I did more reading than writing this year—at least, so I’m tempted to say; but as I realize mid-sentence, I don’t know what that means. What common metric could make sense of the comparison? Still, it has the ring of truth.
It was a good year, too, in that I read a lot of things I loved. In the past, I’ve picked two or three to recommend. This year, I wrote about a dozen brilliant books:
And there were more I should have written about, but didn’t:
Enid Welsford, The Fool: His Social and Literary History—a classic chronicle of fools, jesters, and buffoons from ancient Greece and Rome through their demise in the 18th century, stand-ups before stand-up comedy:
The buffoon is neither the unconscious fool, nor the conscious artist who portrays him; he is the conscious fool who shows himself up, chiefly for gain, but occasionally at least for the mere love of folly. The psychological situation is at times curiously subtle. … For genuine buffoonery is not synonymous with acting. The buffoon gives most pleasure, by being most himself. … part at least of the amusement sprang from the belief (however erroneous) that his tales were true…
Daniel Wickberg, The Senses of Humor—a cultural history of “humour” from the the theory of four humours to the “sense of humour” as a cardinal virtue:
By making humor a term of both sympathy and laughter, modern culture reinvented the longstanding eccentricity of characterological humor as ‘incongruity,’ collapsed the distance between object and subject by allowing for the possibility of nonderisive laughter with rather than at another person, and placed a value on the altogether novel capacity of the individual to laugh at himself.
Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World—a philosophical satire? the first science fiction? an unpredictable, tedious, thrilling, mind- and genre-bending work by a genius autodidact in the 17th century.
Mark Haber, Saint Sebastian’s Abyss—a profound comic novel that both mocks and celebrates the transcendent power of art.
Peter Mendelsund, Exhibitionist—1 Journal, 1 Depression, 100 Paintings.
This year, I also read Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, in a reading group at MIT, along with a host of essays written for its centenary—but for the life of me could not see why the book has been revered as a philosophical novel.
I was told: it’s a book about the question of engagement or retreat in times of world-historical chaos. But while I see the retreat, the world-historical chaos goes unmentioned till the very end of a very long book; the first two-thirds are about sexual obsession and repression, themes that interest me much less.
I was told: it’s the paradigmatic novel of ideas. But the ideas expressed by characters in the novel are largely sophomoric and while that’s compatible with extra-diegetic depth, the going interpretation—at least, Mann’s own—is that the book’s philosophy is found
in the chapter called ‘Snow,’ where Hans Castorp, lost on the perilous heights, dreams his dream of humanity. … It is the idea of the human being, the conception of a future humanity that has passed through and survived the profoundest knowledge of disease and death.
Castorp dreams of a world in which Love, not Reason or Death, is sovereign—but the dream is sophomoric, too. And if Mann had not directly asserted otherwise, I would assume it was satirized in the ludicrous charisma of Mynheer Peeperkorn—who shows up late, extols the power of love, and kills himself, with comic abruptness—not exalted as the Holy Grail.
Mann’s self-analysis begins with “a very arrogant request that [his book] be read not once but twice,” though he concedes that the request is “not to be heeded … if one has been bored at the first reading.” If you can recommend an essay that will save me a second journey up The Magic Mountain, I would welcome it!
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