I: Once Upon a Time…

When I was about eight, my mother was hospitalized a couple times for kidney trouble. My dad would take me and my sister (who was about six) to visit Mom in the hospital. She had tubes coming out of her that I didn’t understand, and the doctors had given her a scratchy blue robe and slippers to wear. I know there was at least one surgery involved, and I suspect there must have been a second. I remember one day in the waiting room with my aunt, watching her work on her cross-stitching while I pawed through her plastic box of embroidery floss, rearranging the skeins according to some instinctual color scheme.

I remember another day when Dad, my sister and I were the only ones in the waiting room, so we were able to spread out. I took my calligraphy kit across the room to where a chair gleamed in a shaft of sunlight. I sat down on the floor and used the seat of the bright-lit chair as a table, where I read through the pamphlet in my calligraphy kit and learned the difference between italic and Gothic writing styles. I liked the Gothic-style alphabet better; it was more mysterious, full of extra strokes that made towers, chess pieces, and inscrutable knots out of the letters I’d been so friendly with for years.

I also learned fractions during that period. They were coming up in school anyway, and I was nervous about learning them, so I asked Dad to teach me. He explained what they represented and how to understand them, and then showed me how to add and subtract them. (He saved multiplying for my mom to explain from her hospital bed.)

The strongest memory I have of that time, though, is of a library book Mom read to my sister and me when we would visit her in the evenings: Dean Koontz’s Oddkins. I’m pretty sure my sister and I picked it because of the beautiful illustrations. The cover calls it “a fable for all ages,” but that’s really not true—I just found it again at the library, and rereading it, I have to say it has some wicked flaws that would never get by an astute adult reader.

II: …A Terrible Book Was Written…

The book opens with a kindly old magic toy-maker, who makes stuffed animals that magically live (called Oddkins) and magically find themselves delivered to children who desperately need special friends. As the children escape their awful circumstances, the life fades out of the toys. The kindly old magic toy-maker is very ill, and before he’s able to get his whole household in order, he drops dead. It’s up to a small group of Oddkins to trek across town and find the kindly new magic toy-maker. Unfortunately for them, the death of the kindly old magic toy-maker has released from their decades-long coma a group of evil toys made by his predecessor and crated up in the secret subcellar (against the day they might return to their tasks of pinching and burning and stabbing children, it seems, although that’s never very clear; probably a mercy, come to think of it). A lingering aura of goodness from the kindly old magic toy-maker prevents the evil toys from conquering the workshop, so they strike out after the Oddkins to kill them before they reach the kindly new magic toy-maker. If their candidate for evil magic toy-maker (a man just released from prison) gets to the workshop first, he’ll get to take over, and it will again be an evil magic toy shop as it apparently was up until the Nazis were defeated. (I wish I were kidding.) Then there’s a climactic battle in a department store after hours, the evil toys are destroyed, the candidate for evil magic toy-maker goes back to prison on rather general grounds (“We’ve had some unsolved crimes around here. You’ll do!”), and the kindly new magic toy-maker assumes her responsibilities and explains to the Oddkins what happens to them when their useful lives are over.

III: …Containing Some Terrible Religious Ideas…

I’ll get to that explanation, because it’s part of what’s badly wrong with this book: the theology. It’s seriously confused, y’all. The kindly old magic toy-maker has drummed into the Oddkins’ heads a bunch of teachings that are supposed to pass for normal Christianity. The Oddkins have a strong idea of Heaven as a place of reward, for example, and in fact, when a runaway dog threatens their expeditionary party, the toy dog in the story admonishes him that he might not be good enough for Heaven:

“Ashamed? I should think so. If you have any hope of redeeming yourself and one day bringing credit to your loving mother, I’d advise you to put your tail between your legs right now, slink home, lick the hand of your master, and do what you’re told from now on. In time there might even be a place in the pastures of Heaven for you, though right now I think you’re destined to spend eternity running on sore and bleeding feet through a much hotter place than Heaven.”

Nevermind the incongruity of rewarding a domesticated dog with an eternity of life in a pasture—she’s telling him he’ll go to Hell and be given wounds that will never heal because he’s run away from home and snapped at a little troop of living stuffed animals. His only other option is abject self-mortification and total obedience. Clearly this is a children’s story.

There’s a weird, lopsided focus on Hell and the Devil in this book, too. The head evil toy (a marionette with a sword-cane and no strings) and the candidate for evil magic toy-maker are guided by catoptric visitations and telepathic instructions from the Devil himself; when the head evil toy fails, a tide of sewer rats comes to carry him to the Devil’s side, where he will sit forever with strings and without the power of independent movement, as a sign of the eternal punishments in store for failed Satanic minions.

Mentions of God, though, are scarce. One comes when the Oddkins pass through a zoo on their way through the center of town. The stuffed elephant sees a real elephant, then there’s some “inspirational” chatter among the Oddkins about why people need magic like living stuffed animals when they have the inherent magic of God’s creation around them every day. Or something. I might have been napping.

The weirdest bit of theology in the book is the kindly new magic toy-maker’s explanation of what happens to an Oddkin when it dies: It’s reborn as a flesh-and-blood animal of the same kind. (The oldest Oddkin, who is a stuffed version of some indistinct, extinct beast, gets to choose his reincarnated body from among all the species on earth. So that’s some consolation for the loss of species diversity, at least: free choice in reincarnation.) When the live body dies, the Oddkin’s spirit is taken to Heaven, where it will stay by the side of God—because God loves toys. I swear that’s in the book.

It’s so strange: The main goal of the book is evidently to be a religious fable, which is fine. But the instructional elements grow fuzzier when the chosen plot requires some theological invention. As general character-building inspiration—the way children’s entertainment often strives to inculcate relatively uncontroversial values, such as kindness, curiosity, reading, etc.—it’s not all that bad, but the religious trappings are deeply odd, because there’s no branch of Christianity I know of that has room in its beliefs for living stuffed animals.

IV: …Compounded by Terrible Construction.

I think I’ve pinpointed the source of the troubling theology, and what’s interesting is that it seems to be a result of some questionable artistic choices—that is, Koontz’s (primarily structural) missteps lead him into a world where he can’t stick to any recognizable version of Christianity, but he doesn’t appear to recognize that fact. On the face of it, it should be a great allegory: The maker creates beings out of everyday stuff and animates them to lead lives of goodness and service to others, and they face difficulties in their pursuit of spiritual fulfillment. I can imagine something at least somewhat interesting being made out of that setup.

But a “properly” Christian story can’t have two Creators, so the toy-maker has to be a mere human (with powers that are never explained, probably because they can’t be). Suddenly the allegorical element is drained from the story, and it tries instead to be straightforwardlier didactic about living in proper reverence of God. It turns into a kind of religious realist story that is direly at odds with the fabulism inherent in a tale about walking, talking stuffed animals.

And there’s the problem. The cover calls Oddkins a fable, which explains the living toys, who can easily stand in for human beings in a non-literal story. But when that story also contains actual human beings, the toys can’t be metaphors anymore. What’s an author to do with them, then? Well, a clear-sighted author would choose to write either a religious fable about stuffed animals or a more literal book in which human characters explain to other characters how they should relate to God. But when an author can’t (or doesn’t) decide between the two, the result is a book that invents whole subfields of theology dealing with the relationship between God and animated toys, and tries to pass that off as standard doctrine, and then nobody wins. Especially not the reader.

V: The End

Because here in the Empiricum we like facts and information, and I left all of that out this morning: Take it away, Gray Lady.

Link

(According to N.B. Notewell, weekdays are the only days. I’m not as far behind as it seems.)

Three sentences in to “True Confessions,” James Joyce pops up in what is, I think, a successful bid for Supportingest Supporting Character in the book. This time around, he’s tutoring Ettore Schmitz, a Triestine businessman, in English. When Schmitz finds out that his tutor has literary ambitions (this is before Chamber Music, even), he brings to lessons one day copies of his two novels, Una vita and Senilità, published under the name Italo Svevo. Joyce reads them and loves them, and when World War I and the closure of his paint factory leave Schmitz with nothing to do but write, he passes the final product on to Joyce again. This novel, called La coscienza di Zeno (translated into English as The Confessions of Zeno, and then recently again, in a William Weaver translation Acocella highly recommends, as Zeno’s Conscience), so impresses Joyce that he persuades Schmitz to send it on to some of the most influential literary editors of the day in London, New York, and Paris, with the end result that Italo Svevo becomes known as the Italian Proust. He’s famous for two years, then his chauffeur crashes the car; Schmitz is the only one who dies.

The essay has some more biography in it, but it’s not all that interesting, outside of the sweet romance between Schmitz and his cousin Livia. The rest is a breakdown of Svevo’s novels, which Acocella strongly (and persuasively) advocates for. She praises their modernity, unprecedented in Italian literature at the time, and, particularly in the case of Zeno, their humaneness. It’s a good overview of Svevo’s work, but it honestly isn’t one of the stronger essays in the book. Acocella seems to hint in the introduction to Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints that she included this one because it illustrates what part luck can play in a writer’s life, and that’s true, as far as it goes: Schmitz got lucky in having Joyce as a tutor, and unlucky in dying just as he was super-famous. In the end, though, the essay basically amounts to “These are good books; here’s why; you should read them,” which is fine, but apparently I’m looking for something else this time around.

Here’s what I’ll say: It’s a fine essay, and I have nothing substantive to say against it, even if I’m having to scrounge for reasons to recommend it. Perhaps I need to give it another shot.

After rounding up the book’s every target and knocking them all down in one determined opening essay, Acocella changes tack entirely by moving to a surprise item. “Blocked” is about neither an artist nor a saint; it’s a history of writer’s block, winding from a quick genetic overview to a taxonomy and demystification of various species of block.

Drawing on Zachary Leader’s Writer’s Block, Acocella says the concept was basically invented by the English Romantic poets, who characterized their art as coming purely from outside themselves and therefore subject to blockage. (I can go along with her on this one; I’m happy blaming Wordsworth and Coleridge for all manner of evils, not least this and this.) “After the English Romantics,” she writes, “the next group of writers known for not writing were the French Symbolists,” and then a large number of postwar U.S. American writers, who bring psychoanalysis into the picture. In fact, it was a psychoanalyst named Edmund Bergler who coined the term “writer’s block” in 1950.

Bergler gives Acocella a springboard to discuss proposed causes—and therefore treatments—of writer’s block. Here she recounts Bergler’s explanation for block: “Oral masochism, entrapment in rage over the milk-denying pre-Oedipal mother. Starved before, the writer chose to become starved again—that is, blocked.” This sounds like total hooey to me, and Acocella passes over it without comment—except to note Bergler’s unusual confidence. As psychology shifted focus from the unconscious to neurochemistry, so did its explanations of writer’s block; treatment with either Prozac or Ritalin became common. Acocella mentions one writer who even speculates on which brain structures produce creativity and which interfere with it (which reminds me unavoidably of research I read about on Language Log demonstrating that people are more likely to believe utter nonsense if it’s tarted up with neuroscience). There are even magnetic and cognitive-behavioral cures proposed.

The dogged pursuit of a cure for writer’s block throughout the 20th century presupposes an essential thingness to writer’s block that Acocella objects to. (You can see how she might, given her admiration of perseverance.) Brandishing Occam’s razor at multiple high-profile cases of block, she carves out one unremarkable reason after another that these writers might have stopped writing, whether temporarily or for good. There’s nothing mystical or even really unusual behind these stoppages:

Dashiell Hammett: alcoholism. F. Scott Fitzgerald (“famous at twenty-three, washed up at forty, dead at forty-four,” Acocella writes; she has a gift for the pungent phrase): alcoholism. (“When an alcoholic writer stops writing, do we call this block or just alcoholism? … Such cases lack the bleak dignity generally associated with block. Instead of the lonely writer, at his desk, staring at the blank page, we get a disorderly drunk, being hauled off to detox.”) Jeffrey Eugenides: pressure to reproduce a huge first-novel success. Harper Lee: …no identifiable reason, really. Ralph Ellison: “It is sometimes said that a writer can be stopped when he outlives the world he was writing about, and for. That may have been true, in part, for Ellison.” E.M. Forster: realized he was gay but couldn’t publish a gay novel.

(I recently listened to a back episode of This American Life called “Quiz Show,” in which Ira Glass spends some time talking to a Jeopardy champ named Bob Harris. Harris explains a mnemonic technique that involves creating a mental picture, and illustrates it with the story of how he memorized the titles of E.M. Forster’s novels. He has a friend with a beautiful large living room with giant windows, so that’s a room with a view; he has this other friend called Howard, so he pictured a “30-foot buttocks” just outside the window: Howard’s end. Ira jumps into the narration and says, “You don’t even wanna know how he fit A Passage to India in there.”)

Henry Roth took 60 years off between books for two main reasons Acocella can see: psychological difficulty in telling the possibly autobiographical incest story he knew would be his next book; and a crucial unfulfilled need for a full-time editor.

Then comes the wind-down. Writer’s block, according to Acocella, is basically a thin, showy umbrella propped up over a host of unglamorous, unremarkable obstacles. To some extent, the existence of writer’s block as an idea becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of writer’s block as a phenomenon: she appeals to the philosopher Ian Hacking’s idea of “dynamic nominalism” in an argument that “some writers become blocked simply because the concept exists, and invoking it is easier for them than writing.” But Acocella is sympathetic to the self-preserving aspect of writer’s block. Art is difficult, she says, and makes the artist vulnerable. Small wonder, then, if artists unconsciously find themselves putting it off. (It is slightly strange, at the end of such a pragmatic piece of writing, to see the author slip gently into Romantic ideas about art and Freudian ideas about its production.) But if you want a career in it, you’ve got to keep hacking away.