Category Archives: Articles/reviews

July 13, 2014 · 5:17 pm

Yusuf Idris’s “The Chair Carrier”–Symbolic double entendres from sentence to sentence

First, let me apologize for having been away for so long from posting.  I went away to a lovely lake, Lake Champlain, for the July 4th holiday, and some of me didn’t come back right away (mainly, my heart, which is in love with lakeshore trees and breezes in green leaves, and widely various birdsong in the forest, and good times with family and friends).  But I’m ready now to re-enter my daily life, and today’s post is on a short story of Yusuf Idris, a writing physician from Egypt.  The story is called “The Chair Carrier.”  This story, in fact, shows what the whole necessity for revolution and change in society is about, and it does so at the sentence level, symbolically.

Basically, the story is a sort of surreal one, and here is how it begins:  “You can believe it or not, but excuse me for saying that I saw him, met him, talked to him and observed the chair with my own eyes.  Thus I considered that I had been witness to a miracle.  But even more miraculous–indeed more disastrous–was that neither the man, the chair, nor the incident caused a single passer-by in Opera Square, in Gumhourriyya Street, or in Cairo–or maybe in the whole world–to come to a stop at that moment.”

The entire story is taken up with the speaker, a literate and prosperous person, trying to persuade the unread unfortunate chair carrier to lay his burden down (he has apparently been carrying that identical chair since before the time of the Pyramids, in search of the man whom he is to receive permission to put his burden aside from, “Uncle Ptah Ra”).  Already here, we have a sort of symbolic double entendre (but of the political and not the sexual kind)–the chair carrier is the same primitive man, unable to read or write, who has been around since time immemorial, the serf or slave of the more fortunate, bowing to their customs and insistences, respecting their whims.

Then, the speaker asks the man what he will do if he cannot find the man he seeks, only to find that he will continue to carry the chair, because it’s been “deposited in trust” with him.  The narrator tells us:  “Perhaps it was anger that made me say:  ‘Put it down.  Aren’t you fed up, man?  Aren’t you tired?  Throw it away, break it up, burn it.  Chairs are made to carry people, not for people to carry them.’  ‘I can’t.  Do you think I’m carrying it for fun?  I’m carrying it because that’s the way I earn my living.’….”  Even when the narrator assures the chair carrier that Uncle Ptah Ra is dead long ago, the chair carrier, in another symbolic passage, which is meant to show the nature of serfdom and servility and sheer desperation to be able to support oneself somehow, indicates that he cannot put it down with a “token of authorization” from “his successor, his deputy, from one of his descendants, from anyone with a token of authorization from him.”

Even an outright command from the narrator, who is certainly of higher status, will not persuade the chair carrier that he has permission to put the chair down.  Then, suddenly the narrator notices “something that looked like an announcement or sign fixed to the front of the chair.  In actual fact, it was a piece of gazelle-hide with ancient writing on it, looking as though it was from the earliest copies of the Revealed Books.”  As it turns out, the writing says, “O chair carrier,/You have carried enough/And the time has come for you to be carried in a chair./This great chair,/The like of which has not been made,/Is for you alone./Carry it/And take it to your home./Put it in the place of honor/And seat yourself upon it your whole life long./And when you die./It shall belong to your sons.”  This too is highly symbolic, because of course any one individual chair carrier would in reality have been dead after one lifetime anyway, but this chair and this chair carrier symbolize something and someone forever a part of the human scene.  Note also that the poetry says that the chair is that “the like of which has not been made,” which seems to contradict the spirit of the rest of the lines, as if it could never happen.

When the narrator reads off this poetic scripture to the chair carrier, the narrator feels joy that at last his interlocutor can put down the chair, because initially overlooked by both of them, this sign gives the necessary permission without which the chair carrier refuses to do other than carry the chair.  But the narrator is unable to persuade the man, because as the chair carrier says of himself, he cannot read and does not therefore know for a fact that that is what the sign says:  he has no “token of authorization,” and can only accept the reading the narrator has done for him if the narrator has such a token.  The chair carrier becomes angry and says, “All I get from you people is obstruction.  Man, it’s a heavy load and the day’s scarcely long enough for making just the one round.”  He moves off, and leaves the perplexed narrator asking himself confused and bitter questions:

“I stood there at a loss, asking myself whether I shouldn’t catch him up and kill him and thus give vent to my exasperation.  Should I rush forward and topple the chair forcibly from his shoulders and make him take a rest?  Or should I content myself with the sensation of enraged irritation I had for him?  Or should I calm down and feel sorry for him?  Or should I blame myself for not knowing what the token of authorization was?”  In this series of questions, one can perceive a gradually diminishing element of violence and hostility, until finally the narrator turns the questions in toward himself, and supposes that he himself is ignorant or lacks a certain kind of understanding.  These questions in fact symbolically represent the different tactics human often take toward those less fortunate than themselves, those who are forced to live by different rules until at last they often accept their sorrowful lot and think that there is no other possible way for them to exist.  Here, the better educated and more fortunate narrator sounds to the chair carrier almost like an agent provocateur, with his suggestions which do not fit within the framework of possibilities that are allowable to the chair carrier.

Yusuf Idris, the author of this remarkable story, worked as a government health inspector in some of the poorest sections of Cairo.  This affected his social and political views, and gained him an audience for his works, while causing him also to be imprisoned a number of times.  He was finally able to leave medicine due to his popularity and concentrate solely on his writings.  What does not perhaps come across in translation (which has been done in this version by Denys Johnson-Davies) is the way in which Idris used spoken language in his compositions, producing his own individual style.  Though the story above is so entirely symbolic and speaks of a long history of oppressive regimes in the world, one can almost imagine the concerned government health inspector here in dialogue with one of his poorest patients, trying to persuade him to act for his health and set his burden aside for a time.  And while the chair carrier’s response is certainly grounds for pessimism, something which the narrator noted at the beginning as “disastrous” is the fact that the little scene provoked no response at all from those surrounding them in the street.  This suggests the reaction Idris wants us as readers to have, possibly, and seems to indicate that our role is at least to be witnesses, and concerned witnesses as that, if we are not strong and capable enough to be changers of the scene.  For, enough witnesses to an injustice can eventually provoke change, and after all is said and done, this clever and very short short story is made to be a witness’s statement, and to cause change in at least our perceptions, which is of course the first step to enacting justice.

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June 30, 2014 · 4:40 pm

Fame Versus a Moment in Time–Joyce Carol Oates’s “Three Girls”

Have you ever read a story and been so enthralled by what it reveals about a famous person that you feel a strong impulse to research it and find out whether or not it’s a true story?  But then, you decide that it tells you something more essential about what we all are, and think that of course it’s true, whether or not it actually took place as described in exact detail?  That’s how I feel about Joyce Carol Oates’s short story “Three Girls.”

This story is addressed to a “you,” which means of course that it is written in the hard-to-master second person singular, and retells an event which happened to the narrator and the person addressed, two of the “three girls.”  It’s all about the romance of books and book lovers, and what it is like to be young and lost in the infinite (or nearly so) world of words and word enthusiasts.  The story is set in “Strand Used Books on Broadway and Twelfth one snowy March early evening in 1956,” and the book descriptions are as important as the descriptions of physical space:  “No bookstore of merely ‘new’ books with elegant show window displays drew us like the drafty Strand, bins of books untidy and thumbed through as merchants’ sidewalk bins on Fourteenth Street, NEW THIS WEEK, BEST BARGAINS, WORLD CLASSICS, ART BOOKS./50% OFF, REVIEWERS’ COPIES, HIGHEST PRICE $1.98, REMAINDERS./ 25¢–$1.00.  Hard-cover/paperback.  Spotless/battered.  Beautiful books/cheaply printed pulp paper.  And at the rear and sides in that vast echoing space massive shelves of books books book rising to a ceiling of hammered tin fifteen feet above!  Stacked shelves so high they required ladders to negotiate and a monkey nimbleness (like yours) to climb.”

It is significant that the story takes place where it does, because it doesn’t take place where the narrator and her friend would expect it to, in surroundings such as “Tiffany’s,” or “the Plaza,” or the “Waldorf-Astoria,” or on “the Upper East Side.”  Instead, it takes place on their own home turf, where they have often been and browsed through the books before, at a stage in their relationship with each other which causes them all too eagerly to incorporate their enthusiasms with a certain event that takes place there, quite unexpectedly.  The event?  They sight a third girl poring through the sections of books, a girl older than they by about 9 years, but dressed like a girl still, in contrast to her usual famed appearance:  they see Marilyn Monroe, intently perusing books in the modern poetry section, first of all, then picking up Darwin’s Origin of Species, then going through shelves marked “Judaica.”  Unseen by her for most of the story, they watch her read, astonished to conclude that she apparently wants to be like them, as they see themselves, two girls with a love for poetry and writing and reading.

They have previously considered Monroe’s world to be beneath them, to be frivolous and airheaded and needful of men–whom they pride themselves on doing without–to make it meaningful.  But now they see that Marilyn Monroe has a more serious side, wants to share the world they two share with each other especially, and when she hesitates near the checkout, fearful apparently of being recognized, they take her money and buy her books for her, rather than doing the more pedestrian thing of asking for her autograph.  She lends her magic aura to their friendship, however, more, perhaps, to their love relationship.  She gives them as a thank-you one of the books she bought, and they treasure it as a talisman both of their adventure in the bookstore and of their connection with each other.  The last paragraph of the story reads:  “That snowy early evening in March at Strand Used Books.  That magical evening of Marilyn Monroe, when I kissed you for the first time.”  Thus, Marilyn, far from being a force which causes them to scorn their enthusiasm and surroundings, instead consecrates these things for them because she turns out to have a side which is equal to the more serious topics (than movie fame) which engage them.

Though I hesitate to expose my own dubiousness about whether or not Marilyn Monroe was “bookish,” I should at least reveal that I was curious as to whether or not Joyce Carol Oates meant for her two main characters to have been correct or deluded in their notion that the woman they saw was Monroe.  For one thing, she commented on the “blue eyes” of Marilyn:  in all the photos I’d seen of her, I’d thought Monroe had chocolate brown eyes, and the movies of hers I’d seen were too long ago for me to be sure.  Though the experience of the two girls was still significant regardless of whether or not it was actually Monroe (just as the story was significant whether or not it was autobiographical), I was intrigued by what Oates’s intentions were in this respect.  So, I actually looked up a gallery of photos of Marilyn Monroe.  A lot of the shots were in black and white, and those which weren’t seemed to suggest that her eyes were dark.  In two of the photos taken close up and in color with Monroe’s eyes very wide open, however, the eyes were clearly a deep and pellucid blue!  It was just the excessive dark eye makeup of the time which had deceived me.  Thus, apparently Oates meant for the experience of the two girls to be a genuine one, in literary terms at least.  And also in literary terms (with particular reference now to postmodernism), Monroe’s cameo appearance is meant to signify an interpenetration of the “realism” of films and the eerie hyperreality of seeing a film star in actual life, which is rather like seeing where the “toys” are put away after we are finished “playing” with them.

To the two girls, however, the experience joins them even more strongly to each other, as does the one book Monroe gives them to share (a book of poems by Marianne Moore, another M. M.).  The glamor of the film world is therefore bestowed like a halo upon a world which for the main characters already had its crown of light; to find an unexpected “ally” of sorts involved in their dreams and fantasies of literary excellence, however, gives the experience a validity from an unexpected quarter, and somehow these situations always impress us humans the most.  I still remember once back in the mid-70’s, when I was briefly in Cannes, and came back with a photo of a startling redhead whose picture had been accidentally taken while I was filming a town square:  my family and I argued amongst ourselves for days as to whether or not it was Ann-Margret (the stage name of Ann-Margret Olsson).  The square was still beautiful and historic regardless of who the intruding redhead was, but somehow to others looking at the photos with us, the photo became not “And this is the such-and-such Place in Cannes” but “Here’s the square in Cannes where we think Ann-Margret walked in front of the camera.”

Such is fame, and such is the significance of a moment in time in Oates’s story:  the fame is there for everyone to see, and gets as near to immortality as humans can perhaps conceive of, but the moment in time in which ordinary people think they brush up against fame in non-typical or unexpected surroundings often becomes the touchstone for a private moment of their own when they felt they were in communication with infinity because of something they were sharing with others who, like them, “just happened to be there.”

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June 21, 2014 · 4:31 pm

How much does God weigh?–Emily Dickinson and her quizzical answer

Today is a hot, sunny, beautiful day of summer, when the sky and the ocean are both full of blue ecstasy, and that makes it just right for a little ditty of a post on the natural world, so that I can return to it as soon as possible and leave the air conditioning and the computer to their own devices (yes, I’m getting lazy in the summer heat, you guessed it).  So, I chose a short three-stanza poem by Emily Dickinson, who is the perfect poet when images from nature come into question, as so many in her huge corpus of short poems have images and a figurative lexicon drawn from nature and its seasonal languages, even when the subject is death, or the departure from the world of nature.  This poem (#632 of her poems), however, includes some of her homey domestic images as well, the images of a woman used to keeping house and dealing with household implements.  But the real “kicker” about this poem is the way it goes along so very, very simply only to hit us with a real conundrum of an image at the very end.  Here is how it goes:

“The Brain–is wider than the Sky–/For–put them side by side–/The one the other will contain/With ease–and You–beside–/

The Brain is deeper than the sea–/For–hold them–Blue to Blue–/The one the other will absorb–/As Sponges–Buckets–do–/

The Brain is just the weight of God–/For–heft them–Pound for Pound–/And they will differ–if they do–As Syllable from Sound–”

There is something a bit sly and even coy about the way she leads us into her   transcendent world, which while using simple everyday images, sensations, and experiences makes such astounding transitions to experiences beyond this world.  She starts easily enough, by observing that the brain can contain both the image of the sky and the experience of seeing it, as well as the self.  “Well, okay, Emily D.,” one is bound to say, “I think we can accept that for starters.”  Then, she passes on to another apparently limitless thing the senses encounter, which curiously enough is less big than the sky, when it seems that it might otherwise be more poetically ordinary to start with the smaller of the two items (the sea) and build up in the next stanza to the larger (the sky).  But then, we find that her quirkiness or perhaps odd sense of humor has assigned a color to the brain (she says of the brain and the sea “hold them–Blue to Blue–” which means to compare the two “blue” items).  This makes us forget for the moment our previous quibble about relative sizes of infinite or quite large things, and leaves us, bemused, to go on to the last stanza.

Here, in the last stanza, Dickinson is asking us to perform another and even more daunting task, really quite impossible even for the believer in God, and certainly more than impossible for the questioner or doubter.  Not that it’s been easy up until now:  so far, we’ve put the brain and the sky side by side, we’ve held the brain and the sea up to each other for comparison, at least mentally, and been asked to imagine the brain soaking up the sea as a sponge would a bucket of liquid.  Now, we are being asked to “heft” the brain and God, to judge whether or not she is just when she suggests that they are of a similar “weight” and “differ–if they do–” and here the problem comes in.  Now, we are no longer being asked to judge of something which can at least be visualized with a great deal of imagination:  now we have to guess what the difference might be, if there is any, between “syllable” and “sound.”  The one is presumably the visual or physical or mental notation of the second, which proposes a more sophisticated relationship than between the items in the other two stanzas.  If one reads the items in order and assumes that the brain is the “syllable” and God the “sound” (and there is really no assurance that this is the correct “formula,” except that “sound” seems slightly more mysterious, as God would probably be thought to be), then the first, the brain, records or notates the second, God, and the second is the fulfillment of the first.  But it’s a stretch.

Perhaps the useful thing to end this post with is the observation that Dickinson, in many if not all of her poems (and yes, I do want to assure you that my curiosity was once pronounced enough to take me through the whole volume), likes to play “riddle me this” with images and concepts.  She finds in so many instances that the natural world speaks to her of what is beyond it, yet retains its own quiddity and essence, partaking of the “great beyond” without being any less literal and precious as what it is on earth.  Even the experiences of imagining death use homey and everyday images and pictures drawn from the natural world, because death is the great riddle of our existence, yet is a part of the natural world as well, and Dickinson was well acquainted with its appearance in nature.  And now that I have paid my tribute both to one of the greatest American poets of all time and to the lovely and perplexing world of nature that inspired her, I’ll quit writing, and go off to be inspired by the summer day myself (for so at least one always hopes to be).  Goodday to all my readers, and here’s hoping that even if you aren’t in the middle of summer where you are, that you find something in the natural world to make you happy today.

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June 14, 2014 · 7:27 pm

A Conflict of Worlds–Two traditions in Amrita Pritam’s story “The Weed”

Though there are narrated sections in Amrita Pritam’s short story “The Weed,” the real interior story is about a dialogue between traditions which takes place in the actual dialogue and in the happenings of the story.  As the educated narrator says at the very beginning–a sophisticated and more worldly woman known simply as “bibi,” a term of affection–“Angoori [the younger character] was the new bride of the old servant of my neighbor’s neighbor’s neighbor.”  “Bibi” takes care in her relation of events to establish that Angoori is a joyous and cheerful and attractive young woman recently married to a much older husband, and is very traditional in her beliefs and values.

For example, Angoori has been taught and apparently believes that it is sinful for a village woman like herself (but not a “city” woman, like the narrator) to know how to read.  She also believes that it is a great sin for a woman to fall in love with her husband except through the intervention of her father.  The acceptable tradition is that a girl child, when five or six, “adore[s] someone’s feet.”  In this, she is directed by her father’s wishes, because he has placed money and flowers at the man’s or boy’s feet.  In this way, it is decided whom the girl shall later marry.  The exceptions, those girls who have love affairs, are thought to have eaten of a mysterious “wild weed” that an intending man has placed in a sweet or paan and given them to eat.  Angoori has seen a girl in her village in such a situation, and she says that the girl sang sad songs a lot, and never combed her hair and acted otherwise oddly.  Angoori regards this as a very unfortunate situation, and is glad, apparently, that she is married to Prabhati, the old man who does not always live at her home because he is a servant and eats at his employers’ household.

Nevertheless, a few days later, the narrator finds Angoori in “a profoundly abstract mood,” and the younger woman asks to be taught to read, and to write her name.  Mark what happens next:  the narrator, Bibi, makes a guess that seems to be correct, that it is because Angoori wants to be able to write letters to someone, and to read letters back.  Instead of immediately agreeing as a friend of equal status would probably do if she knew how, Bibi asks her if she won’t be committing a sin in learning to read and write.  The girl refuses to answer, but when Bibi sees her later, she is singing a sad song, and nearly crying, as she had told Bibi the other girl in her village had done.  Bibi further intrudes and asks her if this was the song the girl in her village had sung, and she admits it.  She tries to force Angoori to sing the song to her, but on this point Angoori stands firm:  she will only recite the words.  The narrator further investigates in a logical, forceful manner, and finds that because Angoori’s husband does not eat at home, and the night watchman, Ram Tara, who has been taking tea with milk as a regular guest at Angoori’s and Prabhati’s house, as is the tradition, has been away on a visit, the girl has had not only not much food, but also not even any tea with milk.

Then the narrator Bibi remembers something else about Ram Tara:  [he was] “good-looking, quick-limbed, full of jokes.  He had a way of talking with smiles trembling faintly at the corner of his lips.”  Instead of just asking, as a person who thought of themselves as equal might do, whether or not Angoori was sad to be alone so much, or missed her friend Ram Tara, Bibi makes a particular kind of mischief by almost making a joke to herself of the girl’s village beliefs and traditions:  she asks her, in what seems a kindly but nevertheless mocking fashion, “Is it the weed?”  If the innocent and superstitious girl did not think so before, to have someone she regards as her intellectual superior ask her this sways her conviction on this point.  Far from being able to persuade herself away from her own unhappiness, she responds, “‘Curse on me!….I never took sweets from him…not a betel even…but tea….'”  We are told by the narrator, who seems to relish this point:  “She could not finish.  Her words were drowned in a fast stream of tears.”

In many ways, because this work shares certain tendencies with other 20th century modernist texts in which traditional, aboriginal, or village peoples are viewed supposedly objectively by a better educated person or persons (Edith Wharton’s novel Ethan Frome, with its frame story narrator, comes to mind), it has the tendency that makes of the village traditions and mannerisms something quaint or odd, something the character of higher status muses on with varying degrees of wonder, amusement, or curiosity.  Though these texts are not without a certain amount of compassion by and large, by this point in the 21st century even the compassion seems like a form of condescension, and as we can see in this story, even a writer like Pritam, who was clearly and solidly in the camp of those attempting to better conditions for poorer or less advantaged peoples in her native Punjab region, leaves the question of village autonomies unvisited.  While I really enjoyed the story, and felt sympathy was directed at Angoori, it’s a different matter to engineer empathy with Angoori.  This latter is more what late 20th century and early 21st century aims at, in contradistinction to and in rebellion against 20th century models of social reform and conscience.

So, to view this story from a later perspective than that in which it was written is to see highlighted not only the young girl Angoori, which I feel was the original intention of the piece, but to see also the somewhat downward-looking Bibi as a character as well, not simply as an empty tabula rasa or a quiet sounding board to receive the picture of Angoori.  This is why I call this story “a conflict of worlds, two traditions”:  whereas it is Angoori’s tradition to live simply within the bounds of her own village, and to obey its rules, it is also her tradition to respect the opinions and values of those who look down upon her from a superior social height, and to attempt to scale the heights of reading and writing, which have been posited to her as values she could espouse.  By contrast, the narrator Bibi is in her own way sophisticatedly naive, because she has too her own form of blindness in automatically assuming that it’s not simple loneliness but the love affair attributed by Angoori’s village traditions to “the wild weed” that the girl will claim as her dilemma.  The true kindliness is practiced by the author in showing these two characters face-to-face, two faces of what was once a part of India and what is now a part of Pakistan.  Amrita Pritam is clearly not the narrator, but is even one remove farther away, sharing with us a type of encounter which in all likelihood happens relatively frequently, whatever part of the world one is in.  Two forms of naiveté, two forms of sophistication, first contradicting each other then complementing each other, then cooperating with each other.  At the end of the story, it is clear that something else will happen, but what concerns us most has already been seen:  the women, working through the problem together, despite their other differences.  One will take care of the other if it is necessary, and one will make the other feel significant; and this, perhaps, is one of the fairer exchanges life offers.

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June 6, 2014 · 10:19 pm

“Diana of the Crossways”: Not “The End of the Novel of Love,” but “The Beginning of the Novel of the Theory of Love”

Once again, as I look back in memory over the course of not-too-distant posts, I see that I have been inspired to write something by way of tribute to the erudite and talented blogger Caroline, who first supplied me with the information about a very interesting book which has provoked a lot of my recent thought.  That book is called The End of the Novel of Love, and in typical fashion I feel a need to discuss something from that book.  I can always discuss things with Caroline on her site, and she welcomes many and diverse points of view and responds with great verve and élan to them.  But I have chosen to recategorize one of the novels chosen by Vivian Gornick as her subject matter in The End of the Novel of Love, and therefore it is perhaps more proper to post on my own site than to monopolize Caroline’s site in a quibble about terminology with an author she chose who is a quite talented writer as well.  But let’s begin at the beginning.

This is Vivian Gornick’s thesis statement in the first pages of her book:  “In a thousand novels of love-in-the-Western-world the progress of feeling between a woman of intelligence and a man of will is charted through a struggle that concludes itself when the woman…melts into romantic longing and the deeper need for union.  There are, however, a handful of remarkable novels written late in the last century and early in this one [Gornick’s book was published in 1997] where, at the exact moment the woman should melt, her heart unexpectedly hardens.  Just at this place where give is required, some flat cold inner remove seems to overtake the female protagonist….The woman has taken a long look down the road of her future.  What she sees repels.  She cannot ‘imagine’ herself in what lies ahead.  Unable to imagine herself, she now thinks she cannot act the part….[I]n these novels this is the point at which the story begins.”

Now, the first book discussed by Gornick is a bit anomalous in one respect already, because whereas several of the earliest novels discussed are by women, just as early in time is this first book by a man, George Meredith.  It is his book Diana of the Crossways.  And because it is by George Meredith, it shares certain similarities with his other more well-known book The Egoist, in that it uses up an inordinate amount of time developing the theory of something:  in the case of The Egoist just what egoism really is along with a case history, in Diana of the Crossways the theory of just what true and genuine and unselfish love of a woman by a man is.  In the book describing Diana Warwick, née Merion, there are several case histories of the way men love women, but only one of them is worthy of Meredith’s golden scepter, so to speak.  And Meredith is quite straightforward even as to the way he structures his novel as to which of the forms of love is to be accounted the correct one.

For one thing, his entire lengthy first chapter is theory, all theory, a recounting not of characters and places and events, but of ideas relating to his overall topic.  When he finally positions Diana at the Irish ball for Lord Larrian in Dublin, where Diana shines as a belle and is made much of as a pronounced wit, her willing foil is her friend Lady Emma Dunstane, who praises her to others and is willing all through the book to come to her aid as much as her own ill health allows.  There are several main suitors in this initial setting, of whom one is the overly gallant Irishman Sullivan Smith, and another the steadier and more sedate Englishman Tom Redworth.  Two other male figures court Diana, the never-appearing but always in the background bad husband who makes her Diana Warwick, and the slightly younger politician Percy Dacier who almost persuades her away from her husband when they are having “irreconcilable differences.”

Of course, in the England of the time, a no-fault divorce was not even dreamed of, and Diana is in danger for quite some time of suffering lengthy legal proceedings set up by her jealous (without cause) husband.  It is in fact Diana’s wit, charm, intelligence, and dash which have caused her husband to be jealous of her, and which also cause a certain proportion of her society in the form of malicious gossips to bring much suffering and grief down upon her.  She attempts to make a living with her pen, which works at first because of her notoriety, but then tapers off.  The rest of the novel, I leave to other readers to pursue for themselves.  Suffice it to say, that this novel is not so much about the end of a loving career for a woman as it puts an emphasis on Gornick’s second point, that the woman is resistant to her potential future because she wants her freedom.  It is only when Diana sees a way clear to her freedom that she chooses happily for herself, and still emerges with a mated life.

My point, then, is not so much to contest Gornick’s overall theory as to point out that in the case of George Meredith, whose novels are heavy (some would say top-heavy) with theories and explanations and lengthy philosophizing about relationships, the novel of love is not so much ended as it “suffers a sea change” into the beginnings of the novel of the theory of genuine love.  And as in The Egoist, the female figure is the main protagonist, only in this case, there is more than one Sir Willoughby Patterne to be dealt with.  Thus, if you would see a positive “pattern” eventually work his way to the forefront of the fiction, this is the book for you to read, though you must wait for quite some time for him to work his way to the forefront of Diana’s imagination and to win her away from her reluctance.  Still, even George Meredith for all his serious thoughts on the issue provides the reader with a happy ending, and that is something that not all the authors whom Gornick writes about feel able to do.  It is a much-fraught issue, and one which will continue to bear serious thought for those who read Gornick’s provocative book.

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May 22, 2014 · 4:00 pm

China Mieville’s “The City and the City”–Alterity and the reader divided

The concept of alterity, or the “otherness” of another person or culture is one familiar to most serious readers from contemporary cultural studies.  This sense of division crops up in one’s ordinary life along any cultural divide when one is aware of someone or something as opposed, different, “alien,” strange, or just plain foreign.  But as China Miéville postulates and fairly convincingly demonstrates in his metaphorical crime story/fable The City and the City, the other is oneself, divided against oneself.

There are two cities connected by their disconnection in the book, one Beszel (from which comes the hero and narrative voice, Inspector Tyador Borlú), and the other Ul Qoma (from which comes his official counterpart SD Dhatt).  I call this story a “metaphorical” fable (and fables and the like are often more usually connected with allegory) because Miéville points out, in the appended interview in the book, that though people have tried to read the book as an “allegory of the relations between the West and the Muslim world” in at least one instance, that he is in line with Tolkien, who felt and expressed a “‘cordial dislike’ of allegory.”  Miéville explains that he sees allegory as does F. Jameson, as a “‘master code'” to “‘solve'” the story and find out what it’s “‘really about.'”  But as he points out, “….[I]f it’s totally reducible in a very straightforward way, then why not just say that thing?”  The success of the author’s formula for creating his world is in fact more related to metaphor, as Miéville insists:  “Fiction is always more interesting to the extend that there’s an evasive surplus and/or a specificity.  So it’s not saying there are no meanings, but that there are more than just those meanings.”  With this warning, I will now explain a little more about the novel itself.

Miéville has indicated that his novel The City and the City is primarily a crime story; he says a crime novel is in essence “a kind of dream fiction masquerading as a logic puzzle.”  He invokes the noir tradition as well, and in the novel we see many of the elements of the standard Chandler or Hammett novel, the multiple available women, the jostling for supremacy between the official forces of law and order and the rogue cop or detective, the setting of city streets and dust-blown landscape as a metaphor for the aridity and starkness of official enquiry.  The noir detective gets involved with his subject and therefore regularly falls afoul of the law, sometimes without penalty and sometimes in such a way as to make a lasting change in his own life.  The latter is the case in this novel.

But the most startling difference for the reader between this and the average crime novel will be what could be called without stretching too much the fantastic element of the fiction:  the two cities, Beszel and Ul Qoma, occupy the same physical (or “grosstopical”) space, but the citizens themselves and a mysterious officialdom called “Breach”–after the name of the ostensible crime of being aware of someone from the opposite city–police the citizens to make sure that they don’t “breach,” or respond in any way to any sensory input from the other city.  Sections of the city, streets, buildings, and even floors of buildings, hallways, and etc. are divided between the two cities, and it is the responsibility of every “good” citizen of each city to be self-vigilant.  Even when accidents occur on the streets or in traffic, it is left to Breach to sort it out, while citizens scramble to “see” and “unsee” only what is in their city or the other city, respectively.

Into this mix of restriction and limits there is cast an archeological “dig” run by a Canadian university, a dig which is situated largely in Ul Qoma and which seems to refer back to a time before the “Cleavage” which either split the cities apart or put them together, depending on which theory you follow.  Foreigners from other countries and cities in the world are accepted and tolerated, but must go through stringent training in “unseeing” and “unsensing” the opposite city, and there are sometimes failures or setbacks.  One such is one which starts the book out, the crime which Inspector Borlú and his subordinate, a “smart young woman” named Lizbyet Corwi, are investigating.  A female body is found in an alleyway in Beszel, but after much investigation, it turns out to be the corpse of a young foreign student from the digs in Ul Qoma, and thus seems to require an invocation of Breach to investigate it.  Nevertheless, by some apparent fluke of higher administration, which looks more and more ominous and paranoid-making the more time that passes from its inception, instead of invoking Breach and passing the case on up, the “higher-ups” leave it to Borlú to cross officially into Ul Qoma as a consultant and work with his colleague in the other city, SD Dhatt, to solve the crime.  Not only must the two detectives deal daily with the spectre of Breach and breaching which they themselves are in danger of as they pursue their case, but they have also to investigate academic reports of the mysterious third in-between city of Orcziny, which is believed by some to dominate and rule the other two.

With what might be otherwise considered a minor grace note of composition, the author has named the main hall of meeting between the two cities “Copula Hall,” which is a very strong symbolic element because of what “copula” means:  “1.  A verb, such as a form of be or seem, that identifies the predicate of a sentence with the subject….2.  Logic.  The word or set of words that serves as a link between the subject and predicate of a proposition.” (The American Heritage Dictionary, 4th Edition).  As has already become evident from the narrator’s story as he tells it, it’s not that one does not actually “see” the other city of Ul Qoma from Beszel or vice-versa:  it’s rather that one has been trained arduously to ignore all signs of it, to neglect to notice, to practice an informed ignorance of it (and “informed ignorance” is obviously a logical and not just a poetic oxymoron).  Because one is basically practiced in “lying” to oneself and others, whichever city one is in, and one can only be whole and whole-hearted when one is in breach, the main meeting hall between the two cities is called “Copula Hall” because it describes and contains a lie and not a lie at the same time:  it is “is” at its source, the reality of two sister cities in one space at the same time.  “Is” is a contradiction of “you don’t exist because I don’t see you,” or “out of sight, out of mind.”  And yet because there is still the fiction of one city being the subject (whichever one comes from) and the other being the object (the one which one goes to address at Copula Hall), the hall “lies” because it suggests the divide between the two.  The divide is only a logical one, but it has been given flesh by its citizens, who act it out and embody it every day.  So, Copula Hall is the present form of the cities’ incarnation in the book, whereas the archeological dig is the past form, quickly becoming the future as objects from the site become part of the puzzle.

All in all (and I use the expression suggestively), this book contains one of the best arguments ever for practicing contemporary civic (not civil) disobedience to the traditions of shutting out one’s neighbor and all the “noise” of a supercivilized society, and “breaching” to notice what’s going on around one.  You just never know what or whom you might see.  And one doesn’t have to be allegorical about The City and the City to feel that there is in fact an argument intended:  a dystopia is a dystopia, and this one is frighteningly real and put in terms of our contemporary life, not all that far from what we can really understand as our own embattled and perhaps embittered conditions.  It’s not necessary to be disingenuous, to say, “Here we are, or here we will be,” or even “here we were”; it’s only necessary to take in the total city-scape picture of The City and the City to feel that our awareness of ourselves and others is being called into question, and that there are ways to do this as China Miéville would have it, which don’t rely on the traditional allegory form.  Just as a metaphor carries meaning across from one realm of discourse to another, so our ability to relate ourselves to the characters in the novel, particularly to the narrator, carries his meanings to us though he be only a character and we real flesh and blood.  And this, I think, is just as the author, all quibbles about terminology aside, would have it.

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May 17, 2014 · 3:53 pm

“Daniel Deronda”–George Eliot’s dream of justice

George Eliot being George Eliot, the notable “bluestocking” amongst Victorian and earlier female novelists, one of her most famous heroes, Daniel Deronda, occupies what one might find the closest place next her heart by turning out a scholar himself.  But more than that, and more essentially close to her own preferences and feelings, he turns out to be a momentally just man, a man who fulfills Eliot’s program of fair play in managing to be fair to everyone, and only finally and modestly to himself (in the very long eponymous novel, Daniel Deronda).

One thing that is characteristic of all Eliot novels, as least as far as this reviewer has seen, is that she can use what in another less thoughtful writer would be stereotypical situations in a new, different, and provocative way (like a drowning, a seduction, the revelation of a hero’s or heroine’s ancestral descent, a parent’s dereliction of duty, an attempted suicide, on and on ad infinitum).  She takes these staples of the earlier Romantic period and turns them not only into serious and provocative material for the picturing of the character’s internal workings, but also into meditative and theoretical and intellectual examinations of what the actual situations mean themselves as events.  It is this interrogation of persons and actions from which her novels derive their deep seriousness of purpose for which she is famed.  And it’s not only Romantic novelists with whom she can be contrasted in this regard:  even so serious another Victorian novelist as Dickens makes more melodramatic “hay” of his fields of enquiry than she does from the same sorts of plot elements.  Just for example, drawn from any Dickens novel you want to name in which parents are less than honest or just plain conniving, Dickens wrings out the last final drop of suspense and sentiment from the action by making the dishonest parent figures appear again and again at intervals and submitting the young hero or heroine to their machinations until the reader “feels” the sadomasochistic squeeze of events.  By contrast (and for example in Daniel Deronda) when the young Jewish heroine Mirah Lapidoth’s wastrel father comes back into the picture, it is not after a huge build-up, though he is mentioned early on; rather, he comes in near the end as a minor blocking figure and simultaneous deus ex machina of sorts (by stealing the wealthier character Deronda’s diamond ring, he precipitates the declaration of love Deronda makes to Mirah).  Once he is gone, he is gone, and he does not appear again to further complicate matters, which is to say that Eliot relies less on unlikely coincidences than Dickens does.

The bifurcation of the plot into two plots following the fortune of two different heroines (whose stories are joined through Deronda himself) makes up the structure of the book.  One is the story of young, beautiful, haughty and vain Gwendolen Harleth, who marries (without love) Henleigh Grandcourt, an even haughtier slightly older man, not only to save her family from poverty but also to ensure herself of a powerful and wealthy future.  She for a while has what she wants in material terms, but has enough conscience to be tortured by the knowledge (which came to her before her marriage) that she has married a man who had a wife in all but name and four dependents through her before meeting Gwendolen.  In addition, he is a sadistic and controlling person who mentally abuses her until he drowns in a boating accident.  To Gwendolen, Deronda is a sort of conscience and guide, upon whose counsel she comes to rely more and more in her own travails with her personal destiny.

The second line of plot concerns Mirah Lapidoth, whom Daniel has rescued from an attempted suicide, and with whom he falls in love very gradually.  As he goes about trying to find her mother and brother for her, from whom she was separated many years before by her degenerate gambler of a father who abducted her and used her to make his living, and from whom she escaped to London, Daniel simultaneously meets up with other Jews who all seem certain that he is one of themselves, which he turns out to be.  He takes up a serious study of Hebrew and Jewish customs before he knows who his own parents were, under the tutelage of a man named Mordecai who turns out later to be Mirah’s long ago separated brother.  This coincidence, however, seems natural, because he has in fact been searching for her family in places where it would be natural to expect them.  Less natural (but touched with the hand of miracle rather than melodrama) is the unexpected meeting in a synagogue in Frankfort with the best friend of his grandfather, who immediately asks him about his parentage.  At this earlier point in the novel, Daniel denies Jewish descent, not being aware of who his mother and father were, and only having come into the synagogue out of a sort of curiosity about the people whom he had met in London.

The full development of the “man of justice” theme is achieved by the end of the novel:  Daniel has helped to make Gwendolen less selfish and more inclined to seek the good of others and accept her own lot.  He has freed Mirah from the clutch of her past and made her his wife.  He has made Mordecai his brother-in-law and placed him in a better economic condition, though Mordecai is slowly dying of consumption.  He has righted wrongs he came across and learned to accept parts of his own heritage and surroundings which at first left him cold (such as his real, distant, unaffectionate mother, and the effervescent Cohens, friends of Mordecai’s).  Finally, in justice to himself, without undue soul-searching he marries Mirah and heads for the East, there to embark upon a study of his own people and their customs and conditions.  But even this apparent self-involvement is to bear the fruit of justice for some others; namely, he intends in the fullness of time to benefit the Jewish people by improving their status in the world.

There are women writers who seem to “fall in love” with their male protagonists, in fact who create them as if they were writing a recipe for a love affair they would like to have themselves.  Dorothy Sayers in her creation of Lord Peter Wimsey has been accused of so doing, for one.  If George Eliot is in any way culpable of this in Daniel Deronda then it would be better to say that she has “fallen in deep and enamored intellectual discussion with” her hero, making him the fulfilled pattern of what she most admired in scholars and learned men who also have a societal role to occupy in the larger world.  And just as Deronda emerges from his dream of doing something larger for a group of people somewhere in the world into a reality which is simultaneously the closest and best personal fulfillment he could hope for, so the reader emerges from the dream of the two heroines with the hero at one point poised equidistant between them into a vision of justice and peace which helps some mightily, and helps everyone at least to bear what burden they must.

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May 14, 2014 · 4:56 pm

Fatema Mernissi and “Scheherazade Goes West”–Women’s status East and West

This post is going to be a limited one, partly out of modesty because my main competency is with self-proclaimed fiction and not apparent sociological research.  Another reason this post is short is because the engaging and talented author of the book Scheherazade Goes West, Fatema Mernissi, more or less reasons to a standstill, not really claiming that there are not good and bad qualities to both East and West when it comes to women’s rights, but seeming almost to claim that the East still has some edge, which is not what most western women (and men too, for that matter) would expect to hear.

Her argument runs briefly like this:  In the East, men control women through control of space but not through the intimidation of their intellects (which is clearly untrue now at least in the light of things which have happened since she wrote, such as the recent abduction of the schoolgirls in Chibok, Nigeria by the Boko Haram, which signifies control of both factors).  Mernissi says that the traditional seclusion of women in an Eastern harem is such a control of space, as is the insistence that women go veiled in public, along with other laws and statutes pertaining mainly to women or to the public relations of men and women.  She claims that the Eastern man perceives this as a necessity not because he does not regard women as his equals, but because he knows that a woman’s intellect is equal to his and has chosen other means of control.

Much of Mernissi’s argument concerns the different ways women are pictured in art, both East and West, and she mentions some surprising things:  the East, which most Westerners believe traditionally prohibits pictures of living things en masse regardless of country, has in fact many portraits of active and assertive women who were queens or wives or both, dressed in hunting gear or clothed for other vigorous activity, whereas the female figures painted in harem situations by Western painters, even those who knew better, are seen as nude, passive and available merely.  While this line of argument is certainly interesting and vital, it’s a question as to how much one can determine of a society’s traditions by looking mainly at art.  Luckily, Mernissi hits many different notes in her concerted debate on the issues.

Mernissi, who was born in a harem, points to the long tradition of allowing women to cultivate their creative, intellectual, and cultural qualities within the harem’s walls which, though their talents were to be used to fascinate and entertain the male still, were nevertheless appreciated as necessary accompaniments to the sensual relationship.  She finds that by contrast, men in the West prefer for women to at least act brainless and less accomplished than the male because they are threatened by women’s equality.  The surprise ending of the book comes when she suddenly has an “epiphany” in the department store she goes to that Western men control women as well through the clothing and cosmetic industries and by insisting that the women diet crazily and look like young girls in their physical beings before they are allowed to take a role in public affairs.  She points out that in the East, women have seamstresses make their clothes, and that sizes are rarely discussed (at least speaking of women of her high status, which factor in my opinion should be seen to throw a different light on some of her arguments).

She does acknowledge that she has an advantage of higher social status, but puts the observation in the mouth of a male conservative who is telling her that her work is unimportant in its focusing on “what men want” and who is telling her she has an obligation to help less fortunate women instead.  I say, they are both right:  she does sometimes overlook the differences between herself and less financially or socially fortunate women, but also there is more than one way to help, and her book certainly helps by showing the upward path in all its reality.  When all’s said and done, it’s clear that men in both East and West have much explaining to do, or since many are all too ready to explain why their systems should be as they are, that women and men “of good will” (as the saying goes) must both occupy themselves, whichever part of the world they are in, with improving the lot of those less fortunate than themselves.  This is so true that it is a truism of many different sorts of political or societal effort, but in this case in particular, it’s not that one system needs to replace the other (we should remember that Boko Haram means “Western education is forbidden”).  Let each society open its mind to ways in which the other has some superiority, and let each society see that its own citizens are all treated equally with each other, that is probably the most and the least that we should expect.

This book as I indicated before is written with humor and an engaging tone, never badgering or hectoring, and is documented with footnotes to every chapter for those who wish to pursue the matter in greater depth.  All in all, I’m very glad that I took the opportunity to add some depth myself to my picture of the Eastern world; it replaces that sense that I had taken away from our constant news broadcasts in their slant that suggests that Eastern women have never had anything approaching equality or good education before the Western education system came along.  Whereas the Boko Haram is lethal to the responsible and good conduct of societal affairs, and the schoolgirls have been following the education they themselves chose, which they have a clear right to do, I think we in the West must also realize that there are things we could do, ways we could interact which might be a little less likely to rile violent opposition and ways to be less condescending in our interactions with other cultures.  I mean, let us help where we can, but be careful of attaching certain unspoken price tags to what we have to offer.  By what I’ve seen of her writing, mutual respect is what I think Fatema Mernissi would appreciate and advise; I concur.

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April 30, 2014 · 8:08 pm

“Flatliners” and Larry Dossey’s “Healing Words”–My occasional confrontations with the hinterlands of science and belief

Have you ever been in need of a sort of “spring tonic” for what we call, for lack of a better word, the soul (but I’m almost sure you have, who hasn’t?)?  Of course, we don’t all call it “the soul,” some of us call it “being in need of a personality overhaul,” others of us call it “a desire to take up a new hobby of some kind,” “being depressed for no particular reason,” “feeling under a curse,” “wanting psychotherapy,” “feeling lost,” etc.  This state I’m speaking of can take place in the comparative absence of anything objectively wrong in one’s life, so that it may happen in a condition of extremity in general or just when suddenly for no particular reason one feels deeply out of sorts.  It may also happen for specific reasons of an emotional or spiritual nature that we have long ago despaired of having any control over.  And when it happens, it happens just as often unpredictably as it does when we expect it to happen, and for differing spans of time, both long and short.  My own condition of “soul-lethargy” goes back in time for several years, but it hasn’t been uninterrupted by better times.  In fact, during the last few years of finishing up my thesis and getting my doctoral degree (in 2012), it was noticeably absent, but returned intermittently when I no longer had that particular kind of energy occupying my time.  Every time I work well on my novel(s), it goes away for a little while, until I once again hit a snag.  It’s easy to get dragged under by a sense of sterility sometimes, especially when work isn’t going well, someone is sick (either I or someone close to me), when I am too busy with work-a-day affairs and don’t have the time to assess things properly–in short, this condition is a sort of lack of attention to my inner being which may come about for a variety of reasons.  If left alone long enough, it can cause a sort of “soul sickness,” not the same as something mental or emotional, I don’t think, but feeling just as debilitating if not more.  And it’s sometimes accompanied by very unpleasant side effects.

For example, one of the most frequently occurring negative evidences these days is a hypnagogic nightmare of a sort of black tangle of bad energy hovering on or in or near me as I struggle back into wakefulness to fight it, an angry, evil non-auditory snarl of sorts, which must be blocked out and done away with by a sort of internal prayer which I have learned to make rise from my consciousness (I know, it sounds loopy), the struggle going on sometimes for several moments, the bad energy making as many as two or three passes in a row.  This is not a mental or a physical event, is not accompanied by a speeded heart rate, or clammy palms, or waking hallucinations of any sort.  In fact, a hypnagogic nightmare occurs when one is in the earliest stages of falling asleep, and can simply wake one back up to deal with some startling effect of consciousness.  The awareness of the “ball of negative energy” as a non-pictorial, non-dramatized (by human dream actors) reality of a stage of sleep is a relatively new thing:  it’s not that I never before in my life had hypnagogic nightmares, but when I was younger, the occasional negative energy most of us at one time or another experience “blamed” itself on someone in particular, had an actual theme and plot and human or other living actors, people I knew, things, events, or animals I was afraid of, etc.  This, I understand, is the more usual pattern.  In a way, though it’s still bad news, it’s better to deal with a disembodied energy than to have to try and figure out later why such and such a person or such and such an event, possibly someone I like or something I enjoy doing, is the confusing source of negativity.  From this you may guess that though I’m an inverterate navel-gazer, I’m trying to break the habit of so much non-productive interiority and go instead for the more productive kind, whatever it may prove to be.

As well, there are times (rarer and rarer lately, but still happening sometimes) when I wake in the middle of the night (not in hypnagogic sleep, but after dreaming REM sleep); just after dreaming that someone is standing by my bed looking down at me, I’m terrified until I turn on the light and sit for about five minutes.  Though I’ve heard it said by others who have this sort of dream that this is in fact a normal and reassuring dream to have, and even that it indicates that someone at a distance may be concerned about you, I’ve so far never gotten over my fear of this kind of dream.  Where is she going with this disquisition on odd and unsettling states of mind, you ask?  I’m not sure that I can make my point well, but I figure it’s better to make the attempt than not to speak of something which I’ve found illuminating and perhaps allow you to share it, so here goes:

By and large, for the preponderance of my life, I have been a sceptic about spiritual beliefs.  I say “spiritual beliefs” rather than “religious beliefs” because I’ve always had a tendency to prefer things messy rather than cut-and-dried and rigid and in a prescribed shape.  People annoy me who believe things easily, or who seem to me too gullible; it’s as my brother often says, I feel no innate sympathy with “Gullible’s Travels.”  Still, there have been times of extremity in my life when I feel, upon looking back on them, that some creative urge has come without warning into my life just when I needed to be shaken up or in some way made to observe something other than whatever I happened to be fixating on at the time, particularly if it was something unhealthy or bad for me.  I wanted today to write about just two of these incidents, a time back in the 1990’s and a time just about a week ago (in both of which cases, however, the malaise preceding the incident of creative activity had gone on for some time).

During the first instance, I was deeply depressed by the bad fortune I’d had in my personal life, and was in an extremely strong funk and was disinclined to be forthcoming to even the most sympathetic friend or relative, most of whom had in any case already heard what I’d had to say and had been encouraging but not effective.  This was fairly usual, because I’ve often found my own personality to be generally intractable to influence once I really decide that I think or feel something strongly.  By chance, I happened to be in a group of strangers one night, and someone suggested watching the latest thriller out, the movie “Flatliners.”  For those who didn’t see this basically negligible thriller, it was about a group of medical students who were curious about the afterlife or the lack thereof, and even more curious about the near-death experiences of some case studies they’d read, in which people basically experienced a moment of death or near-death and then “came back” to life.  All the concerned case studies had apparently reported sightings or experiences of paranormal events or encounters with already deceased friends or relatives, and etc.  The medical students one after the other caused themselves to “flatline” (“die”) while the others stood ready to revive him or her after a given number of seconds.  The movie portrayed the startling experiences of what each encountered, but I believe the climax of the movie occurred when the young experimenters had difficulty reviving one of themselves.  I can’t really recall what happened after that, whether the subject in question lived or died, which may seem odd.  All that stuck in my mind was a strong impression of the basic story line:  even doctors had to admit that there was something beyond their materialistic universe, though no one, least of all I, could say exactly what or draw any solid conclusions from the fictional experiments.  Truth to tell, I’ve always been more impressed with stories and tales than with so-called “facts,” so perhaps it wasn’t a fair test of materialism.

There have been other times when I have needed something from what one could refer to as “the infinite” if one has that inclination (and I can at least tolerate the expression now without a total sneer), and it has stepped up to bat for me, though it’s not a regular occurrence by any means, nor one that I can just hope for and have it happen.  I can’t “deserve” it and make it occur, either.  I am probably the most surprised of all when it does happen, though whom I’m comparing myself to in that assessment, I don’t know.  This is the first time I’ve ever written anything about it, for example.

The other occasion that I found a book (in this case) to be of use (even inchoate, undirected, imprecise use) was a couple of nights ago, when I was in the process of reading Larry Dossey’s book Healing Words.  I can honestly say that I have never before read a book about prayer, have never willingly or deliberately allowed myself to be prayed for, though like everyone else, I’ve had transient moments in the midst of some turmoil or other when I appeal to a force I often profess not to believe very much in with a “Oh, god, let this turn out right!”  The most interesting thing about Dossey’s book to me wasn’t in fact any encouragement to pray or be prayed for, but was his open-mindedness to other states of being than the verifiable, materialistic world of science and medicine which rules so much of the world today.  He has apparently written other books, of which I had never heard, having only happened across this book on a library online website and picked it up sheerly out of a kind of curiosity, sure that I would be annoyed enough to drop it before long (you may recall in this connection that Ralph Waldo Emerson said “The power men have to annoy me I give them by a weak curiosity”).  Instead, I finished the whole book.

Dossey did not become an advocate for any one religious system or belief, and in fact seemed to consider many alternative forms of healing under an umbrella of spiritual endeavor, whether they employed a sense of the named Divine or not.  That was what was so liberating about his book, the mere possibility that there are ways of doing things other than the dose, cut, and sew of conventional medicine, or at least that there exists a serious and valid accompaniment to the usual medical tools at most doctors’ disposal.  The book came in handy for me a night or so ago not in relation to any specific malady I had, but in one of my occasional nightly fights with the hypnagogic nightmare, familiar by now but never gladly tolerated:  I was able to reduce the size of the dark ball of gunk and rid myself of it in fairly quick order, and not because of any proclaimed “power of positive thinking” which had been “proven” to work–Dossey says such beliefs often lead to guilt when employed in this way because people are blamed for not believing enough or being “positive” enough to shake their malaise, whatever it is–but because I had allowed for the possibility in myself that whatever causes the negative energy is within my power to affect to some degree, sometimes.  And more than that, more than just ridding me of an inconvenient nightmare, the openness and simultaneous strenuous examining of the book helped me fight through some waking situations which I’m still engaged with, but which I feel a better hope of affecting positively now.

I’m not saying that I’ll automatically become rich and famous for my fiction, or find a lot of new friends and acquaintances in my daily life who are muy simpatico, or do something, anything, else which causes my life to be distinguished much from other people’s.  But now I feel, due to Dossey’s book in part, that people and their “souls” or “intelligences” or “personalities,” whatever one wants to call them, are what he indicates they are, continuous and not isolated, whole and not separate, and that is a very comforting feeling (or belief, or conviction) to be going on with, for now.

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April 23, 2014 · 2:52 pm

Edwidge Danticat’s “The Farming of Bones”–There’s no such thing as a small massacre

Ours is a time in which people of conscience are becoming more and more aware of the cruelties of wars and “police actions” which have been fought across the globe from times so far back we have lost count of them, and often it’s the “big” conflicts which have been memorialized, the battles which have resulted in more deaths in sheer numbers which are remembered and moralized on most.  In modern times, some of these are the French Revolution, the American Civil War, WWI, WWII, fighting in Korea, the Vietnam War, the wars in Sarajevo, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan.  Many of these wars are remembered at least in the North American continent because the United States has been involved, and the United States, to whatever degree right or wrong, sees itself as a “major player,” and often people in the United States either ignore or are not aware of conflicts in which they play mainly a passing role.  But in order to realize that there is no such thing as a “small” war or massacre, one has only to understand from the testimonies from writers around the world that cruelty is an absolute, not something of numbers and degrees, which when it is employed wreaks havoc and shock and causes a maximum of human suffering regardless of how many people exactly were persecuted or died.  One such writer who leaves vital and pertinent testimony is Edwidge Danticat, in her novel The Farming of Bones, a book about the 1937 “unrest” between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, in which Haitians were massacred and brutalized in their thousands by the Dominican Republican dictator Trujillo’s forces and also by civilians.  I call it “unrest” ironically, because it was much more than that, but the “Yankis” who are referred to only as a former interfering force in the book would have called it so, from their perspective of “big” wars and conflicts.  They are merely a shadow in this book, which is upclose and personal when it comes to the characters who are affected.

The book begins with a quote which is not only thematic, but also becomes part of the plot structure in a later incarnation of event.  The quote is from Judges 12:4-6, describing how in a war between the men of Gilead and the Ephraimites, the men of Gilead held the fords, and tested all passersby by their ability to say the word “Shibboleth.”  If instead they were unable to pronounce the word and said “Sibboleth,” they were killed.  The Bible records that 40,000 were killed in this manner, and though the number is not the issue, it shows the extent to which a by-word can be applied and misapplied in a world of danger and cruelty.

But for at least half the book The Farming of Bones, the setting is in the Dominican Republic, in which the French and Kreyol-speaking immigrants from Haiti are employed as house servants, workers in the cane fields, and otherwise “peasant” labor, while the Spanish-influenced Dominicans are the gentry and aristocracy of the area.  And at least half the book tells the story, both in the present and through flashbacks, of Amabelle Désir, a daughter of herb healers and an employee of the Duarte household, her daily life in the Dominican Republic as a second-class citizen, and her love for Sebastien Onius, her man, who comes to her at night sometimes.

The gentility with which the two treat each other is an indirect comment upon the harshness of Pico Duarte, Amabelle’s employer, and his relationship with his wife, Valencia, with whom Amabelle was raised after her parents died in a flood and she was left an orphan.  Sebastien lives at a distance from Amabelle, and one night he wants her to undress and they simply sit in the dark, for as he tells her, “It is good for you to learn and trust that I am near you even when you can’t place the balls of your eyes on me.”  By contrast, Pico leaves his wife in childbirth and goes to support the Generalissimo in various actions, returning to see the babies (twins), but leaving again after the boy baby dies, and not perhaps valuing the girl baby as much.  As Amabelle says of Sebastien, “When he’s not there, I’m afraid I know no one, and no one knows me.”  Again by contrast, Valencia, her “milk sister,” is supported by her whole family, her father “Papi” (Don Ignacio), his estate, the local doctor and priests, and the servants.

When word first comes that the Dominicans under Trujillo are killing Haitians (who have been employed by them and who are currently living in the Dominican Republic, where the first part of the story is set), Amabelle does not believe it to be true, and many around her also think of it as a rumor.  She finally makes plans to meet up with Sebastien in order to go back to Haiti by cart with the local priests and the doctor, all of whom are thinking of helping to get Haitians safely across the river and the mountains back to Haiti.  The sad results of the delay with which the original news was greeted by many, however, have their part to play, and it is in a company mostly of strangers that Amabelle finally leaves the place which has been her home for many years.

When the group Amabelle is escaping with reach a town nearer to their destination, where they are hoping to meet up with others, they are greeted by a rowdy and violent crowd of Dominicans, who “try” them by the verbal system with the word “perejil,” or “parsley,” a common herb to both parts of the island.  When they can only say “pesi,” they are brutalized, though in fact their tormenters already have made their minds up about them in advance.  Amabelle thinks that she could say the word the “right” way if she had time to gather her thoughts, but she isn’t given the chance.

The rest of the story deals with Amabelle’s life without Sebastien, on the Haitian side of the border, except for the end, some years later, when she bribes a driver to drive her back across the border.  She goes to visit Señora Valencia and hear about her daughter Rosalinda, who is now married, and also meets Sylvie, the current servant.  It is now that she mentally revisits the past and realizes that she and Valencia were really ever only strangers to each other, for all that they played together as children, their different parts and roles in the household of Papi holding them apart.  Finally, she goes to try and find a cave which she associates with Sebastien, but has no success in finding it for certain.  Much of this novel is in fact the mourning for people and things lost through wars, battles, conflicts, actions, hostilities, and quarrels.  As Edwidge Danticat writes on her last page, “And the very last words, last on the page but always first in my memory, must be offered to those who died in the massacre of 1937, to those who survived to testify, and to the constant struggle of those who still toil in the cane fields.”  Truly, there are no small massacres; numbers are not what we should be concentrating on when we discuss genocide and political murder, but the sheer inhumanity of the manner in which we often use other people, and the quick escalation of hatred which threatens to sink us all into obliquity, both victims and persecutors.

Danticat’s book is simultaneously a beautifully written testiment to human survival, which persists though the human spirit is insulted and damaged by its encounter with the dregs of harshness and meanness that inspire people to consider others less than themselves because of factors of birth and nationality, caste and class.  All of us can surely benefit by exposure to her marvelously supple prose and insight into what really constitutes a loving human situation, and her cues as to where the human equation needs to be re-configured.  Danticat writes with love even of the loveless, with compassion even of those who show they have none, and with certainty that in the moments of uncertainty we have our survival, when we hesitate to pronounce on someone else’s fate.  This book is one of the simplest and yet most complicated I think I have ever read, and is in my estimation one of the best books of its time.

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