Mind the Gap

Below is a quote from p. 324 of my edition of Wings of the Dove. For my readers (all two of you...hi Bob, hi Myrna!), I apologize for being as stuck as I have been on Henry James, thereby neglecting all those scintillating articles I'd planned to write on Thousand Island dressing and cribbage. The Wings of the Dove is just so....domineering. Really it's more like a landscape than a novel: I'm hiking it, and I keep stopping to look at this interesting rock, or that noisy streamlet. Plus my view keeps changing every twenty steps or so, so that I can never quite get the full sense of the place.

OK, so interesting rock #346:

"That produced a relation which required a name of its own, an intimacy of consciousness in truth for each- an intimacy of eye, of ear, of general sensibility, of everything but tongue."

I like this quote. It also makes me squirm a little. I think both reactions are rooted in the way the passage points up the gap -sometimes narrow, sometimes wide- between what you think and what you say.

Backing up a little, I once took an introductory linguistics course in which either the professor or the textbook -both were vaguely dusty- kept hammering home the assertion that thoughts and words were distinct. This word/thought separation is the gateway drug for Chomskian linguistics: if your thoughts presage your words, then they're free to be fed into a neat little grammar machine and packaged for display.

For a long time, this assertion irritated me. This was probably because it was so alien to my own experience of consciousness (ugh, I just used the phrase "experience of consciousness." That dies here) which pretty much amounted to a lot of words rattling around in my skull. Over the years, though, I've reconsidered. Just because a thought is couched in words doesn't mean it's not a thought. After all, there's a difference between the sentences in my head and the ones that come out of my mouth.

Anyway, the more I tromp through The Wings of the Dove, the more convinced I am that the heart of the novel beats in that flexible space between what's thought and what's said. No one in James's world says what they mean; all social interaction is an intricate campaign wherein words are marshaled, vetted, and deployed in the service of intention. Moreover, the "intimacy....of everything but tongue" described by James seems to be most characters' social ideal: interaction is considered "beautiful" when full communication is achieved using only a few well-chosen (and often superficially irrelevant) words.

In short, James likes his gap wide. In this, he's atypical for an American. We're a nation, after all, that likes its politicians and cultural leaders straightforward and none too smart. Americans tend to distrust people with large gaps, deeming them calculating, devious, or worse. Small-gap folks, with their more immediate transfer of thought to mouth, are more reassuring.

I have mixed feelings. Although I'm more than a little alarmed at the monstrosity our small-gap bias has wrought in the voting booth, large-gap people do have a tendency to make me nervous. If I'm honest with myself, I'd guess that this is because, as a person with a larger gap than I'd like, I know just how much can fall into the crevice between what you think and what you say. Not that large-gap folks can't be talkers; it's just that there's always room for one or more operations between impulse and act, thought and word. Large gaps mean adulteration, modification, guile.

At the same time, though, there's a tricky beauty to it, some quality that James, with his tongueless intimacy, was trying to describe. You see the crown of the tree but not the roots; the fruit but not the vine. You see only part of something and so you look closer, imagine deeper, think long...trip and fall headfirst over the interesting rock. Ah, well.

Check Please

There was an article in the Style section of the NYT today (hi my name is Anne and I read the Style section before I read the Week in Review) about life lists. Apparently, lots of people like to make checklists of the things they want to accomplish before they die. I confess to occasionally contemplating thinking about starting to begin to make such a list, sometimes partly on alternate Tuesdays.

That I never actually set pen to paper speaks in part to the amazing attention-grabbing power of just about everything else, but also to the fact that life goals are so alarmingly....big. Sure I could inscribe my desire to write a novel or contribute to society or do unmentionable things to Jeff Goldblum (please note that the above sample list should not in any way be construed as remotely resembling my own), but if I do, I've set myself up for a veritable Sophie's Choice. Either I have to expend enormous (and possible futile) effort working toward my goals, or I'm a failure. Just thinking about it makes me tired.

Fortunately, I've repaired to the brainmobile and come up with the following handy solution. I'm going to make a life list, but rather than large, meaningful, sharp-toothed goals, I will select small, amiable goals of the type it would be difficult not to accomplish in the course of oh, say, walking around.

To wit, Anne's life list:

1) Take a nap
2) Eat cheese
3) Eat a number of apricot cream-cheese danishes greater than, but not limited to, three
4) Nap number two
5) Smile at kittens

All in all, I think this should be -barely- manageable. Readers, please keep me in your thoughts and prayers as I embark on this difficult journey.

Split my Infinitive, Captain

I've been trying to cut back on shame lately, so I'll just come right out and confess that between the ages of 12 and 14, I was a huge fan of Star Trek TNG. I think in part this was because TNG's vision of the future is so comforting: humankind really has bettered itself, and people are out there trying to do good. Whereas at 13, my vision of the future pretty much amounted to a vague hope I'd make it out of middle school.

In TNG, everyone HAS made it out of middle school (more or less), and adulthood is one big holodeck. Of course, there are problems. Riker's an ass, for one. Also everyone has to wear spandex. And then there's the borg.

The borg (is? are? The confusion between singularity and plurality was really the point, I think) a hive-mind species that incorporates stray humans into itself. I sort of suspect the borg was supposed to be code for Socialism run amok: they even pilot square grey spaceships, as if to echo Soviet-era design.

But that's neither here nor there. The point is that, although I don't think about the borg very often (the world just seems to be filled with more gripping thing to think about, like cheese), I did today. I was driving around in the mid-sized Midwestern city to which I have to move in two months. It's the kind of city that consists almost entirely of sprawl. One strip mall flows into another strip mall, metastasizing out and out and out until you hit the bulldozers on the edge of town. There are places to work, places to park, and places to buy.

I was watching the traffic inch forward and suddenly I thought: all these people think this is life. The working, the driving, the buying: they think this is life.

Because it is. For the family in the Saturn and the woman in the Ford and the guy picking his nose in the Escalade, every minute of it is real, live, technicolor life. How long before I'll think so, too?

I'm taking bets.

Burning

There are some questions I carry around with me all day, kind of like a lumpy purse. There's Why am I so much colder than everyone else all the time? There's Now that Karl Rove has resigned, who's operating Bush's neuroanatomy? And then there's the eternal Celery: why?

Lately, though, my oldies but goodies have been shoved aside to make room for a new and pressing query. Lately all I have the strength to wonder is: What's the point of Susan Stringham?

Susan Stringham, for those of you who don't operate my neuroanatomy, is a peripheral character in Henry James' The Wings of the Dove. (This is a book club, right? I thought this was a book club.) I'm smack in the middle of the novel right now, and the three main characters are, in turn, smack in the middle of their nasty little machinatory muddle. Some of them are busy embodying passivity, some of them are busy embodying activity, and some of them are busy embodying passivity in the service of activity. And in the midst of it all, poor little Susan Stringham, nee Shepard, is busy embodying, as far as I can make out, squat.

Other peripheral characters serve as foils or perform instrumental plot functions. Other peripheral characters -Mrs. Lowder, Lord Mark- have substance, or, at the very least, style. What has Susan got? A one-paragraph, snooze-worthy backstory, a little bit of hand-wringing, a lot of zero.

As a result, she's all I think about. Is James just going to leave her dangling there? Or is she going to be like gasoline: inert until tossed on the fire? I confess I can't see it, but if Susan Stringham does ignite a blaze, I'll be the more delighted for my blindness.

Striped German, Tommy Toe

One of the biggest disappointments of adulthood is that you don't really get to squish anything anymore. You come of age, and suddenly, rather than flattening play-doh, you're supposed to be doing useful things with your hands. Pulling the voting lever and flipping through Hustler are in; societally-sanctioned squishing is out.

That's why I was so excited to see this recipe (blithely poached from Melinda Clark) for pan con tomate (NYT, 8/22).

4 thick slices country-style bread, toasted
1 garlic clove, halved
extra virgin olive oil
coarse sea salt
1 large tomato, halved crosswise

Rub bread with garlic halves. Drizzle slices with oil and sprinkle with salt. Rub tomato cut side down on toasted bread, GENEROUSLY SQUEEZING INSIDES OUT as you go. More salt. Eat.

Okay, so maybe I did some judicious editing. But how often do you get a free pass to generously squeeze the insides out of something? That deserves emphasis! And second helpings. Bye now.

p. 181

So last night I misread "a permission of which he took, she could feel, both immense and unconscious advantage" as "a persimmon of which he took, she could feel, both immense and unconscious advantage" and was promptly incapacitated with laughter. Sometimes I feel like the universe's cheap date.

Wings

The first thing I did after buying a plane ticket to Europe the summer after my super-senior year in college was to launch my search for the perfect paperback. It needed to be long -I was going to be gone for close to a month- and light -I was only carrying a backpack. It needed to be interesting enough for me to bear reading, but not so riveting that I'd be tempted to hole up in the hostel with it and not actually, well, travel.

I settled on a pocket classics edition of Henry James's Portrait of a Lady. And it was, for that trip, exactly right. She was traveling; I was traveling. She was an American in Europe; so was I. The plot proceeded at a stately pace- and so did the trains.

Now I'm reading James again, except this time I'm stationary. James's prose is the same: dense, marvelously circuitous, forever toying with some feeling a fingersbreadth away But I've altered, or at least my physical surroundings have, and there is something about reading peripatetically that's different from reading at home.

Well, you ask, so what?

Let's look at it from another angle. Musicians have long considered not only the work of art itself, but a person's experience of it. That's what's at the root of the vogue for "authentic" performances -that is to say, performances which, for the listener, hew as closely as possible to either a) the intention of the composer or b) the experience of an audience member at the time of composition. (There's a whole delightful war in there, but I'll leave it be.)

Yet, no similar impulse towards "authentic" experience has even been breathed of for reading. This either points up the ridiculousness of the whole "authenticity" enterprise, or raises an interesting set of questions. (Or both.) To what extent is reading a "performance?" Is the reader's role that of performer, audience, or some combination thereof? Did James have a set of "intentions" or expectations for what his readers would experience, and if so, to what extent do they matter? What about the norms (semantic, syntactic, societal) of James's time, and the way these shaped the book's initial readings?

Among the most salient features, for me, of James's writing is its density. The average syntactic complexity of James's constructions is noticeably higher than the average syntactic complexity of the constructions of modern authors. As a modern reader, I'm forced to slow down and pay close attention to the unraveling of every sentence. If I'd grown up reading James and his contemporaries, though, I might breeze through every tangled clause. Instead of slow and dreamlike, James's books might seem sharp and fast-paced.

Then again, maybe not.