Category Archives: What is literature for?

July 18, 2013 · 5:18 pm

“Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of society, including the very poor, and are of interest to social historians as well as lovers of literature.”–Wikipedia quote

Though of Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell’s works I had originally intended to read and post on both the volume I picked up entitled The Cranford Chronicles and the very long novel (incomplete at the time of the author’s death) Wives and Daughters, because it took such an unconscionably long time to read The Cranford Chronicles (which is in fact composed not only of the novel Cranford but also of two related novellas), I have decided to post on the first only and to leave Wives and Daughters as a project for another time.  When I looked up Mrs. Gaskell’s works, I was surprised to learn that Mr. Harrison’s Confessions and My Lady Ludlow, which bookend the novel Cranford in the volume The Cranford Chronicles, are in fact novellas usually published separately, so I can only imagine that the unnamed editor/collector at Vintage Books saw some connection amongst the three works, perhaps that of similar fictional locale, since they all three take place in sedate, small villages.  It’s true, of course, that these three novels are not among the novels largely and ostensibly about the industrial North of England, which Mrs. Gaskell is so noted by social historians for having written about; nevertheless, she makes her points about the changes which came to England at the time and their effects upon the poor by showing the changes as they had their impact upon the small family seats and villages [I refuse to say “impacted”–that’s not a correct verbal usage].

First for a bit of background about Elizabeth Gaskell, née Stevenson, courtesy of Wikipedia, the rapid poster’s friend.  Her father was a Unitarian minister who gave up his orders for conscientious reasons and was finally appointed Keeper of the Treasury Records.  Her mother, who produced eight children–only two of whom survived to adulthood–died when Elizabeth was thirteen months old, which her father felt left him no recourse but to send the infant to her mother’s sister, one Hannah Lumb, for raising.  Elizabeth led a life with an uncertain future, but was a “permanent guest” at her aunt’s and at her grandparents’ house.  Her father remarried but Elizabeth did not see her father’s new family for many years.  Her older brother John, however, visited her and her aunt regularly before he went missing (he was a sailor with the East India Company on an exploration to India).

Leaving school at the age of sixteen after having been taught the usual basic skills, lessons, and accomplishments of a young lady of her time, Elizabeth spent some time in London, Newcastle upon Tyne, and Edinburgh with various cousins and friends.  When she was almost twenty-two, she married a Unitarian minister named William Gaskell.  They settled in the northern city of Manchester.  Her married life was apparently checkered with some heartbreak.  The subjects, though not the steadfastness of her tone in her fiction, seem to show it:  her first two children died.  The other four, however, survived.  In 1835, she began a diary on family events and her opinions, which probably put her in the frame of mind to continue to express herself through writing.  The next year, she and her husband co-authored a cycle of poems which were published in Blackwood’s Magazine.  She continued to write for the magazines under various pseudonyms, penning her first novel, Mary Barton, in 1848.

Elizabeth Gaskell’s friends and visitors included Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Eliot Norton, Charlotte Bronte, and Charles Hallé.  Her novel Cranford (her best-known work) was published in Dickens’s journal Household Words.  She continued to write novels for the rest of her life, some of which required travel.  Elizabeth Gaskell died in 1865 of a heart attack while looking at a house she had purchased.  Her last novel, Wives and Daughters, though unfinished when she died, was the one she thought her best.  In 2010 there was a memorial for Elizabeth Gaskell placed in Poet’s Corner, in Westminster Abbey.

Now for my own opinion of the three works of hers which I read in the omnibus The Cranford Chronicles, an opinion perhaps not as humble as it ought to be, given that Mrs. Gaskell was such a prolific and talented writer, and occupied and still holds such an important place in English literary history, especially since the revision of the literary canon has been going on.  Her work drags.  I suppose I had been led to expect, by the snippets and fragments of “Cranford” which I managed to catch on the BBC production featured on American PBS programs a few years back, that I would be meeting up with a character as coyly dimpled in the delivery of her lines as Dame Judi Dench, or a railway martinet as sure of his own beliefs as the character whom all the ladies went in dread of on that show.  But as I came to find, the railway scenes from the BBC were a total fabrication when it came to the three works I was actually reading, which Alex, in her recent comments on her own site when she wrote her talented post about Cranford, had warned about.  As she noted, the television mini-series seems to have been a compilation of Mrs. Gaskell’s works.  But to blame Mrs. Gaskell for not having written a BBC mini-series attuned to modern tastes would be a real case of unfairness, wouldn’t it, as well as an unpardonable anachronism?  So instead of saying what’s wrong (the slow pacing) and what’s not there, let’s look on the bright side (now that the task is accomplished) and say what was good about it, or charming, or thought-provoking.

In the first part of The Cranford Chronicles, Mr. Harrison’s Confessions, I was pleased to watch Mrs. Gaskell leave the safe and well-known (to her) ground of the female character and venture into the more hazardous waters of the male mentality.  Hazardous because of course Mrs. Gaskell, though clearly understanding men quite as well as women, excels in her portraits of women in different walks of life.  It was a sheer delight, after the basic comedic “givens” of the situation were set up, however, to watch Mr. Harrison (a new doctor) try to follow the sometimes self-contradictory dictates of his older and authoritarian colleague all the while also trying not to get himself married off to the wrong woman (which in this case multiplied itself into “women,” as every single woman within the tiny village of Duncombe who wasn’t absolutely ancient seemed to have an interest other than medical in trying to monopolize the young doctor’s attention).  This shortest of the three works was my clear favorite, not because it was short in this case, but because Mrs. Gaskell managed so much in so short a compass (that is, not because of the shortness, but in spite of it).  Though it’s clear that the novella will have some sort of happy ending, the tensions are handled excellently, and when I finished reading it, I was wanting more.

Cranford itself, occupying the middle position in this volume, has a very slowly emerging main character, Miss Matty, whose gallant modesty itself seems to constitute the nature of the whole volume.  Which is to say, though this was not my favorite of the three works, I can clearly see that it’s in contention for the position of “the best” (it’s priceless in its portrait of what’s often referred to derogatorially as “decaying gentlewomen,” but contends with My Lady Ludlow, the third work, for first place in the category of comprehensive portraits of society.  As most of the main characters in Cranford are “gentle,” their society is thoroughly painted, but the characters in My Lady Ludlow supply more of a range of different societal positions, and thus have a different kind of interest and variety).  Miss Matty’s and the other ladies’ even more recessive biographer, a person who until almost three-fourths of the way through the book is unnamed, focuses all her discussion on the minor and (as it turns out) not so minor fortunes and misadventures of these ladies, not omitting their foibles and vanities, but encouraging us to appreciate their individuality while particularly and gradually concentrating more and more attention on Miss Matty herself.  It’s rather as if the commonly named narrator Miss Mary Smith is a foil in her constant focusing of attention on the most genuinely humble of the ladies and in her own refusal to say much about herself (and I mean “common” only in the most inoffensive way, i.e., a “frequently occurring” name, as goodness knows, it would not flatter me myself to refer to the name “Mary Smith” as “common” in any rude way, having both Marys and Smiths in my own family tree!)  After quite a lot of rueful comedy is generated by the way in which the ladies gossip and are motivated by silly though human questions of precedence and correct behavior, we see them draw together and operate as a supportive group, disregarding their differences, when Miss Matty has a stroke of ill fortune.  There is an equally modest happy ending which ties up all loose ends, and though the main characters have often been figures of fun, they have humanized their readers, perhaps, by their very lack of major vices and their jumping at the shadows of even small hints of vices.  Though the atmosphere is rather claustrophobic for my tastes with so many maiden ladies and widows and so few men in the mix, yet they are strong and determined women, and thus Mrs. Gaskell has given feminism its due though in the way of her time and taste.

As to the last of the three works I’m considering today, My Lady Ludlow, it’s a rather rambling work which takes place at Hanbury, the family seat of the widowed Lady Ludlow.  A character named Margaret Dawson is the narrator, and here again we have a portrait not only of a main character, Lady Ludlow, but also of those who surround her and constitute her daily society.  In this case, however, the characters run the gamut from Lady Ludlow’s aristocratic relatives to the lowest of the characters on the totem pole, the poachers and tinkers whom Lady Ludlow herself, at the opening of the fiction when Margaret Dawson first meets her, would never think would have contact with the more fortunately placed characters.  Nearly as long as Cranford, this novella describes the gradual (very gradual) relaxing of Lady Ludlow’s strict upper-class beliefs about religion, society, business, in short, upon all areas of life which impinge upon her.  Time after time, some aspect of progress which is usually for the benefit of the poorer characters meet up with opposition from Lady Ludlow.  It’s not that she’s unkind, but she is quite adherent to the preferences of the upper classes to give charitably to those who are under their thumbs rather than to increase the privileges, rights, and capabilities of the lower-class characters by changing the way society operates.  For the longest time, she stubbornly though politely opposes her own steward and the village rector who both have in mind improvements, and it’s a mark of how much she is respected that all but a very few characters follow her absolutely and unquestioningly (until such time as she gives way and changes her mind).  It in fact takes most of the length of the novella for her to change the staunchest of her opinions and procedures, and it is only after a deep personal loss that she eventually brings herself to do so.  It is in fact while she is sad and in mourning that she seems the most to reach out to those to whom she has in the past opposed, and they are more than ready to accept her olive branch.  Once again, the requisite happy ending is in order, in which all parties seem to relax their former standards slightly and to strive to get along as a group.  Mrs. Gaskell is nothing if not supportive of the basic structure of society in these three works, however society may need change from time to time or come to be refigured.

All in all, I am quite glad I read Mrs. Gaskell.  She will never win a prize for the rapidly occurring “hook” at the beginnings of her works, for it takes her some time to build up steam and provide a basic conflict or drama for her characters to participate in.  Her works instead excel in character portraits, to judge only from these three-in-one, and as such the action is secondary.  She is not one of whom Henry James’s dictum that plot is character and character plot is very convincing, because while for James this is true and he shows a tight and firm connection between the two, she by contrast often seems to have very little in the way of plot for long stretches of at least the two later works here, and this disjoins the two elements of structure which for James were so intimately connected.    Of course, she wrote so much that I am quite prepared to be contradicted by others who may have read more of her works.  I would also advise anyone having trouble with characterizations in particular to observe her techniques, her pacing being of less significance in that regard.  She is a highly talented verbal portrait painter, and though she is capable of capturing a significant incident with a few lines, these incidents are quite often moments indicative of interior states of mind or of character analysis going forward.

So, during this long, seemingly never-ending summer, when you’re looking for a book to spend time with and really get in the midst of, you could do worse than to spend time with Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell and to watch her cause characters to materialize right before your eyes.  If nothing else, start with Mr. Harrison’s Confessions, full of gentle though sometimes quite pointed humor, and expect to step back in time with a Victorian chuckle rather than a contemporary guffaw (because, you know, the true ladies and gentlemen in Mrs. Gaskell’s worlds don’t guffaw!).

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June 20, 2013 · 8:50 pm

Shadows of reality and shades of the imagination in Isabel Allende’s collection “The Stories of Eva Luna”

The storyteller’s art is above all a way of defeating mortality, a way of underlining moralities and playing them off against each other, and a way of leaving one’s mark on the world.  But in The Stories of Eva Luna, the storyteller’s voice drifts like smoke across the scene and disappears from one story to the next, fading out between moments and leaving only a taste of clean, clear water, somewhat in the same way the sand mandalas of the Tibetan monks are visible for a short time then blow away in the next strong wind.  The only continuous thing is thus the spell of words rising and falling and then halting, in fact introducing mortality at key points, sometimes making moral points and sometimes not, and allowing even and especially the storyteller to evade capture by leaving no mark at all behind.  It is not a coincidence that these characteristics coincide with an opening and closing mention in the book of the tale of Scheherazade, for the character Eva Luna narrates tales in bed in this fiction at the request of her lover Rolf Carlé (another character from the original novel Eva Luna, to which this collection of stories is a sequel).

The picture of South American life is what emerges most clearly, whether it is the life of the twentieth century or of the earlier centuries with their conflicts between Spanish conquerors and aboriginal citizens; in fact, history is set at odds in the South American scene of these stories, because the economic climate pictured herein is one in which several histories are being played out at once in the same or near physical space, with the economically privileged citizens living cheek-by-jowl with and in seeming ignorance of or indifference to the native tribes and their traditions.  Indeed, part of the richness and irony of Allende’s portrait of South American life comes from this juxtaposition of different traditions, and in the very midst of this scene, the storyteller takes a central place, and is received differently by different portions of the populace.

There are aristocrats and dictators, peasants and native Indians, prostitutes and degenerates, revolutionaries and banditti, sexy women and virile men, aged men and women of both wisdom and foolish credulity, children who suffer and children whose innocence protects them, and in the middle of all this, the fortune tellers and storytellers and magicians (who are sometimes one and the same) take up their posts.  Yet, in all this richness and confusion, it is clear that this is not reality, but a facsimile, a model of reality touched with the magic of the storyteller’s art, particularly in those places where the more fantastic elements of belief come into play with both Christian and secular miracles, ghosts, curses, places and people who disappear in thin air, reappear, then fade out again, doctors and professors of strange sciences whose cures and discoveries cannot be re-documented.  Yet the story also touches reality in those places where Eva Luna appears as a character, or one of her friends or acquaintances from the novel Eva Luna is woven into one of the dependent stories as a character, sometimes in words very similar to that of their original appearance in the first book.  Thus, the figure of the storyteller sits before us always, and in fact, the first section in the book is one spoken by the lover Rolf Carlé, describing the storyteller as she appears before him just as he asks her for stories.

The book circles back to the reference to Scheherazade in the end with a sad story about a young girl who comes to an unenviable end which Rolf is unable to prevent, and Eva Luna is stricken too, because of her empathy with Rolf.  Rolf is a famous camera man, who has tried to mobilize help for the young girl, but to no avail, and Eva suffers because Rolf’s emotional paralysis is one which has been lying dormant for years under a layer of accomplishment and happiness with her, until the young girl cannot be saved.  I don’t think it ruins the experience of reading the book at all to quote from the last page of the final story “And of Clay Are We Created,” in which the storyteller must cede ground to reality because at a certain point fiction is stricken mute.  She addresses Rolf directly, just as originally in the book he addressed her in his description of her:  “You are back with me, but you are not the same man.  I often accompany you to the station and we watch the videos of [the young girl] again; you study them intently, looking for something you could have done to save her, something you did not think of in time.  Or maybe you study them to see yourself as if in a mirror, naked.  Your cameras lie forgotten in a closet; you do not write or sing; you sit long hours before the window, staring at the mountains.  Beside you, I wait for you to complete the voyage into yourself, for the old wounds to heal.  I know that when you return from your nightmares, we shall again walk hand in hand, as before.”  On the final page just after this, we read:  “And at this moment in her story, Scheherazade saw the first light of dawn, and discreetly fell silent.”  Thus, there are some wounds that storytelling cannot heal, wounds that require private introspection, a kind of private storytelling akin to self-therapy rather than the more public storytelling of having even one other person present.  But paradoxically, by stating this in the story framework, Allende has given the cue and initiated the moment of healing by indicating that it starts with a voyage into self, a fearless exploration of nightmare terrain.  Finally, by reverting back to Scheherazade and the “first light of dawn,” the hope of awaking from nightmare terrain of whatever negative stories we all have privately or share with each other is extended to each of us as we read, and we too see the “first light of dawn” and the preservation of who and what we are for yet another day.  By concurring in this adventure of the storyteller’s art, we thus defeat mortality a little longer, reinforce the humanly shared morality of helping one’s neighbor to live and have joy, and by chalking this reading up to experience, leave our own mark on the world of the imagination, having found yet another thing we can share with others to make all our lives better and richer.

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June 15, 2013 · 4:15 pm

“[The art of the novel] happens because the storyteller’s own experience of men and things…has moved him to an emotion so passionate that he can no longer keep it shut up in his heart.”–Murasaki Shikibu

Isabel Allende’s novel Eva Luna, written about a sort of modern-day Scheherazade continually dancing on the edge of the volcano of societal upheaval with her tales as her only defense against falling, is first and foremost a novel about new beginnings.  Eva’s mother Consuelo dies when Eva is only a child, and from then on, Eva makes her way through the various strata of society from being a house servant to being a loved informally adopted daughter to being a well-known and respected formal story-teller.  But it is not a rags-to-riches story per se, because one is always having one’s attention called to the reversals and contretemps in the plot of Eva’s life, and there is never an easy answer to her dilemmas, despite the basically strong and positive way in which she seems to confront her problems.

A key theme relates to the role literature plays in our lives, whether of the “high” literary variety or of the popular variety heard on the radio and seen on the television screen.  What seems to be important is the impetus to keep on telling, keep on telling, and never stop.  It’s almost as if Eva is spinning out a thread like a spider from which she may hang until her feet touch solid ground again, for in every part of her life, and regardless of whom she is staying with or living with or serving, there is always someone to whom she can tell her tales, which gives her an added purpose in life to merely being a house servant or a dependent.

Yet another important element in the book Eva Luna is the plethora of generations of mothers and mother figures, and the degree to which they contribute support to younger women, not so much financially as psychologically and spiritually.  There are many male characters, but they are often seen as adversarial unless they manage to think beyond the machismo of the average male in the South American society of the time portrayed in the book, during some part of the twentieth century.  Possibly due to the fact that while being born in Peru, she is a Chilean, Allende seems purposefully to have left the exact South American country she is writing about imprecise and has instead created a sort of composite land for the story.  Yet still the female characters, in their subsidiary place in society, are yet seen as the hidden strength of the country, while the men bickering and politicking and warring and torturing and imprisoning each other are seen as passing fads, with one following behind and more or less resembling another, despite their apparent differences.

This, however, does not mean that there is not an opportunity for love between men and women.  The women in the book (and this includes a transgender woman named Mimi with whom Eva Luna resides in the latter part of the novel) keep looking for love, accepting the men as much as possible as they are, never giving up hope for a better life or a better relationship, forgiving and overcoming and enduring in a way that Allende evidently sees as essentially female.  The men, in their turn, look to the women for nurturing and companionship and sexual love, and are conventionally male in general, with the good and the bad alike that goes along with this.  The question of love is not relegated only to passionate sexual relationships, however; family or family-like love and societal love of one’s fellows are equally subjects of the book.

While Eva Luna’s stories are told to happy, unhappy, and desperate people alike in the novel, Allende makes her character Eva, a storyteller from a very young age, aware of the way in which stories not only help ameliorate harsh conditions, but also can distract from harsh realities which need to be addressed.  For instance, in the final pages of the book, Eva negotiates with the Comandante of the government over just how much of a real recent event (the freeing of guerrillas by their comrades, friends of Eva’s) can be put into her televised fictional script (since the government is trying to suppress the guerrillas by keeping quiet about news of their success).  This shows not only how Eva’s stories have power over the small and comparatively simple events in her friends’ lives, but how they also acquire power in the daily events of a country as well.

Allende has emphasized throughout her own story that while people are continually requesting happy endings to stories from Eva, Eva chooses instead to go for high drama and complicated and tragic endings.  But for her story of Eva Luna’s own life, Allende generously and equivocatingly gives us a choice:  after providing a qualified happy ending for Eva with a lover, in which the “judicious” and “modest” degree of love and happiness they win is at the end of the penultimate paragraph said to be worn to “shreds,” Allende ends with “Or maybe that isn’t how it happened,” and then goes on to suggest that sometimes reality responds to how it is described rather than the other way around.  This means (according to the storyteller) that though she has provided a slightly elevated and ecstatic description of Eva’s love, it isn’t totally fictional.  And here the indeterminacy and open-endedness of stories which is a contemporary preference finds acceptance.

It took me a long time to read this book, partly because I found its episodic structure a bit distracting, partly because of other things that have to do with time commitments rather than with literature.  But I’m not sure it wasn’t the ideal way to encounter the adventuresome and inventive Eva Luna, who was always in another scrape, always surviving somehow, always finding another audience for her stories.  Eva Luna is a character of Allende’s who becomes a character in her own tales, so that a voice from beyond the world of fictional limits speaks to us, penetrating and interpenetrating our own views of reality and story, and giving us hope of passing beyond our own limits, our imaginations having become our swords with which to slash through the veil between worlds.

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June 5, 2013 · 5:05 pm

“In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed.”

This sixth amendment to the Constitution of the United States in the title of my post is, like most other statutes and rules and regulations, an ideal, or it speaks of ideal conditions.  For example, a lot of prosecutions in society are prosecutions of public opinion, which while they have no legal status, yet have consequences upon the people involved, on both sides of the issue (or on all sides, since some controversies are more complex than ones that have only two sides).  And if no one accuses you outright, but only begins to look at you askance with certain assumptions in his or her mind which lead to consequences likewise, what do you do?  How defend yourself against a charge that is not openly articulated?  And what if, little by little, the unspoken accusations do eventually lead to an official sort of “trial”–and I emphasize the word “eventually”–how do you find an “impartial jury”?  The gossip, backbiting, and publicity that may surround such trials by public opinion cause no one to be sure that she or he is truly impartial, though he or she may be truly committed as far as possible to finding justice as an ideal.  And what if the crime one is suspected of participating in is so horrific, so publicized, so hated and full of distress for so many people, that it is practically impossible to achieve an impartial trial not only in the “State and district” concerned, but even in the world in general?  This is the situation of Jassim and Salwa Haddad, a Muslim couple settled in Tucson, Arizona and living there just after the 9/11/01 plane bombing of the World Trade Center in Laila Halaby’s extraordinary novel Once in a Promised Land.

Let me hasten to point out that this novel is not an apologia for Muslim causes, yet nor is it weak in its indictment of Western culture in its lack of center and soul, from at least the perspective of Salwa and Jassim, who are used to a more stable and conservatively structured family culture.  The novel is above all honest about its own limitations of vision in the sense that it does not try to portray Western culture as dramatically evil or depraved, but as diverse and as complicated as it is in any large American city, with its real estate deals, business offices, cheap restaurants, areas of lovely homes, small neighborhoods, drug dealers, all the while acknowledging that even this complex view is seen from outside by two fairly recent immigrants.  Jassim, the husband, is a hydrologist, studying water tables and rainfall gathering methods, and attempting to garner the knowledge necessary to help the globe, particularly someday his own part of it in Jordan, to sustain itself hydrologically and not waste water.  Salwa, the wife, works in a bank and sells real estate, and is most susceptible to the lures of Western society (in her case, in the form of lacy pajamas and frilly underwear, which she acquired a taste for when a female relative a long time before first sent her silk pajamas).

One of the most interesting things about this novel is that it is not really about 9/11, but is about Salwa and Jassim and their love life, and Salwa’s at-first secret pregnancy and miscarriage, Jassim’s equally hidden car accident (known to officials but not originally to his wife) in which he unintentionally kills a skateboarder, and the forces that gradually motivate these divisions and nearly cause the couple to part.  It is the story of a marriage, and it’s just that one of the forces that almost tear them from each other’s arms is the day of 9/11; Salwa indignantly and heroically challenges Anglo-Americans who treat them with prejudice or suspicion, Jassim tries to reason or decides to ignore the issues all together.  But not only their relationship is at stake:  Jassim is also suspected unjustly by prejudiced right-wingers at work and by a man, a former Marine clearly suffering from some kind of battle stress and psychological fatigue, who informs some FBI friends that Jassim is suspicious, and so starts an intrigue which ends up threatening Jassim’s posh and advantageous job working with water resources in Tucson.  Both Salwa and Jassim are being courted by members of the opposite sex, and because they are experiencing growing distance from each other, part of the climax and catastrophe of the novel is invested with these elements which have thrust them apart.

The ending–and I don’t need to issue a spoiler alert, because it’s somewhat unclear–winds two threads of plot together, the main story line and a line from folk tales about a female demon called a “ghula” in Salwa’s tradition, which has been in the story from the beginning.  The suggestion is that Jassim and Salwa are returning to Jordan, but that is not a foregone conclusion, nor is it a definite one:  it is said that the man is carrying the “injured” woman “home,” though whether it is to her family home in Jordan or to their mutual home in Tucson is not entirely clear.  The ghula is apparently the symbolic equivalent of the 9/11 experience for all those Muslims and people of Eastern descent who, while guilty of nothing to do with the bombings, suffered from a sort of racist and ethnocentric fervor in the United States immediately afterwards, and in the West in general.

Possibly the most valuable thing about this book, or arguably, anyway, is that the two main characters are presented as ordinary undemonized people, full of their own troubles, whose troubles have the misfortune to get wound up in a larger societal perspective which does demonize them.  This characteristic allows the reader to experience the psychological difficulty of sorting out the common issue of “in for a penny, in for a pound.”  What I mean by this is that it is not always true that someone guilty of one crime or sin or misdemeanor or piccadillo is therefore guilty of something more major, but often one small lie or one flaw of character causes a jury (for example) to decide in favor of conviction on a charge when perhaps the accused is not guilty of the larger charge at all.  This kind of fiction forces us to practice discrimination (in the positive sense of the word) in our choices and in our judgements, so that we become better able to say that sometimes, “in for a penny” is just “in for a penny,” and has nothing to do with “a pound,” and that not all old sayings and saws are what they are cracked up to be.

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May 16, 2013 · 4:41 pm

The Shakespearean sonnet and the past, present and future of love of a friend….

Shakespeare wrote many a sonnet about the love of friends and friendship, and though we have commentators and historians to tell us that some of his sexual loves were female and others male, the friendship component of many of the sonnets is a free-standing element of them, which could lead one to read those particular sonnets aloud to friends of a more Platonic nature and mean it just as literally.  Today, I would like to illustrate this point with a comparison of three of them, representing a sort of past, present and future in the conceptual history of a friendship.

First, the past:  “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought/I summon up remembrance of things past,/I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,/And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:/Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,/For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,/And weep afresh love’s long since canceled woe,/And moan the expense of many a vanished sight:/Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,/And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er/The sad account of fore-bemoanéd moan,/Which I new pay as if not paid before./But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,/All losses are restored and sorrows end.”  Here, the past is the main emphasis of the poet’s conception, yet he thinks of the “dear friend” and ceases to mourn, though there is no sure sign that the friend is still alive in the present tense except possibly for the direct address in the word “thee” (which is still temporally ambiguous to a certain extent).

Then, the present:  “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,/I all alone beweep my outcast state,/And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,/And look upon myself, and curse my fate,/Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,/Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,/Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,/With what I most enjoy contented least;/Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,/Haply I think on thee–and then my state,/Like to the lark at break of day arising/From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;/For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings/That then I scorn to change my state with kings.”  In this sonnet, though the poet does speak of “thy sweet love remembered,” almost as if the love were in the past, the main gist of the poem casts the experience of the poet in the present:  he is even despairing of “deaf heaven” at the beginning of the poem, yet by the end he forsakes the considerations of “sullen earth” and his “state” transitions into something like a “lark” which “sings hymns at heaven’s gate.”  Thus, the change is not so much within heaven as within the poet’s experience and attitude toward heaven, and the poem is the moment of transition contained in an awareness of the present.

Finally, the future:  “Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,/So do our minutes hasten to their end;/Each changing place with that which goes before,/In sequent toil all forwards do contend./Nativity, once in the main of light,/Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crowned,/Crooked eclipses ‘gainst his glory fight,/And time that gave now doth his gift confound./Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth/And delves the parallels in beauty’s brow,/Feeds on the rarities of nature’s truth,/And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow./And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,/Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.”  In this poem, which looks at the entire span of human life as a gradual hopeless fight of the pebbles against the sucking sea, of youth against gradual aging, of “the flourish set on youth” against the wrinkles, “the parallels set in beauty’s brow,” there is yet that promise for the future and future humans and ages which occurs in more than one Shakespearean sonnet:  “And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,/Praising thy worth….”  The poet has thus secured a future existence not only for himself, but for his friend who inspires him to write as well.

Thus, for the perfection of a form united with a concept, for the developing view of past, present, and future as they impinge upon a great poet’s awareness, and for deservedly famous tributes to love and friendship, these three sonnets by Shakespeare that I have reproduced here and commented on in passing are ideal:  if you enjoyed them, why not read them aloud with a friend, to a friend, when occasion presents itself?  Even better, commit them to memory or do some art work to accompany the words on parchment paper as a special gift for a friend who’s down in the dumps.  Even if your friend is not an expert with Shakepearean English, the meanings are fairly clear if you read with the punctuation, and worth sharing.

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May 13, 2013 · 4:15 pm

Gerard Manley Hopkins and two incidents of mourning for self, young and older

Gerard Manley Hopkins was a poet almost from the beginning, son of a poet and of a pious woman.  In later life, he combined the two streams of his existence by becoming a Jesuit and by taking up again (in 1875) the writing of poetry, which he had left off when assuming the life of a religious, having destroyed all his earlier poems as too worldly.  After his death and much later in 1918, the Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges, who had been a friend of Hopkins’s, saw that his poems were published.  Today I would like to remark upon my two favorite poems of his, both frequently anthologized and both published in several other sites on the Internet.

The first poem to be considered is contemplative but a bit whimsical, even lightly teasing of a child who is sad or melancholy without a precise way of recognizing the cause or expressing her state.  The speaker is an older individual, one who feels that he sees her situation well, and can enlighten her as to the sources of her frustration or grief.  There is both a formal cause and an efficient cause:  that is, the change of season is the formal cause of her grief, but her sadness has a deeper source, an efficient cause, “the blight man was born for.”  Here is the poem in its entirety:

“Spring and Fall (to a Young Child)”

“Margaret, are you grieving/Over Goldengrove unleaving?/Leaves, like the things of man, you/With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?/Ah! as the heart grows older/It will comes to such sights colder/By and by, nor spare a sigh/Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;/And yet you will weep and know why./Now no matter, child, the name:/Sorrow’s springs are the same./Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed/What heart heard of, ghost guessed:/It is the blight man was born for,/It is Margaret you mourn for.”

When the speaker himself is the sufferer, however, the matter is not even this blithe or teasing or capable of being sifted out as to the cause.  In the second poem, which had no precise title but was instead given its first line as a title, we see the lyric voice itself as expressing the suffering, and it is far more serious in tone; there is not any hint herein that the speaker sees an end or a meaning to his grief, only that death itself will end the matter, a tough plight indeed in which to be.  The expressive quality is here heightened, so that no one can possibly miss the meaning, and the formal cause is muddled together with the efficient cause in the line ” O the mind, mind has mountains: cliffs of fall,” as if there were no other explanation.  There is even a Shakespearean quote from Edgar (as the madman Poor Tom) in King Lear, when the fugitives are wandering around out in the storm without cover and the misery is extreme:  “Creep, wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind.”  The unquantifiable misery in this poem is in stark contrast with Margaret’s almost self-centered complaint in the first poem, though both take a dim view of human happiness.  Here, then, is the second poem:

“[No Worst, There Is None.  Pitched Past Pitch of Grief]”

“No worst, there is none.  Pitched past pitch of grief,/More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring./Comforter, where, where is your comforting?/Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?/My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief/Woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing–/Then lull, then leave off.  Fury had shrieked ‘No ling-/ering!  Let me be fell:  force I must be brief’./  O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall/Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.  Hold them cheap/May who ne’er hung there.  Nor does long our small/Durance deal with that steep or deep.  Here!  creep,/Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind:  all/Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.”

It is almost as if the second poem is an instance of the prediction from the first poem coming true:  the speaker in the first poem predicts that “as the heart grows older it will come to such sights colder by and by,” and sure enough, in the second poem it does, though “knowing why” is a little sketchy, and it is said to be because of the state of the mind’s “mountains,” which are “frightful, sheer,” and “no-man-fathomed.”  But these poems have a therapeutic use, as poems often do, even if we aesthetically hesitate to use them as “medicine,” because that seems perhaps an inappropriate way to use literature.  Here’s what I mean:  if you are feeling really, really low, whether in spring and fall or in a rainstorm or on a dull, gray, stormy day, you can read “Spring and Fall,” and end by counselling yourself that after all, “it is Margaret [yourself] you mourn for,” and perhaps find some self-discipline that enables you to put the matter aside.  But if you’re really feeling abysmal and totally lousy, you can read “[No Worst, There is None.  Pitched Past Pitch of Grief],” and not only achieve catharsis, but go catharsis one even better:  no matter how dreadful I’m feeling, I have only to read this second poem and I immediately perk up a little:  not only did someone else feel as I do, but his expression of mourning for the human condition is even more extreme than anything I could possibly come up with, even at my most poetic and articulate, and my case is not, after all, that bad.

So, enjoy the upcoming summer if you are in the temperate zone, and if you are not, or when the summer cheats on you and issues a cold, rainy day or when it is over altogether, drag out the Gerard Manley Hopkins and give him a read:  he has happy poems and sad poems, all beautifully evocative, but even if you only get acquainted with these two I’ve discussed today, you will be doing yourself a favor:  Hopkins is one of those poets at heart who have shared their hearts and minds without stint, and who will always have something to say to you if you want to listen.

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March 29, 2013 · 9:18 pm

“The Way of Thorn and Thunder (The Kynship Chronicles)” and Fluidity of Process and Purpose

Twice previously to this post, I have had something brief to say about this magnificent fantasy novel, and I’ve promised then to come back to it and conclude my remarks.  It took me a long time to get back to finishing it up, not because it was not gripping and vital enough to hold my interest, but because I had just plainly entered a phase when I was a little further away from my “reading fantasy” self and a little closer to my “reading what purports to be realism.”  Recently, however, I at long last returned to finish up the second half of The Way of Thorn and Thunder (The Kynship Chronicles) and found myself thoroughly satisfied with the promise of the first half of the book as it was fulfilled in the second half.  There are many reasons why this is so, but one of the most compelling is what I would like to term the “fluidity of process and purpose” in the book.

For there is no question, this book flows.  At first, it was hard to stay attached to some of the characters because of this, and the reason seemed to be that just when I would reach a point of intense involvement with one set of characters, the scene would shift and I would find myself with a different set of characters within a very short amount of time.  There were also a number of places where (in contrast to the things we’re all lectured about in beginning creative writing courses) new characters were introduced fairly late and began to be important in the story.  In other words, this fantasy novel was too lifelike in some respects!  What a strange thing to complain about!  Not that I was complaining–I liked all of the characters and all of the scenarios, and found them very enticing to follow:  it’s just that the book, like the “Eld Green” life force itself (called the wyr), kept slipping and flowing away from my control of the plot.

Then I asked myself, finally, “Why should a reader control the plot?”  And thereupon I made an important discovery:  the reader was evidently intended to ride like a surfer on the waves of the novel, occasionally losing his or her balance when the plot or characters did something unexpected, and wiping out.  Then he or she was supposed to go back out into what I have called the “flow” to try again, not to master the fluidity of process, rather to enjoy it as it passed underneath with the reader riding along until something else changed.

There also was a fluidity of purpose:  the topic seemed to change from advocation of good ecological practices to kind love practices to responsible governing practices and so on through a whole list of actions and beliefs that might support our real world better than we are proving ourselves capable of now, for the most part.  So, as I found, I hadn’t really left my realistic reading world behind at all:  I was only engaged in seeing that there are other tactics and strategies for everything we need to do in the real world, and that “continuity in change,” a phrase which occurs in the novel, is one of the key topics though it is hidden away in a picture of a world which appears on the surface to be a fantasy.  For, except for the force of magic, which most people in the world today might regard with toleration as a fantasy subject, yet would probably not really believe in except for their own particular stripe of religious belief, there are many, many points of correspondence between the experiences of the characters in this novel and those of people in real life.  And just as the positive characters adopt each other freely into their “kynship” structures, allowing friends to become kith and kin, so the reader is taken up as a novelistic responsibility by Daniel Heath Justice, who never once lets the reader off with making a facile generalization and never lets the reader down by doing something trite.  This novel, in conclusion, is well worth reading for anyone who finds the topics of fairness, equality, and societal love important issues; as well, it’s just a plain fun, good-humored, and remarkably admirable world in which to find oneself.  The only problem is that it ends too soon (do I hear “sequel?”).

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March 22, 2013 · 6:13 pm

Ford Madox Ford’s “Parade’s End”–The History of My Friendship with a Book

I’ve previously written a post here on WordPress.com about the way the love scenes are structured in the early portions of Ford Madox Ford’s tetralogy Parade’s End, but I just last night finished the last of the four novels, and have decided that I have a little more to say, even as to remarks about the physical book itself, and so I will post today and believe if I can that you will bear with me as I wander the vagaries of my friendship with a particular volume.  The four novels in question which comprise the tetralogy are (in order):  Some Do Not…, No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up–, and The Last Post.  I checked the four out from the library, published in one thick and much mishandled volume as they were, at least two months ago, and have been making my slow way through them ever since.  I should issue a spoiler alert, but first, I’d like to describe the physical volume as a clue to the book’s significance and history, odd though that might seem.

At first sight, the volume was too hefty and not particularly prepossessing:  the dust cover was black, with orange, gray, and white lettering, and much torn and beaten up under its plastic surface, with the two latter names “Madox Ford” filled in with a piece of white note paper by a diligent but not especially skilled librarian where it had been torn away.  There were pages where pieces of the text were missing, and the spine of the book was broken in a quite final way in one spot.  As the consoling librarian told me when I talked to her about how damaged the book was, how sad that it had not been adequately repaired or replaced, and how very slow-moving and not really exciting the plot was (as I was thinking at the time), she said, “Well, if it’s not that good a book, that’s probably why they’ve kept renewing it for people instead of replacing the copy with a newer and more costly copy.”  This stirred my sympathy for the book, and incidentally for Ford Madox Ford, whom Hemingway disliked intensely even as a friend and called a liar; and we all know that Hemingway, though a great writer, wasn’t entirely likeable himself in many of his manifestations and friendships.  So, I decided to stick it out with my friend the book to see what more it might have to say other than “I’m a boring old book by a stick of a writer who wrote tons of other books and whose other famous book The Good Soldier is much better.”  And I’m glad I did.

My reasons for being glad are a little unclear, however.  The book seems old-fashioned and sometimes prissy, and has the subtitle “Being the story of Christopher Tietjens, ‘the last English Tory,’ now for the first time in one volume, as intended by the author.”  Why should I, a staunch American liberal, want to read about a Tory, the ironically claimed last one or otherwise?  Why should I care were he truly the last one?  But the book already had a hold on me through the love relationship the already married Christopher was trying to restrain himself from having with the much younger Valentine Wannop; in short, I was so exasperated with him for not having the umph! to divorce his wife Sylvia, who dramatically tortures and abuses him emotionally throughout the book, even when he has made a commitment to Valentine, lives with her, and is having a child with her out of wedlock, that I had to read to the end to see what would happen.  This is the motive for reading which is one of the three or four different motives listed by Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction, and it is arguably the least artistically or aesthetically inclined, but I wasn’t much enchanted with the style of the writing, so cannot claim that that was my reason for persisting.  I slogged through a volume which bore mainly on England during the years leading up to WW I and also through two volumes taking place mostly in Europe at the battle sites with Tietjens during the war, and I was damned if I was going to put the book down before I got to read any possible part about Sylvia getting her comeuppance and Valentine and Christopher making a life together.

In the end, Sylvia declares her intention of divorcing Christopher (his main objection to divorcing her, in spite of the fact that she had cheated on him from their honeymoon on was that “a gentleman” doesn’t divorce a woman, whereas he can allow her to divorce him); Valentine and he can get married, with his dying brother Mark saying his last words to Valentine about not running Christopher into the ground with too much criticism.  Certainly, Christopher needs someone’s empathy, but he’s such a hapless figure, often described physically as a “meal sack,” which description not only eliminates our tendency to view him as “the dashing hero” but also seems to apply to the weightiness of his frame of mind, intellectual though meandering and slow-thinking as he is, that it’s hard to maintain empathy with him.  We are told that he is a good person, a heroic person, a person given to altruistic gestures of really quite an extreme nature, but sometimes it almost seems that he is a deliberate screw-up, a person who wants to lose because he is afraid to be victorious.

And of course, with all the self-interested eccentrics grouped around Tietjens in the novel, we have to ask ourselves that key question, which Ford is provoking us with, both in terms of war and of social status, and of love:  what price victory?  Finally, Christopher’s status as a successful lover is forced upon him by Valentine, who insists that his wife’s latest stratagem–that of saying she has cancer and deliberately spraining her ankle to prevent Tietjens and Valentine from having a good first night together–is a fraud and a hoax.  Christopher, at the end of the novel, is still being taken advantage of by business associates and “friends” of the family, but even though his brother Mark is dying, putting him himself in the position of being Tietjens of the family estate Groby, a responsibility he tries to duck out of in favor of his son Michael (by Sylvia), he now has a determined Valentine in his corner.  We see her both fussing at him in a justifiable way for a bad business deal he has made which endangers their ability barely to eke out a living, and giving way to Mark’s advice to her not to become irate with Christopher in front of her child, when it is born.  Thus, victory when it comes to Tietjens is serendipitous, a gift from chance or heaven, allowable within the terms of the stern fictive premise that noblesse oblige is what one owes to the whole world, not only those parts of it that favor one.  And the price of victory for finishing the book?  Now I no longer have a meal sack hero to shake my head over and become exasperated with for his so-called Christ-like demeanor (another comparison applied to him by other characters in the novel).  For, I think there is always a part of us which, engaged upon following the extended adventures of a traditional “sad sack” hero, secretly wishes the best for him, especially when we are convinced that his motives are good.  Were he a character in a purely satirical novel, it might be otherwise, but having read the four volumes, having lived within the “picture” of the world of England in the early 20th century as seen by Ford Madox Ford for the considerable time it took me to read the tetralogy, I have finally made my peace with a character whose impossibly “good” characteristics seem to cause other people to want to be “bad” to him.  While teleologically (that is, in terms of the ending, which is “looking up” for at least the two main characters, Christopher and Valentine) one might argue that it’s finally better to be “good” and keep waiting for the serendipitous ending to take place, however, the novel is so long and goes through so many vicissitudes of fortune for Christopher, that it’s hard to stick to this sort of readerly resolve.  As to Tietjens himself and his personality, I take it not only as a good character portrait, but as an object lesson:  you might be able to imagine someone, a character or a real person, being unrealistically good, but don’t try it yourself, unless you want infamy and obliquity to descend upon you in bucketsful!  And this is the point I thank my friend, the tetralogy in the volume Parade’s End, for making clear to me.  Sometimes, a book can be a very good friend indeed!

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March 21, 2013 · 3:59 pm

Julio Cortazar and a 1967 Example of Circular Form in the Short, Short Story….

I should preface my remarks today by saying that in the history of my own exposure to circular form, Julio Cortázar’s short short story “A Continuity of Parks” (translated by Paul Blackburn in the Ann Charters anthology I’ve mentioned before, The Story and Its Writer) is not the first example of circular form I’ve run across.  This is a particular kind of circular form, not simply that of a story which begins and ends at the same point rhetorically, in a rather humdrum way, but a form which circles in on itself almost solipsistically, and yet “looks” more like a spiral thus than like a circle, because it has implications of story which continue indefinitely instead of applying closure to the fiction.  Here’s a simple example of what I mean, from my own first exposure to the idea of spiral circular form; it may in actual fact have been either previous to or immediately after (and possibly inspired by) Cortázar’s story in actual historical terms, though I saw it long before I read “A Continuity of Parks,” because it too is from the 1960’s, from a time in my early childhood when I had escaped parental supervision enough to watch an afternoon horror film.  In this film, the title of which I likely never knew and which probably wasn’t memorable even at the time, a man is sitting in a chair reading a book.  As he sits, he reads aloud that a man (who seems to have his name) is sitting in a chair reading a book.  He then reads that a panel opens up behind the man’s head silently, and a pair of hands comes out, which in fact happens (and this inartistic pursuance of  the form strains credulity rather fast in a way which takes away from the true enjoyment of the spiral form in a way which “A Continuity of Parks” does not).  He then reads that the hands close around near to the man’s neck, which in actual fact the real hands do.  Then, he reads that the man is strangled, and so he is.  The rest of the movie was not even as artistic or as memorable as that rather weak attempt at postmodern form, but several more people are killed as in any horror film.  That I only remember that one death points to the singularity of its nature fictionally, and perhaps also not a little to my at the time immature and inattentive mind.

Cortázar’s story is far more intense and valid as a fictional essay at raising hairs on the back of one’s neck, and also points up the contract that each reader makes, willy-nilly, with each fiction he or she reads, just like the contracts and business of the reader’s daily life.  In the story, we are first told that a man had started to read a novel “a few days before,” but has had other urgent business to attend to and so has let the story drop for a while.  Then we read that he has signed a power of attorney and discussed “a matter of joint ownership with the manager of his estate,” and we can’t help but wonder if the man is ill, or aged, or is in some way expecting not to be around much longer, but this speculation doesn’t hold us for long, because promptly we are told that he takes up the novel again in “his favorite armchair” in “the tranquility of his study” and gradually we become absorbed in the story he is reading, about a couple who meet in a mountain cabin, the man armed with a knife.  We read of the reader, “He tasted the almost perverse pleasure of disengaging himself line by line from the things around him, and at the same time feeling his head rest comfortably on the green velvet of the chair with its high back….”  We are told that he is reading the “final chapters” of the book, and we follow along breathlessly, wondering if the male lover is getting ready to kill the female with the knife.  We read “Nothing had been forgotten:  alibis, unforeseen hazards, possible mistakes.  From this hour on, each instant had its use minutely assigned.  The cold-blooded, twice-gone-over reexamination of the details was barely broken off so that a hand could caress a cheek.  It was beginning to get dark.”

Next, though, instead of the male character stabbing the woman in the story (and they are the only two characters in the inset story so far), we are told “they separated at the cabin door.  She was to follow the trail that led north.”  He, by contrast, follows an “avenue of trees which led up to the house.”  In this last long paragraph, we read, “The dogs were not supposed to bark, they did not bark.  The estate manager would not be there at this hour, and he was not there.  He went up the three porch steps and entered.  The woman’s words reached him over the thudding of blood in his ears:  first a blue chamber, then a hall, then a carpeted stairway.  At the top, two doors.  No one in the first room, no one in the second.  The door of the salon, and then, the knife in hand, the light from the great windows, the high back of an armchair covered in green velvet, the head of the man in the chair reading a novel.”  Thus finally in the story, we see that the contract a reader makes with the novel is one in which he or she is at risk of losing something (in this fantastic, surreal case a life) in addition to what he or she gains in the reading of the novel.  The fictional reader has lost a life, by “contracting” to read the book, and we as the most external readers of this fiction have, in true postmodern form, lost our innocence, which is our ability to immerse ourselves in a fiction and to treat it as a whole, real fact, as a species of reality.  It is fiction, and only fiction, self-consciously so, and we must be self-conscious as we read it and as contemporary readers must learn to enjoy the puncturing of the balloon of a “whole, real” traditional kind of fiction.

As I’ve mentioned before in writing about Ann Charters’s anthology, she has also supplied a casebook of remarks made both by the authors of the stories and by other readers and critics which shed light upon the stories and their forms and conventions.  In a section pertaining to “A Continuity of Parks” entitled “On the Short Story and Its Environs” (written by Cortázar in 1986 and translated by Thomas Christensen), the author quotes one of the “Ten Commandments for the Perfect Story Teller” by Horacio Quiroga:  “Tell the story as if it were only of interest to the small circle of your characters, of which you may be one.  There is no other way to put life into the story.”  Though one could argue that there may be infinite other ways to put “life” into a story, which only have to be thought of to become a new tradition, one can certainly see that this sort of “circular” thinking is one which Cortázar finds natural and inspirational to his way of writing.  He goes on to say “This concept of the ‘small circle’ is what gives the dictum its deepest meaning, because it defines the closed form of the story, what I have elsewhere called its sphericity; but to this another, equally significant observation is added:  the idea that the narrator can be one of the characters, which means that the narrative situation itself must be born and die within the sphere, working from the interior to the exterior, not from outside in as if you were modeling the sphere out of clay.  To put it another way, an awareness of the sphere must somehow precede the act of writing the story, as if the narrator, surrendering himself to the form he has chosen, were implicitly inside of it, exerting the force that creates the spherical form in its perfection.”  This in fact is a very good description of what happens in this particular short story–the narrator himself as a character steps forward (in one sense) to close the fiction off in its “sphericity” and (in another sense) to open up a space for himself in the spiral, from the inside of which he “exerts the force,” like a dynamo perpetually active in generating a circle.  What sets the dynamo going?  It is the reader, who by picking up the book in the first place initiates a “contract” giving “power of attorney” and “joint interest” in his or her worldly “estate” to the book itself, entrusting himself or herself to the fortunes of fiction instead of the fortunes of war!

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March 14, 2013 · 11:58 pm

A Partisan Post–Cats and the Contemplative Life….

Today’s post is a partisan one, purely dedicated to cats as the companions and instigators of contemplation.  There are three famous poems at least having to do with cats (and I’m sure that there are many more poems which feature cats, but these are three particularly thought of by religious men, so since we have recently had a new Pope in the news, my thoughts turned to churchly cats doing, however, what cats do with their usual skill).  I wanted to share these poems because I myself am a cat fan and cannot help wondering if perhaps we are to see a cat in the Vatican as we have seen dogs and cats in the White House.  I mean no disrespect by this curiosity; rather, I had a strange dream last night of a tabby cat sitting high in an ornate window sill like those of the famous Basilica and fixedly watching a pigeon, and I wondered if maybe, just maybe, the new Pope would be allowed a feline companion.  Or if he even wants one.  Who knows, he may be a dog or a canary man.  Of the three poems below, the first was written by an unknown Irish monk and found in St. Paul, Carinthia, Austria in the 9th century, and has been translated by several poets, including W. H. Auden, Eavan Boland, and Frank O’Connor (the rendition below is O’Connor’s).  The second poem was written by a religious fanatic who was periodically hospitalized but was a talented poet revered more after his death than during his lifetime, Christopher Smart, who lived from 1722-1771.  The third and last poem, from 1937, was written by Canadian Methodist clergyman, philosopher, and English professor E. J. Pratt, and perhaps views the cat with what many would regard as the most realism of the three poems, but which also clearly places the cat in the position of contemplative “muse.”  I will give these three poems in their entirety below, as each is past its first copyright expiration date and has appeared on the Internet elsewhere.  Thus, I am leaving the real work today to my readers and the respective cats, and hoping that even those who are not innate cat lovers as I am will enjoy the ingenuity of the poets concerned.

Poem #1–“Pangur Ban” (translated as “White Fuller,” which Frank O’Connor retitles “The Scholar and the Cat”):  “Each of us pursues his trade,/I and Pangur my comrade,/His whole fancy in the hunt/And mine for learning ardent./More than fame I love to be/Among my books and study,/Pangur does not grudge me it,/Content with his own merit./When a heavenly time! we are/In our small room together/Each of us has his own sport/And asks no greater comfort./While he sets his round sharp eye/On the wall of my study/I turn mine, though lost its edge,/On the great wall of knowledge./Now a mouse drops in his net/After some mighty onset/While into my bag I cram/Some difficult darksome problem./When a mouse comes to the kill/Pangur exults, a marvel!/I have when some secret’s won/My hour of exultation./Though we work for days and years/Neither the other hinders;/Each is competent and hence/Enjoys his skill in silence./Master of the death of mice,/He keeps in daily practice,/I too, making dark things clear,/Am of my trade a master.”

Poem #2–“For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry (excerpt, Jubilate Agno)”:  “For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry./For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him./For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way./For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness./For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer./For he rolls upon prank to work it in./For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself./For this he performs in ten degrees./For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean./For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there./For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended./For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood./For fifthly he washes himself./For sixthly he rolls upon wash./For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat./For eighthly he rubs himself against a post./For ninthly he looks up for his instructions./For tenthly he goes in quest of food./For having consider’d God and himself he will consider his neighbour./For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness./For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance./For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying./For when his day’s work is done his business more properly begins./For he keeps the Lord’s watch in the night against the adversary./For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes./For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life./For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him./For he is of the tribe of Tiger./For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger./For he has the subtlety and hissing of a serpent, which in goodness he suppresses./For he will not do destruction, if he is well-fed, neither will he spit without provocation./For he purrs in thankfulness, when God tells him he’s a good Cat./For he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon./For every house is incomplete without him and a blessing is lacking in the spirit./For the Lord commanded Moses concerning the cats at the departure of the Children of Israel from Egypt./For every family had one cat at least in the bag./For the English Cats are the best in Europe./For he is the cleanest in the use of his forepaws of any quadruped./For the dexterity of his defence is an instance of the love of God to him exceedingly./For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature./For he is tenacious of his point./For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery./For he knows that God is his Saviour./For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest./For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion./For he is of the Lord’s poor and so indeed is he called by benevolence perpetually–Poor Jeoffry! poor Jeoffry! the rat has bit thy throat./For I bless the name of the Lord that Jeoffry is better./For the divine spirit comes about his body to sustain it in complete cat./For his tongue is exceeding pure so that it has in purity what it wants in music./For he is docile and can learn certain things./For he can set up with gravity which is patience upon approbation./For he can fetch and carry, which is patience in employment./For he can jump over a stick which is patience upon proof positive./For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command./For he can jump from an eminence into his master’s bosom./For he can catch the cork and toss it again./For he is hated by the hypocrite and the miser./For the former is afraid of detection./For the latter refuses the charge./For he camels his back to bear the first notion of business./For he is good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly./For he made a great figure in Egypt for his signal services./For he killed the ichneumon-rat very pernicious by land./For his ears are so acute that they sting again./For from this proceeds the passing quickness of his attention./For by stroking of him I have found out electricity./For I perceived God’s light about him both wax and fire./For the Electrical fire is the spiritual substance, which God sends from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast./For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements./For, tho he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer./For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadruped./For he can tread to all the measures upon the music./For he can swim for life./For he can creep.”

Poem #3–“The Prize Cat”:  “Pure blood domestic, guaranteed,/Soft-mannered, musical in purr,/The ribbon had declared the breed,/Gentility was in the fur./Such feline culture in the gads/No anger ever arched her back–/What distance since those velvet pads/Departed from the leopard’s track!/And when I mused how Time had thinned/The jungle strains within the cells,/How human hands had disciplined/Those prowling optic parallels;/I saw the generations pass/Along the reflex of a spring,/A bird had rustled in the grass,/The tab had caught it on the wing;/Behind the leap so furtive-wild/Was such ignition in the gleam,/I thought an Abyssinian child/Had cried out in the whitethroat’s scream.”

And there you have them, folks, three perspectives on the cat:  companionable, laudatory in the extreme, and finally taken wild with the wildness of the cat’s spring itself.  After having had a chance to read them again, I still reserve my own admiration for and right to admire the cat, but perhaps I should hesitate about the “election” of a cat as the ideal contemplative companion, tail twitching as it watches the pigeons in Rome–what do you think?

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