Monthly Archives: August 2012

August 30, 2012 · 3:05 pm

If you’re going to skin a buffalo or steer, make sure your karma’s good….

Years ago, someone told me a story, a sort of folk tale which is circulated in parts of the West and Southwest, about a naive buffalo hunter who got stuck out in a snow storm on the range.  Though apparently the story is circulated among different groups of people as a tall tale based on fact, it has actually been written down and made into a literary work.  I wish I knew by whom, because several people have been credited with it.  Anyway, in this story the buffalo hunter, stuck out on the range when the storm hits, decides to wrap himself up in what turns out to have been a “green” (uncured) buffalo hide, with the result that he is smothered to death as the hide “shrinks.”  Obviously, he should’ve known the difference between a cured and an uncured hide.

When I first encountered the title of Annie Proulx’s short story “The Half-Skinned Steer” from her collection of stories Close Range, I assumed that it was some version of this story that I was going to read.  But her story, while to some degree lacking the sort of slapstick human element of the other story, is untimately more chilling.  The similarity between the two is not only in the skinning of a buffalo or steer, but in the unity in what’s being done to animals and how they are avenged on humans.  There’s a supernatural element in Proulx’s story, which yet can be explained away by those determined to do so as the natural demise in grief of a plain, boring, and everyday elderly rich man who rides an exercise bike and decides to drive himself across several states in a Cadillac to his brother’s funeral.

Mero, the main character, is contacted by his nephew Tick’s wife with the news that his brother Rollo has died.  This information provokes his decision to travel and causes him to reminisce about the past, and to wonder if his brother ever managed to steal his father’s girlfriend away, a “horsy” woman who evidently appealed to all of them in slightly different ways.  For one thing, she was a natural storyteller: as we are told, “It was her voice that drew you in, that low, twangy voice, wouldn’t matter if she was saying the alphabet, what you heard was the rustle of hay.  She could make you smell the smoke from an unlit fire.”  The message that the storyteller conveys is one about how natural things are avenged on humankind, the interloper; it’s a question of Tennyson’s “nature red in tooth and claw.”  When humanity participates in this earthly menage, it risks being treated itself in the same terms as its victims, even if by apparent “supernatural” influence.

The extent to which Mero’s lack of adjustment to a natural ranch environment is fairly complete is shown by the fact that he is living in city surroundings far away from his original home, exercising on a stationary bike when Tick’s wife calls him to tell him that his brother Rollo has died.  The main fact she tells him about the death is that Rollo has been running his ranch as a sort of Australian theme park, with emus (among other “Down Under” animals) on site; one of the emus has slashed him with its nails “from belly to breakfast,” an event which is thoroughly in line with what will happen later in the story.  It’s obvious from this death that even someone who is more accustomed to ranch life than Mero must still treat his surroundings with constant attention and respect, and one gets the feeling quite early on, from his determination to drive his Cadillac to his brother’s funeral in the midst of winter snowstorm conditions, that Mero has forgotten this very important adjustment.

He is given several warnings by his surroundings that he is not capable to take on this “mission”:  he is stopped while speeding by a policeman, and at first can’t remember what he’s driving for when the policeman asks.  Then, he has a collision and must purchase another car, which though also a Cadillac turns out to be a malfunctioning one.  But he thinks to himself about purchasing yet a third car on his presumed way home, “I can do whatever I want.”  Yet, even when talking to his nephew’s wife on the phone, he himself introduces the element of superstition in thinking:  he’d “never had an accident in his life knock on wood.”  And this superstitious element in the story becomes the correct way to confront the apparently supernatural picture of his downfall, in which the reader is pulled between seeing the story both as a pragmatic account of a man’s lack of forethought and caution, and also as a symbolic reminder of how his early beginnings get their belated revenge on him.

One might say, of course, that he is not concentrating while he drives.  But he is taken up with remembering his early life with his father, his father’s girlfriend the storyteller, and his brother.  The story which she told that is set up as a foil and in counterpoint to the story of his trip is that of “Tin Head,” a rancher who supposedly had “a metal plate in his head from falling down some cement steps.”  Tin Head is one of those archetypal figures from tales to whom odd things happen as a matter of course.  We are encouraged to believe that he made a series of bad decisions due to the plate “eating into his brain.”  This brought bad luck on his ranch therefore, really highly unusual bad luck sometimes, such as the chicks turning blue.  And all the while that Mero is thinking of the story of Tin Head and how he once half-skinned a steer and then left it while he went to supper only to come back and find it gone, he is also thinking of his father’s girlfriend as the only flesh and blood woman he’s ever known.  From the time he was 11 or 12, when according to his memory, he showed an anthropologist some cave paintings and learned that some of them were vulvas, he has thought of all other women as having “the stony structure of female genitalia.”

These three threads of storyline entertwine:  he thinks of himself as a “cattleman gone wrong” who doesn’t like rare steak and who considers he’s been preserving his health with exercising, “nut cutlets, and green leafy vegetables”; he thinks of Tin Head, whose luck turned permanently against him after he came out to the pasture in search of where someone might’ve dragged the half-skinned steer only to find it glaring at him from a far field, its “red eyes” full of hate; and he remembers the storyteller who could tell the story so well, and thinks about her appearance.  The symbolism and imagery of the story work as foreshadowing.  For example, during his trip he wakes up early in a motel room with his “eyes aflame” from lack of sleep.  Everything practical that one knows about safe driving and arrival at a destination goes against his logic, yet in the end, when he is stuck up in a snow drift and has to break a window to get back into his car after a trip out to see if he could perhaps walk (to a nearby ranch whose owner, he finally remembers, would be dead by then), it is the “red eyes” of his taillights winking that signal again just how much trouble he is in.  He all the while is assuring himself that he “might” find his way, or a truck “might” come by, but when he thinks of the “mythical Grand Hotel in the sagebrush,” we know either that he is acknowledging himself to be in desperate straits or that he really is delusional.

At the very end of the tale, the two threads of actual story, the story of Mero’s drive and the story of Tin Head’s bad luck, come together in a final tribute to the girlfriend’s act of storytelling itself:  for Mero notices some cattle in a nearby field, and one of them, whose “red eye” he thinks he sees, is stalking him, keeping up pace for pace.  The last line of the story brings the whole picture stunningly and neatly together, proposing in the “rhetoric of fiction” (Wayne Booth) that stories, however exaggerated, are what our lives come down to, that we are always joining another story which has come down to us “from before” (note the symbolic presence in the story of an anthropologist), and that a person is a fool who thinks that he or she can escape acting a role in some story which began even before he or she was born.

The collection of stories in Close Range is subtitled Wyoming Stories, and is the collection from which “Brokeback Mountain” originally came.  There are many other stories in it which deserve equal attention, but this is my post for today.  Naturally, my skill at retelling the story is not nearly as accomplished as Annie Proulx’s in the original telling, and I hope you will buy the book or check it out from a library, or get it online if it’s available there, and read it for yourself.  I think you’ll agree with me that it is a welcome and accomplished addition to what might be called New Americana.

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August 29, 2012 · 3:43 pm

Life strategies suggested by a poem by Seamus Heaney

Just how often, when you are smarting from some sort of a blow to your pride, equilibrium, feelings, intelligence, or perhaps more life-endangering, your physical person, has some other well-meaning and ultimately interfering soul muttered “Oh, well, we should all learn to turn the other cheek…”?  And usually their remark trails off into an infinity of foolish remarks, because most people do not suffer either fools or bullies or well-meant interference gladly, and you (listening to this from them), however much you are a follower of Scripture or perhaps only an admirer of some of the wisdom there, find other bits of doctrine hard to swallow.

Your hour has come!  Rather, it came back in 1996, when Seamus Heaney told the other side of the “turn the other cheek” story in his poem “Weighing In.”  This poem came to my attention first because it’s one of my brother’s favorites, and I felt compelled to read it and compare it with the man I know and see just what made the poem (and him!) tick.  Before I go any further with this, I should say that my brother is a very erudite and accomplished university teacher, who puts up with a great deal and never complains, or at least he seasons his complaints with the salt of jest, which never grows old.  He never complains about his students to me, of course, because his students don’t ask him computer questions and don’t ask him to design websites the way his sister has until recently.  But according to the poem, I’m not just supposed to say mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa and let it go at that.  I’ll try to give, in my prosaic and ultimately less interesting flow of words, some sense of what Seamus Heaney has to say on this subject in his poem “Weighing In,” which comes from his collection “The Spirit Level” (in Ireland, a spirit level is what we refer to as a “carpenter’s level” in the U. S.  You know, that straight hunk of wood or metal which has a little window full of liquid in the middle of it–when the liquid bubble is exactly in the middle of the window, then the surface you have it placed on is level!).

Heaney begins the poem “Weighing In” by describing another piece of builder’s machinery, a “56 lb. weight.”  He characterizes it as a “solid iron/Unit of negation.”  His main point in the first few stanzas of the poem is that it’s nearly too heavy to lift at all until placed upon a weighbridge (which holds another balancing weight on it).  Then, “everything tremble[s], flow[s] with give and take.”

Having established his governing metaphor thus in the first four stanzas of his poem, he goes on to consider what this imagery means in human terms:

“And this is all the good tidings amount to:/This principle of bearing, bearing up/And bearing out, just having to/Balance the intolerable in others/Against our own, having to abide/Whatever we settled for and settled into/Against our better judgement.  Passive/suffering makes the world go round./Peace on earth, men of good will, all that/Holds good only as long as the balance holds/The scales ride steady and the angels’ strain/Prolongs itself at an unearthly pitch.”

But having enunciated this poetic and sparse and tightly and neatly rhetorical principle in its human terms, Heaney goes on in the next section of the poem to elucidate what the two sides of the balance are in Scriptural terms, the part of the balance we’re familiar with hearing in terms of Christ’s “turning the other cheek” and the less familiar (if in realistic fact more common) command to “refuse the other cheek.”  For Heaney sees the knuckling down to others’ whims and egos as humoring “The obedient one you hurt yourself into,” a question therefore of masochism (though this makes a somewhat more simplistic idea of his intricate and involved picture of the emotional and psychological elements involved).  He suggests that what Christ did in fact when the soldiers were mocking him was to exercise “the power/Of power not exercised, of hope inferred/By the powerless forever.”  Then, he begs the party addressed in the poem, “just this once,” to say who hurt him or her, “give scandal, cast the stone.”

Finally in this mastery of poetical imagery and argument, he brings the poem down even more to the personal level and a specific time (“one night when follow-through was called for”) and apologizes for having withheld retaliation for a remark from his friend which required a swift and presumably angry rejoinder, and says that he thus “lost an edge.”  The last two lines of the poem tell us that this was a “deep mistaken chivalry,” and that “At this stage only foul play cleans the slate.”

This poem is a vital and thorough recognition not only of the struggles we go through in making and holding on to our accomplishments and strengths, but also of the difficulties we encounter in making and holding on to friends.  In relatively small space, the poem links our friends to our innermost habits of response and self:  do we forgive too readily, do we take offense too easily?  Is there a middle ground?  Can “chivalry” be “mistaken,” can we be too gentle with a friend?  And just when does a friend need to hear from us that he or she has gone too far, and not from the point of view of our own concerns only?  The entire question of a fair balance is, after all, what hangs in the balance.

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August 28, 2012 · 8:49 pm

“Where the hell have I been all day? What have I been doing?”

Hi, I haven’t written a new literary post for today.  If you’ve already been online to my site, you know this, of course.  So, where have I been and what have I been doing?  Clearly, this is one of those “other than literary days” I have noted down in my categories.  Yes, it is.  Here’s what I’ve been doing since about 9 o’clock yesterday morning:

I’m on the verge of finishing my fourth novel, which is very, very exciting (that is, the prospect of finishing it is–as to whether or not the novel itself is exciting, it’s a matter of opinion, though of course I’ve been having a fantastic time writing it).  It’s hard, yes, but with this novel I have written in bits and pieces, and then stopped sometimes for a week or more, until I had something else to say, or had an idea of how to continue.

Though I have a very good idea of just how the novel is going to end (which I explicated to my ride on the way in to the eye doctor this morning), I was really dreading more the inevitable necessity to design the book cover and get it placed on the front of my novel file.  Previously, my brother the good and noble web designer has always done this for me, using PhotoShop of which he owns a download.  This time, I was on my own.

First, I took the background picture off my USB drive and put it in Windows Live Photo Gallery, where I played around with getting the logo from the I Ching in the right position (upper right-hand corner).  Then, when I discovered that Windows Live Photo Gallery would do this but wouldn’t allow me to switch the height and the width, I went to RoxioCreator and RoxioPhotoSuite.  Here, I was able to make changes to the size and shape of my picture.  By about 11:30 p.m. last night (Monday night), I had the lettering placed on the canvas in the correct positions, and was feeling mighty pleased with myself.

Next, however, I had to put the altered photo back into Windows Live Photo Gallery and transfer it into my Microsoft Word documents file so that I could place it at the beginning of my text.  This was when the fun began.  Rather, I’d been having a certain amount of fun so far proving to myself that I’m not a total ninny when it comes to computers; now, however, it was necessary to get my Photo Gallery to accept that yes, I really was not interested in putting together a slide show, or e-mailing my photos to anyone else, or doing any one of the nearly 110 other ingenious things that were apparently done by anyone else with photos.  I nearly despaired.

Then, however, I found something called Microsoft Office Picture Manager.  This became very grueling, because I kept trying to follow directions instead of being innovative (it’s hard to be innovative with the posted instructions unless you’re in a sort of devil-may-care frame of mind about experimenting and taking things down and putting them up again in a series of trial-and-error runs).  By 1:30, I was too tired to continue, and had to go to bed, because I had to travel about 45 minutes to get to the eye doctor’s office this morning.  So, knowing that I was almost there in terms of getting my photo project done (which just started out life as a .jpeg copy scanned from a watercolor), I went to bed and was unable to get to sleep because I wanted so badly to keep on working.  Finally, I slept.

When I got up this morning, I discovered that the “edit” button the Microsoft Office Picture Manager had described as having a “insert into text” option actually showed no such thing.  But you don’t know how stubborn I am; I tried again and again and again, until I was tired.  I’d gotten the thing to work one time, but it didn’t look the way I’d wanted it to, so I’d taken it down, and now couldn’t remember what I’d done.  Finally, I discovered that what I’d done the time it worked was to go to one of my favorite functions on Word and use the extremely useful “send to” button to send the picture to the front of my document.  And there it sits now, waiting for the title page and copyright page to be put in behind it, between it and the body of the novel.

True, it still doesn’t look entirely as I would like for it to, but I’m content to tinker and twiddle with it hoping to find perfection.  And the eye doctor even gave me a clean bill of health, so I haven’t totally ruined my eyesight from hours and hours in front of the computer!  Now, in place of my usual literary endeavors, isn’t that just about the most exciting story you ever heard (no, I know, probably not)?  Well, it’s at least exciting to me, because it proves I can usefully be stubborn instead of (what usually happens) being stubborn to no avail.  Now, if only perfection and I can work things out!

I hope to have another literary post up for you folks tomorrow or the next day, and I hope you’ll continue to visit my site.  Until then, onwards and upwards, as they say!

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August 27, 2012 · 5:05 pm

“The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.”–Mark Twain

As Mark Twain says of good books in the title of today’s post, so it is true as well of good posts:  you actually have to read them to get the benefit of your advantage of being able to read, having a computer, et cetera. Along those lines, the time has come around again for me to do homage to the sites which, though most of them aren’t new, are relatively new to me.  The blogs below make up the next five newest blogs I’ve been revelling in, with my comments appended.  If I’ve recently started to follow your site but haven’t commented about it yet on my own, it’s because I’ve started to follow you more recently than I did these folks below.  I’m reading and commenting on a lot of sites now, and at some point I’m going to reach the saturation level, where I can only write about sites I read without following them.  There are only so many hours in a day!  To those who have been Freshly Pressed or have won another award, I offer congratulations and sympathy:  they are very busy people right now, but I’m sure must be busily enjoying the recent attention.  So, here goes:

Peter Monaco– at http://petermonaco.com/ .  Peter defines himself as a husband and father foremost, and a worker in analytical mathematics.  So far (though he promises to come back some day and edit his early posts after he’s published lots of novels and mention them), he writes very witty, alert articles with innovative and funny titles, such as:  “If You Want to Write, Don’t Barf on Your Readers,” “A Query to All You Blog Stalkers Out There,” and in the mastery of the bright ripost, “Things to Say as a Jerk for a Day.”  These titles are probably tantalizing enough to draw your curiosity to him quickly, but if not, I should tell you that he does have more serious moments when he considers such things as the mechanics of writing (like characterization, for example).  He also features clever stick figure drawings as illustrations of the writing principles and jests he enunciates.  All I can say having observed his site so far is that you should beware of not taking your sense of humor along with you when you read him:  he’s serious-minded, but tongue-in-cheek at the same time.  So, without further ado (as they say in the MC business) I’ll leave you to it, commenting from my own perspective only that I think he has mastered pacing very well in reference to just when to drop the punchline (and though bombs aren’t funny, I can view him as one of his stick figures up in a glider, “bombing” us below with meringue pies).

The Long Summer– at http://thelongsummerblog.wordpress.com/ .  The promise of this site is also in what still is yet to come, for our writer here is a sort of foreign correspondent in the making, a teaching NYU Abu Dhabi fellow who will be teaching and tutoring in writing English for undergrads during the next year from this August to the end of next May.  His name on the blog is mattatthemovies, and his real moniker is Matthew J. Flood.   Though his two posts that caught my attention were on Susan Sontag’s distaste for tourists’ pictures and his comical essay about what it’s like to fly Business Class on a United Arab Emirates flight (versus Economy Class), he suggests that there are many more posts to come, not only on the topics and praxis of writing and teaching, but (pace Susan Sontag) also including a lot of wonderful photographs and visuals like the ones already on his site.  He’s probably getting settled into his teaching job right now, because it’s been a couple of weeks since he’s published a new posts, but all in all, I’ll be very glad to hear about him and his experiences in Abu Dhabi, and I hope you’ll all follow him, too.

Shelf Love–at http://shelflove.wordpress.com/ .  At this site are two simply wonderful reviewers of books, and their title is apt, for reading their reviews and comments not only draws one’s attention to excellent new and older publications, but also is a real act of “self-love” on the part of any serious reader.  Their names are “Jenny” and “Teresa,” and they attract what seems like a huge and faithful following of readers in all categories of writing except the cheap or tawdry.  For, they are attuned to quality and the pursuit of excellence.  If you have a question about any book you’ve happened to read which falls in the literary category, they’re really very hard to stump:  not that anyone would or should try, because their help is immensely more valuable than showing them up would be, even were one so underhanded as to try it.  They seem to have both further information at the tips of their fingers as well as recommendations, and have suggested more books for my list of things to read that I will probably be able to cover in a lifetime.  They will cause me to be extra busy with even the things they’ve recommended that I have time to read, but there are, after all, worse ways of spending one’s time.  Kudos, ladies, and keep those reviews and comments coming!

thelivingnotebook— at http://thelivingnotebook.wordpress.com/ .  Here we have a multitalented young writer much engaged with the question of what spurs creativity in general, and he theorizes, and writes, and draws analogies, and draws dream mandalas and basically includes us with great welcome in the things he’s learning and coming up with in his journey through graduate school (I don’t remember if he said it’s an MFA, but to judge by his output and perspective, it well could be, as well as whatever else he is engaged in academically).  He has thoughts on many different aspects of what makes writers write, and what in fact makes one person a writer and another a hack.  He seems fully in touch with both his inner angels and his inner demons, and I would guess is in the process of getting a compromise from the two camps, so that he can engineer a few creative projects based on their interaction.  Most importantly, he is in the process of crafting himself, which is, after all, what good writers really do.  I hope some day to see a novel, poetry, or short stories he’s written, especially since he is so generously sharing the journey to them with us.

Beauty Is a Sleeping Cat–at http://beautyisasleepingcat.wordpress.com/ .  Here is another excellent and considering reviewer and commenter on world literature, who also shows a wide conversance with different aspects of the literary endeavor.  “Caroline,” who has not only been Freshly Pressed but has also won the Liebster Award, in recent posts has covered such widely diverse topics as Dickens and “The Dickens Dictionary,” and the Canadian writer Mary Lawson.  She has held an Antonio Tabucchi week complete with a Giveaway.  She has a regular feature known as Literature and War, in which her latest feature was Aharon Applefeld’s “Story of a Life.”   This wide variety is only scraping the surface of her literary talents, however.  She also writes on different authors in the categories of American, British, German, French and Japanese literature.  She has in her cloud categories as well the subjects of short stories and non-fiction.  She seems either to be immensely educated literarily and/or to be a very fast, accurate and comprehensive reader with multiple enthusiasms.  Now her blogsite is one of my regular enthusiasms for the insights it offers.

That’s all for this post on other bloggers I’ve met through WordPress.com’s sites.  There will be more to come next week.  See you then.  Until then, I will be writing my usual posts on literary topics and interests of my own, and I hope you will enjoy these as well.  In leaving you today, I would like to quote what Gustave Flaubert had to say about writing:

“It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.  Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made then almost close their love-drowned eyes.  When I brood over these marvelous pleasures I have enjoyed, I would be tempted to offer God a prayer of thanks if I knew he could hear me.  Praised may he be for not creating me a cotton merchant, a vaudevillian, or a wit.”

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August 24, 2012 · 9:17 pm

“When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut. Oh, grant me my prayer that I may never lose the touch of the one in the play of the many.”–Rabindranath Tagore

In the quote I have added to my post for today, Tagore brings up the issue of the many and the one, and asks that he be always able to see each person as an individual, not just one person lost in a crowd, a sea of possibly opposed faces.  He also suggests that knowing even one person well is an entryway into knowledge of others in general.  This is a very complex statement of quite laudable values, and one which bears upon the book of short fiction by another Indian author, Jhumpa Lahiri, the winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Her book Interpreter of Maladies, the title of which was taken from one of her stories by that title,  not only won the Pulitzer Prize, but was also a Pen/Hemingway Award winner and was selected by the New Yorker as a “Debut of the Year.”  The most intriguing thing about the relationship between the author and her book is in fact the degree to which she herself is an “interpreter of maladies,” the maladies of alienation and separation visited upon people either moving from one continent to another or from one state of being to another.  In each of her nine stories, whether they are stories of families travelling between India and the U. S. for love or work or recreation or whether they are portraits of unique and unusual loves and characters, she traverses the boundaries, both those which keep her characters separate and those which, being overcome, unite them more firmly to each other.  And as she does so, her characters and their dilemmas, however firmly they may be rooted in cultures which don’t understand each other intuitively, become the objects of a further development of intuition.  Just as Tagore says, understanding one person’s motives and concerns, even if they are very different from yours, and though the understanding may be hard won and have developed from a totally alien perspective, shakes one’s faith in the notion of alienation and causes readers to extend their minds to the faiths and concerns of others.  Suddenly, one can imagine the person as being like oneself after all; one can at least understand.

From the first story, “A Temporary Matter,” in which a young couple deals with the conditions of having been deprived of their child, the subject of alienation is strong.  In order to overcome the separation which has been occasioned by their mutual grief, they begin to confide in each other about things they’ve never before told.  Their reconciliation is made bittersweet by the recognition that they have perhaps never really known the other person fully.

“When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine,” the second story, shows an Indian family joining forces in their support of a man from Dacca, a Pakistani (before Bangladesh became separate) who has some different traditions from themselves.  The story is told from the point of view of the young daughter of the house, for whom Mr. Pirzada brings treats every evening, missing as he does his own seven daughters.  He nervously watches the news on their television in a town near Boston, since he is unable to be with his own family in Dacca.  The manner in which the American society around them isolates the newcomer with his own hard luck is portrayed by a scene in which the young daughter is prevented by a teacher from following up on her interest in the geography and history of the region Mr. Pirzada is from.  The family must wait with Mr. Pirzada to find out if his family survived the conflict or not.  The ending is reported obliquely, not only by the news broadcasts the family continues to watch on their television set, but also by the letters Mr. Pirzada writes them after he leaves Boston to return to Dacca.  Clearly, it is up to neighbors to act locally in order to overcome cultural blindnesses.

In “Interpreter of Maladies,” Mr. Das and his wife, who were raised in the States and who are visiting India and various tourist sites there for the first time, rely on their guide, Mr. Kapasi, to show them around and inform them of local traditions.  Mrs. Das, however, upon finding out that Mr. Kapasi works for a doctor as a language interpreter, assumes incorrectly that he is a sort of psychologist who can help her with her problems.  Mr. Kapasi, meanwhile, has been misunderstanding Mrs. Das to mean that she wants to be special friends.  Gradually, though Mrs. Das has a rude awakening in discovering her error, Mr. Kapasi’s cover of polite and correct behavior aids him in preserving his equilibrium and delivering the family from a crisis which has arisen due to their own inability to adjust to their environment.  It is Mr. Kapasi in this case who has the epiphany, or perhaps the moment of wisdom, when he realizes just how the Dases see him:  for they are people who are estranged from the land of their origins, and are rather ordinary “ugly American” tourists.  Thus, he has correctly deduced their malady.

“A Real Durwan” is a tragic sort of story to which even someone unfamiliar with the idea of what a “durwan” is (a sort of underprivileged charperson) can relate.  It takes place in an Indian setting, where Boori Ma, the staircase sweeper and door guard of an apartment building, each day chants up and down the stairwells as she sweeps the tale of where she used to live (a much better place) and the life she used to live (how grand), and though the other residents of the building where she sleeps in an old quilt under the mailboxes don’t entirely believe her, until the landlord moves, they all treat her with a guarded respect.  The sad outcome is derived, ironically, from a promise the landlord makes to get her better sleeping arrangements, perhaps because it leads Boori Ma to “count her chickens before they’e hatched.”  Her friend the landlord forgets, with unfortunate consequences for Boori Ma, because the building has recently had a facelift and the other residents have become prideful, just as they blame Boori Ma for having been all her years there.  Was she telling the truth all that time, or only fabricating?  The ending doesn’t resolve this issue; it only portrays how the Wheel of Fortune can betray any one of us at any moment who is without friends.

In “Sexy,” a seasonal story if ever there was one, a young woman, Miranda, who is having a love affair with a married Indian man, learns the difference between seasonal and perpetual.  The story features a background plot of another love affair with a married person:  Miranda’s friend Laxmi also has a cousin who now knows that she’s being cheated on by her husband, a frequent traveller on airplanes between Delhi and Montreal.  Instead of coming home to the cousin in the Boston area, that husband has picked up with a younger woman he met on a flight.  The story in the background acts as a foil for Miranda’s relationship; besotted as she is with Dev, her own married man, the words of a young boy she’s babysitting for, who tells her she’s sexy just as Dev did previously, awaken her to what is actually happening.  She plans what to tell Dev, but the change of seasons, a sort of fate, articulates her points for her, in a fine and neatly handled end to the story.

The next piece of fiction, “Mrs. Sen’s,” tells the story of a friendship between a young boy, Eliot, and the Indian woman, Mrs. Sen, who babysits for him.  As Eliot watches Mrs. Sen chop vegetables and deal with her various fears and insecurities about living in a new community outside of Boston (where her husband teaches mathematics), he begins to understand something about her points of reference.  For one, she previously had a chauffeur, and now Mr. Sen is insisting that she learn to drive.  She is worried by the fact that she feels alone and isolated in the building where she lives, too far away for other people to hear her if she screams.  When she encounters further difficulty with the driving, it is in fact Eliot who hears her crying in the bathroom as Mr. Sen apologizes to Eliot’s mother for having involved him in an accident.  Eliot hears her, and has thus understood something about her fear and her difficulties.  And with this, he has gone through a learning experience of his own.

“This Blessed House” is a deceptively simple story about the nature of tolerance and belief.  When Twinkle and Sanjeev begin to find Christian ornaments hidden in every nook and cranny of their new home, Twinkle celebrates them, though she is a Hindu, by putting them all up on the mantel.  The objects by and large have no real artistic value, they are obviously the result of a sincere and devout observance, however one without much taste.  But as everything continues to go well for the young couple, Twinkle insists on retaining the objects, which costs Sanjeev something severe in the way of his ability to tolerate them.  It’s not, in fact that Twinkle is changing her religion:  she seems simply to regard the objects as good luck charms, and despite Sanjeev’s embarrassment when they have friends over, the couple’s lucky popularity is clearly a result of Twinkle’s open and receptive personality.  It becomes clear by the end of the story that despite disdaining Twinkle’s good luck charms themselves, Sanjeev cannot resist the charm of Twinkle herself.  He has a dark moment of the soul, as it’s called, when he realizes just what this will entail.

When we first begin the story “The Treatment of Bibi Haldar,” we have to wonder ourselves just what is wrong with Bibi.  From the description of the many different kinds of medical treatment and advice she has received, not all of them equally reputable, we have to ask if perhaps she is an unacknowledged hysteric, or perhaps if she suffers an unknown form of epilepsy.  Her fits are looked upon with sympathy by her friends and neighbors, which she has in spite of being closely quarantined by her family.  It’s only when Bibi’s own preferred solution and a chance event that it turns out no one can trace coincide that she finds herself an ordinary member of society.  This story seems to suggest that ordinary human interaction and good-heartedness can guide people to accept what seems at first like a totally anomalous situation, something which comes about without the sanction of restrictions and family rule.  Bibi is after all human, not a demon as her cousin’s wife, with whom she lives on and off, sees it; people may be demonized by someone around them, it is clear, but there are equally those prepared to accept what they don’t understand.

Finally, in “The Third and Final Continent” the book ends with a sort of summary story about the way in which a person originally difficult to understand in their ideas and motives can come to symbolize something precious for someone from an entirely different society.  A young Indian man leaves his home in 1964 to go to Boston and study, and to work in the MIT library system.  While there, he is at first situated in a YMCA, but soon moves to another room in a private house for the summer before his wife can come over from India to join him.  He meets a real eccentric in the owner of the house, Mrs. Croft.  At first, it takes some real practice of patience and conscious good will on his part to meet her halfway.  Soon, however, he meets her daughter and learns things about her that cause him to feel a genuine empathy for her.  Later, when he moves into another house with his wife, he still thinks of Mrs. Croft as an essential part of his establishing himself in America, and goes to see her.  The results of his interest in her affect the rest of his life, and become a watchword for his family as well.  As the story concludes in the character’s voice at the end, “….[T]here are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept.  As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.”  Luckily for us, we have Jhumpa Lahiri’s work of imagination to fall back on, so that if such things are beyond us for the time being, we can always find a translator, in fact an “interpreter” of our “maladies.”

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August 23, 2012 · 4:36 pm

When is borrowing acceptable, and when is it unacceptable (and actionable) plagiarism?

The twentieth century and the early twenty-first have not been kind to the notion of borrowing from others in order to create one’s own work.  From Ezra Pound’s edict “Make it New” to the constant reiteration in critical and creative writing courses for students of the priniciple “just do your own work,” the modern (1899-1945) and contemporary (1945-present) eras have put a high premium on originality, that loaded term of terms.

Of course, Pound himself was a great borrower from much earlier works, which he imitated, borrowed from, referred to, and essentially canonized in the more acceptable (read:  non-anti-Semitic) of his Cantos.  So, Pound’s instruction to “make it new” was less an injunction to create ex nihilo, or like Athena’s “springing full-blown from the mind of Zeus,” than it was to revitalize literature by returning to past models and revamping them for modern use.  It’s just that in returning to past models, Pound went further back in time for his models, instead of basing his work on that which came immediately before him.

T. S. Eliot, who had his poetry sculptured and shaped by Pound in Pound’s character of literary patron and advisor, is known to have further muddied the waters of clarity by saying “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal” (from Philip Massinger).  Nevertheless, this statement is qualified by other things Eliot says, such as “[Tradition] cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor” (from the essential essay for students even now, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”).  He also says “The great poet, in writing himself, writes his time” (from Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca).  Of course, to some extent writers who are very self-aware of their status like to issue shocking or startling remarks like Eliot’s first one quoted above.  But wait–take these three quotes together and with their sources, and I think things become a little clearer again, at least with reference to T. S. Eliot.  We might have considered anyway that Eliot was referring to writers like Shakespeare in the first quote above:  for, Shakespeare regularly stole plots and sometimes whole plays from others, improved upon them immeasurably, and set them in their forms for generations to come, because of his sheer poetic and dramatic greatness.  The problem is, this took place at a time when it was the norm for poets and playwrights to draw freely upon the works of others, both contemporary to their own times and from antiquity.  But our times have insisted upon originality as part of the essence of a truly great work, and upon innovation as a necessary rite of passage in the struggle to turn out a good and creditable work.  It’s no wonder that those people who are genuinely confused by the issue of plagiarism are so taken aback by what seem like competing sets of requirements.

And then, of course, there’s the issue of writing articles and books in the academy.  If you can still find recordings of the Harvard mathematician Tom Lehrer’s hilarious satirical songs anywhere (and let me not wander too far from my topic, but Lehrer is well worth hearing; he’s the John Stewart of his time, in the 1960’s), you’ll run across a lyric about Lobachevsky, a Russian mathematician who evidently wrote things without proper attribution that were at least highly imitative of what others had written.  Part of the lyric reads:  “Plagiarize.  Let no one else’s work evade your eyes.  Remember why the good Lord made your eyes.  So don’t shade your eyes, but plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize–only be sure always to call it, please–research.”  For another quote of this ilk, there’s Wilson Mizner’s “Copy from one, it’s plagiarism; copy from two, it’s research.”  These quotes are not meant to make students who might read my column cynical; rather they’re intended as an airing of the issues involved.  The best advice in the academic life is:  however much you may borrow, either credit the work outright and get consent, or if it’s an occasion between friends where no credit is needed, check that out with the friend or let them see it to make sure.  You can always credit it privately and impersonally for them if they are shy of attention, or can perhaps say something like “as a friend noted some time ago” or variations on the same.  If you’re working for credit in a class rather than writing a manuscript, let your instructor know that you are honest by crediting quotes as you are taught.  The basic rule is: be modest.  Don’t take credit for something which you have found somewhere else, and if it turns out especially that the other fellow or gal beat you to the punch and said what was just on the tip of your tongue (infelicitous mixing of metaphors here, but you get my point), give them credit anyway:  they historically said it before you did, even if the idea is a brand new one which just occurred to you.  If you find out too late to credit it that it was said by someone else first (after you publish or turn in an essay for example), tidy up behind yourself by mentioning (in any new edition or to your teacher) that you were previously unaware of the concurrence of remarks, and give the other person a footnote or mention.  Contrary to what you may believe, it makes you look better rather than worse.

To return just for a moment to Shakespeare and one of the reasons he got by with his extensive borrowings without credit (aside from the traditions of his time, that is) let’s look at the poet John Milton for a quote:  “For such kind of borrowing as this, if it be not bettered by the borrower, among good authors is accounted Plagiarè” (Eikonoklastes).  There have been a number of studies written, only a few of which I’ve even seen or had presented to my attention by my own teachers, that show how Shakespeare immensely bettered the other playwrights and poets he stole from.  So, in the traditions of his own time, in which it was essential to write upon some story that perhaps was well-known anyway, in the same fashion in which a realistic writer of our own time might use as inspiration a story which is covered by all the major news networks, Shakespeare “made the grade,” so to speak.

During the twentieth century also, the scholar and critic Julia Kristeva came along, with her idea of intertextuality, which is a way of referring to the intricate and intertwined relationships literary texts establish among themselves without recourse to authors’ intents.  As this is more a move to put consideration of what the authors’ intentions are out of the picture than an actual stance on plagiarism, it is a more theoretical issue.  It takes place after the fact of composition, however, not before the fact, so I’m leaving it out of account for now (and I’m being a bit lazy here–Julia Kristeva is a very challenging author to read, and I’ve only covered most of one of her books).  I’m just mentioning it because there is some tangential relationship to originality as a topic.

And what about all those columnists in the news in the last ten years who were fired for plagiarizing from other columnists or newspeople?  It’s tempting just to let Peter Anderson settle the issue.  He says, “Quotations are a columnist’s bullpen.  Stealing someone else’s words frequently spares the embarrassment of eating your own.”  Still, as we have seen, this doesn’t really settle the issue, because the columnists get fired anyway, and several of them have declared that the fault was unintentional.  What do we make of this?  Perhaps it would be generous in this discussion to remember the many times in which some of us literary wannabees copied out the words of others in our notebooks or on our computers because they seemed so strongly to chime in with what we ourselves wanted to say or felt.  I’ve certainly had times myself (in the days before personal computers) when I found thoughts scribbled in one of my writer’s notebooks, and said to myself complacently, “Boy, that’s really a good one.  I have to use that soon.”  And in the days before I started also to take the time to copy down the author’s name and possibly the source of the quote as well, I misremembered more than once and assumed the thought was mine, only to have a friend or teacher to whom I showed the idea furrow his or her brow a moment and say something like “That sounds like so-and-so.  Are you quoting or did you think of that yourself?”  It can happen, yes, which is why it’s a good idea always to note down under your quote where it came from and the author, if you know.  It only takes a little more effort, but more effort is what being a good writer is about.  And if it’s just a coincidence, look up the author anyway, and see how they developed their thought that was similar to your own.  This is what truly changes your work from plagiarism to research, which all kidding aside is a noble endeavor.  And there’s no rule that says you have to write only about your own little mud puddle or corner of the world to stay original; most good writers are either knowledgeable already upon some subject they want to write about or do actual research on it (and either directly or indirectly credit their sources).

My solution in fiction, which would not suit everybody, is to have a character mention the name of the author he or she is quoting, or initiate a literary discussion which makes it obvious what issues are being discussed.  In poetry, I give notes to my poems and let my readers know whom I was thinking of when I wrote, if anyone.  Most of all, I try to “just do my own work.”  And I put my whole heart into it, because what everyone on this planet has to say, despite all the many human things we share and the human experiences which join us one to the other, makes them as individual as myriad snowflakes, each one original and different.  Putting your whole heart into being your plot, being your characters, being your style, et cetera, and relying likewise on the best models you can find and the best literary advice is advancing a large step ahead on the path towards real originality.

P.S.  My own investigation of and meditation upon this topic was occasioned by dialogues I’ve had with the blogger at http://thelivingnotebook.wordpress.com/ .  By and large I think we agree, though he is advocating a freer system of borrowing than I feel comfortable with.  I rather suspect that he’s more interested in spurring creativity in others by his remarks than he is in actually encouraging people to steal freely.  He’s a little like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound in that he knows enough about what he’s talking about to know just how far he can go without seeming unoriginal (and of course, he turns out a very original column, which I’ve much enjoyed).

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August 20, 2012 · 7:19 pm

“What beck’ning ghost, along the moonlight shade/Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade?”–Alexander Pope

There is a corollary to the proposition that there’s more rejoicing over the return of a prodigal son than there is over the continuing excellence of a constant one; that corollary is that it’s worse when a potentially good man goes bad than it is when a bad man continues what he’s doing.  In Kingsley Amis’s book The Green Man, we get a double reflection of this second notion, when we not only meet up with a modern day man of relaxed moral fiber, but also with the ghost of a minister turned evil revenant who confronts him.

In an English tradition descended from the ancient fear of nature and natural forces–for our worship of nature is an entirely different tradition, though equally ancient, which even so recognizes the power of the earth–the “green man” is a sort of roving spirit, sometimes neither good nor ill, sometimes outright malevolent, and sometimes given to testing mankind, as in the medieval tale “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” which many of you will already have read and I hope enjoyed in a literature class.  In Amis’s book, the man of easy morals is an innkeeper named Maurice Allington, who is situated with his wife, father, and daughter in an old inn in Hertsfordshire, England.  Though the elemental force is so strong that there’s almost no bargaining with it, Maurice learns from the evil spectre of the minister’s ghost and a mysterious young man, and makes some sacrifices on his way to learning what evil and good may actually be about.

The book relies on a combination of fear and hilarity, the deep-seated source of a certain intensified response from the reader in both directions.  The book is not unlike other chilling literary/stage/movie experiences I can think of:  for example, the 70’s stage show “Dracula,” with its equally hysteria-inducing combination of the two otherwise opposed tendencies.  We alternately thrill with horror and gasp, then laugh out loud.  A movie experience utilizing this same formula was “An American Werewolf in London,” which used the by now reliable combination of slapstick, horror, satire, and cultural and occult lore that Amis’s book uses.  But Amis’s book preceded these dramatic offerings in time; it was first published in 1969, though also published in the U.S. by an American publisher in 1986.

So, just what are Maurice Allington’s problems?  Firstly, he is dissatisfied with his marriage to his wife, Joyce, and wants to bed the lovely Diana, wife of his best friend, the doctor Jack Maybury.  His father, who is not in the best of health, lives with his family and Maurice is unsettled by him, too.  He also has a massive drinking problem, as his concerned family members and friends constantly remind him.  And he has to decide if it’s his drinking which is causing the most unusual of his problems:  that is, he sees spirits.  He sees spirits and experiences psychic phenomena far beyond the limit of the simple antique ghost tale which is retailed by him to his customers at the inn to pique their interest.  Of course the book deliberately, artfully, and effectively leaves it unclear for the most part as to whether these are genuine manifestations, a result of the door between worlds suddenly being opened, or whether Maurice is actually becoming mentally unhinged and debilitated by the liquor and his own lack of balance alone.  The only being who seems to confirm the sightings he himself experiences is the cat, Victor, who in the time-honored tradition of cats with psychic abilities arches his back, hisses and spits, or runs out of the room and hides when the ghosts come to visit.

Maurice sees not only the sinful and spirit-summoning minister from the past, but also what turns out to have been the minister’s (Underhill’s) wife; an incarnation of a young man who acts something like a modern version of Christ but something more like a modern version of Satan; an apparent manifestation of a twittering bird which makes him wonder if he has delirium tremens; and a large clump of walking devastation of foliage which reads like one of J. R. R. Tolkien’s ents on steroids:  this last is the so-called “green man.”

The dapper young man without a name helps orient Maurice to the experiences he’s undergoing, though the orientation isn’t one conducive to dwelling safely and well in this world.  Others try to help him recoup his losses, such as his doctor friend Jack Maybury, whose wife Maurice is trying to bed on the sly.  His own wife, Joyce, and his son Nick and Nick’s girlfriend are all equally concerned, and are trying in their various ways to help Maurice come to terms with what they mostly regard as a fiction of his overwrought imagination.  His young daughter Amy is in danger of becoming a pawn in the game he is playing with his otherworldly experiences and foes.  Finally, he has trouble keeping track of the time, time having no meaning when he’s conversing with the elegant young man, because his watch and clocks no longer aid him in determining how time is passing when they are speaking to one another.  Worst of all, perhaps, is his difficulty in coordinating daily reality with the supernatural things which are happening to him (in his head?).

For Henry James readers who have encountered some of the criticism written about James’s story “The Turn of the Screw,” this double-barrelled treatment of suspicious happenings, when a character is proclaimed by different critics to be 1) suffering under a real visitation from the other world or 2) suffering from an overactive imagination, a drinking problem, a psychological disorder, et cetera, will be familiar.  James is in fact mentioned in The Green Man.  And though I’m not going to reveal the ending of the book (with its unexpected romantic alliance), I can safely tell you without ruining the reading experience that even up to the very end the suspenseful questions of exactly what happened remain.  After all, part of the time we may be in the mind of a crazy drunk (or is he in legitimate danger of losing his soul?  Or has he squeaked “out from under” losing his soul?).  This is a book well worth the occasional difficulty with theological terminology and concepts; in fact, it is a book that I think Henry James himself would’ve been proud, in our time, to have written.

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August 19, 2012 · 8:53 pm

“The school of hard knocks is an accelerated curriculum.”–Menander

In Gertrude Stein:  A Biography of Her Work, the scholar/critic Donald Sutherland says, “Gertrude Stein uses the simplest possible words, the common words used by everybody, and a version of the most popular phrasing, to express the most complicated thing….[S]he uses repetition and dislocation to make the word bear all the meaning it has….one has to give her work word by word the deliberate attention one gives to something written in italics.”  This is certainly true of one of her early works, a collection of three stories called Three Lives, which is much more readable than her later more experimental works.  Still, even with this early work, the “repetitions and dislocations” of language would confuse an inexperienced, simple reader who was reading mainly for the story and who was also launching a fledgling attempt to get a sense of the English written language.  This would be true even were the reader going only for the story of the characters’ emotions and nothing else.

Thus it is that though I have routinely read very challenging poetry and prose both, I have no enthusiasm for the works of Gertrude Stein in general, except to view them as experiments, perhaps necessary stages the written English language had to go through (or perhaps “confront” is the correct word) in order to be renovated.  Something similar could be said of the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet in terms at least of what they have contributed in English translation:  they are amazingly like each other, and seem all to go about language developments in the same way.  Yet they were at the time they were written part of a focus to objectify the narrative voice or experiment with it in a way which was begun but not finished by people like Ernest Hemingway.  Still, Hemingway is readable, whereas often Gertrude Stein is simply difficult, mainly meant for people who like romans à clef, word puzzles, and guessing games.  One way around this difficulty with Stein, if you are determined to read things she has written other than Three Lives, is to look over a copy of editor Renate Stendhal’s biography in captions, short quotes, and pictures entitled Gertrude Stein:  In Words and Pictures, a thick photographic history of Stein’s life which enables the reader to see better the things and people Stein was referring to in her novels and poetry, and to get a better sense of the time in which she lived.  I looked at that, but I also read Three Lives, mainly because it was the one thing of hers I felt I could read well from start to finish.  Here’s what I found and what I feel I can honestly offer about the collection of stories:

The stories are three sobering portraits of three different women’s lives in America in the early 1900’s.  The first woman, who is the main character of “The Good Anna,” Anna Federner, is “of solid lower middle-class german stock” (the lower-case “g” in german is as Stein uses it throughout the book).  The entire story is concerned with incidents relating to Anna’s employers’ lives (she is a sort of housekeeper and a general factotum), her dogs’ lives, and her conflicts with the scheming and lack of generosity she sometimes encounters.  For, she is good to others; it is not just a title, it is her title, this is the source of what she is, some short-sighted errors aside.  She comes to a dismal but quite ordinary end and the story ends simultaneously.

“Melanctha,” the second story, while different from the first story in that it speaks of a young African American woman and her intrigues and relationships with men and with women, ends similarly.  Though more enigmatic in nature and more amoral, just as the prose about her is more enigmatic in its starkly expressed picture, without narrative sympathy or reserve, Melanctha too comes to a bad end, but without having noticeably distinguished herself by unmotivated kindness to others, as the first character, the “good” Anna did.  There is also a certain amount of dated treatment of black people’s issues in the book, for all that it is Gertrude Stein writing, and for all that she was in sympathy herself with the African American struggle for rights in her own time.

In the third story, “The Gentle Lena,” the shortest of the three stories, Lena is described as “patient, gentle, sweet and german.”  She too starts out life as a servant, brought over to the U. S. to serve.  Though her life is called “peaceful” by the narrative voice, her fellow nursemaids tease her, apparently because she is not intelligent or quick-witted and will believe anything they tell her.  Her basic incomprehension of what is going on around her is shown quite clearly in Stein’s recording style:  it isn’t a language barrier problem, because it persists even when she is with other German people.  For example, we are told that Lena did not enjoy her life in Germany, but that she herself is unaware of this.  Stein quite simply tells us why, with no preamble or laborious psychologizing to indicate special insight (and this is true though Stein herself was a gifted student of the American psychologist William James before she went to live in France).  Lena’s life only slightly improves materially when she gets married and has her husband’s three children, and it improves not at all emotionally, for after going into what used to be termed “a decline,” she too dies, with no moral to the story, in true Steinian fashion.

What can be said about these three lives?  First of all, that they are simply that:  three lives, varied in some specifics, but each of them ending where we all end.  Yet, they do so without the least fanfare or blare of symbolism, imagery, or obvious rhetoric.  And that they are no better, or happier, or more rewarded with heroic status is the point I believe we are meant to take away.  Since they are all three women, this can possibly be interpreted to be a feminist moral if one is so inclined, yet Stein doesn’t assign any moral at all.  The final point is perhaps that there are so many unremarkable lives, which so many of us live, and that we are lucky even to be as well-remembered as these characters are, either by the other “characters” in our lives or by writers like Stein.

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August 17, 2012 · 2:26 pm

“An evil mind is a constant solace.”–Unknown

Have you ever watched an anti-hero, whom you know to be an anti-hero if not an outright villain, get away with murder in a novel, and find yourself hoping that he will continue to do so for the pure (or not so pure) comic pleasure it gives you to see him go from incident to incident, triumphant but flawed?  And of course, because he is so flawed you can laugh at him freely, and not invest real sympathy in his travails the way you would for a noble hero or heroine.  In this case, the reader himself or herself becomes a receptacle of a certain sort of selfishness in allowing such sympathy to exist:  that is, while you don’t give the character any true respect or empathy, you can still enjoy the course of his actions and, if and when he meets his inevitable nemesis, have nothing to mourn for except perhaps in having to stop following an enjoyable read.  It is in this sense alone that the reader imitates sympathetically the character Michael Beard’s “evil mind,” a “constant solace” to Beard and one unknown to the other characters, whose misunderstandings of his actions are all fairly humorous.

Michael Beard is the anti-hero of Ian McEwan’s 2010 book Solar, and a literal murder is exactly what it looks like he will get away with, though his tribulations mount up in a very funny way as if he is being punished by fate.  Beard, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist past his prime, is making a living through public speaking engagements, through a remote sort of participation in some corporations as an advisor, and lackadaisically through working along with a government project on global warming.  On the home front, Beard has freed himself time after time from his entanglements with women, until he one day wakes up to the fact that his latest wife has in fact turned the tables on him in this regard.  With murder in his heart Beard approaches the situation, only to be relieved of responsibility through a bizarre accident, for which the wrong man is later blamed and arrested.

It would appear through most of the novel that Beard has what is known as “the devil’s own luck”; all he has to do is resent someone or something, and bad things happen, but not to him.  And to counterpoint his involvement with the “dark side,” Beard has the satirical version of “the mark of the beast” on him, a melanoma on his hand that, were he sincerely concerned with solar problems and global warming and its after-effects, would have been dealt with safely.  Yet, he is also a figure of fun, just as the devil(s) in medieval morality plays often were:  for example, when Beard participates in a polar expedition to view a glacier, he makes a hilarious mistake.  Badly needing to pee while he is out on the iceberg on a snowmobile, Beard makes his typical error of being badly adjusted to his circumstances on earth by peeing in a sub-zero temperature, with comically disastrous results.  For as the saying goes among men, “it’s cold enough to freeze your pecker off.”

A more serious challenge to the comic devil known as Beard is the fact that he takes little care of his health in general and is obviously living on borrowed time, not only because of the events due to his bad actions, which are snowballing behind him, but due also to a mounting stress and heart condition resulting from the fact that he is monumentally selfish, even to himself.

The one love of Beard’s life is his little daughter, Catriona, who stands alone as a challenge to all that Beard is and has done wrongly.  Will Beard free himself from a life-long habit of cynicism and casual indifference to the rights of others, or will he get his just deserts just when he is close to redemption?  To some extent, the reader must figure this out.  One thing is certain:  Solar is a wonderful satirical masterpiece, and Beard is the traditional “satyr” at its center.

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August 15, 2012 · 9:10 pm

“….I look upon all men as my compatriots…making less account of the national than of the universal and common bond.”-Michel de Montaigne

From the cave paintings of hunting scenes in French caves to hieroglyphs of planting and sacred rituals to tribal dances that tell stories, even to modern day poetry slams and support groups, human beings have always told stories about how we came to be or how we come to be who we are, or where we still plan to go.  One of the most essentially human things a person can do is to shape a narrative about an event or feeling and share it with other people.  It is therefore an especially touching tale that Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni has come up with in her 2009 novel One Amazing Thing, in which there are stories within the main frame story, stories which people not congregated around the age-old campfire or stove but trapped in a U. S. city passport office tell each other.  They do this not just in order to pass the time, but also to align themselves with each other as survivors, and to attempt to rejoin the human tribe from which they are separated, they hope only temporarily.

Uma Sinha is a graduate student studying Medieval Literature; Malathi is an administrative clerk in the passport office where the group is isolated by an earthquake sealing off the building section they are in.  V. K. S. Mangalam is her boss, an unhappily married man to and by whom she is alternately attracted and angered.  An older Chinese woman and her teenage granddaughter are also there, the grandmother trapped behind the barrier of language which she must rely on her granddaughter to translate (or at least so they think).  There’s also a mature Caucasian couple who are passing through the throes of an indifferent marital relationship; a young Indian Muslim man who to Uma seems to be “from one of the mountain tribes,” and a young African American man who has experience in the armed forces.

Uma’s voice is the main interpretative voice at first; then the story is seen as it progresses from several of the other characters’ perspectives, as they try to settle and soothe their wounds, get into conflicts over minor episodes between them, and finally give way to Uma’s suggestion.  For, Uma suggests that they tell stories to each other, each telling about “one amazing thing” in their lives, in order to keep the time they share humane and ethical.  They are all surprised when the first person amongst them to agree is the Chinese grandmother, Jiang.  Cameron, the young African American, is meanwhile the tribal leader for the “tribe” of story-tellers made up of people from all different nations.  He sets in motion the search for a safe way out, for adequate and clean water and sanitary facilities, and for a first aid kit.  He also uses his experience in disasters to monitor the risky behavior of some of the others (for example, of Mr. Pritchett, who must have a smoke in this dangerously inflammatory setting), and helps keep them as calm as possible while they wait for rescue.

One pragmatically valuable thing that happens later on in the story is that Uma’s idea of story-telling brings the group together closely enough in their shared values that they become also more generous with their hidden and hoarded foodstuffs.  Whereas before there had only been a small number of items to be shared out placed on the counter for food, suddenly previously unseen items begin to appear, and are shared out as well.  Their time is becoming shorter, however, and is threatened by at least two things:  Cameron, their “leader,” who has asthma, is running out of time on his inhaler; and water is climbing up in the room, leaking in from damaged pipes somewhere else in the building.  And some of their stories have been painful in the telling:  as Uma thinks to herself “on behalf” of one of them, “Hell is other people,” (the quote I cited a day or two ago from Jean-Paul Sartre).  Then they experience aftershocks, then more water–and not being a “spoiler” at least in this article, I leave you to find out not only the rest, but the key to the rest:  all the stories they have told together which have led them to their mutual conclusion.

The frame story here is only that, a frame story, like that of The Decameron or The Canterbury Tales (the latter book of which Uma has with her at the beginning, which we may feel gave her the original inspiration for her story-telling idea).  For, these characters too, though not on a literal journey or at a wayside inn like the pilgrims in Chaucer’s collection of verse tales, are on a journey, a journey into each of themselves and sometimes through traumatic “moments of truth” or self-confrontation.  As a group, they learn from each other, and as individuals, they manuever themselves in other directions from those of the past.  Their challenges are not entirely internal, because they are fearful of the building’s collapse; rather the collapse of the building symbolizes the falling apart of old identities and the new ones rising from the dust of the city.  I hope you will read this book and appreciate how new and old are woven together in these tales from different cultures and age groups, and will agree with me that they make a very tender and feeling picture of what is known as “the human condition.”

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