake in the shadows of the snow white Alps. It’s a moment.
Joyce was famously a bit peripatetic, and picked up languages along the way. I suspect, as I come slowly to speaking ever-more-adept French, that this had something to do with his prose. I don’t mean, so much, in the obvious sense; the multi-lingual neologisms or runs of foreign words, but in a more fundamental, compositional one: it seems that Joyce, at play with all these languages, grew to understand the inherent impossibility of using any of them to completely get at lived experience. His fiction works in this way, relying more on aesthetic than mimetic meaning, comfortable and making peace with the duality of words: they can be used to express just about anything, except the deepest, most obvious truth.
The Last Philosopher
Rachel Cusk and the Transgressions of Art
3:AM || June 2024
When Hamlet, the madman, reveals by letters the true nature of his discontent, sensible Polonius hastens to the sovereign, brimming with the news: the Prince is lovesick, of course, and unrequited affections have led to his decay. Polonius, however, never was one for brevity, and vexes the Queen with his loquacity. “More matter with less art,” Gertrude says, annoyed; the regal courtier has not lived up to his own proscriptions. “Madam,” Polonius replies (and here we might imagine his shoulders back, his height drawn up) “I swear I use no art at all.” For it is truth that is sought, in Elsinore, and what could so noble an aim have to do with so base a thing as art?
One of the first things we learn about G, an artist at the elusive center of Rachel Cusk’s latest novel, Parade, is that his revolutionary technique, whereby he paints his scenes and subjects upside down, has led to a corresponding inversion of morality itself, an expression his wife finds to be summative of her experience as woman: “G was not the first man to have described women better than they seemed to be able to describe themselves.” For G, as the book proceeds to explore, art is the path to truth, is indeed truth itself, and its ability to communicate meaning is the prevalent force in a novel that, by its very composition, demonstrates the veracity of this proposition. In our class on Cusk and autofiction, my undergraduates struggle with the sort of textual analysis that is required of literary dissection; they want to know why it matters how a story is told, so long as what it says is interesting, or shocking, or fun (they are, indeed, the purest kind of Structuralists; ones who’ve never heard the term). I cannot, obviously, tell them the answer, I must show them. With this, Wittgenstein and writing workshop traditionalists alike would sympathize. The answer is contained in art itself, as an idea, and the ability it has to make apparent our most fundamental questions, to communicate the unspeakable core of lived experience. Next semester I may replace my entire syllabus with Parade, and wait for the final papers, brimming with understanding, to come in.
A Commentary: Spring 2024
L’Esprit Literary Review || May 2024
In the sky last night there was nothing remarkable to see. There had been rumors, all throughout the day, of the northern lights, timed off by some routine cataclysm of the solar system and creeping beyond its usual range. I went to the lake and found nothing, only a dozen people emerging from the darkness with their phones, lined up along the shore with their backs to the skyline as it shimmered off the water, taking solemn photos of nothing. In there, someplace, must be a metaphor.
Lately I’ve been thinking about criticism. About what it is and, more interestingly, what its not. Or, what is not to be counted as such. Last week I read Rachel Cusk’s new novel, Parade, which I’ll be covering for Chicago Review of Books. It’s a remarkable work, perhaps her best in twenty years, a radical re-orientation of the form (yet again). As anyone reading this probably knows, I spend a great of time writing, reading, and teaching Cusk. What has always struck me about her work is the belief she has in the power of art to do philosophical work, in the conviction that criticism need not trace convention.
Two Pasts for the Novel
The Present Nostalgia of the First-Person in The Great Gatsby and La Rochelle
Eclectica || January 2024
It was unseasonably cool in California this year. There was wind, and there were scarves, and there were strange, heavy things that lurked in the sky and spat water at us. There was grey fog along footpaths and fractured palms on sidewalks, early morning breath in short, stinging bursts and bright mountains lit up in white and blue. Perhaps that’s why I spent my ninth Californian January reading two essay collections written at either end of a tempestuous century. I had the time, and given the authors—Virginia Woolf, Granite and Rainbow, and Zadie Smith, Changing My Mind—all the motivation one could need. And so, as the 405 jammed and the sands of Long Beach ran up towards Ocean Boulevard like the waves, I got to thinking.
At first, I planned to talk about these two collections, both of which are inventive, insightful blends of sophisticated intellectual thought and impressionistic reflections from subtle literary minds, but writing about writing about writing felt a step too far down the rabbit hole, even for me. So instead, I’m taking a page from Woolf and Smith in terms of approach, if not content, and attempting to distill this current moment in my time as a writer, editor, and critic into my recent encounters with two vastly different yet temptingly similar novels. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Michael Nath’s La Rochelle, via their respective narrators, offer two remarkably precise accounts of history, loss, and the stories we tell about our pasts.
A Commentary: Winter 2024
L’Esprit Literary Review || January 2024
What does it mean, to delay? It is an unpopular word these days, if the lexicographers are to be believed: two hundred year lows in usage, for delay. This coheres—if there’s anything the modern world is sure about, we want it now. Two hundred years is also about the time scholars have been preoccupying themselves with the “central question” in Hamlet, re: that delay. Before that, it seems, playgoers were more concerned with the theatrical devices taking up space in the middle of the plot, rather than the vicissitudes of our black prince himself. Apparently if not suitably entertained, Elizabethan audiences were prone to grow restless and impatient, demanding that something interesting happen already. What was it again, that Marx said about history?
Our patient friend comes to us from the Old French, délayer. Today, délayer is a French verb, meaning to thin, to dilute, to mix. It makes sense, after a moment. To delay is to mix the future in with the present, to dilute the now, to thin out a moment until it becomes elongated, stretching back defiantly into the past. Descartes insists that we posit our existence anew at every moment; this becomes somewhat easier with a bit of temporal mélanger.
A Commentary: Fall 2023
L’Esprit Literary Review || November 2023
‘No art is mad,’ Roland Barthes says in Camera Lucida (or something like it; apologia to our readers for my only consulting the English), because it is tame. When we perceive the representation of the thing, qua representation, and not the thing itself—this is art, and it is not madness. This, it seems to me, is dubious. There could be no art without madness, for it requires of its creator some special torment through which the world is refracted and wants out. The ordinary manner of seeing life is to not turn it into art; it is instead to live it, or approximate what it might look like to do so. If the world were composed solely of artists, they would have nothing to create.
12 Rue de l’Odéon
L’Esprit Literary Review || June 2023
It’s an odd thing, memory. It so very rarely does what we’d like, or expect. One takes a trip, sees the Sights To See, does the Things To Do, and then, back home in the ordinary run of life, it’s the cafe with the gregarious waiter, the interchange with the flashing lights, the subway car and the hotel clerk that are remembered. Of course those big events are there, to be recalled with a bit of effort and the endless albums of clouded photos, but the moments that simply arise in the mind, unaided and uninhabited, are the small ones, the ones that were unexpected and unplanned—the, in a word, ordinary.
‘An ordinary mind on an ordinary day’—this is what Virginia Woolf, in that ruthless disquisition “Modern Fiction”, calls for the novel to encapsulate. What might that mean? What is the ordinary day, the ‘stuff of life’? For Woolf it’s everything—the banality and the memory, the profound and the forgotten. Clarissa Dalloway doesn’t remember some charged sequence of sweeping Victorian resonance, she remembers Sally Seton running through an upstairs hall, a nothing moment on endless loop in her mind—the little things. This seems to be how our minds work in general, and is part of what makes modernist literature so compelling and fascinating; beyond the innovation in technique and narrative mode, it is the fixture on the quotidian reality, the day-to-day ephemera that earlier (and later) novelists dismiss out of hand. With the right perspective, an understating of how to harness the awesome power of existence, it becomes art. For when one truly looks back on something, tries to recall a stretch of life and how it was, more often than not we find it is the trivialities that are preserved, the nothingness that makes up meaning.
A Commentary: Summer 2023
L’Esprit Literary Review
To change is to know, probably someone has said, at some point. To leave a thing behind—a place, a time, a self—and go off and find some other thing, a replacement or revision or reverse, this is the way life seems to proceed, with or without our understanding or our will. It happens overtly and covertly, gradually and all at once, irrevocably and only for a little while. But it is inexorable, change, and just as soon as we recapture our footing, then again does the ground begin to shake.
A Commentary: Spring 2023
L’Esprit Literary Review
Lately, I’ve been thinking about point of view. This isn’t so unusual a situation, I suppose, but specifically in the context of the challenge and power of a certain type of fiction, and of art, and when it comes across that ill-defined and ill-refined creature we call the marketplace. “POV” is a term often used in casual discussions of writing, from elementary school all the way to Lit Hub, and seems to defy easy, or standard, definition. Point of view, as the engine of literary fiction, is the angle from which a narration views a given perspective—but this is A Commentary, not an essay (more of those in the pages beyond). What is the point? That, much like “stream of consciousness” (about which I will refrain from discussion, and won’t dive into how strangely that Calypso phrase often is used or how—), POV is a term found in both the most general, lighthearted chats on literature and in the most (self-)serious, scholarly essays on criticism and theory. In short, it is a meeting place where both the marketers and the rogues may be found. What else might we find in so ominous a locale?
L’Année et L’Heure
Narrative Distance and First-Person Memory in G. B. Edwards’ The Book of Ebenezer Le Page and J. L. Carr’s A Month in The Country
West Trade Review || April 2023
There is, in our brief lease of the mortal coil, much to be said for those experiences that demand to be lived again. After all, to give time to one thing is to irrevocably not give it to something else—this is what the economists call opportunity cost, that lurking demon of sense and sensibility. And so, when we redo, return, or, yes, reread, it is a sure sign of the power and the magnetism of the thing itself—or, at least, its memory. For the literary minded, beset on all sides by TBR lists and ‘haven’t you read this yet’, a never-ending assault of recommendation and requirement, it is a special book indeed that warrants a return trip. But it is a rewarding endeavor for those who venture it. There is an alchemy to rereading a novel, a change—wrought by time, experience, knowledge, the vast phenomenological unknown—that results in a new experience of a familiar place. In this way, like so much else in art, fiction mirrors life.
Two novels, each of them more than worthy of rereading, approach this problem of memory in different ways, carving distinct routes through that overcrowded wood of the first-person, that nonetheless lead to a similar destination. J. L. Carr’s A Month in the Country (1980) and G. B. Edwards’ The Book of Ebenezer Le Page (1981)feature two opposing narrative responses to time—compression in one, expansion in the other—before eventually weaving back towards each other: a meeting place of memory and time, of controlled, precise first-person narration, and the way in which the stories we tell ourselves, about those people we used to be, tucked away behind the shroud of life, expand and contract in their proximity to something like the truth.
A Commentary: Winter 2023
L’Esprit Literary Review
Next month is the one-year anniversary of L’Esprit, conceived (of) in a Parisian bar hard up against the Seine (I think it was Pub Saint-Michel) in November and born online, as so much is these days, in February. It’s been an incredible year, and when we overuse excited here and on social media, it’s for good reason. To go from a third-beer idea in the Paris rain to a real living journal, one with contributors and readers and all that stuff of life, has been a wild, extraordinary thing. We’ve so far put out two full issues and a commemorative feature, with the last two, including Issue One, coming entirely from general submissions. We’ve got Issue Two ready to go, a start on Issue Three, and more already lined up as well. Most importantly, we have an expanding network of contributors, readers, and supporters who share our passion for exploring the boundaries of fiction, for refusing convention at the expense of truth, for always advancing the cause of fearless writing. That, one might say, is truly hors de prix.
A Ferocious Simplicity
Language and Legacy in Renata Adler’s Speedboat and Pitch Dark
Another Chicago Magazine || November 2022
There is an interesting thing that begins to happen if one spends enough time working at a particular endeavor: an inability to see. The fresh eyes of the novice eventually give way to the jaded, if perspicacious, vision of the proficient. For the writer, especially the novelist, this phenomenon is both goal and curse. It is, of course, necessary for a young writer of fiction to develop her skills, her understanding of craft, theory, and form, and to be able to read more deeply, to then incorporate what she has learned into her own work. However, like all great gifts, there is a price that comes with this increase in knowledge: the price of astonishment. The wonder of fiction, that amazement that first lit the spark—once so powerful because it was inexplicable—becomes dulled with understanding and ability. Once one can perform the tricks themselves, the magic is no longer extraordinary.
A Commentary: Fall 2022
L’Esprit Literary Review
Today marks Armistice Day, 104 years since the cessation of fighting on the Western Front. The First World War, among the most cataclysmic and shocking events in human history, left profound scars on the society it left behind. The Modernist movement—in literature and beyond—and the works it produced represent an emergence of this convulsion into a radically different method of artistic expression and investigation. The scope and breadth of the disaster can be seen in the sheer revolutionary scale of Modernist art; one does not need a history degree to appreciate in some way the impact of the First World War; one needs simply to read Charles Dickens followed by Virginia Woolf.
Woolf was perhaps the writer most impacted by the war; surely it is her work that, at least among the novelists, comments the most directly upon it. The striking of Big Ben that rhythmically punctuates Mrs. Dalloway recalls to mind the apocalyptic artillery barrages of The Somme and Ypres; the ghostly interlude of To The Lighthouse is a silent reflection on the price demanded by war; the narrative vacuum that forms the core of Jacob’s Room is an elegiac lament to the dead; an aspirational portrait of the sunlit English uplands is one of Woolf’s most arresting moments towards the end of The Years. Then, of course, there is Septimus Smith, the most tragic of Woolf’s characters, who embodies the terrible burden of survival.
We’ll To The Woods Once More
Emily Hall’s The Longcut and the Dujardin Problem of Consciousness in First-Person Narration
L’Esprit Literary Review || June 2022
As with all art forms, there are to be found in fiction various movements, lineages, schools, questions, and, indeed, problems. For those who, with any degree of seriousness, study, consume, and attempt literature, there is an infinite supply of specific areas of investigation, turns within turns, subterranean Undergrounds of rabbit holes. One such niche that must be of particular interest to at least several people is that which can be called the Dujardin Problem, a particular set of ontological difficulties and occurrences that arise in specific types of first-person narration. Taking its name from a short, obscure novel published nearly one hundred and fifty years ago and promptly forgotten, this phenomenon is a strange and vexing branch off the point-of-view family tree.
A Loose Collection of Beautiful Things
The Ferocious Ambition of The Swank Hotel (A Conversation with Lucy Corin)
West Trade Review || October 2021
D.W. White: One thing that I really thought was interesting about this book is how it intersects with this emerging trend in fiction right now to discuss the Great Recession, a literary movement that is fairly nascent. There’s Elizabeth Gonzalez James’ Mona at Sea, which came out earlier this year, and was great. And there’re others. But your book, of course, is set in the Great Recession and deals with it, but also it’s kind of a little bit of a cosmic background. I think it works really well as a temporal setting, but I think also this book and what it’s concerned about fundamentally could be set anytime in recent America. So what was the process, what was the decision-making behind that temporal location, and what did it allow you to do, setting the book when you did?
Lucy Corin: For me, writing a book is about feeling out the resonances between the thing that is occupying me overall and really particular individual daily experiences and wondering about where those resonances come from. In story writing, it’s pretty common to go into the psychological history of a character to try to connect those things. You find the thing in their background that helps explain the rest of the stuff the story’s about. Then there’s another way that says that we’re kind of symptoms of our surroundings. But in isolation, they both feel unsatisfactory, and a lot of writing this book was tracing those unsatisfactory explanations. The book starts with tracking these characters and what happens to them, but then I want to include in the book that hovering question around trauma, which is like, where does this come from? You feel like it comes from inside or it comes from outside, and what is that relationship, what does it feel like when the truth is both.
dwhitethewriter 