Greg Jackson's Reading List

"A number of writers, including Borges and other luminaries of Latin American literature, have described this as a perfect novel. And there is something perfect in its plotting. As I mentioned before, it plays an amazing trick on you. It puts you in an odd situation in which you think you’re reading something like Kafka, where you shouldn’t expect any kind of systematic explanation. And then it miraculously delivers one, which makes a bizarre sense of everything that’s come before. It’s hard to know how much to summarize a book like Morel . I don’t want to give away too much of the conceit. But in essence, the fugitive lands on the island, thinking it’s deserted. He’s fleeing political persecution, or in any event he’s trying to escape from forces he believes are pursuing him. On the island, however, he begins seeing these figures, whom he at first takes as real and then increasingly—since they seem unresponsive to his presence—as phantasmal. He falls in love with one of them. And the plot of the book is his uncovering over time what’s really going on. The novel is said to be the basis of the film Last Year at Marienbad , which is fitting because Casares was apparently inspired to write it by his infatuation with the silent movie star Louise Brooks, who eventually transitioned into ‘talking pictures’ as well. On some level, Morel is a commentary on new technologies and their progression. Silent pictures were purely visual, then sound was added and they became more ‘real’. Part of what Casares seems to ask—if you accept the idea that as you incorporate more senses, more of life becomes amenable to representation—is if at some point the reproduction of reality turns into reality itself. If we know the world only through our senses, is there a point at which virtual reality becomes reality, if you see what I mean. Yes, certain preoccupations in my book overlap with those in Casares’, which today seems very prescient about our current age. Morel was already talking about how, as reproductions capture reality with ever greater accuracy, there may cease to be anything to distinguish them from the reality they reproduce. This obviously bears on issues we’re grappling with right now relating to technological advances in simulation and AI . At the most extreme we are led to wonder, when does a human subject emerge from a machine, if it recapitulates enough of what we think it means to be human? In The Dimensions of a Cave I was interested in asking two questions. First: What status, ultimately, do we give these things that come closer and closer to approximating reality? I place this in a long continuum that reaches way back to storytelling—to fiction—as the original ‘virtual’ reality. Second: How fully can you live in stories, in virtual realities, without becoming perilously untethered from the reality underneath them? At the same time, I think it’s important to recognise that we have always lived partly in virtual realities—in the stories and meanings that we invent to make sense of the world. I took interrogation as a jumping-off point because it concretizes the idea of wanting to penetrate another person’s mind. There is something irreducibly or impenetrably private about one’s conscious experience, but we want to know what other people think and what they keep hidden. On the flip side, people live inside minds with their own blind spots and limitations. It’s quite difficult to know the reality that exists outside one’s head. So it’s a two-way street: The world is trying to know what’s inside us, and we’re trying to know what’s outside us. The key allegory—and an almost perfect metaphor for virtual reality—is Plato’s cave. Yes. Borges was a very close friend of Casares. It seems that the metaphysical bent in their writing grew at least partly from their friendship and conversation. Borges’ story ‘ Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius ‘—an excellent candidate for the ur -text of metaphysical literature—begins with the narrator (presumably Borges) having a discussion with Bioy (Casares) about the abominable nature of mirrors. For me, Borges is the central figure in metaphysical literature. Some might argue for Kafka, but Kafka, to my mind, transcends the genre and moves beyond its preoccupation with the interplay between reality and that which eclipses reality. I’m not sure if people would accept that Borges wrote thrillers, but I consider his stories philosophical thrillers of a sort, or as close to a thriller as a thought experiment could get. Still, Borges didn’t write novels. So instead of including him, I let him hover in the background of Morel , which has the advantage of being less well known."

"The concept is amazing. When you first encounter it, you can’t believe someone pulled it off. Its skeleton, if I can call it that, comprises ten chapters—or chapter beginnings—from different novels. And in between these false starts you meet a reader, presented as ‘you’, who like the real you is reading each new chapter only for it to break off midstream. These interstitial chapters narrate the reader’s attempt to track down the rest of the novel only to discover, instead, the beginning chapter of a new novel. This keeps going on and gradually these fragments and the search for their missing counterparts becomes a novel unto itself. That’s the basic setup. I mean, I find it quite enjoyable, although it does test your patience. I think we all sometimes get to a point in a book where we think, ‘I’m a little tired of this,’ or ‘I’m ready for something new.’ Calvino teases again and again the pleasure of opening a new book. He casts you as the ‘traveller’ of the title, repeatedly showing up in virgin territory, new terrain, and there’s real excitement in that. This is a metaphor for the reader, who is always a tourist in the territory of their reading, never an immigrant. But then you often do want to know what happens. You want resolution. So the book puts an interesting strain on you. It frustrates the inherent expectation of prosecuting the plot that has been set up for you. The plot becomes a meta plot, grounded in interstitial drama of trying to piece together into a coherent whole what is by nature fragmentary and incomplete. You could see this as a metaphor for novel writing. By breaking apart its elements, the book draws attention to the puzzle-like nature of fiction . But it also, by fracturing the reading experience, puts pressure on the idea that a novel draws its meaning from the continuity of its plot. In true postmodern fashion, it refocuses on the timeless or conceptual aspects of what a novel is, as opposed to just, you know, a set of entailed events, one following the next. It puts forward a vision of one-novel-as-all-novels, showing how content can keep shifting while pattern and form endure."

"Yes. It’s set on a ship travelling from New York to Buenos Aires. This is also a nested story, or a frame narrative—but if we focus on the central characters, that’s simpler. The reigning chess champion is aboard the ship, and over the course of the voyage some of the passengers become interested in challenging him to a game of chess. He’s reluctant, but eventually they get him to play. And of course he destroys them. He’s a chess champion after all. But at some point an unexpected figure emerges: Dr. B. He starts giving the players advice, and it turns out that he’s a chess prodigy too, but unlike Czentovic, the champion, he’s a total unknown. I don’t want to say too much about the plot, but essentially Dr. B has discovered chess while being imprisoned and interrogated by the Gestapo. Chess becomes an escape from his predicament, and then later a kind of mania. The novella parallels, in some ways, aspects of Zweig’s own life. It was one of the last things he wrote and it was published posthumously. Zweig left Europe in 1940 for New York, then emigrated to Brazil, where not long after he and his wife committed suicide. The main characters in Chess Story represent elements of Zweig’s own experience as well as events in Europe at that time. That’s the backdrop. I’m interested in the blurry line here between fiction and author. And the use of a narrator who is in the middle of but not part of the action. He mostly just relates stories told to him. So there are all these different levels of reality and storytelling. It’s not clear-cut. Both Czentovic and Dr. B have come to chess from places of profound deprivation. Czentovic has a largely empty mind and seems incapable of doing anything else. He is discovered and elevated by his fellow countryman out of chauvinistic pride. There’s something very simple about him, and they think they can ride his talent to nationalist glory. But ultimately they can’t control him. His monomaniacal fixation, the single-minded doggedness that allows him to succeed at chess, makes him ungovernable, refractory. I leave it to readers to decide what—who—he may represent. “We have always lived partly in virtual realities—in the stories and meanings that we invent to make sense of the world” Then you have Dr. B, who discovers an imaginative outlet in chess. He doesn’t have anyone to play with during his imprisonment, so he turns inward, divides his psyche, and plays both sides. This results in a kind of insanity—that of taking two sides, multiple perspectives, into himself. But this madness also amounts to a kind of sophistication: the power of perspective, imagination, nuance. I think of Dr. B as a Zweig figure, who has fled Europe and feels the profound deprivation and loss of the culture he so prized, laid waste to by National Socialism. He discovers an escape in the imagination—Czentovic crucially lacks the imagination to play chess ‘blind’—and his power arises from this self-awareness and reflexivity, his ability to achieve a certain distance on himself. This is the temperament of the artist or thinking person, who insists on nuance and rejects the literally ‘black-and-white’ nature of politics and perhaps society at large. But this is his strength and his weakness. He is able to play both sides—but it drives him mad."

"This is probably the most ‘pure’ thriller on the list, and in some ways it’s also the most allegorical. It takes place in a version of mid-century New York City, perhaps a decade or two before the Civil Rights Era. This was a time of large-scale Black migration to northern cities. And in the imaginative world of the novel, one of the most important jobs you can have in such a city is that of elevator inspector. The main character, Lila Mae Watson, is a Black female elevator inspector—the first. She is what’s called an ‘intuitionist’. There are two competing schools of elevator inspection: empiricism, which examines the elevator machinery . . . well, empirically, and intuitionism, which relies on an uncanny, quasi-spiritual sense of what’s going on inside an elevator. There’s a great deal of tension and mistrust between the two schools, and a backdrop of political machinations and corruption. For the first time it seems that an intuitionist might be elected Chair of the Elevator Guild and chief of elevator inspectors. Then an elevator Lila Mae has inspected crashes. This sets the plot in motion. Was the crash an act of sabotage, meant to undermine the intuitionist candidate before the election? This possibility sends Lila Mae underground to try to discover whether she was set up. The book takes off from there in countless ingenious directions. This is a great point. Metaphysical fiction asks you to be comfortable in a world that won’t make perfect sense—not the way you expect reality in life or most fiction to make sense. But it does, I think, have to satisfy you on at least one of the two levels: either the mystery of the plot must resolve, or the mystery destabilizing everyday reality must be explained. Kafka may not be truly metaphysical in the sense I mean because he gives you neither satisfaction. The Intuitionist is an interesting book because it tiptoes right along border between metaphysical and physical reality. There’s a deeper question that emerges by the end of the novel which I don’t want to spoil. But all along, the opposition between the empiricists and the intuitionists is slightly unstable. It operates as a metaphor for different ways of knowing or making sense of the world—through a hyperrational or mechanistic lens, or via a somewhat more intuitive, spiritual, or philosophical one. By the end, I think you may feel that neither one nor the other is exactly right, or can exist alone. Can I say one more thing before we move on? There are many clever things about this book. It’s beautifully plotted and written. And at first it seems strange that Whitehead has taken elevators as his central theme. But you quickly realize how well they work on both a physical and metaphorical level. The development of the modern city occurred in large part thanks to elevators. You couldn’t really have buildings much above five or six stories before they came along. So this urban world Whitehead brings us into, and the well-known historical and racial drama behind it, is literally made possible by elevators. But elevators then become an incredible metaphor for the idea of personal uplift, on the one hand, and racial uplift, on the other. And beyond that, for spiritual or religious transcendence—there’s talk of a ‘second elevation’—over and above the narrow bounds of the political moment. It’s perfect and expansive and extends out in manifold directions. The way it works on both literal and metaphorical levels at the same time is core to how metaphysical literature, as I think of it, operates. Absolutely. When we’re kids, we do this naturally, because we haven’t fully segregated the literal, metaphorical, and sonic qualities of language in our minds. I, for instance—speaking of railroads—pictured a locomotive when I heard my parents use the word ‘expression,’ since the only related term I knew was ‘express train’. ‘Friday’ I associated with a frying pan. But we lose this awareness as we age, and it takes significant imagination for an adult to recover the ingenuous vision of a child."

"Yes, it’s the least truly metaphysical. But I love Ferrante so much, and especially The Lost Daughter . And I do see its underlying meaning and structure as metaphysical. It’s organized around parallels and doublings, and somewhat like The Invention of Morel , it asks what relation the double has to the original, and when we are treating other people as real and when merely as projections of our internal dramas and dreams. In The Lost Daughter these questions are largely psychological, but the pairings and repetitions are unsettling all the same. Mothers and daughters and dolls stand in for one another—doublings close enough to eerie but no so close as to be perfect, exact. These imperfect doppelgangers become a way of talking about children, which are part us, genetically, but also separate. And the doll, crucially, represents the simulacrum of a child or daughter: a stand-in that elicits the behaviour of one human being toward another absent any conviction that the other being is real and alive apart from its relationship to you. In Morel the question is: When does the reproduction become the real thing, as it approaches reality with great fidelity. The Lost Daughter deals with reproduction in the sense of actual human reproduction. When does the ‘reproduced’ diverge and separate and become distinct unto itself. The drama and devastation of the book revolves around that question. Ferrante gets at something profoundly true about parenthood, that it is both a glorious and a torturous bond. One feels a natural resentment about the demands children place on you—a desire to run away from them and live unencumbered by responsibility—yet also a desire never to be separate from them. Ferrante does an amazing job of rejecting both self-exaltation and self-abasement. She’s not writing to convince you to see her or to judge her in a particular way. She’s just unbelievably honest. And I think this unsettles people, who feel more comfortable suppressing these tensions and dilemmas and operating within the normal bounds of how we’ve been taught to talk about these things in public, affirming certain values or opinions even as we feel some inner conflict about them. I find this ruthless honestly, delivered without apology or self-righteousness, very freeing. It frees us from those dishonest stories we get roped into telling one another, these fictions people lay on top of one another and force each other to repeat and reaffirm. Literature can be a private document of inner honesty, and it can free us from the burden of living in a world made of lots and lots of small lies."