Category Archives: What is literature for?

July 30, 2014 · 9:49 pm

Does a purely scientific world have imagination?–Ray Bradbury’s answer in “The Exiles”

I have to confess, this story is undertaken partly as an assignment from a reader and fellow blogger, Ste J.  Having asked for some notions of what readers would like to see me post about, some story, novel, or poem (fiction being my forté rather than non-fiction), I have taken it upon myself to do as Ste J (otherwise known as Steve Johnson) suggested and post on a “cheesy horror” fiction, or something similar.  I have chosen to write today on Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Exiles,” which if not found in a short story collection of his can be found in The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction.  Thus, though the story is a sort of cheesy horror story set in the future, and therefore also science fiction at the same time, it’s not written by a cheesy author, as Ray Bradbury is well-respected in many quarters.

The dual nature of the story is apparent not only in the fact that it partakes both of the horror story and the science fiction story, but also in the remarkable title, “The Exiles.”  There are two different kinds of exiles in this story, dead authors and their most famous characters being the first exiles, and the actual living human beings of the year 2120 who follow them into space unintentionally, when going to colonize Mars being the “second wave” of exiles.  As develops when the characters on both sides begin to talk among themselves, the dead authors (who occupy the same level of reality as their most famous characters in the categories of “science fiction, fantasy, horror, or the supernatural”) are on Mars because nearly all copies of their books have been burned as irresponsible fictions on Earth.  The space travellers, on the other hand, are approaching Mars because they have made Earth unliveable; they don’t know what’s making them see spirits and have mysterious maladies that often deal death, or see witches and suffer curses, but they do have the last copies of the “forbidden books” with them.  As it turns out, both Halloween and Christmas have been banned and eliminated, and though the captain of the ship and his doctor cannot figure out how the men can have been having horrible visions and strange illnesses, since they are only mentioned in the forbidden books, they have brought the last copies of the books with them, for what purpose they cannot yet determine.

Edgar Allan Poe, the famous mystery and horror writer, is the ringleader of the authors, and has as an eager second Ambrose Bierce; on the other hand, there’s Charles Dickens, who was only included in the first mysterious wave of exiles because of the ghosts in A Christmas Carol and some of his other books, and who is unwilling to inflict any punishments on the arriving spacemen.  His characters are participating in the sort of party scene for that holiday made popular in that novel, and refusing to take part in the aggression.  Some of those who are involved are Bram Stoker (author of Dracula), Mary Shelley (Frankenstein), Henry James (The Turn of the Screw), Washington Irving (The Legend of Sleepy Hollow), Lewis Carroll (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland), L. Frank Baum (The Wizard of Oz), et. al, including any author whose works are not strictly scientific and factual.  But the saddest fantasy character and the one who seems most pitiful to all the others is the now dessicated figure of Santa Claus.  The authors and their characters determine to go on to other planets, farther and farther out into space, if the humans obsessed with science continue to follow them and are not deterred by the nightmares and hexes cast by their witches and the like (and one of the oddest things is that these once-living people and their never-having-lived-except-in-imagination characters occupy the same level of reality).

When the humans finally do alight on the surface of Mars, they decide a fitting gesture to mark their transition to a new world would be to burn each and every one of the last of their copies of the fictional works which do contain horror, science fiction, fantasy, or supernatural characters and events.  They hear a scream, and have a sudden sense of a vacuum as the books burn.  But one of the men–a sort of Everyman with the commonly occurring name “Smith”–remembers a scene from fantasy fiction when he sees an emerald city (Oz) topple in the distance as the last copy of The Wizard of Oz is burned.  The captain makes him report to the ship’s doctor.  The final straw takes place just a second later:

“The men tiptoed, guns alert, beyond the ship’s aseptic light to gaze at the long sea and the low hills.  ‘Why,’ whispered Smith, disappointed, ‘there’s no one here at all, is there?  No one here at all.’  The wind blew sand over his shoes, whining.”

It’s illuminating, of course, that Bradbury, a predominantly fantasy and science fiction author, puts things in black and white in this story.  It takes a great deal of imagination to come up with many of the concepts scientists come up with on a regular basis, and we always have that much-belabored truism “Truth is stranger than fiction.”  Yet, there are layers and layers of truth in this story, and one must decide whether or not one believes that a world without fiction would indeed be inhabited only by the wind blowing sand across one’s feet, a symbol of death and dearth and sterility.  I for one would find it a far inferior place, and think liars would probably be much more popular than they are, purely for their imaginative efforts, were fiction writers not available.

I’ve given a quick summary of this entire story, and I know I didn’t issue a spoiler alert, but it is a very short story, and one which is worth reading even when you know (or intuit) ahead of time what the outcome is going to be.  It’s also just a bit kitschy (if not entirely cheesy, as Ste J requested), and a little dated, by now, since the time when we have with a Mars Rover and a great deal of imagination scientifically speaking already explored part of the surface of Mars.  As well, it’s one of a great number of literary works which rely on or refer to other literary works for part of what makes them functioning stories, and naturally it helps if you have some inkling of the stories involved which are being referred to.  If nothing else, it could guide you to some of the great stories of imaginary worlds and people which are ours to share.  Let’s hope we have the sense to keep our book monitors under control in the real world, and forego book burning and destruction of our shared texts–when you take away a book, you had better be sure that you know what you’re doing, and whose reality you might be impairing (we do not want to find only the dry sand blowing over our feet in any real world we have to inhabit!).  And that’s my post for today.

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July 24, 2014 · 5:23 pm

“The personal is political”–Two stories of marriage gone awry, from Jane Smiley and Joan Didion

On the surface of the matter, the two novels I’m going to make some comment on today could not be more different.  The first, Jane Smiley’s novel Private Life, starts just after the Civil War, and traces the whole course (nearly) of a marriage, from the early days when there is still hope to the sad remainder, the ashes of hope, near the end of life.  The second novel, by contrast, Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays, is a more recently set novel, taking place in the late 1960’s, almost contemporaneous with its date of publication in 1970.  The first novel shows a woman observing all marital proprieties, though chafing against them.  The second, a woman who regularly rebels not just in spirit, but who is no longer quite sure what marital proprieties are, or which ones pertain.  Smiley’s novel is set in the American Mid- and Southwest:  it starts in Missouri, and travels with its main characters to the area on the coast near San Francisco.  It always seems to have a local sense of place, if that makes sense to my readers.  Though Didion’s novel takes place in the Southwest too, and in fact is mainly set in Los Angeles, its surrounds, and Las Vegas, it has an international frame of reference which includes New York City.  Private Life describes both the mundane and intimate daily life of a wife and her Navy-background husband, Margaret Early and Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early, as they live together stolidly day-by-day and traces a gradual arc of development in Margaret’s knowledge of and feelings for her husband.  Play It As It Lays, by contrast, focuses on only a short span of time in the yearly life of the wife of a movie executive, her name being Maria and his Carter.  The first novel develops a sense of crisis gradually, and has its “big bang” at the very end; the second novel refers back elliptically to isolated former events, but subsists in a constant state of crisis, though the “answer,” the wife’s philosophical statement, and an expected crisis of sorts does emerge at the end.

The novels both show a mismatched couple, however, and both novels begin at a point in the end of the time arc and then flashback and work forward to that time again.  As well, the rallying slogan of students and feminists from the 1960’s and 1970’s, “The personal is political,” applies to both novels, both marriages, and is at the heart of our discussion today.  As some may recall and others may come to know, the slogan “The personal is political”  was popularized by feminist Carol Hanisch in her 1969 essay of the same name.  As one may discover by consulting Wikipedia, “It was a challenge to the nuclear family and family values.”  Whereas Jane Smiley’s novel makes the point directly, however, by showing how historically important events in the daily life of the nation affect a wife and her husband attempting to live together when it is clear almost from the beginning that they are not really compatible, Joan Didion’s novel makes the point in a more convoluted way, by showing another mismatched couple in which the wife is longing not for freedom of self-expression so much as for that very nuclear family life her husband disdains.  Both wives lose a baby in the respective stories, Margaret to early infant death and Maria to an abortion insisted on by her husband because he doubts the baby is his.  And both wives are far more affected by these deaths than the husbands, Andrew indifferently accepting the fact that his wife can never have another baby and that he must not engage in connubial relations with her, and Carter hardly able to feel properly about his wife as a partner at all, because he is (to give him some credit) as tortured as she is in their mutually hellish life of adultery, alcohol and drug abuse, and feverish party-going.

The most essential way in which these two heroines are alike is in the fact that both live their lives mainly as adjuncts to their husbands’ lives, and this is the part which ends up tripping them up.  Margaret is typing handmaid to Andrew, who fancies himself a great public man and a keen scientific mind, and who ends up becoming a bit delusional and given to fits of mistaken grandeur.  Her attention to his belief that everyone wants to hear everything he has to say, and that in print, is in addition to her dutiful practice of the tenets of housewifery of the time, the cooking, cleaning, and management of the household.  Maria’s way of being an adjunct to her husband’s life is to star in minor pictures he makes, to trail along after him through his life of partying and so forth, even though they are estranged and thinking of divorce and he cheats on her and she on him in a casual way, and allowing him to dominate her in the matter of their differences about how to deal with the daily life of a small child they already have, Kate, whom Carter put in a home because she suffers from some sort of developmental disability.

The two heroines are different in some respects.  Margaret is very practically oriented, and survives her life by taking care of ordinary matters, and using them as pegs upon which to hang her self-references.  Maria, on the other hand, takes sudden drives up and down the coast, to Las Vegas, and stays in bed all day on some days, or makes tiny and repeated futile attempts to reach out to someone among the disaffected and brazen denizens and hangers-on of her and Carter’s world.  Margaret makes purposeful friendships which help to see her through the days and nights, with Dora (a woman reporter who reads like a portrait of Willa Cather), Pete (a mysterious and charming Russian adventurer), and Naoko Kimura and her family, Japanese citizens of the United States who later suffer being sent to detention centers during WW II.  Furthermore, she maintains the socially expected contacts with her landlady at a boarding house she once stayed in during her confinement and with neighbors and friends of her husband’s.  Her revolution, though it comes at the end, is extremely slow in coming.  Maria, on the other hand, is often dismissive of her husband’s and her own friends, because actually she feels so taut and miserable all the time that they bring her no relief, though she does spend some time with them.  She is described by one reviewer, the blurb writer, as “catatonic,” and this, though not true in the technical sense, is true in the metaphorical sense:  she can’t seem to effect change in any measurable way until the end.

Perhaps the main difference in them, however, is that in the end Margaret sets aside all the anxiety and care and trouble she’s taken over her husband and his books, and decides to write her own book, whereas Maria makes a suicide attempt which results in Carter placing her too (like her daughter Kate) in some kind of facility.  But the difference isn’t perhaps as much as it might seem:  though Maria’s solution is seemingly more self-destructive, Margaret’s choice is also destructive of the self she has always maintained, the dutiful wife and friend.    When her friend Pete (and love interest) leaves town, she angrily does something she’s never done before and throws one of her husband’s thick and self-important letters into the back yard unread, to get wet in the rain and the dew.  And she thinks to herself, “I have…no reason to be alive.”  But far from actually causing her to kill herself, this thought gives her pleasure because it so contravenes what she knows are her husband’s beliefs.  The main similarity is that finally both choose not to continue to follow in their husbands’ wake, but to call attention to themselves and their own needs, apart from the expected course of having a nuclear family as it appears in Private Life and the disapppointed ideal of Maria’s of the nuclear family model as it occurs in Play It As It Lays.  Maria calls attention to herself by making an attempt on her own life, Margaret by electing to write a book of her own.  How many heroines in how many novels and stories have we seen driven towards one or other of these extremes in order to survive as a woman in society?  I don’t think I need to emphasize the point further.

What’s perhaps most intriguing is that near the end of both novels, the two heroines each state a sort of philosophy or guiding principle.  As Margaret finally realizes and says to herself with some bitterness (able at last to bring to recall a long-lost memory from her childhood because she can now face the truth), “There are so many things that I should have dared before this.”  In a similarly memory-oriented fashion, Maria thinks to herself near the end of Didion’s novel, “When I was ten years old my father taught me to assess quite rapidly the shifting probabilities on a craps layout:  I could trace a layout in my sleep….Always when I play back my father’s voice is it with a professional rasp, it goes as it lays, don’t do it the hard way.  My father advised me that life itself was a crap game:  it was one of the two lessons I learned as a child.  The other was that overturning a rock was apt to reveal a rattlesnake.  As lessons go those two seem to hold up, but not to apply.”  In a sense, though one woman is actively planning an overthrow of her husband’s dominance by imitating his way with the world (appearing in print), and the other is biding her time (perhaps delusively) in a care facility and planning sometime in the future to live alone with just her daughter, Kate, they each have plans.  And to each, the marriage she has endured with some difficulty has become a metaphor for all of life, which shows how overwhelming to each the experience has been.

To many people, even some well-intentioned and fervent feminists, now as in the earlier days of the women’s movement in the 1960’s and 1970’s, the slogan “The personal is political” has seemed a trifle humorless and grim, engendering nightmarish visions and imaginations of constant negotiations in the bedroom, the boardroom, and in all facets of daily life.  It is only when we un-demonize the word “political” (hard as that is sometimes, given the shenanigans we see career politicians getting up to) that we realize that human existence is a perpetual matter of negotiation and compromise anyway, and that to admit women into the ranks of those allowed to participate was never a matter of choice, but was always a matter of moral necessity, long though it took to happen.  But if you would sweeten the pill a little, then why not have a look at these two excellent novels, Jane Smiley’s a slow-developing long-reading picture of a lifetime lived with the “intimate enemy,” and Joan Didion’s a tough, glaring, burning endictment of a decadent lifestyle lived under the Western sun, without relief in sight?  You will perhaps find that even the portrayal of pain and frustration has its aesthetic parameters and pleasures in the hands of masters.

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July 20, 2014 · 9:56 pm

The Learning Curve of Life and Death–Richard Gilbert’s fine memoir “Shepherd”

Today, I am sitting inside a comfortable beachside  condo, enjoying a precious tea that a Russian friend kindly provided me with, taking in both its nearly indescribable aroma and its delicate perfumed taste.  It’s a Basilur family tea imported from Sri Lanka, flavored with “natural cornflower, jasmine buds, blue malva, and flavor roasted almond.”  The whiff seems at first to be that of an expensive chocolate, and then one thinks “No, not chocolate exactly–what is that delicious smell?”  I have had the luxury of consuming the tea not only as a wonderful gift, but as something I didn’t have to question or think about much, except that I do sometimes after having a tea from Sri Lanka wonder about how they ever got their crops back in order after that frightful tsunami a number of years ago.

I’ve usually had lamb in the same way, especially enjoying having it with my brother, because he appreciates the visceral element in eating meat from the bone, possibly a holdover from our more carnivorous forebears, but when you see the two of us nibbling along the bones held aloft at a private family dinner (one where our company can’t judge us savages), you know we must be kin.  And as I say, I’ve not usually given a thought to where the sheep come from, how they are raised, how deprived of life, not much in fact beyond what cut I’m eating and how much it costs.  A standard consumer, then.  And this in spite of the fact that we are only two generations away from Appalachian small-time farmers ourselves on our father’s side, though I don’t think they had sheep.

Since I’m trying to be as honest as the book I’m reviewing today is, I will confess that my word picture of the tea above is an attempt to make tea lovers (at least) salivate and want to know more.  And it’s the very word pictures of the Appalachian countryside, scattered from beginning to end of Richard Gilbert’s book Shepherd, the gorgeous imagery and word poetry which demonstrate not only his love itself of the land, his accomodation to its demands that change with where it’s located in the country, but which also in a literary manner justify that love and draw in the eager reader for more.  There is a price to be paid, of course, and that is the price of empathizing with both sheep and shepherd as they suffer as well as glory in life; still, the book itself is true as true can be to living especially in this sense:  despite the pain endured and the trials encountered, one can imagine few who would rather go without it.

A general statement from a little past the middle of the book itself which expresses the author’s feel for his subject is this home truth:  “Something is always going awry, getting out of control, and otherwise cheating one’s fantasies on a farm.”  This might almost be juxtaposed with the statement of a friendly elderly neighbor from another section of the memoir, from a time when the author lived in Bloomington, Indiana in a more residential community before the farm in Athens, Ohio was even thought of except as a remote dream:  “You’re happier than you know.”  Yet, as one reads forward in the book but back and forth in time in the memoir structure of past juxtaposed to present and then retroactively again, one sees a man and his family going through a much-desired learning experience.  One begins to appreciate that it’s the price in lives and lifetime which gives one the right to speak in tropes and epigrams, which are scattered throughout the book, both from the author’s own words and those of the many farmers and breeders whom he acknowledges as his teachers.

One famous epigram I can recall from our own neck of the Appalachian countryside, and which I also found when I went to college for the first time at a school that was located in the midst of an agrarian community, was this punning one:  one seems to praise someone by saying “He’s outstanding in his field,” but a sly grin changes this into “He’s out standing in his field,” idly, of course, not a desirable condition for a farmer or an academic.  And Richard Gilbert has worn many hats during his lifetime, among others those of both an academic and a sheep farmer, while keeping his sense of humor and his modesty intact as if he were constantly mindful of this very epigram.  I first encountered him as a blogger not too long after I signed onto my own site in summer of 2012, and I’ve read his many excellent posts on narrative, memoir and memoir writers, teaching creative non-fiction to students, music, featured guest bloggers, and more (see Richard Gilbert).  And this summer, I was finally able to read his memoir Shepherd, which I recommend not just for anyone who has an interest in farming or raising livestock, but for those with a sincere interest in memoir or even narrative fiction:  the whole aggravated question of pacing, whether of restraining oneself when one desperately wants to go ahead with a treasured project or of knowing how to pace a memoir or fiction and make it suspenseful and fulfilling and true-to-life is at stake, and Richard Gilbert satisfies, even though he himself is constantly questioning and re-evaluating his own motives.

Like Socrates, the wise man knows only that he knows not, and Gilbert allows us to follow him along in his path across the farming scene, and lets us watch him make mistakes, celebrate successes, and confront the long learning curve of life and death that attends upon even the canniest farmer.  He shows us himself in his most soul-searching, depressed, angry, and perhaps even unjust moments, a man willing to learn and seeking answers. He asks at one point, “Was I really just starting to see, so late, that having strong feelings didn’t make me special?  That they certainly didn’t make me good?”  Again and again, he evaluates himself (even to his genetic inheritance of a weak back) against his father’s plans, disabilities, desires, and accomplishments, and those of other farmers he knows.  He describes his struggle to fit into an agrarian community that has its own traditions, suspicions, and ways of doing things, the most innocuous of which perhaps is what he calls “Appalachian Zen”: his friend and employee Sam’s advice to get to work, “Let’s do something even if it is wrong.”  And of his imitation of his father, he finally concludes, after a visionary dream which comes to him near the end of his farming venture, “I’ve never seen that while I tried to emulate him, I also tried to outdo him.”

His farming wisdom and advice?  As he says, “Many of my breeding-stock customers had [a] broader perspective from the beginning.  They didn’t aim to make money.  They came to farming seeking aesthetic pleasure and solace from an angry world.  And a word had arisen to honor food produced with less control but more craft:  artisanal.  The goal wasn’t high production per acre, but food infused with love and time.  Like art….For the highest quality, nothing beats small, slow, and inefficient.”

His philosophy?  His philosophy is not of the cut-and-dried kind which can be communicated in one heartbeat, but of that learning curve, there is certainly at least one wise lesson to be taken in by all of us, and it can be found by tracing an arc from his first sentence (“Childhood dreams cast long shadows into a life”) through to the very last paragraph of his book, when he describes a “sacred moment” which comes back to him as he gets ready to depart his sheep farm for yet another home elsewhere.  He remembers his Georgia boyhood on a farm, when he was four or five and was surrounded on a hillside by butterflies which “infuse[d] me with wonder and joy.  Because I’m so young, I can’t name, but only receive, their gift:  a revelation of life’s unfolding daily abundance:  a miracle.”  And in that word “miracle” is after all the solution to the vexed question of the learning curve of life and death, given us by an articulate, gifted, and knowledgeable memoirist who, while not mincing words about the negatives, avers that they are only the other side of the positives we prefer to see.  But this is to anticipate the reader’s travels with Gilbert, which must be experienced as a whole and followed from beginning to end to fully appreciate such a grand American adventure, and to place the right value on such an inestimable gift to the reading community.  Though it may not lead you to adopt a lamb, it will certainly lead you to ponder, laugh, cry, and dream dreams with at least one academic who has earned his agrarian stripes, and that human shepherd is Richard Gilbert.

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July 17, 2014 · 4:05 pm

Arturo Perez-Reverte’s “Purity of Blood”–A swashbuckling fiction romancing about a lie

After having read Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s exciting and tumultuous novel The Club Dumas some time ago (it is a free-standing novel at this point, not a part of a series), I made up my mind that his other novels, all apparently written in the great tradition of the adventurous Dumas, must certainly be worth a read too.  What with one thing and another, however, I got distracted by other books and literary endeavors, and until I found a copy of his second Captain Alatriste novel, Purity of Blood, on a free shelf at the library, I blush to confess that I had more or less put the great romancer Pérez-Reverte out of my mind.

At first, I hesitated to read the book right away, because usually I am a stickler for doing things in a certain order, and I felt that unless I had already acquired or at least read his first eponymous novel in the series, Captain Alatriste, that I should not go on to the second.  But then, a friend assured me that the novels were linked mainly by internal references back and forth to the adventures in each, and each book was still easily readable as a stand-alone experience.  So in I leapt.  At first, I felt that I was drowning in a sea of Spanish names as Pérez-Reverte built up his world of characters, and I do not know enough Spanish history to be sure, but I suspect that some of the characters in the novel are references to actual poets, con men, and adventurers (other than the king and queen, who appear in cameo fashion, and are of course meant to refer to the real people).

The story is handled very well, and is related by a thirteen-year-old ward of sorts of Captain Alatriste, Íñigo Balboa, in turn with an anonymous omniscient narrator who tells things that happen in Balboa’s absence which he could only know about by being told about them afterwards (which we are free to think is the case if we want).  The story flows easily, but the narrative waters are constantly perturbed by the concept of “blood,” both in the amount of it that is (or is in danger of being) shed in petty quarrels and scrapes, and in the troubled history of Spain’s Inquisition period, when the concept of “pure blood” (a descent unmarked by having Jewish or Moorish “blood”) was supreme.  I say the concept was supreme, because as the narrator relates from a later period than his thirteen-year-old perspective–and it’s a point made gracefully and well by the rhetoric of events as well as by any rhetoric of declamation, which is kept at a minimum–the concept was all there actually was.  As is reiterated by what the characters know already as well as by what they find out, there is no such thing in their world as “pure blood” of any group or category (and our world has already confronted this truth again and again in history, enough to be equally sure, though there are those slow to admit this, and even violently inclined to aver the opposite).  People are people, we are all related through Adam and Eve (or through whatever “Ur” figures one chooses to prefer), and any claim to the contrary is a lie.

Romancing about the confrontation of the lie, however, adds another dimension to the dialogue.  For example, Pérez-Reverte does not make his positive characters earnest and totally well-intentioned purveyors of the truth, but erstwhile adventurers, scandalous poets, and scoundrels, all of whom have their own reasons for seeking the truth.  They are pitted against the evil characters mainly because they are sickened by hypocrisy and have other axes to grind, old grudges and claims and quarrels, and they even have some prejudices of their own against disadvantaged groups, though they do not make victims of these groups.  The strongest rhetorical ploy they use which features the question of blood descent in fact comes about because a young nun of Jewish ancestry and the young man, Íñigo Balboa, are in the clutches of the Inquisition, and they must find a way to free them.  The very fact that they are not high-flown ministers of justice and the truth but only ordinary culprits and swashbuckling adventurers of men who make use of the truth and come to think the better of the truth in spite of their own prejudices is more convincing in some fictional ways than if they had had totally good intentions themselves to start with.

Finally, there is the rhetoric of the book which cleverly allows the reader not only to participate in a vigorous and page-turning tale of derring-do, but also to feel superior to those benighted characters who persist in their errors to their own undoing.  That not all can be saved who should be and not all adequately punished who deserve it is an element of realism which Pérez-Reverte allows to creep into the novel; still, this one realistic gesture makes the otherwise a little fantastic fiction breathe life, and reinforces our awareness of just how unreal the world can become in actual fact when people allow a corrupt idea to lead them into action, and when they make victims of their fellow human beings according to a notion of division and superiority.

I have, of course, written some very serious words about this novel, as I think it deserves, but of course, another good reason to read it is because, quite simply, it’s fun, gripping, and full of wit and wizardry of blade and dagger.  After all, it’s not every day our serious lessons about life are accompanied by a generous dose of fantasy and play with history and historical figures.  And who better to deliver this combination than Arturo Pérez-Reverte?

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July 13, 2014 · 5:17 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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June 6, 2014 · 10:19 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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May 14, 2014 · 4:56 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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April 23, 2014 · 2:52 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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April 10, 2014 · 4:20 pm

Wally Lamb’s “I Know This Much Is True,” Wayne Booth’s “types of literary interest,” and the fictional “memoir” form

Having within the month finished another huge book, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, and feeling nostalgia for the slow but steady pace of reading a long book and the satisfaction that comes from completing it and having a certain vision of the whole, I picked up next Wally Lamb’s I Know This Much Is True, lured by the philosophical glamour of the title as much as by the heft of the book itself.  It wasn’t what I expected, but I enjoyed it nevertheless.  The idea of a bare minimum of knowledge that could be absolutely counted on, I figured (that title again) was something I or anyone might want to know about.  In its neatness, it reminded me of Paul Simon’s lyric from his Graceland album, which I dearly love:  “I know what I know/I’ll sing what I’ve said/We come and we go/It’s a thing that I keep in the back of my head….”  As we’re all aware who have even a smattering of Greek philosophy, Socrates is responsible for the notion that the wise man knows only that he knows nothing, and any time someone claims to know even a smidgen or a smattering, I want “to know” about it.

And as I said, I enjoyed the book, but it wasn’t what I expected, and the philosophical statement as such came only at the very end of the book, and didn’t really satisfy my curiosity, though it did represent fairly adequately the growth of knowledge in the primary narrator.  It’s a strangely uneven book, one which is too long perhaps, and which perhaps could’ve used another editing than the one it received, but I remain unsure of those conclusions because after all, I had been interested enough to follow it cover to cover, and to complain of the length or editing once one has “eaten the sweet” is perhaps a bit precious.  I Know This Much Is True uses matter-of-fact, work-a-day, rarely technical language thoughout most of the book except for the short philosophical lyrical passage at the very end which somehow seems insufficient for all the weight of the story as it’s told.  There is an interior story as well, the written narrative of the main character and primary narrator Domenick Birdsey’s grandfather Domenico Tempesta, full of grandeur and bombast and thoroughly unlikeable even to the primary narrator himself.  But it is by way of the past and this narrative, as well as through contemporary events and psychological analysis, that Domenick, the “sane” brother, learns to understand his twin brother Thomas (afflicted with paranoid schizophrenia), his family, and even his own place in the world.  And it is because of the closeness with which this narrative sticks to plain, ordinary, everyday (if sometimes harsh and brutal) events that I happened to recall what the renowned scholar Wayne Booth said about “types of literary interest (and distance)” in his famous work The Rhetoric of Fiction, and to see how it might be applied to this novel.

Wayne Booth said:  “The values which interest us, and which are thus available for technical manipulation in fiction, may be roughly divided into three kinds.  (1)  Intellectual or cognitive:  We have, or can be made to have, strong intellectual curiosity about ‘the facts,’ the true interpretation, the true reasons, the true origins, the true motives, or the truth about life itself.  (2)  Qualitative:  We have, or can be made to have, a strong desire to see any pattern or form completed, or to experience a further development of qualities of any kind.  We might call this kind ‘aesthetic,’ if to do so did not suggest that a literary form using this interest was necessarily of more artistic value than one based on other interests.  (3)  Practical:  We have, or can be made to have, a strong desire for the success or failure of those we love or hate, admire or detest; or we can be made to hope for or fear a change in the quality of a character.  We might call this kind ‘human,’ if to do so did not imply that 1 and 2 were somehow less than human.  This hope or fear may be for an intellectual change in a character or for a change in his fortune; one finds this practical aspect even in the most uncompromising novel of ideas that might seem to fall entirely under 1.  Our desire may, second, be for a change of quality in a character; one finds this practical aspect even in the purely ‘aesthetic’ novel of sensibility that might seem to fall under entirely under 2.  Finally, our desire may for for a moral change in a character, or for a change in his fortune–that is, we can be made to hope for or to fear particular moral choices and their results” (p. 125).

In Lamb’s work, Booth’s categories 1 and 3 are strongly marked, category 2 not so much:  the burden of carrying the category 1 rhetoric falls fairly strongly on the interior narration of the grandfather’s handed-down manuscript, in which our curiosity and interest in “the facts” of the family history are satisfied.  Booth’s category 3 rhetoric is developed in the main narrative, which I would refer to as the “external frame story” were it not for the fact that it is much more voluminous than the average frame, yet that is in effect what it is.  Perhaps for those who have read or will read this book, the best way to understand the way in which the category 2 rhetoric is less significant herein is to place this book side by side for comparison and contrast purposes with some of the heavily “aesthetic” novels of Virginia Woolf, like The Waves or Mrs. Dalloway, in which the completion of pattern and form is of a sublimated, almost entirely thematic kind.

Finally, the shape that comes most strongly to mind in reference to this work is that of a memoir (albeit a fictional one) as I have come to understand it from the website of Richard Gilbert, an expert in the form.  The three elements which Gilbert mentions as essential to the development of the memoir in his reviews, interviews, and guest posts from other memoir writers and teachers are:  structure, scene, and persona.  This work of fiction reads very much like a memoir in its development because of the strength of the persona ( or since it is a work of fiction actually, the voice) of Domenick Birdsey and the tight structuring of scenes with flashbacks closely tied to each cautious step forward in the contemporary day action.  As well, as has been commented on in Gilbert’s site, a memoir is different from an autobiography in that an autobiography attempts a chronological development, whereas a memoir attempts a more “thematic” development.  In I Know This Much Is True, the overall theme is one of Domenick’s attempting to overcome the fear and anger he feels at his twin brother Thomas’s insanity.  That he manages to deal with his demons is clear from that last, atypical, lyrical passage, which I give here not only to prove my point, but because it will not be necessary to issue a “spoiler alert” for types 1 and 3 of literary interest, and I think it will encourage readers to pick up the book to see “how” the novel develops:  “I am not a smart man, particularly, but one day, at long last, I stumbled from the dark woods of my own, and my family’s, and my country’s past, holding in my hands these truths:  that love grows from the rich loam of forgiveness; that mongrels make good dogs; that the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things./This much, at least, I’ve figured out.  I know this much is true.”

The beauty of that final passage points up the only real quarrel I have with this book, which is that I wish it had more such fine lyrical passages in the rest of the novel.  Putting this one in at the ultimate position does give it major emphasis, but I would feel more comfortable with the book as a whole if it were all of a piece, and did not leave that final summation to do for all the narration what needs to be done in the way of ending things with the correct emphasis.  Be that as it may, this is a good novel, and should be read by anyone who has an interest in the topics of mental illness, twins, the history of family generations, period history, feminism, in short, it covers a lot of ground.  And for its good qualities, I would recommend making it your next long read.

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March 30, 2014 · 1:09 am

Kathryn Stockett’s “The Help”–Better as a movie script than as a book?

After trying to purchase the audiobook and getting the book itself by mistake (a gift for my mother a year or so ago), I finally took it upon myself to read Kathryn Stockett’s book about an aspect of civil rights in the American South of the last mid-century, The Help.  I was curious as to why so many people, most of whom I knew had feelings and politics on the correct side of the civil rights question, seemed lukewarm about the book.  Why, hadn’t it been compared to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird by more than one of the reviewers?  Wasn’t it a genuine effort to capture the voices and sentiments of the women who worked as maids and nannies for the southern white supremacists?

Well, the voices weren’t the problem, as it turned out.  The voices, once one got over that rather ordinary reader’s annoyance with having to follow a dialect, a perplexing dilemma from Mark Twain on up, the voices, I say, were a delight.  They seemed genuine, and insightful, and heartfelt.  Once I hit my stride with following the dialect and spelling, it was far less troublesome than Mark Twain himself, and I got into the rhythm of it, eager to read more of what the women had to say.

But the truth is, since reading the book, I’ve realized that no, it isn’t like Harper Lee, who was writing more or less at the same time as some major civil rights changes were arduously making their way onto the scene.  Harper Lee’s book was courageous, whereas unfortunately, as popular and right as The Help is, it’s got a much larger choir to preach to, and by that much is the more run-of-the-mill.  As my brother put it, “It’s been done before, been done better, and I guess I have to say I’m just tired of seeing yet another privileged white slowly clue in to what’s at stake.”  He wasn’t talking about Kathryn Stockett herself, the author, I don’t think, but about the character of “Miss Skeeter,” who helps the maids publish their book so that the world will know what actually goes on from their point of view in the houses of their white employers.

This is why I think that the book quite possibly is better as a movie, though I never thought I would say that about any book.  I’m planning to see the movie to verify my impressions, but somehow I think that once the topic is as mainstream as this one is, a movie is the proper venue for it.  This is a form that allows people to congregate in a public space and share what they (by this time) almost certainly all agree about, which is the uncontestable opinion that civil rights is an important and valid endeavor with which to engage and something that has a continued reality and force whose ever rights we’re talking about.  And if there are some who don’t agree, in all likelihood they will be shamed into silence by the internal logic of the characters’ modest demands, though they may possibly continue to defy public opinion in private.

While I realize that this book has become the darling of book clubs all over the country, I would just ask this question about its literary quality:  is there that sense that the author had to pay the penalty of serious insight in order to write it, or is it a little flimsy, a little thin?  Though To Kill a Mockingbird is uplifting in the end, there is a sense of genuine penalty paid about it, a feeling of tragedy and at the same time a feeling of being borne aloft.  Though the intentions of The Help may not have been exactly the same, what penalty is actually paid by Miss Skeeter for what she does?  She goes to NYC and becomes a writer, at least that is what is predicted of her future.  She escapes the consequences of at least some of her actions, and though her mother is dying, for some reason this is not played upon in the same way we can imagine Harper Lee using it.  It’s instead a sort of “feel good” book.  So, maybe this is a good book-to-movie script, but after all, let’s not exaggerate and compare it to something it cannot reach to.  It’s a well-written, workmanlike bit of writing, which follows all the rules and touches most of the bases, but it’s not a great American novel.  It’s enjoyable seeing the white supremacists–particularly a real bitch named “Miss Hilly”–get their comeuppance, but it’s important to remember that the challenges that were there when Harper Lee was writing are far less now than they were then, and by that much exactly is The Help the lesser novel.

It’s still worth reading, however, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in the period and in the stories and feelings of the ordinary people who stood in the shadows of the great integrationists and civil rights leaders, for they too have their stories, real or imagined, and this is a capable imagining of some things we know from other documents to be true.  I did enjoy the book, and we can all use some reinforcement of what we already believe to be true, as long as what we believe is on the fair side of things.  But we should also find books that enable us to be challenged in the fair things we have difficulty believing at first, in the things which provoke our imagination to allow us to grow closer and closer to the brotherhood and sisterhood of humankind.  It is only then that we can award the highest accolades to a work of art and place it in the pantheon of great works.

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