Unfinished Business

Lately, I’ve found myself thinking about this large body of work written by Americans for whom Jewishness was central, and wondering how well it actually has transformed testament into a literature that will last. What, after all, can the ultimate achievement be of a body of prose riddled through with an anxiety that is nonstop complaint, an irony that barely masks supplication, and the kind of satire that deprives all but the narrator of empathy? How deep can it go, how far can it reach, how long endure

Anomie and desire: a specialty in French literature that can be traced back at least as far as the 1792 publication of Les Liasons Dangereuses and carried forward at least as far as the mid-twentieth-century work of Marguerite Duras. For, after all, what is the work of Marguerite Duras if not an ongoing study of desire linked intimately to self-estrangement? With one important complication: as Duras is writing well into the Freudian century, it was impossible for her to not trace the origins of emotional disconnect to the family romance gone viciously wrong.

Much as she wishes to be “free,” and much as she associates freedom with work, Renée’s resolve is repeatedly undermined by her conflicted desire for love. Struggle as she may, Colette is saying, a woman is always torn between the longing for independence and the even greater longing for passion. This is the dilemma that commands Renée’s real attention. Love has come, and love has gone: she knows its pleasures and its pains inside out. Should it come again, she muses repeatedly, will she give in to the siren song or will she resist it? She thinks about the emotional slavery that accompanies desire: the longings, the anxieties, the potential for humiliation. Still, the lure is powerful. The war within provides the excitement of transgression.

Because the question of whether she is to be an independent working woman or a woman given over to Love torments her. In this voice we found a glamorous loneliness, the kind we fantasized as emblematic of the contemporary woman who could throw off the despair of an unhappy marriage, but would then find that along with freedom from the conventions came the potential for another kind of despair, the despair

His metaphor—the repression of the erotic—was, in fact, to become the wedge that modernism used to pry open the uncharted territory of human consciousness

Lawrence was writing at the beginning of the Freudian century, the time when Western culture was on the verge of validating his own inner torment

In literature one does that by naming the crime against nature without pity or caution or euphemism; renouncing in no uncertain terms, as W. H. Auden had it, “the laziness or fear which makes people prefer second-hand experience to the shock of looking and listening for themselves.”

is passages like these two that mark the modernity of the book. Modernity was pushing all writers to put on the page the entire truth of whatever it was the writer found festering in the human psyche: not only sorrow and disorder, but sadism, alienation, and the brevity of passion

In the ideal life, it was felt—the educated life, the brave life, the life out in the larger world—that love would not only be pursued, it would be achieved; and once achieved transform existence; create a rich, deep, textured prose out of the inarticulate reports of inner life we daily passed on to one another.

the protagonist in thrall to forces beyond his or her control. And when I write I still hope to put my readers behind my eyes, experience the subject as I have experienced it, feel it viscerally as I have felt it. What follows is a collection of pieces written in appreciation of the literary enterprise as I have encountered it through the reading and re-reading of books that made me feel anew all of the above.