Book Group: Helen DeWitt's "The Last Samurai" - Discussion Thread

but i think that's part of the point (also it's not like the sections are hard or aren't ever thoroughly translated), what with sibylla trying to develop this linear approach to mastery and ludo skipping straight to learning the characters for "turtle" and "gloom"

Blah, y'all are making me want to read this again.

I read it 6 or 7 years ago, but I'm not sure I got it. Or I didn't entirely pick up on the 'anti-elitist' aspect (Christian Lorentz in that Vulture canon piece):

Is this boy, Ludo, a genius? Sibylla, his mother, is of two minds about it. She recognizes that she’s done something out of the ordinary by teaching the kid The Iliad so young, following the example of J.S. Mill, who did Greek at age 3. She knows he’s a “Boy Wonder” and she encourages him in every way to follow his omnivorous instincts. But she also believes that the problem with everybody else — literally everybody else — is that they haven’t been properly taught and have gone out of their way, most of the time, to avoid difficult things, like thinking. Otherwise we’d be living in a world of Ludos.

So a novel that appears on the surface to be elitist — concerned as it is with great works of art, scientific achievement, and excellence generally — is actually profoundly anti-elitist at its core. DeWitt’s novel is infused with the belief that any human mind is capable of feats we tend to associate with genius. But the novel’s characters, especially Sibylla, are aware that youthful talent can be thwarted at any turn.

while reading the book i felt its position on the education system and the ethics of raising a child in this way was somewhat ambiguous (the school Ludo attends is clearly not right for him, but Sibyll's interactions with the staff are also pretty erratic) but then in the epilogue HdW strongly advocates for reforming the education system to breed and nurture child prodigies. i felt that was a bit intrusive of her

I never got the idea that Helen DeWitt was advocating any particular approach to childhood education. It felt to me she was purely playing with ideas to see what sort of characters might attempt them, and what sort of a story might evolve out of those characters and ideas. The whole book felt like an exercise in intense mental playfulness, made manifest by projecting it into a story.

i agree that that is true of the book itself. but in the epilogue there's a weird call-to-arms. my copy is in a box in my mom's basement so i can't check it out now

the red devlin section really hurt my feelings

but then in the epilogue HdW strongly advocates for reforming the education system to breed and nurture child prodigies. i felt that was a bit intrusive of her

― flopson, Thursday, December 20, 2018 1:49 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

imo sibylla wrote the afterward and signed it “helen dewitt”

also the afterword isn’t really part of the text and is just curious about the possibilities of a world where kids were allowed to explore and master whatever interests them

i think there’s elitist/anti-elitist themes floating throughout the book but i find it weird that lorentz singled them out when attempting to summarize this book, bc it’s far more about... idk, roughly a thousand other things. art and intelligence and mastery and the profound isolation and suicidal gloom that lurks around them. devlin is written off early by sibylla as a shitty writer but he got so close to his subject, mastered his one skill so thoroughly that he was the only person who could do it, and then he could no longer bring himself to do it

imo sibylla wrote the afterward and signed it “helen dewitt”

― jolene club remix (BradNelson), Saturday, December 29, 2018 3:48 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm

she has a new novella! titled "the english understand wool"

https://www.gawker.com/culture/the-difficulties-of-helen-dewitt-the-english-understand-wool-review

thanks for the link xyzzzz__. I've just finished The English Understand Wool, and I need to collect my thoughts on it. But I did laugh out loud in public once and finished with a massive grin on my face. There is a great suppleness + tension in her writing, which I think is unmatched elsewhere.

The only thing I would say is, for those who think they are going to read the novella (barely even that tbh) - don't read that review. Any sort of clumsy-ish summary of the plot knackers the balance and structure in the story itself.

nothing against the review, which is fine and touches on a couple of points, perhaps slightly peripheral, of interest, but the book is so condensed to its own purpose that any description of what takes place is going to botch it.

the approach to reading this book involved a sort of delicacy. it's extremely short, barely a novella, and I didn't want to read it in a frame of mind that wasn't in some way tuned up to read it. Blink and you miss it. also, reading a new book by a writer that you like always produces a sense of wariness. *what if they fuck it up*.

I loved many of the stories in Some Trick but not all of them - though admittedly the ones I didn't like were the older ones, written at Oxford, which were just ok, and a couple of the music ones felt a bit 'off'.

There is tension in her writing akin to Jonathan Swift's, created by layers of meaning, of irony working at a fine level of detail. 'This is language on a hair trigger' as Geoffrey Hill said of another writer in one of his lectures. It's not quite that razor's edge at the level of language as such, but it is working somewhere there at a conceptual level. It doesn't matter as such - it's a technical observation - but the effect is very fine and enjoyable.

So I re-read Some Trick. I reread most of Against the Gods, by Peter Bernstein, about the history of risk and probability, and mentioned by DeWitt in one of the ST stories. I read a couple of the pieces in Erving Goffman's Interaction Ritual (a fascinating book!), also mentioned.

I was in Cádiz, which is a favourite city, not least because its cool, dark, narrow streets open periodically onto tree-shaded plazas, with fountains and ornate benches in dappled shade, perfect for reading.

it's v much in the same vein as the better stories in Some Trick. In fact it covers a number of the same obsessions. The nature of people who are able to achieve things... wrong word... do? *accomplish* things. The nature of the things that we might term *accomplishments*. What sets them apart. A specificity of terminology, of language, representing decisions about taste - knowing the difference between x and y and your preferences - and in The English Understand Wool of *terroir*, what it means to *understand* something, what 'social conjunctions' cause certain qualities to flourish. What it means for something to be innate.... or not. Can you fake that understanding? What would it mean to be fake. There is something indefatigable and

Also, what are the things the world can give us? What skills? What thoughts? Being specific about these things leads to the world looking quite fantastic and strange.

I suppose in one sense all of HDW's writing are fables about τέχνη/techne.

There is also an irony of snobbery at play, and some publisher/book industry irritation (what the article xyzzzz linked is getting at - HDW is clearly very exacting to work with, and in one light this book is all about justifying that, but i think it's quite a limited angle really).

It's a very sparse book. Some of the chapters are only a few lines long. So you sometimes wonder what HDW is playing at. What is this innocuous chapter doing? I don't know. I haven't really got to the bottom of it. Part of me wonders if after all this obsession is really ultimately rather slender?

It was good that I had read the Goffman, because the notions of 'face' and poise play a role. And HDW is usually generous with her reference points – ie she tells you what they are, though here it was chasing references via Some Trick. I wonder if The English Understand Wool was in fact an uncompleted short story, or superfluous to the 'trick' (as in whist or bridge

I'm reminded of something I realised when I was putting some thoughts down about High Rise by Ballard. I realised that although his ideas were very exciting and prophetic feeling, his models were quite conservative for the time he was writing: 19th century exploration novels, psychoanalysis of the jungian variety, anthropology of the Claude Levi-Strauss variety. But that didn't matter. It gave his stories a very basic set of dynamics which he could pursue to the utmost extent to generate something quite radical and exciting. People in his books operated according to the models he put in place. But he was still conservative.

i think HDW also uses theory, or non literary models to drive her writing - anthropology ofc, coding and statistics, art philosophy. There are people who understand the models (the savants, the accomplishers, the slightly lacking in affect or very odd) and try and operate via those models as a way of operating in and understanding the world, and there are those who do not know about the models. do not care. the humour comes out of the interaction between the two. it's clear that DeWitt's sympathies are with the former, but it's not entirely one way. That two way street is most obvious in Lightning Rods, but it's also here.

The other reason I like her. There was a thing doing the rounds on twitter, some business grad's idea of the 100 books you *must* read and ofc it was full of nn taleb, gladwell, thiel etc and of course a lot of book twitter was eye-rolling the hell out of it, and with some reason. that whole slate star codex/tyler cowen stuff is p nauseating, but HDW connects the methodologies, and the thinking of the modern age, and much of its insanity to the notion of *accomplishing* things (they may not be good things of course). This is another of her frictions and amusements. How do you *get* published, what trade offs do you end up making to be successful, how do you operate in the world?

So, I enjoyed it a lot and read it quickly, so then I read it again. And it was noticeable the way she manages the structure of the plot and emotional dramatic irony throughout - there's a lot of amusement to be had by reading it again, knowing what will take place.

i think there are only two lines that are possibly slightly off, one irrelevant (aisle seat on plane), one very important (pdf), but i'm assuming HDW must have encountered the latter, possibly even it was the prompt for the story.

It's *really* short. Don't read a review, read the book first then read the review.

oh, couple of other things. it was a good book to read in Cádiz:

It was, in fact, better to have six weeks at one’s disposal. Maman liked to go to places where there are secret lives. Grenada, Venice, even, yes, Paris—places where one can, of course, walk the public streets, the walls are high, barred, occasionally one catches a glimpse of a garden, or an open window at night, high above the street, spills golden light from a room lined with ancient volumes. (This is undoubtedly why she chose a residence in Marrakech.) Six weeks offer the courtesy of time. One will not be thrust in by chance invitations from the fool of the family, an impulsive youngster whose social blunders leave everyone rolling their eyes. There is the possibility of invitations of value. It is of no importance if these do not come; what matters is the glimpse of the garden, only to be entered by the favorites of chance.

'places where there are secret lives' – yes (and with reason in the context).

As usual I didn't finish a sentence in the previous post:

I wonder if The English Understand Wool was in fact an uncompleted short story, or superfluous to the 'trick' (as in whist or bridge) in Some Trick, as it shares much with stories in that collection. And incidentially, bridge as a transactional and communication system is also an obsession which overlaps w the goffman obviously. what are our communication transactions, our plays? again how do the two 'sides' outlined above transact?

What happens to the underabsorbtion of feeling in these systems?

Very appealing, intriguing takes, thanks! There are people who understand the models (the savants, the accomplishers, the slightly lacking in affect or very odd) and try and operate via those models as a way of operating in and understanding the world, reminded me of Pynchon writing (no idea if this is accurate) that Norbert Weiner's model of human cognition as basis for user-friendly/mirroring AI had turned out to be wrong, according to later neurological research---but meanwhile people using computers were adjusting themselves to this false/limited model: which might be the false/limited basis for his early stories about modern human attraction to reductive, though massive, mechanistic, inanimate patterning (ain't got no soul, going with his hipster Huguenot-descendant aversions). Stories which he's harsh on in the intro to Slow Learner, which collects a number of them, but he's also down on Lot 49, and it's easy to connect that to themes of V., and some of Gravity's Rainbow. Which (young and/or older TP's creative misprision in there somewhere? Let it roll if so, I say) goes w what you describe as DeWitt's irony and also her not taking sides between model-minded weirdos and others.

Also, what you say about Ballard reminds me of his 1978 conversation w Jon Savage, in Search and Destroy (also in an issue of RE:Search):

S&D:That's another thing very noticeable in High-Rise and Concrete Island that modern isolation -- because of all that, as in the case of the guy an the Concrete Island, you can actually be on the road trying to hitch a ride -- you might as well be light years away.

JGB: You can't stop here and you can't stop there -- well even if you wanted to if you’re driving along, say the Westway near Shepherd's Bush at 60 miles an hour, and you saw somebody bleeding by the roadside -- you try to stop, you'll be in a multi-car pile-up, you'd be dead, you'd be hit by about 15 or 20 cars. And of course you don't want to stop -- the whole system is engineered around the assumption that nobody is going to express any impulsive charity -- or do anything impulsive, for that matter! You no more can express some original impulse than somebody riding a rollercoaster who suddenly decided to got off -- once the rollercoaster begins you have to ride it through to the end. Many of these modern roads are beautifully landscaped, actually.

oops, meant to link: https://www.jgballard.ca/media/1978_reprinted_1988_search%26destroy_newspaper.html

Also, re models, patterning, loops, living by, makes me think of Didion's Where I Was From, about getting a headful of California Golden State mythos at an early age, what that does to people, including herself, very gradually coming to terms with it---

I think Fizzles is very on point re Ballard’s novels, though in his short fiction he really let his structural experiments go wild in a very un 19th century way.

i need to process those posts, dow, i think there's a lot in what you say (i'm sort of circling around how ontologies of metadata in media interact with emotional states and recommendations in a limiting or creatively deterministic way at the moment), but i'm not sure it's exactly an HDW concern as such, or rather it's much more ludic with HDW. systems as a quite humanistic, serious and ethical *game*. i don't feel i'm being v clear in my own head about all this tbh.

aiui the great west road and the westway were both modelled on Moses' parkways. i feel that statistics and probability is the base of any common interests in systematisation. Seeing Like a State is an obvious place to look.

Agree w JM on the short fiction. Which reminds me of something i meant to post a while ago: A while ago, I read two short stories, The Vats by Walter de la Mare in 1917, and JG Ballard's *The Waiting Grounds* (1959). There are have numerous similarities, and a comparison seemed valid, so i wrote quotes, parallels and differences down either side of a line i drew in a notepad. I seem to have mislaid the notepad in an ill-advised tidying-up session, but i circle back to it periodically, as it's not a comparison i've seen made anywhere else.

They are both about Time: Time on a vast, theistic or metaphysical scale. They are also both about how that version of Time may be specifically accessible in a particular type of landscape, via inhuman constructions.

We came at once to a standstill amid the far-flung stretches of the unknown plateau on which we had re-found ourselves, and with eyes fixed upon these astonishing objects, stood and stared. I have called them Vats. Vats they were not; but rather sunken Reservoirs; vast semi-spherical primeval Cisterns, of an area many times that of the bloated and swollen gasometers which float like huge flattened bubbles between earth and heaven under the sunlit clouds of the Thames. But no sunbeams dispread themselves here. They lay slumbering in a grave, crystal light, which lapped, deep as the Tuscarora Trough, above and around their prodigious stone plates, or slats, or slabs, or laminae; their steep slopes washed by the rarefied atmosphere of their site, and in hue of a hoary green.

anyway... this isn't the thread for it.

i am interested to hear ilxor's thoughts on The English Understand Wool - as you can tell from the above i'm really fumbling around it. it has all sorts of positive what I might call secondary qualities or indicators. like the fact you can't really describe any aspect of the book without giving out an important element of the whole, far better in its own context than taken out of it and plonked here or in a review. which is why or partly why my thoughts above are deliberately so abstract. and while i'm still fumbling around, i don't want to *mess it up*. another good secondary indicator or quality: i find myself continually thinking about it, so i'm v much still in the *woolgathering* stage as it were.

i'm not sure it's exactly an HDW concern as such, or rather it's much more ludic with HDW. systems as a quite humanistic, serious and ethical *game*. i don't feel i'm being v clear in my own head about all this tbh.

I raved about TEUW on twitter and Helen deWitt responded and I am somewhat starstruck.

Congratz! I never thought to look for her on Twitter---(oh that was meant to be *grind* the text to pieces)

Are you a student who's passionate about translation? The OAT needs you! We are now accepting applications for various roles ahead of our second issue in the winter. Check out the link in our bio for more! pic.twitter.com/zK2K132T4l

— Oxford Anthology of Translation (@oatanthology) August 28, 2022

DeWitt retweeted that, characteristically enough.

was re-reading the v amusing, geneous and insightful piece on pierre michon by wyatt mason in the nyrb, and a phrase at the end struck me cos it seemed so appropriate for The English Understand Wool:

the distilledness of his work, its compression and *the yields of exclusion*

tho as i write that down, i realise again, that it's not quite right – there's not a sense of exclusion, of the sort you might get in evelyn waugh or pg wodehouse dialogue, or indeed in michon. in TEUW it's more a sort of *exactness*.

Behind the scenes on the narrator's wine choice in TEUW

Ha. No, my first choice was ludicrously wrong for a supposedly knowledgeable narrator, then had LONG email exchange w Lena Devos, France-based Russian translator of Some Trick, who was SO helpful re wine & meal

— Helen DeWitt (@helendewitt) August 30, 2022

Fizzles - about this WOOL book that you like: what is it about and why does it have this title?

i think i won't answer that, partly because it's so incredibly short, that you can answer both those questions after something less than an hour of reading, partly because it's so well put together that to add my summary information... i don't think there's enough words for my view to dilute into without affecting the effect!

nice interview in berlin here (nothing on The English Understand Wool though).

i'm not sure it's exactly an HDW concern as such, or rather it's much more ludic with HDW. systems as a quite humanistic, serious and ethical *game*.

i enjoyed the novella but the cover is incredibly hideous in design and also in feel (feels like some weird cheap kids book). the design is so ugly that maybe it's good. not sure.