a berlin blog
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a berlin blog |
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Thursday, November 27, 2003 Das ist ja cool! 2Last week I mentioned a German review of the novel. The writer, like I said, gets a number of things wrong. The crucial thing has to do with the Zohar's three-part model of the soul (nefesh, ruach, neshamah), which is very interesting to my dead narrator. The German critic, being German, writes that the model "might remind one of [Freudian] psychoanalysis and the id, ego, and super-ego — although the reader should not make the same mistake as the author [of making this parallel], which he apologizes for in an afterword."Id, ego, and super-ego are delightful toys for German lit students but they have nothing to do with my novel. All I apologize for in the afterword is bending ideas from the Zohar to my own purposes. Freud had nothing to do with it. In fact I went fleeing from Freud to the Zohar because "id, ego, and super-ego" were too crusted with cliché. Nefesh, ruach, and neshamah seemed new to me; they also paralleled Hindu models of Atman and Brahman that fascinated Emerson (who has more than a little to do with my book). Anyway. German critics also have a thing for "coolness" as a motive in modern fiction; they take it seriously. (Americans more or less invented the notion of cool, so American critics tend to be embarrassed by it and dismiss it as a foible with no place in literature.) So here's a translation of the most thoughtful and interesting paragraph by my German reader, Tobias Else: "Moore distinguishes himself from his pop-literary contemporaries in this sense: Coolness and sang-froid exist in his novel, but not in the foreground. The big city is the story's backdrop, not its point, much less a dark mystery. Sections of the novel even consist of warm, emotionally-engaged storytelling. No social 'scene' or class is described; the 'scene' is just part of the whole influence on a growing individual ... It's not just movies, music, friends, society, and parents which build us into good or evil people, but also our own selves." Richtig! posted by Michael Scott Moore | 1:42 AM | |
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