The Ellstrom Award for Literature—2008

Dear World of Literature,

I have been thinking about the 2008 non-cash, no notoriety award that is the Ellstrom Award for Literature. Named after JJ Ellstrom, see picture below, I feel compelled to make the right decision, if for no other reason than that I named the thing for my grandfather.



As I pointed out several days ago, I am considering a stiff field of books. I was quite impressed by them all. Think about Percy's Last Gentleman. It contains, to my way of thinking one of the greatest scenes in literature. The last 5th of the book is pretty spectacular. However, it also contains some skewed thinking, including subtle views of women and blacks that are hurdles I can't get over when naming my winner. Sorry Walker. (I'll write.)

Then, how about that book, Sand Child, by Tahar Ben Jelloun. It stuck in my mind for weeks. I still haven't figured it out. And that is the problem. A little too obscure. Great, but obscure. Perhaps I will read this book again and then I can consider it again next year.

Then there is that great book by Richard Wright, Black Boy and American Hunger. I think Wright painted an amazing self portrait on top of a canvas filled with revelations of culture and politics. I am not sure why this book didn't rise to the top of my list. It just didn't, perhaps writing style.

The last two books are about equal in my esteem. Vladimir Nabakov created two amazing characters in his book, Lolita. This work was not an easy one for me to even want to read. The subject matter seemed too much for me--a man molesting a child over and over again. Yet, Nabakov handled the subject matter so sensitively, delicately, completely, yet not more than necessary, that it is hard to say the book was anything but masterful. One would expect to come out on the other side of such a book either desensitized or perhaps hating Humbert Humbert, the man who stole Lolita's childhood. Yet the reader is not forced to become hardened, nor are they left without empathy for Humbert. And because of that we are able to see ourselves better, understand our own obsessions, and perhaps be more compassionate toward those who we normally would neither see nor value. This book is truly one of the classics of twentieth century writing.

But it is The Plague by Albert Camus that wins the 2008 Ellstrom Award for Literature.

JJ Ellstrom and Albert Camus, whose book The Plague won the 2008 Ellstrom Award

Why, this book, you ask? I think it is that it faces death and suffering with grace, courage, and compassion, and hope. It is not an easy book, but it is a good one. And it is the one I chose.


Congratulations Albert and The Plague. Congratulations World.

brd

Lost in the Cosmos

Dear Walker Percy,

The Wall Street Journal (says the book jacket of the edition of Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book that I am reading) was quoted as proposing that this book is “one of Percy’s best books.” Of course who are we to believe the strange quotations that camp out on the frontispieces and such of paperbacks? One of the best of your books? Well, maybe if they mean one of the top twelve of your books. How many books did you write?

I’m not sure if it’s a very good book. It’s a good title. I feel lost in the cosmos half the time, don’t you? And what a hope it raises. This could be the last self-help book I may ever need. A-a-ah!

But it rambles about with your tongue in its cheek, not really trying to be helpful at all. I’m wondering though, what were you trying to talk about, really? Certainly it is a repetition of material found in your other books. You talk about knowing or not knowing ourselves, transcendence, sex, religion, the uniqueness of humans and human language, being screwed up, being alone and lonely, and how we are desperately seeking others and ourselves, or perhaps desperately trying not to seek ourselves.

It is interesting that while talking with others about this non-fiction book, which, hypothetically is not subject to the veil that covers fiction, we constantly looked to your fiction for disclosure of the words of this text. When we talked about the “unformulability” of ourselves, we looked to Will Barrett in The Last Gentleman. When we consider sex and the sexual eroticism that permeates contemporary life, we look to Lancelot.

But there is much to be considered in this book, and I did appreciate it. The one thing it confirms for me is an idea that I feared might be true, the little helpful concept that you dropped into my lap and that I will doubtless forget in my own hopeful treks through the universe, is that I cannot know myself. As you mused, “Why it is possible to learn more in ten minutes about the Crab Nebula in Taurus, which is 6,000 light-years away, than you presently know about yourself, even though you’ve been stuck with yourself all your life.” Your targeted example is that of the horoscope reader who finds accidentally that she has read the entry for Aries when really seeking for Gemini. Before realizing her mistake, the reader says, “Hm, quite true.” Then having identified the proper column of information, she likewise nods and agrees, “I’m like that.”

Shall we ever come to know ourselves, if you are correct in identifying that we are wandering about the Cosmos like ghosts of ourselves without any idea what we are really like? (Might we, perhaps, rely on the imaging that only a friend in community can provide?) Or as Brock Eide points out, you are fond of quoting Kierkegaard…something like, “The self can only know itself as it stands transparently before God.” Perhaps that is the apparitional way we can come to know ourselves.

A friend who blogs at Pretty Fakes, talks about the temptations of Halloween, the one day in which we are permitted to openly live our masked lives. But maybe it is not a masked life we are living. Maybe we are simply living who we might be, unable to know, but taking a stab at it. Today, I am Gemini. Tomorrow Capricorn. You say in Love in the Ruins, when “a person has so abstracted himself from himself and from the world around him, seeing things as theories and himself as a shadow. . . he cannot, so to speak, reenter the lovely ordinary world. Instead he orbits the earth and himself. Such a person, and there are millions, is destined to haunt the human condition like the Flying Dutchman.”

You might know, that I love The Flying Dutchman. I saw a wonderful production of the opera in Knoxville, of all places, a few years ago. Wagner’s bent to the dark is interesting, but this is one of his works in which it is love that triumphs in redemptive majesty. It carries a bit of the high-minded that is present in the immolation scene of Brunnhilde from Gotterdammerung. Brunnhilde knows that sacrificial love alone has the infinite power to over come the bitter and brutal of life. The Dutchman is trying to find this. His ghostly, glowing ship sails under a curse that it shall never reach it’s destination until the end of the world. Wagner adds a modifier to the curse. The curse will be broken should the captain find true love.

Your conclusion of Lost Cosmos is a confused tangle of sci-fi, religio-sexual speculation. Oh dear, and so filled with sexism I could barely stand it. (You didn’t exactly get feminism did you? But you are in very good company there.) No one in your book seems able to love or find love. You seem to miss the qualifier that Wagner finds. Love can make a difference. There is a redemptive quality to love. Not sex though. That is beside the point. (Not non-existent, but beside.) You seem to be unable to break through there. Perhaps it is your low view of women that prevents you from finding the mirror you need in a loving relationship. Your female characters are always real pasty. Did you know that some women are real? But now I’m rambling.

So, may I know myself? No, not completely, not clearly, hardly at all perhaps. But it is the quest I am on for life. Your perceptions may serve me, i.e. your book leads to my self-help in knowing myself. And it is in clarity of the seeking mind, that I would continue this quest, with a healthy dose of standing as transparently as possible before God. Yet I think that it is in well-developed, mutually respectful love relationships that we can best find our reflection, our possibility for a glimmer of seeing and understanding ourselves.


That vision of a higher level of relationship is present in your books in relationships between men to some degree. And you allow for that in relation to God. Unfortunately, you seem to miss it in terms of its possibility within heterosexual relationships. And it is here that your ship, whether it is the Dutchman or the starship Copernicus 4, sinks off the cape of good hope.

I’m thinking I’d best return to your fiction.

Betsy

Item 4 Peoples is Peoples

Dear Steve, with a special thanks to Dave (who couldn't bowl too well) and Walker Percy,



I do not have to tell you this, yet I was reminded of it during a book study with your old buddy, metaphorically known here as Forest Old-Rambler-Model. We are looking at the book Lost in the Cosmos by Walker Percy. In it there is a section that talks about how a characteristic of some people is to sense that they are transcendent, that they can understand others but others cannot understand them.

Now, I can't say for sure that I "transcend" the text enough to know what Walker Percy is trying to say, but I do remember an incident from my life when I was your age. I went bowling with a man, perhaps now I would call him a boy. We went bowling. I bowled better than he did. That rankled him. I suppose, in that era, I was expected to gutter a few so that the male of the species in this coupling could crow and strut, et al. However, this post is not about feminism. It is about human dynamic. The incident was enough to make this guy say what was on his mind about me. He told me, "You are so proud and think that you are better than everyone else."

I received that blow full-face. What? Who was this punk? I understood his kind. He didn't even make good grades in school. I had consented to go bowling with him, not because I was interested in him, but because I was being nice to him. I transcended him, didn't I? And did he appreciate it? "NO." He insulted me.

There are some things, some events, even hurtful ones, that a person takes and ponders, and keeps tenderly, respectfully in one's heart. For me, this was such an event. I don't know if I have ever verbalized what happened that night to anyone before. I was ashamed. I still am, for I still fall prey to the tendency described by Percy in his book. We stop listening to other people. We put them in a box of our own imaginings, thinking that we transcend them, and we no longer hear what they are saying, pay attention to what they are doing, or are willing, on the basis of input from a relationship with another human revelator--or as Percy might call them, co-namer, co-sustainer, co-discoverer, co-sign-user of our world--change ourselves on the basis of information they can provide.

I don't have to tell you this, because you have not stopped listening to other people. That is one of your special gifts. Perhaps it is what makes you an effective leader. You are a bit like Kermit. Willing to hear and willing to change and willing to lead. We need Peoples like you in our world. Not listening, not being open to others is a form of pride, and it makes leaders unfit to lead.

In contrast to people who practice transcendency, I think about the life and teaching of Henri Nouwen. Here are a couple of comments from his books,

“Somewhere we know that without silence words lose their meaning, that without listening speaking no longer heals, that without distance closeness cannot cure.”

“The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing... not healing, not curing... that is a friend who cares.”

Nouwen lived pretty incarnationally, and the older he got the more he lived that way. I think that is a good way to live.

Tell you what is, "There's tomatoes huh, there's peoples, there's dancing, there's music, there's peoples. So, peoples is peoples." I know that helps a lot.

MOM aka brd

Richard Wright's Native Son, Albert Camus' The Stranger, and Walker Percy's Lancelot

Dear Richard, Albert, and Walker,

I am fascinated by this thread of commonality between your books, Native Son (1940), The Stranger (1942), and Lancelot (1977). This is cute. Did you plan this or did it just happen? I imagine the three of you doing an IM Chat.














rman:
inside_resistance: sanctus+dude:
So this is how this whole series of books got going? No?

Well, I'll have to think about this some more. Others are thinking about it too, like Lemony Snicket and the Baudelaire children.

*Richard Wright, an American novelist of the realist school, asks a famous unfathomable question ... "Who knows when some slight shock," he asks, "disturbing the delicate balance between social order and thirsty aspiration, shall send the skyscrapers in our cities toppling?"

You guys are too much!

Betsy

*The Penultimate Peril