“Art, of course, lives in history,” said Elizabeth Hardwick. By which she meant that a novel emerges in its own time, and changes in its passage to our own. This — the likeness which is also an unlikeness, the unfamiliar familiarity — is the shock of reading classic literature, of literature even a generation or two removed from one’s own. We understand that a novel is essentially a historical survivor, written in one moment, picked off the shelf in another, yet we want it also to enlighten us about our own lives, of which the author necessarily knew nothing. Astoundingly, they quite often do. And yet it is in those gaps, those absences, that the real excitement lives. We should not recognize ourselves, and yet we do. We should not be moved, but we are. And then we are offended, or struck, or in some other way expelled, and the gap expands, and the past and the work and the author come to seem the distant shore they really are. We can visit, but not to stay. I have a theory: the more we recognize in an era, a place, an artwork, the stranger its differences strike us. This is perhaps especially true for the novel, whose most familiar forms can be used to convey so much that we do not understand. “So much of a novel, after all,” observes Hardwick, “is information, necessary fact that gives a floor of understanding from which the flights of inspiration are launched.” Reading a novel from another country, another century, requires you to set a new foundation, plane a new floor — and to surrender yourself to the novel’s “subtle time,” that “spiritual and intellectual lengthening, extending like a dream in which much is surrendered and slowly transformed.” Yet for even the most sympathetic reader, this process is never complete. Your surrender becomes a kind of suspension, slack or tense, between your time and the novel’s, your era and the author’s, communicating down the years like a current shooting down a wire. You connect, and you don’t. You feel, you sense, you embrace, but always at a distance. There is always some gap. Yet a reader’s life, too, has its seasons. At a certain time in your life, you encounter a work written a certain time in the author’s, and you understand, or you don’t. The work, the reader, the writer are like dancers moving across the floor; all three must make a trio for the dance to continue. Thirteen years ago I first tried to read The Savage Detectives; but this past spring I read it at a sprint. All that intertextuality, all those fractured, puffed-up perspectives: I needed a decade-plus and hundreds of other books to begin to approach them. So, too, can a writer miss his or her moment, and be recovered later. Robert Walser’s obsessive self-obscuring semi-fictions sing clearer in our deeply pessimistic age than during the course of his indigent life. To say nothing of chance, when we are made to encounter the unexpected, and are made to change. In January 2017, I was twenty-five years old and in Melbourne, Australia. One day I was wandering north of the river when I passed a bookshop that was going out of business. I was with a friend then stationed in Okinawa and in a week I would fly to Tokyo, and so I picked up, at a deep discount, a slim Japanese novel called Snow Country. Published in 1948, Snow Country tells the story of Shimamura, a young man from Tokyo, and his relationship with Komako, a geisha who serves a hot springs resort in the mountains. Shimamura is a cold man, ambivalent to the point of cruelty; in the first pages, he reflects that only a single forefinger remembers his lover. And yet again and again across the seasons he finds himself drawn away from his family, and back to Komako and the mountains. The novel proceeds as a series of piercing images: a woman’s complexion melting into a snowy mirror, a train window in which the reflection of an eye is superimposed off a light burning deep in the mountains. Komako will not let go of Shimamura, who, whatever his apathy, cannot raise the strength to escape. It concludes suddenly, and with great violence: Shimamura arrives at the site of a fire, turns upward, and feels the Milky Way roaring down into his body. It was a startling book, a vision of the novel as something both shaped and shattered. By chance, it was also my first encounter with the great Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata. A master of compressed forms and oblique endings, Kawabata helped introduce modernism to Japan, and published a number of significant novels, as well as more than a hundred and fifty short and ultra-short stories. For this he was the first Japanese writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. From his time to mine: I have been reading him ever since. 
In the early 1920s, when he was a student at Tokyo Imperial University, Kawabata lived above a hat shop in the northeastern neighborhood of Asakusa. The neighborhood was then one of the liveliest and most Westernized in Tokyo, and the indifferent student preferred to wander the modern quarter, taking in the revues, going to the movies, and soaking in the public baths. He seemed determined to engage in all that was new and exciting, and at the expense of his studies. Along with much of Tokyo and Yokohama, Asakusa was leveled in the Kanto earthquake in 1923. Viewing the ruins, the novelist Jun’ichiro Tanizaki reveled in the possibilities available for reconstruction in the Western style. “How marvelous!” he wrote. “Tokyo will become a decent place now!” Kawabata’s building withstood the shaking, and he spent the following days wandering the wreckage, a jug of water and lunch in his backpack, writing down his observations. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Japanese literature felt like a similarly cleared space.
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence