Philip Roth, something old and something new!

Lately I've been multitasking Philip Roth. His classic "American Pastoral", the essay book "Reading Myself and Others", and the recent "The Humbling". Certainly there's a big distance between this three works aside from the time span between first editions.

American Pastoral is Roth at its best: clever, sharp, acute, accurate. His depiction of a New Jersey family of a successful Jewish-American family in enthralling. Full of universal constructs, archetypal images, and the right doses of conflict. His characters are far from the regular bread and butter, black and white, yes or no subjects that are now populating mainstream Literature.

Seymour Levov is the perfect son, perfect husband, perfect businessman, to whom life reserved some major blows, low blows. Married to a beauty queen, high school athlete, but broken down by guilty, disappointment, and doubt. The major source of doubt comes from his realization that life's low blows know no boundaries, come from anywhere, strike as they want, and seem impossible to understand. Despite all his efforts to raise a kid, build a life, keep up the good work, value his employees, life still stinks, and makes him puke. He's alone in his quest for an answer because everybody seems to have already found a way to circumvent the question. The brother, the wife, the kid, the father, they all seem to know exactly what to do, or at least how to find a way out, be it writing letters to the senate, having a face lift, or tending to the family's graves at the local cemetery. At the end of the book there's that awkward feeling that every men is a foreigner in his own land. The realization that we are all Seymour Levovs, fighting to find any sort of meaning in life's daily tragedies.

The Humbling is a different story altogether. It doesn't have the same "pathos", the same complexity, or the same appeal. It is more like a long and tedious short story, prolonged to the maximum of the reader's tolerance. It seems that Roth had a deadline and a purpose: to edit a book. And that's it! Far from the author of 1997 in American Pastoral, this Philip Roth tries to catch the reader's attention by repeating an approved formula, but with ingredients that already expired or went sour.

The hero is an actor in his seventies who lost the ability to act in front of an audience. His attempts to impersonate old age characters were doomed to frustration, and he contemplates the idea of forcefully retiring. Striving through depression and frustration, he comes across a much younger lover that may be his last shot towards a meaningful life. We can see in this brief summary many of the elements that this novel has in common with previous Roth's books. However, in this case, the recipe doesn't work as well, and the net result is shallow, empty, and somewhat disappointing. The hero doesn't add any new nuances to the rich color palette that is Roth's gallery of characters. He wanders around, looking at others and reflecting shallowly upon their lives. His ponderings could well be in the counseling pages of any frivolous magazine, and do not have the radical turns and tosses that were the core of "Portnoy's Complaint" or "Shabath's Theater". You could be amazed by the complexity and richness. Now you just have the sensation that somebody is serving you a cold meal with a nice name, and a fancy price.

"Reading Myself and Others" shows us a different Roth. The essayist. Committed to his Art, he gives us invaluable backstage tours to "Portnoy's Complaint", "Defender of the Faith", and "The Gang". We appreciate his method, at the same time that we get a glimpse of the ideas behind the scene. We see that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. In others there's a complexity that escaped a first reading, and entices us to go to the book once again, and find a subplot that wasn't in broad view. He retaliates criticisms brilliantly, by showing his erudition lightly, without looking snob. In his essays the words come in the right moment, and the references naturally appear as support, never as cheap demonstrations of erudition.

His ideas on his times (the Nixon years) have the exact measure of an artist that knows that Art is there to change man and mankind, but individually. The artist is above all a reader and a decoder of the world. Solutions may come, but his main purpose is to state the questions in a way that we couldn't before.

The multitask payed off. I traveled with Roth in a road that spans his career from early success to late self confidence, taking notice of the big change that ensued. He's still one of the best English contemporary authors, and no matter how high or low our expectations are set, a must read.

The neurobiology of love

This theme is probably one of the most complicated to discuss. Many great thinkers, philosophers and Neuroscientists had their share of disappointment when trying to digress about it. The subjectivity of the concept of “love” goes crashing against the objectivity of what is expected from “neurobiology”.

For this reason, one of the best approaches is to have Art, or a piece of Art, as the anchoring factor to base the discussion. Whenever Science falls short, Art may be our guide. Artists are much better prepared to cope with ambiguities, opposing ideas, and counter intuitive concepts. Love is a mixture of all of those, and much more.

Having stated that, and having justified our shortage of objective material, let’s take the movie “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”, written by Charlie Kaufmann, and directed by Michel Gondry, as our anchor.

A doctor develops a machine and a technique that can “erase” undesired memories from the minds of prospective patients. As we may imagine, a very interesting and colourful cohort of cases come and go at the waiting room of the clinic. The majority of the cases are about romantic relationships, and their universal tendency of ending traumatically, or not ending at all.

However, the technique fails in what should be its strongest prescription. The subconscious minds of lovers, or ex-lovers, although suffering from love, resist any intervention, and have a strong resilience towards keeping their suffering. It’s some sort of scientifically implausible masochism.

At this point, Neurobiology collapses. Love is a dilemma, so to speak. This feeling is not only the amalgam of good and bad memories. There are attraction and desire, which pre-exist any conscious memory. They are inaccessible neither to those who suffer, nor to those who attempt to heal it. It is the large, unknown, undiscovered, yet vastly explored, land of romantic attraction.

This land has always been heavily populated by poets, artists, lunatics. Very few Scientists ever tried to make the ultimate leap towards inhabiting it.

This fact tells us much more about the methodological limitations of Science, than about the curiosity of humankind. We, Scientists or not, always wanted to know why girl/boy A attracts us much more than girl/boy B. What makes us insane, crazy for love, ridiculous, shameful, but at the same time happy, full of life, exhilarating.

We never had the tools to measure and quantify feelings, in a rigorous and controlled mode, as Science expects it to be measured.

New Neuroimaging techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET), are starting to give us the first glimpses of the living and activated brain. The subject is given tasks to perform during the acquisition, and the areas responsible for those tasks “light up” on the scanner. The Holy Grail of Neuroscience is to map the areas or pathways responsible for consciousness, emotions, and feelings.

However, some questions may precede the epistemological quest for the Holy Grail. Where is the mind? Would that be a creation of the brain, its millions of neurons, and its trillions of synapses? The co-occurrence of somatic responses (piloerection, tachycardia, cold sweats) and good memories would be the anatomical correlates of love? And that’s it? Where is the music, the candles, the violins, the champagne? Why? The mind is what the brain does! But that is also a very tricky and ambiguous statement, very far from any definitive answer.

Descartes (“cogito, ergo sum!”) made the separation between emotions and reason, soul and body. Recently, Antonio Damasio made ends meet by stating that emotions are the cornerstone of memories. If we don’t “like” a given subject, odds are that it will be very difficult for us to master it. Many of us had the experience of a teacher in grade school that made us “hate” his/her subject because of his/her “attitude”. In clear opposition to that teacher that showed passion, love, for a given subject, and is one of the factors for the choice of our careers. Emotions are, after all, a precious tool for biological evolution. It helps us learn, reason, evolve.

Richard Dawkins took this to extremes by saying that living beings are only biological machines, designed to carry and preserve genes, at any cost. In his book “The Selfish Gene” we are confronted with the disappointing reality that our romantic love, our candlelight dinners, our memories of loves past, are only a very well designed strategy that gives pleasure in return to us passing forward our genetic information.

No matter what: theories, hypothesis, and methodological approaches. We are curious little monkeys, or “carbon units”, to use a trekkie term. Maybe we are still too far from the answer with the tools we inherited from the Greeks, Galileo, and the likes. Maybe a new Scientific paradigm will eventually come to free us, in a quantum way.

However, even the most pragmatic Neuroscientist will continue to be driven to tears or laughter with Charlie Kaufmann, Michel Gondry, Shakespeare, Faulkner, or Camoes. And many of us will leave the theatre with “hearts” filled, “minds” overflowing, and the sensation that there has to be more in Art than Science can ever measure.

MR James


Being ignorant has its advantages. The best is maybe the amazement experienced when you found a new outstanding author. Browsing at an old book store, I recently found MR James, aka Montague Rhodes James. It took me only 5 reais to buy "ghost stories", but the pleasure to read such a book is priceless. He´s one of the most important examples of what is called "Gothic mystery". His creeping stories are generally happening to the regular British citizen who, all of a sudden, finds himself in a trivial situation that unfolds into a major supernatural event. Many of them happen to professors, scholars, and such well read men, skeptic, who have to bow and accept their complete ignorance of what is happening, or where it will lead them. An interesting point is also the recurrence of the traveling individual, not aware of local lore and tradition. An innocent victim, so to speak.
Far from being exceedingly amazing, his stories are creepy for their verisimilitude. It could happen to any of us, at any time, buying our grocery, or lodging at a country inn.
The supernatural creatures are mostly inherently evil, and not only "wandering souls", eager to find freedom. Their evil is a mean in itself, and their only purpose is to make us scream and run.
Spiders are one of his favorite evil animals. In the "Ash Tree", he loads an ash tree with them. In other stories, evil as they are, they come to set old quarrels, as in the "tractate middoth".
Probably this has something to do with the author and his own beliefs. He was a linguist, a scholar himself, teaching at traditional English schools such as Cambridge. He became famous there for his "Christmas terror nights", and even after his death, tradition held for many years (don´t know if they still do it).
In his bibliography there are also some kid´s books. I couldn´t go that far yet, but certainly it´s not easy to portrait him talking about small bunnies, flowers, and armoured heroes.

Terrorist by John Updike

Terrorist by John Updike


It is probably the worst of John Updike. "The terrorist" is his last novel, about the breeding of a muslim terrorist at the very core of american middle class. The idea is great, there is enough material in the media to support and fuel the theme, but the actual book lacks art. If we define Art as the human act of creating new objects to portrait human feelings, Updike hit water this time. Many clichés are tirelessly presented during the plot. The terrorist to be comes from a shattered home, raised by a single mother, nurse, and frustrated artist. A character that was created as a survivor of the 70´s crazy years. She can´t give any emotional education to his kid, being herself a soul in need of emotional male support. Her sexual adventures create in his son a rage, only finding relief in a strict system of rules and regulations, such as american projected Islamism. Not the real Islamism, but the perception that the american middle class has of it.
There´s also the jewish teacher (highly educated, frustrated, maritally unhappy) as the local heroe. Someone whose guilt leads to the obligation to save the boy from Alah´s tightening hands. A good man, unfairly taken into adultery by his vegetative wife. Herself a fat lady in her early fifties, who´ve seen better years as a wife and woman.
The whole terrorist plot hides itself at a furniture store, perhaps a joke about being inside every american home. Family business as a disguise for anti-american practices.
The boy stands at the center of this world, intelectually very gifted, having to fight his doubt about going to college (
becoming american), or assuming his position as an outcast and attending technical school. His dream of becoming a truck driver is nothing more than his reaction against the status quo. Predictible? To the hilt.
At the end, everything turns out to be only sort of a bad dream, and the world is saved by seconds, like in any James Bond movie.
Let´s stick with the Rabbit novels, just in case.

Philip Roth

He is probably the best American author alive. His books form a real corpus, since they carry an inherent cohesion, and some common pathos. His view of middle class America has many points in common with other Jewish-American authors like John Updike and Saul Bellow. However, he goes beyond common interpretations by giving us just the right amount of neurosis and mind deviations. His characters are never too normal. But nobody is, after all. But most of us are lucky enough to walk away without been noticed. At the secrecy of our rooms we are not guilty at all. Roth´s people are usually living in a state of relative innocence, given their inability to be empathic. The world revolves around their selfish emotions. Maybe Sabath is the best example. He´s amoral, and his acts are not judged by his own inner conscience. Even his mistress is a burden to him, and will bring him to very awkward situations. At the end of his life, though, his final acts give the reader a sensation of the conclusion of a work. A depraved work.

Harold Bloom

The western canon is biased, awkward, politically incorrect, arrogant, but mainly essential. One of the best books on Literature Criticism. Bloom is not a very sweet person, and never tryes to contemporize his opinions. His canon is based almost exclusively in English Literature, with some few glorious and obvious exceptions. He claims that is not bound to any party, clan, or Criticism School, and we may believe in it, based on the amount of ammunition he spends against his detractors, both real and imaginary. One of the real interesting points in his book is the criticism on aestetic analysis based on political grounds, such as what we see in Literature from "Minorities". Bloom´s basic criteria for the canon is literary originality, and the pleasure that one can savour from such readings. Sometimes bordering harshness, Bloom has the erudition, the expertise, and the strict criteria to justify his influence on the Literary community. 

Camille Paglia - Sexual Personae

Although completed in 1981, the manuscript of Sexual Personae was rejected several times by many editors. Finally accepted by Yale University Press in 1985, it became a major hit. Camille Paglia is certainly polemical, and none of her opinions swoops silently. Sexual Personae found a very interesting approach to Art History. It analyzes Art Movements and Art Periods through the never ending conflict of male and female world views. It may sound simple, but yet it can be very complex and rich. According to Paglia, men has always been more prolific in Art as an envious reaction to the female capacity to generate life. There is also a major dichotomy between chtonian and divine, mind and matter, creation and sterility, Apollo and Dionisius, sex and even better sex. The subtitle (Art and Decadence from Emily Dickinson to Nefertiti)tells about the time span of the book. From the creation of the western eye in Egypt (the first manifestation of aesthetic issues in the West)to the utmost sexual perversion of Emily Dickinson´s reclusion in Amherst. Everything "artsy" is sexual, and artistic pleasure is eminently a perversion. The Egyptians were the first to move from creating pots and pans to the creation of objects without practical uses, only for artistic contemplation and enjoyment. Every original artist is a sexual pervert in the sense that it takes sexual originality to create artistic originality. Mixing up Art Criticism, Art History, Psychoanalisis, Pornography, and Hollywood Culture is not only pervert, but also highly original and refined.