Despite his one-time friend and mentor Sigmund Freud’s enormous impact on Western self-understanding, I would argue it is Carl Jung who is still most with us in our communal practices: from his focus on introversion and extroversion to his view of syncretic, intuitive forms of spirituality and his indirect influence on 12-Step programs. But Jung’s journey to self-understanding and what he called “individuation” was an intensely private, personal affair that took place over the course of sixteen years, during which he created an incredible, folio-sized work of religious art called The Red Book: Liber Novus. In the video above, you can get a tour through Jung’s private masterpiece, presented in an intensely hushed, breathy style meant to trigger the tingly sensations of a weird phenomenon called “ASMR.” Given the book’s disorienting and often disturbing content, this over-gentle guidance seems appropriate.
After his break with Freud in 1913, when he was 38 years old, Jung had what he feared might be a psychotic break with reality as well. He began recording his dreams, mystical visions, and psychedelic inner voyages, in a stylized, calligraphic style that resembles medieval European illuminated manuscripts and the occult psychic journeys of Aleister Crowley and William Blake.
Jung had the work bound but not published. It’s “a very personal record,” writes Psychology Today, “of Jung’s complicated, tortuous and lengthy quest to salvage his soul.” Jung called this process of creation the “numinous beginning” to his most important psychological work. After many years spent locked in a bank vault, The Red Book finally came to light a few years ago and was translated and published in an expensive edition.
“How did Faulkner pull it off?” is a question many a fledgling writer has asked themselves while struggling through a period of apprenticeship like that novelist John Barth describes in his 1999 talk “My Faulkner.” Barth “reorchestrated” his literary heroes, he says, “in search of my writerly self… downloading my innumerable predecessors as only an insatiable green apprentice can.” Surely a great many writers can relate when Barth says, “it was Faulkner at his most involuted and incantatory who most enchanted me.” For many a writer, the Faulknerian sentence is an irresistible labyrinth. His syntax has a way of weaving itself into the unconscious, emerging as fair to middling imitation.
While studying at Johns Hopkins University, Barth found himself writing about his native Eastern Shore of Maryland in a pastiche style of “middle Faulkner and late Joyce.” He may have won some praise from a visiting young William Styron, “but the finished opus didn’t fly—for one thing, because Faulkner intimately knew his Snopses and Compsons and Sartorises, as I did not know my made-up denizens of the Maryland marsh.” The advice to write only what you know may not be worth much as a universal commandment. But studying the way that Faulkner wrote when he turned to the subjects he knew best provides an object lesson on how powerful a literary resource intimacy can be.
Not only does Faulkner’s deep affiliation with his characters’ inner lives elevate his portraits far above the level of local color or regionalist curiosity, but it animates his sentences, makes them constantly move and breathe. No matter how long and twisted they get, they do not wilt, wither, or drag; they run river-like, turning around in asides, outraging themselves and doubling and tripling back. Faulkner’s intimacy is not earnestness, it is the uncanny feeling of a raw encounter with a nerve center lighting up with information, all of it seemingly critically important.
It is the extraordinary sensory quality of his prose that enabled Faulkner to get away with writing the longest sentence in literature, at least according to the 1983 Guinness Book of World Records, a passage from Absalom, Absalom! consisting of 1,288 words and who knows how many different kinds of clauses. There are now longer sentences in English writing. Jonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Clubends with a 33-page long whopper with 13,955 words in it. Entire novels hundreds of pages long have been written in one sentence in other languages. All of Faulkner’s modernist contemporaries, including of course Joyce, Woolf, and Beckett, mastered the use of run-ons, to different effect.
But, for a time, Faulkner took the run-on as far as it could go. He may have had no intention of inspiring postmodern fiction, but one of its best-known novelists, Barth, only found his voice by first writing a “heavily Faulknerian marsh-opera.” Many hundreds of experimental writers have had almost identical experiences trying to exorcise the Oxford, Mississippi modernist’s voice from their prose. Read that onetime longest sentence in literature, all 1,288 words of it, below.
Just exactly like Father if Father had known as much about it the night before I went out there as he did the day after I came back thinking Mad impotent old man who realized at last that there must be some limit even to the capabilities of a demon for doing harm, who must have seen his situation as that of the show girl, the pony, who realizes that the principal tune she prances to comes not from horn and fiddle and drum but from a clock and calendar, must have seen himself as the old wornout cannon which realizes that it can deliver just one more fierce shot and crumble to dust in its own furious blast and recoil, who looked about upon the scene which was still within his scope and compass and saw son gone, vanished, more insuperable to him now than if the son were dead since now (if the son still lived) his name would be different and those to call him by it strangers and whatever dragon’s outcropping of Sutpen blood the son might sow on the body of whatever strange woman would therefore carry on the tradition, accomplish the hereditary evil and harm under another name and upon and among people who will never have heard the right one; daughter doomed to spinsterhood who had chosen spinsterhood already before there was anyone named Charles Bon since the aunt who came to succor her in bereavement and sorrow found neither but instead that calm absolutely impenetrable face between a homespun dress and sunbonnet seen before a closed door and again in a cloudy swirl of chickens while Jones was building the coffin and which she wore during the next year while the aunt lived there and the three women wove their own garments and raised their own food and cut the wood they cooked it with (excusing what help they had from Jones who lived with his granddaughter in the abandoned fishing camp with its collapsing roof and rotting porch against which the rusty scythe which Sutpen was to lend him, make him borrow to cut away the weeds from the door-and at last forced him to use though not to cut weeds, at least not vegetable weeds ‑would lean for two years) and wore still after the aunt’s indignation had swept her back to town to live on stolen garden truck and out o f anonymous baskets left on her front steps at night, the three of them, the two daughters negro and white and the aunt twelve miles away watching from her distance as the two daughters watched from theirs the old demon, the ancient varicose and despairing Faustus fling his final main now with the Creditor’s hand already on his shoulder, running his little country store now for his bread and meat, haggling tediously over nickels and dimes with rapacious and poverty-stricken whites and negroes, who at one time could have galloped for ten miles in any direction without crossing his own boundary, using out of his meagre stock the cheap ribbons and beads and the stale violently-colored candy with which even an old man can seduce a fifteen-year-old country girl, to ruin the granddaughter o f his partner, this Jones-this gangling malaria-ridden white man whom he had given permission fourteen years ago to squat in the abandoned fishing camp with the year-old grandchild-Jones, partner porter and clerk who at the demon’s command removed with his own hand (and maybe delivered too) from the showcase the candy beads and ribbons, measured the very cloth from which Judith (who had not been bereaved and did not mourn) helped the granddaughter to fashion a dress to walk past the lounging men in, the side-looking and the tongues, until her increasing belly taught her embarrassment-or perhaps fear;-Jones who before ’61 had not even been allowed to approach the front of the house and who during the next four years got no nearer than the kitchen door and that only when he brought the game and fish and vegetables on which the seducer-to-be’s wife and daughter (and Clytie too, the one remaining servant, negro, the one who would forbid him to pass the kitchen door with what he brought) depended on to keep life in them, but who now entered the house itself on the (quite frequent now) afternoons when the demon would suddenly curse the store empty of customers and lock the door and repair to the rear and in the same tone in which he used to address his orderly or even his house servants when he had them (and in which he doubtless ordered Jones to fetch from the showcase the ribbons and beads and candy) direct Jones to fetch the jug, the two of them (and Jones even sitting now who in the old days, the old dead Sunday afternoons of monotonous peace which they spent beneath the scuppernong arbor in the back yard, the demon lying in the hammock while Jones squatted against a post, rising from time to time to pour for the demon from the demijohn and the bucket of spring water which he had fetched from the spring more than a mile away then squatting again, chortling and chuckling and saying ‘Sho, Mister Tawm’ each time the demon paused)-the two of them drinking turn and turn about from the jug and the demon not lying down now nor even sitting but reaching after the third or second drink that old man’s state of impotent and furious undefeat in which he would rise, swaying and plunging and shouting for his horse and pistols to ride single-handed into Washington and shoot Lincoln (a year or so too late here) and Sherman both, shouting, ‘Kill them! Shoot them down like the dogs they are!’ and Jones: ‘Sho, Kernel; sho now’ and catching him as he fell and commandeering the first passing wagon to take him to the house and carry him up the front steps and through the paintless formal door beneath its fanlight imported pane by pane from Europe which Judith held open for him to enter with no change, no alteration in that calm frozen face which she had worn for four years now, and on up the stairs and into the bedroom and put him to bed like a baby and then lie down himself on the floor beside the bed though not to sleep since before dawn the man on the bed would stir and groan and Jones would say, ‘flyer I am, Kernel. Hit’s all right. They aint whupped us yit, air they?’ this Jones who after the demon rode away with the regiment when the granddaughter was only eight years old would tell people that he ‘was lookin after Major’s place and niggers’ even before they had time to ask him why he was not with the troops and perhaps in time came to believe the lie himself, who was among the first to greet the demon when he returned, to meet him at the gate and say, ‘Well, Kernel, they kilt us but they aint whupped us yit, air they?’ who even worked, labored, sweat at the demon’s behest during that first furious period while the demon believed he could restore by sheer indomitable willing the Sutpen’s Hundred which he remembered and had lost, labored with no hope of pay or reward who must have seen long before the demon did (or would admit it) that the task was hopeless-blind Jones who apparently saw still in that furious lecherous wreck the old fine figure of the man who once galloped on the black thoroughbred about that domain two boundaries of which the eye could not see from any point.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2019.
Though he never said so directly, we might expect that Situationist Guy Debord would have included Saturday Night Live in what he called the “Spectacle”—the mass media presentation of a totalizing reality, “the ruling order’s nonstop discourse about itself, its never-ending monologue of self-praise.” The slickness of TV, even live comedy TV, masks carefully orchestrated maneuvers on the part of its creators and advertisers. In Debord’s analysis, nothing is exempted from the spectacle’s consolidation of power; it co-opts everything for its purposes. Even seeming contradictions within the spectacle—the skewering of political figures, for example, to their seeming displeasure—serve the purposes of power: The spectacle, wrote Debord, “is the opposite of dialogue.”
So I wonder, what he might have made of the appearance of cult writer and Beat pioneer William S. Burroughs on the comedy show in 1981? Was Burroughs—a mastermind of the counterculture—co-opted by the powers that be? The author of Junkie, Naked Lunch, and Cities of the Red Night also appeared in a Nike ad and several films and music videos, becoming a “presence in American pop culture,” writes R.U. Sirius in Everybody Must Get Stoned.
David Seed notes that Burroughs “is remembered by many members of the intelligentsia and glitterati as dinner partner for the likes of Andy Warhol, David Bowie, and Mick Jagger,” though he had “been a model for the political and social left.” Had he been neutered by the 80s, his outrageously anarchist sentiments turned to radical kitsch?
Or maybe Burroughs disrupted the spectacle, his droning, monotonous delivery giving viewers of SNL exactly the opposite of what they were trained to expect. The appearance was his widest exposure to date (immediately afterward, he moved from New York to Lawrence, Kansas). One of the show’s writers convinced producer Dick Ebersol to put Burroughs on. In rehearsal, writes Burroughs’ biographer Ted Morgan, Ebersol “found Burroughs ‘boring and dreadful,’ and ordered that his time slot be cut from six to three and a half minutes. The writers, however, conspired to let his performance stand as it was, and on November 7, he kicked off the show sitting behind a desk, the lighting giving his face a sepulchral gauntness.”
In the grainy video above, Burroughs reads from Naked Lunch and cut-up novel Nova Express, bringing the sadistic Dr. Benway into America’s living rooms, as the audience laughs nervously. Sound effects of bombs and strains of the national anthem play behind him as he reads. It stands as perhaps one of the strangest moments in live television. “Burroughs had positioned himself as the Great Outsider,” writes Morgan, “but on the night of November 7 he had reached the position where the actress Lauren Hutton could introduce him to an audience of 100 million viewers as America’s greatest living writer.” I’m sure Burroughs got a kick out of the description. In any case, the clip shows us a SNL of bygone days that occasionally disrupted the usual state of programming, as when it had punk band Fear on the show.
Perhaps Burroughs’ commercial appearances also show us how the counterculture gets co-opted and repackaged for middle-class tastes. Then again, one of the great ironies of Burroughs’ life is that he both began and ended it as “a true member of the midwestern tax-paying middle class.” The following year in Lawrence, Kansas, he “caught up on his correspondence.” One student in Montreal wrote, imagining him in “a male whorehouse in Tangier.” Burroughs replied, “No… I live in a small house on a tree-lined street in Lawrence, Kansas, with my beloved cat Ruski. My hobbies are hunting, fishing, and pistol practice.” Did Burroughs, who spent his life destroying mass culture with cut-ups and curses, sell out—as he once accused Truman Capote of doing—by becoming a celebrity?
Perhaps we should let him answer the charge. In answer to a fan from England who called him “God,” Burroughs wrote, “You got me wrong, Raymond, I am but a humble practitioner of the scrivener’s trade. God? Not me. I don’t have the qualifications. Old Sarge told me years ago: ‘Don’t be a volunteer, kid.’ God is always trying to foist his lousy job not someone else. You gotta be crazy to take it. Just a Tech Sergeant in the Shakespeare Squadron.” Burroughs may have used his celebrity status to his literary advantage, and used it to pay the bills and work with artists he admired and vice-versa, but he never saw himself as more than a writer (and perhaps lay magician), and he abjured the hero worship that made him a cult figure.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.
In a letter dated May 31, 1960, Flannery O’Connor, the author best known for her classic story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (listen to her read the story here) penned a letter to her friend, the playwright Maryat Lee. It begins rather abruptly, likely because it’s responding to something Maryat said in a previous letter:
I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.
O’Connor’s critical appraisal of Ayn Rand’s books is pretty straightforward. But here’s one factoid worth knowing. Mickey Spillane (referenced in O’Connor’s letter) was a hugely popular mystery writer, who sold some 225 million books during his lifetime. According to his Washington Post obit, “his specialty was tight-fisted, sadistic revenge stories, often featuring his alcoholic gumshoe Mike Hammer and a cast of evildoers.” Critics, appalled by the sex and violence in his books, dismissed his writing. But Ayn Rand defended him. In public, she said that Spillane was underrated. In her bookThe Romantic Manifesto, Rand put Spillane in some unexpected company when she wrote: “[Victor] Hugo gives me the feeling of entering a cathedral–Dostoevsky gives me the feeling of entering a chamber of horrors, but with a powerful guide–Spillane gives me the feeling of listening to a military band in a public park–Tolstoy gives me the feeling of an unsanitary backyard which I do not care to enter.”
All of this goes to show that _____. We’ll let you fill in the blank.
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Before the word processor, before White-Out, before Post-It Notes, there were straight pins. Or, at least that’s what Jane Austen used to make edits in one of her rare manuscripts. In 2011, Oxford’s Bodleian Library acquired the manuscript of Austen’s abandoned novel, The Watsons. In announcing the acquisition, the Bodleian wrote:
The Watsons is Jane Austen’s first extant draft of a novel in process of development and one of the earliest examples of an English novel to survive in its formative state. Only seven manuscripts of fiction by Austen are known to survive. The Watsons manuscript is extensively revised and corrected throughout, with crossings out and interlinear additions.
Janeausten.ac.uk (the website where Austen’s manuscripts have been digitized) takes a deeper dive into the curious quality of The Watsons manuscript, noting:
The manuscript is written and corrected throughout in brown iron-gall ink. The pages are filled in a neat, even hand with signs of concurrent writing, erasure, and revision, interrupted by occasional passages of heavy interlinear correction.… The manuscript is without chapter divisions, though not without informal division by wider spacing and ruled lines. The full pages suggest that Jane Austen did not anticipate a protracted process of redrafting. With no calculated blank spaces and no obvious way of incorporating large revision or expansion she had to find other strategies – the three patches, small pieces of paper, each of which was filled closely and neatly with the new material, attached with straight pins to the precise spot where erased material was to be covered or where an insertion was required to expand the text.
According to Christopher Fletcher, Keeper of Special Collections at the Bodleian Library, this prickly method of editing wasn’t exactly new. Archivists at the library can trace pins being used as editing tools back to 1617.
You can find The Watsons online here:
The Watsons, Morgan Library & Museum, New York — Facsimile
The Watsons, Bodleian Library, Oxford — Facsimile
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in August, 2014.
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H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds has terrified and fascinated readers and writers for decades since its 1898 publication and has inspired numerous adaptations. The most notorious use of Wells’ book was by Orson Welles, whom the author called “my little namesake,” and whose 1938 War of the Worlds Halloween radio play caused public alarm (though not actually a national panic). After the occurrence, reports Phil Klass, the actor remarked, “I’m extremely surprised to learn that a story, which has become familiar to children through the medium of comic strips and many succeeding and adventure stories, should have had such an immediate and profound effect upon radio listeners.”
Surely Welles knew that is precisely why the broadcast had the effect it did, especially in such an anxious pre-war climate. The 1898 novel also startled its first readers with its verisimilitude, playing on a late Victorian sense of apocalyptic doom as the turn-of-the century approached.
But what contemporary circumstances eight years later, we might wonder, fueled the imagination of Henrique Alvim Corrêa, whose 1906 illustrations of the novel you can see here? Wells himself approved of these incredible drawings, praising them before their publication and saying, “Alvim Corrêa did more for my work with his brush than I with my pen.”
Indeed they capture the novel’s uncanny dread. Martian tripods loom, ghastly and cartoonish, above blasted realist landscapes and scenes of panic. In one illustration, a grotesque, tentacled Martian ravishes a nude woman. In a surrealist drawing of an abandoned London above, eyes protrude from the buildings, and a skeletal head appears above them. The alien technology often appears clumsy and unsophisticated, which contributes to the generally terrifying absurdity that emanates from these finely rendered plates.
Alvim Corrêa was a Brazilian artist living in Brussels and struggling for recognition in the European art world. His break seemed to come when the War of the Worlds illustrations were printed in a large-format, limited French edition of the book, with each of the 500 copies signed by the artist himself.
Unfortunately, Corrêa’s tuberculosis killed him four years later. His War of the Worlds drawings did not bring him fame in his lifetime or after, but his work has been cherished since by a devoted cult following. The original prints you see here remained with the artist’s family until a sale of 31 of them in 1990. You can see many more, as well as scans from the book and a poster announcing the publication, at The Public Domain Review and the Monster Brains site.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
As you’ve probably noticed if you’re a regular reader of this site, we’re big fans of book illustration, particularly that from the form’s golden age—the late 18th and 19th century—before photography took over as the dominant visual medium. But while photographs largely supplanted illustrations in textbooks, magazines, and newspapers over the course of the 20th century, works of fiction, which had been routinely published in lavishly illustrated editions, suddenly became the featureless banks of words we know today. Though image-heavy graphic novels and comic books have thrived in recent decades, the illustrated literary text is a rarity indeed.
Why did this change come about? “I really don’t know,” writes Christopher Howse at The Telegraph, but he points out that the era of illustrated fiction for grown-ups ended “after the death of the big Victorian novelists,” like Dickens and Trollope. Before adult picture-books went out of style, several now-famous artists made careers as book illustrators. When we think of the big names from the period, we think of Aubrey Beardsley and Gustave Doré, both of whom we’ve covered heavily here. We tend not to think of Irish artist Harry Clarke—a relative latecomer—but we should. Of the many incredible illustrations from famous works of literature we’ve featured here, my favorite might be Clarke’s 1926 illustrations of Goethe’s Faust.
So out-there are some of his illustrations, so delightfully nightmarish and weird, one is tempted to fall back on that rather sophomoric explanation for art we find disturbing: maybe he was on drugs! Not that he’d need them to conjure up many of the images he did. His source material is bizarre enough (maybe Goethe was on drugs!). In any case, we can definitely call Clarke’s work hallucinatory, and that goes for his earlier, 1923 illustrations of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination as well, of which you can see a few choice examples here.
Dublin-born Clarke worked as a stained-glass artist as well as an illustrator, and drew his inspiration from the earlier art nouveau aesthetic of Beardsley and others, adding his own rococo flourishes to the elongated forms and decorative patterns favored by those artists. His glowering figures—including one who looks quite a bit like Poe himself, at the top—suit the feverish intensity of Poe’s world to perfection. And like Poe, Clarke’s art generally thrived in a seductively dark underworld filled with ghouls and fiends. Both of these proto-goths died young, Poe under mysterious circumstances at age 40, Clarke of tuberculosis at 42.
51 years ago, Hunter S. Thompson wrote Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, which “is still considered a kind of bible of political reporting,” noted Matt Taibbi in a 40th anniversary edition of the book. Fear and Loathing ’72 entered the canon of American political writing for many reasons. But if you’re looking for one bottom-line explanation, it probably comes down to this: Says Taibbi, “Thompson stared right into the flaming-hot sun of shameless lies and cynical horseshit that is our politics, and he described exactly what he saw—probably at serious cost to his own mental health, but the benefit to us was [his legendary book].”
Thompson may have reached some journalistic apogee with his coverage of the ’72 Nixon-McGovern campaign. But his political writing hardly stopped there. The Gonzo journalist covered the ’76 election for Rolling Stone magazine. And inevitably he crossed paths with Jimmy Carter (RIP), the eventual winner of the election. Above, Thompson recalls the day when Carter first made an impression upon him.
It happened at the University of Georgia School of Law on May 4, 1974. Speaking before a gathering of alumni lawyers, Carter upset their celebratory occasion when he dismantled the criminal justice system they were so proud of. And Carter particularly caught Thompson’s attention when he traced his sense of social justice back to a song written by Bob Dylan:
The other source of my understanding about what’s right and wrong in this society is from a friend of mine, a poet named Bob Dylan. After listening to his records about “The Ballad of Hattie Carol” and “Like a Rolling Stone” and “The Times, They Are a‑Changing,” I’ve learned to appreciate the dynamism of change in a modern society.
I grew up as a landowner’s son. But I don’t think I ever realized the proper interrelationship between the landowner and those who worked on a farm until I heard Dylan’s record, “I Ain’t Gonna Work on Maggie’s Farm No More.” So I come here speaking to you today about your subject with a base for my information founded on Reinhold Niebuhr and Bob Dylan.
You can read the full text of Carter’s speech here. It’s also worth watching a related clip below, where Thompson elaborates on Carter, his famous speech and his alleged mean streak that put him on the same plane as Muhammad Ali and Sonny Barger (the godfather of The Hells Angels).
Note: An earlier version of this post first appeared on our site in 2012. With the passing of President Carter, it seemed like a good time to bring it back.
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