Monthly Archives: August 2012

August 14, 2012 · 4:02 pm

“No jury in the world would convict him/her….”–common saying

Today I would like to comment on a story which I found anthologized in The Best  American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike and Katrina Kenison in 2000.  It has been anthologized in other collections as well, I believe, though incredibly enough (considering that it was written at a time before women got the vote) it was first published in 1917 in a periodical called Every Week.  It’s the short story “A Jury of Her Peers,” by Susan Glaspell.  Though I’ve sort of hinted at the symbolic outcome in the title of my post, you will get a great deal more out of the experience of the story by actually reading it, regardless of anything I might write about it (it’s one of those “it helps to have  been there” stories).

As we all know, justice is often (maybe even usually) a partial thing.  Just think of how long media, public, and private debates about any but the most extremely obvious and egregious breaches of law or custom can go on.  In this story, the topics dealt with are things such as community responsibility towards members (in the fellowship of women, for example, something almost forbidden by the tight fellowship of the male bonding in the story, which makes fun of the women’s ties); the manner in which surroundings can reveal a person’s life to an attentive viewer; and fellow feeling as the source of true justice.

The women in this story are two married women who go with their husbands (one the sheriff) and a third man (a prosecuting attorney) to view the scene of where, it is suspected, a woman killed her husband.  At first, though one woman is more clearly open-minded and views things from her own ability to relate to other women, both of the women stand unresisting in their husbands’ shadows.  Things begin to change, however, when the men go upstairs in the house of the murdered man to view the “scene of the crime” and the women stay downstairs by the fire, intending only to find and take some of the accused woman’s possessions to her where she waits in custody in the jailhouse.  The women down below get a chance, instead, to view things which make it obvious how the woman bore up under her husband’s bad treatment:  they see that she was isolated and alone (though not by choice), that she made do with unnecessarily shabby clothes and home goods, and that she was not only negligently but cruelly treated in a casual, despicable way by a man accounted a “good” man by his peers.  Meanwhile, the men stay mostly in the top of the house, certain that their wives are the stereotypical “good” women (ones who provide for and abide by their husbands’ wills); when they do confront the women, their attitudes are sexist, condescending, and full of undeserved criticism of the accused woman (for not keeping a good clean house, for example, or for leaving things half done).  Though the men have reached the correct answer (for we are fairly sure throughout the story that the woman is somehow responsible for her husband’s death), they have done so for the wrong reasons, and in an entirely wrong spirit.

It is the women who, with simple innocent curiosity are led to the truly correct answers regarding the murder, though they start by knowingly suppressing the details they are finding downstairs from the men; the men josh and joke them about what they are doing and handling, not for a moment seeing how it connects; and the more they discover, the more we are led to question the nature of evidence, and whether or not the women will reveal what they have “seen.”

As with every jury, some of the members start on one side, some on another, and at first the most timorous of the two women (the sheriff’s wife, whom the men joke about as “married to the law”) is Mrs. Peters.  When she is finally and fully persuaded by Mrs. Hale of the injustice with which the accused woman was treated by her husband, even of the psychological brutality which has no outright link with physical punishment in the story, we read “It was as if something within her not herself had spoken, and it found in Mrs. Peters something she did not know as herself.”  These two women are the informal “jury” of the story:  though Mrs. Wright, the accused woman, was to a degree less fortunate than they, that they truly are “a jury of her peers” is born out by the way in which they both quickly reach the same conclusions from the same evidence and comparison of it with what they know of their own lives.

The climax of the story comes when the men arrive back downstairs, fully convinced that they have seen “the scene of the crime” (while the women whom they laugh at and condescend to have been viewing downstairs the “scene” of another “crime” entirely).  They say in the women’s hearing that what they actually need is a motive, something which would explain the woman’s actions.  What will the women do?  All they have to do is surpress their knowledge of the other “story” they have pieced together (just as the woman who was arrested was said to be “piecing together” a quilt, an important symbol in the story):  should they live within the foolish, silent limitation their husbands have set for them?  Or, perhaps, they can speak to the men about what they know (which the shy, quiet Mrs. Peters would certainly prefer).  Does Mrs. Hale (as in “hale and hearty”) persuade Mrs. Peters, or does Mrs. Peters lead Mrs. Hale to give way?  There’s no assurance for them either way that their actions will make any difference to the outcome.  And yet, there’s the story they now share between them.  Man or woman, become a part of their community, and read the story.  Though I’ve done a lot of hinting about how things proceed, it’s always better and more rewarding to see for yourself!

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August 13, 2012 · 5:22 pm

“Hell is other people.”–Jean-Paul Sartre

Buckets and buckets of ink have been spilled debating the topic of what constitutes a short long story (a short novel) and what makes up a long short story (to still qualify it as a short story).  And where does the novella fit into this system, exactly?  Also, there is the series of considerations about form and content which insist that what makes a short story or novel is not only a question of length, but has formal aspects as well.  Though I’m not going to rehash any of these arguments today–aren’t you glad?–I would just point out that this book I plan to discuss, The Stepdaughter, by Caroline Blackwood, is one of the shortest epistolary pieces of fiction I’ve ever read, with both a (strong but illusory) sense of length in the form, as might occur in a novel or novella, and a twisted ending such as one might expect to find in a short story.

In Sartre’s play “Huit Clos” (translated most often as “No Exit”), when we are told “hell is other people,” we can probably all relate imaginatively to the experience being articulated, thinking perhaps of some time or other when someone else made themselves intolerable to us.  Yet, there is a deeper meaning lurking here, and Blackwood’s novel brings it out.  Sometimes, the people around us as we ourselves imagine them to be are actually much worse than the actual people, once we get to know them a little better.  Sadly, we lose all too many opportunities to do this, and repent of it too late.  As well, sometimes a whole group of people can be adversely affected and made to suspect, resent, or misinterpret each other because of the actions of one self-centered person in their midst.  Such a character is the husband figure, Arnold, in this book.

This epistolary novel (a novel written in letters) is produced in the voice of a woman known only as “J.”   She writes letters to a sort of imaginary friend, known either as “Dear….” or “Dear So-and-So.”  The letters at first are said to be “written in [her] head,” though later it seems that she is actually writing letters; at least, she excuses herself from a conversation by saying that she has letters to write.  She always signs off in a somewhat self-indulgent style, with an adverb or adverbial phrase like “In all haste as usual,” “Dismally,” “Bitterly,” “Yours miserably,” or sometimes simply “Yrs. ever.”

Her situation is this:  she shares an expensive apartment in Manhattan (provided by her soon-to-be ex-husband) with her 4 year old daughter, an introverted, fat teenage daughter passed on from her husband’s previous marriage (Renata), and an au pair.  While she is filled with rage that her husband goes away to France with a new, younger, French girlfriend and plans to leave her, her rage is expressed at first by being mutely directed outward towards the people with whom she lives.  She seems to have little self-knowledge, but instead detests first the au pair, then Renata; finally, she reveals that she no longer takes pleasure either in her friends and their offers to help or in spending time with her own little daughter.

But startling revelations are in store for “J.”  As she (and the book’s narrative, following her state of mind) pass from Part 1) resentment and rage through Part 2) opening up and understanding to Part 3) frantic fear of loss, she makes a decision to tell Renata that her husband, Arnold, Renata’s putative father, has left her.  When she does, the story begin its progress toward a truly agonizing dénouement as Renata, the previous bump on a log who did nothing much but bake instant cakes and consume them all herself, takes a hand in the action.  The experience of this short novel (or novella, or long short story) is to make one realize yet again how dependent we are not only upon what we think we share with other people, but also upon what they think they share with us:  missing reciprocity is the unspoken story in this book.

Though Caroline Blackwood has written other books by now, this was her first novel, published in paperback form by Penguin Books in 1984 (the date of first release in hardback was 1976).  Yet, it is not at all dated; for many, many women, particularly those grouped around the central figure of a male “character” like Arnold, who at worst is a conniving, serially-monogamous-while-still-cheating-near-the-end-of-a-relationship monster, and at the best is insincere and ambivalent, these issues still need to be aired.  And Arnold is a central mystery, for we never hear his voice except through the women’s quotes and interpretations of what he says.  Fiction can here fulfill one of its major functions; it can allow us to be other selves, and to learn from the experience, even to see where we ourselves have gone wrong.  I don’t mean either that this book is meant only for women:  I suspect that many men attentive to fiction might find “The Stepdaughter” worthwhile reading as well.

And lastly, I would like to raise a mourning paean over a distribution catalog that has now been discontinued.  “A Common Reader” catalog, whose home was situated at 141 Tompkins Avenue in Pleasantville, NY (doesn’t it just sound bookish and fun?) was the place I obtained “The Stepdaughter”; it was in fact a place from which I ordered most of the books that I bought from the United Kingdom.  I wanted to pass the full address and phone number along (for the benefit of some Luddites such as I have been who still love to get boxes in the mail from “real” book companies), but when I went to wikipedia to research them, it seems they ran from 1986-2006 and were then discontinued.  Such a short time, and they provided me with so much pleasure!  Goodbye old friend!  (I still haven’t bought a Kindle, so though I read some fiction and poetry from the Internet, I technically haven’t deserted.)  To my own readers, I’d say:  read, read, read, though, that’s the main thing, regardless of where you get your reading from–and I’ll be writing again soon!

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August 12, 2012 · 3:23 pm

“All good things which exist are the fruits of originality.”–John Stuart Mill

It’s been a number of days now since I last did a post on the many wonderful (new to me) blogsites I’ve been reading, and I think it’s about time to do another five.  Though most of them are about some angle or variety of literature or literary life, and some have original literary compositions on them, some disperse their topics rather more broadly.  I read them for different things, as I’ve said before, though mostly I stick pretty closely to subjects relating to books and writing.  This is because as I’ve aged, I’ve begun to get a sense of my own mortality, and I know there’s not time to read everything out there that I might want to dabble in, and so have made my own interests a little narrower.  And except for the occasional off-topic post, that quality of narrowness may help my readers to identify what they can come to my site for, too.  Again, most if not all of my reading choices have recently been Freshly Pressed.

Having made the rule of mostly literary things, I’m now going to provide the exception that “proves” (tests) the rule.  The blogsite “Miss Royal Disaster” is at http://missroyaldisaster.wordpress.com , and it features a lot of different issues in modern life.  The theme page is truly luscious with a gorgeous heart of a flower on it.  The topics here range from the societal to the personal, from ecological concerns to makeup issues, and the author, though making the occasional unchecked typo, is never at a loss for words.  Especially on articles such as “animals on the edge of extinction” (which includes beautiful photographs of some of the animals in question) and the post on “hydrogen cars,” the blogger comes into her stride.  Her health and wellness issues are also very informative.  There have been recent posts on vegetarianism and vegan diet which were highly readable likewise.  But lest you think that “fun” is left out, there is a category for that (including a short bit on breaking up with a boyfriend, not exactly my idea of fun).  There are features such as a review of “Snow White and the Huntsman:  A Modern Fairy Tale.”  Also, you’ll find an advice column, and a section on psychology.  All in all, though one has to wonder if the author of the blog will be able to keep up with all the subjects she’s assigned herself, and though these topics are covered in an informal manner and using a colloquial style, she has shown a devotion to a wide range of subjects which may be of interest to nearly everyone.

NARRATIVE–  At http://richardgilbert.me/ , this blogsite is for a kind of literature I haven’t previously had much interest in, inasmuch as I’ve always taken an extreme literary purist’s (and perhaps an ignoramus’s) view that there’s sometimes a kind of self-indulgence in memoir writing, as opposed to “pure” fiction.  I’ve often avoided autobiography for the same reason.  But Richard Gilbert, a memoirist, specialist in memoirs, and academician who has “returned to the land” by way of farming and who currently wears all these hats at once, is fast convincing me otherwise.  I now treasure the list he has on his website as a list I can refer to while reading up on some of the people involved.  He has a wonderfully visually appealing site which contains a wide range of writerly activities, interests, and obsessions, such as “how stories make us human,” “on hating a memoirist,” and “my wild summer reading and revising.”  There are also others.  He has the occasional film review and a goodreads link under “narrative bookshelf.”  The tags on this site cover by name not only a huge number of well-known writers, but also songwriters, radio personalities, politicians, and a lot of people who use and live out narratives on the world stage.  One could read forever on and from this site, I get the feeling, and still not totally exhaust Gilbert’s erudition and humanity.

Nutshells & Mosquito Wings–at http://christinalay.wordpress.com/ .  The blog is subtitled “A Fantasy Writer’s Journey Through Reality.”  This site focuses on a transposition of the stuff of reality with its corresponding myth value, or perhaps vice versa, as in the post in which Christina ponders the symbolic import of a toad turning up in the kitchen, an event dealt with using an appropriate amout of humor.  Indeed, a resolute sense of humor pervades nearly all of her posts here, even though in her post “Victorian Mansion Seeks Spirits” she speaks half-seriously of how spirits “haunt” an old house in which many different fortunes have been met.  “The Agony of Empathy” is a subject she confronts in dealing with how an earlier sort of fantasy writer, Alexander Dumas, forces empathy on his readers in The Count of Monte Cristo.  Empathy is after all an essential experience in reading and writing good fantasy, whose fictional situations may be utterly strange to us, but whose human emotions should not be.  Next, she joins us in a post called “For the Love of Adverbs,” which excites my sympathy and is both apt and comic, and a subject of interest these days when even Hemingway is becoming a little out-of-date, though still essential reading.  Finally, Christina puts up a thoughtful post on the nature of God.  Handled with characteristic humor and good nature and a great deal of honesty from a contemporary point of view, it allows us all to find some sense of balance as writers and as people.

First We Read, Then We Write–at http://deborahrosereeves.wordpress.com/ .  This blog also has a goodreads link, but it is a good read all by itself.  Subtitled “Reviews, Ruminations, Reflections, Reveries,” this is what it is about, playing over many different aspects of the literary field.  Currently living in Portland, OR, Deborah defines herself as “a writer, a restless wanderer, and a recent woodworker.”  Her degrees are in English and Women and Gender Studies, and her toughmindedness in writing about things literary is tempered and balanced by a true humanity which keeps the doors open to new understandings.  She is by turns realistic, funny, and heartwarming in her blogs and posts, while avoiding the adverse of these qualities, not being pretentious, rude, or lacrimose.  It’s quite clear from the professionalism and taut quality of this blog that the blogger has taken her own injunction seriously:  first she reads, then she writes.  She never meanders around her subject without fulfilling its potential, except of course when meandering and releasing potential for others is the point.  This is clearly one of the best blogs I’ve seen lately.

beautifullittlesarajevo–at http://beautifullittlesarajevo.wordpress.com/ .  The work of another recent Portlander,  this blog, which is subtitled “A Place for Pretty Things” has as its declared topics food, photography, and writing.  The photography is highly evocative, some of it in stark and beautiful black-and-white, other parts in half-tones or equally beautiful color.  There is a sparse feel to the site, which gives it a surrealistic or film noir quality even including some of the color photographs, curiously.  In the food section, there are few words except to extol a healthy diet; but then, the pictures included are in the outworn but apposite saying “worth a thousand words.”  Such delicious looking delights are in the photographs that one salivates just at the pictures.  Now, how does one get to Portland, which the blogger says is a food-friendly city, in the blink of an eye?  Just look at the pictures, and don’t blink!  This is home cooking, from the blogger herself.  The literary part of the blog is equally innovative and gorgeous with “poems” that aren’t actually poems, because as the blogger states categorically, “I Hate Poetry.”  Yet the proliferation of word pictures, the lovely word pictures, say “poem” to me.  Anyway, whatever the pieces are called, “prose fragments,” perhaps, the blogger has written them well, and I hope to see more of them shortly.  If we don’t agree exactly on what makes a poem, we can all agree on one thing:  the writer has an eye for beauty, wherever it occurs.

And that’s my blog for today.  I hope you can get around to these sites if you haven’t already (I mean, you may be impatiently throwing bread pellets at me and yelling, “We already knew that one!”).  I have five or six more sites already chosen to write upon, but I like to leave some space between the days I do this so that I’m not just sponging off other people’s blogs constantly.  Until tomorrow, hang on tight, and hang loose!  (And congratulations to all the folks who participated fairly and squarely in the Olympics).

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August 11, 2012 · 1:42 am

“Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.”–Sylvia Plath

I wish I had managed to track down the exact reference for this quote from Sylvia Plath, so that I would know under exactly what circumstances she said it.  Did she, for example, mean that the writing was lousy and that that’s why it had never been published?  Or did she mean that it would stop stinking once the impulse to publish it had been answered?  I took this latter meaning as my own yesterday and today, in getting my poetry–of which very few poems have seen the light of day–online with the U. S. Copyright Office and then here to you.

Mostly, I wouldn’t say the poems actually were stinky, though they were dusty and dog-eared (even the more recent ones) from being carried around in an equally ratty notebook.  I typed them up yesterday and this morning, and then got online with the U. S. Copyright Office formally to “seal the deal.”  You can file online for $35, provided that all their conditions are met and you are only publishing online (publishing in print form costs more, takes longer, and has more conditions).  So, since I just wanted to publish right now for the sake of my website (maybe some kind editor of print books will come along and discover me eventually, should I prove worthy), I went ahead and went through the process.  It can be done in a very short amount of time, and the instructions are generally quite clear, once you get used to the format.  I had a little trouble at first, because I haven’t been online to copyright since my last novel was completed in 2010, but the system is made for people who simply want to follow instructions without too much who-hah.

The best part is, that although your case may be pending for a day or two (in this case, over the weekend), once you’ve (1) applied (2) paid and (3) uploaded your files successfully (in that order), your work is officially copyrighted and registered.  The copyright office even sends you several e-mails during the process to let you know when each part is complete.  So, you don’t have to cool your heels wondering why, oh why, you didn’t start an hour earlier in the morning, or take less time for lunch, or why you were so muddle-headed about the process when it told  you (fairly clearly) what to do.  They will send you a paper copy of your registration in about 6 months (they say less, but face it, there are lots of people publishing out there).

So, now–my poems are up on this site, and though I would like to get rich off them and off my other writings too, I’m realistic enough to recognize that I should probably just point once more to my PayPal button, silently, and let it go at that.  Like Shakespeare said, “Sell when you can, you are not for all markets.”  I hope you will read my poems at your own pace, and enjoy them, and tell me what you like or were perhaps left cold by (I love getting comments and replies, and haven’t had nearly enough of them so far).  And now you know what I was doing instead of putting up a post a day at the end of this week!  I was suffering (read typing and proofreading) for my art!

A word about the poems themselves:  they go from my days as an undergraduate (when I won an honorable mention in a contest for about 3-4 of them) to the recent poems I wrote for the characters in my first published novel to exchange and read to each other.  Had I been able to remember exactly which poems had placed in the contest, I would have noted it down, but it’s too long ago now, and those are old moments of near-glory.  What’s more important now is how the poems hold up under the burden of time.  Suffice it to say that though I no longer liked all of the poems in this collection, I still felt that all of them had some merit which made them worth retaining.  So, without more stuff and nonsense about it, here they are for your–I hope–reading pleasure.  Someday, I hope to write poetry again, and I hope to get to it long before I have to call the volume Old Age!

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August 8, 2012 · 3:00 am

Some novels which use the demotic (people’s) voice–Part III

Part III–The later twentieth and twenty-first century American fictions in particular which I have considered (though others cannot be excluded) focus on ridding the characters of the “names” their relatives, their society, or they themselves have previously given them, or making the “names” they have significant of a new identity or idea.  To mention just a few, in The Shipping News, there’s Quoyle, “the newspaperman” (whose past life is indeed a “coil,” like the cultural knots in a rope from which he descends and which he wants to limit).  He transitions from a name alone to a fuller identity when he happens upon the “scoop” of his own life, the startling news that the aunt whom he loves is actually his mother, and that he is not excluded from receiving mature sexual love from a girl he meets.  In The Lacuna, a young man is named alternately by those around him as a tool against his father (by his mother), a servant (even by his enlightened employers in his later life), a suspicious character (by the paranoid, communist-fearing functionaries of the United States government of the time), and finally as a good friend, and these are the roles and identities he generally accepts.  Finally, with the aid of his good friend, a woman, he is able to escape into a never-quite-previously lived “lacuna” (lacuna can mean either “absence, gap,” or “lagoon”)–into an idyllic past, and his further identity thus becomes a lacuna itself, a mystery.

Even earlier in one of the precursive texts I looked at, Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, Ethan is by his wife treated or “named” a shiftless, no-good husband; is gradually accepted as a transgressive but gallant suitor of sorts by his cousin Mattie; and ends his days caught between the two “names,” his identity a cipher, that of a “dead man,” as one of the internal characters defines him at the end.  He is a condensation only of the name “Frome” and the evidence of “the hard compulsions of the poor.”

The transition largely achieved by the struggles of the main characters themselves from being “only a name” to fulfilling (or “filling full”) an identity, cultural or personal, is not restricted to the Americans, however.  Firmly and repeatedly undercutting his audience’s expectations, the author/narrator-as-author-as-narrator of London Fields at the end of the novel turns out to be the “murderer” he himself has been seeking (to “kill off” one of the characters).  He steps thus with great irony and satirical intent into the shoes he has sought to fill (as if forcing the reader to write the novel), and satirizes audience expectations of identity patterns for characters, authors, and readers.  This ending rejects and simultaneously glorifies the use the reader would make of him, and constructs by ironies that point in all directions a narrative “identity” of his own making, which is that of a whimsical dictator, a character nearly as sadistic as the woman who is to be murdered is toward her lovers.

To revisit the topic of the picturesque briefly, contemporary authors sometimes focus less overtly on figurative language from page to page, but choose summational titular and thematic structures (“the shipping news,” “prodigal summer,” “the lacuna,” “the joke,” “London fields,” “a thousand acres,” even “the girl with the dragon tattoo”) as partial naming concepts.  They then “fill in” the significance of such things by close attention to character study as plot, setting, etc.  The character becomes the plot, the character’s interior in some way evokes or resembles the setting, and so on.

Though my treatment in three parts has not been exhaustive, it has been as far as I can see at the present time.  All of the contemporary novels I’ve mentioned above are in my opinion well-written and show a consistent concern with quality of reading experience which signals aesthetic significance, and each has a moral value system firmly in place.  You may have to find your way through multiple ironies to it, and sometimes traditional moral values are revised or moral elements are shifted around to allow for a more contemporary viewpoint–but clearly these writers, who manipulate the demotic and traditional voices of literature and experiment with both romance and realistic elements in their fiction, and who show characters caught up in the process of finding their own identities–these writers just as obviously have no doubts or qualms of any force about their own voices or identites in these books.  I hope if you haven’t read some of them you will find some new “friends” among them, after my long demand on your patience.

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August 8, 2012 · 2:03 am

Some novels which use the demotic (people’s) voice–Part II

Part II–The book London Fields by Martin Amis, which is discussed by Scott in his book, has a complicated sort of voyeurism as one subject (and as far as romance is concerned, an intricate satire of voyeurism is the key element in the examination of romance here).  This book is seen as a sort of “art-speech,” containing near examples of skaz and the demotic voice, while flouting a general disregard for any specific political agenda to promote them.  (But more about this book later.)

Another set of works which deserves mention because it has reached a world demotic community (in translation) is the trilogy of “the Girl” books by Stieg Larsson beginning with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.  The books are not only written in the popular form of a Swedish mystery-cum-suspense series, which is demotic in its own country, but by taking up the world community topics of computer hacking, cruelty to women, espionage political, industrial, and personal, and sexual mores in a contemporary society, they also are able to reach a popular world community of such breadth as is rare.  Moreover, the books are clearly addressed, through their picaresque travelling heroine, to a democratic world community beset with these issues.  Not only have they reached a world community, but also they depict such sexual frankness and open social violence that they overtly take up the topic of cruelty at large and discovery of it by those who can take matters into their own hands, whether legally or simply justifiably by popular “vote.”  The gritty realism cuts against a simple sense of romance in the Larsson novels.  Perhaps the most one can say of these novels as potential avatars of the romance genre is to point to the unlikely degree to which the multiply challenged heroine manages in spite of all vast hurdles to overcome the challenges in her way.  And we are with her all the way in an enthusiasm for her abilities and with sympathy for her struggle.

Other contemporary authors choose to follow earlier role models by writing various kinds of regional fiction, using the culture, language, and sense of belonging special to certain communities or professions.  For instance, there is Jane Smiley’s novel A Thousand Acres, in which the subject matter (farming), settings, and character descriptions are special to the Iowa farming community.  There is not a specific dialect or idiom operating to translate the experience, except for the rueful practicality of the characters’ outlooks, and the way in which the rape of the daughters by the father, and old and forgotten secret, is made to parallel the story of the simultaneous rape of the land.  The surfacing of this secret, along with its sensational nature, and the focus on the psychological twists and turns of the plot, are surely at least tangentially related to the romance mode (it should be understood that I am using “romance” in the technical sense here).  As well, there are encyclopedic listings of Iowan native plants, flowers, and wildlife at the scene at the farm dump between Ginny and Jess (a romance in the usual sense of the word–read the book!).  Pictures of the culture also occur perhaps  in something so fleeting and elusive as the inflections in conversations which aren’t quite dialect, but which have the sense of certain speakers’ rhythms.

A really notable writer who has rung changes on the fictional particularizing skills of earlier precursors (whether the ones I named or others) is E. Annie Proulx, especially in her books The Shipping News and Brokeback Mountain.  Like many contemporary novels, hers either celebrate or detail changes in contemporary life, and break forth with cataclysms directed against the past and revelations about it.  The suppression and subsequent revelation of a hidden truth or way of life is equally a sign of the romance mode and variations of the realistic mode, and is perhaps the point at which the two are branches of the same tree.  Each of these two books contains some demotic speech markers in speech rhythms and abruptions as well.  Also, there are cultural markers in the first book, such as occurs at the beginnings of many chapters, where detailed instructions for the tying of different shipping knots, or regional sayings, are in evidence.  The first book furnishes a qualified “happy ending”–“And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.”  Brokeback Mountain by contrast furnishes a bleak picture of the past and its limitations rising to choke off the present, another frequent topic of demotic literature.  In this book, a bisexual man is left alone to mourn his gay lover’s death by beating at the hands of some other men who found him out, and there is thus the frequent demotic topic of society’s punishments of transgressions made against its prejudices.

The book The Joke by Milan Kundera is one which in its native language is another book full of skaz.  The fifth edition “Author’s Note” describes the difficult course of getting an accurate English translation.  The book blurb claims that it has “fidelity…to the words and syntax” and to “the characteristic dictions and tonalities” of its multiple narrators.  This matter aside, there is an attempt at fidelity to cultural practices in the descriptions of a Bohemian wedding ceremony in Chapter Seven, complete with the ritual wedding dialogues and actions.  As well, there is in addition to the otherwise scholarly analysis of folk songs of Chapter Four a recounting of the musicians’ lives as they are seen to live with their music.  There is a doubling of the picture, with two cultures in one place:  the original Bohemian culture and the Soviet regime which is superimposed over it, as they are lived out by the main character, a member of the original culture caught up in the toils of government repression.  Conflicts between two reigns or cultures is far from unheard of in romance, and were it not for the fact that the stark realism of Kundera’s text plays against it, one could also point to the picturesque elements upon which romanticism is fed, such as the celebration of village life and tradition, here an ironic picturesque because it is threatened.

A cultural doubling similar to this one can be seen in the book The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver.  In this book, a young boy is brought up alternately by his mother in the Mexico of the 1930’s, and in close contact with the Trotskyite faction there, and then by his father in Washington, D. C. during the early years of the Communist scare.  Here, the two cultures, each of which has its own demotic voice and events, are not layered one over the other as in Kundera’s book, but are placed side by side for purposes of contrast.  The main character lives his life drawing elements first from one cultural milieu and then from the other.  There is in both cases a demotic fiction clearly in place.  In this book, the picturesque of modest living and the picturesque of artistic concerns are mingled in the (imagined) views  given of the household(s) of Diego Riviera and Frieda Kahlo; likewise, the main character’s final escape to an idyllic setting sounds a note of the romance tradition.

Another book by Barbara Kingsolver also deserves mention in any serious discussion of demotic voice.  This is the book Prodigal Summer.  There is in this book a deliberate focus on dialect and pronunciation from as early as page 4, when a mountain person recognizes an American Northerner by the sound of “y” at the end of a vowel; on page 25, a Northerner teases an American Southern speaker about the double locution “still yet,” made for emphasis.  There are examples of how skaz of the area sounds to a strange ear.  The book takes up the topics of farming, plants, animals, and insects as a world cultural knowledge practiced not only by specialists and scientists, but also by folk specialists born to the culture as a people.  The overarching topic is the stewardship of the earth, and in their conflicts over this issue, the characters make outright comparisons of their different regional dialects and customs.  They are thus sophisticated in their understandings of their own speech.  Of most interest in terms of the picturesque and/or romance tradition is the mingling of an overall appreciation of nature not only by the simpler folk who live in the midst of it, but by those of more sophisticated intellectual tradition who also enjoy it.  The “prodigal summer” to which the novel refers is in fact the main vehicle of romance and superfluity for all concerned, with its exaggerated and lush influence over the personal identities of the people involved.  Personal identity will be further explored briefly in Part III.

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August 8, 2012 · 12:26 am

Some novels which use the demotic (people’s) voice–Part I

Part I–In writing a long and complicated post (which I’ll feature in three parts for easier reading) I’d like to discuss identity issues as they impact first upon some precursory texts of contemporary fiction, and then upon some contemporary fictions themselves.  The literary issue which is involved here is the question of identity in narrative voice, when talking especially about the more contemporary and lately widespread use of the “demotic” voice (or the literary voice “of the people” as opposed to the “mandarin” voice or “high art” voice).  The demotic voice includes not only the speech of characters in dialogue, but especially features “skaz,” or, following Mikhail Bakhtin’s definition, “homodiegetic…narration which takes its cue from oral rather than written discourse.”  For more on “skaz” and “homodiegetic” see note below in Part III*.  (An earlier example of skaz is the narrative voice in Huckleberry Finn.).  Yet another point to be considered when one is determining how fictional voice operates is the issue of romance (in the technical literary sense) versus realism.  I would like to credit the valuable discussion of mandarin and demotic voices in fiction in Jeremy Scott’s book The Demotic Voice in Contemporary British Fiction.  Though he discusses a number of authors whom I am not going to mention here, his entire thesis is useful for understanding the questions relating to voice in fiction.

Taking the precursors to contemporary fiction first in order to say how they are related, I need to remark that they were particularizers and in-depth analyzers of the life and culture of certain communities, and often chose demotic speakers or humbler dialogues in the construction of their pictures of societies.  There are no doubt many precursors:  I’m only going to discuss three.  These precursors left a legacy behind them, which contemporary practitioners of the demotic novel in general have followed, been inspired by, or perhaps coincidentally (and intertextually) come after, changing a mandarin (or high literary) ethos for a more demotic one, inspired by the voice of whomever they took “the people” to be.  Scott remarks in his book that probably the first novel to imitate a character’s dialect and style of locution in the narration is Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent:  An Hibernian Tale.  In this book, a supposedly native Irish speaker gives his views on the aristocracy for whom he works.  The effects of “hearing” Thady Quirk (the native speaker) are broadly burlesque; he is clearly a folk narrator made up by someone with a rather distant relationship with the real Irish.  He’s funny, but he’s also made fun of, in addition to being the source of comedy aimed at others.  The opinions he has of his employers, however, ring true enough, though they are exaggerated for comic effect.

Another precursor is the American Sarah Orne Jewett in some of her novels and stories.  While she says there is “a likeness to be traced” to some particular town in her work, she also says the “sketches” of characters are not usually drawn from that town.  She is different from Edgeworth because, having only colorful local humor in one of her books such as Deephaven, she does not burlesque her characters, but treats them with a very careful attitude of respect.  Her two main characters in Deephaven follow and illustrate the staid morality of New England, though there are a few remarks which seem to suggest the subject of a “Boston marriage.”  In one such remark, for example, the speaker compares the two young ladies, herself and her friend, to the “ladies of Llangollen” (a “Boston marriage” was at the time a term for close emotional, personal friendship between two women, who would probably identity themselves as gay today).  The two ladies operate as an audience for the characters of the town, who are “characters” in more than one sense.  There are a few occasions when Jewett is particularly broad, and she is at those times reminiscent of Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn, though again she is not as sly and satirical by half as Twain (who is give a nod by Scott as a writer of demotic fiction).  By way of contrast with Deephaven, in Jewett’s A Country Doctor, there is less of a demotic voice, mainly because there are fewer humble characters who speak a naturally simpler language.  There is also a strong plot line concerned more with a single character (a young woman who wants to become a doctor) rather than with a whole culture.  In The Country of the Pointed Firs as well, there is more “hybrid” characterization and subject matter than in Deephaven, which is a set piece of dialect examination without much of a plot or story to it.  (Scott also makes use of the term “hybrid” in several different ways, to indicate the duality or mixture of story line, voice, and characterization).

A final major precursor (though there are undoubtedly many more which could be discussed) is Edith Wharton, not at all in her society novels, but in her novel of the New England countryside, Ethan Frome.  In her “Introduction,” the characters are compared to “granite outcroppings.”  They are said to be seen through the limited understanding of two “chroniclers.”  It is in fact the most external narrator who purports to understand them and who details the rhythms of speech and occasional grammatical lapses or “picturesque” language.  The starkness of the surroundings is both natural and societal.  The narrator, who is said to be more complex and sophisticated in understanding in this “Introduction,” empathizes near the end with the “hard compulsions of the poor,” this hardness bodied forth in the unsympathetic landscape.  Had Scott commented on Wharton, he might have noticed the frequency with which she does as he says Thomas Hardy does, and “often seek[s] to dramatise the internal lives of [his] characters…by displacing character ‘sensibility’ onto the landscape.”  This tendency also relates to the picturesque and romance traditions, to be taken up in more detail later, in Part II.

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August 6, 2012 · 2:13 pm

“Always be smarter than the people who hire you.”–Lena Horne

The French author Muriel Barbery’s highly acclaimed novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog (translated into English in 2008 by Alison Anderson) is a book for and about self-directed readers and smart people, particularly frustrated ones. In it, a hôtel building’s concierge, Renée Michel, unprepossessing physically and getting on in years, hides behind the concierge stereotype.  After all, this is all that is expected or wanted of her by the vast majority of the building’s inhabitants.  But behind her mask, she is a self-taught intellectual (an autodidact, to use the correct term) who reads and/or comprehends everything from philosophy to fine music and art, with a generous smattering of topics her employers are themselves too ignorant and worldly truly to understand.  The book goes a long way to prove that wealth is not necessarily a sign of intelligence, nor is intelligence an index to personal income and status.

The second heroine of the book is a pre-teen named Paloma Joss, who is also very gifted, and who understands too much to feel comfortable with her family’s privileged lifestyle.  Paloma lives in the hôtel, but isn’t planning to continue that way for long:  she contemplates setting things on fire, but then confusedly though valiantly decides to commit suicide on her thirteenth birthday.  She keeps a journal of “Profound Thoughts,” and some of them truly are profound.

The status quo and equilibrium of the building’s social system are disturbed, however, when a wealthy but unusually modest Japanese gentleman moves in.  For he sees through Renée’s cover almost at once, perceiving her as a kindred soul (he is not only wealthy but is also intelligent, educated, and genuinely well-bred).  He is clearly determined not to allow the concierge to continue to hide out behind her mask of dullness.  She and he and Paloma become acquaintances and then friends, all three of them joining to defy the class and age barriers that would keep them apart.

I won’t reveal the startling and moving ending except to quote Renée:  “The paths of God are all too explicit for those who pride themselves on their ability to decipher them….”  Paloma’s voice ends the novel, which is only fitting, especially since she is thought of by the concierge as “the daughter I never had,” and is at the ending a voice of hope.  She is thus a member of one of those human families we all make for ourselves, sometimes consisting partly of actual relations, sometimes not.  Amongst them, Renée, Paloma, and Ozu (their new friend) have sketched out the parameters that bound what people, rich or poor, can aspire to achieve–the territory is boundless.

This book, lest you think it a solemn, preachy text, is constructed of many comic moments, both when sketching out characters through their dialogue, and in the actual events that happen to people when they least expect it.  One of my favorite moments occurs when Renée is shyly visiting Ozu, and makes a trip to his bathroom, only to find that his toilet plays music at top volume when flushed.

Barbery has in this book successfully mingled the nobler aspects of the human race with the humorous and the painful to show that everywhere a human being is, so there is a potential fellow just hiding and waiting to be found by an appreciator.  May we all keep this in mind as we meet other people, and may we hope to find in them something we can relate to, however sad, funny, ironic, or small.

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August 5, 2012 · 5:08 pm

“Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are.”–Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

Yes, I know we’ve all heard the remark before that’s posted as my title today.  But did you know that Brillat-Savarin wrote a whole book of aphorisms about food and eating called “The Physiology of Taste”?  I didn’t, before today, when I looked up the quote to see where it came from.  Anyway, you’ll have to take my word for it, but I’m an elf.

Why am I an elf, and what do I eat that makes me one?  Well, the so-called “waybread of the elves,” of course (along with a judiciously tall glass of milk–waybread is a little bit dryish and full of delicious crumbs, just as it should be, so milk goes with it just fine!).  End this vain pretense, you say, come out from behind that elvish persona and reveal a real subject that someone can sink a literary tooth into.  Well, that’s exactly what I’m doing; but I’d better explain.

Several of the interesting folks whose works have been in Freshly Pressed lately and who write on books or literature have recently commented on what they eat or drink while writing, or reading, or they’ve just shared recipes as a periodic feature on their posts.  So, in the interests of combining the literary with the culinary, here’s my own offering in that light, along with an excellent recipe for “waybread of the elves” (at least, that’s what I call it–the originator of the recipe was much more modest and less histrionic).

Back in the days when I had recently become a teenager and was babysitting my brother, who was five years younger than I was, I had just re-read Tolkien’s Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings for the second time.  One particular summer, time was hanging particularly heavily on my brother’s and my hands, and I proposed to him that I read Tolkien to him to get us through the long, hot summer days when it was too scorching or humid to be outside in the sun and we were stuck inside.  Quickly, so enchanted was my brother with the book and I with my own voice communicating the story by reading aloud to someone whom I had often previously aggravated and pestered, that we kept it up until the entire book was done.  We had real meals, of course, either cooked up ahead of time by my mom, provided by my grandmother (who lived close by and could look in on us from time to time), or dreamed up by ourselves.  But I had recently discovered another book as well, a book called Old Timey Recipes, a series of recipes collected from the Appalachian area by someone named Phyllis Connor, and I had a favorite recipe in it:  her recipe for butter cookies.  The plot begins to thicken, you say, or at least the dough.

Now, lest you run away with the idea that these cookies were like the effete, overly sweet, LITTLE cookies that come in those tins at Christmas, I would like to tell you that you’d be misinformed:  these so-called butter cookies, especially when made entirely with butter the way (I confess) I changed the recipe to make them, come out nothing like a sweet cookie but much more like what’s correctly called shortbread, or shortbread cookies.  That is, when they emerge at the correct time from the oven, they’re not yellowish, but rather lightish buff color with slightly browned edges and bottom.  And with a contribution of imagination from Tolkien, you can easily imagine them wrapped in preserving leaves by the elves to sustain weary travellers on their way, and you can even imagine how they taste after several days’ travel, filling and innervating, because cookies made entirely with butter don’t go rancid the way cookies made even partially with margarine can.  Instead, they age, though they may get slightly softer; hence, you can imagine Sam’s grief and sense of loss as he sees Gollum’s nasty work of crumbling the cookies and throwing them down the mountainside in Mordor.

I know one thing:  to the despair of my mother, who kept asking where all of the butter and milk were disappearing to while she was gone, my brother and I ate copious amounts of waybread and drank milk all summer long (some elves drink milk, too!) while we read through Tolkien.  Finally, my brother read the books to himself by preference another time, since I was at this later time occupied with other things.  And now, he’s reading the books to his child, doing all the different voices as he no doubt imagined them for himself (since I made no attempt to reproduce accents when I read to him, doing instead only the emotional tonalities and nuances).

And now that I have dragged you through this piece of back history, here’s the recipe:  like all old timey recipes, it leaves some details out, such as the information that if you cut these cookies with an old-fashioned biscuit cutter (a large one), it’ll look more like standard shortbreads, or that you bake these on an ungreased pan, or that actual baking time if your oven is accurate is 12-15 minutes (check often in the last 3 minutes).  Or, that you can press out the dough gently with your hands.  Also, as I said before, the cookies will keep better if you use all butter, but I want to give you the exact recipe as I first encountered it:

“Cream 1/2 cup butter, 1/2 cup shortening, and 3/4 cup sugar until fluffy.  Add 1 beaten egg and 2 teaspoons vanilla.  Sift together 3 cups flour, 1/2 teaspoon baking powder, 1/8 teaspoon salt.  Add this to cream mixture very gradually.  Roll out on a pastry cloth [doughboard is fine] and cut into desired shapes.  A cookie press may be used [unnecessary].  Bake at 375 degrees until light brown.”  And that’s it.

There are other recipes in the book which were mainly of historical interest to me, such as recipes for parsnip wine, home brew, and moonshine.  And there is one which I’ve never tried, but which some people still swear by:  hog jowls and turnip greens.  Corn fritters, dandelion greens, grandmother’s spice cake (the third one of these I have tried, and it’s very good), you name it.  If it’s an Appalachian traditional recipe, chances are some version of it appears here (though since some of the recipes are very old and don’t supply cooking times or temperatures, you may have to improvise).  I first bought the book in 1970 or so, in a sort of “hippyish” place which also sold beads, incense, and quirky jewelry.  A few years ago (about 5), I was in a gift shop in Appalachia, and I sighted the book again!  Evidently, it is still continuing to sell.  My edition is the 3rd edition; I was distracted at the time and so happy to see my old friend on the bookshelf that I unfortunately can’t tell you what edition it’s in now.  But if you want a copy, I can tell you that it’s published in Bluefield, WV.  Put that together with Phyllis Connor’s name and the title of the book, and you may be fortunate enough to locate a distributor/supplier, especially with the Internet being the haven for information that it is these days.

And whether you get a copy or only follow my revised recipe, be sure and bake a recipe of waybread for your favorite elves and Tolkien fans (even if you’re the only elf you know for 40 miles!).  You surely can’t go wrong, whether in summer, spring, fall, or even winter to supply hungry literary “travellers” with sustenance.  (And keep in mind that waybread burns the hands of minions of the Dark Lord, just in case there are any grumps around!).

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August 4, 2012 · 3:47 pm

“You will see something new./Two things. And I call them/Thing One and Thing Two.”–Dr. Seuss

Hello again, friends and readers.  And about Thing One and Thing Two….

Here’s Thing One–Since I first began blogging on July 4 (no significance intended; I wasn’t in revolution against anything in particular), I’ve been turning out slightly over a post a day if you average it all out.  My mind is aswim, of course, with all the good books and essays that still remain to be written upon.  Still, my thinking processes are also bogged down with what to say, as I ask myself how I remember the writing best from when I first encountered it, and try to compare that with how I feel now about the same material.  For, I think we have relationships with books the same way we do with people, or almost.  Just to support that contention, perhaps weakly, what about that friend or relative who’s been divorced from someone for 15 years or so, and yet who can still only dish about that one relationship, as if nothing else matters?  That relationship and divorce is clearly the “novel of life” they’re hooked on.  And whether we want to hear it or not, they go over it and over it and over it, still looking for clues as to what makes the other person tick.  There are books too which don’t give up their secrets easily, and which continue  to tantalize:  they’re just a lot more fun than a worn-out relationship, though I suppose we have to hope we can all learn both from books and from life, eventually.

So–and here’s Thing Two–since I’ve been writing and have written a little more than a blog a day (only about 4 of my topics previous to this one are non-literary), I feel that today I need a break from literature, to look around me, to (above all!) read and review more books.  Thus, without much–or at least extended–apology, I’m going to take today off, while I read some more of Daniel Heath Justice’s gripping fantasy novel trilogy The Way of Thorn and Thunder:  The Kynship Chronicles.  Though it may be a while before I will be able to do a review of this hefty read (and already, just 3 chapters in, I can tell that it’s one of those books you can’t help but read in large chunks because you just can’t set it aside), I hope to share it with you before October sometime.  Better yet, get a copy and read along:  the trilogy is available in its revised edition as a single volume from Amazon.com.  I promise, you won’t be disappointed.  It may be available on Kindle as well (I don’t currently have a Kindle), and I read on Google that it is available online.  Daniel Heath Justice is originally from Colorado, but is now a Canadian citizen and is a member of the Cherokee Nation.  Most recently, he has taught Aboriginal literatures at the University of Toronto, and is going on to the University of British Columbia.  To follow his insights about Aboriginal literature and such modern related movie topics as “Avatar,” just  Google his name–there’s plenty there to keep an avid reader busy.

And this is my blog for today.  Keep reading, and please pass along any comments, questions, or recommendations for reading that you would like to share.  I hope to have another post up tomorrow or Monday (today’s Saturday in my part of the world).

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