Day 21: Louise Glück, Yiyun Li, Zoe Hu
Likes, I wrote too much again. Ideally I'd keep the character count below 6000. Well. it daint matter.
Poem: Louise Glück - Gretel in Darkness (1975)
This is the world we wanted.
All who would have seen us dead
are dead. I hear the witch's cry
break in the moonlight through a sheet
of sugar: God rewards.
Her tongue shrivels into gas...
Read the rest of the poem here
I am onto The House in the Marshland, the second Louise Glück collection in the omnibus. I am still not really connecting with her poems, but have been told she is great. Most poems in the collection are vibes-based and don't seem to be about actual things. Occasionally I like something - this poem being the highlight so far.
The poem is a dark sequel to the Hansel and Gretel fairy-tale. Years later, the two children are living safe and secure in the parents house, yet both are clearly traumatised by the events of the candy house, in which they murdered their captor.
The ending reminds me of something out of True Detective.
Am I alone? Spies
hiss in the stillness, Hansel,
we are there still and it is real, real,
that black forest and the fire in earnest.
Story: Yiyun Li - A Little Flame
I love Yiyun Li's non-fiction, but am lukewarm on her stories. They never feel much like "stories" - rather, they feel like compilations of facts and anecdotes that paint a picture of the character. But we scarcely get events or actions; mostly just backstory. Still, after the third reading, I find this one good and am coming round to understanding her approach.
This story begins with the character Bella, having returned to China, behaving shockingly coldly to a street urchin. The urchin can't go home until she sells all her roses, so Bella flings her a large sum, snatches the whole bundle, and throws them into the bushes. She is then furious when the girl recollects them and runs away. The remainder of the story is in the past, a free-association of flashbacks that help us piece together why she has acted like this. There is no classic narrative- just an action, and then memories that explain the action.
I read this story last year in her collection Wednesday's Child, remembering nothing about any of the stories, but was slightly annoyed the whole time- as if I were listening to a long anecdote endlessly derailed with digressions. It was only on listening to the story discussed on The New Yorker podcast that I understood there was a story at all. The story feels very random, but is crafted with great complexity. Even on my first reading, I was confused by my feeling of inexplicable sadness at the end- the throat-closing feeling of wanting to cry. How she could get me to this point without knowing why is impressive.
Li's style is a brutal honesty, an honesty that wounds, that punctures, to hear. Her aesthetic of bluntness and coldness may come from having lived through so much tragedy, but is also an affect I find common across other Chinese writers - Yu Hua, RF Kuang, Cixin Liu - all write unflinchingly about Chinese life, and whether discussing the past or present, they do not paint the country as a particuarly warm or kind place to exist.
In the story, Yiyun Li paints family life among the privileged classes as ruthless and self-serving:
Her mother, whose beauty and career were not to be destroyed by childbearing, had adopted a pretty baby girl from her home province. At two, the girl had been diagnosed, in the parlance of the day, as deaf-mute and had been sent away.
Bella (adopted by the family for her beauty) later seeks warmth and recognition from a cold, indifferent teacher. The teacher, who changed her life in many ways, haunts her forever after. Years later, she tracks down Miss Chu to find that she is an activist for LGBT rights, speaking openly about her experience with same-sex domestic violence. Rather than being impressed by this bravery, as we would expect, Bella is disappointed; this is not the stony, apathetic teacher she thought she knew...
The latter had had a heart made of polished ice, which, inviolable and immovable, had long ago absorbed what warmth could be found in Bella’s blood. This stranger, talking about her activism and revealing her personal life, was a sham, looking for purpose and solace in the wrong place. Mistakenly, she thought she had found them in a just cause.
The story reveals that people are not born cynical and cruel. Rather their environment and culture sucks away their chances of developing compassion.
-rant about australian politics redacted-
Essay: Zoe Hu - Break the Aspiration Meter
Yesterday I bought a digital subscription for the New York Review of Books, as I had finished all the essays I wanted to read in the books on my shelf. Founded by Elizabeth Hardwick, the journal is primarily concerned with thoughtful, approachable literary criticism, so I was surprised there was an essay on The Sims 1 & 2 rerelease.
The Sims is one of my favourite games- there have been months where I became addicted to it, neglecting other duties in an attempt to stage my Faulknerian sagas; yet I was still surprised to find a piece of video-game writing in the NYRB. I don't think games are a lower art form than others, nor do I think that games are undeserving of literary criticism. Its just that most game-journalism is completely insipid; when writers aren't trying to convince you to buy or avoid, they are harping on about "nostalgia", employing the dullest definition of the word (i miss being a little kiddd). Still, if I love the game, I read what people have to say. The most interesting games writing usually not by fans, but by other game developers- I really liked Derek Yu's book on the making of Spelunky. But it is hard to seperate the kernel of wheat from the bulk of the chaff.
This essay is interesting in that its main idea is around our natural desire to tell meaningful stories. We always hope a Sims game will be a virtual dollhouse in which we can channel our imagination, living vicariously through a virtual avatar, yet without a hundred cheat codes, our quest for grand narrative quickly falls as we grind the gameplay loop for meeting basic needs...
A Sims home is not a haven or stage for emotions; it is only a system that challenges players to maintain its various parts. The game’s characters therefore never seem to experience the ongoing dramas of domesticity—neither its tender feelings nor its threat of betrayal, violence, resentment, dependency, scandal, and mutual ruination.
Towards the end, the essay takes a sudden turn towards the similar pitfalls of GenAI, which also relies on algorithms that cannot make sense of contradictions:
On The Sims you can caress a beloved and then immediately antagonize her, and these two acts will cancel each other out. A quantity of affection has been given and then taken away, but there are no ligaments of memory or sense between the moments, no way in which one act might deepen another or throw it into question. A Large Language Model, too, might flag certain phenomena as contradictory, but it has no way to interpret those contradictions, no way to reclaim or improvise meaning out of them—or out of anything.
It is only narrative that can do this: allow us to interpret contradiction by appealing to a higher level of sense, recoup absurdity and give us the structure we need to bear it.
The ending of this essay is fantastic. It ends in the best possible way. You can read it here