August 23, 2012 · 4:36 pm

When is borrowing acceptable, and when is it unacceptable (and actionable) plagiarism?

The twentieth century and the early twenty-first have not been kind to the notion of borrowing from others in order to create one’s own work.  From Ezra Pound’s edict “Make it New” to the constant reiteration in critical and creative writing courses for students of the priniciple “just do your own work,” the modern (1899-1945) and contemporary (1945-present) eras have put a high premium on originality, that loaded term of terms.

Of course, Pound himself was a great borrower from much earlier works, which he imitated, borrowed from, referred to, and essentially canonized in the more acceptable (read:  non-anti-Semitic) of his Cantos.  So, Pound’s instruction to “make it new” was less an injunction to create ex nihilo, or like Athena’s “springing full-blown from the mind of Zeus,” than it was to revitalize literature by returning to past models and revamping them for modern use.  It’s just that in returning to past models, Pound went further back in time for his models, instead of basing his work on that which came immediately before him.

T. S. Eliot, who had his poetry sculptured and shaped by Pound in Pound’s character of literary patron and advisor, is known to have further muddied the waters of clarity by saying “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal” (from Philip Massinger).  Nevertheless, this statement is qualified by other things Eliot says, such as “[Tradition] cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor” (from the essential essay for students even now, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”).  He also says “The great poet, in writing himself, writes his time” (from Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca).  Of course, to some extent writers who are very self-aware of their status like to issue shocking or startling remarks like Eliot’s first one quoted above.  But wait–take these three quotes together and with their sources, and I think things become a little clearer again, at least with reference to T. S. Eliot.  We might have considered anyway that Eliot was referring to writers like Shakespeare in the first quote above:  for, Shakespeare regularly stole plots and sometimes whole plays from others, improved upon them immeasurably, and set them in their forms for generations to come, because of his sheer poetic and dramatic greatness.  The problem is, this took place at a time when it was the norm for poets and playwrights to draw freely upon the works of others, both contemporary to their own times and from antiquity.  But our times have insisted upon originality as part of the essence of a truly great work, and upon innovation as a necessary rite of passage in the struggle to turn out a good and creditable work.  It’s no wonder that those people who are genuinely confused by the issue of plagiarism are so taken aback by what seem like competing sets of requirements.

And then, of course, there’s the issue of writing articles and books in the academy.  If you can still find recordings of the Harvard mathematician Tom Lehrer’s hilarious satirical songs anywhere (and let me not wander too far from my topic, but Lehrer is well worth hearing; he’s the John Stewart of his time, in the 1960’s), you’ll run across a lyric about Lobachevsky, a Russian mathematician who evidently wrote things without proper attribution that were at least highly imitative of what others had written.  Part of the lyric reads:  “Plagiarize.  Let no one else’s work evade your eyes.  Remember why the good Lord made your eyes.  So don’t shade your eyes, but plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize–only be sure always to call it, please–research.”  For another quote of this ilk, there’s Wilson Mizner’s “Copy from one, it’s plagiarism; copy from two, it’s research.”  These quotes are not meant to make students who might read my column cynical; rather they’re intended as an airing of the issues involved.  The best advice in the academic life is:  however much you may borrow, either credit the work outright and get consent, or if it’s an occasion between friends where no credit is needed, check that out with the friend or let them see it to make sure.  You can always credit it privately and impersonally for them if they are shy of attention, or can perhaps say something like “as a friend noted some time ago” or variations on the same.  If you’re working for credit in a class rather than writing a manuscript, let your instructor know that you are honest by crediting quotes as you are taught.  The basic rule is: be modest.  Don’t take credit for something which you have found somewhere else, and if it turns out especially that the other fellow or gal beat you to the punch and said what was just on the tip of your tongue (infelicitous mixing of metaphors here, but you get my point), give them credit anyway:  they historically said it before you did, even if the idea is a brand new one which just occurred to you.  If you find out too late to credit it that it was said by someone else first (after you publish or turn in an essay for example), tidy up behind yourself by mentioning (in any new edition or to your teacher) that you were previously unaware of the concurrence of remarks, and give the other person a footnote or mention.  Contrary to what you may believe, it makes you look better rather than worse.

To return just for a moment to Shakespeare and one of the reasons he got by with his extensive borrowings without credit (aside from the traditions of his time, that is) let’s look at the poet John Milton for a quote:  “For such kind of borrowing as this, if it be not bettered by the borrower, among good authors is accounted Plagiarè” (Eikonoklastes).  There have been a number of studies written, only a few of which I’ve even seen or had presented to my attention by my own teachers, that show how Shakespeare immensely bettered the other playwrights and poets he stole from.  So, in the traditions of his own time, in which it was essential to write upon some story that perhaps was well-known anyway, in the same fashion in which a realistic writer of our own time might use as inspiration a story which is covered by all the major news networks, Shakespeare “made the grade,” so to speak.

During the twentieth century also, the scholar and critic Julia Kristeva came along, with her idea of intertextuality, which is a way of referring to the intricate and intertwined relationships literary texts establish among themselves without recourse to authors’ intents.  As this is more a move to put consideration of what the authors’ intentions are out of the picture than an actual stance on plagiarism, it is a more theoretical issue.  It takes place after the fact of composition, however, not before the fact, so I’m leaving it out of account for now (and I’m being a bit lazy here–Julia Kristeva is a very challenging author to read, and I’ve only covered most of one of her books).  I’m just mentioning it because there is some tangential relationship to originality as a topic.

And what about all those columnists in the news in the last ten years who were fired for plagiarizing from other columnists or newspeople?  It’s tempting just to let Peter Anderson settle the issue.  He says, “Quotations are a columnist’s bullpen.  Stealing someone else’s words frequently spares the embarrassment of eating your own.”  Still, as we have seen, this doesn’t really settle the issue, because the columnists get fired anyway, and several of them have declared that the fault was unintentional.  What do we make of this?  Perhaps it would be generous in this discussion to remember the many times in which some of us literary wannabees copied out the words of others in our notebooks or on our computers because they seemed so strongly to chime in with what we ourselves wanted to say or felt.  I’ve certainly had times myself (in the days before personal computers) when I found thoughts scribbled in one of my writer’s notebooks, and said to myself complacently, “Boy, that’s really a good one.  I have to use that soon.”  And in the days before I started also to take the time to copy down the author’s name and possibly the source of the quote as well, I misremembered more than once and assumed the thought was mine, only to have a friend or teacher to whom I showed the idea furrow his or her brow a moment and say something like “That sounds like so-and-so.  Are you quoting or did you think of that yourself?”  It can happen, yes, which is why it’s a good idea always to note down under your quote where it came from and the author, if you know.  It only takes a little more effort, but more effort is what being a good writer is about.  And if it’s just a coincidence, look up the author anyway, and see how they developed their thought that was similar to your own.  This is what truly changes your work from plagiarism to research, which all kidding aside is a noble endeavor.  And there’s no rule that says you have to write only about your own little mud puddle or corner of the world to stay original; most good writers are either knowledgeable already upon some subject they want to write about or do actual research on it (and either directly or indirectly credit their sources).

My solution in fiction, which would not suit everybody, is to have a character mention the name of the author he or she is quoting, or initiate a literary discussion which makes it obvious what issues are being discussed.  In poetry, I give notes to my poems and let my readers know whom I was thinking of when I wrote, if anyone.  Most of all, I try to “just do my own work.”  And I put my whole heart into it, because what everyone on this planet has to say, despite all the many human things we share and the human experiences which join us one to the other, makes them as individual as myriad snowflakes, each one original and different.  Putting your whole heart into being your plot, being your characters, being your style, et cetera, and relying likewise on the best models you can find and the best literary advice is advancing a large step ahead on the path towards real originality.

P.S.  My own investigation of and meditation upon this topic was occasioned by dialogues I’ve had with the blogger at http://thelivingnotebook.wordpress.com/ .  By and large I think we agree, though he is advocating a freer system of borrowing than I feel comfortable with.  I rather suspect that he’s more interested in spurring creativity in others by his remarks than he is in actually encouraging people to steal freely.  He’s a little like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound in that he knows enough about what he’s talking about to know just how far he can go without seeming unoriginal (and of course, he turns out a very original column, which I’ve much enjoyed).

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August 20, 2012 · 7:19 pm

“What beck’ning ghost, along the moonlight shade/Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade?”–Alexander Pope

There is a corollary to the proposition that there’s more rejoicing over the return of a prodigal son than there is over the continuing excellence of a constant one; that corollary is that it’s worse when a potentially good man goes bad than it is when a bad man continues what he’s doing.  In Kingsley Amis’s book The Green Man, we get a double reflection of this second notion, when we not only meet up with a modern day man of relaxed moral fiber, but also with the ghost of a minister turned evil revenant who confronts him.

In an English tradition descended from the ancient fear of nature and natural forces–for our worship of nature is an entirely different tradition, though equally ancient, which even so recognizes the power of the earth–the “green man” is a sort of roving spirit, sometimes neither good nor ill, sometimes outright malevolent, and sometimes given to testing mankind, as in the medieval tale “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” which many of you will already have read and I hope enjoyed in a literature class.  In Amis’s book, the man of easy morals is an innkeeper named Maurice Allington, who is situated with his wife, father, and daughter in an old inn in Hertsfordshire, England.  Though the elemental force is so strong that there’s almost no bargaining with it, Maurice learns from the evil spectre of the minister’s ghost and a mysterious young man, and makes some sacrifices on his way to learning what evil and good may actually be about.

The book relies on a combination of fear and hilarity, the deep-seated source of a certain intensified response from the reader in both directions.  The book is not unlike other chilling literary/stage/movie experiences I can think of:  for example, the 70’s stage show “Dracula,” with its equally hysteria-inducing combination of the two otherwise opposed tendencies.  We alternately thrill with horror and gasp, then laugh out loud.  A movie experience utilizing this same formula was “An American Werewolf in London,” which used the by now reliable combination of slapstick, horror, satire, and cultural and occult lore that Amis’s book uses.  But Amis’s book preceded these dramatic offerings in time; it was first published in 1969, though also published in the U.S. by an American publisher in 1986.

So, just what are Maurice Allington’s problems?  Firstly, he is dissatisfied with his marriage to his wife, Joyce, and wants to bed the lovely Diana, wife of his best friend, the doctor Jack Maybury.  His father, who is not in the best of health, lives with his family and Maurice is unsettled by him, too.  He also has a massive drinking problem, as his concerned family members and friends constantly remind him.  And he has to decide if it’s his drinking which is causing the most unusual of his problems:  that is, he sees spirits.  He sees spirits and experiences psychic phenomena far beyond the limit of the simple antique ghost tale which is retailed by him to his customers at the inn to pique their interest.  Of course the book deliberately, artfully, and effectively leaves it unclear for the most part as to whether these are genuine manifestations, a result of the door between worlds suddenly being opened, or whether Maurice is actually becoming mentally unhinged and debilitated by the liquor and his own lack of balance alone.  The only being who seems to confirm the sightings he himself experiences is the cat, Victor, who in the time-honored tradition of cats with psychic abilities arches his back, hisses and spits, or runs out of the room and hides when the ghosts come to visit.

Maurice sees not only the sinful and spirit-summoning minister from the past, but also what turns out to have been the minister’s (Underhill’s) wife; an incarnation of a young man who acts something like a modern version of Christ but something more like a modern version of Satan; an apparent manifestation of a twittering bird which makes him wonder if he has delirium tremens; and a large clump of walking devastation of foliage which reads like one of J. R. R. Tolkien’s ents on steroids:  this last is the so-called “green man.”

The dapper young man without a name helps orient Maurice to the experiences he’s undergoing, though the orientation isn’t one conducive to dwelling safely and well in this world.  Others try to help him recoup his losses, such as his doctor friend Jack Maybury, whose wife Maurice is trying to bed on the sly.  His own wife, Joyce, and his son Nick and Nick’s girlfriend are all equally concerned, and are trying in their various ways to help Maurice come to terms with what they mostly regard as a fiction of his overwrought imagination.  His young daughter Amy is in danger of becoming a pawn in the game he is playing with his otherworldly experiences and foes.  Finally, he has trouble keeping track of the time, time having no meaning when he’s conversing with the elegant young man, because his watch and clocks no longer aid him in determining how time is passing when they are speaking to one another.  Worst of all, perhaps, is his difficulty in coordinating daily reality with the supernatural things which are happening to him (in his head?).

For Henry James readers who have encountered some of the criticism written about James’s story “The Turn of the Screw,” this double-barrelled treatment of suspicious happenings, when a character is proclaimed by different critics to be 1) suffering under a real visitation from the other world or 2) suffering from an overactive imagination, a drinking problem, a psychological disorder, et cetera, will be familiar.  James is in fact mentioned in The Green Man.  And though I’m not going to reveal the ending of the book (with its unexpected romantic alliance), I can safely tell you without ruining the reading experience that even up to the very end the suspenseful questions of exactly what happened remain.  After all, part of the time we may be in the mind of a crazy drunk (or is he in legitimate danger of losing his soul?  Or has he squeaked “out from under” losing his soul?).  This is a book well worth the occasional difficulty with theological terminology and concepts; in fact, it is a book that I think Henry James himself would’ve been proud, in our time, to have written.

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August 19, 2012 · 8:53 pm

“The school of hard knocks is an accelerated curriculum.”–Menander

In Gertrude Stein:  A Biography of Her Work, the scholar/critic Donald Sutherland says, “Gertrude Stein uses the simplest possible words, the common words used by everybody, and a version of the most popular phrasing, to express the most complicated thing….[S]he uses repetition and dislocation to make the word bear all the meaning it has….one has to give her work word by word the deliberate attention one gives to something written in italics.”  This is certainly true of one of her early works, a collection of three stories called Three Lives, which is much more readable than her later more experimental works.  Still, even with this early work, the “repetitions and dislocations” of language would confuse an inexperienced, simple reader who was reading mainly for the story and who was also launching a fledgling attempt to get a sense of the English written language.  This would be true even were the reader going only for the story of the characters’ emotions and nothing else.

Thus it is that though I have routinely read very challenging poetry and prose both, I have no enthusiasm for the works of Gertrude Stein in general, except to view them as experiments, perhaps necessary stages the written English language had to go through (or perhaps “confront” is the correct word) in order to be renovated.  Something similar could be said of the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet in terms at least of what they have contributed in English translation:  they are amazingly like each other, and seem all to go about language developments in the same way.  Yet they were at the time they were written part of a focus to objectify the narrative voice or experiment with it in a way which was begun but not finished by people like Ernest Hemingway.  Still, Hemingway is readable, whereas often Gertrude Stein is simply difficult, mainly meant for people who like romans à clef, word puzzles, and guessing games.  One way around this difficulty with Stein, if you are determined to read things she has written other than Three Lives, is to look over a copy of editor Renate Stendhal’s biography in captions, short quotes, and pictures entitled Gertrude Stein:  In Words and Pictures, a thick photographic history of Stein’s life which enables the reader to see better the things and people Stein was referring to in her novels and poetry, and to get a better sense of the time in which she lived.  I looked at that, but I also read Three Lives, mainly because it was the one thing of hers I felt I could read well from start to finish.  Here’s what I found and what I feel I can honestly offer about the collection of stories:

The stories are three sobering portraits of three different women’s lives in America in the early 1900’s.  The first woman, who is the main character of “The Good Anna,” Anna Federner, is “of solid lower middle-class german stock” (the lower-case “g” in german is as Stein uses it throughout the book).  The entire story is concerned with incidents relating to Anna’s employers’ lives (she is a sort of housekeeper and a general factotum), her dogs’ lives, and her conflicts with the scheming and lack of generosity she sometimes encounters.  For, she is good to others; it is not just a title, it is her title, this is the source of what she is, some short-sighted errors aside.  She comes to a dismal but quite ordinary end and the story ends simultaneously.

“Melanctha,” the second story, while different from the first story in that it speaks of a young African American woman and her intrigues and relationships with men and with women, ends similarly.  Though more enigmatic in nature and more amoral, just as the prose about her is more enigmatic in its starkly expressed picture, without narrative sympathy or reserve, Melanctha too comes to a bad end, but without having noticeably distinguished herself by unmotivated kindness to others, as the first character, the “good” Anna did.  There is also a certain amount of dated treatment of black people’s issues in the book, for all that it is Gertrude Stein writing, and for all that she was in sympathy herself with the African American struggle for rights in her own time.

In the third story, “The Gentle Lena,” the shortest of the three stories, Lena is described as “patient, gentle, sweet and german.”  She too starts out life as a servant, brought over to the U. S. to serve.  Though her life is called “peaceful” by the narrative voice, her fellow nursemaids tease her, apparently because she is not intelligent or quick-witted and will believe anything they tell her.  Her basic incomprehension of what is going on around her is shown quite clearly in Stein’s recording style:  it isn’t a language barrier problem, because it persists even when she is with other German people.  For example, we are told that Lena did not enjoy her life in Germany, but that she herself is unaware of this.  Stein quite simply tells us why, with no preamble or laborious psychologizing to indicate special insight (and this is true though Stein herself was a gifted student of the American psychologist William James before she went to live in France).  Lena’s life only slightly improves materially when she gets married and has her husband’s three children, and it improves not at all emotionally, for after going into what used to be termed “a decline,” she too dies, with no moral to the story, in true Steinian fashion.

What can be said about these three lives?  First of all, that they are simply that:  three lives, varied in some specifics, but each of them ending where we all end.  Yet, they do so without the least fanfare or blare of symbolism, imagery, or obvious rhetoric.  And that they are no better, or happier, or more rewarded with heroic status is the point I believe we are meant to take away.  Since they are all three women, this can possibly be interpreted to be a feminist moral if one is so inclined, yet Stein doesn’t assign any moral at all.  The final point is perhaps that there are so many unremarkable lives, which so many of us live, and that we are lucky even to be as well-remembered as these characters are, either by the other “characters” in our lives or by writers like Stein.

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August 17, 2012 · 2:26 pm

“An evil mind is a constant solace.”–Unknown

Have you ever watched an anti-hero, whom you know to be an anti-hero if not an outright villain, get away with murder in a novel, and find yourself hoping that he will continue to do so for the pure (or not so pure) comic pleasure it gives you to see him go from incident to incident, triumphant but flawed?  And of course, because he is so flawed you can laugh at him freely, and not invest real sympathy in his travails the way you would for a noble hero or heroine.  In this case, the reader himself or herself becomes a receptacle of a certain sort of selfishness in allowing such sympathy to exist:  that is, while you don’t give the character any true respect or empathy, you can still enjoy the course of his actions and, if and when he meets his inevitable nemesis, have nothing to mourn for except perhaps in having to stop following an enjoyable read.  It is in this sense alone that the reader imitates sympathetically the character Michael Beard’s “evil mind,” a “constant solace” to Beard and one unknown to the other characters, whose misunderstandings of his actions are all fairly humorous.

Michael Beard is the anti-hero of Ian McEwan’s 2010 book Solar, and a literal murder is exactly what it looks like he will get away with, though his tribulations mount up in a very funny way as if he is being punished by fate.  Beard, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist past his prime, is making a living through public speaking engagements, through a remote sort of participation in some corporations as an advisor, and lackadaisically through working along with a government project on global warming.  On the home front, Beard has freed himself time after time from his entanglements with women, until he one day wakes up to the fact that his latest wife has in fact turned the tables on him in this regard.  With murder in his heart Beard approaches the situation, only to be relieved of responsibility through a bizarre accident, for which the wrong man is later blamed and arrested.

It would appear through most of the novel that Beard has what is known as “the devil’s own luck”; all he has to do is resent someone or something, and bad things happen, but not to him.  And to counterpoint his involvement with the “dark side,” Beard has the satirical version of “the mark of the beast” on him, a melanoma on his hand that, were he sincerely concerned with solar problems and global warming and its after-effects, would have been dealt with safely.  Yet, he is also a figure of fun, just as the devil(s) in medieval morality plays often were:  for example, when Beard participates in a polar expedition to view a glacier, he makes a hilarious mistake.  Badly needing to pee while he is out on the iceberg on a snowmobile, Beard makes his typical error of being badly adjusted to his circumstances on earth by peeing in a sub-zero temperature, with comically disastrous results.  For as the saying goes among men, “it’s cold enough to freeze your pecker off.”

A more serious challenge to the comic devil known as Beard is the fact that he takes little care of his health in general and is obviously living on borrowed time, not only because of the events due to his bad actions, which are snowballing behind him, but due also to a mounting stress and heart condition resulting from the fact that he is monumentally selfish, even to himself.

The one love of Beard’s life is his little daughter, Catriona, who stands alone as a challenge to all that Beard is and has done wrongly.  Will Beard free himself from a life-long habit of cynicism and casual indifference to the rights of others, or will he get his just deserts just when he is close to redemption?  To some extent, the reader must figure this out.  One thing is certain:  Solar is a wonderful satirical masterpiece, and Beard is the traditional “satyr” at its center.

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August 15, 2012 · 9:10 pm

“….I look upon all men as my compatriots…making less account of the national than of the universal and common bond.”-Michel de Montaigne

From the cave paintings of hunting scenes in French caves to hieroglyphs of planting and sacred rituals to tribal dances that tell stories, even to modern day poetry slams and support groups, human beings have always told stories about how we came to be or how we come to be who we are, or where we still plan to go.  One of the most essentially human things a person can do is to shape a narrative about an event or feeling and share it with other people.  It is therefore an especially touching tale that Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni has come up with in her 2009 novel One Amazing Thing, in which there are stories within the main frame story, stories which people not congregated around the age-old campfire or stove but trapped in a U. S. city passport office tell each other.  They do this not just in order to pass the time, but also to align themselves with each other as survivors, and to attempt to rejoin the human tribe from which they are separated, they hope only temporarily.

Uma Sinha is a graduate student studying Medieval Literature; Malathi is an administrative clerk in the passport office where the group is isolated by an earthquake sealing off the building section they are in.  V. K. S. Mangalam is her boss, an unhappily married man to and by whom she is alternately attracted and angered.  An older Chinese woman and her teenage granddaughter are also there, the grandmother trapped behind the barrier of language which she must rely on her granddaughter to translate (or at least so they think).  There’s also a mature Caucasian couple who are passing through the throes of an indifferent marital relationship; a young Indian Muslim man who to Uma seems to be “from one of the mountain tribes,” and a young African American man who has experience in the armed forces.

Uma’s voice is the main interpretative voice at first; then the story is seen as it progresses from several of the other characters’ perspectives, as they try to settle and soothe their wounds, get into conflicts over minor episodes between them, and finally give way to Uma’s suggestion.  For, Uma suggests that they tell stories to each other, each telling about “one amazing thing” in their lives, in order to keep the time they share humane and ethical.  They are all surprised when the first person amongst them to agree is the Chinese grandmother, Jiang.  Cameron, the young African American, is meanwhile the tribal leader for the “tribe” of story-tellers made up of people from all different nations.  He sets in motion the search for a safe way out, for adequate and clean water and sanitary facilities, and for a first aid kit.  He also uses his experience in disasters to monitor the risky behavior of some of the others (for example, of Mr. Pritchett, who must have a smoke in this dangerously inflammatory setting), and helps keep them as calm as possible while they wait for rescue.

One pragmatically valuable thing that happens later on in the story is that Uma’s idea of story-telling brings the group together closely enough in their shared values that they become also more generous with their hidden and hoarded foodstuffs.  Whereas before there had only been a small number of items to be shared out placed on the counter for food, suddenly previously unseen items begin to appear, and are shared out as well.  Their time is becoming shorter, however, and is threatened by at least two things:  Cameron, their “leader,” who has asthma, is running out of time on his inhaler; and water is climbing up in the room, leaking in from damaged pipes somewhere else in the building.  And some of their stories have been painful in the telling:  as Uma thinks to herself “on behalf” of one of them, “Hell is other people,” (the quote I cited a day or two ago from Jean-Paul Sartre).  Then they experience aftershocks, then more water–and not being a “spoiler” at least in this article, I leave you to find out not only the rest, but the key to the rest:  all the stories they have told together which have led them to their mutual conclusion.

The frame story here is only that, a frame story, like that of The Decameron or The Canterbury Tales (the latter book of which Uma has with her at the beginning, which we may feel gave her the original inspiration for her story-telling idea).  For, these characters too, though not on a literal journey or at a wayside inn like the pilgrims in Chaucer’s collection of verse tales, are on a journey, a journey into each of themselves and sometimes through traumatic “moments of truth” or self-confrontation.  As a group, they learn from each other, and as individuals, they manuever themselves in other directions from those of the past.  Their challenges are not entirely internal, because they are fearful of the building’s collapse; rather the collapse of the building symbolizes the falling apart of old identities and the new ones rising from the dust of the city.  I hope you will read this book and appreciate how new and old are woven together in these tales from different cultures and age groups, and will agree with me that they make a very tender and feeling picture of what is known as “the human condition.”

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August 14, 2012 · 4:02 pm

“No jury in the world would convict him/her….”–common saying

Today I would like to comment on a story which I found anthologized in The Best  American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike and Katrina Kenison in 2000.  It has been anthologized in other collections as well, I believe, though incredibly enough (considering that it was written at a time before women got the vote) it was first published in 1917 in a periodical called Every Week.  It’s the short story “A Jury of Her Peers,” by Susan Glaspell.  Though I’ve sort of hinted at the symbolic outcome in the title of my post, you will get a great deal more out of the experience of the story by actually reading it, regardless of anything I might write about it (it’s one of those “it helps to have  been there” stories).

As we all know, justice is often (maybe even usually) a partial thing.  Just think of how long media, public, and private debates about any but the most extremely obvious and egregious breaches of law or custom can go on.  In this story, the topics dealt with are things such as community responsibility towards members (in the fellowship of women, for example, something almost forbidden by the tight fellowship of the male bonding in the story, which makes fun of the women’s ties); the manner in which surroundings can reveal a person’s life to an attentive viewer; and fellow feeling as the source of true justice.

The women in this story are two married women who go with their husbands (one the sheriff) and a third man (a prosecuting attorney) to view the scene of where, it is suspected, a woman killed her husband.  At first, though one woman is more clearly open-minded and views things from her own ability to relate to other women, both of the women stand unresisting in their husbands’ shadows.  Things begin to change, however, when the men go upstairs in the house of the murdered man to view the “scene of the crime” and the women stay downstairs by the fire, intending only to find and take some of the accused woman’s possessions to her where she waits in custody in the jailhouse.  The women down below get a chance, instead, to view things which make it obvious how the woman bore up under her husband’s bad treatment:  they see that she was isolated and alone (though not by choice), that she made do with unnecessarily shabby clothes and home goods, and that she was not only negligently but cruelly treated in a casual, despicable way by a man accounted a “good” man by his peers.  Meanwhile, the men stay mostly in the top of the house, certain that their wives are the stereotypical “good” women (ones who provide for and abide by their husbands’ wills); when they do confront the women, their attitudes are sexist, condescending, and full of undeserved criticism of the accused woman (for not keeping a good clean house, for example, or for leaving things half done).  Though the men have reached the correct answer (for we are fairly sure throughout the story that the woman is somehow responsible for her husband’s death), they have done so for the wrong reasons, and in an entirely wrong spirit.

It is the women who, with simple innocent curiosity are led to the truly correct answers regarding the murder, though they start by knowingly suppressing the details they are finding downstairs from the men; the men josh and joke them about what they are doing and handling, not for a moment seeing how it connects; and the more they discover, the more we are led to question the nature of evidence, and whether or not the women will reveal what they have “seen.”

As with every jury, some of the members start on one side, some on another, and at first the most timorous of the two women (the sheriff’s wife, whom the men joke about as “married to the law”) is Mrs. Peters.  When she is finally and fully persuaded by Mrs. Hale of the injustice with which the accused woman was treated by her husband, even of the psychological brutality which has no outright link with physical punishment in the story, we read “It was as if something within her not herself had spoken, and it found in Mrs. Peters something she did not know as herself.”  These two women are the informal “jury” of the story:  though Mrs. Wright, the accused woman, was to a degree less fortunate than they, that they truly are “a jury of her peers” is born out by the way in which they both quickly reach the same conclusions from the same evidence and comparison of it with what they know of their own lives.

The climax of the story comes when the men arrive back downstairs, fully convinced that they have seen “the scene of the crime” (while the women whom they laugh at and condescend to have been viewing downstairs the “scene” of another “crime” entirely).  They say in the women’s hearing that what they actually need is a motive, something which would explain the woman’s actions.  What will the women do?  All they have to do is surpress their knowledge of the other “story” they have pieced together (just as the woman who was arrested was said to be “piecing together” a quilt, an important symbol in the story):  should they live within the foolish, silent limitation their husbands have set for them?  Or, perhaps, they can speak to the men about what they know (which the shy, quiet Mrs. Peters would certainly prefer).  Does Mrs. Hale (as in “hale and hearty”) persuade Mrs. Peters, or does Mrs. Peters lead Mrs. Hale to give way?  There’s no assurance for them either way that their actions will make any difference to the outcome.  And yet, there’s the story they now share between them.  Man or woman, become a part of their community, and read the story.  Though I’ve done a lot of hinting about how things proceed, it’s always better and more rewarding to see for yourself!

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August 13, 2012 · 5:22 pm

“Hell is other people.”–Jean-Paul Sartre

Buckets and buckets of ink have been spilled debating the topic of what constitutes a short long story (a short novel) and what makes up a long short story (to still qualify it as a short story).  And where does the novella fit into this system, exactly?  Also, there is the series of considerations about form and content which insist that what makes a short story or novel is not only a question of length, but has formal aspects as well.  Though I’m not going to rehash any of these arguments today–aren’t you glad?–I would just point out that this book I plan to discuss, The Stepdaughter, by Caroline Blackwood, is one of the shortest epistolary pieces of fiction I’ve ever read, with both a (strong but illusory) sense of length in the form, as might occur in a novel or novella, and a twisted ending such as one might expect to find in a short story.

In Sartre’s play “Huit Clos” (translated most often as “No Exit”), when we are told “hell is other people,” we can probably all relate imaginatively to the experience being articulated, thinking perhaps of some time or other when someone else made themselves intolerable to us.  Yet, there is a deeper meaning lurking here, and Blackwood’s novel brings it out.  Sometimes, the people around us as we ourselves imagine them to be are actually much worse than the actual people, once we get to know them a little better.  Sadly, we lose all too many opportunities to do this, and repent of it too late.  As well, sometimes a whole group of people can be adversely affected and made to suspect, resent, or misinterpret each other because of the actions of one self-centered person in their midst.  Such a character is the husband figure, Arnold, in this book.

This epistolary novel (a novel written in letters) is produced in the voice of a woman known only as “J.”   She writes letters to a sort of imaginary friend, known either as “Dear….” or “Dear So-and-So.”  The letters at first are said to be “written in [her] head,” though later it seems that she is actually writing letters; at least, she excuses herself from a conversation by saying that she has letters to write.  She always signs off in a somewhat self-indulgent style, with an adverb or adverbial phrase like “In all haste as usual,” “Dismally,” “Bitterly,” “Yours miserably,” or sometimes simply “Yrs. ever.”

Her situation is this:  she shares an expensive apartment in Manhattan (provided by her soon-to-be ex-husband) with her 4 year old daughter, an introverted, fat teenage daughter passed on from her husband’s previous marriage (Renata), and an au pair.  While she is filled with rage that her husband goes away to France with a new, younger, French girlfriend and plans to leave her, her rage is expressed at first by being mutely directed outward towards the people with whom she lives.  She seems to have little self-knowledge, but instead detests first the au pair, then Renata; finally, she reveals that she no longer takes pleasure either in her friends and their offers to help or in spending time with her own little daughter.

But startling revelations are in store for “J.”  As she (and the book’s narrative, following her state of mind) pass from Part 1) resentment and rage through Part 2) opening up and understanding to Part 3) frantic fear of loss, she makes a decision to tell Renata that her husband, Arnold, Renata’s putative father, has left her.  When she does, the story begin its progress toward a truly agonizing dénouement as Renata, the previous bump on a log who did nothing much but bake instant cakes and consume them all herself, takes a hand in the action.  The experience of this short novel (or novella, or long short story) is to make one realize yet again how dependent we are not only upon what we think we share with other people, but also upon what they think they share with us:  missing reciprocity is the unspoken story in this book.

Though Caroline Blackwood has written other books by now, this was her first novel, published in paperback form by Penguin Books in 1984 (the date of first release in hardback was 1976).  Yet, it is not at all dated; for many, many women, particularly those grouped around the central figure of a male “character” like Arnold, who at worst is a conniving, serially-monogamous-while-still-cheating-near-the-end-of-a-relationship monster, and at the best is insincere and ambivalent, these issues still need to be aired.  And Arnold is a central mystery, for we never hear his voice except through the women’s quotes and interpretations of what he says.  Fiction can here fulfill one of its major functions; it can allow us to be other selves, and to learn from the experience, even to see where we ourselves have gone wrong.  I don’t mean either that this book is meant only for women:  I suspect that many men attentive to fiction might find “The Stepdaughter” worthwhile reading as well.

And lastly, I would like to raise a mourning paean over a distribution catalog that has now been discontinued.  “A Common Reader” catalog, whose home was situated at 141 Tompkins Avenue in Pleasantville, NY (doesn’t it just sound bookish and fun?) was the place I obtained “The Stepdaughter”; it was in fact a place from which I ordered most of the books that I bought from the United Kingdom.  I wanted to pass the full address and phone number along (for the benefit of some Luddites such as I have been who still love to get boxes in the mail from “real” book companies), but when I went to wikipedia to research them, it seems they ran from 1986-2006 and were then discontinued.  Such a short time, and they provided me with so much pleasure!  Goodbye old friend!  (I still haven’t bought a Kindle, so though I read some fiction and poetry from the Internet, I technically haven’t deserted.)  To my own readers, I’d say:  read, read, read, though, that’s the main thing, regardless of where you get your reading from–and I’ll be writing again soon!

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August 12, 2012 · 3:23 pm

“All good things which exist are the fruits of originality.”–John Stuart Mill

It’s been a number of days now since I last did a post on the many wonderful (new to me) blogsites I’ve been reading, and I think it’s about time to do another five.  Though most of them are about some angle or variety of literature or literary life, and some have original literary compositions on them, some disperse their topics rather more broadly.  I read them for different things, as I’ve said before, though mostly I stick pretty closely to subjects relating to books and writing.  This is because as I’ve aged, I’ve begun to get a sense of my own mortality, and I know there’s not time to read everything out there that I might want to dabble in, and so have made my own interests a little narrower.  And except for the occasional off-topic post, that quality of narrowness may help my readers to identify what they can come to my site for, too.  Again, most if not all of my reading choices have recently been Freshly Pressed.

Having made the rule of mostly literary things, I’m now going to provide the exception that “proves” (tests) the rule.  The blogsite “Miss Royal Disaster” is at http://missroyaldisaster.wordpress.com , and it features a lot of different issues in modern life.  The theme page is truly luscious with a gorgeous heart of a flower on it.  The topics here range from the societal to the personal, from ecological concerns to makeup issues, and the author, though making the occasional unchecked typo, is never at a loss for words.  Especially on articles such as “animals on the edge of extinction” (which includes beautiful photographs of some of the animals in question) and the post on “hydrogen cars,” the blogger comes into her stride.  Her health and wellness issues are also very informative.  There have been recent posts on vegetarianism and vegan diet which were highly readable likewise.  But lest you think that “fun” is left out, there is a category for that (including a short bit on breaking up with a boyfriend, not exactly my idea of fun).  There are features such as a review of “Snow White and the Huntsman:  A Modern Fairy Tale.”  Also, you’ll find an advice column, and a section on psychology.  All in all, though one has to wonder if the author of the blog will be able to keep up with all the subjects she’s assigned herself, and though these topics are covered in an informal manner and using a colloquial style, she has shown a devotion to a wide range of subjects which may be of interest to nearly everyone.

NARRATIVE–  At http://richardgilbert.me/ , this blogsite is for a kind of literature I haven’t previously had much interest in, inasmuch as I’ve always taken an extreme literary purist’s (and perhaps an ignoramus’s) view that there’s sometimes a kind of self-indulgence in memoir writing, as opposed to “pure” fiction.  I’ve often avoided autobiography for the same reason.  But Richard Gilbert, a memoirist, specialist in memoirs, and academician who has “returned to the land” by way of farming and who currently wears all these hats at once, is fast convincing me otherwise.  I now treasure the list he has on his website as a list I can refer to while reading up on some of the people involved.  He has a wonderfully visually appealing site which contains a wide range of writerly activities, interests, and obsessions, such as “how stories make us human,” “on hating a memoirist,” and “my wild summer reading and revising.”  There are also others.  He has the occasional film review and a goodreads link under “narrative bookshelf.”  The tags on this site cover by name not only a huge number of well-known writers, but also songwriters, radio personalities, politicians, and a lot of people who use and live out narratives on the world stage.  One could read forever on and from this site, I get the feeling, and still not totally exhaust Gilbert’s erudition and humanity.

Nutshells & Mosquito Wings–at http://christinalay.wordpress.com/ .  The blog is subtitled “A Fantasy Writer’s Journey Through Reality.”  This site focuses on a transposition of the stuff of reality with its corresponding myth value, or perhaps vice versa, as in the post in which Christina ponders the symbolic import of a toad turning up in the kitchen, an event dealt with using an appropriate amout of humor.  Indeed, a resolute sense of humor pervades nearly all of her posts here, even though in her post “Victorian Mansion Seeks Spirits” she speaks half-seriously of how spirits “haunt” an old house in which many different fortunes have been met.  “The Agony of Empathy” is a subject she confronts in dealing with how an earlier sort of fantasy writer, Alexander Dumas, forces empathy on his readers in The Count of Monte Cristo.  Empathy is after all an essential experience in reading and writing good fantasy, whose fictional situations may be utterly strange to us, but whose human emotions should not be.  Next, she joins us in a post called “For the Love of Adverbs,” which excites my sympathy and is both apt and comic, and a subject of interest these days when even Hemingway is becoming a little out-of-date, though still essential reading.  Finally, Christina puts up a thoughtful post on the nature of God.  Handled with characteristic humor and good nature and a great deal of honesty from a contemporary point of view, it allows us all to find some sense of balance as writers and as people.

First We Read, Then We Write–at http://deborahrosereeves.wordpress.com/ .  This blog also has a goodreads link, but it is a good read all by itself.  Subtitled “Reviews, Ruminations, Reflections, Reveries,” this is what it is about, playing over many different aspects of the literary field.  Currently living in Portland, OR, Deborah defines herself as “a writer, a restless wanderer, and a recent woodworker.”  Her degrees are in English and Women and Gender Studies, and her toughmindedness in writing about things literary is tempered and balanced by a true humanity which keeps the doors open to new understandings.  She is by turns realistic, funny, and heartwarming in her blogs and posts, while avoiding the adverse of these qualities, not being pretentious, rude, or lacrimose.  It’s quite clear from the professionalism and taut quality of this blog that the blogger has taken her own injunction seriously:  first she reads, then she writes.  She never meanders around her subject without fulfilling its potential, except of course when meandering and releasing potential for others is the point.  This is clearly one of the best blogs I’ve seen lately.

beautifullittlesarajevo–at http://beautifullittlesarajevo.wordpress.com/ .  The work of another recent Portlander,  this blog, which is subtitled “A Place for Pretty Things” has as its declared topics food, photography, and writing.  The photography is highly evocative, some of it in stark and beautiful black-and-white, other parts in half-tones or equally beautiful color.  There is a sparse feel to the site, which gives it a surrealistic or film noir quality even including some of the color photographs, curiously.  In the food section, there are few words except to extol a healthy diet; but then, the pictures included are in the outworn but apposite saying “worth a thousand words.”  Such delicious looking delights are in the photographs that one salivates just at the pictures.  Now, how does one get to Portland, which the blogger says is a food-friendly city, in the blink of an eye?  Just look at the pictures, and don’t blink!  This is home cooking, from the blogger herself.  The literary part of the blog is equally innovative and gorgeous with “poems” that aren’t actually poems, because as the blogger states categorically, “I Hate Poetry.”  Yet the proliferation of word pictures, the lovely word pictures, say “poem” to me.  Anyway, whatever the pieces are called, “prose fragments,” perhaps, the blogger has written them well, and I hope to see more of them shortly.  If we don’t agree exactly on what makes a poem, we can all agree on one thing:  the writer has an eye for beauty, wherever it occurs.

And that’s my blog for today.  I hope you can get around to these sites if you haven’t already (I mean, you may be impatiently throwing bread pellets at me and yelling, “We already knew that one!”).  I have five or six more sites already chosen to write upon, but I like to leave some space between the days I do this so that I’m not just sponging off other people’s blogs constantly.  Until tomorrow, hang on tight, and hang loose!  (And congratulations to all the folks who participated fairly and squarely in the Olympics).

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August 11, 2012 · 1:42 am

“Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.”–Sylvia Plath

I wish I had managed to track down the exact reference for this quote from Sylvia Plath, so that I would know under exactly what circumstances she said it.  Did she, for example, mean that the writing was lousy and that that’s why it had never been published?  Or did she mean that it would stop stinking once the impulse to publish it had been answered?  I took this latter meaning as my own yesterday and today, in getting my poetry–of which very few poems have seen the light of day–online with the U. S. Copyright Office and then here to you.

Mostly, I wouldn’t say the poems actually were stinky, though they were dusty and dog-eared (even the more recent ones) from being carried around in an equally ratty notebook.  I typed them up yesterday and this morning, and then got online with the U. S. Copyright Office formally to “seal the deal.”  You can file online for $35, provided that all their conditions are met and you are only publishing online (publishing in print form costs more, takes longer, and has more conditions).  So, since I just wanted to publish right now for the sake of my website (maybe some kind editor of print books will come along and discover me eventually, should I prove worthy), I went ahead and went through the process.  It can be done in a very short amount of time, and the instructions are generally quite clear, once you get used to the format.  I had a little trouble at first, because I haven’t been online to copyright since my last novel was completed in 2010, but the system is made for people who simply want to follow instructions without too much who-hah.

The best part is, that although your case may be pending for a day or two (in this case, over the weekend), once you’ve (1) applied (2) paid and (3) uploaded your files successfully (in that order), your work is officially copyrighted and registered.  The copyright office even sends you several e-mails during the process to let you know when each part is complete.  So, you don’t have to cool your heels wondering why, oh why, you didn’t start an hour earlier in the morning, or take less time for lunch, or why you were so muddle-headed about the process when it told  you (fairly clearly) what to do.  They will send you a paper copy of your registration in about 6 months (they say less, but face it, there are lots of people publishing out there).

So, now–my poems are up on this site, and though I would like to get rich off them and off my other writings too, I’m realistic enough to recognize that I should probably just point once more to my PayPal button, silently, and let it go at that.  Like Shakespeare said, “Sell when you can, you are not for all markets.”  I hope you will read my poems at your own pace, and enjoy them, and tell me what you like or were perhaps left cold by (I love getting comments and replies, and haven’t had nearly enough of them so far).  And now you know what I was doing instead of putting up a post a day at the end of this week!  I was suffering (read typing and proofreading) for my art!

A word about the poems themselves:  they go from my days as an undergraduate (when I won an honorable mention in a contest for about 3-4 of them) to the recent poems I wrote for the characters in my first published novel to exchange and read to each other.  Had I been able to remember exactly which poems had placed in the contest, I would have noted it down, but it’s too long ago now, and those are old moments of near-glory.  What’s more important now is how the poems hold up under the burden of time.  Suffice it to say that though I no longer liked all of the poems in this collection, I still felt that all of them had some merit which made them worth retaining.  So, without more stuff and nonsense about it, here they are for your–I hope–reading pleasure.  Someday, I hope to write poetry again, and I hope to get to it long before I have to call the volume Old Age!

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August 8, 2012 · 3:00 am

Some novels which use the demotic (people’s) voice–Part III

Part III–The later twentieth and twenty-first century American fictions in particular which I have considered (though others cannot be excluded) focus on ridding the characters of the “names” their relatives, their society, or they themselves have previously given them, or making the “names” they have significant of a new identity or idea.  To mention just a few, in The Shipping News, there’s Quoyle, “the newspaperman” (whose past life is indeed a “coil,” like the cultural knots in a rope from which he descends and which he wants to limit).  He transitions from a name alone to a fuller identity when he happens upon the “scoop” of his own life, the startling news that the aunt whom he loves is actually his mother, and that he is not excluded from receiving mature sexual love from a girl he meets.  In The Lacuna, a young man is named alternately by those around him as a tool against his father (by his mother), a servant (even by his enlightened employers in his later life), a suspicious character (by the paranoid, communist-fearing functionaries of the United States government of the time), and finally as a good friend, and these are the roles and identities he generally accepts.  Finally, with the aid of his good friend, a woman, he is able to escape into a never-quite-previously lived “lacuna” (lacuna can mean either “absence, gap,” or “lagoon”)–into an idyllic past, and his further identity thus becomes a lacuna itself, a mystery.

Even earlier in one of the precursive texts I looked at, Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, Ethan is by his wife treated or “named” a shiftless, no-good husband; is gradually accepted as a transgressive but gallant suitor of sorts by his cousin Mattie; and ends his days caught between the two “names,” his identity a cipher, that of a “dead man,” as one of the internal characters defines him at the end.  He is a condensation only of the name “Frome” and the evidence of “the hard compulsions of the poor.”

The transition largely achieved by the struggles of the main characters themselves from being “only a name” to fulfilling (or “filling full”) an identity, cultural or personal, is not restricted to the Americans, however.  Firmly and repeatedly undercutting his audience’s expectations, the author/narrator-as-author-as-narrator of London Fields at the end of the novel turns out to be the “murderer” he himself has been seeking (to “kill off” one of the characters).  He steps thus with great irony and satirical intent into the shoes he has sought to fill (as if forcing the reader to write the novel), and satirizes audience expectations of identity patterns for characters, authors, and readers.  This ending rejects and simultaneously glorifies the use the reader would make of him, and constructs by ironies that point in all directions a narrative “identity” of his own making, which is that of a whimsical dictator, a character nearly as sadistic as the woman who is to be murdered is toward her lovers.

To revisit the topic of the picturesque briefly, contemporary authors sometimes focus less overtly on figurative language from page to page, but choose summational titular and thematic structures (“the shipping news,” “prodigal summer,” “the lacuna,” “the joke,” “London fields,” “a thousand acres,” even “the girl with the dragon tattoo”) as partial naming concepts.  They then “fill in” the significance of such things by close attention to character study as plot, setting, etc.  The character becomes the plot, the character’s interior in some way evokes or resembles the setting, and so on.

Though my treatment in three parts has not been exhaustive, it has been as far as I can see at the present time.  All of the contemporary novels I’ve mentioned above are in my opinion well-written and show a consistent concern with quality of reading experience which signals aesthetic significance, and each has a moral value system firmly in place.  You may have to find your way through multiple ironies to it, and sometimes traditional moral values are revised or moral elements are shifted around to allow for a more contemporary viewpoint–but clearly these writers, who manipulate the demotic and traditional voices of literature and experiment with both romance and realistic elements in their fiction, and who show characters caught up in the process of finding their own identities–these writers just as obviously have no doubts or qualms of any force about their own voices or identites in these books.  I hope if you haven’t read some of them you will find some new “friends” among them, after my long demand on your patience.

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