Parisian Literary Salon

Parisian Literary Salon Newsletter 20 October 2008
1. November/December Thursday evening & Tuesday day Salon: Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
2. Salon Details & book notes
3. Reflections & a poem… for free!!

1. Invisible Man Salons
Although we had talked about studying King Lear in this series, the confluence of history and opportunity made Ellison’s masterpiece a more obvious choice. The Thursday evening Salon group just finished our intensive study of The Sound and the Fury- the issues around race and division between selves was part of this large conversation. With the historic possibility of a black man being elected as president of the United States, an examination of race as played out in an epic work offers an objective platform for consideration of this highly charged and difficult subject. Invisible Man is not simply about race, of course, here is a brief description of the text and selection of commentary from Saul Bellow. The Owl Bookstore in Kentish Town Road has copies of the recommended edition- please mention that you are purchasing for the ‘Toby Brothers book club’ to receive your discount.
2. Salon Details & book notes

SALON DETAILS
The November Salons will commence the week of November 3rd. As of today, there is room for three participants in the Thursday evening Salon; registration is open for the day time Salon. For registration details, please send me an email and I will confirm your place once I have received your deposit of 25£ (this is not necessary for those who have previously done a Salon). If you are interested in the day-time Salon, please include your available times and I will confirm meeting times as soon as I have enough participants. Reading schedule and opening notes will be sent as soon as you have registered.
Thursday evening Salon dates (7:45-9:45 PM): 06.11, 13.11, 20.11, 27.11, 4.12
Tuesday day-time Salon dates (either 11 AM -1 PM or 2PM to 4 PM): 04.11, 11.11, 18.11, 25.11, 2.12.
BOOK NOTES
Invisible Man - by Ralph Ellison.
I consider this to be one of the greatest works of American Literature. The unnamed protagonist’s search for identity in a world that will not see him gives us as readers an opportunity to try and understand the psychological devastation of racism in its subtle as well as its violent forms as well as to consider how each of us participates in the fate of all humanity. Ellison weaves in themes and images from Virgil, Dante, Emerson, and TS Eliot while also using the structure and transcendence of Jazz to create a work that haunts and stirs to the core of our experience.

From Saul Bellow’s essay:
“Man Underground”
Review of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
by Saul Bellow
published in Commentary (June 1952)

It is commonly felt that there is no strength to match the strength of
those powers which attack and cripple modern mankind. And this feeling
is, for the reader of modern fiction, all too often confirmed when he
approaches a new book. He is prepared, skeptically, to find what he
has found before, namely, that family and class, university, fashion,
the giants of publicity and manufacture, have had a larger share in
the creation of someone called a writer than truth or imagination that
Bendix and Studebaker and the nylon division of Du Pont, and the
University of Chicago, or Columbia or Harvard or Kenyon College, have
once more proved mightier than the single soul of an individual; to
find that one more lightly manned position has been taken. But what a
great thing it is when a brilliant individual victory occurs, like Mr.
Ellison’s, proving that a truly heroic quality can exist among our
contemporaries. People too thoroughly determined and our institutions
by their size and force too thoroughly determine can’t approach this
quality. That can only be done by those who resist the heavy
influences and make their own synthesis out of the vast mass of
phenomena, the seething, swarming body of appearances, facts, and
details. From this harassment and threatened dissolution by details, a
writer tries to rescue what is important. Even when he is most bitter,
he makes by his tone a declaration of values and he says, in effect:
There is something nevertheless that a man may hope to be. This tone,
in the best pages of Invisible Man, those pages, for instance, in
which an incestuous Negro farmer tells his tale to a white New England
philanthropist, comes through very powerfully; it is tragi-comic,
poetic, the tone of the very strongest sort of creative intelligence.
In a time of specialized intelligences, modern imaginative writers
make the effort to maintain themselves as unspecialists, and their
quest is for a true middle-of-consciousness for everyone. What
language is it that we can all speak, and what is it that we can all
recognize, burn at, weep over, what is the stature we can without
exaggeration claim for ourselves; what is the main address of
consciousness?

I was keenly aware, as I read this book, of a very significant kind of
independence in the writing. For there is a way for Negro novelists to
go at their problems, just as there are Jewish or Italian ways. Mr.
Ellison has not adopted a minority tone. If he had done so, he would
have failed to establish a true middle-of-consciousness for everyone.
3. Reflections & a poem… for free!!

How did we get to the end of October? The autumn colors- even in London as it slips and stumbles into winter- can so distract me that suddenly I awake to the rushing sound of holidays approaching- in spite of tumbling economies, impending elections and continuing carnage in Iraq - and I am amazed.
Perhaps a poem…

Try to Praise the Mutilated World
By Adam Zagajewski
Translated by Clare Cavanagh

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June’s long days,
And wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
The abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
One of them had a long trip ahead of it,
While salty oblivion awaited others.
You’ve seen the refugees heading nowhere,
You’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
In a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in the autumn
And leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.
Praise the mutilated world
And the gray feather a thrush lost,
And the gentle light that strays and vanishes
And returns.

This poem reminds me- in delicate, careful language, how fragile the balance between what is wonderful and what is horrific- and how both are inexorable woven together. This will come as no surprise to those who just finished our immersion in Sound & The Fury. I am still grappling with the question as to why study tragedy when for many it is to escape the violent world that we turn to literature. But Faulkner’s evocation of love amidst family ruins gives a shard of light- and I pursue that. As much as I worry about the coming US election results and the crumbling economy, a part of me needs confirmation of my continuing life- a swim in a chilly lake, a pungent glass of wine, tickling my daughter- not to disregard world events but to make some room in the joy of life to hold what is horrible, indigestible.
The poem also commands and implores (“You must praise…Try to … You should…”) which I think recognizes the difficulty of the task- how hard it is to be thankful of what we want to reject, what causes us despair. Within the poem as well is necessity to return to what gives us balm- “remember the moments when we were together…” the small sensory experiences that make up a life and make us whole in the presence of a ‘mutilated world’. What do you think?