Category Archives: What is literature for?

April 22, 2016 · 3:28 pm

When is a cow not a cow, and a story not (much of) a story?–David Duchovny’s “Holy Cow!”

Maybe it’s just that it’s spring, all things are budding and blooming, and once again I’ve begun my hunt for the perfectly (or even imperfectly) uplifting book, possibly one with a message, or just one with a lot of fun to it.    I had wondered if David Duchovny’s book Holy Cow! would be it.  It wasn’t.  Perceive me as seriously underwhelmed, both in the uplifting-message and the amusement department.

Since there’s not much point in worrying about spoilers and such when a book has no suspense anyway (especially not of the literary kind), here’s what the book is basically “about”:

A cow named Elsie, a pig first named Jerry who then re-names himself “Shalom,” and a turkey named Tom, all of whom suddenly acquire the ability to read and operate technology, decide to leave the farm and go (respectively) to India, Israel, and Turkey, where they expect to elude their seeming fates as human food and be appreciated (or worshipped, in Elsie’s case) as the individuals they are.  Fair enough.  But the book’s jokes are hokey and fall flat, the twists and turns of the “plot” are unsurprising or at least unrewarding, and the “message” at the end, that we should all (humans as well as animals) appreciate that we are animals and work a better deal out between our higher and lower faculties, is not handled well, and comes out facile and silly.  The whole is clearly not an allegory, and even mentions George Orwell’s famous book Animal Farm, which is.  The later book mentions that an ordinary farm is not like Orwell’s allegorical one, which seems to initiate a departure point for Duchovny’s story, yet the point seems to be obvious:  this is a story with talking animals which is not an allegory.  So what?  It doesn’t make it as a fairy tale either, and is not one which I can imagine children taking an interest in (or adults finding enough satisfaction in to keep then reading, unless they had committed to do a post on the book, like yours truly).

The three animals travel together (and the improbabilities of this roving life are not overcome by any startling or marvelous events such as we are used to in fantasy fiction), and in each of the three target countries, they are disappointed of their goals to be individuals.  Their learning curves are very unstupendous, as they don’t change much in the choices they anticipate for themselves, Elsie (for example) returning to the farm, to the ordinary cow’s life, quite possibly.

So, what do I advise about this book?  Give it a miss, unless you are just a sort of person who’s curious about what celebrities think about in their spare time.  The “I-wrote-this-book” element comes in strongly at the end, when Duchovny presents himself as the “cow-writer” (by unamusing analogy with “ghost-writer”?).  Though I rarely pan a book wholeheartedly, this is one that I really do dislike, not for any big overwhelming thing it does wrong, but just because it’s boring and the choices are ones that are expected and dull.  But then, I guess that is a big overwhelming thing!  The author is listed in the credits as an actor, director, and writer.  I suppose it’s cranky to say he should stick to acting, where others provide him with words, and where a lot of us like him.  I’ve never seen anything he’s directed, and so can’t comment about that.  But if this a representation of his abilities as a writer, then he needs a writing class which focuses on topic (I didn’t really notice much wrong with his stylistics or grammar, but perhaps that’s because I was slogging through the book looking for content).  And now, I think I’ll take a dose of spring tonic to get over my bitchy mood, and look for a better book to read and review.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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April 10, 2016 · 8:20 pm

The Shape Events Take in the Human Mind–William Trevor’s “After Rain”

Finally, I am back to blogging again, and it has been a long time since I could really call myself a regular blogger, several months in fact.  Therefore, I hope my readers will be patient with a very long post, to make up for all the time away.  Also, I need to issue spoiler alerts for the short stories in this volume, but since they are literary short stories and not suspense or mystery ones, but ones which a person might read again and again for their staying power and quality, I don’t feel so bad about that.  So here goes:

In his well-known short volume The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode said, “It is not expected of critics as it is of poets that they should help us to make sense of our lives; they are bound only to attempt the lesser feat of making sense of the ways in which we try to make sense of our lives.”  To again quote and paraphrase Kermode, this critique is thus “at two removes” from life itself, and at one remove from “the meaning of the work.”  Humans, he indicates, are “uncomfortable with their own short life span, and they try to make sense of the beginning, middle, and end of history and histories,” seeing themselves in “a middle” which is particularly important to “a future.”

I find Kermode’s words particularly interesting in the evolving story pattern which develops in William Trevor’s collection of short stories, After Rain.  Even when the characters are near the end of their lives, as are the devoted husband and wife who are snubbed by their son at his birthday celebration in “Timothy’s Birthday” in the third story of the collection, there is no real compositional sense of resolution at hand outside of what characters think.  Characters markedly have trouble making sense in any sustained way of their facts and changes near the ends of their lives, or fail to do so, as does Eddie the “rough trade” character in the same story.  By contrast, they sometimes (especially as one gets farther into the book) create whole worlds of events to happen or which they surmise have happened.

In the first story (to go back a bit), “The Piano Tuner’s Wives,” the blind piano tuner accepts that his second wife may be lying to him about things his first beloved wife described to him in detail, in order to claim her own place at his side, but he doesn’t seem to feel any need to resolve the contradictions:  instead, he faces the remainder of his life with two different versions of reality as his compass.

The story “The Friendship” is anticlimactic at the end, which spells the end of a long friendship over what was a moment’s choice of deceit in the story.  The two friends merely separate, but the finality of it, though stated, is not emphasized at its otherwise preeminent and important place at the end of the story with anything like strong emotion.  It seems instead deliberately understated.  Though they separate for good, the emphasis is rather on the day as an ordinary day, which prefigures “A Day” later on.  Yet even though no one can foresee the future, the deceitful character tells herself that the other will mention their resolve to part later on, and even thinks she knows what the circumstances will be.

“Child’s Play” is a story in which two children, Gerard and Rebecca, are thrown together as playmates because two of their parents are cheating with each other.  There is a divorce, and a new family structure is formed.  The adults are never known by their own names, but in a reversal of their importance to themselves and the children’s minor positions are known only by appellations such as “Gerard’s father,” “Rebecca’s mother.”  The children play together by imitating the words and phrases they have heard the parents say, underlining the actual rockiness and irony of the children’s ability to possess them.  But even this pattern gets disrupted in the sudden impermanence that comes from the adults’ inability to behave well themselves in terms of their children’s interests.  The children’s game is broken, and with no future to it in sight.

“A Bit of Business” is a story in which two hoodlums, Mangan and Gallagher, are busy looting empty homes left empty while people go to see the Pope in Phoenix Park.  Mr. Livingston, an older man, is left by the Herlihys to mind their flat “while the Guards [are] all out at the park,” as they tell him.  He thinks that they really just wanted him to be able to watch the Pope on their television set, and so isn’t prepared for the two crooks when they break in on him; they are equally surprised to confront anyone at home.  But the rest of the story follows the action of the two burglars, who pick up a couple of girls, or “motts,” as they call them, and spend the day drinking and taking advantage of the girls’ only too willing favors.  The worst thing that happens to them this day at least is that at the end of it, the girls become insistent about seeing them again, which promise the men do not intend to keep.  The end of their day consists in each wondering how long it will be before Mr. Livingston gives an accurate description to the police, their individual regrets that they didn’t kill him while they had the chance, and their questions, each to himself, as to whether the ability to kill was acquired.  Their future, such as it is, is one in which they imagine themselves caught.

In “After Rain,” the scene taking place once the refreshment of rain is over doesn’t happen until the last sentence, which it is compared to a visual scene in the background of a painting of the Annunciation in the Church of Santa Fabiola, in a town in Italy where a young woman has gone after the death of a love relationship.  She stays in a pensione she visited when a child.  Going to the church and viewing the painting, the young woman thinks that it was intended to show a scene that happened after rain.  “The story of Santa Fabiola is lost in the shadows that were once the people of her life, the family tomb reeks odourlessly of death.  Rain has sweetened the breathless air, the angel comes mysteriously also.”  Thus, her past and her present and her future too are telescoped just as in the Annunciation the angel was both a vision to Mary of the future and a prefiguration of the Angel of Death.  Still, the angel’s coming mysteriously is the source of the title of the whole book of stories, for the entire collection has mysteries and predictions and truncated endings as its modus operandi.  The entire book falls under the rubric of death in terms of death of relationships, as in this story, and each story ends and yet most don’t really resolve.  Therefore, after the rain, though it may seem to clear the air, the mystery of the angel remains.

The story “Widows” is perhaps not so much about the death of a relationship or death itself as it is about the transformation of a relationship, just as the Tarot card “Death” signifies not actual death but change.  In this case, the relationship between two sisters is fated to change.  Catherine (a recent widow who was happy with her husband) and Alicia (a widow of many years, who had an unhappy marriage) live together, and in this composition have to deal with a dishonest odd-jobs man with the outsize (and inaccurate) name of Thomas Pius John Leary, who insists that the job done for them before Catherine’s husband died is not paid for.  This is a kind of fraud that he and his wife are likely to practice on a widow, but because she can’t find the receipt that proves her husband’s payment, Catherine eventually feels she has to pay.  He presses, by insisting that he has no copy of a receipt in his book.  Alicia, the stronger and older sister, wants to report Leary to the Guards for trying to run a confidence trick, but even though she always protected her sister in their youth, Catherine won’t allow it now because of a strange sort of pride and desire for privacy about her married life.  “….Catherine was paying money in case, somehow, the memory of her husband should be accidentally tarnished.”  The relationship between the sisters is conditioned in the present by the relationship each had with her husband:  Alicia’s husband was a disappointment, Catherine’s was a jewel of a gentleman.  Thus, Alicia cannot understand Catherine’s protectiveness towards her own husband’s memory.  But as Catherine realizes the morning before she goes to pay the undue debt, “[w]hile they were widows in her house Alicia’s jealousy would be the truth they shared….widows were widows first.  Catherine would mourn, find in solitude the warmth of love.  For Alicia there was the memory of her [own] beauty.”  This story too has no obvious ending, other than an implied one, but this makes it more complete than the stories which are placed before “After Rain” in the book.  Indeed, the stories featured after that pivotal title story all seem to have at least some implied ending if not a complete one.

Another aspect of family membership, motherhood in particular, appears in “Gilbert’s Mother.”  Rosalie Mannion, who is the “Gilbert’s mother” of the title, is in a story which is chilling for two (at least) different reasons:  the first is that if Gilbert is the serial miscreant being covered in at least one local news story, then he is too clever to be caught.  The second is that it’s his own mother who suspects him of being that person and her suspicion is parsed in a grammar of differences that she has noticed about him, at least in her own imagination, since he was two.  “It was always the News, on the radio or the television, that prompted her dread.  When a fire was said to have been started deliberately, or a child enticed, or broken glass discovered in baby-food jars in a supermarket, the dread began at once–the hasty calculations, the relief if time and geography ruled out involvement.”  The story is left unfinished in a sense, because even though there’s never any proof against Gilbert, the suggestion is that he controls his mother and makes himself the center of her life by manipulating her fears about him.  Yet, he is never arrested or accused of anything in any but his mother’s mind.  Inasmuch as there is the Biblical clause “and Mary pondered these things in her heart,” and the central story of this collection, “After Rain,” is connected with a painting of “The Annunciation,” so this story is the negative version of the Virgin Mary’s “ponderings.”  The destiny of a child, who can foresee or control it, even its mother?

“The Potato Dealer” is a tale in which yet another birth occurs, in which the unwed mother, Ellie, is married off to a much older potato dealer, Mulreavey, to hide her shame.  He is willing to take her for the sake of her uncle’s farm and lands, a deal made for the future.  While he doesn’t insist on his “conjugal rights,” Mulreavy does expect to inherit the farm from Mr. Larrissey, Ellie’s uncle.  When the baby, Mary Josephine, is born, Ellie remembers the real father, a visiting priest, but whereas she treasures the child for the sake of this real father’s memory, Mulreavey accepts the child out of greed, practicality, and even a small measure of affection.  Finally, though, when the child is ten, Ellie can no longer keep the father’s identity a secret, and tells the potato dealer he was a priest; her family is angry with her.  Then, that same evening, she tells the child.  The local priest is as angry with her for revealing the truth as he is with her for her original activity with the visiting priest.  In the end, the revelation doesn’t much affect the relationship between Mulreavy and Ellie.–So, what is the story’s point?  Interestingly enough, and obviously enough as well, I suppose, when viewed from the perspective of the child’s name (Mary Josephine, family names, “Joseph” being Mr. Larrissey’s first name), this is about a modern version of the Biblical story of Christ, with a priest (God’s representative) standing in the place of the Holy Dove.  The story is shot with many ironies, but most of all, it suggests human dimensions to the divine birth, dimensions that one can imagine in any time or any place.  Most of all, the events are like those of a storm which has been long coming, and thus again “after the rain” is a representational idea.

Events in Northern Ireland are in the forefront of “Lost Ground.”  Briefly, it is the tale of a Protestant boy who is slain by a member of his own family for saying that a woman who called herself St. Rosa kissed him with a holy kiss in his father’s apple orchard.  Before the bitter ending, however, the reactions of people on both sides of the Protestant-Catholic split are shown.  His brother-in-law, the Protestant minister, tells him to forget about it and not to mention it.  The Catholic priest tries to help him identify the woman as a known saint, assuming that she was actually a saint, but is privately resentful and angry because the appearance wasn’t to a Catholic.  His family gradually restricts his movements until he is confined to his room permanently, because he becomes convinced that he has to go from town to town and preach about her appearance to him.  Finally, when his whole family but one is away for the day at a Protestant march, his one brother remaining, who is a butcher and a sort of gangster, comes with a friend and murders him.  And even though most of the family members secretly know that this is what happened to him, yet they as well as the other guessing members of the community remain silent.  The story ends:  “The family would not ever talk about the day, but through their pain they would tell themselves that Milton’s death was the way things were, the way things had to be:  that was their single consolation.  Lost ground had been regained.”  This is yet another story in a progression of Christianity-related material, yet even though there’s a discernible pattern of events to it with a discernible ending, the tragedy of the fighting back and forth in the Northern Ireland of the time is highlighted:  one side loses ground, then the other side.  At times, it must have surely seemed that there was indeed no ending.  And the fact that none of the family members actually witnessed the event of the boy’s murder yet that all accepted it was necessary and had been done by a family member–what if it wasn’t?  What if it had been the breaking and entering that they apparently represented it as in public?  Again, there are characters surmising, not being sure of an ending, yet creating it for themselves.

In the short piece “A Day,” reminiscent in a sense of a dark Mrs Dalloway, though it’s seemingly simple enough, there is a sudden surprise “ending”; of course, the scene is rather of repetition and continuation and not of an actual isolated event at all, by the time that the story is over in words.  Mrs. Lethwes’s day is presented, event after event, a simple unfolding of a daily routine.  In the course of this routine, we learn that her husband, who is apparently a very kind and considerate person, is cheating on her, at least to judge by an intercepted letter of his which she read and threw away (we know only a few isolated facts from it which she assumes as a matter of course, and we never see the letter.  Is it possible that there is some other explanation?).  She is barren, and is afraid that her husband intends to leave her for the other woman, whom she imagines to be younger and more fertile than she.  The story moves slowly, chronologically, through the day.  It is only at the cocktail hour, while she is preparing dinner, that we hit upon the crux of the matter:  for her repeated cocktails as she is fixing the food show that she is in fact an alcoholic, which is the real surprise.  It seems that she drinks out of fear every day, of that being the one day in which her husband will come in and announce that the other woman is pregnant and that he is leaving her, Mrs. Lethwes.  The story ends with her having passed out, as it appears she often does, and her husband carrying her away gently to bed.  The emphasis in this story is divided between the ending she thinks is coming, and the continued sense of her husband’s love and gentleness, one playing against the other.  One wonders if it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The last sentence of “Marrying Damian” is in a certain sense a motto for the whole book, but more of that in a moment.  This story, as the last one in the book, is indeed entitled to have the last word, though the plot doesn’t force this conclusion.  Though the story  is evidently complete, it reverts in a way to the overall foregoing pattern of something unresolved.  When Johanna is five, she tells her mother, Claire, and her father (the “I” of the story) that she is going to marry Damian, a family friend who is their age, and who is already married.  A brief tale of the years passing shows them manifesting consternation and some amusement as Damian weds and divorces woman after woman.  He is their soap opera, if you will.  They don’t take Johanna’s words seriously.  After all, it’s not their problem.  But then comes the day when, on one of his periodic sponging visits, Damian and Johanna meet again;  she is twenty-seven.  The parents fear at once that she is taking to Damian as one of her human projects to an alarming degree, and that the conclusion is foregone.  Yet, they do not feel that they can do anything about it.  As the speaker sees it:  “It was too late to hate him.  It was too late to deny that we’d been grateful when our stay-at-home smugness had been enlivened by the tales of his adventures, or to ask him if he knew how life had turned out for the women who had loved him.  Instead we conversed inconsequentially.”  In a way, this story has commonalities with “Gilbert’s Mother,” in that a character is postulating a series of actions that may or may not be true, though in this case they are future actions; in the case of Gilbert’s mother, she is guessing at the actions of his immediate past.  And in both cases, their surmises are a sort of annunciatory angel, as in the central story’s artistic reference, though a sort of this flawed world, which may be imperfectly true.  What we are in fact being given a chance to see and speculate upon in this collection is in fact the number of times our actions are inconsequential and incomplete, until we shape them by our own beliefs and prognostications.  Then, they become the plots in our lives whose structures seem given by our stars.  As the character above says, we try to duck beneath what we may have caused to happen by “convers[ing] inconsequentially.”

Indeed, this is a fine book of stories, and one of the best I’ve ever found for carrying a theme from beginning to end.  I hope that you will read this book for yourself, for even if you know the plots by my recalling them, the point of a fine story is in the number of times it can be reread or retold.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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January 27, 2016 · 5:14 pm

Gathering material for a memoir: “A Cat’s-Eye View of These Mean Streets”

Dear Loyal Readers,

I believe that it has now been roughly two months since I regularly posted anything to this blog, and while that is outrageous, I had my reasons, namely that first, I was completing crochet projects for Christmas, and then that (regrettably but unavoidably) I picked up a nasty laryngitis-sore throat bug during the holidays themselves, and was busy trying not to be too miserable, so as not to ruin my own and others’ good time.  But by way of apology, I would like to offer you my first ever guest post, done by an aspiring author who is handicapped by the absence of opposable thumbs, and digits on her little mitts long enough to type with.  She is my new roommate, Lucie-Minou, and we not only share living space now, but also share the same last name; that is, if I can ever effect change of her opinion that she adopted me, whereas I think I adopted her.  For now, she will only consent to be called “Lucie-Minou,” which is a Frenchified name given her because when I heard her say “Miaow,” and not “Meow,” I knew that she would prefer it.  Since I am only her amanuensis for this post, however, let me cease typing my own greetings, and give you the direct words (as far as I can claim to understand by inference and occasional miaows and lots of purrs and pats with a paw) of the aspiring author who has been staring out windows to gain perspective, and gathering materials for a memoir of her life up to now.  I suspect that her efforts will also owe something to fiction, due to the number of times she’s knocked down the same books from the lower shelves until they lie by her food bowl, apparently for reading with her meals.  So far, her interests seem to lie with Jane Smiley’s Ordinary Love and Good Will, Barbara Howes’s edition of The Eye of the Heart:  Short Stories from Latin America, a pocket anthology of Robert Frost’s Poems (edited by Louis Untermeyer), e.e.cummings’s Erotic Poems, Loomis’s and Willard’s Medieval English Verse and Prose, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Collected Novellas.   Here, then is Lucie-Minou:

“Bonjour, mes amis!  There, we’ve now settled the question of whether I know any French for real and true.  I have to say that I pride myself on being able to be a sort of universally acceptable speaker, and frankly Shadowoperator is being a bit pretentious in assuming that my miaows are perfect enough to suit the French, certainly at least the Parisians, who themselves are very particular about their language.  Furthermore, as we are learning by our reading of a book loaned us by a friend who also is allowed to share space with a cat (Patricia Barey’s and Therese Burson’s Julia’s Cats:  Julia Child’s Life in the Company of Cats), “Minou” is a masculine cat name, not usually used for a female cat.  Still, I find it acceptable because I am in some ways an old-fashioned girl, and don’t mind bearing my father’s or my erstwhile husband’s last name, whichever of them gave it me (philandering husbands are a sore subject with me, however, best left out of the memoirs).

But on to my working life.  Right now, I am putting together materials in my head for a memoir, called tentatively A Cat’s-Eye View of These Mean Streets, about my early life (which to this point remains shrouded in mystery, except that I have a birthdate of 7/2/14), and then my woeful sojourn on the streets of a small Vermont town, belly swollen with young after being put out by my faithless human friends for something which was not, after all, my fault.  I was, however, lucky soon to find other human friends, who though they couldn’t keep me were able to bring me to a shelter, where I introduced myself to Shadowoperator and her nephew Charles when they came in requesting a cat.  Well, I may be a bit shy, but after all, I too am a literary cat, though at that point one with few options other than to present myself, and if a cat was wanted, I felt I could certainly fit the bill.  To paraphrase Shakespeare, “If you stroke me, do I not purr?”  Unhappily (though I don’t mean to go into this extensively in my memoir, my perspective basically being a bowl-half-full one), I lost my kittens because they were stillborn.  I will touch on that lightly in my memoir, as it was a definitive moment in my life, but not a permanently damaging one.  I am quite happy right now to be where I am doing what I am doing, and I think my memoir, which will handle both past and present, with a hopeful note of future doings, will reflect that.  Basically, though not wanting to give too much away, I plan to filter my own early days and days on the street through the more comfortable perspective of my present-day life, spent safely inside a condo without access to the street, watching from a window high above the goings-on of other beings not so lucky.  There are moments, yes, when I approach the condo door and sniff at it, detecting unusual smells and sounds, and then I feel my curiosity rising.  But when Shadowoperator hears me miaow at her to open the door and very solemnly says that prohibitive and final word “No,” I am content to let her go out without me.  For now, anyway.

But you are probably wondering about the other portions of my day.  Well, first we have breakfast.  That’s an English word I know.  Then, I do some portion of my memoir, looking out at the street for inspiration.  Then, after Shadowoperator has something called “coffee,” and her own food, there’s sometimes play in the desk chair with a bird on a stick, or a session of stroking, or a brush (I prefer usually to have my fur done while I recline in the desk chair, since I’m allowed to finish the job by pulling my claws in the chair back when we’re done.  It’s really quite bizarre how humans react to the places I choose to pull my claws–some places “No!” and some places “Good kitty.”  They really are peculiar about it).  Then, I find one of my two favorite sleeping spots and curl up for a nap, a long nap, coming out only to eat a bit or use the facilities.  Periodically, Shadowoperator sticks her head in the room to inquire where I am, what’s the good kitty doing, do you want a brush? and other such things.  She baby-talks to me constantly, sings to me lyrics we’ve put to other old songs, and I put up with it, though I do put my ears back when she hits a wrong note, or when she chooses to tell me that it’s time to change my litter because I’m “such a little ‘tinky-poo!”  Really!  Some things are not meant to be subjects of funning.  Anyway, the day progresses, and sometimes I go to see what she is doing, and sometimes she comes to see what I am doing.  When it starts getting dark, she comes back into my main room hangout and closes the curtains and turns on the lights for me (she knows I can see in the dark, but it seems to comfort her to turn the lights on, so I let her do it.  Besides, humans can trip over one quite easily in a dark room, and I don’t like those misunderstandings we have when she’s trying to reassure me that she didn’t mean to run into me).  Then, we have supper, another human English word I know, and persisting in her determination to have me artificially multilingual, Shadowoperator warns me repeatedly to “use les dents.  Chew your food, don’t just swallow it!”  This comes from a problem I have because I had a tooth coming in for a while, and I gulped my food so as not to hurt the gum line, which sometimes resulted in an upchucking later.  But these things happen, and for the most part (which seemed to amaze my human friend no end) I always regurgitated on a flat, wipeable surface, for her convenience.

I know several other words, too.  There’s “treat,” and “play,” and “down,” and “brush,” and my play antagonist, the “comb,” and a few other bits and pieces I’ve picked up.  For example, when we’ve finished our nighttime play, there’s the sentence “Okay, time for bed.”  I hang around for a minute or two, just to see if this is negotiable, but it’s usually not.  I also feel that I know what “Come up on the bed” means, because when my friend says it, intending to brush me or stroke me or go to sleep with me at her feet, I do it, and then she says, “Goodnight, Lucie-Minou,” and sings a little night-time song that the two of us know.  And then we go to sleep.  Of course, I do get up at night and roam around, sometimes accidentally knocking something off.  When this wakes my friend up, she comes to see if I am hurt or have made any sort of difficult mess, but so far we’ve managed just fine together.  At this date, I am very pleased with my new life, though I sometimes despair of being understood completely, because my human friend only knows a few cat words, and the only one she says even half-way right is a more or less happy word, “prrrrrrtt!” and no one’s happy all the time.  No, I am philosophical:  this is far better than what I had before, and I do my best to remain content.  Even my curiosity about the main hall door remains somewhat in abeyance, because I was recently curious about one of the closets, and when she opened it to let me see what was inside, that dreaded monster which she calls “vacuum cleaner” was inside!  So, I suppose there is some reason for caution.  I hissed, she petted me, and we went on with our game in the smaller condo hall, but I couldn’t remain easy.  Still, that’s for another time.  So, now that you know some of the material I will be covering in my memoir, I hope that you will respect my fellow artists and artistes as well, and check to inquire whether your cat, dog, parakeet or whatever you may have is planning a similar venture.  Except for the turtles, of course.  With them, it’s a bit plodding; they tend to be the old school philologists, and spend a lot of time arguing about the meanings of different word roots and grammatical endings in the works of others, and their “creative” efforts (to be kind about the matter) are deep, rather boring, and sometimes inconclusive.  They too have their advocates, however, and I would be wrong to slight them.  We all have our work to do, after all.  At this stage, it would be fitting to end as I began, and say ‘Au revoir, mes amis,’ and I hope you have had such good luck for the New Year as to find a new friend like I have found in Shadowoperator and she has found in me.”

Well, there you have it:  my first guest post, by a treasured and devoted friend.  I hope and trust I have accurately transcribed her miaows and purrs and pats.  As the medieval monk told his scribe, “When you transcribe correctly, it is my work.  When you do it badly, it begins to be yours,” or words to that effect.  Lucie-Minou seems to feel her obligation to speak more directly, and not merely to appear as a subject as did another medieval monk’s cat “Pangur Ban,” or Christopher Smart’s cat “Geoffrey.”  I would like to wish her all good luck with her creative venture, and all of you reading some form of pet to help you with your happiness factor.  Yours most joyously, vociferously, and sincerely,

Shadowoperator

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October 17, 2015 · 2:29 pm

A Halloween Floral Tribute from H. G. Wells–“The Flowering of the Strange Orchid”

The impetus toward discovery is a key feature of human nature, and it has spawned many a great invention and many a new and innovative usage of older inventions.  Without those first tentative steps from the depths of the cave and into a new world of perhaps questionable provenance, where would humankind be now?  Still in what is somewhat inaccurately known as the Stone Age.  Nevertheless, as one would say of a secondary computer program, “concurrently running” is the conservative and opposite function of drawing back and using fear of difference as a guide to behavior, and each of these two impulses has its place in guiding human behavior; each is appropriate and necessary for human survival in a world which at times is placid and forgiving, at times inimical and hostile.  As you will see, one without the other can be downright dangerous and spooky, in this Halloween celebration of one of the lesser-known tales of H. G. Wells, “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid.”

T he principle of discovery and the delight one may take in it are articulated in the first paragraph of the story, written at a time when some parts of the globe were still largely foreign and shrouded in mystery:  “The buying of orchids always has in it a certain speculative flavour.  You have before you the brown shrivelled lump of tissue, and for the rest you must trust your judgment, or the auctioneer, or your good-luck, as your taste may incline.  The plant may be moribund or dead, or it may just be a respectable purchase, fair value for your money, or perhaps–for the thing has happened again and again–there slowly unfolds before the delighted eyes of the happy purchaser, day after day, some new variety, some novel richness, a strange twist of the labellum, or some subtler coloration or unexpeccted mimicry.  Pride, beauty, and profit blossom together on one delicate green spike, and, as it may be, even immortality.  For the new miracle of Nature may stand in need of a new specific name, and what so convenient as that of its discoverer?  ‘Johnsmithia’!  There have been worse names.”  This is the elevated perspective of Winter-Wedderburn, a “shy, lonely, rather ineffectual man, provided with just enough income to keep off the spur of necessity, and not enough nervous energy to make him seek any exacting employment.”  This is his hobby, his main enthusiasm, his love.

Speaking on the other side of the question is his housekeeper, who is also a distant female cousin.  Every time he enthuses about orchids or discoverers of orchids who have risked life and limb in jungles and swamps to search for the strange blooms, she promptly puts him down.  And every time he longs for something new and different to happen in his life, she applies the breaks of reason, and assures him that such thoughts are perilous, controversial, and undesirable.  He doesn’t listen, however, but keeps wishing for an eventful life, totally opposed to the efforts he actually puts forth to get one:  “‘Nothing ever does happen to me,’ he remarked presently, beginning to think aloud.  ‘I wonder why?  Things enough happen to other people.  There is Harvey.  Only the other week–on Monday he picked up sixpence, on Wednesday his chicks all had the staggers, on Friday his cousin came home from Australia, and on Saturday he broke his ankle.  What a whirl of excitement!–compared to me.'”  His housekeeper, feeling perhaps that he is heading for disaster (as in fact he is, by wishing for a life which is basically opposed in action, even if whimsically, to his own), responds:  “‘I think I would rather be without so much excitement….It can’t be good for you.'”

He continues, without hearing her caution, to mull over the even more adventurous life, recently ended, of an orchid collector:  “‘That orchid-collector was only thirty-six–twenty years younger than myself–when he died.  And he had been married twice and divorced once; he had had malarial fever four times, and once he broke his thigh.  He killed a Malay once, and once he was wounded by a poisoned dart.  And in the end he was killed by jungle leeches.  It must have been all very troublesome, but then it must have been very interesting, you know–except, perhaps, the leeches.”  The housekeeper, however, also sticks to her convervational guns:  “‘I am sure it was not good for him….'”  He prepares to go to another orchid sale, she, once again protectively, makes sure he has his umbrella, and he heads straight for the adventure he has been longing to have.  As this story among many shows, the old adage “Be careful what you ask the gods for, for you shall surely receive it,” is spot on the money.

He comes back with a selection of orchids of various kinds, some of which are recognizable and one of which is not identified.  He is very excited by it (it is described as “a shrivelled rhizome),” but his housekeeper in immediate answer takes what seems like an unreasonable dislike to it.  “‘I don’t like the look of it….It’s such an ugly shape….I don’t like those things that stick out….It looks…like a spider shamming dead.'”

He addresses her concern by answering with something which is not, in fact, any further recommendation to her, but to him and his perspective:  “‘They found poor Batten lying dead, or dying, in a mangrove swamp–I forget which…with one of these very orchids crushed up under his body.  He had been unwell for some days with some kind of native fever, and I suppose he fainted.  These mangrove swamps are very unwholesome.  Every drop of blood, they say, was taken out of him by the jungle-leeches.  It may be that very plant that cost him his life to obtain.’  ‘I think none the better of it for that’ [says the housekeeper].'” Remarks this ludicrous little Walter Mitty-ish hero, “‘Men must work though women may weep,'” thus partaking in the glory of one of his own supposed role models.  But he is in for more than he bargained for.

As the orchid grows and develops, Wedderburn becomes more and more protective of it, adjusting everything in his small hothouse to suit it.  The housekeeper maintains her prejudice, however, and the aerial rootlets, reaching forth like so many fingers, do not increase her confidence in it.  She refuses to go to the orchid-house until the day when Wedderburn is extremely late for tea, given his usual punctual habits.  This is the same day when he first notices the “new odour in the air, a rich, intensely sweet scent,” and sees to his delighted surprise that the orchid has blossomed.  “…[B]ehold, the trailing green spikes bore now three great splashes of blossom,, from which this overpowering sweetness proceeded.  He stopped before them in an ecstasy of admiration….The flowers were white, with streaks of golden orange upon the petals; the heavy labellum was coiled into an intricate projection, and a wonderful bluish purple mingled there with the gold.  He could see at once that the genus was altogether a new one.  And the insufferable scent!  How hot the place was!  The blossoms swam before his eyes….He would see if the temperature was right.  He made a step towards the thermometer.  Suddenly everything appeared unsteady.  The bricks on the floor were dancing up and down.  Then the white blossoms, the green leaves behind them,  the whole greenhouse, seemed to sweep sideways, and then in a curve upward.”

When the housekeeper finally reaches the hothouse, an eerie sight greets her:  “He was lying, face upward, at the foot of the strange orchid.  The tentacle-like aërial rootlets…were crowded together, a tangle of grey ropes, and stretched tight with their ends closely applied to his chin and neck and hands….She did not understand.  Then she saw from under one of the exultant tentacles upon his cheek there trickled a little thread of blood.”  At first, she approaches and tries to tear the tentacles off, but the scent of the orchid begins to overpower her as well, so she masters her main force and drags both man and orchid with a crash into the open air.  There she is able to tear away the rootlets, where she can see that he is “white and bleeding from a dozen circular patches.”  She calls the odd-job man, and Annie, the housemaid, and sends for Doctor Haddon.  Wedderburn’s life is saved, and the others go to the orchid house later and see that the odd orchid is in a stage of decay, though when the doctor steps too near, one of the aerial roots still stirs upward briefly.

The next day, the adventure is over, but even though the housekeeper’s warnings have been supported and verified by events, Wedderburn is unrepentant.  “Wedderburn himself was bright and garrulous…in the glory of his strange adventure.” So, the next time you wish your life were more eventful, or envy even slightly the busy, bold, bustling life of your favorite hero or heroine, reflect that there is a reason why such people exist and a reason why you exist as you do, not in the forefront, but safely in the rearguard, or the main body.  For, such people’s stories are meant to inspire you, perhaps, to continue forth with your own adventure, while reassuring you that great things are possible.  And also odd and eerie–Happy Halloween!

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May 3, 2015 · 4:22 pm

A Nobel-Prize-winning Master’s Use of Extended Metaphor–Jose Saramago’s “Blindness”

José Saramago’s masterpiece Blindness is one of the few novels I have read which manages to use extended metaphor in such a way as not to make me weary of the imposition of values on fact.  What I mean by this is that extended metaphor, if sustained for long enough in a work, makes the work into a sort of allegory in which the reader is always busy imputing other values to literal words and things.  An example is of course Pilgrim’s Progress, in which we are “clued in” to the values which must be read in by having certain words and names capitalized and used repeatedly to illustrate the point the author is trying to make.  But the main value which Saramago uses in an allegorical way, or as an extended metaphor, is “blindness.”  And he keeps the fear of blindness closely enough tied to the actual condition that we can perceive his characters’ predicaments for ones likely to be suffered by blind people in a real-life, literal setting.  As well, the characters do not stand for abstract qualities, but are kept very closely drawn as real people, with realistic feelings and impulses.  They have no names except for example “the doctor,” “the girl with the dark glasses,” “the old man with the black eye patch,” “the doctor’s wife,” etc.  Thus, though their situation is allegorical, they are people whom we can see as very like us in a novel (meaning here “new” or “unprecedented”) situation.

The basic plot is this:  one day, while driving in his car, a man is suddenly stricken with a new kind of blindness, not the “dark” blindness which people have always suffered before, but a kind of “white blindness” in which people see only a white mist before their eyes.  From this uncertain beginning, the disease spreads, even affecting eye doctors and policemen and other people in every walk of life, while authorities try not only to stop the spread of the illness by guessing how it spreads (which no one is actually ever sure of) but also by confining to deserted public buildings those who have gone blind, in the suspicion that they may be contagious.  Our focus is on a small group of characters who have interacted in an ophthalmologist’s office, who all happen to wind up in the same ward of an empty mental hospital used to confine the blind. The ophthalmologist himself has gone blind just as he was attempting to do research on this startling new condition, and only his wife, who has pretended to be blind so that she cannot be separated from him and can go along to help, is fully a witness to what is happening.

What happens, but very gradually, is that order breaks down and chaos reigns, as blind crooks lord it over the other inmates and make them pay with valuables and women’s sexual favors for their very food rations.  The soldiers who are supposed to be monitoring the activity and the distribution of food are powerless (by choice) to affect change, because they are afraid to get too close to the blind lest the condition is contagious by sight of them.  They in fact repeatedly threaten to shoot any of the blind who step too close.  The halls are covered in excrement and other offal, including sometimes the bodies of those who have died, because there is no one in charge who can restore order and who will make sure that all the dead are buried.  Thus, the halls of the mental hospital quickly become more and more polluted with things which actually are likely to cause contagion.  The doctor as a figure of wisdom often has good ideas about what can be done, but it’s his wife who as a figure of mercy “steals the show” in the book.  Because she inexplicably remains sighted, and resists or seems to have no selfish impulses, she is the moral compass of the book.

The characters’ blindness is basically the condition all humankind is in as it goes through its own petty or even important concerns from day to day, unaware of others or not taking them into account.  Their new blindness forces them to calculate what others owe them and they owe others, and illuminates the human condition of desperation which can arise when there is not enough food, clothing, shelter.  It is a question posed by life as to whether or not humans will become savages when they are driven into close competition for basic needs and services.  They are only able to hear of the outside world when someone admits to having a radio, but then the voices from outside go dead, and the radio’s batteries are exhausted just after, so they must assume that things are chaotic on the outside as well.

Because of a fire, the seven characters find their way out of the hospital and into the broader world outside with the doctor’s wife leading them due to her still having her sight, but now they “see” that the mental hospital they were confined in is an apt symbol for the life outside in the world.  Everyone has gone blind, domestic animals are eating from dead bodies, people are breaking into the homes of others in order to have somewhere to sleep safely.  The doctor’s wife finds a small food store, and they are able to stay in a safe place, but their meetings with others everywhere are fraught with fear.  They are afraid even to let others know that they have someone with them who can see, lest she have too many importunate demands placed on her or figuratively be torn limb from limb.

At this key juncture, I’m going to stop my synopsis, not because any highly unlikely series of events takes place and I don’t want to ruin the surprise, but because the novel is resolved with such feeling and compassion and insight that I don’t want to ruin your reading.  This book is so deceptively simple as it moves from step to step, and we can understand each step in the series of events that take place.  We can “see” and feel how and why the people act as they do; the motivations that Saramago gives them are easily accessible to our own feelings, as we put ourselves in their place.  This book is a cautionary tale which asks humankind when it will begin to “see,” to respond to others adequately and to save itself thereby. From having opposed interests, you against me, the characters learn to cooperate and have lesson after lesson before them of what happens to those who cannot compromise.  Above all, this work is a masterwork about ordinary people, even those among them who find it possible to be extraordinary.  The doctor’s wife, the moral center of the book, is “sighted” in more than one way:  she knows that it is through no virtue of her own that she has not lost her sight too, so she is always ready to help those who rely upon her, because she for some unknown reason has an advantage.  This is not a matter of superiority of status or condition, but merely a matter of chance.  Blind chance, as one might say.  Thus, we all of us have some chance of someday being extraordinary because we are able to help someone else, and yet we will only be people with no particular status or name other than “the doctor’s wife,” “the doctor,””the girl with dark glasses,””the boy who cried for his mother,” etc.  This is the promise and the state of all humanity, to be able to extend itself to others empathetically when necessary, if we only take advantage of the opportunity.  This is the uplifting message of José Saramago’s book Blindness.  I hope that you will have a chance to read it soon.

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April 29, 2015 · 5:56 pm

The Perennial Appeal and Vision of Tennyson’s “Tears, Idle Tears”

Though I was planning to post in a few days on another work entirely, today I happened to read Caroline’s post at BeautyIsASleepingCat , and was struck with an exchange she and I had about the material of a book she was reviewing, and which she is currently receiving comments on (for those who have read it or are interested in reading it, as am I).  Her review topic was J. L. Carr’s A Month in the Country, and I’ll just repeat the part of our discussion that is pertinent to my own topic today:  in effect, we talked about the way that sometimes, happy memories from the past can make us unhappy in the present because they are no longer a part of our current experience.  This is part of the character’s experience in the book she is discussing, and for some reason–and it turns out to be a fairly good one–I was unable to dismiss my own faint memory of some other work, at some other time, which had been on the same general subject.

As it so happens, it was one of my favorite of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poems, short and to the point though it is, in contrast with his several lengthier poems which have won worldwide acclaim.  The poem is “Tears, Idle Tears,” and I am able to give it here in complete form, because it is available elsewhere on the Internet as well:

“Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,/Tears from the depth of some divine despair/Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,/In looking on the happy autumn-fields,/And thinking of the days that are no more./”  “Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,/That brings our friends up from the underworld,/Sad as the last which reddens over one/That sinks with all we love below the verge;/So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more./”  “Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns/The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds/To dying ears, when unto dying eyes/The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;/So sad, so strange, the days that are no more./”  “Dear as remembered kisses after death,/And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned/On lips that are for others; deep as love,/Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;/O Death in Life, the days that are no more!/”

I’ve always said that no one can milk an emotion like Tennyson!  But how does the poem actually work?  It seems to work by an intricate set of connecting words and phrases which rely on experiences everyone has either had or has imagined having, so that its universal appeal can easily be understood.  In the first stanza, Tennyson begins with the rhetorical trope of paralipsis, or denying something that he is in fact going to affirm, when he first says, “I know not what they mean,” and then goes on to tell us exactly what they mean.  The tears are “idle” only in the same sense that they are “vain,” not as in “vain’ equalling “empty” or “egotistical,” but “vain” as in “useless,” “hopeless,” “having no worthwhile issue.”  The present “autumn-fields” are “happy,” but the speaker is sunk in recollection by what they call up to memory.  There have been other autumn days and fields which were happier still.

In the second stanza, it’s not just the memories that are said to be past, but also what would be a rather eerie visitation by friends “up from the underworld,” were it not a welcome visitation.  The beam of sunlight which the speaker can imagine “glittering” on the underworld sail as it rises is challenged in its “fresh” quality by the nearly concurrent “sad” quality (a word reiterated throughout the poem) which “sinks with all we love below the verge,” so that “the days that are no more,” the phrase repeated in the end of each stanza, has a focus on the distant horizon, whether in the rise of memories or their return to the underworld which apparently stores them, the horizon often being a symbol of life’s bourne, limits, and of death.

The subject of death having been well-introduced by now, the speaker makes a tie between an experience everyone has perhaps had, that of “dark summer dawns” and hearing “the earliest pipe of half-awakened birds,” and links it with an experience that awaits everyone but which only those who are already gone could actually have, “the dying ears” hearing the sounds, and the “dying eyes” which see the casement “slowly grow[] a glimmering square.”  This stanza uses the word “sad” as well to describe this imagined experience, but whereas in the second stanza it was  living persons watching those from the underworld approach and leave, at least in imagination, so here it is the imagined dying people who have the “strange” experience of watching the dawn of a day which they possibly will not live to see the end of.  In this respect, the poem reminds me a little of Emily Dickinson’s poem “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died,” which also discusses a moment when “I could not see to see,” and purports to be talking from a time after that moment, to judge by its past tense.

Lost causes seem to be the subject of the fourth stanza, whether that of kisses that are no longer accessible, or fantasies about love and lovers that did not bear fruit, and the word “hopeless” emphasizes the whole tenor of the poem, which acknowledges happiness only to grieve its short tenure.  The days that are no more are “deep as love,/Deep as first love,” which is another repetition emphasizing what is missing from the present that was available in the past, love itself, since the speaker seems not to anticipate any further happiness from the current moment or day.  And then, of course, “wild with all regret,” whether of things not done at all or things that can be no longer done, we get the strongest statement yet of the speaker’s dilemma, “O Death in Life, the days that are no more!”  Here, the grieving requires emphatic punctuation at the end of the line, and Tennyson caps off his line with an exclamation point, to emphasize that death is a main concern to the speaker, whether actual deaths that he is mourning or the loss of happier times which he cannot conceive will come again or be followed by more happy times.

Now, having written about this poem and having lived with it again for a short space, I can say that there is a sort of catharsis one experiences when reading a poem such as this one, so that as well as turning out an inspired bit of work, Tennyson has provided a vision with a workaday or utilitarian use.  My older teachers in grade school and even in high school were excessively fond of poems with this quality, which in Samuel Johnson’s words could “point a moral” and “adorn a tale.”  Their own confreres amongst the more exalted academic circles at the time of their own youth must have surely pooh-poohed this approach to literature, and it has its limits.  But I do have to say that having re-read the poem after a long time of not seeing it in front of me, I do feel not only admiration and reverence for its aesthetic qualities, but appreciation as well for the cathartic release it engenders.  I think it likely that the book Caroline is reviewing, A Month in the Country, may well have similar cathartic capabilities.  Why not visit her site and see?

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April 19, 2015 · 12:49 am

“The Hunger Games,” “Catching Fire,” and “Mockingjay”–or, Incitement, the Turn Against Repression, and Outright Rebellion

Once again, a younger person has been instrumental in getting me to read a fiction he has enjoyed, and once again, the person is my nephew, Charles.  In this case, it was a slightly longer proceeding, because from the time I continually saw him sitting around engrossed in The Hunger Games trilogy to the time when I could pry the books from his fingers to read them was longer.  I’m just joking, though, about his reluctance:  he was quite enthusiastic about having me read the series.  And as I read and let him know over the phone what book exactly I was on, he eagerly asked each time “How do you like it?”  I was able to be just as happily engaged with the books as he expected, though I did point out that in this book as in others I’ve read in the YA category from time to time, the author has neglected to observe some grammar rules, such as the difference between “who” and “whom.”  It happens to everyone from time to time, because our society has become so casual in its observance of some parts of grammatical precision that even quite well-read and literate people have been known to slip up.  And of course, his rejoinder was to remind me of the last book he had me reading, The Wide Window from the A Series of Unfortunate Events series, in which a character named “Aunt Josephine” continually corrects grammar (I also reviewed that book for this site).  So now, on to the review of the events of the books themselves, which will probably be shorter, however, due to the fact that I don’t want to have to issue spoiler alerts, but instead want to leave those who have not yet read the books or seen the movies to their own discoveries.

The first thing I noticed about the books, even early on, and which I was surprised about and would highly commend is that in them, Suzanne Collins didn’t pull her punches.  Tragedies were not just things which took place in the past, well-drawn and well-liked characters die and suffer in the present as well, and even though there are repairs which can be made surgically to the competitors in the games, or to those fortunate enough to be able to afford them, more and more the sense grows in the books that some things can’t be changed, some misfortunes must be lived with, some bad things will have to be lived through again and again and again in the memories and sorrow-filled dreams of the main characters, those who survive, that is.  This is a series of books which, with a few changes, a very few indeed, could easily be marketed to an adult audience.  And yet, the difficulties approached by the characters are ones easily understandable and accessible to a youth audience:  it’s just that the book makes no attempt, fortunately, to “dumb down” or “soft-pedal” suffering, no matter whose it is.  There is no condescension in these books, and I can see why they have easily won a loyal following among parents and young people alike.

Next, I appreciated the slight amount of retelling that was necessary in the later two books in order to link them with the first.  Often, authors make the mistake of retelling large swatches of the plot or of characters’ histories in series, in order to play to the market either of people who were not paying attention in the earlier parts or to pick up new readers who are too indifferent to begin at the beginning.  Collins has clearly chosen to regard her audience as both intelligent and energetic enough to start with the first book and keep on going, and trusts herself to maintain their interest.  That her trust is not misplaced is I think obvious in the great enthusiasm with which people discuss the series.

Finally, what people these days call “the story’s arc” is both very accomplished and very insightful about the nature of slavery, rebellions, and resolutions of conflicts.  I have said the story begins with the “incitement” that the Capitol offers the known-to-exist twelve districts by forcing them to participate in the Hunger Games; follows this up with “the turn against repression,” which draws in some of those originally with the Capitol and aligns them with the gradually more and more rebellious people in the districts, which begin to revolt; and concludes with the picture of a whole society as it experiences “outright rebellion,” including quite intelligent assessments of both sides in the combat as first of all run by individuals with conflicting aims and desires, whatever their side.  Among the thanks which Suzanne Collins includes to her colleagues, friends, and family in the back of the third volume, are these tributes:  “Special love to my late father, Michael Collins, who laid the groundwork for this series with his deep commitment to educating his children on war and peace, and my mother, Jane Collins, who introduced me to the Greeks, sci-fi, and fashion (although that last one didn’t stick)….”  Certainly, these dedications are quite apt, as the force of them shows everywhere in the books (even in the playful tweaking of the nose of the “fashion police” who appear in the series).  I would gladly recommend these books for their teaching abilities and their warmth of heart, their ability to educate young people in both their methods of forming allegiances and their gradual and growing awareness of when something isn’t as it should be.  These books, like the folk song taken from Scripture, proclaim “to everything there is a season…and a time to every purpose under heaven.”  Only, having read them, young people may well emerge with a stronger sense of the right time for each and every purpose which confronts them.  These books, far from being just for entertainment, are for the mind and the spirit as well, and I can think of nothing better to advise than that adults as well as young people read them, not just to keep an eye on what their children are reading, but to keep an eye on their own strengths, weaknesses, decisions, and impulses as well.  This is a family book in the best sense of the term.

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March 7, 2015 · 2:34 am

Fay Weldon’s “Watching Me, Watching You” and the Gnostic “Gospel of Thomas”

Has anyone ever said to you “Everything happens for a reason”?  Or, perhaps, like Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow, “There is no such thing as coincidence”?  We smile and nod, and pass by the cues to a better understanding of such notions of Jung’s synchronicity.  But today, while reading from two supposedly widely different texts on two different library websites, I ran “smack-dab”–as people from my part of the world say–into a lovely coincidence about meanings and situations which I’d like to share with you.  On one website, I was starting to read from the Nag Hammadi scriptures, the Gnostic scriptures which were suppressed from the canon of allowed Christian texts by clerics who called them “heretical.”  They have now surfaced again, and have been translated from the Greek and the Coptic into English, and have stirred my curiosity.  On the other website, I was finishing up a reading of Fay Weldon’s book of short stories called Watching Me, Watching You, which was named after one of the stories.  And then, it hit me:  the whole of Weldon’s book bore an intimate relation in its themes and structures to something quoted from one of the Gnostic texts, the Gospel of Thomas.  And here’s what it was:

“Know what is in front of your face, and what is hidden from you will be disclosed to you.  For there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed.”  Ever hear someone say to someone else “It’s as plain as the nose on your face”?  But then, in order to get a proper view of one’s own nose, one needs a reflective surface in front of one, and Fay Weldon’s short stories, with their scalpel-sharp ironies and desperate comic turns, are that reflective surface of what often goes on in front of us, but which we chose to ignore, or cannot master the trick of deciphering, simple as it might seem to others watching.  The book is dated in some respects, having been a collection of stories from the 7o’s and published as a whole in 1981, and yet the situations that make up the action in them still occur today, in actuality or in shadows of actions.  I would like here to give a brief summary or synopsis (not so brief, in the first instance) of each story, just to whet the readers’ appetites, and then without spoiling the adventure, go on to final comment.

1.  “Christmas Tree”–A writer gradually becoming successful for his counterculture writings allows his personal life to affect his career.  An old story, but told with refreshing clarity here.  As Weldon writes about her character, “Writers tend to undervalue those who praise them, or complain that praise is patronising; whilst at the same time feel aggrieved if they are not praised.  They never win the battle with themselves, which is why, perhaps, they go on writing.”  With this writer, his first wife left him taking with her their small daughter, when he cheated on her, starting him on a lifetime of going from woman to woman.  In this case, however, the womanizer finally becomes the victim of his habit, and is deceived and taken advantage of by a much younger woman who gets him to marry her because he believes she is “pure” and virginal.  As he says of her before he marries her:  “I’m glad she’s a waitress….I’m finally back where I belong.  Amongst real people, who do real things, and live simple, honest hard-working lives.”  When he finds himself amongst her whole family of small-time grifters, he is instead of being realistically downcast about it (as his art would suggest) ironically overjoyed.  “He had bound himself by accident to a monstrous family in a monstrous place and had discovered by accident what he felt to be the truth, long evident, long evaded.  It was that human nature was irredeemable….All aspirations and ambition had been burned away:  all wounds cauterised with so sudden and horrific a knife as to leave him properly cleansed and purified.”  This is a funny way to describe total failure and withdrawal from one’s own creative sphere, but thus it is, and we see it as he does not, for he is like the Christmas tree that his own family used to replant year after year, only now his “roots” have been “cauterized” as his new family does when they steal trees to sell off someone else’s land:  his roots have been boiled, and he seems not to mind his fate at all.

Breakages–In this very innovative story, a clerical wife is “haunted” by a ghost who gets even with her husband for his unfair treatment of her by breaking his things.  This only happens when he is in church preaching or is elsewhere occupied and she is alone, at least in the beginning of the story.  The bitter issue between them of whose fault it is that they have no children comes to a head, however, and then the husband too is confronted by the “ghost,” though he funnily enough persists in blaming the wife for the noises and moving furniture up in the attic, even while she is in the same room downstairs with him.  Against all the reader’s expectations as they are established by the story thus far, when the two characters finally get around to speaking to each other about their “guest,” even though they are still deluding themselves about some things, they are visited by a happy ending, which yet is not free of whimsical irony.  This is thus another story in which something is obvious, yet needs to be confronted before the apotheosis can take place.

Alopecia–The topic is “sisterhood” or the lack thereof, amongst a group of women, and the lovely reversal at the end that takes place when the least sisterly of the women is suddenly put in the same position as a woman known to them all whom she has maliciously gossiped about for years.  Once again, the quote from the Gnostic gospels rings true, because she has willfully ignored for years what has been right in front of her, which has been going on between the woman and her husband, blaming the wife for everything and seeming deliberately to cause hatred and suspicion to surround her.  The term “alopecia,” which is a kind of diseased hair loss, stands in as a subject-replacement for the actual “bald” cruelty of the other woman’s husband, who among other brutalities has made a habit of pulling her hair out by handfuls.  When the situation is reversed between the two women, the woman in the previously superior place derives the full benefit of a hateful kind of achieved wisdom, too late.

Man With No Eyes–This is another “ghost story,” featuring “the man with no eyes,” a sort of bugaboo from an Eastern culture, who seems to visit a family purporting to be a happy one in which the husband, however, is always demanding much, giving little, and constantly and apparently deliberately misjudging his wife.  He is another one not seeing what is before his eyes.  It seems likely that at this point the general drift of the stories of Weldon’s labelled (and sometimes marketed) as “ghost stories” must be obvious to my readers:  a number of her stories, though they all contain ironic reversals or heapings-on of fated happenings, are clearly not the cheap and simple ghost story per se (fun as that can be).  Several of them, however, were in the 70’s and 80’s published in magazines and volumes which purported to be ghost story-oriented.

Threnody–This is the most mysterious, in its way, of all the stories.  A female character who is seeing a therapist, another woman whose words we know only through those that the first character repeats aloud, changes her story repeatedly, ready to take anyone’s view of her as the true one.  She seems to have no sense of self, but one after the other, follows other people’s views of what she is “like.”  We as readers are frustrated in some ways in trying to get to know this character, because we cannot really be sure of what the truth is about what these other characters say and do to and with her.  Thus, this story is in a sense a sort of defeat of the Gospel of Thomas notion that it is possible to know what is in front of your face, because as another more famous Biblical quote says, we are seeing her “through a glass, darkly.”

Angel, All Innocence–Yet another young woman, an expectant mother this time, who becomes aware of “ghosts” in the attic, hears a tale of former tenants from the kindly village doctor who treats her and senses her husband’s casual emotional cruelty and indifference.  She makes a decision which is not logical at all in ordinary human terms, but which the ghost from the attic (whom she thinks she sees one day upon the stair) would understand completely.  She is the character par excellence among these in the book who, though “all innocence,” yet is worldly enough in spiritual terms of a good sort to know what to do to save herself and her child.

Spirit of the House–The predominance of the characters in this story do not see what is in front of them, an abusive nanny.  One character does, and must strive for justice.

Watching Me, Watching You–Cyclic wives and lovers, and a ghost who sleepily observes them all, as they take perspectives on each other, and history repeats itself.  One could even argue that it’s the accumulation of repetitions through history that has made the ghost so “knowing,” that this is in fact the spirit of all the tales in the book.

Geoffrey and the Eskimo Child–This is the bittersweet story of a man who for years is a sort of feminist’s ideal man, at least on the surface, a feminist himself, and a good socialist and humanist at the same time, who yet presents his wife with a final shocking conundrum and doesn’t help her to solve it.  The question is, why is the view occluded for her, his closest, and why is it likewise obscure to others on the outside?  One might almost suspect Weldon of attempting to suggest that such model behavior is too hard for any man (as opposed to the women whom she celebrates in her stories), did he not have a certain charm and resilience as a character, even though he may have just a bit of feet of clay.

Weekend–This is a final picture in the book of a condensation of a family’s whole way of life into how their lives are arranged for a single weekend (one of many, a pattern) in their country home.  No words are wasted; every single thing that happens means something, amounts to something, counts for something, to the characters living through it nearly as much as for the reader.  Though the two creative works are so very different, and the character of the mother in this work is gentle and constantly striving to please, very different from Elizabeth Taylor’s character in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, yet the economy of the wording and the ferocious amount of energy that is released from it reminds me of that in the famous play by Edward Albee.

Fay Weldon, whom I have never read before but whose works I now intend to become more familiar with, was awarded the CBE in Britain, and is the author of the pilot for the famous PBS series Upstairs, Downstairs.  She has written many novels and scripts and plays and books of short stories, and given my acquaintance with her merely through this one work I’ve written on today, I think she would well repay serious attention.  It’s quite clear that though in this book the plight of women is one of her chief concerns, or at least was in 1981 when she published this work (and I can’t imagine such a devoted advocate changing her mind), she is well able to see more than just the contemporary injustice and look behind it for the historical one.  As well, her male characters are not straw men, easy to knock down, but believable even when culpable or villainous.  I hope to run across something else by her again soon, perhaps something a little more recent and topical.  For the meantime, I hope you haven’t been totally exhausted by this long post, and welcome any comments you may have to make.

 

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February 27, 2015 · 6:00 pm

A reversal of expectations for characters and readers alike–Juan Bosch’s “The Beautiful Soul of Don Damian”

Readers in the English-speaking world are familiar with the word “expectations” (in its sense of having something to inherit) from its usage in Charles Dickens’s famous novel Great Expectations.  Readers in the Dominican Republic, however, are surely more familiar with the ironic and witty tale of reversed expectations in Juan Bosch’s short tale “The Beautiful Soul of Don Damian,” which has some plot twist surprises for the reader as well.  The tale goes thusly:

Don Damian’s soul, which in passing is shown to be hosted in the body of a miserly and greedy and unscrupulous rich old man, is just preparing to make its final withdrawal from the world and the body as the story opens.  It is described as having tentacles, which it is slowly retracting because the temperature of the body in a coma is too hot for it to stand much longer.  As it is withdrawing, the nurse becomes alarmed and sends for the doctor and gives an injection, but to no avail, apparently:  “At the precise moment that the needle punctured Don Damian’s forearm, the soul drew its last tentacles out of his mouth, reflecting as it did so that the injection would be a waste of money.”

As the body becomes cold and yellowish, the soul flies up to a Bohemian glass lamp in the middle of the ceiling and looks down on the scene below, watching who mourns and who hesitates, meanwhile able to be aware of all their secret thoughts and feelings.  The housemaid mourns sincerely; she has served Don Damian “for more than forty years,” and she weeps and wails, and as the priest arrives to give last rites (which he should’ve done the night before, only he was preoccupied with trying to get money for a new church from Don Damian), she says that it doesn’t matter whether Don Damian is shriven or not, because he has a “beautiful soul.”  In the meantime, the beautiful but unfaithful young wife and the mother-in-law are crying crocodile tears in order to deceive everyone into thinking that the wife (who has a lover) truly grieves her husband.

Two things happen almost simultaneously, though in the course of the story they are related one at a time–the hypocritical mother-in-law, wife, and priest take up the housemaid’s cry of “beautiful soul” and start to ring changes upon it to prove that they too mourn the passing, and the soul, hearing how beautiful it is from all sides, decides to have a look at itself in the bathroom mirror, to be able to visualize its own beauty.  Both sides are in for a shock, however, the soul first:  “But good God, what had happened?  In the first place, it had been accustomed, during more than sixty years, to look out through the eyes of Don Damian, and those eyes were over five feet from the ground; also, it was accustomed to seeing his lively face, his clear eyes, his shining gray hair, the arrogance that puffed out his chest and lifted his head, the expensive clothes in which he dressed.  What it saw now was nothing at all like that, but a strange figure hardly a foot tall, pale, cloud-gray, with no definite form.  Where it should have had two legs and two feet like the body of Don Damian, it was a hideous cluster of tentacles like those of an octopus, but irregular, some shorter than others, some thinner, and all of them seemingly made of dirty smoke, of some impalpable mud that looked transparent but was not; they were limp and drooping and powerless, and stupendously ugly….It had no waist.  In fact, it had no body, no neck, nothing:  where the tentacles joined there was merely a sort of ear sticking out on one side, looking like a bit of rotten apple peel, and a clump of rough hairs on the other side, some twisted, some straight.  But that was not the worst, and neither was the strange grayish-yellow light it gave off:  the worst was the fact that its mouth was a shapeless cavity like a hole poked in a rotten fruit, a horrible and sickening thing…and in the depths of this hole an eye shone, its only eye, staring out of the shadows with an expression of terror and treachery!”  Don Damian’s soul thus has its own expectations reversed when it sees itself truly.  Not realizing that it is invisible to others, the soul wonders how it can go out into the street appearing thus, and just as the doctor rings at the front door, it reverses the expectations of the mourners by making a mad jump back into the ice-cold mouth of the body of Don Damian.

The doctor, taking the wrist of Don Damian, grows excited and then opens his bag, taking out a stethoscope and a syringe.  He too avows that Don Damian has a beautiful soul, and that he must try to save him.  While the simple housemaid rejoices in the next few minutes that Don Damian has been returned to life, the doctor and the priest both plan secretly what they are going to be receiving from him, while the wife and mother-in-law make the best they can of a bad situation, and evidently pretend to be elated.  “The soul of Don Damian, tired of so many lies, decided to sleep.  A moment later, Don Damian sighed weakly and moved his head on the pillow.  “‘He’ll sleep for hours now,’ the doctor said.  ‘He must have absolute quiet.’  And to set a good example, he tiptoed out of the room.”

Amid the reversals in the story, the readers’ expectations too may be reversed, especially if they are anticipating a typical “and I felt myself flying toward the white light” sort of tale.  The soul not only does not see a white light, but perches on the Bohemian lamp and finds it as much too warm as the body with its fever was.  As well, despite the fact that all proclaim the soul as beautiful, the soul when it confronts a mirror sees itself as it truly is, and flies back into the body so as to have the countenance (literal as well as figurative) of the body.  This is yet another reversal, because usually when people are physically ugly, some well-meaning sort will come along and say something like “Yes, but I think he/she must have a beautiful soul.”  In this story, as in The Picture of Dorian Gray, a sleek and attractive physique hides an ugly soul.

The author of this story, Juan Bosch, was born of educated farmers in the Dominican Republic, but at one stage of his life attained the office of President.  When he was deposed, he turned to teaching, and then began to concentrate on nonfiction as the best way to expose the problems of human existence.  Though the tale we have looked at today is necessarily fictional because we cannot know in actuality what happens to the soul after death, the farcical elements yet have a reality of their own, which makes the story persuasive and compelling just as it is.  And certainly what some regard as the soul but which could also be seen as the sum total of a person’s actions and emotions in life is part of the human experience, along with its eventual destiny.  Thus Bosch’s light touch and gift of humor give to Don Damian’s “death scene” an enduring significance which puts it among the best of the tableaux of this sort, and an ability to affect its readers not only with a smile and a rueful shake of the head, but with some moments of serious thought as well:  what will all our souls look like when we no longer have bodies to hide them?  Two apposite quotes spring to mind, one from the cynical and witty La Rochefoucauld and one from a medieval nun:  La Rochefoucauld said, “Our words are given us to hide our thoughts.”  The only person in the story “The Beautiful Soul of Don Damian” who is sincere in her appraisal of his goodness (though mistaken, as it turns out) is the housemaid, who perhaps has not the realistic view we see of the soul, but something even beyond that.  The medieval nun said:  “God sees us not as we see ourselves, nor as others see us, nor yet as we are, but as we would be.”  One can only surmise that when the housemaid sees Don Damian from the point of view of a long-time employee and household dependent, that she is looking with the eyes of God, and that somewhere, sometime, in some way, Don Damian has wanted to be better than he is!

 

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February 8, 2015 · 8:48 pm

Agony and a Painter’s Eye: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “The Woodspurge”

Today’s post is about one of the most frequently taught poems of the early Victorian era, one which has perplexed many an undergraduate (including me, at the time) and even more seasoned readers, I think primarily because they are waiting for it to tell a story, or give an explanation, of however attenuated a kind.  And it does both of these things in its own way, except that its own way is not that of the usual lyric poem; rather, it is an encapsulation of a lyric moment caught by the “eye” of a painter who was also a poet.  This multi-talented individual was Dante Gabriel Rossetti, one of the founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of artists and writers.

The poem is “The Woodspurge,” a modest title in line with the mostly restrained and simple words used.  The overall effect, however, is anything but simple.  Here is the poem in its entirety, all four four-line stanzas, which have been quoted elsewhere on the Internet previously as well:

“The wind flapped loose, the wind was still,/Shaken out dead from tree and hill;/I had walked on at the wind’s will–/I sat now, for the wind was still./Between my knees my forehead was–/My lips, drawn in, said not Alas!/My hair was over in the grass,/My naked ears heard the day pass./My eyes, wide open, had the run/Of some ten weeds to fix upon;/Among those few, out of the sun,/The woodspurge flowered, three cups in one./From perfect grief there need not be/Wisdom or even memory;/One thing then learned remains to me–/The woodspurge has a cup of three.”

Now to embark upon an interpretation, which is of course only one among many possible, but which I believe has some points to recommend it, such as its close reliance upon the items found in the poem, without adding possibly spurious additional material.

The first stanza begins by stressing that even when the speaker is in motion, as when walking, he is passively affected in the main:  when the wind pushes him along, he walks; when the wind ceases, he sits.  The wind is said to be “shaken out dead,” and indeed he is deathlike and still, or at least motionless, when the wind dies down.

Though many people think that the arcania of rhetorical figuration is mainly limited to such figures as similes, metaphors, apostrophes, and other such figures more common to poetry, it is a fact that in this poem Rossetti uses both paralipsis and litotes (in the second and third stanzas respectively), which perhaps occur less often in poetic circumstances.  Here in the second stanza, the speaker “paints a picture” of himself with head hanging low, and says that his lips did not say “alas.”  Well, why should they?  We don’t know, but by saying that he did not say something he is in fact saying, the poet is using the figure of paralipsis, which is denying that one is making a statement while in fact making it.  He speaks of his naked ears, and here the word “naked” is like the word “dead” in the first stanza, in that it is a powerful and evocative word that stands out as unusual; there is a sense that he is unprotected; there is a sense of vulnerability.

In the third stanza, this same sense of vulnerability occurs when we are told that his eyes are “wide open,” and therefore exposed.  At first we think that they are not exposed to much, it is true, as his head is hanging between his knees, but this seems to be a case of much from little.  Using the figure of litotes, or understatement, he says that he can see “ten weeds,” which is surely not all he can see even given his restricted field of vision.  Weeds and grass grow thickly, after all.  This figure of understatement produces a sense of lowness (as does his crouch), and depression.  Among these weeds, he focuses on the woodspurge because is it different and isolated, as he the speaker too is isolated, even among natural things and nature, though in poetry these are very often seen as potentially sympathetic, even sometimes to the extreme of using the “pathetic fallacy,” in which a speaker’s or character’s emotions are said to be experienced by a natural force or being.  The woodspurge is “out of the sun” literally because it is overshadowed by the speaker’s limbs and head hanging; the speaker himself is “out” of a sort of shining grace, of happiness.

In the fourth stanza, the speaker brings up “perfect grief,” and suggests that there is no wisdom which comes from it or memory which can resolve it.  Though the reader may experience a sense of shock at this sudden introduction of intense emotion as a subject, yet there is something about it which shows fittingness as well.  Even though it “ups the ante” in a sudden way, it’s appropriate because we know that all this so far has been adding up to something, some climax.  The last two lines contain a living crystallization of a moment of pain and suffering, the sense of “perfect grief” as embodied in the totally a-historical symbol of the woodspurge.  That is, before Rossetti wrote his poem, there was no necessary connection between the tiny weed/flower and sorrow; since his poem, I doubt that anyone aware of the poem, either seeing the poem and/or seeing the woodspurge knowingly, could help but think of the emotional connection.

This poem “The Woodspurge” is an excellent introduction to the Pre-Raphaelite notion that a poem (or a painting) can be about a moment of intense emotion without a history in words of the cause (though of course many of the paintings were of characters from literature or myth).  As well, to anyone themselves subject to the feelings recorded in the poem, “The Woodspurge” itself is a woodspurge-in-words which can capture their own emotions, again without an actual historical rehearsing of the cause of the emotions.  Thus the vagueness of the “backstory,” as it’s called now, makes the poem itself more universal and accessible to more people.  The statement that “One thing then learned remains to me–/The woodspurge has a cup of three” betrays the lastingness of the grief and the simultaneous poverty and wealth of sorrow:  sorrow is full and overflowing, so full that the speaker cannot say more than he does, yet it leaves him empty of all but the final awareness of the association between his emotion and what he sees at the extreme moment of its intensity.

At the risk myself of having made much of a little thing, I have written this analysis of one of Rossetti’s most famous poems, maybe the most well-known, because it is so perfect of its kind.  I hope that you too will find it answers to your notion of a fine work of art, and will remember its beauty at any time when you feel that the world’s beauty has deserted you:  the woodspurge may be a simple flower, but it is a deceptively simple poem, and one which has much to offer to those who would notice.

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