April 27, 2013 · 1:41 am

The old-fashioned and repellent question of “breeding,” and a way in which it still applies

When I was but a young person, I attended a summer day camp which had horseback riding as an activity, and I also took horseback riding lessons independently.  What sticks in my memory are two horses in particular, Prince and Show Prince, two horses whose similarity in name bore not at all upon their individual equine temperaments and manners.  The pure thoroughbred, Prince, whose people had retired him to the stable for cheaper boarding on the condition that young people could (after being taught to be gentle to his mouth) ride him for lessons, had the manners of the most flawed and cranky aristocrat.  He tried to buck.  He had a habit of twisting around and trying to bite his rider, and with the best will in the world to be gentle to his mouth, it was hard to do, because he fought his young rider constantly, fishtailing and dancing around, not in high spirits as would a racer, but in pure spite and bad temper.  By contrast, the mixed breed largely Appaloosa, with the misnomer Show Prince (a misnomer because though he could win trophies as an Appaloosa, he was not a thoroughbred competitor), was a perfect and lovable mount, one whose manners were kind, whose gait was so gentle that I once found myself galloping and being held on safely almost by his will when all I was asked to do was trot.  He was affectionate and dear, responsive and never ill-intentioned, and had a truly gentle mouth because it would never occur to anyone to jab at the reins.  Thus though Show Prince was perhaps less valuable in dollars, he was a dream of a horse, the ideal horse with children, who yet had some pride of place in breeding circles as a show horse.  I was years away from having heard of a writer named Henry James, for whom the question of human “breeding” was so very important that it was one of his most constant subjects, which he turned back and forth and back again and examined in great detail.  Yet, years later, when I read his short story “The Real Thing,” one of the first things that popped into my mind were my old acquaintances, Prince and Show Prince, in one of those unbidden sorts of thoughts that will occur when the mind is not censoring itself.

People are not horses; horses are not people.  That much is clear.  When we discuss the question of “breeding” in people, there has historically and repellently been a tendency to assume that wealthier people are necessarily “better bred” than poor people, though there has also been the opposing mythology (for “breeding” is a mythology in the sense of an informing societal belief) of “nature’s gentlemen,” that is, of those of poorer status who have an innate sense of what to say and do in difficult situations.  The writer Henry James was one much given to exploring the questions relating to breeding and good manners, and in “The Real Thing,” an artist, an aspiring portrait painter who makes the main part of his living in doing magazine and book illustrations, meets up with both sorts of people.  He has some regular models, such as Miss Churm, an irrepressible Cockney, and Oronte, an impoverished Italian man who acts as his butler as well, and they both have a sense of how to pose for various portraits of aristocrats and rich people in novels with whom they have nothing in common.  By contrast, there are also a Major Monarch and his wife, who come by when recommended to the artist by Mr. Rivet, another artist.  They are genuinely “well-bred” people, who have fallen on hard times financially.  They have looked for work, for what they might be able to turn their hands to, among various venues, and have at last hit upon the stratagem of asking to pose as the artist’s models for aristocrats and well-bred people, reasoning that since they are “the real thing,” it ought to be easy.

This is a mistake, as the artist finds out.  He tries his best, but is unable to make anything successfully of Major and Mrs. Monarch.  Whatever they do, they simply are not “right” for the role of artist’s models.  For what they lack, it turns out, is the ability to practice “imitation,” which Miss Churm and Oronte have in abundance.  Miss Churm has so much that she is able to pose as an Italian, whereas the Italian Oronte, in the right costume, makes a perfect artistic model of an English gentleman!  At a point near the end of the story, the artist has to tell Major Monarch that he can’t afford to lose the artistic contract in order simply to give them employment.  The text reads:  “I drew a long breath, for I said to myself that I shouldn’t see him again.  I hadn’t told him definitely that I was in danger of having my work rejected, but I was vexed at his not having felt the catastrophe in the air, read with me the moral of our fruitless collaboration, the lesson that in the deceptive atmosphere of art even the highest respectability may fail of being plastic” [italics mine].

The artist does see his erstwhile “well-bred” models, though.  His friend Jack Hawley, who has returned after an absence, has told him that they are ruining his work, and so he is “disconcerted” when they turn up again, to watch him sketch at a love scene between his other two models.  The artist feels that “this is at least the ideal thing.”  Not “the real thing,” but “the ideal thing.”  Suddenly, Mrs. Monarch offers to straighten the hair of Miss Churm, whose curls seems a little untidy to her for the scene.  The artist is at first afraid that Mrs. Monarch means some harm.  “But she quieted me with a glance I shall never forget–I confess I should like to have been able to paint that–and went for a moment to my model.  She spoke to her softly, laying a hand on her shoulder and bending over her; and as the girl, understanding, gratefully assented, she disposed her rough curls, with a few quick passes, in such a way as to make Miss Churm’s head twice as charming.  It was one of the most heroic personal services I’ve ever seen rendered.  Then Mrs. Monarch turned away with a low sigh and, looking about her as if for something to do, stooped to the floor with a noble humility and picked up a dirty rag that had dropped out of my paint-box.”

The next ten minutes are telling.  While the artist continues to work, the Monarchs (so tellingly symbolically named for their erstwhile social status) do his dishes and clean up his kitchen in order to be useful to him.  As he says, “They had accepted their failure, but they couldn’t accept their fate.  They had bowed their heads in bewilderment to the perverse and cruel law in virtue of which the real thing could be so much less precious than the unreal; but they didn’t want to starve.  If my servants were my models, then my models might be my servants.  They would reverse the parts–the others would sit for the ladies and gentlemen and they would do the work.”  For the time being, this dutiful bowing to the forces of “fate” ruins his ability to work, and he dismisses the sitters temporarily.  He continues to allow the Monarchs to work for him for another week, then he gives them “a sum of money to go away.”  He gets the remaining contract for designing the rest of the book series’ art works, but as he says, “my friend Hawley repeats that Major and Mrs. Monarch did me a permanent harm, got me into false ways.  If it be true I’m content to have paid the price–for the memory.”

What’s most obvious is that the “false ways” the Monarchs get him into are ironically the opposite of the “true ways” of art, which are in turn only the arts of “imitation,” as opposed to the attempt to secure “the genuine.”  Miss Churm knows how to “look over a head” in an imagined “crowded room,” though she says honestly that she would rather be “looking over a stove”; it’s no doubt a bit chilly in the artist’s rooms in her borrowed costumery.  But the point is that the artist can make it look good through “the alchemy of art,” which does not need the actual facts with which to construct a painting or illustration.  And it’s hard to believe, honestly, that the artist really doesn’t mind if he has been done a “permanent [artistic] harm,” or that he feels repaid in having “the memory” on which to look back.  Still, when the Monarchs first walk in, before he knows they want to be paid as models, he assumes they are there to pay him, that is, to sit for a portrait of themselves as wealthy people do.  This is perhaps the crowning irony, that they would have been appropriate for his most genuine aspiration to fulfill itself in terms of.  Or is the crowning irony that Mrs. Monarch shows a kind of quality of gentleness that he is in fact incapable of painting, that is individual, not class-oriented, and not susceptible to artistic representation?

So, though Henry James often plays favorites and writes far more sympathetically of the so-called upper classes and less so of the so-called lower classes, even to the point of being often and sometimes justifiably labelled an elitist, in the world of art, at least in the world of this story, he recognizes no aristocrats except those who “can make the thing work.”  Thus essentially, my old friend Show Prince told me a much-valued secret a long time ago, when we were trotting and cantering and galloping around together:  Prince may have gone to some sort of valuable stud farm and have sired other genuine aristocrats as crabby and intemperate as himself, and have made the thing work that way, in a sense “doing the dishes” like the Monarchs, but for making the thing work as a mannerly steed with the true sweetness and aplomb of the real artistic gentleman, give me Show Prince (and Oronte and Miss Churm) every time.

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April 22, 2013 · 2:05 pm

“The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”–Stephen Bantu Biko

Finally, as of the weekend it seems (or perhaps I just didn’t notice it before, in the events of the last week), the trees are bursting out with green tips.  The long and soggy winter has given way to a greener, more glorious spring, whereas last spring the grass, due to droughts, came up brown.  The forsythia, dandelions, redbush, hyacinths, and daffodils are out and are waving in gentle spring breezes.  The temperatures have wavered from 50-74 (F) or so, and the world seems a brighter, sunnier, sweeter place in spite of pollen counts vexing some folks and bad weather reports coming in from elsewhere.  It’s possible now to sit by the water and watch the ripples and the current and dream of an impossibly beautiful summer still to come.  And already this morning, there is on the news a report of a five-person shooting in Seattle and a shooting of undetermined number in North Carolina.  This is on the heels of last week’s Boston Marathon bombings and shooting spree and God knows how many separate bombings and shootings and stabbings and slayings and injuries in the last year, some due to verifiable quarrels, some simply due to indescribable malice, others due to mental confusion, others due to doctrinal differences, and others (as seems to be emerging in the Boston bombings) due to apparently unknowable factors.  For, though both of the Tsarnaev brothers were said to be devoutly religious Muslims, the outrage of their relatives and communities speaks I believe genuinely when it declares that they were not acting as sincere Muslims act, but were acting out on their own tick, motivated by unimaginable things even to their nearest family members.  So here we sit, as a nation and a part of the world community, left with another question mark even more noticeable than that of 9/11 because that had an origin of easily determined cause (a particular radical group).

It may sound odd to quote Steve Biko at this juncture, from his own struggle for freedom and dignity, but I would like first to quote and then to explain my frame of reference:  he said “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”  He was abused and jailed and suffered for a cause, and it may seem odd to apply his remark to a whole nation, nay, a whole world enslaved by violence and mayhem, and to pilgrims from other countries “yearning to breathe free.”  But who is it but the convenience store clerk, working the night shift, or the female student, trying to make her way home at night after a late class or library study, the enthusiastic people at a political rally supporting their candidate, or the happy crowds in full daylight enjoying a community spectacle and thinking to get away from chaos and heartbreak for a day’s communal fun, who stand the most to lose when martial law of the streets becomes the norm due to insane and unpredictable explosions and bullets?  We all lose freedom and dignity and the right to keep open minds in that situation, because the caretakers of our nation have to treat us all as potential suspects in order not to miss a real miscreant through carelessness.

Our dilemma is a real one, experienced all over the world in this century, and becoming more and more what a frenzied and frustrated newscaster who was trying to follow up the scene in last week’s day of terror on Friday called it (when the second Boston Marathon bomber was finally cornered):  he referred to our dilemma as “the new norm.”  Is this the truth?  Is terror and looking surreptitiously around oneself constantly in all directions instead of just looking both ways when crossing in traffic to become the new norm?  Is reporting tittle-tattle on possibly innocent new neighbors with some “funny” foreign habits that are not ours to become the new norm?  Is going through numerous checkpoints and security checks and barriers where we need to present identity cards the new norm?  Guess what?  In some parts of the world, it already is, and has been for quite some time.  And maybe it’s time that we in the United States stopped flag-waving in a chauvinistic way and pretending that it can’t continue to happen here just because our individual right to bear guns and apparently kill each other at will is “secure” and instead raise our flag more reverentially and attempt to make realistic adjustments to our new conditions as long as they may last.

For, things change.  They do, though we don’t always notice it right away.  It may not be today, it may not be tomorrow, but while a utopia is perhaps not likely, neither is a dystopia absolutely necessary.  We are not the slaves of Fortune, but are instead the controllers of our own souls and hearts and minds, and we can choose to maintain freedom and dignity inside ourselves, in our own hearts and minds, not to forge forward without fear, but to inform ourselves with our fears, of our fears, and then to try to go ahead anyway, heads and hearts not high, but realistically levelled and eyes alert and aware.  The human mechanism is a wonderful entity–you’ll notice I don’t say “thing”–capable of marvelous degrees of adaptation, and because we are not things and are reasonably and within limits self-directed at our best, we can choose to participate in our own enslavement by adverse conditions, or can fight free of the bonds of hysteria and cant, and can ask ourselves what more, under each set of requirements, we can do to keep free of feeling enslaved.

Now is the hour of our choice, a long-overdue choice according to some.  We are now more than ever, as Plato said of himself, “citizens of the world,” and now as then, when the known world was a smaller place by far, we must act according to a different set of responsibilities, a mature set of responsibilities, acknowledging that there are those who perhaps for partially understandable reasons do not like us or fit in with our descriptions of ourselves, whether we label them agitators, lunatics, terrorists, or human ciphers.  We must deal with the anomalous and abnormal in our midst, and must begin by accepting that even as “the old world, she goes on the same as she always did,” that “the world has [also] changed,” that now as never before there is more ferocious firepower and destructive power and wanton energy around to make our task a hard one.  What we must ask ourselves is:  will we, with Steve Biko, refuse to allow our inner beings to become oppressed when we cannot prevent the external being from suffering oppression, will we, as the world has with a resonant voice and Boston has with one unified voice decreed in our stead, be strong?    I think that with respect and acknowledgement for all that was lost on that Monday in Boston and with the same respect for the sufferers and grievers in every like situation, my question answers itself.

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April 15, 2013 · 5:01 pm

The Nature of Human Imperfection, Idealism, and the Spectre of Human Doubt–Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown”

One of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s best-loved and most effective tales (which Edgar Allan Poe praises for the mastery of its brevity and “single effect”) is his tale “Young Goodman Brown,” about the spiritual adventure–rather, misadventure–of young Goodman Brown, who journeys away from his young “aptly named” wife of three months, Faith, on an “evil purpose,” about which he tells himself, “‘Well, she’s a blessed angel on earth, and after this one night I’ll cling to her skirts and follow her to heaven.'”  Now, there are ways of arguing as to whether this short story is a fable, parable, or exemplum, all special kinds of allegorical endeavor, and one could make a closely reasoned argument for any of the three, but this technical detail is of less moment, to my way of thinking, than the fact that Hawthorne seems to prefer a final mystification as to which of the three exactly it is.  As M. H. Abrams told us long ago in A Glossary of Literary Terms, if it’s a fable, it “exemplifies a moral thesis or a principle of human behavior; usually in its conclusion either the narrator or one of the characters states the moral in the form of an Epigram.”  Well, in a long paragraph at the end of the story, the narrator shows young Goodman Brown’s life history in brief after he has (perhaps, or apparently) attended a witches’ sabbath.  The narrator draws a conclusion, however fictionalized and broadly painted:  the moral seems to be either that one should, if one wants to retain faith (that key word again), either never part from the right path or–and this is a split moral, from which we see the saturnine features of Hawthorne grinning at us broadly–we should have a sufficiently complex view of human sin and redemption that we can allow for the occasional straying from the right path, as long as we also envision human goodness to reside in a disproportionate overbalance on the “good” side of actions and intentions.  On the other hand, if the story is an exemplum, it’s told as “a particular instance of the general theme of a sermon.”  If in fact we see Hawthorne’s story as an example of the way ministers and priests and speakers of various kinds often preface their sermons and talks with an illustrative story, then this is an exemplum; but given Hawthorne’s complexity of vision and the way he often in his tales seems to prefer putting his reader over a barrel or leaving the reader sitting on a fence (to mention just two uncomfortable psychological results of his work), he makes a somewhat quizzical preacher.  Still, if complications and complexity are the issues he is trying to raise, then this story is a perfect exemplum of the issues involved.  Finally, if the story is a parable, or “a short narrative presented so as to stress the tacit but detailed analogy between its component parts and a thesis or lesson that the narrator is trying to bring home to us,” this would account for the ease with which the analogies in the story as it is structured shine forth (though again, one has to beware of seeming ease when Hawthorne is the source–he likes to throw the occasional spanner into the works).

Now for the story itself:  young Goodman Brown (and the story, as must be obvious by now, is set in the American Puritan era) leaves at sunset to make a journey of some sort overnight away from his young wife Faith.  Faith begs him not to go in a key but indeterminate phrase, on this night “of all nights in the year.”  Thus, the night, which fills Faith with apprehension at the thought of being alone, is an important date somehow, perhaps Halloween or some other night of ill omen.  As he tells her in response, “‘Say thy prayers, dear Faith, and go to bed at dusk, and no harm will come to thee.'”  He feels guilty and thinks that it’s as if “‘a dream had warned her what work is to be done to-night.'”  And of course, near the end of the story, we are proposed the option of thinking of Goodman Brown’s adventure in the forest that he too might have had a dream:  “Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting?”  But then the solemn knell of Hawthornian tones rings out in the final paragraph:  “Be it so if you will; but alas! it was a dream of ill omen for young Goodman Brown.  A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man did he become from the night of that fearful dream.”  For, when young Goodman Brown goes forth toward the woods, he goes to meet a man “in grave and decent attire” (and many texts tell us that the devil appears as a gentleman) who bears “a considerable resemblance to” young Goodman Brown as if they were “father and son,” though “more in expression than in features.”  In short, as this fable, exemplum, or parable leads us to believe, he goes to meet the devil and attend a witches’ sabbath.

Several times during the course of his journey farther and farther into the woods, Brown bethinks himself of his Christian teachers and people who have been held up to him as moral examples, and he wants to turn back, and even declares his purpose to the devil, who slyly doesn’t resist his suggestions but leaves him with his options open.  Still, as they walk on, he sees and hears these very moral examples heading for the same place he is heading, and saying such things that he believes they have been deceiving him all along.  They talk about a “goodly” young man who is going to be taken into their communion, and the devil, when young Goodman Brown protests that his own family has always been free of the taint of sin, responds thus:  “‘I have been as well acquainted with your family as with ever a one among the Puritans; and that’s no trifle to say.  I helped your grandfather, the constable, when he lashed the Quaker woman so smartly through the streets of Salem; and it was I that brought your father a pitch-pine knot, kindled at my own hearth, to set fire to an Indian village….They were my good friends, both; and many a pleasant walk have we had along this path, and returned merrily after midnight.  I would fain be friends with you for their sake.'”  When young Goodman Brown–though still walking ahead–objects that he doesn’t want to break Faith’s heart, the devil cunningly agrees with him and allows him to step to one side of the path, where he nevertheless sees other moral exemplars of his youth coming along to the meeting, and hears them greeting his new acquaintance in a friendly manner.

When the devil gives Brown his staff to lean upon (again, an involved kind of symbolism from Hawthorne), he tells Brown, “‘You will think better of this by and by….Sit here and rest yourself a while; and when you feel like moving again, there is my staff to help you along.'”  Next come along in front of the resting Brown some male members of the “communion,” who discuss the fact that a “goodly young woman” is to be taken into the fold, and though the well-known figures further demoralize Brown, he looks up to the starry heavens and shouts, “‘With heaven above and Faith below, I will yet stand firm against the devil!'”  But then, a cloud comes between him and the stars, and we read:  “Aloft in the air, as if from the depths of the cloud, came a confused and doubtful sound of voices.”  He then in desperation begins to call out Faith’s name, but hears mocking voices and a woman’s scream.  “‘My Faith is gone!’ cried he after one stupified moment.  ‘There is no good on earth; and sin is but a name.  Come, devil; for to thee is this world given.'”  He has of course before been relying on the Christian doctrine that if a man or woman is sufficiently good, that they may even take a sinning mate into heaven with them; but because this is his weak point, relying upon Faith rather than upon himself, this is where he is morally the weakest (or perhaps Hawthorne wants to point here to the necessity as well of Good Works, which from what we have heard from the devil in Brown’s moments of doubt, Brown’s relatives haven’t practiced).

There is a dramatically rewarding and frightening scene of Brown in the woods at the witches’ sabbath, where he comes face to face with the other “convert,” Faith, his wife, and the devilish figure says, “‘Lo, there ye stand, my children….Depending upon one another’s hearts, ye had still hoped that virtue were not all a dream.  Now are ye undeceived.  Evil is the nature of mankind.  Evil must be your only happiness.  Welcome again, my children, to the communion of your race.'”  Then, after they are welcomed by the whole group, Brown suddenly perks up and shouts to the apparent figure of his wife, Faith, “‘Faith!  Faith!….look up to heaven, and resist the wicked one.'”  The text says he doesn’t know if she does or not, but that the whole scene promptly vanishes, the fiery hearth and forest as well as the rest, and he finds himself sitting on a rock.

So, what do we have?  We’ve had the chilling apparitions associated with demon worship, yet we have the option (or do we?) of interpreting the whole thing as a dream.  At the very least, we have the option of assuming that in the end Brown repented of his bad mistake, and departed “a sadder and a wiser man.”  But the end of Hawthorne’s tale tells us instead, in a lengthy paragraph, that Brown felt suspicion and dread the rest of his days of everyone around him, including Faith, who continues in the end of the tale to greet him as she did at the beginning.  The last line reads, “And when he had lived long, and was borne to his grave a hoary corpse, followed by Faith, an aged woman, and children and grandchildren, a goodly procession [again that word “goodly”!], besides neighbors not a few, they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom.”

Thus, Hawthorne’s story is about the nature of human imperfection and its involvement with idealism:  too much idealism, which demands that  one never err or make a mistake, can be the real mistake, because any little slip can cause one to assume that there is no way to recoup the loss.  This was one of the perpetual criticisms which Hawthorne, in all his tales, seemed to be making of Puritanism:  too strict and unrelenting a moral code seems to invite mistakes, because people are human, and cannot help the occasional misstep.  Thus, those who are held up as models in the average community, like ministers, deacons, judges, and virtuous women, are often held up by Hawthorne as short-changing those who rely upon them.  But were so much not expected of them in the first place, idealistically, or were more forgiven them, then they would not seem so flawed and dramatically imperfect.  Hawthorne cleverly selects a prime sin in Puritan times, consorting with the devil and witches, because it involves us to some extent in the realm of the imagination:  we can propose to ourselves that it is an allegory even, in which whatever it was that young Goodman Brown was going away for that night was perhaps some quite ordinary sin, symbolized by the illicit meeting in the woods, and thus was a sort of flaw more of us might be able to sympathize with rather than something a bit anomalous.  The spectre of human doubt is the face of young Goodman Brown himself, gloomy and brooding over all the scene that had previously been so filled with joy for him–once doubt enters, can it ever fully be dismissed?  Or is human doubt the nature of human life?  This is why I say that Hawthorne’s dark visage grimaces at us a little in stern amusement:  he knew that his tale was one that we couldn’t easily dismiss with an either-or idealistic answer, because he allows us the same freedom either to doubt or believe that the devil-figure allows Brown, and if we lack imaginative robustness and are so weak-minded as to be swayed by a cloud that sweeps over the midnight stars and the sound of the wind shrieking in the forest trees, then we deserve what we get.  And what we got this time was a superlative tale by a master of the short story, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

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April 11, 2013 · 8:25 pm

Robert Frost’s “Neither Out Far nor In Deep”–The Nature of Aspiration, Longing, Disappointment, and Fulfillment

Today, I had it in mind to share a poem by Robert Frost, “The Bearer of Evil Tidings.”  Unfortunately, this poem has no version which is in the public domain yet (i.e., which has been out for a sufficient period of time and can be found elsewhere on the Internet), and so my own sense of aspiration and longing to communicate both the poem and an analysis closely interwoven with it cannot be met.  Strangely and funnily enough, however, as I was searching the Frost poems that are quotable in full, I ran across another Frost poem which I find intriguing and worth commenting on, and so I wasn’t doomed to disappointment, but instead was able to fulfill at least some part of my desire to share a Frost poem today.  The title of the poem is “Neither Out Far nor In Deep,” and it appears in several other places on the Internet, but I want to quote it in full, so here goes:

“The people along the sand/All turn and look one way./They turn their back on the land./They look at the sea all day./As long as it takes to pass/A ship keeps raising its hull;/The wetter ground like glass/Reflects a standing gull./The land may vary more;/But wherever the truth may be–/The water comes ashore,/And the people look at the sea./They cannot look out far./They cannot look in deep./But when was that ever a bar/To any watch they keep?”

Some commentators on this poem (who can be found in other sites on the Internet) like to point out that the people who watch the sea and its horizon are deluded (are in fact “gulls” like the bird in the foreground, that is, “dupes”).  Others point to the finite nature of human achievement.  By contrast, I would like to point to the infinite nature of human aspiration, which persistently looks at that which seems opaque, or boundless, or impenetrable.  The received wisdom about this poem also seems to be that Frost is taunting or mocking the effort to see “out far” or “in deep,” but I’m not sure that’s really the point of the poem.  It may well be that he is in fact practicing a sort of self-mockery in titling his poem “Neither Out Far nor In Deep,” as if he was aware that his own view is shallower than that of those whom he is watching.  The mystery of the sea beckons, casts its external evidences forward (like ships and sand–the “wetter ground”–and the gull) and seems to frustrate or deliberately limit what can be seen.  Still, the humans insist on their view of the horizon and the water which “comes ashore” to such an extent that Frost, writing of them, does not say that they “turn their backs on the land” but rather that they “turn their back on the land,” as if they were all one body.

As one body thus the humans “look at the sea all day,” regardless of the land behind them which “may vary more.”  They clearly find something which makes up to them for the fact that “they cannot look out far” and “they cannot look in deep”–perhaps after all, Frost is not slighting the watchers at the shore, but is instead commenting on and commending to our attention the nature both of disappointment and fulfillment, and the difference between goal and process, between achievement and journey.  For, despite the fact that the sea seemingly limits our abilities to penetrate its meaning, still the goal and the achievement of doing so may not be the correct things for us to be focusing on.  Perhaps instead we are meant to be focusing on the process of the quest and the journey, of the seeking itself.  And thus, the people who sit and stare so fixedly at the sea are not necessarily the “dupes” of the view (and of Frost, one might add), but instead are doing what humans always do when faced with a limitless puzzle–continuing to ponder and question the conundrum in view, somehow secure in the “knowledge” that even if none of the present watchers manage to circumvent the enigma’s unending nature, yet there is more than enough of that nature there to supply generations to come with riddles which they can solve, not perhaps the ultimate riddle of existence, but smaller goals to achieve which all chip away at that riddle, piece by piece, adding more and more to the stock of human understanding.  And here, I’ve mixed Frost’s metaphor, by suggesting that the sea (a fluid, after all) is a solid something which can be chipped away at like a block of stone–I apologize to my critical readers for this figure, though of course I could switch my figure and say that Frost, in mentioning “the wetter ground like glass” means to foreground the sand as an objective correlative of sorts for what the sea itself endlessly washes back and forth, gradually itself eroding the solid earth beneath.

Finally, the nature of human faithfulness to “keeping watch” is perhaps also being commented upon, whether or not one sees it as commendable being a matter of individual interpretation:  “They cannot look out far./They cannot look in deep./But when was that ever a bar/To any watch they keep?” suggests other sorts of watches, such as religious vigils and death watches over deceased bodies or ill persons, and the victory of human perseverance in maintaining watches of these sorts.  For, who can look “out far” or “in deep” to the endless mystery of human life and death, and not wonder “wherever the truth may be?”  Whether “on the land” of our ordinary perspectives or “on the sea” of our more unusual views and speculations, we are both limited by our capacities and distinctly suited by our longings and aspirations to touch some small parts of the “infinite sea,” and find some sorts of fulfillment in the watches we keep.  Thus, though today I did not get to put before you the full text of “The Bearer of Evil Tidings,” I was able to find some measure of fulfillment and soften my own disappointment by putting before you yet another Frost poem, which I hope you have enjoyed.  A simple search of the author’s name and the title of the poem, listed together, will take you to various sites where other commentators have written on it.

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April 7, 2013 · 6:19 pm

“It’s not you, it’s me” and Alice Sebold’s “The Lovely Bones”–individuality of people, characters, and plots….

Sometimes literary hype is a friend of a novel or novelist, and more often it’s simply misleading, or is not a friend at all.  Everyone was telling me that I should read Alice Sebold’s novel, The Lovely Bones, and the terms they chose to portray it in were definitely not the most accurate that could be chosen.  Well, I mean, what are you going to do, people give book recommendations often in the way they recommend you try a strange new cheese on the market:  everyone has their own tastes, and no cheese tastes the same to everyone, not even to people who like it.  But what puzzles me is the way the book was often described:  “It’s a novel about a murdered girl who comes back to lead people to her killer,” was the one that turned up most often.  Now, this sounded like a very inventive new way of investigating and invigorating the suspense novel, so even though I don’t read many suspense novels, I decided to read this one.  When I finally picked up a copy of it, my desire to read was (I recognize unfairly) strengthened by some of the reviewers who had given the book high marks:  Michiko Kakutani, writing for the New York Times, Anna Quindlen, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, et. al., et. al., et. al.

What I found instead was a fair-to-middling novel that roamed all over the fictional terrain of suspense without really settling down into a familiar pattern of the crime eventually being solved.  Oh, there is retribution of sorts, but I found myself reading a novel which couldn’t seem to make up its mind whether it was a family drama, a suspense novel, a young adult’s story about heaven written for pre-teens, or something else entirely.  I found my interest lagging early on, and after half-way through, I had to force myself to keep reading.  Of course, I was thoroughly grateful for one thing which normally proves troublesome with a lot of first and even second or third novels if the writer isn’t well trained in revision or the editors are sleeping:  there were no real stylistic or grammatical errors of a major variety that I noticed.  Still, it was workmanlike without being craftsmanlike or artistic:  but it was vouched for by a lot of mature writers and reviewers all of whom presumably knew better than I did, so I kept reading until the end, determined to find out what it was which had sparked such a flurry of interest in so many.

I discovered that, in looking for a familiar pattern, I was looking for the wrong thing.  What this book is about is the individuality of people, and separately of characters, and of plots.  But I had to read the attached essay by Alice Sebold called “The Oddity of Suburbia” and the interview with her conducted by David Mehegan of the Boston Globe fully to appreciate these things, and also to become aware that Sebold’s earlier memoir of 1999, Lucky, which I had neither read nor heard of, was partially behind The Lovely Bones in backstory terms.

The earlier memoir apparently describes Sebold’s experience of being raped and her account of the circumstances attached and the conclusion (if one can ever assume that there is a conclusion to the experience of being raped, an experience of a sort one is not likely to be able to forget or easily put aside even momentarily).  And it was there, in the “Reading Group Guide” postscript to the novel that I was able to make a connection with the book, and recognize the substantial value that the book does have, not only as a promising first novel (though not Sebold’s first attempt at a published novel), but as a work which can shed the “promising first novel” designation and actually win recognition as a novel classified in general amongst other novels.  For, I myself went through the trauma of an attempted rape, and though I was able to escape, and though having done so I in all likelihood avoided what I’m sure must’ve been the far worse consequences of Sebold’s experience, the trauma is one which any woman or man must recognize as real and devastating, to say nothing of the fact that each experience is also an individual experience of pain and loss of some sort of innocent humanity for everyone who goes through it.

What threw me off about the book to start out with–and to be fair, the book does still drag a little, even though I’m looking back on it with more understanding now–is the sleight-of-hand Sebold pulls off by almost encouraging the reader to think that the book is about the murderer being brought to justice.  For, the book is really about the murdered girl’s family, friends, and neighbors (and I don’t think I have to issue a spoiler alert to tell my own readers this, because they will eventually be satisfied with what happens to the murderer, though it is almost “too little too late” in terms of the outrages he has perpetrated).  The most accurate and perceptive blurb of all the ones on the book cover or in the front of the book is thus that of Conan Putnam, writing for the Chicago Tribune, when he says “The Lovely Bones seems to be saying there are more important things in life on earth than retribution.  Like forgiveness, like love.”  Thus, following up what happens to those who remain behind is really of more moment than writing a suspense novel, and if I had had ahead of time Alice Sebold’s intriguing essay on the strange sameness of the suburbs in which people (and therefore also the characters in her novel) are full of individuality nevertheless, then the individuality of the plot wouldn’t have bothered me so.  And while I’m glad that the supplementary material in the book occurred where it did in the volume (after the text of the novel), I can’t help but speculate as to how the book would have held me had the essay been published as a foreword or introduction–maybe I wouldn’t have found myself getting impatient with the pace of the novel if I had known ahead of time that the dead girl’s family and friends were the real focus of the novel.

So now, whose fault is it that I’m still not thoroughly entranced with The Lovely Bones?  Is it the fault of the many people who led me to believe that I would be reading a suspense novel with a difference?  Is it the fault of the writer, who stubbornly refuses to commit to one subplot or another after beginning with a feint to the suspense plot?  Is it my own fault for ignoring so many of the reviewers who indicated quite clearly that “neighborhood tragedy” and “holding on and letting go” and “familial love and how it endures and changes over time” and “coming of age” were all subtopics of the novel?  As to that last possibility, I suppose I’ve just gotten in the habit of disregarding blurbs more often than not, unless I find after I’ve read the book that they are particularly pertinent, and all of these tag phrases are certainly part of what the novel is about.  I guess in the end I just have to say “The novel is well written, with no glaring grammatical or stylistic errors.  It has variety and surprises aplenty for the reader who is jaded with the average family novel or suspense novel or what-it’s-like-in-heaven supposition.  If you don’t read it, you’ll be missing something worth the time it takes to adjust to the pacing and perspective.  And if I’m not fully satisfied with you, The Lovely Bones, well then, it’s not you, it’s me; you leave me feeling a little out-of-sorts and wishing for a fuller revenge on the killer, at the same time as I’m wishing I could embrace any and all of the miracles in the book as they happen.”  And in this book, there are plenty of miracles for even the most quarrelsome of readers; I guess I’m just exceptionally obstreperous.

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April 1, 2013 · 9:49 pm

Running Away to Join the Circus, or Toby Tyler and me….and “Water for Elephants”

I could only have been three years old, because the movie “Toby Tyler, or Ten Weeks with the Circus” came out in 1960, when I was just a sprout.  All I remember is an emotional rationale for leaving one’s foster parents behind, and acquiring a new friend in the form of a chimp, which of course in pre-chimp violence in the media days, we all longed to do.  I mean, who wouldn’t want to run away and join the circus and have a monkey for a pal?  The rest of the movie is very, very dim in my recollection, except I imagine from the aura it left in my mind, that there was a happy ending.  For anyone interested in finding out, however, there is a copy available still on Amazon, for rent or purchase.

Now, monkeys are one thing, elephants are another:  firstly, monkeys are of a manageable size (as were all the monkeys in the movies in the old days, the ones kids made friends with, and leaving King Kong out of account); they are natural mimics, and show us a part of ourselves we rarely see except in mimicry.  But elephants?  They are large and ungainly and however noble and intelligent are just plain too big to wrap their limbs around one’s neck in affection.  But that doesn’t mean, as Sara Gruen would have us know, that they don’t feel and retain memories and affection, and also remember grudges.  And there is, after all, that versatile trunk.  It’s not only that an elephant never forgets, to quote the old saw, but as Gruen quotes from Dr. Seuss’s work Horton Hatches the Egg, “An elephant’s faithful–one hundred per cent!”  And in her novel about the circus, circus folk, and circus animals and their correct treatment, Water for Elephants, she illustrates not only elephants and other animals showing qualities which only people are sometimes believed to have, but also shows the downside of some members of the human race, who are, in the phrase which unfairly characterizes our cohabitants on this planet, “acting like animals.”

The story is told from the perspective of one Jacob Jankowski, who in the present of the novel is a resident in an assisted living home where too much assistance is sometimes given and too little real living is going on, at least in his own view.  In alternate chapters, he relives his past in memory, first as a veterinary student then as an only partially qualified vet for animals in a circus he joins when his parents die and unintentionally leave him penniless and homeless.  And in many ways, he is leaping out of the frying pan into the fire.  For example, he is among a group of heavy drinking people during Prohibition, many of whom drink chemically dangerous alcohol derivatives; he is under the supervision of an occasionally crazed equestrian director and a circus manager who cares only for the main chance to make a buck; finally, while it takes him a while to keep from alienating a number of roustabouts and performers alike on the circus train, he finds himself falling in love with the paranoid schizophrenic equestrian director’s wife, and playing a role to hide his feelings in order to protect the two of them from retribution.

Little by little, Jacob’s fortunes go first up and then down in the circus past as he remembers it, partially in keeping with the fortunes of the rather lately acquired elephant, Rosie, who turns out to be much more “human” than some of her keepers.  And then, he enters a period of relative good luck.  I really refuse to issue the standard spoiler alert and spoil the surprises waiting for the reader at the end of the novel.  Suffice it to say that Jacob’s experience on the circus train serves him well both in his past, his present, and in what we are led to believe will be his future, and in order to appreciate Sara Gruen’s fine work, which came about in spite of the fact that she had no early experience of the circus, growing up in northern Ontario and only doing her research as an adult, the reader will have to read the quite suspenseful and exciting book.  By the by, the book contains an excellent interview with Gruen, who is a pet lover and owner with her husband and family of various pets, as well as a question section which provides topics for group discussion.  All in all, the book is well worth the asking price of $13.95 which is on the cover, though I am sorry to report that my copy was a library discard, which usually makes me happy because I get them for free that way.  Still, I can always hope that the reason it was discarded isn’t because the library judged it no longer of literary value, but because they had acquired a non-water-damaged copy to replace the somewhat warped paperback version I now have.  For certainly, this book is an adventure full of both the excitement any of us may feel at seeing a circus or carnival, revisiting our own childhoods, and provocative adult issues of love, kindness, and humanity that need to be explored by us in our mature lives.

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March 29, 2013 · 9:18 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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March 24, 2013 · 8:21 pm

Things always seem fairer when we look back at them, and it is out of that inaccessible tower of the past that Longing leans and beckons.”–James Russell Lowell

The title of my post for today is basically a half-truth, and I don’t have a lot to say about it, but I wanted to call it to my readers’ attention because, quite often when we are bemoaning the fact that something is no longer as it was, we are told by well-meaning but possibly quite wrong-headed friends or family “You just see it that way now.  But don’t you remember at the time when I tried to get you to see it/them/the experience/the day in a positive light, you were full of gloom and doom, and dreaded meeting the persons involved/going to the event?”  That is, there is truth in the statement that once we have overcome a difficulty, the positive aspects of our experience are what we prefer to remember (always assuming that we are not born-again pessimists, who prefer to see things in a negative light anyway.  Or, we might be persons who prefer to remember both halves of an experience or another individual because we believe in the principle of balance).  It is questionable whether or not we can assume that things “always seem fairer” and as well we may argue that through the magic of memory and our ability to create repetition, the “tower” of memory and the past isn’t as “inaccessible” as one might assume from that fact that we look at time most often as something linear, and most often see the past as gone and done with.  In fact, James Russell Lowell’s assertion seems quite valid only from the perspective of the linear, and foregoes any association with living through one’s memories as a way of reanimating the past.  It’s as if he assumes that memory is only an old scrapbook, and our past a faded collection of photographs, which in his day was largely the way memory was thought of.

Of course, we know now (and this might at first seem to make his insistence on his point more justifiable) that memory is imprecise, and that witnesses to scenes are notoriously unreliable even when they are making their best effort to be accurate; yet this very imprecision is what is reassuring, when one thinks about it.  For it is in living through the memories we have, and reanimating them through the agency of this imprecision, that we create new things.  When we come face to face with others who lived through the same times or experiences, we may of course decide to argue as to whose analysis of the past situation is more accurate, and there may in fact be cases in which one person’s memories are wildly inaccurate, for example with those who have Alzheimers.  Yet in a situation in which both people can be assumed to have normal memories, it is part of the adventure of living and loving and part of the risk attached thereto that animates our being and keeps us vigorously discussing “what really did happen.”

Finally, why is it, in Lowell’s poetical figure, that “Longing” is the one in the “inaccessible tower of the past” beckoning?  Longing is what the beholder feels when someone or something else is beckoning–hence the poetical figure itself is askew.  For, Love or Memory or Experience or some other entity is what beckons that causes the person on the plain below–to expand the picture–to feel Longing. Thus my dissatisfaction with the entire image, and my feeling that Lowell was cheating poetically and relying on cheap sentiment at the same time.  May we all “look back” with impunity on good things, forget as far as possible negative things that cause us pain except to keep their lessons in mind in order to avoid repeating them, and not tell ourselves, as Lowell seems to be attempting to do here, that if only we were experiencing things in the present they wouldn’t “seem” as “fair”–Dammit, we know what we like and what has pleased us and displeased us, don’t we?  James Russell Lowell, let’s have no more palavering on the matter–you’re sounding more and more like a grim, dissatisfied type of customer who has nothing good to say about either the present or the past.  Time travel is only possible in our day and age with memory aiding–I say, let’s live it up, past, present, and based upon these two, future, with anticipation of more good things like others we have known fulfilling its role.  And that’s my not-very-intellectual-but-deeply-felt post for this first week of Spring 2013!

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March 22, 2013 · 6:13 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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March 21, 2013 · 3:59 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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