William James, Pragmatism / The Meaning of Truth ****

I've said it before: If I could have dinner with one historical figure, it would be William James. The first argument in Pragmatism is that people choose a philosophy based on their temperament, and James' temperament (and ergo his philosophy) largely matches mine. Also his prose is clear and enjoyable -- at least in works written after 1904; the articles from the 19th century collected in The Meaning of Truth fall short in both departments.

The back cover promotes Pragmatism as "the most famous single work of American philosophy." Like James' masterpiece The Varieties of Religious Experience, it derives from a series of lectures. He seeks to define the nature of the doctrine and show how it provides a middle way between the dogmatic views of idealists and empiricists. He hopes to defuse some fundamental disagreements between them.

I gained new perspective on several points despite being well acquainted with pragmatism and with William James. I see more clearly how the pragmatic method relates to James' view of evolving reality and how he defines 'truth' as a relation whose details differ in each concrete case. One insight that stands out is a new understanding of Bishop Berkeley's philosophy:

So far from denying the external world which we know, Berkeley corroborated it. It was the scholastic notion of a material substance unapproachable by us, behind the external world, deeper and more real than it, and needed to support it, which Berkeley maintained to be the most effective of all reducers of the external world to unreality. Abolish that substance, he said, believe that God...sends you the sensible world directly... (p 47)

James is not the most rigorous of thinkers, and so the book suffers when he tackles abstruse philosophical disputes. His prose becomes less clear and gains an edge of defensiveness. This happens more frequently in The Meaning of Truth, which unlike the Pragmatism lectures is targeted at professional philosophers. The Meaning of Truth acts like a set of detailed footnotes or essays in a Norton critical edition.

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant ***

The Buried Giant is a fairy tale, with ogres, dragons, sprites, and knights. Like all fairy tales, it uses its fantastical elements to make a point about the real world. Unlike many fairy tales, the characters in this one don't live happily ever after.

In the years following the reign of King Arthur, an elderly couple sets off to visit their estranged son. A strange mist has spread amnesia throughout the land, so Axl and Beatrice can't quite remember how to get to their son's village or why they haven't seen him for so long. They meet various characters along the way, including a Saxon warrior and a former Knight of the Round Table, and become entangled in a quest to kill the dragon whose breath is the cause of the mist of forgetfulness.

Ishiguro allows the true story to emerge slowly from the mist. It turns out that the mass amnesia is a mixed blessing, since it causes the Britons and Saxons to forget the horrible deeds they committed against each other during the earlier wars. They've been living together peacefully for years, but what will happen when they remember their former grievances? Is forgetting atrocities enough of a balm, or do they demand retribution? If the cost of forgetting pain is also forgetting happiness, is it worth it?

Paul Theroux, O-Zone ** 1/2

Around 1990, based on the one-two punch of Riding the Iron Rooster and The Mosquito Coast, I went on a Paul Theroux binge. O-Zone is one of his books from that time period, his only stab at science-fiction as far as I know. It didn't stand up too well to re-reading.

The story is a transparent allegory about class. A group of rich New Yorkers spend a weekend in O-Zone, a quarantined wilderness about which they have only heard rumors, and find themselves transformed by their contact with the natives. The characters are less well developed than the setting: except for the awkward young genius who falls in with the "aliens," everyone's personality is defined by a single oversimplified motive. The prose is needlessly repetitive, as if Theroux were expecting us to read each chapter individually.

Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One ***

I enjoyed this slim volume for the opposite reason than I expected to. I expected to enjoy Fish's appreciation of finely crafted sentences more than his advice about writing, but his writing exercises are actually fun. Replace the nonsense words in Jabberwocky with good English words; transform a simple sentence into a hundred-word monster; pile on clauses to imitate the styles of Henry James, Virginia Woolf, or Philip Roth.

I was less impressed by his chosen example sentences and his literary analysis of them. His taste differs from mine, apparently. (Shouldn't be surprising, I suppose, given that his typical writing style is stereotypically academic.) I did appreciate his analysis of "the additive style," which I associate with Jose Saramago and his endless sentences.

Immediacy, not linear reflection leading to a conclusion, is the goal here, and to reach it [the author] must at once write sentences and somehow defeat the deferral of meaning -- the sense of building toward a completed thought -- that is the very nature of a sentence. Usually a sentence does not deliver its meaning until the end, and only at the end do its components acquire their significance and weight. But what [the author] wants is meaning to be present at every instant, to be always the same in weight and yet different as each word is different.

Diana Athill, Stet: An Editor's Life ***

Evelyn read Diana Athill's memoir Somewhere Towards the End and thought I might enjoy this earlier book about her career as an editor. Athill has a wonderfully chatty style that makes her a pleasurable companion as she gossips about about writers and publishers in post-war England. I have to say, though, that I would probably find her less charming if I had to work with her. As she warns us on page 6:

Although for all my life I have been much nearer poor than rich, I have inherited a symptom of richness: I have a strong propensity for idleness. Somewhere within me lurks an unregenerate creature which feels that money ought to fall from the sky, like rain. Should it fail to do so -- too bad: like a farmer enduring a drought one should get by somehow, or go under, which would be unpleasant but not so unpleasant as having blighted one's days by bothering about money. ... although I never went so far as to choose to do nothing, I did find it almost impossible to do anything I didn't want to do. Whether it was 'cannot' or 'will not' I don't know, but it felt like 'cannot'...

I would find this attitude infuriating. I would also be driven mad by much of the behavior Athill reports from her publisher Andre Deutsch and the writers Jean Rhys, Brian Moore, and V.S. Naipaul. But when Athill reports on writers behaving badly, she demonstrates the virtue that surely made her a great editor: she describes their motivations in their own terms rather than judging them from hers.

One thing the book made me conscious of was how many great books there are that few people ever hear about. Based on Athill's recommendations, I might consider Striker by Michael Irwin and Azadi by Chaman Nahal.