by Derek Neal
I simply can’t seem to stop writing the same essay over and over. This is, I admit, not a great opening to a new essay. If all I do is repeat myself, why bother reading something new from me? Fair enough. You’ve heard it all before. But allow me one objection, which is that many writers write the same novel repeatedly, many filmmakers create the same movie multiple times, and these are often the best novelists and filmmakers. Now, I don’t mean to put myself in this category, but I can take solace in the fact that the greats do the same thing I seem to be fated to do.
Paul Schrader, whom I have mentioned in many of my recent essays, has made the same movie for the last 30 years. I thought it was just his recent trilogy—First Reformed, The Card Counter, and Master Gardener—but then I watched Light Sleeper from 1992, starring Willem Defoe as a drug dealer trying to change his life in New York. Does he write in a journal? He does. Does he sleep in a spare bedroom with no furniture? You bet. Does he try to change his life, only to be dragged back into the world he thought he could escape? Of course. Finally, does the move end with the Pickpocket ending, with the main character achieving something akin to a state of grace while paradoxically in prison? He sure does, and I wouldn’t want it any other way. This is Schrader’s world, it’s what he does best, and when I feel like spending a couple hours there, I know where to go.
Another writer who does this is Patrick Modiano, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014. It had been a few years since I’d read a Modiano novel, and a week or so ago I decided I’d like to go hang out for a bit with the phantoms that haunt Modiano’s France, stalking the dark streets with the silent specter of French collaboration during World War II hanging over them. I started reading Des Inconnues. Was there a character narrating a story in the first person about their past? There sure was. Did this character fall in with a shady group, a cast of characters who used fake names and performed clandestine activities? Absolutely. Was anything ever resolved, or would the characters exist in a dream-like state from beginning to end, unable to explain the meaning of what had happened to them? Indeed, the characters would never wake up.
The fact that writers repeat themselves is not a criticism, then, but a recognition that they are performing variations on a theme close to their heart and presenting their version of what it means to be a person living in the world. Another writer who does this is Haruki Murakami, as evidenced by the Haruki Murakami bingo card published in The New York Times in 2012, the idea being that you can play along as you read any one of his novels, crossing out squares like “Old Jazz Record” or “Speaking to Cats.” Personally, I would have added “Extensive Description of Cooking Pasta.” This bingo card was not made to mock Murakami, but as a show of appreciation by one of his adoring readers.
Another example: I recently started a new Karl Ove Knausgaard novel called A Time for Everything. It’s one of his first books, written before the enormous success of the My Struggle series and his subsequent books. I thought, in reading it, that I might get a sense of the development of Knausgaard’s thoughts and preoccupations. Not so. I read the first twenty pages, and even though this part of the story is set in the 16th century and tells of a man’s encounter with two angels, it’s not much different that Knausgaard writing about himself going to the bathroom, or spreading liver pâté on toast as a boy in Norway. His concern has always been the border between the two worlds people inhabit—the first being the physical, objective, and meaningless world; the second being the religious or spiritual world imbued with meaning and significance. His main talent, to my mind, is showing how the border between these two worlds is porous and we pass through it constantly. I didn’t continue with A Time for Everything—the timing wasn’t right—but I know that at some point in the future I’ll return to it and Knausgaard will be there waiting with his same old story, just as it should be.
When I was a college student, I wrote an undergraduate thesis titled Grace, Play, and the Body in the Writings of Albert Camus. My goal in this paper was to show how Camus’ philosophy of the absurd shared similarities with a sociological understanding of play, and how in effect Camus’ philosophy turned life into a game that one played to the best of their ability. Playing a game, or playing at life, then allowed for one to enter a state of grace. I was clear in my thesis that I was talking about physical grace—a unity of mind and body that we see on display in sports and in various passages of Camus’ writings—not divine grace. When I defended my thesis, one of the professors on the panel made a quip about this distinction I’d created, saying that a psychoanalytic reading could be done on my text by looking at how the repressed concept of divine grace threatened to emerge at various points. This annoyed me—to my mind the two concepts were clearly distinct—but I now see that, of course, she was right.
In my recent essays I’ve been looking at Paul Schrader’s concept of “transcendental style,” a filmmaking language that Susan Sontag referred to as “a state of spiritual balance.” Another way to refer to this would be as “a state of grace.” The films Schrader and Sontag write about try to represent this state and then induce this feeling in the viewer of the film. I have become, perhaps, a little obsessed with this idea. As I began to wonder why, I was reminded of my thesis from almost a decade ago, and I realized that, in fact, my preoccupations now are the same that they were then—physical grace, divine grace, spiritual balance, transcendental style, it’s really all the same thing, just expressed in different terms. Physical grace, which is most easily visible today in professional athletic competitions, strikes us because it seems as if a human being has perfectly merged their mind and body to the point of eliminating self-consciousness, thus transcending the constraints of the body, and with it, death.
Sontag refers to this in her essay on Robert Bresson, the director she and Schrader both consider to have a spiritual/transcendental style: “Consciousness of self is the ‘gravity’ that burdens the spirit; the surpassing of the consciousness of self is ‘grace,’ or spiritual lightness” (Sontag refers to grace twice as spiritual lightness and puts grace in quotation marks both times). Schrader writes about one of Bresson’s protagonists that “the freedom of his body coincides with the freedom of his soul, and this unique occurrence is the result of grace.” In movies, or in novels, the most obvious way to express divine grace or a transcendent moment may be through images or text describing physical grace, as this allows the viewer or reader to visualize something that is spiritual. The spirit is made flesh.
An example of this, a moment in a book that combines a description of physical grace with Sontag’s or Schrader’s notion of transcendence, is the end of Nemesis by Philip Roth. I have been meaning to write about this scene for years. The novel recounts a polio epidemic in Newark, New Jersey in 1944. Physical suffering and the destruction of the body are evident throughout the book, as are descriptions of strong, healthy young men. The book, as may be expected, is a tragedy. Yet Roth, for whatever reason, amends a sort of epilogue to the end of the novel that goes back in time before the summer of polio, when old, frail men were still young and strong.
Over five or so pages, the narrator recounts when he was a young boy and his gym teacher, a 23-year-old man named Bucky Cantor (the protagonist of the story), taught him and his schoolmates how to throw the javelin. It is surely no mistake that Roth chose such an ancient athletic activity as the javelin throw to describe. Here’s the narrator setting the scene: “At twenty-three, he was, to all of us boys, the most exemplary and revered authority we knew…And never a more glorious figure than on the afternoon near the end of June, before the ’44 epidemic seriously took hold in the city—before, for more than a few of us, our bodies and our lives would be drastically transformed—when we all marched behind him to the big dirt field across the street and down a short slope from the playground.” The scene already begins to have the feel of a ritual, as if Bucky is not himself but is embodying the spirit of those who have come before him. He is a “glorious figure” because glory goes to the winner of athletic competitions; the boys do not walk but “march” and are later referred to as a “pack” that is being lead; they are not yet individuals but students eager to learn from a master.
The master is “dressed in his skimpy, satiny track shorts and his sleeveless top” because his strong body needs to be visible. Before he begins to warm up, Bucky “let us each examine the javelin and heft it in our hands,” and he then explains the history of the javelin, referencing it first as a hunting weapon and then as part of the Olympics and Greek mythology. When Bucky throws the javelin, it is clear; he, too, will become a Greek hero. Bucky’s stretching routine is then described; Roth uses verbs like “kneeled,” “squatted,” “lunged,” flexed,” and “rotated.” The foregrounding of the body is essential to prepare us for the transcendent moment to follow.
Finally Bucky throws the javelin. I will not paraphrase it here because the scene should be read on its own, in its entirety, but I will mention a couple of Roth’s sentences. The narrator says that “None of us had ever before seen an athletic act so beautifully executed right in front of our eyes” and that “It was as though our playground director had turned into a primordial man…he seemed to us invincible.” Through a graceful physical act, he achieves transcendence.